The Cross-Cultural Wit of Lin Yutang

It doesn’t take long for a China expat to become a self-styled expert on the many idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies of his host culture. Not one such expert has the insight or brio of expat Lin Yutang. Born in 1895, Lin lived mostly in America from age thirty-three until his death in 1976. His primary avocation was bridging the East-West divide, a pursuit that earned him multiple nominations for the Nobel Prize. But his observations on western attitudes excite admiration in anyone who realizes culture shock is a two-way street. These bon-bons are taken from his masterpiece The Importance of Living, first published in 1937.

No one need tell me how kind American civilization is to women, when it permits so many nice women to go unmarried through no fault of their own.

But above all, the American’s inability to loaf comes directly from his desire for doing things and in his placing action above being. Sometimes a prophetic vision comes to me, a beautiful vision of a millennium when Manhattan will go slow, and when the American “go-getter” will become an Oriental loafer.

Against the old contention, however, that we must all be useful, be efficient, become officials and have power, the old reply is that there are always enough fools left in the world who are willing to be useful, be busy, and enjoy power, and so somehow the business of life can and will be carried on.

The trouble with Americans is that when a thing is nearly right, they want to make it still better, while for a Chinese, nearly right is good enough.

I am quite sure Lindbergh would have been much happier if he had flown only halfway across the Atlantic. It is only in this milieu of well-known obscurity and financial competence with a pinch, when life is fairly carefree and yet not altogether carefree, that the human spirit is happiest and succeeds best.

There is a convenient American word which combines the three humbugs into the one Great Humbug: Success. But many wise men know that the desires for success, fame and wealth are euphemistic names for the fears of failure, poverty and obscurity, and that these fears dominate our lives.

What Karl Marx forgot to calculate was the human factor in England and in the United States and the Englishman’s or American’s way of doing things and of solving problems. The English distrust of theories and slogans, the Englishman’s way of slowly bungling, if necessary, but in any case slowly finding his own way, the Anglo-Saxon’s love of individual liberty, self-respect, good sense and love of order, are things which are more powerful in shaping the course of events in England and America than all the logic of the German dialectician.

Germany lost the war because Wilhelm Hohenzollern did not know when to laugh, or what to laugh at. His dreams were not restrained by laughter.

The English have a ruddy complexion, developed no doubt by the London fog and by cricket. A skin that is so healthy cannot but help playing an important part in their thinking, that is, in the process of feeling their way through life. And as the English think with their healthy skin, so the Chinese think with their profound intestines.

According to ancient notions only half a century ago, comfort was a sin, and to be comfortable was to be disrespectful. The feudalistic society which made the rise of the armchair impossible until modern days, as described by Huxley, was exactly the same as that which existed in China up to a generation ago.

In the West, the old people efface themselves and prefer to live alone in some hotel with a restaurant on the ground floor, out of consideration for their children and an entirely unselfish desire not to interfere in their homelife. But the old people have the right to interfere, and if interference is unpleasant, it is nevertheless natural, for all life, particularly the domestic life, is a lesson in restraint.

The most undeveloped branch of Western cooking is that of preparing vegetables. In the first place, vegetables are extremely limited in variety; in the second place, they are merely boiled in water; and in the third place, they are always over-cooked until they lose their color and look mushy.

Now the philosophy behind Chinese and Western dress is that the latter tries to reveal the human form, while the former tries to conceal it. But as the human body is essentially like the monkeys’, usually the less of it revealed the better. Think of Gandhi in his loin-cloth! Only in a world of people blind in sense of beauty is the foreign dress tolerable. Let any one who doubts this go to Coney Island and see how beautiful real human forms are.

English travlers in Shanghai make sure that they put up at an English hotel where they can have their bacon and eggs and toast with marmalade at breakfast, and hang about the cocktail lounge and fight shy of any inducement to get them to take a rickshaw ride. They are terribly hygienic, to be sure, but why go to Shanghai at all?

Among the most beautiful amenities of life I have seen in the West are the clicking of heels of Prussian gentlemen bowing to a lady in a parlor and the curtsying of German girls, with one leg crossed behind the other. That I consider a supremely beautiful gesture, and it is a pity that this custom has gone out of vogue.

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1. The Dreaded ‘Cultural Differences’

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