Here Be Dragons

The Borgia Map (circa 1430 AD) states, over a dragon-like figure in Asia ... "Here, indeed, are men who have large horns of the length of four feet, and there are even serpents so large, that they could eat an ox whole."

-Wikipedia

When I took my first good long gander at a modern political map of China, I was pretty bummed out to find that it was nowhere demarcated with a "Here Be Dragons" no-fly zone. The map was, in fact, nauseatingly detailed: a great big black-and-green inkblot clogged with unpronounceable megalopoli from one end to the other. There did not appear to be any unexplored, potentially dragon-infested regions of the Middle Kingdom. Indeed, there did not appear to be anywhere at all that wasn't crawling with people.

What struck me next was mainland China's resemblance to a chicken. Minus the legs and feet - I imagine the omnivores of Guangzhou Province devoured them centuries ago. With a side of pickled monkey brains. Still, the likeness is uncanny. China is a chicken. If you take Heilongjiang Province to be the beak - and how could you not? just look at it! - it's a graceful anatomical swoop south through the neck of Hubei, on down along the coastline, which swells into a fulsome, savory breast, upholstered by the luscious tenderloin of Anhui and Jiangxi Provinces.

My fellow volunteers and I live out in drumstick country. The wastelands to our immediate north I would liken to the gizzard or gall bladder of the Chinese chicken. Westward ho, and lo: China blossoms into the thunder thighs of Tibet, and Xinjiang Province, which is something like the tail of the chicken, a delicacy so rare and precious that you need a special government clearance just to eat it.

And lest this all seem a bit too glib and cheeky of me, I have received corroboration from many Chinese citizens from all walks of life and they, too, will proudly acknowledge that their country looks like a chicken. What of it? they ask me. I shrug. Just sayin', is all.

Something I noticed much later, long after I had, with the aid of an electron microscope, finally located my adoptive Chinese hometown on the map: there indeed be dragons in China, or at least dragons of the Google Earth variety. If we return to the east coast and scroll slowly downward from the beak until we arrive at the cleft where neck meets breast - the cleavage of China, if you will - off the coast of Tianjin, you will notice the unmistakable profile of a fire-breathing dragon, facing westward, laying to waste all of Shandong Province with its sulphurous loogeys. The illusion, I am told, is formed by the Bohai Sea, whose name does not mean "Dragon-ish Looking Sea" as you and I might hope. But then, I don't suppose the people who named it had access to Google Earth at the time. Rather unhelpfully, my Chinese-English dictionary tells me that the name "Bohai Sea" means "Bohai Sea."

But anyway, it looks like a dragon. So, Here Be Dragons, on a technicality. Still, from experience I am inclined to believe that the Chinese mainland is just teeming with dragons, and not the big red twelve-man stretch limo dragons you see snaking around the streets of Chinatown in Chicago on Chinese New Year's. Come to think of it, I've never seen a single fucking one of those in China. Then again, I've never seen fortune cookies or egg rolls here, either.

I'm lucky. Most Peace Corps volunteers are cast into the legitimate dragonlands. The phrase "in the bush" takes on a deeper meaning, I imagine, to someone serving in a Zambian village than it currently holds for me, a hack of an English professor in an unsung, overpopulated Chinese megalopolis of seven million strong. The volunteer in Zambia faces dragons of a more literal sort; he resides in a part of the world that, fifty or a hundred years ago, might as well have been labeled "Here Be Dragons." The volunteer in China has it much easier from a cartographic standpoint. I can Mapquest my way around Nanchong, fer chrissakes. But we nevertheless face dragons of a sort. They may only be dragons of the metaphorical variety, but they are no less frightening, imposing, or annoying for all that.

The fact remains that China - all of it, from beak to brisket - eludes the West, has always eluded the West, and looks likely to elude the West for as long as there is a West, and for as long as there is a China. It isn't just cultural misunderstanding or any of that mushy Obamanian glop, though it is also that. The differences between China and the West are fundamental differences. As in, irreconcilable differences. China, by and large, does not want to become more like the West. It wants the opposite of that. Japan and South Korea were similarly opposed to Western influence, once upon a time. But one way or another, they have come to embrace Western values along with Western commerce - not without some hand-wringing along the way, of course. The Chinese have adopted Western commerce while remaining extremely wary of Western values. And that wariness shows no signs of diminishing. Not from my very limited viewpoint, at any rate.

What surprised me most on my first visit to China, some three-odd years ago, was the absolute dearth of English. My first night in downtown Hangzhou - nicknamed the Silicon Valley of China - I desperately needed to use a telephone. I swung by an information booth just off the main square.

"Qing wen," I read from my Lonely Planet. "You meiyou yi ge ... um ... telephone?"
The girl behind the Plexiglas went into conniptions of misunderstanding.
"Telephone," I said. "Te-le-phone."
"TE-LE-HUA?!"
I talked into my hand. I took out my wallet and talked into that, too. Telephone, I said. Telephone. By then, she was looking at me like she was about to telephone the padded rickshaw to come take me away.

I was still a traveling greenhorn at the time, but not really all that much of one. I had lived in Poland, with its spotty English, and South Korea, with its even spottier Konglish. I was well aware that the English language hadn't yet conquered the world. In my travels, I had always made a point of learning more of the local language than I needed, so as to appear as dignified and untouristic as possible. But in desperate times, in all my travels, I had always been able to unearth an English speaker. Not so in the Silicon Valley of China. I forget how many people I asked that night on the laser-lit streets of Hangzhou. Telephone? Telephone? Telephone? Nobody knew what the fuck a telephone was. Here was China's most affluent upper crust, and nobody knew the English word "telephone," which has to be among the top ten most widely known words worldwide. Even in your Zambian village, I imagine the kids know what the word "telephone" means, or understand what a white dude talking into his wallet means.

That was my first impression of China, and it is an impression that has stuck with me long after I left Hangzhou, long after I retreated to the relative Sichuanese bush for two years. In the relative Sichuanese bush, it is even worse. Out here, if you don't speak a lick of Chinese - and many foreigners do not - I bid you good luck. The Chinese study English, even in the relative Sichuanese bush. In fact, they study their asses off. But very few Chinese seem in any way inclined to actually learn English. When you come right down to it, English just isn't very Chinese.

This is neither a positive nor a negative attribute of the Chinese mindset. I see very few reasons - and of those, only practical ones - why the average Chinese needs to learn English. The absence of English makes life hell for tourists, sure. But on the plus side, for me at least, the absence of English makes learning Chinese a helluva lot easier.

It's only when I really dwell on it that the absence of English disturbs me. Clumsy old, sloppy old English has become the world's lingua franca. English has become not only the language of business, not simply a means of communicating with lost tourists - for better or worse, English, wherever you live, has become pretty much the only means of interacting with people from the outside world.

For as much as China has opened itself to the outside world, and for as quickly as it has adopted an appreciation for Western commerce and Western luxuries, the average educated Chinese adult has no command of basic English and is not terribly interested in matters un-Chinese. He resides permanently in a Chinese bubble. The same, of course, could be said for a great many Americans. But we are lucky in that regard, because there is no real American bubble. Not anymore, not unless you're from Nebraska. And even then. Because the American bubble includes microbubbles: Mexican bubbles, African bubbles, Native American bubbles, Chinese bubbles and Japanese bubbles and Korean bubbles. Even the most isolated, most ignorant American is at least peripherally aware of those other bubbles. But the Chinese bubble is all China, all the time.

I don't claim to be an authority on China. Who can? But there is a palpable swagger here. I see it mostly in the young people. It's a swagger that says, we are Chinese and we don't need to be anything else. The rest of the world has wronged us for centuries - for millennia, even. What do we owe the rest of the world? I respect that swagger to a point. I respect that much of the national pride swirling around here has been earned through the sort of hard work that Americans shudder to think about. We shrink away from the sort of pride the Chinese have, because we sense - guiltily and probably correctly - that we are no longer worthy of it.

But outside of China, most of us are slowly learning a lesson that we will all have to learn eventually: that our bubble no longer exists. Or perhaps it's just the opposite. Perhaps our bubble has swollen up so huge as to swallow up all the other bubbles. The definition of an American is a human being with an American passport. The same could be said for most nations on earth. So to be an American is to be everyone, or to be no one at all, depending on how you look at it. Either way, it is a claustrophobic and at the same time isolating sensation. Above all else, it is an uncomfortable sensation. But it is one that must be lived with. That, in the end, will be the direction of things.

The Chinese are a long way away from that realization. Their bubble may have been opened to McDonald's and Apple and General Electric, but very little else has been allowed in. Exports are flying out of the bubble, but very little else is allowed out. My fear is that the more Chinese the Chinese become, the less they will feel the need to contribute to the conversation the rest of the world is having. And for better or worse, that conversation is happening in English. So perhaps my job is important, after all. But my students have never been expected to learn English. They have been mandated to memorize it. And it is my fear that the conversation the rest of the world is having - wherever that conversation takes us - is going to be misinterpreted, misunderstood, or ignored by the Chinese. By the young, China-loving college students - my students - who will inherit this country. I often worry about them. I often worry that I let them slip through my fingers. But then I pour myself a cold one and think, no: those kids slipped through a lot of fingers before they got to you.

Wander-Thirst

Beyond the east the sunrise; Beyond the west the sea
And East and West the Wander-Thirst that will not let me be;
It works in me like madness to bid me say goodbye,
For the seas call, and the stars call, and oh! The call of the sky!

I know not where the white road runs, nor what the blue hills are,
But a man can have the sun for friend, and for his guide, a star;
And there's no end to voyaging when once the voice is heard,
For the rivers call, and the road calls, and oh! The call of a bird!

Yonder the long horizon lies, and there by night and day
The old ships draw to home again, the young ships sail away
And come I may, but go I must, and if men ask you why,
You may put the blame on the stars and the sun,
And the white road and the sky.

- Gerald Gould

Narcissus, Reflecting

gonna forget about myself for a while
gonna go out and see what others need
-Bob Dylan

The other day I walked into class and found an unusual word written on the blackboard in the impeccable cursive penmanship of a Chinese English teacher. The word was "Narcissus."

"Who knows what this word means?" I asked the class.
Nobody knew.
"Well, it's pronounced like this," I said. "Nar-sis-us."

A low murmuring: narcississississississ ...

"Not bad," I said.

"What is Narcissississississ?" asked one of the suck-ups in the front row.
"Narcissus is a person," I said. "He is a famous character in Western mythology. He might have been Greek. Or Roman. I'll have to Wikipedia that."
"For what is he famous?"
"Narcissus is famous for loving himself. And only himself."
Much giggling from the peanut gallery.
"Seriously," I said. "He saw his own reflection in a pond or some shit and he fell in love with himself."
More giggling. I whirled around to the board.
"And we call people who fall in love with themselves ... " I wrote the word in the gnarly mixed caps of a native speaker. "We call them 'narcissists.'"

More murmuring: narcississississississ ...

A hand shot up in the back row, the back row that persistently avoids kissing my ass.
"Mr. Panda," asked the hand, "are you a narciss ... iss ... iss ... isst?"

I grinned and tugged at my necktie. Then I dodged the question and fished out my lesson plan for the evening - unexpectedly, it was the best class I have ever taught in my life. But more on that later. In the meantime, let's talk about me.

Mr. Panda, are you a narciss ... iss ... iss ... isst? The question unsettled me more than I'd like to admit. Am I a narcissist? Frankly, I'm not sure. I'm not Greek, if that helps any. I don't have a mirror in my apartment and the tap water is too grimy to reflect much of anything, so my living arrangements grant me very few opportunities to fall in love with my gruff, red-bearded visage. So, at the very least, I am not Narcissus incarnate. But when I think about my writing and what I write about, and when I think about this blog in particular - lo, I have to admit to the very self I love and cherish so much: you and me, my friend, we are narcissists.

It's hard not to be a narcissist if you happen to be a foreigner in China. As a foreigner, you are the center of China's attention. Everywhere you go, you are special. Harassed, yes. Cheated, certainly. Worshiped, occasionally. But whatever which way the Chinese treat you, the treatment is always special.

And then, after spending the day at the center of China's attention, you return home to your crummy apartment, where you are the center of your own attention. The narcissist joins the Peace Corps seeking to annihilate his narcissism. But in China, you find yourself wherever you go.

Some degree of narcissism is unavoidable. But why, when it comes time to write, does the narcissistic expat continue to write about himself instead of, say, geopolitics or cultural differences or the Chinese education system or the rest of the world outside his own nappy-headed noggin? From a practical standpoint, I suppose I'm not really allowed to write about those things very much. But even if I could, the thing is, China continues to elude me. After two years, I know more about the place than I did when I arrived, but I feel less and less qualified to write about it. China is too complex. Too many variables. I, myself, am relatively simple by comparison. So when I sit down to write, I cling to the most solid Cartesian rock I can find - myself - and I go from there. Sometimes I brush up against China. Sometimes I bump into China. Sometimes China runs me over with a moped. But China is always the agonist and I, for better or worse, am the protagonist.

Protagonism is a habit I would like to get out of. I'm tired of being the center of attention. I long to dissolve into the obscurity of the Chicago O'Hare arrivals terminal. I long to be ignored and neglected. I long to be belittled by sassy Starbucks baristas. I'm tired of finding myself. Nobody ever finds themselves. Or I don't know. Maybe they do. But what would that entail, anyhow? You find yourself and then what? Then you have to live with yourself.

No, at this point, I would like nothing more than to go back home and eat a baby-sized Chipotle burrito and be good to the people who have been so very good to me over the years. I suppose, at the risk of sounding like Eckhart Tolle or some shit, I suppose that one finds oneself only to the extent that one forgets about oneself. A narcissist I am, indeed. But it is a temporary narcissism, a narcissism born of necessity. Necess-iss-iss-iss-iss ... Narcissism is my way of remaining sane in China, the self-grooming of a cat that has been left out in the rain. I look forward to going home and forgetting about myself for a while. Maybe I'll get myself a warehouse job. Maybe I'll take the GRE. Maybe I'll volunteer someplace. But that's all in the future. I never plan for the future. I think about my present to an unhealthy degree, and I dwell on my past. Also to an unhealthy degree. But the future? What's the sense in worrying about that?

Ocean Ghost

I haunted my old apartment all that summer, just waiting around for the new volunteer to show up. I watched The Wire all the way through for the fourth time. Then I watched Six Feet Under. Not a bad show; a bit too morbid for my liking. I even got so bored that I watched the first two seasons of Lost. Then I watched them again. What a stupid show. Why can't I stop watching it? I was brooding on that when the door flew open and the new volunteer came in. She dropped all her luggage and naturally, she screamed. I was almost inclined to scream, myself. But I pulled it together, counted to five, and floated over to shake her hand.

"Keith Petit," I said. "China 15."
"You're ... dead."
"No," I chuckled. "Not dead. It's a long story. Have a seat."

I indicated the plastic leather sofa. She didn't so much sit there as much as she passed out and faceplanted there. I floated off to the kitchen to fix up some coffee.

When the new volunteer finally came to, I asked her if there was anything she wanted to know about Nanchong.

"Thanks, but I don't drink coffee," she said. "If you're not dead, why are you a ghost?"
"I've been trying to figure that out myself," I said. "I don't even believe in ghosts."
"Me neither."
"But my best guess is, well - you know how if you sit on a couch for long enough, you leave behind a more or less permanent ass groove?"

She glanced over at the ass groove seated beside her. My ass groove.

"You might say I was a bit of a slob in my day," I said. "So my best guess is that I left behind a more or less permanent imprint of myself. In your apartment. Sorry about that."
"It looks pretty clean now," she said.
I laughed. Then I laughed some more.
"Yeah," I said. "It's clean now."

"So, can you leave the apartment at all?"
"Nope," I said. "I've tried a few times. I'm pretty much stuck here. I can float through the front door, but I've only ever gotten as far as the 3rd floor stairwell. Then I disintegrate and reappear right here on my sofa. Your sofa."
"Can people see you?"
"You can see me, can't you?"
"I mean, can other people see you? Can Chinese people see you?"
"If I hover in front of the window for a long time, sure. They point and shout yang gui-zi."
"What does that mean?"
"'Ocean ghost', if you want to be all literal about it," I said, "but 'foreign devil' is probably more to the point."

She coughed. I took out a pack of Shuangxis.

"Do you mind if I - "
"No. Go ahead."
I lit a cigarette.
"C'mon. Let me give you the tour," I said.

I floated across the living room and she followed me into the study.

"I left behind a lot of books for you," I said. "I wanted to keep them all for myself. But there was only so much room in my satchel."
"Um, thanks." She took a book down from the shelf. "Eat, Pray, Love?"
"Oh," I blushed. "That's not mine. I found it when I got here."
"Huh," she said.
"This here is the air conditioning unit," I said. "As you can see, most of the paint on the wall has chipped off. That's because the AC leaks like a motherfucker. If you leave it on, it leaks down through the floor and your downstairs neighbors will give you no end of grief about it. So try not to use the AC at all."
"But what do I do if it gets hot? It's already hot."
"I'm not sure," I said. "I never figured that out."

I floated into the kitchen.

"You cook at all?" I asked.
"Yeah, I do."
"I don't," I said. "I almost never came in here, come to think of it."
She started looking through the cupboards.
"Isn't there supposed to be, like, silverware and stuff?"
"There is."
"Where did it go?"
"I'm not sure," I said. "You lose track of things sometimes, you know?"
"Right," she said.

I floated into the bedroom.

"This here is the bed. If you can manage it, I recommend sleeping somewhere else."
"Somewhere else? Why? Where else would I sleep?"
"Sleeping in this bed," I said, shaking my head. "Sleeping in this bed is like sleeping on a plank of wood. But at least you can brag about sleeping on a plank of wood. You can't really brag about sleeping in an uncomfortable bed."
"The paint's coming off this wall, too."
"Correct," I said. "So you should probably avoid using this AC unit as well."
"Shouldn't you have gotten all this fixed?"
"I should have," I said.

I floated into the bathroom.

"And the last stop on our little reality tour," I said. "The grand finale. The shitter."
"Um," she said.
"Except if you've gotta go number two, I recommend going somewhere else."
"Somewhere else? But - "
"Like a restaurant or something. It's a crap shoot, so to speak," I said. "It's Russian roulette with this toilet. Most of the time, everything goes down easy. But sister, you don't wanna be around when the shit hits the fan. I'll just leave it at that."
"Yeah. Thanks."
"Let's see. What's next? Oh, right. The shower. They cut off the water for no apparent reason every couple days or so. And the hot water is pretty much cold water. And the water pressure comes and goes. Most showers, it just feels like an old man is drooling on your scalp. But it could be worse, right?"
"I guess it could be."

I hovered over to the couch and sipped my coffee.

"I'm sorry," said the new volunteer, "but that's really disgusting."
"What?"
"You. When you drink that coffee. I mean, I can see it just - "
"Then don't look," I snapped.

It got quiet.

"Sorry. I'm just touchy about certain things, is all," I said. "I'm new at this ghost thing. Anyhow. Is there anything you'd like to know about our fair city of Nanchong?"
"What is there to know?"
"Not much," I shrugged.
"I'm sorry," she said, "but I get the impression that you're pretty worthless."
"I get that impression sometimes, too," I said. "Of course it doesn't help that I'm an insubstantial blob of ectoplasm."
"Like, how long do you plan on haunting me? I didn't exactly count on having a roommate."
"I'm not sure," I said. "Maybe another ten minutes, maybe another month or two. It really depends on how big of an ass groove I left behind."

Again, her eyes lingered upon the ass groove on my sofa. Her sofa. She smacked it with her palm. She smacked it with both palms. Then, shrieking like a rabid lemur, she picked up the cushion and punched it in the face repeatedly. She threw it back down. The cushion was smooth for a moment. Then, slowly, audibly, the plastic leather snarled into a familiar pair of basins. My ass groove.

"I might be here a while," I sighed.
"Wonderful."
"Believe me, sister, I'm every bit as happy about it as you are. You think I want to hang out in this dingy apartment watching Lost all day?" I huffed. "I just want to go home."
"But you won't go home, will you? You're a ghost. You'll just ... disappear one day."
"I'm not so sure," I said. "But you're probably right. There's already another one of me out there. A real me. He's back in Nebraska right now, working for a temp agency or something. Now there's a spectral existence for you."

There was a knock at the door. The new volunteer looked at me.

"Isn't this where you're supposed to float away and hide yourself in the closet or something?"
"Naw," I said. "It's cool."

She grunted and stomped off to get the door. It was my old boss.

"Good afternoon, Jennifer. Your apartment is okay, yes?"
The new volunteer - Jennifer, I guess - glanced back at me for a moment.
"Yeah. Everything's fine."
"That is good. You must be tired. You had better have a rest. But tomorrow the English department will invite you to a banquet. Will you go?"
"That sounds great."
"I will call your telephone tomorrow. You had better pick it up."
My old boss gave me a definite look.
"Great. See you tomorrow."

Jennifer shut the door and turned around to face me.
"I thought you said people could see you," she said.
"They can. Some people just choose to ignore me."

If they were a long two years for Jennifer, they were an even longer two years for me. At least she was able to get out of the house every now and then. She got homesick a couple months in and stayed that way for a while. Then, the following spring, she hooked up with another volunteer, this guy Jared. Pretty alright dude. After that, nothing really seemed to faze her. Young love. Jared came over to visit sometimes and I'd have to hide out in one of the kitchen cupboards the whole time and stuff my ears with Kleenex at night.

Jennifer kept the place impeccably clean, no thanks to me, but most of the time we got along okay. After a while, though, she decided to ignore me, too. It was easier that way, I guess. When she was out of the house, I'd re-watch The Wire or re-watch Six Feet Under. I even re-watched the first two seasons of Lost. I still don't know if they ever get off the island, and I don't really care to find out. And I still don't know why I keep watching that stupid show.

Jennifer returned to America this past July. I heard that somewhere along the way Jared proposed to her and she said yes. So I'm happy for them, of course. I hope everything works out okay. She took most of my DVDs home with her and a lot of my books, too. I started reading Eat, Pray, Love and when I finished it I found myself weeping uncontrollably all over my sofa. My ghost tears pooled up in the twin basins of my ass groove. Then they evaporated. The AC's broke again.

In the evenings, I hover in front of the window and watch the construction going on outside. I can't tell if they're building something or tearing something down. After four years, I can barely even recognize the place. Everything has changed so quickly, and so much. It's only a matter of time before they tear down my apartment complex. And then where will I go?

The new volunteer doesn't show up for another two weeks. I hope she is cool. Or that he is cool. I hope, whoever it is, they bring plenty of books. I'm tired of re-reading the ones I have. I'm tired of re-reading Eat, Pray, Love.

Nothing to read, nothing to watch, nothing to do. No one to talk to. These days, I just float around the apartment, looking for old junk in the desk drawers, behind the bookshelf, under the sofa cushions. There isn't much of anything left. Jennifer cleaned this place like a woman possessed. But I did find a little scrap the other day when I was rummaging around under the bed, a sliver of faded canary yellow paper, a crumpled-up scribble that read: I can't wait to get the fuck out of here. Well, Keith. Neither can I.

Dash 7

the wind blew me back
via Chicago
in the middle of the night
-Wilco

I remember well the last time I came home via Chicago. But I cannot remember where exactly I was coming home from. Perhaps Mexico, which would go a long way towards explaining why I found myself smoking a Delicado in a t-shirt and cargo shorts just outside of Terminal B, shivering so violently that the ash scattered everywhere and blended neatly into the night's snowy deluge.

An older gent joined me outside for a smoke. He asked me if I was cold. Yes, I said, I am. Then he launched into his life story. I couldn't follow most of it - I am not that well-versed in racial slurs - but his story ended happily, I think. He was waiting for a connecting flight to JFK, then he was off to The Philippines to meet his mail-order bride for the first time. Aren't mail-order brides supposed to come in the mail, I asked. I mean, isn't that the whole point of mail-order brides?

"Whelp," he said, "I just thought I'd save her the trouble. The exchange rate ain't so kind over there. Kinda want to give the ol' girl a test drive anyway."

The twelve-hour overnight layover at O'Hare looked much less gruesome on the itinerary. I slept on the floor of Terminal B that night with my backpack for a pillow. They had benches in Terminal B, but they were short ones, and artsy ones. So I'd wake up with my legs dangling out into space and a rustic sliver of sharpened tin jabbing me in the kidney. The floor, alas, was my best bet, and it wasn't a very good bet at all. The soothing whir of the floor buffers did little to alleviate the train wreck going on in my spinal column. I would wake up in the middle of the night and gaze up at the multi-billion dollar ceiling of Terminal B, and I'd think to myself, this might just be the nicest house I ever fall asleep in.

Dawn arrived and I was the first person in line. We boarded the learjet, or the turboprop, or the Dash 7 or whatever it was. I wasn't afraid of flying at the time, so I just kind of sat there in my assigned window seat and eavesdropped. The guy seated behind me started jawing to his neighbor about a party he went to in Phoenix.

"Y'ever heard of Usher?" he asked. Silence. "No? No? Where you been, man? Living under a rock? Heh heh."

This was in 2009, when I last came home via Chicago. I can no longer remember the last time Usher was big.

The guy seated behind me took out his laptop and within seconds, all of us seated in coach were listening to Usher's "Yeah" on laptop speakers that were the hip-hop equivalent of a black hole.

"This," said the guy, "is Usher."

I turned around to make sure of what I already knew: that the guy seated behind me was not young or black, that he was in fact a salt-of-the-earth Nebraskan in his early forties, wearing a brutally folded and sweatstained Poulan Weed Eater baseball cap. A bevy of Nebraskans had gathered in the aisle to watch the music video, and their bovine faces were blank with the sort of silent trepidation known only to people who move to Nebraska later in life. About two minutes into the video, the stewardess came by to tell the guy seated behind me to turn off his laptop. The guy grudgingly complied and the Nebraskans, relieved, returned to their seats.

The guy seated behind me, however, was not done. He had a story to tell, a real humdinger that he would lavish upon his neighbor whether his neighbor liked it or not.

"We went to a party with this guy," said the guy seated behind me. "Usher, I mean. The party was at Usher's house."

The House of Usher, I thought, thoroughly amused with myself and my English degree.

"Well, I mean, Usher has like, a million houses, I'm sure," said the guy. "But this was one of them."
"Oh. Yeah?" grunted his neighbor.
"Yeah. Me and my buddies were on the guest list and everything. Unfortunately, the line was too long. You shoulda seen it, man. I mean, a line out the gosh-danged door. So we never got in," said the guy. "But we were still partyin' in the street. I tell you what: that Usher knows how to throw a party."

We lifted off. Nobody spoke for a while, least of all the businessman seated next to the guy seated behind me. I imagine he popped a fistful of Unisoms and strapped on his sleep visor ASAP. But the guy seated behind me was not yet sated conversationally. So he reached across the aisle, so to speak.

Two Nebraskans: A Dialogue. Their conversation kicked off, predictably, with high school football. I listened, was familiar with all of the shitkicker towns and most of the mascots. I even knew some of the players. Or their older brothers, perhaps. Then the conversation shifted, somewhat less predictably, to Native American heritage.

"Yeap. I got some redman blood in me. I'm about 1/8th Winnebago, 1/16th Pawnee. Yourself?"
"Welp. About 1/16th Nemaha, 1/32nd Omaha, 1/128th Yamaha ... "

I listened but kept silent. Considering my own negligible Irish ancestry, I figured I was probably the least Nebraskan Nebraskan on board.

The stewardess came by and tossed me a bag of pretzels. I've never liked pretzels as much as everyone else on earth seems to, so I gave them to my neighbor. My neighbor was a college girl, blonde and homely in the rural Nebraskan way, and we talked for a bit in the rural Nebraskan way. We talked about high school football. Out the window, miles below, the weird agricultural circuitry of the American Midwest scrolled lazily past.

The stewardess came back around to pick up our empty bags of pretzels. I thought about asking her for a Bud Light, but everyone on board was palpably Mormon or worse. Then I asked her for one anyway. But we were already starting our descent. The flight home from Chicago never takes very long. It's a line drive. A puddle jumper, if there were any puddles to jump. But it's all refurbished desert down below. The front lawn of America. Irrigation circles, buzzcut farmland, straightedge roads to nowhere - long and gray and deserted except for a tiny twinkle of metal, a Ford F-150 pickup, perhaps, zipping along with a frantic slowness to the intersection of nowhere and nowhere in particular.

The seatbelt lights came on. Always a sepulchral moment for some reason, the descent. I buckled my safety belt and wrapped up my conversation with the girl next to me. Even the guy seated behind me fell silent. What else was there to talk about? We'd be landing soon. Though everyone on the plane was probably related somehow, we'd never see each other again. We were descending. We'd hover past the used car lots of Council Bluffs, hurdle the muddy Missouri, and the tires would kiss the runway. Home at last. We'd taxi to the only terminal Omaha has to its name. Is there even a departures wing? I wonder sometimes. And then the seatbelt light would blink to black. And summarily, as a herd, we would remove our masks of polite airplane formality and apply our masks of polite Nebraskan formality. And that's just what we did.

But as I reached up for the overhead bin, as a panicked afterthought, the girl next to me asked for my phone number.
"I don't have one," I said. It took me a moment to realize that was true.

Via Chicago

I've found
the way those engines sound
will make you kiss the ground
when you touch down
-Wilco

Three months left in China and I'm sputtering towards the finish line. Shuddering my way through black plumes of industrial backwash, muttering my way through ribbon after ribbon of red tape, stuttering my way through Oral English 101. Sputtering my way through Chinese airspace like a battered old Sopwith Camel, fuselage peppered with artillery wounds, professorial elbow patches sewn into my wings, the whole thing jerry rigged together with dental floss and Chinese finger traps, faltering and fluttering, stammering and stuttering but still, still sputtering through the People's secondhand smoke towards a drive-thru McMirage on the distant horizon.

Rest assured, when I return home, via Chicago, I will return in one piece, but it will be a piece so shoddily taped together as to inspire some metaphysical debate.

China has been rough on me, as I imagine it is rough on just about anyone who isn't Chinese. As I imagine it is rough on many people who are Chinese. Here is no country for old men. Here is no country for young men. Here is no country for middle-aged divorcées, or bright-eyed college graduates. Here is no country for peasants, or priests, or philosophers, or poets, or the sad lot of soft-hearted daydreamers who submit themselves daily to the process of being hammered and screwed into bright yellow star-shaped pigeonholes. It must be a country for some particular demographic of people. But I'm pretty sure by now that, wherever else I belong, I do not belong to that demographic.

So I am sputtering. Here is no country for pandas. I haven't cleaned my apartment in months. The Maginot Line between my living room and the garbage dump outside has been reduced to a matter of geopolitical nitpickery. I sleep when the sun comes up. I rise just before it sets. My routine has grown so erratic that the erratic has become routine. The pitching rotation of my wardrobe - through theft, loss, and washing machine mishaps - has been thinned down to a single middle reliever, a colorblind knuckleballer thrust unexpectedly into the Major League limelight - and he starts more games these days than I am comfortable admitting.

I am sputtering, but I have not yet crashed. And I'm not likely to, not at this point. Because I'm so close to the finish line. Because however much my personal hygiene has suffered, my life out of doors has gotten that much better. A wonderful sort of existential callus has formed around my person. I no longer notice the traffic noise, the construction, the esophageal explosions that rage in the streets, not unless they are pointed out to me, not unless I consciously decide to think about them by way of reminding myself of just how numb I have become to the sensorial circus of my surroundings. It matters very little to me what I have for lunch or dinner. Let's do Chinese, I figure. These days, I teach with the part of my brain that reptiles use when they are snoozing on rocks. Which is not to say that I have grown lazy, or that I care little for my work. But it is to say that I no longer panic, or worry, or even think about teaching. It is something I do, almost instinctively, rather than something I get my panties in a bunch about. Not even my hecklers can get my goat these days. Foreigner, foreigner! Chinese person, Chinese person. I am mindful of the fact that every heckle is one heckle closer to the last heckle, which will occur on an eastbound flight from Beijing to San Francisco. And then, for that one heckler at least, the tables will turn, indeed. Have fun on Haight Street, asshole.

Sputtering though I am, I have turned a corner. Sichuanese winter died in its sleep last week. The westerly winds have ushered in days of warmth, days of something resembling sunshine: a dusty orange tennis ball dangling down from the aluminum-tinged sky. I am in a consistently better mood when there is something resembling sunshine to wake up to. The days will be warmer from here on out, I know, and the sun won't be the stranger that it was. Things will be easier from here on out. It's as though, after rowing against the waves for the past 21 months, I have finally settled into a warm and easy current. It is only a matter of time before I am sighted by the Peace Corps rescue chopper and hoisted aboard with fistpounds and manhugs and bottles of champagne to be uncorked and splooged about the cabin.

I have turned a corner. I have already lived far more days in China than I have left. The next time I clean my apartment will be the last time I clean my apartment. The next time I step on a fresh baby turd on the sidewalk will be the last time I step on a fresh baby turd on the sidewalk. There remains a daunting amount of Peace Corps paperwork left to be done, but I will fill it out with the same giddiness as a middle schooler cleaning out his locker, or a high schooler returning his books, or a frat boy foiling the crusty dean one last time.

Back when I was still grappling with the enormity of two years abroad, I used to measure the time on my late night jogs. I would run for 24 minutes - two years - and if I had already spent six months in China, I knew those 18 remaining minutes were what I had left ahead of me. Two months ago - my 19th month - my right achilles tendon had an unfortunate run-in with the front tire of a moped. I walked it off and thought nothing of the encounter. Until last week - the start of my 21st month - when my right achilles tendon started talking to me and, on a mid-afternoon cigarette run, audibly popped. No more running. I can barely even walk. But late at night, after the eleven o'clock curfew has sent all my hecklers to bed, I go out for a hobble, if you will. Every step is a bitch, as every day in China has been a bitch. The walk (the hobble) takes about half an hour, but for my purposes I round it down to 24 minutes. And those last three minutes back home, when my achilles tendon feels about ready to snap in two like a Chinese condom - well, I say to myself, that's where I'm at. I'm so close to home, and every tedious, tentative step brings me closer. I really have nothing left to do but keep hobbling, and keep an eye out for mopeds.

Expatriate Act is Dead (Long Live Expatriate Act)

"Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity."
- Gustave Flaubert

To the four readers I have left (hi mom), Expatriate Act is not dead. But it will be soon enough. If you listen closely, you can hear the death knells ringing down from the Sichuanese hills. They - the knells, I mean - sound something like 600 million Chinese men launching double barrel snot rockets in unison. And what that sounds like, I leave you to imagine. Rest assured, I can imagine it well enough.

Sometime in April, this blog will turn five years old. And three months after that, it will die. Of that I am certain. Because as of July, I will be traveling no longer. As of July, I will be an expatriate no more. As of July, consider my ass retired.

In July, I will return to my native Omaha. And I intend to stay there for a while. I also intend to keep writing. So I could, of course, prolong the inevitable. I could rechristen this blog "Repatriated Act" or "Ex-Expatriate Act." I could write about the outside world from my foreign correspondent's desk in Omaha. Or I could write about Omaha; no doubt my native Nebraska will be as foreign to me as China once was. But I started this blog as a first-time traveler, and I intend to close it out as a retired traveler. Frankly, I am exhausted. I sense that my work here is done. And anyway, five years seems like a good number to go out on. So at this juncture, I will graciously bow out and pass on the torch. Let the laowais write for the laowais, I figure.

I started this blog in April of 2006. I turn 28 this Friday, but I was 23 back then. Imagine that. Time gets away from us.

At 23, I had successfully graduated from college with a degree in creative writing. For the better part of a year, I worked as a copywriter until I realized what I had known all along: that the encubicled life was not for me. So that fateful April, I set off for Poland to earn a teaching certificate of sorts. I started a blog. I called it Expatriate Act. I got the teaching certificate, but all my luggage was stolen in Berlin. Broke and half-naked, I returned to the States to buy some new clothes from the Salvation Army. Shortly thereafter, I landed a fairly lucrative gig teaching children in South Korea. I lived in South Korea for one year. Then I vacationed for a month on the east coast of China, where unmentionable things happened. Then I spent two weeks in The Netherlands, where even less mentionable things happened. I returned to the States and squandered my life savings on beer and women and Taco Bell. A good couple months they were. Then I taught English for six months in a coal mining town in Poland. The women were many, but I couldn't bring myself to stay there, so I tried to put together a life in Berlin. I failed. I returned to the States. I got a teaching job in Mexico. I lived there for six happy months while the country tumbled into civil war. Somewhere along the way, I was accepted into the Peace Corps fold. In the summer of 2009, the Peace Corps shipped me off to China. I have spent the past two years in Nanchong, Sichuan Province, People's Republic of China.

This is the trajectory of the past five years of my life. At the outset, when I first left America, I couldn't have anticipated, or guessed, or dreamed that I would be gone for so long. And now that my adventure is drawing to a close, I'm surprised at how quickly the time has passed.

Vague intentions begat vague writing. I didn't know what I was looking for when I first left America, so I wasn't sure what to write about when I started this blog, the blog I dubbed Expatriate Act. After five years of writing, I am still not sure what I am writing about. I cannot say that I have gotten any closer to figuring out who I am. I cannot say that I understand China, or Mexico, or Poland, or Korea any better than I did before I lived in those places. Writing, and the process of writing, eludes me even more than it did when I first started writing.

I cannot say that I have ever consciously worked on Expatriate Act. If anything, Expatriate Act has worked on me. If anything, the presence of Expatriate Act has dogged me and pestered me, has compelled me to write more than I otherwise would have. For better and for worse, Expatriate Act has injected me with a neurotic compulsion to write, even when there is positively nothing worth writing about.

That said, the most wonderful times of my life - namely, the six months I spent in Mexico - are almost totally absent from this blog. I wrote nothing about Mexico. I was too busy being happy. Conversely, the most tedious, most miserable times of my life - the time I have spent in Asia - have been written about ad nauseam. This isn't terribly mysterious. Or at least, it shouldn't be. The natural habitat of the writer is misery. In the absence of misery, what else is there to write about? Perhaps that is why I couldn't stay in Mexico. I had nothing to write about in Mexico. I was too happy. But in the end, I am not just a writer. I am also a person. And like most people, I tend to avoid misery when I can. And that is why I cannot stay in China.

I don't know why I started writing Expatriate Act. And I'm not sure why I continued writing it. I never attracted an audience in the beginning, and I only just barely have an audience now, five years later. A cult following, you might say. But at no point have I written for the sake of attracting an audience. I am too selfish and not quite conniving enough for that. I write to get things off my chest. And more than that, I write to amuse the people I hold dear. As I write, I am forever wondering and worrying - would so-and-so find this funny? Getting things off my chest is a necessity, but it only affords relief. It brings me no pleasure. What affords me the most pleasure are the emails, comments, compliments, criticisms, and assorted contributions from the people who read what I write. So I thank you all for that. Very little in life makes me happier than the knowledge that other people are made happier by what I write. I mean that. The fact that other people read what I write flatters me to no end, and is pretty much the only thing that inspires me to keep writing. This all sounds very cheesy and Oscarspeechworthy, but I wouldn't have written for five years if so many people hadn't encouraged me along the way. I thank you again.

I have learned a lot about myself through writing, and through writing, I have learned much about the cultures that have allowed me to cavort - drunk and disheveled all the while - in their midst. But above all else, it has been a real pleasure to write: the process itself has been indescribably rewarding. I have always been a writer, but I have never enjoyed writing so much. Expatriate Act was an experiment, and I consider the experiment a marvelous failure. In five years of writing, I never once put things exactly the way I wanted to. But that goes with the territory. Dancing bears and cracked kettles and what not. So - fuck it, I say. If my hypercaffeinated, hyperinebriated crotch-scratching labors have inspired a single bout of unfalsifiable laughter, then my work here is done.

But my work here isn't done. Not quite yet. I still have four months left to go. I still have many classes left to teach, countless hecklers left to ignore, and yes, many things left to write about. Expatriate Act is not yet dead. I'm just letting you know that it will be soon enough. This is not to say that Expatriate Act will disappear completely. I imagine I will leave it up for posterity, in all its unabridged, unedited glory. As a time capsule. As a tombstone. As a cautionary note to the up and coming generations of college graduates. Listen: here are all the mistakes you can make during your mid to late twenties. And listen: here is why they are worth repeating.