Here Be Dragons

The Borgia Map (circa 1430 AD) states, over a dragon-like figure in Asia ... "Here, indeed, are men who have large horns of the length of four feet, and there are even serpents so large, that they could eat an ox whole."

-Wikipedia

When I took my first good long gander at a modern political map of China, I was pretty bummed out to find that it was nowhere demarcated with a "Here Be Dragons" no-fly zone. The map was, in fact, nauseatingly detailed: a great big black-and-green inkblot clogged with unpronounceable megalopoli from one end to the other. There did not appear to be any unexplored, potentially dragon-infested regions of the Middle Kingdom. Indeed, there did not appear to be anywhere at all that wasn't crawling with people.

What struck me next was mainland China's resemblance to a chicken. Minus the legs and feet - I imagine the omnivores of Guangzhou Province devoured them centuries ago. With a side of pickled monkey brains. Still, the likeness is uncanny. China is a chicken. If you take Heilongjiang Province to be the beak - and how could you not? just look at it! - it's a graceful anatomical swoop south through the neck of Hubei, on down along the coastline, which swells into a fulsome, savory breast, upholstered by the luscious tenderloin of Anhui and Jiangxi Provinces.

My fellow volunteers and I live out in drumstick country. The wastelands to our immediate north I would liken to the gizzard or gall bladder of the Chinese chicken. Westward ho, and lo: China blossoms into the thunder thighs of Tibet, and Xinjiang Province, which is something like the tail of the chicken, a delicacy so rare and precious that you need a special government clearance just to eat it.

And lest this all seem a bit too glib and cheeky of me, I have received corroboration from many Chinese citizens from all walks of life and they, too, will proudly acknowledge that their country looks like a chicken. What of it? they ask me. I shrug. Just sayin', is all.

Something I noticed much later, long after I had, with the aid of an electron microscope, finally located my adoptive Chinese hometown on the map: there indeed be dragons in China, or at least dragons of the Google Earth variety. If we return to the east coast and scroll slowly downward from the beak until we arrive at the cleft where neck meets breast - the cleavage of China, if you will - off the coast of Tianjin, you will notice the unmistakable profile of a fire-breathing dragon, facing westward, laying to waste all of Shandong Province with its sulphurous loogeys. The illusion, I am told, is formed by the Bohai Sea, whose name does not mean "Dragon-ish Looking Sea" as you and I might hope. But then, I don't suppose the people who named it had access to Google Earth at the time. Rather unhelpfully, my Chinese-English dictionary tells me that the name "Bohai Sea" means "Bohai Sea."

But anyway, it looks like a dragon. So, Here Be Dragons, on a technicality. Still, from experience I am inclined to believe that the Chinese mainland is just teeming with dragons, and not the big red twelve-man stretch limo dragons you see snaking around the streets of Chinatown in Chicago on Chinese New Year's. Come to think of it, I've never seen a single fucking one of those in China. Then again, I've never seen fortune cookies or egg rolls here, either.

I'm lucky. Most Peace Corps volunteers are cast into the legitimate dragonlands. The phrase "in the bush" takes on a deeper meaning, I imagine, to someone serving in a Zambian village than it currently holds for me, a hack of an English professor in an unsung, overpopulated Chinese megalopolis of seven million strong. The volunteer in Zambia faces dragons of a more literal sort; he resides in a part of the world that, fifty or a hundred years ago, might as well have been labeled "Here Be Dragons." The volunteer in China has it much easier from a cartographic standpoint. I can Mapquest my way around Nanchong, fer chrissakes. But we nevertheless face dragons of a sort. They may only be dragons of the metaphorical variety, but they are no less frightening, imposing, or annoying for all that.

The fact remains that China - all of it, from beak to brisket - eludes the West, has always eluded the West, and looks likely to elude the West for as long as there is a West, and for as long as there is a China. It isn't just cultural misunderstanding or any of that mushy Obamanian glop, though it is also that. The differences between China and the West are fundamental differences. As in, irreconcilable differences. China, by and large, does not want to become more like the West. It wants the opposite of that. Japan and South Korea were similarly opposed to Western influence, once upon a time. But one way or another, they have come to embrace Western values along with Western commerce - not without some hand-wringing along the way, of course. The Chinese have adopted Western commerce while remaining extremely wary of Western values. And that wariness shows no signs of diminishing. Not from my very limited viewpoint, at any rate.

What surprised me most on my first visit to China, some three-odd years ago, was the absolute dearth of English. My first night in downtown Hangzhou - nicknamed the Silicon Valley of China - I desperately needed to use a telephone. I swung by an information booth just off the main square.

"Qing wen," I read from my Lonely Planet. "You meiyou yi ge ... um ... telephone?"
The girl behind the Plexiglas went into conniptions of misunderstanding.
"Telephone," I said. "Te-le-phone."
"TE-LE-HUA?!"
I talked into my hand. I took out my wallet and talked into that, too. Telephone, I said. Telephone. By then, she was looking at me like she was about to telephone the padded rickshaw to come take me away.

I was still a traveling greenhorn at the time, but not really all that much of one. I had lived in Poland, with its spotty English, and South Korea, with its even spottier Konglish. I was well aware that the English language hadn't yet conquered the world. In my travels, I had always made a point of learning more of the local language than I needed, so as to appear as dignified and untouristic as possible. But in desperate times, in all my travels, I had always been able to unearth an English speaker. Not so in the Silicon Valley of China. I forget how many people I asked that night on the laser-lit streets of Hangzhou. Telephone? Telephone? Telephone? Nobody knew what the fuck a telephone was. Here was China's most affluent upper crust, and nobody knew the English word "telephone," which has to be among the top ten most widely known words worldwide. Even in your Zambian village, I imagine the kids know what the word "telephone" means, or understand what a white dude talking into his wallet means.

That was my first impression of China, and it is an impression that has stuck with me long after I left Hangzhou, long after I retreated to the relative Sichuanese bush for two years. In the relative Sichuanese bush, it is even worse. Out here, if you don't speak a lick of Chinese - and many foreigners do not - I bid you good luck. The Chinese study English, even in the relative Sichuanese bush. In fact, they study their asses off. But very few Chinese seem in any way inclined to actually learn English. When you come right down to it, English just isn't very Chinese.

This is neither a positive nor a negative attribute of the Chinese mindset. I see very few reasons - and of those, only practical ones - why the average Chinese needs to learn English. The absence of English makes life hell for tourists, sure. But on the plus side, for me at least, the absence of English makes learning Chinese a helluva lot easier.

It's only when I really dwell on it that the absence of English disturbs me. Clumsy old, sloppy old English has become the world's lingua franca. English has become not only the language of business, not simply a means of communicating with lost tourists - for better or worse, English, wherever you live, has become pretty much the only means of interacting with people from the outside world.

For as much as China has opened itself to the outside world, and for as quickly as it has adopted an appreciation for Western commerce and Western luxuries, the average educated Chinese adult has no command of basic English and is not terribly interested in matters un-Chinese. He resides permanently in a Chinese bubble. The same, of course, could be said for a great many Americans. But we are lucky in that regard, because there is no real American bubble. Not anymore, not unless you're from Nebraska. And even then. Because the American bubble includes microbubbles: Mexican bubbles, African bubbles, Native American bubbles, Chinese bubbles and Japanese bubbles and Korean bubbles. Even the most isolated, most ignorant American is at least peripherally aware of those other bubbles. But the Chinese bubble is all China, all the time.

I don't claim to be an authority on China. Who can? But there is a palpable swagger here. I see it mostly in the young people. It's a swagger that says, we are Chinese and we don't need to be anything else. The rest of the world has wronged us for centuries - for millennia, even. What do we owe the rest of the world? I respect that swagger to a point. I respect that much of the national pride swirling around here has been earned through the sort of hard work that Americans shudder to think about. We shrink away from the sort of pride the Chinese have, because we sense - guiltily and probably correctly - that we are no longer worthy of it.

But outside of China, most of us are slowly learning a lesson that we will all have to learn eventually: that our bubble no longer exists. Or perhaps it's just the opposite. Perhaps our bubble has swollen up so huge as to swallow up all the other bubbles. The definition of an American is a human being with an American passport. The same could be said for most nations on earth. So to be an American is to be everyone, or to be no one at all, depending on how you look at it. Either way, it is a claustrophobic and at the same time isolating sensation. Above all else, it is an uncomfortable sensation. But it is one that must be lived with. That, in the end, will be the direction of things.

The Chinese are a long way away from that realization. Their bubble may have been opened to McDonald's and Apple and General Electric, but very little else has been allowed in. Exports are flying out of the bubble, but very little else is allowed out. My fear is that the more Chinese the Chinese become, the less they will feel the need to contribute to the conversation the rest of the world is having. And for better or worse, that conversation is happening in English. So perhaps my job is important, after all. But my students have never been expected to learn English. They have been mandated to memorize it. And it is my fear that the conversation the rest of the world is having - wherever that conversation takes us - is going to be misinterpreted, misunderstood, or ignored by the Chinese. By the young, China-loving college students - my students - who will inherit this country. I often worry about them. I often worry that I let them slip through my fingers. But then I pour myself a cold one and think, no: those kids slipped through a lot of fingers before they got to you.

Ocean Ghost

I haunted my old apartment all that summer, just waiting around for the new volunteer to show up. I watched The Wire all the way through for the fourth time. Then I watched Six Feet Under. Not a bad show; a bit too morbid for my liking. I even got so bored that I watched the first two seasons of Lost. Then I watched them again. What a stupid show. Why can't I stop watching it? I was brooding on that when the door flew open and the new volunteer came in. She dropped all her luggage and naturally, she screamed. I was almost inclined to scream, myself. But I pulled it together, counted to five, and floated over to shake her hand.

"Keith Petit," I said. "China 15."
"You're ... dead."
"No," I chuckled. "Not dead. It's a long story. Have a seat."

I indicated the plastic leather sofa. She didn't so much sit there as much as she passed out and faceplanted there. I floated off to the kitchen to fix up some coffee.

When the new volunteer finally came to, I asked her if there was anything she wanted to know about Nanchong.

"Thanks, but I don't drink coffee," she said. "If you're not dead, why are you a ghost?"
"I've been trying to figure that out myself," I said. "I don't even believe in ghosts."
"Me neither."
"But my best guess is, well - you know how if you sit on a couch for long enough, you leave behind a more or less permanent ass groove?"

She glanced over at the ass groove seated beside her. My ass groove.

"You might say I was a bit of a slob in my day," I said. "So my best guess is that I left behind a more or less permanent imprint of myself. In your apartment. Sorry about that."
"It looks pretty clean now," she said.
I laughed. Then I laughed some more.
"Yeah," I said. "It's clean now."

"So, can you leave the apartment at all?"
"Nope," I said. "I've tried a few times. I'm pretty much stuck here. I can float through the front door, but I've only ever gotten as far as the 3rd floor stairwell. Then I disintegrate and reappear right here on my sofa. Your sofa."
"Can people see you?"
"You can see me, can't you?"
"I mean, can other people see you? Can Chinese people see you?"
"If I hover in front of the window for a long time, sure. They point and shout yang gui-zi."
"What does that mean?"
"'Ocean ghost', if you want to be all literal about it," I said, "but 'foreign devil' is probably more to the point."

She coughed. I took out a pack of Shuangxis.

"Do you mind if I - "
"No. Go ahead."
I lit a cigarette.
"C'mon. Let me give you the tour," I said.

I floated across the living room and she followed me into the study.

"I left behind a lot of books for you," I said. "I wanted to keep them all for myself. But there was only so much room in my satchel."
"Um, thanks." She took a book down from the shelf. "Eat, Pray, Love?"
"Oh," I blushed. "That's not mine. I found it when I got here."
"Huh," she said.
"This here is the air conditioning unit," I said. "As you can see, most of the paint on the wall has chipped off. That's because the AC leaks like a motherfucker. If you leave it on, it leaks down through the floor and your downstairs neighbors will give you no end of grief about it. So try not to use the AC at all."
"But what do I do if it gets hot? It's already hot."
"I'm not sure," I said. "I never figured that out."

I floated into the kitchen.

"You cook at all?" I asked.
"Yeah, I do."
"I don't," I said. "I almost never came in here, come to think of it."
She started looking through the cupboards.
"Isn't there supposed to be, like, silverware and stuff?"
"There is."
"Where did it go?"
"I'm not sure," I said. "You lose track of things sometimes, you know?"
"Right," she said.

I floated into the bedroom.

"This here is the bed. If you can manage it, I recommend sleeping somewhere else."
"Somewhere else? Why? Where else would I sleep?"
"Sleeping in this bed," I said, shaking my head. "Sleeping in this bed is like sleeping on a plank of wood. But at least you can brag about sleeping on a plank of wood. You can't really brag about sleeping in an uncomfortable bed."
"The paint's coming off this wall, too."
"Correct," I said. "So you should probably avoid using this AC unit as well."
"Shouldn't you have gotten all this fixed?"
"I should have," I said.

I floated into the bathroom.

"And the last stop on our little reality tour," I said. "The grand finale. The shitter."
"Um," she said.
"Except if you've gotta go number two, I recommend going somewhere else."
"Somewhere else? But - "
"Like a restaurant or something. It's a crap shoot, so to speak," I said. "It's Russian roulette with this toilet. Most of the time, everything goes down easy. But sister, you don't wanna be around when the shit hits the fan. I'll just leave it at that."
"Yeah. Thanks."
"Let's see. What's next? Oh, right. The shower. They cut off the water for no apparent reason every couple days or so. And the hot water is pretty much cold water. And the water pressure comes and goes. Most showers, it just feels like an old man is drooling on your scalp. But it could be worse, right?"
"I guess it could be."

I hovered over to the couch and sipped my coffee.

"I'm sorry," said the new volunteer, "but that's really disgusting."
"What?"
"You. When you drink that coffee. I mean, I can see it just - "
"Then don't look," I snapped.

It got quiet.

"Sorry. I'm just touchy about certain things, is all," I said. "I'm new at this ghost thing. Anyhow. Is there anything you'd like to know about our fair city of Nanchong?"
"What is there to know?"
"Not much," I shrugged.
"I'm sorry," she said, "but I get the impression that you're pretty worthless."
"I get that impression sometimes, too," I said. "Of course it doesn't help that I'm an insubstantial blob of ectoplasm."
"Like, how long do you plan on haunting me? I didn't exactly count on having a roommate."
"I'm not sure," I said. "Maybe another ten minutes, maybe another month or two. It really depends on how big of an ass groove I left behind."

Again, her eyes lingered upon the ass groove on my sofa. Her sofa. She smacked it with her palm. She smacked it with both palms. Then, shrieking like a rabid lemur, she picked up the cushion and punched it in the face repeatedly. She threw it back down. The cushion was smooth for a moment. Then, slowly, audibly, the plastic leather snarled into a familiar pair of basins. My ass groove.

"I might be here a while," I sighed.
"Wonderful."
"Believe me, sister, I'm every bit as happy about it as you are. You think I want to hang out in this dingy apartment watching Lost all day?" I huffed. "I just want to go home."
"But you won't go home, will you? You're a ghost. You'll just ... disappear one day."
"I'm not so sure," I said. "But you're probably right. There's already another one of me out there. A real me. He's back in Nebraska right now, working for a temp agency or something. Now there's a spectral existence for you."

There was a knock at the door. The new volunteer looked at me.

"Isn't this where you're supposed to float away and hide yourself in the closet or something?"
"Naw," I said. "It's cool."

She grunted and stomped off to get the door. It was my old boss.

"Good afternoon, Jennifer. Your apartment is okay, yes?"
The new volunteer - Jennifer, I guess - glanced back at me for a moment.
"Yeah. Everything's fine."
"That is good. You must be tired. You had better have a rest. But tomorrow the English department will invite you to a banquet. Will you go?"
"That sounds great."
"I will call your telephone tomorrow. You had better pick it up."
My old boss gave me a definite look.
"Great. See you tomorrow."

Jennifer shut the door and turned around to face me.
"I thought you said people could see you," she said.
"They can. Some people just choose to ignore me."

If they were a long two years for Jennifer, they were an even longer two years for me. At least she was able to get out of the house every now and then. She got homesick a couple months in and stayed that way for a while. Then, the following spring, she hooked up with another volunteer, this guy Jared. Pretty alright dude. After that, nothing really seemed to faze her. Young love. Jared came over to visit sometimes and I'd have to hide out in one of the kitchen cupboards the whole time and stuff my ears with Kleenex at night.

Jennifer kept the place impeccably clean, no thanks to me, but most of the time we got along okay. After a while, though, she decided to ignore me, too. It was easier that way, I guess. When she was out of the house, I'd re-watch The Wire or re-watch Six Feet Under. I even re-watched the first two seasons of Lost. I still don't know if they ever get off the island, and I don't really care to find out. And I still don't know why I keep watching that stupid show.

Jennifer returned to America this past July. I heard that somewhere along the way Jared proposed to her and she said yes. So I'm happy for them, of course. I hope everything works out okay. She took most of my DVDs home with her and a lot of my books, too. I started reading Eat, Pray, Love and when I finished it I found myself weeping uncontrollably all over my sofa. My ghost tears pooled up in the twin basins of my ass groove. Then they evaporated. The AC's broke again.

In the evenings, I hover in front of the window and watch the construction going on outside. I can't tell if they're building something or tearing something down. After four years, I can barely even recognize the place. Everything has changed so quickly, and so much. It's only a matter of time before they tear down my apartment complex. And then where will I go?

The new volunteer doesn't show up for another two weeks. I hope she is cool. Or that he is cool. I hope, whoever it is, they bring plenty of books. I'm tired of re-reading the ones I have. I'm tired of re-reading Eat, Pray, Love.

Nothing to read, nothing to watch, nothing to do. No one to talk to. These days, I just float around the apartment, looking for old junk in the desk drawers, behind the bookshelf, under the sofa cushions. There isn't much of anything left. Jennifer cleaned this place like a woman possessed. But I did find a little scrap the other day when I was rummaging around under the bed, a sliver of faded canary yellow paper, a crumpled-up scribble that read: I can't wait to get the fuck out of here. Well, Keith. Neither can I.

Via Chicago

I've found
the way those engines sound
will make you kiss the ground
when you touch down
-Wilco

Three months left in China and I'm sputtering towards the finish line. Shuddering my way through black plumes of industrial backwash, muttering my way through ribbon after ribbon of red tape, stuttering my way through Oral English 101. Sputtering my way through Chinese airspace like a battered old Sopwith Camel, fuselage peppered with artillery wounds, professorial elbow patches sewn into my wings, the whole thing jerry rigged together with dental floss and Chinese finger traps, faltering and fluttering, stammering and stuttering but still, still sputtering through the People's secondhand smoke towards a drive-thru McMirage on the distant horizon.

Rest assured, when I return home, via Chicago, I will return in one piece, but it will be a piece so shoddily taped together as to inspire some metaphysical debate.

China has been rough on me, as I imagine it is rough on just about anyone who isn't Chinese. As I imagine it is rough on many people who are Chinese. Here is no country for old men. Here is no country for young men. Here is no country for middle-aged divorcées, or bright-eyed college graduates. Here is no country for peasants, or priests, or philosophers, or poets, or the sad lot of soft-hearted daydreamers who submit themselves daily to the process of being hammered and screwed into bright yellow star-shaped pigeonholes. It must be a country for some particular demographic of people. But I'm pretty sure by now that, wherever else I belong, I do not belong to that demographic.

So I am sputtering. Here is no country for pandas. I haven't cleaned my apartment in months. The Maginot Line between my living room and the garbage dump outside has been reduced to a matter of geopolitical nitpickery. I sleep when the sun comes up. I rise just before it sets. My routine has grown so erratic that the erratic has become routine. The pitching rotation of my wardrobe - through theft, loss, and washing machine mishaps - has been thinned down to a single middle reliever, a colorblind knuckleballer thrust unexpectedly into the Major League limelight - and he starts more games these days than I am comfortable admitting.

I am sputtering, but I have not yet crashed. And I'm not likely to, not at this point. Because I'm so close to the finish line. Because however much my personal hygiene has suffered, my life out of doors has gotten that much better. A wonderful sort of existential callus has formed around my person. I no longer notice the traffic noise, the construction, the esophageal explosions that rage in the streets, not unless they are pointed out to me, not unless I consciously decide to think about them by way of reminding myself of just how numb I have become to the sensorial circus of my surroundings. It matters very little to me what I have for lunch or dinner. Let's do Chinese, I figure. These days, I teach with the part of my brain that reptiles use when they are snoozing on rocks. Which is not to say that I have grown lazy, or that I care little for my work. But it is to say that I no longer panic, or worry, or even think about teaching. It is something I do, almost instinctively, rather than something I get my panties in a bunch about. Not even my hecklers can get my goat these days. Foreigner, foreigner! Chinese person, Chinese person. I am mindful of the fact that every heckle is one heckle closer to the last heckle, which will occur on an eastbound flight from Beijing to San Francisco. And then, for that one heckler at least, the tables will turn, indeed. Have fun on Haight Street, asshole.

Sputtering though I am, I have turned a corner. Sichuanese winter died in its sleep last week. The westerly winds have ushered in days of warmth, days of something resembling sunshine: a dusty orange tennis ball dangling down from the aluminum-tinged sky. I am in a consistently better mood when there is something resembling sunshine to wake up to. The days will be warmer from here on out, I know, and the sun won't be the stranger that it was. Things will be easier from here on out. It's as though, after rowing against the waves for the past 21 months, I have finally settled into a warm and easy current. It is only a matter of time before I am sighted by the Peace Corps rescue chopper and hoisted aboard with fistpounds and manhugs and bottles of champagne to be uncorked and splooged about the cabin.

I have turned a corner. I have already lived far more days in China than I have left. The next time I clean my apartment will be the last time I clean my apartment. The next time I step on a fresh baby turd on the sidewalk will be the last time I step on a fresh baby turd on the sidewalk. There remains a daunting amount of Peace Corps paperwork left to be done, but I will fill it out with the same giddiness as a middle schooler cleaning out his locker, or a high schooler returning his books, or a frat boy foiling the crusty dean one last time.

Back when I was still grappling with the enormity of two years abroad, I used to measure the time on my late night jogs. I would run for 24 minutes - two years - and if I had already spent six months in China, I knew those 18 remaining minutes were what I had left ahead of me. Two months ago - my 19th month - my right achilles tendon had an unfortunate run-in with the front tire of a moped. I walked it off and thought nothing of the encounter. Until last week - the start of my 21st month - when my right achilles tendon started talking to me and, on a mid-afternoon cigarette run, audibly popped. No more running. I can barely even walk. But late at night, after the eleven o'clock curfew has sent all my hecklers to bed, I go out for a hobble, if you will. Every step is a bitch, as every day in China has been a bitch. The walk (the hobble) takes about half an hour, but for my purposes I round it down to 24 minutes. And those last three minutes back home, when my achilles tendon feels about ready to snap in two like a Chinese condom - well, I say to myself, that's where I'm at. I'm so close to home, and every tedious, tentative step brings me closer. I really have nothing left to do but keep hobbling, and keep an eye out for mopeds.

The Left Side Door is Always Locked

I think I will take a short break from my Kunming travelogue, if you don't mind. I'm stuck, you see. The words are already written down in my pretentious little Moleskine® notebook. There they are, perfectly visible, scribbled down in barely decipherable black ink. All I have to do is type the words. But they don't feel good on my fingertips, however many times I type and retype them. Lost in transcription, I guess.

To me, the hardest things to write about are the things that happened in the not-so-distant past. It's like retelling the joke you just told. The joke everyone laughed at. But somebody missed the joke. So you have to repeat the joke for this one inattentive dude, even as you ruin it for everyone else.

When you find yourself caught up in a story, you run that story through your mind so many times that it becomes too big to fail. Then, lo and behold, when you finally sit down to write the story, it fails. And you can't bail it out, however late into the night you filibuster, however many Starbucks stimulus packages you sneak past the House. The story fails. It fails because it's too big to fail, because it was never supposed to fail, because you never believed it could fail. It fails because it is a good story but you're not yet good enough to write it. It fails because you're too far away from the story to remember what it felt like when it happened, and because you're still too near to the story to comprehend what the hell it means.

I find it much easier to write about things that happened in the not-so-distant present. Like what happened just now. I can write about that. So that is what I will try to do. Something happened this evening, just a couple hours ago, though I'm not quite sure anything happened at all. Well, obviously, something happened. Something is always happening. But I'm not sure whether the events are related to one other, or whether I am stringing them together after the fact. Whatever. I'm writing this because I'm verbally constipated for the moment. I'm writing this, mostly, to see what happens when I write it.

It was round about midnight and I was on the prowl for beer, a couple bottles to unblock the aforementioned writer's block. The usual shops - the shops whose shopkeepers know what kind of beer I want - were all closed, shutters down. So I resorted to a back-alley shish-kebab place. I try to maintain a steady rapport with all the shopkeepers in my part of town, especially with this back-alley shish-kebab man who is ethnically Tibetan and therefore almost as foreign as I am. I tried to score a quick trio of takeout beers but the Tibetan invited me to sit. So I sat. I knew I would be there a while. A couple of college kids came dweebing into the restaurant and sat across from me. They didn't bother me. I sensed that they were not the usual Chinese undergraduate riffraff, so I offered them cigarettes. We got to talking.

They were not the usual Chinese undergraduate riffraff. They spoke no English, but they understood my Chinese - which is to say they possessed an uncanny knack for hand gestures and sound effects. Over the course of an hour, I successfully explained the existential impact of the Obama presidency, the ever-widening income gap in the Western world, the ominous rise of the Tea Party, the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords and the many reasons why it scared the shit out of me. The college kids, in turn, offered me some unusually candid opinions on Chinese politics. They, in turn, offered me some unusually candid Chinese cigarettes. They recommended some Chinese proxy servers, the better to access my own blog with. These kids were not the usual Chinese undergraduate riffraff. We feasted upon spiced pig brain - the first time I have ever eaten brain, believe it or not, in all my time in China. The pig brain was good, and I feel slightly smarter for having eaten it. When it was time to leave, I tried to pay the tab, but the college kids swatted my hand away. I tried to swat their hands away, but they swatted my swatting hand away. They paid the tab.

We parted ways. I was running low on cigarettes, so I hailed a cab. The cabbie was an old timer with a wife and a son, and he was awfully happy to talk about his son, a recent graduate of Sichuan Normal University. The cabbie stopped along the way to pick up a couple college kids waiting on the side of the road. There were two of them and one of me. I scooched over to the left back seat because the kids would have to get in from the right side. I knew this because in China, or at least in Nanchong, the left side door of the cab is always locked. I suppose the cabbies keep the left side door locked to prevent renegade drunks from bailing on the fare. Or perhaps if the cabbies didn't keep the left side door locked, Chinese Fire Drills would rage in the streets every time they stopped the cab. Truth be told, I don't know why Chinese cabbies lock the left side door. But the left side door is always locked. This is a rule and I have adjusted to it, as I have adjusted to so many other rules in China, as I have adjusted to so many other rules in Nanchong, often without knowledge, always without quite understanding.

The college kids eavesdropped on my sweet Chinese nothings and complimented my accent. The cabbie agreed that it was good. I contested that it was shit. Everyone laughed. I offered the college kids cigarettes and they thanked me. We smoked for a bit. The cabbie dropped the college kids off at the train station, then waited while I ran across the street to buy cigarettes. The cigarette vendor was all giggles and smiles to see me. She complimented my Chinese. I complimented her Chinese. She giggled and smiled.

On the ride home, the cabbie ran out of things to say. So I thought back on the dreams I'd had last night. It was a rough night's sleep as I remembered it. I had dreamt that I was back in Omaha, smoking a cigarette outside The Brothers on 38th and Farnam. My favorite bar. A cold and dark night. Breathing fog. Black ice everywhere. I smoked. I joggled my leg to the faintly audible bass line of the Roxy Music song I'd just put on the jukebox. I shoegazed. I gazed back up. A derelict was shambling my way. He pulled a gun. I threw up my hands. He shot me in the gut. I woke up in a cold sweat, as one does. Holding my gut. I was stunned, but I wasn't altogether surprised. This is one of many possibilities in America.

In China, among many other impossibilities, being shot down in the street is not a possibility. Never in Nanchong could I be held up at gunpoint. No, in Nanchong, one of China's most violent cities, I can troll the shady avenues in the shady hours to my heart's content and I will never be assaulted - or if I am, as I have been a couple times, it will not be at gunpoint, but at the feeble meathooks of a thoroughly drunk Chinese salaryman. For however much I loathe the place, I have nothing to be afraid of in Nanchong. And after months and months of homesick idolatry, that dream reminded me that in America - even in mild-mannered Omaha - I have a great deal to be afraid of, indeed. I can almost understand why so many creepy Americans linger around Asia for decades, extending their visas indefinitely. The Asian existence is an antlike existence, but if nothing else, it is a safe existence.

And there is the hospitality to consider. In America, a night like tonight would never have happened. Consider this: I walk into The Brothers for some beers-to-go. I'm wearing my pajamas, basically. Some college kids treat me to dinner and drinks. They pay the tab. They bid me farewell. They will never see me again. They ask for nothing in return. Impossible in America. A nightly occurrence in Nanchong. Granted, it's because I'm a foreigner. But that kind of hospitality doesn't exist in America. It's not that I seek out Chinese meal tickets. The Catholic guilt, in fact, is almost too much for me to bear. But it's such pleasant companionship. No pretensions. Just the amusingly futile attempt to understand one another over beer and spiced pig noggin. I know that once I leave Nanchong, these sorts of things will never happen to me, never again. I will go to hipster bars with my very best hipster friends, and each of us will pay our share. We will divvy up in the Dutch manner. At the night's end, a handshake, maybe a man-hug, and we drive home separately. In Nanchong, amidst all the xenophobia and cross-cultural weirdness, any sane interaction is a miracle. So those interactions verge on the divine, when they happen. Acts of generosity leave you overfed, half-drunk and breathless. But in America, I will find naught but good conversation, mutual respect and the occasional gun-wielding raving derelict. At this point, I'm not willing to say that either set of circumstances is better than the other. Instinctively, I prefer the American way. I miss my home. But at no point prior to tonight did I think that I would miss Nanchong. At no point prior to tonight did I even entertain the thought that I would miss Nanchong. At no point prior to tonight did I even dream of thinking that I would ever entertain the thought that I would miss Nanchong. But I suppose, pending tonight's dreams, that for the moment, very tentatively, I am willing to risk saying that I might yet dream to think that I will one day entertain the thought that I will one day miss Nanchong, Sichuan Province, People's Republic of China.

1/17/2011: Loomings, et cetera

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

- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick


hypo
noun, Archaic
hypochondria.

- Random House Dictionary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1/16/2011: McRumble

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'm hungry," I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Somewhat Bearable Lightness of Being a Hobo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hmm, I said.

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

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

Enter the 36 Chambers of Nanchong

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

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

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

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

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

"Whatever. How much is my beer?"

I couldn't resist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Practice starts tomorrow.

Promises To Keep

I teach Oral English.

I would much rather be teaching Oral Spanish. Or Oral German.

... or American Literature. Or British Literature. Or Writing. Or Creative Writing - ooh, that would be nice. Hell, at this point I'd be willing to teach Business English. Or Linguistics. Or Quantum Mechanics. Or, I don't know, Home Economics.

... or better yet, English 407: Beatniks and Politics - A Psychedelic Flashback to The 1960's and a Totally Trippy Analysis of its Posthumous Reverberations in Contemporary American Culture. Or better yet, English 502: Stan The Man - An Assessment of Stanley Kubrick, His Films, and His Legacy. Or even better yet, OK Computer 543. Or Kid A 571.

... or even better yet ... well, I could dream up a long list of uber-hip elective classes that I could (and perhaps should) be teaching at China West Normal University. But Oral English is not an elective for my students, and it isn't an elective for me. Twice I have begged the director of the University for some variety in my teaching diet, but she keeps throwing Oral English classes my way. Oral English is the only class I have taught thus far, and Oral English is probably the only class I will ever teach in China.

And I'm okay with that. My students need a lot of help in the speaking department. They probably don't need any more literature in their lives. They certainly don't need to do any more writing. So I try to keep reading and writing far away from the syllabus. But once in a while, I throw some poetry at the kids to see how it hits them, just to see how it bounces back to me. Or I give them a writing assignment, as a kind of survey to figure out what, exactly, my students are thinking when they are too terrified to speak.

We watched The Joy Luck Club a couple weeks ago. My students were stoked about the film, and a couple of them rushed up to the computer after class to copy it to their memory sticks. But the kids tend to clam up under pressure; I didn't think an in-class discussion would unearth anything worth unearthing. So after the movie, I let them out a full ten minutes early and gave them writing homework instead. They weren't sure whether to cheer or groan.

The following week, I was pretty damn excited to have those hot little papers in my hands. I rushed home to read them. I was curious to see what my students would have to say about Chinese-Americans, a demographic they didn't even know existed prior to seeing the film. Would they consider Amy Tan Chinese, or would they think of her as an American? How did my students imagine the average Chinese-American lived in America? And how did they imagine the average laowai fared in their country? I asked them to write about all of those things, both because I was curious, and because it was a subject innocuous enough and ambiguous enough to hopefully inspire some real thought in my students without getting my ass in trouble. What bounced back at me, however, wasn't innocuous or ambiguous in the least. It actually kind of scared me.

1. Do you consider the second-generation Chinese-Americans in the film more Chinese or more American?

More Chinese - 96% (361 students)
More American - 4% (15 students)

All precincts reporting.


2. What difficulties might a Chinese person encounter in America?

racism - 26%
language - 19%
dutch pay - 8%
love - 4%

All precincts reporting.


3. What difficulties might a foreigner encounter living in China?

chopsticks - 28%
food - 24%
language - 20%
traffic - 4%

All precincts reporting.


I read through every last one of the 376 papers. I did not juke the stats. What you see is what my students believe. In a way, they responded just the way I had expected them to. I've been here three semesters, after all. But I hadn't counted on such an overwhelming landslide. When I'd finally hashed out the numbers, I couldn't believe them. 96 to 4? Chopsticks - honestly? My gut American instinct told me that the Republicans had fucked with the voting machines again.

I am not a Chinese-American, but I will hazard a guess that fewer than 96% of second-generation Chinese-Americans would identify themselves with the country of their ancestors rather than the country in which they were born and bred. It would be a significant slight, I would think, to refer to a second-generation Chinese-American as anything other than an American - or at least, I have never met a Chinese-American who wouldn't take it as anything less than an insult.

I am not a sociologist, either, so I won't analyze questions 2 or 3 any more than I should, other than to remark that racism and a pair of wooden sticks make for a mighty odd couple at the top of the respective lists. Chopsticks and food have been, for me, the #1 and #2 easiest things to adjust to in China. Like I'm complaining about the twice cooked pork. None of my 376 students mentioned racism as a potential problem for foreigners living in the People's Republic of China.

This week, I hit my students with some classic American poetry. Teaching is always an experiment, especially when you are not a teacher by trade. My poetry classes are the most successful experiment I have ever conducted. I didn't expect the poetry experiment to succeed in my first semester, one year ago. And I have kept waiting for it to fail in the semesters since. But my poetry class is always the best class of the semester. My students get fired up about poetry, and I have no idea why. I get fired up, too, because I am a literary hack who enjoys masquerading as a professor from time to time. Perhaps I feed off the energy of my students, or perhaps they feed off of mine. In China, TEFL may crumble, but poetry always wins.

My very best poetry classes have the same feel as my undergraduate literature courses at the Midwestern Jesuit College to Remain Nameless, back when we used to read and discuss texts instead of vivisecting them - during that fragile, Edenesque bliss before junior year English Major Bullshit rolled around and the twin spinsters of Deconstructionism and New Criticism burst into the room with their rusty meat cleavers and hacked to bits whatever pleasure there was left to be taken from reading.

My students take time to read the poems, they brood on them, and they bust their asses trying to understand them. I doubt I could expect the same from a class of American undergraduates. Hell, I doubt I could've expected the same from myself as an undergraduate. I was too busy ... let's just say I was busy. But without exception, all of my students, even my very worst students respond to the poems in a thoughtful way, often in an insightful way. I don't teach them. They teach me. They might not be able to speak worth a damn, but they can analyze poetry. Poetry inspires them to speak.

I have learned a lot from my students, and I see all of those old poems in a new light because of them. But they remain rote learners - so my kids will sometimes ask me point blank to tell them what the poem means. I admit to them that frankly, I don't really know. I may perhaps underline something with my index finger, or mention that the author is a woman, or that he is black - but otherwise, I want them to follow their own noses, to chase their own lines of thought. I want to throw these poems at my students and see how they bounce back to me. Their analyses are never anything less than fascinating. But more often than not, their ideas bounce right past my outstretched glove, and go skipping out into left field.

I had my students split into six groups, and each group analyzed one of six poems: "Dream Variations" and "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" by Langston Hughes; "Loving You Less Than Life, A Little Less" and "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why" by Edna St. Vincent Millay; "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost.

I chose those six poems because they are relatively easy to read, and because all of them are fairly literal but invite interpretation. I chose those three authors because they are a neat and tidy (and not terribly subversive) cross-section of all the rage, lust, and mystique that make American poetry what it is, whatever it is.

Before they dug in, I told my students that there were no right or wrong interpretations, that their opinions were as good as mine. That wasn't just a hollow feel-good statement to bolster my students' confidence, though it was partially that. By now, I know what my kids are capable of. They aren't much for conversation, but they can read. They've been force-fed Jane Austen since they were freshmen in high school, so I knew that Robert Frost was well within their literary grasp. The diction was not going to be a problem. I knew that they would understand the poems, and that they would have opinions about them. And I knew that our opinions would differ, as they always do, and I wanted our opinions to differ. I wanted the stony mass interrogation chamber that is Room 307 to feel more like a room with padded walls, where they could fling themselves against the barriers like crash test dummies and afterwards, as in the wake of a particle collision, we'd slowly try to piece everything together. The poem goes in, the thoughts come out - you and I scurry around the lab trying to make sense of them.

In all of my classes, the St. Vincent Millay groups maintained that the author was a male writing about a female. This, despite Millay's "unremembered lads" in the one poem, and the brown hair growing about the brow and cheek of her lover in the second poem. I explained that a "lad" was a young man, and that facial hair, under ideal conditions, does not manifest itself upon the cheeks of women. But my students insisted that Millay was a man, either because they were unacquainted with female poets, or because they were uncomfortable with the idea of females poetizing about such racy promiscuous shenanigans. Even after I made it clear that the romantic objects in both poems were men, and many different men at that, my students maintained that the poet was a man. Homosexuality was, perhaps, less shocking to them than the prospect of a female with a somewhat diversified love life. So I left it open. Perhaps Ms. Millay was writing in character as a man who had fallen in love with a bearded lady when the circus came to town. But I couldn't help myself. I couldn't help nudging them in the right direction. The poet is a woman. Her boo has a beard. Odds are, she's writing about a man. My students giggled into their hands. And I can't even describe the giggling that followed after I insinuated that "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed" might just have been referring to more than one pair of lips ...

My students fared a bit better with the Langston Hughes poems. Most of the kids picked up on the fact that the poet was black. Others I had to prod a bit.

"What kind of person do you think he is? Do you think he's white, like me? Do you think he's Chinese? Or Indian ... "
"He must be very tall."
"And very handsome."
"Maybe," I said.
"He must be very rich."
"And he must have a colorful life."
"In a sense," I said. "But what about this line: 'dark like me.' And this one: 'black like me.'"
"His heart is black."
"Kind of," I said.

The groups reading "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" relished using the word "negro," whatever it meant, and I had to discourage them from making a habit of it.

"Teacher, is it bad?"
"Er, uh," I said. "Yes. People will hurt you for using that word."

Their electronic dictionaries led them down a treacherous path of synonyms that I likewise had to stamp out.

"Teacher, I think the the writer is a n_____."
"Um. Yes," I said, "he is an African-American."
"So he is in fact a n_____?"
"Don't say that. People will kill you for using that word. But yes, he is an African-American."
"Sorry, teacher. So he is a black?"
"Yes. He is ... black."

Most puzzling and wonderful of all were the Robert Frost poems. I have never been afforded such an instantaneous glimpse into the Chinese psyche. Somewhere, Robert Frost is rolling in his frosty grave. This is not the way he would've wanted to have been interpreted. And yet, poetry being what it is, I had no means (and no desire) to cockblock the interpretations that my students offered me. I let them stand. I lavished my students with praise. I disagreed with them completely, but I am not Robert Frost, and I am not Chinese, so I listened to them for a good long while, gave them all a solid pat on the back, and moved onto the next group.

"The Road Not Taken" is so quintessentially American that by now it is almost beyond interpretation. Two highways diverged in bumfuck Nebraska. One of them freshly paved, adopted by the Sarpy County Jaycees, dotted with McDonaldses and Burger Kings and Cracker Barrels, a mainline to the clogged artery of Interstate 80: boring. The other, all gravel and glass shards, like something out of Deliverance: exciting. I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference.

Whatever an American may or may not be, no American would interpret "The Road Not Taken" as anything less than an ode to individualism. Robert Frost might be the last criteria we have left for Americanism. Wherever our politics may lie, however blasé our lives may in fact be, we all believe that we are following our own paths, that our road is the lonely road, that we have broken ranks with the rest of society in order to pursue our own preferred brand of happiness. Deluded or not, that sentiment, perhaps, is what makes us American. And it might just be the only unifying belief we share in common. Maybe we should include Robert Frost's poem on our naturalization test. If you find this poem somewhat uplifting, you're in. If you are of the mind that Robert Frost royally fucked up in wandering down that nasty road littered with doggie doo and backwoods sodomites, you're out.

But my students are not American. No, they universally agreed: "The Road Not Taken" was a poem about regret. They did not appeal to the text, but to their nature. The man in the poem deviated from the common road and went down the unpopular path. A grave mistake. Frost was writing the poem as a bitter old man, ruing the day he made that decision. Why, oh why, did I take that shady-ass Deliverance road? Why didn't I follow everyone else down I-80? The road not taken, according to my students, was the road that Frost damn well ought to have taken.

Above all else, I am charitable to my students. So I didn't disagree with them outright, however much I disagreed inwardly. But I tried to Ouija Board them in the right direction. Well, don't you think it's possible that the poet is happy with his decision? Doesn't this poem feel optimistic to you? Before long, though, I realized that Robert Frost had rigged his poem in just such a way that I had no evidence, no case, and no authority to even suggest that my students were wrong.

"I shall be telling this with a sigh," writes Frost, "somewhere ages and ages hence/two roads diverged in a wood, and I --/I took the one less traveled by/and that has made all the difference."

In life, there are happy sighs and sad sighs. There are good differences and bad differences. Was Robert Frost sighing in a contented way? Or was he sighing like a Notre Dame football fan? Did the road less traveled by lead him to a Conoco station, or into one of the deleted scenes from Deliverance? I could point to nothing in the text that indicated that, yes, Robert Frost was pleased with his decision. He was sighing, after all. Perhaps, after all, he had fucked up. Maybe, after all, I have fucked up, too, by joining the Peace Corps when I should've taken that five-figure recruiting gig with the University of Phoenix. But every high fructose fiber of my American being tells me that Robert Frost didn't fuck up, and that I haven't fucked up, either. My students would beg to differ. Two roads diverged in a wood and the less harmonious road is to be avoided. And this, I suppose, makes all the difference between us.

My students, all of them but one, reacted the same way to "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." It wasn't a poem about escaping from society, about reveling in solitude, about sinking into the majesty of nature if only for a short while. No, the poet just wants to go home, they said. It's cold and it's dark and he's very lonely, they said. He just wants to go home to be with his wife.

"But what about this?"
I underlined with my index finger.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep

"We don't understand," my student said. "How can the woods be dark and deep - and lovely?"
"Sometimes the loveliest things in life are dark and deep," I said.
"But he has promises to keep," she said. "And miles to go before he sleeps."
"And miles to go before he sleeps," agreed another.
"He wants to go home to be in bed with his wife."
"Yes. He wants to go home."
"The woods are terrible and scary."
"His home is cozy and warm."
"He must get out of the woods."

I nodded. I didn't quite disagree. Then, a girl in the front row lowered her head so that her hair obscured her face. She cleared her throat and she spoke.

"Maybe it's about writing," she said.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"He is a writer. Maybe he means, writing is lonely, and dark, and deep, and scary."
"Go on."
"And home is comfortable, and easy, and very relaxing."
"Yes?"
"But he wants to stay with writing. Although it is lonely. Even though it is scary. Even though it is hard for him," she said. "He will go home someday. Everybody goes home. He will go home. But only when he is ready."

The bell rang. Time for a smoke break.

"That's a really good idea," I told the girl. "I honestly hadn't thought of it before. That probably means that you're smarter than me."

I couldn't see her face, but I could see that she was smiling. I left the room and walked up four floors to the roof of the teaching building, where I could be alone. It was evening. The sun was setting with a snarl of smog smeared across its face. I lit a cigarette and flicked the ash seven floors down. Then I planted my arms on the ledge and planted my head in my hands and I cried like a bitch. Fuck, I said. Fuck. You fool. Yes, there are students who slip through the cracks, students who survive. That is why you are here. You fool. You colossal fool. How did you not see it? Even after fourteen years of education and reeducation, there are kids who survive, whose brilliance somehow escapes unstrangled. You are here for them, you fool. So stop whining and teach them. You fool.

They exist. They slip through the cracks. They survive. Let them succeed, I thought. Let them be happy. Let the world give them all that they need. Sometimes they slip through the cracks. If only all of them could slip through the cracks. If only there were more cracks ...

3:10 to Kamchatka

My Chinese DVD collection consists primarily of whatever movies the girl before me left behind in the apartment: You've Got Mail, Feast of Love, Married Life, The Other Boleyn Girl, A Love Song for Bobby Long. I have no shortage of beer coasters. Then there are the handful of movies I brought from home, a couple that I bought in Chengdu, and There Will Be Blood, which I stole from Jacob and am holding hostage until a day in the distant future when he can appreciate it for the masterpiece that it is.

I don't buy many DVDs in Nanchong, because I don't really know where to buy them. There are no sprawling bootleg DVD markets here. I have seen them in Chengdu and Chongqing, and on the east coast of China. But in Nanchong, we have proper DVD shops that are strictly legitimate and almost exclusively domestic. It's slim pickins for Western films. They can be found in the darkest, rankest corner of the shop, hidden behind the softcore pornography and the instructional ping-pong videos. They're pricey, these laowai DVDs, about the same as they would cost in the States, and the selection is some pretty lowbrow shit - and overdubbed lowbrow shit to boot. So unless watching Mariah Carey's Glitter in Mandarin is your thing, your best bet is probably the internet.

But when it comes to streaming movies, my laptop is no better than my toaster oven. If I want to watch a movie, I have to splurge on an overpriced DVD of less than exacting taste. Or at least I had to, up until a couple weeks ago, when I finally found a DVD shop that caters to my impoverished American sensibilities. It is called the "Open-Hearted Video Store."

The owner smokes excessively, even for a Chinese man. At the same time, his accent and his mannerisms aren't Chinese at all. Perhaps he's Japanese - but around these parts, that is not exactly the kind of question you want to ask if you're interested in keeping a full set of teeth.

As I enter, Mr. Openheart will grunt and gesture with his cigarette at a couple of cardboard boxes stashed under the legitimate DVD rack. This means that he has gotten a fresh shipment of bootlegged foreign DVDs. Or he will smoke and say nothing, which means that no new shipment has arrived. Either way, Mr. Openheart has already amassed an epic collection of bootlegs, and I can easily while away several hours of the evening sifting through DVD slips until my hands are coated in an invisible but palpably grody dust. Call it the dust of piracy.

Yesterday, Mr. Openheart grunted and gestured, and indicated not one but four new boxes of DVDs. Jackpot. I rubbed my hands together and squatted down on a little wooden stool. I cracked open the first box. And I sifted through the schizophrenic rubbish.

Mr. Openheart has eclectic taste, which is not to say that he has good taste. No, it does not seem as though Mr. Openheart has any taste at all. His is the DVD collection of someone who simply buys movies at random, regardless of quality, popularity, genre, rating, or country of origin. A typical sequence of titles goes something like this:

The Talented Mr. Ripley (in Portuguese), Toy Story 2, bondage film from Hong Kong, Predator 2, Singin' in the Rain, Ceausescu-era propaganda film from Romania, Saw 6, Season Three of Bob the Builder, bundle of anime porn, The Godfather Part III (in Korean), Bushwhacked (starring Daniel Stern), Little Women, bundle of anime porn, art flick from Latvia, City Slickers 2: The Legend of Curly's Gold (in German) ... und so weiter.

The DVDs are organized in no way that I can tell. Maximum entropy seems to have been Mr. Openheart's filing criteria. This makes DVD searching a tedious process, but at the same time an engrossing one. I am never quite sure what I'll find. It's the thrill of the hunt, I suppose. There have been evenings where I've browsed for two hours and left without buying a thing. Other times, it's as though Mr. Openheart imported an entire box with my Amazon Wish List firmly in mind. The Stanley Kubrick Criterion Collection? Meeting People Is Easy? Blue Velvet? Weekend at Bernie's ... 1 and 2? When that happens, I shoot Mr. Openheart a suspicious glance across the room.

Mr. Openheart might be openhearted, but he ain't cheap. Sketchy and disorganized as his DVDs may be, they go for three bucks a pop: a pretty Peace Corps penny. So whichever movie I finally decide on, I'm liable to watch it at least seventeen times before my service is up. Better make it a good one. On an openhearted shopping day, I will reject about 98% of the available DVDs and place the remaining 2% in a "maybe pile" on the floor.

Yesterday, after sifting through the four new boxes and several of the older ones whose contents I pretty much have memorized by now, I set out the following maybe pile: Good Night and Good Luck, How the West was Won, 3:10 to Yuma, and Gangs of New York.

I wrote off Good Night and Good Luck because it was too short. I knew it was going to be a long, cold night in the apartment. I needed some filler. Back in the box with ye, George Clooney. How the West was Won I ruled out because I was feeling fidgety and I needed a movie that would hold my attention, nothing with panorama shots or substance. Gangs of New York, at a whopping 163 minutes, was about to get my final nod when I read on the back of the case that the soundtrack included a new song from U2. Shuddering, I put Bono back in the box. And I decided that I'd take the 3:10 to Yuma.

Mr. Openheart, having smoked and watched over my shoulder for the duration of my two-hour hunt, sensed that I was either autistic or a man of discriminating taste, so he offered me a cigarette. He asked me a question that I didn't understand, then smirked and told me that he was giving me a discount. Then he lit my cigarette for me and bid me adieu.

On the walk home, I passed a woman hawking bootleg DVDs on the corner. A rare thing in this town. Most of her movies were overdubbed, but as I approached, she produced a stack of 10-in-1 DVDs.

The 10-in-1 DVD is a modern marvel of intellectual property theft. Ten movies for the price of one. Ten movies on a single disc. How do they do it?, the reader wonders. Easy enough. The bootleggers use state-of-the-art software to drop the video integrity down so low that it's like watching multicolored bits of sand dancing around on the screen. (Mel Gibson actually looks less insane this way.) And they chop out all the mid-levels of the soundtrack, such that the dialogue is only barely audible but the gunshots ring out so loudly that your neighbors will come knocking on your door, just to make sure you haven't offed yourself. But it's still ten movies for the price of one, even if you'll never watch eight of them, even if you need to hold a magnifying glass up to the screen to make sense out of the other two.

My favorite thing about the Chinese 10-in-1 DVD is the cover artwork. There is a picture of some half-naked (or naked) woman, or some greased-up action hero like Jean-Claude Van Damme, looking his most constipated. And there is fire everywhere. And some embossed, shiny letters screaming ... screaming ... something at you.

SUPER THE SCOURGE THE BALLOON BOY OF THE WESTERN ENTERTAINMENT!

KISSING THE FACE MELODRAMA WALLOWS IN THE LOVE!

CRAZY BEAST DO THE BITE OF NICHOLAS CAGE!

If you squint long enough and hard enough, you can deduce the unifying theme of the ten movies. It's like a Magic Eye, or Where's Waldo? Ah, yes: these are romantic comedies. Okay, these are horror movies, I guess. These are movies about ... Neanderthals? Oh, wait. No. These are movies starring Nicholas Cage.

They will sometimes try to fit an actor's entire body of work on a single DVD, but they get mixed up every so often, especially when it comes to black actors - and Tom Cruise for some reason.

THE DENZEL WASHINGTON IS ASTOUNDING SEXY HAT MAN!
(Included on the DVD are about three Denzel movies, Driving Miss Daisy starring Morgan Freeman, Ghost Dad starring Bill Cosby, and everything in the Orlando Jones oeuvre.)

TOM CRUISE FAR AWAY THE ACTOR TURNS HEAD IN THE SKY!
Ben Stiller, Robert Downey, Jr., Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Adam Sandler, and of all people, Mr. Bean. I guess we all really do look the same.

I settled on the special edition THE KICK THE BLOCK FLYING DOWN MASTER OF THE ANKLE! DVD, which consisted of five b-movies with the word "fighting" in the title, Karate Kids 1 through 3, and Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2. The nice lady sold it to me for a buck.

I went out for dinner. All the restaurants were packed with college kids who were already standing up to heckle me as I passed. So I walked until I found a truly filthy little dive that was completely empty except for the owners and their son.

While his parents were back in the kitchen, the kid approached me and snatched my DVD cases off the table. He opened 3:10 to Yuma, tried to fit the DVD in his mouth, then threw it on the floor. He moved onto the 10-in-1, which he started rolling along the floor, going vrooooooooom.

When my food arrived, I was bent over, trying to pluck the DVDs off the floor with my fingernails, sweeping all the sauce-soaked packaging into a pile. The parents were watching all this. The kid was watching me and giggling with his fingers in his mouth. I grinned at him, as if to say: boy, are you in trouble. But nothing happened. Papa set my food on the table and sat down next to his wife in front of the television. I sat down to eat. The kid came over and took my chopsticks right out of my hands. I fetched another pair, but he took them, too. Then he pulled something out of his pocket. It didn't appear edible, but he put it in his mouth anyway and started chomping on it with his mouth wide open, right in front of my face. My twice cooked pork was getting to be mighty unappetizing.

The kid went for my backpack. He unzipped the flap and started taking my papers out.
"No, no," I said. "Don't do - ... I need those!"

Then he discovered my Kindle. I glanced up at the parents. I wasn't about to discipline their kid for them, but from the looks of things, their baby was about to discipline my baby.

"Hey, boss!" I called. I gestured at the kid.
The mom came rushing over.
"Come on," she cooed. "Don't do that."
He kept rummaging.
She tapped him on the shoulder.
"Come on," she said. "Don't play with Foreign Uncle's bag."
He wasn't listening. He had successfully freed the Kindle, and whether he'd smash it on the floor or start reading Nabokov was anyone's guess.

Just then a cat came tumbling out of a styrofoam box in the kitchen. The cat lay there stunned for a moment. Then he made eye contact with the kid. His tail poofed and the poor critter booked it out into the street. The kid gave chase. Ah, yes. Another animal to torment. I was off the hook. Me 'n Kindle could breathe easy again. I could eat. There is a lot happening in China, so when worse comes to worst, and it often does, rest assured a deus ex machina is always waiting in the wings.

When I got home, I tidied up the living room just enough that I could bring myself to sit down in it for two full hours. I dusted off the TV screen with a dirty sock. Then I popped in 3:10 to Yuma. A Western backdrop came up on the screen. There were gunshots, the clip-clop of horses. But when Russell Crowe's mouth moved, a funky cocktail of consonants came tumbling out. The title faded into view. "3:10," I read, "... to where, exactly?"

It was a Russian DVD. Easy enough, I figured. I know at least six letters of the Cyrillic alphabet. I'll just find the language menu and squint for a while and then switch the DVD back to English somehow. No problem. But only Russian Dolby Surround Sound was available. And Russian subtitles. Also, Ukrainian subtitles, from the looks of things. And my Ukrainian is no better than my Russian. My shoulders slumped. It was a Russian DVD. There was no English.

I flew at the television.

"Nyet! Nyet! Nyet!" I raged. "Confound you, you scoundrel! Foo!"

And the television merely blinked back at me with screwed-up eyes. I nearly succumbed to the brain fever right there on the spot. Instead, I heated up some coffee in the samovar and had myself a nice, long Dostoevskian sulk.

I rewound back to the scene at the DVD shop. Mr. Openheart. The cigarette. The discount. The smirk on his face. I replayed the transaction frame by frame and found that I could decipher what he had asked me. Yes. He had asked me: can you speak ... Russian? It was all clear to me then. I had been taken for the proverbial ride - on the 3:10 to Kamchatka.