For me, the four photos showing a detritus-cluttered Times Square were hardly surprising. Any place that had just packed in a million people would leave jetsam and flotsam of garbage - even under the best of circumstances. I'm not oblivious to factors such as cultural impact, educational levels and social backgrounds, etc. A typical American crowd that scientifically represents US demographics would probably litter less than a typical Chinese crowd. Within China, an urban gathering would heed public sanitation more than a rural assemblage. This has nothing to do with race, but lots to do with education, especially the teaching of civility.

在我看来，纽约时代广场的垃圾照片一点都不令人惊奇。即使是在最好的情况下，一个刚刚有一百万人呆过的地方都会产生大量的碎屑垃圾。我并非没有注意到诸如文化影响、教育水平和社会背景之类的因素。一群能科学地代表美国人口结构的典型美国人群很可能会比一群典型中国人丢的垃圾更少。在中国国内，城市居民集会时会比乡村居民更加注重公共卫生。这和民族属性没有任何关系，而与教育水平关系关系匪浅，尤其是公民的礼仪教育。

New York, a city I called home for two years in the 1990s, is not typically American, not in my eyes. It attracts a much more diverse segment from the US and the rest of the world. For the New Year's countdown, the crowd was predominantly youthful, similar to the one at Shanghai's Bund. Anyway, I would hesitate to draw sweeping conclusions from one event or a few photos of it. I've seen American downtowns much dirtier and scarier than Chinese cities, and American suburbs and small towns much cleaner than Chinese ones. There are many reasons for the discrepancy, but race or ethnicity is not among them as far as I can figure out.

上个世纪90年代，我在纽约居住了两年。纽约并不是一个典型的美国城市，至少在我看来不是。它吸引了来自全美和世界各地的人们，因而多元的文化和思想在这里交汇融合。参加新年夜倒数的绝大多数都是年轻人，情况和在上海外滩狂欢的人群类似。不管怎么说，我不会仅从一件事或几张照片就匆匆下一个笼统的结论。我见过一些美国的市中心比中国的城市更肮脏、更可怕。我也见过一些美国的郊区和小镇比中国的郊区和小镇干净整洁许多。这种差异的形成是有原因的，但据我所知，民族和种族绝不是其中之一。

As I see it, the outcry from Chinese netizens over the photos stems from ignorance. Those who do not know the US that well may imagine it as a symbol, either of goodness or of evil. As such, they would see the posting of the photos as a gesture of reluctance to face our own problems - or even one of denigrating the Utopia of their mind. I'm convinced those people have never lived in the States or read an American newspaper, which is usually plastered with local setbacks and criticisms of various policies.

如我所想，中国网民对于时代广场垃圾照片的过激反应是无知的表现。那些不了解美国的人们很可能会把这种行为看作是一种标志——善良或邪恶的标志。如果是这样，他们会把这种发布垃圾照片的行为看作是不愿面对自身问题的表现——或甚至是诽谤他们心中理想国的恶劣行径。我相信那些人应该从来没有在美国呆过或读过美国的报纸，而美国的报纸通常会在醒目的位置刊登当地面临的问题和批评政府政策的文章。

Of course, there was also the camp of schadenfreude that, "They were no better than us". They used the photographic evidence to justify domestic problems, inadvertently bearing witness to the mentality portrayed by the old Chinese saying, "Those who run 50 steps away from danger call those who fled 100 steps cowards". They forgot that lessons learned in other countries can indeed be applied to similar situations in our own country, with qualification, of course, thus saving us the trouble of making the same mistakes.

当然，也有许多人幸灾乐祸道：“他们和我们一样没什么素质。”他们以这些照片为据，为国内的社会问题正名。他们的心态无意中印证了中国的一句古话：“五十步笑百步”。他们忘记了，其他国家的经验教训在一定条件下也可以在我国相似的问题中得到运用。这样我们就可以避免犯类似的错误。

Other than ignorance, the tendency to see a place as either pure good or pure bad is rooted in a stubborn inability to absorb the complexities of the real world. The world does not abide by either-or rules. Even a simple thing like littering has a full gamut of variations. Coupled with other factors, it may have so many dimensions as to dwarf the imagination of the creators of the theoretical physics-based movie Interstellar. We tend to simplify matters by winnowing less significant details from the discussion. But we should remind ourselves that the golden nuggets of wisdom are distilled from real-life experiences that are often messy and hard to grasp.

除了无知，这些人看待一个地方不是好就是坏，这种倾向源于他们缺乏观察真实世界复杂性的能力。这个世界并不是非黑即白的。即使是像丢垃圾这样简单的事情也会有各种各样的变化。与其他因素结合起来，它可能有如此多个维度，以致于（以物理理论为基础的电影）《星际穿越》创造者的想象力都显得相形见绌。我们倾向于在讨论中省去一些细枝末节以达到简化问题的目的。但是我们应当要提醒自己，智慧的金块是从真实的生活经历中提炼出的，而现实生活往往是混乱而难以捉摸的。

Last year, I staged a play I had written earlier, titled The Ring Road, part of which was based on what I know personally. It features a Chinese couple who live in Silicon Valley. The husband wants to come back to China, listing all the things he finds unbearable stateside, like the glass ceiling for Asians and pure boredom for the middle class, and the wife counters with a litany of objectionable phenomena in China, such as pollution and the unremitting competition in Chinese schools.

去年，我创作的剧目《环路》上演了。这是我以前写的一部剧，故事是部分地基于我个人的所见所闻。故事的主角是一对居住在硅谷的中国夫妇。丈夫想要回到中国，于是他列举出所有他觉得美国不可容忍的地方，比如说存在对亚洲人的晋升障碍，中产阶级逐渐失去社会地位等。妻子则说起一系列有关中国不好的地方的陈词滥调，例如污染严重，学校竞争压力巨大等。

I invited some friends to the dress rehearsal and their feedback disconcerted me. Some said my play was too pro-American and some too anti-America. I tried to explain that I did not have any political agenda either way, but I stopped midway. Instead I told them not to see it as an allegory, but as one man's journey through a real place, or more accurately, journeys of various characters I created from my observations.

我邀请了一些朋友观看这部剧的排练，而他们的反馈令我有些困惑不安。一些人说我的剧亲美色彩太重，另一些人则觉得它带有很强的反美意识。我试着向他们解释我并未在剧中隐含任何政治意图，但中途我便放弃了。与之相反，我告诉他们，我希望他们不要把这部剧看作是一个政治性的寓言，它只不过是我通过观察而创作出的真实反映人生旅途的一部作品罢了。

We all have our little prisms through which we see the world and which we cannot discard completely. But the ability to see a place for what it truly is, not what it is supposed to be, relies on the assiduous accumulation of knowledge. Only under the mountain of knowledge and impartiality will globs of prejudice crumble.

我们每个人都习惯于用自己的方式来看待这个世界，而我们都不能完全摆脱自身主观判断的影响。但是要能够看到一个地方它“是什么样子”，而不是它“应该是什么样子”，就需要刻苦勤勉地积累知识。只有掌握了足够多的知识，秉承公正客观的原则，才能消除内心的一丝偏见。

（中国日报网英语点津 Helen 编辑）