Having Fun All The Time

Since it basically feels like summer again, and warm and sunny and nice, I have started jogging again over the past month.

Unfortunately, however, the track and soccer field in the middle of town has been torn down for a new housing development, leaving no public space for working out in the entire city, and no soccer field except two that are inaccessible to the public because they’re at schools.

There have been upset people in town and annoyed people, and there appears even to have been a store that protestied the demolition of the arena by refusing to move their stuff out of the store (their store is built into part of the stadium walls, so they’ve got to go). But mostly people have just dealt with it and started doing ridiculous things, like running in circles in the big apartment park that I live in, or braving the walkway by the river, which constantly has motorcycles zipping along it (even though it’s for pedestrians). I’m in the latter category.

Yesterday when I was coming home from my run it was a beautiful, hot, sunny afternoon. After a few days of rain, people seemed to be celebrating by doing laundry. The faces of the buildings were collages of pinks and greens and blues, sheets and shirts hung out to dry.

Apparently the small scuzzy restaurant on the corner nearest my building had decided to air out their kitchen, too, because as I was walking home I heard a crash from inside the doors, and out came two rats, squeaking madly, with a couple short young cooks in white, but grimy, chef’s coats in pursuit. A girl came out after them, smiling happily at the entertainment. Another rat came running out. I noted that their refrigerator unit appeared to have been pulled away from the wall.

The rats appeared stunned by the sudden sunlight. They ran towards the street, and then ran back towards the shop, but the cooks were chasing them around, and there was nowhere to go but the street or the restaurant. This went on for about 40 seconds, I’d say.

The two Chinese guys were wearing the blue flip-floppy things that I wear in the shower and occasionally when I’m hanging out at home, and that you sometimes see on poor guys from the villages who have come to town to beg, on old ladies out for evening walks, or on extremely casual cooks with questionable personal hygiene. My suspicions of their poor hygiene were confirmed when the shorter guy, with long orange hair reminiscent of a hedgehog, managed to stomp on the head of one of the rats, leaving a smear of blood on the step of the restaurant.

It was a good hit. Even though he was wearing soft rubber flip flops, I got the impression that he had hit some kind of nerve or perhaps given the rat a concussion. It sort of flopped around helplessly for a sec before the other short guy in the grimy white smock gave it a good stomper, crushing it with much more authority, which was easier, now that it was immobile. A little more blood sort of splattered out, and one of the cooks sort of kicked it onto the sidewalk. No time to dally; there were two other rats to deal with. This is all while they’re wearing these flimsy little fucking flip-flops, mind you, which if you were going to ask me to stomp a rat to death I’m not even sure I would do it in combat boots, for fear some globule of rat gore would fly up and hit me in the eye, or something.

The next rat had been pretty much cornered next to the entrance to the restaurant, but it was evading death by flip-flop by virtue of a motorcycle and a few crates of garbage that it was running behind. There was a crack in the wall that would have been amply big enough for the rat to run into and perhaps even re-enter the restaurant, but for some reason it didn’t seem to see the escape route and instead just kept running back and forth madly, trying to escape the blows that rained down around it. The cook had now picked up a crude wooden stool and was attempting to smash the rat with the seating area, and eventually succeeded, crushing some part of the rat’s hindquarters, thereby stunning it, thereby allowing the death blow to be dealt with said crude wooden stool with relative ease by the cook in the grimy whitish-gray smock with the hedgehog hair and the blue rubber flip-flops and the questionable personal hygiene.

Which left rat three. I should note that at no time during this ordeal has any of the onlookers, besides perhaps me, reacted to this scene with anything other than complete absorption and apparent delight. The two stocky young pasty-faced cooks are laughing and grinning and moving about with great enthusiasm, and the very pretty young girl who works as a waitress and is wearing a one-piece blue-and-white uniform advertising some kind of Chinese beer on the apron, and a couple of other onlookers, have seemed pretty much totally happy to be witness to this brutal rat massacre, and I have to admit that even though I find rats repulsive, and in this case I was especially repulsed because I had on many occasions enjoyed the fish and snail dishes at this rather overpriced “cheap restaurant” (so the window claims), I too enjoyed the show, and couldn’t help smiling every time the rat again evaded the pudgy little cook guy. There was something really funny, and gross, about the little rat managing to escape him because of a pile of trash and a motorcycle. But the others seemed to more think just funny.

The glee of the audience is important here because at this point a motorcycle driver, who had just been parked on this corner waiting for fares, decided that he wanted to have a go, and joined the fray. This proved the rat’s undoing, because with the pudgy hedgehog-haired cook guy on the outside of the garbage and the motorcycle cabbie wearing a white helmet on the inside, they were able to do a pincer motion, thereby, through pure strategy and superior cognitive ability, eliminate the rat’s chances of escape.

It was the moto-cabbie who did it. He sort of poked at the rat with his toe, leaning his body back and stretching his foot forward in a jabbing motion because he couldn’t quite reach past the trash and the motorcycle with his full flat foot, and something about that quick sharp poke totally wrecked the rat’s game, and that was it, it was stunned, and the moto-cabbie sort of dragged the rat out by clamping down on its rear end with his toe and clawing backward with his sneaker, the way you might try to trap a dropped roll of toilet paper with your foot if you didn’t want or couldn’t get up from the toilet seat, and then he, and it wasn’t so gross to me, somehow to see a person actually wearing shoes to do this, stomped the rat sharply, obviously killing it.

Everybody seemed pretty proud and celebratory, and I did notice one woman who had stopped to watch the hunt immediately continue on her walk after the death of the third rat, looking somewhat perplexed and troubled, and I too decided to move on, sort of trying to forget about it but also feeling that this kind of made me less afraid of rats, in a way, and more confident that the next time I encounter a rat in my home (if there’s a next time) I’ll know how to kill it, as in the past I’ve always been afraid to try the stomping method with rats, out of a fear, mostly, that blood would splatter everywhere the way it does when you stomp a fat and juicy bug.

I’ve also been thinking about studying Buddhism lately and thinking a bit more about what it has to say about treatment of life forms and thinking more critically about my consumption of animals and how I still have no way to really justify it that is in any way ethical, but I’m not all the way there yet.

I also decided promptly after witnessing the rat killing never to eat at that overpriced restaurant ever again. And also not to talk to those pudgy little hedgehog cooks any more. I always thought they smiled a little psychotically whenever I went into their restaurant, and the service was terrible.

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In a completely unrelated note, I have learned how to play a Taylor Swift song on the guitar and how to sing it, after one of my students shared his almost total obsession with the American country-pop singer a couple weeks ago. (Many students have told me they really like her songs and I try to teach stuff they like, and they like nothing more than learning songs.) This is, needless to say, a serious blow to my sense of manhood and my trust in my own musical taste, but even worse is the fact that after I learned the song I actually kind of liked it, which is very confusing for me.

———

I also recently learned that the reason so many old Chinese men have hideously long hairs growing out of moles on their faces is because Chinese medicine teaches (supposedly) that plucking or removing those hairs can make the mole cancerous. I had previously, and erroneously, it turns out, been told (by a foreigner — the recent correction came from a Chinese) that it was because they thought those disgusting long hairs were good luck. This is typical: it’s amazing how many things I’ve had to re-learn multiple times about Chinese and Chinese culture, because of poor translations, miscommunications, or just bad information. It’s funny, because if I had stayed here for just like three months and then gone home I could have talked like nonstop about China and it probably would have all been garbage. It’s entirely possible that that’s still the case, although I hope not.

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All for today. End of trans.

Last year at about this time, I was moving into a friend’s apartment to stay for the month of June while he went back to his home country (Camaroon) to see his family. My friend was another foreign teacher at the college, and he had long paid for his own apartment in the city center, even though the college also provided housing on campus for us foreign teachers.

The place was pretty spartan. He had two bedrooms, a kitchen, a small bathroom with no hot water and a dining room slash living room. He had furnished the apartment with a folding aluminum table in the kitchen, about five blue plastic stools, a more than 10-year-old bed in the bedroom, a typewriter stand with a computer on it next to the bed, a TV on a TV stand in the corner of the bedroom, and a bamboo mat on the floor of the second bedroom. There was a poster of a young Chinese pop-star-looking model half torn off the wall of the second bedroom (left by the previous resident) and a laminated picture of a Chinese woman that a student of his had cut from red paper. Aside from a refrigerator that stood in the kitchen with a bowl sitting on top of it, and built-in closets full of clothes, that was all that he had in the apartment. He had lived there for more than a year.

Despite the black hole of charm that this apartment represented, however, it was an improvement from my previous living situation. The apartment I had on the college campus was old and unclean, and located too far from the city. So I was glad to move into my friend’s apartment in the city.

His apartment quickly proved to be not to my liking, though, mostly due to a serious roach problem. I remember one night in particular that I was spending with my girlfriend at the time, after we entered the apartment I turned on the light, and then quickly turned it off again. “Are you afraid of cockroaches?” I asked her in Chinese.

“Yes,” she said.

“Wait outside for a minute,” I said. She stepped outside, I went back in, turned on the light, killed as many Cheeto-sized roaches as I could before they all scattered out of sight (about three or four), and then poked my head out the door. “OK, you can come in now,” I said.

After that, I simply decided to move into the newest building I could find in the city. This is an urge I have never had before in any place. I’ve always gravitated towards old places, places that I thought had more of an austere look and seemed a bit weathered. But that changed after I dealt for a while with dirt, roaches, rats and bats. I became a lover of new things, and in this way came to understand, to some degree, not to romanticize poverty or to intuitively reject development as an idea.

This is all a rambling way to introduce the place where I now live, which is called “Sunny City”. Before I moved in here the place looked ridiculous to me: about 20 brand-new apartment buildings in a huge cluster, built on top of an underground shopping mall. The buildings are all around 20-stories, which by my reckoning means there are around 2,000 or more apartment units, which is pretty vast. The grounds are all nicely landscaped and well tended. There is at-your-door garbage pickup. There are security cameras. Like most Chinese construction, the buildings are already showing signs of wear and deficient building — there’s a crack in the wall of my bedroom, and for some reason for months all the kitchen fans on this side of the building seemed to blow backwards directly into my apartment through my kitchen fan. So that was awesome. But other than that, it’s mostly OK. I haven’t killed any roaches or wild animals in my home for a year, which has been very nice.

But there is one thing that is maddening about the place — one thing that I realized recently would never be accepted in the U.S.: the noise.

The thing about Sunny City is that the buildings were considered complete before any of the apartments’ interiors had been designed or built. Half of the apartments in the park haven’t been sold or lived in yet. That means that even though there are already a ton of people living here, every time an apartment is sold it must be built on the inside. They are selling these fuckers a la carte. And building an apartment’s interior is, it turns out, very loud.

Last weekend they were resurfacing a wall in a unit just below mine, which mean that there was a guy with a hammer and chisel taking the tiles and the concrete binding agent off the wall, and it took him four days. He started at 7:45 every morning. I know this because the noise sounded like it was right next to my head, and it was impossible to sit in my apartment without feeling like I was going nuts when the chiseling was going on. It lasted about six hours each day. No writing happened on those days. At one point I resorted to picking up a corner of my very heavy bed and slamming it on the floor, in the hope that it might make him stop (yes, clearly illogical).

At one point, I remembered with nostalgia the nice notes the landlady used to put up in the elevator in my apartment in Portland, Ore. when the water was going to be off for 45 minutes on a Tuesday morning at 10:30, when no one was going to be home anyway. Even then the notes seemed absurd. Just turn off the water, lady — do you really think we’re gonna complain? I used to think. Now the elevator note seems like an exotic and incredible fairy tale. Nobody else in this building seemed particularly disturbed by the hammering last week. It just happened, and people accepted it. And this happens all the time. People are much more willing to accept rude and abrupt intrusions into their personal space and nice quiet bubble, to an extent that Americans’ finickiness and insistence that others’ respect their personal space and right to peace and quiet and safety seems completely absurd.

The best example I can think of is that the last time I went home, I was shocked to learn that you’re not allowed to use cell phone on long-range buses in the U.S. I had forgotten this in my time in China. The idea that someone was telling me not to make phone calls to respect others’ who might want to rest seemed laughable when I heard it, but it was great when I wanted to take a nap. You never find that here. It seems a long range bus ride is a license for the loudest imaginable person to start shouting into his cell phone here.

This idea extends to so many things in life, including accepting the decisions of authority. I have been astonished to see the gentle, almost blithe acceptance by people here of decisions from above — decisions that make me bridle as though someone had taken away one of my basic rights, or denied me food, or something. In my first couple of months of teaching there was a sports meet at the university for which all classes would be canceled for a couple days, and I didn’t find out about it two days before. How could they not tell me? I said to myself. Don’t they know that if they had told me a head of time I could have planned some travel, or something? Now I’m just going to sit at home with nothing to do. I was sincerely, unashamedly pissed off. Then the next day, when, because of rain, the sports meet was canceled and class was back on the following day, I was even more pissed. What if I had made plans to travel somewhere?! I chafed.

But people around me just accepted it, as I’ve seen them do time after time here over the past two years. An order comes down from above, and everybody follows it. There is no use complaining. Complaining only makes people upset and angry. You’re better off just going along with it.

The cultural difference was hammered home last week when I was describing to my Chinese teacher an ordeal involving an alum from my college in the U.S., who I had helped the university invite to China to teach. They had strung him along for a month, saying that the position, and then at the last minute, in a mysterious, completely unexplained twist of events, they had changed their minds and said they had enough foreign teachers. He had put off job searching for a month and several people had spent a lot of time communicating to prepare for his trip out, not to mention the Chinese books he bought to get ready, and the kind of mental preparations you have to make for a trip like that. But the word came down from above, and the people who informed him and me of the change passed on the information nonchalantly, as if they couldn’t imagine a world in which another option aside from indifferent acceptance was possible.

When I told my teacher about this, I used the word “disappointment”, cuozhe, and her reaction was confusion.

“No, I think that word is too strong,” she said. “You should use a lighter word.” Her eyes looked straight ahead as she searched for a word, as if the story didn’t even warrant a negative label — really, as if this was actually how things should have gone. Then she came up with a word. “This is just a small trouble,” she said, using xiao (meaning small) and mafan, which is the kind of word you use when you don’t want to put ketchup on your fries because opening the little foil ketchup packet is too mafan. “You can just call it a small trouble.”

By now I could almost expect this reaction, and I felt a weird mix of guilt but also frustration. Guilt because I knew for a fact that she, my teacher, had experienced much worse in her life than I could ever imagine, and therefore really did see the problem as just a small trouble; and frustration, of course, because I am an American, and some part of me — I would even say some slightly spoiled, self-righteous part (characteristics that aren’t necessarily always bad) — wanted to insist. No, this is not just a small trouble, he wanted to say. This is a tragedy!