Dear Newly Arrived Peace Corps Volunteers,
If you came to China with designs on kicking booze and smokes once and for all, perhaps Saudi Arabia would have been a better decision. The Chinese, as you have probably already discovered, are not Latter Day Saints. They love debauchery in all its forms. They enjoy revelry, merriment, bacchanalia, shindigs, and, in the parlance of our times, "getting crunk." The unholy sacraments of the Chinese Dionysian rites - formaldehyde beer and overpriced cigarettes - are almost impossible to avoid, or resist. The American mantra of Just Say No is flipped on its head in China. Here, Just Say Yes is the name of the game; it is rude to do otherwise.
Of course, you can abstain should you so desire, but you must be persistent, and your excuses had better be convincing.
Exhibit A: Wǒ bù hē. Wǒ shì shān dá jī yuán. I don't drink. I am a Scientologist.
Exhibit B: Chōuyān jī wǒ de chángdào yì jī zōnghézhèng. Smoking aggravates my Irritable Bowel Syndrome in explosive fashion.
The word for "alcoholic" in Chinese is jiu gui, or "booze devil." The word for "chain smoker" in Chinese is yan gui, or "cigarette devil." If you are to maintain some semblance of face in this country, you don't want to become either of those devils. But two years is a long time to behave oneself. And nobody around you will be behaving themselves. Furthermore, the Chinese are persuasive. They have strength in numbers and, in all likelihood, they will wear you down. Formal banquets tend to be even rowdier than high school keggers. If you are a man and you happen to be out with your coworkers, you will be offered fresh cigarettes before you've even finished the one you're working on. In short, if you were on the rickshaw of sobriety when you arrived, the Chinese will kick you off of it. If you were already off the rickshaw from the get-go, you will probably remain there. No doubt your willpower is stronger than mine, but I have found abstinence to be a losing battle in China. The key, then, is to indulge your vices responsibly, cost effectively, and enjoyably. So, what follows is my feeble attempt to assess the nature of debauchery in China, and to catalog the key players involved. This guide to debauchery will be part Gulliver's Travels, part Consumer Reports. It is not my aim to ruin the surprise for any of you - certainly, trial and error (and mostly error) is the best way to find things out for yourself - but simply to provide some helpful suggestions and shopping advice for all you young libertines out there who have so selflessly committed yourselves to two years of service and self-destruction. Happy debauching!
Warm regards,
Pan Da
Volume 1: On Smoking
When I first arrived in China, I was convinced for some reason that the Peace Corps was a celibate order of monks. Surely, nobody within the sacred fold smoked or drank, and I certainly didn't want to be regarded as the Kingsley Amis of the flock. So, I held off smoking for the first two days of my service, until the inside of my head started to feel like a rapidly inflating hot air balloon. I paced the room. I played Spider Solitaire. Eventually, I succumbed to Sudoku. Fucking Sudoku? No. I couldn't stand it any longer. Shortly after midnight, I tiptoed out of my hotel room and took the elevator downstairs. There were other volunteers lounging around the lobby. I waved at them, wearing an inconspicuous smirk. Oh, just going out for a little stroll is all, some fresh air, y'know - but I had blown my cover. Moments after I'd checked the walls for CCTV cameras and stashed myself in the darkest corner I could find, my soon-to-be friend Tim came around the bend. I stuffed my Marlboros back in my pocket.
"Whatcha up to, Keith?"
"Oh, uh, well," I said. "Just. Chillaxing. Man. In the corner. Y'know. In the dark."
"... um, cool. I thought you were maybe sneaking out for a cigarette or something."
"That ... is also possible. Do you ... errr?"
"I'm trying not to. But fuck it. It's China."
And so I dug deep into my dwindling supply of American cigarettes, offered Tim one, and lit a number for myself. Ah, sweet contentment.
Over the days and weeks that followed, the smokers' circle expanded. At first, it was just Tim and I. Then Gary came along. Vijay crumbled pretty quick. Then Christina and Genevieve. Jim and John. Tristan and Dave. They kept crawling out of the woodwork, shamefaced at first, then suddenly boisterous and bitchy like the rest of us. I'm not proud of our missionary work, and I don't mean to imply that the Peace Corps is the opposite of a monastic order, or that my fellow volunteers are as weak-willed as I am - but in a country where cigarettes are the official currency of kindness, it's almost impossible to stay on the non-smoking rickshaw.
After a couple weeks, after we had smoked down and snubbed out every last homegrown Marlboro, Camel, and American Spirit our backpacks had to offer, we in the smokers' circle turned with much wailing and gnashing of teeth to Chinese cigarettes. I'll be the first to admit that there is no such thing as a "good" cigarette, not even in America. Although I do savor the smell of secondhand smoke, I can't say that I've ever enjoyed my time in Flavor Country. As far as cigarettes go, there are only varying degrees of awful. American Spirits are considerably less awful than Marlboros. Marlboros, in my opinion, are considerably less awful than Camels. And Camels are unquestionably less awful than anything available for less than $7.00 a pack. But even bargain bin cigarettes - you know, the ones with the American flags on the front - are nowhere near as awful as the best Chinese cigarette on the market. Chinese cigarettes are f-bomb awful. That's all there is to it.
Deep down in our lungs, we in the smokers' circle knew that all Chinese cigarettes were f-bomb awful from the very beginning, but that didn't stop us from searching for that elusive mildly awful cigarette. Between Peace Corps health seminars, the smokers' circle would gather at the foot of the hotel stairs and, reaching into our pockets, we would produce a rainbow of cigarette packs. Blue packs, red ones, green packs, purple ones. The names eluded us at the time - Shuangxi? Hongtashan? Hongmei? - but the prices and the relative degrees of awfulness did not.
"These Shwoongshys ain't half bad. Ain't half good, either."
"Hayngtahshewns are only seven kuai. But it's like I'm inhaling a barbecue pit."
"Ugh, Hayngmee. Four kuai, and I feel like I'm smoking the New York Times."
A few of us adopted brands. But most of us, myself included, are still free agents, are still searching, hoping, still jumping from one f-bomb awful self-destructive experience to the next. In so doing, I have become something of a taxonomist of modern Chinese smokeables. I wouldn't consider myself a connoisseur, because that would imply some level of enjoyment that I am not familiar with. But after one full year off the rickshaw, I can categorize Chinese cigarettes by price, origin, nicotine content, and that most important of variables: degree of awfulness. And so, my dear volunteer, now I present that information to you. The reviews that follow will not include anything out of my price range, which is exactly $2.50 US.
Upper-Middle Class Cigarettes
Name: Marlboro
Origin: Fujian, China
Color: Red or white, depending on what kind of cancer you want
Price: 15 kuai ($2.50 US)
Degree of Awfulness: Pretty Damn Awful ☠☠☠☠
Review: It is with much relish and a slight twinge of heartbreak that I launch into this review of Chinese-made Marlboros. Don't let the classic deck-of-cards packaging fool you: these are not American Marlboros. Some foreigners persist in smoking them because the brand name does seem to have some sort of soothing placebo effect on the laowai mind. But I will go out on a limb and say that Chinese Marlboros are perhaps even more awful than most bargain bin Chinese brands. If you are familiar with the smell of valerian root, that is the exact stench you can expect the moment you put flame to paper. The smell of dirty socks. Of expired milk. A high-pitched smell, if that is possible. I don't mean to imply that Marlboro puts valerian root in their Chinese cigarettes, although that wouldn't surprise me in the least. Valerian root or no, smoking these monsters will not help you sleep at night. They will only amplify your Nescafe jitters, and what is worse, by keeping them around, you will sorely disappoint your expat friends every time you take out a pack and have to explain that oh, no, these aren't American Marlboros. They're, uh, Chinese. Like, sorry, bro.
Name: Hongtashan - Salaryman Edition
Origin: Yuxi, China
Color: Silver or gold. I can't tell. I'm colorblind, yo.
Price: 12 kuai ($2.00 US)
Degree of Awfulness: Pretty Damn Awful ☠☠☠☠
Review: A bit of trivia, first off. "Hongtashan" means Red Pagoda Hill. I have no idea where that particular hill is, but I can only assume it is somewhere in Yuxi, and that the red pagoda is obscured in a carcinogenic haze carried downwind from the nearby Hongtashan Cigarette Factory. Another bit of trivia: Hongtashan, Ltd. has a Twitter account. I can only imagine what a Chinese cigarette manufacturer must tweet about. "Keep smoking. KEEP SMOKING. LOL!!!! @hongtashan" Anyhow. There are at least three varieties of Hongtashan that I am aware of. What I call the CEO Edition is out of my price range, so I will not review it here. The Peasant Edition is well within my means, and is somewhat less awful than the Pretty Damn Awful Salaryman Edition, which I will sink my teeth into presently. Until I smoked one of these puppies, I didn't believe it was possible for China to engineer a cigarette that was "not strong enough." But smoking a Hongtashan Salaryman Edition is like sucking air through a straw. There does not appear to be any actual tobacco in the cigarette, though I have not yet been willing to dissect one in the name of science. I imagine if I were to do so, I would find a few dirty blonde strands of plant material blended in with pure nothingness. I do not recommend smoking these overpriced tubules of condensed oxygen. It is a waste of your volunteer stipend. Smoking a pack of Hongtashan Salaryman Editions is like not smoking anything at all. It's like breathing clean air, for chrissake, and who in their right mind wants to do that?
Name: Pride (a/k/a Panda) - Purple Panda
Origin: Unknown - somewhere with pandas, perhaps
Color: Purple, with some panda coloration
Price: 12 kuai ($2.00 US)
Degree of Awfulness: Not Too Awful ☠☠
Review: The Pride Cigarette Corporation, for reasons known only to Chinese cab drivers, has about ten different flavors of cigarette on the market. Or perhaps "flavors" isn't the right word. Let's say they have about ten different colors of cigarette on the market. There are yellow packs and blue packs, red ones and green ones, and most recently, purple ones. There is not much difference in awfulness between the many colors of the Panda rainbow, and to review them all would be pointless and exhausting work, so I will stick to the two least awful colors available: blue and purple. Pride Cigarettes are known to laowaidom as "Pandas," because of the cuddly little panda insignia on the front of the packs. Pandas are easily the cutest cigarettes in China. The Purple Panda logo is especially charming, because the little fellow looks like he's just spent two weeks on the high end of a bamboo bong. Panda rings aside, his eyes are unmistakeably bloodshot, his cheeks are flushed, and his lips are puckered, clearly showing signs of drymouth. I'm not sure if this partytime panda goes for tobacco, but I suspect he wouldn't be too disappointed with his namesake. As far as Chinese cigarettes go, I am willing to place Purple Pandas in the upper echelon of endurability. Slightly tangy, slightly bitter. Not too skunky. Pride Cigarettes, Ltd. have really come close to hitting the bullseye with this one; or have at least come close to hitting the target; or at the very least, they have come close to grazing the tree from which the target is hanging. In a vast sea of mass produced awfulness, by being Not Too Awful, the Purple Pandas have managed a feat unsurpassed by anyone except their less stoned brothers in arms: the Blue Pandas.
Middle Class Cigarettes
Name: Pride (a/k/a Panda) - Blue Panda
Origin: The Land of Milk and Honey and Tar, China
Color: Navy blue with trippy panda-related holograms
Price: 10 kuai ($1.50 US)
Degree of Awfulness: Merely Awful ☠
Review: It's all downhill from here. The high water mark for Chinese cigarettes is the Blue Panda. I can't say what makes me such a loyal customer. If I could, I probably wouldn't be a smoker. But that shimmering 3-D panda hologram draws me back time and time again. The problem is, Blue Pandas only seem to be available in Chengdu. Ah, yes. Chengdu. Therein, perhaps, lies the source of my attraction: Blue Pandas are the brand of choice in Chengdu, and that, after all, was the place of my Chinese rebirth, the city where I shed the shackles of my white man's name and was rechristened Pan Da. Pan Da smokes Pandas. Perhaps the name thing has something to do with it, too. Anyhow. I spent my first two months in Chengdu, and it is likely that my very first pack of Chinese cigarettes were Blue Pandas. I associate their inky deathsmoke with my first laowai friends, with the noobish novelty I found in Mother China, and with that first weekend debauch when, finally, everyone could let their guard down and stop acting s'damned serious all the time. Nostalgia aside, I mean it when I say that these cigarettes are Merely Awful, and not Rather Awful, or Pretty Damned Awful, or F-Bomb Awful. Sure, the filter is blue and plasticky, and all that painted plastic is probably wreaking unseen havoc on the poor little alveoli of my battered lungs. The smoke is by no means smooth, and tastes, in its way, like a condensed shot of Chengdu smog. But hey, nobody's perfect. Most things in life are mediocre. And in the realm of Chinese cigarettes, even mediocrity is unattainable. So it is with a deep sense of relativity that I award Blue Pandas the coveted Smoke Ring D'or. That said, I do not recommend them to anyone.
Name: Yunyan
Origin: Yunnan Province, China
Color: Crimson
Price: 10 kuai ($1.50 US)
Degree of Awfulness: Rather Awful ☠☠☠
Review: As enamored as I am of Yunnan Province, its mountains, its rivers, its eternal sunshine, its dwarf communes, its 300 foot tall Optimus Primes, its warmhearted people, its microbreweries, its matriarchal communes where the men drink wine and hibernate in hammocks all year long - as enamored as I am of the place, Yunnan's flagship cigarette company, Yunyan, is an extreme disappointment. It's not that Yunyans are all that awful. As you can see, I have rated them Rather Awful, as opposed to Pretty Damn Awful or F-Bomb Awful. But like the aforementioned Hongtashan Salaryman Editions, Yunyan cigarettes don't really do anything for me. They seem to consist of oxygen and dirt, with a dash of MSG and a sprinkling of horseradish. I don't know much about tobacco farming, but it puzzles me that Yunnan, a tropical fairyland that is unusually well suited for growing tobacco (among other things), should produce cigarettes that are anything less than Merely Awful. I don't have much to say about Yunyans, and have nothing to express but my disappointment. Yunyans are the Phil Collins of Chinese cigarettes. That, and the name is really hard to pronounce.
Name: Shuangxi - Classic Style
Origin: Shanghai, China
Color: Red China red
Price: 10 kuai ($1.50 US)
Degree of Awfulness: Not Too Awful ☠☠
Review: The coveted Silver Smoke Ring goes hands-down to Shuangxi Cigarettes, Ltd. The packaging makes them a bit hard to find - everything in China is red - but, while not quite rewarding, Shuangxis never prove lethal. At least not instantly so. The word "shuangxi" means "Double Happiness," which, I suppose, translates to "very, very happy." According to Wikipedia, "[t]he brand carries only a tiny health warning on the side of a 20-cigarette pack," and I can vouch for that. The tiny health warning goes something like this: SMOKING IS HARMFUL TO YOUR HEALTH; QUIT SMOKING EARLY IS GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH. I like that. It's much more pleasing to the smoker's ear than "SMOKING WAS A DUMBASS MOVE IN THE FIRST PLACE. DUMBASS." Because Blue Pandas are not readily available in Nanchong, and because Purple Pandas are too expensive, Shuangxis are generally my brand of choice. Their ten kuai price is convenient for breaking hundred-kuai bills. The cigarettes themselves are not really worth writing home about, but who the hell writes home about cigarettes anyway? The filters have a bad habit of dyeing my fingernails red, so I imagine my students suspect me of moonlighting as a stripper. As far as flavor goes, Shuangxis taste slightly minty. Or maybe that's just me. Otherwise, they are cigarettes - and Not Too Awful ones, at that.
Lower-Middle Class Cigarettes
Name: Hongtashan - Peasant Edition
Origin: Yuxi, China
Color: White, with red pagodas all over the fucking place
Price: 7.5 kuai ($1.10 US)
Degree of Awfulness: Not Too Awful ☠☠
Review: Ever the internet-savvy missionaries of death, in addition to a Twitter account, the Hongtashan Cigarette Company has a Wikipedia page. Let's peruse it, shall we? "The cigarettes are made with a flue-cured tobacco type and therefore sugar and nicotine levels are relatively high." I don't know what "flue-cured" means, and I'd prefer not to find out. Wait, there's sugar involved? Great, so my teeth will rot out along with everything else. I suppose it's probably best to just not read about cigarettes, ever. Least of all Chinese ones. Nevertheless, whatever I'm inhaling, it's not F-Bomb Awful. I will be charitable and give the Hongtashan Peasant Editions a mark of Not Too Awful, even though they are, at times, Rather Awful. Inconsistency is their achilles' heel. Overall, the Peasant Edition is pretty hit or miss. The packaging is seldom the same. Sometimes, they come in plastic bundles. Other times, in proper cardboard packs. Sometimes, they taste like rolled-up newspaper. Other times, like licorice. The only consistent thing about Hongtashans, so far as I can tell, is that they unravel like a motherfucker. For that reason, they are rather embarrassing to smoke in public. They disintegrate, fall to pieces. You're sitting there at the bar with ash all over the crotch of your jeans and meanwhile, a trail of flames is swallowing up your cigarette like a fuse. But if I can say anything complimentary about the Hongtashan Peasant Editions, it's this: they don't pussyfoot around. They bring it hard. The Hongtashan Peasant Edition cigarettes were clearly designed with lovable old Chinese men in mind, and for that I cannot fault them, even if they were the primary culprit in the Great Fire of Keith's Totally Bitchin' O'Leaver's Pub T-Shirt in the winter of twenty ought nine.
Lower Class Cigarettes
Name: Hongmei
Origin: Yuxi, China
Color: Day Glo yellow and other such retro hues
Price: 4 kuai (80 cents US)
Degree of Awfulness: Rather Awful ☠☠☠
Review: Hongmei is a brand that is nothing if not modest. It offers itself to you for four kuai. Its official website acknowledges, with charming honesty, that it is a "B grade cigarette." If hipsters existed in China, they would smoke Hongmeis. Because sometimes you want to listen to B sides. Sometimes you want to watch B movies. And sometimes you want to do B grade damage to your lungs. So if you're hard up for dough, Hongmei is your man. The name means "red plum," and according to Cigarettespedia (a website I just now discovered and subsequently bookmarked), the red plum is "a symbol of good character." And I suppose that is exactly what Hongmei, and most of its smokers, possess: good character. Hongmei is the poison of choice among China's elderly, both for its affordability and for its relatively low awfulness. My host dad was a Hongmei devotee. You pianyi, you hao, he would say to me as he handed me a Hongmei: if it's cheap, it's good. And although even then I had more refined tastes, I wasn't one to turn down a cigarette, and for the sake of host family harmony, I was briefly a Hongmei devotee myself. But then came my host teenager rebellious phase, and I began to host doubt my host dad's wisdom. Jeez, I would think to myself, these Hongmeis really taste like shit. Here, host dad. Smoke these. These are better. He would turn the Blue Panda over in his fingers like it was an artifact from the distant future. We would squint at each other. And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon, little boy blue and the man on the moon, and all the rest. So it goes. But I'm not being a cigarelitist (my coinage) when I say that Hongmeis are beneath me. Smoking them is simply a level of trauma I do not wish to subject myself to. Not yet, anyway. Not until I am 65 and Chinese. The only living Italian in Nanchong is a Hongmei fan as well. "The cheaper the better," he told me, and loaded me up with Hongmeis. They really aren't all that bad for four kuai. Eighty cents a pack. And Cigarettespedia tells me that Hongmei cigarettes won something called the "Excellent Prize at the Show of China's 10-Year Packing Achievement." Yeah, I've got your Packing Achievement right here, buddy. Anyway, I don't really have much to say about Hongmeis either way. They're cheap and awful. You get what you pay for and you pay for what you get. So, I suppose I'll let my old friend Cigarettespedia close this one out: "The filaments of the cigarette are golden and bright; the fragrance is sweet and pure; the taste is agreeable and comfortable; and the ashes are gray."
Name: Honghe
Origin: Yunnan, China
Color: Cornhusker crimson and Cornhusker creme
Price: 5 kuai (90 cents US)
Degree of Awfulness: F-Bomb Awful ☠☠☠☠☠
Review: And at long last, we have arrived at the worst of the worst. The coveted Loogey D'or goes to Honghe Tobacco Group Co., Ltd. I was surprised, upon glancing at one of the many cigarette packs that litter my living room floor, to learn that Honghe cigarettes are made in Yunnan Province. Another blow for that beloved southwestern Shangi-La of mine. What can I say about these death twigs? That they rank only slightly higher than paint thinner on my List of Things I Like to Inhale? That they are Colon Blow for the lungs? That the stench they give off is enough to kill every last locust within a ten mile radius? Yes, I suppose I can say all of these things. Nobody I know, not even my host dad, stoops so low as Honghe. I have smoked them on exactly three occasions, when my pockets were full of more lint than cash, and each time I spent the next week ruing my decision. I have considered filing suit against the Honghe Tobacco Group, but I don't know how to write "it was like scraping my lungs out with a periodontal probe" in Chinese. The name "Honghe" means "red lake," and after you've smoked one, it's easy to see why. As an anti-smoking campaign, I propose that every high school freshman in America be forced to smoke exactly one Honghe cigarette. Although the cumulative lung damage from a single Honghe is probably equal to smoking two packs of Marlboro Reds every day for the better part of a century, the experience would strongly deter America's children from actually smoking two packs of Marlboro Reds every day for the better part of a century. The experience would, in the blink of an eye, in the coughing up of a lung, instantly counteract all the coolness that Misters B. Dylan and T. Waits have lent to the profession of chainsmoking. God damn them both, and God bless America.
As an incidental footnote to all this, I would like to include the following cigarette-inspired anecdote: while writing, I inevitably had to take a break so I could scurry out and purchase a ten kuai pack of Shuangxi Classic Style cigarettes. (See above.) In the stairwell, I ran into the old man who is currently shacked up with my neighbors. Like most old Chinese men, I am able to communicate with him freely and fluently in a way that I am not able to with anyone under the age of 35. And like most old Chinese men, he chain smokes. He handed me a cigarette and lit it for me.
"What are we smoking?" I asked.
"Hongmei," he said. (See above.)
"Hongmei hao bu hao chou?" I asked. Are Hongmeis good to smoke?
"Bu hao chou. Bu hao chou," he said, shaking his head. Not good to smoke.
"But they're cheap."
"They are that," he said, and coughed.
We looked out over the balcony. It was dark outside. A handful of stars were dimly visible. The apartments across the way were all lit up, and we could see a shirtless man with D-cup bitchtits sitting on his couch, locked in heated conversation with the television.
"What have you been up to these days?" I asked.
"Well," said the old man, "tomorrow I'm going back to Guiyang."
My face dropped.
"Oh. That's too bad."
"Not really," he said. "Guiyang's nice. It's cooler there. The people are friendlier. You'd like it. There are lots of foreigners in Guiyang. Laowais like y'rself. Koreans. Japs. You name it."
The old man was nearing the end of his Hongmei, and used it to light another. He handed me a second cigarette and gestured for me to do the same.
"I don't usually do this," I said, laughing a bit, "but I like talking to you, so I suppose ... "
I snubbed out the first and lit the second.
"What will you do in Guiyang? Work?"
"Me? No. Too old for work. My working days are over," he said. "Just going there to relax."
"That's good. Is Guiyang your hometown?"
"Yes, it's my hometown. Nobody left, though. Everyone I know lives in there," he said, nodding towards the apartment next to mine.
"What kind of work did you do before you retired?"
"I was a farmer."
"It must have been a very hard life," I said.
"Yes. A very hard life."
"But life in China has improved very quickly."
"In some ways," he said. "In some ways. Right now you can see stars in Nanchong, but not for long. So many cars these days. Every year, more and more cars. In Chongqing, you can't see stars. In Chengdu, you can't see stars. When I was young in Guiyang, when I worked out in the fields, you could see stars. But not anymore. So many cars."
He snubbed out his cigarette in a nearby potted plant.
"So many cars," he said.
I took a drag. I exhaled. The smoke drifted from my lips, leaving a string of illegible handwriting hanging in midair with a question mark at the end.
"Well, goodnight," he said.
I shook his hand, though he was unfamiliar with the gesture.
"Safe travels to Guiyang."
"Thank you. Goodnight."
He hobbled up the stairs, unlocked the door and shut it behind him. I snubbed my cigarette on the window ledge. What a stupid habit. But would I trade it for all the conversations I've had with old Chinese men? Well, I don't know if I'd trade those for anything.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Attention Surplus Disorder
If I walk briskly, it takes me about half an hour to get from my apartment to the park downtown. This afternoon, I decided to conduct an experiment. For curiosity's sake, I decided to walk to the park and count my hecklers along the way. I made a point of not counting gawks, stares or leers; nor did I count bursts of laughter, or points, or people following me in the streets. I only counted HAH-LOOs and variations on the word "foreigner" - laowai, waiguoren, and the dreaded yang guizi: foreign devil.
During my half-hour walk to the park, I was heckled 33 times - a little over once a minute. When I'm out and about in Nanchong, I tend to take side streets to avoid being heckled, so for the most part, I wasn't walking on the overcrowded thoroughfares where heckling is the worst. China is a noisy place, so between the traffic and the earthmovers and the jackhammers, I couldn't even hear most of what was being shouted at me. Nevertheless, I counted 33 different hecklers in about 30 minutes of walking. This afternoon was not an anomaly. It wasn't even a particularly unpleasant walk. I've enjoyed much worse. I imagine, if someone were to average my daily heckler ratio, it would come out to something like one heckler per minute. That seems about right.
My hecklers don't know me. They aren't friends, or students, or anyone I have ever met. They are complete strangers. They are not children, as you might expect, or the elderly, who should be the most startled by my presence. My hecklers are college kids, well-off twentysomethings, and middle-aged salarymen - in short, full-grown adults who should know enough about the world to know better than to heckle another human being. The heckling is not friendly. A HAH-LOO is not a hello. Here, it is almost always a taunt. The word laowai, in my town, is not gasped with astonishment as it is in the countryside. There are enough foreigners in Nanchong that our presence is no longer altogether surprising. Rather, the word is uttered with a kind of disdain. Foreigner. Outsider. Laowai. I cannot think of a more unpleasant word in the Chinese language. A slow, rising tone followed by a fast, striking tone. Lao-WAI.
I already had some experience in the field of being a laowai before coming to China, so I wasn't entirely unprepared. I lived for a year in the suburbs of Daegu, South Korea. The people of Daegu were fairly familiar with foreigners, and had only just started to begin viewing them as more threat than novelty. I was heckled in Daegu fairly consistently, but not as often as I am here. My hecklers were generally elementary school kids, whose taunts were more cute than infuriating. Living a normal life in Daegu was something of a challenge, but nothing I couldn't get around by shaving regularly, dying my hair black, and sunbathing on the roof of my apartment.
My friend Jared lived in a somewhat rural Chinese town named Xiaoshan, just outside of Hangzhou. When I visited him several years ago, my presence was just as astonishing to the locals as it must be to the people of Nanchong, but I never felt as though I was being harassed. I stayed there a month and was never bothered unduly. Everywhere I went, I was greeted with smiles and hellos, but they weren't smirks or HAH-LOOs, if that makes any sense. The number of foreigners per capita wasn't any greater in Xiaoshan than it is here, but the people, for whatever reason, seemed more open and less threatened by us.
Just last week, I paid a visit to my friends in Chengdu - a big city but not a terrifically diverse one, some two hours away from Nanchong. Over the course of three days that I mostly spent outside, I was heckled exactly once, by a drunk motorcycle driver whose friends promptly told him to shut up. Otherwise, the fact that I was a foreigner was not commented on by anyone I met. I was at first startled by my anonymity, then relieved. I was ecstatically happy during my weekend in Chengdu. I could live there. But the moment I stepped off the bus in Nanchong, I was heckled all the way down the street until I was finally able to throw myself into the back of a cab, and when the cabby dropped me off at the campus gate, college students heckled me all the way home.
I don't mention all this as a point of criticism. Xenophobia is a bald fact of my existence, and I understand to some extent why it exists. But it is a fact that I struggle with. How am I to interpret it? How can I ignore it? How can I use it to my advantage? I am heckled wherever I go. The more language I learn, the more dismayed I am. I have, on a number of occasions, been called a monkey. The last time I took a shared taxi, the passenger in front protested because the driver was dropping off the foreigner before the other Chinese passengers. I am no longer fazed by these experiences, just startled by the frequency with which they occur, and the fact that they still happen. I am aware that other volunteers elsewhere in the world have it considerably worse, living in places where the color of their skin incites violence. But foreigners are not quite welcome in Nanchong City, Sichuan Province, and the negative attention is not trivial by any means. It is like an electric shock. The experience itself is not traumatic, but it is extremely unpleasant, unpleasant enough to distract me from the things I would like to be doing to help my community. And it does not fade with time. If anything, I have come to anticipate the shock, which makes the shock even worse when it comes. One of my fellow laowais lived in Chengdu for seven years and only recently came to Nanchong to be with his wife and child. He struggles with life here. He loved it in Chengdu, but is visibly wearing at the seams in Nanchong. Once the kid's grown up enough, he told me, we're out of here.
By now, I have traveled to many parts of China, and each trip has been a welcome respite from my daily life in Nanchong. I have visited some of the world's largest metropolises and some of China's most rural backwaters, and nowhere has the harassment been so intense as it is in the city in which I live. I won't speculate as to the reasons why, because I realize now that I can never hope to understand them. But of course, I signed up for all this. I joined such-and-such volunteer organization because I knew it would be difficult, and it has proven to be difficult. I wouldn't have it any other way. And in writing all this, I am not angry, or depressed, or pessimistic. I am as hopeful and cross-eyed idealistic as I have ever been. I want China to open its eyes to the rest of the world, rather than curling up into the fetal position of itself. This, really, is the reason why I came here. China must not remain a rock or an island. To my mind, there is almost nothing more vital to the future of humanity than making sure China becomes a part of the world. And it starts here in the hintergrund. In a sense, it starts in Nanchong.
My parents can vouch for this: as a young child, when I was feeling sulky, I used to bang my head against the bedroom wall until someone came in to stop me. Now, at 27, I am banging my head against the Great Wall. This is Einstein's definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. But I can do nothing else at this point. I have a full year left to go. So I will go outside with my idiotic smile and I will buy toilet paper. A six-ton jumbo economy pack of toilet paper. And people will point and laugh and shout nasty things as I pass. Let them. But it is my hope that one day, after I've walked by enough, after they've run out of things to shout at me, these people will arrive at the realization that this laowai is a human being who shits, who eats and shits just like us, who has emotions just like us, who doesn't like being shouted at when he's walking home with a six-ton jumbo economy pack of toilet paper. And then the snowball of logic will roll. Freedom is the freedom to say that 2 + 2 = 4. All else shall follow.
During my half-hour walk to the park, I was heckled 33 times - a little over once a minute. When I'm out and about in Nanchong, I tend to take side streets to avoid being heckled, so for the most part, I wasn't walking on the overcrowded thoroughfares where heckling is the worst. China is a noisy place, so between the traffic and the earthmovers and the jackhammers, I couldn't even hear most of what was being shouted at me. Nevertheless, I counted 33 different hecklers in about 30 minutes of walking. This afternoon was not an anomaly. It wasn't even a particularly unpleasant walk. I've enjoyed much worse. I imagine, if someone were to average my daily heckler ratio, it would come out to something like one heckler per minute. That seems about right.
My hecklers don't know me. They aren't friends, or students, or anyone I have ever met. They are complete strangers. They are not children, as you might expect, or the elderly, who should be the most startled by my presence. My hecklers are college kids, well-off twentysomethings, and middle-aged salarymen - in short, full-grown adults who should know enough about the world to know better than to heckle another human being. The heckling is not friendly. A HAH-LOO is not a hello. Here, it is almost always a taunt. The word laowai, in my town, is not gasped with astonishment as it is in the countryside. There are enough foreigners in Nanchong that our presence is no longer altogether surprising. Rather, the word is uttered with a kind of disdain. Foreigner. Outsider. Laowai. I cannot think of a more unpleasant word in the Chinese language. A slow, rising tone followed by a fast, striking tone. Lao-WAI.
I already had some experience in the field of being a laowai before coming to China, so I wasn't entirely unprepared. I lived for a year in the suburbs of Daegu, South Korea. The people of Daegu were fairly familiar with foreigners, and had only just started to begin viewing them as more threat than novelty. I was heckled in Daegu fairly consistently, but not as often as I am here. My hecklers were generally elementary school kids, whose taunts were more cute than infuriating. Living a normal life in Daegu was something of a challenge, but nothing I couldn't get around by shaving regularly, dying my hair black, and sunbathing on the roof of my apartment.
My friend Jared lived in a somewhat rural Chinese town named Xiaoshan, just outside of Hangzhou. When I visited him several years ago, my presence was just as astonishing to the locals as it must be to the people of Nanchong, but I never felt as though I was being harassed. I stayed there a month and was never bothered unduly. Everywhere I went, I was greeted with smiles and hellos, but they weren't smirks or HAH-LOOs, if that makes any sense. The number of foreigners per capita wasn't any greater in Xiaoshan than it is here, but the people, for whatever reason, seemed more open and less threatened by us.
Just last week, I paid a visit to my friends in Chengdu - a big city but not a terrifically diverse one, some two hours away from Nanchong. Over the course of three days that I mostly spent outside, I was heckled exactly once, by a drunk motorcycle driver whose friends promptly told him to shut up. Otherwise, the fact that I was a foreigner was not commented on by anyone I met. I was at first startled by my anonymity, then relieved. I was ecstatically happy during my weekend in Chengdu. I could live there. But the moment I stepped off the bus in Nanchong, I was heckled all the way down the street until I was finally able to throw myself into the back of a cab, and when the cabby dropped me off at the campus gate, college students heckled me all the way home.
I don't mention all this as a point of criticism. Xenophobia is a bald fact of my existence, and I understand to some extent why it exists. But it is a fact that I struggle with. How am I to interpret it? How can I ignore it? How can I use it to my advantage? I am heckled wherever I go. The more language I learn, the more dismayed I am. I have, on a number of occasions, been called a monkey. The last time I took a shared taxi, the passenger in front protested because the driver was dropping off the foreigner before the other Chinese passengers. I am no longer fazed by these experiences, just startled by the frequency with which they occur, and the fact that they still happen. I am aware that other volunteers elsewhere in the world have it considerably worse, living in places where the color of their skin incites violence. But foreigners are not quite welcome in Nanchong City, Sichuan Province, and the negative attention is not trivial by any means. It is like an electric shock. The experience itself is not traumatic, but it is extremely unpleasant, unpleasant enough to distract me from the things I would like to be doing to help my community. And it does not fade with time. If anything, I have come to anticipate the shock, which makes the shock even worse when it comes. One of my fellow laowais lived in Chengdu for seven years and only recently came to Nanchong to be with his wife and child. He struggles with life here. He loved it in Chengdu, but is visibly wearing at the seams in Nanchong. Once the kid's grown up enough, he told me, we're out of here.
By now, I have traveled to many parts of China, and each trip has been a welcome respite from my daily life in Nanchong. I have visited some of the world's largest metropolises and some of China's most rural backwaters, and nowhere has the harassment been so intense as it is in the city in which I live. I won't speculate as to the reasons why, because I realize now that I can never hope to understand them. But of course, I signed up for all this. I joined such-and-such volunteer organization because I knew it would be difficult, and it has proven to be difficult. I wouldn't have it any other way. And in writing all this, I am not angry, or depressed, or pessimistic. I am as hopeful and cross-eyed idealistic as I have ever been. I want China to open its eyes to the rest of the world, rather than curling up into the fetal position of itself. This, really, is the reason why I came here. China must not remain a rock or an island. To my mind, there is almost nothing more vital to the future of humanity than making sure China becomes a part of the world. And it starts here in the hintergrund. In a sense, it starts in Nanchong.
My parents can vouch for this: as a young child, when I was feeling sulky, I used to bang my head against the bedroom wall until someone came in to stop me. Now, at 27, I am banging my head against the Great Wall. This is Einstein's definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. But I can do nothing else at this point. I have a full year left to go. So I will go outside with my idiotic smile and I will buy toilet paper. A six-ton jumbo economy pack of toilet paper. And people will point and laugh and shout nasty things as I pass. Let them. But it is my hope that one day, after I've walked by enough, after they've run out of things to shout at me, these people will arrive at the realization that this laowai is a human being who shits, who eats and shits just like us, who has emotions just like us, who doesn't like being shouted at when he's walking home with a six-ton jumbo economy pack of toilet paper. And then the snowball of logic will roll. Freedom is the freedom to say that 2 + 2 = 4. All else shall follow.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Three Shops/Twin Peaks
Every now and again, god or Yahweh or whoever decides to give up the reigns, and invites David Lynch to guest direct a scene or two of my life.
There are three shops in my neighborhood, all on the same street. The street is lined with garages on both sides, and the garages that aren't already occupied by Volkswagen Santanas have been rented out to shopkeepers. There are three shops. They sell the exact same stuff - smokes and booze, Sprite and Coca-Cola, yogurt and ramen noodles - and they sell that stuff for the exact same government-mandated prices. One bottle of Yanjing: three kuai. One tube of yogurt: two kuai, five mao. One pack of Hongtashans: seven kuai, five mao. These prices are Chinese universals. I know them by heart. The prices don't change from place to place, do not rise or fall with plenitude or scarcity. A bottle of Yanjing is three kuai, is three kuai, is three kuai. Here, everyone knows the going rate for everything. In China, it is not prices, but guanxi that matters. If you have guanxi, the prices drop. If you don't, they don't. As a foreigner, the guanxi system doesn't really apply to me, which suits me just fine, as I enjoy my three shops, and their shopkeepers, equally.
The First Shop is owned by a young couple. The wife is a beautiful and astonishingly curvy woman with wide brown eyes that must be the envy of Nanchong. Her daughter is the single cutest child in all of China - and Chinese children are, well, cute. Every so often, one of the owner's cousins drops in to run the shop. She, too, is astonishingly curvy, with wide brown eyes. "Good genes" are the words that come to mind when I swing by the First Shop to purchase my nightly bottle of yogurt. The husband doesn't seem to like me none too much, but whenever I buy three bottles of Yanjing on a Saturday night, he launches into a seemingly improvised tune that goes San piiing/Yanjiiing.
The Third Shop is owned by another young couple. The wife is cute, but a bit rough around the edges. Tough. No-nonsense. "Sturdy" is the word that comes to mind when I swing by for my morning pack of Shuangxis. She keeps the money in a black fanny pack strapped to her left hip. Her husband likes me quite a bit. Once, he let me use his phone to track down a lost care package. So I owe him some guanxi and try to patronize the Third Shop whenever I can. But the First Shop, with its wide-eyed females, beckons.
The Second Shop is owned by an impossibly old man and his impossibly old wife. The man owns an impossibly old bicycle with an impossibly old trailer hitched to the back. On the rare occasion that I wake up before noon, I often run into the old man pedaling his bike uphill with a trailer full of recyclables. I smile and wave. He smiles and waves. I tingle all over. Sometimes, I find him rummaging through the garbage for spare bottles and cans. He smiles and waves. I smile and wave. And I tingle all over. These kinds of interactions, free of nuance, free of judgment, are hard to come by in Nanchong, and I am eternally grateful for them. So I try to patronize the Second Shop whenever I can. But I owe the Third Shop a couple of favors, and the First Shop, with its wide-eyed females, beckons. In the end, the three shops wind up getting an even 33.3 percent cut of my Peace Corps stipend.
Tonight I walked past the First Shop because the owners were hosting some sort of family reunion, and I was intimidated by all the buxom, wide-eyed females in attendance. I had already bought several bottles of faux-Gatorade from the Third Shop after my morning run, so I decided to stop by the Second Shop. The impossibly old man was waiting for me there, shirtless, smoking, and loading recyclables into his impossibly old trailer.
"Do you have Shancheng?" I asked.
"Yes," he said.
"Three bottles, please."
"Yes," he said.
While he fetched the beers from the meat freezer, I looked around the shop. Cardboard boxes piled high with stunted potatoes. Stacks of yellowed newspaper. Garbage bags full of plastic bottles. And there on the counter, a copy of Great Expectations, in English, splayed open to page 468.
"Is this yours?" I asked in Chinese.
"Yes," he said.
"Are you reading it?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Do you speak English?"
"Yes."
"Can you understand the book?"
"Yes."
I blinked furiously and scratched my head.
"This is one of my favorite books," I said. "Most of my English students couldn't even read it."
"Yes," said the impossibly old man.
"I didn't know you could speak English."
"Yes," he said.
"Can you speak English?"
"Yes."
The impossibly old man loaded the beers into my backpack. I stood there watching him. Could this impossibly old man really be reading Charles Dickens in the original English, or was he just saying yes to everything for the sake of getting me out of his garage as soon as possible? I began to suspect, and not for the first time, that David Lynch was pulling the strings. And that was when I came across the cigarettes on the counter: a pack of Newport Menthol 100s.
"My God," I said, "these are American cigarettes!"
"Yes," he said.
"You can't get these in China," I said. "American pimps smoke these. Where did you buy them?"
He said nothing, but gave me one.
"Thanks," I said, "but where did you get the Newports?"
He laughed and lit one for himself. Then he shut the garage door, hopped on his bike, and with a wave, pedaled off into the night.
I walked home. The setting sun spewed a radioactive smear across the horizon. I lit my Newport and, for the first time in over a year, achieved a legitimate nicotine buzz. I had been planning on writing about something else tonight - hence the beers - but I have long since come to accept the fact that I am not the author of this story.
There are three shops in my neighborhood, all on the same street. The street is lined with garages on both sides, and the garages that aren't already occupied by Volkswagen Santanas have been rented out to shopkeepers. There are three shops. They sell the exact same stuff - smokes and booze, Sprite and Coca-Cola, yogurt and ramen noodles - and they sell that stuff for the exact same government-mandated prices. One bottle of Yanjing: three kuai. One tube of yogurt: two kuai, five mao. One pack of Hongtashans: seven kuai, five mao. These prices are Chinese universals. I know them by heart. The prices don't change from place to place, do not rise or fall with plenitude or scarcity. A bottle of Yanjing is three kuai, is three kuai, is three kuai. Here, everyone knows the going rate for everything. In China, it is not prices, but guanxi that matters. If you have guanxi, the prices drop. If you don't, they don't. As a foreigner, the guanxi system doesn't really apply to me, which suits me just fine, as I enjoy my three shops, and their shopkeepers, equally.
The First Shop is owned by a young couple. The wife is a beautiful and astonishingly curvy woman with wide brown eyes that must be the envy of Nanchong. Her daughter is the single cutest child in all of China - and Chinese children are, well, cute. Every so often, one of the owner's cousins drops in to run the shop. She, too, is astonishingly curvy, with wide brown eyes. "Good genes" are the words that come to mind when I swing by the First Shop to purchase my nightly bottle of yogurt. The husband doesn't seem to like me none too much, but whenever I buy three bottles of Yanjing on a Saturday night, he launches into a seemingly improvised tune that goes San piiing/Yanjiiing.
The Third Shop is owned by another young couple. The wife is cute, but a bit rough around the edges. Tough. No-nonsense. "Sturdy" is the word that comes to mind when I swing by for my morning pack of Shuangxis. She keeps the money in a black fanny pack strapped to her left hip. Her husband likes me quite a bit. Once, he let me use his phone to track down a lost care package. So I owe him some guanxi and try to patronize the Third Shop whenever I can. But the First Shop, with its wide-eyed females, beckons.
The Second Shop is owned by an impossibly old man and his impossibly old wife. The man owns an impossibly old bicycle with an impossibly old trailer hitched to the back. On the rare occasion that I wake up before noon, I often run into the old man pedaling his bike uphill with a trailer full of recyclables. I smile and wave. He smiles and waves. I tingle all over. Sometimes, I find him rummaging through the garbage for spare bottles and cans. He smiles and waves. I smile and wave. And I tingle all over. These kinds of interactions, free of nuance, free of judgment, are hard to come by in Nanchong, and I am eternally grateful for them. So I try to patronize the Second Shop whenever I can. But I owe the Third Shop a couple of favors, and the First Shop, with its wide-eyed females, beckons. In the end, the three shops wind up getting an even 33.3 percent cut of my Peace Corps stipend.
Tonight I walked past the First Shop because the owners were hosting some sort of family reunion, and I was intimidated by all the buxom, wide-eyed females in attendance. I had already bought several bottles of faux-Gatorade from the Third Shop after my morning run, so I decided to stop by the Second Shop. The impossibly old man was waiting for me there, shirtless, smoking, and loading recyclables into his impossibly old trailer.
"Do you have Shancheng?" I asked.
"Yes," he said.
"Three bottles, please."
"Yes," he said.
While he fetched the beers from the meat freezer, I looked around the shop. Cardboard boxes piled high with stunted potatoes. Stacks of yellowed newspaper. Garbage bags full of plastic bottles. And there on the counter, a copy of Great Expectations, in English, splayed open to page 468.
"Is this yours?" I asked in Chinese.
"Yes," he said.
"Are you reading it?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Do you speak English?"
"Yes."
"Can you understand the book?"
"Yes."
I blinked furiously and scratched my head.
"This is one of my favorite books," I said. "Most of my English students couldn't even read it."
"Yes," said the impossibly old man.
"I didn't know you could speak English."
"Yes," he said.
"Can you speak English?"
"Yes."
The impossibly old man loaded the beers into my backpack. I stood there watching him. Could this impossibly old man really be reading Charles Dickens in the original English, or was he just saying yes to everything for the sake of getting me out of his garage as soon as possible? I began to suspect, and not for the first time, that David Lynch was pulling the strings. And that was when I came across the cigarettes on the counter: a pack of Newport Menthol 100s.
"My God," I said, "these are American cigarettes!"
"Yes," he said.
"You can't get these in China," I said. "American pimps smoke these. Where did you buy them?"
He said nothing, but gave me one.
"Thanks," I said, "but where did you get the Newports?"
He laughed and lit one for himself. Then he shut the garage door, hopped on his bike, and with a wave, pedaled off into the night.
I walked home. The setting sun spewed a radioactive smear across the horizon. I lit my Newport and, for the first time in over a year, achieved a legitimate nicotine buzz. I had been planning on writing about something else tonight - hence the beers - but I have long since come to accept the fact that I am not the author of this story.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Moth Logistics
The mosquitoes have returned to Nanchong, back from their timeshare vacation in Thailand. I didn't notice them at first. I figured the constant buzzing in my ears was the televised vuvuzelan ambiance of the Uruguay-Ghana game. I assumed the stinging sensation in my right lovehandle was merely the onset of my usual late night Nescafe DTs. I sat there writing. Twitching and writing. Itching. And writing. Backspacing. Rewriting. Twitching. Itching some more. Then I whirled around to see that a twelve-legged helicopter with a stabber the size of a Capri-Sun straw was sucking my blood through my shirt.
I swatted the beast and tried several times to finish him on the rebound, to no avail. So I went nuclear. I picked up a nearby canister of Chinese Raid. Psssssssshhhhhhhh! Not quite a direct hit, but the ominous gray mist spread across the room and, upon contact, the mosquito buzzed a frantic mayday to his comrades, went into a tailspin, and crashed audibly to the floor. I turned the canister over and squinted at the ingredients. The Chinese symbol for death. Whatever is in this stuff, I thought, it can't be good for anyone.
Living abroad, you will find existential questions waiting for you in your morning bowl of imported Fun Pak Alpha-Bits. "ARE YOU HAPPY?" the Alpha-Bits will ask. Yes, you tell them, I suppose I am happy. "ARE YOU BECOMING A BETTER PERSON?" I dunno, you grumble, probably. "DO YOU FEEL THAT YOU ARE MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN YOUR COMMUNITY?" By then, you're just trying to finish your cereal before it finishes you. It's hard to tell, you gurgle as you're slurping up the sickly sweet dregs, but I believe that I am. And then the Alpha-Bits have nothing left to say because you've eaten them all and moved onto Raisin Bran, who isn't much for conversation.
Existential questions may nag from time to time, but they are easy to answer because you realize by now that they are unanswerable. Far more distressing to the incompetent bachelor are more practical questions, questions of survival, questions like: Why are there so many bugs in my apartment? and, Why are bugs drawn to my apartment? and, How should I go about killing all these many bugs in my apartment without killing myself in the process?
My host family, in my deafmute days of grunting and gesturing, once gave me an electronic device that, through much grunting and gesturing, I learned was supposed to be plugged into the wall. Then, every couple days, my host family would supply me with a small teal-green tablet that bore the Chinese symbol for "bugs." After more grunting and gesturing and several rudimentary diagrams, I learned that I was supposed to slip the teal-green tablet into the machine, and that the machine, via a small heat plate, would disperse fumes that would kill on contact any and all mosquitoes, ants, cockroaches, chiggers, no-see-ems, rats, and burglars.
The heat plate machine seemed to work. But here in Nanchong, I cannot find it and wouldn't know how to ask for it. So instead, I use these DDT-frosted cinnamon roll incense sticks that take a solid ten minutes to light, and once lit, fill the apartment with a foreboding stench of indiscriminate death. The DDT cinnamon rolls get the job done, but at what cost? Minute by minute, I watch insect after insect drop to the floor like Spanish futbolistas and wriggle their legs until death sets in, and I begin to wonder whether I am biologically above all that. In the afternoons, I watch - somewhat amused, extremely disgusted - as an insectoid World War II rages in my living room. The mosquitoes come in droves, gather and mount kamikaze offensives that are suddenly and abruptly quashed by my mustard gas cocktail of DDT and cigarette smoke.
But even with the aid of chemical weapons, I am at an extreme disadvantage. I am but one man. The insects are infinite. I will reproduce when I am 35, if ever. They reproduce every two seconds, put Catholics to shame. The bugs have strength in numbers. All the DDT in China could not stop them. So, although I fear insects more than anything in the known universe - it is not rats, but cockroaches that await me in my Room 101 - I have learned to live with them. I regard them almost as pets. If you can't beat them, sublet your apartment to them. Naturally, when my six-legged roommates aren't around, questions of entomology occur to me.
Why are flies so attracted to humans? I wondered. I asked Jeeves.
"Well, old chap," he said, lighting up a Winchester, "flies are attracted to humans because humans often possess food. We are an upper class species with upper class sensibilities. Flies, as scavengers, are always on the dole. So they mooch off of us. Our pheromones attract them in droves, and once they have found us, they refuse to leave us alone."
I was eating fourthmeal at the time, so I told Jeeves to shut up. His answer was more disgusting than anything I was prepared for, and I preferred not to think about the matter any further.
Late one evening, I heard a sudden chorus of vuvuzelas overhead and glanced up at the ceiling. I was appalled to find a biker gang of black-winged insects clinging to the light bulb. I had never noticed them before. During the days, they ran rampant, but at night, I had no clue as to where they went, what they did during their afterhours. I figured they migrated down to the Jack Bar. But no, my living room ceiling was their headquarters. Their Central Perk. The Point. The light bulb was where they mated, swapped business cards, held clandestine Socialist caucuses ...
Curiosity got the better of me, so I asked Jeeves again. Say, Jeeves, why are bugs attracted to light?
"Well, old chap," he said, "nobody's quite sure about that, but I reckon ol' Jeevesy has a jolly good hunch."
He turned 'round to the blackboard.
"Nocturnal insects," he said, "use the moon as their compass star when migrating long distances. With the advent of the electric light bulb, the insect community has found itself in a sticky wicket - they think light bulbs are the bloody moon! And that's not the half of it! When they ... why, hullo ... well, what's this, then?"
A white van screeched up to the curb. The doors flew open. Jeeves's Winchester fell to the floor. One man threw a bag over Jeeves's head while the others worked on him with billy clubs. "Oh, dear me," Jeeves said, fainting as the men carried him away and dumped him in the trunk. The doors clapped shut and the van screeched off into the distance. My screen went blank. "The connection to askjeeves.com has been interrupted," it read. Weird, I said.
Though it was nearly midnight, I decided to get out of the house, away from the bugs. Outside, I ran into my neighbors and their four year-old son. This is not unusual. There is no curfew in China for children under the age of five. Parents here never miss an opportunity to show off the solitary fruit of their loins. My neighbors, a professor of basketball and his wife, a yoga instructor, were out in the courtyard, running a high-speed passing drill with their giggling son while several elderly admirers looked on.
"Hah-loo, Uncle!" whispered the father as I passed.
"Hah-loo, Uncle!" whispered the mother.
The child said nothing. He was busy eating his own hand.
"The Germans lost yesterday," I said.
"Ai-ya! I know. I wanted them to win."
My neighbors, for whatever reason, are the only people I know who are rooting for the imperialist powers in this year's World Cup. The rest of China is - or was - pulling for Brazil, Argentina, and North Korea, in that order. After North Korea lost seven-nil to Portugal, I risked a chuckle in front of my students.
"But teacher," said one student, "they tried their best."
"Yes," said another, "they tried their best."
"But seven to nothing!" I cackled. "Hilarious!"
"Very sad," said a third. "They tried their best."
A few days later, when, glowing and somewhat red in the cheeks, I told the basketball professor that the United States had defeated Algeria at the last possible second, his wife jumped up and down and clapped her hands. This is all fairly unusual, of course, but has nothing to do with anything.
"What a pity the Germans are lose," said the basketball professor, in English, and was about to continue when his son interrupted him.
"Daddy?" the boy said in Chinese, pointing at a nearby streetlamp. "Why do moths always fly towards the light?"
"Well, son," said the basketball coach. "I'm not really sure. I think they like the heat."
Instinctively, my hand shot up in the air. I knew this one. And I was stoked, stoked to have understood the exchange, and stoked to be privy to such a formative moment in the life of a Chinese youth.
"Actually, I just asked my friend the same question," I said, thinking of poor Jeeves. "He is a bug expert."
The basketball professor nodded dubiously.
"It turns out - well. You see," I said, fumbling for my vocabulary, "moths like to travel. They travel to very far away places, very late at night. The moon helps them find where they are going. They are not used to electric light. It is a new invention. The moths think light bulbs are the moon. So they fly to the moon, so to speak."
It took my neighbor a moment to sort out my clunky syntax, but when he did, he nudged his son and said, "You hear that? Moths think light bulbs are the moon!"
His son laughed, amused.
"Well, good night, Uncle," said the basketball professor.
"Good night. Uncle," said the kid.
And in the moment, I did feel like an uncle. Just wait 'til they get a load of the pull-my-finger gag. I bid the neighbors goodnight and, gazing up at the half-eaten moon, fluttered off to a neon light on the dark side of town.
I swatted the beast and tried several times to finish him on the rebound, to no avail. So I went nuclear. I picked up a nearby canister of Chinese Raid. Psssssssshhhhhhhh! Not quite a direct hit, but the ominous gray mist spread across the room and, upon contact, the mosquito buzzed a frantic mayday to his comrades, went into a tailspin, and crashed audibly to the floor. I turned the canister over and squinted at the ingredients. The Chinese symbol for death. Whatever is in this stuff, I thought, it can't be good for anyone.
Living abroad, you will find existential questions waiting for you in your morning bowl of imported Fun Pak Alpha-Bits. "ARE YOU HAPPY?" the Alpha-Bits will ask. Yes, you tell them, I suppose I am happy. "ARE YOU BECOMING A BETTER PERSON?" I dunno, you grumble, probably. "DO YOU FEEL THAT YOU ARE MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN YOUR COMMUNITY?" By then, you're just trying to finish your cereal before it finishes you. It's hard to tell, you gurgle as you're slurping up the sickly sweet dregs, but I believe that I am. And then the Alpha-Bits have nothing left to say because you've eaten them all and moved onto Raisin Bran, who isn't much for conversation.
Existential questions may nag from time to time, but they are easy to answer because you realize by now that they are unanswerable. Far more distressing to the incompetent bachelor are more practical questions, questions of survival, questions like: Why are there so many bugs in my apartment? and, Why are bugs drawn to my apartment? and, How should I go about killing all these many bugs in my apartment without killing myself in the process?
My host family, in my deafmute days of grunting and gesturing, once gave me an electronic device that, through much grunting and gesturing, I learned was supposed to be plugged into the wall. Then, every couple days, my host family would supply me with a small teal-green tablet that bore the Chinese symbol for "bugs." After more grunting and gesturing and several rudimentary diagrams, I learned that I was supposed to slip the teal-green tablet into the machine, and that the machine, via a small heat plate, would disperse fumes that would kill on contact any and all mosquitoes, ants, cockroaches, chiggers, no-see-ems, rats, and burglars.
The heat plate machine seemed to work. But here in Nanchong, I cannot find it and wouldn't know how to ask for it. So instead, I use these DDT-frosted cinnamon roll incense sticks that take a solid ten minutes to light, and once lit, fill the apartment with a foreboding stench of indiscriminate death. The DDT cinnamon rolls get the job done, but at what cost? Minute by minute, I watch insect after insect drop to the floor like Spanish futbolistas and wriggle their legs until death sets in, and I begin to wonder whether I am biologically above all that. In the afternoons, I watch - somewhat amused, extremely disgusted - as an insectoid World War II rages in my living room. The mosquitoes come in droves, gather and mount kamikaze offensives that are suddenly and abruptly quashed by my mustard gas cocktail of DDT and cigarette smoke.
But even with the aid of chemical weapons, I am at an extreme disadvantage. I am but one man. The insects are infinite. I will reproduce when I am 35, if ever. They reproduce every two seconds, put Catholics to shame. The bugs have strength in numbers. All the DDT in China could not stop them. So, although I fear insects more than anything in the known universe - it is not rats, but cockroaches that await me in my Room 101 - I have learned to live with them. I regard them almost as pets. If you can't beat them, sublet your apartment to them. Naturally, when my six-legged roommates aren't around, questions of entomology occur to me.
Why are flies so attracted to humans? I wondered. I asked Jeeves.
"Well, old chap," he said, lighting up a Winchester, "flies are attracted to humans because humans often possess food. We are an upper class species with upper class sensibilities. Flies, as scavengers, are always on the dole. So they mooch off of us. Our pheromones attract them in droves, and once they have found us, they refuse to leave us alone."
I was eating fourthmeal at the time, so I told Jeeves to shut up. His answer was more disgusting than anything I was prepared for, and I preferred not to think about the matter any further.
Late one evening, I heard a sudden chorus of vuvuzelas overhead and glanced up at the ceiling. I was appalled to find a biker gang of black-winged insects clinging to the light bulb. I had never noticed them before. During the days, they ran rampant, but at night, I had no clue as to where they went, what they did during their afterhours. I figured they migrated down to the Jack Bar. But no, my living room ceiling was their headquarters. Their Central Perk. The Point. The light bulb was where they mated, swapped business cards, held clandestine Socialist caucuses ...
Curiosity got the better of me, so I asked Jeeves again. Say, Jeeves, why are bugs attracted to light?
"Well, old chap," he said, "nobody's quite sure about that, but I reckon ol' Jeevesy has a jolly good hunch."
He turned 'round to the blackboard.
"Nocturnal insects," he said, "use the moon as their compass star when migrating long distances. With the advent of the electric light bulb, the insect community has found itself in a sticky wicket - they think light bulbs are the bloody moon! And that's not the half of it! When they ... why, hullo ... well, what's this, then?"
A white van screeched up to the curb. The doors flew open. Jeeves's Winchester fell to the floor. One man threw a bag over Jeeves's head while the others worked on him with billy clubs. "Oh, dear me," Jeeves said, fainting as the men carried him away and dumped him in the trunk. The doors clapped shut and the van screeched off into the distance. My screen went blank. "The connection to askjeeves.com has been interrupted," it read. Weird, I said.
Though it was nearly midnight, I decided to get out of the house, away from the bugs. Outside, I ran into my neighbors and their four year-old son. This is not unusual. There is no curfew in China for children under the age of five. Parents here never miss an opportunity to show off the solitary fruit of their loins. My neighbors, a professor of basketball and his wife, a yoga instructor, were out in the courtyard, running a high-speed passing drill with their giggling son while several elderly admirers looked on.
"Hah-loo, Uncle!" whispered the father as I passed.
"Hah-loo, Uncle!" whispered the mother.
The child said nothing. He was busy eating his own hand.
"The Germans lost yesterday," I said.
"Ai-ya! I know. I wanted them to win."
My neighbors, for whatever reason, are the only people I know who are rooting for the imperialist powers in this year's World Cup. The rest of China is - or was - pulling for Brazil, Argentina, and North Korea, in that order. After North Korea lost seven-nil to Portugal, I risked a chuckle in front of my students.
"But teacher," said one student, "they tried their best."
"Yes," said another, "they tried their best."
"But seven to nothing!" I cackled. "Hilarious!"
"Very sad," said a third. "They tried their best."
A few days later, when, glowing and somewhat red in the cheeks, I told the basketball professor that the United States had defeated Algeria at the last possible second, his wife jumped up and down and clapped her hands. This is all fairly unusual, of course, but has nothing to do with anything.
"What a pity the Germans are lose," said the basketball professor, in English, and was about to continue when his son interrupted him.
"Daddy?" the boy said in Chinese, pointing at a nearby streetlamp. "Why do moths always fly towards the light?"
"Well, son," said the basketball coach. "I'm not really sure. I think they like the heat."
Instinctively, my hand shot up in the air. I knew this one. And I was stoked, stoked to have understood the exchange, and stoked to be privy to such a formative moment in the life of a Chinese youth.
"Actually, I just asked my friend the same question," I said, thinking of poor Jeeves. "He is a bug expert."
The basketball professor nodded dubiously.
"It turns out - well. You see," I said, fumbling for my vocabulary, "moths like to travel. They travel to very far away places, very late at night. The moon helps them find where they are going. They are not used to electric light. It is a new invention. The moths think light bulbs are the moon. So they fly to the moon, so to speak."
It took my neighbor a moment to sort out my clunky syntax, but when he did, he nudged his son and said, "You hear that? Moths think light bulbs are the moon!"
His son laughed, amused.
"Well, good night, Uncle," said the basketball professor.
"Good night. Uncle," said the kid.
And in the moment, I did feel like an uncle. Just wait 'til they get a load of the pull-my-finger gag. I bid the neighbors goodnight and, gazing up at the half-eaten moon, fluttered off to a neon light on the dark side of town.
Monday, July 05, 2010
ANT Logistics
A Friday afternoon at Nanchong Jialing Bus Terminal. There I stood at the front of the line for the three o'clock bus to Chengdu. But when three gave way to 3:30 and still no bus arrived, the line swelled into a crowd, then a horde, and finally a mob. Almost imperceptibly, I was shunted to the rear, along with the bang bang man who had waited with me for an hour. Angrily, uselessly, he tried to jostle his way back to the front. Then he gave up, set his cargo down and bitched angrily, uselessly. Nobody could understand his dialect, and anyway, nobody cared. The man's dust-streaked dress shirt was unbuttoned all the way down; his ribs stuck out like piano keys. His cargo must've weighed in the neighborhood of 200 pounds. They say an ant can lift 50 times its own weight.
Bang bang men are the soul of Sichuan. They are scrawny men, often shirtless men, who keep the scales of labor balanced on either end of a bamboo rod that they wear across their shoulders like a portable stockade. Bang bang men will carry anything anywhere. In a city like Chongqing, where the hills are homicidal and the heat is murderous, there are so many bang bang men out and about that they are rightfully called the bang bang army. They wait outside twelve hours a day, can be found on every street corner, and will perform astounding feats of powerlifting and marathon walking for about two dollars U.S.
For as much as I admire the bang bang men, their profession ranks only a couple of notches higher than prostitution on the Chinese chain of command. So, although China is, ostensibly, a country that respects its elderly, and although this particular bang bang man was old enough to be Mao's grandpa, it wasn't all that surprising to me that both he and the resident laowai were the first people to be excreted by the great bowel movement that is the Chinese queuing system. The question was: could we still make the three o'clock bus to Chengdu, now that it was coasting into its stable at 4 PM?
I polished my elbows. I balled my fists. Well, Petit, I said to myself, I know you don't like doing this, but if you and your bang bang man are going to get on the 3:00 bus at 4 PM, you're going to have to stoop to everyone else's level. I imagined myself blocking for the bang bang man. He would juke and plunge through the gap like Emmitt Smith. Yes, I told myself, for the bang bang man's sake, for your sake, you're gonna have to buck up, suck it up, bite the bullet, nip it in the bud and ... - but I was not prepared for what happened next. The security guards unlatched the stanchions. A salaryman socked me in the breadbasket. A baby kicked me in the neck. Somebody's grandma slide tackled me. I'd been watching too much soccer. My first instinct was to flop to the floor and grab my ankle, roll back and forth wearing an Argentinian mask of anguish until one of the security guards gave China a red card. But all I could muster was the single American English word douchebags! as the people muscled past. The stampeding herd spun the bang bang man around like a top and jostled me forward and to the left until I flew wide of the turnstile like a Steve Christie field goal. I tried to hurdle the aluminum barricades, but by then, droves of people were grabbing their luggage hot out of the x-ray scanner and charging full steam ahead, having waited all of three seconds for the bus that me and the bang bang man so rightfully deserved. In the end, we were left out in the cold. The security guards hitched the stanchions back in place. The bang bang man and I had missed the bus. The good news was: we were back in the front of the line. The bad news was: that meant absolutely nothing.
As luck would have it, when 5 PM rolled around, the bang bang man and I squeaked through the turnstile at the last possible second and caught the four o'clock bus. But about ten miles out of Nanchong, we came up against a long line of cars that stretched all the way to Chengdu, some 200 kilometers away. It took us six hours to get to Chengdu. It's only supposed to take two.
But now that I'm here, I've set myself up in an undisclosed location, perhaps the swankiest undisclosed location in all of Chengdu. I'm reclined in a wicker chaise lounge, sitting outside at 9 AM on an 8th floor balcony with my feet up on the railing. My friends are at work. I have the morning to myself and there is absolutely nothing to stop me from drinking up every last ground of real, actual coffee this undisclosed location has to offer.
In Chengdu, at this elevation, most of the clouds are beneath me. At this height, I am invisible for the first time in months. The smog is my veil. I can see the people below, but they can't see me. This morning, I have decided to sit outside in my boxer shorts, because when you're invisible, you can be as much of an exhibitionist as you want. I am chaise lounging, lounging chaisely, purposefully overdosing on coffee. And I am people watching, something I haven't dared to do since I arrived, because in this country, the people are always watching me.
The funny thing about people watching is that the further away you get, the less human the people are. If you're sitting in a coffee shop watching the crowds stream past your window, you pick up facial expressions, gestures, snippets of conversation ... You can still see the individual at that range. But from eight floors up, the people start to seem less like people and more like - ants.
Eight floors up. Here is behavior without emotion, routine stripped of intent. From this height, you don't see people. All you see is civilization. You can't see the anxious faces of the human beings at the bus stop. All you know is that they're waiting for the bus. In two minutes, they will be replaced by more people just like them, waiting for the bus, same as the ones who came before.
So many people. Every second, thousands of them pass by, thousands of people I will never really see or know anything about. If you are a solipsist, you might regard the nameless, faceless masses as thoughtless cyborgs programmed to deceive you. But nobody I know is a solipsist. Or if anyone is, I can only assume they are solipsistic cyborgs programmed to deceive me. It is a leap of faith of sorts. We tend to regard the nameless, faceless masses as conscious entities every bit as awake and alive as we are, possessed by dreams and hopes and idiosyncrasies the same as we are, and so on. At this point, I'm not sure which of the two ideas is more frightening.
A bus passes. There go fifty people. The light changes. Fifty cars streak across the intersection. Another hundred people. An airplane lofts overhead, invisible as it rockets through one of Chengdu's outer orbits of smog. Another 200 people. The people on the streets. Another hundred. The people in the apartments around me. Another 500, easy. A thousand people in my field of view at any given second. And that's just for one second. The people change, circulate like skin cells, and whether they belong to anything like an organism is a question too big for me to answer.
Fifteen identical cargo trucks rumble by. Another thirty people. The trucks are bright yellow and the blue letters on the trailers read ANT Logistics, ANT Logistics, ANT Logistics, ANT ... I have seen these trucks before, always in Chengdu, always in caravans of ten or more. I used to amuse myself contemplating the services rendered by ANT Logistics, imagining the kind of help ants might need with logistics, of all things. Flow charts. Pie charts. Bar graphs. Efficiency assessments. Drone-to-worker ratios. Banquet halls infested with ants, Chinese ant consultants leading their clients via long trails of sugar to the appropriate conclusions.
But a couple days ago, I learned that ANT Logistics is simply a conglomeration of bang bang men. That's all it is. Stick men for hire. A moving company, if you like. In Chongqing, because of the hills, bang bang men can work freelance. But in Chengdu, where there are no hills, there is little work for the enterprising stick soldier. There are, however, thousands of affluent families moving from the cheap and smoggy city to the ever more unaffordable frontier. So trucks are necessary. Trucks and sticks.
So you call ANT Logistics and ten bright yellow cargo trucks pull up in front of your apartment complex. ANT Logistics, ANT Logistics, ANT ... Thirty men who are well past retirement age pile out of the trucks and start squawking at you in accents that are more music than language. They spit on your floor, blow smoke in your baby's face, do unspeakable, unimaginable things to your squat toilet - but they are not rude people, understand. These are the lao bai xing, the Old Hundred Names, the Joe Smiths and John Taylors and Jim Carpenters of China. Nobody knows it, but China belongs to them, even though they are laughed at, mocked, derided; even though they are regarded more and more as the unwelcome scum that floats atop the bubbling Sichuanese hot pot.
The Old Hundred Names work at a breakneck pace. They are also the laziest men you have ever seen in your life. Half of the men are on permanent smoke breaks. One of them is sleeping, or dead on the sidewalk outside. The smell of rice liquor makes your eyes burn. And yet your house has been picked clean in ten minutes. A horde of Mongols couldn't have done it faster. Your heirloom piano is dangling off the back of an ANT Logistics truck, suspendered in by what looks to be a shoelace. You gesture at the piano but the chief ANT Logician just belches and waves you off. It's no use. These men have loaded up all your worldly possessions, have piled them into their trucks like the Beverly Hillbillies, and with impeccable Chinese skill, or luck, or magic, they will have everything safely installed in your new $1.3 million dollar apartment across town, without so much as a scratch or a cigarette burn.
Coffee. More coffee. Here come another ten trucks. ANT Logistics, ANT Logistics, ANT ... The cabbies across the highway are taking a siesta. A mahjongg table materializes. Even from way up here I can hear the tiles shuffling. An old man in a wifebeater is exercising in the courtyard below. He situates himself in the exact center of the courtyard and stands looking over a manmade waterfall. From where he's standing, the apartment complex splits into two identical and perfectly symmetrical halves. He performs an exercise in which he smacks his thighs, smacks his manboobs, then shakes his hands in the air as though he's flicking water off the tips of his fingers. He does about forty reps, then sits down on a bench to read a newspaper.
Just on the other side of the highway is a river, coasting along way below the speed limit. It can't seem to make up its mind which way it wants to go, and its brown surface is a confusing interference pattern of crests and troths. One stream headed East, the other headed West. Conflicted river. Jostling itself to get on the bus. There is a sunbather sprawled out on the shore next to a pile of aluminum cans, but she's wearing pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and is hiding under two umbrellas thrust down into the mud. And anyway, there is no sun.
All along the river: apartment complex after apartment complex after apartment complex, all of them identical, like the man in charge just clicked copy-paste copy-paste until he ran into the horizon. It's like standing between two mirrors. Apartment complexes, on and on forever. And in the foreground stands a four-tiered pagoda - impossible to tell at this distance whether it is as old as history or younger than the apartments that surround it - and the pagoda stands there with the river in front and the city all around, and it looks scared. Like it knows something is bound to devour it sooner or later. The apartments, probably. Or the river. The warped and leaning pagoda knows. It knows that one day, that muddled brown river is bound to get its shit together. One day the river will march single file, overflowing its banks, and it will inundate the world in its uniform earthtone, reflecting itself and itself and itself, on and on forever, and it will wash all the dirt away like a glass of lemonade spilled onto an anthill.
Bang bang men are the soul of Sichuan. They are scrawny men, often shirtless men, who keep the scales of labor balanced on either end of a bamboo rod that they wear across their shoulders like a portable stockade. Bang bang men will carry anything anywhere. In a city like Chongqing, where the hills are homicidal and the heat is murderous, there are so many bang bang men out and about that they are rightfully called the bang bang army. They wait outside twelve hours a day, can be found on every street corner, and will perform astounding feats of powerlifting and marathon walking for about two dollars U.S.
For as much as I admire the bang bang men, their profession ranks only a couple of notches higher than prostitution on the Chinese chain of command. So, although China is, ostensibly, a country that respects its elderly, and although this particular bang bang man was old enough to be Mao's grandpa, it wasn't all that surprising to me that both he and the resident laowai were the first people to be excreted by the great bowel movement that is the Chinese queuing system. The question was: could we still make the three o'clock bus to Chengdu, now that it was coasting into its stable at 4 PM?
I polished my elbows. I balled my fists. Well, Petit, I said to myself, I know you don't like doing this, but if you and your bang bang man are going to get on the 3:00 bus at 4 PM, you're going to have to stoop to everyone else's level. I imagined myself blocking for the bang bang man. He would juke and plunge through the gap like Emmitt Smith. Yes, I told myself, for the bang bang man's sake, for your sake, you're gonna have to buck up, suck it up, bite the bullet, nip it in the bud and ... - but I was not prepared for what happened next. The security guards unlatched the stanchions. A salaryman socked me in the breadbasket. A baby kicked me in the neck. Somebody's grandma slide tackled me. I'd been watching too much soccer. My first instinct was to flop to the floor and grab my ankle, roll back and forth wearing an Argentinian mask of anguish until one of the security guards gave China a red card. But all I could muster was the single American English word douchebags! as the people muscled past. The stampeding herd spun the bang bang man around like a top and jostled me forward and to the left until I flew wide of the turnstile like a Steve Christie field goal. I tried to hurdle the aluminum barricades, but by then, droves of people were grabbing their luggage hot out of the x-ray scanner and charging full steam ahead, having waited all of three seconds for the bus that me and the bang bang man so rightfully deserved. In the end, we were left out in the cold. The security guards hitched the stanchions back in place. The bang bang man and I had missed the bus. The good news was: we were back in the front of the line. The bad news was: that meant absolutely nothing.
As luck would have it, when 5 PM rolled around, the bang bang man and I squeaked through the turnstile at the last possible second and caught the four o'clock bus. But about ten miles out of Nanchong, we came up against a long line of cars that stretched all the way to Chengdu, some 200 kilometers away. It took us six hours to get to Chengdu. It's only supposed to take two.
But now that I'm here, I've set myself up in an undisclosed location, perhaps the swankiest undisclosed location in all of Chengdu. I'm reclined in a wicker chaise lounge, sitting outside at 9 AM on an 8th floor balcony with my feet up on the railing. My friends are at work. I have the morning to myself and there is absolutely nothing to stop me from drinking up every last ground of real, actual coffee this undisclosed location has to offer.
In Chengdu, at this elevation, most of the clouds are beneath me. At this height, I am invisible for the first time in months. The smog is my veil. I can see the people below, but they can't see me. This morning, I have decided to sit outside in my boxer shorts, because when you're invisible, you can be as much of an exhibitionist as you want. I am chaise lounging, lounging chaisely, purposefully overdosing on coffee. And I am people watching, something I haven't dared to do since I arrived, because in this country, the people are always watching me.
The funny thing about people watching is that the further away you get, the less human the people are. If you're sitting in a coffee shop watching the crowds stream past your window, you pick up facial expressions, gestures, snippets of conversation ... You can still see the individual at that range. But from eight floors up, the people start to seem less like people and more like - ants.
Eight floors up. Here is behavior without emotion, routine stripped of intent. From this height, you don't see people. All you see is civilization. You can't see the anxious faces of the human beings at the bus stop. All you know is that they're waiting for the bus. In two minutes, they will be replaced by more people just like them, waiting for the bus, same as the ones who came before.
So many people. Every second, thousands of them pass by, thousands of people I will never really see or know anything about. If you are a solipsist, you might regard the nameless, faceless masses as thoughtless cyborgs programmed to deceive you. But nobody I know is a solipsist. Or if anyone is, I can only assume they are solipsistic cyborgs programmed to deceive me. It is a leap of faith of sorts. We tend to regard the nameless, faceless masses as conscious entities every bit as awake and alive as we are, possessed by dreams and hopes and idiosyncrasies the same as we are, and so on. At this point, I'm not sure which of the two ideas is more frightening.
A bus passes. There go fifty people. The light changes. Fifty cars streak across the intersection. Another hundred people. An airplane lofts overhead, invisible as it rockets through one of Chengdu's outer orbits of smog. Another 200 people. The people on the streets. Another hundred. The people in the apartments around me. Another 500, easy. A thousand people in my field of view at any given second. And that's just for one second. The people change, circulate like skin cells, and whether they belong to anything like an organism is a question too big for me to answer.
Fifteen identical cargo trucks rumble by. Another thirty people. The trucks are bright yellow and the blue letters on the trailers read ANT Logistics, ANT Logistics, ANT Logistics, ANT ... I have seen these trucks before, always in Chengdu, always in caravans of ten or more. I used to amuse myself contemplating the services rendered by ANT Logistics, imagining the kind of help ants might need with logistics, of all things. Flow charts. Pie charts. Bar graphs. Efficiency assessments. Drone-to-worker ratios. Banquet halls infested with ants, Chinese ant consultants leading their clients via long trails of sugar to the appropriate conclusions.
But a couple days ago, I learned that ANT Logistics is simply a conglomeration of bang bang men. That's all it is. Stick men for hire. A moving company, if you like. In Chongqing, because of the hills, bang bang men can work freelance. But in Chengdu, where there are no hills, there is little work for the enterprising stick soldier. There are, however, thousands of affluent families moving from the cheap and smoggy city to the ever more unaffordable frontier. So trucks are necessary. Trucks and sticks.
So you call ANT Logistics and ten bright yellow cargo trucks pull up in front of your apartment complex. ANT Logistics, ANT Logistics, ANT ... Thirty men who are well past retirement age pile out of the trucks and start squawking at you in accents that are more music than language. They spit on your floor, blow smoke in your baby's face, do unspeakable, unimaginable things to your squat toilet - but they are not rude people, understand. These are the lao bai xing, the Old Hundred Names, the Joe Smiths and John Taylors and Jim Carpenters of China. Nobody knows it, but China belongs to them, even though they are laughed at, mocked, derided; even though they are regarded more and more as the unwelcome scum that floats atop the bubbling Sichuanese hot pot.
The Old Hundred Names work at a breakneck pace. They are also the laziest men you have ever seen in your life. Half of the men are on permanent smoke breaks. One of them is sleeping, or dead on the sidewalk outside. The smell of rice liquor makes your eyes burn. And yet your house has been picked clean in ten minutes. A horde of Mongols couldn't have done it faster. Your heirloom piano is dangling off the back of an ANT Logistics truck, suspendered in by what looks to be a shoelace. You gesture at the piano but the chief ANT Logician just belches and waves you off. It's no use. These men have loaded up all your worldly possessions, have piled them into their trucks like the Beverly Hillbillies, and with impeccable Chinese skill, or luck, or magic, they will have everything safely installed in your new $1.3 million dollar apartment across town, without so much as a scratch or a cigarette burn.
Coffee. More coffee. Here come another ten trucks. ANT Logistics, ANT Logistics, ANT ... The cabbies across the highway are taking a siesta. A mahjongg table materializes. Even from way up here I can hear the tiles shuffling. An old man in a wifebeater is exercising in the courtyard below. He situates himself in the exact center of the courtyard and stands looking over a manmade waterfall. From where he's standing, the apartment complex splits into two identical and perfectly symmetrical halves. He performs an exercise in which he smacks his thighs, smacks his manboobs, then shakes his hands in the air as though he's flicking water off the tips of his fingers. He does about forty reps, then sits down on a bench to read a newspaper.
Just on the other side of the highway is a river, coasting along way below the speed limit. It can't seem to make up its mind which way it wants to go, and its brown surface is a confusing interference pattern of crests and troths. One stream headed East, the other headed West. Conflicted river. Jostling itself to get on the bus. There is a sunbather sprawled out on the shore next to a pile of aluminum cans, but she's wearing pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and is hiding under two umbrellas thrust down into the mud. And anyway, there is no sun.
All along the river: apartment complex after apartment complex after apartment complex, all of them identical, like the man in charge just clicked copy-paste copy-paste until he ran into the horizon. It's like standing between two mirrors. Apartment complexes, on and on forever. And in the foreground stands a four-tiered pagoda - impossible to tell at this distance whether it is as old as history or younger than the apartments that surround it - and the pagoda stands there with the river in front and the city all around, and it looks scared. Like it knows something is bound to devour it sooner or later. The apartments, probably. Or the river. The warped and leaning pagoda knows. It knows that one day, that muddled brown river is bound to get its shit together. One day the river will march single file, overflowing its banks, and it will inundate the world in its uniform earthtone, reflecting itself and itself and itself, on and on forever, and it will wash all the dirt away like a glass of lemonade spilled onto an anthill.
Thursday, July 01, 2010
Chevy Chaise Lounge
If you were to ask me how it is that I got to where I am today, I suppose I would have to blame copywriting.
Rewind to four years ago. I was living with my parents in Bellevue, Nebraska. A college graduate. A Bachelor in Fine Arts. A Creative Writing major. And I was writing for a living. Writing copy for online furniture catalogs. The upside was that I worked from home. The downside was that I worked from home.
I started out "gangbusters," as Murray, my temp agent, would tell me the day he let me go. That first week, Murray assigned me 90 wicker furniture copyblocks, 50 words per block, two bucks apiece. And at the end of two 24-hour days, after a truly disgusting number of Monster Energy Drinks, I had written all 90 of them. Some kind of wicker furniture catalog copywriting record, apparently. Murray clapped me on the back and spoke floridly of pay raises, full-time employment, health insurance, etc., etc., etc.
The following week, he entrusted me with lawnchairs. It took me twice as long to write half as much, but I managed to beat deadline. So Murray bumped me up to the big time: chaiselounges.com. Furniture for people I will never ever rub elbows with. Furniture that costs more than cars, but won't get you anywhere. And I, of all people, had to write the copy. Having never once lounged upon a chaise lounge in my entire life, I had to write as though I had not only chaise lounged, but regularly experienced multiple chaise lounging orgasms. I had to sell Made in Cambodia avant garde chaise lounges to the chaise lounging American masses. One-hundred words, two bucks per copyblock, a couple mil worth of merchandise up for grabs.
You can find my writing everywhere on the internet, only it's not credited to me or anyone else. The author is this anonymous, ghostly voice with a kind of disembodied wit. That's me. The Chevy Chaise Lounge is "perfect for a nap after a long day of caddying." I wrote that. That was me. Google "Chevy Chaise Lounge" and there I am. In the original draft, I included a number of Fletch references that didn't make the cut. "Our Chevy Chaise Lounge will make you feel like a hundred bucks." I wrote that, too. But it's not exactly the sort of quip you want to make when promoting an item that is supposed to make you feel like $2,999 US, no more no less.
Then there was the Aja Chaise Lounge, named after the Steely Dan album, or so I assumed. You can find the Aja Chaise online, though it is a bit harder to track down because nobody bought it. Steely Dan fans don't buy chaise lounges. They buy heroin. That and the damned thing is the color of expired poultry.
"Kick those 'Deacon Blues' with a soothing afternoon nap upon our Aja Chaise Lounge," I wrote. "Now you're 'Home At Last.'" I wrote that. "The Aja Chaise Lounge has you 'pegged.'" I wrote that, too. And they paid me money to write it. None of my bosses caught the Steely Dan references, nor did they complain that the copy was total nonsense. You'd think one thing or the other would've come to somebody's attention. But they published it anyway and my half-ass copy has since spread across the internet like some kind of transspermatozoon STD. Two dollars worth of hypercaffeinated copywriting from a disillusioned 24 year-old, and now Italian duchesses are running my copy through Google Translate, trying to decide whether the Chevy Chaise Lounge will get along with the Rodney Dangerfield Ottoman.
The more I wrote, the more my face sagged, the more I needed caffeine. I established a rapport with the Starbucks drive-thru baristas. They told me I looked like Chris Martin. You know, from Coldplay. They asked what I did for a living and I told them that I was a writer. They fluttered their eyelashes and asked what I wrote about and I told them chaise lounges, mostly. Must be exhausting, they said, twirling their hair extensions, caffeinated off their asses. You have no idea, I told them.
Good news. I just found the Infanta Chaise Lounge. So I can pinpoint the exact moment when I snapped.
Bun feet? Stylish buttons? I could be writing about a Japanese empress. You don't have to be traditional to be comfortable. Well said, Petit. At your next wine tasting? I have never been to a wine tasting. The only tastings I'm familiar with involve someone's girlfriend puking in the bathroom for three hours and at least two complete strangers doing the wild thang on your bed. Where did the words come from? Nowhere. Where did they go? Everywhere, it seems. I can write as much as I want on this blog. Only my copy will survive me. It will outlast me and anything of substance that I write. My senile traveling anecdotes will be ignored by my grandchildren, but my chaise lounge descriptions will live on. Long after Steely Dan's vinyl LPs have melted to the sea. Long after Chevy Chase has balded to death. Music, films, writing - these are fads, but chaise lounges are forever. Chaise lounges are a basic human right. The pursuit of happiness. The pursuit of lounge.
The chaise lounge copy was the turning point for me. The next week, Murray demoted me to inflatable beach furniture. I'd like to say I abandoned copywriting for artistic reasons, but it wasn't that at all. I just couldn't write anymore. Every copyblock turned into a Rorschach test. Item RK-56925B - what do you see? I see a chair. Item LP-24491X - what do you see? I see a bed. Item XB-014554L - what do you see? I don't even know what that is anymore. I went catatonic. I had nothing to say. Everything was the same to me. A chair is a chair is a chair, a bed is a bed is a bed, an ottoman is an ottoman is an ... My brain had turned to wicker. Murray would give me 90 copyblocks and I'd finish 45. He'd give me 40 and I'd finish ten. He'd give me ten and I'd finish one.
And that's how it ended. I showed up a week after deadline with one copyblock hot off the laser printer. I handed it to Murray and apologized. This was all I could do, I said. One copyblock? he asked. One fucking copyblock? One fucking copyblock, I said. Why? he asked. I don't know why, I said.
Murray invited me outside for a cigarette, but I didn't smoke at the time, so he smoked and I watched him smoke and I listened.
"I'm going to be really nice and let you go. I'm not going to fire you," he said. Then he shook his head and laughed. "But I don't understand it! You started out gangbusters! What happened back there, man?"
"I don't know," I said. "I'm beginning to think I'm a writer and not a copywriter."
Murray laughed.
"Yeah, I get that a lot. Look," he said, "just don't let me find you working the Starbucks drive-thru, alright?"
Murray gave me a fistpound, then he stamped out his cigarette and went back upstairs. It was February in Omaha and it was cold and I was without a coat, so I sprinted across Harney Street. It took me a long time to find my car. A month later, I was in Poland.
Rewind to four years ago. I was living with my parents in Bellevue, Nebraska. A college graduate. A Bachelor in Fine Arts. A Creative Writing major. And I was writing for a living. Writing copy for online furniture catalogs. The upside was that I worked from home. The downside was that I worked from home.
I started out "gangbusters," as Murray, my temp agent, would tell me the day he let me go. That first week, Murray assigned me 90 wicker furniture copyblocks, 50 words per block, two bucks apiece. And at the end of two 24-hour days, after a truly disgusting number of Monster Energy Drinks, I had written all 90 of them. Some kind of wicker furniture catalog copywriting record, apparently. Murray clapped me on the back and spoke floridly of pay raises, full-time employment, health insurance, etc., etc., etc.
The following week, he entrusted me with lawnchairs. It took me twice as long to write half as much, but I managed to beat deadline. So Murray bumped me up to the big time: chaiselounges.com. Furniture for people I will never ever rub elbows with. Furniture that costs more than cars, but won't get you anywhere. And I, of all people, had to write the copy. Having never once lounged upon a chaise lounge in my entire life, I had to write as though I had not only chaise lounged, but regularly experienced multiple chaise lounging orgasms. I had to sell Made in Cambodia avant garde chaise lounges to the chaise lounging American masses. One-hundred words, two bucks per copyblock, a couple mil worth of merchandise up for grabs.
You can find my writing everywhere on the internet, only it's not credited to me or anyone else. The author is this anonymous, ghostly voice with a kind of disembodied wit. That's me. The Chevy Chaise Lounge is "perfect for a nap after a long day of caddying." I wrote that. That was me. Google "Chevy Chaise Lounge" and there I am. In the original draft, I included a number of Fletch references that didn't make the cut. "Our Chevy Chaise Lounge will make you feel like a hundred bucks." I wrote that, too. But it's not exactly the sort of quip you want to make when promoting an item that is supposed to make you feel like $2,999 US, no more no less.
Then there was the Aja Chaise Lounge, named after the Steely Dan album, or so I assumed. You can find the Aja Chaise online, though it is a bit harder to track down because nobody bought it. Steely Dan fans don't buy chaise lounges. They buy heroin. That and the damned thing is the color of expired poultry.
"Kick those 'Deacon Blues' with a soothing afternoon nap upon our Aja Chaise Lounge," I wrote. "Now you're 'Home At Last.'" I wrote that. "The Aja Chaise Lounge has you 'pegged.'" I wrote that, too. And they paid me money to write it. None of my bosses caught the Steely Dan references, nor did they complain that the copy was total nonsense. You'd think one thing or the other would've come to somebody's attention. But they published it anyway and my half-ass copy has since spread across the internet like some kind of transspermatozoon STD. Two dollars worth of hypercaffeinated copywriting from a disillusioned 24 year-old, and now Italian duchesses are running my copy through Google Translate, trying to decide whether the Chevy Chaise Lounge will get along with the Rodney Dangerfield Ottoman.
The more I wrote, the more my face sagged, the more I needed caffeine. I established a rapport with the Starbucks drive-thru baristas. They told me I looked like Chris Martin. You know, from Coldplay. They asked what I did for a living and I told them that I was a writer. They fluttered their eyelashes and asked what I wrote about and I told them chaise lounges, mostly. Must be exhausting, they said, twirling their hair extensions, caffeinated off their asses. You have no idea, I told them.
Good news. I just found the Infanta Chaise Lounge. So I can pinpoint the exact moment when I snapped.
Fit for a king or queen, our Infanta Chaise lends regal fashion to any room. Styled in modern swirls, curves, and embellishments, this lovely lounge just goes to show that you don't have to be traditional to be comfortable. The Infanta is structured around a strong metal frame and a cozy red velvet fabric surface that you'll have to feel to believe. Resting on three sturdy bun feet and trimmed with stylish buttons, this lively lounge is sure to be the subject of conversation at your next wine tasting. Available as shown.
Bun feet? Stylish buttons? I could be writing about a Japanese empress. You don't have to be traditional to be comfortable. Well said, Petit. At your next wine tasting? I have never been to a wine tasting. The only tastings I'm familiar with involve someone's girlfriend puking in the bathroom for three hours and at least two complete strangers doing the wild thang on your bed. Where did the words come from? Nowhere. Where did they go? Everywhere, it seems. I can write as much as I want on this blog. Only my copy will survive me. It will outlast me and anything of substance that I write. My senile traveling anecdotes will be ignored by my grandchildren, but my chaise lounge descriptions will live on. Long after Steely Dan's vinyl LPs have melted to the sea. Long after Chevy Chase has balded to death. Music, films, writing - these are fads, but chaise lounges are forever. Chaise lounges are a basic human right. The pursuit of happiness. The pursuit of lounge.
The chaise lounge copy was the turning point for me. The next week, Murray demoted me to inflatable beach furniture. I'd like to say I abandoned copywriting for artistic reasons, but it wasn't that at all. I just couldn't write anymore. Every copyblock turned into a Rorschach test. Item RK-56925B - what do you see? I see a chair. Item LP-24491X - what do you see? I see a bed. Item XB-014554L - what do you see? I don't even know what that is anymore. I went catatonic. I had nothing to say. Everything was the same to me. A chair is a chair is a chair, a bed is a bed is a bed, an ottoman is an ottoman is an ... My brain had turned to wicker. Murray would give me 90 copyblocks and I'd finish 45. He'd give me 40 and I'd finish ten. He'd give me ten and I'd finish one.
And that's how it ended. I showed up a week after deadline with one copyblock hot off the laser printer. I handed it to Murray and apologized. This was all I could do, I said. One copyblock? he asked. One fucking copyblock? One fucking copyblock, I said. Why? he asked. I don't know why, I said.
Murray invited me outside for a cigarette, but I didn't smoke at the time, so he smoked and I watched him smoke and I listened.
"I'm going to be really nice and let you go. I'm not going to fire you," he said. Then he shook his head and laughed. "But I don't understand it! You started out gangbusters! What happened back there, man?"
"I don't know," I said. "I'm beginning to think I'm a writer and not a copywriter."
Murray laughed.
"Yeah, I get that a lot. Look," he said, "just don't let me find you working the Starbucks drive-thru, alright?"
Murray gave me a fistpound, then he stamped out his cigarette and went back upstairs. It was February in Omaha and it was cold and I was without a coat, so I sprinted across Harney Street. It took me a long time to find my car. A month later, I was in Poland.
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