Saturday, December 26, 2009
Exploding Button Trick
Strolling past the ramen joint with a five-kuai spring in my step, I felt a sudden and violent percussion emanating from my chest and instinctively hit the floor. After I'd clambered back up to my feet, I scanned the horizon for a gunman, finding none. I checked my coat for an entry wound and saw that my "Soy Amada" button was missing. Glancing up, I noticed that the people in the ramen joint were staring at me more intently than usual. Then I saw the noodle man rushing towards me. He handed me my button, which had shot over the heads of several customers, banked off the back wall, and landed in a vat of MSG. Too pressurized, I guess. I thanked the noodle man, whistled a little ditty to myself as I stuffed the greasy button in my breast pocket, and stole into the night. As though my reputation around these parts weren't mythical enough. I used to be a regular at the ramen place, but I doubt I can ever go back. I mean, what kind of vaudeville shit is that?
The Heart of Saturday Night
It's Saturday night and there is nowhere in particular I'd like to go. Maybe if they opened a Denny's just off the Nanchong exit, I'd head out there on a night like tonight, order me some smoggy-side-up pigeon eggs and sit there pounding coffee, giving the Wuhan waitresses Sichuanese sass 'til the Tibetan bus boys buffed my bum right out of the booth. But there are no Denny'ses, no Perkinseses, no Country Kitchens or Waffle Houses, no Roy Rogerses, no IHOPs, nary a Village Inn to be found: so here I am, sitting in my war-torn apartment with a Nalgene bottle full of Nescafe between my legs, listening to Nighthawks at The Diner by Tom Waits. It is the first night of my two-month vacation. I could walk outside and hail a cab. I'd be downtown in ten minutes. That would make things interesting. But things will get interesting whether I want them to or not. For the moment, I'm thinking I'll conserve my energies: do some writing, use my newfound internet connection for neither good nor evil but inane, eat some oatmeal and recover from finals week.
For the final exam, I decided to interview all of my students one by one. It was a terrible idea on paper. On paper, it meant 350 interviews. At five minutes apiece, that added up to some thirty manhours for yours truly. But I hadn't seen half of my students since the first day of school, so I figured the whole process wouldn't take me longer than a couple of days. But lo: all 350 of them turned up for the final. They came from the four corners of the Chinese mainland, from internships in Xi'an and factory gigs in Shenzhen, to sit for five minutes on Dr. Panda's big red couch. Every morning, I showed up at Room 209 to find a line of college kids snaking around the corner, all the way down to the men's bathroom at the end of the hall. I'd conduct forty interviews in one sitting and the queue would only grow longer, and louder. For two weeks, for four hours a day without so much as a pee break, I sat and interviewed one kid after the next. Under my bed is a notebook full of Wangs, Lees, Zhangs, and Zhous, with their final scores written first in Arabic numerals, then Korean, then Spanish so as to keep their curiosity at bay.
I gave my students four interview questions to choose from.
1. What is your most valuable possession? Describe it and tell me where you got it.
2. In your opinion, how are Chinese people and Westerners different? How are they alike?
3. What do you see yourself doing after graduation? In five years? In fifteen years? In thirty years?
4. You are stranded on a desert island. There are wild pigs on the island, and some coconut trees, but not much else. If you were stuck on the island for five years, how would you survive? What would you do to amuse yourself? When you finally came back to China, how would you have changed?
Having survived all 350 interviews, I am forced to conclude that either my students were cheating, or they are tapped into some kind of beelike collective consciousness, a vast telepathic database of Chinglish.
1. A) My most valuable possession is my parents. They give me the love ...
B) My most valuable possession is this watch. My boyfriend give it to me. He give me the love ...
2. Chinese people are little and yellow with little eyes. Westerners are white and tall and fat with blue eyes and many hairs. Chinese people speak Chinese. Westerners speak English. Chinese people like delicious food. Westerners like nutritious food. Chinese people are very shy. Westerners are very outgoing. But Chinese people and Westerners are both humans. We both like the happy life.
3. After graduation, I will be a green hand, but I maybe teach English in the middle school. In five years, I will find my Mr. Right. [slight chuckle] We will have two babies, one boy and one girl. As time flies. In fifteen years, I will be old. I will open a restaurant because I want a colorful life. In thirty years, I will be retired. I will take my moneys and use it to travel the world. I will go to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou ...
These were the answers I got from hundreds of college seniors, more or less verbatim. Nobody tackled the island question until the third-to-last day. I have one student who is flamboyantly gay. He speaks better English than most of the teachers here. "Well," he said, "I'd like to answer the island question. Since it's hypothetical, I imagine you want me to use the subjunctive mood ... " A moment of English. The score I gave the kid made him giggle and throw his scarf over his shoulder. By Christmas Eve, the rumor had spread. Then, all of a sudden, everyone was shipwrecked with a bunch of wild pigs, and explaining themselves for good measure: "Mr. Panda, I know many other students answer questions one, two, three. But I want to be creative, so I answer question four."
Christmas morning was so foggy that I had to feel my way down the street with a pair of chopsticks. I arrived at the teaching building to find a line of college kids snaking from Room 209 to the men's bathroom. I sat on the couch, a yule log of Christmas cheer metabolizing in my gut. By then, I was a kind of machine. I seldom made eye contact, slurped loudly from my coffee, scribbled cryptic little notes to myself. Next! I'd bark. My most valuable possession is my parents ... Chinese people are little and yellow with little eyes ... I will find my Mr. Right ... as time flies ...
Apples are the traditional Christmas gift in China, and thirty minutes in, my desk was heaped high with cellophane-wrapped fruit. I interviewed 65 students in a row. After five hours, there was a lull. I rose from my chair, my legs atrophied to the point that it sapped all my strength to totter to the window and look: the coast was clear. Finally, at long last, the semester was -
- the door flung open and in came a very small little boy whom I'd never seen before. He sat down on the sofa across from me. I had him sign his name in my notebook. When he spoke, I found myself, for the first time in several days, on the verge of laughter. The poor kid was a contralto. Permanent helium voice. Like Tiny Tim without the ukulele. The semester was ending on a pipsqueak. But this kid had my undivided attention. In China, I have come to relish and admire the oddballs and misfits, for I am one of them.
He cleared his throat like a revving Vespa ...
"Chinese people are little and yellow with little eyes," he explained. "Westerners are big and tall and fat with blue eyes and many hairs. ... That's all."
"Good job," I said, and shook the kid's hand. I showed him his score. He was so happy with an 82% that he bowed five times rapid-fire and darted out the door before I could change my mind. I jumped up from the couch, tossed an apple skyward and caught it in midair. Merry Christmas.
For the final exam, I decided to interview all of my students one by one. It was a terrible idea on paper. On paper, it meant 350 interviews. At five minutes apiece, that added up to some thirty manhours for yours truly. But I hadn't seen half of my students since the first day of school, so I figured the whole process wouldn't take me longer than a couple of days. But lo: all 350 of them turned up for the final. They came from the four corners of the Chinese mainland, from internships in Xi'an and factory gigs in Shenzhen, to sit for five minutes on Dr. Panda's big red couch. Every morning, I showed up at Room 209 to find a line of college kids snaking around the corner, all the way down to the men's bathroom at the end of the hall. I'd conduct forty interviews in one sitting and the queue would only grow longer, and louder. For two weeks, for four hours a day without so much as a pee break, I sat and interviewed one kid after the next. Under my bed is a notebook full of Wangs, Lees, Zhangs, and Zhous, with their final scores written first in Arabic numerals, then Korean, then Spanish so as to keep their curiosity at bay.
I gave my students four interview questions to choose from.
1. What is your most valuable possession? Describe it and tell me where you got it.
2. In your opinion, how are Chinese people and Westerners different? How are they alike?
3. What do you see yourself doing after graduation? In five years? In fifteen years? In thirty years?
4. You are stranded on a desert island. There are wild pigs on the island, and some coconut trees, but not much else. If you were stuck on the island for five years, how would you survive? What would you do to amuse yourself? When you finally came back to China, how would you have changed?
Having survived all 350 interviews, I am forced to conclude that either my students were cheating, or they are tapped into some kind of beelike collective consciousness, a vast telepathic database of Chinglish.
1. A) My most valuable possession is my parents. They give me the love ...
B) My most valuable possession is this watch. My boyfriend give it to me. He give me the love ...
2. Chinese people are little and yellow with little eyes. Westerners are white and tall and fat with blue eyes and many hairs. Chinese people speak Chinese. Westerners speak English. Chinese people like delicious food. Westerners like nutritious food. Chinese people are very shy. Westerners are very outgoing. But Chinese people and Westerners are both humans. We both like the happy life.
3. After graduation, I will be a green hand, but I maybe teach English in the middle school. In five years, I will find my Mr. Right. [slight chuckle] We will have two babies, one boy and one girl. As time flies. In fifteen years, I will be old. I will open a restaurant because I want a colorful life. In thirty years, I will be retired. I will take my moneys and use it to travel the world. I will go to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou ...
These were the answers I got from hundreds of college seniors, more or less verbatim. Nobody tackled the island question until the third-to-last day. I have one student who is flamboyantly gay. He speaks better English than most of the teachers here. "Well," he said, "I'd like to answer the island question. Since it's hypothetical, I imagine you want me to use the subjunctive mood ... " A moment of English. The score I gave the kid made him giggle and throw his scarf over his shoulder. By Christmas Eve, the rumor had spread. Then, all of a sudden, everyone was shipwrecked with a bunch of wild pigs, and explaining themselves for good measure: "Mr. Panda, I know many other students answer questions one, two, three. But I want to be creative, so I answer question four."
Christmas morning was so foggy that I had to feel my way down the street with a pair of chopsticks. I arrived at the teaching building to find a line of college kids snaking from Room 209 to the men's bathroom. I sat on the couch, a yule log of Christmas cheer metabolizing in my gut. By then, I was a kind of machine. I seldom made eye contact, slurped loudly from my coffee, scribbled cryptic little notes to myself. Next! I'd bark. My most valuable possession is my parents ... Chinese people are little and yellow with little eyes ... I will find my Mr. Right ... as time flies ...
Apples are the traditional Christmas gift in China, and thirty minutes in, my desk was heaped high with cellophane-wrapped fruit. I interviewed 65 students in a row. After five hours, there was a lull. I rose from my chair, my legs atrophied to the point that it sapped all my strength to totter to the window and look: the coast was clear. Finally, at long last, the semester was -
- the door flung open and in came a very small little boy whom I'd never seen before. He sat down on the sofa across from me. I had him sign his name in my notebook. When he spoke, I found myself, for the first time in several days, on the verge of laughter. The poor kid was a contralto. Permanent helium voice. Like Tiny Tim without the ukulele. The semester was ending on a pipsqueak. But this kid had my undivided attention. In China, I have come to relish and admire the oddballs and misfits, for I am one of them.
He cleared his throat like a revving Vespa ...
"Chinese people are little and yellow with little eyes," he explained. "Westerners are big and tall and fat with blue eyes and many hairs. ... That's all."
"Good job," I said, and shook the kid's hand. I showed him his score. He was so happy with an 82% that he bowed five times rapid-fire and darted out the door before I could change my mind. I jumped up from the couch, tossed an apple skyward and caught it in midair. Merry Christmas.
Monday, December 21, 2009
A Very Laowai Christmas
I'm finally on the bus, en route to A Very Laowai Christmas in Wanzhou. It took me the better part of two days to get to the bus station because Nanchong has six of them, and I can never remember the name of the one I want to go to. I asked my barber last night, but he thought I was just making chit-chat: yeah, Wanzhou, snip-snip, mm-hmm, bus station, snap-snap. I asked three different convenience store clerks, each of whom insisted that the bus was no way to travel and refused to tell me the name of the bus station. But I wasn't going to take the train this time around, nosiree. Chinese trains are dead to me. Owing to my last trip to Wanzhou, the train is a sensory cocktail of squawking junk vendors, screaming children, and feces.
I went home, went to bed, and redoubled my efforts this morning: I put my fate in the hands of a Nanchong Toyotavan driver. She took me to two different bus stations before consulting the cabby oracle, a tubby dude in a Russian hat who gave me a cigarette and bellowed directions that got me, at last, to the bus station I wanted to get to in the first place, whatever it's called.
If I am a C-List celebrity on campus, I am a jailhouse debutante down by the bus station. The college kids shout HELLO! - the bus station riffraff chants FRESH FISH! Cabbies, trishaw pilots, ticket scalpers, shoeshiners, whores, gigolos, warty old men in fake leather jackets flogging air filters for mid-sized Suzuki mopeds ... you wave your hands and run in the opposite direction, but your disinterest only succeeds in convincing the riffraff that you're secretly interested in their wares.
Claustrophobic and famished, I ducked into an alleyway that reeked promisingly of MSG. I wound up in the Nanchong toilet district and walked for blocks looking for a place to eat, finding naught but places to shit. Then I passed through Nanchong's J-shaped pipe district, responsible for the manufacture and distribution of every single J-shaped pipe in the world. Then I came upon the door district: street after street of doorless shops filled with doors, like something out of Borges ... I keep hoping that someday I will stumble across the Oriental Trading Company's Sichuan headquarters, where I would show the boss my old business card - Keith Petit, Freelance Copywriter - and maybe he'd hook me up with some complimentary "Over the Hill" koozies, hot off the press. But these wanderings seldom lead anywhere, just into the bowels of some kafkaesque/borgesian industrial labyrinth and, eventually, the realization that China is a very large place that I will never understand.
Now, on the bus, we are passing Nanchong's industrial labyrinths at warp speed. There goes the Fargo-sized-woodchipper district, the neon light district, the ginseng district, and then we're out in the industrial hintergrund: vast swathes of fenced-off mudpits marked with imposing Chinglish signs, mustard gas hanging thick in the air. The hintergrund stretches for miles. This is part of Nanchong, too, the part where no one lives and no one goes voluntarily - and it is probably the biggest part of the city. The area I am familiar with - my college campus and a couple of half-pleasant streets lined with what pass for bars in this country - is the cherry sitting atop a monstrous slag heap of hard work, noxious gases, and heavy industry.
My bus companion does not seem to care that I am a foreigner, so it's just me and the scenery and Robert M. Pirsig for four hours. Gradually, Zen and the Art puts me in a zenlike trance, then a fullblown coma. When I regain consciousness, we're pulling into a rest stop just outside of Liangping. I pop out for some noodles and a smoke. All the passengers who were hitherto unaware of the laowai on board are henceforth aware. They speculate (loudly) as to whether I can understand Chinese or not. The Mandarin words for "to understand" and "to not understand" are ting de dong and ting bu dong, respectively, so an odd chorus of Chinese bell chimes fills the air as I'm waiting in line for noodles. Ting de dong, ting bu dong, ting de dong ...
"What do you want? You want a hardboiled pigeon egg? Corn on the cob? Wiener on a stick?"
"I'd like some noodles," I say.
... ting de dong, ting de dong! A thrill sweeps through the crowd: he understands!
"Noodles!" shouts the vendor. "That guy over there sells noodles."
I head in the direction of the noodle man.
"Wait! You need to buy a ticket from me first."
I pause and scratch my head.
... ting bu dong, ting bu dong! Heads shaking all around: he doesn't understand!
"So, let me get this straight," I say. "I need to buy a ticket from you so I can get noodles from him?"
"You don't understand?"
"I understand," I say, "but I don't understand."
I hand the middleman seven kuai. He hands me a ticket.
One of my fellow passengers tells the noodle man to go easy on the spice.
"Laowais can't handle spice," he explains.
"What do I look like? A baby?" I ask. Approving laughter from my entourage. "Extra spice, please."
... ta chi la, ta chi la! A miracle: the laowai eats spicy!
I hand the noodle man my ticket. The noodle man hands me a bowl of noodles heaped high with chili pepper. I sit and no fewer than ten grown men huddle around the table to watch me eat.
Our Very Laowai Christmas turns out to be very laowai, indeed. Not since August have I found myself in the company of more than five Americans at once. I'm not sure how to act. I have no idea who Lady Gaga is. I keep reverting to Special English - "The weather in Nanchong is very, very cloudy!" - and using the sign language I rely on to communicate with my students. We eat burritos and drink spiced wine until, at seven sharp, China knocks at the door. In comes a man named Kingway, wielding a toddler in split pants. Some old timers arrive with a portable mahjongg table. A ten-year-old boy shows up with an erhu and performs for us. Dear Santa, earplugs make a perfect stocking-stuffer for the sensory-overloaded laowai on your list.
Fair warning: if you throw a Halloween party, your Chinese guests will turn it into a Mid-Autumn Festival party, and if you throw a Christmas party, they will turn it into a Spring Festival party. We sit around listening to the locals talk about Spring Festival. By now, of course, we are well-versed in the nuances of the Chinese New Year: four generations of Zhangs gather in the living room to watch CCTV for days on end, glutinous rice balls for breakfast, there is footwashing involved, etc., etc. But our guests don't seem all that curious about our own annual pagan ritual, about the droll-mouthed fat man cutouts on the wall, the plastic fir tree in the corner or the row of giant red socks arrayed in the hall. And why should they be? The Lunar New Year is upon us! Spring Festival is only a month away! This is China. Welcome to our China. Red lanterns are hanged to banish the evil beasts. You had better eat the black algae to engender prosperity and industrious well-being. Wash the feets at midnight for produce colorful life ...
Our guests leave at exactly nine PM, and it is once again a very laowai Christmas. We sit and drink and talk until dawn turns the Yangtze a healthy shade of cyan. I fall asleep in mid-sentence, refuting Thomas Nagel's What Is It Like To Be A Bat? The next afternoon, I'm back at the Wanzhou bus station, but there aren't any buses to Nanchong, so I catch a cab to the train station.
I'm smoking on the steps, waiting for the 8:00 train, when the Chinese Howard Beale comes swaggering towards me. "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymo'!" he screams to no one in particular, then his eyes focus on mine and he rests his hand on my shoulder. "Laowai, have you eaten?" Not in a couple hours, I say. "Let's go!" he shouts.
We wind up in a seedy dive across the street. Beale is visibly and olfactorily drunk. He orders three dishes: sauteed green peppers, the MSG cabbage platter, sweet-and-sour bitter melon. Then he fetches a couple of beers from the fridge, shoots a cigarette my way, and sits there watching me eat, drink, and smoke.
"Laowais are humans," he observes. "Chinese people are humans."
"That's right!" I nod. "We are all humans on this planet."
"You are a human. I am a human."
"Ha ha! You are correct, sir."
"Different minds," he says, pounding his chest, "same heart!"
He is shouting. By now the people around us are staring at him and not at me, a bad sign.
At home and especially abroad, I am a magnet for schizophrenics and raging drunks. When I'm at the pearly gates, I'll be escorted to St. Peter's podium by a ragged army of derelicts and winos who will inform St. Peter in broken English punctuated with OK!s and the occasional thumbs-up that I am a human, that I have a colorful heart, that I once gave them the equivalent of 17 U.S. cents for a hipflask of rice vodka, and for this good deed and many others I should be admitted to the massage parlor at the end of the neon pink tunnel.
"So, er, what kind of work do you do?" I ask.
What Beale describes involves too many hand gestures, seems too intricate and shady for my liking. I ask no further questions. He demands two more beers and tells the waitress to hurry up when the beers don't materialize instantaneously. The woman at the next table comes over to sit with us. She orders a dish of stir-fried mushrooms and watches me eat them. She mentions that she lives in Nanchong and that she has a son. She wants me to teach him English. Howard Beale pulls me into his trenchcoat.
"Do you understand what she's asking you?"
I nod.
"But do you really understand?" he asks.
"She wants me to teach her son English."
"Yes," he nods. "She wants you to teach her 'son' English."
Oh, Christ. Not this again.
"Sorry, ma'am," I say. "I'm a volunteer, so I'm not allowed to teach for money."
"Oh, you don't have to do it for money," she says.
Beale nudges me in the ribs. He toasts the young woman and me and we empty our glasses. Beale stuffs a hundred-kuai note into the waitress's fanny pack on the way out the garage door.
The three of us walk to the train station. I try to lose them in the crowd, but Howard Beale clings to my backpack and keeps pushing me into the woman from Nanchong. He hands me a cigarette.
"Can I smoke here?" I ask. There is a sign above my head depicting a cigarette with an X through it. It says, confusingly, "SMOKING PERMITTED."
"We can't," Beale says, "but you can."
I light my cigarette and start throwing elbows in an effort to dissolve myself. Beale gets held up at the turnstile. The woman from Nanchong has a ticket for a different compartment, but tells me to wait for her when we get to Nanchong. I noncommittally agree and climb aboard.
I'd sworn off Chinese trains after my last trip to Wanzhou, but this time I manage to score a middle bunk in a sleeper cabin. My cabinmates are from Chengdu, so they don't even blink when a foreigner barges into their quarters with a beer in his hand and an Intro to Philosophy volume tucked under his arm. Someone has an especially cute three-year-old granddaughter who is too bashful to say hello to me. She is clamoring for her imaginary friend, a black scarf with skulls on it, whom she addresses as "Skully." As I'm climbing up to my bunk, one of the pins on my field jacket falls off. The little girl's grandma hands it back to me: it is my Poodleface pin.
"What does it mean?" she asks, staring into the poodle face on the pin.
"My friend gave it to me," I explain. "He was on American television once."
She squints at the poodle face, then back at me, as though Poodleface, American television, and my very laowai existence are as imaginary as Skully, whom she is stuffing into a burlap sack full of radishes while her granddaughter weeps and pees her pants simultaneously.
I went home, went to bed, and redoubled my efforts this morning: I put my fate in the hands of a Nanchong Toyotavan driver. She took me to two different bus stations before consulting the cabby oracle, a tubby dude in a Russian hat who gave me a cigarette and bellowed directions that got me, at last, to the bus station I wanted to get to in the first place, whatever it's called.
If I am a C-List celebrity on campus, I am a jailhouse debutante down by the bus station. The college kids shout HELLO! - the bus station riffraff chants FRESH FISH! Cabbies, trishaw pilots, ticket scalpers, shoeshiners, whores, gigolos, warty old men in fake leather jackets flogging air filters for mid-sized Suzuki mopeds ... you wave your hands and run in the opposite direction, but your disinterest only succeeds in convincing the riffraff that you're secretly interested in their wares.
Claustrophobic and famished, I ducked into an alleyway that reeked promisingly of MSG. I wound up in the Nanchong toilet district and walked for blocks looking for a place to eat, finding naught but places to shit. Then I passed through Nanchong's J-shaped pipe district, responsible for the manufacture and distribution of every single J-shaped pipe in the world. Then I came upon the door district: street after street of doorless shops filled with doors, like something out of Borges ... I keep hoping that someday I will stumble across the Oriental Trading Company's Sichuan headquarters, where I would show the boss my old business card - Keith Petit, Freelance Copywriter - and maybe he'd hook me up with some complimentary "Over the Hill" koozies, hot off the press. But these wanderings seldom lead anywhere, just into the bowels of some kafkaesque/borgesian industrial labyrinth and, eventually, the realization that China is a very large place that I will never understand.
Now, on the bus, we are passing Nanchong's industrial labyrinths at warp speed. There goes the Fargo-sized-woodchipper district, the neon light district, the ginseng district, and then we're out in the industrial hintergrund: vast swathes of fenced-off mudpits marked with imposing Chinglish signs, mustard gas hanging thick in the air. The hintergrund stretches for miles. This is part of Nanchong, too, the part where no one lives and no one goes voluntarily - and it is probably the biggest part of the city. The area I am familiar with - my college campus and a couple of half-pleasant streets lined with what pass for bars in this country - is the cherry sitting atop a monstrous slag heap of hard work, noxious gases, and heavy industry.
My bus companion does not seem to care that I am a foreigner, so it's just me and the scenery and Robert M. Pirsig for four hours. Gradually, Zen and the Art puts me in a zenlike trance, then a fullblown coma. When I regain consciousness, we're pulling into a rest stop just outside of Liangping. I pop out for some noodles and a smoke. All the passengers who were hitherto unaware of the laowai on board are henceforth aware. They speculate (loudly) as to whether I can understand Chinese or not. The Mandarin words for "to understand" and "to not understand" are ting de dong and ting bu dong, respectively, so an odd chorus of Chinese bell chimes fills the air as I'm waiting in line for noodles. Ting de dong, ting bu dong, ting de dong ...
"What do you want? You want a hardboiled pigeon egg? Corn on the cob? Wiener on a stick?"
"I'd like some noodles," I say.
... ting de dong, ting de dong! A thrill sweeps through the crowd: he understands!
"Noodles!" shouts the vendor. "That guy over there sells noodles."
I head in the direction of the noodle man.
"Wait! You need to buy a ticket from me first."
I pause and scratch my head.
... ting bu dong, ting bu dong! Heads shaking all around: he doesn't understand!
"So, let me get this straight," I say. "I need to buy a ticket from you so I can get noodles from him?"
"You don't understand?"
"I understand," I say, "but I don't understand."
I hand the middleman seven kuai. He hands me a ticket.
One of my fellow passengers tells the noodle man to go easy on the spice.
"Laowais can't handle spice," he explains.
"What do I look like? A baby?" I ask. Approving laughter from my entourage. "Extra spice, please."
... ta chi la, ta chi la! A miracle: the laowai eats spicy!
I hand the noodle man my ticket. The noodle man hands me a bowl of noodles heaped high with chili pepper. I sit and no fewer than ten grown men huddle around the table to watch me eat.
Our Very Laowai Christmas turns out to be very laowai, indeed. Not since August have I found myself in the company of more than five Americans at once. I'm not sure how to act. I have no idea who Lady Gaga is. I keep reverting to Special English - "The weather in Nanchong is very, very cloudy!" - and using the sign language I rely on to communicate with my students. We eat burritos and drink spiced wine until, at seven sharp, China knocks at the door. In comes a man named Kingway, wielding a toddler in split pants. Some old timers arrive with a portable mahjongg table. A ten-year-old boy shows up with an erhu and performs for us. Dear Santa, earplugs make a perfect stocking-stuffer for the sensory-overloaded laowai on your list.
Fair warning: if you throw a Halloween party, your Chinese guests will turn it into a Mid-Autumn Festival party, and if you throw a Christmas party, they will turn it into a Spring Festival party. We sit around listening to the locals talk about Spring Festival. By now, of course, we are well-versed in the nuances of the Chinese New Year: four generations of Zhangs gather in the living room to watch CCTV for days on end, glutinous rice balls for breakfast, there is footwashing involved, etc., etc. But our guests don't seem all that curious about our own annual pagan ritual, about the droll-mouthed fat man cutouts on the wall, the plastic fir tree in the corner or the row of giant red socks arrayed in the hall. And why should they be? The Lunar New Year is upon us! Spring Festival is only a month away! This is China. Welcome to our China. Red lanterns are hanged to banish the evil beasts. You had better eat the black algae to engender prosperity and industrious well-being. Wash the feets at midnight for produce colorful life ...
Our guests leave at exactly nine PM, and it is once again a very laowai Christmas. We sit and drink and talk until dawn turns the Yangtze a healthy shade of cyan. I fall asleep in mid-sentence, refuting Thomas Nagel's What Is It Like To Be A Bat? The next afternoon, I'm back at the Wanzhou bus station, but there aren't any buses to Nanchong, so I catch a cab to the train station.
I'm smoking on the steps, waiting for the 8:00 train, when the Chinese Howard Beale comes swaggering towards me. "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymo'!" he screams to no one in particular, then his eyes focus on mine and he rests his hand on my shoulder. "Laowai, have you eaten?" Not in a couple hours, I say. "Let's go!" he shouts.
We wind up in a seedy dive across the street. Beale is visibly and olfactorily drunk. He orders three dishes: sauteed green peppers, the MSG cabbage platter, sweet-and-sour bitter melon. Then he fetches a couple of beers from the fridge, shoots a cigarette my way, and sits there watching me eat, drink, and smoke.
"Laowais are humans," he observes. "Chinese people are humans."
"That's right!" I nod. "We are all humans on this planet."
"You are a human. I am a human."
"Ha ha! You are correct, sir."
"Different minds," he says, pounding his chest, "same heart!"
He is shouting. By now the people around us are staring at him and not at me, a bad sign.
At home and especially abroad, I am a magnet for schizophrenics and raging drunks. When I'm at the pearly gates, I'll be escorted to St. Peter's podium by a ragged army of derelicts and winos who will inform St. Peter in broken English punctuated with OK!s and the occasional thumbs-up that I am a human, that I have a colorful heart, that I once gave them the equivalent of 17 U.S. cents for a hipflask of rice vodka, and for this good deed and many others I should be admitted to the massage parlor at the end of the neon pink tunnel.
"So, er, what kind of work do you do?" I ask.
What Beale describes involves too many hand gestures, seems too intricate and shady for my liking. I ask no further questions. He demands two more beers and tells the waitress to hurry up when the beers don't materialize instantaneously. The woman at the next table comes over to sit with us. She orders a dish of stir-fried mushrooms and watches me eat them. She mentions that she lives in Nanchong and that she has a son. She wants me to teach him English. Howard Beale pulls me into his trenchcoat.
"Do you understand what she's asking you?"
I nod.
"But do you really understand?" he asks.
"She wants me to teach her son English."
"Yes," he nods. "She wants you to teach her 'son' English."
Oh, Christ. Not this again.
"Sorry, ma'am," I say. "I'm a volunteer, so I'm not allowed to teach for money."
"Oh, you don't have to do it for money," she says.
Beale nudges me in the ribs. He toasts the young woman and me and we empty our glasses. Beale stuffs a hundred-kuai note into the waitress's fanny pack on the way out the garage door.
The three of us walk to the train station. I try to lose them in the crowd, but Howard Beale clings to my backpack and keeps pushing me into the woman from Nanchong. He hands me a cigarette.
"Can I smoke here?" I ask. There is a sign above my head depicting a cigarette with an X through it. It says, confusingly, "SMOKING PERMITTED."
"We can't," Beale says, "but you can."
I light my cigarette and start throwing elbows in an effort to dissolve myself. Beale gets held up at the turnstile. The woman from Nanchong has a ticket for a different compartment, but tells me to wait for her when we get to Nanchong. I noncommittally agree and climb aboard.
I'd sworn off Chinese trains after my last trip to Wanzhou, but this time I manage to score a middle bunk in a sleeper cabin. My cabinmates are from Chengdu, so they don't even blink when a foreigner barges into their quarters with a beer in his hand and an Intro to Philosophy volume tucked under his arm. Someone has an especially cute three-year-old granddaughter who is too bashful to say hello to me. She is clamoring for her imaginary friend, a black scarf with skulls on it, whom she addresses as "Skully." As I'm climbing up to my bunk, one of the pins on my field jacket falls off. The little girl's grandma hands it back to me: it is my Poodleface pin.
"What does it mean?" she asks, staring into the poodle face on the pin.
"My friend gave it to me," I explain. "He was on American television once."
She squints at the poodle face, then back at me, as though Poodleface, American television, and my very laowai existence are as imaginary as Skully, whom she is stuffing into a burlap sack full of radishes while her granddaughter weeps and pees her pants simultaneously.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
The Merchant of Nanchong
I haven't been writing much. At this point, I am utterly wu-yü, the wonderful Chinese word for "speechless." Over the past couple weeks, the realization has sunk into me slow and deep, like bathwater into a bathmat: I will always be a foreigner in this country. The word laowai is scrawled across my forehead in big indelible block letters that won't wash off no matter how much Lava I use, or how much of the language I learn. At the four-month mark, I figured that I would grow less visible as I went along. I could imagine a day in the distant future when I would blend in with the people on the bus, an oddly pale, unusually hairy Chinese salaryman and nothing more. But a few days ago, as a mob gathered round the cash register to watch me purchase a roll of toilet paper, it hit me: Petit, my friend, you will never make another sane toilet paper transaction again, not in Nanchong, not in China, not until you are well back in the Nebraskan suburbs, standing in the impulse aisle down at No Frills.
In Nanchong, I am a C-List celebrity, like Steven Seagal or Kramer from Seinfeld. People crane their necks as I pass. "Is that - holy shit, it is!" When I get on the bus, it's like Andy Warhol's gone and cracked a canister of nitrous in the air vent: laughter, merriment, Crazy English, hello!!! how are you!!!, etc., etc. I lead a humdrum Chinese life - I take the bus to work, I take the bus back home; I buy a roll of toilet paper and some Brillo pads - but every public appearance I make is a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle for the people around me. And unless I get a face transplant or invest in an invisibility cloak, my life will remain a spectacle for the next two years.
The elderly are amused by me. I seem to frighten children. But I am wildly popular with the 18 to 22 year-old demographic. College kids are my biggest fans, and because I live on one college campus and make a daily commute to another college campus, my afternoons are a flurry of hellos, how are yous, and incoherent encounters with complete strangers.
Today, I happened to be waiting in line for the ATM as Nanchong's elementary and middle school students were pouring out of class. A little kid bumped into my leg and, looking up at me, said (in Chinese), "Whoa. Fuck!" Meanwhile, there was such a ruckus around me that it was impossible to pick out anything but the word "foreigner." My pulse shot up into the triple digits. Blood pressure: 240 over 160 and rising. There are days that I take the fanfare in stride, and days when I feel like I'm on the verge of a myocardial event. I wanted to dissolve into a little puddle of laowai atoms and ooze down the nearest sewer grate. I wanted to evaporate into a noble gas and swirl up into the chalky Nanchong sky. I wanted to vanish. But in order to vanish, I needed to withdraw money for lunch at the ramen place, where people would gather around my table to watch me slurp up my noodles, and a haircut, which would draw a crowd, and the bus, where I would be ogled, and ... I am not a religious man, but there in the ATM confessional booth, with a couple of college dudes peering over my shoulder, I prayed to some higher power to deliver me to my apartment, where nobody but Doctor Zhivago was waiting for me.
Foreigner, hello! Foreigner, my name is ... Foreigner, welcome to China! Foreigner ... An epic monologue took form in my throat: "Yes, we are laowais! But if you prick us, do we not bleed? If you stare at us, do we not feel rather awkward? If you shout hello! at us from a distance of twenty feet, do we not cringe?" But a fiery speech would've only attracted more people. There was nothing to be done.
I was walking to the ramen place when a college kid grabbed me by the elbow. My neckhairs shot up. I turned and eyed him wearily. What was it going to be? English lessons? Your phone number, please?
"You forget," he said, and like a magic trick, produced my ATM card.
"Holy shit," I said. "Thank you so much!"
He must've chased me for blocks. Amidst days of claustrophobia, an individual will break from the crowd and do something unspeakably kind, and you wind up feeling bad for being such a damned curmudgeon all the time.
To my credit, I handle the attention gracefully. There are westerners who do not. But it seems to irk me more than most, perhaps because I'm introverted, or because Chinese people find me unusually approachable, or because I happen to live in a swirling Han Chinese metropolis that has never seen a curly-headed, ginger-bearded Irishman before. Maybe I just need to lop off all my hair and shave for once. Perhaps that is just what I will do.
In Nanchong, I am a C-List celebrity, like Steven Seagal or Kramer from Seinfeld. People crane their necks as I pass. "Is that - holy shit, it is!" When I get on the bus, it's like Andy Warhol's gone and cracked a canister of nitrous in the air vent: laughter, merriment, Crazy English, hello!!! how are you!!!, etc., etc. I lead a humdrum Chinese life - I take the bus to work, I take the bus back home; I buy a roll of toilet paper and some Brillo pads - but every public appearance I make is a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle for the people around me. And unless I get a face transplant or invest in an invisibility cloak, my life will remain a spectacle for the next two years.
The elderly are amused by me. I seem to frighten children. But I am wildly popular with the 18 to 22 year-old demographic. College kids are my biggest fans, and because I live on one college campus and make a daily commute to another college campus, my afternoons are a flurry of hellos, how are yous, and incoherent encounters with complete strangers.
Today, I happened to be waiting in line for the ATM as Nanchong's elementary and middle school students were pouring out of class. A little kid bumped into my leg and, looking up at me, said (in Chinese), "Whoa. Fuck!" Meanwhile, there was such a ruckus around me that it was impossible to pick out anything but the word "foreigner." My pulse shot up into the triple digits. Blood pressure: 240 over 160 and rising. There are days that I take the fanfare in stride, and days when I feel like I'm on the verge of a myocardial event. I wanted to dissolve into a little puddle of laowai atoms and ooze down the nearest sewer grate. I wanted to evaporate into a noble gas and swirl up into the chalky Nanchong sky. I wanted to vanish. But in order to vanish, I needed to withdraw money for lunch at the ramen place, where people would gather around my table to watch me slurp up my noodles, and a haircut, which would draw a crowd, and the bus, where I would be ogled, and ... I am not a religious man, but there in the ATM confessional booth, with a couple of college dudes peering over my shoulder, I prayed to some higher power to deliver me to my apartment, where nobody but Doctor Zhivago was waiting for me.
Foreigner, hello! Foreigner, my name is ... Foreigner, welcome to China! Foreigner ... An epic monologue took form in my throat: "Yes, we are laowais! But if you prick us, do we not bleed? If you stare at us, do we not feel rather awkward? If you shout hello! at us from a distance of twenty feet, do we not cringe?" But a fiery speech would've only attracted more people. There was nothing to be done.
I was walking to the ramen place when a college kid grabbed me by the elbow. My neckhairs shot up. I turned and eyed him wearily. What was it going to be? English lessons? Your phone number, please?
"You forget," he said, and like a magic trick, produced my ATM card.
"Holy shit," I said. "Thank you so much!"
He must've chased me for blocks. Amidst days of claustrophobia, an individual will break from the crowd and do something unspeakably kind, and you wind up feeling bad for being such a damned curmudgeon all the time.
To my credit, I handle the attention gracefully. There are westerners who do not. But it seems to irk me more than most, perhaps because I'm introverted, or because Chinese people find me unusually approachable, or because I happen to live in a swirling Han Chinese metropolis that has never seen a curly-headed, ginger-bearded Irishman before. Maybe I just need to lop off all my hair and shave for once. Perhaps that is just what I will do.
Monday, December 07, 2009
Scott/Mayne 2000
Kenny Mayne: Tom Gugliotta was later torn apart by wild dogs.
Stuart Scott: Movin' right along to chikkity-China for some intramural hoops action. Live from the land of MSG - and we ain't talkin' about The Garden, folks - it's the China West Normal University Old Campus Foreign Language Department versus the Fine Arts Department of China ... West ... Normal ... you get the idea. Suiting up for the Foreign Language squad, Tyreke Petit, the transfer from Creighton, where he averaged 1.8 points per game -
Mayne: Nice socks.
Scott: It's gotta be the socks! There's Petit, savoring a pre-game cigarette. Just before tip-off, the trash-hua was a-flyin'. Foreign Language big man Liu Ai-Guo had this to say about his new teammate -
Mayne: Harsh words. First quarter. Petit puts one up from Outer Mongolia - air ball. Gets the give-and-go from Mr. Wang - clunk. Heaves up a baseline prayer - oh dear. Ten minutes in, Petit's 0 for 7 from the field. He can't buy a bucket. He can't even haggle for a bucket. Meanwhile, Mr. Liu - feelin' it. Wang feeds it to Liu in the paint - guanxi. Liu from way downtown - count it. Laowais up by six. Second quarter, Fine Artists on the fast break. Professor Li goes up for the easy lay-in, but Mr. Liu says bu yao! Zhou, for three -
Scott: Bu yao!
Mayne: Zhang driving the lane -
Scott: Dou bu yao!
Mayne: Going into the half, Laowais up by twelve. Mr. Liu leads the charge with 16 points, six boards, and four blocks. Stu-Pot!
Scott: Third quarter, Laowais doin' it and doin' it and doin' it well. Petit dishes to Liu - don't fake the funk on a nasty lay-up. Wang from the perimeter - don't hate the playa, hate the game! Laowais up by 18. Petit breaks the ice with a jumper - aw, sookie sookie now. It's 42-20 going into the fourth. Wang with the steal, and from here on out, it's like playin' mahjongg with grandma. Wang pulls up for three -
Mayne: Peng.
Scott: Liu for three -
Mayne: Peng!
Scott: Petit for three -
Mayne: Peng!
Scott: Laowais up by 36 - and now they just gettin' sick wit it! Mr. Liu - call him butter, cuz he's on an eggroll.
Mayne: If I have an eggroll, and you have an eggroll, and I have some chopsticks. My chopsticks reach acroooooooooss the room -
Scott: I eat your eggroll! I eat it up! Laowais win this thing big: 68-30. Liu walks away with 38 points, 14 boards and ten blocks. Petit chips in with eight points and twelve assists. For the Fine Artists, Professor Li leads the way with four points and 18 turnovers. Laowai skipper Rudy Tomjanovich had some words for us after the game -
Mayne: Up next for the Laowais - the Chinese Language Department. The winner advances to the second round of the round robin, and remember, folks - no drawing firearms during league play.
Stuart Scott: Movin' right along to chikkity-China for some intramural hoops action. Live from the land of MSG - and we ain't talkin' about The Garden, folks - it's the China West Normal University Old Campus Foreign Language Department versus the Fine Arts Department of China ... West ... Normal ... you get the idea. Suiting up for the Foreign Language squad, Tyreke Petit, the transfer from Creighton, where he averaged 1.8 points per game -
Mayne: Nice socks.
Scott: It's gotta be the socks! There's Petit, savoring a pre-game cigarette. Just before tip-off, the trash-hua was a-flyin'. Foreign Language big man Liu Ai-Guo had this to say about his new teammate -
"This [expletive] laowai with his headband and Chuck Taylors and Kurt Rambis goggles ... this is my house, and if he thinks he's gonna come into my house and [expletive] my [expletive], he can [expletive] my [expletive]. His job is to feed me the rock and get out the way. Period."
Mayne: Harsh words. First quarter. Petit puts one up from Outer Mongolia - air ball. Gets the give-and-go from Mr. Wang - clunk. Heaves up a baseline prayer - oh dear. Ten minutes in, Petit's 0 for 7 from the field. He can't buy a bucket. He can't even haggle for a bucket. Meanwhile, Mr. Liu - feelin' it. Wang feeds it to Liu in the paint - guanxi. Liu from way downtown - count it. Laowais up by six. Second quarter, Fine Artists on the fast break. Professor Li goes up for the easy lay-in, but Mr. Liu says bu yao! Zhou, for three -
Scott: Bu yao!
Mayne: Zhang driving the lane -
Scott: Dou bu yao!
Mayne: Going into the half, Laowais up by twelve. Mr. Liu leads the charge with 16 points, six boards, and four blocks. Stu-Pot!
Scott: Third quarter, Laowais doin' it and doin' it and doin' it well. Petit dishes to Liu - don't fake the funk on a nasty lay-up. Wang from the perimeter - don't hate the playa, hate the game! Laowais up by 18. Petit breaks the ice with a jumper - aw, sookie sookie now. It's 42-20 going into the fourth. Wang with the steal, and from here on out, it's like playin' mahjongg with grandma. Wang pulls up for three -
Mayne: Peng.
Scott: Liu for three -
Mayne: Peng!
Scott: Petit for three -
Mayne: Peng!
Scott: Laowais up by 36 - and now they just gettin' sick wit it! Mr. Liu - call him butter, cuz he's on an eggroll.
Mayne: If I have an eggroll, and you have an eggroll, and I have some chopsticks. My chopsticks reach acroooooooooss the room -
Scott: I eat your eggroll! I eat it up! Laowais win this thing big: 68-30. Liu walks away with 38 points, 14 boards and ten blocks. Petit chips in with eight points and twelve assists. For the Fine Artists, Professor Li leads the way with four points and 18 turnovers. Laowai skipper Rudy Tomjanovich had some words for us after the game -
"What can I say? Petit put his heart on the line. Nobody's had to do what he's had to do. New team. New country. New language. It's tough. But Mr. Liu's the big man. Petit's gotta find a way to get the ball to Liu down low. Liu's been making big shots for us. Any time a team commits to the double team on Liu, we have been doing a great job of making them pay, especially towards the end of the game. I think that Liu wants to win. He's a tremendous competitor, as fierce as anybody I've ever been around. I don't know what all the drama's about between him and Petit, I didn't read the book. But it's just like they got to have a soap opera."
Mayne: Up next for the Laowais - the Chinese Language Department. The winner advances to the second round of the round robin, and remember, folks - no drawing firearms during league play.
Sunday, December 06, 2009
I Love You, China
Every so often, I am called upon to MC a pageant, judge a speech competition, or give a keynote address on quantum mechanics at the Petroleum University. A lot of the foreign teachers here regard the English public speaking circuit as a lot of drudgery that is to be avoided at all costs. I, however, jump at the chance to stand behind a podium with a microphone. There is something liberating about ad-libbing a speech that the adoring public will applaud unconditionally, no matter how little of it they, or you yourself, understand.
A few months ago, Jacob and I judged the regional semifinals of the CCTV Cup, China's coveted English oratory championship. The theme was, "Which is more important: science smart or culture intelligent?" I am not joking. Each of the nineteen contestants trembled in front of the podium for five minutes, pontificating on the delicate balance between science smart and culture intelligent. By the fourth speaker, I had just about bitten my tongue in half. The urge to laugh was impossible for me to supress, but cracking up mid-speech would mean a tremendous loss of face for the speaker - nay, by the time I was done laughing, there would be no face left to lose. And of course, it wasn't the poor kid's fault: all over the country, at the behest of CCTV, tens of thousands of Chinese undergrads were talking about science smart this and culture intelligent that.
By Contestant Number 6, I vowed that I would award a perfect score to anyone with the balls to point out that the very question "Science smart or culture intelligent?" was grammatically absurd. But no one did. Mediocre scores across the board. By far the highlight of the competition was a fire-and-brimstone nationalist who might've belonged to the Chinese Kennedy family. He concluded his speech - which, happily, did not address either science smart or culture intelligent - by pounding his fist on the podium several times and shouting, "God bless you and God bless China!" He received a standing ovation but was eliminated in the first round.
Tonight, I was tapped to judge a campuswide storytelling competition. I was ushered to my front row seat by a flock of usheresses in matching banana yellow suits. The auditorium was full to capacity. Ambient Michael Bolton on the PA system. A complimentary bottle of Nongfu Spring water on my desk. Balloons everywhere. Nice.
The competition opened with a skit dubbed "The Peacock Flying Towards the Southeast." My Wikipedia research tells me it was an adaptation of a Chinese folktale, but at the time it reminded me of something Samuel Beckett might've written if he'd fallen in with the American Beat crowd. There was a two-timing temptress named Lunch. Her husband, played by a girl in a cowboy hat, galloped about on a hobbyhorse shouting, "Lunch! Lunch! Lunch!" There was a plastic swordfight followed by a few competent kung-fu scenes. In the end, I think the cowboy got back with Lunch in time for dinner, but it was hard to tell. The lights came up and the MC welcomed someone named "Keat" to the stage. After my boss elbowed me in the ribs, I realized it was me.
If you're new in China, you'd do well to write and rehearse a five-minute speech the morning prior to any large social engagement. Tonight, China had once again caught me with my pants down, but if nothing else, I at least had my boxer-briefs on.
"Well," I said, sweeping up the microphone, "how am I to follow an act like that?"
A round of applause.
"As something of a storyteller myself, I am extremely happy to be here, judging this year's China West Normal University English Storytelling Championship," I said. More applause. "In my college days, I studied creative writing. By reading my work out loud, I learned that when you tell a story, the reaction you get from your audience is not always the one you expect." I took a gulp of water and Tom Waits-growled into the microphone. "When I wrote seriously, my audience found me amusing. When I wrote for amusement, you could hear the crickets chirping."
Chirp, chirp.
"When we learn a foreign language, we sometimes focus so intensely on grammar and pronunciation, examinations and certifications, that we forget the simple pleasures language affords: the ability to express our thoughts and opinions to people of another culture, to make connections and build bridges. Language gives us the voice to share our stories with the world." I was gagging on my own words. Every platitude that came out of my mouth was like a wallop of castor oil. C'mon, kid. Wrap it up. "Storytelling is the expressway to the American heart." Jesus, did you win a Daytime Emmy or something? Cut and run! Abort, Keith, abort! "From The Monkey King to Shakespeare, from Lu Xun to Hemingway, it is storytellers who bring unity to our lives and to our world, and it is your stories I have come tonight to listen to and learn from. Thank you." I took a bow. A standing O. "And so, with no further ado: gentlemen, start your engines!"
The Chinese definition of plagiarism differs from our own in the west - in short, it does not exist. My students will sometimes look up Wikipedia articles on their phones in the middle of class, and present the information as though it were their own writing. But they seem unaware of any wrongdoing, or of anything that could be construed as wrongdoing. Of the sixteen storytellers, fourteen of them read scripts that they'd printed from the internet or lifted from textbooks. One of the stories - "Loveing [sic] and Losing Michael Jackson" - sounded instantly familiar, and by the third paragraph, when it became clear that the narrator was not a college-aged Chinese male but a teenage girl living in West Philadelphia, I realized that I had heard the story on NPR.
Perky, pigtailed Contestant Number 5 didn't so much tell a story, as much as she performed the Chinese answer to an American USO show. Her story was named "I Love You, China."
"I love you, China!" she shouted. Feedback. Then: softer, more reflective, "I - love you - China."
Applause. Whistling.
"I love you, China. I love you for feed me and make me strong," she said. "My dad is go to America on business. His boss ask him if I speak English and he very proud say yes. Every student learn English in China. His boss is very surprising. I love you, China. I am proud of you, China. I love you because you teach me English and make me strong."
I was waiting for a red flag to drop down from the rafters, a six-man Lunar New Year dragon to go snaking across the stage.
"Now I want you to clap your palms with me. Clap your palms. Clap clap clap."
She sang. The PA system whinnied like a flogged horse.
"I love you, China/I am so proud of you, China/thank you, China/I love you too much."
She bowed. I clapped. "7.2," I wrote on the scorecard.
Happily, when all was said and judged, the winner deserved to win. Contestant Number 14 had obviously written her story herself, because there were nitpicky little grammatical errors everywhere, but her delivery was impeccably ... human. She told the story of Thanksgiving, of Myles Standoffish and the Pilgrims, of maize and pumpkin pie and the Injuns and all the rest. At one point, she described the American rite of sitting around the television post-feast, holding one's belly and groaning with gluttonous exhaustion. I laughed and the contestant smiled at me, and I smiled back, and at that moment I wanted her to win and to win overwhelmingly, with a ten-point spread between her and the next guy, with his ten-minute robot sermon about being yourself and living life to the fullest. And to my surprise, through some scoring fluke, Contestant Number 14 did win. They gave her a badminton racket and a down comforter.
The Chinese word for judge is pingwei, which, so far as I can tell, means "one who levels things out." And tonight, I feel as though I have done my own little part in leveling shit out, in tilting the scales of culture smart and science intelligent one metric iota closer to equilibrium.
A few months ago, Jacob and I judged the regional semifinals of the CCTV Cup, China's coveted English oratory championship. The theme was, "Which is more important: science smart or culture intelligent?" I am not joking. Each of the nineteen contestants trembled in front of the podium for five minutes, pontificating on the delicate balance between science smart and culture intelligent. By the fourth speaker, I had just about bitten my tongue in half. The urge to laugh was impossible for me to supress, but cracking up mid-speech would mean a tremendous loss of face for the speaker - nay, by the time I was done laughing, there would be no face left to lose. And of course, it wasn't the poor kid's fault: all over the country, at the behest of CCTV, tens of thousands of Chinese undergrads were talking about science smart this and culture intelligent that.
By Contestant Number 6, I vowed that I would award a perfect score to anyone with the balls to point out that the very question "Science smart or culture intelligent?" was grammatically absurd. But no one did. Mediocre scores across the board. By far the highlight of the competition was a fire-and-brimstone nationalist who might've belonged to the Chinese Kennedy family. He concluded his speech - which, happily, did not address either science smart or culture intelligent - by pounding his fist on the podium several times and shouting, "God bless you and God bless China!" He received a standing ovation but was eliminated in the first round.
Tonight, I was tapped to judge a campuswide storytelling competition. I was ushered to my front row seat by a flock of usheresses in matching banana yellow suits. The auditorium was full to capacity. Ambient Michael Bolton on the PA system. A complimentary bottle of Nongfu Spring water on my desk. Balloons everywhere. Nice.
The competition opened with a skit dubbed "The Peacock Flying Towards the Southeast." My Wikipedia research tells me it was an adaptation of a Chinese folktale, but at the time it reminded me of something Samuel Beckett might've written if he'd fallen in with the American Beat crowd. There was a two-timing temptress named Lunch. Her husband, played by a girl in a cowboy hat, galloped about on a hobbyhorse shouting, "Lunch! Lunch! Lunch!" There was a plastic swordfight followed by a few competent kung-fu scenes. In the end, I think the cowboy got back with Lunch in time for dinner, but it was hard to tell. The lights came up and the MC welcomed someone named "Keat" to the stage. After my boss elbowed me in the ribs, I realized it was me.
If you're new in China, you'd do well to write and rehearse a five-minute speech the morning prior to any large social engagement. Tonight, China had once again caught me with my pants down, but if nothing else, I at least had my boxer-briefs on.
"Well," I said, sweeping up the microphone, "how am I to follow an act like that?"
A round of applause.
"As something of a storyteller myself, I am extremely happy to be here, judging this year's China West Normal University English Storytelling Championship," I said. More applause. "In my college days, I studied creative writing. By reading my work out loud, I learned that when you tell a story, the reaction you get from your audience is not always the one you expect." I took a gulp of water and Tom Waits-growled into the microphone. "When I wrote seriously, my audience found me amusing. When I wrote for amusement, you could hear the crickets chirping."
Chirp, chirp.
"When we learn a foreign language, we sometimes focus so intensely on grammar and pronunciation, examinations and certifications, that we forget the simple pleasures language affords: the ability to express our thoughts and opinions to people of another culture, to make connections and build bridges. Language gives us the voice to share our stories with the world." I was gagging on my own words. Every platitude that came out of my mouth was like a wallop of castor oil. C'mon, kid. Wrap it up. "Storytelling is the expressway to the American heart." Jesus, did you win a Daytime Emmy or something? Cut and run! Abort, Keith, abort! "From The Monkey King to Shakespeare, from Lu Xun to Hemingway, it is storytellers who bring unity to our lives and to our world, and it is your stories I have come tonight to listen to and learn from. Thank you." I took a bow. A standing O. "And so, with no further ado: gentlemen, start your engines!"
The Chinese definition of plagiarism differs from our own in the west - in short, it does not exist. My students will sometimes look up Wikipedia articles on their phones in the middle of class, and present the information as though it were their own writing. But they seem unaware of any wrongdoing, or of anything that could be construed as wrongdoing. Of the sixteen storytellers, fourteen of them read scripts that they'd printed from the internet or lifted from textbooks. One of the stories - "Loveing [sic] and Losing Michael Jackson" - sounded instantly familiar, and by the third paragraph, when it became clear that the narrator was not a college-aged Chinese male but a teenage girl living in West Philadelphia, I realized that I had heard the story on NPR.
Perky, pigtailed Contestant Number 5 didn't so much tell a story, as much as she performed the Chinese answer to an American USO show. Her story was named "I Love You, China."
"I love you, China!" she shouted. Feedback. Then: softer, more reflective, "I - love you - China."
Applause. Whistling.
"I love you, China. I love you for feed me and make me strong," she said. "My dad is go to America on business. His boss ask him if I speak English and he very proud say yes. Every student learn English in China. His boss is very surprising. I love you, China. I am proud of you, China. I love you because you teach me English and make me strong."
I was waiting for a red flag to drop down from the rafters, a six-man Lunar New Year dragon to go snaking across the stage.
"Now I want you to clap your palms with me. Clap your palms. Clap clap clap."
She sang. The PA system whinnied like a flogged horse.
"I love you, China/I am so proud of you, China/thank you, China/I love you too much."
She bowed. I clapped. "7.2," I wrote on the scorecard.
Happily, when all was said and judged, the winner deserved to win. Contestant Number 14 had obviously written her story herself, because there were nitpicky little grammatical errors everywhere, but her delivery was impeccably ... human. She told the story of Thanksgiving, of Myles Standoffish and the Pilgrims, of maize and pumpkin pie and the Injuns and all the rest. At one point, she described the American rite of sitting around the television post-feast, holding one's belly and groaning with gluttonous exhaustion. I laughed and the contestant smiled at me, and I smiled back, and at that moment I wanted her to win and to win overwhelmingly, with a ten-point spread between her and the next guy, with his ten-minute robot sermon about being yourself and living life to the fullest. And to my surprise, through some scoring fluke, Contestant Number 14 did win. They gave her a badminton racket and a down comforter.
The Chinese word for judge is pingwei, which, so far as I can tell, means "one who levels things out." And tonight, I feel as though I have done my own little part in leveling shit out, in tilting the scales of culture smart and science intelligent one metric iota closer to equilibrium.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Hard Sleeper
My first Chinese train ride - such romance! such bohemian squalor! Stepping aboard the general admission car, I was swatted in the face by the fetid stink of latex and feces. I slugged my way to seat number 87 and sat. Avoiding the stares of the people around me, I took in the crowd. This was an exotic bunch: Mongolians, Tibetans, Uighurs, and other Chinese minorities I could not readily identify. Some of them looked as though they had been living in trains for weeks. It was 2:30 AM and many of the passengers were asleep, but those who weren't sat forward in their seats with duffel bags stowed between their legs, gawking at me. This wasn't the usual big-city curiosity I've learned to ignore: this was genuine astonishment. I must have been the first white devil these peasants had ever lain eyes upon.
With six hours 'til Wanzhou, I cracked open my writing notebook. "NOTEBOOK," it says on the front cover. "Progress is the activity of today and the assurance of tomorrow." For a long time, I thought those words were just gratuitous Chinglish wisdom, until I discovered they were a direct quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson. I started writing. My neighbors craned their necks to watch.
"His handwriting is too messy," said the man across from me. "I can't read it."
"Many foreigners have bad penmanship," said another. "Even in English."
"Do you think he understands us?"
"No. I don't think so."
"But maybe he does. Sometimes they do."
Before long, my scribbling had drawn a crowd, which wasn't helping my writer's block one bit. I put my notebook away, tucked my head into my lap, and pretended to sleep until I fell asleep. I was jolted awake some hours later by a man barking into a megaphone. Had we arrived already? No. I saw that the man was carrying a basket full of boxes. He was hawking something. I checked my phone. It was 5 AM. The peddler strode up and down the aisle, barking and squawking until the passengers groaned into wakefulness. My stomach reminded me that I hadn't eaten in twelve hours: was this breakfast? No. The peddler opened a box and pulled out a Super Happy Fun Color-Change LED Spinning Top. He flipped a switch and set the thing loose. It whirled down the aisle and coasted under my seat, where it bleeped and tooted and screeched at a maddening volume.
"It's fun! It's high-tech! It will make your life colorful! It even sings a song!" As he passed, the peddler slowed to aim the cone of his megaphone into the inner ear canals of what few passengers remained sleeping. "Only fifty kuai to bring hours of happy playtime to your child's life!"
As the peddler stooped to fetch the runaway gizmo from under my seat, a tense American frequency was buzzing in my brain. Someone was going to do something. I could sense it. Someone was going to get up from their seat, march right down the aisle, snatch the megaphone from the peddler's hand and stomp it to bits. This is what would happen in America. But as your students will constantly remind you, T.I.C.: This Is China. The crowd drank in the peddler's rap. They were intrigued by the gizmo. They wanted personal demonstrations. What else can it do? Does it play any other songs? What kind of batteries does it use? Thirty kuai is all I've got; will you take thirty kuai? After twenty minutes of lo-fi squawking, the peddler had completely sold out of gizmos. He switched off his megaphone. I was drifting off into a befuddled slumber when I noticed a brownish-yellow pool oozing towards my sneakers. The man next to me pointed at it.
"Is that poop or pee?" he asked.
"It looks like pee," said his companion, "but it smells like poop."
The peddler stepped over the spreading puddle as he passed, riffling the bills in his hand. The stench multiplied. A stewardess stepped in the puddle - splash! - and let out a noise of mild disgust, but did not return to clean it up. I picked my bag up off the floor and sat with my nose tucked into my armpit to ward off the stench. I napped that way for fifteen minutes until the peddler returned, this time with hand-powered flashlights, which sold like mooncakes. And he came back a half hour later, flogging what looked to be imitation Nickelodeon Gak. The purgatory of public transportation had turned very quickly to hell. I pulled my hood over my head and curled up on the bench, and for two hours, amidst all the stinking and squawking, I pretended to sleep.
When I removed my hood, the first thing I saw was a boot. My eyes followed the boot upward to find that it was connected to a stockinged calf, which was connected to an unusually luscious thigh: a woman's leg. I blinked and shook my head. This was a woman's leg! Who was this woman, and what was she doing in China? Then I glanced up to see a very pretty face watching me sleep. She smiled. I squinted. Then, like a startled turtle, I pulled my hood back over my head and rolled over on my side.
A few stops later, two new guys took the seats across from me and started placing bets as to whether I could understand them.
"I bet he can't."
"I bet he can."
"I bet he can't."
"He can," said the woman. "I know he can. I heard him speaking earlier."
One of the guys leaned forward and slapped my thigh.
"Hey. If I speak Chinese, can you understand me?"
I sat up and de-hooded.
"More or less," I said.
He crowed triumphantly and collected a couple cigarettes from the peasant next to him.
A few days ago, I had what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity, and since then I have been able to understand and produce much more Chinese than I could a week ago. This Is Chinese: weeks of frustration and regression, moments of insight and comprehension. So I cleared one conversational hurdle after another with the man across from me - a clean-shaven sleazeball in a shiny silk suit - and eventually, with the unbelievably voluptuous woman across the aisle. She was sitting with a much older man: her father? her grandpa? her husband? The train passed through a tunnel. I gazed out the window into the darkness and saw that the woman was smiling at my reflection. My eyes shot down towards the floor and lingered on the dried poop-pee puddle under my feet. I have not been in China long enough to understand what constitutes normal Chinese behavior, but the woman across the aisle was behaving mighty unorthodoxically, indeed.
We chatted. The sleaze in the suit, at one point, turned to the woman across the aisle and said, "You should make a foreigner friend." He paused for emphasis. "I mean - make a foreigner friend." He grinned. She smiled.
We arrived. The Mongol hordes wrestled their way down the aisle and off the train. I waited until the car was empty and stepped out onto the platform. The woman was reverse following me, trailing behind her uncle, or coworker, or husband, or whoever he was. When I'd caught up to her, she drew me close and whispered in my ear, "Do you have a phone?"
"Yes," I said, "but it's dead at the moment."
"Then I'll give you my number."
She wrote it on the back of her ticket and slipped it into my hand. No mention of English lessons and no "foreigner friend" spiel. Just a phone number. Call me sometime. There was something indescribably sexy about the gesture, something very un-Chinese. The old man caught her by the arm and they melted into the crowd together. I put her number in my wallet. But I don't think I'll call. My marital status is confusing enough without steamy train station affairs thrown into the mix.
Two days later, I was back at the Wanzhou Train Station. The moment I stepped out of the cab, I was assailed by barkers and floggers and hecklers: do you want to eat? do you want to relax? do you want to go to Nanchong? I take you to Nanchong!
"Bu yao, bu yao, dou bu yao!" I shouted those magic words with my newly acquired Chinese gravitas and the sea of urchins parted before me. "I don't want, I don't want, I don't want any of it!"
I fished out my wallet. According to my fuzzy calculations, after the bus and the cab ride to the station, I should have had 50 kuai left over for a hard sleeper bunk. But my wallet served up 34 kuai and two mao. I'd have to ride coach again. I paced back and forth, racking my mind for the exact moment the swindle had taken place. In China, your pockets seem to hemorrhage money, a phenomenon that will often drive you into a sweaty rage, before you realize that you've been gypped the equivalent of three U.S. dollars. I bought a ticket.
"34 kuai," said the clerk.
I slid my last 34 kuai across the counter, and stared at the two mao in my palm as though there were an ominous portent therein.
Boarding the train to Wanzhou had been a surprisingly civilized affair, but boarding the train back to Nanchong was like being thrown into the throes a Gwar show. The instant the gates opened, the hordes forearm shivered their way out onto the platform. I stood on the outskirts for a few minutes to catch my breath, then I surged into the pit. We were so much cattle; we were turn-of-the-century mobs rioting in the wake of a Stravinsky concert; we were 500 human beings eroding each other to a polished sheen. For a moment, western rationality strained against the bars of my skull: isn't there a better, a smoother way to go about this? Must we cross-check grandmothers into plexiglas walls so we can get to our assigned seats first? Well, shit, I shrugged: as far as excitement goes, this beats the hell out of waiting in line for half an hour. I headbutted someone in the chest and Rodmanned my way through the turnstile.
China will shake you and rattle you sometimes. Other times, it will grin mischievously while you sit and wait for chaos to strike. Nothing happened on the train ride back to Nanchong. It was six hours of purgatory. I reread Brave New World. I wrote. Nobody seemed to notice me. I snuck out to the smoking car for a cigarette. The train ride was uncomfortable, smelly, and cramped. The peddler swept through at midnight to flog bottles of nerve tonic. But it wasn't as maddening or as tedious as I had anticipated. We coasted into Nanchong thirty minutes early. For the first time, I felt like I was coming home. I was relieved to be back in Nanchong, with its familiar peculiarities, its incomprehensible dialect, its distinctly drab architecture; the twiggy girls at the shishkebab joint asking me for English lessons; back to my sterile modern campus, the cold squareness of my apartment, and finally, after a meditative cigarette or two, to the Keithish musk of my hard, well-slept-in bed.
With six hours 'til Wanzhou, I cracked open my writing notebook. "NOTEBOOK," it says on the front cover. "Progress is the activity of today and the assurance of tomorrow." For a long time, I thought those words were just gratuitous Chinglish wisdom, until I discovered they were a direct quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson. I started writing. My neighbors craned their necks to watch.
"His handwriting is too messy," said the man across from me. "I can't read it."
"Many foreigners have bad penmanship," said another. "Even in English."
"Do you think he understands us?"
"No. I don't think so."
"But maybe he does. Sometimes they do."
Before long, my scribbling had drawn a crowd, which wasn't helping my writer's block one bit. I put my notebook away, tucked my head into my lap, and pretended to sleep until I fell asleep. I was jolted awake some hours later by a man barking into a megaphone. Had we arrived already? No. I saw that the man was carrying a basket full of boxes. He was hawking something. I checked my phone. It was 5 AM. The peddler strode up and down the aisle, barking and squawking until the passengers groaned into wakefulness. My stomach reminded me that I hadn't eaten in twelve hours: was this breakfast? No. The peddler opened a box and pulled out a Super Happy Fun Color-Change LED Spinning Top. He flipped a switch and set the thing loose. It whirled down the aisle and coasted under my seat, where it bleeped and tooted and screeched at a maddening volume.
"It's fun! It's high-tech! It will make your life colorful! It even sings a song!" As he passed, the peddler slowed to aim the cone of his megaphone into the inner ear canals of what few passengers remained sleeping. "Only fifty kuai to bring hours of happy playtime to your child's life!"
As the peddler stooped to fetch the runaway gizmo from under my seat, a tense American frequency was buzzing in my brain. Someone was going to do something. I could sense it. Someone was going to get up from their seat, march right down the aisle, snatch the megaphone from the peddler's hand and stomp it to bits. This is what would happen in America. But as your students will constantly remind you, T.I.C.: This Is China. The crowd drank in the peddler's rap. They were intrigued by the gizmo. They wanted personal demonstrations. What else can it do? Does it play any other songs? What kind of batteries does it use? Thirty kuai is all I've got; will you take thirty kuai? After twenty minutes of lo-fi squawking, the peddler had completely sold out of gizmos. He switched off his megaphone. I was drifting off into a befuddled slumber when I noticed a brownish-yellow pool oozing towards my sneakers. The man next to me pointed at it.
"Is that poop or pee?" he asked.
"It looks like pee," said his companion, "but it smells like poop."
The peddler stepped over the spreading puddle as he passed, riffling the bills in his hand. The stench multiplied. A stewardess stepped in the puddle - splash! - and let out a noise of mild disgust, but did not return to clean it up. I picked my bag up off the floor and sat with my nose tucked into my armpit to ward off the stench. I napped that way for fifteen minutes until the peddler returned, this time with hand-powered flashlights, which sold like mooncakes. And he came back a half hour later, flogging what looked to be imitation Nickelodeon Gak. The purgatory of public transportation had turned very quickly to hell. I pulled my hood over my head and curled up on the bench, and for two hours, amidst all the stinking and squawking, I pretended to sleep.
When I removed my hood, the first thing I saw was a boot. My eyes followed the boot upward to find that it was connected to a stockinged calf, which was connected to an unusually luscious thigh: a woman's leg. I blinked and shook my head. This was a woman's leg! Who was this woman, and what was she doing in China? Then I glanced up to see a very pretty face watching me sleep. She smiled. I squinted. Then, like a startled turtle, I pulled my hood back over my head and rolled over on my side.
A few stops later, two new guys took the seats across from me and started placing bets as to whether I could understand them.
"I bet he can't."
"I bet he can."
"I bet he can't."
"He can," said the woman. "I know he can. I heard him speaking earlier."
One of the guys leaned forward and slapped my thigh.
"Hey. If I speak Chinese, can you understand me?"
I sat up and de-hooded.
"More or less," I said.
He crowed triumphantly and collected a couple cigarettes from the peasant next to him.
A few days ago, I had what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity, and since then I have been able to understand and produce much more Chinese than I could a week ago. This Is Chinese: weeks of frustration and regression, moments of insight and comprehension. So I cleared one conversational hurdle after another with the man across from me - a clean-shaven sleazeball in a shiny silk suit - and eventually, with the unbelievably voluptuous woman across the aisle. She was sitting with a much older man: her father? her grandpa? her husband? The train passed through a tunnel. I gazed out the window into the darkness and saw that the woman was smiling at my reflection. My eyes shot down towards the floor and lingered on the dried poop-pee puddle under my feet. I have not been in China long enough to understand what constitutes normal Chinese behavior, but the woman across the aisle was behaving mighty unorthodoxically, indeed.
We chatted. The sleaze in the suit, at one point, turned to the woman across the aisle and said, "You should make a foreigner friend." He paused for emphasis. "I mean - make a foreigner friend." He grinned. She smiled.
We arrived. The Mongol hordes wrestled their way down the aisle and off the train. I waited until the car was empty and stepped out onto the platform. The woman was reverse following me, trailing behind her uncle, or coworker, or husband, or whoever he was. When I'd caught up to her, she drew me close and whispered in my ear, "Do you have a phone?"
"Yes," I said, "but it's dead at the moment."
"Then I'll give you my number."
She wrote it on the back of her ticket and slipped it into my hand. No mention of English lessons and no "foreigner friend" spiel. Just a phone number. Call me sometime. There was something indescribably sexy about the gesture, something very un-Chinese. The old man caught her by the arm and they melted into the crowd together. I put her number in my wallet. But I don't think I'll call. My marital status is confusing enough without steamy train station affairs thrown into the mix.
Two days later, I was back at the Wanzhou Train Station. The moment I stepped out of the cab, I was assailed by barkers and floggers and hecklers: do you want to eat? do you want to relax? do you want to go to Nanchong? I take you to Nanchong!
"Bu yao, bu yao, dou bu yao!" I shouted those magic words with my newly acquired Chinese gravitas and the sea of urchins parted before me. "I don't want, I don't want, I don't want any of it!"
I fished out my wallet. According to my fuzzy calculations, after the bus and the cab ride to the station, I should have had 50 kuai left over for a hard sleeper bunk. But my wallet served up 34 kuai and two mao. I'd have to ride coach again. I paced back and forth, racking my mind for the exact moment the swindle had taken place. In China, your pockets seem to hemorrhage money, a phenomenon that will often drive you into a sweaty rage, before you realize that you've been gypped the equivalent of three U.S. dollars. I bought a ticket.
"34 kuai," said the clerk.
I slid my last 34 kuai across the counter, and stared at the two mao in my palm as though there were an ominous portent therein.
Boarding the train to Wanzhou had been a surprisingly civilized affair, but boarding the train back to Nanchong was like being thrown into the throes a Gwar show. The instant the gates opened, the hordes forearm shivered their way out onto the platform. I stood on the outskirts for a few minutes to catch my breath, then I surged into the pit. We were so much cattle; we were turn-of-the-century mobs rioting in the wake of a Stravinsky concert; we were 500 human beings eroding each other to a polished sheen. For a moment, western rationality strained against the bars of my skull: isn't there a better, a smoother way to go about this? Must we cross-check grandmothers into plexiglas walls so we can get to our assigned seats first? Well, shit, I shrugged: as far as excitement goes, this beats the hell out of waiting in line for half an hour. I headbutted someone in the chest and Rodmanned my way through the turnstile.
China will shake you and rattle you sometimes. Other times, it will grin mischievously while you sit and wait for chaos to strike. Nothing happened on the train ride back to Nanchong. It was six hours of purgatory. I reread Brave New World. I wrote. Nobody seemed to notice me. I snuck out to the smoking car for a cigarette. The train ride was uncomfortable, smelly, and cramped. The peddler swept through at midnight to flog bottles of nerve tonic. But it wasn't as maddening or as tedious as I had anticipated. We coasted into Nanchong thirty minutes early. For the first time, I felt like I was coming home. I was relieved to be back in Nanchong, with its familiar peculiarities, its incomprehensible dialect, its distinctly drab architecture; the twiggy girls at the shishkebab joint asking me for English lessons; back to my sterile modern campus, the cold squareness of my apartment, and finally, after a meditative cigarette or two, to the Keithish musk of my hard, well-slept-in bed.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Evil
Every so often, a scrap of western garbage washes ashore and I pounce upon it like a castaway. Yesterday morning, I found a National Enquirer in the stairwell. Patrick Swayze was on the cover, smoking a cigarette, boxed-in by dayglo yellow scare headlines gleefully predicting his imminent death. Inside were exclusive paparazzi photos of Swayze's final days, with arrows indicating his distended belly and the tufts of wig sticking out from under his hat. TWO FEET IN THE GRAVE! DAYS LEFT TO LIVE, DOCTORS REPORT! SWAYZE STILL SMOKING EVEN AS HE'S DYING OF PANCREATIC CANCER! Who reads this shit, I asked myself. That much is obvious: millions upon millions of Americans read this shit. But more frightening, to my mind, is the sheer amount of manpower that goes into producing the shit. Hundreds of photographers, editors, and graphic designers; a legion of libelists busting their asses to beat deadline; a beehive of cubicles swarming with hardworking, law-abiding citizens. If some wet-eared intern along the way raised the objection that roasting a dying man was in poor taste, he must have been laughed out of the staff meeting.
This is the evil we must fight against. It is a grey evil. An unleaded, decaffeinated, fat-free evil. It is a subtle and powerful evil. It is the evil of groupthink, the evil that makes you look around the room before you raise your hand, the evil that draws a crowd to a car wreck. Nowadays, it no longer pays to bash your foe over the head with a rock. You'll get thrown in the cooler for that. Modern man has more refined tastes: he prefers mass-produced, assembly line evil. None of the chickenshits at the National Enquirer would have the gall to spit in the face of a dying friend, but the lot of them will gladly work together to piss on the grave of someone they have never met. It is this grey, insectoid evil that we must fight against.
After college, I worked as a copywriter for the Oriental Trading Company. My job involved writing product descriptions for Chinese finger traps, whoopie cushions, Jesus frisbees, gummi crucifixes, World's Greatest Dad koozies, novelty hand buzzers, Groucho Marx glasses, googily eyes, fake vomit, und so weiter. It wasn't the work itself that drove me to quit, but the pervading sense of evil. Nobody in that cold, dimly lit basement actually wanted to be there. Nobody believed in what they were doing. They all worked diligently for 40+ hours a week. And to what end? Ultimately, so the CEO could blow the company purse in Council Bluffs.
About two months in, my cubicle-mate grabbed me by the wrist, looked me in the eyes, and said, "Get out of here. Quit. While you still can." And so eventually, I did. Now I'm in China, living on $180 a month. Whatever the future holds in store for me, I am certain I won't turn a profit. I have grown out of the metaphysical rebellion that fueled my first, second, and third puberties. In its stead, I have adopted a simple non serviam policy. I will take no part in anything I consider evil. Of course, I will do locally evil deeds along the way, as we all do. But I want no part in the big, grey evil. I'd rather work for nothing in some foggy corner of the world, and I am content to do that for the rest of my life. And if by the end of it all I have made a name for myself, I invite the Enquirer to come and piss upon my grave. IDEALISTIC HOBO SPENDS LAST DAYS LISTENING TO "PRETZEL LOGIC" BY STEELY DAN ON REPEAT! DOCTORS SAY THE VAGABOND HASN'T BATHED IN A FORTNIGHT! EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS SHOW LOVABLE TRANSIENT TRYING (AND FAILING) TO MAKE BURRITOS FROM SCRATCH! And so on.
This is the evil we must fight against. It is a grey evil. An unleaded, decaffeinated, fat-free evil. It is a subtle and powerful evil. It is the evil of groupthink, the evil that makes you look around the room before you raise your hand, the evil that draws a crowd to a car wreck. Nowadays, it no longer pays to bash your foe over the head with a rock. You'll get thrown in the cooler for that. Modern man has more refined tastes: he prefers mass-produced, assembly line evil. None of the chickenshits at the National Enquirer would have the gall to spit in the face of a dying friend, but the lot of them will gladly work together to piss on the grave of someone they have never met. It is this grey, insectoid evil that we must fight against.
After college, I worked as a copywriter for the Oriental Trading Company. My job involved writing product descriptions for Chinese finger traps, whoopie cushions, Jesus frisbees, gummi crucifixes, World's Greatest Dad koozies, novelty hand buzzers, Groucho Marx glasses, googily eyes, fake vomit, und so weiter. It wasn't the work itself that drove me to quit, but the pervading sense of evil. Nobody in that cold, dimly lit basement actually wanted to be there. Nobody believed in what they were doing. They all worked diligently for 40+ hours a week. And to what end? Ultimately, so the CEO could blow the company purse in Council Bluffs.
About two months in, my cubicle-mate grabbed me by the wrist, looked me in the eyes, and said, "Get out of here. Quit. While you still can." And so eventually, I did. Now I'm in China, living on $180 a month. Whatever the future holds in store for me, I am certain I won't turn a profit. I have grown out of the metaphysical rebellion that fueled my first, second, and third puberties. In its stead, I have adopted a simple non serviam policy. I will take no part in anything I consider evil. Of course, I will do locally evil deeds along the way, as we all do. But I want no part in the big, grey evil. I'd rather work for nothing in some foggy corner of the world, and I am content to do that for the rest of my life. And if by the end of it all I have made a name for myself, I invite the Enquirer to come and piss upon my grave. IDEALISTIC HOBO SPENDS LAST DAYS LISTENING TO "PRETZEL LOGIC" BY STEELY DAN ON REPEAT! DOCTORS SAY THE VAGABOND HASN'T BATHED IN A FORTNIGHT! EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS SHOW LOVABLE TRANSIENT TRYING (AND FAILING) TO MAKE BURRITOS FROM SCRATCH! And so on.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Field Jacket
Last week, a socially transmitted disease swept through the Nanchong foreigner ghetto. By Thursday, I had succumbed to the grippe. It sopped up every last fluid ounce of inspiration I had left. I woke up an hour before class and my throat was so swollen that I couldn't even talk to myself. My ears were sealed shut, so all I could hear was the beating of my heart and the bubbling of internal organs that, thankfully, we are not usually privy to. I called the class monitor and through a morse code of coughs and wheezes, communicated that today's Oral English 101 class would be postponed due to lack of voice. Then I crawled back under the blankets and lay there, unable to sleep, or talk to myself, or listen to Thelonious Monk, or even write, because of the block that wedged itself in my Broca's Area immediately after my last blog entry. So I got out of bed and washed my field jacket. Then I dried it on the radiator, turning it over every few minutes like a slab of meat. At least the jacket gave me something to look forward to, namely warmth, and thoughts of how bad-ass I would look patrolling the apartment grounds in a vintage Cold War Era U.S. Air Force field jacket.
The jacket, as my mom would have you know, belongs to my mom. She wore it when she was stationed in North Dakota, up until my in-utero existence began to stretch its seams. The jacket survived several moves and remained hidden away in the Petit Family Closet until a few winters ago, when in desperate need of a coat, I took it from the rack and scurried off to the Brothers Lounge. The jacket followed me to Poland, then to Germany. But in the scramble to get out of Europe before my tourist visa expired, I left the jacket behind, entrusting it to my friend Ben, fully expecting to never see it again. I returned to the States, then flew south to Mexico for the winter.
When I resurfaced in Nebraska the next January, I met up with Ben at The Brothers and found him looking rather mod-chic in a government-issue field jacket.
"Man, that jacket is bad-ass," I told Ben.
"Thanks," he said.
"Where'd you get it? Army Surplus?"
He mumbled something into his lapel.
"Whazzat?" I asked.
"It's your mom's," he said.
So it was. I tend to fight Nebraskan winter with denial: I do not wear a coat until it becomes biologically imperative to do so. So all that January I shivered in my hoodie and hawked pneumonia loogies into my Moscow Mule until Ben, one day, offered me my mother's coat, which I happily reclaimed as my own.
It's the kind of jacket that has threatening instructions sewn into the lining: eight of them, to be exact.
1. ADJUST CLOSURES AND DRAWCORDS TO VENTILATE - AVOID OVERHEATING OF BODY
2. WHEN HOOD IS USED, LOWER EXTENSION SHALL BE WORN OVER NECK OPENING
3. BRUSH SNOW OR FROST FROM GARMENTS BEFORE ENTERING HEATED SHELTERS
4. DO NOT EXPOSE TO HIGH TEMPERATURE OF A STOVE
5. LUBRICATE SLIDE FASTENERS WITH WAX
6. FOR CLEANING AND RESTORING OF WATER REPELLENCY, RETURN TO LAUNDRY FOR MACHINE WASHING IN ACCORDANCE WITH ESTABLISHED PROCEDURES FOR QUARPEL TREATED GARMENTS
7. DO NOT STARCH OR BLEACH
8. DO NOT REMOVE THIS LABEL
OVERHEATING OF BODY isn't going to be a problem in Nanchong. I do not own a stove, but in any event, I will avoid baking this jacket. I am reading up on the established procedures for quarpel treated garments: I am reading up on quarpel. My lone complaint is that the jacket feels a bit naked. Where are the epaulettes? The badges of merit? Perhaps the Peace Corps can do something in that direction. The Medal of Cultural Integration. Upper-Intermediate Speaker of Mandarin. The Bronze Finger Trap. The Purple Liver, commemorating a month-long struggle with Japanese Encephalitis B. The prestigious Empty Cradle, awarded to male volunteers who complete two years of service without fathering a child. Et al.
The jacket, as my mom would have you know, belongs to my mom. She wore it when she was stationed in North Dakota, up until my in-utero existence began to stretch its seams. The jacket survived several moves and remained hidden away in the Petit Family Closet until a few winters ago, when in desperate need of a coat, I took it from the rack and scurried off to the Brothers Lounge. The jacket followed me to Poland, then to Germany. But in the scramble to get out of Europe before my tourist visa expired, I left the jacket behind, entrusting it to my friend Ben, fully expecting to never see it again. I returned to the States, then flew south to Mexico for the winter.
When I resurfaced in Nebraska the next January, I met up with Ben at The Brothers and found him looking rather mod-chic in a government-issue field jacket.
"Man, that jacket is bad-ass," I told Ben.
"Thanks," he said.
"Where'd you get it? Army Surplus?"
He mumbled something into his lapel.
"Whazzat?" I asked.
"It's your mom's," he said.
So it was. I tend to fight Nebraskan winter with denial: I do not wear a coat until it becomes biologically imperative to do so. So all that January I shivered in my hoodie and hawked pneumonia loogies into my Moscow Mule until Ben, one day, offered me my mother's coat, which I happily reclaimed as my own.
It's the kind of jacket that has threatening instructions sewn into the lining: eight of them, to be exact.
1. ADJUST CLOSURES AND DRAWCORDS TO VENTILATE - AVOID OVERHEATING OF BODY
2. WHEN HOOD IS USED, LOWER EXTENSION SHALL BE WORN OVER NECK OPENING
3. BRUSH SNOW OR FROST FROM GARMENTS BEFORE ENTERING HEATED SHELTERS
4. DO NOT EXPOSE TO HIGH TEMPERATURE OF A STOVE
5. LUBRICATE SLIDE FASTENERS WITH WAX
6. FOR CLEANING AND RESTORING OF WATER REPELLENCY, RETURN TO LAUNDRY FOR MACHINE WASHING IN ACCORDANCE WITH ESTABLISHED PROCEDURES FOR QUARPEL TREATED GARMENTS
7. DO NOT STARCH OR BLEACH
8. DO NOT REMOVE THIS LABEL
OVERHEATING OF BODY isn't going to be a problem in Nanchong. I do not own a stove, but in any event, I will avoid baking this jacket. I am reading up on the established procedures for quarpel treated garments: I am reading up on quarpel. My lone complaint is that the jacket feels a bit naked. Where are the epaulettes? The badges of merit? Perhaps the Peace Corps can do something in that direction. The Medal of Cultural Integration. Upper-Intermediate Speaker of Mandarin. The Bronze Finger Trap. The Purple Liver, commemorating a month-long struggle with Japanese Encephalitis B. The prestigious Empty Cradle, awarded to male volunteers who complete two years of service without fathering a child. Et al.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
The Last Day of Autumn
As I was forging through the dampness towards the nearest non-electrified ATM, some college bros spotted me and one of them shouted, "To be or not to be! A question!" I hope literary quotations are the new direction in laowai heckling. I wouldn't mind all the attention if my admirers hit me with words of wisdom from E.M. Forster and George Bernard Shaw.
Winter has come to Nanchong. At the laowai Halloween party, one of the Mennonites told me that it gets so ruthlessly cold in Nanchong that he actually flies home to Saskatchewan for the winter. That moment was like The Deerhunter, when the warhungry steelmill riffraff encounters a Vietnam vet at the bar, or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, when McMurphy returns from electroshock therapy: the fading of smiles, the shuffling of feet, the optimistic persistence in disbelief. For the first two weeks of November, we newbies went about our work in cargo shorts and t-shirts. And then winter came. Saskatchewan is sounding downright peachy right about now.
I'm no lightweight when it comes to winter. I am a Nebraskan. In subzero temperatures, I have been known to gallivant in a hoodie full of holes and a pair of corduroys. Objectively, winters in Nebraska are much worse than winters in Sichuan. The temperature is lower, the wind is stronger. But there is something about the quality of the cold here. Nebraska is dramatically cold, with gusts of wind and eddies of snow. Nebraska is also capriciously cold: it will snow two feet one day, only to be 65 and sunny the next. But Nanchong winters are consistently, mercilessly cold. It is a damp cold, the kind of chill you get when you read 1984. It chills you to the bone. I once watched a tai-chi master kick my friend's ass in slow motion, and that is the sort of cold Nanchong has to offer. Because Sichuan is situated under some imaginary Chinese line below which buildings are not furnished with central heating, there is no escape from the cold, unless you are showering or nestled under several blankets with another human being. When I happen to be in my apartment - a rare thing these days - I huddle as close as possible to the plug-in radiator. This morning, I couldn't finish my Mandarin journal entry because my hands were shaking so bad.
The last day of autumn, whatever the calendars may say, occurred last Friday. It was sunny, and warm in the sunlight. I was leaving my Mandarin lesson. My tutor had invited me to air my grievances, and air I did, for two hours, while she tweaked my syntax along the way. Passing the outdoor ping-pong tables, I saw that they were full to capacity - all forty of them - and that the games were halting mid-ping mid-pong so that the players could take a good long look at me. There was kung-fu in the square by the stadium, badminton games across the street, and a soccer match raging in the mudpit down the way. The Chinese are nothing if not active. My thoughts were heavy, but pleasant. I could chew on them for hours. The sun was setting over the ten-story Jiao-Xue Building, whose roof was built to look like a splayed book, from whose pages a middle-aged man from Anhui Province leapt to his death two weeks ago.
Anhui is a long way from Nanchong. The man came to my school, his alma mater, looking for work. The university informed him that there were no positions available. So he took the elevator up to the top floor of the Jiao-Xue Building, situated himself in the spine of that great big cement book on the roof, and jumped. He jumped at 11:30 AM, right around the time I would've been coming back from class. The students in the building were said to have heard the splat. Trauma counselors were dispatched. The man left his wife and child behind. So it goes.
I am not one to dwell on coincidences, but the day before the jumper jumped, I met a middle-aged man on the bus who happened to be from Anhui Province. I knew he was an out-of-towner because out-of-towners are rare, and because I could understand him: he was speaking Mandarin and not Sichuanese. He complimented me on my Chinese and said that it was bang, which is a word I had to ask my tutor about: it is the east coast way of saying "awesome." So I thanked him. We chatted for a bit. Then I turned away, because I was tired of talking to strangers on the bus, and because I needed a few minutes to think about what I was going to teach in that morning's class and how I was going to teach it. He got off a few stops before I did. The next day, someone leapt to their death from the tenth story of the Jiao-Xue Building.
My toilet is malfunctioning and public restrooms do not come with toilet paper, so I carry a roll in my backpack.
Winter has come to Nanchong. At the laowai Halloween party, one of the Mennonites told me that it gets so ruthlessly cold in Nanchong that he actually flies home to Saskatchewan for the winter. That moment was like The Deerhunter, when the warhungry steelmill riffraff encounters a Vietnam vet at the bar, or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, when McMurphy returns from electroshock therapy: the fading of smiles, the shuffling of feet, the optimistic persistence in disbelief. For the first two weeks of November, we newbies went about our work in cargo shorts and t-shirts. And then winter came. Saskatchewan is sounding downright peachy right about now.
I'm no lightweight when it comes to winter. I am a Nebraskan. In subzero temperatures, I have been known to gallivant in a hoodie full of holes and a pair of corduroys. Objectively, winters in Nebraska are much worse than winters in Sichuan. The temperature is lower, the wind is stronger. But there is something about the quality of the cold here. Nebraska is dramatically cold, with gusts of wind and eddies of snow. Nebraska is also capriciously cold: it will snow two feet one day, only to be 65 and sunny the next. But Nanchong winters are consistently, mercilessly cold. It is a damp cold, the kind of chill you get when you read 1984. It chills you to the bone. I once watched a tai-chi master kick my friend's ass in slow motion, and that is the sort of cold Nanchong has to offer. Because Sichuan is situated under some imaginary Chinese line below which buildings are not furnished with central heating, there is no escape from the cold, unless you are showering or nestled under several blankets with another human being. When I happen to be in my apartment - a rare thing these days - I huddle as close as possible to the plug-in radiator. This morning, I couldn't finish my Mandarin journal entry because my hands were shaking so bad.
The last day of autumn, whatever the calendars may say, occurred last Friday. It was sunny, and warm in the sunlight. I was leaving my Mandarin lesson. My tutor had invited me to air my grievances, and air I did, for two hours, while she tweaked my syntax along the way. Passing the outdoor ping-pong tables, I saw that they were full to capacity - all forty of them - and that the games were halting mid-ping mid-pong so that the players could take a good long look at me. There was kung-fu in the square by the stadium, badminton games across the street, and a soccer match raging in the mudpit down the way. The Chinese are nothing if not active. My thoughts were heavy, but pleasant. I could chew on them for hours. The sun was setting over the ten-story Jiao-Xue Building, whose roof was built to look like a splayed book, from whose pages a middle-aged man from Anhui Province leapt to his death two weeks ago.
Anhui is a long way from Nanchong. The man came to my school, his alma mater, looking for work. The university informed him that there were no positions available. So he took the elevator up to the top floor of the Jiao-Xue Building, situated himself in the spine of that great big cement book on the roof, and jumped. He jumped at 11:30 AM, right around the time I would've been coming back from class. The students in the building were said to have heard the splat. Trauma counselors were dispatched. The man left his wife and child behind. So it goes.
I am not one to dwell on coincidences, but the day before the jumper jumped, I met a middle-aged man on the bus who happened to be from Anhui Province. I knew he was an out-of-towner because out-of-towners are rare, and because I could understand him: he was speaking Mandarin and not Sichuanese. He complimented me on my Chinese and said that it was bang, which is a word I had to ask my tutor about: it is the east coast way of saying "awesome." So I thanked him. We chatted for a bit. Then I turned away, because I was tired of talking to strangers on the bus, and because I needed a few minutes to think about what I was going to teach in that morning's class and how I was going to teach it. He got off a few stops before I did. The next day, someone leapt to their death from the tenth story of the Jiao-Xue Building.
My toilet is malfunctioning and public restrooms do not come with toilet paper, so I carry a roll in my backpack.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Babies' Republic
There isn't a mathematician, statistician, or social scientist alive who could explain to me why there are so many babies in this country. Well, says the informed reader, it is a nation of some 1.5 billion souls, and at least some them are bound to be babies, right? To which I respond, yes, but still: there are far too many babies here for comfort. Even the campus I live on, which you would imagine as teeming with young coeds in skintight sweats with "CHINA WEST NORMAL UNIVERSITY" printed across the butt, is overrun with babies: babies crawling to class, babies doing kegstands, babies hazing younger babies. I jest - but seriously, you would not believe how many babies there are in China.
There are six babies living on the fourth floor of my apartment building, which doesn't make any sense, as there are only four apartments. There are rules here, remember. One of the apartments is mine, and I do not currently own any babies, biologically related or otherwise. My neighbors are well past childrearing age. It is unclear to which of the two remaining tenants the six babies belong to. They are free-range babies. The hallway is their rumpus room and there, the babies - all of them boys - love shooting each other, and me, with the same Made in China lazer guns that were such a big hit stateside during my own childhood. Last night, one of the babies pelted me in the stomach with a rubber ducky, and this morning I tripped over the sawed-off plastic shotgun that he'd left outside my door. The babies run this crib.
In China, even the babies are aware that you are a laowai. This morning, as I hustled to catch the last Toyotavan to school, I passed a baby who was so startled by my pale beardedness that he tripped over himself and faceplanted into the sidewalk. There was a brief lull in which the baby came to the realization that he was hurt, then he started bawling. I stopped to apologize and bowed deeply before the mother, who said Mei guanxi - No problem! - then hoisted the little shrieking bundle up into her arms and walked away. I once gave a toddler such a bad scare that he fell forward and cracked his forehead against a metal pipe. I begged forgiveness from the mother, or the grandmother, or the aunt - at any rate, the guardian of this screaming, bleeding child. "Mei guanxi," she said. "It's not your fault."
Contrary to what we think in the West, the Chinese baby is not lonely. Don't get me wrong: the Young Emperor is alive and well. He is 29, single, living at home, and spends his Friday nights locked in his room, sorting his glass clown collection by height. But because Chinese families are huge - and because China is dense - Chinese children have an infinity of potential playmates, or at least far more than I had at their age, a time when I could either get myself beat up by my sister, or play with the neighbor kid's Super Nintendo while in the bathroom, his big sister was helping him administer his very first hit from a crack pipe.
I am scared of babies. They know everything. Like other domestic animals, they are impeccable judges of character. Chinese babies have been known to point and shake their heads when I've picked up smoking again, and will scream and pee their pants when they catch me listening to the Wham! jams I keep stashed on my MP3 player for a rainy day. "The child is father of the man," William Wordsworth once wrote, and I believe it. Babies are smarter than us. If you give a baby an IQ test, he'll probably eat it or, if he is especially precocious, spit up on it. But who among us full-grown humans could master Sichuanese in three years? Here in Nanchong, I have been thoroughly insulted by babies who weren't even potty trained, and found myself unable to furnish a response. But then, babies are capable of many impossible feats, such as doubling their height and girth in as little as a year, and pooping over half their body mass in a single potty session. So perhaps we shouldn't regard them as human, but as little Übermenschen.
Because I fear their judgment, and because I am frightened by their vulnerability, I have always tended to avoid babies. I have never once held a baby, for the same reason that I don't bring an antique vase with me on a bender. But that has changed here in China, where babies are some of my best friends. To begin with, many of them cannot yet talk, so they will not address me as laowai. Their eyes may balloon out of their heads at the sight of me - they know something is amiss - but they are not yet vocally racist. Plus, everyone in China seems to keep at least one baby in tow, especially the shopkeeps, so for guanxi purposes, it helps to maintain a healthy rapport with the local babies.
They, too, want to improve their Oral English, these babies, though they cannot yet speak Chinese. Last night, the baby at the shop across the street - a pudgy little guy I had never seen before - told me that he was one year old. "Won," he said, holding up a carrot stick of a finger. "Won." This astounded me. This baby, who was in the womb a year ago and did not exist nine months before that, has at least some primitive conception of time, which is more than you can say for most of Latin America. He knows he has existed for roughly one of the earth's revolutions around the sun. He knows how to express units of time using his fingers, and in two languages to boot. Still disbelieving, I asked him again in Chinese: "Ni ji sui le?" I asked. "How old are you?"
"Won," he said, holding up the finger. "Won."
So this one-year-old could answer a question posed to him by a seedy-looking foreigner speaking in tones that weren't anywhere near correct. And that 26-year-old foreigner, just a few months ago, wouldn't have been able to answer the same question, couldn't even have indicated the answer with his fingers because he wouldn't have understood the question in the first place.
Then, the baby flipped it on me.
"Ni ji sui le?" he asked. "How old are you?"
I thought about it.
"Won," I said, holding up one finger. "Won."
There are six babies living on the fourth floor of my apartment building, which doesn't make any sense, as there are only four apartments. There are rules here, remember. One of the apartments is mine, and I do not currently own any babies, biologically related or otherwise. My neighbors are well past childrearing age. It is unclear to which of the two remaining tenants the six babies belong to. They are free-range babies. The hallway is their rumpus room and there, the babies - all of them boys - love shooting each other, and me, with the same Made in China lazer guns that were such a big hit stateside during my own childhood. Last night, one of the babies pelted me in the stomach with a rubber ducky, and this morning I tripped over the sawed-off plastic shotgun that he'd left outside my door. The babies run this crib.
In China, even the babies are aware that you are a laowai. This morning, as I hustled to catch the last Toyotavan to school, I passed a baby who was so startled by my pale beardedness that he tripped over himself and faceplanted into the sidewalk. There was a brief lull in which the baby came to the realization that he was hurt, then he started bawling. I stopped to apologize and bowed deeply before the mother, who said Mei guanxi - No problem! - then hoisted the little shrieking bundle up into her arms and walked away. I once gave a toddler such a bad scare that he fell forward and cracked his forehead against a metal pipe. I begged forgiveness from the mother, or the grandmother, or the aunt - at any rate, the guardian of this screaming, bleeding child. "Mei guanxi," she said. "It's not your fault."
Contrary to what we think in the West, the Chinese baby is not lonely. Don't get me wrong: the Young Emperor is alive and well. He is 29, single, living at home, and spends his Friday nights locked in his room, sorting his glass clown collection by height. But because Chinese families are huge - and because China is dense - Chinese children have an infinity of potential playmates, or at least far more than I had at their age, a time when I could either get myself beat up by my sister, or play with the neighbor kid's Super Nintendo while in the bathroom, his big sister was helping him administer his very first hit from a crack pipe.
I am scared of babies. They know everything. Like other domestic animals, they are impeccable judges of character. Chinese babies have been known to point and shake their heads when I've picked up smoking again, and will scream and pee their pants when they catch me listening to the Wham! jams I keep stashed on my MP3 player for a rainy day. "The child is father of the man," William Wordsworth once wrote, and I believe it. Babies are smarter than us. If you give a baby an IQ test, he'll probably eat it or, if he is especially precocious, spit up on it. But who among us full-grown humans could master Sichuanese in three years? Here in Nanchong, I have been thoroughly insulted by babies who weren't even potty trained, and found myself unable to furnish a response. But then, babies are capable of many impossible feats, such as doubling their height and girth in as little as a year, and pooping over half their body mass in a single potty session. So perhaps we shouldn't regard them as human, but as little Übermenschen.
Because I fear their judgment, and because I am frightened by their vulnerability, I have always tended to avoid babies. I have never once held a baby, for the same reason that I don't bring an antique vase with me on a bender. But that has changed here in China, where babies are some of my best friends. To begin with, many of them cannot yet talk, so they will not address me as laowai. Their eyes may balloon out of their heads at the sight of me - they know something is amiss - but they are not yet vocally racist. Plus, everyone in China seems to keep at least one baby in tow, especially the shopkeeps, so for guanxi purposes, it helps to maintain a healthy rapport with the local babies.
They, too, want to improve their Oral English, these babies, though they cannot yet speak Chinese. Last night, the baby at the shop across the street - a pudgy little guy I had never seen before - told me that he was one year old. "Won," he said, holding up a carrot stick of a finger. "Won." This astounded me. This baby, who was in the womb a year ago and did not exist nine months before that, has at least some primitive conception of time, which is more than you can say for most of Latin America. He knows he has existed for roughly one of the earth's revolutions around the sun. He knows how to express units of time using his fingers, and in two languages to boot. Still disbelieving, I asked him again in Chinese: "Ni ji sui le?" I asked. "How old are you?"
"Won," he said, holding up the finger. "Won."
So this one-year-old could answer a question posed to him by a seedy-looking foreigner speaking in tones that weren't anywhere near correct. And that 26-year-old foreigner, just a few months ago, wouldn't have been able to answer the same question, couldn't even have indicated the answer with his fingers because he wouldn't have understood the question in the first place.
Then, the baby flipped it on me.
"Ni ji sui le?" he asked. "How old are you?"
I thought about it.
"Won," I said, holding up one finger. "Won."
Monday, November 09, 2009
Webster's Folly
A few weeks ago, the Italian got me thinking that Chinglish was the product of a lot of heady linguistic differences between the two languages it attempts to weld together. But now it seems to me that technical difficulties might have more to do with the problem, namely the cheap-o electronic dictionaries that my students (and no doubt the signsmiths) swear by.
Yesterday, my tutor was trying to explain why I should use one Chinese phrase in place of another.
"The second phrase is more, hmm," she said. "I don't know how to describe it."
She slipped her electronic dictionary from its Hello Kitty carrying case and punched in a few Chinese characters. Then she tilted the screen towards me. I almost spit up my chamomile tea.
Circumbendibus, said the dictionary. She pressed a button and a robot voice uttered the word for good measure: CIR-CUM-BEN-DI-BUS.
"What is that?" I laughed.
"Is it not correct?"
"I have no idea," I said. "I've never seen the word in my life."
What my tutor wanted to communicate was that one phrase "sounded nicer" than the other, and what we ended up with was circumbendibus. I wrote the word down in my notebook, but she caught me and crossed it out.
"No," she said. "I'm embarrassed."
So I wrote it on the palm of my hand when she wasn't looking and stole off after class to look it up in a dictionary, except none of the dictionaries I use seemed to have it.
Today, because I had fifteen minutes left over towards the end of class, I wrote up a list of the most common Chinglish mistakes, or at least the most common ones among my 350 students and the thousands of strangers I have taught pro bono on the streets of Nanchong.
1. humorous: Keith is so humorous.
How about: Keith is so funny.
2. clever: Keith is so clever.
How about: Keith is so smart.
3. you had better: You had better call me after work.
This is by far my least favorite Chinglishism. I am aware that it is Chinglish, and yet it never fails to rub me the wrong way. In the States, we tend to use "You had better" when we're making threats - "You'd better not look at my sister that way" - or scolding underlings, so even if a well-meaning friend of yours tells you that "you had better" do something innocuous, you still have to fight the impulse to smack them across the face.
How about: You should call me after work or You ought to call me after work - or better yet, You oughtta gimme a call after work.
4. play with me: If you're not busy after work, you should come play with me.
This is a direct translation from Chinese. In Mandarin, you ask people - even if they're crotchety 67-year-old pedants - whether they'd like to come play with you after work. The word "play," in this case, means "to hang out." But in English, the phrase has some unintended connotations: either that you are an oversized child, or that you are a very naughty girl, indeed.
How about: If you're not busy after work, we should hang out.
5. our China: Our China is developing rapidly.
You will often hear the Chinese refer to China as "our motherland," so perhaps this isn't so much a language issue as it is a difference in national identity. Never in a million years would I refer to the United States as "my America" - I sometimes live there, but it belongs to somebody else. Anyhow, when my students refer to "our China" in English, I can't help but imagine that they're boasting about a new IKEA dinette set.
6. campurs: I live on the old campurs, but I go to school at the new campurs.
Here I had to play around with phonetics to make my point. I proved to my students that they could produce the sounds "cam" and "piss." Then, I had them put the syllables together. "Campiss," they said. "Campus." Yes! I smacked my eraser on the podium and a plume of chalkdust clouded my ecstatic features. My students murmured the strange new word to themselves: campus, campus, campus. Then a lower, more urgent murmuring started at the back of the classroom and worked its way to the front: could it be that they had been learning the wrong pronunciations all their lives?
7. pander: The pander bear is China's national treasure.
This has baffled me since my arrival. My Chinese name is "Pan Da" and my students can pronounce that well enough. And yet their mascot is the "pander." Nobody likes a panderer. So I wrote "Pan" and "Duh" on the board. "Panda," my students chanted, "panda panda panda panda panda!" I had to cut them off like a conductor: my class was starting to sound like a Deerhoof song.
After the bell rang, a rush of students smothered me at the chalkboard, demanding to know whether what I had said was true: was campurs really campus, and pander panda, and all the rest?
It's true - I proclaimed - yea, verily, I tell thee, it is true.
My students covered the board in white, yellow, pink, and blue phonetic symbols.
"But Mr. Hu always told us to pronounce it like this."
"But in middle school we learned to say it like this."
"I've always pronounced it this way."
I was entering dicey territory. It's an uncomfortable spot to be in, a self-proclaimed literary hack like me with little to no technical training, righting the wrongs of unseen Mr. Lis and Mrs. Lus and Dr. Zhangs. But it's all true, I told them, "pander" is completely wrong and "panda" is entirely correct.
One of my students wrote the word "ship" on the board.
"How do you pronounce this?" she asked.
"Ship," I said.
"But I learned sheep!"
"Sheep is wrong. Ship is right."
She slipped her electronic dictionary from its Hello Kitty carrying case. She pressed a button.
"SHEEP," quod the robot, smugly.
I checked the screen and saw that the IPA symbols were indeed "ʃip," that the dictionary called for a ruminant mammal of the genus Ovis where a large oceangoing vessel should have been. So was this the problem, after all? Crummy low-end electronic dictionaries? I stood there wondering whether I should outlaw the blasted robots from class.
"So, Mr. Pander - Mr. Panda!" asked one student. "If my teachers are wrong and my dictionary is wrong, who can I trust?"
For lack of a more qualified authority, I shrugged and said, "Me."
But I suppose the electronic dictionary isn't such a bad invention, even if yours happens to have been programmed by a handful of drunks working the night shift at the Suzhou Guanchang Electron Stuff Limited Factory. An electronic dictionary will at least get you in the ballpark most of the time. I am reflecting, now, on the year I taught Hangman Studies in Korea. The day in question was probably a Friday, and almost certainly the last class of the day: my energy was spent and my students had seized control of the markers, the erasers, and the whiteboard. They were too hyper to play an orthodox game of hangman, so they scribbled a beard and an afro on the man at the gallows - it was me - and drew a giant vat of bubbling, steaming liquid under his feet.
"What is that?" I asked.
"Teacher, please wait," said the artist, and he slipped his electronic dictionary from its Hello Kitty carrying case. He punched in a few Korean characters and held the dictionary up for all to hear.
"SULFURIC ... ACID," said the robot voice.
"That's great," I laughed. "That's great."
I could no longer tell, at that point, whether my laughter was sincere.
The letters on the board were "F _ C K."
"Teacher, now you guess!"
"Let me think about this one," I said. "U?"
Yesterday, my tutor was trying to explain why I should use one Chinese phrase in place of another.
"The second phrase is more, hmm," she said. "I don't know how to describe it."
She slipped her electronic dictionary from its Hello Kitty carrying case and punched in a few Chinese characters. Then she tilted the screen towards me. I almost spit up my chamomile tea.
Circumbendibus, said the dictionary. She pressed a button and a robot voice uttered the word for good measure: CIR-CUM-BEN-DI-BUS.
"What is that?" I laughed.
"Is it not correct?"
"I have no idea," I said. "I've never seen the word in my life."
What my tutor wanted to communicate was that one phrase "sounded nicer" than the other, and what we ended up with was circumbendibus. I wrote the word down in my notebook, but she caught me and crossed it out.
"No," she said. "I'm embarrassed."
So I wrote it on the palm of my hand when she wasn't looking and stole off after class to look it up in a dictionary, except none of the dictionaries I use seemed to have it.
Today, because I had fifteen minutes left over towards the end of class, I wrote up a list of the most common Chinglish mistakes, or at least the most common ones among my 350 students and the thousands of strangers I have taught pro bono on the streets of Nanchong.
1. humorous: Keith is so humorous.
How about: Keith is so funny.
2. clever: Keith is so clever.
How about: Keith is so smart.
3. you had better: You had better call me after work.
This is by far my least favorite Chinglishism. I am aware that it is Chinglish, and yet it never fails to rub me the wrong way. In the States, we tend to use "You had better" when we're making threats - "You'd better not look at my sister that way" - or scolding underlings, so even if a well-meaning friend of yours tells you that "you had better" do something innocuous, you still have to fight the impulse to smack them across the face.
How about: You should call me after work or You ought to call me after work - or better yet, You oughtta gimme a call after work.
4. play with me: If you're not busy after work, you should come play with me.
This is a direct translation from Chinese. In Mandarin, you ask people - even if they're crotchety 67-year-old pedants - whether they'd like to come play with you after work. The word "play," in this case, means "to hang out." But in English, the phrase has some unintended connotations: either that you are an oversized child, or that you are a very naughty girl, indeed.
How about: If you're not busy after work, we should hang out.
5. our China: Our China is developing rapidly.
You will often hear the Chinese refer to China as "our motherland," so perhaps this isn't so much a language issue as it is a difference in national identity. Never in a million years would I refer to the United States as "my America" - I sometimes live there, but it belongs to somebody else. Anyhow, when my students refer to "our China" in English, I can't help but imagine that they're boasting about a new IKEA dinette set.
6. campurs: I live on the old campurs, but I go to school at the new campurs.
Here I had to play around with phonetics to make my point. I proved to my students that they could produce the sounds "cam" and "piss." Then, I had them put the syllables together. "Campiss," they said. "Campus." Yes! I smacked my eraser on the podium and a plume of chalkdust clouded my ecstatic features. My students murmured the strange new word to themselves: campus, campus, campus. Then a lower, more urgent murmuring started at the back of the classroom and worked its way to the front: could it be that they had been learning the wrong pronunciations all their lives?
7. pander: The pander bear is China's national treasure.
This has baffled me since my arrival. My Chinese name is "Pan Da" and my students can pronounce that well enough. And yet their mascot is the "pander." Nobody likes a panderer. So I wrote "Pan" and "Duh" on the board. "Panda," my students chanted, "panda panda panda panda panda!" I had to cut them off like a conductor: my class was starting to sound like a Deerhoof song.
After the bell rang, a rush of students smothered me at the chalkboard, demanding to know whether what I had said was true: was campurs really campus, and pander panda, and all the rest?
It's true - I proclaimed - yea, verily, I tell thee, it is true.
My students covered the board in white, yellow, pink, and blue phonetic symbols.
"But Mr. Hu always told us to pronounce it like this."
"But in middle school we learned to say it like this."
"I've always pronounced it this way."
I was entering dicey territory. It's an uncomfortable spot to be in, a self-proclaimed literary hack like me with little to no technical training, righting the wrongs of unseen Mr. Lis and Mrs. Lus and Dr. Zhangs. But it's all true, I told them, "pander" is completely wrong and "panda" is entirely correct.
One of my students wrote the word "ship" on the board.
"How do you pronounce this?" she asked.
"Ship," I said.
"But I learned sheep!"
"Sheep is wrong. Ship is right."
She slipped her electronic dictionary from its Hello Kitty carrying case. She pressed a button.
"SHEEP," quod the robot, smugly.
I checked the screen and saw that the IPA symbols were indeed "ʃip," that the dictionary called for a ruminant mammal of the genus Ovis where a large oceangoing vessel should have been. So was this the problem, after all? Crummy low-end electronic dictionaries? I stood there wondering whether I should outlaw the blasted robots from class.
"So, Mr. Pander - Mr. Panda!" asked one student. "If my teachers are wrong and my dictionary is wrong, who can I trust?"
For lack of a more qualified authority, I shrugged and said, "Me."
But I suppose the electronic dictionary isn't such a bad invention, even if yours happens to have been programmed by a handful of drunks working the night shift at the Suzhou Guanchang Electron Stuff Limited Factory. An electronic dictionary will at least get you in the ballpark most of the time. I am reflecting, now, on the year I taught Hangman Studies in Korea. The day in question was probably a Friday, and almost certainly the last class of the day: my energy was spent and my students had seized control of the markers, the erasers, and the whiteboard. They were too hyper to play an orthodox game of hangman, so they scribbled a beard and an afro on the man at the gallows - it was me - and drew a giant vat of bubbling, steaming liquid under his feet.
"What is that?" I asked.
"Teacher, please wait," said the artist, and he slipped his electronic dictionary from its Hello Kitty carrying case. He punched in a few Korean characters and held the dictionary up for all to hear.
"SULFURIC ... ACID," said the robot voice.
"That's great," I laughed. "That's great."
I could no longer tell, at that point, whether my laughter was sincere.
The letters on the board were "F _ C K."
"Teacher, now you guess!"
"Let me think about this one," I said. "U?"
Sunday, November 08, 2009
The White Whale
On Saturday morning, I heaved myself out of bed, stuffed my books in a backpack, and walked over to the library. I downed a coffee on the way and had to pee something fierce by the time I got there, so I ducked into a bathroom, couldn't find any urinals, and made use of one of the squatters. On my way out, a girl stopped dead in her tracks and just about dropped her teacup at my feet. I turned and took an uncomfortably long time reading the sign above my head: "Woman ... bath ... room."
Getting into the teachers' reading room took some doing.
"You're a teacher?"
"Yes," I said, uneasily.
"Do you have an I.D. card?"
"No," I said, decisively.
"What th - why don't you have an I.D. card?"
"I'm new here."
The library troll granted me passage, but I had to register all of the books I was bringing in with me. My list looked like this:
1. The Norton Anthology of American Literature
2. Oxford English-Chinese Chinese-English Minidictionary
3. Peace Corps Language Manual - Mandarin
4. Las Muertas - Jorge Ibargüengoitia
5. Larousse Pocket Diccionario
I asked if I had to sign in my water bottle of Nescafe. The clerk shook her head, no.
And I remained in the library for six hours, writing Chapter One of Laowai de Riji: Diary of a Foreigner - my first stab at composing anything in Chinese more involved than "My name is Pan Da. I am an American," etc.
I told my tutor on the first day of class that I didn't want to study Chinese characters. I am a man who has yet to master the 26 letters of the English alphabet. At the time I judged that learning 10,000 Chinese pictographs was beyond my ability, and that we should focus on chit-chat. My tutor - in her Chinese way - showed up the following day with a pageful of symbols and asked me to copy them. So, coffee hands a-trembling, I did. We started with mama and papa, auntie and uncle, but even those four characters seemed impossible to mimic. After five minutes of concentrated effort, I would find that "papa" had somehow flipped itself mirrorwise on the page, which would send my tutor into a giggling fit.
But a month later, I find myself writing short essays in a script that was Greek - nay, Chinese - to me a month ago. I'm not bragging, here. I am indebted to my tutor, who knew better than I what a laowai can accomplish when he's paying 900 kuai a month.
After my day in the library, I went home and watched an overdubbed version of The Matrix. I'm not such a big fan of the film, overdubbed or otherwise, but I sat there in the dark with my notebook, scribbling down any and all words I recognized but didn't know. And in so doing, I acquired a pretty decent working vocabulary in the field that interests me most: bullshit philosophy. I then watched ten minutes of a BBC documentary about the Space Race before I realized it was overdubbed in Cantonese, which is probably why I couldn't understand a word of it.
I returned to the library this morning and studied for four hours. Although there is much to be said for whooping it up with the locals and learning 600 words for the male anatomy, mastering a language is a profoundly unsexy process, one that involves rote memorizing a lot of phrases that you have little use for and absolutely no interest in knowing: to invest in the stock market, to wait in line, and so on. I remember such-and-such foreign friend in such-and-such foreign country explaining to me why he'd never bothered to learn such-and-such foreign language. It's easy, he said, just use gestures. If you want a plunger, make a plunging gesture. If it's toilet paper you need, make an ass-wiping gesture. It seemed like a very apelike way to live, but I suppose it is one means of survival. That said, I am committed to avoiding pantomime at all costs and, if I am able, I would like one day to communicate my nest of weird western ideas to the Chinese in their own language.
This evening, I showed up early to class and played ping-pong with the wall until my tutor arrived and sat down to dissect my first journal entry. There were the expected syntax errors. But what surprised me was that she wasn't so much critiquing my grammar as much as she was trying to correct my writing style.
"Your writing is very," she paused and made a bouncy gesture with her hands. Desultory? Scatterbrained? I understood. "I don't see what the third and fourth sentences have to do with the first two sentences."
My first paragraph went as follows:
"In China, there are good days and bad days. On a good day, I am invisible, nobody seems to notice me. My students are excited to practice their English. I remember all of my new Chinese words and my tutor (Wendy) is happy with me. On a bad day ... "
She understood the sentences individually, but couldn't see why they were linked together into a paragraph. I tried to explain myself: good days consist of invisibility, good students, good Mandarin classes. The next paragraph is about bad days, which consist of ... but she didn't follow.
"You are talking about people not noticing you, and then you're suddenly talking about your English classes."
At that point, I had to laugh out loud. The beast had come out into the open. The problem was not my grammar or even my writing, but the way I organized my thoughts: in order to write Chinese, I am going to have to learn to think like the Chinese. Events which seem sequential and orderly to me make no sense whatsoever to my tutor. And so it's back to the drawing board for me, back to the library with my harpoon and nautical maps and a bottle of instant grog to keep me company on my tireless pursuit of the White Whale: avast! there she blows! -- there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Mandarin!
Getting into the teachers' reading room took some doing.
"You're a teacher?"
"Yes," I said, uneasily.
"Do you have an I.D. card?"
"No," I said, decisively.
"What th - why don't you have an I.D. card?"
"I'm new here."
The library troll granted me passage, but I had to register all of the books I was bringing in with me. My list looked like this:
1. The Norton Anthology of American Literature
2. Oxford English-Chinese Chinese-English Minidictionary
3. Peace Corps Language Manual - Mandarin
4. Las Muertas - Jorge Ibargüengoitia
5. Larousse Pocket Diccionario
I asked if I had to sign in my water bottle of Nescafe. The clerk shook her head, no.
And I remained in the library for six hours, writing Chapter One of Laowai de Riji: Diary of a Foreigner - my first stab at composing anything in Chinese more involved than "My name is Pan Da. I am an American," etc.
I told my tutor on the first day of class that I didn't want to study Chinese characters. I am a man who has yet to master the 26 letters of the English alphabet. At the time I judged that learning 10,000 Chinese pictographs was beyond my ability, and that we should focus on chit-chat. My tutor - in her Chinese way - showed up the following day with a pageful of symbols and asked me to copy them. So, coffee hands a-trembling, I did. We started with mama and papa, auntie and uncle, but even those four characters seemed impossible to mimic. After five minutes of concentrated effort, I would find that "papa" had somehow flipped itself mirrorwise on the page, which would send my tutor into a giggling fit.
But a month later, I find myself writing short essays in a script that was Greek - nay, Chinese - to me a month ago. I'm not bragging, here. I am indebted to my tutor, who knew better than I what a laowai can accomplish when he's paying 900 kuai a month.
After my day in the library, I went home and watched an overdubbed version of The Matrix. I'm not such a big fan of the film, overdubbed or otherwise, but I sat there in the dark with my notebook, scribbling down any and all words I recognized but didn't know. And in so doing, I acquired a pretty decent working vocabulary in the field that interests me most: bullshit philosophy. I then watched ten minutes of a BBC documentary about the Space Race before I realized it was overdubbed in Cantonese, which is probably why I couldn't understand a word of it.
I returned to the library this morning and studied for four hours. Although there is much to be said for whooping it up with the locals and learning 600 words for the male anatomy, mastering a language is a profoundly unsexy process, one that involves rote memorizing a lot of phrases that you have little use for and absolutely no interest in knowing: to invest in the stock market, to wait in line, and so on. I remember such-and-such foreign friend in such-and-such foreign country explaining to me why he'd never bothered to learn such-and-such foreign language. It's easy, he said, just use gestures. If you want a plunger, make a plunging gesture. If it's toilet paper you need, make an ass-wiping gesture. It seemed like a very apelike way to live, but I suppose it is one means of survival. That said, I am committed to avoiding pantomime at all costs and, if I am able, I would like one day to communicate my nest of weird western ideas to the Chinese in their own language.
This evening, I showed up early to class and played ping-pong with the wall until my tutor arrived and sat down to dissect my first journal entry. There were the expected syntax errors. But what surprised me was that she wasn't so much critiquing my grammar as much as she was trying to correct my writing style.
"Your writing is very," she paused and made a bouncy gesture with her hands. Desultory? Scatterbrained? I understood. "I don't see what the third and fourth sentences have to do with the first two sentences."
My first paragraph went as follows:
"In China, there are good days and bad days. On a good day, I am invisible, nobody seems to notice me. My students are excited to practice their English. I remember all of my new Chinese words and my tutor (Wendy) is happy with me. On a bad day ... "
She understood the sentences individually, but couldn't see why they were linked together into a paragraph. I tried to explain myself: good days consist of invisibility, good students, good Mandarin classes. The next paragraph is about bad days, which consist of ... but she didn't follow.
"You are talking about people not noticing you, and then you're suddenly talking about your English classes."
At that point, I had to laugh out loud. The beast had come out into the open. The problem was not my grammar or even my writing, but the way I organized my thoughts: in order to write Chinese, I am going to have to learn to think like the Chinese. Events which seem sequential and orderly to me make no sense whatsoever to my tutor. And so it's back to the drawing board for me, back to the library with my harpoon and nautical maps and a bottle of instant grog to keep me company on my tireless pursuit of the White Whale: avast! there she blows! -- there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Mandarin!
Thursday, November 05, 2009
The Haystacks: Regurgitated
The year was 1999. Grindcore, rap-rock, and other confusing musical crossbreeds ruled the adolescent hearts and minds of suburban Nebraska. Ska was back on life support, but the mustard plug was about to be pulled for good. Commercially viable independent rock remained a twinkle in Conor Oberst's dilated pupils. Nerd rock pioneers like Ben Folds Five and Cake had bravely blazed a trail for upper-middle-class balladeers, but they and their ilk were too self-absorbed and sexually frustrated to coalesce into anything like a popular movement. And so, listless and torpid in the post-coitus of Kurt Cobain and the First Gulf War, the township of Bellevue, Nebraska lay snoozing upon a musical faultline.
That summer, 16-year-old Keith Petit inherited a used drum set from a used car salesman, an acquisition his parents would rue for decades to come. Petit converted his minimum wage at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo into a TASCAM PortaStudio 424 mixer. With the addition of a $15 Yamaha PortaSound keyboard, all the trappings of a PortaBand were assembled in Petit's basement. But as yet he had no friends and thus, no band.
Petit's early recordings featured himself and whichever family pets were close at hand. They (the recordings) were not deliberately avant-garde, but sounded a bit like "Revolution 9" played backwards at 16 RPM. In his youth, Petit explored that sparse musical frontier between John Cage and The Bloodhound Gang. He relied heavily on his PortaSound's preprogrammed samba beat. His favorite (perhaps only) chord was A-Minor. Rock music was still intimidating to him and, afraid his parents might mistake him for one of the fauxhawked nogoodniks who smoked cloves out in front of Taco John's, he maintained a strict silence in the studio, always recording with a direct line-in connection and refusing to sing on any of his tracks unless the folks were out of town for an extended period: say, three weeks.
Meanwhile, as a marching band jock, Petit's circle of underconfident, acne-pickled friends was expanding. Before long, he had made four or five acquaintances who wouldn't beat his ass and were semi-proficient with unpopular brass instruments. Petit used his study hall time to delve into his high school library's expansive home studio recording section, where he found a slim, dust-jacketed volume entitled Start Your Own Band, which (along with instructions for building stage lights out of old Sanka cans and colored cellophane) chronicled the rise (but not the fall) of a fictitious 1970's jock-rock band named The Haystacks. It was The Haystacks whose final chapters Petit longed to write: the chapters where the band succumbs to creative differences and amphetamine addiction.
Not since The Beatles has the world seen a more agoraphobic studio band. The Haystacks were terminally afraid of performing, and indeed of appearing, in public, so they found refuge in Petit's basement on Hillcrest Avenue. There, the band wrote and recorded songs through a process they called stream-of-unconsciousness songsmithery. Lyrics were scrawled on the back of a Burger King receipt in the seconds before each session. A handful of chords were chosen, usually at random. Rather than rehearsing songs prior to recording, they simply hit the RECORD button and played so loudly and discordantly that tufts of asbestos rained down from the ceiling.
A glance at their early efforts reveals a stripped-down, minimalist sound when compared to their later, lusher, lewder work. The original Haystacks were a mere skeleton crew: Kevin Stinn on keyboards and screaming, Petit on drums, Jon Miller on guitar, and Jeff Hines on trombone, plastic wind tubes, and IBC Root Beer bottles. It was their very first session which yielded their least abrasive song: a spoken-word gem entitled "Cucumber."
"It's all there in the music," keyboardist/screamer Kevin Stinn says of Cucumber, taking a long drag from something that looks like a piccolo. "My mom used to teach at a Catholic school. I liked to play soccer with the fifth graders. I ate a lot of Subway sandwiches in those days. It's all there in the music. I'm not gonna explain it away."
Because the core members of The Haystacks were too socially inept to turn musicians away, the band's membership quickly ballooned to Funkadelic proportions. Andy Wenstrand contributed alto saxophone on a few neo-Basie numbers, while MENSA member "Toad" Taylor sat in on his homemade washbucket bass. A Franciscan monk known only as "Stu" hovered in the studio periphery and is regarded by fans as the seventeenth member of the band; he can be heard snarfing down York Peppermint Patties on a number of tracks. The Haystacks enlisted producer Phil Spector to add string ensembles to songs that didn't deserve them. Gradually, the Petit basement began to fill up with neighborhood gawkers and noisemakers - who were also included in the band - such that Phil Spector had to elbow and stab his way to the 424 to hit the STOP button.
Just as The Haystacks were starting to come together as a bandlike organism, Petit had his first experience with the then-unregulated psychedelic Miller Lite. Excerpts from his journal describe the intense revulsion he felt upon his first sip, how he dumped the rest of the can out in the sink and spent the next several days struggling through ego death and rebirth. He sank into seclusion and, as Phil Spector guarded the Petit studio day and night with a 700-year-old enchanted mace, collaboration was impossible and The Haystacks were suddenly reduced from a 37-man supergroup to a one-man chamber ensemble.
During this dark period, Petit's communiqués with the outside world were limited to a couple of EPs featuring African chants ("We Will Stay," "Dream Team"), sea shanties ("I Like Boats!"), and heavily accented Hindi raps ("Ball Song"). But it was with the surprisingly peppy Chicken Bucket single that Petit and The Haystacks finally struck gold.
"Mom and dad were at one of my sister's volleyball tournaments in Gretna or some shit," Petit says. "I went barefoot to the basement to cut a track before they got home. I got kitty litter in my toes. Between my toes, I mean. And I got to thinking about how bands should clump together, instead of allowing themselves to fall apart."
Chicken Bucket was a smash hit, peaking at #23,431 on the Unclassifiable charts at the now-defunct MP3.com. Built upon two not-quite-chords and the melody from "Devil's Haircut," the song was described by a member of the Bellevue West tuba section as "almost listenable." The Chicken Bucket EP also featured "Electric Football," a bareboned ballad about electric football and the loss of innocence, and was topped off with "Mean Ham Sandwich," a Nashville country jamboree featuring Jeff Hines on vocals, Petit on cornet, and Jon Miller on guitar: a harbinger of the more disastrous collaborations that loomed on the horizon.
The tripartite lust for fame, money, and sex with multiple anonymous partners finally wooed Petit from his psychedelic funk. The Haystacks reunited and returned to the basement for what would prove to be their most fecund studio session, recording some sixteen tracks in just over 34 minutes. Here we find them at their most intimate - the shuddering, undersexed horns on "Kopper Kettle" - and their most polemical - the rabidly McCarthyist "Communist Manifesto." Afro-Caribbean rhythms (or at least stereotypes) remained a key component of their sound on tracks like "Congo," whose lyrics evoke (and sometimes induce) a bad case of diarrhea, and "King Ridge Crabs," with Stinn's somewhat ingenuous Rastafarian lilt. They dabbled in hip-hop, inviting guest rapper RAJIV into the studio for a one-off freestyle that turned into a seven-minute exercise in scatology at which Henry Miller himself would've blushed. But the masses were growing restless. Bellevue ached for a full-length LP and a citywide tour. For far too long, The Haystacks had teased their fan base with sporadic EP releases and unannounced (and unattended) rooftop concerts. Over a round of Barq's Root Beers and three rounds of Putt-Putt Golf, producer Phil Spector unveiled his vision for The Haystacks' future: they would perform in the 2001 Bellevue Battle of the Bands.
There was a six-song minimum to enter the competition but, poring over their repertoire, The Haystacks failed to see how they could play fewer than 36 songs. Guided by Phil Spector's impeccable taste, they trimmed down their canon, disposed of several unimportant or unattractive members, and eventually agreed upon a seven-man lineup and a one-song performance.
What follow are the notes from an unpublished review by Clive Liverpool of NME Magazine, chronicling The Haystacks' first and only live concert:
The Venaculas - a four-piece rap-rock outfit featuring three teenage brothers on guitars and their 56-year-old father on drums - took home the sweepstakes that night. The Haystacks lingered backstage, hoping to cop a stray beer or a female groupie from one of the actual bands, to no avail. Nobody invited them to the afterparty, so The Haystacks went out to eat - probably at the Sonic Burger on Cornhusker - and citing a mutual lack of confidence, agreed never to do anything creative ever again.
But The Haystacks' first and only public performance had stirred some interest among Omaha's indie scenesters - none of them female - and so it was that Phil Spector, always looking to make a quick buck off the lonely and disenfranchised, released the definitive 23 Reasons to Hate Us, complete with a string ensemble on all 23 tracks. It hit the charts like a dragonfly splattering against a windshield. The public unanimously agreed: they did not need 23 more reasons to hate The Haystacks. The album clung to the bottom of the US Avant-Garde Top 40 like a fat kid at the chin-up bar before it was taken out by a two-disc collaboration between Sinead O'Connor and the lead singer of Chumbawamba.
The Haystacks parted ways. Keith Petit spent the next seven years untangling the mess of cables in his basement and repackaging all of his instruments and mixers. He gathered up the tapes that covered his bedroom floor, shut them in his bedroom closet, and Masterlocked the door. It is said that only Phil Spector knows the combination. And so, like the Lost Ark, the lost recordings of The Haystacks have been hidden away for the salvation of mankind. But Phil Spector still holds the key to unleash the specters of that unholy sound, and all of us here at AMG shudder to imagine the Nazi face-melting that will certainly follow the release of the twelve-disc Haystacks: Regurgitated box set, due out in June of 2010.
- Mike Godol, AMG Music
The Haystacks:
Brendan Hartigan - tuba
Jeff Hines - trombone, plastic wind tube, IBC Root Beer bottle
Justin Kassube - bass, vocals
Jon Miller - guitar, bass, keyboards, vocals
Keith Petit - drums, guitar, bass, trombone, trumpet, vocals
Kevin Stinn - trombone, euphonium, bass, keyboards, vocals
RAJIV - vocals
Stu - ambiance
Andrew "Toad" Taylor - washboard bass, drums
Andy Wenstrand - saxophone
That summer, 16-year-old Keith Petit inherited a used drum set from a used car salesman, an acquisition his parents would rue for decades to come. Petit converted his minimum wage at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo into a TASCAM PortaStudio 424 mixer. With the addition of a $15 Yamaha PortaSound keyboard, all the trappings of a PortaBand were assembled in Petit's basement. But as yet he had no friends and thus, no band.
Petit's early recordings featured himself and whichever family pets were close at hand. They (the recordings) were not deliberately avant-garde, but sounded a bit like "Revolution 9" played backwards at 16 RPM. In his youth, Petit explored that sparse musical frontier between John Cage and The Bloodhound Gang. He relied heavily on his PortaSound's preprogrammed samba beat. His favorite (perhaps only) chord was A-Minor. Rock music was still intimidating to him and, afraid his parents might mistake him for one of the fauxhawked nogoodniks who smoked cloves out in front of Taco John's, he maintained a strict silence in the studio, always recording with a direct line-in connection and refusing to sing on any of his tracks unless the folks were out of town for an extended period: say, three weeks.
Meanwhile, as a marching band jock, Petit's circle of underconfident, acne-pickled friends was expanding. Before long, he had made four or five acquaintances who wouldn't beat his ass and were semi-proficient with unpopular brass instruments. Petit used his study hall time to delve into his high school library's expansive home studio recording section, where he found a slim, dust-jacketed volume entitled Start Your Own Band, which (along with instructions for building stage lights out of old Sanka cans and colored cellophane) chronicled the rise (but not the fall) of a fictitious 1970's jock-rock band named The Haystacks. It was The Haystacks whose final chapters Petit longed to write: the chapters where the band succumbs to creative differences and amphetamine addiction.
Not since The Beatles has the world seen a more agoraphobic studio band. The Haystacks were terminally afraid of performing, and indeed of appearing, in public, so they found refuge in Petit's basement on Hillcrest Avenue. There, the band wrote and recorded songs through a process they called stream-of-unconsciousness songsmithery. Lyrics were scrawled on the back of a Burger King receipt in the seconds before each session. A handful of chords were chosen, usually at random. Rather than rehearsing songs prior to recording, they simply hit the RECORD button and played so loudly and discordantly that tufts of asbestos rained down from the ceiling.
A glance at their early efforts reveals a stripped-down, minimalist sound when compared to their later, lusher, lewder work. The original Haystacks were a mere skeleton crew: Kevin Stinn on keyboards and screaming, Petit on drums, Jon Miller on guitar, and Jeff Hines on trombone, plastic wind tubes, and IBC Root Beer bottles. It was their very first session which yielded their least abrasive song: a spoken-word gem entitled "Cucumber."
"It's all there in the music," keyboardist/screamer Kevin Stinn says of Cucumber, taking a long drag from something that looks like a piccolo. "My mom used to teach at a Catholic school. I liked to play soccer with the fifth graders. I ate a lot of Subway sandwiches in those days. It's all there in the music. I'm not gonna explain it away."
Because the core members of The Haystacks were too socially inept to turn musicians away, the band's membership quickly ballooned to Funkadelic proportions. Andy Wenstrand contributed alto saxophone on a few neo-Basie numbers, while MENSA member "Toad" Taylor sat in on his homemade washbucket bass. A Franciscan monk known only as "Stu" hovered in the studio periphery and is regarded by fans as the seventeenth member of the band; he can be heard snarfing down York Peppermint Patties on a number of tracks. The Haystacks enlisted producer Phil Spector to add string ensembles to songs that didn't deserve them. Gradually, the Petit basement began to fill up with neighborhood gawkers and noisemakers - who were also included in the band - such that Phil Spector had to elbow and stab his way to the 424 to hit the STOP button.
Just as The Haystacks were starting to come together as a bandlike organism, Petit had his first experience with the then-unregulated psychedelic Miller Lite. Excerpts from his journal describe the intense revulsion he felt upon his first sip, how he dumped the rest of the can out in the sink and spent the next several days struggling through ego death and rebirth. He sank into seclusion and, as Phil Spector guarded the Petit studio day and night with a 700-year-old enchanted mace, collaboration was impossible and The Haystacks were suddenly reduced from a 37-man supergroup to a one-man chamber ensemble.
During this dark period, Petit's communiqués with the outside world were limited to a couple of EPs featuring African chants ("We Will Stay," "Dream Team"), sea shanties ("I Like Boats!"), and heavily accented Hindi raps ("Ball Song"). But it was with the surprisingly peppy Chicken Bucket single that Petit and The Haystacks finally struck gold.
"Mom and dad were at one of my sister's volleyball tournaments in Gretna or some shit," Petit says. "I went barefoot to the basement to cut a track before they got home. I got kitty litter in my toes. Between my toes, I mean. And I got to thinking about how bands should clump together, instead of allowing themselves to fall apart."
Chicken Bucket was a smash hit, peaking at #23,431 on the Unclassifiable charts at the now-defunct MP3.com. Built upon two not-quite-chords and the melody from "Devil's Haircut," the song was described by a member of the Bellevue West tuba section as "almost listenable." The Chicken Bucket EP also featured "Electric Football," a bareboned ballad about electric football and the loss of innocence, and was topped off with "Mean Ham Sandwich," a Nashville country jamboree featuring Jeff Hines on vocals, Petit on cornet, and Jon Miller on guitar: a harbinger of the more disastrous collaborations that loomed on the horizon.
The tripartite lust for fame, money, and sex with multiple anonymous partners finally wooed Petit from his psychedelic funk. The Haystacks reunited and returned to the basement for what would prove to be their most fecund studio session, recording some sixteen tracks in just over 34 minutes. Here we find them at their most intimate - the shuddering, undersexed horns on "Kopper Kettle" - and their most polemical - the rabidly McCarthyist "Communist Manifesto." Afro-Caribbean rhythms (or at least stereotypes) remained a key component of their sound on tracks like "Congo," whose lyrics evoke (and sometimes induce) a bad case of diarrhea, and "King Ridge Crabs," with Stinn's somewhat ingenuous Rastafarian lilt. They dabbled in hip-hop, inviting guest rapper RAJIV into the studio for a one-off freestyle that turned into a seven-minute exercise in scatology at which Henry Miller himself would've blushed. But the masses were growing restless. Bellevue ached for a full-length LP and a citywide tour. For far too long, The Haystacks had teased their fan base with sporadic EP releases and unannounced (and unattended) rooftop concerts. Over a round of Barq's Root Beers and three rounds of Putt-Putt Golf, producer Phil Spector unveiled his vision for The Haystacks' future: they would perform in the 2001 Bellevue Battle of the Bands.
There was a six-song minimum to enter the competition but, poring over their repertoire, The Haystacks failed to see how they could play fewer than 36 songs. Guided by Phil Spector's impeccable taste, they trimmed down their canon, disposed of several unimportant or unattractive members, and eventually agreed upon a seven-man lineup and a one-song performance.
What follow are the notes from an unpublished review by Clive Liverpool of NME Magazine, chronicling The Haystacks' first and only live concert:
Curtain rises grudgingly. Enter Haystacks.
Band seems to consist of a trombone, a tuba, a drummer, a guitar, a bass, a dancer, and a boy in a rainbow afro who serves some unspecified purpose. Oh, I see. He is the lead singer. Bassist is wearing a wifebeater with the word "GOD" scrawled across the front in blue perminent [sic] marker. The guitarist and the drummer are wearing matching blue uniforms and earthtone nametags - perhaps they just got off work. All are wearing KFC chicken buckets on their heads.
Drummer counts off, music begins. Guitar is barely audible - is it plugged in? Bass is flatulant [sic]. Unbearable groaning from the low brass section. Lead singer roaming the stage uneasily, does not know what to do during the intro, does not feel comfortable in the wig. Uproar in first few rows of the crowd: fans or hecklers? Are those batteries they're throwing?
Singer finally takes the mic and holds it at armslength like an unappetizing vegetable, sings the following couplet: I'm going crazy today/got a bat in my attic. Better get that looked at, mate. Melody sounds familiar, perhaps lifted from early Butthole Surfers? Chorus arrives somehow. Singer likes wearing chicken buckets on his head. So, evidently, does the rest of the band. And the gimmick comes out into the open: this is their hit single. Doesn't a band normally save the single for the end? Is this the end?
Trombone solo. Trombonist is furious. Look at him go. Removes KFC bucket from head and uses it as a plunger mute, with deleterious effect. Singer once again roams the stage, hides his face by turning away from the crowd and staring into the guitarist's amplifier, which is no larger, no more powerful than a shoebox. Solo winds down and for a glorious instant, the music stops. Is it over? Someone claps ... No. It continues.
This is the last chorus, one hopes. The low brass are blurting with heightened ferocity. Yes, the end is nigh. The bassist's wifebeater is dripping with sweat, blue ink is running down his chest. The guitarist's chicken bucket has fallen onto the stage, grease stains are visible on the inside, how utterly grotesque. The music stops. Again, there is impatient clapping. The curtain inches downward, sagging towards the stage like a lazy eyelid. An inept Phil Collinsesque drum solo and the dirge picks up again, this time at half-tempo. Wailing and gnashing of teeth. Someone is soloing but it is not clear who. Perhaps they are all soloing at this point.
Ritardando. The song is within measurable distance of its end. The band builds up to a chord that will not resolve to any other chord known to man. Good thing they don't try. After a murderous fermata, there is silence followed by a relieved wave of applause. The band remains stone still. Now they all look as lost as the lead singer, as though they've just woken from hypnosis to find that they have been masturbating in public. Clearly audible in the lull, a stage hand asks, "Is that your only song?" The band exchange glances. That was their only song. "Judas!" shouts an English folk revivalist from the upper deck. The drummer seizes an overhead mic and slurs, "I don't believe you. You're a liar!" Then he cries out, "'B-Flat Blues,' play it fucking loud!" and the band launches into one of those high school jazz band warm-ups, although there is some disagreement in the rhythm section as to which chords are B-Flat and which are not. The lights dim. The curtain drops suddenly, knocking both chicken bucket and afro wig from the singer's head. He appears to lose consciousness. Drummer flings drum sticks and chicken bucket into the crowd, either in frustration or gratitude. Lights go out, all is dark, only the fire exit signs remain visible. xDiztrezzDx is up next.
The Venaculas - a four-piece rap-rock outfit featuring three teenage brothers on guitars and their 56-year-old father on drums - took home the sweepstakes that night. The Haystacks lingered backstage, hoping to cop a stray beer or a female groupie from one of the actual bands, to no avail. Nobody invited them to the afterparty, so The Haystacks went out to eat - probably at the Sonic Burger on Cornhusker - and citing a mutual lack of confidence, agreed never to do anything creative ever again.
But The Haystacks' first and only public performance had stirred some interest among Omaha's indie scenesters - none of them female - and so it was that Phil Spector, always looking to make a quick buck off the lonely and disenfranchised, released the definitive 23 Reasons to Hate Us, complete with a string ensemble on all 23 tracks. It hit the charts like a dragonfly splattering against a windshield. The public unanimously agreed: they did not need 23 more reasons to hate The Haystacks. The album clung to the bottom of the US Avant-Garde Top 40 like a fat kid at the chin-up bar before it was taken out by a two-disc collaboration between Sinead O'Connor and the lead singer of Chumbawamba.
The Haystacks parted ways. Keith Petit spent the next seven years untangling the mess of cables in his basement and repackaging all of his instruments and mixers. He gathered up the tapes that covered his bedroom floor, shut them in his bedroom closet, and Masterlocked the door. It is said that only Phil Spector knows the combination. And so, like the Lost Ark, the lost recordings of The Haystacks have been hidden away for the salvation of mankind. But Phil Spector still holds the key to unleash the specters of that unholy sound, and all of us here at AMG shudder to imagine the Nazi face-melting that will certainly follow the release of the twelve-disc Haystacks: Regurgitated box set, due out in June of 2010.
- Mike Godol, AMG Music
The Haystacks:
Brendan Hartigan - tuba
Jeff Hines - trombone, plastic wind tube, IBC Root Beer bottle
Justin Kassube - bass, vocals
Jon Miller - guitar, bass, keyboards, vocals
Keith Petit - drums, guitar, bass, trombone, trumpet, vocals
Kevin Stinn - trombone, euphonium, bass, keyboards, vocals
RAJIV - vocals
Stu - ambiance
Andrew "Toad" Taylor - washboard bass, drums
Andy Wenstrand - saxophone
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
The Thin White Duke was Here
I was the first person in line for the Beck show at Columbiahalle. Other German hipsters may boast, may have the lie tattooed across their biceps. But it was I, standing on the kerb, ticket in hand, who was uncool enough to show up two hours before the bouncers did. It had been years since I'd attended a concert where you actually had to buy tickets beforehand, so I'd grown accustomed to waltzing through the doors in an altered state midway through the third opener, sidling up with whomever I knew at the bar and slugging my way to the front after the lights had dimmed. But this was Beck and this was Berlin: I erred on the anal side and showed up three hours before the doors opened. I had to ask a wino whether I was at the right place. Then it started to rain, so I ducked into a nearby pub whose clientele reminded me of American war vets, though they were probably just retired Krautrock scenesters. I sat and ate a pickle and langenscheidted my way through Die Andere Seite and waited for the rain to stop.
When I returned to Columbiahalle, I was no longer the first person in line. There was a German girl with Beck pins covering both lapels of her frockcoat and a Spaniard wearing the Beck t-shirt that I had left at home.
"So, ehh, you guys like Beck much?" I asked.
As they talked about Him, their eyes glazed over in a way that mine did not. But like all music buffs, I nurtured the belief that they didn't appreciate Beck the way I did, and like the rest, I was probably right about that.
The bouncer let us in and we pressed as far forward as the guardrails allowed. We sent the Spaniard out for drinks and we sat injun-style on the floor and waited.
There may have been an opening act, but I have no memory of it. I remember Beck walking out on stage - already some Germans were chanting "Loser" - and I was surprised to see him sporting his Loser-era locks, his Mellow Gold shades, and the sneer to match.
It was an underwhelming show, or perhaps it was just me who was underwhelmed. I hadn't slept in a fortnight and after a month in Berlin, my body was turning to Nutella and currywurst. I remember little about the concert, just that Beck was surly and anhedonic, that I was dissecting the performance too much to enjoy it, and that the German girl in the frockcoat had fallen in love with me, but I dissected her to bits and so lost her to an autistic Swede. The whole night would have been a wash if a German graphic designer hadn't adopted me after the show and paid for me to dance at the rockabilly club until the sun came up over Kreuzberg.
A week later, Radiohead came to town. This was, for me, the mother of all shows; was, in fact, the reason I had allowed myself to linger in Berlin for so long. The night before the concert, I tried to get a good night's sleep, and so I stayed up 'til five. I tried to get geared up in the hours before kickoff, and so I found myself listless and lifeless as I slipped through the turnstile.
There was an opener, the much-hyped Modeselektor. I was able to cut through the crowd with unexpected ease, so I was close enough to the stage that Jonny Greenwood's hair was whipping me in the face. And yet I can't say I enjoyed the show. They played songs - i.e. all of them - that always put me in a visionary trance when I listen to them at home on my oversized headphones, but there, live and in the moment, I couldn't build an enthusiasm that wasn't false. In truth, I wanted to go home and see what Ben was up to.
Through incredibly dumb luck, I scored a free ticket to see R.E.M. the following week. I figured that expectations were at the root of my rock show impotence, that perhaps a band whose lyrics weren't already tattooed across my cortex might stir me out of my slumber. And R.E.M. did, but not as much as I'd led myself to expect. I'd never heard "Electrolite" before, which remains a staple on any mixes I make for girls. And Michael Stipe was lively and carefree on stage, as Michael Stipes are wont to be. But as the drunken hordes pushed through the black forest towards the nearest U-Bahn station, I was haunted by the suspicion that I had missed something.
I was crashing in Schöneberg at the time, which is where David Bowie lived while he was recording the Berlin Trilogy. Twice I set out to find his old digs, where one imagines the Thin White Duke lavishing himself with a spongebath in a porcelain tub overflowing with Nutella and cocaine. On my first expedition, I walked in the complete opposite direction and found myself merging onto the autobahn. The second time, I grew confused by the apartment numbers and gave up, settling instead for a döner kebab and a Franziskaner for the road.
And then my cash ran out and I was ejected from Germany like a bad organ. I wasn't disappointed, not exactly. I had expected Berlin - and at least two of those performances - to transform me. And in some way they had. Everything always transforms you. But the moment has a way of eluding me. The attempt to measure the moment renders the moment, like the electron, nonexistent: a smear in time and space. The moment only becomes a moment after the moment has passed, often years and years later.
If I am to be honest with myself, and to my readership (who will judge me), the only rock show I ever enjoyed the way a rock show should be enjoyed was the Counting Crows concert I saw when I was sixteen. It was my first show. For me, the electric guitar was a recent discovery. I remember standing in a garage with one of my cronies as he plugged his amp into the wall. There was a screech of feedback, then the unexpected power of the non-chord he strummed, the disproportionate relationship between the sheer volume generated and the 106-pound nerd who had so amateurishly generated it. The electric guitar, for me, was the first great equalizer between brawn and intellect, though I would discover others as I went along in life.
At that young age, live music thrilled me. It wasn't something to be dissected or inspected for quality. The sound of a savage beat on a thrift store trap set was enough to set my legs joggling against their caucasian will. And so the Counting Crows show was a spiritual experience for me, though I would cringe and probably vomit to see something like it now. Adam Duritz - I believe he was wearing pleather pants - tightroped along a stack of amplifiers with his arms outstretched and his head thrown back in an unabashed Christ imitation. The band broke into seemingly impromptu interludes in which Duritz sang what was glossolalia to me then, though I know now that they were just Byrds lyrics. And on the drive home, there was no debate as to whether what we had just seen was three hours of contrived bullshit: we knew the mind of God and were content to say "Wow" over and over again. We were also buzzing to be in a car - a 1992 Plymouth Acclaim - driving back on the interstate from a rock show in Iowa with no adult supervision. It is hard to tell whether the enthusiasm of youth is misguided, or whether it is more pure than anything we will ever experience again.
There were other good shows, of course. I saw The Fiery Furnaces four years ago and I appreciated the performance several months later, though I struggled to understand it in the moment. Devendra Banhart came to Omaha a while back with his band of sleepy-eyed beards, and he suspended us between sleep and waking for two wonderful hours. I saw Low once and the Sokol Underground was unusually sepulchral for the occasion: nobody spoke, and people shooshed you when you did. We were hyped up on something, laughing way too much, and Will was acting goofy, so we removed ourselves from the show before it got too sublime. I have seen Bright Eyes on three occasions. The first time, Conor was so hopped up on quaaludes that he smashed his guitar midway through the second song. The other two shows were in Council Bluffs, and though they were four years apart, I found myself in the same predicament: drinking with Will, about to leave my main squeeze for the weird, wild East. Strangely, perhaps cruelly, life functions like a broken elevator and, despite an infinity of other possibilities, will deliver you to the same floor several times in a row: step in, please - sixth floor - women's hats and coats, lingerie and perfume - step in, please ...
When I returned to Columbiahalle, I was no longer the first person in line. There was a German girl with Beck pins covering both lapels of her frockcoat and a Spaniard wearing the Beck t-shirt that I had left at home.
"So, ehh, you guys like Beck much?" I asked.
As they talked about Him, their eyes glazed over in a way that mine did not. But like all music buffs, I nurtured the belief that they didn't appreciate Beck the way I did, and like the rest, I was probably right about that.
The bouncer let us in and we pressed as far forward as the guardrails allowed. We sent the Spaniard out for drinks and we sat injun-style on the floor and waited.
There may have been an opening act, but I have no memory of it. I remember Beck walking out on stage - already some Germans were chanting "Loser" - and I was surprised to see him sporting his Loser-era locks, his Mellow Gold shades, and the sneer to match.
It was an underwhelming show, or perhaps it was just me who was underwhelmed. I hadn't slept in a fortnight and after a month in Berlin, my body was turning to Nutella and currywurst. I remember little about the concert, just that Beck was surly and anhedonic, that I was dissecting the performance too much to enjoy it, and that the German girl in the frockcoat had fallen in love with me, but I dissected her to bits and so lost her to an autistic Swede. The whole night would have been a wash if a German graphic designer hadn't adopted me after the show and paid for me to dance at the rockabilly club until the sun came up over Kreuzberg.
A week later, Radiohead came to town. This was, for me, the mother of all shows; was, in fact, the reason I had allowed myself to linger in Berlin for so long. The night before the concert, I tried to get a good night's sleep, and so I stayed up 'til five. I tried to get geared up in the hours before kickoff, and so I found myself listless and lifeless as I slipped through the turnstile.
There was an opener, the much-hyped Modeselektor. I was able to cut through the crowd with unexpected ease, so I was close enough to the stage that Jonny Greenwood's hair was whipping me in the face. And yet I can't say I enjoyed the show. They played songs - i.e. all of them - that always put me in a visionary trance when I listen to them at home on my oversized headphones, but there, live and in the moment, I couldn't build an enthusiasm that wasn't false. In truth, I wanted to go home and see what Ben was up to.
Through incredibly dumb luck, I scored a free ticket to see R.E.M. the following week. I figured that expectations were at the root of my rock show impotence, that perhaps a band whose lyrics weren't already tattooed across my cortex might stir me out of my slumber. And R.E.M. did, but not as much as I'd led myself to expect. I'd never heard "Electrolite" before, which remains a staple on any mixes I make for girls. And Michael Stipe was lively and carefree on stage, as Michael Stipes are wont to be. But as the drunken hordes pushed through the black forest towards the nearest U-Bahn station, I was haunted by the suspicion that I had missed something.
I was crashing in Schöneberg at the time, which is where David Bowie lived while he was recording the Berlin Trilogy. Twice I set out to find his old digs, where one imagines the Thin White Duke lavishing himself with a spongebath in a porcelain tub overflowing with Nutella and cocaine. On my first expedition, I walked in the complete opposite direction and found myself merging onto the autobahn. The second time, I grew confused by the apartment numbers and gave up, settling instead for a döner kebab and a Franziskaner for the road.
And then my cash ran out and I was ejected from Germany like a bad organ. I wasn't disappointed, not exactly. I had expected Berlin - and at least two of those performances - to transform me. And in some way they had. Everything always transforms you. But the moment has a way of eluding me. The attempt to measure the moment renders the moment, like the electron, nonexistent: a smear in time and space. The moment only becomes a moment after the moment has passed, often years and years later.
If I am to be honest with myself, and to my readership (who will judge me), the only rock show I ever enjoyed the way a rock show should be enjoyed was the Counting Crows concert I saw when I was sixteen. It was my first show. For me, the electric guitar was a recent discovery. I remember standing in a garage with one of my cronies as he plugged his amp into the wall. There was a screech of feedback, then the unexpected power of the non-chord he strummed, the disproportionate relationship between the sheer volume generated and the 106-pound nerd who had so amateurishly generated it. The electric guitar, for me, was the first great equalizer between brawn and intellect, though I would discover others as I went along in life.
At that young age, live music thrilled me. It wasn't something to be dissected or inspected for quality. The sound of a savage beat on a thrift store trap set was enough to set my legs joggling against their caucasian will. And so the Counting Crows show was a spiritual experience for me, though I would cringe and probably vomit to see something like it now. Adam Duritz - I believe he was wearing pleather pants - tightroped along a stack of amplifiers with his arms outstretched and his head thrown back in an unabashed Christ imitation. The band broke into seemingly impromptu interludes in which Duritz sang what was glossolalia to me then, though I know now that they were just Byrds lyrics. And on the drive home, there was no debate as to whether what we had just seen was three hours of contrived bullshit: we knew the mind of God and were content to say "Wow" over and over again. We were also buzzing to be in a car - a 1992 Plymouth Acclaim - driving back on the interstate from a rock show in Iowa with no adult supervision. It is hard to tell whether the enthusiasm of youth is misguided, or whether it is more pure than anything we will ever experience again.
There were other good shows, of course. I saw The Fiery Furnaces four years ago and I appreciated the performance several months later, though I struggled to understand it in the moment. Devendra Banhart came to Omaha a while back with his band of sleepy-eyed beards, and he suspended us between sleep and waking for two wonderful hours. I saw Low once and the Sokol Underground was unusually sepulchral for the occasion: nobody spoke, and people shooshed you when you did. We were hyped up on something, laughing way too much, and Will was acting goofy, so we removed ourselves from the show before it got too sublime. I have seen Bright Eyes on three occasions. The first time, Conor was so hopped up on quaaludes that he smashed his guitar midway through the second song. The other two shows were in Council Bluffs, and though they were four years apart, I found myself in the same predicament: drinking with Will, about to leave my main squeeze for the weird, wild East. Strangely, perhaps cruelly, life functions like a broken elevator and, despite an infinity of other possibilities, will deliver you to the same floor several times in a row: step in, please - sixth floor - women's hats and coats, lingerie and perfume - step in, please ...
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