Interesting Times

Before I left England for China in 1936 a friend told me that there exists a Chinese curse — "May you live in interesting times". If so, our generation has certainly witnessed that curse's fulfilment [sic].

— Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, Diplomat in Peace and War

I came to China in search of interesting times, and upon arrival, did my darndest to avoid them. I turned my apartment into a bomb shelter, walled myself in with secondhand Russian novels and truly apocalyptic caches of Nescafe. And ten months later, China remains China. I crack open the venetian blinds. There she is. China. Gray and metallic. Under construction. Growing more exotic and mystifying by the day. But I stubbornly remain myself. Four teaspoons of Nescafe, two chapters of Crime and Punishment. Every day I have the option of getting myself into all sorts of Chinese weirdness, but for the sake of sanity, I avoid it, opting instead to pursue my own weirdness in the comfort of my hermetically sealed bachelor pad.

But in China, I am never bored or uninspired or comfortable for very long. With eerie regularity, about once every three days or so, something or someone comes along and startles me right out of my hermetic slumber. China ambushes me on the walk home from work, gives me a wedgie and a purple nurple, steals my lunch money and runs cackling off into the distance. Or she takes me out for karaoke, serves me fresh watermelon and spiced radishes, gets me drunk on Crown Royal spritzers, and at the end of the night, when I insist on paying, she swats my hand away, reaches into her purse and makes it rain. These things happen to me. China does these things to me. I have no say in the matter. I can no more avoid China than MSG, can no more escape Chinese absurdity than I can breathe her air without inhaling coaldust, or drink her tap water without ingesting lead and arsenic and formaldehyde and all the rest. I came to China in search of interesting times, and despite my best efforts, I have found them.

When I came home from Mandarin class last night, a man in a bright orange China Mobile t-shirt was waiting for me in the stairwell. He shook my hand, then hugged me. I laughed uneasily. He followed me up the stairs and slid an ID card out from his billfold.

"My name is Mr. Wang!" he shouted. I turned the card over in my fingers. Indeed, Mr. Wang he was. He asked me where I lived. Upstairs, I murmured. I asked where he lived and he shouted, not here. In his left hand he held a plastic binder. His right hand kept pinching me. We arrived at the fourth floor and he hugged me again. Then he patted my gut.

"Don't ever drink," he shouted, hoisting up his belly for comparison, "or you'll get fat like me!"

My thoughts turned to the bottle of Duwel in my backpack, the first formaldehyde-free beer I'd managed to get my hands on since my arrival. I looked into Mr. Wang's eyes. A flicker of madness there. I could imagine him stabbing me in the stomach, swiftly retracting the dagger and darting down the stairs in one fluid motion. How cruel that would be. Me bleeding to death in the stairwell, a handful of neighbors watching me expire, and this beautiful eleven-ounce bottle of imported Duwel in my backpack that one of my college roommates would dump out over my grave after the funeral. Mr. Wang cackled. I smiled. Then he grew serious.

"No, don't ever get fat! We are men. And we like women. And women like us," he said, banging his fists together in the International Sign Language for "doing the wild thang." He cackled again and smacked me in the gut. The smile slowly faded from my face. I stared at Mr. Wang while he ranted at me. A puzzle was assembling itself in my brain. Mr. Wang looked familiar.

"So," he said, indicating my door, "let's go inside and talk."
"Actually, my apartment doesn't look so hot right now," I said. "It needs cleaning."

By then, one of my neighbors - a delightful chainsmoking Buddha of a man - was watching us from his doorway, smoking a Hongmei and grinning ever so slightly.

"Come on," Mr. Wang insisted. "Let me in!"
"It's very messy in there."
"I'm not scared!" he shouted, and laughed. "No, I'm not scared of anything, because of this!"

He reached down into his shirt and pulled out a small plastic crucifix. I nodded. And so one piece of the puzzle had fallen into place: I was being proselytized. But still, this Mr. Wang looked awfully familiar. Who was he? Where had I seen him before?

"Let's go! Let's go inside!"
"Wait," I said. "First of all, who are you?"

He yanked at my arm, pulled me towards the door. And that was the moment it all came together. Who is Keyser Söze? Who is Mr. Wang? Right then I realized that the man on my doorstep was the same maniac who, six months earlier, downtown, had yanked my arm as I was making an important cigarette transaction and tried to drag me out into the street. In the meantime, he had tracked me down, found out where I lived, had waited for me in the stairwell, and now he wanted in my apartment.

"Who are you?" I asked again.
"I'm Mr. Wang," he smiled. "I'm your friend!"
"You are not my friend," I said. "I don't know you."
He laughed. "I understand. I understand."
He turned and tried the door to my apartment.
"It's locked!" he shouted.
"Of course it's locked," I said. "It's my apartment."
"I just want to talk."
"Then we can talk here. What do you want?"
"I want to help you," he said.
"Help me with what?"
"Everything."

He laughed and smacked me in the gut.

"Look," I said. "I just got home from work. I'm very tired. How about we talk some other time."
"Let's talk now! Just for five minutes!"
"I am a busy man," I lied.
"I understand. I understand. In that case," he said, and opened his binder, "do you know where Ao Yan-Fei lives?"
I blinked. Ao Yan-Fei was the Chinese name of one of the Mennonites.
"No," I said. "I have no idea where she lives."
"You don't know?"
"No. Sorry. I have no idea."
"But you must know! You laowais are thick as thieves!"
"I'm new here," I said. "I don't know where anybody lives."
"But I want to help her!"
He smacked me in the gut. I looked him in the eyes.
"I don't think ... she needs ... your help."
"... what?"
"I said, I don't think ... she needs ... your help."
Mr. Wang laughed uncontrollably.
"Everybody needs my help," he said. "Look here."

He opened his binder. I peered over his shoulder as he shouted and thumped his index finger down on the handwritten pages. I squinted but couldn't make out any of the writing, just the words "In the year 1966 ... "

"Okay," I said. "I really have to go."
"Come with me to Ao Yan-Fei's apartment!"
"I'm not going to her apartment, and neither are you."
"What?"
I pointed towards my door.
"You see that? That's my apartment. That's where I live. That's my home," I said. "You are bothering me. I didn't invite you here. I don't know who you are. You're a stranger. You just showed up."

Mr. Wang frowned, then smiled. He raised his finger to speak, but I cut him off.

"And I know for a fact that my friend doesn't want some stranger showing up at her apartment," I said. "That's her home. That's where she lives. It's not polite to bother people at home. It's not very Chinese. You're not being very Chinese right now."

By then, in addition to the chainsmoking Buddha, a couple other neighbors had poked their heads out to observe the spectacle of the furious laowai shouting in bad Sichuanese, and under the gaze of so many Chinese eyes, Mr. Wang grew nervous.

"Just tell me where she lives," he said softly.
"I'm not going to tell you that."
"Okay," he said, "then I will find her myself."

He flung his arms open, hugged me, and swatted the hell out of my back. The bottle of Duwel clinked around in my backpack. Then Mr. Wang turned and scampered down the stairs two at a time. I watched him leave. Then I turned to my neighbor. He glanced at me, glanced at Mr. Wang, then glanced at me again. He spun his finger around his ear in the International Sign Language for "batshit crazy." Then he bid me a good night and shut the door.

After I'd triple-locked the door behind me, I sat down on the couch and cracked open my Duwel. Was it ever good. Then I put on an LCD Soundsystem album and turned it up so loud that the speakers threatened to jump off the table. And I sat there thinking about Mr. Wang. Was he schizophrenic, or just Christian? How did he find me? Why had he chosen me in the first place? Was I right in turning him away, or should I have caved and let him into my apartment, where the squalor of my bachelordom would have driven him away in seconds flat? No, he'd have said to himself, stifling a dry heave, this Pan Da cannot be saved.

In China, confrontations like these are mercifully few and far between. Most of the negative attention a laowai receives is strictly hit-and-run: a distant heckler, constant laughter, constant stares. It is omnipresent, but rarely is it personal. That said, when you finally find yourself mano a mano with someone who is actively conspiring to make your life less enjoyable, it is extremely difficult, almost impossible not to lose your cool. All that hit-and-run aggravation catches up with you all of a sudden. If you happen to have Irish blood pumping through your veins, you must stifle the impulse to punch, to kick, and to swear. You have to take a deep breath and politely suggest to the gentleman that he vacate your 800 square feet of rented property. Fight passive-aggression with aggressive pacifism. Gandhi and Martin Luther King and all the rest. Forgive these people, for they know not what they do. They know not what Irish rage they incur. Speak softly and -

A knock at the door. I sat there, frozen. Another knock. I stared into my beer. Knock, knock, knock. Slowly, silently, I got up and retreated to my study. I turned down my music, then switched it off altogether. Knock, knock, knock. I sat and waited. Thirty minutes passed, then an hour, and still the man knocked. I googled Chinese obscenities. "Fuck off" seemed a bit too strong for my purposes, as did "go to hell," but "leave me the hell alone" felt apropos. Knock, knock, knock. I waited. Knock, knock, knock. I tried to read. Knock, knock, knock. Then I got up, stormed across the living room, and peered through the peephole. There was Mr. Wang, knocking, smiling.

"Listen," I shouted, "I don't need your help."
"I want to help you!"
"This is my apartment. This is my home! You are bothering me!"
"I am trying to help you!"
"Leave me the hell alone!" I shouted. "Get lost!
He laughed. "I understand. I understand."
A moment passed. Then he knocked again.
"Go away," I said, "or I will call the police."
"You're going to call your friend? Ao Yan-Fei?"
"No. I am going to call the police."
"Oh. I understand. I understand."

A beat. I took a breath. I took a step towards my bedroom. He knocked again. So I kicked and pounded all hell out of the door. Mr. Wang let out a startled yelp, then he laughed. He shouted something. Then, finally, I heard his voice receding down the stairwell. I waited there with my ear pressed to the door for a minute or two. Silence. Then I gathered up my bottle of Duwel and my secondhand copy of Anna Karenina and curled up in bed. Oh, Anna, it's been so long. She's looking a bit worse for wear these days. I don't take care of my books. Her spine's all scoliotic, her pages stained with hot and sour soup, her foreword falling out one page at a time. But there she is, Anna Karenina, in all her promiscuous glory, sultry and seductive across the ages. And in these times of interesting times, I can't help but sink into Leo Tolstoy's interesting times. I can put Anna Karenina down. China, on the other hand, is inescapable. I crack open the venetian blinds. There she is. China. A security guard hawks a loogey. A nightbird cackles. Who knows what lurks around the bend?

Listless Mistress

Just before I came to China, I wrote about wanderlove. I coined the pun to describe the long-term contentment with living abroad that sets in after wanderlust has faded, after you've grown jaded to all manner of foreign novelties - squat toilets, babies crapping in the street, movie theaters that sell beer, the Royale With Cheese. Wanderlust becomes wanderlove at the point when you cease to view those cultural quirks as novelties, but as inescapable facts of life.

Love is a difficult thing, and so is wanderlove. It's all roses for the first three months, when you're still flying along on the wings of wanderlust. Babies crap at your feet, and you laugh. You slip and tumble headlong into the squat toilet, and you laugh. You order a Royale With Cheese and they give you six of the goddamn things, and you laugh. Then you hit month four and all those shenanigans suddenly cease to be amusing. You wish you didn't have to sidestep so much human feces on your walk to work, and you wish that you could sit and read Bakunin on the crapper, and you wish that you could just get a Quarter Pounder With Cheese fer chrissakes. You spend the next three months reviling everything about the culture that surrounds you, too proud for homesickness but thoroughly pissed off that nobody conforms to your definition of normalcy. So you sulk and delve into your Russian novel collection, because therein lies normalcy, right?

After six months, you peek out from under your Dostoevskian shell and find that life is once again livable. You make friends. You establish connections. You flourish, sort of. And so begins wanderlove, the understanding that you are not separate from the foreigners around you - however separately they may regard you as a foreigner - but that you are a human being, and that they are human beings, and that you all must live with each other somehow and so on and soforth. Which sounds like a happy ending, but it really isn't. It is only the beginning of a long and often tedious marriage built on a foundation of routine, compromises, petty squabbles and honey-do chores.

It's like courting the ravishing Anna Karenina and, after six painstaking months, finally luring her away from that robot husband of hers – only to watch her grow obese and leathery and dull before your very eyes. After six months abroad, you start to wonder where the spark went. We used to have such great chemistry, me and China Karenina, but nowadays I'm lucky if she even puts out. She refers to the sex act as our "duty to the Party." And now she wants kids. Kids? To be perfectly honest, there are days when I get home from work, crack open the Rand McNally World Atlas and ogle the hell out of Kyrgyzstan - her exotic netherregions, her vague southern border, that skimpy little green bikini that leaves little of her topography to the imagination.

This is my roundabout way of saying that I am fending off another bout of writer's block. China remains as quirky as ever, but at the moment, I don't find her all that alluring. I tried attacking my writer's block with gross amounts of Nescafe, with formaldehyde beer, with Panda cigarettes. I experimented with cleaning my apartment, then I experimented with trashing the place. Perhaps, I thought, my diet had something to do with it. I ate nothing but cabbage for a week, then I devoured four Royales With Cheese in rapid succession. Then I started appearing at strange new restaurants and pointing at random menu items whose Chinese characters looked menacing, to say the least. I discovered spicy pig intestine soup that way, but the experiment did little to clear my writer's block - or my colon, for that matter.

I'm not sure what the problem is. There is no shortage of material to write about. I still haven't written about my trip to Yunnan, or the Kunming Dwarf Kingdom, or the World's Largest Transformer – nor have I written about the Zebra Music Festival, or the two-hour lecture on Western History and Culture that I gave the other night, or the rural middle school I taught at a couple weeks ago in exchange for a pack of Panda cigarettes, or the Mrs. Robinson of China, who first tried to set me up with her daughter, then literally threw herself at me in the darkness of a karaoke room, asking me in a baijiu-breathed whisper whether I wanted "a Chinese mama." And meanwhile, the babies continue to crap at my feet, the cabbies continue to scare the bejeezus out of me, and my students continue to baffle me. So there is no shortage of material. But what I lack at the moment is the ability to see any of that material as new, or amusing, or worth writing about.

Which leads me back to wanderlove. Who is this pimply old China Karenina in my bed? This is not my beautiful wife! This is not my beautiful house! And the days go by, same as it ever was. You watch her playing mahjongg with her oldster friends and wonder how she could possibly find that lousy game so damned fascinating. For four hours she plays mahjongg, then she comes home and nags you to shave, to get a haircut, to tie your shoes. She asks if you can use chopsticks. Look, honey, for the 1.3 billionth time ... She tells you your classes are too easy, then she tells you they're too hard. She flips through the Russian novel you're reading and shouts, "I can't understand a word of it!" On the street, she picks up and coddles somebody else's baby, then holds it over a sewer drain to take a crap. Then on the walk home all she talks about is babies this, babies that, oh Panda, shouldn't we perform our duty to the Party and make one of our very own? And meanwhile, Kyrgyzstan, that saucy little thing, beckons you from page K-72 of the 2006 Rand McNally World Atlas.

But something about China keeps you around. She is nothing if not consistent. She's loyal, hardworking. She keeps you well fed. She isn't much for conversation, but then, neither are you. Every now and again, she does something charming to remind you of the good old days, when you were young together, and the spark flickers anew, if only for a minute or two. Then, one day, you hear through a mutual friend that Kyrgyzstan has fallen off the democratic wagon and checked into rehab again. You breathe a sigh of relief. Dodged a bullet, there. Maybe, you begin to think, you don't have it so bad after all. You watch China slaving away in the kitchen. My God, you think, the size of that rump! No, China might not be much to look at anymore - the old grey mare, as they say, just ain't what she used to be. She's stubborn, impolite, surprisingly filthy. She's sensitive to a fault and moody as hell. She's jealous of all your past loves: Germany, Poland, Mexico, and especially South Korea, that soju-drinking hussy. She's a sucker for gossip, she pries into your personal affairs, and she can't carry a tune. All and all, she's a totalitarian woman. But can she ever cook ...