Neither East Nor West

Dear Reader(ship),

To quote the now late Christopher Hitchens, who himself was quoting the very late Mark Twain: reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

It wasn't my intention to kill off Expatriate Act with some drunkenly transcribed Dylan lyrics, but they were all I could muster at the time. I'd long since run out of good things to say about China; it was a mutual breakup, but certainly not an amicable one. To have wrapped things up in a neat and nostalgic little prose package would've been untrue and anyhow, I wasn't in the mood for writing by then. I was in the mood to get the hell out of China and to never again set foot in the developing world so long as I lived. 

So much for that.

Sometime in January, I may have mentioned to you that I was bound for Georgia. Perusing my inbox four months later, it seems that I failed more often than not to specify exactly which Georgia. At any rate, I did mention to most of you that I'd be writing about my travels again, which must have led to at least some speculation that I would be kicking off my very own Atlanta Falcons fanblog.

But to quote my own late ass: reports of my resurrection were a wee bit premature.

When first I arrived in Georgia, I had every intention of picking up where I'd left off writing-wise, making sure to skip over the nasty in-between parts re: leaving China, re: attempting to survive in America, and especially re: my short-lived speechwriting career on The Hill. The plan was to write about life in Georgia: The Country. The trouble with that, you see, was the part where I actually had to write about life in Georgia: The Country whilst living in Georgia: The Country.

Firstly (and most horrifyingly, my brothers), I live in a village of some 300 souls, most of whom share the same last name, none of whom have access to the internet. If you are reading this in America, or Bolivia, or Djibouti, or pretty much anywhere that isn't rural Georgia, there is probably quite literally more internet going on in your pants pocket than there is within a five mile radius of where I live.

Exiled from interconnectedness, whatever I write these days feels somehow stripped of immediacy. I have been writing without the electric momentum/slight panic one experiences knowing that one's writing can and eventually will be published instantaneously. Things get half-written, then sit on the shelf waiting for a time in the distant future when maybe, just maybe, I will be near enough to a semi-functional computer with a dial-up modem and not too much human semen between the home row keys and perhaps, just perhaps ... But once something I've written has been collecting dust that long, and after I've jumped through that many hoops to post it, a gloomy sense of what's-the-fucking-point descends upon me and I decide not to post anything at all.

This is also not an easy country in which to write. Or at least: I have not found my situation terribly conducive to writing. I live with a host family, and Georgian families tend to be very familiar. The Western notion of "alone time" strikes Georgians as conspicuously fruity and new age as a concept, and morally perverse when enjoyed in moderation. It is exceeding rare that I can lock myself in my room long enough to eke out a paragraph. At half-hourly intervals, my host mom comes pounding at the door, clamoring for me to eat. Or my host brother comes pounding at the door, clamoring for me to play indoor basketball with him. Or my host sister comes pounding at the door, clamoring in general. And I'm usually too nice to keep myself to myself. On the odd occasion that I really put my foot down and bolt the door shut, I start to feel like a hermit, or a pervert, or a pretentious hermit pervert asshat. So being alone – something I enjoy – winds up making me feel shittier than being surrounded by droves of noisy people – something I hate. This is what happens when collectivism and Catholic guilt collide.

In Georgia, I have found myself increasingly estranged from my primary muse: capital-A German Angst. I was able to write regularly in China because I had no shortage of things to be pissed off about; I could list them here, but that's what I spent the past two years doing. Georgia is almost tranquil to a fault. The scenery, at least in the countryside, is indescribably lovely – though describe it I will in due time. The villagers are, as you might expect, down to earth and omnipleasant. And for what it's worth, I am comfortable, underworked, overpaid, and overfed. I even have access to free health care, something that has also figured into my inability to write.

About a month ago, I broke my left wrist. I won't tell that story now, but will save it for later, for a time when my writerly bowels have regained some semblance of bullshit regularity. Suffice it to say that typing blog posts one-handed isn't something I've attempted since I was 14 and owned a LiveJournal account. Even now, having finally regained the ability to flip a flaccid bird and a feeble thumbs-up, typing is a chore, one that, when combined with the aforementioned lack of privacy/lack of Angst/lack of internet trifecta, makes the what's-the-fucking-point variable very, very hard to divide and conquer.

But I've made it this far. And if I can get the provincial cigarette distributor to give my gimp ass a lift into town this weekend, I will have made my triumphant return to the blogosphere. What a crummy word that is. Blogosphere.

So what will happen next is this: we will engage in an act of not-very-exciting time travel. I will go back and spit shine what I have written about my first two-odd months in Georgia, then regurgitate it at weekly intervals as though it is occurring in the present tense: what happens next week will have happened my first week, and so on. Then, if all goes well, figuring in my current level of sloth, the past will eventually catch us up with the present, and then we can proceed into the future as if nothing ever happened. Until my host mom finagles a way of mounting a wi-fi hotspot to the family cow, this is how things will have to go for a while. Her name is Jurga, by the way. The cow, I mean.

Warm regards,

- Petit

Expatriate Act is Dead (Long Live Expatriate Act)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

1/18/2011: A Writing Vacation

My one-man exodus was not to be. Not just yet, anyway. All roads to Kunming were sold out. So I settled on a 7 AM Wednesday morning departure. Let my people go, eventually. Let my children of Israel sleep off the hangover on a 24-hour train ride. Not such a bad deal, though. This extra day gives me time to fold my underwear. And it gives me time to think about what my little trip is going to be about.

A writing vacation. The words have been kicking around in my head for a while now. A writing vacation. What is a writing vacation? Have I heard those words before? I feel as though I have. But I'm not sure whether they constitute a proper phrase, whether the words "a writing vacation" are actively in use among modern day practitioners of non-Chinglish English. I haven't been home in a while. My English isn't what it used to be. I'm not sure whether a writing vacation is a cliché, or an expression that I have newly minted, right here on the spot. Whatever. It doesn't matter. Because I am set to embark on a writing vacation. That's all there is to it.

A writing vacation. I'm too lazy to Google it. So let's just assume that I have coined a phrase. Right here on the spot. If so, I reserve the right to define my coinage and redefine it as I go along. And so, pending future revisions:

1) A writing vacation does not necessarily entail writing. Nor does it necessarily exclude writing.

2) A writing vacation is not what happens when a writer goes on vacation. Nor is it what happens when a vacationer suddenly decides to take up writing.

3) That is to say, a writing vacation is not to be confused with Jack Kerouac loading up on amphetamines and setting off on a trans-American road trip. Nor is it to be confused with some Baby Boomer sporting a fanny pack and a Discover Thailand t-shirt who suddenly gets a fire up his ass to write the Great American Novel even as he's bankrupting the Carnival Cruise seafood buffet. Whatever a writing vacation may be, it is neither of those two things.

4) A writing vacation should include some writing. But it should include a great deal more lazing around cafes or bars, depending on the hour. It should also include much coffee or beer, depending on the hour.

5) The "vacation" component of a writing vacation needs not involve travel - not too much of it, anyway.

6) Hell, if anything, travel should be avoided on a writing vacation. A writing vacation should consist of two trips and two trips only: the trip out of Dodge, and the trip back to Dodge. A writing vacation means getting the hell out of Dodge and lingering around for a while in a slightly nicer place than Dodge, for a period of time just long enough to allow the writer to get his head screwed on straight before his inevitable return to Dodge. A hiatus. A sabbatical. A respite from Dodge, an escape of sufficient length to ensure that the writer will be able to write again when he gets back to Dodge.

7) So, if you accept premises one through six, a writing vacation boils down to this: the writer catches a long-distance vessel to someplace considerably warmer than his natural habitat. Once there, the writer shouldn't feel especially compelled to write. Nor should he avoid writing. No. The writer goes about his business. He scratches his junk when nobody is watching, if that is his wont. He farts. Belches sometimes. When nobody is watching. If that is his wont. He takes a load off. He loiters. He talks to strangers. He eats a lot more than he usually does. He drinks less than he usually does, because he is not writing as much as he usually does. So he doesn't have to drink as much as he usually does. But he still drinks prodigiously. Otherwise, his usual habits remain intact. He smokes, if that is his wont. He drinks coffee, then switches to beer at the crucial moment. He is relaxing, sure. Taking it easy. But mostly, he is on the lookout. On the lookout for something worth writing about. On the lookout for that svelte raven-haired girl in the wire-framed glasses. On the lookout for inspiration, if any of that sweet stuff is to be found just sitting out in the open. But mostly, the writer is changing his scenery. Rearranging his props. Mostly, he's just buying time before gravity pulls him back down into his usual ruts. Just buying time before he's séanced back home to haunt his old haunts once again. Buying time before his widening ass is coaxed back home to settle into the canyonesque ass-groove of his usual barstool at the Jack Bar in Nanchong. The writer is on his writing vacation, but he pictures himself back home. Round about closing time on a Tuesday night. That telepathic nod that means "gimme another beer, Liu Bao." The frowning wallet, the fuzzy math, the ritual paying of the tab. The insufficient dough. The IOU's. The IOU's. The IOU's. The writer needs a break from all the IOU's. The writer needs some UOI's. That is a writing vacation.

There will be writing on this writing vacation. But it will not be my usual writing. My usual writing is like a Prom date. She takes a long time to get ready, but comes out looking somewhat presentable. Or so I would like to think. But this writing will not dress up much at all. This writing isn't even going to the dance. No, this writing is going to O'Leaver's with the guys. Shirt half-tucked (half-untucked?), soy sauce grease stains everywhere. Cigarette burns on both thighs of his corduroys. No frills. Rest assured, this writing will not be driving itself home. Somebody call a cab. I am throwing away my bag of tricks. On this writing vacation, I will avoid introspection. I will avoid digression. Let this blog post be the most meta I get for the next week or two. What is the opposite of meta? Is there an opposite of meta? At any rate, this will be an opposite-of-meta writing vacation.

Lastly: On the Necessity of This Writing Vacation. Whatever else this writing vacation might be, above all, I feel that it is necessary. In Nanchong, I found myself sinking into one of those ruts that sucks and sucks until the rut is wide enough to swallow the wagon whole. I wrote every day, but I no longer felt like I was writing when I wrote - which is to say that nothing I wrote surprised me. I was no longer capable of surprising myself in writing. Which is bad news, indeed. I caught myself reaching into the same old bag of tricks. Writing was no longer a pursuit, or a journey. It was a habit. Like masturbation. Or smoking. It was just something I did. So with the murky abyss sucking my wheels down into the earth, I flogged and flogged those horses until the wagon finally lurched free. Yahhh!, I crowed. Yahhh! Without much forethought, I set us on a steady course towards Kunming. And now we're rolling south, rumbling south in search of green space, in search of new territory, new frontiers, and inevitably, new ruts to sink into.

A writing vacation. The ticket to Kunming is burning a hole in my pocket. Or perhaps it was the cigarette I just dropped on my thigh. Either way, from here on out, dear reader, the gloves come off. The tuxedo comes off. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword. Melville quietly takes to the ship. And wearing something like a smirk, the vacationing writer, on his writing vacation, dons his best tuxedo t-shirt.

Hemingway Interlude

Every time you catch a Chinese cab, it's like being shot out of a cannon.

An explosion. Bam. Then, a rushing sensation. Your ears whistle. Your cheeks flap wildly in the wind. Thousands of faces whoosh past. You have just enough time to utter a clench-teethed prayer to whatever deity you happen to believe in, but not enough time to see whether it's been answered. Everything turns hot white. Then everything goes black. And if you're lucky, you'll wake up a moment later to find you've landed safely, ass-first, back in the fake leather sofa in your living room. If you're not, some poor cab driver is going to have an international incident on his hands.

Walking around a Chinese metropolis is no less disorienting to me. It's like being shot out of a cannon on the moon. Slower, yes. But you're still being shot out of a goddamned cannon.

I am a man who feels truly overmatched in most cities, even lowly Omaha. The crush of people and cars puts me in a kind of autistic trance, where words and emotions elude me and all I can do is gawk and grunt. But downtown Nanchong overwhelms me completely, pushes me past the point of annoyance or frustration, beyond organized thought or linear perception. My nervous system keeps me walking and breathing. But my brain gives up making sense out of its surroundings. The world comes in fits and starts, in the form of isolated images stripped of context, like slides projected onto a blank white wall.

A child dropping a deuce into a sewer grate. A heaping vat of glazed duck livers behind a red-tinted storefront window. A blast of sparks. A tornado of soot churning up into the air. A white dog and a black dog sniffing each others' behinds, spinning around in an unending yin-yang of anuses and cold noses. A loogey. Another loogey. A young woman in a flowerprint dress perched sidesaddle on the back of a moped with one leg crossed over the other at the ankle, just so. An elderly Chinese peasant woman sporting a Tina Turner 'do. Toy poodles for sale. Toy handguns for sale. Sex toys for sale. A man walking a live praying mantis down the street on a string, not for sale. A gang of young children stomping on a sheet of Styrofoam until the flakes are caught up by the wind and sent flurrying off into traffic. A man standing with his woman backed into a corner, the flat of his hand poised in midair en route to the side of her face. A heckler. Another heckler. Across the way, one of the guys at the Muslim noodle joint spots me. We make eye contact, and he winks. But I don't know how to wink. So I blink and keep walking. A minor bicycle accident. A crowd gathers. A major car accident. A crowd gathers. Bargain bin umbrellas for sale. A crowd gathers. I stop walking for a moment because I no longer know where I am walking. A crowd gathers.

There is a restaurant downtown that I like to go to. The owners are a gruff, not-from-around-here husband and wife duo who don't give a shit that I am a foreigner, and couldn't give two shits if I patronized their restaurant or not. They are about as welcoming as a couple of tranquilized lizards. And that's how I like my service in this country. Surly and distant. The restaurant is almost always empty. So it gets my business.

It is a small restaurant, not much bigger than my living room, and the walls are thin, so the roar of the Big Red Machine is never quite far off. But after a year, I no longer notice the noise. The noise I can deal with. It is solitude I crave, the ability to sit down and read, undisturbed, in some dank shithole with a lukewarm plate of grub and a lukecold bottle of beer, sequestered from the whole sensory barrage raging just outside the window.

On Friday night, I swung by the restaurant and ordered fried eggs with diced tomato. And a beer. While I waited, I took out my Norton Anthology of American Literature and flipped it open at random. I landed on Hemingway. I read. And after a while, I said aloud: "Huh."

Nick knew it was too hot. He poured on some tomato catchup. He knew the beans and spaghetti were still too hot. He looked at the fire, then at the tent ... He was very hungry.

"Huh," I said again.

The fried eggs showed up. The owner kind of frisbeed the dish at me. Then came the beer. The eggs weren't so hot. The beer wasn't all that cold. Nothing was good enough, but it was good enough for me. I resumed reading.

"Nick drank the coffee ... The coffee was bitter."

"He was sleepy. He felt sleep coming."

"He wished he had brought something to read. He felt like reading."

I laughed and looked out the window. Then I looked back down at the book. Then I laughed again. What was I reading? Where the hell had it come from? What time, what place? Sparse and economical, but vivid; understated and confident. Hemingway, in short. And yet - I looked back out the window. Something clicked.

How in the blue fuck could anyone write like that - about a place like this?

How to write The Heming Way about somewhere so profoundly Pynchonesque?

How does a writer remain sparse and economical in the extravagant modern fairyland of bullshit? Remain understated and confident in the age of festering neuroses?

No idea, I shrugged. I'd already finished my eggs, and the beer. So I ordered another bottle. The owner had no opinion. He couldn't give three shits how much of my money I gave him, and wouldn't give four shits if I stayed there reading 'til the restaurant closed.

I imagined Hemingway in China. How would he write this place?

"The boy needed to pee. The boy ran out to the sidewalk to pee. He peed. It felt good to pee."

"The students saw the man. The man was a foreigner. They liked to shout at the foreigner. They shouted at the foreigner."

"The old man wanted to spit. He liked to spit. He spat. It was a very good feeling."

Hemingway. I like the guy. He is good. During undergrad, I drank heavily from the wineskin of Hemingway's prose. He was once the ideal I aspired to. Back then, all adjectives were four-letter words to me. And adverbs were the kind of four-letter words that'd get you smacked. And abstractions? Shee-it. For a wishy-washy noun like "essence," the Minimalist Mafia would cut you up in a back alley and dump you into the Missouri for fish food.

But concreteness seems heavyhanded to me now, as I try to write about a place where complexity and ambiguity and chaos are the primary players. Where the characters don't follow narrative arcs, but dance the frenzied jig of breakneck consumerism. A place where what little clarity to be found is in my own 1500 cubic centimeters of skull space, and all else is fog, and people, and more people, and too much fog to tell the too-many-people apart.

Aw, hell, I grunted. What do I know? It's Friday night. No time for this. I closed the book and, like a good Norton Anthology hardcover should, it thumped shut like a drum. I got up to pay my tab. The owners told me how much and I paid them that much, and they didn't say thank you, so I didn't say I was welcome. I turned to leave, then I turned back around because I had to pee.

"Do you have a bathroom?" I asked.
The woman pointed into the kitchen, and the man pointed where she pointed.

The bathroom was in the back of the kitchen, behind a plywood door hanging off its hinges like a loose tooth. I nudged open the door with my elbow and the ammonia peeled my eyes like a couple of grapes. The toilet, as you might expect, was a squatter, and it was filthy.

But I really had to pee. I pulled down my pants to pee. I peed. It felt good to pee.

Freeze The Gorillas

Skinner: Well, I was wrong; the lizards are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
- The Simpsons

I just named my laptop a couple hours ago. I guess people do that nowadays. What with The Internet. And The Googles. And shit. I named her Adell. Because, dude - she's a Dell.

I've had Adell for four years now. During that time my spine has warped under the dull weight of her increasingly obsolete body. I have lugged Adell around in my backpack for four years. Taken her to coffee shops and bars. Taken her to the park. I took her out to Dennys for dinner once, because I was feeling generous. I have lugged Adell all over the world by now - or at least, all over the parts of the world nobody really cares to visit. I lugged her from the United States to Poland, to Darmstadt, Germany, and back to the States - across the Pacific, to a swarming, metallic Korean metropolis, to Japan, to China, and back to the States - over the Atlantic, to a cheerless mining town in Poland, to a soiled mattress in Berlin, and back to the States - to a wartorn Mexican city, and back to the States - and finally, to China again. I'm surprised she's made it this far. Hell, I'm surprised we've made it this far.

And I remain loyal to her, as I remain loyal to all things old and valuable that I nevertheless treat like utter shit. I don't want a new computer, though I perhaps need one. Over the years, Adell and I have bonded. Have fused ourselves together, as it were. We are one. Patiently and meticulously, I have trained this computer, this Adell, to be as scatterbrained and forgetful and occasionally drunk as I am. I have programmed her in my own image. Any writing that I have done over these past four years, I have done on Adell's dust encrusted, Cheetoh powdered, hair imbroglioed keyboard. Or at least, that is what I would have her believe.

But I waited until a couple hours ago to name her. It seemed like the right time. Before it's too late, I suppose. I'm rather worried about the ol' girl these days. I'm worried about Adell because her cooling fan has stopped spinning. On the plus side, that means she's running a whole helluva lot quieter than she used to. But now she's got these wicked mood swings, you see. Hot flashes. The whole shebang. It's all motherboard menopause up in this bitch.

After ten minutes of typing, Adell gets hotter than doing the Macarena in the summer of 1995. I could cook stir fry on her touchpad. Her home row keys brand my fingertips, her space bar scalds the prints right off my thumbs. She makes writing much more of an adventure than it ought to be. When I start to heat up, she starts to heat up, and just as I'm splicing my last comma, just as I'm hanging my very last participle up to dangle, Adell decides to shut down. Six thousand words vanish from the screen. Those words may as well have never been written. There they go: into the void. I tap at Adell's monitor: darkness there, and nothing more. I exhale and church my hands in my lap. And then my eyes glass over and I sit there real quiet-like. Somewhere in the distance, a loogey is hawked. A moment later, there comes a deafening pronouncement from the laowai's fourth floor apartment. The cicadas scatter. The children scream. Moped alarms go off. Meanwhile, my next door neighbors are sitting around the coffee table taking notes. Fawk, the dad says. Fawk, fawk, fawk chants the kid.

Like many another great innovation, my temporary solution to Adell's little overheating problem came to me serendipitously. Late one Friday night, I discovered that a strategically placed ice cold beer kept Adell at room temperature for just the right amount of time necessary to write a half-ass blog post. As long as I had a beverage close at hand, I could type myself crosseyed. But in this country, a cold beer is hard to find. And the thing about cold beers is, they have a curious way of disappearing.

I needed a more permanent fix. So I began to dabble in feng shui. I pushed my desk into the far left corner of the room so that the computer was sitting directly under the AC unit. Then I cranked the AC all the way down to a couple goosebumps above absolute zero. In short, I turned the room into a meat locker. I'd write for hours at a time that way, hunkered there in the steely breath of the artificial Arctic, teeth chattering all the while, and then I'd step out into the Sichuanese summer and sweat like a hunk of microwaved chicken.

Operation Freezer Burn worked out well enough, for a month. And if I gave Adell a cold beer or two on top of that, why, she ran as briskly and as smoothly as the fastest Atari on the block.

But by meddling with the primal forces of nature, I had unwittingly incurred the spitting wrath of the ancient Chinese Gods of Interior Design. Feng shui translates to "wind and water," in English. And in the weeks that followed, there would be wind. And there would be water. The AC started leaking. At first, it merely dribbled. Then it started raining. Then it started hawking loogeys across the room. I often had to shield poor Adell from the barrage. For a time, I hid us behind a crude protective wall of cardboard and aluminum cans. But eventually, after one too many loogeys in the face, I caved: I moved the desk back to the other side of the room so that me 'n Ms. Adell were out of spitting distance. Better an overheated Adell than a drowned one.

Still, she wouldn't even boot up without a little climate control, so I kept the AC on, despite its relentless slobber. This presented yet another problem: the AC started slobbering so much that the floor was beginning to puddle. So I solved that problem by blanketing the floor with dirty towels. But I'll have you know: dirty towels soaked through with AC runoff don't, as a general rule, smell terribly inviting after the third or fourth day of writing. So I had to wash the towels. But my washing machine leaks, too. So I had to use still more towels to soak up the washing machine runoff. And eventually, I had to wash those towels, too.

Jesus. If Adell were cool enough to let me open PowerPoint, I'd show you a flowchart. It's hard to explain. I'm a complicated man, and I lead a complicated Sino-Bohemian existence. Lots of ins, lots of outs. But in sum, what I do every day is this: I use a bunch of towels to soak up the water left behind by the washing machine, which I use to wash the bunch of towels that I use to soak up the water left behind by the washing machine, which I use to wash the bunch of towels that I use to soak up the water left behind by the AC unit, which I use to cool my laptop, Adell, who has an internal fan that doesn't turn. And I use Adell to write blog posts: sloppy little snippets of my mind that I send tottering out into the world on their tiny little matchstick legs.

And I smoke in order to write. And I overdose on Nescafe in order to write. And I drink a bit of formaldehyde beer in order to write. And all of these are bad habits. Well, then. Maybe I should give up writing. That might just solve everything. That might just freeze the gorillas. As it were.

Fat Panda

I have been away from my writing desk for about a month now. I spent two weeks in Dazhou teaching teachers how to teach, and another week in Chengdu, bidding farewell to some of my favorite assholes in the whole world. July was a significant month for me, and a big part of why I haven't written anything about it is precisely because it was so significant. I'm not sure I can do it justice at this point.

Another thing is: I didn't have time to write. When I wasn't working, I was out carousing, and when I wasn't out carousing, I was avoiding natural disasters left and right (and up and down, for that matter). For thirty-odd days, I was refreshingly estranged from the internet. I'm the kind of guy who checks the Huffington Post every ten seconds for news of the impending apocalypse, so it was educational for me to return to the Huffington Post after a month and find that absolutely nothing worth reading about had occurred in my absence. The only news I cared about was going on all around me.

And yet another thing is: I have been avoiding writing. Every writer worth his or her own salt swears that hard work is a must. A writer must write every day, preferably for eight hours at a time, and preferably with a tumbler of bad whiskey at the ready. But as you well know by now, bad whiskey or no, I often go long stretches without writing a word. And I suspect I'm none the worse for it. For me, writing is like riding a bike - or a unicycle, if you happen to be a street mime. It does require hard work and dedication, but it is not incompatible with bouts of travel or debauchery. After a prolonged absence, when I finally do sit back down at my desk, I find that my brain has changed in all sorts of ways that I wouldn't have noticed if I had been writing all the way through. The compositional act is a bit awkward and clunky at first, but after a while the realization sinks in that the person writing now is very different from the person writing only a month before, which tends to make the writing process a lustier, sexier pursuit than it usually is for me. Who is this stranger in my head and where has he been?

In the same vein, reunions after a prolonged absence are often awkward and clunky (but also lusty and sexy) experiences. I believe that the most trustworthy mirrors are the ones that haven't seen you in a while. Your close friends are accustomed to seeing your mug around every day, and for that reason, they go unaware of changes in your physique or accent or patterns of thought because those changes happen so gradually. But leave somebody for one year, or even for one month, and when you return, you will find yourself oddly transformed in the eyes of your beholder, though you yourself feel not a whit different.

Last week, I visited my host family for the first time in over a year. After all the awkward embraces had been gotten out of the way, my host mother sized me up and said, "Pan Daaaaa! You've gotten fat!"

I laughed it off in the manner of the Chinese. Then I sat down to dinner. My host parents, apparently, were conspiring to make me even fatter. I devoured my share of veggies, but self-consciously avoided the twice-cooked pork. Then I got up and went to the bathroom.

I have never been sensitive about my weight because I've never possessed much weight to speak of. But I'd found my host mother's remark particularly cutting. So I switched on the vanity lights and lifted up my shirt. True: a bit more baby fat than I had in my early twenties, but that much is unavoidable. Baby fat and all, I was still as skinny as a chopstick. I sucked in my gut, then I let it hang out. It wasn't even a passable gut. Just a little more Panda to love, that's all. So I wasn't fat, at least not by any sane definition of the word. But for the first time since the throes of puberty, I had allowed anxiety about my appearance to creep into my head, and in that moment in front of the mirror, I swore off sweet and sour pork for the indefinite future.

When I returned to Nanchong a couple days ago, my first stop was the convenience store by my apartment. I slid a bottle of yogurt across the counter. The shopkeeper sized me up.

"Wow! You've gotten fat!"
"I've gotten fat?"
"Yeah! I mean, really fat!"
I put the yogurt back in the fridge and replaced it with a bottle of chamomile tea.

This afternoon, Cabbie Chan (who will figure very slightly into my upcoming Great Flood of Dazhou saga) squinted at me in the rear view mirror and commented on my newfound corpulence. He dropped me off at the restaurant across from the old campus and there, the laoban called me a fatty and looked at my heaping dish of kung pao chicken like she was about to cut me off. And just now at the coffee shop, where I came to write, the owner joined me at the table and distracted me for the better part of an hour by ranting about how fat I'd become. "Fat! Really fat!" he exclaimed, though he followed that up with, "More handsome, too!"

Who is this stranger and how did he get so fat? Maybe it's my haircut. I'm short haired and clean shaven for the first time in almost a year. Maybe that makes one appear fatter. Or maybe I've actually become something of a fatass. If anyone among my readership has seen me lately and is willing to shatter my body image in the name of honesty, I would gladly welcome your criticism so that I can step up my exercise regimen, if that is what is necessary. But I don't believe that I am much fatter than I have ever been, and in any case, I have never been the least bit fat. In fact, when I am among Americans these days, they are quick to point out how much stronger I look, with the appropriate fondling of biceps and manboobs that tend to follow such a compliment. So my guess is that something has been lost in translation, and I will attempt to translate that loss here.

In China (and in South Korea, for that matter) people do not ask, "How are you?" They ask, "Have you eaten?" There are reasons for that. Not so long ago it was a relevant question, hunger taking its rightful precedence over mood and state of being. So my guess is that plumpness in China, as long as it's not morbid obesity, is (at least linguistically) regarded as a virtue. Because plumpness was once, indeed, very much a virtue. Calling a friend or acquaintance "fat" in China is not necessarily the same as calling them "lard-ass." It's more like: you're looking nourished these days. Or at least, that is what I have to assume. Because I am not fat. Trust me on this one. In fact, over the past couple months, through sporadic push-ups and chin-ups, I've more than doubled my cup size and have added quite a bit of meat to my upper arms, though you could still easily wrap your hand around one of my biceps like a sphygmomanometer. I've also grown somewhat swarthy from wandering aimlessly in the remorseless Sichuan summer. All and all, I suppose I do look rather well nourished. But not fat. And if I am fat, then so what? There are worse things to be.

My ego has not been hurt by this recent spate of commentary on my waistline. I'm just puzzled that it came all at once. Fortunately, the Chinese often remark on my appearance, and I seldom find any of their remarks even remotely true. I am not a monkey, though I am distantly related to that species. I am not a giant, although I have been told so by countless Chinese men who are taller than me. My nose is not a triangle, at least not in the Euclidian sense. And I look nothing like Los Angeles Lakers power forward Pau Gasol. Or Ben Stiller, for that matter. (But maybe I do look a little like Pau Gasol.) So I will file this judgment away with all the rest of China's warped perceptions of my appearance. Then I will wolf down four double cheeseburgers from McDonald's and sit on my fat ass at the computer and try to navigate the keyboard with my fat-ass fingers so I can painstakingly regurgitate all of the things that happened to me over the month of July while I was so busy devouring metric ton after metric ton of condensed lard.

pimwarts5943682.doc

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listless Mistress

Just before I came to China, I wrote about wanderlove. I coined the pun to describe the long-term contentment with living abroad that sets in after wanderlust has faded, after you've grown jaded to all manner of foreign novelties - squat toilets, babies crapping in the street, movie theaters that sell beer, the Royale With Cheese. Wanderlust becomes wanderlove at the point when you cease to view those cultural quirks as novelties, but as inescapable facts of life.

Love is a difficult thing, and so is wanderlove. It's all roses for the first three months, when you're still flying along on the wings of wanderlust. Babies crap at your feet, and you laugh. You slip and tumble headlong into the squat toilet, and you laugh. You order a Royale With Cheese and they give you six of the goddamn things, and you laugh. Then you hit month four and all those shenanigans suddenly cease to be amusing. You wish you didn't have to sidestep so much human feces on your walk to work, and you wish that you could sit and read Bakunin on the crapper, and you wish that you could just get a Quarter Pounder With Cheese fer chrissakes. You spend the next three months reviling everything about the culture that surrounds you, too proud for homesickness but thoroughly pissed off that nobody conforms to your definition of normalcy. So you sulk and delve into your Russian novel collection, because therein lies normalcy, right?

After six months, you peek out from under your Dostoevskian shell and find that life is once again livable. You make friends. You establish connections. You flourish, sort of. And so begins wanderlove, the understanding that you are not separate from the foreigners around you - however separately they may regard you as a foreigner - but that you are a human being, and that they are human beings, and that you all must live with each other somehow and so on and soforth. Which sounds like a happy ending, but it really isn't. It is only the beginning of a long and often tedious marriage built on a foundation of routine, compromises, petty squabbles and honey-do chores.

It's like courting the ravishing Anna Karenina and, after six painstaking months, finally luring her away from that robot husband of hers – only to watch her grow obese and leathery and dull before your very eyes. After six months abroad, you start to wonder where the spark went. We used to have such great chemistry, me and China Karenina, but nowadays I'm lucky if she even puts out. She refers to the sex act as our "duty to the Party." And now she wants kids. Kids? To be perfectly honest, there are days when I get home from work, crack open the Rand McNally World Atlas and ogle the hell out of Kyrgyzstan - her exotic netherregions, her vague southern border, that skimpy little green bikini that leaves little of her topography to the imagination.

This is my roundabout way of saying that I am fending off another bout of writer's block. China remains as quirky as ever, but at the moment, I don't find her all that alluring. I tried attacking my writer's block with gross amounts of Nescafe, with formaldehyde beer, with Panda cigarettes. I experimented with cleaning my apartment, then I experimented with trashing the place. Perhaps, I thought, my diet had something to do with it. I ate nothing but cabbage for a week, then I devoured four Royales With Cheese in rapid succession. Then I started appearing at strange new restaurants and pointing at random menu items whose Chinese characters looked menacing, to say the least. I discovered spicy pig intestine soup that way, but the experiment did little to clear my writer's block - or my colon, for that matter.

I'm not sure what the problem is. There is no shortage of material to write about. I still haven't written about my trip to Yunnan, or the Kunming Dwarf Kingdom, or the World's Largest Transformer – nor have I written about the Zebra Music Festival, or the two-hour lecture on Western History and Culture that I gave the other night, or the rural middle school I taught at a couple weeks ago in exchange for a pack of Panda cigarettes, or the Mrs. Robinson of China, who first tried to set me up with her daughter, then literally threw herself at me in the darkness of a karaoke room, asking me in a baijiu-breathed whisper whether I wanted "a Chinese mama." And meanwhile, the babies continue to crap at my feet, the cabbies continue to scare the bejeezus out of me, and my students continue to baffle me. So there is no shortage of material. But what I lack at the moment is the ability to see any of that material as new, or amusing, or worth writing about.

Which leads me back to wanderlove. Who is this pimply old China Karenina in my bed? This is not my beautiful wife! This is not my beautiful house! And the days go by, same as it ever was. You watch her playing mahjongg with her oldster friends and wonder how she could possibly find that lousy game so damned fascinating. For four hours she plays mahjongg, then she comes home and nags you to shave, to get a haircut, to tie your shoes. She asks if you can use chopsticks. Look, honey, for the 1.3 billionth time ... She tells you your classes are too easy, then she tells you they're too hard. She flips through the Russian novel you're reading and shouts, "I can't understand a word of it!" On the street, she picks up and coddles somebody else's baby, then holds it over a sewer drain to take a crap. Then on the walk home all she talks about is babies this, babies that, oh Panda, shouldn't we perform our duty to the Party and make one of our very own? And meanwhile, Kyrgyzstan, that saucy little thing, beckons you from page K-72 of the 2006 Rand McNally World Atlas.

But something about China keeps you around. She is nothing if not consistent. She's loyal, hardworking. She keeps you well fed. She isn't much for conversation, but then, neither are you. Every now and again, she does something charming to remind you of the good old days, when you were young together, and the spark flickers anew, if only for a minute or two. Then, one day, you hear through a mutual friend that Kyrgyzstan has fallen off the democratic wagon and checked into rehab again. You breathe a sigh of relief. Dodged a bullet, there. Maybe, you begin to think, you don't have it so bad after all. You watch China slaving away in the kitchen. My God, you think, the size of that rump! No, China might not be much to look at anymore - the old grey mare, as they say, just ain't what she used to be. She's stubborn, impolite, surprisingly filthy. She's sensitive to a fault and moody as hell. She's jealous of all your past loves: Germany, Poland, Mexico, and especially South Korea, that soju-drinking hussy. She's a sucker for gossip, she pries into your personal affairs, and she can't carry a tune. All and all, she's a totalitarian woman. But can she ever cook ...

Hotel Ambos Mundos

After a long and profoundly foggy winter, I promised myself that I would stake out an outdoor writing spot so that at the first hint of spring I might claim it and write there all summer long. A couple weeks ago I went out on the prowl and found my writing spot - a little hardwood table stashed behind the mahjongg tables along Beihu Lake - but the better part of April passed before I got a chance to use it.

Then, without warning, spring came. I left the house in my usual five layers - thermal underwear, undershirt, button-down, sweater, suitcoat - and nearly melted on the spot. My students were first amused, then disgusted by how much I was sweating. After class, I draped my suitcoat over my arm, peeled off my sweater, and went out for a walk in Beihu Park, en route to my writing spot. But in Nanchong, a walk in the park is never a walk in the park.

"FOREIGNER! COME HERE!" some college boys shouted from a distance. "HEY LAOWAI, COME BACK!"

Then, another troupe of them approached.

"FOREIGNER! HAH-LOO! HOW ARE YOU! COME HERE!"

It's always the twerpy college boys: square-framed non-prescription glasses, skinny black jeans, Converse All-Stars, hip-hop jackets - you know the type.

Back in the day, Shelley and I used to humor them.

"HAH-LOO!" they would shout, and "HAH-LOO!" we would shout back, at twice the volume.

"FOREIGNER!" they would bark.

"Foreigner!" we would gasp. "Where? Where? Let me at 'im!"

Laughter all around. But hardened veterans like Phil and Joe were unamused.

"Don't encourage them," Phil would sigh.

"Don't be their monkey," Joe used to say.

Once, some college twerps interrupted us at dinner. They shouted HAH-LOO and snapped several pictures before we had time to pose. Then they asked where we were from. Joe turned to them and said, in fluent Sichuanese, "We are from Mars." That silenced everyone.

In those early days, I found Phil and Joe a bit too cynical for my liking. I've never been one to mouth off at strangers, or to ignore a friendly greeting. But I've since become something of a veteran myself. I no longer encourage my hecklers. In a word, the constant heckling exhausts me. It probably seems easy enough to deal with when you're reading about it. But living with it is another thing entire. Where else on earth (aside from Korea) is it acceptable to scream at a complete stranger, a full-grown adult walking in the park? I'm twenty-seven fer chrissake. I sport a beard: leave me alone. So I politely ignore the college twerps. And of course, they act offended when I pass by without a word. But we are all humans here. If you would like to talk, please do come introduce yourself, and I would be more than happy to speak passable Sichuanese with you.

All hecklers aside, I navigated the park, following the faint scent trail left behind by my previous self. I walked past the arcade and the carnival booths, stopped briefly to check out the plastic bubble apparatuses which, for fifteen kuai a pop, allow children ages five and up to embark on a vomit-inducing tumble across the the surface of Beihu Lake. I passed something called the "Pleasure Center" and something else called the "Source of Life." Then I arrived in mahjongg country, where the Sichuanese men swearing at each other are very nearly canceled out by the soothing sound of plastic tiles sliding across felt-topped tables.

I sat. Immediately, I felt absurdly conspicuous, like the guy who goes to Red Lobster and requests a table for one. Red Lobster is a family restaurant, and China is a family country. If you do things by yourself, you may as well have the plague, or H1N1. My students refuse to believe that I live alone, and are creeped out by the thought of it. I tried several times to flag the waitress, but she looked through me to the table of boisterous drunks behind me. As soon as I started writing, a couple of dorks came and hovered over my shoulder. I swatted them away with a horsetail glance.

Beihu Lake: the most picturesque spot in all Nanchong. I had anticipated a picturesque writing session - not quite Hemingway chomping on a Cuban at the Hotel Ambos Mundos, but I figured I'd be able to get in a notebook page or two. Instead, I found myself distracted. Nobody was out-and-out bothering me, but every time I looked up from my notebook, I caught pairs of eyes watching me, and the people belonging to those eyes acted startled and offended, as though it were me staring at them the whole time. Lord only knows what those people must have thought of me, a sweaty laowai wearing a suitcoat on the first day of spring, sitting alone and writing furiously - and I bet he's not even going to order anything to eat. Well, if that doesn't beat the band ...

Nevertheless, I did get some writing in. At least this much worth. But I know it can't last forever. In a few minutes, someone will sit at my table, or drag me over to sit at theirs. At that point, I will leave behind the page and step out into the weird Chinese world, to do more of that all-important counterpart to writing which is called living. And perhaps that experience will inspire more writing, which will be interrupted by another minor confrontation worth writing about, and so on.

I suppose that's the important thing if you're a writer: that at all times you are either writing, or distracted from it.

Sabbatical

I've ridden this wave of creativity about as far as it will go for the moment. I have no idea how actual writers do it. I was on a roll, there, for a while. But past a certain point, in the midst of your delirious scribbling, you begin to fear the writer's block you know is lurking just around the corner, and the fear of writer's block turns into writer's block. In your efforts to stave it off, you develop the superstitious quirks of a Big League knuckleballer: leaving your shoes untied, opening doors with the pinkie finger of your left hand, wearing the same chalkstained suit coat for weeks on end, crossing your chopsticks in an X over the rice bowl, and so on. But the writer's block arrives right on time no matter how schizophrenic you become and the only thing to do at that point is shut the whole thing down for a while, read some new authors, get out of the house, stay out late and get yourself in trouble, and return to your desk after a week or two when you've stopped thinking so damned much.

Molla.

My second month in Korea. The world remains vomit-inducingly large and full of moral ambiguity. This keeps me from writing, but it doesn't keep me from walking around looking constipated all the time.