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.

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.

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.