The Mud Season

Learning to complain about mud

(Illustration from the Finnish Meteorological Institute)

There is a saying that circulates on Chinese-language social media, attributed vaguely to the Finns: their greatest worry is that when the snow melts, the roads get muddy. I think of this whenever I am putting on my boots to go outside in weather I do not want to go outside in. It is a useful thought. It contains, like most useful thoughts, a small accusation.

Friday brought a snowstorm, the kind Denmark sees perhaps once in ten years. I walked to the grocery store through drifts that came up past my ankles, sliding with each step, and the Finnish proverb came to me again. It sounds, of course, like a boast—a sly little complaint designed to advertise the absence of real problems. The nanny state, as they call it here, has arranged everything from cradle to grave.

When there is enough to go around, people seem to stop clawing at each other. I do not mean this as a grand political observation; I mean it in the small, daily sense. Neighbors hold doors. Colleagues say what they mean. Family dinners do not end in someone leaving the table. Before Denmark, I had rarely seen adults disagree without raising their voices, or apologize without first establishing that the other person was more wrong. I did not know that was an option.

In China, where I grew up, it sometimes felt as though everyone was braced for a fight that might or might not come. You could not simply say a thing; you had to say it sideways, with a little vinegar. Sincerity was suspicious. Directness was naive. To be happy without irony was to be either too young or too stupid. We were not unkind people. We were just people who had learned, over generations, that resources were scarce and someone was always watching. It leaves a mark—on your voice, on your posture, on the way you hold a door. And it leaves a mark at home, too. Love wore the costume of criticism. Parents scolded because they cared; control was a form of devotion. A friend of mine, also Asian, put it this way: in many of our families, people love each other deeply but end up owing each other, and guilt becomes the thread that holds them together. We understood each other immediately when she said this. We had both been loved in ways that left marks.

Thus, when I first arrived in Denmark, I did not trust it. I had the suspicious mind of someone raised on subtext. Surely, I thought, this is the setup for a dystopian novel. Surely something is wrong, or people would not look so content. I watched them in supermarkets, in buses, in the soft gray light of afternoon, and I waited for the crack in the facade. It did not come. They were, as far as I could tell, simply fine.

This seemed to me a kind of moral failure—theirs, but also, if I allowed myself to join them, mine. I had been a journalist in China. I knew what the state could do when it wanted silence. I had felt the particular chill of being watched, of knowing that certain words, typed or spoken, could bring trouble not just to you but to people you loved. I had heard the stories—reporters detained, protesters disappeared, the long arm reaching even for those who thought they had gotten out. How could these people just stand in line at the bakery, thinking about bread?

There is a passage in Kundera I used to return to, back when I needed my suspicion to feel like philosophy:

“The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.”

I believed this. I wanted to believe it. The Danes, with their bicycles and parental leave and sensible sweaters, were floating. I was the one with my feet on the ground. My suffering meant something; their ease was a kind of illusion, pleasant but thin.

It is a seductive idea, and I am not sure it is wrong. But I have started to wonder whether it is something we tell ourselves—those of us who have suffered—so that the suffering was not for nothing. If lightness is meaningless, then at least our heaviness has purchased us something: depth, truth, a life that matters. It is a good trade, if you can convince yourself of it.

And yet. There were moments—watching a father pedal past, two kids in the box up front, all three of them laughing at something I couldn't hear; watching colleagues leave work at three to pick up their kids, guilty about nothing—when something darker stirred. A kind of envy, the kind that sits low in your chest and does not announce itself. Not envy of what they had, exactly, but of what they had never lost. Their innocence was intact. They had not been taught to flinch.

Why should the accident of birthplace make such a difference in what a person gets to feel? But envy, if you follow it honestly, becomes a question: if they can live this way, why not me?

The answer, I used to think, was that I had not earned it. To be happy here felt like betrayal—of the people still there, still watching what they say, still afraid. If I set down the weight, who would carry it?

I convinced myself for years. Until I couldn't.

Last year I was at a conference in Brussels, and the conversation turned, as it often does among people like us, to the question of staying in the field. China policy. Human rights. The work that follows you home and sits with you at dinner. One person said his partner, who is Chinese, refused to touch anything China-related. “I left to get away from that shit,” she had said. Fair enough. Another friend, who works in human rights, shrugged. “Someone has to do it. If not me, it goes to people who don’t understand. I’d rather do it myself than watch someone else do a crappy job.”

After dinner we walked back through the old city, and somehow the conversation circled around again. I tried to explain why I still stay in the field—partly practical, yes, but mostly because I feel that being Chinese in Europe obligates me to do something, however small, to make the public conversation about China a little more accurate, a little less stupid.

A German friend stopped walking. Her parents are from Russia. She understood exactly what I meant, which is perhaps why she could say it so directly: “It’s not responsibility. It’s guilt. But you are free here. Why should you feel guilty? You don’t owe anyone anything. Go do what you like.”

I wanted to print the first part on a T-shirt. It’s not responsibility. It’s guilt. I have been repeating it to myself ever since, not as a conclusion but as a question. What if the weight I carry is not moral seriousness? What if it is just a habit, left over from a life that required it?

The trouble with letting go is that you cannot do it by deciding to. You cannot think your way out of a habit that lives in your body. You have to practice, the way you practice a language or an instrument—badly, at first, and then less badly, and then one day you realize you have stopped translating in your head.

This is what the Danes do with their winters. The sun disappears for months; the sky turns the color of wet cement; you are trapped indoors with nothing but yourself and the dark. They do not fight it. They knit. Everywhere you look, someone is pulling out needles and yarn—on buses, in waiting rooms, at the back of lecture halls. It used to strike me as absurd, all these grown adults making scarves. Now I think it is a technology, a way of metabolizing time that would otherwise sit heavy.

After five years, once my life had settled into something like a shape, I began to do the things people do when they are not in survival mode. I bought houseplants and kept them alive. I learned the Danish word for cozy—hygge—and stopped rolling my eyes at it. I took up baking. I made my first loaf of bread. It was the sort of thing that had always seemed difficult when described but turned out, once attempted, to be not so hard. Most things are like that. We build them into obstacles, and then we do them, and they are just things we have done.

The bread turned out fine. This surprised me, though I am not sure why. I had followed the instructions. Perhaps I had expected some secret difficulty, some hidden test that would expose me as someone who does not really belong here, in this life of small satisfactions. But there was no test. There was only flour and water and time.

I am told the snow will melt in two weeks. The roads will turn to mud. I will put on my boots and feel, perhaps, a flicker of genuine annoyance—just annoyance, nothing more, nothing underneath.

I am practicing. I am not there yet. But I am looking forward to it.