1/17/2011: Loomings, et cetera

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick


hypo
noun, Archaic
hypochondria.

- Random House Dictionary

Don't call me Ishmael. Call me Panda. I read the better part of Moby-Dick in the bathtub of my childhood. Splashing around with a vinyl fleet of rubber duckies, making submarine noises, Johnson & Johnson No More Tears Shampoo, the whole deal. I was 24 years old at the time, and I was living at home. I had just returned to Nebraska after a year in South Korea. Between countries. I had little or no money in my manpurse and nothing particular to interest me on shore. In those tedious days of born-again infancy, I split my time between the bathtub and the coffee shop and the piss-tinged reading rooms of the Omaha Public Library. I read Moby-Dick for a living. I loved the book and loved it deeply. It had me at Ishmael. Eventually, I got myself a job. I was a scrivener, basically. But the job wasn't enough, and neither was hunting the White Whale. Wanderlust, restless legs, et cetera. I had to leave. But how?

Spoiler alert: Ahab and me, we didn't get the whale in the end. Sigh. The one that got away. After two full months in the tub with Melville, Moby-Dick was a hard book to put back on the shelf. I didn't want to stop reading it. As far as books go, it was a messy breakup. Herman started dating that pretentious asshat bartender at The Anchor Inn. In retaliation, I kept all of Melville's favorite sea shanty records. But several years down the road, I find myself returning again and again to that first chapter of his, the unimpeachable LOOMINGS - which just has to be the most bad-ass chapter title of all time.

Call me Ishmael, but that first paragraph of LOOMINGS rings truer to me than anything I have ever read. Especially when I read it for the first time, nestled there in my parents' upstairs bathtub. Grim about the mouth, indeed. A damp, drizzly November in my soul. An icy, windblasted January in Nebraska. I remember that winter well, however much I want to unremember it. The rocksalted roads led nowhere. The street lights were all flashing red. My gym membership had expired. So, too, had my library card. All relations with the fairer sex had come to naught. The cubicle work was sharpening my soul to a fine, shiv-like point. Rest assured I would have started knocking off the backwards "DEEZ NUTS" hats that were so en vogue amongst the Omaha frat boy community in those days, if I had stayed in Omaha any longer than I did. But I willed myself out of the country. I did some intercontinental ballistic job searching and found myself a teaching gig in Kielce, Poland. And in February, I left Omaha for a place that was even colder, even more miserable than Omaha. What can I say? My hypos got the upper hand of me.

Nanchong, Sichuan Province, People's Republic of China. Three years later. I am 27, somehow. The winter semester shuddered to a close sometime last week. The campus has been evacuated. The students are gone. I was relieved at first. As a bearded laowai, I am heckled, harassed, hectored and huckstered whenever I leave my apartment, mostly by students. So any set of circumstances that conspires to reduce my daily quota of degradation is a godsend. But with the departure of the students, the shops have closed down. The oldsters have gone home. And the outside world has become a very cold, very damp, very empty place, indeed.

The only open restaurant within walking distance of my apartment is a dingy little dumpling shop that is eternally sold out of dumplings. But nobody eats there. So my guess is that they don't bother making dumplings in the first place. This evening, out of desperation, I walked a half-mile to the Dumpling Restaurant of Woe and supped on a tiny plate of stale radishes.

"These aren't very good," the boss said as he slid them across the table. "Eat slowly."

He was right. They weren't very good. I ate slowly and left quickly.

There is one convenience store still standing. I go there for toilet paper, soap, shampoo, beer, smokes, snacks, water. These days, I go there for conversation. The boss always asks me if I'm going back to my hometown for Spring Festival.

"Probably not," I tell her. "Too expensive."
"Where will you go, then?"
"I dunno," I say. "Probably nowhere."

And so far, I have gone absolutely nowhere. I spent the first two weeks of the new year, the Year of the Rabbit, in Nanchong: reading, writing, taking long walks. Squatting in my apartment like a hen, with a space heater tilted upward towards my netherregions. I actually started reading The Bible, just because I had never read it before and figured that I ought to read it before I died. But somewhere around the end of Exodus, I began to wonder what the fuck I was doing with my time. Why am I here, I wondered - not in the broader existential sense, but like, why am I here in Nanchong when I don't have to be? I'll be stranded in China for seven more months, and then I will leave, almost certainly never to return. This is my last vacation in China. Let my people go, I said. The cruel Sichuanese winter had sunk in. Fog upon smog upon fog. A deep grayness. A damp, drizzly November in my soul. LOOMINGS, et cetera. Let my people go, et cetera.

I put down The Good Book. It was Sunday night and it was late. Let my people sleep, I said. I polished off my nightcap. I zipped my coat up tight, pulled the hood over my head, and I curled up into bed under two layers of sweater and two layers of blanket. A human burrito. I drifted off to sleep and I dreamt that I was in Yunnan Province. I was in Kunming, at a youth hostel. And I was sitting outside in the sun, across a table from a gorgeous raven-haired girl with black wire-framed glasses. We didn't talk because we didn't need to. We were in love. And we both knew what that meant. She was wearing a frilled white blouse and a purple skirt. I was probably wearing the same clothes I've worn for the past month. I forget. She didn't say a word and neither did I, but we knew. It was not an erotic dream, not at all. I never got past first base in the dream. Heck, I never left the on-deck circle. But the dream was more erotic than anything I have ever experienced. Nothing happened. We just sat there at the table, reading our respective books and understanding each other until I woke up. Groaning and babbling sweet nothings to myself, I tried to get back into the dream, but it didn't happen. In my experience, you can never get back into the dream. You just get shipped off to somewhere you'd rather not be. I fell asleep again and I dreamt I was walking along the edge of the Grand Canyon, wearing a backpack full of neutron star material. They say a spoonful weighs a ton. I kept falling over. Getting back up and falling over. Getting back up. Falling over. Eventually, I gave up walking and let myself tumble over the edge. I fell and I fell.

I woke up gasping for breath. After a while, I realized that I was very hungry. So I caught a cab to the McDonald's downtown and there, a very drunk Nanchonger grabbed me by the neck and threw me out into the street. Threw me right out into damp, drizzly Nanchong. A damp, drizzly November in my soul. Loomings. I decided right then that I needed to leave town. Let my people go, I said.

So, here is what will happen. Tomorrow, I will wake up around noon and throw my laundry in the washing machine. Then, wearing the same clothes I have worn for the past month, I will march right down to the front office of the China West Normal University Foreign Language Department. I will ask my boss for my passport, a vital document that I haven't seen in eight months. He will tell his underling to go find it, and his underling will tell his underling to go find it, and his underling will rummage around his employer's office for the better part of an hour, before discovering my passport in his coat pocket. He will open up my passport and laugh at my photo. I will thank him. Then I will return to my apartment, collect my laundry, wave it around a lot by way of drying it, and stuff it all in a plastic bag. Then I will catch a taxi to the train station. I will purchase a one-way ticket to Kunming, Yunnan Province. The train bureaucrat will ask to see my passport. I will show it to her. She will giggle at the photograph. I will thank her. I will while away the hours until departure in some bar. Then I will wait in line for a good long while. Then I will board a greasy chain-linked vessel bound for the south. I will lay me down in a cot some fifteen feet off the ground. I will read Hermann Hesse until I fall asleep. The next morning, I will wake up to the sun coming in through the window. Miraculously, I will wake up in a warm part of the world. I will step out onto the platform in Kunming and nobody will care none too much that I am a foreigner. And I will catch a cab and check into a youth hostel and squeeze the juice out of two weeks - lying out in the sun, eating greasy sandwiches, drinking coffee by day, imbibing beer by night, playing ping-pong with any and all comers.

Of course, I did the same exact thing last year. I went to Kunming last year. A year ago to the day. So I am retracing my steps. I am repeating myself. By escaping to Kunming, I am leaving one rut for another. But Nanchong dogs me. And this dream of mine haunts me. Being choke-slammed out into the damp, drizzly streets of Nanchong. And this raven-haired girl with the wire-frame glasses: who is she? Does she exist? My dreaming self has posed a question that my waking self must answer. I don't believe in dreams, but one never knows, does one?

I have never been a very good traveler. I never seem to make it to the places you're supposed to go see. I am an American who has never seen the Grand Canyon. Can't even imagine it. In all my time in Poland, I never made it to Auschwitz. I never did Day of the Dead in Pátzcuaro, though I was only a couple hours away from it. I've never seen the Great Wall or the Terracotta Warriors, and I probably never will. And on some level, I don't care. I don't really care to see those things. I don't chase places. I chase my own tail. I chase whims and vapors. Smoke and mirrors. I hunt the white whale. The raven-haired girl in the wire-framed glasses. The end is there in the beginning, and it's there for all to see. Because I will never catch the white whale, you see. Nobody ever does. But I'd like to think that I'll land a pretty damned hefty bass fish somewhere along the way. And it won't be the white whale. But I'll take it over a can of sardines. You know?

1/16/2011: McRumble

Sichuanese cuisine satisfies me without quite satiating me. Every day, I consume metric tons of fresh, nutrient-clogged vegetables. And they make me feel pretty damn nourished, those veggies. The antioxidants perhaps even counteract all the smoking and drinking I do when I'm not eating. But Sichuanese cuisine does not fill me. By the time 3 AM rolls around, when I'm tossing and turning and trembling in the subzero temperatures of my own bedroom, by then a colossal abyss has opened up in my stomach and my lone desire - more than warmth, more than sleep - is to fill that gastrointestinal abyss: to devour mass quantities of processed meat, and that right soon. So, on those nights, I will stumble out of my apartment in my pajamas, catch a cab to McDonald's, and there, I will devour two double cheeseburgers and a spicy chicken sandwich. Sometimes I order a Coke.

This is what happened last Sunday night. Around 3 AM, I caught a cab to the McDonald's downtown. I waited in the queue a bit. Several drunk college kids cut in front of me. I let them. This is typical. So was the drunk man over by the McDonald's Playplace, ranting at the fluorescent lights, brandishing a fist in front of his wife's face. Typical. If he didn't hit her, it would've been typical. If he actually hit her, it would've been typical. As a volunteer, I am not allowed to intervene. I can only watch. And I have been watching for just about two years now. Everything is typical to me. Being cut in line is typical. Domestic abuse is typical. I can do nothing to change things. I can only pretend that I don't exist. That way, I don't get upset when I am cut in line. That way, I don't get upset when a man beats his wife in public. Otherwise, I could get in trouble. Why, I could lose my visa.

When I finally got to the front of the line, I ordered two double cheeseburgers and a spicy chicken sandwich. I went upstairs to take a pee. And when I came back down, the drunk man was waiting for me. I juked around him and reached for my brown plastic tray and the delicious waxpapered bundles thereupon. And the drunk man grabbed me by the throat with both hands and started choking me towards the door. I threw him loose with an agility unknown to me. And I shoved him away. The first words out of my mouth happened to be English: "What the fuck is your problem, you drunk fuck?"

The drunk man charged, and immediately the McDonald's staff poured out of the kitchen. But they restrained me, not the drunk man. Four McDonald's employees descended upon me and dragged me outside, out to the street.

"But what about him?" I asked in Chinese. "He's drunk. I'm not. He wants to fight. I don't. Get him. I just want my burgers."

The McDonald's employees tried to keep me out, but I wriggled my way loose and stormed back into the restaurant.

"I'm hungry," I said.

As I approached the counter, the drunk grabbed me by the neck again and threw me back outside.

"Get out of here, foreigner!" he shouted. "Get out of here, white devil!"

His wife whispered apologies in my ear, but did not try to stop him. She just walked alongside as her husband choked me and screamed at me. Luckily, he was drunk. He was easy enough to shake off. The McDonald's employees, by then, were just trembling in the background.

"What's the problem?" I asked.
"You can speak Chinese," he gasped.
"A little," I said. "What's the problem?"
"What's the problem?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "What's the problem? Why did this just happen? Why are you so angry? You don't even know me. And you just tried to strangle me. I'm hungry. You threw me out onto the street."
He shuffled his feet around a bit, then looked up at me like a child, like I was his father.
"Well," he said, "my cell phone isn't working."

He took out his phone and slid the casing loose. He pointed at the battery. My phone isn't working, he said. And this was a big deal, apparently.

"Well," I said, "if you talk to the McDonald's employees in the kitchen, maybe they can help you. Probably, the battery's just run out. It's probably not that big a deal."

The drunk man was hanging on my every word. I could see that he was about to cry.

"Just ask them if they have a phone charger," I said. "They probably do."

He didn't apologize for anything, but he did as I said. I collected my burgers. I sat down in the darkest corner of the restaurant. The police showed up a few minutes later, and they helped fix up the drunk man's phone. I ate my burgers. And I left. Outside, it was cold and damp and raining just enough to freezerburn my bones. And that was when I decided to leave Nanchong for a while.

Happy New Year Every Day

I am finicky about music and literature, but when it comes to the visual arts, I am no more cultured than Joe The Plumber or Larry The Cable Guy or Liu Bao The Octopus Tentacle Vendor.

Like most men, I have endured my share of art gallery dates. And like most men, I felt compelled by the female anchored to my elbow to say something rather than nothing about the artwork on display. And so from time to time I have found myself waxing dilettante on "texture" and "depth" and "perspective" - things I knew nothing about then, and have persisted in knowing nothing about ever since. For one thing, visual art, like hockey, has never appealed to me as much as I feel like it ought to have. For another thing, I'm colorblind.

But there was one painting in particular that enchanted me, once upon a time. Naturally, it was black and white. A sketch, if you will. I discovered it during my senior year of college, in someone else's art history book. I have since forgotten who sketched the sketch, or whether the name of the sketcher/sketchist was ever known in the first place. I cannot, for the life of me, find the sketch anywhere. I have been googling the words "monochromatic medieval shitshow" for the better part of a decade, to no avail. So I can only remember the sketch. And I remember it sketchily, if you will.

The sketch hailed from the medieval days of yore, and was included in my friend's art history textbook by way of illustrating how texture and perspective and depth and what have you have evolved in the centuries since aforementioned medieval days of yore. The sketch was of a medieval village. A medieval village of, like, yore. The village was spread out across the canvas in two dimensions, roadmapwise, totally flat. No main characters, no depth, no one thing to focus on. An 11th Century Where's Waldo, minus Waldo. If the sketch had any perspective at all, it was that of a one-eyed helicopter pilot flying over the lowly fiefdom of Oafsville, England - A.D. 1043.

As I remember it: a couple of dudes in feathered caps jousting on horseback. A child chasing a pig. A man swordfighting a cloth dummy. The town drunk incapacitated, X's on his eyes, a toppled jug of ale at his side. A blacksmith doing blacksmithy things. A carpenter doing carpenter-like things. Nine ladies dancing. Eight maids a-milking. And one particularly jovial lord a-leaping, suspended in midair for all artistic eternity.

I appreciated the sketch mostly for reasons of camp. How quaint. How cute. How feudal. But it wasn't until my first New Year's in Chicago that I was able to make a metaphor out of it. If it was a metaphor that I in fact made. At any rate, it wasn't until New Year's 2007 that I was able to see a city in two dimensions, in black and white, from a great height, from a helicopter, in feudalistic terms.

I suffered somewhat en route to my arrival at the promised metaphor. The afternoon of my New Year's Eve in Chicago, my lady friend and I got lost in the Northwest Suburbs just as an apocalyptic Great Lakes snowstorm set in. When we first set off on our little stroll, it was cool and clear. An unsuspecting afternoon in the upper middle class projects. Then, within minutes, it was snowing so heavily that we couldn't see where we were walking. A blizzard. We blundered our way into a German graveyard and amused ourselves for a short time, brushing the snow off of tombstones, mispronouncing the names and speculating on the lives those people lived. But that got old fast, given the temperature. My Converse All-Stars were soaked through and frozen solid. So we tried to wander back to my friend Jeff's apartment, from whence we had come. But we succeeded only in sinking deeper and deeper into the morass of Midwestern suburbia. The Home Alonesque homes started to look like German tombstones. We had lost our way. We didn't dare to ask anyone to let us in. In accordance with the rules of Midwestern hospitality, we would gladly freeze to death in the gutters of the fruitily named parkways and boulevards of Mount Prospect before we stooped so low as to ask anyone for help.

We finally found refuge beneath the heat vent of an elementary school. The lukewarm mist reeked of corndogs and turkey ala king, but it was enough to sustain us for an hour or so. After an hour or so, I remembered that I owned a cell phone. So I called Jeff. Where are you, he asked. I have no idea, I said. Under a heat vent somewhere, I said. It smells like corndogs, I said. Not enough information, he said. So I left behind lady friend and deep fat fried warmth of heat vent and I cross country skied to the nearest street sign.

"Apparently, we are at the intersection of Willie Street ... and Memory Lane," I said.
"You're fucking with me," came Jeff's eventual reply.
"No," I said, "I shit you not. We are dying. On Memory Lane. And Willie Street."

Jeff, bless his recently Mormonized heart, Mapquested it. He pulled his Honda up to the intersection of Willie and Memory, just as the Chicago Public School district's underground supply of vaporized lard was running out. My lady friend and I sprinted through the snow. She made it to the car alright. But I stumbled over the kerb and slid for five-odd yards, tearing my corduroy suit coat to shit in the process. When I got in the back of Jeff's car, I was bleeding profusely from both lovehandles, but laughing, laughing - laughing at myself, laughing at the absurdity of it all, laughing even as I shivered away the last calories I had left in me. But I had paid two dollars for that suit coat and had worn it for a year consecutively, and I couldn't help but feel that part of me (the better part of me) had died with the death of that suit coat.

When we got back to Jeff's apartment, warmth was the thing. My lady friend took a shower, as that was the warmest place available. I trembled around the living room and made short work of a pair of White Russians. Then I took a shower. My toes burned as they thawed. I wept and bellowed with the burning. Jeff had to feed me a tallboy of Guinness through the shower curtain just to get me through the showering process. But when it was over, I felt ready to brave the cold again. I was young then. I braved cold then. Everyone pitched in to clamp my suit coat together with heavy duty Office Depot binder clips. And in that sorry state, I went downtown.

We went to a bar but couldn't afford to drink our way into New Year's 2007. So I was able to observe, somewhat objectively, Chicago on its worst behavior. I went out to the street shortly after the kazoos went off. I wasn't yet a smoker, so I just stood there watching. Here was Chicago. The Year of Our Lord, 2007. Happy New Year. Everyone seemed to be puking or slipping on puke. Twentysomething girls high-heeling it through piles of puke, stumbling, puking, stumbling through their own puke, skirts hiked up to expose gartered thighs, skirts unzipped to reveal tramp stampage. Puking. Stumbling through piles of puke. Throwing themselves unsuccessfully into taxis. Amateur frat boy rapists trying to scoop them up and throw them into taxis of their own design. Meanwhile: howling winds, swirling snow. Meanwhile: winos raging, hobos raving. It felt very much like the end of the world.

And there I was, soberly drunk, standing on the corner of Thompson and Grand with a road beer in hand, puzzled by the scene. Country boy Nebraskan that I am, I had heard of the apocalypse in scripture, but I had never seen it played out in reality. I was puzzled by the end of the world. Who knew it would look like this? Who knew there would be so many tramp stamps? And I was fascinated by it, just as I had been by that medieval sketch. I could only stand there and sip from my road beer and marvel. All I could think was, this is happening all over town. All over Chicago. All over America. All over the world, for all I knew. Everyone was puking. Slipping on puke. Throwing themselves into taxis. Jousting on horseback. Chasing pigs. Swordfighting with cloth dummies. Oafs. Serfs. The fiefdom of Chicago. For a moment, I could see the city of Chicago from a helicopter, from a thousand feet up - and from that perspective, it was a glorious first-world medieval shitshow, indeed.

I have made efforts to get myself to the nearest available megalopolis, the nearest available shitshow every New Year's since. I went to Seoul for New Year's 2008. I went to Chongqing last year, and I went to Chongqing this year. It's that top-down two-dimensional black and white perspective I'm interested in. I want to see an entire city on its worst behavior. I want to see the rapture reenacted time and time again, and I want to revel in the morning after, the waking up next to some strange woman, the knowing that we have survived it together, whoever she is. Whoever I am.

This year, I caught a black taxi to Chongqing on December the 31st. Not surprisingly, I had lazed around the apartment so long that, with luck, I would make it to Chongqing just in the nick of the new year. I made a couple phone calls and it was clear that some amount of catching up was in order, so I slipped a little something into my iced tea. I had hoped that nobody in the cab would notice. As it happened, the old dudes crammed into the backseat with me caught wind, and they wanted a swig. So we made merry in backwoods Mandarin until we fell asleep. And by the time I was deposited at whichever Chongqing Normal School I was bound for, my fellow passengers were still comatose and I was sober as a priest. Nay, sober as a Shaolin monk.

What followed doesn't warrant much description. Americans. Embraces. Fist pounds. A countdown. Smooches. There was a dog at the party. Somebody spilled beer on it. A kerfuffle ensued. But who cares? The new year cometh, cameth, had comethed, offering misbegotten promises of good behavior. 2011. The Year of the Rabbit. A year in which no one will deliberately spill beer upon dogs.

Somebody decided that we should go to The Club. I loathe The Club. I have never had a good time at The Club, not since I was young enough to be excited about getting into The Club. But everyone loves The Club for some reason. So we went. And predictably, we had a miserable time. It was crowded and sweaty, stuffy, short of oxygen. It was too loud to talk. I stumbled in and checked my coat. Two minutes later, I stumbled back out and unchecked my coat. Then I went down to the nearest shish-kebab vendor, bought a couple cans of beer, and walked back up to the balcony of The Club so I could watch the new year unfold from a somewhat great height, all of forty feet up, and I slouched there brooding and sipping canned formaldehyde from my perch overlooking the intersection of whatever and whatever streets. Shitshow Avenue and Memory Lane.

I tried to conjure up the usual Year In Review montages. 2010. The Year of the Panda. The year in which certain individuals deliberately spilled beer upon dogs. A year never to be repeated. But aside from that poor dog, I couldn't really remember anything about 2010. I didn't feel a thing about it. It was a year. My twenty-seventh on earth. I was happy to be rid of it. What a shitty attitude to take, I thought. You'll be standing on some balcony in 2011 thinking the same exact thing, I thought. What a shitty attitude to take. And I stood there for a minute, or perhaps an hour, slouched over the balcony, nursing a clandestine two kuai can of beer on the doorstep of a place that sold the same shit for twenty, and I kind of spaced out and murmured bad words to myself. Until a fight broke out in the streets below. With the first punch, I suppose, 2011 began.

There was a pudgy African fellow standing right in the middle of Shitshow Avenue. A Chinese man was punching him in the face. The African was trying to shield the blows, but already a crowd had gathered and several other Chinese men had started punching him, too. Before I could even process what was happening, a horde of people had enveloped the African man. A perfect storm of human beings. And at the eye of the storm: a pudgy African dude, and whichever Chinese dudes felt like taking a shot at him. The African fellow was not fighting back. He was trying to deflect the blows, but he was not succeeding. His assailants were not the same people involved in the initial scrum. They were drunk Chinese men, passersby who happened to be passing by, young men who were bored and drunk and down for punching a black man in the face, secure in the knowledge that all of Chinese Chongqing had their back. Happy New Year.

I have no idea what the African fellow did to deserve being mauled by the biggest city on earth. My Chinese intuition tells me that he must have done something to incur its wrath. Foreigners are stared at in this part of the country, they are heckled and they are cheated on cab fares, but they are seldom beaten down in the streets. So the man must have done something. Nevertheless, watching all of Chongqing gather around a public lynching was frightening. And the violence wasn't the most frightening part. The indifference. The amusement. I suppose the amusement was what disturbed me the most. It was a spectacle. It was an event. The beating dragged on so long that somebody could have sold tickets. People would've bought them. And somebody would have scalped those tickets. And so on. It went on for ten minutes. This African dude was punched in the face for ten minutes. He didn't or couldn't defend himself. And as a Peace Corps volunteer, I could do nothing but watch. Watch and stifle my vomit. Watch as the African man was pummeled in the face by random Chinese adversaries for ten minutes. Watch as he was finally thrown into the back of a police golf cart. Watch as the masses threw a last couple punches for good measure. Watch as the golf cart puttered its constipated way through the crowd. Watch as the man was pelted with beer bottles and half-eaten food. Watch and mutter bad words to myself, watch and then decide to go get myself a couple more road beers. Happy New Year.

Later – so much later that it felt like a new year altogether – we left The Club and made our way to McDonald's. I had a road beer tucked away in my jacket. I had just bought a pack of cigarettes, but upon entering Mickey D's, I was convinced that I needed another pack of cigarettes to get me through the two quarter-pounders I'd just ordered. So I wandered off to the nearest Chongqing Police outpost and asked them where I could buy cigarettes. They gave me a cigarette, then argued briefly about the proximity of the nearest cigarette vendor. By then, I had discovered the bundle in my butt pocket and realized that the whole venture was absurd: I already had cigarettes. But by then, a random Chinese drunk had stolen my road beer.

"No," I said in Chinese, "that's mine."

What he said back to me was unintelligible. But he held fast onto my beer and he swaggered away. Justice swelled in my gut. We were standing in front of a police outpost. I had had a beer. I no longer had a beer. It had been stolen from me by a man who clearly had plenty enough beer in his system. I wouldn't stand for it. I snatched my beer back from him and said, no. The beer is mine.

So he grabbed my arm, zoomed in on my hand, and with impeccable precision, set about twisting my pinkie finger. I could hear the ligaments groaning. I yelped, anticipating in that instant the fateful pop of broken bone. I shoved the drunk away, kicked him lightly in the ass, and rattled off some Chinese obscenities that I am somewhat proud of in retrospect. The man charged towards me, fists of fury a-flailing. He was subdued by the Chongqing Police. Then he was kicked and punched and thoroughly beaten by the Chongqing Police, right there in the street. A crowd gathered around to watch. I walked away very quickly. I went to the nearest cigarette shop, though I didn't need to buy any cigarettes. I just kinda asked the cigarette vendor how she was doing and walked back to McDonald's with my hard-fought road beer in hand and my tail between my legs. I felt bad about the whole thing at the time, and I feel bad about it in retrospect. A police beating, all because I went out for cigarettes I didn't need – a scrum over a road beer I probably didn't need, either.

Oh, well. I suppose that sometime in the distant future, medieval art will become en vogue again. Some post-postmodern sketch artist will sit down to tackle feudal Chongqing. And I will be trapped in charcoal amber, suspended on a canvas for all artistic eternity, road beer firmly in hand, X's on my eyes, a Chinese wino bending my pinkie finger to the breaking point, X's on his eyes, two police officers in full sprint, truncheons in mid-swing – and across town, across the canvas: a black-bearded foreigner pouring a full can of beer on a gorgeous chocolate lab - and yet further across the canvas, a black man being wailed on by hordes of Chinese men, rotten vegetables cascading through the air, hundreds of onlookers smiling and watching – and even further across the canvas, a young American hobo with a backpack and a daydream, a hobo who came to Chongqing for New Year's with a daydream and a backpack and a Z Visa, a hobo who won't realize what he's gotten himself into until a good year or so down the road.

Harmony Corps

Dear Family and Friends,

It has been a long time since I have written, and for that I am sorry. But between work, my host family (the Gustafsons), and life in the exotic frontier town of Omaha, my rice bowl is pretty full these days.

The Gustafsons are nice enough people and I really enjoy teaching at Metro Community College. But everything is so different here. It is not at all like Our China. After two full months in the Harmony Corps, I still haven't gotten used to life in the United States of America.

There is too much space and not enough people. The other day, I went to a supermarket called "Hy-Vee" and there was nobody there. It was just me and my shopping cart. I could hear the fluorescent lights humming. There was this scary music playing softly in the background. Everything was bright and clean. The fish was all prepackaged. The vegetables looked seriously ill. I couldn't find the ku-gua or the hua-jiao or the jiang. I found an employee and tried to describe what I wanted with my hands. She gave me a bushel of black bananas and something called a diaphragm. My Chinese-English dictionary tells me it is the muscle underneath your ribcage, but that is not what it looks like to me.

It's too quiet here. I can never wake up on time because the construction doesn't start until 10 AM. I can't sleep at night because there are these strange American bugs making noises outside. I asked Mr. Gustafson what the bugs were but he couldn't hear what I was talking about.

Americans are friendly. They don't stare at me or shout at me the way that people used to stare and shout at Mr. Panda. (I will have to ask him about that when I return.) But they don't really notice me, either. I am invisible here. Everyone smiles at me when I talk to them. And they like to talk a lot, mostly about the weather. But they all seem to be trying their best to hide some sort of mental illness. And some of them don't really hide it all that well.

Let me introduce my host family. Mr. Gustafson is very fat, even fatter than Second Uncle Liu. He is the size of two Second Uncle Lius. I asked Mr. Gustafson what kind of work he did and he tried to explain it to me, but I didn't understand. So we looked up the words in the dictionary together. There were six or seven words in his job title, and I knew them, but when we put them all together I still had no idea what he did.

"To be honest," I said, "I still have no idea what you do."
"None of us do, darling," he said. "None of us do."

Unlike Mr. Gustafson, Mrs. Gustafson is very thin. And unlike most American women, I don't think she has a job. When Mr. Gustafson is home, she follows him around with a broom and dustpan, sweeping up his crumbs. She does not like doing this. She never talks to Mr. Gustafson and he never talks to her, except to argue. One time I asked Mrs. Gustafson if she loved Mr. Gustafson and she laughed for a long time. Then she looked sad for a moment. Then she patted me on the head like a child. In the afternoon, when Mr. Gustafson is at work, doing whatever it is that he does, Mrs. Gustafson sits in the living room watching television. She watches soap operas, but she calls them her "stories." She drinks wine, but she calls it her "medicine." She also likes to smoke cigarettes. I sometimes fear that my own host mother is a woman of ill repute.

The Gustafsons have a son. His name is Kyle. I cannot tell how old he is. My host dad tells me that Kyle still wets the bed, which is strange to me, because Kyle has more facial hair than Grandpa Wang. He has more facial hair than two Grandpa Wangs. Kyle likes to wear silk shirts with dragons on them. Or maybe it is just one silk shirt with a dragon on it that he wears every day. He is very fat like his father. One time I asked Kyle why he wasn't married and he looked at me in a funny way. So I tried again and asked him why he didn't live in his own apartment like most American adults. He didn't want to talk about it. He got angry. He went to his room and slammed the door behind him. But he came back out a couple minutes later and sat down at the edge of my bed, and he watched me study English for a very long time.

The Gustafsons have a dog. Mr. Gustafson told me that it was a type of dog called a "rottweiler." The dog's name is Rascal. Rascal doesn't like me. He doesn't seem to like anybody, not even Mr. Gustafson. Rascal especially does not like Kyle Gustafson. I asked Mr. Gustafson why they owned such an unfriendly dog and Mr. Gustafson said, "protection."

"But what about all those guns you have?" I asked. "The ones in the attic."
"Protection," he said.
"Protection from whom?"
"From the bad guys," he said.
"But this neighborhood feels very safe," I said.
"Not anymore it ain't," he said. "Don't get me wrong. You're welcome here. The Chinese are welcome here. We're business partners." He brightened a bit, then darkened again. "But some people just ... ain't welcome."
Then he got quiet and drank from a very small glass and looked out the window for a long time.

I am very happy to know that I am welcome here in America.

I teach Mandarin Chinese at Metro Community College. My students are not like Chinese students at all. Many of them remind me of Kyle Gustafson: very fat, with dragon shirts. They never do their homework. They are almost always late. Some of them have never shown up for class at all. They are just names to me. A few of them don't seem to know where they are when they do show up to class. They keep looking around the room like, where am I? They ask me questions about Bruce Lee, and a lot of questions about Chinese politics that make me uncomfortable. None of them are very good at memorizing new vocabulary words.

But the girls in my class are friendly. They invite me to go out with them on the weekends. They call me "girlfriend" when we go out together. They like teaching me new words and they laugh whenever I say them. Last Friday, they took me to a city called Council Bluffs. Council Bluffs is located in the province next to Nebraska, a place they call Iowa. It was my first time in Iowa, and I never want to go there ever again.

The American word for KTV is "karaoke." But karaoke is not the same as KTV. As we all know, in Our China, we sing KTV with our very best friends, in a cozy little room, and we can stay there in that room singing as many songs as we want to sing. But in America, there are "karaoke bars," where you have to sing for people you don't even know, and you only get to sing one song.

My girlfriends really wanted me to sing, so I did. I asked the DJ if he had Di Yi Ge Qing Chen and he looked at me funny. So I asked if he had Jie Bu Dao. He shook his head. So I asked if he had Na Nu Hai Dui Wo Shuo and he said, "Sorry honey, but you're gonna have to speak American."

So I decided to sing "Take Me Home Country Road" by John Denver, the only English song I know. I did a good job, I thought, but everyone laughed at me. Probably because my English is so poor. My girlfriends were laughing, too, but they clapped for me when I sat down. Then they made me drink something they called "Jaeger." It tasted the way Mrs. Gustafson's medicine smells. Then my girlfriends asked me if I wanted to smoke.

"I don't smoke," I said.
"No," they said. "Smoke."

We went outside to the parking lot. It was very cold out there. It was snowing, in fact. Britney, one of the girls, lit a cigarette and passed it to the girl on her left hand side. Eventually, it came around to me. I didn't want to smoke it, but everyone told me that I had better smoke it. So I did. Everyone laughed when I smoked it. I don't know why. And I don't really remember what happened after that. I remember I started laughing at everything, even things that I didn't understand. I must have been very drunk. My girlfriends made me say dirty words and that made them laugh until they could no longer breathe. Then I got really hungry. My girlfriends took me to a local restaurant called "Taco Bell," and even though I don't really like Iowa Province, I have to say that Taco Bell is a really wonderful place. Sorry, mother, but it was probably the best meal I have ever had in my life.

Then we went to Britney's boyfriend's house. He lives there all by himself, with three dogs that are even meaner than Rascal. My girlfriends all smoked homemade cigarettes with him. They offered me one, but I said no thanks this time. Britney's boyfriend is named Dwayne. My girlfriends laughed at everything he said, and I think I understood him, but he didn't seem all that funny. In fact, he was kind of scary. His eyes were yellow. He was talking really fast and twitching all over the whole time. Then he would get quiet and look at Britney and they would go into the bathroom together. They would come back out a few minutes later and Britney would be twitching while Dwayne looked almost normal. But then he would start twitching again. So they would go back into the bathroom. This went on for a while, until finally Britney said something that got Dwayne so angry that he started calling Britney a lot of the words that she makes me say to make her laugh. He kicked one of his dogs in the ribs and went to his room. I told Britney that I had English class in the morning and I had to go. She wanted to stay. I needed to get home. The Gustafsons were worried about me, I said. I told her that I would get a taxi. She gave me a strange look. Something shattered in Dwayne's room and a dog came running out. There are no taxis in Council Bluffs, she said.

Yesterday I made some new friends. Or I tried to, anyway. They came right up to the Gustafsons' house and rang the doorbell. They were two nice looking young men dressed in suits, and they had a lot of books with them. They were students, I guess. They introduced themselves as Elder Micah and Elder Levi, though they didn't look all that old to me. They wanted to come in so I let them in. They sat down in the living room and I went to get them some tea, but they said they couldn't drink tea. So I sat down on the sofa across from them.

They asked me how I was doing and I said fine, thank you, and you? They said "good" in a way that really made me believe that they were doing pretty good. Then they asked me if I had been saved. I told them that yes, I felt pretty safe in the Gustafson household. I told them about the bad guys outside and I told them about Rascal, who even then I could hear trying to rip the basement door off its hinges. I told them about all the guns that Mr. Gustafson kept in the attic. They laughed a little and said, no, not safe. Saved. What's the difference, I asked.

They wanted to know where I was from and I told them "Nanchong" and asked them if they had heard of my hometown. They told me that no, they had never heard of it. They wanted to know what country I was from, and I told them "China." They were very interested in China.

"Do you have churches where you live?" they asked.
"Yes," I said. And I told them about the monastery on the West Mountain, and The People's Catholic Church down the street from our house.
"Do you go to church?"
"No, I have never been to the church," I said. "Do you go to church?"
They laughed a little and said that yes, of course they went to church. They asked me if I believed in God.
"I believe in science," I told them, "and I believe in the heroes of the People."
They nodded. This seemed to make sense to them.
"We like science, too. As a matter of fact, Elder Micah over here majored in physics at Bi-Wai-Yu." They laughed, so I laughed too. "Which heroes of the People do you believe in?"
"I believe in Chairman Mao," I said, "and Deng Xiao Ping, who grew up in Guang-an, which is only 45 minutes by bus from my hometown!"

They were unimpressed. They were still smiling, but they were nervous smiles that they wore. I must have said something wrong. They gave me a big black book and told me to read the first page. I tried my best. The writing was like Shakespeare, but not as pretty. I told them that my English was poor and that I couldn't really understand the words. So they started telling me a story about a nice man named Joe who lived in America long, long ago - back when there used to be Indians. They told me all about this Joe and how he did all these nice things for me before I was even born. It was a strange story, but an interesting one, and I was just beginning to make sense out of it when Mrs. Gustafson came into the room.

"Lily," she said to me, "who the fuck are these people and why are they in our living room?"

I could tell she'd had her medicine. The two young men seemed to recognize her. They got up off the couch and started towards the door. She grabbed Elder Levi by the collar of his blazer.

"What did I tell you? What did I tell you about coming to my house?"

The young men were apologizing and backing away. Mrs. Gustafson seemed to be looking around for a weapon, but the guns were upstairs in the attic. Rascal started barking up a storm. Then, something in Mrs. Gustafson's eyes seemed to click. She went over to the basement door and threw it open.

Elders Micah and Levi ran squealing out into the street. The screen door slammed shut behind them just in time. Rascal smashed his face against the window and barked so hard that he fogged up the glass. Then, after he'd worn himself out, Mrs. Gustafson kneeled down, hugged Rascal around the neck, and scratched him behind the ears.

"Good boy," she said. "Gooood boy."
Rascal growled.
"Mrs. Gustafson," I said, "who were those young men? Were they the bad guys?"
"No, Lily," she said. "They're just Morons."
Which I guess is a kind of American religion.

As if I'm not busy enough, I have to do something called a "secondary project." So I have been volunteering at the Omaha Zoo. It's a nice zoo. Very big, with lots of animals. But they don't have any pandas. What a pity. (There are some American pandas that live on our back porch. Mr. Gustafson calls them "fucking coons." Fucking Coons are like pandas, but much smaller, much dirtier, and not as friendly. Fucking Coons eat garbage instead of bamboo. Mr. Gustafson catches them in traps he builds himself and I'm not sure what he does with the Fucking Coons after that.)

Anyway, volunteering at the zoo isn't as fun as it sounds. I told the people in the employment office that I wanted to volunteer and they said okay. I told them I wanted to work with animals. And in a way, I guess I do. I work at a concession stand.

Earlier I said that Americans are friendly. But really, they are only friendly when they are well-fed. The Americans I serve at the Sea Lion Concession Stand are even meaner than Third Uncle Zhang when he drinks. I never seem to do anything right. I can't seem to put enough cheese on anything. Everything is too hot, or too cold. Or it's too spicy. My English is so poor that nobody understands me and I don't understand them. One fat old man got so angry with me when I gave him a Mr. Pibb instead of a Dr. Pepper that I thought he would have a heart attack. Then he did have a heart attack. Now there is something called a "lawsuit" pending in court, but Mr. Gustafson's lawyer tells me I can plead "diplomatic immunity." Mr. Gustafson and I looked up the words in the dictionary together and I understood them both, but I still don't know what they mean put together.

Today, Kyle lifted up his shirt to show me his tattoo, which he called a "tatt." (Maybe this is local Nebraskan dialect. I will ask my students tomorrow.) Oddly enough, it was a Chinese tattoo. He asked if I knew what it meant and I said no. He told me that it meant "virility." I didn't tell him it meant "duck penis." Then he told me that he had some bad news. He started looking like he was about to cry. I asked him if he was okay and he said no. He told me that he was very sick.

"Do your mom and dad know?" I asked.
"Nobody knows," he said. "Except me. And now you, I guess."
"What's wrong?"
"I'm afraid it's – " He sniffled. "It's – yellow fever."
"Oh my God. Is it serious?" I asked.
He nodded.
"Oh, yes. Very serious."
"Are you dying?"
"Every day I die a little more," he said, and put his hand on his heart. And I noticed for the first time that his silk dragon shirt was unbuttoned halfway, and that unlike most American men (and some American women), Kyle had no chest hair.
"It is winter," I said. "You should wear more clothes."
He seemed embarrassed.
"Yeah, I guess I should."

He went back to his room and shut the door. I stayed up studying English, and the light under his door was on all night. I have no idea what he does in there all by himself. He is always in his room by himself, making little noises. Anyway, I'm worried about Kyle. I looked up yellow fever on Baidu, and it says that if he doesn't get medical help, he could die in as soon as three hours.

I should go. Mrs. Gustafson wants to have "Girl Talk" again, which is something we do every Tuesday afternoon. Girl Talk is usually just her talking and smoking a lot of cigarettes and taking a lot of medicine and crying a little at her stories and then crying a lot in my lap about things I don't understand. She is not a girl and I don't really get to talk. So why do we call it Girl Talk? I don't understand that, either. I guess it is just another part of American Culture. I have so much left to learn.

Happy Every Day,
- Li Li

On and Off the Road to Neijiang

Masculine idiocy has a way of disguising itself as pragmatism. Practicality. Common sense: the voice of the testes. It works sometimes. Other times, it self-destructs. The same rationality that invented the calculus drives a man to reduce a malfunctioning can opener to a battered heap of scrap metal.

But as long as idiocy remains incubated there in the masculine mind, it is both safe and harmless. No one will bother it in its cave. In its cave, it will bother no one. It is mere bullshit introspection at this point: it has not yet been beshatted. There is no way to detect an idiotic manthought until it is fully digested by the manbrain and excreted out the manmouth, at which point the outside world exacts its swift and unforgiving judgment, usually in the form of a kick to the crotch, the very origin of the bullshit manthought in the first place.

My sitemates and I decided to go to Neijiang for Thanksgiving. The two of them went about the planning process in their own effeminately reasonable ways - consulted students, looked up ticket prices online, weighed the pros and cons of various modes of transportation - while I nourished my inner Jew reading Portnoy's Complaint and otherwise whiled away the week flatulating and scratching my junk around the apartment up until the day before departure, when I was suddenly assailed by my usual wave of pre-departure panic.

I happened to run into Meghan that afternoon. For her and Christy, the jury was still out. They weren't sure which bus to take. Their students had presented them with a travel dilemma that I, in my infinite masculine wisdom, decided to resolve.

"Our students told us that the direct bus to Neijiang takes six to eight hours," said Meghan, "but they said that if we go to Chengdu first, then catch a bus to Neijiang, it only takes four."
"Students schmudents," I said.
I observed that Neijiang was only 240 kilometers away, and that it was impossible that the direct bus would take eight hours. Heck, I said, with all the running around you'd have to do in Chengdu – catching taxis, buying more bus tickets, waiting in line - with that whole rigmarole, I bet it would take eight hours from Chengdu.
"Yeah," said Meghan, a bit warily, "You've been here longer than I have. I guess you're probably right."

The next morning, Meghan and Christy sallied forth at daybreak. I loafed around the apartment eating cereal, waiting for my jeans to dry.

I made it to the bus station at 11:45 and had the good fortune of winning Seat #2 on the 11:50 direct bus to Neijiang. Seat #2 gave me a panoramic view of the road, as well as a direct line to the bus driver in brokering pit stops for my hyperactive bladder. I was the bus driver's right-hand man. His co-pilot. The Andy Richter to his Conan. Sitting in Seat #2 meant that I was hidden from the gawping crowds in the middle and rear of the bus – if I played my cards right, no one would ever know there had been a laowai on board. Aside from the bus driver. And my neighbor, a college coed. A smitingly gorgeous college coed, I might add. This meant that I wouldn't muster the courage to talk to her. Which meant I could get some reading done.

My neighbor stuffed her shopping bags under the seat and sat down rigid and slouchless next to me with her hands on her knees. Then she leaned forward and asked the driver how long the drive would be.

"Depends," he said.
"Depends on what?"
"Luck."

We sailed away. The bus merged onto the highway. NEIJIANG - 240 km. Already, I was beginning to question the merits of Seat #2. For one thing, the floor was movie theatre sticky and the air was swimming with fruit flies. For another, the only loudspeaker on the entire bus was bolted to the wall directly above my head – and it should come as a surprise to no one that the Chinese like their in-flight entertainments loud.

My neighbor was uninterested in talking to me. So uninterested, in fact, that she quickly zonked out into one of those mouth-open, slobbering-everywhere slumbers. Which looked nice. I tried to zonk myself out as well. But I could neither sleep nor read nor write nor think, what with the fruit flies and the squawking loudspeaker. Then, as we left the highway for a shitty gritty two-lane road, there was death via vehicular manslaughter to consider.

The panorama view from Seat #2 was suddenly a curse. Blasting towards oncoming traffic at a combined velocity of 120 miles per hour terrifies me, as I figure it ought to terrify anyone, but I'm the type of guy who can't take his eyes off the onrushing headlights. On road trips in the developing world, I cannot help but stare my own mortality in the grille. Reading was out of the question; Portnoy's Complaint turned colder than a frozen latke in my lap. I sat there in a cloud of fruit flies, sweating, feet stuck to the floor, calculating the space between the tip of my nose and the mirrors of each and every semi-truck that typhooned past. Twelve inches. Six inches. Three inches. Just the widowpane. The road narrowed from two lanes to one, and after a while, even the one lane was debatable. A notional lane. A platonic ideal that no one had gotten around to building. Smelling fear, the fruit flies mounted an offensive on my scalp. They were sluggish and out of season, but they had strength in numbers.

But even death grew boring after a while. Gradually, my mind drifted around to the in-flight entertainment, a piece of VHS junk called The Little Princes. The protagonists – who else but The Little Princes? – were a trio of ten year old kung fu fighting brothers. Caught between the adorability of childhood and the depravity of puberty, The Little Princes seized upon a little bit of both for their own distinctly Chinese charm. They were cheeky and misguided. They were lecherous creeps. They were not altogether likeable. But they beat the shit out of everybody.

My favorite scene took place in an optometrist's office. American optometrists are generally soft-spoken Jewish men. But the Chinese archetype of the optometrist is different. It is a feminine archetype, an unusually busty archetype, and one that is dripping with sexuality. Or so I gathered from my bus screening of The Little Princes.

Optometrist: Read the first line, please.
Little Prince #3: L … R … Q … O.
Optometrist: Very good. Second line.
Little Prince #3: W … A … L … V.
Optometrist: Excellent. Bottom line.
Little Prince #3: Optometry Exam Number 54, Copyright 1982, Xiao Wang Printing Company.
[some sort of "baffled" sound effect]
Optometrist: What! You can read that? I can barely read it, and I'm standing right next to the board!
Little Prince #3: Of course I can read it, missy. It's easy with eyesight like mine. They don't call me "Eagle-Eyed Little Prince #3" for nothing! I could read it with my eyes closed.
Optometrist: Well, we'll just see about that! Close your eyes, young man.
[Little Prince #3 shuts eyes]
Optometrist: Now tell me what you see.
[camera zooms in on Optometrist's blouse]
Little Prince #3: The label seems to say … 38-D. Xiao Wang Brassiere Company. What does that mean?
Optometrist: [fainting] Well, I never!

Amidst all the leching and asskicking, there was a song and dance number. Granted, the Little Princes fared much better at leching and asskicking than they did at singing and dancing. But as a critic, I have to say that the soundtrack really held the film together.

We are The Little Princes
We will pursue our enemies to the very ends of the earth
We will banish all opponents to oblivion
We are young and we are mighty
We are The Little Princes
We will handily dispose of the problem

Thirty minutes into The Little Princes and two hours into the bus ride, the sleepless weeks of writing were compressing my eyes into hyphens. Neither death nor 140 decibel fart noises could keep me conscious. I gazed out the window and saw that we were approaching a village that billed itself "The Lemon Paradise of Sichuan." But the fruits on the billboards didn't look like lemons. They were green. They didn't even look like fruits. They appeared to be gourds. I drifted off into a half-sleep and dreamt of Donkey Kong throwing lemonlike gourds at me. I had just reached Level 3 when the bus skidded and swerved and I was jolted awake. Out the window, I could see that we were being chased by peasants, and that the road ahead was blocked by two very large trucks. Pirates? A bus robbery? Terror on the high seas? A hijacking in the Lemon Paradise of Sichuan?

The driver stopped the bus and leaned on his horn. The trucks didn't budge. Briefly, he considered off-roading it into a ravine, which would have killed him and everyone else on board. Then he shut off the engine and got out to parley with the peasants. A few minutes later, he came back and told us that we were going to stop for a while. A few minutes after that, the peasants boarded the bus with crates full of lemon gourds. Almost everyone on the bus bought a lemon gourd, except for me and the smitingly attractive coed next to me, who was still drooling everywhere.

We remained parked there in that weird place for half an hour. It was 3 PM. The sun seemed neither to rise nor to set. It just hung there like a lemon gourd on a string. The sides of the road were strewn with gutted lemon gourd carcasses. I could hear the people in the seats behind me snarfing away, sucking the juicy gourd meat through their teeth. When they were done, they cast the rinds onto the floor of the bus. Ah, yes. Hence the movie theatre stickiness. Hence the fruit flies. I watched the driver smoke a cigarette with the lemon gourd people. I saw him shake hands with everyone, and I could've sworn I saw him pocket a little something for himself.

The lemon gourd trucks parted and we were moving again, but not for very long. Just long enough for the smitingly gorgeous coed to wake up in horror at the sight of a bearded white man next to her. Then she remembered where she was, remembered me, wiped the drool off her chin, and stared at the television, which was playing trashy Russian music videos by then. We were entering a village of even less consequence than the Lemon Paradise of Sichuan and the road had thinned out to a salt and pepper strip of gravel upon which three lanes of traffic were bargaining with each other for death or safe passage. I had a good view of the speedometer and I could see that we were moving along at a steady 80 km/h clip, much too fast for my liking, up until we were stopped outside the Village of Little Consequence, at which point we were moving at about 0 km/h, which is much too slow for anyone's liking.

We were stuck behind a convoy of kerosene tankers. Together, we rumbled into the village like a procession of elephants. The villagers were lauding our arrival, or lampooning it. They walked alongside the bus, chattering and cat-calling and peering into the windows like we were zoo exhibits, something the other passengers were uncomfortable with but I thought was rather ordinary. Our driver grew impatient and tried to pass one of the kerosene tankers, whose captain responded by threatening us with fiery death, swinging so close to the bus that I could've reached out and touched the kerosene tank if I'd opened the window. The bus driver stopped and shut off the engine. We were officially screwed. None of the tankers were moving. There was no way to pass them without killing the entire population of the Village of Little Consequence and ourselves in the process. So we just waited there. And then, amidst the already bountiful absurdity, the capitalized Absurd struck. A four-to-the-floor beat pumped from the bus stereo, and after a brief synth interlude, I heard the six words that no self-respecting gentleman of poor endowment ever wants to hear: don't want no short dick man.

I had heard the song before, three years ago in a club in Hangzhou, but passed it off at the time as just another formaldehyde-induced hallucination. I've since googled the song. Surprise: it's called "Short Dick Man," and it's by a band called 20 Fingers. It is perhaps more fun reading the song than listening to it, unless you happen to be on board a Chinese bus stuck in a village of little consequence. The abridged lyrics are as follows:

don't want no short dick man
eensy weensy teeny weeny
shriveled little short dick man
what in the world is that thing?
do you need some tweezers to put that thing away?
that has got to be the smallest dick
I've ever seen in my whole life
I have ever seen in my whole life
get the fuck out of here
eensy weensy teeny weeny
shriveled little short dick man
isn't that cute? an extra belly button
you need to put your pants back on, honey
don't want no short dick man
pobre, pobrecito
que diablo eso?

I no longer even laugh when these sorts of things happen in China. If I did, I would likely be wack-evacked for giggling in perpetuum. So I just looked around the bus to see whether anyone was wearing the same facial expression that I was, which one of you tech-savvy kids might render like so: >:-O. But no. The people were bobbing their heads to the beat, secure in their magnitude. Here were no short dick men. Here were men of girth and substance. Here were satisfied women. Here were the Chinese. Me, I kind of grimaced and checked my watch and wondered what would end first: our internment in the Village of Little Consequence, or the extended Short Dick Man megamix.

I fired a text message to Meghan.

"How's Neijiang?" I asked.
"We're not there yet," she said.
">:-O, " I typed. "You guys left four hours before me."
"Yeah," she said, "we did."
"Three hours in and I'm stranded in a village," I wrote. "Does it get any better?"
"No," she wrote, "it only gets worse."

I was not encouraged. Neither was the bus driver. So he left the convoy of kerosene tankers and set off down a side street. He rolled down the window to ask a villager whether we could make it through to the highway. The villager nodded emphatically. The peasants gathered around the bus and seemed to be carrying us uphill. They would perhaps one day tell their grandchildren about us. The Bus That Came to the Village of Little Consequence. There was daylight ahead. A through street. A dusty little capillary that would lead us back to the clotted artery to Neijang. We were almost there. And then we came to a series of widely spaced pillars in the middle of the road. The bus driver stopped the bus at the top of the hill. He shut off the engine, got out, and visually measured the breadth of the bus against the space between the pillars.

"We're too big! We won't fit!" he screamed.
Ah. Poetic justice for the Small Bused Man.
The bus driver's peasant Virgil trembled.
"Sorry," said the peasant.
"Sorry? Sorry! We've wasted a half hour. You told me we could get to the highway on your shitty peasant road." Here, the driver spit in the dust. "Fuck you, you fucking cunt."

The driver got back on the bus. He fired up the engine. Fuck you, you fucking cunt. I knew the words. They were some of the first I'd committed to memory, but I had never before heard them used in China. I was shocked and amused, which looks like this: >:-D. The driver put the bus in reverse and we coasted forlornly back down the hill. The villagers gathered around to laugh us off. When we'd returned to the main road, the kerosene tankers were long gone and the road was clear. The driver cursed at his sudden good fortune.

But we weren't free yet. The road ahead wasn't quite busworthy. It wasn't even monster truckworthy. Looking back, I still have no idea how the kerosene tankers made it out of town. The driver stopped the bus and got out to consider the potholes. One of them was deep enough that the driver practically had to spelunk his way down into it. The Chinese words zenme ban popped into my head: what to do? And almost instinctively came the Sichuanese reply: mou fa – nothing can be done.

I have used the following tagline before in writing, but it is not really mine to use. It belongs to Richard Lee of Daegu, South Korea, and it was originally applied to South Korea. But I will borrow it once again – assuming that the namedrop is a sufficient citation – and I will here apply it to China: the land where everything is possible, but nothing is possible.

There is a certain zenlike contradiction to possibilities in China. Or perhaps it is more of a Daoist thing. But the laughably sure things in Chinese life – e.g., that you can get noodles at a noodle restaurant – sometimes turn out to be absolutely, unthinkably impossible. Twice last week I went to restaurants that not only specialized in noodles, but did not in fact sell anything other than noodles. And on both occasions, I was told, "No noodles." Mou fa. Nothing can be done.

And yet, what do the Chinese do when a road is in such disrepair that a busload of 49 people and one laowai appear to be stranded forever in a village of little consequence? Why, they build the road.

Noodles at a noodle restaurant? Impossible. "Short Dick Man" playing on a Chinese bus to nowhere? Possible, even probable if you're stranded on the bus long enough. But building a road, almost from scratch, in order to get a single vehicle back onto the highway was a stretch of the imagination for me, even as I sat there and watched the peasants do it. They scrambled about with wheelbarrows full of ground-up stone. They lugged over massive slabs of concrete. Whatever scraps they could drum up from the construction site across the street, they dumped into the potholes. And one way or another, the potholes were filled and leveled off, and in fifteen minutes flat, the only road out of the Village of Little Consequence had been rebuilt.

The bus driver fired up the engine and we crept slowly forward. Finally, the laughter I'd managed to stifle through twenty minutes of "Short Dick Man" came tumbling out. The peasants were steering the bus forward like it was a taxiing 747. We dropped gently into Divet #1, then rolled up and out of it. Divet #2 gave the TV set a good rattle, but aye, the mizzenmast, she held. Divet #3, the real doozy, the one the peasants filled up with what looked to be birdseed, set the bus a-shimmying, but our fearless pilot clung to the wheel with two iron fists until the front tires at last kissed the somewhat paved road that stretched out ahead of us. The driver gunned it. We were off. My fellow passengers let out a whoop, and the peasants let out a whoop – either because they were happy to have helped us, or because they were happy to be rid of us.

All and all, the bus ride to Neijiang would take seven hours. My sitemates were none too pleased with me when I arrived, but I'd like to think that they derived some satisfaction from the knowledge that karma had indeed given me my well-deserved seven-hour kick to the crotch. And then, suddenly, it was Thanksgiving. And there were forty other laowais to entertain. The masculine idiocy, as it turned out, had only just begun.

The Somewhat Bearable Lightness of Being a Hobo

This year I wanted winter to come and it came. Now I want it to leave. But it won't go away. I know winter will linger well into March. The fog has descended and the fog will remain. And I will write away the next four months of my life in my meat locker of an apartment, with a space heater tilted upward towards the most vital organs I have to offer. I hate winter. Always have. But this year I wanted it to come just the same. I wanted winter to come because it was familiar. Last summer, like all summers, is a blur to me. But I can remember last winter. That memory is comforting to me. I can remember very clearly where I was last year at this time. I remember the fog, how the windows were windows onto nothingness. I remember the cold. I remember breathing fog. I remember me, a spry young 26 year old, writing away those winter months in his meat locker of an apartment, with his space heater tilted upward towards the most vital organs he had to offer. And it comforts me to think that he is me and that I am him, and that we are both waiting for the next big thing, whether it comes or not. Most of all, it comforts me to think about the next big thing.

I spent this past Thanksgiving weekend in Neijiang, a Nanchongesque city some 200 kilometers southwest of Nanchong. After the party, I stowed myself away on a boxcar in the middle of the night and left everything else behind. Like a vagabond calling card, I left behind my hobo satchel, my winter coat, and what little dignity I had left. Most of my earthly possessions remain back there in Neijiang. So I have been parading around Nanchong in autumnal gear – my usual sweater-and-collared-shirt combo – in the foggy depths of Sichuanese winter.

If you go around underdressed in China, people will tell you one of two things. They will compliment you on how healthy you are – voluntarily freezing one's ass off is clearly the mark of a physically robust human being - and they will tell you to put on more clothes. I get this several times a day. You are so healthy! You should put on more clothes! I get it in Chinese, and in English. Ni-de jiankang hen hao! Ni yao duo chuan dianr yifu! You are so healthy. You should put on more clothes. After a while, I get to feeling like a total stud. Or a hooker. A rugged beast of a man. Or a two-bit laowai gigolo. You tell me.

There is nothing I fear more than shopping. I will go shopping with women, because I enjoy the company of women. Who doesn't? But I never go shopping on my own volition, least of all in China. Least of all will I go shoe shopping in China. I've tried it before. I do not have abnormally large feet, not in the West. But my feet are anomalies here in China. Nobody has seen anything like them. Nobody sells shoes my size. Not the Chinese Big & Tall, not the Nanchong Clown College. Nobody. I go out shopping for shoes and wind up feeling like the Elephant Man. Sorry, sir. We don't have your size, sir. It seems you are freakishly disproportioned, sir. Perhaps if you had bound your feet years ago, sir, you wouldn't have this problem, sir.

So I've worn the same shoes for two years now. I own two pairs of shoes. I have worn both pairs for two years. I have my Pumas, which where good as new when I found them at a Goodwill in Omaha two years ago. They fit me perfectly when I bought them for one US dollar. Then I have my pointy-toed dress shoes, which I purchased for a similar fee at a similar thrift store. Both pairs of shoes have fallen to shit over the past few months. The Pumas are unwearable by now. The pointy-toed dress shoes, too, are unwearable, but I wear them anyway, because they are in slightly better shape than the Pumas. And they are dress shoes, after all.

So you can imagine me trolling the frigid, unforgiving streets of Nanchong in my sweater and misaligned collar, unshaven, unshowered, my shoes falling to pieces with each and every step. And perhaps charity is your natural reaction. Somebody get this man a coat. Somebody get this man some shoes, fer chrissakes. But it is really nothing to me. I prefer to troll about in such disarray. I have been doing it for years, and on several continents. Sichuanese winter is not Nebraskan winter, nor is it Polish winter, so I do not fear it. And there is little I enjoy more than a pair of shoes with a history. I was perfectly happy in my dishevelment. The way I saw it, I'd endure the winter until I retrieved my coat from Neijiang. And I'd wear those pointy-toed dress shoes until there was nothing left of them but socks.

My students were not of the same mind. As I was leaving class today – shivering ever so slightly, trailing gnarled strips of leather in my wake – a student approached me, wished me a merry Christmas, and thrust two very large bags into my hands.

"Thank you!" I said.
"It's nothing," she said, and disappeared.

I didn't open my Christmas presents, not right away. I wanted to be surprised. Perhaps my students had given me a book. Or a snow globe. But after a couple of blocks, I couldn't resist. I stopped on the side of the road, opened one of the bags, cleared away the tissue paper and found a shoebox buried underneath. I cracked open the shoebox and saw that there were indeed shoes inside. And in the other bag, beneath the tissue paper, there was a winter coat. And taped to the coat was a card.

"Mr. Panda – You always look so cold! You must be very healthy! You should wear more clothes! And your shoes are death. Let us provide for you. Do not thank us. It is nothing. We just wish you happy every day! Happy Christmas!"

Hmm, I said.

My old shoes carried me to my new favorite restaurant, this dumpy little dive where they serve rice noodles with beef chunks in a delectable MSG broth. I sat and read the card over and over again. I looked at the jacket. I looked at the shoes. I felt an immense amount of Catholic guilt. How to explain to the kids that this is how I live? That crummy shoes and freezing my ass off in winter are simply how I go about life? That the straits I sail in China are really no more dire than the ones I explored in Mexico, or Poland, or Korea, or Omaha? That I am never really comfortable unless I am uncomfortable? How to explain that I am a hobo, that thousand-proof moonshine courses through my vagabond veins, that I care not for luxury unless it's cheap and dripping with irony? How to thank them? I put on the coat. Was it ever warm. I shivered with warmth. I did not put on the shoes, but took them out of their shoebox and compared them to the warped strips of leather bound to my feet. They were exactly the right size. How did my students know I wore size ten and a half shoes? How did they even find size ten and a half shoes? Christ, I said aloud, and I tried to light a cigarette, but the owner of the restaurant swept in and planted one of his own cigarettes in my mouth. He lit it for me. I smoked it. Christ, I said again. This place beats you and it breaks you, then it overwhelms you with kindness. And in the end, you no longer know what to think of the place.

So I sit here in my meat locker of an apartment on a Friday night that has soured into a Saturday morning. I sit here writing, wearing a poofy black down-feather jacket and a pair of perfectly fitted Chinese shoes – half-sneaker, half-dress shoe. I look like J-Lo from the waist up, and like a Chinese vegetable monger from the waist down. I no longer need the space heater. From here on out, I will save energy. I will just wear the jacket. My old shoes sit there in the corner of the room, frowning, decomposing with jealousy. My winter coat sits curled up at the bottom of my hobo satchel in an apartment some 200 kilometers away in Neijiang. Me, I feel as good as new. Younger, in a way, than I have ever felt before. Wiser, perhaps. Dumber, certainly. But still restless, still hungry, still homeless, just another hobo waiting ever so patiently, ever so foolishly for the next big thing to come my way.

Enter the 36 Chambers of Nanchong

So, check it. I have this running repartee with the owner of the inconvenience store on Fly-Infested Restaurant Street. It goes something like this: I walk in and she calls me laowai, so I call her laowai. Then, for whichever customers happen to be present, she explains that I am a laowai to her, and that she is a laowai to me. Though she is Chinese and I am an American, we are both laowais to one another, and we are both okay with that. I introduced this concept to her about a year ago and she has since taken quite a liking to it. So have I, for that matter.

The owner works the counter. She also stocks the shelves. She takes inventory, receives shipments, and all the rest. Her husband just kind of hangs out, watching TV and getting drunk. I don't think he holds much stock in the company. He gets jealous whenever I come in because I tend to hang around for hours at a time, cracking jokes with the missus - or at least he goes through an awful lot of beer when I'm there. I don't mean to provoke him. I'm not attracted to his wife in the least. She is older. Out of my age group. Beyond the reach of my libido. But fellow absurdists are hard to come by in this country. So you make jokes with them when you can, and sometimes they give you free cigarettes in return.

Monday night, while I was wisecracking with the missus, some college kid came up to the counter with a bagful of beer. I asked him what brand the beer belonged to. I'd never seen it before, I said. Just curious, is all.

"Zhe shi wo-de pijiu," he said. This is my beer.
"Well, I figured as much," I said, "but I mean, what brand is it?"
"It's mine. That's the brand. Mine."
"Mine? Hmm. Never heard of it," I said.
"Mine. Look it up."

I nodded and shot a glance at the missus. She mentioned to Lao Douchebag that I was a regular customer, that I spoke half-decent Chinese, that despite my being a laowai, I was a rather charming fellow, all things considered, and so on.

"Whatever. How much is my beer?"

I couldn't resist.

"Wait a minute," I said. "Just making sure. Is that - is that your beer? The beer that you're buying? It's your beer, right? I mean, you didn't really make that clear beforehand. The beer. Is it yours?"
"Yes. It's my beer."
"So it's your beer, is it?"
"Yes. It's mine."
"So it's not mine."
"No. It's not yours. It's mine."
"Good. Good," I said. "Enjoy your beer!"
And I bid him a good night.

Lao D left the shop in a huff, but stood outside watching while I shot the shit with the missus, up until the shop closed and her husband threatened to guillotine me with the garage door.

I bought the cheapest pack of cigarettes available on the Chinese market and slipped out into the night. Lao D was waiting for me.

"Do you want to drink these with me?" he asked.

Well, I thought, here was an unexpected twist. I was just about to punch this kid between the eyes a moment before, and I'm sure he was just about to do the same to me. But now beers were at stake. And we were men. And there was beer. And the kind of guy I am, I wouldn't turn down a beer from Dick Cheney himself. So I accepted the offer. Now it was our beer. Along the walk, his girlfriend joined us, and the three of us went up to Lao D's one-room apartment above the inconvenience store on Fly-Infested Restaurant Street.

"So," I said, assuming a seat on his living room couch, sipping on one of our beers, "what do you do?"
"I'm a kung fu master," he said. "I teach at the university sometimes."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. I studied at Shaolin Temple," he said. "You heard of it?"
"Shaolin," I murmured. "Rings a bell."
"Yeah. Shaolin."
"So you're probably pretty good at this kung fu thing," I offered.
"Yeah. Pretty good, I guess."
"Show me," I said.

He told me to stand against the bed. Then he told me to punch him in the face.

"I'm not sure if I can just - "
"Punch me in the face. Hard as you can."

I couldn't bring myself to do it. Until I remembered the beer transaction. It's my beer. Look it up. Douchebag. I swung as hard as I could.

What happened next, I cannot explain. I found myself on my back with my legs flailing around in the air. I could do nothing but gasp for breath at first. Then I started laughing uncontrollably. He released me and I got back up to my feet.

"Again," I said.
"Okay. Hit me."

I juked around this time, feinted left, feinted right, then lobbed a drunken Irish uppercut at Lao D's lower jaw. Again, I found myself laid out flat on my back, an elbow grinding into my neck and my face smothered into a pillow. I let out a muffled shriek. Master Lao D released me and stood there at the end of the bed, watching disinterestedly while I wriggled like a bug crushed into the carpet. I got back up, thoroughly winded.

"You know," I said, "I mean no offense, but you don't really look that strong. But I guess that's part of your - "
"My windpipe," he said. "Stick your fingers in it."
"No, thanks," I said. "I don't want to kill you."
"Trust me. You won't."
"But - ... I will?"
"You won't."
"You wan't me to put my fingers - in there?"
I drew a circle just under his adam's apple.
"Yes, right in there."

Cringing, I poked at his esophagus. Then I went for broke and shoved two fingers into his neckhole. A network of hidden muscles emerged. They tensed. They flexed. And they clenched. I squealed and withdrew my fingers as from a hot stove.

"Shit!" I said. "How did you do that?"
"I'm a Shaolin master," he said. "That's how I did that."

I stood there massaging my fingers back to life. They had turned purple. Lao D handed me another cigarette. I struggled to hold onto it. He handed me another beer, and I used it to ice my fingers.

"So," I said, "stupid question, but can you levitate at all?"
"A little," he said. "I'm gonna need you to stand up against that wall, though. And hold your arm out. Yeah. Like that."

He backed up into the hallway and I waited while he stretched.

"Don't move your arm," he said. "Hold it up, nice and steady."

He did some calisthenics of the sort that generate fireballs in Street Fighter II. A barely audible thrumming sound seemed to emanate from his gut. He squatted slightly, like in Super Mario 2 when you want to jump really high. He focused on an object in the far-off distance. By then, I was fully expecting the impossible.

Instead, he just kind of hopped. And landed. Well short of my arm.

"Sorry," he said. "I can't levitate right now. These khakis are too tight. And I can't take them off because my girlfriend is here."
"That's alright," I said. "That was about three feet higher than I can levitate. On a good day."
"Maybe I can levitate for you next time."
"Yeah," I said. "I'd like that."

Alas, alack: the Shaolin master scoffs at gravity, spits upon the very laws of physics, but is humbled by bootleg Dockers and prudish ladyfriends.

"How long have you been doing the kung fu thing?" I asked.
"Started training at Shaolin when I was two."
"Two. Years. Old?"
"Two years old."
"So did you beat the shit out of five year olds when you were two?"
"No," he said, "but I could probably beat up five year olds now."
"Yeah," I said.

I massaged my wrist. Those two tumbles he'd given me had really aggravated my Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. I wondered if I would ever type again.

Lao D's girlfriend had been sitting in the corner the whole time, silently watching her boyfriend kick the ever-loving sand out of the hobo he'd brought home.
"Are you a kung fu master, too?" I asked her.
"Oh, no," she said. "I just work at Zhang Fei Beef. Have you heard of it?"
"Of course," I said. "Very famous."
"Do you want some?"
She produced a large plastic bag and opened it at my feet. She reached in and took something out. Beef, I figured. She gave it to me and I started indiscriminately noshing on it.
"Thanks," I said. Then I turned the greasy object over in my hands. I couldn't make heads or tails of it. Bony. Oblong. Like a deep fat fried stone. "This is good. What is it?"
"Rabbit skull," she said.
I became suddenly aware of the jawline, the sloped forehead, the notches where the ears had been, and the eyeballs: all white, stewed in their sockets.
"Yes," I chuckled. "Rabbit skull."
Lao D got up to take a leak and when his lady friend wasn't looking, I slipped the hideous thing into the nearest trash can.
"So, are you a student as well?" I asked Xiao D.
"No. Just a worker," she said. "But I do study kung fu. He is my teacher."
"Show me," I said.

So I stood in one place while this nice Chinese girl kicked me in the kidneys ten times in a row. (Like most nice Chinese girls, she was wearing steeltoed jackboots.) When Lao D came out of the bathroom, he told her that she was doing it wrong, so he kicked me five more times in the kidneys, very effectively, until I told him that, yo, I'm probably gonna need those internal organs.

He handed me a cigarette and lit one for himself. We clunked beercans and we drank.

"I've been meaning to ask," he said. "Can you teach me English?"
"Probably," I said. "But you can't pay me. I'd get in trouble."
"So how can I pay you?"
"Teach me the ways of the Wu-Tang Clan," I said.
"Never heard of them."
"Yeah, probably not," I shrugged. "They're really more of a Westside thing, aren't they?"
"Right. Well. Anyway, my dream is to open a dojo in America."
"Might need English for that," I said.
"So I was thinking you could maybe help me. And I'll teach you kung fu for free."
"Sounds good to me," I said, "because my dream is to kick the shit out of a frat boy at Billy Frogg's on a Tuesday night in Omaha."

We shook hands. Then he squeezed a pressure point I hadn't known about and I dropped like a 160 pound bag of rice. His girl sat down on the bed, coughed, and gave Lao D a look. He hoisted me back up to my feet.

"Time for you to go," he said, and started hustling me towards the door. He gave me one last cigarette, and one more His Brand beer for the road.
"Can you smoke and still do Shaolin kung fu?" I asked.
"Yes," he said.
"And can you drink, too?"
He clunked his beer against my beer.
"Of course."
"Well, then," I said. "Let's do it."

Practice starts tomorrow.

Throwing Out the Script

On your first day in China, the director will hand you a script. And you would do well to follow that script, at least until you have all your lines memorized, or until you've learned enough of the language to improvise.

But improvise at your own peril. In my experience, deviating from the script only ruffles the feathers of the other actors, and actors are a delicate bunch. For them, the script is fixed and immutable. People change but the script does not. Not much, anyway. The script may mutate ever so slightly over the course of thousands of years, but I have run into some Chinese dudes at the park who were at least a thousand years old, and they followed pretty much the same script that my students do.

The script looks like this:

Chinese Person: Hello.
You (The Foreigner): Hello.
CP: Hey, your Chinese is really not too bad!
You: Oh, pshaw. My Chinese is lousy.
CP: What country are you from?
You: America.
CP: Are you a teacher or a student?
You: A teacher.
CP: Do you teach English?
You: Yes.
CP: How much money do you make?
You: 1,500 bucks a month.
CP: US dollars?
You: No. Chinese RMB.
CP: Impossible! That's not enough money!
You: I know. But I'm a volunteer.
CP: A what?
You: A vol-un-TEER.
CP: Huh?
You: A vol-UN-teer.
CP: ... I don't understand.
You: A VOL-un- ... teer?
CP: Oh! You mean a VOL-un-TEER!
You: Yes.
CP: [shaking head] Not enough money.
You: ...
CP: How long have you been in China?
You: About a year.
CP: Have you gotten used to Our China?
You: Yes.
CP: Do you like Chinese food?
You: Yes.
CP: Are you married?
You: No.
CP: Do you have a Chinese girlfriend?
You: No.
CP: You should get one.
You: Maybe I should.
CP: Do you think Chinese girls are beautiful?
You: Yes. Very beautiful.
CP: You should get a Chinese girlfriend. Then you can stay in China forever.
You: ...


The above questions may come at you in a variety of accents, or in a slightly different order - but the script almost always begins with Your Chinese and Your Country of Origin, moves on to Your Job and Your Puny Salary, Whether or Not You Like China, and then, finally, Whether or Not You're Planning on Anchoring Yourself Via Ye Olde Ball and Chain to China Forever.

Other acceptable topics include the prosperity of America relative to China, the amount of time it takes to fly from China to America, the different places you have visited in China, and the length of Chinese history relative to our own negligible ancestry in the West. But these are not usually included in the script.

I am well acquainted with the script by now. I can recite it in my sleep, and sometimes I catch myself doing so. It's not that my Chinese is all that good - in fact, it has been languishing as of late. But I have mastered the script. At the very least, I know my lines. And that is because I have the exact same conversation countless times every day. That, incidentally, is the biggest reason why my Chinese is languishing: I am rarely allowed to deviate from the script.

About six months in, I threw away the script and started to dabble in deviation. If someone asked me where I was from, I would say "Nanchong," and laugh in a disarming enough way. And the conversation would drop like a dead duck. If someone asked me whether I liked Chinese girls, I would chuckle and say "Not really. They only seem to want me for my money." A dead pelican. "Have you gotten used to life in China?" "No, actually. It's kind of crowded, rather noisy, and people bother me all the time because I'm a foreigner." A dead ostrich.

The Chinese conversation is all about achieving the most harmonious pitch possible. Deviating from the script is like playing in the wrong key. In the West, our conversations are more like fugues. There are melodies and countermelodies, inversions and key changes, dissonance and consonance, agreements and disagreements. When you're talking to someone in China, you need not be interesting, but you must strive to be agreeable.

Questions like "Have you gotten used to life in Our China?" do not ask for an honest answer. If you say anything other than "Yes," you are sure to make your interlocutor very uncomfortable. Likewise with questions about Chinese members of the opposite sex, Chinese food, and China in general. You must express unflinching admiration for all things Chinese. It isn't necessarily that the Chinese are blind to their own flaws. Often, a Chinese person will observe that His or Her China is much poorer than Your America, but because it is the Chinese person making the observation, it is safe for you to agree. The most important thing is not political orthodoxy, but avoiding conflict, upholding the opinions of the person you are talking to. Above all else, you must be agreeable.

What happens when you're not? The conversation dies a sudden and awkward death. The other day, a cabbie asked me whether I made more money in China or in America. I laughed and said, "America, of course." Wrong answer. He fell silent. I tried to qualify the remark by adding, "You see, I'm a volunteer here. I don't make any money at all!" But it was too late. I had slighted His China with that inadvertently smug-sounding "of course" - I had lost him, and he didn't say a word to me the rest of the long cab ride home until he blurted out the fare. He didn't even say goodbye.

The same thing happened when I was asked for my thoughts on Chinese girls, and made the mistake of alluding to their avariciousness. I had been asked a question, so I decided to give an honest answer. The dude I was talking to nodded, looked down at his shoes, bid me farewell, and made his escape.

We follow a script in the West, as well. I'm not denying that. Very few people in your life really want to know how you're doing: the only real answer to "How are you?" is "Good." When talking to a stranger in the West, if you start all of a sudden unloading baggage about your ex-girlfriend, you're liable to be abandoned for a more appealing corner of the room. There are social penalties for throwing the script out the window. But the Western script is just a framework. It is the rhythm section, over which we improvise according to our whims. In China, the rhythm section is the music - and in that respect, it is conversational muzak. To my ears, at least.

It puzzles me, the script. I don't enjoy following it, least of all because I have to act out the same scene ten, twenty, thirty times a day. But the script is not something that changes, and it is not something any of us laowais can hope to change, not even by playing our own Ornette Coleman free jazz tenor solo over the muzak. The Chinese script is something that must be gotten used to. And at least in that sense, to answer your question, Mr. Cabbie, I suppose I have gotten used to Your China. I'm not quite cozy enough to live here forever, reciting the same script till I'm dead - but I suppose I'll just keep that to myself now, won't I?

[exeunt Mr. Panda, passenger side door]