xuzhou

Work

2011-12-28T09:52:00.000-08:00

I'm nearing the end of my first semester teaching at CUMT in Xuzhou. It has been strange, frustrating, sweaty and truly wonderful. It is the best job I've ever had by a country mile. Not only is it perfectly suited to my temperament, it has also been an exhilarating challenge, a creative and professional bullwhipping. (I'm the bull in that metaphor, by the way). I've never before had a job that I loved. This is so strange and alien a feeling that I've had to, at times, remind myself of this pleasant fact.

I have quite a few humorous and demanding students, as well as some who are rather dull (and a handful whose laziness and stupidity are utterly dispiriting). I have come to know many of them quite well, and count most them a friend. It would probably be obvious and boring to say that I have learned a lot. More accurately, I've realized a lot. And my plans for the spring semester are inscribed on the drum of a steamroller. I'm excited for the future. I have a lot of ideas; some of them are sure to be quite good.

And just for a little background: CUMT (China University of Mining and Technology) is a 102 year old institution started in Beijing. After being relocated to a number of cities, it finally settled in Xuzhou in 1978. I work for the Sino-Australian College, which is a private company operating within the School of Foreign Studies. I teach IELTS preparation (IELTS being the examination Chinese students need to pass to study abroad) to second year students, and creative writing to first year students. That about does it.

A Holiday Classic

2011-12-08T22:08:00.000-08:00

Hot cocoa, stocking stuffers... and Tonyboy

Christmas at the Beach

We took the bus to Atlantic City, me my cousins and my sister's boyfriend

We brought a thermos of lentil soup, some apple-smoked bacon and some beers

We showed up on the boardwalk and no one was around for miles

We were terrified

Christmas, Christmas, Christmas at the beach

We built a snowman out of sand and then immediately after that there was a terrible incident

My cousin with down syndrome raced into the water

We didn't pat attention at first, but then we heard him scream and go rigid

I lost my leg to hypothermia in the cold dark water

Christmas, Christmas, Christmas at the beach

My cousin and my sister's boyfriend went to hit the casino

My sister's boyfriend didn't have any money, but he really wanted to play,

So he put his car keys on 17 red and lost everything

The car was back in Milwaukee so he had to pay some guy to have it towed

1,00 miles to Atlantic City

I don't really talk to those guys anymore

I heard my sister broke it off with corey

My family still thinks I let julius drown because he had down syndrome

He was always such a burden

Now I'm the family burden now I'm the family burden now I'm the family burden...

Christmas, Christmas, Christmas at the beach

2008

Scott Guild: Music and backing vocals

Randall Cox: Lyrics and lead vocals

Grass Mud Horse

2011-12-03T05:54:00.000-08:00

Ai Wei Wei is a Chinese artist. He grew up in the Xin Jiang region in the far northwest of China, and also in Beijing. He works across a variety of media including design, installation, film and photography. He collaborated with the Swiss design firm Herzog and de Meuron to build the "Bird's Nest" stadium, the center piece of the Beijing Olympics.

Ai Wei Wei has, throughout his career, been openly critical of the Chinese Communist Party. He has documented human rights abuses, censorship, and cover-ups. He organized a campaign to document the real toll of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Much of the official relief effort was conducted by the Chinese Army.

One of his funniest and most poignant works is a self-portrait. It's a photograph depicting the artist nude with a stuffed animal covering his junk. The photo captures him in mid-air with both legs and the free arm outstretched. This by itself would be interesting enough. But what really makes it pop is the title, "Grass Mud Horse Covering the Middle". This can be taken literally, the stuffed animal in question is called the "grass mud horse", and it is indeed "covering the middle". This wording, slightly mispronounced in it's original Mandarin, can sound like one is saying, "Fuck your mother, the Communist party central committee". It's a double entendre that doesn't work in English, but is quite funny and quite a bit more rude and provocative in Mandarin.

I think this piece exemplifies the artist's wit, boldness and moral convictions. All three of these attributes are "against the rules" in the New China (supposedly so much more open and modern).

Ai has been the frequent victim of state sponsored harassment and brutality. He has been hospitalized a number of times and is now, at the age of 54, in ill health. In April of this year he was arrested and detained for two months without formal charges, without a trial or the right to an attorney. In fact he was not allowed contact with anyone, and for a time it was feared that he would be kept indefinitely, or worse. Upon his release Ai has largely remained out of the spotlight, and has refused to speak openly about his arrest, citing a condition of his release.

Ai is a true artist and a true moral voice, and he is being silenced by the Chinese Communist party.

Xuzhou At Night

2011-11-30T01:26:00.000-08:00

The Kitchen

2011-11-29T21:30:00.001-08:00

Our kitchen flooded a few of days ago. One day it was a nice, reliable, dry kitchen and the next day it was a grimy pond. After a couple of days of serious and dedicated denial, I finally decided that, like most other problems, it wasn't going to vanish no matter how tightly I shut my eyes.

We got some guy to come over yesterday morning. He clanked around for a few minutes, said something to me in Chinese that I understood just enough of to start getting angry, and then he left. He came back 20 minutes later brandishing some kind of curled tube. He seemed pleased with himself, but I was dubious. A few more minutes of clanking and humming; then he said, "好了". This basically means, "It's okay now". To demonstrate this he pulled at the faucet rapidly. The basin began to shake. I did not know what I was watching. He turned to me beaming. I gave him some money and told him I was keeping his mobile number. I have a feeling I'll be seeing this guy again.

Bring your clothes

2011-11-15T20:56:00.000-08:00

Text message I just received from my school: "Can you come today and bring your clothes?" I guess this means they're pleased with my job performance, but disappointed that I show up to work naked as a jay-bird.

Actually I just got through to the office, and they've decided to take me to Beijing for a few days to help them celebrate the 10th anniversary of the company. And they have also decided, in their boundless wisdom, to give me two (that's 2) hours notice. I'm packing as I type this. The only concrete info they could give me is, the party/gala/what-have-you is to be held in a castle. But this could really mean anything. I haven't even showered. I got to get going.

Excerpt From a Letter Home (Sept. 2009)

2011-11-02T04:04:00.000-07:00

To get there, I pass through an alley loud with chickens; some running and fighting, others stuffed into cages. Stray dogs looking for water-- content with a slice of shade. And stray Chinese ladies dressed like disgraced, overweight matadors. Their hair cropped short in a straight line across their foreheads and over their ears like theyre waiting for someone to come home.

No one is coming home.

The wide, low-rimmed, wicker baskets full of seeds and spices crushed to a fine powder. Red and yellow and brown. The baskets are on the ground and the powder is so fine it could blow away and you wouldnt notice until it was all gone. The men in the alley wear the old style snub-brimmed caps and seem to be paying attention to very little and thinking of less. Sometimes they speak to the ladies, but the ladies are dreadful. Occasionally a small boy or girl will come running out of one of the tin shacks to pee on the ground before being shewed away by the old ladies.

And they all spit. Deep, grinding and full-throated. Constantly. I dont know why they spit so much. I wish they wouldn't.

My apartment is on the 12th floor. From my window, much of the northwestern side of the city is visible. And beyond that where it all breaks down into hills and clouds. The landlady is a nag and a crook. She looks like someone made her out of cardboard and in their haste forgot a few things. She always talks like she's being raped. She's coming today to hook-up the washing machine. I will probably be polite, though i won't want to be. My apartment came with a new flat-screen TV which I promptly unplugged and put in the back of the closet. If the landlady asks about it today, I will tell her I sold it. Fuck her.

I take a bus to school and another to the grocery store. It can be a bit lonely sometimes. More so in the crowds than in my room. I think I will become friends with the other teachers. They're all nice and some of them are young.

I found an English language book shop. I bought 'Othello', 'Crime and Punishment' and 'a Moveable Feast'. I found 'Crime and Punishment' to be very funny, except for the parts that gave me nightmares.

October 1st is National Day in China. This year marks the 60th anniversary of China as a communist republic. All schools and most offices are closed for an entire week. I will have a week of paid vacation. I may do a bit of traveling in the area if it's not too costly. Most cities have elaborate celebrations and parades, and it would be interesting and fun to see. I would like to go to Beijing where the biggest celebration takes place-- but many people travel during this week and booking a train and hotel will be difficult with only a few days notice.

Find Me

2011-10-28T10:08:00.000-07:00

So there is this really wicked commercial airing on Chinese TV. It's like a mini-series or a movie. There's even short trailers for the full length, 5-PART!! feature. The company is Oppo, a Chinese mobile phone giant. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio (yes) reprising his role from 'Inception', or at least squinting a lot and chasing after specters of sexy French girls. Oh yeah, it takes place in France. He runs, looks out from train windows, and is very short with a cab driver, all while his voice-over intones gems like: "She was here" and "Wait!"

The production quality is amazing, possibly better than 'Inception'. The editing is fast paced, both thrilling and needlessly confusing. The music is heavy with ominous sounding strings. I bet they gave him like a billion dollars. There are billboards and posters for this thing everywhere. It's not like he's lacking in work or money. Something in the script must have truly spoke to him.

Or what's equally likely, this is what Leonardo DiCaprio is doing anyway, and camera crews just happened to be there shooting something else. One thing that makes Leonardo DiCaprio, in my opinion, such a great actor is he's absolutely bat-poop fucking insane. The name of this off-beat documentary is "Find Me".

Indeed.

徐州人 2

2011-10-27T23:54:00.000-07:00

This Shaq, seriously. Shaq Attack!

徐州人

2011-10-25T15:00:00.000-07:00

This is Wei, he makes the best fried noodles in XuZhou.

The Game Was Cancelled Due to Smell

2011-08-20T22:50:00.000-07:00

It's been raining lately. A lot. Let me put it another way: It smells like shit here. Doodoo. When it rains here, the legions of odors that lay dormant under the earth, or concealed in roving dumpsters are unleashed upon the living. "Smell" is like a type of weather here, like snow, hail, thunderstorms, etc. Some days, particularly when it's been raining, it just plain stinks. A toxic, stinging, auto-rhinectomy inducing, eerie and bewildering system (in the weather pattern sense) of effluvia will occasionally, sans warning, arrive at the city gates like zombies, or the Japanese, or Jap-zombies! (That's another thing: God Almighty, they hate the Japanese here, almost to a man.) But, anyway, like any other type of weather, there's no use complaining. Simply modify your clothing appropriately and carry-on. But it's hard, for me anyway, to think of smell as weather. Because it seems like something can be done to counter it, unlike say, a tornado.

There have been, on extreme occasions, times when I simply went home because it smelled so mercilessly shitty outside--"That's it, fuck this, I'm done!"--only to find similar smells seeping up from my shower drain and from the grouting around my toilet.

The frustrating thing is, I have no idea what is causing these smells. The cost of doing business, I suppose. Perhaps it's simply the smell of progress! Hasty, sleazy, nepotistic, thoroughly corrupt progress.

加油徐州

On-the-Job Training

2011-08-17T20:43:00.000-07:00

My first job in China was teaching English at a public school here in Xuzhou. This was almost two years ago, but feels like much longer. The job was a disaster.

On one particular cold, sulfurous morning, a Chinese teacher pulled me aside while I was in the middle of class (by "in the middle of class" I mean, standing in front of fifty, small, dim faces, slowly getting angrier and clenching my bottom together so fiercely tears would come to my eyes which I would quickly wipe away with grimy chalk-stained hands causing further eye discomfort and tearing) and asked me "How's everything going?" I didn't know whether to cry or hit her in the face. She continued "... the children want to know why you don't blame them..."

I leaned in close, "Believe me" I said, "I blame them for everything. Everything! But what am I supposed to do? I mean, look at them, they're like animals. They're like a zoo exhibit gone wrong. It's like gorillas mated with cockroaches..." At this point it was clear that I had lost her, but I was on a roll. "And they have the attention span, and capacity for English that one would reasonably expect from a horrible gorilla-cockroach-hybrid-mutant-thing. There's fifty of them in every one of these classrooms, and really, I'm just... very cold. Look at my hands, I'm shaking!"

When I was finished she smiled, opened her mouth as if to respond, then, catching something in my eyes, turned and walked away. Now that I think about it, I have no idea who she was. I had never seen her before, and never saw again. What I do know is, that by "blame" she meant "reprimand" or "scold" but she didn't know these words. And I chose to take literally her poor English because I was bored.

When I re-entered the classroom there was a very old man seated alone in the last row smoking a cigarette. None of the children seemed to notice him. I think he crawled in through the window. He appeared to be in rather poor health. He sat so still between drags of his cigarette that each time I thought he had fallen asleep, until, finally he would raise his hand to his mouth, and take in another buoying lungful. When he was done he dropped the butt on the floor and quietly stood and left.

Making Plans

2011-08-15T23:12:00.000-07:00

Kyle,

I trust you will have read the email "Autumn" before moving on to this one. It's important that the two of you start a dialogue w/r/t my upcoming homecoming. To that end, it's necessary that the two of you have a clear understanding of what the other party knows, and when they knew it. Below is the email "Autumn part II" which I have just sent to Jim. Just substitute your name for YOURS and his name for HIS, and then read it normally. I hope you're reading all this after breaking your fast for the day, it's not what I would consider hypoglycemia-friendly reading. Furthermore, you need to be keen, and belly-full when taking this all in.

James,

I trust you will have read the email "Autumn" before moving on to this one. I have just written to Kyle. The body of that message can be seen below. (Just substitute your name for his, and his name for yours (where applicable) then read it normally). This will provide you with a clear sense of what Kyle will have seen. Or will see, depending.

Kyle,

I'm coming home. October 1-8. This is the email I just seconds ago sent to Jim... just substitute your name for his and his name for yours (where applicable) then read it normally. Can't wait to see you crazy maniacs!

James,

I'm coming home. October 1-8. I know this is still a ways yet (about six weeks or so) but thought I'd let you know. So, if possible, keep the week open for reunion themed merriment and hijinks!

I arrive at Newark Liberty International Airport at 6:20 in the pee em on Oct. 1 (I think that's a Saturday). You should seriously consider accepting a shockingly small, damn near insulting amount of cash for retrieving my depleted, travel wearied, but nonetheless triumphal, self from said International Airport.

Never mind. Make Kyle do it.

Or, another option: you both come to New Haven and gather my further depleted, travel wearied, and now vaguely pissed-off, but nonetheless triumphal, self around 9-ish the same evening. Something to think about. No, really. I will write to Kyle next and test the H2o regarding a possible Jersey Airport/Elm City Metro North/jailbreak scenario.

I wanna see some goddamned foliage!

Randall

Garbage

2011-08-08T07:52:00.001-07:00

Xuzhou is a dirty place. By that I mean, unclean. I try to be as favorable and benefit-of-the-doubt giving as possible with my comparisons, and still Xuzhou is just plain gross.

There seems to be no impetus for individuals to care for the hygiene or aesthetic appeal of their (our) town. Anti-littering laws, such as those enacted in the U.S., would be met with such a profound confusion by the general populace that littering may actually cease simply from stunned would-be litterers jamming their fists into their mouths. I think if the government decided to hand out fines to those caught littering, China would overtake the U.S. as the world's biggest economy in about the time it took me to type this sentence. There are, of course, bent, undernourished, octogenarians in wild orange vests sweeping around the trash that piles up on every street. And, considering the state of their health and overall toothpick physicality, not to mention the astounding tackiness of their habiliments, they do manage to stay abreast of the stinky influx. More or less. But, no matter how effective the street cleaners, it seems to me prevention is better by far. Despite the aforementioned shock that would result from any anti-littering legislation, the people here do do what they are told.

So, a cheesy cartoon P.S.A. campaign would probably do the trick. And the stooped, browned, toothless old men and woman can take off those hideous vests and get back to spitting and blowing their noses all over the newly litter-free streets.

That's one thing that may never change. I mean, of course, the freedom, and I'll say it, aplomb with which people evacuate in public. Any internal fluid or semisolid (spittle, mucus, vomit, phlegm, pus, perspiration, cerumen, sebum, blood, necrotic tissue, urine and feces) is casually deposited on the sidewalk, sometimes in mid stride.

It takes some getting used to...

City Squeeze*

2011-06-19T08:43:00.001-07:00

Well, they're burning down the countryside again. They do this periodically, maybe two or three times a year. The smoke blows into the cities like a tide of dirty brown fire. It's so thick and dark you can lose sight of your hand fully outstretched. It's eerie and confusing and that's not all. I'm sure there must be some ages old reason for burning the shit out recently harvested fields, something about nutrients in the soil or scaring off ghosts. Whatevs, bro.

The real scary thing is the chemical pesticides and fertilizers hidden in the soil; liberally applied and dangerously misunderstood. The color of the smoke is one indication that something isn't right: a freckly, sooty copper, the color of Satan's loincloth! It hangs in the air, stinging the eyes, settling in the nasal cavity and causing nasty, nauseating headaches. At night when the barometer drops and the air is still, it's like walking on a different planet.

The local governments, the same governments that mandate the farmers use these chemicals, are starting to impose penalties on them for burning the fields. They sell this stuff by the fucking barrel, and when the farmers predictably burn the fields at the end of the season, the government fines them for burning dangerous chemicals. What a mess. I was in Xuzhou last week when the smoke first came. Several days later I traveled a couple of hours by bus to a small town. Along the way we passed miles of charred wheat fields. No one has it harder than a Chinese farmer. No one is subjected to more absurd, legislated thievery than the Chinese farmer. They are forced to use this stuff, and then penalized for doing so.

I suppose it might be a small tasty thrill for a farmer to watch news reports of local officials and up-in-arms urbanites wheezing and coughing and demanding these belligerent, rogue farmers get with the times, and stop holding China back. Or, maybe it's just one more spine-crushing, heartbreaking indignity working its way into the soil.

*"City Squeeze" is the title of a Hong Kong comedy directed by Clifton Ko. Released in 1989 to modest sales and unfavorable reviews, it has lately found a niche playing on low-budget Chinese movie channels. If, by some bizarre miracle, you have a chance to see it, maybe it's available on Netflix, I suggest you do so. It has absolutely nothing to do with farming. It's about inter-office politics and philandering.

Oh

2011-04-13T03:43:00.000-07:00

Why can't I find one of those rocks that looks like the Mona Lisa or Jesus weeping? I only find rocks that look like potatoes.

This Probably Doesn't Make Much Sense

2011-03-30T19:55:00.000-07:00

Behind my apartment they're building another shopping plaza. There are so many shopping centers in my neighborhood already that it seems either idiotic, or perhaps brilliant, to build one more.

And this fun mixture of brilliance and idiocy is a neat description of something else that there is quite a lot of here: Chinglish. Along the side of my building there are giant placards heralding the new plaza. The ads are a mess, verbally that is.

And for some reason this calls to mind Mike Tyson, someone whose verbal mastery (inanity?) has always fascinated me. I'm unsure of just what I'm going for with the following juxtaposition, but have fun...

Tyson:
I was gonna rip his heart out, I'm the best ever. I'm the most brutal and vicious and most ruthless champion that has ever been... My style is impetuous, my defense is impregnable, and I'm just ferocious. I want your heart. I want to eat his children. Praise be to Allah.

I'm just happy I'm not a phony.

Another thing that freaks me out is time. Time is like a book. You have a beginning, a middle and an end. It's just a cycle.

I could feel his muscle tissues collapse under my force. It's ludicrous these mortals even attempt to enter my realm.

I feel like sometimes that I was not meant for this society.

I just want to conquer people and their souls.

I'm a historian, and that freaks me out.

I ain't the same person I was when I bit that guy's ear off.

When I fight someone, I want to break his will. I want to take his manhood. I want to rip out his heart and show it to him.

When Jesus comes back, these crazy, greedy, capitalistic men are gonna kill him again.

Everyone has a plan 'till they get punched in the mouth.

It's good to know how to read, but it's dangerous to know how to read and not how to interpret what you're reading.

Now the ads:
Be easily while comfortable, carefree while content.

Dynamic or quiet, according to your own will.

To expect beauty among bustling, to reveal brilliance under glory.

At front of the fashion, showing unique youthfulness.

Explanatory free and untrammeled.

Childish joyous under warm care.

Track international fashion, share digital city life.

Lippo Plaza, the elegant city, riches and honor city.

Shopping much appeal, life multiple level.

Delicious food, let the life more delicate.

Smoke Up

2011-03-28T01:12:00.000-07:00

I can just make out a bit of the lake from my bedroom window. It's wedged between apartment towers, a hospital and a low sloping mountain chain. It's a big lake. And it's bigger when you consider it's entirely man-made. It's called Yun Long Hu, in English, Dragon in the Clouds Lake. A lot people got together with picks and shovels and wheelbarrows and god knows how many cartons of cigarettes and dug that bitch out! For no apparent reason. I guess it looks nice. The smell of it, though, is something other than nice. I've seen a few dough-eyed old men in their underwear slip into the lake, and they always come out looking stupefied or indignant, pleading with their eyes for help or failing that, cigarettes.

Cigarettes are a kind of social currency here. The passing out, or exchange of cigarettes is an important step in greeting others. Almost no one will refuse a cigarette. There are few places in China where cigarette smoking is prohibited. Hospitals, believe it or not, are not one of these places. Often the presence of "No Smoking" signs will do little to curb cigarette smoking. At the train station here in Xuzhou there is a "Smoking Area" which doubles as a baby-changing station. There are signs in other areas of the train station prohibiting smoking. Often people will light up directly under the sign, not in an act of defiance or belligerence, but simply because they fancy a smoke. There is a nice bakery around the corner from my building. There are "No Smoking" signs in Chinese and English on every wall, and ashtrays on every table.

The Noodle Shop

2011-02-18T07:01:00.000-08:00

Tonight it is snowing. It's unexpected and coming down in stinging wet sheets. I'm in a small noodle shop in a little alley two blocks behind the central square of the city. Through the sliding plastic door the snow storm looks like some kind of terrible parade. Seven days after the New Year--called "da nian chu qi"-- the fireworks are still lighting up the sky. And these brief bursts of red and silver and white show a camera-flash glimpse of the snow pouring over the buses and taxis and people ducking into doorways.

Inside the noodle shop it's steamy and cold. There's a 13 inch television bolted to the wall in one corner playing military news on China Central TV. The food is hellishly spicy and my mouth burns with each bite and beads of sweat form on my scalp. It's a way of staying warm on these cold nights. The place is run by a family from Xinjiang, a province far to the west bordering Russia on the north and Kazakhstan and Tajikistan to the west. They are a long way from home. The men wear small white paper hats. Their wives and daughters are brusque and irritable. And fat.

It's simple and slow magic to watch the noodles made. A lump of dough, transformed with the moves of an accordion player, into long thin noodles. The newly made noodles are dropped into a large vat of boiling water, big enough for a grown man to bathe in. It's about eight o'clock and a long day is nearly done. There are a few people still seated at thin plastic tables. The shop is the shape of a railroad tenement, big enough to seat a dozen or so people, if they crowd close together. The people eat their noodles, which they twine around green plastic chopsticks, hurriedly and noisily.

I leave seven yuan on the table (a little over one U.S. dollar) and thank the two men at the front who are talking jovially over the steaming vat. I step though the door--zipping my jacket and clenching my shoulders--and into the blowing snow. I walk home; it's very cold and I feel heavy and good.

New Year's Eve

2011-02-01T23:17:00.000-08:00

Year of the Rabbit

New Year's Eve in the Heavenly Kingdom

It's a little nuts here right now. There hasn't been a full minute in the past twenty-four hours without fireworks exploding somewhere nearby. All day and night. Sometimes they're so close I can hear the suction sound of the charge firing out of the cylinder, then the high-pitched whistling as it rises in the air, the explosion overhead, the car-alarms, and the men responsible laughing and congratulating themselves. Toasting baijiu and lighting cigarettes for one another they set up the next round of explosions. These guys are so fucking cool! All day they get drunk and blow shit up!

In less than eleven hours, from the time I'm writing this, it will be a new year in China. Officially it's been 2011 here for as long is it has in the West. But, crucially, it is not yet the Year of the Rabbit. That will happen at midnight between February third and fourth.

Most people have already left the cities where they work and have gone home to be with their families. This annual mass exodus is known in Chinese as Chun Yun. It basically means a shit load of people are getting the eff out of Dodge. Snatching up any train ticket they can get calloused fingers around, they crowd into the trains and chug home.

It's been a long year. And next year will be long too. But tonight we wish each other well, eat a lot, drink more, and welcome the Year of the Rabbit.

A Very Xuzhou Christmas

2011-01-08T04:35:00.000-08:00

A lot of the glitz and superficiality of Christmas is largely preserved in the Chinese translation. There are long strings of flashing lights unfurled upon the downtown facades, storefronts and office towers. This is really a year round condition, but the stakes are higher for about a month or so. The malls and stores all have exciting, no irresistible, bargains. Fake snow sprayed on the floors, paper cut-outs of Santa Claus and Frosty the Snowman, glowing artificial Christmas trees, it's all there. And it all seems like a ruse or an elaborate prank. Because it's not actually Christmas.

Most people here have no idea what Christmas is. It's just some silly western tradition. A fat man in a red suit comes flying out of the sky with a team of reindeer and delivers gifts to every person whose name is on a secret list. Yeah, fine. I've never bothered to explain this aspect of it to anyone here. My Chinese isn't adequate to the task, and I would just feel like an idiot. What I do say when asked, is it's simply a time for family and friends to gather at the end of the year and eat, drink and exchange gifts. My Chinese friends all say it sounds very nice. But no one cares.

It's quite strange to see things as important as holidays and family traditions stripped of their inner meaning and presented as a glittering turd. To those in the U.S. who bemoan the devaluing or secularization of Christmas, trust me, we still have a long way to go. Earlier this year I went to a Halloween party at an Italian restaurant where no one wore a costume or ate candy. I'm not even sure, now that I think back, if it was a Halloween party. It can get confusing at times. I definitely thought I was at a Halloween party, but I can't remember why. Honestly, I'm not sure why the Chinese try to celebrate Western holidays.

I guess the obvious answer is money. For anyone who may have been living on the moon for the past decade, the Chinese economy is booming. Thundering away. And the people here, particularly those too young to remember food rations and melting down scrap metal, love to shop. The biggest past-time in the biggest country in the world is buying stuff. For a nation that is, at least nominally Communist, where Marx is still required reading for government officials, it's amazing how much of the culture is consumerist. It rivals or surpasses anything I've seen in the West. It's remarkable how quickly and jarringly the country has pulled a 180. It's hard for the people here, some adapt, some go crazy. It's Christmas again. You know, Christmas...

Home(s)

2010-08-07T14:03:00.000-07:00

I've been home for over a month now, in a way it feels like I'm not even here. I'll be going back to China in 19 days, making this too long for a vacation, but not long enough to apply for food stamps. A terrible limbo to be sure. Although it is kind of a neat summary of my recent years: trapped between the competing realms of unprecedented luxury and hard tubercular poverty.

China is hotter than holy hell this time of year. When I get back there will be another month or so of unrepentant heat followed by a brief flirty autumn, followed by a slow wet winter. It will feel like home.

I will be teaching again in Xuzhou, but for a different school, and I will be living in a much nicer apartment. I'm looking forward to getting back there. I've missed the damn place terribly.

Min Zhu Nan Lu

2010-05-17T02:15:00.001-07:00

Learning Chinese is not easy. I have five books, three CDs and one DVD, and I still can't adequately explain to a cab driver how to get to my apartment. Well, that's a particular circumstance, in that, as far as I can tell, I don't actually have an address. So I just point and wave my arms with escalating degrees of urgency until finally the driver refuses to go on, shouting at me, "Zher, zher, zher!" (meaning "here, here, here").

I know where I live by what's nearby. The street I live on has no name. There are no numbers on the building. Why bother having an address if the street doesn't exist, I guess is the reasoning. I have any mail sent to my school. If I'm having someone over I tell them to meet me at a restaurant across the street. There's no other way. The back of my building, which in a certain way, that I will not here elucidate, is also the front, faces Min Zhu Nan Lu. Min Zhu translates to "democracy". Nan translates to "south". Lu is "road". So, I possibly live on South Democracy Road. The other side of the building faces the end of the world.

A muddy, gritty, exhaust fumes-filled street that winds upward and is hidden from the main roads below. Little shops selling cigarettes and toilet paper, and places to eat defined by plastic tarps lashed to poles hanging over a hissing wok, 18-wheel trucks carting huge sacks filled with smaller sacks filled with crap. A giant lot at one end is laced with alleys of shops, each alley has it's specialty, shoes, rugs, animals, small appliances, etc. There is, not far from my building a large pile of flattened cardboard. All day and all night it is attended to by three or four guys in thin body-length ponchos, who soak the pile in water from hoses. They are there everyday, and I've seen them at all hours. Somehow the pile never seems to grow or shrink. There are also dirty little dogs that never leave the immediate area of the cardboard pile. There is a constant stiff rain over the pile and the smell from whatever had been in the cardboard gets inside you and stings your face a bit. The dogs are mean and have terrible facial deformities, likely from very deserved beatings, or from the kind of unavoidable accidents that come from ostensibly guarding a pile of wet cardboard.

Spots of garbage baking in the sun, people shouting smoking sleeping ducking under a tarp for lunch. Trucks, bicycles, scooters and cars of all size and shape clogging the thin stretch of concrete that leads back to the main road. It's a very loose area. There is a police station but the police aren't really police. They're more like guys dressed up as police. Car wrecks are the norm. Anyone who wants to sell anything on any open patch of road is not hindered from doing so. Prostitutes, dumplings, bootleg cigarettes, school supplies, badminton rackets, whatever. And over it all, zippy Chinese tunes playing from speakers in every doorway.

Late at night it all goes away. The cargo trucks are gone, the tarps are taken down and bundled up, the speakers are switched off and brought inside, the people have returned home, there is only the hard stream from the hoses over the cardboard pile and the dogs giving me the crazy-eye.

The Bathroom Situation

2010-05-15T22:48:00.000-07:00

The other day, while showering, the entire fixture came loose from the wall and fell on my head before hitting the floor and breaking to pieces. For those unfamiliar with a Chinese shower/bathroom, allow me to paint a picture: In most bathrooms here there is no separation between the shower and the rest of the bathroom. That is to say there is no tub, or rim of any kind to keep the water from, as water is wont to do, going everywhere. It combines the fun of showering at the beach, with the horrid mess of well, showering at the beach. Every goddamn day. My bathroom is a soggy nightmare. (Not to be confused with a 'wet dream'.)

Nevertheless, I have mostly adapted. That is until Friday afternoon, when the shower unexpectedly broke from the wall and hit me on the head. As I stood there, naked and betrayed, I felt a creeping hopelessness. When something so simple and fundamental literally comes crashing down around you, even something as small as a shower fixture, it can be a strange experience. I remember thinking, "Well, this wasn't supposed to happen." I still had shampoo in my hair. There was a stream of water shooting up out the one piece still attached to the wall. I held my head over it to finish rinsing off.

After a few moments the confusion passed. And after a few more minutes the stinging sensation on my head faded as well. Now I just need to get the bastard fixed. I've had two repair men here in the past two days, and both have left, having done nothing to fix the shower, shaking their heads and offering me cigarettes. Now another repair man is coming tomorrow, they say he's the best. The repair man that repair men call. I wonder what he's going to do? Maybe he's some kind of sage or mystic. Showering here is so weird and unnecessarily messy, that it wouldn't surprise me if the right man for the job is some insane freak who hasn't spoken in years and lives on a mountain top with monkeys.

I find it very difficult to be culturally sensitive when I've been mildly inconvenienced. Don't you?

Update

2010-05-13T03:35:00.000-07:00

Over the past week or so there has been increased security at the public schools in Xuzhou. My school has two new uniformed security guards and one old man who shows up at lunch time smoking cigarettes and staring with a look of distant menace at the bowl of rice gruel he's allowed. I've noticed that other schools in the city have police officers at their front gates. This, being of course, a classic example of "too little, too late". But since I last wrote of the school attacks in China I've heard no news of more occurring. There was a total of five attacks in about one month's time. There is little news available on who the attackers are and what there motives may have been. I'm sure they're all smoldering in an incinerator somewhere.

And my mysterious foot injury has finally healed. I still have no idea how it happened, or what precisely the injury was. A friend of mine here looked at my foot and said it was probably a fracture. For some reason this seemed a reasonable diagnosis, and I felt no need to consult a... um... you know... doctor. Whatever, it's over. I even played a little basketball the other day and my jumper was like 'rain drops'.

Oh, Jesus, I Have Meningitis!

2010-05-07T22:40:00.000-07:00

Well, perhaps I don't. But, my neck hurts and that's a major symptom of meningitis. Other symptoms include nausea and complaining that you have meningitis. So, I'm three for three.

Moving on; I have only about six more weeks in 'the land that time forgot'. Having been here now for more than eight months, I can say with certainty that I have no idea what this place is about. I think I had more of an idea the first week I was here, or even before I arrived. Every day I lose just a little bit more of what I may or may not have been looking for. Part of it is the antic development going on all over the city, it's hard to catch my breath.

A friend in Nanjing recently returned to Xuzhou after being away for a year, and he couldn't believe how much had changed, he barely recognized his old neighborhood. As for me, I can barely recognize the place when I wake up in the morning. (To be fair, I have trouble recognizing my face some mornings). Nevertheless, the pace at which this city is growing is fierce, and cannot possibly be maintained for much longer. If Xuzhou were in the U.S. it would be the fifth biggest city by population, behind only New York, L.A., Chicago and Houston. In China, Xuzhou is 37th by population.

I don't know if It's my lack of an architectural imagination, but I look around the city and I think, "OK, that's enough." But I can find no signs of it stopping or slowing at all. This is what they do. I'm not saying it should stop or slow, I'm saying only that the people here get a little dizzy at times (myself included). It was only five years ago that Xuzhou was not much more than a train station and a handful of tin shacks. It must be hard for some to live in a place that is so constantly and dramatically growing. It must be hard to know just where you are, every day getting a little smaller.

I have lived in big cities in the past, and I've experienced large scale and fast paced development, but this is something else. It seems that the goal is to simply keep going; and as long as they do things will be fine. There is no end to it. The Chinese word for "future" literally translates to English as "never come". And why would anyone worry about something that will never come?

Labor Day

2010-05-01T23:25:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is the official opening of the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai. Not coincidentally, tomorrow is also a major Communist holiday, May 1, Labor Day in China. As I write this I can hear fireworks exploding on the street outside. For three hours now, the fireworks have been going off all over the city. This will likely continue all night.

Also this week, three schools; two kindergartens and one primary school, have been attacked by lone men wielding knives, and in one case a hammer.

In today's attack a man who has been described by authorities as "a local farmer" rammed through the front gate of a kindergarten with a motorcycle, from there he proceeded to attack students and teachers with a hammer. No one was killed, other than the attacker, who, having completed his rampage, broke out the gasoline and set himself on fire.

In yesterday's attack a man stabbed 29 kindergarten students, two teachers and a security guard with an 8 inch knife before being subdued by a delivery man who smacked him in the head with a fire-extinguisher. Some of the students are in critical condition, but no one was killed.

On Wednesday, an unemployed teacher broke into a primary school and stabbed 15 students and a teacher. Again, somehow, no one was killed.

All the reports I have found seem to focus on the mental health of the attackers, and how much can be blamed on China's shifting political and economic identity. Of course, here in China, there is almost no word whatsoever regarding the attacks. At my school today there was no indication that anyone was aware of what's been happening. Instead, students prepared for tomorrow's May 1 celebrations and Expo opening by wearing various costumes and dancing and jumping over sticks, punchy music playing over the PA system.

It's unclear how many teachers here are aware of what's been going on. Today's attack was in the neighboring province of Shandong, and yesterday's was in this province, Jiangsu. It's possible of course, that not one of them has any idea. It's odd, but it's easier to find out what's going on in China in the U.S. than in China. One can sense a kind of googly eyed paranoia in the way embarrassing or uncomfortable news stories are reported. For instance, the aftermath of the April 14 earthquake in Tibet has been closely guarded by the Chinese Army. There are some inside Tibet who are suggesting that the Communist government is deliberately downplaying the number of casualties to curb further international attention. This may be common knowledge in the west, or maybe not, but here, a news search of "Tibet Earthquake" is almost always met with an "error" message. Many news stories involving the Dalai Lama are censured. It seems whenever anything happens in Tibet, or anything in the nature of this week's school attacks, or the occasional mining disaster, etc. the focus is not on covering the story and attempting to gain an understanding of what's happening, rather the focus is on cleaning it up as quickly and quietly as possible. What's truly amazing to me is how transparent these attempts are, and how little concern this generates among the public.

No, the top stories of the week are how diligently we have all been preparing for the May 1 holiday, and what a great success the Shanghai World Expo will be. I clearly do not want to broach the subject with the other teachers. With my broken Chinese and uncertain legal status that would be a disaster for everyone. I think maybe I'll just call in sick tomorrow.

It's Tomb Sweeping Day

2010-04-03T19:23:00.000-07:00

Actually, it's the second of three consecutive days of tomb sweeping. Like everything else here, Qingming Jie, as it's called in Chinese, has a long twisted history involving self-cannibalism, dragons, sexy martyrs and a fitful relationship with the Communist government. I first heard of Tomb Sweeping Day when I got to school this morning and the gate was locked. And of course, what all this adds up to is a reason to shoot off fireworks all night.
Tomb Sweeping Day was originally called Hanshi Day and was observed by eating cold food and treading on grass. Somebody ate his own leg, somebody else was a disgraced Emperor and one or both of them died in a forest fire in 636 b.c.e. It was outlawed by the Communist Party in 1949 and reinstated in 2008.
It's possible that I'm making this up. Or, what is more likely, I quickly glanced at a Wikipedia page, fell asleep and when I came to, this is what I could remember.
But enough about Tomb Sweeping Day.
My foot is broken and my apartment building is flooded from burst pipes. My building, windswept and forlorn under normal conditions, now resembles a refugee camp somewhere between Blade Runner and That's So Raven. The halls are deluged, men in jumpsuits are everywhere. The elevators are out, leaving me to hop up and down twelve flights of stairs on a broken foot.
... Maybe they'll do a holiday based on my confused and unfortunate life in China. Fridge Cleaning Day.
All the rumors are true!

Don't Piss Everywhere

2010-03-17T08:09:00.002-07:00

I found this sign nailed to a bathroom wall of a school I work for. It's a very small, neighborhood primary school here in Xuzhou. The school is mostly first and second grade students, and a few older students who come in the afternoon for band practice. I never imagined I would need Mickey Mouse to warn me of the dangers of errant urine, but being that the bathroom is simply a long trough with a sprinkler valve at one end, and the users of the bathroom are no more than 8 years old, it does make a kind of daring sense.

Of course the state sanctioned copyright infringement against one of the biggest corporations on the planet is what really gets me to pee straight.

I guess the kids just think it's funny. (And in case you were wondering, I waited until after school, when there were no children around, to start snapping pictures in the bathroom. Just me and Mickey. Thank you)

Cures Unsightly Dishpan Hands... Supports the Bust line... The Effect of Truth

2010-03-17T08:09:00.001-07:00

The weather is finally turning. Last night I went for a long walk. The streets were wet, and a few streetlamps here and there like something forgotten. I've started naming the trees. I've noticed the junkyard dogs becoming more brazen and venturing further into the streets. I had to kick one. Believe me, I had to.

It's weather for talking of Jesus; for picking a person in a crowd and following them all afternoon; for neglecting obligations and going somewhere to get wet. I've opened up my windows and the dust comes in like something in a Buster Keaton short. I grit my teeth.

At night the streets are empty but for a few homeless people. The official policy on homelessness here is simple. The government more than adequately provides for all citizens, therefore homelessness doesn't exist. But a cursory walk around the neighborhood of the railway station in Xuzhou will discredit that assertion. But the weather is nicer, and most of the time they can get into an ATM lobby. So, I guess it works out. 2 + 2 = 5. Or four. It doesn't matter.

I stopped into a corner store to get a Tsingdao. There was an advertisement playing on a little TV in the corner for some type of revolutionary new mop technology. The images came seizure fast, the testimonials were moving and heartfelt. I decided to stay and have my beer there in the store. The ad went on for ten minutes in a repeating 60 second loop. What I could gather from the ad, and from conferring with the store clerk, was, this new mop is going to be big. No longer shall we suffer filth! "Supports the Bust-line!", it boasts."Cures Unsightly Dishpan Hands!", says a weeping mother. "The Effect of Truth!" in bold lettering. The ad finally ended. The clerk stared at me for a moment, then shouted something in Chinese. I thanked him and left.

The effect of truth! What a monumentally ridiculous and brilliant phrase. The effect of truth. I've been repeating it to myself all day. It seems a very communist phrase. Or, not necessarily communist, but certainly propagandistic. It implies that there may be no truth to the bold claims made on behalf of the mop, only the all important effects of truth. Wonderful. It could also be the case, that there is truth to the claims, but no one is concerned about that. The real object here, what's going send these things flying of the shelves is the effect of truth. An honest, if convoluted advertisement.

And what are the effects of truth? Belief. Faith. Dissolution of doubt. It seems a lot of bullshit and PR poetry for a goddamn mop. Admittedly it is pretty cool, it has this spinning bucket attachment, and it comes in pulse-pounding colors like grey, and tan. But who am I to judge? Maybe mops make people happy. There is a hole in all of us. Let's jam a mop in there and swish it around.

Cranes

2010-03-07T01:11:00.000-08:00

There are cranes. More and more everyday. Giant steel bastards slowly swaying over high-rise apartment towers and office buildings, engaged in the simultaneous task of destruction and renewal of the city sky line. In a country that is only sixty years old, but also thousands of years old, the line between destruction and construction is often blurred beyond distinction. From my window, which offers only a small slice of the northwestern part of the city, there is a clear view of this juxtaposition of ancient steady simplicity and modern haste.

The silliest things are the biggest. A giant TV tower shaped like an onion on a kebab skewer is set apart from most other buildings. Every night the the thing lights up in neon displays of waste and uselessness. Radio towers and mobile phone towers stick up here and there, and they bear an odd resemblance to the pagodas set in the hills further off. There is an air of hurry, of catching up maybe, in the way this city is expanding and rising, as if simply throwing a bunch of concrete together, stirring it up and pouring it everywhere will somehow make this place viable.

There is an inertia to the building of this city that exceeds reason and taste. Everything is done simply to be done. More, bigger, heavier. And the cranes seem to be shaking their heads as they smash into something in the way, and to be nodding in approval as they raise themselves up to pile on another floor.

The little temples and parks are being crowded into oblivion. The small mountains just beyond the city limits are now almost gone, hidden behind the latest tower and blanketed over by the concomitant dust and photochemical haze. Since I've been living in Xuzhou, nearly five months now, four hotels have opened on my street, all within a one block radius. And for what? Why would someone come here. There is nothing unique or special about this city. What's going on here is happening everywhere in China, in many cases on a much bigger scale. Perhaps some do come to see the ancient ruins and the Terra-cotta warrior museum. But it's these hotels that are crowding them into dirty corners and threatening their existence, should they prove one day to be more in the way than they are currently.

Being a foreigner, I am often asked by strangers or colleagues, why I am here. Sometimes I don't know what to say, but what I'm usually thinking, as a response to this question is, "Why are you here?"

The Canal

2010-03-06T06:08:00.000-08:00

Along the quays, when the weather is nicer, men sit outside for a haircut and a shave, dry, with a straight razor. Buses pass coughing and clanking. Car horns ring and pound. Stairs set at intervals lead from the street down to the canal. In some places there are no platforms, the steps simply disappear into the water. The water is dark and never moves.

It seems to be a purely decorative canal. It's too small and shallow to support any kind of navigation, the only land nearby is pavement, so irrigation is not a likely reason. Along the little stone bridges men hold fishing poles and occasionally pull a thin grey fish from the black water. At the platforms, crowds of old men and a few tough gals gather to play cards or mah jong. Dusty sheets spread along the walkways display cell phones, oversized novelty cigarette lighters, unwrapped underwear and socks, out of print wrestling magazines, and polished stones presided over by understandably confused Tajiks. The Tajiks wear little square caps and smoke even more than their Chinese counterparts. They also appear to be more proud of the crap they're selling. Neither they, nor anybody else has a clue how they came to be on the eastern coast of China selling rocks. One of them apparently lost an arm in the bargain.

Along the banks of the canal, and drifting throughout are piles of richly colored garbage. There is a seemingly endless volley of debris landing in the canal. Pink plastic bottles, green rectangles of crinkled cellophane and the sharp glare of aluminum wrappers collect and spread in greasy ripples. The bits of trash, some of it intact, and some of it broken and smashed, produce a weird and lovely burst soaked against the blackness of the water.

With the coming nightfall the peddlers wrap up their goods in sheets and blankets. The card players split up and wander off. The barber's chairs disappear. The Tajiks file into a little run down mosque. A few makeshift barbecues appear for people coming home from work or school, but these too pack and go before long.

The Spirit World

2010-03-05T09:11:00.000-08:00

I have with me a framed 5 x 7 portrait of my mother. She's about my age in the photo. It was taken about five years before I was born. Her hair is longer, and lighter than I knew it. It's parted in the center and gentle waves to her shirt collar. It's a typical portrait studio shot. The background is a purplish void. She is looking off just a bit to the right. It was the first thing I thought of taking and the last thing I packed.

When I was two years old we lived in a 2-family vinyl bungalow in a housing project. My earliest memories are in this house. There was an old woman who hung her laundry on a line and threw little balls of stale bread at the pigeons. My mom drove a beat-up yellow Buick. When I was six we lived with a guy she knew from church. They split up and he married a bald woman. When I was eight we lived with this guy she worked with, he had a hot-tub. One morning she didn't wake me for school because she said I looked peaceful. I think she was crying. And there was a june bug in the basement. The guy had to kill it. When I was twelve we lived in a one bedroom apartment that was owned by my grandmother. I slept on a little bed in the living room. During the day we dressed it up as a couch with pillows and old afghans. No one visited. I had to empty the dishwasher before she got home from work. I didn't always do it. When I was thirteen she married a guy and we moved to South Carolina. When I was fourteen we moved back. It was around this time that I first became conscious of our situation.

When I was sixteen my grandmother came to visit. My mother stayed in bed because it was too painful to get up. She looked at me and said "You look just like my son." To my grandmother she said "Doesn't he look just like Randall?" It's one of those memories where I can see myself, and not what I saw.

After she died no one knew what to say to me, they worried I would develop a dark outlook. I got a job filling gas and started reading William Burroughs.

My apartment here is very small, fine for one person. I keep the photograph on a table by the window. It gets dusty so I wipe the glass with toilet paper. It's remarkable how similar we look. People have always said that.

The Train to Hong Kong

2010-02-23T07:14:00.000-08:00

Why is the staff wearing army fatigues? Never mind, we're late. The air brakes hissed and the train lurched forward. We checked into our cabins and I smoked a cigarette. The cart came around and I bought a bottle of baijou. I mixed it with a bottle of fruit punch and got settled. I was traveling with a Canadian named Arthur. We were leaving Nanjing on a cold snowy afternoon and heading for Hong Kong. It was the day before the Chinese New Year. We had 25 hours and over 700 miles ahead of us.

The entire staff was made up of teenage girls in army fatigues. They looked more like a pop band than train attendants. I went into the dining car to have some dinner. Through a propped open door I could see into the kitchen. There was a number of salty looking old men getting drunk, playing cards, yelling and laughing at each other. I decided to eat later. It was a couple of hours later that I finished my bottle of baijou and went looking for another. It was getting dark outside, but I could see we were far into the countryside. I went into Arthur's cabin, woke him up and told him it was time to get drunk. He said, before his eyes were open, "I'm up for anything." It was about 10 pm. I said, "Good, because I think something weird is going on here." We went into the hall just as a girl in army fatigues was being dragged into the bathroom. In a moment we heard her vomiting. I said, "What the fuck!" Arthur said, "What the fuck!"

We walked into the dining car and found a sea of filth and mayhem. The floors were soaked with what I can only describe as fluid. There were cigarette butts strewn everywhere. There was maybe 20 people all piss drunk. A fat Chinese cook decided to take charge of the situation. He shouted a few instructions, pointed his dirty index finger at me and then sunk into a chair and fell asleep. There were some people sleeping, some people smoking, and some doing both. "Can we get some damn baijou?" I said. After a few minutes of confusion we discovered that all the booze on the train was gone. I didn't believe it, but they wouldn't let us into the kitchen, and demanded that we return to our compartment.

For the next few hours, one by one, every staff member was dragged from the dining car and either stuffed into their bed or locked in the bathroom. I wondered who was driving the train. But really I couldn't worry about that. No goddamn booze. Jesus. Later, once the lights were out I snuck into the stock closet behind the kitchen. Not only was there no booze, there was no anything. No water, food, nothing. And we still had 14 hours to Hong Kong. I went to sleep hungry and disappointed. In the morning I noticed the train was traveling in the opposite direction. I asked Arthur about this but he didn't seem to care. Somehow, through it all, we made it to Hong Kong roughly alive and on schedule.

Wish You Were Here!

2010-02-09T23:34:00.000-08:00

Trying to Off Myself in 'The City of Tomorrow Today' (Shanghai)

2010-01-27T01:09:00.000-08:00

So I thought, well, at least I can go down to the subway platform and throw myself in front of an on-coming train. This way the day won't be a total loss. So I went down to the station and purchased a one time subway ticket, and followed the mass of people down to the platform. Once the crowd thinned a bit and I could finally take a look around, I felt the final frustrating insult smack me in the mouth. There, at the the edge of the platform, was a clear plastic wall.

There are automatic doors in the wall that open only after the train has arrived, and close again before it leaves. The trains always stop at exactly the same spot, and the doors in the wall line up with the doors in the train. Brilliant, I thought, just fucking brilliant. What the hell am I supposed to do?

Throwing oneself in front of a subway train is a tradition. It's been a reliable method of auto-disposal since subways were created. It must seem to those in the final throes of misery as if subway trains were made for this very purpose. Why has 'The City of Tomorrow Today' gone and messed things up? It's part of the social compact. Most of us ride the train to get where we need to go, and some of us toss our worthless bodies into them as they approach the station. It's simple. No one cares; it's the cost of doing business.

I briefly looked around for any gaps in the wall or areas under construction where I might be able to sneak by. But then the train arrived, so I squeezed in with a thousand other people and went for a little ride. No point wasting three yuan.

Once I reached my destination I felt markedly better about my situation, indeed my outlook and general humor had improved greatly. I felt so good I began to whistle. And I laughed when I thought that only fifteen minutes previous I had wanted to leap into the head of a speeding subway train. If I continue to be so brash and impetuous, I thought, I might get myself into trouble one day. There won't always be a clear plastic 'thwarting wall'.

What The Hell Is A Communist?

2010-01-26T05:04:00.000-08:00

My employer here in China is an organization called the Jiangsu Educational Service for International Exchange. We just call it JESIE. As I understand it, JESIE is part of the broader Ministry of Education for Jiangsu province. (I don't know if it's really called something as ominous as a "Ministry", but we'll go with it for now.) This means they are a governmental organization. This means that I work for the government of China. This means... I'm a communist? Am I a communist? I know I don't go to church, but really, what the hell is a communist?

Around here a communist is someone who goes to karaoke five or six time a day stone damn sober. (They call it KTV) Here it's not a big room where everyone laughs at you for spilling your vodka tonic down your shirt as you mumble through 'Knock on Wood' by Amii Stewart. Here you go into a private room with your friends, you take nothing to eat or drink with the rare exception of 'GoldenMonkey (one word) Milk Candy'. I've had some, and I couldn't tell you what it is. I did not taste any milk, or milk derivatives. I'm also fairly certain that I didn't taste any goldenmonkey, but then, how would I know? And you pick out all your favorite Chinese super hits from the computerized catalogue, and then, you stay there, for hours, until you've sung every last godforsaken song on the list, passing the microphone around and quietly nodding.

Also, a communist is someone insensitive to extremes of temperature and odour. Both of which stalk the streets of XuZhou like the bloody plague. The smells here can be traumatizing. If my fingers weren't so numb from the cold I would cut my nose off with a pair of pruning shears and bury it under my building.

I don't think this fits with the master ideas of Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx and Lenin/Trotsky/Stalin et al. Indeed if the 'Communist Manifesto' was written today in response to the situation of the Chinese working class, it would probably be sold as science-fiction in the West. Or maybe it would be just another weird Chinese sit-com that everyone is too tired to pay attention to. And wouldn't that be a pity.

Come little rabbit, come and play: part 2

2009-12-30T21:58:00.000-08:00

I have been listening to Akmal Shaikh's plea for world peace "Come Little Rabbit" on repeat for two days now. I have added dozens of hits to the YouTube video of the same name. I was first struck by how silly and small it is. It's not made particularly well, the singing is off, the melody is grating and there is maybe 20 to 30 words in the whole song, which lasts less than two minutes.

But I also think it is perfect, lovely and heartbreaking. There is a sadness in his voice. I think what most people ask themselves when they hear this song is "How could the man who recorded this song be a drug smuggler and criminal deserving of death?" They also see it as evidence of his ambiguous mental state. And that's the truly dispiriting part of this whole story, the questions, the uncertainty. All I know for certain of Mr Shaikh is, he's a British citizen, he wrote and recorded "Come Little Rabbit" because he thought he would bring about world peace and become a pop star, he was arrested twenty-seven months ago for smuggling heroin into China, and was executed Tuesday for the same crime.

But what if he was fully cognizant of what he was doing? There is, as the Chinese have repeatedly asserted, no prior documentation of mental illness. There are rumors that he "behaved erratically" or was bipolar and depressed. Well, maybe he was, maybe he wasn't. Maybe he was something bigger. His whole life is a mystery, even his family members are unsure of what to say of him. There seems to be no questioning, in any of the reports, of his determination to become a hero of world peace. Why was he so driven? Why would he so blindly follow anyone who could further his dream? Why would he go to China? He clearly wasn't familiar with the current state of Chinese pop music.

It's a far more interesting and compelling story if we allow ourselves to assume for a moment that everything Mr Shaikh did was intentional. That his determination to become a pop star would not be limited by his own life. That he carried something much bigger. I'm not suggesting that he perpetrated some suicidal hoax. I'm suggesting that he was a truly innocent and fearless person who gave his life for his art, though it consisted of only one song, and that song only one hundred and five seconds. But it's a song so sorrowful and pained and joyous. It's a song inspired by and representative of timeless optimism.

Come little rabbit, come and play: part 1

2009-12-30T08:42:00.000-08:00

The Chinese government this week executed Akmal Shaikh, a British citizen charged with drug smuggling. He was arrested in the northern city of Urumqi in 2007 after arriving by plane from Tajikistan. Most reports describe a mentally ill man with delusions of pop stardom who was duped into carrying a suitcase containing four kilograms of heroin alone across the Chinese border. The Chinese government has insisted that Mr Shaikh's human rights had been respected and that calls by the British government and human rights organizations for a commuted sentence were highly disrespectful to Chinese sovereignty. Certainly none of this matters now, Reprieve and Amnesty International have moved on to the next case, and the British quietly fell into line after a stern rapping on the knuckles by the Chinese.

There is, however, a much larger background to this sad and strange story. It could be that the execution of Mr Shaikh was politically motivated. Not in the sense that the Chinese have a strong position on drug trafficking, but in the much deeper sense of a country, once nearly crippled by the opium trade, striking back. Mr Shaikh was born in Pakistan, spent some time in time the U.S. as well as many countries throughout the border regions of Eurasia, but he was a British citizen.

When Mao Zedong and the Communist party came to power after WWII, there was a great deal of anger and hostility toward the west, and the British in particular. The British had imported enormous amounts of opium into China, amassing a fortune large enough to literally rule the world. One of the most popular reforms instituted by the Maoists was to make all drugs illegal and mandate the harshest possible punishments for possession and trafficking, including death.

From this point of view it is a grim irony that a man of middle eastern descent, who emigrated to England as a young boy would be arrested in China for smuggling heroin. The case may have touched a nerve among some in the Party. Not only did they insist on trying the case without outside interference, but strongly condemned any voice of opposition. Of course, if the roles were reversed Britain or the U.S. would have acted similarly. However, these roles could never be truly reversed, not without ignoring a long and bloody history, but it is in cases such as this one that we can see the balance has shifted.

It is not my contention that Mr Shaikh was tried and convicted for anything other than his crimes, but it does make for a perfectly weird bit of propaganda. A representative of the immoral capitalist west, sentenced to death by the logic and justice of Chinese communism.

The Confidence of a Trickster and the Blistered Fingers of an Alchemist

2009-12-19T23:48:00.000-08:00

Notorious. 1946. Directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock from a screenplay by Ben Hecht. The film stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, two thwarted lovers squaring off against a Nazi cabal in fabulous Rio de Janeiro. High Speed Thrills! Romance! Intrigue! Suspense! Uranium in the Wine Cellar! This one's got it all.

Ingrid Bergman plays Alicia Huberman, daughter of a Nazi conspirator, and darling of the post-war, jet-setting party crowd. Cary Grant is T.R. Devlin, a government agent whose mission is to persuade Alicia to infiltrate a secret society of Nazis who have relocated to Brazil. Alicia is, of course, initially dubious, but her desire to atone for her families crimes, and to gain the trust and love of Devlin finally brings her to accept the mercies of her fate. As with the best Hitchcock films, doing the right thing is often terrifying and dangerous.

The leader of the Nazis in Brazil is Alex Sebastian, played with eerie charm by the great Claude Rains. Alicia gains the confidence (and more) of the diabolical Sebastian, and Devlin, like the audience, has to watch painfully removed as their meticulous plans spin wildly and uncontrollably toward a final showdown.

The style and look of Notorious is at once a heart-breaking romance of two lovers with the full terror and madness of the world between them, and a spy thriller perfectly timed and layered. Hitchcock was the master of toying with his audience. This was the joy of film making for him. He was a natural trickster, and the bigger the stakes, the faster his fingers moved under the cloak. A sly smile, a quick wink, and what unfolds is a story of the sacrifices of love clashing with unspeakable evils, the devastating simplicity of the age of mass murder.

The uneasy affair between Devlin and Alicia is the human balance to a story of conspiracy and murder. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman are simply mesmerizing. There is a sharp passion in their characters, the painful desire to throw off everything and be together. And this is where the story displays a delicate paradoxical and agonizing mastery. For, it is only through this dangerous and deadly pursuit of justice that Devlin and Alicia can finally trust and love one another. The slightest weakness or wavering by either of them could not only jeopardize the other's safety but also crush their hopes of love if and when they make it out of Rio.

So, there is, to this film, not the easy pat resolution so hoped for by the audience and characters alike. The conclusion of the film, though there is some satisfaction in it, is as twisted and wonderful as what had lead to it. The ending of the film is a praising of the whole film itself. It's not so much a resolution as a doxology. The story is over, but the power and mystery remains.

A Dee-luxe Apartment in the Sky

2009-12-01T08:11:00.000-08:00

The halls are filled with cigarette smoke like a bad movie. Or a really good movie. The smoke sets into the walls turning them a pale sickly yellow, and lifts the wallpaper from it's creases like a nervous virgin. Down the hall the sounds of old men seated in tiny fold-up chairs, shouting spitting gambling. They wear threadbare coats and little black hats with short brims. Have they lately escaped a threshing accident? Sometimes they play a game similar to 'asshole' without the booze, but usually they play mah jong (think of it like Chinese dominoes, although I'm not sure that's what it is.) I don't know where they come from, they smell dreadfully.

From my window there are banks and military barracks and glowing neon radio towers and in the distance little temples and pagodas at the crest of the hills. Most nights there are fireworks, sometimes they are spectacular. Sometimes they are so close I think the building's going to burn down. And the car alarms plead and scream their little songs of violation. There is, as far as I've been able to discover, never any reason for these expenditures of sound and smoke. In the ancient times they used fireworks to scare off spirit demons. Fine. Now it's just for a good time on a cold Tuesday night. I stand at my window drinking jing wine and cursing the brutal morons who feel the need to explode the sky every night. Jing wine, by the way, is not wine at all. It's 35% alcohol and tastes like candy and baked rubber. In a word: Divine. In the morning the charred debris.

In the elevators there are ad posters slipped into plastic frames bolted to the wall. In the lobby security guards in long coats and black cargo pants and cleaning ladies carrying mops. Sometimes it rains. I say 'Hi' to everyone. There's a store across the street, I buy cookies and beer. Because that's what I like.

#4

2009-11-29T08:53:00.000-08:00

Today I saw a girl vomit in the street. It was yellow. She looked to be about thirteen. A friend held her hair back. I was hailing a cab. It was terribly cold. In the cab on the way home I did not speak. I thought about action movies I would like to watch, cigarettes and how refreshing and deadly they are, and that poor stupid girl losing her lunch in the middle of the street. How unfortunate. (For her.) I'm fine.

And now a story...

Europe

“Died of black-lung she did; the first in our neighborhood. Father was distraught. We found him the very night, drowning kittens he’d stuffed in a sack and raving about Freud and Henry Asquith.

“The following morning, Missus Thinwhistle, who lives upstairs, came to the door to ask if we’d seen the little calicoes she had bred as part of Lizaveta’s dowry. Father was drunk and sent her away. And that’s when Tisha killed that Spanish cockroach big as a squirrel. I swear it had green eyes. They heard its neck snap in the stairwell. You wouldn’t believe all the fluid in that thing, and it looked like runny eggs. God almighty! Killed it with the fat end of an axe she did.

“Father, Tisha, the baby and I sleep in the same bed. Father’s always spilling vodka in the sheets. He sings weepy old songs and clutches at us in our sleep. Sometimes he wakes us in the night demanding we say the Ave Maria right there, all of us holding the baby. He says war will break on the continent any day and we had better pray the Blessed Virgin keeps us safe, if she so chooses that is.

“Missus Thinwhistle says that if we don’t pay the last two months rent she’ll be forced to put us on the street. Father truly hates her, says she does the work of Satan and has bad breath and carries on with heathens, and that’s why her husband never saw forty.

“I went to her flat once; she had hard candies in a blue porcelain dish. I put some in my pocket. She saw me, but let me keep them. When I left I spit on her door. I’ve taken Mum’s place cleaning furnaces at the mill, but it doesn’t bring enough to pay the rent and food, not with father spending most of it on drink. Father says Missus Thinwhistle is just bitter because her darling Lizaveta never did marry that fancy protestant; apparently the kittens were a deal breaker.

“Father says when the war breaks out I shall have to go and fight. He says it doesn’t matter whose hat I wear just kill everyone I see. He certainly gets worked up about this war, starts him hacking and lately spitting blood. But I don’t want to go to the war and bayonet other boys. I’m in love. Or maybe I don’t know anything about love. But how my heart does pound when I smell the powder on her neck, like sweet candy it is.

“Father says he has a relation in military affairs that may be able to get me a favorable post with the opportunity for promotion. He says this love business is a hoax perpetrated by the Church of England, one of father’s dearest and longest enemies you can be sure. This relation’s name is Milic, a half Prussian. He’s been to the Crimea on three occasions, got the clap all three times. He was personally appointed by Archduke Ferdinand, before he was shot of course.

“I don’t remember much of home. Father says the hills ran with oil black as Satan’s asshole, and great columns of fire rose into the sky writhing and twisting like drugged dervishes. He says its best to keep cold because women are from fire, and women bring children. Father blames me for his lame arm, says the terrible scars on my face spooked those horses. I hope one day he will forgive me. He says the Lord has what more do I want?”

The Neighborhood

2009-11-11T21:23:00.000-08:00

The goats are hung one at a time by their feet from a rusty steel hook. Their legs are bound, and the binding rope secures them to the hook. For a moment, the goat hangs there, blinking and drooling, while the butcher finds a suitable knife. All of this is done in a partially closed off street, lined with improvised kitchens, produce stands and wide wooden planks displaying various cuts of red meat and poultry. The butcher isn't gone long. He briefly studies the hanging goat. The goat looks back at him with big, shadowy eyes, and not the merest flicker of recognition of what's coming. One quick, deep incision in the neck and the blood comes. There is, by the way, a lot of blood in a goat.

Smooth like silk and how it shines.

Next to the butcher's stand, parked in the road, is a flatbed truck with three or four more goats. Waiting. Bound at the feet, propping themselves up on their elbows and snapping at each other. Then settling back down as rushing, jockeying shoppers pass. The blood spills onto the cracked pavement, already stained brown from what had gone before. The butcher's wife sits nearby, nonplussed. Their small naked daughter intermittently runs into the road to pee on the ground and then runs back to her mother.

When the blood has drained, the skinning begins. This is the only part of the operation that seems to require any skill or deftness of movement, and the butcher performs this task with relish. Smiling. Often, he leaves the tail with its tuft of fur as an artistic flourish maybe, or perhaps, no one eats the tail, so why waste time skinning it? As with much of what goes on in this gruesome marketplace, I find myself philosophizing and deconstructing this situation much more so than it necessitates, rather than simply buying what I need and leaving.

Which brings me to an interesting point: I'm the freak there. I'm what's out of place. There are big, silvery fish chopped neatly in half on sheets of newspaper(still flopping and writhing), the sweet, tangy stench of spilled animal blood pervades the air, there are naked children screaming and peeing, pregnant dogs with hip injuries hobbling through the crowd, their serous carriage swaying roughly, geese and pheasants tied up, lying on the ground, sere, solemn and half-dead, men shouting, women shouting, coins and paper clutched tightly in their hands and every person there is looking at me. It's fun to be so accidentally exotic. And a little unnerving.

So, in the end, after the self-conscious awe and disgust has settled again somewhere inside me, I buy a few bananas, some ginger, and a few apples, and I go. On my way I pass the butcher again as he hangs another unfortunate goat on his rusty hook. The previous one still there, a pile of bloody fur below it, its yellowy-red organs still clinging to parched connective tissue and soft bones. The butcher pauses for a moment to stare at me, and then attends to his business.

Xuzhou: 6,000 Years of Bizarre Nonsense

2009-11-11T21:22:00.000-08:00

Here is a brief history of Xuzhou, The Han Dynasty and the Communist Revolution of 1949, as I see them.

Depending on who you ask the city of Xuzhou is either 6,000 years old, 2,200 years old or sixty years old. Well, I've been here for two months, and it all seems like a strange dream, so lets not split hairs.

-6,000 years; the oldest existing record of anyone doing anything here.

-2,200 years; Xuzhou becomes a prominent city in the Han Dynasty (206 b.c.e.-220 c.e.). Liu Bang, the first emperor of the Han Dynasty was born in Xuzhou.

The Han Dynasty is important and funny for two reasons. The first being the silk road. Somehow, amid the famines, factionalism, civil unrest and a dangerously ignorant obsession with gunpowder, not to mention the ever present threat of the Japanese dropping anchor for a surprise house cleaning, the successive emperors of the Han Dynasty managed to establish one of the most significant trade routes in history. How did they do it? Insatiable and merciless blood lust.

The other reason is eunuchs! That's right. During the Han Dynasty the practice of keeping eunuchs, both as political advisers as well as escorts for the emperor's concubines became wide spread. I certainly understand the topic of voluntary castration may be an uncomfortable one for some of you, for others though, it may be just what you need to hear. My personal feelings on the subject are mixed. Now, I know what some of you must be saying: "A man without a pair of figs is no man at all." Fair enough. Nevertheless there is a long and interesting history of the role they played in the Oriental dynasties, some amassing significant political power. Indeed, it wasn't until the twentieth century that the practice of keeping eunuchs finally ended, and only then because it was simply no longer fashionable. In a certain sense this is fine. Fashion is a great motivator. A lot can happen under the influence of fashion. The problem, of course, is fashions can change dramatically and often with no warning. There must, out there, be some true believers yet. As with anything. Waiting for the spotlight to swing back in their direction. Which is hilarious. Laugh-out-loud, pee-your-pants, shoot-yourself-in-the-FUCKING-face hilarious.

-60 years; The Communist Revolution and 'The New China'. Food rations, totalitarian nightmare, 2 + 2 = 5 and all that. Who gives a shit!

Yeah.

The First Two Months

2009-10-24T20:03:00.000-07:00

I've been here two months now, long enough to feel the weather changing, to see it in the trees, and feel it in the night as I get up to find a pair of socks. I feel it too, when, arriving at school I find my students, red of cheek and buried in a concentric ring of sweaters. It's at these moments that my mind goes back to the weeks, hours and minutes leading to my departure.
My vision of the upcoming year was put into a strange and unwelcome context as I scanned the faces of family members assembled at a 'farewell' party a few days before I left. They all seemed to know something that I didn't. And their faces told me it was hideous. "China! Wow! Why on Earth are you going to China?" (To teach English). "How long will you be there?" (About a year). Silence. We chewed our pizza, sipped our drinks. We were seated in folding chairs in my backyard, it was a humid, breezy afternoon. There was food on tables, napkins tumbling through the lawn, coolers stocked with beer, and questions. "Are you packed?" (I don't leave until Thursday). "Still... "
Their faces tightened as I attempted to cast a positive, or at least calming light on something they all felt to be truly dreadful. I could hear the panicky subtext of their questions. The terms 'angina', 'toothless pimps', 'habeas corpus', 'Godless' and 'glass eye' were never uttered. But these words more accurately describe the tone of the afternoon's inquiries. We chewed pizza.
"This pizza is great!", I offered. A hopeless attempt at changing the subject.
"Does it get very cold there... I mean how will you stay warm?"
After a few hours each guest handed over a card, or pointed to a table where one had been left. "Good luck" was said with alarming earnestness more than once. And then they drove home, feeling, I presume, as though they had been handed some bad news, dealt a blow. I went inside, took some aspirin, and laid down. My plan for the upcoming days was to sleep as much as possible, something I had done little of in the previous weeks.
And a few days later I left. Newark to Beijing. Beijing to Nanjing. And finally I settled in the city of Xuzhou (after some initial uncertainty and hand-wringing on the part of my employer).
And the weather is turning. And I wake in the predawn to find my socks.
Something else occurs to me then as well: Jesus, I'm actually here. Perhaps what I found (imagined?) to be so unsettling about that afternoon gathering was not the questions, but the lack of reason on my part they exposed. I had no reason to come here. There was no grand vision of seeing the Far East, or altruistic motive in teaching children, or even the need to 'get away'. I was simply going. That's all. The reasons would come later. Or they wouldn't. This was a fun little thought experiment while I was sipping beer in my backyard, but it was a whole different animal once I boarded the plane, and stayed on it for 16 hours.
But it seems to me now that it may take doing something with no reasons to really see what I'm doing. In other words, I'm figuring it out. It's strange and exciting and not always agreeable. Sometimes though, sometimes it is just magical.