Expatriate Act

(Yet Another) Restless Farewell

2011-06-15T01:36:00.000+08:00

Oh all the money that in my whole life I did spend
Be it mine right or wrongfully
I let it slip gladly past the hands of my friends
To tie up the time most forcefully
But the bottles are done
We’ve killed each one
And the table’s full and overflowed
And the corner sign
Says it’s closing time
So I’ll bid farewell and be down the road

Oh ev’ry girl that ever I’ve touched
I did not do it harmfully
And ev’ry girl that ever I’ve hurt
I did not do it knowin’ly
But to remain as friends
And make amends
You need the time and stay behind
And since my feet are now fast
And point away from the past
I’ll bid farewell and be down the line

Oh ev’ry foe that ever I faced
The cause was there before we came
And ev’ry cause that ever I fought
I fought it full without regret or shame
But the dark does die
As the curtain is drawn and somebody’s eyes
Must meet the dawn
And if I see the day
I’d only have to stay
So I’ll bid farewell in the night and be gone

Oh, ev’ry thought that’s strung a knot in my mind
I might go insane if it couldn’t be sprung
But it’s not to stand naked under unknowin’ eyes
It’s for myself and my friends my stories are sung
But the time ain’t tall, yet on time you depend
And no word is possessed by no special friend
And though the line is cut
It ain’t quite the end
I’ll just bid farewell till we meet again

Oh a false clock tries to tick out my time
To disgrace, distract, and bother me
And the dirt of gossip blows into my face
And the dust of rumors covers me
But if the arrow is straight
And the point is slick
It can pierce through dust no matter how thick
So I’ll make my stand
And remain as I am
And bid farewell and not give a damn

The Returned Peace Corps Volunteer

2011-05-08T03:40:00.012+08:00

The Returned Peace Corps Volunteer returns home after two years in the Peace Corps. You see him, very briefly, at the ass-end of his Welcome Home Party, but speech is not one of his stronger suits by the ass-end of that particular soirée. So you call him a couple days later and agree to meet him the following Wednesday at The Brothers Lounge on 38th and Farnam, your usual haunt, for drinks and a good, honest plunge into his volunteer experience. And some more drinks after that, presumably.

He shows up late and seems out of sorts when he finally arrives. Is he drunk? Already? No, you decide, he is not drunk. Just bewildered, for whatever reason. He sits down across from you at a four-person table at which only the two of you are seated, in the very darkest corner of a very dark bar. You shake hands.

"How you been, man?"
"Alright. You?"
"Doing well."
"Whatchoo drinking?"

You order a couple of Moscow Mules, the house specialty. The first round, you make clear, is on you. The drinks arrive in those little tin cups you like. Your friend stirs his Mule and stares down into his cup like he is trying to read his fortune therein, and you utilize the prolonged silence to drink in his appearance. He has changed. He looks unreal to you. His facial expressions are not quite his own, do not match the dossier of stillframes and short films you keep in your head. His movements are almost cartoonish. It's like the first time you saw a celebrity: Ashton Kutcher, at the zoo, a long time ago. They look so different in person. Shorter, for one thing, but it's mostly their movements that throw you off. They move like cartoons. Unreal. Larger than life, but weirdly diminished in real life. Unreal, or too real to be believed. You ponder this for a moment. Of course, you figure, it could be that your mental image of your friend has remained exactly the same while he has changed, which is only natural. People change. That's all they ever do, is change. It is irrational to expect people to remain the same. Two years. Who knows what he went through over there? Or whether he went through anything at all. Perhaps he is more or less the same as he ever was. Perhaps it is you who has changed. Perhaps you have gone through more shit than he has - you entertain the possibility. You reflect on all this shit while the goof stirs his drink and stirs it some more. In the end, you conclude: who the hell knows and does it even really matter?

Option A: "How was China?" you ask.
"You know," he says. "Good times. Bad times. Strikes and gutters."
"I hear you," you say.

Then you launch into a narrative about your workplace and the goings-on therein. The technical terms take quite some time to explain to your friend (who has always been fairly dense), and after you've fleshed out the details, you almost lose yourself altogether in the greasy depths of your law firm's dramatis personæ, comprised as it is of unattractive middle-aged white men who are of no particular interest to anyone - least of all you, least of all your friend, the Returned Peace Corps Volunteer. But your friend, the Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, hears you out and asks you the right questions, so you keep going. And before either of you are quite aware of the hour, it's closing time already. You pay the tab. Your friend thanks you for the drinks and bows ever so slightly in your direction. The both of you walk out to your respective vehicles together and shake hands there in the parking lot. A beautiful summer night. Trees whispering in the wind, etc. You get into your resepective vehicles. You drive north towards Midtown. He drives south, towards I-80 and The Suburbs. You think about hitting up Taco Bell. You put on the radio and switch it to the local NPR affiliate. It's the BBC World Service radio hour, which means it must be pretty damn late. Taco Bell time. Mexico, it seems, has surpassed Iraq and Afghanistan in kidnappings per capita. You order two Nacho Cheese Chalupas. You decide you are sober enough to take Dodge Street home. You reflect on the evening as you switch on your turn signal and wait for the oncoming headlights to pass so you can make that fateful/illegal left turn onto South 50th Street, and while you wait it occurs to you that you still have no idea what your friend, the Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, did for the past two years of his bizarre fucking life.

Option B: "How was China?" you ask.
"You know," he says. "Good times. Bad times. Strikes and gutters."

You both stir your drinks. Some fat guy across the bar slides a dollar into the jukebox. A song comes on. He and his buddies laugh their asses off, exchange fistpounds. You don't recognize the song, but it comes on three times in a row. Some sort of inside joke, you figure.

"But mostly bad times," says your friend, the Returned Peace Corps Volunteer. "I can't even begin to describe it. It's one thing to hear about it. It's one thing to read about it. But it's a whole other thing to live it."

You remain silent. Good friend that you are, you sense that this is the beginning of a monumental rant. As it turns out, you are not the least bit wrong about that.

"First off," he says, "it's not what they say it is. China. In the States, half the people are of the mind that China is 1984 incarnate. Big Brother and shit. The other half of the people, the China Apologists, are convinced that China is just like America, only more disciplined. Neither of those is the truth. But the truth is not quite in-between. To be honest, I have no fucking idea where the truth is anymore."

Your friend pauses, broods, stirs his drink. He takes a long sip from the thin red straw. You can hear the fluids gurgling at the bottom of his tin cup. He has already finished his first Moscow Mule. It's only been five minutes. You decide to catch up, while your friend, the Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, flags down the bartendress.

"Thanks, ma'am. Anyway. Like I said, it's not 1984. But it's not not 1984. If that makes any sense."

You nod, indicating via various/assorted facial cues that this makes no sense to you whatsoever.

"My students, for one thing, were completely brainwashed. As were 99.9% of the people I met over the course of two years. I still have no idea how they did it. The Party, I mean. How does one go about brainwashing 1.3 billion people? Beats the fuck out of me. Beats the fuck out of you. But they've done it. Mission Accomplished, as it were. The modern day Communist Party has succeeded where Mao failed. The older generation - the generation that grew up under Mao, that suffered unimaginably under Mao - are much more sane, much more capable of ... of thinking than the younger generation." Here, your friend sighs so hard that he practically spits across the table. "The young kids, the kids I used to teach - I hate to say it, but they were already a lost cause a long, long time before they showed up in my class."

He broods on this for a moment. The second round arrives. You both thank the bartendress. Your friend, you notice, bows ever so slightly in her direction. Do they bow in China? Or has your friend just gotten weird? You mean to ask him but decide to let the question sit until he has finished his rant. Because you are a good friend and what not. The inside joke song on the jukebox finally stops repeating itself. Something else comes on. An indie punk number. It's an indie punk bar, after all. It's so dark you can barely make out your Indiglo watch. You have no idea what time it is, but you hope it's getting close to closing time.

"I hate to generalize," your friend says, "but then, I've never lived anywhere where I could generalize. People are, as a rule, far too complex to be generalized. But China was different. Everywhere I went, everyone I talked to - for two years - I could predict almost exactly how they would respond to me, what they would say to me. There was a definite Chinese ... type. Everyone dressed the same, thought the same, shouted the same bullshit at me on the streets. It got to where every day was almost exactly the same to me. Which makes a man want to drink more than he should. Which makes a man smoke like a flaming pile of shit."

"Which I did," he adds, taking a long sip. "Like a flaming pile of shit."
"You still smoke?"
"Not anymore," he says.
"Damn," you mutter. You take out a pack of American Spirits and smack the pack against the back of your hand. "You mind if I sneak out for a - "
"Not at all," he says.

You sneak out for a cigarette. A beautiful summer night. Trees whispering in the wind, etc. You recognize most of the smoking crew out there. That one Far Side cartoon springs to mind, the one with the smoking dinosaurs, and you think about quitting. You always think about quitting. Never do, though. The smokers talk about the bands they're in, the record deals they're about to get. They're younger than you, almost embarrassingly so. You couldn't give a shit about their record deals, but you pretend to and shake hands with everyone on your way back in.

"Sorry," you say to your friend, who is obsessively-compulsively stirring his drink again. "Proceed."

"I dunno, man," he says. "I've never been more miserable in my life. In China, I mean. Not since high school, at least. Puberty. The Descent of the Testes and what have you. But I wasn't miserable about me in China. In fact, I'd never felt more sure of myself. But never in my life have I been more miserable about my surroundings. Not since puberty, I mean. Just imagine - "

We're already up to drink three, you realize. Or at least your friend is. You haven't even broken the seal on drink two. Your friend flags down the bartendress. You get to slurping.

"Imagine," he says. "Every day. Every time you leave your apartment. Every time you go out to do anything, you are pointed at. Stared at. Laughed at. People shout at you. Cat call you. Shout wai-guo-ren, which means foreigner, or laowai, which means foreigner, too, though it feels more like The N-Word. Sometimes they even shout the word foreigner in English, just to get your goat. Which is the worst one of all. Because you realize that they are using what little English they know, and they are using it to get your goat. Which is pretty damned sadistic of them, if you ask me. Two fucking years of that."

He sighs. You nod. You don't really think it sounds all that bad, but your friend's brow is furrowed in a way that suggests some sort of personal injury that you are not quite privy to, because it is probably deeply internal. His forehead looks like a page out of a Mead® college-ruled notebook.

"College kids - strangers, adults - will shout fuck you in your face as they pass you in the streets. But that doesn't really bother you all that much. Direct hatred, I've found, is much easier to deal with than sideways, peripheral, perpetual disdain. China made me an angry person. I came to appreciate hip-hop in China. Imagine that. I'm not black or anything, but I can almost imagine ... "

He trails off, cracks his knuckles. Drinks.

"Anyway. You come to think of yourself almost as a kind of superhero at the end of the day, just because you didn't kick the shit out of anyone. Two years of that bullshit and I only maybe flipped off a couple of douchebags, only mouthed off to a handful of hecklers. A less patient man than me - a more dignified man, perhaps - would've wound up in a Chinese prison. It was tough in the beginning and it never got easier. If anything, my nerves were totally shot by the end of it. I could hardly even look at people by the end. My last month in the country, I remember, I was out trying to buy a roll of toilet paper and some kid approached me and told me to go fuck myself. Then he walked away. I had to bite my tongue in half just to keep myself from going all medieval on his ass. So to speak. But bite my tongue in half I did."

Your friend blushes. You can't tell if it's the drink, or if he is on some level ashamed of everything that he has confessed to you over the past five minutes. Already, despite your best efforts, you are rather bored. Your chair creaks as you wiggle from one ass-cheek to the other. You stifle a yawn just in time for your friend not to notice (he is busy stirring his drink again) and you find yourself studying the cleavage of a brunette hunkered down over the pool table, just to keep your morale up, just to keep yourself awake.

"I almost went crazy back there. I swear I did. The worst part wasn't the heckling. Or the xenophobia. Or being so different from everyone else," he says. "The worst part was the monotony. The absence of hope. Every day was the same. There was no trajectory. No plot. And once you've lost the plot - "

He's stopped stirring his drink, because there is no drink left. He is lapping you. He flags down the bartendress. His fourth Mule is lined up for the slaughter. You're still nursing Mule two. You're fine with that. It is you, after all, who is driving.

"But the funny thing is," he says, "as bad as I thought it was as the time. As uneventful, as awful as most days were. Now that I'm back. Now that I'm here. It doesn't seem that bad at all. I just feel like I'm bitching about a great big nothing. China already feels like a dream. A great big cloud of vapor. What I've told you tonight is more than I've told anybody. And it's probably more than I ever will tell anybody else. The truth is, I no longer want to talk about it. Not to anyone. I just feel like I'm whining. And I'm not a whiner. I'm not. Sure, I had wanted to talk about it for a good long while, but only when I was there. Now that I'm home, it's not really worth talking about, is it? It doesn't matter. It was all just a dream. It doesn't exist to me anymore, not really. And anyway, nobody cares. I'm sure you don't. I mean, not really. I mean, you listen. Because you're a good guy. But - "

Your friend nods at the brunette hunkered over the pool table.

"Your mind is wandering."

You nod and finish your second Mule. You order your third. Why the hell not? This is getting depressing. Your friend, the Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, stands up and wobbles his way over to the jukebox. You already know two of the three songs he's going to put on. He's very predictable in that regard. You're not sure about the third, though. That much remains a mystery. He wobbles back to his seat. You both sit around thinking of things to say to one another. After a while, "Let It Loose" by The Rolling Stones comes on. Followed by, surprise surprise, "Mother of Pearl" by Roxy Music. Then - an actual surprise - "Waiting Room" by Fugazi.

"Shiieeeeet," you say. "Man, I didn't know you were into Fugazi."
"What the hell is Fugazi?" he asks, genuinely puzzled. "I was just pushing buttons up there."

Option C: "How was China?" you ask.

Your friend, the Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, laughs a bit. Then he laughs some more. The drinks arrive. He drinks his. You drink yours.

"Let's not talk about me," he says. "Let's talk about you."

Official Minutes from One Last Teacher Rampage, 5/04/2011

2011-05-04T21:17:00.019+08:00

Teacher: Okay. Look. Hey. All of you. Look. Look at me. Stop what you're doing. Stop it. Stop that. Stop. Please stop. Close those books. Close them. The cell phones. End them. Shut up. Please shut up. Look at me. Look. See? Okay.

Teacher: How old are you? Twenty-two? Twenty-one?

Students: [incomprehensible murmuring]

Teacher: Okay, twenty. So you're young. I was twenty, too, like eight hundred years ago. And you won't believe me when I say this, but believe me when I say this: you will miss college someday. You will wish you could go back. You will wish one day you could go back and do it again, only better. You will miss all the free time you had back in college. Which is a roundabout way of saying that you won't have any free time at all after you graduate.

Teacher: Now, I know (or strongly suspect) that you find my class boring. You've demonstrated that to me by doing fuck-all for the past three weeks. You probably find your other classes boring, too, and for that I can't exactly blame you. I've sat in on a handful of them, and they are, indeed, excruciatingly fucking boring. But bear in mind that you'll be out of here in a year or two and you will never be able to come back. You'll never go to college again. This is it. After college, either you'll be working your asses off, or you'll be married and working your asses off, or you'll be married with a kid and working your asses off.

Teacher: You will never have an opportunity like this again. Right now, today, you have all the free time in the world. And I think it's time you started thinking about how to use that time. You are English majors, and English will in all likelihood become your vocation, your job. But never again will you have eight hours a day to study English. Never again will you have a native English speaker at your disposal, willing to bust his Anglo-Saxon balls to answer your every question about English, about America, about the Western World. Your English won't improve after you graduate, not unless you get out of the country. Otherwise, you won't have the time or the means to improve it. You may teach English for the rest of your natural life, but your English will probably remain exactly as good as it was when you left college. If anything, it will only get worse. Because you will never again have the time, the resources, or the ability to study the way you can right now.

Teacher: I'm 28 years old. I can learn the basics of Chinese fairly quickly if I work very hard at it, but I will never find the time to master it. And I will never be as good as I could've been if I had started studying Chinese when I was your age. Over the years, the brain gets hard. Like a rock. You grow inflexible. More and more set in your ways. Less and less thrilled by the new, more and more hung up on your old habits. Haunted by memories. Memories of old women. And part of the calcifying process is, you learn languages much, much more slowly than you usedta could. So, if you want to learn English, this is your time.

Teacher: But what do you do during my class? You're busy reading those books. Those exam booklets of yours. Which are mostly written in Chinese, anyhow. Those (here, a profound note of disgust issues from Teacher) ... fucking ... books won't do you a damned bit of good in the long run. No matter how deep you stick your noses into them. You know how many students I've taught at this university? Over a thousand. Close to two-thousand by now. All of them just like you. English majors. You know how many of those students could hold up their end of a conversation with me by the time they left? Ten. Maybe fifteen. Those ten, maybe fifteen kids learned English because they studied the language, not the books. They watched movies. They read novels in their free time. They talked to me and talked to their classmates. In English. During class time. The other 1,490 kids passed all their exams, sure. But "How are you?" I'd ask them when we passed on the streets. "I go home," they'd say.

Students: [laughter]

Teacher: I'm serious. You're laughing. But those students failed. I passed them, sure. I'm obligated to pass everybody, as I will probably pass all of you. But those students failed at English, in a bad way. Ten, maybe twelve years of studying, and they never learned how to answer a simple how-are-you -- because they believed in the book, not in the language. All of them, like all of you, had already studied English for at least ten years when I met them. And all of them studied English by the book -- by those exam booklets you seem so fond of sticking your noses into when you're supposed to be working on my assignments.

Teacher: And that's fine. You're adults. You're twenty years old. I'm only eight years older than all y'all, remember. So I'm not going to force you to do anything you don't want to do. I'm not going to chew you out, or scold you, or punish you. You are adults. Next year, you will be working adults. I'm not your boss. I'm just your teacher. And if you don't want to put in the work that this class, that the English language, that any language demands, that is your choice. But this (gestures at board) this is the work. This is the only way you will ever improve your English.

Teacher: I know all of you want to improve your English. Almost every single one of you has come up to me and asked me for help at some point. Mr. Panda, how can I improve my English? My answer is this: you have to do the work. That is the only thing you can do. The work.

Teacher: You have all studied English for ten years, at least. All of you are English majors. Each and every one of you is capable of talking about the topic I assigned you today. But each and every one of you either stuck your noses into those goddamned books of yours or spoke straight Chinese to your friends for eighty minutes; at any rate, you ignored the assignment and accomplished absolutely nothing during my class time. This is the work. What I assigned you today. What I assigned you two weeks ago. What I assigned you three weeks ago. The work I give you each and every class period. That is the work. If you really want to learn English, you need to really want to learn English. And if you really want to learn English, you need to do the work. (gestures again at board) This is the work.

Teacher: I can't understand why you wouldn't put in the work. You're already dedicating eight hours a day to studying the language. But you're not learning it that way. You're just studying English. You're not learning it. My question is: do you want to pass the exams or do you want to learn the language?

Teacher: I expect a lot from you. You're smart kids. I have no doubt about that. But from my perch, up here behind the podium, all I see is 47 noses stuck in their fucking books, studying for some other class that doesn't happen to be my class. I've taught plenty of disrespectful students - mostly eight year old Korean kids, and some Mexican teenagers who egged my house, twice - but nothing has ever pissed me off more than seeing you, young adults, English majors, fucking around with your extracurricular bullshit during my class time. You are wasting my time and you are not doing the work. And I have been patient with you. I have allowed you to get away with not doing the work. Because you are adults and I treat you that way. But understand that when you don't do the work, you are insulting me. You make me wonder why I bothered to wake up at 7 AM, when I was so blissfully dreaming of making out with the Assistant State's Attorney from The Wire. You make me wonder why I bothered to pay the cab fare to get here, to teach you. If you're not willing to do the work, I should've just stayed in bed and saved myself the seven kuai. And, oh, Rhonda ...

Teacher: Would you do this in front of your Chinese professors? (gestures towards hallway) Show up and start reading some bullshit book from another class? Would you do that during your Chinese classes? (gestures once again towards hallway) I can only fucking imagine what your Chinese professors would do if you started doing my homework during their classtime.

Teacher: I'm sorry. I don't mean to scold you. You are adults. If you don't want to put in the work, you don't have to. I will just give you a bad grade, that is all, and life will go on for the both of us. But this is the language. This is the work. If you really want to learn the language. If you really want to make something of yourself. There is a world out there. Outside of China. And it speaks English. If you want to be part of that world. If you want to be more than a middle school English teacher in some redneck Chinese town. If you want that, I'm listening. But if you want that, if you want something better, understand that you have to do the work. And this is the work. That shit there on the board. Which I didn't just write for my health, contrary to popular belief. I spent time planning that shit, see. And I spent time writing it. And I spent time explaining it to you. Not for my health. Certainly not for my health. I did all that work in the hope that you would do the work. This is the work. You don't have to do it. But I'm 28 and, looking back, I'm going to say that you kinda have to. For my sake.

Students: [silent, one half inspired, other half angry and insulted]

Teacher: Well, it's a beautiful day. I'd hate to keep you all pent up in this crappy classroom when you could be out enjoying yourselves. So I'll let you out a bit early, unless you have any questions.

Student: Mr. Panda, do you have a girlfriend?

Teacher: Well, I'm not really sure about that right now.

[bell rings]

Off The Rickshaw: A Libertine's Guide to Living a Healthy Life of Debauchery in the People's Republic of China - Volume 2

2011-04-07T04:40:00.007+08:00

This is the second installment of Keith Petit's two-part Off The Rickshaw series. The first volume, "On Smoking," was published in July of 2010 and has since appeared in Vibe, Men's Health, and Better Homes and Gardens. This, his second volume, "On Drinking," is likely to be the final installment of the series. The author, quite frankly, doesn't want to get into any of his other vices, and sincerely doubts that his readers would care to hear about them.

About the Author: Keith Petit does not currently drink or smoke, and has never drinked nor smoked in his entire life. He is an active member of the Nanchong Women's League of Teetotalers and Contract Bridge Players, as well as his local Joy Luck Club, JLC Lodge No. 451. He does not recommend smoking or drinking to his readership, however badly his writing may drive them to swallow the contents of the nearest open container within reach of the keyboard.

If at the end of this article you remain curious about the infinitely hued and shaded spectrum of human depravity, the author suggests that you check out Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller from your local public library, making sure to avert the steely, menopausal glare of your local public librarian.

Volume 2: On Drinking

~*A TWOPARTITE, TWO-PART FUGUE IN TWO PARTS*~

When I pause to consider the vast, beer-bellied body of literature about alcohol - and all of the great literature written by alcoholics - I figure that I really ought to be quoting Ernest Hemingway or Malcolm Lowry or Christopher Hitchens at the top of the page. But to my mind, no one has put it more succinctly than Homer Simpson.

"Beer: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems."

By that infallible Simpsonian logic, I cannot advocate drinking any more than I can recommend abstaining from it. In China, there are certain social predicaments (called banquets) that alcohol will enhance significantly. But there remain other, more important facets of your life (your job, your reputation, your liver) that alcohol will not enhance at all. So in general, and in China in particular, the author recommends that you enjoy alcohol in moderation - and when your boss won't let you, at least enjoy it in abundance.

On the Varieties of Chinese Liquor

The many nerve tonics of China can be metabolized and broken down into three families of liquor, somewhat akin to their alcoholic cousins in the West. There is beer, there is wine, and there is alcohol.

But already, in this early stage of classification, things have gotten more complicated than they really ought to be.

Due either to a flawed translation, or a deliberate obfuscation intended to get everyone shamefully sloshed very early in the night, what the Chinese call "wine" is often, in fact, hard liquor. Baijiu – literally "white alcohol" – is among the most potent substances known to non-Russian man, but its name is rendered in English as "white wine," something, clearly, it is not.

On the flip side (and here, the brewing companies are probably the culprit), what the Chinese call "beer" is what we in the West would call "pisswater."

I will address these confusing misappropriations in further detail as the night progresses. Which reminds me, I gotta go to the shop real quick. But bear in mind that when you accept a glass of wine in China, you will more than likely find yourself staring down the barrel of a shot glass. And after you've put away a Chinese beer, or five, or ten, you will suffer all of the urinary distress of drinking an equivalent amount of Western brewskis, with none of the more pleasant side-effects. In China, nothing you drink is quite what it seems. Remember that. Beer is water. Wine is vodka. Ignorance is strength.

The Five-Second Plan

The Chinese are far better at making five-year plans than they are at making plans for the evening. Hopefully, on an unsuspecting Tuesday night, getting completely trashed isn't anywhere on your agenda. But then, This Is China: your agenda doesn't matter. On an unsuspecting Tuesday night, around 9:30 in the PM, you will receive a phone call from a friend, a stranger, or (in all likelihood) your employer. He will invite you out for some "white wine." Sounds good. When? This weekend? No, your boss says. Now. I am waiting for you. Outside. You part the blinds and see that, yes indeed, a black Lexus is parked there, idling just outside your window. From here on out, the narrative of your unsuspecting Tuesday night collapses into a totally fatalistic Choose Your Own Adventure book in which the choices have been blacked out from the text. You can make decisions, but they don't mean anything. You can run, but you can't hide. You can hem and haw, you can turn down the invitation outright, you can terminate the call and toss your phone under the bed like a live grenade. You can even mention to your employer that you have to work in the morning. So do I, he'll say. Whatever you do, short of suicide, your prolonged existence in China amounts to your accepting the invitation. And your accepting the invitation amounts to your consuming more alcohol than you really ought to on a school night. At the behest of your boss, no less. Well. Hell. At least he's buying.

Toastmasters International

The Chinese love to propose toasts. Or, I don't know - I'm not really sure whether they love it or not. Do songbirds love singing? Do crickets love chirping? Duz lolcats luvz cheezburgerz? Who knows? Who cares? It's what they do.

Whereas most American nights on the town are merely kicked off with a toast, Chinese benders live and die by the toast. A toast in America is a one-time thing: the brittle clinking of fork to glass, or a "let's get down to business" pregame huddle.

In China, the toast is a recurring nightmare. It is a tender one-on-one moment that serves two purposes that I am aware of. A: It establishes rapport (thus, a connection) with a valuable social contact. And B: It ensures that said valuable social contact is at least as drunk as you are.

Everyone is expected to toast everyone else at least once. If there are ten people at table, you must toast nine of them. (You wouldn't toast yourself because that would be weird.) And all nine of the people at table must toast you in return. Now, I'm no mathematician, but I would imagine that toasting nine people and nine people toasting you adds up to an astronomical, disastrous number of toasts. Either that, or it's just eighteen. Please do let me know.

During a toast, you must look your toasting partner in the eye and express (in Chinese or in Chinglish) your hopes and aspirations for your shared future as drinking buddies and business associates. A useful expression to know is tian tian kuai le, which translates into Chinglish as "happy every day!" If Chinese isn't your strong suit, the Chinglish version will also suffice. You might want to mention how overjoyed you are to be toasting the person you are toasting, whether you know who they are or not. It is, after all, entirely likely that you met them five minutes ago but completely forgot who they were after that oh-so-memorable 27th toast with Vice Principal Liu. Either way, you must act as though you are ecstatically happy to meet so-and-so and in full possession of all of your senses. It is important not to appear drunk, however drunk you may be, however drunk everyone else assuredly is. Saving face is everything. Which invites the question: what does face have to do with anything when everyone is shitfaced? My dear reader, I have not the foggiest fucking idea.

The Social Lubricant Network

The Chinese do not drink their beers straight from the bottle for public health reasons, and they do not drink their beers in pint glasses, for logistical reasons. They drink their beers from shot glasses. This helps out the lightweights of the banquet scene, who can carefully mete out their drinking and abstain from shots as their field of vision starts to blur. Likewise, it benefits the boozers, who can rapidly put away beerstuff by hooking up with other boozers via the toasting system described above. Vice Principal Liu! You again? Happy every day, man! Clink. It's like Facebook for alcoholics.

There are two kinds of toasts in China. There is the gan bei toast. Gan bei translates to "dry the glass," and when someone proposes a gan bei toast, you are obligated to man up and "chug" or "pound" the booze. Then there is the xiao he toast. The xiao he, or "little drink," involves a ginger sip of the glass from both parties. To mix up the two toasts - to take a shot when the other person is just sipping - is a minor faux pas that can be glossed over easily enough by making a few extra toasts on the side. But what cannot be forgiven is drinking independently. If the party starts to get slow, and it will, you are not allowed to pour yourself a beer and drink it. Should you grow weary of the company, and you will, you cannot abscond to a dark corner and drink by your lonesome. To botch a toast is a slight but forgivable gaffe. To quit drinking before everyone else is a mere act of wussiness. But to drink while others are not drinking is a deadly sin.

When the Chinese go out drinking, they drink as a unit. They drink together, they giggle together, and they puke together. They have a system. They pace their drinking as a means of separating the men from the boys. Or the women from the boys, for that matter. When everyone at the table is drinking at the exact same rate, the lightweights are the first ones to be TKO'ed, while the heavyweights are free to remain in the ring until there is blood all over the mat. A kind of intramural drinking hierarchy unfolds: Dean Wang can't hold his liquor; Vice President Liu can't even hold his chopsticks at this point; Mr. Pan, however, seems to possess a liver of titanium alloy.

Drinking in China is almost always competitive, and the Chinese have a system, the sheer organization of which puts March Madness to shame. If everyone were to start drinking independently of the toasting system, it would inject chaos into the all-important ranking schema and we'd have another Bowl Championship Shitshow on our hands.

To be a heavyweight in China is a great honor, and you will gain much face in this country by drinking everyone else under the table. If you grew up in America and cut your teeth on all the fine high-gravity lagers that your neighborhood Conoco station had to offer, you will almost certainly be considered a heavyweight in China. As a Westerner, drinking among the Chinese is almost too easy, like playing a video game with cheat codes activated. Over the course of the evening, you will successfully tuck away an uncountable number of watered-down Chinese lagers. By 10 PM, everyone else will be stumbling around like defective marionettes, flinging sauteed eggplant all over the floor. And by the end of the night, you will have beaten the game, i.e. everyone else will be vomiting in the squatter toilets while you sit there at the banquet table, alone, bored off your ass, noshing on cold cucumbers and feeling more sober than when you arrived.

I should add that the above paragraph applies only to beer nights. Baijiu nights are different. When it comes to Sino-American drinking relations, baijiu is, alas, the great equalizer.

The Translucent Scourge of the Far East

As a rule, the Chinese cannot handle their beer, but I have seen them perform incredible feats of baijiu absorption.

Baijiu is somewhat analogous to vodka, insofar as it is a clear liquid that is more alcohol than anything else. But it is also far worse than vodka. It is far worse than any fluid - bodily or otherwise - ever concocted by man or beast. I can't physically stomach baijiu. Most Westerners cannot. Regardless of the loss of face involved, I will always refuse baijiu at banquets, both because I can't bear the agony of drinking it, and because I don't want to wind up passing out overnight in a construction site. For chemical reasons that can't be entirely related to alcohol content, baijiu will (in the parlance of our times) "fuck you up" in the sort of way that, believe me, you do not want to be fucked up.

Richard Nixon had the dubious pleasure of sampling the Cadillac of baijius, Maotai, when he graced Chairman Mao and Zhou Enlai with his jowly, hemorrhoidal presence back in 1972. A man with a strong genetic predisposition for Bitter Beer Face, it remains hard to tell from the photographs just how disgusted Nixon was after his first Chinese gan bei. But the banquet, in the end, was a rollicking success, leading Nixon to proclaim, "If we drink enough Moutai, we can solve anything." It is my hope, for the rest of the world's sake, that the Sino-American policy of Maotai diplomacy has long since been discontinued.

~*TO BE CONTINUED IN PART TWO OF THIS TWOPARTITE, TWO-PART FUGUE WHICH IS POSSESSED OF TWO PARTS*~

Here Be Dragons

2011-03-31T02:23:00.008+08:00

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

2011-03-28T22:53:00.000+08:00

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

2011-03-26T21:27:00.003+08:00

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

2011-03-20T02:26:00.018+08:00

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

2011-03-10T23:26:00.007+08:00

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

2011-03-10T17:53:00.002+08:00

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)

2011-03-03T00:46:00.004+08:00

"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.

The Left Side Door is Always Locked

2011-01-29T04:39:00.010+08:00

I think I will take a short break from my Kunming travelogue, if you don't mind. I'm stuck, you see. The words are already written down in my pretentious little Moleskine® notebook. There they are, perfectly visible, scribbled down in barely decipherable black ink. All I have to do is type the words. But they don't feel good on my fingertips, however many times I type and retype them. Lost in transcription, I guess.

To me, the hardest things to write about are the things that happened in the not-so-distant past. It's like retelling the joke you just told. The joke everyone laughed at. But somebody missed the joke. So you have to repeat the joke for this one inattentive dude, even as you ruin it for everyone else.

When you find yourself caught up in a story, you run that story through your mind so many times that it becomes too big to fail. Then, lo and behold, when you finally sit down to write the story, it fails. And you can't bail it out, however late into the night you filibuster, however many Starbucks stimulus packages you sneak past the House. The story fails. It fails because it's too big to fail, because it was never supposed to fail, because you never believed it could fail. It fails because it is a good story but you're not yet good enough to write it. It fails because you're too far away from the story to remember what it felt like when it happened, and because you're still too near to the story to comprehend what the hell it means.

I find it much easier to write about things that happened in the not-so-distant present. Like what happened just now. I can write about that. So that is what I will try to do. Something happened this evening, just a couple hours ago, though I'm not quite sure anything happened at all. Well, obviously, something happened. Something is always happening. But I'm not sure whether the events are related to one other, or whether I am stringing them together after the fact. Whatever. I'm writing this because I'm verbally constipated for the moment. I'm writing this, mostly, to see what happens when I write it.

It was round about midnight and I was on the prowl for beer, a couple bottles to unblock the aforementioned writer's block. The usual shops - the shops whose shopkeepers know what kind of beer I want - were all closed, shutters down. So I resorted to a back-alley shish-kebab place. I try to maintain a steady rapport with all the shopkeepers in my part of town, especially with this back-alley shish-kebab man who is ethnically Tibetan and therefore almost as foreign as I am. I tried to score a quick trio of takeout beers but the Tibetan invited me to sit. So I sat. I knew I would be there a while. A couple of college kids came dweebing into the restaurant and sat across from me. They didn't bother me. I sensed that they were not the usual Chinese undergraduate riffraff, so I offered them cigarettes. We got to talking.

They were not the usual Chinese undergraduate riffraff. They spoke no English, but they understood my Chinese - which is to say they possessed an uncanny knack for hand gestures and sound effects. Over the course of an hour, I successfully explained the existential impact of the Obama presidency, the ever-widening income gap in the Western world, the ominous rise of the Tea Party, the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords and the many reasons why it scared the shit out of me. The college kids, in turn, offered me some unusually candid opinions on Chinese politics. They, in turn, offered me some unusually candid Chinese cigarettes. They recommended some Chinese proxy servers, the better to access my own blog with. These kids were not the usual Chinese undergraduate riffraff. We feasted upon spiced pig brain - the first time I have ever eaten brain, believe it or not, in all my time in China. The pig brain was good, and I feel slightly smarter for having eaten it. When it was time to leave, I tried to pay the tab, but the college kids swatted my hand away. I tried to swat their hands away, but they swatted my swatting hand away. They paid the tab.

We parted ways. I was running low on cigarettes, so I hailed a cab. The cabbie was an old timer with a wife and a son, and he was awfully happy to talk about his son, a recent graduate of Sichuan Normal University. The cabbie stopped along the way to pick up a couple college kids waiting on the side of the road. There were two of them and one of me. I scooched over to the left back seat because the kids would have to get in from the right side. I knew this because in China, or at least in Nanchong, the left side door of the cab is always locked. I suppose the cabbies keep the left side door locked to prevent renegade drunks from bailing on the fare. Or perhaps if the cabbies didn't keep the left side door locked, Chinese Fire Drills would rage in the streets every time they stopped the cab. Truth be told, I don't know why Chinese cabbies lock the left side door. But the left side door is always locked. This is a rule and I have adjusted to it, as I have adjusted to so many other rules in China, as I have adjusted to so many other rules in Nanchong, often without knowledge, always without quite understanding.

The college kids eavesdropped on my sweet Chinese nothings and complimented my accent. The cabbie agreed that it was good. I contested that it was shit. Everyone laughed. I offered the college kids cigarettes and they thanked me. We smoked for a bit. The cabbie dropped the college kids off at the train station, then waited while I ran across the street to buy cigarettes. The cigarette vendor was all giggles and smiles to see me. She complimented my Chinese. I complimented her Chinese. She giggled and smiled.

On the ride home, the cabbie ran out of things to say. So I thought back on the dreams I'd had last night. It was a rough night's sleep as I remembered it. I had dreamt that I was back in Omaha, smoking a cigarette outside The Brothers on 38th and Farnam. My favorite bar. A cold and dark night. Breathing fog. Black ice everywhere. I smoked. I joggled my leg to the faintly audible bass line of the Roxy Music song I'd just put on the jukebox. I shoegazed. I gazed back up. A derelict was shambling my way. He pulled a gun. I threw up my hands. He shot me in the gut. I woke up in a cold sweat, as one does. Holding my gut. I was stunned, but I wasn't altogether surprised. This is one of many possibilities in America.

In China, among many other impossibilities, being shot down in the street is not a possibility. Never in Nanchong could I be held up at gunpoint. No, in Nanchong, one of China's most violent cities, I can troll the shady avenues in the shady hours to my heart's content and I will never be assaulted - or if I am, as I have been a couple times, it will not be at gunpoint, but at the feeble meathooks of a thoroughly drunk Chinese salaryman. For however much I loathe the place, I have nothing to be afraid of in Nanchong. And after months and months of homesick idolatry, that dream reminded me that in America - even in mild-mannered Omaha - I have a great deal to be afraid of, indeed. I can almost understand why so many creepy Americans linger around Asia for decades, extending their visas indefinitely. The Asian existence is an antlike existence, but if nothing else, it is a safe existence.

And there is the hospitality to consider. In America, a night like tonight would never have happened. Consider this: I walk into The Brothers for some beers-to-go. I'm wearing my pajamas, basically. Some college kids treat me to dinner and drinks. They pay the tab. They bid me farewell. They will never see me again. They ask for nothing in return. Impossible in America. A nightly occurrence in Nanchong. Granted, it's because I'm a foreigner. But that kind of hospitality doesn't exist in America. It's not that I seek out Chinese meal tickets. The Catholic guilt, in fact, is almost too much for me to bear. But it's such pleasant companionship. No pretensions. Just the amusingly futile attempt to understand one another over beer and spiced pig noggin. I know that once I leave Nanchong, these sorts of things will never happen to me, never again. I will go to hipster bars with my very best hipster friends, and each of us will pay our share. We will divvy up in the Dutch manner. At the night's end, a handshake, maybe a man-hug, and we drive home separately. In Nanchong, amidst all the xenophobia and cross-cultural weirdness, any sane interaction is a miracle. So those interactions verge on the divine, when they happen. Acts of generosity leave you overfed, half-drunk and breathless. But in America, I will find naught but good conversation, mutual respect and the occasional gun-wielding raving derelict. At this point, I'm not willing to say that either set of circumstances is better than the other. Instinctively, I prefer the American way. I miss my home. But at no point prior to tonight did I think that I would miss Nanchong. At no point prior to tonight did I even entertain the thought that I would miss Nanchong. At no point prior to tonight did I even dream of thinking that I would ever entertain the thought that I would miss Nanchong. But I suppose, pending tonight's dreams, that for the moment, very tentatively, I am willing to risk saying that I might yet dream to think that I will one day entertain the thought that I will one day miss Nanchong, Sichuan Province, People's Republic of China.

1/18/2011: A Writing Vacation

2011-01-24T05:00:00.010+08:00

My one-man exodus was not to be. Not just yet, anyway. All roads to Kunming were sold out. So I settled on a 7 AM Wednesday morning departure. Let my people go, eventually. Let my children of Israel sleep off the hangover on a 24-hour train ride. Not such a bad deal, though. This extra day gives me time to fold my underwear. And it gives me time to think about what my little trip is going to be about.

A writing vacation. The words have been kicking around in my head for a while now. A writing vacation. What is a writing vacation? Have I heard those words before? I feel as though I have. But I'm not sure whether they constitute a proper phrase, whether the words "a writing vacation" are actively in use among modern day practitioners of non-Chinglish English. I haven't been home in a while. My English isn't what it used to be. I'm not sure whether a writing vacation is a cliché, or an expression that I have newly minted, right here on the spot. Whatever. It doesn't matter. Because I am set to embark on a writing vacation. That's all there is to it.

A writing vacation. I'm too lazy to Google it. So let's just assume that I have coined a phrase. Right here on the spot. If so, I reserve the right to define my coinage and redefine it as I go along. And so, pending future revisions:

1) A writing vacation does not necessarily entail writing. Nor does it necessarily exclude writing.

2) A writing vacation is not what happens when a writer goes on vacation. Nor is it what happens when a vacationer suddenly decides to take up writing.

3) That is to say, a writing vacation is not to be confused with Jack Kerouac loading up on amphetamines and setting off on a trans-American road trip. Nor is it to be confused with some Baby Boomer sporting a fanny pack and a Discover Thailand t-shirt who suddenly gets a fire up his ass to write the Great American Novel even as he's bankrupting the Carnival Cruise seafood buffet. Whatever a writing vacation may be, it is neither of those two things.

4) A writing vacation should include some writing. But it should include a great deal more lazing around cafes or bars, depending on the hour. It should also include much coffee or beer, depending on the hour.

5) The "vacation" component of a writing vacation needs not involve travel - not too much of it, anyway.

6) Hell, if anything, travel should be avoided on a writing vacation. A writing vacation should consist of two trips and two trips only: the trip out of Dodge, and the trip back to Dodge. A writing vacation means getting the hell out of Dodge and lingering around for a while in a slightly nicer place than Dodge, for a period of time just long enough to allow the writer to get his head screwed on straight before his inevitable return to Dodge. A hiatus. A sabbatical. A respite from Dodge, an escape of sufficient length to ensure that the writer will be able to write again when he gets back to Dodge.

7) So, if you accept premises one through six, a writing vacation boils down to this: the writer catches a long-distance vessel to someplace considerably warmer than his natural habitat. Once there, the writer shouldn't feel especially compelled to write. Nor should he avoid writing. No. The writer goes about his business. He scratches his junk when nobody is watching, if that is his wont. He farts. Belches sometimes. When nobody is watching. If that is his wont. He takes a load off. He loiters. He talks to strangers. He eats a lot more than he usually does. He drinks less than he usually does, because he is not writing as much as he usually does. So he doesn't have to drink as much as he usually does. But he still drinks prodigiously. Otherwise, his usual habits remain intact. He smokes, if that is his wont. He drinks coffee, then switches to beer at the crucial moment. He is relaxing, sure. Taking it easy. But mostly, he is on the lookout. On the lookout for something worth writing about. On the lookout for that svelte raven-haired girl in the wire-framed glasses. On the lookout for inspiration, if any of that sweet stuff is to be found just sitting out in the open. But mostly, the writer is changing his scenery. Rearranging his props. Mostly, he's just buying time before gravity pulls him back down into his usual ruts. Just buying time before he's séanced back home to haunt his old haunts once again. Buying time before his widening ass is coaxed back home to settle into the canyonesque ass-groove of his usual barstool at the Jack Bar in Nanchong. The writer is on his writing vacation, but he pictures himself back home. Round about closing time on a Tuesday night. That telepathic nod that means "gimme another beer, Liu Bao." The frowning wallet, the fuzzy math, the ritual paying of the tab. The insufficient dough. The IOU's. The IOU's. The IOU's. The writer needs a break from all the IOU's. The writer needs some UOI's. That is a writing vacation.

There will be writing on this writing vacation. But it will not be my usual writing. My usual writing is like a Prom date. She takes a long time to get ready, but comes out looking somewhat presentable. Or so I would like to think. But this writing will not dress up much at all. This writing isn't even going to the dance. No, this writing is going to O'Leaver's with the guys. Shirt half-tucked (half-untucked?), soy sauce grease stains everywhere. Cigarette burns on both thighs of his corduroys. No frills. Rest assured, this writing will not be driving itself home. Somebody call a cab. I am throwing away my bag of tricks. On this writing vacation, I will avoid introspection. I will avoid digression. Let this blog post be the most meta I get for the next week or two. What is the opposite of meta? Is there an opposite of meta? At any rate, this will be an opposite-of-meta writing vacation.

Lastly: On the Necessity of This Writing Vacation. Whatever else this writing vacation might be, above all, I feel that it is necessary. In Nanchong, I found myself sinking into one of those ruts that sucks and sucks until the rut is wide enough to swallow the wagon whole. I wrote every day, but I no longer felt like I was writing when I wrote - which is to say that nothing I wrote surprised me. I was no longer capable of surprising myself in writing. Which is bad news, indeed. I caught myself reaching into the same old bag of tricks. Writing was no longer a pursuit, or a journey. It was a habit. Like masturbation. Or smoking. It was just something I did. So with the murky abyss sucking my wheels down into the earth, I flogged and flogged those horses until the wagon finally lurched free. Yahhh!, I crowed. Yahhh! Without much forethought, I set us on a steady course towards Kunming. And now we're rolling south, rumbling south in search of green space, in search of new territory, new frontiers, and inevitably, new ruts to sink into.

A writing vacation. The ticket to Kunming is burning a hole in my pocket. Or perhaps it was the cigarette I just dropped on my thigh. Either way, from here on out, dear reader, the gloves come off. The tuxedo comes off. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword. Melville quietly takes to the ship. And wearing something like a smirk, the vacationing writer, on his writing vacation, dons his best tuxedo t-shirt.

1/17/2011: Loomings, et cetera

2011-01-23T01:52:00.004+08:00

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

hypo
noun, Archaic
hypochondria.

- Random House Dictionary

Don't call me Ishmael. Call me Panda. I read the better part of Moby-Dick in the bathtub of my childhood. Splashing around with a vinyl fleet of rubber duckies, making submarine noises, Johnson & Johnson No More Tears Shampoo, the whole deal. I was 24 years old at the time, and I was living at home. I had just returned to Nebraska after a year in South Korea. Between countries. I had little or no money in my manpurse and nothing particular to interest me on shore. In those tedious days of born-again infancy, I split my time between the bathtub and the coffee shop and the piss-tinged reading rooms of the Omaha Public Library. I read Moby-Dick for a living. I loved the book and loved it deeply. It had me at Ishmael. Eventually, I got myself a job. I was a scrivener, basically. But the job wasn't enough, and neither was hunting the White Whale. Wanderlust, restless legs, et cetera. I had to leave. But how?

Spoiler alert: Ahab and me, we didn't get the whale in the end. Sigh. The one that got away. After two full months in the tub with Melville, Moby-Dick was a hard book to put back on the shelf. I didn't want to stop reading it. As far as books go, it was a messy breakup. Herman started dating that pretentious asshat bartender at The Anchor Inn. In retaliation, I kept all of Melville's favorite sea shanty records. But several years down the road, I find myself returning again and again to that first chapter of his, the unimpeachable LOOMINGS - which just has to be the most bad-ass chapter title of all time.

Call me Ishmael, but that first paragraph of LOOMINGS rings truer to me than anything I have ever read. Especially when I read it for the first time, nestled there in my parents' upstairs bathtub. Grim about the mouth, indeed. A damp, drizzly November in my soul. An icy, windblasted January in Nebraska. I remember that winter well, however much I want to unremember it. The rocksalted roads led nowhere. The street lights were all flashing red. My gym membership had expired. So, too, had my library card. All relations with the fairer sex had come to naught. The cubicle work was sharpening my soul to a fine, shiv-like point. Rest assured I would have started knocking off the backwards "DEEZ NUTS" hats that were so en vogue amongst the Omaha frat boy community in those days, if I had stayed in Omaha any longer than I did. But I willed myself out of the country. I did some intercontinental ballistic job searching and found myself a teaching gig in Kielce, Poland. And in February, I left Omaha for a place that was even colder, even more miserable than Omaha. What can I say? My hypos got the upper hand of me.

Nanchong, Sichuan Province, People's Republic of China. Three years later. I am 27, somehow. The winter semester shuddered to a close sometime last week. The campus has been evacuated. The students are gone. I was relieved at first. As a bearded laowai, I am heckled, harassed, hectored and huckstered whenever I leave my apartment, mostly by students. So any set of circumstances that conspires to reduce my daily quota of degradation is a godsend. But with the departure of the students, the shops have closed down. The oldsters have gone home. And the outside world has become a very cold, very damp, very empty place, indeed.

The only open restaurant within walking distance of my apartment is a dingy little dumpling shop that is eternally sold out of dumplings. But nobody eats there. So my guess is that they don't bother making dumplings in the first place. This evening, out of desperation, I walked a half-mile to the Dumpling Restaurant of Woe and supped on a tiny plate of stale radishes.

"These aren't very good," the boss said as he slid them across the table. "Eat slowly."

He was right. They weren't very good. I ate slowly and left quickly.

There is one convenience store still standing. I go there for toilet paper, soap, shampoo, beer, smokes, snacks, water. These days, I go there for conversation. The boss always asks me if I'm going back to my hometown for Spring Festival.

"Probably not," I tell her. "Too expensive."
"Where will you go, then?"
"I dunno," I say. "Probably nowhere."

And so far, I have gone absolutely nowhere. I spent the first two weeks of the new year, the Year of the Rabbit, in Nanchong: reading, writing, taking long walks. Squatting in my apartment like a hen, with a space heater tilted upward towards my netherregions. I actually started reading The Bible, just because I had never read it before and figured that I ought to read it before I died. But somewhere around the end of Exodus, I began to wonder what the fuck I was doing with my time. Why am I here, I wondered - not in the broader existential sense, but like, why am I here in Nanchong when I don't have to be? I'll be stranded in China for seven more months, and then I will leave, almost certainly never to return. This is my last vacation in China. Let my people go, I said. The cruel Sichuanese winter had sunk in. Fog upon smog upon fog. A deep grayness. A damp, drizzly November in my soul. LOOMINGS, et cetera. Let my people go, et cetera.

I put down The Good Book. It was Sunday night and it was late. Let my people sleep, I said. I polished off my nightcap. I zipped my coat up tight, pulled the hood over my head, and I curled up into bed under two layers of sweater and two layers of blanket. A human burrito. I drifted off to sleep and I dreamt that I was in Yunnan Province. I was in Kunming, at a youth hostel. And I was sitting outside in the sun, across a table from a gorgeous raven-haired girl with black wire-framed glasses. We didn't talk because we didn't need to. We were in love. And we both knew what that meant. She was wearing a frilled white blouse and a purple skirt. I was probably wearing the same clothes I've worn for the past month. I forget. She didn't say a word and neither did I, but we knew. It was not an erotic dream, not at all. I never got past first base in the dream. Heck, I never left the on-deck circle. But the dream was more erotic than anything I have ever experienced. Nothing happened. We just sat there at the table, reading our respective books and understanding each other until I woke up. Groaning and babbling sweet nothings to myself, I tried to get back into the dream, but it didn't happen. In my experience, you can never get back into the dream. You just get shipped off to somewhere you'd rather not be. I fell asleep again and I dreamt I was walking along the edge of the Grand Canyon, wearing a backpack full of neutron star material. They say a spoonful weighs a ton. I kept falling over. Getting back up and falling over. Getting back up. Falling over. Eventually, I gave up walking and let myself tumble over the edge. I fell and I fell.

I woke up gasping for breath. After a while, I realized that I was very hungry. So I caught a cab to the McDonald's downtown and there, a very drunk Nanchonger grabbed me by the neck and threw me out into the street. Threw me right out into damp, drizzly Nanchong. A damp, drizzly November in my soul. Loomings. I decided right then that I needed to leave town. Let my people go, I said.

So, here is what will happen. Tomorrow, I will wake up around noon and throw my laundry in the washing machine. Then, wearing the same clothes I have worn for the past month, I will march right down to the front office of the China West Normal University Foreign Language Department. I will ask my boss for my passport, a vital document that I haven't seen in eight months. He will tell his underling to go find it, and his underling will tell his underling to go find it, and his underling will rummage around his employer's office for the better part of an hour, before discovering my passport in his coat pocket. He will open up my passport and laugh at my photo. I will thank him. Then I will return to my apartment, collect my laundry, wave it around a lot by way of drying it, and stuff it all in a plastic bag. Then I will catch a taxi to the train station. I will purchase a one-way ticket to Kunming, Yunnan Province. The train bureaucrat will ask to see my passport. I will show it to her. She will giggle at the photograph. I will thank her. I will while away the hours until departure in some bar. Then I will wait in line for a good long while. Then I will board a greasy chain-linked vessel bound for the south. I will lay me down in a cot some fifteen feet off the ground. I will read Hermann Hesse until I fall asleep. The next morning, I will wake up to the sun coming in through the window. Miraculously, I will wake up in a warm part of the world. I will step out onto the platform in Kunming and nobody will care none too much that I am a foreigner. And I will catch a cab and check into a youth hostel and squeeze the juice out of two weeks - lying out in the sun, eating greasy sandwiches, drinking coffee by day, imbibing beer by night, playing ping-pong with any and all comers.

Of course, I did the same exact thing last year. I went to Kunming last year. A year ago to the day. So I am retracing my steps. I am repeating myself. By escaping to Kunming, I am leaving one rut for another. But Nanchong dogs me. And this dream of mine haunts me. Being choke-slammed out into the damp, drizzly streets of Nanchong. And this raven-haired girl with the wire-frame glasses: who is she? Does she exist? My dreaming self has posed a question that my waking self must answer. I don't believe in dreams, but one never knows, does one?

I have never been a very good traveler. I never seem to make it to the places you're supposed to go see. I am an American who has never seen the Grand Canyon. Can't even imagine it. In all my time in Poland, I never made it to Auschwitz. I never did Day of the Dead in Pátzcuaro, though I was only a couple hours away from it. I've never seen the Great Wall or the Terracotta Warriors, and I probably never will. And on some level, I don't care. I don't really care to see those things. I don't chase places. I chase my own tail. I chase whims and vapors. Smoke and mirrors. I hunt the white whale. The raven-haired girl in the wire-framed glasses. The end is there in the beginning, and it's there for all to see. Because I will never catch the white whale, you see. Nobody ever does. But I'd like to think that I'll land a pretty damned hefty bass fish somewhere along the way. And it won't be the white whale. But I'll take it over a can of sardines. You know?

1/16/2011: McRumble

2011-01-22T02:46:00.003+08:00

Sichuanese cuisine satisfies me without quite satiating me. Every day, I consume metric tons of fresh, nutrient-clogged vegetables. And they make me feel pretty damn nourished, those veggies. The antioxidants perhaps even counteract all the smoking and drinking I do when I'm not eating. But Sichuanese cuisine does not fill me. By the time 3 AM rolls around, when I'm tossing and turning and trembling in the subzero temperatures of my own bedroom, by then a colossal abyss has opened up in my stomach and my lone desire - more than warmth, more than sleep - is to fill that gastrointestinal abyss: to devour mass quantities of processed meat, and that right soon. So, on those nights, I will stumble out of my apartment in my pajamas, catch a cab to McDonald's, and there, I will devour two double cheeseburgers and a spicy chicken sandwich. Sometimes I order a Coke.

This is what happened last Sunday night. Around 3 AM, I caught a cab to the McDonald's downtown. I waited in the queue a bit. Several drunk college kids cut in front of me. I let them. This is typical. So was the drunk man over by the McDonald's Playplace, ranting at the fluorescent lights, brandishing a fist in front of his wife's face. Typical. If he didn't hit her, it would've been typical. If he actually hit her, it would've been typical. As a volunteer, I am not allowed to intervene. I can only watch. And I have been watching for just about two years now. Everything is typical to me. Being cut in line is typical. Domestic abuse is typical. I can do nothing to change things. I can only pretend that I don't exist. That way, I don't get upset when I am cut in line. That way, I don't get upset when a man beats his wife in public. Otherwise, I could get in trouble. Why, I could lose my visa.

When I finally got to the front of the line, I ordered two double cheeseburgers and a spicy chicken sandwich. I went upstairs to take a pee. And when I came back down, the drunk man was waiting for me. I juked around him and reached for my brown plastic tray and the delicious waxpapered bundles thereupon. And the drunk man grabbed me by the throat with both hands and started choking me towards the door. I threw him loose with an agility unknown to me. And I shoved him away. The first words out of my mouth happened to be English: "What the fuck is your problem, you drunk fuck?"

The drunk man charged, and immediately the McDonald's staff poured out of the kitchen. But they restrained me, not the drunk man. Four McDonald's employees descended upon me and dragged me outside, out to the street.

"But what about him?" I asked in Chinese. "He's drunk. I'm not. He wants to fight. I don't. Get him. I just want my burgers."

The McDonald's employees tried to keep me out, but I wriggled my way loose and stormed back into the restaurant.

"I'm hungry," I said.

As I approached the counter, the drunk grabbed me by the neck again and threw me back outside.

"Get out of here, foreigner!" he shouted. "Get out of here, white devil!"

His wife whispered apologies in my ear, but did not try to stop him. She just walked alongside as her husband choked me and screamed at me. Luckily, he was drunk. He was easy enough to shake off. The McDonald's employees, by then, were just trembling in the background.

"What's the problem?" I asked.
"You can speak Chinese," he gasped.
"A little," I said. "What's the problem?"
"What's the problem?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "What's the problem? Why did this just happen? Why are you so angry? You don't even know me. And you just tried to strangle me. I'm hungry. You threw me out onto the street."
He shuffled his feet around a bit, then looked up at me like a child, like I was his father.
"Well," he said, "my cell phone isn't working."

He took out his phone and slid the casing loose. He pointed at the battery. My phone isn't working, he said. And this was a big deal, apparently.

"Well," I said, "if you talk to the McDonald's employees in the kitchen, maybe they can help you. Probably, the battery's just run out. It's probably not that big a deal."

The drunk man was hanging on my every word. I could see that he was about to cry.

"Just ask them if they have a phone charger," I said. "They probably do."

He didn't apologize for anything, but he did as I said. I collected my burgers. I sat down in the darkest corner of the restaurant. The police showed up a few minutes later, and they helped fix up the drunk man's phone. I ate my burgers. And I left. Outside, it was cold and damp and raining just enough to freezerburn my bones. And that was when I decided to leave Nanchong for a while.

Happy New Year Every Day

2011-01-09T01:02:00.009+08:00

I am finicky about music and literature, but when it comes to the visual arts, I am no more cultured than Joe The Plumber or Larry The Cable Guy or Liu Bao The Octopus Tentacle Vendor.

Like most men, I have endured my share of art gallery dates. And like most men, I felt compelled by the female anchored to my elbow to say something rather than nothing about the artwork on display. And so from time to time I have found myself waxing dilettante on "texture" and "depth" and "perspective" - things I knew nothing about then, and have persisted in knowing nothing about ever since. For one thing, visual art, like hockey, has never appealed to me as much as I feel like it ought to have. For another thing, I'm colorblind.

But there was one painting in particular that enchanted me, once upon a time. Naturally, it was black and white. A sketch, if you will. I discovered it during my senior year of college, in someone else's art history book. I have since forgotten who sketched the sketch, or whether the name of the sketcher/sketchist was ever known in the first place. I cannot, for the life of me, find the sketch anywhere. I have been googling the words "monochromatic medieval shitshow" for the better part of a decade, to no avail. So I can only remember the sketch. And I remember it sketchily, if you will.

The sketch hailed from the medieval days of yore, and was included in my friend's art history textbook by way of illustrating how texture and perspective and depth and what have you have evolved in the centuries since aforementioned medieval days of yore. The sketch was of a medieval village. A medieval village of, like, yore. The village was spread out across the canvas in two dimensions, roadmapwise, totally flat. No main characters, no depth, no one thing to focus on. An 11th Century Where's Waldo, minus Waldo. If the sketch had any perspective at all, it was that of a one-eyed helicopter pilot flying over the lowly fiefdom of Oafsville, England - A.D. 1043.

As I remember it: a couple of dudes in feathered caps jousting on horseback. A child chasing a pig. A man swordfighting a cloth dummy. The town drunk incapacitated, X's on his eyes, a toppled jug of ale at his side. A blacksmith doing blacksmithy things. A carpenter doing carpenter-like things. Nine ladies dancing. Eight maids a-milking. And one particularly jovial lord a-leaping, suspended in midair for all artistic eternity.

I appreciated the sketch mostly for reasons of camp. How quaint. How cute. How feudal. But it wasn't until my first New Year's in Chicago that I was able to make a metaphor out of it. If it was a metaphor that I in fact made. At any rate, it wasn't until New Year's 2007 that I was able to see a city in two dimensions, in black and white, from a great height, from a helicopter, in feudalistic terms.

I suffered somewhat en route to my arrival at the promised metaphor. The afternoon of my New Year's Eve in Chicago, my lady friend and I got lost in the Northwest Suburbs just as an apocalyptic Great Lakes snowstorm set in. When we first set off on our little stroll, it was cool and clear. An unsuspecting afternoon in the upper middle class projects. Then, within minutes, it was snowing so heavily that we couldn't see where we were walking. A blizzard. We blundered our way into a German graveyard and amused ourselves for a short time, brushing the snow off of tombstones, mispronouncing the names and speculating on the lives those people lived. But that got old fast, given the temperature. My Converse All-Stars were soaked through and frozen solid. So we tried to wander back to my friend Jeff's apartment, from whence we had come. But we succeeded only in sinking deeper and deeper into the morass of Midwestern suburbia. The Home Alonesque homes started to look like German tombstones. We had lost our way. We didn't dare to ask anyone to let us in. In accordance with the rules of Midwestern hospitality, we would gladly freeze to death in the gutters of the fruitily named parkways and boulevards of Mount Prospect before we stooped so low as to ask anyone for help.

We finally found refuge beneath the heat vent of an elementary school. The lukewarm mist reeked of corndogs and turkey ala king, but it was enough to sustain us for an hour or so. After an hour or so, I remembered that I owned a cell phone. So I called Jeff. Where are you, he asked. I have no idea, I said. Under a heat vent somewhere, I said. It smells like corndogs, I said. Not enough information, he said. So I left behind lady friend and deep fat fried warmth of heat vent and I cross country skied to the nearest street sign.

"Apparently, we are at the intersection of Willie Street ... and Memory Lane," I said.
"You're fucking with me," came Jeff's eventual reply.
"No," I said, "I shit you not. We are dying. On Memory Lane. And Willie Street."

Jeff, bless his recently Mormonized heart, Mapquested it. He pulled his Honda up to the intersection of Willie and Memory, just as the Chicago Public School district's underground supply of vaporized lard was running out. My lady friend and I sprinted through the snow. She made it to the car alright. But I stumbled over the kerb and slid for five-odd yards, tearing my corduroy suit coat to shit in the process. When I got in the back of Jeff's car, I was bleeding profusely from both lovehandles, but laughing, laughing - laughing at myself, laughing at the absurdity of it all, laughing even as I shivered away the last calories I had left in me. But I had paid two dollars for that suit coat and had worn it for a year consecutively, and I couldn't help but feel that part of me (the better part of me) had died with the death of that suit coat.

When we got back to Jeff's apartment, warmth was the thing. My lady friend took a shower, as that was the warmest place available. I trembled around the living room and made short work of a pair of White Russians. Then I took a shower. My toes burned as they thawed. I wept and bellowed with the burning. Jeff had to feed me a tallboy of Guinness through the shower curtain just to get me through the showering process. But when it was over, I felt ready to brave the cold again. I was young then. I braved cold then. Everyone pitched in to clamp my suit coat together with heavy duty Office Depot binder clips. And in that sorry state, I went downtown.

We went to a bar but couldn't afford to drink our way into New Year's 2007. So I was able to observe, somewhat objectively, Chicago on its worst behavior. I went out to the street shortly after the kazoos went off. I wasn't yet a smoker, so I just stood there watching. Here was Chicago. The Year of Our Lord, 2007. Happy New Year. Everyone seemed to be puking or slipping on puke. Twentysomething girls high-heeling it through piles of puke, stumbling, puking, stumbling through their own puke, skirts hiked up to expose gartered thighs, skirts unzipped to reveal tramp stampage. Puking. Stumbling through piles of puke. Throwing themselves unsuccessfully into taxis. Amateur frat boy rapists trying to scoop them up and throw them into taxis of their own design. Meanwhile: howling winds, swirling snow. Meanwhile: winos raging, hobos raving. It felt very much like the end of the world.

And there I was, soberly drunk, standing on the corner of Thompson and Grand with a road beer in hand, puzzled by the scene. Country boy Nebraskan that I am, I had heard of the apocalypse in scripture, but I had never seen it played out in reality. I was puzzled by the end of the world. Who knew it would look like this? Who knew there would be so many tramp stamps? And I was fascinated by it, just as I had been by that medieval sketch. I could only stand there and sip from my road beer and marvel. All I could think was, this is happening all over town. All over Chicago. All over America. All over the world, for all I knew. Everyone was puking. Slipping on puke. Throwing themselves into taxis. Jousting on horseback. Chasing pigs. Swordfighting with cloth dummies. Oafs. Serfs. The fiefdom of Chicago. For a moment, I could see the city of Chicago from a helicopter, from a thousand feet up - and from that perspective, it was a glorious first-world medieval shitshow, indeed.

I have made efforts to get myself to the nearest available megalopolis, the nearest available shitshow every New Year's since. I went to Seoul for New Year's 2008. I went to Chongqing last year, and I went to Chongqing this year. It's that top-down two-dimensional black and white perspective I'm interested in. I want to see an entire city on its worst behavior. I want to see the rapture reenacted time and time again, and I want to revel in the morning after, the waking up next to some strange woman, the knowing that we have survived it together, whoever she is. Whoever I am.

This year, I caught a black taxi to Chongqing on December the 31st. Not surprisingly, I had lazed around the apartment so long that, with luck, I would make it to Chongqing just in the nick of the new year. I made a couple phone calls and it was clear that some amount of catching up was in order, so I slipped a little something into my iced tea. I had hoped that nobody in the cab would notice. As it happened, the old dudes crammed into the backseat with me caught wind, and they wanted a swig. So we made merry in backwoods Mandarin until we fell asleep. And by the time I was deposited at whichever Chongqing Normal School I was bound for, my fellow passengers were still comatose and I was sober as a priest. Nay, sober as a Shaolin monk.

What followed doesn't warrant much description. Americans. Embraces. Fist pounds. A countdown. Smooches. There was a dog at the party. Somebody spilled beer on it. A kerfuffle ensued. But who cares? The new year cometh, cameth, had comethed, offering misbegotten promises of good behavior. 2011. The Year of the Rabbit. A year in which no one will deliberately spill beer upon dogs.

Somebody decided that we should go to The Club. I loathe The Club. I have never had a good time at The Club, not since I was young enough to be excited about getting into The Club. But everyone loves The Club for some reason. So we went. And predictably, we had a miserable time. It was crowded and sweaty, stuffy, short of oxygen. It was too loud to talk. I stumbled in and checked my coat. Two minutes later, I stumbled back out and unchecked my coat. Then I went down to the nearest shish-kebab vendor, bought a couple cans of beer, and walked back up to the balcony of The Club so I could watch the new year unfold from a somewhat great height, all of forty feet up, and I slouched there brooding and sipping canned formaldehyde from my perch overlooking the intersection of whatever and whatever streets. Shitshow Avenue and Memory Lane.

I tried to conjure up the usual Year In Review montages. 2010. The Year of the Panda. The year in which certain individuals deliberately spilled beer upon dogs. A year never to be repeated. But aside from that poor dog, I couldn't really remember anything about 2010. I didn't feel a thing about it. It was a year. My twenty-seventh on earth. I was happy to be rid of it. What a shitty attitude to take, I thought. You'll be standing on some balcony in 2011 thinking the same exact thing, I thought. What a shitty attitude to take. And I stood there for a minute, or perhaps an hour, slouched over the balcony, nursing a clandestine two kuai can of beer on the doorstep of a place that sold the same shit for twenty, and I kind of spaced out and murmured bad words to myself. Until a fight broke out in the streets below. With the first punch, I suppose, 2011 began.

There was a pudgy African fellow standing right in the middle of Shitshow Avenue. A Chinese man was punching him in the face. The African was trying to shield the blows, but already a crowd had gathered and several other Chinese men had started punching him, too. Before I could even process what was happening, a horde of people had enveloped the African man. A perfect storm of human beings. And at the eye of the storm: a pudgy African dude, and whichever Chinese dudes felt like taking a shot at him. The African fellow was not fighting back. He was trying to deflect the blows, but he was not succeeding. His assailants were not the same people involved in the initial scrum. They were drunk Chinese men, passersby who happened to be passing by, young men who were bored and drunk and down for punching a black man in the face, secure in the knowledge that all of Chinese Chongqing had their back. Happy New Year.

I have no idea what the African fellow did to deserve being mauled by the biggest city on earth. My Chinese intuition tells me that he must have done something to incur its wrath. Foreigners are stared at in this part of the country, they are heckled and they are cheated on cab fares, but they are seldom beaten down in the streets. So the man must have done something. Nevertheless, watching all of Chongqing gather around a public lynching was frightening. And the violence wasn't the most frightening part. The indifference. The amusement. I suppose the amusement was what disturbed me the most. It was a spectacle. It was an event. The beating dragged on so long that somebody could have sold tickets. People would've bought them. And somebody would have scalped those tickets. And so on. It went on for ten minutes. This African dude was punched in the face for ten minutes. He didn't or couldn't defend himself. And as a Peace Corps volunteer, I could do nothing but watch. Watch and stifle my vomit. Watch as the African man was pummeled in the face by random Chinese adversaries for ten minutes. Watch as he was finally thrown into the back of a police golf cart. Watch as the masses threw a last couple punches for good measure. Watch as the golf cart puttered its constipated way through the crowd. Watch as the man was pelted with beer bottles and half-eaten food. Watch and mutter bad words to myself, watch and then decide to go get myself a couple more road beers. Happy New Year.

Later – so much later that it felt like a new year altogether – we left The Club and made our way to McDonald's. I had a road beer tucked away in my jacket. I had just bought a pack of cigarettes, but upon entering Mickey D's, I was convinced that I needed another pack of cigarettes to get me through the two quarter-pounders I'd just ordered. So I wandered off to the nearest Chongqing Police outpost and asked them where I could buy cigarettes. They gave me a cigarette, then argued briefly about the proximity of the nearest cigarette vendor. By then, I had discovered the bundle in my butt pocket and realized that the whole venture was absurd: I already had cigarettes. But by then, a random Chinese drunk had stolen my road beer.

"No," I said in Chinese, "that's mine."

What he said back to me was unintelligible. But he held fast onto my beer and he swaggered away. Justice swelled in my gut. We were standing in front of a police outpost. I had had a beer. I no longer had a beer. It had been stolen from me by a man who clearly had plenty enough beer in his system. I wouldn't stand for it. I snatched my beer back from him and said, no. The beer is mine.

So he grabbed my arm, zoomed in on my hand, and with impeccable precision, set about twisting my pinkie finger. I could hear the ligaments groaning. I yelped, anticipating in that instant the fateful pop of broken bone. I shoved the drunk away, kicked him lightly in the ass, and rattled off some Chinese obscenities that I am somewhat proud of in retrospect. The man charged towards me, fists of fury a-flailing. He was subdued by the Chongqing Police. Then he was kicked and punched and thoroughly beaten by the Chongqing Police, right there in the street. A crowd gathered around to watch. I walked away very quickly. I went to the nearest cigarette shop, though I didn't need to buy any cigarettes. I just kinda asked the cigarette vendor how she was doing and walked back to McDonald's with my hard-fought road beer in hand and my tail between my legs. I felt bad about the whole thing at the time, and I feel bad about it in retrospect. A police beating, all because I went out for cigarettes I didn't need – a scrum over a road beer I probably didn't need, either.

Oh, well. I suppose that sometime in the distant future, medieval art will become en vogue again. Some post-postmodern sketch artist will sit down to tackle feudal Chongqing. And I will be trapped in charcoal amber, suspended on a canvas for all artistic eternity, road beer firmly in hand, X's on my eyes, a Chinese wino bending my pinkie finger to the breaking point, X's on his eyes, two police officers in full sprint, truncheons in mid-swing – and across town, across the canvas: a black-bearded foreigner pouring a full can of beer on a gorgeous chocolate lab - and yet further across the canvas, a black man being wailed on by hordes of Chinese men, rotten vegetables cascading through the air, hundreds of onlookers smiling and watching – and even further across the canvas, a young American hobo with a backpack and a daydream, a hobo who came to Chongqing for New Year's with a daydream and a backpack and a Z Visa, a hobo who won't realize what he's gotten himself into until a good year or so down the road.

Harmony Corps

2011-01-04T22:11:00.005+08:00

Dear Family and Friends,

It has been a long time since I have written, and for that I am sorry. But between work, my host family (the Gustafsons), and life in the exotic frontier town of Omaha, my rice bowl is pretty full these days.

The Gustafsons are nice enough people and I really enjoy teaching at Metro Community College. But everything is so different here. It is not at all like Our China. After two full months in the Harmony Corps, I still haven't gotten used to life in the United States of America.

There is too much space and not enough people. The other day, I went to a supermarket called "Hy-Vee" and there was nobody there. It was just me and my shopping cart. I could hear the fluorescent lights humming. There was this scary music playing softly in the background. Everything was bright and clean. The fish was all prepackaged. The vegetables looked seriously ill. I couldn't find the ku-gua or the hua-jiao or the jiang. I found an employee and tried to describe what I wanted with my hands. She gave me a bushel of black bananas and something called a diaphragm. My Chinese-English dictionary tells me it is the muscle underneath your ribcage, but that is not what it looks like to me.

It's too quiet here. I can never wake up on time because the construction doesn't start until 10 AM. I can't sleep at night because there are these strange American bugs making noises outside. I asked Mr. Gustafson what the bugs were but he couldn't hear what I was talking about.

Americans are friendly. They don't stare at me or shout at me the way that people used to stare and shout at Mr. Panda. (I will have to ask him about that when I return.) But they don't really notice me, either. I am invisible here. Everyone smiles at me when I talk to them. And they like to talk a lot, mostly about the weather. But they all seem to be trying their best to hide some sort of mental illness. And some of them don't really hide it all that well.

Let me introduce my host family. Mr. Gustafson is very fat, even fatter than Second Uncle Liu. He is the size of two Second Uncle Lius. I asked Mr. Gustafson what kind of work he did and he tried to explain it to me, but I didn't understand. So we looked up the words in the dictionary together. There were six or seven words in his job title, and I knew them, but when we put them all together I still had no idea what he did.

"To be honest," I said, "I still have no idea what you do."
"None of us do, darling," he said. "None of us do."

Unlike Mr. Gustafson, Mrs. Gustafson is very thin. And unlike most American women, I don't think she has a job. When Mr. Gustafson is home, she follows him around with a broom and dustpan, sweeping up his crumbs. She does not like doing this. She never talks to Mr. Gustafson and he never talks to her, except to argue. One time I asked Mrs. Gustafson if she loved Mr. Gustafson and she laughed for a long time. Then she looked sad for a moment. Then she patted me on the head like a child. In the afternoon, when Mr. Gustafson is at work, doing whatever it is that he does, Mrs. Gustafson sits in the living room watching television. She watches soap operas, but she calls them her "stories." She drinks wine, but she calls it her "medicine." She also likes to smoke cigarettes. I sometimes fear that my own host mother is a woman of ill repute.

The Gustafsons have a son. His name is Kyle. I cannot tell how old he is. My host dad tells me that Kyle still wets the bed, which is strange to me, because Kyle has more facial hair than Grandpa Wang. He has more facial hair than two Grandpa Wangs. Kyle likes to wear silk shirts with dragons on them. Or maybe it is just one silk shirt with a dragon on it that he wears every day. He is very fat like his father. One time I asked Kyle why he wasn't married and he looked at me in a funny way. So I tried again and asked him why he didn't live in his own apartment like most American adults. He didn't want to talk about it. He got angry. He went to his room and slammed the door behind him. But he came back out a couple minutes later and sat down at the edge of my bed, and he watched me study English for a very long time.

The Gustafsons have a dog. Mr. Gustafson told me that it was a type of dog called a "rottweiler." The dog's name is Rascal. Rascal doesn't like me. He doesn't seem to like anybody, not even Mr. Gustafson. Rascal especially does not like Kyle Gustafson. I asked Mr. Gustafson why they owned such an unfriendly dog and Mr. Gustafson said, "protection."

"But what about all those guns you have?" I asked. "The ones in the attic."
"Protection," he said.
"Protection from whom?"
"From the bad guys," he said.
"But this neighborhood feels very safe," I said.
"Not anymore it ain't," he said. "Don't get me wrong. You're welcome here. The Chinese are welcome here. We're business partners." He brightened a bit, then darkened again. "But some people just ... ain't welcome."
Then he got quiet and drank from a very small glass and looked out the window for a long time.

I am very happy to know that I am welcome here in America.

I teach Mandarin Chinese at Metro Community College. My students are not like Chinese students at all. Many of them remind me of Kyle Gustafson: very fat, with dragon shirts. They never do their homework. They are almost always late. Some of them have never shown up for class at all. They are just names to me. A few of them don't seem to know where they are when they do show up to class. They keep looking around the room like, where am I? They ask me questions about Bruce Lee, and a lot of questions about Chinese politics that make me uncomfortable. None of them are very good at memorizing new vocabulary words.

But the girls in my class are friendly. They invite me to go out with them on the weekends. They call me "girlfriend" when we go out together. They like teaching me new words and they laugh whenever I say them. Last Friday, they took me to a city called Council Bluffs. Council Bluffs is located in the province next to Nebraska, a place they call Iowa. It was my first time in Iowa, and I never want to go there ever again.

The American word for KTV is "karaoke." But karaoke is not the same as KTV. As we all know, in Our China, we sing KTV with our very best friends, in a cozy little room, and we can stay there in that room singing as many songs as we want to sing. But in America, there are "karaoke bars," where you have to sing for people you don't even know, and you only get to sing one song.

My girlfriends really wanted me to sing, so I did. I asked the DJ if he had Di Yi Ge Qing Chen and he looked at me funny. So I asked if he had Jie Bu Dao. He shook his head. So I asked if he had Na Nu Hai Dui Wo Shuo and he said, "Sorry honey, but you're gonna have to speak American."

So I decided to sing "Take Me Home Country Road" by John Denver, the only English song I know. I did a good job, I thought, but everyone laughed at me. Probably because my English is so poor. My girlfriends were laughing, too, but they clapped for me when I sat down. Then they made me drink something they called "Jaeger." It tasted the way Mrs. Gustafson's medicine smells. Then my girlfriends asked me if I wanted to smoke.

"I don't smoke," I said.
"No," they said. "Smoke."

We went outside to the parking lot. It was very cold out there. It was snowing, in fact. Britney, one of the girls, lit a cigarette and passed it to the girl on her left hand side. Eventually, it came around to me. I didn't want to smoke it, but everyone told me that I had better smoke it. So I did. Everyone laughed when I smoked it. I don't know why. And I don't really remember what happened after that. I remember I started laughing at everything, even things that I didn't understand. I must have been very drunk. My girlfriends made me say dirty words and that made them laugh until they could no longer breathe. Then I got really hungry. My girlfriends took me to a local restaurant called "Taco Bell," and even though I don't really like Iowa Province, I have to say that Taco Bell is a really wonderful place. Sorry, mother, but it was probably the best meal I have ever had in my life.

Then we went to Britney's boyfriend's house. He lives there all by himself, with three dogs that are even meaner than Rascal. My girlfriends all smoked homemade cigarettes with him. They offered me one, but I said no thanks this time. Britney's boyfriend is named Dwayne. My girlfriends laughed at everything he said, and I think I understood him, but he didn't seem all that funny. In fact, he was kind of scary. His eyes were yellow. He was talking really fast and twitching all over the whole time. Then he would get quiet and look at Britney and they would go into the bathroom together. They would come back out a few minutes later and Britney would be twitching while Dwayne looked almost normal. But then he would start twitching again. So they would go back into the bathroom. This went on for a while, until finally Britney said something that got Dwayne so angry that he started calling Britney a lot of the words that she makes me say to make her laugh. He kicked one of his dogs in the ribs and went to his room. I told Britney that I had English class in the morning and I had to go. She wanted to stay. I needed to get home. The Gustafsons were worried about me, I said. I told her that I would get a taxi. She gave me a strange look. Something shattered in Dwayne's room and a dog came running out. There are no taxis in Council Bluffs, she said.

Yesterday I made some new friends. Or I tried to, anyway. They came right up to the Gustafsons' house and rang the doorbell. They were two nice looking young men dressed in suits, and they had a lot of books with them. They were students, I guess. They introduced themselves as Elder Micah and Elder Levi, though they didn't look all that old to me. They wanted to come in so I let them in. They sat down in the living room and I went to get them some tea, but they said they couldn't drink tea. So I sat down on the sofa across from them.

They asked me how I was doing and I said fine, thank you, and you? They said "good" in a way that really made me believe that they were doing pretty good. Then they asked me if I had been saved. I told them that yes, I felt pretty safe in the Gustafson household. I told them about the bad guys outside and I told them about Rascal, who even then I could hear trying to rip the basement door off its hinges. I told them about all the guns that Mr. Gustafson kept in the attic. They laughed a little and said, no, not safe. Saved. What's the difference, I asked.

They wanted to know where I was from and I told them "Nanchong" and asked them if they had heard of my hometown. They told me that no, they had never heard of it. They wanted to know what country I was from, and I told them "China." They were very interested in China.

"Do you have churches where you live?" they asked.
"Yes," I said. And I told them about the monastery on the West Mountain, and The People's Catholic Church down the street from our house.
"Do you go to church?"
"No, I have never been to the church," I said. "Do you go to church?"
They laughed a little and said that yes, of course they went to church. They asked me if I believed in God.
"I believe in science," I told them, "and I believe in the heroes of the People."
They nodded. This seemed to make sense to them.
"We like science, too. As a matter of fact, Elder Micah over here majored in physics at Bi-Wai-Yu." They laughed, so I laughed too. "Which heroes of the People do you believe in?"
"I believe in Chairman Mao," I said, "and Deng Xiao Ping, who grew up in Guang-an, which is only 45 minutes by bus from my hometown!"

They were unimpressed. They were still smiling, but they were nervous smiles that they wore. I must have said something wrong. They gave me a big black book and told me to read the first page. I tried my best. The writing was like Shakespeare, but not as pretty. I told them that my English was poor and that I couldn't really understand the words. So they started telling me a story about a nice man named Joe who lived in America long, long ago - back when there used to be Indians. They told me all about this Joe and how he did all these nice things for me before I was even born. It was a strange story, but an interesting one, and I was just beginning to make sense out of it when Mrs. Gustafson came into the room.

"Lily," she said to me, "who the fuck are these people and why are they in our living room?"

I could tell she'd had her medicine. The two young men seemed to recognize her. They got up off the couch and started towards the door. She grabbed Elder Levi by the collar of his blazer.

"What did I tell you? What did I tell you about coming to my house?"

The young men were apologizing and backing away. Mrs. Gustafson seemed to be looking around for a weapon, but the guns were upstairs in the attic. Rascal started barking up a storm. Then, something in Mrs. Gustafson's eyes seemed to click. She went over to the basement door and threw it open.

Elders Micah and Levi ran squealing out into the street. The screen door slammed shut behind them just in time. Rascal smashed his face against the window and barked so hard that he fogged up the glass. Then, after he'd worn himself out, Mrs. Gustafson kneeled down, hugged Rascal around the neck, and scratched him behind the ears.

"Good boy," she said. "Gooood boy."
Rascal growled.
"Mrs. Gustafson," I said, "who were those young men? Were they the bad guys?"
"No, Lily," she said. "They're just Morons."
Which I guess is a kind of American religion.

As if I'm not busy enough, I have to do something called a "secondary project." So I have been volunteering at the Omaha Zoo. It's a nice zoo. Very big, with lots of animals. But they don't have any pandas. What a pity. (There are some American pandas that live on our back porch. Mr. Gustafson calls them "fucking coons." Fucking Coons are like pandas, but much smaller, much dirtier, and not as friendly. Fucking Coons eat garbage instead of bamboo. Mr. Gustafson catches them in traps he builds himself and I'm not sure what he does with the Fucking Coons after that.)

Anyway, volunteering at the zoo isn't as fun as it sounds. I told the people in the employment office that I wanted to volunteer and they said okay. I told them I wanted to work with animals. And in a way, I guess I do. I work at a concession stand.

Earlier I said that Americans are friendly. But really, they are only friendly when they are well-fed. The Americans I serve at the Sea Lion Concession Stand are even meaner than Third Uncle Zhang when he drinks. I never seem to do anything right. I can't seem to put enough cheese on anything. Everything is too hot, or too cold. Or it's too spicy. My English is so poor that nobody understands me and I don't understand them. One fat old man got so angry with me when I gave him a Mr. Pibb instead of a Dr. Pepper that I thought he would have a heart attack. Then he did have a heart attack. Now there is something called a "lawsuit" pending in court, but Mr. Gustafson's lawyer tells me I can plead "diplomatic immunity." Mr. Gustafson and I looked up the words in the dictionary together and I understood them both, but I still don't know what they mean put together.

Today, Kyle lifted up his shirt to show me his tattoo, which he called a "tatt." (Maybe this is local Nebraskan dialect. I will ask my students tomorrow.) Oddly enough, it was a Chinese tattoo. He asked if I knew what it meant and I said no. He told me that it meant "virility." I didn't tell him it meant "duck penis." Then he told me that he had some bad news. He started looking like he was about to cry. I asked him if he was okay and he said no. He told me that he was very sick.

"Do your mom and dad know?" I asked.
"Nobody knows," he said. "Except me. And now you, I guess."
"What's wrong?"
"I'm afraid it's – " He sniffled. "It's – yellow fever."
"Oh my God. Is it serious?" I asked.
He nodded.
"Oh, yes. Very serious."
"Are you dying?"
"Every day I die a little more," he said, and put his hand on his heart. And I noticed for the first time that his silk dragon shirt was unbuttoned halfway, and that unlike most American men (and some American women), Kyle had no chest hair.
"It is winter," I said. "You should wear more clothes."
He seemed embarrassed.
"Yeah, I guess I should."

He went back to his room and shut the door. I stayed up studying English, and the light under his door was on all night. I have no idea what he does in there all by himself. He is always in his room by himself, making little noises. Anyway, I'm worried about Kyle. I looked up yellow fever on Baidu, and it says that if he doesn't get medical help, he could die in as soon as three hours.

I should go. Mrs. Gustafson wants to have "Girl Talk" again, which is something we do every Tuesday afternoon. Girl Talk is usually just her talking and smoking a lot of cigarettes and taking a lot of medicine and crying a little at her stories and then crying a lot in my lap about things I don't understand. She is not a girl and I don't really get to talk. So why do we call it Girl Talk? I don't understand that, either. I guess it is just another part of American Culture. I have so much left to learn.

Happy Every Day,
- Li Li

On and Off the Road to Neijiang

2010-12-20T05:35:00.006+08:00

Masculine idiocy has a way of disguising itself as pragmatism. Practicality. Common sense: the voice of the testes. It works sometimes. Other times, it self-destructs. The same rationality that invented the calculus drives a man to reduce a malfunctioning can opener to a battered heap of scrap metal.

But as long as idiocy remains incubated there in the masculine mind, it is both safe and harmless. No one will bother it in its cave. In its cave, it will bother no one. It is mere bullshit introspection at this point: it has not yet been beshatted. There is no way to detect an idiotic manthought until it is fully digested by the manbrain and excreted out the manmouth, at which point the outside world exacts its swift and unforgiving judgment, usually in the form of a kick to the crotch, the very origin of the bullshit manthought in the first place.

My sitemates and I decided to go to Neijiang for Thanksgiving. The two of them went about the planning process in their own effeminately reasonable ways - consulted students, looked up ticket prices online, weighed the pros and cons of various modes of transportation - while I nourished my inner Jew reading Portnoy's Complaint and otherwise whiled away the week flatulating and scratching my junk around the apartment up until the day before departure, when I was suddenly assailed by my usual wave of pre-departure panic.

I happened to run into Meghan that afternoon. For her and Christy, the jury was still out. They weren't sure which bus to take. Their students had presented them with a travel dilemma that I, in my infinite masculine wisdom, decided to resolve.

"Our students told us that the direct bus to Neijiang takes six to eight hours," said Meghan, "but they said that if we go to Chengdu first, then catch a bus to Neijiang, it only takes four."
"Students schmudents," I said.
I observed that Neijiang was only 240 kilometers away, and that it was impossible that the direct bus would take eight hours. Heck, I said, with all the running around you'd have to do in Chengdu – catching taxis, buying more bus tickets, waiting in line - with that whole rigmarole, I bet it would take eight hours from Chengdu.
"Yeah," said Meghan, a bit warily, "You've been here longer than I have. I guess you're probably right."

The next morning, Meghan and Christy sallied forth at daybreak. I loafed around the apartment eating cereal, waiting for my jeans to dry.

I made it to the bus station at 11:45 and had the good fortune of winning Seat #2 on the 11:50 direct bus to Neijiang. Seat #2 gave me a panoramic view of the road, as well as a direct line to the bus driver in brokering pit stops for my hyperactive bladder. I was the bus driver's right-hand man. His co-pilot. The Andy Richter to his Conan. Sitting in Seat #2 meant that I was hidden from the gawping crowds in the middle and rear of the bus – if I played my cards right, no one would ever know there had been a laowai on board. Aside from the bus driver. And my neighbor, a college coed. A smitingly gorgeous college coed, I might add. This meant that I wouldn't muster the courage to talk to her. Which meant I could get some reading done.

My neighbor stuffed her shopping bags under the seat and sat down rigid and slouchless next to me with her hands on her knees. Then she leaned forward and asked the driver how long the drive would be.

"Depends," he said.
"Depends on what?"
"Luck."

We sailed away. The bus merged onto the highway. NEIJIANG - 240 km. Already, I was beginning to question the merits of Seat #2. For one thing, the floor was movie theatre sticky and the air was swimming with fruit flies. For another, the only loudspeaker on the entire bus was bolted to the wall directly above my head – and it should come as a surprise to no one that the Chinese like their in-flight entertainments loud.

My neighbor was uninterested in talking to me. So uninterested, in fact, that she quickly zonked out into one of those mouth-open, slobbering-everywhere slumbers. Which looked nice. I tried to zonk myself out as well. But I could neither sleep nor read nor write nor think, what with the fruit flies and the squawking loudspeaker. Then, as we left the highway for a shitty gritty two-lane road, there was death via vehicular manslaughter to consider.

The panorama view from Seat #2 was suddenly a curse. Blasting towards oncoming traffic at a combined velocity of 120 miles per hour terrifies me, as I figure it ought to terrify anyone, but I'm the type of guy who can't take his eyes off the onrushing headlights. On road trips in the developing world, I cannot help but stare my own mortality in the grille. Reading was out of the question; Portnoy's Complaint turned colder than a frozen latke in my lap. I sat there in a cloud of fruit flies, sweating, feet stuck to the floor, calculating the space between the tip of my nose and the mirrors of each and every semi-truck that typhooned past. Twelve inches. Six inches. Three inches. Just the widowpane. The road narrowed from two lanes to one, and after a while, even the one lane was debatable. A notional lane. A platonic ideal that no one had gotten around to building. Smelling fear, the fruit flies mounted an offensive on my scalp. They were sluggish and out of season, but they had strength in numbers.

But even death grew boring after a while. Gradually, my mind drifted around to the in-flight entertainment, a piece of VHS junk called The Little Princes. The protagonists – who else but The Little Princes? – were a trio of ten year old kung fu fighting brothers. Caught between the adorability of childhood and the depravity of puberty, The Little Princes seized upon a little bit of both for their own distinctly Chinese charm. They were cheeky and misguided. They were lecherous creeps. They were not altogether likeable. But they beat the shit out of everybody.

My favorite scene took place in an optometrist's office. American optometrists are generally soft-spoken Jewish men. But the Chinese archetype of the optometrist is different. It is a feminine archetype, an unusually busty archetype, and one that is dripping with sexuality. Or so I gathered from my bus screening of The Little Princes.

Optometrist: Read the first line, please.
Little Prince #3: L … R … Q … O.
Optometrist: Very good. Second line.
Little Prince #3: W … A … L … V.
Optometrist: Excellent. Bottom line.
Little Prince #3: Optometry Exam Number 54, Copyright 1982, Xiao Wang Printing Company.
[some sort of "baffled" sound effect]
Optometrist: What! You can read that? I can barely read it, and I'm standing right next to the board!
Little Prince #3: Of course I can read it, missy. It's easy with eyesight like mine. They don't call me "Eagle-Eyed Little Prince #3" for nothing! I could read it with my eyes closed.
Optometrist: Well, we'll just see about that! Close your eyes, young man.
[Little Prince #3 shuts eyes]
Optometrist: Now tell me what you see.
[camera zooms in on Optometrist's blouse]
Little Prince #3: The label seems to say … 38-D. Xiao Wang Brassiere Company. What does that mean?
Optometrist: [fainting] Well, I never!

Amidst all the leching and asskicking, there was a song and dance number. Granted, the Little Princes fared much better at leching and asskicking than they did at singing and dancing. But as a critic, I have to say that the soundtrack really held the film together.

We are The Little Princes
We will pursue our enemies to the very ends of the earth
We will banish all opponents to oblivion
We are young and we are mighty
We are The Little Princes
We will handily dispose of the problem

Thirty minutes into The Little Princes and two hours into the bus ride, the sleepless weeks of writing were compressing my eyes into hyphens. Neither death nor 140 decibel fart noises could keep me conscious. I gazed out the window and saw that we were approaching a village that billed itself "The Lemon Paradise of Sichuan." But the fruits on the billboards didn't look like lemons. They were green. They didn't even look like fruits. They appeared to be gourds. I drifted off into a half-sleep and dreamt of Donkey Kong throwing lemonlike gourds at me. I had just reached Level 3 when the bus skidded and swerved and I was jolted awake. Out the window, I could see that we were being chased by peasants, and that the road ahead was blocked by two very large trucks. Pirates? A bus robbery? Terror on the high seas? A hijacking in the Lemon Paradise of Sichuan?

The driver stopped the bus and leaned on his horn. The trucks didn't budge. Briefly, he considered off-roading it into a ravine, which would have killed him and everyone else on board. Then he shut off the engine and got out to parley with the peasants. A few minutes later, he came back and told us that we were going to stop for a while. A few minutes after that, the peasants boarded the bus with crates full of lemon gourds. Almost everyone on the bus bought a lemon gourd, except for me and the smitingly attractive coed next to me, who was still drooling everywhere.

We remained parked there in that weird place for half an hour. It was 3 PM. The sun seemed neither to rise nor to set. It just hung there like a lemon gourd on a string. The sides of the road were strewn with gutted lemon gourd carcasses. I could hear the people in the seats behind me snarfing away, sucking the juicy gourd meat through their teeth. When they were done, they cast the rinds onto the floor of the bus. Ah, yes. Hence the movie theatre stickiness. Hence the fruit flies. I watched the driver smoke a cigarette with the lemon gourd people. I saw him shake hands with everyone, and I could've sworn I saw him pocket a little something for himself.

The lemon gourd trucks parted and we were moving again, but not for very long. Just long enough for the smitingly gorgeous coed to wake up in horror at the sight of a bearded white man next to her. Then she remembered where she was, remembered me, wiped the drool off her chin, and stared at the television, which was playing trashy Russian music videos by then. We were entering a village of even less consequence than the Lemon Paradise of Sichuan and the road had thinned out to a salt and pepper strip of gravel upon which three lanes of traffic were bargaining with each other for death or safe passage. I had a good view of the speedometer and I could see that we were moving along at a steady 80 km/h clip, much too fast for my liking, up until we were stopped outside the Village of Little Consequence, at which point we were moving at about 0 km/h, which is much too slow for anyone's liking.

We were stuck behind a convoy of kerosene tankers. Together, we rumbled into the village like a procession of elephants. The villagers were lauding our arrival, or lampooning it. They walked alongside the bus, chattering and cat-calling and peering into the windows like we were zoo exhibits, something the other passengers were uncomfortable with but I thought was rather ordinary. Our driver grew impatient and tried to pass one of the kerosene tankers, whose captain responded by threatening us with fiery death, swinging so close to the bus that I could've reached out and touched the kerosene tank if I'd opened the window. The bus driver stopped and shut off the engine. We were officially screwed. None of the tankers were moving. There was no way to pass them without killing the entire population of the Village of Little Consequence and ourselves in the process. So we just waited there. And then, amidst the already bountiful absurdity, the capitalized Absurd struck. A four-to-the-floor beat pumped from the bus stereo, and after a brief synth interlude, I heard the six words that no self-respecting gentleman of poor endowment ever wants to hear: don't want no short dick man.

I had heard the song before, three years ago in a club in Hangzhou, but passed it off at the time as just another formaldehyde-induced hallucination. I've since googled the song. Surprise: it's called "Short Dick Man," and it's by a band called 20 Fingers. It is perhaps more fun reading the song than listening to it, unless you happen to be on board a Chinese bus stuck in a village of little consequence. The abridged lyrics are as follows:

don't want no short dick man
eensy weensy teeny weeny
shriveled little short dick man
what in the world is that thing?
do you need some tweezers to put that thing away?
that has got to be the smallest dick
I've ever seen in my whole life
I have ever seen in my whole life
get the fuck out of here
eensy weensy teeny weeny
shriveled little short dick man
isn't that cute? an extra belly button
you need to put your pants back on, honey
don't want no short dick man
pobre, pobrecito
que diablo eso?

I no longer even laugh when these sorts of things happen in China. If I did, I would likely be wack-evacked for giggling in perpetuum. So I just looked around the bus to see whether anyone was wearing the same facial expression that I was, which one of you tech-savvy kids might render like so: >:-O. But no. The people were bobbing their heads to the beat, secure in their magnitude. Here were no short dick men. Here were men of girth and substance. Here were satisfied women. Here were the Chinese. Me, I kind of grimaced and checked my watch and wondered what would end first: our internment in the Village of Little Consequence, or the extended Short Dick Man megamix.

I fired a text message to Meghan.

"How's Neijiang?" I asked.
"We're not there yet," she said.
">:-O, " I typed. "You guys left four hours before me."
"Yeah," she said, "we did."
"Three hours in and I'm stranded in a village," I wrote. "Does it get any better?"
"No," she wrote, "it only gets worse."

I was not encouraged. Neither was the bus driver. So he left the convoy of kerosene tankers and set off down a side street. He rolled down the window to ask a villager whether we could make it through to the highway. The villager nodded emphatically. The peasants gathered around the bus and seemed to be carrying us uphill. They would perhaps one day tell their grandchildren about us. The Bus That Came to the Village of Little Consequence. There was daylight ahead. A through street. A dusty little capillary that would lead us back to the clotted artery to Neijang. We were almost there. And then we came to a series of widely spaced pillars in the middle of the road. The bus driver stopped the bus at the top of the hill. He shut off the engine, got out, and visually measured the breadth of the bus against the space between the pillars.

"We're too big! We won't fit!" he screamed.
Ah. Poetic justice for the Small Bused Man.
The bus driver's peasant Virgil trembled.
"Sorry," said the peasant.
"Sorry? Sorry! We've wasted a half hour. You told me we could get to the highway on your shitty peasant road." Here, the driver spit in the dust. "Fuck you, you fucking cunt."

The driver got back on the bus. He fired up the engine. Fuck you, you fucking cunt. I knew the words. They were some of the first I'd committed to memory, but I had never before heard them used in China. I was shocked and amused, which looks like this: >:-D. The driver put the bus in reverse and we coasted forlornly back down the hill. The villagers gathered around to laugh us off. When we'd returned to the main road, the kerosene tankers were long gone and the road was clear. The driver cursed at his sudden good fortune.

But we weren't free yet. The road ahead wasn't quite busworthy. It wasn't even monster truckworthy. Looking back, I still have no idea how the kerosene tankers made it out of town. The driver stopped the bus and got out to consider the potholes. One of them was deep enough that the driver practically had to spelunk his way down into it. The Chinese words zenme ban popped into my head: what to do? And almost instinctively came the Sichuanese reply: mou fa – nothing can be done.

I have used the following tagline before in writing, but it is not really mine to use. It belongs to Richard Lee of Daegu, South Korea, and it was originally applied to South Korea. But I will borrow it once again – assuming that the namedrop is a sufficient citation – and I will here apply it to China: the land where everything is possible, but nothing is possible.

There is a certain zenlike contradiction to possibilities in China. Or perhaps it is more of a Daoist thing. But the laughably sure things in Chinese life – e.g., that you can get noodles at a noodle restaurant – sometimes turn out to be absolutely, unthinkably impossible. Twice last week I went to restaurants that not only specialized in noodles, but did not in fact sell anything other than noodles. And on both occasions, I was told, "No noodles." Mou fa. Nothing can be done.

And yet, what do the Chinese do when a road is in such disrepair that a busload of 49 people and one laowai appear to be stranded forever in a village of little consequence? Why, they build the road.

Noodles at a noodle restaurant? Impossible. "Short Dick Man" playing on a Chinese bus to nowhere? Possible, even probable if you're stranded on the bus long enough. But building a road, almost from scratch, in order to get a single vehicle back onto the highway was a stretch of the imagination for me, even as I sat there and watched the peasants do it. They scrambled about with wheelbarrows full of ground-up stone. They lugged over massive slabs of concrete. Whatever scraps they could drum up from the construction site across the street, they dumped into the potholes. And one way or another, the potholes were filled and leveled off, and in fifteen minutes flat, the only road out of the Village of Little Consequence had been rebuilt.

The bus driver fired up the engine and we crept slowly forward. Finally, the laughter I'd managed to stifle through twenty minutes of "Short Dick Man" came tumbling out. The peasants were steering the bus forward like it was a taxiing 747. We dropped gently into Divet #1, then rolled up and out of it. Divet #2 gave the TV set a good rattle, but aye, the mizzenmast, she held. Divet #3, the real doozy, the one the peasants filled up with what looked to be birdseed, set the bus a-shimmying, but our fearless pilot clung to the wheel with two iron fists until the front tires at last kissed the somewhat paved road that stretched out ahead of us. The driver gunned it. We were off. My fellow passengers let out a whoop, and the peasants let out a whoop – either because they were happy to have helped us, or because they were happy to be rid of us.

All and all, the bus ride to Neijiang would take seven hours. My sitemates were none too pleased with me when I arrived, but I'd like to think that they derived some satisfaction from the knowledge that karma had indeed given me my well-deserved seven-hour kick to the crotch. And then, suddenly, it was Thanksgiving. And there were forty other laowais to entertain. The masculine idiocy, as it turned out, had only just begun.

The Somewhat Bearable Lightness of Being a Hobo

2010-12-11T03:55:00.000+08:00

This year I wanted winter to come and it came. Now I want it to leave. But it won't go away. I know winter will linger well into March. The fog has descended and the fog will remain. And I will write away the next four months of my life in my meat locker of an apartment, with a space heater tilted upward towards the most vital organs I have to offer. I hate winter. Always have. But this year I wanted it to come just the same. I wanted winter to come because it was familiar. Last summer, like all summers, is a blur to me. But I can remember last winter. That memory is comforting to me. I can remember very clearly where I was last year at this time. I remember the fog, how the windows were windows onto nothingness. I remember the cold. I remember breathing fog. I remember me, a spry young 26 year old, writing away those winter months in his meat locker of an apartment, with his space heater tilted upward towards the most vital organs he had to offer. And it comforts me to think that he is me and that I am him, and that we are both waiting for the next big thing, whether it comes or not. Most of all, it comforts me to think about the next big thing.

I spent this past Thanksgiving weekend in Neijiang, a Nanchongesque city some 200 kilometers southwest of Nanchong. After the party, I stowed myself away on a boxcar in the middle of the night and left everything else behind. Like a vagabond calling card, I left behind my hobo satchel, my winter coat, and what little dignity I had left. Most of my earthly possessions remain back there in Neijiang. So I have been parading around Nanchong in autumnal gear – my usual sweater-and-collared-shirt combo – in the foggy depths of Sichuanese winter.

If you go around underdressed in China, people will tell you one of two things. They will compliment you on how healthy you are – voluntarily freezing one's ass off is clearly the mark of a physically robust human being - and they will tell you to put on more clothes. I get this several times a day. You are so healthy! You should put on more clothes! I get it in Chinese, and in English. Ni-de jiankang hen hao! Ni yao duo chuan dianr yifu! You are so healthy. You should put on more clothes. After a while, I get to feeling like a total stud. Or a hooker. A rugged beast of a man. Or a two-bit laowai gigolo. You tell me.

There is nothing I fear more than shopping. I will go shopping with women, because I enjoy the company of women. Who doesn't? But I never go shopping on my own volition, least of all in China. Least of all will I go shoe shopping in China. I've tried it before. I do not have abnormally large feet, not in the West. But my feet are anomalies here in China. Nobody has seen anything like them. Nobody sells shoes my size. Not the Chinese Big & Tall, not the Nanchong Clown College. Nobody. I go out shopping for shoes and wind up feeling like the Elephant Man. Sorry, sir. We don't have your size, sir. It seems you are freakishly disproportioned, sir. Perhaps if you had bound your feet years ago, sir, you wouldn't have this problem, sir.

So I've worn the same shoes for two years now. I own two pairs of shoes. I have worn both pairs for two years. I have my Pumas, which where good as new when I found them at a Goodwill in Omaha two years ago. They fit me perfectly when I bought them for one US dollar. Then I have my pointy-toed dress shoes, which I purchased for a similar fee at a similar thrift store. Both pairs of shoes have fallen to shit over the past few months. The Pumas are unwearable by now. The pointy-toed dress shoes, too, are unwearable, but I wear them anyway, because they are in slightly better shape than the Pumas. And they are dress shoes, after all.

So you can imagine me trolling the frigid, unforgiving streets of Nanchong in my sweater and misaligned collar, unshaven, unshowered, my shoes falling to pieces with each and every step. And perhaps charity is your natural reaction. Somebody get this man a coat. Somebody get this man some shoes, fer chrissakes. But it is really nothing to me. I prefer to troll about in such disarray. I have been doing it for years, and on several continents. Sichuanese winter is not Nebraskan winter, nor is it Polish winter, so I do not fear it. And there is little I enjoy more than a pair of shoes with a history. I was perfectly happy in my dishevelment. The way I saw it, I'd endure the winter until I retrieved my coat from Neijiang. And I'd wear those pointy-toed dress shoes until there was nothing left of them but socks.

My students were not of the same mind. As I was leaving class today – shivering ever so slightly, trailing gnarled strips of leather in my wake – a student approached me, wished me a merry Christmas, and thrust two very large bags into my hands.

"Thank you!" I said.
"It's nothing," she said, and disappeared.

I didn't open my Christmas presents, not right away. I wanted to be surprised. Perhaps my students had given me a book. Or a snow globe. But after a couple of blocks, I couldn't resist. I stopped on the side of the road, opened one of the bags, cleared away the tissue paper and found a shoebox buried underneath. I cracked open the shoebox and saw that there were indeed shoes inside. And in the other bag, beneath the tissue paper, there was a winter coat. And taped to the coat was a card.

"Mr. Panda – You always look so cold! You must be very healthy! You should wear more clothes! And your shoes are death. Let us provide for you. Do not thank us. It is nothing. We just wish you happy every day! Happy Christmas!"

Hmm, I said.

My old shoes carried me to my new favorite restaurant, this dumpy little dive where they serve rice noodles with beef chunks in a delectable MSG broth. I sat and read the card over and over again. I looked at the jacket. I looked at the shoes. I felt an immense amount of Catholic guilt. How to explain to the kids that this is how I live? That crummy shoes and freezing my ass off in winter are simply how I go about life? That the straits I sail in China are really no more dire than the ones I explored in Mexico, or Poland, or Korea, or Omaha? That I am never really comfortable unless I am uncomfortable? How to explain that I am a hobo, that thousand-proof moonshine courses through my vagabond veins, that I care not for luxury unless it's cheap and dripping with irony? How to thank them? I put on the coat. Was it ever warm. I shivered with warmth. I did not put on the shoes, but took them out of their shoebox and compared them to the warped strips of leather bound to my feet. They were exactly the right size. How did my students know I wore size ten and a half shoes? How did they even find size ten and a half shoes? Christ, I said aloud, and I tried to light a cigarette, but the owner of the restaurant swept in and planted one of his own cigarettes in my mouth. He lit it for me. I smoked it. Christ, I said again. This place beats you and it breaks you, then it overwhelms you with kindness. And in the end, you no longer know what to think of the place.

So I sit here in my meat locker of an apartment on a Friday night that has soured into a Saturday morning. I sit here writing, wearing a poofy black down-feather jacket and a pair of perfectly fitted Chinese shoes – half-sneaker, half-dress shoe. I look like J-Lo from the waist up, and like a Chinese vegetable monger from the waist down. I no longer need the space heater. From here on out, I will save energy. I will just wear the jacket. My old shoes sit there in the corner of the room, frowning, decomposing with jealousy. My winter coat sits curled up at the bottom of my hobo satchel in an apartment some 200 kilometers away in Neijiang. Me, I feel as good as new. Younger, in a way, than I have ever felt before. Wiser, perhaps. Dumber, certainly. But still restless, still hungry, still homeless, just another hobo waiting ever so patiently, ever so foolishly for the next big thing to come my way.

Enter the 36 Chambers of Nanchong

2010-12-03T13:21:00.002+08:00

So, check it. I have this running repartee with the owner of the inconvenience store on Fly-Infested Restaurant Street. It goes something like this: I walk in and she calls me laowai, so I call her laowai. Then, for whichever customers happen to be present, she explains that I am a laowai to her, and that she is a laowai to me. Though she is Chinese and I am an American, we are both laowais to one another, and we are both okay with that. I introduced this concept to her about a year ago and she has since taken quite a liking to it. So have I, for that matter.

The owner works the counter. She also stocks the shelves. She takes inventory, receives shipments, and all the rest. Her husband just kind of hangs out, watching TV and getting drunk. I don't think he holds much stock in the company. He gets jealous whenever I come in because I tend to hang around for hours at a time, cracking jokes with the missus - or at least he goes through an awful lot of beer when I'm there. I don't mean to provoke him. I'm not attracted to his wife in the least. She is older. Out of my age group. Beyond the reach of my libido. But fellow absurdists are hard to come by in this country. So you make jokes with them when you can, and sometimes they give you free cigarettes in return.

Monday night, while I was wisecracking with the missus, some college kid came up to the counter with a bagful of beer. I asked him what brand the beer belonged to. I'd never seen it before, I said. Just curious, is all.

"Zhe shi wo-de pijiu," he said. This is my beer.
"Well, I figured as much," I said, "but I mean, what brand is it?"
"It's mine. That's the brand. Mine."
"Mine? Hmm. Never heard of it," I said.
"Mine. Look it up."

I nodded and shot a glance at the missus. She mentioned to Lao Douchebag that I was a regular customer, that I spoke half-decent Chinese, that despite my being a laowai, I was a rather charming fellow, all things considered, and so on.

"Whatever. How much is my beer?"

I couldn't resist.

"Wait a minute," I said. "Just making sure. Is that - is that your beer? The beer that you're buying? It's your beer, right? I mean, you didn't really make that clear beforehand. The beer. Is it yours?"
"Yes. It's my beer."
"So it's your beer, is it?"
"Yes. It's mine."
"So it's not mine."
"No. It's not yours. It's mine."
"Good. Good," I said. "Enjoy your beer!"
And I bid him a good night.

Lao D left the shop in a huff, but stood outside watching while I shot the shit with the missus, up until the shop closed and her husband threatened to guillotine me with the garage door.

I bought the cheapest pack of cigarettes available on the Chinese market and slipped out into the night. Lao D was waiting for me.

"Do you want to drink these with me?" he asked.

Well, I thought, here was an unexpected twist. I was just about to punch this kid between the eyes a moment before, and I'm sure he was just about to do the same to me. But now beers were at stake. And we were men. And there was beer. And the kind of guy I am, I wouldn't turn down a beer from Dick Cheney himself. So I accepted the offer. Now it was our beer. Along the walk, his girlfriend joined us, and the three of us went up to Lao D's one-room apartment above the inconvenience store on Fly-Infested Restaurant Street.

"So," I said, assuming a seat on his living room couch, sipping on one of our beers, "what do you do?"
"I'm a kung fu master," he said. "I teach at the university sometimes."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. I studied at Shaolin Temple," he said. "You heard of it?"
"Shaolin," I murmured. "Rings a bell."
"Yeah. Shaolin."
"So you're probably pretty good at this kung fu thing," I offered.
"Yeah. Pretty good, I guess."
"Show me," I said.

He told me to stand against the bed. Then he told me to punch him in the face.

"I'm not sure if I can just - "
"Punch me in the face. Hard as you can."

I couldn't bring myself to do it. Until I remembered the beer transaction. It's my beer. Look it up. Douchebag. I swung as hard as I could.

What happened next, I cannot explain. I found myself on my back with my legs flailing around in the air. I could do nothing but gasp for breath at first. Then I started laughing uncontrollably. He released me and I got back up to my feet.

"Again," I said.
"Okay. Hit me."

I juked around this time, feinted left, feinted right, then lobbed a drunken Irish uppercut at Lao D's lower jaw. Again, I found myself laid out flat on my back, an elbow grinding into my neck and my face smothered into a pillow. I let out a muffled shriek. Master Lao D released me and stood there at the end of the bed, watching disinterestedly while I wriggled like a bug crushed into the carpet. I got back up, thoroughly winded.

"You know," I said, "I mean no offense, but you don't really look that strong. But I guess that's part of your - "
"My windpipe," he said. "Stick your fingers in it."
"No, thanks," I said. "I don't want to kill you."
"Trust me. You won't."
"But - ... I will?"
"You won't."
"You wan't me to put my fingers - in there?"
I drew a circle just under his adam's apple.
"Yes, right in there."

Cringing, I poked at his esophagus. Then I went for broke and shoved two fingers into his neckhole. A network of hidden muscles emerged. They tensed. They flexed. And they clenched. I squealed and withdrew my fingers as from a hot stove.

"Shit!" I said. "How did you do that?"
"I'm a Shaolin master," he said. "That's how I did that."

I stood there massaging my fingers back to life. They had turned purple. Lao D handed me another cigarette. I struggled to hold onto it. He handed me another beer, and I used it to ice my fingers.

"So," I said, "stupid question, but can you levitate at all?"
"A little," he said. "I'm gonna need you to stand up against that wall, though. And hold your arm out. Yeah. Like that."

He backed up into the hallway and I waited while he stretched.

"Don't move your arm," he said. "Hold it up, nice and steady."

He did some calisthenics of the sort that generate fireballs in Street Fighter II. A barely audible thrumming sound seemed to emanate from his gut. He squatted slightly, like in Super Mario 2 when you want to jump really high. He focused on an object in the far-off distance. By then, I was fully expecting the impossible.

Instead, he just kind of hopped. And landed. Well short of my arm.

"Sorry," he said. "I can't levitate right now. These khakis are too tight. And I can't take them off because my girlfriend is here."
"That's alright," I said. "That was about three feet higher than I can levitate. On a good day."
"Maybe I can levitate for you next time."
"Yeah," I said. "I'd like that."

Alas, alack: the Shaolin master scoffs at gravity, spits upon the very laws of physics, but is humbled by bootleg Dockers and prudish ladyfriends.

"How long have you been doing the kung fu thing?" I asked.
"Started training at Shaolin when I was two."
"Two. Years. Old?"
"Two years old."
"So did you beat the shit out of five year olds when you were two?"
"No," he said, "but I could probably beat up five year olds now."
"Yeah," I said.

I massaged my wrist. Those two tumbles he'd given me had really aggravated my Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. I wondered if I would ever type again.

Lao D's girlfriend had been sitting in the corner the whole time, silently watching her boyfriend kick the ever-loving sand out of the hobo he'd brought home.
"Are you a kung fu master, too?" I asked her.
"Oh, no," she said. "I just work at Zhang Fei Beef. Have you heard of it?"
"Of course," I said. "Very famous."
"Do you want some?"
She produced a large plastic bag and opened it at my feet. She reached in and took something out. Beef, I figured. She gave it to me and I started indiscriminately noshing on it.
"Thanks," I said. Then I turned the greasy object over in my hands. I couldn't make heads or tails of it. Bony. Oblong. Like a deep fat fried stone. "This is good. What is it?"
"Rabbit skull," she said.
I became suddenly aware of the jawline, the sloped forehead, the notches where the ears had been, and the eyeballs: all white, stewed in their sockets.
"Yes," I chuckled. "Rabbit skull."
Lao D got up to take a leak and when his lady friend wasn't looking, I slipped the hideous thing into the nearest trash can.
"So, are you a student as well?" I asked Xiao D.
"No. Just a worker," she said. "But I do study kung fu. He is my teacher."
"Show me," I said.

So I stood in one place while this nice Chinese girl kicked me in the kidneys ten times in a row. (Like most nice Chinese girls, she was wearing steeltoed jackboots.) When Lao D came out of the bathroom, he told her that she was doing it wrong, so he kicked me five more times in the kidneys, very effectively, until I told him that, yo, I'm probably gonna need those internal organs.

He handed me a cigarette and lit one for himself. We clunked beercans and we drank.

"I've been meaning to ask," he said. "Can you teach me English?"
"Probably," I said. "But you can't pay me. I'd get in trouble."
"So how can I pay you?"
"Teach me the ways of the Wu-Tang Clan," I said.
"Never heard of them."
"Yeah, probably not," I shrugged. "They're really more of a Westside thing, aren't they?"
"Right. Well. Anyway, my dream is to open a dojo in America."
"Might need English for that," I said.
"So I was thinking you could maybe help me. And I'll teach you kung fu for free."
"Sounds good to me," I said, "because my dream is to kick the shit out of a frat boy at Billy Frogg's on a Tuesday night in Omaha."

We shook hands. Then he squeezed a pressure point I hadn't known about and I dropped like a 160 pound bag of rice. His girl sat down on the bed, coughed, and gave Lao D a look. He hoisted me back up to my feet.

"Time for you to go," he said, and started hustling me towards the door. He gave me one last cigarette, and one more His Brand beer for the road.
"Can you smoke and still do Shaolin kung fu?" I asked.
"Yes," he said.
"And can you drink, too?"
He clunked his beer against my beer.
"Of course."
"Well, then," I said. "Let's do it."

Practice starts tomorrow.

Throwing Out the Script

2010-12-01T14:28:00.005+08:00

On your first day in China, the director will hand you a script. And you would do well to follow that script, at least until you have all your lines memorized, or until you've learned enough of the language to improvise.

But improvise at your own peril. In my experience, deviating from the script only ruffles the feathers of the other actors, and actors are a delicate bunch. For them, the script is fixed and immutable. People change but the script does not. Not much, anyway. The script may mutate ever so slightly over the course of thousands of years, but I have run into some Chinese dudes at the park who were at least a thousand years old, and they followed pretty much the same script that my students do.

The script looks like this:

Chinese Person: Hello.
You (The Foreigner): Hello.
CP: Hey, your Chinese is really not too bad!
You: Oh, pshaw. My Chinese is lousy.
CP: What country are you from?
You: America.
CP: Are you a teacher or a student?
You: A teacher.
CP: Do you teach English?
You: Yes.
CP: How much money do you make?
You: 1,500 bucks a month.
CP: US dollars?
You: No. Chinese RMB.
CP: Impossible! That's not enough money!
You: I know. But I'm a volunteer.
CP: A what?
You: A vol-un-TEER.
CP: Huh?
You: A vol-UN-teer.
CP: ... I don't understand.
You: A VOL-un- ... teer?
CP: Oh! You mean a VOL-un-TEER!
You: Yes.
CP: [shaking head] Not enough money.
You: ...
CP: How long have you been in China?
You: About a year.
CP: Have you gotten used to Our China?
You: Yes.
CP: Do you like Chinese food?
You: Yes.
CP: Are you married?
You: No.
CP: Do you have a Chinese girlfriend?
You: No.
CP: You should get one.
You: Maybe I should.
CP: Do you think Chinese girls are beautiful?
You: Yes. Very beautiful.
CP: You should get a Chinese girlfriend. Then you can stay in China forever.
You: ...

The above questions may come at you in a variety of accents, or in a slightly different order - but the script almost always begins with Your Chinese and Your Country of Origin, moves on to Your Job and Your Puny Salary, Whether or Not You Like China, and then, finally, Whether or Not You're Planning on Anchoring Yourself Via Ye Olde Ball and Chain to China Forever.

Other acceptable topics include the prosperity of America relative to China, the amount of time it takes to fly from China to America, the different places you have visited in China, and the length of Chinese history relative to our own negligible ancestry in the West. But these are not usually included in the script.

I am well acquainted with the script by now. I can recite it in my sleep, and sometimes I catch myself doing so. It's not that my Chinese is all that good - in fact, it has been languishing as of late. But I have mastered the script. At the very least, I know my lines. And that is because I have the exact same conversation countless times every day. That, incidentally, is the biggest reason why my Chinese is languishing: I am rarely allowed to deviate from the script.

About six months in, I threw away the script and started to dabble in deviation. If someone asked me where I was from, I would say "Nanchong," and laugh in a disarming enough way. And the conversation would drop like a dead duck. If someone asked me whether I liked Chinese girls, I would chuckle and say "Not really. They only seem to want me for my money." A dead pelican. "Have you gotten used to life in China?" "No, actually. It's kind of crowded, rather noisy, and people bother me all the time because I'm a foreigner." A dead ostrich.

The Chinese conversation is all about achieving the most harmonious pitch possible. Deviating from the script is like playing in the wrong key. In the West, our conversations are more like fugues. There are melodies and countermelodies, inversions and key changes, dissonance and consonance, agreements and disagreements. When you're talking to someone in China, you need not be interesting, but you must strive to be agreeable.

Questions like "Have you gotten used to life in Our China?" do not ask for an honest answer. If you say anything other than "Yes," you are sure to make your interlocutor very uncomfortable. Likewise with questions about Chinese members of the opposite sex, Chinese food, and China in general. You must express unflinching admiration for all things Chinese. It isn't necessarily that the Chinese are blind to their own flaws. Often, a Chinese person will observe that His or Her China is much poorer than Your America, but because it is the Chinese person making the observation, it is safe for you to agree. The most important thing is not political orthodoxy, but avoiding conflict, upholding the opinions of the person you are talking to. Above all else, you must be agreeable.

What happens when you're not? The conversation dies a sudden and awkward death. The other day, a cabbie asked me whether I made more money in China or in America. I laughed and said, "America, of course." Wrong answer. He fell silent. I tried to qualify the remark by adding, "You see, I'm a volunteer here. I don't make any money at all!" But it was too late. I had slighted His China with that inadvertently smug-sounding "of course" - I had lost him, and he didn't say a word to me the rest of the long cab ride home until he blurted out the fare. He didn't even say goodbye.

The same thing happened when I was asked for my thoughts on Chinese girls, and made the mistake of alluding to their avariciousness. I had been asked a question, so I decided to give an honest answer. The dude I was talking to nodded, looked down at his shoes, bid me farewell, and made his escape.

We follow a script in the West, as well. I'm not denying that. Very few people in your life really want to know how you're doing: the only real answer to "How are you?" is "Good." When talking to a stranger in the West, if you start all of a sudden unloading baggage about your ex-girlfriend, you're liable to be abandoned for a more appealing corner of the room. There are social penalties for throwing the script out the window. But the Western script is just a framework. It is the rhythm section, over which we improvise according to our whims. In China, the rhythm section is the music - and in that respect, it is conversational muzak. To my ears, at least.

It puzzles me, the script. I don't enjoy following it, least of all because I have to act out the same scene ten, twenty, thirty times a day. But the script is not something that changes, and it is not something any of us laowais can hope to change, not even by playing our own Ornette Coleman free jazz tenor solo over the muzak. The Chinese script is something that must be gotten used to. And at least in that sense, to answer your question, Mr. Cabbie, I suppose I have gotten used to Your China. I'm not quite cozy enough to live here forever, reciting the same script till I'm dead - but I suppose I'll just keep that to myself now, won't I?

[exeunt Mr. Panda, passenger side door]

Promises To Keep

2010-11-13T02:06:00.013+08:00

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

2010-11-12T21:07:00.005+08:00

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

2010-11-05T03:32:00.007+08:00

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

2010-11-02T19:34:00.007+08:00

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.

The Third Place

2010-10-30T06:51:00.002+08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pepto Bismol Dawn

2010-10-27T17:13:00.018+08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NO!!!!! they shouted in unison.

"Boring!"

"Sad!"

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

"We want watch this movie!"

Watch this movie! they chanted, watch this movie!

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

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

NO!!!!!

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

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

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

"Thanks," I muttered.

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

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

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

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

Big Man on Campus

2010-10-21T03:56:00.015+08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hemingway Interlude

2010-10-10T19:13:00.007+08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Huh," I said again.

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

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

"He was sleepy. He felt sleep coming."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the Red, Black and Blue

2010-10-02T03:36:00.005+08:00

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

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

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

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

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

"Symptoms," he grunted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday

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

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

"Just a moment!" I shouted in Chinese.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Son of a bitch bastard," I muttered.

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

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

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

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

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

Monday

7 AM arrived at 7 AM. Right on time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"2," said the machine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I tussled my hair.

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

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

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

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

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