all the things you haven't heard

I can still feel the humiliation of the kindergarten cafeteria scene in which my friends discovered (to their dismay) that I did not know who Elvis Presley was, so I tried to go gentle with my astonishment when we found out FR had never heard of Adolph Hitler. GX was watching the propaganda film that he said was guaranteed to make even a Jew love the man. I wasn't so convinced - maybe it's related to all the propaganda I was raised on (and I mean this in the best sense) - the shivers I get from military marching tunes and videos of soldiers marching to them are much more horror than awe-inspired.

Anyway, I tried not to laugh too much, and told her to go baidu "hitler." I don't know if she has, but this morning she was baidu-ing away about the train wreck reported on the front page of the newspaper. She showed me the article and the website that provided a little box with a simulation of the accident. One train was going too fast, fishtailed a bit, collided with another passing train. 7o people died, just like that. Most of them were probably asleep.

Then we talked about how we always feel like trains are so safe, but was it ZX that said that you're safer on a plane? I think this is what my students meant when they wrote that news should be "close to my life." Tomorrow evening we take the train to her hometown (or to the closest town) for the labor day holiday. We ain't comin' back 'til Sunday.

Yesterday evening I reunited with my Chinese tutor after a strange three-week break. I brought him a bottle of water. He brought me a flower that he picked from a vine. At 5:45 we left the picnic table where we always meet near White Horse Park, and I headed towards the yoga place. When I ducked into a Lanzhou noodle place for supper, a young guy was reading a headline from a newspaper aloud to his two friends. Something about the US and Spain. I never did understand, but my curiousity won me some new friends (we exchanged telephone numbers, I invited them to English Island next week) and a gifted lamb skewer. Another guy waiting for his take-out order said, "Look at her shoes, look at her pants, they have a Chinese flavor. She's lived here for a long time." I told them that I bought the shoes in the US, and the pants in Cambodia.

My taiji instructor had met the Italian monk who lives in the monastery across the street and invited him to come practice with us. When he arrived, the middle-aged woman leaving after yoga was excited to tell him that she had read about him in the newspaper. BAO-ZHI! she said, real loud and distinct, even after being told (when she asked right in front of him) that he spoke excellent Chinese. I'm pretty sure the China Daily article that I read about him pointed out that he could speak Chinese, and I'd bet you a hundred yuan the one that she read had too.

just so you know

In case you aren't lucky enough to actually live here like I do, you might not know that...

Everything good in the world is orginally Chinese, everything bad Western.

For example, there's capitalism (bad) - forced on China in the Qing dynasty (1800's) by the eight foreign powers, who after using military might (or GUNS, which we must remember, were NOT invented by Chinese people though they had long before invented gunpowder) to force their way into China's market, proceeded to post signs on the land they had stolen in Shanghai that read, "No Chinese or dogs allowed". It's hard to argue that capitalism hasn't been fully embraced here, but we'll argue that we never wanted it, never chose it.

And the all-inclusive, "openness" (bad) - immodesty, loose morality, and sex on TV, in movies, in young people's lives, is learned, of course, from the West, and mainly from "America", where everyone knows people wear as few clothes as they can get away with and divorce, sleep around, and in general assert their (scarily-extreme) independence as easily as they deposit their parents in an old folk's home.

Anais Mitchell sings (I think) about being a "westerner" in a place other than the "west" in "The Belly and the Beast" and I understand the general feeling ...

I, in my longing, fly out in the night
unveiled and irreverently dressed
I'm lipstuck and liquored up, pickin' a fight
I'm the wicked, wicked witch of the west

See, I want to complain about how I'm misunderstood, but really, I work with amazingly open people who understand relatively much about where I'm coming from and the mutual misunderstandings that we're all mired in and, best of all, they like to talk about it with me. We're all thinking a bit more politically these days; even my poor, very apolitical roommate is aware that something is going on because of the unavoidable buzz about boycotting Carrefour because we've been having these hours of conversations about politics and culture. I really think I understand a lot about China. I say to my roommate, "I really think I understand a lot about China," and then add, "but not enough."

"That's right, a little humbler!" she admonishes jokingly, and I know she's right, but I also wonder if "understanding China" for her doesn't meant holding the same views that every "good girl" is supposed to, 'cause I don't think I'll ever get there. Today we conclude our lunchtime lecture saying peacework is helping people in China and the west to understand each other more. I agree, I agree.

We pick up later with why the officials can't engage in real dialogue, because they have no "culture". (A related article about why officials shouldn't read, and I read the other day that the Pope can speak ten languages, and thought, "Now that guy deserves to be a leader!") . I mentioned this article, which offers China suggestions on "Putting the PR into the PRC" .

This was sort of the author's summary advice to China on how to come across a little more positively to the rest of the world.

Be confident and honest, not defensive and secretive

The outright denials of the obvious, the virulent rhetoric, the strained historical arguments, the paranoid claims that foreigners cause your problems - all make China look bad. And China does not need to look bad. Moreover, the world needs China not to look bad. China has a great deal to be proud and confident of, with an unprecedented record of poverty alleviation, phenomenal economic growth, glittering new architecture, high-levels of education, a space programme, trillions in foreign reserves, a savings rate that is the envy of spendthrift Americans, and what is likely to be a rich harvest of Olympic gold - not to mention a long history and glorious culture.

Sure, China has problems - who doesn't? But no one is going to take Tibet or Xinjiang away from China. If you respond to disturbances in these regions with restraint, with a statesmanlike air "more in sadness than in anger", and demonstrate an interest in attempting to resolve, rather than deny, the economic, cultural and political problems underlying these disturbances, you could earn world understanding and sympathy rather than looking like a bully.

I like this article because what he's saying is true: China has a lot going for it, and if it weren't so frustratingly defensive and secretive about everything, and stopped thinking, acting, and talking as if it's AGAINST the rest of the world rather than dealing with a lot of similar issues (a giant rich-poor gap, environmental issues, a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society, etc), things could be so much prettier. SW agrees, but there's little chance of that happening she seems to suggest, "The problem is that the officials lack confidence to really openly engage" even this country's own intellectuals, much less the international community. They have too much pressure - they're clinging tight to their power because it's not just power, but their means for survival (they're not lawyers or businessmen that changed professions, they're peasants that fought their way into these positions). You can think of China like a person, she says. They've had all this trauma (fuedalism, invasion from the west, from Japan, the cultural revolution). What China's people need is healing, and a real understanding of all the good that China has and is ... that can slowly grow into real confidence.

Last night when I couldn't stand to look at Chinese characters any longer I went out for a walk in the misty rain. When I handed my vegetables to the malatang guy so he could stew them in the pot of savory broth, he asked what country I'm from. It's such a common question, but weightier these days, so after I'd said "US", I asked, "but if I were from France, what would you do?"

He didn't hesitate an instant. "不卖!" (he wouldn't sell me the soup!) and a big head-thrown-back laugh. I laughed with him, but couldn't resist a mini-speech about how he should know that the government isn't related to us common folk.

"Look at the American government, I said. They're bad, but I'm good!"

"I'm good too!" he said, and I said I knew. When the soup was done he brought it to my table, and welcomed me to come back again. When the girl at the table beside mine got up to leave she put the napkins from her table onto mine, and met my eyes with a smile. I was moved. Daily, I try to remember to worry less about these big things and go about the more important business of creating my own life.

My yoga instructor sweetly came to English Island on Friday night "second to practice English," she told me, and "first, to see you." She asked if I'd been busy recently, and I said I had (though not busy enough to explain why I haven't been to yoga in a good month). "I think you should practice more," she said simply, and I promised I'd be there tonight. Now that's love like it's supposed to be done.

economizing stories

When SW was young there were tall vats in which everyone in the courtyard would throw their food scraps. At primary school the teachers encouraged them to throw their leftover rice and dishes into them as well instead of into the regular trash. Peasants from the surrounding countryside would come daily to collect the scraps, dipping it up out of the vats into their barrels to take home to feed the pigs. Today they only do that for the restaurants, then it was everyone. The peasants would give the kids tickets (taomipiao 淘米票, lit. “wash rice tickets”) when they faithfully threw their scraps into the vats. The kids would then give their tickets to the teachers who would praise them; the tickets were like merits, to be collected; the more you had the better.

At the Suguo (the local convenience store chain), they are selling green light canvas bags for one kuai, which is nothing. The making of the super-thin bags has already been suspended (and factories closed, jobs lost), but the giving away of free plastic bags in the supermarkets ban doesn't start till June.

FR wonders if ALL the plastic bags in the land will be done away with. If that is the case, she thinks, then certainly there will people who will stockpile rolls of these trashcan-lining bags; they will fill rooms with them. We laugh at her.

Then they tell me something I’ve never heard before. That people had to be taught how to use plastic bags, and the change came all at once about ten years ago, as the result of extensive propaganda. At that time people just put waste straight into their small bins and then dumped them into the big bins, or trashpiles. Then someone somewhere decided that the people needed to be using plastic bags, and suddenly there was propaganda everywhere telling people to line their trashcans with plastic bags. At first everyone thought it was strange, because they were used to the old way. It took them a month or two, but after that, they all got used to the plastic bags.

The bags should be gotten rid of, SW argues. They litter the sides of the streams in the country. China has so much countryside, and so many rivers, and they’re all so dirty, she says. I want to argue that there are much worse things polluting those rivers than plastic bags, but I don’t.

We talk of how Chinese people used to (and even in Hong Kong today?) use paper to wrap meat when they bought it . . . FR says she remembers "oil paper" to wrap the noodles they bought when she was young. Chinese people truly had a good, economic way of life, now everything is “broken.”

I try to explain how I still can feel the knowledge (and the will) buried, even in the current young people. You’re closer to it than we are in the US, I wanted to communicate. My grandparents’ generation may have had it, and even some of my parents’ generation. I struggled to explain by saying, “I feel like here, at least, I can always use a “save and economize” argument and it’s somewhat effective, at the very least, understood. SW’s interpretation of what I’d said was a bit off, but interesting. She thought that I was talking about how I’m not allowed to speak into other people’s lives in the US, because of cultural norms that keep us distant from each other. Like I can’t tell someone that they should turn off the water while they’re brushing their teeth, even if I’m completely convinced that it’s the right thing to do. I’m not allowed to tell someone that George Bush is an idiot, even if my bones want to scream it. (Those are my examples, not hers). In China, she was contrasting, you can tell people to do something just because you think its right . . . (hmmm, that has implications for current political debates, doesn't it?)

It's true, and an interesting cultural difference to think about, but what I'm trying to get at, and appreciate so much about China, is the economizing mindset that the society as a whole seems to have. Obviously it comes from a mixture of culture and poverty, and obviously its slipping away, but it's also still here.

When we were listing adjectives in English Island last week for a "good" person, there was "handsome" and "reliable" and "warm-hearted" and "smiling", and those were interesting, but the one that I liked the most? "Economic" (in Chinese, lit. "saving") Yes. That's why I live here.

the ordinary

It's been weird reading Justin's blog recently, as he's posting stuff he wrote while he was here. It's weird to go back and read someone else's perspective on things that you witnessed and (especially) that you had conversations about. Still, weird in a not un-nice way. Cause Justin is nice and doesn't write how I talked for hours about myself and had no idea which ATM took international cards. He admires things about my life that I don't always see, just like how I admire things about his that he doesn't necessarily see. That he gets out of bed in the mornings to write, and walks to the library to stack books for food (and rent). I admire the freedom in how he chooses friends and his books, and the cat, and the tea, and the principles as he wants to live them, no danger of his job defining him.

On the Tuesday after Justin left, inspired by the stretching before me of months unmarked by foreseeable visitors or trips, I decided to register myself for the April HSK exam, the Mandarin proficiency test for non-native speakers.

On the way to the registration office I passed a hotel billowing black smoke, people gathered around to watch. The fire engine wasn't getting anywhere fast, so it stopped 500 meters from the intersection and the firefighters got out and jogged to the scene in their ill-fitting yellow uniforms. One had to slow slightly to fix his helmet when it slipped down over his eyes. They were young, and I was filled with a sudden affection for all of them, and for the familiarity of the people gathering on the street corners to watch . . . as they would an argument . . . or anything, really.

On the Nanjing University campus I asked directions for the building whose name I hadn't understood on the phone (after asking her to repeat it four or five times I had gotten embarrassed and given up). The worker I stopped took pity on me and walked me to the nearest corner (opposite of the direction he was going) and carefully explained the turns I'd need to make. In the awkward space of his kindness and the steps to the corner I tried to make conversation. "I hadn't imagined that NanDa was so big!" I exclaimed. He turned to me with a mixture of confusion and sternness, and shortly replied, "Nanda is not big. It's not big at all."

I found the registration office with ten minutes till closing. The man and the young woman behind the temporary office messy desk seemed bored, sharp contrast to my country mouse excitement. I tried to mask it, was glad I had everything ready, the two passport pictures and the money, and didn't have to ask them to help me read the form. It's good to taste once in awhile the expectation that I should actually be able to get along in the language of the land.

Later I went to the bookstore to look for books to help me study. Got mad that after almost four years I'm only ready for the basic level test. I was in the bookstore coffeeshop, looking at the prices of the desserts (thinking to buy time at the coffeeshop tables so I wouldn't have to buy the book) when a manager-ish man approached and asked if I would like to have a free cup of coffee. It was their first day, and they were doing test-runs, collecting comments. I asked him twice if he was serious.

In the end I had two different specials, and a chat with the actual manager, who was younger than me, as peppy as her hair was curled, a newly-gradeeaaated English major, and highly goal-oriented it seemed . . . but also (and why should this be surprising, really?) fairly pleasant to talk to. (It's probably just that she complimented my Chinese a lot. And she was from Gansu, which is closer to Sichuan than to Jiangsu . . . and she gave me free coffee.) She said a big part of their marketing is just educating people about coffee - where it comes from, how it's processed, different kinds, etc. We're different from the Starbucks kind of fast-food coffee, you know? she said. That's what we should be doing with psychology, I thought.

Which brings me to the little work I have been doing lately. Drumroll, please. That's right, "English Island" has been brought out of the garage, revamped, re-oiled and, with Holly at the wheel (less concerned about the actual driving than the re-adjustment of the driver's seat), we're off. Friday's second round went well. That old energy came, and it felt that they went away pleased, if that's the way we're to measure these things. The unfortunate thing is that the level is so low (with a few shining exceptions) that interesting conversation is spare-to-none. I guess I'll have to settle for fun, which it has been.

My uncle asked in an email this morning about my thoughts on Tibet. I've been wanting to write more for awhile, and hope to soon, but my mind's a mess. I've been reading and reading - news, blogs, videos - from foreign journalists, Chinese alternative news, bloggers in China both western and Chinese, some of it good, some of it labeling and/or emotional, some of it only worth laughing at. I've gotten overwhelmed and depressed, and been comforted and relieved, then numb and tired of it all. I've thought I understood then been shocked with a new side of it. And there's the personal emotion all wrapped up in it because this thing of China being criticized (consistently) by the West is me and these are my friends and this my home. Then swirl in the added stuff of the discussions ZX and I have done over and over, almost nightly for awhile, swept away in the anger and defensiveness, the cultural views, then forcing ourselves to step away, to separate . . .

To cope, maybe, I started looking up stuff about Daosim. (Sunday's sabbath was good. To leave the computer at work for a whole day, read and write on the balcony, make food in the kitchen.) Started reading a book by Thomas Merton The Way of Chuang Tzu. I like this from "A Note to the Reader" in which he's explaining his appreciation for the philosopher and the "Dao",

But the whole "way" contained in these anecdotes, poems, and meditations, is characteristic of a certain taste for simplicity, for humility, self-effacement, silence, and in general a refusal to take seriously the aggressivity, the ambition, the push, and the self-importance which one must disply in order to get along in society.

Yes, we have that taste, some of us, don't we. Breathe, sigh, breathe. Look up at the world in a new way all over again. Later in the afternoon I hold FR's hand (like usual) as we walk to the supermarket. I don't think about the places I'd rather be (this is rather unusual) and laugh deep when she says the air "smells warm". I argue, that air can't 'smell warm' even though I agree that the description is true. But FR being FR responds to my half-serious protests with a full-out lesson about how in Chinese this is a valid way of saying it. It's a metaphor, see, similar to how we say she has a 'sweet' smile. We don't actually taste her smile . . .

we're all fooled and fooling

When he called on Monday, it was April Fool's, a holiday that people here seem to take much more seriously than I'm used to. So FR was convinced that my leaping heart would be thrown to the ground and stomped upon come Tuesday morning, and just kidding, he wouldn't be able to come, again. But my weak faith managed at least this much - that I drew a line,shook my head insisted, "If the ticket prices suddenly rose (like they can do in the space of minutes) maybe. But not a joke, not this cruel, and I was right.

By Thursday the restoring faith had warmed me into lots of corners, like the sun subverting the weather reports for the holiday. We had two days off plus Sunday, went to bed late, like “睡得晚” and got up late, like "sleep late", spent other time on blankets on the ground overlooking lakes. The rain held off until we reached the restaurant Sunday night, seven of us young people come down from the mountain on a bus on a bike, giddy over how we occasionally met (I was sure they meant something closer to "happenstance") and running on the boardwalk and dirt paths around the small Pipa lake, backlit like the trees by floodlights the color of artificial spring green but still beautiful somehow.

We hung out with my favorite friends, and with others who just happened to be along, and it didn't matter, really. I saw the games, marveled, enjoyed them mostly. ZX says that it can be so intricately woven that no words need be spoken, not a sword raised. The spirit of the eye, they say. And this is why we all love China. And hate it too.

Draught beer and big-bottled beer and walking and the black squeaky couch, FR beside us, tiring of our lapsing-into-English, voices-get-raised, drawn-out-too-long "discussions" of media bias. "Do you feel love for each other when you're talking about those things?" she asks, and I stubbornly insist I do, knowing that something in me is wired to enjoy conflict, from time to time. I also know she's a little bit right, and repent everyday, and try to remember to back down easily. I love friends who rebuke me, and when two of them sit together and we all are close, I am happy. This is a part of the story of the weeks since Justin left. April flies by.

Nanjing, through a J-lens

So Justin is a good photographer, and when he wasn't on the balcony in my apartment writing, spent a lot of the time walking around the city. We joked about how he got more familiar with the place than I am after eight months, but it's mostly true. He also helped me to see the city in new ways, and get excited about it again.

A corner near my apartment . . . .

View from the counseling room in our office.

On the city wall

Boats on the Yangtze

Worship at the Buddhist convent temple

One of my favorities.

I have loved this second-hand made-of-iron stove-top one-cup coffeepot since Theresa gifted it in November. Like she told me, it can burn bad coffee to a pretty good taste. Plus I just like the sound of the bubbling, the routine of dumping out the old grounds, watching the blue flames leap around it's bottom. My roommate's brother came over and opened it up and peered inside and asked me to explain how it works. "I have a coffeemaker too," he then told me. "It uses electricity."

And this is just outside the door of my apartment.

Apparently, I've never looked up.

Will they change the name to "Unity Fries"?

Fifteen years ago, my Chinese teacher tells me, taxis were rare, and the driving of them was a decent job. The government supported them - they were basically for the foreigners - and it was easy to make a girlfriend when you had a car in which she could be driven around all day.

These days taxi drivers work twelve hour shifts and the pay isn't all that good. They get lonely and bored. They'll always talk to you if you're the only one in the cab. I was running late for Chinese class and got to the bus stop just as the 48 bus was pulling away, so I got in the taxi that hesitated there.

The driver guessed I was from England. No? US? That's good, the US is good. France is bad. Why is France bad? They've talked about not participating in the Olympics. If China and France had bad relations we'd understand more, but traditionally we've had a good relationship. Now, when we're hosting . . .

He was so anti-France that I was surprised to find when I looked up the news that France hasn't actually said they're boycotting anything. Sarkozy just said they wouldn't rule out the possibility of boycotting the opening ceremony. I argued when he said Bush was great (something about Taiwan). Lots of Americans are criticizing China too, I ventured.

That's normal, he said. Everybody's got their own opinion, and they can express it. Chinese people understand that. We care about actions. He asked me what I thought. I told him that I know China is a great country; I live here. I said it's hard to know what's going on in Tibet because the reporters can't go in.

Reporters are being kept out for their own safety he told me. All Tibetans carry knives you know, sell them out on the street. They're allowed to. If any of us Han people had a knife, we'd be arrested in an instant. We both wanted to smooth the conversation up a bit, so I flattered Nanjing when he asked, and he told me about a temple we were passing that I should visit. You've helped me understand more how the Chinese people feel, I told him. The Olympics are their chance to 请客 (to host) and Chinese people are 很好客 (so hospitable). The fare was 11Y, but he wouldn't take more than 10.
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Justin left, and it's a let-down after an intense month of having a good friend around. The cool thing was that he left me a bunch of beautiful pictures of our play and of the city. Another cool thing was that it didn't rain on Sunday and we had a near-perfect last day. A sun-filled morning on the balcony of my house, then a picnic at the free park, with naps in the sun-warmed grass and a view of the lake. Lamb kebabs, grilled naan, and cheesecake. The traditional into-the-late-night playing of the CD.

There's not much that makes me happier than grass stuck to my sweater and my hands smell like bark.