According to my father, northern China was a Happening Place back in the day. While the Southern Chinese were intellectual touchy-feely types who had trouble wielding swords, the Northerners could fight and thus, ruled.

This was my first trip to mainland China. It was familiar. It was foreign. And despite everybody ‘looking like me’, I stuck out. The clothes I wore, the way I did my hair, my white boyfriend—I trailed behind my parents like a lost duckling, using them as a shield. I relied on them when women talked to me in hushed and polite tones, realizing I have only learned angry and food-related Mandarin.

For my parents needed their native tongue only to express the depths of their rage, or for their favorite dishes, which Americans had no name for.

Our first leg of the trip was Xi’An. Arriving at our hotel, I noted the no smoking signs plastered everywhere (or, ‘no smoklng’). Yet, a lonely cigarette butt sat on the elevator floor.

Besides being someone’s ash tray, this elevator had the impatient tendency to close on its passengers. We resorted to leaping through, as if it were a circus hoop on fire.

We put our bags down in our room. I sniffed. Hmm…

My dad visited our room to make sure everything was okay.

“Does your room smell like cigarettes and… something else? Something strange?” I pointed to the no smoking sign outside the door.

He laughed and spread his hands. With mock gravity: “Welcome to China.”

China assaults the senses. There’s a sense of grandeur and freedom in a distinctly un-American way. Neat queues are ripe for cutting and any knob not behind acrylic gets touched by zillions.

We tobogganed down from the Great Wall and were told if we went too fast that it’d be well possible to flip out of the track. At the very least, you’d collide with the person in front of you and make a terrible mess of things. But they welcomed us to do it anyway after teaching us how the brake worked, leaving the speed of our ride to our own discretion.

The guy working the ‘ride’ asked me if I liked living in America or Asia better. I was diplomatic and said, both have merits. He clicked his tongue and said, of course I must prefer America. People are allowed to carry firearms there.

The shock didn’t stop there. Other moments of note: a lady pissing into a squatting toilet with the door wide open, a tourist emptying the trash from her purse onto the floor of a 1500 year old temple. A man who snorted and hacked for three hours on our train from Luoyang. I think I wore a seatbelt 10% of the time, as it was usually stuffed under a cute terrycloth cover. And forget motorcycle or bike helmets. We saw literally no one wearing them, despite flagrant traffic violations and rampant jay-walking.

But in most places I wouldn’t be allowed anywhere to speed down a mountain or climb all over a world heritage site.

So it’s a bit confusing, what we gain or give up for order’s sake. It’s probably great that in America I won’t get thrown to the ground by an aggressive and placid faced group of tourists. But then again, we crush people at Walmart during the holidays. So maybe we’re all even.

My parents were really good guides. They know all the crazy stories behind sites, and what the best parts are. They speak the language and can confirm English plaques that have gone through one too many layers of translation and no longer make sense. But sugarcoaters they are not.

“That’s where so and so hanged himself! That’s the well the eunuch threw the emperor’s favorite concubine down to drown! This is where they found the skeletons and claw marks of the people who got buried alive!”

At first I was disturbed by their morbidity. But really, it’s just a shock that China is so old. Where they have suicidal emperors and poisoning wives, the West has the Crusades, witch hunts years of slavery and conquest.

Americans have done awful things, and I’m sure we will continue to, but we are lucky to be young. Because while doing wrong in the future may be a determinable struggle, having done wrong seems inevitable. Just by sheer newness, we’ve only really had a few centuries to do bad things.

We are the happy-go-lucky idiots of the world.

The kids who just registered to vote and have all sorts of opinions on things. Here’s to hoping that we really do become more and more civilized as time goes on. So we may commit fewer mistakes than our ancestors.