Later, when I interviewed them outside the car, they unconsciously repeated this same behavior. To me, the scratching was an old childhood tic, an absent, unstudied gesture the men used to comfort and reassure themselves in a time of stress. The men knew they were doing something wrong. They were in a car that wasn’t theirs. They were revealing their childhood dreams. They wanted to make sure no one else noticed. In China, I would later learn, almost every other bodily gesture or expression has been tamed, trained and controlled out of existence, except, perhaps, for this one. I took note of
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