In Defense of Mr. Panda

A couple days ago, one of my students invited me over to chat with him at his desk. He wanted help buying a Blackberry from Canada. I had only recently discovered that the Blackberry was something other than an aggregate fruit, but I told him that I'd see what I could do. We shot the bull for a while. He asked me what my goals in life were, and I told him that I had no idea. He suggested that I stay in China for the rest of my life, and I told him that we'd just have to see about that. He laughed. Then his face clouded over.

"Mr. Panda," he said, "we all have a problem with you."

"Okay," I said. "What's up?"

"I'm fine, thank you," he said, and continued. "The problem is you are treat us like middle school student. We all think this. We tell the other teachers about the problem."

I stood there smiling like a total galoot.

"The subject things is too simple," he said. "We are knowing all the subject things already. We all think so."

The classroom was silent. All eyes were on me. I told the kid that I appreciated his honesty and that I would try to include more challenging material in the future. My students, who were supposed to be acting out break-ups, sat watching me until it was clear I had finished speaking. Then they resumed air-smacking their ex-boyfriends across the face.

That sort of confrontation is uncomfortable, but not unusual. My students often pull me aside to criticize what I am teaching them, or the way in which I am teaching them. They level their criticism with the same passive-aggressive trajectory familiar to those of us who have worked the U.S. temp agency circuit: they butter me up with chit-chat and a handful of compliments, then comes a long laundry list of things I need to do differently. For my part, I hear them out and weigh their suggestions on the long bus ride home. More often than not, I do find some truth in what they're saying. I am not a teacher by trade, so I have much to learn from my students. But on this particular occasion, I was more than a little irked. I am confident in what I am teaching this semester. I certainly don't treat my college sophomores like middle schoolers, but if my classes seem elementary, that's because they are: I planned them that way. Anyhow, I'm not one to argue with my students, so I'll just have to argue with myself. In the proud tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo, I would like to write a short apologia in defense of that teaching alter-ego of mine, Mr. Panda.


In Defense of Mr. Panda

I. Of Criticism: That I'm Cool With It
I find it hard to imagine any of my students directly criticizing a Chinese professor, which is to say, I can't see it happening. Ever. But my students - intimidated as they are by my body hair, terrified as they are of talking to me - are not afraid to challenge me. I respect their nerve and to some extent I nurture it. They are, after all, college students. And I, perhaps, am a professor. So it is natural, even desirable that they should question my authority. I often question it myself.


II. Of Language Barriers: That They Exist
The same students who tell me that my class is not challenging enough tend to have a hard time expressing themselves clearly. And there are certain phrases that my students have been taught - namely You had better - that come off a lot more aggressively than they mean them to. You had better teach more difficult subject things ... You had better not treat us like middle school children ... I have learned over time not to take offense, because I am almost certain that there is none intended.


III. Of Last Semester: That It Was Weird
I set the bar too high last term. Although my students were seniors and English majors to boot, and though they possessed bottomless vocabularies and could name all the tenses and moods, I made the mistake of assuming that they were advanced speakers of English. I launched the class into debates on the perils of technology and overpopulation. They talked a lot, and I listened. My students spoke of art and beauty. They experimented with the language and enjoyed themselves immensely. In that sense, last semester was a success. But I run into my former students on the street every now and then and ask them how they're doing. They don't know what to say. They scratch their heads and mumble a few Chinese stall words before asking me if I have eaten. They have studied English for twelve years, and by now they are English teachers like me.


IV. Of This Semester: That It Will Be Less Weird
I opened the 2010 school year with a lesson that I dubbed How To Talk To Your Local Laowai. I introduced my students to casual greetings - what's up? what's happenin'? But be careful, I cautioned them: if you ask what is happening, your friends will worry that you are experiencing an existential crisis. Now if you ask what's happenin', everything's cool. And when we ask you what's happenin', we don't want to hear your life story. We don't want to know about your shih tzu's bladder control problems. No. We expect you to say not much - or nothin' if you're into the whole brevity thing.

My students took notes. They committed the magic words to memory. And the next week, when I asked them what was up, they said in unison: nothin' - not nothing, mind you, but nothin'. It was my greatest triumph. For twelve years, these kids had been conditioned to blurt out "I am fine, thank you, and you?" In a span of eighty minutes, I managed to reverse that, at least temporarily. I was awfully proud of myself.


V. Of Confusion: That It Exists
This afternoon, while my students were acting out break-ups, a fellow English teacher wandered into my classroom and started tinkering with the computer. He put Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on the stereo and cranked the volume all the way up to drown out the ruckus. Then he stood watching my class from the hallway. Eventually, he shook his head and wandered off. So the fact that my students are speaking sometimes poses problems.

The students themselves appear puzzled by my classes. Each and every one of them has expressed a burning desire to improve his or her oral English, and yet when I give the class a prompt and twenty minutes to practice speaking in groups, my students grow listless and resume studying the long lists of SAT words they keep hidden under their desks. They seem most comfortable when I am talking, or having them recite things.

Every once in a while, I catch flack for teaching slang.

"You had better not teach 'what's up,'" one of my Chinese coworkers told me the other day. "It is not good Oral English. The students can only say 'nothing.'"

"Yes, but that is how we greet each other in the West."

"But how about 'How do you do?' That question makes more options."

"If I ask my students how they're doing, they will all say 'I'm fine, thank you, and you?'"

"But you had better not ... "

And so on. The name of the course I am teaching is Oral English, but everyone seems to expect me to do all of the talking, and to teach "Proper Oral English," the official language of Toastmasters International.


VI. Of Mr. Panda: That He Is Not A Total Galoot
A couple teachers and a handful of students are wary of my syllabus. But I am not. For the first time in three years, I am confident in what I am teaching. I daresay I might even have some crude epistemological theory lurking behind my lesson plans. Or perhaps I shouldn't daresay that.

You would be amazed at what linguistic feats my students are capable of. I can give them a long list of American jivetalk and they'll have everything memorized by the end of class. They can read quantum physics extracts in English and understand them. But they stumble over the simple things: greetings, small talk, chit-chat, farewells. Of my 500 students, perhaps a handful can navigate a basic conversation. And yet most of them can define the word "lugubrious" and use it in a sentence.

Fundamentals. I can hear Dick Vitale barking in my ear. Dribbling, passing, boxing out - free throws, baby. The last thing my students need is some uppity laowai pummeling them with more flowery vocab words. What my students need is class time to hone their conversational chops. What they need is more variety in their basic English diet. In short, I want them to spend less time on alley oops and windmill jams, and more time at the free throw line.


VII. Of Chinglish: That It Is Intransigently Obstreperous
As I have written in the past, Chinglish is not the absence of English. If anything, it is an overabundance of bad English.

My students have spent a decade tackling English by rote memorization. At present, I find them tumbling headlong into the yawning abyss of English vocabulary. I can only guess as to why vocabulary is so coveted here, while oral English remains almost completely neglected. Vocabulary is more testable than speaking, I suppose, but that can't be the whole picture. In any case, I won't go into the why? question here. But it is important to bear in mind that, for most of these kids, the process of learning English has always been a race to acquire new vocabulary. They want to develop their speaking skills, of course, but they've never had an opportunity to do so and they're not sure where to begin. Mr. Panda's Oral English class is something completely unprecedented in their fifteen years of education. I don't talk - they do. And instead of quantity, I am shooting for quality, which means taking things slow and drilling the pants off of English fundamentals. So although I anticipate that some of my students will regard my class as a regression of sorts, I see no point in building a high-rise on such a shaky foundation.

The vocabulary my students memorize for their exams is often (to put it mildly) useless or outdated, incorrectly defined or poorly framed. Meanwhile, while they're busy cramming their minds with billions of counterfeit million-dollar words, their conversational skills are languishing, rooted as they are in stock phrases and transliterations, many of which are obsolete or contextualized poorly, and so on.

With all of this in mind, I would like to present to you, dear Reader, my crowning pedagogical achievement, a work of art that took me nearly two man-hours to produce: The Tree of Chinglish.



Fig 16.7: The Tree of Chinglish

Imagine, if you will, that you have successfully dissected a college sophomore's brain. And imagine that you are wearing a pair of neurotranslator goggles that allow you to see just what is going on down there in the English Department of young Xiao Wang's cerebral cortex. To make things more visually stimulating, your goggles generate a crappy-looking clip art tree called The Tree of Chinglish.

Your first observation is that the Tree's leafy boughs are weighed down with all sorts of polysyllabic gobbledygook that you vaguely remember from the ACT test you took, lo those many moons ago.

Scrolling slowly downward, you arrive at the trunk of the Tree, which is made up of the loadbearing fundamentals of language. You notice that it is a dangerously skimpy trunk, indeed. You realize that the huge, weighty canopy of polysyllabic gobbledygook at the top of the Tree is being held up by what amounts to a mere twig of English catchphrases. And many of the catchphrases, you notice, are of questionable utility: what a pity? you had better? and what the heck is filial piety, anyway?

But the truly frightening thing is not the catchphrases in and of themselves, but the lack of diversity in that twiggy little trunk. There is exactly one word for general greetings - HELLO! - and only one short phrase for inquiring about someone else's state of being - How are you? - and no more than one way to respond to inquiries about one's own state of being - I'm fine, thank you, and you? Why, if some well-intentioned British aristocrat were to mosey on by and say Cheerio! instead of HELLO!, the whole Tree of Chinglish would go tumbling right over. And if that Tree falls, poor Xiao Wang's heteromorphic paucity is likely to felicitate his priggish interlocutor.


VIII. Of Mr. Panda: That He Is Sleepy
So you can see that teaching basic conversational English in China can be surprisingly complex. In a way, I have to trick my students into forgetting a lot of what they have already learned. I have to manually replace "what a pity" with "that's too bad," "you had better" with "you oughtta," and so on. At the end of the day, my students don't seem to believe that I am teaching them Real English. I am not Dr. Zhang or Professor Liu, after all. I am merely Mr. Panda.

It has proven difficult for me to write this apologia for Mr. Panda. Thanks to my clumsy, soy-slick typing fingers, I managed to delete everything three times in as many days. In rewriting it twice from memory, I found that the words no longer fit together the way they did the first time. Another thing is: it is hard to write critically about one's students, particularly when they are as enthusiastic and determined and wonderful as my own. And another thing: I was irked at the start of this post, but having reached the end, I am no longer irked. As I prattled along, I became less concerned with defending Mr. Panda, and more interested in figuring out just why teaching Chinese undergraduates is so challenging compared to, say ...

No, I suppose teaching in general is difficult. Like writing, teaching demands that you perform the greatest magic trick of all, that you transfer invisible ideastuff from your mind to another mind, so that that mind can one day transfer your ideastuff to another mind, and on and on ... But though it is a magic trick, that doesn't make it impossible. It takes patience, yes, and it is often frustrating. But the rewards, simple and unglamorous as they are, are many. I, for one, find great pleasure these days in bumping into my students on the street.

"What's up?" I'll ask the kid.
He hesitates. He fumbles around for those dreaded words. I'm fi - ... no. Have you eate - ... no. Then he smiles.
"Nothin'," he says.

Oh, sweet nothin' ...

Oreo

My friend Erin came to visit this weekend. Early that first morning, we packed a lunch and set off on a hobo tour of the Nanchong countryside. But we were unable to leave the apartment because there in the hall was a large black and white mutt, bearing its fangs and growling. It pounced. We ran up the stairs two at a time. The dog pursued us as far as the second floor, then turned and doubled back. We peered down from the forth story balcony and watched in horror as the beast belched and hissed and trotted in frantic circles.

A toddler went toddling by. The dog glanced up at him.
"If he goes after the kid, we're running down there and killing that dog," said Erin. I grabbed a bamboo rod from a nearby garbage heap and brandished it unconvincingly.
But the dog wasn't interested in toddlers. Nor did he seem to have an appetite for the Chinese, as my neighbors came and went without incident. But when we tiptoed back downstairs, there he was, snarling at us.

One of my neighbors saw us come scrambling up the stairwell.
"Eeeee?" she said, the standard Mandarin noise of befuddlement.
"Is the dog downstairs friendly?" I asked her.
"Yes, he's very friendly," she said.
"I don't think he likes laowais."
My neighbor smiled politely and escorted us downstairs. She made it out alright, but the dog caught whiff of us and gave chase. We ran back upstairs.

For the next hour and a half, we hid in the stairwell, studying the dog's movements from the balcony. He would disappear around the corner every so often, then he'd come back and pop a squat in the bushes. Then he'd go dig up somebody's vegetable garden. Sometimes he would run up to the top of a nearby hill and pose there, watching us. But always he would come running back to the front door of apartment building #62, grumbling to himself, ears flattened, lying in wait.

I paced back and forth and repeated the F-word, the way I do when absurdity descends and no escape routes present themselves. From the fourth story perch, I thought I could maybe plant a long-range loogey on the dog's head, but that might've only made matters worse. My next-door neighbor came down the stairs with his son.

"Hello!" he whispered, nudging the little boy. "Hello!"
"Hello," murmured the kid.
His dad pointed at me. "Uncle, uncle!"
"Hello, Uncle," said the kid.

They went outside. The dog perked his ears and wagged his tail as they passed. My neighbor got into a mid-sized Volkswagen and tried to park it across the street while the kid watched. After a few low-speed collisions, he finally succeeded in parallel parking it at a 45-degree angle. Then he dusted his hands off on his pants, hoisted his son onto the back of a motorbike, and the two of them zipped off together.

"The dog can't wait out there forever, can he?" asked Erin.
"I'm not sure," I said. "I suspect he can."

I thought back on the night I locked myself out of the apartment building. I had waited down there on the stoop where the dog now lurked, convinced that at some point, someone would have to let me in. Somebody would sneak out of the house for a nightcap, or somebody would come stumbling home from the massage parlor. I couldn't just wait out there forever, after all. But I stood around like a clod from 9 PM until the sun came up the next morning. I tried to nap on an abandoned couch, but after five restless minutes I developed a nasty full-body itch. The security guards came by. None of them had keys. One of them suggested I shout until somebody came down to let me in, but it was late, all the lights were off and I couldn't bring myself to do it. Eventually, one of the security guards sat down on the filthy couch, ripped a fart and drifted off to sleep. I paced around the courtyard for hours on end and peed in the bushes like a dog. Finally, at 7 AM, an old lady came down for her early morning tai chi exercises. I kowtowed before her and nearly kissed her feet.

I mention all this because, as Erin and I watched the dog circling like a vulture four stories below, I was reminded of past absurdities, and of the fact that when the universe decides to suck you into a vortex of absurdity, you can be stuck down there for quite a long time.

But then, all of a sudden, the dog turned around and trotted up the hill. He stopped to look back at us a few times before disappearing behind a row of apartments in the distance.

"Let's move," said Erin.
"I don't know," I said, squinting out the window. "He might be baiting us."
"Dammit, Petit," she said. "Get the sand out of your [expletive]."

So, with bamboo rod firmly in hand, I scampered down the stairs. No sign of the dog. We took off at a dead sprint. Then my phone rang. It was Shelley, my laowai neighbor.

"I can't talk right now," I said, panting. "We're being pursued by a rabid beast."

Shelley, familiar with the terms and conditions of my daily life, wished me luck and hung up the phone. Then, after Erin and I had put about a quarter mile between us and the dog, Shelley called again. She was laughing.

"Your neighbors just introduced me to your rabid beast," she said. "His name is Oreo. He's great with kids. He lets the babies pull his tail. Everyone loves him!"

Yes, everyone loves Oreo. But what did it mean, this personal vendetta of his? He was good with children and didn't seem to mind Shelley, a fellow laowai. He did not appear to be a racist dog. No, it was Erin and I - only we could incur the wrath of an otherwise harmless neighborhood mutt.

But harmless or no, even after we had left the campus far behind us, we saw Oreo in the face of every approaching pekingese. We saw his lanky silhouette lurking behind every rapeseed bush, heard his growl in the whinny of every passing motorbike. We walked at a brisk clip, stopping every few feet to kick coaldust over our shoeprints.

We opted to postpone our hobo tour, figuring that in the countryside, we would only encounter nastier, more depraved Oreos. Kimchi cravings took us to Nanchong's one and only Korean joint. Neither of us spoke for a full thirty minutes, drugged as we were by the onslaught of antioxidants.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and I whirled around to see Jacob, a fellow volunteer, and Lisa, the owner of The Jack Bar.

"Goddamn. That was the best meal I've had in a year," said Jacob.
"I know," I groaned. "God, I've missed Korean food."
Lisa was sulking.
"I mean, Chinese food is great. Really great. It's so hao chi," I said. But by then Lisa was inconsolable. She pointedly changed the subject to my guitar playing.
"Tonight you play five songs," she said. "Is enough. Enough."

The two of them departed. I tried out some rudimentary Korean on the wait staff but every last one of them proved to be Chinese. Erin and I split a bottle of Korean lager and the 4% alcohol-by-volume swam through our heads. It was the kind of meal that puts you in a coma. I sat there a while, half-asleep, with one hand stuffed down the front of my trousers. And then all of a sudden Erin's eyes got big. I heard the voice behind me and bolted upright in my chair.

"What's this? No time to say hello to an old friend?"

It was Oreo. The beast stood on his hind legs, glowering over our table, his ears slicked back and his blue eyes glimmering with omniscience. He was dressed in a suitcoat and creased pinstripe slacks, a checkered cravat knotted over his flea collar.

"Oh, come now. I'm just teasing. I myself find it hard to speak when in the presence of such ... delectable foreign fare." He licked his chops and slid his claws over the surface of our table. My forehead grew damp with sweat. Erin sat staring disconsolately into her lap.

"Old friends, old friends," sang Oreo. His voice quavered in the lower register like Berlin Trilogy Bowie. He rested his paw on my shoulder. "Though we've much to discuss, I do so hate to be a bother. So I suppose I'll leave you to your chow. Eat slowly, as the Chinese say."

He scratched behind his ear for a moment, then pitched a crumpled napkin onto our table. He turned and walked away, toenails clicking off into the background. I sat watching the shivering napkin expand. Erin leaned across the table and grabbed my arm.

"We need to get out of here. Right now," she whispered. "I don't like this Oreo character, not one bit."
"I don't like him either. But what are we going to do? Hide from him for the rest of our lives?" I took a swig from the bottle. "I don't know about you, but I for one refuse to live in fear."
"Here's what we'll do. I'll get up and pay the bill. You wait for me outside."
"He's a dog," I said. "He'll smell us leaving. And anyway, we're safer here. He's not going to devour us at a Korean restaurant. Hell, they're more likely to eat - "
"My ears are burning!" Oreo had materialized behind me. He scratched himself with one paw, then the other. "Though it is almost certainly the fleas. Of course, neither of you would know anything about that. But I must say, they are persistent little buggers ..."
His brow furrowed. Erin and I stared into the tabletop.

"Right," said Oreo, clapping his paws together. "Well, friends, far be it from me to act as an enabler, but certainly a toast to one's health never hurt anybody."
He produced three shot glasses and a bottle of maotai, then he filled the glasses one by one.
"Let's not forget that we live in a toasting culture, my friends, and - how does that old adage go? When in Rome," he paused meditatively, then smiled, "do as the Chinese do."
He hoisted his glass and we lifted ours from the table.
"What shall we drink to?" asked Oreo, searching our faces.
"To humanity," said Erin.
"Yes," said Oreo, staring into her eyes. "To humanity."
We drank. Oreo slammed his shot glass down with such force that the bean paste stew overflowed.
"Ahh, now that wasn't so bad, was it?" he said. Then, with a flourish, he bowed to us and sauntered out the door, twirling his pocket watch and humming Rigoletto.

The next day, Erin returned to Yunyang and I returned to bachelordom. I spent the afternoon organizing my book collection alphabetically by author. Then I paid an evening visit to Little Prince Coffee and took my usual seat by the window. The waitress filled my glass with water. I asked her if she had eaten, but she said nothing, just shot me a worried glance and rushed back to the espresso bar. The table of Koreans across the aisle hurriedly paid their tab and left. The swinging door whooshed shut behind them. The empty coffee shop fell silent.

I pulled out my notebook and got to work. A moment later, the waitress came by, but she did not have my usual Caffè Americano. She slid a folded note across the table and I waited until she had gone to open it. It took me a moment to decipher the characters.

"Man man si," it said. "Die slowly."

I heard a burst of slow, rich laughter from the darkest corner of the coffee shop. Behind a plume of blue smoke, I could just make out a leather-bound book and the top of a bowler hat. Slowly, the book descended and I saw those blue eyes, that snaggletoothed muzzle. It was Oreo. He shut the book and got up on his hind legs. The waitresses disappeared into the kitchen, drawing the curtain closed behind them. As Oreo drew nearer, I saw that the book in his paws was Crime and Punishment.

"They say that Dostoevsky was humanity's first psychologist," he said, "but I have always taken him to be your greatest humorist. Consider the following passage. Oh, where is it -"

He sifted through the book.

"Ah, yes. That's the one," he said, clearing his throat. "'If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be punishment - as well as the prison.'"

He sucked on his pipe and nodded briskly before closing the book.

"Now, you might not find that remark particularly funny as such. But the wit of Dostoevsky, for me, lies not in any deliberate humour noir on the author's part, but in his uncanny, almost superhuman eye for sublime human truths. Do you mind if I sit?"

I said nothing. Oreo chuckled softly and remained standing.

"I admire you travelers. I believe you call yourselves 'globetrotters,' yes? Yes. I admire you globetrotters. So idealistic, so brave. You believe in escape. In 'getting away from it all.' And perhaps in a very limited way you do succeed in escaping from some things. Responsibilities, social norms, the dull grind of a forty-hour work week," said Oreo, "but in a certain sense - in a Dostoevskian sense - it all strikes me as hopelessly naive."

He took a long draw from his pipe, then bent down to snort the smoke out his nose, sending it cascading across the tabletop.

"The Grand Inquisitor," he said. "The self."

He seemed to pick up a faint aroma in the distance, and sniffed reflectively, almost sadly. Then he grinned.

"In the end, how can one ever escape from oneself? To what extent can you even hope to succeed in breaking out of the greatest institution of them all?" He leaned in close and stared me in the eyes. Then he tapped his skull with his paw, making a hollow clucking sound with his tongue. "This one - right - here." He laughed and sat down across from me, crossing one leg over the other. I flinched and felt around for my cigarettes.

"Oh, allow me," said Oreo, pulling a lighter from his trouser pocket. "Or - I see. Suit yourself."

He smiled and watched the smoke rise.

"Listen. I don't like you," I said. "I don't want to see you anymore. So here's what's going to happen. You're going to tuck your little tail between your legs and walk out that door on all fours. Then you're going to check into the Humane Society, the dog pound, whatever. You're going to stop coming around. You're going to disappear."

Oreo stroked his goatee.

"Are you familiar with the word cur?" he asked. "No, I don't suppose you would be. It's archaic - an old, nasty word. From the Middle English curdogge, meaning a mongrel dog, especially a worthless or unfriendly one. Happily, the term is no longer widely in use. But that old, nasty word of yours was once used to describe canines of my sort. Strays, you call us nowadays. Junkyard dogs."

He lowered his pipe.

"There's an expression in your language. I hope I am wording it correctly. The saying goes: you can take the dog out of the hood, but you can't take the hood out of the dog," he said, and chuckled. "Frankly, I think you humans have it completely backwards. It seems to me that you can take the hood out of the dog, but you can't take the dog ... out of the hood."

He rose to his feet and took his billfold from his vest pocket. He counted out forty kuai and pitched it onto the table.

"Believe what you will about me. That I'm dirty, uncultured. A junkyard dog. A cur, if you must. But I am no one's pet," he said. "Your neighbors love me well enough. But I am not theirs. They call me Oreo. But I am not Oreo. Do me a favor and think about that. Now if you'll excuse me, I must be off to mark my territory."

The swinging door whooshed shut behind him. It was twenty minutes before the waitress brought out my coffee and she didn't give me my usual membership card discount.

This afternoon, I came home from lunch and found Oreo there in the courtyard. He didn't seem to notice me at first, immersed as he was in frolicking with the neighborhood kids. They were squealing with joy, chasing him, yanking his tail, hopping on his back and riding him for a few seconds at a time. Oreo was exuberant, barking, yelping, jumping up and down, lapping at the children's faces. Oreo's ears perked as I passed. We exchanged a glance. Then he resumed rolling in the dirt with the kids, tormenting them with the cold wetness of his muzzle. I shut the door to my apartment and sat at my writing desk with a blank document in front of me. Through the open window, I could hear the children laughing and shrieking. Oreo! they shouted, Oh, Oreo! After a while, the kids must have gone inside, because all fell silent except for Oreo's steady barking. It took me a few minutes to notice that he was barking a melody, and it wasn't until he reached the refrain that I realized what it was: O Fortuna by Carl Orff.

Bring Me Far Away

Though I am tempted to write a William Jamesian exposition on the Varieties of Taxi Experience, in China there are really only two such varieties that I am aware of, not nearly enough for a scholarly work. There is the Grandfatherly Cabby experience, in which an impossibly old man asks you personal questions and says flattering things about your language skills - and then there is the Club Circuit Cab experience, which I describe below.

I always seem to get the Club Circuit Cabby first thing in the morning, when spirits are low. Approaching the vehicle, I can feel the pavement thumping under my feet. I open the door and am assailed by a sonic barrage that takes my brain a full ten minutes to sort out. Gradually, my feeble pattern recognition software clicks in: it appears to be an acid trance remix of Akon's Right Now (Na Na Na), featuring vocal samples from Joan Jett and what sounds like an Air China inflight safety announcement. Moments later, it has escalated into a full-fledged Missy Elliott/Thomas Dolby/John Denver gangbang. Please fold your tray table up and fasten your safety belts ... got them Platinum Visas, hot boyz ... S-S-SCIENCE! ... take me home, country road ... in case of emergency ...

The Club Circuit Cab Megamix is without beginning or end, and samples every worthless pop song ever recorded by man, woman, or beast. I have ridden long-distance Club Circuit Cabs where the music did not let up once for three hours. I am not sure how the Club Circuit Cabby does it. It is not FM radio he's listening to, as the Megamix does not fade out in tunnels. Nor can it be satellite radio, for no such thing exists here. But it might be the case that the cabby's stereo spontaneously generates acid trance megamixes via some kind of self-modifying algorithm - or what seems even more likely: the cabby possesses a single mix CD of infinite length, burned for him by the reclusive Gatsbyesque owner of The No. 1 Nightclub down on Renmin Lu.

The Club Circuit Cabby, in case you're wondering, is young and androgynous - that is to say, he is clearly a male specimen, but not much of one. He wears rectangle frames, acne sideburns, an expressionless face. He is motionless from the torso up. Though the volume is cranked up loud enough to induce undesired bowel movements, the cabby shows no outward signs of enjoying his Infinite Megamix in the least. But this is only natural. China is a loud place, and its inhabitants make noise not for the pleasure it affords, but for the same unknowable reason that songbirds twitter and Kanye West tweets.

The confusing slurry of pop entrails that make up the Club Circuit Cabby Megamix is by and large representative of modern Chinese music in general. While pop music in China is almost exclusively Chinese in origin, it is lifted directly from the U.S. Top 40 charts. Listen to the radio and you will hear Sean Paul soundalikes, rapping in proper Mandarin with a Rastafarian lilt. There are slightly trampy pseudo-Spearses, quasi-Nickelbacks, bizarro Beyonces ... In short, Chinese pop plagiarizes the absolute worst elements of Western pop, multiplying the awfulness of those elements exponentially in the process. But what you will seldom hear on Chinese pop radio stations are the genuine articles of awfulness themselves: Sean Paul, Britney Spears, Nickelback, or Beyonce. And you will almost never hear anything of a more refined taste, unless you're into The Carpenters or John Denver.

It should be clear by now that I have tried to dupe you, my dear Reader, into thinking you were reading another lighthearted commentary on cabbies and their many quirks, when I am really about to fly into a tirade about Chinese teenyboppers. For that I apologize: I didn't plan on this at the outset. But it is a Thursday afternoon and I am well into my fifth cup of coffee. It's either this or clean my room.

Let me say first that it is a bit chauvinistic of me to expect Chinese kids to enjoy, or even have the foggiest idea about Western music. And it is naive of me to assume that my college students might know the name "Bob Dylan," or that they should appreciate Kid A. There is no cultural context in China for the music that we (or Pitchfork) deem "high art," and only very recently has a context emerged for the kind of pop garbage we deem "low art." Consider the sort of lovey-dovey nonsense Americans listened to in the early 1950's. Rhyming "baby" and "maybe" was something new and fresh back then. It isn't hard to imagine why power ballads and choreographed dancing seem new and fresh to the up-and-coming Chinese youth. Heck, they still seem fresh to many of us in the West.

But it is part of my job as an English teacher to provide my students with the context necessary to appreciate what I deem "high art" - or at least "better art." It is very hard work, because your average Sichuanese undergrad possesses a very limited Western context to build upon. We are starting from scratch. Or perhaps even worse than scratch. To give you an idea, a certain widely circulated Western Culture textbook (to remain nameless) claims that "Americans fear cats, because they believe cats are possessed by witches." We have a long way to go, indeed.

On the first day of the semester, I had my students submit a writing sample. What would you like to learn about in our class? I asked them, and they wrote frantically for twenty minutes. Without exception, all 500 of my students wrote some version of the following: I want to learn about Western culture, Western film, Western music, Western literature ... At least there is no shortage of curiosity. But the nature of that curiosity is something I am still grappling with, and I hope that the following anecdotes baffle you as much as they continue to baffle me.

Last Wednesday, I found myself with about ten minutes to spare at the end of class, so I asked my students how they'd like to put that time to use.
"Listen to music!" came the unanimous reply.

I just happened to have Abbey Road in my pocket, so I explained that we were going to listen to The Beatles, and that this particular album was one of the most widely known, deeply beloved, greatly admired, culturally significant artifacts ever to come out of Western civilization. I made Abbey Road out to be the Chinese New Year, Jackie Chan and Yao Ming all rolled into one. Perhaps I was overhyping it, but my students, already familiar with Let It Be and Yesterday, were psyched.

But then something strange happened. The music started. Come Together - that sleazy bass, Ringo's goofball drum rolls, the tense harmony of Lennon and McCartney. Almost instantly, my students lost interest and started talking to each other, loudly, in Chinese. I watched in disbelief from my perch behind the podium. By the end of the song - come together, yeahhhhh! - The Beatles were only barely audible, and the classroom sounded like a vegetable market.

I had asked my students to pay close attention to the song, to answer a couple of questions about it, and to write down how it made them feel. But when I opened the floor for their thoughts and opinions, the class fell silent. A minute passed. Finally, the class monitor offered an adjective: boring, he said. Someone in the back mumbled "strange." That was it for The Beatles. And so much for Kid A, while I'm at it.

My efforts in the medium of film have not proven any more successful. As a segue into a debate on the benefits and drawbacks of technology, I played a few short clips from 2001: A Space Odyssey - the monkey wars, Hal 9000 going berserk. I had described 2001 as the stuff of legend, as a film that was constantly referenced in ... well, everything. But in the end, my students once again voiced boredom and a fair amount of discomfort.

"This movie is very 'fresh,'" said a girl in the front row, one of my brightest students, "but we want to watch romantic comedy."

Fresh is a Chinglish word. It does, in a way, mean new, exciting, and creative. But it also carries undertones of strange, unusual, and unpleasant. 2001 is all of those things. As are The Beatles. They are both, in the Chinglish sense of the word, very "fresh." But isn't this a college class? Shouldn't we be studying "fresh" things? And wait a minute - weren't my students interested in learning about Western culture? Aren't The Beatles sufficiently ... cultural?

Of course, I am running headlong into my own wall. My students might never respond to The Beatles and Stanley Kubrick. That isn't their fault. I could always make things easy for them. We could analyze Beyonce lyrics together. We could delve into the Hugh Grant Criterion Collection. But what would they learn? By sticking to pop culture, I would only be helping to reinforce the perceptions that many Chinese undergraduates already have: that every white male carries at least three concealed firearms to work, that all black Americans are capable of spinning on their heads for prodigious lengths of time, and that generally, we Westerners are a greedy, promiscuous, and violent lot of people, indeed.

My students are boundlessly curious, but it is a contradictory sort of curiosity. They are fascinated with the West and they want to know everything about it, but they only seem to glom onto the things that Hollywood and misinformed textbooks have taught them. I can show my students statistics, hard facts, numbers: America is only 72% Caucasian, and arguably even less than that. But at the end of the day, my students see me, Mr. Panda, my radiant dirty blonde locks, my piercing off-blue eyes, and they see me as a Real American. Minorities are Americans, too, I guess, but on the spectrum of Americanness, they are less American than Mr. Panda.

I have stumbled across all this through some trial and mostly error, by experimenting in class and by playing guitar at a dingy pole dance bar on the dark side of town. I was more flexible in the early days, more inclined to make concessions to stereotypes and expectations. But as I've gone along, I've come to question the purpose of my Chinese existence if I am not presenting what I perceive to be an accurate and honest portrayal of the West. That is why I will continue to play indie rock at a bar that specializes in Mariah Carey karaoke, and why, when my students demand music, I will play them The Beatles. But it's not just a question of authenticity: I also happen to like indie rock and The Beatles. I'm a better teacher when I'm teaching something that I'm interested in, and I'm a better guitar player when I'm playing songs that aren't garbage. The line between high art and low art is a matter of taste, but I can't help being of the opinion that Hugh Grant films are garbage, and that Mariah Carey songs are garbage sung by someone with a spectacular set of pipes. And call me an elitist if you like, but I'd rather not teach or perform garbage.

If you are a foreigner in China, every so often large groups of people will demand that you perform for them. Sing a song. Dance. Entertain us. It's impolite to refuse, so you will sometimes find yourself breaking into a song and dance number you didn't know you had in you. On other occasions, you manage to wriggle out of it and everyone goes home disappointed. This semester, on the first day of class, each and every one of my classes - about ten minutes in - asked me to sing a song for them.

"Can you sing a song for us?" a bespectacled girl in the back would ask, followed by a thunderous round of applause.

It is a truly bizarre request when you think about it. You have known this foreigner for all of ten minutes. He has come from the other side of the world to teach you English and your first decree is that he pull a song out of his wazoo and sing it a cappella in front of fifty people he has never met. Not only that, but the kids want to hear something they know. You can't sing a Hank Williams ditty. They want "My Heart Will Go On" or The Theme from The Bodyguard, or a selection from the little-known (but fascinating) oeuvre of English-language pop songs written for the non-English-speaking world.

I generally wriggle out of song requests, but sometimes the kids are so persistent that all I can do is postpone the performance.
"I can't sing without music," I'll explain. "I do play guitar, though, so next time I will bring my guitar and sing for you."
It usually works, too. Eventually, the kids forget about crusty old Mr. Panda and his phony promises. But this semester it backfired in spectacular fashion when someone brought an Epiphone acoustic to the classroom.

"Teacher, sing us a song now." A round of applause. No way out.
Midway through a Dylan tune, the crowd grew restless, almost violent.
"We don't like this song!" someone shouted. "Play 'Take Me To Your Heart.'"

And this, my friends, is where I will bring my Thursday afternoon tirade to a close - because "Take Me To Your Heart" might make for a satisfying conclusion, as well as a natural starting point for your Chinglish soft rock collection.

As every expat in China would be happy to tell you, "Take Me To Your Heart" is a hit single by Danish adult contemporary phenom Michael Learns to Rock, or MLTR if you're into the whole brevity thing. MLTR formed in 1988, and they have sold over 10 million records hence, "most of them in Asia," as Wikipedia notes in typically understated fashion. Take Me To Your Heart (not to be confused with the Rick Astley track of the same name) has proven to be MLTR's most enduring effort. Eight months ago, due to a mechanical failure in the karaoke machine, I found myself singing TMTYH (if you're into the whole brevity thing) at a KTV joint in Chengdu. Somehow, I seemed to know the melody already, though the lyrics were less than intuitive.

"Hiding from the rain and snow/trying to forget but I won't let go," I sang, wincing, voice faltering under the weight of so much clunky syntax. "Looking at a crowded street/listening to my own heart beat."

The imagery was vivid in my mind then, and remains so: a spear-wielding troglodyte, braving the harsh elements, hides briefly in a cave, then reemerges to stare grimly at cars as they pass, heart palpitating with the insuppressible animal instinct to gore, kill, devour ...

Then the pre-chorus build-up:
So many people all around the world/tell me where do I find someone like you, girl?

MLTR makes a valid point here. Overpopulation is without question one of the most pressing social issues of the modern era, but girls like you remain inexplicably rare, girl.

And then, finally, we have arrived:

Take me to your heart, take me to your soul
Give me your hand before I'm old
Show me what love is - haven't got a clue
Show me that wonders can be true
They say nothing lasts forever
We're only here today
Love is now or never
Bring me far away

Michael Learns to Blow My Mind. Yes. It's all in there. Take me to your heart, bring me far away - the romantic dichotomy of push and pull, of nearness and separation. Give me your hand before I'm old - the tenderness of corporeal intimacy both threatened and augmented by the looming spectre of death and dissolution. Show me that wonders can be true - here we see a repentant agnostic begging the heavens for salva ...

But no. Let us stop there. One mustn't sink in too deep. Let's just crank up those earbuds and drink it all in. Let's take it to our hearts, as it were, and not into our higher brain structures. Perhaps this is the mistake I have been making all along. Popular music in China is much the same as it is anywhere else. It is not something to be picked apart. It is, as music ought to be, an escape from reality - something that, if only for a moment, or three of them, brings you far away from wherever it is that you are.

Instant Guanxi

My favorite street in all of Nanchong is Yuying Lu, Teach Bravery Road. It is the only street in town that you might be inclined to call "pretty." Absent are China's ubiquitous coal-stained, white-tiled, blue-windowed, barred-in twelve-story apartment buildings. The shops that line Yuying Road are two stories and two stories only, and they are made of red brick. On Yuying Road there are trees and wide sidewalks, and bicycle lanes that the cars keep out of most of the time. In short, it is a street that feels as though it were designed for humans. Yes, the city planning commission must have thought things through for at least five minutes before they started building Yuying Road.

I will often take the bus to Yuying Road simply for the pleasure of walking beneath the relatively green boughs of its relatively living trees. But it also happens to be home to the only bar worth going to, and the only coffee shop worth going to.

The bar specializes in overpriced Coors Light, and it reeks of burnt popcorn at all times. The owner has an affinity for badly scratched Celine Dion CDs. Still, I will be charitable and maintain that it is the only bar worth going to in Nanchong.

There are two coffee shops on Yuying Road, but only one of them is worth going to. The other seems to double as a massage parlor, as its windows are painted over with cleavage and thighs, and I have never in all my passings seen anyone go in or come out.

The coffee shop I go to is named Little Prince Coffee. I like to go there with an empty notebook and sit for hours, deluding myself that I am making progress in some direction or another. The first time I went, I thought about walking back out straightaway, as the house brew cost a staggering three dollars. But I decided to treat myself, and in so doing, began to accumulate that mysterious socioeconomic grease that the Chinese refer to as guanxi.

The first day, they charged me full price for two coffees, but gave me a membership card. The second day, I got one free coffee, and the waitress asked me if I had eaten. The third day, the waitress bought me a pack of cigarettes after I had run out. Tonight, the owner himself asked me whether I had eaten. When I answered in the affirmative, he insisted that I sit with him and eat again.

I have rounded a corner with Mandarin: people laugh less at my mistakes than they do at my jokes. That is not to say that they don't laugh at my mistakes. Nor is it to say that my jokes are the least bit witty. My Chinese humor runs in the Seinfeldian vein: what is the deal with Chinese drivers? what is the deal with hot pot? what is the deal ... and so on with the deals. But I am happy to be of some amusement to people. I imagine my Chinese self as a kind of deranged, wild-eyed Slav who goes on long tirades in his sub-Russian brogue, mixing up the words for household objects and school supplies with those of vegetables and genitalia. "And then I opened the potato, walked in, and discovered that my ass had fallen off!" he might shout, amidst much laughter that he doesn't understand.

After dinner and many such ill-fated tirades, the owner gave me a free bag of espresso ("We're closed during the daytime," he explained) and after I'd paid my share of the bill, he offered to drive me home. A few of his long-haired friends tagged along. I asked whether they lived near the university and they all shook their heads no. "We have some important business to do in the neighborhood," explained the owner. And in saying that, I noticed that he had slowed the car to scope out some of the nightclubs we were passing.

"What about that one?" he asked the other guys.
"They won't be there tonight," said the kid next to me.
"Okay, then how about this one?" He stopped the car in front of a place called "1984."
"Hao, hao, hao, hao, hao," said the kid. Good, good, good, good, good ...

Mutations

I showed up at The Jack Bar around ten. Lisa snapped her fingers and some teenager in a cowboy hat appeared with two bottles of Kingway, already opened. Another young buckaroo handed me a pack of cigarettes.

"Please wait," said Lisa. "I go and get your new guitar."

I sat at the bar while she rummaged around in a storage closet.

"Nice hat," I said to one of the buckaroos. "You like working here?"
He nodded, chuckled nervously, and resumed staring out into nowhere.

Lisa slid a guitar case across the bar and opened it.
"It cost 2,500 yuan," she said. I whistled: 400 dollars. I took the guitar out of its case and cradled it in my arms like a newborn.
"What will you play for us tonight?" she asked.
"I was thinking that each week I'd play one of my favorite albums," I said in bad Chinese. "Tonight I am going to play Mutations by Beck."
She smiled politely. Then the lights dimmed and a spotlight flashed on a metal pole in the middle of the room, where a nice-looking college girl stood in a black miniskirt and torn fishnet stockings. My opening act was a pole dancer.

One week earlier, on my birthday, I had swaggered into The Jack Bar, seized the communal guitar and strummed a series of woebegone ballads that, apparently, made the owner cry. She approached me later that evening and offered me money to play at her bar. I declined the cash, explaining that I was a volunteer and was thus bound by an American oath of poverty, but that I wouldn't turn my nose up at free beer.

"How much beer?" she asked.
I shrugged. "Enough?"

Those were the terms of our contract: you show up three nights a week and play songs that no one will like, and we will provide a guitar and all the formaldehyde lager your renal system can handle. The only part I objected to was Lisa's insistence that I wear a misshapen felt cowboy hat during my set, but I figured if the teenaged wait staff had to wear them, why shouldn't I? It was, after all, a cowboy bar.

The spotlight veered away from the pole dancer and wandered like a lazy eye towards the stage, where I sat in my misshapen felt cowboy hat, strumming a sleeping guitar. The show was delayed by some technical difficulties. For about ten minutes, I subjected the crowd to glorious blasts of feedback and flatulent bursts of static. They covered their ears and groaned while a flurry of teenagers in cowboy hats scurried about the stage with mic cables and rolls of electrical tape. I was enjoying myself. In a land where everything is dissonant except the music, I was happy to be leveling some Western distortion upon my already dismayed audience.

Finally, one of the buckaroos gave me a thumbs up. I strummed a D chord.
"Alright," I said. "My name's Pan Da. I will be your entertainment this evening."
Some puzzled Sichuanese squawks: Pan Daaa?! Pan ... Daaaaaaaa?!
"That's right. Pan/Da. First tone/second tone," I said. "This one's called 'Cold Brains.'"

The guitar sounded delicious. I have spent the whole of my puberty and young adulthood tinkering with thrift store junkers, so playing a 2,500 kuai acoustic/electric over a KTV PA system was almost too hi-fi for my lo-fi nerves to handle. And wonderfully, the guitar was turned up high enough that the chords crackled ever so slightly against the back wall. Dissonance, American delinquentism, my toes curled with delight. And then the buckaroos came galloping back on stage. "No! No! No!"

I stopped playing. One of the buckaroos turned the guitar down, cranked my microphone way up into the red, and added some greasy karaoke reverb for good measure. I thanked him dubiously and took Mutations again from the top.

I play guitar the way Woody Allen might, with lots of musical stutters, a consistently nauseous look upon my face, and occasional breakdowns of the nervous, non-musical sort. It took me two weeks just to get where I could play a single one of Mutations' eleven tracks straight through without collapsing in a fit of profanities, or giggles. So when I slammed the last chord of Cold Brains, it was as though I'd just nailed a triple lutz: I looked around the bar for a Béla Károlyi to hug. But all was silent - just the rattling of dice and the clinking of glasses. Nobody even seemed to be looking at me anymore. I shrugged and set about detuning the guitar for Nobody's Fault But My Own.

"Alright," I said, playing to my profoundly male, profoundly Chinese audience, "this is the kind of song you might listen to if you just broke up with your girlfriend."
Small amount of feedback.
"You know, break up. Girlfriend," I said. "I know some of you guys have done that, right?"
I translated everything into Chinese for good measure: girlfriend, break up, nü pengyou, fen shou le. Dead silence, murmuring. So I played the second song of the set, without many hitches. And the third. Not a clap to be found. After Tropicalia, my index finger started gushing blood. I held it up to the spotlight and the crowd withered disgustedly. I asked Lisa for a band-aid, a guitar pick, and another bottle of Kingway.

I began to wonder what exactly I was doing wrong. During my short time in this country, I've seen the Chinese masses applaud juggling midgets, prerecorded TV shows, and unsuccessful magic tricks. My students have been known to give me a standing O for coming to class in a clean shirt. And now I'd even seen a bar full of Chinese men applaud a pole dancer. So surely the spectacle of a somewhat bearded foreigner strumming his native instrument, albeit sloppily, deserved some form of recognition, didn't it? The fact that I was playing the entirety of a fairly inaccessible concept album about matrons and gigolos and robots vibrating with pleasure - well, what did that matter? Nobody could understand me in the first place, right? So what was the problem? Not for the first time, it struck me as a particularly cruel irony that as foreigners, we are only invisible precisely in the two places we don't want to be: in the classroom, and on stage.

But the crowd loved me, in a way. They wanted me to drink with them. Throughout the second half of my set, one by one, tubby men in polo shirts and windbreakers and weird glam-ass sunglasses would stumble up to the microphone with a bottle of Kingway and demand that I sit at their table. They would fiddle with my microphone, strum my guitar for me, remove my hat and wear it themselves. I gave them my best harried westerner look: wait a minute, I'm busy right now! Between songs, I tried to quell the onslaught of sexually frustrated fortysomethings by explaining that I would be right with them in three songs. It didn't work. During Dead Melodies, my favorite of all psycho-morbid Beck ballads, tables of men were barking, "COME HERE! COME HERE!"

And so, as inclined as I was to torment those rowdy Jack Bar scenesters with the bonus noise track from Mutations, I closed out my set with a wispy little A chord and ran off to sit with a couple of Inner Mongolians. There are many social situations in China that you cannot escape from, and I could tell this was one of them. I knew I would remain with the Inner Mongolians until the sun came up.

One of the Inner Mongolians was lithe and athletic, the other ogreish and missing a few teeth. We spoke Chinese for the most part, but the ogreish Inner Mongolian, after a few too many Kingways, began to resort to English. The only word he possessed full command over was "FRIEND." So he would point at himself, point at me, and in his thunderous baritone he would intone the word, "FRIEND. FRIEND!" I would nod and say, yes. Friend! "FRIEND. FRIEND!" Yes. Friend! It went on like that for hours.

The Inner Mongolians threw me in the back of a cab. They wanted to get something to eat. It was 2:30 AM. This wouldn't end well for anyone. They took me to a seafood place in some dark corner of Nanchong that I couldn't find again if I tried. We ate clams, shrimp, squid, all of it basted in a retina-melting wasabi sauce. After we'd eaten a few pounds of the stuff, the ogreish Inner Mongolian circled our dishes with his finger and said, in Chinese, "The sea is very far away from Sichuan. All of this food has been frozen for a very long time."

There was no ominous intent in his statement. And of course, I'd known what I was getting into all along. But already, I could feel a sinking sensation in my stomach, and over the next several days that sensation would blossom and expand until there was nothing left of my body but stomach. And let this be the segue into my next post, a post about intestinal parasites and the joys thereof.

Rising Tone/Falling Tone

Several months ago, I began practicing my Chinese with an eccentric Swedish internet personality named Serge Melnyk. Though his choppy Scandinavian English added yet another layer of misunderstanding to my already muddled efforts at self-instruction, his lessons were concise and useful, and gradually I grew to trust him.

One December evening, seated in my meat locker of a living room with a space heater tilted up towards my rump, I came across a lesson entitled "Annoyances in China: Protect Yourself." I downloaded it and duly committed Mr. Melnyk's phrases to memory.

Are you trying to cheat me?
Do I look like some kind of idiot?
Don't bother me!
Why are you following me?
Stop following me!
Don't touch me!
Piss off!

These are not the sorts of expressions one learns in elementary German or Spanish, but they have served me well thus far in China. People do bother foreigners here: they stare at them, follow them, and on a couple of occasions, complete strangers have manhandled me in ways that have made my copious Western body hair stand on end. So, armed with some foreknowledge of their utility, I started belting these phrases out to no one, while my next-door neighbors - who are always audible through the crumbling wall that divides our two apartments - probably wondered whether I was finally suffering my first schizophrenic break.

Don't bother me! Don't touch me! Piss off! I barked, growing secretly eager for an opportunity to put those words to use. I wouldn't have to wait long, of course. Scarcely a day goes by in Nanchong without some sort of insane encounter on the street. But testosterone and adrenaline make for a nasty cocktail, and when those epic confrontations finally came, I found that my remedial tough guy Chinese was nowhere to be found, because all words had vanished from my mind but one: why?

A few weeks after my lesson with Mr. Melnyk, I was eating a bowl of gourmet ramen at the Muslim noodle joint next to the old campus. Two men in their mid-forties sat down across from me and stared with such intensity that I could see their black eyes reflected in the layer of oil floating on the surface of my noodle broth. I did what I usually do in those situations: I buried my face in my noodles and didn't look up. I ate quickly and called for the check. But when I made my way out to the street, the two men followed me. One of them caught me by the arm and asked me where I was going.

"I'm going home," I said, and walked in the opposite direction.
The other man grabbed me by the sleeve and pulled me back towards him.
"Come with us," he said. "We'll take you home."

I jerked free of his grip and turned to look him and his accomplice in the eyes. They were smiling in a non-threatening way, but when I turned to walk away, one of the men started yanking at the sleeve of my suitcoat, the beloved 200 kuai suitcoat that I bought two years ago from a tailor in Hangzhou and have worn every day since. I am a tolerant man, perhaps even a pacifist, but if there is a short road to a foreigner's fist in your face, it runs through the sleeve of his fitted Hangzhou suitcoat.

"Where are you going?" shouted the man. "Come with us! We'll take you home!"

By then we were tangled up in the middle of a four-lane road, the gusts of passing cars jostling us in both directions at once. The two men were hanging onto my suitcoat and crowds were forming on both sides of the street to observe the spectacle.

"No. I'm not going with you," I hissed through clenched teeth. My hands were shaking. "I'm taking the bus."

I pointed across the street, where the last school bus of the evening was pulling out onto the main road. I tried to swat the men away and make a run for it, but they held fast.

There were phrases I had learned for just this kind of situation - don't touch me! piss off! - but they had vanished. All that remained was the kind of seething male rage that leads men to do idiotic things. The only words that I could muster were wei shenme: why?

Luckily, a passing motorcycle almost clipped us and I was able to break free. When one of the men reached after me, I smacked his hand away. Then I dashed between a Toyotavan and an oncoming taxi, flagged down the bus, and hoisted myself aboard. From the window, I could see the two men standing in the middle of the road, looking baffled and insulted, watching me as I glided past. I hid my face behind a book and sat there for a long time without reading it. After a while, I was surprised to find myself feeling somewhat guilty about the whole thing. Perhaps, after all, they were just offering me a ride home.

I decided to beef up a bit in the weeks that followed. I started doing push-ups in my living room and pull-ups on the rusty bars down in the mudpit behind the stadium. There was no point in jogging, because where I live it is a hazard to one's health.

A few months passed. My understanding of the language improved, but Chinese crowd dynamics continued to elude me. Going out in public remained a crap shoot. There were often friendly encounters, or innocuous ones. There was also a vast gray area of hah-loos that might have been well-meant or mocking - it was impossible to tell. I never quite felt comfortable outside of my apartment, knowing that any second some anonymous arm could yank me out of the crowd and things could turn very weird indeed.

And then, the night before I left for Yunnan Province, it happened: Round Two. Pan Da vs. Nanchong - fight! I was downtown, it was late in the evening. Up and down the street, the red Spring Festival lanterns had just switched on and the night began to feel oddly Christmassy. I swung by my usual shop to buy a pack of Pandas. I was handing a fistful of kuai to the cashier when someone seized my free arm from behind and started pulling. The cashier reached for my money, but the man had already succeeded in dragging me halfway out the door. I whirled around to see who my assailant was this time: a squat, oily man in his mid-forties. He was yanking me by the sleeve of my field jacket and absurdly, because my old Pumas no longer had any traction to their soles, I was sliding across the linoleum floor. I smacked the man's arm away and shouted wei shenme? Why? The shopkeepers were still standing behind the counter, watching with great interest, and already a small crowd had materialized just outside the door.

"What are you doing right now?" barked the man.
"I'm trying to buy cigarettes. Who are you?"
"Are you working right now?" he asked.
"No."
"Let's go!" he shouted, and once again grabbed my arm and started dragging me, grunting and puffing, hunched and tromping towards the street with my sleeve stretched tight across his back, like Chinese Sisyphus lugging a laowai up the side of a mountain.

By then, I was an unthinking beast. Six months of heckling, of shouted hah-loos and murmured laowais, and now this - this man had finally blown my head gasket. I was enraged. I wanted to punch indiscriminately. But, to my credit I suppose, I simply swatted his arm away once more, turned around, and handed ten kuai to the cashier. She slid my pack of Pandas across the counter without a word. The man, crestfallen, slinked outside and waited for me in the street, where the crowd that had assembled for the impending throw-down was slowly beginning to disperse.

As I came out of the shop, the man produced a cigarette and thrust it in front of my mouth.

"No," I said. "Wo bu chou yan."

This meant two things: I don't smoke in general, and I don't want to smoke right now, both of which were obvious lies, as my next act was to light up one of my own cigarettes and throw myself into the nearest vacant taxi. It was the harshest insult I could level given the circumstances. To deny a man's cigarette is a pretty severe slight in this country. I didn't want to fight, or even to belittle the man. I simply wanted to send the message that grabbing a stranger by the sleeve and dragging him out the door is not a wise thing to do; no sane Chinese person would even think of doing it to another Chinese person, so why do it to a foreigner? And yet, as the cab sputtered away from the man standing there, mouth agape, at the curb, I was once again assailed by guilt. Perhaps the poor guy, after all, had just wanted to get me drunk.

These sorts of encounters are not common, which is why I have written about them. They stand out, is all. Over the course of eight months, I have been physically harassed three or four times, which isn't all that bad considering the amount of attention I attract everywhere I go.

Most of that attention is overwhelmingly positive. The Chinese people, generally, will bend every which way to make sure that I get where I'm trying to go, and that I get there safely and on time. I have been lavished with kindness that I cannot possibly repay, both because I am unused to such hospitality in the West, and because the Chinese refuse to accept anything in return. It is nothing, they will say, and they mean it. And how could I repay China for the countless dinners, for the too many drinks, for the companionship and compassion with which most of the people here have welcomed me? I couldn't begin to. I am a volunteer and I don't have the do-re-mi to return what I owe to this country.

And yet the kindness, too, is special treatment. Nobody buys the peasants dinner. I am a foreigner, so for good or for ill, I am treated like a foreigner. After a while, even kindness becomes exhausting.

A student once asked me what Chinese people should call "my people." Should I call your people laowai, she asked, or waiguoren (foreigner), or waiguo pengyou (foreign friend), or what? My answer surprised her and me alike: I told her that I'd rather nobody called me anything. It surprised her, perhaps, because it was unthinkable that my motley crew of golden-haired, tattooed, multicolored people should go without a label. And it surprised me because, up until that moment, I hadn't realized that it wasn't the various Chinese words for foreigner that irked me, but the fact that those words were spoken at all.

It is naive to expect that the Chinese will treat me, a foreigner, precisely the same way they would treat a Chinese shish-kebab vendor or a Chinese shopkeeper or a Chinese salaryman. We are too new, and China is too complex for that. But all special treatment - whether it is a cat call or a free shot of Crown Royal from a complete stranger - amounts, in the foreigner's mind, to the same thing: you are a foreigner, you are different. That sentiment can seem like a warm welcome, or it can feel like a boot in the ass.

A laowai's life is a dizzying collage of wonderful and horrific moments. Immigrants the world over experience the heights of human kindness and the depths of human fear and ignorance. There is very little in between. In the day to day life of a laowai, one day will scarcely resemble the next. There are wonderful days and terrible days, up days and down days - like the word lǎowài itself: a rising tone, a falling tone.

But the situation is not hopeless. I am reminded of a quote from the great Chinese author Lu Xun, a quote that has never been dearer to me than it is right now, as I type it:

Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.

The Peace Corps does not build houses in China. The Chinese are perfectly good at doing that for themselves. I wouldn't know where to begin with the construction of a 72-story residential megaplex anyhow. But lest one come to doubt the work that the volunteers are doing in this country, consider that we, in many ways, are the first ones to walk these roads. Most of the locals I talk to in Nanchong - a city of some 700,000 people - have never spoken with a foreigner before. For most of the shopkeepers and the barbers, the taxi drivers and the bus drivers, even for my college students and my fellow professors, I am the first contact they have ever had with that long feared, often maligned, occasionally admired and envied specter of The West. I am an English teacher, but that is only my part-time job. My real job is to make every first impression a positive one, and almost all of my interactions in this country are a first impression.

Among the people I talk to on a daily basis, taxi drivers are by far and away the most likely to have met a foreigner before. The other night, on the way home from Chongqing, the cabbie told me that my Chinese was very bang. But as usual, the more I spoke, the more sparse were his compliments, until by the end of the ride, I had been downgraded to a modest "not bad."

He mentioned that he'd met a foreigner before, that he used to drive the guy to school every so often.

"As far as I could tell," said the cabbie, "the foreigner could only speak three words of Chinese: Southwest Petroleum University."

The cabbie laughed and shook his head.

"He wasn't like you. Your Chinese is not too bad. This foreigner lived here for three years - three years! - and he couldn't say or understand anything. Just Southwest Petroleum University."
He chuckled and blared his horn at an onrushing gas tanker.

"Anyway," he said, "how many years have you been here?"
"About eight months," I said.
"Eight years," he said flatly.
"No, eight months."
"Eight months?" He looked me over in the rearview mirror. "Eight months! Yes, your Chinese is really not too bad for only eight months."

And it's really not that good, either. I don't study hard enough to speak good Chinese. But I do talk to people whenever I get the chance - usually old, poor people: amidst all the other changes they have seen in their lifetimes, a foreigner stumbling through their rice paddy isn't really all that surprising. But I'm not using them for language lessons. I'm not out to be the next Da Shan. I'm shooting for something a whole lot less ambitious. I'm hoping that by walking the same road over and over again, by eating the same ramen noodles at the same grimy hole in the wall every day, by joking with all the cabbies that drive me home at odd hours of the night, by doing all of these small things every day for two years and two months - I am hoping that the next volunteer who comes to Nanchong, or maybe the one after that, or the one after that, will have an easier time of it than I do in the year 2010, that he'll hop in a cab on a baijiu-soaked Friday night and the cabbie will say, "Yeah, I met a foreigner like you once. His Chinese wasn't too bad." He'll offer the foreigner a cigarette and the foreigner will politely stick it behind his ear. "Not as good as yours, of course. But not too bad."

Opening Day

Teaching elementary school English in Korea was a lot like officiating hockey. The classrooms were cramped and sweaty, rinked in with Plexiglas windows that rattled in their frames whenever my third-graders slammed each other into the walls. I was constantly tossing kids in the penalty box for fighting, cross-checking, high-sticking, and activating the fire extinguishers in the back of the room. By the end of the day, the floor was so slick with squid guts, flame retardant foam and bodily fluids that you had to skate your way out.

Teaching college English in China is more like playing baseball. The atmosphere is breezy and meditative, the crowd sedate but chatty. The floor is littered with the shells of peanuts and sunflower seeds. The wrap-around auditorium seats fold down the way they do in a big league ballpark, and after the bell rings, all eyes are on the podium that stands atop the pitcher's mound where I, the pitcher, pitch my spiel.

I am no Pedro Martinez. If anything, I am a bumbling Wakefeldian knuckleballer. My windup is irregular, my ERA less than impressive. My fastball clocks in at around 60 MPH. I am superstitious, the kind of guy you might find in the grimiest corner of the dugout, rocking back and forth autistically in the minutes before gametime, spitting torrents of chew into a hollowed-out cucurbita gourd that I've kept around 17 years for good luck. I am valued less for my performance than I am for my presence in the locker room. I am not a franchise player, but I am a decent guy to have in the four or five slot on the rotation. I'm the sort of pitcher who walks more batters than he strikes out, loses more games than he wins, and spends more time on the DL than on the active roster. But the ballclub keeps me around anyway, because I'm cheap, and because among the coaching staff there remains some dim hope that perhaps one day, in the twilight of my career, when a dusty wind comes sweeping down from the Himalayas and blows through eastern Sichuan to make my knucklers dance and kowtow over the plate, I might just toss nine innings of no-hit ball.

Today was Opening Day. There were the usual Opening Day jitters. It's hard to keep your cool when fifty college kids shriek with horror as you walk into the classroom for the first time. I pitted out five minutes in and my knees trembled for the whole three hours. And there were broader anxieties: worrying whether I've still got "the stuff" or whether it's gone to pot during the off-season, wondering what kind of muscle I've got in the batting order, et al. But I pitched well. So well, in fact, that I half-expected someone to swat my ass on the way out to the bus.

I am teaching sophomores this semester, and there was a kind of electricity in the classroom that was lacking in my last batch of juniors. There was also literal electricity: computers with projector screens, televisions with DVD players. Never in my teaching career have I had so much technology at my disposal and I am at a loss for what to do with it. Probably nothing too exciting. I'm just thrilled that I can type things on the board rather than subjecting my students to my hideous chalkmanship, which must be as legible to them as Chinese is to you and me.

I gave my students fifteen minutes at the end of class to interview me. Over the past six months, I have learned my fair share of shortcuts. I outlawed the following questions:

1. Do you like China?
2. Do you like Chinese food?
3. Do you have a Chinese girlfriend?
4. Can you use chopsticks?

These are questions that your garden variety laowai gets fed up with after a few hours in country. They are also the only questions that most of the people in your life will ever ask you. So I was a bit taken aback when a cute little sophomore in the front row stood up and asked me about He Whose Name Cannot Be Named Right Now and just why my America is meeting with him at this tense juncture in our international relationship. There was the usual canned audience response - some oohs, some laughter - but there were more than a few students cheering her on.

"Well," I said, revving up my Ambiguous Nitpicky Geopolitical Situation Translator (ANGST) for the first time in two months. "Well."

The classroom fell silent. Even the ventilators seemed to be holding their breath.

"Well. As Americans, we often disagree with our government. So please do not judge us for our government's actions," I paused to let the cloud of platitudes envelop me, then I continued. "Speaking for the American people, I can say that we all respect the Chinese people. We have been business partners for a long time now, and I hope that we can become friends."

There was a smattering of applause from the far back, but the girl in the front row wasn't buying it.

"But Mr. Panda, with all due respect," she said, "that doesn't answer my question."
"Well," I said, and took a sip of coffee. Then I tilted my mug back and took a solid slurp of coffee. "Well. It's a very complicated situation and it is very hard to understand. Even I don't understand it. Maybe you guys understand it better than I do. In order to understand it, I think we need to look at – and hey, there's the bell!"

I blurted out the homework assignment and made a beeline for the dugout under a jeering cascade of hot dog wrappers, peanut shells and AA batteries, shielding my head as I leaped over the third base line, the young season's first complete game under my belt.