White Boy

I regret to inform you that my comprehension of spoken Chinese has not improved much during my first month back in Suzhou. My formal study of Chinese consisted of the same three-week class two summers in a row. During the seasons between, I forgot everything I learned the first time and have essentially been spinning on a linguistic wheel.

My tutors Liru and Yuanyuan are always patient with me but must find me incredibly dense as they repeatedly teach me the same sentence patterns and words. It is as if my ability to learn a new language is confined to a small box in my brain that is already full. I can only let in new words if I squeeze a few others out. My cause is not helped by my sense that all languages must share the same box. One of my friends, Yimin, expressed to me an interest in learning Spanish. I deemed myself up to the task of teaching her, for, while my Spanish is poor, it is infinitely better than my Chinese—or at least I used to think so. A few days ago, I found myself stumped by the most elementary Spanish, unable able to recall the Spanish word for “I.” Apparently, there’s no space left for “yo” in my box now that it’s been supplanted by “wo.”

I’d estimate that I understand about one percent of the Chinese words I hear, and that’s probably being a little generous. I’m sure the percentage would go up several points if I could get everyone in the country to agree to speak about twenty times slower, but I know that the odds of that happening are not good.

Recently, riding in a van to go get my residence permit, I listened carefully to a conversation in Chinese. I was able to pick out four words—wo (I) xiang (want) dongxi (something) meiyou (not have)—which, when strung together, make a little sense. The problem was, however, that they were not strung together in the conversation. Instead, on average, there were about one hundred words I didn’t recognize between the ones I did.

Ineptitude with the language is just one of many things that set me apart here. I’ve come to loathe the tourist strip on Shi Quan Jie and spend most of my time in places where I am the only foreigner in sight. This is desirable in many respects, as I came here to experience the culture, not to seek comfort in the familiar. However, the weight of difference can be quite burdensome to bear. It is in my skin, in my height, in my curly brown hair and my blue eyes, in my tone-dead English tongue and ears—everything about me is touched with the taint of “the other.”

Fortunately, I’ve been able to keep a sense of humor, even when my sense of difference leads to auditory hallucinations. On three occasions while walking in public places where I seemed to be the only non-Chinese person present, I overheard conversations that went something like this: beibian xianglian guoji canjin yaba WHITE BOY meikong haoyou chou yangqu ceng. It seems highly unlikely that the phrase “white boy” actually came out of the speakers’ mouths, but the experience suggests that sometimes what we hear has more to do with what we feel within than with what we sense from without. Anxieties can take such a powerful hold that they project themselves into the world. Perhaps laugher is the only way to counter such anxieties, the only way to stumble along with them without weeping.

Two Live Kills

Yesterday, I went to the market with teacher and friend Liru. Along the way, I saw a kitten dying by the side of the road. It had not been hit by a car but rather was either sick or simply starving. I wanted to put the kitten in the basket on my bike and take it somewhere so that at least it would be cool and comfortable and out of the sun. Liru convinced me that there was nothing I could do, so I left the kitten to die. I’ve not been able to stop thinking about it, though, and my response seems to be about something more than the lonely death of a particular cat. It is in addition my discomfort with the way we seal ourselves off from the suffering of others, whether those others are animals or people.

In quick succession, I experienced another jolt when we went into the market. I’ve walked through several of these markets since I’ve been in Suzhou—bustling places packed into narrow lanes, with rows of colorful and sometimes unfamiliar vegetables, old women and little girls shelling buckets of beans, pails full of slithering eels, mesh baskets stuffed with live turtles and frogs, cages of chickens and ducks decked in their soiled feathers, bloody chopping blocks and piles of fish heads and guts—but this was the first time I purchased any meat. Liru picked out a live chicken, and a man killed it and plucked it on the spot. I had to look away and have felt nauseous ever since. Of course, I know that all meat I eat comes from an animal that has been killed, but I’ve never actually witnessed the killing before, sheltered as I have been by clean wrappings and chilled grocery story bins. Later at my apartment, Liru stir-fried the whole bird—head, feet, and all, with every piece bearing a bone.

All of this made me recall why I had become a vegetarian when I was 19, more a visceral than intellectual or even emotional response, so sickened was I by the images of Chicago slaughterhouses in Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle. I did not eat meat for 17 years and only resumed doing so to accommodate my wife’s celiac diet. And I’ve never prepared any meat by myself and even would ask Sandy to cut it for me when we ate it so that I wouldn’t have to confront a slab of flesh. Now that I am here alone, perhaps I should go back to vegetarianism.

To people like Liru who have grown up on a farm, my reaction must seem like mere hypersensitivity; she would no more give thought to the life of a chicken than to the life of a carrot. But yesterday’s experiences leave me feeling a kinship with the Buddhists who attempt to refrain from harming any sentient being. It strikes me as callous to let a cat die alone by the road or to pick out a live chicken as if it were a stalk of celery, to look at these creatures as if their lives do not matter, when, perhaps, they matter no less than my own. I don’t think this is hypersensitivity. It is simply refusing to lose the capacity to feel.

Have You Eaten?

I met Daoerji last summer in a gift shop on Shi Quan Jie. He’s from Tibet—a man just shy of thirty with hair that brushes the top of his shoulders, kindly black eyes, a few small Tibetan characters tattooed on his forearm, and garbled English that was still far superior to my infantile Chinese. We struck up a friendship and began some informal tutoring in his shop. Several nights a week, I would bring my textbook and recite the vocabulary words, and he would correct my pronunciation, which was almost invariably wrong. In turn, he would read passages from his English textbook, and I would correct his pronunciation, which was almost invariably wrong. Whenever I entered the shop, he would greet me with a smile and say, “My teacher.” There was warmth and welcoming in those words, and even if I were in reality more the student than the teacher, that shop came to feel like a kind of home to me.

One thing puzzled me about Daoerji. After the initial greeting, he would always ask me if I had eaten. Given that I went into his shop in the evening, the answer was usually “yes” and provided no cause for further thought beyond wondering about his strange fixation on my diet. However on one occasion, I had skipped dinner and answered “no.” I was actually quite hungry, and I got the sense from Daoerji’s sympathetic expression that he was indirectly asking me to join him for dinner. I had visions of us walking into an obscure Tibetan restaurant that I never could have found on my own, a place dimly lit where portraits of the Lamas hung from the walls and the air was full of incense and the servers were monks in red robes who viewed eating as a form of prayer.

Minutes passed, and minutes merged into an hour. I kept reciting my vocabulary as customers came in and diverted Daoerji’s attention. A few of the customers looked over my shoulder to see what I was doing and became my informal instructors. A girl of no more than ten took up the cause and gave it up as hopeless after a dozen words. A prostitute from the brothel-bar next door came in and helped with a dozen more and didn’t charge me the service. Finally, with my stomach grumbling, I left the shop and went to find something on the street to eat.

It was only when I got back to the US that I discovered the source of my misunderstanding. One of the phrasebooks I’d bought noted that “chifan le ma?” (have you eaten?) is a common greeting in many parts of China. It is a question that requires a genuine answer no more than “how are you?” does in English, and one that never holds the promise of a memorable meal in a Tibetan restaurant. What I take from all this is that merely accumulating words will never take one very far in learning a language. Context is everything, and words without context invite confusion—and sometimes lead to an empty stomach.

Transcontinental

If you’ve never taken a long flight before, I can assure that you cannot imagine the misery that this entails. I left Baltimore at 10:30 on a Sunday morning and arrived in Suzhou more than twenty-four hours later by way of New York, Seoul, and Shanghai. The long stretch was between New York and Seoul—more than fourteen hours with my long legs cramped in economy class. For the first seven hours, I was able to read without too much discomfort. It’s the last half of this stretch that got to me and led me at the twelfth hour to pound on the emergency exit and beg the pretty Korean Air flight attendants with their matching hair pins to kick me into the clouds.

However, in retrospect, I can see an unexpected benefit. I departed feeling melancholy at the thought of leaving everything familiar behind for so long. As the flight dragged on, physical discomfort drove out the psychological pain. Emotions become a luxury to discard when the body begs for reprieve. I arrived at last in China thankful to have my feet on the ground and would, in fact, have been happy to land in hell. I have never like taking medication, so the first thing I did upon arriving was to toss my antidepressants into the wind. If any problems of this sort arise while I’m here, I’ll just book another long flight

By Way of an Introduction

Writing, like all forms of language use, is inevitably social. Even when I am writing only to myself, I am bound to others by a common tongue. However, uncertainties concerning audience have made it difficult for me to begin writing here. I imagine that the friends and family to whom I send the link will eventually grow weary of what I’m posting here, and I will ultimately be writing only for myself. This leads me to wonder why I don’t simply keep my thoughts to myself in a Word file as opposed to posting them in a blog on the World Wide Web. I don’t have an answer to my own question.

I will be in China for ten months teaching English at Suzhou University, making some attempt to learn the language, and exploring as much of the country as I am able to see. I invite you to share the experience through the entries I post here. I will try to give you a sense of what it is like to live here and my impressions of the people and the culture. Hopefully, I can occasionally make you laugh as well.