We're back. What an adventure.

Much to share. At the moment I'm kicking myself a bit for not having my audio recorder running while out and about.

Year after year, one of the running jokes among China-weary expats I've known has been about the decibel level everywhere you go in China, or at least urban Han China. TVs in hotel rooms, loudspeakers on buses and subways, music blasting outside beauty salons. A constant assault, and hard to get used to for Westerners. The joke goes that the noise provides comfort of a sort, like a security blanket.

Once, back in 1993, an American friend, living in Beijing, was visiting me in Guangzhou and crashing in my room. In the cluster of high-rises I was living in, one morning the noise started earlier than usual (sappy karaoke music wafting from someone's window), and I was particularly impatient and spiteful. I dug around my tapes for NWA's Straight Outta Compton, popped it in, and played the first (title) track, at maximum volume, with the box pointed straight out the window. I immediately felt guilty, and confessed my guilt to my friend. He joked: It's nothing to them. Like the buzzing of a fly, or maybe even soothing. True or not, by the time the track was finished, the karaoke music had disappeared, and I went back to sleep.

The joke is rooted in cynicism and condescension. Yet even if the spirit isn't right, I now think that in content the joke is dead on.

The first of my two weeks I spent with the YingHua-in-Beijing Summer Language and Leadership Institute, where, like last year, I was guiding 8-to-15-year-old Americans and Chinese through the bewilderment of being thrown together as roommates. My spouse had already been in Beijing for three weeks, co-directing the program, while our older daughter, age 8, participated, and our 6-year-old was tagging along in a pseudo-mascot role.

We spent the week in Huairou, near Beijing, at the National Mountaineering Training Center. Over four and a half days the Center's "coaches" led the kids in a series of team-building exercises. In so many ways the coaches' treatment of the kids was jarring to me (and, I suspect, to the American kids). There are many reasons for this, but I think first and foremost is the EXTREME DECIBEL LEVEL.

Whether yelling "Line up!" or shouting "Can you do it?" or counting down from 10 to get everyone to listen, the noisy episodes just kept coming. Often they'd come after a period of relative silence, making them all the more startling. There's a harshness and an edge to the noise, which can't help but encourage the development of a counter-harshness and counter-edge in the children — a tangible, physical manifestation of the harshness and edge of Chinese society writ large.

The week after Huairou we vacationed as a family in Qingdao — the sunny, breezy coastal city of Tsingtao beer fame. Having emerged into the blinding sunshine from the impressive depths of Underwater World, we ambled about in search of a lunch location. As we passed a stall selling fried seafood, a speaker belted out: "Fried seafood! Fried pork! Shishkabob!" Over and over again. Then, as we rounded a corner, we heard something baffling: next to a lady selling a variety of toys sat a speaker. Out of the speaker, at typical volume, issued what couldn't have been, even to native speakers, anything more than a watery, humanish voice saying…something, over and over and over. As grating as the fried-food bit might have been, at least it had some modest informational value. But the informational value-add of this was nil. The noise was obviously and undeniably serving no purpose but to simply be noise.

I chuckled and commented to my spouse, who also chuckled. In light of what had struck me at YingHua it all suddenly made perfect sense. And I recalled how our daughter, at age 3, not long after we had moved to Beijing in 2004, and having spent much time out and about on the streets of Beijing with Mom and Dad, would at odd times hold up a toilet paper roll to her mouth and start shouting quasi-verbal inanities at high volume, reminiscent of the sorts of noise I've been describing throughout this post.

From the perspective of my own personal growth, what had once been nothing but pure annoyance to me now fit inside of a completely coherent framework: adaptive human behavior. Being annoyed is understandable, but by itself annoyance is ultimately fruitless in our species' quest for genuine understanding. With the distance from it that I now have it all seems quite obvious, but the bodily fact of culture makes it tough to see beyond our own immediate reactions. More on this next time.