"Look at that pumpkin!" the visitors say

In my May 16 post "'Come buy, come buy,' was still their cry," I mention an anecdote from Whitley Strieber about an alien going door-to-door selling squash. I also note that I had initially misremembered the story and thought that it was pumpkins the alien was selling, but that in any case the Chinese language does not distinguish between the two: 南瓜 can mean either "squash" or "pumpkin."

Although most people would say Strieber's books are about "aliens," he himself almost never calls them that. In an effort to be neutral and avoid jumping to the conclusion that they are of extraterrestrial origin, he prefers to refer to the Other People as visitors. In the anecdote in question, quoted in my 2021 post "Cucurbits from an alien land," Strieber describes his friend Michael Talbot talking to a stranger at the door at five in the morning:

The idea that this was a visitor certainly hadn't crossed Michael's mind. . . . Then I heard him say, "are you trying to sell those vegetables?"

It stunned me practically senseless. Then I saw that the visitor was holding a big paper shopping bag full of squash.

This quote highlight's Strieber's idiosyncratic use of the word visitor. Obviously Michael was well aware that the stranger standing at the door was a "visitor" in the ordinary sense of that word; what Strieber means is that Michael didn't suspect it was an alien.

Today I saw this in one of my students' textbooks:

The first sentence on the page is, "'Look at that pumpkin!' the visitors say." These are of course visitors in the ordinary sense -- Cheng is locally famous as an excellent gardener, and "people come from all over to see the beautiful plants" -- but the word still jumped out at me due to the synchronistic context. Note also that the story is set in China, and it is in Chinese that "squash" and "pumpkin" are interchangeable. I had mentioned Chinese only because I live in Taiwan and speak that language every day. This book, though, is published in America and distributed worldwide, so the fact that this story happens to be about Chinese people is a coincidence. (Visitors of the Strieberian type are often described as looking "Chinese.")

In the story, the Emperor of China holds a gardening context. Each gardener is given a seed to plant and told that the one who grows the most beautiful plant from it will be the next emperor. In the end, it is revealed that all the seeds were dead and that the contest was actually a test of honesty. Cheng, the only one honest enough to bring the emperor an empty flowerpot, wins and is chosen to be his successor.

In Alma 32 in the Book of Mormon, the "word" -- an idea or belief -- is compared to a seed  which is planted in the heart, and if the seed grows, that means "that the word is good, for it beginneth to enlarge my soul; yea, it beginneth to enlighten my understanding, yea, it beginneth to be delicious to me" (Alma 32:28).

When one has invested a lot in a particular seed, there is a temptation to trick oneself into believing it has borne fruit even if it hasn't -- perhaps, like the dishonest gardeners in the story, by introducing other seeds into the pot and pretending that what grows from them has grown from the original seed. Resisting that temptation is a difficult but important form of honesty.