Having Fun All The Time

I realized something today while watching a video on the New York Times web site called “The Continental Picture Show Series”.

The video is mostly silent, with written narration inserted in frames ala old-time-stilent movies.

It’s about birds, and visiting the oldest woman in America, or something like that.

It reminded me of W.G. Sebald’s novels, where he splices his stories with random photographs that seem to have no explanation, or only connect tangentially to the story.

The video, however, should have some connection to reality. But it has a surreal mood. Things definitely don’t connect to each other logically but obviously relate visually, emotionally, symbolically.

This is very much the case with Sebald’s books. And Kafka’s. And what I think that does is it makes the distinction between fiction and nonfiction less important. Kafka’s and Sebald’s books were fiction but there was a great deal of the author visible in each work. Just not literally — only symbolically, emotionally, intellectually. Everything connected but nothing connected.

This is extremely hard to do, I think. It’s much easier to write a story that has nothing real in it (surral needs real in order to be surreal, I guess, because it turns real on its head) and is pure fiction, or to write a story that is essentially autobiographical. Sebald and Kafka, and the creator of this video, I think, did both. They seem to inquire into reality deeply enough as to make the question of what is reality their real inquiry. In a way that you almost can’t detect or touch or rationalize.

I think this is important because we must accept that life is not simply a mediated form…everything we do is both fact and fiction; life is both a construct of our wills, an active narrative that we construct in the moment and in retrospect and looking forward; and it is also a series of random events with no meaning, no future intent or history or significance; it is both of those things at the same time. It is useful, I think, to inquire into that divide sufficiently enough to understand the ways that reality stands on its head.

It isn’t strictly surreal…I think “surrealism” is a much broader category. It’s just so inquisitive that we can understand it without understanding it. Like Kafka narrating, in the Castle, how time speeds up and slows down like an elastic plane; or like Sebald in the Emigrants narrating as a young man describing his uncle standing on the seashore and explaining that it is the edge of the darkness, with an underexposed black-and-white picture of a man standing on the seashore on the opposite page.

Or it’s like theses weird birds in this video flying across the road in Iowa.

After being in china for only six months, one of the things I have noticed is that everybody is starting or has started a business of his/her own, and if a person hasn’t started a business, he or she probably has an eye on starting one sometime, whatever it might be.

Sometimes these are small businesses that don’t go much further than supporting the person’s family or providing extra income outside his/her primary job. Sometimes, if the person has a fair amount of sense and is good at navigating the hoops of maintaining an enterprise in this country (keeping customers and bureaucrats happy) the business becomes more successful, and he or she can have a very comfortable life, even by Western standards, or even more than that.

I only really have a few examples, but just those examples are enough to convince me that in China there is a serious spirit of entrepreneurship and business-starting. I’m going to wait till the end of the post to give you my examples because first I want to point out that the reason this stands out so much for me is because back in the U.S. I don’t really know anyone my age or even significantly older than me who has seriously put work into starting a business, let alone gone the whole way and really started a business on his/her own.

That seems totally unthinkable to me – that someone I know in the U.S. would have started a business and had it take off and managed to support himself/herself on the proceeds. I mean, think about it. Who do you know who has done that? The vast majority of my friends and relations in the U.S. are not thinking about starting something up to work for themselves. They are, at best, working a steady job for a corporation, nonprofit, or the state, or they are going to school, or working for a school; at worst they have no job at all and they are applying to Starbucks or Borders or some other huge retail/service chain, basically resigned to the idea that they are going to have to punch a clock to shovel shit for a wage or if they’re lucky a salary…and at the end of the day whatever profit is seen will fall into the pocket of a few guys in suits in a boardroom somewhere.

Maybe it’s just the company I keep back home that gives me this view…maybe in the U.S. I only hung out with types who weren’t likely to get charged up about the economics of life to try to start a business, but I really think there’s more to it than that. The few people I’ve met who have openly speculated to me about the prospects of starting a business in the U.S. were people who had been bred to do so because they grew up in a wealthy family, and had no real need to think about the possibility of having to work an ordinary job. Everybody else, the middle-class people I know from home, basically planned to work for a larger organization of some kind. The idea of starting a school, or a restaurant, or a bakery, or a car service, or a web site…it didn’t occur to them. Why is that? Doesn’t that sound backwards? That people in the Land of Opportunity wouldn’t really have that much interest in starting up businesses? Does that strike anyone else as marginally true (i.e. that most of the people they know don’t seem to talk/think about starting a business)?

The reasons for that may be too many to even fathom. Maybe it’s because in America there actually is a lot of security in a day-job, whereas in China most day-job workers don’t make enough money to have a comfortable life (the teachers at my university certainly don’t) and often don’t get the nice benefits that many Americans get in their day-jobs. Maybe it’s because many of the day-jobs in China aren’t nearly as nice as the day-jobs in America (i.e., nice corporate offices, nice desks and computers, windows next to desk, designer furniture, plenty of meetings to sleep through, etc. – versus the options in China: factory, construction worker, low-paid overworked teacher, etc.)

I will tell you one thing I have noticed a lot more since coming to China. I hear it when I read U.S. news or, honestly, when I watch the Daily Show and they show me what political figures in the U.S. are saying these days re: financial industry reform. “Don’t tax the rich, they’re the ones creating the jobs.” Those ten condescending words, which I’m sure every American has heard (over and over) over the past 10 years (if not more….10 years is really the full amount of time I’ve been at all politically aware) seem so contrary to every economic ideal America is supposed to be about it makes my head spin. And sitting here in China, where everybody knows that if you really want a job you’ve got to make it for yourself, it makes absolutely no sense and just sounds absurd. Which of course it is.

But where does it come from? Who says it? I must add the caveat here that I used to ask the same questions whenever I would hear American pop music back home. Who listens to this shit? Who churns it out and who consumes it? I know I don’t and no one I know does. So why is it so ubiquitous, so cloying, so pleasantly easy-to-swallow and yet obviously specious and wrong? Why is this shit everywhere? It’s like when you go swimming at the nearest Howard Johnson’s indoor pool and you go to use the bathroom and somebody has shit all over the floor and somehow it’s on the walls and the mirror too. Who the fuck went into the bathroom and shit everywhere? And why? What were they trying to achieve, except to make everybody else’s life just slightly wretched?

It would be easy to spin a conspiracy theory of some kind here about how corporate interests have blanketed the American television media with messages that benefit the priveleged few. And I’m not at all opposed to that explanation. But I think there’s got to be something more to it than that. In my eye America seems to have this history of innovation and brilliance and the will of the individual to innovate, adapt, change and build. A guy in America’s supposed to be able to come up with a good idea and start a business and run it the way he wants to run it, and have a good life because of his hard work. But why does that seem like a few-and-far-between kind of thing in America now? And why are so many people I know consigned to lives beneath fluorescent lights in the U.S., in shitty offices with shitty cubicles doing stuff they don’t care about. Basically sitting for eight hours a day in a HoJo’s bathroom that has been hand-painted with human shit?

I don’t get it. I think my idea here is a little underformed and I don’t really have any empirical evidence to back up what I’m saying, just anecdotal evidence. But here are the examples of people I know here who are running businesses of their own.

An English teacher who runs and owns his own bar

An English teacher who runs his own school on the weekends and makes enough money to afford two apartments and a car (things that are way out of reach for most Chinese)

A young 30-year-old guy who is starting his own English school

A young 22-year-old girl who is starting up a photo shop with a photographer friend

A young economics teacher who does work consulting teaching management to local companies

A guy who opened a half-million-dollar (USD) exclusive tea-shop-club next to the steel mill in this town to serve steel mill executives

I don’t know very many teachers here…most of them are on this list. The majority of my friends here are students, and they’re the only ones who aren’t trying to start businesses, for obvious reasons. Everybody else…seems to be trying to start one. I’m sure I’ll keep meeting more people like that. And I think it’s safe to say that most foreigners who have spent some time in China over the last several years have noticed that there are a lot of people trying to start businesses.

It just seems right, in China, to start a business. And maybe that’s why China is developing and changing and growing so quickly – because a lot of people are chasing their proverbial piece of the pie, and that creates a lot of competition and productivity and economic pressure. I dunno. This is stuff I probably should not even bother thinking about. But it’s there. It’s been there ever since I graduated college and really had to think about my own economic survival. Because I don’t want to work for anybody, either. I don’t want to work for Starbucks or Borders, ever. I don’t want to wear an apron or a robe identical to that worn by 500,000 other baristas all across the Land of Opportunity. And I know too many smart and talented people who are doing or have had to do just that. And it seems backwards to me. Especially when I know how much money the guys at the top make for sitting in office chairs and holding their pencils.

Anyway, I think that’s all I have for today. Anybody who cares to chime in on this topic is more than welcome.

Thanks for reading HFATT.

<: 0 )

I realized today when I got a phone call from a Chinese person and took it without really any major communication problems that my Chinese has gotten a lot better in the past two months.

The thing that made me realize it was that the first successful phone conversation I had with a non-English-speaking Chinese person was only two months ago, and at the time, I was totally thrilled.

Obviously, the first conversation was sub-preschool level language use. The converstaion went something like this:

Me: Hello. Is XiaoLu there?

Other person: No. This is his mother.

Me: Oh, his mother. Hello.

Other person: XiaoLu will come back in something something. He went to something something.

Me: Where?

Other person: Something something. Are you that foreigner?

Me: Oh, yeah. I am.

Other person: Something something phone call.

Me: Oh. Can you have him call me later please?

Other person: Yes. Something.

Me: Thank you. Goodbye.

Other person: Bye-bye.

So maybe the word “sucessful” is too strong. But at the time, I thought it was cool that the basic function of a phone call had taken place. I didn’t just have to say “sorry, I don’t understand” and then hang up.

But the conversation today was much better. A guy from the online store where I buy clothes called because I hadn’t put my name on my order. So I gave him my name, and everything was fine. And I realized that I had basically understood everything he had said.

Maybe the reason this stuff is so interesting to me is because even though I studied French for five years before and during high school, I never really got good at it or had the chance to practice it in real-life situations. If you just memorize vocabulary and grammar when you’re learning a language, as a lot of students in the U.S. do (at least in New Hampshire when I was growing up — in cities and in places with more Spanish speakers I guess you could put the language to use) you never get the chance to stand on your feet in the language. You never know that with the sliver of vocabulary you have learned, it is possible to convey meaning.

Also, if you live in an single-language environment like I always did, even if you’re studying another language you’re probably not very likely to be able to speak it easily in the real language environment. For instance, when I studied French in high school we did go to Quebec on a field trip once. But the minute people opened their mouths, the language spilled out so fast and was pronounced so differently from how I pronounced it (meaning badly) that I didn’t really understand anything. Except hello.

Also, there is a lot of work to be done in between saying hello in a language and then actually speaking it. When I went to France in college for a week my pronounciation of “bonjour” was good enough at times to make people on the street think I actually spoke French. Which I didn’t really.

My point is basically that learning another language is totally interesting in itself, especially when you can walk out the door and talk to people who couldn’t speak English even if you wanted them to. And also that semi-off-the-beaten-path China has got to be the best place anywhere for learning another language, because even if you don’t feel like talking to strangers, strangers definitely want to talk to you.

Talking to cab drivers is another great way for me to measure my progress in learning the language. It’s about a 35-minute cab ride from downtown to my door, and cab drivers love to ask questions and talk (last week, one cab driver who I had apparently ridden with before actually offered me a cigarette and we both smoked as we headed back to the college). Of course, when I first got here, small talk with cab drivers was impossible. I felt lucky just to be able to make my destination clear to them verbally. But that has slowly changed.  First I was able to chat with them for 30 seconds, then a few minutes, then more like 10 minutes, and now, if I am reasonably creative, I can go almost 20 minutes without the conversation breaking down and the driver just chatting away with me no longer understanding. Basically, as long as I don’t get lost in the skein as words, they will keep conversing with me (it’s kind of like a mini-Chinese lesson that I get as a free bonus for riding in a taxi).

The other good thing about talking to taxi drivers is the repetition. The conversation basically always starts the same way. Here’s what the driver almost always says/asks, in order:

Where are you from?

Are you a student or a teacher?

Oh, you’re Chinese is great. Very standard. (This after me saying the words “America” and “teacher”; people here are very nice.)

Why did you come to China — for work or to learn Chinese?

I have a cousin/brother/friend who lives in Canada/the U.S./Hong Kong. He speaks English very well.

How much money do you make?

Oh, that’s pretty good. But it’s not much in America, right?

How much money does a cab driver make in America?

From here the conversation could go anywhere, and as the time grows longer it becomes less and less likely that I will understand what he is saying. But it’s becoming easier as I get better at knowing and recognizing the structure of words and sentences, the basic vocabulary, which then allows me to recognize and isolate the words I don’t know from everything else. Which in turn lets me think about the words I don’t know and either try to put together their meaning or infer their meaning from the context. That’s a big shift from where I was at a couple of months ago — basically grasping for straws and recognizing a word or phrase here or there, but everything else being a big mush pit where I didn’t know what was going on.

This all tells me that the initial hump of learning Chinese might be receding a bit. There’s a good post by John Pasden at Sinosplice.com that looks at the difficulty level of learning Chinese versus other languages (namely Japanese), and basically he points out that people tend to think Chinese is super hard to learn…but it’s actually just hard to learn how to learn – meaning that there’s a huge hump of stuff you’ve got to learn in the beginning, and then it gets easier from there. Basically, to first start learning Chinese, you’ve got to bend your brain around this concept that the meaning of words is totally dependant on the tone of their prononciation — which for an English speaker is really pretty damn far out — and then you’ve got to actually learn what those tones are, how to say them and then how to parse them in rapid-fire speech.

Those things are now becoming less difficult for me (I don’t want to jinx myself by saying anything more pronounced than that. It’s still all pretty damn difficult.) I think that basically started to happen (the decrease in difficulty) when I started obsessively listening to Chinesepod.com lessons and practicing pronouncing sentences in bed and in the shower (I think now my listening has gotten better than my speaking…because my vocabulary still sucks but listening to Chinesepod has made me more comfortable hearing normal-speed speech and exposed me to the sounds of lots of words). I still have a long way to go…and I am hoping and praying that things will continue to go smoothly (enough) here so that I can stay and learn more.

Especially now that forming the sentence “Can you please bring me a glass of water” is no longer a small miracle.

Other language landmarks…

Learning how to say the names of all the delicious stuff at my favorite restaurant

Teaching someone how to play poker in Chinese

Actually understanding what my Chinese teacher is saying some of the time

Translating an English word for some confused students into Chinese during class (note: extreme aberration)

Traveling to another city (for snacks…yeah, weird) with someone who speaks no English  and then back again and having fun

Learning how to lift weights in Chinese (fairly extensive use of pantomime)

Understanding an Upper-Intermediate lesson on Chinesepod.com

That’s all for today.

: )

One of the good things about getting a visit from a friend who is also a teacher in another part of China was that I got to hear how her employer had helped her handle the hurdles of moving to the country to teach.

For her, the process sounded remarkably easy once she got the job. Her employer handled all the paperwork before she left the U.S. and provided her with ample assistance finding a suitable apartment when she arrived. They also offered her a pretty hefty salary — not big by U.S. standards, but not small either (she makes almost three times what I make, but she works 30 hours a week to my 12 and she lives in the third-largest city in China while mine probably doesn’t even make the top 100, so that’s the explanation for that).

They also reimburse her each month for a fraction of the flight costs to the country, so that when he contract is up she will have been reimbursed the full amount.

You can probably guess what all this explaining is leading up to…yep, my coming-to-the-country and paperwork situation has been so different from hers as to be totally unrecognizable. My paperwork was not even really started before I left the U.S., I went to Hong Kong about four-ish months in to change my visa status, and now the matter still hasn’t been entirely settled. (I won’t go into details here, but…you get the picture.)

The reason my visa experience has been so much more convoluted is itself convoluted and involves miscommunications, bureaucratic snafus, lackadaisical administrators and probably a fair measure of cultural differences. Suffice it to say that between my school and I, the visa issue has been at times hairy, at times thorny, and even on a couple occasions bordering on antagonistic.

So, a little bit after my sixth month in-country without the visa issue fully resolved, I delivered an ultimatum of sorts. Being nice and friendly had gotten me nowhere, being accomodating but firm had also gotten me just about nowhere, so I decided to make things as clear as possible: get the visa situation taken care of this month, or I’m going to make like a tree and get outta here.

This did seem to make the message much more clear. But things have not taken shape as quickly as I would have liked them to. So I am still holding my breath, in a sense. Which would put me close to seven months of breath-holding. But, things other than that seem to be moving along fairly nicely. And I have been promised that the visa will be done within the week. So when I know, I’m pretty sure I’ll be writing about it here.

Till then thanks for tuning in.

: )

This week a friend of a friend, whom I had never met (the friend of the friend), came to visit me from a huge city (Guangzhou) several hundred miles west of here where she also teaches English.

The trip was a little slapdash. She had a few days off and took the sleeper bus here from Guangzhou, arriving on Monday morning, and had about two and a half days to stay here and see Fujian.

The idea, before she arrived, was to travel down to Xiamen, about five hours away by bus, to spend some time there and see the sights. But when I realized she wouldn’t get here until 6 a.m. Monday morning I backed off that plan a little, thinking it would be too rushed to cram in a trip to another city in Fujian if she wanted to see any of my base city.

It turned out that we managed to get to Xiamen and see my city at the same time, a feat which involved hiking around here for one day and taking a cruise around on the backs of some motorcycle taxis, and then the next day rising fairly early and deciding to go to Xiamen anyway, even though we couldn’t stay in a hotel there because neither of us had our passports with us.

It was fun, if tiring. Monday was tomb-sweeping day in China, a holiday for honoring the dead by visiting their tombs  in the mountains and lighting small fires by them and burning incense with family. So we swung out of town and started up a country road that my professor, when he was still here last month, had shown me, and walked a few miles into the country. We saw lots of tombs untouched, and then a few with families milling around, burning incense and I think eating. We climbed up a hill and saw a tomb up close and, next to it, another under construction.

The tombs are sort of scattered around the evergreen-and-bamboo forested mountains of Fujian, oval shaped, made of gray and red stone and brick, resembling a female oraface or a bisected papaya. The mountains in Fujian are pretty and misty and lush-looking, resembling in shape and size the Green Mountains in Vermont where I lived for five years in college. They look prime for skiing to my native Northerner’s eye, but as far as I know snow falls here only once a decade or less. Once you put the city behind you walking on those roads, it would be easy to forget about the large, clogged city you left behind if not for the smog that still lingers in the air even miles away.

We came back to town after an afternoon in the hills, walking on the way back past the enormous steel mill in this city that has essentially swallowed whatever town was there before. There are small residential streets where people still make a life as the ten-foot-wide blue dump trucks from the steel mill rumble by all day, leaving behind trails of exhaust and dust, and whatever industry churns inside the blue steel walls of the factory that stands above the small houses.

Then we ate and considered watching a movie and then went home instead. We were both tired from the walk and planned to go to Golden Lake the next day. But when I woke up rain was dumping down and I realized that anything we did would have to be indoors. There being nothing to do indoors in my city, I proposed that we catch a bus to Xiamen and see what we could in an afternoon. If we had to be sitting around inside all day, at least we would be moving.

This made me feel better after waking up and seeing the rain. We went downtown and bought tickets for a bus leaving ten minutes later and hopped on board. That was at 11 a.m., and I figured that at least we would be there by four and would be able to see some of the city, no matter how early we had to come back. I was exicted. I’ve lived close to Xiamen for more than five months now and haven’t really seen any of it except the bus station, and I knew I would be satisfied to get just a taste of it.

I felt that way for the first three hours of the trip, buzzed because of hopping on a bus with no set plan for return, and then I started looking out the window. Long stretches of tumbling, slanting mountains drifted by at first, interrupted only by 30-second stretches of darkness as we passed under mountains. Then the mountains began to flatten and the air thickened. It looked almost like twilight, even though it was only two o’clock. The air was thick with smog and occasional rain, and we began to see factories, but not just factories — huge industrial compounds of factories, whole towns made into factories or factories made into towns. Many seemed to be oriented towards stone mining or refining and furniture manufacture. It was one of those moments when you don’t willingly step back, but feel shoved back to marvel at the vastness of production that our world requires, and the system that allows it to exist thusly — the size of those factories that produce towels, desks, chairs, stone steps, whatever, that no doubt find themselves post-production scattered all across the world, used by every kind of person, all manufactured in this little vein of mountainous land between here and there.

Once, around three in the afternoon, I looked out the window and saw a town going by — smoke rising from the factories, the factories seeming to be all there was of the town, the air thick and twilightish, a long row of maybe 1,000 middle-school students walking along the side of the main road in front of a factory in their nylon school uniforms, returning home, probably, from school, in the middle of all this.

Then it started to rain harder and the traffic on the highway stopped for maybe an hour. Just stopped, no explanation, no idea of what was ahead of us. People got off the bus to socialize and smoke cigarettes on the road. Somebody lit one on the bus. It seemed to be getting later more quickly. I wondered if going all this way had been a good idea, and thought about my classes the next morning.

Eventually the traffic cleared up and we passed by the scene of the accident. Most of the debris and all of the victims appeared to have been cleared away. What was left were five or six cars piled together inside a tunnel and pushed to the side of the road to let traffic through. The bus picked up speed and a half hour later we were inside Xiamen and it was raining hard and 5:30 p.m. We hailed a cab to the bus station and got train tickets back for 10:30. This gave us about four hours to explore, and we went to Gulangyu (a small island just across from the city that was British-settled a century-or-so ago) and walked around for a while, ate, bought a souvenir, and went back to the train station.

We had hard sleepers, which turned out to be comfortable enough, but for some reason I couldn’t sleep. My visitor-traveling companion spent an hour on the phone with her boyfriend and I put on my headphones and turned the music all the way up. I started thinking about things I didn’t want to think about, feeling lonely and worried about being awake to get off the train when it arrived back home. An old man, who I had been a little rude to when we got on the train (he had told us we had the wrong bunks and I had insisted he was wrong, until, of course, I realized he was right — I still can’t really read Chinese) had told me that we would arrive around 6 a.m. but I didn’t know how we would know.

It turned out to be not a problem. The train steward woke us up at six and swapped out our tickets and fifteen minutes later, as I stood on the smoker train looking out the window, I saw the first signs of my home town out the window; I knew we’d be there in about five minutes.

I felt fine after we got off the train. That had been my first real trip in China where my Chinese skills had been sufficient enough to handle all the stuff involved with booking tickets, finding sightseeing stuff, buying food and other necessities, talking to cab drivers. But it wasn’t just that. The morning had one of those feelings that you get when you have been moving for a while, when you’re dead tired but not ready to sleep. There were a few people riding by on bicycles this early, dressed in ponchos and boots for the rain, but still not many people on the street. We hailed a cab and went home and I showered and spent a couple hours preparing for class and then slept for ten minutes.

For my afternoon class my friend came and actually taught the class a tongue twister, and they were amazed to meet another foreigner and, as always, incredibly warm and excited and eager to learn. It was really fun, and it was really nice to see someone else’s teaching stlye, to get some new ideas and to get some tips and constructive critiques of my teaching. I got off class and my friend packed her bags and got ready to go. We caught the bus to the bus station, grabbed some Lanzhou noodles to go and I saw her off on the train platform.

Before she left, we sat in the waiting room and watched Chinese Informercials for skin whitening creams and laughed and made fun of the T.V. It was fun, and I learned a lot just in three days about what it is like to be a foreigner in a major city (Guangzhou, where she teaches, is huge, and there are a ton of foreigners there — it was interesting to hear about her experience and how different it has been from mine; she makes more than twice the money, for instance, is not nearly such a spectacle to the locals and has a lot of foreigner friends and, as previously mentioned, a foreigner beau), but as we waited for the train I didn’t really feel like eating and I couldn’t stop feeling surprised at how much I felt I was going to miss this person who I hadn’t even known three days before.

This was a repeat of the experience I had a month previously, when a professor  and friend from my undergrad college stayed here for a month and I spent some time with him almost every day. Seeing this place through both of their eyes definitely changed it for me, and also made me realize that in the day-to-day, when I am here, even if I am not actively missing home or the people I know and love back there, there is a lot I am missing.

So, I walked out of the train station after she left and headed back outside. It was getting darker again and the rain was settling down now; the streets were wet but it was barely drizzling on my neck. I sat on a bench for a while and thought about it, about what it means to go somewhere and then come back, to do things that you do just because you want to, not because you know how they will end up or what they will mean.

Then I got on the bus and came back home, one foot after the other, happy and surprised like always, but also sad again to see someone go.