Escape Button

Somewhere in the bustling bowels beneath the Capitol building, sometime around noon, my trousers exploded and the button that had once so dutifully bundled my junk together suddenly shot off down the hall and went skittering betwixt the clickity-clacketing wingtips of any number of our fair nation's elected officials. Then, as gravity would have it, my pants fell down. That was when I decided that I didn't have a future in politics. This cockamamie vaudevillian bullshit, I knew, would happen to me every day that I remained on The Hill. Or for as long as The Hill would have me. The Republicans would've been better off hiring Mr. Bean.

I was finished. Kaput. Less than a month in, it was time for me to retire. Still, my dong was hanging out in a very public place and for eminently prosecutable reasons, an escape had to be made. So I sequestered myself in the most secluded basement bathroom I could find and listened to Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) filibust ass in the stall next to mine while I tried to MacGyver my pants back together with a broken keyring and half a tab of prechewed Dentyne chewing gum. Were there any emergency tailors lurking in the depths of D.C.'s Fraggle Rockian underground, I wondered. Certainly, I figured, I couldn't be the only man on Capitol Hill having trouble keeping his pants up – but that's what interns were for. And I, alas, was the intern.

My engineering efforts having failed colossally (and stickily), I sucked in my gut and adopted the Napoleon stance – i.e., the Untreated Ulcer Swagger – then I made my hunchbacked way out through several security checkpoints with one arm clenched around my waist and the opposite hand resolutely cupping my balls. This drew some looks, sure, but once I'd made it outside, out into D.C. proper, I was just one of a million other half-dressed derelicts cupping their balls: a privileged one in fact, with two whole pantlegs to his busted-ass pants and a Van Heusen™ necktie to cover up the delicate bits.

I caught the subway home looking mighty glum, indeed. Nobody in the office knew that I was gone, or that I wasn't coming back. I had no idea what to tell them, or whether I should tell them anything at all. Maybe I should just steal away in the night. That had always worked for me in the past. Or maybe there was still time to fix things. Call in. Apologize. Say you got sick. Brush it off. Get some sleep. Put on a new pair of pants and turn up bright and early the next morning. But the button thing. Always a button, always an unzippable zipper, always a banana peel when you least expect it. That shit happens to me all the time. It doesn't happen to John Boehner or the thousands of Princeton grads lining up to puff on his metaphorical cigarette. Whatever Paul McCartney has to say on the matter, fools don't make it on The Hill. But what was to be done if I didn't make it? What in the ever-loving hell was to be done next? I'd thrown everything I had into D.C. and watched it spiral down into a black hole, like one of those plastic charity vortexes you see at the mall. Fuck me. I put my head in my hands and swallowed back a delicious flare of gastric acid. The train shudder-whooshed into a tunnel and I watched through my fingers the bright white sidelights streak by like flashes of a future that I – through idiocy? through laziness? through some sort of subconscious moral rectitude? – was now banishing to a dark and irretrievable past. All knowingly. All willingly. All because of a fucking button. I'd gained weight. I chewed the inside of my cheek and looked up. An old black fellow seated in the seat in front of me seemed to be reading my reverie. 

"Rough day?" he asked.
"Life kind of sucks at the moment," I said, "to be perfectly honest."
"It's never life that sucks," he said. "We always have the power to change things. It's all in your mind. It's all up to you. Remember that, son."

I told him I would. I thanked him and shook his hand. Then it was my stop, so I got up and clutched my balls and embraced my artificial ulcer and shuffled off the train like a sack of potatoes on stilts. Witnessing an exit like that, I'm thinking maybe the guy changed his mind.

That afternoon, I tendered my resignation over the phone. And so my paid internship became an unpaid one. I'd fallen off The Hill.

It wasn't a wasted trip. I learned some things. I learned, for instance, that politicians very seldom (if ever) actually write their own material; speeches, press releases, op-eds; no, the writing is almost entirely left to staffers like me. On the other hand, I learned (and was pleasantly surprised to learn) that most representatives actually do take time to read the mail they receive from their constituents, so long as the letters are not written in shit. I learned that most members of the House cannot afford to live in Washington D.C.; when they are in town (which is not altogether all that often) not a few of them spend their nights on tiny little futons that fold out into their tiny little office closets. Quite a few politicians are hapless drunks – how they keep this under wraps media-wise is something I never did figure out. John Boehner's office is the one closest to the designated outdoor smoking zone. Can't say I blame the guy. The House chamber or the Senate chamber, or at any rate whichever chamber it is where the President of the United States makes his State of the Union Address – that chamber is an optical illusion. It belongs on the side of the Interstate, next to Carhenge and The World's Largest Ball of Aluminum Foil. I shit you not. The room puts on at least 15,000 square feet when seen on television. It is actually very, very small in real life. You couldn't host a Magic: The Gathering tournament in there. Also: there are gas masks and various paranoiac anti-terrorism prophylactics stashed in little tote bags tucked under the seats. House and Senate votes are cast via a machine that hasn't been upgraded since the late 1980's by my guesstimation. On the machine, there are three square plastic buttons – red, yellow, green – "Yea," "Nay," and "Meh" – and I imagine they flash excitedly and play the original Pac-Man theme when pressed. Voting also involves inserting a dusty gray plastic game cartridge into a warped wooden slot – not sure how that works, or whether it works at all. When you come right down to it, the overall aesthetic of our representational democracy lies somewhere between the original Atari, gas station slot machines, and a 1987 Plymouth station wagon tricked out with woodgrain everything. What else did I learn? Well. Come CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) season, the "Casual Encounters" section of the D.C. craigslist is clogged with anonymous personal ads soliciting all manner of clandestine conservative buttsex. I did not partake, but I can tell you it's legit. The bars in D.C. abide by all sorts of byzantine drinking rules – you can't stand up; you can't sit down; you can't wear two items of clothing that belong to two different colors starting with the same letter – and these rules make drinking very difficult. Just because I learned all this crap doesn't mean that I understand it. But perhaps most significantly (for me at least), I learned that I am very good at sitting down at a keyboard and cranking out mass amounts of bullshit in a very short time, bullshit that argues in favor of all manner of harebrained and horrific and hateful things – and most creepily of all, I learned that this aforementioned bullshit of mine, written without an iota of sincerity on my part, was effusively adored by certain circles of voters who (were they not a kind of dominant and well-funded minority in America) would almost certainly be institutionalized. But now I'm politicizing again. And like I told you: I've retired from all that.

Where were we? So. I left The Hill. I did not leave with my tail between my legs as you might expect, but with my tail wagging at the thought of going somewhere else. At the end of my month in D.C., I coughed up the rent and caught an Amtrak back to Omaha. Days later, I learned that I'd been accepted for a volunteer teaching gig in Georgia: The Country. I had no money, no other options, and no real desire to do much of anything else. A week later, I was in Georgia. And that is when shit got interesting. To say the least.

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.