Let Me Explain...
Two Misunderstandings, Two Continents, and the Borders of Our Thought
True story.
I. The Anatomy of a Texan Joke
Many years ago, when I was still young, my very first stop in America was a small town in Texas.
Although I had spent years studying English back home and could read and write academic research papers without a hitch, the first time I walked into a Walmart, the standard American female voice blaring through the PA system made me instantly question my reality. I had absolutely no idea what she was saying.
Language is far more than a collection of words. Back then, American humor was entirely beyond my cultural reach. Whenever people gathered and burst into laughter, I could only stand on the periphery, politely squeezing out a rigid, hollow smile.
Until that one Wednesday evening.
In a community church not far from the university, local residents had prepared dinner for international students. The long wooden tables were packed, mostly with volunteers from the local congregation—a group of incredibly hospitable, authentic folks of the American South.
I was sitting next to a young man named Dan, swapping brief snippets of our life stories. Soon, a few more locals drifted over to our circle. Among them was Matt, a local doctor, who sparked up the conversation with visible excitement, shouting across the table:
“Hey, Scott! Do you remember that guy from TAMU last week…”
Matt spoke at breakneck speed, his accent thick with local cadence. Within two or three minutes of setup, our corner of the long bench exploded into the most joyous, uninhibited laughter I had ever heard.
“Oh my god, and that’s not even the best part—the following weekend…” Matt was practically vibrating, eager to push the punchline to its next climax.
“Hold on, stop right there.”
Sitting right beside me, Dan abruptly cut the joke short. He tapped Matt on the shoulder and turned to the circle: “Excuse me, let me explain to Chien first. I don’t believe he got it.”
The laughter died down into hushed chuckles, though I could see someone next to me wiping tears of mirth that had literally dropped into their dinner plate.
Dan turned his face to me. With a depth of patience I had never before encountered in my life, he deliberately slowed his speech, dissecting the hidden universe behind the laughter, layer by layer, word by word.
He pointed to a middle-aged man sitting directly opposite us named Scott. Scott was introverted, the one in the crowd who had laughed the most reservedly. Dan explained to me that Scott had a rather unique hobby: he kept a machine setup in his garage to reload and refurbish used brass bullet casings, packing them with fresh gunpowder into gleaming new ammunition. In this town, friends habitually brought three spent casings to Scott to exchange for one fresh bullet. It was significantly cheaper than Walmart—a tacit, self-organized credit network of trust shared among these old hunters.
During a hunting trip the previous week, a complete outsider joined the group—a freshman from Texas A&M. He had absolutely no idea how this micro-economy worked. As the hunt ended and everyone lined up to board the truck, Scott stood by the vehicle, dressed in his olive-green windbreaker and cap, holding a pen and a ledger, meticulously recording everyone’s name and the number of casings returned.
The freshman completely panicked. Scott’s attire and his grim, bureaucratic ledger-keeping led the young man to believe that this was a local Sheriff enforcing some strict state wildlife contraband policy. Terrified, he nudged Dr. Matt and whispered frantically, “Shit, I didn’t know this! What am I supposed to do if I lost some of my cartridge cases? Is the Sheriff going to suspend my hunting license?”
Matt saw through the misunderstanding instantly. But instead of clearing it up, he decided to play along with a classic prank. Deadpan, Matt said, “Rules are rules, bro. You lose the brass, you’re in deep trouble.” Then, Matt actually went along with the ruse, selling his own spare casings to the poor freshman at an exorbitant premium just so the kid could “settle his account” with the law. To make it even more absurd, the exact same drama repeated itself during another hunt two weeks later!
When Dan reached this point in his explanation, Scott, sitting across from us, rubbed his nose, a sudden epiphany dawning on him. He chimed in: “Ah! Now I see why that kid called me ‘Sheriff’ so respectfully every single time. I thought he was just making fun of my jacket!”
That was the ultimate trigger. The entire table erupted into an absolute roar of laughter all over again, with people slamming their hands onto the wood in pure delight.
And under Dan’s thoughtful, slow-motion English explanation, I finally understood. Sitting at that Texan dinner table, surrounded by these Americans, I burst into a laugh that was entirely free of cultural estrangement—vibrant, effortless, and shared.
That night, I caught a glimpse of the true borders of our thought.
I realized that when navigating the chasm between civilizations, mere “translation” is profoundly inadequate. Translation is superficial; it only exchanges symbols. Only “explanation” can decrypt the micro-institutions, the psychology, and the lived realities behind those symbols. But in this world, people who are willing to halt their momentum, slow their pace, and explain things to you are exceedingly rare.
II. The Magnificent Misunderstanding
This story would find a nearly flawless sequel years later.
By then, I was wrapping up my graduate studies, preparing to move across the country to Silicon Valley, California. Dan had become one of my closest friends. On an evening shortly before my departure, I was invited to his home for a farewell dinner.
Dan’s mother, Sarah, was a devout, deeply kind woman who spent most of her years volunteering at the church. At the dinner table, she looked at me and posed a question that had perplexed her for a long time—a question framed by a distinctly Western curiosity:
“Russ, is the Chinese authority’s strict regulation and skepticism toward underground churches rooted in the 19th-century Taiping Rebellion? Because that group claimed to be Christian, started a civil war, and caused such catastrophic loss of life.”
It was a question of immense depth, yet one riddled with the typical information fractures that occur when looking across oceans.
I may be a technologist with a STEM background, but I grew up in the household of a historian. To read classical annals in their original form, I was rigorously trained from a very young age in classical Chinese philology and text-critical analysis.
Facing Sarah’s perplexity, the awkward young man who once sat paralyzed by an American joke was gone. At that moment, my English was fluid and precise enough to hold the weight of such an intricate civilizational knot.
“It is a magnificent, beautiful misunderstanding,” I replied with a quiet smile. “To put it simply: no.”
Just as Dan had done for me years prior with the bullet joke, I slowed my pace and began to unravel the massive historical tapestry for his family.
I began across the globe in the 1860s, tracing how Issachar Roberts, an American Southern Baptist missionary, arrived in China and inadvertently influenced Hong Xiuquan. I explained how Hong localized Christian theology, warping it into a destructive heresy; why the traditional literati and the Imperial court feared this ideological breach; how the British Empire calculated its geopolitics between the Opium Wars and the rebels; and, crucially, how subsequent rulers—from Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek to Mao and then modern China—viewed and utilized this historical trauma through the lenses of political security and institutional preservation. I even traced the thread all the way back to the Tang Dynasty, to the Nestorian Stele that marked Christianity’s earliest footprints in China.
I offered no black-and-white ideological verdicts. Instead, with the instinct and detachment of a classical historian, I laid bare the deep-seated fears and institutional calculations that drove each generation.
When I finally finished speaking, a profound silence fell over the room. The golden rays of the setting Texan sun filtered through the window, washing over the dining table. Everyone sat in complete stillness, as though they had just traveled through a millennium of human friction alongside my words.
Sarah looked at me, a quiet amazement reflecting in her eyes. She said softly:
“Wow, young man. You know what? You truly have a gift. You should let more people hear this.”
Sitting beside her, Dan caught my eye and subtly flashed a thumbs-up. I smiled back, a warmth swelling in my chest. At that exact moment, I realized I had finally taken the grace of explanation Dan had gifted me at that church table years ago and returned it to his civilization in its highest form.
III. The Chasm and the Ledger
But as time marched on, I gradually discovered that this ability to see through two worlds simultaneously is also a unique curse.
From the chilling winds of geopolitical friction that began gathering momentum around 2016, to the global fracture of the 2020 pandemic, I have lived entirely within a bilingual existence. Every morning, I open my eyes to screens from both sides of the Pacific. I watch media outlets on both ends describe the exact same sunset, the exact same tragedy, yet piece together two completely parallel, mutually demonizing, and hysterical universes within their respective information cocoons. Witnessing these monumental misunderstandings manifest in real-time is a form of mental exhaustion that frequently leaves me suffocated.
Elites and the masses on both sides stand securely behind their respective firewall barriers, screaming in fury at out-of-context fragments. They look so much like that panicked college freshman at the end of the hunt—unable to decode Scott’s jacket and ledger, running blindly to buy spare casings from a cynical onlooker just to survive a policy that didn’t exist.
We are living through a historical junction that is both profoundly critical and dangerous. The sweeping macroeconomic and geopolitical prophecies of Kissinger and Huntington are playing out right before our eyes. Yet, on the micro-level—amidst the debris of this freezing polarization—almost no one is willing to stand in the gap, strip away the emotion, and carefully document, describe, and explain what is actually happening.
The borders of our language are the borders of our thought. If our two worlds are destined to endure the deep winter of a New Cold War, then at the very least, there ought to be a friend sitting right beside you on the bench.
I am Russ S. Chien. Over the years, I have quietly built an extensive ledger of unpublished manuscripts and analytical notes. Perhaps these writings will see the light of day in my twilight years, or perhaps they never will. Who knows?
But starting today, on this little bench on Substack, I intend to use the cold, clinical mechanics of institutional economics and applied history to take this massive, chaotic, fast-moving world, slow the pace down, break it into pieces, and explain it to you.
Welcome aboard. Let us stay present in our time.
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