Momentous Events! (as scattered sentences)

Roger Federer, Man-god!

Last night and this morning I felt sick, so did not go to five out of seven hours of class today. Now I feel better, and have done some good work. Towards up, indeed.

I have been reading Jonathan Spence’s “In Search of Modern China” and am struck by certain parallels between the late Ming/Qing and today. This goes only so far, naturally; take it with a grain of salt. There is continuity of socio-political substratum: an overpowered local authority, a rooted, hanging-ivy corruption, a whirlwind of ineffectual (at least on the surface) intellectual responses. Beijing’s grasping hand clutches at the shoots and leaves of this country. Some are crumpled, some are crushed, some fall away; those in the middle, one might say, keep growing. Haruki Murakami (now first on the list of people I need to read and but already admire), used the most poignant metaphor that I have yet heard. According to his Chinese translator Lin Shaohua: “…human rights are to be highly respected, like an egg smashed colliding with a wall. If [I] had to choose, [I] would be on the side of the egg.” Today however, the population is pliant. There will be no revolutionary change — nor should there be, if past revolutionary changes provide any indication of what consequences might arise. Good things: Perhaps the environmental crises will pull up the grass roots (those very same that Mao exploited to create this, the PRC), and the ensuing popular war against pollution provide a model of sorts for collective responsibility. Perhaps the environment will simply collapse in certain areas, and the ensuing devastation will prompt meaningful reform. Perhaps a new, strong leader (more likely a cabal) will emerge and effectively attack the rotting limbs of government. Perhaps one of the above is happening right now. I am an optimist, but not such that I think the situation should be left alone. Careful, creative individual initiatives and careful, creative diplomacy. Realpolitik blustering is preschool crap. International politics is not a zero sum game.

More anecdotes later, I suppose. For now, here is a Chinese sentence that sounds funny to people who also speak English:
“Wo3-de wang3 bu4 hao3.” [My internet isn't working.] Sounds like: “My wang isn’t good.”

It has been too many days

On Thursday I skipped out and tried to meet Max at a well-known tea house in Qianmen.  On Friday we had our weekly exam, I slept, we went to the Beijing Opera, we went to Mix, in Sanlitun.  On Saturday I slept through the field trip to the Marco Polo Bridge and Sino-Japanese War Memorial Museum, searched the Qianhai shores for a jazz club, went to a Karaoke birthday party.  Today I slept into the afternoon, and have done little else.  I ought to explain each of these in its turn, but I think I will come back to it later.  Now the light is fading.  I have put some pictures on facebook (we call it 脸书 [lian3shu1]).  I will try and deal with pictures here later.

Independence Day is very cool when you’re not home in the States

This is the second year in a row that I’ve spent July 4th outside America during an extended stay in another country. With luck, next summer I will also be abroad. It’s almost better being away.  The farther afield you get, the bigger your home becomes, until it’s not a neighborhood, not a city, not a country, not a state, and even not quite a country (though more that than anything else). If you are in the zone, the hoop gets bigger.  There is your metaphor.

Getting along with people is easier for me when I’m from home, in a certain way and for reasons that remain unclear to me. Far from home also tends to be different from home, but maybe at a certain distance difference collapses and people are people. It isn’t the distance, though, that I felt tonight; I think it’s the fact of traveling. It opens you, and makes other people open to you. There is a transcendental pleasure in being alone in a place, and engaging a stranger. The desk clerk at the hotel gave me a bunch of unsolicited advice. Two women from poor farming regions complained to me about Beijingers. A man from French West Africa told me about that region’s development over the last fifty years.  I had one conversation that used all three languages I know, with an American living in Beijing, the African, and the Frenchman from before (who has shaved his head, and worries about the effect it will have on his chances with girls).  It gets easier, and it gets easier.

Today was my first calligraphy lesson. Over the course of a couple hours I listened to an old man give a long and at least half-indecipherable explanation of the development of Chinese characters, then ogled my roommate’s work. His characters were, as they say, 活泼有力 [lively and forceful]. Calligraphy is as hard as I’d suspected. Read: extremely hard. If you wish to master an art such as this, it needs constant, undivided attention. It was a lot of fun, and now I have my own “Four Treasures of the Study” — brush, inkstick, slab, paper. Next week I will improve! Progress towards up!

For Independence Day, we thought about ordering Domino’s, but it’s waaay too expensive (100 kuai for a pizza?) . So we got MacDonald’s, and it was good. Though I didn’t get any, ice cream was later passed out by our resident awesome guy, TK (I guess his position is something like an RA’s). After dinner I worked in the Kafeiguan, then interviewed several people for my next essay, which I mistakenly thought I needed to present orally tomorrow. After class tomorrow I will hopefull see Max.  Now yet again it is very late and I still have work left to do.  I average 4-6 hours of sleep a night here, which I know for many people around the world is normal, but for me is not at all.  I survive by the strategic application of short naps.

In which my teachers are totally awesome

Not a lot of time to post today; sorry.

Wang Laoshi suggested that, since I had lost one of my school books (I later recovered it) I must “坐这个特别车” [ride the short bus (to class)]. This same Wang Laoshi also suggested that my saxophone playing would propbably give anyone who heard it nightmares. I gave a couple of my teachers the address of this blog; if you’re here reading this 您们好！

Here are some gushy, romantic words:

“…Fait couler le rocher et fleurir le désert
Devant ces voyageurs, pour lesquels est ouvert
L’empire familier des ténèbres futures.” (from Les Fleurs du Mal, XIII) translation

“…But have you wine and music still,
And statues and a bright-eyed love,
And foolish thoughts of good and ill,
And prayers to them who sit above?

How shall we conquer? Like a wind
That falls at eve our fancies blow,
And old Moeonides the blind
Said it three thousand years ago.

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young…” (J.E. Fletcher, from “To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence”)

Yeah, I know, I’m insanely pretentious.

One evening ago

While I was writing my first little Chinese essay (“write a letter to your friend in America”) I had a long conversation in French with a man from Paris, and hurt my brain trying to switch between French and Chinese. I discovered that in fact I do still know how to speak French, and that I may well speak more fluidly now than I did when the summer started. Of course I forget odd words, but I’ve found that not speaking a language for a little while either a) allows the language to sink into the folded coral of your brain, or b) makes it seem like it did. I imagine that past a certain point this will cease to be true.

Samis, I think his name was, d’origine algerienne. He told me my French sounded like a German’s. I didn’t really hear him speak English, but I think his English wasn’t too great. He was cagey on what he was doing in Beijing, and professed to know little of America. He was surprised that a guy from the west coast of America could speak French. He described Americans as “northern, like Anglo-Saxon.” He told me that the octopus is the symbol of the mafia, though I don’t know which mafia he meant. He took a while to remember the French word for octopus (une prieuve). He wanted to know what astrological sign I was. I told him the story of my trip to Marseille, and we talked about social unrest the world over. He can’t wander around his neighborhood outside Paris anymore, he says (though he didn’t say, it was obvious he lives in a lower-class banlieue dehors la peripherique). He was reluctant to propose ideas to improve the situation so many disaffected, socio-economically disenfranchised people find themselves in, but finally came out for a policy of eyes for eyes. Il faut reagir avec la force, c’est la seule chose ce type de gen peut comprendre. I asked him, what happens when they meet your violence with more of their own? He was reluctant to consider the question. He seemed to feel that the entire situation was incredibly unfortunate, but that his was the only way. He had been mugged, he said. He was thirty.

I’m writing this in TextEdit while sitting in a Kafeiguan at 2:30 in the Monday morning. The attendants in this building are here all night; that is, the group of male night watchmen and the group of female store clerks. One of them just came over to my table and gave me two big slices of watermelon, for no reason at all, dripping that sticky popsicle juice all over the table. Lots of black seeds. The night watchmen act like 3rd graders around the girls, swaggering over ever now and then to flirt, but never daring stay. The girls don’t leave their stores, except for once, to push one of the guards, and then squeal when he pushed back. An hour later they’re having a slow, winding conversation. Such is the night: long, and without a flat narrative shape.

Big Mac Dreams

I went to 麦当劳 (MacDonald’s) like a chump. As I sat with my two dollar meal (anyone remember when a Big Mac, fries, and a coke cost two dollars in the states? I don’t think I was alive then.) I watched a woman across the room clutching her stomach. In my head, there is obscure alchemy with new vocab:

Out of the crowd, a lone foreiner walks up to her.

Me: 那，你的肚子不太舒服吗？ [So your stomach's not feeling too good?]

Confused Woman: 。。。？

Me: 没想到， 我有这个 “从来我没病法子”！ 跟在电视上看到的不一样！ [Unexpectedly, I have the "I've never been sick method!" Not like what you saw on TV!]

I hand her a cheerfully packaged drug of some kind.

CW: 啊？[eh?]

Before she can move, I’m walking out the door, but turn back at the last second.

Me: 别问我。。。来问问他们！[Don't ask me...go ask them!]

I gesture to everyone else in the MacDonald’s and they all yell:

All: 成功！我从来没病过！ (Huzzah!  I’ve never been sick!)

Apologies for my fantasy Chinese. If you can read it, you can see how bad it is.

She must sit down first, as is proper

As I have explained in Chinese to various people:

[I have a roommate (from Guangdong); my roommate has a (older male) cousin; this cousin has a (older female) sister; this sister lives in Beijing and is very rich.]

Thus, so it goes, I found myself last Monday in a VIP room in one of the most expensive restaurants in Beijing. We were driven, my roommate, his friend, and I, by that type of Chinese servant-driver who is entitled to eat with everyone at the main table, but not to join conversation. He may chat in the car, if conversation is struck up, but he likely won’t speak much otherwise. He is always around, opening doors for you, unsmiling, commenting (if asked) on which might be the fastest route, or the most expensive plot of real estate.

He picked us up, already carrying Joe, my roommate’s cousin (that is his English name). We drove to Joe’s sister’s apartment, located in the Beijing equivalent of the Upper West Side, where we had tea. At the restaurant, we were met by two uniformed valets for each of the six us, and ushered inside my a maitre d’ who knew Joe’s sister. Our room had the largest windows. It had a flat-screen television, a private bathroom, a sitting area with leather couches and a cloistered stock of beer and wine. Western wine is extremely expensive in China.

The central room of this restaurant was a cavern filled with sequestered pools of water, and lines of refrigerated shelves tucked into nooks made to look like they were carved from rock.  In this room could be seen every animal and every plant that the restaurant might use to make food.  The pools were filled with hundreds of living lobsters, crabs, clams, salt water fish, freshwater fish, bottom dwellers, snails, sea urchins, shrimp, prawns, octopi, turtles, and eels.  The shelves were filled with carcasses of land animals, their children, their limbs, their organs; and plates of completed dishes extending all the way down past the island of tall green foliage and into the dark rear of the cave.  Somewhere back there were regular tables, with people eating at them in the low light.

We could not sit at the table until she sat first, because she was the host, and in our little Confucian hierarchy, the highest.  We waited while she used the private bathroom, standing and talking.  “At these kind of places,” Joe said, “we have to follow these rules.

The chicken feet I liked, though the pig’s feet yielded only scraps of cartilege in my mouth.  The giant crabs were difficult to eat, because I’m not used to eating them, and the bamboo was hairy, and like a squash.  There weren’t any dishes that I recognized, save the pile of dead crab.  The TV was on through dinner, but not so that you could hear it.  Towards the end of the meal, a man came in and performed a dance while twirling dough. We laughed and clapped like royalty. I thought we were going to eat the dough, but we didn’t.  I don’t know what they did with it.

As we drove home, we passed Tian’anmen Square.  That is still the only time I have seen it.

I wonder what the evening will look like

Today is what Beijing is like when they turn off all the factories.  Some days, I hear, they just shut everything down, and the smog slides down the buildings and through the roads and away, and the sky is blue, or cloudy, or even carries a white moon below the sun (though I’ve never seen that).  They order people out of their cars, too, and they run their instruments and watch the air and ask the athletes how it goes.  These days are tests for the Olympics, which by all accounts is the end of this city.  I remember when I road from the airport into the city for the first time, watching the sun set like a Technicolor red balloon.  The light in Beijing is almost all red, to be seen through the mist.  Hatches of red character floating in dark fog.  Today there is no fog, because it is like one of those non-days, when the city has clear blue sky, and long paved swathes of sun, and you can see the dirt most clearly on the glass of the window.  Today, though, they didn’t turn off anything, such as I know.  It rained for the last three days, and stopped just before the light this morning.  Tomorrow we’re a port city again, like when the Olympics end.