I rolled my pantlegs back down on my way up the stairs. One of my students darted past and bid me HAH-LOO. I waved. I felt around in my pocket to see how many cigarettes I had left. Not enough. Never enough. I kicked open the wrought iron security gate with graceless ease. And there on the second floor of the Laowai Projects, I found Jacob, Andrew, and Micah sitting out in the hallway with their laptops, well, atop their laps, as it were.
"Dude. Dudes," I said, "y'all should come check it out. The campus is flooding."
No reply.
"I mean, the water is climbing the stairway to campus. It was almost to the top, last I checked."
Jacob laughed into his monitor and slapped his thigh. Micah grumbled to himself. Moose belched, then lifted up his laptop to scratch his junk.
"Guys, I don't know how to tell you this," I said, biting my lower lip, "but I'm thinking about getting a sex change."
Nothing. I shrugged and lit a cigarette. I walked down to the end of the hall and blew my exhaust out the window. Then I snubbed the cigarette on the windowsill and flicked it over the edge. And then I walked back down the hall and stood there watching the three of them watch whatever they were watching.
"What the hell is this?" I asked. "A fucking teleconference?"
"Naw, man," said Jacob. "The hallway's the only place we can get internet."
"Oh. That's cool. Hey. Look. I gotta take a piss. But in the meantime, the campus is flooding, dude." I tipped my hat. "Dudes."
I stepped over the three of them one leg at a time, found my door, and pressed my keycard against the lock. Nothing happened.
"Fuck," I said. "My keycard's broken."
"Naw, man," said Jacob. "They all broken. You gotta get the Missus to let you in."
"The Missus?"
"Yeah. She's in there."
He gestured towards a half-open door at the end of the hall.
"Yo, Keith. Before you go in," said Moose, "would or wouldn't?"
"Would or wouldn't what?"
He nodded towards the Missus' door and raised his eyebrows.
"Oh. That," I sighed. "Well, how the hell would I know? I haven't even seen the Missus yet."
I found the Missus cross-stitching in her office. Or her apartment. Or whatever it was. I cleared my throat. She looked up. I looked down. Then I looked back up. And I blushed a bit. True. The Missus was not exactly an eyestrain.
"Qingwen," I said. Excuse me, I said.
But she already knew what I wanted. She swept a jangle of keys off the table and followed me to my room.
"Xie xie," I said as the door scrolled open. Thank you. And I bowed, however slightly.
"Bu yong xie," she said. You're welcome.
I smiled. The Missus didn't smile back. But she did give me a look. Or was it a look? Yes, I decided, it was a definite look. A sultry look. Or was it really all that sultry of a look? Yes, I decided, it was definitely a sultry kind of look. Or was it? Then the Missus turned away without a word and jangled off down the hallway while I stood there wondering.
My room was bare and dark and unusually clean. For lack of a filth to wallow in, I returned to the teleconference in the hallway.
"You guys work for Google or something?"
"You never answered me," said Moose. "Would or wouldn't?"
"That's a complicated question," I said, gazing towards the Missus' room.
"What's so complicated about it?"
"The question."
Moose was watching Youtube footage of a turtle humping a rock. Jacob was watching the Thrilla in Manilla. Team Leader Micah was lesson planning for tomorrow.
Moose giggled girlishly.
Micah groaned.
Jacob cackled and stomped his feet.
"Damn! Goddamn! Get it, Clay! Get it!" he shouted at the screen. "Goddamn, Muhammad!"
A bell rang. End of Round Six.
"Hey yo, Keith - beer run!"
"What? Dude, I went on three beer runs last night."
"You were late. Dude."
"I know I was late," I said, "but it wasn't even my fault this time."
"This time is right."
I half-sighed, half-grumbled.
"Man, no more beer runs for me. I'm done," I said. "I think I pulled a bicep last night. I'm not lugging another 16-pack of shitty Snow all the way across town for you inglourious basterds."
"I think I pulled a bicep last night," whined Jacob, throwing his voice up a few octaves.
"Fuck off. And anyway, I'm broke."
"Bitch, I'm broke," rapped Moose.
Then he balled his fist and beatboxed, poorly.
He was referencing an obscure Cody ChesnuTT track by the name of "Bitch, I'm Broke" - an absurd, obscene, charmingly lo-fi, delightfully lowbrow hip-hop jam that that only Moose and I and maybe four other people in the entire world knew about at the time, a jam that the other seven volunteers would come to know and hate altogether too well before the end of the two-week Dazhou Experiment.
"Hey, where's Katie?" asked Moose, after a beat. "She'd probably go get us some pijius."
"I haven't seen her since lunch," said Micah. "At the cafeteria. I mean, the canteen."
"Yeah, where she at?" asked Jacob. "That girl owes me Oreos."
"Oreos?"
"Yeah. Told her to go to Wal-Mart and get me some Oreos."
Then the power went out.
"Fuck!" said Moose.
"Shit!" said Jacob.
Micah shrugged and resumed typing.
The hallway was dark. Moose's turtles were frozen in mid-hump. Muhammad Ali was suspended in mid-punch like a pinned-down butterfly.
"Told you," I said. "The campus is flooding. It's the end of days. The Rapture, and what have you. Moose - beer run!"
Moose paid and I carried. In the meantime, Micah, as Team Leader, ran down to the store and bought nine flashlights and a shit ton of candles. We set up shop in Moose's room. Twenty-four hours into the Dazhou Experiment and the dude's clothes were already strewn all over the floor. But the candles lent the place a kind of churchy ambiance. A Catholic grotto mystique. Everything reeked of feet and booze. But it was an awfully romantic venue nonetheless. With the candles and what not.
While the rest of us shot the bullshit, Moose lay there in bed in front of his laptop. Gunshots rang out and police sirens wailed from across the room.
"Yo, Keith. You ever played this?" Moose asked.
"What is it?" I asked, peering over his shoulder. "Grand Theft Auto?"
"Naw, man."
"Jesus," I said. "Is that who I think it is? The guy in the car?"
"Yeah. Probably."
"No. Wait. Wait," I stammered. "Wait. You're telling me that's _____?"
"Yeah."
"And you're shooting him."
"I guess so. If you want to put it that way."
"There's no way to put it," I said.
"That's just how it is," followed Jacob.
And Jacob and I fist-pounded, having tag-team quoted the one movie we can both agree on. But nobody noticed. They just thought we were weird.
"Where the hell did you get this?" I asked.
"The internet," said Moose. "You can find it online. But that's the only place you can get it. The company went out of business a while ago. For some reason the game didn't - fuck!"
"What?"
"I just shot ______ in the crotch, but I didn't finish him. Goddammit. That goldbricking sonofabitch."
"Jesus," said Jacob.
"Christ," I said.
The door creaked open and Kevin, my handler, peeked his normal-sized head into the room.
"Keith," he said, all wispy-like. "Keith."
"What's up?"
"What are you doing right now?"
"I can't tell you what I'm doing right now," I said. "I am currently an accomplice to a historical tragedy that I want no part in."
"Let me see," he said, and wrapped his arm around my shoulder.
"Booyah!"
"Jesus Christ, Moose," said Jacob. "You are a depraved human being, you know that?"
"Who is he? The man with the head blood?" asked Kevin. "Is he Jesus Christ?"
"Far from it," I said. "That's _____. Moose just assassinated him."
"Ass-ass ate him?"
"More or less."
"Who is _____?" asked Kevin.
"He was a great man," said Jacob, "until Moose ass-ass ate him."
"Plus four bodyguards," said Moose, "plus the driver. 750 points total. Like I said: booyah."
"You are shooting him? For pleasure?" asked Kevin.
"Don't look at me," I said. "Moose is the lone gunman here. It's his game. I'm just watching it."
Round after round, replay after replay, Kevin stared at the screen until I could see the ocular fluid glazing his eyes like a pair of glutinous rice balls. Then he embraced me, stood up and left.
The rest of the volunteers trickled in eventually. They came bringing frankincense and beer. And it was good. We bullshat by candlelight. The night progressed. Then it digressed. Then it regressed, as nights are so wont to do.
"What the hell is wrong with you? It's a Terrible. Fucking. Movie!"
"But you just admitted that it was a great performance," I countered.
"I never said that."
"You just did! Thirty seconds ago!"
"Actually, I don't usually agree with Keith," said Moose, "but Jacob, you did say that it was a great performance. In a terrible fucking movie."
"Okay, so what? Maybe it was a great performance. From a fucking psychopath. Who actually believed that he was an oil tycoon from the 1900's. A great performance, maybe. But that doesn't un-make it a terrible fucking movie."
"Look, man," I said, "I watched it again the other day and - "
"You been watchin' it six times a day ever since I gave you the DVD! Which you never returned, by the way."
"That's not true. I only watched it six times a day when you first gave it to me. I've been cutting back - "
"And when you gonna give it back?"
"Why do you even want it back? I thought it was a terrible fucking movie."
"It is a terrible fucking movie! My God, it's the worst movie ever made. But it's still my property. I bought it. For twenty dollars. In America. The light of the world."
"I'll give it back. I promise. Once I'm done with it."
"Yeah. Done jerking off to it six times a day."
An "ooh" from the crowd. I rolled my eyes.
"Anyway," I said, "I watched it a couple nights ago. For the first time since January, I'll have you know. And I realized something. For a long time, I thought about the film in terms of Capitalism vs. Christianity. But then, the last time I watched it, I realized that I was looking at everything the wrong way. The film is actually about - "
"Yo, where's Katie?" asked Moose.
"Last I heard, she was going to Wal-Mart," said Jeesun.
"Yeah. Girl owes me Oreos," muttered Jacob.
"Oreos?"
"Yeah. Oreos. What? You don't know what Oreos are? Girl, you call yourself an American? Fuckin' Oreos. Damn."
A tense silence. Then Jacob started giggling.
"Right," said Team Leader Micah. "I'm gonna see if I can get a hold of Katie."
He called. No answer.
He called again. Still no answer.
"Weird," he said, and put his Team Leader cellphone back in his Team Leader pocket.
A few minutes later, the IT Guy sent me, of all people, a message telling us that we were, under no circumstances, to leave the dorm that night.
"Water is everywhere," he wrote.
"And not a drop to drink," I said to myself.
"What? Who the hell are you talking to, man?" asked Jacob.
"Nobody. Hey. The handlers say we're not supposed to leave the dorm tonight."
"Cool. We still got time for one more beer run though, right?"
I said nothing.
"Hey yo! Moose!"
Moose bought and I carried. It was like the Day of the Dead outside. A morbidly festive occasion. The weirdly dark streets were crammed with people holding candles. One end of the main drag was cordoned off and sandbagged, and a crowd had gathered there. The Chinese riffraff wandered about, carrying candles in their palms, gawping at the raging river, chattering about the flood, smoking, hawking loogeys. Street vendors were hawking candles for five kuai a pop. Candles. Get yer candles. A good day for the candle men. I lit a cigarette and instinctively offered one to Moose. He took it.
"... the hell? You smoke?"
"Yeah," said Moose. He produced his own lighter. "Fuck it, man. It's China."
The flickering candlelight lit our way to the Gettin' Place.
"It is apocalypse season," I said to Moose. "Maybe we should stock up on bottled water and ramen noodles. And firearms, while we're at it."
"I know, right?"
We bought beer.
In the dark, I stumbled over an embankment and the bottles clattered in their case. Then I stumbled over an abutment and regained my footing.
"Panda, if you drop my fucking beer, you're not even gonna live to see the apocalypse."
When we got back to Moose's room, the freeloaders snatched up our beers, but we managed to sneak a couple for ourselves. I sat down next to Jacob. And the night progressed. And digressed. And regressed.
"What is wrong with you? You're saying that hearing and sight are the same fucking thing? You're saying that ears and eyes are the same fucking organs?"
"They're not," I said. "I'm just saying that the way a bat perceives reality, well, I don't know. Because I'm not a bat. I'm just saying that bats probably see sounds and hear sights, so to speak. I don't think the organs involved really matter. Sound and vision come from the same waves at different wavelengths, so whether it's eyes or ears, it doesn't really matter. It's not about the senses, or the wavelengths. It's about perception - "
"But sound waves and light waves are different," said Moose.
"Are they?" I asked.
"They are."
"Two completely fucking different things," agreed Jacob.
"I didn't know that. I'll have to look it up. I don't know shit about science. I'm kind of a hack," I said.
"Yes," said Jacob. "You are."
"Mind if I smoke up in here?" I asked Moose.
"As long as you don't ash on my floor."
"I won't. I promise." I lit up. I coughed. Ash flew everywhere. Moose glowered. "My bad. But look. Anyway. What I'm saying is this: when a bat processes sounds, it can't possibly be hearing them the way we hear sounds. Bats fly around in dark caves for a living. And they fly really fucking fast. They find shit to eat in the dark. They find mates in the dark. They get it on with she-bats. In the dark. So they can't be hearing in the same way we do. Bats must have evolved the ability to form mental pictures very similar to the ones we see when we see things, only they use sound waves to form those pictures. Otherwise they couldn't - "
"Pictures? Pictures? But pictures are sight, man! You can't hear pictures! You're contradicting yourself! What is wrong with you?"
"I mean mental pictures, dude. Images. Like when you listen to a baseball game on the radio. Or when you're reading a book. You can't see the players, you can't see the story, but you form a - "
"Hey yo," said Moose, "where's Katie?"
"Lemme call her again," said Micah, who had been watching our conversation the same way you watch your dog lift its leg on a lamppost when you're taking it out for a late night walk.
The bat debate raged. The night regressed. Nobody had an opener, so Moose uncapped everyone's bottles with the butt-end of a lighter, a skill I admire but have yet to master. And then Micah started jumping up and down and shooshing us. He had found Katie. In the sudden silence, the digitized sound of a weeping female was audible.
"You're where? ... Where? Okay. So you're okay. You're at a hotel. ... A nice hotel. ... With room service. Sweet. ... Are you okay? ... Good. Good. That's good. ... You what? ... You what? ... You wanted to swim across? The river. Jesus. You would've died, Katie. I mean, I've seen the river. You wouldn't have made it. ... No. No, you wouldn't have. ... I know you're a good swimmer. ... Look, class is important. But it's not that important. ... No, it's okay. No need to apologize. ... Okay. As long as you're okay. We'll see you tomorrow, alright? ... Okay. Okay. Hang in there. And don't worry about the - "
"Ooh," said Jacob, and he was so excited that he actually raised his hand. "What about the Oreos?"
Despite ourselves, we laughed. And laughed hard.
"Oh. ... Nothing. Jacob's just being ... Jacob. Yeah. Sleep tight."
Micah hung up. We giggled.
"You assholes," said Micah.
And we giggled some more.
We went to sleep at 27 AM and woke up the next morning at seven. Baggy-eyed and foul-breathed, I donned my glasses, brushed my teeth, and sucked down a pitcher of Moose's coffee. Katie had returned. The school had trucked her in from the other side of the river. She had teachers to teach, after all. The show must go on, after all.
I went outside to patrol the riverside promenade. There were no crowds. The sidewalk was a bit damp, but the campus had not flooded as prophesied. Students were flocking to class. I had to teach in ten minutes. Business as usual. The show would go on. The Rapture had not come, not just yet. The waters had risen, had left their filthy mark on the sodden grass of the floodplain, and then they had receded, overnight. The waters had returned to the river, where they belonged. I lit a cigarette. Beneath me I saw an innocent brown stream murmuring slowly past, a stream that rippled and waved but had not even the slightest intentions of overflowing its banks. A well-behaved, obedient river. Yes, sir. No, ma'am. Domesticated. Tranquilized. Etherized. Nature. Good nature. Good, good nature.
I taught my classes. I did my job. Then I skipped lunch and went back to my room for a three-hour nap. After that, I caught a cab downtown and took a walk along the other side of the river.
"See those restaurants?" an old fart peasant said to me. He pointed with his pipe to a row of hot pot joints nestled against the neck of the levee. "All of them were flooded last night. You can see it. Nothing left inside. All gone."
"And the bridge?" I asked.
"The bridge flooded, too. Couldn't cross it. The cabbies would tell you, 'No way.' Then they'd take you to an expensive hotel on the other side of the river. That's just what I heard. And that was last night, of course. Not a problem anymore."
It was hard to believe. The bridge arched a good fifty feet above the river as it stood then. But the bridge had flooded. Everywhere I walked that evening had been filled in with water only eighteen hours before. And now, life was going on as it usually does in China. Street vendors and cabbies. Mahjongg and Fight the Landlord. Shish-kebab stands and bang bang men. And assholes like me were coming in droves to walk along the river, to imagine the disaster that might have been. It was hard to believe. But the evidence was there. And quite a bit of water remained. I had to leapfrog my way to the riverfront along a trail of cinder blocks set down in the murky bog that the flood had left behind in its wake. The restaurant signs had been erased, and extra large Chinese hieroglyphics went coasting down the street in a shallow stream of dull brown sewage.
I parted the crowds on my way up to the bridge. Laowai, they said. Laowai. Foreigner. Foreigner. I stopped and leaned against the balcony overlooking the river, and I smoked. The pillars holding up the bridge were marked with Chinese characters, and I recognized the characters as "low," "medium," and "high." I could see the greasy smear left behind by the flood, and it was way higher than high. But there the dirty river lay, mumbling, muttering - it looked hungover. Now, it was way lower than low.
I crossed the bridge. I wandered until I was suitably lost. Then I stopped by an internet cafe. I checked my email and read from my parents that Tibbets, my twenty year-old tabby cat, was going to be put to sleep in a couple of days. I allowed myself to laugh. Twenty years of Mr. Tibbs. The lazy orange bastard. About time, I said. Lived a full life, I told myself. A lazy life. A good life. America's Favorite Fat Cat, I chuckled. Then I caught a cab back to campus. The party broke up at 27 AM and I got up at seven the following morning.
I walked to school. I smoked a quick one in the bathroom. In the hallway, Kevin, my handler, came out of nowhere and gripped me by the arm.
"Keith," he said. "Keith."
"Yeah?"
"Keith. I have something to talk about to you."
"Oh. Jesus. Is it the video game? Ah, Christ. I mean, look. It's not my game. I didn't download it. Hell, I have nothing to do with it. It's Moose's game. And let me tell you: Moose is kind of a douchebag. A goddamned lovable douchebag for sure, but - aw, Jesus. I'm sorry. Do you know what a douchebag is? No? Well, literally speaking, it is a hygienic implement that women use to - "
"Brother. It is not about dooshy bags," said Kevin. "It is about this: I feel I don't want to live anymore."
"What? Wait. Wait. What?"
"I feel I can't go around living any longer."
I chuckled a bit and clapped Kevin on the back.
"Aw, hell," I said. "Buddy, I feel like that every day. And yet, here I am!"
"No," said Kevin. "It is more reality than that. I am dying. Every day I am dying."
"Well, then. Ahem. Well. I am very sorry to hear that. Are you sick?"
"Yes. Very sick."
I looked Kevin over and noticed - how had I missed it? - that his head had almost doubled in size since the last time I'd seen him. Its newly acquired breadth was concentrated primarily in the lymph nodes. The man was quite literally gaining face.
"Now that you mention it," I said, "your head is looking pretty big these days."
"That is something else," he said. He took my hand and held it to his jaw. "Feel it? I have a cold. My head is swell."
"Swollen," I said.
"Swallow?"
"Swollen."
Kevin took out his language notebook, jotted something down, and closed it. The bell rang.
"Well, I hope you get better," I said. "It's just a cold, right? It's not serious or anything?"
"Yes. It is just a cold."
"Good. That's good. I mean. I got some aspirin. Or actually, it's Un-Aspirin. I'm not sure what the difference is. The Peace Corps gave it to me. But it seems to work. Cures hangovers, at least. Check it. I got some right here in my pocket. You need some water to chase it down with? I can run to the store and - "
"No. Aspirin will not work. Water will not work. I feel like death. I want to die. Because of her."
He sighed until his body had all but deflated. It was then that I understood. I clapped my hands together.
"Oh! So it's lady troubles, is it?"
"Yes. I guess so," said Kevin.
"So you're not actually dying," I probed.
"Yes. I am. But not with disease."
"Good. Good. That's great news, Kevin. I am not a doctor. But women. Women I can deal with. What exactly went down, Kev?"
"I broke down with her."
"Broke up," I said.
"What?"
"Broke up with her. We say break up, not broke down."
Kevin scribbled some more in his language notebook.
"Why did you break up with her?" I asked.
"We are always breaking down. And I wanted to stop breaking down with her."
"How long have you been dating?"
"Two years."
"And how often do you break up?"
"The number of instances is uncountable."
I nodded.
"I'm familiar with that one," I said. "That's bad news bears, right there, brother. Did she want to break up this time? Or was it your decision?"
"It was my idea. But now I am fear that I will regret it. For the rest of my life."
"Yeah. Regret is a bitch. But look," I said, "you have to stick to your guns. Stick to your guns - write that down. It means, you have to make a decision and - "
"Make a decision and don't ever look back."
"Exactly. You got it. And this is a big decision, my friend. And you've already made it. So you gotta run with that shit. Or else you'll drive yourself crazy."
"Thanks, man," he said, and there was a kind of glint in his eyes. "Now I feel - I feel that I can live."
"Right on. You gotta talk about these things. Or you'll drive yourself crazy. Plenty of ways of driving yourself crazy, and very few of them are very much fun at all."
"Yeah, man. Thank you. Can you hold me?"
"Er. Yeah. I mean. Sure. That's what brothers do, right? Hug it out."
I gave Kevin a hug and he cradled his baggy jaw on my shoulder. Then he pulled away.
"Now you had better go teach your class. You are already late," he said. "And we had better talk about this after class."
"Right on. Sounds good, man. Don't die. The prospect is tempting from time to time. But it's good to stay alive. See you in the cafeteria! I mean. The canteen!"
"No, man. I am coming with you."
"Oh, you're gonna - oh. I see. You're watching my class today?"
"Yes. I will watch your class every day. Now on."
I held the door for Kevin. He took a seat in the far back of the room and immediately put his head down and went to sleep. I'm not sure, I said to myself, if that counts as watching my class, Kev. But have it your way. I bid my students a good morning. We talked about the flood, but not for very long. They didn't seem interested in it. Then I popped open my lesson plan and remembered that the title of my class that morning was "Love Connection."
Vocabulary: break up (v.), split up (v.), heartbroken (adj.), get over (v.) ...
I peered across the room at Kevin, who was actually snoring by then. I shut my folder and stuck it back in my backpack. Then I took out the American Accent Training textbook and held it up in the air.
"Alright, kids. I mean. Adults. Open your books to page ... er ... ah ... um ... ah, yes. That's the one. Open your books to page 69."
And I allowed myself to giggle.
Showing posts with label there will be blood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label there will be blood. Show all posts
Friday, September 10, 2010
Wednesday, September 01, 2010
There Will Be Flood
When the rains come softly in Sichuan, you can hear the big fat individual drops dropping like nails on the rusty aluminum overhangs of the buildings. When the rain comes down hard, you can hear nothing but the rain. It whooshes. It washes. The rain whispers loud enough, even, to drown out China. The sound of the rain envelops you like a cloud, and only the most violent of loogeys, hawked by the most pneumatic of old men, is loud enough to cut through the sonic fog.
The rain was coming down hard the night I arrived in Dazhou. And not surprisingly, I was without an umbrella. I roved the campus like a forgotten dog. It rained until my Pumas turned to sponges, and I sensed that it wasn't the kind of rain that would stop. The rain had already flooded the sewers, and would soon flood the river. And while an unseasonably boisterous tributary of the Yangtze was creeping ever closer to campus, a foul-smelling flood of considerably higher proof had already inundated the second floor of L'hôtel des Laowaix, in the French Quarter of Dazhou County, Sichuan Province, People's Republic of China. The moment I checked in, I knew I was in for a long and liver-curdling couple of weeks.
It was round about ten PM and my fellow Peace Corpses, from the sounds and smells of things, were well into post-banquet mode. I set my hobo bindle down beside my bed and followed the eye-watering fumes to a door at the end of the hall labeled "Andrew Moose." I made my belated entrance and bowed, gracefully and apologetically, there in the doorway.
"Panda!" shouted Moose. "Beer run!"
I suppose I deserved it. I was eight hours late, after all. But that, for once, was not my fault. Nanchong had flooded, the power had gone out, my alarm clock had shut off, the bank was closed, the barber shop wouldn't shave me, et cetera. Perhaps, I grumbled internally, these laowais should be buying me beer. Then I thought of Kevin, my Chinese handler, and what he would say given the circumstances. "What a pity you are so late. What a pity. You had better go on a beer run." No. In the land of passive-aggression, I'll take good old aggressive-aggressive American douchebagism any day of the week. So I duly bowed there in the doorway of Andrew Moose's room, and then I duly ran down to the convenience store, and then I duly opened my lint-clogged wallet and duly bought my fellow running dogs of capitalism the next round, and the next round after that. And the one after that. Because I'm nice.
So it began. And so it went. For two whole weeks, night after night, beer upon beer upon regrettable baijiu. Under the fleeting spell of formaldehyde and conversation, time seemed to stand still from time to time. But in spite of our sodden efforts - and perhaps, indeed, because of them - the second and minute and hour hands of the present inevitably groped their way into the unimaginably hungover future. Midnight begat 2 AM, and 2 AM spawned the bastard child of 4 AM, and 4 AM did unspeakable things to 5 AM, and that unholy hour presented the lot of us like a pile of stray kittens to the loathsome dawn. Still, the urge to remain awake, and to keep bullshitting, and arguing, and insulting these wonderful Western minds - in English! - persisted. Hence it would prove a long and liver-curdling couple weeks.
We weren't juvenile (twentysomething) delinquents the whole time. Far from it. During the daytime hours, we were model volunteers. We gave all, and we did some damned good work, I think. But given the circumstances, and given the living arrangements, and given the personalities involved - given all that, some amount of delinquency was inevitable. And I firmly believe that our late night delinquency was for a greater good. Perhaps I am the only one of our group of nine who will admit it, but we damn well missed each other by the time the Dazhou Experiment finally rolled around. For months, for an entire lunar year we had been working our hairy foreign hides off. And during that time, we had (at least publicly) restricted ourselves to Chinese goodthink. Can you use chopsticks? Yes. Do you like China? ... Yes. Do you have a Chinese girlfriend? ... No, not to my knowledge, no. Et cetera.
Cue the Dazhou Project. Suddenly, here were nine Type A American personalities who wanted to talk, and really talk; who wanted to drink, and really drink; who disagreed with me about everything, and really disagreed; who called me out on my bullshit; who caught my Simpsons references ... and there we were, arranged coed-wise on the second floor of a Chinese dormitory, sans-RA. So, understand that we weren't striving for delinquency - not exactly - but that the whole situation was trouble to begin with. I knew in advance that I wouldn't see most of these people ever again, and neither would they ever see me again, so we all felt the need to sneak our jabs in while we could.
Each and every night of the two-week Dazhou Experiment would prove a long night for me. Most of the other volunteers, save for a couple, were more responsible than I. Micah and Allison were generally the first to leave, but they are de facto married, so I don't fault them in the least for retiring early to their own private boudoir in order to perform their nightly duty to The Party. Jeesun would take off shortly thereafter; she has a boyfriend back in Philly to attend to, albeit virtually. Katie, as Moose's attorney and caretaker, would linger a bit, but only just long enough to make sure that Moose didn't asphyxiate on his own bullshit. Emily has managed to woo a Chinese boyfriend, and now that I know all about him and the work he does, I will refrain from saying anything else about their torrid Sino-Navajo affair - at any rate, she would receive a long-distance phone call from Chengdu around 1 AM and leave shortly after Katie. Emma, a Brit-Lit major, always hung around much longer than she ought to have, for as heated and perverse and decidedly un-Victorian as the conversation inevitably became. But even she gave up after a while. By 3 AM, the room had pretty much cleared out, leaving the unholy trinity of Moose, Jacob, and Panda to sort the universe out - until four, until five, until six AM. If there existed a 27 AM, I am sure that we would have discovered it, planted our flag in it, and stayed up 'til then.
But we had to get up at eight every morning. So there were chronological limits to our delinquency. And we pushed them. There were several nights where sleep seemed more joke than biological necessity. To sleep for one hour? Or to continue hashing out the parameters of the known and unknown universe? Both possibilities were absurd, but the latter possibility was much more fulfilling, so sleep always lost. Our conversations ranged from the banal - Super Mario 3, "Macho Man" Randy Savage, Howard Cosell - to the otherworldly, and we made our conversational leaps unpretentiously and - or so it seemed to me at the time - seamlessly. But not always peacefully. There were tense moments where a three-man battle royale seemed on the verge of breaking out. But cooler heads always prevailed. And at the end of the night, fistpounds were exchanged. And on more than a few occasions, awkward three-way manbraces were shared. I learned much from those firewater-side chats, and in retrospect, I certainly wouldn't trade them for eighty hours of sleep that, as it turns out, I wouldn't need anyway.
And I'd love to transcribe some of those firewater-side chats for you. But anyone who has heard one's own voice on a tape recorder, or who has seen oneself on television, or who has watched someone else's impersonation of oneself is familiar with the extreme discomfort involved in retelling an inside joke, or reenacting a conversation, or replicating a personality. The microwaved, leftover result is unpalatable, to say the least. So, try as I might (and try I won't), I cannot and will not regurgitate any of the conversations that took place over the course of those two long, liver-curdling weeks. At this point, I'm not sure I can even remember them, though they changed me in such a way that long-term memory is insufficient and unnecessary. I suppose I will resign myself to saying that those two weeks were pseudointellectually significant for me, and then I will resign myself to finally getting on with my Great Flood of Dazhou saga, which may or may not be pseudointellectually significant for you.
That first night, I went to sleep at 27 AM. And then I woke up at 8 AM and taught teachers how to teach. As an icebreaker, I had my students (teachers) interview each other. They chatted in English. Pleased as hell, I walked around the room and constructively eavesdropped. Then I asked for a few volunteers to introduce their partners to the class. After a surreal two-minute standoff where nobody was quite able to muster the cojones to speak, I called on a fortysomething gentleman in the front row.
"Would you mind telling me about your English partner, Mr., er, ah, Zhang?"
"Sorry, teacher. But I cannot speak," said Mr. Zhang.
"Don't be shy! We're all friends here," I rejoined.
A round of applause from the studio audience. I felt, briefly, like Tony Robbins.
"No. Really I cannot speak," said Mr. Zhang. He slid his cellphone out from his pants pocket. "My father's hometown is flood and I must telephone my father. To see if he is still living."
"Jesus," I said. "Christ. No. Go. Call your father."
Mr. Zhang bowed slightly and ducked out of the room.
"Ladies and gentlemen," I announced, "if any of you are concerned about the existence of your relatives, please do not ask to leave my classroom. Just go."
My students took notes.
Somewhere along my errant way to Dazhou, I had drawn the short end of the chopstick, so I not only had to teach four hours that first day, but I also had to give a two-hour lecture on American Culture at 2 PM sharp. I raided Moose's stores of Nescafe and spent the early afternoon pacing the narrow, moldy perimeters of my hotel room, practicing my delivery, perfecting my timing, stiffarming my hangover. Then, well before I was ready, it came time to perform. What follows, I am sure, will seem like hyperbole. Because what follows will seem mostly unbelievable. And I realize that I have a habit of exaggerating or rearranging events in such a way that they make pseudoliterary sense. But what follows is what happened, more or less, as far as I can remember - and Moose as my witness, to the best of my ability, I have refrained from distorting these next five or ten paragraphs. Though I haven't written them yet, I know they will be very hard to write. It is easy, in my experience, to make the mundane interesting. It is infinitely more difficult to render reality believable.
It was a hot day and it had finally stopped raining. I swaggered into the lecture hall at 1:30 PM, unfashionably dressed but fashionably early. Kevin, my handler, embraced me against my will and asked if I wanted some water. Sure, I said. Give me two kuai, he said. Grumbling, I forked over twopence of my Peace Corps blood money, then I dished my USB stick to the IT Guy and stepped up to the podium. I checked out the audience. Hundreds of Chinese English teachers sat before me, fanning themselves, hawking loogies, toggling through the ringtones of their thousand-dollar Nokias. Check one two, I mumbled into the microphone. Check one two.
My American Culture 101 Powerpoint opens with the oldest trick in the Powerpoint book. A picture of Samuel L. Jackson. A picture of Daniel Day-Lewis. A picture of Khalil Gibran. A picture of Francis Fukuyama. Which of these individuals, I ask, is American? I cringe. I shudder. I drink more Nescafe. The Rest of the World would laugh me out of the lecture hall. But I have given this lecture all over Sichuan Province, and always the response has been the same.
Samuel L. is, at first, not American. An overwhelming NO from the audience. Then a murmuring ensues. Followed by a ruckus. The NBA is cited. LeBron and Kobe are cited. China loves basketball, and American basketball players are almost always black, so maybe, the audience figures, just maybe Americans can be black. After much heated debate, black people are agreed upon as perhaps, possibly, maybe Americans. Samuel L. Jackson is possibly, maybe, perhaps American.
Daniel Day-Lewis is unquestionably American at first, but my audience is clever and they sense a trick. So they shout a muddled yes/no that sounds something like "sysonooayshuysuesnoysy." Which I interpret as: maybe yes, maybe no. Daniel Day-Lewis is maybe American, maybe not American.
Then comes Khalil Gibran. Bearded, olive-skinned, Middle Eastern. The oldest Powerpoint trick in the Powerpoint book has been suddenly and completely forgotten. This man is not American. He is a Muslim. He is Osama Bin-Laden. He is a terrorist. NO, shouts the audience, NO NO NO. An overwhelming NO.
And then, Francis Fukuyama, who has been proclaiming (albeit absurdly) the end of history for several decades in unaccented English, he cannot be American, either. Because he is Chinese. He is one of us. NO, shouts the crowd, NO NO NO. An overwhelming NO.
I take a long swig of Nescafe. Next slide, I murmur. And cue the punchline: all of these people, but one, are Americans. Samuel L. Jackson is an American, Khalil Gibran is an American, and Francis Fukuyama is an American. But Daniel Day-Lewis, if he were in character, would pummel you with bowling balls for calling him American. He happens to be Irish, and he happens to have starred in one of my favorite films of all time, There Will Be Blood, a film that Jacob, my fellow volunteer, happens to hate with a fiery passion that will never die, and so on.
So it goes with my college kids: Americans are white and blue-eyed and yellow-haired and they are rich and they don't love their families and they can only eat beef and bread. And so it went, at first, with my teachers in Dazhou, who had been studying English for a quarter-century, who had (for a not insignificant amount of time) been steeped in some warped interpretation of American Culture. Disappointing, of course. Frustrating, certainly. But such is my work. By now, I am no longer fazed or unfazed by it. Neither jaded nor gilded. By now, I am merely determined.
I ruthlessly guzzled from my Thermos of Nescafe, and then I gave my students (my teachers) some hard statistics. True, America is mostly Caucasian, but it probably won't remain so. Cue pie chart. True, America was once rich, but it doesn't currently appear to be so. Cue line graph. True, America was born a Christian nation, though it certainly is not so today. Cue anecdote.
"My students often ask me if I am a Christian," I said. "'Teacher, you believe in Jesus, yes?' And I tell my students that, no, I do not believe in the Christian idea of god -"
I was so startled by what happened next that I did not appreciate the timing. Only much later did my fellow volunteers inform me (laughing their asses off) that my last words before the blackout were, "I do not believe in the Christian idea of god." So I hope their testimony contributes to whatever credibility I have as a narrator. It really happened this way, and I suppose that I am burdened with the responsibility of proving it.
I do not believe in the Christian idea of god, I said, period. And then, suddenly, all was dark, or slightly dimmed. My microphone was dead. The projector screen had gone black. My Chinese handlers sprung into action, were scrambling all over the place, fumbling with cords, unplugging and replugging electrical wires. Only after a full minute of total chaos did I begin to entertain the idea that the impending flood might have had something to do with anything. My audience, meanwhile, was caught up in an old-timey courtroom uproar. What's the big idea?, etc. I stood there at the podium, looking around for a gavel to bang.
My handlers in the front row gestured for me to keep going, to keep lecturing. But speaking over an audience of 300 Chinese adults, even with the aid of a PA system, is an exercise in ... well, it's really too much exercise to be worth anyone's while. My vocal cords were no match for the loogey-hawking masses. I knew that much from experience. So I tightroped the ledge of the stage and cleared my throat several times, then I paced back and forth and hawked a false loogey - perhaps this might summon their attention - and then, finally, I stood stock still behind the podium, scratched my head like the fop I am, and surveyed the scene. And as my eyes searched the audience for an audience, I spotted Moose a few rows back and saw that he had collapsed into his desk, and that he was laughing so hard that a Rorschach blotch of sweat had formed on the back of his shirt. And that set me off. I started laughing and I could not stop. I faceplanted into the podium and laughed into my elbowpits until there were no more laughs to be laughed. And then I hooted to myself, took a swig of Nescafe, and wandered off to the bathroom to take a much-needed piss. Eventually, I wandered out to the balcony for a much-needed smoke.
My students (teachers) had assembled there to watch the gathering flood. And after I'd lit my ciggie and recovered from the divine relief it afforded, I grew as entranced as my students were with nature's bubbling wrath. The raging brown waters of the pseudo-Yangtze were ten feet beneath us and rising. According to my neurotic calculations, the lecture hall would flood well before the end of my two-hour lecture. Meanwhile, traditional Sichuanese debris rafted past. A hot-pot table coasted by and my students shouted out the English word, "table!" The carved wooden fringes of a Buddhist temple floated past and in unison, my students said, "pagoda." We were learning vocabulary. Improving our Oral English. At one point, a vague, yellowish blob bobbed along downstream and several of my students murmured, "body." For the life of me, I couldn't tell how serious they were.
Katie, who was scheduled to follow up my lecture with something far more educational and informative, came out to the balcony and, unperturbed by the pending rapture, started playing with the roly-polies on the banister. She pinched one of them between her fingers and held it up, legs writhing, for all to see.
"This is a roly-poly," she said to my students, in her delightful sing-song teacher voice. "We have them in America, too!"
"Roly-poly," my students chanted. "Roly-poly!"
Though I love all creatures great and small, I would never lobby Congress on the behalf of insects, which I find terrifying and disgusting and insulting to all humanity. But Katie, bless her South Carolinian heart, right there and then set about crushing one unsuspecting Chinese roly-poly after another in the vain attempt to make them roll in the Western mode. And I could not abide.
"Jesus God. You're killing them!" I shouted.
"But they're roly-polies," she said, squishing one between her fingers. "They're supposed to roll!"
"No. They're Chinese roly-polies," I said. "They're Confucian. Who knows what they will do when provoked?"
And what they did was this: they died. En masse. Feebly, I tried to stop Katie, but she was on a mission. A crusade. She aimed to convert these heathen, anti-roly polies with the sword. To Katie's mind, these lightly armored Chinese insects were roly-polies, whether they knew it or not, and she would teach them how to roll by force, if necessary. It got ugly real fast. She killed at least eight of them before I could stop her. Meanwhile, my students (teachers) were murmuring the words "roly-poly" and "dead." I tried to disrupt Katie's Inquisition by pointing out a daddy long legs that happened to be high-stepping its way up a nearby wall. And I was genuinely excited. I hadn't seen a daddy long legs in years, not since I lived in Missouri, and was amazed to find one in Dazhou, of all places.
"Daddy long legs!" I shouted.
"Daddy long legs," repeated my students.
"House," a few of them murmured, as somebody's living room tumbled past.
"Daddy long legs," I said.
"Car," they agreed.
"Roly-poly," they remembered.
"Dead."
"Bicycle."
"Daddy long legs."
"Dead."
"Tire."
"Roly-poly."
"Tree."
"Dead."
"Table."
Katie reached for the daddy long legs and I smacked her hand.
Then Kevin, my handler, embraced me from behind and dragged me back into the lecture hall.
"Good news. We have a generator," he said. "The power is on. You had better finish your lecture now."
Evidently, my Powerpoint would continue, even as our lives were transitioning ever more ominously towards the final slide.
I reassumed the stage. Check onetwo, I said into the revived microphone, check onetwo. A round of applause. I opted to skip over the blasphemous segment of my lecture and said, hastily, "Not everyone in America is a Christian. Moving right along -" And then there came a deafening pop from the PA system and the lights went out again.
More scrambling. More plugging and replugging. I paced the stage. I took a swig of Nescafe. Then, outside, the flood sirens went off. Which did much in the way of convincing me that I was not merely neurotic, that I hadn't overdosed on Nescafe, that in fact there was a very real natural disaster about to take place. And who was I to lecture on diversity in the face of the all-devouring apocalypse? That, or something like it, was the modest appeal I levied against my handlers, in Chinese and in English, but they were not to be persuaded. The show must go on, after all. My handlers did not seem aware of any conflict of interest, not even of that one interest we are all interested in as humans, as living things, as organisms: that of survival. Out of politeness, I fought the urge to run for the hills. Then I conquered that urge and stood there on stage like Merriam-Webster's definition of an oaf. Though my audience was, by that time, either half-panicked or half-asleep, my handlers insisted that my lecture must proceed, and that my audience must remain. In the moments that followed, my handlers spontaneously generated a generator that regenerated the generator which revived the electrical system of the lecture hall in which I was supposed to complete my lecture while the gathering flood threatened to dampen the whole damned party, and that right soon.
The projector screen fired up again. The microphone screeched, a banshee of feedback. I took a long swig of Nescafe - my last, I wondered? - cleared my throat and proceeded.
"Anyhow. America is a very diverse place. Diverse. Many different kinds of people. And some of them don't believe in - "
The speakers popped, the screen went black. There was a kind of finality about the third blackout that pleased me. I was free, and I knew it. My heart rejoiced for its renewed prospect of beating and thumping and stumbling into the indefinite future. The crowd got up to leave. I stepped down from the stage. My handler negotiated with his handler for a time - perhaps there was a third meta-generator in the broom closet? - then he slowly approached, gripped me by the bicep, and told me that my lecture had been postponed until tomorrow.
"Sweet. Will there be a tomorrow?" I asked, as a matter of journalistic interest.
"Yes. Always," my handler said.
"Cool. Thanks for the water," I said, and took a grateful swig from my bottle of Nongfu Springs, even as the undrinkable, unfishable, unswimmable springs of Dazhou County began to trickle into the lecture hall. I rolled up my pantlegs, and so did everyone else. Then, right on cue, hordes of barechested Chinese peasants entered stage right and started loading the amplifiers, the computers, the podium, et al, started hauling everything out of the auditorium. Much panting, much chanting, many loogeys were hawked. Exit Panda stage left.
I ran into Jacob on the way to the hotel. He was sweaty and short of breath, dressed in Marvel Comics-themed athletic attire.
"Aren't you supposed to be lecturing, man?"
"Canceled," I said, "due to apocalypse. Whatchoo doing?"
"I was just playing basketball. With the children," he added dismissively. "You had lunch yet?"
We went to the cafeteria, or what Chinese students refer to (in their delightfully Orwellian English) as the "canteen." The food wasn't half-bad, but it wasn't half-good, either. Moose joined us after a bit. We laughed a lot, as we are wont to do, and our laughs echoed. Aside from the three of us, the canteen was empty. But before we'd had time to give up on our food, the canteen began to fill up with shirtless peasants. They lingered around for a while and smoked, spat on the floor, shouted at each other. It wasn't clear, at first, why they were there at all. Then they sprung into action. They smoked and spat their way outside, and under the command of some derelict peasant captain, started hauling in tables, desks, chairs, sound equipment, computers, et al. They were at work. They were preparing for the flood. They deposited all the heavy, valuable stuff in the back of the canteen. A questionable move, I thought, given the proximity of the canteen to the very flood waters they were trying to avoid. These gnarled old men were moving tens of tons of equipment up a single flight of stairs, while the river, from the looks of things, appeared quite capable of washing Dazhou right off the map. Rearranging rickshaws on the Titanic, or however the idiom goes.
I couldn't bring myself to finish my undercooked twice-cooked pork and I was in desperate need of a nap, so I bid zai jian to my 27 AM partners in absurdity and left the canteen.
In China, crowds will gather around just about anything worth watching - a fatal car accident, a cellphone promotion, a Tibetan junk vendor, a laowai - and the crowds had turned out in droves for the Great Flood of Dazhou. As a foreigner, I tend to avoid crowds, because if I'm not careful, I will become the center of their attention. But I happened to be passing by. Happened to have nothing better to do. And I happened to be very curious about the horde of people standing outside the canteen, because they weren't talking much, weren't smiling, were unusually sullen for a pack of Chinese rubberneckers. So I wormed my way into the crowd and got up on my tippy-toes to see what, exactly, they were looking at.
There were two attractions, I suppose. First of all, there were the peasants: the lao bai xing, the bang bang men. These men are the beauty of China. They represent all that is good. They carry burdens for a living. And there they were, hauling the Dazhou University Music Department pianos up and out of the flood zone. Impossibly old men carrying pianos. They say an ant can lift 50 times its own weight. The bang bang men worked in crews of eight. Eight scrawny old, wiry old shirtless men, lifting a baby grand out of the muck and up an uneven flight of stairs, then collectively lugging it twenty feet before setting it down with a gentle thump! in the rear of the students' canteen. Fascinating, inspiring, horrible to watch. The coxswain would bark - HEAVE! - and seven oldsters would chant, HEAVE HEAVE HEAVE. HEAVE! HEAVE HEAVE HEAVE. HEAVE! HEAVE HEAVE HEAVE. These men were old enough to be your great-grandpa, if not greater. I stood there and watched. I couldn't believe that these oldsters, scrawny and malnourished as they were, were up to the task, and there were moments where it seemed the piano would slip from their fingers, tumble end over end, and smash with a splash and a Thelonious Monk discord at the flooded foot of the stairs. But the bang bang men persevered and got the job done without fail. They delivered twelve baby grands to the canteen without so much as a scratch, while they, the scarred, bruised, battered lao bai xing, were already well beyond repair.
But the main attraction was the river itself. It flowed and it raged. It thundered. It muscled along like an unimaginably large serpent snaking past in the gathering gloom. It rumbled. It breathed. It held us under its spell. The old men weaved their legs into the balcony and sat, smoking cigarettes and watching the river. Here was nature, our old nemesis, our one-time adversary, now strapped down to the bed, etherized, tranquilized, subdued. Long ago we conquered it, put signs all over it, made it a tourist attraction. Were awfully smug about all that, and justifiably so. But now, the river, on a whim, had reduced us all to ants. Reminded us that yes, we had defeated it, but could nevertheless be washed away, erased, obliterated with a careless shrug of the shoulders. The river. I couldn't take my eyes off it. The power there. I thought nothing, felt nothing. I was not afraid. Understand, I fear petty things, and fear them deeply. I am afraid of insects, Styrofoam, flying in airplanes. I fear chalkboards and advanced mathematics and swimming pools. But I did not fear the river right then, or the annihilation it promised with a mudshot wink as the smog-blurred sun fell down behind its back. I was interested in the river. I studied it. I was, I suppose, learning from it.
One month before I set out on my Dazhou adventure, well before much of western China flooded, I wrote the following:
I wrote those words with a lot of caffeine in my system, and I wrote them about a thoroughly domesticated creek in Chengdu. That creek will never flood. I imagined it could at the time, that it was capable. But I did not mean for those words to be prophetic. I didn't foresee the Great Flood of Dazhou. At the time, I foresaw another cup of coffee, and that is all. But I do find those words rather apropos when I think back on that uncertain evening in Dazhou, watching the waters tumble past in the background, even as they seeped and inched their way into the foreground. Wondering how to react, wondering whether I should panic, whether I should laugh, whether I should feel anything at all. Wondering whether I ought not to call somebody important and cancel the whole Dazhou Experiment straightaway. But no, I have always found that the best course of action is inaction, especially in times of helplessness. Past a certain point, you have to let go and recognize your role as an ant, as a pebble caught in the flood of history, of physics, of nature, and all the rest. We are pebbles, I suppose. No more, no less. And once you let go, the whole existential shitshow is tremendously fun to watch, free will be damned. Let go. Enjoy. Laugh. And try to write about it, if you have time. Over the years, I have come to accept my place as an observer, as a pebble, as a somewhat intelligent ant. There remains much to overcome, much to be fought for, much to rebel against, and humanity needs a great deal of help in that direction. But I am no longer interested in hauling baby grands up uneven staircases. That job, perhaps, belongs to other, more courageous pebbles. That task is beyond me. I like to watch, and to think, and to laugh, and to write about the shitshow as it unravels. Why are we here? What is human destiny? What does it all mean? I have my guesses, but I don't know. Nobody knows. And I don't suppose anyone ever will. But isn't it pretty to wonder about?
Down by the river, while I gawked, a couple of college girls hovered in my hairy midst. They giggled about me, chatted to each other about me, worked up the courage to talk to me. And after a while I preemptively struck: I talked to them. They were from Zigong, but had come to Dazhou to study. They were freshmen.
"Do you live on campus?" I asked in my motley Mandarin.
"Yes," one of the girls said. "We live here."
She indicated the dormitory in front of us.
"We live there."
"That's awfully close to the river," I said. "Aren't you worried about the flood?"
"Yes. Very much so," she said. "If the water gets any higher, we're going to have to move all of our things."
"Where will you move them?" I asked.
"We don't know."
The girl giggled, blushed. Her accomplice was silent, giggled a bit. I was the first foreigner they had ever spoken to or giggled with. The flood seemed like a serious enough dilemma to me, but the girls were more shaken by their first conversation with a laowai than they were by the looming deluge.
The sun went down. It floated for a moment like a mandarin orange on the surface of the river. Then it sank beneath the waters and the light vanished. The world dimmed, the shadows spread, and only the immediate foreground remained visible: the flooded shops, the climbing waters, silhouettes, cigarette ends that blossomed and faded into the darkness. I took out my battered cellphone and sent a quick message to Jacob: "The river is climbing up the steps to campus. Ought to come see it." I waited, but Jacob didn't answer, and he didn't come out to watch. Meanwhile, the river inched and centimetered its way up the stairs. The same stairs the oldsters had climbed an hour before, chanting and spitting, with pianos on their backs. The brown waters made their way up the stairs, stood poised halfway for a moment like an asthmatic old man, and then they climbed further - subtly, almost imperceptibly, like a tedious argument of insidious intent, to borrow a quote.
I bid farewell to the college girls, wished them luck, and walked back to the hotel. I lit a cigarette along the way, smoked it for a bit, but stubbed it out before I could really enjoy it. I waved to the desk clerk and went upstairs. Perhaps, I hoped, Moose would buy me the first round. And perhaps life would proceed as normal in spite of the flood. I would sleep at 27 AM, wake up at 8 AM and teach teachers how to teach. There will be a tonight and there will be a tomorrow. This is the assumption we all must make. It's no leap of faith in my book. It is a necessity. What else do we have? Life will resume as it always has. The show must go on. Eventually, I suppose, it won't. But isn't it pretty to think so? And isn't it unpleasant to think otherwise?
The rain was coming down hard the night I arrived in Dazhou. And not surprisingly, I was without an umbrella. I roved the campus like a forgotten dog. It rained until my Pumas turned to sponges, and I sensed that it wasn't the kind of rain that would stop. The rain had already flooded the sewers, and would soon flood the river. And while an unseasonably boisterous tributary of the Yangtze was creeping ever closer to campus, a foul-smelling flood of considerably higher proof had already inundated the second floor of L'hôtel des Laowaix, in the French Quarter of Dazhou County, Sichuan Province, People's Republic of China. The moment I checked in, I knew I was in for a long and liver-curdling couple of weeks.
It was round about ten PM and my fellow Peace Corpses, from the sounds and smells of things, were well into post-banquet mode. I set my hobo bindle down beside my bed and followed the eye-watering fumes to a door at the end of the hall labeled "Andrew Moose." I made my belated entrance and bowed, gracefully and apologetically, there in the doorway.
"Panda!" shouted Moose. "Beer run!"
I suppose I deserved it. I was eight hours late, after all. But that, for once, was not my fault. Nanchong had flooded, the power had gone out, my alarm clock had shut off, the bank was closed, the barber shop wouldn't shave me, et cetera. Perhaps, I grumbled internally, these laowais should be buying me beer. Then I thought of Kevin, my Chinese handler, and what he would say given the circumstances. "What a pity you are so late. What a pity. You had better go on a beer run." No. In the land of passive-aggression, I'll take good old aggressive-aggressive American douchebagism any day of the week. So I duly bowed there in the doorway of Andrew Moose's room, and then I duly ran down to the convenience store, and then I duly opened my lint-clogged wallet and duly bought my fellow running dogs of capitalism the next round, and the next round after that. And the one after that. Because I'm nice.
So it began. And so it went. For two whole weeks, night after night, beer upon beer upon regrettable baijiu. Under the fleeting spell of formaldehyde and conversation, time seemed to stand still from time to time. But in spite of our sodden efforts - and perhaps, indeed, because of them - the second and minute and hour hands of the present inevitably groped their way into the unimaginably hungover future. Midnight begat 2 AM, and 2 AM spawned the bastard child of 4 AM, and 4 AM did unspeakable things to 5 AM, and that unholy hour presented the lot of us like a pile of stray kittens to the loathsome dawn. Still, the urge to remain awake, and to keep bullshitting, and arguing, and insulting these wonderful Western minds - in English! - persisted. Hence it would prove a long and liver-curdling couple weeks.
We weren't juvenile (twentysomething) delinquents the whole time. Far from it. During the daytime hours, we were model volunteers. We gave all, and we did some damned good work, I think. But given the circumstances, and given the living arrangements, and given the personalities involved - given all that, some amount of delinquency was inevitable. And I firmly believe that our late night delinquency was for a greater good. Perhaps I am the only one of our group of nine who will admit it, but we damn well missed each other by the time the Dazhou Experiment finally rolled around. For months, for an entire lunar year we had been working our hairy foreign hides off. And during that time, we had (at least publicly) restricted ourselves to Chinese goodthink. Can you use chopsticks? Yes. Do you like China? ... Yes. Do you have a Chinese girlfriend? ... No, not to my knowledge, no. Et cetera.
Cue the Dazhou Project. Suddenly, here were nine Type A American personalities who wanted to talk, and really talk; who wanted to drink, and really drink; who disagreed with me about everything, and really disagreed; who called me out on my bullshit; who caught my Simpsons references ... and there we were, arranged coed-wise on the second floor of a Chinese dormitory, sans-RA. So, understand that we weren't striving for delinquency - not exactly - but that the whole situation was trouble to begin with. I knew in advance that I wouldn't see most of these people ever again, and neither would they ever see me again, so we all felt the need to sneak our jabs in while we could.
Each and every night of the two-week Dazhou Experiment would prove a long night for me. Most of the other volunteers, save for a couple, were more responsible than I. Micah and Allison were generally the first to leave, but they are de facto married, so I don't fault them in the least for retiring early to their own private boudoir in order to perform their nightly duty to The Party. Jeesun would take off shortly thereafter; she has a boyfriend back in Philly to attend to, albeit virtually. Katie, as Moose's attorney and caretaker, would linger a bit, but only just long enough to make sure that Moose didn't asphyxiate on his own bullshit. Emily has managed to woo a Chinese boyfriend, and now that I know all about him and the work he does, I will refrain from saying anything else about their torrid Sino-Navajo affair - at any rate, she would receive a long-distance phone call from Chengdu around 1 AM and leave shortly after Katie. Emma, a Brit-Lit major, always hung around much longer than she ought to have, for as heated and perverse and decidedly un-Victorian as the conversation inevitably became. But even she gave up after a while. By 3 AM, the room had pretty much cleared out, leaving the unholy trinity of Moose, Jacob, and Panda to sort the universe out - until four, until five, until six AM. If there existed a 27 AM, I am sure that we would have discovered it, planted our flag in it, and stayed up 'til then.
But we had to get up at eight every morning. So there were chronological limits to our delinquency. And we pushed them. There were several nights where sleep seemed more joke than biological necessity. To sleep for one hour? Or to continue hashing out the parameters of the known and unknown universe? Both possibilities were absurd, but the latter possibility was much more fulfilling, so sleep always lost. Our conversations ranged from the banal - Super Mario 3, "Macho Man" Randy Savage, Howard Cosell - to the otherworldly, and we made our conversational leaps unpretentiously and - or so it seemed to me at the time - seamlessly. But not always peacefully. There were tense moments where a three-man battle royale seemed on the verge of breaking out. But cooler heads always prevailed. And at the end of the night, fistpounds were exchanged. And on more than a few occasions, awkward three-way manbraces were shared. I learned much from those firewater-side chats, and in retrospect, I certainly wouldn't trade them for eighty hours of sleep that, as it turns out, I wouldn't need anyway.
And I'd love to transcribe some of those firewater-side chats for you. But anyone who has heard one's own voice on a tape recorder, or who has seen oneself on television, or who has watched someone else's impersonation of oneself is familiar with the extreme discomfort involved in retelling an inside joke, or reenacting a conversation, or replicating a personality. The microwaved, leftover result is unpalatable, to say the least. So, try as I might (and try I won't), I cannot and will not regurgitate any of the conversations that took place over the course of those two long, liver-curdling weeks. At this point, I'm not sure I can even remember them, though they changed me in such a way that long-term memory is insufficient and unnecessary. I suppose I will resign myself to saying that those two weeks were pseudointellectually significant for me, and then I will resign myself to finally getting on with my Great Flood of Dazhou saga, which may or may not be pseudointellectually significant for you.
That first night, I went to sleep at 27 AM. And then I woke up at 8 AM and taught teachers how to teach. As an icebreaker, I had my students (teachers) interview each other. They chatted in English. Pleased as hell, I walked around the room and constructively eavesdropped. Then I asked for a few volunteers to introduce their partners to the class. After a surreal two-minute standoff where nobody was quite able to muster the cojones to speak, I called on a fortysomething gentleman in the front row.
"Would you mind telling me about your English partner, Mr., er, ah, Zhang?"
"Sorry, teacher. But I cannot speak," said Mr. Zhang.
"Don't be shy! We're all friends here," I rejoined.
A round of applause from the studio audience. I felt, briefly, like Tony Robbins.
"No. Really I cannot speak," said Mr. Zhang. He slid his cellphone out from his pants pocket. "My father's hometown is flood and I must telephone my father. To see if he is still living."
"Jesus," I said. "Christ. No. Go. Call your father."
Mr. Zhang bowed slightly and ducked out of the room.
"Ladies and gentlemen," I announced, "if any of you are concerned about the existence of your relatives, please do not ask to leave my classroom. Just go."
My students took notes.
Somewhere along my errant way to Dazhou, I had drawn the short end of the chopstick, so I not only had to teach four hours that first day, but I also had to give a two-hour lecture on American Culture at 2 PM sharp. I raided Moose's stores of Nescafe and spent the early afternoon pacing the narrow, moldy perimeters of my hotel room, practicing my delivery, perfecting my timing, stiffarming my hangover. Then, well before I was ready, it came time to perform. What follows, I am sure, will seem like hyperbole. Because what follows will seem mostly unbelievable. And I realize that I have a habit of exaggerating or rearranging events in such a way that they make pseudoliterary sense. But what follows is what happened, more or less, as far as I can remember - and Moose as my witness, to the best of my ability, I have refrained from distorting these next five or ten paragraphs. Though I haven't written them yet, I know they will be very hard to write. It is easy, in my experience, to make the mundane interesting. It is infinitely more difficult to render reality believable.
It was a hot day and it had finally stopped raining. I swaggered into the lecture hall at 1:30 PM, unfashionably dressed but fashionably early. Kevin, my handler, embraced me against my will and asked if I wanted some water. Sure, I said. Give me two kuai, he said. Grumbling, I forked over twopence of my Peace Corps blood money, then I dished my USB stick to the IT Guy and stepped up to the podium. I checked out the audience. Hundreds of Chinese English teachers sat before me, fanning themselves, hawking loogies, toggling through the ringtones of their thousand-dollar Nokias. Check one two, I mumbled into the microphone. Check one two.
My American Culture 101 Powerpoint opens with the oldest trick in the Powerpoint book. A picture of Samuel L. Jackson. A picture of Daniel Day-Lewis. A picture of Khalil Gibran. A picture of Francis Fukuyama. Which of these individuals, I ask, is American? I cringe. I shudder. I drink more Nescafe. The Rest of the World would laugh me out of the lecture hall. But I have given this lecture all over Sichuan Province, and always the response has been the same.
Samuel L. is, at first, not American. An overwhelming NO from the audience. Then a murmuring ensues. Followed by a ruckus. The NBA is cited. LeBron and Kobe are cited. China loves basketball, and American basketball players are almost always black, so maybe, the audience figures, just maybe Americans can be black. After much heated debate, black people are agreed upon as perhaps, possibly, maybe Americans. Samuel L. Jackson is possibly, maybe, perhaps American.
Daniel Day-Lewis is unquestionably American at first, but my audience is clever and they sense a trick. So they shout a muddled yes/no that sounds something like "sysonooayshuysuesnoysy." Which I interpret as: maybe yes, maybe no. Daniel Day-Lewis is maybe American, maybe not American.
Then comes Khalil Gibran. Bearded, olive-skinned, Middle Eastern. The oldest Powerpoint trick in the Powerpoint book has been suddenly and completely forgotten. This man is not American. He is a Muslim. He is Osama Bin-Laden. He is a terrorist. NO, shouts the audience, NO NO NO. An overwhelming NO.
And then, Francis Fukuyama, who has been proclaiming (albeit absurdly) the end of history for several decades in unaccented English, he cannot be American, either. Because he is Chinese. He is one of us. NO, shouts the crowd, NO NO NO. An overwhelming NO.
I take a long swig of Nescafe. Next slide, I murmur. And cue the punchline: all of these people, but one, are Americans. Samuel L. Jackson is an American, Khalil Gibran is an American, and Francis Fukuyama is an American. But Daniel Day-Lewis, if he were in character, would pummel you with bowling balls for calling him American. He happens to be Irish, and he happens to have starred in one of my favorite films of all time, There Will Be Blood, a film that Jacob, my fellow volunteer, happens to hate with a fiery passion that will never die, and so on.
So it goes with my college kids: Americans are white and blue-eyed and yellow-haired and they are rich and they don't love their families and they can only eat beef and bread. And so it went, at first, with my teachers in Dazhou, who had been studying English for a quarter-century, who had (for a not insignificant amount of time) been steeped in some warped interpretation of American Culture. Disappointing, of course. Frustrating, certainly. But such is my work. By now, I am no longer fazed or unfazed by it. Neither jaded nor gilded. By now, I am merely determined.
I ruthlessly guzzled from my Thermos of Nescafe, and then I gave my students (my teachers) some hard statistics. True, America is mostly Caucasian, but it probably won't remain so. Cue pie chart. True, America was once rich, but it doesn't currently appear to be so. Cue line graph. True, America was born a Christian nation, though it certainly is not so today. Cue anecdote.
"My students often ask me if I am a Christian," I said. "'Teacher, you believe in Jesus, yes?' And I tell my students that, no, I do not believe in the Christian idea of god -"
I was so startled by what happened next that I did not appreciate the timing. Only much later did my fellow volunteers inform me (laughing their asses off) that my last words before the blackout were, "I do not believe in the Christian idea of god." So I hope their testimony contributes to whatever credibility I have as a narrator. It really happened this way, and I suppose that I am burdened with the responsibility of proving it.
I do not believe in the Christian idea of god, I said, period. And then, suddenly, all was dark, or slightly dimmed. My microphone was dead. The projector screen had gone black. My Chinese handlers sprung into action, were scrambling all over the place, fumbling with cords, unplugging and replugging electrical wires. Only after a full minute of total chaos did I begin to entertain the idea that the impending flood might have had something to do with anything. My audience, meanwhile, was caught up in an old-timey courtroom uproar. What's the big idea?, etc. I stood there at the podium, looking around for a gavel to bang.
My handlers in the front row gestured for me to keep going, to keep lecturing. But speaking over an audience of 300 Chinese adults, even with the aid of a PA system, is an exercise in ... well, it's really too much exercise to be worth anyone's while. My vocal cords were no match for the loogey-hawking masses. I knew that much from experience. So I tightroped the ledge of the stage and cleared my throat several times, then I paced back and forth and hawked a false loogey - perhaps this might summon their attention - and then, finally, I stood stock still behind the podium, scratched my head like the fop I am, and surveyed the scene. And as my eyes searched the audience for an audience, I spotted Moose a few rows back and saw that he had collapsed into his desk, and that he was laughing so hard that a Rorschach blotch of sweat had formed on the back of his shirt. And that set me off. I started laughing and I could not stop. I faceplanted into the podium and laughed into my elbowpits until there were no more laughs to be laughed. And then I hooted to myself, took a swig of Nescafe, and wandered off to the bathroom to take a much-needed piss. Eventually, I wandered out to the balcony for a much-needed smoke.
My students (teachers) had assembled there to watch the gathering flood. And after I'd lit my ciggie and recovered from the divine relief it afforded, I grew as entranced as my students were with nature's bubbling wrath. The raging brown waters of the pseudo-Yangtze were ten feet beneath us and rising. According to my neurotic calculations, the lecture hall would flood well before the end of my two-hour lecture. Meanwhile, traditional Sichuanese debris rafted past. A hot-pot table coasted by and my students shouted out the English word, "table!" The carved wooden fringes of a Buddhist temple floated past and in unison, my students said, "pagoda." We were learning vocabulary. Improving our Oral English. At one point, a vague, yellowish blob bobbed along downstream and several of my students murmured, "body." For the life of me, I couldn't tell how serious they were.
Katie, who was scheduled to follow up my lecture with something far more educational and informative, came out to the balcony and, unperturbed by the pending rapture, started playing with the roly-polies on the banister. She pinched one of them between her fingers and held it up, legs writhing, for all to see.
"This is a roly-poly," she said to my students, in her delightful sing-song teacher voice. "We have them in America, too!"
"Roly-poly," my students chanted. "Roly-poly!"
Though I love all creatures great and small, I would never lobby Congress on the behalf of insects, which I find terrifying and disgusting and insulting to all humanity. But Katie, bless her South Carolinian heart, right there and then set about crushing one unsuspecting Chinese roly-poly after another in the vain attempt to make them roll in the Western mode. And I could not abide.
"Jesus God. You're killing them!" I shouted.
"But they're roly-polies," she said, squishing one between her fingers. "They're supposed to roll!"
"No. They're Chinese roly-polies," I said. "They're Confucian. Who knows what they will do when provoked?"
And what they did was this: they died. En masse. Feebly, I tried to stop Katie, but she was on a mission. A crusade. She aimed to convert these heathen, anti-roly polies with the sword. To Katie's mind, these lightly armored Chinese insects were roly-polies, whether they knew it or not, and she would teach them how to roll by force, if necessary. It got ugly real fast. She killed at least eight of them before I could stop her. Meanwhile, my students (teachers) were murmuring the words "roly-poly" and "dead." I tried to disrupt Katie's Inquisition by pointing out a daddy long legs that happened to be high-stepping its way up a nearby wall. And I was genuinely excited. I hadn't seen a daddy long legs in years, not since I lived in Missouri, and was amazed to find one in Dazhou, of all places.
"Daddy long legs!" I shouted.
"Daddy long legs," repeated my students.
"House," a few of them murmured, as somebody's living room tumbled past.
"Daddy long legs," I said.
"Car," they agreed.
"Roly-poly," they remembered.
"Dead."
"Bicycle."
"Daddy long legs."
"Dead."
"Tire."
"Roly-poly."
"Tree."
"Dead."
"Table."
Katie reached for the daddy long legs and I smacked her hand.
Then Kevin, my handler, embraced me from behind and dragged me back into the lecture hall.
"Good news. We have a generator," he said. "The power is on. You had better finish your lecture now."
Evidently, my Powerpoint would continue, even as our lives were transitioning ever more ominously towards the final slide.
I reassumed the stage. Check onetwo, I said into the revived microphone, check onetwo. A round of applause. I opted to skip over the blasphemous segment of my lecture and said, hastily, "Not everyone in America is a Christian. Moving right along -" And then there came a deafening pop from the PA system and the lights went out again.
More scrambling. More plugging and replugging. I paced the stage. I took a swig of Nescafe. Then, outside, the flood sirens went off. Which did much in the way of convincing me that I was not merely neurotic, that I hadn't overdosed on Nescafe, that in fact there was a very real natural disaster about to take place. And who was I to lecture on diversity in the face of the all-devouring apocalypse? That, or something like it, was the modest appeal I levied against my handlers, in Chinese and in English, but they were not to be persuaded. The show must go on, after all. My handlers did not seem aware of any conflict of interest, not even of that one interest we are all interested in as humans, as living things, as organisms: that of survival. Out of politeness, I fought the urge to run for the hills. Then I conquered that urge and stood there on stage like Merriam-Webster's definition of an oaf. Though my audience was, by that time, either half-panicked or half-asleep, my handlers insisted that my lecture must proceed, and that my audience must remain. In the moments that followed, my handlers spontaneously generated a generator that regenerated the generator which revived the electrical system of the lecture hall in which I was supposed to complete my lecture while the gathering flood threatened to dampen the whole damned party, and that right soon.
The projector screen fired up again. The microphone screeched, a banshee of feedback. I took a long swig of Nescafe - my last, I wondered? - cleared my throat and proceeded.
"Anyhow. America is a very diverse place. Diverse. Many different kinds of people. And some of them don't believe in - "
The speakers popped, the screen went black. There was a kind of finality about the third blackout that pleased me. I was free, and I knew it. My heart rejoiced for its renewed prospect of beating and thumping and stumbling into the indefinite future. The crowd got up to leave. I stepped down from the stage. My handler negotiated with his handler for a time - perhaps there was a third meta-generator in the broom closet? - then he slowly approached, gripped me by the bicep, and told me that my lecture had been postponed until tomorrow.
"Sweet. Will there be a tomorrow?" I asked, as a matter of journalistic interest.
"Yes. Always," my handler said.
"Cool. Thanks for the water," I said, and took a grateful swig from my bottle of Nongfu Springs, even as the undrinkable, unfishable, unswimmable springs of Dazhou County began to trickle into the lecture hall. I rolled up my pantlegs, and so did everyone else. Then, right on cue, hordes of barechested Chinese peasants entered stage right and started loading the amplifiers, the computers, the podium, et al, started hauling everything out of the auditorium. Much panting, much chanting, many loogeys were hawked. Exit Panda stage left.
I ran into Jacob on the way to the hotel. He was sweaty and short of breath, dressed in Marvel Comics-themed athletic attire.
"Aren't you supposed to be lecturing, man?"
"Canceled," I said, "due to apocalypse. Whatchoo doing?"
"I was just playing basketball. With the children," he added dismissively. "You had lunch yet?"
We went to the cafeteria, or what Chinese students refer to (in their delightfully Orwellian English) as the "canteen." The food wasn't half-bad, but it wasn't half-good, either. Moose joined us after a bit. We laughed a lot, as we are wont to do, and our laughs echoed. Aside from the three of us, the canteen was empty. But before we'd had time to give up on our food, the canteen began to fill up with shirtless peasants. They lingered around for a while and smoked, spat on the floor, shouted at each other. It wasn't clear, at first, why they were there at all. Then they sprung into action. They smoked and spat their way outside, and under the command of some derelict peasant captain, started hauling in tables, desks, chairs, sound equipment, computers, et al. They were at work. They were preparing for the flood. They deposited all the heavy, valuable stuff in the back of the canteen. A questionable move, I thought, given the proximity of the canteen to the very flood waters they were trying to avoid. These gnarled old men were moving tens of tons of equipment up a single flight of stairs, while the river, from the looks of things, appeared quite capable of washing Dazhou right off the map. Rearranging rickshaws on the Titanic, or however the idiom goes.
I couldn't bring myself to finish my undercooked twice-cooked pork and I was in desperate need of a nap, so I bid zai jian to my 27 AM partners in absurdity and left the canteen.
In China, crowds will gather around just about anything worth watching - a fatal car accident, a cellphone promotion, a Tibetan junk vendor, a laowai - and the crowds had turned out in droves for the Great Flood of Dazhou. As a foreigner, I tend to avoid crowds, because if I'm not careful, I will become the center of their attention. But I happened to be passing by. Happened to have nothing better to do. And I happened to be very curious about the horde of people standing outside the canteen, because they weren't talking much, weren't smiling, were unusually sullen for a pack of Chinese rubberneckers. So I wormed my way into the crowd and got up on my tippy-toes to see what, exactly, they were looking at.
There were two attractions, I suppose. First of all, there were the peasants: the lao bai xing, the bang bang men. These men are the beauty of China. They represent all that is good. They carry burdens for a living. And there they were, hauling the Dazhou University Music Department pianos up and out of the flood zone. Impossibly old men carrying pianos. They say an ant can lift 50 times its own weight. The bang bang men worked in crews of eight. Eight scrawny old, wiry old shirtless men, lifting a baby grand out of the muck and up an uneven flight of stairs, then collectively lugging it twenty feet before setting it down with a gentle thump! in the rear of the students' canteen. Fascinating, inspiring, horrible to watch. The coxswain would bark - HEAVE! - and seven oldsters would chant, HEAVE HEAVE HEAVE. HEAVE! HEAVE HEAVE HEAVE. HEAVE! HEAVE HEAVE HEAVE. These men were old enough to be your great-grandpa, if not greater. I stood there and watched. I couldn't believe that these oldsters, scrawny and malnourished as they were, were up to the task, and there were moments where it seemed the piano would slip from their fingers, tumble end over end, and smash with a splash and a Thelonious Monk discord at the flooded foot of the stairs. But the bang bang men persevered and got the job done without fail. They delivered twelve baby grands to the canteen without so much as a scratch, while they, the scarred, bruised, battered lao bai xing, were already well beyond repair.
But the main attraction was the river itself. It flowed and it raged. It thundered. It muscled along like an unimaginably large serpent snaking past in the gathering gloom. It rumbled. It breathed. It held us under its spell. The old men weaved their legs into the balcony and sat, smoking cigarettes and watching the river. Here was nature, our old nemesis, our one-time adversary, now strapped down to the bed, etherized, tranquilized, subdued. Long ago we conquered it, put signs all over it, made it a tourist attraction. Were awfully smug about all that, and justifiably so. But now, the river, on a whim, had reduced us all to ants. Reminded us that yes, we had defeated it, but could nevertheless be washed away, erased, obliterated with a careless shrug of the shoulders. The river. I couldn't take my eyes off it. The power there. I thought nothing, felt nothing. I was not afraid. Understand, I fear petty things, and fear them deeply. I am afraid of insects, Styrofoam, flying in airplanes. I fear chalkboards and advanced mathematics and swimming pools. But I did not fear the river right then, or the annihilation it promised with a mudshot wink as the smog-blurred sun fell down behind its back. I was interested in the river. I studied it. I was, I suppose, learning from it.
One month before I set out on my Dazhou adventure, well before much of western China flooded, I wrote the following:
One day the river will march single file, overflowing its banks, and it will inundate the world in its uniform earthtone, reflecting itself and itself and itself, on and on forever, and it will wash all the dirt away like a glass of lemonade spilled onto an anthill.
I wrote those words with a lot of caffeine in my system, and I wrote them about a thoroughly domesticated creek in Chengdu. That creek will never flood. I imagined it could at the time, that it was capable. But I did not mean for those words to be prophetic. I didn't foresee the Great Flood of Dazhou. At the time, I foresaw another cup of coffee, and that is all. But I do find those words rather apropos when I think back on that uncertain evening in Dazhou, watching the waters tumble past in the background, even as they seeped and inched their way into the foreground. Wondering how to react, wondering whether I should panic, whether I should laugh, whether I should feel anything at all. Wondering whether I ought not to call somebody important and cancel the whole Dazhou Experiment straightaway. But no, I have always found that the best course of action is inaction, especially in times of helplessness. Past a certain point, you have to let go and recognize your role as an ant, as a pebble caught in the flood of history, of physics, of nature, and all the rest. We are pebbles, I suppose. No more, no less. And once you let go, the whole existential shitshow is tremendously fun to watch, free will be damned. Let go. Enjoy. Laugh. And try to write about it, if you have time. Over the years, I have come to accept my place as an observer, as a pebble, as a somewhat intelligent ant. There remains much to overcome, much to be fought for, much to rebel against, and humanity needs a great deal of help in that direction. But I am no longer interested in hauling baby grands up uneven staircases. That job, perhaps, belongs to other, more courageous pebbles. That task is beyond me. I like to watch, and to think, and to laugh, and to write about the shitshow as it unravels. Why are we here? What is human destiny? What does it all mean? I have my guesses, but I don't know. Nobody knows. And I don't suppose anyone ever will. But isn't it pretty to wonder about?
Down by the river, while I gawked, a couple of college girls hovered in my hairy midst. They giggled about me, chatted to each other about me, worked up the courage to talk to me. And after a while I preemptively struck: I talked to them. They were from Zigong, but had come to Dazhou to study. They were freshmen.
"Do you live on campus?" I asked in my motley Mandarin.
"Yes," one of the girls said. "We live here."
She indicated the dormitory in front of us.
"We live there."
"That's awfully close to the river," I said. "Aren't you worried about the flood?"
"Yes. Very much so," she said. "If the water gets any higher, we're going to have to move all of our things."
"Where will you move them?" I asked.
"We don't know."
The girl giggled, blushed. Her accomplice was silent, giggled a bit. I was the first foreigner they had ever spoken to or giggled with. The flood seemed like a serious enough dilemma to me, but the girls were more shaken by their first conversation with a laowai than they were by the looming deluge.
The sun went down. It floated for a moment like a mandarin orange on the surface of the river. Then it sank beneath the waters and the light vanished. The world dimmed, the shadows spread, and only the immediate foreground remained visible: the flooded shops, the climbing waters, silhouettes, cigarette ends that blossomed and faded into the darkness. I took out my battered cellphone and sent a quick message to Jacob: "The river is climbing up the steps to campus. Ought to come see it." I waited, but Jacob didn't answer, and he didn't come out to watch. Meanwhile, the river inched and centimetered its way up the stairs. The same stairs the oldsters had climbed an hour before, chanting and spitting, with pianos on their backs. The brown waters made their way up the stairs, stood poised halfway for a moment like an asthmatic old man, and then they climbed further - subtly, almost imperceptibly, like a tedious argument of insidious intent, to borrow a quote.
I bid farewell to the college girls, wished them luck, and walked back to the hotel. I lit a cigarette along the way, smoked it for a bit, but stubbed it out before I could really enjoy it. I waved to the desk clerk and went upstairs. Perhaps, I hoped, Moose would buy me the first round. And perhaps life would proceed as normal in spite of the flood. I would sleep at 27 AM, wake up at 8 AM and teach teachers how to teach. There will be a tonight and there will be a tomorrow. This is the assumption we all must make. It's no leap of faith in my book. It is a necessity. What else do we have? Life will resume as it always has. The show must go on. Eventually, I suppose, it won't. But isn't it pretty to think so? And isn't it unpleasant to think otherwise?
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Escape Velocity
Before I bring my Great Flood of Dazhou saga to its half-Biblical, half-Kafkaesque conclusion, I would like to write a half-assed eulogy for the recently departed Jacob Burney: sitemate, partner in absurdity, and one of the best fiends ("r" omitted quite deliberately) I have ever had the pleasure and extreme discomfort of knowing.
Fear not - the man yet lives, and is living well. By now, Jacob is breakfasting on a leaning tower of syrup-slathered French toast, topped with two equilateral slabs of Land O'Lakes butter and served with three rashers of bacon, accompanied by a frosty glass of orange juice from concentrate, and a steaming cup of real Columbian coffee, and - and - ... and now I am slobbering into the home-row keys of my laptop.
Jacob is gone and I am happy for him. He has moved on. He is in a better place now, as it were. But his departure has left a hefty dent in Nanchong's already scant reserves of wit and sarcasm. In our day, Jacob and I were the stuff of mid-80's buddy comedies. Consider Jacob: a black, 260-pound NCAA Championship Subdivision defensive lineman, a philosophy major and Marvel Comics enthusiast. (I suspect he may be the only man in the world who owns - and regularly wears - a Batman Forever leather jacket.) And consider me: a six-foot nothin', hundred and nothin' caucasian pseudointellectual with a degree in creative writing and a soft spot for certain self-destructive vices. Oddly, impossibly, the pairing worked, and I commend the Peace Corps for putting us in the same Chinese city, whether or not there was any rationale behind the decision.
Jacob's last words to me were, "I reap what I say." At the time, I had no idea what the fuck he was talking about, and I still don't. But he was happy to repeat those words for me, in case I held out any doubt that he meant them. "I reap what I say," he said, and stepped off the train. And I am happy to accept those words for the profound nonsense they are. Of all the farewells that have been bidden me over the past couple weeks, Jacob's was by far the most appropriate.
So this year, in the parlance of politics, is a transitional phase for me. In the parlance of sport, it is a rebuilding year. In Jacob's absence, I have been left behind to hold the fort. I am, for the moment, the only Peace Corps volunteer in Nanchong. Two newbies will arrive next month, but they have size twelve Air Jordans to fill. Of course, I will not hold it against them if they are not Jacob. Nobody, I suppose, is Jacob except for Jacob. But I hope the newbies will forgive me if, late at night, after one too many Shanchengs, in a fit of Jacobean nostalgia, I beg them to disagree with me about the war in Iraq, or to talk shit about There Will Be Blood and all of the other films and musicians I adore, or to make fun of the way I walk in the most offensive manner possible. It's not that I am a masochist, or that I enjoy being insulted, but regrettably, the number of remorselessly inappropriate people born post-PC Revolution are few and far between, and Jacob was (and is) one of that number. I learned much about language and even more about humanity from Jacob, and was able to test the surprisingly elastic boundaries of my own rationality through my many late-late-much-too-late night debates with the late Mr. Burney. For all that, no mere xie xie will suffice. Jacob will be missed, but some birds are not meant to be caged - a quotation from a film that I'm sure both he and I can agree on.
Thus concludes my half-assed eulogy. Jacob has escaped Nanchong, and in so doing, he has succeeded where I have, on many occasions, failed. I have already related my truly Sisyphean effort to escape a minor flood in Nanchong en route to a major deluge in Dazhou. But that experience - the experience of failing miserably at the most elementary sort of travel, i.e. leaving the place where one happens to be - is so commonplace for me in Nanchong that I often wonder why I bother writing about it. But, like most forms of interpersonal conflict - e.g. conversations with Jacob - arguing with surly taxi pimps is an incredibly efficient means of learning about oneself. And just last night, after being pushed to the brink by an especially surly taxi pimp, I was able to explore the dimensions of my inner asshole: an internal sphincter that, prior to life in China, I was completely unacquainted with.
Yesterday evening, I was invited by the Peace Corps to come to Chengdu, to give a brief lecture the following morning on the nature of my sino-bohemian existence in eastern Sichuan, in front of 95 fresh-off-the-boat laowais. The thought unnerved me a bit more than it should have, but bear in mind that I have grown accustomed to speaking in front of vast crowds of semi-rural Chinese. The knowledge that your audience doesn't understand a word you're saying goes a long way towards curing stage fright. Nevertheless, I was excited about the opportunity to wax National Geographic about life in Nanchong, to hobnob with the new batch of volunteers, and to mooch around Chengdu on Barack Obama's dime. But in typically Pandastic fashion, I lingered around the apartment until well after the last train had departed. Then, having discovered a wealth of Charlie Rose interviews with Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, I sat there agog at the computer until the sun had set and getting to Chengdu via even the shadiest of means had become a near impossibility. That, my friends, is how I roll - which is to say that I don't roll very well at all.
So around 10 PM, I made my way to the train station and shouted the word "Chengdu!" Instantly, I was whisked away by a taxi pimp, who told me to climb onto his moped so we could putter off to some sort of taxi pimp rendezvous point on the dark side of town. But motorcycles, mopeds, Segways, and motorized trishaws are a big Peace Corps no-no, so I waved my hands around and said, "No can do." Grumbling, the taxi pimp called another, pimpier taxi pimp and we waited there in front of the train station for the big pimp to arrive in his pimped-out Volkswagen Santana.
In China, if you are as tactless a buffoon as I am, traveling late at night can become an incredibly convoluted affair. The people arranging your transportation are not the people who will provide your transportation. Instead, you must work within a back-alley network of meta-cabbies and meta-meta-cabbies: taxi drivers who will deliver you to other taxi drivers, who will deliver you to other taxi drivers, who will deliver you to other taxi drivers, who will finally dump you into the backseat of a pimped-out Volkswagen Santana that will, ostensibly, deliver you to your final destination.
When I arrived at the taxi pimp rendezvous and slipped into the back of this particular pimped-out Volkswagen Santana, I was under the impression that we were headed directly to Chengdu. But that would not prove to be the case. Instead, I was taken to the parking lot of a seafood joint just off the Chinese interstate. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to get dinner, or what. So I smoked a purgatorial ciggie and took a much-needed piss in the bushes. Then I was told to get on a bus. There were six other passengers on the bus, and the cabin reeked of Sichuanese peppercorns and feces. This was an unexpected turn. Not the feces, but the bus. How shady were these people, that they had hijacked a government-issue bus whose origin and destination (as posted on the windshield) were no cities that I'd ever heard of? My meta-cabbie came around to gather everyone's bus fare. The fee was unexpectedly cheap - about $10 US - but I fumbled through my ever-disappointing wallet and found that I was about one American buck short. I handed over the rest of my money and gazed hopefully, Bambi-eyed at the meta-cabbie.
"I need ten more kuai!"
"Sorry, sir," I said, "but I didn't know the fare when I got on the bus. I'm afraid I'm a little short."
"Won't work! Impossible! Get off the bus!"
"But sir," I said, injecting a bit of self-righteousness into my rudimentary Sichuanese, "surely, we can stop at an ATM when we get to Chengdu. It will take me five minutes. I'll pay you the fare, with interest, if necessary."
"Impossible! Won't work! Get off the bus!"
I thrust what money I had into the meta-cabbie's hand, but he wouldn't take it. So I appealed to my fellow passengers, with whom I had already chatted for half an hour, with whom I had bonded, or so I thought - the same people who had expressed such disbelief at my nonexistent monthly income as a Peace Corps volunteer. But nobody budged; nobody even thought of donating the piddling amount of chump change it would take to keep the foreigner on the bus.
"Can anybody help me out? It's six kuai," I said, "one U.S. dollar. I'll pay you back. With interest, if necessary."
But no one said a word. The meta-cabbie was shaking visibly. Already, we had wasted more than the five minutes necessary for me to hop out in Chengdu and hit up an ATM.
"Get off the bus!" he shouted in my face.
And that was the moment I accessed my hitherto unknown reservoir of controlled rage. I seldom get angry in the West, and when I do, it is profoundly unimpressive. My face turns red. My cheeks tremble. I stutter and stammer, and sweat to a disgusting degree. But in China, I have learned to shout, and to argue, and to curse, and meanwhile, my emotions lay there in my chest, cold and unmoved as a cadaver.
"Listen," I said, "we stop in Chengdu, I get out of the bus. I use the ATM for five minutes. And I pay you your damned six kuai. With interest. How about that?"
"Impossible! It won't work! Get off the bus!"
The bus driver shouted something-or-other. The meta-cabbie seized me by the backpack strap and I got to my feet. He dragged me off the bus, but stopped short of throwing me out. Instead, he led me out to his pimped-out Volkswagen Santana and offered, somewhat guiltily, to take me to an ATM. The bus, meanwhile, sped off into the night.
Chinese ATMs are programmed not to work when you need them most. We stopped at four ATMs in a row and none of them coughed up the dollar I needed to get to Chengdu. But the Agricultural Bank of China, as usual, came through in the clutch. The meta-cabbie drove me back to the train station and left me to wait in his backseat while he wandered off to badmouth Americans to his meta-cabbie cadre.
Growing up, I was a Notre Dame football fan. Naturally, I entertained teenaged fantasies of one day going to school there, and perhaps walking on to the football team as a punter, and making my punting debut as a fifth-year senior, in the last game of the season, and executing an awe-inspiring coffin-corner punt that would prove decisive in salvaging a victory in the 2005 Poulan Weed Eater Bowl, versus those pesky Pirates of East Carolina University. Ah, youth. My childhood hero was Rudy Ruettiger. As a sophomore in high school, I wrote an exhaustive five-page literary analysis of his autobiography/self-help book. Rudy's number was 45, and as a teenager, so superstitious and smitten was I that I measured everything in 45-second intervals. It was my first and only flirtation with obsessive-compulsion. In the mornings, I never wanted to leave the warmth of the shower, and I (perhaps justifiably) dreaded subjecting myself to the meat market that is high school in middle America. But I couldn't stay in the shower forever because I was afraid of my profoundly Irish mother, so I would count down from 45, and after 45 seconds, I would towel myself off, pop a few zits, and get dressed. Strangely, that remains a habit of mine. When I don't want to do something, I count down from 45 seconds, and then I sit down to the odious task at hand. So it was 11:41 when the meta-cabbie parked his pimped-out Volkswagen Santana in the train station parking lot, and there in the backseat, I vowed to make my escape at precisely 11:45. And when 11:45 rolled around and still no meta-meta cabbie had arrived, I got out of the cab, put on my backpack, and stormed off into the night. It took the meta-cabbie a meta-moment to notice that I was ditching him. He shouted several times, then came running after me.
"HEY! HEY! WHERE ARE YOU GOING?"
He yanked at my sleeve and I judo chopped him loose.
"I'm going home. You kicked me off that bus because I didn't have six fucking kuai," I said. "I thought that was rather rude. So I'm going home."
"But the cab to Chengdu is coming! I got that cab just for you!"
"I know you did. But six kuai? Really? Anyway, it's too late now. I'm not going to Chengdu anymore. I need to go home and get some sleep."
"But the cab is coming!"
"I'm going home."
"You owe me money," he said. "I drove you to five different ATMs so you could withdraw money. Doesn't that count for anything?"
It was a salient point. I was unusually moved by it. But I was also unusually pissed off, so I kept walking. He grabbed me by the backpack strap.
"I drove you to five different ATMs," he said. "I wasted almost an hour driving you here and there and - "
"Okay," I said.
I reached into my wallet and handed him a crumpled wad of bills. He went silent. It was as though I'd stabbed him in the gut. He was stunned. He took the money and stuffed it into his pocket. And without a word, he turned and walked away. I was instantly reminded of No Country For Old Men, another one of those rare films that Jacob and I can agree on. Greed is all-powerful, but the greedy can be bought. Then I hailed a cab home. The non-meta cabbie in question was changing shifts, so he drove me all the way to the other end of town to pick up his cabbie successor, and his cabbie successor charged me for the whole escapade. And I paid him the full fare, both because I am a colossal fool, and because Nanchong cabbies (not to be confused with its meta-cabbies) are among the best people on earth, and I tend to give them the benefit of a doubt.
So I apologize to any of you newly arrived Peace Corps volunteers who had hoped to hear me wax National Geographic about my sino-bohemian existence in Nanchong. Believe me: I would have loved to have waxed National Geographic on that particular subject. But I struggle with travel, because I am incompetent. I have no doubt that you will have better luck than I with the meta-cabbies in this country. Probably, you will never need to resort to them, because you won't spend four of your evening hours listening to Christopher Hitchens shoot off at the mouth. Understand that I am an incompetent. Jacob often reminded me of that fact, and I often remind myself of it, too. It makes things difficult, of course, but if it weren't for my incompetency, and the misadventures it breeds, I don't know what else I could possibly write about.
Fear not - the man yet lives, and is living well. By now, Jacob is breakfasting on a leaning tower of syrup-slathered French toast, topped with two equilateral slabs of Land O'Lakes butter and served with three rashers of bacon, accompanied by a frosty glass of orange juice from concentrate, and a steaming cup of real Columbian coffee, and - and - ... and now I am slobbering into the home-row keys of my laptop.
Jacob is gone and I am happy for him. He has moved on. He is in a better place now, as it were. But his departure has left a hefty dent in Nanchong's already scant reserves of wit and sarcasm. In our day, Jacob and I were the stuff of mid-80's buddy comedies. Consider Jacob: a black, 260-pound NCAA Championship Subdivision defensive lineman, a philosophy major and Marvel Comics enthusiast. (I suspect he may be the only man in the world who owns - and regularly wears - a Batman Forever leather jacket.) And consider me: a six-foot nothin', hundred and nothin' caucasian pseudointellectual with a degree in creative writing and a soft spot for certain self-destructive vices. Oddly, impossibly, the pairing worked, and I commend the Peace Corps for putting us in the same Chinese city, whether or not there was any rationale behind the decision.
Jacob's last words to me were, "I reap what I say." At the time, I had no idea what the fuck he was talking about, and I still don't. But he was happy to repeat those words for me, in case I held out any doubt that he meant them. "I reap what I say," he said, and stepped off the train. And I am happy to accept those words for the profound nonsense they are. Of all the farewells that have been bidden me over the past couple weeks, Jacob's was by far the most appropriate.
So this year, in the parlance of politics, is a transitional phase for me. In the parlance of sport, it is a rebuilding year. In Jacob's absence, I have been left behind to hold the fort. I am, for the moment, the only Peace Corps volunteer in Nanchong. Two newbies will arrive next month, but they have size twelve Air Jordans to fill. Of course, I will not hold it against them if they are not Jacob. Nobody, I suppose, is Jacob except for Jacob. But I hope the newbies will forgive me if, late at night, after one too many Shanchengs, in a fit of Jacobean nostalgia, I beg them to disagree with me about the war in Iraq, or to talk shit about There Will Be Blood and all of the other films and musicians I adore, or to make fun of the way I walk in the most offensive manner possible. It's not that I am a masochist, or that I enjoy being insulted, but regrettably, the number of remorselessly inappropriate people born post-PC Revolution are few and far between, and Jacob was (and is) one of that number. I learned much about language and even more about humanity from Jacob, and was able to test the surprisingly elastic boundaries of my own rationality through my many late-late-much-too-late night debates with the late Mr. Burney. For all that, no mere xie xie will suffice. Jacob will be missed, but some birds are not meant to be caged - a quotation from a film that I'm sure both he and I can agree on.
Thus concludes my half-assed eulogy. Jacob has escaped Nanchong, and in so doing, he has succeeded where I have, on many occasions, failed. I have already related my truly Sisyphean effort to escape a minor flood in Nanchong en route to a major deluge in Dazhou. But that experience - the experience of failing miserably at the most elementary sort of travel, i.e. leaving the place where one happens to be - is so commonplace for me in Nanchong that I often wonder why I bother writing about it. But, like most forms of interpersonal conflict - e.g. conversations with Jacob - arguing with surly taxi pimps is an incredibly efficient means of learning about oneself. And just last night, after being pushed to the brink by an especially surly taxi pimp, I was able to explore the dimensions of my inner asshole: an internal sphincter that, prior to life in China, I was completely unacquainted with.
Yesterday evening, I was invited by the Peace Corps to come to Chengdu, to give a brief lecture the following morning on the nature of my sino-bohemian existence in eastern Sichuan, in front of 95 fresh-off-the-boat laowais. The thought unnerved me a bit more than it should have, but bear in mind that I have grown accustomed to speaking in front of vast crowds of semi-rural Chinese. The knowledge that your audience doesn't understand a word you're saying goes a long way towards curing stage fright. Nevertheless, I was excited about the opportunity to wax National Geographic about life in Nanchong, to hobnob with the new batch of volunteers, and to mooch around Chengdu on Barack Obama's dime. But in typically Pandastic fashion, I lingered around the apartment until well after the last train had departed. Then, having discovered a wealth of Charlie Rose interviews with Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, I sat there agog at the computer until the sun had set and getting to Chengdu via even the shadiest of means had become a near impossibility. That, my friends, is how I roll - which is to say that I don't roll very well at all.
So around 10 PM, I made my way to the train station and shouted the word "Chengdu!" Instantly, I was whisked away by a taxi pimp, who told me to climb onto his moped so we could putter off to some sort of taxi pimp rendezvous point on the dark side of town. But motorcycles, mopeds, Segways, and motorized trishaws are a big Peace Corps no-no, so I waved my hands around and said, "No can do." Grumbling, the taxi pimp called another, pimpier taxi pimp and we waited there in front of the train station for the big pimp to arrive in his pimped-out Volkswagen Santana.
In China, if you are as tactless a buffoon as I am, traveling late at night can become an incredibly convoluted affair. The people arranging your transportation are not the people who will provide your transportation. Instead, you must work within a back-alley network of meta-cabbies and meta-meta-cabbies: taxi drivers who will deliver you to other taxi drivers, who will deliver you to other taxi drivers, who will deliver you to other taxi drivers, who will finally dump you into the backseat of a pimped-out Volkswagen Santana that will, ostensibly, deliver you to your final destination.
When I arrived at the taxi pimp rendezvous and slipped into the back of this particular pimped-out Volkswagen Santana, I was under the impression that we were headed directly to Chengdu. But that would not prove to be the case. Instead, I was taken to the parking lot of a seafood joint just off the Chinese interstate. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to get dinner, or what. So I smoked a purgatorial ciggie and took a much-needed piss in the bushes. Then I was told to get on a bus. There were six other passengers on the bus, and the cabin reeked of Sichuanese peppercorns and feces. This was an unexpected turn. Not the feces, but the bus. How shady were these people, that they had hijacked a government-issue bus whose origin and destination (as posted on the windshield) were no cities that I'd ever heard of? My meta-cabbie came around to gather everyone's bus fare. The fee was unexpectedly cheap - about $10 US - but I fumbled through my ever-disappointing wallet and found that I was about one American buck short. I handed over the rest of my money and gazed hopefully, Bambi-eyed at the meta-cabbie.
"I need ten more kuai!"
"Sorry, sir," I said, "but I didn't know the fare when I got on the bus. I'm afraid I'm a little short."
"Won't work! Impossible! Get off the bus!"
"But sir," I said, injecting a bit of self-righteousness into my rudimentary Sichuanese, "surely, we can stop at an ATM when we get to Chengdu. It will take me five minutes. I'll pay you the fare, with interest, if necessary."
"Impossible! Won't work! Get off the bus!"
I thrust what money I had into the meta-cabbie's hand, but he wouldn't take it. So I appealed to my fellow passengers, with whom I had already chatted for half an hour, with whom I had bonded, or so I thought - the same people who had expressed such disbelief at my nonexistent monthly income as a Peace Corps volunteer. But nobody budged; nobody even thought of donating the piddling amount of chump change it would take to keep the foreigner on the bus.
"Can anybody help me out? It's six kuai," I said, "one U.S. dollar. I'll pay you back. With interest, if necessary."
But no one said a word. The meta-cabbie was shaking visibly. Already, we had wasted more than the five minutes necessary for me to hop out in Chengdu and hit up an ATM.
"Get off the bus!" he shouted in my face.
And that was the moment I accessed my hitherto unknown reservoir of controlled rage. I seldom get angry in the West, and when I do, it is profoundly unimpressive. My face turns red. My cheeks tremble. I stutter and stammer, and sweat to a disgusting degree. But in China, I have learned to shout, and to argue, and to curse, and meanwhile, my emotions lay there in my chest, cold and unmoved as a cadaver.
"Listen," I said, "we stop in Chengdu, I get out of the bus. I use the ATM for five minutes. And I pay you your damned six kuai. With interest. How about that?"
"Impossible! It won't work! Get off the bus!"
The bus driver shouted something-or-other. The meta-cabbie seized me by the backpack strap and I got to my feet. He dragged me off the bus, but stopped short of throwing me out. Instead, he led me out to his pimped-out Volkswagen Santana and offered, somewhat guiltily, to take me to an ATM. The bus, meanwhile, sped off into the night.
Chinese ATMs are programmed not to work when you need them most. We stopped at four ATMs in a row and none of them coughed up the dollar I needed to get to Chengdu. But the Agricultural Bank of China, as usual, came through in the clutch. The meta-cabbie drove me back to the train station and left me to wait in his backseat while he wandered off to badmouth Americans to his meta-cabbie cadre.
Growing up, I was a Notre Dame football fan. Naturally, I entertained teenaged fantasies of one day going to school there, and perhaps walking on to the football team as a punter, and making my punting debut as a fifth-year senior, in the last game of the season, and executing an awe-inspiring coffin-corner punt that would prove decisive in salvaging a victory in the 2005 Poulan Weed Eater Bowl, versus those pesky Pirates of East Carolina University. Ah, youth. My childhood hero was Rudy Ruettiger. As a sophomore in high school, I wrote an exhaustive five-page literary analysis of his autobiography/self-help book. Rudy's number was 45, and as a teenager, so superstitious and smitten was I that I measured everything in 45-second intervals. It was my first and only flirtation with obsessive-compulsion. In the mornings, I never wanted to leave the warmth of the shower, and I (perhaps justifiably) dreaded subjecting myself to the meat market that is high school in middle America. But I couldn't stay in the shower forever because I was afraid of my profoundly Irish mother, so I would count down from 45, and after 45 seconds, I would towel myself off, pop a few zits, and get dressed. Strangely, that remains a habit of mine. When I don't want to do something, I count down from 45 seconds, and then I sit down to the odious task at hand. So it was 11:41 when the meta-cabbie parked his pimped-out Volkswagen Santana in the train station parking lot, and there in the backseat, I vowed to make my escape at precisely 11:45. And when 11:45 rolled around and still no meta-meta cabbie had arrived, I got out of the cab, put on my backpack, and stormed off into the night. It took the meta-cabbie a meta-moment to notice that I was ditching him. He shouted several times, then came running after me.
"HEY! HEY! WHERE ARE YOU GOING?"
He yanked at my sleeve and I judo chopped him loose.
"I'm going home. You kicked me off that bus because I didn't have six fucking kuai," I said. "I thought that was rather rude. So I'm going home."
"But the cab to Chengdu is coming! I got that cab just for you!"
"I know you did. But six kuai? Really? Anyway, it's too late now. I'm not going to Chengdu anymore. I need to go home and get some sleep."
"But the cab is coming!"
"I'm going home."
"You owe me money," he said. "I drove you to five different ATMs so you could withdraw money. Doesn't that count for anything?"
It was a salient point. I was unusually moved by it. But I was also unusually pissed off, so I kept walking. He grabbed me by the backpack strap.
"I drove you to five different ATMs," he said. "I wasted almost an hour driving you here and there and - "
"Okay," I said.
I reached into my wallet and handed him a crumpled wad of bills. He went silent. It was as though I'd stabbed him in the gut. He was stunned. He took the money and stuffed it into his pocket. And without a word, he turned and walked away. I was instantly reminded of No Country For Old Men, another one of those rare films that Jacob and I can agree on. Greed is all-powerful, but the greedy can be bought. Then I hailed a cab home. The non-meta cabbie in question was changing shifts, so he drove me all the way to the other end of town to pick up his cabbie successor, and his cabbie successor charged me for the whole escapade. And I paid him the full fare, both because I am a colossal fool, and because Nanchong cabbies (not to be confused with its meta-cabbies) are among the best people on earth, and I tend to give them the benefit of a doubt.
So I apologize to any of you newly arrived Peace Corps volunteers who had hoped to hear me wax National Geographic about my sino-bohemian existence in Nanchong. Believe me: I would have loved to have waxed National Geographic on that particular subject. But I struggle with travel, because I am incompetent. I have no doubt that you will have better luck than I with the meta-cabbies in this country. Probably, you will never need to resort to them, because you won't spend four of your evening hours listening to Christopher Hitchens shoot off at the mouth. Understand that I am an incompetent. Jacob often reminded me of that fact, and I often remind myself of it, too. It makes things difficult, of course, but if it weren't for my incompetency, and the misadventures it breeds, I don't know what else I could possibly write about.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Schizoglot
Chinese lessons have begun. For want of a classroom, my tutor and I meet in the security guard vestibule by the main gate of China West Normal University. When the pseudo-police come in for smokes and tea, they gather round the desk to watch me prattle along in rudimentary Mandarin. My efforts seem to perplex them: this full-grown man can bullshit 'til the maos come home but he can't even pronounce the word "mama." In America, we are used to having our language butchered by foreigners and Americans alike. Here, the illiterate are so few and far between that I imagine the general population lumps me in with the hopelessly poor and mentally retarded.
And yet the people I meet are delighted that I have bothered to learn their language - the most widely spoken in the world - at all. Only the surliest of cabbies will take my money without telling me how bang my Chinese is. Whether it really is all that bang is an open question. I possess a knack for language, but for the moment I have the vocabulary of a Chinese fruit fly. And the Chinese will compliment just about any foreigner on his language skills, whether they exist or not. But even in Chongqing, the Starbucks baristas are stunned by a westerner who can order a small black coffee without choking on his tongue.
I have the unfortunate reputation of being a polyglot. But I am not. If anything, I am a schizoglot. I am functionally illiterate in five foreign languages and a bluthering idiot in my native tongue. I know the word for "whore" in all five of those languages, but I'm not sure I could find a bathroom if my life depended on it. I do not believe I am fluent in anything.
My attempts at learning language have been mostly frustrating and wholly unsuccessful. It is hard to find anyone, for one, who doesn't speak better English than your piddling amount of whatever language it is you hope to learn. So you wind up speaking English with your language tutors. Plus, at least for me, the gumption to learn a language evaporates once I am surrounded by it. In Germany, I studied Polish. In Poland, I studied German. In Korea, I studied everything but Korean.
Wendy is my Mandarin tutor. She is a graduate student majoring in Teaching Mandarin as a Foreign Language - TMFL? She has as much gumption to teach me as I have to learn. When we first met, I cautiously posed six hours a week, fearing that I'd jumped the gun, that it was too much for her hectic schedule. "Why not eight?" she asked. "Or more? Any time you're bored, call me and we'll have class."
Well, then. After my first month in Nanchong, I feared that I would leave China with less Chinese than I had when I came, that I would curl up in a ball on my pleather sofa watching 2001: A Space Odyssey until every muscle and brain cell in my body atrophied and expired. But now it seems I will leave this place fluent in Mandarin, all because I bothered to answer a phone call from an unknown number on a rainy Thursday evening as I was walking back to my apartment with a bowl of ramen.
I have never gotten to the point with a language where I felt the flaps go up and the whole mother start to lift off into the fluent air. Perhaps I came close with Spanish, at 3 AM on some wild night a few days before I left Mexico. It is hard to tell with Chinese. Mandarin is an abyss of a language, a tongue so different from our own that you could lose a lifetime in studying it. But there are moments - when I've slept well and I've slurped down just the right amount of coffee - when I can feel the vertical lift pulling me skyward.
There are good days and better days. On the better days, I wake up and can barely lift my head because it is so heavy with fresh neural connections. Forgive me for referencing There Will Be Blood two posts in a row, but it's a bit like the scene where H.W. is learning sign language: I bitch to my tutor about what's chapping my ass. She listens and, every so often, corrects me.
On the good days, I feel like I'm making no progress at all and I can see myself frozen lizardlike on the side of a plateau covered in Chinese hieroglyphs that stretches up into the heavens and beyond.
There is the added difficulty that the people around me are not speaking Mandarin, but Sichuanese. As far as dialects go, Mandarin and Sichuanese are fairly similar. But in essence, I am learning Queen's English in a place that speaks Creole. The more Mandarin I learn, the less I understand the cab driver. I would like to master both tongues, but I am uncertain as to whether I should learn to speak like an anchorman before I go out and get myself dirty, or whether I should go the Pygmalion route and learn to be a Cockney first.
Like China itself, Chinese grew overcrowded with words, so they started stacking them vertically into tones. Ma, depending on your intonation, can mean horse, mom, morphine, numb, grasshopper, ant, dragonfly, toad, or leprosy. Liang kuai can mean two bucks, or nice and cool. And so on. This is the main distinction between Mandarin and Sichuanese: two of the four tones are reversed and the other two are completely different. On top of that, the Sichuanese pronounce things strangely. The numbers four and ten, as well as the verbs to be, to eat, and to die sound exactly the same to the untrained ear. So the sentence "It's not fourteen, it's forty-four," easily parsable in Mandarin, sounds something like "Bu suh suh suh, suh suh suh suh."
But for now, I focus on the basics. Today I broke down giggling after I asked Wendy the words for number one and number two. On Chinese toilets, I have seen them represented by the symbol for small and the symbol for big.
"So you want to know pee and poop?" she asked. I bit my tongue and nodded. Then I lost it again. Then I recovered.
"Sorry," I told her. "I am a child."
"We say xiao hao for take a pee and da hao for take a poop."
"Little number and big number. We say the same thing in English, sort of," I said. "Thank you. I'll never forget them."
And I won't. To your tutor's chagrin, though you may forget the words for Christmas and autumn and environment, you will never forget pee and poop and an endless litany of other crudities that you might recite on your deathbed, should you so happen to expire in China.
And yet the people I meet are delighted that I have bothered to learn their language - the most widely spoken in the world - at all. Only the surliest of cabbies will take my money without telling me how bang my Chinese is. Whether it really is all that bang is an open question. I possess a knack for language, but for the moment I have the vocabulary of a Chinese fruit fly. And the Chinese will compliment just about any foreigner on his language skills, whether they exist or not. But even in Chongqing, the Starbucks baristas are stunned by a westerner who can order a small black coffee without choking on his tongue.
I have the unfortunate reputation of being a polyglot. But I am not. If anything, I am a schizoglot. I am functionally illiterate in five foreign languages and a bluthering idiot in my native tongue. I know the word for "whore" in all five of those languages, but I'm not sure I could find a bathroom if my life depended on it. I do not believe I am fluent in anything.
My attempts at learning language have been mostly frustrating and wholly unsuccessful. It is hard to find anyone, for one, who doesn't speak better English than your piddling amount of whatever language it is you hope to learn. So you wind up speaking English with your language tutors. Plus, at least for me, the gumption to learn a language evaporates once I am surrounded by it. In Germany, I studied Polish. In Poland, I studied German. In Korea, I studied everything but Korean.
Wendy is my Mandarin tutor. She is a graduate student majoring in Teaching Mandarin as a Foreign Language - TMFL? She has as much gumption to teach me as I have to learn. When we first met, I cautiously posed six hours a week, fearing that I'd jumped the gun, that it was too much for her hectic schedule. "Why not eight?" she asked. "Or more? Any time you're bored, call me and we'll have class."
Well, then. After my first month in Nanchong, I feared that I would leave China with less Chinese than I had when I came, that I would curl up in a ball on my pleather sofa watching 2001: A Space Odyssey until every muscle and brain cell in my body atrophied and expired. But now it seems I will leave this place fluent in Mandarin, all because I bothered to answer a phone call from an unknown number on a rainy Thursday evening as I was walking back to my apartment with a bowl of ramen.
I have never gotten to the point with a language where I felt the flaps go up and the whole mother start to lift off into the fluent air. Perhaps I came close with Spanish, at 3 AM on some wild night a few days before I left Mexico. It is hard to tell with Chinese. Mandarin is an abyss of a language, a tongue so different from our own that you could lose a lifetime in studying it. But there are moments - when I've slept well and I've slurped down just the right amount of coffee - when I can feel the vertical lift pulling me skyward.
There are good days and better days. On the better days, I wake up and can barely lift my head because it is so heavy with fresh neural connections. Forgive me for referencing There Will Be Blood two posts in a row, but it's a bit like the scene where H.W. is learning sign language: I bitch to my tutor about what's chapping my ass. She listens and, every so often, corrects me.
On the good days, I feel like I'm making no progress at all and I can see myself frozen lizardlike on the side of a plateau covered in Chinese hieroglyphs that stretches up into the heavens and beyond.
There is the added difficulty that the people around me are not speaking Mandarin, but Sichuanese. As far as dialects go, Mandarin and Sichuanese are fairly similar. But in essence, I am learning Queen's English in a place that speaks Creole. The more Mandarin I learn, the less I understand the cab driver. I would like to master both tongues, but I am uncertain as to whether I should learn to speak like an anchorman before I go out and get myself dirty, or whether I should go the Pygmalion route and learn to be a Cockney first.
Like China itself, Chinese grew overcrowded with words, so they started stacking them vertically into tones. Ma, depending on your intonation, can mean horse, mom, morphine, numb, grasshopper, ant, dragonfly, toad, or leprosy. Liang kuai can mean two bucks, or nice and cool. And so on. This is the main distinction between Mandarin and Sichuanese: two of the four tones are reversed and the other two are completely different. On top of that, the Sichuanese pronounce things strangely. The numbers four and ten, as well as the verbs to be, to eat, and to die sound exactly the same to the untrained ear. So the sentence "It's not fourteen, it's forty-four," easily parsable in Mandarin, sounds something like "Bu suh suh suh, suh suh suh suh."
But for now, I focus on the basics. Today I broke down giggling after I asked Wendy the words for number one and number two. On Chinese toilets, I have seen them represented by the symbol for small and the symbol for big.
"So you want to know pee and poop?" she asked. I bit my tongue and nodded. Then I lost it again. Then I recovered.
"Sorry," I told her. "I am a child."
"We say xiao hao for take a pee and da hao for take a poop."
"Little number and big number. We say the same thing in English, sort of," I said. "Thank you. I'll never forget them."
And I won't. To your tutor's chagrin, though you may forget the words for Christmas and autumn and environment, you will never forget pee and poop and an endless litany of other crudities that you might recite on your deathbed, should you so happen to expire in China.
Cellphone's Dead
My least favorite invention of the modern era is the cellular phone. With regard to cell phones, I am a luddite. Not that I don't own one, or use it as an alarm clock. But unless you're my lady friend, I may not answer your calls for weeks at a time. I apologize. I enjoy solitude, I suppose, but I think it has more to do with keeping focused on my surroundings. I like to concentrate on the person I'm talking to, the book I'm reading, or the fishy-flavored eggplant I'm eating. Answering the phone, for me, is like making a Monty Python scene jump: and now for something completely different ...
In China, I have come close to pitching my phone in the lake. If you were to browse my contacts list, you would find five or six good friends, two or three coworkers, and upwards of forty people I have no recollection of whatsoever. They have names like Hill and Lemon and Eros and Pumpkin and Circle and Dynasty. These are the names of Host Country Nationals, in peacecorpsspeak, who at one time or another approached me on the street for English lessons. I am much too polite to deny anyone my phone number, but if I were to answer all of their calls, I would turn into an itinerant pro bono English-teaching hobo. Unfortunately, my aloofness often comes back to bite me in the ass, as was the case with my most recent stalker. We'll call her Sunshine.
Sunshine got my number by interrupting last Monday's Mandarin class to ask for it. She then followed me for several blocks and waited for my tutor to leave so she could ask me for English lessons, and so on. Over the next week, she called me fifteen times a day, starting at 7:30 AM and persisting until ten at night. I had managed to avoid her until yesterday, when she materialized in the street and followed me and my tutor on our after-class walk. She didn't say a word, just lurked behind us, waiting. After parting ways with my tutor, I ran into the Mennonites. We exchanged fist pounds. Then Sunshine made her move.
"Excuse me," she said to the Mennonites. "I want to be Keith friend, but he never, never, never pick up he phone!"
The Mennonites chuckled.
"Yeah," said Phil. "He's a shady fella when it comes to phones."
"So, I don't want to be Keith friend anymore. I want to be you friend."
She asked them when they were free to teach her English and somehow, in their smooth West Coast way, the Mennonites dodged her. They invited me to dinner and, already having a Daniel Plainview afternoon, I politely declined.
"Thanks. But I think I need to get back to my apartment," I said, "and away from these ... people."
I took ten paces in the opposite direction before I heard my name.
"Keith, do you have free time now?"
It was Sunshine.
"I think I'd better go home and rest," I said.
"How about tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow I have class."
"How about after class?"
"Perhaps," I said.
"You had better pick up your phone."
"I will."
But I didn't, I haven't, and I won't. It sits there on the desk in front of me, rattling and jingling and buzzing its way towards the ledge, where it looks like it might drop into the trash can if Sunshine calls again. And there she is. And there it goes. Nothing but net.
In China, I have come close to pitching my phone in the lake. If you were to browse my contacts list, you would find five or six good friends, two or three coworkers, and upwards of forty people I have no recollection of whatsoever. They have names like Hill and Lemon and Eros and Pumpkin and Circle and Dynasty. These are the names of Host Country Nationals, in peacecorpsspeak, who at one time or another approached me on the street for English lessons. I am much too polite to deny anyone my phone number, but if I were to answer all of their calls, I would turn into an itinerant pro bono English-teaching hobo. Unfortunately, my aloofness often comes back to bite me in the ass, as was the case with my most recent stalker. We'll call her Sunshine.
Sunshine got my number by interrupting last Monday's Mandarin class to ask for it. She then followed me for several blocks and waited for my tutor to leave so she could ask me for English lessons, and so on. Over the next week, she called me fifteen times a day, starting at 7:30 AM and persisting until ten at night. I had managed to avoid her until yesterday, when she materialized in the street and followed me and my tutor on our after-class walk. She didn't say a word, just lurked behind us, waiting. After parting ways with my tutor, I ran into the Mennonites. We exchanged fist pounds. Then Sunshine made her move.
"Excuse me," she said to the Mennonites. "I want to be Keith friend, but he never, never, never pick up he phone!"
The Mennonites chuckled.
"Yeah," said Phil. "He's a shady fella when it comes to phones."
"So, I don't want to be Keith friend anymore. I want to be you friend."
She asked them when they were free to teach her English and somehow, in their smooth West Coast way, the Mennonites dodged her. They invited me to dinner and, already having a Daniel Plainview afternoon, I politely declined.
"Thanks. But I think I need to get back to my apartment," I said, "and away from these ... people."
I took ten paces in the opposite direction before I heard my name.
"Keith, do you have free time now?"
It was Sunshine.
"I think I'd better go home and rest," I said.
"How about tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow I have class."
"How about after class?"
"Perhaps," I said.
"You had better pick up your phone."
"I will."
But I didn't, I haven't, and I won't. It sits there on the desk in front of me, rattling and jingling and buzzing its way towards the ledge, where it looks like it might drop into the trash can if Sunshine calls again. And there she is. And there it goes. Nothing but net.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)