My mother had warned me to watch out for color wolves, but I did not believe her. Maybe as a child I had, when tales of the ghosts that walked the hinterlands still had the force to haunt my dreams. But at twenty-four, I thought of myself as a modern girl—a modern girl in a modern world. All that superstition was a part of the old China that we young Chinese had left behind. I no more believed in color wolves than I did in the ghosts of my ancestors. We might sweep their tombs on Qing Ming Jie, but no one under thirty believed that the spirits were really there. We might make nods to tradition, but the old ways had never set roots deep in our hearts.
I was a medical student in Suzhou that summer. The supervisory doctor needed somebody to go to Fujian province to collect some data on patient care in the rural hospitals. He picked me not because he had great faith in me. It was actually just the opposite. Dr. Li had ten medical students under his supervision. Seven were men, which automatically gave them the top slots in Dr. Li’s mind. Of the three women I was the quietest, and this Dr. Li seemed to equate with stupidity. I think he sent me because he saw me as the most expendable.
“This trip will do you good, Zhang Xiaojie,” he told me. “Maybe it will help you find your tongue. A doctor needs one sometimes, you know.”
That only made it sound like punishment to me, but as with a prisoner who has just received his sentence, I didn’t really have a choice.
It would be more dramatic if I could tell you it was my first time to take such a trip, but I had taken trains by myself many times. My hometown in Jiangxi province is about a twelve-hour ride from Suzhou, and twice a year during my undergraduate days I had made the long journey home, usually alone. The trips were typically weary but uneventful and certainly nothing to fear.
I had bought my ticket a few days before I left. The hospital had given me a little money for travel. In one way, it covered the cost; in another it wasn’t nearly enough. As anyone who has traveled by train in China can tell you, the price of the ticket varies by the level of comfort. If you’ve got enough money to get a sleeper berth, you can read for a few hours and then fall asleep and wake up the next morning near the place you’re going. But if you have to spend the minimum, you end up on a hard seat feeling each shake of the train as it snakes its way through the night. The hospital gave me enough money for a hard seat. I didn’t have the money to move up to a sleeper, so I bought the cheap ticket and braced myself for a long night. I’ve had foreign friends tell me that they would never travel this way, but for Chinese students, it is the usual way, and we only dream of the day we can ride in the sleeper.
The train was set to leave at 8:30 in the evening, and I arrived at the station just under an hour before that. Although the sun had nearly set, the June heat had not lifted, and the skin of the people sitting on the ground outside the building glistened with sweat. The guards herded the crowd through the security check, and I felt the warm flesh of so many bodies pressed together and thought of all the germs passing between us and of all the sickness in the world and of how little a doctor could really do to cure it.
The Fujian train came only a few minutes before the departure time, and all the people who had formed a line at the gate made a dash to the platform, knowing that the margin was slim. As I walked along the train toward car number seven, I saw through the window some passengers at rest on their sleeper car beds. I envied them.
The train began to move less than a minute after I boarded. Car number seven was crowded, with every seat taken and the poorest of travelers, seat-less, stranded on the metal floor between cars like a flock of birds with clipped wings. I found the seat on my ticket already taken by a man with weathered skin sleeping with a straw hat in his lap. I tapped him gently on the shoulder, but he did not stir.
“Duibuqi,” I said and shook him with a little more force. “Zhe ge wo de zuowei.”
He opened his eyes and stood up and joined the other lost birds on the metal floor. He departed with eyes downcast and the deference that had been instilled in him since birth.
That was when I first noticed the color wolf. He was in the seat next to mine with a newspaper half-concealing his face. But his eyes were above the paper and fixed on mine, not on the page. They were wider than the average Chinese man’s eyes and somehow darker, so wide and dark that I could see clearly the doubled reflection of myself in them. The sight made me shudder, though I don’t know why. He dropped the paper into his lap and smiled at me—a smile that was more mocking than friendly. When his thin lips parted, the teeth that emerged were oversized and stained from tobacco. I turned away and sat down and tried not to think of him.
Like so many who travel by train in China, I had brought a simple dinner along—a cup of noodles that could be cooked with the hot water available between cars. I got up to fill my cup. So many passengers were eating in the mid-evening that a noodle scent filled the air—strong enough to drive out the days’ sweat and even the waft of cigarette smoke that floated in from the floor between cars.
When I returned to my seat, the color wolf had folded the newspaper on his left thigh, and he appeared to be sleeping. Yet when the noodles had finished cooking and I began to eat, I had the discomfiting sense of being watched. I looked a little closer and saw something I hadn’t noticed before. He was in the same position, with his legs stretched out and his head back and his arms folded. His eyes were closed, but not fully so. There was there narrowest of gaps at the base of both lids. He was watching me through a screen of lashes.
I lost my appetite and only managed to eat half the noodles. Across the aisle, a group of six students were laughing as they played cards. That made me feel safer—to be in a well-lighted place with others nearby. But the color wolf’s eyes stayed on me, burning like a low bulb that begins to hurt if it’s held for too long near the skin.
Aiming for distraction, I took out one of my medical textbooks and tried to read. The words rushed through my brain and left as quickly as they came in, hardly making an impression. I stole a few glances at the color wolf over my book. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt, but it was not tucked in and bore a brown stain the size of a small coin beneath the pocket. His light brown pants were stylishly cut but frayed at the bottoms. He wore sandals rather than shoes, and no socks. On each big toe, a few hairs popped out over the leather. He was lean all over, but his bare arms were muscular and showed that he might have surprising strength. His hair was a little long and disheveled, and above his lips a downy mustache had begun to grow.
Within an hour or so, the card game waned, and most of the players began to nap fitfully. The air in the car was heavy, and sleep floated about like a sickness. Soon, I too drifted off and dozed with my hands folded on the open book. I woke not with a start but with the almost imperceptible sense of being touched. The color wolf appeared to be sleeping beside me. His eyes were fully closed now, and his head tilted to the side, so near to me that his hair brushed lightly against my shoulder.
But it was not his hair that alarmed me, not his hair that stirred me from my sleep. Instead, the color wolf rested with his right arm stretched across his waist and his open palm cupping my hip. I tried to shift away from him, but something restrained me. No matter how much I willed myself to move, my body remained motionless. The color wolf opened his eyes and smiled at me—the same smile I had seen on him when I first took my seat. His hand began to move slowly, around and around my hip in ever widening circles and then down the outside of my thigh until it found the hem of my skirt well below the knee. I trembled all over and struggled to shift away, but I could not break the spell. I felt his fingers begin to crawl up the skin of my inner thigh like the damp legs of a spider.
Suddenly, the train violently shook, and the lights flickered on and off. Had we hit something on the track? The train steadied its course, but the shock of it had awakened the passengers, who now looked about with bleary eyes. The color wolf’s hand had stopped high up my thigh, his fingers stilled by the commotion. The old woman sitting across from the color wolf looked at his hand and then into my eyes. Then she turned quickly away and kept her eyes on the floor.
I don’t know if it was the shaking of the train or the shame that I felt under the old woman’s gaze that set me free. I jumped out of my seat, surprised by the strength I had reclaimed.
“Jiuren! Ni zuo shenme!” I shouted. “Stop! What are you doing!”
The card players looked on with moderate curiosity, peering sleepily at what they probably thought was a lover’s squabble. The old woman stared out the window into the featureless dark. The color wolf smiled at me and twitched his fingers on his knee.
I grabbed my bag and took refuge on the metal floor. It would be the longest night I’d ever spend, standing and shaking through the night. But I could not go back there with the color wolf waiting in his lair. Discomfort was a small price to pay for safety.
The man in the straw hat waited for a while and then, seeing that I had no intention to return, reclaimed the seat I’d taken from him. We Chinese are a resourceful people; what one person discards another will surely treasure. And, as everyone knows that color wolves have little taste for aging men, what had he to fear? He had his seat, and I had my safety. We could both consider ourselves happy.
----------------------------------------------------
This is the way I have told the story the few times that I have told it—to my cousin, to my closest friend, to the Englishman who later became my husband. It is the way I usually tell it to myself. It is mostly true but not wholly so.
Maybe memory works this way, taking raw facts and reshaping them in ways that make it a little easier for us to live with ourselves. My mother warned me to watch out for color wolves, but I did not believe her. I do believe in color wolves now. I believe in them because one still lives within me. They cannot be driven out by something so simple as the shake of a train or an old woman’s gaze. And once a color wolf gets inside you he will never come out. He is with me when I see a certain kind of man on the street—a man who has that look in his eyes, a man with a body that is hungry and lean. He is with me when my husband touches me, taking over my husband’s body, taking over me. He is with me in my dreams.
The old woman's eyes could not break the spell, though she surely saw, the only one who knows besides the color wolf and me. And the shame did not come from the woman’s eyes. It comes from within me, from knowing that I did not/could not/would not refuse his touch and that, intermingled with the horror was—and here I must pause for I can hardly think the words—something much too close to wanting to tell the story whole.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Yao Ming in Reverse
The day after I returned to the US, I went to my neighborhood library to check out some books. After spending eleven months in Suzhou, I found myself drawn by an irresistible force to the library’s holdings on China, as if the books there could reclaim part of what I had loved and left behind. Quickly, I caught a conspiratorial scent in the air. There, along with the usual histories and travel guides, were a half-dozen books written by Americans warning of perils looming to the east, books with titles like China: The Dragon Rises and China: The Gathering Threat.
Perhaps it is my affection for Chinese people individually and collectively that makes me recoil from such texts. I’m too fond of China and the Chinese to begin to be frightened. Besides, while in China, I witnessed how little foreigners sometimes require to see signs of danger. There’s a popular Olympic t-shirt that people are wearing in China these days. The text on the shirt reads, “One China, One World, One Dream.” More than one foreigner has commented to me that this slogan proclaims China’s desire to take over the world. I find the conclusion highly dubious, for world conquest usually requires a little subtlety. If China truly aspired to conquer the world, it probably wouldn’t announce the intention on mass-produced t-shirts. Regardless, I’ve been too busy coming to terms with a real conspiracy to divert much attention to one that is largely fictitious.
It all happened because I am tall--that, and still mobile enough to play a little basketball. I have long arms, can shoot near the basket with my right or left hand, and can even hit a three-point shot now and then. In America, this adds up to mediocrity, and I’ve occasionally known how it feels to be the worst player on the court. But in China, the package made me a monster, a kind of Yao Ming in reverse. But as I recently discovered, excelling at something in a foreign country sometimes comes with a cost: a metaphorical if not literal pound of flesh.
Although basketball is an American invention, the sport is far more popular at present in China than it is in the United States, especially among students. At the college where I work in the US, I would sometimes go to the gym looking to get in a pick-up game and end up shooting free throws by myself. I never had a similar problem during my year in China. I lived a short bike ride from the campus of Suzhou University, where just about any time of day dozens of courts would be full of Chinese men playing basketball. On a clear and not so hot day, so many would be playing that it might take a while to get in a game. Even after the big snowstorm in February, the students had swept the court of snow and were playing again within a few days, braving the cold and the occasional patch of ice.
While there were a few other foreigners teaching and studying at the university, I never met another one on the basketball court. This, along with my height, made it impossible to blend in. The average Chinese man is seven or eight inches shorter than I, which meant that I was often guarded by players whose crowns came up to my chin. Sometimes I matched up against men close to my height--and, once, against one even taller--but typically my size gave me such an advantage that my shots were hardly contested. My worst enemy many days was myself.
You might think a tall waiguoren scoring at ease would breed resentment in China, but that was not initially my experience--at least not on the surface. Only once was an opponent openly hostile. This occurred when an undersized player grew increasingly frustrated with guarding me. Suddenly he accused me of throwing an elbow at him. In fact, he had run face-first into my back, and I could still feel the impact on my shoulder blade. When I told him so, the guy stormed off the court in the middle of game and sat sulking on his e-bike for an hour while I continued to play. As soon as I’d had enough, he began playing again. As in all things Chinese, I am limited, and talking trash on a basketball court is no exception. Da bao bao was all I could think of to say--big baby. In eleven months in China, that was the only occasion I had to attempt an insult, however feeble and ineffectual.
Generally, though, the Chinese players were welcoming and friendly, inviting me to play with them and peppering me with questions in the hybrid tongue of Chinglish. Sometimes we exchanged cell phone numbers and called in advance to meet and play another day. Mostly, though, I rode up alone and joined a game wherever I could find one, playing often enough that many strangers met in this way later became acquaintances and casual friends.
Beneath the friendly façade, however, danger lurked. With increasing frequency, my opponents employed the defense known in the NBA as “hack-a-Shaq.” The strategy first developed as a means to exploit Shaquille O’Neal’s terrible free throw shooting. At 7’2” and more than 300 pounds, Shaq is nearly unstoppable close to the basket. However, from fifteen feet away at the foul line, he’s worse than most schoolboys. So teams took to clobbering him every time Shaq had the ball, knowing that the odds were pretty good that he’d miss the foul shots. The strategy works even better in pick-up games, where there are no free throws, and it’s impossible for a player to foul out. On the playground, “hack-a-Shaq” has all the benefits with none of the costs.
As the spring semester went on, I found myself defended in this fashion quite often, practically tackled whenever I touched the ball. There were games when I never managed to lift my hands over my shoulders--a Gulliver in shorts bound up by Lilliputians. And then the injuries began, always inflicted with a smile first and apology afterwards. First, it was a black eye, or a panda eye, as the Chinese call it. Perhaps fearing that I’d be out of balance that way, another player blackened the other eye. Then a boy threw the ball in my face, nearly crushing my nose. My glasses were broken, and I started to play blind. One week in May, I played three days and suffered in succession a panda eye, a dislocated finger, and a sprained ankle. I had cuts and bruises on my arms and legs, scratches on my face.
It was all was too much to be coincidental. I imagined secret meetings in which my opponents parried over who would hit me where. Surely someone from the Party was calling the shots. At Suzhou University, the Chinese had reopened the Boxer Rebellion, and this time they were winning. Somebody had decided one foreign devil had go down.
So when I witness others indulging in conspiracy theories about China, I’m not impressed, for I have been the target of a real one. I’ll leave it to others to find a subtext of danger in slogans like “One China, One World, One Dream.” I’m just happy that I made it out of China alive.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Suzhou Blues Revisited
In late January, I posted an essay on this blog called “Suzhou Blues II.” Today, back in Baltimore, I re-read that essay for the first time in a long time. Maybe the mid-point of any long journey lies at the nadir of an arc that ascends twice: one arrives, rises on the crest of the new, tumbles, recovers, and rises again. In any event, for me, the “Suzhou Blues” essay documented the low point of a nearly eleven-month stay in China, and it gives the false impression that I was miserable much of time in Suzhou. Misery, as you will see, was the exception rather than the rule, and now that I’ve returned to the U.S., it’s time to take stock of what I learned from the experience.
Adaptability
Through living and working in China for almost a year, I’ve discovered that I am quite adaptable. I went to China alone, speaking only a little bad Chinese and knowing only a handful of people--most of whom I knew well enough to call acquaintances but few of whom I could call friends. From this spare beginning, I made a life for myself in Suzhou, riding my bicycle each morning through sun, rain, and snow to the bus stop to Wenzheng; bargaining for vegetables in the market with my garbled Chinese, eating with chopsticks like an old China hand; witnessing a culture that had once seemed foreign and strange become familiar and friendly to my eyes; forming close friendships across cultures, friendships that transcended cultural difference, that were in fact energized by a recognition that difference and commonality can exist simultaneously when people have hearts and minds big enough to hold them both.
There’s a lot of discussion these days in the West about how China is changing, and perhaps the survival of an individual as much as that of a nation depends on adaptability. Once disparaged by Westerners as “the sick man of the East,” China is now on a course of rapid economic growth that has aroused both admiration and fear. Regardless of the reaction, China’s capacity to adapt is undeniable. In just thirty years, China has utterly transformed itself; over the course of sixty years, it has done so twice, moving from Japanese occupation and civil war to Maoism to capitalism with Chinese characteristics, all within the ordinary span of an individual life. Maybe there is something infectious about such adaptability, for I feel it within myself, too. I arrived in China a sick man of the West with a wounded heart and returned home with a restored capacity for hope. Life in China was varied and interesting to me, and I rediscovered a talent for friendship that I once had as a child but assumed I had forever lost. The true test of these changes, however, comes now, back in America, without the charms of place to prop me up. My fate, like that of China itself, still hangs in the balance.
In the last paragraph of “Suzhou Blues II,” I offered an embarrassingly quick overview and dismissal of Albert Camus’s use of the Sisyphus myth as a metaphor for life. I closed by suggesting that I might be better off finding another metaphor. Perhaps now, in noting parallels between the adaptability of nations and of individuals, I have found one. People who resist change, like nations, drown in the sea of their own defects. Those who adapt change and grow--sometimes painfully so--and in the process reinvent themselves.
Necessity
By American standards, my life in China was almost Spartan. I lived in a room that might generously be called an efficiency apartment and less generously simply a room. It had a tiny kitchen with cabinets that opened at chest-level (for me). The water in the kitchen and bathroom would shut off on a whim, though I fortunately avoided being caught tall and dry with shampoo in my hair or soap on my skin. The bed was a queen, and the room had three hard wooden chairs but no recliner or couch. The desk by window was long, but soon after I moved in, I had covered every inch of it with papers and books, concealing the faux-wooden surface.
The room was on the fourth floor and overlooked a parking lot, but I still liked to sit outside on the balcony on cool nights and play my cheap Chinese guitar in the moonlight. And everywhere there was dust; it filtered through the air conditioning fixtures and laid claim to the room; it blackened the white tiles on the balcony floor; I can only imagine what it has done to my lungs.
This was all that I had for nearly a year, and I never found myself wanting more. I hadn’t known there would be a washing machine in the bathroom, and I’d stuffed the wardrobe too full of clothes. I often found myself wishing I had less. Some of my old clothes and even my sneakers I wore to threads and threw away when I moved out. My two suitcases were lighter when I departed than they had been when I arrived.
For nearly a year, I didn’t drive a car and never once had the desire to do so. I got around Suzhou by bicycle and bus and on foot and traveled between cities by train. I didn’t spend a penny on gas in eleven months, and a single trip on a Suzhou bus typically cost one yuan--about 15 cents.
My salary was about $600 USD a month, and I never felt exploited or underpaid. The school provided my room for free, and, despite traveling frequently within China and eating out on average four or five times a week, I managed to return with quite a bit of cash in my pocket.
I’m writing this now in my old house in Baltimore, feeling a little weighted down by things, knowing as I do now how little I really require, and how believing that I need more is a kind of disease.
Happiness
For a long time, I was a skeptic of happiness and assumed that smiles were ill-omens in disguise. Perhaps this stemmed in large measure from sharing my life with another depressive. If I could not make her happy, at least we might be united in our gloom. In China, there were no rewards for unhappiness, which made it much easier to let the mood pass.
This ability to let go brightened my life in almost every respect. It made me receptive to friendship, pulling me out of myself in proportion with my willingness to let others into my life. It enabled me to find pleasure in my work. During the spring semester, I actually found myself enjoying teaching and the rapport I had developed with my students--even if I never did learn all their names. For the first time, I felt no anxiety about walking into a classroom, nor did I need to survive the semester by counting the days till its end. For the first time, I was genuinely sad to see the last day come. Maybe that sensation is a marker of happiness--the desire to linger a little longer in the moment rather than to escape from it.
Words
I began this blog with an entry in which I wondered who would read it. I’ve always sensed that my readership was small, and I sometimes feared that it was nonexistent. There were days when that sense stifled my desire to write, but I always found a way to push on, even when I believed that it mattered to no one but me whether I did so or not.
In the end, that was reason enough, for writing such as this is as much about discovery as it is about communication. Through writing, I discovered much about both China and myself, and working in the medium of words enabled me to bring clarity and order to a jumble of thoughts, impressions, and emotions. I do hope others were able to take pleasure in and gain meaning from what I’ve posted here, but, in retrospect, I can see that the words have inherent value to me regardless. Anything beyond that is appreciated but by no means a necessity.
Note: This entry is a kind of conclusion, though there are a few unfinished entries that I may work on and post in the weeks ahead. Even though I’m no longer in China, China is still very much within me.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Goodbye to Suzhou
Back in late April, I wrote a song about leaving Suzhou, as I did in actuality yesterday. It features some pretty fast finger picking, with a melody that echoes Pachabel’s Canon (though here in the key of C). The title is “Goodbye to Suzhou,” and it expresses an anticipatory grief over parting from what I’ve come to like about living in China. Maybe the lyric is a little sentimental, but it has some nice imagery, too.
In about an hour, I composed parts for two guitars, bass, and two voices, along with the lyric. Creativity like this is truly is a gift. I don’t know where the song came from; I only know it came to me. I say this not because I think the song is great but instead because I partake in the wonder of making something out of nothing, as all creative people do. In this small way, if only for a moment, we are like gods of a lesser order.
I’m leaving Suzhou today
with a box of words
and pockets full of blossoms
such as friends
whose fathers worked the land
with weathered hands
that are as wise as Lao Zi.
Goodbye to Suzhou--
I won’t see you anymore.
I’ll remember women’s slippered feet
walking on the stone streets
by the water
and how the sunlight
wedded with the stones
and sparkled noontime
in a boatman’s eyes.
Goodbye to Suzhou--
hello to Baltimore.
In Maryland, there’ll be
baseball games and crab cakes,
shopping malls and car jams on the beltway
and addicts staring
with their jaundiced eyes,
standing on those
hope-deserted corners.
And I’ll dream of Suzhou
on the streets of Baltimore.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Grand Theft Bicycle
In life as in literature, foreshadowing is obvious to the obtuse only in retrospect. Looking back, I should have known that the joke Liru told me the day she helped me buy my bicycle last fall carried with it an undercurrent of doom. The joke went something like this…
A man who wanted to make certain that no one would steal his bicycle put ten locks on it and a sign taunting any prospective thieves as well: “I’d like to see you steal this bike!” A thief passing by read the sign and took offense. He bought an eleventh lock and clamped it on, along with a sign of his own: “I’d like to see you try to ride it!”
Perhaps I should view the theft of my own bicycle this spring as a kind of blessing, for I couldn’t say that I had truly lived in Suzhou for a year unless I’d lost at least one. Such a loss is a bonding experience, and now, after having my first bike stolen, I’m practically a native.
It was only after bemoaning the loss of my bicycle that I discovered just how prevalent such theft is in Suzhou. My tutor Yuanyuan has had five bikes stolen during her years of study and work in this “Venice of the East.” Zhou, my contact at the foreign affairs office, noted that he and his wife and child had lost eight bicycles to thieves in recent years. Then there was the Chinese teacher I met on a trip to Wuxi who had ten stolen in a single year. At that point, I think I would conclude that the universe did not intend for me to own a bike, but my new friend wasn’t deterred. He bought an eleventh and was still able to laugh about it when he told me the story. Maybe laughter in such circumstances is the only way to stave off despair. As the comedian Chris Rock once noted, comedy is the blues for people who can’t sing. This must explain why there are so many bicycle theft jokes circulating in Suzhou these days.
The high rate of bike theft is perplexing, as the crime here is negligible in other respects. I feel perfectly safe walking alone anywhere at any hour in Suzhou--a claim that I surely couldn’t make about my home in the US, Baltimore, where a short stroll alone through some neighborhoods at night would not be far removed from suicide. The low crime rate derives in large measure from China’s harsh penal code. China leads the world in executions, and the country has more than sixty capital offenses. Evidently, bicycle theft isn’t among them and has slipped through the cracks of the code altogether.
For about a week after my bike was stolen, I tried to make do on foot. I quickly discovered just how dependent upon my bike I had become. I mourned its loss like that of an old friend. Getting anywhere took four or five times longer, and I was deprived of a cooling breeze just as the return of the Suzhou heat had made it necessary again. I concluded that I could not go on this way. However, I would not make the same mistake twice.
Back in September, Liru had convinced me to buy a new rather than a used bicycle on the grounds that I could avoid having to make costly repairs along the way. This proved true enough, and at about $50 USD, the cost of a new bike was hardly exorbitant. My new bike had a spiffy purple paint job and an eye-catching Phoenix label on the frame. And, aside from needing a new chain, the bike proved very reliable, requiring no other repairs during the seven months that I owned it. But what I hadn’t counted on was that all that made the bicycle attractive to me would make it attractive to others as well, including the thief who eventually stole it. For my second bike in China, I decided to look for that special bicycle, one just barely good enough to get me around but so bad otherwise that a lock would be superfluous.
It didn’t take long to find such a bike, and it cost me only $7 USD. Or at least that was the cost upfront. My battered bicycle has rust on the frame, rust on the rims, rust even on the spokes. The rust on the back fender is so severe that it severed the metal and made a terrible racket when the fender collapsed on the tire the day that I bought it. I solved that problem by rigging the fender in place with a twisted clothes hanger. I sometimes see people laughing at that when I pass by, but this bicycle was not bought to win beauty contests. The handlebars are bent and give the impression that I’m constantly turning. The breaks squeak well enough, but their bark is better than their bite. At best, they only slow me down, and coming to a complete stop requires a firm drag of the feet. This has led to a few harrowing moments on mornings when I’m running late to catch the Wenzheng bus, racing down the Dongwu Bridge and praying to Christ, Buddha, Lao Tzu, and Mao that no one gets in my way.
My Chinese friends call a bicycle like mine a tank, just as Americans call a used car that’s backfiring or dragging its muffler down the street a bomb. Tanks and bombs share the trait of needing a combination of ingenuity and cash to keep them going. This has been true of my tank as well, and, unfortunately, most of the problems have been beyond my powers to solve by twisting clothes hangers. It all began a few minutes after I bought the bike. My friend Yimin had come with me to help if I needed translating during the purchase, and, as she departed, I told her to wish me good luck on my maiden voyage. I’d not pedaled more than ten feet before the chain fell off. A worn-out crank was the culprit and had to be replaced. Soon the treadless front tire and its dry-rotted tube had to go, followed by the back inner-tube as well. Then, a couple of close calls on Dongwu Bridge convinced me something really had to be done about those brakes. The new brake pads do help, though a little foot-dragging is still required.
All told, the cost of repairs has already exceeded the original price. You might think I have regrets, knowing that I could have spent my money more wisely and bought a better bike to begin with, but I’m not complaining. In Suzhou, there’s inherent value in having a tank that no one would want to swipe. Rusted frame and rusted wheels, bent handlebars and fenders hanging by a metal thread: these are features money can’t buy and no thief will touch. Who, in the waning weeks of his year in China, could ask for anything more?
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Return to Yangzhou: A Farce in Two Parts
Given the trauma my digestive system suffered during my first trip to Yangzhou, it may surprise you that I had any desire to go back at all. However, I try be open to new experiences, especially with Chinese friends, as much of what I learn about Chinese culture comes from simply being present within it. Even so, when my teacher and friend Yuanyuan called and invited me to spend the weekend in Yangzhou with her husband and some of their friends, I hesitated, fearing that I might feel a bit out of place, the only foreigner among seven close Chinese friends. I decided to go in the end, though, as I knew pretty much what would happen if I spent the weekend in my room. Yangzhou had the lure of the unknown on its side, and in the end it delivered.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Sing Karaoke
The sense of being the outsider was most pronounced at dinner on Friday night. My Chinese friends had gone to college together and hadn’t seen one another for a while. There were innumerable toasts, and the more my Chinese friends drank, the less English they spoke, and the more invisible I became. I have trouble understanding Chinese in any context, so, not surprisingly, Chinese in slurred speech proved quite impossible for me. In the end, the two words I could comprehend may have been the only ones that mattered: gan bei! (Empty your glass!)
The evening improved for me when we left the restaurant and went to a KTV bar. You in America may not appreciate what a national institution karaoke has become in China, and in other Asian countries as well. There are many hundreds of KTV bars in Suzhou, and singing karaoke is the favorite social activity among most young Chinese. Each bar includes dozens of private rooms, where friends gather and sing, usually with enthusiasm and sour notes in equal measure. The song lyrics scroll across the large-screen TVs, along with often incongruous images. Last summer, for example, I sang “Roxanne” to a series of clips from The Shawshank Redemption. I don’t recall a prostitute in that film, nor a prison in the song.
Waiters will bring food and drinks on demand and, in the shadier establishments, I’ve been told, prostitutes and drugs as well. The friends who took me to my first KTV bar in Nanjing two summers ago described such places as “unwholesome KTV.” A couple of things made me think that perhaps the KTV bar we patronized in Yangzhou may have been a bit on the unwholesome side. The place had dozens of young women in skimpy black dresses lurking about, saying “hello” as I passed them in the hall. I noted a whole room full of them, in fact, waiting for something or someone. Then when I went to the restroom, a KTV employee surprised me by putting a hot towel on my neck and proceeding to give me a neck rub as I stood at the urinal. I was so stunned that I remained speechless the first time. I don’t think of myself as homophobic, but the last thing I want while my privates are out for a breath of unfresh air is for a strange man to start giving me a massage. The second time I visited the bathroom, I was ready for him. He approached with his hot towel and slightly leering smile. “Bu yao,” I said. (Don’t want). Sometimes, at such critical moments, even a little Chinese is enough.
As always there were plenty of English songs for me to sing, and I was able to sing a couple of challenging ones, including Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” In light of the Chinese government’s distorted coverage of the unrest in Tibet and the apparent willingness of many Chinese to swallow the distortions whole, I couldn’t help but think of a political subtext to the lyrics: “When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer.” I managed to go up a whole octave for the word “suffer,“ hitting a note I hadn’t known was in me. My Chinese friends clapped at that, fortunately unable to read my mind.
My favorite moment, however, had to be singing the Beatles’ “Revolution,” in particular the lines, “But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow.” I commented to one of my Chinese friends that “Revolution” had to be one of the only Western pop songs to mention Mao. I heard him repeat my observation, with minimal accuracy, to a friend who had not caught my words over the blaring speakers: “He said that the Western singers admire our Chairman Mao.” Ah, to be in China at such a moment…
Storming Normandy in a Dragon Boat
The next day, we went to Shou Xihu Gongyuan (Thin West Lake Park)--the most beautiful and famous spot in Yangzhou. I had visited the lake in November, but it is much lovelier in spring, with thousands and thousands of flowers in bloom. But with the flowers come the people--at least ten thousand, I would guess. In November, the place was nearly deserted and quite peaceful, so I guess congestion is the price we must pay for beauty in a country of more than a billion.
Speaking of price, the entry fee for the park led to a comic adventure. My Chinese friends thought that the admission fee was too high (90 yuan, or about $13), so they concocted a plan to lower the price. Two of them bought tickets and entered the park. They told me to wait with the others outside the gate. Then they rented two pedal-driven dragon boats, pedaled them out of the park, and picked the rest of us up outside the gate, on a bank concealed by an old stone bridge. After we’d floated back into the park, a man on the bank noticed that boats that formerly carried only one person now held four and started shouting at us in Chinese and gesticulating for us to come to shore. We pedaled harder and out of his view, but I saw him talking into a hand-held radio before I could see him no more. Soon, a police boat approached, and one of my Chinese friends went into a panic, certain that we’d all be going to jail. I found myself thinking about a report I’d heard earlier that week on NPR that cited China as the world leader in executions and noted that the country had sixty capital offenses. I wondered if illegally entering a park by boat might be among them. But the police craft went right past us, and we jumped to the shore inside the park, leaving just one person in each boat to pedal back to the dock.
I’m amazed that I at least wasn’t apprehended; I would have been easy to find. Of the ten thousand people in the park, I believe I was one of two foreigners, and the only other foreigner I saw all day was a woman of less-than-average height. How hard would it have been to find the tall waiguoren in the red cap, the one person in the park with blue eyes? It all made for a memorable entry. Who ever recalls simply buying the ticket and walking through the gate?
Yuanyuan had been in the other boat, and later she me that she and her party had been greeted with a hero’s welcome when they stepped ashore. An old man had seen us loitering by the canal outside the gate and had wondered what we were up to. He happened to be walking by the water when Yuanyuan’s boat came ashore inside the park. He began to clap with mock admiration. “You are storming the beach at Normandy,” he said. “Hurrah! Hurrah!” This landing, however, was uncontested, with no Germans in bunkers firing down, just thousands of flowers in bloom, and a sea of Chinese within which I somehow managed to lose myself.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Sing Karaoke
The sense of being the outsider was most pronounced at dinner on Friday night. My Chinese friends had gone to college together and hadn’t seen one another for a while. There were innumerable toasts, and the more my Chinese friends drank, the less English they spoke, and the more invisible I became. I have trouble understanding Chinese in any context, so, not surprisingly, Chinese in slurred speech proved quite impossible for me. In the end, the two words I could comprehend may have been the only ones that mattered: gan bei! (Empty your glass!)
The evening improved for me when we left the restaurant and went to a KTV bar. You in America may not appreciate what a national institution karaoke has become in China, and in other Asian countries as well. There are many hundreds of KTV bars in Suzhou, and singing karaoke is the favorite social activity among most young Chinese. Each bar includes dozens of private rooms, where friends gather and sing, usually with enthusiasm and sour notes in equal measure. The song lyrics scroll across the large-screen TVs, along with often incongruous images. Last summer, for example, I sang “Roxanne” to a series of clips from The Shawshank Redemption. I don’t recall a prostitute in that film, nor a prison in the song.
Waiters will bring food and drinks on demand and, in the shadier establishments, I’ve been told, prostitutes and drugs as well. The friends who took me to my first KTV bar in Nanjing two summers ago described such places as “unwholesome KTV.” A couple of things made me think that perhaps the KTV bar we patronized in Yangzhou may have been a bit on the unwholesome side. The place had dozens of young women in skimpy black dresses lurking about, saying “hello” as I passed them in the hall. I noted a whole room full of them, in fact, waiting for something or someone. Then when I went to the restroom, a KTV employee surprised me by putting a hot towel on my neck and proceeding to give me a neck rub as I stood at the urinal. I was so stunned that I remained speechless the first time. I don’t think of myself as homophobic, but the last thing I want while my privates are out for a breath of unfresh air is for a strange man to start giving me a massage. The second time I visited the bathroom, I was ready for him. He approached with his hot towel and slightly leering smile. “Bu yao,” I said. (Don’t want). Sometimes, at such critical moments, even a little Chinese is enough.
As always there were plenty of English songs for me to sing, and I was able to sing a couple of challenging ones, including Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” In light of the Chinese government’s distorted coverage of the unrest in Tibet and the apparent willingness of many Chinese to swallow the distortions whole, I couldn’t help but think of a political subtext to the lyrics: “When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer.” I managed to go up a whole octave for the word “suffer,“ hitting a note I hadn’t known was in me. My Chinese friends clapped at that, fortunately unable to read my mind.
My favorite moment, however, had to be singing the Beatles’ “Revolution,” in particular the lines, “But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow.” I commented to one of my Chinese friends that “Revolution” had to be one of the only Western pop songs to mention Mao. I heard him repeat my observation, with minimal accuracy, to a friend who had not caught my words over the blaring speakers: “He said that the Western singers admire our Chairman Mao.” Ah, to be in China at such a moment…
Storming Normandy in a Dragon Boat
The next day, we went to Shou Xihu Gongyuan (Thin West Lake Park)--the most beautiful and famous spot in Yangzhou. I had visited the lake in November, but it is much lovelier in spring, with thousands and thousands of flowers in bloom. But with the flowers come the people--at least ten thousand, I would guess. In November, the place was nearly deserted and quite peaceful, so I guess congestion is the price we must pay for beauty in a country of more than a billion.
Speaking of price, the entry fee for the park led to a comic adventure. My Chinese friends thought that the admission fee was too high (90 yuan, or about $13), so they concocted a plan to lower the price. Two of them bought tickets and entered the park. They told me to wait with the others outside the gate. Then they rented two pedal-driven dragon boats, pedaled them out of the park, and picked the rest of us up outside the gate, on a bank concealed by an old stone bridge. After we’d floated back into the park, a man on the bank noticed that boats that formerly carried only one person now held four and started shouting at us in Chinese and gesticulating for us to come to shore. We pedaled harder and out of his view, but I saw him talking into a hand-held radio before I could see him no more. Soon, a police boat approached, and one of my Chinese friends went into a panic, certain that we’d all be going to jail. I found myself thinking about a report I’d heard earlier that week on NPR that cited China as the world leader in executions and noted that the country had sixty capital offenses. I wondered if illegally entering a park by boat might be among them. But the police craft went right past us, and we jumped to the shore inside the park, leaving just one person in each boat to pedal back to the dock.
I’m amazed that I at least wasn’t apprehended; I would have been easy to find. Of the ten thousand people in the park, I believe I was one of two foreigners, and the only other foreigner I saw all day was a woman of less-than-average height. How hard would it have been to find the tall waiguoren in the red cap, the one person in the park with blue eyes? It all made for a memorable entry. Who ever recalls simply buying the ticket and walking through the gate?
Yuanyuan had been in the other boat, and later she me that she and her party had been greeted with a hero’s welcome when they stepped ashore. An old man had seen us loitering by the canal outside the gate and had wondered what we were up to. He happened to be walking by the water when Yuanyuan’s boat came ashore inside the park. He began to clap with mock admiration. “You are storming the beach at Normandy,” he said. “Hurrah! Hurrah!” This landing, however, was uncontested, with no Germans in bunkers firing down, just thousands of flowers in bloom, and a sea of Chinese within which I somehow managed to lose myself.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Golden Lotuses
I must confess that I sometimes catch myself staring at my students’ feet. Let me be perfectly clear: this happens not because I’ve stayed in China long enough to develop a foot fetish. Besides, the mass foot fetish is mercifully a thing of the past in a China where footbinding is now unknown. The practice was banned with uneven results after the fall of the Qing in 1911 and later was one of the “olds” driven out forever by Mao—this one for very good cause. Though my students’ feet tend to be small, they are naturally so. No, these feet hold my gaze because they remind me that the demographics of my classes at Wenzheng College bear witness to a social transformation that approaches the miraculous. More than ninety percent of my students are young women, and this in a country where little more than a half century ago illiteracy bound the minds of ninety percent of women and girls as surely as custom bound their feet.
Women in China have a long history of experiencing bindings of various kinds. Most famous are the “golden lotuses” or “golden lilies,” as bound feet were euphemistically called. Lately, I’ve been reading The Great Chinese Revolution by John King Fairbank, a frustrating book full of insights and interesting details but written in a style that makes it feel like penance to read. However, even cumbersome prose has the power occasionally to give one pause, if not steal one’s breath. Fairbank’s five-page overview of the history of footbinding had such an effect on me. Fairbank describes in excruciating detail the painful process of footbinding as well as its cultural impact in China generally and on women in particular. But it is a sentence noting the scale of the practice that left the deepest impression on me: “First and last one may guess that at least a billion Chinese girls during the thousand-year currency of this social custom suffered the agony of footbinding and reaped its rewards of pride and ecstasy, such as they were” (Fairbank 71).
At least a billion Chinese girls. Just the size of the number is sobering enough. A billion Chinese girls. That’s something akin to the entire population of China today hobbling about on bound feet. A billion Chinese girls. A haunting figure, but human suffering, for me, is measured best not in sums but instead in the lived experiences of individuals. That’s when it really gets to me—when I think of the individual pain of those billion Chinese girls. To comprehend this, we must reflect for a moment on what it meant to have one’s feet bound.
Typically, the process of footbinding began when a girl was somewhere between four and seven. The earlier the binding was initiated, the less severe the pain, but the pain was severe in every instance:
Each of the girl’s small toes was broken in the process and forced by the increasingly tight wrappings to bend down under the foot, driving the broken arch up into the desired lotus shape. I can scarcely imagine the pain this must have entailed, but the initial deformation of the foot was just the opening act of a lifetime of suffering for a woman with bound feet:
Like most oppressive practices, footbinding was supported by an ideology that infiltrated the minds of the empowered and the disempowered alike. In fact, it sometimes made them hard to distinguish. Ironically, the actual binder of a girl’s foot was a trusted female relative, typically her mother or grandmother. And in the late-19th and early 20th century, when efforts to abolish footbinding gathered force in China, women with bound feet sometimes were the reformers’ staunchest foes. Perhaps this should not be surprising, as no one had more invested in footbinding than they—few people will immediately embrace a view that requires them to conclude that their own suffering has all been for naught.
While women may have been responsible for the literal binding of a girl’s foot, the figurative binders were men, and the custom could have evolved into a norm only in a culture that was already deeply patriarchal. Classical Chinese erotic manuals suggest that women with bound feet gained sexual hypersensitivity, but such manuals were written by men for men, and the source of the purported “advantages” for women was likely the male imagination rather than the experience of any real women. Ultimately, footbinding revealed far more about the interconnection between male desire and power than anything else. A woman with bound feet was a housebound woman, a nearly immobile woman, a dependent woman, a woman who would always be small and something akin to a child. Footbinding, then, was an extreme form of eroticizing the subordination of women.
Footbinding disempowered women in terms that are easy to see and—from our vantage today—almost a reflex to oppose. The binding power of illiteracy is more insidious because it is hidden, more difficult to drive out because it is more difficult to see. Yet the binding of women’s minds in China shares a common cultural origin with the binding of their feet. The old Chinese saying, “A talentless woman is a virtuous women,” points toward the connection. Denying education to women, like binding their feet, immobilized women and inhibited their potential for growth.
The founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 offered the promise of change for Chinese women. In the early years of the PRC, Mao asserted that “women hold up half the sky” and instilled laws in support of gender equality—measures that ran counter to the patriarchal currents of traditional Chinese culture. To a large extent, the PRC has delivered on that promise, and the opportunities available to women in China today are unprecedented and would have been difficult to imagine a half-century ago. Even so, the promise has not been completely fulfilled, for the currents of tradition are strong, especially in rural areas. Only in the large cities has China come close to meeting its goal of universal literary, and a gender gap in the literacy rates of men and women has been present throughout the sixty-year history of the PRC. Even today, about fourteen percent of Chinese women are illiterate, compared with five percent of men. Granted, fourteen percent is a striking improvement over ninety, but the nearly ten-point gap between men and women is telling.
Highly educated Chinese women confront their own barriers as well. If women in the West still come up against the glass ceiling, women in China face something similar, though the glass here is tinted red. In both the governmental bureaucracy and the growing private sector, men continue to dominate high-level positions of power and influence. And the exceptional woman who rises to such heights pays a cultural price for her success. Women perceived as choosing career over family are disparagingly called “dragon women.” Perhaps such labels do the greatest harm not to the women so labeled but instead to girls and young women who’ve yet to choose their course in life. The phrase “dragon woman” is as much a warning as an indictment, an assertion that a woman ought not set her sights so high. Not surprisingly, no one ever speaks of dragon men.
Despite these constraints, I feel hopeful about the future for women in China, and my students surely contribute a great deal to this hope. At the beginning of the semester last fall, I asked the students to fill out information cards that included a question about career goals. The young women in my classes expressed a wide range of aspirations. They want to become translators, executives, educators, officials. Many also noted they wish to travel the world. That’s quite a shift in a culture where bound feet once prevented a billion women from aspiring to leave their own homes. Calling bound feet “golden lotuses” was always a misnomer, for the practice stunted growth and nipped lives in the bud. This is what I think about when I look at my students’ feet: in China, the lotuses are only just now beginning to bloom.
Work Cited
Fairbank, John King. The Great Chinese Revolution: 1800-1985. Singapore: Harper Perennial, 1987.
Women in China have a long history of experiencing bindings of various kinds. Most famous are the “golden lotuses” or “golden lilies,” as bound feet were euphemistically called. Lately, I’ve been reading The Great Chinese Revolution by John King Fairbank, a frustrating book full of insights and interesting details but written in a style that makes it feel like penance to read. However, even cumbersome prose has the power occasionally to give one pause, if not steal one’s breath. Fairbank’s five-page overview of the history of footbinding had such an effect on me. Fairbank describes in excruciating detail the painful process of footbinding as well as its cultural impact in China generally and on women in particular. But it is a sentence noting the scale of the practice that left the deepest impression on me: “First and last one may guess that at least a billion Chinese girls during the thousand-year currency of this social custom suffered the agony of footbinding and reaped its rewards of pride and ecstasy, such as they were” (Fairbank 71).
At least a billion Chinese girls. Just the size of the number is sobering enough. A billion Chinese girls. That’s something akin to the entire population of China today hobbling about on bound feet. A billion Chinese girls. A haunting figure, but human suffering, for me, is measured best not in sums but instead in the lived experiences of individuals. That’s when it really gets to me—when I think of the individual pain of those billion Chinese girls. To comprehend this, we must reflect for a moment on what it meant to have one’s feet bound.
Typically, the process of footbinding began when a girl was somewhere between four and seven. The earlier the binding was initiated, the less severe the pain, but the pain was severe in every instance:
A girl’s foot was made small, preferably only three inches long, by pressing the four smaller toes under the sole or ball of the foot in order to make it narrower. At the same time it was made shorter by forcing the big toe and heel closer together so that the arch rose in a bowed shape. As a result the arch was broken and the foot could bear no weight except on the heel. (Fairbank 71)
Each of the girl’s small toes was broken in the process and forced by the increasingly tight wrappings to bend down under the foot, driving the broken arch up into the desired lotus shape. I can scarcely imagine the pain this must have entailed, but the initial deformation of the foot was just the opening act of a lifetime of suffering for a woman with bound feet:
After the first two years, the pain lessened. But constricting the feet to a three-inch size was only the beginning of trouble. By this time they were very private parts indeed and required daily care, washing and manicuring at the same time that they had to be kept constantly bound and shod night and day. Unmanicured nails could cut into the instep, bindings could destroy circulation, blood poisoning or gangrene could result. (Fairbank 72)
Like most oppressive practices, footbinding was supported by an ideology that infiltrated the minds of the empowered and the disempowered alike. In fact, it sometimes made them hard to distinguish. Ironically, the actual binder of a girl’s foot was a trusted female relative, typically her mother or grandmother. And in the late-19th and early 20th century, when efforts to abolish footbinding gathered force in China, women with bound feet sometimes were the reformers’ staunchest foes. Perhaps this should not be surprising, as no one had more invested in footbinding than they—few people will immediately embrace a view that requires them to conclude that their own suffering has all been for naught.
While women may have been responsible for the literal binding of a girl’s foot, the figurative binders were men, and the custom could have evolved into a norm only in a culture that was already deeply patriarchal. Classical Chinese erotic manuals suggest that women with bound feet gained sexual hypersensitivity, but such manuals were written by men for men, and the source of the purported “advantages” for women was likely the male imagination rather than the experience of any real women. Ultimately, footbinding revealed far more about the interconnection between male desire and power than anything else. A woman with bound feet was a housebound woman, a nearly immobile woman, a dependent woman, a woman who would always be small and something akin to a child. Footbinding, then, was an extreme form of eroticizing the subordination of women.
Footbinding disempowered women in terms that are easy to see and—from our vantage today—almost a reflex to oppose. The binding power of illiteracy is more insidious because it is hidden, more difficult to drive out because it is more difficult to see. Yet the binding of women’s minds in China shares a common cultural origin with the binding of their feet. The old Chinese saying, “A talentless woman is a virtuous women,” points toward the connection. Denying education to women, like binding their feet, immobilized women and inhibited their potential for growth.
The founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 offered the promise of change for Chinese women. In the early years of the PRC, Mao asserted that “women hold up half the sky” and instilled laws in support of gender equality—measures that ran counter to the patriarchal currents of traditional Chinese culture. To a large extent, the PRC has delivered on that promise, and the opportunities available to women in China today are unprecedented and would have been difficult to imagine a half-century ago. Even so, the promise has not been completely fulfilled, for the currents of tradition are strong, especially in rural areas. Only in the large cities has China come close to meeting its goal of universal literary, and a gender gap in the literacy rates of men and women has been present throughout the sixty-year history of the PRC. Even today, about fourteen percent of Chinese women are illiterate, compared with five percent of men. Granted, fourteen percent is a striking improvement over ninety, but the nearly ten-point gap between men and women is telling.
Highly educated Chinese women confront their own barriers as well. If women in the West still come up against the glass ceiling, women in China face something similar, though the glass here is tinted red. In both the governmental bureaucracy and the growing private sector, men continue to dominate high-level positions of power and influence. And the exceptional woman who rises to such heights pays a cultural price for her success. Women perceived as choosing career over family are disparagingly called “dragon women.” Perhaps such labels do the greatest harm not to the women so labeled but instead to girls and young women who’ve yet to choose their course in life. The phrase “dragon woman” is as much a warning as an indictment, an assertion that a woman ought not set her sights so high. Not surprisingly, no one ever speaks of dragon men.
Despite these constraints, I feel hopeful about the future for women in China, and my students surely contribute a great deal to this hope. At the beginning of the semester last fall, I asked the students to fill out information cards that included a question about career goals. The young women in my classes expressed a wide range of aspirations. They want to become translators, executives, educators, officials. Many also noted they wish to travel the world. That’s quite a shift in a culture where bound feet once prevented a billion women from aspiring to leave their own homes. Calling bound feet “golden lotuses” was always a misnomer, for the practice stunted growth and nipped lives in the bud. This is what I think about when I look at my students’ feet: in China, the lotuses are only just now beginning to bloom.
Work Cited
Fairbank, John King. The Great Chinese Revolution: 1800-1985. Singapore: Harper Perennial, 1987.
Small Happiness
The birth of a son is cause for celebration;
the birth of a daughter is only a "small happiness."
--John Bryan Starr, Understanding China
For one such as this,
the pangs are no less
nor the first breath
a lesser wonder,
but such a joy's
outstripped by sorrow,
his disapproval,
the scorn of bitter elders.
Such is the small happiness,
the kind that sends her
to the corner with an infant
dressed in swaddling clothes.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Guihua Gongyuan
At Guihua Gongyuan
old men fix time to string
and let it fly.
From my perch a mile north,
I watch flight take form—
bats, birds, demons, dragons
rising above tiled roofs,
fettered yet borne by wind
and in pursuit of cloud.
If old men with sore bones
and weary hearts can soar
in winter to such heights,
where might I go, with hair
still scarcely touched by snow?
old men fix time to string
and let it fly.
From my perch a mile north,
I watch flight take form—
bats, birds, demons, dragons
rising above tiled roofs,
fettered yet borne by wind
and in pursuit of cloud.
If old men with sore bones
and weary hearts can soar
in winter to such heights,
where might I go, with hair
still scarcely touched by snow?
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Real Fake
Any day in which one nearly gets bamboozled a dozen times in an hour is a day worth remembering to me. I had such a day and such an hour on an outing to Shanghai last summer. It began with a walk along Nanjing Lu with a couple of American students. There, we learned how it feels to be human magnets, or else thick rolls of 100-yuan notes with heads and limbs sticking out. Every street hawker of wristwatches and wheeled shoes came our way, making the same tired pitch in one or two English words. One man stood apart in diversifying his stock, though, unfortunately for him, this approach yielded no better luck: “Wristwatch? T-Shirt? Massage? Sex?” How’s that for one-stop shopping?
Next, three young Chinese people approached—a tall young man with a warm smile and a twinkle in his eye that I recognized as ironic only in retrospect, and his two vivacious female companions.
“We are art students from Beijing University,” one of the girls said. “There is an art festival in Shanghai this week, and we have an exhibit in a gallery on this street.”
“It is our first exhibit,” said the young man. “Won’t you please have a look? We are so curious to know what people will think of our paintings.”
We had nearly an hour to kill before we needed to meet up with our group, and they were such nice and polite young people and so excited about their artistic debut. What harm could there be in having a look?
Nanjing Lu is a pedestrian street, and, on a sunny summer afternoon, it’s a great place to get a sense of just how crowded Chinese cities can be. It would have also been a great place to get lost, but our new friend was taller than almost any of the other 10,000 black-headed people walking about, and we followed him closely as he cut through the crowd. Somehow, two policemen in a golf cart managed to weave through the mass of flesh and pull up beside our friend. The two girls vanished in an instant, diving deep into the anonymity of that human sea. Both officers spoke to our companion for a moment, and then one broke away to have a word with us.
“Do you know this man?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “We just met him.”
“This man is not an art student. He’s a con artist. He will take you to a gallery full of ridiculously overpriced paintings. Once you’re inside, you’ll find the door bolted and guarded by a muscle-bound man with a pair of nunchaku and a penchant for relieving nervous tension by pummeling foreigners. Your ticket out will be either to buy a painting or take a beating.”
By this point, Ian and I had turned considerably paler than we already are; Jheff had the advantage of possessing dark skin that masked his emotions. The other cop and the tall man were seated in the golf cart, talking animatedly. Our “friend” turned around to glance at us, and it was only then that I realized what I had taken for a smile was actually a sneer. On Nanjing Lu, we discovered, not only the wristwatches were fakes. The same went for friends, too.
We continued our walk, and, within thirty minutes, a half-dozen other groups of aspiring artists offered to lead us to the fate the policeman had described. Finally, we turned around and headed back toward the Bund, having had more than our fill of Nanjing Lu.
Perhaps it was our near-run escape from an art gallery beating that led Jheff to have some vindictive fun on the Bund by bargaining over a wristwatch he had no intention of buying. He talked the vendor down to a preposterous price—about $10—and then turned away.
“That can’t be real,” he said. “A Rolex for $10? You’ve got to be kidding.”
“”Not real,” the man pleaded. “Real fake. Fake real. Real fake.”
We chuckled as we departed, seeing the phrase as a humorous absurdity. However, when I returned to Suzhou and narrated the day’s events to a Chinese friend, she told me that the expression was not absurd at all but in fact communicated an important distinction. On the Chinese black market, there are real fakes and fake fakes. A real fake may not really be a Rolex, but it will tell the time. A fake fake will at best make you late to an important meeting and at worst will burn the skin on your wrist when it oozes acid. Real fake designer jeans may last about as long as their legitimate siblings, while fake fakes will dissolve into threads and strip you to your underwear on the street the first time that you wear them. A real fake person may not really want to be your friend but intends you no real harm. A fake fake, in contrast, will smile as he leads you to ruin. Thus, for the average Chinese person, learning to distinguish between real fakes and fake fakes is an essential life skill.
Among the many pirated goods in China, none are more numerous than DVDs. Most pirated discs fall somewhere in the middle on the real fake-fake fake continuum. A purely fake fake DVD won’t play at all if it doesn’t melt down your hard drive, but even the best real fakes are imperfect imitations and have something wrong. Problems occur most frequently in the packaging. Perhaps due to the language barrier, the producers of pirated English DVDs have great difficulty matching up the credits on the jacket with the actual film. Consequently, your pirated copy of Schindler’s List may display the cast of Meet the Parents and include among its catalogue of special features the promise of hilarious outtakes. The jacket of Nanking—a recent documentary about Japanese atrocities in China in the winter of 1937-1938—suggests that the disc offers a “never-before seen alternate ending.” Unfortunately, for the victims of the “Rape of Nanking,” history affords no such opportunities.
Even when the packaging happens to connect with the right film, the content choices are often questionable. The jacket for Atonement lists the proper cast but includes as a description of the film a user posting from a movie fan web site: “My brain tends to turn to mush in the presence of greatness. This makes it difficult when I want to write about something that I thought was truly great. It is so much easier to write about something that is rubbish.” Needless to say, I watched the film despite rather than because of this unhelpful blurb. But what do I have to complain about anyway? For about seventy-five cents, I viewed on DVD a fine film that had just begun to run in theaters back home.
Typically, I would not seek out pirated goods and do believe that the artists who make films deserve a fair cut of the sales. In China, however, it’s actually rather difficult to find non-pirated discs. Even Auchan—a large supermarket similar to Wal Mart—has bins stuffed with thousands of DVDs priced so low that they surely must be pirated. When Americans hear the words “black market,” they envision places that can be reached only in darkness by boat or can be entered only by people wearing trench coats with the collars turned up. That is not the case at all in Suzhou. On Shi Quan Jie, the tourist street where I live, there are more than a half-dozen well-lighted places selling pirated DVDs in plain view, with each disc priced at less than one US dollar. Apparently, the government has periodic crackdowns on such operations, but there are no real consequences. The shops stay closed for a week or two, and then it’s back to business as usual.
Most of my Chinese friends see no problem with piracy. It is a simple matter of cost to them. One friend, in fact, was genuinely perplexed by the high price of DVDs in America. I explained that the price was so high because many people take a share of the proceeds when a legal disc is sold, while the pirated discs earn money only for the copier and the store. This seemed to make an impression on her, but the impression didn’t run very deep. By the end of the conversation, she was telling me how I could avoid paying such high prices for movies when I return to America by downloading them for free on Chinese web sites. I’m sure I will not do this, but while in China, I’ve learned to do as the Chinese do. I’ve made my peace with the real fakes; it’s the fake fakes that I seek to avoid.
Next, three young Chinese people approached—a tall young man with a warm smile and a twinkle in his eye that I recognized as ironic only in retrospect, and his two vivacious female companions.
“We are art students from Beijing University,” one of the girls said. “There is an art festival in Shanghai this week, and we have an exhibit in a gallery on this street.”
“It is our first exhibit,” said the young man. “Won’t you please have a look? We are so curious to know what people will think of our paintings.”
We had nearly an hour to kill before we needed to meet up with our group, and they were such nice and polite young people and so excited about their artistic debut. What harm could there be in having a look?
Nanjing Lu is a pedestrian street, and, on a sunny summer afternoon, it’s a great place to get a sense of just how crowded Chinese cities can be. It would have also been a great place to get lost, but our new friend was taller than almost any of the other 10,000 black-headed people walking about, and we followed him closely as he cut through the crowd. Somehow, two policemen in a golf cart managed to weave through the mass of flesh and pull up beside our friend. The two girls vanished in an instant, diving deep into the anonymity of that human sea. Both officers spoke to our companion for a moment, and then one broke away to have a word with us.
“Do you know this man?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “We just met him.”
“This man is not an art student. He’s a con artist. He will take you to a gallery full of ridiculously overpriced paintings. Once you’re inside, you’ll find the door bolted and guarded by a muscle-bound man with a pair of nunchaku and a penchant for relieving nervous tension by pummeling foreigners. Your ticket out will be either to buy a painting or take a beating.”
By this point, Ian and I had turned considerably paler than we already are; Jheff had the advantage of possessing dark skin that masked his emotions. The other cop and the tall man were seated in the golf cart, talking animatedly. Our “friend” turned around to glance at us, and it was only then that I realized what I had taken for a smile was actually a sneer. On Nanjing Lu, we discovered, not only the wristwatches were fakes. The same went for friends, too.
We continued our walk, and, within thirty minutes, a half-dozen other groups of aspiring artists offered to lead us to the fate the policeman had described. Finally, we turned around and headed back toward the Bund, having had more than our fill of Nanjing Lu.
Perhaps it was our near-run escape from an art gallery beating that led Jheff to have some vindictive fun on the Bund by bargaining over a wristwatch he had no intention of buying. He talked the vendor down to a preposterous price—about $10—and then turned away.
“That can’t be real,” he said. “A Rolex for $10? You’ve got to be kidding.”
“”Not real,” the man pleaded. “Real fake. Fake real. Real fake.”
We chuckled as we departed, seeing the phrase as a humorous absurdity. However, when I returned to Suzhou and narrated the day’s events to a Chinese friend, she told me that the expression was not absurd at all but in fact communicated an important distinction. On the Chinese black market, there are real fakes and fake fakes. A real fake may not really be a Rolex, but it will tell the time. A fake fake will at best make you late to an important meeting and at worst will burn the skin on your wrist when it oozes acid. Real fake designer jeans may last about as long as their legitimate siblings, while fake fakes will dissolve into threads and strip you to your underwear on the street the first time that you wear them. A real fake person may not really want to be your friend but intends you no real harm. A fake fake, in contrast, will smile as he leads you to ruin. Thus, for the average Chinese person, learning to distinguish between real fakes and fake fakes is an essential life skill.
Among the many pirated goods in China, none are more numerous than DVDs. Most pirated discs fall somewhere in the middle on the real fake-fake fake continuum. A purely fake fake DVD won’t play at all if it doesn’t melt down your hard drive, but even the best real fakes are imperfect imitations and have something wrong. Problems occur most frequently in the packaging. Perhaps due to the language barrier, the producers of pirated English DVDs have great difficulty matching up the credits on the jacket with the actual film. Consequently, your pirated copy of Schindler’s List may display the cast of Meet the Parents and include among its catalogue of special features the promise of hilarious outtakes. The jacket of Nanking—a recent documentary about Japanese atrocities in China in the winter of 1937-1938—suggests that the disc offers a “never-before seen alternate ending.” Unfortunately, for the victims of the “Rape of Nanking,” history affords no such opportunities.
Even when the packaging happens to connect with the right film, the content choices are often questionable. The jacket for Atonement lists the proper cast but includes as a description of the film a user posting from a movie fan web site: “My brain tends to turn to mush in the presence of greatness. This makes it difficult when I want to write about something that I thought was truly great. It is so much easier to write about something that is rubbish.” Needless to say, I watched the film despite rather than because of this unhelpful blurb. But what do I have to complain about anyway? For about seventy-five cents, I viewed on DVD a fine film that had just begun to run in theaters back home.
Typically, I would not seek out pirated goods and do believe that the artists who make films deserve a fair cut of the sales. In China, however, it’s actually rather difficult to find non-pirated discs. Even Auchan—a large supermarket similar to Wal Mart—has bins stuffed with thousands of DVDs priced so low that they surely must be pirated. When Americans hear the words “black market,” they envision places that can be reached only in darkness by boat or can be entered only by people wearing trench coats with the collars turned up. That is not the case at all in Suzhou. On Shi Quan Jie, the tourist street where I live, there are more than a half-dozen well-lighted places selling pirated DVDs in plain view, with each disc priced at less than one US dollar. Apparently, the government has periodic crackdowns on such operations, but there are no real consequences. The shops stay closed for a week or two, and then it’s back to business as usual.
Most of my Chinese friends see no problem with piracy. It is a simple matter of cost to them. One friend, in fact, was genuinely perplexed by the high price of DVDs in America. I explained that the price was so high because many people take a share of the proceeds when a legal disc is sold, while the pirated discs earn money only for the copier and the store. This seemed to make an impression on her, but the impression didn’t run very deep. By the end of the conversation, she was telling me how I could avoid paying such high prices for movies when I return to America by downloading them for free on Chinese web sites. I’m sure I will not do this, but while in China, I’ve learned to do as the Chinese do. I’ve made my peace with the real fakes; it’s the fake fakes that I seek to avoid.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Great Walls of China
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out.
--Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”
Recently, I returned from my second excursion to Beijing. After my first visit in late October, I had a conversation on the bus to Wenzheng College with a Chinese teacher, and this exchange ensured that I would have to go back to the capital during my time in China. “Did you visit the Great Wall?” my colleague asked. He looked at me with profound disappointment as I explained that the weather had been so foggy all weekend that it would have made little sense to take the relatively long trek north of Beijing to the wall. “Well,” he said after a long pause, “you are not a real man until you have been to the Great Wall.”
Today, I can report with pride that, as I approach my fortieth birthday, I’ve became a real man at last, at least by the Chinese measure. I have climbed the long ascent at Mutianyu to the crest of the wall and walked for hours on stones that weave through the mountains like a twisted spine. In winter, tourists are sparse, and once one passes through the stands of dispirited souls selling trinkets without luck at the base of the hill, it’s actually possible to take a contemplative walk on top of the wall. As I walked, I pondered what I’d read about the wall before coming to Beijing. Somewhere between two and three million men died during the long history of the wall’s construction. Surely, the impressed laborers who built the wall felt no investment in the project, but many gave their lives for it nevertheless. At its peak of military use during the Ming dynasty, more than a million men were garrisoned along the wall’s 4000 miles of stone. Was I walking in the footsteps of such masons and soldiers?
The short—and literal—answer is, no. There is, in fact, no Great Wall in the singular. Instead, it would be more accurate to speak of great walls. The first incarnations of the Great Wall were not even erected in the same place where I stood in the winter sun. The wall constructed in the 3rd century B.C.E. under the Qin dynasty was farther to the north, and little of it now remains—an immense effort of men swallowed into the earth, as if it had never been. Thus, when people speak of the Great Wall being more than 2000 years old, the claim is in dire need of qualification—and nearly as much of a myth as the assertion that the wall can be seen from the moon. The Great Wall that draws crowds of visitors today was not built until the 15th century during the Ming dynasty. Yet even here, when we walk along the wall at places like Badaling and Mutianyu, we trod on a reconstruction built not to keep the northern invaders out but to draw the tourists in. We may not like to be reminded by the trinket hawkers that we are mere consumers of a packaged past, but that is the true state of things. Even if we don’t buy the t-shirts and postcards they’re selling, our ticket to the Great Wall purchases an illusion.
Be that as it may, the Great Wall is a glorious illusion. Of all the places I have traveled, only Machu Picchu in Peru surpasses the wall’s fusion of natural and man-made splendor. A large part of the wonder of the wall is that human beings could have managed to build anything at all given the rugged terrain, yet the Chinese had the audacity to construct a stone partition across the county’s vast northern border. The wall rises and falls innumerable times, conquering the topography in Taoist fashion by yielding to it. Yet the wall, like the Eiffel Tower in France, has become a beloved national icon only in retrospect. With regard to its original purpose, it was a dismal failure. The old wall didn’t prevent the Mongols from storming south and conquering China in the 13th century, nor did the Ming wall fare better in staving off the Manchus in the 17th century. Consequently, in historical terms, the wall is a monument to futility more than anything else. How then, did the wall become an enduring symbol of China?
Perhaps the answer lies in the tension between China’s view of itself and its attitude toward the rest of the world. The Chinese word for China, Zhongguo, literally translates as “middle country,” and China has a longstanding cultural tendency to see itself at the center of the universe. There is nothing unusual in this, for anthropologists have noted the presence of such ethnocentrism across cultures. What is unique to China is how long its cultural patterns endured and the extent to which its sense of superiority was well founded. The latter point is best illustrated by what transpired when the Mongols and Machus breeched the Great Wall and conquered China. Both northern invaders reached the same conclusion: there was no better way to govern China than the Chinese way, and the Confucian system of governance that had evolved for well over a millennium continued on despite the dynastic shift into foreign hands. The wall had proved ineffectual in keeping the “barbarians” out but much more successful in sealing in the culture of China. The invaders had triumphed militarily, but, culturally, the positions of victor and vanquished were inverted. To rule China, the Mongols and Manchus strove to become de facto Chinese.
Only in the 19th century did the Chinese confront foes whose sense of cultural superiority rivaled their own, and these invaders came from the east by sea, where the Great Wall offered no resistance. By this time, the medieval wall could not have presented much of an obstacle to the Western powers and their modern weaponry anyhow. The physical wall had become irrelevant, but the Great Wall’s psychological twin persisted much longer. Modern Chinese history is, to a large extent, the story of a great and ancient power coming to terms with modernity and reinventing itself to meet the demands of a changing world. One response to perceived threats from without is to retreat within, to seek refuge behind great walls of the mind. However, a modern nation can hide behind walls for only so long before it begins to suffocate itself.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, reformers such Zhang Zhidong sought to encourage both the adaptation of Western technological innovation and the preservation of Confucian values. His was a mission at cross-purposes. The revolution of 1911 that ended the long history of dynastic China and sent the country into decades of social turmoil also made it clear that a nation cannot move backwards and forwards simultaneously. This tumultuous period did not end until the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 brought Mao to power and reinforced the psychic wall that ran not just along the northern border but around all of China as well. Mao may have opened diplomatic channels with the US as part of a triangulation strategy against the Soviet Union, but, in doing so, he unwittingly began the process of dismantling the last incarnation of the Great Wall, a wall without stones that has proved to be the most durable wall of them all. Current practices in China such as Internet and other media censorship suggest that the dismantling is far from complete, but, like the old Qin wall, Mao’s psychic wall is nearly in ruins now.
As I walked along the Great Wall, I thought about this complex history and of how, in less than the course of my own lifetime, the very act of a foreigner taking such a stroll on the wall had gone from unthinkable to uncommon to commonplace. In the thirty-odd years since the death of Mao, China has changed from an impoverished and insular country whose isolation rivaled that of North Korea into a vibrant nation with cosmopolitan cities and seemingly limitless potential for economic growth. I don’t think that visiting the Great Wall really did much for my masculinity, but it surely filled me with a sense of awe. The awe stemmed both from a brush against China’s dynastic past as well as the awareness that the China I inhabit today has transformed in ways that almost no one could have imagined, much less have predicted. The Great Wall is now nothing but a tourist stop, and, as I stood on its reconstructed towers and stared out at the scenery, it was as if I could catch a glimpse across the 21st century. There were no real barriers in sight.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Day of the Eunuchs, or How the Chinese Must Have Discovered the World
Columbus Day is already held in low regard, if not contempt, by many in the United States. Back in 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage to the “new world” prompted much discussion about the meaning of the European eras of discovery and colonization and their impact on the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Those towing the traditional line cast Columbus in a heroic light, while his detractors portrayed him as a villain who initiated an age of genocide. Both sides, however, concurred on at least one simple fact that every schoolboy thinks he knows: Columbus discovered the Americas. But did he?
According to British author Gavin Menzies, he most definitely did not. Instead, Menzies asserts, the Chinese, some seventy before Columbus, set out on grand voyages of discovery from 1421 through 1423 and became the first to visit and chart on maps not only North and South America but Antarctica, New Zealand, and Australia as well. If Menzies is right, we should wipe Columbus Day from the calendar and begin celebrating the Day of the Eunuchs instead. This new holiday would belatedly honor the eunuch admirals who commanded nearly all of the ships of the treasure fleets of Zhu Di, the third Ming emperor whose desire to bring unknown lands into the Chinese system of tribute was purportedly the driving force behind the discovery voyages that Menzies describes.
Menzies develops his stunning thesis in great detail in the book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World. Not surprisingly, the book has aroused some strong opposition, as might be expected from a text that aspires to topple more than half a millennium of received wisdom. In his postscript, Menzies equates any criticism of his thesis with a knee-jerk defense of tradition, but that is not necessarily so. For this reader, the ideas presented in 1421 are fascinating to contemplate but never convincing. Instead, reading 1421 has taken me on my voyage of intellectual discovery that includes an exploration of historical epistemology and of the sometimes-nebulous divide between believing and knowing.
The most serious obstacle to accepting Menzies’s claims as historical truth is the lack of documentary evidence. History is, to a large extent, inter-textual; it is built on a foundation of words. The validity of a secondary text depends on the strength of its primary sources. In this sense, 1421 is a structure of epic proportions build on a foundation of emptiness. Simply put, Menzies provides no primary source evidence because such sources do not exist, or at least have not been found to date. European explorers like Columbus left a wealth of first-hand accounts charting the course of their journeys and describing their experiences. We know that the European voyages of discovery took place because their existence is sealed in words. Menzies offers nothing comparable, and for this reason his narrative falls short of the standards of history. Words are like watchers in the forest when the proverbial tree falls. The dearth of primary-source evidence doesn’t disprove Menzies’s account, but without such evidence, his narrative is at best something less than history, something akin to a tree falling in an un-peopled forest.
Menzies does provide an explanation for the lack of primary source evidence. In 1421, shortly after lead admiral Zheng He and the other eunuch commanders set sail, a terrible fire destroyed much of the Forbidden City that Zhu Di had built when he moved the Chinese capital from Nanjing to Beijing. The Chinese viewed such a catastrophe as an omen, a sign of divine disapproval for an emperor whose ambitions had over-reached into hubris. In response, Zhu Di withdrew his support for the discovery voyages and suspended all foreign travel after the close of the present mission. Zheng He returned to China more than two years later to find himself at the head of a fleet without purpose. The following year, Zhu Di died, and his successors only extended the insular and isolationist policies that characterized the last years of Zhu Di’s reign. For the succeeding emperors, however, it was not enough to lock China in time and place for the present and future; any attempts to reach out to the world in the past had to be expunged from the record as well. In this manner, Menzies accounts for how the world’s greatest voyages of discovery could have vanished without documentary trace. Notwithstanding the unlikelihood that the emperors’ long reach could have extended to every public and private account of the voyages, offering a plausible explanation for why there are no primary sources is quite distinct from having them in hand.
Lacking the primary sources that are generally the foundation of history, Menzies turns to other kinds of evidence. Most extensively he relies upon maps. Menzies asserts that the European explorers, no matter how daring and brave, were neither sailing into uncharted waters nor discovering anything new. Instead, they were following in the wake of their Chinese predecessors. To support this claim, Menzies presents a series of 15th century world maps that appear to chart landmasses prior to the dates of their discovery by Europeans. In addition, he cites passages from explorers’ journals that suggest they sailed with cartographical guides to the places they were later credited with discovering. In the Internet discussions of 1421, some of Menzies’s critics argue that the cartographic evidence is the product of either forgeries or Menzies’s misreading of genuine maps.
Due to my own cartographical ignorance, I am not equipped to enter this debate. Even so, I do recognize a logical problem in the way that Menzies uses maps in 1421. The basic argument is this: 1) Europeans relied upon preexisting maps in their voyages of “discovery”; 2) someone must have preceded the Europeans to create the maps; 3) the Chinese had the resources and technological expertise required to embark on such voyages in the first half of the 15th century; 4) therefore, the Chinese must have discovered the world. There is a leap of logic between the argument’s third and forth steps, and this leap occurs precisely at the divide between believing and knowing. The conclusion is, in the end, a non-sequitur, for, without ample primary source evidence, it does not follow, no matter how tantalizing Menzies’s reading of the maps may be. This pattern repeats throughout 1421 and is what makes the book so exasperating to read. Its claims are often plausible enough that one can’t dismiss them as mere counterfactual or fantasy, but they are never grounded deeply enough in evidence to be acceptable as fact.
Beyond the cartographical, Menzies provides several other categories of support, all of which is interesting to ponder but none of which rises above reasonable doubt. The Chinese, Menzies claims, left physical traces of their presence in disparate parts of the world—from shipwrecks and stone observatory towers to shards of Ming-era pottery and pieces of jade jewelry. In addition, many plant and animal species native to one continent turn up in others, and Menzies attributes this, too, to the Chinese voyages of discovery. Finally, in perhaps the boldest claim of the book, Menzies asserts that the Chinese not only were the first to discover the Americas; they were the first to colonize it as well. He cites passages in European explorers’ journals that describe meetings with Asiatic people in the Americas quite distinct from their indigenous neighbors and insists that DNA testing is beginning to show unequivocally a Chinese presence in places like Mexico and Peru and the Great Plains and American Southwest.
Menzies does cite studies to support the DNA claims, but I am ill-equipped to judge the validity of the studies. For other claims, he relies on either antiquated sources or none at all. For example, in the postscript, Menzies alludes to three jade pieces found in Central America that have been determined to be “unquestionably” of Chinese origin. However, anyone who follows the endnote will discover that this claim is based on a chemical evaluation conducted in 1886. I know nothing about the nature of chemical evaluation processes used in 1886 beyond the fact that no one but Menzies has likely relied upon them for anything in more than a hundred years. Then, in one of the most bizarre assertions of 1421, Menzies states that Navajo elders “to this day understand Chinese.” Having visited the Navajo reservation and heard the language spoken and knowing that Chinese dialects display such regional variation that a person from Suzhou sometimes can’t understand someone from Nanjing (two cites in the same province), I find it laughable to imagine that a Chinese speaker could show up in Gallop, New Mexico, and find a single receptive ear. Most alarmingly, Menzies cites no source for the claim. Such shoddy documentation alone would be enough to sink 1421 deep in the mire of doubt. As it stands, it only pulls the book a little deeper down.
Lacking adequate support, Menzies is left with gaps that he fills with conjecture. Early in my reading of the book, I began to underline the past conditional verb phrases that appear with great frequency: might have been, must have been, would have been. Eventually, I gave up the effort, for such phrases recur so often that it was becoming exhausting to note them in every instance. More troublingly, they regularly appear in passages laced with descriptive language designed to leave the impression that the scene is something more than speculation. Here’s an example:
The combination of such concrete sensory details with such uncertain verb constructions strikes me as a sign of intellectual dishonesty and an attempt to seduce with words. The vivid descriptions invite us to experience a scene on a voyage that the verbs acknowledge may or may not have transpired. It seems that the seduction was quite successful, for, as the book cover proudly proclaims, 1421 became an international bestseller. However, I’m not sure where to file this book on my shelf. “Might have beens,” no matter how frequently or artfully employed, never add up to “was,” and history is a discipline that traffics in “was.”
In time, perhaps Menzies’s thesis will be proven true, and the history of the world will be revised accordingly. Based on 1421, however, the time for such a radical revision is not yet upon us. Menzies alludes often to the book’s companion web site where corroborating evidence will be presented and updated, but, as a book, it must stand or fall on its merits in the printed form. As history, 1421 falls short. Consequently, America still tilts toward Europe on its historical axis, and we need not sweep Columbus Day from our calendars but can continue to note its passage each October with a shrug, a sneer, or smile. And for now, at least, we can hold onto the view that, figuratively and literally, it took balls to discover the “new world.” The Day of the Eunuchs has not yet arrived.
According to British author Gavin Menzies, he most definitely did not. Instead, Menzies asserts, the Chinese, some seventy before Columbus, set out on grand voyages of discovery from 1421 through 1423 and became the first to visit and chart on maps not only North and South America but Antarctica, New Zealand, and Australia as well. If Menzies is right, we should wipe Columbus Day from the calendar and begin celebrating the Day of the Eunuchs instead. This new holiday would belatedly honor the eunuch admirals who commanded nearly all of the ships of the treasure fleets of Zhu Di, the third Ming emperor whose desire to bring unknown lands into the Chinese system of tribute was purportedly the driving force behind the discovery voyages that Menzies describes.
Menzies develops his stunning thesis in great detail in the book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World. Not surprisingly, the book has aroused some strong opposition, as might be expected from a text that aspires to topple more than half a millennium of received wisdom. In his postscript, Menzies equates any criticism of his thesis with a knee-jerk defense of tradition, but that is not necessarily so. For this reader, the ideas presented in 1421 are fascinating to contemplate but never convincing. Instead, reading 1421 has taken me on my voyage of intellectual discovery that includes an exploration of historical epistemology and of the sometimes-nebulous divide between believing and knowing.
The most serious obstacle to accepting Menzies’s claims as historical truth is the lack of documentary evidence. History is, to a large extent, inter-textual; it is built on a foundation of words. The validity of a secondary text depends on the strength of its primary sources. In this sense, 1421 is a structure of epic proportions build on a foundation of emptiness. Simply put, Menzies provides no primary source evidence because such sources do not exist, or at least have not been found to date. European explorers like Columbus left a wealth of first-hand accounts charting the course of their journeys and describing their experiences. We know that the European voyages of discovery took place because their existence is sealed in words. Menzies offers nothing comparable, and for this reason his narrative falls short of the standards of history. Words are like watchers in the forest when the proverbial tree falls. The dearth of primary-source evidence doesn’t disprove Menzies’s account, but without such evidence, his narrative is at best something less than history, something akin to a tree falling in an un-peopled forest.
Menzies does provide an explanation for the lack of primary source evidence. In 1421, shortly after lead admiral Zheng He and the other eunuch commanders set sail, a terrible fire destroyed much of the Forbidden City that Zhu Di had built when he moved the Chinese capital from Nanjing to Beijing. The Chinese viewed such a catastrophe as an omen, a sign of divine disapproval for an emperor whose ambitions had over-reached into hubris. In response, Zhu Di withdrew his support for the discovery voyages and suspended all foreign travel after the close of the present mission. Zheng He returned to China more than two years later to find himself at the head of a fleet without purpose. The following year, Zhu Di died, and his successors only extended the insular and isolationist policies that characterized the last years of Zhu Di’s reign. For the succeeding emperors, however, it was not enough to lock China in time and place for the present and future; any attempts to reach out to the world in the past had to be expunged from the record as well. In this manner, Menzies accounts for how the world’s greatest voyages of discovery could have vanished without documentary trace. Notwithstanding the unlikelihood that the emperors’ long reach could have extended to every public and private account of the voyages, offering a plausible explanation for why there are no primary sources is quite distinct from having them in hand.
Lacking the primary sources that are generally the foundation of history, Menzies turns to other kinds of evidence. Most extensively he relies upon maps. Menzies asserts that the European explorers, no matter how daring and brave, were neither sailing into uncharted waters nor discovering anything new. Instead, they were following in the wake of their Chinese predecessors. To support this claim, Menzies presents a series of 15th century world maps that appear to chart landmasses prior to the dates of their discovery by Europeans. In addition, he cites passages from explorers’ journals that suggest they sailed with cartographical guides to the places they were later credited with discovering. In the Internet discussions of 1421, some of Menzies’s critics argue that the cartographic evidence is the product of either forgeries or Menzies’s misreading of genuine maps.
Due to my own cartographical ignorance, I am not equipped to enter this debate. Even so, I do recognize a logical problem in the way that Menzies uses maps in 1421. The basic argument is this: 1) Europeans relied upon preexisting maps in their voyages of “discovery”; 2) someone must have preceded the Europeans to create the maps; 3) the Chinese had the resources and technological expertise required to embark on such voyages in the first half of the 15th century; 4) therefore, the Chinese must have discovered the world. There is a leap of logic between the argument’s third and forth steps, and this leap occurs precisely at the divide between believing and knowing. The conclusion is, in the end, a non-sequitur, for, without ample primary source evidence, it does not follow, no matter how tantalizing Menzies’s reading of the maps may be. This pattern repeats throughout 1421 and is what makes the book so exasperating to read. Its claims are often plausible enough that one can’t dismiss them as mere counterfactual or fantasy, but they are never grounded deeply enough in evidence to be acceptable as fact.
Beyond the cartographical, Menzies provides several other categories of support, all of which is interesting to ponder but none of which rises above reasonable doubt. The Chinese, Menzies claims, left physical traces of their presence in disparate parts of the world—from shipwrecks and stone observatory towers to shards of Ming-era pottery and pieces of jade jewelry. In addition, many plant and animal species native to one continent turn up in others, and Menzies attributes this, too, to the Chinese voyages of discovery. Finally, in perhaps the boldest claim of the book, Menzies asserts that the Chinese not only were the first to discover the Americas; they were the first to colonize it as well. He cites passages in European explorers’ journals that describe meetings with Asiatic people in the Americas quite distinct from their indigenous neighbors and insists that DNA testing is beginning to show unequivocally a Chinese presence in places like Mexico and Peru and the Great Plains and American Southwest.
Menzies does cite studies to support the DNA claims, but I am ill-equipped to judge the validity of the studies. For other claims, he relies on either antiquated sources or none at all. For example, in the postscript, Menzies alludes to three jade pieces found in Central America that have been determined to be “unquestionably” of Chinese origin. However, anyone who follows the endnote will discover that this claim is based on a chemical evaluation conducted in 1886. I know nothing about the nature of chemical evaluation processes used in 1886 beyond the fact that no one but Menzies has likely relied upon them for anything in more than a hundred years. Then, in one of the most bizarre assertions of 1421, Menzies states that Navajo elders “to this day understand Chinese.” Having visited the Navajo reservation and heard the language spoken and knowing that Chinese dialects display such regional variation that a person from Suzhou sometimes can’t understand someone from Nanjing (two cites in the same province), I find it laughable to imagine that a Chinese speaker could show up in Gallop, New Mexico, and find a single receptive ear. Most alarmingly, Menzies cites no source for the claim. Such shoddy documentation alone would be enough to sink 1421 deep in the mire of doubt. As it stands, it only pulls the book a little deeper down.
Lacking adequate support, Menzies is left with gaps that he fills with conjecture. Early in my reading of the book, I began to underline the past conditional verb phrases that appear with great frequency: might have been, must have been, would have been. Eventually, I gave up the effort, for such phrases recur so often that it was becoming exhausting to note them in every instance. More troublingly, they regularly appear in passages laced with descriptive language designed to leave the impression that the scene is something more than speculation. Here’s an example:
Seamen would have worked frozen and soaked to the skin and shouted themselves hoarse in a vain attempt to be heard amid the shrieking of the wind through the rigging, the creaks and groans of timbers as the hull flexed and twisted in a swell like none other on earth, and the roar and hiss of waves breaking over the bows and foaming away through the scuppers. The prow would have dragged itself free of one giant wave only to bury itself immediately in the next. There would have been little respite for the men below decks, their clothes permanently sodden and the pitching and heaving of the ship so severe that sleep would have been all but impossible. (183-184)
The combination of such concrete sensory details with such uncertain verb constructions strikes me as a sign of intellectual dishonesty and an attempt to seduce with words. The vivid descriptions invite us to experience a scene on a voyage that the verbs acknowledge may or may not have transpired. It seems that the seduction was quite successful, for, as the book cover proudly proclaims, 1421 became an international bestseller. However, I’m not sure where to file this book on my shelf. “Might have beens,” no matter how frequently or artfully employed, never add up to “was,” and history is a discipline that traffics in “was.”
In time, perhaps Menzies’s thesis will be proven true, and the history of the world will be revised accordingly. Based on 1421, however, the time for such a radical revision is not yet upon us. Menzies alludes often to the book’s companion web site where corroborating evidence will be presented and updated, but, as a book, it must stand or fall on its merits in the printed form. As history, 1421 falls short. Consequently, America still tilts toward Europe on its historical axis, and we need not sweep Columbus Day from our calendars but can continue to note its passage each October with a shrug, a sneer, or smile. And for now, at least, we can hold onto the view that, figuratively and literally, it took balls to discover the “new world.” The Day of the Eunuchs has not yet arrived.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Jiu Gui
Jiu Gui,
the Chinese say—
wine ghost—
he who has squeezed
the fruit of life
into a cask
and made of rice
a bitter vintage.
No hunger dwells
within him now
but swells of thirst,
the whetting of his tongue,
the wedding of his throat
to wine—
four beauties danced
around his sheets unsheathed
and could not wake
his notice.
His bones have shrunk
to slender poles;
his skin has thinned
into transparency—
this squatter’s tent
his form becomes,
hollowing out,
pickled within,
housing a voice
that speaks two words:
fill me.
the Chinese say—
wine ghost—
he who has squeezed
the fruit of life
into a cask
and made of rice
a bitter vintage.
No hunger dwells
within him now
but swells of thirst,
the whetting of his tongue,
the wedding of his throat
to wine—
four beauties danced
around his sheets unsheathed
and could not wake
his notice.
His bones have shrunk
to slender poles;
his skin has thinned
into transparency—
this squatter’s tent
his form becomes,
hollowing out,
pickled within,
housing a voice
that speaks two words:
fill me.
Old Woman Selling Greens at a Suzhou Bazaar
Time could not weather
leather so harsh—
a face with lines
like wizened rings
cut into trunks,
hands
calloused and bronzed
and stronger than
small bones suppose
or credulity allows,
eyes
unflinching and dark,
narrowed to pass
unvarnished light.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Ni Jiao Shenme Mingzi?
My first attempt to speak Chinese on this long stay in China was not encouraging. After the grueling transcontinental flight, I was greeted at the Shanghai airport by…no one. Hundreds of people stood holding signs as I exited from the international gate, but I saw no sign bearing my name. Surely they could not have missed me, with my head poking out above all the rest. I walked up and down the line several times with no better luck and then began to thumb through my phrasebook to learn how to say, “How do I take a bus to Suzhou?” Then, two men came toward me. One of them carried a small square of cardboard with my name scribbled on it.
“Sorry we are late,” Zhou said. “There was much traffic coming into Shanghai tonight.”
Zhou and his companion took my fat suitcases and led me out to the deck where they had parked. Zhou and I conversed a little along the way, mostly small talk about the flight. I had corresponded with Zhou several times by e-mail in making arrangements, but I quickly discovered that that he is much easier to understand in writing than in speech. He speaks Chinese, Japanese, and English, and, to my ear, sometimes interchangeably.
His companion said nothing the whole way to the van and remained silent as Zhou sped away from the airport. I presumed that he could speak little or no English, but I wanted to acknowledge him in some way. After all, he had just hauled a seventy-pound suitcase for me. So I drew on my store of a dozen stock phases that I knew in full and believed I could pronounce passably well.
“Ni jiao shenme mingzi?” I asked. (What is your name?)
He paused for thirty seconds, as if pondering the deep philosophical scope of the question and the psychology of personal identity.
“Sorry,” he said at last. “I can’t speak much English.”
I’m happy to report that I’ve improved somewhat in my pronunciation of Chinese since that blundering start, but that was just the beginning of my problems learning names.
The biggest challenge is in my classes. I have 245 students in seven classes, with between thirty and forty in each section. About 220 of those students are young women, and the disproportion both helps and hinders my ability to learn their names. It helps by ensuring that I can learn all of the boys’ names with ease. In one section, I have thirty-four girls and two boys. When Asuka and Crazy are absent, as they often are, I notice. As for the girls, the imbalance hinders, and I can only guess.
After twenty weeks of teaching them, I estimate that I know about one-third of my students by name. I tried to use seating charts to improve my retention, but, for several reasons, this didn’t work as well as I had hoped. First, the students didn’t observe my directive to sit always in the same place. More than once, I stole a glance at my chart and confidently called on a student by name only to find the person occupying the seat staring blankly ahead while another student pointed to the other side of the room. Second, for my students, English names are disposable and often don’t stick. A girl named Sunny morphed into Summer and then Spring, all within a few months, as variable as the seasons. Another girl called Tony grew weary of gender bending and settled on the more traditional Alice.
These difficulties occurred in my writing courses for second-year students, all of whom had selected English names before they met me. This was not the case with my oral English classes for first-year students. About half of these students didn’t have English names at all when the semester began. As described in his book River Town, Peter Hessler, during a teaching assignment in China in the mid 1990s, resolved a similar problem by assigning English names to his students, often giving them joke names to amuse himself. Claiming such power over the identity of students struck me as neo-colonialist, and if I were to assume it, I could only do so in good faith by changing my own name to Mr. Kurtz. Instead, I encouraged the students to choose an English name. I didn’t force them to, and most did not. Thus, I was left with seating charts half-full of names that continue to befuddle me. As I write this, I’m looking down at one of those charts, which includes the following row of names: Zhang Ting, Xu Jinjie, Lu Yi, Liu Yi Si, and Hu Xiao Yan. Despite working with them for twenty weeks, I can’t put a face to any of these names.
Among the second-year students, some of the English names they had chosen are quite memorable. Here are just a few of my favorites: Crazy, Coffee, Sunshine, Winter, Eleven, Lemoncy, Lemon, Terrific, Jones, Careful, Rainy, Cherry, Main, Libra, Trackle, Cooking, Seven, Stony, Florrie, Summy, Penguin, Cherish. A few of these names are rough translations of the students’ Chinese names. Most, however, are expressions of taste: a favorite season, number, animal, beverage, or activity. Lemoncy and Trackle stand out, for they appear to express a taste for the pleasure in the sounds of words that lack sense. Finally, a few names hint at the nature of the student, but the hints sometimes clash with perception. Terrific, a stone-faced boy who never interacts with me and rarely with any of his classmates, evidently thinks very highly of himself, even if he keeps the reasons for his high regard hidden behind the mask of his silence.
From talking with other foreign teachers in Suzhou, I’ve learned that this pattern of naming among Chinese students is quite common. The best name I’ve heard thus far came from a fellow American, who told me that he has a student named Lucifer in his English poetry class. Let’s hope, for my colleague’s sake, that Lucifer is content with his grade at the end of the term.
Initially, these names were simply humorous to me, and I wondered why the students didn’t choose “proper” English names. The more I think about the power of naming, however, the more I sense my students chose names of greater significance than my own. Cooking and Careful say more about the individual’s identity than a name like William does. I know that William derives from the German words for “will” and “helmet,” but what in the world does that have to do with me? Even my surname is empty. It’s the adoptive name of my father, and I have no relatives outside my nuclear family who bear it. Unless I surprise myself by having a child, it will die along with me, and none will mourn its loss. Perhaps, like my students, I should choose a new name, to make my name, too, an expression of taste or nature. Perhaps like a fasting Indian who has met his totem animal, I should view this journey as a rite of passage and return home with a new name.
While I ponder a new name for myself, I will continue the struggle to learn the names of my students. In China, after the long break for Spring Festival, classes resume with part two of the writing and oral English courses. This means that I will teach the same 245 students in exactly the same groups. Such an arrangement has many disadvantages, the most prominent among them the fact that my bag of teaching tricks is nearly empty after twenty weeks. In fact, I’m not quite sure what I will do. After twenty more weeks together, I fear we will become quite bored with one another at best; at worst, I envision chaos and violence and a harrowing flight in tattered clothes to the American embassy.
The only advantage that I can see is that I will have twenty more weeks to learn my students’ names. Even so, I doubt that I will ever fix all 245 in my brain. My Chinese friends have tried to console me by assuring me that teachers in China never know all of their students by name, but, still, I can’t shake the American sense that not knowing their names is a sign of not caring. And I can’t help but look ahead to my last days in China, when a student will approach me to inquire about her grade in the course, and I’ll be forced to make some of my last words in China echo some of the first: “Ni jiao shenme mingzi?”
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Mao: A Life in Six Parts
1
What do men
born to kill millions
look like at birth?
Do they cry their way
out the dank canal
or do they hatch
impervious to pain?
Do their mouths suck
with telling force
and a hunger
no milk can sate?
When they crawl,
do their mother’s weep?
When they walk,
is there something
awful in the gait?
2
At twenty-four,
sharp-tongued and lean,
he set out on foot
seeking China,
his pockets bare,
feeding off monks
in time-sealed robes
and feudal temples,
floating the short
draft of gratitude.
A seer studied his palm:
“You could kill ten thousand
without blinking an eye.”
Unblinking, he smiled,
knowing how low
she’d set the bar.
3
Hard rules he learned
at Futian:
a live enemy
is worth more than
a dead enemy.
for a while.
truths that hide
can be pried
from beneath
a man’s fingernails.
the way to right
knows no limits,
is a path paved
with stones of wrong.
cruelty in the right hands
is a kind clasp.
4
Greek-like,
she learned the folly
of wedding a god—
sharing the march,
bearing his children,
freeing his bowels
with her bare fingers,
out-breathing him,
broken, alone.
Once, he sat
in her mad room
and spoke of the past,
this flesh made myth
who sired a nation
and left his own child
by the side of the road.
5
A most guileful
gardener was he,
who grew flowers
to sever the buds.
Come out, come out,
reticent rose;
come out, come out,
you wary mumes,
let one hundred
flowers blossom
in the garden
of discontent
so that color can be
purged from the earth
and the lotuses
drowned in their blooms.
6
Do embalmed men
muse as they float
between death and life?
Do they note words
spoken by callers
to their crypts
or see in faces
the misshapen ghosts
of themselves?
Do lips ever quiver
to smile or speak
or bones long to sleep?
How do they feel,
deprived of a heart,
awaiting the keeper
to cut off the light?
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Suzhou Blues II
Last summer, after returning from a three-week language study program in China, I wrote a song called “Suzhou Blues.” The song has a tone of affectionate and mocking complaint, for mosquitoes, intense heat, linguistic ineptitude, and dirty water don’t rise—or rather fall—to the level of suffering required for a true blues. Instead, a blues with such content cannot be more than a parody, no matter how much the guitar and harmonica riffs bend to approximate the sound.
Now, nearly mid-way through eleven months of living and working in China, I feel that I could sing an authentic blues about my life here, if only I had verse and a new melody. Lacking either, I must make due with prose and write an essay that chants the blues in monotone or else lapse into parody. Or perhaps a little of both.
I got them Suzhou Blues
and I can’t get ‘em out of my mind.
No matter how far I roam,
I’ll never leave them Suzhou Blues behind.
I came to China less in search of something and more in flight. While I’ve always been enchanted with traveling and experiencing life in cultures different from my own, I would not have signed on to teach in China for a year had my marriage not been terminally ill. It was too emotionally entangling for me to separate while remaining in Maryland, and the distance in this respect has done me much good. Generally, however, I concealed my primary motive in the months before I departed. Dozen of times, people asked me questions like this: “What about your wife? Will she go with you? Will she visit? Will you come home during your break?” I answered such inquiries in vague terms—not exactly lies but with words that were surely less than honest. I have come to think of all of this as the secret history of my trip to China and my reticence as the fulfillment of a social obligation. Our culture has rituals in response to one kind of grief, but when a marriage dies, we lie. Even now, I sense that I am saying more than I ought to. Even now, I am unwilling to say more.
I intended for the year I spend here to be a buffer between what came before and what is to come afterwards. The trip has more or less already achieved the purpose. I don’t know exactly what I will do when I go back to the US, but I will not return to my old life. This is probably the most powerful force in the Suzhou blues I’m presently feeling. My main reason for coming here was to sever ties with the past, and I have already accomplished the goal. Yet here I am, idling in the long break between terms, facing another semester with the same 245 Chinese students whose names I can’t remember. Those in flight, I suppose, can’t escape the fact that, in life, we are always seeking purpose, whether we set out to find it or not.
Well, it’s four flights up
to your room in the Dongwu Hotel
where the mosquitoes are swarming
and the air conditioner don’t work very well.
Maybe, as the parody lyrics suggest, it all comes down to climate in the end. The mosquitoes, of course, have long since perished, and the only creature stirring outside these days is a lean and filthy cat that has taken to waiting by the door of my building for me to feed him. I’ve started calling him Mao for two reasons: 1) ‘mao,’ pronounced in the first tone, is the Chinese word for ‘cat’; 2) appropriating the name for such purposes cuts the chairman down to size. Mao is the closest friend I’ve made in China, and we have come to depend on one another as only close friends can. Without me, he would likely die of starvation this winter, and without him, I would lose the sense of knowing that someone here is happy to see me. Maybe, purpose for me has always been bound up in caring for someone or something. Maybe, without that, I am lost.
Winter is deceptively harsh in Suzhou. It rarely snows here, but the cold is a damp cold, a chill floating on beads of mist that squeeze through pores and ice the bones. There are deciduous trees in Suzhou with leaves that stay green all year, shaking in the taunting wind and giving the false sense that, as I look out my window, it surely cannot be winter. And the air conditioner really doesn’t work very well. In winter, the problem is mostly a matter of spatial arrangement. The air conditioner in my room was installed about a foot from the ceiling. As we all know, heat rises. Were I a fly, I could hang upside down and stay comfortable and warm. Since I am not, I freeze close to the floor and keep my fingers thawed enough to type by squeezing bottles of boiled water.
Note: the Chinese word for air conditioner, ‘kongtiaoji,’ refers to both heating and cooling. This makes a lot sense, for whether we are making a room warmer or cooler, we are conditioning the air. Even so, it always causes a moment’s confusion when a Chinese friend asks if my air conditioner is keeping me warm. I guess this just shows how much language shapes our perceptions and makes what is actually arbitrary appear natural.
When it’s a hundred and ten
and you think it can’t go any higher,
you’ll be sweating hot rain
and you’ll feel like your skin is on fire.
If only I could have bottled some of that hot rain in July and saved it to set my skin on fire in January. Boiled water helps, but it doesn’t hold the heat for long. I don’t want to leave my room or even change out of my pajamas today. Even inside, I am wearing long underwear, pajama bottoms, three shirts, two pairs of socks, and a knit cap. I can see my breath when I talk to myself. Outside, it has begun to snow—big wind-blown flakes that melt when they hit the wet ground. Too many days are passing this way, alone in a cold room plucking phrases from a fog of words. Sometimes I wonder how I’ve managed to fit a country so vast and populous as China within the walls of such a small room. Sometimes I can’t help but laugh at myself for traveling 7000 miles to sit in a room and read about China in books.
When you’re out on the street,
people speak, and you don’t understand.
Then you know how it feels
to be a stranger inside a strange land.
I met my teacher and friend Liru for lunch on Saturday. She is busy trying to finish up a thesis on the literary theory of Milan Kundera, and I can only imagine what is like to read that in Chinese translation. I haven’t seen much of her recently—in fact, not at all for about three months. She asked how my Chinese has been progressing since we last met. “Bu hao,” I said—not well. Together, we identified the two primary reasons for my stagnation. First is the lack of desire. Learning a language is hard work, and one has to be driven from within to cut through the tedium toward mastery. Simply skimming through vocabulary lists a couple of times a week and sending text messages to friends in pinyin, as I have been doing, isn’t nearly enough. The second reason relates to the first. If the inner fire to learn is lacking, necessity can create a spark. But in Suzhou, it is too easy to live in China without speaking Chinese. Around the university and on the tourist strip of Shi Quan Jie where I live, English speakers are everywhere, and when none is to be found, a few dozen stock phrases of even poorly pronounced Chinese will usually suffice. The sad and simple fact is that I am not putting much effort into learning to speak Chinese because I don’t have to.
Despite remaining a linguistic outsider, I no longer feel like a stranger, and Suzhou no longer seems strange to me—for better or worse. Mostly, I think it’s for worse. In fact, Suzhou has begun to bore me with its familiarity. I remember the excitement I felt in coming here the first two times. Every second seemed precious to me then, and I sought to mine the depths of each moment. I took nearly a thousand photographs on those trips. I hardly take any at all now. Scenes reflected on the still canal waters once left me breathless; I don’t even notice them anymore. I tried to discern something of the lives of the people on the street by studying the lines on their faces and the reflections in their eyes. I don’t do this anymore, mostly because I rarely walk on the street at all, and I can see no face but my own in reflection on the days when I don’t leave my room.
Well, the canal water’s dirty,
and you know if you drink it you’ll die,
but your mouth is so parched you think,
“what the hell—why don’t I give it a try.”
I found myself thinking recently of Albert Camus’s dark yet hopeful essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” that begins with the sentence, “There is but one truly serious philosophical question, and that is suicide.” I had hoped this trip might give me a new sense of direction in life, but thus far that has not happened. At the very least, I had hoped it might provide a means of escape. This can never be, for, when we travel, we must bring ourselves along. This is why geographical cures inevitably fail. In his essay, Camus asserts that despite the absurdity of life we can gain meaning through pushing our stone repeatedly up the hill as an act of defiance and dignity. I like the poetry of the essay but am not fully swayed by the thought. I am not convinced that defiance and dignity are meaning enough. After one semester in Suzhou, I feel like I’ve pushed my stone to the crest of the hill and watched it roll back down into the dell. I will let it lie there a while before I begin the long ascent back up the slope. Or, better yet, I'll find another metaphor.
I got them Suzhou Blues
and I can’t get ‘em out of my mind.
No matter how far I roam,
I’ll never leave them Suzhou Blues behind.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
