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.
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