Below, China's gold-medal winning synchronized security team.

Two weeks ago in a hotel room in Providence, Rhode Island my girlfriend and I were talking when, apropos of what I don't remember, she told me about the torch lighting ceremony at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. Her description piqued my interest and we brought it up on YouTube on her notebook computer. I was enchanted.

"Did you see the torch lighting in Beijing?," Carmen asked. (I hadn't).

"Wait till you see that one!"

"I remember my friends telling me about it..." "Wait, wait," she interrupted in excitement.

The YouTube genie was called forth again.

Sixty, fifty-nine, fifty-eight...It was with that sequence that the segment opened.

"They're people!," Carmen explained. I don't know if my jaw dropped because I wasn't looking at my jaw but I hadn't gotten it until she said that. The jaw in my mind certainly dropped.

"Oh, that's not good," I said when I got it. Carmen's excited smile disappeared.

"Oh, no." The grotesquerie of scene after scene of Chinese-as-rustless-screws continued.

I remembered a friend telling me about the drummers, below, as I watched that part.

"This is so typical of the Chinese," I said to Carmen. "This is what they excel at, this Hollywood special-effects stuff. This is what they think we're all about."

I thought of Rae Yang's comment in Morning Sun about growing up with Lei Feng as a role model:

"A shiny bolt? That's what our generation was to become?"

So she became a Red Guard and beat people, sometimes to death. (1)

I watched to the end, I think it was only seven or eight minutes long, but it was like seven or eight minutes of nonstop hardcore porn, it was so over-the-top that it was dulling rather than exciting.

At the end, there was Hu Jintao, getting up from his seat applauding like a proud Olympic gymnastics coach who had choreographed a perfect-10 performance.

"Oh my god," I said, wincing when it was mercifully, finally over.

Westerners have a very difficult time understanding China, this westerner in particular. Chinese have equal difficulty understanding America.

1. Spider Eaters, 228-231.