Before I bring my Great Flood of Dazhou saga to its half-Biblical, half-Kafkaesque conclusion, I would like to write a half-assed eulogy for the recently departed Jacob Burney: sitemate, partner in absurdity, and one of the best fiends ("r" omitted quite deliberately) I have ever had the pleasure and extreme discomfort of knowing.
Fear not - the man yet lives, and is living well. By now, Jacob is breakfasting on a leaning tower of syrup-slathered French toast, topped with two equilateral slabs of Land O'Lakes butter and served with three rashers of bacon, accompanied by a frosty glass of orange juice from concentrate, and a steaming cup of real Columbian coffee, and - and - ... and now I am slobbering into the home-row keys of my laptop.
Jacob is gone and I am happy for him. He has moved on. He is in a better place now, as it were. But his departure has left a hefty dent in Nanchong's already scant reserves of wit and sarcasm. In our day, Jacob and I were the stuff of mid-80's buddy comedies. Consider Jacob: a black, 260-pound NCAA Championship Subdivision defensive lineman, a philosophy major and Marvel Comics enthusiast. (I suspect he may be the only man in the world who owns - and regularly wears - a Batman Forever leather jacket.) And consider me: a six-foot nothin', hundred and nothin' caucasian pseudointellectual with a degree in creative writing and a soft spot for certain self-destructive vices. Oddly, impossibly, the pairing worked, and I commend the Peace Corps for putting us in the same Chinese city, whether or not there was any rationale behind the decision.
Jacob's last words to me were, "I reap what I say." At the time, I had no idea what the fuck he was talking about, and I still don't. But he was happy to repeat those words for me, in case I held out any doubt that he meant them. "I reap what I say," he said, and stepped off the train. And I am happy to accept those words for the profound nonsense they are. Of all the farewells that have been bidden me over the past couple weeks, Jacob's was by far the most appropriate.
So this year, in the parlance of politics, is a transitional phase for me. In the parlance of sport, it is a rebuilding year. In Jacob's absence, I have been left behind to hold the fort. I am, for the moment, the only Peace Corps volunteer in Nanchong. Two newbies will arrive next month, but they have size twelve Air Jordans to fill. Of course, I will not hold it against them if they are not Jacob. Nobody, I suppose, is Jacob except for Jacob. But I hope the newbies will forgive me if, late at night, after one too many Shanchengs, in a fit of Jacobean nostalgia, I beg them to disagree with me about the war in Iraq, or to talk shit about There Will Be Blood and all of the other films and musicians I adore, or to make fun of the way I walk in the most offensive manner possible. It's not that I am a masochist, or that I enjoy being insulted, but regrettably, the number of remorselessly inappropriate people born post-PC Revolution are few and far between, and Jacob was (and is) one of that number. I learned much about language and even more about humanity from Jacob, and was able to test the surprisingly elastic boundaries of my own rationality through my many late-late-much-too-late night debates with the late Mr. Burney. For all that, no mere xie xie will suffice. Jacob will be missed, but some birds are not meant to be caged - a quotation from a film that I'm sure both he and I can agree on.
Thus concludes my half-assed eulogy. Jacob has escaped Nanchong, and in so doing, he has succeeded where I have, on many occasions, failed. I have already related my truly Sisyphean effort to escape a minor flood in Nanchong en route to a major deluge in Dazhou. But that experience - the experience of failing miserably at the most elementary sort of travel, i.e. leaving the place where one happens to be - is so commonplace for me in Nanchong that I often wonder why I bother writing about it. But, like most forms of interpersonal conflict - e.g. conversations with Jacob - arguing with surly taxi pimps is an incredibly efficient means of learning about oneself. And just last night, after being pushed to the brink by an especially surly taxi pimp, I was able to explore the dimensions of my inner asshole: an internal sphincter that, prior to life in China, I was completely unacquainted with.
Yesterday evening, I was invited by the Peace Corps to come to Chengdu, to give a brief lecture the following morning on the nature of my sino-bohemian existence in eastern Sichuan, in front of 95 fresh-off-the-boat laowais. The thought unnerved me a bit more than it should have, but bear in mind that I have grown accustomed to speaking in front of vast crowds of semi-rural Chinese. The knowledge that your audience doesn't understand a word you're saying goes a long way towards curing stage fright. Nevertheless, I was excited about the opportunity to wax National Geographic about life in Nanchong, to hobnob with the new batch of volunteers, and to mooch around Chengdu on Barack Obama's dime. But in typically Pandastic fashion, I lingered around the apartment until well after the last train had departed. Then, having discovered a wealth of Charlie Rose interviews with Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, I sat there agog at the computer until the sun had set and getting to Chengdu via even the shadiest of means had become a near impossibility. That, my friends, is how I roll - which is to say that I don't roll very well at all.
So around 10 PM, I made my way to the train station and shouted the word "Chengdu!" Instantly, I was whisked away by a taxi pimp, who told me to climb onto his moped so we could putter off to some sort of taxi pimp rendezvous point on the dark side of town. But motorcycles, mopeds, Segways, and motorized trishaws are a big Peace Corps no-no, so I waved my hands around and said, "No can do." Grumbling, the taxi pimp called another, pimpier taxi pimp and we waited there in front of the train station for the big pimp to arrive in his pimped-out Volkswagen Santana.
In China, if you are as tactless a buffoon as I am, traveling late at night can become an incredibly convoluted affair. The people arranging your transportation are not the people who will provide your transportation. Instead, you must work within a back-alley network of meta-cabbies and meta-meta-cabbies: taxi drivers who will deliver you to other taxi drivers, who will deliver you to other taxi drivers, who will deliver you to other taxi drivers, who will finally dump you into the backseat of a pimped-out Volkswagen Santana that will, ostensibly, deliver you to your final destination.
When I arrived at the taxi pimp rendezvous and slipped into the back of this particular pimped-out Volkswagen Santana, I was under the impression that we were headed directly to Chengdu. But that would not prove to be the case. Instead, I was taken to the parking lot of a seafood joint just off the Chinese interstate. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to get dinner, or what. So I smoked a purgatorial ciggie and took a much-needed piss in the bushes. Then I was told to get on a bus. There were six other passengers on the bus, and the cabin reeked of Sichuanese peppercorns and feces. This was an unexpected turn. Not the feces, but the bus. How shady were these people, that they had hijacked a government-issue bus whose origin and destination (as posted on the windshield) were no cities that I'd ever heard of? My meta-cabbie came around to gather everyone's bus fare. The fee was unexpectedly cheap - about $10 US - but I fumbled through my ever-disappointing wallet and found that I was about one American buck short. I handed over the rest of my money and gazed hopefully, Bambi-eyed at the meta-cabbie.
"I need ten more kuai!"
"Sorry, sir," I said, "but I didn't know the fare when I got on the bus. I'm afraid I'm a little short."
"Won't work! Impossible! Get off the bus!"
"But sir," I said, injecting a bit of self-righteousness into my rudimentary Sichuanese, "surely, we can stop at an ATM when we get to Chengdu. It will take me five minutes. I'll pay you the fare, with interest, if necessary."
"Impossible! Won't work! Get off the bus!"
I thrust what money I had into the meta-cabbie's hand, but he wouldn't take it. So I appealed to my fellow passengers, with whom I had already chatted for half an hour, with whom I had bonded, or so I thought - the same people who had expressed such disbelief at my nonexistent monthly income as a Peace Corps volunteer. But nobody budged; nobody even thought of donating the piddling amount of chump change it would take to keep the foreigner on the bus.
"Can anybody help me out? It's six kuai," I said, "one U.S. dollar. I'll pay you back. With interest, if necessary."
But no one said a word. The meta-cabbie was shaking visibly. Already, we had wasted more than the five minutes necessary for me to hop out in Chengdu and hit up an ATM.
"Get off the bus!" he shouted in my face.
And that was the moment I accessed my hitherto unknown reservoir of controlled rage. I seldom get angry in the West, and when I do, it is profoundly unimpressive. My face turns red. My cheeks tremble. I stutter and stammer, and sweat to a disgusting degree. But in China, I have learned to shout, and to argue, and to curse, and meanwhile, my emotions lay there in my chest, cold and unmoved as a cadaver.
"Listen," I said, "we stop in Chengdu, I get out of the bus. I use the ATM for five minutes. And I pay you your damned six kuai. With interest. How about that?"
"Impossible! It won't work! Get off the bus!"
The bus driver shouted something-or-other. The meta-cabbie seized me by the backpack strap and I got to my feet. He dragged me off the bus, but stopped short of throwing me out. Instead, he led me out to his pimped-out Volkswagen Santana and offered, somewhat guiltily, to take me to an ATM. The bus, meanwhile, sped off into the night.
Chinese ATMs are programmed not to work when you need them most. We stopped at four ATMs in a row and none of them coughed up the dollar I needed to get to Chengdu. But the Agricultural Bank of China, as usual, came through in the clutch. The meta-cabbie drove me back to the train station and left me to wait in his backseat while he wandered off to badmouth Americans to his meta-cabbie cadre.
Growing up, I was a Notre Dame football fan. Naturally, I entertained teenaged fantasies of one day going to school there, and perhaps walking on to the football team as a punter, and making my punting debut as a fifth-year senior, in the last game of the season, and executing an awe-inspiring coffin-corner punt that would prove decisive in salvaging a victory in the 2005 Poulan Weed Eater Bowl, versus those pesky Pirates of East Carolina University. Ah, youth. My childhood hero was Rudy Ruettiger. As a sophomore in high school, I wrote an exhaustive five-page literary analysis of his autobiography/self-help book. Rudy's number was 45, and as a teenager, so superstitious and smitten was I that I measured everything in 45-second intervals. It was my first and only flirtation with obsessive-compulsion. In the mornings, I never wanted to leave the warmth of the shower, and I (perhaps justifiably) dreaded subjecting myself to the meat market that is high school in middle America. But I couldn't stay in the shower forever because I was afraid of my profoundly Irish mother, so I would count down from 45, and after 45 seconds, I would towel myself off, pop a few zits, and get dressed. Strangely, that remains a habit of mine. When I don't want to do something, I count down from 45 seconds, and then I sit down to the odious task at hand. So it was 11:41 when the meta-cabbie parked his pimped-out Volkswagen Santana in the train station parking lot, and there in the backseat, I vowed to make my escape at precisely 11:45. And when 11:45 rolled around and still no meta-meta cabbie had arrived, I got out of the cab, put on my backpack, and stormed off into the night. It took the meta-cabbie a meta-moment to notice that I was ditching him. He shouted several times, then came running after me.
"HEY! HEY! WHERE ARE YOU GOING?"
He yanked at my sleeve and I judo chopped him loose.
"I'm going home. You kicked me off that bus because I didn't have six fucking kuai," I said. "I thought that was rather rude. So I'm going home."
"But the cab to Chengdu is coming! I got that cab just for you!"
"I know you did. But six kuai? Really? Anyway, it's too late now. I'm not going to Chengdu anymore. I need to go home and get some sleep."
"But the cab is coming!"
"I'm going home."
"You owe me money," he said. "I drove you to five different ATMs so you could withdraw money. Doesn't that count for anything?"
It was a salient point. I was unusually moved by it. But I was also unusually pissed off, so I kept walking. He grabbed me by the backpack strap.
"I drove you to five different ATMs," he said. "I wasted almost an hour driving you here and there and - "
"Okay," I said.
I reached into my wallet and handed him a crumpled wad of bills. He went silent. It was as though I'd stabbed him in the gut. He was stunned. He took the money and stuffed it into his pocket. And without a word, he turned and walked away. I was instantly reminded of No Country For Old Men, another one of those rare films that Jacob and I can agree on. Greed is all-powerful, but the greedy can be bought. Then I hailed a cab home. The non-meta cabbie in question was changing shifts, so he drove me all the way to the other end of town to pick up his cabbie successor, and his cabbie successor charged me for the whole escapade. And I paid him the full fare, both because I am a colossal fool, and because Nanchong cabbies (not to be confused with its meta-cabbies) are among the best people on earth, and I tend to give them the benefit of a doubt.
So I apologize to any of you newly arrived Peace Corps volunteers who had hoped to hear me wax National Geographic about my sino-bohemian existence in Nanchong. Believe me: I would have loved to have waxed National Geographic on that particular subject. But I struggle with travel, because I am incompetent. I have no doubt that you will have better luck than I with the meta-cabbies in this country. Probably, you will never need to resort to them, because you won't spend four of your evening hours listening to Christopher Hitchens shoot off at the mouth. Understand that I am an incompetent. Jacob often reminded me of that fact, and I often remind myself of it, too. It makes things difficult, of course, but if it weren't for my incompetency, and the misadventures it breeds, I don't know what else I could possibly write about.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Before The Flood
My handler met me at the Dazhou Train Station. We shook hands. He introduced himself as Kevin. Then he apologized for not being a chick.
"I know it is American tradition for man serve the woman and woman serve the man," he said, "but there is some confusion before you arrive. My boss, she is thinking you are a woman. So she give me to you. Man serve the man. Very strange."
"Wait. She thought I was a woman?" I blinked violently. "Didn't she see my passport picture?"
"Yes," said Kevin, "but still there is some doubt."
We walked. Three days of ceaseless rain had flooded the square. I rolled up my pantlegs and forded the filth Oregon Trail style.
"What a pity you are so late," said Kevin.
"Well," I said, "as I mentioned on the phone, Nanchong flooded last night and the power went out. So I apologize if I'm late. But there were - ahem - technical difficulties."
"That is not what I mean," said Kevin. "I don't mean to be a burden. But you are very late. What a pity."
"I did my best to get here on time," I said, my left eyeball twitching involuntarily, "and I'm sorry if I'm late. But I didn't miss anything important, did I? And anyway, I've told you several times what happened. Nanchong flooded, so the power went out, so my alarm didn't go off, so I overslept, so I missed my 9 AM train, so I had to catch the 5 PM train to Dazhou. So yes, I am a little late. And I'm sorry if I missed the banquet or whatever. But I'm lucky to have gotten here at all."
"Yes," said Kevin, and I could've sworn I caught him smirking ever so slightly, "but what a pity."
We took a cab to campus and got out at the main gate. Kevin asked me what I wanted for dinner.
"I dunno," I said. "Chinese?"
He sat and watched me eat my kung pao chicken.
"Are you sure you don't want anything?" I asked.
"No. As I mentioned earlier," he said, "I have already eaten. At the banquet. You missed the banquet, remember? What a pity you missed the banquet."
I lowered my chopsticks and took a deep breath. Then I resumed eating.
"Is the kung pao chicken very delishurs?" asked Kevin.
"I dunno about delishurs, but it's pretty good."
"Yes. But sadly. It cannot be as good as the banquet food. What a pity you are so late."
"Yeah," I said, "what a pity."
I flagged down the laobar and ordered a beer.
Easy, Panda, I told myself. Chill. Eat some bamboo. Drink some formaldehyde beer. In the words of George Harrison: all things must pass. Even dinners with passive-aggressive twerps. Those dinners, too, must pass. Christ. Not even twenty minutes into the handler/handlee relationship and I'd already let the kid get under my skin. Ordinarily, I am not so easily irked, but I really had busted my ass to get to Dazhou on time, and nature really had conspired to keep me in Nanchong. I'll be the first to admit it: I am a flake. I was born late, via C-section. And ever since, I have been hustling to catch up. I am chronically delayed, waylaid, held up, hung up, behind, belated, and otherwise late in the least fashionable way imaginable. But on this one, isolated occasion in my life, I was justified in my tardiness. Nanchong flooded. It flooded, and I am no Moses. Hell, I don't even know how to swim.
It was a Saturday night in Nanchong. When the storm first arrived, I was, as usual, unimpressed. I am a Nebraskan. Thunderstorms, even tornadoes, are little more than a source of giddy adventure for me. Over the years, I have evolved an internal barometer that tells me when to scoop up the cats and run for the basement. Sichuan is not quite tornado alley. It's more like a bowling alley, where Thor rolls nothing but gutterballs. The storms here are weak sauce. So I was unperturbed when the billowy black thunderheads came rolling in. There was no lightning, only a kind of effervescence in the clouds. And the thunder was a low and feeble gurgling, like a concerto for sousaphone and farting grandpa. Like I said, weak sauce. It was 1 AM and I was busy getting a head start on packing, stuffing all my worldly possessions into my hobo bindle. My worldly possessions these days mostly consist of boxer briefs: Hanes, Fruit of the Loom, BVD, bootleg Chinese undies with the Playboy Bunny's bucktoothed doppelganger stitched into the ass. The thing about life is, you wind up with too much underwear and not enough clothes.
When I'd finished packing, I set about tidying my room. After a while, I grew so depressed at the futility of cleaning that I had to sit down at the computer and watch a World Cup's Greatest Goals montage to cheer me up. GOOOAAALLLLL! ... GOOOAAALLLLL! ... GOOOAAA - Boom. There came an impressive stomp of thunder and I could hear the reverberation rippling up the aluminum bleachers of English Corner Stadium. Boom - zzzip! I got up from my desk chair and lifted the curtain just in time to see the Epcot Center Cafeteria across the street light up like a Tesla coil.
"... the fuck?" I asked the Royal Me, and received no reply. Then there came another lightning strike, this one even closer, and I leapt away from the computer. The power went out. My laptop dimmed slightly. GOOOAAALLLLL!
I backed away from the window, stumbled over my Peace Corps medical kit and cracked my head against the doorframe. Fuck, I said. I groped around in the dark until I found the washing machine. Ah, yes. It had been doing my laundry up until the power went out. Now all my clothes were lying there in a wet heap. Double fuck. I highstepped over the garbage in the hallway and stood in the middle of the living room, listening. An ominous whooshing filled the apartment and when the next lightning strike came, I saw that my bedroom curtains were pasted up against the ceiling. I began to shake. This was not weak sauce. I paced back and forth like a frightened dog. At any moment, I expected a funnel to take form in my living room and blow the whole stinking mess sky high. They'd find my boxer briefs in Shanghai. The Yangtze would be clogged with abortive journal entries from yours truly. Plastic tubes of Astroglide would rain down on Sichuan for weeks, courtesy of the Peace Corps medical office.
But tornado or no, I had no basement to scurry down into and no cats to keep me company. So I decided to sleep or die trying. It was 2 AM and I needed to be up in six hours, so I crawled into bed. The bedsheets were drenched in rain. The curtains kept smacking me in the face. I plugged my phone into the wall and set the alarm. Then I lay there awake while the torrential rains turned Nanchong into a rice paddy. By 3 AM, I still couldn't sleep and bloodshot desperation set in, so I did something I have only done once before: I popped a sleeping pill. Gradually, I sank into a kind of metaphysical troth and watched the storm rage for another hour until one last bolt of lightning sent me into a short-lived coma.
But the coma wasn't short-lived enough. Something I had failed to consider when I plugged the phone into the wall: there was no power. I might as well have plugged the damned thing into a pineapple. So the alarm didn't go off. So while my 8 AM train was clickety-clacketing its way off to Dazhou, my phone was a vegetable and so was I.
It was the strangest awakening of my life, and all of them have been strange. A white bolt from a gray sky shot me upright in bed. It was 10 AM and it was still storming outside. It took me several minutes to remember who and where I was. Then, sifting through the coffee-stained manila folders of my mind, I remembered vaguely that there was something I was supposed to do, somewhere I was supposed to be ...
Shit, fuck, etc. The power was still out, my phone was dead, and my laundry was half-washed and starting to mildew. I hung it up to dry. Then I took a cold shower. A glance in the mirror reminded me that I was still bearded. I was going to Dazhou to work, and professionalism in China does not involve looking like Bob Veila after a two-week do-it-yourself bender. But I wasn't about to hack at all that Irish scrubgrass with a Bic razor. So I put on some cargo shorts and a dirty undershirt, walked to the nearest barber shop, and asked them if they could shave me.
"We can't shave you electrically," announced the barber. "There is no power. But."
He approached me with an unlathered razor. I threw my hands up and backed slowly out onto the street.
I caught a cab downtown. Downtown, there was power. But the sewers had overflowed and the taxi cabs jetted spumes of brown semisolids as they passed. I wielded my umbrella like a shield. Tides of sewage rolled over the sidewalk whenever the streetlights changed and a competition broke out among the Chinese pedestrians to see who was courageous enough to cross the Brown Sea. I watched and waited. The Chinese women proved their meddle by tromping through the filth high-heels and all. The young men, not surprisingly, were colossal wussies about the whole thing and tried to pass over the sludge by clambering across the rungs of a nearby fence. A troupe of Germans materialized on the scene and, ever the sensible ones, decided to avoid the Scheisswasser altogether. Their leader, an overweight fellow in a too-tight t-shirt, shouted loudly, matter-of-factly, in a strange tongue that no one but me could understand, "Well, we must go around, then!" And the other Germans followed him. They turned and marched single file down the sidewalk, crossed the unflooded portion of the street, and marched down the opposite sidewalk unscathed. Only much later did the thought occur to me: Germans? In Nanchong? ... the fuck?
I waded across the filth. Then I got myself shampooed, scalp massaged, and shaved for 80 cents US. Then I bought a pair of sweatshop dress shirts for four bucks a pop. The next and final step was to get mine ass on board a train, or preferably a bus. I caught a cab to the biggest bus station in town, but they told me to go to the smallest bus station in town. My cabbie the second time around was the splitting image of Jackie Chan. I am not being racist, here: this man closely resembled Jackie Chan. And I began to feel like his laowai sidekick in a half-ass buddy comedy.
"Where are you going?" he asked me.
"Dazhou," I said.
"They've probably sold out of tickets."
"But I've got to get to Dazhou tonight," I said. "There's a banquet, or something."
"If they're sold out, what are you gonna do?"
"I have no idea," I said. "What can I do?"
Cabbie Chan was mum on this point. He lit a cigarette and offered me one. Then he screeched to a halt on the side of the road.
"Check it out," he said. "Look at that beautiful girl."
And indeed, a rather stacked Sichuanese woman was sauntering our way.
"In Sichuan, there are many beautiful women," said Cabbie Chan, "and I try to stop for them whenever I can."
Cabbie Chan dropped off the girl, then he dropped me off at the bus station. The black market cabbie urchins closed in around me. WHERE ARE YOU GOING? WHERE ARE YOU GOING? I elbowed and stiffarmed my way into the bus station. Needless to say, all tickets to Dazhou had been sold out, not just for the day in question, but also for the next day, and the one after that. I thrust my hands in my pockets and wandered back out to the parking lot, gave myself over to the long-distance cab racket. But I had spurned them and now they were ignoring me. I walked in circles but nobody seemed to notice me. So I began to call out the word "Dazhou." Dazhou, Dazhou, Dazhou. A hunchbacked man with pronounced acne scars approached.
"Dazhou?"
"Dazhou."
"700 kuai!"
"But I don't have that kind of money," I said. "I'm a volunteer."
"A what?"
"Nevermind. 500 kuai."
He shook his head.
"That's not gonna work. 600 kuai."
600 kuai. A hundred bucks. I bit my tongue and fumbled around in my wallet. The cabbie urchin extended his palms eagerly. Then, Cabbie Chan came to the rescue.
"600 kuai? Are you crazy?" he snapped. "This man is a foreigner. He doesn't know any better. He is our guest. Don't cheat him."
Cabbie Chan grabbed my arm and flicked his head towards his cab. He had been waiting for me the whole time.
"Let's go. I'll take you to the train station."
I followed Cabbie Chan and the cabbie urchin gave chase.
"Hey! Hey! Hey!"
"Hey hey hey," snorted Chan. "Idiot."
We sped off. The cabbie urchin chased us for a bit, then faded into the industrial haze.
I am wary of Chinese trains. They tend to be a crap shoot. As in: there is poop on the floor half the time. For that reason, among others, I hadn't ridden a Chinese train in six months. But my handlers had told me to get to Dazhou as early as possible, by whatever means possible, so that I might attend some sort of event that may or may not have been important. So I risked it. And as luck would have it, thanks to Cabbie Chan, I found myself in a relatively cozy bullet train bound for Dazhou, with no poop on the floor, and due to arrive only eight hours later than I'd originally planned. Of course, I missed the inaugural banquet by a couple hours. What a pity. But I did make it, floods and power outages and all. So I figured that I'd be welcomed in Dazhou with a tickertape parade. Instead, it was a listless Kevin, a lukewarm beer, and a tepid plate of kung pao chicken.
"Yes, what a pity that you were so late," Kevin said as we were walking home. "The banquet was very delishurs."
By then, the two bottles of Yanjing were doing their job, so I was able to laugh Kevin off in the Chinese manner. But then I stopped dead in my tracks because something in my periphery hadn't rubbed me the right way. I doubled back and peered down a dimly lit alleyway. In the not-so-distant distance was a river, and the river was raging.
"Um," I said.
"Yes," said Kevin, "the river is very high today."
"Is that normal?" I asked.
"No."
All along the riverside, there were old Chinese men, standing and watching the river. A bad sign. And I stood there for a moment to watch the river with them. It rolled past like a python. The crests of the waves gleamed in the moonlight. I had never seen anything like it, such natural rage. Such strength. I had never felt such powerlessness. Then, Kevin yanked me by the arm. And I walked.
"I forgot to say to you," he said, "that class is begin tomorrow."
"What?" I asked. I had forgotten all about the river. "What? When?"
"Eight AM. Sunday morning class is begin. What a pity you were late. I tell you earlier if you are not so late."
"Yes," I said, "what a pity."
So tomorrow began the next morning. I suppose that made sense. Then I shook Kevin loose and darted back to steal one last glance at the raging river. Marvelous. Horrific. The silent Chinese men knew. Tomorrow began the next morning, but whether or not tomorrow came was another question entire.
"I know it is American tradition for man serve the woman and woman serve the man," he said, "but there is some confusion before you arrive. My boss, she is thinking you are a woman. So she give me to you. Man serve the man. Very strange."
"Wait. She thought I was a woman?" I blinked violently. "Didn't she see my passport picture?"
"Yes," said Kevin, "but still there is some doubt."
We walked. Three days of ceaseless rain had flooded the square. I rolled up my pantlegs and forded the filth Oregon Trail style.
"What a pity you are so late," said Kevin.
"Well," I said, "as I mentioned on the phone, Nanchong flooded last night and the power went out. So I apologize if I'm late. But there were - ahem - technical difficulties."
"That is not what I mean," said Kevin. "I don't mean to be a burden. But you are very late. What a pity."
"I did my best to get here on time," I said, my left eyeball twitching involuntarily, "and I'm sorry if I'm late. But I didn't miss anything important, did I? And anyway, I've told you several times what happened. Nanchong flooded, so the power went out, so my alarm didn't go off, so I overslept, so I missed my 9 AM train, so I had to catch the 5 PM train to Dazhou. So yes, I am a little late. And I'm sorry if I missed the banquet or whatever. But I'm lucky to have gotten here at all."
"Yes," said Kevin, and I could've sworn I caught him smirking ever so slightly, "but what a pity."
We took a cab to campus and got out at the main gate. Kevin asked me what I wanted for dinner.
"I dunno," I said. "Chinese?"
He sat and watched me eat my kung pao chicken.
"Are you sure you don't want anything?" I asked.
"No. As I mentioned earlier," he said, "I have already eaten. At the banquet. You missed the banquet, remember? What a pity you missed the banquet."
I lowered my chopsticks and took a deep breath. Then I resumed eating.
"Is the kung pao chicken very delishurs?" asked Kevin.
"I dunno about delishurs, but it's pretty good."
"Yes. But sadly. It cannot be as good as the banquet food. What a pity you are so late."
"Yeah," I said, "what a pity."
I flagged down the laobar and ordered a beer.
Easy, Panda, I told myself. Chill. Eat some bamboo. Drink some formaldehyde beer. In the words of George Harrison: all things must pass. Even dinners with passive-aggressive twerps. Those dinners, too, must pass. Christ. Not even twenty minutes into the handler/handlee relationship and I'd already let the kid get under my skin. Ordinarily, I am not so easily irked, but I really had busted my ass to get to Dazhou on time, and nature really had conspired to keep me in Nanchong. I'll be the first to admit it: I am a flake. I was born late, via C-section. And ever since, I have been hustling to catch up. I am chronically delayed, waylaid, held up, hung up, behind, belated, and otherwise late in the least fashionable way imaginable. But on this one, isolated occasion in my life, I was justified in my tardiness. Nanchong flooded. It flooded, and I am no Moses. Hell, I don't even know how to swim.
It was a Saturday night in Nanchong. When the storm first arrived, I was, as usual, unimpressed. I am a Nebraskan. Thunderstorms, even tornadoes, are little more than a source of giddy adventure for me. Over the years, I have evolved an internal barometer that tells me when to scoop up the cats and run for the basement. Sichuan is not quite tornado alley. It's more like a bowling alley, where Thor rolls nothing but gutterballs. The storms here are weak sauce. So I was unperturbed when the billowy black thunderheads came rolling in. There was no lightning, only a kind of effervescence in the clouds. And the thunder was a low and feeble gurgling, like a concerto for sousaphone and farting grandpa. Like I said, weak sauce. It was 1 AM and I was busy getting a head start on packing, stuffing all my worldly possessions into my hobo bindle. My worldly possessions these days mostly consist of boxer briefs: Hanes, Fruit of the Loom, BVD, bootleg Chinese undies with the Playboy Bunny's bucktoothed doppelganger stitched into the ass. The thing about life is, you wind up with too much underwear and not enough clothes.
When I'd finished packing, I set about tidying my room. After a while, I grew so depressed at the futility of cleaning that I had to sit down at the computer and watch a World Cup's Greatest Goals montage to cheer me up. GOOOAAALLLLL! ... GOOOAAALLLLL! ... GOOOAAA - Boom. There came an impressive stomp of thunder and I could hear the reverberation rippling up the aluminum bleachers of English Corner Stadium. Boom - zzzip! I got up from my desk chair and lifted the curtain just in time to see the Epcot Center Cafeteria across the street light up like a Tesla coil.
"... the fuck?" I asked the Royal Me, and received no reply. Then there came another lightning strike, this one even closer, and I leapt away from the computer. The power went out. My laptop dimmed slightly. GOOOAAALLLLL!
I backed away from the window, stumbled over my Peace Corps medical kit and cracked my head against the doorframe. Fuck, I said. I groped around in the dark until I found the washing machine. Ah, yes. It had been doing my laundry up until the power went out. Now all my clothes were lying there in a wet heap. Double fuck. I highstepped over the garbage in the hallway and stood in the middle of the living room, listening. An ominous whooshing filled the apartment and when the next lightning strike came, I saw that my bedroom curtains were pasted up against the ceiling. I began to shake. This was not weak sauce. I paced back and forth like a frightened dog. At any moment, I expected a funnel to take form in my living room and blow the whole stinking mess sky high. They'd find my boxer briefs in Shanghai. The Yangtze would be clogged with abortive journal entries from yours truly. Plastic tubes of Astroglide would rain down on Sichuan for weeks, courtesy of the Peace Corps medical office.
But tornado or no, I had no basement to scurry down into and no cats to keep me company. So I decided to sleep or die trying. It was 2 AM and I needed to be up in six hours, so I crawled into bed. The bedsheets were drenched in rain. The curtains kept smacking me in the face. I plugged my phone into the wall and set the alarm. Then I lay there awake while the torrential rains turned Nanchong into a rice paddy. By 3 AM, I still couldn't sleep and bloodshot desperation set in, so I did something I have only done once before: I popped a sleeping pill. Gradually, I sank into a kind of metaphysical troth and watched the storm rage for another hour until one last bolt of lightning sent me into a short-lived coma.
But the coma wasn't short-lived enough. Something I had failed to consider when I plugged the phone into the wall: there was no power. I might as well have plugged the damned thing into a pineapple. So the alarm didn't go off. So while my 8 AM train was clickety-clacketing its way off to Dazhou, my phone was a vegetable and so was I.
It was the strangest awakening of my life, and all of them have been strange. A white bolt from a gray sky shot me upright in bed. It was 10 AM and it was still storming outside. It took me several minutes to remember who and where I was. Then, sifting through the coffee-stained manila folders of my mind, I remembered vaguely that there was something I was supposed to do, somewhere I was supposed to be ...
Shit, fuck, etc. The power was still out, my phone was dead, and my laundry was half-washed and starting to mildew. I hung it up to dry. Then I took a cold shower. A glance in the mirror reminded me that I was still bearded. I was going to Dazhou to work, and professionalism in China does not involve looking like Bob Veila after a two-week do-it-yourself bender. But I wasn't about to hack at all that Irish scrubgrass with a Bic razor. So I put on some cargo shorts and a dirty undershirt, walked to the nearest barber shop, and asked them if they could shave me.
"We can't shave you electrically," announced the barber. "There is no power. But."
He approached me with an unlathered razor. I threw my hands up and backed slowly out onto the street.
I caught a cab downtown. Downtown, there was power. But the sewers had overflowed and the taxi cabs jetted spumes of brown semisolids as they passed. I wielded my umbrella like a shield. Tides of sewage rolled over the sidewalk whenever the streetlights changed and a competition broke out among the Chinese pedestrians to see who was courageous enough to cross the Brown Sea. I watched and waited. The Chinese women proved their meddle by tromping through the filth high-heels and all. The young men, not surprisingly, were colossal wussies about the whole thing and tried to pass over the sludge by clambering across the rungs of a nearby fence. A troupe of Germans materialized on the scene and, ever the sensible ones, decided to avoid the Scheisswasser altogether. Their leader, an overweight fellow in a too-tight t-shirt, shouted loudly, matter-of-factly, in a strange tongue that no one but me could understand, "Well, we must go around, then!" And the other Germans followed him. They turned and marched single file down the sidewalk, crossed the unflooded portion of the street, and marched down the opposite sidewalk unscathed. Only much later did the thought occur to me: Germans? In Nanchong? ... the fuck?
I waded across the filth. Then I got myself shampooed, scalp massaged, and shaved for 80 cents US. Then I bought a pair of sweatshop dress shirts for four bucks a pop. The next and final step was to get mine ass on board a train, or preferably a bus. I caught a cab to the biggest bus station in town, but they told me to go to the smallest bus station in town. My cabbie the second time around was the splitting image of Jackie Chan. I am not being racist, here: this man closely resembled Jackie Chan. And I began to feel like his laowai sidekick in a half-ass buddy comedy.
"Where are you going?" he asked me.
"Dazhou," I said.
"They've probably sold out of tickets."
"But I've got to get to Dazhou tonight," I said. "There's a banquet, or something."
"If they're sold out, what are you gonna do?"
"I have no idea," I said. "What can I do?"
Cabbie Chan was mum on this point. He lit a cigarette and offered me one. Then he screeched to a halt on the side of the road.
"Check it out," he said. "Look at that beautiful girl."
And indeed, a rather stacked Sichuanese woman was sauntering our way.
"In Sichuan, there are many beautiful women," said Cabbie Chan, "and I try to stop for them whenever I can."
Cabbie Chan dropped off the girl, then he dropped me off at the bus station. The black market cabbie urchins closed in around me. WHERE ARE YOU GOING? WHERE ARE YOU GOING? I elbowed and stiffarmed my way into the bus station. Needless to say, all tickets to Dazhou had been sold out, not just for the day in question, but also for the next day, and the one after that. I thrust my hands in my pockets and wandered back out to the parking lot, gave myself over to the long-distance cab racket. But I had spurned them and now they were ignoring me. I walked in circles but nobody seemed to notice me. So I began to call out the word "Dazhou." Dazhou, Dazhou, Dazhou. A hunchbacked man with pronounced acne scars approached.
"Dazhou?"
"Dazhou."
"700 kuai!"
"But I don't have that kind of money," I said. "I'm a volunteer."
"A what?"
"Nevermind. 500 kuai."
He shook his head.
"That's not gonna work. 600 kuai."
600 kuai. A hundred bucks. I bit my tongue and fumbled around in my wallet. The cabbie urchin extended his palms eagerly. Then, Cabbie Chan came to the rescue.
"600 kuai? Are you crazy?" he snapped. "This man is a foreigner. He doesn't know any better. He is our guest. Don't cheat him."
Cabbie Chan grabbed my arm and flicked his head towards his cab. He had been waiting for me the whole time.
"Let's go. I'll take you to the train station."
I followed Cabbie Chan and the cabbie urchin gave chase.
"Hey! Hey! Hey!"
"Hey hey hey," snorted Chan. "Idiot."
We sped off. The cabbie urchin chased us for a bit, then faded into the industrial haze.
I am wary of Chinese trains. They tend to be a crap shoot. As in: there is poop on the floor half the time. For that reason, among others, I hadn't ridden a Chinese train in six months. But my handlers had told me to get to Dazhou as early as possible, by whatever means possible, so that I might attend some sort of event that may or may not have been important. So I risked it. And as luck would have it, thanks to Cabbie Chan, I found myself in a relatively cozy bullet train bound for Dazhou, with no poop on the floor, and due to arrive only eight hours later than I'd originally planned. Of course, I missed the inaugural banquet by a couple hours. What a pity. But I did make it, floods and power outages and all. So I figured that I'd be welcomed in Dazhou with a tickertape parade. Instead, it was a listless Kevin, a lukewarm beer, and a tepid plate of kung pao chicken.
"Yes, what a pity that you were so late," Kevin said as we were walking home. "The banquet was very delishurs."
By then, the two bottles of Yanjing were doing their job, so I was able to laugh Kevin off in the Chinese manner. But then I stopped dead in my tracks because something in my periphery hadn't rubbed me the right way. I doubled back and peered down a dimly lit alleyway. In the not-so-distant distance was a river, and the river was raging.
"Um," I said.
"Yes," said Kevin, "the river is very high today."
"Is that normal?" I asked.
"No."
All along the riverside, there were old Chinese men, standing and watching the river. A bad sign. And I stood there for a moment to watch the river with them. It rolled past like a python. The crests of the waves gleamed in the moonlight. I had never seen anything like it, such natural rage. Such strength. I had never felt such powerlessness. Then, Kevin yanked me by the arm. And I walked.
"I forgot to say to you," he said, "that class is begin tomorrow."
"What?" I asked. I had forgotten all about the river. "What? When?"
"Eight AM. Sunday morning class is begin. What a pity you were late. I tell you earlier if you are not so late."
"Yes," I said, "what a pity."
So tomorrow began the next morning. I suppose that made sense. Then I shook Kevin loose and darted back to steal one last glance at the raging river. Marvelous. Horrific. The silent Chinese men knew. Tomorrow began the next morning, but whether or not tomorrow came was another question entire.
Friday, August 13, 2010
Fat Panda
I have been away from my writing desk for about a month now. I spent two weeks in Dazhou teaching teachers how to teach, and another week in Chengdu, bidding farewell to some of my favorite assholes in the whole world. July was a significant month for me, and a big part of why I haven't written anything about it is precisely because it was so significant. I'm not sure I can do it justice at this point.
Another thing is: I didn't have time to write. When I wasn't working, I was out carousing, and when I wasn't out carousing, I was avoiding natural disasters left and right (and up and down, for that matter). For thirty-odd days, I was refreshingly estranged from the internet. I'm the kind of guy who checks the Huffington Post every ten seconds for news of the impending apocalypse, so it was educational for me to return to the Huffington Post after a month and find that absolutely nothing worth reading about had occurred in my absence. The only news I cared about was going on all around me.
And yet another thing is: I have been avoiding writing. Every writer worth his or her own salt swears that hard work is a must. A writer must write every day, preferably for eight hours at a time, and preferably with a tumbler of bad whiskey at the ready. But as you well know by now, bad whiskey or no, I often go long stretches without writing a word. And I suspect I'm none the worse for it. For me, writing is like riding a bike - or a unicycle, if you happen to be a street mime. It does require hard work and dedication, but it is not incompatible with bouts of travel or debauchery. After a prolonged absence, when I finally do sit back down at my desk, I find that my brain has changed in all sorts of ways that I wouldn't have noticed if I had been writing all the way through. The compositional act is a bit awkward and clunky at first, but after a while the realization sinks in that the person writing now is very different from the person writing only a month before, which tends to make the writing process a lustier, sexier pursuit than it usually is for me. Who is this stranger in my head and where has he been?
In the same vein, reunions after a prolonged absence are often awkward and clunky (but also lusty and sexy) experiences. I believe that the most trustworthy mirrors are the ones that haven't seen you in a while. Your close friends are accustomed to seeing your mug around every day, and for that reason, they go unaware of changes in your physique or accent or patterns of thought because those changes happen so gradually. But leave somebody for one year, or even for one month, and when you return, you will find yourself oddly transformed in the eyes of your beholder, though you yourself feel not a whit different.
Last week, I visited my host family for the first time in over a year. After all the awkward embraces had been gotten out of the way, my host mother sized me up and said, "Pan Daaaaa! You've gotten fat!"
I laughed it off in the manner of the Chinese. Then I sat down to dinner. My host parents, apparently, were conspiring to make me even fatter. I devoured my share of veggies, but self-consciously avoided the twice-cooked pork. Then I got up and went to the bathroom.
I have never been sensitive about my weight because I've never possessed much weight to speak of. But I'd found my host mother's remark particularly cutting. So I switched on the vanity lights and lifted up my shirt. True: a bit more baby fat than I had in my early twenties, but that much is unavoidable. Baby fat and all, I was still as skinny as a chopstick. I sucked in my gut, then I let it hang out. It wasn't even a passable gut. Just a little more Panda to love, that's all. So I wasn't fat, at least not by any sane definition of the word. But for the first time since the throes of puberty, I had allowed anxiety about my appearance to creep into my head, and in that moment in front of the mirror, I swore off sweet and sour pork for the indefinite future.
When I returned to Nanchong a couple days ago, my first stop was the convenience store by my apartment. I slid a bottle of yogurt across the counter. The shopkeeper sized me up.
"Wow! You've gotten fat!"
"I've gotten fat?"
"Yeah! I mean, really fat!"
I put the yogurt back in the fridge and replaced it with a bottle of chamomile tea.
This afternoon, Cabbie Chan (who will figure very slightly into my upcoming Great Flood of Dazhou saga) squinted at me in the rear view mirror and commented on my newfound corpulence. He dropped me off at the restaurant across from the old campus and there, the laoban called me a fatty and looked at my heaping dish of kung pao chicken like she was about to cut me off. And just now at the coffee shop, where I came to write, the owner joined me at the table and distracted me for the better part of an hour by ranting about how fat I'd become. "Fat! Really fat!" he exclaimed, though he followed that up with, "More handsome, too!"
Who is this stranger and how did he get so fat? Maybe it's my haircut. I'm short haired and clean shaven for the first time in almost a year. Maybe that makes one appear fatter. Or maybe I've actually become something of a fatass. If anyone among my readership has seen me lately and is willing to shatter my body image in the name of honesty, I would gladly welcome your criticism so that I can step up my exercise regimen, if that is what is necessary. But I don't believe that I am much fatter than I have ever been, and in any case, I have never been the least bit fat. In fact, when I am among Americans these days, they are quick to point out how much stronger I look, with the appropriate fondling of biceps and manboobs that tend to follow such a compliment. So my guess is that something has been lost in translation, and I will attempt to translate that loss here.
In China (and in South Korea, for that matter) people do not ask, "How are you?" They ask, "Have you eaten?" There are reasons for that. Not so long ago it was a relevant question, hunger taking its rightful precedence over mood and state of being. So my guess is that plumpness in China, as long as it's not morbid obesity, is (at least linguistically) regarded as a virtue. Because plumpness was once, indeed, very much a virtue. Calling a friend or acquaintance "fat" in China is not necessarily the same as calling them "lard-ass." It's more like: you're looking nourished these days. Or at least, that is what I have to assume. Because I am not fat. Trust me on this one. In fact, over the past couple months, through sporadic push-ups and chin-ups, I've more than doubled my cup size and have added quite a bit of meat to my upper arms, though you could still easily wrap your hand around one of my biceps like a sphygmomanometer. I've also grown somewhat swarthy from wandering aimlessly in the remorseless Sichuan summer. All and all, I suppose I do look rather well nourished. But not fat. And if I am fat, then so what? There are worse things to be.
My ego has not been hurt by this recent spate of commentary on my waistline. I'm just puzzled that it came all at once. Fortunately, the Chinese often remark on my appearance, and I seldom find any of their remarks even remotely true. I am not a monkey, though I am distantly related to that species. I am not a giant, although I have been told so by countless Chinese men who are taller than me. My nose is not a triangle, at least not in the Euclidian sense. And I look nothing like Los Angeles Lakers power forward Pau Gasol. Or Ben Stiller, for that matter. (But maybe I do look a little like Pau Gasol.) So I will file this judgment away with all the rest of China's warped perceptions of my appearance. Then I will wolf down four double cheeseburgers from McDonald's and sit on my fat ass at the computer and try to navigate the keyboard with my fat-ass fingers so I can painstakingly regurgitate all of the things that happened to me over the month of July while I was so busy devouring metric ton after metric ton of condensed lard.
Another thing is: I didn't have time to write. When I wasn't working, I was out carousing, and when I wasn't out carousing, I was avoiding natural disasters left and right (and up and down, for that matter). For thirty-odd days, I was refreshingly estranged from the internet. I'm the kind of guy who checks the Huffington Post every ten seconds for news of the impending apocalypse, so it was educational for me to return to the Huffington Post after a month and find that absolutely nothing worth reading about had occurred in my absence. The only news I cared about was going on all around me.
And yet another thing is: I have been avoiding writing. Every writer worth his or her own salt swears that hard work is a must. A writer must write every day, preferably for eight hours at a time, and preferably with a tumbler of bad whiskey at the ready. But as you well know by now, bad whiskey or no, I often go long stretches without writing a word. And I suspect I'm none the worse for it. For me, writing is like riding a bike - or a unicycle, if you happen to be a street mime. It does require hard work and dedication, but it is not incompatible with bouts of travel or debauchery. After a prolonged absence, when I finally do sit back down at my desk, I find that my brain has changed in all sorts of ways that I wouldn't have noticed if I had been writing all the way through. The compositional act is a bit awkward and clunky at first, but after a while the realization sinks in that the person writing now is very different from the person writing only a month before, which tends to make the writing process a lustier, sexier pursuit than it usually is for me. Who is this stranger in my head and where has he been?
In the same vein, reunions after a prolonged absence are often awkward and clunky (but also lusty and sexy) experiences. I believe that the most trustworthy mirrors are the ones that haven't seen you in a while. Your close friends are accustomed to seeing your mug around every day, and for that reason, they go unaware of changes in your physique or accent or patterns of thought because those changes happen so gradually. But leave somebody for one year, or even for one month, and when you return, you will find yourself oddly transformed in the eyes of your beholder, though you yourself feel not a whit different.
Last week, I visited my host family for the first time in over a year. After all the awkward embraces had been gotten out of the way, my host mother sized me up and said, "Pan Daaaaa! You've gotten fat!"
I laughed it off in the manner of the Chinese. Then I sat down to dinner. My host parents, apparently, were conspiring to make me even fatter. I devoured my share of veggies, but self-consciously avoided the twice-cooked pork. Then I got up and went to the bathroom.
I have never been sensitive about my weight because I've never possessed much weight to speak of. But I'd found my host mother's remark particularly cutting. So I switched on the vanity lights and lifted up my shirt. True: a bit more baby fat than I had in my early twenties, but that much is unavoidable. Baby fat and all, I was still as skinny as a chopstick. I sucked in my gut, then I let it hang out. It wasn't even a passable gut. Just a little more Panda to love, that's all. So I wasn't fat, at least not by any sane definition of the word. But for the first time since the throes of puberty, I had allowed anxiety about my appearance to creep into my head, and in that moment in front of the mirror, I swore off sweet and sour pork for the indefinite future.
When I returned to Nanchong a couple days ago, my first stop was the convenience store by my apartment. I slid a bottle of yogurt across the counter. The shopkeeper sized me up.
"Wow! You've gotten fat!"
"I've gotten fat?"
"Yeah! I mean, really fat!"
I put the yogurt back in the fridge and replaced it with a bottle of chamomile tea.
This afternoon, Cabbie Chan (who will figure very slightly into my upcoming Great Flood of Dazhou saga) squinted at me in the rear view mirror and commented on my newfound corpulence. He dropped me off at the restaurant across from the old campus and there, the laoban called me a fatty and looked at my heaping dish of kung pao chicken like she was about to cut me off. And just now at the coffee shop, where I came to write, the owner joined me at the table and distracted me for the better part of an hour by ranting about how fat I'd become. "Fat! Really fat!" he exclaimed, though he followed that up with, "More handsome, too!"
Who is this stranger and how did he get so fat? Maybe it's my haircut. I'm short haired and clean shaven for the first time in almost a year. Maybe that makes one appear fatter. Or maybe I've actually become something of a fatass. If anyone among my readership has seen me lately and is willing to shatter my body image in the name of honesty, I would gladly welcome your criticism so that I can step up my exercise regimen, if that is what is necessary. But I don't believe that I am much fatter than I have ever been, and in any case, I have never been the least bit fat. In fact, when I am among Americans these days, they are quick to point out how much stronger I look, with the appropriate fondling of biceps and manboobs that tend to follow such a compliment. So my guess is that something has been lost in translation, and I will attempt to translate that loss here.
In China (and in South Korea, for that matter) people do not ask, "How are you?" They ask, "Have you eaten?" There are reasons for that. Not so long ago it was a relevant question, hunger taking its rightful precedence over mood and state of being. So my guess is that plumpness in China, as long as it's not morbid obesity, is (at least linguistically) regarded as a virtue. Because plumpness was once, indeed, very much a virtue. Calling a friend or acquaintance "fat" in China is not necessarily the same as calling them "lard-ass." It's more like: you're looking nourished these days. Or at least, that is what I have to assume. Because I am not fat. Trust me on this one. In fact, over the past couple months, through sporadic push-ups and chin-ups, I've more than doubled my cup size and have added quite a bit of meat to my upper arms, though you could still easily wrap your hand around one of my biceps like a sphygmomanometer. I've also grown somewhat swarthy from wandering aimlessly in the remorseless Sichuan summer. All and all, I suppose I do look rather well nourished. But not fat. And if I am fat, then so what? There are worse things to be.
My ego has not been hurt by this recent spate of commentary on my waistline. I'm just puzzled that it came all at once. Fortunately, the Chinese often remark on my appearance, and I seldom find any of their remarks even remotely true. I am not a monkey, though I am distantly related to that species. I am not a giant, although I have been told so by countless Chinese men who are taller than me. My nose is not a triangle, at least not in the Euclidian sense. And I look nothing like Los Angeles Lakers power forward Pau Gasol. Or Ben Stiller, for that matter. (But maybe I do look a little like Pau Gasol.) So I will file this judgment away with all the rest of China's warped perceptions of my appearance. Then I will wolf down four double cheeseburgers from McDonald's and sit on my fat ass at the computer and try to navigate the keyboard with my fat-ass fingers so I can painstakingly regurgitate all of the things that happened to me over the month of July while I was so busy devouring metric ton after metric ton of condensed lard.
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