Nanjing Wedding

You may want to take deep breath before you read the next sentence….

I got married this weekend. Actually, it was a mock wedding at Zhongyuan, a garden that my friend Yimin and I visited in Nanjing on Saturday. The garden included a teahouse with four young women playing classical Chinese instruments. After the performance, a man came out and explained that they would now have a traditional wedding ceremony. I think he was supposed to be the bride’s father. He threw three red balls to men in the audience, and one of them fell to me.

The bride—one of the women who had been performing a few moments before—was led onstage wearing an elaborately patterned Chinese dress and an embroidered veil that covered her face and neck. We three potential grooms were then ushered onto the stage, and the host read some words in Chinese affixed to white labels on the red balls. My inability to understand Chinese greatly impairs my ability to narrate this story, but my cluelessness is, in the end, the outstanding feature of the tale. Naturally, the text eliminated my two competitors, and I was left alone, the lucky groom. The other musicians led me off stage and dressed me in a Chinese gown and hat, forcing me to remove my Washington Nationals cap in the process.

I was the only foreigner present, so the audience found my selection to be quite a hoot. The host was making some wisecracks at my expense, but I couldn’t understand them—I just heard everyone laughing. Yimin told me later that he’d made a joke to the effect that he hoped I wouldn’t try take off my pants as the women dressed me in the Chinese gown.

Once I was properly attired, the wedding began. To his credit and my salvation, my new father-in-law could speak enough English to give me cues at each stage of the ceremony. My bride and I held onto opposite ends of a red cord and bowed to the four cardinal directions. Then we walked around in a circle together, still clinging to our cord. The ceremony concluded with me lifting the veil from the bride’s face. Fortunately, she didn’t scream in horror at the sight of me, but, despite that auspicious sign and the bride’s beauty and musical talent, I didn’t think it would work out. The cultural and linguistic differences were simply too great, so I got an immediate annulment. In closing, the host asked me to address the audience, and I made an absurd statement—the only kind that my Chinese skills will allow:

“Xiexie. Wo jiao Weilian. Wo shi meiguoren. Wo hui shuo yidiandian hanyu. Wo xihuan kan shu.” (Thank you. My name is William. I am American. I can speak a little Chinese. I like to read books.)

The crowd roared in approval, and the musicians stripped me of my Chinese garb. What little dignity I posses had already been gone for quite some time.

Waiguoren

Shuffling down Shi Quan Jie
with hair on their knuckles
and flesh bloating their knees,
with bodies stuffed into shops
and wallets fattened on kuai,
waiguoren have taken over the town.

Cameras chained to their necks,
skin reeking sunscreen and sweat,
they’ve swept gardens of charm
and plucked the lotus of blooms
and dipped painted toes in the tarn;
waiguoren have taken over the town.

On rank nights, pleading fresh air,
men pin their wives to sheets white,
and slouch toward shadowy bars
where the ex-peasant girls wait
selling shares in free-market touch;
waiguoren have taken over the town.

In temples buying off Buddhas,
swaggering drunk in ex-pat pubs,
they’ve laid claim to the canals
and poled the red-lantern punts
into mirrors and harbored there;
together, we’ve taken over the town.

Suicide by Bike?

I did not come to China to die, though, during the turbulent months of the past year, the thought did cross my mind, drawn as it was to the dark irony of arriving with two oversized suitcases and returning home as ash in a small box. Things are better now; life here has fallen into a pattern that makes the present tolerable, and the future has even begun to assume a vague shape. But one simple fact makes me wonder if Thanatos might not still be at work within me: a few days after I arrived in Suzhou, I bought a bike.

Don’t let the photo here fool you; it was taken on the campus of Suzhou University—the one place in this city where the odds of getting killed while riding a bicycle are less than even. The causes of the danger can be simply stated: congestion and chaos. Like almost every place I go in Suzhou, the streets teem with people in motion. Buses and cars speed down the narrow lanes with so many drivers laying on their horns that the sounds merge into a loud irrelevancy. Mothers weave in and out of traffic on their e-bikes (battery-powered mopeds that are nearly as common as their foot-powered cousins) toting their toddlers on handlebars. A few young riders type text messages on their cell phones as they go. And cyclists crossing streets don’t wait for a gap to open in traffic; instead, they create one by rolling forward on the faith that drivers of buses and cars, when pressed by the threat of blood, will ultimately stop.

The chaos doesn’t stem from a lack of rules or infrastructure. The city is flat, and the streets are neatly laid out and nearly all straight and well paved. The traffic lights at every busy intersection include counters that anticipate the next change of light. There’s a general understanding that traffic moves on the right side of the road. And many streets include wide bike lanes that cyclists in the US would figuratively die for; here, they literally do.

No, the problem isn’t with the lack of rules; instead, it’s in the refusal to observe them when doing so becomes slightly inconvenient. Take the bike lanes, for example. Despite the high volume of riders, the lanes would function beautifully if they were used as intended. However, if the sidewalks are too crowded, pedestrians will walk there, and if the roads grind to a halt, taxis and cars will stage a coup and use their bulk to claim the bike lanes for themselves. And one cannot ride for more than thirty seconds without encountering someone on a moped or bike going the wrong way.

So far, I’ve managed to avoid disaster, though I have had a few close calls. The closest came one day when I was riding alone to Jinji Lake. My building manager rode past me on her e-bike and said “ni hao.” Since an exchange of ni haos is the only communication in Chinese that I can participate in with full confidence, I eagerly turned toward her to return the greeting. When I looked back at the road ahead, someone on a e-bike was bearing down straight in front of me, no more than ten feet away. It was a near-run thing, with both of us making reflex swerves that fortunately took us in opposite directions.

And did I mention that no one wears helmets here? The Chinese not only don’t wear helmets; they also have an unhealthy contempt for anyone who does. I recall this summer my friend Liru with her normally kind face contorted into a sneer telling me that she had seen three foreigners ride across campus wearing helmets. There are many ways in which I cannot make myself Chinese, but this I can do something about, so I’ve been riding the Chinese way, with my skull exposed. It may cost me my life, but at least it will spare me some unnecessary derision.

I’ve been thinking about what all of this means with regard to cultural difference. In Columbia, Maryland, the town where I teach in the US, there’s a community initiative to encourage civility. People there have “Choose Civility” bumper stickers on their cars, though I have seen the drivers of some of these cars weaving with maniacal fury on Route 29 and giving the finger to old men who are moving too slow. The advocates of the civility initiative present it as a universal principle, but is that necessarily so? Perhaps in a country like the US that is comparatively under-populated, civility is a nicety we can afford. In China, with its billion-plus filling every nook, a Darwinism of space has taken hold, and not just on the roads. Show any sign of passivity in a line at a store or fast food joint or bank and you’re sure to be standing there all day.

I must admit that I’ve begun to take some pleasure in this socially sanctioned aggression and disregard for the other. In a month, I’ve gone from having my feelings hurt by the guy who bumped me on his moped and didn’t turn back to say duibuqi to cutting people off on my bike with the best of them. And in lines, I simply lean forward and fall to the front, reveling in one of few ways that my freakish size is a decided advantage. I do worry, though, about how such changes will play out once I return to the US, where I am soft-spoken and generally polite. Assuming that I do make it back alive, when you see me again, you’ll have to be patient and give me some time to adjust. For the first couple of months, at least, I have a suggestion that will ensure we don’t come into conflict over this, even if it makes P. M. Forni shudder. Just get the hell out of my way.

Yi, Er, San, Si, Yi!

Now, these words I do understand. I even know the characters for the first three—my only characters to date: – = … One, two, three, four, one…

During the first two weeks of the semester, I heard the words shouted in unison by thousands of voices, by baby-faced girls in camouflaged clothes marching along with their boot straps unlaced, by young men with boyish figures and the bills of their infantry caps hanging down over their eyes, by upperclassmen with crisp uniforms and straight spines doing their best impersonation of a drill sergeant.

You see, this is how college life begins for incoming students in China. They cluster together by the thousands all over campus and pretend to be soldiers for two weeks, complete with high-stepping in column and standing at attention in line and even some target practice with real guns, all done under the hot lamp of the late-summer sun. It’s an army of small soldiers, many of whom to my eyes scarcely appear to be out of middle school.

There’s something in me that wants to resist such behavior made collective, whether under duress or not. I recall walking once with a friend at Lake Elkhorn and seeing some ducks pull themselves out of the water and waddle across the grass in perfect column. I remarked to my friend that if I were a duck, I would walk ten feet away out of principle. I’m even troubled by cheers at sporting events, when people shout such seemingly innocuous words as “Defense!” or sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” together. I make it a point to stretch in the sixth inning and remain pinned to my seat in the seventh. The trivial content doesn’t particularly matter to me. It’s more the sense of witnessing the individual voice swallowed up by the crowd that’s unsettling. I can’t help feeling that some vaguely fascist force is at work.

For the incoming college student in China, the collective behavior is most definitely made so under duress. If given the choice, few students, if any, would voluntarily subject themselves to the rigors of the training. But they are not given the choice, and two weeks of sweat and soldier-play are part of the price of admission, no less than tuition and a high score on the entrance exams. This was not always so. I read that the required training grew out of the government’s desire, in the wake of Tiananmen, to make college campuses less hospitable grounds for dissent and to foster instead a spirit of national pride and shared purpose.

Despite my unease with all of this, I’ve tried to keep an open mind, and I actually do see some benefits for the students, though, in terms of the policy, the perks are subsidiary if not accidental. At my college in Maryland, several instructors advocate a teaching approach called “first-year experience” that emphasizes the psychological needs and interpersonal challenges of incoming students as they adjust to college life. The military training in China might be viewed as an extreme first-year experience measure, and the effect on students is apparent. They enter with a sense of cohesion that American students lack. Like the average American student who has gone away to college, Chinese college students are living away from home for the first time. But they begin classes with a new sense of family. Their peers are not classmates but something akin to brothers and sisters, a kinship forged not by blood but by the shared experience of overcoming physical and psychological adversity. They begin college knowing that they have accomplished something—together.

American colleges have a rite of passage at the end of a student’s college career—the graduation ceremony—but nothing that rises to the requirements of that phrase at the beginning. All offer some kind of orientation, but that typically consists of a crash course in college policies, with little to help students gain a sense of connection to one another. In a culture that purportedly values individualism, perhaps it is fitting that many college students arrive as individuals, alone. This was certainly the case for me when I first enrolled in college. The university held a three-day orientation that consisted of lectures about the college and help with registering for classes and a folder of policies that I never cracked. I knew my roommate and few other students from my high school, but I didn’t know why I was there and lasted only one semester. This was my transition from childhood to quasi-adulthood, and it was isolating—an isolation that in some ways has been sustained to the present. I can’t help but wonder if two weeks of military training at eighteen might have made me, for better and for worse, a different person.

This is not to say that the effects on Chinese students are entirely positive. Perhaps the price of cohesion is the loss of the individual voice. The first sets of essays in my writing classes have been painfully dull to read. I feel like I’m reading the same essay over and over again, and in a sense I am. Their rite of passage has encouraged students to move and speak in unison and perhaps think in unison as well. And the atmosphere in the classroom is strikingly formal, with patterns not far removed from military drill. When I call on students in class (and I must call on them, for no student will voluntarily answer a question), they rise from their seats and respond with downcast eyes. They will remain standing until I give them permission to sit down again. Sometimes, when I write on the chalkboard, I’m surprised to turn around and find the last student to speak still standing. As I write this, we are on a week-long break for the national holiday, and I’m filled with anxiety. Did I give the last student I called on permission to sit down? If not, will I find her still standing there when we return, disciplined past the point of absurdity?