I was somewhat reluctant to choose the following topic for today's column. One could go so far as to say I had Second Thoughts about its content. Actually, two or more could say it as well. I am a firm believer in "the more the merrier". That adage applies to both Yankee regular season victories and my salary. As for the number of neighbors using paper clips to jimmy my door lock and pinch Gouda and Brie from my fridge in the middle of the night ... not so much. Just a shoutout to my building residents. Not appreciated.

So about the title: A tale of two cities. Let's just say one of them is Beijing, and the other, New York.

I live in the former and grew up in the latter, which can be a bit confusing to the uninitiated because in the latter part of my life I live in the former.

When I first arrived in the former, Beijing, I must say a few things struck me.

First, while taking a cab back from Beijing Capital International Airport T3, the largest air terminal on Earth, I was struck in the jaw, uppercut style, when I leaned in too close while the cabbie opened the trunk for my bulky luggage. I chalk it up to sleep-induced jetlag for letting down my guard, but the cabby's trunk lid was the first thing to strike me upon my arrival in China's capital.

But I groggily reached down, retrieved two bicuspids, placed them in my breast pocket, and settled in for my ride to my new dwellings.

Luckily, I had two chilled Red Bulls for the hourlong journey, so I was able to stave off the urge to embrace the siren's call from the land of Nod to nod off.

I soon learned a few things about my newly-adopted city. Or, was I the adopted adoptee? I can never remember how these new nom de plumes pan out in Beijing parlance.

Anyway, in my homeland, locals in Pennsylvania generally speak the same style of English as those on the other side of North America, say in Oregon. The United States have only been united (save for a tragic four-year stretch in the middle of the 19th-century) for around two-and-a-half centuries. This compares with around five millennia of Chinese history. One would think that a new country, especially made up primarily of immigrants from different nation states of Europe arriving over the centuries, would still have a fractured mother tongue and wide disparities in dialect, pronunciation and local bon mots.

But au contraire. Quite the opposite is the case. Spoken English in the four corners - Portland (Oregon), Portland (Maine), Pensacola (Florida) and Pasadena (California) is more or less undistinguishable.

However, far from the same can be said about Mandarin Chinese spoken in Heilongjiang, Guizhou, Fujian and Gansu provinces. I don't pretend to comprehend why over 5,000 years of regional dialects remain rather than evolve into a standard national language. I suppose that for reasons of cultural preservation and diversity, it is worthy of celebration.

Another thing that struck me, apart from the trunk and the languages, was the space.

China and the US are very close in geographic size, but the former's population is nearly five times greater. So Beijing should be five times more crowded, right?

Not so, it seems. I soon found I could walk my dog to the local mart in the wee hours and sometimes not encounter a single soul! This would be nearly impossible in New York City, which prides itself as "the city that never sleeps".

Anyway, the lid, languages and lebensraum all struck me in Beijing. The first cost me some choppers, but the second gave me pause for thought about tongues while the third allowed me to swing my elbows with reckless abandon in ways I could never imagine doing on Manhattan.

Contact the writer at andrew@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 05/22/2019 page22)