Kvetcher In The Rye

Long thoughts on complaining, NIMBYism, and pluralism

I’ve written once or twice about how I’m very used to complaining just as a kind of activity. My most natural default reaction is often some kind of complaint: “Oh yeah, we need that, right?” “It’s okay, but it would be better if…” “Well, they’re a big corporation, what do you expect?”

My wife, who is Chinese, doesn’t have this habit, and she doesn’t really know an equivalent term to “kvetch”—this sort of background complaining that isn’t really meant literally, that’s just a variety of shooting the breeze. Sometimes a way to just chat or make small talk. It’s probably the New Yorker I inherited from my parents. It’s perfectly natural to small-talk about the weather by noting how unpleasant it is; to a Midwesterner, maybe, that isn’t the natural way to remark on it.

One of the things you realize when you spend a lot of time with other people is that you aren’t the baseline of human experience or normalcy. You find that you have your own tendencies, which is to say, tendencies you didn’t know everybody didn’t have. It puts you in the position of having to admit to yourself that what you’ve always implicitly considered to be objectively right/proper/normal might not be, or that everyone else is out there being wrong all the time.

My wife isn’t at all like this, but one thing you hear about Chinese people—usually older folks—is that they have limited palates, and will only eat Chinese food when traveling, or even do things like bring a rice cooker with them and make some kind of instant Chinese-ish food in a hotel room rather than try local food.

I assume that some of the commentary on this is a little bit tinged with racism, and I also imagine that Americans many decades ago would have had much less sophisticated attitudes about foreign countries and their culture and food than we do now, on average. So part of that is that China is “growing up” now in a way the United States did a long time ago, and passing through a phase of development—affluent enough to travel, but not quite cosmopolitan yet—that every country probably passes through.

But what’s interesting to me is that because China has regional cuisines that people in those places basically eat, many people probably never have eaten much food from other places. Not just other countries, but other regions in China. The long habit of eating the local food regularly basically teaches you to sort of abstract the idea that this is food.

Everything else that people eat in all those other places…isn’t quite food. I totally understand that slight annoyed discomfort of looking at people eating things I don’t like and thinking, why do they like this not-quite-food so much, what’s wrong with them? And I bet they think my real food isn’t real food! On some level, you don’t believe that they really like their not-quite-food. They envy you secretly. In their heart, they know you’re right.

At best, of course, this is provincialism; at worst, it’s xenophobia. And in some ways, it’s a kind of NIMBYism. A lot of NIMBYism, I think, is a sort of suspicion of pluralism. If you’re familiar with one way of life, one broad group of people/culture/religion, it can threaten your sense of yourself to see other very different people who are also basically normal.

Somehow it activates the threat assessment in your lizard brain. The fact that it makes you uncomfortable or that you really wouldn’t like it—whether it’s eating things you find gross, or, say, living in a city and not owning a car—you feel that somehow you’ll eventually be forced to do it. The only protection from other people’s lifestyles is not to allow them at all.