Here Be Dragons

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

-Wikipedia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Left Side Door is Always Locked

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.

Harmony Corps

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

High Loon

And so my second semester in China ends as suddenly and chaotically as it began. This morning, I noticed a 48th student sitting all by her lonesome in the back row of the auditorium. After a series of idiotic squints, I managed to make out the blunt features of my blunt-spoken supervisor. I broke into a sweat. My knees buckled and trembled. I assumed, as I always do when confronted by an authority figure, that I was in deep shit. I mentally packed my bags, visualized the concourse of the Chengdu International Airport, and ran through my resignation speech as I switched on the projector screen and cued up The Joy Luck Club. Then, I sat in the very front row for about fifteen seconds before my supervisor snuck up from behind and swatted me on the shoulder.

"Come to the rear, please?"
"Oh, right, sure, no problem, okay!" I stammered.

"I have three things to tell," she said.
I could see where this was going already. Number one: a vague compliment. Number two: a schedule change, an upcoming Chinese holiday, a 93-year-old handyman coming to my apartment at such-and-such o'clock. It was number three that I was afraid of. Actually, I couldn't see where this was going at all.

"Number one," she said. "The final exam is start next week."
I painted over my astonishment with a dopey grin and a string of rapid-fire nods.
"Oh, that's cool. Like, next Monday?"
"That is number two," she said. "Next Wednesday you know is Chinese Dragon Boat Festival. Monday and Tuesday there is no class. No class Monday and Tuesday. We will have class Saturday and Sunday in lieu."
In lieu? In the loo? I nodded, nodded, nodded.
"So we have a vacation? But not really?"
"Yes," she said, "vacation, but not really. So the final exam is begin on Saturday."
"The day after tomorrow. Excellent," I said, "and what's behind door number three?"
"Oh. Number three is, do you like singing a song?"
"Sometimes," I said, listing in my mind the conditions under which I have been known to sing publicly.
"I will go to KTV tomorrow loon," she said.
"Pardon?"
"Tomorrow loon I will go to KTV."
"... sorry?"
"KTV tomorrow loon."

The Sichuanese possess two of the world's more puzzling speech impediments. Surprisingly, the L/R dichotomy is a non-issue in Sichuan. My students can pronounce the word "ruler" without spraining their tongues, and the kids on the street certainly have no problem with "HELLO!" But in my leck of the woods, otherwise fluent speakers of Mandarin cannot seem to distinguish L from N. So the city in which I live is interchangeably called "Nanchong" or "Lanchong." Not even l/native N/Lanchongers can make up their minds on the issue. H and F are another trouble spot. My beard is either a fuzi or a huzi, depending on how rustic the barber is. And the Mandarin word for mediocre, mama huhu, already perhaps the best word in any language, is unquestionably improved by the Sichuanese pronunciation: mama fufu.

"Loon! Loon!" said my supervisor with mounting exasperation. Then, finally: "Noon!"

So my supervisor was proposing a karaoke date for tomorrow noon. I thought again of the conditions necessary for me to risk singing in public, and certainly stone sober at high noon with my supervisor in a simultaneously glitzy and dumpy karaoke room did not meet my crooning criteria. I nodded, nodded, nodded, and before I could weasel my way out of the appointment, found myself agreeing to meet her the next day at loon. Noon!

I've watched the first half of The Joy Luck Club exactly six times by now. I didn't have time to screen the movie before I showed it to my first batch of kids, just fired up the DVD player and let it fly, trusting that the R rating was on account of adult language and similarly adult themes, not full-frontal nudity or graphic sex scenes or realistic depictions of human dismemberment. A high school history teacher of mine used to quote a phrase, one that he seemed to believe he'd coined himself: when you ASSUME, you make an ass out of U and ME. ASS, U, ME. Assume. I'm not sure why he directed this at us, or at me in particular. Perhaps I assumed more than your average high school freshman. But this time I assumed correctly, making an ASS out of neither U nor ME. The Joy Luck Club wasn't raunchy at all. I was relieved: a wholesome family film about Chinese mothers and their daughters, Rated M for Mahjongg. But what I hadn't considered beforehand was precisely the one thing that should've been foremost in my mind in the first place: namely, whether the film contained any questionable, er, um, content.

So about fifteen minutes in, just as I was beginning to doodle flying dinosaurs in the margins of my notebook, I heard something that jolted me bolt upright in my seat and sent my blood pressure shooting up into the red, way up into the Limbaugh Zone.

"That's when I remembered what we could never talk about," said the narrator. "My mother had once told me this strange story about what happened to her in China."

A crowd of displaced Chinese men and women appeared on screen, hobbling forlornly up a gravel road. Burning buildings in the background. Screaming children. Jesus. I felt like screaming, myself. Instead, I sat perfectly still and sweated all over my flying dinosaurs and wondered whether Spherion Temp Services would take me back. Stupid, Mr. Panda. Really stupid. Now you've done it. Now you've made an ass out of U, ME, and - well, just U and ME, it looks like. But U'll be lucky if U and ME even have an ASS left after THEY are done with U. I rose slightly from my chair. I would walk right across the room and skip the movie ahead ten minutes. That's what I would do. A problem with the DVD, I would chuckle. But that was too obvious. So I stalled there for a moment, halfway in my seat and halfway out of it. A Chinese mother left her twin babies on the side of the road. They lay there sleeping. And then the flashback evaporated. We were back in 1993, accompanying the old ladies to a church picnic. There had been no mention of - well, anything, really. And the babies, as it turned out, were still alive. And Mr. Panda, he was still alive, too - at least until the next flashback.

But I lucked out. And my students, to my surprise, enjoyed the movie. Or the first half of it, anyway. At the end of class, one of my students approached the computer wielding a USB stick.

"I want to copy movie," she said. She set to work. Paternally, I stepped forward to help, but this girl knew what she was doing. "Yes, I think this movie is very great. It address very deep, very serious topic. So I like it very much."

Mr. Panda, I thought to myself, you are on a roll. Narrowly averting international incidents day in and day out, yet still finding time to expose young Chinese college kids to the wonderful R-Rated world of human misery. Yes, the semester had been an unexpected success. In the beginning, my students didn't seem to understand a word I was saying. Stand up, I'd tell them, and everyone remained finger-trapped to their desks. But by the end, they could catch the asides that I often mumble to myself when nervous in front of 47 people. My students were wary at first, reluctant to trust the sermons I belted out from the pulpit about this schizophrenic and indefinably abstract entity we call America. But the kids warmed up to me after a while. They learned at least a handful of things that they won't forget anytime soon, I hope. Perhaps I blew no minds in the process, but I'd like to think that I inflated a few of them ever so slightly. And in retrospect, though I hadn't planned it, the semester seemed to possess a kind of internal symmetry: I opened with Lost in Translation and closed with The Joy Luck Club. Americans in Asia, Asians in America. The semester began with a text message from my supervisor - The class is start tomorrow! - and it ends on a similarly hectic lote - final exam, Saturday, loon!

There remains much to be frustrated with and much to improve upon. I walked into class this morning and asked the kids how they were doing.

"Nothing!" came the unanimous reply.
"Oh, no," I said, scrunching up my forehead like a surgeon who has just inadvertently killed his patient. "No, no. You are not nothing, my dears! You are something!"

And then there was the lecture I gave a couple weeks ago: "What Is An American?" Over the course of ninety minutes, I stripped (or tried to strip) away those pesky preconceptions my students have absorbed from years of gossip and Gossip Girls alike; that Americans are blonde, blue-eyed, hairy, rich, strong, tall, creative, grotesquely obese ... "What is an American?" I asked, wrapping things up. "An American is a human who lives in America." Some confused grunts, a laugh or two. I opened the floor for questions and a hand shot up in the far back of the room. A sophomore stood up and shifted nervously from foot to foot.

"But, Mr. Panda," she said, "how can Barack Obama be President of America if he is not American?"

This poor girl was no Birther. The Obama birth certificate controversy (not to mention the recent Tag Team imbroglio) hasn't quite made it out of the Bible Belt, and I doubt it will ever reach the Bamboo Belt. No, this girl was fundamentally puzzled as to how a black African could be President of the United States.

At the end of a long semester, and despite my best efforts, it remains inconceivable to many of my students that an American can be Dikembe Mutombo or Francis Fukuyama, Mr. Panda or Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, and that all those variously colored individuals are more or less equally American.

Perhaps cultural pluralism is an idea my students can entertain in principle, but it seems more fancy than fact to them. Sure, there exist in the world such wonders as Siamese twins, and four-leaf clovers, and black swans, and Chinese women who smoke cigarettes - but these are anomalies and not the norm. And in a country like China, the norm is the norm. The Chinese are Chinese, and Americans should be American. Like Mr. Panda. Or maybe a little more handsome than Mr. Panda. And would it hurt if he shaved every once in a while?

Keep on runnin'.

I tend to avoid any and all references to Journey cover art, but:

Run DMZ

2100 hours
I am due at Camp Kim by 0700 hours. Decisions await me, like where will I sleep? How will I sleep? Will I sleep? But for now, I can only leer out the dark window watching the lights as they hover by.

Korea has two trains, the fast one and the slow one. The fast one is named KTX. The slow one is named Mugunghwa, after the Korean national flower. I am riding the slow one.


0100 hours
The Mugunghwa groans to a stop. The doors hiss open and I step off the train. I climb the stairs between two escalators. Under the white lights of Seoul Station, I scout out a bench I can drop dead on for a few hours. But the lights are suddenly shut off. Next thing, I’m being hustled out the door with the rest of Seoul’s poor, mad, disfigured, drunk, foreign souls. After the doors are locked shut behind us, we stand together for a few minutes at the top of the stairs, a confused mass of grumbling, flailing human beings. It’s like the aftermath of a shipwreck.


0130 hours
I am standing at the end of a long line of people waiting for cabs. But the cabs ain’t coming. A taxi scalper seduces me into riding with him for ten bucks. I get in the back seat and tell him Camp Kim.


0200 hours
The cab stops on a darkened street. I hand the cabby my last ten bucks and get out. Ahead of me is an open gate flanked by two Korean MPs. I ask them about Camp Kim. The one glances at me briefly then stares straight ahead. The other doesn’t budge at all.

"Hello. Where is Camp Kim?"

The one glances at the other, glances at me again, mumbles "I don’t know," stares straight ahead. I shrug and walk through the gate.

I come to a small brown building and peer into the window. Inside are four Korean soldiers sitting around in their fatigues eating ramen noodles. One of them gets up and comes to the window.

"Is this Camp Kim?"

"No," he says.

He invites me in and draws a map on the back of a napkin.

"Is it near?" I ask him in Korean.

"Yes. Near," he replies in English.


0230 hours
It is a nasty kind of cold. I walk down the ice-scabbed sidewalk. It’s been half an hour and I haven’t seen anything but barbed wire and the occasional Korean MP. Perhaps the Koreans meant "near" in some relativistic Seoulian sense. I decide to hail a cab, but I’m wondering just how many cabs come down this way.


0300 hours
A cab stops. I get in back.

"Camp Kim," I say.

"Camp Kim?" I ask.

No answer. The cabby watches me in the rear view mirror.

The passenger’s side door opens and a pudgy crew cut drops in shotgun.

"What time is it?" he asks.

The cab driver puts his index finger on the clock radio.

"Fuck all. Late for curfew."

I ask the guy where he’s going, but he mumbles and sinks into his chair, falls asleep with his eyes open. He is stoned. I tell the cab driver that we’re both going to Camp Kim. The cab driver calls an English interpreter, but the interpreter’s English is no better than the cab driver’s.

After a few minutes sitting in the dark, the cab driver has an epiphany and starts driving. The stoned soldier wakes up, gives me an uncomfortable frontseat/backseat embrace, and says thank you like he’s about to cry.


0330 hours
Arrival at the Hotel Gaya. I rifle through my wallet for the fare, but find nothing but receipts. My pockets yield no change. The stoned soldier produces a crumpled 1,000 won note and holds his palm out to the cab driver. It is assumed that through some unspoken bond forged during our travels that the driver will not expect us to pay. This is not the case.

I suggest to the cabby that we hit up a cash machine, but he’s not having it. I search every pocket in my pants, my coat, my body. Nothing. I open up my backpack and unzip an out-of-the-way compartment. On most occasions, this reveals exploded pens and old boarding passes. This time, I find twenty dollars in change that I didn’t know I had. I hand the cabby the fare and a generous tip. When I get out, the stoned soldier hugs me.

My room has two beds and a bottle of aftershave in the bathroom. I catch the last ten minutes of Charlie’s Angels before I sleep.


0700 hours
I report to USO headquarters wearing the bland formal wear specified in the tour information packet. But glancing at the crowd of westerners around me, I see that I am laughably overdressed. I buy a Dr. Pepper from the vending machine and sigh. I have ironed my fancy pants for nothing.


0730 hours
We get on a bus.


0800 hours
We escape Seoul’s gravitational pull. The roadside turns all mawkish and brown, like the floodplains of Council Bluffs, Iowa. The highway traffic thins out until it’s only semi-trucks and square blue vans on the road with us. We stop at a gate. Next to the gate is a billboard with a cartoon depicting a boot stepping on a shiny metal thing. Above the boot is a fireball. Above the fireball is a bright red Korean word. One assumes this word means "land mines" in Korean.


0830 hours
A craggy-faced lieutenant steps on board. The name on his uniform is Polish, encoded in Cs and Zs. Miraculously, he pronounces it "Spinski." He is holding a stainless steel coffee mug the size and shape of a cremation urn.

"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the DMZ," he says. "Your debriefing is at 0900 hours. Any questions?"

Someone in the front row ogles his mug and asks, "How much coffee do you drink?"

"About three of these cups a day in the winter," he says. "I don’t drink coffee during the summer because it gets hot up here."


0900 hours
We file into the conference room. While we're waiting for our debriefing, we sign waivers. We are on a covert tour group espionage mission. The lights dim.

Spinski takes the stage and gives a Powerpoint presentation. He starts out booming like a drill sergeant, but after a few minutes he is stammering like a buck private. By slide six, he is sputtering out. Things start to unravel. Behind him is a half-red half-blue map of the Korean peninsula ...

Spinski: In nineteen-forty ...
[pause]
Spinski: In nineteen-forty ...
[pause]
[pause]
Spinski: In nineteen-forty ...
[pause]
[pause]
[pause]
Spinski: In nineteen-forty ...

He clicks ahead to the next slide, a grainy black-and-white photo of Kim Il-Sung.

Spinski: ... Communist North Korea was ruled by Kim ...
[pause]
Spinski: Kim ...
[pause]
[pause]
Spinski: Kim ...
[pause]
[pause]
[pause]
Spinski: Kim ...

He leaps off stage and dashes out of the room. Nobody makes a sound. Another officer takes over. The name on his uniform is Dawkins.

Dawkins: Apparently, Lieutenant Spinski woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. I’m not sure what just happened. In 1948, Kim Il-Sung took control of Communist North Korea ...


0930 hours
We are back in the bus. Spinski is gone, Dawkins has taken control.

"When we arrive at the Joint Security Area, you will be on your best behavior," Dawkins says.

"You will see North Korean soldiers," Dawkins says.

"Do not flip them the bird. They know what the bird means," Dawkins says.

"Do not shout at them. Do not shout at them in Korean, because I will not understand you," Dawkins says.

"Do not shout at them in English, because I will understand you," Dawkins says.


1000 hours
The bus crests a hill and stops. We get out and stand in two lines. Dawkins leads us up the stairs, through an empty white building of polished granite and glass.

"This 49 million dollar facility was built by the Hyundai Corporation to host North/South family reunions," Dawkins says. "It has never been used."

"On the other side of this facility," Dawkins says, "is North Korea."

We file slowly down the hall. Mr. Kim, our Korean civilian tour guide, drifts towards the back.

"I am something nervous whenever I go," he says. "The North Korea is knowing my face. I am fear, that they shoot me one time."


1030 hours
We step out onto a grey cement platform. Ahead of us are two long, light blue compounds. Behind them stands a drab three-story building, a Maoist pagoda. And twenty feet away are the North Korean soldiers.

There are fifteen of them. They are milling around, mingling, meandering idly along the border, watching us.

Dawkins orders us to stand in a straight line facing the North Koreans. He peers across at his brown-uniformed nemeses.

"There are a lot of them out today," Dawkins says. "I don’t know why."

"Don’t point, don’t shout, don’t taunt them," Dawkins says.

"They may taunt you. They may make throat-slashing gestures. They may flip you the bird. They misbehave. That’s why we call this The Monkey House," Dawkins says.

"Right now, they are taking hundreds of pictures of you. There are cameras watching you from guard posts hidden in the trees," Dawkins says.

"They are taking hundreds of pictures of you and we encourage you to return the favor," Dawkins says.



I snap a few photographs but anxiety keeps me from focusing. These men in the funny hats have guns and they are separated from us by twenty feet and a four-inch high cement beam. And they are staring. Contemptuous stares? Curious stares? I lower my camera and stare back, wondering ...



Three of the soldiers suddenly break from the rest of their comrades and stand in a row facing away from us. A commanding officer drops down on one knee in front of them. Our side is silent as we crane our necks to see what exactly they are doing.

Soft gasps as the officer reaches into his pocket and pulls out ... a camera. The three soldiers glance behind them and reposition themselves accordingly. There is some time before we realize fully what is going on. They are taking pictures with us. Not for strategic reasons, for espionage, to stick to Kim Jong-Il's fridge; but for curiosity, amusement, bragging rights ... They are tourists. Two or three at a time, the North Koreans line up with their heels right up against the wall. The others wait in line. They pose next to each other with our blurry black and white faces watching them in the background. This goes on for ten minutes. I take pictures of them taking pictures of me. You stare into the abyss, the abyss stares into you, that sort of thing.




1045 hours
A daydream plays itself out in my mind. Keith Petit – a lowly space dilettante from Bellevue, Nebraska – sprints headlong into a wall of North Korean soldiers. Naturally, the North Korean soldiers respond by blasting him with machine gun bullets until it is objectively clear that he is dead. The South Koreans respond accordingly by firing on the North Korean soldiers. As there is only a four-inch high cement barrier separating the two of them, soldiers from both sides cross this barrier freely in the ensuing gunfight. With relations between the two Koreas strained as it is, the North views Petit’s bellowing, bow-legged infiltration as a declaration of war. After examining Petit’s dossier, America views it as an act of unexplained idiocy, but seizes the opportunity to nuclearly annihilate North Korea. Radioactive dust meanders into China. China – already tempted to stick up for their North Korean chums, furthermore slobbering over the recently vacated Korean peninsula – jumps in on the side of what remains of the North Korean army. China nukes Seoul, Busan, Daegu – note that if Petit hadn’t been killed in the gunfight he started, he would have almost certainly met his demise at this point – Japan nukes China, Pakistan nukes India, France nukes Iceland for some reason ... a nuclear orgy ensues and the whole world wants in. When the smoke clears, intelligent life on earth has been extinguished. The three-toed sloth survives but does not evolve quickly enough to spread its three-toed wisdom to the stars before the rapidly expanding universe disperses to the point that matter can no longer form. Nothingness comes into existence, somethingness ceases to be. I blink and slide my finger up my crotch to make sure my fly isn’t down. We are all very powerful, depending on what time it is.

The North Koreans arrange themselves single file and march dodderingly away, a sluggish mopey march, not the frightening clockwork we see on the news. Dawkins leads us down the stairs and into the light blue compound on the left.

Inside the compound are two dark wooden tables, a display case full of plastic flags, and in the corner by the door, a mauve Samsung heater. In front of the back door stands a Korean soldier. This is the door to North Korea.

"This is a Republic of Korea special forces officer," Dawkins says.

"He is trained in the martial art of taekwondo. Do not get too close to him. Do not try to touch him. He will ... stop you," Dawkins says.

"On one occasion, the North Koreans opened the door behind him, seized him by the coat, and attempted to drag him across to their side of the border," Dawkins says.

"He beat them both up pretty bad," Dawkins says.

"See that display case with the plastic flags?" Dawkins asks.

We stare.

"Those plastic flags used to be silk flags, but a little while ago, when President Bush came to town, two North Korean soldiers broke into the display case," Dawkins says. "One used the American flag to shine his shoes. The other used the South Korean flag to blow his nose."

"We have replaced the silk flags with plastic flags to deter the North Koreans from repeating this performance," Dawkins says.

You can’t really blow your nose with a plastic flag.

We take pictures standing next to the gatekeeper. Most people flip the peace sign.





1100 hours
The bus takes us to a South Korean village nestled inside the DMZ. The South Koreans call the village Daeseong-dong. The Americans call the village Freedom Village. I’m not sure what the North Koreans call it.

We stop at a restaurant. I eat bulgogi with two scarf-wearing Irishmen and a Swede who is the brother of a mediocre Korean League soccer player. Someone asks where I’m from and their faces blanch when I say Nebraska. USA. I am ignored. After ten minutes, I’ve quipped my way back into the conversation, but by then the topic has shifted to America’s airport security policies. They are staring at me expectantly.

"I just live there. I didn’t invent the place," I shrug. For that, you have George Washington Carver to thank. He also invented the peanut.


1200 hours
Our bus passes through the thick of the DMZ. Though billed as an environmentalist’s wet dream, in winter it is above all a bleak place. The grass is brown, the trees are gnarled, the terrain has the look of tussled hair. Dawkins tells us that a photography ban is in effect and that our cameras will be confiscated if we try to take any pictures. But nothing out here looks especially picturesque.


1230 hours
The bus huffs and puffs up the side of a mountain. When it reaches the top, we get out and pay 50 cents to stare through binoculars at the southernmost swatch of North Korea. We see brownish farmland nestled in between green-grey mountains. Square concrete slabs. And a flagpole.

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is what the North Koreans call Peace Village," Dawkins says.

"But we call it Propaganda Village," Dawkins says.

"We call it Propaganda Village because nobody actually lives there," Dawkins says.

"Propaganda Village is maintained by a few North Korean servicemen who clean and turn the lights on and off every so often to make the buildings look inhabited," Dawkins says.

"The flagpole you see is the tallest flagpole in the world. In the 1980s, the South Koreans built a 328-foot flagpole on their side of the Demilitarized Zone. The North Koreans responded by building a taller one," Dawkins says.

"The flagpole you see stands at 525 feet tall. The flag you see weighs 600 pounds. On a wet day, it cannot fly," Dawkins says.

"The US Army is offering a one million dollar reward to anyone who can cut a one meter square off of that flag and return it to camp. One day, I hope to claim that reward," Dawkins says.

High up as we are, the two Korean flags are twiggy models, you could crush them between your fingers. And they're only a couple inches apart from each other. The buildings of Propaganda Village and Freedom Village lay strewn in the grass, little bits of paper. On the north horizon is the city of Kaesong. A few flecks of silver glisten in the sun. These are North Korean cars.


(This picture was taken from ground level. If you squint, you can see Kim Jong-Il's face chiseled into the side of the mountain. Kidding.)

1400 hours
We watch a video.
Introduction: a small Korean girl walking through a field, weeping into a handkerchief. Suddenly, an explosion. The girl gasps and turns around. Building guitar feedback and a fuzz bass riff. Drums. Black-and-white footage of tanks thundering through the brush, soldiers crawling forward on their elbows, shells ejaculating, explosions, explosions, explosions. A History Channel voiceover.

In June of 1950 ...
The 38th parallel ...
Communist forces ...
4 million casualties ...

A guitar solo.

Suddenly, everything is Technicolor. The camera pans over an animated landscape of luscious green tropical vegetation. Deer dashing between the trees. Toucan Sams pirouetting through the air. Kim Jong-Il is vigorously shaking hands with a South Korean president. Uniformed Asian men are sitting around a dark brown table. Families are strolling hand-in-hand along a barbed wire fence.

The Demilitarized Zone is ...
... an environmental treasure trove ...
... 1,000 square kilometers of hope ...
... a seed of peace planted in the hearts and minds of all Koreans, North and South alike ...

A harp flourish. The screen goes black. The projection screens roll back up and the lights come on. Blink.


1430 hours
We stop at the gift shop. Against my better judgment, I buy a DMZ t-shirt because the smiling anime soldiers on the front are too ridiculous to pass up. I avoid the North Korean hard liquor cabinet. A concerned shopper - a chubby bearded guy in a black t-shirt - asks Dawkins whether any of the gift shop's proceeds go directly to North Korea.

"No," Dawkins says. "All of the North Korean products for sale here are purchased by a South Korean agency that does business directly with the North Koreans."

"So," says the bearded guy, "the money I'm paying goes to the South Korean agency. But the South Korean agency's money goes to the North Koreans, doesn't it?"

"Yes," says Dawkins. "But none of the money you see here today is going to end up in the hands of Kim Jong-Il."

The chubby guy looks a little bewildered, then turns around to go see about the Pyeongyang brandy.


1500 hours
Since the de facto end of the Korean War, the North Koreans have dug at least four tunnels winding from the North/South border all the way to Seoul, some 3.5 kilometers away. The tunnels - if they weren't stuffed with tourists - could pump 30,000 North Korean troops into downtown Seoul within a couple of hours. Ostensibly, these tunnels were dug for the purpose of invading South Korea, but the Capra in me imagines that the North Koreans were just lonely, that every now and again when Kim Jong-Il was feeling drunk or horny or magnanimous, they received his supreme permission to take a weekend in Seoul, to drop in and surprise old friends and relatives, maybe hit up a karaoke room or a massage parlor or something ...

We don yellow hardhats and trudge down a sharply descending two-mile long shaft until we reach the bottom. Stretching towards the north like a clogged artery is a narrow, jagged yellow-lit tunnel. Inside, water drizzles down from the ceiling and pools up on the ground. I notice the rocks are the same rocks they use to build most of the office stairwells in Korea. Granite?

We follow the tunnel to the end. At the end of the tunnel is a patch of barbed wire in front of a metal door. Watching the metal door is a CCTV camera. Who is watching the camera?

By the time the South Koreans found this tunnel, the North Koreans had abandoned it and painted the walls black. "Just coal mining," they said ...


1630 hours
We have parted ways with forty bucks and thus, our mission is complete. We’re in the bus, riding back to Seoul. I haven’t seen the city in the daytime yet. It looks like any other Korean city, but bigger. Apartments, smokestacks, cars. It’s as bleak as I expected. But as we cross the Han River, the setting sun sits at just the right angle to glance off the water and obscure the nastiness as it rushes at the speed of light to meet me. There’s a wreath of brightness surrounding all those grey rectangles. It’s almost relaxing. The British teenager in the seat behind me is bitching, asking her dad when we’re gonna get back to Seoul.

"This is Seoul, cupcake," her dad says, "I think."

"I can’t wait to get back to the room," the girl says. "I’m bored."

I squint out the window and think, it’s been a real long time since I’ve been bored.