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.

_____

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.

_______

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!

Today I was teaching class and had a realization when a student read a sentence from a dialogue we were working on.

The sentence was: “I’ve got two potential applicants for the position in your company.”

A single student read the sentence, because recently whenever I’ve introduced new material to the class I’ve been asking them to read it one-by-one, rather than in the group, so that I would have a chance to listen to the students’ tone and word emphasis carefully.

In this case, when the student read the sentence, she had no pronunciation problems in terms of the individual words. She produced the sounds of each word perfectly, as if the rules of pronunciation of the International Phonetic Alphabet (the IPA) had been hard-coded into her brain (which they pretty much have, by this point).

But I noticed a problem. It was that she wasn’t using tone and emphasis to indicate that the word “two” was in fact the number two, not the word “to”.

For example, take a look at two sentences:

“I know to dance.”

“I know two dances.”

Do me the favor of ignoring for a moment that “I know to dance” is kind of a nonsense sentence, and think about this question: What is the pronunciation difference between these two sentences? Of course, as a native speaker of English, you know that the word “to” is pronounced more like “tuh” in the first sentence, whereas the pronunciation of “two” in sentence two is louder, clearer, and longer, with a long “ooh” sound at the end.

But what is the pronunciation difference between “to” and “two”? Can you explain it?

After teaching English as a second language for a year and a half to age groups from college to primary school and everything in between, I don’t remember anymore if I could have succinctly answered that question before I came to China. But I doubt it.

I certainly had zero familiarity with the IPA, and didn’t even know, at the time, that my soon-to-be students would have been relying on the IPA to learn the pronunciation of words since their childhoods when they first started studying English.

For most of my first year of teaching, in fact, I still had no idea how to write or read the IPA, much less, for that matter, how to teach the individual sounds of English other than standing in front of my students and saying, “It’s thhhhhhh. THHHHHH! Put your tongue between your teeth! Watch me! THHHHHHH!”

But that’s because I hadn’t taken the time to learn the IPA. Every time I looked at it I got a headache. The IPA is that pronunciation coding that you find in some dictionaries when you look up English words. It’s the one that virtually all native English speakers ignore, because they never had to learn it.

I still hate looking at the IPA, but I’ve learned its value. Just to give you a peek at what it looks like, here’s the sentence above that my student read, rendered in the International Phonetic Alphabet:

aiv gat tu: strɔ:ŋ kændədəts fɔ:r ðə markətiŋ pəzɪʃən jʊr lʊkiŋ tu: fɪl

If you put this string of funny looking characters in front of a Chinese student in middle school or above, she can read it. I learned it because last semester I grudgingly taught a course in English pronunciation. I started teaching the class  only knowing a few of the several dozen characters, and by the end I knew all of them, just by bloody in-class repetition of use and by having to teach the students the letters one-by-one.

The necessity of the IPA for language learners is pretty obvious. If you have no inborn knowledge of English, and you reference the dictionary, and it tells you that “pretentious” is pronounced pri-ten-shuhs, how are you supposed to know how to read that any better? Is the i in pri the same as the i in prize? Or is it the i in ship? The IPA solves that kind of problem by giving a character whose pronunciation is always the same.

But the funny thing about it, and the reason I say that your (meaning native English speakers in general) understanding of language is too simple, is that Chinese people are generally shocked and confounded when I tell them that we never learn the IPA in school in the United States, and that most native speakers don’t even know what the IPA is.

How, then, could you learn to read? How could you see a five syllable word on a page and produce it flawlessly, without ever learning a system to explain English’s idiosyncratic, deeply flawed spelling system? (For reference on the “deeply flawed” part see approximately half of the comedian George Carlin’s stand-up material.) The answer is just that when you are born in a language, and are then surrounded by it every day during the formative period of your life, the first 8 to 15 years, you are exposed to so much of that language that you learn it naturally.

But that concept is difficult to understand for someone who grew up in a differently language. Thusly for me and Chinese. When I first started studying Chinese, the fact that every Chinese word has a tone (flat, rising, dipping, or falling) was overwhelmingly frustrating to me. It seemed impossible that anyone could ever speak that way truly comfortably, truly fluently.

Of course, I was wrong, and over the past six months I have been at times surprised to see myself finally expressing Chinese sentences with minimal thought applied to tones but the tones actually coming out right. All it took was constant exposure and a kind of unhealthy obsession.

Even uttering the most basic word in the beginning, “hello” 你好 or nǐ hǎo, was nearly impossible. I could produce the correct tones when sitting alone in my apartment, but I would walk out the door, go to the convenience store outside, open my mouth, and an aberration would come out. Something not even close to the proper tones.

Because foreigners across the board have sucked at Chinese tones since the beginning of time, when I meet people they often greet me with intentionally mangled tones, as though they think it will be easier for me to understand that way. Cab drivers do this the most. I open the cab door and deliver the accurately pronounced “hello” that I’ve worked on for nearly two years, and they give me a very weird sounding hello in response.

My landlord does this, too. At this point I’ve lived in the little apartment that’s adjoined to his and his family’s for eight months, and I’ve had numerous lengthy conversations with everyone in the family throughout which I’m confident nearly all my tones were correct, but every time I see him he still gives me a “hello” with crazy tones, as if he thinks all laowai (foreigners), even ones who can speak Chinese, still can’t tell a wrong tone when they hear it.

Every time he does this, I can’t help thinking of what it would be like if a Chinese person lived in the U.S. for two years, learned OK English, and then every time he ran into his landlord, he received a loud “HERRO!” in greeting.

My Chinese teacher in my first year was a young Psychology teacher in my department named Ms. Li. The reason I got her as a teacher was (as I learned later) because she could speak pretty good English. Ms. Li is just a few months older than me and thin and attractive, with light freckles on her nose and cheeks and a wide, slightly tan face.

One experience I will never forget is her trying to teach me how to pronounce the word “umbrella” 雨伞 or yǔ sǎn. Those little up-side-down triangles over yu and san indicate that each of the characters should be pronounced with the third tone, a slow, low, dipping tone.

But the thing I didn’t know, and Ms. Li didn’t know to tell me, was that when there are two third tones in a row in Chinese, the first one becomes a second tone.

Ms. Li didn’t know that. Of course she knew it, in that she produced beautiful spoken Chinese every day, by dint of a native speaker’s effortless, masterful control of a language. But she didn’t know it consciously in that she could teach it to me. She couldn’t explain it to me. She could only sit there, and say: “Two third tones. Yǔ sǎn. Yǔ sǎn. Yǔ sǎn!”

There are things we don’t know. And there are things we don’t know we don’t know. And then there are things we know, but we don’t know that we know. Those things, maybe more than anything else, consist in language. And that is one of the major things I have learned in my time here.

If you want to learn a language, you must do so in chunks. You must find audio recordings of native speakers conversing at natural or near-natural speeds (forget all of those useless Rosetta Stone tapes. They are all bullshit) and you must push yourself to copy their pronunciation as perfectly as possible.

You must remain flexible. You must remember that there are rules, but every rules has an exception. You must focus on memorizing words, and then stop memorizing words for a while and practice listening, and then practice pronunciation, and then do tongue twisters, and then walk around town talking to anyone who will talk to you, and then go home and memorize more words, and then do the cycle all over again.

You must alter your strategy every month or so and focus on something new, but then you must also have consistency. You must do the same thing every day. You must do things to get yourself in the company of strangers who can’t speak English, you must go on boring trips, go to dinner with people you don’t like, sit for hundreds of hours listening to people talk and not understanding them.

You must slowly, gradually, allow yourself to expand. You must never wonder if it’s worth it. You must understand that you will never speak the language as beautifully as the clumsiest native speaker. You must accept that painful truth. You must keep going anyway. You must gain confidence gradually, and then lose the majority of it in one disastrous encounter in which communication fails completely. You must gradually regather confidence.

You must forget the you who couldn’t communicate at all in the tongue you can now speak. You must realize, now, that you are worse than a child, even in the language that you now speak. You must accept that your skills in your native language have actually become slightly weaker, that there are new words, new concepts, that have actually emerged since you left your native country that you now know nothing about.

You must do all these things to learn, but why? I don’t know why. Because it’s interesting. Because in the beginning every week you realize that you have taken a step forward, and you said something. And then a few weeks later you said something even better and longer, and then a few months later you sort of had a conversation, and then several months later you understood everything she said to you, and then a year later you spent a whole day with someone without uttering a single English word, and then you come to know someone in that language, and then you laugh in that language.

It’s not about thinking in Chinese. It’s not about dreaming in Chinese. Anyone who has studied Chinese seriously for more than a few months has done both, I think. It’s about becoming a person in the language you want to speak. Building yourself up in a new language, a new person, of sorts, but the same person. It’s about all those things. And along the way, you learn that language is a hell of a thing.

I suppose everybody, even people in the U.S., know that the Internet in China is censored. Here in the mainland, foreigners tend to refer to the block that is imposed on their Internet use as the “Great F!rew@ll of China” (you can take out the exclamation point and at sign yourself), also known by its abbreviation, the G – F  _ W, or sometimes called the “Net N@nny” (again remove at sign).

If you think I’m going overboard with my use of euphemistic @s and !s, then you haven’t been trying to use the Internet in China the last couple of weeks.

Gmail: I can't live if living is without you.

Starting about two weeks ago, the V.P.N. (virtual private network) that I previously used to access blocked sites in China went dead. There was no warning, no explanation — just a dot that had been green on my MacBook’s menu bar went to orange, and I couldn’t open Facebook anymore.

For those not in the know, a V P N is a service that allows you to connect to an offshore ISP, which encodes the transfer of information between you and the I.S.P. and allows you to circumvent any blockage that might be going on in the place you’re in. V.P.N.s are also used by businesses to encode Internet use within the company, so that information can’t be stolen by “hackers” (the Chinese word for hacker, interestingly, is hei1ke4, 黑客, or “black guest”).

The service I use costs about $60 U.S. per year, not a huge dent in the fender, and allowed me to continue to communicate with friends and family back home via Facebook, also to post pictures of my life here and generally remain connected. (Facebook seems to have taken the place of email over the past few years. For some reason it just now seems more comfortable, and more personal, to send messages by Facebook rather than by email.)

The service also allowed me to keep posted about the real goings on within China. One of the most noticeable victims of the Net N@nny has been China bloggers, who sometimes find cause to write blog posts that are either critical of big papi here or that simply say things big papi would not rather have out there. I follow about 20 blogs that cover China, most of which are blocked here. The news is interesting and, more than informing me about political events, also give me a lot of non-sensitive news about what’s happening here that I can’t find in Western news sources.

The New York Times isn’t blocked. (Maybe big papi isn’t so worried about a big, unwieldy English news source?) Most university sites aren’t blocked. General harmless information that has nothing to do with China isn’t blocked, naturally. And Wikipedia generally isn’t blocked, but if you try to look up anything controversial you’re going to come up with a big “This webpage is not available” error message.

But Facebook, Youtube, blogger.com sites, many Wikipedia pages, countless non-blogger.com blogs, all sites that reveal more skin than a woman or man in a bathing suit, and countless other news and information sources are blocked by the Great F!rew@ll of China. The only reason that this blog is not blocked in China is because I have never written the names of certain places, and I have never written anything remotely critical of big papi, or if I have I have done so carefully (as evidence see this post).

This was all fine and acceptable to me, as long as I could use my trusty V.P.N. And I think most laowai (“old outside”, i.e. foreigner in Chinese) felt the same way. We went about our business, keeping ourselves informed and connected and I think, for the most part, keeping our traps shut about controversial issues when talking with Chinese people on a daily basis.

But soon after my V.P.N. went haywire, I started to experience an even worse problem: Gmail was suddenly acting very strange, sometimes not loading at all, loading very slowly, taking forever to load emails or perform searches, moving like a snail when I wanted to send a message and sometimes never getting there at all.

I think I read somewhere, back in my high school Psychology class, that if you feed a rat every five minutes, it gets used to the predictability of its food and slowly saunters over when snacks arrive. If you feed the rat every ten hours, you get about the same reaction. But if you mess with the rat’s head — if you give it food now, then five minutes later, then an hour later, then twenty seconds later, then a day later, the rat goes completely nuts every time the food arrives. It thinks the food will never come again after this one time. To anthropomorphize, the rat is driven completely insane with the unpredictability of things.

This is, it turns out, what China is trying to do to its Gmail users. The country’s censors decided not to completely block Gmail, but instead to mess with Gmail, so that its users never know when it’s going to work or not work, so that we’re constantly on edge, so that every time we try to check our email we sweat a little.

I wish I were making this shit up. But I’m not. A few days after Gmail started acting really weird, first bloggers started to complain (see John Pasden’s helpful post and his links for more), then headlines started popping up about Gmail not working for other users, and then finally, just two days ago, Google officially accused China of interfering with Gmail’s services.

“There is no technical issue on our side — we have checked extensively. This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail,” Google said in a statement.

Google finally threw down the gauntlet and accused big papi of what those of us on this side of the wall knew all along. Somehow papi had found a way to seriously screw with Gmail services in the country without totally blocking them. There’s a lot of mumbo jumbo on the net about how technically difficult this is to do, but what it came down to was that Gmail was just barely usable.

There were other people saying that Google docs and other services had become unusable as well, and that, again, papi had found a way to make it look like everything was fine on this end, but that something was screwy with Google.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case. It was just big papi interfering with our internal affairs. And for this laowai, this issue suddenly became very personal. I use Google Video to chat with my family. Of course I use it to email everyone I know. I use it for document backup for my writing. I use it for chat. I check it ten times a day. More than six years of conversations, long-winded emails, and contact information of people I barely hear from anymore, are stored there. It’s very much in my blood, a part of my life.

Perhaps its sad, but this development was the first that really made me question whether I want to be here in China, or at least, it made me question my being here more than any other thing I’ve encountered in my 15-ish months here has. I started trying to think of using a Chinese email client, switching my email and informing everyone I know, no longer being able to be informed about what is really going on in the place where I live, and I thought, is it worth it?

I don’t know if it’s worth it. Certainly the lack of Gmail is not the greatest tragedy of the Great F!rew@ll. The fact that hundreds of millions of people can’t read about what’s happening in their country is clearly more relevant. Or the fact that including the English word “sex” in an email can make it impossible to send without use of a V.P.N. here. But that doesn’t affect me as much. For laowai, I suppose it’s more about what our situation is — if we can find a way to make life here worth it, especially those of us who are just here to live and learn, and have only personal reasons for wanting to get around the Wall.

The vinegar in the wound is that Baidu, the Chinese response to Google.com, is such a shameless ripoff it’s not funny. Google.com, for instance, recently added a feature that allows search results to roll down as you scroll down the page, so that you don’t have to thumb-forward to see the next page of search results. As far as I could tell, within two weeks of Google.com adding the feature, Baidu had added it as well (hm, that feature seems to have disappeared now…maybe my observation was wrong). Renrenwang, likewise, is the China mainland response to Facebook. It, too, is a shameless ripoff of Facebook, featuring the same designs, same features, same theme color.

The same sites that are blocked in mainland China are copied by mainland companies, down to the most basic design elements. Of course, this is the smart move for China. It shelters domestic companies and protects papi from the dissemination of potentially dangerous information. But it’s nearly the definition of frustration for laowai. It is not infuriating. There are much more infuriating things that happen here every day. It is merely frustrating.

To cap off the post, I’ll say that as of today, about a day after the Google announcement that China was interfering with Gmail (accusations that big papi denied), all of the issues with Gmail seem to have mysteriously disappeared. This is the “feint” that, I hope, has concluded papi’s interference in our Gmail usage. The poor drunk went too far, and hopefully all the people who use Gmail all over the country helped to put him in line. But who knows, really. He could turn it all off, the whole Internet, for all I know, tomorrow, and it’s impossible to say what the people here would do.

Maybe they would just shrug their shoulders, and say oh well, and turn back to whatever it was they were doing. Except for one little problem that (I guess) might come up: That thing they were doing? It was probably using the Internet!

I was in my apartment studying Chinese last Friday when the earthquake struck and the tsunami hit Japan. One of my high school students sent me a text message that said simply:

“News Alert: Tsunami Hits Japan After 8.8 Magnitude Earthquake Off Coast”

After learning that the tsunami wouldn’t at all affect the province I’m in, my first thought was about my friend Mami, a Japanese teacher who lives on the coastal capital city of this province. I see her every week or so. I met her last summer while I was traveling in Fujian. I was worried that the tsunami might have been near her home, because she’s from a beach town. But Mami is from Okinawa, the far South of Japan, and after a quick scan of the news it was obvious that Okinawa hadn’t been damaged by the tsunami. I called her an hour or so later (I figured her students would be jamming her phone with messages, so I didn’t call right away) and she said everybody in her family was fine, but she wasn’t sure about some friends who were living in northern Japan.

A photo of a whirlpool off the coast of Japan from the Sendai quake - pulled from ChinaSmack.com

Actually, the first day the news didn’t sound so bad. The New York Times reported that only a hundred or more people had died. This sounds strange now, since the headlines are saying that more than 10,000 have died, but the first day it didn’t seem so bad.

The thing I dreaded the most that first day was hearing what Chinese people were going to say about it. I assumed, since Chinese are  generally very open and unabashed about their negative feelings toward Japanese (and vice versa, from what I’ve heard, although I’ve never been to Japan so I don’t know), that people would gloat and be happy about the horrible disaster. I braced myself for what I assumed would be a few days of jarring, insensitive comments.

It turned out that I underestimated people, at least the people I know. I first asked my close Chinese friend Mike what he thought about the disaster, since that evening I was in his family’s house and the news was on the TV.

“It’s a terrible tragedy,” he said in English. “Of course there is some negative history between the two countries, but this kind of natural disaster is no one’s fault.”

Since I know that Mike is generally more open-minded than the average Chinese, I asked him if he thought other people would be happy about the disaster.

“Zhege wo bu dong,” he said. I don’t know about that.

So I decided, in my Sunday speech classes with the high school students, to use the Japan earthquake as a discussion prompt. All of my students were interested in talking about the event, but their faces all grew a little austere when I asked them if people would be happy about it. One student of mine, Anthony, whose English is pretty good, saw it coming and addressed it before I even asked her.

“Of course, there is some bad history between the two countries. But if anyone thinks that the earthquake is a good thing, that is wrong. This has happened to innocent people,” she said (after asking me in Chinese how to say “innocent”).

One of my students, Rachel, said that she had already donated money to a rescue organization in Japan. She added, looking a bit shy, that she had donated much more money when an earthquake struck Sichuan Province in western China in 2008, killing more than 68,000 people. “Because I should give more to my country,” she said.

Among all the people I’ve talked to, everyone has seemed gravely sympathetic to the Japanese over the disaster, perhaps because the memory of the Sichuan earthquake is not too distant. And it has been pleasantly surprising to me to see people be sympathetic, especially since in recent months the Chinese have been pretty vocal about their disregard for the Japanese. Last fall there were protests all over China, even in this small city, after the Japanese Coast Guard detained a Chinese fishing vessel captain after his boat crashed into a Japanese vessel in contested waters.

Another photo from the earthquake - pulled from ChinaSmack

Last semester I even got into an argument with a student from the English department when he told me, with no prompting from myself, that Chinese hate Japanese. I confronted him on the opinion and tried to make it clear that it was offensive to me, which ultimately seemed to offend him. Eventually, the student actually got up from the lunch table and walked away from me, a sign of disrespect no one had ever shown me here. I tried to resolve it by getting up, stopping him, and explaining that as a foreigner I didn’t understand some things about Chinese culture, and that my intent was not to disagree but to learn. That seemed to calm him down, but it was still an awkward encounter, and after that I decided not to talk to Chinese about Japanese if I could avoid it.

But a levy seems to have broken: I sense little animus from Chinese towards Japanese now. The Chinese government sent a team of rescuers to try to help out in the country, and even on ChinaSmack (where the Internet hate-speak that all Internet users spew out is translated from Chinese into English) comments were supportive of Japan, and in the cases where people decided to say something offensive (“Because it’s Japan, I’m so happy”) there were other commenters who kept them in check (“The entire world will look at the reaction of Chinese people, can you please not make us lose face? Don’t forget that only yesterday Yunnan had an earthquake, do you want to completely lose face for Chinese people?”).

Of course, all this is in the face of a complete nightmare going on in the country next door. I just read in the Times that 400,000 people are homeless, well over 10,000 dead, and a nuclear power plant is fomenting the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Mami, my friend in Fuzhou, has gotten in touch with her friends in northern Japan and said that they’re all OK, but none of them can get back to their homes. They don’t even know if they still have homes. And my other Japanese friend, who is still in New York, may have friends or family in the same situation or worse.

It’s reason to be grateful to know that I, and the people I’m closest to, are all in safe places. And I guess comforting that even though the country next door has been crippled by a very sad natural disaster, at least people on this side of the map care enough to put the past aside.

Before I came to China, my former professor, who helped get me the job here, recommended that I read a book by Peter Hessler about two years the author spent living in rural Sichuan as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Hessler came to China in the late 90s to teach English at a lower-level university. He was one of the first foreigners to live in the city since the communist takeover in 1949, and the book was basically a straight-up account of his time as an English teacher. He supplemented the narrative about his experience with several vignettes about people he met while living in the small city of Fuling, but mostly the book was about what it was like to be an English teacher at a university in small-city China.

On the first page of that book (the book is called River Town), Hessler writes,

When we arrived, there was one other foreigner, a German who was spending a semester teaching at a local high school. But we met him only once, and he left not long after we settled in. After that we were the only foreigners in town. The population was about 200,000, which made it a small city by Chinese standards.

Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler

When I read the book, I didn’t know it, but it would be basically a guidebook to my entire first year in China. The town that I moved to, Sanming, has a population of about 200,000. I’m an English teacher at a lower-tier university. My students, like his, are largely from the countryside. I am one of only a few foreigners in town. I rarely see anyone who isn’t native Chinese. The environment is isolating at times, inspiring at the same time, very different from the world I knew before socially, historically, economically, linguistically.

That book was a completely indispensable guide to me in the beginning. Especially with regard to preparing me, mentally, for the discipline it would take to make progress learning Chinese. One of the best things about Hessler’s book is how he patiently describes the process of learning Chinese, from the high-level, like realizing, from month to month, that he could read and understand more than what he could before, to the very specific, like describing his method for studying Chinese characters:

And so Soddy’s question remained: How do you spend your spare time? When I finished teaching I would sit at my desk, which looked out across the Wu River to the city, and I would write:

学   学   学   学   学   学   学   学

While I wrote, I pronounced the word over and over, as carefully as I drew it:

“Xue xue xue xue xue xue xue xue.”

I would write the same character about a hundred times total, and then I would think of ways in which it was used: xuexi, xuesheng, xuexiao. And I would write it on a flash card and put it on a stack that grew steadily on my desk–between five and ten a day, usually.

After I had been in China for about three months, I re-read his book, and seeing how quickly his Chinese had progressed, I became extremely jealous and copied his method precisely.

That was for writing. I had different tools available for learning speaking and listening — better tools, most likely, since I had the Internet at my fingertips, something he didn’t have. I still struggled to keep up with the pace that he made in the book, feeling myself slowly slipping behind as one year became one and thensome (Hessler was practicing reading newspapers at the end of year one, and I’m just getting to that point now after a year and a half). But it was to a large extent his book that pushed me, gave me a goal to shoot for when there was nobody else around me who was trying as hard to learn Chinese (except Chinese school kids, but a foreigner could never compete with them). It was that way with so many things about China — I had read Hessler’s book, and saw the astonishing things he learned and the things he had to do to learn them, and to a large extent I just copied. I learned some of my own tricks along the way, improvising and also reading blogs of other China expats. But his book was the bible. It was the Alpha and the Omega for me in the first months. I am eternally grateful for it.

But, after finishing his second book, Oracle Bones, a few days ago, I think I have found a book about China that I can be more grateful for. I am about to slip from reviewing to fawning, but this is a blog: Oracle Bones has changed everything in subtle ways; after I got through the second half of the book my whole idea of China and Chinese people was changed, and I read the second half just in awe, the book two inches from my face. It seemed like every few pages I was either tearing up or laughing. It was one of the most intense reading experiences I’ve had since Henry Roth tore my heart to pieces in Call It Sleep when I read that novel four or five years ago.

That is, of course, largely because China has become so huge in my world over the past year and a half. Certainly if I had never left the shores of the U.S. and hadn’t struggled for almost 18 months to find a life that seemed sane here, I would not have been so gripped by Hessler’s account of his time in China from 1999 to 2002. But I think there is something transcendent about this particular book (it goes far beyond his third book, Country Driving, which came out last year and which I read last spring) — something that portrayed Chinese people, and how their lives have been driven, torn, shaped, annihilated, by history, that has made this book special to me. Like beautiful fiction, which I wouldn’t have thought a book that is essentially a piece of long-form journalism could ever approach.

To start, Hessler sprinkles the book with fascinating facts that remain imminent for the average expat: Chinese is “logographic”, meaning that each character represents one spoken syllable; a linguist named Zhou Youguang was the main architect of pinyin, the system by which Chinese is romanized (417); the ubiquitous Chinese dish in America called General Tao’s Chicken is named after General Zuo Tongtang who expanded the Chinese empire in the Qing Dynasty (377); and that, after Chinese writing was invented 3000 years ago, “the heavens rained millet and the ghosts wept all night long” (289). Also that the word “oracular” exists.

These are snippets, random notations that were significant to me as a reader, giving sense to things that formerly made no sense. But the true beauty of Oracle Bones is Hessler’s narrative achievement, how he takes a string of unrelated stories and binds them. And, by doing that, how he demonstrates the subjectivity of history. Hessler’s book is not a history book, and it’s not merely a work of reportage: it’s a book about the Chinese world and how mercurial our interpretation of that world is, how it is always changing, how its story is malleable to the point of almost falling apart at any moment, like pizza dough, except in the hands of an experienced teller.

At one point, he breaks away from his whole narrative about China to explain his feelings about journalism as a craft, field and profession:

When I had first arrived in Beijing, the translation from teacher to writer hadn’t seemed so difficult. The basic role was similar: I was the outsider who sifted information between worlds. But over the years, as I thought about what Emily had written, I realized that there would always be something unnatural about being a foreign correspondent. As a teacher, I had taken information from far away–American culture, English literature–and introduced it to a classroom of living Chinese students.

But a writer’s work moved in the opposite direction. I started with living people and then created stories that were published in a distant country. Often, the human subjects of my articles couldn’t even understand the language in which they were written. From my perspective, the publishing world was so remote that it seemed half real. Once a year, I visited editors in New York, and I rarely heard anything from readers of the magazine. Usually, I wrote only two or three articles a year, which was adequate to live simply in a country like China. The fee for a single published word in the New Yorker–more than two dollars–was enough to buy lunch in Beijing. With one long sentence, I could eat for a week. Those were the exchanges of a freelance foreign correspondent: people and places were distilled into words, and the words were sold.

Whenever I received copies of my New Yorker articles, I found myself flipping through the pages, thinking about the gap between the world where I lived and the world where I published. I traded on that gap–that was my margin, and the advertisements reflected the breadth of the divide. In one published story, anecdotes about Fuling students were interspersed with ads for Orb Silversmiths, the Tribeca Grand Hotel, and Wildflower Log Homes (“lots starting at 49k”). The article about Polat was entitled “The Middleman”, and it began with the sentence, “You can buy anything in Yabaolu.”

These paragraphs attest to someone who has done some serious thinking about his role in a country where the majority of people are still scrambling to eat, yet where an American can also conduct interviews, write stories, and make a six-figure salary in U.S. dollars. This is an idea that has been prominent in my mind for over a year. Since I arrived in China I have been diligently taking notes, studying Chinese, trying my best to make sure that I am observing everything completely. I do it not necessarily with the idea that I will write a book, as Hessler did, but simply to record. I want to know what I have been thinking and seeing and experiencing, whether or not I ever write a book about it. But there is something strange, something tarnished about that act. It’s the same problem that all journalism has. You watch, you observe, you note, you write. But what if somebody doesn’t want to be observed? What if somebody doesn’t want to be written about? Your job, your work, is to take a living person and reduce them to words. What happens if they don’t like what they see? How are you supposed to reconcile your work with that fact? This question involves all of journalism, eventually. I imagine, sometimes, a Chinese person going to America and writing a book about his or her experience. How much of what he or she saw, and then noted, and then wrote, would be true? Perhaps it is all about experience. What is relevant to the viewer, the subjectivity about it. I suppose what I appreciate about Hessler’s writing is that he doesn’t deign to be authoritative: he is always there, or at least usually there, admitting that what he sees is limited by his perspective.

The book, as I mentioned earlier, is also about the malleability of history. This is one reason why I hate history books. They are Swiss cheese in my eyes. A history book’s flaws are always at the fore of my mind when I read one. It’s so obvious that history is limited by the perspective of the time in which it is written, but that is so rarely made clear in the writing. Hessler makes an effort to do that. The most powerful story that Hessler follows in his book is one that he admits he knew from the start he would fail to ever learn the facts about: the story of Chen Mengjia, a Chinese scholar who was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution (the period under Mao Zedong’s reign in which China turned in on itself and destroyed many of its cultural relics) and later committed suicide. Hessler splices the story of Chen Mengjia (his given name means “dreaming of home” — Meng4jia1) through the whole book, introducing it briefly and then moving on to other things, touching on it again 50 pages later. We slowly discover that Mengjia was a great scholar who studied the famous oracle bones, the 3000 year-old fossils on which the first Chinese characters appear, who criticized Mao and the party in the 50s for simplifying Chinese characters, and we hear different stories about his death: he committed suicide out of pride after being labeled a rightist, he was killed by Red Guards, he had a racy love life, he was faithful to his wife, until finally, toward the end of the book, Hessler writes about his encounter with Chen Mengjia’s younger brother, Mengxiong (dream of bear). The interview is tense, and becomes moreso when Hessler shows Mengxiong a photocopy of one of the last letters his brother ever wrote — a letter Mengxiong has never seen:

In China, people often speak circuitously when confronted with an uncomfortable memory. The narrative emerges loosely, like string falling slack onto the floor; the listener has to imagine how everything connects. Sometimes the most important details are omitted entirely. But when the Chinese do decide to speak openly, their directness can be overpowering. Often, there is no visible emotion: just the simple straight words. And something about seeing his brother’s letter causes Mengxiong to pick up the story and pull it taught. For the next hour he speaks without fatigue.

He tells about how his older brother had been persecuted, and why, and how he eventually tried to kill himself by taking sleeping pills, but failed. So Mengxiong went to his home, and there encountered Red Guards (the activists who, with Mao Zedong’s support, worked to destroy artifacts, ideas and people who were perceived as “traditional” during the Cultural Revolution) who detained Mengxiong and Mengjia’s wife, shaved off half their hair as a form of punishment, and proceeded to beat them:

“…they took off their leather belts and started beating us. First they used this part–”

The old man touches the leather tip of his belt. Then he slides his hand to the buckle. “After a while, they used this part, the metal. That’s when I started bleeding. They were beating me on the head, and I was wearing a white shirt — it was summertime. It turned entirely red with blood. They weren’t beating Lucy on the head like that. After a while, I was getting seriously hurt, and I asked them to let me get some bandages at the local clinic. I explained that otherwise I was going to bleed too much, and I promised to return immediately. Finally, they agreed. But while I was at the clinic, I made a phone call to my work unit, and they immediately sent some people over. They explained that I was a good person, and the Red Guards let me go. On my way home I saw my wife–not the same wife you’ve met, but my wife at the time. I told her to hurry home. That was a terribly dangerous time. That evening you could hear them all night long, knocking on doors and beating people.”

Mengxiong explains that he couldn’t visit his brother again, and shortly after that his brother killed himself. The sad thing about it, the most immediately sad thing after you read about the brutality, is simply that the people being beaten were often scholars, people who had invested themselves in knowledge and the past, and in many cases in understanding the outside world–Mengjia and his wife had both lived in America for a time. And that is precisely what they were beaten and humiliated for–they had ideas that seemed dangerous. China was working to destroy its past, in a period of self-immolation, and also was working to destroy anything that hinted of the outside world. In that case, anyone who has pursued knowledge is suspect. When the past and the outside world are the enemies, what else is there? There isn’t anything left. That’s what these interviews make clear. That’s what’s so tragic about the whole thing.

And what’s so beautiful about this book. Hessler sees things, meets people, that you can hardly hold in your mind without feeling that it will burst, and yet he writes so stunningly clearly. China is his onion. And as he showed in River Town, he has such a capacity for understanding it, such a gift for learning about things so quickly and absorbing them so deeply, and yet holding on to himself, the reader can only stand and watch in awe. Hessler took a great leap of faith when he wrote this book that his reader would understand the perspective that he was looking through. That’s what lends the book such clarity, such greatness.

Early on in the book, Hessler visits the North Korean border and finds himself in a field in the middle of nowhere, looking at a border marker with no one around. This is the true feeling of the book: wherever Hessler goes, he has the clarity of someone who has been hiking for days without seeing a soul:

I dropped my pack and took a few steps into North Korea, where I balanced my camera on a rock and set the timer. In the photograph, the sky is a deep blue and white clouds hand low on the horizon. I am kneeling and my shadow falls across the stone marker. There is a dirty white bandage on my left hand. The mountains could be the mountains of any country.

When I read this book, I get the feeling that Hessler could be writing about any place, and it would still be this good.

Well, I’m back at my desk in China, studying Chinese, reading books, and scrambling, somewhat, to prepare for classes that I completely neglected to prepare for while I was home. Which was just as well, because it gave me time to hang out with people, get caught up as much as possible on what had been happening in my friends’ and families’ lives for the past year or so and just enjoy being there.

It was definitely a huge recharger, seeing friends especially and being around people who I relate to instinctively; at first it was unfamiliar and a little scary, I think because I was worried that we wouldn’t be able to relate or connect anymore for whatever reason. But when we did it felt good, as you’d expect, and made me question all over again whether I really wanted to go back to China.

Of course, not having anything else lined up, I had to come back. And now have been back for about three days. But the hard things about coming back are not the ones I expected. I’ve found that it’s basically just a horrible bitch to get over the time difference and the germs that you’re exposed to during long-distance travel, that moving from China to America and America to China is basically the same in that your first couple of days in either place is challenging physically and mentally, just because you have to confront a life that you haven’t confronted in a while, and do it on a severely mangled sleep schedule. Apart from that, and from a nasty cold that set in after my first day here, it’s been smooth — I was surprised at how natural and normal it felt to walk into my apartment building and put down my bags in the apartment I hadn’t seen for 5 weeks. Similar to how it used to feel to arrive back in Oregon after having been on the East Coast for a week or so, except in this case I was a hell of a lot farther from home.

Even that seems pretty remarkable to me. On the way to the airport I asked my father how long he thought it would have taken to get to China 100 years ago, and although I don’t know I assume it would be at least weeks and probably months. Now you can do it in a day and a half and feel like you never left.

Some observations from being home:

American food consists mainly of cheese and fried beef. That’s OK, but it becomes a problem because I love those foods. Particularly cheese. The fact that cheese is hard to come by in small-town China is extremely good for my waistline.

After a year in China, it takes about three weeks not to be stunned every time you see a person of non-Asian ethnicity.

After a year in China, even if you hate everything about Fox News, it is for some reason just intrinsically interesting to watch on TV. I have no idea why about this one. I can’t even begin to explain it. Maybe it has to do with how Fox News presents a simplified, uglier version of Americanism that is pretty close to the Chinese idea of what Americans are. I don’t know. That’s just a theory and I don’t think it’s true. It’s just fascinating, is all. The English voices, the big loud Americans, the bright colors, the extravagance, the extreme theories and unadorned Americanism. It’s weird. I couldn’t get enough of it, like picking at an itchy scab, so satisfying. I’d never even watched Fox News before this trip back to the U.S., but every time I saw it this time I was transfixed.

China quickly becomes a weird almost inaccessible washed-out memory. After a week home I found it difficult to recall lots of things, but now that I’m back that doesn’t make any sense because I don’t seem to have forgotten any of the language.

People in the U.S. are interested in China. I ended up having a lot more conversations about China than I expected with people who seemed genuinely interested. I kind of expected people to be pretty indifferent, because it’s such a far-away, weird, obscurely unknown kind of place. But people were pretty interested across the board, not too judgy, just asked questions and listened, which was really cool.

Now that I’ve woken up after a 15-hour night’s sleep and am feeling much better than I did the last two days, I think I’m getting used to things again and not feeling completely destroyed by the time change, I’m getting a bit more glad to be back. Not completely there yet, but getting there.

In October 2009 I left the U.S. to fly to China, to some city that I probably couldn’t have pointed to on a map if you asked me. I left by car; actually my mom drove me from my parents’ house in New Hampshire the five hours down to JFK in the middle of the night; we arrived after midnight and waited outside a brightly lit airport restaurant for the check-in counter to open. After I checked in we moved to the second floor, because it seemed a little quieter, and sat by a big wall of windows –it was still night so the windows were black — and waited for the time when my plane would board.

When it came time to go board I didn’t feel like I was consciously walking and moving and talking anymore; I was swimming in a mixture of emotions, just fighting to keep moving. And then, of course, saying goodbye to my mom felt like saying goodbye to the last person I knew in the world; the idea that I was going someplace where no one knew me or was likely to know anything about people like me was not just in my brain but enveloping my whole brain with fog. I guess I’m a creature who generally shies away from change, even though I have managed to find it pretty consistently in life for the past ten years.

Hugging my mom and saying bye was the first time that I felt like maybe bagging the whole thing, the whole idea, and just saying nope, take me home: Not goin’. Can’t do it.

Of course I didn’t do that. I recently returned home for the first time after about 15 months in China teaching English and studying Chinese. At a certain point I decided to go, and, knowing that it would be a disaster to let fear or anxiety get in the way of that plan, and wanting very much to stay there and have an immersive experience, I stayed.

I think a lot of people would not have such a hard time leaving home to go live in another country like China for so long — some people are better at it than others. But that saying-goodbye moment was very difficult for me — maybe the toughest thing that I’ve done.

The good news was, as I discovered, that was also the hardest thing I would have to do. Before I left, a friend who knew somebody who had also taught in China recalled a quote about the initial going-away experience: “It’s like jumping off the end of a pier into dark water, and when you land realizing that the water is only a foot deep.” I wouldn’t say that arriving in China, adjusting to the culture, making friends and learning the language, was as easy as wading around in knee-deep water, but it was a lot easier than I imagined it to be when I was waiting in the U.S. to leave.

I spent 15 months there. I learned, more or less, how to be a decent ESL teacher (although I know I still have a lot to learn about being a teacher). I made Chinese friends who I’ll definitely remember forever and had experiences that have totally changed my worldview. I managed to become fairly conversant in Chinese, although I also have many more years’ work ahead of me on that front. But I made it through, and none of the bad stuff I imagined before I left happened, or if some of my fears turned out to be true (getting sick from the water or street food, for instance), they weren’t nearly as bad as I imagined they could be (getting sick from water or food was never a major inconvenience — it happens, but I certainly never had to go to the hospital for it, for example).

So in the end I would say that the maxim about going to China was half-true. Or maybe I would offer this modification: “It’s like jumping off the end of a pier into dark water and remembering, oh yeah, I can swim.” Life in China isn’t necessarily harder than life in the U.S. : it’s just different, in a thousand fascinating ways.

So I’m going back in a month to continue teaching, with the hopes of reaching a level with my Chinese so that I can be certified as proficient, which hopefully will help me go in new directions that I maybe haven’t even thought of yet. And I’m looking forward to going back. When I was in NYC last week and walked by a Chinese man playing an erhu and all the memories came flooding back to me, I knew I wanted to go back. So I’m gonna. Hopefully I can find some people who want to go to Sanming to teach, too, because that school needs good teachers.

I recently discovered that the New Yorker has a bunch of free podcasts that you can download back episodes of in the iTunes store, the most interesting of which is called “The Political Scene”, a monthly conversation about American politics hosted by the magazine’s executive editor, Dorothy Wickendon.

One of the things I have soaked up from the podcasts is that there are a bunch of reasons that the Democrats lost so many seats in Congress in the midterm elections. Everybody seems to think the biggest reason is the persistent shittyness of the economy, combined with a general “lack of trust” in the government (mostly due to the bailout which seemed to favor banks over common people) and a feeling that Congress in general has been ineffective.

One thing that strikes me that could also be a big reason is that one of the biggest pieces of legislation that the Democrats have managed to pass since Obama took office has been health care reform, which has from the start been a great program that seems destined to truly help tens of millions of people and make America a fairer and better place to live, but unfortunately just seems really hard to get excited about. Whenever I think of health care reform I think, yeah, that’s awesome, now we will finally have what Canadians have had for decades, it’s about time…but I also think, damn, now I’m going to have to pay for health care in the future whether I want to or not. I think bills and paperwork and headaches…even though I know this is the right thing, I’m happy this happened, this is definitely what I wanted and this is why I voted for Obama.

This is the opposite of the effect of something like, say, the Iraq War had for the Republican base. Even though it disgusted many of those of us on the left, it definitely got the rocks off of most of the people who went on American-flag shopping sprees after September 11th. It was decidedly polarizing, a rock-star-excitement moment for hawks and a moment of fear and despair for doves.

Healthcare is maybe somewhere near as historic as Bush’s war, but nobody is on their lawn Yosemite Samming over it. There are just some of us quietly thanking Obama, and then a bunch of insurance men in suits running all over the place trying to shut it down.

I guess that doesn’t play so well for Democrats come election day.

This article in the New York Times about the state of climate change as a political priority in the world was a good reminder of the issue. Interesting facts:

China has surpassed the United States in overall energy consumption; there is actually an MIT climatologist who claims that climate change isn’t a big problem (doesn’t that look bad for MIT?); and the parts-per-million measure of CO2 in the atmosphere will soon surpass 400 (it had been below 300 for about 800,000 years before the Industrial Revolution).

And then one haunting quote from the son, now himself a famous atomospheric scientist, of Charles David Keeling, the scientist who discovered in the 1950s or 60s that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere was rising. The son (Ralph Keeling) said:

“When I go see things with my children, I let them know they might not be around when they’re older,” he said. ” ‘Go enjoy these beautiful forests before they disappear. Go enjoy the glaciers in these parks because they won’t be around.’ It’s basically taking note of what we have, and appreciating it, and saying goodbye to it.”

Pretty fucking startling words…I hadn’t been startled on this issue in a while.