Month: May 2015

On November 11th, my students burst forth upon me with a quiz. “Do you know! What day is today?” Some were giggling with anticipation.

So I played along. “No, what is today?”

“It’s Singles’ Day!” they exclaimed over guffaws.

“Oh,” I said, not nearly as amused, “what is Singles’ Day?”

“Wahn, wahn, wah, wahn,” they said, gesturing with their pointer finger to emphasize the digits in the date 11/11.

I could do the simple logic, without their explanation, to determine that the calendar date was indeed made all up of one’s, and that one symbolized a single person, yet I was left to question why they were so very gleeful about the eleventh of the eleventh.

“So, what do you do?”

Confused silence. Smiles.

“What do you do on Singles’ Day?” I demanded. I could not have spoken more plainly.

They were still holding their smiles, mouths beginning to twitch. But no answer.

“What… is… Singles’ Day?” I spoke as if trying to be heard over crackling radio static.

“It’s wahn, wahn, wahn, wan!”

I was about to lose face in front of the whole class. If it had been the first time I had played this game in China- repeating the simplest of questions to non-answers- I would have just thought it odd and dismissed it with a laugh. But I had gone through this routine in every classroom so far in the semester, and the novelty had long worn off.

“I KNOW.” Huffing the stress out of my nostrils, then, “But what do you DO on Singles’ Day? I am single. What do I DO?”

I had them trapped in a corner of logic. This wasn’t memorizing formulas, so my Chinese students had no way out. Still smiling, one of the students, bold enough to be one of the regular (i.e. only) speakers for the rest of the mostly dormant class, held up his pointer finger again and said, “One is for singles.”

“All right,” I began, sighing and looking downward to compose myself, just managing not to crush the chalk in my hand, “Do you know what happened November 11th, 1918?”

Absolutely no guesses.

“Today is a real holiday in the west. In 1918, World War I ended, so in America, today is a holiday called Veterans Day.” I wrote “veteran” and its simple definition on the board.

This pattern repeated itself in my other classes that day: students barely containing their excitement over Singles’ Day and asking me if I could guess their surprise (I suppose that since it was 2011, it was the only day in our lifetimes we would see 11/11/11). It was a pointless exercise, but to be fair, Singles’ Day wasn’t a national holiday or significant cultural celebration, just some obviously clever (and hence, not actually clever) day for some of my Chinese students to have fun with, like when Americans say “Hump Day” for Wednesday and spend more time discussing Daylight Saving Time than is saved.

But what of the national holidays and cultural festivals in China? Roundly terrible. They fall into non-events, nonsensical mythologies and convoluted historical tales, or proud displays of communist victories.

Take National Day: October 1st, the patriotic celebration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China on this date in 1949. Schools and many employers give the week off for the days surrounding National Day, so after the holiday I asked my classes how they spent their time.

“Watch TV.”
“Sleep.”
“Play computah games.”

“Oh,” I said, underwhelmed by their honesty, “Did you travel?” No response. “What about National Day? Did you do anything on National Day?”

Another moment of silence, then a student brave enough to answer for everyone else forced out: “Watch TV.”

On the 4th of July, Americans at least take part in the celebration of our nation’s independence. Friends and families gather, enjoy time outside, eat summer food together, and attend fireworks displays, not watch them on TV. Why wasn’t anyone in China, land of firecrackers that rattled me as I looked through my refrigerator most mornings, telling me about some outdoor festival or gathering with food, parades, and fireworks?

One young man, after I mentioned America’s Independence Day, told me (in reference to National Day) that China had a day of independence, too. “Oh?” I asked slyly, “You celebrate independence from whom?” I had to repeat myself a couple times, but I don’t think he ever caught my meaning.

The big letdown of the National Day holiday week was receiving a text message from my escort teacher on Saturday: “SO, ARE YOU READY FOR CLASS TOMORROW?”

I replied, “You mean Monday, right?”

“NO, WE HAVE CLASS ON SUNDAY. FRIDAY MORNING CLASSES ARE TOMORROW. AM I CLEAR?”

I think I could have complained that Sunday classes weren’t on my contract, but I wasn’t going to protest and cause friction. I swallowed my personal feelings and told myself to do it for the students. I would end up having to repeat this mantra to motivate myself on several other occasions throughout the year.

I wanted to point out to whomever was in charge that a day off on Friday is not a holiday if everyone has to work on Sunday; it’s just a tease of a weekend followed by a 6-day work week. I knew my argument wouldn’t have made a difference, though. I vented my frustrations and poked holes through the logic of the “holi-shift” (since it wasn’t a free day, just a shift in schedule) to an audience of my escort teacher, Ms. Ding (she came with a car to my apartment and took me to class in the morning), and like an immovable wall of Chinese school status quo she said, “But the students have many tests. They must have class on the weekend so they can take their tests.”

Ms. Ding and me outside of our middle school.

Not only that one Sunday, the students would have tests occasionally on Saturdays and other Sundays. Christmas Sunday my university students had tests all morning. Not that their godless state recognizes any holy days, but the people still celebrated Christmas in their own borrowed, bastardized way.

So schoolwork takes precedence over days of rest in China (they ought to learn from America that only commerce takes precedence over days of rest), and the state promotes hollow commemorations of Communist party history, but besides these, the Chinese people observe a mishmash of historical and mythological celebrations.

There’s the Mid-Autumn Festival, held on the full moon in late September or early October, which celebrates a story about the Moon’s sister (yes, you read right), who lives on the moon, and her husband who offers her sacrifices once a year. Moon worship during the holiday was built upon this story. Now, when the Santa mythology is layered over Christmas, it is certainly far-fetched, but there is usually some fantasy logic behind the magical yarns. Santa uses helpers to deliver all the toys, he has the elves to help make presents, moms and dads help Santa, too, and so forth. I tried to read through the story of the Moon’s sister and gauge the people’s reaction to it to see if it was just a tongue-in-cheek occasion for fun, that the story wasn’t so important but just a lingering, fossilized pretext for a holiday. Well, I can say that moon worship still takes place (I didn’t see it in person but discussed it with Chinese friends). Why worship according to an irrational idea? The power of cultural tradition, I suppose.

The big plus of the Mid-Autumn Festival was getting a holiday, a real day off work not made up for later on a Saturday or Sunday. But what happens during the Mid-Autumn Festival? Front and center, in my observation, were “standing outside and looking at the moon” at its brightest, as my friends advertised to me, and giving and eating moon cakes- a dense, disc-shaped pastry with a decorative top and a fruit or nut filling.

The Mantis is a pretty big fan of most kinds of moon cakes.

Stores stocked moon cakes leading up to the holiday so people could gift them to their friends, but I would have been glad to buy them year round. After September, I never did see them again, unfortunately. Moon cakes are a pastry, so it’s not like their availability depended on ingredients being in season. I suppose their popularity is not unlike the spike in sales of whole turkeys in November. Americans could eat roast turkey probably any time, but they don’t.

The other minor, food-related holiday is the Dragon Boat Festival, held in the spring and celebrated, if that is the word for it, by eating sticky rice triangles wrapped in bamboo leaves. The rice would usually have a piece of meat or fruit in the middle. Not bad, but not holiday-worthy.

I asked some of my Chinese friends and acquaintances about the significance of the Dragon Boat Festival, and all I got were uncomfortable grimaces and explanations that the history behind the day wasn’t pleasant. My Christian friends said the day had a bad meaning, so they chose not to honor it, but still encouraged me to have some sticky rice triangles. I had to look up the meaning myself and found out it commemorated a minister and poet, Qu Yuan (pronounced- oh, who am I kidding? make up your own pronunciation), who drowned himself in a river as a political protest or sacrifice. The traditional story follows that the locals dropped sticky rice into the river so that fish would not eat his body. Cheers to that! I suppose.

Every time an acquaintance inquired if I knew about the Dragon Boat Festival, I replied with my own question, “No. Do you have dragon boats in the river?” They reacted like an American might if a foreigner asked him on March 17th, “So, where are St. Patrick and his snakes?” Of course they didn’t have dragon boats in the river, I could tell by the awkward silence on their faces, why would they?

I’m using a stock photo found online because, as I said, you can’t actually find one of these to take a picture of in the real China.

I was left to conclude that it was another silly, minor holiday barely worth mentioning, yet nonetheless inspiring gleeful responses from the natives. The sticky rice triangles they kept asking me about- I had already eaten four or five the week prior. What was so special about them? A fine snack, but giving these out constituted a holiday? Imagine May Day without kids having the fun of distributing cups of candy by ringing doorbells and running way; instead the day was about eating bagels for lunch and asking friends if they’d had their May Day bagel yet.

Of course, the holiday of holidays in China is the Spring Festival (held in either January or February, go figure) usually referred to as the Chinese New Year in America. Being a holiday of holidays, it is basically an amplification of Chinese merry-making. Impossible amounts of dumplings and popular homemade foods are prepared and consumed. Dinner plates are piled in layers and tabletops are obscured for days. Nearly everyone gets work off for the week or weeks-long celebration (depends on the area), so train travel and public transportation are even more of a dystopian nightmare than usual, and once the workers and students get home, the tops of liquor bottles are smashed en masse and swallowed down along with the lavish, largesse-proving spread of foods.

Like other Chinese holidays, families like to hang around their homes for feasting, TV watching, and likely games of cards and mah jong (no, it’s not played like the mah jong computer program; more like rummy). Children are especially excited to receive a red envelope of lucky money, equivalent to a Christmas gift, but in the form of cash. And, unless living in a large enough city that performances would be organized, the colorful festivities like dragon and lion dances would have to be watched on TV, as per usual. Each day of the Spring Festival has its own superstitious meanings and rituals, which I won’t detail here, partially because that trivia can be found in dry lists elsewhere and mostly because I have little interest in perpetuating their charming nonsense. For example, the fifth day of the Spring Festival is supposed to be the god of wealth, Guan Yu’s, birthday, so people light firecrackers to get his attention.

Not that the Chinese need an excuse to light off firecrackers. Some areas have issued bans on fireworks for reason of noise and air pollution, but regardless, in a lesser policed city, it is expected that fireworks will last throughout the night to herald the turning of the lunar calendar, and nary a sublunary creature can expect to get any sleep. The celebrants don’t light one pack of skinny red tubes, but grand, street-stretching rolls of finger-sized explosives. Plus, the sound will be reverberating off of the surrounding concrete high-rises built all around.

I wasn’t even in town for all of this fanfare. I had to hear about it from everyone, nearly all of whom hyped it as the greatest party in China and the greatest part about living in China. And, whenever the conversation seemed to imply that things in my neck of the Chinese woods were dull, the Spring Festival was always brought out as an apology- the feast I just had to take part in and see. The ultimate party that I had missed, which was thenceforth sealed in the vaults of nostalgia and spoken of as a legendary euphoric experience. But, unlike pathetic adults who are trapped telling tales about “last year” or their high school glory days, Chinese New Year repeats itself every year, so everyone knows well enough to buy their train or bus tickets plenty early to make the mad-as-salmon rush back home.

That, the Spring Festival, is arguably the one feast day worth feasting about in China, and yet, I would argue that the things inspiring the celebration- the change of the lunar calendar, the superstitions alleged to garner luck for the upcoming year, the deference to all kinds of dubious gods of wealth and whatnot with jolly offerings and rituals- are preposterous pretext. Visiting family, especially when far apart and visits home are costly and rare, seems very worthwhile, but the impetus- a new calendar year- what is essentially so important about that?

At least there is something more to do that day than remark that it is in fact a holiday when business is heedlessly proceeding all around like a typical work day. I suppose it is my American upbringing that makes me expect some kind of ritual or public action to make a holiday official, even for the stupid holidays with convoluted historical and mythological meanings, like St. Patrick’s Day and the practice of wearing green, boasting how proud you are of your far-removed Irish heritage, and riding an excuse for public binge drinking. Yes, in America, we don’t make a big show by asking people if they’ve had something to eat for Flag Day. We take a quasi-holiday like Halloween, shape a fun costume-and-candy children’s tradition around it, and then take part in it ourselves, planning our costumes months in advance so that we are the cleverest movie character in the office on Halloween Day or the sexiest vampire at the after-hours party.

And when it comes to arbitrary dates, we don’t settle for a giggle over Singles’ Day on 11/11. No, we take the entire month, call it “No Shave November” and grow ourselves a beard. Never mind the absurdity, we are a people of action and alliteration (“Taco Tuesday” anyone?).

So, lest anyone accuse me of ignoring the plank in my own eye while pointing out the speck in China’s, let me end by stating my disdain for the nonsense that takes place stateside, where radio DJ’s and overly cheery colleagues squeal for attention by asking everyone in earshot if they knew it was “Talk Like a Pirate Day.”

“So what do you do for that?” I might ask.

Giggles. “You say, ‘Aarrh! Matey!’”
“Arr!”
“Aarrg!”

“Anything else? What’s the point?”

“You get to say, ‘Aarrh!’ and ‘Walk the plank!’” Raucous laughter.

“Oh. Some holiday.”

Smog covers the distant snaking segments at the Great Wall of the real China.

One question I have never been able to answer is “What do you do?”

Of course, people mean “Where do you work?” Or, broadly, “How are you occupied?”

It is not an unfair question. Without it, I don’t think Americans could ever start a conversation. But for a timid soul like me, who dreads introductions and supplying an answer about work because I ether haven’t had a job or I haven’t had one I could describe without embarrassment, the question is a quick way to shame me and kill any social standing I may have otherwise had. It is like going to the library with overdue fines on my account. I could fill my book bag with all the titles like Never Break Eye Contact: Social Networking Strategies Guaranteed to Dominate Your Peers and How to Convince Women to Fall in Love With You at First Sight – all the subjects of a young man’s social potential- but once I scanned my card at the check-out, once I had to fess up that I was jobless and practically penniless, I would be denied, told simply of the bad news that my library card, and social options, had been blocked.

When I was a college student, I had to make the dreaded rounds with not only every person I met but with every curious acquaintance who heard that I was in college. “What’s your major?” they would ask reactively. (I’ve asked it, too- everyone does- and that is what aggravates me.)

I would respond in a mumble, trying to avoid eye contact, “I’m an English major.”

Some would outright scoff and rebuke me, “What are you going to do with that?”

Others, more polite, would smile uncomfortably and only criticize me mentally. He was supposed to say something impressive related to computers, science, or business. Their restraint of open judgment wore heavier on my heart than the snide jeers.

Still others, trying to be optimistic, would follow up by asking, “So, are you gonna be a teacher?” English graduates have no industry, but public schools are always hiring. Problem was, I hated the idea of returning to public school and becoming like so many of the pedants, graying social revolutionaries, and shameless eccentrics who called themselves English teachers. And, spend my days trying to maintain authority over a classroom full of kids like the ones I went to school with, or worse? No, thanks.

“No,” I would reply. Try and make lemonade with that.

“Oh,” they would say. Conversation- and any further social relationship- over.

My dilemma was that I had entered into my English studies with certain post-graduate expectations. But two jaded years later, I was despondent and desperate just to graduate, bargaining with myself that all I needed was enough credits for a diploma. Then I would never have to step foot inside a classroom again.

My misery was predictably unalleviated once I left college for the “real” world. I faced further volleys of “What are you going to do?” and had to make up weak and vague answers, or tell people the plain truth and flatly reply that I had no job, no leads, and no ideas to begin a job search. Or, if I were employed at the time, that I was working part-time in a position meant for students or ne’er-do-wells.

The soul can only tolerate being crushed for so long.

After a few fruitless, post-graduation years, I began entertaining, seriously, the idea of teaching English overseas. I had heard people talk about their foreign teaching experience glowingly, and I had seen schools and agencies advertise abundantly online.

Sadly, while living with my parents and still working part-time, my energy was low and my overseas search was slow. But I remember at one point, finally finding a big agency for recruiting English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers, and deliberating between China and South Korea. Korea seemed to be the most popular destination for ESL teachers, and I was interested in the country and the people, but I already had a sense of what it was like. China, on the other hand… what did it even look like?

Unlike I expected, the actual Great Wall is a very slippery climb. I fell three times.

Besides the decorations inside every Chinese restaurant, the colorful outfits and costumes worn during Chinese New Year celebrations and in Chinese historical films, and not counting cultural icons like the Great Wall, what did China really look like? I mean, if I walked around a neighborhood in China, drove through its streets, or went shopping there, what would it be like? What was the everyday experience?

At that time, still searching online, I didn’t have the courage to take the plunge. About two years later, after a series of events I will soon detail, I was still in America, but with a teaching contract signed and an apartment secured in China. The strong force able to pull me out of my malaise and my parents’ house was not my courage, it was my contacts- knowing a friend from China.

Starting as a teacher in the upcoming school year- in China- meant I had a surprising, yet un-prideful, answer when I bumped into old friends and they asked me, “So, what are you up to?”

One casual acquaintance, a man encroaching on middle age with a stern and somewhat stiff, awkward demeanor, gave me a startled reaction.

“China!” he said, bridling his head and looking stunned, “Why China?” Dark images of communism probably swam through his head; he had seen its after-effects as a Marine touring through the former Eastern Bloc states.

I gave him the short answer, the comfortable answer, about making a friend who referred me to a school in China, but I had a longer, full answer that I kept to myself.

When I was a child, I was taken by Japan, and so I thought, all things Asia. I loved eating at Chinese restaurants and I became intrigued by seeing the smooth faces of people with hair so black it glistened in the light. Listening to them talk to each other in incomprehensible languages was an ignorant fascination. I didn’t know much about the cultures of the Far East, but I compiled a visual vocabulary from martial arts movies, Nintendo, and the pop culture detritus that had traversed the Pacific and washed onto American shores in the form of cartoons, toys, colorful images, mentions in casual conversation, movies, and TV.

When the subject of culture came up in school, I would compare the contrasting examples. “In America,” the text might say, “people like to shake hands firmly, maintain eye contact, and speak their feelings directly. In Fig. 1A, John is giving his colleague Carl what is known as “a hard time.” Conversely, in Japanese culture, the people bow in greeting, they prefer to lower their gaze and speak modestly, and always respectfully to superiors. In Fig. 1B, Suzuki-sensei frowns at the blushing Tanaka-san to teach him a proper sense of shame.” I would almost always find my personal habits or preferences described in the Japanese or Chinese characteristics. Not only did I align more with Oriental forms of politeness, I thought they were better. Why don’t we do that here? I wanted to know.

Over the years, as I sampled more entertainment media, I developed a finer understanding of the distinct cultures in the Orient, or what is now cravenly called Asia or East Asia, and I could correctly pigeonhole all the most intriguing cultural aspects according to country. I might hear people ask where Sumo wrestling was from (“Is it China? I thought it was Japan”) and confirm their suspicion, or correct someone who confused kung-fu and karate. Simple trivia, I know, but it was a treasured catalog in my imagination.

Plus, I had always felt an innate and inexplicable connection to Japan and its related cultures. Growing up, I not only took a secret interest in these foreign cultures, people often told me my face looked like I was half-Chinese, Japanese, or part Vietnamese. I can’t explain the mysterious inward and outward attractions. I could only respond to ethnic guesses with the disappointing news that both my parents were white and my family came to America long ago from Germany and Norway.

So, I had lived a young lifetime sensing that I needed to go live among these countries and explore them. I had to see if they matched my mind’s eye and I could feel as comfortable there as I assumed.

And although I probably would have preferred living in Japan over China, the Land of the Rising Sun is notoriously expensive and difficult to assimilate into. The Japanese mind views the world according to in-groups and out-groups, and not speaking the language or being born to Japanese parents, on Japanese soil, made me a lifelong member of the out-group. Of course, thousands of expatriates have overcome the obstacles and realized their dreams to live for years- as a semi-permanent foreign guest- in Japan. But I had a link to China that secured where I would live in Asia. Knowing a native in a Chinese city would provide me a home base, so to speak, where I could begin my travels throughout the continent.

And again, I wanted to explore and uncover the mystery of China, that country impinging on the American consciousness with fears of economic dominance and military threat. China was so big, had so many people, and had such a long and detailed history that it was hard to manage mentally. I think I can safely say that the average American has a clouded image of China, formed by the sources I’ve already named: martial arts films, restaurants, and Chinese New Year decorations (red lanterns, firecrackers, bright dragon costumes); or, Americans imagine a gray, militant landscape of factories and school buildings, churning out an assembly line of cheap goods and math prodigies to overtake our economy.

I wanted to know the truth about China. I had heard the facts, but I wanted to feel firsthand what it was like to live among 1.3 billion people. The sage wisdom of Confucius had made its way inside the papers of American fortune cookies, but if I lived among Confucian, Chinese society, how would they actually behave? What was it like to wake up on the other side of the world?

No travel guide would be complete without the trite advice to be open to other cultures that are “not wrong, only different.” This vain reminder ought to be known to be smug and unctuous. Unless forced against their will to travel for business, overseas visitors are traveling in a foreign country precisely because they want to see new things and experience a different culture. A diner knows not to pick an ethnic restaurant, for example, unless his very intention is to find different foods eaten with different utensils.

Travel guides have to be know-it-alls though, and so they cannot share an experience without preaching how unique and praiseworthy every aspect of the foreign culture is, how Americans and others could only fail to see so because of their narrow, Western perspectives. Part of my mission is to refute this uncritical assumption. I am by no means down with foreign culture, up with America. I will spend many pages slicing other cultures to ribbons, but I also turn the point of my pen against the complacent absurdities and excesses cemented in my native land, where relevant to the topic. My need to write this came after my wide-eyed openness to Chinese culture became exhausted, my intention to see things as “only different” could no longer cohere with reality. Scanning their faces in shock, I could find no native neighbor who could comprehend my exasperation in language or in essence. How could I question this thing that the locals took for granted? Blank-faced, my Chinese companions would answer me, “That’s China.”

I believe I have been fair in my writing, but I have also been honest. If the crowds in China pushed me while grunting like beasts (a regular thing), I say so. When the young people behaved so much more innocently and charmingly than their sexual American peers, I give them credit for it. I am not shy to use humor and drastic realism to make points best made by humor and realism, and my exaggeration is proportional to the actual thing. In fact, in most cases where it appears as if I am exaggerating, I am only reporting. Marco Polo said that he had not even told the half of what he had seen in his travels; you might say I’ve included the other half. I have included my impressions of all aspects of Chinese life, so that means that the typically mundane features as the flat plain in comparison to the astoundingly high peaks of absurdities I witnessed. Be prepared to travel through both.

I have dispensed with the carefully chosen travel guide snapshots of the country and provided a good long peak behind the curtain. I will not hide China behind politeness and delicate phrasing, which were depleted in me by the fervent nationalistic pride for a nation that I did not believe deserved its boasts. I have not “focused on the good,” but I have not excluded it. This is one man’s complete, honest commentary and critique of his experiences in China, not a crafted survey of cultural highlights and historical knowledge.

I would rewrite the trite admonition of a travel guide to read “In America, we drive on the right, and in England they drive on the left. That is different. In China, I saw children defecate on both sides of the street. That is very different. Differences between cultures cannot always be classified as East versus West. It is often a question of decency versus depravity.” Please forgive my crassness. That is what I regularly, really saw. I do not “dwell on the bad” either, but I have included it without excusing it. I have plenty more to share other than talk about the filth I saw in the streets. I mention this at the start to forewarn of the shameful sights I wished I had not seen but could not ignore in my daily life, nor avoid in a full telling of my time overseas.

I might make it sound like I have made it my mission to wage a one-man polemic against China, using caustic criticism as my weapon. No, that is not right. I have the need to unburden my heart of the grievous experiences, but I want to preserve and honor the friendships of the Chinese people who were so generous and welcoming to me. Perhaps I will fail in this. I have strained to make my trenchant points against my timid hesitations. I did not want to speak criticisms that would likely seem undue to my Chinese friends. In China, I was often on the receiving end of hospitality and kind attention that I have never known in America. I met simple people who had no cultural pretense to guard themselves with, and so eagerly sought to engage with me in smiling conversation. Some of them were thrilled to meet me only because I was a young American with a “charming” smile and an interest in China. We struggled to communicate, but our words were so often naked and genuine. I cannot say the same for my home culture. I have enjoyed no such celebrity or welcome in the places familiar to me. And though I have failed to carve out a place for myself in American society, I can say with confidence that if I had found comfort enough in China I could be living there now, making quick friends among people who often admired and accepted me with open arms.

So, who am I? How did I come by this Chinese experience? And what makes it worth reading about?

As I alluded, my name is not noteworthy. I have no credentials or credits to speak of. My time in China was lived as a not atypical expatriate, a foreign English teacher in a small (by Chinese standards) city. My account is noteworthy in that it is representative of a foreigner’s experience in the heart of the mysterious Middle Kingdom, and in so far as the words are written with precision and penetration. I describe- with my own voice- what it was like to live in the real China. I never ventured into very rural Western China, and I only spent a week traveling in the South. Most of my time was spent in the East, not many provinces removed from the coast, towards the center of China’s shifting population mass. I saw the major cities and toured several provinces- getting a sense of urban, modernizing China- but mostly I lived in Anhui province, splitting my time between two cities that do not have much reputation in or outside of China.

I refer to it as the “real China” because that is how a Chinese professor described it to me. He rightly discussed how most foreign visitors rarely make it out of Beijing, Shanghai, or the other major cities to push into the interior and see the cities that most Chinese live in, the places most representative of developing China. I saw mega-cities, growing urban zones and outlying towns, and even a few farm villages, but the majority of my experience was lived in the real China, cut off from ex-pat communities and tourist areas. I got a strong sense of what it was like to live the Chinese way, with the infrastructure and amenities that the Chinese were used to.

This then is not an ex-pat’s self-indulgent adventures around the magnificent, wonderful, and exotic locales of a foreign land. It is a condensed, topical view into the real thing, a place at once ordinary, bizarre, and surreal, a place I have found every American I have discussed it with to be fascinated by.

Instead of giving a walk-through tour of a historical home, pointing out interesting trivia and names and dates, I have written what I experienced as a real guest in the home- how the hosts lived, how they behaved, how they talked, what we ate. I am not alone in my Chinese experiences, and most of them will be confirmed by any ex-pat who has spent enough time there.

I have met Americans who simply shook their head when asked about China, or who made no secret of their resentment of their former foreign home, but also I met those who were more than happy to be there and had found a place for themselves in China. I was hoping to be in the latter group. Disappointed, I do not think it fair to air my bitterness as a man who turned out mostly jaded like the former group. I am telling the truth about China, gathered from my individual experiences being immersed in the real thing. To tell the truth, I have to overcome my reservations about revealing the bad of my friends’ home culture, and I also have to cut through the two main excuses that were given to cover every frustrating problem of my friends’ homeland.

First, spoken testily, was “You don’t understand China.” This conceit imagined that foreigners’ complaints were the result of ignorance, narrowness, dullness, or cultural misunderstanding, not from a genuine moral offense, which I believed they were. I argue throughout that the greatest threat to China’s sensitive ego is when foreigners do understand China, when they get to see her for what she really is. I will say what the real experience is like for a common visitor or foreign resident, so sensitive readers who want China to be exalted as a mysterious and ancient civilization should be advised to look elsewhere.

Second, I regularly heard the natives say with a shrug, “That’s China.” They would smirk at infants peeing in public, crowds pushing and scrambling to get through the queue for the bus, or cars whizzing past elderly women hobbling aimlessly through a busy intersection and say, “That’s China.” I realized that they could either dismiss things cutely or confront the craziness, which would mean having to carry the weight of the distressing sights on their conscience. I have elected to do battle with the anguish on my soul. I will not let my sorrows fester in silence. These stories are worth telling, and I believe the arguments and cultural criticisms are valid and incisive- for Chinese, for Americans, and for all others who need another’s eyes to help them see their own culture.

My experiences, my observations, my opinions, and the details of my time in China are written out in the following. I have written truthfully- at times humorously so, sorrowfully so, and uncomfortably, offensively so. Let the reader be advised and weigh my account for what it is worth.

Mantis
A D 2015