I wanted to recount a situation I recently observed.

I was sitting in the cafeteria at the new campus today enjoying my steaming bowl of noodles when I heard a crash nearby. I looked up and saw that a girl passing by a nearby table had inadvertantly knocked over another boy's bottle of peanut milk with her handbag. The bottle as if in slow motion toppled over (the crash that I heard), rolled across the table spilling its contents all over the floor and the boy's backpack that was in the seat across from him and finally came to a stop...on the floor...in pieces. All of us sitting nearby watched as the bottle made its trip and no one moved to stop it. I watched the boy's face as it turned from surprise to disappointment to annoyance and finally settled into a perturbed frown. He just looked at the girl with this cold look of frustration and disgrace. The girl had turned around when she heard the first crash to see what had happened, saw the anger on the boy's face then turned back around and hurriedly walked away. The boy glanced at the shattered pieces of bottle and at his backpack bearing the spilled peanut milk, sighed heavily and went back to eating. A few moments later, one of the cleaning staff ladies came and started sweeping up the bottle and the milk. The cleaning lady was about halfway finished with the mess when the girl came back and set a new bottle of peanut milk on the table in front of the boy. Surprised, the boy looked at the bottle, then at the girl, they exchanged a look, as if to say ok, we're even and then the girl walked away.

I was sitting directly across from the boy at the next table and was completely fascinated by his reaction. His face was so expressive. The whole time, he said not one word. Didn't even utter a sound. He didn't turn to talk to his friend sitting beside him and at no point did he say a thing to the girl. The girl also was completely silent. When she turned and walked away the first time, I was surprised, thinking to myself, what, no apology? No nothing? I wondered if she might come back with another bottle and sure enough, she did. I was thinking about it later and was wondering if the same thing had happened in america, what would people do? I think surely there would be words exchanged and there'd probably be some explanation from the offending party as to what would be done to rectify the matter. I doubt it would be as silent as this was though. This is not to say that given any two Chinese people, they would have handled the situation in the same way. I can think of quite a few Chinese people who might have been more verbal. I just found observing the whole situation and the surprising differences in how it was handled very interesting.