One of the finer pleasures of your early days in Asia is the naming of things. When you first arrive in your foreigner ghetto, you are a child: you don't know your address, or the names of objects, or what to call manmade structures. Perhaps you know "here" and "there," but that will get you neither here nor there. And so you and your band of expats start naming things, at first for the practical reason that if you are to meet another expat somewhere, you must choose a discrete location in time and space at which to meet them, and then for the purpose of distinguishing important places from the sameness that surrounds them, a sameness that would astound even americanus suburbicus, and finally with the same giddy imperialism as kids naming lightning-splintered trees or NASA geeks naming rocks on Mars.
You can master the Korean alphabet in three months without even trying, and despite our best efforts, some of us did. We could read street signs, but the problem in Korea was that there were none: the Koreans stubbornly refuse to name their streets. So the expats of Chilgok District 3 devised an atlas of their own, a geography that was well-known even to the fringe members of the group. There was Cakehouse Road and Footbridge Boulevard, Garbage Heap Turnpike and Exploding Transformer Square. We often built bonfires along Cremated Cat Creek, so named, suffice to say, because the foreigners of Chilgok 3 once cremated a dead cat upon its fertile shores. We felt no need to rename the Gugu Tunnel, though nearby Mt. Unamji was known only as "Jumanji," and it was pretentious to call it otherwise. There was Rub 'n Tug Lane, a reference to the services rendered by its afterhours massage parlors. I lived on the corner of the Pig Intestine Intersection. You often took your best girl for a late night stroll along Sea Penis Promenade, named for its seafood restaurants and their specialty, an uncannily phallic bottom-dwelling organism that propels itself by ejaculating torrents of milky saltwater from its uncircumcised head, served raw. (Breaking News: Though for years I was unable to empirically prove the Sea Penis's existence, Wikipedia now tells me it is the urechis unicinctus, a species of marine spoon worm. That which we call a Sea Penis by any other name is just as hideous.)
There were other places which we did not rename, but endowed with a kind of mythical status that baffled any and all Koreans in our company. There was the GS 25 convenience store, where we sat outside in plastic chairs around a plastic table and insulted each other until four AM, and The Coffee Bean downtown, where we congregated the following afternoon to apologize, to read the New York Times, and to sneak off to the bathroom one by one to enjoy the sudden and violent regularity afforded by a hangover and too much coffee.
We rechristened the beers, mostly out of spite. Hite was Shite. Cass, obviously, became Ass. O.B., like the Gugu Tunnel, needed no alteration, was just fine the way God made it, though you were allowed to call it B.O. if that was your wont. And lest you think we were amused by ourselves, we always spoke these names with straight faces.
At Old School, Daegu's one and only hip-hop bar, Mark introduced the bartenders to the Irish Car Bomb, which later resurfaced on the menu as an Ai-ri-shi Ka Bom-buh and went for nine bucks a pop.
Children's Day became Youth in Asia Day. Daegu was known, affectionately (I think), as The 'Gu. Chilgok was The 'Gok. I was Kisu, Mark was Marker, and Arthur was R-Dor 3000. Hyunmin was Richard and Sangmin was John.
And now, in China, I am Pan Da. I have so far neglected to mention this fact, perhaps the key plot element of my Chinese existence. I did not choose the name, though I certainly would have if I had been creative enough to think of it myself.
Our official Chinese names were posted on the wall of the hotel conference room on our third or fourth day in-country. I'm not sure who picked them for us, whether it was a Chinese bureaucrat down at the immigration office, one of our Mandarin teachers, or a Peace Corps employee with his tongue planted firmly in cheek.
I remember glancing at the other names as I looked for myself on the list. Song Min-Tao, Gao Hai-Ning, Bai Li-Jie, Lin Rei: these were names that I could not pronounce or make fun of. Then I found mine: Pan Da. Pan ... Da. Panda. I stood there for an unusually long time. I ran my index finger across the page to make sure that the name was indeed mine. Keith Petit - Pan Da. I searched the other 74 names for a Kou A-La, a Wen Hung-Lo, a Long Dong, to no avail. I shrugged. It was a happy coincidence that the most ridiculous volunteer should have the most ridiculous name. From that day on, I was Panda. Many of my fellow Peace Corpses still do not know my Christian name.
Pan Da looks something like this: 潘达. The first symbol, Pan, is a surname. The second symbol, Da, means "dignity" or "to achieve." But to my students, Pan Da means "panda." And so, after asking them to call me Keith, Mr. Petit, or Pan Da, they insist upon calling me Mr. Panda.
It's good to be a panda in China. When my name comes up at the drinking table, I will smugly say, Dui-aaaa - wo shi guo bao: Yep - I'm a national treasure. It's hard to gauge whether my audience is amused, revolted, or amused despite their revulsion.
China has named me, but the naming of China is not yet complete. I have named and renamed some of my students. Monkey, I explain, is probably not such a good name for a human. How about Edwin? I am slowly mapping out Nanchong, planting flags and lifting my leg on street signs, but it remains largely uncharted. And Chengdu was far too vast for naming, aside from the bar where I met and came to know some of my favorite people, where we were once attacked by a hive of ill-tempered wasps, a bar we dubbed The Bee Bar and much later, The Bee Bar and Grille, after we discovered that they served peanuts upon request.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Milgram Experiment
Because I am chronically three minutes and 37 seconds behind the rest of the world, every morning I miss the bus and wind up riding shotgun in one of the Toyotavans that wait for me just off campus. The drivers charge me ten yuan, which is two kuai more than a taxi, and ten times more expensive than a bus. But it's well worth footing the bill for companionship and a complimentary lesson in Sichuanese, and the comfort that comes with knowing the Toyotavan cannot exceed thirty miles per hour, which gives me ample time to grab the "oh shit" handle prior to head-on collision.
This morning, I told the driver to wait while I hit up the ATM so I could pay him. It was raining, as it has been for the past month. Poised there with my fingers hovering over the keypad, some inner Pavlovian voice barked at me, some vague memory of a past trauma suffered at the hands of a rain-drenched Chinese cashbox, perhaps this very one - but I ignored it. "Please be entering your secret number," said the ATM. The instant my first digit met the first digit, the ATM dealt me an electric shock that made my Amish beard stand on end. A stream of religious personages and scatology flew out of my mouth. The security guards stared. I hobbled in a circle and slapped my thighs. The Toyotavan man tooted his horn. I returned to the machine and was shocked again. And again. Chinese pin numbers are six digits long. So, zap, I hit the "cancel" button and withdrew my card, which sent a current of not unpleasant energy coursing through my bones.
I jerked and jolted over to the machine across the street and waited in the queue for the girl ahead of me to finish. That she was not screaming and cursing throughout her transaction seemed to me to be a good sign. I inserted my card and zap, I flew away from the machine. I staggered back to it and zap. I snuck up on it from the side and zap. As a foreigner, apparently, I am a much better conductor than your average Asian coed. I needed something plastic to put between me and all that misdirected Chinese energy. But I had neither pen, nor lighter, nor tiddlywink. One of my students passed by, no doubt wondering why I looked like Gene Wilder on meth. I asked him for a pen. And thusly was the transaction completed and the taxi paid for. Now the problem was that I was five minutes late for class.
And oddly, trembling with static, my mind still lost somewhere in Tuesday night, I taught the best class of my life. It was my first run-through of a lesson I had dubbed "Poetry Slam." I began by reading the entirety of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot, and nearly succumbed to a crying jag when I came to the part about the coffee spoons. My students gave me a polite ovation. I asked how the poem made them feel.
"Depressed," offered a girl in the front row.
"Excellent! That's how it's supposed to make you feel. And why did it seem depressing to you?"
"Because it was too long."
Laughter. I laughed, too, though me and the ghost of Tough Shit Eliot were both wounded by the remark.
"Prufrock seems scared of some event in the future. I think it is coming soon," another girl said. "What is he scared of?"
"I don't know," I shrugged. "Probably death or something."
I had them read aloud and analyze poems by Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Carl Sandburg. One of the groups was reading The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Langston Hughes, and though the word "Negro" made them giggle, they loved the poem. One girl began to write her thoughts on the bottom of the page - "I am warm," she wrote - but I asked her to please write on another piece of paper, as these hand-written copies were the only ones I had.
When it came time for her group to slam Langston Hughes, her friend walked up to the podium and read him beautifully, with a sincerely oppressed tremolo in her voice.
"I've known rivers. Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers." She paused and her sad eyes searched the crowd. " ... I am warm."
I spent several minutes keeled over a desk until I'd laughed myself out.
After class, feeling awfully smug, I treated myself to a cigarette on the balcony. Across the way, I saw a girl leaning on the ledge with her head in her hands. She stayed that way for a long time. I wasn't about to abide any suicides on my watch, so I walked over and said, in Chinese, "Hey. What's wrong?"
She looked up. She wasn't crying.
"Are you an English teacher?"
"Yes," I said. "I am a laowai."
She looked me over.
"I know that," she said.
She wanted English lessons. She wanted to improve her oral English. She wanted a foreigner friend. And so on. Fairly certain that she wasn't a jumper, I wished her a good afternoon and ran off to my next class.
As I was walking out to the bus, I heard my name and saw her standing up on the balcony four stories above me.
"Can you catch?" she asked.
"Some things!"
She let a folded-up scrap of paper flutter down to me and I missed it. I plucked it up from the wet ground and hurried off to catch the bus. I was meeting an Italian for lunch.
One of my handlers from the university knew a girl who was married to an Italian. So she had arranged a foreigner playdate. It occurred to me that never in my travels had I ever met a Real Live Italian. Truth be told, I wasn't entirely convinced that they existed. But Fiero's story checked out. He was a chain smoker. He loved wine. He was old and fat and missing a few important teeth. He spoke little, probably because I was young and American. But when he did, his English, I thought, was better than my own: riddled with endearing errors and full of old world European depth and character.
There is always some conversational inertia when a European first meets an American. I'm not sure whether it's because the European has encountered unpleasant Americans in the past, or because the America we broadcast is so loud and schizophrenic and domineering that, as a European, you are no more inclined to talk to an American than you are to your television set. But over the years, I have developed an international charm that I didn't have before, and of course, it is easy for westerners to relate on matters pertaining to the experience that is China. So, by the time the fifth course had arrived, the Italian was waxing Chomsky on linguistic differences and Chinese etiquette.
"The Chinese have this way of making themselves disappear," he said, sucking a three-kuai cigarette through the gap in his front teeth. "When they are wanting to go, they stand up and say bye bye and they are gone!"
"This is not normal?" asked his wife.
"No! No. No!" Much gesticulating. "In Italy and in America, you must stay and shake hands and say, oh how I hate to leave, and make excuses and say goodbye to each person ten times."
Fiero and I agreed on the strangeness of Chinese teleportation. And we both agreed that we liked the Chinese way better.
I mentioned how, when I first visited China, I was curious as to how the Chinese typed. At the time, I said, I wasn't sure how it was even possible. Did they have 5,000-character keyboards that wrapped around you like a control panel? The Italian spit out a chunk of eggplant laughing and began spinning in his chair, pressing invisible buttons behind his back: "Dear ... mother ... I ... miss ... you ... so ... much!" The two Chinese girls tittered.
"But yes," the Italian said, composing himself. "This is problem with Chinese. You cannot have too many hieroglyphics because you cannot learn 300,000 hieroglyphics. So every symbol have fifteen or twenty meanings."
"Hence we have Chinglish," I said. "It's difficult to translate the openness of a Chinese sentence into the precision of English. So we have signs telling us, 'Please, gentlemen, how barbaric it is to shit on the floor!' And so on."
It is through conversations with Italians that you come across ideas you didn't know you had. While the Italian translated a verse of Dante's Inferno for me, I thought about Chinglish: I had always thought of it as bad English, plain and simple. It hadn't occurred to me before that there might be a deeper linguistic reason for Chinglish, but a fundamental difference in language seems to me, now, to be precisely the problem: each Chinese symbol has several possible interpretations, and as a reader of Chinese, you learn to choose the interpretations that make the most sense to you. But we have half a billion words in English, so the difference between a good writer and a literary hack is precision - putting the exact right words in the exact right places - and just about any English speaker, whether they can write or not, can separate good writing from bad writing. Chinglish is nowhere to be found on the quality spectrum, though it often reads like James Joyce at his best.
The four of us lingered for several hours. The Italian raged about the restaurant's interior design. "They construct this beautiful granite waterfall and then put it in the corner by the bathroom where it is invisible!" He asked whether I liked European beer and European coffee and I nodded emphatically on both counts. He invited me downtown to his European beer and coffee bar. And I trembled at the possibility of savoring a bottle or a cup of foul and bitter stuff without having to endure the formaldehyde hangover that comes ten minutes later.
I had to jet off to my Mandarin lesson, so I made my escape the Chinese way: "I'd love to stay and chew the fat, but bye-bye!" I caught the Number Five bus home and, on the way, passed a new restaurant whose logo was a black-and-white portrait of Saddam Hussein raising a finger in defiance. It reminded me of The Hitler Bar in Daejeon, South Korea - where the Third Reich comes alive! - with its balsa wood Messerschmitt BF109's rotating slowly on catgut cords dangling from the ceiling, the walls decked a la Applebee's with Afrikacorps caps, castrated Karabiner 98K's, framed photographs of The Fuhrer himself ... the smiling waiter clomping towards your table in his steel-toed jackboots, brown uniform decorated in Panzer Assault Badges and silver eagle patches ... the unabridged version of "Deutschland über Alles" warbling and crackling through the speakers in the bathroom. It is these warped glimpses of the West that remind you how far away from home you really are.
This morning, I told the driver to wait while I hit up the ATM so I could pay him. It was raining, as it has been for the past month. Poised there with my fingers hovering over the keypad, some inner Pavlovian voice barked at me, some vague memory of a past trauma suffered at the hands of a rain-drenched Chinese cashbox, perhaps this very one - but I ignored it. "Please be entering your secret number," said the ATM. The instant my first digit met the first digit, the ATM dealt me an electric shock that made my Amish beard stand on end. A stream of religious personages and scatology flew out of my mouth. The security guards stared. I hobbled in a circle and slapped my thighs. The Toyotavan man tooted his horn. I returned to the machine and was shocked again. And again. Chinese pin numbers are six digits long. So, zap, I hit the "cancel" button and withdrew my card, which sent a current of not unpleasant energy coursing through my bones.
I jerked and jolted over to the machine across the street and waited in the queue for the girl ahead of me to finish. That she was not screaming and cursing throughout her transaction seemed to me to be a good sign. I inserted my card and zap, I flew away from the machine. I staggered back to it and zap. I snuck up on it from the side and zap. As a foreigner, apparently, I am a much better conductor than your average Asian coed. I needed something plastic to put between me and all that misdirected Chinese energy. But I had neither pen, nor lighter, nor tiddlywink. One of my students passed by, no doubt wondering why I looked like Gene Wilder on meth. I asked him for a pen. And thusly was the transaction completed and the taxi paid for. Now the problem was that I was five minutes late for class.
And oddly, trembling with static, my mind still lost somewhere in Tuesday night, I taught the best class of my life. It was my first run-through of a lesson I had dubbed "Poetry Slam." I began by reading the entirety of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot, and nearly succumbed to a crying jag when I came to the part about the coffee spoons. My students gave me a polite ovation. I asked how the poem made them feel.
"Depressed," offered a girl in the front row.
"Excellent! That's how it's supposed to make you feel. And why did it seem depressing to you?"
"Because it was too long."
Laughter. I laughed, too, though me and the ghost of Tough Shit Eliot were both wounded by the remark.
"Prufrock seems scared of some event in the future. I think it is coming soon," another girl said. "What is he scared of?"
"I don't know," I shrugged. "Probably death or something."
I had them read aloud and analyze poems by Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Carl Sandburg. One of the groups was reading The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Langston Hughes, and though the word "Negro" made them giggle, they loved the poem. One girl began to write her thoughts on the bottom of the page - "I am warm," she wrote - but I asked her to please write on another piece of paper, as these hand-written copies were the only ones I had.
When it came time for her group to slam Langston Hughes, her friend walked up to the podium and read him beautifully, with a sincerely oppressed tremolo in her voice.
"I've known rivers. Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers." She paused and her sad eyes searched the crowd. " ... I am warm."
I spent several minutes keeled over a desk until I'd laughed myself out.
After class, feeling awfully smug, I treated myself to a cigarette on the balcony. Across the way, I saw a girl leaning on the ledge with her head in her hands. She stayed that way for a long time. I wasn't about to abide any suicides on my watch, so I walked over and said, in Chinese, "Hey. What's wrong?"
She looked up. She wasn't crying.
"Are you an English teacher?"
"Yes," I said. "I am a laowai."
She looked me over.
"I know that," she said.
She wanted English lessons. She wanted to improve her oral English. She wanted a foreigner friend. And so on. Fairly certain that she wasn't a jumper, I wished her a good afternoon and ran off to my next class.
As I was walking out to the bus, I heard my name and saw her standing up on the balcony four stories above me.
"Can you catch?" she asked.
"Some things!"
She let a folded-up scrap of paper flutter down to me and I missed it. I plucked it up from the wet ground and hurried off to catch the bus. I was meeting an Italian for lunch.
One of my handlers from the university knew a girl who was married to an Italian. So she had arranged a foreigner playdate. It occurred to me that never in my travels had I ever met a Real Live Italian. Truth be told, I wasn't entirely convinced that they existed. But Fiero's story checked out. He was a chain smoker. He loved wine. He was old and fat and missing a few important teeth. He spoke little, probably because I was young and American. But when he did, his English, I thought, was better than my own: riddled with endearing errors and full of old world European depth and character.
There is always some conversational inertia when a European first meets an American. I'm not sure whether it's because the European has encountered unpleasant Americans in the past, or because the America we broadcast is so loud and schizophrenic and domineering that, as a European, you are no more inclined to talk to an American than you are to your television set. But over the years, I have developed an international charm that I didn't have before, and of course, it is easy for westerners to relate on matters pertaining to the experience that is China. So, by the time the fifth course had arrived, the Italian was waxing Chomsky on linguistic differences and Chinese etiquette.
"The Chinese have this way of making themselves disappear," he said, sucking a three-kuai cigarette through the gap in his front teeth. "When they are wanting to go, they stand up and say bye bye and they are gone!"
"This is not normal?" asked his wife.
"No! No. No!" Much gesticulating. "In Italy and in America, you must stay and shake hands and say, oh how I hate to leave, and make excuses and say goodbye to each person ten times."
Fiero and I agreed on the strangeness of Chinese teleportation. And we both agreed that we liked the Chinese way better.
I mentioned how, when I first visited China, I was curious as to how the Chinese typed. At the time, I said, I wasn't sure how it was even possible. Did they have 5,000-character keyboards that wrapped around you like a control panel? The Italian spit out a chunk of eggplant laughing and began spinning in his chair, pressing invisible buttons behind his back: "Dear ... mother ... I ... miss ... you ... so ... much!" The two Chinese girls tittered.
"But yes," the Italian said, composing himself. "This is problem with Chinese. You cannot have too many hieroglyphics because you cannot learn 300,000 hieroglyphics. So every symbol have fifteen or twenty meanings."
"Hence we have Chinglish," I said. "It's difficult to translate the openness of a Chinese sentence into the precision of English. So we have signs telling us, 'Please, gentlemen, how barbaric it is to shit on the floor!' And so on."
It is through conversations with Italians that you come across ideas you didn't know you had. While the Italian translated a verse of Dante's Inferno for me, I thought about Chinglish: I had always thought of it as bad English, plain and simple. It hadn't occurred to me before that there might be a deeper linguistic reason for Chinglish, but a fundamental difference in language seems to me, now, to be precisely the problem: each Chinese symbol has several possible interpretations, and as a reader of Chinese, you learn to choose the interpretations that make the most sense to you. But we have half a billion words in English, so the difference between a good writer and a literary hack is precision - putting the exact right words in the exact right places - and just about any English speaker, whether they can write or not, can separate good writing from bad writing. Chinglish is nowhere to be found on the quality spectrum, though it often reads like James Joyce at his best.
The four of us lingered for several hours. The Italian raged about the restaurant's interior design. "They construct this beautiful granite waterfall and then put it in the corner by the bathroom where it is invisible!" He asked whether I liked European beer and European coffee and I nodded emphatically on both counts. He invited me downtown to his European beer and coffee bar. And I trembled at the possibility of savoring a bottle or a cup of foul and bitter stuff without having to endure the formaldehyde hangover that comes ten minutes later.
I had to jet off to my Mandarin lesson, so I made my escape the Chinese way: "I'd love to stay and chew the fat, but bye-bye!" I caught the Number Five bus home and, on the way, passed a new restaurant whose logo was a black-and-white portrait of Saddam Hussein raising a finger in defiance. It reminded me of The Hitler Bar in Daejeon, South Korea - where the Third Reich comes alive! - with its balsa wood Messerschmitt BF109's rotating slowly on catgut cords dangling from the ceiling, the walls decked a la Applebee's with Afrikacorps caps, castrated Karabiner 98K's, framed photographs of The Fuhrer himself ... the smiling waiter clomping towards your table in his steel-toed jackboots, brown uniform decorated in Panzer Assault Badges and silver eagle patches ... the unabridged version of "Deutschland über Alles" warbling and crackling through the speakers in the bathroom. It is these warped glimpses of the West that remind you how far away from home you really are.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Sabbatical
I've ridden this wave of creativity about as far as it will go for the moment. I have no idea how actual writers do it. I was on a roll, there, for a while. But past a certain point, in the midst of your delirious scribbling, you begin to fear the writer's block you know is lurking just around the corner, and the fear of writer's block turns into writer's block. In your efforts to stave it off, you develop the superstitious quirks of a Big League knuckleballer: leaving your shoes untied, opening doors with the pinkie finger of your left hand, wearing the same chalkstained suit coat for weeks on end, crossing your chopsticks in an X over the rice bowl, and so on. But the writer's block arrives right on time no matter how schizophrenic you become and the only thing to do at that point is shut the whole thing down for a while, read some new authors, get out of the house, stay out late and get yourself in trouble, and return to your desk after a week or two when you've stopped thinking so damned much.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Taxionomy: A Passenger's Guide to Cabbies of the World
I don't pretend to be an expert on taxi drivers. I admit to you, my fellow passenger, that I have no idea what makes the cabby tick. I can't imagine how he spends his off hours or whether he feels absurd when it's time for him to get out of his cab and into his car to drive home. Like most far-flung fields of human study - quantum mechanics and what have you - the taxi driver eludes the common man as well as the so-called experts, who demonstrate at best a well-articulated befuddlement when it comes to their pet subject.
There is nothing on the Newtonian scale so puzzling as the cabby. Like the electron, the cabby wheels about in an exhaust plume of probability: it is impossible to know his exact location and his future destination simultaneously. Perhaps the taxi driver remains a riddle even to himself. But because cabbies, unlike Higgs bosons and neutrinos and antimatter, are a real and active force in our day to day lives, and because I have a layman's understanding of taxi drivers from various unpleasant corners of the globe, I will offer this brief and elementary introduction to cabbies of the world: their customs, their caprices, and their cunning.
Let me begin by narrowing our scope. This essay will concern itself solely with taxi drivers outside the United States of America. First of all, the only American taxi I can remember taking was from New York's Kennedy Airport to a Holiday Inn in nearby Jamaica. My senses were not at their sharpest and my only recollection of the experience is of leaving the cab much lighter than when I'd entered it. Secondly - and I know this only from hearsay, literature, and my own a priori speculations - American cab drivers, because they can trace their roots to everywhere on earth and beyond, share almost nothing in common. These men may once have piloted Fiats, Volkswagens, alpacas, or rickshaws in their native lands, may once have driven under the umbrella of whatever Geneva Convention governs international cab driving, but they are Americans now: their morals have long since burned up in U.S. Customs like so much space dust.
It is something of a mystery, then, that cabbies elsewhere in the world, even in nations whose embassies have been closed to one another for decades, abide by the same unspoken code of conduct. For this reason - though I do not profess to understand it - cabbies of the world, to some degree, can be measured and understood. Taking an American cab, on the other hand, is a game of Russian or Jamaican or Armenian roulette. An analysis of the American cabby would be as fruitless as an analysis of The American, who, if we consider the human antipodes of Shaquille O'Neal and Woody Allen, cannot be said to exist in anything but the most rarified metaphysical sense.
In the American cab - or so I am given to understand - the driver is the agitator and the passenger is his agitatee. As a passenger, you can do nothing to improve your standing with the American cabby. Most of the time, he will talk and you, despite yourself, will listen. He will usually offend you in some indirect (but lowbrow) way, and you will be unable to defend yourself either verbally - good luck getting a word in - or physically, as the backseat ear-slap is among the weakest assaults known to man. The American cabby deals you the damnation card from the instant the fare meter lights up and you can only dig yourself into deeper and deeper layers of perdition by opening your mouth. No tip, however generous, can pull you out of the hole the American cabby, by default, has placed you in.
But in the non-American cab, the ball (to coin a sports metaphor) is in your court. You are the guest and so you are the agitator. The cabby, as host, is the agitatee. He is your friend to lose. In the non-American cab, you are granted a very finite number of friend points the moment you get in the car, and will add to or subtract from them according to your behavior.
The first thing you will notice about the non-American cabby is that he is silent. This is not from a lack of things to say. Bear in mind: this man has transported tens of thousands of people hither and thither, most of them drunk and many of them vagrant. He has stories, grievances, and wisdom to share, as any traveler does. But he is waiting for you to make the first move.
Speaking of first moves, it seems I have gotten ahead of myself, for the first question any conscientious passenger must ask himself is: front seat or back? Which seat best facilitates a healthy driver/passenger relationship?
The front seat, I feel, must make the non-American cabby uncomfortable. It is literally too forward. It gives the appearance that the two of you are going somewhere together - which, in a relativistic sense, you are - but understand that, after you've arrived wherever it is you're going, you will never see your cabby again. Let's try and not get too attached. To make the separation less painful, I always sit in the back.
Which is not to say you should keep yourself distant and aloof. Though he may not look directly at you, the cabby has at least three mirrors at his disposal. The cab is his domain and he sees all that goes on within it. Make eye contact with your cabby not by staring at the side of his head, but by looking directly into the rear view mirror. This sounds elementary, but I rode foreign cabs for two years before I was stunned one evening to notice a pair of sad, jaundiced eyes in the mirror, studying my every backseat fidget. From that day on, I have maintained eye contact with my cabbies and it has yielded positive results in terms of rapport and chivalry. Eye contact lets the cabby know: here sits no greenhorn, here is a man who has ridden in a taxi before.
Do not buckle your safety belt. Non-American cab drivers view this as an ominous portent and an insult to boot. You don't begin a romp on the high seas by stuffing your ears full of wax and strapping yourself to the mast, or at least I don't. Buckling up doesn't bode well for the trip and it implies a lack of faith in the cabby, that you think him fallible when - aged 75 and a 63-year veteran of the Chinese road - he clearly is not. The clicking of the safety belt is as the ticking of the deathwatch to the cabby's ear. If he hears you buckling up, which he will, he is infinitely more likely to drive the vehicle into a gorge, killing you but not him.
Cabbies are a finicky lot when it comes to seatbelts, but there is much that doesn't faze them. Language, for one. Tell the cabby where you're headed in English, Tagalog, or 12th Century Plattdeutsch. It doesn't matter. He understands you just the same. Of course, this is not to say that all languages are equal. German - links! rechts! geradeaus! - will get you there minutes before you departed, whereas if you use Spanish - mañana, mañana, mañana - you will not reach your destination until the next Big Bang.
Cabbies sometimes make mistakes: they are not yet automatons. If you tell the cabby "Tesco," he will 99.999999% of the time get you to Tesco. But if you take a million cab rides, your cabby will one day drop you off in the middle of an alkali flat. Do not tell the cabby he has made a mistake. Perhaps he has not made a mistake at all; perhaps he knows something you do not. Slowly get out of the cab and walk out into whatever strange landscape you are confronted with. If there is a shack, a toolshed, a porta-potty, or some sort of closed structure within view, enter it and shut the door behind you. Remain there until you are sure the cabby has pulled away. If there are no manmade structures nearby, continue to walk off into the distance until you are a mere speck on the horizon - from the cabby's vantage point, not yours. Do whatever it takes to convince the cabby that he has successfully and punctually brought to where you were supposed to go. Otherwise, you will probably hurt his feelings.
If you become violently ill in transit, indicate to the cabby that you would like to blow chunks out the window. Again, language is not an issue. When you have received his blessing and he has toggled the child safety lock feature, commence blowing chunks out the window. But it is crucial that you first receive his blessing. While the cabby is no prude and certainly will not blanch at the sight of bodily fluids or the scattering to the four winds thereof, he is deeply bothered by unpermitted violations of the boundaries of his vehicle. He does not appreciate it when people touch his cab or when other vehicles collide with it. Nor is he comfortable with you throwing things (the contents of your stomach) out of the cab without his prior consent.
He is similarly irked when you play with the windows or smoke in the backseat without his permission. I prefer not to imagine what he might do if you fiddled with the mirrors, changed the radio station, or opened the glovebox. Though he does not technically own it, remember that the cab is a direct extension of the cabby's nervous system. He senses all that you do and all that you are about to do. He can read all of your thoughts. In a very real sense, you are a parasite upon his body and, if agitated, he can expel you from his cab as quickly and as violently as your stomach just expelled that last shot of Jager.
Sometimes your cabby will be wearing medals. These were awarded him either by the taxi corporation or by the Alfred Nobel Foundation. You should commend him for his decorations, because he probably received them for meritorious behavior in the line of duty and not for, I don't know, killing scores of pedestrians or something.
A non sequitur: many years ago, I rode in the back of a Chinese trishaw whose pilot - a man with black hair, a neck, and rather indistinct features because he was facing the other way - had mounted between the handlebars of his bicycle a small wooden box. On that box, in a whimsical old-timey font, were the words "MYSTERY BOX," underscored by not one but four italicized question marks. When I asked, in English, about the contents of the Mystery Box, the cabby pretended not to understand, though he had been carrying on just fine a moment before. My translator asked him once in Mandarin and again in whatever the local dialect was, but it seemed the cabby had forgotten how to communicate altogether. Meanwhile, I couldn't be sure, but the longer we rode, the more the Mystery Box seemed to take on a dull red glow. I felt fine that evening, but the next day I all of a sudden succumbed to brain fever, an ailment I would recover from only gradually and painfully, though there remains a sharp, high-pitched ringing in my ears whenever I encounter an excessively punctuated sentence.
Anyway, cabbies: how 'bout em????
There is nothing on the Newtonian scale so puzzling as the cabby. Like the electron, the cabby wheels about in an exhaust plume of probability: it is impossible to know his exact location and his future destination simultaneously. Perhaps the taxi driver remains a riddle even to himself. But because cabbies, unlike Higgs bosons and neutrinos and antimatter, are a real and active force in our day to day lives, and because I have a layman's understanding of taxi drivers from various unpleasant corners of the globe, I will offer this brief and elementary introduction to cabbies of the world: their customs, their caprices, and their cunning.
Let me begin by narrowing our scope. This essay will concern itself solely with taxi drivers outside the United States of America. First of all, the only American taxi I can remember taking was from New York's Kennedy Airport to a Holiday Inn in nearby Jamaica. My senses were not at their sharpest and my only recollection of the experience is of leaving the cab much lighter than when I'd entered it. Secondly - and I know this only from hearsay, literature, and my own a priori speculations - American cab drivers, because they can trace their roots to everywhere on earth and beyond, share almost nothing in common. These men may once have piloted Fiats, Volkswagens, alpacas, or rickshaws in their native lands, may once have driven under the umbrella of whatever Geneva Convention governs international cab driving, but they are Americans now: their morals have long since burned up in U.S. Customs like so much space dust.
It is something of a mystery, then, that cabbies elsewhere in the world, even in nations whose embassies have been closed to one another for decades, abide by the same unspoken code of conduct. For this reason - though I do not profess to understand it - cabbies of the world, to some degree, can be measured and understood. Taking an American cab, on the other hand, is a game of Russian or Jamaican or Armenian roulette. An analysis of the American cabby would be as fruitless as an analysis of The American, who, if we consider the human antipodes of Shaquille O'Neal and Woody Allen, cannot be said to exist in anything but the most rarified metaphysical sense.
In the American cab - or so I am given to understand - the driver is the agitator and the passenger is his agitatee. As a passenger, you can do nothing to improve your standing with the American cabby. Most of the time, he will talk and you, despite yourself, will listen. He will usually offend you in some indirect (but lowbrow) way, and you will be unable to defend yourself either verbally - good luck getting a word in - or physically, as the backseat ear-slap is among the weakest assaults known to man. The American cabby deals you the damnation card from the instant the fare meter lights up and you can only dig yourself into deeper and deeper layers of perdition by opening your mouth. No tip, however generous, can pull you out of the hole the American cabby, by default, has placed you in.
But in the non-American cab, the ball (to coin a sports metaphor) is in your court. You are the guest and so you are the agitator. The cabby, as host, is the agitatee. He is your friend to lose. In the non-American cab, you are granted a very finite number of friend points the moment you get in the car, and will add to or subtract from them according to your behavior.
The first thing you will notice about the non-American cabby is that he is silent. This is not from a lack of things to say. Bear in mind: this man has transported tens of thousands of people hither and thither, most of them drunk and many of them vagrant. He has stories, grievances, and wisdom to share, as any traveler does. But he is waiting for you to make the first move.
Speaking of first moves, it seems I have gotten ahead of myself, for the first question any conscientious passenger must ask himself is: front seat or back? Which seat best facilitates a healthy driver/passenger relationship?
The front seat, I feel, must make the non-American cabby uncomfortable. It is literally too forward. It gives the appearance that the two of you are going somewhere together - which, in a relativistic sense, you are - but understand that, after you've arrived wherever it is you're going, you will never see your cabby again. Let's try and not get too attached. To make the separation less painful, I always sit in the back.
Which is not to say you should keep yourself distant and aloof. Though he may not look directly at you, the cabby has at least three mirrors at his disposal. The cab is his domain and he sees all that goes on within it. Make eye contact with your cabby not by staring at the side of his head, but by looking directly into the rear view mirror. This sounds elementary, but I rode foreign cabs for two years before I was stunned one evening to notice a pair of sad, jaundiced eyes in the mirror, studying my every backseat fidget. From that day on, I have maintained eye contact with my cabbies and it has yielded positive results in terms of rapport and chivalry. Eye contact lets the cabby know: here sits no greenhorn, here is a man who has ridden in a taxi before.
Do not buckle your safety belt. Non-American cab drivers view this as an ominous portent and an insult to boot. You don't begin a romp on the high seas by stuffing your ears full of wax and strapping yourself to the mast, or at least I don't. Buckling up doesn't bode well for the trip and it implies a lack of faith in the cabby, that you think him fallible when - aged 75 and a 63-year veteran of the Chinese road - he clearly is not. The clicking of the safety belt is as the ticking of the deathwatch to the cabby's ear. If he hears you buckling up, which he will, he is infinitely more likely to drive the vehicle into a gorge, killing you but not him.
Cabbies are a finicky lot when it comes to seatbelts, but there is much that doesn't faze them. Language, for one. Tell the cabby where you're headed in English, Tagalog, or 12th Century Plattdeutsch. It doesn't matter. He understands you just the same. Of course, this is not to say that all languages are equal. German - links! rechts! geradeaus! - will get you there minutes before you departed, whereas if you use Spanish - mañana, mañana, mañana - you will not reach your destination until the next Big Bang.
Cabbies sometimes make mistakes: they are not yet automatons. If you tell the cabby "Tesco," he will 99.999999% of the time get you to Tesco. But if you take a million cab rides, your cabby will one day drop you off in the middle of an alkali flat. Do not tell the cabby he has made a mistake. Perhaps he has not made a mistake at all; perhaps he knows something you do not. Slowly get out of the cab and walk out into whatever strange landscape you are confronted with. If there is a shack, a toolshed, a porta-potty, or some sort of closed structure within view, enter it and shut the door behind you. Remain there until you are sure the cabby has pulled away. If there are no manmade structures nearby, continue to walk off into the distance until you are a mere speck on the horizon - from the cabby's vantage point, not yours. Do whatever it takes to convince the cabby that he has successfully and punctually brought to where you were supposed to go. Otherwise, you will probably hurt his feelings.
If you become violently ill in transit, indicate to the cabby that you would like to blow chunks out the window. Again, language is not an issue. When you have received his blessing and he has toggled the child safety lock feature, commence blowing chunks out the window. But it is crucial that you first receive his blessing. While the cabby is no prude and certainly will not blanch at the sight of bodily fluids or the scattering to the four winds thereof, he is deeply bothered by unpermitted violations of the boundaries of his vehicle. He does not appreciate it when people touch his cab or when other vehicles collide with it. Nor is he comfortable with you throwing things (the contents of your stomach) out of the cab without his prior consent.
He is similarly irked when you play with the windows or smoke in the backseat without his permission. I prefer not to imagine what he might do if you fiddled with the mirrors, changed the radio station, or opened the glovebox. Though he does not technically own it, remember that the cab is a direct extension of the cabby's nervous system. He senses all that you do and all that you are about to do. He can read all of your thoughts. In a very real sense, you are a parasite upon his body and, if agitated, he can expel you from his cab as quickly and as violently as your stomach just expelled that last shot of Jager.
Sometimes your cabby will be wearing medals. These were awarded him either by the taxi corporation or by the Alfred Nobel Foundation. You should commend him for his decorations, because he probably received them for meritorious behavior in the line of duty and not for, I don't know, killing scores of pedestrians or something.
A non sequitur: many years ago, I rode in the back of a Chinese trishaw whose pilot - a man with black hair, a neck, and rather indistinct features because he was facing the other way - had mounted between the handlebars of his bicycle a small wooden box. On that box, in a whimsical old-timey font, were the words "MYSTERY BOX," underscored by not one but four italicized question marks. When I asked, in English, about the contents of the Mystery Box, the cabby pretended not to understand, though he had been carrying on just fine a moment before. My translator asked him once in Mandarin and again in whatever the local dialect was, but it seemed the cabby had forgotten how to communicate altogether. Meanwhile, I couldn't be sure, but the longer we rode, the more the Mystery Box seemed to take on a dull red glow. I felt fine that evening, but the next day I all of a sudden succumbed to brain fever, an ailment I would recover from only gradually and painfully, though there remains a sharp, high-pitched ringing in my ears whenever I encounter an excessively punctuated sentence.
Anyway, cabbies: how 'bout em????
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Rain Check
A funny thing happened this afternoon. I met Wendy in our new classroom, a bricked-off cubicle down by the lake. I sat across from her and recounted the weekend's adventures: Friday night, arguing with the riffraff at the shishkebab place and someone's eight-year-old daughter until four AM; Saturday, trying and failing to buy a computer and all of the misunderstandings that involved.
It started to rain, so we moved to a gazebo. After five minutes there, the bench we were sitting on was claimed by a young couple with amorous ends, so we moved to another gazebo. Before long, it began to fill up with gawkers.
"Okay," said Wendy, clearly agitated. "Just pretend it is you and me and no one else is here."
I've gotten good at that, so I did. But they kept coming. Strangers were seated on both sides of us, leaning over the banisters to get a good look at me, a parade of bikes and bao-bao men and babies and dogs that was as loud as it was endless. It got to where we were being muscled out of the gazebo by the very people coming in to watch us. Every half-sentence I produced was telephoned down to the end of the line and either applauded for its cuteness or dissected for its incorrectness. Wendy was on the verge of a panic attack.
"Maybe we will only have one hour of class today," she said, "since it is raining and there are too many people watching us."
When the street vendors showed up to hawk their wares, it was clear that things had escalated to an unacceptable level of ridiculousness.
"Maybe we can just cancel class today and meet tomorrow," Wendy said. I nodded.
We packed up our things and pushed our way to the street. The crowd lingered, unsure whether they should follow me back to my apartment or remain there in the gazebo to discuss what they had just seen.
I felt bad for Wendy, the poor girl. As comforting as it is, perhaps, to briefly share my claustrophobic existence with another person, it is an insane world that I don't want to subject anyone to, not anyone who doesn't deserve it. We haven't had a single class, indoors or out, that hasn't been disrupted by a curiosity seeker, usually several of them. After my stalker blew up at us last week, Wendy gave me a class on refusing invitations.
I tend not to complain to my tutor about life in China per se - I like it here - but when the crowd gets so tight around us that I have to throw elbows just to finish my vocab quiz, I send a feeble smile across the table, by way of saying, "This is what it's like. The only thing to do is move quickly."
It started to rain, so we moved to a gazebo. After five minutes there, the bench we were sitting on was claimed by a young couple with amorous ends, so we moved to another gazebo. Before long, it began to fill up with gawkers.
"Okay," said Wendy, clearly agitated. "Just pretend it is you and me and no one else is here."
I've gotten good at that, so I did. But they kept coming. Strangers were seated on both sides of us, leaning over the banisters to get a good look at me, a parade of bikes and bao-bao men and babies and dogs that was as loud as it was endless. It got to where we were being muscled out of the gazebo by the very people coming in to watch us. Every half-sentence I produced was telephoned down to the end of the line and either applauded for its cuteness or dissected for its incorrectness. Wendy was on the verge of a panic attack.
"Maybe we will only have one hour of class today," she said, "since it is raining and there are too many people watching us."
When the street vendors showed up to hawk their wares, it was clear that things had escalated to an unacceptable level of ridiculousness.
"Maybe we can just cancel class today and meet tomorrow," Wendy said. I nodded.
We packed up our things and pushed our way to the street. The crowd lingered, unsure whether they should follow me back to my apartment or remain there in the gazebo to discuss what they had just seen.
I felt bad for Wendy, the poor girl. As comforting as it is, perhaps, to briefly share my claustrophobic existence with another person, it is an insane world that I don't want to subject anyone to, not anyone who doesn't deserve it. We haven't had a single class, indoors or out, that hasn't been disrupted by a curiosity seeker, usually several of them. After my stalker blew up at us last week, Wendy gave me a class on refusing invitations.
I tend not to complain to my tutor about life in China per se - I like it here - but when the crowd gets so tight around us that I have to throw elbows just to finish my vocab quiz, I send a feeble smile across the table, by way of saying, "This is what it's like. The only thing to do is move quickly."
Dislikes
(in order of appearance in consciousness)
1. styrofoam
2. chalk
3. chalkboards
4. insects
5. airplanes
6. shopping
7. the word "milk"
8. sugar in my coffee
9. too-much-coffee puke sensations
10. driving purposefully
11. unlocking doors
12. balloons
13. dragonflies mating in midair
14. clowns
15. casinos
16. poetry slams
17. cellular phones
18. fighting with road maps and newspapers
19. reading something I wrote several months ago
20. comedians
21. birds
22. fish
23. reptiles
24. street gravel in early spring
25. the way a basketball feels in my hands
26. thoughts of infinity
27. babies
28. the sound of typing
29. Nebraskan winters and everything associated with them
30. the sound of running water
31. climbing ladders
32. choking on fish bones
33. the soprano saxophone when played by anyone other than John Coltrane
34. televisions
35. lime green
36. amusement parks
37. the eyes of goats
38. the part of the neck where the voicebox is located
39. being impersonated
40. 90% of all movies I've seen
41. happy endings
42. passing semi trucks on the interstate
43. mathematics
44. not giving money to hobos
45. giving money to hobos
46. the smell of alcohol
47. liquor
48. when girls get together and scream
49. malls
50. meatballs
51. Council Bluffs, Iowa
52. ending an otherwise amusing anecdote with a sigh and the words "Good times"
53. mops
54. Nicholas Cage
55. being stared at by the faceless masses
56. any phrase that begins with "If looks could kill ..."
57. narratives written in the present tense
58. when someone says "just kidding" because they assume you haven't gotten the joke
59. anything that requires manual dexterity
60. the last hundred pages of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle
61. tying my shoes
62. billboards
63. overdubbed films
64. those thick glass tiles endemic to apartment buildings built in the 1970's
65. "What kind of music do you like?" "Oh, I like everything."
66. having to pee all the time
67. the smell of products ordered from the OTC Catalog
68. babysitters who tickle
69. mannequins
70. nightmares about teeth
71. the question "What do you want to do?"
72. the question "Where do you want to eat?"
73. North Platte, Nebraska
74. whoopie cushions
75. the buying and selling of Indulgences
76. objective truth
77. wind
78. finding myself on either end of the service industry
79. comic books
80. receiving a Matchbox Car when I have asked for a Transformer
81. the last three notes of "I Just Called to Say I Love You" by Stevie Wonder
82. perfection
83. having to rewrite something I have accidentally erased
84. offensive bumper stickers
85. cleaning my room
86. cooking
87. tourism
88. formal wear
89. elevators
90. escalators
91. grain elevators
92. shaving
93. Interstate 29
94. martinis
95. misspellings in marquee displays
96. gratuitous use and misuse of French by novelists
97. meatloaf
98. organized religion
99. pornography
100. pictures of lampreys
101. tattoos
102. "An Inconvenient Truth"
103. people who take a lot of pictures at social occasions
104. wearing a watch
105. swimming pools
106. long corridors
107. aliens
108. venetian blinds
109. the word "fag"
110. Bluetooths/Blueteeth
111. video games
112. discotheques
113. cracking one's knuckles
114. professional wrestling
115. men who spit
116. and the women who love them
1. styrofoam
2. chalk
3. chalkboards
4. insects
5. airplanes
6. shopping
7. the word "milk"
8. sugar in my coffee
9. too-much-coffee puke sensations
10. driving purposefully
11. unlocking doors
12. balloons
13. dragonflies mating in midair
14. clowns
15. casinos
16. poetry slams
17. cellular phones
18. fighting with road maps and newspapers
19. reading something I wrote several months ago
20. comedians
21. birds
22. fish
23. reptiles
24. street gravel in early spring
25. the way a basketball feels in my hands
26. thoughts of infinity
27. babies
28. the sound of typing
29. Nebraskan winters and everything associated with them
30. the sound of running water
31. climbing ladders
32. choking on fish bones
33. the soprano saxophone when played by anyone other than John Coltrane
34. televisions
35. lime green
36. amusement parks
37. the eyes of goats
38. the part of the neck where the voicebox is located
39. being impersonated
40. 90% of all movies I've seen
41. happy endings
42. passing semi trucks on the interstate
43. mathematics
44. not giving money to hobos
45. giving money to hobos
46. the smell of alcohol
47. liquor
48. when girls get together and scream
49. malls
50. meatballs
51. Council Bluffs, Iowa
52. ending an otherwise amusing anecdote with a sigh and the words "Good times"
53. mops
54. Nicholas Cage
55. being stared at by the faceless masses
56. any phrase that begins with "If looks could kill ..."
57. narratives written in the present tense
58. when someone says "just kidding" because they assume you haven't gotten the joke
59. anything that requires manual dexterity
60. the last hundred pages of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle
61. tying my shoes
62. billboards
63. overdubbed films
64. those thick glass tiles endemic to apartment buildings built in the 1970's
65. "What kind of music do you like?" "Oh, I like everything."
66. having to pee all the time
67. the smell of products ordered from the OTC Catalog
68. babysitters who tickle
69. mannequins
70. nightmares about teeth
71. the question "What do you want to do?"
72. the question "Where do you want to eat?"
73. North Platte, Nebraska
74. whoopie cushions
75. the buying and selling of Indulgences
76. objective truth
77. wind
78. finding myself on either end of the service industry
79. comic books
80. receiving a Matchbox Car when I have asked for a Transformer
81. the last three notes of "I Just Called to Say I Love You" by Stevie Wonder
82. perfection
83. having to rewrite something I have accidentally erased
84. offensive bumper stickers
85. cleaning my room
86. cooking
87. tourism
88. formal wear
89. elevators
90. escalators
91. grain elevators
92. shaving
93. Interstate 29
94. martinis
95. misspellings in marquee displays
96. gratuitous use and misuse of French by novelists
97. meatloaf
98. organized religion
99. pornography
100. pictures of lampreys
101. tattoos
102. "An Inconvenient Truth"
103. people who take a lot of pictures at social occasions
104. wearing a watch
105. swimming pools
106. long corridors
107. aliens
108. venetian blinds
109. the word "fag"
110. Bluetooths/Blueteeth
111. video games
112. discotheques
113. cracking one's knuckles
114. professional wrestling
115. men who spit
116. and the women who love them
Likes
(in order of appearance in consciousness)
1. the smell of coffee
2. coffee
3. rain
4. late night turboprop flights to Omaha
5. mid-1980's Chrysler products
6. the sound of far-off marching bands
7. the smell of far-off burning leaves
8. the smell of gasoline
9. the smell of secondhand smoke
10. Franziskaner and Weihenstephaner weissbiers
11. Rhodes pianos
12. the sound of a trap set played sans-instrumentation
13. women
14. women with glasses
15. several
16. things
17. pertaining
18. to
19. women
20. (omitted
21. for
22. propriety)
23. ...
24. ...
25. ...
26. ...
27. ...
28. ...
29. old Chinese men
30. old shoes
31. driving aimlessly
32. airports
33. cats
34. burritos drowned in green sauce
35. ownerless dogs who look like they've got places to go
36. emerging from the movie theater surprised to find it is still midday
37. the hum of a room full of vending machines
38. the smell of low-budget hotel hallways
39. the smell of churches
40. Christmas lights
41. Korean red bean stew
42. college campuses
43. darkrooms
44. positive remarks from doctors re: my pulse
45. the smell of books
46. waking up on Saturday thinking it's Friday before remembering it is Saturday
47. The Brothers Lounge on 38th and Farnam
48. choosing a point in the distance and walking there
49. the way cornfields swirl when you're passing them on the highway
50. the month of September
51. Old Spice deodorant
52. deserts
53. fog
54. cranberry juice
55. suit coats
56. boxer briefs
57. the lo-fi voices of bank tellers
58. pneumatic tube systems
59. dumbwaiters
60. the smell of sawdust
61. payphones
62. getting on the wrong bus
63. taking the stairs two at a time
64. the sweet, fetid smell of zoos
65. taking so long to finish a book you feel like you're living in it
66. being told off by Bob Dylan
67. thrusting my hands in my pockets
68. hooded sweatshirts
69. dissonance
70. harmony
71. dreaming
72. taking a crap
73. arriving in a small town where the high schoolers still sit on the hoods of their cars parked on Main Street on a Friday night
74. garlic
75. listening to pathological liars
76. trees lit up by streetlights
77. maps
78. my facial hair
79. the Berlin U-Bahn system
80. mustard
81. the sound of a band tuning in the moments before the lights come up
82. trains
83. garages
84. absurdly long showers
85. mammals
86. pet names
87. the delirium that comes after running six miles
88. photographs of microorganisms
89. the names of places on the arrivals/departures board
90. those upside-down-J-shaped metal pipes that stick up from the ground and every so often emit a mysterious steam
91. the diner at 3 AM
92. plucking leaves from low-hanging tree limbs
93. baseball diamonds
94. the fold-down seats in the back of a pickup truck
95. tollbooths
96. paintings of feudal scenes
97. mailboxes with their red flags up
98. miniature golf courses
99. losing track of time in a writing frenzy
100. talking to myself
101. kimchi
102. the shrieking of espresso machines
103. learning animal noises in foreign languages
104. tree sloths
105. new car smell
106. kicking rocks
107. organizing my bookshelf
108. microscopes
109. telescopes
110. root beer
111. picking my nose
112. Air Force bases
113. extremity numbness caused by an electric razor running up the back of your neck
114. the dobro
115. sandwiches
116. cicadas in the evening
117. and crickets at night
1. the smell of coffee
2. coffee
3. rain
4. late night turboprop flights to Omaha
5. mid-1980's Chrysler products
6. the sound of far-off marching bands
7. the smell of far-off burning leaves
8. the smell of gasoline
9. the smell of secondhand smoke
10. Franziskaner and Weihenstephaner weissbiers
11. Rhodes pianos
12. the sound of a trap set played sans-instrumentation
13. women
14. women with glasses
15. several
16. things
17. pertaining
18. to
19. women
20. (omitted
21. for
22. propriety)
23. ...
24. ...
25. ...
26. ...
27. ...
28. ...
29. old Chinese men
30. old shoes
31. driving aimlessly
32. airports
33. cats
34. burritos drowned in green sauce
35. ownerless dogs who look like they've got places to go
36. emerging from the movie theater surprised to find it is still midday
37. the hum of a room full of vending machines
38. the smell of low-budget hotel hallways
39. the smell of churches
40. Christmas lights
41. Korean red bean stew
42. college campuses
43. darkrooms
44. positive remarks from doctors re: my pulse
45. the smell of books
46. waking up on Saturday thinking it's Friday before remembering it is Saturday
47. The Brothers Lounge on 38th and Farnam
48. choosing a point in the distance and walking there
49. the way cornfields swirl when you're passing them on the highway
50. the month of September
51. Old Spice deodorant
52. deserts
53. fog
54. cranberry juice
55. suit coats
56. boxer briefs
57. the lo-fi voices of bank tellers
58. pneumatic tube systems
59. dumbwaiters
60. the smell of sawdust
61. payphones
62. getting on the wrong bus
63. taking the stairs two at a time
64. the sweet, fetid smell of zoos
65. taking so long to finish a book you feel like you're living in it
66. being told off by Bob Dylan
67. thrusting my hands in my pockets
68. hooded sweatshirts
69. dissonance
70. harmony
71. dreaming
72. taking a crap
73. arriving in a small town where the high schoolers still sit on the hoods of their cars parked on Main Street on a Friday night
74. garlic
75. listening to pathological liars
76. trees lit up by streetlights
77. maps
78. my facial hair
79. the Berlin U-Bahn system
80. mustard
81. the sound of a band tuning in the moments before the lights come up
82. trains
83. garages
84. absurdly long showers
85. mammals
86. pet names
87. the delirium that comes after running six miles
88. photographs of microorganisms
89. the names of places on the arrivals/departures board
90. those upside-down-J-shaped metal pipes that stick up from the ground and every so often emit a mysterious steam
91. the diner at 3 AM
92. plucking leaves from low-hanging tree limbs
93. baseball diamonds
94. the fold-down seats in the back of a pickup truck
95. tollbooths
96. paintings of feudal scenes
97. mailboxes with their red flags up
98. miniature golf courses
99. losing track of time in a writing frenzy
100. talking to myself
101. kimchi
102. the shrieking of espresso machines
103. learning animal noises in foreign languages
104. tree sloths
105. new car smell
106. kicking rocks
107. organizing my bookshelf
108. microscopes
109. telescopes
110. root beer
111. picking my nose
112. Air Force bases
113. extremity numbness caused by an electric razor running up the back of your neck
114. the dobro
115. sandwiches
116. cicadas in the evening
117. and crickets at night
Friday, October 23, 2009
Pannonica
I have often looked upon life and thought: if one's lifetime is all one knows of eternity, then life is an eternity. There remains time for endless revisions and reincarnations. I think of Dylan and Bowie. I think of Orlando, though I read that in another lifetime and cannot remember the book, just that one can play infinite roles and both genders and a multitude of selves foreign to oneself if one allows oneself.
I think of myself ten years ago and myself ten minutes ago and see them as different novels written by different authors.
I think about the next sentence and what it holds in store for me. Perhaps I have drank too much, perhaps I will vomit. Or perhaps the gate to my apartment will be locked and I will have to beg entrance from the nightwatchman. And perhaps he will not have the key.
Then I focus on now, which is five shish-kebab sticks and two cigarette butts smoldering on an aluminum tray, the beer I cannot finish, the owners of the restaurant waiting for me to leave so they can close, the shouting of drunks pushing each other into the back of a taxi - and this moment, too, is an eternity.
There seems to be no solution - rational or otherwise - to the problem of time but to concede that the moment is infinite, a lifetime moreso, and eternity even more infinite than the both of them combined.
And wonderfully, all of it is as fleeting as the cigarette given me by the nightwatchman, now smoldering on the aluminum tray with the five shish-kebabs and the moment that passed away with them.
I think of myself ten years ago and myself ten minutes ago and see them as different novels written by different authors.
I think about the next sentence and what it holds in store for me. Perhaps I have drank too much, perhaps I will vomit. Or perhaps the gate to my apartment will be locked and I will have to beg entrance from the nightwatchman. And perhaps he will not have the key.
Then I focus on now, which is five shish-kebab sticks and two cigarette butts smoldering on an aluminum tray, the beer I cannot finish, the owners of the restaurant waiting for me to leave so they can close, the shouting of drunks pushing each other into the back of a taxi - and this moment, too, is an eternity.
There seems to be no solution - rational or otherwise - to the problem of time but to concede that the moment is infinite, a lifetime moreso, and eternity even more infinite than the both of them combined.
And wonderfully, all of it is as fleeting as the cigarette given me by the nightwatchman, now smoldering on the aluminum tray with the five shish-kebabs and the moment that passed away with them.
Schizoglot
Chinese lessons have begun. For want of a classroom, my tutor and I meet in the security guard vestibule by the main gate of China West Normal University. When the pseudo-police come in for smokes and tea, they gather round the desk to watch me prattle along in rudimentary Mandarin. My efforts seem to perplex them: this full-grown man can bullshit 'til the maos come home but he can't even pronounce the word "mama." In America, we are used to having our language butchered by foreigners and Americans alike. Here, the illiterate are so few and far between that I imagine the general population lumps me in with the hopelessly poor and mentally retarded.
And yet the people I meet are delighted that I have bothered to learn their language - the most widely spoken in the world - at all. Only the surliest of cabbies will take my money without telling me how bang my Chinese is. Whether it really is all that bang is an open question. I possess a knack for language, but for the moment I have the vocabulary of a Chinese fruit fly. And the Chinese will compliment just about any foreigner on his language skills, whether they exist or not. But even in Chongqing, the Starbucks baristas are stunned by a westerner who can order a small black coffee without choking on his tongue.
I have the unfortunate reputation of being a polyglot. But I am not. If anything, I am a schizoglot. I am functionally illiterate in five foreign languages and a bluthering idiot in my native tongue. I know the word for "whore" in all five of those languages, but I'm not sure I could find a bathroom if my life depended on it. I do not believe I am fluent in anything.
My attempts at learning language have been mostly frustrating and wholly unsuccessful. It is hard to find anyone, for one, who doesn't speak better English than your piddling amount of whatever language it is you hope to learn. So you wind up speaking English with your language tutors. Plus, at least for me, the gumption to learn a language evaporates once I am surrounded by it. In Germany, I studied Polish. In Poland, I studied German. In Korea, I studied everything but Korean.
Wendy is my Mandarin tutor. She is a graduate student majoring in Teaching Mandarin as a Foreign Language - TMFL? She has as much gumption to teach me as I have to learn. When we first met, I cautiously posed six hours a week, fearing that I'd jumped the gun, that it was too much for her hectic schedule. "Why not eight?" she asked. "Or more? Any time you're bored, call me and we'll have class."
Well, then. After my first month in Nanchong, I feared that I would leave China with less Chinese than I had when I came, that I would curl up in a ball on my pleather sofa watching 2001: A Space Odyssey until every muscle and brain cell in my body atrophied and expired. But now it seems I will leave this place fluent in Mandarin, all because I bothered to answer a phone call from an unknown number on a rainy Thursday evening as I was walking back to my apartment with a bowl of ramen.
I have never gotten to the point with a language where I felt the flaps go up and the whole mother start to lift off into the fluent air. Perhaps I came close with Spanish, at 3 AM on some wild night a few days before I left Mexico. It is hard to tell with Chinese. Mandarin is an abyss of a language, a tongue so different from our own that you could lose a lifetime in studying it. But there are moments - when I've slept well and I've slurped down just the right amount of coffee - when I can feel the vertical lift pulling me skyward.
There are good days and better days. On the better days, I wake up and can barely lift my head because it is so heavy with fresh neural connections. Forgive me for referencing There Will Be Blood two posts in a row, but it's a bit like the scene where H.W. is learning sign language: I bitch to my tutor about what's chapping my ass. She listens and, every so often, corrects me.
On the good days, I feel like I'm making no progress at all and I can see myself frozen lizardlike on the side of a plateau covered in Chinese hieroglyphs that stretches up into the heavens and beyond.
There is the added difficulty that the people around me are not speaking Mandarin, but Sichuanese. As far as dialects go, Mandarin and Sichuanese are fairly similar. But in essence, I am learning Queen's English in a place that speaks Creole. The more Mandarin I learn, the less I understand the cab driver. I would like to master both tongues, but I am uncertain as to whether I should learn to speak like an anchorman before I go out and get myself dirty, or whether I should go the Pygmalion route and learn to be a Cockney first.
Like China itself, Chinese grew overcrowded with words, so they started stacking them vertically into tones. Ma, depending on your intonation, can mean horse, mom, morphine, numb, grasshopper, ant, dragonfly, toad, or leprosy. Liang kuai can mean two bucks, or nice and cool. And so on. This is the main distinction between Mandarin and Sichuanese: two of the four tones are reversed and the other two are completely different. On top of that, the Sichuanese pronounce things strangely. The numbers four and ten, as well as the verbs to be, to eat, and to die sound exactly the same to the untrained ear. So the sentence "It's not fourteen, it's forty-four," easily parsable in Mandarin, sounds something like "Bu suh suh suh, suh suh suh suh."
But for now, I focus on the basics. Today I broke down giggling after I asked Wendy the words for number one and number two. On Chinese toilets, I have seen them represented by the symbol for small and the symbol for big.
"So you want to know pee and poop?" she asked. I bit my tongue and nodded. Then I lost it again. Then I recovered.
"Sorry," I told her. "I am a child."
"We say xiao hao for take a pee and da hao for take a poop."
"Little number and big number. We say the same thing in English, sort of," I said. "Thank you. I'll never forget them."
And I won't. To your tutor's chagrin, though you may forget the words for Christmas and autumn and environment, you will never forget pee and poop and an endless litany of other crudities that you might recite on your deathbed, should you so happen to expire in China.
And yet the people I meet are delighted that I have bothered to learn their language - the most widely spoken in the world - at all. Only the surliest of cabbies will take my money without telling me how bang my Chinese is. Whether it really is all that bang is an open question. I possess a knack for language, but for the moment I have the vocabulary of a Chinese fruit fly. And the Chinese will compliment just about any foreigner on his language skills, whether they exist or not. But even in Chongqing, the Starbucks baristas are stunned by a westerner who can order a small black coffee without choking on his tongue.
I have the unfortunate reputation of being a polyglot. But I am not. If anything, I am a schizoglot. I am functionally illiterate in five foreign languages and a bluthering idiot in my native tongue. I know the word for "whore" in all five of those languages, but I'm not sure I could find a bathroom if my life depended on it. I do not believe I am fluent in anything.
My attempts at learning language have been mostly frustrating and wholly unsuccessful. It is hard to find anyone, for one, who doesn't speak better English than your piddling amount of whatever language it is you hope to learn. So you wind up speaking English with your language tutors. Plus, at least for me, the gumption to learn a language evaporates once I am surrounded by it. In Germany, I studied Polish. In Poland, I studied German. In Korea, I studied everything but Korean.
Wendy is my Mandarin tutor. She is a graduate student majoring in Teaching Mandarin as a Foreign Language - TMFL? She has as much gumption to teach me as I have to learn. When we first met, I cautiously posed six hours a week, fearing that I'd jumped the gun, that it was too much for her hectic schedule. "Why not eight?" she asked. "Or more? Any time you're bored, call me and we'll have class."
Well, then. After my first month in Nanchong, I feared that I would leave China with less Chinese than I had when I came, that I would curl up in a ball on my pleather sofa watching 2001: A Space Odyssey until every muscle and brain cell in my body atrophied and expired. But now it seems I will leave this place fluent in Mandarin, all because I bothered to answer a phone call from an unknown number on a rainy Thursday evening as I was walking back to my apartment with a bowl of ramen.
I have never gotten to the point with a language where I felt the flaps go up and the whole mother start to lift off into the fluent air. Perhaps I came close with Spanish, at 3 AM on some wild night a few days before I left Mexico. It is hard to tell with Chinese. Mandarin is an abyss of a language, a tongue so different from our own that you could lose a lifetime in studying it. But there are moments - when I've slept well and I've slurped down just the right amount of coffee - when I can feel the vertical lift pulling me skyward.
There are good days and better days. On the better days, I wake up and can barely lift my head because it is so heavy with fresh neural connections. Forgive me for referencing There Will Be Blood two posts in a row, but it's a bit like the scene where H.W. is learning sign language: I bitch to my tutor about what's chapping my ass. She listens and, every so often, corrects me.
On the good days, I feel like I'm making no progress at all and I can see myself frozen lizardlike on the side of a plateau covered in Chinese hieroglyphs that stretches up into the heavens and beyond.
There is the added difficulty that the people around me are not speaking Mandarin, but Sichuanese. As far as dialects go, Mandarin and Sichuanese are fairly similar. But in essence, I am learning Queen's English in a place that speaks Creole. The more Mandarin I learn, the less I understand the cab driver. I would like to master both tongues, but I am uncertain as to whether I should learn to speak like an anchorman before I go out and get myself dirty, or whether I should go the Pygmalion route and learn to be a Cockney first.
Like China itself, Chinese grew overcrowded with words, so they started stacking them vertically into tones. Ma, depending on your intonation, can mean horse, mom, morphine, numb, grasshopper, ant, dragonfly, toad, or leprosy. Liang kuai can mean two bucks, or nice and cool. And so on. This is the main distinction between Mandarin and Sichuanese: two of the four tones are reversed and the other two are completely different. On top of that, the Sichuanese pronounce things strangely. The numbers four and ten, as well as the verbs to be, to eat, and to die sound exactly the same to the untrained ear. So the sentence "It's not fourteen, it's forty-four," easily parsable in Mandarin, sounds something like "Bu suh suh suh, suh suh suh suh."
But for now, I focus on the basics. Today I broke down giggling after I asked Wendy the words for number one and number two. On Chinese toilets, I have seen them represented by the symbol for small and the symbol for big.
"So you want to know pee and poop?" she asked. I bit my tongue and nodded. Then I lost it again. Then I recovered.
"Sorry," I told her. "I am a child."
"We say xiao hao for take a pee and da hao for take a poop."
"Little number and big number. We say the same thing in English, sort of," I said. "Thank you. I'll never forget them."
And I won't. To your tutor's chagrin, though you may forget the words for Christmas and autumn and environment, you will never forget pee and poop and an endless litany of other crudities that you might recite on your deathbed, should you so happen to expire in China.
Cellphone's Dead
My least favorite invention of the modern era is the cellular phone. With regard to cell phones, I am a luddite. Not that I don't own one, or use it as an alarm clock. But unless you're my lady friend, I may not answer your calls for weeks at a time. I apologize. I enjoy solitude, I suppose, but I think it has more to do with keeping focused on my surroundings. I like to concentrate on the person I'm talking to, the book I'm reading, or the fishy-flavored eggplant I'm eating. Answering the phone, for me, is like making a Monty Python scene jump: and now for something completely different ...
In China, I have come close to pitching my phone in the lake. If you were to browse my contacts list, you would find five or six good friends, two or three coworkers, and upwards of forty people I have no recollection of whatsoever. They have names like Hill and Lemon and Eros and Pumpkin and Circle and Dynasty. These are the names of Host Country Nationals, in peacecorpsspeak, who at one time or another approached me on the street for English lessons. I am much too polite to deny anyone my phone number, but if I were to answer all of their calls, I would turn into an itinerant pro bono English-teaching hobo. Unfortunately, my aloofness often comes back to bite me in the ass, as was the case with my most recent stalker. We'll call her Sunshine.
Sunshine got my number by interrupting last Monday's Mandarin class to ask for it. She then followed me for several blocks and waited for my tutor to leave so she could ask me for English lessons, and so on. Over the next week, she called me fifteen times a day, starting at 7:30 AM and persisting until ten at night. I had managed to avoid her until yesterday, when she materialized in the street and followed me and my tutor on our after-class walk. She didn't say a word, just lurked behind us, waiting. After parting ways with my tutor, I ran into the Mennonites. We exchanged fist pounds. Then Sunshine made her move.
"Excuse me," she said to the Mennonites. "I want to be Keith friend, but he never, never, never pick up he phone!"
The Mennonites chuckled.
"Yeah," said Phil. "He's a shady fella when it comes to phones."
"So, I don't want to be Keith friend anymore. I want to be you friend."
She asked them when they were free to teach her English and somehow, in their smooth West Coast way, the Mennonites dodged her. They invited me to dinner and, already having a Daniel Plainview afternoon, I politely declined.
"Thanks. But I think I need to get back to my apartment," I said, "and away from these ... people."
I took ten paces in the opposite direction before I heard my name.
"Keith, do you have free time now?"
It was Sunshine.
"I think I'd better go home and rest," I said.
"How about tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow I have class."
"How about after class?"
"Perhaps," I said.
"You had better pick up your phone."
"I will."
But I didn't, I haven't, and I won't. It sits there on the desk in front of me, rattling and jingling and buzzing its way towards the ledge, where it looks like it might drop into the trash can if Sunshine calls again. And there she is. And there it goes. Nothing but net.
In China, I have come close to pitching my phone in the lake. If you were to browse my contacts list, you would find five or six good friends, two or three coworkers, and upwards of forty people I have no recollection of whatsoever. They have names like Hill and Lemon and Eros and Pumpkin and Circle and Dynasty. These are the names of Host Country Nationals, in peacecorpsspeak, who at one time or another approached me on the street for English lessons. I am much too polite to deny anyone my phone number, but if I were to answer all of their calls, I would turn into an itinerant pro bono English-teaching hobo. Unfortunately, my aloofness often comes back to bite me in the ass, as was the case with my most recent stalker. We'll call her Sunshine.
Sunshine got my number by interrupting last Monday's Mandarin class to ask for it. She then followed me for several blocks and waited for my tutor to leave so she could ask me for English lessons, and so on. Over the next week, she called me fifteen times a day, starting at 7:30 AM and persisting until ten at night. I had managed to avoid her until yesterday, when she materialized in the street and followed me and my tutor on our after-class walk. She didn't say a word, just lurked behind us, waiting. After parting ways with my tutor, I ran into the Mennonites. We exchanged fist pounds. Then Sunshine made her move.
"Excuse me," she said to the Mennonites. "I want to be Keith friend, but he never, never, never pick up he phone!"
The Mennonites chuckled.
"Yeah," said Phil. "He's a shady fella when it comes to phones."
"So, I don't want to be Keith friend anymore. I want to be you friend."
She asked them when they were free to teach her English and somehow, in their smooth West Coast way, the Mennonites dodged her. They invited me to dinner and, already having a Daniel Plainview afternoon, I politely declined.
"Thanks. But I think I need to get back to my apartment," I said, "and away from these ... people."
I took ten paces in the opposite direction before I heard my name.
"Keith, do you have free time now?"
It was Sunshine.
"I think I'd better go home and rest," I said.
"How about tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow I have class."
"How about after class?"
"Perhaps," I said.
"You had better pick up your phone."
"I will."
But I didn't, I haven't, and I won't. It sits there on the desk in front of me, rattling and jingling and buzzing its way towards the ledge, where it looks like it might drop into the trash can if Sunshine calls again. And there she is. And there it goes. Nothing but net.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
English Cornered
There have been two earthquakes in Sichuan since my arrival and I have slept through both of them. Last night's tremor was a 4.9 on the Richter Scale. I have no idea what that means, but the rubble that covers my living room floor does not appear to have been disrupted, nor has it somehow organized itself into a less entropic state.
Tonight was my English Corner debut, so after work I was picked up by the wonderful (and wordy) Mr. Xie and taken out for a twelve-course seafood dinner at a restaurant overlooking the river that oozes like a nosebleed through the middle of Nanchong. Ours was a party of twelve, so Mr. Xie dubbed it The Last Supper.
"And he," Xie said, indicating Mr. Liu, "is Judas!"
Mr. Liu, baffled, laughed politely.
"Do I get to be The Big Guy?" I asked. "I'm the only one here with any facial hair to speak of."
"I am only joking," said Xie. "It is just a joke!"
And I sat, as I often do in this country, wondering where I'd missed the boat of Chinese humor.
Someone ordered beers for the group but nobody wanted them, so they found their way to me. Everyone else drank milk.
"Are you capable of ingesting two Yanjing beers prior to English Corner, Mr. Keith?" asked Mr. Xie.
"Dangran," I said. "Of course. I'm Irish. And French."
Those beers would come in handy. I was about to be thrown to the Romans.
Xie drove me back to the old campus. He wove through some back alleys, puttered up over a hill, and parked his Chevy on a basketball court. I could see students, lots of them, milling around in the dark. I stepped out of the car.
Applause. Screaming. The canned "wahhhh!" that you hear on Chinese game shows. The crowd swallowed me up, forming a tremendous circle of which I was the center. In the dim and distant flood lighting, I could see hundreds of faces, all of them turned towards me.
"Good to see all of you," I shouted.
"NICE TO MEET YOU TOO!!!!!"
"Right. Well. My name is Keith. I'm the new English teacher in town ..."
For the next two hours, one student after another assaulted me with one question after another. My brain did backflips translating my answers into Special English. Because people were continuously devoured by the crowd, I was asked the same things over and over again:
1. Do you like China? (7)
2. Tell us something about American culture. (5)
3. Do you have a girlfriend? (4)
4. Do you like Chinese girls? (4)
5. Do you like Chinese food? (3)
(several others tied at three)
Just once, I wish someone would knock me out with a hard-hitting Stephen Sackur question. Mr. Keith: don't you think the suit coat-tshirt-jeans ensemble you're wearing is a little passe? Your thoughts on being at the center of a 200-person mob on a basketball court at 9 PM, sir? Your hair: are you trying to look like Phil Spector or is the resemblance merely an unfortunate accident? But in the meantime, yes, I like China just fine and the kung pao chicken is delicious.
By the end of it, my voice was thin and brittle, but Mr. Xie still had the pipes to belt out Careless Whisper on the car ride home.
"You are knowing this song? By WHAM!"
"Yessir," I said. "It's a classic."
"Yes. I am, how you say, nostalgic."
Me too, Mr. Xie. Nostalgic for a time when I could sink into that sax riff like a hot tub, a time well before I had eaten of the apple of irony.
Tonight was my English Corner debut, so after work I was picked up by the wonderful (and wordy) Mr. Xie and taken out for a twelve-course seafood dinner at a restaurant overlooking the river that oozes like a nosebleed through the middle of Nanchong. Ours was a party of twelve, so Mr. Xie dubbed it The Last Supper.
"And he," Xie said, indicating Mr. Liu, "is Judas!"
Mr. Liu, baffled, laughed politely.
"Do I get to be The Big Guy?" I asked. "I'm the only one here with any facial hair to speak of."
"I am only joking," said Xie. "It is just a joke!"
And I sat, as I often do in this country, wondering where I'd missed the boat of Chinese humor.
Someone ordered beers for the group but nobody wanted them, so they found their way to me. Everyone else drank milk.
"Are you capable of ingesting two Yanjing beers prior to English Corner, Mr. Keith?" asked Mr. Xie.
"Dangran," I said. "Of course. I'm Irish. And French."
Those beers would come in handy. I was about to be thrown to the Romans.
Xie drove me back to the old campus. He wove through some back alleys, puttered up over a hill, and parked his Chevy on a basketball court. I could see students, lots of them, milling around in the dark. I stepped out of the car.
Applause. Screaming. The canned "wahhhh!" that you hear on Chinese game shows. The crowd swallowed me up, forming a tremendous circle of which I was the center. In the dim and distant flood lighting, I could see hundreds of faces, all of them turned towards me.
"Good to see all of you," I shouted.
"NICE TO MEET YOU TOO!!!!!"
"Right. Well. My name is Keith. I'm the new English teacher in town ..."
For the next two hours, one student after another assaulted me with one question after another. My brain did backflips translating my answers into Special English. Because people were continuously devoured by the crowd, I was asked the same things over and over again:
1. Do you like China? (7)
2. Tell us something about American culture. (5)
3. Do you have a girlfriend? (4)
4. Do you like Chinese girls? (4)
5. Do you like Chinese food? (3)
(several others tied at three)
Just once, I wish someone would knock me out with a hard-hitting Stephen Sackur question. Mr. Keith: don't you think the suit coat-tshirt-jeans ensemble you're wearing is a little passe? Your thoughts on being at the center of a 200-person mob on a basketball court at 9 PM, sir? Your hair: are you trying to look like Phil Spector or is the resemblance merely an unfortunate accident? But in the meantime, yes, I like China just fine and the kung pao chicken is delicious.
By the end of it, my voice was thin and brittle, but Mr. Xie still had the pipes to belt out Careless Whisper on the car ride home.
"You are knowing this song? By WHAM!"
"Yessir," I said. "It's a classic."
"Yes. I am, how you say, nostalgic."
Me too, Mr. Xie. Nostalgic for a time when I could sink into that sax riff like a hot tub, a time well before I had eaten of the apple of irony.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Revivencias
In Mexico, the gringa and I had the good fortune of befriending Anna Paula and Flavio, who had a car. So on Saturday morning, a yellow Volkswagen Bug would pull up in front of the house, we'd throw our things in the back and hit the carretera for destinations more scenic than Zamora. We took several of these trips, but I am unable to separate one from another. It may as well have been a single month-long road bender.
I loved Mexico for how Mexican it was. We'd roll through some indigenous town late at night, pass slowly alongside the square - little more than a readymade gazebo and some mariachis - see the expressionless old men in panchos and sombreros staring out from doorways, the fat little kids with popsicles frozen to their tongues. Flavio would roll down the window and bark at the locals and they would make the sign of the cross. Then we'd find the carretera again and I would lie awake with my face pressed to the window, watching the oncoming headlights and wincing with every whoosh.
We went to Morelia a week after the bombings, walked around the square and the cordoned-off area where the blasts took place, now a shrine to the departed. A tour guide gave us the history of the cathedral. I remember feeling more bored than I've ever felt in my life. I kept shifting from foot to foot and looking for a way out. Then, suddenly, the urge to vomit: I tapped Anna Paula on the shoulder and said, "Necesito ... agua." When I came to, a doctor with a little black bag was kneeled over me.
"Do you suffer from epilepsy?" he asked.
"No, Señor Doctor," I said.
"Do you suffer from depression?"
"No."
"Have you been drinking?"
"Not much."
"Are you on any drugs or medication?"
"Not that I know of."
The doctor shrugged and Flavio helped me to my feet. I stared up at the cathedral and the Virgen de Guadalupe watched me as I staggered away. After all these years, was I still Catholic? Was it a vision that I'd had? I once read that Freud always passed out when The Pyramids came up. No, I decided, it wasn't the mysterium tremendum; I just needed a Coke.
We stayed with some guitar jocks in the heavily graffitied part of town. They played Paranoid Android. I sat google-eyed and entranced. They wanted me, el gringo del amor, to play something for them, but it was three hours and several shots of tequila before I served up a sloppy rendition of People Are Strange by The Doors. There weren't enough beds, so we jockeyed for floor space. And in the morning, making use of the markerboard that was propped up against the wall, the gringa and I taught an ad hoc class of English for Perverts. Our students were eager to put the new material to use.
"So, this 'taint' is ... cómo se dice ... entre ... be-tuín the ... and the ... "
We went to Tangancicuaro for Día de la Independencia. We were going to see something they called The Castle. I've always been an inattentive tourist, so when a crowd started gathering in the square around midnight, I wandered off and made merry with the locals until Anna Paula grabbed me by the arm and dragged me back into the thick of it all. "You need to see this," she said.
And I'm glad I did. The Castle was a three-story building made of fireworks. After several unsuccessful attempts at lighting the fuse, there was suddenly a trail of sparks and a delicious hissing sound. The crowd hooted and aieeeeee-ed. What happened next is too complex to describe, but a network of pulleys and levers and whirling pinwheels conveyed the flame slowly upward until, finally, inexplicably, impossibly, a little spaceship at the very top lit up and went warbling off into the night. I stood there agape.
"See, cabron!" shouted Anna Paula, slugging me in the breadbasket. "You were going to miss it!"
En route to Zirahuén, we stopped at a gas station. I stretched my legs and jumped around in place. A woman and her son were sitting out on the curb with a golden retriever between them. I approached with my hand outstretched.
"Don't touch him," said the woman. "He is evil."
"Aww, but he's ..."
I took another step and the dog transformed, bore its fangs, growled, and made a flying leap for my crotch. I whirled to the side just in the nick and the beast took a healthy bite out of my thigh. Amidst much screaming and barking, I hightailed it in the opposite direction. The Mexicans were wailing, "Guero, guero, ay no, guero!" I found refuge in the bathroom, closing and locking the stall behind me while the dog's meaty paws thundered against the door. Somewhere outside, I could hear Flavio laughing himself to exhaustion.
At the risk of sounding wishy-washy and existentialist, most of the Mexican adventure takes place on the carretera itself: passing the roadside shrines, the crucifixes and Virgens planted in the rockpiles, the burnt-out husks of abandoned cars; stopping while a herd of wild cattle washes over the road, weaving around a dam of tree limbs lain down as an offering of protest by the indigenous poor, a warning of some imminent catastrophe that can't get at you because you are in the back of a yellow Volkswagen Bug with Radiohead's Amnesiac on the stereo, and Flavio is laughing and barking like a maniac, and Anna Paula is feeding you cigarettes, and the lot of you are splitting a road beer, eager to get where you're headed but quietly hopeful that you will never arrive.
I loved Mexico for how Mexican it was. We'd roll through some indigenous town late at night, pass slowly alongside the square - little more than a readymade gazebo and some mariachis - see the expressionless old men in panchos and sombreros staring out from doorways, the fat little kids with popsicles frozen to their tongues. Flavio would roll down the window and bark at the locals and they would make the sign of the cross. Then we'd find the carretera again and I would lie awake with my face pressed to the window, watching the oncoming headlights and wincing with every whoosh.
We went to Morelia a week after the bombings, walked around the square and the cordoned-off area where the blasts took place, now a shrine to the departed. A tour guide gave us the history of the cathedral. I remember feeling more bored than I've ever felt in my life. I kept shifting from foot to foot and looking for a way out. Then, suddenly, the urge to vomit: I tapped Anna Paula on the shoulder and said, "Necesito ... agua." When I came to, a doctor with a little black bag was kneeled over me.
"Do you suffer from epilepsy?" he asked.
"No, Señor Doctor," I said.
"Do you suffer from depression?"
"No."
"Have you been drinking?"
"Not much."
"Are you on any drugs or medication?"
"Not that I know of."
The doctor shrugged and Flavio helped me to my feet. I stared up at the cathedral and the Virgen de Guadalupe watched me as I staggered away. After all these years, was I still Catholic? Was it a vision that I'd had? I once read that Freud always passed out when The Pyramids came up. No, I decided, it wasn't the mysterium tremendum; I just needed a Coke.
We stayed with some guitar jocks in the heavily graffitied part of town. They played Paranoid Android. I sat google-eyed and entranced. They wanted me, el gringo del amor, to play something for them, but it was three hours and several shots of tequila before I served up a sloppy rendition of People Are Strange by The Doors. There weren't enough beds, so we jockeyed for floor space. And in the morning, making use of the markerboard that was propped up against the wall, the gringa and I taught an ad hoc class of English for Perverts. Our students were eager to put the new material to use.
"So, this 'taint' is ... cómo se dice ... entre ... be-tuín the ... and the ... "
We went to Tangancicuaro for Día de la Independencia. We were going to see something they called The Castle. I've always been an inattentive tourist, so when a crowd started gathering in the square around midnight, I wandered off and made merry with the locals until Anna Paula grabbed me by the arm and dragged me back into the thick of it all. "You need to see this," she said.
And I'm glad I did. The Castle was a three-story building made of fireworks. After several unsuccessful attempts at lighting the fuse, there was suddenly a trail of sparks and a delicious hissing sound. The crowd hooted and aieeeeee-ed. What happened next is too complex to describe, but a network of pulleys and levers and whirling pinwheels conveyed the flame slowly upward until, finally, inexplicably, impossibly, a little spaceship at the very top lit up and went warbling off into the night. I stood there agape.
"See, cabron!" shouted Anna Paula, slugging me in the breadbasket. "You were going to miss it!"
En route to Zirahuén, we stopped at a gas station. I stretched my legs and jumped around in place. A woman and her son were sitting out on the curb with a golden retriever between them. I approached with my hand outstretched.
"Don't touch him," said the woman. "He is evil."
"Aww, but he's ..."
I took another step and the dog transformed, bore its fangs, growled, and made a flying leap for my crotch. I whirled to the side just in the nick and the beast took a healthy bite out of my thigh. Amidst much screaming and barking, I hightailed it in the opposite direction. The Mexicans were wailing, "Guero, guero, ay no, guero!" I found refuge in the bathroom, closing and locking the stall behind me while the dog's meaty paws thundered against the door. Somewhere outside, I could hear Flavio laughing himself to exhaustion.
At the risk of sounding wishy-washy and existentialist, most of the Mexican adventure takes place on the carretera itself: passing the roadside shrines, the crucifixes and Virgens planted in the rockpiles, the burnt-out husks of abandoned cars; stopping while a herd of wild cattle washes over the road, weaving around a dam of tree limbs lain down as an offering of protest by the indigenous poor, a warning of some imminent catastrophe that can't get at you because you are in the back of a yellow Volkswagen Bug with Radiohead's Amnesiac on the stereo, and Flavio is laughing and barking like a maniac, and Anna Paula is feeding you cigarettes, and the lot of you are splitting a road beer, eager to get where you're headed but quietly hopeful that you will never arrive.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Lush Life
Because I have not yet mastered the art of smoking and drinking coffee in my sleep, I wake up in a foul mood. The earth's gravity seems to have multiplied in strength and after a wild and fecund night, the crickets in my bedroom have multiplied their numbers. I light a Shuangxi and dump several spoonfuls of Nescafe into a water bottle and all over the kitchen floor. Coffee and cigarettes get me to the shower, which drizzles a leaden stream of lukewarm onto my scalp. My toilet is a few inches from the shower head, so I multitask. I bellow along with the Johnny Hartman/John Coltrane album I bellow along with every morning, but my morning voice doesn't reach high or low enough, so I sing the verses and choruses in different octaves. As I sit and shit and shower and bellow, the lesson plan for the week's classes is mitosisizin' in my brain.
I teach seven classes with 50+ students apiece and I am a volunteer, so photocopies are not financially prudent. That means I need to come up with a lot of speaking activities and deliver them like Barack Obama on benzedrine. Luckily, I teach the same lesson seven times a week, so a single flash of inspiration is enough to get by. I plan for my lessons the way a snail might if it had the cognitive capacity to teach Oral English: I start with a pebble and build a spiral of saliva around it as the week goes by until, by Friday, I have a spit-shined, well-rehearsed presentation that makes me feel like a real, actual teacher of sorts.
Today is the second run-through of "Bon Appetit," my guide to American cuisine and dining etiquette, so the lesson is only a sketch and my scripted jokes will be jittery and Bob Newhartesque. As I walk into the classroom, there is a chorus of oooooohs and a brief round of applause. I look around and remember that I am wearing my suit coat. I take a bow. Then I bust out my jug of coffee and set it on the podium and there is another long ooooooh. I explain that the American professor is fueled by caffeine, that without it he is a zombie. And zombielike, I guzzle some coffee and start writing on the board.
Ideally, an Oral English class should be an interactive vaudeville act. The trick is duping your students into believing that they are actually caught in the scenario you have presented them with. If they are supposed to be dining out at Red Lobster, they should be able to hear Savage Garden piped down from the styrofoam ceiling tiles. If they are supposed to be the United Nations, the Chinese contingent should loathe the Japanese contingent with an undying contempt, and vice versa. In short, you must suspend all disbelief, otherwise your students will rote memorize a handful of stock phrases and mumble them to each other like little lobotomized HAL 9000s. Setting the stage for a productive class is a lot like writing the start of a novel: there must be background, complications, and some sort of impetus to push the whole thing forward.
Today's class goes well. I briefly explain the American tipping system and demonstrate an untippable waiter.
"Whaddya want?" I snap, putting on my surliest Waffle House sass. My pen twitches at the ready. The poor girl giggles and hides her face in her hands.
"You ready to order or what?"
"Yes. I will have the chicken."
"Chicken soup? Chicken salad? Chicken nuggets? Chicken sandwich? Fried chicken? Chicken a la king? Kung pao chicken? General Tso's chicken?!"
By now she is so embarrassed that it looks like she is having an out-of-body experience. Thankfully, my phone rings: one of my stalkers calling for the sixth time that morning.
"Hang on. It's my girlfriend."
I dart into the kitchen, fake a kissyface conversation, and swagger back to Table 9.
"So. What'll it be?"
"I'll take the fried chicken."
I storm backstage and bark at the short order cooks. Then, I return bearing a half-rotten apple which, through the power of mass delusion, is starting to look more and more like a drumstick. I stumble over my shoelace and send the apple flying into the crowd.
"Oops. There goes your chicken."
By then, my students are rearing to dine-and-dash, so I turn it over to them for the rest of class. I am pleased with the results and the following dialogue almost makes me weep with satisfaction:
Waitress: Here is your food.
Customer: Excuse me, ma'am, but there is a fly in my soup.
Waitress: Impossible!
Customer: Look. You see it! I would like to speak with the manager.
Manager: [approaches with a clipboard] What seems to be the problem?
Customer: There is a fly in my soup.
Manager: Don't worry about it. Your dinner is on the house.
Customer: Thanks. And could you do something about my waitress?
Manager: What would you like me to do?
Customer: Fire her immediately.
Manager: Okay, I will fire her at once.
Of course, part of the reason these roleplays are so amusing is that they are painfully awkward and quite a ways off the mark. But accuracy matters little to me. Every morning as I walk to the bus that takes me to the campus across town, I hear English majors in the bushes, reciting speeches by Henry Kissinger. From a young age, Chinese students are given the task of memorizing the entirety of the English language, with the end result that, after twelve years of English, they can barely muster a "Hello" without second-guessing themselves. My classes are about giving Chinese students the cajones to use the language, and in order to grow a pair, they need a heavily padded environment, an English laboratory in which they are free to mix and mismatch nouns and verbs and adjectives until they find the combinations that make sense.
In China, the expectations for us foreign teachers are high. We are widely believed to possess the ability to heal rhotacism with the laying on of hands. Hell, I used to think I had that power, but over the years I have set more modest goals for myself. And I would love to talk about them, but night has fallen on China. The young emperors at the internet cafe are yawning and removing their headsets. The rats have come out to slurp pools of Red Bull from the floor. And my cold, hard bed with its dreams of coffee and cigarettes is calling to segue me into tomorrow and whatever red tape that entails.
I teach seven classes with 50+ students apiece and I am a volunteer, so photocopies are not financially prudent. That means I need to come up with a lot of speaking activities and deliver them like Barack Obama on benzedrine. Luckily, I teach the same lesson seven times a week, so a single flash of inspiration is enough to get by. I plan for my lessons the way a snail might if it had the cognitive capacity to teach Oral English: I start with a pebble and build a spiral of saliva around it as the week goes by until, by Friday, I have a spit-shined, well-rehearsed presentation that makes me feel like a real, actual teacher of sorts.
Today is the second run-through of "Bon Appetit," my guide to American cuisine and dining etiquette, so the lesson is only a sketch and my scripted jokes will be jittery and Bob Newhartesque. As I walk into the classroom, there is a chorus of oooooohs and a brief round of applause. I look around and remember that I am wearing my suit coat. I take a bow. Then I bust out my jug of coffee and set it on the podium and there is another long ooooooh. I explain that the American professor is fueled by caffeine, that without it he is a zombie. And zombielike, I guzzle some coffee and start writing on the board.
Ideally, an Oral English class should be an interactive vaudeville act. The trick is duping your students into believing that they are actually caught in the scenario you have presented them with. If they are supposed to be dining out at Red Lobster, they should be able to hear Savage Garden piped down from the styrofoam ceiling tiles. If they are supposed to be the United Nations, the Chinese contingent should loathe the Japanese contingent with an undying contempt, and vice versa. In short, you must suspend all disbelief, otherwise your students will rote memorize a handful of stock phrases and mumble them to each other like little lobotomized HAL 9000s. Setting the stage for a productive class is a lot like writing the start of a novel: there must be background, complications, and some sort of impetus to push the whole thing forward.
Today's class goes well. I briefly explain the American tipping system and demonstrate an untippable waiter.
"Whaddya want?" I snap, putting on my surliest Waffle House sass. My pen twitches at the ready. The poor girl giggles and hides her face in her hands.
"You ready to order or what?"
"Yes. I will have the chicken."
"Chicken soup? Chicken salad? Chicken nuggets? Chicken sandwich? Fried chicken? Chicken a la king? Kung pao chicken? General Tso's chicken?!"
By now she is so embarrassed that it looks like she is having an out-of-body experience. Thankfully, my phone rings: one of my stalkers calling for the sixth time that morning.
"Hang on. It's my girlfriend."
I dart into the kitchen, fake a kissyface conversation, and swagger back to Table 9.
"So. What'll it be?"
"I'll take the fried chicken."
I storm backstage and bark at the short order cooks. Then, I return bearing a half-rotten apple which, through the power of mass delusion, is starting to look more and more like a drumstick. I stumble over my shoelace and send the apple flying into the crowd.
"Oops. There goes your chicken."
By then, my students are rearing to dine-and-dash, so I turn it over to them for the rest of class. I am pleased with the results and the following dialogue almost makes me weep with satisfaction:
Waitress: Here is your food.
Customer: Excuse me, ma'am, but there is a fly in my soup.
Waitress: Impossible!
Customer: Look. You see it! I would like to speak with the manager.
Manager: [approaches with a clipboard] What seems to be the problem?
Customer: There is a fly in my soup.
Manager: Don't worry about it. Your dinner is on the house.
Customer: Thanks. And could you do something about my waitress?
Manager: What would you like me to do?
Customer: Fire her immediately.
Manager: Okay, I will fire her at once.
Of course, part of the reason these roleplays are so amusing is that they are painfully awkward and quite a ways off the mark. But accuracy matters little to me. Every morning as I walk to the bus that takes me to the campus across town, I hear English majors in the bushes, reciting speeches by Henry Kissinger. From a young age, Chinese students are given the task of memorizing the entirety of the English language, with the end result that, after twelve years of English, they can barely muster a "Hello" without second-guessing themselves. My classes are about giving Chinese students the cajones to use the language, and in order to grow a pair, they need a heavily padded environment, an English laboratory in which they are free to mix and mismatch nouns and verbs and adjectives until they find the combinations that make sense.
In China, the expectations for us foreign teachers are high. We are widely believed to possess the ability to heal rhotacism with the laying on of hands. Hell, I used to think I had that power, but over the years I have set more modest goals for myself. And I would love to talk about them, but night has fallen on China. The young emperors at the internet cafe are yawning and removing their headsets. The rats have come out to slurp pools of Red Bull from the floor. And my cold, hard bed with its dreams of coffee and cigarettes is calling to segue me into tomorrow and whatever red tape that entails.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Zen and the Art of Rickshaw Maintenance
Two months into Korea, I met an expat named Wolf, a bearded, ponytailed rat of a man who, from his whitewashed jeans and black metal t-shirt, I was able to carbon date as a fossil from the Reaganomic Era. My comrades and I were new to Asia, bursting with all the greenness and enthusiasm that entails, whereas Wolf was a veteran and a lifer: he did not thrive in the east, but would shrivel up and die if he were ever extradited to the west.
On the night in question, the newbies and I were huddled around a table at one of the expat bars downtown, while Wolf sat in the corner oozing disdain into his can of fake Heineken. The Canadian was doing impressions again. He stood up and did me: cradled his head in his hands, compulsively stroked his beard, covered his mouth and let out a high-pitched giggle.
"Stop it," I said, "or I will fade out of existence again."
He changed channels and took a seat next to Wolf.
"Okay, guess who I am!" He crossed his arms and glowered down into his beer. "Life sucks. I hate Korea even though I've lived here for 26 years. Metallica is the best band in the world."
Wolf looked up from his Heineken and stared down the Canadian. I searched the room for a black hole to crawl into.
"Anyone? Any guesses? That's right! I'm Wolf!"
"... the fuck you are," murmured Wolf.
These were the first words I'd ever heard him speak, so I thought perhaps Wolf was warming up to us, or at least to me because I was not the Canadian.
"How long you been here, Wolf?" I asked.
"What the fuck is it to you?"
I cradled my head in my hands and compulsively stroked my beard, then felt like I was impersonating myself, so I just sat there silently, looking hurt, until Wolf spoke again.
"How long have you been here?"
"Two months," I said.
"And you haven't snapped yet?"
"No," I said. "I don't mind it here."
"Give it time," Wolf said. "It'll come."
After the bar closed, we made our way to another joint and without a word, Wolf went meandering down a darkened alleyway waving a tallboy of Cass in the air, belting out a surprisingly svelte rendition of "Unchained Melody" as he faded into the night. That was the last I ever saw of him.
Wolflike expats are not uncommon in Asia. Permit me to borrow another wonderful David Foster Wallaceism: when you speak with Wolves, you feel as though the conversation is being warped and diffracted, like a beam of light passing through swimming pool water. In short, Wolves are a little off - and they make you feel a little off, too. What creates a Wolf? Your average English teacher in Asia is not under much duress. He is overpaid, overfed, saturated with free alcohol, and generally beloved by the locals. And yet the long-term Asian veteran wears a thousand-yard stare and a permanent sneer, and loathes expats even more than he disdains the general population.
Of course, even among the lifers, there are more non-Wolves than Wolves. But make no mistake: there are pitfalls to living here and I am only just starting to become aware of them. After an especially bad week, I can see something of the Wolf in me, the urge to turn upon myself like an ingrown toenail, to stock up on instant ramen and bootleg DVDs and get me to a nunnery. And that is what I would like to talk about in this chautauqua: how to maintain one's sanity living in a society that on a literal level cannot understand you, and in a more existential sense, cannot understand what you are about.
The main culprit in the Wolfization of an otherwise well-meaning expat is what Robert Pirsig calls a gumption trap: the loss of any sort of desire to interact with the weirdness that surrounds you. Gumption traps can be brought about by general gumption erosion, specific gumption-sucking events, or what I will call Laowai Escapism Disorder (LED). Often a combination of all three is involved in the formation of a bona fide Wolf.
Gumption erosion results from the sustained, unlubricated friction between the laowai's individualist rickshaw and the collectivist traffic that surrounds it. There is no obvious treatment for gumption erosion aside from lubrication - i.e. alcohol - and lots of it, but drinking oneself stupid should be regarded as an occupational hazard rather than a cure. Much of the adjustment to gumption erosion is made by the subconscious, though the right mindset will go a long way towards expediting the process.
Gumption erosion in Asia is primarily a matter of space. Your average East Asian city is more densely populated than an oversexed beehive, which means a lot of people, a lot of cars, and very little unoccupied space. The Chinese in particular are far from claustrophobic. The rule for public transportation seems to be "cram in as many people as possible" and when it comes to public spaces, people to tend to get as close to other people as the laws of physics will allow. Whereas westerners en masse instinctively arrange themselves in horizontal and vertical lines, the natural state of the Chinese crowd is a forward-shoving mob. There are no referees in China: no one will blow a whistle for a handcheck, an elbow to the breadbasket, or a forearm shiver.
As a westerner, you are at a twofold disadvantage, both because you are not used to being in such close quarters with so many total strangers, and because those total strangers are very curious about you. Frankly, they have never seen anything quite like you before, so they will take an unusual interest in the book you're reading, the email you're writing, the money you're withdrawing, or your armhair.
China is under construction, so it is an extremely loud country. The work is in progress twenty-four hours a day, not exempting The Sabbath, so the jackhammering and buzzsawing never cease. Meanwhile, Chinese drivers are not bashful about laying on their horns, and the muffler is an invention that never seems to have caught on.
Underneath the general cacophony of China is a steady stream of laowai-directed noise. A fair amount of young people will scream "HELLO!" from a safe distance of twenty feet. The more of the language you understand, the more you realize what a sensation you are. You will quickly learn the local words for "westerner," "foreigner," and (if applicable) "white devil." If you are already inclined to introversion, as I am, crowd noise can make walking to the convenience store for toilet paper an almost insurmountable task.
And of course, China is dangerous. There is no obvious difference between the traffic laws and the laws that govern walking down the sidewalk. The roads carry two ill-defined currents of cars, trucks, madhat cabbies and relentless buses, with a circus of bicycles, pedestrians, trishaws, and mopeds scuttling every which way amidst the honking, screeching torrent of smoke-belching metal.
This state of affairs - a claustrophobic, noisy, dangerous state of affairs - can make leaving one's apartment less appealing than other antisocial pursuits, say: making a list of all the girls you have ever kissed, Spider Solitaire, or Season 3 of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
As I mentioned earlier, adjusting to one's Asian surroundings takes time and most of the work is done while one is asleep. Some expats choose to spend a good amount of their time abroad drunk, but this only leads to hangovers that are several orders of magnitude worse than any state of consciousness known in the west.
The trick is to wait it out. Recite a mantra of your choice. Avoid rice liquor. Wear headphones when you make public appearances. Gradually, your mind will make the necessary adjustments. Your instincts will sharpen themselves on their own accord such that you will one day find yourself able to talk a fifty kuai cab ride down to twenty and navigate a Chinese crosswalk like Christ upon the Sea of Galilee. Your brain will learn to filter out the high-frequency garbage that comes roaring in from your overtaxed sensory organs: you will nap upright as a horse on the bus home from work and you will walk the street blissfully unaware of the migraine-inducing ruckus and seizure-inducing lights of the city.
You will also learn how to defuse hecklers and cat callers. "Hello," you might say to someone who says hello to you. "A laowai? Where?" you might gasp in the local tongue when someone claims to have sighted a foreigner. Above all else, you must remember that your presence in Asia is bizarre and inexplicable to the common man. If you saw a talking St. Bernard go walking down 32nd Street, you might be inspired to say to your neighbor, "There goes a talking St. Bernard!" - or perhaps, if you were brave enough, to call out "Hello!" from a safe enough distance. I am not saying that westerners are talking St. Bernards or that we should be treated as such, but it is important to keep in mind that, at least in Asia, we are only slightly more commonplace.
The second kind of gumption trap I want to talk about is brought on by specific gumption-sucking events. Amidst a lot of general gumption erosion, these are the straws that break the rickshaw's back. I can think of three specific examples, but the list of possible misunderstandings that can send a laowai into semi-permanent hermitage is too vast to record here.
There was an African-American teacher living in Hangzhou, I believe, who ran away crying when a Chinese vegetable vendor approached her shouting "Nigga nigga nigga!" One imagines the vegetable vendor was as baffled and startled as the American. In addition to meaning "that one," the phrase nigga is the all-purpose Chinese stall word. So the vendor was saying, "Er, um, ah." (Though I was sheepish about using it at first, I am now able to carry on whole conversations of nigga nigga nigga with a straight face.)
A former Peace Corps volunteer stormed back to her apartment after an old lady, late at night, cornered her in the street and said, "Go home." Of course, it is possible that the old woman was indeed saying, "Yankee, go home." But considering the impeccable politeness of the Chinese toward foreigners, it seems more likely to me that the old woman was nicely suggesting that the young lady go home because it was unsafe to be out on the street so late at night. Or perhaps she was asking the laowai whether she was going home or not. In any case, unless one is a master of Mandarin, there is no use in taking offense at anything, even a remark that seems overtly insulting. To begin with, it is likely that you have misunderstood the situation and anyhow, as a laowai, you don't have the language or the legal representation to settle the score.
A few weeks ago, I was walking back from class on a particularly foul and rainy day when a group of college dorks spotted me and started chanting, "Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!" I went home, locked the door, and had myself a nice, long sulk: I came 10,000 miles to teach you dorks English and this - this - is the thanks I get, et cetera. But then I had to laugh at myself. "Fuck you," as chanted by some Chinese college dorks, does not have the same meaning as a "fuck you" uttered through the clenched teeth of some frat boy down at Billy Frogg's. In all likelihood, the dorks had no idea what the phrase meant, or had at best only a vague understanding that it might evoke some sort of response from a passing laowai. Probably, they just picked it up from watching Scarface and liked the sound of it.
The only way to deal with a specific gumption-sucking event is to assume something has been lost in translation and forget about it, because there is not a damned thing you can do one way or the other.
This leads me to Laowai Escapism Disorder (LED). Inevitably, though laowais are few and far between, one foreigner will encounter another foreigner at the bus stop and before long, that germ of western brotherhood will snowball into a raucous herd of laowais who prowl the streets at night and frighten the local restauranteers by drinking large quantities of beer without ordering anything to eat. There is nothing wrong with making foreigner friends in and of itself, but all too often I have seen it lead to the disappointing realization, on the flight back home, that you can't understand a word of the captain's announcement and that you have to order your celebratory mid-flight Budweiser in English. And so the time spent abroad amounts to a passport stamp and a blip on a future resume.
But the real danger of Laowai Escapism Disorder is that it exacerbates general gumption erosion and specific gumption-sucking events. You get in the habit of blowing off steam with your nightly laowai therapy group and before long, one-upmanship leads to nasty little Two Minutes Hate sessions where the five of you get sloppy and talk trash about nobody in particular, or everybody in general. You begin looking for specific gumption-sucking events to bring up at the next meeting and never fail to grumble about the general gumption eroding process. Meanwhile, all sorts of locals are streaming past your table, secretly longing to take you and your band of laowais out for a ridiculous night on the town. But alas, you will never meet them, because by then you are as insoluble as a drop of motor oil in a glass of baijiu.
I would like to close this chautauqua by saying that, though Hinduism is about as widespread in China as Denny's, there is a karmic ebb and flow in the day-to-day existence of the laowai and it tends to tilt overwhelmingly in his favor. For every long-range heat-seeking "HELLO!" there are a hundred smiling old men who are content to sit and smoke cigarettes and quietly ponder your existence. And for every cab driver who gyps you on the fare, there is a college girl you have never met who will walk two miles with you to the bank, then run two miles to her dorm room to find her Chinese I.D. card, then run two miles back to the bank so you can exchange your $100 U.S. dollars for life-giving Chinese RMB, so you can pay for the bus ride home, so you can afford to sit and write this blog post, so you can eat, and so on.
On the night in question, the newbies and I were huddled around a table at one of the expat bars downtown, while Wolf sat in the corner oozing disdain into his can of fake Heineken. The Canadian was doing impressions again. He stood up and did me: cradled his head in his hands, compulsively stroked his beard, covered his mouth and let out a high-pitched giggle.
"Stop it," I said, "or I will fade out of existence again."
He changed channels and took a seat next to Wolf.
"Okay, guess who I am!" He crossed his arms and glowered down into his beer. "Life sucks. I hate Korea even though I've lived here for 26 years. Metallica is the best band in the world."
Wolf looked up from his Heineken and stared down the Canadian. I searched the room for a black hole to crawl into.
"Anyone? Any guesses? That's right! I'm Wolf!"
"... the fuck you are," murmured Wolf.
These were the first words I'd ever heard him speak, so I thought perhaps Wolf was warming up to us, or at least to me because I was not the Canadian.
"How long you been here, Wolf?" I asked.
"What the fuck is it to you?"
I cradled my head in my hands and compulsively stroked my beard, then felt like I was impersonating myself, so I just sat there silently, looking hurt, until Wolf spoke again.
"How long have you been here?"
"Two months," I said.
"And you haven't snapped yet?"
"No," I said. "I don't mind it here."
"Give it time," Wolf said. "It'll come."
After the bar closed, we made our way to another joint and without a word, Wolf went meandering down a darkened alleyway waving a tallboy of Cass in the air, belting out a surprisingly svelte rendition of "Unchained Melody" as he faded into the night. That was the last I ever saw of him.
Wolflike expats are not uncommon in Asia. Permit me to borrow another wonderful David Foster Wallaceism: when you speak with Wolves, you feel as though the conversation is being warped and diffracted, like a beam of light passing through swimming pool water. In short, Wolves are a little off - and they make you feel a little off, too. What creates a Wolf? Your average English teacher in Asia is not under much duress. He is overpaid, overfed, saturated with free alcohol, and generally beloved by the locals. And yet the long-term Asian veteran wears a thousand-yard stare and a permanent sneer, and loathes expats even more than he disdains the general population.
Of course, even among the lifers, there are more non-Wolves than Wolves. But make no mistake: there are pitfalls to living here and I am only just starting to become aware of them. After an especially bad week, I can see something of the Wolf in me, the urge to turn upon myself like an ingrown toenail, to stock up on instant ramen and bootleg DVDs and get me to a nunnery. And that is what I would like to talk about in this chautauqua: how to maintain one's sanity living in a society that on a literal level cannot understand you, and in a more existential sense, cannot understand what you are about.
The main culprit in the Wolfization of an otherwise well-meaning expat is what Robert Pirsig calls a gumption trap: the loss of any sort of desire to interact with the weirdness that surrounds you. Gumption traps can be brought about by general gumption erosion, specific gumption-sucking events, or what I will call Laowai Escapism Disorder (LED). Often a combination of all three is involved in the formation of a bona fide Wolf.
Gumption erosion results from the sustained, unlubricated friction between the laowai's individualist rickshaw and the collectivist traffic that surrounds it. There is no obvious treatment for gumption erosion aside from lubrication - i.e. alcohol - and lots of it, but drinking oneself stupid should be regarded as an occupational hazard rather than a cure. Much of the adjustment to gumption erosion is made by the subconscious, though the right mindset will go a long way towards expediting the process.
Gumption erosion in Asia is primarily a matter of space. Your average East Asian city is more densely populated than an oversexed beehive, which means a lot of people, a lot of cars, and very little unoccupied space. The Chinese in particular are far from claustrophobic. The rule for public transportation seems to be "cram in as many people as possible" and when it comes to public spaces, people to tend to get as close to other people as the laws of physics will allow. Whereas westerners en masse instinctively arrange themselves in horizontal and vertical lines, the natural state of the Chinese crowd is a forward-shoving mob. There are no referees in China: no one will blow a whistle for a handcheck, an elbow to the breadbasket, or a forearm shiver.
As a westerner, you are at a twofold disadvantage, both because you are not used to being in such close quarters with so many total strangers, and because those total strangers are very curious about you. Frankly, they have never seen anything quite like you before, so they will take an unusual interest in the book you're reading, the email you're writing, the money you're withdrawing, or your armhair.
China is under construction, so it is an extremely loud country. The work is in progress twenty-four hours a day, not exempting The Sabbath, so the jackhammering and buzzsawing never cease. Meanwhile, Chinese drivers are not bashful about laying on their horns, and the muffler is an invention that never seems to have caught on.
Underneath the general cacophony of China is a steady stream of laowai-directed noise. A fair amount of young people will scream "HELLO!" from a safe distance of twenty feet. The more of the language you understand, the more you realize what a sensation you are. You will quickly learn the local words for "westerner," "foreigner," and (if applicable) "white devil." If you are already inclined to introversion, as I am, crowd noise can make walking to the convenience store for toilet paper an almost insurmountable task.
And of course, China is dangerous. There is no obvious difference between the traffic laws and the laws that govern walking down the sidewalk. The roads carry two ill-defined currents of cars, trucks, madhat cabbies and relentless buses, with a circus of bicycles, pedestrians, trishaws, and mopeds scuttling every which way amidst the honking, screeching torrent of smoke-belching metal.
This state of affairs - a claustrophobic, noisy, dangerous state of affairs - can make leaving one's apartment less appealing than other antisocial pursuits, say: making a list of all the girls you have ever kissed, Spider Solitaire, or Season 3 of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
As I mentioned earlier, adjusting to one's Asian surroundings takes time and most of the work is done while one is asleep. Some expats choose to spend a good amount of their time abroad drunk, but this only leads to hangovers that are several orders of magnitude worse than any state of consciousness known in the west.
The trick is to wait it out. Recite a mantra of your choice. Avoid rice liquor. Wear headphones when you make public appearances. Gradually, your mind will make the necessary adjustments. Your instincts will sharpen themselves on their own accord such that you will one day find yourself able to talk a fifty kuai cab ride down to twenty and navigate a Chinese crosswalk like Christ upon the Sea of Galilee. Your brain will learn to filter out the high-frequency garbage that comes roaring in from your overtaxed sensory organs: you will nap upright as a horse on the bus home from work and you will walk the street blissfully unaware of the migraine-inducing ruckus and seizure-inducing lights of the city.
You will also learn how to defuse hecklers and cat callers. "Hello," you might say to someone who says hello to you. "A laowai? Where?" you might gasp in the local tongue when someone claims to have sighted a foreigner. Above all else, you must remember that your presence in Asia is bizarre and inexplicable to the common man. If you saw a talking St. Bernard go walking down 32nd Street, you might be inspired to say to your neighbor, "There goes a talking St. Bernard!" - or perhaps, if you were brave enough, to call out "Hello!" from a safe enough distance. I am not saying that westerners are talking St. Bernards or that we should be treated as such, but it is important to keep in mind that, at least in Asia, we are only slightly more commonplace.
The second kind of gumption trap I want to talk about is brought on by specific gumption-sucking events. Amidst a lot of general gumption erosion, these are the straws that break the rickshaw's back. I can think of three specific examples, but the list of possible misunderstandings that can send a laowai into semi-permanent hermitage is too vast to record here.
There was an African-American teacher living in Hangzhou, I believe, who ran away crying when a Chinese vegetable vendor approached her shouting "Nigga nigga nigga!" One imagines the vegetable vendor was as baffled and startled as the American. In addition to meaning "that one," the phrase nigga is the all-purpose Chinese stall word. So the vendor was saying, "Er, um, ah." (Though I was sheepish about using it at first, I am now able to carry on whole conversations of nigga nigga nigga with a straight face.)
A former Peace Corps volunteer stormed back to her apartment after an old lady, late at night, cornered her in the street and said, "Go home." Of course, it is possible that the old woman was indeed saying, "Yankee, go home." But considering the impeccable politeness of the Chinese toward foreigners, it seems more likely to me that the old woman was nicely suggesting that the young lady go home because it was unsafe to be out on the street so late at night. Or perhaps she was asking the laowai whether she was going home or not. In any case, unless one is a master of Mandarin, there is no use in taking offense at anything, even a remark that seems overtly insulting. To begin with, it is likely that you have misunderstood the situation and anyhow, as a laowai, you don't have the language or the legal representation to settle the score.
A few weeks ago, I was walking back from class on a particularly foul and rainy day when a group of college dorks spotted me and started chanting, "Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!" I went home, locked the door, and had myself a nice, long sulk: I came 10,000 miles to teach you dorks English and this - this - is the thanks I get, et cetera. But then I had to laugh at myself. "Fuck you," as chanted by some Chinese college dorks, does not have the same meaning as a "fuck you" uttered through the clenched teeth of some frat boy down at Billy Frogg's. In all likelihood, the dorks had no idea what the phrase meant, or had at best only a vague understanding that it might evoke some sort of response from a passing laowai. Probably, they just picked it up from watching Scarface and liked the sound of it.
The only way to deal with a specific gumption-sucking event is to assume something has been lost in translation and forget about it, because there is not a damned thing you can do one way or the other.
This leads me to Laowai Escapism Disorder (LED). Inevitably, though laowais are few and far between, one foreigner will encounter another foreigner at the bus stop and before long, that germ of western brotherhood will snowball into a raucous herd of laowais who prowl the streets at night and frighten the local restauranteers by drinking large quantities of beer without ordering anything to eat. There is nothing wrong with making foreigner friends in and of itself, but all too often I have seen it lead to the disappointing realization, on the flight back home, that you can't understand a word of the captain's announcement and that you have to order your celebratory mid-flight Budweiser in English. And so the time spent abroad amounts to a passport stamp and a blip on a future resume.
But the real danger of Laowai Escapism Disorder is that it exacerbates general gumption erosion and specific gumption-sucking events. You get in the habit of blowing off steam with your nightly laowai therapy group and before long, one-upmanship leads to nasty little Two Minutes Hate sessions where the five of you get sloppy and talk trash about nobody in particular, or everybody in general. You begin looking for specific gumption-sucking events to bring up at the next meeting and never fail to grumble about the general gumption eroding process. Meanwhile, all sorts of locals are streaming past your table, secretly longing to take you and your band of laowais out for a ridiculous night on the town. But alas, you will never meet them, because by then you are as insoluble as a drop of motor oil in a glass of baijiu.
I would like to close this chautauqua by saying that, though Hinduism is about as widespread in China as Denny's, there is a karmic ebb and flow in the day-to-day existence of the laowai and it tends to tilt overwhelmingly in his favor. For every long-range heat-seeking "HELLO!" there are a hundred smiling old men who are content to sit and smoke cigarettes and quietly ponder your existence. And for every cab driver who gyps you on the fare, there is a college girl you have never met who will walk two miles with you to the bank, then run two miles to her dorm room to find her Chinese I.D. card, then run two miles back to the bank so you can exchange your $100 U.S. dollars for life-giving Chinese RMB, so you can pay for the bus ride home, so you can afford to sit and write this blog post, so you can eat, and so on.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Strange Invitations
Three years abroad have turned me into an anglophonic handyman, a TEFL jack-of-all-trades, a linguistic plumber. I work short hours, but there is always tweaking to be done, dangling participles to saw off and subject/verb disagreements to weld together. I am on call 24/7, especially in China, where nary an afternoon goes by without some odd English request from someone I've never seen in my life.
A few weeks ago, a pudgy and bespectacled college kid came tiptoeing up to me in the teachers' lounge. He was not one of my students.
"Excuse me, foreign teacher," he said, "but I have question for you."
He wanted to know my thoughts on drug education.
"Can you be more specific?" I asked. "Do you mean the bad kind of drugs?"
He nodded emphatically. I shrugged. Well, I said, I think drug education is important, but I also believe that individuals should have the freedom to choose what they put in their bodies.
"Okay, I bring some information for you next time," he said. We shook hands and he was gone.
The next week, the kid resurfaced with a laminate binder full of good ol' government-issue American anti-drug literature. He told me to take the stuff home, look over it, and return the next week with a prepared speech: he wanted me to give a lecture in his class. So, on a bored Tuesday evening, I broke open the binder and read all about the horrors of marijuana, hallucinogens, crack cocaine and The Horse. It was a nostalgic flashback to my D.A.R.E. days, the Reefer Madness films, the no-saying to everything. "Marijuana induces false feelings of euphoria and happiness. Pot smokers become anxious and paranoid." But, I asked myself, if the euphoria and happiness are artificial, aren't the anxiety and paranoia equally so? Or if the anxiety and paranoia are real, isn't the euphoria ... and so on. I put the pot pamphlet down. I was in a tough spot. There was nothing I could say in my lecture that wouldn't step on toes or get me in trouble. So, when I saw the kid next, I handed him back the binder and repeated my original thesis statement: "I think drug education is important, but I also believe that individuals should have the freedom to choose what they put in their bodies." And I politely declined his invitation.
A few days later, in my Thursday Oral English class, I noticed a new student who was sitting by himself, talking to himself, and not participating in the lesson whatsoever. As I was making my rounds, he called me over and invited me to sit with him, so I did.
"Teacher, I have three questions for you."
"Shoot," I said.
"Number one: tell me about American history and culture."
"You might have to be more specific."
"Okay. Tell me how American history made American culture."
"Well," I said, "um."
I took a long gulp of coffee and then I wove a tapestry of bullshit that took us from the American Revolution to Public Enemy. My student (or was he my student?) was satisfied and moved on to question two.
"Tell me about the most recent advancements in American weapons technology," he said.
"You know, I really don't know much about that," I said. "I'm not in the military and I don't work for the government. Well, I mean, I do, but I'm in the wrong branch of the service. Anyway, I imagine that we have plenty of weapons as it is. Look, I gotta teach a class ... "
Yesterday afternoon, I was making a break for the bathroom between classes and a girl stopped me in the hall.
"Excuse me, sir," she said. "I am collecting 365 notes for my boyfriend because I love him so much. Please help me."
She handed me a pen and a little green post-it note.
"Who am I addressing this to?" I asked.
"Bai Li-Jie," she said.
Here is what I wrote:
Li-Jie,
You are a lucky man. You have a beautiful girlfriend who loves you very much.
Warm regards,
-Keith
This afternoon, a girl snagged me on the way out of class and asked me for my thoughts on college students who study mental health issues. She had to write a thesis, she said.
"Can you be more specific?" I asked. "Do you want my opinion on mental health education, or the reasons people study psychology, or ... "
"I am writing a thesis and I don't know what to write about."
"Well," I said, and I wove another tapestry that took us from Freud to electroshock therapy to Prozac.
"Thank you," she said. "That helps me very much."
She followed me onto the Number 5 bus.
"I'm so sad because I don't have a foreign teacher," she said. "How many foreigners are at our school?"
"Six or seven," I said, "but I'm the only one teaching at the old campus."
"Oh, you must be a very great teacher!"
"Or a very old teacher."
"No, you are look very young!"
"I'm 26," I said.
"That is very close to me. I am 24," she said. "Old enough!"
"Hey, look. There's my stop."
A few weeks ago, a student raised his hand and asked me whether I believed in God.
"No," I said. There was a brief round of applause. I was momentarily relieved to be in China.
"I believe in the goodness of the universe," I said, "and the human attempt to understand it."
It wasn't until I was on the bus back home that I realized, yes: that is precisely what I believe.
A few weeks ago, a pudgy and bespectacled college kid came tiptoeing up to me in the teachers' lounge. He was not one of my students.
"Excuse me, foreign teacher," he said, "but I have question for you."
He wanted to know my thoughts on drug education.
"Can you be more specific?" I asked. "Do you mean the bad kind of drugs?"
He nodded emphatically. I shrugged. Well, I said, I think drug education is important, but I also believe that individuals should have the freedom to choose what they put in their bodies.
"Okay, I bring some information for you next time," he said. We shook hands and he was gone.
The next week, the kid resurfaced with a laminate binder full of good ol' government-issue American anti-drug literature. He told me to take the stuff home, look over it, and return the next week with a prepared speech: he wanted me to give a lecture in his class. So, on a bored Tuesday evening, I broke open the binder and read all about the horrors of marijuana, hallucinogens, crack cocaine and The Horse. It was a nostalgic flashback to my D.A.R.E. days, the Reefer Madness films, the no-saying to everything. "Marijuana induces false feelings of euphoria and happiness. Pot smokers become anxious and paranoid." But, I asked myself, if the euphoria and happiness are artificial, aren't the anxiety and paranoia equally so? Or if the anxiety and paranoia are real, isn't the euphoria ... and so on. I put the pot pamphlet down. I was in a tough spot. There was nothing I could say in my lecture that wouldn't step on toes or get me in trouble. So, when I saw the kid next, I handed him back the binder and repeated my original thesis statement: "I think drug education is important, but I also believe that individuals should have the freedom to choose what they put in their bodies." And I politely declined his invitation.
A few days later, in my Thursday Oral English class, I noticed a new student who was sitting by himself, talking to himself, and not participating in the lesson whatsoever. As I was making my rounds, he called me over and invited me to sit with him, so I did.
"Teacher, I have three questions for you."
"Shoot," I said.
"Number one: tell me about American history and culture."
"You might have to be more specific."
"Okay. Tell me how American history made American culture."
"Well," I said, "um."
I took a long gulp of coffee and then I wove a tapestry of bullshit that took us from the American Revolution to Public Enemy. My student (or was he my student?) was satisfied and moved on to question two.
"Tell me about the most recent advancements in American weapons technology," he said.
"You know, I really don't know much about that," I said. "I'm not in the military and I don't work for the government. Well, I mean, I do, but I'm in the wrong branch of the service. Anyway, I imagine that we have plenty of weapons as it is. Look, I gotta teach a class ... "
Yesterday afternoon, I was making a break for the bathroom between classes and a girl stopped me in the hall.
"Excuse me, sir," she said. "I am collecting 365 notes for my boyfriend because I love him so much. Please help me."
She handed me a pen and a little green post-it note.
"Who am I addressing this to?" I asked.
"Bai Li-Jie," she said.
Here is what I wrote:
Li-Jie,
You are a lucky man. You have a beautiful girlfriend who loves you very much.
Warm regards,
-Keith
This afternoon, a girl snagged me on the way out of class and asked me for my thoughts on college students who study mental health issues. She had to write a thesis, she said.
"Can you be more specific?" I asked. "Do you want my opinion on mental health education, or the reasons people study psychology, or ... "
"I am writing a thesis and I don't know what to write about."
"Well," I said, and I wove another tapestry that took us from Freud to electroshock therapy to Prozac.
"Thank you," she said. "That helps me very much."
She followed me onto the Number 5 bus.
"I'm so sad because I don't have a foreign teacher," she said. "How many foreigners are at our school?"
"Six or seven," I said, "but I'm the only one teaching at the old campus."
"Oh, you must be a very great teacher!"
"Or a very old teacher."
"No, you are look very young!"
"I'm 26," I said.
"That is very close to me. I am 24," she said. "Old enough!"
"Hey, look. There's my stop."
A few weeks ago, a student raised his hand and asked me whether I believed in God.
"No," I said. There was a brief round of applause. I was momentarily relieved to be in China.
"I believe in the goodness of the universe," I said, "and the human attempt to understand it."
It wasn't until I was on the bus back home that I realized, yes: that is precisely what I believe.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Cloud City
I woke up on National Day with a brain full of smog and a great wall of mucous obstructing my sinuses. I could hear the National Day Parade echoing in the halls, so like the rest of China, I turned on the TV and sat down in my underwear to watch it. Walt Disney meets Kim Jong-Il: a trillion dollars worth of long-range warheads scrolling past, followed by pastel papier-mâché floats overflowing with oompa-loompas, emperors and astronauts. The premier, arms crossed over his chest, appeared pleased with his people's display of military might and camp.
I napped off the rest of the day, played Mario Kart with the Mennonites for a bit, and slept off the rest of the night. The next morning, I threw a pair of underwear, some mismatched socks, and three indie rock t-shirts in a backpack and caught a taxi to the bus station. I was bound for Yunyang, a small town in Chongqing Province, whose name, I am told, means "Cloud City."
Public transportation in China has a way of making you kneel down to kiss the ground of wherever you wind up. You find solace in the bus driver's age: he couldn't have lived to see fifty if he were an incompetent driver, or a homicidal maniac. These are your thoughts as you and the person sitting next to you grow suddenly silent because your bus is passing a police car at 140 kilometers an hour on a two-lane highway - the driver is on the phone - and you're careening towards another onrushing police car, who flashes his brights but keeps on coming. The bus driver leans on the horn. Just as you start to murmur the Lord's Prayer and fondle rosary beads that aren't there, the driver veers you back into the right lane, averting death by a ramen noodle, puts down the phone and lights up a cigarette.
The bus driver was something of a comedian. He insisted that I sit next to him, which gave me a front-row seat for all his interstate acrobatics, and made me the butt of his jokes. About eighty kilometers out of Nanchong, he stopped on the side of the road to pick up his sidekick, his co-pilot, the Kevin Eubanks to his Jay Leno. Leno wisecracked, delivered aimless monologues, cursed at slow-moving vegetable trucks; Eubanks cackled and slapped the dashboard. Eventually, I had to pee in the worst way.
"Excuse me," I said to Leno. "I need to use the bathroom."
Leno cackled. Eubanks slapped the dashboard.
"It's three hours to Yunyang, laowai!" Leno shouted over the squawk of the horn. "But if you really must pee, perhaps we can stop on the side of the road."
Determined to save face, I held my water for three hours. Meanwhile, Leno kept the laughs a-coming. I couldn't understand whatever dialect it was that he was speaking, but he and Eubanks kept looking at me and cackling. The whole front half of the bus was vastly amused. At one point, he gestured towards me and said, "This laowai doesn't understand what I'm saying!" That much, of course, I could understand.
China is like Gulliver's Travels in that you can ride 200 kilometers in a bus and find yourself among lilliputians or houyhnhnms who speak an incomprehensible local dialect and live in their own incomprehensible local way. So it was with Yunyang, the Cloud City. It should perhaps be renamed Cloud City II, or Yunyang, Jr., as the original was wiped out by the floods that drowned the towns along the Yangtze after the completion of the Three Gorges Dam. Fifteen years ago, the inhabitants of Old Yunyang packed up and rerooted themselves on the side of a mountain. New Yunyang was hastily stacked in terraces, four of them, such that if you live on the top level, you can peer over the artificial canyon's edge and see Matchbox cars and ant-sized humans scurrying around on the bottom level. The sidewalks on the top terrace are pocked with drainage holes - which the Yunyang Peace Corps volunteers call "death" - that look down onto heaps of sewage-drenched garbage four stories below. Some of the deaths are grated with reebar, others are covered in Plexiglas. Children like to dance around on the deaths while their parents sip tea and play mahjongg.
Because the top level of Cloud City is way up in the stratosphere, the preferred mode of transportation in Yunyang is not the taxi, the bus, or the bicycle rickshaw: Yunyangers take the stairs. From above, the city looks like an Escher painting. There are stairwells that rise so high that if you take the steps two at a time your ears pop and if you race back down to the bottom you get the bends. There are secret stairwells that take you through a wormhole to the opposite end of town. There are stairwells that lead nowhere. There are stairwells which loop around so that you wind up precisely where you started. Yunyang holds an annual motorcycle race up the biggest stairwell in town, although I am told that it is not as thrilling as it sounds, because they only race one motorcycle at a time.
As far as I know, there are three foreigners in Yunyang. Two of them are my friends. The third was rumored to be a fat Cuban girl, but I am now informed that he is a musclebound Cameroonian man. My arrival in Cloud City was greeted with much fanfare. The university staff took me out for a night of mahjongg, Moutai, and moongazing.
I know enough mahjongg vocabulary to show my opponents that I am not ignorant of the rules or the language, but that I am a colossal idiot nonetheless. We played twenty games before dinner and I lost all of them but one. It was like Gary Kasperov, Bobby Fischer and Big Blue vs. a malfunctioning Apple IIe computer. My only triumph was a cheap one, largely owed to the dean of the university, who took control of my mahjongg tiles and slid them around the table in such a way that I came out the victor.
We sat down for dinner. I sensed that these were my kind of people. They were absurdists. The dean of the music department - a lanky fellow with an Arnold Schwarzenegger voice - drank and crooned and toasted the laowais once a minute. We talked about language: the universal language of people who cannot understand each other. Someone busted out the Moutai - a vile but expensive rice liquor that comes in little gasoline cans - and I was coerced into drinking two glasses of the stuff before I broke down and pleaded for a beer. We ate until we could eat no more, then the Dean of Music stood up and barked, in English, "Let's look at moon!" We went outside. It was raining. The Dean of Music raised a finger. "I am go get beer," he proclaimed, "so we drink beer and look at moon!" Again, these were my kind of people.
We took the stairs as high as we could and got so close to the moon that you could smell the moondust. But the moon was invisible, covered in natural and artificial Cloud City clouds. We took the stairs back down to ground level and closed out the night huddled under a nylon canopy on the side of the road. We played a drinking game that I could not understand, and even after I understood it, could not play because it involved numbers.
"Five! Fifteen! Twenty-five! Drink," the Dean of Music shouted. "Ten! Twenty! Thirty-five! Drink."
It turned out one of the guys was a tai-chi instructor, so we took to the street, foreigners and Chinese alike, and lined up in a row. A crowd of bao-bao men gathered to watch. Our sensei slinked along the sidewalk, chopping the air in slow-mo with a bottle of booze in his free hand, and we recited the mantra familiar to all English-speaking novices in the Way of the Supreme Ultimate Fist: "One big watermelon. I cut it in half. One for you. One for me. I don't want either of them."
I napped off the rest of the day, played Mario Kart with the Mennonites for a bit, and slept off the rest of the night. The next morning, I threw a pair of underwear, some mismatched socks, and three indie rock t-shirts in a backpack and caught a taxi to the bus station. I was bound for Yunyang, a small town in Chongqing Province, whose name, I am told, means "Cloud City."
Public transportation in China has a way of making you kneel down to kiss the ground of wherever you wind up. You find solace in the bus driver's age: he couldn't have lived to see fifty if he were an incompetent driver, or a homicidal maniac. These are your thoughts as you and the person sitting next to you grow suddenly silent because your bus is passing a police car at 140 kilometers an hour on a two-lane highway - the driver is on the phone - and you're careening towards another onrushing police car, who flashes his brights but keeps on coming. The bus driver leans on the horn. Just as you start to murmur the Lord's Prayer and fondle rosary beads that aren't there, the driver veers you back into the right lane, averting death by a ramen noodle, puts down the phone and lights up a cigarette.
The bus driver was something of a comedian. He insisted that I sit next to him, which gave me a front-row seat for all his interstate acrobatics, and made me the butt of his jokes. About eighty kilometers out of Nanchong, he stopped on the side of the road to pick up his sidekick, his co-pilot, the Kevin Eubanks to his Jay Leno. Leno wisecracked, delivered aimless monologues, cursed at slow-moving vegetable trucks; Eubanks cackled and slapped the dashboard. Eventually, I had to pee in the worst way.
"Excuse me," I said to Leno. "I need to use the bathroom."
Leno cackled. Eubanks slapped the dashboard.
"It's three hours to Yunyang, laowai!" Leno shouted over the squawk of the horn. "But if you really must pee, perhaps we can stop on the side of the road."
Determined to save face, I held my water for three hours. Meanwhile, Leno kept the laughs a-coming. I couldn't understand whatever dialect it was that he was speaking, but he and Eubanks kept looking at me and cackling. The whole front half of the bus was vastly amused. At one point, he gestured towards me and said, "This laowai doesn't understand what I'm saying!" That much, of course, I could understand.
China is like Gulliver's Travels in that you can ride 200 kilometers in a bus and find yourself among lilliputians or houyhnhnms who speak an incomprehensible local dialect and live in their own incomprehensible local way. So it was with Yunyang, the Cloud City. It should perhaps be renamed Cloud City II, or Yunyang, Jr., as the original was wiped out by the floods that drowned the towns along the Yangtze after the completion of the Three Gorges Dam. Fifteen years ago, the inhabitants of Old Yunyang packed up and rerooted themselves on the side of a mountain. New Yunyang was hastily stacked in terraces, four of them, such that if you live on the top level, you can peer over the artificial canyon's edge and see Matchbox cars and ant-sized humans scurrying around on the bottom level. The sidewalks on the top terrace are pocked with drainage holes - which the Yunyang Peace Corps volunteers call "death" - that look down onto heaps of sewage-drenched garbage four stories below. Some of the deaths are grated with reebar, others are covered in Plexiglas. Children like to dance around on the deaths while their parents sip tea and play mahjongg.
Because the top level of Cloud City is way up in the stratosphere, the preferred mode of transportation in Yunyang is not the taxi, the bus, or the bicycle rickshaw: Yunyangers take the stairs. From above, the city looks like an Escher painting. There are stairwells that rise so high that if you take the steps two at a time your ears pop and if you race back down to the bottom you get the bends. There are secret stairwells that take you through a wormhole to the opposite end of town. There are stairwells that lead nowhere. There are stairwells which loop around so that you wind up precisely where you started. Yunyang holds an annual motorcycle race up the biggest stairwell in town, although I am told that it is not as thrilling as it sounds, because they only race one motorcycle at a time.
As far as I know, there are three foreigners in Yunyang. Two of them are my friends. The third was rumored to be a fat Cuban girl, but I am now informed that he is a musclebound Cameroonian man. My arrival in Cloud City was greeted with much fanfare. The university staff took me out for a night of mahjongg, Moutai, and moongazing.
I know enough mahjongg vocabulary to show my opponents that I am not ignorant of the rules or the language, but that I am a colossal idiot nonetheless. We played twenty games before dinner and I lost all of them but one. It was like Gary Kasperov, Bobby Fischer and Big Blue vs. a malfunctioning Apple IIe computer. My only triumph was a cheap one, largely owed to the dean of the university, who took control of my mahjongg tiles and slid them around the table in such a way that I came out the victor.
We sat down for dinner. I sensed that these were my kind of people. They were absurdists. The dean of the music department - a lanky fellow with an Arnold Schwarzenegger voice - drank and crooned and toasted the laowais once a minute. We talked about language: the universal language of people who cannot understand each other. Someone busted out the Moutai - a vile but expensive rice liquor that comes in little gasoline cans - and I was coerced into drinking two glasses of the stuff before I broke down and pleaded for a beer. We ate until we could eat no more, then the Dean of Music stood up and barked, in English, "Let's look at moon!" We went outside. It was raining. The Dean of Music raised a finger. "I am go get beer," he proclaimed, "so we drink beer and look at moon!" Again, these were my kind of people.
We took the stairs as high as we could and got so close to the moon that you could smell the moondust. But the moon was invisible, covered in natural and artificial Cloud City clouds. We took the stairs back down to ground level and closed out the night huddled under a nylon canopy on the side of the road. We played a drinking game that I could not understand, and even after I understood it, could not play because it involved numbers.
"Five! Fifteen! Twenty-five! Drink," the Dean of Music shouted. "Ten! Twenty! Thirty-five! Drink."
It turned out one of the guys was a tai-chi instructor, so we took to the street, foreigners and Chinese alike, and lined up in a row. A crowd of bao-bao men gathered to watch. Our sensei slinked along the sidewalk, chopping the air in slow-mo with a bottle of booze in his free hand, and we recited the mantra familiar to all English-speaking novices in the Way of the Supreme Ultimate Fist: "One big watermelon. I cut it in half. One for you. One for me. I don't want either of them."
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Let's get this dog a bath
I came in from the rain and passing the fun house mirror in the lobby I fussed my hair into place and fixed my professorial collars. By the stairwell, a man in a blue blazer was kneeled over a mud-splashed poodle. "You're dirty," he said to the poodle. "Let me give you a bath." I was pleased with myself for understanding this little dialogue, and pleased that the man was going to bathe the poodle. He picked up the dog and lugged it into the teacher's lounge, where one of his colleagues chewed him out for carrying around such a filthy beast. He drew a bath in the sink.
I went upstairs and taught two hours of Oral English. Today's topic: Mission to Mars. Earth is going down the tubes; we are sending forth our best and brightest to colonize space, etc., etc. To my surprise, our Model U.N. selected the homosexual Canadian physicist, the manic-depressive Japanese astronaut, the lesbian doctor from Zimbabwe, and the alcoholic Russian biologist as the seeds of humanity on The Red Planet. Nobody voted for Song Min-Tao, the 63-year-old Chinese novelist.
I haven't written much about China because I haven't been able to settle into any sort of existential groove. My first two months were an exercise in communal living. I stayed with a host family and the Peace Corps kept me busy with a daily regimen of Nescafe, language classes, antidiarrheal seminars, and beer. Everything I wrote during that time reminded me of Ayn Rand's Anthem - we did this, we did that - so I wasn't inclined to post any of it.
Then, on the first of September, I was shipped out to Nanchong, Sichuan: my home for the next two years. I spent the first thirty days recovering from the shock of landing. It was easily the roughest month I have ever spent abroad, though I am unable to articulate why it was so. But I am gradually recovering from the denial that tends to hit me once I realize that I am stuck in a particular location for a particular length of time. I have found a good coffee hook-up and I have amassed a solid jazz library. The university has set me up with a Mandarin tutor and the street vendors all know me by name. This is what the Chinese call guanxi: connections. Guanxi isn't so hard to come by if you're a laowai living in China, particularly if you're a laowai who sports a ginger beard and a grin.
I am a teacher of Oral English at China West Normal University in Nanchong, an obscure city the size of Denver. Nanchong is home to three KFCs, a McDonald's, and eight laowais, of which I am one. (Most of those eight laowais are Mennonites. I am not a Mennonite.) My students are juniors majoring in English education. My apartment is on the fourth floor of a building that looks over the rubble of an unfinished student center whose architect seems to have had The Epcot Center in mind. Cuisine: the local specialty is a dish of spicy noodles served cold. Nightlife: nonexistent. Transportation: blood-curdling. Percentage of Nanchong college students who scream hello at the passing laowai: 63%. Hello, China. Hello.
I went upstairs and taught two hours of Oral English. Today's topic: Mission to Mars. Earth is going down the tubes; we are sending forth our best and brightest to colonize space, etc., etc. To my surprise, our Model U.N. selected the homosexual Canadian physicist, the manic-depressive Japanese astronaut, the lesbian doctor from Zimbabwe, and the alcoholic Russian biologist as the seeds of humanity on The Red Planet. Nobody voted for Song Min-Tao, the 63-year-old Chinese novelist.
I haven't written much about China because I haven't been able to settle into any sort of existential groove. My first two months were an exercise in communal living. I stayed with a host family and the Peace Corps kept me busy with a daily regimen of Nescafe, language classes, antidiarrheal seminars, and beer. Everything I wrote during that time reminded me of Ayn Rand's Anthem - we did this, we did that - so I wasn't inclined to post any of it.
Then, on the first of September, I was shipped out to Nanchong, Sichuan: my home for the next two years. I spent the first thirty days recovering from the shock of landing. It was easily the roughest month I have ever spent abroad, though I am unable to articulate why it was so. But I am gradually recovering from the denial that tends to hit me once I realize that I am stuck in a particular location for a particular length of time. I have found a good coffee hook-up and I have amassed a solid jazz library. The university has set me up with a Mandarin tutor and the street vendors all know me by name. This is what the Chinese call guanxi: connections. Guanxi isn't so hard to come by if you're a laowai living in China, particularly if you're a laowai who sports a ginger beard and a grin.
I am a teacher of Oral English at China West Normal University in Nanchong, an obscure city the size of Denver. Nanchong is home to three KFCs, a McDonald's, and eight laowais, of which I am one. (Most of those eight laowais are Mennonites. I am not a Mennonite.) My students are juniors majoring in English education. My apartment is on the fourth floor of a building that looks over the rubble of an unfinished student center whose architect seems to have had The Epcot Center in mind. Cuisine: the local specialty is a dish of spicy noodles served cold. Nightlife: nonexistent. Transportation: blood-curdling. Percentage of Nanchong college students who scream hello at the passing laowai: 63%. Hello, China. Hello.
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