Hotel Ambos Mundos

After a long and profoundly foggy winter, I promised myself that I would stake out an outdoor writing spot so that at the first hint of spring I might claim it and write there all summer long. A couple weeks ago I went out on the prowl and found my writing spot - a little hardwood table stashed behind the mahjongg tables along Beihu Lake - but the better part of April passed before I got a chance to use it.

Then, without warning, spring came. I left the house in my usual five layers - thermal underwear, undershirt, button-down, sweater, suitcoat - and nearly melted on the spot. My students were first amused, then disgusted by how much I was sweating. After class, I draped my suitcoat over my arm, peeled off my sweater, and went out for a walk in Beihu Park, en route to my writing spot. But in Nanchong, a walk in the park is never a walk in the park.

"FOREIGNER! COME HERE!" some college boys shouted from a distance. "HEY LAOWAI, COME BACK!"

Then, another troupe of them approached.

"FOREIGNER! HAH-LOO! HOW ARE YOU! COME HERE!"

It's always the twerpy college boys: square-framed non-prescription glasses, skinny black jeans, Converse All-Stars, hip-hop jackets - you know the type.

Back in the day, Shelley and I used to humor them.

"HAH-LOO!" they would shout, and "HAH-LOO!" we would shout back, at twice the volume.

"FOREIGNER!" they would bark.

"Foreigner!" we would gasp. "Where? Where? Let me at 'im!"

Laughter all around. But hardened veterans like Phil and Joe were unamused.

"Don't encourage them," Phil would sigh.

"Don't be their monkey," Joe used to say.

Once, some college twerps interrupted us at dinner. They shouted HAH-LOO and snapped several pictures before we had time to pose. Then they asked where we were from. Joe turned to them and said, in fluent Sichuanese, "We are from Mars." That silenced everyone.

In those early days, I found Phil and Joe a bit too cynical for my liking. I've never been one to mouth off at strangers, or to ignore a friendly greeting. But I've since become something of a veteran myself. I no longer encourage my hecklers. In a word, the constant heckling exhausts me. It probably seems easy enough to deal with when you're reading about it. But living with it is another thing entire. Where else on earth (aside from Korea) is it acceptable to scream at a complete stranger, a full-grown adult walking in the park? I'm twenty-seven fer chrissake. I sport a beard: leave me alone. So I politely ignore the college twerps. And of course, they act offended when I pass by without a word. But we are all humans here. If you would like to talk, please do come introduce yourself, and I would be more than happy to speak passable Sichuanese with you.

All hecklers aside, I navigated the park, following the faint scent trail left behind by my previous self. I walked past the arcade and the carnival booths, stopped briefly to check out the plastic bubble apparatuses which, for fifteen kuai a pop, allow children ages five and up to embark on a vomit-inducing tumble across the the surface of Beihu Lake. I passed something called the "Pleasure Center" and something else called the "Source of Life." Then I arrived in mahjongg country, where the Sichuanese men swearing at each other are very nearly canceled out by the soothing sound of plastic tiles sliding across felt-topped tables.

I sat. Immediately, I felt absurdly conspicuous, like the guy who goes to Red Lobster and requests a table for one. Red Lobster is a family restaurant, and China is a family country. If you do things by yourself, you may as well have the plague, or H1N1. My students refuse to believe that I live alone, and are creeped out by the thought of it. I tried several times to flag the waitress, but she looked through me to the table of boisterous drunks behind me. As soon as I started writing, a couple of dorks came and hovered over my shoulder. I swatted them away with a horsetail glance.

Beihu Lake: the most picturesque spot in all Nanchong. I had anticipated a picturesque writing session - not quite Hemingway chomping on a Cuban at the Hotel Ambos Mundos, but I figured I'd be able to get in a notebook page or two. Instead, I found myself distracted. Nobody was out-and-out bothering me, but every time I looked up from my notebook, I caught pairs of eyes watching me, and the people belonging to those eyes acted startled and offended, as though it were me staring at them the whole time. Lord only knows what those people must have thought of me, a sweaty laowai wearing a suitcoat on the first day of spring, sitting alone and writing furiously - and I bet he's not even going to order anything to eat. Well, if that doesn't beat the band ...

Nevertheless, I did get some writing in. At least this much worth. But I know it can't last forever. In a few minutes, someone will sit at my table, or drag me over to sit at theirs. At that point, I will leave behind the page and step out into the weird Chinese world, to do more of that all-important counterpart to writing which is called living. And perhaps that experience will inspire more writing, which will be interrupted by another minor confrontation worth writing about, and so on.

I suppose that's the important thing if you're a writer: that at all times you are either writing, or distracted from it.

Saloon Doors

By the time I finished that last blog post, I had so much Nescafé in my system that I was peeing every twelve seconds and trembling on the verge of a grande latte seizure. Lisa called and wanted me to come play at the Jack Bar, so I jitterbugged my way outside and launched myself into the back of the nearest cab.

Lisa was profoundly drunk somewhere, so I was able to play fourteen songs instead of my usual six. And for an audience that didn't once acknowledge my existence, I played the best guitar of my life. My setlist was as follows:

1. Via Chicago - Wilco
2. Long Way Home - Tom Waits
3. Our House - CSNY
4. Random Rules - Silver Jews
5. Nobody Does It Better - Carly Simon
6. Lola - The Kinks
7. Love Song - The Cure
8. Lonesome Whistle - Hank Williams
9. Sad Songs And Waltzes - Willie Nelson
10. I Wish I Was The Moon - Neko Case
11. Joan Jett Of Arc - Clem Snide
12. Ruby Tuesday - The Rolling Stones
13. Do It Again - Steely Dan
14. Restless Farewell - Bob Dylan

As you can see, I am no longer covering albums front-to-back. I have opted instead for a schizophrenic barrage of songs that I like, or that Chinese people might like. But of course, Chinese people don't like my songs. Only I like them. I usually screw up a lot, but this time I played to my satisfaction. So I bid the crowd a restless farewell and took my seat at the bar, grinning broadly. The surly teenage cowboys slid two Bud Ices my way. I saw that they had scavenged a bottle of wine for themselves, so it was a good night all around. I picked up the bottle and gave it a look: Cabernet Chawuyvnon, the label said.

"This is fake," I told the cowboys.
"Fake? It's French!"
"No, it's Chinese. This name's not right."
"But it cost 200 kuai!"
"Fake," I said, and offered them a couple of consolation cigarettes.

But fake or not, the cowboys had scavenged a bottle of 200 kuai wine, which was nothing to laugh about. They were triumphant, chatting on QQ, chainsmoking and passively watching Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. And I, too, was triumphant, though with Lisa out of commission and the teenage cowboys lost in the interwang, I had absolutely no one to talk to. I went to the bathroom and there I heard a girl weeping in the stall next to mine.

"Are you okay?" I asked. "Do you need help?"

She stopped weeping.

"Hello?" I called.

No answer. Perhaps I'd scared her sober. I washed my hands and returned to the bar.

It makes for an odd social scene, Nanchong. Nobody wants anything to do with me unless I've been introduced by an affluent Chinese woman. Without Lisa, the only affluent Chinese woman I know, I was powerless. I sat watching the salarymen play their dice games. A college kid ushered his girlfriend into the bathroom, where she vomited loud enough for all to hear, and then he ushered her back to his table for more drinks. A gentleman.

I began to daydream. I can't play acoustic guitar here forever, I thought to myself. That's background music. That's Kenny G. I ought to put a band together. Maybe get Poodleface to manufacture some synth-pop beats for me, enlist those hyperenergetic Mennonites to play percussion, hire Jacob to do some popping and locking and heckling. Something to get a reaction out of these people. We'd call ourselves Kung Pao Panda and show up at the Jack Bar in glam sunglasses and funny hats. We'd gain a steady following in Nanchong and move onto bigger and better: Chongqing, Chengdu, Changsha, Shanghai, Beijing. Then we'd succumb to substance abuse and spend the next two decades pursuing ill-fated solo careers, paying off our alimonies with the proceeds from our Greatest Hits box set. That could be fun, I thought to myself. And then all of a sudden it was closing time. The cowboys removed their hats, the strobe lights went out, the cavemen dragged their booze-clubbed cavewomen out into the street, and the saloon doors hit my sorry ass on the way out ...

The Bling Dynasty

Lisa called on Thursday night to tell me that we had "business" to discuss. I showed up at the Jack Bar around ten, and she set out my usual two bottles of Bud Ice. She told me to sit so I sat. I was expecting bad news, probably the long-anticipated termination of my duties as the Jack Bar's official court minstrel. But instead, she gave me an offer that I couldn't refuse.

"New apartment grand opening," she said. "Heavenly Peach Blossom Lifestyle Development. You play two song. Only two song. We pay you $100 U.S. dollar."

Of course, I belong to the monastic order of the Peace Corps, so I couldn't accept the money. But I wasn't interested in making bank anyhow. No, this was the sort of gig I was more than happy to do pro bono - the sort of once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that only comes once a week if you're a foreigner in China. A backstage pass to the heart of Chinese opulence, a journey to the center of the housing bubble, a lo-fi interlude in the middle of a high-tech freak show.

"I'll do it," I said.

The next day, Lisa called me and told me to meet her at the front gate in five minutes. I was naked at the time and woefully unprepared, so I tossed a pair of clean underwear onto the radiator and frantically scribbled some lyrics and chords in my trusty green Chinglish notebook.

I had spent the afternoon deliberating what songs to perform. Theme: houses, apartment complexes, construction. Mood: snide, cheeky, tongue-in-cheeky. I judiciously ruled out "The Roof is on Fire," as well as "Grave Architecture" by Pavement. "Burning Down the House" wasn't going to fly, and sadly, neither would my dad's tasteful suggestion, "The House of the Rising Sun." I needed something sweet and melodic but subtly jeering, the sort of inside joke that only a bona fide laowai would get. Finally, around 4 PM, it came to me: "Our House" by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Two cats in the yard. Perfect. It was a bit out of my vocal range, but so are all the songs I sing.

For my second number, I decided to go with "Long Way Home" by Tom Waits - not exactly relevant, but with lines like "money's just something you throw off the back of a train" and "let's go out past the Party lights," I figured I would get a chuckle out of singing it, even if nobody else did. By the time I'd finished writing, my boxer-briefs were hot to the touch and I was ten minutes late.

One of the Inner Mongolians sat behind the wheel, Lisa in the passenger's side.

"We go to banquet first," she said.

"Hao hao hao hao hao," I said. "Good good good good good."

Chinese banquets are the panopticon of dining rituals. Fourteen people in a brightly-lit room, crammed elbow-to-elbow around a circular table with a not-so-lazy susan spinning round at 120 RPM. Everyone can see everyone else, but all eyes are on Mr. Laowai. The Asian world wants to know: can he use chopsticks? Ordinarily yes, but banquet chopsticks are oversized and extremely slippery, so someone eventually claims Mama Bird duty and puts food in Mr. Laowai's bowl. There is an overabundance of beer, if you're lucky, and rice vodka if you're not. Everyone toasts everyone else. If you have fourteen people at the table, that adds up to 91 toasts. Things can get sloppy very fast.

Our guests of honor were from Heilongjiang Province, the beak of the chicken-shaped Chinese landmass. Although Heilongjiang is practically cosmopolitan compared to lowly Nanchong, the out-of-towners were even less tactful around me than my Nanchong entourage tends to be.

"Whoa, a laowai. Can he speak Chinese?" the b-boy in the gorilla sweater asked Lisa.
"Yes," I said. "I can speak Chinese."
"Holy cow, a foreigner who can speak Chinese. Now I've seen everything. Can he use chopsticks?"
"Yes. I can use chopsticks."
"Wowzers. Amazing. Where is he from?"
"I'm from America."
"America. What does he do?"
"I am an English teacher."
"How much money does he make?"

And so on.

I was the center of attention for a short while, but after it was established that I could speak passable Chinese and feed myself without making a mess, everyone seemed to grow bored of me. There was a Cavaliers game on the big screen, so the men zoned out watching it, breaking the trance every so often to shout "Good ball!" or to express their admiration for the legendary Lei-bu-lon Jei-mu-si.

One by one, the men toasted me. I wish you happy every day. I wish you colorful life in Nanchong. I wish you find beautiful Chinese girlfriend. The tempo picked up. The men began touching each other below the belt. Everyone kept poking fun at the b-boy's beer belly, and he responded by laughing triumphantly and beatboxing while playing his gut like a bongo drum. So when it came time for me to toast him, I patted his belly and wished him and his baby a long and happy life together. He chuckled, but he didn't smile. A line had been crossed. Chinese ribbing is one thing, but a fat joke from the obesity capital of the world is another. I made my escape and ran over to toast the elderly couple who were smiling bashfully at me from the other end of the table. I downed my beer and they downed their walnut milk. We all smiled bashfully. Then it was time to go. The Inner Mongolian grabbed me by the arm and yanked me out into the hallway. I shouted a frantic farewell but everyone was too drunk to notice.

The Heavenly Peach Blossom Lifestyle Development was so bright that, from a distance, the murky Jialing River looked downright resplendent. Searchlights darted back and forth across Nanchong's low-hanging heavens. Faintly audible: a stubborn beat, the voice of a circus barker.

We arrived. The Inner Mongolian parked illegally and a policeman came running over to scold him. But he indicated the laowai in the backseat and the policeman nodded and walked away.

We made our way up the red carpet.
"Did you drink too much?" asked Lisa.
"Chinese beer? Impossible," I said.
"Are you nervous?"
"Me? Never."

If the former was a slight fib, the latter was an outright lie. Even by Chinese standards, the crowd that had assembled to christen this residential behemoth was truly gargantuan, in the thousands, easy. The Volkswagen insignia was plastered up everywhere, and there was a trio of Volkswagen SUVs rotating on platforms, barely dressed xiaojies caressing their aerodynamic curves. The jumbotron on stage was looping a montage of a Volkswagen GTI Hatchback skidding up and down a rain-slick mountain road. The circus barker was whipping up a frenzy, but the only word I could make out was Da Zhong Qi Che - Volkswagen.

There was a visible divide between the people on the inside of the velvet-roped stanchions and the people on the outside. The out crowd was the same riffraff I usually encounter down by the bus station: old timers in filthy suitcoats wielding bamboo sticks and swollen duffel bags. Wielding ducks, wielding chickens. I passed an old man chewing a quid of tobacco - a quid of tobacco! The out crowd was very Ming Dynasty. Meanwhile, on the inside of the stanchion, it was all champagne and mini-cigars: The Bling Dynasty.

My opening act this time was a magician. At least it wasn't a pole dancer. But he wasn't too well-versed in the ways of magic. He just about strangled himself with his own neverending handkerchief. The MC saw me and came rushing over.

"Hello, please to meet you," he said. "I am MC Li Zhong Bo. What is your name?"
"You can call me Pan Da," I said.
"Oh, you speak Chinese."
"Sort of, yes."
"What is your American name?"
"Keith," I said. "K-E-I-T-H."
"K-I-I-G-H."
"K-E-I-T-H."
"Okay! Okay! Kitty!"
"Keith."
"Kitty!"
"Kitty."

He noticed my Chinglish notebook.
"What is this?"
"My music," I said.
"Cannot use. We have no," he said, searching for the word. "We have no ... thing."
No thing. Shit. I would have to play two songs from memory. So much for the two cats in the yard.

The magician, deeply ashamed, left the stage with his neverending handkerchief between his legs. It was my time to shine. The MC summoned Kitty to the microphone, and I Obama-trotted up to the stage.

"Our foreign friend has come tonight to entertain us with a few songs!" he said. "Now, what is your name?"
"My name is Pan Da and I am a laowai," I said into the microphone.
"This is Pan Da and he is a laowai. Very good. Pan Da - is that your Chinese name?"
"Yes. I am a national treasure."
Someone coughed.
"I see. Well, Mr. National Treasure - what kind of music will you be playing for us tonight?"
"American rock and roll."

There is footage floating around of Bob Dylan performing "Mr. Tambourine Man" at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. He was young back then, and widely believed to be the Second Coming. So the crowd is awestruck and silent for the whole seven minutes, all these bucktoothed boys with wheat-colored hair sitting at Dylan's feet, blowing dandelions and musing quietly to themselves. The haunted, frightened trees? - one hand waving free? - circus sands? - what does it all mean? Meanwhile, a dust bowl wind blows havoc into the banners and stage curtains, and warbles the hell out of Dylan's already warbly voice.

Now, I'm not comparing myself to Dylan by any means, though I am disheveled enough these days to bear a passing resemblance to some of his latter day incarnations. But for all the glitz and pyrotechnic Volkswagen displays, the grand opening of the Heavenly Peach Blossom Lifestyle Development turned into the 1964 Newport Folk Festival the moment I started playing. Which is not to say the audience was awestruck. They were perplexed, slightly bored, somewhat uncomfortable. And they were dead silent. I played two Beck songs that featured a combined total of three chords. I played them because they are dear to me, and because they are simple - in front of all those people, I just wanted to leave the stage with my face intact. At the end of Jackass, the MC had to bark at the crowd until they applauded, and midway through Beautiful Way, he barked at them again, so that the second verse was drowned out by microphone feedback and a listless round of clapping. And then it was quiet again, just me and Lisa's beautiful thousand-dollar acoustic-electric, me and my three chords, and my warbly voice warbling in a wind that had come down all the way from the Himalayas just to mess up my hair.

I bowed and left the stage. I put the guitar away and the Inner Mongolian grabbed me by the arm.

"Now you play at Jack Bar, okay?"
"Okay," I said.

The next act passed me in the aisle: a very tall man with a very small bicycle. Later, at the Jack Bar, my opening act was a pole dancer.

Choose Your Own Adventure #639: Passive Attack!

1
You are an English teacher in an overcrowded but unheard-of Chinese metropolis. You teach 500 students a semester and many of them have never seen a foreigner before. They all want to be your friend, but how does one go about befriending 500 people, exactly? Beats me. Beats you.

Turn to page 36.


36
Your student invites you to The Blue Note on a Wednesday night. It is International Night, she explains, and it is very important that you show up. You would like to join her, but you are contractually obligated to teach Oral English at eight the next morning. You explain your predicament and politely decline her invitation, offering to hang out with her over the weekend. But she is not pleased. She sends you a phone-clogging barrage of text messages, one of which reads, "oh my god.. stupid panda, you had better come right now and bring your friends." She then rapid-fire calls you for the next hour while you're lying there in bed. Finally, there comes a passive rapping at your door, followed by an aggressive pounding, then a passive-aggressive I-know-you're-in-there knocking. The lights are out. You are shirtless and in your underwear. It is 1 AM and you must teach in seven hours. You have no idea how she found out where you lived. You don't answer the door and after a while the knocking ceases, though you can hear her high-heels clacking in the stairwell until you drift off to sleep.

Turn to page 43.


43
You feel somewhat guilty, so you try to gloss things over by meeting your student and her friends at The Blue Note the following Saturday. Jacob is there. He holds out his hand and you extend your fist, then you switch, then switch again before you finally agree on a clammy handshake. "Smooth," you say. Then you are suddenly set upon from all sides by angry students. It is a passive attack - incidentally, the title of this book, the 639th edition of the Choose Your Own Adventure series.

"Why are you so late?" your student shouts in your ear, barely audible over the slutty flatulence of Britney Spears.
"Late?" you shout back, smiling. "It's only 9:00!"
"...!" she shouts. "...!"
"What?!"
"Why you no come last week?!"
"It was late! I had to teach!"
"That day is very important!" she shouts. "You let us down!"
You smile and shrug foppishly. But she isn't smiling.

A second student starts shouting in your other ear, the one that has been plugged up for a month now.
"What?!" you shout.
"We are very angry you no come last week!"
"It was late! I had to teach!"
She pouts a bit and shouts, "It is very special night! You must come here!"
"I am here!"
"Yes," she shouts, "but that night is very special!"

The owner of The Blue Note gives you a couple of free drinks and, given the circumstances, this is a good thing. You take a sip. It might be champagne, but you're not sure - not sure, that is, until you spot the bottle of wine hiding behind the watermelon/pineapple fruit platter, and the two-liter of Sprite next to it. You are drinking a Sprite and wine cocktail.

"How is it?" asks Jacob as you ganbei the rest of your glass.
"It's not bad!" you shout, to the approval of your hosts.
"But it's not that good either," mouths Jacob, and you both laugh, and everyone at the table cranes their necks to see what it is the foreigners could possibly find so funny about Sprite and wine.

Turn to page 47.


47
A student - neither Jacob's nor your own - sits down next to you and starts talking about guitars. He has been playing for two years, he says, and he loves the Backstreet Boys.

"Cool!" you shout. "My sister used to like them!"

Whoops. You don't want to insult the poor kid, so you add, "I mean, when she was thirteen!"

Even worse. But he doesn't seem to notice. Instead, the kid changes the subject completely, as Chinese youngsters are wont to do.

"Now you sing an English song, OK?"

You furrow your mouth, if that is possible. You're not ready for karaoke. The Sprite/wine cocktail hasn't kicked in yet, and it won't kick in even if you drink twelve of them (which you do, eventually) because it is 90% high fructose corn syrup. You don't really answer the kid one way or the other, so he runs off to talk to the DJ. Shania Twain fades out and one of the waitresses makes an ominous announcement. Everyone starts clapping and you find yourself on stage with a microphone in your hand. You wait for the music to start - Hotel California, Every Rose Has Its Thorn, You Are Not Alone - but nothing happens. Everyone is staring at you, waiting.

"Where's the music?" you ask the DJ.
"No music!" he shouts. "Sing!"
"Sing what?"
"An English song!"

You explain with a violent shaking of hands that a cappella isn't going to work. He rifles through his CD wallet.

"You know 'I Don't Know?'"
"I don't know 'I Don't Know,'" you say. "Is that a song?"
"You know 'Take Me To Your Heart?'"
"I know it, but I hate it."

A student runs to your aid with his cellphone. He shows you his MP3 collection. The DJ plugs the kid's phone into the PA system. You settle for your favorite band's least favorite song: "Creep," by Radiohead.

You pace back and forth across the stage. The microphone does not appear to be turned on. The crowd applauds when you forget the second verse and claps wildly when Thom Yorke sings the high parts, though your own voice does not register on the monitor. As you bow and return to your table, one of the waitresses hands you a commemorative Year of the Tiger Beanie Baby that you totally forget to bring with you when you leave The Blue Note some five minutes later.

Turn to page 52.


52
You and Jacob find refuge in a nearby shish-kebab joint. Much has happened since the last time you spoke with an English speaker. The president of Poland was killed in a plane crash. In America, a castrated version of health care reform passed into law - and in retaliation, Kentucky Fried Chicken unveiled its 1,245-calorie Double Down sandwich. So you and Jacob launch into a discussion, somewhat serious, somewhat absurd, totally cathartic. But somebody has followed you from the club. He sits down at your table. He interrupts with questions like, "What is your happiest thing in China?" and "Can you use chopsticks?" and "Do you want a Chinese girlfriend?" He latches onto words like "fuckin' A" and "clusterfuck" and murmurs them under his breath to commit them to memory. He laughs loudly when you and Jacob chuckle, but the moment the conversation shifts to Obama, your third wheel's mood sours and he calls for the check. Thus ends the night. As Jacob flags down an oncoming taxi, it occurs to you that, although you have seen him several times a week, you haven't really talked to the man in months.

To grab a couple more shish-kebabs for the road,
turn to page 87.

To head straight home and have yourself a nice long sulk,
turn to page 91.


87
The shish-kebab place has sold out of shish-kebabs.

Turn to page 91.


91
You head home and have yourself a nice long sulk.


THE END

Knives Out

I was late for my date at the hospital, so I folded up my umbrella and started trotting through the rain. A beggar saw me coming and ran alongside me, riding my shirt like a cornerback and thwacking my gut with a crock pot full of damp, crumpled bills. As I juked past him and sprinted for the endzone, I slipped on one of Nanchong's randomly placed patches of Teflon-slick sidewalk and only narrowly averted arriving at the hospital by other means.

The lovely Dr. Gao was waiting for me on the doorstep of the emergency ward, and I was happy to see that Jacob had tagged along. I held out my hand and he extended his fist, then we switched, then switched again before we finally agreed on a lackluster fistpound. "Smooth," said Jacob. Then we noticed the gurney behind us, and the man thereupon, and the two blood-spattered EMTs waiting for us to move. We jumped out of the way and they hustled past. Smooth.

Every so often, the Peace Corps sends us on a mission, and they like to keep us guessing as to what excitement it will entail. Over the weekend, I learned that Dr. Gao was coming to visit. I knew that I was to meet her at the Nanchong City Hospital, and sensed that I should probably clean my apartment, which I managed to render livable by 5 AM on the morning of Dr. Gao's arrival. But I didn't know what I was getting into. I didn't anticipate a tour of the rheumatology wing, or a visit to the Intensive Care Unit, or that we'd be taken backstage into a room full of lab technicians squinting into ominous-looking vials of infectious disease.

The hallways had that salty ketchup smell that I've come to associate with hospitals of the developing world. I guess blood smells like salty ketchup - or at least blood was the most obvious culprit, because there was a lot of it everywhere: red splotches on the walls, patients lying around with open wounds, vials of blood flying all over the place. The halls were jammed with people in various states of surgical disrepair - bandaged eyes, wrapped limbs, an old man smoking a Shuangxi through the slit in his facemask and wheeling his IV around in circles. Everyone was standing, except for those confined to wheelchairs, and the babies, who were being held. Bumping my way down the hall, I was reminded of Radiohead's Knives Out video - flurries of doctors waving around charts and x-ray film, ghastly operations being performed in plain view, bizarre Michel Gondryesque gadgetry whirring and whizzing, projecting monochrome displays of the inner workings of body and mind. I followed Dr. Gao, rotating in a slow circle as I went, taking it all in.

The hospital director dropped whatever trifles he was busy with (a kidney transplant, a triple bypass, whatever) to show us around. He rushed us through several operating rooms so he could show us the good stuff.

"This is a Toshiba, from Japan. Very high quality," he said. "This blood scanner is Architect brand. Made in USA. Top of the line, second to none. Bar none."

The machines were impressive, whatever it was they did. But every time we left a fluorescent-lit room full of humming electronics, we found ourselves back in the grotto of the convalescents. All was dull gray, children screaming, the smell of salty ketchup. There were hordes of people lined up to get their prescriptions filled, jostling each other and shouting at the girl behind the Plexiglas screen - for a moment it felt like we were back at the Nanchong train station. We entered a room full of oxygen tanks and little plastic boxes with black accordions inside and clear plastic tubes coming out of them.

"This is sucking machine," said Dr. Gao. "It is for ... suck ... suck out the sputum."

The people we passed in the halls were surprised to find a couple of foreigners in their midst, but they didn't HAH-LOO us or stare for very long. The mood of the place was too somber even for laowai ogling. In the rheumatatology wing, a dashing young Indian resident came running over and grabbed Jacob by the arm.

"What's wrong? Can I help you?" he asked.
It was one of Jacob's students.
"Naw, I'm aight, Sanjay," said Jacob. "We're just on a tour."
Sanjay let out a high-pitched giggle, the wonderful sort of laugh you seldom hear in this country, and returned to his patient. But you got the impression that he'd have lopped off Jacob's arm in a heartbeat.

We waited for the elevator to take us up to the 13th floor, where the Intensive Care Unit was hidden.

"So, remind me, Jake," I said. "What does an Intensive Care Unit do?"
"They care," he said, "intensively."
"This is going to be unpleasant, isn't it?"
Jacob shrugged. "It's a Chinese hospital, man."

The crowd pushed Jacob and Dr. Gao onto the elevator, along with thirty other people. One of the doctors urged me to get in, but the elevator was sagging too much for my comfort and I watched the doors close in front of me. Then I waited for the next elevator. Though I was the first person in line, I was one of the last to get in. The elevator started sagging a bit, then dropped a full inch when a doctor rolled his patient in. The patient was unconscious and his face was covered in blood, plastic tubes snaking out from his nose and arms. With each stop, people jostled each other to get in and jostled each other to get off. At one point, someone shoved me so hard that I very nearly toppled over on top of the patient. I was happy to get out of the elevator, but less than enthused to find myself in the ICU, where the doctors had us slip on little plastic booties.

There were twenty beds and all of them were occupied. Most of the patients were elderly and all of them appeared to be unconscious. The sleeping faces reminded me of all the grouchy old Chinese shopkeepers I've grown to know, but they were devoid of all the loogey-hawking, profanity-muttering animation I've grown to love. Family visitation hours were from 4:00 PM to 4:30 PM, said Dr. Gao. A college kid - part of Jacob's entourage - started snapping pictures of us. I can't imagine that the photographs turned out very flattering. I must have been shielding my eyes from the flash in the first photo, and staring glumly at the floor in all the others. I wanted to leave. I wasn't comfortable being privy to such a private moment. Who could imagine what all these old timers had lived through, only to wind up here, in this sterile room full of bleeping state-of-the-art Japanese life-extending devices. A secretary from my school tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to one of the beds, in which a badly burned child was curled up in the fetal position. "It's a child," he said, and I nodded, saying nothing. A nurse stood beside the child, patting his back to the rhythm of the pulse meter. The director cleared his throat and pointed to a blanketed object in the corner.

"New medical ventilator," he said. "Bird VIP. Top of the line. Bar none."

The Higgs Boson Fruitcake Switcheroo

"Throughout the ages the Chinese have had only two ways of looking at foreigners. We either look up to them as gods, or look down on them as wild animals."
-Lu Xun

Nanchong is home to some 1.2 million souls and 99.98% of them are Han Chinese, which means (according to my second grade math) that there are roughly 240 minorities in all of Nanchong. Granted, some of us weren't counted in the last census, but no matter: 240 feels about right.

There are perhaps as many as twenty Westerners in town. Four of them are Mennonites and three of them are Peace Corps volunteers; five of them are evangelical Christians with beards, studying Mandarin at the Normal College; there are six or seven freelance teachers that I have never met, but whose sex lives are the stuff of legend; there is an Italian named Fiero who owns a coffee shop downtown, and then you have Ricky and Sadiq over at the Medical College. We are a small group, but not a tight one. Most days, I don't see any laowais at all. When I get home from work and glance in the mirror, I'm surprised and a bit disappointed to find that I am not Asian.

Most of the minorities in Nanchong are Uighurs. Uighurs are Chinese citizens, but they aren't really Chinese. They eat noodles instead of rice, lamb instead of pork, and they speak Mandarin instead of Sichuanese. The Uighurs have a monopoly on the local ramen racket, but their relationship with the Han Chinese population is strictly business: you buy noodles, we serve you noodles. One would think that as fellow outsiders, the Uighurs and I would share some sort of camaraderie, but whenever I swing by a Uighur noodle joint for a bowl of beef ramen, the cooks watch me eat and laugh at me. I don't really mind. I suppose when the world is staring at you, you've got to find someone else to stare at - and at the moment, I happen to lie at the very bottom of the chain of normalcy.

So even in Nanchong, you can find little pockets of diversity here and there if you know where to look for them. But 99.98% of the time, I lead a Han Chinese existence. For the past nine months, I have played by Han Chinese rules. I've learned what is polite and what isn't: loogeys are fair game, as is cutting in line, as is holding your baby over the sewer drain to take a crap - but don't even think about leaving your chopsticks standing upright in the rice bowl. I know a billion ways to modestly refuse a compliment. I can sense when I'm about to be screwed over. On a good day, I can talk a peddler down to half his original price. In short, I have adapted. But the longer I live here, the more perplexed I am by foreigners. I'm not quite sure how to act around Americans, and in the rare event that I find myself caught in a pickle with someone who isn't a local, I'm at a complete loss for what to do.

For your consideration: I was on my way to dinner the other day when I was corralled by a Uighur cake vendor.

"No thanks," I said, and kept walking. The cake man blocked my path with his cart and told me to check out his cake. I stopped and gave it a look-see. It was a mighty odd cake alright: the thing was as long as a Blimpies party sub, with dates and berries and little ears of baby corn embedded in the bread. But it wasn't exactly my cup of tea, so I said bu yao and started walking the other way. But the cake vendor grabbed hold of my sleeve and wouldn't let go. Then he whipped out a knife and started cutting the cake.

I shrugged. Why not? It was just the sort of overaggressive salesmanship I'd gotten used to in China, so I knew what to expect. I figured I'd wind up spending a bit of dough I hadn't planned on spending, but I'd probably get my money's worth.

"One liang, three bucks," said the cake man.

I nodded. "I'll take one liang, then."

He finished cutting the cake. Then he pulled out a scale and weighed the slice - and Large Hadron Collider be damned, because right there and then, before my very eyes, the cake man must have found the elusive Higgs Boson, for the cake had suddenly acquired ten times its original mass.

"One jin, thirty bucks," he said flatly.

I should've seen it coming - the oldest trick in the book, the Higgs Boson Fruitcake Switcheroo. And now the cake man had me in a bind. The masses were already gathering around to observe the transaction, and if I refused to pay, he'd simply have to cry thief! and I'd be screwed. Which is just what he did.

"I don't want the cake," I said, and turned to walk away.

"Thief, thief!" he cried. I stopped in my tracks.

"You're the thief," I said. "You're trying to cheat me."

"One liang, three bucks!" he shouted, then he pointed at the scale. "One jin, thirty bucks!"

"I never wanted that much cake in the first place. I wanted one liang. Three bucks. I told you that," I said. "Do I look like some kind of idiot?"

An ooh from the crowd: this was getting good. The people came in droves. As I pleaded my case and shook my fists at the heavens, the old ladies around me grunted and nodded their heads approvingly.

"But I've already cut the cake," the cake man said. "There it is. You asked me for one jin and I cut you one jin. Just pay for your cake and there won't be any trouble."

"I can't afford it," I said.

"You can't afford it?" said the cake man, raising an eyebrow and smirking.

"I don't have that kind of money."

"How much do you have?"

"Five bucks," I said, "and I'm only going to give you three."

"No, you're going to give me thirty. Because that's what you owe me."

"In my country," I said, "we don't buy fruitcake. Your grandma mails it to you for Christmas."

Laughter. By then, the crowd had spilled over into the street, and they were unanimously on my side. Red-faced and scowling, the cake man put down his knife and stepped up to me. We were standing face-to-face, chest-to-chest. He didn't speak. Someone in the audience shouted, "Why are you cheating our foreign friend? Just cut him a smaller slice!" I gave the crowd a thumbs-up and grinned at the cake man. He stared at me for a long time.

"This is funny, isn't it?" I said to him.

"There's nothing funny about it," he said.

I laughed. "Well, I'm not really hungry anymore. So I'm not going to buy anything. But you know I didn't want thirty bucks worth of cake," I said. I gestured toward the crowd. "They know I didn't want thirty bucks worth of cake. So I'm going to leave and you're not getting any of my money."

The crowd seemed proud of me. I thought they were going to give me a standing ovation. But they just watched me ride off into the metallic Nanchong sunset, nodding to themselves. Meanwhile, the cake man, sensing that the sidewalk across from the university was no longer a good place to do business, lit up a cigarette and rolled his cake cart on down the road.

I got some dinner - sweet and sour cabbage, a bowl of spicy pig intestines - and sat there thinking about what had just happened. I replayed the confrontation in my mind. I felt no sympathy for the cake man. He had tried to rob me blind and, all things considered, I thought I'd handled the situation pretty well. But in retrospect, it was Chinese crowd dynamics that puzzled me.

It starts with a couple of rubberneckers. Those rubberneckers attract more rubberneckers, and pretty soon you have a full-fledged mob of staring humans. A Chinese crowd can materialize in instant and disperse just as quickly. In China, crowds gather around fights, car wrecks, mahjongg games, and foreigners who have made the mistake of remaining in one place for too long. It is one of the eeriest things in the world to watch - or to be watched by - a Chinese crowd. Emotionless faces, a low murmuring, row after row of staring eyes. Should the situation turn violent, no one will break formation to intervene. Should someone get injured, no one will help. The Chinese crowd is a weird organism, indeed - a creature that does nothing but hover in one place mumbling to itself until it is dissolved by pure boredom.

Generally speaking, Chinese crowds are a harmless nuisance. They get in my way and turn me into a stammering wreck. They look me over and talk about my body hair, my clothes, the size of my nose. But this crowd had urged me on. They stood up for me. If things had escalated any further, I have no doubt that some dude in a crusty suitcoat would have stepped up and put the cake man in his place. And that was precisely what puzzled me. I have been cheated in the past by Han Chinese junk vendors, but not once did anyone raise a finger in my defense. The crowd just stood around watching my money evaporate. Only after the fact did a couple of old ladies rush over to tell me that I'd been gypped. But my showdown with the cake man was different somehow. He was an outsider and I was an outsider. In a sense, it was something of a cockfight, a roadside sideshow, a form of cheap entertainment. But this time, the crowd was emphatically on my side. They wanted me to win. They didn't want the cake man to take my money. I was a laowai, but at least I wasn't a Uighur. I suppose it all boiled down to a kind of relative racism. As a Westerner, I am an unknown variable. I am a god, or I am a wild animal. The Uighurs, on the other hand, have a definite reputation here - and it is not an altogether positive one. I empathize with them. It's tough being an outsider. Who wants to be a wild animal, after all? Or a god, for that matter?

But what do I know? I'm generalizing. Guessing. Imagining. When you're living abroad, sometimes the only way to make sense out of anything is to generalize. But then you sit in a park on a Sunday afternoon with your moleskine and your cigarettes and your half-empty bottle of beer, and you watch the people pass, hundreds upon thousands of them. They stare at you and you stare at them. Foreigner, they say. Chinese person, you think. Chinese person. Chinese person. There are so many people in the world, and who knows a damned thing about any of them?

Pigeons in the Park

I happened to be in Chongqing for the first annual Laowai Erotica Poetry Slam. We set up shop in the most neglected corner of a Starbucks, the one across from the animatronic pirates in Wan Da Plaza. All around us were Chinese coffee shop scenesters: college girls, young professionals, salarymen napping with Frappucinos stalled en route to mouth. We waited for a couple old foreigners to leave and then we slammed. Josh opened with a pair of raunchy limericks, then Erin gave us all a Large Hadron with a free verse poem about body particle collisions. Finally, it was my time to shine. On my walk up to the podium, I found myself, as usual, proofreading something I'd scrawled on the back of a Subway receipt. My offering was called "Pigeons in the Park."

After I'd finished reading, there was complete silence. Vijay ran off to the bathroom to vomit. Josh yanked at his collar. A handful of claps.

"Points for creativity?" someone offered. And all fell silent again.

Perhaps I had crossed some unspoken line. Perhaps my story had proven too erotic. Or perhaps it wasn't all that good. Flustered and ashamed, I bowed to the audience and returned to my pleather seat and sat there listening to the rest of the throbbing what-nots and dripping what-have-yous. All and all, I was a bit grossed out.

Milling around Wan Da Plaza, we came across a band setting up on the riverfront: a couple guitarists with Korean mullets and a drummer with an electronic trap set. They warmed up for half an hour, then they shuffled fifteen feet to the right, replugged all their rock paraphenalia and warmed up for another half-hour. A mosh pit of police gathered around the band, but I couldn't tell whether they were digging the music or warming up their truncheons. The band saw us - they muttered laowai and shouted HAH-LOO! - then they launched into the first verse of "Welcome to the Jungle" and followed it up with "Hotel California," at which point we wandered off and found something better to do.

I have mixed feelings about Chongqing. I can't recommend it. My hometown of Nanchong is a foggy place, but the Chongqing fog is of a more sinister palette: DDT white and coaldust grey. Despite the fog, as a foreigner, you are not invisible in Chongqing like you are in Chengdu. In Chongqing, a city the size of New York, strangers will still mutter laowai as they pass you, and shout HA-LOO from a safe enough distance.

After one last coffee with my erotic Western crew, I set off for the bus station and meandered for an hour along the dusty sidewalk that traces the sandy contours of the Yangtze. Eventually, I felt the need to drop a deuce and waddled into a seventeen-story business park looking for a squat toilet to clog. No options presented themselves in the lobby, so I took the stairs to the second floor.

"Excuse me," I said to a businessman waiting for the elevator, "but where is the ce-suo?"

He did not deign to acknowledge my existence. I stood there for a moment with my beard, my gnarled Irish half-fro, my trippy Radiohead-shirt-and-suitcoat combo. I cleared my throat. Was it not enough? I walked a circle around the man to make sure he was real. But he didn't see me. A bell chimed and he stepped into the elevator.

I walked to the end of the hall and found myself surrounded by police officers.

"Excuse me," I said to the whole regiment, "but where is the ce-suo?"

"What? What?" said Lt. Wang. "Oh! The chay-suay ... Try the fish place across the hall."

"But their doors are locked," I said.

"Then open them."

"But they're locked."

A heavy sigh. "I will help you."

It was 9:30 in the morning and the owner of the fish place was sleeping, but he jumped to his feet to let me in. I thanked him and he said it was nothing. I shut the bathroom door behind me. Then I squatted before the squatter in prayer, for there was paper.

In Defense of Mr. Panda

A couple days ago, one of my students invited me over to chat with him at his desk. He wanted help buying a Blackberry from Canada. I had only recently discovered that the Blackberry was something other than an aggregate fruit, but I told him that I'd see what I could do. We shot the bull for a while. He asked me what my goals in life were, and I told him that I had no idea. He suggested that I stay in China for the rest of my life, and I told him that we'd just have to see about that. He laughed. Then his face clouded over.

"Mr. Panda," he said, "we all have a problem with you."

"Okay," I said. "What's up?"

"I'm fine, thank you," he said, and continued. "The problem is you are treat us like middle school student. We all think this. We tell the other teachers about the problem."

I stood there smiling like a total galoot.

"The subject things is too simple," he said. "We are knowing all the subject things already. We all think so."

The classroom was silent. All eyes were on me. I told the kid that I appreciated his honesty and that I would try to include more challenging material in the future. My students, who were supposed to be acting out break-ups, sat watching me until it was clear I had finished speaking. Then they resumed air-smacking their ex-boyfriends across the face.

That sort of confrontation is uncomfortable, but not unusual. My students often pull me aside to criticize what I am teaching them, or the way in which I am teaching them. They level their criticism with the same passive-aggressive trajectory familiar to those of us who have worked the U.S. temp agency circuit: they butter me up with chit-chat and a handful of compliments, then comes a long laundry list of things I need to do differently. For my part, I hear them out and weigh their suggestions on the long bus ride home. More often than not, I do find some truth in what they're saying. I am not a teacher by trade, so I have much to learn from my students. But on this particular occasion, I was more than a little irked. I am confident in what I am teaching this semester. I certainly don't treat my college sophomores like middle schoolers, but if my classes seem elementary, that's because they are: I planned them that way. Anyhow, I'm not one to argue with my students, so I'll just have to argue with myself. In the proud tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo, I would like to write a short apologia in defense of that teaching alter-ego of mine, Mr. Panda.


In Defense of Mr. Panda

I. Of Criticism: That I'm Cool With It
I find it hard to imagine any of my students directly criticizing a Chinese professor, which is to say, I can't see it happening. Ever. But my students - intimidated as they are by my body hair, terrified as they are of talking to me - are not afraid to challenge me. I respect their nerve and to some extent I nurture it. They are, after all, college students. And I, perhaps, am a professor. So it is natural, even desirable that they should question my authority. I often question it myself.


II. Of Language Barriers: That They Exist
The same students who tell me that my class is not challenging enough tend to have a hard time expressing themselves clearly. And there are certain phrases that my students have been taught - namely You had better - that come off a lot more aggressively than they mean them to. You had better teach more difficult subject things ... You had better not treat us like middle school children ... I have learned over time not to take offense, because I am almost certain that there is none intended.


III. Of Last Semester: That It Was Weird
I set the bar too high last term. Although my students were seniors and English majors to boot, and though they possessed bottomless vocabularies and could name all the tenses and moods, I made the mistake of assuming that they were advanced speakers of English. I launched the class into debates on the perils of technology and overpopulation. They talked a lot, and I listened. My students spoke of art and beauty. They experimented with the language and enjoyed themselves immensely. In that sense, last semester was a success. But I run into my former students on the street every now and then and ask them how they're doing. They don't know what to say. They scratch their heads and mumble a few Chinese stall words before asking me if I have eaten. They have studied English for twelve years, and by now they are English teachers like me.


IV. Of This Semester: That It Will Be Less Weird
I opened the 2010 school year with a lesson that I dubbed How To Talk To Your Local Laowai. I introduced my students to casual greetings - what's up? what's happenin'? But be careful, I cautioned them: if you ask what is happening, your friends will worry that you are experiencing an existential crisis. Now if you ask what's happenin', everything's cool. And when we ask you what's happenin', we don't want to hear your life story. We don't want to know about your shih tzu's bladder control problems. No. We expect you to say not much - or nothin' if you're into the whole brevity thing.

My students took notes. They committed the magic words to memory. And the next week, when I asked them what was up, they said in unison: nothin' - not nothing, mind you, but nothin'. It was my greatest triumph. For twelve years, these kids had been conditioned to blurt out "I am fine, thank you, and you?" In a span of eighty minutes, I managed to reverse that, at least temporarily. I was awfully proud of myself.


V. Of Confusion: That It Exists
This afternoon, while my students were acting out break-ups, a fellow English teacher wandered into my classroom and started tinkering with the computer. He put Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on the stereo and cranked the volume all the way up to drown out the ruckus. Then he stood watching my class from the hallway. Eventually, he shook his head and wandered off. So the fact that my students are speaking sometimes poses problems.

The students themselves appear puzzled by my classes. Each and every one of them has expressed a burning desire to improve his or her oral English, and yet when I give the class a prompt and twenty minutes to practice speaking in groups, my students grow listless and resume studying the long lists of SAT words they keep hidden under their desks. They seem most comfortable when I am talking, or having them recite things.

Every once in a while, I catch flack for teaching slang.

"You had better not teach 'what's up,'" one of my Chinese coworkers told me the other day. "It is not good Oral English. The students can only say 'nothing.'"

"Yes, but that is how we greet each other in the West."

"But how about 'How do you do?' That question makes more options."

"If I ask my students how they're doing, they will all say 'I'm fine, thank you, and you?'"

"But you had better not ... "

And so on. The name of the course I am teaching is Oral English, but everyone seems to expect me to do all of the talking, and to teach "Proper Oral English," the official language of Toastmasters International.


VI. Of Mr. Panda: That He Is Not A Total Galoot
A couple teachers and a handful of students are wary of my syllabus. But I am not. For the first time in three years, I am confident in what I am teaching. I daresay I might even have some crude epistemological theory lurking behind my lesson plans. Or perhaps I shouldn't daresay that.

You would be amazed at what linguistic feats my students are capable of. I can give them a long list of American jivetalk and they'll have everything memorized by the end of class. They can read quantum physics extracts in English and understand them. But they stumble over the simple things: greetings, small talk, chit-chat, farewells. Of my 500 students, perhaps a handful can navigate a basic conversation. And yet most of them can define the word "lugubrious" and use it in a sentence.

Fundamentals. I can hear Dick Vitale barking in my ear. Dribbling, passing, boxing out - free throws, baby. The last thing my students need is some uppity laowai pummeling them with more flowery vocab words. What my students need is class time to hone their conversational chops. What they need is more variety in their basic English diet. In short, I want them to spend less time on alley oops and windmill jams, and more time at the free throw line.


VII. Of Chinglish: That It Is Intransigently Obstreperous
As I have written in the past, Chinglish is not the absence of English. If anything, it is an overabundance of bad English.

My students have spent a decade tackling English by rote memorization. At present, I find them tumbling headlong into the yawning abyss of English vocabulary. I can only guess as to why vocabulary is so coveted here, while oral English remains almost completely neglected. Vocabulary is more testable than speaking, I suppose, but that can't be the whole picture. In any case, I won't go into the why? question here. But it is important to bear in mind that, for most of these kids, the process of learning English has always been a race to acquire new vocabulary. They want to develop their speaking skills, of course, but they've never had an opportunity to do so and they're not sure where to begin. Mr. Panda's Oral English class is something completely unprecedented in their fifteen years of education. I don't talk - they do. And instead of quantity, I am shooting for quality, which means taking things slow and drilling the pants off of English fundamentals. So although I anticipate that some of my students will regard my class as a regression of sorts, I see no point in building a high-rise on such a shaky foundation.

The vocabulary my students memorize for their exams is often (to put it mildly) useless or outdated, incorrectly defined or poorly framed. Meanwhile, while they're busy cramming their minds with billions of counterfeit million-dollar words, their conversational skills are languishing, rooted as they are in stock phrases and transliterations, many of which are obsolete or contextualized poorly, and so on.

With all of this in mind, I would like to present to you, dear Reader, my crowning pedagogical achievement, a work of art that took me nearly two man-hours to produce: The Tree of Chinglish.



Fig 16.7: The Tree of Chinglish

Imagine, if you will, that you have successfully dissected a college sophomore's brain. And imagine that you are wearing a pair of neurotranslator goggles that allow you to see just what is going on down there in the English Department of young Xiao Wang's cerebral cortex. To make things more visually stimulating, your goggles generate a crappy-looking clip art tree called The Tree of Chinglish.

Your first observation is that the Tree's leafy boughs are weighed down with all sorts of polysyllabic gobbledygook that you vaguely remember from the ACT test you took, lo those many moons ago.

Scrolling slowly downward, you arrive at the trunk of the Tree, which is made up of the loadbearing fundamentals of language. You notice that it is a dangerously skimpy trunk, indeed. You realize that the huge, weighty canopy of polysyllabic gobbledygook at the top of the Tree is being held up by what amounts to a mere twig of English catchphrases. And many of the catchphrases, you notice, are of questionable utility: what a pity? you had better? and what the heck is filial piety, anyway?

But the truly frightening thing is not the catchphrases in and of themselves, but the lack of diversity in that twiggy little trunk. There is exactly one word for general greetings - HELLO! - and only one short phrase for inquiring about someone else's state of being - How are you? - and no more than one way to respond to inquiries about one's own state of being - I'm fine, thank you, and you? Why, if some well-intentioned British aristocrat were to mosey on by and say Cheerio! instead of HELLO!, the whole Tree of Chinglish would go tumbling right over. And if that Tree falls, poor Xiao Wang's heteromorphic paucity is likely to felicitate his priggish interlocutor.


VIII. Of Mr. Panda: That He Is Sleepy
So you can see that teaching basic conversational English in China can be surprisingly complex. In a way, I have to trick my students into forgetting a lot of what they have already learned. I have to manually replace "what a pity" with "that's too bad," "you had better" with "you oughtta," and so on. At the end of the day, my students don't seem to believe that I am teaching them Real English. I am not Dr. Zhang or Professor Liu, after all. I am merely Mr. Panda.

It has proven difficult for me to write this apologia for Mr. Panda. Thanks to my clumsy, soy-slick typing fingers, I managed to delete everything three times in as many days. In rewriting it twice from memory, I found that the words no longer fit together the way they did the first time. Another thing is: it is hard to write critically about one's students, particularly when they are as enthusiastic and determined and wonderful as my own. And another thing: I was irked at the start of this post, but having reached the end, I am no longer irked. As I prattled along, I became less concerned with defending Mr. Panda, and more interested in figuring out just why teaching Chinese undergraduates is so challenging compared to, say ...

No, I suppose teaching in general is difficult. Like writing, teaching demands that you perform the greatest magic trick of all, that you transfer invisible ideastuff from your mind to another mind, so that that mind can one day transfer your ideastuff to another mind, and on and on ... But though it is a magic trick, that doesn't make it impossible. It takes patience, yes, and it is often frustrating. But the rewards, simple and unglamorous as they are, are many. I, for one, find great pleasure these days in bumping into my students on the street.

"What's up?" I'll ask the kid.
He hesitates. He fumbles around for those dreaded words. I'm fi - ... no. Have you eate - ... no. Then he smiles.
"Nothin'," he says.

Oh, sweet nothin' ...

Oreo

My friend Erin came to visit this weekend. Early that first morning, we packed a lunch and set off on a hobo tour of the Nanchong countryside. But we were unable to leave the apartment because there in the hall was a large black and white mutt, bearing its fangs and growling. It pounced. We ran up the stairs two at a time. The dog pursued us as far as the second floor, then turned and doubled back. We peered down from the forth story balcony and watched in horror as the beast belched and hissed and trotted in frantic circles.

A toddler went toddling by. The dog glanced up at him.
"If he goes after the kid, we're running down there and killing that dog," said Erin. I grabbed a bamboo rod from a nearby garbage heap and brandished it unconvincingly.
But the dog wasn't interested in toddlers. Nor did he seem to have an appetite for the Chinese, as my neighbors came and went without incident. But when we tiptoed back downstairs, there he was, snarling at us.

One of my neighbors saw us come scrambling up the stairwell.
"Eeeee?" she said, the standard Mandarin noise of befuddlement.
"Is the dog downstairs friendly?" I asked her.
"Yes, he's very friendly," she said.
"I don't think he likes laowais."
My neighbor smiled politely and escorted us downstairs. She made it out alright, but the dog caught whiff of us and gave chase. We ran back upstairs.

For the next hour and a half, we hid in the stairwell, studying the dog's movements from the balcony. He would disappear around the corner every so often, then he'd come back and pop a squat in the bushes. Then he'd go dig up somebody's vegetable garden. Sometimes he would run up to the top of a nearby hill and pose there, watching us. But always he would come running back to the front door of apartment building #62, grumbling to himself, ears flattened, lying in wait.

I paced back and forth and repeated the F-word, the way I do when absurdity descends and no escape routes present themselves. From the fourth story perch, I thought I could maybe plant a long-range loogey on the dog's head, but that might've only made matters worse. My next-door neighbor came down the stairs with his son.

"Hello!" he whispered, nudging the little boy. "Hello!"
"Hello," murmured the kid.
His dad pointed at me. "Uncle, uncle!"
"Hello, Uncle," said the kid.

They went outside. The dog perked his ears and wagged his tail as they passed. My neighbor got into a mid-sized Volkswagen and tried to park it across the street while the kid watched. After a few low-speed collisions, he finally succeeded in parallel parking it at a 45-degree angle. Then he dusted his hands off on his pants, hoisted his son onto the back of a motorbike, and the two of them zipped off together.

"The dog can't wait out there forever, can he?" asked Erin.
"I'm not sure," I said. "I suspect he can."

I thought back on the night I locked myself out of the apartment building. I had waited down there on the stoop where the dog now lurked, convinced that at some point, someone would have to let me in. Somebody would sneak out of the house for a nightcap, or somebody would come stumbling home from the massage parlor. I couldn't just wait out there forever, after all. But I stood around like a clod from 9 PM until the sun came up the next morning. I tried to nap on an abandoned couch, but after five restless minutes I developed a nasty full-body itch. The security guards came by. None of them had keys. One of them suggested I shout until somebody came down to let me in, but it was late, all the lights were off and I couldn't bring myself to do it. Eventually, one of the security guards sat down on the filthy couch, ripped a fart and drifted off to sleep. I paced around the courtyard for hours on end and peed in the bushes like a dog. Finally, at 7 AM, an old lady came down for her early morning tai chi exercises. I kowtowed before her and nearly kissed her feet.

I mention all this because, as Erin and I watched the dog circling like a vulture four stories below, I was reminded of past absurdities, and of the fact that when the universe decides to suck you into a vortex of absurdity, you can be stuck down there for quite a long time.

But then, all of a sudden, the dog turned around and trotted up the hill. He stopped to look back at us a few times before disappearing behind a row of apartments in the distance.

"Let's move," said Erin.
"I don't know," I said, squinting out the window. "He might be baiting us."
"Dammit, Petit," she said. "Get the sand out of your [expletive]."

So, with bamboo rod firmly in hand, I scampered down the stairs. No sign of the dog. We took off at a dead sprint. Then my phone rang. It was Shelley, my laowai neighbor.

"I can't talk right now," I said, panting. "We're being pursued by a rabid beast."

Shelley, familiar with the terms and conditions of my daily life, wished me luck and hung up the phone. Then, after Erin and I had put about a quarter mile between us and the dog, Shelley called again. She was laughing.

"Your neighbors just introduced me to your rabid beast," she said. "His name is Oreo. He's great with kids. He lets the babies pull his tail. Everyone loves him!"

Yes, everyone loves Oreo. But what did it mean, this personal vendetta of his? He was good with children and didn't seem to mind Shelley, a fellow laowai. He did not appear to be a racist dog. No, it was Erin and I - only we could incur the wrath of an otherwise harmless neighborhood mutt.

But harmless or no, even after we had left the campus far behind us, we saw Oreo in the face of every approaching pekingese. We saw his lanky silhouette lurking behind every rapeseed bush, heard his growl in the whinny of every passing motorbike. We walked at a brisk clip, stopping every few feet to kick coaldust over our shoeprints.

We opted to postpone our hobo tour, figuring that in the countryside, we would only encounter nastier, more depraved Oreos. Kimchi cravings took us to Nanchong's one and only Korean joint. Neither of us spoke for a full thirty minutes, drugged as we were by the onslaught of antioxidants.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and I whirled around to see Jacob, a fellow volunteer, and Lisa, the owner of The Jack Bar.

"Goddamn. That was the best meal I've had in a year," said Jacob.
"I know," I groaned. "God, I've missed Korean food."
Lisa was sulking.
"I mean, Chinese food is great. Really great. It's so hao chi," I said. But by then Lisa was inconsolable. She pointedly changed the subject to my guitar playing.
"Tonight you play five songs," she said. "Is enough. Enough."

The two of them departed. I tried out some rudimentary Korean on the wait staff but every last one of them proved to be Chinese. Erin and I split a bottle of Korean lager and the 4% alcohol-by-volume swam through our heads. It was the kind of meal that puts you in a coma. I sat there a while, half-asleep, with one hand stuffed down the front of my trousers. And then all of a sudden Erin's eyes got big. I heard the voice behind me and bolted upright in my chair.

"What's this? No time to say hello to an old friend?"

It was Oreo. The beast stood on his hind legs, glowering over our table, his ears slicked back and his blue eyes glimmering with omniscience. He was dressed in a suitcoat and creased pinstripe slacks, a checkered cravat knotted over his flea collar.

"Oh, come now. I'm just teasing. I myself find it hard to speak when in the presence of such ... delectable foreign fare." He licked his chops and slid his claws over the surface of our table. My forehead grew damp with sweat. Erin sat staring disconsolately into her lap.

"Old friends, old friends," sang Oreo. His voice quavered in the lower register like Berlin Trilogy Bowie. He rested his paw on my shoulder. "Though we've much to discuss, I do so hate to be a bother. So I suppose I'll leave you to your chow. Eat slowly, as the Chinese say."

He scratched behind his ear for a moment, then pitched a crumpled napkin onto our table. He turned and walked away, toenails clicking off into the background. I sat watching the shivering napkin expand. Erin leaned across the table and grabbed my arm.

"We need to get out of here. Right now," she whispered. "I don't like this Oreo character, not one bit."
"I don't like him either. But what are we going to do? Hide from him for the rest of our lives?" I took a swig from the bottle. "I don't know about you, but I for one refuse to live in fear."
"Here's what we'll do. I'll get up and pay the bill. You wait for me outside."
"He's a dog," I said. "He'll smell us leaving. And anyway, we're safer here. He's not going to devour us at a Korean restaurant. Hell, they're more likely to eat - "
"My ears are burning!" Oreo had materialized behind me. He scratched himself with one paw, then the other. "Though it is almost certainly the fleas. Of course, neither of you would know anything about that. But I must say, they are persistent little buggers ..."
His brow furrowed. Erin and I stared into the tabletop.

"Right," said Oreo, clapping his paws together. "Well, friends, far be it from me to act as an enabler, but certainly a toast to one's health never hurt anybody."
He produced three shot glasses and a bottle of maotai, then he filled the glasses one by one.
"Let's not forget that we live in a toasting culture, my friends, and - how does that old adage go? When in Rome," he paused meditatively, then smiled, "do as the Chinese do."
He hoisted his glass and we lifted ours from the table.
"What shall we drink to?" asked Oreo, searching our faces.
"To humanity," said Erin.
"Yes," said Oreo, staring into her eyes. "To humanity."
We drank. Oreo slammed his shot glass down with such force that the bean paste stew overflowed.
"Ahh, now that wasn't so bad, was it?" he said. Then, with a flourish, he bowed to us and sauntered out the door, twirling his pocket watch and humming Rigoletto.

The next day, Erin returned to Yunyang and I returned to bachelordom. I spent the afternoon organizing my book collection alphabetically by author. Then I paid an evening visit to Little Prince Coffee and took my usual seat by the window. The waitress filled my glass with water. I asked her if she had eaten, but she said nothing, just shot me a worried glance and rushed back to the espresso bar. The table of Koreans across the aisle hurriedly paid their tab and left. The swinging door whooshed shut behind them. The empty coffee shop fell silent.

I pulled out my notebook and got to work. A moment later, the waitress came by, but she did not have my usual Caffè Americano. She slid a folded note across the table and I waited until she had gone to open it. It took me a moment to decipher the characters.

"Man man si," it said. "Die slowly."

I heard a burst of slow, rich laughter from the darkest corner of the coffee shop. Behind a plume of blue smoke, I could just make out a leather-bound book and the top of a bowler hat. Slowly, the book descended and I saw those blue eyes, that snaggletoothed muzzle. It was Oreo. He shut the book and got up on his hind legs. The waitresses disappeared into the kitchen, drawing the curtain closed behind them. As Oreo drew nearer, I saw that the book in his paws was Crime and Punishment.

"They say that Dostoevsky was humanity's first psychologist," he said, "but I have always taken him to be your greatest humorist. Consider the following passage. Oh, where is it -"

He sifted through the book.

"Ah, yes. That's the one," he said, clearing his throat. "'If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be punishment - as well as the prison.'"

He sucked on his pipe and nodded briskly before closing the book.

"Now, you might not find that remark particularly funny as such. But the wit of Dostoevsky, for me, lies not in any deliberate humour noir on the author's part, but in his uncanny, almost superhuman eye for sublime human truths. Do you mind if I sit?"

I said nothing. Oreo chuckled softly and remained standing.

"I admire you travelers. I believe you call yourselves 'globetrotters,' yes? Yes. I admire you globetrotters. So idealistic, so brave. You believe in escape. In 'getting away from it all.' And perhaps in a very limited way you do succeed in escaping from some things. Responsibilities, social norms, the dull grind of a forty-hour work week," said Oreo, "but in a certain sense - in a Dostoevskian sense - it all strikes me as hopelessly naive."

He took a long draw from his pipe, then bent down to snort the smoke out his nose, sending it cascading across the tabletop.

"The Grand Inquisitor," he said. "The self."

He seemed to pick up a faint aroma in the distance, and sniffed reflectively, almost sadly. Then he grinned.

"In the end, how can one ever escape from oneself? To what extent can you even hope to succeed in breaking out of the greatest institution of them all?" He leaned in close and stared me in the eyes. Then he tapped his skull with his paw, making a hollow clucking sound with his tongue. "This one - right - here." He laughed and sat down across from me, crossing one leg over the other. I flinched and felt around for my cigarettes.

"Oh, allow me," said Oreo, pulling a lighter from his trouser pocket. "Or - I see. Suit yourself."

He smiled and watched the smoke rise.

"Listen. I don't like you," I said. "I don't want to see you anymore. So here's what's going to happen. You're going to tuck your little tail between your legs and walk out that door on all fours. Then you're going to check into the Humane Society, the dog pound, whatever. You're going to stop coming around. You're going to disappear."

Oreo stroked his goatee.

"Are you familiar with the word cur?" he asked. "No, I don't suppose you would be. It's archaic - an old, nasty word. From the Middle English curdogge, meaning a mongrel dog, especially a worthless or unfriendly one. Happily, the term is no longer widely in use. But that old, nasty word of yours was once used to describe canines of my sort. Strays, you call us nowadays. Junkyard dogs."

He lowered his pipe.

"There's an expression in your language. I hope I am wording it correctly. The saying goes: you can take the dog out of the hood, but you can't take the hood out of the dog," he said, and chuckled. "Frankly, I think you humans have it completely backwards. It seems to me that you can take the hood out of the dog, but you can't take the dog ... out of the hood."

He rose to his feet and took his billfold from his vest pocket. He counted out forty kuai and pitched it onto the table.

"Believe what you will about me. That I'm dirty, uncultured. A junkyard dog. A cur, if you must. But I am no one's pet," he said. "Your neighbors love me well enough. But I am not theirs. They call me Oreo. But I am not Oreo. Do me a favor and think about that. Now if you'll excuse me, I must be off to mark my territory."

The swinging door whooshed shut behind him. It was twenty minutes before the waitress brought out my coffee and she didn't give me my usual membership card discount.

This afternoon, I came home from lunch and found Oreo there in the courtyard. He didn't seem to notice me at first, immersed as he was in frolicking with the neighborhood kids. They were squealing with joy, chasing him, yanking his tail, hopping on his back and riding him for a few seconds at a time. Oreo was exuberant, barking, yelping, jumping up and down, lapping at the children's faces. Oreo's ears perked as I passed. We exchanged a glance. Then he resumed rolling in the dirt with the kids, tormenting them with the cold wetness of his muzzle. I shut the door to my apartment and sat at my writing desk with a blank document in front of me. Through the open window, I could hear the children laughing and shrieking. Oreo! they shouted, Oh, Oreo! After a while, the kids must have gone inside, because all fell silent except for Oreo's steady barking. It took me a few minutes to notice that he was barking a melody, and it wasn't until he reached the refrain that I realized what it was: O Fortuna by Carl Orff.

Bring Me Far Away

Though I am tempted to write a William Jamesian exposition on the Varieties of Taxi Experience, in China there are really only two such varieties that I am aware of, not nearly enough for a scholarly work. There is the Grandfatherly Cabby experience, in which an impossibly old man asks you personal questions and says flattering things about your language skills - and then there is the Club Circuit Cab experience, which I describe below.

I always seem to get the Club Circuit Cabby first thing in the morning, when spirits are low. Approaching the vehicle, I can feel the pavement thumping under my feet. I open the door and am assailed by a sonic barrage that takes my brain a full ten minutes to sort out. Gradually, my feeble pattern recognition software clicks in: it appears to be an acid trance remix of Akon's Right Now (Na Na Na), featuring vocal samples from Joan Jett and what sounds like an Air China inflight safety announcement. Moments later, it has escalated into a full-fledged Missy Elliott/Thomas Dolby/John Denver gangbang. Please fold your tray table up and fasten your safety belts ... got them Platinum Visas, hot boyz ... S-S-SCIENCE! ... take me home, country road ... in case of emergency ...

The Club Circuit Cab Megamix is without beginning or end, and samples every worthless pop song ever recorded by man, woman, or beast. I have ridden long-distance Club Circuit Cabs where the music did not let up once for three hours. I am not sure how the Club Circuit Cabby does it. It is not FM radio he's listening to, as the Megamix does not fade out in tunnels. Nor can it be satellite radio, for no such thing exists here. But it might be the case that the cabby's stereo spontaneously generates acid trance megamixes via some kind of self-modifying algorithm - or what seems even more likely: the cabby possesses a single mix CD of infinite length, burned for him by the reclusive Gatsbyesque owner of The No. 1 Nightclub down on Renmin Lu.

The Club Circuit Cabby, in case you're wondering, is young and androgynous - that is to say, he is clearly a male specimen, but not much of one. He wears rectangle frames, acne sideburns, an expressionless face. He is motionless from the torso up. Though the volume is cranked up loud enough to induce undesired bowel movements, the cabby shows no outward signs of enjoying his Infinite Megamix in the least. But this is only natural. China is a loud place, and its inhabitants make noise not for the pleasure it affords, but for the same unknowable reason that songbirds twitter and Kanye West tweets.

The confusing slurry of pop entrails that make up the Club Circuit Cabby Megamix is by and large representative of modern Chinese music in general. While pop music in China is almost exclusively Chinese in origin, it is lifted directly from the U.S. Top 40 charts. Listen to the radio and you will hear Sean Paul soundalikes, rapping in proper Mandarin with a Rastafarian lilt. There are slightly trampy pseudo-Spearses, quasi-Nickelbacks, bizarro Beyonces ... In short, Chinese pop plagiarizes the absolute worst elements of Western pop, multiplying the awfulness of those elements exponentially in the process. But what you will seldom hear on Chinese pop radio stations are the genuine articles of awfulness themselves: Sean Paul, Britney Spears, Nickelback, or Beyonce. And you will almost never hear anything of a more refined taste, unless you're into The Carpenters or John Denver.

It should be clear by now that I have tried to dupe you, my dear Reader, into thinking you were reading another lighthearted commentary on cabbies and their many quirks, when I am really about to fly into a tirade about Chinese teenyboppers. For that I apologize: I didn't plan on this at the outset. But it is a Thursday afternoon and I am well into my fifth cup of coffee. It's either this or clean my room.

Let me say first that it is a bit chauvinistic of me to expect Chinese kids to enjoy, or even have the foggiest idea about Western music. And it is naive of me to assume that my college students might know the name "Bob Dylan," or that they should appreciate Kid A. There is no cultural context in China for the music that we (or Pitchfork) deem "high art," and only very recently has a context emerged for the kind of pop garbage we deem "low art." Consider the sort of lovey-dovey nonsense Americans listened to in the early 1950's. Rhyming "baby" and "maybe" was something new and fresh back then. It isn't hard to imagine why power ballads and choreographed dancing seem new and fresh to the up-and-coming Chinese youth. Heck, they still seem fresh to many of us in the West.

But it is part of my job as an English teacher to provide my students with the context necessary to appreciate what I deem "high art" - or at least "better art." It is very hard work, because your average Sichuanese undergrad possesses a very limited Western context to build upon. We are starting from scratch. Or perhaps even worse than scratch. To give you an idea, a certain widely circulated Western Culture textbook (to remain nameless) claims that "Americans fear cats, because they believe cats are possessed by witches." We have a long way to go, indeed.

On the first day of the semester, I had my students submit a writing sample. What would you like to learn about in our class? I asked them, and they wrote frantically for twenty minutes. Without exception, all 500 of my students wrote some version of the following: I want to learn about Western culture, Western film, Western music, Western literature ... At least there is no shortage of curiosity. But the nature of that curiosity is something I am still grappling with, and I hope that the following anecdotes baffle you as much as they continue to baffle me.

Last Wednesday, I found myself with about ten minutes to spare at the end of class, so I asked my students how they'd like to put that time to use.
"Listen to music!" came the unanimous reply.

I just happened to have Abbey Road in my pocket, so I explained that we were going to listen to The Beatles, and that this particular album was one of the most widely known, deeply beloved, greatly admired, culturally significant artifacts ever to come out of Western civilization. I made Abbey Road out to be the Chinese New Year, Jackie Chan and Yao Ming all rolled into one. Perhaps I was overhyping it, but my students, already familiar with Let It Be and Yesterday, were psyched.

But then something strange happened. The music started. Come Together - that sleazy bass, Ringo's goofball drum rolls, the tense harmony of Lennon and McCartney. Almost instantly, my students lost interest and started talking to each other, loudly, in Chinese. I watched in disbelief from my perch behind the podium. By the end of the song - come together, yeahhhhh! - The Beatles were only barely audible, and the classroom sounded like a vegetable market.

I had asked my students to pay close attention to the song, to answer a couple of questions about it, and to write down how it made them feel. But when I opened the floor for their thoughts and opinions, the class fell silent. A minute passed. Finally, the class monitor offered an adjective: boring, he said. Someone in the back mumbled "strange." That was it for The Beatles. And so much for Kid A, while I'm at it.

My efforts in the medium of film have not proven any more successful. As a segue into a debate on the benefits and drawbacks of technology, I played a few short clips from 2001: A Space Odyssey - the monkey wars, Hal 9000 going berserk. I had described 2001 as the stuff of legend, as a film that was constantly referenced in ... well, everything. But in the end, my students once again voiced boredom and a fair amount of discomfort.

"This movie is very 'fresh,'" said a girl in the front row, one of my brightest students, "but we want to watch romantic comedy."

Fresh is a Chinglish word. It does, in a way, mean new, exciting, and creative. But it also carries undertones of strange, unusual, and unpleasant. 2001 is all of those things. As are The Beatles. They are both, in the Chinglish sense of the word, very "fresh." But isn't this a college class? Shouldn't we be studying "fresh" things? And wait a minute - weren't my students interested in learning about Western culture? Aren't The Beatles sufficiently ... cultural?

Of course, I am running headlong into my own wall. My students might never respond to The Beatles and Stanley Kubrick. That isn't their fault. I could always make things easy for them. We could analyze Beyonce lyrics together. We could delve into the Hugh Grant Criterion Collection. But what would they learn? By sticking to pop culture, I would only be helping to reinforce the perceptions that many Chinese undergraduates already have: that every white male carries at least three concealed firearms to work, that all black Americans are capable of spinning on their heads for prodigious lengths of time, and that generally, we Westerners are a greedy, promiscuous, and violent lot of people, indeed.

My students are boundlessly curious, but it is a contradictory sort of curiosity. They are fascinated with the West and they want to know everything about it, but they only seem to glom onto the things that Hollywood and misinformed textbooks have taught them. I can show my students statistics, hard facts, numbers: America is only 72% Caucasian, and arguably even less than that. But at the end of the day, my students see me, Mr. Panda, my radiant dirty blonde locks, my piercing off-blue eyes, and they see me as a Real American. Minorities are Americans, too, I guess, but on the spectrum of Americanness, they are less American than Mr. Panda.

I have stumbled across all this through some trial and mostly error, by experimenting in class and by playing guitar at a dingy pole dance bar on the dark side of town. I was more flexible in the early days, more inclined to make concessions to stereotypes and expectations. But as I've gone along, I've come to question the purpose of my Chinese existence if I am not presenting what I perceive to be an accurate and honest portrayal of the West. That is why I will continue to play indie rock at a bar that specializes in Mariah Carey karaoke, and why, when my students demand music, I will play them The Beatles. But it's not just a question of authenticity: I also happen to like indie rock and The Beatles. I'm a better teacher when I'm teaching something that I'm interested in, and I'm a better guitar player when I'm playing songs that aren't garbage. The line between high art and low art is a matter of taste, but I can't help being of the opinion that Hugh Grant films are garbage, and that Mariah Carey songs are garbage sung by someone with a spectacular set of pipes. And call me an elitist if you like, but I'd rather not teach or perform garbage.

If you are a foreigner in China, every so often large groups of people will demand that you perform for them. Sing a song. Dance. Entertain us. It's impolite to refuse, so you will sometimes find yourself breaking into a song and dance number you didn't know you had in you. On other occasions, you manage to wriggle out of it and everyone goes home disappointed. This semester, on the first day of class, each and every one of my classes - about ten minutes in - asked me to sing a song for them.

"Can you sing a song for us?" a bespectacled girl in the back would ask, followed by a thunderous round of applause.

It is a truly bizarre request when you think about it. You have known this foreigner for all of ten minutes. He has come from the other side of the world to teach you English and your first decree is that he pull a song out of his wazoo and sing it a cappella in front of fifty people he has never met. Not only that, but the kids want to hear something they know. You can't sing a Hank Williams ditty. They want "My Heart Will Go On" or The Theme from The Bodyguard, or a selection from the little-known (but fascinating) oeuvre of English-language pop songs written for the non-English-speaking world.

I generally wriggle out of song requests, but sometimes the kids are so persistent that all I can do is postpone the performance.
"I can't sing without music," I'll explain. "I do play guitar, though, so next time I will bring my guitar and sing for you."
It usually works, too. Eventually, the kids forget about crusty old Mr. Panda and his phony promises. But this semester it backfired in spectacular fashion when someone brought an Epiphone acoustic to the classroom.

"Teacher, sing us a song now." A round of applause. No way out.
Midway through a Dylan tune, the crowd grew restless, almost violent.
"We don't like this song!" someone shouted. "Play 'Take Me To Your Heart.'"

And this, my friends, is where I will bring my Thursday afternoon tirade to a close - because "Take Me To Your Heart" might make for a satisfying conclusion, as well as a natural starting point for your Chinglish soft rock collection.

As every expat in China would be happy to tell you, "Take Me To Your Heart" is a hit single by Danish adult contemporary phenom Michael Learns to Rock, or MLTR if you're into the whole brevity thing. MLTR formed in 1988, and they have sold over 10 million records hence, "most of them in Asia," as Wikipedia notes in typically understated fashion. Take Me To Your Heart (not to be confused with the Rick Astley track of the same name) has proven to be MLTR's most enduring effort. Eight months ago, due to a mechanical failure in the karaoke machine, I found myself singing TMTYH (if you're into the whole brevity thing) at a KTV joint in Chengdu. Somehow, I seemed to know the melody already, though the lyrics were less than intuitive.

"Hiding from the rain and snow/trying to forget but I won't let go," I sang, wincing, voice faltering under the weight of so much clunky syntax. "Looking at a crowded street/listening to my own heart beat."

The imagery was vivid in my mind then, and remains so: a spear-wielding troglodyte, braving the harsh elements, hides briefly in a cave, then reemerges to stare grimly at cars as they pass, heart palpitating with the insuppressible animal instinct to gore, kill, devour ...

Then the pre-chorus build-up:
So many people all around the world/tell me where do I find someone like you, girl?

MLTR makes a valid point here. Overpopulation is without question one of the most pressing social issues of the modern era, but girls like you remain inexplicably rare, girl.

And then, finally, we have arrived:

Take me to your heart, take me to your soul
Give me your hand before I'm old
Show me what love is - haven't got a clue
Show me that wonders can be true
They say nothing lasts forever
We're only here today
Love is now or never
Bring me far away

Michael Learns to Blow My Mind. Yes. It's all in there. Take me to your heart, bring me far away - the romantic dichotomy of push and pull, of nearness and separation. Give me your hand before I'm old - the tenderness of corporeal intimacy both threatened and augmented by the looming spectre of death and dissolution. Show me that wonders can be true - here we see a repentant agnostic begging the heavens for salva ...

But no. Let us stop there. One mustn't sink in too deep. Let's just crank up those earbuds and drink it all in. Let's take it to our hearts, as it were, and not into our higher brain structures. Perhaps this is the mistake I have been making all along. Popular music in China is much the same as it is anywhere else. It is not something to be picked apart. It is, as music ought to be, an escape from reality - something that, if only for a moment, or three of them, brings you far away from wherever it is that you are.