Chinese Silence No. 22

after Billy Collins, "Monday" The Italians are making their pasta, the French are making things French, and the Chinese cultivate their silence. They cultivate silence in every Chinatown on the persimmon of earth— mute below the towers of Toronto, silently sweeping the streets of Singapore clear of noisy self-expression. The Americans are in their sport utility vehicles, the Canadians are behaving reasonably, but the Chinese remain silent maybe with a cup of tea or an opium pipe and maybe a finger puzzle or water torture is involved. Or maybe the Chinese are playing the Chinese game of ping-pong, the pock-pock of the ball against their tight-lipped mouths as their chefs dice scallions and bean curd. The Chinese are silent because it is their job for which I pay them what they got for building the railroads. Which silence it is hardly seems to matter though many have a favorite out of the 100 different kinds— the Silence of the Well-Adjusted Minority, the Girlish Silence of Reluctant Acquiescence, the Silence that by No Means Should Be Mistaken for Bitterness. By now, it should go without saying that what Crocodile Dundee is to the Australian and Mel Gibson is to the Scot, so is silence to the Chinese. Just think— before I invented the 100 Chinese silences, the Chinese would have had to stay indoors and gabble about civil war and revolution or go outside and build a really loud wall. And when I say a wall, I do not mean a wall of thousands of miles that is visible from the moon. I mean a noisy wall of language that dwarfs my medieval battlements and paves the Pacific to lap California’s shores with its brick-hard words.