Saturday, October 30, 2010

The Third Place

For every man must have somewhere - to go.
- Marmeladov, Crime and Punishment, as read by Anthony Heald


I am a man who is constant need of somewhere to go.

In a broad sense, in an abroad sense, I am always moving, always leaving the country or on the verge of leaving it. Sprinting like Mr. Zip to make a connection, zipper undone, shirt half-tucked, parti-colored strips of underwear flapping like Tibetan prayer flags from the jawline of my suitcase. Or snoozing with a backpack for a pillow on the cold, unforgiving floor of the International Departures lounge of Chicago O'Hare in the wake of a connection that never arrived. I have returned to America several times since I left it in the summer of 2006, but I have never really been back. I have always been in transit, between jobs, between countries. I have spent a good part of my youth on the lookout for Malthusian industrial nowherelands in which to fritter away my youth. And I have spent the better part of my youth living in those Malthusian industrial nowherelands, frittering away my youth.

In a momentary sense, I am fidgety to a fault, never quite at ease in my apartment, or in a loveseat down at Starbucks, or perched upon a barstool at The Brothers Lounge. The moment I get cozy, I am no longer cozy. I am forever doing the same Last Man Shuffle I wrote about in a blog post, oh so long ago. I want to move. I want to be comfortable. I move in order to find comfort. And by now, after four years of shuffling, I suppose motion is the state that has become most comfortable to me.

My Last Man momentum carried me to China. Then the Peace Corps shipped me to Nanchong for two years. And so it was that I somewhat unwittingly committed myself to the Akron, Ohio of China. I fell into her arms, and she caught me in a vice grip. I am no longer in motion. I am suspended in midair, trapped in amber, frozen in carbonite. I am stuck in an eternal layover. I am in Nanchong. I can make excursions to the Big City on the weekends, if I have the money. I can take leave, should I so desire. But I am anchored here, shackled here, Chinese fingertrapped here in Nanchong. I cannot leave this town very often, or for very long. For the next year at least, Nanchong is pretty much the only place I can go. And after one full year in Nanchong, the only Chinese city I know, I have not yet found anywhere - to go.

There are coffee shops, yes. And bars. But on my paltry Peace Corps stipend, a cup of actual coffee is far too dear to make a habit out of it. And the bars here are not really bars, just very loud and confusingly decorated rooms where a bottle of beer costs ten times more than it does at the mom 'n pop shop next door. And anyhow, the bars and the coffee shops are either so crowded that I'm liable to start a passive-aggressive riot just by ordering a drink, or so empty that I'll have three waiters and five waitresses fawning over me while I'm trying to read Crime and fucking Punishment. So, where does one go in a town like Nanchong? Beats the hell out of you. Beats the hell out of me. At the very least, I know where the Chinese people go. They go shopping.

Shopping is a contact sport in this country. It is also what people do for fun. But me, you couldn't pay me to go shopping in China. The people. The screaming. The beshitted toddlers. The flashing lights. It stresses me out. It freaks me out. I have seizures, or at least I fake them, just to get out of the store in the most expedient and least violent manner possible. In short, I don't see how shopping in China could appeal to anyone with a functional limbic system. But when I ask my students what they did over the weekend, even the surliest dudes in class will tell me, "Uhm, like, ohmigod, I went shopping!"

There are bars in Nanchong, but most of the establishments here sell clothes. Or clothing accessories. Or clothing accessory accessories. Or, I don't know, crap.

In the beginning, all the neon lights intrigued me. That first deceptive cab ride home gave me the misguided impression that Nanchong was a city with a thumping, pulsating nightlife. But nobody's partying here. The moment work lets out, everybody's out buying fake Gucci purses. For themselves or for their girlfriends. Or for their wives. Or for their mistresses. Or for their other mistresses. At 11 PM on a Friday night, everybody's out buying pre-torn jeans. Everybody's out buying skirts that look like they were bitten in half by a shark. Everybody's out buying facelifts and whitening skin lotion. Everybody's buying.

When I first met Meghan, my new sitemate, she asked me whether there were any good Mexican restaurants in Nanchong. I busted up laughing. Mexican restaurants! That's a good one. But then I choked back the giggles, and I felt kind of mean for laughing in the first place. It was an honest question. And really, I wasn't sure how to answer it. Because I didn't know. I didn't have a clue as to whether there were any Mexican restaurants in Nanchong. I'd never bothered to ask. After my first couple of weeks in town, I just figured there weren't any and got on with my Sino-Bohemian existence.

I ought to have asked. Because there could very well be a Mexican restaurant nestled somewhere in the irritable bowels of Nanchong and I'd be the last one to hear about it. Nanchong is a big place. Bigger than Denver. And I haven't explored very much of it, to be honest. So who knows what diversity lurks beneath the Han Chinese veil? Once upon a time there was going to be an Italian place, but The Italian died last summer. My friend Holly just opened a fantastically realistic American coffee shop downtown, and if I hadn't known her, I wouldn't have known about her coffee shop. So I could be missing out on all sorts of cosmopolitan monkeyshines.

But over the past year, I have come to doubt it. I don't know Nanchong very well, but by now, I know what to expect from it. It is, as a Korean friend of mine often said about his motherland, a place where nothing is impossible, but nothing is possible.

For better and for worse, China is one of the few countries left on earth that has stubbornly refused to become anywhere else. When I left America four years ago, I left in search of somewhere else, somewhere that wasn't America. Somewhere unchained from chain stores and unbranded by brand names. Somewhere authentically itself, whatever that means anymore.

I certainly didn't find what I was looking for in South Korea, where the Jack Daniel's flowed like wine and the Franzia flowed like whiskey. And when the whiskey and boxed wine were finally tapped out, when we'd polished off the last of the Guinnesses, we would hit up Burger King for some 4 AM munchies. Or McDonald's, if we were desperate enough. There was a Bennigan's downtown, and you can't even find those in America anymore.

Poland was no better, and no worse. And Mexico - well, Mexico was Mexico. The only thing missing was Taco Bell, but there was no need for Taco Bell in Mexico. Because it was Mexico. No shortage of tacos. No shortage of bells.

So I came to China hoping it would be different, that I would finally break free of America's gravitational pull. And I suppose that I have, though not quite in the way I had anticipated. It's more like I've rocketed out of the earth's orbit altogether, sailed countless light years across the galaxy, only to crashland on some desolate, hyper-polluted asteroid that Colonel Sanders colonized in the mid-1950's, then abandoned to the natives.

The very worst of America is on display here. There are two McDonald's franchises in Nanchong, and at least four KFC's that I am aware of. I visit them only sparingly, i.e., when I am very drunk. Uncle Sam is there when you need him, in desperate times, in drunk times. And he waits for you with open arms. Come to papa, he says. And when you're drunk enough, you obey. His restaurants wait patiently for your hard-earned cash, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They are strewn about the city like little fluorescent-lit oases of processed lard in an endless Sahara of nutrients and MSG.

I won't lie. I do, on occasion, succumb to my bestial cravings for genetically modified meat. But for the past year, I have subsisted for the mostpart on Sichuanese cuisine. And I have enjoyed it. I cannot complain about Chinese cooking. Sichuan food is what I will miss most when I leave, and it is the one thing I can say that the Chinese have done right, and done right proper.

There are plenty of places to eat in Nanchong. But I have yet to find somewhere - to go. I do not have a coffee shop or a bar. I am not a regular anywhere. Imagination goes a long way when you're living abroad, but I can no longer pretend that the coffee shops here are coffee shops, or that the bars here are bars. I can't even stomach the places anymore, to be honest. They just depress me. On a Friday night, I'd much rather have a cold beer in my apartment and screw around on the internet. On a Saturday morning, I'd much rather pound Nescafe and read a book in bed. I no longer want to go out on the town, so I don't. Perhaps this strikes you as sad, but the alternative, to me, is even sadder still. Getting pestered at a coffee shop while Kenny G ovulates through the loudspeakers, being force-fed unwanted beer at some hyperkaraoke meat market juke joint. It's no fun. It's negative fun. And just think of all the money involved. No, I'll pass.

For the better part of a year, I've quipped to myself that Nanchong would get its first Starbucks the very day that I left town. Not the day after, mind you, because I'd never know about it that way. No, the City Planning Commission (if indeed there is one) would be sure to time things such that the Mayor of Nanchong (if indeed there is one) would be cutting the red ribbon on my day of departure, as I peered, rubbing my disbelieving eyes, from the backseat window of a green Nanchong taxi on its merry way to the train station. Snip. A round of applause. And the proletariat masses would rush in for their very first Venti Green Tea Frappuccinos.

It's not that I am all that enamored of Starbucks Coffee, though I secretly kind of am. It's more about what Starbucks would mean for Nanchong. For a city that will always have x number of McDonald's, and x² number of KFC's, and a handful of funky pizza places of the sort that consider "tomato sauce" an extra topping – for Nanchong, another McDonald's, another KFC, even a Pizza Hut would be redundant and meaningless. But a Starbucks would suggest to me that a corner had been turned in the Chinese hinterlands, that a new multicultural Golden Age lay shimmering before us somewhere on the smog-smeared horizon. To acquire a taste for processed lard is one thing. Human beings love lard. However much we fight it, our lard lust is innate. But for Nanchong to finally embrace coffee - an occidentally reviled substance that local folklore places in the same category as black tar heroin - that, my friends, would be revolutionary. Nay, counter-revolutionary.

And hell, it would give me someplace to go. I can't go anywhere in China without attracting unwanted attention, not even McDonald's or KFC. Even at McDonald's, I am a foreigner. Only the Starbucks in Chongqing and its sister franchise in Chengdu are sacrosanct. In Starbucks alone I am safe. Starbucks isn't 'Nam. There are rules at Starbucks. The Geneva Convention specifies that one may heckle a foreigner in public places or locally owned establishments during daylight hours, but that all embassies, consulates, and Starbucks Coffee franchises are strictly off limits.

I forget why I even looked it up. It was a Monday night. You look up all sorts of garbage on Monday night, just so you don't have to go to bed and find yourself on the wrong side of Tuesday. I typed the words "Nanchong" and "Starbucks" into Google and pressed enter. And what popped up on screen was a road map.

"Well," I said, "I'll be damned."

It had been there all along. Starbucks Coffee, not even a mile from the Old Campus. True, it strained the imagination, pushed the boundaries of what few things are possible and what many things are impossible in Nanchong – but there was the name, Xing Ba Ke, and there was the logo. So I took out a notebook and jotted down the directions, in the way that I jot down directions to myself – not in that paternal shorthand one uses when directing misplaced out-of-towners, but in the sort of vulgar prose-poetry that lights a fire under my ass.

Dear Pan Da,
Listen, shitbird.
So you get out of class and people heckle you. Fuck that noise.
You walk down past the campus hotel. Some undergrad flips you the bird and tells you to go fuck yourself. Who cares? Then there's that really pretty street on the left, the prettiest street in all of China ... don't go down that street. No, you want to take a right and walk down that fucking grody avenue that slogs along the lake like a human-sized sewer runnel.
Follow that avenue until you get to that shady four-lane highway where you're no longer sure whether the women on the streets are just women on the streets or ladies of the night. Take a left.
Then, you will walk for a long-ass time until you come to a government-issue blue sign that bears the following confusing Chinese symbols: __ __ __. Take a right.
Walk until you're about to die of exposure. Hopefully, you'll hit Crush Imperialism Road well before then, but no promises. In the event that you reach the intersection before rigor mortis sets in, hang a left on Crush Imperialism Road.

And so on. Upon second thought, the Starbucks was far more than a mile from the Old Campus. It only looked like a mile on Google Maps. But maps, especially Google Maps, are deceptively small. It would be a hike. But hiking I can handle, as long as there is a destination at the end of the hike, a place where I can sulk and brood with my Amazon Kindle projecting samovar-hot Russian literature, a steaming cup of Unfair Trade coffee firmly in hand, a Zoot Sims b-side warbling on the house stereo, some cultureshocked Chinese dudes tearing the condiments bar asunder, spilling organic brown sugar everywhere, spiking their coffee with six kilos of nutmeg and sixteen cows' worth of creme – and as long as those dudes don't harass me while I sulk and read my Dostoevsky ... for all that, I would walk five-hundred miles. And I would walk five-hundred more, as the song goes.

So I set out on Wednesday after work, a young Ahab looking for his Venti White Whale Latte. I walked at such a ferocious clip that my secondhand wingtips seemed to devour themselves with every step. I'd bought them for a dollar at an Omaha thrift store almost two years ago. They were scuffed and winestained when I bought them, but relatively intact. After a week in China, they turned black and hard as dried lava. And by the time I reached Crush Imperialism Road, they looked like a couple of abused Brillo pads strapped to my feet. Still, I walked. I would violate the Starbucks No Shirt, No Shoes policy if it came to that. But I would get my coffee. And I would get my Dostoevsky. And I would get my solitude. That much was certain. I was not to be denied. Not on this particular Wednesday evening. From Hell's heart I stab at thee ... hey, come to think of it, wasn't Starbuck a character from Moby Dick? It is now 7 AM, and this blog post is starting to get weird.

I wandered into new territory, parts of Nanchong so foreign to foreigners that the people in the streets didn't know whether they should heckle me, or kiss my feet, or call the police, or what. I passed a beautician offering "NEW SLEEK HAIL STYLE," and I laughed. I passed a restaurant that utilized none other than Saddam Hussein as their logo. And not just Saddam Hussein, but post-Operation Iraqi Freedom Saddam. Bearded, delirious, tortured, raising a single defiant finger in the air. The name of the restaurant was "B.T.," which I guessed was shorthand for bian tai, Chinese for "fucking crazy." It made sense, in a sense, but why it would make for good restaurant marketing was beyond me. Saddam Hussein is not exactly Colonel Sanders, though they were both military figures in their day, and at least in monochrome, they do bear an eerie sort of resemblance to one another. But Saddam Hussein doesn't make me hungry. The visage of Colonel Sanders, on the other hand, does. And here I leave it to the reader to determine just how perverse it is that otherwise sane, non-cannibalistic human beings can be driven to the point of salivation by caricatures of deceased colonels.

I kept walking. There was a ruckus in my wake as the people behind me suddenly realized that a foreigner had passed them by, as they realized that they had let me get away. Some desperate HAH-LOOs in the background. I kept walking. Eventually, I reemerged onto a fairly familiar stretch of road. Yes, this road, I remembered, led to the inter-provincial bus station across town. Which meant I was way out in the sticks. There were high-end car dealerships and high-end apartment complexes. At the same time, there were bona fide peasants, and vegetable vendors, and garage stall cigarette shops. At the very least, the Chinese rich are not above buying from the Chinese poor. The cars whooshed past on the highway, like spaceships from an era both before my time and far ahead of it. I kept walking. I trusted my directions. They promised me that a Starbucks would be coming up any moment now on the left. Still, this didn't seem like a Starbucks neighborhood. I began to doubt, not without some small amount of pride, that a foreigner had ever walked this street before. And the shopkeepers were certainly baffled enough to flatter me in that respect. They gasped. They gawked. Black BMW's shuttled past. Here was wealth. Here was poverty. Here was a part of China that had long since been developed, but hadn't been tidied up for foreign eyes. That should have been my first tip-off.

I kept walking. Altogether, I walked five miles in pursuit of what I ought to have known was perfectly unattainable: that Starbucks at the end of the smog-smeared horizon. After an hour or so, I got in such a walking rhythm that I didn't really want to stop. So when I finally found the place, I didn't quite know how to react. There was the sign, and there was the logo. XING BA KE, the Chinese word for "star" and the Chinese transliteration of "bucks," spelled out both in Chinese and in English. Starbucks. And there was the logo, or something like it. I had found it. The Starbucks at the end of the smog-smeared horizon. But I knew immediately that no, this was not a Starbucks. I was greeted by a primly dressed hostess standing behind a podium. I sensed that I should've made a reservation beforehand. Pan Da, party of one. Through the window, I could see plush couches sandwiching glassine tables with ashtrays planted smack dab in the middle. I could make out the estrogen tones of Kenny G, and I lingered around just long enough to hear that the track was playing on repeat. No. This was not Starbucks. This was a Chinese coffee shop. This was the kind of place where Chinese salarymen go to sell themselves for prices that make my Peace Corps stipend look like a financial hiccup. So I bolted. Or at least, I walked swiftly in the opposite direction. And where that would take me, I could only guess.

In the end, it took me to an empty restaurant. The owners had never seen a foreigner before, and brought a two year-old of theirs out with the food to practice his English.

"Hi," I said.
He spit up on himself.
"Hello," I said.
He put his fist in his mouth. His parents tissued up the spittle.
"How are you?"
He toddled away.
I ate my twice-cooked pork.

The night was still young and I didn't really feel like going home. The sun had set, but it was only 7 PM. I didn't have to work in the morning, so perhaps there was some mischief left to be done. I retraced my steps and walked my way back downtown. I passed a trio of places that billed themselves "pubs," and thought for a moment that maybe I'd step into one of them for a pint and shoot the shit with whatever clientele happened to be around. But the windows were frosted and bolted shut, which meant that they were whorehouses. Or worse, whorehouses masquerading as bars, so I'd walk in and get hustled by some college girl turned poolshark. She'd ask me to buy her a drink and thirty minutes later, I'd walk out 200 kuai lighter without so much as a consolation kiss on the cheek. So I passed. I kept walking. I found myself back at the Old Campus, where I tried in vain to hail a cab.

When you need a cab in Nanchong, they are not to be found. When you couldn't give a damn about taxis, they will very nearly run you over trying to get you inside them. Such is the nature of the Nanchong taxi system. It doesn't make much financial or existential sense, but both the cabbies and the locals seem to put up with it. The cabbies change shifts during the morning commute, and change shifts again during rush hour, such that eight vacant taxis in a row will pass you by when you're trying to get to work, and eight vacant taxis in a row will pass you by when you're trying to get home from work. If you're lucky, maybe they'll slow down just long enough for you to blurt out your destination. But inevitably, your destination is not in line with theirs. They're off the clock. They don't have to take you anywhere if they don't want to. They're off to park their car in some back alley, and then, off to go out boozing with their fellow cab drivers until the next shift begins. And who can blame them? But at 10 PM, when you're just trying to make your way to the convenience store without being crushed by a Volkswagen Santana, they'll come swerving out in front of you, wondering whether there's anywhere you'd like to go.

"No, nowhere," you'll say. "Just that shop across the street."
"But what about downtown? Lots of bars downtown, you know. Lots of coffee shops."

I lucked out on the night of my ill-fated Starbucks crusade. It was rush hour, and I managed to catch the sixth cab. But as he was swinging over to the curb to pick me up, a moped slammed into his bumper and one of the passengers went flying out into the street. She lay there startled for an instant, but once she realized what had happened, she started bawling. The pilot, her boyfriend, parked the moped and rushed over to scream at the cabbie. Then he went out to the street to see if his girlfriend was alive. Then he returned to scream at the cabbie. Tentatively, I got in the backseat.

The cabbie was stoic, unsympathetic. And for my part, I was rooting for him. I was willing to testify on his behalf in Chinese court (if there is such a thing). The cabbie had signaled and slowly glided towards the sidewalk. The moped, meanwhile, had been riding his ass, and the pilot had been speeding along inattentively, on the wings of love, as the song goes. His girlfriend was alright. Sniffling a bit, but alright. In any case, Mr. Moped seemed more concerned about his ride. But his shitbike was alright, too. Still, he kept demanding money from the cabbie, and kept stealing glances at me in the backseat, as though I were somehow to blame. Of course, I was the obvious suspect in all this. Car accidents are a rare event and foreigners are a rare event, so in the rare event that those two rare events collide, it makes sense that they should be connected.

Eventually, Mr. Moped made a gesture that might have been obscene, and the cabbie reciprocated it. Then the cabbie hawked a loogie out the window, lit a cigarette, and asked me where I wanted ... to go.

"Take me home," I said.
"Home," he grunted.
"The New Campus," I said. "The First Wing of the New Campus. The Big Gate of the New Campus. The Teachers' Apartments on the New Campus. Building number 61."
"So that's home," laughed the cabbie.
"It'll do for now," I said. Or something like that.

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Pepto Bismol Dawn

I went to bed around midnight but never got around to sleeping. My mind did crossword puzzles for half an hour, amused itself with half-baked puns and not-quite jokes. Then it jolted me awake at 1 AM with an idea. I hustled to the study and sat down in front of my laptop. I cracked my knuckles and typed the following:

"What if there were a bank where you could walk in, hand over your money, and the teller would give you an equivalent amount of food in return ..."

In that goofy frame of unconscious mind, The Bank of Food struck me as a sturdy foundation for an 800-page utopian novel. My magnum opus. But before I'd even broken ground on the second paragraph, the fog began to part, and I realized that, yes, such banks already exist. They call them restaurants. Dumbass.

By then I was fully awake and, given my work schedule, I decided that this was not a good thing. So I went back to bed and lay there reading The Count of Monte Cristo. Nothing like a thousand-page novel about a prison cell to put a man to sleep, I figured. But I have always been a carcerophile, so I read and kept reading until my Kindle ran out of juice. I was horrified when I checked the clock again and saw that it was 4:30. I needed to be up in two hours. Well, shit. I had committed myself to another zombie Monday. So I went back out to the study, dumped a couple kilos of Nescafe into a preexisting vat of lukewarm waterlike fluid, and drank my first cuppa of the stillborn day. I started writing, and I wrote until my laptop ran out of juice, until the shaded windows started glowing. I parted the blinds and saw that the sun was coming up. The sky was pink.

I took a birdbath in the sink, brushed my teeth in the shower, and poured all my Nescafe proceeds into a plastic water bottle for the road. I started walking to school. It was 6:30.

Mornings are by far the most pleasant time of day in China, and it's really a shame that I'm never awake for them. China's circadian rhythm doesn't start pounding until 7 AM, so I had a solid half-hour to enjoy the sounds of Nanchong rather than its ruckus, its sights rather than its spectacles, and its windborne aromas rather than its airborne diseases.

The streets were empty, aside from the occasional geriatric tai ji guru, sculpting and slow-mo chopping the air. They say you can kick a man's ass that way, but I imagine it takes a while. There was an oldster dance troupe in the square behind the Confucius statue, a bunch of grandmas two-stepping to a Chinese Salt 'n Pepa jam pumping from an old school boombox propped up at Confucius' learned feet. I caught my first heckle of the day at 6:47 AM, a scaldingly loud lao-WAI from a college kid, and all I could muster in return was the saddest, weariest "Why?" face, a face that made me shudder, and my heckler, too.

I've been rooting for winter this year. A first for me. As a native Nebraskan, winter is not something I would wish upon anyone, least of all myself. But summer hung around a bit too long, if you ask me, lingered like a stale barroom conversation well into the middle of October. I'd long since wanted to call for the tab and move onto the next thing, though I knew full well the next thing was another gray and miserable November in Nanchong.

That Monday morning, winter came in with the Pepto Bismol dawn, and Nanchong was once again all mud and London fog and puddles so deep that you'll lose your shoes in them if you're not careful. Just the way I remembered the place.

The sidewalk tiles are the same wherever you go in China, the same alternately off-red and bright yellow bricks, etched with the same pattern of parabolas, on and on forever. The sidewalks in Nanchong were laid either in great haste or with awe-inspiring laziness. If you had a mind to do so, you could pluck the tiles out one by one with a pair of chopsticks. If it's rained sometime in the past week - a safe bet in Nanchong - the tiles will spurt murky black water all over your pantlegs when you step on them. On at least two occasions that I can remember, the tiles have belched up live toads. Which isn't all that surprising. There are toads all over the place in Nanchong. You very rarely see them alive, but come autumn, the streets are practically tarred with squashed toads and artistic splashes of dried black toad blood. The other day, I saw a live toad that was as big as a small dog. I know this because there was a small dog standing right next to the toad, unawares. So I had time to compare. The toad hopped and the dog ran for its ever-loving life.

Nanchong winters are not Nebraskan winters. There is no snow, for one thing. And the temperature seldom drops below freezing, for another. But by some hideous miracle of humidity and air pressure, the winters here are perhaps even worse than the ones I've grown to know and loathe in the American Midwest. It is, as they say, a damp cold. It's colder indoors than it is outdoors. And likewise, you are colder inside than you are outside. You'll find yourself sweating, even as your bones have turned to icicles. It is a murky, gloomy, dead sort of cold. And yet I couldn't wait for it to come. And now it is here. And it will remain here through March. Or April. Winter, too, will wear out its welcome.

The classroom was frigid and dank as the Château d'If. My students were already watching an overdubbed version of The Gods Must Be Crazy as I ascended to my rightful throne. I clicked "stop" and my students groaned.

"Actually, today, we're going to finish watching The Joy Luck Club - "

NO!!!!! they shouted in unison.

"Boring!"

"Sad!"

A first. My students love The Joy Luck Club. Unconditionally.

"We want watch this movie!"

Watch this movie! they chanted, watch this movie!

And another first: I was legitimately pissed off at my students.

"No. This movie is in Chinese," I snapped. "This is an English class. I was nice enough to let you watch a movie today. So if it's boring to you, we can always, oh, I don't know, practice speaking English or something - "

NO!!!!!

I put on the film and took my place in the very back row of the classroom, where the desktop graffiti is vulgar and amusing. I've watched The Joy Luck Club sixteen times by now. Buy me a beer and I'll recite the whole damned thing for you.

Something I neglected to mention in my last post: I'm actually very popular on campus, at least among those students who actually know me. My former students adore me, and I adore them. Which only makes my college life all the more schizophrenic.

On my way out to lunch, I passed a trio of sexually frustrated twerps, and one of them barked, "FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU."

"Thanks," I muttered.

In the next instant, a gaggle of young ladies spotted me and started giggling.

"Mr. Panda! Hey! What's up?"
My old students.
"Howdy, ladies," I called out, suddenly jovial. "How you doin'?"

They giggled some more, and I smiled all the way to the next heckler.

It was noon and I had another four hours of teaching ahead of me. It was already a full 24 hours since I'd last slept. I had three hours to kill before my first afternoon class and no money to spend, and the tiles spewed raw sewage all over my shoes as I walked. And I walked, just looking for somewhere ... to go.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Big Man on Campus

Here in China, I split my time between two college campuses: the Old Campus and the New Campus. And I suppose that I'm the Big Man on both of them. Not because I am the most popular man, or the biggest man, or even the most manly man - but because, by virtue of being the only white male employed at the one campus, and the only white male in residence at the other, I attract the most attention.

And as any eighth-year frat boy senior will tell you, the job of Big Man on Campus is a demanding one. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, et cetera. Big Man on Campus isn't an empty title like Queen of England or Governor of Alaska. No. The Big Man on Campus has his work cut out for him.

The Big Man on Campus has to plot and execute high-risk afterhours assaults on heavily fortified ladies' dormitories, and he must foot the bill for any and all water balloons, rotten fruit, whipped cream, and feral pigs deployed in the attack.

Once a year, the Big Man has to track down the gawkiest freshman girl on campus and painstakingly transform her into the sultriest maiden in all of Sichuan Province. Then he must set her up with the hunky-ass dreamboat Captain of the Ping-Pong Team, and make the relationship work via opportunely timed roofies coupled with underground surveillance. And the Big Man must get all of that shit squared away in time for the Mid-Autumn Dance.

Then, before the end of the spring semester, the Big Man must find the geekiest, most linguistically inept Southeast Asian foreign exchange student, take him under his wing and (more roofies, more surveillance) turn him into a kind of all-purpose gigolo.

This is a hefty workload for even the biggest of all Big Men. So there are very few applicants for the position. But Big Man on Campus isn't really the kind of position you can apply for. Not just anyone can be a Big Man. No, the Big Man on Campus is, in his way, a kind of Chosen One.

The Big Man on Campus must possess certain assets, most of them born of nature rather than nurture. He must own a bulletproof liver. So he should probably be Irish, or Polish, or preferably both. Beerpong skills are a prerequisite - or Caps skills, should he happen to be a Big Man somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard.

The Big Man must be functionally illiterate, or must be capable of appearing so during social outings. He must not use polysyllabic words like "polysyllabic." He must not succumb to moods, or what might be construed as moods by other undergraduates. Ideally, the span of the Big Man's consciousness should range between two emotions and two emotions only: first and foremost, a kind of chanting, fist-pumping "party mode," in which the Big Man incites his underlings to a riotous state of chanting, fist-pumping, binge-drinking fury; and then a "burned mode" that comes out only when the Big Man has been let down by his underlings, who, fearing suspension or expulsion from school, didn't have the balls to purchase eight kegs of Keystone Light with an absurdly counterfeit out-of-state license, or didn't have the cojones to clog the heating ducts of the girls' dormitory with 69 gallons of Vaseline. Or lacked the testicular fortitude to shove a banana in the tailpipe of the Crusty Dean's Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, or were too pussy to puke and rally after five too many Natty Ices. And so on.

The Big Man should be something of a misogynist, and must own at least five misogynistic t-shirts. But at the same time, the Big Man has to be just chivalrous enough to get some.

Heavy is the head that wears the crown. Et cetera.

I certainly didn't fit the Big Man mold during my time as an undergrad. I was more like the linguistically inept Southeast Asian foreign exchange student. Or worse, the aspiring writer who moonlighted as a trombonist in a ska band. But I was prepared to step into the Big Man's shoes in China, if my services were needed to that end. Given the sheer number of young people on your average Chinese campus - 20,000, 30,000 kids? - and the complete absence of meaningful liquor laws, I imagined long before I arrived in China that the role I'd be playing would be more Will Ferrell than Jeremy Piven, more "Bluto" Blutarsky than Vernon Wormer, more Big Man than Crusty Dean.

But needless to say, Chinese college campuses have proven to be a bit different from their counterparts in the US of Fuckin' A. Which is to say: they ain't the same ballpark, ain't the same league, ain't even the same fuckin' sport. Chinese colleges are colleges insofar as there are dormitories, students, professors, public safety officers, classrooms, cafeterias, and libraries. As far as the faculty and facilities go, there are parallels. But the parallels stop there, and I have long since given up drawing them.

To begin with, on all Chinese campuses, there is a strictly enforced curfew. The gates to the campus are bolted shut at eleven PM. Should you happen to break curfew, unless the drunk-ass nightwatchmen are feeling especially cognizant on the night in question, you will be stranded outside for the remainder of the evening, left to commune with the stray dogs and stray drunks and stray drunk dogs until the sun comes up. Then, the next morning, Lucy, you got some splainin' to do.

The power to the dormitories gets cut off at eleven sharp, so you had better well be back in your dorm room with all your faculties intact and your PJ's on by 10:30 at the latest. And did I mention that you have five roommates? And that you all live together in a single dorm room the size of a Burger King bathroom? That there is no running water? And that your room is not heated in the winter, or air conditioned in the summer? If you're lucky, maybe one of your roommates brings a space heater from home, or splurges for a heavy-duty fan. And maybe someone owns a laptop that all six of you can fight over during the daytime hours, when you're not in class, when you're not studying your asses off, when the power is on.

All and all, having lived with a handful of dudes in college confines that weren't anywhere near as close, the life of a Chinese undergraduate strikes me as a profoundly sweaty, smelly, and claustrophobic existence.

Nor do you shed the shackles of mass cohabitation as you grow older and more qualified. My Mandarin tutor, a 26 year-old graduate student, still lives with five other girls she doesn't know very well, in a room the size of a Burger King bathroom, with no heat and no air conditioning, no running water, and so on.

In the mornings, when you walk past the dormitories, you see all these jumbo-sized plastic thermoses lined up on the sidewalk.

"What're those for?" I once asked a fellow professor of English.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, what do the kids use those thermoses for?"
"They use them to get water from the well. So they can wash their faces before class," he said in a matter-of-fact way that made me feel like the biggest boob on Earth, just for asking.

So the baldfaced facts of college life in China are enough to throw a pretty damned wet fucking rag on the party. Still, you'd think a handful of troublemakers would manage to find a way to slip through the cracks, to get around the system. They're college kids, after all. To quote Dr. Ian Malcolm: Greek life finds a way. Greek life always finds a way.

But the rules here are about as flexible as a chin-up bar.

I get my exercise done after dark. Because that way, no one stares at me. No one laughs. Except for the young couples giggling in the bushes. But I don't mind them, because eventually, I get to laugh back at them.

Every night, around ten PM, I walk to the chin-up bar behind the basketball courts. And along the way, I will often pass a young couple giggling in the bushes. They will sit and watch me grunt and wheeze there at the bar, and they will giggle. And I look at them like, what? Can't a white man do chin-ups at ten PM in this country? But the couples are never there for very long. Because inevitably, one of the omnipresent public safety officers will sweep through with his flashlight, twirling his bamboo truncheon, hawking his loogeys, and the star-crossed lovers will scatter through the brush like a couple of fugitives.

If I happen to be out a little earlier, if I happen to be buying beer in lieu of working out, I can hear the couples talking about me as I pass, as though I'm an accessory to their romantic evening, like a shooting star, or a mutually adored booty song that suddenly comes on the radio.

"There goes a laowai," the girl will say.
"Yeah. Check out his beard."
"And his clothes."
"And his nose. It's so big."
"And his hair. It's so curly."
"He looks like a monkey."
"Yeah."
"Yeah."
"So you love me, right?"
"Of course I love you."
"We're gonna be alright, right?"
"Of course we're gonna be alright, girl."
"Alright."
"Hey. Check it out. HAH-LOO! FOREIGNER, HAH-LOO!"
"You're so funny."
"I know."

But at 10:30 sharp, their evening will end. Like a wet dream shattered by an alarm clock. A hypercharged flashlight in the face. A truncheon stick, twirling. A grunt, a command. Young love broken up by the lustbusters.

Night owl that I am, I every so often find myself the unwitting target of a late night tonsil hockey raid. I'll come swaggering up the road whistling to myself with some Chinese take-out on my hands, and an old man in uniform will blast his 400-kilowatt flashlight in my face. I'd like to think that what he sees frightens him - not a virginal young couple sucking face, but a bearded and depraved white beast, slobbering and frothing with a bagged-up chicken carcass in his greasy hands. But terrified or not, the old man will say nothing. He will grunt dismissively and shoot his flashlight down towards the pavement. Then he will suddenly dash off into a nearby clump of reeds, from whence he has heard the brittle snap of a Chinese Wonderbra unclasping.

It's an overpopulated country, so a good makeout spot is hard to find. And the rules here are not of the breakable, or even bendable variety. Add to this the fact that most Chinese college students - and here, I have to try very hard not to say "all Chinese college students" - are totally uninterested in breaking the rules. No, the rules are unbreakable, like one of those black plastic combs. So the kids sneak their makeouts in when they can. But otherwise, they follow the rules. Everyone is in bed by 11 PM.

The American college experience is all about pushing boundaries, breaking the black plastic comb.

For one thing, your worldview is immensely and irrevocably changed by college. College forces you to push your own boundaries, usually in a positive direction, and for that I'm willing to say that those four years were well worth several decades of debt to my parents, god bless 'em, and to Nelnet, the bastards.

For another thing, the moral codes you used to follow unconditionally as a young lad are suddenly and profoundly elastic once you show up on campus. You make out with girls you have no business making out with. You drink when you're not allowed to drink. You find yourself tapped to smuggle alcohol into the dormitory after hours, and the social perks are too much to pass up. You successfully sneak past the front desk the first few times. And the social perks remain too much to pass up. So you keep at it for a while. And when the RA's start to catch on to you after a couple weeks, you're forced to hide the hooch in ever more elaborate containers: a trombone case, a burlap sack with a dollar sign on it, a prized family heirloom vase, a hobo satchel - part of your Halloween costume. "I'm a hobo this year," you explain. The RA looks you over, frowning. "Dude, you're a hobo every year."

One fateful, heart-palpitating day, you swing by the ladies' dormitory during open visitation hours, lay around shooting the shit with your best girl all evening, then hide out in her closet for a tense thirty minutes while the she-RA makes her nightly sweep. And only after the she-RA has passed through and bid everyone goodnight, only then do you finally let your gut hang out, push open the closet, and drop into the expectant arms of your freshman year fuckbuddy. Or maybe, if you're lucky, just maybe you know the girl working the night shift at the front desk. So you show up in the lobby late one night wearing a wig. With a knowing smile, your accomplice pushes a magic button and the door clicks open. You make your way upstairs. Minutes later, while you're tangled in an impassioned but sloppy makeout, your friend at the front desk executes a small clerical miracle, checks you into the aforementioned fuckbuddy's room under a female alias, a name she makes up on the spot. Suzanne McMaltroy. Or some shit. And your friend at the front desk, god bless 'er, keeps a straight face around the she-RA the next morning.

All of this as much a part of the American college experience as the degree itself. And I would be much poorer today if I hadn't dabbled in some version of the above shenanigans during my tenure as an undergraduate at a Midwestern Jesuit University to remain nameless.

But such intrigue doesn't happen at Chinese universities. Of course, I'd be the last one to know if it did. I am a professor of sorts, so I wouldn't want to know anyway. But I understand my students fairly well by now, and my intuition tells me that, no, nothing of the sort happens. My students know enough by now to follow the rules, and they know that by following the rules, they will get a degree. So they follow the rules.

And therein lies the biggest difference. Chinese college students are told what to think. They are given the rules in advance. American college students are taught how to think. They must find their own rules. Whereas American universities are a training ground for adulthood - a brief, four-year sampling of all the intellectual maturity that adulthood has to offer, and likewise a coarse introduction to the bottomless moral depravity of the adult world - Chinese universities are a boot camp for successful integration into the Chinese economy. Chinese universities are obedience schools. They are little else.

Chinese college students are not adults when they arrive on campus, and they are not adults when they leave. Or I should say, very few of them are. And of course, certain American college students are not quite grown-up either, even after graduation. But however badly American undergrads misbehave, at the end of four or six or eight years, they are generally well on their way towards maturity. At the very least, they graduate with some understanding of the real world, however much they choose to avoid it. I cannot say the same for my Chinese college students. The maturity gap is stunning. Both socially and intellectually, my students have been very deliberately preserved in a kind of larval stage.

The vast majority of my students have never had a girlfriend or a boyfriend. They are 21 years old and have never, not once been on a date. The idea of romance is something they take a great deal of interest in, judging by the movies they watch and the music they listen to. But when applied to their own hopes and aspirations, love is a vaguely disgusting prospect that makes them blush and turn away from the person who was so uncouth as to bring it up.

What few gentlemen I have in my Oral English classes sit in the very back row, not because they are the most indifferent students (though they often are), but because they want to get as far away from the girls as possible. Rare are the boys who will break rank to mingle with the girls. And even more rare are the girls who will dare to infiltrate the Chinese brotherhood, even when I specifically pair them up with boys. Chinese college classes have the feel of a middle school sockhop.

Outside of class, you will often encounter a gang of fired-up college guys, five or six of them, and if you happen to be a foreigner, they will likely heckle you. Or you may encounter a flock of giggling college girls, five or six of them, and if you happen to be a foreigner, they will likely heckle you. Every now and again, usually late at night, you may see the odd young couple holding hands, might hear them giggling in the bushes. But otherwise, the genders never collide at Chinese universities. Not quite coeds, these kids.

I'll admit that it's a bit charming, in a way. As something of a late bloomer myself, I don't think it's entirely unhealthy that the Chinese hold off on the dating game. And there's something admirable about the austerity with which most of my students tackle their studies. The way they show up for my class on time and prepared each and every day, even if Mr. Panda doesn't. The way they scurry off the moment the bell rings to lock themselves away in an empty classroom with a stack of English grammar books for the remainder of the afternoon and evening, and for much of the night. Their very best qualities shine through in their studies. Determination, patience, thrift. But at the same time, their studies are where their naïvité comes most to the fore.

I am not much older than my students - a grizzled 27 to their almost cartoonishly chipper 21 - but still I must structure my classes so that they are not too adult for my audience. I do this out of respect for my students, and out of necessity.

I get the impression that if I were to show my students a film rated PG-13 or above, they would be extremely offended and would not forgive me for the offense. And for as much as I am here to teach, I am also here not to offend, and the latter certainly pulls more weight than the former when it comes to keeping myself employed.

My students are utterly underwhelmed by what we in the West think of as adult conversation. They do not want to exchange ideas. They do not want to learn about the outside world. They would rather repeat after me. They would rather listen to me lecture. They would rather I sing them a song. They would rather watch a brainless romantic comedy. My job is to turn the floor over to them. But they don't want the floor. They don't know what to do with the floor. They are terrified of the floor.

Often, one of my students will disrupt a classroom debate on global warming, on pollution, on overpopulation, on religious freedom in America to demand that I sing them all a song, right there on the spot. And what follows is a tremendous round of applause from the students, just about all of them. My students don't want to debate. They don't want to test their ideas. They don't want to practice speaking English. They want me to sing them a song. For most of them, I am their first non-Chinese teacher. For many of them, I am the first foreigner they've ever spoken with. But they don't want to know anything about me or where I come from. They want me to sing a song. They want to watch a movie. They want to be entertained.

My students know by now what I expect of them, and they value my expectations. So they will at least parrot a debate, for my sake. To humor me. But I remain mindful of what they'd rather be doing with their time: they'd rather I were singing them songs in Chinese, talking to them in Chinese, and being jokey and absurd, as I often am. Debates and discussions are merely the things they do to keep me happy. I know that, and they know that.

When I showed my students Into The Wild last semester, they told me point blank that it was "sad and boring." Which stunned me. I don't even like the film that much, myself. But they weren't talking aesthetics. They found the subject matter sad and boring. A young college graduate burns all of his cash in the middle of the desert and hitchhikes his way to Alaska, where he dies a gruesome and lonely death. Sad, yes. But boring?

Then, a few months later, my students returned with the same verdict for Lost in Translation. Sad and boring. This stunned me all the more. Lost in fucking Translation. A romantic comedy. And my students love romantic comedies. But the themes, perhaps, were too adult for them. Broken marriages, failed careers, cultural dissonance, falling in love, Bill Murray. It wasn't fluffy enough, I guess. It was too real, I suppose.

Of all the songs and films I showed them, only The Joy Luck Club held their attention, perhaps because it involved Chinese people, perhaps because a smattering of Chinese is spoken in the film. Either way, nobody dared to call The Joy Luck Club sad or boring, though admittedly, I found it a great deal of both.

My students don't want to watch challenging films, or talk about difficult things. They would rather that I, Mr. Panda - their white, blue-eyed, somewhat blonde professor - sang them "Hotel California," or "Take Me Home, Country Road," or something by Lady Gaga, or something by The Carpenters.

But I don't know those songs. And I didn't come here to entertain. I want to prepare these kids for the world that awaits them, the world they are about to inherit, a world that very much wants to include them. I am here to prepare these kids for adulthood, to prepare them for a very adult world that will crush them if they are not ready for it. But they have been brought up as children, and the system wants them to remain so.

If I were to cater to their interests, I would be doing them a tremendous disservice. I would be giving them a spoonful of sugar to help the Pepsi go down. On the other hand, there is the risk that by shooting over their heads, my students wouldn't get anything out of my class at all. They would remain sad and bored. And there is the even greater risk of getting into trouble by teaching subject matter that is too adult, i.e., too real.

So I try to find a middle ground. Far short of showing them Schindler's List. Far short of breaking into song and dance. And that is the tedious ground I stand upon these days.

Meanwhile, outside of class, college students taunt me, mock me, laugh in my face. Because I am a foreigner, you know. These are twentysomethings who are smart enough, rich enough, or lucky enough to be studying at an institute for higher education, and they will remorselessly heckle a faculty member who belongs to their own school. I try to delude myself: these kids are merely bidding me a friendly HAH-LOO. But deep down, I know there is nothing friendly about it. They know what they are doing. I know what they are doing. They are harassing me, plain and simple, and for all the history between us, I still do not understand the foreigner treatment in the least.

Walking around campus is when I feel most estranged from my college days. I am the Big Man on Campus, after all. I attract the most attention, after all. But here in Nanchong, here on my own college campus, the attention is overwhelmingly negative. If we could sit down and talk, I'd tell these kids, listen: I work for you. I bust my ass for you. I am here, teaching for nothing, because I believe that I can help you. If we could only just sit down and talk -

FOREIGNER. HAH-LOO, FOREIGNER. HAH-LOO. FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU!

Yes. Fuck me. You are a college student. You are 21 years old. I have come here to help you. And I feel like a colossal fool.

When I try to turn the tables and imagine some Ethiopian professor on a whitebread American campus catching flack for leaving his apartment, I can't picture it at all. In fact, I can't imagine anywhere else in the world - not even Korea - where an English teacher would have to absorb such nonsense day in day out, just for going to work.

America has already endured the worst of its racial growing pains. Or I should hope so, anyway. But in China, especially in Sichuan, racism hasn't even begun to enter the picture. Foreigners are still novelties here, not yet a threat. I live on a college campus, but it is still a campus that is 99.9% Han Chinese. So I can't expect my provincial college to be as welcoming of foreigners as the university I attended back in the States. But China is a fairly developed country. China is the world's second largest economy. China is a part of the world, and the Chinese are no longer as isolated as they would like to believe. They have the Internet, and thus, some limited access to the non-Chinese world. They are certainly aware that Westerners exist in their country. And college students, of all people, should be the most aware of that fact. In short, it strikes me more as a question of growing up, rather than a question of ignorance. The awareness is already there, but not the understanding.

So, yes, ye undergrads of Nanchong, I'm sure that I probably do look funny to you. I have yellow hair. I sport a beard. And I'm awfully pale. And sometimes my fly is down when I don't mean it to be. But by now, you've seen bearded white men on the television. By now, you've probably even seen bearded white men on the street. So, why is it that your first impulse is not to wave politely at me, or to simply let me pass by undisturbed, but to harass me? I am a human being. Like you, I go to school. I return home from school. I eat, I drink. I am 27, a fact that scares even me. I teach at your university, and I teach there for free. I am doing a service to your country. So where, exactly, do you get off harassing me, and making my life miserable when it doesn't have to be? Beats you. Beats me.

I have nothing else to say about the matter. But ladies and gentlemen, Big Men and Sichuanese divas, Southeast Asian exchange students and eighth year frat boy seniors, we now live in a world where no man is an island, where no country is an island, where no island is an island - we live in a world where nobody anywhere is likely to remain an island for very much longer. And I suppose we're all just going to have to cozy up to that fact pretty damned fast.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Hemingway Interlude

Every time you catch a Chinese cab, it's like being shot out of a cannon.

An explosion. Bam. Then, a rushing sensation. Your ears whistle. Your cheeks flap wildly in the wind. Thousands of faces whoosh past. You have just enough time to utter a clench-teethed prayer to whatever deity you happen to believe in, but not enough time to see whether it's been answered. Everything turns hot white. Then everything goes black. And if you're lucky, you'll wake up a moment later to find you've landed safely, ass-first, back in the fake leather sofa in your living room. If you're not, some poor cab driver is going to have an international incident on his hands.

Walking around a Chinese metropolis is no less disorienting to me. It's like being shot out of a cannon on the moon. Slower, yes. But you're still being shot out of a goddamned cannon.

I am a man who feels truly overmatched in most cities, even lowly Omaha. The crush of people and cars puts me in a kind of autistic trance, where words and emotions elude me and all I can do is gawk and grunt. But downtown Nanchong overwhelms me completely, pushes me past the point of annoyance or frustration, beyond organized thought or linear perception. My nervous system keeps me walking and breathing. But my brain gives up making sense out of its surroundings. The world comes in fits and starts, in the form of isolated images stripped of context, like slides projected onto a blank white wall.

A child dropping a deuce into a sewer grate. A heaping vat of glazed duck livers behind a red-tinted storefront window. A blast of sparks. A tornado of soot churning up into the air. A white dog and a black dog sniffing each others' behinds, spinning around in an unending yin-yang of anuses and cold noses. A loogey. Another loogey. A young woman in a flowerprint dress perched sidesaddle on the back of a moped with one leg crossed over the other at the ankle, just so. An elderly Chinese peasant woman sporting a Tina Turner 'do. Toy poodles for sale. Toy handguns for sale. Sex toys for sale. A man walking a live praying mantis down the street on a string, not for sale. A gang of young children stomping on a sheet of Styrofoam until the flakes are caught up by the wind and sent flurrying off into traffic. A man standing with his woman backed into a corner, the flat of his hand poised in midair en route to the side of her face. A heckler. Another heckler. Across the way, one of the guys at the Muslim noodle joint spots me. We make eye contact, and he winks. But I don't know how to wink. So I blink and keep walking. A minor bicycle accident. A crowd gathers. A major car accident. A crowd gathers. Bargain bin umbrellas for sale. A crowd gathers. I stop walking for a moment because I no longer know where I am walking. A crowd gathers.

There is a restaurant downtown that I like to go to. The owners are a gruff, not-from-around-here husband and wife duo who don't give a shit that I am a foreigner, and couldn't give two shits if I patronized their restaurant or not. They are about as welcoming as a couple of tranquilized lizards. And that's how I like my service in this country. Surly and distant. The restaurant is almost always empty. So it gets my business.

It is a small restaurant, not much bigger than my living room, and the walls are thin, so the roar of the Big Red Machine is never quite far off. But after a year, I no longer notice the noise. The noise I can deal with. It is solitude I crave, the ability to sit down and read, undisturbed, in some dank shithole with a lukewarm plate of grub and a lukecold bottle of beer, sequestered from the whole sensory barrage raging just outside the window.

On Friday night, I swung by the restaurant and ordered fried eggs with diced tomato. And a beer. While I waited, I took out my Norton Anthology of American Literature and flipped it open at random. I landed on Hemingway. I read. And after a while, I said aloud: "Huh."

Nick knew it was too hot. He poured on some tomato catchup. He knew the beans and spaghetti were still too hot. He looked at the fire, then at the tent ... He was very hungry.


"Huh," I said again.

The fried eggs showed up. The owner kind of frisbeed the dish at me. Then came the beer. The eggs weren't so hot. The beer wasn't all that cold. Nothing was good enough, but it was good enough for me. I resumed reading.

"Nick drank the coffee ... The coffee was bitter."

"He was sleepy. He felt sleep coming."

"He wished he had brought something to read. He felt like reading."

I laughed and looked out the window. Then I looked back down at the book. Then I laughed again. What was I reading? Where the hell had it come from? What time, what place? Sparse and economical, but vivid; understated and confident. Hemingway, in short. And yet - I looked back out the window. Something clicked.

How in the blue fuck could anyone write like that - about a place like this?

How to write The Heming Way about somewhere so profoundly Pynchonesque?

How does a writer remain sparse and economical in the extravagant modern fairyland of bullshit? Remain understated and confident in the age of festering neuroses?

No idea, I shrugged. I'd already finished my eggs, and the beer. So I ordered another bottle. The owner had no opinion. He couldn't give three shits how much of my money I gave him, and wouldn't give four shits if I stayed there reading 'til the restaurant closed.

I imagined Hemingway in China. How would he write this place?

"The boy needed to pee. The boy ran out to the sidewalk to pee. He peed. It felt good to pee."

"The students saw the man. The man was a foreigner. They liked to shout at the foreigner. They shouted at the foreigner."

"The old man wanted to spit. He liked to spit. He spat. It was a very good feeling."

Hemingway. I like the guy. He is good. During undergrad, I drank heavily from the wineskin of Hemingway's prose. He was once the ideal I aspired to. Back then, all adjectives were four-letter words to me. And adverbs were the kind of four-letter words that'd get you smacked. And abstractions? Shee-it. For a wishy-washy noun like "essence," the Minimalist Mafia would cut you up in a back alley and dump you into the Missouri for fish food.

But concreteness seems heavyhanded to me now, as I try to write about a place where complexity and ambiguity and chaos are the primary players. Where the characters don't follow narrative arcs, but dance the frenzied jig of breakneck consumerism. A place where what little clarity to be found is in my own 1500 cubic centimeters of skull space, and all else is fog, and people, and more people, and too much fog to tell the too-many-people apart.

Aw, hell, I grunted. What do I know? It's Friday night. No time for this. I closed the book and, like a good Norton Anthology hardcover should, it thumped shut like a drum. I got up to pay my tab. The owners told me how much and I paid them that much, and they didn't say thank you, so I didn't say I was welcome. I turned to leave, then I turned back around because I had to pee.

"Do you have a bathroom?" I asked.
The woman pointed into the kitchen, and the man pointed where she pointed.

The bathroom was in the back of the kitchen, behind a plywood door hanging off its hinges like a loose tooth. I nudged open the door with my elbow and the ammonia peeled my eyes like a couple of grapes. The toilet, as you might expect, was a squatter, and it was filthy.

But I really had to pee. I pulled down my pants to pee. I peed. It felt good to pee.

Saturday, October 02, 2010

In the Red, Black and Blue

Fourteen days, I been sleepin' in a barn
Better get a paycheck tattooed on my arm
-Beck


The dog days of summer took a rabid bite out of my ass. And in this country, loss of ass is the ultimate loss of face. So on a trashy Tuesday afternoon, I hobbled on down the road to consult my friendly neighborhood practitioner of Chinese medicine, the provincially feared Dr. Wu.

I found him behind the counter, in the lotus position, levitating four feet off the ground with a stale cigarette butt clenched between his teeth. It took him a full minute to notice me. Then his mouth dropped open like a glove compartment, the cigarette fell dead to the floor, and he barked the word laowai. Disbelieving, he hawked a loogey and the loogey levitated, too. Gross, I said.

"Where are you from?" Dr. Wu asked.
"America."
"Can you use chopsticks?"
"Sometimes."
"Do you like China?"
"... Yes."
"Do you want a cigarette?"
"Yes."

He hovered back down to his bare feet. He squeezed a pack of Hongmeis from the pocket of his robe, offered me one, and lit one for himself. We smoked, sizing each other up. Then I cleared my throat and kowtowed before him. He nodded.

"Symptoms," he grunted.

I described my affliction to Dr. Wu in the most apt cartoon metaphors I could think of at the time.

"When I open my wallet, flies come out," I said. "When I look at my friends, I see hotdogs and hamburgers. When I pass a restaurant window, I turn into a wolf and my tongue dangles way the fuck out my mouth."
"Yes, yes. And when you try to withdraw money from the ATM, a sad trombonist plays a descending glissando somewhere in the distance."
"That's the one," I said.
"Hmm," he hmmed, gathering his fu manchu into a goatee. "Yes. I understand. You are hungry but no food fills. You are thirsty but no cold beverage quenches. You are jonesing but no cigarette soothes. You punch in your PIN number but no ATM machine puts out."
I nodded.
"Yes. It is clear to me now. All very clear. Yes."
"Is it serious, Dr. Wu?"
"It is serious. Very, very serious," he said, shaking his head. "I am afraid it is Ah Q Disease."
"Ah Q Disease? What the hell does that mean?"
"It means - " and here, he paused to light his second Hongmei with his first. Then he smirked. "It means: bitch, you broke."

I begged and pleaded for the antidote.
"Doctor," I said, "ain't there nothing I can swallow? To put some money in my wallet?"
Dr. Wu snapped his fingers and his cigarette vanished. He smirked.
"I said, doctor, ain't there nothing I can swallow? I said, doc-tor, to put some money in my wallet?
He gazed at me wearily, muttered something to himself, then sank down below the counter and rifled around in the shelves. He reemerged with a vial of black slime and a fun-sized box of Cocoa Puffs.
"You put the slime in the Cocoa Puffs and you drink 'em both together," he said. "You put the slime in the Cocoa Puffs, and you'll feel better."
"Now lemme get this straight," I said. "I put the slime in the Cocoa Puffs and I drink 'em both up."
He nodded. "You put the slime in the Cocoa Puffs. And call me in the morning."

I took out my wallet.
"How much?" I asked.
"Twenty kuai."
"And what is the slime, exactly?"
"Pulverized Left Buttock of Landlord. Good for treating poverty," he said, "and The Clap."
"And where'd you get the Cocoa Puffs?"
He smirked.
"Wal-Mart, dumbass."

When I got home, I put the slime in the Cocoa Puffs and mixed them up real good with a chopstick. I took a deep breath and chugged down the whole sugary-sulfurous concoction in a single gulp, with a beer chaser. Then, after a mad dash across the room, I chundered it all into the kitchen sink. Holding my own hair back and groaning, I fumbled around for the vial, squinted at the label, and made out the fine print at the bottom: "NO BEER CHASERS."

I flopped down on the living room couch. I didn't have the money for another vial of Pulverized Left Buttock of Landlord. So there was nothing to do but while away my last hours watching Season Five of The Wire. I took a break after Episode Four to look up Ah Q Disease on Wikipedia. The prognosis wasn't good. I'd have to quit smoking. And drinking. And unless I amputated my broke ass myself, I only had three episodes to live.

Apologies. I am speaking in metaphors again. Yet another symptom of Ah Q Disease.

This is my roundabout way of saying that, bitch, I was broke. It was September the 16th, and I had already blown most of my September stipend way back in August. I was feeling generous at the time, so I decided to donate my Peace Corps proceeds to the Chinese Economy. It was for a good cause. Or so I thought. At the time.

August was a wild and delirious month. My brothers and sisters of Peace Co., Ltd. were being shipped back home one by one, so I voyaged to Chengdu to see them off, one by one. I made that trip more times than I can now remember. Looking back, the entire month of August kind of bleeds together into a single regrettable night on the town. It was like going to an Irish wake every day of the week. Who knows, me lad, when you'll ever see the likes of these people again? Vijay's last words to me were "Black Power," accompanied by a feeble brown fist thrust halfheartedly into the air. And Jacob faded into the night with his usual nonsense. "I reap what I say," he said. "You reap what you say?" I asked. "I reap what I say," he said. Then he was gone. And so on. By the end of it, I was taking saline tablets to replenish my tear ducts. By the end of it, my wallet looked like a cirrhotic liver. By the end of it, my liver looked like my wallet.

I found out school was starting about twelve hours before school started. I received a phone call from my handler around 8 PM. Class starts tomorrow at 8 AM, she told me. You had better not be late. A polite string of affirmatives from my end. Well, I'm in Chengdu at the moment, but ... I didn't know, but ... Okay. Yes. Good. Good. Great. Yes. That's fine. Yes, ma'am. I'll be there. Then, a button was pushed, a tone sounded, and a torrent of profanities sprung out of my lips like a canned snake. This is how the semester starts, not with a bang but an f-bomb.

So, ragged and sleep-deprived, with a pocketful of lint and a mouthful of sand, I caught a black cab back to Nanchong. By the time I got home, it was already too late for sleep, so I stayed up planning the next day's lesson. I smoked like a film noir dick until the night turned black as coffee, until the unsuspecting sun woke up and was silently chloroformed by the noxious gray fumes of Nanchong County.

My Mandarin tutor got wind of my return and came by in the afternoon to remind me of an old I.O.Her. Another five hundred kuai out the window. The days leaked past. My stocks tanked. Eventually, my pockets grew so light that I no longer needed a belt to keep my pants up. Then my stomach shrank until I once again needed a belt to keep my pants up.

I wasn't living the lush life any longer. I was living like a bohemian Gandhi. Drinking tap water. Subsisting on rice and ramen. Smoking cigarette butts. I was wringing quarters out of pennies. But given the kind of August I'd had, and figuring in September's daily commute, figuring in photocopies for 400-odd students, figuring in the occasional bowl of rice, figuring in the foreigner tax that I pay when I'm not paying attention, and the stupidity tax that keeps me in cigarettes - figuring in all of that, and after a week or two, even on my very best behavior, I found myself in dire financial straits well before payday. Which was Monday, rumor had it. Or Tuesday, according to more reputable sources. And as timing would have it, Wednesday through Saturday were a bank holiday.


Friday

On the Friday in question, payday was three or four or eight days away, and I could hear poverty buzzing in my ears like one of those fat Chinese houseflies that possess a special affinity for human ear canals. So instead of taking the bus that afternoon, I walked the five miles to class. By the time I'd arrived, the resurgent Sichuanese sun had worked me over and I was wearing a shirtbeard of sweat. And a tan, apparently.

"He's turned black!" gasped a student in the front row.
The Children were appalled. Me, I was flattered. I'm one of those guys who has a permanent beard tan. I'm whiter than white on rice. But when I glanced in the bathroom mirror during my smoke break, I saw that I was indeed looking rather swarthy. Ooh la la, I said to my reflection. Not quite black, though. Not as black, at any rate, as Jacob. Or Chinese Jacob, for that matter.

I walked home in the evening and wasn't heckled once the whole five miles back. Unbelievable. Unprecedented. Five unharassed miles - this was an anomaly, one that begged an explanation.

After a year in this country, I have come to be a firm believer in Jung's collective unconscious. At least as it applies to China. China has moods. I swear it does. My temperament no longer fluctuates much. I'm in China today, and I figure I'll be in China tomorrow. So I live accordingly. But there are days in China when you, as a foreigner, get the shit heckled out of you. Every other person screams in your face. The mopeds chase you down the sidewalk like heatseeking missiles. The construction crews seem to be conspiring to jackhammer your feet, to drop a pallet of cinderblocks on your head, to weld your eyes shut at any given moment. And those days are most days. They are Chinese days. But Chinese days are followed by unexpected hours of inexplicable calm and invisibility. Nobody notices you. The people you meet are courteous and uninterested in the color of your skin. The sidewalk mopeds give you the right of way. The construction crews wave at you, then get back to work on their 73-story apartment megaplex.

But still, these five miles were an anomaly. Not even the good days are this good. I walked and walked. And nobody bothered me. I walked for five miles through a cloud of asbestos and anonymity. And those five miles begged an explanation. And the only theory I could put forth was this: that my newfound complexion and proletariat sweatstains actually scared people. By growing a beard and walking around in the sun all day, I had successfully transformed from whitebread Nebraskan to Muslim extremist. And it was pleasant, this invisibility thing. I vowed to spend more time outdoors. And I vowed to keep my beard.

I had about three US dollars to my name, so I bought myself some crummy ramen noodles of the heat-inflated beef variety. I bought a bottle of water. And I bought a pack of four-kuai Shipai cigarillos.

When I got back home, I boiled the bottled water and dumped it into my bucket of noodles. The noodles sizzled and radiated an eye-watering chemical sting. The beef duly inflated. I sat down at my computer, smoked and tried to write. Nothing came. I grew restless and decided to do some laundry. Clearing out my pockets, I found an unopened pack of cigarettes - what? I set the pack on my writing desk. Then I opened the pack to make sure the cigarettes were real. I fingered them with my eyes, beholding the miracle. I certainly hadn't bought the cigarettes. Nor am I the type to shoplift, not even under the most punishing financial duress. So, where had the cigarettes come from? Perhaps some kindly old shopkeeper had stuffed the pack into my pocket when I wasn't looking. As a gift to a lonesome foreign soul. But the jeans I wear are so damned skinny that I can't even take anything out of my pockets, much less put anything into them. Perhaps I was a shoplifter after all. Perhaps, sensing the destitution lurking around the bend, my subconscious had goaded me into swiping the smokes from the counter when the cashier wasn't looking. But Chinese cashiers are always looking. I brooded. There seemed to be no explanation. I have a gift for making cigarettes disappear, but I have never, not once succeeded in spontaneously generating them. I pondered these mystery cigarettes for a long time. There they were, staring me in the face like the barrels of a gatling gun. Twenty of them - of the half-decent ten kuai variety, too. Then I decided it was silly of me to sit around questioning China's sudden generosity. The thing to do was whoop it up, overdose on Nescafe, and write until Saturday showed up in the mail like a canceled check.


Saturday

Around midnight, Saturday showed up in the mail like a canceled check. I watched the lights across the way flicker out one by one like cigarette butts stomped into the pavement. I got up and tossed a pile of laundry into the washing machine, salted the pile with soap, hit a few buttons at random, and pressed START. A squeamish hissing issued from the machine. I knew what that meant. No water. I tried the tap. A loogey of liquid rust squirted out and nothing more. So much for showering, or wearing clothes over the weekend. But I was okay with that. A typical weekend in the Peace Corps. As long as there was plenty of Nescafe, abundant smokables, an overheating computer, a leaky air conditioner ... briefly, I entertained the thought of collecting all the AC runoff in a bucket and dumping it into the washing machine, but the more I thought about it, the less sure I was that the fluid coming out of the air conditioner was even remotely related to my friend and yours, dihydrogen monoxide.

I wrote for several hours and didn't really get anywhere. I smoked like a coal preparation plant and sang gibberish songs to myself. My AC slobbered all over the heap of rags nestled against the wall and my computer crunched along, erratic and lovable as ever. Then, around midnight, there came a frantic knocking at the door. It was a Chinese knocking, so it came at me in two second intervals. Knock-knock-knock, pause, knock-knock-knock, pause, knock-knock-knock ... I got up to answer it, out of annoyance more than anything else. Then I remembered that I wasn't wearing any pants. So I fished the dry, soap-dusted jeans out of the washing machine and struggled to button them around my waist. The knocking persisted, then it grew louder, more frantic.

"Just a moment!" I shouted in Chinese.

At the door was a sweaty old Chinese man. He started shouting at me before the door had time to open all the way. I knew this couldn't be good. From the old man's cloud of rage, I managed to pluck out the words "water" and "you." I immediately understood the problem. With unusual tact, I explained to the man that there was something the matter with my air conditioning and that I would rectify the problem ASAP. He was not at all comforted by my reassurance and tried to push past me into my apartment. I held him back, for his sake. He kept craning his neck over my shoulder, peering into the writing room.

"Don't worry," I said. "It's an air conditioning problem. There is water coming out. I didn't know it was bothering you down there. I'll turn it off immediately."

He understood, and was suddenly grateful. He bowed before me and smiled, nodded his head rapidly, and said so many thank yous that the words came out in an unbroken convulsion of xie xies. Xie xie xie xie xie xie xie xie xie ... I nodded uncomfortably and shut the door.

I switched off the AC. A few last wallops of slobber pitched to the floor. The room grew instantly muggy, and a kind of steam seemed to waft out of the walls. Then my computer shut off. I dropped the f-bomb. So much for writing. Or showering. Or wearing clothes. Then, from across the room, I heard a splash, and saw that my upstairs neighbor's AC was leaking into my room.

So overcome was I at that point by the sheer folly of existence that I plowed through an unprecedented number of cigarettes, wrote furious and absurd things in an old moleskine, and smoked well into the dark side of Saturday morning.

When I woke up around noon, I had five cigarettes left, and six kuai to my name. About one US dollar. I seemed to remember that there was a bit of gas left in my Chinese bank account, though certainly not enough to be taken out of an ATM without the aid of a crowbar. So I walked the five miles to the bank and asked the teller how much I had left. He took my bank book, fanned it in the air to get the sweat off of it, and swiped it. A beep. He read something off the monitor and laughed. A machine grinded and printed. The teller handed me a receipt.

"Ten kuai and two jiao," he said, grinning.
Ah, yes. I suppose this must be funny, after all.
"In that case, let me take out the ten kuai," I said. "I'll leave the two jiao there. A jiao saved is a jiao earned, as they say."

The teller handed me a filthy taped-together ten spot. A buck fifty. I walked back home and bought some lunch.

Buying cigarettes was out of the question. Certainly, even at the age of 27, survival still took some precedence over self-destruction. But the prospect of survival didn't exactly thrill me at that point. Unless my long-awaited stipend came in on a Sunday, I'd have to make it 48 hours without a cigarette. And there wouldn't be much eating along the way, either.

On the walk home, I scanned the sidewalks for a homeless hundred kuai note tumbling past in the wind. Or even a stray, half-empty pack of cigarettes would've done me some good. But it was nothing but dust and human feces and bits of copper wire, nothing but receipts and real estate brochures, piles of vomit, glass shards, crumpled beer cans, and used cigarettes so old and clearly expired that not even I would stoop to try and smoke them.

Nor would I stoop to ask any of my friends for money. What friends I have here are good ones, so no doubt they would've helped a brother out. But the university hasn't paid the Mennonites in three months, and I imagine the new volunteers, were they to find me on their doorstep late at night in the throes of nicotine withdrawal, trembling, sweating and begging for a ten spot, well - I wasn't sure that would've made the right impression.

So I resolved to lie there in the missionary position and take it like a man. Starvation aside, nicotine withdrawal or no, I would make the most of my weekend in the red. I decided that I would make it my weekend of fasting and spiritual reflection. My two-day Lent. My Diet Ramadan.

I spent most of Saturday curled up in my fake leather sofa, reading My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse. Pleasant company, if nothing else. Hell, I thought, I could use a man like Jeeves. He'd know what to do in a tight spot such as this. "Well, sir, I happen to be acquainted with a ramen noodle distributor just outside of Devonshire ... "

I got up and tried the sink again. More rust juice came squirting out. I flopped back down on the couch and re37watched There Will Be Blood. By the time dinnertime rolled around, I was feeling mighty smug. Why, I hadn't smoked a cigarette in ... six hours. But as day dithered into night and my nocturnal writerly instincts started to gnaw at the bars of their cage, I began to experience that familiar hot air balloon sensation between my ears. I needed to write. And I needed a cigarette.

I scoured the ashtrays, but my stores of half-smoked cigarettes had long since evaporated. I dug through the pockets of all known pairs of pants, suits, coats, pantsuits, and suitcoats - and I added up my life savings: a truly pitiful five jiao. One twelfth of a dollar. About seven cents that had to last me two days. I laughed aloud, and kept laughing until I began to fear that I was probably laughing rather too much given the circumstances.

I sat back down on the couch and fanned my five jiao out on the coffee table like an ill-omened poker hand. Five jiao. Seven cents. I imagined all the things I could buy in China with five jiao. Why, I could probably order an extra dash of vinegar to go with the noodles I couldn't afford. Or an extra scoop of Sichuanese numbing pepper to go with my nonexistent twice-cooked pork. I could perhaps even afford to take a leak in a public restroom, though dropping a deuce would've been out of my price range. In sum, I concluded that having five jiao was about as good as having no money at all. Except it was probably a great deal worse, because I had to sit on my ass in my apartment with five worthless jiao laughing at me the whole time.

I finished Jeeves and started reading The Big Sleep by Raymond Carver. But all Detective Marlowe's smoking on the job really put me in the mood for a cigarette. And unlike Jeeves, Marlowe didn't really seem like the kind of guy who could get me out of a jackpot. So I put down the book and fired up the computer. I tried to write. But writing while your body is busy purging itself of nicotine is like trying to catch feathers in a wind tunnel. So I resorted to desperate measures. I started cleaning my apartment.

Cleanliness was not my motivation. Neither was boredom. Their powers combined are never enough, even, to inspire me to make my own bed. Shame has, on a handful of occasions, duped me into tidying up the place. As have social pressures: a visiting friend, a date with the plumber, snooping employers, et cetera. But this was something else. This was pure desperation. I was not cleaning my apartment - I was excavating it. Or rather, I was cleaning for the purpose of excavation. There was money at stake. And cigarettes at stake. And money with which to buy cigarettes, at stake.

I know myself well enough by now to know that I am the kind of guy who will pitch fistfuls of money on the floor, and then kick them under the bed, and then, over time, kick all sorts of other worthless junk on top of the money under the bed. I am also the kind of guy, believe it or don't, who will discard empty packs of cigarettes without bothering to make sure that they are empty. So I was confident that if I spent a solid ten minutes tidying up my room, I'd come up with four hundred kuai and a box of Cuban cigars that had somehow come into my possession over the past year.

But after I'd cleaned for two hours and turned up nothing but three jiao, I began to worry. On the plus side, I'd worked my way up to eight jiao: a respectable American dime. But eight jiao was certainly not enough for the kind of cigarettes that I was interested in smoking. Enough, perhaps, to drop a deuce in a public squat toilet. But that was way down on my list of things I'd want to do with eight jiao. Way down on my list of things I'd want to do period.

I journeyed deeper into the center of the filth. I found old boarding passes for flights I could no longer remember taking. Phoenix to Guadalajara. Guadalajara to Phoenix. Dublin to Warsaw. Warsaw to Chicago. Chicago to Cincinnati. Cincinnati to Omaha. Omaha to San Francisco - hey, I remember this one! I found old socks, stiff as newspaper. I found the keys to cars I could no longer drive. I found a rusted-out watch, stone dead. I found an old cell phone that I managed to fire up for five minutes so I could flip through its phone book and reflect on the state of my social life circa 2006, before it flickered and went out forever. I found old journal entries where I was imitating Hemingway so badly that I nearly vomited all over my freshly mopped floor - for want of a fireplace, I threw them away. I found Mexican centavos, Polish grosz, Eurocents, Korean won. Japanese coins, like little silver donuts with holes in the middle. I found coins from Thailand, Vietnam, Ecuador, Australia, Indonesia, and all manner of places I have never been. I found a crumpled can of Korean beer that I was able to date to around April, 2007 A.D. And then, under the bed, I came across a promising pack of purple Pandas, relatively untrampled. I shook the pack around a bit. Something rattled. I flipped open the lid and there, inside, was an untouched, mint condition, perfectly smokable cigarette.

"Booyah," I shouted.
And then guilt set in. What are you doing, Pan Da? Wasn't this, after all, your two-day Ramadan? Your Diet Lent? Your weekend of temperance and sobriety and spiritual reflection and what not?

"Fuck it," I said to myself. "It's China."

I lit the cigarette and smoked it. And it was good.


Sunday

Nicotine withdrawal is a funny thing. For me, it isn't the grinding freight train that it is for some smokers. No headaches. No cravings. No, none of that. For me, nicotine withdrawal is a very rational descent into ever more ludicrous stages of rationalization.

At first, it's not really a big deal. Smoke 'em if you got 'em. If you ain't got 'em, don't smoke 'em. Sure, after about six hours, a cigarette would be nice. But so would a lot of things. A ladyfriend to snuggle with. A cat. A pair of decent shoes. A new suitcoat. A functional AC unit. A laptop that doesn't overheat.

After about twelve hours of deliberate non-smoking, my subconscious tackles the case from the public health perspective. Fuck it. It's China. Who knows what kind of nasty shit you're putting in your body as it is. Lead. Asbestos. Melamine. High fructose corn syrup. Among other chemicals yet unknown to science. What's a little tobacco on top of it?

After fourteen hours, my internal debate starts to take on a more existential bent. Look, brother: smoking helps you write, and writing is what you want to do, and you're finally excited about writing, and you're finally sitting down and doing it every day, for several hours every day, so why stop a good thing? Can you write when you're not smoking? (An awkward silence ensues.) See? Smoking goes with the territory. It's the curse of the trade. Smoking is stupid. You know that. But you've already sold your soul to the devil. You'll trade it back later. Now write. And smoke.

Even after all that, I'm still not quite convinced. But after sixteen hours, my subconscious goes for the apocalyptic jugular. Hell, look at the way the world's headed, it says. Has the world gotten safer since you were born? Has oil gotten more plentiful? Has the number of humans on Earth gotten smaller? Shee-it. We'll be lucky if we have five years left. Every tomorrow is an unexpected paycheck. You wake up every morning and think, fuck, is it still on? The way we're headed, either we'll spawn an artificial intelligence that makes our feeble human experiment look like Chinese checkers - in which case, our robot overlords will either wipe us out or kindly cure all our diseases and put us out to pasture - either that or we'll blow the whole shitshow to smithereens. Either way, Petit, you don't stand to be smoking cigarettes for very much longer. And if you do, you certainly don't stand to suffer their consequences. And you enjoy cigarettes, do you not? So, why not enjoy them while you can?

And that last argument always gets me. After sixteen hours, whatever brains I have turn back against themselves like a hangnail.

The problem with Sunday, though, was that neither the technological singularity nor the apocalypse seemed to have gone down overnight. And my stipend hadn't come in, either. And there I was with a hot air balloon for a head and eight jiao to my name. In the parlance of our times, I was royally fucked. So I went down to the bank to see what they could do.

"Has my stipend come in yet?" I asked the teller.
By now, this twiggy little stick of a man had seen my face plenty of times before, had seen it joyfully contort with sudden wealth, had seen its brow furrow with unforeseen scarcity. Still, he laughed in my face when the computer beeped.
"No money," he said, and smirked. "Two jiao."

At the Bank of China, they have these little Customer Approval machines propped up in front of the teller windows. You can hit one of three buttons to rate your banking experience: Satisfied, No Feeling, or Dissatisfied. And your vote gives the bank tellers points, or takes those points away. The bank tellers are rated on the five star system. The veterans have all five stars lit up on the machine. The rookies have no stars at all. Your vote can light up the stars, or blot them out. And as the bank teller smirked at me and my poverty, and as I grimaced at him and my poverty, I let my index finger hover over the Dissatisfied button for an instant. I raised my eyebrows at the man. He smirked. Then I turned away without hitting the button, and I left.

Or I tried to leave.
"HAH-LOO!" barked a security guard.
"Eh?"
"Come here," he said, sternly. "Sit."
"I have to go home," I said.
"Come here," he repeated. "Sit."
He was wielding a rubber truncheon, so I complied.

There were two other guards loitering around the desk, and they were watching me, smirking. The main man looked me over, assessed my ragged jeans, let his eyes linger a bit on my sweatbearded shirt, then leaned forward in his chair.

"Where are you from?" he asked.
"America."
"Can you use chopsticks?"
"Sometimes."
"Do you like China?"
"... Yes."
"Why are you here? In our China?"
"I teach English at the university."
"How much money do you make?"
I cocked my head to the side and stuffed my tongue in my cheek.

I walked back home. My tan had worn off. I was heckled all the way. When I got home, I knifed open an old backlogged care package from my parents and polished off a box of Nutri-Grain bars and a tube of Salt & Vinegar Pringles. I cleaned two more rooms of my apartment but found no cigarettes and no money. I hadn't smoked since Saturday morning. It was Sunday night.

The water was on again, so I resalted the laundry from the night before, turned on the washing machine, and pressed START. It whirred for a couple minutes. Then the power went out.

"Son of a bitch bastard," I muttered.

Everyone in the apartment complex flooded out into the streets. For two hours, it was me in my dark room, writing away with the last juice my laptop had left, while TV-withdrawn children screamed and shrieked and wept down below. Then my computer shut off. And it was just me in my dark room. I felt my way to the living room, thinking I'd watch There Will Be Blood again. But ah, yes. No power. I felt my way to the bedroom and thought I'd read another couple chapters of Chandler, but when I hit the lightswitch - ah, yes. No power. So I felt my way around the apartment for a while, unsure, really, what to do with myself, until I kicked over a bottle of beer and stumbled across an idea. Ah, yes!

It pays to drink in China. Whatever you pay for a beer, you can get a third of it back by returning the bottle. And over the course of a year, the bachelor that I am, I have accumulated my share of brown-tinted glassware. And there at the foot of my bed was a cleaned-out care package. Well, I'll be damned, I said to myself. I loaded the box with bottles. Hot damn. I was back in the black.

I made three runs to the convenience store that night, and collected a cool 54 kuai. About ten bucks. And it was good exercise. My biceps were practically visible by the time I was done with it. And 54 kuai goes a long way in this part of China - at least to the cigarette shop and back. So I had myself a good vegetarian meal, polished off four bowls of complimentary rice, and, yes, bought a pack of the mediocre Shuangxis I love so well. The apartment was still dark when I got back, but around 10:30, the lights popped back on and there came a joyous shriek from the streets below. I fired up the washing machine and it rumbled for a good five minutes before my downstairs neighbors pounded a broomstick against the ceiling.

"Fuck me," I said, and turned off the washing machine.

Then I sat down and typed up the bulk of last week's blog post. I gave up after a while. Then I tucked myself in at 1 AM because I had to be up the next morning. I drifted off to sleep with ten kuai to my name and dreams of fishy-flavored eggplant dancing in my head.


Monday

7 AM arrived at 7 AM. Right on time.

I zombie shuffled to the shower and let the lukewarm water drizzle down onto my fontanelle. I toweled myself off and ransacked the cauldron of day-old coffee in the kitchen. I put on my damp, half-washed jeans and my damp, half-washed shirt. Whatever junky financial schemes I'd devised the night before, I was still wary of my cashflow, so I walked to school.

I had eight classes to teach that day. And there I was, walking along a dusty highway, malnourished, pissed off at nothing in particular, pissed off at everything in general, wearing the least stinky outfit in a very stinky suspect lineup wardrobe, with ten kuai burning a hole in my thigh while somewhere in the electronic ether, a much-needed government stipend was muscling its way down the wires, en route to the lowly Nanchong branch of the esteemed Bank of China.

I taught those first four classes with half my mind waiting in line at the bank. And I taught well. I tend to teach my ass off when panic strikes a match against the back of my brain. With about three minutes left, I kindly asked my students if they would mind it so terribly much if I let them out a couple-three minutes early. Nobody objected. So they went their way, and I went mine - down the secret stairwell for laowais, janitors, and other untouchables.

I walked the half-hour to the bank. Already anticipating failure, I resolved to check in at noon, then to wait two hours and check in again at the bank across town. So as to not arouse suspicion. So as to not arouse laughter and mockery. I caught the time of day off the scoreboard of the gynecologist across the street. 11:49. I slipped my bank book out of my backpack pouch and went in.

The security guards barked at me. I ignored them. I asked about my stipend. The teller smirked. He took my bank book and swiped it. A beep.

"Hasn't arrived yet," he said, "but you still have two jiao. If you want to withdraw - "
"I'll pass," I said. I turned and left. The security guards barked at me.

A Chinese metropolis is not the kind of place you want to spend your time if you have no money to spend. It's like being stranded at Chuck E. Cheese's without any game tokens. I couldn't even afford a pair of Groucho Marx glasses at that point. High noon. I had two hours to kill and no way to dispose of the body. It was the hottest day of the year, so wandering around aimlessly like I usually do wasn't an option. I'd already dropped all the cash I had on water. I stood outside the Bank of China, genuinely at a loss for where to go. Meanwhile, the hecklers were mounting. Standing in one place wasn't an option, either. Stillness is never an option if you're a foreigner in China. Wasn't there a park I could go to, or something? A place in the shade where I could sit and smoke and read by my lonesome? Somewhere I could go to get away from all these ... people? I walked. The sweat stained my shoes.

The elementary school down the way was letting out early. A couple of spotters duly spotted me and shouted "FOREIGNER!" And as the kids streamed out of the gates, they pointed, shouted, and followed. Call me the Pied Piper.

The adults were no better. As I came up on the old campus with a tail of screaming children on my ass, a motorbike slowed to a walking pace and the two full-grown twerps on board screamed at me point blank.

"HAH-LOO! ... HAH-LOO! ... HAH-LOO!" A pause. "HAH-LOO, foreigner! Wo shuo, HAH-LOO!"

They kept at it for a good two minutes. I walked and sweated. Another motorbike carrying another couple twerps puttered over to heckle me, but the awkwardness that arose between the twerps when they realized that they had, all four of them, gone out of their way to give me, a bearded laowai minding his own business, a hard time - the awkwardness sent the two motorbikes scattering like a pair of dragonflies.

I saw a posse of college kids coming my way, so I left the sidewalk, paused to light a cigarette, and kept walking, into oncoming traffic. Let me be clipped by a motorcycle. Let me be smacked down by a public bus. But no more heckling, please. Undeterred by my evasive maneuvers, the kids shouted HAH-LOO, HAH-LOO, HAH-LOO. Then, WHAT'S YOUR NAME? Then, WHAT'S YOUR NATIONALITY? Then, I LOVE YOU. Then, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU. I kept walking. It's a tough love in this town.

A couple of thirtysomething twerps spotted me as I was returning to the sidewalk.

"Foreigner," one of the twerps said, loudly, in English.
"Chinese person," I said, in Chinese.
"Foreigner," he said again, more boldly. He wasn't smiling.
"Chinese person," I said.
"Foreigner."
"Chinese person."
"Foreigner."

I let him have the last word. This sort of thing gets old after about three days. You ought to try it for two years.

I found a secluded spot behind the Building for Biology and Animal Experimentation on the old campus. I hid behind a thicket of bushes and read my book for a minute or two. Then some coeds on the sixth floor of a nearby dormitory caught sight of my foreign hide and wouldn't let me live it down. HAH-LOO, FOREIGNER. HAH-LOO. So I got up, swept the sweat off my forehead, and took another walk. I racked my brain for a place I could go where there wouldn't be any hecklers. In all my time here, I've never really encountered one. Then I passed a girl in the street holding an umbrella and wearing a respiratory facemask and wielding a notebook over her face to boot. Ah, yes! The sun. To be dark-skinned in this country is to be horribly disfigured. So it stood to reason that on a hot-ass day such as this ... I tried to think of the sunniest, most brutally deforested spot in all of Nanchong. And I decided that the river was a safe bet. So I walked the five miles to the river.

When I got there, I found the stairs down to the riverfront barricaded with sandbags. Because of the floods. I thought about scaling the sandbags, but I didn't want to make a scene. And anyway, all this walking around town in shitty shoes on shitty sidewalks had turned my knees into softballs. So I walked some more, until I came to an alleyway that weaseled its way down to the riverfront walkway. Then I walked along the river until I was out of earshot of the highway. I found a set of stairs leading down to the water and sat down on the top step. I lit a rancid four-kuai cigarette and rolled up my sleeves. And I sighed one of those sighs that seems to take more out of you than it puts back in.

Beneath me was an old, brown fisherman, squatted on a plastic stool he'd planted in a sandbar on the margins of the river. He was fishing with a long, elastic pole. His bait looked to be a string of pigeon eggs, though I couldn't quite see well enough to tell for certain. He sat there for a half-hour, motionless, silent, tensely loose. And I sat there watching him. After a while, he yanked back the rod and flossed the fish off the wire with his fingers. It didn't seem like a profitable enterprise, fishing this river. The river was little more than a nosebleed. Most of the waters were proceeds from the Nanchong sewer system. The river was shallow as a Prom Queen and nothing stirred within it but garbage. What this fisherman had reeled in were guppies, minnows, discarded goldfish. But you dry them out a bit, douse them in spices, and sell them to the Jack Bar downtown - and I imagine you break even, if you're retired.

I timed myself by the cigarette. These are cheap ones, I reminded myself, last about four minutes. Smoke three of these at ten minute intervals and it's time to walk two miles to the bank across from the train station.

I smoked and watched the fisherman, and found some small solace in his work. His patient, solitary, futile work. The city was faintly audible, with its screeching cars and shrieking children and hammering jackhammers, but the lazy trickle of the river and the sewer water sloshing down into the river nearly drowned it all out. I closed my eyes and remembered Mexico. A bird squalled somewhere in the distance, a lovely sound I hadn't heard in a good long while. The waters burbled and the sewage sloshed. I kept my eyes shut. I was on the beach. I was on the coast of Michoacan. I was elsewhere. I wasn't there. I wasn't here. I wasn't anywhere. Then somebody hawked a loogey over my shoulder. I opened my eyes and saw that it was the fisherman's buddy, equipped with fishing pole and basket of bait. Somebody from one of the riverfront apartments spotted me and shouted HAH-LOO, FOREIGNER, HAH-LOO! I got up and brushed the dust off my pants. I walked away from the river, stepping carefully over the poles the fisherman had left behind on the sidewalk, and made my way back to the city. The afternoon buses droned past on the overpass with the window blinds drawn to, but I could make out the eyes watching me through the slits.

I took my number at the bank. I waited in line for a half hour. Then I approached the teller and asked whether my stipend had come in. I handed her my bank book. This was a different branch with different tellers, but they were laughing at me just the same. She swiped my bank book and the computer beeped.

"No money," she smirked, and handed the bank book back to me.
I opened the book and flipped through it. And I was amazed to discover, there at the bottom of the third page, that overnight, I had accrued a whopping two kuai in interest.
"Wait," I said, "I have two kuai here. And I'd like to withdraw it."
"You - you want to withdraw two kuai?"
"Yes. That's what I said."
"What do you want it for?" she asked.
"I need water," I said.
She turned to her supervisor and told him all that I'd said. He laughed. She laughed. They both laughed. Then she swiped the bank book again and opened a drawer. She took out two grimy notes and, smirking at me, dropped them into a cash counting machine.

"2," said the machine.

Then she handed me a couple of forms. I signed them both and shot them back. She stamped them several times each and handed me the money. All 25 cents of it.
"Thanks," I said.

I bought two bottles of water. I was broke again. I walked back to school and stood there on the fourth floor of the Teaching Building, smoking my cigarettes of woe and waiting for the bell to ring. Jesus, I said to myself. Christ, I said. I rested my head on the balcony. I drifted off into a half-sleep. I daydreamed. And for whatever reason, I daydreamed of Dr. Feezell, the wonderful old curmudgeon who, when I was a sophomore in college, cured me once and for all of superstition.

Feezell. The Man. He is perhaps the world's leading authority in the Philosophy of Sport. For what it's worth. At a Jesuit university, he was my first flamboyantly nonreligious professor. I stopped going to Midnight Mass two weeks into his Philosophy 207 course. Bald, goateed, with a penchant for wearing his reading glasses propped up on his scalp. After a couple years of feeling genuinely lost, Feezell was my first introduction to what has become an important axiom for me in the years hence: fear not, Petit - there are people who think as you do - you just haven't met them yet.

Feezell assigned us an essay on the first day of class. The topic: How would you design the universe if you were God? And in my plucky sophomoric way, I responded with a succinct, snappy little page to the effect of, "If I were God, I wouldn't allow myself to be God, so the whole question is invalid." I was awfully proud of myself. I turned in the essay with a smirk.

Feezell was visibly agitated the next class. I sat there grinning in the back row. Up until he spoke.

"Life is a game," he said. "College is a game. This class is a game. But you can't play the game if you don't follow the rules. Having carefully read all of your essays, I found that certain individuals in this classroom are not willing to follow the rules of this particular game. And although some of the essays in question might have been witty, and though I admit that some of them were unusually well-written," - here, Feezell let his reading glasses slide down to the tip of his nose and stared directly at me - "and though I may have found those essays amusing in the most absurd sense of the word - despite all this, those essays did not play according to the rules of the game. And lest we forget, this is a game. And there are rules. And I shall grade those essays in accordance with the rules of the game."

And with that single Feezelian flourish, I snapped into adulthood. That was it. That was my moment of clarity. But of course. How had I missed it? Life was a game. There were rules. And to not follow them was to not participate in the game. And who doesn't want to be a part of the game? Outside of the game, what else is there? I understood it then. And I understand it now. Neglecting the rules meant sitting on the sidelines. Neglecting the rules meant not existing. To neglect the rules was to fail the class. To neglect the rules was to lose the game. And I had been neglecting those rules all my life. Had made a point of doing so, up until Feezell.

And hunched there with my forehead steaming on the hotplate balcony, as I woke up from my daydream, all of this struck me as a pretty weird non-sequitur. Until I realized that rules were precisely the problem I was up against. What were the rules of the game, after all? Well. The single, all-consuming rule was money. And I had none of it. And so I couldn't play. And not playing the game is a fucking drag.

"Fuck me," I said aloud. I lit a cigarette. I was awake, but my mind yet wandered. Wouldn't it be nice, I thought, if the school canceled afternoon classes. So I could go to the bank. So I could withdraw some money. So I could get back into the game. But naw, I said to myself, you're not that lucky. The bell will ring, I said to myself, and you will walk the hallways straining to remember which classroom you're in. Then, the bell rang, and I walked the hallways, straining to remember which classroom I was in.

But the classrooms were all shut tight and deadbolted. I took the stairs up to the sixth floor, then wound my way all the way down to the first floor. No classes were in session. I walked all the way back up to the sixth floor and wound my way back down again. Eventually, I ran into a janitor.

"Teacher," she said, "where's your classroom?"
"I don't know," I said. "I forget."
She laughed.
"Are classes in session today?" I asked. "All the classrooms are locked up."
"I don't know," she said. "All's I know is, none of the teachers have shown up."
"So there are no classes."
"I guess not."
"So I can go the bank."
"If it's open," she said. "It's a holiday coming up, dontcha know."
"Yes. I know," I said, and thanked her.
And then I did a little Michael Jordan fist pump and took off down the stairs.

I walked the three miles to the bank. Everyone smirked as I came in.
"Has my stipend come in yet?" I asked.
A beep. Some laughter.
"Nope. Still got that two jiao, though."
"Great," I said. "I'll let that shit accrue interest."

For lack of anywhere else to go, I walked back to the river. I watched the fisherman fish. His luck seemed to be about as good as mine. Guppies, minnows, goldfish. Slim pickins in this town for the quiet man.

Around 4:30, I walked back to the bank. I took a number and waited in line for a half hour. Several people cut in front of me, but miraculously, I didn't punch them in the face. The security guards were locking the doors by the time I was able to present my case to the bank teller.

"Has my stipend come in yet?" I asked.
My heart was playing drum solos in my chest.
"Well," smirked the teller, "let me see."
Meanwhile, as often happens, another customer had taken an interest in my case.
"Can he speak Chinese?" the man asked the teller.
"He speaks a little," the teller said. "Not very well, though."
"Where's he from?"
"I don't know," said the teller.
"Where are you from?" the man asked me.
"America," I grunted.
"Can you use chopsticks?"
"Sometimes."
"Do you like China?"
"... Yes."
"Why are you here?"
"I teach English at the university."
I was craning my neck to see what the teller was reading off the monitor.
"How old are you?"
"I'm twenty-seven," I blurted.
"Do you like Chinese food?"
"Yes."
"Are you married?"
"No."
"You should find a Chinese wife."
"Yes."
"How much money do you make?"
"I don't make money," I said.

A beep. The bank teller read the monitor, shouted something at his buddy, and sat there spacing out for a moment. He got up from his chair and scurried off to tackle some paperwork. He stamped a couple documents and did some filing. I was waiting for him to light up a Cuban and pour himself a glass of sherry. Then he sat back down, turned to me and said, flatly, smirking, "No money. Still got that two jiao, though."

"Have you gotten used to life in China?" asked the man.
"Yes," I said.

I turned around and walked away. Then, as I reached the door, as the desolate 24 hours before me came into focus, I could hold off no longer. I slapped the bank book across my thigh and shouted the word "FUCK!" Instantly, the bank tellers broke into unfettered laughter.

"He's angry!" someone shouted.
And they laughed even harder. The door swung shut behind me and I could hear the waves of laughter doppling in and out until the door finally swung to a stop.

That night, I returned three more boxes of beer bottles and made another 54 kuai out of nothing. I went to the convenience store and bought a bowl of ramen and a four kuai pack of Hongmeis.

"You're buying these?" asked the clerk, turning the pack over in her hands. She laughed in my face.
"Somebody has to," I said, and stole off into the bankrupt night.


Tuesday

I didn't have to work on Tuesday, so I did my best to sleep the day away. I certainly didn't want to be awake for it. I wiped out midnight through 2:30 PM with great ease. But around 2:30, all the babies in China start screaming. I woke up. I swore off having children. I took a shower. I knew the last ten hours of Tuesday were going to be a bitch. I walked the five miles downtown and checked in at the bank. Not surprisingly, my stipend hadn't come in yet, so I spent a couple hours walking around, kicking rocks, being foreign, being heckled.

A peculiar state of mind sets in after you haven't had money in a while. Everything seems rigged, like a carnival game you can't win. Everyone is against you. Or at least that is the perception. You actually stop to watch people eating meals in restaurant windows. Fruit becomes unusually appetizing. Apples. Bananas. Oranges. You start to eye puddles in the street with the depraved thirst of a stray dog. You begin to despise money, and the people who have it.

Between banks, on my way past the university, I saw a curl of five kuai bills go rolling past on the sidewalk. My first instinct was to bend down and grab the cash, discreetly slip it into my pocket and buy myself some lunch. But my second instinct, by far the more powerful of the two, was to let it go. To let the money drift by. Because it belonged to someone else. And anyway, hundreds of people were watching me. Judging me. And I certainly didn't want to appear on an episode of Chinese Candid Camera. So I left the loose money behind. And I kicked myself later, kicked myself in the ass, kneed myself in the crotch as the day wore on and the sun ripped away the clouds like a cheap negligee.

In my wandering, I ran into a coworker of mine, the nice Chinese lady who is married to the Italian. I hadn't seen her in a while, so I asked her how she'd been. She didn't answer me, talked about something completely different. This is a roadblock I have encountered often enough in my Chinese conversations, so I rephrased the question. How was your summer, I asked.

"Um. Not very good," she said.
"Why's that?"
"My husband," she said. "He passed away."
This sucked the smoke right out of me. I've never been very good at expressing sympathy for that which I cannot understand, so I was silent for a while before settling for the standard I'm-very-sorry-to-hear-that.
"Yes. I was in Italy for the summer," she said. "For the funeral."
"Jesus," I said. "I'm sorry."
"Yes," she said. "We will go to hot pot tomorrow. You should come, too."

We parted ways. I made my way back to the river. Along the highway, I passed the restaurant where I'd first met the Italian. There, he'd split a pack of Hongmeis with me. He lit one and smoked it through the gap in his teeth. He offered me one. I accepted. "They're cheap and they're good," he had told me, though I hadn't believed him then and I certainly do not believe him now. His English had been good. He had translated a verse of Dante for me, there at the restaurant. I had liked him. So as I passed the restaurant, I lit a Hongmei in his honor. And I remembered the last time I'd seen the Italian. He was disembarking from his moped across the street from the university, and a crowd of college kids were gathered around him, shouting very loudly, loud enough even for me to hear, about how fat he was. "FAT FOREIGNER, FAT FOREIGNER, FAT FOREIGNER," they had chanted. He stared at them, uncomprehending. It's a tough love in this town.

I sat by the river for altogether too long. The burbling sewage shooshed me into half-sleep. I forgot where I was, I forgot what time it was, and I forgot about the state of financial ruin I was trapped in. Then I was grazed by the side mirror of a passing moped, and I remembered everything quickly enough. I got to my feet, dusted off my jeans and set off at a steady trot. My circadian clock told me that it was about 4:30, and I'd have to step pretty damn lively to get to the bank before it closed.

I couldn't run with my shoes the way they were, or with my knees the way they were. So I stepped pretty damned lively. I was HAH-LOOed and FOREIGNERed and LAOWAIed the whole way, but I didn't hear a damned thing. I had my mind on my money and my money on my mind. When I arrived at the bank, the tellers started chattering, and smirking, and laughing. All except one little lady in the middle. And as it happened, I drew her number. Or she drew mine.

I tussled my hair.

"Hey, er. I was wondering. Young lady. If my, y'know," I coughed, "if my stipend has come in yet."
"Let me check," she said. She took my bank book and swiped it. Nothing happened. The screen painted half-moons across the lenses of her glasses. She read for a moment and handed the book back to me.
"It says you have one-thousa - "
"Yes. Okay." I turned away from her. I hooted, and my hoot painted the cavernous walls of the bank building with a kind of joy they'd probably never known. "Sorry. In that case, I'd like to withdraw 500 kuai."
"500 kuai it is," she said. And she smiled. She didn't smirk. She did her job, while the other bank tellers watched me, smirking.
"Please sign here," she said.
I signed.
She handed me the money.
I thanked her.
I pushed the "SATISFIED" button. The machine beeped and said something in Chinese.
She thanked me.
"No problem," I said. I pressed the button again but nothing happened. And I smiled broadly and hooted once more. She smiled back at me and watched me leave.

I hailed the first cab I saw and told him to take me home. He stopped at the campus gates to let me out and I said, "Naw. We goin' all the way with this tonight." So he drove me to my apartment.

"Wait," I said. "I'd like to go to the shop."
"Which one?" he asked.
"The one on the corner."
He drove me there. By then, the fare was quite sizable.
"Wow," he said, "you must make a lot of money."
"Brother, you don't even know."

The shopkeeper's eyes bugged when I stepped out of the cab.
"I haven't seen you in a long time," she said. "I was starting to worry about you. Where you been?"
I scooped up a couple-three beers from the fridge. And a pack of Shuangxis.
"Away," I said. "On business. At the bank, mostly."
"Sounds exhausting," she said.

I stuffed everything into my backpack and I walked home. I was back in the game. I was back on the case. And brother, I had some serious writing to do.