(Nothing, the General muttered, is ever so expensive as what is offered for free.)
I heard this from a Japanese professor in Tokyo during a wonderful sashimi dinner where I was the guest as a visiting lecturer. The dinner was, for me, free. But the mild implication was that there was now a web of obligation in which I was caught. I haven’t yet had the chance to repay that hospitality. But what the professor said has always remained with me, as it’s probably true. At least in some cases.
The material above is from a "Goodreads" feature in which Viet Thanh Nguyen offers a bit of explication for his novel "The Sympathizer," set in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
The question of whether a gift of one sort or another is truly free is an issue I deal with near the end of my novella, "Manhattan Morning" and as you can see from reading the excerpt below, it is not surprising that this question apparently first arose in Nguyen's mind during a stay in Japan.
From "Manhattan Morning:"
The woman took a sip of the tea, put it down and pushed it slightly away. Pretty dreadful, Dan thought. Probably the water in the cup wasn’t piping hot and in any event, she clearly hadn’t let it steep long enough.
She pulled her briefcase up and began prowling around in it. Dan tried hard not to look.
“Shit!”
Dan couldn’t believe his ears.
“Oh, shit!”
Fork in midair, he looked at her, hesitated slightly, and then asked what was wrong.
“I can’t pay for my lunch. I don’t have enough cash and I don’t have my credit card with me. I must have left it at home this morning. What a nightmare!” She was staring at the briefcase with a distraught look on her face.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll pay for it. It looks like … what, about ten bucks? Including the tip? I mean it’s nothing. I’d be happy to.”
“No, no, I can’t let you do that.”
They looked at each other and Dan smiled.
“Come on, what’s ten dollars? I mean it’s just nothing. And what’s the alternative? My guess is this place doesn’t run tabs and I can’t exactly see you washing dishes here.”
She laughed.
“I guess not. Well … I feel totally ridiculous … how could this happen? … How can I let a complete stranger buy my lunch? … Only if I can pay you back. You have to promise.”
“Sure, but I don’t care if you forget. Really, it’s a ridiculously small amount.”
“It’s the principle.”
Dan knew what she meant from his days in Japan. If she didn’t pay him back, it would hang over her. The Japanese often refused help from strangers, even in rather dire circumstances, and by the same token, people sometimes walked past a person in need, unwilling to help. As soon as one did something for someone, a debt was incurred. The problem was, there was never any way to pay it off exactly, to square the account. So one tended to overpay so as not to have doubled the burden through what might be perceived as ingratitude. But over payment simply shifted the obligation to the other side, presenting the same dilemma there. The two parties were now linked like two small children on a seesaw that refused to balance in the middle.
Americans were better able to shrug it off and move on, but in a way, once a person enters your life in this fashion, they never really leave. Just a ghost in most cases, but people did make friends – even enemies – through such circumstances. Dan suddenly felt sorry for his companion. She seemed busy. She didn’t need complications in her life.
“Here, write your name and address on this piece of paper,” the woman said, handing Dan one of the white tablets and a ballpoint pen. She had turned over many pages before finding one that was blank.
As Dan took the materials, the woman looked at him rather intently, afraid he might refuse?
“Sure,” Dan said, and wrote it out.
(Martin, Fowler. Manhattan Morning: A Novella (pp. 111-113). Kindle Edition.)
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