My least favorite invention of the modern era is the cellular phone. With regard to cell phones, I am a luddite. Not that I don't own one, or use it as an alarm clock. But unless you're my lady friend, I may not answer your calls for weeks at a time. I apologize. I enjoy solitude, I suppose, but I think it has more to do with keeping focused on my surroundings. I like to concentrate on the person I'm talking to, the book I'm reading, or the fishy-flavored eggplant I'm eating. Answering the phone, for me, is like making a Monty Python scene jump: and now for something completely different ...
In China, I have come close to pitching my phone in the lake. If you were to browse my contacts list, you would find five or six good friends, two or three coworkers, and upwards of forty people I have no recollection of whatsoever. They have names like Hill and Lemon and Eros and Pumpkin and Circle and Dynasty. These are the names of Host Country Nationals, in peacecorpsspeak, who at one time or another approached me on the street for English lessons. I am much too polite to deny anyone my phone number, but if I were to answer all of their calls, I would turn into an itinerant pro bono English-teaching hobo. Unfortunately, my aloofness often comes back to bite me in the ass, as was the case with my most recent stalker. We'll call her Sunshine.
Sunshine got my number by interrupting last Monday's Mandarin class to ask for it. She then followed me for several blocks and waited for my tutor to leave so she could ask me for English lessons, and so on. Over the next week, she called me fifteen times a day, starting at 7:30 AM and persisting until ten at night. I had managed to avoid her until yesterday, when she materialized in the street and followed me and my tutor on our after-class walk. She didn't say a word, just lurked behind us, waiting. After parting ways with my tutor, I ran into the Mennonites. We exchanged fist pounds. Then Sunshine made her move.
"Excuse me," she said to the Mennonites. "I want to be Keith friend, but he never, never, never pick up he phone!"
The Mennonites chuckled.
"Yeah," said Phil. "He's a shady fella when it comes to phones."
"So, I don't want to be Keith friend anymore. I want to be you friend."
She asked them when they were free to teach her English and somehow, in their smooth West Coast way, the Mennonites dodged her. They invited me to dinner and, already having a Daniel Plainview afternoon, I politely declined.
"Thanks. But I think I need to get back to my apartment," I said, "and away from these ... people."
I took ten paces in the opposite direction before I heard my name.
"Keith, do you have free time now?"
It was Sunshine.
"I think I'd better go home and rest," I said.
"How about tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow I have class."
"How about after class?"
"Perhaps," I said.
"You had better pick up your phone."
"I will."
But I didn't, I haven't, and I won't. It sits there on the desk in front of me, rattling and jingling and buzzing its way towards the ledge, where it looks like it might drop into the trash can if Sunshine calls again. And there she is. And there it goes. Nothing but net.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
English Cornered
There have been two earthquakes in Sichuan since my arrival and I have slept through both of them. Last night's tremor was a 4.9 on the Richter Scale. I have no idea what that means, but the rubble that covers my living room floor does not appear to have been disrupted, nor has it somehow organized itself into a less entropic state.
Tonight was my English Corner debut, so after work I was picked up by the wonderful (and wordy) Mr. Xie and taken out for a twelve-course seafood dinner at a restaurant overlooking the river that oozes like a nosebleed through the middle of Nanchong. Ours was a party of twelve, so Mr. Xie dubbed it The Last Supper.
"And he," Xie said, indicating Mr. Liu, "is Judas!"
Mr. Liu, baffled, laughed politely.
"Do I get to be The Big Guy?" I asked. "I'm the only one here with any facial hair to speak of."
"I am only joking," said Xie. "It is just a joke!"
And I sat, as I often do in this country, wondering where I'd missed the boat of Chinese humor.
Someone ordered beers for the group but nobody wanted them, so they found their way to me. Everyone else drank milk.
"Are you capable of ingesting two Yanjing beers prior to English Corner, Mr. Keith?" asked Mr. Xie.
"Dangran," I said. "Of course. I'm Irish. And French."
Those beers would come in handy. I was about to be thrown to the Romans.
Xie drove me back to the old campus. He wove through some back alleys, puttered up over a hill, and parked his Chevy on a basketball court. I could see students, lots of them, milling around in the dark. I stepped out of the car.
Applause. Screaming. The canned "wahhhh!" that you hear on Chinese game shows. The crowd swallowed me up, forming a tremendous circle of which I was the center. In the dim and distant flood lighting, I could see hundreds of faces, all of them turned towards me.
"Good to see all of you," I shouted.
"NICE TO MEET YOU TOO!!!!!"
"Right. Well. My name is Keith. I'm the new English teacher in town ..."
For the next two hours, one student after another assaulted me with one question after another. My brain did backflips translating my answers into Special English. Because people were continuously devoured by the crowd, I was asked the same things over and over again:
1. Do you like China? (7)
2. Tell us something about American culture. (5)
3. Do you have a girlfriend? (4)
4. Do you like Chinese girls? (4)
5. Do you like Chinese food? (3)
(several others tied at three)
Just once, I wish someone would knock me out with a hard-hitting Stephen Sackur question. Mr. Keith: don't you think the suit coat-tshirt-jeans ensemble you're wearing is a little passe? Your thoughts on being at the center of a 200-person mob on a basketball court at 9 PM, sir? Your hair: are you trying to look like Phil Spector or is the resemblance merely an unfortunate accident? But in the meantime, yes, I like China just fine and the kung pao chicken is delicious.
By the end of it, my voice was thin and brittle, but Mr. Xie still had the pipes to belt out Careless Whisper on the car ride home.
"You are knowing this song? By WHAM!"
"Yessir," I said. "It's a classic."
"Yes. I am, how you say, nostalgic."
Me too, Mr. Xie. Nostalgic for a time when I could sink into that sax riff like a hot tub, a time well before I had eaten of the apple of irony.
Tonight was my English Corner debut, so after work I was picked up by the wonderful (and wordy) Mr. Xie and taken out for a twelve-course seafood dinner at a restaurant overlooking the river that oozes like a nosebleed through the middle of Nanchong. Ours was a party of twelve, so Mr. Xie dubbed it The Last Supper.
"And he," Xie said, indicating Mr. Liu, "is Judas!"
Mr. Liu, baffled, laughed politely.
"Do I get to be The Big Guy?" I asked. "I'm the only one here with any facial hair to speak of."
"I am only joking," said Xie. "It is just a joke!"
And I sat, as I often do in this country, wondering where I'd missed the boat of Chinese humor.
Someone ordered beers for the group but nobody wanted them, so they found their way to me. Everyone else drank milk.
"Are you capable of ingesting two Yanjing beers prior to English Corner, Mr. Keith?" asked Mr. Xie.
"Dangran," I said. "Of course. I'm Irish. And French."
Those beers would come in handy. I was about to be thrown to the Romans.
Xie drove me back to the old campus. He wove through some back alleys, puttered up over a hill, and parked his Chevy on a basketball court. I could see students, lots of them, milling around in the dark. I stepped out of the car.
Applause. Screaming. The canned "wahhhh!" that you hear on Chinese game shows. The crowd swallowed me up, forming a tremendous circle of which I was the center. In the dim and distant flood lighting, I could see hundreds of faces, all of them turned towards me.
"Good to see all of you," I shouted.
"NICE TO MEET YOU TOO!!!!!"
"Right. Well. My name is Keith. I'm the new English teacher in town ..."
For the next two hours, one student after another assaulted me with one question after another. My brain did backflips translating my answers into Special English. Because people were continuously devoured by the crowd, I was asked the same things over and over again:
1. Do you like China? (7)
2. Tell us something about American culture. (5)
3. Do you have a girlfriend? (4)
4. Do you like Chinese girls? (4)
5. Do you like Chinese food? (3)
(several others tied at three)
Just once, I wish someone would knock me out with a hard-hitting Stephen Sackur question. Mr. Keith: don't you think the suit coat-tshirt-jeans ensemble you're wearing is a little passe? Your thoughts on being at the center of a 200-person mob on a basketball court at 9 PM, sir? Your hair: are you trying to look like Phil Spector or is the resemblance merely an unfortunate accident? But in the meantime, yes, I like China just fine and the kung pao chicken is delicious.
By the end of it, my voice was thin and brittle, but Mr. Xie still had the pipes to belt out Careless Whisper on the car ride home.
"You are knowing this song? By WHAM!"
"Yessir," I said. "It's a classic."
"Yes. I am, how you say, nostalgic."
Me too, Mr. Xie. Nostalgic for a time when I could sink into that sax riff like a hot tub, a time well before I had eaten of the apple of irony.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Revivencias
In Mexico, the gringa and I had the good fortune of befriending Anna Paula and Flavio, who had a car. So on Saturday morning, a yellow Volkswagen Bug would pull up in front of the house, we'd throw our things in the back and hit the carretera for destinations more scenic than Zamora. We took several of these trips, but I am unable to separate one from another. It may as well have been a single month-long road bender.
I loved Mexico for how Mexican it was. We'd roll through some indigenous town late at night, pass slowly alongside the square - little more than a readymade gazebo and some mariachis - see the expressionless old men in panchos and sombreros staring out from doorways, the fat little kids with popsicles frozen to their tongues. Flavio would roll down the window and bark at the locals and they would make the sign of the cross. Then we'd find the carretera again and I would lie awake with my face pressed to the window, watching the oncoming headlights and wincing with every whoosh.
We went to Morelia a week after the bombings, walked around the square and the cordoned-off area where the blasts took place, now a shrine to the departed. A tour guide gave us the history of the cathedral. I remember feeling more bored than I've ever felt in my life. I kept shifting from foot to foot and looking for a way out. Then, suddenly, the urge to vomit: I tapped Anna Paula on the shoulder and said, "Necesito ... agua." When I came to, a doctor with a little black bag was kneeled over me.
"Do you suffer from epilepsy?" he asked.
"No, Señor Doctor," I said.
"Do you suffer from depression?"
"No."
"Have you been drinking?"
"Not much."
"Are you on any drugs or medication?"
"Not that I know of."
The doctor shrugged and Flavio helped me to my feet. I stared up at the cathedral and the Virgen de Guadalupe watched me as I staggered away. After all these years, was I still Catholic? Was it a vision that I'd had? I once read that Freud always passed out when The Pyramids came up. No, I decided, it wasn't the mysterium tremendum; I just needed a Coke.
We stayed with some guitar jocks in the heavily graffitied part of town. They played Paranoid Android. I sat google-eyed and entranced. They wanted me, el gringo del amor, to play something for them, but it was three hours and several shots of tequila before I served up a sloppy rendition of People Are Strange by The Doors. There weren't enough beds, so we jockeyed for floor space. And in the morning, making use of the markerboard that was propped up against the wall, the gringa and I taught an ad hoc class of English for Perverts. Our students were eager to put the new material to use.
"So, this 'taint' is ... cómo se dice ... entre ... be-tuín the ... and the ... "
We went to Tangancicuaro for Día de la Independencia. We were going to see something they called The Castle. I've always been an inattentive tourist, so when a crowd started gathering in the square around midnight, I wandered off and made merry with the locals until Anna Paula grabbed me by the arm and dragged me back into the thick of it all. "You need to see this," she said.
And I'm glad I did. The Castle was a three-story building made of fireworks. After several unsuccessful attempts at lighting the fuse, there was suddenly a trail of sparks and a delicious hissing sound. The crowd hooted and aieeeeee-ed. What happened next is too complex to describe, but a network of pulleys and levers and whirling pinwheels conveyed the flame slowly upward until, finally, inexplicably, impossibly, a little spaceship at the very top lit up and went warbling off into the night. I stood there agape.
"See, cabron!" shouted Anna Paula, slugging me in the breadbasket. "You were going to miss it!"
En route to Zirahuén, we stopped at a gas station. I stretched my legs and jumped around in place. A woman and her son were sitting out on the curb with a golden retriever between them. I approached with my hand outstretched.
"Don't touch him," said the woman. "He is evil."
"Aww, but he's ..."
I took another step and the dog transformed, bore its fangs, growled, and made a flying leap for my crotch. I whirled to the side just in the nick and the beast took a healthy bite out of my thigh. Amidst much screaming and barking, I hightailed it in the opposite direction. The Mexicans were wailing, "Guero, guero, ay no, guero!" I found refuge in the bathroom, closing and locking the stall behind me while the dog's meaty paws thundered against the door. Somewhere outside, I could hear Flavio laughing himself to exhaustion.
At the risk of sounding wishy-washy and existentialist, most of the Mexican adventure takes place on the carretera itself: passing the roadside shrines, the crucifixes and Virgens planted in the rockpiles, the burnt-out husks of abandoned cars; stopping while a herd of wild cattle washes over the road, weaving around a dam of tree limbs lain down as an offering of protest by the indigenous poor, a warning of some imminent catastrophe that can't get at you because you are in the back of a yellow Volkswagen Bug with Radiohead's Amnesiac on the stereo, and Flavio is laughing and barking like a maniac, and Anna Paula is feeding you cigarettes, and the lot of you are splitting a road beer, eager to get where you're headed but quietly hopeful that you will never arrive.
I loved Mexico for how Mexican it was. We'd roll through some indigenous town late at night, pass slowly alongside the square - little more than a readymade gazebo and some mariachis - see the expressionless old men in panchos and sombreros staring out from doorways, the fat little kids with popsicles frozen to their tongues. Flavio would roll down the window and bark at the locals and they would make the sign of the cross. Then we'd find the carretera again and I would lie awake with my face pressed to the window, watching the oncoming headlights and wincing with every whoosh.
We went to Morelia a week after the bombings, walked around the square and the cordoned-off area where the blasts took place, now a shrine to the departed. A tour guide gave us the history of the cathedral. I remember feeling more bored than I've ever felt in my life. I kept shifting from foot to foot and looking for a way out. Then, suddenly, the urge to vomit: I tapped Anna Paula on the shoulder and said, "Necesito ... agua." When I came to, a doctor with a little black bag was kneeled over me.
"Do you suffer from epilepsy?" he asked.
"No, Señor Doctor," I said.
"Do you suffer from depression?"
"No."
"Have you been drinking?"
"Not much."
"Are you on any drugs or medication?"
"Not that I know of."
The doctor shrugged and Flavio helped me to my feet. I stared up at the cathedral and the Virgen de Guadalupe watched me as I staggered away. After all these years, was I still Catholic? Was it a vision that I'd had? I once read that Freud always passed out when The Pyramids came up. No, I decided, it wasn't the mysterium tremendum; I just needed a Coke.
We stayed with some guitar jocks in the heavily graffitied part of town. They played Paranoid Android. I sat google-eyed and entranced. They wanted me, el gringo del amor, to play something for them, but it was three hours and several shots of tequila before I served up a sloppy rendition of People Are Strange by The Doors. There weren't enough beds, so we jockeyed for floor space. And in the morning, making use of the markerboard that was propped up against the wall, the gringa and I taught an ad hoc class of English for Perverts. Our students were eager to put the new material to use.
"So, this 'taint' is ... cómo se dice ... entre ... be-tuín the ... and the ... "
We went to Tangancicuaro for Día de la Independencia. We were going to see something they called The Castle. I've always been an inattentive tourist, so when a crowd started gathering in the square around midnight, I wandered off and made merry with the locals until Anna Paula grabbed me by the arm and dragged me back into the thick of it all. "You need to see this," she said.
And I'm glad I did. The Castle was a three-story building made of fireworks. After several unsuccessful attempts at lighting the fuse, there was suddenly a trail of sparks and a delicious hissing sound. The crowd hooted and aieeeeee-ed. What happened next is too complex to describe, but a network of pulleys and levers and whirling pinwheels conveyed the flame slowly upward until, finally, inexplicably, impossibly, a little spaceship at the very top lit up and went warbling off into the night. I stood there agape.
"See, cabron!" shouted Anna Paula, slugging me in the breadbasket. "You were going to miss it!"
En route to Zirahuén, we stopped at a gas station. I stretched my legs and jumped around in place. A woman and her son were sitting out on the curb with a golden retriever between them. I approached with my hand outstretched.
"Don't touch him," said the woman. "He is evil."
"Aww, but he's ..."
I took another step and the dog transformed, bore its fangs, growled, and made a flying leap for my crotch. I whirled to the side just in the nick and the beast took a healthy bite out of my thigh. Amidst much screaming and barking, I hightailed it in the opposite direction. The Mexicans were wailing, "Guero, guero, ay no, guero!" I found refuge in the bathroom, closing and locking the stall behind me while the dog's meaty paws thundered against the door. Somewhere outside, I could hear Flavio laughing himself to exhaustion.
At the risk of sounding wishy-washy and existentialist, most of the Mexican adventure takes place on the carretera itself: passing the roadside shrines, the crucifixes and Virgens planted in the rockpiles, the burnt-out husks of abandoned cars; stopping while a herd of wild cattle washes over the road, weaving around a dam of tree limbs lain down as an offering of protest by the indigenous poor, a warning of some imminent catastrophe that can't get at you because you are in the back of a yellow Volkswagen Bug with Radiohead's Amnesiac on the stereo, and Flavio is laughing and barking like a maniac, and Anna Paula is feeding you cigarettes, and the lot of you are splitting a road beer, eager to get where you're headed but quietly hopeful that you will never arrive.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Lush Life
Because I have not yet mastered the art of smoking and drinking coffee in my sleep, I wake up in a foul mood. The earth's gravity seems to have multiplied in strength and after a wild and fecund night, the crickets in my bedroom have multiplied their numbers. I light a Shuangxi and dump several spoonfuls of Nescafe into a water bottle and all over the kitchen floor. Coffee and cigarettes get me to the shower, which drizzles a leaden stream of lukewarm onto my scalp. My toilet is a few inches from the shower head, so I multitask. I bellow along with the Johnny Hartman/John Coltrane album I bellow along with every morning, but my morning voice doesn't reach high or low enough, so I sing the verses and choruses in different octaves. As I sit and shit and shower and bellow, the lesson plan for the week's classes is mitosisizin' in my brain.
I teach seven classes with 50+ students apiece and I am a volunteer, so photocopies are not financially prudent. That means I need to come up with a lot of speaking activities and deliver them like Barack Obama on benzedrine. Luckily, I teach the same lesson seven times a week, so a single flash of inspiration is enough to get by. I plan for my lessons the way a snail might if it had the cognitive capacity to teach Oral English: I start with a pebble and build a spiral of saliva around it as the week goes by until, by Friday, I have a spit-shined, well-rehearsed presentation that makes me feel like a real, actual teacher of sorts.
Today is the second run-through of "Bon Appetit," my guide to American cuisine and dining etiquette, so the lesson is only a sketch and my scripted jokes will be jittery and Bob Newhartesque. As I walk into the classroom, there is a chorus of oooooohs and a brief round of applause. I look around and remember that I am wearing my suit coat. I take a bow. Then I bust out my jug of coffee and set it on the podium and there is another long ooooooh. I explain that the American professor is fueled by caffeine, that without it he is a zombie. And zombielike, I guzzle some coffee and start writing on the board.
Ideally, an Oral English class should be an interactive vaudeville act. The trick is duping your students into believing that they are actually caught in the scenario you have presented them with. If they are supposed to be dining out at Red Lobster, they should be able to hear Savage Garden piped down from the styrofoam ceiling tiles. If they are supposed to be the United Nations, the Chinese contingent should loathe the Japanese contingent with an undying contempt, and vice versa. In short, you must suspend all disbelief, otherwise your students will rote memorize a handful of stock phrases and mumble them to each other like little lobotomized HAL 9000s. Setting the stage for a productive class is a lot like writing the start of a novel: there must be background, complications, and some sort of impetus to push the whole thing forward.
Today's class goes well. I briefly explain the American tipping system and demonstrate an untippable waiter.
"Whaddya want?" I snap, putting on my surliest Waffle House sass. My pen twitches at the ready. The poor girl giggles and hides her face in her hands.
"You ready to order or what?"
"Yes. I will have the chicken."
"Chicken soup? Chicken salad? Chicken nuggets? Chicken sandwich? Fried chicken? Chicken a la king? Kung pao chicken? General Tso's chicken?!"
By now she is so embarrassed that it looks like she is having an out-of-body experience. Thankfully, my phone rings: one of my stalkers calling for the sixth time that morning.
"Hang on. It's my girlfriend."
I dart into the kitchen, fake a kissyface conversation, and swagger back to Table 9.
"So. What'll it be?"
"I'll take the fried chicken."
I storm backstage and bark at the short order cooks. Then, I return bearing a half-rotten apple which, through the power of mass delusion, is starting to look more and more like a drumstick. I stumble over my shoelace and send the apple flying into the crowd.
"Oops. There goes your chicken."
By then, my students are rearing to dine-and-dash, so I turn it over to them for the rest of class. I am pleased with the results and the following dialogue almost makes me weep with satisfaction:
Waitress: Here is your food.
Customer: Excuse me, ma'am, but there is a fly in my soup.
Waitress: Impossible!
Customer: Look. You see it! I would like to speak with the manager.
Manager: [approaches with a clipboard] What seems to be the problem?
Customer: There is a fly in my soup.
Manager: Don't worry about it. Your dinner is on the house.
Customer: Thanks. And could you do something about my waitress?
Manager: What would you like me to do?
Customer: Fire her immediately.
Manager: Okay, I will fire her at once.
Of course, part of the reason these roleplays are so amusing is that they are painfully awkward and quite a ways off the mark. But accuracy matters little to me. Every morning as I walk to the bus that takes me to the campus across town, I hear English majors in the bushes, reciting speeches by Henry Kissinger. From a young age, Chinese students are given the task of memorizing the entirety of the English language, with the end result that, after twelve years of English, they can barely muster a "Hello" without second-guessing themselves. My classes are about giving Chinese students the cajones to use the language, and in order to grow a pair, they need a heavily padded environment, an English laboratory in which they are free to mix and mismatch nouns and verbs and adjectives until they find the combinations that make sense.
In China, the expectations for us foreign teachers are high. We are widely believed to possess the ability to heal rhotacism with the laying on of hands. Hell, I used to think I had that power, but over the years I have set more modest goals for myself. And I would love to talk about them, but night has fallen on China. The young emperors at the internet cafe are yawning and removing their headsets. The rats have come out to slurp pools of Red Bull from the floor. And my cold, hard bed with its dreams of coffee and cigarettes is calling to segue me into tomorrow and whatever red tape that entails.
I teach seven classes with 50+ students apiece and I am a volunteer, so photocopies are not financially prudent. That means I need to come up with a lot of speaking activities and deliver them like Barack Obama on benzedrine. Luckily, I teach the same lesson seven times a week, so a single flash of inspiration is enough to get by. I plan for my lessons the way a snail might if it had the cognitive capacity to teach Oral English: I start with a pebble and build a spiral of saliva around it as the week goes by until, by Friday, I have a spit-shined, well-rehearsed presentation that makes me feel like a real, actual teacher of sorts.
Today is the second run-through of "Bon Appetit," my guide to American cuisine and dining etiquette, so the lesson is only a sketch and my scripted jokes will be jittery and Bob Newhartesque. As I walk into the classroom, there is a chorus of oooooohs and a brief round of applause. I look around and remember that I am wearing my suit coat. I take a bow. Then I bust out my jug of coffee and set it on the podium and there is another long ooooooh. I explain that the American professor is fueled by caffeine, that without it he is a zombie. And zombielike, I guzzle some coffee and start writing on the board.
Ideally, an Oral English class should be an interactive vaudeville act. The trick is duping your students into believing that they are actually caught in the scenario you have presented them with. If they are supposed to be dining out at Red Lobster, they should be able to hear Savage Garden piped down from the styrofoam ceiling tiles. If they are supposed to be the United Nations, the Chinese contingent should loathe the Japanese contingent with an undying contempt, and vice versa. In short, you must suspend all disbelief, otherwise your students will rote memorize a handful of stock phrases and mumble them to each other like little lobotomized HAL 9000s. Setting the stage for a productive class is a lot like writing the start of a novel: there must be background, complications, and some sort of impetus to push the whole thing forward.
Today's class goes well. I briefly explain the American tipping system and demonstrate an untippable waiter.
"Whaddya want?" I snap, putting on my surliest Waffle House sass. My pen twitches at the ready. The poor girl giggles and hides her face in her hands.
"You ready to order or what?"
"Yes. I will have the chicken."
"Chicken soup? Chicken salad? Chicken nuggets? Chicken sandwich? Fried chicken? Chicken a la king? Kung pao chicken? General Tso's chicken?!"
By now she is so embarrassed that it looks like she is having an out-of-body experience. Thankfully, my phone rings: one of my stalkers calling for the sixth time that morning.
"Hang on. It's my girlfriend."
I dart into the kitchen, fake a kissyface conversation, and swagger back to Table 9.
"So. What'll it be?"
"I'll take the fried chicken."
I storm backstage and bark at the short order cooks. Then, I return bearing a half-rotten apple which, through the power of mass delusion, is starting to look more and more like a drumstick. I stumble over my shoelace and send the apple flying into the crowd.
"Oops. There goes your chicken."
By then, my students are rearing to dine-and-dash, so I turn it over to them for the rest of class. I am pleased with the results and the following dialogue almost makes me weep with satisfaction:
Waitress: Here is your food.
Customer: Excuse me, ma'am, but there is a fly in my soup.
Waitress: Impossible!
Customer: Look. You see it! I would like to speak with the manager.
Manager: [approaches with a clipboard] What seems to be the problem?
Customer: There is a fly in my soup.
Manager: Don't worry about it. Your dinner is on the house.
Customer: Thanks. And could you do something about my waitress?
Manager: What would you like me to do?
Customer: Fire her immediately.
Manager: Okay, I will fire her at once.
Of course, part of the reason these roleplays are so amusing is that they are painfully awkward and quite a ways off the mark. But accuracy matters little to me. Every morning as I walk to the bus that takes me to the campus across town, I hear English majors in the bushes, reciting speeches by Henry Kissinger. From a young age, Chinese students are given the task of memorizing the entirety of the English language, with the end result that, after twelve years of English, they can barely muster a "Hello" without second-guessing themselves. My classes are about giving Chinese students the cajones to use the language, and in order to grow a pair, they need a heavily padded environment, an English laboratory in which they are free to mix and mismatch nouns and verbs and adjectives until they find the combinations that make sense.
In China, the expectations for us foreign teachers are high. We are widely believed to possess the ability to heal rhotacism with the laying on of hands. Hell, I used to think I had that power, but over the years I have set more modest goals for myself. And I would love to talk about them, but night has fallen on China. The young emperors at the internet cafe are yawning and removing their headsets. The rats have come out to slurp pools of Red Bull from the floor. And my cold, hard bed with its dreams of coffee and cigarettes is calling to segue me into tomorrow and whatever red tape that entails.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Zen and the Art of Rickshaw Maintenance
Two months into Korea, I met an expat named Wolf, a bearded, ponytailed rat of a man who, from his whitewashed jeans and black metal t-shirt, I was able to carbon date as a fossil from the Reaganomic Era. My comrades and I were new to Asia, bursting with all the greenness and enthusiasm that entails, whereas Wolf was a veteran and a lifer: he did not thrive in the east, but would shrivel up and die if he were ever extradited to the west.
On the night in question, the newbies and I were huddled around a table at one of the expat bars downtown, while Wolf sat in the corner oozing disdain into his can of fake Heineken. The Canadian was doing impressions again. He stood up and did me: cradled his head in his hands, compulsively stroked his beard, covered his mouth and let out a high-pitched giggle.
"Stop it," I said, "or I will fade out of existence again."
He changed channels and took a seat next to Wolf.
"Okay, guess who I am!" He crossed his arms and glowered down into his beer. "Life sucks. I hate Korea even though I've lived here for 26 years. Metallica is the best band in the world."
Wolf looked up from his Heineken and stared down the Canadian. I searched the room for a black hole to crawl into.
"Anyone? Any guesses? That's right! I'm Wolf!"
"... the fuck you are," murmured Wolf.
These were the first words I'd ever heard him speak, so I thought perhaps Wolf was warming up to us, or at least to me because I was not the Canadian.
"How long you been here, Wolf?" I asked.
"What the fuck is it to you?"
I cradled my head in my hands and compulsively stroked my beard, then felt like I was impersonating myself, so I just sat there silently, looking hurt, until Wolf spoke again.
"How long have you been here?"
"Two months," I said.
"And you haven't snapped yet?"
"No," I said. "I don't mind it here."
"Give it time," Wolf said. "It'll come."
After the bar closed, we made our way to another joint and without a word, Wolf went meandering down a darkened alleyway waving a tallboy of Cass in the air, belting out a surprisingly svelte rendition of "Unchained Melody" as he faded into the night. That was the last I ever saw of him.
Wolflike expats are not uncommon in Asia. Permit me to borrow another wonderful David Foster Wallaceism: when you speak with Wolves, you feel as though the conversation is being warped and diffracted, like a beam of light passing through swimming pool water. In short, Wolves are a little off - and they make you feel a little off, too. What creates a Wolf? Your average English teacher in Asia is not under much duress. He is overpaid, overfed, saturated with free alcohol, and generally beloved by the locals. And yet the long-term Asian veteran wears a thousand-yard stare and a permanent sneer, and loathes expats even more than he disdains the general population.
Of course, even among the lifers, there are more non-Wolves than Wolves. But make no mistake: there are pitfalls to living here and I am only just starting to become aware of them. After an especially bad week, I can see something of the Wolf in me, the urge to turn upon myself like an ingrown toenail, to stock up on instant ramen and bootleg DVDs and get me to a nunnery. And that is what I would like to talk about in this chautauqua: how to maintain one's sanity living in a society that on a literal level cannot understand you, and in a more existential sense, cannot understand what you are about.
The main culprit in the Wolfization of an otherwise well-meaning expat is what Robert Pirsig calls a gumption trap: the loss of any sort of desire to interact with the weirdness that surrounds you. Gumption traps can be brought about by general gumption erosion, specific gumption-sucking events, or what I will call Laowai Escapism Disorder (LED). Often a combination of all three is involved in the formation of a bona fide Wolf.
Gumption erosion results from the sustained, unlubricated friction between the laowai's individualist rickshaw and the collectivist traffic that surrounds it. There is no obvious treatment for gumption erosion aside from lubrication - i.e. alcohol - and lots of it, but drinking oneself stupid should be regarded as an occupational hazard rather than a cure. Much of the adjustment to gumption erosion is made by the subconscious, though the right mindset will go a long way towards expediting the process.
Gumption erosion in Asia is primarily a matter of space. Your average East Asian city is more densely populated than an oversexed beehive, which means a lot of people, a lot of cars, and very little unoccupied space. The Chinese in particular are far from claustrophobic. The rule for public transportation seems to be "cram in as many people as possible" and when it comes to public spaces, people to tend to get as close to other people as the laws of physics will allow. Whereas westerners en masse instinctively arrange themselves in horizontal and vertical lines, the natural state of the Chinese crowd is a forward-shoving mob. There are no referees in China: no one will blow a whistle for a handcheck, an elbow to the breadbasket, or a forearm shiver.
As a westerner, you are at a twofold disadvantage, both because you are not used to being in such close quarters with so many total strangers, and because those total strangers are very curious about you. Frankly, they have never seen anything quite like you before, so they will take an unusual interest in the book you're reading, the email you're writing, the money you're withdrawing, or your armhair.
China is under construction, so it is an extremely loud country. The work is in progress twenty-four hours a day, not exempting The Sabbath, so the jackhammering and buzzsawing never cease. Meanwhile, Chinese drivers are not bashful about laying on their horns, and the muffler is an invention that never seems to have caught on.
Underneath the general cacophony of China is a steady stream of laowai-directed noise. A fair amount of young people will scream "HELLO!" from a safe distance of twenty feet. The more of the language you understand, the more you realize what a sensation you are. You will quickly learn the local words for "westerner," "foreigner," and (if applicable) "white devil." If you are already inclined to introversion, as I am, crowd noise can make walking to the convenience store for toilet paper an almost insurmountable task.
And of course, China is dangerous. There is no obvious difference between the traffic laws and the laws that govern walking down the sidewalk. The roads carry two ill-defined currents of cars, trucks, madhat cabbies and relentless buses, with a circus of bicycles, pedestrians, trishaws, and mopeds scuttling every which way amidst the honking, screeching torrent of smoke-belching metal.
This state of affairs - a claustrophobic, noisy, dangerous state of affairs - can make leaving one's apartment less appealing than other antisocial pursuits, say: making a list of all the girls you have ever kissed, Spider Solitaire, or Season 3 of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
As I mentioned earlier, adjusting to one's Asian surroundings takes time and most of the work is done while one is asleep. Some expats choose to spend a good amount of their time abroad drunk, but this only leads to hangovers that are several orders of magnitude worse than any state of consciousness known in the west.
The trick is to wait it out. Recite a mantra of your choice. Avoid rice liquor. Wear headphones when you make public appearances. Gradually, your mind will make the necessary adjustments. Your instincts will sharpen themselves on their own accord such that you will one day find yourself able to talk a fifty kuai cab ride down to twenty and navigate a Chinese crosswalk like Christ upon the Sea of Galilee. Your brain will learn to filter out the high-frequency garbage that comes roaring in from your overtaxed sensory organs: you will nap upright as a horse on the bus home from work and you will walk the street blissfully unaware of the migraine-inducing ruckus and seizure-inducing lights of the city.
You will also learn how to defuse hecklers and cat callers. "Hello," you might say to someone who says hello to you. "A laowai? Where?" you might gasp in the local tongue when someone claims to have sighted a foreigner. Above all else, you must remember that your presence in Asia is bizarre and inexplicable to the common man. If you saw a talking St. Bernard go walking down 32nd Street, you might be inspired to say to your neighbor, "There goes a talking St. Bernard!" - or perhaps, if you were brave enough, to call out "Hello!" from a safe enough distance. I am not saying that westerners are talking St. Bernards or that we should be treated as such, but it is important to keep in mind that, at least in Asia, we are only slightly more commonplace.
The second kind of gumption trap I want to talk about is brought on by specific gumption-sucking events. Amidst a lot of general gumption erosion, these are the straws that break the rickshaw's back. I can think of three specific examples, but the list of possible misunderstandings that can send a laowai into semi-permanent hermitage is too vast to record here.
There was an African-American teacher living in Hangzhou, I believe, who ran away crying when a Chinese vegetable vendor approached her shouting "Nigga nigga nigga!" One imagines the vegetable vendor was as baffled and startled as the American. In addition to meaning "that one," the phrase nigga is the all-purpose Chinese stall word. So the vendor was saying, "Er, um, ah." (Though I was sheepish about using it at first, I am now able to carry on whole conversations of nigga nigga nigga with a straight face.)
A former Peace Corps volunteer stormed back to her apartment after an old lady, late at night, cornered her in the street and said, "Go home." Of course, it is possible that the old woman was indeed saying, "Yankee, go home." But considering the impeccable politeness of the Chinese toward foreigners, it seems more likely to me that the old woman was nicely suggesting that the young lady go home because it was unsafe to be out on the street so late at night. Or perhaps she was asking the laowai whether she was going home or not. In any case, unless one is a master of Mandarin, there is no use in taking offense at anything, even a remark that seems overtly insulting. To begin with, it is likely that you have misunderstood the situation and anyhow, as a laowai, you don't have the language or the legal representation to settle the score.
A few weeks ago, I was walking back from class on a particularly foul and rainy day when a group of college dorks spotted me and started chanting, "Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!" I went home, locked the door, and had myself a nice, long sulk: I came 10,000 miles to teach you dorks English and this - this - is the thanks I get, et cetera. But then I had to laugh at myself. "Fuck you," as chanted by some Chinese college dorks, does not have the same meaning as a "fuck you" uttered through the clenched teeth of some frat boy down at Billy Frogg's. In all likelihood, the dorks had no idea what the phrase meant, or had at best only a vague understanding that it might evoke some sort of response from a passing laowai. Probably, they just picked it up from watching Scarface and liked the sound of it.
The only way to deal with a specific gumption-sucking event is to assume something has been lost in translation and forget about it, because there is not a damned thing you can do one way or the other.
This leads me to Laowai Escapism Disorder (LED). Inevitably, though laowais are few and far between, one foreigner will encounter another foreigner at the bus stop and before long, that germ of western brotherhood will snowball into a raucous herd of laowais who prowl the streets at night and frighten the local restauranteers by drinking large quantities of beer without ordering anything to eat. There is nothing wrong with making foreigner friends in and of itself, but all too often I have seen it lead to the disappointing realization, on the flight back home, that you can't understand a word of the captain's announcement and that you have to order your celebratory mid-flight Budweiser in English. And so the time spent abroad amounts to a passport stamp and a blip on a future resume.
But the real danger of Laowai Escapism Disorder is that it exacerbates general gumption erosion and specific gumption-sucking events. You get in the habit of blowing off steam with your nightly laowai therapy group and before long, one-upmanship leads to nasty little Two Minutes Hate sessions where the five of you get sloppy and talk trash about nobody in particular, or everybody in general. You begin looking for specific gumption-sucking events to bring up at the next meeting and never fail to grumble about the general gumption eroding process. Meanwhile, all sorts of locals are streaming past your table, secretly longing to take you and your band of laowais out for a ridiculous night on the town. But alas, you will never meet them, because by then you are as insoluble as a drop of motor oil in a glass of baijiu.
I would like to close this chautauqua by saying that, though Hinduism is about as widespread in China as Denny's, there is a karmic ebb and flow in the day-to-day existence of the laowai and it tends to tilt overwhelmingly in his favor. For every long-range heat-seeking "HELLO!" there are a hundred smiling old men who are content to sit and smoke cigarettes and quietly ponder your existence. And for every cab driver who gyps you on the fare, there is a college girl you have never met who will walk two miles with you to the bank, then run two miles to her dorm room to find her Chinese I.D. card, then run two miles back to the bank so you can exchange your $100 U.S. dollars for life-giving Chinese RMB, so you can pay for the bus ride home, so you can afford to sit and write this blog post, so you can eat, and so on.
On the night in question, the newbies and I were huddled around a table at one of the expat bars downtown, while Wolf sat in the corner oozing disdain into his can of fake Heineken. The Canadian was doing impressions again. He stood up and did me: cradled his head in his hands, compulsively stroked his beard, covered his mouth and let out a high-pitched giggle.
"Stop it," I said, "or I will fade out of existence again."
He changed channels and took a seat next to Wolf.
"Okay, guess who I am!" He crossed his arms and glowered down into his beer. "Life sucks. I hate Korea even though I've lived here for 26 years. Metallica is the best band in the world."
Wolf looked up from his Heineken and stared down the Canadian. I searched the room for a black hole to crawl into.
"Anyone? Any guesses? That's right! I'm Wolf!"
"... the fuck you are," murmured Wolf.
These were the first words I'd ever heard him speak, so I thought perhaps Wolf was warming up to us, or at least to me because I was not the Canadian.
"How long you been here, Wolf?" I asked.
"What the fuck is it to you?"
I cradled my head in my hands and compulsively stroked my beard, then felt like I was impersonating myself, so I just sat there silently, looking hurt, until Wolf spoke again.
"How long have you been here?"
"Two months," I said.
"And you haven't snapped yet?"
"No," I said. "I don't mind it here."
"Give it time," Wolf said. "It'll come."
After the bar closed, we made our way to another joint and without a word, Wolf went meandering down a darkened alleyway waving a tallboy of Cass in the air, belting out a surprisingly svelte rendition of "Unchained Melody" as he faded into the night. That was the last I ever saw of him.
Wolflike expats are not uncommon in Asia. Permit me to borrow another wonderful David Foster Wallaceism: when you speak with Wolves, you feel as though the conversation is being warped and diffracted, like a beam of light passing through swimming pool water. In short, Wolves are a little off - and they make you feel a little off, too. What creates a Wolf? Your average English teacher in Asia is not under much duress. He is overpaid, overfed, saturated with free alcohol, and generally beloved by the locals. And yet the long-term Asian veteran wears a thousand-yard stare and a permanent sneer, and loathes expats even more than he disdains the general population.
Of course, even among the lifers, there are more non-Wolves than Wolves. But make no mistake: there are pitfalls to living here and I am only just starting to become aware of them. After an especially bad week, I can see something of the Wolf in me, the urge to turn upon myself like an ingrown toenail, to stock up on instant ramen and bootleg DVDs and get me to a nunnery. And that is what I would like to talk about in this chautauqua: how to maintain one's sanity living in a society that on a literal level cannot understand you, and in a more existential sense, cannot understand what you are about.
The main culprit in the Wolfization of an otherwise well-meaning expat is what Robert Pirsig calls a gumption trap: the loss of any sort of desire to interact with the weirdness that surrounds you. Gumption traps can be brought about by general gumption erosion, specific gumption-sucking events, or what I will call Laowai Escapism Disorder (LED). Often a combination of all three is involved in the formation of a bona fide Wolf.
Gumption erosion results from the sustained, unlubricated friction between the laowai's individualist rickshaw and the collectivist traffic that surrounds it. There is no obvious treatment for gumption erosion aside from lubrication - i.e. alcohol - and lots of it, but drinking oneself stupid should be regarded as an occupational hazard rather than a cure. Much of the adjustment to gumption erosion is made by the subconscious, though the right mindset will go a long way towards expediting the process.
Gumption erosion in Asia is primarily a matter of space. Your average East Asian city is more densely populated than an oversexed beehive, which means a lot of people, a lot of cars, and very little unoccupied space. The Chinese in particular are far from claustrophobic. The rule for public transportation seems to be "cram in as many people as possible" and when it comes to public spaces, people to tend to get as close to other people as the laws of physics will allow. Whereas westerners en masse instinctively arrange themselves in horizontal and vertical lines, the natural state of the Chinese crowd is a forward-shoving mob. There are no referees in China: no one will blow a whistle for a handcheck, an elbow to the breadbasket, or a forearm shiver.
As a westerner, you are at a twofold disadvantage, both because you are not used to being in such close quarters with so many total strangers, and because those total strangers are very curious about you. Frankly, they have never seen anything quite like you before, so they will take an unusual interest in the book you're reading, the email you're writing, the money you're withdrawing, or your armhair.
China is under construction, so it is an extremely loud country. The work is in progress twenty-four hours a day, not exempting The Sabbath, so the jackhammering and buzzsawing never cease. Meanwhile, Chinese drivers are not bashful about laying on their horns, and the muffler is an invention that never seems to have caught on.
Underneath the general cacophony of China is a steady stream of laowai-directed noise. A fair amount of young people will scream "HELLO!" from a safe distance of twenty feet. The more of the language you understand, the more you realize what a sensation you are. You will quickly learn the local words for "westerner," "foreigner," and (if applicable) "white devil." If you are already inclined to introversion, as I am, crowd noise can make walking to the convenience store for toilet paper an almost insurmountable task.
And of course, China is dangerous. There is no obvious difference between the traffic laws and the laws that govern walking down the sidewalk. The roads carry two ill-defined currents of cars, trucks, madhat cabbies and relentless buses, with a circus of bicycles, pedestrians, trishaws, and mopeds scuttling every which way amidst the honking, screeching torrent of smoke-belching metal.
This state of affairs - a claustrophobic, noisy, dangerous state of affairs - can make leaving one's apartment less appealing than other antisocial pursuits, say: making a list of all the girls you have ever kissed, Spider Solitaire, or Season 3 of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
As I mentioned earlier, adjusting to one's Asian surroundings takes time and most of the work is done while one is asleep. Some expats choose to spend a good amount of their time abroad drunk, but this only leads to hangovers that are several orders of magnitude worse than any state of consciousness known in the west.
The trick is to wait it out. Recite a mantra of your choice. Avoid rice liquor. Wear headphones when you make public appearances. Gradually, your mind will make the necessary adjustments. Your instincts will sharpen themselves on their own accord such that you will one day find yourself able to talk a fifty kuai cab ride down to twenty and navigate a Chinese crosswalk like Christ upon the Sea of Galilee. Your brain will learn to filter out the high-frequency garbage that comes roaring in from your overtaxed sensory organs: you will nap upright as a horse on the bus home from work and you will walk the street blissfully unaware of the migraine-inducing ruckus and seizure-inducing lights of the city.
You will also learn how to defuse hecklers and cat callers. "Hello," you might say to someone who says hello to you. "A laowai? Where?" you might gasp in the local tongue when someone claims to have sighted a foreigner. Above all else, you must remember that your presence in Asia is bizarre and inexplicable to the common man. If you saw a talking St. Bernard go walking down 32nd Street, you might be inspired to say to your neighbor, "There goes a talking St. Bernard!" - or perhaps, if you were brave enough, to call out "Hello!" from a safe enough distance. I am not saying that westerners are talking St. Bernards or that we should be treated as such, but it is important to keep in mind that, at least in Asia, we are only slightly more commonplace.
The second kind of gumption trap I want to talk about is brought on by specific gumption-sucking events. Amidst a lot of general gumption erosion, these are the straws that break the rickshaw's back. I can think of three specific examples, but the list of possible misunderstandings that can send a laowai into semi-permanent hermitage is too vast to record here.
There was an African-American teacher living in Hangzhou, I believe, who ran away crying when a Chinese vegetable vendor approached her shouting "Nigga nigga nigga!" One imagines the vegetable vendor was as baffled and startled as the American. In addition to meaning "that one," the phrase nigga is the all-purpose Chinese stall word. So the vendor was saying, "Er, um, ah." (Though I was sheepish about using it at first, I am now able to carry on whole conversations of nigga nigga nigga with a straight face.)
A former Peace Corps volunteer stormed back to her apartment after an old lady, late at night, cornered her in the street and said, "Go home." Of course, it is possible that the old woman was indeed saying, "Yankee, go home." But considering the impeccable politeness of the Chinese toward foreigners, it seems more likely to me that the old woman was nicely suggesting that the young lady go home because it was unsafe to be out on the street so late at night. Or perhaps she was asking the laowai whether she was going home or not. In any case, unless one is a master of Mandarin, there is no use in taking offense at anything, even a remark that seems overtly insulting. To begin with, it is likely that you have misunderstood the situation and anyhow, as a laowai, you don't have the language or the legal representation to settle the score.
A few weeks ago, I was walking back from class on a particularly foul and rainy day when a group of college dorks spotted me and started chanting, "Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!" I went home, locked the door, and had myself a nice, long sulk: I came 10,000 miles to teach you dorks English and this - this - is the thanks I get, et cetera. But then I had to laugh at myself. "Fuck you," as chanted by some Chinese college dorks, does not have the same meaning as a "fuck you" uttered through the clenched teeth of some frat boy down at Billy Frogg's. In all likelihood, the dorks had no idea what the phrase meant, or had at best only a vague understanding that it might evoke some sort of response from a passing laowai. Probably, they just picked it up from watching Scarface and liked the sound of it.
The only way to deal with a specific gumption-sucking event is to assume something has been lost in translation and forget about it, because there is not a damned thing you can do one way or the other.
This leads me to Laowai Escapism Disorder (LED). Inevitably, though laowais are few and far between, one foreigner will encounter another foreigner at the bus stop and before long, that germ of western brotherhood will snowball into a raucous herd of laowais who prowl the streets at night and frighten the local restauranteers by drinking large quantities of beer without ordering anything to eat. There is nothing wrong with making foreigner friends in and of itself, but all too often I have seen it lead to the disappointing realization, on the flight back home, that you can't understand a word of the captain's announcement and that you have to order your celebratory mid-flight Budweiser in English. And so the time spent abroad amounts to a passport stamp and a blip on a future resume.
But the real danger of Laowai Escapism Disorder is that it exacerbates general gumption erosion and specific gumption-sucking events. You get in the habit of blowing off steam with your nightly laowai therapy group and before long, one-upmanship leads to nasty little Two Minutes Hate sessions where the five of you get sloppy and talk trash about nobody in particular, or everybody in general. You begin looking for specific gumption-sucking events to bring up at the next meeting and never fail to grumble about the general gumption eroding process. Meanwhile, all sorts of locals are streaming past your table, secretly longing to take you and your band of laowais out for a ridiculous night on the town. But alas, you will never meet them, because by then you are as insoluble as a drop of motor oil in a glass of baijiu.
I would like to close this chautauqua by saying that, though Hinduism is about as widespread in China as Denny's, there is a karmic ebb and flow in the day-to-day existence of the laowai and it tends to tilt overwhelmingly in his favor. For every long-range heat-seeking "HELLO!" there are a hundred smiling old men who are content to sit and smoke cigarettes and quietly ponder your existence. And for every cab driver who gyps you on the fare, there is a college girl you have never met who will walk two miles with you to the bank, then run two miles to her dorm room to find her Chinese I.D. card, then run two miles back to the bank so you can exchange your $100 U.S. dollars for life-giving Chinese RMB, so you can pay for the bus ride home, so you can afford to sit and write this blog post, so you can eat, and so on.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Strange Invitations
Three years abroad have turned me into an anglophonic handyman, a TEFL jack-of-all-trades, a linguistic plumber. I work short hours, but there is always tweaking to be done, dangling participles to saw off and subject/verb disagreements to weld together. I am on call 24/7, especially in China, where nary an afternoon goes by without some odd English request from someone I've never seen in my life.
A few weeks ago, a pudgy and bespectacled college kid came tiptoeing up to me in the teachers' lounge. He was not one of my students.
"Excuse me, foreign teacher," he said, "but I have question for you."
He wanted to know my thoughts on drug education.
"Can you be more specific?" I asked. "Do you mean the bad kind of drugs?"
He nodded emphatically. I shrugged. Well, I said, I think drug education is important, but I also believe that individuals should have the freedom to choose what they put in their bodies.
"Okay, I bring some information for you next time," he said. We shook hands and he was gone.
The next week, the kid resurfaced with a laminate binder full of good ol' government-issue American anti-drug literature. He told me to take the stuff home, look over it, and return the next week with a prepared speech: he wanted me to give a lecture in his class. So, on a bored Tuesday evening, I broke open the binder and read all about the horrors of marijuana, hallucinogens, crack cocaine and The Horse. It was a nostalgic flashback to my D.A.R.E. days, the Reefer Madness films, the no-saying to everything. "Marijuana induces false feelings of euphoria and happiness. Pot smokers become anxious and paranoid." But, I asked myself, if the euphoria and happiness are artificial, aren't the anxiety and paranoia equally so? Or if the anxiety and paranoia are real, isn't the euphoria ... and so on. I put the pot pamphlet down. I was in a tough spot. There was nothing I could say in my lecture that wouldn't step on toes or get me in trouble. So, when I saw the kid next, I handed him back the binder and repeated my original thesis statement: "I think drug education is important, but I also believe that individuals should have the freedom to choose what they put in their bodies." And I politely declined his invitation.
A few days later, in my Thursday Oral English class, I noticed a new student who was sitting by himself, talking to himself, and not participating in the lesson whatsoever. As I was making my rounds, he called me over and invited me to sit with him, so I did.
"Teacher, I have three questions for you."
"Shoot," I said.
"Number one: tell me about American history and culture."
"You might have to be more specific."
"Okay. Tell me how American history made American culture."
"Well," I said, "um."
I took a long gulp of coffee and then I wove a tapestry of bullshit that took us from the American Revolution to Public Enemy. My student (or was he my student?) was satisfied and moved on to question two.
"Tell me about the most recent advancements in American weapons technology," he said.
"You know, I really don't know much about that," I said. "I'm not in the military and I don't work for the government. Well, I mean, I do, but I'm in the wrong branch of the service. Anyway, I imagine that we have plenty of weapons as it is. Look, I gotta teach a class ... "
Yesterday afternoon, I was making a break for the bathroom between classes and a girl stopped me in the hall.
"Excuse me, sir," she said. "I am collecting 365 notes for my boyfriend because I love him so much. Please help me."
She handed me a pen and a little green post-it note.
"Who am I addressing this to?" I asked.
"Bai Li-Jie," she said.
Here is what I wrote:
Li-Jie,
You are a lucky man. You have a beautiful girlfriend who loves you very much.
Warm regards,
-Keith
This afternoon, a girl snagged me on the way out of class and asked me for my thoughts on college students who study mental health issues. She had to write a thesis, she said.
"Can you be more specific?" I asked. "Do you want my opinion on mental health education, or the reasons people study psychology, or ... "
"I am writing a thesis and I don't know what to write about."
"Well," I said, and I wove another tapestry that took us from Freud to electroshock therapy to Prozac.
"Thank you," she said. "That helps me very much."
She followed me onto the Number 5 bus.
"I'm so sad because I don't have a foreign teacher," she said. "How many foreigners are at our school?"
"Six or seven," I said, "but I'm the only one teaching at the old campus."
"Oh, you must be a very great teacher!"
"Or a very old teacher."
"No, you are look very young!"
"I'm 26," I said.
"That is very close to me. I am 24," she said. "Old enough!"
"Hey, look. There's my stop."
A few weeks ago, a student raised his hand and asked me whether I believed in God.
"No," I said. There was a brief round of applause. I was momentarily relieved to be in China.
"I believe in the goodness of the universe," I said, "and the human attempt to understand it."
It wasn't until I was on the bus back home that I realized, yes: that is precisely what I believe.
A few weeks ago, a pudgy and bespectacled college kid came tiptoeing up to me in the teachers' lounge. He was not one of my students.
"Excuse me, foreign teacher," he said, "but I have question for you."
He wanted to know my thoughts on drug education.
"Can you be more specific?" I asked. "Do you mean the bad kind of drugs?"
He nodded emphatically. I shrugged. Well, I said, I think drug education is important, but I also believe that individuals should have the freedom to choose what they put in their bodies.
"Okay, I bring some information for you next time," he said. We shook hands and he was gone.
The next week, the kid resurfaced with a laminate binder full of good ol' government-issue American anti-drug literature. He told me to take the stuff home, look over it, and return the next week with a prepared speech: he wanted me to give a lecture in his class. So, on a bored Tuesday evening, I broke open the binder and read all about the horrors of marijuana, hallucinogens, crack cocaine and The Horse. It was a nostalgic flashback to my D.A.R.E. days, the Reefer Madness films, the no-saying to everything. "Marijuana induces false feelings of euphoria and happiness. Pot smokers become anxious and paranoid." But, I asked myself, if the euphoria and happiness are artificial, aren't the anxiety and paranoia equally so? Or if the anxiety and paranoia are real, isn't the euphoria ... and so on. I put the pot pamphlet down. I was in a tough spot. There was nothing I could say in my lecture that wouldn't step on toes or get me in trouble. So, when I saw the kid next, I handed him back the binder and repeated my original thesis statement: "I think drug education is important, but I also believe that individuals should have the freedom to choose what they put in their bodies." And I politely declined his invitation.
A few days later, in my Thursday Oral English class, I noticed a new student who was sitting by himself, talking to himself, and not participating in the lesson whatsoever. As I was making my rounds, he called me over and invited me to sit with him, so I did.
"Teacher, I have three questions for you."
"Shoot," I said.
"Number one: tell me about American history and culture."
"You might have to be more specific."
"Okay. Tell me how American history made American culture."
"Well," I said, "um."
I took a long gulp of coffee and then I wove a tapestry of bullshit that took us from the American Revolution to Public Enemy. My student (or was he my student?) was satisfied and moved on to question two.
"Tell me about the most recent advancements in American weapons technology," he said.
"You know, I really don't know much about that," I said. "I'm not in the military and I don't work for the government. Well, I mean, I do, but I'm in the wrong branch of the service. Anyway, I imagine that we have plenty of weapons as it is. Look, I gotta teach a class ... "
Yesterday afternoon, I was making a break for the bathroom between classes and a girl stopped me in the hall.
"Excuse me, sir," she said. "I am collecting 365 notes for my boyfriend because I love him so much. Please help me."
She handed me a pen and a little green post-it note.
"Who am I addressing this to?" I asked.
"Bai Li-Jie," she said.
Here is what I wrote:
Li-Jie,
You are a lucky man. You have a beautiful girlfriend who loves you very much.
Warm regards,
-Keith
This afternoon, a girl snagged me on the way out of class and asked me for my thoughts on college students who study mental health issues. She had to write a thesis, she said.
"Can you be more specific?" I asked. "Do you want my opinion on mental health education, or the reasons people study psychology, or ... "
"I am writing a thesis and I don't know what to write about."
"Well," I said, and I wove another tapestry that took us from Freud to electroshock therapy to Prozac.
"Thank you," she said. "That helps me very much."
She followed me onto the Number 5 bus.
"I'm so sad because I don't have a foreign teacher," she said. "How many foreigners are at our school?"
"Six or seven," I said, "but I'm the only one teaching at the old campus."
"Oh, you must be a very great teacher!"
"Or a very old teacher."
"No, you are look very young!"
"I'm 26," I said.
"That is very close to me. I am 24," she said. "Old enough!"
"Hey, look. There's my stop."
A few weeks ago, a student raised his hand and asked me whether I believed in God.
"No," I said. There was a brief round of applause. I was momentarily relieved to be in China.
"I believe in the goodness of the universe," I said, "and the human attempt to understand it."
It wasn't until I was on the bus back home that I realized, yes: that is precisely what I believe.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Cloud City
I woke up on National Day with a brain full of smog and a great wall of mucous obstructing my sinuses. I could hear the National Day Parade echoing in the halls, so like the rest of China, I turned on the TV and sat down in my underwear to watch it. Walt Disney meets Kim Jong-Il: a trillion dollars worth of long-range warheads scrolling past, followed by pastel papier-mâché floats overflowing with oompa-loompas, emperors and astronauts. The premier, arms crossed over his chest, appeared pleased with his people's display of military might and camp.
I napped off the rest of the day, played Mario Kart with the Mennonites for a bit, and slept off the rest of the night. The next morning, I threw a pair of underwear, some mismatched socks, and three indie rock t-shirts in a backpack and caught a taxi to the bus station. I was bound for Yunyang, a small town in Chongqing Province, whose name, I am told, means "Cloud City."
Public transportation in China has a way of making you kneel down to kiss the ground of wherever you wind up. You find solace in the bus driver's age: he couldn't have lived to see fifty if he were an incompetent driver, or a homicidal maniac. These are your thoughts as you and the person sitting next to you grow suddenly silent because your bus is passing a police car at 140 kilometers an hour on a two-lane highway - the driver is on the phone - and you're careening towards another onrushing police car, who flashes his brights but keeps on coming. The bus driver leans on the horn. Just as you start to murmur the Lord's Prayer and fondle rosary beads that aren't there, the driver veers you back into the right lane, averting death by a ramen noodle, puts down the phone and lights up a cigarette.
The bus driver was something of a comedian. He insisted that I sit next to him, which gave me a front-row seat for all his interstate acrobatics, and made me the butt of his jokes. About eighty kilometers out of Nanchong, he stopped on the side of the road to pick up his sidekick, his co-pilot, the Kevin Eubanks to his Jay Leno. Leno wisecracked, delivered aimless monologues, cursed at slow-moving vegetable trucks; Eubanks cackled and slapped the dashboard. Eventually, I had to pee in the worst way.
"Excuse me," I said to Leno. "I need to use the bathroom."
Leno cackled. Eubanks slapped the dashboard.
"It's three hours to Yunyang, laowai!" Leno shouted over the squawk of the horn. "But if you really must pee, perhaps we can stop on the side of the road."
Determined to save face, I held my water for three hours. Meanwhile, Leno kept the laughs a-coming. I couldn't understand whatever dialect it was that he was speaking, but he and Eubanks kept looking at me and cackling. The whole front half of the bus was vastly amused. At one point, he gestured towards me and said, "This laowai doesn't understand what I'm saying!" That much, of course, I could understand.
China is like Gulliver's Travels in that you can ride 200 kilometers in a bus and find yourself among lilliputians or houyhnhnms who speak an incomprehensible local dialect and live in their own incomprehensible local way. So it was with Yunyang, the Cloud City. It should perhaps be renamed Cloud City II, or Yunyang, Jr., as the original was wiped out by the floods that drowned the towns along the Yangtze after the completion of the Three Gorges Dam. Fifteen years ago, the inhabitants of Old Yunyang packed up and rerooted themselves on the side of a mountain. New Yunyang was hastily stacked in terraces, four of them, such that if you live on the top level, you can peer over the artificial canyon's edge and see Matchbox cars and ant-sized humans scurrying around on the bottom level. The sidewalks on the top terrace are pocked with drainage holes - which the Yunyang Peace Corps volunteers call "death" - that look down onto heaps of sewage-drenched garbage four stories below. Some of the deaths are grated with reebar, others are covered in Plexiglas. Children like to dance around on the deaths while their parents sip tea and play mahjongg.
Because the top level of Cloud City is way up in the stratosphere, the preferred mode of transportation in Yunyang is not the taxi, the bus, or the bicycle rickshaw: Yunyangers take the stairs. From above, the city looks like an Escher painting. There are stairwells that rise so high that if you take the steps two at a time your ears pop and if you race back down to the bottom you get the bends. There are secret stairwells that take you through a wormhole to the opposite end of town. There are stairwells that lead nowhere. There are stairwells which loop around so that you wind up precisely where you started. Yunyang holds an annual motorcycle race up the biggest stairwell in town, although I am told that it is not as thrilling as it sounds, because they only race one motorcycle at a time.
As far as I know, there are three foreigners in Yunyang. Two of them are my friends. The third was rumored to be a fat Cuban girl, but I am now informed that he is a musclebound Cameroonian man. My arrival in Cloud City was greeted with much fanfare. The university staff took me out for a night of mahjongg, Moutai, and moongazing.
I know enough mahjongg vocabulary to show my opponents that I am not ignorant of the rules or the language, but that I am a colossal idiot nonetheless. We played twenty games before dinner and I lost all of them but one. It was like Gary Kasperov, Bobby Fischer and Big Blue vs. a malfunctioning Apple IIe computer. My only triumph was a cheap one, largely owed to the dean of the university, who took control of my mahjongg tiles and slid them around the table in such a way that I came out the victor.
We sat down for dinner. I sensed that these were my kind of people. They were absurdists. The dean of the music department - a lanky fellow with an Arnold Schwarzenegger voice - drank and crooned and toasted the laowais once a minute. We talked about language: the universal language of people who cannot understand each other. Someone busted out the Moutai - a vile but expensive rice liquor that comes in little gasoline cans - and I was coerced into drinking two glasses of the stuff before I broke down and pleaded for a beer. We ate until we could eat no more, then the Dean of Music stood up and barked, in English, "Let's look at moon!" We went outside. It was raining. The Dean of Music raised a finger. "I am go get beer," he proclaimed, "so we drink beer and look at moon!" Again, these were my kind of people.
We took the stairs as high as we could and got so close to the moon that you could smell the moondust. But the moon was invisible, covered in natural and artificial Cloud City clouds. We took the stairs back down to ground level and closed out the night huddled under a nylon canopy on the side of the road. We played a drinking game that I could not understand, and even after I understood it, could not play because it involved numbers.
"Five! Fifteen! Twenty-five! Drink," the Dean of Music shouted. "Ten! Twenty! Thirty-five! Drink."
It turned out one of the guys was a tai-chi instructor, so we took to the street, foreigners and Chinese alike, and lined up in a row. A crowd of bao-bao men gathered to watch. Our sensei slinked along the sidewalk, chopping the air in slow-mo with a bottle of booze in his free hand, and we recited the mantra familiar to all English-speaking novices in the Way of the Supreme Ultimate Fist: "One big watermelon. I cut it in half. One for you. One for me. I don't want either of them."
I napped off the rest of the day, played Mario Kart with the Mennonites for a bit, and slept off the rest of the night. The next morning, I threw a pair of underwear, some mismatched socks, and three indie rock t-shirts in a backpack and caught a taxi to the bus station. I was bound for Yunyang, a small town in Chongqing Province, whose name, I am told, means "Cloud City."
Public transportation in China has a way of making you kneel down to kiss the ground of wherever you wind up. You find solace in the bus driver's age: he couldn't have lived to see fifty if he were an incompetent driver, or a homicidal maniac. These are your thoughts as you and the person sitting next to you grow suddenly silent because your bus is passing a police car at 140 kilometers an hour on a two-lane highway - the driver is on the phone - and you're careening towards another onrushing police car, who flashes his brights but keeps on coming. The bus driver leans on the horn. Just as you start to murmur the Lord's Prayer and fondle rosary beads that aren't there, the driver veers you back into the right lane, averting death by a ramen noodle, puts down the phone and lights up a cigarette.
The bus driver was something of a comedian. He insisted that I sit next to him, which gave me a front-row seat for all his interstate acrobatics, and made me the butt of his jokes. About eighty kilometers out of Nanchong, he stopped on the side of the road to pick up his sidekick, his co-pilot, the Kevin Eubanks to his Jay Leno. Leno wisecracked, delivered aimless monologues, cursed at slow-moving vegetable trucks; Eubanks cackled and slapped the dashboard. Eventually, I had to pee in the worst way.
"Excuse me," I said to Leno. "I need to use the bathroom."
Leno cackled. Eubanks slapped the dashboard.
"It's three hours to Yunyang, laowai!" Leno shouted over the squawk of the horn. "But if you really must pee, perhaps we can stop on the side of the road."
Determined to save face, I held my water for three hours. Meanwhile, Leno kept the laughs a-coming. I couldn't understand whatever dialect it was that he was speaking, but he and Eubanks kept looking at me and cackling. The whole front half of the bus was vastly amused. At one point, he gestured towards me and said, "This laowai doesn't understand what I'm saying!" That much, of course, I could understand.
China is like Gulliver's Travels in that you can ride 200 kilometers in a bus and find yourself among lilliputians or houyhnhnms who speak an incomprehensible local dialect and live in their own incomprehensible local way. So it was with Yunyang, the Cloud City. It should perhaps be renamed Cloud City II, or Yunyang, Jr., as the original was wiped out by the floods that drowned the towns along the Yangtze after the completion of the Three Gorges Dam. Fifteen years ago, the inhabitants of Old Yunyang packed up and rerooted themselves on the side of a mountain. New Yunyang was hastily stacked in terraces, four of them, such that if you live on the top level, you can peer over the artificial canyon's edge and see Matchbox cars and ant-sized humans scurrying around on the bottom level. The sidewalks on the top terrace are pocked with drainage holes - which the Yunyang Peace Corps volunteers call "death" - that look down onto heaps of sewage-drenched garbage four stories below. Some of the deaths are grated with reebar, others are covered in Plexiglas. Children like to dance around on the deaths while their parents sip tea and play mahjongg.
Because the top level of Cloud City is way up in the stratosphere, the preferred mode of transportation in Yunyang is not the taxi, the bus, or the bicycle rickshaw: Yunyangers take the stairs. From above, the city looks like an Escher painting. There are stairwells that rise so high that if you take the steps two at a time your ears pop and if you race back down to the bottom you get the bends. There are secret stairwells that take you through a wormhole to the opposite end of town. There are stairwells that lead nowhere. There are stairwells which loop around so that you wind up precisely where you started. Yunyang holds an annual motorcycle race up the biggest stairwell in town, although I am told that it is not as thrilling as it sounds, because they only race one motorcycle at a time.
As far as I know, there are three foreigners in Yunyang. Two of them are my friends. The third was rumored to be a fat Cuban girl, but I am now informed that he is a musclebound Cameroonian man. My arrival in Cloud City was greeted with much fanfare. The university staff took me out for a night of mahjongg, Moutai, and moongazing.
I know enough mahjongg vocabulary to show my opponents that I am not ignorant of the rules or the language, but that I am a colossal idiot nonetheless. We played twenty games before dinner and I lost all of them but one. It was like Gary Kasperov, Bobby Fischer and Big Blue vs. a malfunctioning Apple IIe computer. My only triumph was a cheap one, largely owed to the dean of the university, who took control of my mahjongg tiles and slid them around the table in such a way that I came out the victor.
We sat down for dinner. I sensed that these were my kind of people. They were absurdists. The dean of the music department - a lanky fellow with an Arnold Schwarzenegger voice - drank and crooned and toasted the laowais once a minute. We talked about language: the universal language of people who cannot understand each other. Someone busted out the Moutai - a vile but expensive rice liquor that comes in little gasoline cans - and I was coerced into drinking two glasses of the stuff before I broke down and pleaded for a beer. We ate until we could eat no more, then the Dean of Music stood up and barked, in English, "Let's look at moon!" We went outside. It was raining. The Dean of Music raised a finger. "I am go get beer," he proclaimed, "so we drink beer and look at moon!" Again, these were my kind of people.
We took the stairs as high as we could and got so close to the moon that you could smell the moondust. But the moon was invisible, covered in natural and artificial Cloud City clouds. We took the stairs back down to ground level and closed out the night huddled under a nylon canopy on the side of the road. We played a drinking game that I could not understand, and even after I understood it, could not play because it involved numbers.
"Five! Fifteen! Twenty-five! Drink," the Dean of Music shouted. "Ten! Twenty! Thirty-five! Drink."
It turned out one of the guys was a tai-chi instructor, so we took to the street, foreigners and Chinese alike, and lined up in a row. A crowd of bao-bao men gathered to watch. Our sensei slinked along the sidewalk, chopping the air in slow-mo with a bottle of booze in his free hand, and we recited the mantra familiar to all English-speaking novices in the Way of the Supreme Ultimate Fist: "One big watermelon. I cut it in half. One for you. One for me. I don't want either of them."
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Let's get this dog a bath
I came in from the rain and passing the fun house mirror in the lobby I fussed my hair into place and fixed my professorial collars. By the stairwell, a man in a blue blazer was kneeled over a mud-splashed poodle. "You're dirty," he said to the poodle. "Let me give you a bath." I was pleased with myself for understanding this little dialogue, and pleased that the man was going to bathe the poodle. He picked up the dog and lugged it into the teacher's lounge, where one of his colleagues chewed him out for carrying around such a filthy beast. He drew a bath in the sink.
I went upstairs and taught two hours of Oral English. Today's topic: Mission to Mars. Earth is going down the tubes; we are sending forth our best and brightest to colonize space, etc., etc. To my surprise, our Model U.N. selected the homosexual Canadian physicist, the manic-depressive Japanese astronaut, the lesbian doctor from Zimbabwe, and the alcoholic Russian biologist as the seeds of humanity on The Red Planet. Nobody voted for Song Min-Tao, the 63-year-old Chinese novelist.
I haven't written much about China because I haven't been able to settle into any sort of existential groove. My first two months were an exercise in communal living. I stayed with a host family and the Peace Corps kept me busy with a daily regimen of Nescafe, language classes, antidiarrheal seminars, and beer. Everything I wrote during that time reminded me of Ayn Rand's Anthem - we did this, we did that - so I wasn't inclined to post any of it.
Then, on the first of September, I was shipped out to Nanchong, Sichuan: my home for the next two years. I spent the first thirty days recovering from the shock of landing. It was easily the roughest month I have ever spent abroad, though I am unable to articulate why it was so. But I am gradually recovering from the denial that tends to hit me once I realize that I am stuck in a particular location for a particular length of time. I have found a good coffee hook-up and I have amassed a solid jazz library. The university has set me up with a Mandarin tutor and the street vendors all know me by name. This is what the Chinese call guanxi: connections. Guanxi isn't so hard to come by if you're a laowai living in China, particularly if you're a laowai who sports a ginger beard and a grin.
I am a teacher of Oral English at China West Normal University in Nanchong, an obscure city the size of Denver. Nanchong is home to three KFCs, a McDonald's, and eight laowais, of which I am one. (Most of those eight laowais are Mennonites. I am not a Mennonite.) My students are juniors majoring in English education. My apartment is on the fourth floor of a building that looks over the rubble of an unfinished student center whose architect seems to have had The Epcot Center in mind. Cuisine: the local specialty is a dish of spicy noodles served cold. Nightlife: nonexistent. Transportation: blood-curdling. Percentage of Nanchong college students who scream hello at the passing laowai: 63%. Hello, China. Hello.
I went upstairs and taught two hours of Oral English. Today's topic: Mission to Mars. Earth is going down the tubes; we are sending forth our best and brightest to colonize space, etc., etc. To my surprise, our Model U.N. selected the homosexual Canadian physicist, the manic-depressive Japanese astronaut, the lesbian doctor from Zimbabwe, and the alcoholic Russian biologist as the seeds of humanity on The Red Planet. Nobody voted for Song Min-Tao, the 63-year-old Chinese novelist.
I haven't written much about China because I haven't been able to settle into any sort of existential groove. My first two months were an exercise in communal living. I stayed with a host family and the Peace Corps kept me busy with a daily regimen of Nescafe, language classes, antidiarrheal seminars, and beer. Everything I wrote during that time reminded me of Ayn Rand's Anthem - we did this, we did that - so I wasn't inclined to post any of it.
Then, on the first of September, I was shipped out to Nanchong, Sichuan: my home for the next two years. I spent the first thirty days recovering from the shock of landing. It was easily the roughest month I have ever spent abroad, though I am unable to articulate why it was so. But I am gradually recovering from the denial that tends to hit me once I realize that I am stuck in a particular location for a particular length of time. I have found a good coffee hook-up and I have amassed a solid jazz library. The university has set me up with a Mandarin tutor and the street vendors all know me by name. This is what the Chinese call guanxi: connections. Guanxi isn't so hard to come by if you're a laowai living in China, particularly if you're a laowai who sports a ginger beard and a grin.
I am a teacher of Oral English at China West Normal University in Nanchong, an obscure city the size of Denver. Nanchong is home to three KFCs, a McDonald's, and eight laowais, of which I am one. (Most of those eight laowais are Mennonites. I am not a Mennonite.) My students are juniors majoring in English education. My apartment is on the fourth floor of a building that looks over the rubble of an unfinished student center whose architect seems to have had The Epcot Center in mind. Cuisine: the local specialty is a dish of spicy noodles served cold. Nightlife: nonexistent. Transportation: blood-curdling. Percentage of Nanchong college students who scream hello at the passing laowai: 63%. Hello, China. Hello.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Timeline
My blog was recently added to the Peace Corps Journals website, so I need to get my shit together. Anyone who stumbles across Expatriate Act in its present form will observe that there are more entries about kimchi than there are about the Peace Corps and China combined. They will also notice that I don't write very often. I vow henceforth to be more consistent and less cryptic. But in the meantime, for those of you new readers who are curious about who I am and how I came to the decision to sign away two years of my life to the U.S. Peace Force, here is a timeline of the events and non-events that pushed me to the edge of the diving board upon which I am now perched, shivering in my idealistic Speedo.
Let's go with the present tense, shall we?
June 23rd, 2008
I wake up in a pile of medical records on a hardwood floor in the Schöneberg district of Berlin. My roommate is snoring, so I take a shower and spend close to an hour massaging the crick out of my lower back and scrubbing away the carbon ink stains that seep into one's skin when one is reduced to sleeping in a pile of one's medical records. As I return to the bedroom, covering my genitals with a handtowel, a board creaks underfoot. My roommate snorts, flips over, and resumes snoring. I decide to join the Peace Corps.
June 24th
I complete my Peace Corps application. I email three references and assure them that I am not asking for money. My references are wary but receptive.
In the meanwhile
Life in Berlin cannot be sustained much longer. I am teaching six hours a week. The exchange rate has reduced me to cheese slices and Nutella. Under duress, I take up smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, which I can neither roll nor smoke very well.
August 13th
I am interviewed over the telephone. I stammer and talk too much. The interviewer seems neither impressed nor disappointed with my performance, which only adds to my anxiety. By the end of it, the desktop is basted in engine coolant. I hang up the phone, convinced that I won't get into the Peace Corps. I resume my search for organic farm work in Tuscany.
Sometime in August
I give up on Berlin. A teary-eyed farewell to the snoring roommate. Leaving half of my possessions behind, I walk out into a 5 AM squall, clunking my wheeled luggage down a cobblestone road until I find a taxi to take me to the airport.
The flight home is overbooked, so the kind (albeit smarmy) people at American Airlines offer me a free night's stay in Berlin, along with several thousands of frequent flier miles. But I am so delirious that I decline the offer and board the plane. Twelve hours later, I arrive in New York to find that my connecting flight has been canceled. I find the cheapest available hotel room, a $250 unmade bed on the 19th floor of a bombed-out Holiday Inn in Jamaica. I sleep for sixteen hours and catch a plane to Chicago the next evening. Because my connecting flight to Omaha has long since departed, I have to reschedule for the following morning, which carries a surcharge that costs more than the ticket. For the third time in my life, I collapse on a bench at Chicago O'Hare and wake up to the whirring of the 5 AM floor buffers.
September
After a two-week furlough in Nebraska, I set off to teach English in Mexico. At some point, I learn that I have indeed been accepted into the Peace Corps and that they are considering placing me somewhere in Central Asia. I keep my fingers crossed for China and my toes crossed for Kyrgyzstan.
October
Mongolia it is. Tentative date of departure: May, 2009.
November
The more I read up on Mongolia, the more squeamish I become. The image that comes to mind is of a yurt, windblasted and utterly alone, trembling upon a frozen alkali flat. Hermitage will teach me a lot about myself, I figure, but do I really want to know that much about myself?
January 16th
The mierda hits the ventilador. Spiraling towards bankruptcy, my school gives me the boot and wants me out of town by the end of the week. I spend a lot of time pacing around my room and swearing. In the midst of all this, the Peace Corps sends me a typically brief email which illuminates nothing. They want me to call them ASAP and after many failed attempts, I get through to them.
"Well," says my placement officer, "I know you're supposed to be headed to Mongolia in May, but we've had another position open up."
I try to sound as disinterested as my adrenaline will allow.
"It's with a university teaching program," he says, "and it's in ... the People's Republic of China."
"The People's Republic of China," I murmur. "Ah, yes. I've heard of it."
(I am pumping my fists and jumping on the bed.)
"It starts in July. You still have the option of serving in Mongolia, should you so desire. We'll give you about a week to deci -"
"Let's do China," I sputter.
"... whoa-kay. You're sure about this?"
"Yes. Count me in."
I spend the rest of the night trumpeting the happy news to coworkers, students, taco vendors, mariachis, nuns, rodeo clowns, narcotraffickers: I ... am ... going ... to ... China! But no one is as excited as I am, so at the end of the night, I throw a fiesta de autocompasión on my balcony, with four green sauce burritos and a bottle of Indio (con limón).
The rest you probably don't care to read about, and I don't care to write about it, either. EKGs and x-rays. Coughs and turns. Hepatitis vaccines A through Z. A tussle with a baby raccoon: may need rabies shots. Passport applications. Visa applications. Nagging doubts. Long, reflective car rides. I leave in 14 days.
Let's go with the present tense, shall we?
June 23rd, 2008
I wake up in a pile of medical records on a hardwood floor in the Schöneberg district of Berlin. My roommate is snoring, so I take a shower and spend close to an hour massaging the crick out of my lower back and scrubbing away the carbon ink stains that seep into one's skin when one is reduced to sleeping in a pile of one's medical records. As I return to the bedroom, covering my genitals with a handtowel, a board creaks underfoot. My roommate snorts, flips over, and resumes snoring. I decide to join the Peace Corps.
June 24th
I complete my Peace Corps application. I email three references and assure them that I am not asking for money. My references are wary but receptive.
In the meanwhile
Life in Berlin cannot be sustained much longer. I am teaching six hours a week. The exchange rate has reduced me to cheese slices and Nutella. Under duress, I take up smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, which I can neither roll nor smoke very well.
August 13th
I am interviewed over the telephone. I stammer and talk too much. The interviewer seems neither impressed nor disappointed with my performance, which only adds to my anxiety. By the end of it, the desktop is basted in engine coolant. I hang up the phone, convinced that I won't get into the Peace Corps. I resume my search for organic farm work in Tuscany.
Sometime in August
I give up on Berlin. A teary-eyed farewell to the snoring roommate. Leaving half of my possessions behind, I walk out into a 5 AM squall, clunking my wheeled luggage down a cobblestone road until I find a taxi to take me to the airport.
The flight home is overbooked, so the kind (albeit smarmy) people at American Airlines offer me a free night's stay in Berlin, along with several thousands of frequent flier miles. But I am so delirious that I decline the offer and board the plane. Twelve hours later, I arrive in New York to find that my connecting flight has been canceled. I find the cheapest available hotel room, a $250 unmade bed on the 19th floor of a bombed-out Holiday Inn in Jamaica. I sleep for sixteen hours and catch a plane to Chicago the next evening. Because my connecting flight to Omaha has long since departed, I have to reschedule for the following morning, which carries a surcharge that costs more than the ticket. For the third time in my life, I collapse on a bench at Chicago O'Hare and wake up to the whirring of the 5 AM floor buffers.
September
After a two-week furlough in Nebraska, I set off to teach English in Mexico. At some point, I learn that I have indeed been accepted into the Peace Corps and that they are considering placing me somewhere in Central Asia. I keep my fingers crossed for China and my toes crossed for Kyrgyzstan.
October
Mongolia it is. Tentative date of departure: May, 2009.
November
The more I read up on Mongolia, the more squeamish I become. The image that comes to mind is of a yurt, windblasted and utterly alone, trembling upon a frozen alkali flat. Hermitage will teach me a lot about myself, I figure, but do I really want to know that much about myself?
January 16th
The mierda hits the ventilador. Spiraling towards bankruptcy, my school gives me the boot and wants me out of town by the end of the week. I spend a lot of time pacing around my room and swearing. In the midst of all this, the Peace Corps sends me a typically brief email which illuminates nothing. They want me to call them ASAP and after many failed attempts, I get through to them.
"Well," says my placement officer, "I know you're supposed to be headed to Mongolia in May, but we've had another position open up."
I try to sound as disinterested as my adrenaline will allow.
"It's with a university teaching program," he says, "and it's in ... the People's Republic of China."
"The People's Republic of China," I murmur. "Ah, yes. I've heard of it."
(I am pumping my fists and jumping on the bed.)
"It starts in July. You still have the option of serving in Mongolia, should you so desire. We'll give you about a week to deci -"
"Let's do China," I sputter.
"... whoa-kay. You're sure about this?"
"Yes. Count me in."
I spend the rest of the night trumpeting the happy news to coworkers, students, taco vendors, mariachis, nuns, rodeo clowns, narcotraffickers: I ... am ... going ... to ... China! But no one is as excited as I am, so at the end of the night, I throw a fiesta de autocompasión on my balcony, with four green sauce burritos and a bottle of Indio (con limón).
The rest you probably don't care to read about, and I don't care to write about it, either. EKGs and x-rays. Coughs and turns. Hepatitis vaccines A through Z. A tussle with a baby raccoon: may need rabies shots. Passport applications. Visa applications. Nagging doubts. Long, reflective car rides. I leave in 14 days.
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Wanderlove
Wanderlust is not a sustainable resource. Within weeks of my arrival in the textile capital of South Korea, the Asian novelty wore off and I saw that an Asian microwave was just a microwave, that a job was a job was a job, and that the same scrabbling for cash was going on all over the world. My pent-up reserves of suburban rage evaporated. I no longer thirsted for Monte Cristo revenge against the jocks who scribbled nasty things on my book covers in 8th grade. I discovered that my problems had followed me, undetected, through any number of security checkpoints and customs inspections.
And yet I kept traveling because I had nothing better to do. In a poof of coal dust, I appeared in a woebegone Polish mining town. Then I washed ashore in Mexico. Wanderlust, I suppose, had congealed into something like wanderlove. I worked and went jogging at night, drank with multiethnic hipsters, did the same sorts of things I would have been doing in Omaha. I certainly wasn't roughing it and I only backpacked in the sense that I kept a backpack full of underwear and often traveled without an itinerary.
In 28 days, I will embark on my last great adventure: two years in China, serving as a buck private in the U.S. Peace Corps. I am, of course, looking forward to doing all of the cultural bonding you're supposed to write about in a Peace Corps application essay. But I am not unaware of the fact that returning to the U.S. fluent in Mandarin will be more lucrative in the long run than sticking around Omaha and fighting off the wolves with a Bachelor's in Creative Writing. My 22-year-old self shudders in his idealistic cocoon: lucrative, Future Keith, honestly? But at a certain point in one's mid-twenties, for emotional and chiropractic reasons, sleeping on a futon loses its Bohemian luster and what one wants most of all is a comfortable bed, preferably with someone else in it. And two cats in the yard, while you're at it.
And yet I kept traveling because I had nothing better to do. In a poof of coal dust, I appeared in a woebegone Polish mining town. Then I washed ashore in Mexico. Wanderlust, I suppose, had congealed into something like wanderlove. I worked and went jogging at night, drank with multiethnic hipsters, did the same sorts of things I would have been doing in Omaha. I certainly wasn't roughing it and I only backpacked in the sense that I kept a backpack full of underwear and often traveled without an itinerary.
In 28 days, I will embark on my last great adventure: two years in China, serving as a buck private in the U.S. Peace Corps. I am, of course, looking forward to doing all of the cultural bonding you're supposed to write about in a Peace Corps application essay. But I am not unaware of the fact that returning to the U.S. fluent in Mandarin will be more lucrative in the long run than sticking around Omaha and fighting off the wolves with a Bachelor's in Creative Writing. My 22-year-old self shudders in his idealistic cocoon: lucrative, Future Keith, honestly? But at a certain point in one's mid-twenties, for emotional and chiropractic reasons, sleeping on a futon loses its Bohemian luster and what one wants most of all is a comfortable bed, preferably with someone else in it. And two cats in the yard, while you're at it.
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