China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Opening one’s home is a way to open hearts
Whenever my husband and I used to visit his grandmother in her village in Zhejiang province, there was one thing we could always count on — an onslaught of hospitality.
It didn’t matter that she was busy knitting a hat or scarf to earn some extra money.
She would immediately pull out a stool for us, sometimes even trying to offer her own seat piled high with cushions.
Then came the cups filled with green tea leaves and hot water, a must for guests anywhere the village. And soon after she would disappear, usually to the kitchen where she would start soaking a batch of rice noodles to fry up in her wok, but sometimes to reach into one of her overflowing bags of seasonal fruit, choosing the freshest just for us.
Even if we just happened to say hello at the door, she would never let us leave without taking something to eat. On one occasion, where we chatted with her on our way to hike up the mountains, she was so insistent we accept her mandarin oranges that she tried chasing after us.
She never did catch up, but her resolve reminded me that hospitality is a serious business in culture.
And it wasn’t just her or my husband’s close relatives in the village who would welcome us.
A woman always invited us over for dinner whenever we hiked through the pine grove surrounding her home.
While cruising down a hill on bicycle, a man standing outside his house holding a bowl of rice asked us to eat with him.
A farmer picking cherries in the fields pushed his basket Jocelyn Eikenburg of sweet red bounty in front of me, insisting I must take some home — and even forcing the cherries into my hands when I hadn’t taken enough.
In every case, these people would offer us some of the most cordial smiles I’ve ever encountered. Smiles that embodied, “Be our guest.”
As much as I’ve enjoyed hospitality in the US, it doesn’t come close to what I’ve experienced in my husband’s hometown.
In the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, where I grew up, it was rare to visit relatives unannounced and enjoy such lavish attention and rarer for people to invite passers-by into their homes. And even if they did, at most you could generally expect something to drink, maybe some cookies or snack foods, but never a homecooked dinner.
The generosity of people in my husband’s village — from relatives to strangers — has upended everything I thought I ever knew about hospitality.
It has introduced me to a world where doors are still left wide open with the hope that someone might wander in,and where it’s never trouble to stay a while, dine or even spend the night if needed.
A place where welcoming others into your life — even when it’s not on your schedule — is one of the most sacred things a person can do.
It can magically transform even the most humble surroundings, such as grandma’s two-room cottage, into a corner of warmth and humanity.
After what I’ve been blessed to experience here in China, I only hope I can pass it on by opening my home to someone else with kindness. Chinhua Achebeand and the civil war in Biafra. Achebeand died in 2013. In the book, he describes the country of his youth as a place where most talented young people had opportunities to get excellent educations and where crime was so low that no one feared to travel alone.
Putnam’s final chapter on the causes of social problems in America and the possible cures is the weakest part of the book. Like everyone else, he doesn’t know what to do.
What is really scary, as Putnam’s stories show, is that there is a social, cultural and moral collapse, which is much worse than an economic one.