From Time Tunnel, which will be published next month by New York Review Books. Composed in 1958, this essay was discovered in a University of Maryland archive in 2020.
Snow-covered New England unrolled endlessly in the bus window like a Chinese painting scroll: bare trees and stripped woods done in black ink with a half-dry brush on the blank space of white sky and snow. Now and then in the distance the misty shadow of a mountain. I have seen places in China which look like our paintings but never so many miles of pure uninterrupted landscape, no paddies, no houses, no burial mounds, no waterwheels, and not a single human being to be seen. Nothing on the road but cars whizzing past busily in their grooves; what people were in them were hid away in metal and glass and speed. As the day wore on the desolation became sinister. Was it too cold for pedestrians to be out? Not even a hitchhiker. Does everybody have a car of his own? Only recently in Hong Kong there has been a furor over the case of the man who, riding in his private car, snatched a fountain pen from a passerby. Why would a man so rich do such a thing, the newspapers wondered.
The Hong Kong papers also talked for days about the shoplifter in a Dacron suit. Hong Kong may be a sophisticated city but there still are a few things it is greatly impressed by. A new office building had an escalator installed and drew a big crowd daily, people who went merely for free rides up and down. The management posted a notice forbidding all persons wearing mules to use the escalator as the flapping soles might get caught in the steps.
I of course laughed, reading this. My native city, Shanghai, had an escalator years ago. Coming from that city I did not find New York as strange as New England. The bus that brought me to a little town deep in the heart of New England arrived at night. The driver took my suitcases out of the luggage compartment and put them down in the middle of the street.
“Where can I get a taxi?” I asked.
“Go in there and phone for a cab,” he pointed at the inn.
I stooped to pick up my suitcases.
“You can leave them here,” he said.
I hesitated, not wishing to make him lose face by a show of distrust. Abandon suitcases on an empty, ill-lit street? And what if he himself was to stow them back in the bus and drive off with them? I walked toward the house empty-handed, feeling that I deserved whatever was to befall me.
A sleigh stood silhouetted on the porch. I opened the door. The ancient circle around the fire turned as I came in. Pewter pots and brass warming pans gleamed over the fireplace, flanked by highboys and lowboys. The men gazed at me without surprise, as though a Chinese woman walked in here every day.
“Can I use your telephone? I want a taxi.”
One of them rose mumbling, “I’ll get it,” and went out of the room.
I waited, worrying about my luggage in the street, and presently began to wonder if I had understood him correctly, that he was going to telephone for me? Could it be a ruse to keep me from using their phone? Had they got a pay booth? Perhaps I should have made it clear that I would pay anyway.
The taxi arrived before the man came back, and managed not to run over the suitcases in the street. The bus was gone. Since then I have learned that it is all right to leave parcels and even purses on the curbstones. Expensive toys litter the pavement when children have gone in the house. Iron and plastic lawn chairs and tables stay out all night with no walls around them. I have lived in the town for two years without ever having to lock the front door, which makes me think of ancient China. Even there it took no less than Confucius himself to achieve this condition. When Confucius governed the Duchy of Lu, for the first time putting his teachings into practice, in three months “things were not picked up from the street; doors were not shut at night.” This state of affairs collapsed the moment Confucius was ousted from the government.
Still, except in ancient China I could find no parallel for the New Englander’s restraint and contentment. They are almost inscrutable like the Chinese are said to be. Shopmen are most agreeable when they have made no sale. The shoe shop promised to order a pair of sandals for me, smilingly strung me along all summer, never placed the order. I made, I thought, an arrangement with the local moving man to have my goods picked up in New York. In due time he went south, taking his wife along for a holiday spin, passed through New York, got fined for illicit parking on the street at dawn, and returned with no word to me at all, except to tell me the story—upon further inquiry. I sometimes could not help suspecting this lack of interest in money might be put on for the sake of face, since most of these people are not wealthy and have little prospect of becoming so. Or it might be due to the tradition, peculiar to this part of the world, that all must work. To avoid the stigma of not working, these people are obliged to camouflage their retirement with various occupations even though they are born retired.
The only bustling places of business are the library, which is free, and the post office, which is losing money. The clothing store is overstaffed with just one clerk. The owner, shrewd as he is, could find nothing to do but sprint around turning off the lights as fast as possible after the rare customer. The clerk is raising a large family on his pay, hunts deer and partridge in his spare time, and catches trout, but I doubt it is to augment the family provisions. The overworked American male killing himself to provide for his wife and children evidently does not live in New England.
A bad man is hard to find. What passes for the town villain here is the surveyor. Everybody shakes his head and smiles when his name is mentioned. He is known to be partial to money.
This is such a change for me from Hong Kong, reputed to be the only place in the world where the shops charge the old customer more—he has already formed the habit of buying there. The department stores dismiss with superior smiles any attempts to bargain at their counters, yet bargaining is practiced there as much as anywhere else. Whatever you buy, you will hear of someone else getting it cheaper from the same people, which reflects on your intelligence as well as your personality and is bound to spoil some of your pleasure in the purchase.
Hong Kong is of course a long way off from ancient China. It gratifies me to know that our dream of old China could have been true as it still is in this corner of the Western world, a living thing even if it is not our own. The New Englanders are probably as good as any people have been. A storekeeper who wanted an assistant passed up several pretty girls and hired a plain girl who had an illegitimate child to support. This actually is two stories in one. It shows every place could be Peyton, depending on how you see it and what you are looking for.
