Having Fun All The Time

Tonight I found something that I wrote last October while I was still in Vermont, before I came to Fujian. Not sure why I never posted it but now seems as good a time as any. I had forgotten what my professor, Mark, had told me before I left. His words have turned out to be totally accurate and true; it’s a pity that I managed to more or less forget them. I suppose that’s the reason for writing in the first place…

How I ended up going to China by saying “OK”

On a summer afternoon this year I was sitting at a desk, in a cubicle, on the eleventh floor of an office building in downtown Portland, Oregeon. A lot of things were gray in that office. The linoleum covering the desk was a kind of granite color, with little chips of darker colored gray to give it a little less sterile look; the cubicle walls were covered in that gray nylon fabric that all cubicle walls are covered with. I had all kinds of charts and phone directories and printouts of information that I had affixed to the wall with gray staples. I had stapled the sheets of paper to the wall long before that day, and had since memorized most of what was on the sheets by sheer repetition of use, which meant that the sheets of paper on my cubicle walls had become invisible to me and therefore meaningless. I had gray pens, and gray file organizers, and a gray computer tower. I even had gray pants. The dust that accumulated on the cuffs of my shirt was gray, and the highway that was visible out the nearest window was gray, and the carpeting that stretched out all around me and throughout the small hive of cubes was gray. Everything was gray, gray, gray. Gray was everywhere. I checked into work at about 8 a.m. and checked out at 5:30 p.m., with a 20-minute lunch break somewhere in the middle. Which meant that for a good portion of my day, nearly every day, I spent a considerable amount of time contemplating, absorbing, ignoring and reviling gray.

As you might expect, the gray in my work life, after a time, began to make things outside of work begin to seem pretty gray, too. Not gray in the literal sense, exactly. More gray in an all-encompassing, world-view-orienting type of way. I think I began to see gray in everything. I began to be gray. I began to think in tones of gray. Not in any kind of well-balanced, yin-yang, seek-the-middle-ground way, but in a dull, impassive, grim, unhappy way. Things were gray and I was not enthused about them, the color or the overall outlook.

But that’s just to set the tone for you. On that day, that summer day, I was feeling very gray, but I was working. I was busily doing whatever it is that office workers do on their computers all day long. I was probably working in Excel. I was probably concentrating hard, on whatever I was working on. Then, for a momentary reprieve from the drudgery of coding, or looking at data, or tweaking some presentation or graph in Excel, I pulled up gmail. There was an email from a friend of mine. It was a brief, informal email, a quick bite that looked like it had been copy and pasted from a newsletter or something that had come through his inbox. The email said that a former professor of mine, from the college where I got my B.A. (the college is a tiny liberal arts school in Vermont), was looking for someone, preferably an alum, to fill a position teaching English in China. The subject line was probably in all caps, and probably said something like “AMAZING OPPORTUNTIY TO TEACH ENGLISH IN CHINA”. I am certain that it contained the word opportunity, because that is where all the trouble started. Or, maybe I should say, that is where all the fun started. However you look at it, I think it was the word “opportunity” that drew me in.

I tend to think that our society, meaning the United States society, and presumably other nations, although I’m not sure which, are generally obsessed with the idea of opportunity. The idea of the American Dream is very much built on the concept of opportunity. Capitalism, at least in my lay mind, is generally synonymous with opportunism, so maybe that is why it seems to me that America is generally preoccupied with the idea of opportunity. The maxim of American opportunism is generally thus: You only get a limited number of opportunities in life, and you have to jump on them when they come along. Stand around long enough, and you’ll get a chance to sit down. You only live once. So on and so on.

The general idea of these idioms seems to be that life is like a waterslide at a summer water park. You wait in line, and wait in line, and wait in line, and eventually you get your chance to jump into some dark, downward-slanting chute through which a ceaseless current of chlorinated water courses. You go whooping and hollering your way down the pipes, toward some unknown wave pool full of screaming, sweaty children. You hope that if someone becomes your landing pad, it will be a chubby kid. You don’t really know where the pipe goes or how long the slide is, because they all wind in and out of each others’ paths confusingly, but you generally expect that the ride will be fun, and that you will get wet, and that you will not get hurt. So you leap willingly into a dark chasm which, to an untrained eye, could easily be an entryway to drowning or suffocation. Occasionally, a kid chickens out and walks the 10-year-old version of the walk of shame, back down the long poolwater-soaked stairways, elbows his or her way through the lines of kids snaking up said stairways and through the cloisters of excited children on each transom, to the sympathetic (we hope) arms of his or her mom. Most kids gawk at these chicken shit children as they walk back down the stairs. Everybody knows they chickened out. Everybody knows that they did not leap into the waterslide whooping and hollering. They got scared.

Maybe people really don’t think of life that way, but sometimes I get the suspicion that nobody ever really leaves the waterpark. There is a little bit of the excitable water-slide goer in all of us, hawkishly looking out for the next scaredy-cat kid to come walking down those urine and chlorine slicked steps.

There are certain key things that certain individuals said to me that helped me make the decision to go. Tonight, sitting in a friend’s living room with the college professor who helped me get the job in China, a friend of mine asked him what the most important piece of advice he could give me was. “I would say just be patient,” he said. “There are all kinds of ways that your patience will be tested, and it’s generally not OK in China to express a lot of impatience, which can be maddening.” He explained that people tend to be less inclined to question orders handed down from on high. That people are generally not good at questioning the whys of what they do, but just accept it as necessary.

One friend who had taught in China told me to bring lots of gifts.

Milton Leathers, a soft-spoken southern gentleman from Athens, Georgia, told me that there was no way I could ever regret going to China if I did it. His words were “Even if something bad happens – and I really don’t think there’s any chance that anything bad will happen – you still will never regret it. I meant think of all the things that you will learn just by being there.”

He also said, “You’re 25, which is about the age that you are starting to realize that the years are going by a bit faster than they did when you were 14 or 15; soon you’ll be working some type of regular job, with a focus on your career, and there won’t be any time to get away to do something like this; and if you do, there will be someone right behind you to replace you in your work.”

The general consensus of everyone I know is that I had to go, which, in a way, means that I did have to go. There was no way that I could have made any other choice, given that. When everyone in your world gives you one version of reality, or potential reality, you have no choice but to accept it. To do otherwise would be nihilistic. Of course, in a way, they never understand the full context, which is why one must question it and make sure they understand the full picture. But there is a difference between showing the whole picture and insisting on one’s unwillingness to do something. I think people saw enough of the picture.

I talked to quite a few people about China, some of whom had been there to teach. One of those people is the uncle of my significant other. He is a writer with graying hair that tends to stand up on his head (his hair), giving him a bit of a shocked look. I talked with him in his living room for an afternoon, about a week ago. Almost the entire time I sat on the couch silently, nodding and smiling as he held forth about everything he could remember about his experience in China.

He talked about the language, his past studies of Chinese, where he was located and the lifestyle he had had there. He told me about some of the friends he had made, and the fact that many of his students had visited him in New York since he had come back home. He talked about some of the other teachers he befriended, one of whom was the dean of his department, whom he taught English during his time there. He showed me books, gave me reading suggestions, burned some CDs of Chinese dictionaries.

One of the things he said was striking, for some reason. He was looking across the coffee table at me, with his wide-eyed, slightly awed look. He crossed one knee over the other. Behind him was a stack of books that reached to the ceiling. Daylight slanted in through the old wood-paned windows of their tiny apartment in the Upper West Side of New York. He mentioned that it had been easy to meet people, that the majority of people were kind, and gentle, and generous. “I loved them,” he added.