Travel Breeds Content

Sand

2011-12-13T00:34:00.005-05:00

My ass was sore for a week. For days after I could hardly move it. Overnight train rides were spent on my stomach, meals were taken over the backs of chairs, and I was more comfortable than ever about squatting over toilets. It was probably how long the damn thing took. I don’t care who you are: three hours on the back of a camel will do strange things to your body—the nearly constant state of gyration, made all the worse by an irrational fear of being slumped off at any moment.

Tyra and I saw brochures for the outing at our hostel in western Gansu Province. The literature was picketed with phrases like “relive the mystery of the Silk Road” and “experience one thousand and one Arabian nights!” The translations weren’t nearly as polished, but what really sold us were the tiny snapshots superimposed over the text—smiling tourists posing on camel-back, peeking out from inside a tent, and climbing up sandbanks. Almost two full days in the beautiful Mingsha Sand Dunes, the advertisement continued, complete with an overnight stay in the desert followed by a breathtaking morning sunrise.

My eyes widened to the size of saucers. “A camel,” I said to Tyra, beaming. “How many people can say they’ve done that?”

There were seven of us on the trip—two other couples, one Chinese and one American—neither of which could communicate with the other—and a lone female traveler from Shanghai, a spunky twenty-six year old intent on seeing more of her own country. She was seated third in the pecking order of the camel caravan behind Tyra and I, with the final two couples to follow, and an 8th camel charged with carrying the camping tents and cooking supplies bringing up the rear.

Each camel was tied to the one in front of it with a thick rope, a wad of knotted string protruding through its nostril and capped with a stopper to hold it in place. Any hold-up in the journey meant that each subsequent camel in line was turned sideways, its head precariously hooked to the one behind, which forced the camels to quickly learn to cooperate and move in tandem. At the head of the caravan was an older Chinese gentleman of Tibetan or Uighur descent whose inhabitants were not uncommon in the Far West.

The older gentleman acted as the foreman, and walked the end of the rope out in front of the line of camels. For a man of fifty or sixty (I have always been mercilessly poor at predicting age), he was rugged and fit, certainly aided by a profession that involved trekking ten or twelve miles into the desert every day. It didn’t help that it was the middle of July and the desert was sweltering. The foreman was wearing a long-sleeve shirt, gloves, and a hat, certainly to protect himself from the sun, whereas I had rolled up the sleeves of my thin T-shirt to my shoulders and was tugging helplessly at the hem of my jeans. Tyra was wearing black leggings and a button-down shirt and looked equally flustered.

For all of my ballyhooing about the camel ride, it didn’t take long before I began to tire of it. Out in the dunes, everything begins to look the same. On all sides there were white clouds, blue skies, and towering piles of sand that seemed to reach the stratosphere. The size and scale of it was dizzying. The closest I had ever come to sand was the gravely Coney Island coast, which, even in memory, bore almost no resemblance to the shimmering mounds that swelled and swooped around me, consuming nearly every square inch in sight.

I could tell Tyra was exhausted—as far as I remember, she nary said a word the entire time we spent bobbing up and down like inflatable buoys. Still, it was easy enough to stay amused by the feisty back-and-forth between the foreman and the young unmarried Chinese woman. It was as if she wanted to know everything about his life story—when he got started raising camels, how much he made per year, and what his family was like. It appeared that the Chinese fascination for “otherness” extended well beyond the American foreigner—it was true of its own marginalized citizenry as well.

The foreman acquiesced to her every nagging inquiry. The camels were not his, he explained, but he was able to rent them from a friend to do his treks. His expertise was in leading trips out to the desert and the care with which he took to make his foreign guests comfortable. He had been doing it for over thirty years, and in the winters when it got too cold to camp in the desert overnight, he helped to raise his grandchildren at home, of which he had over a dozen.

The woman seemed particularly intrigued. “How do you make your foreign guests comfortable if you can’t speak any English,” she asked with a smirk. Conversation up to that point had been entirely in Chinese. The foreman remained unfazed.

“Once a foreigner asked me where he could go to the bathroom,” he recalled, repeating the word “bathroom” in English. He hadn’t understood what the word meant and asked the tourist to repeat the question. “Toilet,” the Australian pleaded, looking close to desperation. “Where can I find the toilet?” The foreman smiled. He pointed to a shrub in the distance and, in his most exaggerated English, shouted, “there is toilet.” The whole caravan chuckled in unison.

“So besides speaking English,” the woman asked snidely, “what else can you do?” The foreman thought for a moment.

“I can sing,” he exclaimed, and almost immediately launched into an enthusiastic rendition of a popular Chinese folk song. The woman clapped her hands and looked pleased.

“What about you?”

“I don’t sing,” the woman said doggedly, waving a hand in front of her face.

“Well I’m not going to sing alone,” the foreman averred. “You there,” he said looking up at me, the first one in line. “How about it?”

“Me,” I asked defensively, wishing to distance myself from the banter. “I can’t sing either.” The foreman shook his head.

“Oh I’m sure you can sing,” he said eagerly. “All you Americans must be able to sing something. What about your national anthem?”

There were few things I detested more than my own singing voice. Karaoke with friends in an enclosed room was one thing, but the desert was suspiciously quiet and sound tends to carry for a long time across an open space. I spun around to look at Tyra. She was applying a new layer of sunscreen; the others on the tour looked even more disinterested.

“No, I’d really rather not,” I said. I thought it was an adequate enough rejection, but the foreman pressed harder.

“You need to sing.” He paused. “Or else I’m turning all of us around.” He was staring me dead in the eyes.

“I don’t want to sing,” I blurted out, half-shouting. The foreman’s pace slowed to a halt. The only sound was the lithe crunch of sand beneath my camel’s hooves. For what felt like minutes, no one said anything, and then, at last, the woman from Shanghai piped up.

“What else can you do?” she asked him.

“I can also cook,” the foreman said, as he gradually took the reigns in his hand and resumed course.

At some point along the way I managed to fall asleep. How one falls asleep riding on the back of a moving camel sounds hyperbolic, but there was something otherworldly about the experience. I could almost picture myself a wealthy Chinese merchant, a team of vassals at my beck-and-call, lazily slouching along the Silk Road. For the moment, neither time nor bodily desires seemed of the least concern.

By the time we stopped it was almost dark. The foreman helped let us down, and began unpacking the tents and cooking equipment. He tied the first camel to the last, rigging them in a closed loop, and instructed each one to kneel on the ground one-by-one. He announced that we would have dinner there at the base in an hour, but that in the meantime, we should enjoy the sunset on the lookout of a tall sandy peak he pointed to not far in the distance.

It was as if the sand rekindled some deep child-like exuberance in me. From the moment I stepped off the camel I caught myself running across the plains, rolling down hills and scrambling up embankments. I was six years old again playing in a giant, ever-expansive sandbox. Tyra, sensing my mood, began stalking me like a lion, and the two of us got down on all fours, pouncing and shuffling barefoot in our imagined African Sahara. When she got close enough to touch, I wrestled her to the ground, dusting her clothes and mine with sand. Her skin, white and smooth, contrasted perfectly with its tawny coarseness.

We galloped our way up the sandy peak to the lookout. At one point, we tried to race headlong up the nearly vertical shaft, but with each beleaguered step, we slipped increasingly more deeply into sand. Ours was a cacophony of laughter and high-pitched shrieks. When we reached the top, the lone Chinese woman offered to take our picture. Tyra and I sat with our backs to the sunset in the distance, her head nestled firmly in the crook of my neck.

We had dinner on two squat collapsible tables back at base. In front of us, the foreman had constructed a small fire out of packed twigs and brush. He brought out seven metal containers and placed them on the tables. Under each lid was a brick of instant noodles mixed with the once hot water transported from the town. On all accounts, it was a letdown. My body was starving, and after a full day out in the desert sun, the last thing I wanted to eat was lukewarm noodles. The foreman, sensing the collective disappointment, explained:

“The government doesn’t give me enough money to provide any food for the trip,” he said, in his accented Mandarin. “But since I expect tourists not to bring enough, I buy this out of my own pocket.” The foreman looked around the circle but still strained to make eye contact with me. It was easy enough not to trust him—that perhaps he just skimmed the extra money off the top to pay for cigarettes and liquor and gambling. But the narrative didn’t seem to fit. I added a flimsy packaged sausage to the water—something I almost never eat—and slurped up my noodles in silence.

Nearby, the camels snorted and shifted positions. They slept a stone’s throw away from where the foreman had set-up our sleeping tents. All roped together in a circle, they looked like this single living entity, the silhouette of their humps rising and falling with their breath. No respite from the cold night air, nor any food or water of their own, they still seemed perfectly, dispassionately, content.

Pretty soon everyone began preparing for sleep. Tyra and I and the other two couples each had a tent to share, and the unmarried woman had one to herself. The foreman slept outside beneath the stars—“how he liked it”—though I suspect it was more that he could afford to rent one fewer tent, further defraying his overhead. The tents were roomy but provisions were scarce. Other than a thin mat, the only covering we had was the tattered fleece blanket we had previously used as a make-shift saddle on the camels.

I was unfolding the mat when Tyra grabbed my arm to stop me. She had changed into a long black dress that cut a V beneath her neck and rested just above her ankles. Her lips were a searing, plump, red, and she had a ferocious, naughty glint in her eye. She pointed at me, then at herself, and finally at the mesh flap of the tent leading outside. In her hand was the clear Ziploc of condoms we had been steadily exorcising throughout the trip. I nodded greedily and she laughed, stashing the bag in her purse.

We made our move after the last of the tents went dark. Tyra brought the tiny flashlight we had used to examine cave paintings all morning, along with her purse and the quick-dry travel towel we had been sharing, and we slogged up the little ridge. Our tiny encampment was positioned in a man-made hovel at the bottom of a hill. There was higher ground to every side of us like the raised crust around a dessert’s center. This sand hardly gave at all—each step had to be calculated, like we were snowshoeing up a steep cliff.

When we reached the top, Tyra pointed at the sky. I’d never seen stars like the ones that night. Zealous and bright, the constellations shined like dazzling stadium lights in the distance. Further from the ridge’s lip, the view was the same: hundreds of flecked sand dunes, the moonlight shimmering off their glittery surfaces like a theater packed with flashbulbs—an entire inter-stellar audience waiting for the curtain to be drawn and the show to begin.

All at once, a wave of fear came over me. Not two hours earlier, the sand was near scalding to the touch, but now the cold was sending chills up my feet. I was shaking—those innumerable stars, like thousands of piercing stares, felt almost too much to bear.

At the same time, I realized that there were not many other chances I would get. Tyra rolled out the towel and laid it gently over the sand, and I held her tightly, easing her body to the ground. My body glided between her legs and she wrapped them flush against my thighs, bringing me closer still. My lips coursed over her lips and tongue, following the ridge-lines of her mouth. I wrung my shirt over my head and hooked her arms through the thin straps of her dress. She undid the buckle to my belt and I carefully folded the tapered ends of her dress above her waist.

A part of me ached desperately to take her then, to leave the two of us drenched and smoldering beneath the moon’s glow. But a different part yearned for something else, though it was impossible to communicate. In a parallel world, there would be no cosmic witnesses, no dull hum across the floating expanse—the shared moment existing for the two of us and us alone.

The words began to form in my mouth again. “I don’t—,” I muttered under my breath, but just then something stirred inside me. A blast of wind rolled over the dune, fanning out the sand beneath Tyra, and I slid inside her. There was something screaming inside me that needed to be released, a fire burning in the pit of my stomach. I grabbed her arms and held them firmly to the ground. Her body shook as the sand pulsed and swayed, each thrust sending the earth’s force resisting back against us and into the wind.

Beads of sweat trickled down the nape of my neck, but they didn’t last. As suddenly as it came on, the fire went out. And when it was over, we were both still breathing heavy, Tyra on her back, and me crouched in front of her, the jeans still looped around my ankles. The sand had coursed through her hair and mine, matting it at obtuse angles. She propped herself up with both arms and exhaled deeply into the sky. Her eyes, hazel-green, scanning the clouds like a beacon in the desert.

We ambled back down the sloped ridge, Tyra leading the way with her flashlight. As quietly as I could, I unzipped the mesh shell of the tent and we stepped inside. The temperature had dropped precipitously. On the thin mat, we huddled close together—her back curving to form a tight seal against my chest, and my arms clasped firmly against hers. We pulled the blanket up and let it hang loose around our necks. For some time, everything around us was still. I had nearly fallen asleep when Tyra stirred and reached for the flashlight. Rolling to my right, I took her hand in mine and whispered softly: thank you for being so wonderful.

She squeezed my hand and switched off the light. Silence filled the void like a vacuum. What else was there left to say?

This is the first of many semi-fictionalized short stories based on my two years abroad to be written and anthologized in a future book-length project by Wilder Voice Press. More details forthcoming soon!

Green Onion and Frozen Pizza

2011-10-17T12:11:00.005-04:00

Each dish starts out the same. A few cloves of garlic minced into thin ovals, limbs of ginger pureed into a thick pulp, and finely chopped stalks of green onion, sliced so that the flimsy green leaves coil out from the white stalk. Each is used in equal quantity at the base of the wok, to which is added a few hearty shakes of salt and black pepper, a dash of Asian five spice, and a dollop of spicy chili peppers.

We've been trying to cook together at least once a week, me and Yao Jie, this year's Shansi Visiting Scholar from China. We improvise a little with the ingredients, substituting what we can't get in America with its closest equivalents. The contents of each individual dish don't seem to matter much—strips of eggplant and squash, scrambled eggs and sweet onion, cubed pork and diced potatoes—the preparation is amazingly, eerily, consistent.

Sunday dinner at Shansi House (photo courtesy of Yao Jie).

In a bizarre twist of fate, Yao Jie also hails from Shanxi, the province home to my beloved Taigu, and is enamored by the same iconic Northern Chinese fare. When I lived in Taigu, I never thought I would miss it. So soon had the foreigners tired of the same five or six lei (types) of food that we eagerly sought out non-Chinese dishes at almost every opportunity. But amazingly, that plaintive disdain has quickly morphed into something more like desire. Food has become a metaphor for my unbridled nostalgia for China. The smells and tastes touch my taste buds in dreams, tantalizing me with the utterly fantastic notion of their feasibility, where the closest we get is the once-a-week meals we bastardize using ingredients from Stevenson and IGA.

I am constantly awed by her fascination about Oberlin. There is a certain wide-eyed focus to her gaze, a quiet calculation and analysis of the new world surrounding her, not too dissimilar, in fact, from my own. It’s been interesting, too, hearing what kinds of questions she has, and how even the most ordinary things require a lengthy explanation: “What function do the blue boxes on street corners serve?” “How do you choose the best cell phone service provider?” “What is the meaning of the sign in the Walmart parking lot that reads ‘Reserved Parking: Horse and Buggy Only?’”

I had nearly forgotten how much these small, seemingly insignificant queries dictated my own attitudes toward my first month in rural China. How even the most ordinary things were no longer easy—crossing the street, mailing a postcard—and how it forced me to pay special attention to the little details in my every day life. But pretty soon, everyone learns to adapt. Back in America, you get used to the wide sidewalks, the lack of honking, the monolingual road signs, the orderly grocery check-out counters. By now the joy of those small accomplishments has already fallen away, replaced by preoccupation with bigger, more pressing goals. But to the outside, it’s imperceptible: no one here, perhaps save for Yao Jie herself, understands that loss in quite the same way.

Yao Jie demonstrating Chinese paper cutting at this year's Culture Festival in Tappan Square (photo courtesy of Dale Preston).

I like to think I won’t have culture shock when I eventually return to visit Taigu, but I know that that won’t be the case. My reality is entrenched in my surroundings. I may no longer be shocked or amused by America, but I still yearn futilely for pieces of my past life. In one way, I’m paying it forward, helping to indoctrinate Yao Jie with the same welcoming and patience as those friends I made in Taigu provided for me, but in another, we’re both new to America, struggling with acclimating to this strange, different culture. At our last dinner Yao Jie refused cold water, opting instead to drink the boiled noodle water customarily paired with noodle-based dishes in the north. I paused for a second before I too dipped the ladle into the scalding pot and helped myself to a bowl.

I rarely cooked in China because from a pragmatist's point of view there was no ostensible need—restaurant food was laughably cheap and was much more efficient than cooking at home. Cooking always required what felt like a full day's preparation—shopping at the local supermarket in town for things like meat and tofu, the little mom-and-pop granary for rice and flour, and the farmer's market for things like eggs and vegetables. There was a two-three hour stretch of time at night devoted to the actual cooking—six pairs of hands in a crowded kitchenette taking turns by the electric hot plates, sharing cutting boards, and alternately washing and plating dishes. Then, the hour or two dedicated to eating, and finally the clean-up—scraping pans, storing leftovers, and wiping down tables.

Here there is almost none of that camaraderie. Most of my meals are cooked for one, and yet still, I find solace in that solitary act—returning home at noon, turning on the electric stove, letting the chop and sizzle of the saucepan add layers to Ira Glass's inflection. Then at night, the neat simplicity of reheated leftovers for dinner. It's not the co-op at Oberlin and it certainly isn't a Thursday night banquet in Taigu, but it suffices.

Two weeks ago I received an unlikely gift. Hand-delivered by Alexandra’s sister over seven thousand miles to Oberlin—what in Taigu could almost pass as a food staple unto itself—a package of Taigu bing. These particular bing—Chinese for “cookie,” “biscuit” or almost any breaded ration—came in a red plastic bag, the words “red date” emblazoned across the bottom to indicate the flavor. They are particular to Taigu and absolutely ubiquitous—rare is it to pass a store that doesn't carry them in large plastic crates, the stylized gold characters practically dancing across the label. But to receive them here, at a fancy restaurant in Oberlin, felt like something outer-worldly—my brain just couldn't process it.

I have been holding out on eating the last one, perhaps so long that it will end up spoiling in spite of my efforts, but I can't quite seem to let it go. This, a food staple that I bought with such utter regularity as to never question whether or not I'd have enough, a breakfast item I paired with a bowl of yogurt and a sliced banana each morning. For want of the more conventional Western pastries I once craved, these fluffy, sesame seed-studded cookies were all we had. And now, a single, solitary mouthful is all that remains.

It's a feeling that I find hard to explain. It's like being the sole proprietor of a contraband food ration in the army. Or, perhaps, like a foreign teacher laying claim to the only personal pizza in a rural Chinese town of 80,000. The pie that Gerald took back with him after each trip to Pizza Hut in the nearest big city of Taiyuan, an over four-hour journey in all. At each unveiling, there stood a small group swarming hungrily around the microwave or, more accurately, Gerald holed up in his own room alone, careful not to draw attention to the prodigious gift, like an archaeologist protecting a new discovery.

I can imagine him there, and then again after having returned back to the states—frozen pizza stocked in nearly every grocery store, Domino's delivery never more than 30 minutes away. But staring into that microwave, there was that one extraordinary moment—the collective hopes and dreams of seven foreigners pinned to that gleaming vessel of tomato and cheese, a time when any one of us would have traded the world for a bite. And now, as if in some distant universe, Gerald heats up a slice of pizza in his microwave back home in America, thinking to himself: remember when this used to be valuable.

Mudd and the Towering Inferno of Flames

2011-09-18T12:37:00.008-04:00

I hate how much I missed Mudd. How as a student I could go there after a long day of classes and meetings and be comforted by the feeling that everyone there was in it together, working for this one collective goal. In a lot of ways, I liked being there more than my own house. My favorite place was this spiritually dead room, a window-less cube full of computer monitors and desk chairs. No color, no human interaction, hardly a sound. I couldn’t conceive of a better place to study.

Now that I’m here again it’s like an addict falling off the wagon: the brilliant glow of the fluorescent lights drawing me in, the smell of charcoal and pine outside filling my lungs like the flame of a kerosene lamp. And then there are the stars, lucid and unfettered, burning up in the sky. I could go to Mudd at my absolute lowest, and still feel better knowing that someone in there knew my name. Now, the same sentiment holds true, even if it's done in obscurity.

But if Mudd itself is full of the peculiar liveliness used to comfort individuals, then leaving at night, once the study carrels have emptied and the computer screens are left glowering at vacant seats, has a certain loneliness to it. Walking out into the stark night air—jacket zipped, bag thrown over my shoulder—I am immediately reminded of that senior year. It is a sensation so vivid it shocks me to realize it’s only a memory. Every detail, from the smoke-laced outlines at the side of the ramp down to the cold rush in my hands as I stoop to unlock my bike, is the same.

I saw her for the first time last week. It was midday, almost lunch, and there she was sitting at a bench with friends, speaking in loud gestures, the rise and fall of her hands like she were conducting a symphony. Before that moment, I never experienced what it felt like to have to avoid someone—how it was suddenly inappropriate now to make conversation with a person who, not long ago, had occupied an enormous part of my life. We dated prior to me leaving to go to China, and in the ensuing aftermath that followed, haven't so much as exchanged a word since.

Her friends stood up to leave and, against my better social etiquette, I walked up to her, not knowing what to say but knowing that I had to say something. It was short-lived, a string of empty pleasantries, and pretty soon the conversation was over, and I was walking not towards her but away. The whole episode felt so unsettling, how the underlying force of our convictions were laid dormant. Why is it that love always feels most alive when it's past its end, fraught with the sudden, crippling onset of its nonexistence? The passion that comes with all rejection—a sudden departure, a loss of life. Like how in some cultures even mourning can't be done quietly—a funeral pyre set in a torrential blaze, fiery and vivid and raw.

I hate when things fall apart. Even worse, when they fall apart and you don't understand why. I emailed my dad about it. He told me that sooner or later, you learn to let go. Sooner or later, he wrote, you learn that there's not always closure that is satisfactory. Sometimes things kind of sour and rot and smell bad. Sometimes you just have to walk away.

I saw her again yesterday, this time at Mudd. She used to tolerate my time at the library, but joked that I spent more time there than I did with her. This time, I managed not to talk to her. We were now just two people in the world, our lives detached from one another's, and I realized that it didn't have to be this long, drawn-out sadness. I remembered what my dad had written: If she deigns to see you, by all means, but be aware that it may actually be re-traumatizing yourself. Try not to be attached to the outcome. Give it your best. And if it doesn't work out, then let it out talking to me, or chopping wood, or sparring. But don't go back to the well again and again to be re-wounded.

Two years ago she left a note by my bike. Tucked into the metal crux of the handlebars, a slip of notebook paper, folded and creased, that read, simply: “Saw your bike and thought of you. Don’t stay out studying too late. Miss you. Love, C.” That should have been my cue to go and see her that night, but knowing me I probably didn’t. Here’s what happened: I pocketed the note, rode my bike south and west (the opposite direction of her dorm), walked upstairs to my warm, dimly-lit room, and, with the smell of sandalwood and marijuana piping in from the screened-in balcony, I went to sleep.

Weeks and months passed, but every day since then I kept checking my bike. Edging down the library ramp, hands bristling from the cold, it was the same routine—first the handlebars, then the front wheel spokes, even the narrow slit underneath the seat. Each time I left the library—fingers clutching the bike keys—hoping in vain for some trace of her. The fruitless game I played. I still do.

This is a piece of creative non-fiction, part of a new experimental direction I'm taking with my blog about short semi-fictionalized vignettes from my daily life, lightly polished and greatly embellished for online consumption.

Our Need to Rebuild Is the Reason Everything Falls Apart

2011-09-04T19:00:00.006-04:00

It's my third night at the Feve in a row. I've been here just over a week and I'm batting well over .500. Or, to put it another way: I've been to the Feve more nights than I haven't. It doesn't hurt that there's only one real bar in town, but it still doesn't bode well for my steadfast conviction that China had made me an alcoholic and not the other way around.

Every night at the Feve starts out about the same: a handful of fresh acquaintances, stools nestled around a large wooden table, and a pitcher of beer so black you couldn't run a light through it. Small talk and, if the situation required, a small order of tots to follow. Then, the inevitable parting of ways, the block-and-a-half shuffle home, and Kent State's NPR-affiliate to lull me to bed.

East meets Feve. From left to right: Gerald, David, and myself (photo courtesy of Gerald Lee).

I was talking about the situation with my friend Martha online. She asked me how in just a few days I had already connected with enough people to merit that many trips to the Feve. I told her that it wasn't a coincidence—that meeting every new contact took a great deal of effort on my part. After all, I had to practically construct my entire social life from the ground up. “I feel like I have to go to every social obligation I'm invited to,” I told her, “so I have a chance of building up a base.” “Wow,” she replied without the slightest hint of surprise, “you really network fast.”

I wanted to explain that it didn't matter if I was good or bad at networking or whether or not I even liked to do it. It just wasn't an option for me—I'm an extroverted person and when I'm not around other people for too long I start to lose it. “I can't help it,” I said, “it gets lonely up in this ivory tower.” I paused. I knew I had used the wrong analogy and was sure she would call me on it. “Well this ivory tower seems to have a lot of other towers in its neighborhood,” she quipped, not missing a beat. “It's an ivory tower colony,” I joked, “with no zoning restrictions.”

My own ivory tower is located on the southeastern fringes of campus. It's not to say that I don't feel disconnected from the concerns of non-campus life, but it's so easy to get caught up in my own tailspin—work, school, friendships to maintain. Some of the isolation is self-imposed but most is a product of circumstance. There are “young professionals” (what we call ourselves) in other departments in the college—ResEd, Athletics, Admissions, the MRC—but there's little opportunity for contact, and I certainly never had my radar out for them when I was still a student.

Being older than almost everyone doesn't help either. That, and having to strike a balance between my so-called grown-up friends and my student friends. Then again, the distinction may be a moot point. On my fourth day here I went to a karaoke cook-out event for incoming international students and the staff from the MRC was up there right alongside the new first-years singing “Bad Romance” and doing the Cha Cha Slide.

It felt like looking at Oberlin through the eyes of a stranger. All of the buildings had a foreign newness to them, and I had been exploring them slowly, so as not to embarrass my former self. The people had changed too. No longer could I simply expect to have friends based on geography and shared experience. It made me realize how lucky I had been in Taigu. Oberlin felt, for perhaps the first time in my life, like most of the rest of the world. I wouldn't be able just to fall into friendships here; I'd really have to work for them.

Peters Hall, with newly renovated $1.4 million slate-and-copper roof.

The fall from celebrity to dime-a-dozen has played out like your classic fall from grace, marred by all the telltale signs of recovery and addiction. I realized that I had invariably switched roles overnight—instead of being the person whose door everyone else was trying to knock down, I had become the archetypal “rando” who shows up unannounced and bearing gifts at four in the afternoon, appealing for nothing more than genuine friendship.

The night I went to the Feve with Jerry and Dave—two of the six foreigners I had lived with in China—a new art installation was up on the second floor. They had always been characteristically out there, even when I was a student, but this one seemed odder than most. Next to a collection of multi-colored lighters forming the outline of the African continent there hung a simple blue-and-white ceramic tile, on which, in all lower-case, was scribbled the line, our need to rebuild is the reason everything falls apart.

I wondered, if we stopped trying so hard to create anew, maybe all that should be lasting in our lives would cease to come undone? The network I had gone to great lengths to craft in my four years couldn't have felt more achingly distant. Looking around the bar that night, some faces looked familiar and others I just convinced myself were. Either way, it didn't stop me from trying to make conversation. I seem to be doing that a lot lately—giving my phone number out to almost anyone who seems interesting, hoping only that they might call me back.

Acceptance

2011-09-01T11:27:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was freshmen move-in day. North Professor Street, which until yesterday had still been razed and largely unpaved, was now home to double-parked cars heaped along the two-way road and spilling over into Stevenson parking lot. There were parents with U-Hauls and cargo carriers lugging boxes into dorms, stacks of cardboard piled out in dumpsters for pick-up, and the dozen or so restaurants along Main Street each with a line wrapped around the block during lunchtime. Compared with only a few days ago, it felt like this great accession, a veritable explosion of people arriving all at once.

I finally understood why townies tend to spurn the college, and why students who choose to stay in Oberlin for the summer lament the start of the school year. Oberlin is so refreshingly peaceful with most of its student body away that the transition back to hectic, pedestrian calamity doesn't come without its share of misgivings. Of course, the summer state of utopia wouldn't be sustainable even if the college shut down tomorrow, but it certainly is a romantic notion—to have this sleepy little town all to yourself.

As part of my new job, I was put in charge of working the Resource Fair, a gathering of outreach groups, local businesses and campus organizations that jostle for real estate in the collective mind space of the incoming class. Shansi pulled all the stops—free pens, pencils, books, water bottles, and tote bags—and for three hours, I had my fill of people watching. It was interesting to see the first-years in action—some still stooped behind their parents, others with the leadership reigns clumsily in hand, and still more boundless and free, eager to shirk, at long last, the final remaining vestige of their pre-college lives.

That night there was a buffet dinner in Wilder Bowl for new students and their families. Naturally, I made an appearance, a large take-away Tupperware container at the ready. The green was alive—the tension so thick one could hammer it out with an icepick. Everyone seemed to be waiting, preparing for this one collective exhale, for the moment when all the goodbyes had been said, all the first introductions made, all the wild-eyed probing and propositioning underway, and when all the strange, horrible, shocking, unbelievable theories about college life could finally be put to the test.

I told myself that if I tried hard enough I could fit in here. After all, aside from a BA, what truly separated me from this sea of unknowns—a girl with a shaved head, a guy with biker shorts and a denim jacket, two girls in sun dresses and wedges, a pony-tailed boy with purple nail polish and a “Steak 'n Shake” hat? Sometimes I don't feel my own age, and at other times, it forces itself on me like a creep at a dive bar. Some people looked too old, and others, just about what you'd expect. But for all of them, it was too early to tell: in what ways Oberlin would come to mold their self-image at the end of four years.

That sea of unknowns followed me into the inaugural orientation concert at Finney Chapel. The room was packed, with overflow seating available down the street in Warner Concert Hall. Both President Krislov and Dean Stull made long, meandering speeches, and everything in me wanted to believe that they were talking to me when they spoke—of the limitless opportunities, the expectations of greatness, the proud tradition we would serve to uphold. But they weren't. Like a scorned older child I had been cast aside, neglected at the unwelcome arrival of a new sibling. Now I had only the legacies of other alumni to aspire, their influence so great as to cast a shadow over my very existence.

It was the most engrossing concert I had attended in recent memory. It's not to say that the performances weren't great, but I think it speaks more to the time I had gone without hearing live music, without the sensation of feeling it in every part of my body—back arched, spine tingling. In two hours, I hardly so much as shifted my weight. I found myself immeasurably drawn to each musician on stage—to the way their hands moved, the arch of their fingers, the gape of their mouth. Insisting on going alone, of doing this simply and irrefutably for me, I reveled in music as the great equalizer, in the feeling that we were all one collective audience in the face of its grandeur.

Pretty soon parents and their kids began filing out. On the walk back home, I remembered where I was six years ago, rounding the end of my first day as an Oberlin student. My parents dropped me off at my dorm after the concert and it would be the last time they would know me as a son, a boy on his path to adulthood. It was the first time I ever saw my dad cry, and although I didn't cry then, I felt it now, the tears welling in my eyes like storm water. Suddenly I was that parent, knowing that his time had passed, letting go of what had come before to allow for all the greatness to follow.

Before the concert, I was sitting in the Japanese garden outside of Finney Chapel, where the class of 1996 had dedicated a memorial to those Oberlin students who had given their lives during WWII. Among a long row of plaques listing names and graduation years followed by the letters USAAF and AUS, I saw one, on the far right, with the postscript “AMT '40, Navy, Japan.” And I thought to myself, if in the annals of history, Oberlin could come to accept him, then they'll find a way to accept me too. I didn't need to be someone I wasn't to fit in. Maybe being exactly who I am would have to suffice.

Uprooting, Replanting

2011-08-27T21:45:00.010-04:00

At the front door, just before turning to leave, she handed me the keys to the house. There were two sets—one for the back door and my apartment on the third floor, and another for the company van, a light blue Toyota that we drove back from the airport. The drive from Cleveland wasn't what got to me—stretches of anonymous highway interspersed with small-talk: in-laws, grandkids, vacation, exes. No, it wasn't until we rounded Lorain Road, past Deichlers and the IGA, that things really started to coalesce—that the fuzzy picture of “Oberlin” that I had in my mind was beginning to look more and more like something real than imagined, to come into focus right before my eyes. We took a left at the art museum and slipped past the Oberlin Inn, and before I knew it, we were pulling into the parking lot outside Shansi House. No doubt about it, I was back in Oberlin.

It was an eerily similar feeling to when I first arrived in Taigu two years ago. It felt like waking up from a coma; there was this immediate shock, an overwhelming sense of both dread and astonishment for all that was yet to come. A part of me had gotten used to the way things were, and another, anxious for something different, on this, the start of yet another new life. Standing at the front door, luggage in hand, I wondered, how many more of these can I really bear? I'm not built for change, and yet, the last two years have seen little but it. It's as if change has wormed its way into the fiber of my DNA. It was never an innate trait, nor one that had lain dormant like a cancer, but one that was transplanted, grafted from a more able body onto mine, in the hopes that in time it too might sprout buds and flourish into something large and outstanding and worthwhile.

The first thing I noticed about the new house was the space. More rooms than I could thoroughly explore in a single sitting. There was a living room, dining room, kitchen, two bathrooms, foyer, two office spaces, a library—and that was just the ground level. The second floor had six bedrooms, a private residence attached to the back, two bathrooms, a shared kitchen, and a living room. And then there was my room—bathroom, kitchen, split living room/study, bedroom, big bay windows, and more closets than I could possibly fill spanning the entire third floor. Perhaps many American homes are this big, but I have never lived anywhere even approaching this size. That's what was so ironic—in Taigu I could be forgiven for experiencing culture shock at my new surroundings, but if this truly was my culture, why did everything that should be familiar feel so unimaginably foreign?

Wide, open space. My living room/study at Shansi House.

Last week I went to Target and all I could think about was the space: how there were whole sections where mobs of people weren't clambering at clothes racks and stripping shelves bare. Standing in the middle of a wide aisle, I had only the gentle push of the shopping carts and the Top 40 radio to occupy my thoughts. Coming from China where people habitually live on top of each other, and even my mom's one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn where the four of us had to temporarily co-habit, the seemingly endless stretches of open space in Ohio have been the biggest readjustment to life here. It's like going from one extreme to the other, with nothing in-between. The same can be said of my Shansi experience, with my Taigu life and my Oberlin life each comprising polar halves. Trying to bridge them together in a cohesive manner is like trying to knit a scarf by starting with each set of tassels, and hoping to eventually meet both ends in the middle.

When I went to visit Karl at the office, he told me that being the Returned Fellow is like waking up from a dream, where it's hard to reconcile which part of your life was real and which was imagined—they are so disparate that it seems impossible for them to coexist. Upon first entering my new apartment, there was a 1973 hardcover-bound Time-Life book on the desk entitled The Amazon: The World's Wild Places, that got me half-thinking about embarking on my next great “adventure,” as if my two years of it had scarcely ever happened to begin with. After so long on “the road,” it's weird to be settling down. But even now I know that this is temporary. Perhaps, when it comes down to it, that's all life really is: one never-ending standing-only ticket on “the road,” with no end in sight. Besides, even if I really wanted it, does such a thing as “settling down” even exist?

Everything in its rightful place—coconut milk pencil holder, desk lamp, book on the Amazonian wilds.

Now that I'm in Oberlin, old friends and professors greet me with a hearty “welcome back,” as if I had meant to be back all along. I don't flout their politeness at all, but even being back connotes a return to some semblance of life as I knew it before, and even that is a misnomer. This life, like others that have come before it, will be very different from any life that I have experienced—everything will be changed, from my position at the school and my daily routine to my place of residence. Even despite being the only current inhabitant, this place can scarcely be called my own. All around me are the remnants of other people's lives—people who, like me, have come for a year and gone, leaving only discarded fragments of their identities behind: scribbled reminder notes, FedEx boxes, toiletries, reading materials, stationery, souvenirs, appliances. Theirs is my life to make sense of now—the same fate I left to my own contemporaries upon leaving Taigu.

“You feel like people are saying the same things as before but wearing different faces,” Karl said, as I was leaving the office. And then, just as I turned to leave, he added: “it can sometimes make you feel like you're going crazy.” I began to see it everywhere—the guys chain smoking by the library, the couple holding hands at Gibson's, the girl biking barefoot through campus, the family squatting down in Tappan Square for a picnic—weren't they all people I had known before? There are different faces with the same voices, but there are familiar faces too. On a trip to Yesterday's, I saw Marc, an acquaintance that I made when I was still a student, who is from the town and still lives and works here. I didn't buy any ice cream from him but we exchanged numbers and promised to meet up again. It was encouraging to know: in spite of it all, some things still manage to stay the same.

We Sip Champagne When We're Thirsty

2011-08-16T23:13:00.010-04:00

Whether it was the worrying or late-stage jet lag that was keeping me up at night, no one could say for sure, but the worrying certainly didn't help. Past a certain age, birthdays become more of a burden than they do a reward; less an expression of one's individual character than they are a declaration of his social worth. It's not to say that I've crossed that threshold yet, just merely that it seems closer now than it had before the big 2-4 yesterday.

Sam and his girlfriend Brittany treated me for lunch at the Shake Shack near Times Square. It was my first time, and the excess of it all was what really stuck with me—mouths gorging on cheese fries, burgers oozing with mayonnaise and ketchup, Day-Glo Creamsicle floats and frozen custards. Just peering expectantly into the gray-swirled concretes studded with chocolate chips and fudge chunks was enough to make my heart stop. The burger was definitely good, but you don't need to take my word for it. The lines are so routinely out-the-door that even their promotional T-shirts picture their original Madison Square Park location with a line of people wrapping around the front.

But exactly how good? Consider that the cost of a single ShackBurger nets almost four Tuesday promotional $1.29 Whoppers at the Burger King a block from my house—where I ate my day-after-birthday lunch—and I'll reconsider whether or not I want to wait in line again for 40 minutes. We wandered our way through the Meatpacking District after lunch and darted into Chelsea Market to escape the rain—a hulking steel building outfitted with giant whirring ceiling fans and over-sized cargo elevators built in the late 1890s. The sheer depth to the stores there was remarkable—enough bakeries to fill a small New England township and a specialty produce shop that even sold tamarind rinds and dragon fruit. We bought zucchini and squash to barbecue for dinner.

I had my birthday dinner, not with my own family, but with Sam's. It wasn't so much the circumstances—Hannah was bussing back home from Maryland and my mom had called to say that she was out and wouldn't be home until late—we just weren't that kind of family. Besides, it was something of an accident—the three of us were playing Halo with Sam's kid brother in the living room and lost track of time. Dinner was fancy by my standards—pasta salad, poached salmon, bruschetta—the first real home-cooked meal I'd had since being back. It would have been any ordinary dinner had Sam not mentioned to his mom that we were going out, and before anyone had time to object, Mrs. Graves was out with a kazoo humming the four chords that no birthday celebration should be complete without.

We took the 4 train from Union Square to the Upper East Side. It had been over two years since I'd made it up to that neighborhood, and it felt like I couldn't pass a single building without staring hard at it, the way a dog might eye an errant stain of piss. Inside, the bar could have passed for any house party at college. Ex-frat boys, still wearing Greek letter T-shirts and plaid shorts, playing beer pong on two long tables by the back wall. Girls in tube tops and mini-skirts surreptitiously looking on. Dirty messages scribbled in the bathroom stalls. Blink-182 and Yellowcard blaring over the stereo sound system. A Jets game on one set of TV screens and a Yankees game on the other.

The seven of us were sequestered at the first table by the entrance. When we arrived, another group was in the process of wrapping up a birthday of their own—streamers hanging from the lamp shades, printed napkins in colorful hues, even a half-eaten cake sitting in the center of the table, the letters “PY” and “THDAY” left untouched. To the casual observer, the whole scene would have hardly garnered a second look. Even I, had I tried hard enough, could have believed that the whole production—paper plates and tiny serving forks, fragments of tinsel and wrapping paper—something I never would have asked for but at the same time would not have refused, could all have been for me.

About an hour in, the table next to us cleared out and another party was getting seated. Brushing aside stray cake crumbs, a short, trim man with a mustache inquired about an umbrella that had been left at their table. It was one of those long retractable ones, the kind kids use to propel at each other on rainy days. “Is this yours,” the man asked us, knowing full well that it wasn't and that he was now reluctantly charged with its fate. He turned to me, sitting closest to him. “Well, how would you like a free umbrella,” he asked with a smile. I thought to myself—it wasn't that outlandish of a request. “Sure,” I told him, really meaning it. He handed it over, careful to spare the drinks, and with a sense of irony he couldn't possibly have imagined, added, “Here you go, buddy. Happy birthday.”

Just to allay any worries, my birthday was lovely, and I want to thank everyone who came out with me to celebrate on Monday. Again, these vignettes are semi-fictionalized, and, like much of my writing, tend to ere on the darker side.

Notes from a Casual Spectator's First Trip to Yankees Stadium

2011-08-14T23:32:00.007-04:00

The last time I saw a live baseball game was when I was twelve. The days of Paul O'Neill and Bernie Williams. A powerhouse pitching staff. The Subway Series. Four World Series Championships in five years. A dynasty.

It's been a decade since. Back before Sosa and McGwire. Before doping became a household term. When Joe Girardi still played in pinstripes and the Boss was still “The Boss.” Back when “The House That Ruth Built” still referred to Yankees Stadium. I'm not much of a baseball fan now, but I used to be. How could I not? New York was experiencing one of baseball's great ages, its Renaissance, an absolute resurgence of the sport. No one, save for His Airness in Chicago, was as exciting and electrifying to watch.

Signed 2000 World Series jersey of Paul O'Neill, my favorite baseball player of all-time. On display at the Yankees Stadium Museum.

This time around, I barely recognized the names on the starting line-up. Only two or three players carried any weight—after all, I still cheered on the Yankees' 2009 victory via streaming webcast from China. But it wasn't the same. Ironically, I felt more at home in the Yankees in-house museum than I did in the rest of the newly-built stadium. At least there I could actually pass with some degree of knowledge. Everything else had a newness that was hard to place. Steel struts and supports that almost sparkled. Working water fountains. Ramps and walkways with nary a crack. No gum stuck to the bottom of the stadium seats.

So if not for the fandom and not for the familiarity, why choose to go to a Yankees game? Who on a whim buys three tickets for himself, his best friend, and his sister to a baseball game slated for the middle of the workweek? I felt like Ferris Bueller. To be sure, the “Free Hat Day” promotion helped to sway my vote, but it was more than that. I wanted a truly, one-of-a-kind “American experience,” and what better way than at a showcase of “America's Sport?" It was iconic—everything from the Cracker Jack and fried corn dogs (both of which I ate) down to the Star-Spangled Banner to start the game.

Submitted for your approval, Scott, Hannah, and yours truly, all sporting our free Yankees caps.

The atmosphere and company alone more than made the experience worthwhile. But if I had any doubts, the victory certainly didn't hurt. The Yankees beat the Angels 9-3—the game was never close. If you want the play-by-play, check ESPN; these are my own notes from the game:

I learned that metal containers of all kinds are effectively banned at Yankees Stadium, presumably to prevent escalating a heated physical altercation between fans or with players. Unfortunately, this also included my expensive reusable water canteen. Thankfully, security in charge of such dealings isn't very stringent. Even after a nescient once over made me suspect, I sneaked it in nonetheless.
The Asian food counter at the stadium had exactly four menu items: General Tso's Chicken, Chicken Noodle Bowl, Egg Roll, and Dumplings. And then, in something of a misstep, Rainbow Shaved Ice and Sno-Cones. It stands to reason that I would be upset. If this is your selection of Asian food, at least call it what it is: Bastardized Chinese.
As if I needed any more of a reminder that I was no longer in China, there was this: no alcohol being sold on the street (illegal), no pushing and shoving in the lines, ramps and passageways with enough space to accommodate guests, and enough exits so that wait time was effectively neutralized. Efficiency is a beautiful thing.

The third-tier bleachers directly below our section, still delightfully empty 40 minutes before game time.

Product sponsorship is far from uncommon in our modern age. But sometimes corporations take it too far. Official sports drinks, cleats, and athletic-wear I can fully accept. But when you call yourself the “Official Pudding of the New York Yankees,” I think you're trying too hard. (It's Kozy Shack in case you're wondering).
Overheard via stadium loudspeaker (liberally paraphrased): You too can own a piece of history! For a limited time, Yankees fans can now buy an original bleachers seat from "The House That Ruth Built!" All original chewing gum, mustard stains, beer resin, and dried blood perfectly intact! Display it in an abandoned parking lot or Industrial Sculpture Garden near you! Available now only from Steiner Collectibles.
If I missed an interesting play on the field (exemplified by the crowd cheering or wincing in unison), I kept half-expecting the players to revert back to their original position as the play unfolded again after a 5-second delay. My generation grew up with instant replay and it's as much a part of our world as, it would seem, reality itself.

A zoom-free view from our seats in right field. Angels up at bat and the Yankees take the field.

When the grounds crew comes on to sweep the field, the effect is uncharacteristically serene. Four men, each evenly-spaced with a long rake in his hand making a perfect half-circle of the dirt around the perimeter of the baseball diamond. With the right attitude, they could be practitioners at a zen garden. Except, perhaps, when they dance and raise their arms to the Village People's “Y.M.C.A.” at the end of the sixth inning.
Frank Sinatra's timeless “New York, New York” must have been for his generation what “Empire State of Mind” is for mine. I wonder if in twenty years we'll be hearing that to close out each game at Yankees Stadium.
By the time the last out was recorded, the electric banner reading: “Party City celebrates another Yankees win!” began scrolling across the stadium's LED display. And as fans started making their way to the exits, Scott Grabel was officially christened as a Yankees fan. He wasn't the only one.

Kaleidoscope. So. Innocent.

2011-08-11T16:22:00.020-04:00

It felt like regressing. The four of us sitting in the living room—Jerry, Steph, Paul, and I, a pipe and lighter at the ready. We were in their new apartment—Paul and Steph both transplants from out-of-state. New-wave. Jerry was visiting on his way back home to Fort Worth from Norway and was crashing on their couch. I brought over a six-pack, and there we were, drinking, Paul taking stock of the inventory, Steph fiddling with the projector, and Jerry fishing Sour Patch Kids out of his backpack. We could have been in a movie. Four Asian stoners with time to kill. Like Better Luck Tomorrow.

It took me thirty minutes just to find the place. This, after Paul told me that it was a 5-minute walk from Nostrand Avenue—left on Pacific, right under the LIRR. He couldn't have made it any easier if he tried. I went the opposite way for twenty minutes before doubling back. It was the elevated tracks that tipped me off, crisscrossed metal struts fastened to a wooden track like some ancient roller coaster.

The day before we all got dinner together in Brooklyn Heights. It was the quintessential New York experience—view of the bridge, brick oven pizza, Sinatra on the jukebox. It felt like everyone in there was Italian. New-wave. That is, if you don't count us and the one other table of Asians by the window. And then, even after they left, they put another group of Asians right there in the same spot. Paul joked, “one pipe bomb through the window, and boom, all ten Asians are dead.” He said it so matter-of-fact he could have been talking to a child. “How's that for a 60 Minutes special?”

Before dinner I caught myself taking pictures of the bridge. Imagine that, staring up at the same goddamned bridge I'd seen since before I could think and fussing with my f-stop. I couldn't tell which had changed at that instant: the bridge or me. It was the same feeling I had when I went out with the three of them after dinner for drinks. We drove to Williamsburg, and yes, before you even have to ask, I'll tell you that we had the oysters. The last time I had seen any of them was in Asia—Jerry with me in China, and Paul and Steph living together in Korea. Seeing them here, in my own hometown was like the two halves of my life uniting—the alien and the local, the visitor and the native.

The Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn Bridge.

We talked for a long time that night—about what, it's hard to remember. Stupid stuff. The kinds of things friends can pass hours talking about. Movies. Girls. Reminiscing. Hopes and dreams. How nothing had changed. Or everything. How we could come back from being abroad and feel like strangers to ourselves. And all the while wondering: did we trade in our innocence for a shot at the world? But the whole thing was effortless—like the four of us, all transplants to America, had always known each other like this. It was like going back and forth through time, taking from the past everything we needed to get to that moment.

I woke up in the morning with three words scribbled in my notebook: kaleidoscope so innocent. The memory was fuzzy but still intact. At one point, the visualizer on their projector made a shape like a kaleidoscope—colorful geometric stencils dancing in rhythmic patterns. A kaleidoscope is a child's toy. Children are innocent. Perhaps to a superlatively high degree. Therefore, the kaleidoscope netted innocence of its own. I thought about the last time I looked through an actual kaleidoscope and the whole cognitive process checked out. I was a child. I was innocent. Times had, quite evidently, changed since.

Getting back home from their apartment took just under three hours. This, despite the fact that we lived in the same borough. There's the late night train schedule for you. What does it matter if the subway is 24 hours if there is exactly one train between two and three in the morning? On the way home, I went the opposite way again. I took the A train towards Queens instead of up to Manhattan where I had to change lines. All that trouble just to go back to Brooklyn again. Figures. Sometimes you have to backtrack before you can move forward.

Like Moths to a Light Bulb

2011-08-09T14:11:00.010-04:00

The first time she used the “moth to a light bulb” analogy I thought it was clever. Not clever in the “I've-never-heard-that-before” sort-of way, but clever in the sense that, as far as I could recall, no one in my circle had actually used the phrase in the last two years. It wasn't as if I hadn't seen moths, nor, certainly, light bulbs in my time away. Both were in relative high commodity in my daily life. The naked bulb that dangled on a pull string above my front door in Taigu came alive each night and like clockwork was descended upon by a swarm of moths eager to light their way. It was an enduring image, but one so common I had overlooked it. The analogy, however, conjured the memory back to mind.

But by the third time she used it, I was at my wit's end. “Tracy thinks she's like a light bulb, and everyone else is a moth.” In spite of our relative closeness at the bar, she was speaking louder than necessary. “Everyone's always expected to cater to her. But God forbid she ever move to where the other people are!” We were eating at a Japanese restaurant on St. Mark's Place. It was my first time there, but she had been a regular, taking friends nearly once a week in the time I'd been away. My friend Sam told me that he'd even been roped into going with her after he finished dinner just to sit in front of a bowl of dried edamame corpses and listen to her bitch and moan about her love life.

She grabbed my right arm. “When is she going to realize that she is the moth and we are the light bulbs?” She was wearing a loose-fitting black dress and her hair was smoothed back in a long ponytail that cascaded below her shoulders. “Can there be that many light bulbs in the world,” I asked dumbly, as if it were the most interesting thing I could bring to the discussion. “That's not the issue,” she blurted out defensively. “It's just that I'm tired of sitting around at her apartment all the time. It's eighty degrees out. If I'm getting a drink, I'm going to do it outside.” She motioned to the door with an exasperated look. She went on like that for the next 30 minutes.

I knew that I needed to change the subject. If she did sense that I was getting bored, she certainly didn't allude to it or make any attempts to remedy the situation. I'm not very good about masking my emotions—my face always gives them away. But perhaps, then, I was getting better, that my time abroad supplied me with a tougher outer skin that distanced me from what I was truly feeling—distanced me from myself. I could adopt a new identity, I reasoned, one quite unlike my “true” self, and could play it all the more convincingly because no one here had actually seen me in two years. So why not try something different?

Pretty soon conversation turned, as it is apt to in the right situations, to sex. But more specifically, to the idea of sex, in the capital H hypothetical, to the aura that sometimes surrounds individuals of a particularly vibrant and sexual nature, and how that aura distinguishes them from the countless others who go about their lives. I danced (somewhat gracefully) in circles around the topic, but she wasn't having it. What exactly defined these characteristics, she asked me. And who exemplified these traits? She wanted specifics, and who was I to beat around the bush?

So, I let her have it. “You know this 'aura' is hard to define,” I started. “It's almost imperceptible as a trait. But when you start looking for it, I mean really looking, you'll find that it's all around us. Take, you, for instance.” I paused. I was starting to mince my words and thought it better to slow down. She pointed inquisitively at herself, hard-pressed to find the connection. Her eyes were ablaze, set with as much fiery, inscrutable focus as I had seen all night. “You have this magnetism about you,” I went on. “People can't help but feel drawn to you. You bring people in like, like a moth to a light bulb. It's totally electric.”

She stared back at me, her lips like two thick scribbles on a sheet of oak tag. Just then, the food arrived. She had ordered a miso soup and a selection of grilled kebab skewers—chicken and scallion mostly. As for me, I got a thick bonito-flaked slab of okonomiyaki, a favorite I'd maintained since I'd first tried it in Japan. She started taking big sips of the soup and I tore into the eggy concoction stuffed with more seafood and meat than I could readily identify with the naked eye. We were silent for a time, occupied with the act of eating. And when we started up again, it wasn't about sex or even hypothetical sex. It was about Tracy and that apartment and how not even one of us was safe from its all-consuming orbit.

Dance Dance (Cultural) Revolution

2011-07-04T11:29:00.009-04:00

There was a time not long ago that I was terrified of dancing. The thought of priming my clumsy adolescent body to step in beat to a rhythm was enough to send shivers down my spine. An image of a flummoxed figure, gyrating wildly and making stabbing motions at the air was my impression of my own body kinesthesis. I was panic-stricken at having to dance alone, but even more so at the primeval ritual of doing so with another person. I abhorred school dances, the coming together of girl and boy from opposing gymnasium walls, and I couldn't comprehend the appeal of a nightclub—a sardine sweat-box brimming with expectations as cloying and self-evident as a man's cologne.

Unlike my former self, James has absolutely no qualms about dancing, this time with our boss Xiao Fan after one of our banquets this semester (photo courtesy of Alexandra Sterman).

In my senior year at Oberlin, having already accrued more credits than I needed to graduate, I promised myself that I would take one class that really scared me. As it turned out, that class was Modern Dance I, taught by Elisa Rosasco. By that time, I wasn't shy about letting loose my odd conglomeration of jazz hands and the “running man” at the handful of campus parties that I threw in the living room of my house that year, so long as I was aided by a lack of adequate lighting and a generous amount of alcohol. But in class, with nowhere to hide in a large well-lit dance studio, and with a trained professional dancer grading my ability and improvement, I knew it would be one of the hardest things I had ever done. And, by most accounts, it was. But by the time I graduated from that class, and pretty soon, Oberlin itself, I was filled with a confidence and love for my body that I would take with me all the way to rural China.

When I arrived in Taigu, I was told a lot about the dance parties that for years had been a permanent fixture at the foreign Fellow apartments—how the teachers would invite their friends over to relax in a non-academic setting. It was a cultural exchange of a non-verbal nature. It gave Chinese friends the opportunity to experience a foreign party in spite of the limitations imposed by China, including the 11:00 student curfew which resulted in the ungodly early start time of 8:30. Those who liked the atmosphere came back—to bask under a dizzying disco ball, sip on a cold Snow beer, and dance to the beat of two gigantic speakers. Because of floor damage incurred from previous dance parties at their own house, my co-Fellows Anne and Nick insisted that the tradition of hosting such events—a sought after and noble post, they assured us—would fall to James and I.

Beginning with that first weekend in September of 2009 and continuing about twice-a-month for all two years of my Fellowship, James and I have played host to dozens of dance parties, so many that we have even exacted the art of party preparation down to a science. First comes the text message invitations in the afternoon. Then the buying of alcohol after dinner. Finally, there is the setting up of the house itself. After queuing up “Layla” on the speakers in the living room (The Derek and the Dominoes original, it should be noted), we take out the trash, arrange the furniture, move all unnecessary articles into James' room (jackets, desk lamps, house slippers), stock the flimsy coffee table with beer cans and position it against my door to guard against intruders, and light up the disco ball using the Jurassic Park-sized flashlight jerry-rigged to our bookshelf.

By then the “Dance Party Warm-Up” playlist will have already cycled through three more songs—Kanye West's “Slow Jamz,” KT Tunstall's “Suddenly I See,” and The Temptations' “Get Ready.” By the time “The Seed (2.0)” by The Roots comes on, the clock reads 8:30 and the front door is propped open and ready for business. In cold weather, guests pile coats and sweaters on the couch, and in the spring, due to space constraints and incessant heat, the party spills over to include the front porch. The living room is hot as a cauldron regardless of the season and there are typically 40 to 50 people who show up at any given party. Each time the parties go off in exactly the same fashion, and in their own way, they've always proved successful—that is to say, we've never once had a dud.

Me, directing traffic in the middle of a crowd, at our Halloween dance party in guyuan last December (photo courtesy of Alexandra Sterman).

Still, the first twenty minutes are always the worst. You can spot those who are new to them because they don't yet know the American custom of arriving fashionably late, and as the first ones there, subsequently end up spending more time glued to the living room sofa than they do attempting to make conversation. It takes a few tries to truly become a regular. To be sure, there is nothing particular glamorous about the dance parties—glittery sequins are peeling off from the disco ball and the floor is practically glazed with a layer of dried beer. But the main reason that they have been so successful is that it's never hard to get friends to come. Most of the students at SAU are so bored on a given Saturday night that any break from their prescribed routine of chatting online or studying in the library is a welcome respite. Getting them to dance, however, is another issue entirely.

Halfway through the spring semester of my second year, my first-year English majors told me that they would be throwing a dance party on the 4th floor of guyuan, the school cafeteria. It was to be held in a room outfitted with a large dancing space as well as a stage, special sound and lighting equipment and a dedicated operator. They insisted that the party was in our honor, but they didn't take our advice when it came to the execution. Instead of simply playing music and allowing people to dance, there would be a prescribed program—hosts, contests, breaks for song numbers, closing remarks. It was the Chinese approach to throwing a party. They agreed to provide all of the snacks and set-up the space, but they wanted to know if I could act as DJ. This was not an unreasonable request—as it was, I had DJ'ed every dance party I had ever thrown in Taigu. In fact, it's a job I have really come to love.

Though it is by no means tough work, DJ'ing does require a considerable deal of awareness about your audience to know exactly what to play. With only a few people at the start, it's experimental hour—a time to audition potential songs before their prime-time debut. A waning interest for English songs on the part of the guests necessitates an injection of Chinese pop. A lot of high-energy songs in a row and the mood is set for a slower-paced cool down song. I confess that I enjoy the feeling of playing God, having the ability to gauge people's emotions with the touch of a button. And it's not just in China that I've had the chance to hone this skill. I was put in charge of music for a house party in Yogyakarta, Indonesia last February, and, in a strange twist of fate, I took over as DJ at a bar in Saigon, Vietnam on the night before my 23rd birthday.

We had had other parties in guyuan before too. Because of scheduling conflicts, our anticipated Halloween celebration ended up arriving closer to Christmas than it did October, but there were costumes and face paint all the same. There were probably close to 300 people for that event, and we were all looking forward to having another big party before leaving Taigu in June. But it was only until after the invitations went out to the usual slew of party-goers that Mary and Lisa, the students in charge of organizing the event, informed us that the time had been changed. Instead of being from 7:30 to 10 (late by campus standards), it would now be happening from 6:00 to 8. According to the students, school administrators had co-opted the space for a rehearsal singing competition to honor the Communist Party's 90th Anniversary. It hardly mattered that our students had booked the space months in advance and were just being told of the change hours before the event would go off—this was China, and plans change at the drop of a hat.

All seven foreign teachers dressed up in appropriate garb at last year's Halloween dance party (photo courtesy of Alexandra Sterman).

Me and the other teachers were livid. There was no time to warn my other students of the change, and what's worse, who wants to go to a dance party that starts when the sun is still out? Still, the party went off as planned. James agreed to host it along with a Chinese student and after I played the first song, all of the teachers jumped into the middle of the gigantic white-walled room, and with sunlight still pouring through the windows, began pulling people off of walls and chairs in an attempt to get them to dance. Usually a generous amount of prodding and hand-holding is par for the course, but this was by far the most effort we had ever had to exert. We succeeded in roping in a few students, but the vast majority continued to stand and stare at us like we were aboriginals performing a kind of rain dance.

By the time the clock struck 8:00, the dance party, much to my utter surprise, was actually quite good. The room was at about capacity, strobe lights were cascading across the floor, and students no longer seemed to be shy about dancing. However, it was just at that moment that Mary got on stage and announced that the party would be wrapping up, and almost immediately, students began packing up their things and heading back home. The girls apologized for having to end early, but there was nothing they could do—no one could so much as question the system. In a segregated corner of the room, I began calling for resistance—a chance to stand up to the administration. But my students were mired in inaction. It felt like a holdover from the Cultural Revolution—people were too afraid to do anything but bend to the will of authority. After all, what was more important to them: a permanent black mark on their record or a silly dance party?

I was noticeably embittered and began talking with one of my favorite English majors. I was telling her how frustrated I was at the situation, but she cut me off mid-sentence. “You're not angry,” she assured me in Chinese, “you're just disappointed.” But the truth was that I was angry. Anger is always so controlled in China—gun possession is strictly prohibited and there are few senseless acts of violence committed by common people—but by the same logic, it's hard for people to express their real emotions, there is too much face at stake. It was as if my favorite team had just lost Game 7 of the World Series—I was vengeful and out for blood. I started talking about how I wanted to vandalize a government office or teach bad words to the students performing “Crazy English” near the flower garden. It wasn't the early end to the party that got to me, it was my failure as a leader—that dance parties were my responsibility and I had let down my guests.

But ultimately, and just like everyone else, I did nothing. We went out to eat a late dinner of chuan, skewered meat and vegetables on sticks, over heaping glasses of draft beer. Gradually, I began to forget about my hostility, my anger slowly dissipating into the barbecued cubes of lamb and the fried green beans sitting in front of me. For the rest of my time in Taigu, dance parties were held solely at my house, where I, and not the school, held jurisdiction, and we were not subject to their indiscriminate decision-making.

If you play a song enough times, it starts to get imbued with a certain significance. Take, for instance, Avril Lavigne's “Girlfriend” which Anne sang with her then-students Maggie and Lynn last year as part of a grad school talent show. Or “Like a G6” which got popularized after our collective trip to Korea last winter, “The Situation” thanks to our brief obsession with the MTV phenomenon Jersey Shore, the conga line that forms around the circumference of the living room as a result of playing the Chinese song “Xi Shua Shua,” or screaming the words to “Semi-Charmed Life” with fists pointed toward the ceiling. “I Want You Back” always follows “Hot N Cold” just as “Tik Tok” always precedes “Good Girls Go Bad.” Later, after all the guests have left, we recite the words to Biz Markie's seminal “Just a Friend,” and without exception, we commemorate the official end to each dance party with the theme song to Family Matters.

In perhaps the most unflattering lighting possible, a glimpse at a typical Taigu dance party (photo courtesy of Gerald Lee).

During the party, I typically spend a third of the time dancing, a third doing damage control, and a third making sure I'm back to the speakers with enough time to change songs. At the musical helm, I do song dedications and shout-outs. I try to update the playlist, which has been passed down through at least three Shansi generations, with new songs every two or three weeks. It's fascinating to see its trajectory—a mini-Billboard Top 40 charting hit songs of the last half-decade. We have a stash of crazy hats and sunglasses that guests can try on and wear. I used to have a tradition where at 10:00 all the males did push-ups on my linoleum kitchen floor before rushing out shirtless to the faint amusement of the living room mob. This semester I began taking break-dancing classes and now sanction small cyphers as part of the dance party to practice new moves.

Though originally conceived as a way to give our friends and students a safe space to unwind and be free from the pressures of Chinese society, it has become equally as liberating for us foreign teachers. A few weeks without one and the overwhelming anxiety and stress of Taigu can sometimes be too much to bear. There are few places that make me feel more at ease, more free of inhibition, and more comfortable in my own skin than at a Taigu dance party. There is a pervasive feeling that I can let myself go completely, that nobody will care how badly I dance, and that it doesn't matter in that moment if I'm more a friend than a teacher. People now look to me the way I did my dance teacher at Oberlin—for the strength and confidence to be themselves without fear of being judged. Not only are the dance parties a fun place to unwind, they constitute some of my fondest Taigu memories.

Ten days before I would leave Taigu for good, we had our last dance party ever. After two years of memories, I was expecting it to be full of the sort of sadness and nostalgia reserved for truly special experiences reaching their untimely end, a metaphor for my entire experience in Taigu. But it was far more uplifting than I would have imagined. We had more guests than we'd ever had before, a long line of students stretching from the front door down the dirt path to where the road intersects, and the party went off as well as I could have hoped, interspersed with a generous amount of thanks for all the organizing and work that I had done to make them possible. Rather than a reminder of what we would soon be losing, it was a celebration of what we had, what we were able to create together, and the ongoing legacy that we, as foreign teachers, would leave to the Taigu community.

At 11:00, we each looked at each other, and to the handful of close Chinese friends who had stuck with us past curfew to the end, just as they had at every dance party that came before, and just as I knew, at that moment, that they would always stick it out with me, past time zones and border restrictions that force us apart in the physical world. I cued up the last song. “This one,” I started, “is for the greater love and the family.” And as the theme song to Family Matters crooned in the background, we forged a circle in the living room, laughing and shouting the words for all 81 glorious seconds. We played music until after midnight that night and I had nearly exhausted every song in the playlist. By the time it was over, the Daniel-and-James era had officially ended, but we also knew that someone would be there to pass the torch to, to pick up the reigns for next year, just as generations of Fellows before somehow knew that we would be there for them.

Day 27: We Don't Need No Education

2011-06-23T10:32:00.005-04:00

For most young people, education is a privilege. Though certainly not in the same way that it was in the forlorn years of the Cultural Revolution, most who are in school still regard it as their primary lot in life. The pressure that students face in China is almost inconceivable. As my friend Margaret put it, a lot of it is due to the extreme degree with which Chinese culture values academic success. Beginning in elementary school and climbing straight through college is the strain for students to perform well, pass the requisite standardized tests to advance to the next grade level, and appease their face-starved parents and relatives in the process.

Students routinely endure 10-12 hour days before they even hit high school. Students at the Taigu middle school where I taught part-time had to put up with my 2-hour English elective on Sunday afternoons last year because nearly every other conceivable time slot had already been carved out by other activities—gymnastics, martial arts, music lessons, drawing. The director of the school admitted that his students were overworked, but there was really nothing that could be done about it. Students who aren't that busy risk falling behind and getting upstaged by their overachieving classmates. Lingda, our neighbor's daughter who just turned seven, is in school until 7:00pm every day except Sunday and is up until 10:00 most nights doing homework.

The most immediate consequence of all of this is that it leaves little time for children to be “kids.” And if anything, the hardship only increases as they get older. The mother of all tests is the nationwide gaokao, or college entrance examination, administered once a year to high school seniors. Though similar to the SAT, the gaokao is much more serious, as it can be the sole factor in determining a student's future. Due to China's burgeoning population, of the over 11 million students who apply to college each year in China, less than half score well enough on the gaokao to be accepted, and only another 20% of those test into first and second tier schools, of which Shanxi Agricultural University belongs. In fact, the bell curve looks strikingly un-bell-like in its distribution—the curve is past its apex and actually well into its descent by the time it meets the acceptance cut-off line.

For Chinese students, no time is more intense than during this exam season. China's best schools are public and require a formidable score for entrance. Coupled with the pressure to test well that spurs dozens of student suicides per year, cheating also runs rampant. Since most students already cheat, others do it, ironically, in an attempt to level the playing field. One friend admitted to wearing tiny ear-buds that receive answers via satellite on test day. In lecture classes, some students have classmates show up to forge their exam. Indeed, corruption and fraud are unfortunate realities of Chinese education. Those who don't pass the gaokao either have to rely on a wealthy or well-connected family to foot the cost of private or vocational school which can be up to four times the price of public school, wait a year to re-take the exam, or simply, not go to college.

But even for those lucky enough to attend college, the reality of the situation can be disappointing. Students essentially sacrifice their youth for the sake of studying. Every kind of extracurricular activity or creative outlet including art, dance, music, and athletics—ironically, the very skills that parents had their child clambering to learn in elementary school—is suspended indefinitely during the middle and high school years. In addition, romantic relationships and any shred of personal freedom are scrapped in preparation for the “big” test (as it is commonly known). It would seem, though, that the payoff is not worth the reward—once they finally get to college, students are faced with overcrowded classes, 8-student-per-room dormitories, and teachers still prying on their every move.

Drab walls, fixed desks, and airless windows—the kinds of conditions that high school students have to look forward to in college.

Not surprisingly, most students growing up in this culture have very little real world experience outside of schooling, leading to our frustrations about lack of creativity and free-thinking in the classroom. Students aren't motivated to learn because, ostensibly, that's the sum-total of all they're allowed to do. Almost no one works a part-time job and few are involved with student clubs or organizations. But this mentality is problematic for many other reasons too. In an increasingly global economy, rote memorization is scrapped in favor of creative thinking. When the time comes to graduate, most have less of an idea than even the most bright-eyed American liberal arts college graduate of what they want to do next. The answer I most often hear is “get a job and earn money,” but inherent in that is a seemingly resigned acceptance of a joyless working life.

Despite the hardships, more Chinese students every year are attending and graduating from college. This makes for an incredibly large pool of applicants scrambling for jobs in a bear economy. As a 2007 Time magazine article put it, “As China's economy booms, job competition has become ferocious — and the pressure to land a prestigious degree can be unbearable.” Most put the Chinese education system at fault. Such a huge emphasis is put on test-taking and getting into a good college that finding a job becomes an afterthought. Indeed, most high-level jobs require additional competitive specialized testing, whether they be in accounting, public service, or business. Instead of settling for lower-level jobs, students fall into the trap of the “examination madman.” Most Chinese look to government-subsidized graduate study as an easy way out, a consolation for not being able to find a job.

Still, generalizing the behemoth that is the Chinese education system has its dangers. For starters, not all of China's 1.3 billion people have the same experience. A handful of my students may be more likely to buy a degree or bribe their way to a scholarship, even if the vast majority of them come from predominantly lower class farming families. But perhaps the biggest indicator of wealth is the opportunity to study abroad. Increasingly, more Chinese students are flocking to the West, touting the benefits of the American education system. However, from a strictly post-graduate perspective, the situation is eerily similar. According to a NYT article, over 40% of recent college graduates in America are unemployed or underemployed, comparable to the job woes plaguing China.

Higher education in China, like in America, is getting re-looked at, as thousands of unemployed question whether they need college degrees to climb the ladder. Increasingly, students are coming to terms with the reality of the job market—that instead of relying on the “iron rice bowl” jobs of their parent's generation (essentially, life-long tenure), most are finding it better to set aside their dreams and join the workforce at a younger age, whether that be in vocational jobs, internships, or entrepreneurship. Whatever happens, it's almost certain that given China's slow bureaucratic track record, large-scale education reform won't be arriving any time soon. Of course, that's not to say anything about bricks in the wall, thought control, or dark sarcasm in the classroom.

*

Like others that have come before it, this too is of the 1200-word variety.

He Wanted More Than He Ever Could Say

2011-06-03T12:11:00.009-04:00

This tribute to educator, mentor, and friend Jon Kawano would not have been possible without the words and memories of former students, colleagues, family, and friends whose lives, like mine, he touched deeply. Specifically, many thanks go to contributors to the March 2011 issue of the Columbia Prep Journal, Alan Paukman, and all of the commenters on the Facebook group “The Bosporus Starlings (Kawano Remembrance).”

In a blog post dated December 25, 2010, just six weeks before his death, Jon Kawano wrote the following:

Eleven years ago, eighth grader Pacey Barron spotted Jesus in one of the stairwells of the high school. Ever since, bunches of seventh graders have been led down the stairs where they are instructed to "see," to explore the space before them the way they might a fine painting, edge-to-edge, corner-to-corner, in search of the holy vision. Some spot it right away. Others have to be shown. They are kids, so they always get a kick out of it. But the second coming is by no means guaranteed. All it takes is a sustained incuriosity following one last expedition in search of Jesus, and he will return to sepulchral obscurity, awaiting the return of just the right kind of child's eye infused with the right kind of enthusiasm which was always Pacey’s distinguishing talent.

It wasn't the only time he wrote of Pacey Baron in such glowing terms. She had, I learned, blossomed from a precocious 8th grader in 1999 to go on to lead the Columbia Prep Girl's Varsity Basketball Team in all scores for four years of high school. By the time she graduated in 2004, she became one of only a handful of students in Columbia Prep history to notch 1000 points for her high school career.

In a Flash post dated December 6, 2002, he writes of a particularly tense match between Columbia Prep and rival York Prep:

5:30 P.M. TIP OFF TOURNAMENT EXCLUSIVE: Girls in close match with York. Pacey disrupts their inbounds repeatedly at the far court, lays it in. Candace has huge rebound and it seems Lions have the win but York steals and scores. The whole team is celebrating but there is seven seconds left. Pacey takes the ball as the whole York defense arrays to stop her. With an inner fire which is often masked by her kicked-back California girl ambiance, Pacey busted through the defenders and with a contortionist's move, laid it in for the win.

For a trim, slight man of just over five feet—shorter even than many of the students he taught—and no more than 140 pounds, Mr. Kawano had an uncharacteristic zeal for basketball. At a time when almost no one in my memory went to home games of the Columbia Prep Lions, Mr. Kawano was a constant on the sidelines—in loose slacks and a blazer, shouting and cheering with as much vigor and force as a parent—willing the team to play at its best. Columbia Prep was never much of a contender in the New York Section 12 PSAL basketball division, but Mr. Kawano always seemed to be rooting for the underdog.

It hardly mattered that many of the students who played Varsity Basketball never took the classes that Mr. Kawano taught in Japanese and Creative Writing. He admired and respected them all the same. It was the same relentless, unbridled admiration that Mr. Kawano's students had for him.

In 1999, the same year that Pacey Barron first saw Jesus in a high school stairwell, I had my first encounter with Mr. Kawano.

It was halfway through 7th grade and language classes were being taught as four one-quarter electives, with the expectation that after having tried French, Latin, Spanish, and Japanese, students would choose one to advance with full-time in 8th grade and into high school. Japanese was the last of the four languages in the circuit for me, and there were two teachers who were teaching it—Ms. Kobayashi and Mr. Kawano. Mr. Kawano's class was over-capacity, and me and two other students drew straws for the chance to stay, with the loser relegated to switching over to Ms. Kobayashi's. I drew the short one.

Class wasn't bad, but save for the ability to still recall the words to “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” in Japanese, I didn't feel like I got much out of Ms. Kobayashi's class. A part of me still wistfully pondered how Japanese would be different with Mr. Kawano, and I often wandered across the hall to his room before and after class to try to glean what he was doing. At that time, both rooms were located on the 5th floor of the high school, catty-corner to the chemistry classroom where I spent 10th grade double periods and the Forensics lab which bore strikingly little resemblance to the set of CSI.

Mr. Kawano was no doubt what some of his admirers and critics alike would have called “eccentric.” Not one square inch of his room was devoid of material—corners were piled high with xerox copies of syllabi and mid-term study packets in every conceivable color of paper. On the windowsill were a pair of jade plants and a vase full of water that lucky 7th graders with the highest test scores were allowed to add a drop of food coloring to. There were 32 oz. bottles of Gatorade that never seemed to get touched, a vial of essential freesia oil on his desk, and a mysterious liquid jolly rancher that he refused to throw out. The chalkboard was framed by large swaths of sanctioned-off areas that were not to be erased—boxes for interesting discoveries, reminders, announcements, details to record for later use, and the names of students who were close to being kicked out for bad behavior.

At the front of the class, Mr. Kawano probably spent as much time teaching as he did shouting, pounding on tables, or throwing whatever was in reach at those unruly students. He would drag desks up to the front of the classroom, kick garbage cans, and arm good students with rolled-up newspaper to monitor the bad ones (it was against the law for him to physically abuse them, he said, but not for his students). At his most frustrated, he would give a resounding “goddammit,” hit his head against the wall and exclaim, “Do you want me to go back to being a bike messenger?” If someone asked a question that he didn't feel like explaining, he would say, “Well, I think two-thirds of the class has it down so we're going to move on. I'll give you my number and you can call me later.”

Mr. Kawano hunched over a stack of test papers, circa Hallowwen 2008 (photo courtesy of Tony Eurdekian).

Mr. Kawano wasn't an imposing man. He was a wiry ball of energy, practically bursting with life and a profound respect for emotional creativity, that commanded attention. His teaching techniques were often unusual, and the vast majority of what he brought to the classroom was entirely his own invention. As a long-time lover of comic books, he drew overweight superheros at the tops of tests and homework assignments to reward outstanding effort, everything from Spiderman to Wonder Woman to Hawkman (he had a particular fondness for Green Lantern). Participation and good behavior were rewarded with “ants”—actual tiny plastic ants that one could save up and use for extra points on exams and as homework credit. Each test had an “ETC. box” where students could write down anything else that they had studied that was not specifically on the test.

He taught as much off the syllabus as he did digressing from his own head. Often, he would end class by passing out an article dated from the mid-90s that you could tell had been xeroxed a dozen times, each with the addition of a new underlining or scribble in the margins, and told us to read it for extra credit. They always had to do with art, philosophy, life's secrets, or discovering a new way of looking at the world. He was always more concerned with making good human beings than good students. Later, at the end of a Japanese character test, he would pose a question from the article, just to see if we had read it. Sometimes it was worth more than the entire rest of the exam.

Following the 7th grade language round robin, I chose to take Spanish going into 8th grade. I enjoyed Japanese but I figured that Spanish was more practical—I could progress in the language faster and it would also bring me closer to my mother who, though she never formally taught me, was born in Cuba and grew up speaking Spanish at home. But even after two years, the urge to take Japanese was still there. I saw the other students from my grade who had decided to take Japanese—almost all exclusively from the Kawano and not the Kobayashi camp—excelling and truly enjoying the class. And so, at the start of 10th grade, I decided that I would do something that no one in my grade up until then had done—I enrolled in both languages.

On my first day of Japanese 1, I was humiliated. As a 10th grader, I out-aged everyone in my class by two full years and I felt like a flunkey who had to be left-back to complete his coursework. In high school, at a time when upper and underclassmen rarely mixed ranks, I was an anomaly. It wasn't until Mr. Kawano himself said something that public opinion began to change. No longer was I Daniel, nor even my given Japanese name of Danieru. From that day forward I became sempai, an honorific term roughly equivalent to “mentor.” More than simple seniority, sempai implies a relationship with reciprocal obligations. He garners respect and obedience from the kohai (“protege”), and in return, is responsible for guiding, protecting, and taking care of them as best he can.

The name stuck with me through all three years of Japanese, and I did my best to live up to it [in 11th grade, my name was changed simply from sempai to dai-sempai (big sempai), because a then-10th grader enrolled in my Japanese 2 class and became ko-sempai (small sempai)]. Despite the difference in age, I became close with my fellow classmates and after a time there were no discernible differences in the way we treated one another. I also strove for perfection in his class. I always came prepared and had my homework completed. On tests, I perennially scored among the best in the class. In another Flash post, dated January 22, 2003, Mr Kawano wrote the following:

FLASH EXTRA — JAPANESE 1 TOP 3: Trevor Vaz rocked the Imperial Palace with a 99. Ross Reisman one point behind. Ko-sempai a.k.a., Ben Wlody upset Dai-sempai (Daniel Claiborne), tying Chloé Cargill for third honors with a 93! Dai-sempai only a point behind. From there were a whole bunch of numbers clumped right under.

I learned an incredible amount from Kawano sensei—about how to write the stroke order for each character using actual calligraphy brushes and ink and how each letter of the hiragana and katakana alphabet could be memorized by using pictorial stories. He had a particular gift for teaching the language through off-color references and scatology—shakuhachi is a wooden Japanese flute, ji means constipation, and ikitai, in a loud, high-pitched voice, translates as “I want to come.” Every year we went on a field trip to the Mitsuwa Mall in New Jersey, where we had to complete a scavenger hunt for various Japanese-related items, speak to clerks in Japanese, and (inevitably) stock up on heaping shopping bags of the newest in Japanese candy, snacks, stationery, and dessert.

From left to right: Eric Chan, Ben Kaplan, and yours truly at the Mitsuwa Mall in Edgewater, New Jersey, circa October 2004 (photo courtesy of Jon Kawano).

There was no question that I worked hard and was a good student, but I think in some ways, Mr. Kawano held that against me. I know that what he probably saw in me was a person with potential, but who was conservative, who played it safe, and who didn't take many risks. I was secretly envious of the more radical boys in my grade who had already experimented with drugs and alcohol, who wore backwards spray-painted caps, used graffiti tags, rode their skateboards to school, and wore baggy jeans held up with metal chains and belts clad with pointed metal studs. These were the students who were worthy of the precious extra minutes with Mr. Kawano, whom he begrudgingly let draw pictures on his whiteboards and loiter in his classroom after school. It was the same group of students who Mr. Kawano had bestowed the distinction of “Seeds of Genius,” a moniker that I was at once perplexed and insanely jealous of. If you brand a student as a genius in high school, I wondered, how could he possibly go on to live up to his potential?

Everything got written on the Flash page. From sports results to student's test scores to what was served that day at the cafeteria. It was a repository of quotes, anecdotes, stories, news, and so-called “slice of life” moments, all collected in a place that was secret enough that students could swear and not worry about getting in trouble and public enough that friends who were also in the know could read it. In an age when blogging was just beginning to get its legs, the Flash page was eponymous. It was not officially sanctioned by the school, which made it cool, and yet it had the support and backing of one of its teachers, who gave extra credit to those intrepid students who wrote for it.

The posts were split roughly 3-1 between students' and those written by Mr. Kawano himself. Even if one hadn't known the identity of the author, it would have been easy to pick out Mr. Kawano's posts from most of the others—he had a certain tone that he used, a mixture of authority and candidness that punctuated his writing. Rather than droll on about the weather or how boring classes were, he would pick out specific moments to highlight about the day, and often times, those highlights were his students. Mr. Kawano had a way of motivating students who would normally be prone to under-perform, and make them tap into and make full use of their potential. On January 18, 2002, he used the Flash page to highlight the achievements of two members of the “Seeds of Genius”:

Rather than suffer the trauma of progress reports, and preferring the Flash readership to their Deans and parents, Alan Paukman and Jacob Melinger, having both recently achieved record-setting test scores finally in line with their potential, if not outright genius, hereby submit that their future achievements and misdeeds appear here on the Flash Page.

And it didn't stop there. Further achievements were duly noted. On January 28, he wrote:

Jacob Melinger earned an A on a Farnum research paper, The Rate and Degree of Diffusion as Affected by Volume. Ben Kaplan typed up a 4-page skit on the Crusaders for Ms. Sonju and got his first A in history.

Mr. Kawano cared deeply about his students and did everything he could to foster their growth. He made it a habit to talk to students about what was going on in their classes and write those accomplishments on the website. A great deal of his accolades were also showered on alumni whom he had previously taught. Many of them, including, Andrew Hamilton, Ben Safdie, Alex Fishman, Ethan Ravetch, and Damian Soghoian, were upperclassmen that I knew very tenuously, but whose reach and influence was so huge that I found myself idolizing them throughout my time in high school. Unfortunately, though, I never had the chance to see if he would continue to follow-up on alums after I graduated.

“Seeds of Genius” at the Mitsuwa Mall, circa October 2004 (photo courtesy of Jon Kawano).

Shortly after I left the school in 2005, the scrappy group of bloggers had transformed into a full-fledged student group (“CGPS Flash”) and was taken over by another English teacher. Mr. Bailin, whom I read Zola's Germinal and Sinclair's The Jungle with as part of my first-semester of 11th grade English, wasn't a bad teacher, just considerably less engaging than Mr. Kawano. The website, which started in some ways as anti-establishment and underground was now being moved to the mainstream. Students had to consider a wider audience and Mr. Kawano was no longer there to motivate the group forward. It wasn't long before the club disbanded and the website ceased to be updated.

“Think about your deepest, darkest secret, and write it down on a piece of paper.” This is how he started one of our Creative Writing classes halfway through my junior year. The class hid their nervousness in misbehavior, ignoring the assignment and talking in low murmurs. Mr. Kawano kept us on track. “No one else will read these secrets. They are for you and you alone. But acknowledging a secret, even if only to yourself, is enough to take the weight off of it, to make it easier to live with.” I ripped out a sheet of notebook paper and very slowly wrote down one thing that I had never told anyone. We kept the sheets of paper in our Creative Writing folders, which stayed in the classroom, and at first I was worried about someone tampering with my folder and discovering it. However, two weeks went by and I didn't think about it again. When the time came to collect our folders, Mr. Kawano noted that each of us had left our deepest secrets in a public place. We no longer had to be afraid of what our secrets said about us. Instead, we could put them behind us and move forward.

At first glance, it may seem unlikely that a Japanese teacher would also teach Creative Writing, but Mr. Kawano was less strictly a language teacher than he was an instructor on how to live life, of which writing and the arts play a huge part. He used to joke that the school's administration didn't invite him to English faculty meeting even though he was technically a member of the department. Outside of my immediate family and my closest friends, he is probably the single most important influence on my growth as a human being. It's impossible to accurately and comprehensively catalog the ways in which the material he taught in that class has fundamentally influenced my relationship with art, literature, and music.

What Mr. Kawano taught was like the Gospels, and I hung on to every word accordingly. To this day, whereas almost everything else I have from high school has long since been scrapped, I have kept every single piece of paper that he has ever given me. I regard the four-gigantic folders of hand-outs and stories, literally bursting at the seams from two semesters worth of Creative Writing, like my own personal Bible, a veritable who's-who of the literary and cultural world. It was as if every word that passed his lips was being transmitted from a source of many lifetime's worth of knowledge and experience.

It was through that class that I was first introduced to and subsequently have developed a lifelong love of The New Yorker, NPR's This American Life, and graphic novels. It was because of him that I walked around Brooklyn's Prospect Park with a dog-eared photocopy of Tony Hiss's 1987 walking tour in hand, trying to spot landmarks and secrets invisible to the naked eye. It was his interpretation of Lolita that quickly made it my favorite book of all time—that at its core was about the power of love, and that Vladimir Nabokov (who preferred that his first name be pronounced like “Redeemer”—he taught me that one too) had a remarkable gift for capturing human emotion.

He always asked us to “slam” stories—to give them a first-impression rating from 1-10. Once he brought in an excerpt from a great short story and asked us to slam it. We all gave it 10s. He then revealed that the story was his own. He tried (and failed) to secretly video record the class once to see if he could capture us on film without the self-conscious awareness of being taped. Once a year he would hand out invitations around school to a special “End of the World” lecture, where he taught us everything he would have wanted us to know if the world were to end tomorrow. During one of these, he talked about the merits of art, that art is anything that lets you see the world differently, and that that the closest thing dogs have to art is maybe better dog food.

At the start of each class Mr. Kawano taught us a new word. My favorite was raconteur, which means storyteller. He encouraged us to compile our best stories from our lives and savor them. We didn't need to set aside time or use special equipment—storytelling was a craft that could be practiced every day. To this day, I carry around a small notebook with me at all times, recording the small, seemingly insignificant details of everyday life. It was then that I realized that storytelling would become my life's greatest ambition—that if you look hard enough, everything has its own story to tell.

I applied to college as an engineering major. My dream was to go to MIT, to become an electrical engineer and to apply all of my many years of positively-reinforced left-brain thinking to their natural and logical end. I never liked writing. English had historically been my worst subject in school and I blamed my inadequacy on my mother's Chinese background and having immigrated from Cuba at a young age. I was good at math and science, and happy to play up to the Asian stereotype. I took Creative Writing on a whim. I figured that if I enjoyed Mr. Kawano's Japanese classes, Creative Writing might be fun to try. I needed a break from AP Pre-Calculus and Honors Physics, and thought I should give my right-brain some work for a change.

The rest is history. I fell in love with his class, so much so that I even agreed to take the extra second semester elective that met during my lunch periods. When I was applying for college senior year, I came to Mr. Kawano to ask for a recommendation, for which he agreed to write. Though he obviously knew all of the colleges to which I was applying, it was only until after I got accepted and agreed to go to Oberlin that he told me he was an alumnus (he graduated in 1977 with a degree in Government). And it was only after I got to Oberlin that I would realize the profound influence that Mr. Kawano and his classes would have on the direction my life had taken.

A snapshot from Mr. Kawano's first trip to Eastern Europe, circa 2004 (photo courtesy of Rachel Kb).

Without having known Mr. Kawano or taken his classes, I would not fundamentally be the person that I am today, and for that I will be forever thankful. I looked to him for guidance and inspiration, and as a result, he changed my understanding of who I was. Writing is in my blood. My father is a writer, as was my grandfather. And though my father, to his credit, tried to encourage me to write for many years, it was only through Mr. Kawano's class that the spark actually caught fire, and I was armed with the tools and confidence to proceed. Looking back now at my high school efforts, they are sophomoric at best, but it's exactly like what he told me then—that I should never be complacent or satisfied with anything that I write, that I should always strive to be better.

I never did take an engineering class at Oberlin. In fact, I never even took a math class. As a freshman, I enrolled in Japanese II (with the help of a placement test), an English first-year seminar called “Ways of Seeing, Ways of Knowing,” Modern Japanese History, and Technique and Form in Poetry. Creative Writing became a singular passion that, after every workshop and seminar, kept bringing me back to his class. The rest of my college career followed suit—I ended up spending a semester abroad in Japan and graduated with a double major in Creative Writing and East Asian Studies (with a focus on Japan). And what did I do when I graduated from Oberlin? I became a teacher.

Beware of reflective surfaces. Collect your details lovingly. Shrink your buttons (so you're less vulnerable to your enemies). Invest in high-quality pens. Look for unwatched phenomenon (the peculiar verities in life that most people never give a second thought). Good bread is the keystone of a good sandwich. If you miss the bus, buy a lottery ticket (because in an alternate universe, you won the lottery). You can spot a good pachinko machine by the number of cigarette butts in its ashtray. Keep a journal. Garlic is a cure for all maladies. The bones of the language are near the surface.

Mr. Kawano had a lot of saying, but perhaps his favorite was “turn on your lights.” Simply put, it means that good writing draws on material from an author's life. Most ideas and concepts have already been expressed, better and more eloquently, by writers who have come before. The only way to still come up with fresh ideas is to keep our eyes and senses open—to notice and record those things that most people miss or take for granted. “As an adult,” he said, “it is an artist’s job to teach you to see as a child again.” He described our world as a wealth of things to be perceived and information to be processed. Our synapses are like a door of perception that shrinks with age until it becomes a narrow peep hole. As children, our gates are wide open, absorbing the flood of the world. He wanted us to preserve that precious time, to keep those doors open for as long as possible.

A gift from former students to Mr. Kawano, circa June 2005 (photo courtesy of Teny Eurdekian).

His favorite of all of those senses was smell. He taught us about Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. He made fun of the critics (“philistines, all of them”) who would endlessly debate the seven-volume tome and still never really understand it. To save us the trouble of reading the whole thing (the same, he said, of Moby Dick, Atlas Shrugged, and anything by Tom Clancy—all of which he deemed to be “overrated”), he boiled it down to a simple concept—that smell was our oldest sense and had the strongest connection to memory. If we looked at a picture of a firetruck or a building on fire, for example, it still wouldn't conjure the emotional intensity of escaping a burning building as much as, say, the smell of smoke or of burning embers. The same can be said of the smell of New England salmon being a more visceral reminder of a family vacation to Cape Cod than the sound of the ocean.

To prove it, he had us conduct an experiment, the same lesson that he did with probably every group of students he ever taught. He pulled out a small vial of essential freesia oil, a scent that for me is inextricably linked with his classes. He talked about his particular fondness for the scent—the delicate balance of lightness and sweetness—and dabbed a few drops of it on the front page of our notebooks. I still use that same notebook to this day—and ironically, it was only in the last three months that I filled the final page of it. He told our class to make a memory at that moment. There is still an oblong circle on the front page inscribed with the date and time: October 15, 2003, 1:44 pm. And even now, nearly eight years later, the lithe, flowery scent of freesia is still palpable.

The "Unwatched Phenomenon" board, which hung outside of Mr. Kawano's classroom (photo courtesy of Alan Paukman).

His reverence and commitment to creating memories was perhaps his greatest gift of all, and perhaps fittingly, what will live on as the most lasting and salient reminder of his impact on his students—for as long as there is freesia, there will be the nostalgic memory of his life. In class that day he played us a song by Suzanne Vega called “The Queen and the Soldier,” one of his favorites and one of the only songs that he said could really make him cry. He told me that even the most painful things in life can inspire art. Writing can be used as a source of stability and comfort, a tool for overcoming adversity. When I heard about his death, I started writing—it was my own coping mechanism for grief. I didn't need to hear the song to cry—just remembering the scent of freesia was enough.

I didn't become just any teacher. I came to China and became a foreign language teacher. It was a difficult adjustment, but an initial decision that I never thought twice about. A semester abroad in Japan had peaked my interest for the world at large and I told myself that, regardless of where, after graduation I would spend at least a year away from America. China came to me as a logical next step after Japan. Though I enjoyed my time abroad there, I was hungry for a new adventure, and one that tapped into reconnecting with my mother's heritage. Studying Chinese came with a fervor and enthusiasm similar to that of learning Japanese, and I spent my senior year at Oberlin and an intensive summer with the language before moving to China in August of 2009.

We had had some training before being shipped off and many months to ready ourselves, but nothing can adequately prepare you for two years abroad in a foreign country where you can barely speak the language and with a job that you've never done before than simply doing it. A part of me was eager for the uncertainty involved. I wanted to prove that I was capable of breaking the mold and doing something so utterly out there that I would be forced to challenge myself on a daily basis. Such was the case with Chinese—though obviously not without its daily vexations, it is something that I have developed a great joy and fondness for. A similar thing can be said of teaching.

It's difficult teaching students whose first language is not English. Encouraging them to speak is hard enough, let alone ever considering trying to instruct them in how to write. But I still try to make my students think differently about the world and question their old-world view—that there is a lot that we don't know and understand, but it our job as learners to never stop asking questions. I try my best to encourage free discussion of ideas, teach them about an America they can't learn from textbooks or movies, and above all, explain that creativity and individuality are traits that should be celebrated rather than concealed. Mr Kawano was of a rare few, one who was genuinely curious about the world and not jaded, and his example has encouraged me to pay it forward.

Then again, there are days where I can hardly bear my classes, when I'm so frustrated with students who are unruly or simply don't want to cooperate that I want to slam my own head against the wall. It is at these times that I sympathize most with Mr. Kawano. I always wondered how he ended up teaching at a prep school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan when surely there were places in the city where the majority of the students weren't spoiled, over-privileged brats who didn't appreciate his efforts. Though they don't fit the latter description, the majority of my own students probably wouldn't choose to take my class if they had the choice. Unlike Japanese and Creative Writing at Columbia Prep, Oral English is not an elective at Shanxi Agricultural University, and each of my three 30-student classes of first-year graduate students must take it to graduate.

But Mr. Kawano had a strategy for dealing with even the most obstinate of students. In a blog posted entitled “A Guide to Teaching High School,” Mr. Kawano laid out a 3-step plan for working with students. The first, he wrote, was what he coined as “Teaching in the Interstices.” Students, he said, are never more attentive than when they've succeeded in deflecting you onto a digression, and in these prime circumstances, you should always have something ready to teach them. You can start by teaching them a word like “interstices” by drawing a railway line with a terminus at both ends, where each terminus can be any origin and destination. He continued by writing:

What’s most obvious, what everyone pays most attention to, are the two endpoints. But where you’ll most likely find something new and unexpected is in the interval, or interstice (In TER stiss). You can find treasure sometimes, when you slow down the process on the way to the destination.

The second, he said was something he called “The Big Duh,” which means being aware of your persona and how you come off to others. Because your work persona is necessarily different from who you are, being able to make adjustments to that character gives you control over your effects. And the third, simply, was to “Be On Their Side.”

When I learned of Mr. Kawano's passing last week, I taught my students the word raconteur. I told them that the best stories are found in the times between moments, the interstices, and how “turning on your lights” allows you to see things you might otherwise miss. After I finished, I stepped back and waited for the gleam in each of their eyes.

In his last email to me, dated January 6, 2011, nearly a month before his death, Jon Kawano wrote the following:

Hi Daniel,

Your dispatches are pretty interesting. I wonder if you might play around with your voice some. In other words, for example, sometimes, sound a little more casual, formal, sarcastic, etc. (having control over how you are coming across) or at least be aware of your baseline "reporter" voice.

Did you hear about the Oberlin filmmaker? How is Eric?

JK

I will forever regret how long it took me to reply, and indeed when I finally did in March (a month after his death—though I didn't know it at the time), it was almost spooky to go back and read over those words. I told him about my writing, how I thought my baseline “reporter” voice was still a remnant of my work in magazine publishing and my somewhat outdated dream of becoming a foreign broadcast journalist. I told him about Eric, one of my best friends from high school, who was working at a small consulting firm in Manhattan and had recently moved into an apartment with his brother. I told him that I had not only heard of the Oberlin filmmaker (Lena Dunham) but had known her personally as we had been in Creative Writing workshops together my freshmen year. And I ended with some questions of my own: “How are the new crop of students treating you? Still working on the Flash page? Any new writing of your own of late?”

Learning of his death now, over three months since he passed, has been a surreal experience. News travels slowly in China, and it wasn't until an alumni email from my high school that I found out. I have spent the last week doing research, pouring over friend's testimonies and my own personal database—trying to find anything that would make him feel alive in my mind again. I discovered that he had just finished writing a novel called Tokyo Girls, and I thought about how much he probably would have liked to be remembered posthumously.

Similarly, it felt weird to be reading his old Flash posts from the early 2000s. It was like looking at a journal I never kept, a specter speaking from the grave. In some ways, I have been lucky that he was the first close friend of mine who has passed away. His passing made me reexamine and reassess my relationship with high school—forcing me to dredge up memories that have long since been buried, even forge connections with old acquaintances I have not talked to since graduation in an attempt to grieve and make sense of his death. I realized that despite my regrets and misgivings about my high school years, it was the time spent learning in his classes that was truly a bright spot in my life, propelling me towards becoming who I am today.

A jar of Bosporus Water on Mr. Kawano's desk. The back side says “DO NOT DRINK” (photo courtesy of Alan Paukman).

His death came very suddenly. The story is that he had had a heart condition for a number of years and was put on medication. Eventually, he got sick of the treatments and decided that he would just start eating healthy and exercising. It seemed to work well for a number of years. Then, one morning he went out for his routine jog before work when, somewhere in his neighborhood, he fell, someone called an ambulance, and he died on the way to the hospital. That week, his family organized a memorial service and many friends came to share stories. There was a table with a lot of his old belongings (letters, comics, music, stationary) that people were encouraged to take as a memory.

Mr. Kawano will forever remain one of the most unique, gifted people I have ever had the privilege to know. He doted on us, his students, because he truly believed we were geniuses—and it was our job to realize those ambitions for ourselves. He had a remarkable love for the human race and was able to find creative inspiration in everything. He took on a challenge that few teachers take up—to teach us more than knowledge, to teach us to learn from life. He gave each of us a gift—an awareness to keep the world rushing in and to never narrow our perception. He was a special man, a man of enormous ability, who looked at life through a different lens. He is the reason why I treasure emotional connections and the little moments in life, and most likely always will. The best thing that we can do now is remember his words and live his lessons in our everyday lives.

He told us once about a friend of his who had just died and he said that he missed her and missed talking to her, but that he wasn't afraid of death. He couldn't understand why anyone would be afraid of coming from something abstract, enter life trying to define it, and exit back into the abstract. Here's hoping we can all go that gently into the abstract. You will be missed, Jon. We were lucky to know you.

Day 26: If You Don't Kill Your Enemy, He Will Kill You First

2011-05-23T11:15:00.011-04:00

At Oberlin, I never had trouble finding things to do. From the sheer quantity of student clubs and organizations to the rigor of classes, it felt like I was always busy. However, for students at SAU, the situation couldn't be more different. The overwhelming majority of students complain about their incessant boredom and the incredible lack of happenings on campus. Schoolwork isn't very hard and few take part in events outside of those that they are specifically made to participate in. Though much of it comes from lack of institutional support, there are outlets for activity, so long as you know where to look.

As long-running leader of the Rubik's cube club, Bobby (middle, with a hat) has considerable sway at the school.

In early October, I unwittingly stumbled upon the SAU equivalent of Oberlin's ExCo Fair. Stands were set up along the intersection of the cafeteria and the college dormitories, large multicolored billboards were erected to advertise different student organizations, and club leaders spent the week manning tables and petitioning for student sign-ups. Among the interests represented were arts clubs (origami, knot-tying, paper-cutting), hobbyist clubs (manga, model making), sports clubs (ping pong, biking), and gaming clubs (Rubik's cube, cards, Chinese chess). There is an environmental group that is doing its part to reduce unnecessary trash burning with the introduction of giant recycling stations on campus. A film club whose members produced last spring's Campus Agents was also soliciting new members. But none was more enticing than the robe-clad men and women who were kicking and throwing each other to the ground.

It was the martial arts club, and before they could even finish describing the curriculum, I had already signed up and forked over the $1 tuition fee. Robert, the German teacher on campus, had practiced with the group after spotting them near his house, and I agreed to act as his translator if he helped me learn the moves. From the start, they didn't make it easy for us—practice was at 8am on Sunday mornings, and the weather was getting colder. At our first practice, we worked on doing falls and throws on cut-away foam boards. At our second, my instructor, a scrappy 3rd year with a history of sparring, handed me a pair of boxing gloves and told me to fight. It was a kind of initiation. It was only my second hand-to-hand fight ever, and I was annihilated. Wang Yulong never once cracked a smile as he buried his fist into my ribs and gave me a black eye. Evidently, I wasn't quick enough to defend myself. This, he said, he would teach me.

The promotional billboard for the "Energy Martial Arts Club," complete with photos of the club's members in action.

The fight instilled a certain drive in me. From then on Robert and I studied kicks, punches, dodges, blocks, and quickness drills, as we slowly got whipped into shape. Cue the Rocky sequence: together we practiced each move to exhaustion, a combination of sweat and rain lashed across our faces, the soft drone of getting stronger building slowly in the background. It was clear that our foreignness afforded us special treatment, but it was a double-edged sword. While the rest of the club practiced kicks and punches in pairs using brace pads, Robert, Yulong, and I spent each class beating the shit out of each other.

It was like our own private fight club. We couldn't tell if Yulong was doing it because he wasn't afraid of hurting us or if he was just more comfortable with foreigners. Moreover, I learned that what we were practicing wasn't actually traditional gong fu. The art can roughly be divided into three subcategories: one that stresses stretching and flexibility, another that utilizes weapons such as swords, wooden poles, and nun-chucks, and a third that emphasizes power and quickness. None of them involved putting on boxing gloves.

But it was just as well. Had it not been for playing the cello when I was young, I would have definitely wanted to take up martial arts or tai qi, and as recently as my senior year at Oberlin, I'd been interested in boxing if for no other function than as stress relief. Everyone has their reasons, and for me it was always the satisfaction of a release of tension, a show of force in overpowering a bully or a thief. Growing up, Yulong had gotten into street scuffs in his hometown. He was a long, lanky kid, and even today he wouldn't look that threatening unless you got up close to him. The fights left him with a huge gash running across his right eye that he usually covers with a hat. He later enrolled in a gong fu school where his master didn't let him stop practicing until his hands were bloody and raw. At our last spar, I saw this all written on his face, but I also felt the tenacity rising from the pit of my own stomach, ready to give it my all.

Like others that have come before it, this too is of the 800-word variety.

Day 25: Feels Worse Before It Feels Better

2011-05-22T03:37:00.003-04:00

I get uncomfortable when people do things on my behalf. I'm notoriously bad at taking compliments, receiving gifts, or asking for favors. It's not that I'm not grateful or that fiercely independent; there's just a part of me that winces at the thought of being appeased or pampered. As a result, in the states I had little interest in ever getting a massage. However, when I came to China and heard people talking about the benefits and astonishing economy of Chinese massage, I eventually acquiesced.

My first foray came last spring. Anne, Lynn, Maggie, and I hopped on bikes and plowed our way through sloppy road construction and bifurcated street crossings to the far edge of town. Lynn had been going to the same blind massage parlor for two years running, and it was, according to her, the best place in town. We slipped passed the thick plastic coverings hung like seaweed over the door and walked into a dimly-lit room with twelve massage tables, all placed within two feet of one another. The storefront could have moonlighted as a homeless shelter, so long as the inhabitants didn't mind sleeping with a 16-inch diameter incision at the top of each table to be used as a head rest.

The process of fire cupping, used as traditional medicine in many cultures, including China (photo courtesy of One Inch Punch).

I quickly learned that pain is par for the course. It is said that if a massage isn't gut-wrenchingly painful, it isn't worth the money. Unlike Western massage, you are supposed to come out of Chinese massage feeling battered, wilted, and thankful for it to be over. Another difference is that there is no direct contact with the skin—customers are fully clothed and the masseuse drapes a sheet over any exposed parts before practicing. It is not uncommon to hear shrieks coming from the opposite side of the translucent curtain used to separate customers. The supposition is that it has deep-set benefits—that over time the result of all that kneading and pounding will show with the increased resilience of your body and the lesser likelihood of that pain to resurface.

In that way, it's perhaps more similar to bodywork in all respects except price. Whereas an hour can cost you upwards of $100 in the states, 60 minutes in the hands of a blind masseuse will run you less than $5 in Taigu. It's true that labor is cheap here, especially for the blind masseuses who are trained specially in the art of massage, but it gives them a liveable income and provides a valuable service to the community. The massage starts with the back, then moves to the shoulders and the neck, before flipping over to the head, arms, legs, and feet. My legs are always the most cringe-worthy, a combination of standing for four hours in the morning during class, doing heavy weight lifting in the afternoon, and sitting down for most of the evening.

At the end of the massage, Lynn opted to have baguan, or cupping, done. In traditional medicine, cupping is used to dispel stagnation and increase qi flow to treat respiratory diseases. The masseuse uses an open flame to heat the insides of glass cups and affixes them to soft tissue primarily on the back, neck, and shoulders. As the air inside the cup cools, it contracts and draws the skin toward the surface, resulting in bulbous red and black skin markings after the cups are removed. Lying on the table, she looked like a Christmas tree covered in glass ornaments. After the treatment, we biked back to campus; me, more than a bit sore, and Lynn, her back still raised and warm to the touch.

Day 24: Bowl Cuts Won't Be Coming Back This Season

2011-05-16T12:03:00.001-04:00

It was summertime and I was eleven. My mom lopped a porcelain bowl over my head and with the other hand, she quietly trimmed around the circumference of my skull until the sides of my hair looked roughly flush—a mushroom cloud billowing out of the top of my cranium. It never registered as out of the ordinary—some of the girls in my class were just hitting puberty and I had too many other things on my mind aside from whether or not my sideburns were even. Still, my mom insisted that I should have my hair cut professionally before I got to middle school. And so it was decided—we went to the now defunct Supercuts on West 8th Street in Manhattan and by the time the nail-biting, 20-minute ordeal was over, I was in tears.

To this day, I still can't pinpoint exactly what tipped me off, but the loss of my bangs cannot be overstated. What I saw that afternoon when I stared bleakly into my mom's cosmetics mirror on the 2nd floor of a K-Mart, was a side part, hair that fluffed up at the top, and was buzzed flat and prickly all the way up the back. In short, it was a hairstyle not too dissimilar from the way I have kept my hair in the twelve years since, and my mom has never once had to cut my hair again. My hair has been a defining part of my identity ever since, so I suppose if I ever track down that hairdresser, not only should I give him the tip I had walked out on, but I should also extend my hand and thank him as well.

But it wasn't just my first professional haircut that left me wanting. I daresay that in my whole life, I've never once had a haircut I was completely satisfied with in America. Usually, this would necessitate finding a new hairstylist, but it's been that way with a myriad of barbershops in all corners of the city. The general arc of a haircut for me goes something like this: reel from the misery of my first two weeks with a haircut that is too short, lavish the four weeks when my hair has grown out to the point where it looks presentable, and endure the next two weeks until I can finally bring myself to go back to the barber again with hair that is too long and unruly.

I have come to terms with this fact, accepting simply that my hair will look bad for a quarter of my life, but that it will inevitably go back to looking decently again for another half of it. This has afforded me the opportunity to take a lot of risks that others might be afraid would make or break their image. At Oberlin, I never paid for a haircut, and instead, depended on friends to cut my hair for little or no money, giving would-be barbers free reign to try almost anything. Most had at least had access to a hair trimmer, which was really the only criteria. As a result, I've ended up with lopsided fauxhawks, short-trim buzz-cuts, and straight-hair Afros, all in the name of fashion and frugality.

The impeccably-decorated interior of the "Gold Cut Modeling" hair salon located in the back of the campus bath-house.

My hair is a big part of my identity here in China too. It is black, which automatically sets off alarm bells in people's minds, prompting questions of whether or not it is my natural color, and then, if it is, how it is possible that such a thing could be. Additionally, one of the things my students always joke about is when I walk in to class at 8am on a Monday morning, my hair in kinks and cowlicks, and proceed to teach a lesson as usual. In China, hair styles change about as quickly as the weather—after a long winter vacation, it always shocks me to find about half of my class with their hair newly layered or permed, sprouting brown curls or blond highlights.

So, when it was inevitably time for my first haircut in China, I was understandably a bit nervous. If my haircuts always ended up so badly in America in spite of being able to speak the language, how could they possibly look good here? My first haircut came immediately following the shut-down of campus due to H1N1. As a result, the countless barbershops and hair salons that lined North Yard were temporarily closed down, so I relegated myself to the only place left. It was a small, brightly-lit salon located in the back of the campus-run bath house. In a country where any given establishment is either run down and dilapidated or incredibly gaudy, it took the latter role.

It has the kind of atmosphere you might expect. A row of neat leather-pleated barber stools line the front of the store opposite a long full-length mirror. Like most other barbershops, there is a speaker in the back blasting pop music as a way to drum up business and the walls are plastered with pin-ups of fawning young women sporting new hairdos. In the back sits a high chair with a stone basin for a headrest—here, it is standard practice for patrons to first have their hair shampooed and washed before getting cut. On my very first visit, I was accompanied by Anne who offered to help translate for me in case any difficulties arose. It felt like my mom at my first haircut, telling the hairdresser careful instructions that he would later go on to ignore.

I got a chance to meet the owner of the hair salon who, like most of the other employees, was simultaneously nervous and overjoyed at the prospect of cutting a foreigner's hair. When asked about the poster, he said he had personally cut the hair of each of the girls pictured.

In my experience since, I've probably had eight or nine haircuts at a handful of different barbershops on campus. Whereas before I was nervous about getting my hair cut, now I actually look forward to the slightly goofy conversations, always fixated on some detail of my life in America, and how much more I can understand each time I go. I always tell them the same thing about how to cut my hair: about the same shape as it is now, a little shorter on the sides, and you can use the electric cutting machine on the back. They wash and dry my hair twice, plus throw in the occasional shave, all for eight yuan, just over a dollar, and about twenty times cheaper than any haircut in the states. And miraculously, the haircuts I've gotten here have been among the best I've ever had.

I think it has a lot to do with them knowing intuitively how to cut “Asian hair.” Whereas Nick and James have occasionally gotten the short end of the stick and other foreigners opt not to get haircuts at all, I revel in the new-found realization that my hair doesn't have to look bad for a quarter of my life. It can look good mere minutes after walking out of the hair salon. On my last visit, I had just gotten out of a conversation about job opportunities in America after college, and was walking up to pay my tab. The owner looked at me and then looked at his watch. This is too much, he smiled, motioning me to take back some change. The mid-day price is only five.

This post too is of the “double feature” variety, totaling about 1200 words.

Day 23: If There Is No Alcohol, You Can't Say Anything

2011-04-28T23:51:00.023-04:00

In America, there is a certain cult built around turning 21 as a rite of passage, but in China, there is no legal age for drinking. Here, there are twelve year-olds who serve as cashiers at liquor stores and kids face no difficulty buying beer at corner groceries. In fact, the only times I have had to show my ID in the last two years have been to book a hotel room or board a plane.

But despite the lack of restriction on age, it's hard to say when people actually start to drink. Jiayu, a friend of mine from Oberlin, told me that like dating, drinking is one of those things that you wouldn't do as a “good student” all the way up through high school, but then at some point, it just becomes second nature. Though I can't speak for Chinese high school students, I can certainly echo the carefree attitude that accompanies drinking for everyone past the age of 18. In my experience in Asia, drinking in China is second only to Korea in both its pervasiveness and the degree to which it is taken seriously by society.

There is a lot of nuance and structure to drinking culture in China. Customarily, you should toast everyone at the table, starting with the guest of honor and moving down the ranks. You always want to toast with alcohol unless the person you are toasting isn't drinking, in which case you can use soy milk. Additionally, you always want to have your glass lower than theirs, a sign of both modesty and respect for a person of authority.

High-level Commnunist cadres, or ganbu, have to drink as part of their jobs, and, for the most part, if you can't drink, you don't get ahead. Of course, by the time you're at the top, you can have any number of lower-level minions do your drinking on your behalf, but the road up is paved with clear glass bottles of baijiu. We joke that Chinese President Hu Jintao must have an exceptional tolerance, along with everyone else in the inner CCP sanctum. A student who was applying to be a Party member once told me that male members were expected to be able to drink an entire bottle of baijiu or a whole case of beer in a single sitting. It doesn't hurt that alcohol is remarkably cheap here. A 16-ounce bottle of beer starts at about 12 cents, and baijiu prices vary much like vodka's, increasing exponentially with regard to quality.

After dance parties and "Chinese nights" at my house, we stack the cans and bottles outside to be collected by old men and women who recycle them for a small profit.

In truth, it's not only Communist leaders who drink. There is a certain ease with which drinking cuts across all sectors of the population. Francis, my Chinese tutor went over a joke with me that's been circulating widely on Chinese media outlets. It lists the reasons why different people drink and the role that alcohol plays in people's lives. Without drinking, it says, high-level cadres wouldn't have a friend. Without drinking, mid-level cadres wouldn't have any information. Without drinking, low-level cadres wouldn't have a shred of hope. Without drinking, disciplinary enforcers wouldn't have a clue. Without drinking, commoners wouldn't have any happiness. Without drinking, brothers wouldn't have any feeling. And without drinking, men and women wouldn't have a chance!

Of course, we Shansi Fellows have a joke of our own—that Shansi turns you into an alcoholic. Either you live in a country where alcohol is so prevalent that you are made to drink it, or in a culture so alcohol-repressed that you have to drink secretly just to cope. Though specifically here, it's hard to say whether it's China that truly makes you an alcoholic or you.

It would seem, then, that there would be an entire segment of the population dying off from alcohol poisoning each year, but the truth is that genetics might help more than anything else. Most Chinese are allergic to alcohol and flush when they drink (lending itself to the “Asian glow” phenomenon in the states), and have a low enough tolerance that it's easy to spot someone who's severely intoxicated before it's too late. With that said, though, it's still not uncommon to see a group of men, blurry-eyed and slurring, propping each other up as they try to walk home, or a guy in a business suit and slacks, a lit cigarette in one hand, stumble out of a restaurant in the middle of a meal to throw up.

Drinking culture is both ironic and logic-defying, making it infuriating to outsiders. But nothing more so than it's best kept secret: no one actually likes to drink. Baijiu is notoriously caustic, and even Tsingtao, the most expensive and highly-touted domestic beer, tastes bland and watered-down. At banquets and big dinners, alcohol becomes a necessary evil, acting as a social lubricant, but aside from alcoholics, few people in China are casual drinkers—they either drink because they have to or they don't. More accurately, people appreciate the powers that alcohol affords them, the ability to loosen up and speak their mind without consequence. What's more, being drunk virtually absolves you of all guilt—Chinese people tolerate behavior of all sorts without so much as a second thought.

The best possible situation, of course, is drinking for the fun of it, where there is no secret agenda or underlying social pressures. But even among the foreigners and other good friends here in Taigu, that pressure is sometimes hard to escape—certain occasions inevitably call for the introduction of alcohol. To be sure, most of the burden falls on men as Chinese women are almost always spared from excessive drinking, but foreign women aren't afforded that same luxury. Consumption has dropped markedly since last year, but we still have our moments. Drinking fuels fun and fun fuels memories. We used to say that you could judge a week by the length of Nick's hair—long and unkempt meant a good drinking week and freshly-washed meant we hadn't done our job well.

Rarely does a big dinner out with friends go by without the appearance of large glass bottles of Snow beer.

Still, there's something uniquely Chinese about the experience. Just last night, all six of us Americans sat outside of a shaokao (street stall barbecue) restaurant in North Yard with a bunch of Chinese friends, switching effortlessly between Chinese and English, with a couple dozen sticks of chuanr (skewered meat and vegetables on sticks) and a keg of fresh draft beer. I must admit that casual drinking, though obviously not without its dangers, is a part of Chinese culture I enjoy the most.

It prompted me at our most recent banquet to playfully joke with Xiao Fan that we should have banquets more often. Later on in the night, he would belligerently go on to chastise a visitor from America for trying to make a toast without alcohol, but I caught him as the drinking had just begun. Xiao Fan's entire job as director of the Foreign Affairs Office calls for constant wining and dining—making visiting scholars and new teachers feel welcome on campus. He looked at me with a down-turned smile, the bags under his eyes deep-set and heavy. That would mean you'd have to drink everyday, he said, his hair stiff and gray next to his slowly reddening face. And you really wouldn't want that.

This post can be considered a "double feature," a longer rumination spanning 1200 words, double my project's allotted limit.

Day 22: All the World's a Banquet

2011-04-23T23:39:00.003-04:00

The first time that I sat across the table from Xiao Fan, both of us dressed in suit jackets and ties, each holding a shot of baijiu raised expectantly towards the ceiling, I knew that I was onto something. As the appetizers were being presented on the giant self-revolving Lazy Susan, we were on our third of three mandatory preliminary shots before eating, and Xiao Fan had just started telling us the story of how he applied to be a Communist cadre. Never in my professional life did I envision having the opportunity to get drunk with my boss. In fact, it's less an invitation than an obligation. An aversion to alcohol or a refusal to drink comes with an incredible loss of face for the host—in this case, our bosses at the Foreign Affairs Office and the high-powered school and Communist officials who we dine with—so, the best way to show our respect and gratitude is to drink, and drink a lot.

But like most things in China, there and rules and etiquette to banquet culture. First is seating. The guest of honor sits in the chair furthest from the door, so that he or she can see the entire room. Seated around them are those next in rank, slowly fanning out to fill the table. Next, is how to drink. Though it may sound simple, it is deceptively so—there is a method for whom to toast first and when, as well as how often. Third is how to eat. Banquets typically feature delicious food too expensive for routine consumption, including sweet-and-sour shrimp, fried braised lamb, and abalone. Though you never want to be the first to eat any one dish, you are guaranteed to be bursting by meal's end.

Just your average midday banquet spread (photo courtesy of Alexandra Sterman).

James, as analytical as he is, came up with a formula to analyze just how much we drink at banquets: 3 + 2(n-1) + x, where '3' stands for the number of shots we drink at the beginning of the meal before actually eating anything, 'n' is the number of people in attendance (we drink twice with each person not including ourselves, both proposing a toast and receiving a toast), and 'x' is the number of additional times any one of those people toasts us, thus voiding the entire equation. Depending on the company, we can drink upwards of 20 shots (a combination of baijiu, red wine, and beer) in the two hour affair. And almost without fail at the end of each banquet, we end up staggering back home, either ready to continue the drunken revelry or pass out from exhaustion. One or two times, we roped Xiao Fan into an impromptu dance party at our house, but more often than not, despite the claims that alcohol will actually make us “teach better,” we have had to cancel an afternoon class after a lunchtime banquet due to feeling sick.

Gerald, James, and I, toasting with our boss Xiao Fan (photo courtesy of Alexandra Sterman).

Banquets sort of remind me of big company galas in America—a lot of eating, a lot of drinking, and a lot of networking in the midst of the requisite drunken antics. When our Shansi bosses Deb and Carl came to visit, we were veritably banquet-ed out, but usually, they happen infrequently enough that we really look forward to them. Everyone is dressed up in a fancy room with more courses of food than there are people at the table, all ballyhooing and having a good time. For us, that usually means making small talk, getting thanked for our contributions to the school, and spending the rest of the time exuberantly toasting. Indeed, it is the alcohol that bonds us more than anything else.

Day 21: The Boy with the Dragon Tattoo

2011-04-20T21:51:00.002-04:00

When I was 17, I made a bet with my dad. I had just graduated from high school and was on my way to becoming a wild, sex-crazed, alcoholic—in other words, a college student. Realizing this at an early stage, my dad tried to capitalize. Despite my gripes about tattoos and piercings in the past, my dad bet that before I turned 21, I would have already succumbed to getting some kind of permanent fixture on my body. To make a long story short, his $50 went a long way towards buying alcohol for my wild rager of a 21st birthday party. But even though the thought of actually getting a tattoo hadn't ever seriously crossed my mind, like most people, I still imagined what it would be. I thought about a short stanza of poetry or some small homage or allusion to a favorite novel or piece of music. It behooves me, then, at the ripe age of 23 to consider getting a tattoo of another sort entirely—namely, an enormous dragon across my upper arm.

Me, proudly brandishing my dragon tat, with Daisy, one of my former students (photo courtesy of Alexandra Sterman).

Allow me to explain. For this year's Halloween party, we needed to up the ante. Halloween last year came right in the cross-hairs of the H1N1 crisis and our planned dancing spectacle was canned by the administration. In the year since, the AV room which previously housed such events had been demolished, making that too an impossibility. So, we decided, we would hold a soiree in my house, not too dissimilar from our bi-monthly dance parties. The only difference was that this time we would be in costume.

James, dressed as a visually-impaired ghost (he didn't want to cut holes in his only bed-sheet), alongside our candle-lit jack-o-lanterns (photo courtesy of Alexandra Sterman).

After the usual ritual of messaging friends, chaos-proofing the house to the best of my abilities, and buying a couple cases of beer, the only thing left was to get in costume myself. As I scoured my closet for costume ideas, I was getting discouraged. I brought so few clothes with me to China that there was little room for anything particularly fun or outrageous. Eventually, I settled on my Cleveland Cavaliers basketball jersey—and if there was one thing I knew about professional basketball players, it was that they had an enormous assemblage of tattoos. Alexandra helped to create a pink heart with the word “Mom” embellished on my left arm, while Ray drew free-hand the coiling dragon from an image we found online. I wasn't the only one to come in costume though. Friends came dressed as ninjas, mummies, superstars, soldiers, cowboys, and cats. But none was more creative than my Chinese tutor Francis, who showed up in drag, painted face and make-up, bejeweled bandana, and a mask.

One of Ray's carved pumpkins, after sitting out on her porch for three months.

The week leading up to the Halloween bonanza was met with an appropriate amount of holiday cheer. Like last year, I did pumpkin carving in class with my students and I bought small bundles of candy to give to my English majors when they came over to trick-or-treat. Ray did pumpkin carving with some of her students too and the carved jack-o-lanterns adorned her porch well after Halloween and into the new year. When we came back from winter break, they were still there, their scary faces warped and rotted with age. When you think about it, pumpkins make a pretty good metaphor for human existence—when we are young, our faces are waxy and tight, and as we age, the skin starts to sag, we sprout wrinkles, gums get mushy, teeth get swallowed up, we grow bulbous, our faces decompress. Perhaps a similar thing can be said of arms too. Maybe I'll have to start second-guessing that dragon tattoo sooner than I thought.

Day 20: No Such Thing As a Failed Experiment

2011-04-19T05:34:00.007-04:00

Like all of our graduate students, Bobby does experiments. Each daoshi or adviser in the college is responsible for a group of students often according to major, and assigns them to do field work with the intention of collecting results. Some take soil samples to measure for the amount of carbon and nitrogen, others test the medicinal properties of certain local fauna for the prevention of disease, and still more dabble in animal husbandry and crop cultivation.

Though some of the experiments might actually sound interesting, most students here would tell you otherwise. The truth is that many students don't like their majors—experiments are boring and time-consuming, students are called by their advisers at the drop of a hat, and whole weeks might have to be spent doing research in far-flung farming villages. Advisers are notoriously cruel, chastising students who don't get the results they want. What's more, most of what the students do is grunt work that their adviser later takes credit for. The results get tabulated in exhaustive jargon-heavy reports by PhD candidates that we proof-read before they are sent off to scientific journals.

Grad students in lab coats play amateur scientists at the soil analysis and treatment lab in the main teaching building.

One weekend in the fall, Bobby invited me to go with him to his research site about 10 kilometers from the university. Bobby hailed a taxi right outside of the main gate and he, Lynn, and I all piled in, the early afternoon sun bleating through the windows. It took the driver a while to find it—on a tiny village road, muddy and unpaved, that if you hadn't known any better, could have been an irrigation ditch or an inlet to a small family farm.

Bobby explained that daoshi never actually go to the fields themselves. Rather, students work with local farmers in order to coordinate their research. Bobby introduced me to Mr. Zhou, a handsome, though sun-beat man of about 40, with a slight Taigu accent and a long rake. Having noticed his perplexed look, I explained that I was from America and he smiled, sighing a deep sigh of relief, as if to say, Thank god, I haven't gone crazy yet.

Once there, Bobby put us to work. Our task was to comb through the branches of date trees and put small white tags around the dates that were damaged. There were maybe ten or twelve trees planted in neat rows, and almost every branch had at least one or two such dates—warped, pockmarked, swollen, sprouting a tumor-like growth, or otherwise scarred like a victim of chemical warfare. Lynn numbered the tiny white tags 1 through 50 and I looped them around the dates on the branches.

A healthy date tree in the suburbs of Taigu, taken during a date-picking expedition in the fall of 2009.

Bobby meticulously cataloged each of the 50 samples in a small notebook, measuring each one against an informal rubric: one was pretty harmless, two was average, and three meant serious. Most of the dates were either twos or threes. Bobby explained that he did this work every Sunday, the only day each week that the factories get shut down. It was also the one day each week where we could clearly make out the mountains in the distance. Sure enough, not far up the road, a massive cinder-block complex seemed to rise up out of the ground, its brick smokestack casting a shadow across the field.

The goal of the experiment was to test the effects of chemical pesticides on resisting factory pollution over time. It was hard to tell how effective it was—to be sure, many of the dates were rendered inedible, but the rest looked safe enough to eat, at least at a cursory glance. When I asked Bobby why the county didn't just shut down the factory, he turned to me and laughed. He would be back the following weekend to take more tests, just as he was the previous, for as many weeks as his adviser stipulated. As we were leaving, Mr. Zhou handed me and Lynn a bundle of freshly picked corn and thanked us again for coming.

We started hitchhiking for a while to try to get back to town. There were no cabs that passed by and no “black cars” either, private vehicles with a “Taxi” sign affixed to the top of the roof like a beret. After a while, we gave up on that too. As the sun was setting, there was only the black asphalt stretched out in front of us like a tarp. Finally, we spotted an old man puttering down the road in a beng beng che—a three-wheeled cart powered by a generator rigged to a thick white ribbon that pulls the wheels forward like the treads of a tank. Compliantly, we hopped in the open flat bed, my eyes fixed on the smoke pumping out of the tiny gasket in the back, slowly filling the moonless skies.

For the word-counters of the world, this too is of the 800-word variety.

Day 19: Request for Casual Leave of Absence

2011-04-17T04:09:00.002-04:00

Each day in class I have exactly the same routine—I unpack my bag, write the topic of the lesson in big letters on the blackboard (along with any requisite warm-up questions), and say the same two things: "Hello, everyone!" and "How are you?” Then I take attendance. And just like clockwork, one or two students will undoubtedly pull me aside to report that so-and-so has "asked for leave," sometimes hinting at a reason, and sometimes without so much as a matter-of-fact nod, as if "asking for leave" and actually "being excused" are one and the same. And every time I tell them that “asking for leave” and just plain “being absent” are ostensibly the same thing, at least when it comes to grading, and each time they nod and smile and go back to their seats.

My students have had a bad habit of not coming to class. Admittedly, the situation is much better now than it was this time last year when more than half of my class would “ask for leave” for one reason or another, but still, the excuses are amusing. The best, though, by far was last year when James was doing a walking lesson through campus. As he was describing places and things in English, he went through a student's dormitory only to find one of his students playing Warcraft even though that student had “asked for leave” to do experiments with his adviser. As much as I loathe the “asking for leave” ritual and no matter how easy it is to abuse, it is one of the few times in class when students, without any prompts or soliciting from me, will actually volunteer information, no matter how inane or inconsequential.

I've gotten excuse notes before in class, but this is by far my favorite.

In addition to getting them to speak more, I'm doing my best to motivate my students to change other ingrained habits about oral English class. One of the most prevalent also happens to be the most grating on my sanity—the eternal query of “how are you?” To this end, one of my Chinese friends told me a joke. A group of Chinese coal miners are trapped in a coal mine after a mine collapse. After many days of the miners surviving on small reserves of food and water, international aid finally comes to try and perform a rescue. Calling down into the hole, an American aid worker asks, “How is everybody doing down there?” The Chinese coal miners steel themselves for a moment, a little nervous about speaking in English. “Fine, thank you, and you?” they shout back. Surprised and relieved, the aid workers leave, confident that the miners are well taken care of.

The joke not only illustrates the problem with rote memorization without context, but also the difficulties that arise in a culture where there is little contact with the outside world. Though things have gotten markedly better, it was especially hard for my first-year English majors at the start of the semester. For most of them, I was the first American they had ever met, and having a foreign teacher in and of itself is an adjustment—learning how to participate, engage in discussion, and interact in group activities with one another. But even then, conversation is limited—there are always those subjects that we can't breach in class. The truest showing of “freedom of speech” comes only with those Chinese friends who have weathered the challenges of opening up to and befriending us, to engage in the dialogue for which we were all sent here in the first place—of promoting cultural exchange and understanding.

I See No Changes, and That's the Way It Is

2011-03-28T09:42:00.005-04:00

James has been making muffins all this week. Each day, I help him take an armload full of raw materials—eggs, flour, bananas, baking powder, and water—to the main teaching building and set them up in his classroom. As I go across the hall to start my own class, he leads a couple of students back home for a second trip to bring over a collapsible round table (for cooking purposes) and a small toaster oven containing a flat baking tin and a muffin tray. For the lesson, James goes over the requisite cooking vocabulary on the board and proceeds to demonstrate the cooking words involved with making muffins in class—cutting, pouring, mixing, stirring, baking, etc. Most of the time, he leaves enough time at the end of class to actually bake the muffins, cut them up, and then give them to his students to try. But occasionally, he ends up having to haul the whole eggy, doughy batch back home before popping the muffin tin into our little toaster oven here.

Paired with homemade chai masala, these scones were lovingly made by Anne and Kelly using the toaster oven last May.

For a miniscule red box, it's certainly had its work cut out for it. In the last two years alone, it has been used to make bagels, pizza, chocolate cake, cookies, scones, apple pie, bread, and increasingly, banana muffins. Though it isn't quite ideal for the job, and indeed, the end product sometimes ends up being just as surprising as the sum of its parts, it does the work, and has the desired result of putting us closer to our American culinary roots than anything else we can buy here. As it slowly percolates in the living room, the house begins to fill with the smell of bananas, its scent feeling both close and far away—from the dust-covered fruit stalls that line North Yard to the thick bunches that hang down along the lush forests of Laos and Thailand—eventually forming into plump, lightly-browned morsels of fluffy goodness. Like every other baked good in Taigu that has come before it, it is met with equal parts greedy fanaticism and wonderment.

My lesson this week is considerably less interesting. I'm starting a new topic on travel and am soliciting “most interesting” stories from my students' winter vacations. In the process, I told them about my own journey, which came with a fair degree of guilt, both with respect to my disposable income as a teacher and the relative ease of mobility afforded by my passport. Still, they all got a kick out of the 50 or so photos that I printed out and the stack of bills and coins that I brought in to show them from all of the various countries. As having taught for close to two years now, I should know better than to ask these things of my students. I started every Monday class last year by asking my students what they did over the weekend. Their responses ranged from “played with friends” to “ate a big meal” to “washed clothes.” To be fair, it's not too far from the activities that typify my own life here, but it still didn't do much to inspire confidence in the kinds of anecdotes they would come up with following nearly two months without class.

For more than 90% of my students, their responses fell into a handful of general categories—spent time with their family, attended their high school reunion, watched TV, attended a friend's wedding, played computer games, got drunk and did karaoke, helped with chores around the house, cooked meals for the parents (some, for the first time ever), or looked after aging grandparents or new nieces and nephews. One of my first-year English majors excitedly related a story about playing mahjong with some of her friends. At the end of the game, she said, the loser had a punishment. She paused and scanned the room, suppressing a laugh with her hands. They had to drink cold water! Very few of them left their hometown at all and even less explicitly traveled during the break. It doesn't help that China does a uniquely bad job during spring festival (Chinese New Year) of fostering travel. In a country where tens of millions of people are all leaving where they live to take trains, buses, and planes sometimes over hundreds of miles to make it back to their ancestral hometown is an immensely frustrating feat that leaves little desire or opportunity in the way of actually traveling for fun.

Along with the “most interesting” stories, I paired this lesson with a general discussion on travel, including the question, “if you could go anywhere in the world, where would it be?” Again, it didn't make for the most stimulating conversation. Our students all seem to have preconceived notions on which places are worth visiting and why. There was “romantic Paris,” “mysterious Egypt,” “snowy Vancouver,” and “lavender Provence.” Hawaii, Tibet, and interestingly, the Sahara Desert were also strong contenders. It was as if they had all seen the same travel documentary explicitly stating where people go when they travel—as if this handful of places constitutes all the world's tourism traffic. Frustrated with the seeming lack of creativity, Gerald recently took up an experiment in his classes in which he asked each of his students to come up with an “original thought,” which he defined as something no one has ever thought of before. I did my own creative writing exercise too, having students use the photos from my travel to write their own short stories. In both cases, about a quarter did the assignment well— not basing their thought or story on a movie, a novel, or an event in Chinese history.

This lesson, along with James's impromptu baking, make up a couple of lessons I have come to coin as “greatest hits.” At the beginning of the year, there are mock restaurant lessons centered around ordering food. Around Halloween, there is pumpkin carving in class. For a clothing lesson, we come in wearing four or five layers of tops, bottoms, and accessories and manually strip each one of them off to the delight of our students; later they describe their own clothing as they act as fashion models in a runway show. A topic on marriage and dating yields both a speed dating exercise as well as a marriage counseling skit in which pairs of couples give the fictitious reasons for why they want a divorce. And just in the last year, James and I created a New York City lesson utilizing photos of places of interest that students then locate using subway maps. By their nature, these are the kinds of lessons that have been passed down for years among each generation of foreign teachers. Like a gigantic game of telephone, the best lessons are those that survive through oral history with minor changes made along the way, resulting in a kind of institutional memory. A similar thing can be said about our day-to-day lives.

Pumpkin carving in my Group C class for Halloween last year.

Each of us here in Taigu essentially has the same life—we all teach the same number of hours at about the same times, live in the same kinds of houses, and take the same vacations. We have meals together, share the same friends, and participate in the same group activities. The difference comes in the details. Though some of us spend more time exercising and others watching movies, some playing computer games and others writing, it is rare when any one of breaks significantly from that mold. Even for Fellows in years past, I hazard to guess that only minor tweaks have been made to the same general formula. An old favorite restaurant goes out of business and is replaced with a new one. Some exciting new fad enchants the group for a week before falling out of favor. New Chinese friends are made to account for those who have come before and graduated. Every winter, snow falls, and every fall, dust storms blow in from the north. There isn't that much flexibility to work outside of the box. New Fellows come and go, but Taigu, and, indeed, Shanxi Agricultural University, more or less remain unchanged.

When I arrived last fall to start my second year, I was surprised when Alexandra lamented that she had “stolen Anne's life.” It was true that she had inherited Anne's room, her job, her friends, her two cats, and even some of her old belongings—there greeting her near the door were Anne's old slippers. Though I never really considered it as such, I stole Ben's life in Taigu the same way that James stole Beth's and Ray stole Nick's. In not too long from now, either Skylar or Claire (the two new Fellows selected for next year) will be stealing my life and everything that comes with it. Two weeks ago, we went to the Pingyao restaurant in town, Nick's old favorite, and had a big meal there with a bunch of Chinese friends. It was like old times—we all got drunk and had a blast—and yet, it still felt different. There were no indulgent speeches, no discussions on obscure video games, and no over-the-top singing of “Just a Friend” by meal's end. Now more than ever, I'm remembering that it's the people who make Taigu what it is, and every shift in rank yields new changes regardless if everything else stays the same.

All six Americans and a bunch of Chinese friends and former students celebrating at the Pingyao restaurant in town.

Probably the most challenging and frustrating part of this Fellowship is the fact that no one is here to tell us if we're doing a good job or not or what makes a meaningful experience and what doesn't. Like our lesson plans, the best tidbits about what past Fellows have done get filtered down, but it's our job to interpret and make sense of those stories. Ultimately, it is up to each of us to decide our Fellowship for ourselves, and that is something that can't be passed down or replicated. In the same way that life has gone on without Nick, Anne, David, and Matthias from last year, I know too that life will go on even after I leave Taigu. The sadness gets tempered by catharsis—knowing that someone will be here to pick up my life where I left it and leave his or her own mark on this place. Next year will see the first time in the 100-year history of the Taigu site where the female Fellows will actually outnumber the males. The female majority will certainly make for some interesting differences in the foreigner dynamic. And so even if I see no changes, it doesn't mean that they still won't take place well after I have gone.

To the Losers Go the Spoils

2011-03-20T02:12:00.003-04:00

Last Friday, our bosses came to James and I for help. Simply put, there was a problem at the school. As a result of not passing the foreign teacher-taught oral English classes over the last year, just under 60 graduate and doctoral students were in danger of flunking out of Shanxi Agricultural University. This is not the first time I have written about these students, nor do I expect it to be my last. The students had all failed our classes for a variety of reasons. Some had plainly never once attended class. Others had come for one or two classes before deciding to stop altogether. Others had taken a leave of absence after finding employment in another city or county. Still others never took the final exam either of their own volition or because of our mandates prohibiting students who had missed a certain percentage of classes from doing so. Regardless, school policy states that if a student fails even one class, he or she won't be able to receive a diploma.

From a Western educational perspective, this would not be so great of a problem. After all, it was the individual choices by these students that resulted in their failing grades and not a fault of the university. But from a Chinese point of view, this is a great problem indeed. After all, if of the 380 or so students who matriculate every year in graduate school, 60 are not graduating, that's over 15% who aren't getting their degree. This reflects badly on the university and serves as a warning for prospective students that they only stand an 85% chance of graduating. Like most of the cultural conflicts we Westerners come across in China, this too is a matter of “face”—in other words, a high statistic effectively discourages new students from applying, thus bringing down the school's credibility. In a country like China where ratings for high schools and colleges are weighed even more heavily than in America, every failing student can make a difference.

In truth, America sees its own shortcomings when it comes to higher education. No college likes to have a low graduation rate, in the same way that no college wants a high freshmen transfer rate. Both are indicators of a certain dissatisfaction on the part of the student body—and dissatisfaction translates to loss of prestige. Even in my high school, there had been a rumor that everyone in jeopardy of flunking out was expelled before they reached their senior year for fear that they would bring down the school's perfect 100% graduation rate. That's where supposed grade inflation may factor in to high-end Ivy League colleges and where cheating teachers flub standardized test results at Chicago public schools (see the incredibly smart Freakonomics). Still, it was nothing compared to the proposal that our bosses in Taigu schemed for me and James.

If our bosses Zhao Hong and Xiao Fan weren't the final word on the decision, they were, at least, the masterminds behind the proposition that followed. In order for all of those students not to fail, they would have a retest. That retest—in the form of a written essay in English—would come on a Sunday following two days of classes—two on Friday and two on Saturday, each for two hours. The classes were scheduled to be taught, we soon learned, by James and I, as well as a Chinese English professor—with me and James splitting Friday classes and the other teacher taking the Saturday ones. The business of administering the final exam and the grading would also fall to the Chinese English teacher. When asked about the content of those classes, our boss Zhao Hong simply smiled and laughed. Anything, she told us in Chinese. You can even scold the class for the entire two hours if you want. James and I were flatly appalled. The administration was essentially telling us that coming to four classes and taking a makeshift final exam is all that it takes to pass oral English at Shanxi Agricultural University.

It would have been easier had the Foreign Affairs Office taken a more lenient approach to disciplinary enforcement in the past. Quite the contrary, Zhao Hong was our biggest advocate last spring when it came to failing the scores of students who had only in the last week started coming to our classes. Now, it seemed she was telling us the opposite: that you can be a bad student and there will be no consequences to your actions, and what's more, the system will do everything in its power to help you succeed! Zhao Hong assured us that it wasn't an easy decision. With one or two failing students, it wouldn't have been a problem, but 60 was too huge a pill for the school to swallow. Under pressure from her higher-ups, she relented, despite the fact that she recognized it wasn't fair—both to us and to the dozens of students we had taught who actually deserved the grades they received. But ultimately, as is want to be the case in China, there was nothing she could do to change it. What she was asking of us, then, was to teach those make-up classes, even if we treated them as nothing more than a favor to her.

James was very resistant at first, and for good reason. It felt like all of our conventional Western wisdom was turned on its head—that those who work hard and ultimately reach the top are rewarded, and that cheaters and low-lives are punished by society. It immediately became apparent that the very act of “failing” a student may be a totally Western concept. It would seem that other departments at the school didn't have this problem—that even students who never once showed up to class were still buoyed along to subsequent grades by the Chinese education system. That might explain, at least, how we have students in our classes who have taken over ten years of English and can barely read the alphabet. Furthermore, it made English, and more specifically, our English classes, come off as meaningless—that students should not be held back or denied their degree for failing something as petty as an oral English class. With James away for the weekend in Beijing, it was up to my guilty conscience to eventually suck up my pride and agree.

On Friday morning, I felt like I had walked into a cold, dead place. On the front door, a crude bolt-lock opened up to a room full of lethargic spirits and dull, blank stares. The classroom lent itself to the kind of place where learning goes to die—more so than my regular classroom, the lighting seemed ghostly and hollow, the arrangement of the desks felt entirely impersonal, and the drywall paneling had undergone torpor with age. Photographs of Mao paired with inspirational quotes lined each of the four walls. The teaching building directly overlooked North Yard, and all of the honking, shouting, and loud music from the street wafted its way up to my classroom even with the windows closed. I felt like I could have been entering a rehab facility for drop-outs and delinquents—it was clear that no one, myself and my boss included, had any desire to be there.

My boss was the first to address the class. Generally an incredibly mild-mannered and sweet woman, Zhao Hong never sounded more fierce. She bluntly told the class of flunkies that they were there because of school policy and not because they deserved a second chance. She herself commented on the injustice of how coming to four classes is not a substitute for an entire year's worth of English classes and talked at length about the enormous opportunity that they had wasted—the chance to take English classes with an actual American—an opportunity that other, perhaps more motivated, students would have killed for. At the end of her spiel, she took attendance—a regulation, she told me earlier, of assessing that the students are at least capable of attending any class—before gracefully exiting and handing the floor over to me.

In truth, I was much more nervous about teaching this class than usual. Based on the nature of the class, Zhao Hong originally wanted me and James to teach because we would at least have a scant degree of familiarity with the students. After all, they were students who had had Nick, Anne, Gerald, and James and I as teachers last year, so our faces would at least be recognizable to them. The unintended consequence of that, though, is that I was once again face-to-face with the dozen or so students that I had personally failed, as well as dozens more who were in a similar predicament. It was like being a judge and getting put in the slammer right alongside the criminals that you yourself were responsible for convicting. Even more, most of the students I didn't recognize were significantly older—local politicians and businesspeople who had careers and lives outside of graduate school—who were probably looking at me and wondering who this scrappy youngster was standing in front of them and why they should give a damn.

Still, I had just been listening to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s iconic 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech with all three of my classes of graduate students this week and was feeling confident. I started class by asking in Chinese who among them could speak English. Seeing as how my good students have a hard enough time participating, I wasn't surprised when no one raised their hands. So I asked them again. Still, nothing. So I decided to be a little cruel. It's no wonder none of you can speak English, I told them in Chinese. Perhaps you would have if you had come to class last year. It was then that I decided to teach the class in Chinese. I said that they had already wasted enough of my time for having me teach them on my day off, but that I was going to waste as little of theirs as possible by not requiring them to have to decipher my spoken English. I wrote a single statement on the blackboard. In all capital letters, it read: Writing Exercise: Give the reasons why you did not come to class last year. And while they wrote for thirty minutes, I sat reading Blink, and finished class by listening to each of them stand up and recite their alibis.

A part of me wanted to humiliate them, because I too had been humiliated. Last semester I rested on a moral high ground after having failed these students in good faith. I was confident in my decision—with the strength of the Foreign Affairs Office behind me, and in spite of the numerous efforts on the part of those students to win me over, using bribes, reasoning, and guilt at their disposal. And yet here I was, nine months later, with the only result of having put my foot down in the first place was in making more work for myself. I was like a puppet dictator, trying everything I could to assert my will and dominance, but knowing deep-down that I actually wielded no power. Students were there that I had explicitly failed once before, but regardless of what they did or did not do in class that day, the very fact that they were there meant that they would pass.

For my second class, I had them write on a slightly more benign topic: What makes a good student? At lunch, Alexandra talked me down from my original writing prompt: Writing Exercise #2: Why do you think you deserve to pass this class? I was clutching my chopsticks over a bowl of noodle soup, still visibly upset and shaking with anger. I told her that I was genuinely curious in their answers—in the face of every moral and ethical query, how could they possibly believe that they had the right to pass oral English? No matter the excuse, the heart of the matter was the simple fact that they had not come to class. Sensing how worked up I was getting, she reminded me not to take it personally. Irresponsible students make headaches for teachers across all disciplines—this was not a problem unique to us as English teachers. She encouraged me to give them my “nothing” as anything approaching my “all” would have been far more than they deserved.

That afternoon, I was decidedly more hands-off. No more was the gnawing emotional vexation boring its way under my skin, and no longer did I sit, fuming, at the front of the class as I tried to appear blithe and indifferent as I read my book. Instead, I was a pale drone of myself—stern, robotic, and emotionless. For that hour of my life, it felt odd to abandon everything that I've ever learned about teaching. I made no attempt whatsoever to pretend that I was enjoying myself or give them the slightest satisfaction. There was no excitement about the English language or praising them for good work. I was past the point of empathy. I was irate. These students were slackers and good-for-nothings, and there was nothing that they could possibly learn in two days that would make up for a year's worth of careful lesson planning and dedicated teaching.

The reasons they give for missing class last year were largely predictable. Most were a combination of having to do a research project or an experiment in another city, working a full-time job, taking care of aging parents, newborn children, or a sick wife, being sick themselves, or just being so bad at English that they felt simply being in class was a waste of their time. All of them spoke at some length about how sorry they were, their obligation to their own education, and how thankful they were for these make-up classes to improve their oral English. Similar, were their stock responses for the characteristics of a “good student”: a person who tries their best, helps others, is respectful of their teachers, is hard-working, does their homework, goes to class, is responsible, has a “burning desire to learn,” and “does everything possible to achieve their goals.” Most, if not all, were probably educational propaganda slogans drilled into their heads when they were young. Few, if any, seemed to pick up on the overt irony of the question being aimed as a direct attack at their own ineptitude as graduate students.

It came as a shock to me then that, all things considered, their English levels were actually better than I expected. Most enunciated their words clearly and their accents were comprehensible enough that I didn't struggle with what they were trying to say. No more was this true than for the girl sitting in the front row. Whereas all of the other students sat as close to the back wall as possible, she sat alone, dead center in the front of the classroom. She wore glasses, thigh-high rhinestone boots, and a brown sweatshirt. A thick coif of her hair swooped seductively over her right eye. When I asked her for the reasons why she missed class, she said that she had been traveling and meeting friends in other cities. After college, it was hard to keep in touch with old classmates and there was nothing going on in Taigu anyway. She told me that class was boring and that she thought she could get away with not going. Still, she wrote, it wasn't fair to James, to her other classmates, to the school, or to me. She lamented the lost time and the wasted opportunity, and when I looked hard at her, I almost thought I could see her cry.

In that exact moment, I wanted to take everything back—the anger and frustration, the slow change to sadness, the feelings of abandonment and rejection. Hearing her story, it almost made me want to forgive her right then and there. I had so internalized her narrative that I was left only with a feeling of guilt. The truth was that this was just an honest girl who made an honest mistake. And whereas few students took responsibility for their actions in their essays, she plainly did, and actually seemed to feel badly about it. There was no fabrication or rationalization. She understood that what she did was wrong and was repenting, so who was I to punish her further? I thanked her for reading and after she sat down, I fought my way through the next fourteen essays with a resolve so strong that, by the time I dismissed class, I felt like my body would crumble beneath me.

On the way back home, one of the female students approached me after class. I had intentionally left the classroom a little later to avoid bumping into anyone, but apparently she had been wise to my aversion. She was unimaginably cheery, serving as a perfect counterpoint to my dejected moodiness. Tripping over English phrases and switching intermittently into Chinese, she begun asking me some of those basic questions reserved for first-time encounters. But it was clear, at least to me, that I had no intention of making polite conversation. Rather, I wanted to lock myself in my room and never have to think about these failing students again. Finally, she stammered out, I hope that we can still be friends. I thought for a moment, letting a deep breath rise slowly in my chest and exit through my lips. I turned to her and asked in Chinese, Who was your foreign teacher last year? She paused for a minute. Actually, she told me, I can't quite remember.

The Adventure of the Disheveled Desk

2011-03-09T02:41:00.091-05:00

Here's one for the Sherlock Holmes fans out there. Imagine that you have just entered an unfamiliar place. Your surroundings are shrouded in darkness, above you is a drip that keeps licking from the ceiling, and the ground beneath you is unfurling like a great Persian rug that can be swept from under your feet at a moment's notice. You have never been more aware of your surroundings. Everything is simultaneously fascinating and terrifying and you're half-expecting some bedraggled skeleton to sneak up from behind you at any minute. A position, where the door at the end of a long hallway holds every hope and fear you have ever imagined. You move slowly forward to open it, with each heavy breath and passing moment leading you closer to the end. And you have the uncanny sensation that soon—perhaps very soon—you will uncover that thing you've been searching for, or, in the infamous words of 50 Cent, die tryin'.

This feeling, often reserved for underground caverns, dingy narrow alleyways, and only the seediest of London bars, is curiously the same sensation I have in Taigu after returning home from a long vacation. In the year-and-a-half that I've lived here, I haven't had a particularly good track record when it comes to going back home. Take my return from a summer of travel last August—entering my room only to be met with my posters and tapestry ripped savagely from my walls, my books and papers lying in unorganized heaps across my shelves, and everything on my desk either shoved aside, toppled on to the floor, or lumped on top of my bed. I soon learned that the Foreign Affairs Office had hired workers to come in and repaint and repair our houses while we were gone, though no one had bothered to tell us before we left that we should expect to return to rooms that looked as though they had been ransacked by thieves.

Exhibit A: My desk in utter ruin following my return to Taigu in late August of last year.

For anyone who knows me, I keep my living space meticulous. Books are never so much as misaligned, stacks of papers are neatly squared, and every item on every table surface retains its composure and spatial placement in harmony with those around it. It's not to say that I don't have clutter, because I do, but even the clutter seems to have an imbued sense of purpose and resolve for where it exists and why. I joke with James that if he so much as came into my room and used a tissue, I would notice, but in all honesty (and haplessness), I truly believe that I would. What's great about my relationship with James, though, is that rather than criticize each others' obsessive compulsions, we provide mutual commiseration for their breeding. Case in point: James has to check the front door three times before he leaves the house to make sure he hasn't left something undone (unplugged the space heater, turned off the stove), whereas I go into a mental flurry when I realize that someone has been in my room, borrowed something from my kitchen, or washed their hands in my sink, no matter how seemingly insignificant the infraction.

It came, then (at least to me), as little surprise that someone had once again come into my house uninvited during the time I was away during break. As far as I know, the only people who have the keys to my house are me, James, and, perhaps ironically, the Foreign Affairs Office. In the past, they have used this privilege for both good and evil—sometimes to fix leaks in our bathroom when we are out of the house, but also to ambush us on Saturday mornings with news that we have an impromptu banquet to attend or a scientific paper that needs English revision. To most people, this would come as a gross breach of privacy, and to be sure, it took me a while to put aside my American need for personal space and accept the notion that I can be walked in on or interrupted at any moment. But since there was nothing I could do to change that, I realized that I'd simply do my best to plan accordingly.

What I haven't yet been able to put aside, however, is the thought of someone entering my house without forewarning while I'm away and making a mess of my belongings without a legitimate reason to account for the intrusion. In the case of the summer, the mess was attributed to house repairs. This time, it may have been a simple matter of having a clean room to greet me when I returned. The irony, though, is that whatever “cleaning” was done in the way of dusting corners and sweeping my floor, was undone in the sheer amount of time I had to dedicate to painstakingly rearranging back all of my belongings to my liking. However, the strangest thing about all of this is that unlike the summer, when all of my possessions were somewhat understandably tousled due to the refurbishing, this time around, there was hardly rationale to explain why someone would have been as deeply entrenched in my belongings as they were. Rather than simply being stolen or indiscriminately scrapped, many of the situations in which I found my things were so utterly bizarre that I had to make a list detailing all of the oddities:

Flash drive inserted into one of the ports on my USB hub, despite the fact that it wasn't attached to my computer.
Cap to my flash drive found at the bottom of my laundry hamper.
Two AAA batteries removed from their box in my drawer.
Empty bottle of jasmine tea found on the shelf above my bathroom sink.
Discontinued 10 RMB currency note missing from my collection of foreign money.
Five blue binder clips separated from a box of multicolored clips in my drawer and arranged in a circle on my desk.
A single match removed from my matchbox and lit.
A short clip of staples removed from a box of staples in my drawer and put on my desk.
External hard drive noticeably manhandled and instructional insert removed from its case.
Student gift unwrapped and separated from its cardboard sheath.
Peacock feather removed from my wall.
Two napkins used and discarded in various parts of my room.

It helps to reiterate here that none of these acts, even in my wildest dreams, are things I could have possibly left unattended to leading up to a two-month vacation. The real mystery to me is that aside from the 10 RMB note, nothing (to my knowledge) was explicitly stolen, and it's not like there weren't other valuable things in my room—all kinds of foreign currency, books, electronics, clothing, etc. And still, there are so many other questions left unanswered, like: Why specifically blue binder clips? Why take only one bill and leave the dozens of others untouched? Why light a match? Why mess with my flash drive and external hard drive but not actually steal them? The only thing clear to me now is that whoever had come into my room was not trying to be discrete, or at least, didn't know who he was dealing with. After I showed pictures I had taken of the state of my room to the other foreigners, some joked that a similar thing could have happened to them and they wouldn't have even noticed. Is it my fault for being entirely too anal?

I'm questioning even now whether or not I should bring it up with the Foreign Affairs Office. There were no signs that my house had been forcibly entered, so they are the only people who would have been able to come and go. And although I wouldn't accuse them of foul play, I don't trust the integrity of the workers they hire to come in and do repairs. To this day, they have never mentioned a single bad thing associated with their mid-vacation check-ins, and even if they did trust that I was telling the truth, it still may be impossible to pin down exactly who was responsible for the hi-jinks. I'm upset with myself for letting this get to me, but at the same time, it is frustrating and really quite eerie knowing that someone was so clearly taking liberties with my belongings, potentially lifting information from my drives, or at the very least, being crude and disrespectful in a stranger's home. I still can't help but feel violated. If I can't be sure that my own house won't be broken into every time I leave it, then I can't truly feel safe in Taigu. As Scooby and the gang might say: It looks like we got a real caper on our hands!

Homecoming and the Construct of Home

2011-03-05T04:25:00.043-05:00

Nearly two months—indeed, my longest time ever untethered to even the scantest conceptualization of home—and exactly zero blog posts later, I'm back in chilly Taigu, getting used to snow, air pollution, and the dry chalky feeling that I wake up with in my mouth each morning. By most accounts, the transition hasn't been easy. As it is, I'm still picking sand from the bottom of my backpack and going through intense withdrawal from condensed milk-saturated coffee and banana juice. But through it all, I came back from the end of break eager and excited to start my last semester here in Taigu—a thought that simultaneously excites and terrifies me—both because of how mentally prepared I feel to be back in America and how anxious I am at the thought of extricating myself from the little town I have called home for the last two years. More serious than that, though, is the fear that I won't have enough time to follow through with all of my goals for the next four months.

So far, things have been going to plan well. Four out of four weekdays in my first week back I had dinner with Chinese friends and have been painstakingly trying to get my Chinese back to where it was before my two month hiatus from almost all manner of speaking and reading. One of my closest Chinese friends—Crystal—who was once just another non-student who I reluctantly let sit in on my English classes, has recently left for work in Beijing. She found a teaching job, one that suits her interests perfectly—early education and tutoring in English—but even knowing how happy she will be there as opposed to being stranded in Taigu halfway between college and grad school still doesn't quiet my sadness at losing one of the friends I've known the longest here.

But not all of the news has come with a heavy heart. One of my former students told me that she is getting married in May and invited me to what will be the first wedding I have ever attended on any continent. After dinner at my favorite hot pot restaurant, I got treated to a night of mahjong and girl talk in one of the dorm rooms of some of my closest female Chinese friends. In the interest of expanding our male friend base, James and I started trying our hand at a popular collectible card game (think the Chinese version of Magic: The Gathering), and made a morning of playing it with our Chinese tutor and a couple of his male colleagues. And just this week, I finally mustered enough courage to ask my student from Shenzhen to teach me Cantonese, and in our first lesson, was struggling through new palatal placements with a difficulty not too dissimilar from my first time learning Mandarin.

Of course, traveling had its perks too. Under the pretenses of eating incredible food, seeing new places, and meeting up with old friends (though not necessarily in that order), traveling led me to places far and wide, but mostly, just away from China. Culturally, it couldn't have felt more different—listening to mosques blaring the “call to prayer” in Islamic Northern Sumatra in Indonesia, seeing churches lit up with gleaming red crosses at night in Korea, or hearing monks chanting in Buddhist wats all over Laos and Northern Thailand. Overall, the whole trip was incredibly rewarding (if more than a little exhausting), but if I had the chance to do it again, I would probably leave out one country, spend the extra 10 days scattered amongst the remaining ones, and come back to Taigu a couple days earlier. At this point, I feel like I've got a decent sense of Southeast Asia so that the next time I come back, I will have a more clear idea of what I want to see. This trip was more like an appetizer sampling plate—lots of different things to try, but only a tiny bite of each. Next time, I'm ordering the main course.

Though I haven't stopped trying to challenge myself, I can't help but feeling that since I've been back, the things I'm doing here in Taigu aren't especially new or groundbreaking. By most accounts, it's been back to the old comforts and routines of teaching, writing, exercising, and going out to big dinners with friends. As a town, Taigu has hardly budged in the two months I've been away. As one of my former students roughly put it, “the restaurants are still bright and gaudy and the road still looks like shit.” But for exactly that reason, there is a certain comfort that comes with being in a familiar place. I never realized how much I genuinely liked China until I came back this time around. I've been here long enough now that even moving around Beijing comes with a high degree of intimacy. In spite of the shoving and shouting, the poverty and the grime, the censorship and the corruption, it feels, somehow, cathartic to be in a place again where I can speak the language, interact meaningfully with the locals, and adjust to the local diet, all without having to adapt to a new environment every two or three days during travel.

Indeed, the closest thing I get to travel nowadays is on local buses through town, that, rather than being marked in big English letters with the names of famous sites and tourist attractions, adopt their Chinese stop names from those of local landmarks like “Agricultural Bank of China,” and “Shanxi Agricultural University, Student Dormitories.” On my last bus trip on my way to the supermarket, I saw a traditional farmer funeral going on in the street. It was maybe the second time I had ever seen one here—a procession led by old men and women (presumably good friends of the deceased) dressed in white head scarves and robes covering the majority of their bodies. Their heads were bowed and their hands adopted a praying position in front of their chests. Behind them, a caravan of white pick-up trucks adorned with large peacock-colored wreaths—quite like the psychedelic flashing lights you might find outlining pinball machines—systematically bore through town, obscuring the flow of traffic.

I've been contemplating starting a new blog entitled "China Big Red Balloon" as these things are literally everywhere. Here's one in front of one of our new favorite restaurants in town.

This certainly isn't the first time that this reference has been made, but I feel like I've got one foot in one world and one in another. One need look no further than the smog that has been blanketing the school of late—when afternoon trips to the gym yield clipped footprints in the snow, long silhouetted shadows, and near desertion in the streets. James and I have gone ahead and started a new lifting program, knowing full well that we won't be here long enough to see it through to completion. Such is the feeling that consumes my everyday. Why start something that you know you can't finish? Why foster new friendships that will only be doomed to failure? Why keep studying Chinese when you will only fall behind in America? What I realized was that unlike the transience of travel, this is my life—that the seemingly trivial elements contained therein are nonetheless substantial and meaningful, and no matter what the future has in store for me, I have to live the next four months with the resolve of one facing an ever-expanding present, laid out before me like patched cobblestone streets, brick smokestacks, and fiery pink sunsets.