Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself

by Alan Alda

  This was, of course, nuts. But I had begun my theatrical life as an improviser, and it seemed perfectly natural to me to get my inspiration from an impossible source. “Reach into the dark and pull out the answer,” we used to say. Not knowing what’s coming next can be a pleasant state, if you trust it.

  The difficulty is that you have to keep trusting it even when there’s no evidence that it’s working. I flew to China, and as the days went by, Thomas Jefferson was nowhere to be found. I kept asking people if they had ever heard of him, and I got blank stares. What had I been thinking?

  Maybe I had expected too much. I had been in love with China since the first time I went there in 1980, thinking I might be able to shoot a sequel to The Four Seasons. I loved the people, and I tried to teach myself the language, tripping over the tones, the way I had in glee club as a boy. In Mandarin, if you get one of four musical tones wrong, the word means something else. I took my movie to a group of filmmakers and told them in my weirdest Chinese, “I’m very happy to show you my film: Four Seasons.” I had the words right, but not the tones. What they heard me say was: “I’m very happy to show you my film: Dead Chicken.”

  But I kept trying. Every night at dinner, we were given a banquet by a different committee. After a few days, I realized that this was not so much from hospitality as from their desire to have a really good meal for a change. China was still a desperately poor country.

  I looked forward to these banquets. The Chinese I was meeting with laughed and ate and drank with the same joy as Italians. I would spend each day working out a couple of sentences I could say in their language to impress both them and myself. While I was delivering a particularly poetic thought in Chinese, a thin, scholarly man sitting next to Arlene leaned over to her and said somewhat wryly, “Your husband has the accent of a Tibetan monk.” I took this as a compliment in spite of how they felt about Tibetan monks.

  When we went there with the science show in 1995, China had become in some ways another country. Now it was Glorious to be Rich, and a lot of people in the big cities were covering themselves with glory. One of the scientists I talked to was a mathematician who ran a successful company in Hong Kong. For a half million dollars he had bought a Beijing apartment a few doors down the street from people who still rented apartments from their work units for three dollars a month. Everywhere, rising out of the dusty streets were spikes of affluence as tall buildings poked into the sky. Shanghai now used as much electricity for its neon signs as it had used twenty years earlier to light the whole city.

  Everyone I met was trying to start a business. One of our science stories dealt with a lab in San Francisco that was analyzing herbs from traditional Chinese medicine to see if they actually cured anything—so I toured an herb garden. The man who ran it was very interested in showing me how valuable his herbs were.

  “You see that bush over there?” he said. “Cures AIDS.”

  “Really.” I was mildly amazed that we had never heard of it in our country.

  He pointed to a plant that cured something else, and then we turned down another path. “See that plant over there? That cures AIDS, too.”

  By the time he pointed out the third plant that cured AIDS, I was getting testy.

  “Do you have one here that doesn’t cure AIDS?”

  He seemed to miss the irony and went on to tell me I ought to think about investing in his company. “Chinese herbs are very popular,” he told me. The prospect of learning anything about Jefferson was getting dimmer.

  And then I met Yuan Long Ping.

  We were standing in a rice paddy in Jianjiang. He was shorter than me and wiry, with the skin of a man who had spent years in the sun. His eyes looked straight into yours, and when he smiled or laughed, you joined him in it. You couldn’t help it.

  We rode a bus into the countryside while he tried to catch me up on all the biology I had missed while I was daydreaming in high school. He energetically crammed me full of alleles, dominant and recessive, and “characters.” I couldn’t get this thing about characters. Did it mean characteristics? Was his English in need of repair? I kept repeating what he said, but calling them “characteristics,” and that’s when his unique teaching style came into play. As we bumped down the country road, he got up from his seat and leaned over me. He grabbed my shirt in his skinny hands and put his face an inch from mine: “Alan. Listen to me. Try to understand: Character. Character!” I thought he was going to choke me.

  When I got off the bus and stepped into the rice paddy, I stepped all the way into it, slipping into a ditch full of water. He had a good laugh out of that and then patiently showed me how he had transformed rice production in China, and all over Asia, with an ingenious method that involved simple tools like a rope and a beer bottle—and a deep understanding of genetics. As a boy, he had lived through a famine and promised himself he would devote his life to feeding people. He knew that crossing two strains of rice would produce a hybrid and that hybrids enjoy something called “hybrid vigor,” which allows them to give off much bigger crops. So all he had to do was cross two strains, take the seeds they produced, and get them to the farmers. But that would be extremely difficult, because the rice plant is self-pollinating. The sexual organs are so close together, he would have had to take pollen from one plant and apply it to another with tweezers. This was not a way to feed millions. He needed to find a rice plant that wouldn’t pollinate itself.

  His team searched the countryside, and an assistant came upon an unusual rice plant that had a sterile male organ. It could be pollinated by another plant from a different strain. Here’s where the rope and beer bottle came in. He planted three kinds of rice in a pattern of alternating rows: When the plants were mature, two workers took opposite ends of a rope that had been weighted with a beer bottle and dragged it across the field, bending each row of rice toward the one behind it, pollinating it. Since the day he figured this out, his method has fed hundreds of millions of people across Asia.

  I asked him if he knew of Jefferson. He smiled. “Yes. Jie Fu Sun,” he said, calling him by his Chinese name. “Independence.”

  He was the only person I met in China who knew Jefferson. The real surprise, though, was learning that Yuan Long Ping had lived a life that in many ways paralleled Jefferson’s.

  As a young man studying to be a biologist, Yuan Long Ping was forced to learn Lysenkoism. This was the completely false theory of biology that said acquired changes could be passed on genetically to future generations. If you altered a plant, its offspring would have those same altered qualities. This idea probably appealed to leaders who bashed people over the head today to make good Communists out of future generations. So they decreed that Lysenko’s nonscience was science.

  “Lysenko. Now, I hate him,” he told me. “Because he wasted my useful time—when I was young and strong.”

  But then, somehow, he found books on standard biology, and while he was working on Lysenkoism during the day, he taught himself true biology at night. “I bring Lysenko’s book outside. But inside…”

  This was a brave act; if he had been discovered, he could have been sent to prison, or worse. And I realized in that moment, standing ankle deep in an irrigation ditch in Jianjiang, that I was talking with a Chinese Jefferson. He had risked his life to give his countrymen rice that would save lives—and so had the man from Virginia.

  Jefferson’s side of the story began while he was in France. He was infatuated with Maria Cosway, a British artist, and in order to impress her while they were walking in the park, he tried to jump over a bush. This was not, you would think, the act of a genius. He caught his foot on the bush, fell, and broke his wrist. A short time later, he told people he was going to Italy to recuperate; but actually, he was on a secret mission. He had heard that Italy’s Piedmont rice was better than the kind grown in the Carolinas, and he wanted some of that rice to plant in America. This was partly to help America compete with foreign countries in the sale of rice and partly because slavery,
which he hated, was encouraged by the production of the American strain. The Carolina rice grew in hot, swampy, malarial lowlands, where slaves were becoming sick and dying. The Piedmont rice could be grown by ordinary farmers working without slaves in the highlands. He wanted that rice.

  But the Italians were protective of their rice. It was forbidden, on pain of death, to leave Italy with unhusked rice in your possession. This was a tough sanction, and he ignored it. He sent two bags of it by mule to a port city, and just in case it was intercepted, he filled his pockets with as much as he could carry and brazenly crossed back into France.

  Both men had taken serious risks, both over a question of improved rice and both to serve their country. Yuan seemed to have found the contentment that comes from serving others. I had to ask the typical interviewer’s question: How does it feel to have helped so many people? He hesitated. In China, then, people weren’t used to being asked about their feelings.

  “You…you mean my feeling?”

  “Yes. How do you feel?”

  “My feeling. I feel very happy to do that. If people, they live very comfortable…this is my goal, my goal of my life, to make more people happy.”

  I told this story at Monticello, how I had finally understood Jefferson for the first time when I met this scientist standing in a muddy ditch on the other side of the world.

  Just as Jefferson filled his pockets with forbidden rice, Yuan Long Ping filled his mind with forbidden ideas—placing himself in the same kind of danger.

  Yuan has fed hundreds of millions of people…because he insisted on thinking for himself. He can say, as Jie Fu Sun once said, “I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, and bearding every authority which stood in their way.”

  Meaning can happen when you least expect it. As with Julann’s willingness to take a random walk, one improbable thing can lead to another. I found out a little about Jefferson when I started reading feverishly about him—but now I felt I could sense him, could feel his emotions. I could see his skin and hair; I could smell him. As great as he was, he was a man of complexities and contradictions; he was human. I could accept those contradictions more easily now because I’d found out how to imagine him in a more three-dimensional way.

  And I got there in the oddest of ways. I scared myself.

  Chapter 7

  * * *

  Where Is the Place of Understanding?

  It’s a quaint tradition that must go back centuries. You honor someone in a ceremony that includes seating him at a table on a dais, while the assembled guests watch him eat his dinner. That night they were honoring Simon Wiesenthal, and I was presenting him with an award, so the guests got to watch both of us eat. But, sitting next to him, I saw something more personal than that. I got to look into Wiesenthal’s soul, and it changed me a little.

  Thirty-seven years after Hitler brought his country to ruin, a few neo-Nazis were still trying to kill one more Jew. They planted a bomb outside Wiesenthal’s house in Vienna, so even in 1982, for him the war was not over. I had planned to speak about this, about how harshness and hatred persisted in this artful city of Mozart, Sacher torte, schnitzel, and strudel. But after my meal with Wiesenthal, I put aside what I had planned to say and spoke instead about the man who revealed himself to me in those few minutes. I had been asked once to play him in a movie on television, but I turned down the part because I didn’t think I was right for it. As we talked now, I regretted that I hadn’t said yes, just so I could have met him earlier.

  Wiesenthal had escaped death in concentration camps and had spent his life tracking down Nazis who had never been brought to justice. His goal was not to ambush and kill them, but to deliver them to courts of law. He valued justice more than revenge. He might have felt like killing them, but he didn’t. I had been advising young people for years to stick by their values. But what values? There are plenty of people in both prisons and palaces who follow their values, but not necessarily to anyone else’s benefit. Here was a man whose life made it clear that it mattered what those values actually were; what they pointed you to. Just a few degrees in another direction and they could have led to a life of violent retribution. I wondered where this calibrated sense of values had come from.

  As we talked, I saw a complicated person emerge. Wiesenthal’s life was a serious, dangerous business, yet he was a man with a rich sense of humor. He told me he had a standing competition with an actor friend to see who could come up with the best jokes that the other had not heard before. Each time they met, they would pepper each other with new stories. And then he began telling me a long joke he had just come across. He loved the telling of it. Even the setup made his eyes crinkle with pleasure. He was about two-thirds of the way through the story when we noticed someone had come up to the dais and was waiting to speak to him. Wiesenthal turned to acknowledge him. The man was short and slight, in his seventies, with a weathered face. He smiled, but his smile was sorrowful.

  “Remember me?” he asked.

  Wiesenthal looked at him for a moment, and then tears welled in his eyes. “Yes.”

  They had known each other in one of the camps and had not met since then. They spoke only a few words. Considering the power it had over them, it was a surprisingly short exchange. The man said his name and a few words about the work he did now, and Wiesenthal nodded.

  “I just wanted to say hello.”

  The man left and went to his table. Wiesenthal turned back to me. Tears were streaming down his face, but he didn’t speak about the encounter with the man from the camp. Instead, he picked up where he had left off, and—through his tears—he finished telling the joke.

  When I got up to speak, I told the audience what I had just seen. I thought it was a look not only into Wiesenthal’s own person, but, in a way, into the soul of the whole Jewish people. No matter what the world had done to them, through their tears, they could find something to laugh at. There was almost no pain that couldn’t be eased by humor. The ability to translate misery into something else gave them power over it.

  When the evening was over and I was leaving the hall, a young rabbi came over to tell me he appreciated what I’d said. He told me a famous rabbi had a phrase that explained what made a good talk: “What comes from the heart goes to the heart.”

  That registered—and it stuck with me over the years. Maybe that was how Wiesenthal got his values—someone, at some time, revealing something from the heart that went to his.

  I think that’s how my daughters have found their values. As much as I tried, I don’t think I put them there. Instead, I’ll bet that everything they saw and heard resonated in the part of the brain that, because we don’t know what else to call it, we call the heart. Wherever that particular heart is and whatever it is, I saw it develop in our girls from an early age.

  I was having lunch with our daughter Beatrice when she was six. We were in a restaurant in California, and I was telling her about the wildlife that existed just outside our house. There was a column of flying insects that looked like gnats and clustered in a column, suspended in the air, right in the middle of the brick path leading to the street. They lived for a few weeks every summer, and then they were gone. Dead, I guess. And a year later there they were again, another column of them suspended in the same place. And there was a bird that built a nest every year over the lamp by the front door. She fluttered up and flew out past your ear when you left the house. Her nest was woven tightly. It was made of twigs, and she had no hands to weave it with, only claws and a beak. How did she do it? Once, when it fell out of the cranny between the lamp and the wall, all the eggs broke apart, but not the nest.

  I was carried away by the wonder of it, but suddenly I realized that tears were coming down Bea’s face. I’d been talking about nature, but I’d included death in the story. The dead gnats, the chicks in their broken eggs. Had that upset her? She tried, but she couldn’t tell me why she was crying. Maybe at that time
in her world, death wasn’t part of the wonder of nature. It didn’t seem fair to her.

  Even as a child, Bea had a sense of fairness. We taught her to argue for what she wanted, and she took to arguing like a lawyer. As young as seven or eight, she argued her case meticulously and felt that since her arguments were unassailable, she should get what she was asking for. Anything else would be unfair. And fairness still guides her in her work. She led a group of women in building a children’s museum and spent ten years fighting the opposition of interests with connections all the way up to the governor. They won, and the museum serves thousands of children a year now.

  I wanted to pass on values to Bea’s kids. And my first inclination was to do it the way I did with Bea: by talking. As soon as they were old enough to reason, I would take them after school to a local muffin shop and we’d have tea and talk about ethical issues. This sounds monumentally boring, but they seemed to be interested. A favorite of theirs was the lady who sued a fast-food chain because one of their restaurants sold her a cup of scalding hot coffee that burned her seriously. Was she in the right? Or was the restaurant? In each round of discussions, we would worry about new information that made the issue more complicated, until it was almost impossible to know what was fair. All I wanted, of course, was for them to think about fairness, but I doubt they’ll get it from talking. They’ll get it indirectly, by what they see happen spontaneously around them, because what comes from the heart goes to the heart.

  Bea’s house is full of noise and life. A fire is going in the kitchen. The kids are laughing, fighting, bargaining, complaining. And meanwhile, as the household swirls around him, Bosco is watching it all with one blue eye and one brown eye. He doesn’t know from fairness. He just wants to lick your face. He’s a mutt, a cross between a dog that looks like a frankfurter and one that looks like a hamburger. But he’s all affection. He runs across the room toward you, pees on the floor with excitement, and rolls over on his back so you can scratch his belly. He’s been trained by a professional dog guru, and when someone in the family looks him in his mismatched eyes and says in an unmistakable tone, “Place!” he skitters back to his place, which is a small piece of carpet in the corner. He stays there obediently, straining against an invisible leash that exists only in his trained brain, as he longs to curl in the crook of your arm. To him, I guess, fairness is whatever comes his way. But it seems hard to let him languish there.