Promises To Keep

I teach Oral English.

I would much rather be teaching Oral Spanish. Or Oral German.

... or American Literature. Or British Literature. Or Writing. Or Creative Writing - ooh, that would be nice. Hell, at this point I'd be willing to teach Business English. Or Linguistics. Or Quantum Mechanics. Or, I don't know, Home Economics.

... or better yet, English 407: Beatniks and Politics - A Psychedelic Flashback to The 1960's and a Totally Trippy Analysis of its Posthumous Reverberations in Contemporary American Culture. Or better yet, English 502: Stan The Man - An Assessment of Stanley Kubrick, His Films, and His Legacy. Or even better yet, OK Computer 543. Or Kid A 571.

... or even better yet ... well, I could dream up a long list of uber-hip elective classes that I could (and perhaps should) be teaching at China West Normal University. But Oral English is not an elective for my students, and it isn't an elective for me. Twice I have begged the director of the University for some variety in my teaching diet, but she keeps throwing Oral English classes my way. Oral English is the only class I have taught thus far, and Oral English is probably the only class I will ever teach in China.

And I'm okay with that. My students need a lot of help in the speaking department. They probably don't need any more literature in their lives. They certainly don't need to do any more writing. So I try to keep reading and writing far away from the syllabus. But once in a while, I throw some poetry at the kids to see how it hits them, just to see how it bounces back to me. Or I give them a writing assignment, as a kind of survey to figure out what, exactly, my students are thinking when they are too terrified to speak.

We watched The Joy Luck Club a couple weeks ago. My students were stoked about the film, and a couple of them rushed up to the computer after class to copy it to their memory sticks. But the kids tend to clam up under pressure; I didn't think an in-class discussion would unearth anything worth unearthing. So after the movie, I let them out a full ten minutes early and gave them writing homework instead. They weren't sure whether to cheer or groan.

The following week, I was pretty damn excited to have those hot little papers in my hands. I rushed home to read them. I was curious to see what my students would have to say about Chinese-Americans, a demographic they didn't even know existed prior to seeing the film. Would they consider Amy Tan Chinese, or would they think of her as an American? How did my students imagine the average Chinese-American lived in America? And how did they imagine the average laowai fared in their country? I asked them to write about all of those things, both because I was curious, and because it was a subject innocuous enough and ambiguous enough to hopefully inspire some real thought in my students without getting my ass in trouble. What bounced back at me, however, wasn't innocuous or ambiguous in the least. It actually kind of scared me.

1. Do you consider the second-generation Chinese-Americans in the film more Chinese or more American?

More Chinese - 96% (361 students)
More American - 4% (15 students)

All precincts reporting.


2. What difficulties might a Chinese person encounter in America?

racism - 26%
language - 19%
dutch pay - 8%
love - 4%

All precincts reporting.


3. What difficulties might a foreigner encounter living in China?

chopsticks - 28%
food - 24%
language - 20%
traffic - 4%

All precincts reporting.


I read through every last one of the 376 papers. I did not juke the stats. What you see is what my students believe. In a way, they responded just the way I had expected them to. I've been here three semesters, after all. But I hadn't counted on such an overwhelming landslide. When I'd finally hashed out the numbers, I couldn't believe them. 96 to 4? Chopsticks - honestly? My gut American instinct told me that the Republicans had fucked with the voting machines again.

I am not a Chinese-American, but I will hazard a guess that fewer than 96% of second-generation Chinese-Americans would identify themselves with the country of their ancestors rather than the country in which they were born and bred. It would be a significant slight, I would think, to refer to a second-generation Chinese-American as anything other than an American - or at least, I have never met a Chinese-American who wouldn't take it as anything less than an insult.

I am not a sociologist, either, so I won't analyze questions 2 or 3 any more than I should, other than to remark that racism and a pair of wooden sticks make for a mighty odd couple at the top of the respective lists. Chopsticks and food have been, for me, the #1 and #2 easiest things to adjust to in China. Like I'm complaining about the twice cooked pork. None of my 376 students mentioned racism as a potential problem for foreigners living in the People's Republic of China.

This week, I hit my students with some classic American poetry. Teaching is always an experiment, especially when you are not a teacher by trade. My poetry classes are the most successful experiment I have ever conducted. I didn't expect the poetry experiment to succeed in my first semester, one year ago. And I have kept waiting for it to fail in the semesters since. But my poetry class is always the best class of the semester. My students get fired up about poetry, and I have no idea why. I get fired up, too, because I am a literary hack who enjoys masquerading as a professor from time to time. Perhaps I feed off the energy of my students, or perhaps they feed off of mine. In China, TEFL may crumble, but poetry always wins.

My very best poetry classes have the same feel as my undergraduate literature courses at the Midwestern Jesuit College to Remain Nameless, back when we used to read and discuss texts instead of vivisecting them - during that fragile, Edenesque bliss before junior year English Major Bullshit rolled around and the twin spinsters of Deconstructionism and New Criticism burst into the room with their rusty meat cleavers and hacked to bits whatever pleasure there was left to be taken from reading.

My students take time to read the poems, they brood on them, and they bust their asses trying to understand them. I doubt I could expect the same from a class of American undergraduates. Hell, I doubt I could've expected the same from myself as an undergraduate. I was too busy ... let's just say I was busy. But without exception, all of my students, even my very worst students respond to the poems in a thoughtful way, often in an insightful way. I don't teach them. They teach me. They might not be able to speak worth a damn, but they can analyze poetry. Poetry inspires them to speak.

I have learned a lot from my students, and I see all of those old poems in a new light because of them. But they remain rote learners - so my kids will sometimes ask me point blank to tell them what the poem means. I admit to them that frankly, I don't really know. I may perhaps underline something with my index finger, or mention that the author is a woman, or that he is black - but otherwise, I want them to follow their own noses, to chase their own lines of thought. I want to throw these poems at my students and see how they bounce back to me. Their analyses are never anything less than fascinating. But more often than not, their ideas bounce right past my outstretched glove, and go skipping out into left field.

I had my students split into six groups, and each group analyzed one of six poems: "Dream Variations" and "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" by Langston Hughes; "Loving You Less Than Life, A Little Less" and "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why" by Edna St. Vincent Millay; "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost.

I chose those six poems because they are relatively easy to read, and because all of them are fairly literal but invite interpretation. I chose those three authors because they are a neat and tidy (and not terribly subversive) cross-section of all the rage, lust, and mystique that make American poetry what it is, whatever it is.

Before they dug in, I told my students that there were no right or wrong interpretations, that their opinions were as good as mine. That wasn't just a hollow feel-good statement to bolster my students' confidence, though it was partially that. By now, I know what my kids are capable of. They aren't much for conversation, but they can read. They've been force-fed Jane Austen since they were freshmen in high school, so I knew that Robert Frost was well within their literary grasp. The diction was not going to be a problem. I knew that they would understand the poems, and that they would have opinions about them. And I knew that our opinions would differ, as they always do, and I wanted our opinions to differ. I wanted the stony mass interrogation chamber that is Room 307 to feel more like a room with padded walls, where they could fling themselves against the barriers like crash test dummies and afterwards, as in the wake of a particle collision, we'd slowly try to piece everything together. The poem goes in, the thoughts come out - you and I scurry around the lab trying to make sense of them.

In all of my classes, the St. Vincent Millay groups maintained that the author was a male writing about a female. This, despite Millay's "unremembered lads" in the one poem, and the brown hair growing about the brow and cheek of her lover in the second poem. I explained that a "lad" was a young man, and that facial hair, under ideal conditions, does not manifest itself upon the cheeks of women. But my students insisted that Millay was a man, either because they were unacquainted with female poets, or because they were uncomfortable with the idea of females poetizing about such racy promiscuous shenanigans. Even after I made it clear that the romantic objects in both poems were men, and many different men at that, my students maintained that the poet was a man. Homosexuality was, perhaps, less shocking to them than the prospect of a female with a somewhat diversified love life. So I left it open. Perhaps Ms. Millay was writing in character as a man who had fallen in love with a bearded lady when the circus came to town. But I couldn't help myself. I couldn't help nudging them in the right direction. The poet is a woman. Her boo has a beard. Odds are, she's writing about a man. My students giggled into their hands. And I can't even describe the giggling that followed after I insinuated that "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed" might just have been referring to more than one pair of lips ...

My students fared a bit better with the Langston Hughes poems. Most of the kids picked up on the fact that the poet was black. Others I had to prod a bit.

"What kind of person do you think he is? Do you think he's white, like me? Do you think he's Chinese? Or Indian ... "
"He must be very tall."
"And very handsome."
"Maybe," I said.
"He must be very rich."
"And he must have a colorful life."
"In a sense," I said. "But what about this line: 'dark like me.' And this one: 'black like me.'"
"His heart is black."
"Kind of," I said.

The groups reading "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" relished using the word "negro," whatever it meant, and I had to discourage them from making a habit of it.

"Teacher, is it bad?"
"Er, uh," I said. "Yes. People will hurt you for using that word."

Their electronic dictionaries led them down a treacherous path of synonyms that I likewise had to stamp out.

"Teacher, I think the the writer is a n_____."
"Um. Yes," I said, "he is an African-American."
"So he is in fact a n_____?"
"Don't say that. People will kill you for using that word. But yes, he is an African-American."
"Sorry, teacher. So he is a black?"
"Yes. He is ... black."

Most puzzling and wonderful of all were the Robert Frost poems. I have never been afforded such an instantaneous glimpse into the Chinese psyche. Somewhere, Robert Frost is rolling in his frosty grave. This is not the way he would've wanted to have been interpreted. And yet, poetry being what it is, I had no means (and no desire) to cockblock the interpretations that my students offered me. I let them stand. I lavished my students with praise. I disagreed with them completely, but I am not Robert Frost, and I am not Chinese, so I listened to them for a good long while, gave them all a solid pat on the back, and moved onto the next group.

"The Road Not Taken" is so quintessentially American that by now it is almost beyond interpretation. Two highways diverged in bumfuck Nebraska. One of them freshly paved, adopted by the Sarpy County Jaycees, dotted with McDonaldses and Burger Kings and Cracker Barrels, a mainline to the clogged artery of Interstate 80: boring. The other, all gravel and glass shards, like something out of Deliverance: exciting. I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference.

Whatever an American may or may not be, no American would interpret "The Road Not Taken" as anything less than an ode to individualism. Robert Frost might be the last criteria we have left for Americanism. Wherever our politics may lie, however blasé our lives may in fact be, we all believe that we are following our own paths, that our road is the lonely road, that we have broken ranks with the rest of society in order to pursue our own preferred brand of happiness. Deluded or not, that sentiment, perhaps, is what makes us American. And it might just be the only unifying belief we share in common. Maybe we should include Robert Frost's poem on our naturalization test. If you find this poem somewhat uplifting, you're in. If you are of the mind that Robert Frost royally fucked up in wandering down that nasty road littered with doggie doo and backwoods sodomites, you're out.

But my students are not American. No, they universally agreed: "The Road Not Taken" was a poem about regret. They did not appeal to the text, but to their nature. The man in the poem deviated from the common road and went down the unpopular path. A grave mistake. Frost was writing the poem as a bitter old man, ruing the day he made that decision. Why, oh why, did I take that shady-ass Deliverance road? Why didn't I follow everyone else down I-80? The road not taken, according to my students, was the road that Frost damn well ought to have taken.

Above all else, I am charitable to my students. So I didn't disagree with them outright, however much I disagreed inwardly. But I tried to Ouija Board them in the right direction. Well, don't you think it's possible that the poet is happy with his decision? Doesn't this poem feel optimistic to you? Before long, though, I realized that Robert Frost had rigged his poem in just such a way that I had no evidence, no case, and no authority to even suggest that my students were wrong.

"I shall be telling this with a sigh," writes Frost, "somewhere ages and ages hence/two roads diverged in a wood, and I --/I took the one less traveled by/and that has made all the difference."

In life, there are happy sighs and sad sighs. There are good differences and bad differences. Was Robert Frost sighing in a contented way? Or was he sighing like a Notre Dame football fan? Did the road less traveled by lead him to a Conoco station, or into one of the deleted scenes from Deliverance? I could point to nothing in the text that indicated that, yes, Robert Frost was pleased with his decision. He was sighing, after all. Perhaps, after all, he had fucked up. Maybe, after all, I have fucked up, too, by joining the Peace Corps when I should've taken that five-figure recruiting gig with the University of Phoenix. But every high fructose fiber of my American being tells me that Robert Frost didn't fuck up, and that I haven't fucked up, either. My students would beg to differ. Two roads diverged in a wood and the less harmonious road is to be avoided. And this, I suppose, makes all the difference between us.

My students, all of them but one, reacted the same way to "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." It wasn't a poem about escaping from society, about reveling in solitude, about sinking into the majesty of nature if only for a short while. No, the poet just wants to go home, they said. It's cold and it's dark and he's very lonely, they said. He just wants to go home to be with his wife.

"But what about this?"
I underlined with my index finger.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep

"We don't understand," my student said. "How can the woods be dark and deep - and lovely?"
"Sometimes the loveliest things in life are dark and deep," I said.
"But he has promises to keep," she said. "And miles to go before he sleeps."
"And miles to go before he sleeps," agreed another.
"He wants to go home to be in bed with his wife."
"Yes. He wants to go home."
"The woods are terrible and scary."
"His home is cozy and warm."
"He must get out of the woods."

I nodded. I didn't quite disagree. Then, a girl in the front row lowered her head so that her hair obscured her face. She cleared her throat and she spoke.

"Maybe it's about writing," she said.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"He is a writer. Maybe he means, writing is lonely, and dark, and deep, and scary."
"Go on."
"And home is comfortable, and easy, and very relaxing."
"Yes?"
"But he wants to stay with writing. Although it is lonely. Even though it is scary. Even though it is hard for him," she said. "He will go home someday. Everybody goes home. He will go home. But only when he is ready."

The bell rang. Time for a smoke break.

"That's a really good idea," I told the girl. "I honestly hadn't thought of it before. That probably means that you're smarter than me."

I couldn't see her face, but I could see that she was smiling. I left the room and walked up four floors to the roof of the teaching building, where I could be alone. It was evening. The sun was setting with a snarl of smog smeared across its face. I lit a cigarette and flicked the ash seven floors down. Then I planted my arms on the ledge and planted my head in my hands and I cried like a bitch. Fuck, I said. Fuck. You fool. Yes, there are students who slip through the cracks, students who survive. That is why you are here. You fool. You colossal fool. How did you not see it? Even after fourteen years of education and reeducation, there are kids who survive, whose brilliance somehow escapes unstrangled. You are here for them, you fool. So stop whining and teach them. You fool.

They exist. They slip through the cracks. They survive. Let them succeed, I thought. Let them be happy. Let the world give them all that they need. Sometimes they slip through the cracks. If only all of them could slip through the cracks. If only there were more cracks ...

3:10 to Kamchatka

My Chinese DVD collection consists primarily of whatever movies the girl before me left behind in the apartment: You've Got Mail, Feast of Love, Married Life, The Other Boleyn Girl, A Love Song for Bobby Long. I have no shortage of beer coasters. Then there are the handful of movies I brought from home, a couple that I bought in Chengdu, and There Will Be Blood, which I stole from Jacob and am holding hostage until a day in the distant future when he can appreciate it for the masterpiece that it is.

I don't buy many DVDs in Nanchong, because I don't really know where to buy them. There are no sprawling bootleg DVD markets here. I have seen them in Chengdu and Chongqing, and on the east coast of China. But in Nanchong, we have proper DVD shops that are strictly legitimate and almost exclusively domestic. It's slim pickins for Western films. They can be found in the darkest, rankest corner of the shop, hidden behind the softcore pornography and the instructional ping-pong videos. They're pricey, these laowai DVDs, about the same as they would cost in the States, and the selection is some pretty lowbrow shit - and overdubbed lowbrow shit to boot. So unless watching Mariah Carey's Glitter in Mandarin is your thing, your best bet is probably the internet.

But when it comes to streaming movies, my laptop is no better than my toaster oven. If I want to watch a movie, I have to splurge on an overpriced DVD of less than exacting taste. Or at least I had to, up until a couple weeks ago, when I finally found a DVD shop that caters to my impoverished American sensibilities. It is called the "Open-Hearted Video Store."

The owner smokes excessively, even for a Chinese man. At the same time, his accent and his mannerisms aren't Chinese at all. Perhaps he's Japanese - but around these parts, that is not exactly the kind of question you want to ask if you're interested in keeping a full set of teeth.

As I enter, Mr. Openheart will grunt and gesture with his cigarette at a couple of cardboard boxes stashed under the legitimate DVD rack. This means that he has gotten a fresh shipment of bootlegged foreign DVDs. Or he will smoke and say nothing, which means that no new shipment has arrived. Either way, Mr. Openheart has already amassed an epic collection of bootlegs, and I can easily while away several hours of the evening sifting through DVD slips until my hands are coated in an invisible but palpably grody dust. Call it the dust of piracy.

Yesterday, Mr. Openheart grunted and gestured, and indicated not one but four new boxes of DVDs. Jackpot. I rubbed my hands together and squatted down on a little wooden stool. I cracked open the first box. And I sifted through the schizophrenic rubbish.

Mr. Openheart has eclectic taste, which is not to say that he has good taste. No, it does not seem as though Mr. Openheart has any taste at all. His is the DVD collection of someone who simply buys movies at random, regardless of quality, popularity, genre, rating, or country of origin. A typical sequence of titles goes something like this:

The Talented Mr. Ripley (in Portuguese), Toy Story 2, bondage film from Hong Kong, Predator 2, Singin' in the Rain, Ceausescu-era propaganda film from Romania, Saw 6, Season Three of Bob the Builder, bundle of anime porn, The Godfather Part III (in Korean), Bushwhacked (starring Daniel Stern), Little Women, bundle of anime porn, art flick from Latvia, City Slickers 2: The Legend of Curly's Gold (in German) ... und so weiter.

The DVDs are organized in no way that I can tell. Maximum entropy seems to have been Mr. Openheart's filing criteria. This makes DVD searching a tedious process, but at the same time an engrossing one. I am never quite sure what I'll find. It's the thrill of the hunt, I suppose. There have been evenings where I've browsed for two hours and left without buying a thing. Other times, it's as though Mr. Openheart imported an entire box with my Amazon Wish List firmly in mind. The Stanley Kubrick Criterion Collection? Meeting People Is Easy? Blue Velvet? Weekend at Bernie's ... 1 and 2? When that happens, I shoot Mr. Openheart a suspicious glance across the room.

Mr. Openheart might be openhearted, but he ain't cheap. Sketchy and disorganized as his DVDs may be, they go for three bucks a pop: a pretty Peace Corps penny. So whichever movie I finally decide on, I'm liable to watch it at least seventeen times before my service is up. Better make it a good one. On an openhearted shopping day, I will reject about 98% of the available DVDs and place the remaining 2% in a "maybe pile" on the floor.

Yesterday, after sifting through the four new boxes and several of the older ones whose contents I pretty much have memorized by now, I set out the following maybe pile: Good Night and Good Luck, How the West was Won, 3:10 to Yuma, and Gangs of New York.

I wrote off Good Night and Good Luck because it was too short. I knew it was going to be a long, cold night in the apartment. I needed some filler. Back in the box with ye, George Clooney. How the West was Won I ruled out because I was feeling fidgety and I needed a movie that would hold my attention, nothing with panorama shots or substance. Gangs of New York, at a whopping 163 minutes, was about to get my final nod when I read on the back of the case that the soundtrack included a new song from U2. Shuddering, I put Bono back in the box. And I decided that I'd take the 3:10 to Yuma.

Mr. Openheart, having smoked and watched over my shoulder for the duration of my two-hour hunt, sensed that I was either autistic or a man of discriminating taste, so he offered me a cigarette. He asked me a question that I didn't understand, then smirked and told me that he was giving me a discount. Then he lit my cigarette for me and bid me adieu.

On the walk home, I passed a woman hawking bootleg DVDs on the corner. A rare thing in this town. Most of her movies were overdubbed, but as I approached, she produced a stack of 10-in-1 DVDs.

The 10-in-1 DVD is a modern marvel of intellectual property theft. Ten movies for the price of one. Ten movies on a single disc. How do they do it?, the reader wonders. Easy enough. The bootleggers use state-of-the-art software to drop the video integrity down so low that it's like watching multicolored bits of sand dancing around on the screen. (Mel Gibson actually looks less insane this way.) And they chop out all the mid-levels of the soundtrack, such that the dialogue is only barely audible but the gunshots ring out so loudly that your neighbors will come knocking on your door, just to make sure you haven't offed yourself. But it's still ten movies for the price of one, even if you'll never watch eight of them, even if you need to hold a magnifying glass up to the screen to make sense out of the other two.

My favorite thing about the Chinese 10-in-1 DVD is the cover artwork. There is a picture of some half-naked (or naked) woman, or some greased-up action hero like Jean-Claude Van Damme, looking his most constipated. And there is fire everywhere. And some embossed, shiny letters screaming ... screaming ... something at you.

SUPER THE SCOURGE THE BALLOON BOY OF THE WESTERN ENTERTAINMENT!

KISSING THE FACE MELODRAMA WALLOWS IN THE LOVE!

CRAZY BEAST DO THE BITE OF NICHOLAS CAGE!

If you squint long enough and hard enough, you can deduce the unifying theme of the ten movies. It's like a Magic Eye, or Where's Waldo? Ah, yes: these are romantic comedies. Okay, these are horror movies, I guess. These are movies about ... Neanderthals? Oh, wait. No. These are movies starring Nicholas Cage.

They will sometimes try to fit an actor's entire body of work on a single DVD, but they get mixed up every so often, especially when it comes to black actors - and Tom Cruise for some reason.

THE DENZEL WASHINGTON IS ASTOUNDING SEXY HAT MAN!
(Included on the DVD are about three Denzel movies, Driving Miss Daisy starring Morgan Freeman, Ghost Dad starring Bill Cosby, and everything in the Orlando Jones oeuvre.)

TOM CRUISE FAR AWAY THE ACTOR TURNS HEAD IN THE SKY!
Ben Stiller, Robert Downey, Jr., Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Adam Sandler, and of all people, Mr. Bean. I guess we all really do look the same.

I settled on the special edition THE KICK THE BLOCK FLYING DOWN MASTER OF THE ANKLE! DVD, which consisted of five b-movies with the word "fighting" in the title, Karate Kids 1 through 3, and Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2. The nice lady sold it to me for a buck.

I went out for dinner. All the restaurants were packed with college kids who were already standing up to heckle me as I passed. So I walked until I found a truly filthy little dive that was completely empty except for the owners and their son.

While his parents were back in the kitchen, the kid approached me and snatched my DVD cases off the table. He opened 3:10 to Yuma, tried to fit the DVD in his mouth, then threw it on the floor. He moved onto the 10-in-1, which he started rolling along the floor, going vrooooooooom.

When my food arrived, I was bent over, trying to pluck the DVDs off the floor with my fingernails, sweeping all the sauce-soaked packaging into a pile. The parents were watching all this. The kid was watching me and giggling with his fingers in his mouth. I grinned at him, as if to say: boy, are you in trouble. But nothing happened. Papa set my food on the table and sat down next to his wife in front of the television. I sat down to eat. The kid came over and took my chopsticks right out of my hands. I fetched another pair, but he took them, too. Then he pulled something out of his pocket. It didn't appear edible, but he put it in his mouth anyway and started chomping on it with his mouth wide open, right in front of my face. My twice cooked pork was getting to be mighty unappetizing.

The kid went for my backpack. He unzipped the flap and started taking my papers out.
"No, no," I said. "Don't do - ... I need those!"

Then he discovered my Kindle. I glanced up at the parents. I wasn't about to discipline their kid for them, but from the looks of things, their baby was about to discipline my baby.

"Hey, boss!" I called. I gestured at the kid.
The mom came rushing over.
"Come on," she cooed. "Don't do that."
He kept rummaging.
She tapped him on the shoulder.
"Come on," she said. "Don't play with Foreign Uncle's bag."
He wasn't listening. He had successfully freed the Kindle, and whether he'd smash it on the floor or start reading Nabokov was anyone's guess.

Just then a cat came tumbling out of a styrofoam box in the kitchen. The cat lay there stunned for a moment. Then he made eye contact with the kid. His tail poofed and the poor critter booked it out into the street. The kid gave chase. Ah, yes. Another animal to torment. I was off the hook. Me 'n Kindle could breathe easy again. I could eat. There is a lot happening in China, so when worse comes to worst, and it often does, rest assured a deus ex machina is always waiting in the wings.

When I got home, I tidied up the living room just enough that I could bring myself to sit down in it for two full hours. I dusted off the TV screen with a dirty sock. Then I popped in 3:10 to Yuma. A Western backdrop came up on the screen. There were gunshots, the clip-clop of horses. But when Russell Crowe's mouth moved, a funky cocktail of consonants came tumbling out. The title faded into view. "3:10," I read, "... to where, exactly?"

It was a Russian DVD. Easy enough, I figured. I know at least six letters of the Cyrillic alphabet. I'll just find the language menu and squint for a while and then switch the DVD back to English somehow. No problem. But only Russian Dolby Surround Sound was available. And Russian subtitles. Also, Ukrainian subtitles, from the looks of things. And my Ukrainian is no better than my Russian. My shoulders slumped. It was a Russian DVD. There was no English.

I flew at the television.

"Nyet! Nyet! Nyet!" I raged. "Confound you, you scoundrel! Foo!"

And the television merely blinked back at me with screwed-up eyes. I nearly succumbed to the brain fever right there on the spot. Instead, I heated up some coffee in the samovar and had myself a nice, long Dostoevskian sulk.

I rewound back to the scene at the DVD shop. Mr. Openheart. The cigarette. The discount. The smirk on his face. I replayed the transaction frame by frame and found that I could decipher what he had asked me. Yes. He had asked me: can you speak ... Russian? It was all clear to me then. I had been taken for the proverbial ride - on the 3:10 to Kamchatka.

The Lost Tourist Prefecture of Shangri-La

Gentlemen, I give you a toast. Here's my hope that we all find our Shangri-La.
- Lord Gainsford, Lost Horizon

You need not worry
You need not care
You can't go anywhere
- The Kinks, "Shangri-La"

The mythical city of Shangri-La, like most mythical cities, remains a mythical city. Shangri-La didn't even exist as a mythical city until the 20th Century, when it appeared in print as the fictional setting of James Hilton's 1933 novel Lost Horizon. So you might as well go looking for the Springfield where The Simpsons live, or Tolkien's Middle Earth, or the Lost Starbucks of Nanchong. These places cannot be found because they do not exist. But that hasn't stopped intrepid crackpots from searching for the mythical city of Shangri-La, and it hasn't stopped cash-strapped governments from claiming it as their own.

India insists that Shangri-La belongs to India. Pakistan insists that Shangri-La does not belong to India. Bhutan stakes its own feeble claim to Shangri-La, but nobody knows where Bhutan is, either.

Most occultists worth their salt place Shangri-La somewhere in modern-day Xizang Province - or Tibet, take your pick. Others point toward my home province of Sichuan, but even if Shangri-La had been here, I am sure that it has long since been bulldozed and replaced with a 47-story apartment megaplex, also named Shangri-La.

The Nazis believed that Shangri-La was the Himalayan Ursprung of a blonde, blue-eyed race with untainted National Socialist ideals, but alas! - a 1938 expedition only turned up more brown people. Ach, scheisse!

An American philanthropist named Lutcher Stark gave up the hunt and built his own Shangri-La in Orange, Texas. Lutcher Stark's Shangri-La played host to a shit ton of azaleas - his favorite flower - as well as a couple flocks of free-range swans and ducks. The Shangri-La of Orange, Texas was destroyed by a snowstorm in 1958.

In the late 1960's, The Kinks were purported to have found Shangri-La in lower-upper-middle-class Britain, at least metaphorically. They wrote an album about it. Then they started singing pop songs about transvestites.

More fruitless searching, more Discovery Channel specials, more Kinks reunion tours ... until finally, in the year 2001, the People's Republic of China unearthed the real, actual Shangri-La on the northern frontier of its very own Yunnan Province. Shangri-La's name, incidentally, was Xiang-Ge-Li-La. How had we missed it? It had been right there on the map, staring us in the face all along.

Of course, there are some nasty rumors floating around the internet, to the effect that Xiang-Ge-Li-La skulked around for countless centuries under the guise of Zhongdian, until 2001, when it was hastily rechristened Shangri-La, in order to boost tourism revenue in the otherwise desolate and unproductive nether regions of southwest China. But I wouldn't pay those rumors any mind. Xiang-Ge-Li-La is Shangri-La. It is legit. It's the real deal. I should know. I've been there.

I set off on my quest for Shangri-La in late January of this year. I caught an overnight train to Kunming, where I was reunited with my estranged drinking buddy, Mark: the infamous Bostonian of South Korean fame. We took in the sights of Yunnan's largest city, which is to say we visited the Kunming Dwarf Kingdom and paid homage to the World's Largest Optimus Prime. Yes, above all else, Kunming was a study in contrasts. Then Mark sallied east and I drifted westward, having picked up Erin, a fellow volunteer, along the way.

We caught a bus to Dali, where we crashed the Golden Triangle backpacker scene and lost a small chunk of change gambling on where exactly in the bar an overfed chicken would shit. After we'd worn out our welcome with the local Lostafarian expats, we found that we had just enough money and just enough vacation time left over to go west to Lijiang, or north to Shangri-La.

As a rule, if everyone in China recommends a tourist destination, you'd be wise not to go there. Because everyone in China will be there. You'll spend the better part of a week waiting in line, and when you finally get to the front, a man in drab military garb will say, "Welcome to the end of the World's Longest Queue. Five hundred kuai, please."

Everyone in China had recommended Lijiang to us, so we vowed never to go there. Lijiang was dead to us. We had heard nothing of Shangri-La, but the novelty was irresistible. Where thousands of Discovery Channel camera crews had failed, we would succeed, at least on a technicality. We would make it to Shangri-La. And if there were t-shirts to be gotten, we would get them.

We asked the nice lady at the hostel how to get to Shangri-La.
"Huh? Oh, you mean Zhongdian?"

The next morning, a little yellow bus came hurtling down the road.

"Is that the one?" I asked.
"I don't know! It's got Tibetan writing on the side - run!"

We sprinted, waving our luggage around in the air until the bus whinnied to a stop twenty yards down the road. I got the impression that it wasn't the kind of bus that stopped on a regular basis. Stopping didn't seem to be its strong suit.

Nor was structural integrity its strong suit. Upon further review, this bus didn't have many strong suits at all. The floor of the bus was a hobo suitcoat of welded scrap metal, and even the relatively smooth highways of Dali were threatening at any moment to split the cabin right down the middle. Not even five miles out of town, the trip was doing bad things to my prostate.

In China, you learn to live with vehicles that can't stop or stick together. But then, most of the time you're not weaving ramen noodles up into the foothills of the Himalayas.

I have realized over the years that I was not made for the sea or for the air. I am a land mammal. And for that reason, I tend to gravitate towards the plains. Looking back, all of the places that I've lived have been about as inland as I could get; all of them far removed from any mountains that weren't traversable by stairs. But the little yellow bus to Shangri-La was lugging us up a steady incline and before long the road turned to dust and a yawning abyss began to spread out beneath us.

"My God," I said, recoiling in terror, "it's beautiful."
Erin gripped my wrist.
"It is, isn't it?"
"Yes," I said. "It is."

I couldn't bring myself to look down into the abyss. That giddy top-rung-of-the-jungle-gym sensation blossomed in my gut. The bus driver was driving one-handed, sometimes no-handed, yapping into his cellphone with the one hand and smoking with the other. At the same time, he seemed to be vying for some kind of Road to Shangri-La speed record as he repeatedly scraped the bus up onto the skimpy spaghetti-strap gravel shoulder that lay between us and a ten-second drop into the pit of the stomach of nothingness. No, I thought, forcing myself to peer out the window for a full second: this wouldn't be the kind of fall you get back up from.

Still, the beauty was not lost on me. En route to Shangri-La, we had already reached Shangri-La: not a Shangri-La you can live in or even visit for very long, but the sort of Shangri-La you see out the window of a ramshackle bus with no brakes. The sun was setting over the whitecaps in the distance, planting a golden halo upon the abyss and cloaking in darkness the mountain roads below. No words would suffice, other than some half-assed sentiment to the effect that I had never known such natural beauty was possible - and unfortunately, no photographs will suffice either, as the only pictures of mine that turned out show a golden-green blur, a darkness, a windowframe, and a pair of horrified, bloodshot eyes reflected in the glass.

Just as the sun seemed to have vanished forever, the bus pulled us up out of the darkness and gunned out onto a plain, and it was evening again. I could look out the window again. Here, I felt a bit more at home. It was the Nebraskan panhandle outside. The earth looked dry and punished, the grasses huddled together in knots, as if for warmth. The sky, meanwhile, had swollen to tremendous proportions and belonged to a depth of blue that I had forgotten about after eight months of Sichuan. The architecture, too, was unfamiliar. Not an apartment complex to be seen. Just long, squat houses made of real stone and actual wood. I no longer felt like I was in China. Only the omnipresent red flags mounted from the passing rooftops reassured me. But then, I am nearsighted.

"That's weird," said Erin. "The flags."
"What's so weird about them?"
"They're Soviet flags."

I squinted long and hard and saw that yes, there was a sickle and hammer where the five stars ought to have been. I blinked.

"That is weird," I said.



We were kicked off the bus on a bleary random street corner as the sun went down. We weren't even sure that we had arrived in Shangri-La.

"Are we here?" asked Erin.
"I dunno," I said. "This looks like Billings, Montana to me."
"Maybe Shangri-La was really in Billings, Montana all along."
"Yeah, but this is like the car lot strip of Billings, Montana."

We were back in China again. The buildings were as gray and as soot-stained as they are anywhere else, and the red flags wore the customary five-star constellation in the upper left hand corner. The signs were in Chinese, but there was no English to be found. English had been replaced as a second language by the puzzling curlicues of Tibetan. And in the meantime, it was really fucking cold. Erin and I stomped in place and cursed. We had left Dali and its perpetual spring for the howling Himalayan winds of Shangri-La.



We hailed a cab and told the cabbie to take us to a "cheap hotel," which we hoped would get us to a youth hostel and not to a flophouse. The cabbie was puzzled by our accents and asked where we were from.

"We're Sichuanese," said Erin.

After much negotiation, we wound up at a hostel in the so-called Old Town of Shangri-La. In the lobby, we were descended upon by a couple of ferociously friendly dogs, both of them wearing the underbite that is the mark of good breeding in a Chinese pooch. A door opened and out came a pudgy young Chinese man in a bucket hat. He watched us frolic with the dogs for a moment, then he said something to us in fluently mumbled English.

"Sorry?" I asked.
He mumbled again.
"Er, um," I said.
He mumbled once more, faster this time.
I looked at Erin. She looked at me. We reached for our passports.

It is easy enough to accustom oneself to the diverse accents of the world, but there is really very little one can do with a bona fide mumbler. This mumbler was quite friendly and had plenty of things to mumble about. So we listened. And we established, eventually, that Bucket Hat was the owner of the hostel, that he had owned it for five years, and prior to that, he had served fifteen years in the United States Navy. I glanced at Erin. Erin glanced at me. The thought that struck us then was the same one that would nag us for the rest of our stay: how, just how does one mumble one's way through fifteen years in the military?

Smiling, Bucket Hat invited us to have a seat in front of the television and to crack open a couple Tsingtaos. We stood there smiling back at him like a couple of rubes until he gestured at the couch, the television, and the beers. We sat and we cracked open our beers. Bucket Hat snatched up our passports and, as he turned to the computer, his smile fell off like an untied shoe. He was smiling in one instant, then staring vacantly at the screen in the next as he typed up our vital information.

"Did you see that?" I whispered.
"Yeah," said Erin. "Creepy."
"Your passport's legit, right? I mean, you are who you say you are?"
"I think so. You?"
"I can't remember anymore."

On TV, people were eating noodles with their bare hands.

Bucket Hat returned our passports and yammered at us some more. He sat down across from us but didn't crack open a beer. He asked us some awkward questions. Then, Erin and I did our stretch, yawwwn, boy-what-a-long-trip! routine and managed to sneak upstairs to the room. Erin locked the door, unlocked it, and locked it again.

"I get a weird vibe from that guy," she said.
"Bucket Hat? Yeah, me too."
"I mean, The Shining weird."
"That's funny," I said. "I was about to say that. That's what this place reminds me of, so far."
"The town or the hostel?"
"Both. Hey, you still got that flask in your purse?"
"You mean Mark's Vietnamese snake whiskey?"
"That's the stuff," I gruffed, swigging. "Hair of the dog that bit me."

The next afternoon, we set off on foot to explore the Lost Tourist Prefecture of Shangri-La. The Old Town was little more than a faux-Tibetan nest of knickknack shops. The architecture was of dubious authenticity, and the Tibetans were of equally dubious ethnicity: they were Han Chinese women dressed in Tibetan drag. The shops sold fake animal pelts, replica tusks and replica fangs belonging to various replicated beasts, giant slabs of artificial yak butter, semi-silver machine-minted handcrafts, four-foot tubules of incense that smoked like hydrothermal vents ... Everything smacked of tourist trap claptrap, but Shangri-La would probably be the closest Erin and I would ever get to Tibet, so it was nice, at least, to imagine what Tibet might, perhaps, in no way resemble.



We had breakfast at 2 PM. The Tibetan knickknack vendors of Yunnan Province are generally not Tibetan, but the restaurant owners usually are. And I will say this for the Tibetan restauranteers of Yunnan Province: they do not skimp on breakfast. The English Breakfast at a Tibetan restaurant will set you back twenty kuai, or about three bucks U.S., but it comes with two eggs, a wallop of sausage, a rasher of bacon, a couple slices of toast, and coffee. Real coffee. Or yak butter tea, if you're into that sort of thing. This particular breakfast nook had lots of cats, and it took me two hours to finish my plate because I was too busy rekindling my lifelong feline love affair. The music on the stereo was 21st Century Leonard Cohen, by far the most tasteful music I'd heard in China since my arrival. Though I've always appreciated Leonard Cohen, I'd never quite gotten into his synthy stuff. But the breakfast was so good and the cats were so lovely that I vowed right there and then to steal some albums from the internet and give the old man a chance.

Thoroughly bloated and unusually gassy, we set out again, and this time we walked towards the east, away from the Old Town. We came to a truly devastated building, a building that hadn't just been neglected, but looked to have been actively looted and pillaged. The windows, oddly enough, were still intact, but the walls were not. I pressed my face to the glass and saw heaps of battered cement and crushed bricks strewn about what was once the floor of the establishment. In the middle of it all, there was a western toilet, smashed in half and laid to rest against a stack of cinder blocks.

"A western toilet. That's odd. What the hell was this place, you think?" I asked Erin.
She blew some dust off the glass.
"A youth hostel," she said.
Sure enough, there was the official Lonely Planet logo, stuck to the inside of the window. We walked a bit further and saw the name of the hostel pasted against the next window: SHANGRI-LA TRAVELER CLUB.

The next building over was similarly destroyed, and it, too, was once a youth hostel. Rather eerily, there were still postings taped to the outside wall. "LOOKING FOR A TOUR GUIDE TO TIBET. CALL ME ... " "FOR SALE: USED BICYCLE, GOOD CONDITION ... "

"I hope this didn't start happening today," I said.
"Yeah. I shouldn't have made that crack about The Shining."
"Bucket Hat knows," I said. "He always knows."



A couple blocks later, we arrived at the main square, or something like it. It was a sunny day in Shangri-La, so the square wasn't terribly unpleasant to behold from a distance. But like a good Monet, it was rather hideous up close. The square was completely abandoned, and mostly destroyed. There were knock-off Disney-themed boats in the lake, most of them toppled, overturned, drowning. The pillars along the waterfront had long since come undone and had apparently been cast into the lake with some enthusiasm. The Tourist Information Center had been gutted, the windows smashed. One of the windows had shattered in such a way that what remained of the glass was the outline of the bunny rabbit from Donnie Darko. All of the buildings were clogged with garbage and smashed bricks. They reeked strongly of human feces. And yet they were all new, mint condition. The square couldn't have been five years old.







"Why do I get the feeling," said Erin, "that tourism never quite took off in Shangri-La?"
"Well, we're here, aren't we?"
"Yeah. But we're the only ones here."

This was true. In two lazy afternoon hours, we had navigated the whole of Shangri-La, and the only people we'd encountered on the streets were the faux-Tibetan knickknack vendors and a Canadian couple. And we kept running into the Canadian couple. It didn't seem like the kind of town where anybody actually lived, or the kind of town that people actually came to visit. Shangri-La was a ghost town.

We wandered amongst the rubble until the sun had set, until the cold had turned my beard to leather. We returned to the hostel. Bucket Hat watched us enter and invited us to sit down in the lobby. We stretched and yawned and oh, boy, what an exhausting day on the town we'd had ... We went back up to the room and watched the Winter Olympics.

The next afternoon, after breakfast, we left Shangri-La altogether and drifted up into the mountains. After that first day, I felt like we were a couple of chumps to be hanging around Tibetan Silver Dollar City when all that ... space was out there. The mountains were gorgeous. But as a Nebraskan, I am not well-acquainted with topography. Erin is from Ohio, so she wasn't much better. But let it be known: mountains can be deceptively far away, especially the big ones. We walked our way out of town and across several miles of nothingness. Still, the mountains eluded us. And still, we walked. We walked and walked until we came to a sandy path leading up into the cleavage between a couple of whitecaps.

"You're sure you want to do this?" Erin asked.
"Sure," I said. "I mean, not sure. But sure."
"There's a fence," said Erin, "and a sign. And a dog. Maybe this is private property."
"Naw," I said. "Who would pay for this shit? And anyway, we've come this far - "
"That dog doesn't look friendly."
"He's sleeping. But how about this," I said, "I grab a brick and you grab a brick, and if the dog attacks, we brick the dog."
I knew Erin would go for it. She's Irish, and so am I, at least halfway so. The Irish are not above bricking dogs to death. So we picked up two bricks each.

We walked up the path and as we passed through the gate, the dog raised its head and stared at us. We kept walking. The dog remained poised there, half-awake.

"I don't know about this," said Erin.
"Neither do I," I said, "but we've come this far - "

We took a step. The dog pounced to its feet and visibly bristled. It barked. It charged. We ran. I remember nothing. I remember being scared shitless. I remember flinging a brick over my shoulder and instinctively shielding my balls with my hand. Then we were back out on the street again, hearts racing, adrenaline pumping, legs turned to rubber like we'd just dropped sixty floors in an elevator. In the distance, I saw that the dog had laid back down and was trying to get some sleep.

"Do we try again?" I asked.
"No," said Erin.
"Alright. Have it your way. But would you have killed him?"
"Hell yeah," said Erin. "I like dogs, but ... you?"
"No doubt."



We walked the streets for a bit. There were cows grazing the median of the highway. We passed several mountains but did not approach them. Instead, we named them after our nearest and dearest: Mt. Vijay, Gary Glass, Jr. Memorial Bluff, Rosstin Murphy Shan. We came across a pack of domesticated dogs, all of them collared and well-groomed. They were on something of a rampage, barking up and down the alleys, chasing down windblown scraps of garbage. The leader of the pack was fairly imposing, but the rest of them were anklebiters, dachshunds, mere pups. I gave chase.

"What the hell are you doing?" Erin laughed, grabbing my arm and chasing after me. "Didn't we just get attacked by a dog?"
"We can join the pack! This is the only scene in town," I said, breathlessly. "They probably won't even notice. Look at their raggedy-ass crew. We're better than them."

So follow we did. A couple curious dogheads turned in our direction. But after a while, after the pack had accepted us, they didn't really mind. They did their thing. They went on sniffing expeditions, then shot off on barking expeditions. We sniffed and barked right along with them for several blocks. Thankfully, Shangri-La was desolate enough that no humans were around to judge us. The dogs certainly didn't. They just thought we were a couple of unusually tall and lanky-looking dogs. We hung with them until they got into a tussle with the guard dog out in front of the Communist Party headquarters. At that point, the dogs went one way, and the humans went another. Troublemakers all, none of us wanted that kind of trouble.

Erin and I followed the highway out of Shangri-La until we came to a pleasantly apocalyptic wastescape. We'd just finished reading The Road, so the view was practically nostalgic. We struck poses.

"Give me Lawrence of Arabia," I said.
Snap.
"Give me George Clooney of Syriana," she said.
Snap.
"Give me hitchhiker."
Snap.
"Give me constipated man crushing a chunk of cement with his bare hands."
Snap.










It was frustrating, in a way. All that farmland gridwork stretched out in front of us, the livestock scattered like dots, the jagged whitecaps in the distance, the stormclouds gathering a furious brow upon the horizon. And yet all of it was out of reach. It was within walking distance, but we knew there would be fences, and walls, and guard dogs in our way. And we were already exhausted from an entire day of wandering, and running with the domesticated dogs of Shangri-La, and running from the guard dogs of Shangri-La. If we turned back now, we had Tibetan Silver Dollar City and The Shining youth hostel to look forward to. We didn't want to turn back. So all there was to do was stand there at the side of the highway and admire. Here is beauty. Here is Shangri-La. Shangri-La is not a city. Shangri-La is not Xiang-Ge-Li-La. No, Shangri-La is a place off in the distance that you can never get to. You approach it and it recedes. It is the horizon. But once you know where it is, you can at least stand back and say, what a pretty place it would be to visit.

We returned that night and sat down in the hostel lobby at Bucket Hat's behest. He grilled us some eggs, then he grilled us about what we did during the afternoon and evening. Nothing much, said Erin, and I emphatically agreed. He pressed us further and I told him that we'd tried to walk up into the mountains, and that after we'd been attacked by a dog, we decided to walk along the highway and stare at the mountains for a while. And I swore I could've seen him pressing a button under the desk. Erin yawned. I stretched. We went back upstairs. We watched re-runs of the Winter Olympics and, for the first time in either of our lives, we found ourselves rooting for the United States like they were the Good Guys.

We decided to leave the next morning, but Bucket Hat informed us that there weren't any trains or buses out of Shangri-La for another four days, at least. Panic flared. Erin and I retreated to our room. I locked the door, unlocked it, and relocked it.

"This won't work," I said. "After four days here - "
"After four days here, I will eat you."
"Or I will eat you first," I said. "We'll go crazy."
"We'll go batshit. But maybe we can catch a taxi?"
"Or maybe we can walk?"
"Or maybe we're fucked," said Erin.
"Probably we're fucked," I said, "but in the meantime, the Winter Olympics are on CCTV."

So we watched the Winter Olympics for four days straight in Shangri-La. It's not something I'm proud of, and I'm sure Erin isn't, either. But the both of us learned a great deal about the sheer skill involved in piloting a bobsled, about the geopolitics of figure skating, and more about Tonya Harding than we could ever hope to know. By the end of it, we could actually understand curling. In the afternoons, we would sneak out of the hostel and run off to check out those lonesome mountains in the distance. Once, we saw such a squall brewing in the mountaintop heavens that we had to run along the highway back into town, and that night it actually snowed, though nothing stuck.

The next day, we found a square with some legitimate-looking Tibetan temples, but China had long since conditioned us both to disbelieve in the antiquity of anything. However much we wanted to believe, the Tibetan prayer flags were like used car flags to us. So we wandered around the square for a bit, took some pictures, and returned to our warm hostel room and watched the US-Canada hockey game. For lack of other things to do, I bellowed up a storm.



It had become clear to us, in the meanwhile, that we had been the only guests at Bucket Hat's hostel over the course of that long, sensory deprived week. How did Bucket Hat make money? How did Bucket Hat keep the rooms so clean? How did he keep the Tibetan frills so finely polished, and how could he afford to donate half his proceeds to a Tibetan orphanage across town, as he so proudly mumbled? These questions and others would never be explained to us by our bucket hatted host, and in any case, whatever the answers were, mumble mumble mumble, we would not have been able to understand them.

A yellow bus rolled into town on a Tuesday, one full week after we had arrived, four full days after we had planned on leaving. So we bought the tickets from Bucket Hat and hustled down to the station two hours before the bus arrived. I ran across the street to a noodle shop at 7 AM to buy breakfast for Erin and me. For me and Erin. Whichever is grammatically correct.

A hobo Briton had struck up conversation with Erin in the meanwhile. He had been in Shangri-La the whole time, but we hadn't seen him, no doubt because he was off doing far more adventurous things than gazing at mountains, fending off feral dogs and watching the Winter Olympics. He regaled us with tales of his backpacking misadventures through Tibet. Shangri-La was his last stop before returning home to the Commonwealth. Gap year, y'know. He regaled us with tales of shirpas and gurus, tales of freezing to death in sleeping bags, tales of burning to death on remorseless Tibetan plains. And I tried to maintain interest. I really did. But more and more, backpacker stories bore me, as his stories were visibly boring Erin. His stories didn't bore me out of jealousy. Believe me, I wouldn't have the balls to venture up into the Himalayas, and I do not envy the chapped testicles of those who do. But in the words of my undergraduate creative writing adviser, the lovely Mary Helen Stefaniak (in reference to something I'd written that reminded her of Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy), "It's all been done." (Here, she tilted her head back and cackled a bit. Then she regained composure and churched her hands in her lap.) "Yes, Keith Petit. It's all been done."

I'm not one to disagree with Mary Helen Stefaniak. It has all been done. Tibet, El Dorado, Atlantis, Shangri-La - by now, you'd be hard-pressed to find a square inch of earth that has gone untraipsed by Keds brand footwear. It's all been done. Still, however many times it's been done, as an aspiring traveler, you might yet hold onto some feeble Eat, Pray, Love-esque faith that a backpacking trip through the Himalayas might afford you some sort of spiritual enlightenment. But I've met enough backpackers by now to know that that no, that's not how it works. You can only backpack for so long. Backpackers must one day unpack their backpacks and return to ground level. After that, they get jobs, they get married, they start families, and eventually, they have to grapple with the same problems we're all busy grappling with. Escape is not an escape, because one day, the escape will end, and then you are left with yourself. Or you can escape forever, if you so desire. That option, after all, remains open to all of us. But the universe is plenty lonely as it is, and very few people have the constitution necessary to live apart from society any longer than a couple of years. Very, very few people have what it takes to be a hermit.

Living abroad is a temporary escape. It takes courage, and I admire that courage. It is what I am doing right now, and what I have been doing for several years. But I don't take pride in it, because it is purely voluntary on my part. I could be living very comfortably in the United States right now. I live slightly less comfortably in China at the moment. So what? Were I stranded up in the Himalayas, I'd be living even less comfortably. So what? The difference is: as a Westerner, I have chosen to come here and I do not have to stay here. I can always go back. But the people who live in China are stuck in China. The people who live in Tibet are stuck in Tibet. Their lives are not glamorous, however much we'd like them to think so. What we consider an escape, they consider life. The frontiers we explore remain the frontiers, even after we're done with them, and the people who live on those frontiers have to remain living on those frontiers. There's very little adventure left in travel, the more I think about it. It's all been done.

No, to my mind, the only real adventure left is the mind. The mind is where it's at. That doesn't mean you can't supplement your adventure with a trip through the Himalayas, or a lowly sojourn to Shangri-La. But what matters to me is who you are, not where you've been. When you come down from the mountains, what life can you bring to that story? Why should I listen? Why should I care about it? You've been where I have never been. So make that story dance, child.

Every year, more and more long-haired scrubs go venturing up into the Himalayas, but I shall not. I am currently a scrub and I may yet grow my hair out. But those mountains are much too high for me. No, my story will take place at ground level. I was not made for the sea or for the air. I am a land mammal.

It is not out of envy or bitterness that I rail against the backpackers, if I am railing against them at all. I just don't see a story there anymore. Not unless I know the mind behind it. Not unless I find that mind worthwhile. When it comes to stories, the mind is the only thing that counts. There are men who have never left their hometowns, who have lived their whole lives in cubicles, and yet they have more to say than I ever will. And you should pay attention to them rather than me, because they have traveled and I have not.

The British hobo bid us farewell and departed. Erin lost her stainless steel chopsticks somewhere in the bus station and we spent fifteen minutes looking for them, to no avail. Then it was time to get on the little yellow bus. The whole ride back, all the old ladies were puking out the windows.

A Fond Farewell to a Beard

I ate raw garlic all last week. A sudden and unexpected guilty pleasure. I couldn't have explained myself at the time. Nor could I stop myself. I devoured the stuff in bulk, with all the ferocity of a pregnant woman. Garlic took the place of smoking: a healthy alternative, I suppose, if not quite an attractive one. Between the garlic habit and my rabbinic beard, it was as though my subconscious had taken an oath of celibacy on my behalf and was hell-bent on making sure that I never got in anyone's pants ever again. A manmade chastity belt of untamed facial hair and halitosis.

It started on Monday, the garlic thing, when I discovered that the corner store sold vegetables. For the first time, I noticed the produce counter in the back of the room, like I was peering into an alternate dimension. The produce counter had always been there, of course, but it was never something my brain would have picked up on. Beer. Smokes. Maybe a Pepsi. But vegetables? Why would I buy vegetables? Who buys vegetables?

Nevertheless, I sauntered over to the counter to check out the goods. I am not well-versed in Chinese veggies. There are just so damned many of them. As Americans, we have a very limited produce vocabulary. We learn the words "apple" and "orange" and "banana" in our first few months of vocalizing, but beyond that, at least for me, produce remains an unexplored frontier. I doubt I could tell you the difference between a peach and a plum. I want to say that plums are darker and smaller, but I would have to Wikipedia the word "plum" just to make sure.

The catalog of Chinese vegetables is vast, and most of them remain foreign to me. There are long, spindly shoots sprouting from ghostly white bulbs, there are giant, dopey-looking gourds with serious acne, there are ominous black bulbs that seem lethal or hallucinogenic or both, and other vegetables so anatomically puzzling that only a description of their odor would suffice: like mothballs dipped in ketchup; like dirty socks sauteed in red wine.

I spent fifteen minutes picking up these mystery vegetables one by one, sniffing them, and asking the clerk, "What is this?" He, in turn, would supply me with a Chinese name and ask me what we called it in America. "Um," I'd say. By the end of it, he must have thought I was quite the mental midget, as the only vegetable I could readily identify in English was the humble tomato. "Tou-mei-tou. Good job!" he said, quite sincerely.

But I know garlic when I see it, or at least I know garlic when I smell it. And I like garlic. So I bought six whole bulbs. I didn't know it at the time, but six bulbs of garlic are more than enough for a year's worth of cooking. It was like walking into Wal-Mart and buying eighteen bottles of Robitussin. Uh, my kid's sick. The clerk was suspicious, but duly weighed the garlic and charged me three kuai for it. I bought a couple beers, too. And when I got back home, I sat down at the computer, drank my beers, wrote a blog post, and noshed on some garlic.

There is a reason that people don't eat this stuff raw. Swallowing a clove of garlic like a duck is perhaps a viable option, but the more you chew garlic, the more garlicanoids (or whatever the scientific community calls them) are released into your sinuses, and past a certain point, the stinging sensation actually shuts down your will to live, at least for fifteen seconds at a time. And yet I found it kind of gratifying, in a masochistic way. Like those Shock Tarts you used to get from the candy machine at Pizza Hut. Eating garlic was a challenge. And eating six bulbs of the stuff would be a dietary feat, one that I would go on to accomplish in two days flat.

The beard is much easier to explain. I was growing it out so I could be Joaquin Phoenix for Halloween in Chongqing. I hadn't left Nanchong since I'd started growing my beard, so I figured I might as well put it to use. This, my 47th beard, was my longest and most hideous beard yet. Photographic records place the beard's DOB at or around late July. I grew it out for three months and I never once trimmed the beast. On the streets, I put Chinese hobos to shame. I could see salarymen reaching for their moneyclips as I approached. And yet there was a kind of jealous admiration in those terrified glances. I had done in three months what no Chinese man could do in a lifetime. And I cared for that beard like an American Kennel Club showdog. I shampooed it, brushed it, took it out for walks ...

Until Friday night, when I killed the beard. It was a mercy killing. I put the beard out of its misery. It was getting to be too much. Halloween costume bedamned, I had to get rid of it. It was starting to chafe at my soul. And my neckline. The longer I wore the beard, the more the beard wore on me. Especially in public.

"Monkey! Monkey! Look at the monkey!"
"Ooga-booga! Ooga-booga!"
"Woof woof! Woof woof! Ah-ooooo!"

My beard had demoted me from foreigner to wild animal. From human to laowai is but a small step, but the descent from man to macaque is like being thrown down a stairwell headfirst.

So the Friday before Halloween, I set out on my usual Nanchong orbit, from the apartment to the bank, from the bank to a nearby restaurant. And after dinner, I would head to the barber shop for the first time in three months. The barber would fire up his electric razor. Five minutes and two kuai later, my beard would be a reddish rug on the barbershop floor, and I would be a new man. Or at the very least, I would no longer be a macaque.

Friday was a cold, dead day, with gray light seeping through the clouds like a leak through a cracked ceiling. The air was brisk enough that if I exhaled really hard, a garlicky curl of mist would come wafting out of my mouth. The branches of the trees had turned black as veins full of coal.

A big part of keeping sane in a foreign country is finding new ways of getting to the same places you always go. So I left the main drag and hung a right into a rusty little neighborhood behind the bank. I passed a produce stand and correctly identified several of the vegetables. The vegetable monger applauded my Chinese, though I did not buy anything and didn't know the names of her vegetables in English.

I passed one of Nanchong's open-air HMO's. There were a couple of old men pacing the sidewalk in hospital gowns, smoking and trailing their IV carts behind them. These hospitals are everywhere in China, and they are all windows. Right up against the glass was an impossibly old man spread out on a cot, unconscious and blanketed in synthetic cloth. He was plugged into a clear IV drip while a kind of plastic accordion at his bedside was busy squeezing out the last chords of his life. Despite myself, I lingered for a moment. Then I kept walking. Sometimes, the people gather around the window to watch. The doctors don't mind them watching, and the patients don't mind either, because they're not really alive.

I haven't started writing my will yet, but I suppose this single line will suffice: "In case of emergency, get my ass to Chengdu."

All the stages of Chinese life are on display in downtown Nanchong. There are the toddlers in their assless chaps, popping squats whenever and wherever the spirit moves their bowels. The puke inducingly cute four year-olds. The vaguely malevolent elementary schoolers in their matching windbreakers. The unquestionably malevolent college kids in their matching windbreakers. Then, the wispy young women, all feathers and silk and lace, whose misty almond eyes promise a chaste, Old World romance that will never happen. Then, the bottle-shaped bottle-sucking middle-aged men talking on three cellphones at once, expelling mean torrents of flatulence from three orifices at once. Then the young elderly, the old elderly, and the ancient elderly, their gait slumping year by year ever closer to the pavement, passing their days in tea houses, at mahjongg parlors, playing checkers or cards. The bulk of life having already been lived, the oldsters are content with their grandchildren, content with their rice liquor, content to walk through the park with their hands folded behind their backs, content to be alive for just a little while longer, for at least another day or two before that last stop at the open-air HMO, where their final moments become public spectacle, unconscious there in the cot by the window, suspended in the land of the living by a plastic bag and a plastic accordion, fast asleep forever while the human circus streams past the window, living life loudly and remorselessly. The young people pass like targets at a carnival shooting gallery, stopping only, perhaps, to steal a glance at the old man's expressionless face, seeing not who he was, but what he is. He's dead. They see only the face. And I imagine the oldsters here are content with that, too.

I passed a movie theater called "HOLLYWOOD," and I was pretty sure that the letters on its marquee were not intended to be quite so crooked as they were. I popped my head in to see what was playing. Confucius, The Movie. Not quite Hollywood. But I've heard there's a pretty bad-ass fight scene involving scrolls and bookshelves. I'm not joking about that, either.

I passed an urban beautification detail, all women, standing atop stepladders and repainting a once drab, gray wall in a pleasant shade of creme. They were smiling and chatting, painting at a leisurely pace. They seemed to be enjoying their work. So I enjoyed watching them. And I enjoyed the work they were doing. Nanchong has been making a big push, as of late, to include more colors in their nightmarish urban cityscape. It gives me some hope that, in five years, Seasonal Affective Disorder will not be a year-round affliction for the Peace Corps volunteers of the future.

I went into the bank to take out some money. The teller served it to me cold. Then I went out to eat. I have been cheating on my favorite restaurant with my new favorite restaurant, and unlucky for me, they happen to be on the same street. So the owner of my old favorite restaurant swatted me across the shoulder as I passed and shouted, "Come eat!" I kind of chuckled and told him that I'd be right back, when of course, I wouldn't. I was on my way to my new favorite restaurant. Sorry, laobar - this laowai's got a new boo.

I ordered the twice-cooked pork and a bowl of hot and sour soup. The food wasn't as good as I remembered it, though I first came to this restaurant on the third day of my smoking hiatus, so perhaps that might have had something to do with it. That day, as my body repaired itself, everything became olfactorily intense. The streets were almost unbearably pungent. I became self-consciously aware of how much I reeked of garlic. And at the restaurant, the sauces were unexpectedly tangy, the meat unbelievably rich, the Sichuanese peppercorns almost maddeningly strong - and the soup was so good that I'd have given some serious thought about applying for Chinese citizenship right there and then, if it weren't for a lot of other things. But in the days since, I've contracted a nasty Chinese head cold, with the sort of nasal congestion that not even four bulbs of garlic can fix. So this time, my new favorite restaurant was merely adequate.

My beard kept me there at the restaurant much longer than I wanted to be. It bought me a beer. It didn't want to go just yet. We'd had such good times together.

"Remember that time," my beard said, "when you zipped me up in your coat?"
"Yeah," I said, "I thought about dialing 911. I even considered trimming you. But I didn't want to, you know ... hurt you. It took me ten minutes just to unzip you from my collar. Stung like a bitch, too."
My beard laughed.
"And remember when you said hello to your boss on the street and he didn't even recognize you?"
"Yeah. I remember."
"And what about that time you got a grain of rice stuck in me for the better part of a week, and your students were too nice to point it out?"
I laughed a bit.
"Yeah. Yeah. I remember, beard. Good times," I said.

The conversation sagged. I bought the next round.

"Anyway," I said, "I'm gonna miss you, beard. It was fun wearing you."
"It was fun being worn," he said. "Always a pleasure."
"What are you going to do next? You know, after the - ... "
"Yeah. After that," my beard sighed. "Well, I figure I'll just kind of get swept up by the barber at closing time and then he'll dump me into a garbage bag, and then they'll flip the garbage bag into a dumpster, and then the garbage men will come sometime the next morning and they'll drive me out to that huge-ass garbage dump you saw a couple months ago, the one out in the countryside that you can smell from five miles away - "
"I know the one," I said.
"It won't be the same," said my beard. "I've gotten pretty attached to you over the past three months, to be honest. But I'll find something."
"Of course you will," I said. I checked my imaginary watch. "Well, it's about that time, isn't it?"
"I reckon it is."
I felt around for my wallet.
"Naw, man," said my beard. "I got this one."

With heavy heart and sauce-soaked beard, I walked the two miles to the barber shop. It was raining and the rain washed my beard to a polished ginger sheen. I stroked it as I walked, in a consolatory way.

"Monkey! Monkey! Ooh-ooh, ah-ah!"
"Ah-ooooo!"
"Woof woof! Woof woof!"

When I got to the barber shop, they already knew what I wanted.
"Cut the beard?" the dude asked.
"Cut the beard," I said, "but not all the way. Don't shave me with a straightedge. That takes a long time, and I'm very busy. Just give me the electric shave. I want a little beard left over."

I have to specify this every time I go in. Otherwise, the barber will very painfully extract every last beard follicle with an unlathered razor, sans-anesthesia, and it will take at least an hour. It's like a dental procedure. I grip the arms of the chair and my knuckles turn garlic white. Sometimes, I start crying. But they always insist: bu hao kan, bu hao kan - it doesn't look good, this apelike facial hair of yours. We must remove it completely. Maybe next time I will bring a bottle of Barbasol from home.

This time, some twentysomething twerp buzzed my beard away with an electric razor, but he couldn't handle how goofy I looked with half a beard and started laughing uncontrollably midway through. At one point, he laughed so hard that he actually ejaculated a torrent of snot into my hair. I then requested a shampooing, which made him laugh even harder. He was shooting snot all over the place. Eventually, one of the other barbers had to take over the helm. The twerp retired to the back room, where his giggles were audible for the next ten minutes.

"Sorry about that," said the replacement barber. "He's new here. He's never shaved a foreigner before."
"It's really nothing," I said, "but I'm gonna need that shampoo treatment."
Unless Dude has Vidal Sassoon for boogers.

By the end of it, my beard lay in a ruddy pile between my shoes. The face in the mirror was not one that I recognized, but I was pleasantly surprised at how young I looked. The replacement barber produced a straightedge razor and I instinctively launched out of my chair.

"How about you just wash my hair and we'll call it a night?"
"Hao hao hao," he said. Good, good, good.

I lay there in the dark getting a scalp massage. The barber asked me questions that I was far too listless and contented to answer. He soaked my shirt through with water and apologized profusely for doing so. I shrugged.

The next day, I showed up in Chongqing without a costume.