I think I will take a short break from my Kunming travelogue, if you don't mind. I'm stuck, you see. The words are already written down in my pretentious little Moleskine® notebook. There they are, perfectly visible, scribbled down in barely decipherable black ink. All I have to do is type the words. But they don't feel good on my fingertips, however many times I type and retype them. Lost in transcription, I guess.
To me, the hardest things to write about are the things that happened in the not-so-distant past. It's like retelling the joke you just told. The joke everyone laughed at. But somebody missed the joke. So you have to repeat the joke for this one inattentive dude, even as you ruin it for everyone else.
When you find yourself caught up in a story, you run that story through your mind so many times that it becomes too big to fail. Then, lo and behold, when you finally sit down to write the story, it fails. And you can't bail it out, however late into the night you filibuster, however many Starbucks stimulus packages you sneak past the House. The story fails. It fails because it's too big to fail, because it was never supposed to fail, because you never believed it could fail. It fails because it is a good story but you're not yet good enough to write it. It fails because you're too far away from the story to remember what it felt like when it happened, and because you're still too near to the story to comprehend what the hell it means.
I find it much easier to write about things that happened in the not-so-distant present. Like what happened just now. I can write about that. So that is what I will try to do. Something happened this evening, just a couple hours ago, though I'm not quite sure anything happened at all. Well, obviously, something happened. Something is always happening. But I'm not sure whether the events are related to one other, or whether I am stringing them together after the fact. Whatever. I'm writing this because I'm verbally constipated for the moment. I'm writing this, mostly, to see what happens when I write it.
It was round about midnight and I was on the prowl for beer, a couple bottles to unblock the aforementioned writer's block. The usual shops - the shops whose shopkeepers know what kind of beer I want - were all closed, shutters down. So I resorted to a back-alley shish-kebab place. I try to maintain a steady rapport with all the shopkeepers in my part of town, especially with this back-alley shish-kebab man who is ethnically Tibetan and therefore almost as foreign as I am. I tried to score a quick trio of takeout beers but the Tibetan invited me to sit. So I sat. I knew I would be there a while. A couple of college kids came dweebing into the restaurant and sat across from me. They didn't bother me. I sensed that they were not the usual Chinese undergraduate riffraff, so I offered them cigarettes. We got to talking.
They were not the usual Chinese undergraduate riffraff. They spoke no English, but they understood my Chinese - which is to say they possessed an uncanny knack for hand gestures and sound effects. Over the course of an hour, I successfully explained the existential impact of the Obama presidency, the ever-widening income gap in the Western world, the ominous rise of the Tea Party, the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords and the many reasons why it scared the shit out of me. The college kids, in turn, offered me some unusually candid opinions on Chinese politics. They, in turn, offered me some unusually candid Chinese cigarettes. They recommended some Chinese proxy servers, the better to access my own blog with. These kids were not the usual Chinese undergraduate riffraff. We feasted upon spiced pig brain - the first time I have ever eaten brain, believe it or not, in all my time in China. The pig brain was good, and I feel slightly smarter for having eaten it. When it was time to leave, I tried to pay the tab, but the college kids swatted my hand away. I tried to swat their hands away, but they swatted my swatting hand away. They paid the tab.
We parted ways. I was running low on cigarettes, so I hailed a cab. The cabbie was an old timer with a wife and a son, and he was awfully happy to talk about his son, a recent graduate of Sichuan Normal University. The cabbie stopped along the way to pick up a couple college kids waiting on the side of the road. There were two of them and one of me. I scooched over to the left back seat because the kids would have to get in from the right side. I knew this because in China, or at least in Nanchong, the left side door of the cab is always locked. I suppose the cabbies keep the left side door locked to prevent renegade drunks from bailing on the fare. Or perhaps if the cabbies didn't keep the left side door locked, Chinese Fire Drills would rage in the streets every time they stopped the cab. Truth be told, I don't know why Chinese cabbies lock the left side door. But the left side door is always locked. This is a rule and I have adjusted to it, as I have adjusted to so many other rules in China, as I have adjusted to so many other rules in Nanchong, often without knowledge, always without quite understanding.
The college kids eavesdropped on my sweet Chinese nothings and complimented my accent. The cabbie agreed that it was good. I contested that it was shit. Everyone laughed. I offered the college kids cigarettes and they thanked me. We smoked for a bit. The cabbie dropped the college kids off at the train station, then waited while I ran across the street to buy cigarettes. The cigarette vendor was all giggles and smiles to see me. She complimented my Chinese. I complimented her Chinese. She giggled and smiled.
On the ride home, the cabbie ran out of things to say. So I thought back on the dreams I'd had last night. It was a rough night's sleep as I remembered it. I had dreamt that I was back in Omaha, smoking a cigarette outside The Brothers on 38th and Farnam. My favorite bar. A cold and dark night. Breathing fog. Black ice everywhere. I smoked. I joggled my leg to the faintly audible bass line of the Roxy Music song I'd just put on the jukebox. I shoegazed. I gazed back up. A derelict was shambling my way. He pulled a gun. I threw up my hands. He shot me in the gut. I woke up in a cold sweat, as one does. Holding my gut. I was stunned, but I wasn't altogether surprised. This is one of many possibilities in America.
In China, among many other impossibilities, being shot down in the street is not a possibility. Never in Nanchong could I be held up at gunpoint. No, in Nanchong, one of China's most violent cities, I can troll the shady avenues in the shady hours to my heart's content and I will never be assaulted - or if I am, as I have been a couple times, it will not be at gunpoint, but at the feeble meathooks of a thoroughly drunk Chinese salaryman. For however much I loathe the place, I have nothing to be afraid of in Nanchong. And after months and months of homesick idolatry, that dream reminded me that in America - even in mild-mannered Omaha - I have a great deal to be afraid of, indeed. I can almost understand why so many creepy Americans linger around Asia for decades, extending their visas indefinitely. The Asian existence is an antlike existence, but if nothing else, it is a safe existence.
And there is the hospitality to consider. In America, a night like tonight would never have happened. Consider this: I walk into The Brothers for some beers-to-go. I'm wearing my pajamas, basically. Some college kids treat me to dinner and drinks. They pay the tab. They bid me farewell. They will never see me again. They ask for nothing in return. Impossible in America. A nightly occurrence in Nanchong. Granted, it's because I'm a foreigner. But that kind of hospitality doesn't exist in America. It's not that I seek out Chinese meal tickets. The Catholic guilt, in fact, is almost too much for me to bear. But it's such pleasant companionship. No pretensions. Just the amusingly futile attempt to understand one another over beer and spiced pig noggin. I know that once I leave Nanchong, these sorts of things will never happen to me, never again. I will go to hipster bars with my very best hipster friends, and each of us will pay our share. We will divvy up in the Dutch manner. At the night's end, a handshake, maybe a man-hug, and we drive home separately. In Nanchong, amidst all the xenophobia and cross-cultural weirdness, any sane interaction is a miracle. So those interactions verge on the divine, when they happen. Acts of generosity leave you overfed, half-drunk and breathless. But in America, I will find naught but good conversation, mutual respect and the occasional gun-wielding raving derelict. At this point, I'm not willing to say that either set of circumstances is better than the other. Instinctively, I prefer the American way. I miss my home. But at no point prior to tonight did I think that I would miss Nanchong. At no point prior to tonight did I even entertain the thought that I would miss Nanchong. At no point prior to tonight did I even dream of thinking that I would ever entertain the thought that I would miss Nanchong. But I suppose, pending tonight's dreams, that for the moment, very tentatively, I am willing to risk saying that I might yet dream to think that I will one day entertain the thought that I will one day miss Nanchong, Sichuan Province, People's Republic of China.
Showing posts with label cabbies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cabbies. Show all posts
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Bring Me Far Away
Though I am tempted to write a William Jamesian exposition on the Varieties of Taxi Experience, in China there are really only two such varieties that I am aware of, not nearly enough for a scholarly work. There is the Grandfatherly Cabby experience, in which an impossibly old man asks you personal questions and says flattering things about your language skills - and then there is the Club Circuit Cab experience, which I describe below.
I always seem to get the Club Circuit Cabby first thing in the morning, when spirits are low. Approaching the vehicle, I can feel the pavement thumping under my feet. I open the door and am assailed by a sonic barrage that takes my brain a full ten minutes to sort out. Gradually, my feeble pattern recognition software clicks in: it appears to be an acid trance remix of Akon's Right Now (Na Na Na), featuring vocal samples from Joan Jett and what sounds like an Air China inflight safety announcement. Moments later, it has escalated into a full-fledged Missy Elliott/Thomas Dolby/John Denver gangbang. Please fold your tray table up and fasten your safety belts ... got them Platinum Visas, hot boyz ... S-S-SCIENCE! ... take me home, country road ... in case of emergency ...
The Club Circuit Cab Megamix is without beginning or end, and samples every worthless pop song ever recorded by man, woman, or beast. I have ridden long-distance Club Circuit Cabs where the music did not let up once for three hours. I am not sure how the Club Circuit Cabby does it. It is not FM radio he's listening to, as the Megamix does not fade out in tunnels. Nor can it be satellite radio, for no such thing exists here. But it might be the case that the cabby's stereo spontaneously generates acid trance megamixes via some kind of self-modifying algorithm - or what seems even more likely: the cabby possesses a single mix CD of infinite length, burned for him by the reclusive Gatsbyesque owner of The No. 1 Nightclub down on Renmin Lu.
The Club Circuit Cabby, in case you're wondering, is young and androgynous - that is to say, he is clearly a male specimen, but not much of one. He wears rectangle frames, acne sideburns, an expressionless face. He is motionless from the torso up. Though the volume is cranked up loud enough to induce undesired bowel movements, the cabby shows no outward signs of enjoying his Infinite Megamix in the least. But this is only natural. China is a loud place, and its inhabitants make noise not for the pleasure it affords, but for the same unknowable reason that songbirds twitter and Kanye West tweets.
The confusing slurry of pop entrails that make up the Club Circuit Cabby Megamix is by and large representative of modern Chinese music in general. While pop music in China is almost exclusively Chinese in origin, it is lifted directly from the U.S. Top 40 charts. Listen to the radio and you will hear Sean Paul soundalikes, rapping in proper Mandarin with a Rastafarian lilt. There are slightly trampy pseudo-Spearses, quasi-Nickelbacks, bizarro Beyonces ... In short, Chinese pop plagiarizes the absolute worst elements of Western pop, multiplying the awfulness of those elements exponentially in the process. But what you will seldom hear on Chinese pop radio stations are the genuine articles of awfulness themselves: Sean Paul, Britney Spears, Nickelback, or Beyonce. And you will almost never hear anything of a more refined taste, unless you're into The Carpenters or John Denver.
It should be clear by now that I have tried to dupe you, my dear Reader, into thinking you were reading another lighthearted commentary on cabbies and their many quirks, when I am really about to fly into a tirade about Chinese teenyboppers. For that I apologize: I didn't plan on this at the outset. But it is a Thursday afternoon and I am well into my fifth cup of coffee. It's either this or clean my room.
Let me say first that it is a bit chauvinistic of me to expect Chinese kids to enjoy, or even have the foggiest idea about Western music. And it is naive of me to assume that my college students might know the name "Bob Dylan," or that they should appreciate Kid A. There is no cultural context in China for the music that we (or Pitchfork) deem "high art," and only very recently has a context emerged for the kind of pop garbage we deem "low art." Consider the sort of lovey-dovey nonsense Americans listened to in the early 1950's. Rhyming "baby" and "maybe" was something new and fresh back then. It isn't hard to imagine why power ballads and choreographed dancing seem new and fresh to the up-and-coming Chinese youth. Heck, they still seem fresh to many of us in the West.
But it is part of my job as an English teacher to provide my students with the context necessary to appreciate what I deem "high art" - or at least "better art." It is very hard work, because your average Sichuanese undergrad possesses a very limited Western context to build upon. We are starting from scratch. Or perhaps even worse than scratch. To give you an idea, a certain widely circulated Western Culture textbook (to remain nameless) claims that "Americans fear cats, because they believe cats are possessed by witches." We have a long way to go, indeed.
On the first day of the semester, I had my students submit a writing sample. What would you like to learn about in our class? I asked them, and they wrote frantically for twenty minutes. Without exception, all 500 of my students wrote some version of the following: I want to learn about Western culture, Western film, Western music, Western literature ... At least there is no shortage of curiosity. But the nature of that curiosity is something I am still grappling with, and I hope that the following anecdotes baffle you as much as they continue to baffle me.
Last Wednesday, I found myself with about ten minutes to spare at the end of class, so I asked my students how they'd like to put that time to use.
"Listen to music!" came the unanimous reply.
I just happened to have Abbey Road in my pocket, so I explained that we were going to listen to The Beatles, and that this particular album was one of the most widely known, deeply beloved, greatly admired, culturally significant artifacts ever to come out of Western civilization. I made Abbey Road out to be the Chinese New Year, Jackie Chan and Yao Ming all rolled into one. Perhaps I was overhyping it, but my students, already familiar with Let It Be and Yesterday, were psyched.
But then something strange happened. The music started. Come Together - that sleazy bass, Ringo's goofball drum rolls, the tense harmony of Lennon and McCartney. Almost instantly, my students lost interest and started talking to each other, loudly, in Chinese. I watched in disbelief from my perch behind the podium. By the end of the song - come together, yeahhhhh! - The Beatles were only barely audible, and the classroom sounded like a vegetable market.
I had asked my students to pay close attention to the song, to answer a couple of questions about it, and to write down how it made them feel. But when I opened the floor for their thoughts and opinions, the class fell silent. A minute passed. Finally, the class monitor offered an adjective: boring, he said. Someone in the back mumbled "strange." That was it for The Beatles. And so much for Kid A, while I'm at it.
My efforts in the medium of film have not proven any more successful. As a segue into a debate on the benefits and drawbacks of technology, I played a few short clips from 2001: A Space Odyssey - the monkey wars, Hal 9000 going berserk. I had described 2001 as the stuff of legend, as a film that was constantly referenced in ... well, everything. But in the end, my students once again voiced boredom and a fair amount of discomfort.
"This movie is very 'fresh,'" said a girl in the front row, one of my brightest students, "but we want to watch romantic comedy."
Fresh is a Chinglish word. It does, in a way, mean new, exciting, and creative. But it also carries undertones of strange, unusual, and unpleasant. 2001 is all of those things. As are The Beatles. They are both, in the Chinglish sense of the word, very "fresh." But isn't this a college class? Shouldn't we be studying "fresh" things? And wait a minute - weren't my students interested in learning about Western culture? Aren't The Beatles sufficiently ... cultural?
Of course, I am running headlong into my own wall. My students might never respond to The Beatles and Stanley Kubrick. That isn't their fault. I could always make things easy for them. We could analyze Beyonce lyrics together. We could delve into the Hugh Grant Criterion Collection. But what would they learn? By sticking to pop culture, I would only be helping to reinforce the perceptions that many Chinese undergraduates already have: that every white male carries at least three concealed firearms to work, that all black Americans are capable of spinning on their heads for prodigious lengths of time, and that generally, we Westerners are a greedy, promiscuous, and violent lot of people, indeed.
My students are boundlessly curious, but it is a contradictory sort of curiosity. They are fascinated with the West and they want to know everything about it, but they only seem to glom onto the things that Hollywood and misinformed textbooks have taught them. I can show my students statistics, hard facts, numbers: America is only 72% Caucasian, and arguably even less than that. But at the end of the day, my students see me, Mr. Panda, my radiant dirty blonde locks, my piercing off-blue eyes, and they see me as a Real American. Minorities are Americans, too, I guess, but on the spectrum of Americanness, they are less American than Mr. Panda.
I have stumbled across all this through some trial and mostly error, by experimenting in class and by playing guitar at a dingy pole dance bar on the dark side of town. I was more flexible in the early days, more inclined to make concessions to stereotypes and expectations. But as I've gone along, I've come to question the purpose of my Chinese existence if I am not presenting what I perceive to be an accurate and honest portrayal of the West. That is why I will continue to play indie rock at a bar that specializes in Mariah Carey karaoke, and why, when my students demand music, I will play them The Beatles. But it's not just a question of authenticity: I also happen to like indie rock and The Beatles. I'm a better teacher when I'm teaching something that I'm interested in, and I'm a better guitar player when I'm playing songs that aren't garbage. The line between high art and low art is a matter of taste, but I can't help being of the opinion that Hugh Grant films are garbage, and that Mariah Carey songs are garbage sung by someone with a spectacular set of pipes. And call me an elitist if you like, but I'd rather not teach or perform garbage.
If you are a foreigner in China, every so often large groups of people will demand that you perform for them. Sing a song. Dance. Entertain us. It's impolite to refuse, so you will sometimes find yourself breaking into a song and dance number you didn't know you had in you. On other occasions, you manage to wriggle out of it and everyone goes home disappointed. This semester, on the first day of class, each and every one of my classes - about ten minutes in - asked me to sing a song for them.
"Can you sing a song for us?" a bespectacled girl in the back would ask, followed by a thunderous round of applause.
It is a truly bizarre request when you think about it. You have known this foreigner for all of ten minutes. He has come from the other side of the world to teach you English and your first decree is that he pull a song out of his wazoo and sing it a cappella in front of fifty people he has never met. Not only that, but the kids want to hear something they know. You can't sing a Hank Williams ditty. They want "My Heart Will Go On" or The Theme from The Bodyguard, or a selection from the little-known (but fascinating) oeuvre of English-language pop songs written for the non-English-speaking world.
I generally wriggle out of song requests, but sometimes the kids are so persistent that all I can do is postpone the performance.
"I can't sing without music," I'll explain. "I do play guitar, though, so next time I will bring my guitar and sing for you."
It usually works, too. Eventually, the kids forget about crusty old Mr. Panda and his phony promises. But this semester it backfired in spectacular fashion when someone brought an Epiphone acoustic to the classroom.
"Teacher, sing us a song now." A round of applause. No way out.
Midway through a Dylan tune, the crowd grew restless, almost violent.
"We don't like this song!" someone shouted. "Play 'Take Me To Your Heart.'"
And this, my friends, is where I will bring my Thursday afternoon tirade to a close - because "Take Me To Your Heart" might make for a satisfying conclusion, as well as a natural starting point for your Chinglish soft rock collection.
As every expat in China would be happy to tell you, "Take Me To Your Heart" is a hit single by Danish adult contemporary phenom Michael Learns to Rock, or MLTR if you're into the whole brevity thing. MLTR formed in 1988, and they have sold over 10 million records hence, "most of them in Asia," as Wikipedia notes in typically understated fashion. Take Me To Your Heart (not to be confused with the Rick Astley track of the same name) has proven to be MLTR's most enduring effort. Eight months ago, due to a mechanical failure in the karaoke machine, I found myself singing TMTYH (if you're into the whole brevity thing) at a KTV joint in Chengdu. Somehow, I seemed to know the melody already, though the lyrics were less than intuitive.
"Hiding from the rain and snow/trying to forget but I won't let go," I sang, wincing, voice faltering under the weight of so much clunky syntax. "Looking at a crowded street/listening to my own heart beat."
The imagery was vivid in my mind then, and remains so: a spear-wielding troglodyte, braving the harsh elements, hides briefly in a cave, then reemerges to stare grimly at cars as they pass, heart palpitating with the insuppressible animal instinct to gore, kill, devour ...
Then the pre-chorus build-up:
So many people all around the world/tell me where do I find someone like you, girl?
MLTR makes a valid point here. Overpopulation is without question one of the most pressing social issues of the modern era, but girls like you remain inexplicably rare, girl.
And then, finally, we have arrived:
Michael Learns to Blow My Mind. Yes. It's all in there. Take me to your heart, bring me far away - the romantic dichotomy of push and pull, of nearness and separation. Give me your hand before I'm old - the tenderness of corporeal intimacy both threatened and augmented by the looming spectre of death and dissolution. Show me that wonders can be true - here we see a repentant agnostic begging the heavens for salva ...
But no. Let us stop there. One mustn't sink in too deep. Let's just crank up those earbuds and drink it all in. Let's take it to our hearts, as it were, and not into our higher brain structures. Perhaps this is the mistake I have been making all along. Popular music in China is much the same as it is anywhere else. It is not something to be picked apart. It is, as music ought to be, an escape from reality - something that, if only for a moment, or three of them, brings you far away from wherever it is that you are.
I always seem to get the Club Circuit Cabby first thing in the morning, when spirits are low. Approaching the vehicle, I can feel the pavement thumping under my feet. I open the door and am assailed by a sonic barrage that takes my brain a full ten minutes to sort out. Gradually, my feeble pattern recognition software clicks in: it appears to be an acid trance remix of Akon's Right Now (Na Na Na), featuring vocal samples from Joan Jett and what sounds like an Air China inflight safety announcement. Moments later, it has escalated into a full-fledged Missy Elliott/Thomas Dolby/John Denver gangbang. Please fold your tray table up and fasten your safety belts ... got them Platinum Visas, hot boyz ... S-S-SCIENCE! ... take me home, country road ... in case of emergency ...
The Club Circuit Cab Megamix is without beginning or end, and samples every worthless pop song ever recorded by man, woman, or beast. I have ridden long-distance Club Circuit Cabs where the music did not let up once for three hours. I am not sure how the Club Circuit Cabby does it. It is not FM radio he's listening to, as the Megamix does not fade out in tunnels. Nor can it be satellite radio, for no such thing exists here. But it might be the case that the cabby's stereo spontaneously generates acid trance megamixes via some kind of self-modifying algorithm - or what seems even more likely: the cabby possesses a single mix CD of infinite length, burned for him by the reclusive Gatsbyesque owner of The No. 1 Nightclub down on Renmin Lu.
The Club Circuit Cabby, in case you're wondering, is young and androgynous - that is to say, he is clearly a male specimen, but not much of one. He wears rectangle frames, acne sideburns, an expressionless face. He is motionless from the torso up. Though the volume is cranked up loud enough to induce undesired bowel movements, the cabby shows no outward signs of enjoying his Infinite Megamix in the least. But this is only natural. China is a loud place, and its inhabitants make noise not for the pleasure it affords, but for the same unknowable reason that songbirds twitter and Kanye West tweets.
The confusing slurry of pop entrails that make up the Club Circuit Cabby Megamix is by and large representative of modern Chinese music in general. While pop music in China is almost exclusively Chinese in origin, it is lifted directly from the U.S. Top 40 charts. Listen to the radio and you will hear Sean Paul soundalikes, rapping in proper Mandarin with a Rastafarian lilt. There are slightly trampy pseudo-Spearses, quasi-Nickelbacks, bizarro Beyonces ... In short, Chinese pop plagiarizes the absolute worst elements of Western pop, multiplying the awfulness of those elements exponentially in the process. But what you will seldom hear on Chinese pop radio stations are the genuine articles of awfulness themselves: Sean Paul, Britney Spears, Nickelback, or Beyonce. And you will almost never hear anything of a more refined taste, unless you're into The Carpenters or John Denver.
It should be clear by now that I have tried to dupe you, my dear Reader, into thinking you were reading another lighthearted commentary on cabbies and their many quirks, when I am really about to fly into a tirade about Chinese teenyboppers. For that I apologize: I didn't plan on this at the outset. But it is a Thursday afternoon and I am well into my fifth cup of coffee. It's either this or clean my room.
Let me say first that it is a bit chauvinistic of me to expect Chinese kids to enjoy, or even have the foggiest idea about Western music. And it is naive of me to assume that my college students might know the name "Bob Dylan," or that they should appreciate Kid A. There is no cultural context in China for the music that we (or Pitchfork) deem "high art," and only very recently has a context emerged for the kind of pop garbage we deem "low art." Consider the sort of lovey-dovey nonsense Americans listened to in the early 1950's. Rhyming "baby" and "maybe" was something new and fresh back then. It isn't hard to imagine why power ballads and choreographed dancing seem new and fresh to the up-and-coming Chinese youth. Heck, they still seem fresh to many of us in the West.
But it is part of my job as an English teacher to provide my students with the context necessary to appreciate what I deem "high art" - or at least "better art." It is very hard work, because your average Sichuanese undergrad possesses a very limited Western context to build upon. We are starting from scratch. Or perhaps even worse than scratch. To give you an idea, a certain widely circulated Western Culture textbook (to remain nameless) claims that "Americans fear cats, because they believe cats are possessed by witches." We have a long way to go, indeed.
On the first day of the semester, I had my students submit a writing sample. What would you like to learn about in our class? I asked them, and they wrote frantically for twenty minutes. Without exception, all 500 of my students wrote some version of the following: I want to learn about Western culture, Western film, Western music, Western literature ... At least there is no shortage of curiosity. But the nature of that curiosity is something I am still grappling with, and I hope that the following anecdotes baffle you as much as they continue to baffle me.
Last Wednesday, I found myself with about ten minutes to spare at the end of class, so I asked my students how they'd like to put that time to use.
"Listen to music!" came the unanimous reply.
I just happened to have Abbey Road in my pocket, so I explained that we were going to listen to The Beatles, and that this particular album was one of the most widely known, deeply beloved, greatly admired, culturally significant artifacts ever to come out of Western civilization. I made Abbey Road out to be the Chinese New Year, Jackie Chan and Yao Ming all rolled into one. Perhaps I was overhyping it, but my students, already familiar with Let It Be and Yesterday, were psyched.
But then something strange happened. The music started. Come Together - that sleazy bass, Ringo's goofball drum rolls, the tense harmony of Lennon and McCartney. Almost instantly, my students lost interest and started talking to each other, loudly, in Chinese. I watched in disbelief from my perch behind the podium. By the end of the song - come together, yeahhhhh! - The Beatles were only barely audible, and the classroom sounded like a vegetable market.
I had asked my students to pay close attention to the song, to answer a couple of questions about it, and to write down how it made them feel. But when I opened the floor for their thoughts and opinions, the class fell silent. A minute passed. Finally, the class monitor offered an adjective: boring, he said. Someone in the back mumbled "strange." That was it for The Beatles. And so much for Kid A, while I'm at it.
My efforts in the medium of film have not proven any more successful. As a segue into a debate on the benefits and drawbacks of technology, I played a few short clips from 2001: A Space Odyssey - the monkey wars, Hal 9000 going berserk. I had described 2001 as the stuff of legend, as a film that was constantly referenced in ... well, everything. But in the end, my students once again voiced boredom and a fair amount of discomfort.
"This movie is very 'fresh,'" said a girl in the front row, one of my brightest students, "but we want to watch romantic comedy."
Fresh is a Chinglish word. It does, in a way, mean new, exciting, and creative. But it also carries undertones of strange, unusual, and unpleasant. 2001 is all of those things. As are The Beatles. They are both, in the Chinglish sense of the word, very "fresh." But isn't this a college class? Shouldn't we be studying "fresh" things? And wait a minute - weren't my students interested in learning about Western culture? Aren't The Beatles sufficiently ... cultural?
Of course, I am running headlong into my own wall. My students might never respond to The Beatles and Stanley Kubrick. That isn't their fault. I could always make things easy for them. We could analyze Beyonce lyrics together. We could delve into the Hugh Grant Criterion Collection. But what would they learn? By sticking to pop culture, I would only be helping to reinforce the perceptions that many Chinese undergraduates already have: that every white male carries at least three concealed firearms to work, that all black Americans are capable of spinning on their heads for prodigious lengths of time, and that generally, we Westerners are a greedy, promiscuous, and violent lot of people, indeed.
My students are boundlessly curious, but it is a contradictory sort of curiosity. They are fascinated with the West and they want to know everything about it, but they only seem to glom onto the things that Hollywood and misinformed textbooks have taught them. I can show my students statistics, hard facts, numbers: America is only 72% Caucasian, and arguably even less than that. But at the end of the day, my students see me, Mr. Panda, my radiant dirty blonde locks, my piercing off-blue eyes, and they see me as a Real American. Minorities are Americans, too, I guess, but on the spectrum of Americanness, they are less American than Mr. Panda.
I have stumbled across all this through some trial and mostly error, by experimenting in class and by playing guitar at a dingy pole dance bar on the dark side of town. I was more flexible in the early days, more inclined to make concessions to stereotypes and expectations. But as I've gone along, I've come to question the purpose of my Chinese existence if I am not presenting what I perceive to be an accurate and honest portrayal of the West. That is why I will continue to play indie rock at a bar that specializes in Mariah Carey karaoke, and why, when my students demand music, I will play them The Beatles. But it's not just a question of authenticity: I also happen to like indie rock and The Beatles. I'm a better teacher when I'm teaching something that I'm interested in, and I'm a better guitar player when I'm playing songs that aren't garbage. The line between high art and low art is a matter of taste, but I can't help being of the opinion that Hugh Grant films are garbage, and that Mariah Carey songs are garbage sung by someone with a spectacular set of pipes. And call me an elitist if you like, but I'd rather not teach or perform garbage.
If you are a foreigner in China, every so often large groups of people will demand that you perform for them. Sing a song. Dance. Entertain us. It's impolite to refuse, so you will sometimes find yourself breaking into a song and dance number you didn't know you had in you. On other occasions, you manage to wriggle out of it and everyone goes home disappointed. This semester, on the first day of class, each and every one of my classes - about ten minutes in - asked me to sing a song for them.
"Can you sing a song for us?" a bespectacled girl in the back would ask, followed by a thunderous round of applause.
It is a truly bizarre request when you think about it. You have known this foreigner for all of ten minutes. He has come from the other side of the world to teach you English and your first decree is that he pull a song out of his wazoo and sing it a cappella in front of fifty people he has never met. Not only that, but the kids want to hear something they know. You can't sing a Hank Williams ditty. They want "My Heart Will Go On" or The Theme from The Bodyguard, or a selection from the little-known (but fascinating) oeuvre of English-language pop songs written for the non-English-speaking world.
I generally wriggle out of song requests, but sometimes the kids are so persistent that all I can do is postpone the performance.
"I can't sing without music," I'll explain. "I do play guitar, though, so next time I will bring my guitar and sing for you."
It usually works, too. Eventually, the kids forget about crusty old Mr. Panda and his phony promises. But this semester it backfired in spectacular fashion when someone brought an Epiphone acoustic to the classroom.
"Teacher, sing us a song now." A round of applause. No way out.
Midway through a Dylan tune, the crowd grew restless, almost violent.
"We don't like this song!" someone shouted. "Play 'Take Me To Your Heart.'"
And this, my friends, is where I will bring my Thursday afternoon tirade to a close - because "Take Me To Your Heart" might make for a satisfying conclusion, as well as a natural starting point for your Chinglish soft rock collection.
As every expat in China would be happy to tell you, "Take Me To Your Heart" is a hit single by Danish adult contemporary phenom Michael Learns to Rock, or MLTR if you're into the whole brevity thing. MLTR formed in 1988, and they have sold over 10 million records hence, "most of them in Asia," as Wikipedia notes in typically understated fashion. Take Me To Your Heart (not to be confused with the Rick Astley track of the same name) has proven to be MLTR's most enduring effort. Eight months ago, due to a mechanical failure in the karaoke machine, I found myself singing TMTYH (if you're into the whole brevity thing) at a KTV joint in Chengdu. Somehow, I seemed to know the melody already, though the lyrics were less than intuitive.
"Hiding from the rain and snow/trying to forget but I won't let go," I sang, wincing, voice faltering under the weight of so much clunky syntax. "Looking at a crowded street/listening to my own heart beat."
The imagery was vivid in my mind then, and remains so: a spear-wielding troglodyte, braving the harsh elements, hides briefly in a cave, then reemerges to stare grimly at cars as they pass, heart palpitating with the insuppressible animal instinct to gore, kill, devour ...
Then the pre-chorus build-up:
So many people all around the world/tell me where do I find someone like you, girl?
MLTR makes a valid point here. Overpopulation is without question one of the most pressing social issues of the modern era, but girls like you remain inexplicably rare, girl.
And then, finally, we have arrived:
Take me to your heart, take me to your soul
Give me your hand before I'm old
Show me what love is - haven't got a clue
Show me that wonders can be true
They say nothing lasts forever
We're only here today
Love is now or never
Bring me far away
Michael Learns to Blow My Mind. Yes. It's all in there. Take me to your heart, bring me far away - the romantic dichotomy of push and pull, of nearness and separation. Give me your hand before I'm old - the tenderness of corporeal intimacy both threatened and augmented by the looming spectre of death and dissolution. Show me that wonders can be true - here we see a repentant agnostic begging the heavens for salva ...
But no. Let us stop there. One mustn't sink in too deep. Let's just crank up those earbuds and drink it all in. Let's take it to our hearts, as it were, and not into our higher brain structures. Perhaps this is the mistake I have been making all along. Popular music in China is much the same as it is anywhere else. It is not something to be picked apart. It is, as music ought to be, an escape from reality - something that, if only for a moment, or three of them, brings you far away from wherever it is that you are.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Taxionomy: A Passenger's Guide to Cabbies of the World
I don't pretend to be an expert on taxi drivers. I admit to you, my fellow passenger, that I have no idea what makes the cabby tick. I can't imagine how he spends his off hours or whether he feels absurd when it's time for him to get out of his cab and into his car to drive home. Like most far-flung fields of human study - quantum mechanics and what have you - the taxi driver eludes the common man as well as the so-called experts, who demonstrate at best a well-articulated befuddlement when it comes to their pet subject.
There is nothing on the Newtonian scale so puzzling as the cabby. Like the electron, the cabby wheels about in an exhaust plume of probability: it is impossible to know his exact location and his future destination simultaneously. Perhaps the taxi driver remains a riddle even to himself. But because cabbies, unlike Higgs bosons and neutrinos and antimatter, are a real and active force in our day to day lives, and because I have a layman's understanding of taxi drivers from various unpleasant corners of the globe, I will offer this brief and elementary introduction to cabbies of the world: their customs, their caprices, and their cunning.
Let me begin by narrowing our scope. This essay will concern itself solely with taxi drivers outside the United States of America. First of all, the only American taxi I can remember taking was from New York's Kennedy Airport to a Holiday Inn in nearby Jamaica. My senses were not at their sharpest and my only recollection of the experience is of leaving the cab much lighter than when I'd entered it. Secondly - and I know this only from hearsay, literature, and my own a priori speculations - American cab drivers, because they can trace their roots to everywhere on earth and beyond, share almost nothing in common. These men may once have piloted Fiats, Volkswagens, alpacas, or rickshaws in their native lands, may once have driven under the umbrella of whatever Geneva Convention governs international cab driving, but they are Americans now: their morals have long since burned up in U.S. Customs like so much space dust.
It is something of a mystery, then, that cabbies elsewhere in the world, even in nations whose embassies have been closed to one another for decades, abide by the same unspoken code of conduct. For this reason - though I do not profess to understand it - cabbies of the world, to some degree, can be measured and understood. Taking an American cab, on the other hand, is a game of Russian or Jamaican or Armenian roulette. An analysis of the American cabby would be as fruitless as an analysis of The American, who, if we consider the human antipodes of Shaquille O'Neal and Woody Allen, cannot be said to exist in anything but the most rarified metaphysical sense.
In the American cab - or so I am given to understand - the driver is the agitator and the passenger is his agitatee. As a passenger, you can do nothing to improve your standing with the American cabby. Most of the time, he will talk and you, despite yourself, will listen. He will usually offend you in some indirect (but lowbrow) way, and you will be unable to defend yourself either verbally - good luck getting a word in - or physically, as the backseat ear-slap is among the weakest assaults known to man. The American cabby deals you the damnation card from the instant the fare meter lights up and you can only dig yourself into deeper and deeper layers of perdition by opening your mouth. No tip, however generous, can pull you out of the hole the American cabby, by default, has placed you in.
But in the non-American cab, the ball (to coin a sports metaphor) is in your court. You are the guest and so you are the agitator. The cabby, as host, is the agitatee. He is your friend to lose. In the non-American cab, you are granted a very finite number of friend points the moment you get in the car, and will add to or subtract from them according to your behavior.
The first thing you will notice about the non-American cabby is that he is silent. This is not from a lack of things to say. Bear in mind: this man has transported tens of thousands of people hither and thither, most of them drunk and many of them vagrant. He has stories, grievances, and wisdom to share, as any traveler does. But he is waiting for you to make the first move.
Speaking of first moves, it seems I have gotten ahead of myself, for the first question any conscientious passenger must ask himself is: front seat or back? Which seat best facilitates a healthy driver/passenger relationship?
The front seat, I feel, must make the non-American cabby uncomfortable. It is literally too forward. It gives the appearance that the two of you are going somewhere together - which, in a relativistic sense, you are - but understand that, after you've arrived wherever it is you're going, you will never see your cabby again. Let's try and not get too attached. To make the separation less painful, I always sit in the back.
Which is not to say you should keep yourself distant and aloof. Though he may not look directly at you, the cabby has at least three mirrors at his disposal. The cab is his domain and he sees all that goes on within it. Make eye contact with your cabby not by staring at the side of his head, but by looking directly into the rear view mirror. This sounds elementary, but I rode foreign cabs for two years before I was stunned one evening to notice a pair of sad, jaundiced eyes in the mirror, studying my every backseat fidget. From that day on, I have maintained eye contact with my cabbies and it has yielded positive results in terms of rapport and chivalry. Eye contact lets the cabby know: here sits no greenhorn, here is a man who has ridden in a taxi before.
Do not buckle your safety belt. Non-American cab drivers view this as an ominous portent and an insult to boot. You don't begin a romp on the high seas by stuffing your ears full of wax and strapping yourself to the mast, or at least I don't. Buckling up doesn't bode well for the trip and it implies a lack of faith in the cabby, that you think him fallible when - aged 75 and a 63-year veteran of the Chinese road - he clearly is not. The clicking of the safety belt is as the ticking of the deathwatch to the cabby's ear. If he hears you buckling up, which he will, he is infinitely more likely to drive the vehicle into a gorge, killing you but not him.
Cabbies are a finicky lot when it comes to seatbelts, but there is much that doesn't faze them. Language, for one. Tell the cabby where you're headed in English, Tagalog, or 12th Century Plattdeutsch. It doesn't matter. He understands you just the same. Of course, this is not to say that all languages are equal. German - links! rechts! geradeaus! - will get you there minutes before you departed, whereas if you use Spanish - mañana, mañana, mañana - you will not reach your destination until the next Big Bang.
Cabbies sometimes make mistakes: they are not yet automatons. If you tell the cabby "Tesco," he will 99.999999% of the time get you to Tesco. But if you take a million cab rides, your cabby will one day drop you off in the middle of an alkali flat. Do not tell the cabby he has made a mistake. Perhaps he has not made a mistake at all; perhaps he knows something you do not. Slowly get out of the cab and walk out into whatever strange landscape you are confronted with. If there is a shack, a toolshed, a porta-potty, or some sort of closed structure within view, enter it and shut the door behind you. Remain there until you are sure the cabby has pulled away. If there are no manmade structures nearby, continue to walk off into the distance until you are a mere speck on the horizon - from the cabby's vantage point, not yours. Do whatever it takes to convince the cabby that he has successfully and punctually brought to where you were supposed to go. Otherwise, you will probably hurt his feelings.
If you become violently ill in transit, indicate to the cabby that you would like to blow chunks out the window. Again, language is not an issue. When you have received his blessing and he has toggled the child safety lock feature, commence blowing chunks out the window. But it is crucial that you first receive his blessing. While the cabby is no prude and certainly will not blanch at the sight of bodily fluids or the scattering to the four winds thereof, he is deeply bothered by unpermitted violations of the boundaries of his vehicle. He does not appreciate it when people touch his cab or when other vehicles collide with it. Nor is he comfortable with you throwing things (the contents of your stomach) out of the cab without his prior consent.
He is similarly irked when you play with the windows or smoke in the backseat without his permission. I prefer not to imagine what he might do if you fiddled with the mirrors, changed the radio station, or opened the glovebox. Though he does not technically own it, remember that the cab is a direct extension of the cabby's nervous system. He senses all that you do and all that you are about to do. He can read all of your thoughts. In a very real sense, you are a parasite upon his body and, if agitated, he can expel you from his cab as quickly and as violently as your stomach just expelled that last shot of Jager.
Sometimes your cabby will be wearing medals. These were awarded him either by the taxi corporation or by the Alfred Nobel Foundation. You should commend him for his decorations, because he probably received them for meritorious behavior in the line of duty and not for, I don't know, killing scores of pedestrians or something.
A non sequitur: many years ago, I rode in the back of a Chinese trishaw whose pilot - a man with black hair, a neck, and rather indistinct features because he was facing the other way - had mounted between the handlebars of his bicycle a small wooden box. On that box, in a whimsical old-timey font, were the words "MYSTERY BOX," underscored by not one but four italicized question marks. When I asked, in English, about the contents of the Mystery Box, the cabby pretended not to understand, though he had been carrying on just fine a moment before. My translator asked him once in Mandarin and again in whatever the local dialect was, but it seemed the cabby had forgotten how to communicate altogether. Meanwhile, I couldn't be sure, but the longer we rode, the more the Mystery Box seemed to take on a dull red glow. I felt fine that evening, but the next day I all of a sudden succumbed to brain fever, an ailment I would recover from only gradually and painfully, though there remains a sharp, high-pitched ringing in my ears whenever I encounter an excessively punctuated sentence.
Anyway, cabbies: how 'bout em????
There is nothing on the Newtonian scale so puzzling as the cabby. Like the electron, the cabby wheels about in an exhaust plume of probability: it is impossible to know his exact location and his future destination simultaneously. Perhaps the taxi driver remains a riddle even to himself. But because cabbies, unlike Higgs bosons and neutrinos and antimatter, are a real and active force in our day to day lives, and because I have a layman's understanding of taxi drivers from various unpleasant corners of the globe, I will offer this brief and elementary introduction to cabbies of the world: their customs, their caprices, and their cunning.
Let me begin by narrowing our scope. This essay will concern itself solely with taxi drivers outside the United States of America. First of all, the only American taxi I can remember taking was from New York's Kennedy Airport to a Holiday Inn in nearby Jamaica. My senses were not at their sharpest and my only recollection of the experience is of leaving the cab much lighter than when I'd entered it. Secondly - and I know this only from hearsay, literature, and my own a priori speculations - American cab drivers, because they can trace their roots to everywhere on earth and beyond, share almost nothing in common. These men may once have piloted Fiats, Volkswagens, alpacas, or rickshaws in their native lands, may once have driven under the umbrella of whatever Geneva Convention governs international cab driving, but they are Americans now: their morals have long since burned up in U.S. Customs like so much space dust.
It is something of a mystery, then, that cabbies elsewhere in the world, even in nations whose embassies have been closed to one another for decades, abide by the same unspoken code of conduct. For this reason - though I do not profess to understand it - cabbies of the world, to some degree, can be measured and understood. Taking an American cab, on the other hand, is a game of Russian or Jamaican or Armenian roulette. An analysis of the American cabby would be as fruitless as an analysis of The American, who, if we consider the human antipodes of Shaquille O'Neal and Woody Allen, cannot be said to exist in anything but the most rarified metaphysical sense.
In the American cab - or so I am given to understand - the driver is the agitator and the passenger is his agitatee. As a passenger, you can do nothing to improve your standing with the American cabby. Most of the time, he will talk and you, despite yourself, will listen. He will usually offend you in some indirect (but lowbrow) way, and you will be unable to defend yourself either verbally - good luck getting a word in - or physically, as the backseat ear-slap is among the weakest assaults known to man. The American cabby deals you the damnation card from the instant the fare meter lights up and you can only dig yourself into deeper and deeper layers of perdition by opening your mouth. No tip, however generous, can pull you out of the hole the American cabby, by default, has placed you in.
But in the non-American cab, the ball (to coin a sports metaphor) is in your court. You are the guest and so you are the agitator. The cabby, as host, is the agitatee. He is your friend to lose. In the non-American cab, you are granted a very finite number of friend points the moment you get in the car, and will add to or subtract from them according to your behavior.
The first thing you will notice about the non-American cabby is that he is silent. This is not from a lack of things to say. Bear in mind: this man has transported tens of thousands of people hither and thither, most of them drunk and many of them vagrant. He has stories, grievances, and wisdom to share, as any traveler does. But he is waiting for you to make the first move.
Speaking of first moves, it seems I have gotten ahead of myself, for the first question any conscientious passenger must ask himself is: front seat or back? Which seat best facilitates a healthy driver/passenger relationship?
The front seat, I feel, must make the non-American cabby uncomfortable. It is literally too forward. It gives the appearance that the two of you are going somewhere together - which, in a relativistic sense, you are - but understand that, after you've arrived wherever it is you're going, you will never see your cabby again. Let's try and not get too attached. To make the separation less painful, I always sit in the back.
Which is not to say you should keep yourself distant and aloof. Though he may not look directly at you, the cabby has at least three mirrors at his disposal. The cab is his domain and he sees all that goes on within it. Make eye contact with your cabby not by staring at the side of his head, but by looking directly into the rear view mirror. This sounds elementary, but I rode foreign cabs for two years before I was stunned one evening to notice a pair of sad, jaundiced eyes in the mirror, studying my every backseat fidget. From that day on, I have maintained eye contact with my cabbies and it has yielded positive results in terms of rapport and chivalry. Eye contact lets the cabby know: here sits no greenhorn, here is a man who has ridden in a taxi before.
Do not buckle your safety belt. Non-American cab drivers view this as an ominous portent and an insult to boot. You don't begin a romp on the high seas by stuffing your ears full of wax and strapping yourself to the mast, or at least I don't. Buckling up doesn't bode well for the trip and it implies a lack of faith in the cabby, that you think him fallible when - aged 75 and a 63-year veteran of the Chinese road - he clearly is not. The clicking of the safety belt is as the ticking of the deathwatch to the cabby's ear. If he hears you buckling up, which he will, he is infinitely more likely to drive the vehicle into a gorge, killing you but not him.
Cabbies are a finicky lot when it comes to seatbelts, but there is much that doesn't faze them. Language, for one. Tell the cabby where you're headed in English, Tagalog, or 12th Century Plattdeutsch. It doesn't matter. He understands you just the same. Of course, this is not to say that all languages are equal. German - links! rechts! geradeaus! - will get you there minutes before you departed, whereas if you use Spanish - mañana, mañana, mañana - you will not reach your destination until the next Big Bang.
Cabbies sometimes make mistakes: they are not yet automatons. If you tell the cabby "Tesco," he will 99.999999% of the time get you to Tesco. But if you take a million cab rides, your cabby will one day drop you off in the middle of an alkali flat. Do not tell the cabby he has made a mistake. Perhaps he has not made a mistake at all; perhaps he knows something you do not. Slowly get out of the cab and walk out into whatever strange landscape you are confronted with. If there is a shack, a toolshed, a porta-potty, or some sort of closed structure within view, enter it and shut the door behind you. Remain there until you are sure the cabby has pulled away. If there are no manmade structures nearby, continue to walk off into the distance until you are a mere speck on the horizon - from the cabby's vantage point, not yours. Do whatever it takes to convince the cabby that he has successfully and punctually brought to where you were supposed to go. Otherwise, you will probably hurt his feelings.
If you become violently ill in transit, indicate to the cabby that you would like to blow chunks out the window. Again, language is not an issue. When you have received his blessing and he has toggled the child safety lock feature, commence blowing chunks out the window. But it is crucial that you first receive his blessing. While the cabby is no prude and certainly will not blanch at the sight of bodily fluids or the scattering to the four winds thereof, he is deeply bothered by unpermitted violations of the boundaries of his vehicle. He does not appreciate it when people touch his cab or when other vehicles collide with it. Nor is he comfortable with you throwing things (the contents of your stomach) out of the cab without his prior consent.
He is similarly irked when you play with the windows or smoke in the backseat without his permission. I prefer not to imagine what he might do if you fiddled with the mirrors, changed the radio station, or opened the glovebox. Though he does not technically own it, remember that the cab is a direct extension of the cabby's nervous system. He senses all that you do and all that you are about to do. He can read all of your thoughts. In a very real sense, you are a parasite upon his body and, if agitated, he can expel you from his cab as quickly and as violently as your stomach just expelled that last shot of Jager.
Sometimes your cabby will be wearing medals. These were awarded him either by the taxi corporation or by the Alfred Nobel Foundation. You should commend him for his decorations, because he probably received them for meritorious behavior in the line of duty and not for, I don't know, killing scores of pedestrians or something.
A non sequitur: many years ago, I rode in the back of a Chinese trishaw whose pilot - a man with black hair, a neck, and rather indistinct features because he was facing the other way - had mounted between the handlebars of his bicycle a small wooden box. On that box, in a whimsical old-timey font, were the words "MYSTERY BOX," underscored by not one but four italicized question marks. When I asked, in English, about the contents of the Mystery Box, the cabby pretended not to understand, though he had been carrying on just fine a moment before. My translator asked him once in Mandarin and again in whatever the local dialect was, but it seemed the cabby had forgotten how to communicate altogether. Meanwhile, I couldn't be sure, but the longer we rode, the more the Mystery Box seemed to take on a dull red glow. I felt fine that evening, but the next day I all of a sudden succumbed to brain fever, an ailment I would recover from only gradually and painfully, though there remains a sharp, high-pitched ringing in my ears whenever I encounter an excessively punctuated sentence.
Anyway, cabbies: how 'bout em????
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