My favorite street in all of Nanchong is Yuying Lu, Teach Bravery Road. It is the only street in town that you might be inclined to call "pretty." Absent are China's ubiquitous coal-stained, white-tiled, blue-windowed, barred-in twelve-story apartment buildings. The shops that line Yuying Road are two stories and two stories only, and they are made of red brick. On Yuying Road there are trees and wide sidewalks, and bicycle lanes that the cars keep out of most of the time. In short, it is a street that feels as though it were designed for humans. Yes, the city planning commission must have thought things through for at least five minutes before they started building Yuying Road.
I will often take the bus to Yuying Road simply for the pleasure of walking beneath the relatively green boughs of its relatively living trees. But it also happens to be home to the only bar worth going to, and the only coffee shop worth going to.
The bar specializes in overpriced Coors Light, and it reeks of burnt popcorn at all times. The owner has an affinity for badly scratched Celine Dion CDs. Still, I will be charitable and maintain that it is the only bar worth going to in Nanchong.
There are two coffee shops on Yuying Road, but only one of them is worth going to. The other seems to double as a massage parlor, as its windows are painted over with cleavage and thighs, and I have never in all my passings seen anyone go in or come out.
The coffee shop I go to is named Little Prince Coffee. I like to go there with an empty notebook and sit for hours, deluding myself that I am making progress in some direction or another. The first time I went, I thought about walking back out straightaway, as the house brew cost a staggering three dollars. But I decided to treat myself, and in so doing, began to accumulate that mysterious socioeconomic grease that the Chinese refer to as guanxi.
The first day, they charged me full price for two coffees, but gave me a membership card. The second day, I got one free coffee, and the waitress asked me if I had eaten. The third day, the waitress bought me a pack of cigarettes after I had run out. Tonight, the owner himself asked me whether I had eaten. When I answered in the affirmative, he insisted that I sit with him and eat again.
I have rounded a corner with Mandarin: people laugh less at my mistakes than they do at my jokes. That is not to say that they don't laugh at my mistakes. Nor is it to say that my jokes are the least bit witty. My Chinese humor runs in the Seinfeldian vein: what is the deal with Chinese drivers? what is the deal with hot pot? what is the deal ... and so on with the deals. But I am happy to be of some amusement to people. I imagine my Chinese self as a kind of deranged, wild-eyed Slav who goes on long tirades in his sub-Russian brogue, mixing up the words for household objects and school supplies with those of vegetables and genitalia. "And then I opened the potato, walked in, and discovered that my ass had fallen off!" he might shout, amidst much laughter that he doesn't understand.
After dinner and many such ill-fated tirades, the owner gave me a free bag of espresso ("We're closed during the daytime," he explained) and after I'd paid my share of the bill, he offered to drive me home. A few of his long-haired friends tagged along. I asked whether they lived near the university and they all shook their heads no. "We have some important business to do in the neighborhood," explained the owner. And in saying that, I noticed that he had slowed the car to scope out some of the nightclubs we were passing.
"What about that one?" he asked the other guys.
"They won't be there tonight," said the kid next to me.
"Okay, then how about this one?" He stopped the car in front of a place called "1984."
"Hao, hao, hao, hao, hao," said the kid. Good, good, good, good, good ...
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Mutations
I showed up at The Jack Bar around ten. Lisa snapped her fingers and some teenager in a cowboy hat appeared with two bottles of Kingway, already opened. Another young buckaroo handed me a pack of cigarettes.
"Please wait," said Lisa. "I go and get your new guitar."
I sat at the bar while she rummaged around in a storage closet.
"Nice hat," I said to one of the buckaroos. "You like working here?"
He nodded, chuckled nervously, and resumed staring out into nowhere.
Lisa slid a guitar case across the bar and opened it.
"It cost 2,500 yuan," she said. I whistled: 400 dollars. I took the guitar out of its case and cradled it in my arms like a newborn.
"What will you play for us tonight?" she asked.
"I was thinking that each week I'd play one of my favorite albums," I said in bad Chinese. "Tonight I am going to play Mutations by Beck."
She smiled politely. Then the lights dimmed and a spotlight flashed on a metal pole in the middle of the room, where a nice-looking college girl stood in a black miniskirt and torn fishnet stockings. My opening act was a pole dancer.
One week earlier, on my birthday, I had swaggered into The Jack Bar, seized the communal guitar and strummed a series of woebegone ballads that, apparently, made the owner cry. She approached me later that evening and offered me money to play at her bar. I declined the cash, explaining that I was a volunteer and was thus bound by an American oath of poverty, but that I wouldn't turn my nose up at free beer.
"How much beer?" she asked.
I shrugged. "Enough?"
Those were the terms of our contract: you show up three nights a week and play songs that no one will like, and we will provide a guitar and all the formaldehyde lager your renal system can handle. The only part I objected to was Lisa's insistence that I wear a misshapen felt cowboy hat during my set, but I figured if the teenaged wait staff had to wear them, why shouldn't I? It was, after all, a cowboy bar.
The spotlight veered away from the pole dancer and wandered like a lazy eye towards the stage, where I sat in my misshapen felt cowboy hat, strumming a sleeping guitar. The show was delayed by some technical difficulties. For about ten minutes, I subjected the crowd to glorious blasts of feedback and flatulent bursts of static. They covered their ears and groaned while a flurry of teenagers in cowboy hats scurried about the stage with mic cables and rolls of electrical tape. I was enjoying myself. In a land where everything is dissonant except the music, I was happy to be leveling some Western distortion upon my already dismayed audience.
Finally, one of the buckaroos gave me a thumbs up. I strummed a D chord.
"Alright," I said. "My name's Pan Da. I will be your entertainment this evening."
Some puzzled Sichuanese squawks: Pan Daaa?! Pan ... Daaaaaaaa?!
"That's right. Pan/Da. First tone/second tone," I said. "This one's called 'Cold Brains.'"
The guitar sounded delicious. I have spent the whole of my puberty and young adulthood tinkering with thrift store junkers, so playing a 2,500 kuai acoustic/electric over a KTV PA system was almost too hi-fi for my lo-fi nerves to handle. And wonderfully, the guitar was turned up high enough that the chords crackled ever so slightly against the back wall. Dissonance, American delinquentism, my toes curled with delight. And then the buckaroos came galloping back on stage. "No! No! No!"
I stopped playing. One of the buckaroos turned the guitar down, cranked my microphone way up into the red, and added some greasy karaoke reverb for good measure. I thanked him dubiously and took Mutations again from the top.
I play guitar the way Woody Allen might, with lots of musical stutters, a consistently nauseous look upon my face, and occasional breakdowns of the nervous, non-musical sort. It took me two weeks just to get where I could play a single one of Mutations' eleven tracks straight through without collapsing in a fit of profanities, or giggles. So when I slammed the last chord of Cold Brains, it was as though I'd just nailed a triple lutz: I looked around the bar for a Béla Károlyi to hug. But all was silent - just the rattling of dice and the clinking of glasses. Nobody even seemed to be looking at me anymore. I shrugged and set about detuning the guitar for Nobody's Fault But My Own.
"Alright," I said, playing to my profoundly male, profoundly Chinese audience, "this is the kind of song you might listen to if you just broke up with your girlfriend."
Small amount of feedback.
"You know, break up. Girlfriend," I said. "I know some of you guys have done that, right?"
I translated everything into Chinese for good measure: girlfriend, break up, nü pengyou, fen shou le. Dead silence, murmuring. So I played the second song of the set, without many hitches. And the third. Not a clap to be found. After Tropicalia, my index finger started gushing blood. I held it up to the spotlight and the crowd withered disgustedly. I asked Lisa for a band-aid, a guitar pick, and another bottle of Kingway.
I began to wonder what exactly I was doing wrong. During my short time in this country, I've seen the Chinese masses applaud juggling midgets, prerecorded TV shows, and unsuccessful magic tricks. My students have been known to give me a standing O for coming to class in a clean shirt. And now I'd even seen a bar full of Chinese men applaud a pole dancer. So surely the spectacle of a somewhat bearded foreigner strumming his native instrument, albeit sloppily, deserved some form of recognition, didn't it? The fact that I was playing the entirety of a fairly inaccessible concept album about matrons and gigolos and robots vibrating with pleasure - well, what did that matter? Nobody could understand me in the first place, right? So what was the problem? Not for the first time, it struck me as a particularly cruel irony that as foreigners, we are only invisible precisely in the two places we don't want to be: in the classroom, and on stage.
But the crowd loved me, in a way. They wanted me to drink with them. Throughout the second half of my set, one by one, tubby men in polo shirts and windbreakers and weird glam-ass sunglasses would stumble up to the microphone with a bottle of Kingway and demand that I sit at their table. They would fiddle with my microphone, strum my guitar for me, remove my hat and wear it themselves. I gave them my best harried westerner look: wait a minute, I'm busy right now! Between songs, I tried to quell the onslaught of sexually frustrated fortysomethings by explaining that I would be right with them in three songs. It didn't work. During Dead Melodies, my favorite of all psycho-morbid Beck ballads, tables of men were barking, "COME HERE! COME HERE!"
And so, as inclined as I was to torment those rowdy Jack Bar scenesters with the bonus noise track from Mutations, I closed out my set with a wispy little A chord and ran off to sit with a couple of Inner Mongolians. There are many social situations in China that you cannot escape from, and I could tell this was one of them. I knew I would remain with the Inner Mongolians until the sun came up.
One of the Inner Mongolians was lithe and athletic, the other ogreish and missing a few teeth. We spoke Chinese for the most part, but the ogreish Inner Mongolian, after a few too many Kingways, began to resort to English. The only word he possessed full command over was "FRIEND." So he would point at himself, point at me, and in his thunderous baritone he would intone the word, "FRIEND. FRIEND!" I would nod and say, yes. Friend! "FRIEND. FRIEND!" Yes. Friend! It went on like that for hours.
The Inner Mongolians threw me in the back of a cab. They wanted to get something to eat. It was 2:30 AM. This wouldn't end well for anyone. They took me to a seafood place in some dark corner of Nanchong that I couldn't find again if I tried. We ate clams, shrimp, squid, all of it basted in a retina-melting wasabi sauce. After we'd eaten a few pounds of the stuff, the ogreish Inner Mongolian circled our dishes with his finger and said, in Chinese, "The sea is very far away from Sichuan. All of this food has been frozen for a very long time."
There was no ominous intent in his statement. And of course, I'd known what I was getting into all along. But already, I could feel a sinking sensation in my stomach, and over the next several days that sensation would blossom and expand until there was nothing left of my body but stomach. And let this be the segue into my next post, a post about intestinal parasites and the joys thereof.
"Please wait," said Lisa. "I go and get your new guitar."
I sat at the bar while she rummaged around in a storage closet.
"Nice hat," I said to one of the buckaroos. "You like working here?"
He nodded, chuckled nervously, and resumed staring out into nowhere.
Lisa slid a guitar case across the bar and opened it.
"It cost 2,500 yuan," she said. I whistled: 400 dollars. I took the guitar out of its case and cradled it in my arms like a newborn.
"What will you play for us tonight?" she asked.
"I was thinking that each week I'd play one of my favorite albums," I said in bad Chinese. "Tonight I am going to play Mutations by Beck."
She smiled politely. Then the lights dimmed and a spotlight flashed on a metal pole in the middle of the room, where a nice-looking college girl stood in a black miniskirt and torn fishnet stockings. My opening act was a pole dancer.
One week earlier, on my birthday, I had swaggered into The Jack Bar, seized the communal guitar and strummed a series of woebegone ballads that, apparently, made the owner cry. She approached me later that evening and offered me money to play at her bar. I declined the cash, explaining that I was a volunteer and was thus bound by an American oath of poverty, but that I wouldn't turn my nose up at free beer.
"How much beer?" she asked.
I shrugged. "Enough?"
Those were the terms of our contract: you show up three nights a week and play songs that no one will like, and we will provide a guitar and all the formaldehyde lager your renal system can handle. The only part I objected to was Lisa's insistence that I wear a misshapen felt cowboy hat during my set, but I figured if the teenaged wait staff had to wear them, why shouldn't I? It was, after all, a cowboy bar.
The spotlight veered away from the pole dancer and wandered like a lazy eye towards the stage, where I sat in my misshapen felt cowboy hat, strumming a sleeping guitar. The show was delayed by some technical difficulties. For about ten minutes, I subjected the crowd to glorious blasts of feedback and flatulent bursts of static. They covered their ears and groaned while a flurry of teenagers in cowboy hats scurried about the stage with mic cables and rolls of electrical tape. I was enjoying myself. In a land where everything is dissonant except the music, I was happy to be leveling some Western distortion upon my already dismayed audience.
Finally, one of the buckaroos gave me a thumbs up. I strummed a D chord.
"Alright," I said. "My name's Pan Da. I will be your entertainment this evening."
Some puzzled Sichuanese squawks: Pan Daaa?! Pan ... Daaaaaaaa?!
"That's right. Pan/Da. First tone/second tone," I said. "This one's called 'Cold Brains.'"
The guitar sounded delicious. I have spent the whole of my puberty and young adulthood tinkering with thrift store junkers, so playing a 2,500 kuai acoustic/electric over a KTV PA system was almost too hi-fi for my lo-fi nerves to handle. And wonderfully, the guitar was turned up high enough that the chords crackled ever so slightly against the back wall. Dissonance, American delinquentism, my toes curled with delight. And then the buckaroos came galloping back on stage. "No! No! No!"
I stopped playing. One of the buckaroos turned the guitar down, cranked my microphone way up into the red, and added some greasy karaoke reverb for good measure. I thanked him dubiously and took Mutations again from the top.
I play guitar the way Woody Allen might, with lots of musical stutters, a consistently nauseous look upon my face, and occasional breakdowns of the nervous, non-musical sort. It took me two weeks just to get where I could play a single one of Mutations' eleven tracks straight through without collapsing in a fit of profanities, or giggles. So when I slammed the last chord of Cold Brains, it was as though I'd just nailed a triple lutz: I looked around the bar for a Béla Károlyi to hug. But all was silent - just the rattling of dice and the clinking of glasses. Nobody even seemed to be looking at me anymore. I shrugged and set about detuning the guitar for Nobody's Fault But My Own.
"Alright," I said, playing to my profoundly male, profoundly Chinese audience, "this is the kind of song you might listen to if you just broke up with your girlfriend."
Small amount of feedback.
"You know, break up. Girlfriend," I said. "I know some of you guys have done that, right?"
I translated everything into Chinese for good measure: girlfriend, break up, nü pengyou, fen shou le. Dead silence, murmuring. So I played the second song of the set, without many hitches. And the third. Not a clap to be found. After Tropicalia, my index finger started gushing blood. I held it up to the spotlight and the crowd withered disgustedly. I asked Lisa for a band-aid, a guitar pick, and another bottle of Kingway.
I began to wonder what exactly I was doing wrong. During my short time in this country, I've seen the Chinese masses applaud juggling midgets, prerecorded TV shows, and unsuccessful magic tricks. My students have been known to give me a standing O for coming to class in a clean shirt. And now I'd even seen a bar full of Chinese men applaud a pole dancer. So surely the spectacle of a somewhat bearded foreigner strumming his native instrument, albeit sloppily, deserved some form of recognition, didn't it? The fact that I was playing the entirety of a fairly inaccessible concept album about matrons and gigolos and robots vibrating with pleasure - well, what did that matter? Nobody could understand me in the first place, right? So what was the problem? Not for the first time, it struck me as a particularly cruel irony that as foreigners, we are only invisible precisely in the two places we don't want to be: in the classroom, and on stage.
But the crowd loved me, in a way. They wanted me to drink with them. Throughout the second half of my set, one by one, tubby men in polo shirts and windbreakers and weird glam-ass sunglasses would stumble up to the microphone with a bottle of Kingway and demand that I sit at their table. They would fiddle with my microphone, strum my guitar for me, remove my hat and wear it themselves. I gave them my best harried westerner look: wait a minute, I'm busy right now! Between songs, I tried to quell the onslaught of sexually frustrated fortysomethings by explaining that I would be right with them in three songs. It didn't work. During Dead Melodies, my favorite of all psycho-morbid Beck ballads, tables of men were barking, "COME HERE! COME HERE!"
And so, as inclined as I was to torment those rowdy Jack Bar scenesters with the bonus noise track from Mutations, I closed out my set with a wispy little A chord and ran off to sit with a couple of Inner Mongolians. There are many social situations in China that you cannot escape from, and I could tell this was one of them. I knew I would remain with the Inner Mongolians until the sun came up.
One of the Inner Mongolians was lithe and athletic, the other ogreish and missing a few teeth. We spoke Chinese for the most part, but the ogreish Inner Mongolian, after a few too many Kingways, began to resort to English. The only word he possessed full command over was "FRIEND." So he would point at himself, point at me, and in his thunderous baritone he would intone the word, "FRIEND. FRIEND!" I would nod and say, yes. Friend! "FRIEND. FRIEND!" Yes. Friend! It went on like that for hours.
The Inner Mongolians threw me in the back of a cab. They wanted to get something to eat. It was 2:30 AM. This wouldn't end well for anyone. They took me to a seafood place in some dark corner of Nanchong that I couldn't find again if I tried. We ate clams, shrimp, squid, all of it basted in a retina-melting wasabi sauce. After we'd eaten a few pounds of the stuff, the ogreish Inner Mongolian circled our dishes with his finger and said, in Chinese, "The sea is very far away from Sichuan. All of this food has been frozen for a very long time."
There was no ominous intent in his statement. And of course, I'd known what I was getting into all along. But already, I could feel a sinking sensation in my stomach, and over the next several days that sensation would blossom and expand until there was nothing left of my body but stomach. And let this be the segue into my next post, a post about intestinal parasites and the joys thereof.
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
Rising Tone/Falling Tone
Several months ago, I began practicing my Chinese with an eccentric Swedish internet personality named Serge Melnyk. Though his choppy Scandinavian English added yet another layer of misunderstanding to my already muddled efforts at self-instruction, his lessons were concise and useful, and gradually I grew to trust him.
One December evening, seated in my meat locker of a living room with a space heater tilted up towards my rump, I came across a lesson entitled "Annoyances in China: Protect Yourself." I downloaded it and duly committed Mr. Melnyk's phrases to memory.
These are not the sorts of expressions one learns in elementary German or Spanish, but they have served me well thus far in China. People do bother foreigners here: they stare at them, follow them, and on a couple of occasions, complete strangers have manhandled me in ways that have made my copious Western body hair stand on end. So, armed with some foreknowledge of their utility, I started belting these phrases out to no one, while my next-door neighbors - who are always audible through the crumbling wall that divides our two apartments - probably wondered whether I was finally suffering my first schizophrenic break.
Don't bother me! Don't touch me! Piss off! I barked, growing secretly eager for an opportunity to put those words to use. I wouldn't have to wait long, of course. Scarcely a day goes by in Nanchong without some sort of insane encounter on the street. But testosterone and adrenaline make for a nasty cocktail, and when those epic confrontations finally came, I found that my remedial tough guy Chinese was nowhere to be found, because all words had vanished from my mind but one: why?
A few weeks after my lesson with Mr. Melnyk, I was eating a bowl of gourmet ramen at the Muslim noodle joint next to the old campus. Two men in their mid-forties sat down across from me and stared with such intensity that I could see their black eyes reflected in the layer of oil floating on the surface of my noodle broth. I did what I usually do in those situations: I buried my face in my noodles and didn't look up. I ate quickly and called for the check. But when I made my way out to the street, the two men followed me. One of them caught me by the arm and asked me where I was going.
"I'm going home," I said, and walked in the opposite direction.
The other man grabbed me by the sleeve and pulled me back towards him.
"Come with us," he said. "We'll take you home."
I jerked free of his grip and turned to look him and his accomplice in the eyes. They were smiling in a non-threatening way, but when I turned to walk away, one of the men started yanking at the sleeve of my suitcoat, the beloved 200 kuai suitcoat that I bought two years ago from a tailor in Hangzhou and have worn every day since. I am a tolerant man, perhaps even a pacifist, but if there is a short road to a foreigner's fist in your face, it runs through the sleeve of his fitted Hangzhou suitcoat.
"Where are you going?" shouted the man. "Come with us! We'll take you home!"
By then we were tangled up in the middle of a four-lane road, the gusts of passing cars jostling us in both directions at once. The two men were hanging onto my suitcoat and crowds were forming on both sides of the street to observe the spectacle.
"No. I'm not going with you," I hissed through clenched teeth. My hands were shaking. "I'm taking the bus."
I pointed across the street, where the last school bus of the evening was pulling out onto the main road. I tried to swat the men away and make a run for it, but they held fast.
There were phrases I had learned for just this kind of situation - don't touch me! piss off! - but they had vanished. All that remained was the kind of seething male rage that leads men to do idiotic things. The only words that I could muster were wei shenme: why?
Luckily, a passing motorcycle almost clipped us and I was able to break free. When one of the men reached after me, I smacked his hand away. Then I dashed between a Toyotavan and an oncoming taxi, flagged down the bus, and hoisted myself aboard. From the window, I could see the two men standing in the middle of the road, looking baffled and insulted, watching me as I glided past. I hid my face behind a book and sat there for a long time without reading it. After a while, I was surprised to find myself feeling somewhat guilty about the whole thing. Perhaps, after all, they were just offering me a ride home.
I decided to beef up a bit in the weeks that followed. I started doing push-ups in my living room and pull-ups on the rusty bars down in the mudpit behind the stadium. There was no point in jogging, because where I live it is a hazard to one's health.
A few months passed. My understanding of the language improved, but Chinese crowd dynamics continued to elude me. Going out in public remained a crap shoot. There were often friendly encounters, or innocuous ones. There was also a vast gray area of hah-loos that might have been well-meant or mocking - it was impossible to tell. I never quite felt comfortable outside of my apartment, knowing that any second some anonymous arm could yank me out of the crowd and things could turn very weird indeed.
And then, the night before I left for Yunnan Province, it happened: Round Two. Pan Da vs. Nanchong - fight! I was downtown, it was late in the evening. Up and down the street, the red Spring Festival lanterns had just switched on and the night began to feel oddly Christmassy. I swung by my usual shop to buy a pack of Pandas. I was handing a fistful of kuai to the cashier when someone seized my free arm from behind and started pulling. The cashier reached for my money, but the man had already succeeded in dragging me halfway out the door. I whirled around to see who my assailant was this time: a squat, oily man in his mid-forties. He was yanking me by the sleeve of my field jacket and absurdly, because my old Pumas no longer had any traction to their soles, I was sliding across the linoleum floor. I smacked the man's arm away and shouted wei shenme? Why? The shopkeepers were still standing behind the counter, watching with great interest, and already a small crowd had materialized just outside the door.
"What are you doing right now?" barked the man.
"I'm trying to buy cigarettes. Who are you?"
"Are you working right now?" he asked.
"No."
"Let's go!" he shouted, and once again grabbed my arm and started dragging me, grunting and puffing, hunched and tromping towards the street with my sleeve stretched tight across his back, like Chinese Sisyphus lugging a laowai up the side of a mountain.
By then, I was an unthinking beast. Six months of heckling, of shouted hah-loos and murmured laowais, and now this - this man had finally blown my head gasket. I was enraged. I wanted to punch indiscriminately. But, to my credit I suppose, I simply swatted his arm away once more, turned around, and handed ten kuai to the cashier. She slid my pack of Pandas across the counter without a word. The man, crestfallen, slinked outside and waited for me in the street, where the crowd that had assembled for the impending throw-down was slowly beginning to disperse.
As I came out of the shop, the man produced a cigarette and thrust it in front of my mouth.
"No," I said. "Wo bu chou yan."
This meant two things: I don't smoke in general, and I don't want to smoke right now, both of which were obvious lies, as my next act was to light up one of my own cigarettes and throw myself into the nearest vacant taxi. It was the harshest insult I could level given the circumstances. To deny a man's cigarette is a pretty severe slight in this country. I didn't want to fight, or even to belittle the man. I simply wanted to send the message that grabbing a stranger by the sleeve and dragging him out the door is not a wise thing to do; no sane Chinese person would even think of doing it to another Chinese person, so why do it to a foreigner? And yet, as the cab sputtered away from the man standing there, mouth agape, at the curb, I was once again assailed by guilt. Perhaps the poor guy, after all, had just wanted to get me drunk.
These sorts of encounters are not common, which is why I have written about them. They stand out, is all. Over the course of eight months, I have been physically harassed three or four times, which isn't all that bad considering the amount of attention I attract everywhere I go.
Most of that attention is overwhelmingly positive. The Chinese people, generally, will bend every which way to make sure that I get where I'm trying to go, and that I get there safely and on time. I have been lavished with kindness that I cannot possibly repay, both because I am unused to such hospitality in the West, and because the Chinese refuse to accept anything in return. It is nothing, they will say, and they mean it. And how could I repay China for the countless dinners, for the too many drinks, for the companionship and compassion with which most of the people here have welcomed me? I couldn't begin to. I am a volunteer and I don't have the do-re-mi to return what I owe to this country.
And yet the kindness, too, is special treatment. Nobody buys the peasants dinner. I am a foreigner, so for good or for ill, I am treated like a foreigner. After a while, even kindness becomes exhausting.
A student once asked me what Chinese people should call "my people." Should I call your people laowai, she asked, or waiguoren (foreigner), or waiguo pengyou (foreign friend), or what? My answer surprised her and me alike: I told her that I'd rather nobody called me anything. It surprised her, perhaps, because it was unthinkable that my motley crew of golden-haired, tattooed, multicolored people should go without a label. And it surprised me because, up until that moment, I hadn't realized that it wasn't the various Chinese words for foreigner that irked me, but the fact that those words were spoken at all.
It is naive to expect that the Chinese will treat me, a foreigner, precisely the same way they would treat a Chinese shish-kebab vendor or a Chinese shopkeeper or a Chinese salaryman. We are too new, and China is too complex for that. But all special treatment - whether it is a cat call or a free shot of Crown Royal from a complete stranger - amounts, in the foreigner's mind, to the same thing: you are a foreigner, you are different. That sentiment can seem like a warm welcome, or it can feel like a boot in the ass.
A laowai's life is a dizzying collage of wonderful and horrific moments. Immigrants the world over experience the heights of human kindness and the depths of human fear and ignorance. There is very little in between. In the day to day life of a laowai, one day will scarcely resemble the next. There are wonderful days and terrible days, up days and down days - like the word lǎowài itself: a rising tone, a falling tone.
But the situation is not hopeless. I am reminded of a quote from the great Chinese author Lu Xun, a quote that has never been dearer to me than it is right now, as I type it:
The Peace Corps does not build houses in China. The Chinese are perfectly good at doing that for themselves. I wouldn't know where to begin with the construction of a 72-story residential megaplex anyhow. But lest one come to doubt the work that the volunteers are doing in this country, consider that we, in many ways, are the first ones to walk these roads. Most of the locals I talk to in Nanchong - a city of some 700,000 people - have never spoken with a foreigner before. For most of the shopkeepers and the barbers, the taxi drivers and the bus drivers, even for my college students and my fellow professors, I am the first contact they have ever had with that long feared, often maligned, occasionally admired and envied specter of The West. I am an English teacher, but that is only my part-time job. My real job is to make every first impression a positive one, and almost all of my interactions in this country are a first impression.
Among the people I talk to on a daily basis, taxi drivers are by far and away the most likely to have met a foreigner before. The other night, on the way home from Chongqing, the cabbie told me that my Chinese was very bang. But as usual, the more I spoke, the more sparse were his compliments, until by the end of the ride, I had been downgraded to a modest "not bad."
He mentioned that he'd met a foreigner before, that he used to drive the guy to school every so often.
"As far as I could tell," said the cabbie, "the foreigner could only speak three words of Chinese: Southwest Petroleum University."
The cabbie laughed and shook his head.
"He wasn't like you. Your Chinese is not too bad. This foreigner lived here for three years - three years! - and he couldn't say or understand anything. Just Southwest Petroleum University."
He chuckled and blared his horn at an onrushing gas tanker.
"Anyway," he said, "how many years have you been here?"
"About eight months," I said.
"Eight years," he said flatly.
"No, eight months."
"Eight months?" He looked me over in the rearview mirror. "Eight months! Yes, your Chinese is really not too bad for only eight months."
And it's really not that good, either. I don't study hard enough to speak good Chinese. But I do talk to people whenever I get the chance - usually old, poor people: amidst all the other changes they have seen in their lifetimes, a foreigner stumbling through their rice paddy isn't really all that surprising. But I'm not using them for language lessons. I'm not out to be the next Da Shan. I'm shooting for something a whole lot less ambitious. I'm hoping that by walking the same road over and over again, by eating the same ramen noodles at the same grimy hole in the wall every day, by joking with all the cabbies that drive me home at odd hours of the night, by doing all of these small things every day for two years and two months - I am hoping that the next volunteer who comes to Nanchong, or maybe the one after that, or the one after that, will have an easier time of it than I do in the year 2010, that he'll hop in a cab on a baijiu-soaked Friday night and the cabbie will say, "Yeah, I met a foreigner like you once. His Chinese wasn't too bad." He'll offer the foreigner a cigarette and the foreigner will politely stick it behind his ear. "Not as good as yours, of course. But not too bad."
One December evening, seated in my meat locker of a living room with a space heater tilted up towards my rump, I came across a lesson entitled "Annoyances in China: Protect Yourself." I downloaded it and duly committed Mr. Melnyk's phrases to memory.
Are you trying to cheat me?
Do I look like some kind of idiot?
Don't bother me!
Why are you following me?
Stop following me!
Don't touch me!
Piss off!
These are not the sorts of expressions one learns in elementary German or Spanish, but they have served me well thus far in China. People do bother foreigners here: they stare at them, follow them, and on a couple of occasions, complete strangers have manhandled me in ways that have made my copious Western body hair stand on end. So, armed with some foreknowledge of their utility, I started belting these phrases out to no one, while my next-door neighbors - who are always audible through the crumbling wall that divides our two apartments - probably wondered whether I was finally suffering my first schizophrenic break.
Don't bother me! Don't touch me! Piss off! I barked, growing secretly eager for an opportunity to put those words to use. I wouldn't have to wait long, of course. Scarcely a day goes by in Nanchong without some sort of insane encounter on the street. But testosterone and adrenaline make for a nasty cocktail, and when those epic confrontations finally came, I found that my remedial tough guy Chinese was nowhere to be found, because all words had vanished from my mind but one: why?
A few weeks after my lesson with Mr. Melnyk, I was eating a bowl of gourmet ramen at the Muslim noodle joint next to the old campus. Two men in their mid-forties sat down across from me and stared with such intensity that I could see their black eyes reflected in the layer of oil floating on the surface of my noodle broth. I did what I usually do in those situations: I buried my face in my noodles and didn't look up. I ate quickly and called for the check. But when I made my way out to the street, the two men followed me. One of them caught me by the arm and asked me where I was going.
"I'm going home," I said, and walked in the opposite direction.
The other man grabbed me by the sleeve and pulled me back towards him.
"Come with us," he said. "We'll take you home."
I jerked free of his grip and turned to look him and his accomplice in the eyes. They were smiling in a non-threatening way, but when I turned to walk away, one of the men started yanking at the sleeve of my suitcoat, the beloved 200 kuai suitcoat that I bought two years ago from a tailor in Hangzhou and have worn every day since. I am a tolerant man, perhaps even a pacifist, but if there is a short road to a foreigner's fist in your face, it runs through the sleeve of his fitted Hangzhou suitcoat.
"Where are you going?" shouted the man. "Come with us! We'll take you home!"
By then we were tangled up in the middle of a four-lane road, the gusts of passing cars jostling us in both directions at once. The two men were hanging onto my suitcoat and crowds were forming on both sides of the street to observe the spectacle.
"No. I'm not going with you," I hissed through clenched teeth. My hands were shaking. "I'm taking the bus."
I pointed across the street, where the last school bus of the evening was pulling out onto the main road. I tried to swat the men away and make a run for it, but they held fast.
There were phrases I had learned for just this kind of situation - don't touch me! piss off! - but they had vanished. All that remained was the kind of seething male rage that leads men to do idiotic things. The only words that I could muster were wei shenme: why?
Luckily, a passing motorcycle almost clipped us and I was able to break free. When one of the men reached after me, I smacked his hand away. Then I dashed between a Toyotavan and an oncoming taxi, flagged down the bus, and hoisted myself aboard. From the window, I could see the two men standing in the middle of the road, looking baffled and insulted, watching me as I glided past. I hid my face behind a book and sat there for a long time without reading it. After a while, I was surprised to find myself feeling somewhat guilty about the whole thing. Perhaps, after all, they were just offering me a ride home.
I decided to beef up a bit in the weeks that followed. I started doing push-ups in my living room and pull-ups on the rusty bars down in the mudpit behind the stadium. There was no point in jogging, because where I live it is a hazard to one's health.
A few months passed. My understanding of the language improved, but Chinese crowd dynamics continued to elude me. Going out in public remained a crap shoot. There were often friendly encounters, or innocuous ones. There was also a vast gray area of hah-loos that might have been well-meant or mocking - it was impossible to tell. I never quite felt comfortable outside of my apartment, knowing that any second some anonymous arm could yank me out of the crowd and things could turn very weird indeed.
And then, the night before I left for Yunnan Province, it happened: Round Two. Pan Da vs. Nanchong - fight! I was downtown, it was late in the evening. Up and down the street, the red Spring Festival lanterns had just switched on and the night began to feel oddly Christmassy. I swung by my usual shop to buy a pack of Pandas. I was handing a fistful of kuai to the cashier when someone seized my free arm from behind and started pulling. The cashier reached for my money, but the man had already succeeded in dragging me halfway out the door. I whirled around to see who my assailant was this time: a squat, oily man in his mid-forties. He was yanking me by the sleeve of my field jacket and absurdly, because my old Pumas no longer had any traction to their soles, I was sliding across the linoleum floor. I smacked the man's arm away and shouted wei shenme? Why? The shopkeepers were still standing behind the counter, watching with great interest, and already a small crowd had materialized just outside the door.
"What are you doing right now?" barked the man.
"I'm trying to buy cigarettes. Who are you?"
"Are you working right now?" he asked.
"No."
"Let's go!" he shouted, and once again grabbed my arm and started dragging me, grunting and puffing, hunched and tromping towards the street with my sleeve stretched tight across his back, like Chinese Sisyphus lugging a laowai up the side of a mountain.
By then, I was an unthinking beast. Six months of heckling, of shouted hah-loos and murmured laowais, and now this - this man had finally blown my head gasket. I was enraged. I wanted to punch indiscriminately. But, to my credit I suppose, I simply swatted his arm away once more, turned around, and handed ten kuai to the cashier. She slid my pack of Pandas across the counter without a word. The man, crestfallen, slinked outside and waited for me in the street, where the crowd that had assembled for the impending throw-down was slowly beginning to disperse.
As I came out of the shop, the man produced a cigarette and thrust it in front of my mouth.
"No," I said. "Wo bu chou yan."
This meant two things: I don't smoke in general, and I don't want to smoke right now, both of which were obvious lies, as my next act was to light up one of my own cigarettes and throw myself into the nearest vacant taxi. It was the harshest insult I could level given the circumstances. To deny a man's cigarette is a pretty severe slight in this country. I didn't want to fight, or even to belittle the man. I simply wanted to send the message that grabbing a stranger by the sleeve and dragging him out the door is not a wise thing to do; no sane Chinese person would even think of doing it to another Chinese person, so why do it to a foreigner? And yet, as the cab sputtered away from the man standing there, mouth agape, at the curb, I was once again assailed by guilt. Perhaps the poor guy, after all, had just wanted to get me drunk.
These sorts of encounters are not common, which is why I have written about them. They stand out, is all. Over the course of eight months, I have been physically harassed three or four times, which isn't all that bad considering the amount of attention I attract everywhere I go.
Most of that attention is overwhelmingly positive. The Chinese people, generally, will bend every which way to make sure that I get where I'm trying to go, and that I get there safely and on time. I have been lavished with kindness that I cannot possibly repay, both because I am unused to such hospitality in the West, and because the Chinese refuse to accept anything in return. It is nothing, they will say, and they mean it. And how could I repay China for the countless dinners, for the too many drinks, for the companionship and compassion with which most of the people here have welcomed me? I couldn't begin to. I am a volunteer and I don't have the do-re-mi to return what I owe to this country.
And yet the kindness, too, is special treatment. Nobody buys the peasants dinner. I am a foreigner, so for good or for ill, I am treated like a foreigner. After a while, even kindness becomes exhausting.
A student once asked me what Chinese people should call "my people." Should I call your people laowai, she asked, or waiguoren (foreigner), or waiguo pengyou (foreign friend), or what? My answer surprised her and me alike: I told her that I'd rather nobody called me anything. It surprised her, perhaps, because it was unthinkable that my motley crew of golden-haired, tattooed, multicolored people should go without a label. And it surprised me because, up until that moment, I hadn't realized that it wasn't the various Chinese words for foreigner that irked me, but the fact that those words were spoken at all.
It is naive to expect that the Chinese will treat me, a foreigner, precisely the same way they would treat a Chinese shish-kebab vendor or a Chinese shopkeeper or a Chinese salaryman. We are too new, and China is too complex for that. But all special treatment - whether it is a cat call or a free shot of Crown Royal from a complete stranger - amounts, in the foreigner's mind, to the same thing: you are a foreigner, you are different. That sentiment can seem like a warm welcome, or it can feel like a boot in the ass.
A laowai's life is a dizzying collage of wonderful and horrific moments. Immigrants the world over experience the heights of human kindness and the depths of human fear and ignorance. There is very little in between. In the day to day life of a laowai, one day will scarcely resemble the next. There are wonderful days and terrible days, up days and down days - like the word lǎowài itself: a rising tone, a falling tone.
But the situation is not hopeless. I am reminded of a quote from the great Chinese author Lu Xun, a quote that has never been dearer to me than it is right now, as I type it:
Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.
The Peace Corps does not build houses in China. The Chinese are perfectly good at doing that for themselves. I wouldn't know where to begin with the construction of a 72-story residential megaplex anyhow. But lest one come to doubt the work that the volunteers are doing in this country, consider that we, in many ways, are the first ones to walk these roads. Most of the locals I talk to in Nanchong - a city of some 700,000 people - have never spoken with a foreigner before. For most of the shopkeepers and the barbers, the taxi drivers and the bus drivers, even for my college students and my fellow professors, I am the first contact they have ever had with that long feared, often maligned, occasionally admired and envied specter of The West. I am an English teacher, but that is only my part-time job. My real job is to make every first impression a positive one, and almost all of my interactions in this country are a first impression.
Among the people I talk to on a daily basis, taxi drivers are by far and away the most likely to have met a foreigner before. The other night, on the way home from Chongqing, the cabbie told me that my Chinese was very bang. But as usual, the more I spoke, the more sparse were his compliments, until by the end of the ride, I had been downgraded to a modest "not bad."
He mentioned that he'd met a foreigner before, that he used to drive the guy to school every so often.
"As far as I could tell," said the cabbie, "the foreigner could only speak three words of Chinese: Southwest Petroleum University."
The cabbie laughed and shook his head.
"He wasn't like you. Your Chinese is not too bad. This foreigner lived here for three years - three years! - and he couldn't say or understand anything. Just Southwest Petroleum University."
He chuckled and blared his horn at an onrushing gas tanker.
"Anyway," he said, "how many years have you been here?"
"About eight months," I said.
"Eight years," he said flatly.
"No, eight months."
"Eight months?" He looked me over in the rearview mirror. "Eight months! Yes, your Chinese is really not too bad for only eight months."
And it's really not that good, either. I don't study hard enough to speak good Chinese. But I do talk to people whenever I get the chance - usually old, poor people: amidst all the other changes they have seen in their lifetimes, a foreigner stumbling through their rice paddy isn't really all that surprising. But I'm not using them for language lessons. I'm not out to be the next Da Shan. I'm shooting for something a whole lot less ambitious. I'm hoping that by walking the same road over and over again, by eating the same ramen noodles at the same grimy hole in the wall every day, by joking with all the cabbies that drive me home at odd hours of the night, by doing all of these small things every day for two years and two months - I am hoping that the next volunteer who comes to Nanchong, or maybe the one after that, or the one after that, will have an easier time of it than I do in the year 2010, that he'll hop in a cab on a baijiu-soaked Friday night and the cabbie will say, "Yeah, I met a foreigner like you once. His Chinese wasn't too bad." He'll offer the foreigner a cigarette and the foreigner will politely stick it behind his ear. "Not as good as yours, of course. But not too bad."
Monday, March 08, 2010
Opening Day
Teaching elementary school English in Korea was a lot like officiating hockey. The classrooms were cramped and sweaty, rinked in with Plexiglas windows that rattled in their frames whenever my third-graders slammed each other into the walls. I was constantly tossing kids in the penalty box for fighting, cross-checking, high-sticking, and activating the fire extinguishers in the back of the room. By the end of the day, the floor was so slick with squid guts, flame retardant foam and bodily fluids that you had to skate your way out.
Teaching college English in China is more like playing baseball. The atmosphere is breezy and meditative, the crowd sedate but chatty. The floor is littered with the shells of peanuts and sunflower seeds. The wrap-around auditorium seats fold down the way they do in a big league ballpark, and after the bell rings, all eyes are on the podium that stands atop the pitcher's mound where I, the pitcher, pitch my spiel.
I am no Pedro Martinez. If anything, I am a bumbling Wakefeldian knuckleballer. My windup is irregular, my ERA less than impressive. My fastball clocks in at around 60 MPH. I am superstitious, the kind of guy you might find in the grimiest corner of the dugout, rocking back and forth autistically in the minutes before gametime, spitting torrents of chew into a hollowed-out cucurbita gourd that I've kept around 17 years for good luck. I am valued less for my performance than I am for my presence in the locker room. I am not a franchise player, but I am a decent guy to have in the four or five slot on the rotation. I'm the sort of pitcher who walks more batters than he strikes out, loses more games than he wins, and spends more time on the DL than on the active roster. But the ballclub keeps me around anyway, because I'm cheap, and because among the coaching staff there remains some dim hope that perhaps one day, in the twilight of my career, when a dusty wind comes sweeping down from the Himalayas and blows through eastern Sichuan to make my knucklers dance and kowtow over the plate, I might just toss nine innings of no-hit ball.
Today was Opening Day. There were the usual Opening Day jitters. It's hard to keep your cool when fifty college kids shriek with horror as you walk into the classroom for the first time. I pitted out five minutes in and my knees trembled for the whole three hours. And there were broader anxieties: worrying whether I've still got "the stuff" or whether it's gone to pot during the off-season, wondering what kind of muscle I've got in the batting order, et al. But I pitched well. So well, in fact, that I half-expected someone to swat my ass on the way out to the bus.
I am teaching sophomores this semester, and there was a kind of electricity in the classroom that was lacking in my last batch of juniors. There was also literal electricity: computers with projector screens, televisions with DVD players. Never in my teaching career have I had so much technology at my disposal and I am at a loss for what to do with it. Probably nothing too exciting. I'm just thrilled that I can type things on the board rather than subjecting my students to my hideous chalkmanship, which must be as legible to them as Chinese is to you and me.
I gave my students fifteen minutes at the end of class to interview me. Over the past six months, I have learned my fair share of shortcuts. I outlawed the following questions:
1. Do you like China?
2. Do you like Chinese food?
3. Do you have a Chinese girlfriend?
4. Can you use chopsticks?
These are questions that your garden variety laowai gets fed up with after a few hours in country. They are also the only questions that most of the people in your life will ever ask you. So I was a bit taken aback when a cute little sophomore in the front row stood up and asked me about He Whose Name Cannot Be Named Right Now and just why my America is meeting with him at this tense juncture in our international relationship. There was the usual canned audience response - some oohs, some laughter - but there were more than a few students cheering her on.
"Well," I said, revving up my Ambiguous Nitpicky Geopolitical Situation Translator (ANGST) for the first time in two months. "Well."
The classroom fell silent. Even the ventilators seemed to be holding their breath.
"Well. As Americans, we often disagree with our government. So please do not judge us for our government's actions," I paused to let the cloud of platitudes envelop me, then I continued. "Speaking for the American people, I can say that we all respect the Chinese people. We have been business partners for a long time now, and I hope that we can become friends."
There was a smattering of applause from the far back, but the girl in the front row wasn't buying it.
"But Mr. Panda, with all due respect," she said, "that doesn't answer my question."
"Well," I said, and took a sip of coffee. Then I tilted my mug back and took a solid slurp of coffee. "Well. It's a very complicated situation and it is very hard to understand. Even I don't understand it. Maybe you guys understand it better than I do. In order to understand it, I think we need to look at – and hey, there's the bell!"
I blurted out the homework assignment and made a beeline for the dugout under a jeering cascade of hot dog wrappers, peanut shells and AA batteries, shielding my head as I leaped over the third base line, the young season's first complete game under my belt.
Teaching college English in China is more like playing baseball. The atmosphere is breezy and meditative, the crowd sedate but chatty. The floor is littered with the shells of peanuts and sunflower seeds. The wrap-around auditorium seats fold down the way they do in a big league ballpark, and after the bell rings, all eyes are on the podium that stands atop the pitcher's mound where I, the pitcher, pitch my spiel.
I am no Pedro Martinez. If anything, I am a bumbling Wakefeldian knuckleballer. My windup is irregular, my ERA less than impressive. My fastball clocks in at around 60 MPH. I am superstitious, the kind of guy you might find in the grimiest corner of the dugout, rocking back and forth autistically in the minutes before gametime, spitting torrents of chew into a hollowed-out cucurbita gourd that I've kept around 17 years for good luck. I am valued less for my performance than I am for my presence in the locker room. I am not a franchise player, but I am a decent guy to have in the four or five slot on the rotation. I'm the sort of pitcher who walks more batters than he strikes out, loses more games than he wins, and spends more time on the DL than on the active roster. But the ballclub keeps me around anyway, because I'm cheap, and because among the coaching staff there remains some dim hope that perhaps one day, in the twilight of my career, when a dusty wind comes sweeping down from the Himalayas and blows through eastern Sichuan to make my knucklers dance and kowtow over the plate, I might just toss nine innings of no-hit ball.
Today was Opening Day. There were the usual Opening Day jitters. It's hard to keep your cool when fifty college kids shriek with horror as you walk into the classroom for the first time. I pitted out five minutes in and my knees trembled for the whole three hours. And there were broader anxieties: worrying whether I've still got "the stuff" or whether it's gone to pot during the off-season, wondering what kind of muscle I've got in the batting order, et al. But I pitched well. So well, in fact, that I half-expected someone to swat my ass on the way out to the bus.
I am teaching sophomores this semester, and there was a kind of electricity in the classroom that was lacking in my last batch of juniors. There was also literal electricity: computers with projector screens, televisions with DVD players. Never in my teaching career have I had so much technology at my disposal and I am at a loss for what to do with it. Probably nothing too exciting. I'm just thrilled that I can type things on the board rather than subjecting my students to my hideous chalkmanship, which must be as legible to them as Chinese is to you and me.
I gave my students fifteen minutes at the end of class to interview me. Over the past six months, I have learned my fair share of shortcuts. I outlawed the following questions:
1. Do you like China?
2. Do you like Chinese food?
3. Do you have a Chinese girlfriend?
4. Can you use chopsticks?
These are questions that your garden variety laowai gets fed up with after a few hours in country. They are also the only questions that most of the people in your life will ever ask you. So I was a bit taken aback when a cute little sophomore in the front row stood up and asked me about He Whose Name Cannot Be Named Right Now and just why my America is meeting with him at this tense juncture in our international relationship. There was the usual canned audience response - some oohs, some laughter - but there were more than a few students cheering her on.
"Well," I said, revving up my Ambiguous Nitpicky Geopolitical Situation Translator (ANGST) for the first time in two months. "Well."
The classroom fell silent. Even the ventilators seemed to be holding their breath.
"Well. As Americans, we often disagree with our government. So please do not judge us for our government's actions," I paused to let the cloud of platitudes envelop me, then I continued. "Speaking for the American people, I can say that we all respect the Chinese people. We have been business partners for a long time now, and I hope that we can become friends."
There was a smattering of applause from the far back, but the girl in the front row wasn't buying it.
"But Mr. Panda, with all due respect," she said, "that doesn't answer my question."
"Well," I said, and took a sip of coffee. Then I tilted my mug back and took a solid slurp of coffee. "Well. It's a very complicated situation and it is very hard to understand. Even I don't understand it. Maybe you guys understand it better than I do. In order to understand it, I think we need to look at – and hey, there's the bell!"
I blurted out the homework assignment and made a beeline for the dugout under a jeering cascade of hot dog wrappers, peanut shells and AA batteries, shielding my head as I leaped over the third base line, the young season's first complete game under my belt.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Sleeper Train
Around ten, the steward of Sleeper Train Four stepped into my cabin to tell me that my girlfriend was waiting for me in Sleeper Train Six. I thanked him, finished a chapter of The Glass Bead Game, then I put on my backpack and wandered down the aisle to see just whom he could possibly be talking about. I envisioned a veiled oriental temptress reading the Tao Te Ching in an opium cloud. Or it could be some girl from Pittsburgh with an abundance of chin hair. There was no way to tell.
Sleeper Train Six reeked of baijiu and I followed the scent to a cabin full of Han Chinese businessmen who were sitting on the edges of their bunks, grinning and listening intently to a conversation taking place in the cabin next to them. It took me a moment to realize the voices were speaking Australian English. The Chinese men shoved me next door where I belonged.
There were six Aussie girls and a guy from Colorado. I waved and lingered in the hall for a moment, feeling rather creepy.
"Do you mind if I sit down?" I asked. "The steward told me to come see you."
"Hey, that's how I got here," said the guy from Colorado.
It doesn't take long to become an old hand in China. Foreigners tend not to stick around very long. When I told the Australians I'd been in China for seven months, they collectively gasped.
"That's a long time," one of them offered.
I shrugged. I'll be in China for at least another year and a half, I said, and that's when they really began to worry about me.
Before long, the businessmen next door got drunk enough to break up our conversation. I wound up with a cigarette in my mouth, one behind each ear, and several more tucked in my breast pocket. The ringleader invited me to his hometown in Yunnan to slaughter pigs, sheep, and chicken. I accepted the offer and another cigarette.
One of the Aussies and I snuck out to the smoking car and one of the businessmen tagged along. As the Aussie was lighting up, he pulled me aside and pointed at her.
"How old is she?" he asked.
"She told me she was twenty."
"Twenty? Twenty?"
I nodded. The man began giggling convulsively, covering his mouth, giggling some more.
"You're sure she's twenty?"
"That's what she told me," I said.
Again with the giggling. Finally, he regained enough composure to explain himself.
"It's just – she's twenty and she smokes cigarettes!"
A shade of genuine embarrassment seeped into his booze-reddened cheeks.
"In the West, many younger women smoke cigarettes," I said. "It doesn't mean the same thing."
"What is he saying about me?" asked the Aussie.
"He says you're very beautiful."
At 10:30, the lights went out, so I bid the foreigners adieu and crept back to my sleeper cabin. I lay awake for several hours, knowing that on the other side of sleep I would be in Yunnan. There was sun in Yunnan. Sun, and minorities, and midgets in Yunnan. Matriarchal societies where the women tilled the fields while the men strummed lutes and picked tangerines and got pickled on homemade plonk. In Yunnan. Yunnan. Gradually, the name had a soporific effect on me and despite my excited nerves, I fell asleep. I awoke the next morning to a strange gilded light coming in through the window. I shielded my eyes and backed away. Cautiously, I placed my hand under it. It was sun. I had arrived in Yunnan.
Sleeper Train Six reeked of baijiu and I followed the scent to a cabin full of Han Chinese businessmen who were sitting on the edges of their bunks, grinning and listening intently to a conversation taking place in the cabin next to them. It took me a moment to realize the voices were speaking Australian English. The Chinese men shoved me next door where I belonged.
There were six Aussie girls and a guy from Colorado. I waved and lingered in the hall for a moment, feeling rather creepy.
"Do you mind if I sit down?" I asked. "The steward told me to come see you."
"Hey, that's how I got here," said the guy from Colorado.
It doesn't take long to become an old hand in China. Foreigners tend not to stick around very long. When I told the Australians I'd been in China for seven months, they collectively gasped.
"That's a long time," one of them offered.
I shrugged. I'll be in China for at least another year and a half, I said, and that's when they really began to worry about me.
Before long, the businessmen next door got drunk enough to break up our conversation. I wound up with a cigarette in my mouth, one behind each ear, and several more tucked in my breast pocket. The ringleader invited me to his hometown in Yunnan to slaughter pigs, sheep, and chicken. I accepted the offer and another cigarette.
One of the Aussies and I snuck out to the smoking car and one of the businessmen tagged along. As the Aussie was lighting up, he pulled me aside and pointed at her.
"How old is she?" he asked.
"She told me she was twenty."
"Twenty? Twenty?"
I nodded. The man began giggling convulsively, covering his mouth, giggling some more.
"You're sure she's twenty?"
"That's what she told me," I said.
Again with the giggling. Finally, he regained enough composure to explain himself.
"It's just – she's twenty and she smokes cigarettes!"
A shade of genuine embarrassment seeped into his booze-reddened cheeks.
"In the West, many younger women smoke cigarettes," I said. "It doesn't mean the same thing."
"What is he saying about me?" asked the Aussie.
"He says you're very beautiful."
At 10:30, the lights went out, so I bid the foreigners adieu and crept back to my sleeper cabin. I lay awake for several hours, knowing that on the other side of sleep I would be in Yunnan. There was sun in Yunnan. Sun, and minorities, and midgets in Yunnan. Matriarchal societies where the women tilled the fields while the men strummed lutes and picked tangerines and got pickled on homemade plonk. In Yunnan. Yunnan. Gradually, the name had a soporific effect on me and despite my excited nerves, I fell asleep. I awoke the next morning to a strange gilded light coming in through the window. I shielded my eyes and backed away. Cautiously, I placed my hand under it. It was sun. I had arrived in Yunnan.
The Eighteen Oddities of Yunnan
1. Eggs are tied up and sold in rope-like clusters
2. Bamboo hats are used as wok lids
3. Three mosquitoes make up a dish - mosquitoes are so large that it is said that just three mosquitoes are large enough to make a meal
4. Bamboo is used to make water pipes for smoking
5. Erkuai - a local culinary specialty made of rice, whose name translates literally as "ear piece"
6. The same dress is worn for all four seasons
7. Young girls are called "Old Lady"
8. Automobiles move faster than trains
9. Toes are exposed all year round
10. Rain here but sunshine there - the weather is often variable between areas just a few kilometers apart
11. Girls wear flowers in all four seasons
12. Girls carry tobacco bags
13. Green vegetable is called "bitter vegetable"
14. Grannies climb mountains faster than monkeys
15. Trains go abroad but not inland
16. Monks can have love affairs
17. Children are raised by men
18. Automobiles move in the clouds
-Wikipedia
2. Bamboo hats are used as wok lids
3. Three mosquitoes make up a dish - mosquitoes are so large that it is said that just three mosquitoes are large enough to make a meal
4. Bamboo is used to make water pipes for smoking
5. Erkuai - a local culinary specialty made of rice, whose name translates literally as "ear piece"
6. The same dress is worn for all four seasons
7. Young girls are called "Old Lady"
8. Automobiles move faster than trains
9. Toes are exposed all year round
10. Rain here but sunshine there - the weather is often variable between areas just a few kilometers apart
11. Girls wear flowers in all four seasons
12. Girls carry tobacco bags
13. Green vegetable is called "bitter vegetable"
14. Grannies climb mountains faster than monkeys
15. Trains go abroad but not inland
16. Monks can have love affairs
17. Children are raised by men
18. Automobiles move in the clouds
-Wikipedia
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Year of the Cat
I got a hot shave and a haircut on the way to the bus station. As the razor skimmed my cheek, it shot a ginger stream of hair follicles into the barber's face.
"Fuck," he shouted in Chinese, "I'm choking on your beard!"
He wanted to know about the American Breast.
"There are big ones and small ones," I said.
What about the American Ass? It comes in many different sizes, I said. America is a very diverse country, I explained.
He took me into the back room for a scalp massage.
"How big is your pepper?" he wanted to know.
"That's a secret," I said.
"Secrets don't make friends. Tell me. It'll be our little secret."
"Um," I said.
"Okay, Mr. Laowai. Next time you come in, you can tell me how big your pepper is."
"Deal."
A hot shave and a haircut, a shampoo and a scalp massage, a lesson in Sichuanese: one U.S. dollar.
There were no buses left - it was already 7 PM - so I caught a communal minivan and we shuttled through the mist towards Chengdu. Already the drunk dials were pouring in. Seventy-five Americans with volunteer stipends to blow, gallivanting up and down the alleys of that big dusty construction site 180 kilometers to the west. I leaned forward in my seat to speed the minivan along. I was running four hours late. But, I thought, glancing at my reflection in the window, tussling my bouffant and palming the powdery baby-ass of my cheek, I was looking pretty damned good.
We pulled up to a gas station just outside of Chengdu and the driver seemed content to wait in line for two hours to refill his tank. I paid my fare, hopped out of the van, and flagged down a cab. I checked into the Kehuayuan Hotel around ten and on my way up to the room, someone snagged me by the elbow and the montage began. Such is memory. All the anxiety and nausea and shifting silences are erased. What remains is this montage, six minutes and 35 seconds long, to the tune of Al Stewart's Year of the Cat.
Pulsating neon, hot blue blowtorch blasts, jackhammers and bulldozers, dust and trampled cigarettes, motorbikes and vacant taxis. I think I'd better stay in tonight. Well, maybe just one drink. Up the stairs to a pleather wrap-around sofa in the corner. Tapping your toe against the brass footrail beneath the bar. Frosted steins and sinister shot glasses. A cloud of Rastafarians by the door and the ponytailed Frenchmen around the billiards table. The Chinese girls in their Groucho Marx specs. You asked the bartender if he had any Cure and he did. The married couples danced like they were merely dating. One more and we'll go home. You sent Dave out for another pack of Pandas. Pulling a five-kuai prayer from the depths of your corduroys, the bartender said it was alright and slid a shot of Jack your way. Amplifiers and instrument cases. Broken conversations in line for the men's room. You got Boston Joe to do a JFK impression. Levi did the national jig of Ethiopia while the Ripleys went Costa Rican on the dancefloor. You stole some Irish girl's drink and her man held you hostage until you'd given him the last of Dave's cigarettes. Strobe lights, camera flashes, tobacco hieroglyphics, the stubborn, unrelenting beat. The paternal warmth of watching two young kids make out for the first time, drunken bodies pressed against the Samsung AC Unit in the corner and you across the room wondering how you got so relatively old. What time is it, anyhow? One more and we'll go home. You ask the bartender if he has any Steely Dan and he does. A beer and a shot. Peanuts and sunflower seeds. The Sharpie graffiti on the bathroom walls. One more and we'll go home ...
And then the music fades out like the 1970's and you find yourself at the train station, bidding short-term farewells to people you will never see again. And then the long train ride back home, the countryside all rotting cement and flooded fields in the rain, a formaldehyde hangover squeezing vinegar out of your eyes, and you sitting there with a barfbag close at hand, wishing you'd never gotten so damned attached.
"Fuck," he shouted in Chinese, "I'm choking on your beard!"
He wanted to know about the American Breast.
"There are big ones and small ones," I said.
What about the American Ass? It comes in many different sizes, I said. America is a very diverse country, I explained.
He took me into the back room for a scalp massage.
"How big is your pepper?" he wanted to know.
"That's a secret," I said.
"Secrets don't make friends. Tell me. It'll be our little secret."
"Um," I said.
"Okay, Mr. Laowai. Next time you come in, you can tell me how big your pepper is."
"Deal."
A hot shave and a haircut, a shampoo and a scalp massage, a lesson in Sichuanese: one U.S. dollar.
There were no buses left - it was already 7 PM - so I caught a communal minivan and we shuttled through the mist towards Chengdu. Already the drunk dials were pouring in. Seventy-five Americans with volunteer stipends to blow, gallivanting up and down the alleys of that big dusty construction site 180 kilometers to the west. I leaned forward in my seat to speed the minivan along. I was running four hours late. But, I thought, glancing at my reflection in the window, tussling my bouffant and palming the powdery baby-ass of my cheek, I was looking pretty damned good.
We pulled up to a gas station just outside of Chengdu and the driver seemed content to wait in line for two hours to refill his tank. I paid my fare, hopped out of the van, and flagged down a cab. I checked into the Kehuayuan Hotel around ten and on my way up to the room, someone snagged me by the elbow and the montage began. Such is memory. All the anxiety and nausea and shifting silences are erased. What remains is this montage, six minutes and 35 seconds long, to the tune of Al Stewart's Year of the Cat.
Pulsating neon, hot blue blowtorch blasts, jackhammers and bulldozers, dust and trampled cigarettes, motorbikes and vacant taxis. I think I'd better stay in tonight. Well, maybe just one drink. Up the stairs to a pleather wrap-around sofa in the corner. Tapping your toe against the brass footrail beneath the bar. Frosted steins and sinister shot glasses. A cloud of Rastafarians by the door and the ponytailed Frenchmen around the billiards table. The Chinese girls in their Groucho Marx specs. You asked the bartender if he had any Cure and he did. The married couples danced like they were merely dating. One more and we'll go home. You sent Dave out for another pack of Pandas. Pulling a five-kuai prayer from the depths of your corduroys, the bartender said it was alright and slid a shot of Jack your way. Amplifiers and instrument cases. Broken conversations in line for the men's room. You got Boston Joe to do a JFK impression. Levi did the national jig of Ethiopia while the Ripleys went Costa Rican on the dancefloor. You stole some Irish girl's drink and her man held you hostage until you'd given him the last of Dave's cigarettes. Strobe lights, camera flashes, tobacco hieroglyphics, the stubborn, unrelenting beat. The paternal warmth of watching two young kids make out for the first time, drunken bodies pressed against the Samsung AC Unit in the corner and you across the room wondering how you got so relatively old. What time is it, anyhow? One more and we'll go home. You ask the bartender if he has any Steely Dan and he does. A beer and a shot. Peanuts and sunflower seeds. The Sharpie graffiti on the bathroom walls. One more and we'll go home ...
And then the music fades out like the 1970's and you find yourself at the train station, bidding short-term farewells to people you will never see again. And then the long train ride back home, the countryside all rotting cement and flooded fields in the rain, a formaldehyde hangover squeezing vinegar out of your eyes, and you sitting there with a barfbag close at hand, wishing you'd never gotten so damned attached.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Public Girl
The postmodern slacker hero tends to find his closest confidants among the service sector. Bartenders, shopkeepers, barbers, cabbies, record store cashiers: by definition, these confidants are not friends. Their job is to remain as removed from the plotline of your life as possible and, from that abstracted vantage point, to occasionally serve up meaningless advice that solves none of your problems but makes you feel damned good about yourself.
The Dude confides in Tony, his limousine driver.
"Fuckin' A, man. I got a rash," says The Dude. "I was feeling really shitty earlier in the day. I'd lost a little money, I was down in the dumps."
"Ey, y'know what?" says Tony, gesturing into the rear-view mirror. "Fahgettabout it!"
"Yeah, man! Fuck it! I can't be worrying about that shit."
When I was back in Nebraska last winter, I aired my grievances to a gas station attendant at the BP on Galvin Street. The guy was a retired drug runner, and he was constantly getting in trouble with the management for posting NORML propaganda all over the shop, which apparently didn't jive with the broader interests of Better Petroleum. Nevertheless, whenever I went in for a coffee, he would give me just the sort of nonspecific wisdom I needed at the time, would regale me with tales of his titty bar exploits across the border in Council Bluffs, his most recent car wreck, and so on. Once, for no reason at all, he was pretending to be Australian for the day, which didn't hinder our usual bull session one bit, except that he called me "mate" instead of "dude." Our confidence was a beautiful, insubstantial, mutually beneficial thing. But it ended all of a sudden one afternoon in April, when he invited me to meet him and his crew at the Brazen Head later that evening. An unspoken line had been crossed and from that day forward, I bought my coffee from the Kwik Shop next door, where the attendant didn't seem to speak English or any other human tongue, for that matter.
In China, my service industry confidant is a convenience store clerk. Whenever I pop in for a tube of yogurt, instead of asking me whether I've eaten, as one does in Chinese, he asks me how I've been. He listens for a bit, dispenses some fortune cookie advice. Then he talks about his own shit: running two shops, working 14 hours a day, feeding the dog, keeping the girlfriend at bay. We can spill the beans back and forth for hours. By the end of it, I feel so much better that I'll walk right out the door without paying for my yogurt.
The other night I swung by for a couple cans of fake Budweiser. The clerk's dog, a handsome young yellow lab, is more human than canine. He wears a purple jacket with his name embroidered on the back: Green Tea, it says. He stares me down whenever I come in because he, too, knows I am a foreigner.
"How's it going, pengyou?" my confidant asked.
"Fuckin' A, man. I got a rash."
About an hour into our bull session, a cute but heavily made-up girl threw some dried squid snacks on the counter and complimented my Chinese.
"My Mandarin is alright," I said, "but I can't make heads or tails of Sichuanese."
"Let me teach you," she said. "Sichuanese, Shanghainese, Hunanese. I am a master of dialects. And I'll teach you for free."
I'm studying fifteen hours a week as it is, but I let her write her phone number on a one kuai bill and agreed to call her over the weekend. I walked out the door with my beers. Green Tea yelped.
"Hey, pengyou!" shouted the clerk.
I stopped in my tracks.
"Oh, right!" I remembered. I pulled a wad of dough out of my pocket.
"You moron!" shouted the girl, snatching a bill out of my hand. "My number's on that one!"
"Oh, right," I said. I stuffed the bill back in my pocket and handed the clerk another one.
"... and last week's yogurt," he said.
"Oh, right."
I fumbled around some more and gave him a ten spot.
A couple days later, I was at my confidant's rival shop, the one next door. I usually go to his arch-nemesis, the old bag, for my coffee fix because sometimes I don't have anything to confide to my confidant. Other times, I don't have three hours to burn shooting the bull. And anyway, the absence makes our occasional bull sessions that much more cathartic. Everybody needs a little time away, a wise man once sang. I was walking up the aisle to the checkout counter when I heard a "Pssst!" from the other side of the Red Bull display. Glimmering through the grated metal was a pair of black-painted eyes. It was my Sichuanese tutor.
"Why haven't you called me yet?" she asked.
"I dunno," I mumbled. "I've been lazy."
"Do you still have my number?"
"I haven't spent it yet."
"Call me tomorrow," she said.
"How you been?" I asked.
"Bad. Really bad," she said. "I'm having problems with my boyfriend."
She pouted.
"Oh," I said. "Sorry to hear that."
"Just call me tomorrow."
She turned and left. I set my jug of instant coffee on the checkout counter.
The clerk looked me over.
"Have you eaten?" she asked.
Later that night, I paid my confidant a visit and noticed the dog wasn't around.
"Where's Green Tea?" I asked.
"He's sleeping."
"Sleeping? Busy day?"
The clerk nodded.
"Does he have a girlfriend?"
"Of course he does," said the clerk.
"He seems to have a lot of them. I always see him out on the street in his purple jacket," I said, "sniffing three butts at once."
The clerk laughed.
"Whenever I see him sniffing butts, I run out and smack him on the head," he said. "I'm afraid he's going to catch doggy AIDS."
"Just buy him a pair of matching dog pants."
"They don't sell pants in his size."
"Well, does his ... thing ... still work?"
"Oh, yeah," he said. "It works."
Green Tea's virility seemed to be a source of great pride for the clerk.
"Do you think he's fathered any children?"
"Certainly he has!" the clerk shouted. "Some nights he doesn't come home at all! I find him in the morning, sleeping in the gutter with a smile on his face."
I laughed and smacked my thigh.
"By the way, while we're on the subject," said the clerk, leaning low over the counter, "I have a secret to tell you."
I looked around and ducked towards him conspiratorially.
"You know that girl you met in here the other day?" he asked. "Your Sichuanese tutor?"
I nodded.
"Right. Well, I don't know how to say this," he said, "but she's ... a public girl."
"A public girl?" I scratched my head. "What does that mean?"
"Well, you know that shop next door? The old guy?"
"I know the one."
"One time I saw her run off with him. Then, with the owner of the dumpling joint down the street," he said. "She's always hanging around on the street. Like I said, she's a public girl. Thirty year olds, forty year olds. I've seen it all. Who hasn't she slept with?"
"No kidding," I said.
"So I'm not saying you can't take Sichuanese lessons from her," he said. "I just wouldn't put your thing in there. And if you do, be sure to wear one of these."
He took a Jissbon packet from the impulse rack and flapped it in my face.
"I had no idea," I said. "She seemed like a nice enough girl."
"Take my word for it. You're my friend," he said, "and I don't want you to get doggy AIDS, neither."
"Thanks," I said. I shook his hand, even bowed a little. Then I turned and walked out the door.
"Hey!" shouted the clerk. "Yogurt."
The next day, the public girl called me six times. I sent her a text message suggesting I was busy for the next several years. And then, as I rolled back over in bed, with a few effortless thumb movements I banished her name to the ranks of the Trixies and Candies and Surreals and Lemons, filed her name away in the growing folder reserved for all stalkers past and present, whose phone calls I will never intentionally answer.
The Dude confides in Tony, his limousine driver.
"Fuckin' A, man. I got a rash," says The Dude. "I was feeling really shitty earlier in the day. I'd lost a little money, I was down in the dumps."
"Ey, y'know what?" says Tony, gesturing into the rear-view mirror. "Fahgettabout it!"
"Yeah, man! Fuck it! I can't be worrying about that shit."
When I was back in Nebraska last winter, I aired my grievances to a gas station attendant at the BP on Galvin Street. The guy was a retired drug runner, and he was constantly getting in trouble with the management for posting NORML propaganda all over the shop, which apparently didn't jive with the broader interests of Better Petroleum. Nevertheless, whenever I went in for a coffee, he would give me just the sort of nonspecific wisdom I needed at the time, would regale me with tales of his titty bar exploits across the border in Council Bluffs, his most recent car wreck, and so on. Once, for no reason at all, he was pretending to be Australian for the day, which didn't hinder our usual bull session one bit, except that he called me "mate" instead of "dude." Our confidence was a beautiful, insubstantial, mutually beneficial thing. But it ended all of a sudden one afternoon in April, when he invited me to meet him and his crew at the Brazen Head later that evening. An unspoken line had been crossed and from that day forward, I bought my coffee from the Kwik Shop next door, where the attendant didn't seem to speak English or any other human tongue, for that matter.
In China, my service industry confidant is a convenience store clerk. Whenever I pop in for a tube of yogurt, instead of asking me whether I've eaten, as one does in Chinese, he asks me how I've been. He listens for a bit, dispenses some fortune cookie advice. Then he talks about his own shit: running two shops, working 14 hours a day, feeding the dog, keeping the girlfriend at bay. We can spill the beans back and forth for hours. By the end of it, I feel so much better that I'll walk right out the door without paying for my yogurt.
The other night I swung by for a couple cans of fake Budweiser. The clerk's dog, a handsome young yellow lab, is more human than canine. He wears a purple jacket with his name embroidered on the back: Green Tea, it says. He stares me down whenever I come in because he, too, knows I am a foreigner.
"How's it going, pengyou?" my confidant asked.
"Fuckin' A, man. I got a rash."
About an hour into our bull session, a cute but heavily made-up girl threw some dried squid snacks on the counter and complimented my Chinese.
"My Mandarin is alright," I said, "but I can't make heads or tails of Sichuanese."
"Let me teach you," she said. "Sichuanese, Shanghainese, Hunanese. I am a master of dialects. And I'll teach you for free."
I'm studying fifteen hours a week as it is, but I let her write her phone number on a one kuai bill and agreed to call her over the weekend. I walked out the door with my beers. Green Tea yelped.
"Hey, pengyou!" shouted the clerk.
I stopped in my tracks.
"Oh, right!" I remembered. I pulled a wad of dough out of my pocket.
"You moron!" shouted the girl, snatching a bill out of my hand. "My number's on that one!"
"Oh, right," I said. I stuffed the bill back in my pocket and handed the clerk another one.
"... and last week's yogurt," he said.
"Oh, right."
I fumbled around some more and gave him a ten spot.
A couple days later, I was at my confidant's rival shop, the one next door. I usually go to his arch-nemesis, the old bag, for my coffee fix because sometimes I don't have anything to confide to my confidant. Other times, I don't have three hours to burn shooting the bull. And anyway, the absence makes our occasional bull sessions that much more cathartic. Everybody needs a little time away, a wise man once sang. I was walking up the aisle to the checkout counter when I heard a "Pssst!" from the other side of the Red Bull display. Glimmering through the grated metal was a pair of black-painted eyes. It was my Sichuanese tutor.
"Why haven't you called me yet?" she asked.
"I dunno," I mumbled. "I've been lazy."
"Do you still have my number?"
"I haven't spent it yet."
"Call me tomorrow," she said.
"How you been?" I asked.
"Bad. Really bad," she said. "I'm having problems with my boyfriend."
She pouted.
"Oh," I said. "Sorry to hear that."
"Just call me tomorrow."
She turned and left. I set my jug of instant coffee on the checkout counter.
The clerk looked me over.
"Have you eaten?" she asked.
Later that night, I paid my confidant a visit and noticed the dog wasn't around.
"Where's Green Tea?" I asked.
"He's sleeping."
"Sleeping? Busy day?"
The clerk nodded.
"Does he have a girlfriend?"
"Of course he does," said the clerk.
"He seems to have a lot of them. I always see him out on the street in his purple jacket," I said, "sniffing three butts at once."
The clerk laughed.
"Whenever I see him sniffing butts, I run out and smack him on the head," he said. "I'm afraid he's going to catch doggy AIDS."
"Just buy him a pair of matching dog pants."
"They don't sell pants in his size."
"Well, does his ... thing ... still work?"
"Oh, yeah," he said. "It works."
Green Tea's virility seemed to be a source of great pride for the clerk.
"Do you think he's fathered any children?"
"Certainly he has!" the clerk shouted. "Some nights he doesn't come home at all! I find him in the morning, sleeping in the gutter with a smile on his face."
I laughed and smacked my thigh.
"By the way, while we're on the subject," said the clerk, leaning low over the counter, "I have a secret to tell you."
I looked around and ducked towards him conspiratorially.
"You know that girl you met in here the other day?" he asked. "Your Sichuanese tutor?"
I nodded.
"Right. Well, I don't know how to say this," he said, "but she's ... a public girl."
"A public girl?" I scratched my head. "What does that mean?"
"Well, you know that shop next door? The old guy?"
"I know the one."
"One time I saw her run off with him. Then, with the owner of the dumpling joint down the street," he said. "She's always hanging around on the street. Like I said, she's a public girl. Thirty year olds, forty year olds. I've seen it all. Who hasn't she slept with?"
"No kidding," I said.
"So I'm not saying you can't take Sichuanese lessons from her," he said. "I just wouldn't put your thing in there. And if you do, be sure to wear one of these."
He took a Jissbon packet from the impulse rack and flapped it in my face.
"I had no idea," I said. "She seemed like a nice enough girl."
"Take my word for it. You're my friend," he said, "and I don't want you to get doggy AIDS, neither."
"Thanks," I said. I shook his hand, even bowed a little. Then I turned and walked out the door.
"Hey!" shouted the clerk. "Yogurt."
The next day, the public girl called me six times. I sent her a text message suggesting I was busy for the next several years. And then, as I rolled back over in bed, with a few effortless thumb movements I banished her name to the ranks of the Trixies and Candies and Surreals and Lemons, filed her name away in the growing folder reserved for all stalkers past and present, whose phone calls I will never intentionally answer.
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
Puppies and Kittens
In order to survive in China, you must push a lot of the foreground into the periphery. Otherwise, the madness will drive you mad. As I've mentioned before, peripheralization is something your mind will do on its own, provided you don't throw a wrench in the process by dwelling too damned much. Lately, an overabundance of leisure has given me time to reflect on what my brain passes off as normal these days. When I sit down to write, I can no longer rattle off half-a-dozen pages at a time, partly because my surroundings aren't all that novel to me anymore. A cavalcade of absurdities that would add up to the weirdest single day of my American life are, in China, commonplace and forgettable nuisances that stand between me and my apartment. What baffled me six months ago no longer even registers in my consciousness, though I could probably make a million dollars by wearing a hidden camera and selling the chopped-up footage to Spike TV.
Part of the peripheralization process involves honing your ability to act like a total douchebag in public, i.e. pushing your instinctive American politeness into the periphery. Otherwise, you will be torn apart by wild dogs. On Sunday afternoon, I was smoking one last ciggy outside a bus station in Chongqing when a bag man caught me by the arm and started breathing mustard gas in my face.
"Where are you going, my foreign friend?" he asked.
"Nanchong," I murmured.
"Nanchong! Let's go! Eighty kuai!"
"No," I said. "Leave me alone."
I snubbed my cigarette prematurely and went inside, tossed my bag onto a conveyor belt and waited on the other end of the x-ray scanner for it to emerge. But the bag man was persistent. I saw his hobo-bindle-on-a-bamboo-stick come sliding out of the machine. He swept it up, grabbed me by the elbow, gestured at someone in the distance, and the next thing I knew, I was being pulled at by three men in ragged suits, all of them chattering about Nanchong this, eighty kuai that.
"Don't touch me," I said. "Go away."
I waited in the ticket queue. The art of Chinese line crashing is something I have yet to master; I am not yet that big of a douchebag. So I waited politely, a cosmic fool, standing two inches from the plexiglas ticket window while one old lady after the next cut in front of me, completed their transactions, and jostled their way back out. By then, the three old men were literally riding my coattails.
"They don't have any tickets to Nanchong! It's useless!" the bag man shouted. "They're sold out!"
"I don't believe you," I said. "I'll ask the ticket lady about that, thank you very much."
But the bag man was right: they had sold out of tickets to Nanchong. As often happens in moments of Chinese frustration, a Mandarin phrase leapt to my mind: mei fa - nothing can be done. And so I turned to my old foes, the three old men in the ratty suits, and I asked them, "Nanchong. How much?"
"One hundred kuai," said the bag man, grinning. Miraculously, the price had jumped.
"Eighty kuai," I said.
He said nothing and led me out to the bus. The driver and the bag man exchanged a look. There were no vacant seats, but after a tense standoff with a baby, the bag man succeeded in persuading the toddler to sit on his mother's lap. I handed the bag man one hundred kuai and held my palm out for change, but he turned and walked away.
"How much did you pay for your ticket?" the mom asked me, her child gnawing at its hand, pondering my existence.
"One hundred kuai," I said.
"Ha! One hundred kuai!" She leapt up to her feet to tell the rest of the passengers. "This laowai paid one hundred kuai for a ticket to Nanchong!"
Laughter, a few incredulous scoffs, lots of puzzled stares. The mom sat back down.
"You got cheated," she told me.
"I got cheated," I agreed, unable to explain that being gypped the equivalent of four dollars was vastly preferable to spending the night at one of Chongqing's 32 McDonald's franchises.
Unfortunately, the Chinese bus offers no respite for the ripped-off and haggle-hardened expat. Chinese buses are loud. There is, of course, the ever-squalling horn, the ever-shrieking babies. There is also the feature entertainment, playing on a flatscreen television with the volume cranked way up into the red, a Tang Dynasty romantic comedy exploding with cartoon sound effects: slide whistles, cuckoo clocks, tweetie birds, farts, boings, bonks, bleeps, toots, belches, trombone wah-wah-wah-wahhhhhs. A Chinese bus ride without any passengers would be enough to trigger a sonic seizure, but Chinese folks of all ages love to contribute their own personal ruckus to the general cacophony; one by one, young and old alike will fire up their cell phone MP3 players, so the inside of the bus starts to sound like the symphonic train wreck at the end of A Day In The Life by The Beatles. And yet, for me, ear plugs are no longer necessary. Somewhere along the way, my brain, thoroughly fed up, cut out the middle man and stuffed wads of cotton directly into its auditory cortex. I can actually fall asleep in a Chinese bus, and so deeply that you have to fire up a Boeing 727 to bring me back from the land of nod.
So I fell asleep. A couple hours later, I woke up and noticed that the mom in the seat next to me was holding her baby out over the aisle. Curiosity sometimes gets the better of me: I craned my neck to see that, indeed, the child was pooping in midair, turds dropping single-file into a tie-dye colored bucket on the floor. A few minutes later, the bus stopped, mother and child disembarked, and the tie-dye bucket remained there in the aisle for the rest of the trip. I cracked open my window and resumed reading Kurt Vonnegut.
I don't mention this anecdote for the obvious gross-out factor, or to discourage those of you with aversions to public defecation from visiting China. But it is indeed a place where the boundaries of excretory liberation are being pushed into new and frightening frontiers. And that is something you get used to. I, for one, no longer find China's will-ye nill-ye, squat-when-the-spirit-moves-ye philosophy the least bit odd.
When I got back to Nanchong, I waltzed into my usual haunt and ordered a plate of eggs and pork. Then, half a paragraph into Vonnegut, I heard a soft jingling and, glancing up, had to fight back the most sickening sitcom "Awwwww!" as two tiny beasts, a puppy and a kitten, came tottering my way. The both of them sniffed at my shoes for five minutes, then got tangled up in a play-fight. The puppy won. My eggs and pork arrived. They were so good that I nearly wept with gratitude. Oh, China. Despite my better judgment, I am falling ever more deeply in love with this beautiful and disgusting place, a gorgeous but unkempt mistress who will chloroform you, splash you with mud, piss on your doorstep, and at the end of the day, smother you with puppies and kittens.
Part of the peripheralization process involves honing your ability to act like a total douchebag in public, i.e. pushing your instinctive American politeness into the periphery. Otherwise, you will be torn apart by wild dogs. On Sunday afternoon, I was smoking one last ciggy outside a bus station in Chongqing when a bag man caught me by the arm and started breathing mustard gas in my face.
"Where are you going, my foreign friend?" he asked.
"Nanchong," I murmured.
"Nanchong! Let's go! Eighty kuai!"
"No," I said. "Leave me alone."
I snubbed my cigarette prematurely and went inside, tossed my bag onto a conveyor belt and waited on the other end of the x-ray scanner for it to emerge. But the bag man was persistent. I saw his hobo-bindle-on-a-bamboo-stick come sliding out of the machine. He swept it up, grabbed me by the elbow, gestured at someone in the distance, and the next thing I knew, I was being pulled at by three men in ragged suits, all of them chattering about Nanchong this, eighty kuai that.
"Don't touch me," I said. "Go away."
I waited in the ticket queue. The art of Chinese line crashing is something I have yet to master; I am not yet that big of a douchebag. So I waited politely, a cosmic fool, standing two inches from the plexiglas ticket window while one old lady after the next cut in front of me, completed their transactions, and jostled their way back out. By then, the three old men were literally riding my coattails.
"They don't have any tickets to Nanchong! It's useless!" the bag man shouted. "They're sold out!"
"I don't believe you," I said. "I'll ask the ticket lady about that, thank you very much."
But the bag man was right: they had sold out of tickets to Nanchong. As often happens in moments of Chinese frustration, a Mandarin phrase leapt to my mind: mei fa - nothing can be done. And so I turned to my old foes, the three old men in the ratty suits, and I asked them, "Nanchong. How much?"
"One hundred kuai," said the bag man, grinning. Miraculously, the price had jumped.
"Eighty kuai," I said.
He said nothing and led me out to the bus. The driver and the bag man exchanged a look. There were no vacant seats, but after a tense standoff with a baby, the bag man succeeded in persuading the toddler to sit on his mother's lap. I handed the bag man one hundred kuai and held my palm out for change, but he turned and walked away.
"How much did you pay for your ticket?" the mom asked me, her child gnawing at its hand, pondering my existence.
"One hundred kuai," I said.
"Ha! One hundred kuai!" She leapt up to her feet to tell the rest of the passengers. "This laowai paid one hundred kuai for a ticket to Nanchong!"
Laughter, a few incredulous scoffs, lots of puzzled stares. The mom sat back down.
"You got cheated," she told me.
"I got cheated," I agreed, unable to explain that being gypped the equivalent of four dollars was vastly preferable to spending the night at one of Chongqing's 32 McDonald's franchises.
Unfortunately, the Chinese bus offers no respite for the ripped-off and haggle-hardened expat. Chinese buses are loud. There is, of course, the ever-squalling horn, the ever-shrieking babies. There is also the feature entertainment, playing on a flatscreen television with the volume cranked way up into the red, a Tang Dynasty romantic comedy exploding with cartoon sound effects: slide whistles, cuckoo clocks, tweetie birds, farts, boings, bonks, bleeps, toots, belches, trombone wah-wah-wah-wahhhhhs. A Chinese bus ride without any passengers would be enough to trigger a sonic seizure, but Chinese folks of all ages love to contribute their own personal ruckus to the general cacophony; one by one, young and old alike will fire up their cell phone MP3 players, so the inside of the bus starts to sound like the symphonic train wreck at the end of A Day In The Life by The Beatles. And yet, for me, ear plugs are no longer necessary. Somewhere along the way, my brain, thoroughly fed up, cut out the middle man and stuffed wads of cotton directly into its auditory cortex. I can actually fall asleep in a Chinese bus, and so deeply that you have to fire up a Boeing 727 to bring me back from the land of nod.
So I fell asleep. A couple hours later, I woke up and noticed that the mom in the seat next to me was holding her baby out over the aisle. Curiosity sometimes gets the better of me: I craned my neck to see that, indeed, the child was pooping in midair, turds dropping single-file into a tie-dye colored bucket on the floor. A few minutes later, the bus stopped, mother and child disembarked, and the tie-dye bucket remained there in the aisle for the rest of the trip. I cracked open my window and resumed reading Kurt Vonnegut.
I don't mention this anecdote for the obvious gross-out factor, or to discourage those of you with aversions to public defecation from visiting China. But it is indeed a place where the boundaries of excretory liberation are being pushed into new and frightening frontiers. And that is something you get used to. I, for one, no longer find China's will-ye nill-ye, squat-when-the-spirit-moves-ye philosophy the least bit odd.
When I got back to Nanchong, I waltzed into my usual haunt and ordered a plate of eggs and pork. Then, half a paragraph into Vonnegut, I heard a soft jingling and, glancing up, had to fight back the most sickening sitcom "Awwwww!" as two tiny beasts, a puppy and a kitten, came tottering my way. The both of them sniffed at my shoes for five minutes, then got tangled up in a play-fight. The puppy won. My eggs and pork arrived. They were so good that I nearly wept with gratitude. Oh, China. Despite my better judgment, I am falling ever more deeply in love with this beautiful and disgusting place, a gorgeous but unkempt mistress who will chloroform you, splash you with mud, piss on your doorstep, and at the end of the day, smother you with puppies and kittens.
Monday, January 04, 2010
The Capital of the World
China is the center of the world. China is the edge of the earth. China is a superpower. China is an undeveloped backwater. China is the America of the 21st Century. China is the China of the 20th Century. China welcomes the world. China eludes the world and the Chinese alike. The contradictions of modern China recall the paradoxes of ancient Taoism: perfect straightness looks bent, extreme skill looks clumsy, a brilliant speech sounds like stammering. Whether or not China is the center of the world, the world now believes that China is at its center. The West believes it and the Chinese believe it. "Our China is developing rapidly," the Chinese will tell you with a mystifying mixture of pride and meekness.
If China is the center of the world, Chongqing is the center of the center of the world. Shanghai and Beijing have always been cities of commerce, trade, and European imperialism. The east coast was developed centuries ago. But the real action is taking place out west, out in the Chinese hintergrund, in roaring metropolises that Westerners have never heard of: Chengdu, Lanzhou, Chongqing, Kunming. In the east of China, the pace of change is merely whiplash-inducing. In the west, it is truly breakneck.
Native Chongqingers will tell you that Chongqing is the biggest city in the world, and after you have been there, you will find that you are no longer inclined to doubt that claim. Chongqing was immense to begin with, and it is expanding at such a pace that it is no longer possible to measure how big the city is or how rapidly it is growing. Nowhere on earth is urban migration so frantic as it is in Chongqing Province. While modern western folk find refuge in the suburbs, the Chinese are elbowing and shoving their way towards the center of the world.
On New Years Eve, I, too, wanted to be at the center of the world, and several of my friends were already there, waiting for me, in various enhanced states of consciousness. But I missed the last bus to Chongqing. I stood around in the rain for half an hour before I was shanghaied by an unmarked taxi. I didn't ask how much the ride was going to cost. I didn't want to know. The important thing was that the cabby got me to the center of the world before this catastrophic decade drew to a close. We were slow getting out of Nanchong. "I gotta take a crap," announced the co-pilot, so we drove around for a good long while looking for a public squatter. Then the cabby decided we needed a few additional passengers, and stopped to consult one of Nanchong's many taxi pimps. The backseat was heated from below and upholstered in panda pelt, so despite the foul-smelling and overcrowded cabin, I quickly fell asleep. The cab ride only cost eighty kuai, twenty less than a bus. Two hours later, I was just another back-alley vagabond searching for the center of the world.
I had no idea where my friends were, so I meandered towards the center of the center of the center of the world, only to find it blocked off by a row of expressionless but collectively fierce-looking army men. A gaggle of girls in fluorescent pink devil horns tried to get around the wall by sneaking through the lobby of the Harbor Plaza Hotel, but their efforts were crushed by the soldiers at the back door. I didn't know where to go, so I remained in one place. Three old women wearing matching strobelight mouse ears asked me to take their picture with my camera. They flashed peace signs. "Eggplant!" they shouted in unison. A six-year-old introduced himself as Jack and asked me, in English, which nationality I belonged to. "American," I said. "How 'bout you, Jack?" "I am Chinese," he said, and walked away. A few minutes later, my friends called and told me to meet them at the Harbor Plaza Hotel, which was precisely where I was.
We sat under a nylon tent and ordered vegetable dishes from a dive restaurant. The new decade snuck up on us so stealthily that we weren't even drunk for its inception. We hugged each other one by one and sat back down to sink into our own individual decade-in-review reflections. One year ago, I was in Omaha, working at a library, lusting after ... Five years ago, I was in college, working at the Kiewit Hall front desk, lusting after ... Ten years ago, I was sixteen, working at the zoo, lusting after ... And now I am 26, teaching in China, lusting after ... A handful of fireworks splattered against Chongqing's heavy metal atmosphere. Some hoots here and there. And that was it. At the center of the world, the arrival of a new calendar year is not such a big deal. If you want fireworks, you have to wait for the Lunar New Year.
I stayed in Chongqing a few days too long. On the third day, I set off with my friend and wandering companion Erin for a Saturday evening stroll. By bidding farewell to our hosts and missing the last bus out of town, we had committed ourselves to another night in Chongqing. But it was unclear where the night would end, whether we would find ourselves sleeping in the gutter, or in a swan-shaped bed on the 97th floor of the Chongqing Hilton.
I have visited Chongqing twice. The city doesn't feel like a city. It feels like a very large village. In the West, the city-village aesthetic might call to mind places like Madison, Wisconsin: cities full of mom 'n pop diners and plenty of green space. But that's not what I mean. What I mean is this: Chongqing is a city full of country folk. You'll pass the most opulent nightclub in all of China: strobe lights, crystal chandeliers, a god-awful Fatboy Slim remix thumping on the PA, some dude in a bear costume breakdancing on the stoop, a salaryman in a seersucker suit vomiting over the balcony. Fifteen feet later: a mud-streaked peasant lugging a cartload of pig heads up the hill, a teenaged beggar squatted in the lotus position with an eleven-digit phone number scrawled at his feet, a circle of toothless hags playing mahjongg. The juxtaposition is not exactly cozy, nor is it loaded with socioeconomic tension as it would be in The States. It is simply surreal. You wonder whether the peasants are aware of the glittering, ephemeral riches around them, and whether the young hipster kids are aware of the peasants. As a Westerner, you are aware of both. At the same time, you are aware of nothing.
Erin and I wandered. She asked me how China compared to Korea.
"Korea is brighter than China," I said, indicating the neon haze around us, "if you can imagine anything brighter than this."
But I can't really compare China to Korea. I lived in Korea for a long enough time, but that was three years ago. I was different then. Korea was different then. We change, and our surroundings keep changing at a rate that makes knowing anything impossible. Those who know do not speak, those who speak do not know, etc.
We wandered for eight hours. I exaggerate not. We wandered. We passed a shoe vendor who was selling boots with facial hair, big orange boots with eyebrows, mutton chops and little moustaches. "Fu Man-Shoe," I quipped. Nightclubs and eel vendors. Limousines and trishaws. We passed a man belting karaoke through a portable amplifier: he closed his set with a falsetto flourish, then he hawked a legendary loogey at 120 decibels. The locals laughed, we laughed. Starbuckses and whorehouses. Skyscrapers and hovels. Movie theaters and plastic-wrapped bootleg pornos spread out on dirty quilts.
We arrived at a trio of pagodas. In China, you can never be sure whether the scenery that surrounds you was built 4,000 years ago, or yesterday. These pagodas were built yesterday, and were infested with karaoke rooms and massage parlors and internet cafes. We climbed the stairs and walked to the end of a courtyard that looked over the Yangtze. The earth lay hundreds of feet below, obscured by the eternal fog that pillows the Chongqing skyline. I trembled with a sudden fear of heights: I'd no idea we were so high up. A boyfriend came waddling towards us with his girlfriend on his back and jokingly threatened to hump her over the ledge.
"If any man ever does that to me," Erin said, "I'll throw him over the ledge."
The ledge was covered in keychain graffiti, half of it in Chinese, half in bad English. "I love GJ for ever!" "You are gay fuck." "Thank you very much, World." "Your welcome!"
We walked back to the dimly lit joint that we'd passed in the courtyard. Chongqing, a city of countless millions, is home to perhaps ten bars worth going to. We pressed our foreheads against the window and peered inside. Black people! Heineken! Conversation! Couches!
"My god," I said, choking up a bit. "It looks like - a bar."
We went inside. A bar, indeed, it was. The bartender recommended "the black beer," and I was stunned to find that, after only two bottles, I was tipsy.
"I feel slightly drunk," Erin said to me, "and not formaldehyde drunk. Drunk drunk."
I was zoned out, watching the fractal display on the projection screen. I've been abroad so long that I'm no longer sure what is modern and what is obsolete. But, I said to Erin, slobbering into the collar of my suitcoat, if I'd had access to this sort of psychedelic stimulation as an undergrad, I would never have graduated. And yet there were peasants on the other side of the wall, smoking pipes, skinning radishes, hauling meat uphill. If you brought them inside to see this, even for a moment, if you dragged them inside to observe Afro-Caribbean men digging a reggae redub of Dark Side of the Moon while the universe unfurled itself across a projector screen, would the peasants understand? When we'd paid our tab and stumbled back outside, would we understand? Does anyone understand what is happening?
But existential dilemmas quickly gave way to more practical concerns: where were we going to sleep? We stopped by a love motel. The clerk assured us that a room would be available in 25 minutes, and we waited until a sweaty old man and his escort went scampering out the front door, but in the end, the clerk wouldn't let us stay because I'd forgotten my passport. We hid out in a nearby McDonald's until 4 AM while a schizophrenic girl in the corner pulled her hair out over a Big Mac. We ventured to the four-star hotel across the street. The clerk didn't give a shit. We checked into a room on the 17th floor. The room service menu advertised "vib condoms" and "the magic pants." On the bed was a plastic-wrapped pill that I did not ingest because it cost fifty kuai. In the morning, I parted the curtains and squinted through the Chongqing haze and wondered just how I'd arrived at the center of the world.
If China is the center of the world, Chongqing is the center of the center of the world. Shanghai and Beijing have always been cities of commerce, trade, and European imperialism. The east coast was developed centuries ago. But the real action is taking place out west, out in the Chinese hintergrund, in roaring metropolises that Westerners have never heard of: Chengdu, Lanzhou, Chongqing, Kunming. In the east of China, the pace of change is merely whiplash-inducing. In the west, it is truly breakneck.
Native Chongqingers will tell you that Chongqing is the biggest city in the world, and after you have been there, you will find that you are no longer inclined to doubt that claim. Chongqing was immense to begin with, and it is expanding at such a pace that it is no longer possible to measure how big the city is or how rapidly it is growing. Nowhere on earth is urban migration so frantic as it is in Chongqing Province. While modern western folk find refuge in the suburbs, the Chinese are elbowing and shoving their way towards the center of the world.
On New Years Eve, I, too, wanted to be at the center of the world, and several of my friends were already there, waiting for me, in various enhanced states of consciousness. But I missed the last bus to Chongqing. I stood around in the rain for half an hour before I was shanghaied by an unmarked taxi. I didn't ask how much the ride was going to cost. I didn't want to know. The important thing was that the cabby got me to the center of the world before this catastrophic decade drew to a close. We were slow getting out of Nanchong. "I gotta take a crap," announced the co-pilot, so we drove around for a good long while looking for a public squatter. Then the cabby decided we needed a few additional passengers, and stopped to consult one of Nanchong's many taxi pimps. The backseat was heated from below and upholstered in panda pelt, so despite the foul-smelling and overcrowded cabin, I quickly fell asleep. The cab ride only cost eighty kuai, twenty less than a bus. Two hours later, I was just another back-alley vagabond searching for the center of the world.
I had no idea where my friends were, so I meandered towards the center of the center of the center of the world, only to find it blocked off by a row of expressionless but collectively fierce-looking army men. A gaggle of girls in fluorescent pink devil horns tried to get around the wall by sneaking through the lobby of the Harbor Plaza Hotel, but their efforts were crushed by the soldiers at the back door. I didn't know where to go, so I remained in one place. Three old women wearing matching strobelight mouse ears asked me to take their picture with my camera. They flashed peace signs. "Eggplant!" they shouted in unison. A six-year-old introduced himself as Jack and asked me, in English, which nationality I belonged to. "American," I said. "How 'bout you, Jack?" "I am Chinese," he said, and walked away. A few minutes later, my friends called and told me to meet them at the Harbor Plaza Hotel, which was precisely where I was.
We sat under a nylon tent and ordered vegetable dishes from a dive restaurant. The new decade snuck up on us so stealthily that we weren't even drunk for its inception. We hugged each other one by one and sat back down to sink into our own individual decade-in-review reflections. One year ago, I was in Omaha, working at a library, lusting after ... Five years ago, I was in college, working at the Kiewit Hall front desk, lusting after ... Ten years ago, I was sixteen, working at the zoo, lusting after ... And now I am 26, teaching in China, lusting after ... A handful of fireworks splattered against Chongqing's heavy metal atmosphere. Some hoots here and there. And that was it. At the center of the world, the arrival of a new calendar year is not such a big deal. If you want fireworks, you have to wait for the Lunar New Year.
I stayed in Chongqing a few days too long. On the third day, I set off with my friend and wandering companion Erin for a Saturday evening stroll. By bidding farewell to our hosts and missing the last bus out of town, we had committed ourselves to another night in Chongqing. But it was unclear where the night would end, whether we would find ourselves sleeping in the gutter, or in a swan-shaped bed on the 97th floor of the Chongqing Hilton.
I have visited Chongqing twice. The city doesn't feel like a city. It feels like a very large village. In the West, the city-village aesthetic might call to mind places like Madison, Wisconsin: cities full of mom 'n pop diners and plenty of green space. But that's not what I mean. What I mean is this: Chongqing is a city full of country folk. You'll pass the most opulent nightclub in all of China: strobe lights, crystal chandeliers, a god-awful Fatboy Slim remix thumping on the PA, some dude in a bear costume breakdancing on the stoop, a salaryman in a seersucker suit vomiting over the balcony. Fifteen feet later: a mud-streaked peasant lugging a cartload of pig heads up the hill, a teenaged beggar squatted in the lotus position with an eleven-digit phone number scrawled at his feet, a circle of toothless hags playing mahjongg. The juxtaposition is not exactly cozy, nor is it loaded with socioeconomic tension as it would be in The States. It is simply surreal. You wonder whether the peasants are aware of the glittering, ephemeral riches around them, and whether the young hipster kids are aware of the peasants. As a Westerner, you are aware of both. At the same time, you are aware of nothing.
Erin and I wandered. She asked me how China compared to Korea.
"Korea is brighter than China," I said, indicating the neon haze around us, "if you can imagine anything brighter than this."
But I can't really compare China to Korea. I lived in Korea for a long enough time, but that was three years ago. I was different then. Korea was different then. We change, and our surroundings keep changing at a rate that makes knowing anything impossible. Those who know do not speak, those who speak do not know, etc.
We wandered for eight hours. I exaggerate not. We wandered. We passed a shoe vendor who was selling boots with facial hair, big orange boots with eyebrows, mutton chops and little moustaches. "Fu Man-Shoe," I quipped. Nightclubs and eel vendors. Limousines and trishaws. We passed a man belting karaoke through a portable amplifier: he closed his set with a falsetto flourish, then he hawked a legendary loogey at 120 decibels. The locals laughed, we laughed. Starbuckses and whorehouses. Skyscrapers and hovels. Movie theaters and plastic-wrapped bootleg pornos spread out on dirty quilts.
We arrived at a trio of pagodas. In China, you can never be sure whether the scenery that surrounds you was built 4,000 years ago, or yesterday. These pagodas were built yesterday, and were infested with karaoke rooms and massage parlors and internet cafes. We climbed the stairs and walked to the end of a courtyard that looked over the Yangtze. The earth lay hundreds of feet below, obscured by the eternal fog that pillows the Chongqing skyline. I trembled with a sudden fear of heights: I'd no idea we were so high up. A boyfriend came waddling towards us with his girlfriend on his back and jokingly threatened to hump her over the ledge.
"If any man ever does that to me," Erin said, "I'll throw him over the ledge."
The ledge was covered in keychain graffiti, half of it in Chinese, half in bad English. "I love GJ for ever!" "You are gay fuck." "Thank you very much, World." "Your welcome!"
We walked back to the dimly lit joint that we'd passed in the courtyard. Chongqing, a city of countless millions, is home to perhaps ten bars worth going to. We pressed our foreheads against the window and peered inside. Black people! Heineken! Conversation! Couches!
"My god," I said, choking up a bit. "It looks like - a bar."
We went inside. A bar, indeed, it was. The bartender recommended "the black beer," and I was stunned to find that, after only two bottles, I was tipsy.
"I feel slightly drunk," Erin said to me, "and not formaldehyde drunk. Drunk drunk."
I was zoned out, watching the fractal display on the projection screen. I've been abroad so long that I'm no longer sure what is modern and what is obsolete. But, I said to Erin, slobbering into the collar of my suitcoat, if I'd had access to this sort of psychedelic stimulation as an undergrad, I would never have graduated. And yet there were peasants on the other side of the wall, smoking pipes, skinning radishes, hauling meat uphill. If you brought them inside to see this, even for a moment, if you dragged them inside to observe Afro-Caribbean men digging a reggae redub of Dark Side of the Moon while the universe unfurled itself across a projector screen, would the peasants understand? When we'd paid our tab and stumbled back outside, would we understand? Does anyone understand what is happening?
But existential dilemmas quickly gave way to more practical concerns: where were we going to sleep? We stopped by a love motel. The clerk assured us that a room would be available in 25 minutes, and we waited until a sweaty old man and his escort went scampering out the front door, but in the end, the clerk wouldn't let us stay because I'd forgotten my passport. We hid out in a nearby McDonald's until 4 AM while a schizophrenic girl in the corner pulled her hair out over a Big Mac. We ventured to the four-star hotel across the street. The clerk didn't give a shit. We checked into a room on the 17th floor. The room service menu advertised "vib condoms" and "the magic pants." On the bed was a plastic-wrapped pill that I did not ingest because it cost fifty kuai. In the morning, I parted the curtains and squinted through the Chongqing haze and wondered just how I'd arrived at the center of the world.
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