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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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?”

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?

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.