On a recent day, when a reporter dropped in on an office in North China's Shanxi Province, he found a group of people playing cards. It was during office hours.

This was not just any office, but the disciplinary committee of Hongdong County. Hongdong, if you have a one-week-long memory, is the epicenter of the scandal that shocked and shook the nation with its illegal kilns that enslaved mentally handicapped and under-age workers and treated them with unspeakable cruelty. It is the target of a campaign directed from the central government to free every slave and bring those responsible to justice.

In other words, this is probably not the best time for Hongdong officials to wind down and have a little fun. But of course they can justify it: they had been working overtime for the previous two days and needed a little rest.

Who can begrudge them some freedom from the sudden overload of outsider-induced drudgery? If they were fed only a few steamed buns and water a day, they'd be like the child laborers and want to run away. In an ironic similarity, one of the officials did escape from the window when the reporter guarded the door with a slew of questions.

Compared with the enormity of the kiln story, inopportune card-playing is just a minor act of insensitivity, hardly a sin among certain people.

Unlike most people whose indignation was raised another notch upon hearing this incident, I have been trying to make light of it. Think of it as stoicism in the face of unwanted media avalanche. To these people, life must go on. What's the point of putting on a sad face for the outside world when you can be yourself?

Between genuine numbness and hypocrisy, I may indeed prefer the former. That gives me less false hope. Whatever you may accuse them, these people are not guilty of fake compassion.

I bet as they learn the ways of the world they'll pick up all those tricks, and eventually, nobody, not even they themselves, will be able to tell whether they really feel your pain or are just play-acting. They may call it discomfort and we may call it progress.

Sometimes the most dramatic incrimination comes from those incriminated. But it took me a while to reconcile with the comically enlarged evidence. Outside a big bank in San Francisco, there is a black sculpture shaped like a heart. One day, a friend told me it represents the heart of a banker.

This line of reasoning opened my eyes to a new way of interpreting unhappy sights. When a television news host is repeatedly awarded, many audience members are pissed off because he always wears a smirk on his face. But you know what? This could be what his boss wants him to convey to his audience. Now I see him as very real while those with forced smiles give me goose-bumps.

It doesn't take a psychoanalyst to know that the subconscious seeps out from layers of pomp and protocol. Several county-level governments have built mansions that are not so faint reminders of the Tian'anmen Rostrum. It's not far fetched to interpret that they want to be emperors in their jurisdiction. If they had a choice, they would don the traditional garb and throw death warrants down to the floor as in those period dramas.

Efforts to bring governance up to par with our modern society are necessary and should be done on a systematic level. But for many local officials, it takes longer to change the mindset that they are not put in a place to thunder out proclamations a la Moses, but to serve the people even when you want a moment of relaxation.

Email: raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 06/23/2007 page4)