Before I bring my Great Flood of Dazhou saga to its half-Biblical, half-Kafkaesque conclusion, I would like to write a half-assed eulogy for the recently departed Jacob Burney: sitemate, partner in absurdity, and one of the best fiends ("r" omitted quite deliberately) I have ever had the pleasure and extreme discomfort of knowing.
Fear not - the man yet lives, and is living well. By now, Jacob is breakfasting on a leaning tower of syrup-slathered French toast, topped with two equilateral slabs of Land O'Lakes butter and served with three rashers of bacon, accompanied by a frosty glass of orange juice from concentrate, and a steaming cup of real Columbian coffee, and - and - ... and now I am slobbering into the home-row keys of my laptop.
Jacob is gone and I am happy for him. He has moved on. He is in a better place now, as it were. But his departure has left a hefty dent in Nanchong's already scant reserves of wit and sarcasm. In our day, Jacob and I were the stuff of mid-80's buddy comedies. Consider Jacob: a black, 260-pound NCAA Championship Subdivision defensive lineman, a philosophy major and Marvel Comics enthusiast. (I suspect he may be the only man in the world who owns - and regularly wears - a Batman Forever leather jacket.) And consider me: a six-foot nothin', hundred and nothin' caucasian pseudointellectual with a degree in creative writing and a soft spot for certain self-destructive vices. Oddly, impossibly, the pairing worked, and I commend the Peace Corps for putting us in the same Chinese city, whether or not there was any rationale behind the decision.
Jacob's last words to me were, "I reap what I say." At the time, I had no idea what the fuck he was talking about, and I still don't. But he was happy to repeat those words for me, in case I held out any doubt that he meant them. "I reap what I say," he said, and stepped off the train. And I am happy to accept those words for the profound nonsense they are. Of all the farewells that have been bidden me over the past couple weeks, Jacob's was by far the most appropriate.
So this year, in the parlance of politics, is a transitional phase for me. In the parlance of sport, it is a rebuilding year. In Jacob's absence, I have been left behind to hold the fort. I am, for the moment, the only Peace Corps volunteer in Nanchong. Two newbies will arrive next month, but they have size twelve Air Jordans to fill. Of course, I will not hold it against them if they are not Jacob. Nobody, I suppose, is Jacob except for Jacob. But I hope the newbies will forgive me if, late at night, after one too many Shanchengs, in a fit of Jacobean nostalgia, I beg them to disagree with me about the war in Iraq, or to talk shit about There Will Be Blood and all of the other films and musicians I adore, or to make fun of the way I walk in the most offensive manner possible. It's not that I am a masochist, or that I enjoy being insulted, but regrettably, the number of remorselessly inappropriate people born post-PC Revolution are few and far between, and Jacob was (and is) one of that number. I learned much about language and even more about humanity from Jacob, and was able to test the surprisingly elastic boundaries of my own rationality through my many late-late-much-too-late night debates with the late Mr. Burney. For all that, no mere xie xie will suffice. Jacob will be missed, but some birds are not meant to be caged - a quotation from a film that I'm sure both he and I can agree on.
Thus concludes my half-assed eulogy. Jacob has escaped Nanchong, and in so doing, he has succeeded where I have, on many occasions, failed. I have already related my truly Sisyphean effort to escape a minor flood in Nanchong en route to a major deluge in Dazhou. But that experience - the experience of failing miserably at the most elementary sort of travel, i.e. leaving the place where one happens to be - is so commonplace for me in Nanchong that I often wonder why I bother writing about it. But, like most forms of interpersonal conflict - e.g. conversations with Jacob - arguing with surly taxi pimps is an incredibly efficient means of learning about oneself. And just last night, after being pushed to the brink by an especially surly taxi pimp, I was able to explore the dimensions of my inner asshole: an internal sphincter that, prior to life in China, I was completely unacquainted with.
Yesterday evening, I was invited by the Peace Corps to come to Chengdu, to give a brief lecture the following morning on the nature of my sino-bohemian existence in eastern Sichuan, in front of 95 fresh-off-the-boat laowais. The thought unnerved me a bit more than it should have, but bear in mind that I have grown accustomed to speaking in front of vast crowds of semi-rural Chinese. The knowledge that your audience doesn't understand a word you're saying goes a long way towards curing stage fright. Nevertheless, I was excited about the opportunity to wax National Geographic about life in Nanchong, to hobnob with the new batch of volunteers, and to mooch around Chengdu on Barack Obama's dime. But in typically Pandastic fashion, I lingered around the apartment until well after the last train had departed. Then, having discovered a wealth of Charlie Rose interviews with Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, I sat there agog at the computer until the sun had set and getting to Chengdu via even the shadiest of means had become a near impossibility. That, my friends, is how I roll - which is to say that I don't roll very well at all.
So around 10 PM, I made my way to the train station and shouted the word "Chengdu!" Instantly, I was whisked away by a taxi pimp, who told me to climb onto his moped so we could putter off to some sort of taxi pimp rendezvous point on the dark side of town. But motorcycles, mopeds, Segways, and motorized trishaws are a big Peace Corps no-no, so I waved my hands around and said, "No can do." Grumbling, the taxi pimp called another, pimpier taxi pimp and we waited there in front of the train station for the big pimp to arrive in his pimped-out Volkswagen Santana.
In China, if you are as tactless a buffoon as I am, traveling late at night can become an incredibly convoluted affair. The people arranging your transportation are not the people who will provide your transportation. Instead, you must work within a back-alley network of meta-cabbies and meta-meta-cabbies: taxi drivers who will deliver you to other taxi drivers, who will deliver you to other taxi drivers, who will deliver you to other taxi drivers, who will finally dump you into the backseat of a pimped-out Volkswagen Santana that will, ostensibly, deliver you to your final destination.
When I arrived at the taxi pimp rendezvous and slipped into the back of this particular pimped-out Volkswagen Santana, I was under the impression that we were headed directly to Chengdu. But that would not prove to be the case. Instead, I was taken to the parking lot of a seafood joint just off the Chinese interstate. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to get dinner, or what. So I smoked a purgatorial ciggie and took a much-needed piss in the bushes. Then I was told to get on a bus. There were six other passengers on the bus, and the cabin reeked of Sichuanese peppercorns and feces. This was an unexpected turn. Not the feces, but the bus. How shady were these people, that they had hijacked a government-issue bus whose origin and destination (as posted on the windshield) were no cities that I'd ever heard of? My meta-cabbie came around to gather everyone's bus fare. The fee was unexpectedly cheap - about $10 US - but I fumbled through my ever-disappointing wallet and found that I was about one American buck short. I handed over the rest of my money and gazed hopefully, Bambi-eyed at the meta-cabbie.
"I need ten more kuai!"
"Sorry, sir," I said, "but I didn't know the fare when I got on the bus. I'm afraid I'm a little short."
"Won't work! Impossible! Get off the bus!"
"But sir," I said, injecting a bit of self-righteousness into my rudimentary Sichuanese, "surely, we can stop at an ATM when we get to Chengdu. It will take me five minutes. I'll pay you the fare, with interest, if necessary."
"Impossible! Won't work! Get off the bus!"
I thrust what money I had into the meta-cabbie's hand, but he wouldn't take it. So I appealed to my fellow passengers, with whom I had already chatted for half an hour, with whom I had bonded, or so I thought - the same people who had expressed such disbelief at my nonexistent monthly income as a Peace Corps volunteer. But nobody budged; nobody even thought of donating the piddling amount of chump change it would take to keep the foreigner on the bus.
"Can anybody help me out? It's six kuai," I said, "one U.S. dollar. I'll pay you back. With interest, if necessary."
But no one said a word. The meta-cabbie was shaking visibly. Already, we had wasted more than the five minutes necessary for me to hop out in Chengdu and hit up an ATM.
"Get off the bus!" he shouted in my face.
And that was the moment I accessed my hitherto unknown reservoir of controlled rage. I seldom get angry in the West, and when I do, it is profoundly unimpressive. My face turns red. My cheeks tremble. I stutter and stammer, and sweat to a disgusting degree. But in China, I have learned to shout, and to argue, and to curse, and meanwhile, my emotions lay there in my chest, cold and unmoved as a cadaver.
"Listen," I said, "we stop in Chengdu, I get out of the bus. I use the ATM for five minutes. And I pay you your damned six kuai. With interest. How about that?"
"Impossible! It won't work! Get off the bus!"
The bus driver shouted something-or-other. The meta-cabbie seized me by the backpack strap and I got to my feet. He dragged me off the bus, but stopped short of throwing me out. Instead, he led me out to his pimped-out Volkswagen Santana and offered, somewhat guiltily, to take me to an ATM. The bus, meanwhile, sped off into the night.
Chinese ATMs are programmed not to work when you need them most. We stopped at four ATMs in a row and none of them coughed up the dollar I needed to get to Chengdu. But the Agricultural Bank of China, as usual, came through in the clutch. The meta-cabbie drove me back to the train station and left me to wait in his backseat while he wandered off to badmouth Americans to his meta-cabbie cadre.
Growing up, I was a Notre Dame football fan. Naturally, I entertained teenaged fantasies of one day going to school there, and perhaps walking on to the football team as a punter, and making my punting debut as a fifth-year senior, in the last game of the season, and executing an awe-inspiring coffin-corner punt that would prove decisive in salvaging a victory in the 2005 Poulan Weed Eater Bowl, versus those pesky Pirates of East Carolina University. Ah, youth. My childhood hero was Rudy Ruettiger. As a sophomore in high school, I wrote an exhaustive five-page literary analysis of his autobiography/self-help book. Rudy's number was 45, and as a teenager, so superstitious and smitten was I that I measured everything in 45-second intervals. It was my first and only flirtation with obsessive-compulsion. In the mornings, I never wanted to leave the warmth of the shower, and I (perhaps justifiably) dreaded subjecting myself to the meat market that is high school in middle America. But I couldn't stay in the shower forever because I was afraid of my profoundly Irish mother, so I would count down from 45, and after 45 seconds, I would towel myself off, pop a few zits, and get dressed. Strangely, that remains a habit of mine. When I don't want to do something, I count down from 45 seconds, and then I sit down to the odious task at hand. So it was 11:41 when the meta-cabbie parked his pimped-out Volkswagen Santana in the train station parking lot, and there in the backseat, I vowed to make my escape at precisely 11:45. And when 11:45 rolled around and still no meta-meta cabbie had arrived, I got out of the cab, put on my backpack, and stormed off into the night. It took the meta-cabbie a meta-moment to notice that I was ditching him. He shouted several times, then came running after me.
"HEY! HEY! WHERE ARE YOU GOING?"
He yanked at my sleeve and I judo chopped him loose.
"I'm going home. You kicked me off that bus because I didn't have six fucking kuai," I said. "I thought that was rather rude. So I'm going home."
"But the cab to Chengdu is coming! I got that cab just for you!"
"I know you did. But six kuai? Really? Anyway, it's too late now. I'm not going to Chengdu anymore. I need to go home and get some sleep."
"But the cab is coming!"
"I'm going home."
"You owe me money," he said. "I drove you to five different ATMs so you could withdraw money. Doesn't that count for anything?"
It was a salient point. I was unusually moved by it. But I was also unusually pissed off, so I kept walking. He grabbed me by the backpack strap.
"I drove you to five different ATMs," he said. "I wasted almost an hour driving you here and there and - "
"Okay," I said.
I reached into my wallet and handed him a crumpled wad of bills. He went silent. It was as though I'd stabbed him in the gut. He was stunned. He took the money and stuffed it into his pocket. And without a word, he turned and walked away. I was instantly reminded of No Country For Old Men, another one of those rare films that Jacob and I can agree on. Greed is all-powerful, but the greedy can be bought. Then I hailed a cab home. The non-meta cabbie in question was changing shifts, so he drove me all the way to the other end of town to pick up his cabbie successor, and his cabbie successor charged me for the whole escapade. And I paid him the full fare, both because I am a colossal fool, and because Nanchong cabbies (not to be confused with its meta-cabbies) are among the best people on earth, and I tend to give them the benefit of a doubt.
So I apologize to any of you newly arrived Peace Corps volunteers who had hoped to hear me wax National Geographic about my sino-bohemian existence in Nanchong. Believe me: I would have loved to have waxed National Geographic on that particular subject. But I struggle with travel, because I am incompetent. I have no doubt that you will have better luck than I with the meta-cabbies in this country. Probably, you will never need to resort to them, because you won't spend four of your evening hours listening to Christopher Hitchens shoot off at the mouth. Understand that I am an incompetent. Jacob often reminded me of that fact, and I often remind myself of it, too. It makes things difficult, of course, but if it weren't for my incompetency, and the misadventures it breeds, I don't know what else I could possibly write about.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Before The Flood
My handler met me at the Dazhou Train Station. We shook hands. He introduced himself as Kevin. Then he apologized for not being a chick.
"I know it is American tradition for man serve the woman and woman serve the man," he said, "but there is some confusion before you arrive. My boss, she is thinking you are a woman. So she give me to you. Man serve the man. Very strange."
"Wait. She thought I was a woman?" I blinked violently. "Didn't she see my passport picture?"
"Yes," said Kevin, "but still there is some doubt."
We walked. Three days of ceaseless rain had flooded the square. I rolled up my pantlegs and forded the filth Oregon Trail style.
"What a pity you are so late," said Kevin.
"Well," I said, "as I mentioned on the phone, Nanchong flooded last night and the power went out. So I apologize if I'm late. But there were - ahem - technical difficulties."
"That is not what I mean," said Kevin. "I don't mean to be a burden. But you are very late. What a pity."
"I did my best to get here on time," I said, my left eyeball twitching involuntarily, "and I'm sorry if I'm late. But I didn't miss anything important, did I? And anyway, I've told you several times what happened. Nanchong flooded, so the power went out, so my alarm didn't go off, so I overslept, so I missed my 9 AM train, so I had to catch the 5 PM train to Dazhou. So yes, I am a little late. And I'm sorry if I missed the banquet or whatever. But I'm lucky to have gotten here at all."
"Yes," said Kevin, and I could've sworn I caught him smirking ever so slightly, "but what a pity."
We took a cab to campus and got out at the main gate. Kevin asked me what I wanted for dinner.
"I dunno," I said. "Chinese?"
He sat and watched me eat my kung pao chicken.
"Are you sure you don't want anything?" I asked.
"No. As I mentioned earlier," he said, "I have already eaten. At the banquet. You missed the banquet, remember? What a pity you missed the banquet."
I lowered my chopsticks and took a deep breath. Then I resumed eating.
"Is the kung pao chicken very delishurs?" asked Kevin.
"I dunno about delishurs, but it's pretty good."
"Yes. But sadly. It cannot be as good as the banquet food. What a pity you are so late."
"Yeah," I said, "what a pity."
I flagged down the laobar and ordered a beer.
Easy, Panda, I told myself. Chill. Eat some bamboo. Drink some formaldehyde beer. In the words of George Harrison: all things must pass. Even dinners with passive-aggressive twerps. Those dinners, too, must pass. Christ. Not even twenty minutes into the handler/handlee relationship and I'd already let the kid get under my skin. Ordinarily, I am not so easily irked, but I really had busted my ass to get to Dazhou on time, and nature really had conspired to keep me in Nanchong. I'll be the first to admit it: I am a flake. I was born late, via C-section. And ever since, I have been hustling to catch up. I am chronically delayed, waylaid, held up, hung up, behind, belated, and otherwise late in the least fashionable way imaginable. But on this one, isolated occasion in my life, I was justified in my tardiness. Nanchong flooded. It flooded, and I am no Moses. Hell, I don't even know how to swim.
It was a Saturday night in Nanchong. When the storm first arrived, I was, as usual, unimpressed. I am a Nebraskan. Thunderstorms, even tornadoes, are little more than a source of giddy adventure for me. Over the years, I have evolved an internal barometer that tells me when to scoop up the cats and run for the basement. Sichuan is not quite tornado alley. It's more like a bowling alley, where Thor rolls nothing but gutterballs. The storms here are weak sauce. So I was unperturbed when the billowy black thunderheads came rolling in. There was no lightning, only a kind of effervescence in the clouds. And the thunder was a low and feeble gurgling, like a concerto for sousaphone and farting grandpa. Like I said, weak sauce. It was 1 AM and I was busy getting a head start on packing, stuffing all my worldly possessions into my hobo bindle. My worldly possessions these days mostly consist of boxer briefs: Hanes, Fruit of the Loom, BVD, bootleg Chinese undies with the Playboy Bunny's bucktoothed doppelganger stitched into the ass. The thing about life is, you wind up with too much underwear and not enough clothes.
When I'd finished packing, I set about tidying my room. After a while, I grew so depressed at the futility of cleaning that I had to sit down at the computer and watch a World Cup's Greatest Goals montage to cheer me up. GOOOAAALLLLL! ... GOOOAAALLLLL! ... GOOOAAA - Boom. There came an impressive stomp of thunder and I could hear the reverberation rippling up the aluminum bleachers of English Corner Stadium. Boom - zzzip! I got up from my desk chair and lifted the curtain just in time to see the Epcot Center Cafeteria across the street light up like a Tesla coil.
"... the fuck?" I asked the Royal Me, and received no reply. Then there came another lightning strike, this one even closer, and I leapt away from the computer. The power went out. My laptop dimmed slightly. GOOOAAALLLLL!
I backed away from the window, stumbled over my Peace Corps medical kit and cracked my head against the doorframe. Fuck, I said. I groped around in the dark until I found the washing machine. Ah, yes. It had been doing my laundry up until the power went out. Now all my clothes were lying there in a wet heap. Double fuck. I highstepped over the garbage in the hallway and stood in the middle of the living room, listening. An ominous whooshing filled the apartment and when the next lightning strike came, I saw that my bedroom curtains were pasted up against the ceiling. I began to shake. This was not weak sauce. I paced back and forth like a frightened dog. At any moment, I expected a funnel to take form in my living room and blow the whole stinking mess sky high. They'd find my boxer briefs in Shanghai. The Yangtze would be clogged with abortive journal entries from yours truly. Plastic tubes of Astroglide would rain down on Sichuan for weeks, courtesy of the Peace Corps medical office.
But tornado or no, I had no basement to scurry down into and no cats to keep me company. So I decided to sleep or die trying. It was 2 AM and I needed to be up in six hours, so I crawled into bed. The bedsheets were drenched in rain. The curtains kept smacking me in the face. I plugged my phone into the wall and set the alarm. Then I lay there awake while the torrential rains turned Nanchong into a rice paddy. By 3 AM, I still couldn't sleep and bloodshot desperation set in, so I did something I have only done once before: I popped a sleeping pill. Gradually, I sank into a kind of metaphysical troth and watched the storm rage for another hour until one last bolt of lightning sent me into a short-lived coma.
But the coma wasn't short-lived enough. Something I had failed to consider when I plugged the phone into the wall: there was no power. I might as well have plugged the damned thing into a pineapple. So the alarm didn't go off. So while my 8 AM train was clickety-clacketing its way off to Dazhou, my phone was a vegetable and so was I.
It was the strangest awakening of my life, and all of them have been strange. A white bolt from a gray sky shot me upright in bed. It was 10 AM and it was still storming outside. It took me several minutes to remember who and where I was. Then, sifting through the coffee-stained manila folders of my mind, I remembered vaguely that there was something I was supposed to do, somewhere I was supposed to be ...
Shit, fuck, etc. The power was still out, my phone was dead, and my laundry was half-washed and starting to mildew. I hung it up to dry. Then I took a cold shower. A glance in the mirror reminded me that I was still bearded. I was going to Dazhou to work, and professionalism in China does not involve looking like Bob Veila after a two-week do-it-yourself bender. But I wasn't about to hack at all that Irish scrubgrass with a Bic razor. So I put on some cargo shorts and a dirty undershirt, walked to the nearest barber shop, and asked them if they could shave me.
"We can't shave you electrically," announced the barber. "There is no power. But."
He approached me with an unlathered razor. I threw my hands up and backed slowly out onto the street.
I caught a cab downtown. Downtown, there was power. But the sewers had overflowed and the taxi cabs jetted spumes of brown semisolids as they passed. I wielded my umbrella like a shield. Tides of sewage rolled over the sidewalk whenever the streetlights changed and a competition broke out among the Chinese pedestrians to see who was courageous enough to cross the Brown Sea. I watched and waited. The Chinese women proved their meddle by tromping through the filth high-heels and all. The young men, not surprisingly, were colossal wussies about the whole thing and tried to pass over the sludge by clambering across the rungs of a nearby fence. A troupe of Germans materialized on the scene and, ever the sensible ones, decided to avoid the Scheisswasser altogether. Their leader, an overweight fellow in a too-tight t-shirt, shouted loudly, matter-of-factly, in a strange tongue that no one but me could understand, "Well, we must go around, then!" And the other Germans followed him. They turned and marched single file down the sidewalk, crossed the unflooded portion of the street, and marched down the opposite sidewalk unscathed. Only much later did the thought occur to me: Germans? In Nanchong? ... the fuck?
I waded across the filth. Then I got myself shampooed, scalp massaged, and shaved for 80 cents US. Then I bought a pair of sweatshop dress shirts for four bucks a pop. The next and final step was to get mine ass on board a train, or preferably a bus. I caught a cab to the biggest bus station in town, but they told me to go to the smallest bus station in town. My cabbie the second time around was the splitting image of Jackie Chan. I am not being racist, here: this man closely resembled Jackie Chan. And I began to feel like his laowai sidekick in a half-ass buddy comedy.
"Where are you going?" he asked me.
"Dazhou," I said.
"They've probably sold out of tickets."
"But I've got to get to Dazhou tonight," I said. "There's a banquet, or something."
"If they're sold out, what are you gonna do?"
"I have no idea," I said. "What can I do?"
Cabbie Chan was mum on this point. He lit a cigarette and offered me one. Then he screeched to a halt on the side of the road.
"Check it out," he said. "Look at that beautiful girl."
And indeed, a rather stacked Sichuanese woman was sauntering our way.
"In Sichuan, there are many beautiful women," said Cabbie Chan, "and I try to stop for them whenever I can."
Cabbie Chan dropped off the girl, then he dropped me off at the bus station. The black market cabbie urchins closed in around me. WHERE ARE YOU GOING? WHERE ARE YOU GOING? I elbowed and stiffarmed my way into the bus station. Needless to say, all tickets to Dazhou had been sold out, not just for the day in question, but also for the next day, and the one after that. I thrust my hands in my pockets and wandered back out to the parking lot, gave myself over to the long-distance cab racket. But I had spurned them and now they were ignoring me. I walked in circles but nobody seemed to notice me. So I began to call out the word "Dazhou." Dazhou, Dazhou, Dazhou. A hunchbacked man with pronounced acne scars approached.
"Dazhou?"
"Dazhou."
"700 kuai!"
"But I don't have that kind of money," I said. "I'm a volunteer."
"A what?"
"Nevermind. 500 kuai."
He shook his head.
"That's not gonna work. 600 kuai."
600 kuai. A hundred bucks. I bit my tongue and fumbled around in my wallet. The cabbie urchin extended his palms eagerly. Then, Cabbie Chan came to the rescue.
"600 kuai? Are you crazy?" he snapped. "This man is a foreigner. He doesn't know any better. He is our guest. Don't cheat him."
Cabbie Chan grabbed my arm and flicked his head towards his cab. He had been waiting for me the whole time.
"Let's go. I'll take you to the train station."
I followed Cabbie Chan and the cabbie urchin gave chase.
"Hey! Hey! Hey!"
"Hey hey hey," snorted Chan. "Idiot."
We sped off. The cabbie urchin chased us for a bit, then faded into the industrial haze.
I am wary of Chinese trains. They tend to be a crap shoot. As in: there is poop on the floor half the time. For that reason, among others, I hadn't ridden a Chinese train in six months. But my handlers had told me to get to Dazhou as early as possible, by whatever means possible, so that I might attend some sort of event that may or may not have been important. So I risked it. And as luck would have it, thanks to Cabbie Chan, I found myself in a relatively cozy bullet train bound for Dazhou, with no poop on the floor, and due to arrive only eight hours later than I'd originally planned. Of course, I missed the inaugural banquet by a couple hours. What a pity. But I did make it, floods and power outages and all. So I figured that I'd be welcomed in Dazhou with a tickertape parade. Instead, it was a listless Kevin, a lukewarm beer, and a tepid plate of kung pao chicken.
"Yes, what a pity that you were so late," Kevin said as we were walking home. "The banquet was very delishurs."
By then, the two bottles of Yanjing were doing their job, so I was able to laugh Kevin off in the Chinese manner. But then I stopped dead in my tracks because something in my periphery hadn't rubbed me the right way. I doubled back and peered down a dimly lit alleyway. In the not-so-distant distance was a river, and the river was raging.
"Um," I said.
"Yes," said Kevin, "the river is very high today."
"Is that normal?" I asked.
"No."
All along the riverside, there were old Chinese men, standing and watching the river. A bad sign. And I stood there for a moment to watch the river with them. It rolled past like a python. The crests of the waves gleamed in the moonlight. I had never seen anything like it, such natural rage. Such strength. I had never felt such powerlessness. Then, Kevin yanked me by the arm. And I walked.
"I forgot to say to you," he said, "that class is begin tomorrow."
"What?" I asked. I had forgotten all about the river. "What? When?"
"Eight AM. Sunday morning class is begin. What a pity you were late. I tell you earlier if you are not so late."
"Yes," I said, "what a pity."
So tomorrow began the next morning. I suppose that made sense. Then I shook Kevin loose and darted back to steal one last glance at the raging river. Marvelous. Horrific. The silent Chinese men knew. Tomorrow began the next morning, but whether or not tomorrow came was another question entire.
"I know it is American tradition for man serve the woman and woman serve the man," he said, "but there is some confusion before you arrive. My boss, she is thinking you are a woman. So she give me to you. Man serve the man. Very strange."
"Wait. She thought I was a woman?" I blinked violently. "Didn't she see my passport picture?"
"Yes," said Kevin, "but still there is some doubt."
We walked. Three days of ceaseless rain had flooded the square. I rolled up my pantlegs and forded the filth Oregon Trail style.
"What a pity you are so late," said Kevin.
"Well," I said, "as I mentioned on the phone, Nanchong flooded last night and the power went out. So I apologize if I'm late. But there were - ahem - technical difficulties."
"That is not what I mean," said Kevin. "I don't mean to be a burden. But you are very late. What a pity."
"I did my best to get here on time," I said, my left eyeball twitching involuntarily, "and I'm sorry if I'm late. But I didn't miss anything important, did I? And anyway, I've told you several times what happened. Nanchong flooded, so the power went out, so my alarm didn't go off, so I overslept, so I missed my 9 AM train, so I had to catch the 5 PM train to Dazhou. So yes, I am a little late. And I'm sorry if I missed the banquet or whatever. But I'm lucky to have gotten here at all."
"Yes," said Kevin, and I could've sworn I caught him smirking ever so slightly, "but what a pity."
We took a cab to campus and got out at the main gate. Kevin asked me what I wanted for dinner.
"I dunno," I said. "Chinese?"
He sat and watched me eat my kung pao chicken.
"Are you sure you don't want anything?" I asked.
"No. As I mentioned earlier," he said, "I have already eaten. At the banquet. You missed the banquet, remember? What a pity you missed the banquet."
I lowered my chopsticks and took a deep breath. Then I resumed eating.
"Is the kung pao chicken very delishurs?" asked Kevin.
"I dunno about delishurs, but it's pretty good."
"Yes. But sadly. It cannot be as good as the banquet food. What a pity you are so late."
"Yeah," I said, "what a pity."
I flagged down the laobar and ordered a beer.
Easy, Panda, I told myself. Chill. Eat some bamboo. Drink some formaldehyde beer. In the words of George Harrison: all things must pass. Even dinners with passive-aggressive twerps. Those dinners, too, must pass. Christ. Not even twenty minutes into the handler/handlee relationship and I'd already let the kid get under my skin. Ordinarily, I am not so easily irked, but I really had busted my ass to get to Dazhou on time, and nature really had conspired to keep me in Nanchong. I'll be the first to admit it: I am a flake. I was born late, via C-section. And ever since, I have been hustling to catch up. I am chronically delayed, waylaid, held up, hung up, behind, belated, and otherwise late in the least fashionable way imaginable. But on this one, isolated occasion in my life, I was justified in my tardiness. Nanchong flooded. It flooded, and I am no Moses. Hell, I don't even know how to swim.
It was a Saturday night in Nanchong. When the storm first arrived, I was, as usual, unimpressed. I am a Nebraskan. Thunderstorms, even tornadoes, are little more than a source of giddy adventure for me. Over the years, I have evolved an internal barometer that tells me when to scoop up the cats and run for the basement. Sichuan is not quite tornado alley. It's more like a bowling alley, where Thor rolls nothing but gutterballs. The storms here are weak sauce. So I was unperturbed when the billowy black thunderheads came rolling in. There was no lightning, only a kind of effervescence in the clouds. And the thunder was a low and feeble gurgling, like a concerto for sousaphone and farting grandpa. Like I said, weak sauce. It was 1 AM and I was busy getting a head start on packing, stuffing all my worldly possessions into my hobo bindle. My worldly possessions these days mostly consist of boxer briefs: Hanes, Fruit of the Loom, BVD, bootleg Chinese undies with the Playboy Bunny's bucktoothed doppelganger stitched into the ass. The thing about life is, you wind up with too much underwear and not enough clothes.
When I'd finished packing, I set about tidying my room. After a while, I grew so depressed at the futility of cleaning that I had to sit down at the computer and watch a World Cup's Greatest Goals montage to cheer me up. GOOOAAALLLLL! ... GOOOAAALLLLL! ... GOOOAAA - Boom. There came an impressive stomp of thunder and I could hear the reverberation rippling up the aluminum bleachers of English Corner Stadium. Boom - zzzip! I got up from my desk chair and lifted the curtain just in time to see the Epcot Center Cafeteria across the street light up like a Tesla coil.
"... the fuck?" I asked the Royal Me, and received no reply. Then there came another lightning strike, this one even closer, and I leapt away from the computer. The power went out. My laptop dimmed slightly. GOOOAAALLLLL!
I backed away from the window, stumbled over my Peace Corps medical kit and cracked my head against the doorframe. Fuck, I said. I groped around in the dark until I found the washing machine. Ah, yes. It had been doing my laundry up until the power went out. Now all my clothes were lying there in a wet heap. Double fuck. I highstepped over the garbage in the hallway and stood in the middle of the living room, listening. An ominous whooshing filled the apartment and when the next lightning strike came, I saw that my bedroom curtains were pasted up against the ceiling. I began to shake. This was not weak sauce. I paced back and forth like a frightened dog. At any moment, I expected a funnel to take form in my living room and blow the whole stinking mess sky high. They'd find my boxer briefs in Shanghai. The Yangtze would be clogged with abortive journal entries from yours truly. Plastic tubes of Astroglide would rain down on Sichuan for weeks, courtesy of the Peace Corps medical office.
But tornado or no, I had no basement to scurry down into and no cats to keep me company. So I decided to sleep or die trying. It was 2 AM and I needed to be up in six hours, so I crawled into bed. The bedsheets were drenched in rain. The curtains kept smacking me in the face. I plugged my phone into the wall and set the alarm. Then I lay there awake while the torrential rains turned Nanchong into a rice paddy. By 3 AM, I still couldn't sleep and bloodshot desperation set in, so I did something I have only done once before: I popped a sleeping pill. Gradually, I sank into a kind of metaphysical troth and watched the storm rage for another hour until one last bolt of lightning sent me into a short-lived coma.
But the coma wasn't short-lived enough. Something I had failed to consider when I plugged the phone into the wall: there was no power. I might as well have plugged the damned thing into a pineapple. So the alarm didn't go off. So while my 8 AM train was clickety-clacketing its way off to Dazhou, my phone was a vegetable and so was I.
It was the strangest awakening of my life, and all of them have been strange. A white bolt from a gray sky shot me upright in bed. It was 10 AM and it was still storming outside. It took me several minutes to remember who and where I was. Then, sifting through the coffee-stained manila folders of my mind, I remembered vaguely that there was something I was supposed to do, somewhere I was supposed to be ...
Shit, fuck, etc. The power was still out, my phone was dead, and my laundry was half-washed and starting to mildew. I hung it up to dry. Then I took a cold shower. A glance in the mirror reminded me that I was still bearded. I was going to Dazhou to work, and professionalism in China does not involve looking like Bob Veila after a two-week do-it-yourself bender. But I wasn't about to hack at all that Irish scrubgrass with a Bic razor. So I put on some cargo shorts and a dirty undershirt, walked to the nearest barber shop, and asked them if they could shave me.
"We can't shave you electrically," announced the barber. "There is no power. But."
He approached me with an unlathered razor. I threw my hands up and backed slowly out onto the street.
I caught a cab downtown. Downtown, there was power. But the sewers had overflowed and the taxi cabs jetted spumes of brown semisolids as they passed. I wielded my umbrella like a shield. Tides of sewage rolled over the sidewalk whenever the streetlights changed and a competition broke out among the Chinese pedestrians to see who was courageous enough to cross the Brown Sea. I watched and waited. The Chinese women proved their meddle by tromping through the filth high-heels and all. The young men, not surprisingly, were colossal wussies about the whole thing and tried to pass over the sludge by clambering across the rungs of a nearby fence. A troupe of Germans materialized on the scene and, ever the sensible ones, decided to avoid the Scheisswasser altogether. Their leader, an overweight fellow in a too-tight t-shirt, shouted loudly, matter-of-factly, in a strange tongue that no one but me could understand, "Well, we must go around, then!" And the other Germans followed him. They turned and marched single file down the sidewalk, crossed the unflooded portion of the street, and marched down the opposite sidewalk unscathed. Only much later did the thought occur to me: Germans? In Nanchong? ... the fuck?
I waded across the filth. Then I got myself shampooed, scalp massaged, and shaved for 80 cents US. Then I bought a pair of sweatshop dress shirts for four bucks a pop. The next and final step was to get mine ass on board a train, or preferably a bus. I caught a cab to the biggest bus station in town, but they told me to go to the smallest bus station in town. My cabbie the second time around was the splitting image of Jackie Chan. I am not being racist, here: this man closely resembled Jackie Chan. And I began to feel like his laowai sidekick in a half-ass buddy comedy.
"Where are you going?" he asked me.
"Dazhou," I said.
"They've probably sold out of tickets."
"But I've got to get to Dazhou tonight," I said. "There's a banquet, or something."
"If they're sold out, what are you gonna do?"
"I have no idea," I said. "What can I do?"
Cabbie Chan was mum on this point. He lit a cigarette and offered me one. Then he screeched to a halt on the side of the road.
"Check it out," he said. "Look at that beautiful girl."
And indeed, a rather stacked Sichuanese woman was sauntering our way.
"In Sichuan, there are many beautiful women," said Cabbie Chan, "and I try to stop for them whenever I can."
Cabbie Chan dropped off the girl, then he dropped me off at the bus station. The black market cabbie urchins closed in around me. WHERE ARE YOU GOING? WHERE ARE YOU GOING? I elbowed and stiffarmed my way into the bus station. Needless to say, all tickets to Dazhou had been sold out, not just for the day in question, but also for the next day, and the one after that. I thrust my hands in my pockets and wandered back out to the parking lot, gave myself over to the long-distance cab racket. But I had spurned them and now they were ignoring me. I walked in circles but nobody seemed to notice me. So I began to call out the word "Dazhou." Dazhou, Dazhou, Dazhou. A hunchbacked man with pronounced acne scars approached.
"Dazhou?"
"Dazhou."
"700 kuai!"
"But I don't have that kind of money," I said. "I'm a volunteer."
"A what?"
"Nevermind. 500 kuai."
He shook his head.
"That's not gonna work. 600 kuai."
600 kuai. A hundred bucks. I bit my tongue and fumbled around in my wallet. The cabbie urchin extended his palms eagerly. Then, Cabbie Chan came to the rescue.
"600 kuai? Are you crazy?" he snapped. "This man is a foreigner. He doesn't know any better. He is our guest. Don't cheat him."
Cabbie Chan grabbed my arm and flicked his head towards his cab. He had been waiting for me the whole time.
"Let's go. I'll take you to the train station."
I followed Cabbie Chan and the cabbie urchin gave chase.
"Hey! Hey! Hey!"
"Hey hey hey," snorted Chan. "Idiot."
We sped off. The cabbie urchin chased us for a bit, then faded into the industrial haze.
I am wary of Chinese trains. They tend to be a crap shoot. As in: there is poop on the floor half the time. For that reason, among others, I hadn't ridden a Chinese train in six months. But my handlers had told me to get to Dazhou as early as possible, by whatever means possible, so that I might attend some sort of event that may or may not have been important. So I risked it. And as luck would have it, thanks to Cabbie Chan, I found myself in a relatively cozy bullet train bound for Dazhou, with no poop on the floor, and due to arrive only eight hours later than I'd originally planned. Of course, I missed the inaugural banquet by a couple hours. What a pity. But I did make it, floods and power outages and all. So I figured that I'd be welcomed in Dazhou with a tickertape parade. Instead, it was a listless Kevin, a lukewarm beer, and a tepid plate of kung pao chicken.
"Yes, what a pity that you were so late," Kevin said as we were walking home. "The banquet was very delishurs."
By then, the two bottles of Yanjing were doing their job, so I was able to laugh Kevin off in the Chinese manner. But then I stopped dead in my tracks because something in my periphery hadn't rubbed me the right way. I doubled back and peered down a dimly lit alleyway. In the not-so-distant distance was a river, and the river was raging.
"Um," I said.
"Yes," said Kevin, "the river is very high today."
"Is that normal?" I asked.
"No."
All along the riverside, there were old Chinese men, standing and watching the river. A bad sign. And I stood there for a moment to watch the river with them. It rolled past like a python. The crests of the waves gleamed in the moonlight. I had never seen anything like it, such natural rage. Such strength. I had never felt such powerlessness. Then, Kevin yanked me by the arm. And I walked.
"I forgot to say to you," he said, "that class is begin tomorrow."
"What?" I asked. I had forgotten all about the river. "What? When?"
"Eight AM. Sunday morning class is begin. What a pity you were late. I tell you earlier if you are not so late."
"Yes," I said, "what a pity."
So tomorrow began the next morning. I suppose that made sense. Then I shook Kevin loose and darted back to steal one last glance at the raging river. Marvelous. Horrific. The silent Chinese men knew. Tomorrow began the next morning, but whether or not tomorrow came was another question entire.
Friday, August 13, 2010
Fat Panda
I have been away from my writing desk for about a month now. I spent two weeks in Dazhou teaching teachers how to teach, and another week in Chengdu, bidding farewell to some of my favorite assholes in the whole world. July was a significant month for me, and a big part of why I haven't written anything about it is precisely because it was so significant. I'm not sure I can do it justice at this point.
Another thing is: I didn't have time to write. When I wasn't working, I was out carousing, and when I wasn't out carousing, I was avoiding natural disasters left and right (and up and down, for that matter). For thirty-odd days, I was refreshingly estranged from the internet. I'm the kind of guy who checks the Huffington Post every ten seconds for news of the impending apocalypse, so it was educational for me to return to the Huffington Post after a month and find that absolutely nothing worth reading about had occurred in my absence. The only news I cared about was going on all around me.
And yet another thing is: I have been avoiding writing. Every writer worth his or her own salt swears that hard work is a must. A writer must write every day, preferably for eight hours at a time, and preferably with a tumbler of bad whiskey at the ready. But as you well know by now, bad whiskey or no, I often go long stretches without writing a word. And I suspect I'm none the worse for it. For me, writing is like riding a bike - or a unicycle, if you happen to be a street mime. It does require hard work and dedication, but it is not incompatible with bouts of travel or debauchery. After a prolonged absence, when I finally do sit back down at my desk, I find that my brain has changed in all sorts of ways that I wouldn't have noticed if I had been writing all the way through. The compositional act is a bit awkward and clunky at first, but after a while the realization sinks in that the person writing now is very different from the person writing only a month before, which tends to make the writing process a lustier, sexier pursuit than it usually is for me. Who is this stranger in my head and where has he been?
In the same vein, reunions after a prolonged absence are often awkward and clunky (but also lusty and sexy) experiences. I believe that the most trustworthy mirrors are the ones that haven't seen you in a while. Your close friends are accustomed to seeing your mug around every day, and for that reason, they go unaware of changes in your physique or accent or patterns of thought because those changes happen so gradually. But leave somebody for one year, or even for one month, and when you return, you will find yourself oddly transformed in the eyes of your beholder, though you yourself feel not a whit different.
Last week, I visited my host family for the first time in over a year. After all the awkward embraces had been gotten out of the way, my host mother sized me up and said, "Pan Daaaaa! You've gotten fat!"
I laughed it off in the manner of the Chinese. Then I sat down to dinner. My host parents, apparently, were conspiring to make me even fatter. I devoured my share of veggies, but self-consciously avoided the twice-cooked pork. Then I got up and went to the bathroom.
I have never been sensitive about my weight because I've never possessed much weight to speak of. But I'd found my host mother's remark particularly cutting. So I switched on the vanity lights and lifted up my shirt. True: a bit more baby fat than I had in my early twenties, but that much is unavoidable. Baby fat and all, I was still as skinny as a chopstick. I sucked in my gut, then I let it hang out. It wasn't even a passable gut. Just a little more Panda to love, that's all. So I wasn't fat, at least not by any sane definition of the word. But for the first time since the throes of puberty, I had allowed anxiety about my appearance to creep into my head, and in that moment in front of the mirror, I swore off sweet and sour pork for the indefinite future.
When I returned to Nanchong a couple days ago, my first stop was the convenience store by my apartment. I slid a bottle of yogurt across the counter. The shopkeeper sized me up.
"Wow! You've gotten fat!"
"I've gotten fat?"
"Yeah! I mean, really fat!"
I put the yogurt back in the fridge and replaced it with a bottle of chamomile tea.
This afternoon, Cabbie Chan (who will figure very slightly into my upcoming Great Flood of Dazhou saga) squinted at me in the rear view mirror and commented on my newfound corpulence. He dropped me off at the restaurant across from the old campus and there, the laoban called me a fatty and looked at my heaping dish of kung pao chicken like she was about to cut me off. And just now at the coffee shop, where I came to write, the owner joined me at the table and distracted me for the better part of an hour by ranting about how fat I'd become. "Fat! Really fat!" he exclaimed, though he followed that up with, "More handsome, too!"
Who is this stranger and how did he get so fat? Maybe it's my haircut. I'm short haired and clean shaven for the first time in almost a year. Maybe that makes one appear fatter. Or maybe I've actually become something of a fatass. If anyone among my readership has seen me lately and is willing to shatter my body image in the name of honesty, I would gladly welcome your criticism so that I can step up my exercise regimen, if that is what is necessary. But I don't believe that I am much fatter than I have ever been, and in any case, I have never been the least bit fat. In fact, when I am among Americans these days, they are quick to point out how much stronger I look, with the appropriate fondling of biceps and manboobs that tend to follow such a compliment. So my guess is that something has been lost in translation, and I will attempt to translate that loss here.
In China (and in South Korea, for that matter) people do not ask, "How are you?" They ask, "Have you eaten?" There are reasons for that. Not so long ago it was a relevant question, hunger taking its rightful precedence over mood and state of being. So my guess is that plumpness in China, as long as it's not morbid obesity, is (at least linguistically) regarded as a virtue. Because plumpness was once, indeed, very much a virtue. Calling a friend or acquaintance "fat" in China is not necessarily the same as calling them "lard-ass." It's more like: you're looking nourished these days. Or at least, that is what I have to assume. Because I am not fat. Trust me on this one. In fact, over the past couple months, through sporadic push-ups and chin-ups, I've more than doubled my cup size and have added quite a bit of meat to my upper arms, though you could still easily wrap your hand around one of my biceps like a sphygmomanometer. I've also grown somewhat swarthy from wandering aimlessly in the remorseless Sichuan summer. All and all, I suppose I do look rather well nourished. But not fat. And if I am fat, then so what? There are worse things to be.
My ego has not been hurt by this recent spate of commentary on my waistline. I'm just puzzled that it came all at once. Fortunately, the Chinese often remark on my appearance, and I seldom find any of their remarks even remotely true. I am not a monkey, though I am distantly related to that species. I am not a giant, although I have been told so by countless Chinese men who are taller than me. My nose is not a triangle, at least not in the Euclidian sense. And I look nothing like Los Angeles Lakers power forward Pau Gasol. Or Ben Stiller, for that matter. (But maybe I do look a little like Pau Gasol.) So I will file this judgment away with all the rest of China's warped perceptions of my appearance. Then I will wolf down four double cheeseburgers from McDonald's and sit on my fat ass at the computer and try to navigate the keyboard with my fat-ass fingers so I can painstakingly regurgitate all of the things that happened to me over the month of July while I was so busy devouring metric ton after metric ton of condensed lard.
Another thing is: I didn't have time to write. When I wasn't working, I was out carousing, and when I wasn't out carousing, I was avoiding natural disasters left and right (and up and down, for that matter). For thirty-odd days, I was refreshingly estranged from the internet. I'm the kind of guy who checks the Huffington Post every ten seconds for news of the impending apocalypse, so it was educational for me to return to the Huffington Post after a month and find that absolutely nothing worth reading about had occurred in my absence. The only news I cared about was going on all around me.
And yet another thing is: I have been avoiding writing. Every writer worth his or her own salt swears that hard work is a must. A writer must write every day, preferably for eight hours at a time, and preferably with a tumbler of bad whiskey at the ready. But as you well know by now, bad whiskey or no, I often go long stretches without writing a word. And I suspect I'm none the worse for it. For me, writing is like riding a bike - or a unicycle, if you happen to be a street mime. It does require hard work and dedication, but it is not incompatible with bouts of travel or debauchery. After a prolonged absence, when I finally do sit back down at my desk, I find that my brain has changed in all sorts of ways that I wouldn't have noticed if I had been writing all the way through. The compositional act is a bit awkward and clunky at first, but after a while the realization sinks in that the person writing now is very different from the person writing only a month before, which tends to make the writing process a lustier, sexier pursuit than it usually is for me. Who is this stranger in my head and where has he been?
In the same vein, reunions after a prolonged absence are often awkward and clunky (but also lusty and sexy) experiences. I believe that the most trustworthy mirrors are the ones that haven't seen you in a while. Your close friends are accustomed to seeing your mug around every day, and for that reason, they go unaware of changes in your physique or accent or patterns of thought because those changes happen so gradually. But leave somebody for one year, or even for one month, and when you return, you will find yourself oddly transformed in the eyes of your beholder, though you yourself feel not a whit different.
Last week, I visited my host family for the first time in over a year. After all the awkward embraces had been gotten out of the way, my host mother sized me up and said, "Pan Daaaaa! You've gotten fat!"
I laughed it off in the manner of the Chinese. Then I sat down to dinner. My host parents, apparently, were conspiring to make me even fatter. I devoured my share of veggies, but self-consciously avoided the twice-cooked pork. Then I got up and went to the bathroom.
I have never been sensitive about my weight because I've never possessed much weight to speak of. But I'd found my host mother's remark particularly cutting. So I switched on the vanity lights and lifted up my shirt. True: a bit more baby fat than I had in my early twenties, but that much is unavoidable. Baby fat and all, I was still as skinny as a chopstick. I sucked in my gut, then I let it hang out. It wasn't even a passable gut. Just a little more Panda to love, that's all. So I wasn't fat, at least not by any sane definition of the word. But for the first time since the throes of puberty, I had allowed anxiety about my appearance to creep into my head, and in that moment in front of the mirror, I swore off sweet and sour pork for the indefinite future.
When I returned to Nanchong a couple days ago, my first stop was the convenience store by my apartment. I slid a bottle of yogurt across the counter. The shopkeeper sized me up.
"Wow! You've gotten fat!"
"I've gotten fat?"
"Yeah! I mean, really fat!"
I put the yogurt back in the fridge and replaced it with a bottle of chamomile tea.
This afternoon, Cabbie Chan (who will figure very slightly into my upcoming Great Flood of Dazhou saga) squinted at me in the rear view mirror and commented on my newfound corpulence. He dropped me off at the restaurant across from the old campus and there, the laoban called me a fatty and looked at my heaping dish of kung pao chicken like she was about to cut me off. And just now at the coffee shop, where I came to write, the owner joined me at the table and distracted me for the better part of an hour by ranting about how fat I'd become. "Fat! Really fat!" he exclaimed, though he followed that up with, "More handsome, too!"
Who is this stranger and how did he get so fat? Maybe it's my haircut. I'm short haired and clean shaven for the first time in almost a year. Maybe that makes one appear fatter. Or maybe I've actually become something of a fatass. If anyone among my readership has seen me lately and is willing to shatter my body image in the name of honesty, I would gladly welcome your criticism so that I can step up my exercise regimen, if that is what is necessary. But I don't believe that I am much fatter than I have ever been, and in any case, I have never been the least bit fat. In fact, when I am among Americans these days, they are quick to point out how much stronger I look, with the appropriate fondling of biceps and manboobs that tend to follow such a compliment. So my guess is that something has been lost in translation, and I will attempt to translate that loss here.
In China (and in South Korea, for that matter) people do not ask, "How are you?" They ask, "Have you eaten?" There are reasons for that. Not so long ago it was a relevant question, hunger taking its rightful precedence over mood and state of being. So my guess is that plumpness in China, as long as it's not morbid obesity, is (at least linguistically) regarded as a virtue. Because plumpness was once, indeed, very much a virtue. Calling a friend or acquaintance "fat" in China is not necessarily the same as calling them "lard-ass." It's more like: you're looking nourished these days. Or at least, that is what I have to assume. Because I am not fat. Trust me on this one. In fact, over the past couple months, through sporadic push-ups and chin-ups, I've more than doubled my cup size and have added quite a bit of meat to my upper arms, though you could still easily wrap your hand around one of my biceps like a sphygmomanometer. I've also grown somewhat swarthy from wandering aimlessly in the remorseless Sichuan summer. All and all, I suppose I do look rather well nourished. But not fat. And if I am fat, then so what? There are worse things to be.
My ego has not been hurt by this recent spate of commentary on my waistline. I'm just puzzled that it came all at once. Fortunately, the Chinese often remark on my appearance, and I seldom find any of their remarks even remotely true. I am not a monkey, though I am distantly related to that species. I am not a giant, although I have been told so by countless Chinese men who are taller than me. My nose is not a triangle, at least not in the Euclidian sense. And I look nothing like Los Angeles Lakers power forward Pau Gasol. Or Ben Stiller, for that matter. (But maybe I do look a little like Pau Gasol.) So I will file this judgment away with all the rest of China's warped perceptions of my appearance. Then I will wolf down four double cheeseburgers from McDonald's and sit on my fat ass at the computer and try to navigate the keyboard with my fat-ass fingers so I can painstakingly regurgitate all of the things that happened to me over the month of July while I was so busy devouring metric ton after metric ton of condensed lard.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Off The Rickshaw: A Libertine's Guide to Living a Healthy Life of Debauchery in the People's Republic of China - Volume 1
Dear Newly Arrived Peace Corps Volunteers,
If you came to China with designs on kicking booze and smokes once and for all, perhaps Saudi Arabia would have been a better decision. The Chinese, as you have probably already discovered, are not Latter Day Saints. They love debauchery in all its forms. They enjoy revelry, merriment, bacchanalia, shindigs, and, in the parlance of our times, "getting crunk." The unholy sacraments of the Chinese Dionysian rites - formaldehyde beer and overpriced cigarettes - are almost impossible to avoid, or resist. The American mantra of Just Say No is flipped on its head in China. Here, Just Say Yes is the name of the game; it is rude to do otherwise.
Of course, you can abstain should you so desire, but you must be persistent, and your excuses had better be convincing.
Exhibit A: Wǒ bù hē. Wǒ shì shān dá jī yuán. I don't drink. I am a Scientologist.
Exhibit B: Chōuyān jī wǒ de chángdào yì jī zōnghézhèng. Smoking aggravates my Irritable Bowel Syndrome in explosive fashion.
The word for "alcoholic" in Chinese is jiu gui, or "booze devil." The word for "chain smoker" in Chinese is yan gui, or "cigarette devil." If you are to maintain some semblance of face in this country, you don't want to become either of those devils. But two years is a long time to behave oneself. And nobody around you will be behaving themselves. Furthermore, the Chinese are persuasive. They have strength in numbers and, in all likelihood, they will wear you down. Formal banquets tend to be even rowdier than high school keggers. If you are a man and you happen to be out with your coworkers, you will be offered fresh cigarettes before you've even finished the one you're working on. In short, if you were on the rickshaw of sobriety when you arrived, the Chinese will kick you off of it. If you were already off the rickshaw from the get-go, you will probably remain there. No doubt your willpower is stronger than mine, but I have found abstinence to be a losing battle in China. The key, then, is to indulge your vices responsibly, cost effectively, and enjoyably. So, what follows is my feeble attempt to assess the nature of debauchery in China, and to catalog the key players involved. This guide to debauchery will be part Gulliver's Travels, part Consumer Reports. It is not my aim to ruin the surprise for any of you - certainly, trial and error (and mostly error) is the best way to find things out for yourself - but simply to provide some helpful suggestions and shopping advice for all you young libertines out there who have so selflessly committed yourselves to two years of service and self-destruction. Happy debauching!
Warm regards,
Pan Da
Volume 1: On Smoking
When I first arrived in China, I was convinced for some reason that the Peace Corps was a celibate order of monks. Surely, nobody within the sacred fold smoked or drank, and I certainly didn't want to be regarded as the Kingsley Amis of the flock. So, I held off smoking for the first two days of my service, until the inside of my head started to feel like a rapidly inflating hot air balloon. I paced the room. I played Spider Solitaire. Eventually, I succumbed to Sudoku. Fucking Sudoku? No. I couldn't stand it any longer. Shortly after midnight, I tiptoed out of my hotel room and took the elevator downstairs. There were other volunteers lounging around the lobby. I waved at them, wearing an inconspicuous smirk. Oh, just going out for a little stroll is all, some fresh air, y'know - but I had blown my cover. Moments after I'd checked the walls for CCTV cameras and stashed myself in the darkest corner I could find, my soon-to-be friend Tim came around the bend. I stuffed my Marlboros back in my pocket.
"Whatcha up to, Keith?"
"Oh, uh, well," I said. "Just. Chillaxing. Man. In the corner. Y'know. In the dark."
"... um, cool. I thought you were maybe sneaking out for a cigarette or something."
"That ... is also possible. Do you ... errr?"
"I'm trying not to. But fuck it. It's China."
And so I dug deep into my dwindling supply of American cigarettes, offered Tim one, and lit a number for myself. Ah, sweet contentment.
Over the days and weeks that followed, the smokers' circle expanded. At first, it was just Tim and I. Then Gary came along. Vijay crumbled pretty quick. Then Christina and Genevieve. Jim and John. Tristan and Dave. They kept crawling out of the woodwork, shamefaced at first, then suddenly boisterous and bitchy like the rest of us. I'm not proud of our missionary work, and I don't mean to imply that the Peace Corps is the opposite of a monastic order, or that my fellow volunteers are as weak-willed as I am - but in a country where cigarettes are the official currency of kindness, it's almost impossible to stay on the non-smoking rickshaw.
After a couple weeks, after we had smoked down and snubbed out every last homegrown Marlboro, Camel, and American Spirit our backpacks had to offer, we in the smokers' circle turned with much wailing and gnashing of teeth to Chinese cigarettes. I'll be the first to admit that there is no such thing as a "good" cigarette, not even in America. Although I do savor the smell of secondhand smoke, I can't say that I've ever enjoyed my time in Flavor Country. As far as cigarettes go, there are only varying degrees of awful. American Spirits are considerably less awful than Marlboros. Marlboros, in my opinion, are considerably less awful than Camels. And Camels are unquestionably less awful than anything available for less than $7.00 a pack. But even bargain bin cigarettes - you know, the ones with the American flags on the front - are nowhere near as awful as the best Chinese cigarette on the market. Chinese cigarettes are f-bomb awful. That's all there is to it.
Deep down in our lungs, we in the smokers' circle knew that all Chinese cigarettes were f-bomb awful from the very beginning, but that didn't stop us from searching for that elusive mildly awful cigarette. Between Peace Corps health seminars, the smokers' circle would gather at the foot of the hotel stairs and, reaching into our pockets, we would produce a rainbow of cigarette packs. Blue packs, red ones, green packs, purple ones. The names eluded us at the time - Shuangxi? Hongtashan? Hongmei? - but the prices and the relative degrees of awfulness did not.
"These Shwoongshys ain't half bad. Ain't half good, either."
"Hayngtahshewns are only seven kuai. But it's like I'm inhaling a barbecue pit."
"Ugh, Hayngmee. Four kuai, and I feel like I'm smoking the New York Times."
A few of us adopted brands. But most of us, myself included, are still free agents, are still searching, hoping, still jumping from one f-bomb awful self-destructive experience to the next. In so doing, I have become something of a taxonomist of modern Chinese smokeables. I wouldn't consider myself a connoisseur, because that would imply some level of enjoyment that I am not familiar with. But after one full year off the rickshaw, I can categorize Chinese cigarettes by price, origin, nicotine content, and that most important of variables: degree of awfulness. And so, my dear volunteer, now I present that information to you. The reviews that follow will not include anything out of my price range, which is exactly $2.50 US.
Upper-Middle Class Cigarettes
Name: Marlboro
Origin: Fujian, China
Color: Red or white, depending on what kind of cancer you want
Price: 15 kuai ($2.50 US)
Degree of Awfulness: Pretty Damn Awful ☠☠☠☠
Review: It is with much relish and a slight twinge of heartbreak that I launch into this review of Chinese-made Marlboros. Don't let the classic deck-of-cards packaging fool you: these are not American Marlboros. Some foreigners persist in smoking them because the brand name does seem to have some sort of soothing placebo effect on the laowai mind. But I will go out on a limb and say that Chinese Marlboros are perhaps even more awful than most bargain bin Chinese brands. If you are familiar with the smell of valerian root, that is the exact stench you can expect the moment you put flame to paper. The smell of dirty socks. Of expired milk. A high-pitched smell, if that is possible. I don't mean to imply that Marlboro puts valerian root in their Chinese cigarettes, although that wouldn't surprise me in the least. Valerian root or no, smoking these monsters will not help you sleep at night. They will only amplify your Nescafe jitters, and what is worse, by keeping them around, you will sorely disappoint your expat friends every time you take out a pack and have to explain that oh, no, these aren't American Marlboros. They're, uh, Chinese. Like, sorry, bro.
Name: Hongtashan - Salaryman Edition
Origin: Yuxi, China
Color: Silver or gold. I can't tell. I'm colorblind, yo.
Price: 12 kuai ($2.00 US)
Degree of Awfulness: Pretty Damn Awful ☠☠☠☠
Review: A bit of trivia, first off. "Hongtashan" means Red Pagoda Hill. I have no idea where that particular hill is, but I can only assume it is somewhere in Yuxi, and that the red pagoda is obscured in a carcinogenic haze carried downwind from the nearby Hongtashan Cigarette Factory. Another bit of trivia: Hongtashan, Ltd. has a Twitter account. I can only imagine what a Chinese cigarette manufacturer must tweet about. "Keep smoking. KEEP SMOKING. LOL!!!! @hongtashan" Anyhow. There are at least three varieties of Hongtashan that I am aware of. What I call the CEO Edition is out of my price range, so I will not review it here. The Peasant Edition is well within my means, and is somewhat less awful than the Pretty Damn Awful Salaryman Edition, which I will sink my teeth into presently. Until I smoked one of these puppies, I didn't believe it was possible for China to engineer a cigarette that was "not strong enough." But smoking a Hongtashan Salaryman Edition is like sucking air through a straw. There does not appear to be any actual tobacco in the cigarette, though I have not yet been willing to dissect one in the name of science. I imagine if I were to do so, I would find a few dirty blonde strands of plant material blended in with pure nothingness. I do not recommend smoking these overpriced tubules of condensed oxygen. It is a waste of your volunteer stipend. Smoking a pack of Hongtashan Salaryman Editions is like not smoking anything at all. It's like breathing clean air, for chrissake, and who in their right mind wants to do that?
Name: Pride (a/k/a Panda) - Purple Panda
Origin: Unknown - somewhere with pandas, perhaps
Color: Purple, with some panda coloration
Price: 12 kuai ($2.00 US)
Degree of Awfulness: Not Too Awful ☠☠
Review: The Pride Cigarette Corporation, for reasons known only to Chinese cab drivers, has about ten different flavors of cigarette on the market. Or perhaps "flavors" isn't the right word. Let's say they have about ten different colors of cigarette on the market. There are yellow packs and blue packs, red ones and green ones, and most recently, purple ones. There is not much difference in awfulness between the many colors of the Panda rainbow, and to review them all would be pointless and exhausting work, so I will stick to the two least awful colors available: blue and purple. Pride Cigarettes are known to laowaidom as "Pandas," because of the cuddly little panda insignia on the front of the packs. Pandas are easily the cutest cigarettes in China. The Purple Panda logo is especially charming, because the little fellow looks like he's just spent two weeks on the high end of a bamboo bong. Panda rings aside, his eyes are unmistakeably bloodshot, his cheeks are flushed, and his lips are puckered, clearly showing signs of drymouth. I'm not sure if this partytime panda goes for tobacco, but I suspect he wouldn't be too disappointed with his namesake. As far as Chinese cigarettes go, I am willing to place Purple Pandas in the upper echelon of endurability. Slightly tangy, slightly bitter. Not too skunky. Pride Cigarettes, Ltd. have really come close to hitting the bullseye with this one; or have at least come close to hitting the target; or at the very least, they have come close to grazing the tree from which the target is hanging. In a vast sea of mass produced awfulness, by being Not Too Awful, the Purple Pandas have managed a feat unsurpassed by anyone except their less stoned brothers in arms: the Blue Pandas.
Middle Class Cigarettes
Name: Pride (a/k/a Panda) - Blue Panda
Origin: The Land of Milk and Honey and Tar, China
Color: Navy blue with trippy panda-related holograms
Price: 10 kuai ($1.50 US)
Degree of Awfulness: Merely Awful ☠
Review: It's all downhill from here. The high water mark for Chinese cigarettes is the Blue Panda. I can't say what makes me such a loyal customer. If I could, I probably wouldn't be a smoker. But that shimmering 3-D panda hologram draws me back time and time again. The problem is, Blue Pandas only seem to be available in Chengdu. Ah, yes. Chengdu. Therein, perhaps, lies the source of my attraction: Blue Pandas are the brand of choice in Chengdu, and that, after all, was the place of my Chinese rebirth, the city where I shed the shackles of my white man's name and was rechristened Pan Da. Pan Da smokes Pandas. Perhaps the name thing has something to do with it, too. Anyhow. I spent my first two months in Chengdu, and it is likely that my very first pack of Chinese cigarettes were Blue Pandas. I associate their inky deathsmoke with my first laowai friends, with the noobish novelty I found in Mother China, and with that first weekend debauch when, finally, everyone could let their guard down and stop acting s'damned serious all the time. Nostalgia aside, I mean it when I say that these cigarettes are Merely Awful, and not Rather Awful, or Pretty Damned Awful, or F-Bomb Awful. Sure, the filter is blue and plasticky, and all that painted plastic is probably wreaking unseen havoc on the poor little alveoli of my battered lungs. The smoke is by no means smooth, and tastes, in its way, like a condensed shot of Chengdu smog. But hey, nobody's perfect. Most things in life are mediocre. And in the realm of Chinese cigarettes, even mediocrity is unattainable. So it is with a deep sense of relativity that I award Blue Pandas the coveted Smoke Ring D'or. That said, I do not recommend them to anyone.
Name: Yunyan
Origin: Yunnan Province, China
Color: Crimson
Price: 10 kuai ($1.50 US)
Degree of Awfulness: Rather Awful ☠☠☠
Review: As enamored as I am of Yunnan Province, its mountains, its rivers, its eternal sunshine, its dwarf communes, its 300 foot tall Optimus Primes, its warmhearted people, its microbreweries, its matriarchal communes where the men drink wine and hibernate in hammocks all year long - as enamored as I am of the place, Yunnan's flagship cigarette company, Yunyan, is an extreme disappointment. It's not that Yunyans are all that awful. As you can see, I have rated them Rather Awful, as opposed to Pretty Damn Awful or F-Bomb Awful. But like the aforementioned Hongtashan Salaryman Editions, Yunyan cigarettes don't really do anything for me. They seem to consist of oxygen and dirt, with a dash of MSG and a sprinkling of horseradish. I don't know much about tobacco farming, but it puzzles me that Yunnan, a tropical fairyland that is unusually well suited for growing tobacco (among other things), should produce cigarettes that are anything less than Merely Awful. I don't have much to say about Yunyans, and have nothing to express but my disappointment. Yunyans are the Phil Collins of Chinese cigarettes. That, and the name is really hard to pronounce.
Name: Shuangxi - Classic Style
Origin: Shanghai, China
Color: Red China red
Price: 10 kuai ($1.50 US)
Degree of Awfulness: Not Too Awful ☠☠
Review: The coveted Silver Smoke Ring goes hands-down to Shuangxi Cigarettes, Ltd. The packaging makes them a bit hard to find - everything in China is red - but, while not quite rewarding, Shuangxis never prove lethal. At least not instantly so. The word "shuangxi" means "Double Happiness," which, I suppose, translates to "very, very happy." According to Wikipedia, "[t]he brand carries only a tiny health warning on the side of a 20-cigarette pack," and I can vouch for that. The tiny health warning goes something like this: SMOKING IS HARMFUL TO YOUR HEALTH; QUIT SMOKING EARLY IS GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH. I like that. It's much more pleasing to the smoker's ear than "SMOKING WAS A DUMBASS MOVE IN THE FIRST PLACE. DUMBASS." Because Blue Pandas are not readily available in Nanchong, and because Purple Pandas are too expensive, Shuangxis are generally my brand of choice. Their ten kuai price is convenient for breaking hundred-kuai bills. The cigarettes themselves are not really worth writing home about, but who the hell writes home about cigarettes anyway? The filters have a bad habit of dyeing my fingernails red, so I imagine my students suspect me of moonlighting as a stripper. As far as flavor goes, Shuangxis taste slightly minty. Or maybe that's just me. Otherwise, they are cigarettes - and Not Too Awful ones, at that.
Lower-Middle Class Cigarettes
Name: Hongtashan - Peasant Edition
Origin: Yuxi, China
Color: White, with red pagodas all over the fucking place
Price: 7.5 kuai ($1.10 US)
Degree of Awfulness: Not Too Awful ☠☠
Review: Ever the internet-savvy missionaries of death, in addition to a Twitter account, the Hongtashan Cigarette Company has a Wikipedia page. Let's peruse it, shall we? "The cigarettes are made with a flue-cured tobacco type and therefore sugar and nicotine levels are relatively high." I don't know what "flue-cured" means, and I'd prefer not to find out. Wait, there's sugar involved? Great, so my teeth will rot out along with everything else. I suppose it's probably best to just not read about cigarettes, ever. Least of all Chinese ones. Nevertheless, whatever I'm inhaling, it's not F-Bomb Awful. I will be charitable and give the Hongtashan Peasant Editions a mark of Not Too Awful, even though they are, at times, Rather Awful. Inconsistency is their achilles' heel. Overall, the Peasant Edition is pretty hit or miss. The packaging is seldom the same. Sometimes, they come in plastic bundles. Other times, in proper cardboard packs. Sometimes, they taste like rolled-up newspaper. Other times, like licorice. The only consistent thing about Hongtashans, so far as I can tell, is that they unravel like a motherfucker. For that reason, they are rather embarrassing to smoke in public. They disintegrate, fall to pieces. You're sitting there at the bar with ash all over the crotch of your jeans and meanwhile, a trail of flames is swallowing up your cigarette like a fuse. But if I can say anything complimentary about the Hongtashan Peasant Editions, it's this: they don't pussyfoot around. They bring it hard. The Hongtashan Peasant Edition cigarettes were clearly designed with lovable old Chinese men in mind, and for that I cannot fault them, even if they were the primary culprit in the Great Fire of Keith's Totally Bitchin' O'Leaver's Pub T-Shirt in the winter of twenty ought nine.
Lower Class Cigarettes
Name: Hongmei
Origin: Yuxi, China
Color: Day Glo yellow and other such retro hues
Price: 4 kuai (80 cents US)
Degree of Awfulness: Rather Awful ☠☠☠
Review: Hongmei is a brand that is nothing if not modest. It offers itself to you for four kuai. Its official website acknowledges, with charming honesty, that it is a "B grade cigarette." If hipsters existed in China, they would smoke Hongmeis. Because sometimes you want to listen to B sides. Sometimes you want to watch B movies. And sometimes you want to do B grade damage to your lungs. So if you're hard up for dough, Hongmei is your man. The name means "red plum," and according to Cigarettespedia (a website I just now discovered and subsequently bookmarked), the red plum is "a symbol of good character." And I suppose that is exactly what Hongmei, and most of its smokers, possess: good character. Hongmei is the poison of choice among China's elderly, both for its affordability and for its relatively low awfulness. My host dad was a Hongmei devotee. You pianyi, you hao, he would say to me as he handed me a Hongmei: if it's cheap, it's good. And although even then I had more refined tastes, I wasn't one to turn down a cigarette, and for the sake of host family harmony, I was briefly a Hongmei devotee myself. But then came my host teenager rebellious phase, and I began to host doubt my host dad's wisdom. Jeez, I would think to myself, these Hongmeis really taste like shit. Here, host dad. Smoke these. These are better. He would turn the Blue Panda over in his fingers like it was an artifact from the distant future. We would squint at each other. And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon, little boy blue and the man on the moon, and all the rest. So it goes. But I'm not being a cigarelitist (my coinage) when I say that Hongmeis are beneath me. Smoking them is simply a level of trauma I do not wish to subject myself to. Not yet, anyway. Not until I am 65 and Chinese. The only living Italian in Nanchong is a Hongmei fan as well. "The cheaper the better," he told me, and loaded me up with Hongmeis. They really aren't all that bad for four kuai. Eighty cents a pack. And Cigarettespedia tells me that Hongmei cigarettes won something called the "Excellent Prize at the Show of China's 10-Year Packing Achievement." Yeah, I've got your Packing Achievement right here, buddy. Anyway, I don't really have much to say about Hongmeis either way. They're cheap and awful. You get what you pay for and you pay for what you get. So, I suppose I'll let my old friend Cigarettespedia close this one out: "The filaments of the cigarette are golden and bright; the fragrance is sweet and pure; the taste is agreeable and comfortable; and the ashes are gray."
Name: Honghe
Origin: Yunnan, China
Color: Cornhusker crimson and Cornhusker creme
Price: 5 kuai (90 cents US)
Degree of Awfulness: F-Bomb Awful ☠☠☠☠☠
Review: And at long last, we have arrived at the worst of the worst. The coveted Loogey D'or goes to Honghe Tobacco Group Co., Ltd. I was surprised, upon glancing at one of the many cigarette packs that litter my living room floor, to learn that Honghe cigarettes are made in Yunnan Province. Another blow for that beloved southwestern Shangi-La of mine. What can I say about these death twigs? That they rank only slightly higher than paint thinner on my List of Things I Like to Inhale? That they are Colon Blow for the lungs? That the stench they give off is enough to kill every last locust within a ten mile radius? Yes, I suppose I can say all of these things. Nobody I know, not even my host dad, stoops so low as Honghe. I have smoked them on exactly three occasions, when my pockets were full of more lint than cash, and each time I spent the next week ruing my decision. I have considered filing suit against the Honghe Tobacco Group, but I don't know how to write "it was like scraping my lungs out with a periodontal probe" in Chinese. The name "Honghe" means "red lake," and after you've smoked one, it's easy to see why. As an anti-smoking campaign, I propose that every high school freshman in America be forced to smoke exactly one Honghe cigarette. Although the cumulative lung damage from a single Honghe is probably equal to smoking two packs of Marlboro Reds every day for the better part of a century, the experience would strongly deter America's children from actually smoking two packs of Marlboro Reds every day for the better part of a century. The experience would, in the blink of an eye, in the coughing up of a lung, instantly counteract all the coolness that Misters B. Dylan and T. Waits have lent to the profession of chainsmoking. God damn them both, and God bless America.
As an incidental footnote to all this, I would like to include the following cigarette-inspired anecdote: while writing, I inevitably had to take a break so I could scurry out and purchase a ten kuai pack of Shuangxi Classic Style cigarettes. (See above.) In the stairwell, I ran into the old man who is currently shacked up with my neighbors. Like most old Chinese men, I am able to communicate with him freely and fluently in a way that I am not able to with anyone under the age of 35. And like most old Chinese men, he chain smokes. He handed me a cigarette and lit it for me.
"What are we smoking?" I asked.
"Hongmei," he said. (See above.)
"Hongmei hao bu hao chou?" I asked. Are Hongmeis good to smoke?
"Bu hao chou. Bu hao chou," he said, shaking his head. Not good to smoke.
"But they're cheap."
"They are that," he said, and coughed.
We looked out over the balcony. It was dark outside. A handful of stars were dimly visible. The apartments across the way were all lit up, and we could see a shirtless man with D-cup bitchtits sitting on his couch, locked in heated conversation with the television.
"What have you been up to these days?" I asked.
"Well," said the old man, "tomorrow I'm going back to Guiyang."
My face dropped.
"Oh. That's too bad."
"Not really," he said. "Guiyang's nice. It's cooler there. The people are friendlier. You'd like it. There are lots of foreigners in Guiyang. Laowais like y'rself. Koreans. Japs. You name it."
The old man was nearing the end of his Hongmei, and used it to light another. He handed me a second cigarette and gestured for me to do the same.
"I don't usually do this," I said, laughing a bit, "but I like talking to you, so I suppose ... "
I snubbed out the first and lit the second.
"What will you do in Guiyang? Work?"
"Me? No. Too old for work. My working days are over," he said. "Just going there to relax."
"That's good. Is Guiyang your hometown?"
"Yes, it's my hometown. Nobody left, though. Everyone I know lives in there," he said, nodding towards the apartment next to mine.
"What kind of work did you do before you retired?"
"I was a farmer."
"It must have been a very hard life," I said.
"Yes. A very hard life."
"But life in China has improved very quickly."
"In some ways," he said. "In some ways. Right now you can see stars in Nanchong, but not for long. So many cars these days. Every year, more and more cars. In Chongqing, you can't see stars. In Chengdu, you can't see stars. When I was young in Guiyang, when I worked out in the fields, you could see stars. But not anymore. So many cars."
He snubbed out his cigarette in a nearby potted plant.
"So many cars," he said.
I took a drag. I exhaled. The smoke drifted from my lips, leaving a string of illegible handwriting hanging in midair with a question mark at the end.
"Well, goodnight," he said.
I shook his hand, though he was unfamiliar with the gesture.
"Safe travels to Guiyang."
"Thank you. Goodnight."
He hobbled up the stairs, unlocked the door and shut it behind him. I snubbed my cigarette on the window ledge. What a stupid habit. But would I trade it for all the conversations I've had with old Chinese men? Well, I don't know if I'd trade those for anything.
If you came to China with designs on kicking booze and smokes once and for all, perhaps Saudi Arabia would have been a better decision. The Chinese, as you have probably already discovered, are not Latter Day Saints. They love debauchery in all its forms. They enjoy revelry, merriment, bacchanalia, shindigs, and, in the parlance of our times, "getting crunk." The unholy sacraments of the Chinese Dionysian rites - formaldehyde beer and overpriced cigarettes - are almost impossible to avoid, or resist. The American mantra of Just Say No is flipped on its head in China. Here, Just Say Yes is the name of the game; it is rude to do otherwise.
Of course, you can abstain should you so desire, but you must be persistent, and your excuses had better be convincing.
Exhibit A: Wǒ bù hē. Wǒ shì shān dá jī yuán. I don't drink. I am a Scientologist.
Exhibit B: Chōuyān jī wǒ de chángdào yì jī zōnghézhèng. Smoking aggravates my Irritable Bowel Syndrome in explosive fashion.
The word for "alcoholic" in Chinese is jiu gui, or "booze devil." The word for "chain smoker" in Chinese is yan gui, or "cigarette devil." If you are to maintain some semblance of face in this country, you don't want to become either of those devils. But two years is a long time to behave oneself. And nobody around you will be behaving themselves. Furthermore, the Chinese are persuasive. They have strength in numbers and, in all likelihood, they will wear you down. Formal banquets tend to be even rowdier than high school keggers. If you are a man and you happen to be out with your coworkers, you will be offered fresh cigarettes before you've even finished the one you're working on. In short, if you were on the rickshaw of sobriety when you arrived, the Chinese will kick you off of it. If you were already off the rickshaw from the get-go, you will probably remain there. No doubt your willpower is stronger than mine, but I have found abstinence to be a losing battle in China. The key, then, is to indulge your vices responsibly, cost effectively, and enjoyably. So, what follows is my feeble attempt to assess the nature of debauchery in China, and to catalog the key players involved. This guide to debauchery will be part Gulliver's Travels, part Consumer Reports. It is not my aim to ruin the surprise for any of you - certainly, trial and error (and mostly error) is the best way to find things out for yourself - but simply to provide some helpful suggestions and shopping advice for all you young libertines out there who have so selflessly committed yourselves to two years of service and self-destruction. Happy debauching!
Warm regards,
Pan Da
Volume 1: On Smoking
When I first arrived in China, I was convinced for some reason that the Peace Corps was a celibate order of monks. Surely, nobody within the sacred fold smoked or drank, and I certainly didn't want to be regarded as the Kingsley Amis of the flock. So, I held off smoking for the first two days of my service, until the inside of my head started to feel like a rapidly inflating hot air balloon. I paced the room. I played Spider Solitaire. Eventually, I succumbed to Sudoku. Fucking Sudoku? No. I couldn't stand it any longer. Shortly after midnight, I tiptoed out of my hotel room and took the elevator downstairs. There were other volunteers lounging around the lobby. I waved at them, wearing an inconspicuous smirk. Oh, just going out for a little stroll is all, some fresh air, y'know - but I had blown my cover. Moments after I'd checked the walls for CCTV cameras and stashed myself in the darkest corner I could find, my soon-to-be friend Tim came around the bend. I stuffed my Marlboros back in my pocket.
"Whatcha up to, Keith?"
"Oh, uh, well," I said. "Just. Chillaxing. Man. In the corner. Y'know. In the dark."
"... um, cool. I thought you were maybe sneaking out for a cigarette or something."
"That ... is also possible. Do you ... errr?"
"I'm trying not to. But fuck it. It's China."
And so I dug deep into my dwindling supply of American cigarettes, offered Tim one, and lit a number for myself. Ah, sweet contentment.
Over the days and weeks that followed, the smokers' circle expanded. At first, it was just Tim and I. Then Gary came along. Vijay crumbled pretty quick. Then Christina and Genevieve. Jim and John. Tristan and Dave. They kept crawling out of the woodwork, shamefaced at first, then suddenly boisterous and bitchy like the rest of us. I'm not proud of our missionary work, and I don't mean to imply that the Peace Corps is the opposite of a monastic order, or that my fellow volunteers are as weak-willed as I am - but in a country where cigarettes are the official currency of kindness, it's almost impossible to stay on the non-smoking rickshaw.
After a couple weeks, after we had smoked down and snubbed out every last homegrown Marlboro, Camel, and American Spirit our backpacks had to offer, we in the smokers' circle turned with much wailing and gnashing of teeth to Chinese cigarettes. I'll be the first to admit that there is no such thing as a "good" cigarette, not even in America. Although I do savor the smell of secondhand smoke, I can't say that I've ever enjoyed my time in Flavor Country. As far as cigarettes go, there are only varying degrees of awful. American Spirits are considerably less awful than Marlboros. Marlboros, in my opinion, are considerably less awful than Camels. And Camels are unquestionably less awful than anything available for less than $7.00 a pack. But even bargain bin cigarettes - you know, the ones with the American flags on the front - are nowhere near as awful as the best Chinese cigarette on the market. Chinese cigarettes are f-bomb awful. That's all there is to it.
Deep down in our lungs, we in the smokers' circle knew that all Chinese cigarettes were f-bomb awful from the very beginning, but that didn't stop us from searching for that elusive mildly awful cigarette. Between Peace Corps health seminars, the smokers' circle would gather at the foot of the hotel stairs and, reaching into our pockets, we would produce a rainbow of cigarette packs. Blue packs, red ones, green packs, purple ones. The names eluded us at the time - Shuangxi? Hongtashan? Hongmei? - but the prices and the relative degrees of awfulness did not.
"These Shwoongshys ain't half bad. Ain't half good, either."
"Hayngtahshewns are only seven kuai. But it's like I'm inhaling a barbecue pit."
"Ugh, Hayngmee. Four kuai, and I feel like I'm smoking the New York Times."
A few of us adopted brands. But most of us, myself included, are still free agents, are still searching, hoping, still jumping from one f-bomb awful self-destructive experience to the next. In so doing, I have become something of a taxonomist of modern Chinese smokeables. I wouldn't consider myself a connoisseur, because that would imply some level of enjoyment that I am not familiar with. But after one full year off the rickshaw, I can categorize Chinese cigarettes by price, origin, nicotine content, and that most important of variables: degree of awfulness. And so, my dear volunteer, now I present that information to you. The reviews that follow will not include anything out of my price range, which is exactly $2.50 US.
Upper-Middle Class Cigarettes
Name: Marlboro
Origin: Fujian, China
Color: Red or white, depending on what kind of cancer you want
Price: 15 kuai ($2.50 US)
Degree of Awfulness: Pretty Damn Awful ☠☠☠☠
Review: It is with much relish and a slight twinge of heartbreak that I launch into this review of Chinese-made Marlboros. Don't let the classic deck-of-cards packaging fool you: these are not American Marlboros. Some foreigners persist in smoking them because the brand name does seem to have some sort of soothing placebo effect on the laowai mind. But I will go out on a limb and say that Chinese Marlboros are perhaps even more awful than most bargain bin Chinese brands. If you are familiar with the smell of valerian root, that is the exact stench you can expect the moment you put flame to paper. The smell of dirty socks. Of expired milk. A high-pitched smell, if that is possible. I don't mean to imply that Marlboro puts valerian root in their Chinese cigarettes, although that wouldn't surprise me in the least. Valerian root or no, smoking these monsters will not help you sleep at night. They will only amplify your Nescafe jitters, and what is worse, by keeping them around, you will sorely disappoint your expat friends every time you take out a pack and have to explain that oh, no, these aren't American Marlboros. They're, uh, Chinese. Like, sorry, bro.
Name: Hongtashan - Salaryman Edition
Origin: Yuxi, China
Color: Silver or gold. I can't tell. I'm colorblind, yo.
Price: 12 kuai ($2.00 US)
Degree of Awfulness: Pretty Damn Awful ☠☠☠☠
Review: A bit of trivia, first off. "Hongtashan" means Red Pagoda Hill. I have no idea where that particular hill is, but I can only assume it is somewhere in Yuxi, and that the red pagoda is obscured in a carcinogenic haze carried downwind from the nearby Hongtashan Cigarette Factory. Another bit of trivia: Hongtashan, Ltd. has a Twitter account. I can only imagine what a Chinese cigarette manufacturer must tweet about. "Keep smoking. KEEP SMOKING. LOL!!!! @hongtashan" Anyhow. There are at least three varieties of Hongtashan that I am aware of. What I call the CEO Edition is out of my price range, so I will not review it here. The Peasant Edition is well within my means, and is somewhat less awful than the Pretty Damn Awful Salaryman Edition, which I will sink my teeth into presently. Until I smoked one of these puppies, I didn't believe it was possible for China to engineer a cigarette that was "not strong enough." But smoking a Hongtashan Salaryman Edition is like sucking air through a straw. There does not appear to be any actual tobacco in the cigarette, though I have not yet been willing to dissect one in the name of science. I imagine if I were to do so, I would find a few dirty blonde strands of plant material blended in with pure nothingness. I do not recommend smoking these overpriced tubules of condensed oxygen. It is a waste of your volunteer stipend. Smoking a pack of Hongtashan Salaryman Editions is like not smoking anything at all. It's like breathing clean air, for chrissake, and who in their right mind wants to do that?
Name: Pride (a/k/a Panda) - Purple Panda
Origin: Unknown - somewhere with pandas, perhaps
Color: Purple, with some panda coloration
Price: 12 kuai ($2.00 US)
Degree of Awfulness: Not Too Awful ☠☠
Review: The Pride Cigarette Corporation, for reasons known only to Chinese cab drivers, has about ten different flavors of cigarette on the market. Or perhaps "flavors" isn't the right word. Let's say they have about ten different colors of cigarette on the market. There are yellow packs and blue packs, red ones and green ones, and most recently, purple ones. There is not much difference in awfulness between the many colors of the Panda rainbow, and to review them all would be pointless and exhausting work, so I will stick to the two least awful colors available: blue and purple. Pride Cigarettes are known to laowaidom as "Pandas," because of the cuddly little panda insignia on the front of the packs. Pandas are easily the cutest cigarettes in China. The Purple Panda logo is especially charming, because the little fellow looks like he's just spent two weeks on the high end of a bamboo bong. Panda rings aside, his eyes are unmistakeably bloodshot, his cheeks are flushed, and his lips are puckered, clearly showing signs of drymouth. I'm not sure if this partytime panda goes for tobacco, but I suspect he wouldn't be too disappointed with his namesake. As far as Chinese cigarettes go, I am willing to place Purple Pandas in the upper echelon of endurability. Slightly tangy, slightly bitter. Not too skunky. Pride Cigarettes, Ltd. have really come close to hitting the bullseye with this one; or have at least come close to hitting the target; or at the very least, they have come close to grazing the tree from which the target is hanging. In a vast sea of mass produced awfulness, by being Not Too Awful, the Purple Pandas have managed a feat unsurpassed by anyone except their less stoned brothers in arms: the Blue Pandas.
Middle Class Cigarettes
Name: Pride (a/k/a Panda) - Blue Panda
Origin: The Land of Milk and Honey and Tar, China
Color: Navy blue with trippy panda-related holograms
Price: 10 kuai ($1.50 US)
Degree of Awfulness: Merely Awful ☠
Review: It's all downhill from here. The high water mark for Chinese cigarettes is the Blue Panda. I can't say what makes me such a loyal customer. If I could, I probably wouldn't be a smoker. But that shimmering 3-D panda hologram draws me back time and time again. The problem is, Blue Pandas only seem to be available in Chengdu. Ah, yes. Chengdu. Therein, perhaps, lies the source of my attraction: Blue Pandas are the brand of choice in Chengdu, and that, after all, was the place of my Chinese rebirth, the city where I shed the shackles of my white man's name and was rechristened Pan Da. Pan Da smokes Pandas. Perhaps the name thing has something to do with it, too. Anyhow. I spent my first two months in Chengdu, and it is likely that my very first pack of Chinese cigarettes were Blue Pandas. I associate their inky deathsmoke with my first laowai friends, with the noobish novelty I found in Mother China, and with that first weekend debauch when, finally, everyone could let their guard down and stop acting s'damned serious all the time. Nostalgia aside, I mean it when I say that these cigarettes are Merely Awful, and not Rather Awful, or Pretty Damned Awful, or F-Bomb Awful. Sure, the filter is blue and plasticky, and all that painted plastic is probably wreaking unseen havoc on the poor little alveoli of my battered lungs. The smoke is by no means smooth, and tastes, in its way, like a condensed shot of Chengdu smog. But hey, nobody's perfect. Most things in life are mediocre. And in the realm of Chinese cigarettes, even mediocrity is unattainable. So it is with a deep sense of relativity that I award Blue Pandas the coveted Smoke Ring D'or. That said, I do not recommend them to anyone.
Name: Yunyan
Origin: Yunnan Province, China
Color: Crimson
Price: 10 kuai ($1.50 US)
Degree of Awfulness: Rather Awful ☠☠☠
Review: As enamored as I am of Yunnan Province, its mountains, its rivers, its eternal sunshine, its dwarf communes, its 300 foot tall Optimus Primes, its warmhearted people, its microbreweries, its matriarchal communes where the men drink wine and hibernate in hammocks all year long - as enamored as I am of the place, Yunnan's flagship cigarette company, Yunyan, is an extreme disappointment. It's not that Yunyans are all that awful. As you can see, I have rated them Rather Awful, as opposed to Pretty Damn Awful or F-Bomb Awful. But like the aforementioned Hongtashan Salaryman Editions, Yunyan cigarettes don't really do anything for me. They seem to consist of oxygen and dirt, with a dash of MSG and a sprinkling of horseradish. I don't know much about tobacco farming, but it puzzles me that Yunnan, a tropical fairyland that is unusually well suited for growing tobacco (among other things), should produce cigarettes that are anything less than Merely Awful. I don't have much to say about Yunyans, and have nothing to express but my disappointment. Yunyans are the Phil Collins of Chinese cigarettes. That, and the name is really hard to pronounce.
Name: Shuangxi - Classic Style
Origin: Shanghai, China
Color: Red China red
Price: 10 kuai ($1.50 US)
Degree of Awfulness: Not Too Awful ☠☠
Review: The coveted Silver Smoke Ring goes hands-down to Shuangxi Cigarettes, Ltd. The packaging makes them a bit hard to find - everything in China is red - but, while not quite rewarding, Shuangxis never prove lethal. At least not instantly so. The word "shuangxi" means "Double Happiness," which, I suppose, translates to "very, very happy." According to Wikipedia, "[t]he brand carries only a tiny health warning on the side of a 20-cigarette pack," and I can vouch for that. The tiny health warning goes something like this: SMOKING IS HARMFUL TO YOUR HEALTH; QUIT SMOKING EARLY IS GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH. I like that. It's much more pleasing to the smoker's ear than "SMOKING WAS A DUMBASS MOVE IN THE FIRST PLACE. DUMBASS." Because Blue Pandas are not readily available in Nanchong, and because Purple Pandas are too expensive, Shuangxis are generally my brand of choice. Their ten kuai price is convenient for breaking hundred-kuai bills. The cigarettes themselves are not really worth writing home about, but who the hell writes home about cigarettes anyway? The filters have a bad habit of dyeing my fingernails red, so I imagine my students suspect me of moonlighting as a stripper. As far as flavor goes, Shuangxis taste slightly minty. Or maybe that's just me. Otherwise, they are cigarettes - and Not Too Awful ones, at that.
Lower-Middle Class Cigarettes
Name: Hongtashan - Peasant Edition
Origin: Yuxi, China
Color: White, with red pagodas all over the fucking place
Price: 7.5 kuai ($1.10 US)
Degree of Awfulness: Not Too Awful ☠☠
Review: Ever the internet-savvy missionaries of death, in addition to a Twitter account, the Hongtashan Cigarette Company has a Wikipedia page. Let's peruse it, shall we? "The cigarettes are made with a flue-cured tobacco type and therefore sugar and nicotine levels are relatively high." I don't know what "flue-cured" means, and I'd prefer not to find out. Wait, there's sugar involved? Great, so my teeth will rot out along with everything else. I suppose it's probably best to just not read about cigarettes, ever. Least of all Chinese ones. Nevertheless, whatever I'm inhaling, it's not F-Bomb Awful. I will be charitable and give the Hongtashan Peasant Editions a mark of Not Too Awful, even though they are, at times, Rather Awful. Inconsistency is their achilles' heel. Overall, the Peasant Edition is pretty hit or miss. The packaging is seldom the same. Sometimes, they come in plastic bundles. Other times, in proper cardboard packs. Sometimes, they taste like rolled-up newspaper. Other times, like licorice. The only consistent thing about Hongtashans, so far as I can tell, is that they unravel like a motherfucker. For that reason, they are rather embarrassing to smoke in public. They disintegrate, fall to pieces. You're sitting there at the bar with ash all over the crotch of your jeans and meanwhile, a trail of flames is swallowing up your cigarette like a fuse. But if I can say anything complimentary about the Hongtashan Peasant Editions, it's this: they don't pussyfoot around. They bring it hard. The Hongtashan Peasant Edition cigarettes were clearly designed with lovable old Chinese men in mind, and for that I cannot fault them, even if they were the primary culprit in the Great Fire of Keith's Totally Bitchin' O'Leaver's Pub T-Shirt in the winter of twenty ought nine.
Lower Class Cigarettes
Name: Hongmei
Origin: Yuxi, China
Color: Day Glo yellow and other such retro hues
Price: 4 kuai (80 cents US)
Degree of Awfulness: Rather Awful ☠☠☠
Review: Hongmei is a brand that is nothing if not modest. It offers itself to you for four kuai. Its official website acknowledges, with charming honesty, that it is a "B grade cigarette." If hipsters existed in China, they would smoke Hongmeis. Because sometimes you want to listen to B sides. Sometimes you want to watch B movies. And sometimes you want to do B grade damage to your lungs. So if you're hard up for dough, Hongmei is your man. The name means "red plum," and according to Cigarettespedia (a website I just now discovered and subsequently bookmarked), the red plum is "a symbol of good character." And I suppose that is exactly what Hongmei, and most of its smokers, possess: good character. Hongmei is the poison of choice among China's elderly, both for its affordability and for its relatively low awfulness. My host dad was a Hongmei devotee. You pianyi, you hao, he would say to me as he handed me a Hongmei: if it's cheap, it's good. And although even then I had more refined tastes, I wasn't one to turn down a cigarette, and for the sake of host family harmony, I was briefly a Hongmei devotee myself. But then came my host teenager rebellious phase, and I began to host doubt my host dad's wisdom. Jeez, I would think to myself, these Hongmeis really taste like shit. Here, host dad. Smoke these. These are better. He would turn the Blue Panda over in his fingers like it was an artifact from the distant future. We would squint at each other. And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon, little boy blue and the man on the moon, and all the rest. So it goes. But I'm not being a cigarelitist (my coinage) when I say that Hongmeis are beneath me. Smoking them is simply a level of trauma I do not wish to subject myself to. Not yet, anyway. Not until I am 65 and Chinese. The only living Italian in Nanchong is a Hongmei fan as well. "The cheaper the better," he told me, and loaded me up with Hongmeis. They really aren't all that bad for four kuai. Eighty cents a pack. And Cigarettespedia tells me that Hongmei cigarettes won something called the "Excellent Prize at the Show of China's 10-Year Packing Achievement." Yeah, I've got your Packing Achievement right here, buddy. Anyway, I don't really have much to say about Hongmeis either way. They're cheap and awful. You get what you pay for and you pay for what you get. So, I suppose I'll let my old friend Cigarettespedia close this one out: "The filaments of the cigarette are golden and bright; the fragrance is sweet and pure; the taste is agreeable and comfortable; and the ashes are gray."
Name: Honghe
Origin: Yunnan, China
Color: Cornhusker crimson and Cornhusker creme
Price: 5 kuai (90 cents US)
Degree of Awfulness: F-Bomb Awful ☠☠☠☠☠
Review: And at long last, we have arrived at the worst of the worst. The coveted Loogey D'or goes to Honghe Tobacco Group Co., Ltd. I was surprised, upon glancing at one of the many cigarette packs that litter my living room floor, to learn that Honghe cigarettes are made in Yunnan Province. Another blow for that beloved southwestern Shangi-La of mine. What can I say about these death twigs? That they rank only slightly higher than paint thinner on my List of Things I Like to Inhale? That they are Colon Blow for the lungs? That the stench they give off is enough to kill every last locust within a ten mile radius? Yes, I suppose I can say all of these things. Nobody I know, not even my host dad, stoops so low as Honghe. I have smoked them on exactly three occasions, when my pockets were full of more lint than cash, and each time I spent the next week ruing my decision. I have considered filing suit against the Honghe Tobacco Group, but I don't know how to write "it was like scraping my lungs out with a periodontal probe" in Chinese. The name "Honghe" means "red lake," and after you've smoked one, it's easy to see why. As an anti-smoking campaign, I propose that every high school freshman in America be forced to smoke exactly one Honghe cigarette. Although the cumulative lung damage from a single Honghe is probably equal to smoking two packs of Marlboro Reds every day for the better part of a century, the experience would strongly deter America's children from actually smoking two packs of Marlboro Reds every day for the better part of a century. The experience would, in the blink of an eye, in the coughing up of a lung, instantly counteract all the coolness that Misters B. Dylan and T. Waits have lent to the profession of chainsmoking. God damn them both, and God bless America.
As an incidental footnote to all this, I would like to include the following cigarette-inspired anecdote: while writing, I inevitably had to take a break so I could scurry out and purchase a ten kuai pack of Shuangxi Classic Style cigarettes. (See above.) In the stairwell, I ran into the old man who is currently shacked up with my neighbors. Like most old Chinese men, I am able to communicate with him freely and fluently in a way that I am not able to with anyone under the age of 35. And like most old Chinese men, he chain smokes. He handed me a cigarette and lit it for me.
"What are we smoking?" I asked.
"Hongmei," he said. (See above.)
"Hongmei hao bu hao chou?" I asked. Are Hongmeis good to smoke?
"Bu hao chou. Bu hao chou," he said, shaking his head. Not good to smoke.
"But they're cheap."
"They are that," he said, and coughed.
We looked out over the balcony. It was dark outside. A handful of stars were dimly visible. The apartments across the way were all lit up, and we could see a shirtless man with D-cup bitchtits sitting on his couch, locked in heated conversation with the television.
"What have you been up to these days?" I asked.
"Well," said the old man, "tomorrow I'm going back to Guiyang."
My face dropped.
"Oh. That's too bad."
"Not really," he said. "Guiyang's nice. It's cooler there. The people are friendlier. You'd like it. There are lots of foreigners in Guiyang. Laowais like y'rself. Koreans. Japs. You name it."
The old man was nearing the end of his Hongmei, and used it to light another. He handed me a second cigarette and gestured for me to do the same.
"I don't usually do this," I said, laughing a bit, "but I like talking to you, so I suppose ... "
I snubbed out the first and lit the second.
"What will you do in Guiyang? Work?"
"Me? No. Too old for work. My working days are over," he said. "Just going there to relax."
"That's good. Is Guiyang your hometown?"
"Yes, it's my hometown. Nobody left, though. Everyone I know lives in there," he said, nodding towards the apartment next to mine.
"What kind of work did you do before you retired?"
"I was a farmer."
"It must have been a very hard life," I said.
"Yes. A very hard life."
"But life in China has improved very quickly."
"In some ways," he said. "In some ways. Right now you can see stars in Nanchong, but not for long. So many cars these days. Every year, more and more cars. In Chongqing, you can't see stars. In Chengdu, you can't see stars. When I was young in Guiyang, when I worked out in the fields, you could see stars. But not anymore. So many cars."
He snubbed out his cigarette in a nearby potted plant.
"So many cars," he said.
I took a drag. I exhaled. The smoke drifted from my lips, leaving a string of illegible handwriting hanging in midair with a question mark at the end.
"Well, goodnight," he said.
I shook his hand, though he was unfamiliar with the gesture.
"Safe travels to Guiyang."
"Thank you. Goodnight."
He hobbled up the stairs, unlocked the door and shut it behind him. I snubbed my cigarette on the window ledge. What a stupid habit. But would I trade it for all the conversations I've had with old Chinese men? Well, I don't know if I'd trade those for anything.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Attention Surplus Disorder
If I walk briskly, it takes me about half an hour to get from my apartment to the park downtown. This afternoon, I decided to conduct an experiment. For curiosity's sake, I decided to walk to the park and count my hecklers along the way. I made a point of not counting gawks, stares or leers; nor did I count bursts of laughter, or points, or people following me in the streets. I only counted HAH-LOOs and variations on the word "foreigner" - laowai, waiguoren, and the dreaded yang guizi: foreign devil.
During my half-hour walk to the park, I was heckled 33 times - a little over once a minute. When I'm out and about in Nanchong, I tend to take side streets to avoid being heckled, so for the most part, I wasn't walking on the overcrowded thoroughfares where heckling is the worst. China is a noisy place, so between the traffic and the earthmovers and the jackhammers, I couldn't even hear most of what was being shouted at me. Nevertheless, I counted 33 different hecklers in about 30 minutes of walking. This afternoon was not an anomaly. It wasn't even a particularly unpleasant walk. I've enjoyed much worse. I imagine, if someone were to average my daily heckler ratio, it would come out to something like one heckler per minute. That seems about right.
My hecklers don't know me. They aren't friends, or students, or anyone I have ever met. They are complete strangers. They are not children, as you might expect, or the elderly, who should be the most startled by my presence. My hecklers are college kids, well-off twentysomethings, and middle-aged salarymen - in short, full-grown adults who should know enough about the world to know better than to heckle another human being. The heckling is not friendly. A HAH-LOO is not a hello. Here, it is almost always a taunt. The word laowai, in my town, is not gasped with astonishment as it is in the countryside. There are enough foreigners in Nanchong that our presence is no longer altogether surprising. Rather, the word is uttered with a kind of disdain. Foreigner. Outsider. Laowai. I cannot think of a more unpleasant word in the Chinese language. A slow, rising tone followed by a fast, striking tone. Lao-WAI.
I already had some experience in the field of being a laowai before coming to China, so I wasn't entirely unprepared. I lived for a year in the suburbs of Daegu, South Korea. The people of Daegu were fairly familiar with foreigners, and had only just started to begin viewing them as more threat than novelty. I was heckled in Daegu fairly consistently, but not as often as I am here. My hecklers were generally elementary school kids, whose taunts were more cute than infuriating. Living a normal life in Daegu was something of a challenge, but nothing I couldn't get around by shaving regularly, dying my hair black, and sunbathing on the roof of my apartment.
My friend Jared lived in a somewhat rural Chinese town named Xiaoshan, just outside of Hangzhou. When I visited him several years ago, my presence was just as astonishing to the locals as it must be to the people of Nanchong, but I never felt as though I was being harassed. I stayed there a month and was never bothered unduly. Everywhere I went, I was greeted with smiles and hellos, but they weren't smirks or HAH-LOOs, if that makes any sense. The number of foreigners per capita wasn't any greater in Xiaoshan than it is here, but the people, for whatever reason, seemed more open and less threatened by us.
Just last week, I paid a visit to my friends in Chengdu - a big city but not a terrifically diverse one, some two hours away from Nanchong. Over the course of three days that I mostly spent outside, I was heckled exactly once, by a drunk motorcycle driver whose friends promptly told him to shut up. Otherwise, the fact that I was a foreigner was not commented on by anyone I met. I was at first startled by my anonymity, then relieved. I was ecstatically happy during my weekend in Chengdu. I could live there. But the moment I stepped off the bus in Nanchong, I was heckled all the way down the street until I was finally able to throw myself into the back of a cab, and when the cabby dropped me off at the campus gate, college students heckled me all the way home.
I don't mention all this as a point of criticism. Xenophobia is a bald fact of my existence, and I understand to some extent why it exists. But it is a fact that I struggle with. How am I to interpret it? How can I ignore it? How can I use it to my advantage? I am heckled wherever I go. The more language I learn, the more dismayed I am. I have, on a number of occasions, been called a monkey. The last time I took a shared taxi, the passenger in front protested because the driver was dropping off the foreigner before the other Chinese passengers. I am no longer fazed by these experiences, just startled by the frequency with which they occur, and the fact that they still happen. I am aware that other volunteers elsewhere in the world have it considerably worse, living in places where the color of their skin incites violence. But foreigners are not quite welcome in Nanchong City, Sichuan Province, and the negative attention is not trivial by any means. It is like an electric shock. The experience itself is not traumatic, but it is extremely unpleasant, unpleasant enough to distract me from the things I would like to be doing to help my community. And it does not fade with time. If anything, I have come to anticipate the shock, which makes the shock even worse when it comes. One of my fellow laowais lived in Chengdu for seven years and only recently came to Nanchong to be with his wife and child. He struggles with life here. He loved it in Chengdu, but is visibly wearing at the seams in Nanchong. Once the kid's grown up enough, he told me, we're out of here.
By now, I have traveled to many parts of China, and each trip has been a welcome respite from my daily life in Nanchong. I have visited some of the world's largest metropolises and some of China's most rural backwaters, and nowhere has the harassment been so intense as it is in the city in which I live. I won't speculate as to the reasons why, because I realize now that I can never hope to understand them. But of course, I signed up for all this. I joined such-and-such volunteer organization because I knew it would be difficult, and it has proven to be difficult. I wouldn't have it any other way. And in writing all this, I am not angry, or depressed, or pessimistic. I am as hopeful and cross-eyed idealistic as I have ever been. I want China to open its eyes to the rest of the world, rather than curling up into the fetal position of itself. This, really, is the reason why I came here. China must not remain a rock or an island. To my mind, there is almost nothing more vital to the future of humanity than making sure China becomes a part of the world. And it starts here in the hintergrund. In a sense, it starts in Nanchong.
My parents can vouch for this: as a young child, when I was feeling sulky, I used to bang my head against the bedroom wall until someone came in to stop me. Now, at 27, I am banging my head against the Great Wall. This is Einstein's definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. But I can do nothing else at this point. I have a full year left to go. So I will go outside with my idiotic smile and I will buy toilet paper. A six-ton jumbo economy pack of toilet paper. And people will point and laugh and shout nasty things as I pass. Let them. But it is my hope that one day, after I've walked by enough, after they've run out of things to shout at me, these people will arrive at the realization that this laowai is a human being who shits, who eats and shits just like us, who has emotions just like us, who doesn't like being shouted at when he's walking home with a six-ton jumbo economy pack of toilet paper. And then the snowball of logic will roll. Freedom is the freedom to say that 2 + 2 = 4. All else shall follow.
During my half-hour walk to the park, I was heckled 33 times - a little over once a minute. When I'm out and about in Nanchong, I tend to take side streets to avoid being heckled, so for the most part, I wasn't walking on the overcrowded thoroughfares where heckling is the worst. China is a noisy place, so between the traffic and the earthmovers and the jackhammers, I couldn't even hear most of what was being shouted at me. Nevertheless, I counted 33 different hecklers in about 30 minutes of walking. This afternoon was not an anomaly. It wasn't even a particularly unpleasant walk. I've enjoyed much worse. I imagine, if someone were to average my daily heckler ratio, it would come out to something like one heckler per minute. That seems about right.
My hecklers don't know me. They aren't friends, or students, or anyone I have ever met. They are complete strangers. They are not children, as you might expect, or the elderly, who should be the most startled by my presence. My hecklers are college kids, well-off twentysomethings, and middle-aged salarymen - in short, full-grown adults who should know enough about the world to know better than to heckle another human being. The heckling is not friendly. A HAH-LOO is not a hello. Here, it is almost always a taunt. The word laowai, in my town, is not gasped with astonishment as it is in the countryside. There are enough foreigners in Nanchong that our presence is no longer altogether surprising. Rather, the word is uttered with a kind of disdain. Foreigner. Outsider. Laowai. I cannot think of a more unpleasant word in the Chinese language. A slow, rising tone followed by a fast, striking tone. Lao-WAI.
I already had some experience in the field of being a laowai before coming to China, so I wasn't entirely unprepared. I lived for a year in the suburbs of Daegu, South Korea. The people of Daegu were fairly familiar with foreigners, and had only just started to begin viewing them as more threat than novelty. I was heckled in Daegu fairly consistently, but not as often as I am here. My hecklers were generally elementary school kids, whose taunts were more cute than infuriating. Living a normal life in Daegu was something of a challenge, but nothing I couldn't get around by shaving regularly, dying my hair black, and sunbathing on the roof of my apartment.
My friend Jared lived in a somewhat rural Chinese town named Xiaoshan, just outside of Hangzhou. When I visited him several years ago, my presence was just as astonishing to the locals as it must be to the people of Nanchong, but I never felt as though I was being harassed. I stayed there a month and was never bothered unduly. Everywhere I went, I was greeted with smiles and hellos, but they weren't smirks or HAH-LOOs, if that makes any sense. The number of foreigners per capita wasn't any greater in Xiaoshan than it is here, but the people, for whatever reason, seemed more open and less threatened by us.
Just last week, I paid a visit to my friends in Chengdu - a big city but not a terrifically diverse one, some two hours away from Nanchong. Over the course of three days that I mostly spent outside, I was heckled exactly once, by a drunk motorcycle driver whose friends promptly told him to shut up. Otherwise, the fact that I was a foreigner was not commented on by anyone I met. I was at first startled by my anonymity, then relieved. I was ecstatically happy during my weekend in Chengdu. I could live there. But the moment I stepped off the bus in Nanchong, I was heckled all the way down the street until I was finally able to throw myself into the back of a cab, and when the cabby dropped me off at the campus gate, college students heckled me all the way home.
I don't mention all this as a point of criticism. Xenophobia is a bald fact of my existence, and I understand to some extent why it exists. But it is a fact that I struggle with. How am I to interpret it? How can I ignore it? How can I use it to my advantage? I am heckled wherever I go. The more language I learn, the more dismayed I am. I have, on a number of occasions, been called a monkey. The last time I took a shared taxi, the passenger in front protested because the driver was dropping off the foreigner before the other Chinese passengers. I am no longer fazed by these experiences, just startled by the frequency with which they occur, and the fact that they still happen. I am aware that other volunteers elsewhere in the world have it considerably worse, living in places where the color of their skin incites violence. But foreigners are not quite welcome in Nanchong City, Sichuan Province, and the negative attention is not trivial by any means. It is like an electric shock. The experience itself is not traumatic, but it is extremely unpleasant, unpleasant enough to distract me from the things I would like to be doing to help my community. And it does not fade with time. If anything, I have come to anticipate the shock, which makes the shock even worse when it comes. One of my fellow laowais lived in Chengdu for seven years and only recently came to Nanchong to be with his wife and child. He struggles with life here. He loved it in Chengdu, but is visibly wearing at the seams in Nanchong. Once the kid's grown up enough, he told me, we're out of here.
By now, I have traveled to many parts of China, and each trip has been a welcome respite from my daily life in Nanchong. I have visited some of the world's largest metropolises and some of China's most rural backwaters, and nowhere has the harassment been so intense as it is in the city in which I live. I won't speculate as to the reasons why, because I realize now that I can never hope to understand them. But of course, I signed up for all this. I joined such-and-such volunteer organization because I knew it would be difficult, and it has proven to be difficult. I wouldn't have it any other way. And in writing all this, I am not angry, or depressed, or pessimistic. I am as hopeful and cross-eyed idealistic as I have ever been. I want China to open its eyes to the rest of the world, rather than curling up into the fetal position of itself. This, really, is the reason why I came here. China must not remain a rock or an island. To my mind, there is almost nothing more vital to the future of humanity than making sure China becomes a part of the world. And it starts here in the hintergrund. In a sense, it starts in Nanchong.
My parents can vouch for this: as a young child, when I was feeling sulky, I used to bang my head against the bedroom wall until someone came in to stop me. Now, at 27, I am banging my head against the Great Wall. This is Einstein's definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. But I can do nothing else at this point. I have a full year left to go. So I will go outside with my idiotic smile and I will buy toilet paper. A six-ton jumbo economy pack of toilet paper. And people will point and laugh and shout nasty things as I pass. Let them. But it is my hope that one day, after I've walked by enough, after they've run out of things to shout at me, these people will arrive at the realization that this laowai is a human being who shits, who eats and shits just like us, who has emotions just like us, who doesn't like being shouted at when he's walking home with a six-ton jumbo economy pack of toilet paper. And then the snowball of logic will roll. Freedom is the freedom to say that 2 + 2 = 4. All else shall follow.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Three Shops/Twin Peaks
Every now and again, god or Yahweh or whoever decides to give up the reigns, and invites David Lynch to guest direct a scene or two of my life.
There are three shops in my neighborhood, all on the same street. The street is lined with garages on both sides, and the garages that aren't already occupied by Volkswagen Santanas have been rented out to shopkeepers. There are three shops. They sell the exact same stuff - smokes and booze, Sprite and Coca-Cola, yogurt and ramen noodles - and they sell that stuff for the exact same government-mandated prices. One bottle of Yanjing: three kuai. One tube of yogurt: two kuai, five mao. One pack of Hongtashans: seven kuai, five mao. These prices are Chinese universals. I know them by heart. The prices don't change from place to place, do not rise or fall with plenitude or scarcity. A bottle of Yanjing is three kuai, is three kuai, is three kuai. Here, everyone knows the going rate for everything. In China, it is not prices, but guanxi that matters. If you have guanxi, the prices drop. If you don't, they don't. As a foreigner, the guanxi system doesn't really apply to me, which suits me just fine, as I enjoy my three shops, and their shopkeepers, equally.
The First Shop is owned by a young couple. The wife is a beautiful and astonishingly curvy woman with wide brown eyes that must be the envy of Nanchong. Her daughter is the single cutest child in all of China - and Chinese children are, well, cute. Every so often, one of the owner's cousins drops in to run the shop. She, too, is astonishingly curvy, with wide brown eyes. "Good genes" are the words that come to mind when I swing by the First Shop to purchase my nightly bottle of yogurt. The husband doesn't seem to like me none too much, but whenever I buy three bottles of Yanjing on a Saturday night, he launches into a seemingly improvised tune that goes San piiing/Yanjiiing.
The Third Shop is owned by another young couple. The wife is cute, but a bit rough around the edges. Tough. No-nonsense. "Sturdy" is the word that comes to mind when I swing by for my morning pack of Shuangxis. She keeps the money in a black fanny pack strapped to her left hip. Her husband likes me quite a bit. Once, he let me use his phone to track down a lost care package. So I owe him some guanxi and try to patronize the Third Shop whenever I can. But the First Shop, with its wide-eyed females, beckons.
The Second Shop is owned by an impossibly old man and his impossibly old wife. The man owns an impossibly old bicycle with an impossibly old trailer hitched to the back. On the rare occasion that I wake up before noon, I often run into the old man pedaling his bike uphill with a trailer full of recyclables. I smile and wave. He smiles and waves. I tingle all over. Sometimes, I find him rummaging through the garbage for spare bottles and cans. He smiles and waves. I smile and wave. And I tingle all over. These kinds of interactions, free of nuance, free of judgment, are hard to come by in Nanchong, and I am eternally grateful for them. So I try to patronize the Second Shop whenever I can. But I owe the Third Shop a couple of favors, and the First Shop, with its wide-eyed females, beckons. In the end, the three shops wind up getting an even 33.3 percent cut of my Peace Corps stipend.
Tonight I walked past the First Shop because the owners were hosting some sort of family reunion, and I was intimidated by all the buxom, wide-eyed females in attendance. I had already bought several bottles of faux-Gatorade from the Third Shop after my morning run, so I decided to stop by the Second Shop. The impossibly old man was waiting for me there, shirtless, smoking, and loading recyclables into his impossibly old trailer.
"Do you have Shancheng?" I asked.
"Yes," he said.
"Three bottles, please."
"Yes," he said.
While he fetched the beers from the meat freezer, I looked around the shop. Cardboard boxes piled high with stunted potatoes. Stacks of yellowed newspaper. Garbage bags full of plastic bottles. And there on the counter, a copy of Great Expectations, in English, splayed open to page 468.
"Is this yours?" I asked in Chinese.
"Yes," he said.
"Are you reading it?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Do you speak English?"
"Yes."
"Can you understand the book?"
"Yes."
I blinked furiously and scratched my head.
"This is one of my favorite books," I said. "Most of my English students couldn't even read it."
"Yes," said the impossibly old man.
"I didn't know you could speak English."
"Yes," he said.
"Can you speak English?"
"Yes."
The impossibly old man loaded the beers into my backpack. I stood there watching him. Could this impossibly old man really be reading Charles Dickens in the original English, or was he just saying yes to everything for the sake of getting me out of his garage as soon as possible? I began to suspect, and not for the first time, that David Lynch was pulling the strings. And that was when I came across the cigarettes on the counter: a pack of Newport Menthol 100s.
"My God," I said, "these are American cigarettes!"
"Yes," he said.
"You can't get these in China," I said. "American pimps smoke these. Where did you buy them?"
He said nothing, but gave me one.
"Thanks," I said, "but where did you get the Newports?"
He laughed and lit one for himself. Then he shut the garage door, hopped on his bike, and with a wave, pedaled off into the night.
I walked home. The setting sun spewed a radioactive smear across the horizon. I lit my Newport and, for the first time in over a year, achieved a legitimate nicotine buzz. I had been planning on writing about something else tonight - hence the beers - but I have long since come to accept the fact that I am not the author of this story.
There are three shops in my neighborhood, all on the same street. The street is lined with garages on both sides, and the garages that aren't already occupied by Volkswagen Santanas have been rented out to shopkeepers. There are three shops. They sell the exact same stuff - smokes and booze, Sprite and Coca-Cola, yogurt and ramen noodles - and they sell that stuff for the exact same government-mandated prices. One bottle of Yanjing: three kuai. One tube of yogurt: two kuai, five mao. One pack of Hongtashans: seven kuai, five mao. These prices are Chinese universals. I know them by heart. The prices don't change from place to place, do not rise or fall with plenitude or scarcity. A bottle of Yanjing is three kuai, is three kuai, is three kuai. Here, everyone knows the going rate for everything. In China, it is not prices, but guanxi that matters. If you have guanxi, the prices drop. If you don't, they don't. As a foreigner, the guanxi system doesn't really apply to me, which suits me just fine, as I enjoy my three shops, and their shopkeepers, equally.
The First Shop is owned by a young couple. The wife is a beautiful and astonishingly curvy woman with wide brown eyes that must be the envy of Nanchong. Her daughter is the single cutest child in all of China - and Chinese children are, well, cute. Every so often, one of the owner's cousins drops in to run the shop. She, too, is astonishingly curvy, with wide brown eyes. "Good genes" are the words that come to mind when I swing by the First Shop to purchase my nightly bottle of yogurt. The husband doesn't seem to like me none too much, but whenever I buy three bottles of Yanjing on a Saturday night, he launches into a seemingly improvised tune that goes San piiing/Yanjiiing.
The Third Shop is owned by another young couple. The wife is cute, but a bit rough around the edges. Tough. No-nonsense. "Sturdy" is the word that comes to mind when I swing by for my morning pack of Shuangxis. She keeps the money in a black fanny pack strapped to her left hip. Her husband likes me quite a bit. Once, he let me use his phone to track down a lost care package. So I owe him some guanxi and try to patronize the Third Shop whenever I can. But the First Shop, with its wide-eyed females, beckons.
The Second Shop is owned by an impossibly old man and his impossibly old wife. The man owns an impossibly old bicycle with an impossibly old trailer hitched to the back. On the rare occasion that I wake up before noon, I often run into the old man pedaling his bike uphill with a trailer full of recyclables. I smile and wave. He smiles and waves. I tingle all over. Sometimes, I find him rummaging through the garbage for spare bottles and cans. He smiles and waves. I smile and wave. And I tingle all over. These kinds of interactions, free of nuance, free of judgment, are hard to come by in Nanchong, and I am eternally grateful for them. So I try to patronize the Second Shop whenever I can. But I owe the Third Shop a couple of favors, and the First Shop, with its wide-eyed females, beckons. In the end, the three shops wind up getting an even 33.3 percent cut of my Peace Corps stipend.
Tonight I walked past the First Shop because the owners were hosting some sort of family reunion, and I was intimidated by all the buxom, wide-eyed females in attendance. I had already bought several bottles of faux-Gatorade from the Third Shop after my morning run, so I decided to stop by the Second Shop. The impossibly old man was waiting for me there, shirtless, smoking, and loading recyclables into his impossibly old trailer.
"Do you have Shancheng?" I asked.
"Yes," he said.
"Three bottles, please."
"Yes," he said.
While he fetched the beers from the meat freezer, I looked around the shop. Cardboard boxes piled high with stunted potatoes. Stacks of yellowed newspaper. Garbage bags full of plastic bottles. And there on the counter, a copy of Great Expectations, in English, splayed open to page 468.
"Is this yours?" I asked in Chinese.
"Yes," he said.
"Are you reading it?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Do you speak English?"
"Yes."
"Can you understand the book?"
"Yes."
I blinked furiously and scratched my head.
"This is one of my favorite books," I said. "Most of my English students couldn't even read it."
"Yes," said the impossibly old man.
"I didn't know you could speak English."
"Yes," he said.
"Can you speak English?"
"Yes."
The impossibly old man loaded the beers into my backpack. I stood there watching him. Could this impossibly old man really be reading Charles Dickens in the original English, or was he just saying yes to everything for the sake of getting me out of his garage as soon as possible? I began to suspect, and not for the first time, that David Lynch was pulling the strings. And that was when I came across the cigarettes on the counter: a pack of Newport Menthol 100s.
"My God," I said, "these are American cigarettes!"
"Yes," he said.
"You can't get these in China," I said. "American pimps smoke these. Where did you buy them?"
He said nothing, but gave me one.
"Thanks," I said, "but where did you get the Newports?"
He laughed and lit one for himself. Then he shut the garage door, hopped on his bike, and with a wave, pedaled off into the night.
I walked home. The setting sun spewed a radioactive smear across the horizon. I lit my Newport and, for the first time in over a year, achieved a legitimate nicotine buzz. I had been planning on writing about something else tonight - hence the beers - but I have long since come to accept the fact that I am not the author of this story.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Moth Logistics
The mosquitoes have returned to Nanchong, back from their timeshare vacation in Thailand. I didn't notice them at first. I figured the constant buzzing in my ears was the televised vuvuzelan ambiance of the Uruguay-Ghana game. I assumed the stinging sensation in my right lovehandle was merely the onset of my usual late night Nescafe DTs. I sat there writing. Twitching and writing. Itching. And writing. Backspacing. Rewriting. Twitching. Itching some more. Then I whirled around to see that a twelve-legged helicopter with a stabber the size of a Capri-Sun straw was sucking my blood through my shirt.
I swatted the beast and tried several times to finish him on the rebound, to no avail. So I went nuclear. I picked up a nearby canister of Chinese Raid. Psssssssshhhhhhhh! Not quite a direct hit, but the ominous gray mist spread across the room and, upon contact, the mosquito buzzed a frantic mayday to his comrades, went into a tailspin, and crashed audibly to the floor. I turned the canister over and squinted at the ingredients. The Chinese symbol for death. Whatever is in this stuff, I thought, it can't be good for anyone.
Living abroad, you will find existential questions waiting for you in your morning bowl of imported Fun Pak Alpha-Bits. "ARE YOU HAPPY?" the Alpha-Bits will ask. Yes, you tell them, I suppose I am happy. "ARE YOU BECOMING A BETTER PERSON?" I dunno, you grumble, probably. "DO YOU FEEL THAT YOU ARE MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN YOUR COMMUNITY?" By then, you're just trying to finish your cereal before it finishes you. It's hard to tell, you gurgle as you're slurping up the sickly sweet dregs, but I believe that I am. And then the Alpha-Bits have nothing left to say because you've eaten them all and moved onto Raisin Bran, who isn't much for conversation.
Existential questions may nag from time to time, but they are easy to answer because you realize by now that they are unanswerable. Far more distressing to the incompetent bachelor are more practical questions, questions of survival, questions like: Why are there so many bugs in my apartment? and, Why are bugs drawn to my apartment? and, How should I go about killing all these many bugs in my apartment without killing myself in the process?
My host family, in my deafmute days of grunting and gesturing, once gave me an electronic device that, through much grunting and gesturing, I learned was supposed to be plugged into the wall. Then, every couple days, my host family would supply me with a small teal-green tablet that bore the Chinese symbol for "bugs." After more grunting and gesturing and several rudimentary diagrams, I learned that I was supposed to slip the teal-green tablet into the machine, and that the machine, via a small heat plate, would disperse fumes that would kill on contact any and all mosquitoes, ants, cockroaches, chiggers, no-see-ems, rats, and burglars.
The heat plate machine seemed to work. But here in Nanchong, I cannot find it and wouldn't know how to ask for it. So instead, I use these DDT-frosted cinnamon roll incense sticks that take a solid ten minutes to light, and once lit, fill the apartment with a foreboding stench of indiscriminate death. The DDT cinnamon rolls get the job done, but at what cost? Minute by minute, I watch insect after insect drop to the floor like Spanish futbolistas and wriggle their legs until death sets in, and I begin to wonder whether I am biologically above all that. In the afternoons, I watch - somewhat amused, extremely disgusted - as an insectoid World War II rages in my living room. The mosquitoes come in droves, gather and mount kamikaze offensives that are suddenly and abruptly quashed by my mustard gas cocktail of DDT and cigarette smoke.
But even with the aid of chemical weapons, I am at an extreme disadvantage. I am but one man. The insects are infinite. I will reproduce when I am 35, if ever. They reproduce every two seconds, put Catholics to shame. The bugs have strength in numbers. All the DDT in China could not stop them. So, although I fear insects more than anything in the known universe - it is not rats, but cockroaches that await me in my Room 101 - I have learned to live with them. I regard them almost as pets. If you can't beat them, sublet your apartment to them. Naturally, when my six-legged roommates aren't around, questions of entomology occur to me.
Why are flies so attracted to humans? I wondered. I asked Jeeves.
"Well, old chap," he said, lighting up a Winchester, "flies are attracted to humans because humans often possess food. We are an upper class species with upper class sensibilities. Flies, as scavengers, are always on the dole. So they mooch off of us. Our pheromones attract them in droves, and once they have found us, they refuse to leave us alone."
I was eating fourthmeal at the time, so I told Jeeves to shut up. His answer was more disgusting than anything I was prepared for, and I preferred not to think about the matter any further.
Late one evening, I heard a sudden chorus of vuvuzelas overhead and glanced up at the ceiling. I was appalled to find a biker gang of black-winged insects clinging to the light bulb. I had never noticed them before. During the days, they ran rampant, but at night, I had no clue as to where they went, what they did during their afterhours. I figured they migrated down to the Jack Bar. But no, my living room ceiling was their headquarters. Their Central Perk. The Point. The light bulb was where they mated, swapped business cards, held clandestine Socialist caucuses ...
Curiosity got the better of me, so I asked Jeeves again. Say, Jeeves, why are bugs attracted to light?
"Well, old chap," he said, "nobody's quite sure about that, but I reckon ol' Jeevesy has a jolly good hunch."
He turned 'round to the blackboard.
"Nocturnal insects," he said, "use the moon as their compass star when migrating long distances. With the advent of the electric light bulb, the insect community has found itself in a sticky wicket - they think light bulbs are the bloody moon! And that's not the half of it! When they ... why, hullo ... well, what's this, then?"
A white van screeched up to the curb. The doors flew open. Jeeves's Winchester fell to the floor. One man threw a bag over Jeeves's head while the others worked on him with billy clubs. "Oh, dear me," Jeeves said, fainting as the men carried him away and dumped him in the trunk. The doors clapped shut and the van screeched off into the distance. My screen went blank. "The connection to askjeeves.com has been interrupted," it read. Weird, I said.
Though it was nearly midnight, I decided to get out of the house, away from the bugs. Outside, I ran into my neighbors and their four year-old son. This is not unusual. There is no curfew in China for children under the age of five. Parents here never miss an opportunity to show off the solitary fruit of their loins. My neighbors, a professor of basketball and his wife, a yoga instructor, were out in the courtyard, running a high-speed passing drill with their giggling son while several elderly admirers looked on.
"Hah-loo, Uncle!" whispered the father as I passed.
"Hah-loo, Uncle!" whispered the mother.
The child said nothing. He was busy eating his own hand.
"The Germans lost yesterday," I said.
"Ai-ya! I know. I wanted them to win."
My neighbors, for whatever reason, are the only people I know who are rooting for the imperialist powers in this year's World Cup. The rest of China is - or was - pulling for Brazil, Argentina, and North Korea, in that order. After North Korea lost seven-nil to Portugal, I risked a chuckle in front of my students.
"But teacher," said one student, "they tried their best."
"Yes," said another, "they tried their best."
"But seven to nothing!" I cackled. "Hilarious!"
"Very sad," said a third. "They tried their best."
A few days later, when, glowing and somewhat red in the cheeks, I told the basketball professor that the United States had defeated Algeria at the last possible second, his wife jumped up and down and clapped her hands. This is all fairly unusual, of course, but has nothing to do with anything.
"What a pity the Germans are lose," said the basketball professor, in English, and was about to continue when his son interrupted him.
"Daddy?" the boy said in Chinese, pointing at a nearby streetlamp. "Why do moths always fly towards the light?"
"Well, son," said the basketball coach. "I'm not really sure. I think they like the heat."
Instinctively, my hand shot up in the air. I knew this one. And I was stoked, stoked to have understood the exchange, and stoked to be privy to such a formative moment in the life of a Chinese youth.
"Actually, I just asked my friend the same question," I said, thinking of poor Jeeves. "He is a bug expert."
The basketball professor nodded dubiously.
"It turns out - well. You see," I said, fumbling for my vocabulary, "moths like to travel. They travel to very far away places, very late at night. The moon helps them find where they are going. They are not used to electric light. It is a new invention. The moths think light bulbs are the moon. So they fly to the moon, so to speak."
It took my neighbor a moment to sort out my clunky syntax, but when he did, he nudged his son and said, "You hear that? Moths think light bulbs are the moon!"
His son laughed, amused.
"Well, good night, Uncle," said the basketball professor.
"Good night. Uncle," said the kid.
And in the moment, I did feel like an uncle. Just wait 'til they get a load of the pull-my-finger gag. I bid the neighbors goodnight and, gazing up at the half-eaten moon, fluttered off to a neon light on the dark side of town.
I swatted the beast and tried several times to finish him on the rebound, to no avail. So I went nuclear. I picked up a nearby canister of Chinese Raid. Psssssssshhhhhhhh! Not quite a direct hit, but the ominous gray mist spread across the room and, upon contact, the mosquito buzzed a frantic mayday to his comrades, went into a tailspin, and crashed audibly to the floor. I turned the canister over and squinted at the ingredients. The Chinese symbol for death. Whatever is in this stuff, I thought, it can't be good for anyone.
Living abroad, you will find existential questions waiting for you in your morning bowl of imported Fun Pak Alpha-Bits. "ARE YOU HAPPY?" the Alpha-Bits will ask. Yes, you tell them, I suppose I am happy. "ARE YOU BECOMING A BETTER PERSON?" I dunno, you grumble, probably. "DO YOU FEEL THAT YOU ARE MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN YOUR COMMUNITY?" By then, you're just trying to finish your cereal before it finishes you. It's hard to tell, you gurgle as you're slurping up the sickly sweet dregs, but I believe that I am. And then the Alpha-Bits have nothing left to say because you've eaten them all and moved onto Raisin Bran, who isn't much for conversation.
Existential questions may nag from time to time, but they are easy to answer because you realize by now that they are unanswerable. Far more distressing to the incompetent bachelor are more practical questions, questions of survival, questions like: Why are there so many bugs in my apartment? and, Why are bugs drawn to my apartment? and, How should I go about killing all these many bugs in my apartment without killing myself in the process?
My host family, in my deafmute days of grunting and gesturing, once gave me an electronic device that, through much grunting and gesturing, I learned was supposed to be plugged into the wall. Then, every couple days, my host family would supply me with a small teal-green tablet that bore the Chinese symbol for "bugs." After more grunting and gesturing and several rudimentary diagrams, I learned that I was supposed to slip the teal-green tablet into the machine, and that the machine, via a small heat plate, would disperse fumes that would kill on contact any and all mosquitoes, ants, cockroaches, chiggers, no-see-ems, rats, and burglars.
The heat plate machine seemed to work. But here in Nanchong, I cannot find it and wouldn't know how to ask for it. So instead, I use these DDT-frosted cinnamon roll incense sticks that take a solid ten minutes to light, and once lit, fill the apartment with a foreboding stench of indiscriminate death. The DDT cinnamon rolls get the job done, but at what cost? Minute by minute, I watch insect after insect drop to the floor like Spanish futbolistas and wriggle their legs until death sets in, and I begin to wonder whether I am biologically above all that. In the afternoons, I watch - somewhat amused, extremely disgusted - as an insectoid World War II rages in my living room. The mosquitoes come in droves, gather and mount kamikaze offensives that are suddenly and abruptly quashed by my mustard gas cocktail of DDT and cigarette smoke.
But even with the aid of chemical weapons, I am at an extreme disadvantage. I am but one man. The insects are infinite. I will reproduce when I am 35, if ever. They reproduce every two seconds, put Catholics to shame. The bugs have strength in numbers. All the DDT in China could not stop them. So, although I fear insects more than anything in the known universe - it is not rats, but cockroaches that await me in my Room 101 - I have learned to live with them. I regard them almost as pets. If you can't beat them, sublet your apartment to them. Naturally, when my six-legged roommates aren't around, questions of entomology occur to me.
Why are flies so attracted to humans? I wondered. I asked Jeeves.
"Well, old chap," he said, lighting up a Winchester, "flies are attracted to humans because humans often possess food. We are an upper class species with upper class sensibilities. Flies, as scavengers, are always on the dole. So they mooch off of us. Our pheromones attract them in droves, and once they have found us, they refuse to leave us alone."
I was eating fourthmeal at the time, so I told Jeeves to shut up. His answer was more disgusting than anything I was prepared for, and I preferred not to think about the matter any further.
Late one evening, I heard a sudden chorus of vuvuzelas overhead and glanced up at the ceiling. I was appalled to find a biker gang of black-winged insects clinging to the light bulb. I had never noticed them before. During the days, they ran rampant, but at night, I had no clue as to where they went, what they did during their afterhours. I figured they migrated down to the Jack Bar. But no, my living room ceiling was their headquarters. Their Central Perk. The Point. The light bulb was where they mated, swapped business cards, held clandestine Socialist caucuses ...
Curiosity got the better of me, so I asked Jeeves again. Say, Jeeves, why are bugs attracted to light?
"Well, old chap," he said, "nobody's quite sure about that, but I reckon ol' Jeevesy has a jolly good hunch."
He turned 'round to the blackboard.
"Nocturnal insects," he said, "use the moon as their compass star when migrating long distances. With the advent of the electric light bulb, the insect community has found itself in a sticky wicket - they think light bulbs are the bloody moon! And that's not the half of it! When they ... why, hullo ... well, what's this, then?"
A white van screeched up to the curb. The doors flew open. Jeeves's Winchester fell to the floor. One man threw a bag over Jeeves's head while the others worked on him with billy clubs. "Oh, dear me," Jeeves said, fainting as the men carried him away and dumped him in the trunk. The doors clapped shut and the van screeched off into the distance. My screen went blank. "The connection to askjeeves.com has been interrupted," it read. Weird, I said.
Though it was nearly midnight, I decided to get out of the house, away from the bugs. Outside, I ran into my neighbors and their four year-old son. This is not unusual. There is no curfew in China for children under the age of five. Parents here never miss an opportunity to show off the solitary fruit of their loins. My neighbors, a professor of basketball and his wife, a yoga instructor, were out in the courtyard, running a high-speed passing drill with their giggling son while several elderly admirers looked on.
"Hah-loo, Uncle!" whispered the father as I passed.
"Hah-loo, Uncle!" whispered the mother.
The child said nothing. He was busy eating his own hand.
"The Germans lost yesterday," I said.
"Ai-ya! I know. I wanted them to win."
My neighbors, for whatever reason, are the only people I know who are rooting for the imperialist powers in this year's World Cup. The rest of China is - or was - pulling for Brazil, Argentina, and North Korea, in that order. After North Korea lost seven-nil to Portugal, I risked a chuckle in front of my students.
"But teacher," said one student, "they tried their best."
"Yes," said another, "they tried their best."
"But seven to nothing!" I cackled. "Hilarious!"
"Very sad," said a third. "They tried their best."
A few days later, when, glowing and somewhat red in the cheeks, I told the basketball professor that the United States had defeated Algeria at the last possible second, his wife jumped up and down and clapped her hands. This is all fairly unusual, of course, but has nothing to do with anything.
"What a pity the Germans are lose," said the basketball professor, in English, and was about to continue when his son interrupted him.
"Daddy?" the boy said in Chinese, pointing at a nearby streetlamp. "Why do moths always fly towards the light?"
"Well, son," said the basketball coach. "I'm not really sure. I think they like the heat."
Instinctively, my hand shot up in the air. I knew this one. And I was stoked, stoked to have understood the exchange, and stoked to be privy to such a formative moment in the life of a Chinese youth.
"Actually, I just asked my friend the same question," I said, thinking of poor Jeeves. "He is a bug expert."
The basketball professor nodded dubiously.
"It turns out - well. You see," I said, fumbling for my vocabulary, "moths like to travel. They travel to very far away places, very late at night. The moon helps them find where they are going. They are not used to electric light. It is a new invention. The moths think light bulbs are the moon. So they fly to the moon, so to speak."
It took my neighbor a moment to sort out my clunky syntax, but when he did, he nudged his son and said, "You hear that? Moths think light bulbs are the moon!"
His son laughed, amused.
"Well, good night, Uncle," said the basketball professor.
"Good night. Uncle," said the kid.
And in the moment, I did feel like an uncle. Just wait 'til they get a load of the pull-my-finger gag. I bid the neighbors goodnight and, gazing up at the half-eaten moon, fluttered off to a neon light on the dark side of town.
Monday, July 05, 2010
ANT Logistics
A Friday afternoon at Nanchong Jialing Bus Terminal. There I stood at the front of the line for the three o'clock bus to Chengdu. But when three gave way to 3:30 and still no bus arrived, the line swelled into a crowd, then a horde, and finally a mob. Almost imperceptibly, I was shunted to the rear, along with the bang bang man who had waited with me for an hour. Angrily, uselessly, he tried to jostle his way back to the front. Then he gave up, set his cargo down and bitched angrily, uselessly. Nobody could understand his dialect, and anyway, nobody cared. The man's dust-streaked dress shirt was unbuttoned all the way down; his ribs stuck out like piano keys. His cargo must've weighed in the neighborhood of 200 pounds. They say an ant can lift 50 times its own weight.
Bang bang men are the soul of Sichuan. They are scrawny men, often shirtless men, who keep the scales of labor balanced on either end of a bamboo rod that they wear across their shoulders like a portable stockade. Bang bang men will carry anything anywhere. In a city like Chongqing, where the hills are homicidal and the heat is murderous, there are so many bang bang men out and about that they are rightfully called the bang bang army. They wait outside twelve hours a day, can be found on every street corner, and will perform astounding feats of powerlifting and marathon walking for about two dollars U.S.
For as much as I admire the bang bang men, their profession ranks only a couple of notches higher than prostitution on the Chinese chain of command. So, although China is, ostensibly, a country that respects its elderly, and although this particular bang bang man was old enough to be Mao's grandpa, it wasn't all that surprising to me that both he and the resident laowai were the first people to be excreted by the great bowel movement that is the Chinese queuing system. The question was: could we still make the three o'clock bus to Chengdu, now that it was coasting into its stable at 4 PM?
I polished my elbows. I balled my fists. Well, Petit, I said to myself, I know you don't like doing this, but if you and your bang bang man are going to get on the 3:00 bus at 4 PM, you're going to have to stoop to everyone else's level. I imagined myself blocking for the bang bang man. He would juke and plunge through the gap like Emmitt Smith. Yes, I told myself, for the bang bang man's sake, for your sake, you're gonna have to buck up, suck it up, bite the bullet, nip it in the bud and ... - but I was not prepared for what happened next. The security guards unlatched the stanchions. A salaryman socked me in the breadbasket. A baby kicked me in the neck. Somebody's grandma slide tackled me. I'd been watching too much soccer. My first instinct was to flop to the floor and grab my ankle, roll back and forth wearing an Argentinian mask of anguish until one of the security guards gave China a red card. But all I could muster was the single American English word douchebags! as the people muscled past. The stampeding herd spun the bang bang man around like a top and jostled me forward and to the left until I flew wide of the turnstile like a Steve Christie field goal. I tried to hurdle the aluminum barricades, but by then, droves of people were grabbing their luggage hot out of the x-ray scanner and charging full steam ahead, having waited all of three seconds for the bus that me and the bang bang man so rightfully deserved. In the end, we were left out in the cold. The security guards hitched the stanchions back in place. The bang bang man and I had missed the bus. The good news was: we were back in the front of the line. The bad news was: that meant absolutely nothing.
As luck would have it, when 5 PM rolled around, the bang bang man and I squeaked through the turnstile at the last possible second and caught the four o'clock bus. But about ten miles out of Nanchong, we came up against a long line of cars that stretched all the way to Chengdu, some 200 kilometers away. It took us six hours to get to Chengdu. It's only supposed to take two.
But now that I'm here, I've set myself up in an undisclosed location, perhaps the swankiest undisclosed location in all of Chengdu. I'm reclined in a wicker chaise lounge, sitting outside at 9 AM on an 8th floor balcony with my feet up on the railing. My friends are at work. I have the morning to myself and there is absolutely nothing to stop me from drinking up every last ground of real, actual coffee this undisclosed location has to offer.
In Chengdu, at this elevation, most of the clouds are beneath me. At this height, I am invisible for the first time in months. The smog is my veil. I can see the people below, but they can't see me. This morning, I have decided to sit outside in my boxer shorts, because when you're invisible, you can be as much of an exhibitionist as you want. I am chaise lounging, lounging chaisely, purposefully overdosing on coffee. And I am people watching, something I haven't dared to do since I arrived, because in this country, the people are always watching me.
The funny thing about people watching is that the further away you get, the less human the people are. If you're sitting in a coffee shop watching the crowds stream past your window, you pick up facial expressions, gestures, snippets of conversation ... You can still see the individual at that range. But from eight floors up, the people start to seem less like people and more like - ants.
Eight floors up. Here is behavior without emotion, routine stripped of intent. From this height, you don't see people. All you see is civilization. You can't see the anxious faces of the human beings at the bus stop. All you know is that they're waiting for the bus. In two minutes, they will be replaced by more people just like them, waiting for the bus, same as the ones who came before.
So many people. Every second, thousands of them pass by, thousands of people I will never really see or know anything about. If you are a solipsist, you might regard the nameless, faceless masses as thoughtless cyborgs programmed to deceive you. But nobody I know is a solipsist. Or if anyone is, I can only assume they are solipsistic cyborgs programmed to deceive me. It is a leap of faith of sorts. We tend to regard the nameless, faceless masses as conscious entities every bit as awake and alive as we are, possessed by dreams and hopes and idiosyncrasies the same as we are, and so on. At this point, I'm not sure which of the two ideas is more frightening.
A bus passes. There go fifty people. The light changes. Fifty cars streak across the intersection. Another hundred people. An airplane lofts overhead, invisible as it rockets through one of Chengdu's outer orbits of smog. Another 200 people. The people on the streets. Another hundred. The people in the apartments around me. Another 500, easy. A thousand people in my field of view at any given second. And that's just for one second. The people change, circulate like skin cells, and whether they belong to anything like an organism is a question too big for me to answer.
Fifteen identical cargo trucks rumble by. Another thirty people. The trucks are bright yellow and the blue letters on the trailers read ANT Logistics, ANT Logistics, ANT Logistics, ANT ... I have seen these trucks before, always in Chengdu, always in caravans of ten or more. I used to amuse myself contemplating the services rendered by ANT Logistics, imagining the kind of help ants might need with logistics, of all things. Flow charts. Pie charts. Bar graphs. Efficiency assessments. Drone-to-worker ratios. Banquet halls infested with ants, Chinese ant consultants leading their clients via long trails of sugar to the appropriate conclusions.
But a couple days ago, I learned that ANT Logistics is simply a conglomeration of bang bang men. That's all it is. Stick men for hire. A moving company, if you like. In Chongqing, because of the hills, bang bang men can work freelance. But in Chengdu, where there are no hills, there is little work for the enterprising stick soldier. There are, however, thousands of affluent families moving from the cheap and smoggy city to the ever more unaffordable frontier. So trucks are necessary. Trucks and sticks.
So you call ANT Logistics and ten bright yellow cargo trucks pull up in front of your apartment complex. ANT Logistics, ANT Logistics, ANT ... Thirty men who are well past retirement age pile out of the trucks and start squawking at you in accents that are more music than language. They spit on your floor, blow smoke in your baby's face, do unspeakable, unimaginable things to your squat toilet - but they are not rude people, understand. These are the lao bai xing, the Old Hundred Names, the Joe Smiths and John Taylors and Jim Carpenters of China. Nobody knows it, but China belongs to them, even though they are laughed at, mocked, derided; even though they are regarded more and more as the unwelcome scum that floats atop the bubbling Sichuanese hot pot.
The Old Hundred Names work at a breakneck pace. They are also the laziest men you have ever seen in your life. Half of the men are on permanent smoke breaks. One of them is sleeping, or dead on the sidewalk outside. The smell of rice liquor makes your eyes burn. And yet your house has been picked clean in ten minutes. A horde of Mongols couldn't have done it faster. Your heirloom piano is dangling off the back of an ANT Logistics truck, suspendered in by what looks to be a shoelace. You gesture at the piano but the chief ANT Logician just belches and waves you off. It's no use. These men have loaded up all your worldly possessions, have piled them into their trucks like the Beverly Hillbillies, and with impeccable Chinese skill, or luck, or magic, they will have everything safely installed in your new $1.3 million dollar apartment across town, without so much as a scratch or a cigarette burn.
Coffee. More coffee. Here come another ten trucks. ANT Logistics, ANT Logistics, ANT ... The cabbies across the highway are taking a siesta. A mahjongg table materializes. Even from way up here I can hear the tiles shuffling. An old man in a wifebeater is exercising in the courtyard below. He situates himself in the exact center of the courtyard and stands looking over a manmade waterfall. From where he's standing, the apartment complex splits into two identical and perfectly symmetrical halves. He performs an exercise in which he smacks his thighs, smacks his manboobs, then shakes his hands in the air as though he's flicking water off the tips of his fingers. He does about forty reps, then sits down on a bench to read a newspaper.
Just on the other side of the highway is a river, coasting along way below the speed limit. It can't seem to make up its mind which way it wants to go, and its brown surface is a confusing interference pattern of crests and troths. One stream headed East, the other headed West. Conflicted river. Jostling itself to get on the bus. There is a sunbather sprawled out on the shore next to a pile of aluminum cans, but she's wearing pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and is hiding under two umbrellas thrust down into the mud. And anyway, there is no sun.
All along the river: apartment complex after apartment complex after apartment complex, all of them identical, like the man in charge just clicked copy-paste copy-paste until he ran into the horizon. It's like standing between two mirrors. Apartment complexes, on and on forever. And in the foreground stands a four-tiered pagoda - impossible to tell at this distance whether it is as old as history or younger than the apartments that surround it - and the pagoda stands there with the river in front and the city all around, and it looks scared. Like it knows something is bound to devour it sooner or later. The apartments, probably. Or the river. The warped and leaning pagoda knows. It knows that one day, that muddled brown river is bound to get its shit together. One day the river will march single file, overflowing its banks, and it will inundate the world in its uniform earthtone, reflecting itself and itself and itself, on and on forever, and it will wash all the dirt away like a glass of lemonade spilled onto an anthill.
Bang bang men are the soul of Sichuan. They are scrawny men, often shirtless men, who keep the scales of labor balanced on either end of a bamboo rod that they wear across their shoulders like a portable stockade. Bang bang men will carry anything anywhere. In a city like Chongqing, where the hills are homicidal and the heat is murderous, there are so many bang bang men out and about that they are rightfully called the bang bang army. They wait outside twelve hours a day, can be found on every street corner, and will perform astounding feats of powerlifting and marathon walking for about two dollars U.S.
For as much as I admire the bang bang men, their profession ranks only a couple of notches higher than prostitution on the Chinese chain of command. So, although China is, ostensibly, a country that respects its elderly, and although this particular bang bang man was old enough to be Mao's grandpa, it wasn't all that surprising to me that both he and the resident laowai were the first people to be excreted by the great bowel movement that is the Chinese queuing system. The question was: could we still make the three o'clock bus to Chengdu, now that it was coasting into its stable at 4 PM?
I polished my elbows. I balled my fists. Well, Petit, I said to myself, I know you don't like doing this, but if you and your bang bang man are going to get on the 3:00 bus at 4 PM, you're going to have to stoop to everyone else's level. I imagined myself blocking for the bang bang man. He would juke and plunge through the gap like Emmitt Smith. Yes, I told myself, for the bang bang man's sake, for your sake, you're gonna have to buck up, suck it up, bite the bullet, nip it in the bud and ... - but I was not prepared for what happened next. The security guards unlatched the stanchions. A salaryman socked me in the breadbasket. A baby kicked me in the neck. Somebody's grandma slide tackled me. I'd been watching too much soccer. My first instinct was to flop to the floor and grab my ankle, roll back and forth wearing an Argentinian mask of anguish until one of the security guards gave China a red card. But all I could muster was the single American English word douchebags! as the people muscled past. The stampeding herd spun the bang bang man around like a top and jostled me forward and to the left until I flew wide of the turnstile like a Steve Christie field goal. I tried to hurdle the aluminum barricades, but by then, droves of people were grabbing their luggage hot out of the x-ray scanner and charging full steam ahead, having waited all of three seconds for the bus that me and the bang bang man so rightfully deserved. In the end, we were left out in the cold. The security guards hitched the stanchions back in place. The bang bang man and I had missed the bus. The good news was: we were back in the front of the line. The bad news was: that meant absolutely nothing.
As luck would have it, when 5 PM rolled around, the bang bang man and I squeaked through the turnstile at the last possible second and caught the four o'clock bus. But about ten miles out of Nanchong, we came up against a long line of cars that stretched all the way to Chengdu, some 200 kilometers away. It took us six hours to get to Chengdu. It's only supposed to take two.
But now that I'm here, I've set myself up in an undisclosed location, perhaps the swankiest undisclosed location in all of Chengdu. I'm reclined in a wicker chaise lounge, sitting outside at 9 AM on an 8th floor balcony with my feet up on the railing. My friends are at work. I have the morning to myself and there is absolutely nothing to stop me from drinking up every last ground of real, actual coffee this undisclosed location has to offer.
In Chengdu, at this elevation, most of the clouds are beneath me. At this height, I am invisible for the first time in months. The smog is my veil. I can see the people below, but they can't see me. This morning, I have decided to sit outside in my boxer shorts, because when you're invisible, you can be as much of an exhibitionist as you want. I am chaise lounging, lounging chaisely, purposefully overdosing on coffee. And I am people watching, something I haven't dared to do since I arrived, because in this country, the people are always watching me.
The funny thing about people watching is that the further away you get, the less human the people are. If you're sitting in a coffee shop watching the crowds stream past your window, you pick up facial expressions, gestures, snippets of conversation ... You can still see the individual at that range. But from eight floors up, the people start to seem less like people and more like - ants.
Eight floors up. Here is behavior without emotion, routine stripped of intent. From this height, you don't see people. All you see is civilization. You can't see the anxious faces of the human beings at the bus stop. All you know is that they're waiting for the bus. In two minutes, they will be replaced by more people just like them, waiting for the bus, same as the ones who came before.
So many people. Every second, thousands of them pass by, thousands of people I will never really see or know anything about. If you are a solipsist, you might regard the nameless, faceless masses as thoughtless cyborgs programmed to deceive you. But nobody I know is a solipsist. Or if anyone is, I can only assume they are solipsistic cyborgs programmed to deceive me. It is a leap of faith of sorts. We tend to regard the nameless, faceless masses as conscious entities every bit as awake and alive as we are, possessed by dreams and hopes and idiosyncrasies the same as we are, and so on. At this point, I'm not sure which of the two ideas is more frightening.
A bus passes. There go fifty people. The light changes. Fifty cars streak across the intersection. Another hundred people. An airplane lofts overhead, invisible as it rockets through one of Chengdu's outer orbits of smog. Another 200 people. The people on the streets. Another hundred. The people in the apartments around me. Another 500, easy. A thousand people in my field of view at any given second. And that's just for one second. The people change, circulate like skin cells, and whether they belong to anything like an organism is a question too big for me to answer.
Fifteen identical cargo trucks rumble by. Another thirty people. The trucks are bright yellow and the blue letters on the trailers read ANT Logistics, ANT Logistics, ANT Logistics, ANT ... I have seen these trucks before, always in Chengdu, always in caravans of ten or more. I used to amuse myself contemplating the services rendered by ANT Logistics, imagining the kind of help ants might need with logistics, of all things. Flow charts. Pie charts. Bar graphs. Efficiency assessments. Drone-to-worker ratios. Banquet halls infested with ants, Chinese ant consultants leading their clients via long trails of sugar to the appropriate conclusions.
But a couple days ago, I learned that ANT Logistics is simply a conglomeration of bang bang men. That's all it is. Stick men for hire. A moving company, if you like. In Chongqing, because of the hills, bang bang men can work freelance. But in Chengdu, where there are no hills, there is little work for the enterprising stick soldier. There are, however, thousands of affluent families moving from the cheap and smoggy city to the ever more unaffordable frontier. So trucks are necessary. Trucks and sticks.
So you call ANT Logistics and ten bright yellow cargo trucks pull up in front of your apartment complex. ANT Logistics, ANT Logistics, ANT ... Thirty men who are well past retirement age pile out of the trucks and start squawking at you in accents that are more music than language. They spit on your floor, blow smoke in your baby's face, do unspeakable, unimaginable things to your squat toilet - but they are not rude people, understand. These are the lao bai xing, the Old Hundred Names, the Joe Smiths and John Taylors and Jim Carpenters of China. Nobody knows it, but China belongs to them, even though they are laughed at, mocked, derided; even though they are regarded more and more as the unwelcome scum that floats atop the bubbling Sichuanese hot pot.
The Old Hundred Names work at a breakneck pace. They are also the laziest men you have ever seen in your life. Half of the men are on permanent smoke breaks. One of them is sleeping, or dead on the sidewalk outside. The smell of rice liquor makes your eyes burn. And yet your house has been picked clean in ten minutes. A horde of Mongols couldn't have done it faster. Your heirloom piano is dangling off the back of an ANT Logistics truck, suspendered in by what looks to be a shoelace. You gesture at the piano but the chief ANT Logician just belches and waves you off. It's no use. These men have loaded up all your worldly possessions, have piled them into their trucks like the Beverly Hillbillies, and with impeccable Chinese skill, or luck, or magic, they will have everything safely installed in your new $1.3 million dollar apartment across town, without so much as a scratch or a cigarette burn.
Coffee. More coffee. Here come another ten trucks. ANT Logistics, ANT Logistics, ANT ... The cabbies across the highway are taking a siesta. A mahjongg table materializes. Even from way up here I can hear the tiles shuffling. An old man in a wifebeater is exercising in the courtyard below. He situates himself in the exact center of the courtyard and stands looking over a manmade waterfall. From where he's standing, the apartment complex splits into two identical and perfectly symmetrical halves. He performs an exercise in which he smacks his thighs, smacks his manboobs, then shakes his hands in the air as though he's flicking water off the tips of his fingers. He does about forty reps, then sits down on a bench to read a newspaper.
Just on the other side of the highway is a river, coasting along way below the speed limit. It can't seem to make up its mind which way it wants to go, and its brown surface is a confusing interference pattern of crests and troths. One stream headed East, the other headed West. Conflicted river. Jostling itself to get on the bus. There is a sunbather sprawled out on the shore next to a pile of aluminum cans, but she's wearing pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and is hiding under two umbrellas thrust down into the mud. And anyway, there is no sun.
All along the river: apartment complex after apartment complex after apartment complex, all of them identical, like the man in charge just clicked copy-paste copy-paste until he ran into the horizon. It's like standing between two mirrors. Apartment complexes, on and on forever. And in the foreground stands a four-tiered pagoda - impossible to tell at this distance whether it is as old as history or younger than the apartments that surround it - and the pagoda stands there with the river in front and the city all around, and it looks scared. Like it knows something is bound to devour it sooner or later. The apartments, probably. Or the river. The warped and leaning pagoda knows. It knows that one day, that muddled brown river is bound to get its shit together. One day the river will march single file, overflowing its banks, and it will inundate the world in its uniform earthtone, reflecting itself and itself and itself, on and on forever, and it will wash all the dirt away like a glass of lemonade spilled onto an anthill.
Thursday, July 01, 2010
Chevy Chaise Lounge
If you were to ask me how it is that I got to where I am today, I suppose I would have to blame copywriting.
Rewind to four years ago. I was living with my parents in Bellevue, Nebraska. A college graduate. A Bachelor in Fine Arts. A Creative Writing major. And I was writing for a living. Writing copy for online furniture catalogs. The upside was that I worked from home. The downside was that I worked from home.
I started out "gangbusters," as Murray, my temp agent, would tell me the day he let me go. That first week, Murray assigned me 90 wicker furniture copyblocks, 50 words per block, two bucks apiece. And at the end of two 24-hour days, after a truly disgusting number of Monster Energy Drinks, I had written all 90 of them. Some kind of wicker furniture catalog copywriting record, apparently. Murray clapped me on the back and spoke floridly of pay raises, full-time employment, health insurance, etc., etc., etc.
The following week, he entrusted me with lawnchairs. It took me twice as long to write half as much, but I managed to beat deadline. So Murray bumped me up to the big time: chaiselounges.com. Furniture for people I will never ever rub elbows with. Furniture that costs more than cars, but won't get you anywhere. And I, of all people, had to write the copy. Having never once lounged upon a chaise lounge in my entire life, I had to write as though I had not only chaise lounged, but regularly experienced multiple chaise lounging orgasms. I had to sell Made in Cambodia avant garde chaise lounges to the chaise lounging American masses. One-hundred words, two bucks per copyblock, a couple mil worth of merchandise up for grabs.
You can find my writing everywhere on the internet, only it's not credited to me or anyone else. The author is this anonymous, ghostly voice with a kind of disembodied wit. That's me. The Chevy Chaise Lounge is "perfect for a nap after a long day of caddying." I wrote that. That was me. Google "Chevy Chaise Lounge" and there I am. In the original draft, I included a number of Fletch references that didn't make the cut. "Our Chevy Chaise Lounge will make you feel like a hundred bucks." I wrote that, too. But it's not exactly the sort of quip you want to make when promoting an item that is supposed to make you feel like $2,999 US, no more no less.
Then there was the Aja Chaise Lounge, named after the Steely Dan album, or so I assumed. You can find the Aja Chaise online, though it is a bit harder to track down because nobody bought it. Steely Dan fans don't buy chaise lounges. They buy heroin. That and the damned thing is the color of expired poultry.
"Kick those 'Deacon Blues' with a soothing afternoon nap upon our Aja Chaise Lounge," I wrote. "Now you're 'Home At Last.'" I wrote that. "The Aja Chaise Lounge has you 'pegged.'" I wrote that, too. And they paid me money to write it. None of my bosses caught the Steely Dan references, nor did they complain that the copy was total nonsense. You'd think one thing or the other would've come to somebody's attention. But they published it anyway and my half-ass copy has since spread across the internet like some kind of transspermatozoon STD. Two dollars worth of hypercaffeinated copywriting from a disillusioned 24 year-old, and now Italian duchesses are running my copy through Google Translate, trying to decide whether the Chevy Chaise Lounge will get along with the Rodney Dangerfield Ottoman.
The more I wrote, the more my face sagged, the more I needed caffeine. I established a rapport with the Starbucks drive-thru baristas. They told me I looked like Chris Martin. You know, from Coldplay. They asked what I did for a living and I told them that I was a writer. They fluttered their eyelashes and asked what I wrote about and I told them chaise lounges, mostly. Must be exhausting, they said, twirling their hair extensions, caffeinated off their asses. You have no idea, I told them.
Good news. I just found the Infanta Chaise Lounge. So I can pinpoint the exact moment when I snapped.
Bun feet? Stylish buttons? I could be writing about a Japanese empress. You don't have to be traditional to be comfortable. Well said, Petit. At your next wine tasting? I have never been to a wine tasting. The only tastings I'm familiar with involve someone's girlfriend puking in the bathroom for three hours and at least two complete strangers doing the wild thang on your bed. Where did the words come from? Nowhere. Where did they go? Everywhere, it seems. I can write as much as I want on this blog. Only my copy will survive me. It will outlast me and anything of substance that I write. My senile traveling anecdotes will be ignored by my grandchildren, but my chaise lounge descriptions will live on. Long after Steely Dan's vinyl LPs have melted to the sea. Long after Chevy Chase has balded to death. Music, films, writing - these are fads, but chaise lounges are forever. Chaise lounges are a basic human right. The pursuit of happiness. The pursuit of lounge.
The chaise lounge copy was the turning point for me. The next week, Murray demoted me to inflatable beach furniture. I'd like to say I abandoned copywriting for artistic reasons, but it wasn't that at all. I just couldn't write anymore. Every copyblock turned into a Rorschach test. Item RK-56925B - what do you see? I see a chair. Item LP-24491X - what do you see? I see a bed. Item XB-014554L - what do you see? I don't even know what that is anymore. I went catatonic. I had nothing to say. Everything was the same to me. A chair is a chair is a chair, a bed is a bed is a bed, an ottoman is an ottoman is an ... My brain had turned to wicker. Murray would give me 90 copyblocks and I'd finish 45. He'd give me 40 and I'd finish ten. He'd give me ten and I'd finish one.
And that's how it ended. I showed up a week after deadline with one copyblock hot off the laser printer. I handed it to Murray and apologized. This was all I could do, I said. One copyblock? he asked. One fucking copyblock? One fucking copyblock, I said. Why? he asked. I don't know why, I said.
Murray invited me outside for a cigarette, but I didn't smoke at the time, so he smoked and I watched him smoke and I listened.
"I'm going to be really nice and let you go. I'm not going to fire you," he said. Then he shook his head and laughed. "But I don't understand it! You started out gangbusters! What happened back there, man?"
"I don't know," I said. "I'm beginning to think I'm a writer and not a copywriter."
Murray laughed.
"Yeah, I get that a lot. Look," he said, "just don't let me find you working the Starbucks drive-thru, alright?"
Murray gave me a fistpound, then he stamped out his cigarette and went back upstairs. It was February in Omaha and it was cold and I was without a coat, so I sprinted across Harney Street. It took me a long time to find my car. A month later, I was in Poland.
Rewind to four years ago. I was living with my parents in Bellevue, Nebraska. A college graduate. A Bachelor in Fine Arts. A Creative Writing major. And I was writing for a living. Writing copy for online furniture catalogs. The upside was that I worked from home. The downside was that I worked from home.
I started out "gangbusters," as Murray, my temp agent, would tell me the day he let me go. That first week, Murray assigned me 90 wicker furniture copyblocks, 50 words per block, two bucks apiece. And at the end of two 24-hour days, after a truly disgusting number of Monster Energy Drinks, I had written all 90 of them. Some kind of wicker furniture catalog copywriting record, apparently. Murray clapped me on the back and spoke floridly of pay raises, full-time employment, health insurance, etc., etc., etc.
The following week, he entrusted me with lawnchairs. It took me twice as long to write half as much, but I managed to beat deadline. So Murray bumped me up to the big time: chaiselounges.com. Furniture for people I will never ever rub elbows with. Furniture that costs more than cars, but won't get you anywhere. And I, of all people, had to write the copy. Having never once lounged upon a chaise lounge in my entire life, I had to write as though I had not only chaise lounged, but regularly experienced multiple chaise lounging orgasms. I had to sell Made in Cambodia avant garde chaise lounges to the chaise lounging American masses. One-hundred words, two bucks per copyblock, a couple mil worth of merchandise up for grabs.
You can find my writing everywhere on the internet, only it's not credited to me or anyone else. The author is this anonymous, ghostly voice with a kind of disembodied wit. That's me. The Chevy Chaise Lounge is "perfect for a nap after a long day of caddying." I wrote that. That was me. Google "Chevy Chaise Lounge" and there I am. In the original draft, I included a number of Fletch references that didn't make the cut. "Our Chevy Chaise Lounge will make you feel like a hundred bucks." I wrote that, too. But it's not exactly the sort of quip you want to make when promoting an item that is supposed to make you feel like $2,999 US, no more no less.
Then there was the Aja Chaise Lounge, named after the Steely Dan album, or so I assumed. You can find the Aja Chaise online, though it is a bit harder to track down because nobody bought it. Steely Dan fans don't buy chaise lounges. They buy heroin. That and the damned thing is the color of expired poultry.
"Kick those 'Deacon Blues' with a soothing afternoon nap upon our Aja Chaise Lounge," I wrote. "Now you're 'Home At Last.'" I wrote that. "The Aja Chaise Lounge has you 'pegged.'" I wrote that, too. And they paid me money to write it. None of my bosses caught the Steely Dan references, nor did they complain that the copy was total nonsense. You'd think one thing or the other would've come to somebody's attention. But they published it anyway and my half-ass copy has since spread across the internet like some kind of transspermatozoon STD. Two dollars worth of hypercaffeinated copywriting from a disillusioned 24 year-old, and now Italian duchesses are running my copy through Google Translate, trying to decide whether the Chevy Chaise Lounge will get along with the Rodney Dangerfield Ottoman.
The more I wrote, the more my face sagged, the more I needed caffeine. I established a rapport with the Starbucks drive-thru baristas. They told me I looked like Chris Martin. You know, from Coldplay. They asked what I did for a living and I told them that I was a writer. They fluttered their eyelashes and asked what I wrote about and I told them chaise lounges, mostly. Must be exhausting, they said, twirling their hair extensions, caffeinated off their asses. You have no idea, I told them.
Good news. I just found the Infanta Chaise Lounge. So I can pinpoint the exact moment when I snapped.
Fit for a king or queen, our Infanta Chaise lends regal fashion to any room. Styled in modern swirls, curves, and embellishments, this lovely lounge just goes to show that you don't have to be traditional to be comfortable. The Infanta is structured around a strong metal frame and a cozy red velvet fabric surface that you'll have to feel to believe. Resting on three sturdy bun feet and trimmed with stylish buttons, this lively lounge is sure to be the subject of conversation at your next wine tasting. Available as shown.
Bun feet? Stylish buttons? I could be writing about a Japanese empress. You don't have to be traditional to be comfortable. Well said, Petit. At your next wine tasting? I have never been to a wine tasting. The only tastings I'm familiar with involve someone's girlfriend puking in the bathroom for three hours and at least two complete strangers doing the wild thang on your bed. Where did the words come from? Nowhere. Where did they go? Everywhere, it seems. I can write as much as I want on this blog. Only my copy will survive me. It will outlast me and anything of substance that I write. My senile traveling anecdotes will be ignored by my grandchildren, but my chaise lounge descriptions will live on. Long after Steely Dan's vinyl LPs have melted to the sea. Long after Chevy Chase has balded to death. Music, films, writing - these are fads, but chaise lounges are forever. Chaise lounges are a basic human right. The pursuit of happiness. The pursuit of lounge.
The chaise lounge copy was the turning point for me. The next week, Murray demoted me to inflatable beach furniture. I'd like to say I abandoned copywriting for artistic reasons, but it wasn't that at all. I just couldn't write anymore. Every copyblock turned into a Rorschach test. Item RK-56925B - what do you see? I see a chair. Item LP-24491X - what do you see? I see a bed. Item XB-014554L - what do you see? I don't even know what that is anymore. I went catatonic. I had nothing to say. Everything was the same to me. A chair is a chair is a chair, a bed is a bed is a bed, an ottoman is an ottoman is an ... My brain had turned to wicker. Murray would give me 90 copyblocks and I'd finish 45. He'd give me 40 and I'd finish ten. He'd give me ten and I'd finish one.
And that's how it ended. I showed up a week after deadline with one copyblock hot off the laser printer. I handed it to Murray and apologized. This was all I could do, I said. One copyblock? he asked. One fucking copyblock? One fucking copyblock, I said. Why? he asked. I don't know why, I said.
Murray invited me outside for a cigarette, but I didn't smoke at the time, so he smoked and I watched him smoke and I listened.
"I'm going to be really nice and let you go. I'm not going to fire you," he said. Then he shook his head and laughed. "But I don't understand it! You started out gangbusters! What happened back there, man?"
"I don't know," I said. "I'm beginning to think I'm a writer and not a copywriter."
Murray laughed.
"Yeah, I get that a lot. Look," he said, "just don't let me find you working the Starbucks drive-thru, alright?"
Murray gave me a fistpound, then he stamped out his cigarette and went back upstairs. It was February in Omaha and it was cold and I was without a coat, so I sprinted across Harney Street. It took me a long time to find my car. A month later, I was in Poland.
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