When we go shopping at the supermarket, no one is self conscious about peering into our basket to see what we've bought. When Deb wears new clothing, one of the first questions she is asked is "What did you pay for it?" When you meet a stranger, common questions are "How much money do you make?" and "How old are you?"

This is not considered rude behavior. And once you realize that this is normal, it is a very easy habit to adopt . After all, while we don't do act like this in America, it is not as if nobody is curious about these things.

But it goes further than that. As I've mentioned before, we routinely see people washing their hair on the sidewalks in front of their shops. The first stage in toilet training for children is teaching them to squat by the side of the road. This unselfconsciousness comes in handy later in life because when you take a shit in a public toilet, you are likely to be knee-to-knee with the people squatting on either side of you. The communal showers in government hotels have no door separating the bathing area from the dressing area.

It is tempting to attribute this to the invasive scrutiny of Communist totalitarianism. But it is also possible to see this as evidence of a kind of openness that's missing in much of American life. When something happens here, you know about it. This is not necessarily bad; knowing your neighbor's business has virtues of its own. We pay lip service to this concept when we nostalgically recall the intimacy of life in urban tenements and contrast it with the soulless isolation of suburban tract houses.

We once saw a confrontation between a policeman and a market vendor. What first caught our attention was a mob of people surrounding a pair of shouting voices. This is always a good sign that something interesting is going on. In this case, we slowly deduced, a woman selling vegetables was being accused of using a bogus scale, and by inference, of cheating her customers.

This made it difficult to immediately decide who was the Good Guy and who was the Bad Guy. Generally, if I see a cop intimidating a civilian, my sympathies go out to the citizen. All the more so in a place where government goons wield so much power over the populace. But on the other hand, if this woman was cheating people, lots of people, (maybe even me!) well, then, I was willing to listen to both sides of the story.

The cop was playing to the crowd. He was very theatrical. His shouting was as much an effort to have his words reach as many people as possible as it was an indication of his outrage. He waved his arms flamboyantly, brandishing the scale like a conductor's baton. A market scale is nothing more than a stick with tick marks on it; it has a basket at one end, a counterweight at the other, and it's held and hung from a string. This one, he showed, had been rigged to shortchange the customer. For the climax of his performance, the policeman took the scale in two hands and broke it across his knee.

Now the vegetable vendor was sobbing, and the crowd was murmuring. The cop started demanding that the other vendors let him test their scales. Of course, they all refused. (Hmmm...) But his point was made, and he began to back off.

I thought this was brilliant. As far as I could tell, nobody got arrested, nobody got fined, nobody ended up with a "criminal record." But don't you think everybody in that town is going to know who was cheating them? In addition to her damaged reputation, the vendor is going to have to buy a new scale, a non-trivial financial burden which can be construed as a punishment as well. But presumably her new scale will not be loaded in her favor.

It is the public nature of this drama that made it work. The actions of both the cheating vendor and the heroic policeman were made part of the public record much more powerfully than they could ever have been within our system, despite the best sunshine laws and most vigilant watchdogs.

You can see everything for yourself here. Not only do you get to see the chicken clucking before you eat it for dinner, we vegetarians commonly walk into restaurant kitchens to peruse the vegetables and select those that look most appetizing. When you get your bike fixed, you stand around while the repairs are made on the sidewalk in front of you. Dentist chairs are set up in the front windows of downtown storefronts, with the patients on display like department store mannequins. Even hospital clinics keep their beds in the front rooms for everyone entering to see.

Works in progress are not off limits. We have ridden buses along highways that were in such a state of construction that it is difficult to determine when, if ever, a road is closed for repairs. I gained a new respect for the value of a good road when I saw men and woman with nothing more than hand tools, smashing rock, sifting gravel, mixing and pouring concrete, and grading the ground right beneath our wheels. The fact that our bus was bouncing in and out of craters, or fording streams on boards did not seem to be an issue. The only time we stopped was when the blasting crew needed time to blow holes in the side of the mountain above us.

If you've ever been intrigued by a David Macaulay book, you would love it here. Watching that road get built I had a whole new vision of construction. The road through the mountains was being built *out* of the mountain. The rocks and sand of the hillside, with the help of a little cement and a lot of labor, was reemerging as highway pavement. It was like seeing a bird building a nest out of the nearby twigs and grasses.

On another stretch of road we saw an "asphalt factory." It was built on the slope of a switchback. At the top was a horribly crude, gas powered, lurching engine, with a hopper and crushing rollers. Into this, men threw small boulders. From the bottom, freshly cracked gravel spilled out and tumbled down the mountainside. At the bottom of the "factory", the gravel was fed into a rotating mixer filled with bubbling tar. From here it was shoveled into waiting trucks, hot and fresh, and used to patch potholes.

There may seem to be a world of difference between public humiliation and primitive manufacturing. But I don't think so. I see it all as a sign of a culture where distinctions between that which can be acceptably seen, and that which must be hidden are not based on what is necessarily attractive. It is evidence of a strict practicality which holds that to be necessary is sufficient to being acceptable.

Judgments of acceptability then have nothing to do with aesthetics and very little to do with what we think of as decency. In such an environment, a lack of privacy and the resulting public scrutiny are not such bad ideas. They enforce a kind of peer review for what could otherwise become very self-serving behavior. Consider some things that do stay out of view: everyone knows that bribery and corruption are going on behind closed doors, but nobody can do anything about it. This does not make the best argument for privacy.

I can't say I'm prepared to have my business put up on stage, but I don't know whether it's guilt or modesty that prevents me. I do know that I no longer mind when people check out my market purchases; in fact, I've started to do the same.