Having Fun All The Time

A contest….guess what I ate for dinner tonight…

You get three hints:

Hint #1: Here's the fully prepared dish, bottom left. It tasted a bit like jerky, due to the seasoning.

Yeah, so hint #1 is impenetrable, I know. But wait, there’s more…

Hint #2: Season, dried, and about to be quartered. Viewing this beheading was a kind of twisted revenge for me, having lived with the suckers for some 3-odd months.

If that doesn’t do it for you, I think hint number three will…

Hint #3: Yep, that is the hintquarters of a mouse being lopped off. I ate with relish. These mice were raised to be eaten, so don't get freaked out and think I am in China eating sewer rats, here...

On a mostly unrealted note, we also captured the bat that has been living in my air conditioner since I moved in. I have some pretty gruesome pics of the bat being offed as well, but so as not to provoke the PETA gods, I will forebear to post those tonight…

To pre-empt any possible rat/mouse strikes this evening, I have re-set my rat traps in the bathroom (I found some little rat poop in there today, the first rat evidence I have found in about two months), the kind that kill on impact, so as far as my means go they are as humane as possible, and I (regretfully) am hoping to find some more cold, dead rat corpses in my apartment in the morn.

T-minus 12 days until the solo trip to Hong Kong. Wish me luck.

Hope you all are well.

: )

A thought: The key to my door is really weird. It’s not like a normal key, where you have a flat object with two edges that are all curvy and bumpy. The bumpy, key-blade part of it has another plane that intersects the main key-blade at a perpendicular angle (so that if you point the key at your face you see a plus sign). It’s extra difficult to fit into the door and for the longest time it took me several minutes to get the door opened in the dark. I wondered if I would ever learn to open the door smoothly without a struggle and a full minute of cursing under my breath. I noticed today that I open it smoothly now, with a minimum of jabbing at the door.

This weekend I went to town on the bus to run some errands, and on the way back it was getting dark out and it was raining and the people on the bus, even though we were packed together closely, were more or less quiet. I was listening to music on my headphones and looked around at all their faces and realized that I was unimaginably far from home and still alive, and I got a little rush of joy but also dull, quiet sadness because, also, I could see how unimaginably separate and different I was from the people on the bus.

Another thought: What would happen if there were technology that could translate one spoken language into another orally, on the spot, so that you could have a conversation with someone without a translator present, without knowing any of their language or they of yours?

Another thought: What is the point of travel? Why does it feel so intrinsically interesting to some of us, and not to others? Why do I feel, now, so ambivalent about travel for travel’s sake, as I have for as long as I can remember, and yet then also why am I now so far away from home?

The bus stops. A woman I watched get on carrying a thick bamboo stick over which were slung two large plastic bags filled with blankets and vegetables straightens up and lifts her stick of bamboo and struggles to get the bags back onto the two ends of it, and as she does this the bus begins to lurch forward. But all the passengers around me shout at the bus driver to stop, and he does, and the lady slowly gathers her things and lurches, herself, towards the exit. We all shuffle aside and press against each other to give her way. Everybody pays the same, 1 yuan, about 15 cents, to ride the bus, even these people who bring on large loads of clothes, food, machinery, I assume in most cases to sell somewhere, with them.

The bus rolls forward again and the driver turns out the cab lights. The drivers do this whenever we are on the road and won’t be stopping for a while, and when they do, everyone on the bus seems to get sleepier and quieter. There is a young girl sitting on a cardboard box on the floor of the bus, next to an older woman who is standing next to a few similar boxes. I’m not sure what’s in the boxes, but I look at the girl. She is staring straight ahead, with no expression that I can discern on her face.  I feel like I recognize this girl, but I don’t know why. She doesn’t appear to be sleeping, just absorbed in some kind of thought. Or maybe no thought at all. I keep glancing down at her face, to see if it will reveal something to me about what she is doing or thinking. I keep expecting her to turn to the woman next to her, since I think they are together, and say something. She just sits there, staring off at nothing. She sits there for ten minutes like that.

Finally we come to my stop, and I get off with a bunch of other students who are all going back to the school too. I open my umbrella and walk in front of the bus and look both ways to see what cars are coming. It is clear, except in the distance, in the lane opposite the bus, a silver car is gliding fast through the rain and shows no sign of slowing down for me or the people around me. We walk across the rainy street and about 100 meters away the car starts laying on its horn. By the time it reaches our stop we are all on the other side of the street, and I hear the ragged sound of its horn bend as it passes behind us.

I walk slowly in the rain. I have very little to do with the rest of my day, and I feel tired. I walk up the hill on the rain-soaked dirt road that leads back to campus. There are little pockets of students all walking the same way, and I walk by some of them and some of them walk by me. There are palm trees on both sides of the road and run-down houses and an old brick factory where plastic is burned and recycled. The walls and the window frames of the building are black with soot and a thick smell of urine and trash seeps up from the stream that flows along the road.

I feel old all of a sudden, but very new, in a way, too, because somehow I know that I was never really supposed to be here or to see any of this. It is all a choice you make, to go somewhere far away like this, and I think about how I made that decision some five-odd months ago. It feels like I didn’t really decide so much as let reality decide for me, while I sat by and weighed the reasons for going or not going as if they had perfectly equal weight. They still do, as far as I can tell, even now that I have put the decision behind me. It made itself, or anyway I don’t feel like I had anything real to do with it.

Robert Frost’s old famous poem says, “And sorry I could not travel both / and be one traveler, long I stood / And looked down one as far as I could / To where it bent in the undergrowth”. These lines are so haunting because they hit at precisely what it is to look at a life–your life–and have decisions before you that are so obviously serious and important that it’s impossible not to feel just a little bit outmatched by them. Like it’s unfair that anyone could have that much power over his/her own life in her hands.

It is also about the recursive nature of time; how you can regret things that you did or didn’t do in the past, but you can also regret things you are not doing now; hell, you can regret things you know you’re not going to do in the future.

But that has nothing to do with whether they actually happen. That has more to do with chance, with how you feel on a particular day, with how important you decide it is to think about the road you’re taking. And with how far ahead and how long you stare down that road.

One of the pros of the past three months in China has been the stabilizing effect it has had on my eating and sleeping habits.

There are two reasons for that. The first is that a very common greeting in this area (and, as I understand it, throughout a lot of China) is, “have you eaten?”

I get asked this question like 5+ times a day, and not just when it is around lunchtime. Students often ask me this at 10:30 in the morning, when it is not clear whether we are closer to breakfast or lunchtime. I usually see my students in front of the main dining halls in the middle of campus. When they see me, an expression usually forms on their face that is something like a confused, dazed, interested smile. The expression is utterly unique and fascinating and is reproduced almost every time I see a student who knows me.

They then say, quietly, “Hello, Mr. Will. Have you eaten yet?”

I think the funny, friendly, gentle look they give me is a mixture of panic (at having to compose an English sentence on the spot to greet me), warmth (at seeing a teacher), and concern (foreigner = lost white man).

The question they ultimately pose to me (after groping around in their minds for the right English words and sentence structure) is usually funny in two ways: first, because what meal is never specified; and second, because it has no actual connection to any possibility of our eating together. The answer — “yes, I have eaten,” or “no, I haven’t eaten” — is as inconsquential as the “good” we English speakers give when asked “How are you?” (which question, by the way, Chinese students know very well, because they shout it at me all the time as I walk across campus — more as a blunt statement than a question).

The second big reason “have you eaten?” is so funny is because of the ruthless order that students seem to impose opon their day here. When I first arrived in China, I often ate lunch at 12:30 or 1 p.m., and dinner at 5:30 or 6 p.m. That kind of a dining schedule is almost unimaginable to some students, I think. About 80 to 90 percent of them, as far as I can observe, start eating lunch somewhere between 11:45 and 12, no earlier or later. The dining hall is all but deserted at 1:05, and it is impossible to get anything that isn’t cold and slimy after 1:25.

All of which is to say that if a student sees me at 12:45 p.m. and asks me if I have eaten, and I haven’t, they usually say, “Oh, why so late?”

So, after struggling to answer this question repeatedly in my first few weeks here, I started just eating lunch at 11:45, and dinner at 5 or 5:30, and leaving my former, just-wing-it, unscheduled eating pattern to the dogs.

Which is actually a lot easier than avoiding eating until late in the day and then wandering around, starved and wild-eyed, desperate for something to eat (which is how I always used to do it).

Another hilarious thing that I will add as a poscript is that students love to give me fruit. I’ll be walking along somewhere, maybe having just finished lunch, and I’ll see a student I know, and he or she will be carrying some fruit, and without fail he or she will offer me a piece of fruit from the bag, if not the whole bag. Students will look exactly as if they have just gone shopping for some fruit for themselves, be coming directly out of the fruit store, see me, and then hand me the bag of fruit and say, “this is for you” and then walk away as if they had planned to give me the fruit all along. It is profoundly weird and funny and sweet.

There is an aspect of my present life that I am already familiar with, and that is the mild episodes of paranoia that accompany living in a place where your actions are scrutinized more than usual and people in the community are generally aware of who you are and what you are doing on a daily basis more than you could ever guess.

In some ways, living in a tiny town in Vermont (where I went to college) for five years was like this. Even though I was just a college student, I knew the names and faces of most of the people in my college and a lot of the people outside the college. There weren’t a lot of distractions in Vermont (the town where I went to school had 3,500 people and the college 700), so people chatted, mostly, about each other.

That was, in almost every way, right up my alley; for most of my time I immensely enjoyed living in a place where I saw familiar faces every time I walked outside and where the term “tight-knit community” was more a mantra than a slogan. When I moved away to Portland, Oregon after college, the pointed disinterest with which most non-acquaintances regarded me and my overall insignificance in the social mix of a mid-sized city took me off guard. I had forgotten how different life in small-town Vermont is from the norm.

But now that I am living in a relatively small (by Chinese standards) city in China, I am realizing again what it means to have my actions scrutinized (maybe that’s too strong a word; looked upon with intense curiousity might be more precise) and to have my general reputation and public image be something that can and will change based on almost all my actions. (What I say in public, my politeness while interacting with people, my skills as an English guide and language learner, my shoe size, what I did for work prior to coming to China, how much money I make….every detail about me, it seems, could become something that is used as a detail to describe me to someone who doesn’t know me..) Everything I do / say / write is in a sense potentially public knowledge, and that adds something of a burden to the daily acts of life.

A case in point: A few weeks ago when I was meeting with some students on a particularly cold day, I took off my sweater in from of them because I was feeling warm. I had a button-down shirt on underneath it, of course, so it wasn’t like I was doing anything out of the ordinary (at least, according to my social norms). But everyone in the room gasped and emitted the “Waaaaaaaaah” that is the Chinese version of our “Woah”. Based on their response, you’d think I had just vomited in front of a roomful of students (which, please note, I have never done, despite what some people might say). I often here this “Waaaah” when I walk past little groups of students on campus and it usually makes me flash my trademark “shit-eating grin”. For some reason it is always hilarious to me the amazement I cause in students who don’t know me just by existing. Either that or I have a giant brown stain on my back when this happens; sometimes I wonder.

It turns out (at least as far as I was able to deduce from aggressively questioning students) that they all said “Waaaaah” because they were all freezing, sitting at their desks, and they thought I must be “Very strong” to be able to take off my sweater in such cold weather.

In retrospect (and I have only realized this upon writing about it) they must have been blowing smoke up my ass, because they know I am not that strong (I have always been, and still am, a slender, willowy bastard) and that is just too abstruse a reason for them to have all “Waaaaahhhd” simultaneously upon seeing me taking off my sweater. I’m guessing it just had something to do with the cultural appropriateness of taking off clothes in front of people. Maybe they thought it was weird. I think that is probably it. So, starting that day, I started taking off my sweater in the hallway before going into any classrooms. That seems to do the trick in quelling “waaahs”.

But, that’s not actually the end or the point of the story. The point is that just yesterday, weeks after I took my sweater off in front of the students, another student told me that she had heard, second-hand, about me taking off my sweater in front of the class. I believe her exact words were: “The students think you are very interesting. They said that you took off your sweater in front of the class. That’s very interesting, I thnk.”

My impulse was to ask, again, aggressively, “What on earth does INTERESTING mean?!” But I did not. Instead I smiled, nodded, and said I’m glad that the students find me interesting.

What happened in the classroom that day, what exactly caused them to “Waahhh” at me, perhaps I will never know (note that the students in question who “Waaahd” were all older than me, some by 10 or 20 years, and about evenly divided by gender). But, I am long past worrying about it. More noteworthy, I think, is the kind of general paranoia inspired by a vague awareness that anything I do could become a story that is passed from person to person as somehow emblematic of me. I mean, it’s not like the student I spoke to yesterday heard anything about my progress in Chinese, or my patience or professionalism, or anything (not that I care that she didn’t) – she heard about how I took my sweater off.

All this, however, I understand and am actually pretty comfortable with, I think. After living in a tiny town in Vermont for five years I know that talk is often just talk, and people are usually happy to have something to talk about. It (usually) has little or nothing to do with the subject of the conversation. And I feel OK about my ambassadorial performance so far (despite one experience with a bit of excessive drinking, but that has more to do with the Chinese penchant for forcing beer down one’s throat whenever possible and was not my fault, and I will get to that in another post….) And, as the title of this post suggests, paranoia is, in my opinion, an unavoidable facet of modern life – in America, in China, wherever. If people have the means and the leisure (and now, the technology) to gossip and chit-chat, share judgements and observations within a shared worldview / framework (which the Chinese seem to have in spades), you will have paranoia. Especially if you are a foot taller than everybody else, have different colored skin and hair, and they turn and say “Waaaaaah” when you walk by.

These are just some of the pros and cons. You get much love and affection, and along with it, plenty of attention.

Peace out for now.

: )

Howdy.

I am getting the feeling that I am in an in between places at the moment.

I have been in Chinese lessons for about a month now. I am still waiting for certain paperwork to pass here so that I can be fully legit to teach. I have met a lot of students here, got to know them a bit, and have even made a couple of friends off campus.

I am getting the feeling that I am now putting some of the initial troubles of life in China behind me, like figuring out how to order food, how to communicate about basic things like the bathroom and money, how to answer some yes or no quesetions. How to sleep at night. How to balance my own time with the time demands of others. How to accept things as they come.

But still I am growing an awareness of how little I really know–about the people, about the language, about the country, about the food, about everything. I’m starting to think the smidge of security I have attained is really just blithe ignorance of what this place is really about, and that understanding a little of that will be the next big challenge.

But it is actually a challenge I am OK with. They say that the initial phase of coming to a place like China is the “honeymoon phase”, where you love everything and everyone. After that wears off, you start to get an idea of what you will really think of the place.

With that wearing away of the honeymoon phase, I am starting to wonder what the hell comes next, life-wise, after a thing like this. What does anybody do with themselves. But then I think of this person that I knew several years back who was living with cystic fibrosis, a girl my age who was really beautiful and great but who knew that her chances of living to 30 were slim to nonexistent. She didn’t waste any time doing anything that she didn’t love or didn’t have an interest in. From what I understand she worked her ass off to try to get a master’s degree back in her home (somewhere in England) and she died about a month ago.

We are all going to die eventually, and that isn’t necessarily the greatest foundation to draw life-governing axioms on but it’s a start. She wasn’t wasting her time, and I’m trying not to waste my time too. I don’t know what I’m going to do after I leave China, or decide to start some other career, or whatever. But I don’t feel like a day here is a waste of anything.

That’s something.

: )