Hard Sleeper

My first Chinese train ride - such romance! such bohemian squalor! Stepping aboard the general admission car, I was swatted in the face by the fetid stink of latex and feces. I slugged my way to seat number 87 and sat. Avoiding the stares of the people around me, I took in the crowd. This was an exotic bunch: Mongolians, Tibetans, Uighurs, and other Chinese minorities I could not readily identify. Some of them looked as though they had been living in trains for weeks. It was 2:30 AM and many of the passengers were asleep, but those who weren't sat forward in their seats with duffel bags stowed between their legs, gawking at me. This wasn't the usual big-city curiosity I've learned to ignore: this was genuine astonishment. I must have been the first white devil these peasants had ever lain eyes upon.

With six hours 'til Wanzhou, I cracked open my writing notebook. "NOTEBOOK," it says on the front cover. "Progress is the activity of today and the assurance of tomorrow." For a long time, I thought those words were just gratuitous Chinglish wisdom, until I discovered they were a direct quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson. I started writing. My neighbors craned their necks to watch.

"His handwriting is too messy," said the man across from me. "I can't read it."
"Many foreigners have bad penmanship," said another. "Even in English."
"Do you think he understands us?"
"No. I don't think so."
"But maybe he does. Sometimes they do."

Before long, my scribbling had drawn a crowd, which wasn't helping my writer's block one bit. I put my notebook away, tucked my head into my lap, and pretended to sleep until I fell asleep. I was jolted awake some hours later by a man barking into a megaphone. Had we arrived already? No. I saw that the man was carrying a basket full of boxes. He was hawking something. I checked my phone. It was 5 AM. The peddler strode up and down the aisle, barking and squawking until the passengers groaned into wakefulness. My stomach reminded me that I hadn't eaten in twelve hours: was this breakfast? No. The peddler opened a box and pulled out a Super Happy Fun Color-Change LED Spinning Top. He flipped a switch and set the thing loose. It whirled down the aisle and coasted under my seat, where it bleeped and tooted and screeched at a maddening volume.

"It's fun! It's high-tech! It will make your life colorful! It even sings a song!" As he passed, the peddler slowed to aim the cone of his megaphone into the inner ear canals of what few passengers remained sleeping. "Only fifty kuai to bring hours of happy playtime to your child's life!"

As the peddler stooped to fetch the runaway gizmo from under my seat, a tense American frequency was buzzing in my brain. Someone was going to do something. I could sense it. Someone was going to get up from their seat, march right down the aisle, snatch the megaphone from the peddler's hand and stomp it to bits. This is what would happen in America. But as your students will constantly remind you, T.I.C.: This Is China. The crowd drank in the peddler's rap. They were intrigued by the gizmo. They wanted personal demonstrations. What else can it do? Does it play any other songs? What kind of batteries does it use? Thirty kuai is all I've got; will you take thirty kuai? After twenty minutes of lo-fi squawking, the peddler had completely sold out of gizmos. He switched off his megaphone. I was drifting off into a befuddled slumber when I noticed a brownish-yellow pool oozing towards my sneakers. The man next to me pointed at it.

"Is that poop or pee?" he asked.
"It looks like pee," said his companion, "but it smells like poop."
The peddler stepped over the spreading puddle as he passed, riffling the bills in his hand. The stench multiplied. A stewardess stepped in the puddle - splash! - and let out a noise of mild disgust, but did not return to clean it up. I picked my bag up off the floor and sat with my nose tucked into my armpit to ward off the stench. I napped that way for fifteen minutes until the peddler returned, this time with hand-powered flashlights, which sold like mooncakes. And he came back a half hour later, flogging what looked to be imitation Nickelodeon Gak. The purgatory of public transportation had turned very quickly to hell. I pulled my hood over my head and curled up on the bench, and for two hours, amidst all the stinking and squawking, I pretended to sleep.

When I removed my hood, the first thing I saw was a boot. My eyes followed the boot upward to find that it was connected to a stockinged calf, which was connected to an unusually luscious thigh: a woman's leg. I blinked and shook my head. This was a woman's leg! Who was this woman, and what was she doing in China? Then I glanced up to see a very pretty face watching me sleep. She smiled. I squinted. Then, like a startled turtle, I pulled my hood back over my head and rolled over on my side.

A few stops later, two new guys took the seats across from me and started placing bets as to whether I could understand them.

"I bet he can't."
"I bet he can."
"I bet he can't."
"He can," said the woman. "I know he can. I heard him speaking earlier."
One of the guys leaned forward and slapped my thigh.
"Hey. If I speak Chinese, can you understand me?"
I sat up and de-hooded.
"More or less," I said.
He crowed triumphantly and collected a couple cigarettes from the peasant next to him.

A few days ago, I had what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity, and since then I have been able to understand and produce much more Chinese than I could a week ago. This Is Chinese: weeks of frustration and regression, moments of insight and comprehension. So I cleared one conversational hurdle after another with the man across from me - a clean-shaven sleazeball in a shiny silk suit - and eventually, with the unbelievably voluptuous woman across the aisle. She was sitting with a much older man: her father? her grandpa? her husband? The train passed through a tunnel. I gazed out the window into the darkness and saw that the woman was smiling at my reflection. My eyes shot down towards the floor and lingered on the dried poop-pee puddle under my feet. I have not been in China long enough to understand what constitutes normal Chinese behavior, but the woman across the aisle was behaving mighty unorthodoxically, indeed.

We chatted. The sleaze in the suit, at one point, turned to the woman across the aisle and said, "You should make a foreigner friend." He paused for emphasis. "I mean - make a foreigner friend." He grinned. She smiled.

We arrived. The Mongol hordes wrestled their way down the aisle and off the train. I waited until the car was empty and stepped out onto the platform. The woman was reverse following me, trailing behind her uncle, or coworker, or husband, or whoever he was. When I'd caught up to her, she drew me close and whispered in my ear, "Do you have a phone?"
"Yes," I said, "but it's dead at the moment."
"Then I'll give you my number."
She wrote it on the back of her ticket and slipped it into my hand. No mention of English lessons and no "foreigner friend" spiel. Just a phone number. Call me sometime. There was something indescribably sexy about the gesture, something very un-Chinese. The old man caught her by the arm and they melted into the crowd together. I put her number in my wallet. But I don't think I'll call. My marital status is confusing enough without steamy train station affairs thrown into the mix.

Two days later, I was back at the Wanzhou Train Station. The moment I stepped out of the cab, I was assailed by barkers and floggers and hecklers: do you want to eat? do you want to relax? do you want to go to Nanchong? I take you to Nanchong!

"Bu yao, bu yao, dou bu yao!" I shouted those magic words with my newly acquired Chinese gravitas and the sea of urchins parted before me. "I don't want, I don't want, I don't want any of it!"

I fished out my wallet. According to my fuzzy calculations, after the bus and the cab ride to the station, I should have had 50 kuai left over for a hard sleeper bunk. But my wallet served up 34 kuai and two mao. I'd have to ride coach again. I paced back and forth, racking my mind for the exact moment the swindle had taken place. In China, your pockets seem to hemorrhage money, a phenomenon that will often drive you into a sweaty rage, before you realize that you've been gypped the equivalent of three U.S. dollars. I bought a ticket.
"34 kuai," said the clerk.
I slid my last 34 kuai across the counter, and stared at the two mao in my palm as though there were an ominous portent therein.

Boarding the train to Wanzhou had been a surprisingly civilized affair, but boarding the train back to Nanchong was like being thrown into the throes a Gwar show. The instant the gates opened, the hordes forearm shivered their way out onto the platform. I stood on the outskirts for a few minutes to catch my breath, then I surged into the pit. We were so much cattle; we were turn-of-the-century mobs rioting in the wake of a Stravinsky concert; we were 500 human beings eroding each other to a polished sheen. For a moment, western rationality strained against the bars of my skull: isn't there a better, a smoother way to go about this? Must we cross-check grandmothers into plexiglas walls so we can get to our assigned seats first? Well, shit, I shrugged: as far as excitement goes, this beats the hell out of waiting in line for half an hour. I headbutted someone in the chest and Rodmanned my way through the turnstile.

China will shake you and rattle you sometimes. Other times, it will grin mischievously while you sit and wait for chaos to strike. Nothing happened on the train ride back to Nanchong. It was six hours of purgatory. I reread Brave New World. I wrote. Nobody seemed to notice me. I snuck out to the smoking car for a cigarette. The train ride was uncomfortable, smelly, and cramped. The peddler swept through at midnight to flog bottles of nerve tonic. But it wasn't as maddening or as tedious as I had anticipated. We coasted into Nanchong thirty minutes early. For the first time, I felt like I was coming home. I was relieved to be back in Nanchong, with its familiar peculiarities, its incomprehensible dialect, its distinctly drab architecture; the twiggy girls at the shishkebab joint asking me for English lessons; back to my sterile modern campus, the cold squareness of my apartment, and finally, after a meditative cigarette or two, to the Keithish musk of my hard, well-slept-in bed.

Evil

Every so often, a scrap of western garbage washes ashore and I pounce upon it like a castaway. Yesterday morning, I found a National Enquirer in the stairwell. Patrick Swayze was on the cover, smoking a cigarette, boxed-in by dayglo yellow scare headlines gleefully predicting his imminent death. Inside were exclusive paparazzi photos of Swayze's final days, with arrows indicating his distended belly and the tufts of wig sticking out from under his hat. TWO FEET IN THE GRAVE! DAYS LEFT TO LIVE, DOCTORS REPORT! SWAYZE STILL SMOKING EVEN AS HE'S DYING OF PANCREATIC CANCER! Who reads this shit, I asked myself. That much is obvious: millions upon millions of Americans read this shit. But more frightening, to my mind, is the sheer amount of manpower that goes into producing the shit. Hundreds of photographers, editors, and graphic designers; a legion of libelists busting their asses to beat deadline; a beehive of cubicles swarming with hardworking, law-abiding citizens. If some wet-eared intern along the way raised the objection that roasting a dying man was in poor taste, he must have been laughed out of the staff meeting.

This is the evil we must fight against. It is a grey evil. An unleaded, decaffeinated, fat-free evil. It is a subtle and powerful evil. It is the evil of groupthink, the evil that makes you look around the room before you raise your hand, the evil that draws a crowd to a car wreck. Nowadays, it no longer pays to bash your foe over the head with a rock. You'll get thrown in the cooler for that. Modern man has more refined tastes: he prefers mass-produced, assembly line evil. None of the chickenshits at the National Enquirer would have the gall to spit in the face of a dying friend, but the lot of them will gladly work together to piss on the grave of someone they have never met. It is this grey, insectoid evil that we must fight against.

After college, I worked as a copywriter for the Oriental Trading Company. My job involved writing product descriptions for Chinese finger traps, whoopie cushions, Jesus frisbees, gummi crucifixes, World's Greatest Dad koozies, novelty hand buzzers, Groucho Marx glasses, googily eyes, fake vomit, und so weiter. It wasn't the work itself that drove me to quit, but the pervading sense of evil. Nobody in that cold, dimly lit basement actually wanted to be there. Nobody believed in what they were doing. They all worked diligently for 40+ hours a week. And to what end? Ultimately, so the CEO could blow the company purse in Council Bluffs.

About two months in, my cubicle-mate grabbed me by the wrist, looked me in the eyes, and said, "Get out of here. Quit. While you still can." And so eventually, I did. Now I'm in China, living on $180 a month. Whatever the future holds in store for me, I am certain I won't turn a profit. I have grown out of the metaphysical rebellion that fueled my first, second, and third puberties. In its stead, I have adopted a simple non serviam policy. I will take no part in anything I consider evil. Of course, I will do locally evil deeds along the way, as we all do. But I want no part in the big, grey evil. I'd rather work for nothing in some foggy corner of the world, and I am content to do that for the rest of my life. And if by the end of it all I have made a name for myself, I invite the Enquirer to come and piss upon my grave. IDEALISTIC HOBO SPENDS LAST DAYS LISTENING TO "PRETZEL LOGIC" BY STEELY DAN ON REPEAT! DOCTORS SAY THE VAGABOND HASN'T BATHED IN A FORTNIGHT! EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS SHOW LOVABLE TRANSIENT TRYING (AND FAILING) TO MAKE BURRITOS FROM SCRATCH! And so on.

Field Jacket

Last week, a socially transmitted disease swept through the Nanchong foreigner ghetto. By Thursday, I had succumbed to the grippe. It sopped up every last fluid ounce of inspiration I had left. I woke up an hour before class and my throat was so swollen that I couldn't even talk to myself. My ears were sealed shut, so all I could hear was the beating of my heart and the bubbling of internal organs that, thankfully, we are not usually privy to. I called the class monitor and through a morse code of coughs and wheezes, communicated that today's Oral English 101 class would be postponed due to lack of voice. Then I crawled back under the blankets and lay there, unable to sleep, or talk to myself, or listen to Thelonious Monk, or even write, because of the block that wedged itself in my Broca's Area immediately after my last blog entry. So I got out of bed and washed my field jacket. Then I dried it on the radiator, turning it over every few minutes like a slab of meat. At least the jacket gave me something to look forward to, namely warmth, and thoughts of how bad-ass I would look patrolling the apartment grounds in a vintage Cold War Era U.S. Air Force field jacket.

The jacket, as my mom would have you know, belongs to my mom. She wore it when she was stationed in North Dakota, up until my in-utero existence began to stretch its seams. The jacket survived several moves and remained hidden away in the Petit Family Closet until a few winters ago, when in desperate need of a coat, I took it from the rack and scurried off to the Brothers Lounge. The jacket followed me to Poland, then to Germany. But in the scramble to get out of Europe before my tourist visa expired, I left the jacket behind, entrusting it to my friend Ben, fully expecting to never see it again. I returned to the States, then flew south to Mexico for the winter.

When I resurfaced in Nebraska the next January, I met up with Ben at The Brothers and found him looking rather mod-chic in a government-issue field jacket.

"Man, that jacket is bad-ass," I told Ben.
"Thanks," he said.
"Where'd you get it? Army Surplus?"
He mumbled something into his lapel.
"Whazzat?" I asked.
"It's your mom's," he said.

So it was. I tend to fight Nebraskan winter with denial: I do not wear a coat until it becomes biologically imperative to do so. So all that January I shivered in my hoodie and hawked pneumonia loogies into my Moscow Mule until Ben, one day, offered me my mother's coat, which I happily reclaimed as my own.

It's the kind of jacket that has threatening instructions sewn into the lining: eight of them, to be exact.

1. ADJUST CLOSURES AND DRAWCORDS TO VENTILATE - AVOID OVERHEATING OF BODY
2. WHEN HOOD IS USED, LOWER EXTENSION SHALL BE WORN OVER NECK OPENING
3. BRUSH SNOW OR FROST FROM GARMENTS BEFORE ENTERING HEATED SHELTERS
4. DO NOT EXPOSE TO HIGH TEMPERATURE OF A STOVE
5. LUBRICATE SLIDE FASTENERS WITH WAX
6. FOR CLEANING AND RESTORING OF WATER REPELLENCY, RETURN TO LAUNDRY FOR MACHINE WASHING IN ACCORDANCE WITH ESTABLISHED PROCEDURES FOR QUARPEL TREATED GARMENTS
7. DO NOT STARCH OR BLEACH
8. DO NOT REMOVE THIS LABEL

OVERHEATING OF BODY isn't going to be a problem in Nanchong. I do not own a stove, but in any event, I will avoid baking this jacket. I am reading up on the established procedures for quarpel treated garments: I am reading up on quarpel. My lone complaint is that the jacket feels a bit naked. Where are the epaulettes? The badges of merit? Perhaps the Peace Corps can do something in that direction. The Medal of Cultural Integration. Upper-Intermediate Speaker of Mandarin. The Bronze Finger Trap. The Purple Liver, commemorating a month-long struggle with Japanese Encephalitis B. The prestigious Empty Cradle, awarded to male volunteers who complete two years of service without fathering a child. Et al.

The Last Day of Autumn

As I was forging through the dampness towards the nearest non-electrified ATM, some college bros spotted me and one of them shouted, "To be or not to be! A question!" I hope literary quotations are the new direction in laowai heckling. I wouldn't mind all the attention if my admirers hit me with words of wisdom from E.M. Forster and George Bernard Shaw.

Winter has come to Nanchong. At the laowai Halloween party, one of the Mennonites told me that it gets so ruthlessly cold in Nanchong that he actually flies home to Saskatchewan for the winter. That moment was like The Deerhunter, when the warhungry steelmill riffraff encounters a Vietnam vet at the bar, or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, when McMurphy returns from electroshock therapy: the fading of smiles, the shuffling of feet, the optimistic persistence in disbelief. For the first two weeks of November, we newbies went about our work in cargo shorts and t-shirts. And then winter came. Saskatchewan is sounding downright peachy right about now.

I'm no lightweight when it comes to winter. I am a Nebraskan. In subzero temperatures, I have been known to gallivant in a hoodie full of holes and a pair of corduroys. Objectively, winters in Nebraska are much worse than winters in Sichuan. The temperature is lower, the wind is stronger. But there is something about the quality of the cold here. Nebraska is dramatically cold, with gusts of wind and eddies of snow. Nebraska is also capriciously cold: it will snow two feet one day, only to be 65 and sunny the next. But Nanchong winters are consistently, mercilessly cold. It is a damp cold, the kind of chill you get when you read 1984. It chills you to the bone. I once watched a tai-chi master kick my friend's ass in slow motion, and that is the sort of cold Nanchong has to offer. Because Sichuan is situated under some imaginary Chinese line below which buildings are not furnished with central heating, there is no escape from the cold, unless you are showering or nestled under several blankets with another human being. When I happen to be in my apartment - a rare thing these days - I huddle as close as possible to the plug-in radiator. This morning, I couldn't finish my Mandarin journal entry because my hands were shaking so bad.

The last day of autumn, whatever the calendars may say, occurred last Friday. It was sunny, and warm in the sunlight. I was leaving my Mandarin lesson. My tutor had invited me to air my grievances, and air I did, for two hours, while she tweaked my syntax along the way. Passing the outdoor ping-pong tables, I saw that they were full to capacity - all forty of them - and that the games were halting mid-ping mid-pong so that the players could take a good long look at me. There was kung-fu in the square by the stadium, badminton games across the street, and a soccer match raging in the mudpit down the way. The Chinese are nothing if not active. My thoughts were heavy, but pleasant. I could chew on them for hours. The sun was setting over the ten-story Jiao-Xue Building, whose roof was built to look like a splayed book, from whose pages a middle-aged man from Anhui Province leapt to his death two weeks ago.

Anhui is a long way from Nanchong. The man came to my school, his alma mater, looking for work. The university informed him that there were no positions available. So he took the elevator up to the top floor of the Jiao-Xue Building, situated himself in the spine of that great big cement book on the roof, and jumped. He jumped at 11:30 AM, right around the time I would've been coming back from class. The students in the building were said to have heard the splat. Trauma counselors were dispatched. The man left his wife and child behind. So it goes.

I am not one to dwell on coincidences, but the day before the jumper jumped, I met a middle-aged man on the bus who happened to be from Anhui Province. I knew he was an out-of-towner because out-of-towners are rare, and because I could understand him: he was speaking Mandarin and not Sichuanese. He complimented me on my Chinese and said that it was bang, which is a word I had to ask my tutor about: it is the east coast way of saying "awesome." So I thanked him. We chatted for a bit. Then I turned away, because I was tired of talking to strangers on the bus, and because I needed a few minutes to think about what I was going to teach in that morning's class and how I was going to teach it. He got off a few stops before I did. The next day, someone leapt to their death from the tenth story of the Jiao-Xue Building.

My toilet is malfunctioning and public restrooms do not come with toilet paper, so I carry a roll in my backpack.

Babies' Republic

There isn't a mathematician, statistician, or social scientist alive who could explain to me why there are so many babies in this country. Well, says the informed reader, it is a nation of some 1.5 billion souls, and at least some them are bound to be babies, right? To which I respond, yes, but still: there are far too many babies here for comfort. Even the campus I live on, which you would imagine as teeming with young coeds in skintight sweats with "CHINA WEST NORMAL UNIVERSITY" printed across the butt, is overrun with babies: babies crawling to class, babies doing kegstands, babies hazing younger babies. I jest - but seriously, you would not believe how many babies there are in China.

There are six babies living on the fourth floor of my apartment building, which doesn't make any sense, as there are only four apartments. There are rules here, remember. One of the apartments is mine, and I do not currently own any babies, biologically related or otherwise. My neighbors are well past childrearing age. It is unclear to which of the two remaining tenants the six babies belong to. They are free-range babies. The hallway is their rumpus room and there, the babies - all of them boys - love shooting each other, and me, with the same Made in China lazer guns that were such a big hit stateside during my own childhood. Last night, one of the babies pelted me in the stomach with a rubber ducky, and this morning I tripped over the sawed-off plastic shotgun that he'd left outside my door. The babies run this crib.

In China, even the babies are aware that you are a laowai. This morning, as I hustled to catch the last Toyotavan to school, I passed a baby who was so startled by my pale beardedness that he tripped over himself and faceplanted into the sidewalk. There was a brief lull in which the baby came to the realization that he was hurt, then he started bawling. I stopped to apologize and bowed deeply before the mother, who said Mei guanxi - No problem! - then hoisted the little shrieking bundle up into her arms and walked away. I once gave a toddler such a bad scare that he fell forward and cracked his forehead against a metal pipe. I begged forgiveness from the mother, or the grandmother, or the aunt - at any rate, the guardian of this screaming, bleeding child. "Mei guanxi," she said. "It's not your fault."

Contrary to what we think in the West, the Chinese baby is not lonely. Don't get me wrong: the Young Emperor is alive and well. He is 29, single, living at home, and spends his Friday nights locked in his room, sorting his glass clown collection by height. But because Chinese families are huge - and because China is dense - Chinese children have an infinity of potential playmates, or at least far more than I had at their age, a time when I could either get myself beat up by my sister, or play with the neighbor kid's Super Nintendo while in the bathroom, his big sister was helping him administer his very first hit from a crack pipe.

I am scared of babies. They know everything. Like other domestic animals, they are impeccable judges of character. Chinese babies have been known to point and shake their heads when I've picked up smoking again, and will scream and pee their pants when they catch me listening to the Wham! jams I keep stashed on my MP3 player for a rainy day. "The child is father of the man," William Wordsworth once wrote, and I believe it. Babies are smarter than us. If you give a baby an IQ test, he'll probably eat it or, if he is especially precocious, spit up on it. But who among us full-grown humans could master Sichuanese in three years? Here in Nanchong, I have been thoroughly insulted by babies who weren't even potty trained, and found myself unable to furnish a response. But then, babies are capable of many impossible feats, such as doubling their height and girth in as little as a year, and pooping over half their body mass in a single potty session. So perhaps we shouldn't regard them as human, but as little Übermenschen.

Because I fear their judgment, and because I am frightened by their vulnerability, I have always tended to avoid babies. I have never once held a baby, for the same reason that I don't bring an antique vase with me on a bender. But that has changed here in China, where babies are some of my best friends. To begin with, many of them cannot yet talk, so they will not address me as laowai. Their eyes may balloon out of their heads at the sight of me - they know something is amiss - but they are not yet vocally racist. Plus, everyone in China seems to keep at least one baby in tow, especially the shopkeeps, so for guanxi purposes, it helps to maintain a healthy rapport with the local babies.

They, too, want to improve their Oral English, these babies, though they cannot yet speak Chinese. Last night, the baby at the shop across the street - a pudgy little guy I had never seen before - told me that he was one year old. "Won," he said, holding up a carrot stick of a finger. "Won." This astounded me. This baby, who was in the womb a year ago and did not exist nine months before that, has at least some primitive conception of time, which is more than you can say for most of Latin America. He knows he has existed for roughly one of the earth's revolutions around the sun. He knows how to express units of time using his fingers, and in two languages to boot. Still disbelieving, I asked him again in Chinese: "Ni ji sui le?" I asked. "How old are you?"

"Won," he said, holding up the finger. "Won."

So this one-year-old could answer a question posed to him by a seedy-looking foreigner speaking in tones that weren't anywhere near correct. And that 26-year-old foreigner, just a few months ago, wouldn't have been able to answer the same question, couldn't even have indicated the answer with his fingers because he wouldn't have understood the question in the first place.

Then, the baby flipped it on me.
"Ni ji sui le?" he asked. "How old are you?"
I thought about it.
"Won," I said, holding up one finger. "Won."

Webster's Folly

A few weeks ago, the Italian got me thinking that Chinglish was the product of a lot of heady linguistic differences between the two languages it attempts to weld together. But now it seems to me that technical difficulties might have more to do with the problem, namely the cheap-o electronic dictionaries that my students (and no doubt the signsmiths) swear by.

Yesterday, my tutor was trying to explain why I should use one Chinese phrase in place of another.

"The second phrase is more, hmm," she said. "I don't know how to describe it."

She slipped her electronic dictionary from its Hello Kitty carrying case and punched in a few Chinese characters. Then she tilted the screen towards me. I almost spit up my chamomile tea.

Circumbendibus, said the dictionary. She pressed a button and a robot voice uttered the word for good measure: CIR-CUM-BEN-DI-BUS.

"What is that?" I laughed.
"Is it not correct?"
"I have no idea," I said. "I've never seen the word in my life."

What my tutor wanted to communicate was that one phrase "sounded nicer" than the other, and what we ended up with was circumbendibus. I wrote the word down in my notebook, but she caught me and crossed it out.

"No," she said. "I'm embarrassed."
So I wrote it on the palm of my hand when she wasn't looking and stole off after class to look it up in a dictionary, except none of the dictionaries I use seemed to have it.

Today, because I had fifteen minutes left over towards the end of class, I wrote up a list of the most common Chinglish mistakes, or at least the most common ones among my 350 students and the thousands of strangers I have taught pro bono on the streets of Nanchong.

1. humorous: Keith is so humorous.
How about: Keith is so funny.

2. clever: Keith is so clever.
How about: Keith is so smart.

3. you had better: You had better call me after work.
This is by far my least favorite Chinglishism. I am aware that it is Chinglish, and yet it never fails to rub me the wrong way. In the States, we tend to use "You had better" when we're making threats - "You'd better not look at my sister that way" - or scolding underlings, so even if a well-meaning friend of yours tells you that "you had better" do something innocuous, you still have to fight the impulse to smack them across the face.
How about: You should call me after work or You ought to call me after work - or better yet, You oughtta gimme a call after work.

4. play with me: If you're not busy after work, you should come play with me.
This is a direct translation from Chinese. In Mandarin, you ask people - even if they're crotchety 67-year-old pedants - whether they'd like to come play with you after work. The word "play," in this case, means "to hang out." But in English, the phrase has some unintended connotations: either that you are an oversized child, or that you are a very naughty girl, indeed.
How about: If you're not busy after work, we should hang out.

5. our China: Our China is developing rapidly.
You will often hear the Chinese refer to China as "our motherland," so perhaps this isn't so much a language issue as it is a difference in national identity. Never in a million years would I refer to the United States as "my America" - I sometimes live there, but it belongs to somebody else. Anyhow, when my students refer to "our China" in English, I can't help but imagine that they're boasting about a new IKEA dinette set.

6. campurs: I live on the old campurs, but I go to school at the new campurs.
Here I had to play around with phonetics to make my point. I proved to my students that they could produce the sounds "cam" and "piss." Then, I had them put the syllables together. "Campiss," they said. "Campus." Yes! I smacked my eraser on the podium and a plume of chalkdust clouded my ecstatic features. My students murmured the strange new word to themselves: campus, campus, campus. Then a lower, more urgent murmuring started at the back of the classroom and worked its way to the front: could it be that they had been learning the wrong pronunciations all their lives?

7. pander: The pander bear is China's national treasure.
This has baffled me since my arrival. My Chinese name is "Pan Da" and my students can pronounce that well enough. And yet their mascot is the "pander." Nobody likes a panderer. So I wrote "Pan" and "Duh" on the board. "Panda," my students chanted, "panda panda panda panda panda!" I had to cut them off like a conductor: my class was starting to sound like a Deerhoof song.

After the bell rang, a rush of students smothered me at the chalkboard, demanding to know whether what I had said was true: was campurs really campus, and pander panda, and all the rest?

It's true - I proclaimed - yea, verily, I tell thee, it is true.

My students covered the board in white, yellow, pink, and blue phonetic symbols.
"But Mr. Hu always told us to pronounce it like this."
"But in middle school we learned to say it like this."
"I've always pronounced it this way."

I was entering dicey territory. It's an uncomfortable spot to be in, a self-proclaimed literary hack like me with little to no technical training, righting the wrongs of unseen Mr. Lis and Mrs. Lus and Dr. Zhangs. But it's all true, I told them, "pander" is completely wrong and "panda" is entirely correct.

One of my students wrote the word "ship" on the board.
"How do you pronounce this?" she asked.
"Ship," I said.
"But I learned sheep!"
"Sheep is wrong. Ship is right."
She slipped her electronic dictionary from its Hello Kitty carrying case. She pressed a button.
"SHEEP," quod the robot, smugly.
I checked the screen and saw that the IPA symbols were indeed "ʃip," that the dictionary called for a ruminant mammal of the genus Ovis where a large oceangoing vessel should have been. So was this the problem, after all? Crummy low-end electronic dictionaries? I stood there wondering whether I should outlaw the blasted robots from class.

"So, Mr. Pander - Mr. Panda!" asked one student. "If my teachers are wrong and my dictionary is wrong, who can I trust?"
For lack of a more qualified authority, I shrugged and said, "Me."

But I suppose the electronic dictionary isn't such a bad invention, even if yours happens to have been programmed by a handful of drunks working the night shift at the Suzhou Guanchang Electron Stuff Limited Factory. An electronic dictionary will at least get you in the ballpark most of the time. I am reflecting, now, on the year I taught Hangman Studies in Korea. The day in question was probably a Friday, and almost certainly the last class of the day: my energy was spent and my students had seized control of the markers, the erasers, and the whiteboard. They were too hyper to play an orthodox game of hangman, so they scribbled a beard and an afro on the man at the gallows - it was me - and drew a giant vat of bubbling, steaming liquid under his feet.

"What is that?" I asked.
"Teacher, please wait," said the artist, and he slipped his electronic dictionary from its Hello Kitty carrying case. He punched in a few Korean characters and held the dictionary up for all to hear.
"SULFURIC ... ACID," said the robot voice.
"That's great," I laughed. "That's great."
I could no longer tell, at that point, whether my laughter was sincere.
The letters on the board were "F _ C K."
"Teacher, now you guess!"
"Let me think about this one," I said. "U?"

The White Whale

On Saturday morning, I heaved myself out of bed, stuffed my books in a backpack, and walked over to the library. I downed a coffee on the way and had to pee something fierce by the time I got there, so I ducked into a bathroom, couldn't find any urinals, and made use of one of the squatters. On my way out, a girl stopped dead in her tracks and just about dropped her teacup at my feet. I turned and took an uncomfortably long time reading the sign above my head: "Woman ... bath ... room."

Getting into the teachers' reading room took some doing.
"You're a teacher?"
"Yes," I said, uneasily.
"Do you have an I.D. card?"
"No," I said, decisively.
"What th - why don't you have an I.D. card?"
"I'm new here."

The library troll granted me passage, but I had to register all of the books I was bringing in with me. My list looked like this:

1. The Norton Anthology of American Literature
2. Oxford English-Chinese Chinese-English Minidictionary
3. Peace Corps Language Manual - Mandarin
4. Las Muertas - Jorge Ibargüengoitia
5. Larousse Pocket Diccionario

I asked if I had to sign in my water bottle of Nescafe. The clerk shook her head, no.

And I remained in the library for six hours, writing Chapter One of Laowai de Riji: Diary of a Foreigner - my first stab at composing anything in Chinese more involved than "My name is Pan Da. I am an American," etc.

I told my tutor on the first day of class that I didn't want to study Chinese characters. I am a man who has yet to master the 26 letters of the English alphabet. At the time I judged that learning 10,000 Chinese pictographs was beyond my ability, and that we should focus on chit-chat. My tutor - in her Chinese way - showed up the following day with a pageful of symbols and asked me to copy them. So, coffee hands a-trembling, I did. We started with mama and papa, auntie and uncle, but even those four characters seemed impossible to mimic. After five minutes of concentrated effort, I would find that "papa" had somehow flipped itself mirrorwise on the page, which would send my tutor into a giggling fit.

But a month later, I find myself writing short essays in a script that was Greek - nay, Chinese - to me a month ago. I'm not bragging, here. I am indebted to my tutor, who knew better than I what a laowai can accomplish when he's paying 900 kuai a month.

After my day in the library, I went home and watched an overdubbed version of The Matrix. I'm not such a big fan of the film, overdubbed or otherwise, but I sat there in the dark with my notebook, scribbling down any and all words I recognized but didn't know. And in so doing, I acquired a pretty decent working vocabulary in the field that interests me most: bullshit philosophy. I then watched ten minutes of a BBC documentary about the Space Race before I realized it was overdubbed in Cantonese, which is probably why I couldn't understand a word of it.

I returned to the library this morning and studied for four hours. Although there is much to be said for whooping it up with the locals and learning 600 words for the male anatomy, mastering a language is a profoundly unsexy process, one that involves rote memorizing a lot of phrases that you have little use for and absolutely no interest in knowing: to invest in the stock market, to wait in line, and so on. I remember such-and-such foreign friend in such-and-such foreign country explaining to me why he'd never bothered to learn such-and-such foreign language. It's easy, he said, just use gestures. If you want a plunger, make a plunging gesture. If it's toilet paper you need, make an ass-wiping gesture. It seemed like a very apelike way to live, but I suppose it is one means of survival. That said, I am committed to avoiding pantomime at all costs and, if I am able, I would like one day to communicate my nest of weird western ideas to the Chinese in their own language.

This evening, I showed up early to class and played ping-pong with the wall until my tutor arrived and sat down to dissect my first journal entry. There were the expected syntax errors. But what surprised me was that she wasn't so much critiquing my grammar as much as she was trying to correct my writing style.

"Your writing is very," she paused and made a bouncy gesture with her hands. Desultory? Scatterbrained? I understood. "I don't see what the third and fourth sentences have to do with the first two sentences."

My first paragraph went as follows:
"In China, there are good days and bad days. On a good day, I am invisible, nobody seems to notice me. My students are excited to practice their English. I remember all of my new Chinese words and my tutor (Wendy) is happy with me. On a bad day ... "

She understood the sentences individually, but couldn't see why they were linked together into a paragraph. I tried to explain myself: good days consist of invisibility, good students, good Mandarin classes. The next paragraph is about bad days, which consist of ... but she didn't follow.

"You are talking about people not noticing you, and then you're suddenly talking about your English classes."

At that point, I had to laugh out loud. The beast had come out into the open. The problem was not my grammar or even my writing, but the way I organized my thoughts: in order to write Chinese, I am going to have to learn to think like the Chinese. Events which seem sequential and orderly to me make no sense whatsoever to my tutor. And so it's back to the drawing board for me, back to the library with my harpoon and nautical maps and a bottle of instant grog to keep me company on my tireless pursuit of the White Whale: avast! there she blows! -- there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Mandarin!

The Haystacks: Regurgitated

The year was 1999. Grindcore, rap-rock, and other confusing musical crossbreeds ruled the adolescent hearts and minds of suburban Nebraska. Ska was back on life support, but the mustard plug was about to be pulled for good. Commercially viable independent rock remained a twinkle in Conor Oberst's dilated pupils. Nerd rock pioneers like Ben Folds Five and Cake had bravely blazed a trail for upper-middle-class balladeers, but they and their ilk were too self-absorbed and sexually frustrated to coalesce into anything like a popular movement. And so, listless and torpid in the post-coitus of Kurt Cobain and the First Gulf War, the township of Bellevue, Nebraska lay snoozing upon a musical faultline.

That summer, 16-year-old Keith Petit inherited a used drum set from a used car salesman, an acquisition his parents would rue for decades to come. Petit converted his minimum wage at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo into a TASCAM PortaStudio 424 mixer. With the addition of a $15 Yamaha PortaSound keyboard, all the trappings of a PortaBand were assembled in Petit's basement. But as yet he had no friends and thus, no band.

Petit's early recordings featured himself and whichever family pets were close at hand. They (the recordings) were not deliberately avant-garde, but sounded a bit like "Revolution 9" played backwards at 16 RPM. In his youth, Petit explored that sparse musical frontier between John Cage and The Bloodhound Gang. He relied heavily on his PortaSound's preprogrammed samba beat. His favorite (perhaps only) chord was A-Minor. Rock music was still intimidating to him and, afraid his parents might mistake him for one of the fauxhawked nogoodniks who smoked cloves out in front of Taco John's, he maintained a strict silence in the studio, always recording with a direct line-in connection and refusing to sing on any of his tracks unless the folks were out of town for an extended period: say, three weeks.

Meanwhile, as a marching band jock, Petit's circle of underconfident, acne-pickled friends was expanding. Before long, he had made four or five acquaintances who wouldn't beat his ass and were semi-proficient with unpopular brass instruments. Petit used his study hall time to delve into his high school library's expansive home studio recording section, where he found a slim, dust-jacketed volume entitled Start Your Own Band, which (along with instructions for building stage lights out of old Sanka cans and colored cellophane) chronicled the rise (but not the fall) of a fictitious 1970's jock-rock band named The Haystacks. It was The Haystacks whose final chapters Petit longed to write: the chapters where the band succumbs to creative differences and amphetamine addiction.

Not since The Beatles has the world seen a more agoraphobic studio band. The Haystacks were terminally afraid of performing, and indeed of appearing, in public, so they found refuge in Petit's basement on Hillcrest Avenue. There, the band wrote and recorded songs through a process they called stream-of-unconsciousness songsmithery. Lyrics were scrawled on the back of a Burger King receipt in the seconds before each session. A handful of chords were chosen, usually at random. Rather than rehearsing songs prior to recording, they simply hit the RECORD button and played so loudly and discordantly that tufts of asbestos rained down from the ceiling.

A glance at their early efforts reveals a stripped-down, minimalist sound when compared to their later, lusher, lewder work. The original Haystacks were a mere skeleton crew: Kevin Stinn on keyboards and screaming, Petit on drums, Jon Miller on guitar, and Jeff Hines on trombone, plastic wind tubes, and IBC Root Beer bottles. It was their very first session which yielded their least abrasive song: a spoken-word gem entitled "Cucumber."

"It's all there in the music," keyboardist/screamer Kevin Stinn says of Cucumber, taking a long drag from something that looks like a piccolo. "My mom used to teach at a Catholic school. I liked to play soccer with the fifth graders. I ate a lot of Subway sandwiches in those days. It's all there in the music. I'm not gonna explain it away."

Because the core members of The Haystacks were too socially inept to turn musicians away, the band's membership quickly ballooned to Funkadelic proportions. Andy Wenstrand contributed alto saxophone on a few neo-Basie numbers, while MENSA member "Toad" Taylor sat in on his homemade washbucket bass. A Franciscan monk known only as "Stu" hovered in the studio periphery and is regarded by fans as the seventeenth member of the band; he can be heard snarfing down York Peppermint Patties on a number of tracks. The Haystacks enlisted producer Phil Spector to add string ensembles to songs that didn't deserve them. Gradually, the Petit basement began to fill up with neighborhood gawkers and noisemakers - who were also included in the band - such that Phil Spector had to elbow and stab his way to the 424 to hit the STOP button.

Just as The Haystacks were starting to come together as a bandlike organism, Petit had his first experience with the then-unregulated psychedelic Miller Lite. Excerpts from his journal describe the intense revulsion he felt upon his first sip, how he dumped the rest of the can out in the sink and spent the next several days struggling through ego death and rebirth. He sank into seclusion and, as Phil Spector guarded the Petit studio day and night with a 700-year-old enchanted mace, collaboration was impossible and The Haystacks were suddenly reduced from a 37-man supergroup to a one-man chamber ensemble.

During this dark period, Petit's communiqués with the outside world were limited to a couple of EPs featuring African chants ("We Will Stay," "Dream Team"), sea shanties ("I Like Boats!"), and heavily accented Hindi raps ("Ball Song"). But it was with the surprisingly peppy Chicken Bucket single that Petit and The Haystacks finally struck gold.

"Mom and dad were at one of my sister's volleyball tournaments in Gretna or some shit," Petit says. "I went barefoot to the basement to cut a track before they got home. I got kitty litter in my toes. Between my toes, I mean. And I got to thinking about how bands should clump together, instead of allowing themselves to fall apart."

Chicken Bucket was a smash hit, peaking at #23,431 on the Unclassifiable charts at the now-defunct MP3.com. Built upon two not-quite-chords and the melody from "Devil's Haircut," the song was described by a member of the Bellevue West tuba section as "almost listenable." The Chicken Bucket EP also featured "Electric Football," a bareboned ballad about electric football and the loss of innocence, and was topped off with "Mean Ham Sandwich," a Nashville country jamboree featuring Jeff Hines on vocals, Petit on cornet, and Jon Miller on guitar: a harbinger of the more disastrous collaborations that loomed on the horizon.

The tripartite lust for fame, money, and sex with multiple anonymous partners finally wooed Petit from his psychedelic funk. The Haystacks reunited and returned to the basement for what would prove to be their most fecund studio session, recording some sixteen tracks in just over 34 minutes. Here we find them at their most intimate - the shuddering, undersexed horns on "Kopper Kettle" - and their most polemical - the rabidly McCarthyist "Communist Manifesto." Afro-Caribbean rhythms (or at least stereotypes) remained a key component of their sound on tracks like "Congo," whose lyrics evoke (and sometimes induce) a bad case of diarrhea, and "King Ridge Crabs," with Stinn's somewhat ingenuous Rastafarian lilt. They dabbled in hip-hop, inviting guest rapper RAJIV into the studio for a one-off freestyle that turned into a seven-minute exercise in scatology at which Henry Miller himself would've blushed. But the masses were growing restless. Bellevue ached for a full-length LP and a citywide tour. For far too long, The Haystacks had teased their fan base with sporadic EP releases and unannounced (and unattended) rooftop concerts. Over a round of Barq's Root Beers and three rounds of Putt-Putt Golf, producer Phil Spector unveiled his vision for The Haystacks' future: they would perform in the 2001 Bellevue Battle of the Bands.

There was a six-song minimum to enter the competition but, poring over their repertoire, The Haystacks failed to see how they could play fewer than 36 songs. Guided by Phil Spector's impeccable taste, they trimmed down their canon, disposed of several unimportant or unattractive members, and eventually agreed upon a seven-man lineup and a one-song performance.

What follow are the notes from an unpublished review by Clive Liverpool of NME Magazine, chronicling The Haystacks' first and only live concert:

Curtain rises grudgingly. Enter Haystacks.

Band seems to consist of a trombone, a tuba, a drummer, a guitar, a bass, a dancer, and a boy in a rainbow afro who serves some unspecified purpose. Oh, I see. He is the lead singer. Bassist is wearing a wifebeater with the word "GOD" scrawled across the front in blue perminent [sic] marker. The guitarist and the drummer are wearing matching blue uniforms and earthtone nametags - perhaps they just got off work. All are wearing KFC chicken buckets on their heads.

Drummer counts off, music begins. Guitar is barely audible - is it plugged in? Bass is flatulant [sic]. Unbearable groaning from the low brass section. Lead singer roaming the stage uneasily, does not know what to do during the intro, does not feel comfortable in the wig. Uproar in first few rows of the crowd: fans or hecklers? Are those batteries they're throwing?

Singer finally takes the mic and holds it at armslength like an unappetizing vegetable, sings the following couplet: I'm going crazy today/got a bat in my attic. Better get that looked at, mate. Melody sounds familiar, perhaps lifted from early Butthole Surfers? Chorus arrives somehow. Singer likes wearing chicken buckets on his head. So, evidently, does the rest of the band. And the gimmick comes out into the open: this is their hit single. Doesn't a band normally save the single for the end? Is this the end?

Trombone solo. Trombonist is furious. Look at him go. Removes KFC bucket from head and uses it as a plunger mute, with deleterious effect. Singer once again roams the stage, hides his face by turning away from the crowd and staring into the guitarist's amplifier, which is no larger, no more powerful than a shoebox. Solo winds down and for a glorious instant, the music stops. Is it over? Someone claps ... No. It continues.

This is the last chorus, one hopes. The low brass are blurting with heightened ferocity. Yes, the end is nigh. The bassist's wifebeater is dripping with sweat, blue ink is running down his chest. The guitarist's chicken bucket has fallen onto the stage, grease stains are visible on the inside, how utterly grotesque. The music stops. Again, there is impatient clapping. The curtain inches downward, sagging towards the stage like a lazy eyelid. An inept Phil Collinsesque drum solo and the dirge picks up again, this time at half-tempo. Wailing and gnashing of teeth. Someone is soloing but it is not clear who. Perhaps they are all soloing at this point.

Ritardando. The song is within measurable distance of its end. The band builds up to a chord that will not resolve to any other chord known to man. Good thing they don't try. After a murderous fermata, there is silence followed by a relieved wave of applause. The band remains stone still. Now they all look as lost as the lead singer, as though they've just woken from hypnosis to find that they have been masturbating in public. Clearly audible in the lull, a stage hand asks, "Is that your only song?" The band exchange glances. That was their only song. "Judas!" shouts an English folk revivalist from the upper deck. The drummer seizes an overhead mic and slurs, "I don't believe you. You're a liar!" Then he cries out, "'B-Flat Blues,' play it fucking loud!" and the band launches into one of those high school jazz band warm-ups, although there is some disagreement in the rhythm section as to which chords are B-Flat and which are not. The lights dim. The curtain drops suddenly, knocking both chicken bucket and afro wig from the singer's head. He appears to lose consciousness. Drummer flings drum sticks and chicken bucket into the crowd, either in frustration or gratitude. Lights go out, all is dark, only the fire exit signs remain visible. xDiztrezzDx is up next.

The Venaculas - a four-piece rap-rock outfit featuring three teenage brothers on guitars and their 56-year-old father on drums - took home the sweepstakes that night. The Haystacks lingered backstage, hoping to cop a stray beer or a female groupie from one of the actual bands, to no avail. Nobody invited them to the afterparty, so The Haystacks went out to eat - probably at the Sonic Burger on Cornhusker - and citing a mutual lack of confidence, agreed never to do anything creative ever again.

But The Haystacks' first and only public performance had stirred some interest among Omaha's indie scenesters - none of them female - and so it was that Phil Spector, always looking to make a quick buck off the lonely and disenfranchised, released the definitive 23 Reasons to Hate Us, complete with a string ensemble on all 23 tracks. It hit the charts like a dragonfly splattering against a windshield. The public unanimously agreed: they did not need 23 more reasons to hate The Haystacks. The album clung to the bottom of the US Avant-Garde Top 40 like a fat kid at the chin-up bar before it was taken out by a two-disc collaboration between Sinead O'Connor and the lead singer of Chumbawamba.

The Haystacks parted ways. Keith Petit spent the next seven years untangling the mess of cables in his basement and repackaging all of his instruments and mixers. He gathered up the tapes that covered his bedroom floor, shut them in his bedroom closet, and Masterlocked the door. It is said that only Phil Spector knows the combination. And so, like the Lost Ark, the lost recordings of The Haystacks have been hidden away for the salvation of mankind. But Phil Spector still holds the key to unleash the specters of that unholy sound, and all of us here at AMG shudder to imagine the Nazi face-melting that will certainly follow the release of the twelve-disc Haystacks: Regurgitated box set, due out in June of 2010.

- Mike Godol, AMG Music

The Haystacks:
Brendan Hartigan - tuba
Jeff Hines - trombone, plastic wind tube, IBC Root Beer bottle
Justin Kassube - bass, vocals
Jon Miller - guitar, bass, keyboards, vocals
Keith Petit - drums, guitar, bass, trombone, trumpet, vocals
Kevin Stinn - trombone, euphonium, bass, keyboards, vocals
RAJIV - vocals
Stu - ambiance
Andrew "Toad" Taylor - washboard bass, drums
Andy Wenstrand - saxophone

The Thin White Duke was Here

I was the first person in line for the Beck show at Columbiahalle. Other German hipsters may boast, may have the lie tattooed across their biceps. But it was I, standing on the kerb, ticket in hand, who was uncool enough to show up two hours before the bouncers did. It had been years since I'd attended a concert where you actually had to buy tickets beforehand, so I'd grown accustomed to waltzing through the doors in an altered state midway through the third opener, sidling up with whomever I knew at the bar and slugging my way to the front after the lights had dimmed. But this was Beck and this was Berlin: I erred on the anal side and showed up three hours before the doors opened. I had to ask a wino whether I was at the right place. Then it started to rain, so I ducked into a nearby pub whose clientele reminded me of American war vets, though they were probably just retired Krautrock scenesters. I sat and ate a pickle and langenscheidted my way through Die Andere Seite and waited for the rain to stop.

When I returned to Columbiahalle, I was no longer the first person in line. There was a German girl with Beck pins covering both lapels of her frockcoat and a Spaniard wearing the Beck t-shirt that I had left at home.

"So, ehh, you guys like Beck much?" I asked.
As they talked about Him, their eyes glazed over in a way that mine did not. But like all music buffs, I nurtured the belief that they didn't appreciate Beck the way I did, and like the rest, I was probably right about that.

The bouncer let us in and we pressed as far forward as the guardrails allowed. We sent the Spaniard out for drinks and we sat injun-style on the floor and waited.

There may have been an opening act, but I have no memory of it. I remember Beck walking out on stage - already some Germans were chanting "Loser" - and I was surprised to see him sporting his Loser-era locks, his Mellow Gold shades, and the sneer to match.

It was an underwhelming show, or perhaps it was just me who was underwhelmed. I hadn't slept in a fortnight and after a month in Berlin, my body was turning to Nutella and currywurst. I remember little about the concert, just that Beck was surly and anhedonic, that I was dissecting the performance too much to enjoy it, and that the German girl in the frockcoat had fallen in love with me, but I dissected her to bits and so lost her to an autistic Swede. The whole night would have been a wash if a German graphic designer hadn't adopted me after the show and paid for me to dance at the rockabilly club until the sun came up over Kreuzberg.

A week later, Radiohead came to town. This was, for me, the mother of all shows; was, in fact, the reason I had allowed myself to linger in Berlin for so long. The night before the concert, I tried to get a good night's sleep, and so I stayed up 'til five. I tried to get geared up in the hours before kickoff, and so I found myself listless and lifeless as I slipped through the turnstile.

There was an opener, the much-hyped Modeselektor. I was able to cut through the crowd with unexpected ease, so I was close enough to the stage that Jonny Greenwood's hair was whipping me in the face. And yet I can't say I enjoyed the show. They played songs - i.e. all of them - that always put me in a visionary trance when I listen to them at home on my oversized headphones, but there, live and in the moment, I couldn't build an enthusiasm that wasn't false. In truth, I wanted to go home and see what Ben was up to.

Through incredibly dumb luck, I scored a free ticket to see R.E.M. the following week. I figured that expectations were at the root of my rock show impotence, that perhaps a band whose lyrics weren't already tattooed across my cortex might stir me out of my slumber. And R.E.M. did, but not as much as I'd led myself to expect. I'd never heard "Electrolite" before, which remains a staple on any mixes I make for girls. And Michael Stipe was lively and carefree on stage, as Michael Stipes are wont to be. But as the drunken hordes pushed through the black forest towards the nearest U-Bahn station, I was haunted by the suspicion that I had missed something.

I was crashing in Schöneberg at the time, which is where David Bowie lived while he was recording the Berlin Trilogy. Twice I set out to find his old digs, where one imagines the Thin White Duke lavishing himself with a spongebath in a porcelain tub overflowing with Nutella and cocaine. On my first expedition, I walked in the complete opposite direction and found myself merging onto the autobahn. The second time, I grew confused by the apartment numbers and gave up, settling instead for a döner kebab and a Franziskaner for the road.

And then my cash ran out and I was ejected from Germany like a bad organ. I wasn't disappointed, not exactly. I had expected Berlin - and at least two of those performances - to transform me. And in some way they had. Everything always transforms you. But the moment has a way of eluding me. The attempt to measure the moment renders the moment, like the electron, nonexistent: a smear in time and space. The moment only becomes a moment after the moment has passed, often years and years later.

If I am to be honest with myself, and to my readership (who will judge me), the only rock show I ever enjoyed the way a rock show should be enjoyed was the Counting Crows concert I saw when I was sixteen. It was my first show. For me, the electric guitar was a recent discovery. I remember standing in a garage with one of my cronies as he plugged his amp into the wall. There was a screech of feedback, then the unexpected power of the non-chord he strummed, the disproportionate relationship between the sheer volume generated and the 106-pound nerd who had so amateurishly generated it. The electric guitar, for me, was the first great equalizer between brawn and intellect, though I would discover others as I went along in life.

At that young age, live music thrilled me. It wasn't something to be dissected or inspected for quality. The sound of a savage beat on a thrift store trap set was enough to set my legs joggling against their caucasian will. And so the Counting Crows show was a spiritual experience for me, though I would cringe and probably vomit to see something like it now. Adam Duritz - I believe he was wearing pleather pants - tightroped along a stack of amplifiers with his arms outstretched and his head thrown back in an unabashed Christ imitation. The band broke into seemingly impromptu interludes in which Duritz sang what was glossolalia to me then, though I know now that they were just Byrds lyrics. And on the drive home, there was no debate as to whether what we had just seen was three hours of contrived bullshit: we knew the mind of God and were content to say "Wow" over and over again. We were also buzzing to be in a car - a 1992 Plymouth Acclaim - driving back on the interstate from a rock show in Iowa with no adult supervision. It is hard to tell whether the enthusiasm of youth is misguided, or whether it is more pure than anything we will ever experience again.

There were other good shows, of course. I saw The Fiery Furnaces four years ago and I appreciated the performance several months later, though I struggled to understand it in the moment. Devendra Banhart came to Omaha a while back with his band of sleepy-eyed beards, and he suspended us between sleep and waking for two wonderful hours. I saw Low once and the Sokol Underground was unusually sepulchral for the occasion: nobody spoke, and people shooshed you when you did. We were hyped up on something, laughing way too much, and Will was acting goofy, so we removed ourselves from the show before it got too sublime. I have seen Bright Eyes on three occasions. The first time, Conor was so hopped up on quaaludes that he smashed his guitar midway through the second song. The other two shows were in Council Bluffs, and though they were four years apart, I found myself in the same predicament: drinking with Will, about to leave my main squeeze for the weird, wild East. Strangely, perhaps cruelly, life functions like a broken elevator and, despite an infinity of other possibilities, will deliver you to the same floor several times in a row: step in, please - sixth floor - women's hats and coats, lingerie and perfume - step in, please ...

Armadillo

I struggled with the reality of China for the entire month of September. It was one thing to read about it, and to swim around in it amidst a school of foreign fish, but to confront China head-on every time I opened the front door was too much for my neurotic circuitry. That was September. On the first of October, I woke up and suddenly loved the place. Overnight, my brain had formed a protective callus that screened out all the noise and allowed only the loveliness to seep through.

These stages of loathing and loving were foretold by any number of Peace Corps manuals and cultural integration seminars, so I saw them coming. But again, it is one thing to know about them and another thing to experience them.

Last month's euphoria has faded and November is looking to be a blend of September and October. I have a more nuanced outlook now, a wiser one perhaps. I am ecstatic to be here but mindful of the challenges. Three days out of the week will be good days. Three will be absurd days. And one day (today) will be catastrophic: you will forget all the Mandarin you've learned; after days of invisibility, China will suddenly notice you and follow you about like the pied piper; so you'll lay low in a restaurant, ask the fuwuyuan for a menu, he'll point at the board on the wall, and in the heat of the moment you'll find yourself ordering the bitter melon and bacon combo for ten kuai; winter will arrive later that evening and you'll discover the hot water in your apartment has fizzled out. On those days, you ball yourself up like an armadillo and wait it out. What makes it bearable, even laughable, is the realization that other volunteers elsewhere in the world are reading this paragraph and thinking: bacon? hot water? apartment? and the locals love you? Why don't you write about Nietzsche some more, you goldbricking ninny?

This is easy for me to say, goldbricking Nietzschean ninny that I am, but I believe that the human ability to extract happiness or misery from his surroundings doesn't vary much from one set of circumstances to another. I imagine I would be precisely as happy as I am right now whether I were huddled over a heap of smoldering charcoal while a typhoon made scrap metal out of my Micronesian hovel, or supping on crawdads and Chablis in a dining room the size of the Fleet Center. And precisely as unhappy, too. What matters is having some sort of trajectory, a plot to usher you from one day into the next. That involves finding a cast of characters to support you, and keeping a long list of mostly unattainable goals. It also involves conflict and complications. And laughter. I'm not sure I could endure anything at all if I couldn't every so often collapse face-down on a table laughing so hard I lose track of time and finally, as if waking from a sleep, lift my head, mop my brow and say, "Whew, where did that come from?"

Xiao Pengyou

I flourished early in life. Back in first grade, I was a nordic blonde with steely blue eyes. I wore an aviator jacket and I was unbelievably popular with the ladies. I remember standing in line waiting for the bell to ring while four or five girls fought to give me a backrub when Mrs. Baldwin wasn't watching. And it was no mean-looking harem: all of these girls were future Prom Queens and eventually, waitresses at Applebee's.

At no point in my life have I found girls gross. In the first grade, I did not see cooties as a pressing public health concern. Though I was deathly afraid of getting in trouble, I enjoyed being the object of affection, so long as that affection was stealthy and went no further than a gentle massage.

I was then, as I am now, sensitive to a fault and a complete pushover. The girls I attracted were uniformly sadistic, the kind of girl who would glue your index fingers together, pluck your armhair out one strand at a time to see how far she could go before you begged her to stop, who would bite the webbing between your thumb and forefinger to show her affection, who would color your hands with permanent marker because she knew she could get away with it. I was so obviously defenseless that girls took advantage of me every chance they got and somehow left me feeling guilty when the torture had finally ceased.

Then came puberty. My hair darkened and curled, so I took to plastering it down with gallons of hairspray. I sprouted a pair of buck teeth. A team of dentists strapped a football facemask around my neck: the chastity belt of the modern age. Aviator jackets no longer did the trick. There were several years where, frightened and confused by teenage fashion, I wavered from gangster to preppie to hipster and everywhere in between. Michael Cera was not yet a sex symbol, so high school chicks didn't even enjoy torturing me. They held all the cards; it was too easy. I was forced to turn inward and become an interesting person in the meantime.

Which was a cumulative process and an ongoing one. Hence I came to China.

Although I wrote about writer's block sometime last week, it has not yet arrived, and I find myself filling up notebook after notebook with writing, most of which will never see the light of the internet. This afternoon, in the lingering afterglow of last night's Halloween debauch, I stopped at the juice bar en route to the internet cafe, to buy a couple of cups of joe to fuel this afternoon's writing session.

"Do you have black coffee?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Two cups of black coffee, please." And for good measure: "No cream or sugar, please."
"Coming right up!"
Sure enough, I wound up with two cups of creamy nectar that was already attracting bees. I thanked the barista and turned to leave.
"Lao-wai!" - a little girl, about six or seven, pointing at me with a pair of chopsticks.
"Chinese person!" I said.
"I know you."
I searched my Chinese Rolodex but nothing turned up.
"Where do I know you from?" I asked.
"You came to my shishkebab restaurant! Don't you remember, laowai?"
Ah, yes. This was the little kid I argued with until 3 AM while a Chinese couple - her parents? - looked on and applauded.
"Yes, I remember," I said.
She followed me down the road and pelted me with questions.
"Sorry, little friend," I chuckled. "But I don't understand. I've got to go now."

I took my usual refuge in the far back of the internet cafe, pounded my first coffee, and cracked open my soy sauce splattered writing notebook. I set to work. Then I heard a little voice at the front desk.

"Where is that laowai?" she asked.
The owner led her to my computer and she took the seat next to me.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"Writing."
"Writing what?"
"Stories," I said, for lack of a better word.
"Stories about China?"
I nodded. She stared at the screen. Then she reached over and hit Control-Alt-Delete.
"Hey, don't do that," I said.
"I want to use the computer."
"But I've got work to do!"
"I want to play games."
I shrugged and, turning away from her, lit a cigarette for the kid-repelling effect I hoped it might produce. She stole my lighter and pulled a gum wrapper out of her pocket. She lit the gum wrapper on fire.
"Stop it!" I said. "You'll get in trouble."
I blew out the gum wrapper. She picked it up and lit it on fire again. I blew it out. She picked it up a third time, but the lighter was out of fluid. She asked me for another lighter. I lied and told her I didn't have one.

I got up to ask the teenager at the front desk to log me in again. But by the time I'd returned to my computer, the girl was playing Maple Story.
"Hey, little friend," I said. "I've got work to do!"
"Me too," she said, extinguishing a purple monster with a rainbow gun.
"Where are your parents?"
"They're at work."
"Don't you have other friends to play with?"
"Yes. But they're stupid."
"I need to use the computer," I said. "I've got work to do."
"Work is stupid."

I walked back out to the juice bar and found the owner.
"Excuse me," I said, blushing with absurdity, "but that little girl of yours is bullying me."
"We don't know that little girl."
"She's not yours?"
"No, she's not ours."
"Whose is she?"
"Who knows? Is she bugging you?"
"Yes. She stole my computer and is setting things on fire."
"Kids," said the owner. "What can you do?"

I returned to my computer and loomed over the girl's shoulder for a minute or two. She was in a trance. I no longer existed. I gathered my coffees and cigarettes and went to the bathroom. I stood there looking in the mirror, pacing around and rubbing my forehead. Then I snuck out through the side door and went somewhere else. For all I know, my little friend is still playing Maple Story on my dime.

But she wasn't there when I went back to the internet cafe this evening to write about her. I sank into a zone and found myself, uncharacteristically, listening to Nine Inch Nails. I was putting the finishing touches on this post and scraping my brain for a conclusion that wasn't coming naturally. And then I nearly choked on my heart because someone ripped off my headphones and screamed in my ear. I turned and there she was. She sat on the arm of my chair. Then she produced a bag of hot meat from her pocket and rested it on the back of my hand. I recoiled and shouted, "Gross!" And she is still here, eating shishkebabs, twirling her scarf around her neck, reading this blog post as I draw it to a premature close because she is holding down Control-Alt and reaching for Delete.