The River of Recurrent Shame

I learned how to milk a virtual cow from a very young age.

There was an exhibit at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo that I used to frequent on field trips, across from the pettable beast pen, tucked away in a foul-smelling, unpasteurized little nook they called Dairy World. The only real reason for visiting Dairy World if you were a kid was this kind of prosthetic cow that resided there. You could always pop in and find the cow unattended - it was by far the lamest object in the zoo - and its udder compartment was usually full. You'd yank on the udders and a funky liquid that wasn't quite water but certainly wasn't milk would come spurting out, sometimes into the aluminum bucket provided, but more often than not all over the one kid in class who was even dorkier than you.

The problem with Georgian cows is that many of them happen to be alive, so they move around and stuff, and their udders aren't plastic and sanitized on a bimonthly basis, but are in fact made of flesh, are rather oddly shaped and floppy and slippery and bulbous and tumescent, among many other disgusting-sounding descriptors. Georgian cows tend to be particular about who is milking them, especially when your milking technique is something you've only ever practiced on yourself and a virtual cow somewhere in Omaha, Nebraska. Nothing in my years of training could have prepared me for the real thing. During my tenure as host son, I only milked the host cow once, and having milked everything there was to milk out of the experience, once was plenty enough for me.

It was part of my host mom's last-ditch propaganda campaign to keep me in the family. I'd kept deliberately mum to mom about my plans because I secretly wanted to put myself up for host adoption, to see another side of Georgia, to bear witness to another version of host familial dysfunction. But my host mom wanted to own me for another semester, another year, probably for the rest of my natural life. So, at her behest, the whole village was coming together to show me all the authentic, down-home, rural-type experiences that I could get in Jgali but nowhere else in Georgia, and certainly nowhere in the more civilized world. Milking Jurga, the family cow, was first on the bucket list. So to speak.

The extended host family had come out to watch. I plopped down on a stool and fumbled around Jurga's undercarriage. Her tail started swishing around, symptomatic of bovine anxiety disorder. She groaned and stomped a hoof. She mooed a deranged Transcaucasian moo. Panicking, I grabbed onto the nearest flap of flesh I could find and yanked. Nothing came out.

"She's not working," I said.
"You're pulling the wrong thing."
"Jesus," I said to myself in English, "how many things can there be?"
I brailled my way to another flap of flesh and started yanking anew.
"Nothing's happening," I said.
"You've got to pull very hard," said my host mom.
"I don't want to hurt Jurga."
"You can't hurt Jurga."

Yank and yank as I might, I came to the conclusion that Jurga was all tapped out for the day. I shrugged and threw up my hands. My host mom booted me out of the way and went to work. Torrents of milk blistered the inside of the bucket.

"See? Like that."
I scooted back in.
"Like this?"
"... no, not like that."

After dinner, I came down with strep throat and was laid up in bed for the rest of the week. My host mom made me wear a a damp hunk of cloth around my neck. By the end of the week, I still had strep throat and I also had a big red rash around my neck. I kept getting worse until I got better.

The twilight of summer. Time to brace ourselves for winter. I came home one evening and found the neighbor dude, Ruslani, chopping wood in the front lawn. He called me over.

"Gaumarjos Kitis," he said. "You want to put in some work?"
"Sure."

He handed me a cigarette. I thanked him and lit the cigarette and smoked it as I did some back stretches.  Then I lined myself up, raised the ax, and brought it down upon the log. Clunk. The log bounced off the chopping block and went rolling down the sidewalk.

"No," said Ruslani. "Not like that. Like this."

Effortlessly, he split a log in two and handed me back the ax.

"Like this?" I said.
Clunk. Roll, roll, roll.
"... no, not like that."

My host family's primary export was hazelnuts. Harvesting hazelnuts was a job a six-year-old could do, so it was also a job I could do. It involved grabbing a hazelnut tree by the neck and throttling it until nuts came raining down, then finger-skinning the nuts one by one and popping them into a bucket. I'd challenge my host brother to hazelnut harvesting competitions and he'd always kick my ass by a couple of buckets or so. But it was a job I could do.

There were weird little translucent spiders that lived in the hazelnut skins. They'd fly into a panic upon being outed and vanish imperceptibly into your pants. You'd wake up in the middle of the night itching all over, creepy bumps on your thighs.

We worked all summer long. By the end of the summer, I'd scratched my body raw, but we'd filled the entire guest room full of hazelnuts, a hundred kilos of the damned things piled across the floor.

"We're going to be rich," I said to my host mom.
"Twenty tetri a kilo," she nodded.
"Why that's ... twenty lari," I said. "Why that's ... twelve bucks."

One evening, my host mom knocked on my door and told me that we were going somewhere. I had nothing to do and nowhere to go. We walked down the path between the hazelnut trees, past Jurga's barn and her thirty-foot leaning tower of shit, kept going until we'd reached the fence at the end of our backyard. My host mom opened the gate and we clambered down a steep hill. And there - still, I suppose, technically in our backyard - was a river.

"This is ours," she said.
"Cool."
"If you stay with us, you can swim here every day."
"Every day?"
"Until it gets cold. Then you can't swim anymore."
"Sounds good."
"All of this is ours," she said, sweeping her hand over the water.
"All of it?"
"All of it."
"Wonderful."
"So you will stay?"
"Maybe," I said.
"That's a yes, right?"
"That's a maybe."

It was a very Lion King moment. Everything the light touches, Simba, and so on.

"I'm so happy that you're going to stay," she said. "I hope you like swimming."
"Are you kidding? Who doesn't love swimming?"

I'd never learned how to swim. I've never once swum in my life.

It's not that I'm afraid of the water, more that I do not trust it. I feel the same way about water that I do about flying, or joining the military, or joining a cult, or getting a desk job, or going to church, or ingesting anonymous drugs handed to me by strangers at a Flaming Lips show. I suppose it's the thought of giving myself over to something so vast and powerful and beyond my control, something so potentially lethal or mind-destroying or just plain time-consuming and dull that frightens me, moreso than any specific fear of water per se.

Or perhaps it is something about the water, after all. I have buoyancy issues. The first step towards swimming is floating, or so I've been told, and I have never, ever - not even for an instant - been able to float. I have always sunk to the bottom of everything: of the pool, of the sea, of the hottub, of the bathtub. I am genuinely perplexed whenever I find myself sitting on the periphery of water - on the beach, on the dock of the bay, on a lawnchair sufficiently far removed from the Comfort Inn pool - and watching other human beings of all shapes and sizes gallivant around in the water like a pride of sea lions, so effortlessly that it's like breathing to them. I can't do that. I know full well from experience that, even with little orange inflatable floaties strapped to all four limbs, I'd be receiving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in no time. I don't know how people do it. Float.

In 7th grade, I remember how horrified I was to discover that there was a mandatory swimming component to my P.E. class. I tried to get out of it, citing the heart murmur that I no longer had, the one that had gotten me out of weightlifting. No such luck. Instead, while the rest of the kids swam laps, I ran them: I jogged through the water from one end of the pool to the other, which isn't as easy as it sounds. A "safety buddy" was appointed to swim alongside me and watch me run, to make sure I didn't drown in the shallow end of the pool, while all the other kids hung out at the deep end. Naturally, this did wonders for my popularity. And I was already ever-so-popular in 7th grade.

I don't know. Perhaps it does have something to do with fear, after all. Once upon a time, I very nearly drowned in the Atlantic Ocean. I must have been four or five years old, still a plump little butterbean, and like Melville, my hypos got the best of me and I decided that I'd see a little bit of the watery part of the world. I was not aware at that age of the phenomenon they call the undertow, and within seconds I had completely vanished. My parents - because they were and are good ones, after all - noticed immediately that I was gone. They were and are also very smart parents, well-versed in the classics, and they used Archimedes' principle to deduce - from the heaving waves that came rolling in after my fat ass had plummeted to the bottom of the sea - that I was buried somewhere in the Atlantic, probably drowning. My dad sifted through sea anemones and jellyfishes, discarded bags of Utz® brand crab cakes and crushed cans of Schlitz®, until he finally grabbed hold of a fat little cankle. He snatched me up "like a lobster" (his words) and smacked me instinctively across the ass - and so my ass was saved for the time being, one of many such fortunate little twists of fate that have conspired to keep me alive long enough to write the words I am currently writing. 

All of this is to say that, while it wasn't such a bad thing to discover a river in my own backyard, it certainly wasn't much of a selling point, either.

Ours was not a mighty river, but it was very easy on the eyes, beached as it was with the smooth, white stones peculiar to our part of Georgia. The water was pure and clear and full of fish. Our little elbow of the river was especially tame, tailor-made for human frolicking, with craggy outcroppings of sedimentary rock that served nicely as diving boards, and natural whirlpools that, I imagined, would be quite fun to wade around in with one's best girl. Strung across the river was the ricketiest footbridge I have ever seen in my life - built, perhaps, by the set designers of Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom - a bridge that farmers and their cattle often used in their daily commute. In idle moments, I wondered what it was like to be crushed by a cow.

One hot afternoon, my host dad, host brother, and I went down to the river. It was crowded. We removed our shirts. I was pleasantly reminded of how skinny I had become. Those nearby laughed at how pale I was. My host brother kicked off his shoes and scaled up the nearest crag. He stood there, twenty feet up, nervously sucking in his breath. He glanced at me for reassurance and I gave him the double thumbs-up. He plugged his nose and dove. He splashed into the water and came up a few seconds later, giggling. He invited me to dive in, too. I quickly lit a cigarette and, smoking my cigarette, gestured that I was smoking a cigarette. He shrugged and swam over to meet his friends. 

Dato, my host dad, possessed a weird kind of aquatic grace. He raised one arm and rolled his portly little body into the river, swimming against the current with long, slow strokes. I found a nearby rock with a built-in ass groove and sat there at edge of the river and smoked. I knew that I would be outed soon enough.

The pretty girls from down the way swam over to flirt with me. I smiled and chatted with them without quite flirting back, because I never flirted back, because I was terrified of being tied down to the village forever. They invited me to come swim with them. I gestured at the cigarette, which had already extinguished itself by then. One of the girls plucked the cigarette away from me and flicked it across the rocks. Come swim, she said. I don't know how, I murmured.

"You don't know how to swim?" Disbelief. "Why?"
"Because," I said, "I am a moron."

This set them to giggling, but it wasn't the right sort of giggling. It was as though I had cuckolded myself somehow. They swam to the opposite side of the river, and before long, everyone in the village knew: the foreigner didn't know how to swim.

It was all Dato could do to get me into the water.

"Come in," he said. "I'll teach you!"
"I'm really bad," I said. "Really, very bad."
"It doesn't matter. I'll teach you!"

If there was anyone in the village I trusted, it was Dato. So I dipped my toes into the water, then tottered unevenly across the rocks at the bottom of the river, slipping every so often and splashing down on my ass, shuddering at how cold it was, already disturbed at the swallowing capacity of two feet of water.

"Come out here," called Dato. "It's not deep."

Depth is a very relative thing. There are people who think Dan Brown is deep. When it comes to water, I'm one of those people. I'm a little under six feet tall, so it stands to reason that it would take some effort for me to drown myself in the four feet of water I was stumble-wading my way into, but I knew myself well enough to know that it might not take any effort at all.

Dato explained that the first thing I had to do was float. And that is how I learned the Georgian word for float. Learning a verb, however, is not the same thing as knowing how to perform the action. I knew lots of Georgian verbs by then, and I wasn't very good at any of them: to milk a cow, to chop wood, to flirt ...

Already shaking, I summoned something like courage and allowed my feet to lose contact with the rocks beneath me. I began to sink. I panicked. I slipped my way back up to verticality. Dato laughed, but not cruelly. I tried again, and again, and again, and eventually, I did manage (by flailing all four limbs) to suspend myself midstream, with my head above water.

"Good," said Dato. "Very good. Now you have to stick your face underwater. Like this."

He plunged to the bottom and stayed there for several seconds, then bubbled back up to the surface. It looked easy enough. And it was.

But it was not. Not for me.

It was the strangest sensation I'd felt in a long time. I stared at the thin skin of the water, one foot under my nose, the tiny layer of atoms that divided water from air, and I knew that it was the easiest thing in the world to cross that barrier. But I could not do it. Physically. I could not bring myself to let go. I dipped slowly downward and my nostrils filled with water. I came back up coughing.

"It's water," said Dato. "You can't breathe down there."
"I know," I said. "Wait a minute. I've got this."

I plugged my nose and dipped. And this time, I somehow gulped the water into my mouth. I came back up and coughed violently and felt like crying.

"Try it like this," said Dato, slowing things down, showing me step by step.
"Like this?" I said, when he'd come back up.
I sunk below for a millisecond, came up hacking, very nearly puked.
"No," he said, "... not like that."

I made my way over to the grassy bank at the other side of the river and I held onto the weeds behind my back while I half-floated in the water. This, I realized, was as far as I was going to get with my life aquatic. A small grey fish flitted over and started eating the gunk between my toes. I'd paid twenty bucks for a cleaning fish pedicure, once upon a time in North Korea. True story.

I took no more swimming lessons after that. The men in my host family gave up on me, and I was relieved that they did. I often went down to the river and sat in three feet of water, wore my faux-Dylan shades and smoked cigarettes and let the fish clean my feet. But I did not swim.

One day, my host brother took me crab hunting. This, I thought, was something I could do, and something I would enjoy doing. Hunting. Killing. Cracking the hard outer shell of nature and feasting upon the meat. Like a man. We set off one evening in our flip-flops with a couple of white PVC buckets.

But when we found where they were hiding - under some muddy rocks along the shore of somebody else's creek - and it came time to kill them, I couldn't do that, either.

"What do we do?" I asked my host brother.
"Crush them with a rock!"
"Like this?" I said, and took aim with a pebble, hoping to snipe one from afar.
"No," he said, shaking his head, "not like that! Like this!"
He handed me a boulder and gestured for me to bring it down with all my might upon a single-parent crab family of five.
But I couldn't.

My host brother shook his head. Of all the embarrassing things I'd never been able to do, this was by far the most despicable. It put him in a foul mood, and he no longer cared about crab hunting. He picked one of the crabs up and it pinched him on the palm, so he chucked it into a bush and we went home with two empty PVC buckets between us.

One afternoon I woke up and wandered out to the living room and saw that nobody was home. I checked all the rooms of the house to make sure, then I went out to the backyard and snooped around: everyone was gone. Unprecedented. I popped over to Ruslani's house and asked him what the hell was going on.

"Your family is in Sachino for two days," he said.
"Two days?" I pondered.

I went back up to my room and removed my shirt and my pants. In my boxers, then, I went to the living room and locked the door, just in case. Then I cracked open the fridge to see what could be eaten. Somebody had bought a bunch of eggs. They'd been holding out on me. I hadn't had eggs in months. I cracked a couple in a pan and fried them sunny side up. When they were gone, I threw in four more and scrambled them. I sat around in my underwear watching Al-Jazeera, getting up every other Syrian bombing or so to fry up some more eggs. By mid-afternoon, I had devoured a full dozen. Cool Hand Keith.

Later on, I swiped a bunch of music from my computer, went back to the living room and pumped it up on the stereo. I sat there smoking cigarettes and drinking Nescafé and drumming on the bulge of my belly, feeling like the Lord of All Creation. It was the happiest I'd been in months. As evening came on, there was a knock on the living room door.

It was Dato.

"Gaumarjos Kitis," he said. Long live Keith.
"Gaumarjos," I said, shielding my bosom. "Aüüüfgh! It's hot today!"
"Yes," said Dato, not letting on that anything was out of the ordinary. "Very hot."

I went to my room and put on some clothes. I decided to lay low for a while, read a book. Then there was a knock at my bedroom door.

"Kiti," whispered Dato, "come out to the living room when you get a chance. It's important."

He was sitting at the table with a two-liter Pepsi bottle filled to the top with an ominously clear liquid.

"Do you want to drink with me?"
"Sure," I said.
"They are coming back tomorrow," he said, and I nodded.
"You can't tell my wife," he said. "I will get in trouble if I make you drink."
"I won't tell anyone."
I sat down. He poured me a shot, then poured himself one.
"Do you want to invite Hooha over?" I asked.
"No," said Dato, shaking his head, "because Hooha will talk."

We drank our first shot to family, the second one to friendship, the third one to women, and I lost track of all the ones after that.

Dato was never one to get sloppy and loose-lipped while drunk, and he was almost always drunk. So I was surprised, round about dusk, when a wistful crinkle formed under his eyes, adding a tinge of melancholy to his customarily impish grin, and he glanced around the living room and said, in a low voice, "I built all of this."

I took in the room, trying to see it the way I'd seen it the first time.

"All of it?"
"Everything," he said. "The floor, the ceiling, the walls. I put the tiles on the walls. I built the table we're drinking at and the chairs we're sitting on. I built this house."
"You're very talented," I said, lacking the vocabulary to say anything more meaningful.
"I built the whole thing with my hands. I built the bathroom. It's a very nice bathroom, I think."
I nodded. It was a nice bathroom, the kind of place you'd be happy to defecate in, even in the West.
"I did the plumbing, the electricity, the lighting," he said, "I did the painting and the carpentry and I built all the furniture. I built everything with my hands."
"Gaumarjos Datos," I said, and we drank another shot.

He stared into the bottom of his empty glass for a moment, then he poured us both a fresh one.

"And the farm in the backyard," he said, "the vegetables and the spices. The cucumbers and the beans and the hot peppers you like. I planted them myself and I harvest them. We do everything with our hands. I think it is not like this in America."

I shook my head.
"Not for most people," I said. "For most people, everything is done at the supermarket."

He nodded.

"Here, we must do everything with our hands," he said. "I do everything with my hands."
He held them up for me, to make sure that I had understood.

"You are different," he said.
"I know. My hands are stupid."
"No," he said. "Not stupid."
"I can't build, I can't farm, I can't cook," I said. "I can't swim, I can't chop wood, I can't hunt, I can't kill, and I can't do anything with my hands."
"That is okay," he said, "you are a different kind of person. You don't need your hands."
I laughed a bit.
"I'm serious," he said. "You work with your mind."
"Well, I don't know if I would say that my mind actually works - "
"You teach. You learn languages. You travel all over the world," he said. "You teach my son English. He hates English, but you teach him things. He learns from you. Now his English is better. He really admires you a lot."

At this point, I was blushing - blushing drunk, blushing flattered - and biting my lower lip.

"You teach my daughter English, and German, and Chinese," he said. "All these languages, and for this, she will have a much better life. We are very glad that you are here."
"Well," I said, "I'm glad to be here."
"And in your free time, you read and you write. And I don't know any English, but I think you are probably good at these things. I know that about you."
"Maybe," I said. "I don't know that about me yet."
"I work with my hands. You work with your mind," he said. "But we are men. And we are not so different, I think, you and me."

We stopped toasting after that and just drank. By the time ten o'clock rolled around, it was clear that I would have to use my hands to get Dato safely to bed. And there was nothing, at that point, that could save my mind from itself but sleep.

I went back to my room and floated over to the bed and pushed open the window and leaned over the ledge and looked up at the stars and the stars were bright and clear and Orion's Belt looked like the kind of belt a dude named Orion might wear and you could see why the estranged host parents of humanity's youth were so taken by the constellations and the stories they told and I thought to myself I've got to get out of here before it becomes impossible for me to get myself out of here.

The Old Gray Mare (She Ain't What She Used To Be)

It ain't easy being the World's Oldest Woman. You die at least once a decade and just keep getting older.

In 1986, she shuffled off this mortal coil at the age of 115. By 1993, she had passed on again, 117 years young, and in Pennsylvania of all places. As it stands, according to the people at Guinness, the World's Oldest Woman is forever 122, buried well deep in a graveyard somewhere in the French town where Van Gogh painted Cafe Terrace at Night, not long after her thirteenth birthday. She claimed to have met the guy. 

But there remain a handful of hardscrabble Georgian villagers who would tell you that 122 is some weak shit, indeed. They come from a hard country. People die young there, and live even longer. They would have you know that the World's Oldest Woman was 132 years old when the almighty tamada finally summoned her to the great supra in the sky last September.

Her name was Antisa Khvichava, and I met her a couple of months before she died.

I was sitting on the couch with my host family on a Tuesday night, watching the Georgian news, feeling like the World's Oldest Man. It had already been a long summer. All my old friends were off on vacation, my new friends yet to arrive, so there was mostly nothing to do, and nothing whatsoever to insulate me from my host mother. Neither of my bank accounts were functioning, so I also happened to be flat broke. Escape was not an option. I couldn't even afford to leave the house - or at least, if I did, there was nowhere but noplace to go. 

It wasn't a total loss. I'd learned a lot of Georgian. I'd read a lot of books. And I'd taught myself how to use my busted left hand again, mostly through having my ass handed to me by my host brother, playing a bootleg version of Pro Evolution Soccer. We played every night, on ye olde PC. And before long, I could type again. Other than that, all we had was potatoes, cucumbers, plenty of salt, and the Georgian news to keep us sustained and relatively sane. 

I can't say from experience, but I suspect that the Georgian news is not fundamentally different from what North Koreans watch in North Korea. Plenty of portly bureaucrats inspecting things. Plenty of portly bureaucrats inspecting other things. We had spent several hours that Tuesday evening watching portly Georgian bureaucrats inspect things and other things when my host family suddenly sprang into animation. My host mom cranked up the volume to bowel-releasing decibel levels. The kids and I were told to shut up. And there on the television screen appeared not another portly bureaucrat, but a weatherbeaten scrap of splotchy brown skin shrouded in bedsheets.

"What is that?" I asked.
"That," said my host mom, "is the World's Oldest Woman."
"Cool," I said. "How old is she?"
"132."

I never got the hang of the Georgian numeral system, nor did I ever put much faith in village folklore – the same folklore that would have you wear a wet scarf to cure strep throat; the very same that would have you drink 120 proof cha-cha to cancel out a headache – so I was doubly unconvinced.

"World's Oldest Woman," I murmured.
"She lives here, you know," said my host mom.
"In Georgia?"
"Yes. In Sachino."
"Sachino? We've been there before. That's five minutes away."
"It is," she said. "I was born there."
"Do you know her?"
"Of course I do. She was a hundred years old when I was born."
"Is she really the World's Oldest Woman?"
"Yes. There can be no doubt."
"I'd very much like to meet her."
"What are you doing Friday?"
"Meeting the World's Oldest Woman," I said.

My arrival in Sachino was as good an excuse as any for the villagers there to throw a supra, so a supra was thrown. The first familiar person I bumped into was Lado, a tall, wiry dude with all the delicate mannerisms of a meth-head. I shook his shaky hand and he tugged me back into a garden shed. I figured he was going to get me drunk, or murder me, or perhaps first one and then the other.

"Check this out," he said.
He kicked back a door and there, in a bucket full of blood, was a severed cow head.
"Interesting, no?"
I nodded.
"Very interesting, Lado."

My host grandma found us in there, saw the cow head, saw the delicate foreigner, and shook a splotchy index finger at Lado.

"Sadisti!" she cried. "Sadisti!"

Lado and I wandered back out to the front lawn and joined the oldsters who were gathered there, huddled around a table.

"Do you know this game?" asked Lado.
"Sitting around drinking and smoking?" 
"No. Backgammon."
"I don't know anything about it."
"But everybody in the world knows this game."
"Not me."
"Then I will teach you."

The first thing I had to learn was an alternate numeral system that Mingrelians only use when they're playing backgammon. I memorized the numbers and immediately forgot them. It didn't really matter anyway. The oldsters, watching me play, swiftly established that I had the cognitive capacity of a Svani goatherd and took over operations. I sat and watched them play against Lado.

"Congratulations," said one of the oldsters, when I was already well past half-asleep, "you won."
"Good game," said Lado, and shook my hand.
I was undefeated, and remain so.

We got up and shook every palsied oldster hand held out to us. Then Lado tugged me over to the chicken coop. He had something else to show me. He plucked up one of the birds at random, threw it down on a tree stump, and sliced its head off with a bowie knife. Sadisti, indeed.

The adults were hard at work fixing dinner, so my host mom told me and my host brother to go down to the river and do kid stuff. The path took us through the village graveyard. 

The modern Georgian tombstone is a sight to behold. You wouldn't want to order one for yourself. It is not clear to me how exactly the things are made, but they have the appearance of having been screen printed in a t-shirt shop. A photograph of the deceased, at his or her prime in life, no wart or nosehair omitted, everything chiseled into the stone much too precisely. I respect Georgians and I respect their dead, but "tacky" is the word that springs to mind when it comes to their tombstones. Nobody wants to be remembered the way they actually were. Or at least I don't. One such tombstone, belonging to my friend's host cousin, featured the poor guy jabbering into a mid-90's first-edition Nokia cellphone that was roughly twice the size of his head. Sad. Embarrassing. Permanent. In any case, no reception wherever he's at.

There were pigs rooting around in the graveyard and a few of the more devout ones were trying to get into the church. My host brother punted them away and we went inside. We stood in the back and watched a poor old babushka wail at the altar until the guilty itch of heathenism crept up my spine. I shuddered a bit and made instinctively for the door. My host brother looked at me and shrugged. We went down to the river.

We skipped stones, something my host brother is very good at, a skill I never mastered because the mucky Missouri of my youth was the sort of river where you were liable to peg a rotted corpse six times out of ten. My host brother got tired of trying to teach an old hobo new tricks, so we started gathering up great big boulders and chucking them willy-nilly into the river, reversing tens of thousands of years of geology in about five minutes, laughing and laughing and scaring the bejeezus out of the muddy mudskippers. 

That got old, too. And exhausting. I sat down on a rock and smoked a Pirveli and watched my host brother build a small boat out of a stray chunk of cardboard, some twigs and some threads of grass. This, I thought, was a pretty neat idea.

"We should write a message and stick it on the boat," I suggested. "Maybe someone will find it. Maybe we'll find it when we get back to Jgali."

I was the Hobbes to his Calvin. He, the Calvin to my Hobbes. He thought this was a dumb idea. My host brother had nothing of the sort in mind. He nudged the boat adrift and pummeled it with stones until it sunk to the bottom.

We walked upstream a bit until my host brother found a full bottle of water bobbing against the banks. He handed it to me and gestured for me to throw it at something. I tried to bounce it off a nearby pile of stones, to see what would happen. What happened was: the cap blew off and everything exploded in my face. And it wasn't water. It was pure cha-cha. I nearly puked on the spot. I hadn't brought a change of clothes to Sachino, so I'd have to spend the next couple days smelling like I'd been on a weeklong bender. Luckily, for most Georgian men, such is seldom far from the truth. So I'd blend right in. More or less.     

Later that night, there was wine and there was toasting. Then there was a power outage, which made drinking more difficult than usual. In the darkness, I ran into a dude named Sachino who was born in Sachino. I told him that my name was Grand Forks, North Dakota. Not a bad evening. But I went to bed early. I had a date with the World's Oldest Woman the following afternoon and I couldn't afford to show up looking more haggard than she did.

The next day, I sat around in the living room (where my temporary bed happened to be) and read a book about Georgia's most recent war with Russia. I couldn't make much sense out of it. The war or the book. I put the book down and watched and waited. People kept popping in and out. They'd probably been watching me sleep. There were host cousins running rampant, host cousins I'd never met before, host cousins whose duty it was to give me semi-permanent cluster headaches. They were from Tbilisi, the big city, which meant that they possessed all sorts of things that my host siblings did not: smartphones, new clothes, good haircuts, snotty accents, decent English teachers, decent English. I got to witness the way my host sister's eyes glazed over the first time she held a smartphone in her hands, and it reminded me of the way the religious neighbor kids used to zone out when they came over to my house and saw that we had Predator on VHS. Within an hour of touching the thing, she was begging me to sign her up for Facebook.

"The Face Book?" I said. "Never heard of it."

I'd sooner set a kid up with a coke connect.

I decided to take a nap. Feeling mighty old, indeed. And I slept and I dreamt that I was trapped in a fundamentalist Christian concentration camp, but that I'd broken out of it by making a really good joke. My host sister woke me up before I could remember how it went.

"We are go to see old woman soon," my host sister said, "but we wait for our guide."
"Guide?"
"Yes," said my host sister, giggling. "She is wery beautiful woman."
"Is that a fact?"
"Wery beautiful. Wery, wery beautiful."

It was impossible to unscramble the giggling. There was a slight chance - a wery slight chance - that our guide would turn out to be the one young, single, beautiful woman in the entire Mingrelian countryside, and that I'd need to take a quick shower and wash my clothes in a foamy bucket full of quantum anti-cha-cha and put on some deodorant before she arrived. But this did not strike me as especially likely, or even possible, so I decided that I would tempt fate and remain rurally grody.

There was a knock at the living room door. It opened. And in walked a gender-neutral photocopy of Lado.

"Do you think she is very beautiful?" giggled my host sister.
I wasn't at all sure what to say.
"You are confuse," said my host sister. "That because he is not girl and she is not boy."
"Oh," I said. "I see."
"You have this in America?"
"Yes," I said. "We do have this in America."
"This Lado's sister," she said, "or brother. Nobody know."
She giggled. 
"Grow up," I said to my host sister.
"My name is Eliso," said Eliso.

We shook hands.
"Nice to meet you," I said.
"You too. The old woman is not ready yet. Let's go to the river."

We rounded up Nini - my five year old host cousin, she of the Hello Kitty smartphone - and we went walking along the river. Lado's intersex sibling had a destination in mind, but as often happened, I did not know the Georgian word for where we were going and nobody knew the English word for where we were going, and our game of charades only confused me further. So we kept walking. We plucked foul-smelling berries from the trees and ate them. My host sister taunted me with snails. Nini recited all the foul words she'd learned from my host brother, who had learned them from me. We'd been walking about an hour when we came upon a waterfall storming down from the mouth of a cave, like something out of The Goonies.

The amygdala is the part of the brain responsible for generating fear responses in humans, and I am convinced that most Georgians do not have one. My host sister and Eliso kicked off their shoes. Eliso picked up Nini and sat the fragile, pretty, delicate little five year old girl on his or her shoulders. They began scaling the slick, twenty foot vertical wall up to the mouth of the cave. My host sister tried to get me to come with them, but I'd just gotten my cast removed. I'd sworn off acts of physical idiocy for the time being. In any case, I was far too chickenshit to do anything of the sort. I'd always been. Too chickenshit. I was too chickenshit to even watch them climb. That girl. If she fell. While they climbed, I lingered near the base of the waterfall. Just in case. But when they arrived at the top, I could hear their voices reverberating high up above, telling me how beautiful it was up there, telling me to climb up there myself. I wouldn't. I couldn't. I never would or could. I sat down on a rock and smoked a Pirveli.  

Then we walked back into town. My host brother was waiting for us. And together we walked to the house of the World's Oldest Woman. Eliso opened the front gate and we followed. An old woman was working in the front lawn, drawing water from the well. She unstooped slightly when she saw us coming.

"Hello!" called Eliso. 
The old woman said nothing.
"This is my foreign tourist friend," Eliso said, indicating yours truly. "He thinks your grandma is fascinating and wants to take some pictures with her."

I pieced together what was being said and cringed. The word turisti rubbed me the wrong way. I hadn't come to gawk. A picture with the World's Oldest Woman was not what I had in mind. But what did I have in mind, exactly? What did I hope to accomplish by meeting someone over one hundred years my senior? Would I have even come in the first place if, say, she were merely 112? I began to feel suspicious of myself, and suspicious of my motives, and all and all, tremendously guilty in the residually Catholic way.  

"Can we come inside and see her?" asked Eliso.
"She is not feeling very well these days," said the old woman, "but I will see if it's okay."
"Look," I said to Eliso, after the old woman had shuffled inside, "it's not important. We can go. We should go."
"But we're already here. You've traveled so far."

An old man had come out onto the porch, hunching along on a cane. He looked us over and hobbled back inside.

"Her son," said Eliso.

After a while, the old woman came back outside.
"You can come in," she said.

It was a dark, clammy room, faded photos hanging here and there, no furniture at all but a cot in the corner, pressed up against the wall. And lying in the cot was the World's Oldest Woman.

Eliso nudged me.
"Say something."

I stepped forward.

"Hello," I said.

A pair of eyes emerged from the face, seemed to trace all over the room before they finally settled on me.

"How are you?" I asked in Mingrelian.
She said nothing, so I switched over to Georgian.
"Hello," I said. "How are you?"
She watched me. We made eye contact. She said nothing. I felt like a sperm cell.

"Well," I said, "I am from America. I am an English teacher. I teach English near Sachino, in a village called Jgali. It is very nice to meet you." 

The room expanded with silence. My host brother was shifting around and staring at his shoes. Nobody said a word. 

"We must go now," I said. "Long live you and your family."

I bowed slightly - a nervous holdover from my time in Asia - and turned around to leave. On the porch, the granddaughter of the World's Oldest Woman - no spring chicken herself - was waiting for us.

"She cannot understand. She has hearing problems," she explained to us, "and brain problems."

And that was it.

We went back to the house. Most of the hungover men playing backgammon were in even worse shape than the World's Oldest Woman. They still wanted to drink with me. My host mom didn't think this would be a good idea and I, for once, agreed with her. We got into a car with a guy named Soso - every bit as mediocre as his name would suggest - who drove us the five minutes to Jgali and then tried to touch me for ten lari. Gas money, he said. Fortunately, I was still broke.

In the end, all I could think of was how positively dumb it was for me to wish a long life upon the World's Oldest Woman.

Not pictured: The Author, because he sometimes has respect for human dignity.
(Photograph: David Mdzinarishvili/Reuters)

It wasn't until I straightened out matters at the bank - which takes about as long as you might imagine in Georgia - that I was able to get near the internet again, and when I finally did, I sat down and did some cursory research. Yes, it was true that Antisa Khvichava claimed to be 132 years old, and it was true that nobody could prove that she wasn't. But it was also true that nobody could prove that she was. She had grown up during an especially dicey epoch of Georgian history, and Georgia happens to be a country that has known very many dicey epochs, indeed.

She claimed to have been born on July 8th, 1880, and had a Soviet passport testifying in her favor. If said Soviet passport is testifying truthfully, she would've been 23 when the Wright Brothers took to the skies, 52 when Hitler came to power, and would've just turned 89 when human beings first walked on the moon. 

There are plenty of reasons for doubt. For one thing, no human being - save for Methuselah - has ever lived past the age of 122. 132 would seem to be quite a leap forward. For another, she would've had to have given birth to her son - the codgerly cane-supported fellow I met on her stoop - when she was sixty years old. More likely than not, nobody will ever know how old Antisa Khvichava was when she died. But I'm reasonably certain that the World's Oldest Woman I met was not, in fact, the World's Oldest Woman.

But she lived a very, very, very long time. That much is beyond doubt. She lived through all manner of horrible, and perhaps occasionally wonderful, things that I will never even be able to begin to imagine. She will almost certainly remain the oldest person I will ever meet, however long I live, and I don't plan on sticking around for 132 years.

She attributed her longevity to Georgian brandy - a substance that has killed many other Georgians well before their time, so perhaps it balances out somehow - and she was fairly independent, up until the very end. At her supposed age of 130, she could still do pretty much everything for herself. She only needed help getting to the family outhouse. Which was more than I could manage some nights in Georgia.

All of this information was obtained by Western journalists, who visited her village, and interviewed her through Georgian interpreters, and photographed her, generally with birthday cakes involved. I wonder where the journalists went for lunch. Where they shacked up. What they did for amusement. I wonder what they thought of the place. I wonder whether they ever ventured north to Jgali, where I lived. I never did the work any of them did. That's not my job. I have no job. But for what it's worth, I was probably the last foreigner Antisa Khvichava ever saw. Meeting her certainly changed me. I doubt I left any impression upon her at all.

Pseudosupra

I realized much too late how weird my living situation was. Well before I first donned the teal racecar t-shirt of Orthodox Georgian shame, I'd invited a bunch of foreigners to my host household for an end-of-semester supra. Weird Beard, the Irishman, and a nice girl named Leslie - in a few short hours, they'd be caught up in the thick of it, surrounded by adoring villagers from a village not their own, drinking, drunk, drunken. Nobody in my host family had seen more than two non-Georgians in their lives. That night, they were to see four of them in action simultaneously.

In Georgia, a supra is a nominally formal occasion in which the men drink homemade wine and homemade vodka to elephantine excess while the women set the table, cook a twelve-course meal, collect dirty dishes, wash them, drink a toast or two while remaining sober and clear-headed and servile, for they must constantly empty ashtrays and bring new ones, fix coffee, make dessert, mop up vomit ... The men are expected to drink. Is it ever exhausting to be a man.

The men drink shots, shots of cha-cha, shots of wine. There is no savoring, no nursing, and there is no drinking alone. There is no drinking at all unless a toast is proposed, and all toasting runs through the tamada: essentially, the Stalin of the supra. He appoints the toaster and he nominates the toastees. You may politely ask the tamada for permission to stand up and propose a toast of your own, but you may never, ever, under any circumstances usurp the tamada's toast. I had quite a notorious reputation for doing so without meaning to - particularly after that fateful tenth toast of the evening - and for that reason, I became known far and wide as The Rogue Tamada of Samegrelo Province, one of many nicknames I was to acquire during my ten months in Georgia.

As the night escalates, shot glasses and wine glasses are put away and the horns come out. They are literal horns, the sort that cuckolds wear: hollowed-out cow horns, hollowed-out bull horns. These, usually, can be found dangling from the walls of any Georgian living room, regardless of whether there is drinking going on or not (and there usually is). The tamada starts with the small horns first, then moves up through his collection until, by the end of the night, you find yourself drinking out of a horn the size of your head, something that might well have belonged to a mythical or prehistoric beast. And you are expected to guzzle everything down at a single go. This is why I described the supra as a nominally formal occasion. Things always start out formally enough, but how would Emily Post have you projectile vomit all over someone else's living room floor?

I could sense the electricity in the house when I woke up on Supra Bowl Sunday - it was the only electricity we'd had all week - and by noon I was nearly blinded by the mischievous gleam in my host dad's eyes. My liver ached preemptively. I paced the house while my host dad lugged around ominous-looking plastic jugs and my host mom dusted under our feet. I felt the need to coach my host parents, the way you might coach your actual parents before bringing over your girlfriend for the first time. But of course, there was no point in worrying about anything: the Georgians would be Georgian, the Westerners would be Western, and my host mom would be my host mom, and I would be horrifically embarrassed at some point, and the night would get out of hand in the weirdest of ways. This was all beyond my control. There was nothing to do but pace around and hope that everyone else got drunk enough at the supra for me to steer the morning-after narrative in my favor.

Weird Beard was the first to show up, just shy of 4 PM. My host dad was already out on the piss somewhere else. The rest of the family gathered around on the porch to analyze (and psychoanalyze) Weird Beard in a language that neither he nor I quite understood.

"He's so handsome," said my host sister. "His beard is much better than your beard."
"Uh," said Weird Beard, "what did she say?"
"She said that you're handsome, and that your beard is better than my beard."
"Thanks," said Weird Beard.
"We want you to live here, not Kiti."
"They say that you should live here, not me."
"I like my host family a lot," said Weird Beard, "but thanks."
"Here," I said, tugging Weird Beard by the sleeve, "lemme show you my digs."
"Dang," he said, "how'd your Georgian get so good?"
"It's not," I said, "but if it is, it's because these people run my life."

My room was much the same as any other Georgian room, but that's not what Weird Beard had come to see. He wanted to see the shirt.

"Good God almighty. She makes you wear that?"
"I know, right?"
"So."
"So?"
"Put it on for me."
"No."

Host dad came swaggering back home and summoned us menfolk to the living room. A Big Beautiful Babushka named Nino had showed up. A bottle of high octane cha-cha had appeared. The night had begun.

My host dad was tamada by default. He filled our shot glasses. He proposed a toast to mothers. I clinked glasses with him, with Weird Beard, with Nino. My host mom, meanwhile, was off scrubbing the toilet.

"Sheni deda, sheni deda, sheni deda," I said. "Your mother, your mother, your mother."

Weird Beard nudged me in the ribs.

"Dude," he said. "What the hell?"
"Eh?"
"Do you have any idea what you just said?"
Nino's face had gone red. It looked like her eyes were about to pop out of her head and go flying across the living room. Finally, she could keep it in no longer. She busted up laughing.
"Kiti," she crowed. "Oh, Kiti! Sheni deda!"
She smacked the flat of her palm against the top of her balled-up fist, Georgian Sign Language for "fuck you."
"Seriously? Is that what I said?"
Weird Beard nodded.
"Huh. I had no idea," I said, "but I guess that makes sense. Yo mama. Same in English, no?"
We drank. Off to a good start.

There was a toast to international friendship. Obama, Saakashvili, megobrebi - gaumarjos! A toast to family. Ojakhis gaumarjos! A toast to the deceased.

"Gaumarjos!" I chimed.

Weird Beard nudged me in the ribs. They were starting to hurt, the ribs were.

"Dude," he said. "Think about what you just said."
"What?"
"Dead people. Cheers!"
"Shit," I said.
"Nicely done."
"At this rate, I'm never going to get to be tamada."
"Give it a couple more toasts. You'll go rogue. I just know you will."

My host mom decided it was time for us to switch over to wine. So much the better, I figured. She snatched up the bottle of cha-cha, put it in a box and locked it away in a cupboard like it was the Lost Ark. My host dad left the room and returned with a couple Pepsi bottles full of wine. He filled our glasses. Then he proposed a toast to me. I raised my glass.

"To me, I guess."
"To Oaf Loaf," said Weird Beard.
"Kitis gaumarjos!" cried host dad.
We drank.
I glanced over at Weird Beard.
Weird Beard glanced over at me.
We sat there in silence for a minute or two while host dad topped us off.
"Hey," said Weird Beard. "Notice anything unusual about the wine?"
"Yes. You?"
"There isn't anything in it."
"You're right."
"It's grape juice."
"It is grape juice."
Panic.
"You'd better call the Irishman," said Weird Beard.

"Yes, boyyyyy," said the Irishman. "What's the crack?"
"You still coming over?"
"Aye, reckon I'll be there in an heur, so I will."
"You might want to bring some party supplies."
"To a supra? Are ye mental?"
"The wine," I said. "It's grape juice."
"Aye, fer fook's sakes ... "

Pounding shot after shot of bootleg Welch's. Livers growing bored. Kidneys failing. One by one, the neighbors came tromping in. A digital camera was produced. Videos were taken of Weird Beard and I sitting around, self-conscious as all get-out. The Irishman arrived with a mysterious black bag that he stashed in my room. He sat down and chugged grape juice with us. It was immediately clear that nobody liked the Irishman.

My host sister pulled me aside.
"The Irishman is very bad," she said. "Very bad. He have a very bad character."
"He's been here ten minutes," I said.
"He is stupid and very bad."
"Fair enough."

My host mom mocked the Irishman's English, made a chipmunk face and went bwah-bwah-bwah-bwahhh. Weird Beard shook his head.
"Is your host mom making fun of the Irishman?"
"I believe she is."
"That's bullshit," he said. "Only we're allowed to make fun of the Irishman."

The Irishman had broken out in a sweat. He is a man who knows when he is unwelcome. He tried to ingratiate himself with the family the only way he knew how: by speaking lousy Georgian to my two year old host cousin.

"Batara bichi! Modi, modi!" he cooed. "Little boy! Come here!"
My host cousin shook his head, no. He wasn't going anywhere.
"Batara bichi!" scoffed my host mom later in the evening. "Your Irish friend is an idiot."

Leslie arrived and could immediately sense that things had gotten weirder than planned. Everyone marveled at her red hair. She had stolen the show and I could tell she wanted badly to leave. To her credit, she stayed until the bitter end. We knocked back grape juice, took frequent bathroom breaks, snuck off to the mysterious black bag for a nip or two, reconvened in the interrogation chamber for up-close videos and personal questions and mild humiliations of all sorts. It was nine PM at a Georgian supra and the four of us were stone sober. Under much host familial pressure, I finally caved and did a miserable breakdance routine on the living room floor. Thank God they got that on video. When I returned to the couch, Weird Beard was shaking his head with disgust.

"Enough is enough," he said. "Dinner's over. We've been polite. We've done our bit. Let's head into town and speak some English."
"You think we can pull it off?"
"I'll do the talking," he said. "Your host family actually likes me."
We looked over at the Irishman, who lowered his head.

Weird Beard got to work on my host dad, who was several sheets to the wind thanks to a secret stash that his best friend - a sixty year old geezer with the improbable name of Hooha - had smuggled in without sharing. My host dad agreed to summon a taxi. I went to my room, put on some cologne, took a little nip, ran into Weird Beard in the hallway.
"We're good," he said. "I made your dad promise not to tell your mom."
"Excellent."
"Ten minutes. I'll give the signal."

It was very nearly the perfect crime. A cab pulled up in front of my house. My host mom was next door. The four of us bid the village adieu and piled into the cab.

"Tsalenjikha," said Weird Beard, "and step on it."
The cabby wouldn't budge. He was looking at something in his rear view mirror. Objects are closer than they appear, et cetera.
The back door shot open.
"Kiti! Where are you going?"
"Um," I said. "We. We are going. Going into town. Be back soon."
"Why? What's in town?"
"It was good," I said. "A good evening. Thank you for everything. But now. Together we will go. To town. Be back soon."
"They can go," she said. "You cannot go."
"But - "
"You cannot go."
"But - "
"But what?"
"But ... me katsi var," I squeaked. I am a man.
"You are going nowhere."
She grabbed my leg and started tugging.
"What the hell," I said.
"Drive," Weird Beard said to the cabby.
"Don't drive!" I shouted.
I was halfway out the door.
"Just go," said Weird Beard. "Now."
I could feel my shoe sliding off.
"Man up," Weird Beard said to me. "Say something!"
I could feel my leg sliding off.
"Mom," I said. "Mom."
She looked up.
"I'm 29 years old," I said. "I'm going into town with my friends."
"Okay," she said. "But you're in big trouble when you get back."
She slammed the door, very nearly on my leg.
"Are we ready?" asked the cabby. He was half-asleep by then.
I looked around and nodded.
"Yes. I do believe we're ready."

Unfortunately, no official minutes were kept for the night that followed. Our minds lapsed into time lapse mode. Weird Beard caught a cab home at some point. Leslie lived just down the road. The Irishman and I hiked eight kilometers in pitch darkness back to my house, ogled the constellations and waxed metaphysical along the way, slipped on cow patties times beyond number, got lost twice before realizing we weren't lost at all, finally slipped past the guard dog, tiptoed past my host mom's lair, and bolted ourselves in my room. We had a good laugh about it all and went to sleep. I woke up at eight the next morning.

"Jeesus," groaned the Irishman. "Where the fook am I?"
"My house," I said. I threw on my suit coat.
"What time is it?"
"Eight."
"What the fook are you doing?"
"Going to work," I said.
"How is that even fooking possible?"
"It just is," I said. "Get some sleep. I'll be back in a couple of hours. Want me to lock the door?"
The Irishman was already asleep.

An hour or so later, my host mom broke into my room to do God knows what. She found a half-naked Irishman in my bed. A certain scene from The Godfather springs to mind. My only regret is not having been there to witness it.

So there was that.

At any rate. Looks like I'm the only tamada left. So I'd like to use this final paragraph to propose a toast, if you don't mind. Here's to Georgia. Here's to America. Here's to David Bowie. Here's to The Wire. Here's to friendship. And here's to host mothers. Sheni dedas, gaumarjos!

Racecar is No Longer My Favorite Palindrome (or Is My Favorite Palindrome No Longer Racecar?)

"Happy host families are all alike; every unhappy host family is unhappy in its own way."
- Leo "Tolstoy" Garbleson (TLG Volunteer, Samegrelo Province, Class of 1972)

My host mom came home one afternoon with a great big plastic bag full of crap. I was reading on the porch. She reached into the bag and pulled out a teal green t-shirt. She unfurled it in front of me. I saw that it had racecars on the front. The hounds of dread bayed from the very depths of my bowels.

"So. What do you think?"
"It's interesting."
"Try it on."
"But - "
"But what?"

I looked around, searching all of spacetime for a zippered pocket to climb out through.

"Nothing," I said. "I'll go try it on."

I went to my room and paced around its perimeter. The wood creaked and groaned under my Pumas. I launched into a soliloquy of sorts, the kind of monologue between internal and external where you gesticulate and mouth foul words to yourself without making so much as a sound. The t-shirt lay spread out across my bed. It was at least a double-XL, the size of a national flag. Criminy, I mouthed, I'm not that fat!

I'm colorblind, so I've never fully experienced teal, but this shirt was the sort of color that violated even my stunted sense of sartorial taste. And like I said, there were fucking racecars on the front.

Finally, after a moment of meditation, in which I sat at the edge of my bed with my fingers massaging my forehead and my palm shielding my eyes from the absurdity of the life I'd so freely chosen for myself, I unbuttoned the dress shirt I'd worn to work, navigating the sleeve somewhat skillfully over the bazooka of a cast entombing my left arm, and I put on the racecar shirt. Then I took my paisley patterned sling and slung it over my neck, stuck my busted arm through the sling. I walked over to the mirror. I wanted to beat the shit out of my own reflection. I looked like some sort of white trash time-traveling trainwreck. I saw that there was a price tag stuck to the front of the shirt. Fifteen lari. I wasn't sure whether that meant the shirt was a bargain or an egregious waste of money that would've been better spent on any salable object in the known universe. Pretty sure the latter, seeing how we'd all been eating cucumbers for a month. Either way, I thought I'd play it safe and leave the price tag on.

I trudged out to the porch, shamefaced as a shaven dog. My host mom clapped her hands. My host sister nodded approvingly. My host brother sat motionless with his arms crossed; he knew the score. I did a little pirouette, then I went back to my room, removed the shirt, and locked myself in with Tolstoy for the remainder of the evening.

You'd think that would've been the end of it, but the next morning, my host mom refused to let me go to school until I'd changed out of what I was wearing and put on the shirt. I contended that it was cold - and indeed it was - but in the end, I was badgered into wearing it as an undershirt. Later, in the teacher's lounge, my host mom got me to lift up my sweater so that seven fluorescent yellow racecars could come zooming out from my torso, and the old ladies applauded. What a good host mother you have, she buys you t-shirts with racecars on the front, et cetera.

As the weeks walked by and the northern hemisphere warmed, it became harder and harder for me to find a convincing excuse to not be wearing the shirt at all times, short of coming out and telling my host mom directly that I hated it because it made me look like a child. In retrospect, that is precisely the tact I ought to have taken. Instead, I remained polite, lowered my head, hemmed and hawed and mumbled whenever the shirt came up. Why aren't you wearing your shirt? I wore it yesterday. You wear the same thing every day all the time! But it's not clean? None of your clothes are clean! I don't like racecars? You watch auto racing every day with your brother! (This latter was true, but only because, as far as Georgian satellite TV went, auto racing was marginally preferable to the Turkmenistani Comedy Hour.)

Things finally came to a head towards the ass-end of my first semester. A friend of mine in the next town over was having her students put on a choral concert. It was something of a farewell concert, too, because she was leaving Georgia a couple weeks after. In short, it was a formal occasion. I put on a dress shirt, a tie, and my best suit coat (which also happens to be my worst suit coat). I'd ironed some slacks the night before by stacking a row of books across them and leaving them atop the Soviet-era upright piano. The next afternoon, on my way out the door, I bumped into my host mom coming home from school.

"You are going to the concert?"
"Yes, I'm going to the concert. See you later!"
"Wait," she said. "Where's your shirt?"
"Shirt?"
I tugged at my collar.
"No," she said, "your shirt."
"I'm wearing two of them."
A standoff, so it was.
"You know the shirt," she said. "You know, the shirt."
I nodded.
"I know the shirt."
"So why aren't you wearing it?"
I said nothing.
"Go put it on," she said.
"It's a concert," I said. "Suit. Tie. Pants."
"Shirt."
"I'm already late. I've got to go."

I dribbled forward and she boxed out the lane. Basketball fundamentals. I juked left. She mirror juked right. The shirt, the shirt, the shirt. This went on for an unbelievably long time.

Imagine for a moment a 29 year old man showing up to a choir concert in a XXXL teal green t-shirt with racecars zipping across the front. I wasn't having it. And my host mom, all of 35, wasn't having it from her end, either. Like I said: it was a standoff, so it was. I would be inclined to say that I prevailed in the end, except that as I was making my way down the stairs, I realized that I had no idea what time the marshrutka into town came by. So I was thrust back into the role of the dependent, racecar-t-shirt-wearing host child.

"Uh, hey, mom," I said over my shoulder. "When's the next marshrutka?"
"3:30," she murmured.

A glance at my watch: it was 2:30. The concert was at five. Determined not to show up a sweaty, bedraggled mess, I opted not to walk the eight kilometers into town and sat down instead with my host brother in the living room and watched auto racing for about a half hour.

When I went out to the front lawn to catch the marshrutka, my host mom tagged along. 3:30 came and went. No marshrutka.

"Say, Levani," she called to a neighbor. "When is the last marshrutka into town?"
"Same as it ever was," said the neighbor. "2:30."
"Oops," said my host mom. "You'd better start walking."

Suffice it to say, I missed the concert.

I don't mean to slag off on my Georgian host family more than I ought to. Really, I thought they were wonderful people. If nothing else, they kept me alive for ten months, despite my best efforts. But to quote Garbleson (1972), "every unhappy host family is unhappy in its own way." And there were times in which I was very unhappy, indeed.

Tragically, I do not have any pictures of the t-shirt, or of myself wearing the t-shirt. If I recall correctly, I included the t-shirt in my outgoing trash the very night of the concert I missed. I was in a foul mood. Waste not, want not, I know; but also true: waste if you want not. More to the point: I don't have many pictures of anything from Georgia, because someone in my host family ransacked my room, found my camera, used it, destroyed it, and returned it to my desk drawer as though nothing had happened - and that was well before any of this had happened.

So there was that.

My Life Among The Oldsters

I once attempted to describe the American hipster to my students, which proved to be no small feat. The up-and-coming Chinese youth are about as anti-retro as you can get. Anything that predates Lady Gaga is unhip. Cellphones that do not come equipped with an MP3 player and a 26-watt tazer are obsolete. So when I explained to them that the cool kids in America listen to old music on something called a "record player," that they wear old pants, old suitcoats, and old man hats, the response was unanimous:

"American hipsters are Chinese old people!"

Not quite. But I am inclined to say that old Chinese folk are indeed hipsters.

As wary as I am of Chinese younguns, as put off as I am by the hard-drinking fortysomething nouveau riche, I am completely smitten by the elderly Chinese. But at the moment, I am only a distant admirer. I have yet to break into the oldster scene. They have better things to do than hang out with me. They congregate in the park downtown, in tea houses, or around little streetside poker tables. Legally or otherwise, they gamble - mahjongg, dice games, card games, you name it. They enjoy a violent brand of checkers that involves enormous red and black discs, and when the players make their moves, they slam the discs onto the table - whap! - to the approval or outrage of the throng of oldsters that surrounds them.

The men smoke tobacco from long, metal pipes that resemble Irish tin whistles. The women are stooped from decades of sweeping. Together they walk along the river with their hands folded behind their backs. The elderly will say nothing when they first see you, nothing as you pass them, and nothing when you're fifteen feet away from them. Perhaps some distance later, the old woman will say to the old man, "That was a laowai back there, wasn't it?" to which he'll respond with a soft, rising "O".

This is one of the more puzzling aspects of Chinese society. The younguns, who grew up on Hollywood and KFC, who can sing The Fame Monster front-to-back from memory, are the ones who heckle and fetishize foreigners. Meanwhile, the oldsters, who grew up fearing Westerners, who in seventy years have probably never seen an American live and in the flesh, treat us no differently from anyone else. I write more about hecklers than about oldsters because hecklers are an inescapable part of my day-to-day existence. And because it would be cheesy for me to write something like, "My soul takes flight every time I pass the chainsmoking geriatric shopkeeper on the way to work, because he waves at me and smiles and then pedals off on his bicycle without a word," even though something like that sentiment is pretty close to the truth. I adore the Chinese elderly and I want, someday, to become one of them.

When I first arrived in China, I lived with a host family, and my host parents were hip to the Chengdu oldster scene. My host dad looked like a Chinese Harrison Ford, while my mom bore a slight resemblance to Angelica Huston. Their 27-year-old son, my host brother, could've passed for an alien. The day I moved in, when I asked my host dad what kind of work he did, he said, "I'm retired!" and looked at me funny. When I asked my host mom what she did for a living, she said, "I'm retired, too!" and looked at me even funnier. My host brother, meanwhile, insisted that he was a "worker," though in the two months that I lived there, he left the apartment exactly twice.


Fig 32.7: Pan Da with Host Family

My host parents were up every morning at dawn. Mama would cook breakfast while baba pruned the hedges. Then mama would hustle me off to language class. When I came back home for my Chinese siesta, baba would be cooking lunch. After we'd eaten, mama would scold me to tie my shoes, then she'd hand me an umbrella and boot me out the door again. When I returned in the evening, a six-course meal would already be spread out on the table, and baba would go pound on my host brother's door to wake him up.

More often than not, host dad would break out the baijiu, or some plum wine that he'd made himself. We'd sit at the dining room table for hours, discussing politics in very general terms - Ao-ba-ma is the zongtong of America - and I would nod, scribbling the word down in my notebook. Zongtong, zongtong, zongtong. Host brother never talked to me directly, but he would sometimes linger jealously at the table while host dad and I shot the bull, whining and dining while his father wined and dined me. Host dad would grab a bottle of beer and pour its contents into host brother's rice bowl, which never failed to send the manchild into a tizzy. Baba, bu yao, bu yaoooo!

I'd often find host mom playing mahjongg with the Chengdu Red Hat Society, in a garage across from the apartment. I'd wave and say mama, ni hao! and the old ladies would giggle. I'd ask if she was winning and she'd shake her head and say, "I'm no good at this game!" - though there was a sizable heap of RMB on her end of the table. Then, when she got home, we would go for a walk together along the lake - without host brother, of course. Host dad walked slowly with his hands folded behind his back, and would every so often reach up to pluck a leaf from a low-hanging tree limb. Host mom twirled her umbrella and sang to herself. We didn't talk much in those early days because I was unable to, but we had a pleasant rapport that consisted entirely of lazy sighs and exhausted grunts.

After a couple weeks, I realized that I didn't even know my host parents' names. The words baba and mama were becoming a bit too precious to use in public, so one night, after one too many rounds of rice wine roulette, I asked them.

"Yi Yin Yue," said host mom.
I did my best to repeat her name, but what came out of my mouth, in Chinese, meant Yi Yin Fish.

Host mom covered her mouth and laughed.
"Yi Yin Fish! Pan Daaaaa!" she giggled. "Oh, Pan Daaaaa!"

Red-faced, I turned to host dad.
"My name is Liu Lou," he said in his Sichuanese drawl.
"Niu Rou," I said - the Chinese word for beef. Host mom fell off the couch.

"Yes, my name is 'beef,'" said host dad, grinning.
"Pan Daaaaa! Oh, Pan Daaaaa!"

Mr. Beef hoisted his glass.
"He jiu!" he said. "Drink!"


The Corps kept me busy in those days - language lessons, safety seminars, Friday night bull sessions that carried over into Saturday. On the weekend, I wanted nothing more than to sleep, so sleep I did. One Sunday morning, around eleven, there came an unusually insistent knocking at my bedroom door. It was host mom.

"Pan Da!" she shouted. "Pan Daaaaa!"

I slogged out to the dining room and there was host dad sitting at the dinner table with two glasses of rice wine set out in front of him.

"Pan Da," he said. "It's time to eat. It's time to drink."
"Thanks," I said, "but it isn't noon yet and I don't like to - "
"Eat! Drink!"

So we ate, and we drank - far more on both counts than is recommended by Surgeon General Tso. By noon, a high-pitched frequency was buzzing through my brain, and I was only slightly better off than host dad, who kept dropping chicken feet on the floor. After a while, we both began to drift off to sleep.

"Song Min-Tao!" host dad shouted all of a sudden.
"Song Min-Tao?"
"Yes, your friend Song Min-Tao. What is he doing right now?"
"Um, he's probably asleep," I fibbed, "or studying."
"Call him up!" ordered host dad. "Bring him over. Together we will eat - and drink!"

Through one of those fortuitous coincidences that have lately befallen me in spades - like being christened Pan Da - my good friend Vijay (Song Min-Tao) happened to live right next door. His host family and mine were old friends, or old nemeses - it was hard to tell which - so we often went out for hot pot together, though Vijay's host brother - like my own - seldom joined us, for fear of the sun.

"Call him up!"
"I really think he might be studying," I said.
"That's okay," said host dad. "We'll study Mandarin - together."

The official language of the Liu household was Sichuanese, so I knew a Mandarin study session was unlikely. But host dad insisted, so I sent Vijay a short and diffident text message and, at host dad's behest, downed another shot of baijiu.

A couple minutes later, host dad belched and checked his watch.

"Ai-ya, where is Song Min-Tao? What's keeping him?"
"I bet he's studying. He studies very hard on the weekends and - "
"Give me the phone. Let me talk to him."
"I - well, see - the thing is - he's very busy these days and - "
Host dad snatched the phone from my hand and within seconds, he had our neighbors on the line.

"Yes. Hao, hao. Let me speak to Mr. Song," he said. "It's important."

I began to laugh uncontrollably: Mr. Song! This was happening. It was inevitable. And I could in no way be held to account. It was all host dad at this point.

"Mr. Song? Song Min-Tao? Yes, hello. It's me, Mr. Beef, Pan Da's baba." Host dad turned and shot me the slightest grin. "Have you eaten? Yes? No matter. I would like to invite you over for lunch. Your friend Pan Da and I are studying Mandarin and drinking - green tea."

I clapped my hands together and collapsed on the table laughing.

"Yes, it's very important that you come. We have already cooked a little something for you," he said. "Yes, yes. That's right. We're just over here studying Mandarin and drinking - green tea."

He handed the phone back to me. I wanted to high-five the man, but though he was grinning ever so slightly, he didn't seem to find the situation as funny as I did. He sat back down across from me and we silently awaited the arrival of Mr. Song.

A knock at the door. Host mom got up to open it. In came Vijay, half-asleep in sandals and jogging shorts, a wrinkly gray t-shirt. In a glance, he took in the scene - the chicken feet on the floor, the empty bottles, red-faced host dad, a greasy-haired and grinning Pan Da. He smirked.

"Sup, y'all?" he said. "What's going on?"
I giggled. "Nooooothin'."

We exchanged a fist pound.

"Please sit," said host dad, and Vijay sat. Host dad started pouring him a shot.
"Oh, actually, I don't - "

Too late. I gave Vijay the international "take one for the team" look and he nodded. Host dad hoisted his glass. He jiu!


Little by little, my Sichuanese improved and so did our dinner table talks. I asked host dad where he'd traveled in China and he said, let me show you. He fetched a photo album from behind a case of beer and spread it out on the dining room table.

And there they were, mama and baba at the Great Wall. I laughed. Host dad was a hipster! He looked pretty damn cool back in the 70's, with a swoop of hair scooped across his forehead and the slightest hint of a goatee. And host mom was gorgeous - and still was, I was careful to add, which set mama a-gigglin'.

"Beijing," said host dad, and turned the page.

Baba with his hipster bros in the Forbidden City. It looked like an album cover - goatees, kitschy suitcoats, the smirking visage of Chairman Mao in the background.

Baba turned the page. Host brother was born. As a kid, he didn't look nearly so bratty or so alienlike. He even had complexion back then. But I noted that his outfit hadn't changed in twenty years: a green and white striped polo tucked into drawstring shorts, sandals with socks.

We sat reminiscing for a while. Then host mom went to bed and so did host brother - separately, I assume - and we, the menfolk, stayed up to burn the midnight oil together. I had just become acquainted with the Mandarin past tense, and I was eager to put it to use.

"So, what kind of work did you do before?" I asked host dad. He hoisted his glass. We drank. Host dad filled our glasses again, then sat quietly for a moment.
"I worked," he said, "in a factory."
"What kind of factory?"
"Just a factory," he said. "We made things."

I could see him teetering on the edge of going further, then he sat back in his chair and fell silent.
"Very xinku," he said finally, "Very bitter work."

Was he sweating or crying? I could see that this was a dangerous discovery, this past tense of mine. I changed the subject and talked instead about the future.

"So, what's for lunch tomorrow?"


By the end of the two months, all the volunteers were itching to leave Chengdu, to move on to our own apartments and our own separate lives. We had been adopted, and in a real sense, our host families were like family to us. But in some ways, the experience was a bizarre regression to childhood and - watching my host brother as he pouted and slurped grape juice from his sippy cup - it was a regression I was more than ready to move on from.

But like most long-awaited transitions, it came too quickly. Before we knew it, we found ourselves standing on the side of the road with our luggage lined up along the curb, all our host families chatting with one another, family pets with names like Wang Wang and Kuai Kuai and Deng Deng scurrying all over the place, play fighting, furtively humping each other in the bushes.

We took a couple group pictures with our families, then a bus pulled up and we threw our luggage aboard.

China is not Latin America. The people here don't hug often, and they aren't much for crying, either. But our host parents hugged us goodbye, and many of them were bawling. I hugged Ms. Fish and Mr. Beef. Host brother, of course, was nowhere to be found. Then I got on the bus. Hell, I felt like bawling, myself. There were seventeen volunteers and more than 50 seats on the bus, so we all sat apart from each other until the waterworks ran dry. The bus started and we waved out the window as we passed.

But Ms. Fish and Mr. Beef had already started off down the road, Ms. Fish twirling her umbrella and dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, Mr. Beef with his hands folded behind his back, reaching up to pluck a leaf from a low-hanging branch.