Mantis Versus

Korea Stories: OSHA and Bloodborne Pathogens

September 7, 2016 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

I had to watch an OSHA training video about bloodborne pathogens today. Which reminds me of an experience I had in Korea.

Once upon a time, between class periods, I was walking the short distance from my room (the scorned English reading room) to the English classroom when two rowdy 3rd grade boys- in the midst of the skipping, streaming crowd- stopped right in front of me and faced off, each grabbing the other’s shirt collar with one hand and raising their free fist in the air. They pummeled each other until the bigger boy’s hammer fist smashed the smaller boy’s nose hard enough to draw blood. It splattered over the floor and they both drew back. The bigger boy shouted something sharp and menacing and ran off down the hallway as his victim looked down in slight shock, holding his nose. Then he ran off in the same direction down the hall, probably to their next class.

Now, children’s fights and misbehavior are treated with an exceedingly tolerant, negligently long leash in South Korea, and I regularly saw elementary school students punch, kick, stomp on, jump on, and wrestle each other, many times until there were blood or tears, as teachers turned a blind eye to the whole thing. Anyone who has taught in South Korea will more than likely corroborate this lax indulgence toward children.

So, I stand there, stunned, looking down at the blood splatter as children flow around me- some still marching straight through it and ignoring my upheld arms, as per usual. I turn to the open door of the English classroom and see my co-teacher, Mrs. Seok (sounds like a combination of sock and “sawk”), who I think also caught the end of the brief scrap. She looks unsure and hesitant to respond to the boys, which I had come to expect. So I just state the obvious, hoping to provoke something from her.

“Um, there’s blood on the floor.”

“Yeah,” she grimaced and said in her high, pinched voice, “They fight a lot.”

Children are still merrily shouting as they brush past me, standing in an A-frame stance over the main drops of blood. I mumble in frustration, “No, I mean aren’t we supposed to clean up the blood? It can carry disease…” I trail off as I turn to hustle over to the bathroom sink and grab the mop.

Mrs. Seok had gone back in the classroom and children still stomped through the wet floor as I hurriedly mopped up what I could before the bell.

I have no idea if there is an equivalent to OSHA training in Korea. Judging by the attitudes I saw, I think not.

Korea Stories: Grandma at the Museum

August 23, 2016 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

A still from Jan Fabre’s “Prometheus Landschaft.”

Once upon a time, I went with a friend to the Busan Museum of Art to pleasantly pass a holiday afternoon. The main exhibit there was by a Belgian hack of the highest order named Jan Fabre. In fact, Fabre’s art is so offensively bad that Wikipedia cites an article that he has been attacked by men with clubs for it [this was over his filming cats being thrown high up, spinning into the air and landing hard]. At this particular installation, The Years of the Hour Blue, all the paintings and sculptures were scribbled over with a blue Bic pen. Occasionally, there was a fragment of representational art, but most of it was nonsense with a blue ballpoint pen texture. You could have released a crazy person, sans art degree, with his own supply of Bic pens into the exhibit for an hour’s stretch, and after he had done his worst the museum guests would have had no idea which was the intended art and which the vandalism.

Anyway, there was a secluded corner room separated by a curtain, and inside a projector played this Jan Fabre short film (about 4 minutes) and other selections on loop. It is the usual bonkers hodgepodge of naked or nearly naked skinny people sitting in a dingy old room and saying nonsense in German as they stare into space and bang their heads against the wall. I felt so ashamed by all the obscenity and nudity of this and the next videos that I walked out. But my friend lingered, waiting for I don’t know what, and my perplexed thoughts scrambled in embarrassment, wondering about her as well as the Korean grandmother and little girl sitting with her, also inside the projection room. That poor grandma wanted to do a kind and educational thing for her granddaughter by taking her to a museum on holiday, and now look at what defilement she’s been exposed to! What did they think! What did they say!

A long moment later, my friend shuffled out of the video room and relieved me of my constraint. As our steps echoed throughout the empty, cavernous galleries, my friend reported just what I wanted to know. “Did you see that grandmother in there?” she asked. Of course I had, how could I not feel for her and the shame of the sordid situation?

“Her granddaughter asked her, ‘Grandma, what are they doing? Why are they doing that?'”

The grandma summoned the wisdom of all her years. “‘Sometimes,'” she said, “‘people just want to be crazy.'”

…

The video, Prometheus Landschaft, can be viewed here.

On Muslim Dress and Modesty

August 14, 2016 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

From Peter Hitchens’ blog:

“Islam’s real challenge to Western society is not terrorism. …

“No, the challenge comes from Islam’s near-total monopoly on things we used to value quite a bit and then totally gave up – female modesty being one of them. And yes, I know that plenty of other things, much more controversial, come with the package.

“Pictures of Egypt’s veiled and covered Doaa Elghobashy, (above), competing against bikini-clad Western opponents in the Olympic beach volleyball, are very thought-provoking.

“You don’t have to go more than 100 years back to find Western women who would have had much more in common – in attitudes and dress – with Ms Elghobashy than they did with her near-naked rivals.

“I often wonder if our society will sicken and tire of its seemingly endless relaxation of rules. Such things have happened before. If it does, the Muslim religion may be very well-positioned to lead the counter-revolution. I don’t want this to happen. I just think it might.”

This is an excellent point. When people reject the wearing of hijabs, niqabs, and burqas, I usually agree with them, but I also ask, “What is your counter argument? How do you dress?” The one I usually sense is, “WE CAN WEAR WHATEVER WE WANT!” What hope does this terrible sneer leave anyone who believes in modesty and living a righteous life?

I am tired of rules being relaxed and sneered at, I am tired of the bombardment of sexual titillation on TV shows and advertisements, almost every website or sidebar or thumbnail, and most magazine covers- I have been tired of this my whole life. I hate that modesty is a foreign, archaic concept to women (and men) in America and the larger Western world, and that to even suggest the idea would bring up a bitter argument that would get me outcast.

But what is the effective counter? The so-called Christian church of modern America is feckless, next to worthless. The people often dress in the same fashionable, overly casual, often immodest style as the rest of the world. Instead of coming together for daily and weekly prayer sessions, they would rather build million dollar compounds, give cheap speeches, and sell books about “How Hand-Wringing can Revolutionize Evangelizing.” Either that, or they believe repeating the same centuries-old ceremonies and saying the same general truisms about sin and salvation once a week is all that’s needed.

Islam, for all its evils, is embarrassing us. It is plain to see that many Muslims take their religion seriously and live their life by it, following its rules for how to dress and act. Not many generations ago, it would have been normal, even de rigueur, for American women to wear concealing clothing and a hat or headscarf in public or in a church meeting. Now? Wearing a head covering makes a woman look like she belongs to a strange cult. I am not suggesting that women MUST or SHOULD wear head coverings or that this is the best solution to showing modesty in modern society. I mean that our collective culture has eroded, and there is not an effective counter to it; meanwhile Islam is manifesting itself as the only apparent movement of modesty and moral living.

To try and live a righteous life in America today reminds me more and more of Lot trying to maintain himself in Sodom.

The Real China: Handsome Foreign Spies and Open Secrets

April 21, 2016 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 1 Comment

Posters across Beijing are warning Chinese women to beware of handsome foreign men who might be romancing state secrets out of them. You can see the full comic-style poster and read about it here and here.

As the consensus most shuai guh (handsome guy) among the students and teachers at my university, I should state now that the only secrets I blazed abroad were the open secrets: that China is a rotten, awful country deserving of universal censure, a place of proverbial lawlessness and pollution, with foul-mouthed pushy masses of people fouling the earth with their trash, spit, and excrement, and the cars, buses, and bikes on the streets destroying any peace with their recklessness and blaring horns, and all the selfish, crowded ugliness happening under the sagging smog of the dishwater-colored sky.

But back to the story of the comic, one thing I’ve never understood is how so-called handsome foreign men are even persuading local Chinese women to date them. All my small talk fizzled out before it ever got flirtatious.

Me: So, what do you like to do?

Aggressively Introverted Chinese girl: I LIKE… WATCH TV.

Me, smiling solicitously: Okay. Do you like anything else?

Her: JUST WATCH TV.

Me, giggling nervously: Okay, that’s good. Do you like TV dramas? Prison Break?

Her: …

Me, after a deflating pause: Do you like sleeping?

Her: YES. I LIKE.

[END CONVERSATION AS BOTH LOOK AROUND FOR SOMETHING TO DISTRACT THEMSELVES WITH.]

I learned to assume that everyone in China counted sleeping or dreaming as a hobby. One girl took being a cold fish to an extreme though and told me she had no interests, nothing, even despite me pressing her if she liked the staples of sleep and TV. In a way, that’s a lot more interesting than saying “JUST WATCH TV.”

So, I have no idea how the few foreign guys I saw in China with Chinese girlfriends got that way. I assume they wore it on their sleeve that they were looking for a Chinese girlfriend and they found their inverse half in a worldly metropolis like Beijing.

And- hold everything- since when was it that foreigners were spying on China and not the other way around? Is there a single piece of military equipment, a single automobile, computer, clothing line, or Chinese toy that was not blatantly cheated and copied from foreign sources? A friend of mine works as an engineer for a car company and he’s told me how his management has issued real warnings- not simple cartoons that are getting laughed at in China and abroad- about sharing too much data with Chinese clients because of the now obvious business wisdom that China steals and spies out whatever intellectual property it can.

But this is communist tyranny. Everything corrupts from the inside, from the top down, with the stiff-browed leaders perpetually making highhanded, doublespeak excuses and laughably see-through shows of triumphal patriotism and Big Brother brainwashing. What an awful country.

In fact, at one dinner a few talented English students of mine confessed to me that they all three wanted foreign boyfriends because they found them much more handsome and appealing than Chinese men. Now, I met a lot of decent, likable guys in China, but I could see the ladies’ point. The Chinese husbands I witnessed too often showed off domineering, drinking, dismissive, pouty, entitled behavior, not caring who was watching and seeming to have no appreciation for how much more attractive and shapely their wives were compared to them.

As I’ve said before, the greatest threat from foreign guests in China, handsome or not, is when they see China for what it really is.

On Church: A Visit to St. Agnant Catholic Church

March 20, 2016 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

Despite the humorous pseudonym in the title, I do not write this review of everybody’s favorite scapegoat, the Roman Catholic Church, to mock it. No, the criticisms of Catholic theology and practice are old news- very old news- and I have no desire to pile on more ridicule or scorn.

I would put it like this: C.S. Lewis famously wrote in Mere Christianity how the essential doctrines of the Christian faith, i.e. the deity of Jesus Christ, the salvation of souls through the death and resurrection of Christ, and the one God being a trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, were the foundation of the metaphorical building of the Church, capital C, and each room within the universal Church was occupied by one tradition/denomination of church, small c, with its own practices and statement of beliefs based on the foundation. I would put the problems of church congregations and traditions, small c, like this, that they are patients in a hospice, and while the Roman Catholic Church is afflicted with a terminal cancer, it would be a great mistake for the other traditions, or hospice patients, to ignore their own tumor or tuberculosis in favor of condemning or “evangelizing” the deathbed Catholics. Physician, heal yourself.

From Isaiah: “The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrefying sores: they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment.” This is a word for the modern church. Actually, the modern church needs to prove that it is “church”- big or small c- in the first place. When I survey the congregations and churches today as they are, not as they claim to be, I am not convinced they deserve the name.

But, the situation being what it is, anyone claiming to be a Christian and part of that one Church universal, like me, is inevitably familiar with and following some type of church tradition. And other religious belief traditions, like Roman Catholicism, while loathed in thought, will inevitably interact with one’s own in reality- sometimes in the surprising forms of friendship and alliance. (While some apologists might insist that all Christians are part of one faith in Jesus Christ, “loathe” is a strong word and we don’t loathe any doctrine or person, and that we cannot exclude any Christian or tradition, according to 1 Corinthians, I defy them to give up their own ways and attend Catholic mass and catechism, which teach that the Church of Rome is THE true Church, capital T-H-E and C, or the one metaphorical building which contains rooms for Roman Catholics only. If a Christian does not believe this, will not be a faithful member of a Catholic church, it must be concluded that they loathe this tradition, even if they want to be nice in person.)

So, when Catholics have been in the media’s cross-hairs in recent years, and when they have been used as a byword by every crank looking to deride quote-unquote “religion,” I have been surprised to feel a strange affinity to the Catholic Church. I say strange because I openly loathe the man-made, false traditions of the Catholic Church and I am descended from a line of Lutherans who lived in small Iowa towns where they and the Catholics did not mix.

Growing up, I was jumping out of my skin during confirmation classes when discussing the abuses of the Reformation-era Catholic Church and observing how many people still followed the fossilized beliefs in the pope and inexplicable church laws and hierarchy. But although I was filled with outrage toward the Roman Church, my personal social circle seemed to gravitate towards Catholic friends. And although I attended a Lutheran church every Sunday and Wednesday, I had no real personal ties with the people who should have seemingly been my spiritual community. As the years went on, I noticed that even though the doctrine and terminology of Catholics were bizarre beyond belief to me, their charitable outreach and their public reproach by way of popular media and culture had me taking their side in the ideological divide between them and their secular, progressive taunters. Of course, this is not an endorsement of Catholic belief, practice, or the widespread wickedness of child abuse. I will always protest the Roman Catholic Church for that. This is only an admission of my surprising alliance with a religious group I had assumed would be my mortal enemy.

I quit myself like a man one St. Patrick’s Day weekend and boldly ventured into a local Catholic Church that will be easily distinguished by any Cedar Valley Catholics. I will go ahead and try to obscure the congregation through a pseudonym and by calling the refugee portion of the congregation I refer to as simply immigrants from a southeast Asian nation. It will keep the congregation anonymous to anyone outside the know. My points will still be valid to anyone interested. And those points are not meant to hammer away at the same old problems that everyone has already complained about the Catholic Church, or if a Catholic not lapsed, decided to ignore and accept. I aim to sharply define the problems of institution and culture, gleaned from the crisis in Catholicism, that are relevant to all American Christians, to all patients in the hospice.

Read on:

The people at St. Agnant Catholic Church were sitting separately in two obvious groups. Some wore dress shirts and pants, many were in jeans and sneakers- and most people wore coats or jackets draped over their shoulders because of the unseasonably cold weather that morning. But one block of pews wore clothing that looked like it was bought new from a store, and their hair was mostly light-colored and trimmed in typical middle-American styles. The opposite block of congregants wore brightly mismatched clothes that looked like they had been passed from one person’s closet to a secondhand shop or aid agency to their new, badly-fitted owners. And the pure black hair of the 100-150 Asian immigrants at the Mass, left to grow in long strands or buzzed into a stiff-looking bush growing around their head, on top of their obvious umber-colored skin, clearly demarcated these newcomers from the longtime, white residents with Irish and German backgrounds.

The white congregants, the lifelong Catholics, had come to do their duty. When it was time to respond to the priest, they were mouthing the words with their lips before they had thought them out, bowing at the name of Mary, crossing themselves in unison, and anticipating the time to kneel by pulling down the kneelers four responses prior to the liturgy. I half-expected them to pull out time cards from their jackets so they could punch them on their way out of the sanctuary. They had their parts rehearsed.

The time for Roman Catholic evangelizing is surely over, I thought, no one born and raised outside the rituals and family culture of the Catholic Church could find any appeal in the regimented, arcane traditions. They would be impossible to translate to someone from outside their cultural sphere, and a neophyte would find a long, awkward road of integration in front of him. To persuade someone whose parents weren’t Catholic that the baffling, fossilized traditions and ritual are God’s pure, revealed truth would require unimaginable charisma.

The white congregants repeated their lines without inflection, as a rote repetition to fulfill the burden of their conscience- instructed by the expansive vocabulary, hierarchy, and laws of the Roman Church- or possibly in a devout conceit that these rituals were the genuine article, the God-pleasing service of the faithful. The artwork of the building’s architecture, stained glass, and statuary were more impressive than any other sacred space I have seen in Iowa, yet the spirit of the people’s words and actions had the life of a deflated balloon. The head of this institution used to excommunicate emperors and wage wars. Now its local assemblies couldn’t hope to even stir a person in the pews from his sleepy, mechanical daze.

When it came time for the sermon, a thin, tired priest, who looked like he would rather be thumbing through a periodical alone in his study, quietly and carefully stepped forward to the pulpit. He meekly apologized before his sermon, for its brevity. After reading the account of the woman caught in adultery in St. John’s Gospel, he remarked that some commentators had said perhaps Jesus, when He was writing on the ground as the woman’s accusers questioned Him about stoning her, was writing an account of sins for every man in the crowd. That would be quite a lot of writing, I imagined, even if the accounts were limited only to adulterous sins; an implausible amount of writing for that window of time, and an implausible amount of dirt on the ground to write on. But, I also thought, it is all conjecture. Say on, preacher.

He did not. His commentary on the day’s Scripture abruptly ended there, and he began musing on his recollections of the Catholic congregations of Iowa. As expected, he talked about the history of Dubuque and its Catholic immigrants- how at one point there were two large church buildings built because the Germans did not want to worship with the Irish Catholics. Those were different times, he supposed aloud with a tentative smile. This description was his speech’s humorous anecdote.

After that, he transitioned to the present, where the Asian refugees have joined together with the second and third generation members of the congregation. The existing congregation welcomed them, he said, and apologetically he pointed to the immigrants’ zeal for their faith as “an example to us,” speaking of those American-born church-goers who had been checking in to obligatory weekly services, dabbing the holy water, performing their parts in the liturgy, blessing the Virgin full of grace, and shuffling out after the last hymn without so much as a handshake for such a long time that they had no spirit for it anymore. They still maintained the traditions of their post-Vatican II fathers, yet they lacked the original impetus of their long forgotten post-St. Patrick fathers.

It was not surprising that the contrast between the old congregation members and the new, the refugees, was not a mere matter of skin tone, hair styles, and clothing. It was between a refugee people who had banded together around the name of Jesus Christ and, alas, the traditions of the Church of Rome, and a people who had grown weary and passive, unable to defend themselves from the insidious inundation of a secular American culture that increasingly despises them and their faith. The Asian refugees sang their native language hymns with conviction. The Iowans sang theirs out of nostalgia. One voice proclaimed the verses loudly, the other voice sounded like a halfhearted apology.

His brief discourse ended- suddenly, as promised- the priest invited to the pulpit the leader of the immigrant community to translate. As he spoke in sounds completely unintelligible to me, I wondered what he might be saying, pitying him if he were trying to make a point-by-point translation of the priest’s wavering remarks on Iowa Catholics in the Dubuque of yesteryear. Surely, his Asian hearers would then assume he had it wrong; no way would that white priest present some unprepared notes as his sermon. He is supposed to be our link to the Holy Father, the one who presents Church teaching as we ought to believe.

I have no idea what the immigrant minister said, and none of the English speakers could check him. So I hope he preached his own sermon, making an appeal to his people and telling them, “We have jobs now and homes, yes, and praise be to God for His deliverance and blessing, but look at the American people who have been walking this path of comfort and conformity before us, and ask yourselves if this is what we want. Our children can grow up with all the food they want, all the Pepsi they can drink, in heated homes with computers and smart phones and televisions, and yet the result, what we see before us in the people who have lived off the fat of this land for generations, is a tired and anemic faith.

“Beware that it is not we who are influenced by the ways around us, rather than those around us being influenced by the light they see in us. We might come to learn why it is that this church’s narthex is filled with pamphlets addressed to lapsed Catholics, and soon feel the fear of God replaced by the numbness of ritual, a hopeless effort against the dark tides of culture.

“Do not tell yourselves that we refugees have reached our safe shore. No, not yet. While on the waters, we must always choose and adjust our tack.”

The service closed with the singing of the St. Patrick’s Day classic, Danny Boy. It was sweet and sorrowful, and at the conclusion the people gladly applauded with a short round of light clapping. Then the church emptied- in one motion, as quick and procedural as every other movement of the liturgy.

I stayed after, sitting in a pew to observe the stained glass, the magnificent altar statues, and the relief statues of the fourteen Stations of the Cross. As I observed, a Sunday school teacher, with the best of intentions, explained in simple English to three maturing immigrant girls the meaning of the figures and symbols in the grand stained-glass windows. There was a sense in her words of instruction that, in this decoration and in these conventions, we could find our connection to God. Her voice, in tone and phrasing, was full of niceties. This is it, she seemed to convey, our faith and our worship. The way it is supposed to be.

Spoken through a smile that attempted happiness, meaning to sway the young to this viewpoint and accept the trappings of the church as institution, the high church tradition of Rome, her words sounded hesitant, their feeling echoed in the now empty sanctuary.

The Real China: Conclusion

March 17, 2016 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 2 Comments

The ultimate travel fantasy is not to any place, but to the foreign country of the past, to see the people who lived in one’s home country and culture in their shockingly ancient yet familiar form. The language could be understood and the traditions recognized, but the words used and the way people were would be the most fascinating difference.

My desire to see China was not a longing to live in another hemisphere where the people’s faces looked different and they lived in more exotic architecture. I wanted to see China because I wanted to see what it was like to be human without being a modern American. I wanted life without the restraints of American assumptions. All of our culture and language has a precedent, and I wanted to be in a society that had grown from different roots.

Would the people’s facial expressions and voices be the same as I was used to- in general- only substituting strange-sounding words? Would I feel a natural connection with people and make friends across cultural barriers? Would I feel at home away from home? Would I find my niche? How would things feel differently from the way I had always assumed the world was?

Going to China was not just time spent abroad, a résumé highlight or adventurous gap year. It was life lived among people with completely different hearts, minds, and habits. Things overlapped, as human customs everywhere will, but in colloquial terms these people had no interest in football tailgates, processed foods, hip-hop music, or the American dream. (Well, if you want to be difficult, many Chinese families do dream of sending a child to America for college, and it seems as if as many Chinese as possibly can do emigrate out of China into whatever clean and wealthy country they can get into, with America traditionally at the top of that dream list, but that is not to say that the typical person in urban or semi-urban China conceives of life in American terms.)

In many ways, it was a relief to be there, and I savored the luxuries of Chinese life. By that I mean it was a luxury to find reprieve from the cultural nuisances I lived with in America. In China, the people might have had loud phone conversations in small, public spaces (e.g. the elevator or taxi cab) but my brain had no idea what they were saying. I did not have to involuntarily eavesdrop the way I do with all the rude, sometimes scandalous private conversations I overhear in America.

Another great thing, I only had a guest spot in Chinese society, so it did not stress me to hear people boast about their status. I had no idea, again, what it meant when they advertised the name of their university or the corporation they worked for. “Good for you,” I would tell them without envy. No one I met in China really had what I wanted, so proclamations of personal success rolled off me like water off a…Peking duck before it was killed and roasted- when it had water-wicking feathers, that is.

My acquaintances were not pursuing the American dream- a big house in the suburbs with a big yard, big cars, big salary, and big retirement fund- they were after the Chinese dream- moving to a big, crowded city with job opportunities at mostly depressing jobs, living in a dingy apartment, having one male child, having a foreign car that was inconvenient to park and dangerous to drive, and either getting rich from a non-stop work schedule or from Communist Party funds. I did not want what the Chinese were after, so it made it easy for me to shrug off the competition.

I also savored being around young people who tried to dress in a youthful way rather than an older, sexier way, whose appearance was modest in that they wore simple clothes that covered rather than showed off their bodies, modest in that their attitudes and actions were carefree and without worldly cynicism. The people did not often assert themselves and their identity. In China, when an authority figure or respected leader admonished the people, they listened. They may not have followed, and too often the things they did follow were the irrational words of a demagogue meant to cow the people, but as a people they felt oneness with each other and tried to band together.

That seems like ugly naivety to say that, I know, like I have come around after all my criticism to apologize for China’s brutal authoritarian state, but my meaning is the sense of place felt by the common man. Everyone in China seemed like a part of a whole, or at least the people I met uniformly expressed a strong connection to their Chinese identity. The phrase “We Chinese…” was used to begin many declarative sentences, and it was never a question if the individual saying it could speak on behalf of “we, the Chinese people.” Coming from a land of individualism, alienation, and identity politics, that seemed amazing.

And from the schools and students I saw, there were no obvious cliques of outcasts, rebels, or sharply defined popular kids. Making friends seemed so easy when every student spent their day with the same 30-50 classmates and they all saw school not as a social gaming table but as a serious work with coveted rewards of choice schools and jobs.

I was relieved not to be around the darkness and apathy of American individualism, where not one thing can be said, not one value can be preached, without the strife of vulgar internet message boards and self-justifying arguments. In a fractured society, every piece has sharp edges; they cannot be put together with incompatible pieces. I could better tune out the hostile words in China because I could not understand more than a small fraction of what was spoken. It was up to me to search out the English language materials of my choice. I was free from the bombardment of slang terms that grow like bacteria off of the internet, pop music, and television. No one in China ever told me, out loud, “LOL,” “awesome sauce,” “that rocks my face off,” or insulted my ignorance of the newest shorthand terms for drugs and sex acts. No one, except for people in Shanghai and Hong Kong- possibly– ever judged me for my clothes, for not wearing cool jeans and shoes, or for wearing my shirt tucked into my pants “like an old man.”

China, a land or loud crowds and pollution, was in many ways my place of solitude. I escaped the tyranny of American culture that had left me a pariah in my own hometown. I knew I would not be excluded or shunned the same way in China because the people did not know how to judge me.

My essays on China were not written for personal judgment, but for comment and critique of culture. I write not so much about China as about why people do what they do, how they live, and what are the observable consequences in a people’s culture. The perspective I gained in China I apply to my view of every culture, including my own. China happened to be the place where I lived, the place I commented on, but if you have been reading closely, you will have noticed that this commentary critiqued America sharply, too, and the broader cultural forces that are universal to all societies.

Back to the dream of traveling to the past. I would like to do this for the same reasons I went to China. All the documents and artifacts and the way the scholars, historians, journalists, filmmakers, and writers have described the past- is it true? Or more exactly, how close is it to the truth? What would the people really be like? Live like? Talk like? If they used English, how well would I understand them? Our dictionaries overlap, but from the way the people of earlier times wrote, I can tell they think, believe, and speak in fundamentally different ways than the people I live with today. I do not wish to escape to the past, but I would like to see it, be immersed in it, and let my observations and intuition shape my perspective. That is what I have done with China.

The real result is that there was much to be offended with in the country that I looked to with such airy anticipation. But if a man expects to live in any society, he either has to believe in it and be a part of it, or he has to make peace with his unhappy conscience and abide in a small niche of a corrupted whole. I could not accept the corruption of China. I could not smile and say the good outweighed the bad. I think I have long desired to depart the United States for much of the same reasons.

I am convinced that, if Americans from before our grandparents’ generation could see their homeland today, their strongest impression would not come from our computers, our convenient home appliances, or our city infrastructure. They would not be most surprised by a child using a smart phone or families traversing interstates in a hybrid car. Instead, they would be shocked by the way children talked to their parents and the way parents talked to their children. They would be taken aback by how all the easy technology had isolated people and made their minds dependent, how it had changed basic attitudes and behavior. I am sure they would question the widespread example of parents who were modeling a conformist, materialistic lifestyle for their children. Personal music devices and DVD players would not be as amazing as the language and content of the material being played. The amazement of smart phones would sour when it was seen how much they spoiled dinners and conversations.

Americans from the past might fall prey to the quick and facile lifestyle of microwaved meals and instant entertainment- human nature dictates they would- but I imagine that the first impressions of many would mirror my observations in China. I was not so surprised at the different vehicles being driven on Chinese city streets, but in the willingness of the drivers to run me over. People mattered most, not technology.

I was not confused by the sound of the Chinese people’s words, but by the volume and aggression they were regularly spoken with. I expected to see poverty, but what most alarmed me was how a brand new hospital building could be overwhelmed with loitering families who filled the just-opened lobbies with dirty blankets and careless trash. Foreign technology and television had made its way into China, and the ingestion of electronic media was very familiar to me. The car had made its way even to the smallest towns I visited (I was told by my two Australian friends that only about five years before our town had one traffic light and no cars). Technology in China and the outward forms of buildings and cities- while often very different- were familiar to me in their basics and not surprising at all. What shocked me about Chinese streets was not the way they looked different, but the way people spat and urinated on them. An American-born Chinese person (“ABC” in both Chinese and Chinese-American slang) can instantly be told apart from her Chinese-born peers not by her iPhone and Nike clothes, which can be bought in China, too, but by the way she wears her clothes and the way her face looks.

The point of observing culture- the point of this whole effort- is not to be found in a bloodless survey of outward modes of living. The point is to see the outworking of human thought and human hearts. My Aunt Fong would always tell me “China need time,” a strange apology from a civilization always boasting about its most ancient character, but no, I thought, China need reform- foundational reform that comes from the reform of people’s hearts

Since leaving, I have vacillated between foreswearing China forever and making a return someday to see Aunt Fong and try and find a better way of living there. I love Aunt Fong like my mother, and I talk to her every week over the computer. I also long to see all the friends and students I met in China again. I imagine being able to start new relationships with them, having my heart refined by experience and renewed hope. But I also keep in mind that China is still much the same place as I left it. I might be admired by the people there, but most of them can only giggle and gawk at me, perhaps asking me about my favorite NBA team and whether I can use chopsticks.

I do plan on seeing Aunt Fong again- how could I not? My dilemma now is how long to stay in China and what to travel there for. A one or two-week vacation is not worth the expense or time of a twenty hour flight in my opinion. A stay longer than a month would require a visa sponsorship; I would need to have work in China. I hesitate to do that because of the misery I already experienced standing in front of a Chinese classroom. As much as I respected my elementary school music teachers and participated in their classes, that is how much my Chinese students responded to me. To my former teachers: I have done my penance. I see what I was like. I am sorry.

I was always hoping to see more of the church in China. I have asked Aunt Fong to help me find a way to observe the house churches and meet with them. She has helped me get peaks inside a few churches in what turned out to be frustrated visits. Perhaps, God willing, that hope will fully come to fruition.

For now, I am where I am. I daily dream about finding a new culture to live in and observe, or I think through how best I should get to work from my home base in Iowa writing about my experiences already. Eventually, I hope to find a place where I can be at peace and believe in what I am doing, not so much because I have found the right location, but because I have been refined and found people that I want to join together with as one culture.

Thank you for reading and commenting.

Aunt Fong Speaks: The Hamster in the Wheel

March 15, 2016 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 1 Comment

I drew this picture for Aunt Fong years ago and she asked me to post her reflection on it.

Aunt Fong (translated by a friend and revised by me): One of my friends drew this picture. It has puzzled me for a few years.

Whenever I saw this hamster I would feel pity for it. The hamster is always desperately running on the wheel and cannot stop. Its eyes stare longingly at the dripping water droplets. This picture became lodged in my mind. I couldn’t understand why my friend drew this kind of picture and why he drew the water tank at this location. I couldn’t understand why the hamster’s eyes looked so desperate; why could it not be satisfied?

I finally asked the maker of the drawing: why?

The maker laughed and casually said, “The wheel is just a toy. If the hamster is thirsty, it can stop at any time to drink.”

I suddenly understood: it was self-contained. He had locked himself in an imaginary cage.

[Me again]: Of course, I am “the friend” and “maker of the drawing.” Aunt Fong had piles of these blank sheets of paper with only a black circle printed on them. She encouraged or pestered her students and friends to use pastels to draw pictures or abstract color combinations in the circle as some form of therapy. After doing this once or twice to indulge my aunt, I found each drawing request thereafter to be very tedious. So, one time, instead of making a color splash, I turned the black circle into a rodent’s running wheel and drew a hamster inside.

When I showed it to her, Aunt Fong seemed very troubled. Even though she says she couldn’t understand why the hamster was trapped in the cage(she called it a mouse until I persuaded her after dozens of reminders that it was a hamster), cruelly kept from the water, I remember trying to tell her plainly many times that it was a common running wheel and there was nothing to worry about. I suppose the sad look in my quickly drawn hamster’s eye lent itself to a tragic interpretation, and honestly, when I drew it I think I was transferring my own detached sarcasm and grief over my situation in life, in China, onto the page in one forgotten, frustrated sketch. Well, I thought it would have been forgotten. Aunt Fong has remembered it ever after.

Enjoying a rest with Aunt Fong.

The Real China: “A Handsome American Guy Studies Kung Fu”

March 8, 2016 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

Television is a fun gauge of a nation’s psyche. A look into how a people entertain themselves speaks volumes about who the people are. In America, football, zombies, gritty cop dramas, and sophomoric, snarky sitcoms reign supreme. Chinese TV is dominated by historical fantasies of slaughtering Japan’s invading soldiers, romantic melodramas, singing showcases, dry news reports, and sports (basketball, volleyball, and ping pong- what else).

I didn’t watch much television in China. While it was an entertaining spectacle to flip through when I was home alone and bored, which was quite often, I instead spent most of my free time on the slow-as-molasses and “Great Firewall” blocked internet, or out exercising and exploring around my college campus. When I did watch TV, I would spend a minute on the (mostly) ping-pong and volleyball channel, then click up through several song and dance channels, some serials, and one movie channel that would occasionally play something spoken in English or subtitled. I was at times so desperate for an English-language movie that I’d stay up late to watch whatever forgotten American garbage was airing, like Cheaper by the Dozen 2 until I couldn’t take it any more and went to bed.

Mostly I turned on the television to watch the English language news channel and try to feel somewhat connected to the outside world from my surreal hinterland outpost. The news channels were state-controlled, like all the rest, so it was interesting to note the edge in Chinese reporters’ voices when discussing an issue related to U.S. actions and Chinese sovereignty (not so ironically, each channel is called “CCTV” followed by a number, which stands for China Central Television instead of closed-circuit television). On the surprising bright side, a typical newscast was a plain rundown of international headlines and summits, so the number of biased statements and gimmicks per minute was surprisingly fewer than a typical American broadcast.

Chinese newspapers were completely impenetrable by my illiterate eyes, so I never bothered with one. In my observation, daily newspaper reading was not all that common of a habit in the small (by Chinese standards) cities where I spent the majority of my time. I didn’t see anyone carrying them in hand while commuting through the subways and crowded streets of the Tier 1 cities, either. While I cannot comment on daily readership numbers, I can say from my perspective that I did not notice anyone carrying a newspaper with them, reading it over breakfast, or collecting piles of old papers in their living room or office. The first time I noticed the local newspaper was when I penetrated its sports page as a story. And as long as I am going to do a little boasting, I should add that this was after I was featured on the local television news channel.

So first: how I got on television. It began when Aunt Fong took me around to try and find a martial arts school.

Martial arts training can be very informal in China, and by that I mean I regularly saw tai chi and kung fu groups meeting in the park- perhaps as few as two or three friends practicing their techniques together, or one man sweeping a two-handed sword or pole-arm through the air. Aunt Fong introduced me to a colleague or friend of hers (someone connected to her gwan-shee network) who practiced his routines every morning in a riverside park, so I did get a taste of this do-it-yourself kung fu. About once a week during the spring, Aunt Fong would nag me to wake up extra early and take a taxi to meet “Big” Wei, or Da Wei, as we called him in Chinese, before he finished his 6 a.m. practice and headed back home. While I was thankful to Aunt Fong and Da Wei for the time he spent teaching me a lengthy kung fu routine, and I was open to learn and integrate kung fu techniques into my martial arts knowledge, my heart was just not into performing choreographed, fossilized routines. I wanted to continue the martial arts I had pursued in the United States and develop my skills to a competitive level.

There were no schools nearby for me to practice any wrestling or grappling like the Brazilian jiu-jitsu I studied back in America (those schools exist only in China’s major cities- it is still a nation obsessed with its ancient traditions over contemporary fascinations like mixed martial arts and BJJ), but Aunt Fong had a friend who practiced Sanda, or what might generically be called “kickboxing” in America. She knew I wanted to practice at a serious gym, so she took me there to meet the coach. Master Wei, not Big Wei, was a trim, middle-aged man with an army crew cut and a block-shaped head. His physique did not immediately tip me off that he was a former champion and coach, but when I felt the power of his right hook and watched as he used breath control to take my best punch to his stomach again and again without flinching, I sensed serious power in his modest size. Also, he amazing abilities like the way he could sit cross-legged and use his only his two pointer fingers and thumbs to elevate himself off the floor.

Master Wei’s school was on the second level of a small retail space, indistinct from all the other dingy, white-walled retail spaces lining the downtown city blocks. The gym upstairs was filled with weight-lifting machines, heavy punching bags, and floor mats. During class nights, young kids would come after school and horse around until Master Wei or his nephew would step in, blow the whistle, and start class. Then, all the kids and some adults would run in circles or perform the same leg-swinging exercises for what seemed like forever. Thirty minutes is a very brief time respective to most things, but it is an unendurably long time to repeat the same floor exercise or run in tight ovals without a break. Master Wei would just shout, “Come on!” or blast his whistle as we struggled. He was a strict taskmaster who had never been influenced by the American idea to keep all of the students engaged or entertained.

Sometimes, he would pair students up for sparring or a partner exercise, tell us to begin, then go downstairs to take a half-hour phone call, leaving us to continue the exercise indefinitely. Other times, he would sit and watch his nephew and I fight each other, chiming in “Very good!” if I did something right, or pulling his nephew to the side to scold and slap him with his whistle cord when he did something wrong. Not that I was the one getting the best of his nephew- more often it was just the opposite, but Master Wei wasn’t related to me so that meant I was spared these whistle cord whips.

Those punishment breaks were the only pause in the action. Normally, Master Wei’s nephew and I would fight each other until I saw parents arriving after dark to pick their children up from the gym. Then, I knew my reprieve was mercifully near. Aunt Fong would walk me home as I hobbled on ankles and shin bones that felt like crushed glass. (Here, I tell how a minor injury from fighting at the gym turned into a serious problem that made necessary my first hospital visit.)

My very minor television appearance occurred one afternoon after I finished my classes and took a taxi to meet Aunt Fong at her university before heading off to my normally scheduled Sanda practice. At her campus, I was surprised by a small group of her colleagues and student friends who were expecting me as my taxi arrived. One of her excited students told me that a television crew was coming to film me for the news. I wasn’t sure I could believe her; I did not see why they would be interested in filming me or how the local TV station would even know about me.

But in small city China, word of a young, tall foreigner gets around. Students in my English classes would tell me how their friends had seen me eating at the cafeteria, or shopping downtown- sometimes they would show me unnerving pictures that their friends had taken of me unaware in the middle of class or from across campus. Uncle Jiang (Aunt Fong’s husband) once forbid me to run outside the university campus after the school security guards (I assumed) told him or a link of the social grape vine that they saw me running along the street outside the school’s gate. So I was skeptical that I was newsworthy, but not completely surprised when I came to Aunt Fong’s office building and saw a camera crew waiting outside.

They filmed me walking around the campus, playing ping-pong with a ping-pong professor (they really have those in China) and play-fighting with another young man in front of a crowd of students. Then, the camera crew followed me to the Sanda gym and filmed me training on punching mitts with Master Wei. After the workout, one of Aunt Fong’s friends served as a translator so I could be interviewed. She relayed questions to me about my training and competition experience in America. I tried to explain to her that I had only fought a few fights, as an amateur, and my competition awards were not championships but awards for having finished two of my fights with the “Submission of the Night”. Good luck explaining what “Submission of the Night” meant to a provincial Chinese audience. I was afraid I was being set up as the great white hope of my college town, and as a foreign novelty I would be matched to fight some Chinese giant with bad intentions.

“No, no, I said I killed seven FLIES with one blow!”

I never did get to see my segment on the news. It aired during a holiday week, while I was away in Shanghai, and Aunt Fong said she couldn’t record it.

Master Wei thought that I was good enough to audition, along with his nephew, for a spot on the national broadcast of kickboxing fights: Wu Lin Feng. The prospect of fighting professionally and being able to earn an income from martial arts became my incentive to return to the gym for my regular session of Thursday through Sunday beatings by the hands and feet of Master Wei’s nephew. I was always relieved when Master Wei told us to practice boxing- no knees or kicks- because it was less painful to be hit primarily in the head versus the legs and body, and I could use my long arms to outbox Master Wei’s much shorter nephew.

My newspaper appearance came a couple months later, also due to my training at Master Wei’s gym, and also reported by the same journalist who produced my TV story. In a Chinese martial arts school, students are accepted by their teacher in a formal ceremony where the student pays obeisance to the teacher, is accepted by him, and then they dine together with friends. The night of my ceremony, I knew something formal was about to take place, but I had only a foggy idea of what it was all about and could not fathom how formal and well-attended it would be.

I met two other students, also being officially accepted by Master Wei as students, in the lobby of a nice restaurant near the gym: Ma Cao, a colleague of Aunt Fong’s who taught exercise science and possessed the largest calves proportional to body mass I have ever seen on a human being, and a very skinny college student who I suspected was mostly into training Sanda so he could boast about it to girls. Ma Cao was wearing a mandarin suit; I only had on the khaki pants I wore to my classes that day and a black, wool jacket over my sweater. I felt shamefully underdressed in my normal teaching clothes and I began to get the sense that this ceremonial dinner was of much bigger import than I had assumed. I thought we would probably bow, shake hands, and sign a certificate before training at the gym, but the event at the restaurant was shaping up to become an all-night affair.

Ma Cao showing off his giant calves.

Before most of the guests arrived, we three students took out our billfolds and divided our “lucky money” into three red envelopes so we could present them as gifts to Master Wei. If you want to be someone’s student in China, you had better have a red envelope full of lucky money with their name on it. We had to count out the luckiest of numbers- 888 Chinese yuan- which had me smirking because this number in Chinese is said, “ba bai ba shi ba.” For a moment, as our small group counted and repeated the sum, we sounded like a small chorus of sheep. Then, minutes later, Master Wei, his family, and all of his old kung fu friends arrived. The journalist came with camera in hand to take pictures of our ceremony.

One after another, we three students stood in front of Master Wei and his wife, who were seated on a small couch in the dining room. Then, we poured them each a cup of tea, and bowed. My two friends did a full kowtow on a floor cushion, but Aunt Fong told me to do just a formal standing bow, hands held together. The newspaper reporter captured this scene and it ran under the headline “A Handsome American Guy/ Studies Kung Fu.” I am not making that up. The sub-heading read how I strived to conquer the competition arena “Wu Lin Feng” within one year. This translation was made for me by a Chinese friend with an English degree and excellent English skills, so skeptical, bilingual readers can check the translation for themselves. The original Chinese headlines are 美国帅小伙/ 珠城学功夫 and 力争一年内“武林风”擂台扬威.)

I’m featured in the story on the right, not the one above the women’s curling team.

After the bow, Master Wei, his kung fu colleagues, and I signed a red certificate that said something about how he would teach me and I would be a good student. I was afraid Master Wei would resent it if I ever trained at a different school and possibly track me down to challenge me to mortal combat, like in the movies, but Aunt Fong assured me our teacher-student agreement was not exclusive. I am still alive to this day, so it turns out she was right.

With the contracts signed, the kung fu teachers and students went out into the lobby to take commemorative pictures for a full hour. I stood in with every possible permutation of people involved with the ceremony. After eight o’clock, the picture-taking died down and I was able to join all the people in the dining room who had already been eating while I was in the lobby. It was typical in China to eat foods that had been sitting on the table for half an hour or longer, so coming in to find stacks of room-temperature food didn’t bother me. Master Wei’s new students footed the bill that night, so all the platters and excess amounts of rice liquor were partially funded on my honor. (More about Chinese dining and drinking customs in “Bottoms Up!”)

The wannabe heart throb on the left (I never learned his name), Master Wei sitting in front of me, and Ma Cao on the right.

Joining the students of honor in this picture are Aunt Fong and, I think, a kung fu teacher or university professor in the red jacket.

Master Wei’s very tough nephew on the left.

So how did my training with Master Wei turn out? Did I realize my dream of competing as a professional martial artist? After my foot injury in the fall, I trained regularly at the (unheated) gym over the winter and got toughened up quite a bit by Master Wei’s Spartan practices. But, concurrently, China as a whole was dragging down my health and emotions. By the time the spring semester had wrapped up and I had open days to devote to training in the now sweltering gym, I felt so forlorn that I lost nearly all spirit to fight. It didn’t feel good to train anymore. Master Wei could tell that my emotions were poor and my heart was fading. He proposed that if I wanted to compete on the televised show, I would need to train full-time for two months and try out in August. I would need my visa extended for that, but I thought it might be worth it. Realizing a martial arts dream seemed worth it to try with all my might, even if that meant staying in China for another two months or a year.

Alas, I could not deny my flagging spirits and health, and at the end of June/early July I became so ill that I had to stay in the hospital for three days.
Training became unthinkable.

Looking out at the brownish-gray sky from my hospital bed, I only wanted to leave China for a clean country where I could convalesce in soul and body. At the end of July, I departed from the Hefei airport with a souvenir newspaper in my luggage.

My view from my top floor hospital window. The window pane itself was clean, it was the outside which was so dirty.

The Iowa Caucus: Going and Gone

February 2, 2016 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

Thanks to the precedent of historical accident, my home state of Iowa is the first in the nation to nominate a presidential candidate for each party in the November elections. Actually, what happens is that voters registered to the Democrats and Republicans can go to their respective caucus location, usually a large space like a gym or auditorium, and make their choice on which candidate they want to represent their party, which translates into a number of electors being sent to the parties’ national conventions later this year. Each party does it a little bit differently, and I went both to see what the process is like and support my chosen candidate.

While the crowds to get into my caucus place, a junior high school, were large, and the excitement of this election cycle considerable, the mood remained mild and things proceeded pretty quickly and orderly considering the number of people milling around and waiting to sign in or vote. Since my ward/neighborhood had a more modest turnout than the other large groups in the junior high’s other gym and auditorium, we got straight to it and let out early. The first business was to elect a chair and secretary for our ward, and as expected, no one from the anonymous crowd offered any nominations, so when the lady at the sign-in table asked, “Do you just want me to be the permanent chair?” she got a big round of applause. For secretary, as our new chairwoman asked for nominations, the man sitting at the sign-in table covered his face with his clipboard and awaited his fate. The crowd cheered again and he was shamefully volunteered.

Time was given for a representative of each candidate to make a short speech. With the competing sound of the large group (a neighboring ward) seated next to us echoing off the walls of the gym, this meant neither of the two brave souls who stepped forward with something prepared had their talking points heard. I caught that the second guy, a burly man with a body like mashed potatoes and a military baseball cap, said Ted Cruz “LED THE FIGHT” as a refrain to three or four lines. Simple ballots were passed out- so many people came that I was just given a blank slip of pink paper and told to write my choice on it- we voted quickly, dropped our ballots in the basket, and walked out past the other groups still deliberating. The chair and secretary- the vote counters- are supposed to announce the results afterwards, then go through other party business at the party level, but I think most everyone cleared out as soon as possible.

As reported widely, Ted Cruz won the largest share of the Republican caucus vote, followed closely by Donald Trump and Marco Rubio.

And so, after last night, my home state goes back to being an occasional national punchline for people who’ve never been there and know nothing about it. After being courted for months by high profile politicians and reporters, Iowa will be thankfully ignored and largely forgotten until some hack comic needs an example of a generic backwater. It’s somewhat like the awkward girl character in a teen drama who gets a suspicious amount of attention from the hottest guys in class, only it turns out a day later that the whole thing was a prank. Iowa only has 6 electoral college votes, 30th place out of 51, and won’t be getting near this attention until four years from now.

Some other thoughts about my local caucus:

– I think we broke the fire code allowance for the school building. Large American trucks were parked for blocks around the caucus location in every direction, and people were streaming through the hallways and out the front doors like we were waiting to get on the theme park’s river ride in the high heat of July.

-It was mildly surprising to find familiar faces in the crowds. People I knew from church or Boy Scouts, and even a couple elementary school teachers I knew from way back when. Politics are a big deal in American life, but people are usually pretty mum about outright identifying their party alliances. It’s not prudent to reveal that openly, yet we all have our hunches about how our acquaintances line up politically. Most of the people I saw at my party caucus I could conform to my expectations easily.

-I was very disappointed that, when it came time for a representative from the crowd to speak for each candidate, no one spoke up for Jeb! Bush. It would have been some naughty entertainment to see what kind of real person supports an empty suit like that.

-I thought about the large gathering of adult neighbors and thought to myself, “Where else in American life do middle Americans gather like this? Besides football games, movies, and modern church services, which are all a form of passive entertainment.” I honestly can’t think of any place in American life where neighbors meet together meaningfully any more. I’m sure that, as soon as everyone at the junior high had cast their ballots, they were walking quickly down the snow-lined sidewalks, back to their trucks or SUV/Crossovers, then back home, never to congregate like this with their neighbors for an important discussion until four or eight years for now for the next major Iowa caucus. Showing up to participate in a political event like this means that we all care about our country and our community, but on a daily basis how, if at all, do we care for our local neighbors or even interact with them? I walk outside on an almost daily basis and I hardly ever see my neighbors outside, or if so, we don’t recognize each other and don’t talk to each other. I will give credit that Iowans will often say hi to a passing stranger on a quiet stretch of sidewalk- something unheard of in many places.

On Korea's most sacred national space, Dokdo.

Superlatives Around the World

January 9, 2016 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

When tourists or expats exclaim, “Oh, the people there are so great!” it is usually subjective hype- a good Samaritan returns a lost bill, the local service workers seem exuberant, a few serendipitous encounters introduce friendly strangers, no one gets their pocket picked, and hey, why not look on the bright side of life? Only Scrooges complain about vacations and foreign travel. But the truth is not so rosy. I met many friendly individuals in South Korea, sure, but to characterize the Korean people, above other characteristics, as friendly would seem a step too far. The real question is who- what people- are friendly above all else. I suppose, as an Iowan, I always have my radar out to detect for friendliness and folksiness, so this became a real search for me. If someone visited the places I did and ranked Korea as an especially friendly place above others (it is often a very reserved and well-behaved place) I would dispute it with the argument below:

Friendliest: Thailand
Runner-up: USA (mostly in the Midwest)

Thailand is nicknamed “the Land of Smiles” for good reason. Most every place I tried out my marginal Thai speaking ability, or where I gave a polite wai (prayer hands and bowed head) greeting, I was met with a big smile and a compliment: “You SUH-PEAK Thai soo GOOOD.” I found the few beaches I saw in Thailand crowded, dirty, and touristy; the thrill for me was just trying to ask kind-looking strangers questions or order food in their language. The laid-back sa-baai (relaxed) attitude in Thailand, and their welcoming interest in foreign visitors- not just eyeing me as a walking cash cow to be milked, although that element definitely exists in Thailand’s dirty alleys and shopping arcades- was a highlight of my time there, although the openness did backfire on me.

The ubiquitous, super cheap massage parlors (legit ones; get your mind out of the gutter) were advertised by the masseuses sitting around on the porch and calling out “MASSAGE!” until they had hooked your attention. I made the most of the availability of dirt cheap massages by going almost every other day. But every time the massage lady found out I could speak a little, or nitnoi, Thai, she peppered me with a stream of questions like a chatty beautician in an American hair salon. I couldn’t answer any of them past my name, age, occupation, where I was from, and what I was doing in Thailand, so I had to constantly apologize, “I don’t understand. I don’t understand,” as my overeager acquaintance told me indecipherable lines in Thai and broken English how happy I would be in Thailand.

And yet, unlike in the Philippines, I never got the impression the people were trying to butter me up and work me over. Negotiating price with tuk-tuk drivers and bartering with shopkeepers was never really stressful, but straightforward. I’ve never found it to be true in America or anywhere else, but smile in Thailand, and the Thais smile with you.

Even Ronald McDonald is more friendly and polite in Thailand.

I say the American Midwest is the second friendliest place I’ve ever been because, even among Americans, I’ve heard of people visiting my home state (Iowa) and being taken aback by store clerks greeting customers or saying “Thank you,” strangers holding the door open for each other, and drivers passively letting pedestrians and other cars cross in front of them first. It’s not quite the Garrison Keillor caricature, especially among the younger generations, and sure, the Midwest isn’t THAT much friendlier than other places in America- also, lots of other places have high standards for public manners (get over yourselves, Canadians)- but growing up here I was exposed to a lot of gentle adults who treated me with nothing but kindness. It was just expected that nice people would joke around with you or take up light teasing when they met you out in public, then depart with a smile or a pat on the back. While it seems that my unpleasant experiences close to home have more than balanced out the kind encounters, whenever I visit another place and see the people almost uniformly acting rude or stone-faced to each other, I worry about what’s wrong with them. As soon as I got back to Iowa from abroad, and an oncoming truck driver stopped well short and waved me to walk across the street, I remarked, “That would never, ever happen in China. Ever.”

Least Friendly: Korea
Runner-up: USA

Re the woman’s face in this picture: restaurant advertisement or hostage video?

Sometimes it seemed like no mystery to me why the two halves of Korea are in the midst of the world’s longest ongoing war, not counting the unending hostility Israel has faced from its neighbors since day one (July 1953 marked the armistice agreement between North and South Korea, not the peace treaty). I can think of no disposition so stubborn, grief-mongering, and hostile to outsiders as what I witnessed in modern South Korea. Sure, China’s “People’s” government is also engaged in a constant push of anti-Japan, anti-foreign oppressors propaganda through school curricula, popular media, and official statements, and the present day disputes of China vs. Japan seemed just as petty as Korea’s in some cases (“These barren rocks belong to us! You can see in this mildewed, moth-eaten map that these two black blobs in the middle of the ocean must represent our ancient, irreproachable claim to this territory. Your claim is groundless and absurd!”), but I never got the feeling that everyone in China was carrying a chip on their shoulder towards the outside world, or that they defined the outside world as “everyone not directly in my relative social circle.” Chinese people, in my encounters, looked at the USA and foreign visitors as country bumpkins who didn’t quite know how to contain their curiosity and so might point and shout out “Laowai!” (“Foreigner!”), or just march right up and bombard me with questions or gawk at me. South Korea is the only country I’ve been to where I received the reaction I thought had died out in the modern world: a little girl walking towards me suddenly looked up and gasped, “Waygook-een!” (“Foreigner!”) and turned on her heel, running in panic back to her father.

In my daily experiences in Korea, I often felt like indignantly apologizing that I wasn’t the one to pickle all of my grouchy strangers’ sour kimchi, so why was I getting the mean, frowning looks and calloused treatment? I was warned by some Chinese friends who’d been there that Koreans had a holier-than-thou attitude that Korean culture was superior to all others and Korean people were the best. Still, I had a hard time handling my shock as I’d get cut in line three times in a row as I stood immediately outside a bathroom door, or pushed and scowled at on the bus or subway, or grouped in people’s minds together with every expat drunk and sexual deviant as a foreign bogeyman, or treated so explicitly and embarrassingly as a foreigner that the concept started to take on a dirty meaning, or often excluded with an icy invisible wall. I had heard from other Americans who’d been there and back that Koreans are hard to get to know personally, but once you do the friendship is binding, intimate, and lifelong. I can say that I definitely experienced the first half of that equation, but my hopes of crossing into the latter were never met.

Koreans even have a word, or cultural concept, to describe their feelings of bitterness and unrequited revenge: han (“haan”), or 한 in Korean script, or 恨 in the Chinese root. I read that han is a deep and difficult-to-understand concept, but as soon as I saw it identified in text I thought, “Yes, from every unflinching frown I seem to tangibly feel, I know exactly what they’re talking about.” According to the Wikipedia article (motto: “27 million contributors can’t be wrong”), anthropologists have even “recognized han as a culture-specific medical condition whose symptoms include dyspnea, heart palpitation, and dizziness.” (Wait, can I quote a Wikipedia article? It’s bound to change a week after I post this. I suppose I could just go and change it back, but then I might get into an editing war with a presumptuous Wikipedia editor. Ah, life can be so stressful. I think I might be developing an appreciation for han.) Han is supposed to include bottled-up feelings of sorrow, passive aggression, and an abiding thirst for vengeance against oppressors. As a side note, I can’t be the only one to have noticed that han is a perfect pun in the Korean language for the “Han” people and “Han” country, or Hangook and Hangook-een: “Korea”/”Korean”. I think that the developed han concept is all a self-important gloss for what my grandma would call bein’ ornery, i.e. people acting stubborn, grouchy, and vengeful. Like every comic book villain will teach you, nursing a grievance and spending life seeking to avenge old injustices is a recipe for evil. Not that Koreans would ever listen to a foreigner, but please, let it go. I don’t care about Dokdo Island. I don’t think anyone outside Korea does. Bury all the hatchets.

This is me on one of the two rocks of Dokdo. I’m probably one of a dozen non-Koreans to ever visit this jingoistic symbol.

To be fair, and honest, I met lots of Koreans who were happy to have me around and were delighted to meet me due to my foreign-ness and “so handsome” looks, or even because they genuinely had fun with me in their group. And Koreans’ disposition wasn’t a walking cartoon of clenched teeth, sharply frowned brow lines, dark appearances, gray clouds, and grumbling- but it often seemed close.

I was sometimes asked by Korean acquaintances if I wouldn’t want to stay in their country long term, get a nice English-teaching job, find a Korean girl, have a family and settle down. The thought was tempting, truly- I think Korea is, despite the difficulties, a very comfortable and fun place for Americans to live- but I couldn’t shake the dread of living to be an old man and still having people act surprised at how well I could use chopsticks or read the Korean alphabet, still placing me not even at the bottom of the social totem pole but somewhere out of sight, or having them finding unhappy ways to blurt out “Really? But you’re a foreigner.” I have already dug myself a deep enough hole with any of my remaining Korean friends, so I think I will just quit now.

A perfect metaphor for han?

I say the USA is the next least friendly place I’ve ever been because I think that Jesus’ statement to his home synagogue in Nazareth: “A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country, and in his own house” has always seemed to have a general application to me in the familiar places I’ve lived. In nearly every foreign setting, just being different has sparked many excited conversations that have to rely on fundamental human connections over language subtlety and status. The closer I’ve been to home, the more I had in common, the more people could assume about me, and the more it took to impress them. So, unless I’ve had a job or reputation worth boasting about, most of my conversations with neighbors have stop before they ever get started. People overseas were eager to ask me simply where I was from. Obviously, no one in America was interested in this information unless I really stood out as a tourist or something, and even then my answer wasn’t special enough to spur the conversation on. Most things could just be assumed and went without saying. I’ve also found that Americans closest to my age or social situation like to assume I share most of their same opinions, so if I ever fail to laugh at the same political jokes or fail to echo the social vibe, this puts an uncomfortable damper on the relationship. And, an axiom that people everywhere seem to say is that bad people are everywhere. The insults and cold shoulders sting that much more when I’m literate in the language and context.

Foreign exoticism cut both ways. Whenever I went to tourist spots, strangers would ask to take their picture with me, like this young man. Fun attention, at times, but also overwhelming.

Rudest: To avoid being redundant, I will just link to some stories of my rude encounters in China here and here. Or, just look up “The Real China” category link in the sidebar. Not as bad as China- not nearly- but there were nonetheless a lot of boors in South Korea, especially with the kids who fought, screaming and stomping and hitting and kicking and pushing, without ever getting an adult censure, and the older men and women who pushed and shoved to get into subway cars and elevators and tight spaces.