Expatriate Act is Dead (Long Live Expatriate Act)

"Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity."
- Gustave Flaubert

To the four readers I have left (hi mom), Expatriate Act is not dead. But it will be soon enough. If you listen closely, you can hear the death knells ringing down from the Sichuanese hills. They - the knells, I mean - sound something like 600 million Chinese men launching double barrel snot rockets in unison. And what that sounds like, I leave you to imagine. Rest assured, I can imagine it well enough.

Sometime in April, this blog will turn five years old. And three months after that, it will die. Of that I am certain. Because as of July, I will be traveling no longer. As of July, I will be an expatriate no more. As of July, consider my ass retired.

In July, I will return to my native Omaha. And I intend to stay there for a while. I also intend to keep writing. So I could, of course, prolong the inevitable. I could rechristen this blog "Repatriated Act" or "Ex-Expatriate Act." I could write about the outside world from my foreign correspondent's desk in Omaha. Or I could write about Omaha; no doubt my native Nebraska will be as foreign to me as China once was. But I started this blog as a first-time traveler, and I intend to close it out as a retired traveler. Frankly, I am exhausted. I sense that my work here is done. And anyway, five years seems like a good number to go out on. So at this juncture, I will graciously bow out and pass on the torch. Let the laowais write for the laowais, I figure.

I started this blog in April of 2006. I turn 28 this Friday, but I was 23 back then. Imagine that. Time gets away from us.

At 23, I had successfully graduated from college with a degree in creative writing. For the better part of a year, I worked as a copywriter until I realized what I had known all along: that the encubicled life was not for me. So that fateful April, I set off for Poland to earn a teaching certificate of sorts. I started a blog. I called it Expatriate Act. I got the teaching certificate, but all my luggage was stolen in Berlin. Broke and half-naked, I returned to the States to buy some new clothes from the Salvation Army. Shortly thereafter, I landed a fairly lucrative gig teaching children in South Korea. I lived in South Korea for one year. Then I vacationed for a month on the east coast of China, where unmentionable things happened. Then I spent two weeks in The Netherlands, where even less mentionable things happened. I returned to the States and squandered my life savings on beer and women and Taco Bell. A good couple months they were. Then I taught English for six months in a coal mining town in Poland. The women were many, but I couldn't bring myself to stay there, so I tried to put together a life in Berlin. I failed. I returned to the States. I got a teaching job in Mexico. I lived there for six happy months while the country tumbled into civil war. Somewhere along the way, I was accepted into the Peace Corps fold. In the summer of 2009, the Peace Corps shipped me off to China. I have spent the past two years in Nanchong, Sichuan Province, People's Republic of China.

This is the trajectory of the past five years of my life. At the outset, when I first left America, I couldn't have anticipated, or guessed, or dreamed that I would be gone for so long. And now that my adventure is drawing to a close, I'm surprised at how quickly the time has passed.

Vague intentions begat vague writing. I didn't know what I was looking for when I first left America, so I wasn't sure what to write about when I started this blog, the blog I dubbed Expatriate Act. After five years of writing, I am still not sure what I am writing about. I cannot say that I have gotten any closer to figuring out who I am. I cannot say that I understand China, or Mexico, or Poland, or Korea any better than I did before I lived in those places. Writing, and the process of writing, eludes me even more than it did when I first started writing.

I cannot say that I have ever consciously worked on Expatriate Act. If anything, Expatriate Act has worked on me. If anything, the presence of Expatriate Act has dogged me and pestered me, has compelled me to write more than I otherwise would have. For better and for worse, Expatriate Act has injected me with a neurotic compulsion to write, even when there is positively nothing worth writing about.

That said, the most wonderful times of my life - namely, the six months I spent in Mexico - are almost totally absent from this blog. I wrote nothing about Mexico. I was too busy being happy. Conversely, the most tedious, most miserable times of my life - the time I have spent in Asia - have been written about ad nauseam. This isn't terribly mysterious. Or at least, it shouldn't be. The natural habitat of the writer is misery. In the absence of misery, what else is there to write about? Perhaps that is why I couldn't stay in Mexico. I had nothing to write about in Mexico. I was too happy. But in the end, I am not just a writer. I am also a person. And like most people, I tend to avoid misery when I can. And that is why I cannot stay in China.

I don't know why I started writing Expatriate Act. And I'm not sure why I continued writing it. I never attracted an audience in the beginning, and I only just barely have an audience now, five years later. A cult following, you might say. But at no point have I written for the sake of attracting an audience. I am too selfish and not quite conniving enough for that. I write to get things off my chest. And more than that, I write to amuse the people I hold dear. As I write, I am forever wondering and worrying - would so-and-so find this funny? Getting things off my chest is a necessity, but it only affords relief. It brings me no pleasure. What affords me the most pleasure are the emails, comments, compliments, criticisms, and assorted contributions from the people who read what I write. So I thank you all for that. Very little in life makes me happier than the knowledge that other people are made happier by what I write. I mean that. The fact that other people read what I write flatters me to no end, and is pretty much the only thing that inspires me to keep writing. This all sounds very cheesy and Oscarspeechworthy, but I wouldn't have written for five years if so many people hadn't encouraged me along the way. I thank you again.

I have learned a lot about myself through writing, and through writing, I have learned much about the cultures that have allowed me to cavort - drunk and disheveled all the while - in their midst. But above all else, it has been a real pleasure to write: the process itself has been indescribably rewarding. I have always been a writer, but I have never enjoyed writing so much. Expatriate Act was an experiment, and I consider the experiment a marvelous failure. In five years of writing, I never once put things exactly the way I wanted to. But that goes with the territory. Dancing bears and cracked kettles and what not. So - fuck it, I say. If my hypercaffeinated, hyperinebriated crotch-scratching labors have inspired a single bout of unfalsifiable laughter, then my work here is done.

But my work here isn't done. Not quite yet. I still have four months left to go. I still have many classes left to teach, countless hecklers left to ignore, and yes, many things left to write about. Expatriate Act is not yet dead. I'm just letting you know that it will be soon enough. This is not to say that Expatriate Act will disappear completely. I imagine I will leave it up for posterity, in all its unabridged, unedited glory. As a time capsule. As a tombstone. As a cautionary note to the up and coming generations of college graduates. Listen: here are all the mistakes you can make during your mid to late twenties. And listen: here is why they are worth repeating.

pimwarts5943682.doc

I have managed to keep Expatriate Act aloft for just over four years now. Free Expatriate Act beer koozies for all, etc. But if you were to start from my very first post and read all the way through to this one, you would not, for the life of you, be able to find anything in the way of a narrative. There is no overarching plot here. There are very few recurring characters and even the narrator remains a vague (but hopefully likable) vagrant fop on the horizon. There are no themes or symbols in my story, or if there are, I am unaware of them. There is, naturally, no setting to speak of. One day our protagonist is in Krakow. The next he's back in Omaha. Then he's off to South Korea all of a sudden. Thanks for letting us know, Mr. Foppish Narrator. Much later, we learn that he's in Omaha again, by way of Poland and Mexico, though in neither country did he bother to write about much of anything other than the contents of his stomach. And now he's in China, apparently for a much longer spell than is usual for him. He is writing somewhat regularly these days, though what he writes isn't much different from what he wrote while serving puberty in the American Midwest. Disillusionment, social discomfort, moral ambiguity. Is that all there is to the world? You begin to wonder whether he ever left the country in the first place, whether he might not be hiding out in his parents' basement after all, drinking Miller High Life on the sly and siphoning his ideas from 4 AM reruns of M.A.S.H.

If I am evasive, I swear it isn't deliberate. Really, I wish I could be one of those super personable bloggers who updates four times a day with pictures of himself snorkeling, pictures of himself mounting a camel, pictures of himself mounting a snorkeling camel. But I've never been one to take a whole helluva lot of pictures. I tend to rely on my brain camera. And I wish I could've weaved this blog into a cohesive whole, but it's a bit late for that now, isn't it? I would've very much liked to have explained the trajectory of my life more clearly along the way, but the problem is this: I am chronically unable to come through in the writing clutch. I am the Bill Buckner of the written blog. Let me explain.

Whenever something momentous happens to me, I seem to lose all inspiration to write about it the moment I set pen to Moleskine. I never wrote about my trip to North Korea and wrote only sparingly about my time in Mexico, perhaps the happiest six months of my life. Here in China, I waited so long to write about the Kunming Dwarf Kingdom that Matt Lauer and those muckraking Today Show hacks broke the story before I could. And I will make them pay, believe me. But for whatever reason, I just can't write when the plot is spelled out for me beforehand. It's like I'm doing algebra instead of writing. I have to sort out all these predefined narrative variables and figure them into a story, when what sticks out in my mind, the things that are really interesting to me, are mere trifles: the lispy, contemptuous way the North Korean passport officials spit out the word Yesss when I greeted them in their native tongue, the Brothers Lounge on 38th and Farnam, my long walks into the Świętokrzyskie woods with Walden as my guide, the late night burrito van on Calle Uruguay, the spectacle of piling out of a Toyotavan in downtown Kunming with three Caucasians and six midgets ... These trifles I could weave into prose poems, but the stories that go with them are beyond my ability as a writer. It's as though the moment I try to capture any experience that most people would consider significant, the story acquires a plotline that won't bend, characters that won't budge, and the whole damn thing gets as big and blocky and cold as a Frigidaire.

I don't have that problem when I write about my absurd day-to-day existence. That world is more of a connect-the-dots game for my brain. I sit down with an empty page and nothing to go on but the children peeing in the street and the old men hawking laserbeam loogeys, the ever-present threat of death by trishaw and the sauna-grey skies of Sichuan in summer. This is background radiation. These are Chinese cliches. These are things I have written about tens of hundreds of times already. But amidst that overwritten backdrop, some minor spot of bother acts as the grain of sand that gets the whole snowball rolling. Everything adds up; the semicolons align. One hour later, when the sooty ol' snowball has finally come to a rest at the bottom of the slagheap hill, I've gone places I hadn't planned to, made connections between any number of things that were unrelated in my mind until the moment I wrote about them - and yet the end result is something manageable, something I can sculpt and polish between my proofreading mittens before flinging it at the internet to watch it splatter into oblivion.

So that is one hangup of mine. Another one is this: I happen to be the worst breed of packrat, hoardicus dishevelicus, the packrat who keeps everything while simultaneously losing it all. I am both archivist and book burner. I keep everything I have ever done, but I wouldn't know where to begin finding any of it. If worse came to worst and I had to clean my apartment for some reason, before the rent-a-maid arrived, I would hire a private investigator to sift through the rubble for any writing I may have done over the past year. When I say I didn't write about North Korea or the Dwarf Kingdom, that isn't quite true. I wrote about them, and probably on several occasions, but the ideas never clicked, so I gave up and ripped the pages out of my notebook, dropped them on the floor, spilled coffee on them, ashed my cigarettes onto them, slept on them, walked over them for several months, and eventually kicked them under the bed and forgot they even existed.

Even with the aid of technology, I am no less a packrat, and no less a slob. I save all of my incomplete writing - even the stuff I am proud of - under titles like skoobfob.doc and gompbar.doc and pimwarts5943682.doc. Months later, when I go looking for those writings, I am shocked and outraged that I cannot find them. And yet I continue saving them with Seussian titles. And I write a lot. For several years, my harddrive was little more than a vault of stories I'd meant to write but didn't, blog posts that weren't, the aborted fetuses of novels, snippets of dialogue, quotes from Hemingway and Borges and Dostoevsky, all of them saved as jabberwocky.doc. Then, sometime last winter, my computer suffered a major stroke. What happened was this: Windows shut down, as it often does, but when it came back up, my computer was a blank slate. Generic pastoral background, no non-Windows programs, no non-Windows files, no non-Windows nothing. Just me and Bill Gates. I didn't believe it at first, but when I searched the harddrive for "Radiohead" and turned up nothing, I knew something was amiss.

After that, my computer started to run much faster. But I had lost everything I had ever written. Good, I told myself, perhaps you will start to run faster, too! Ha ha ha. But really, I was devastated. I had always meant to make something out of all those Keith Petit b-sides, elusive and incorrigible as they were, just as I had always meant to make something out of all the crumpled, coffee-stained, cigarette-burned Moleskine pages under my bed. I wanted people, eventually, to read those stories. Those trifles. The Hermit Kingdom and the Midget Kingdom. Burritos and The Brothers Lounge. But lo, the rent-a-maid had come before the private investigator and now, all was lost. Clean, but lost.

Then, this past Sunday, when my internet started running so slowly that it took me a full two hours to download a Ramones album, I finally decided once and for all to purge the harddrive of spyware - a heaping Chinese tumor that, apparently, did not reside in the non-Windows hemisphere of my computer's brain that had been wiped clean in the great stroke of '09. I fired up some virus-infected antivirus software and as I watched my doddering machine psychoanalyze itself, I began to notice an unusual number of blorgdash.docs and sloopbunk.docs. I did some half-ass hackery and discovered that all of my writing, all of my b-sides, had been neatly saved away in a gibberish directory that my computer, perhaps mimicking his master, had cooked up in his last fading seconds of continence: /ZSKGZ7MVCBKET/

Stifling a dry heave, I delved into my writing of yesteryear. Some of it wasn't half bad. Most of it wasn't half good, either. But much of it was worth rewriting, if I can wrap my head around the task. So I think I'll do that. I'm on vacation for the next week. Seven days of voluntary volunteer leave. Then I go to Beijing. Then to Dazhou, wherever that is. I hope that I will be able to write about those places before I crumple up the memories and kick them under the bed. But for these next seven days, I'd like to delve into the nostalgic hemisphere of my brain that hasn't been wiped clean by the asbestos in my room, the lead in my tapwater, or the formaldehyde in my nightcaps. I'd like to revive a few of these amputated tales and chopped-up yarns. They are old stories, broken ones. But we can rebuild them. We have the technology. So, tomorrow, I shall begin with a story I call The Illegal Raëlian.

Webster's Folly

A few weeks ago, the Italian got me thinking that Chinglish was the product of a lot of heady linguistic differences between the two languages it attempts to weld together. But now it seems to me that technical difficulties might have more to do with the problem, namely the cheap-o electronic dictionaries that my students (and no doubt the signsmiths) swear by.

Yesterday, my tutor was trying to explain why I should use one Chinese phrase in place of another.

"The second phrase is more, hmm," she said. "I don't know how to describe it."

She slipped her electronic dictionary from its Hello Kitty carrying case and punched in a few Chinese characters. Then she tilted the screen towards me. I almost spit up my chamomile tea.

Circumbendibus, said the dictionary. She pressed a button and a robot voice uttered the word for good measure: CIR-CUM-BEN-DI-BUS.

"What is that?" I laughed.
"Is it not correct?"
"I have no idea," I said. "I've never seen the word in my life."

What my tutor wanted to communicate was that one phrase "sounded nicer" than the other, and what we ended up with was circumbendibus. I wrote the word down in my notebook, but she caught me and crossed it out.

"No," she said. "I'm embarrassed."
So I wrote it on the palm of my hand when she wasn't looking and stole off after class to look it up in a dictionary, except none of the dictionaries I use seemed to have it.

Today, because I had fifteen minutes left over towards the end of class, I wrote up a list of the most common Chinglish mistakes, or at least the most common ones among my 350 students and the thousands of strangers I have taught pro bono on the streets of Nanchong.

1. humorous: Keith is so humorous.
How about: Keith is so funny.

2. clever: Keith is so clever.
How about: Keith is so smart.

3. you had better: You had better call me after work.
This is by far my least favorite Chinglishism. I am aware that it is Chinglish, and yet it never fails to rub me the wrong way. In the States, we tend to use "You had better" when we're making threats - "You'd better not look at my sister that way" - or scolding underlings, so even if a well-meaning friend of yours tells you that "you had better" do something innocuous, you still have to fight the impulse to smack them across the face.
How about: You should call me after work or You ought to call me after work - or better yet, You oughtta gimme a call after work.

4. play with me: If you're not busy after work, you should come play with me.
This is a direct translation from Chinese. In Mandarin, you ask people - even if they're crotchety 67-year-old pedants - whether they'd like to come play with you after work. The word "play," in this case, means "to hang out." But in English, the phrase has some unintended connotations: either that you are an oversized child, or that you are a very naughty girl, indeed.
How about: If you're not busy after work, we should hang out.

5. our China: Our China is developing rapidly.
You will often hear the Chinese refer to China as "our motherland," so perhaps this isn't so much a language issue as it is a difference in national identity. Never in a million years would I refer to the United States as "my America" - I sometimes live there, but it belongs to somebody else. Anyhow, when my students refer to "our China" in English, I can't help but imagine that they're boasting about a new IKEA dinette set.

6. campurs: I live on the old campurs, but I go to school at the new campurs.
Here I had to play around with phonetics to make my point. I proved to my students that they could produce the sounds "cam" and "piss." Then, I had them put the syllables together. "Campiss," they said. "Campus." Yes! I smacked my eraser on the podium and a plume of chalkdust clouded my ecstatic features. My students murmured the strange new word to themselves: campus, campus, campus. Then a lower, more urgent murmuring started at the back of the classroom and worked its way to the front: could it be that they had been learning the wrong pronunciations all their lives?

7. pander: The pander bear is China's national treasure.
This has baffled me since my arrival. My Chinese name is "Pan Da" and my students can pronounce that well enough. And yet their mascot is the "pander." Nobody likes a panderer. So I wrote "Pan" and "Duh" on the board. "Panda," my students chanted, "panda panda panda panda panda!" I had to cut them off like a conductor: my class was starting to sound like a Deerhoof song.

After the bell rang, a rush of students smothered me at the chalkboard, demanding to know whether what I had said was true: was campurs really campus, and pander panda, and all the rest?

It's true - I proclaimed - yea, verily, I tell thee, it is true.

My students covered the board in white, yellow, pink, and blue phonetic symbols.
"But Mr. Hu always told us to pronounce it like this."
"But in middle school we learned to say it like this."
"I've always pronounced it this way."

I was entering dicey territory. It's an uncomfortable spot to be in, a self-proclaimed literary hack like me with little to no technical training, righting the wrongs of unseen Mr. Lis and Mrs. Lus and Dr. Zhangs. But it's all true, I told them, "pander" is completely wrong and "panda" is entirely correct.

One of my students wrote the word "ship" on the board.
"How do you pronounce this?" she asked.
"Ship," I said.
"But I learned sheep!"
"Sheep is wrong. Ship is right."
She slipped her electronic dictionary from its Hello Kitty carrying case. She pressed a button.
"SHEEP," quod the robot, smugly.
I checked the screen and saw that the IPA symbols were indeed "ʃip," that the dictionary called for a ruminant mammal of the genus Ovis where a large oceangoing vessel should have been. So was this the problem, after all? Crummy low-end electronic dictionaries? I stood there wondering whether I should outlaw the blasted robots from class.

"So, Mr. Pander - Mr. Panda!" asked one student. "If my teachers are wrong and my dictionary is wrong, who can I trust?"
For lack of a more qualified authority, I shrugged and said, "Me."

But I suppose the electronic dictionary isn't such a bad invention, even if yours happens to have been programmed by a handful of drunks working the night shift at the Suzhou Guanchang Electron Stuff Limited Factory. An electronic dictionary will at least get you in the ballpark most of the time. I am reflecting, now, on the year I taught Hangman Studies in Korea. The day in question was probably a Friday, and almost certainly the last class of the day: my energy was spent and my students had seized control of the markers, the erasers, and the whiteboard. They were too hyper to play an orthodox game of hangman, so they scribbled a beard and an afro on the man at the gallows - it was me - and drew a giant vat of bubbling, steaming liquid under his feet.

"What is that?" I asked.
"Teacher, please wait," said the artist, and he slipped his electronic dictionary from its Hello Kitty carrying case. He punched in a few Korean characters and held the dictionary up for all to hear.
"SULFURIC ... ACID," said the robot voice.
"That's great," I laughed. "That's great."
I could no longer tell, at that point, whether my laughter was sincere.
The letters on the board were "F _ C K."
"Teacher, now you guess!"
"Let me think about this one," I said. "U?"

The Naming of Things

One of the finer pleasures of your early days in Asia is the naming of things. When you first arrive in your foreigner ghetto, you are a child: you don't know your address, or the names of objects, or what to call manmade structures. Perhaps you know "here" and "there," but that will get you neither here nor there. And so you and your band of expats start naming things, at first for the practical reason that if you are to meet another expat somewhere, you must choose a discrete location in time and space at which to meet them, and then for the purpose of distinguishing important places from the sameness that surrounds them, a sameness that would astound even americanus suburbicus, and finally with the same giddy imperialism as kids naming lightning-splintered trees or NASA geeks naming rocks on Mars.

You can master the Korean alphabet in three months without even trying, and despite our best efforts, some of us did. We could read street signs, but the problem in Korea was that there were none: the Koreans stubbornly refuse to name their streets. So the expats of Chilgok District 3 devised an atlas of their own, a geography that was well-known even to the fringe members of the group. There was Cakehouse Road and Footbridge Boulevard, Garbage Heap Turnpike and Exploding Transformer Square. We often built bonfires along Cremated Cat Creek, so named, suffice to say, because the foreigners of Chilgok 3 once cremated a dead cat upon its fertile shores. We felt no need to rename the Gugu Tunnel, though nearby Mt. Unamji was known only as "Jumanji," and it was pretentious to call it otherwise. There was Rub 'n Tug Lane, a reference to the services rendered by its afterhours massage parlors. I lived on the corner of the Pig Intestine Intersection. You often took your best girl for a late night stroll along Sea Penis Promenade, named for its seafood restaurants and their specialty, an uncannily phallic bottom-dwelling organism that propels itself by ejaculating torrents of milky saltwater from its uncircumcised head, served raw. (Breaking News: Though for years I was unable to empirically prove the Sea Penis's existence, Wikipedia now tells me it is the urechis unicinctus, a species of marine spoon worm. That which we call a Sea Penis by any other name is just as hideous.)

There were other places which we did not rename, but endowed with a kind of mythical status that baffled any and all Koreans in our company. There was the GS 25 convenience store, where we sat outside in plastic chairs around a plastic table and insulted each other until four AM, and The Coffee Bean downtown, where we congregated the following afternoon to apologize, to read the New York Times, and to sneak off to the bathroom one by one to enjoy the sudden and violent regularity afforded by a hangover and too much coffee.

We rechristened the beers, mostly out of spite. Hite was Shite. Cass, obviously, became Ass. O.B., like the Gugu Tunnel, needed no alteration, was just fine the way God made it, though you were allowed to call it B.O. if that was your wont. And lest you think we were amused by ourselves, we always spoke these names with straight faces.

At Old School, Daegu's one and only hip-hop bar, Mark introduced the bartenders to the Irish Car Bomb, which later resurfaced on the menu as an Ai-ri-shi Ka Bom-buh and went for nine bucks a pop.

Children's Day became Youth in Asia Day. Daegu was known, affectionately (I think), as The 'Gu. Chilgok was The 'Gok. I was Kisu, Mark was Marker, and Arthur was R-Dor 3000. Hyunmin was Richard and Sangmin was John.

And now, in China, I am Pan Da. I have so far neglected to mention this fact, perhaps the key plot element of my Chinese existence. I did not choose the name, though I certainly would have if I had been creative enough to think of it myself.

Our official Chinese names were posted on the wall of the hotel conference room on our third or fourth day in-country. I'm not sure who picked them for us, whether it was a Chinese bureaucrat down at the immigration office, one of our Mandarin teachers, or a Peace Corps employee with his tongue planted firmly in cheek.

I remember glancing at the other names as I looked for myself on the list. Song Min-Tao, Gao Hai-Ning, Bai Li-Jie, Lin Rei: these were names that I could not pronounce or make fun of. Then I found mine: Pan Da. Pan ... Da. Panda. I stood there for an unusually long time. I ran my index finger across the page to make sure that the name was indeed mine. Keith Petit - Pan Da. I searched the other 74 names for a Kou A-La, a Wen Hung-Lo, a Long Dong, to no avail. I shrugged. It was a happy coincidence that the most ridiculous volunteer should have the most ridiculous name. From that day on, I was Panda. Many of my fellow Peace Corpses still do not know my Christian name.

Pan Da looks something like this: 潘达. The first symbol, Pan, is a surname. The second symbol, Da, means "dignity" or "to achieve." But to my students, Pan Da means "panda." And so, after asking them to call me Keith, Mr. Petit, or Pan Da, they insist upon calling me Mr. Panda.

It's good to be a panda in China. When my name comes up at the drinking table, I will smugly say, Dui-aaaa - wo shi guo bao: Yep - I'm a national treasure. It's hard to gauge whether my audience is amused, revolted, or amused despite their revulsion.

China has named me, but the naming of China is not yet complete. I have named and renamed some of my students. Monkey, I explain, is probably not such a good name for a human. How about Edwin? I am slowly mapping out Nanchong, planting flags and lifting my leg on street signs, but it remains largely uncharted. And Chengdu was far too vast for naming, aside from the bar where I met and came to know some of my favorite people, where we were once attacked by a hive of ill-tempered wasps, a bar we dubbed The Bee Bar and much later, The Bee Bar and Grille, after we discovered that they served peanuts upon request.

Milgram Experiment

Because I am chronically three minutes and 37 seconds behind the rest of the world, every morning I miss the bus and wind up riding shotgun in one of the Toyotavans that wait for me just off campus. The drivers charge me ten yuan, which is two kuai more than a taxi, and ten times more expensive than a bus. But it's well worth footing the bill for companionship and a complimentary lesson in Sichuanese, and the comfort that comes with knowing the Toyotavan cannot exceed thirty miles per hour, which gives me ample time to grab the "oh shit" handle prior to head-on collision.

This morning, I told the driver to wait while I hit up the ATM so I could pay him. It was raining, as it has been for the past month. Poised there with my fingers hovering over the keypad, some inner Pavlovian voice barked at me, some vague memory of a past trauma suffered at the hands of a rain-drenched Chinese cashbox, perhaps this very one - but I ignored it. "Please be entering your secret number," said the ATM. The instant my first digit met the first digit, the ATM dealt me an electric shock that made my Amish beard stand on end. A stream of religious personages and scatology flew out of my mouth. The security guards stared. I hobbled in a circle and slapped my thighs. The Toyotavan man tooted his horn. I returned to the machine and was shocked again. And again. Chinese pin numbers are six digits long. So, zap, I hit the "cancel" button and withdrew my card, which sent a current of not unpleasant energy coursing through my bones.

I jerked and jolted over to the machine across the street and waited in the queue for the girl ahead of me to finish. That she was not screaming and cursing throughout her transaction seemed to me to be a good sign. I inserted my card and zap, I flew away from the machine. I staggered back to it and zap. I snuck up on it from the side and zap. As a foreigner, apparently, I am a much better conductor than your average Asian coed. I needed something plastic to put between me and all that misdirected Chinese energy. But I had neither pen, nor lighter, nor tiddlywink. One of my students passed by, no doubt wondering why I looked like Gene Wilder on meth. I asked him for a pen. And thusly was the transaction completed and the taxi paid for. Now the problem was that I was five minutes late for class.

And oddly, trembling with static, my mind still lost somewhere in Tuesday night, I taught the best class of my life. It was my first run-through of a lesson I had dubbed "Poetry Slam." I began by reading the entirety of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot, and nearly succumbed to a crying jag when I came to the part about the coffee spoons. My students gave me a polite ovation. I asked how the poem made them feel.

"Depressed," offered a girl in the front row.
"Excellent! That's how it's supposed to make you feel. And why did it seem depressing to you?"
"Because it was too long."

Laughter. I laughed, too, though me and the ghost of Tough Shit Eliot were both wounded by the remark.

"Prufrock seems scared of some event in the future. I think it is coming soon," another girl said. "What is he scared of?"

"I don't know," I shrugged. "Probably death or something."

I had them read aloud and analyze poems by Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Carl Sandburg. One of the groups was reading The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Langston Hughes, and though the word "Negro" made them giggle, they loved the poem. One girl began to write her thoughts on the bottom of the page - "I am warm," she wrote - but I asked her to please write on another piece of paper, as these hand-written copies were the only ones I had.

When it came time for her group to slam Langston Hughes, her friend walked up to the podium and read him beautifully, with a sincerely oppressed tremolo in her voice.

"I've known rivers. Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers." She paused and her sad eyes searched the crowd. " ... I am warm."

I spent several minutes keeled over a desk until I'd laughed myself out.

After class, feeling awfully smug, I treated myself to a cigarette on the balcony. Across the way, I saw a girl leaning on the ledge with her head in her hands. She stayed that way for a long time. I wasn't about to abide any suicides on my watch, so I walked over and said, in Chinese, "Hey. What's wrong?"

She looked up. She wasn't crying.

"Are you an English teacher?"
"Yes," I said. "I am a laowai."
She looked me over.
"I know that," she said.

She wanted English lessons. She wanted to improve her oral English. She wanted a foreigner friend. And so on. Fairly certain that she wasn't a jumper, I wished her a good afternoon and ran off to my next class.

As I was walking out to the bus, I heard my name and saw her standing up on the balcony four stories above me.

"Can you catch?" she asked.
"Some things!"
She let a folded-up scrap of paper flutter down to me and I missed it. I plucked it up from the wet ground and hurried off to catch the bus. I was meeting an Italian for lunch.

One of my handlers from the university knew a girl who was married to an Italian. So she had arranged a foreigner playdate. It occurred to me that never in my travels had I ever met a Real Live Italian. Truth be told, I wasn't entirely convinced that they existed. But Fiero's story checked out. He was a chain smoker. He loved wine. He was old and fat and missing a few important teeth. He spoke little, probably because I was young and American. But when he did, his English, I thought, was better than my own: riddled with endearing errors and full of old world European depth and character.

There is always some conversational inertia when a European first meets an American. I'm not sure whether it's because the European has encountered unpleasant Americans in the past, or because the America we broadcast is so loud and schizophrenic and domineering that, as a European, you are no more inclined to talk to an American than you are to your television set. But over the years, I have developed an international charm that I didn't have before, and of course, it is easy for westerners to relate on matters pertaining to the experience that is China. So, by the time the fifth course had arrived, the Italian was waxing Chomsky on linguistic differences and Chinese etiquette.

"The Chinese have this way of making themselves disappear," he said, sucking a three-kuai cigarette through the gap in his front teeth. "When they are wanting to go, they stand up and say bye bye and they are gone!"
"This is not normal?" asked his wife.
"No! No. No!" Much gesticulating. "In Italy and in America, you must stay and shake hands and say, oh how I hate to leave, and make excuses and say goodbye to each person ten times."

Fiero and I agreed on the strangeness of Chinese teleportation. And we both agreed that we liked the Chinese way better.

I mentioned how, when I first visited China, I was curious as to how the Chinese typed. At the time, I said, I wasn't sure how it was even possible. Did they have 5,000-character keyboards that wrapped around you like a control panel? The Italian spit out a chunk of eggplant laughing and began spinning in his chair, pressing invisible buttons behind his back: "Dear ... mother ... I ... miss ... you ... so ... much!" The two Chinese girls tittered.

"But yes," the Italian said, composing himself. "This is problem with Chinese. You cannot have too many hieroglyphics because you cannot learn 300,000 hieroglyphics. So every symbol have fifteen or twenty meanings."
"Hence we have Chinglish," I said. "It's difficult to translate the openness of a Chinese sentence into the precision of English. So we have signs telling us, 'Please, gentlemen, how barbaric it is to shit on the floor!' And so on."

It is through conversations with Italians that you come across ideas you didn't know you had. While the Italian translated a verse of Dante's Inferno for me, I thought about Chinglish: I had always thought of it as bad English, plain and simple. It hadn't occurred to me before that there might be a deeper linguistic reason for Chinglish, but a fundamental difference in language seems to me, now, to be precisely the problem: each Chinese symbol has several possible interpretations, and as a reader of Chinese, you learn to choose the interpretations that make the most sense to you. But we have half a billion words in English, so the difference between a good writer and a literary hack is precision - putting the exact right words in the exact right places - and just about any English speaker, whether they can write or not, can separate good writing from bad writing. Chinglish is nowhere to be found on the quality spectrum, though it often reads like James Joyce at his best.

The four of us lingered for several hours. The Italian raged about the restaurant's interior design. "They construct this beautiful granite waterfall and then put it in the corner by the bathroom where it is invisible!" He asked whether I liked European beer and European coffee and I nodded emphatically on both counts. He invited me downtown to his European beer and coffee bar. And I trembled at the possibility of savoring a bottle or a cup of foul and bitter stuff without having to endure the formaldehyde hangover that comes ten minutes later.

I had to jet off to my Mandarin lesson, so I made my escape the Chinese way: "I'd love to stay and chew the fat, but bye-bye!" I caught the Number Five bus home and, on the way, passed a new restaurant whose logo was a black-and-white portrait of Saddam Hussein raising a finger in defiance. It reminded me of The Hitler Bar in Daejeon, South Korea - where the Third Reich comes alive! - with its balsa wood Messerschmitt BF109's rotating slowly on catgut cords dangling from the ceiling, the walls decked a la Applebee's with Afrikacorps caps, castrated Karabiner 98K's, framed photographs of The Fuhrer himself ... the smiling waiter clomping towards your table in his steel-toed jackboots, brown uniform decorated in Panzer Assault Badges and silver eagle patches ... the unabridged version of "Deutschland über Alles" warbling and crackling through the speakers in the bathroom. It is these warped glimpses of the West that remind you how far away from home you really are.

Zen and the Art of Rickshaw Maintenance

Two months into Korea, I met an expat named Wolf, a bearded, ponytailed rat of a man who, from his whitewashed jeans and black metal t-shirt, I was able to carbon date as a fossil from the Reaganomic Era. My comrades and I were new to Asia, bursting with all the greenness and enthusiasm that entails, whereas Wolf was a veteran and a lifer: he did not thrive in the east, but would shrivel up and die if he were ever extradited to the west.

On the night in question, the newbies and I were huddled around a table at one of the expat bars downtown, while Wolf sat in the corner oozing disdain into his can of fake Heineken. The Canadian was doing impressions again. He stood up and did me: cradled his head in his hands, compulsively stroked his beard, covered his mouth and let out a high-pitched giggle.

"Stop it," I said, "or I will fade out of existence again."

He changed channels and took a seat next to Wolf.

"Okay, guess who I am!" He crossed his arms and glowered down into his beer. "Life sucks. I hate Korea even though I've lived here for 26 years. Metallica is the best band in the world."

Wolf looked up from his Heineken and stared down the Canadian. I searched the room for a black hole to crawl into.

"Anyone? Any guesses? That's right! I'm Wolf!"

"... the fuck you are," murmured Wolf.

These were the first words I'd ever heard him speak, so I thought perhaps Wolf was warming up to us, or at least to me because I was not the Canadian.

"How long you been here, Wolf?" I asked.

"What the fuck is it to you?"

I cradled my head in my hands and compulsively stroked my beard, then felt like I was impersonating myself, so I just sat there silently, looking hurt, until Wolf spoke again.

"How long have you been here?"

"Two months," I said.

"And you haven't snapped yet?"

"No," I said. "I don't mind it here."

"Give it time," Wolf said. "It'll come."

After the bar closed, we made our way to another joint and without a word, Wolf went meandering down a darkened alleyway waving a tallboy of Cass in the air, belting out a surprisingly svelte rendition of "Unchained Melody" as he faded into the night. That was the last I ever saw of him.

Wolflike expats are not uncommon in Asia. Permit me to borrow another wonderful David Foster Wallaceism: when you speak with Wolves, you feel as though the conversation is being warped and diffracted, like a beam of light passing through swimming pool water. In short, Wolves are a little off - and they make you feel a little off, too. What creates a Wolf? Your average English teacher in Asia is not under much duress. He is overpaid, overfed, saturated with free alcohol, and generally beloved by the locals. And yet the long-term Asian veteran wears a thousand-yard stare and a permanent sneer, and loathes expats even more than he disdains the general population.

Of course, even among the lifers, there are more non-Wolves than Wolves. But make no mistake: there are pitfalls to living here and I am only just starting to become aware of them. After an especially bad week, I can see something of the Wolf in me, the urge to turn upon myself like an ingrown toenail, to stock up on instant ramen and bootleg DVDs and get me to a nunnery. And that is what I would like to talk about in this chautauqua: how to maintain one's sanity living in a society that on a literal level cannot understand you, and in a more existential sense, cannot understand what you are about.

The main culprit in the Wolfization of an otherwise well-meaning expat is what Robert Pirsig calls a gumption trap: the loss of any sort of desire to interact with the weirdness that surrounds you. Gumption traps can be brought about by general gumption erosion, specific gumption-sucking events, or what I will call Laowai Escapism Disorder (LED). Often a combination of all three is involved in the formation of a bona fide Wolf.

Gumption erosion results from the sustained, unlubricated friction between the laowai's individualist rickshaw and the collectivist traffic that surrounds it. There is no obvious treatment for gumption erosion aside from lubrication - i.e. alcohol - and lots of it, but drinking oneself stupid should be regarded as an occupational hazard rather than a cure. Much of the adjustment to gumption erosion is made by the subconscious, though the right mindset will go a long way towards expediting the process.

Gumption erosion in Asia is primarily a matter of space. Your average East Asian city is more densely populated than an oversexed beehive, which means a lot of people, a lot of cars, and very little unoccupied space. The Chinese in particular are far from claustrophobic. The rule for public transportation seems to be "cram in as many people as possible" and when it comes to public spaces, people to tend to get as close to other people as the laws of physics will allow. Whereas westerners en masse instinctively arrange themselves in horizontal and vertical lines, the natural state of the Chinese crowd is a forward-shoving mob. There are no referees in China: no one will blow a whistle for a handcheck, an elbow to the breadbasket, or a forearm shiver.

As a westerner, you are at a twofold disadvantage, both because you are not used to being in such close quarters with so many total strangers, and because those total strangers are very curious about you. Frankly, they have never seen anything quite like you before, so they will take an unusual interest in the book you're reading, the email you're writing, the money you're withdrawing, or your armhair.

China is under construction, so it is an extremely loud country. The work is in progress twenty-four hours a day, not exempting The Sabbath, so the jackhammering and buzzsawing never cease. Meanwhile, Chinese drivers are not bashful about laying on their horns, and the muffler is an invention that never seems to have caught on.

Underneath the general cacophony of China is a steady stream of laowai-directed noise. A fair amount of young people will scream "HELLO!" from a safe distance of twenty feet. The more of the language you understand, the more you realize what a sensation you are. You will quickly learn the local words for "westerner," "foreigner," and (if applicable) "white devil." If you are already inclined to introversion, as I am, crowd noise can make walking to the convenience store for toilet paper an almost insurmountable task.

And of course, China is dangerous. There is no obvious difference between the traffic laws and the laws that govern walking down the sidewalk. The roads carry two ill-defined currents of cars, trucks, madhat cabbies and relentless buses, with a circus of bicycles, pedestrians, trishaws, and mopeds scuttling every which way amidst the honking, screeching torrent of smoke-belching metal.

This state of affairs - a claustrophobic, noisy, dangerous state of affairs - can make leaving one's apartment less appealing than other antisocial pursuits, say: making a list of all the girls you have ever kissed, Spider Solitaire, or Season 3 of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

As I mentioned earlier, adjusting to one's Asian surroundings takes time and most of the work is done while one is asleep. Some expats choose to spend a good amount of their time abroad drunk, but this only leads to hangovers that are several orders of magnitude worse than any state of consciousness known in the west.

The trick is to wait it out. Recite a mantra of your choice. Avoid rice liquor. Wear headphones when you make public appearances. Gradually, your mind will make the necessary adjustments. Your instincts will sharpen themselves on their own accord such that you will one day find yourself able to talk a fifty kuai cab ride down to twenty and navigate a Chinese crosswalk like Christ upon the Sea of Galilee. Your brain will learn to filter out the high-frequency garbage that comes roaring in from your overtaxed sensory organs: you will nap upright as a horse on the bus home from work and you will walk the street blissfully unaware of the migraine-inducing ruckus and seizure-inducing lights of the city.

You will also learn how to defuse hecklers and cat callers. "Hello," you might say to someone who says hello to you. "A laowai? Where?" you might gasp in the local tongue when someone claims to have sighted a foreigner. Above all else, you must remember that your presence in Asia is bizarre and inexplicable to the common man. If you saw a talking St. Bernard go walking down 32nd Street, you might be inspired to say to your neighbor, "There goes a talking St. Bernard!" - or perhaps, if you were brave enough, to call out "Hello!" from a safe enough distance. I am not saying that westerners are talking St. Bernards or that we should be treated as such, but it is important to keep in mind that, at least in Asia, we are only slightly more commonplace.

The second kind of gumption trap I want to talk about is brought on by specific gumption-sucking events. Amidst a lot of general gumption erosion, these are the straws that break the rickshaw's back. I can think of three specific examples, but the list of possible misunderstandings that can send a laowai into semi-permanent hermitage is too vast to record here.

There was an African-American teacher living in Hangzhou, I believe, who ran away crying when a Chinese vegetable vendor approached her shouting "Nigga nigga nigga!" One imagines the vegetable vendor was as baffled and startled as the American. In addition to meaning "that one," the phrase nigga is the all-purpose Chinese stall word. So the vendor was saying, "Er, um, ah." (Though I was sheepish about using it at first, I am now able to carry on whole conversations of nigga nigga nigga with a straight face.)

A former Peace Corps volunteer stormed back to her apartment after an old lady, late at night, cornered her in the street and said, "Go home." Of course, it is possible that the old woman was indeed saying, "Yankee, go home." But considering the impeccable politeness of the Chinese toward foreigners, it seems more likely to me that the old woman was nicely suggesting that the young lady go home because it was unsafe to be out on the street so late at night. Or perhaps she was asking the laowai whether she was going home or not. In any case, unless one is a master of Mandarin, there is no use in taking offense at anything, even a remark that seems overtly insulting. To begin with, it is likely that you have misunderstood the situation and anyhow, as a laowai, you don't have the language or the legal representation to settle the score.

A few weeks ago, I was walking back from class on a particularly foul and rainy day when a group of college dorks spotted me and started chanting, "Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!" I went home, locked the door, and had myself a nice, long sulk: I came 10,000 miles to teach you dorks English and this - this - is the thanks I get, et cetera. But then I had to laugh at myself. "Fuck you," as chanted by some Chinese college dorks, does not have the same meaning as a "fuck you" uttered through the clenched teeth of some frat boy down at Billy Frogg's. In all likelihood, the dorks had no idea what the phrase meant, or had at best only a vague understanding that it might evoke some sort of response from a passing laowai. Probably, they just picked it up from watching Scarface and liked the sound of it.

The only way to deal with a specific gumption-sucking event is to assume something has been lost in translation and forget about it, because there is not a damned thing you can do one way or the other.

This leads me to Laowai Escapism Disorder (LED). Inevitably, though laowais are few and far between, one foreigner will encounter another foreigner at the bus stop and before long, that germ of western brotherhood will snowball into a raucous herd of laowais who prowl the streets at night and frighten the local restauranteers by drinking large quantities of beer without ordering anything to eat. There is nothing wrong with making foreigner friends in and of itself, but all too often I have seen it lead to the disappointing realization, on the flight back home, that you can't understand a word of the captain's announcement and that you have to order your celebratory mid-flight Budweiser in English. And so the time spent abroad amounts to a passport stamp and a blip on a future resume.

But the real danger of Laowai Escapism Disorder is that it exacerbates general gumption erosion and specific gumption-sucking events. You get in the habit of blowing off steam with your nightly laowai therapy group and before long, one-upmanship leads to nasty little Two Minutes Hate sessions where the five of you get sloppy and talk trash about nobody in particular, or everybody in general. You begin looking for specific gumption-sucking events to bring up at the next meeting and never fail to grumble about the general gumption eroding process. Meanwhile, all sorts of locals are streaming past your table, secretly longing to take you and your band of laowais out for a ridiculous night on the town. But alas, you will never meet them, because by then you are as insoluble as a drop of motor oil in a glass of baijiu.

I would like to close this chautauqua by saying that, though Hinduism is about as widespread in China as Denny's, there is a karmic ebb and flow in the day-to-day existence of the laowai and it tends to tilt overwhelmingly in his favor. For every long-range heat-seeking "HELLO!" there are a hundred smiling old men who are content to sit and smoke cigarettes and quietly ponder your existence. And for every cab driver who gyps you on the fare, there is a college girl you have never met who will walk two miles with you to the bank, then run two miles to her dorm room to find her Chinese I.D. card, then run two miles back to the bank so you can exchange your $100 U.S. dollars for life-giving Chinese RMB, so you can pay for the bus ride home, so you can afford to sit and write this blog post, so you can eat, and so on.

Nebraskano: Ilegal

Oh, yes. Here in Mexico we have something that we simply did not have in Korea or Poland: danger. Peligro. Korea is a sexually frustrated antfarm. Poland is colder than a welldigger's ass. But Mexico.

Yesterday, one of my teenagers gave me a plastic spoonful of congealed caramel wrapped in a plastic baggie. I brought it home and left it on the kitchen counter, where it will remain for the duration of my contract. Today, the same kid reached into his backpack to hand me another caramel spoon and instead produced a big ol' orange-green bag of pot. I did what any English teacher would do: I whipped my head the other way and started scribbling phrasal verbs on the whiteboard. When I turned back around, the baggie was gone and nobody seemed to have noticed it. I'm not sure how the boss would have reacted if my First Certificate class had successfully hotboxed Room 4, but a career in beachside burrito vending would probably have been in my near future.

I joined the gym this afternoon and was walking downtown after work to give the place a whirl. I made it a couple of blocks before I noticed an unusual number of machine gun wielding soldiers. A few blocks later, I saw the canopied truck they were spilling out of, seeming to spontaneously generate like Pac-Man ghosts. Within minutes, the streets were flooded with troops. It was all I could do to avoid catching a Kalashnikov in the crotch. I slowed to a stop, stood very still for a moment, then turned and walked the other way. Whatever sense it is that warns us about impending gunshot wounds recommended in no uncertain terms that I go home, so that's just what I did.

The nickname for my neighborhood wasn't hard to come up with: I live in the Green Zone. In addition to the public hospital where at midnight throngs of exhausted people wait with blank expressions in a queue that winds halfway around the block, my street hosts six heavily fortified compounds where Zamora's rich and foreign hide from the indigenous poor. Stationed at forty-foot intervals on the sidewalk are several contracted security guards. They all cut the same Hitchcockian figure. I doubt any of them could chase down a Frisbee. The one across the street works a 14-hour shift and sneaks frequent pulls from the grenade-shaped bottles he keeps stashed in the front basket of his bicycle.

Tonight I went out with the roommates and we ate six tacos each for $1.20 a person. The taco stand was situated on the curb, so we sat on plastic stools in the right lane of oncoming traffic, making crunchy noises as screaming Chinese motorcycles whipped the wrinkles out of our shirtbacks. Jaded isn't really the right word, because I’m hypersensitive to my surroundings and I am often frightened by them. Denial is closer to the target: the danger is so palpable that I deny the danger altogether. But that isn't quite it, either. What is the word I’m looking for? Ah. Estúpido. Soy estúpido. Si, es correcto.

NoKo

This is the best photograph I've ever been lucky enough to take:


If you look closely, you'll see that they probably have one of me, too.

Carnies.

Teaching in Korea is a carnival game. The object of the game is to teach children, seven or eight classes a day, five or six days a week, armed with Not The Best Resources In The World, with no time to sculpt those resources into a distracting never mind educational form, you must improvise; your students have already been in school for ten hours and they have cell phones and their cell phones have games and the kids are fairly ADD as it is; when you're not in school you're outside where the air smells like pitsweat and the water causes hallucinations and the beer turns your brain to petrified wood, and the Korean suburbanites hound you like a C-list celebrity, and your toilet clogs, and the music sucks, and the restaurant next door has gone and dumped clams in your front lawn and clams are not a mollusk that smells better with age, and your toilet clogs, and the music sucks, and every morning the grape vendor comes megaphoning down the block at 8 o'clock sharp, and amidst all this Seinfeldian angst, the cruelest of all cruel Teaching In Korea ironies comes Hammer-dancing into your mind: everywhere you go you will attract attention (stares, leers, gawks; giggles, titters, guffaws) but not at school, i.e. the one place you want people to pay attention to you is precisely the one place where you vanish, fade, become invisible, cease to exist - and it. is. maddening.

So, good luck. A whole year, 365 days. If you survive, you win. If not, _______. The carny eggs you on. You'll never make it, he says, pansy. But he underestimates the shit you can put up with. He doesn't know that you've survived core-level theology classes at a Jesuit University, that you've worked at a non-figurative zoo, that you've spent a week living out of a Dunkin' Donuts in Berlin, that for four months you proofread catalogues in the Oriental Trading Company's Really Dark Basement Where the Dreams of Liberal Arts Majors Go To Die, i.e. you've been through some shit, or just enough petty shit to know that life is just that: going through shit. So the clouds begin to part around month ten when it starts looking like you're going to make it. The carny is rattled and starts throwing out jabs that go beyond mere gamesmanship, talking shit about your haircut, throwing bottlecaps at your head, flirting with your lady friend and that. You keep going, the days keep falling. You're on pace not only to win but to win big, one of those top-shelf stuffed frogs that weighs more than a human corpse. But in the face of triumph you begin to wonder whether this slithery carny is really a man of his word, whether someone who conducts such a corrupt racket with such compunctionless ease can be trusted to deliver the goods even if you win the carnival game fair and square, whether you oughtn't to have avoided the game in the first place and just held onto your money and stayed home and just I don't know and -

and that's where I stand. Whether the metaphor has a happy ending depends on the next 55 days, whether I am handed certain envelopes, whether I am still sane enough to understand what those envelopes are for.

Last thoughts before North Korea

Last Saturday was Children's Day in the Children's Republic of South Korea. The word that springs to mind is the present continuous verb screaming. We Brazen Expats call it Youth In Asia Day, ha ha, I hope you get the double entendre. My apartment is surrounded on all sides by Korean larvae spawning sites: three elementary schools, a day care, a kindergarten, two junior high schools, a BB gun shop. So I tried to avoid certain things that day, like the universe. But around noon I caved and ventured to the GS 25 for a bottle of Orange 500. I was ambushed en route by a flashmob of girls with pigtails. They were filing into a pink bus. They just kept coming. Hello!!! How are you!!! I'm pine tenk you and you!!! I gave them the peace sign, The V. This excited them. Screaming. Someone hit a seventh-octave high F# and oops, there went another crucial Jenga block from the crumbling wooden tower of sanity.

Right now I'm seated in an oversized leather chair in a PC room in Seoul, waiting to meet my tour group at the Hongik University train station. We're taking a bus to North Korea, under cover of darkness. A hundred people playing Starcraft in a small room sounds like a World Farting Federation battle royale. I've spent most of the day in train stations. Nine months into the game, mass transit facilities are sources of almost sexual temptation. A train to Incheon, a card swipe, a quick frisk and I could be in Indonesia by nightfall. The urge to vanish. I sit there entertaining the thought with a ticket in my hand. My cell phone says "KOREA - 81 DAYS." An inmate on outdoor work detail.

Train stations are the most diverse places in Korea. The train station wildlife features varying shades of Asian, Buddhist monks in Irish Spring Icy Blast-colored habits, already-homesick-looking U.S. Army personnel, the occasional African or Jewish dude on business, trembling 20-something waifs in the early stages of THC withdrawal who really have no idea what they've gotten themselves into.

A side effect of life as a stranger in an Asian metropolis with a population density greater than 7.2 broom-wielding hags per square inch is that you come to devalue the sense of individuality that seventeen years of feelgood American education tried so laissez-fairely to instill in you. You start to think of yourself as an off-colored piece of candy coasting slowly upward on a network of treadmills in a big hollow candy factory, not fundamentally different from the pieces of candy around you but definitely off-colored and therefore more likely to be thrown away without being eaten. Or if you prefer gamete metaphors to candy metaphors, you imagine yourself as one of a billion other sperm cells ramming head-first into some sort of invisibly gigantic mucousy egg with a circumference so great that the mucousy wall you keep ramming into isn't even slightly curved. You know intuitively that penetrating the egg won't satisfy you, but will more than likely kill you and in the process serve some sinister purpose that reaches beyond your spermatozoon imagination in its vastness and diabolism, but still you keep ramming head-first into the same mucousy eggwall day after day, at no small expense of energy/intelligence.

But both of those metaphors are too grim. In fact, there is no real metaphor that works to describe the bigness of the world. None that I can come up with anyway. All metaphors end up coming across too grim or too glib. When I think of the world, I just kind of sit there with my mouth open so wide that if you came up and rapped me on the top of the head I'd make a hollow coconut sound. It's just big. And intimidating when you're right up close to it, but neither positive nor negative. It's just fucking big. The world. Big and indifferent. Smiling creepily. Everyone ought to experience the bigness for a year or two before returning to one's hide-outs in law school libraries, office cubicles, bunkers 4,000 fathoms below the ocean floor, classrooms, micro-worlds where the world is smaller and heavily distilled and somehow more meaningful that way. When I get back home I'd like to lay low in grad school for a while.

There's an essay by David Foster Wallace called "Laughing with Kafka." He writes:

"... our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home ... imagine [Kafka's] art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens ... and it opens outward: we've been inside what we wanted all along."

It is as he says. We spermatozoon have been inside the egg all along. Best to spare ourselves the head trauma and flagellate off in the other direction. Take a few laps. Take it easy. Go make friends. As another one of those anhedonic Omahans who strapped himself to a crude catapult and catapulted himself to someplace weirder than the American Midwest in pursuit of the big zygote, I have my suspicions that what we're all searching for isn't anywhere other than where we're at right now, or at least it is not localized in the Dongdaegu Station lavatory. I refuse to wax Zen Buddhist on the immediacy of the present because I am presently racking up a ridiculous internet tab. I need this money to buy some serious merch, Dear Leader ringer tees, juche rosaries, balsa wood replica Taepodong-2 warheads. K.J. Il, I'm putting your kids through college.

Kae-mi

On a dead grass island at high noon, Lou and Brian are whipping ants with their jump ropes. I'm standing like Boss Godfrey from Cool Hand Luke with one hand on my hip, looking on as if to say That's some fine ant whippin', boys, though mostly just hoping neither of them zings me in the eye with a backlash. Together they pursue a fugitive - black, wingless - across fifty feet of barren terrain, whipping at half-second intervals, stomping, screaming, spitting, et cetera. Miraculously, the ant survives, or is not visibly killed. Brian asks, "Is it dead?" and Lou says, "No."

But in fleeing, the ant has unwittingly led the Koreans to his home base. I kneel in front of the anthill before the brats can go DEFCON 1 on it. The ants are darting about with Schröder-era Germanic diligence, hoisting blades of grass a bazillion times their mass, arranging pebbles and leafy bits into fortresses impervious to anything smaller and less malicious than a jump rope-wielding six year-old. Four grunts line up along the gashed left side of an expired roly-poly and start pushing. In a fatherly moment, I lure an ant onto my palm and blather, grossly exaggerating the freakish shit-hauling capacity of your average 9 to 5 worker drone, and the boys are fleetingly awed. The ant complex - with its sunblasted gravel, its hopeless brown grass, its frantic ant bureaucrats crawling all over one other - reminds me dimly of Phoenix, Arizona.

Lou challenges me to a jump roping duel. I accept, though my left Achilles tendon has been groaning all morning like a busted hydraulic shaft. I hobble a few steps towards the parking lot with a pink Hello Kitty jump rope that barely reaches down to my knees. A girl pedals by on a banana-seat bicycle and eyes me with blank curiosity, singing an amelodic arpeggiated la la la song as she passes. When I turn back around, I see that the boys are whipping the hell out of everything. The jump rope droops from my hand as I watch the ants scatter, some dashing back to defend the fort, others shooting out into desert space. Their home has been destroyed.

Chinese Yellow Dust Blues No. 48

Strap on your Hello Kitty respiratory mask: here comes the Chinese Yellow Dust. It's that muggy breath at your window, the fine tan powder that blankets your blankets, it's that sick yellow-brown glow all around like somebody's clapped a pair of sepiatone filters over your eyes. You step outside, into the cloud: where you should be accosted by the hyperactive Korean preschoolers at your doorstep, cat-called by the mulleted teenagers hocking loogies in the alley back behind the pig intestine shack, there's no such hassle today, you can drift for blocks and blocks and encounter no one, just a stray cat army-crawling under a Kia, a polyethylene bag somersaulting in the wind, even the windbags seem to be running from something ...

If you breathe in deep, you don't feel like you're inhaling anything per se, this Chinese Dust after all is not quite what you expected - see, you envisioned, oh, I don't know, like, swirling Saharan dust devils, beach sand being tossed around through the air, haboobs, etc. - while this is more of an omnipresent pee-colored fog, generally thick rather than particulately abrasive, not unlike the basement atmosphere of Your State University's High Society house, except sucking this smoke in for a while doesn't so much give you a contact high as it makes you queasy and itchy all over, then come rashes, hair loss, impotence, goiter, red-green colorblindness, sweet and sour syndrome, Andy Van Slyke's Disease, shingles, the odd schizophrenic fugue state ... the Chinese Dust kisses you on the mouth, leaves you with the dull taste of tungsten on your tongue ...


Fig. 1, 3: Ordinarily gloomy
Fig. 2, 4: Extraordinarily gloomy

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

I go to bakeries all day long

A three year-old tottering up the sidewalk starts to tip over backwards because she's lost herself in the sunglare of the passing ten year-old's bicycle spokes. He squeals his brakes to gape at the 24 year-old foreigner trudging the other way in yesterday's jeans and a synthetic fur-lined coat that looks thrift storey but really cost him close to 200 American dollars. In seven years, the 24 year-old thinks, the three year-old will be another ten year-old coasting along on a bike. In fourteen years, the ten year-old will be another 24 year-old floundering around a foreign land he knows almost nothing about because he can't find sane work in the country of his birth. Birth; walking by one, pooping in the can by two, reading by six, nocturnally emitting by 13, having second thoughts about everything by 24, what then? ... Our lives unfurl with increasing slowness while our surroundings speed up exponentially. How weird, he thinks, everything must seem to the elderly.

(/artsy-fartsy third-person)

(self-deprecating first-person)

By dinner time, a six year-old affectionately known as "Fart Boy" has kicked me twice, square in the crotch. After the first kick, I get that post-soccer-ball-impact upswell of nausea and hobble to the bathroom, hovering over the can waiting for the puke that doesn't come. After the second kick, I feel positively nothing, I just stand there looking nonplussed. On neither occasion do I use my powers of bigness to scare the shit out of the little shit. But then, a six year-old who is kicking his English teacher in the balls twice in the same day is probably on the right track.

Today has been one of those not infrequent days where the 3rd graders scream for the sake of screaming. A test of the emergency broadcast system. Children ought to be schooled on farms or, when plausible, in the depths of blackest space. Trapping kids in classrooms, arranging their desks so they can be hoppingly navigated like lilly pads, arming them with toys like ceiling fans and markers and whiteboards and flashlights and chairs and windows and electrical outlets and fire extinguishers to play with, giving their high-frequency sound waves four walls to ricochet off of before they come slashing down into my eardrums like drumsticks shaped into shanks, Why?


Teaching in tongues. Give me a black marker and I swear I become a different person. I dislike that person. He's loud and sulky, prone to ranting. Today's pearls:

(after I've kicked over a desk in the front row, I rear my head and bellow so loudly the plexiglas windows rattle in their wooden casings)
"You like being loud, huh? Well, guess what? I can be even louder than you!"

(intoned in a heartbroken warble as I doodle frowning stick figures on the whiteboard with my back to the class)
"Fine. If you won't listen to me, I'll just teach myself."

(truly excited)
"A superintendent is almost the same as a plumber. And who was the most famous plumber of all time? Mario. And what console did Mario Brothers come out on? That's right: Super Nintendo. And Super Nintendo is almost the same as superintendent! Um, but it's spelled and pronounced differently."

Who says these things? Where do these words come from? Not from any mental state that could be called consciousness.


The elementary schoolers blast out of school around 7 PM, leaving in their wake a murder scene of Dixie cups and red sauce. The middle schoolers ooze in with their humid troposphere of sweat and octopus chips. The ecstasy of early childhood, the heroin withdrawal of adolescence, the rickety Temple of Doom bridge that sags down between the two. I make my first class of 7th graders act out a skit.

Tony: Surp is up, doody.
Surf's up, dude.
Tony: ... surp's is up ... dude.
Denise: Hey. Tony. I heard you lik-ee to catch-ee some wabes? I'm Liza's priend-uh, Dennis.
Denise.
Denise: Denise.
Jamal: What's up. Dennis. How - [suddenly realizes he is black, points this out to Tony and Denise, the three of them keel over laughing]
What's so funny?
Jamal: Teacher. Oh my God. I am look like ugly monkey.


Ten o'clock. My last class, 8th graders. They're sucked into to their cell phones within the first five minutes, so I get sulky and start writing Polish on the board. It takes a few minutes for the ringtones to fade, but my cryptic scrawling of seemingly random c's and z's gradually woos their interest for some reason.

"Teacher, what that?"
"Przepraszam. It's Polish for 'Excuse me,'" I say. "You bump into some drunk on the tram, you say, 'Przepraszam.'"
"Teacher, how say?"
"Shuh-pra-shahm."
[in unison] "Shuh-pra-shahm."
[As if awakening from a prolonged vegetative state, several students glance from whiteboard to notebook, notebook to whiteboard ... I stare back, aghast ... they are taking notes!]
"Teacher, Poland speak, what hello?"
"Dzień dobry."
"How say?"
"Jen do-bruh."

By the time the bell rings, they are saying hello, excuse me, goodbye, thank you, goodnight, my cat is black, chattering away like little Copernici. They are saying things in Polish that they probably can't say in English. I leave class looking constipated. In the water cooler reflection I can see the new cowlick that's sprouted from the back of my head flapping around like a car antennae; I didn't have a cowlick before I got everything straightened out. On the heels of this marginal teaching success, I'm thinking that my foppish personality might not be the problem. Maybe I'm just teaching the wrong language. Tomorrow: Plattdeutsch, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, American Sign, morse code ...


My copy of Infinite Jest has a knife wound that doesn't heal until page 157, where there is only the faintest dot of a dent under the word "fellow" in the sentence, "She was in love from afar with this fellow Marlon Brando, son." The book was stabbed on a Sunday morning before dawn two years ago by Jared in one of his whiskey knife rampages. With the same miniature bowie knife that he had earlier used to gouge a chunk of plaster out of our living room wall, he pitched Infinite Jest into the air and stabbed it in the heart, sending it tumbling an impressive ten feet across the room, where it thumped onto the couch and sat there bouncing up and down on the seat cushion for maybe ten minutes.

Infinite Jest is 1079 pages long, not including inside covers (of which there are several), a section dedicated to critical acclaim, and copyright pages. The margins are creepily slim.

Reading Infinite Jest is going to make the next four months more inconvenient than they're already going to be. After a day and a half of lugging it around, my right lugging bicep is already bluish and lumpy from so much lugging. On top of all the lugging, there is the added burden of explaining to people why I'm lugging around this brightly colored pretentious-looking book, and as most of the people I encounter in my lugging are Korean, there is the added added burden of explaining to them that the tome I'm lugging around is not The Bible, though it may one day become something like it.


I just devoured a marine eel (acoustic) in its entirety. According to the local folklore that surrounds all slimy, red, phallic-shaped beasts of the murky depths, choking down all those tiny eelbones is really going to do wonders for my stamina.

Brigadier General Relativity

March. My eighth month. I will soon be expatriating from Korea, the aptly named "Land of the Morning Clam," and I have this fear, you see, of leaving this wretched place behind without having kept an adequately thorough record of events and non-events as they occurred or didn't occur. So, for the last quarter of my term, this is my pledge: to divert you with sweltering tales of homoerotic sauna rendezvous, to write bimonthly reviews of local dog eateries, to defect to the North for your slight amusement; to fencehorth, forcehenth, henceforth spew forth more words, more pictures, more non-sequiturs, more naughty words, more misspellings, more misspelled naughty words ...

The best mimes of my generation ...

I'm a father on Saturday afternoons from twelve until two, at the rate of 15,000 Korean won an hour. My kids are Lou, 8, and Brian, 6. Lou is the cheeky precocious one who asks too many questions about my Friday nights, and Brian is the whiny sissy boy who is still too young to have any real talents besides crying and wetting his pants at the same time. My wife is Lee Ho-Geun. She puts the coffee on for me. And once in a while, she makes a mean bean paste stew.

Under the loose guise of teaching the kids English, I come over to the apartment and hang out for a couple hours. Sometimes we play chess, other times we play Chinese chess. But in all the times I have been there, I have never once seen their father. I don't imagine they see much of him, either. So far as I know, he has not left his plexiglass bank telling chamber ... bank telling, telling banks ... since the Lee Family Ski Trip last December.

It's Saturday. My alarm - this time, "Eye in the Sky" by Alan Parsons Project - startles me into a confused sort of awakeness. After three hours of sweaty sleep with a tornado tearing up my stomach, I have difficulty re-locating the Lee apartment, though I've been there maybe fifteen times. I am lost in the Korean morass of rectangles and squares. I finally straighten out the numbers in my mind - building 206, room 503 - climb the five flights of stairs, tidy my hair in the peephole reflection, dial the security code, 3, 2, 7, um, 2? ... The wife pops out and tells me to take the kids to the park and teach them how to play basketball, in English.

The three of us bring a sad collection of deflated spheroids down to the sandlot between apartment buildings. I dazzle them with a few missed layups and a series of airballs from behind the three point line. Then, I rebound while they granny shoot at the hoop. The only things they're managing to hit are each other. Enthusiasm wanes and our shoot-around dissolves into a soccer-like sport where we're punting the basketball around, and then we're just drop-kicking assorted deflated spheroids at the backboard. We experiment briefly with dodgeball, but the ball is so light, the wind so strong, the kids so weak that it feels like we're playing on the moon.

We get fished into a pickup soccer game with the usual neighborhood riffraff, The Kid With The Prominent Earlobes, The Kid With What Seems Like Nine Fillings, The Kid With Five Dimples Minimum, The Bob Hope Kid ... I am drafted in the first round by The Prematurely Balding Kindergartener, who strikes me at first glance as a shrewd and loyal general manager to be playing for, someone with experience. Brian is on my team. Lou winds up on the other team. The family has been divided.

The other team takes a commanding three to nothing lead early on, partly because The Bob Hope Kid is a juggernaut, partly because the ball is bigger than our goalie, partly because our lone defenseman, Choe Seong-Ook, is sulking and throwing sandballs at the ground. Lou gets cranky and demands that I stop going easy, so I humor him and do some trotting around in circles. I refuse to take any shots on goal. Legitimately trying to score goals in pick-up soccer games against kindergarteners makes you a pervert.

I try to suspend my disbelief and get caught up in the game, but my imagination doesn't fire me up the way it used to when I was ten, when the kids on the other team – whether best friend, churchy kid down the street, unibrowed heir to a local vacuum repair empire – in their striped rugby shirts and dusty Starter jackets, in the flurry of elbows and name-calling, took on suddenly evil hues. Those transmogrifications don't happen today. They are just little kids and I'm their big lumbering servile oaf, an oaf who gets rebounds, shags balls, climbs fences to retrieve things that have been thrown or kicked too far, an oaf who can't move one way or the other without crushing the tiny humans scuttling between his legs, an oaf who is drawing a crowd of ogling fans, who is feeling like a real sicko in doing something wholesome for once. While the kids chase each other around, the oaf stands at midfield, arms akimbo, casting a small Forrest Gump shadow in the early afternoon sun, waiting for a cleared ball to come his way so he can pass it to someone smaller than him.

The score is seven to two, them. A duststorm has kicked up and the game seems to be winding down due to mutual exhaustion when a skirmish breaks out. I decide to be cute and, reaching into my pocket as I trot towards the squealing mass, I produce an off-yellow bus pass, roll my tongue in a high pitched mock whistle, and stand there officiously holding the bus pass up in the air, hoping my idiocy does not go unnoticed. Lou glances up and smiles nervously, nudges his friend, hey, hey, get a load of this big creepy foreigner my mom makes me hang out with, and then there's a scream as The Prematurely Balding Kindergartener knocks Brian to the ground and pounces on top, clawing with both hands at Brian's face.

Brian fights back, grabs both of Baldy's cheeks and yanks down as hard as he can. Baldy punches him in the neck. Brian screams and spits upward, but the spitwad comes splattering down on his forehead, so he screams louder. I grab Baldy by the shirt collar and pull, looking around, hoping some nearby Korean adult will be drunk enough to intervene ...

... but the bystanders have cleared out and it's just me and these little kids on a deserted playground, surrounded on all sides by 14-story apartment buildings but completely alone. Brian and Baldy are both bleeding from the eyes. Every time I manage to subdue them, one dashes past me and roundhouse kicks the other in the chest. Taekwondo. I scream, "Stop, stop, stop," but my voice comes out weak, the sound waves dissipate instantly, scattered by the wind.

Baldy's face is flushed purple and caked with orange, somebody's blood. He's kicking Brian in the gut, trying to rip Brian's face off like a mask. I grab them both by the arms and pull. I am amazed at how tiny and fragile they are, and yet they overpower me, I can't make them stop, though I stomp, bellow, belt out sermons ... Sons of South Korea, peace be upon thee! Peace be upon thy greenish-brown heavily militarized peninsula overflowing with soju and kimchi! Peace be upon thee, ye corporate supermen of the future! Ye aspiring Woori Bank bank tellers! Ye Samsung Life Insurance life insurance brokers! Thy destinies grin sadistically at thee! Fourteen-hour school days! Drunken sexcapades in dimly lit karaoke rooms! Two Starcraft channels! And lo, one day at the end of the rainbow, feathered fedoras and hiking! Nay, drunken hiking! ... but to no avail. They are determined to kill each other, these two six year-olds, calling each other fucking sons of bitches in the sort of Korean that even I understand.

In the swirling dust, the flailing arms, the loogies ... I experience a flashback: grade four, John Beckett brings his yellow hamster, Peaches, to school ... decides Peaches really ought to mingle with the reddish hotdog-shaped class hamster ... drops Peaches into the cage ... in a flash the two furballs are one ... it's a moment before we realize they are tearing each other to shreds ... John, a classic Steinbeck Lenny if you knew the guy, miraculously pries the hamsters apart without crushing either of them in his meaty paws ... but it's too late ... when he holds Peaches up to the light, the critter's right eyeball is dangling out of the socket ... a sad little black circle, like the pupil of a plastic googily eye ... Peaches is trembling with what appears to be hamster rage, but is completely silent, no squeaking or anything ... Johnny's crusty lips tremble, these big blue bags well up under his eyes, he starts to weep ... Peaches, look what he done to Peaches ...


I separate the kids at last. Lou has pinned down Baldy. Brian has collapsed and is weeping into a tree trunk. Their faces are smeared in blood.

"Go home," I tell Baldy. "We go home, you go home."

He's staring, fascinated with the blood on Brian's face, like he wants to make more of it.

"I am big," I say, "you are small. Go home."

Baldy is unfazed, but Brian gets up and tearfully tromps home. Baldy spits in Lou's face and kicks out of the pin, gets to his feet. He charges and tries to tackle Lou, but I fend him off with a basketball. Then, with a strange Van Damme-esque "get into the chopper" sideways head toss, I gesture for Lou to go home. Lou disappears around the corner and then - truly strange - it's just me standing there in this empty sandlot, aiming a basketball at a bloody child who is glaring at my torso like he wants to fight it.

"Hey. Go home."



When I get there, Lou is waiting for me in front of apartment building number 206.

"See you next time," he says, waving.

"Should I come up to check on Brian?" I ask. "He seemed, um, bleeding."

"No, that's okay," Lou says, "but thank you for help in fight. Now I sleep."

A nap sounds good. I give Lou the victory sign and walk home. The clouds have snuck in and it's suddenly cold. The tail end of my coat keeps kicking up in the wind. High school girls float by in their black uniforms - crows or nuns, pick or choose - giggling at me as I pass, spitting out phrases like "Where are you prom?", "I'm pine thank you and you", and "Puck you". Giggling, giggling, giggling. I give them the peace sign. As I walk, sucking on the right corner of my moustache, "Get Together" by The Youngbloods plays in my mind, and this fades neatly into "Everybody's Talkin'" by Harry Nilsson as I'm coming up the stairs to my apartment.

There's a note on my door from The Bostonian, who I have been unintentionally but not accidentally avoiding since he and The Torontonian cremated that cat a few weekends ago. He wants to know where I've been. I shrug to myself. Where have I been?

If I could have any superpower, or if there is any superpower I suspect I may already have, it's obscurity.

The Animal World

Standing on the corner in the gas station glow with the Torontonian, the Bostonian, two high school dudes in matching blue uniforms ... the first dying moth of spring swims in circles on the pavement ... the Torontonian is peering down at his iPod with a green flask in his hand ... the Bostonian is emptying a bottle of soju into this high school dude's wide open mouth, molar fillings catching the light ...

A white girl enters the convenience store ... the Torontonian and the Bostonian peek at her through the glass ... the Torontonian pronounces her ugly ... the Bostonian diagnoses her a dyke ... she comes back out with a carton of milk, the Bostonian gives her shit ...

"Sup, cracker?" he snaps.
"Fuck you," she says.
"Just being friendly," shouts the Torontonian, flipping her off.
"Some party you got there, fags," she snarls as she crosses the street.

The wet sound of passing cars fills the silence ... the high school dudes are red-faced and beaming ... it is 2 AM ...

"What are we gonna do now?" asks the Torontonian ... the question makes me shudder, or maybe it's the wind ...

"We are standing here on the corner," the Bostonian says, "and we are keeping quiet until something happens."

While the Torontonian is quacking about the burgundy fitted suit he bought in Phuket, a cab screams to a stop in the middle of the intersection ... there is a sick muffled pop ... the Torontonian shuts up ... with the engine humming, the driver gets out of the cab, walks around front, squats before the bumper ... something's pinned under his right front tire ... a bag? ... a loaf of bread? ... grey and white ... fuzzy ... a tail ... it is a cat ... the driver lines himself up, free kicks the cat corpse and it tumbles, rolls over twice, tail windmilling, limp paws outstretched and bobbing ... he instep kicks it six times until it's nestled with its nose up against the curb ... the driver gets back in the cab and peels out, careens through a red light ...

The Torontonian removes his headphones ... "Christ," I murmur ... the Bostonian staggers into the convenience store and returns, leading the gas station attendant by the arm ... the attendant, his whole face marred by some terrible blueberry-colored bruise, spots the cat, nods grimly, speaks a soft aside to the high school dudes, they nod grimly ...

Minutes pass ... a white Kia pulls up to the curb ... two women get out of the car ... one woman is carrying a black Adidas shoe bag ... she kneels while the other nudges the cat into the bag with her toe ... the bag is carefully placed atop an impromptu sidewalk garbage heap ... the women get back in the car, the car changes lanes, coasts through a red light ...

"That ain't no way to bury a cat," the Bostonian says and I nod grimly, unsure of what he means ...

A man in a tan trenchcoat swaggers by, points at us, baptizes me with his bottle of soju ... drunk, Korean, man ... a drunk Korean man ... he says to us: "The cat has died. Let's go home."

The high schoolers bow to us and chatter to each other en route to the PC room across the street ... I wander into the convenience store to buy a cup of ramen ... the Bostonian and the Torontonian linger on the corner planning a cremation ceremony, but I'm in bed before that happens ...

Sometimes I'm the slave, sometimes ...

It's dawn and the foreigners are pushing each other around in shopping carts, frightened giggles and metallic rattling noises coming from the illlit alleyway between chicken places. Meanwhile, Korea sleeps: mommy curled up in bed with her 20 year-old son; daddy splayed out naked, lying unconscious on a medicine-white futon down at the neighborhood rub 'n tug. Soon, Korea will wake up, jettison the kids off to school for twelve hours. Mommy will strap on her sun visor, go out and price haggle with vegetable vendors, come home and cook kimchi stew, stare pensively out the window, watch KBS dramas all afternoon. Daddy will wear a silver suit for fourteen hours and he won't come home after that. The foreigner gets up at one PM, groans, watches videos on the internet until three, walks to school munching on a cornbread thing, thinks this is all a pretty raw deal, public restrooms ain't got toilet paper ...