1
It’s that time of year again!
Every morning, as I drive through my neighborhood to get on the expressway, acorns pop under my tires. Green, sticky walnuts jolt the wheels when I run over them, and occasionally one falls from a tree and lands on the hood with a thud.
But if acorns and walnuts are a nuisance, roadkill is something else altogether. I’m talking about the flattened bodies of squirrels in the middle of the street.
Every time I drive past one, I raise my head and look at the trees on both sides of the street. And you know what? Every time I look, I see just as many oak and walnut trees on one side as on the other.
What the fuck is wrong with these stupid squirrels?
Aren’t there enough acorns and walnuts on your side of the street? Aren’t they just as good for you? Why the hell must you cross the street to get the ones on the other side, only to get flattened by some big, fossil-fuel-burning American automobile?
If you’re like me, someone who sees conspiracies everywhere and who takes pity on these poor motherfuckers getting killed left and right on the road, you can’t help but wonder why the fuck they do it.
Well, I’ll tell you what. Lately, I’ve reached a verdict.
Squirrels are intelligent animals. Hardworking, too. But they share with us humans a terrible weakness: they are given to imagination and jealousy.
It’s not just us humans who think the grass is greener on the other side. These tree-hugging little bastards do, too.
In their squirrel eyes, the acorns and walnuts across the street are bigger, tastier, juicier, and altogether more gratifying.
And so they cross. And get flattened.
2
The grass is always greener on the other side.
This was one of the English sayings I learned many years ago, when I was learning the language.
For some reason, the saying has always conjured up in my mind the image of a middle-class American man standing beside the white picket fence surrounding his front lawn, looking over at his neighbor’s grass.
Of course, when you think about it, it isn’t so much the neighbor’s grass that the fellow envies. It’s the suspected superiority of the neighboring family’s life.
The lovely wife. The beautiful children. The sweet smells coming from their kitchen.
The husband and wife never seem to quarrel. Whenever you see them, they’re being affectionate toward each other. The children are well-behaved, the dog doesn’t bark at night, and the lawn, needless to say, is always greener.
You begin to wonder what the hell is going on inside that house.
Now, I’m not insinuating that this image of mine was chiefly responsible for inspiring the American television industry to produce so many shows about the lives of our neighbors.
But think about it.
I Love Lucy invited Americans into the home of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, where they discovered that marriage to a handsome Cuban bandleader wasn’t necessarily all that it was cracked up to be.
The Honeymooners showed us Ralph and Alice Kramden, whose married life in a Brooklyn apartment was hardly a bed of roses.
The Dick Van Dyke Show gave us Rob and Laura Petrie, an attractive suburban couple whose domestic life was repeatedly disrupted by the most ridiculous misunderstandings.
Then there was All in the Family, where Archie Bunker made it abundantly clear that having a house, a wife, a daughter, and a son-in-law didn’t necessarily make a man happy.
And The Jeffersons, where moving on up to a deluxe apartment in the sky didn’t put an end to George Jefferson’s troubles.
The shows were different, of course, and not all were intended to teach us the same lesson. But they shared one remarkable feature: they allowed us to enter other people’s homes and see what went on behind their front doors.
And what did we discover? That the people living on the other side of the fence were just as foolish, quarrelsome, frustrated, jealous, and occasionally miserable as ourselves. In other words, television offered Americans the opportunity to cross the street without getting run over. A privilege not available to squirrels.
3
Lately, stunned by the rapid rise and development of China, one finds pundits falling over themselves to explain why we shouldn’t be surprised by it.
One idea that gets tossed around a lot is that China isn’t just your run-of-the-mill nation-state. It is a civilizational state.
All right. I think I know what they’re getting at. I’ve always suspected that our great Middle Kingdom is more than a constitution, a government, a collection of laws, and a few thousand years of recorded history.
We’ve got other stuff, too. And it’s this other stuff, I suspect, that has made China what it is and accounts, at least in part, for its success.
We Chinese have a saying:
修身、齐家、治国、平天下。
First cultivate yourself, then put your household in order, then govern the country, and finally bring peace to the world. Notice that 齐家 comes before 治国 and 平天下.
That’s right. Before you can go around bringing peace to the world, you’ve got to get your own fucking household in order.
And nothing, to my mind, better illustrates the meaning of 齐家 than a passage from 《朱子治家格言》 that I remember from my college days. It goes something like this:
“清早即起，洒扫庭除，不得觊觎邻家妇女，吃饭不得超过三碗。”
Get up early in the morning. Sweep the courtyard. Do not covet the neighbor’s wife. And never eat more than three bowls of rice.
Now, before some learned gentleman writes to correct me, let me say that I am quoting from memory, and my memory may have taken certain liberties with Zhu Xi and his family instructions.
But that’s beside the point. What a magnificent set of rules for maintaining domestic order! Get up early. Keep your house clean. Keep your hands off the neighbor’s wife. And don’t eat too fucking much. A civilization built on principles like these is bound to go places.
And this brings me back to our squirrels.
You see, the problem with squirrels is that they have nothing resembling 《朱子治家格言》. Had they been brought up on the teachings of our great Chinese sages, they might have learned to be content with the acorns and walnuts on their own side of the street. They might have learned that the acorns across the street aren’t necessarily bigger, sweeter, or juicier. And they might have lived another day, happily ensconced in the branches of their own oak trees.
The same goes for Americans, who are forever looking over the fence and imagining that their neighbors are having a better time than they are.
Indeed, this national obsession eventually gave rise to a television show called Wife Swap, in which two families temporarily exchanged wives, or rather, the women who ran their households.
Now, if you want to find out whether the grass is greener on the other side, I suppose exchanging wives is one way of going about it.
In one particularly memorable episode, a San Francisco fellow named Stephen Fowler found himself sharing his house with a woman from Missouri. He apparently thought so little of her background, manners, and education that he couldn’t keep his contempt to himself.
The episode caused quite a stir.
I remember reading about the outrage, and about how people wanted to give the arrogant bastard a piece of their minds.
One could easily imagine a retired veteran somewhere in the American heartland getting so worked up that he wanted to drive all the way to San Francisco, find that motherfucker Fowler, and strangle him for insulting the poor woman.
Now, had Fowler been properly educated in the Chinese tradition of 齐家, he might have spared himself all this trouble. After all, the ancient Chinese knew a thing or two about keeping one’s household in order. And they certainly wouldn’t have approved of exchanging wives on national television.
4
I can’t help but want to end this essay with a theory of mine concerning the root cause of the disease that makes squirrels get squashed in the street and Americans imagine that their neighbors are living it up.
The theory is this:
It’s the bacteria in our stomachs that are responsible for the whole fucking business.
Yes, sir. Those tiny microorganisms living in our digestive systems, helping us break down food, influencing our metabolism, and generally making life possible.
They’re the culprits.
Now, scientists have discovered that the microorganisms inhabiting our intestines can influence all sorts of things, including appetite, digestion, immune responses, and even aspects of our mood.
There is something called the gut-brain axis, through which our digestive system and our brain communicate with each other. Scientists are still trying to figure out exactly how all this works, especially in humans.
But I have a theory of my own.
You see, farmers know perfectly well that growing the same crop year after year can make the crop vulnerable to pests and diseases. One nasty bug comes along, and the whole damn harvest may be ruined. That’s one reason farmers rotate their crops.
Well, I suspect the bugs in our stomachs know a thing or two about the dangers of putting all one’s eggs in one basket. They don’t want us eating the same stuff day after day, year after year. They want diversity. They want new foods, new ingredients, new microorganisms, new experiences. They want their little book of culinary adventures to have as many entries as possible.
We Chinese have a wonderful expression for this phenomenon:
隔锅香。
The food cooked in somebody else’s pot always smells and tastes better.
When I was growing up, we often heard adults use this expression to describe children who seemed to find their neighbors’ cooking invariably superior to their own mothers’.
And now I think I know why. It wasn’t the children. It was the bacteria. Those little bastards were staging a revolt. And if you refuse to cooperate, they can make life miserable for you. Indigestion, bloating, bowel troubles, and a whole assortment of gastrointestinal complaints.
Now, I’m not saying scientists have established that bacteria deliberately organize themselves into revolutionary committees and issue dietary instructions to their hosts.
Not yet, anyway. But suppose they could. Suppose that what we call curiosity, restlessness, dissatisfaction, envy, and the desire for novelty are, at least in part, expressions of an ancient biological imperative to seek variety. Then the squirrel crossing the street for walnuts, the child running next door for dinner, and the American husband looking longingly at his neighbor’s wife might all be responding to the same underlying impulse.
Of course, how intestinal bacteria might have developed an interest in the neighbor’s wife is something my theory has yet to explain.
But give me time. Even Darwin didn’t figure everything out in one afternoon.
5
Of all the animals in the world, the goat may be the one that most perfectly illustrates the principle that the grass is always greener on the other side.
Give a goat a perfectly good pasture, full of grass, shrubs, and other edible vegetation, and what does the fucking animal do? It sticks its head through the fence to eat what’s growing on the other side.
Sometimes it gets its head stuck.
Now, goats are curious creatures, and unlike sheep, which are primarily grazers, goats are browsers. They enjoy sampling leaves, shrubs, shoots, and a great variety of other plant materials.
But here’s the interesting part. Goats are ruminants. They have a stomach divided into four compartments, the largest of which, the rumen, houses an enormous population of microorganisms that help break down the tough plant fibers the animal eats.
In other words, a goat carries around an entire civilization of microscopic creatures whose livelihood depends on what the goat puts into its mouth.
Think about that for a moment.
The goat is standing in a perfectly good pasture, surrounded by perfectly good food. Yet it insists on sticking its head through the fence to sample something growing on the other side. Why? Because the bacteria in its stomach have decided that the time has come to diversify their portfolio. Or so my theory would have it.
And now we have three animals to consider. The squirrel crosses the street and risks getting flattened by a car. The goat sticks its head through the fence and risks getting stuck. And the human being looks over the fence at his neighbor’s wife and risks ruining his marriage.
All three are convinced that something better awaits them on the other side. And all three, according to my theory, are being manipulated by microorganisms whose only concern is expanding their culinary horizons.
For thousands of years, philosophers and moralists have instructed human beings to be content with what they possess. The Confucians preached restraint. The Buddhists warned against attachment. The Christians condemned covetousness.
And all the while, down in our intestines, billions upon billions of microorganisms were plotting the overthrow of the established order.
“Contentment?”
“Fuck contentment!”
“We haven’t tried what’s across the street!”
And off goes the squirrel. And off goes the goat. And off goes the husband.
I suppose there is a moral to all this, though I’m not entirely sure what it is.
Perhaps it’s that the grass really is greener on the other side. Perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps the whole business has nothing to do with grass in the first place. Perhaps the bacteria just want a change of menu.
Whatever the case, the next time you see a goat with its head stuck in a fence, don’t laugh at the poor creature. Remember that somewhere inside its stomach, several billion microorganisms are probably congratulating themselves on a successful expedition.
And if you happen to see a squirrel crossing the street, for God’s sake, slow down. The little bastard has enough trouble with its bacteria already.
