On Christmas, I had lunch in a factory town near Shanghai at a restaurant whose Chinese name means Stupid Noodle Restaurant. It’s not a joke. Nor a mystery, if you’re Chinese. The reason a restaurant would call itself stupid is because a stupid owner won’t cheat you. Next to the restaurant are a small store that sells cables and a small store that sells car batteries. At the restaurant, the knife-cut noodles were very good.

QUESTION: When the green bean jumped off a tall building, what did it become?

ANSWER: Red bean.

QUESTION: When the banana jumped off a tall building, what did it become?

ANSWER: Eggplant.

QUESTIONER: For Spring Festival, a farmer wanted to kill a donkey or a pig. Which did he choose?

LISTENER: I don’t know. The pig?

QUESTIONER: Congratulations, the donkey agrees with you.

After a three-week trip to China, Ben Casnocha wrote a long post about it. His main point I very much agree with:

Flush toilets and clean water matter more than abstract rights such as a free press.

Sure, the Chinese government censors all sorts of stuff. I find it hard to read anything on blogspot.com, for example (because the free blogs on that site could be used by Chinese bloggers). But, as Ben emphasizes, freedom in China — the freedom to do all sorts of things, including travel and make a living — has vastly increased over the last 10 years. Simply because of the economic growth. How much has American freedom increased over the last 10 years?

I fail to see any substantial America-specific increase. Due to the Internet, free speech has certainly increased but that has almost nothing to do with how America is governed. Free speech has increased everywhere with Internet access. Due to the increased cost of health care in America (an increased percentage of per capita income), worsening health (e.g., the obesity epidemic), and stagnation in the development of better treatments (e.g., for bipolar disorder) and better prevention, I’d say freedom in America has declined because poor health is imprisoning. Obesity, for example, is profoundly imprisoning. Cross-national comparisons show that America has a uniquely poor health-care system given American wealth. Given the concentration in America of support for health research (money and prestige), America is especially responsible for the lack of progress. And when people as smart as Atul Gawande fail to see the great stagnation in health care, it’s hard to imagine those in power doing something about it. So which country is better governed?

Anchorage, of course, is the title of Michelle Shocked’s great song — one of her great songs. She writes to a childhood friend and the answer comes back from Anchorage: I’ve got a husband, two kids, a house . . . Anchorage: state of being anchored.

Yesterday I asked one of my Chinese students what his parents did. “They’re officers,” he said. He meant they worked in an office.

In my experience, most Americans know little about Tibet but that doesn’t prevent some of them from having strong opinions about the Chinese takeover. (A crime against humanity, they say.) At a dinner in Berkeley, I made this point to some friends. One of them asked politely, “What is the other side?” She had no idea what it was.

Yes, Chinese students are brainwashed about this. (When I googled “Tibet slavery” and tried to follow the links, all of sudden nothing worked.) But the smartest among them know more about it than smart American students who have been brainwashed the other way. Here’s what one of them told me about the Chinese side of the argument:

1. Before China took over, Tibet was ruled by a religious elite. It is this elite, personified by the Dalai Lama, that now has influential Americans (e.g., Richard Gere, Robert Thurman) on their side. While the elite are incredibly pissed off by the Chinese takeover — just as rich Cubans were by Castro — the rest of the country, having been oppressed by this elite, doesn’t agree.

2. Before China took over, there was widespread slavery in Tibet. You could incur a debt that basically made you a slave, it took so long to pay off. Of course this makes a mockery of the Dalai Lama’s books. Here are some details:

Until 1959, when the Dalai Lama last presided over Tibet, most of the arable land was still organized into manorial estates worked by serfs. These estates were owned by two social groups: the rich secular landlords and the rich theocratic lamas. Even a writer sympathetic to the old order allows that “a great deal of real estate belonged to the monasteries, and most of them amassed great riches.” Much of the wealth was accumulated “through active participation in trade, commerce, and money lending.”

Drepung monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, with its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. The wealth of the monasteries rested in the hands of small numbers of high-ranking lamas. Most ordinary monks lived modestly and had no direct access to great wealth. The Dalai Lama himself “lived richly in the 1000-room, 14-story Potala Palace.”

Secular leaders also did well. A notable example was the commander-in-chief of the Tibetan army, a member of the Dalai Lama’s lay Cabinet, who owned 4,000 square kilometers of land and 3,500 serfs. Old Tibet has been misrepresented by some Western admirers as “a nation that required no police force because its people voluntarily observed the laws of karma.” In fact. it had a professional army, albeit a small one, that served mainly as a gendarmerie for the landlords to keep order, protect their property, and hunt down runaway serfs.

Runaway serfs. I find these paragraphs vastly more believable than anything I’ve heard Richard Gere or the Dalai Lama say about the situation. Here’s how one Free-Tibeter answers these facts:

The old Tibet was backward in its technological and social systems. Nobody denies this. If, however, you look at the faces of those Tibetans who were born and grew up in that society, you can easily notice their genuine smile. When compared with other communities, the Tibetans were generally quite peaceful and warm-hearted. If they were really as cruel as the Chinese claim, then I think the people who were born and grew up under those circumstances would be different. The people living at the time were happier and calmer than the people in this new generation. At that time, unfortunately, there were people who were used by the landlords. Now the whole nation has become a slave.

3. Tsinghua students sometimes volunteer to work in Tibet as teachers for a year. They teach primary school. The education system in Tibet is very poor; there is a shortage of good teachers.

I don’t have an opinion about this. It is the invisibility of gaps in knowledge that interests me here, the way smart Americans don’t realize they’ve been brainwashed.

It is easy to make people laugh. Yesterday at a faculty meeting I answered a question (asked in English) in Chinese. Everyone laughed.