Tag: Iowa

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.

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.

The World’s Best, Worst, Most, Least, -est, -iest, and -un’s*

January 1, 2016 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

This is a popular time of year for lists of all kinds, and while mine isn’t confined to the year 2015 alone, I thought it might be a fitting time to share. It’s a survey of the superlative places, or better put, the places most notable for each superlative category in the whole world*. (*that I’ve been to**.) (**not just in 2015, but in my lifetime.) While my list isn’t as timely as other common year-end lists, it more than compensates for this in originality of categories. Let’s begin with something fairly typical and move on from there. The…

Best Food: Japan
Runner-up: Thailand
Honorable Mention: New York City

Japan’s famous dishes: sushi, noodles, yakitori (barbecue), teppanyaki (the showy iron hibachi grill food) is all great, but in all my time in Japan, every single thing I tried except for the donuts and desserts was excellent. Japanese tastes are usually right on, in my book, except when it comes to sweet foods. They’d probably find a saltine cracker “too sweet. Oh, no, too sweet.” I have no idea how those seaweed-eaters stay so skinny with all that good food around. Maybe because it’s all incredibly expensive?

Thailand is the country with my second-favorite food. Its people and restaurants are close to my heart. Unlike Japan, almost every place you eat at in Thailand is inexpensive and unpretentious. And there are street food vendors galore, so you never run out of new things to try.

New York is probably the place with the best food I’ve tried in my own country, with the very large caveat that it’s all way overpriced, as if the whole city were inside an airport terminal, and way too classy for a simple Iowan like me to navigate and feel welcome in. A longtime resident there asked me my favorite food in the city, and to get out of her glaring spotlight, I replied generically, “Uh, I like the pizza.” But that wasn’t enough to get me off the hook. “Like what, you mean a pie? Or by the slice? What kind of pizza?” She grilled me so bad I wished I had told her I only ate peanut butter sandwiches, but then she probably would have interrogated me on what kind of peanut butter and bread I used and then humiliated me for using mass market name brands.

Best Meal Experience: China
Runner-up: Korea

I’ve written about how fun (and wild) Chinese dinners could be here and here. In short, Chinese dinners, in celebration with family and friends, are hours-long events with many rounds of food, drinking, toasts, and merrymaking. While the average meal was pretty dismal in China, a big dinner was filled with dozens and dozens of different dishes to choose from, and the fun atmosphere of the event filled a whole evening. The dinners really were the highlight of my time in China.

I’m not crazy about Korean food, (unlike Koreans, whom I believe are in a sense really deranged about their own food, with anecdotes of Korean airline travelers telling security guards that they need to bring their kimchi on board because Koreans can’t eat the food in other countries- look it up), but Korea is a great place to eat out with friends. For one, Korea is jam-packed with independently-owned restaurants, most of which are furnished with long tables meant for very large groups. And the up-all-night culture means there is always a place you can find to take a group of one or two dozen people at any time for barbecue or a crowd-pleaser like chicken and beer or spicy chicken stew (jjimdak). While I disagreed with all the sour pickles being served at every Korean meal, I could never turn down barbecue, a fool-proof and plentiful option in the busy streets of Korea.

Jjimdak, from http://english.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/FOD/FO_EN_6_4_4.jsp?cid=586927

Worst Meal Experience: USA
Runner-up: China

In America, the places available to eat at where I live mostly expect you to sit down, order, eat, pay, and go quickly, with a waitress (cue the authoritarian Millennial: “That’s SERVER.”) constantly coming up and asking you, “How’s everything for ya?” or “How’s that tastin’ for ya?” or anything else “for ya?” Then, after turning down dessert “for ya” by asking for “just the check,” you chat a little, then leave and go home and scroll through your phone. Boring. Any place in America that doesn’t follow this model, in my experience, has been a neat independent place, or more likely, an elite dining experience far out of my price range and cultural comfort zone.

Runner-up is China, because although the special dinners there were great fun, they always brought stomach pain in their wake, and the average meal there was something lousy that you would expect to find as a sight gag in a dreary scene of a movie. Limp, oil-soaked vegetables, hardly any protein, unrecognizable bland, soft-textured, gelatinous foods, stinky foods like smelly tofu, and all of it prepared below acceptable hygienic standards. Okay, maybe not ALL of it, all of it, was prepared with poor hygiene, but enough must have been that I had stomach pain on a weekly basis and spent three days in the hospital at the end of my year-long stay.

Worst Food Instincts: Korea
Runner-up: USA

I think, long ago in the time dominated by robed, funny hat-wearing Confucian scholars, the isolated peninsula of Korea considered its mountainous terrain, cold winters, and limited fruit and vegetable production potential, and began philosophically analyzing everything edible with the question, “But what if we pickle it?” As in, “These green beans would taste great if freshly picked and then boiled or grilled, but what if we pickle them?” Americans think they have a taste for the exotic when they express a fondness for kimchi, but little do they realize that Koreans eat kimchi at literally every meal. Kimchi is not just the cabbage stuff either, there are several kinds of kimchi, with the most common being the cabbage and radish kinds, and there are all kinds of pickled foods eaten for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Being helpless to find a healthy meal anywhere in Korea of lean meats and fresh vegetables, or fresh fruits, without breaking the bank, was an aggravating experience that made me want to toss my sanity to the wind and lash out to a Korean audience, “I DON’T KNOW HOW YOU PEOPLE GOT SO BIG! ALL YOU EAT IS CARBS AND PICKLES! AND YOU TAKE THE ELEVATOR AND ESCALATOR EVERYWHERE INSTEAD OF WALKING. BUT YOU’RE THE THICKEST, HEALTHIEST-LOOKING PEOPLE IN THE ORIENT! WHAT GIVES?!” (Cue the authoritarian Millennial again: “It’s called EAST ASIA. Oriental is a rug.” Cue everyone born in East Asia who has learned English and wasn’t educated overseas: “But we say Orient.”)

America gets the shame of being runner-up in this category because of our obvious, out-of-control instincts to manufacture food with high sugar content, and to load comfort foods with craving-inducing things like bacon and melted cheese and so on. Absurd Frankenstein sandwiches like KFC’s Double Down, made out of two “buns” of fried chicken with cheese and bacon in between are a successful parody of America’s eat-whatever-looks-tasty mentality, and could possibly be a surprisingly healthy alternative, like the Double Down is, to even fattier sugar and carb-loaded cousins. (Compare the classic Burger King Whopper and the Double and Triple Whopper.) It’s a shame to have to talk about and try to explain the American diet to acquaintances overseas, and I think a very sad and shameful reality for us Americans to live with. Why do we continue to eat this way?

The Double Down sandwich, from http://www.cbsnews.com/news/kfcs-double-down-sandwich-smart-marketing-and-not-as-gross-as-youd-think/

Smelliest Place: Busan, Korea
Runner-up: China
Dishonorable Mentions: Key West, Florida and New York City

When I first came to Busan, an exceptionally glib Korean man introduced himself to me and asked where I was from. When I said Iowa, he responded by telling me, garnished with an unctuous ear-to-ear grin, how he had driven through Iowa once and been bombarded by the wafting stench of manure. Yes, I replied through politely gritted teeth, there are quite a lot of farms in Iowa. I knew it was undignified at the time, but I only had a faint idea how outrageous it was for a Busan resident to be having a laugh at the unpleasant smells of any other place.

Iowa is the US’s leading producer of corn and pork, and there are many other farms producing other crops and livestock, so the farm stink settling over its lonesome highways is an unfortunate byproduct of agricultural necessity. Iowans prefer to endure it with a good-humored perspective by repeating the tongue-in-cheek line “That’s the smell of money.” But Busan’s smell? It’s not a necessary byproduct of anything. It is, as far as I could tell, the smell of incompetent plumbing and infrastructure. Every open creek winding through this otherwise picturesque city reeks like an open sewer, as do most of its busy shopping centers if the competing smells of frying oil and grilling meat aren’t enough to mask it. I’ve lived in Iowa most of my life, yet I only smell bad smells on those occasional trips through the country, and even then it’s not a guaranteed fact of every long drive. In Busan, I smelled the sewer every day. It didn’t matter how I tried to mind my own business, that sewer stink found me. No matter how posh-looking or exciting the lights, sounds, and crowds are in any district in Busan, the fumes of human waste will sneak their way in and bring everyone’s haughty upturned nose back down to ugly reality. When I took walks or runs along Busan’s riverside recreational paths, which was quite a lot since the only other place to take a long walk was up a mountain, I sometimes tried holding my breath or masking my face around open drains. The intense, vomit-inducing odor was the most powerful urban stink I had been overcome with outside of China.

China, in my nickname borrowed after Thailand’s “Land of Smiles,” was the Land of Smells. It could have been shoddy plumbing like Korea, which it partially was, but it was also plant and animal waste left after street markets, restaurant refuse rotting outside, human and animal droppings on the sidewalks and streets, and the world’s worst air pollution. I went on an unwisely long run once on a blazing hot summer day in China, traversing along a riverside road from one city to another, and on my way back, passing alongside a farmer with his small herd of cows, I doubled over from the heat, dehydration, and the burning, sulfurous smell of an adjacent glass factory. I thought I would either retch or faint, and if I fainted, I figured my unconscious body would lie baking in the blazing sun until some concerned passerby called for help. Which could have been a long time, since passersby in China aren’t often concerned (see “the Little Yue Yue event”). I soldiered on, but the rest of my stay in China was never sweet-smelling. Pretty much all of China stinks, or if not, it probably means that you’ve been there long enough to have gotten used to the smell.

Dishonorable mentions of Key West, Florida, for the smell of decomposing seaweed and sargassum around its many island beaches which smells nearly like diarrhea and can be smelled for miles around, and New York City, for the smell of ammonia in every dank corner that I assume comes from human urine.

Safest Place: South Korea
Runner-up: Iowa and Middle America

I begrudgingly award this honor to South Korea because they love bragging about themselves, and Korea’s public safety is one of their most vaunted features. Yes, to answer the question asked of every foreign guest in South Korea, I did feel safe there. I much appreciated the public trust there that made it a casual, thoughtless thing to leave one’s bag and phone unattended at a coffee shop while going to the restroom. I was at times shocked when I saw school-aged girls walking alone through unlit parks and back roads to go home after their late night tutoring and study sessions. In big city America, that would be known as “looking for trouble.” But as far as I know, these girls were rarely if ever harassed. Also, the young men in Korea seldom adopt a tough, confrontational attitude as far as I saw, and I never felt the animosity of aggressive men jockeying for social rank and strong appearance like I have in America. Mostly, people minded their own business, and accidents and slip-ups could usually be smoothed over with a meek apology. There is one glaring inconsistency in Korea’s public safety record: drivers, especially scooter and motorcycle drivers, are reckless and boorish, driving over sidewalks or driving through red lights as they please, racking up an alarming number of pedestrian injuries and deaths every year. So, to rain on Koreans’ pride parade, I would point out that I never feared for my life so much as a pedestrian or car passenger in my hometown.

Speaking of, public safety often never crosses my mind where I live. To avoid the element of danger, I just stay away from bars and crowded nightlife areas. Contrary to the world’s fears about Americans’ private gun ownership, the real danger from guns is from inner-city gangs, drug and alcohol-related crime, robberies, and suicides. If you live in Middle America, like I do, these terrible facts of life can mostly be avoided. I’ve never bought into the hysteria that the average American gun owner has a loose hand cannon just waiting to go off. I should mention though, that like Korea, I worry about traffic accidents and injuries. I’ve thought to myself many times that if I died violently, it would probably be from being crashed into by a teenager texting while driving. Big roads and cars dominate American life, and there’s no way to avoid them.

Most Dangerous: China
Runner-up: Manila, Philippines

If I had to pick a “Most Dangerous” place, I would say China because I almost died there and because many times I thought a wild taxi driver or purposeful truck driver callous to the human life of pedestrians would plow into me without a care. I thought I could have been crushed by panic spreading through one of the many crowds I was inevitably caught in, or from getting sick through poor hygienic conditions, pollution, and exposure to the cold (Chinese buildings aren’t allowed to have central heating unless they’re above the geographical mid-line set by the government, or unless they’re a big public or commercial space like a train station or mall).

I also feared for my life in the mean streets of Manila, where I was eyed as prey by nearly every onlooker, and where relatively safe transportation is hard to procure unless you tip a police officer to flag down a taxi whose driver is likewise eager to extort extra money out of you. Plus, every shopping center and public transportation hub has armed police and metal detectors, and pistol and shotgun-wielding police were a common sight outside of shops and banks. There was a worry of attacks by political groups, but even more so I was afraid that a lax officer’s casual grip on his shotgun handle would send an accidental spray into the street. Manila is also the only place I’ve been pick-pocketed, so that infamy earns it high marks of distinction on the dangerous list.

More ranks of honor and dishonor to come.

The Real China: Predictions

August 27, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

A table full of plates at a Chinese wedding.

Continued from The Real China: Preparations

Strange Food
From the opinions of my fellow trainees in New York, and from various voices online, I gained the sense that Chinese food was beloved only by the Chinese. I imagined a bland and unappetizing mix of foods that should not go together or be prepared the way the people liked to prepare them. I imagined unidentifiable foods in gray sauces, or all kinds of crawling creatures and animals laid out in an exotic and intimidating spread, like from a film set.

The truth was not far off, yet not so horrific. I will illustrate with a story from my English class in New York.

A fellow teacher-trainee gave the students a pamphlet to read about a farm that cared for abandoned animals and “food animals.” One student asked, “What is a food animal?”

The teacher said, “You know… cows, chickens, pigs… any animal that can be eaten as food.”

The one Chinese student in the class responded dryly to the teacher’s comment, “Every animal is a food animal.”

Chinese tastes differ depending on region, and every individual has preferences and dislikes (some as finicky as a picky diner in America or wherever), but in Chinese cuisine, all food options are very much on the table.

Turtle soup. I was expected to eat the chewy rim of the shell. Seriously.

Turtle soup. As a guest, I was expected to eat the chewy rim of the shell. Seriously.

I didn’t think this would bother me, I tried to reason that dog and cat were animals and fit for food just like the rest, but when I saw my first red flesh-covered canine skull, I winced, and I had to turn away from the skinned dog carcass hanging upside-down in the morning market.

In China, I saw that food was often bought in the streets, from local vendors who brought their produce into town to sell on tarps they laid out in the roads and sidewalks. Or, if selling chickens, ducks, or geese, the birds were tied up with a strip of plastic strung around one ankle, held in cages, or possibly set on top of the cage or laid down in a pile on the street.

The markets were a free-form zoo of people, fruits, vegetables, live fish and fowl, crabs, crawdads, clothes, dogs (usually the live kind, wandering the streets), pet birds, and the interweaving traffic of motorcycles, honking cars, and tractors. Some markets gathered under the roof of a permanent shelter, which meant no cars or tractors and only rarely a motor scooter. A few city employees would come by every afternoon to hose off the pavement and sweep up the broad swaths of refuse, but their effort was never equal to the size and staggering smell of the mess.

And that is how I saw most people buy their daily groceries in China. They would also make trips to the supermarkets and department stores, of course, and in those the produce and meat sections could be just as wild. There would be rows of tanks for fish, turtles, frogs, crustaceans, eels, and other sea creatures (the “Seafood” and “Pets” sections in Chinese Wal-Mart overlap) and they would often be set up in stair-step levels so hoses could transfer water between them. Raw meat would be sitting out on a counter, uncovered and undated. In the streets, I saw sides of beef hanging over the side of a motorcycle truck and dragging along the pavement with its bloody tip. Also, in the street markets, cuts of red meat were suspended on hooks for sale, being picked over by the flies as they awaited a buyer.

Next to the live seafood and raw meat in the supermarkets were the dried meats and sausages. Whole ducks and geese were strung up by the neck, their flattened bodies displaying all their ribs and the dried flesh that clung to them.
I’m sure my Chinese hosts had no idea what was going through my mind when I walked with them through the markets. I often wished I could bring my mother (who will not eat whole fish because she doesn’t want her food looking at her) and my grandmother on an entertaining tour through the food markets, but I think they would become nauseous or faint. A Chinese food market is the quickest way to open a Westerner’s eyes to life outside the modern world.

Networking
China is known for having a collectivist culture, for children fervently serving their parents in reverent, Confucian obedience, for its zealous advance of the Chinese communist state, and also for its intricate network of social relationships.

The Chinese/Mandarin word for these relationships and social power is guanxi (pronounced gwan-shee, so I’ll write it out gwan-shee since I’m writing in English). In my research, I read that gwan-shee was big on the Chinese mind, and no business could be done without it. I read of foreigners coming up against roadblocks when going to the bank or city government office and being dumbfounded that no one would process their forms. The inconveniences were not an absolute policy; each place handled things differently and business often proceeded without a hitch. Still, strangers needed a mediator to introduce them to business contacts and government officials; without the social connections they would remain powerless.

This brick wall of apathy and willful ignorance plagued the local citizens, too.

When I talked with college students, I heard from them the saying that besides the results of the national college placement test (which is determined by a score tabulated by machines and faceless strangers), nothing in China was fair. If you needed a medical procedure done right away in a good hospital, you had better know the doctor or have plenty of cash to grease the social gears. I was very lucky to know Aunt Fong and always have her or a representative from my university’s Department of Foreign Affairs to escort me. Not only did they translate the language for me, they cleared the social hurdles and introduced me to the right people.

I was on the bad end of gwan-shee, too. Before my first day of teaching, I met with a bunch of teachers and government officials as they all sat around smoking and chatting. Then we had a big celebratory dinner. I found out that the meeting was between my employers at the university and the head officials of the local middle school. The university had agreed to split my teaching hours with the middle school, so I would spend the first semester teaching half of my hours at each. This turned into a nightmare, as the middle school gig involved me worthlessly straining to get 50 unwilling pupils to listen and speak, usually making a fool of myself and wasting my breath. Later, I became privy to the knowledge that the university officials were not happy with my middle school duties either, but because the head of the middle school was a powerful man with gwan-shee connections all over town, they were helpless to stop it.

After reflecting on the Chinese way and comparing it to others, I don’t think the gwan-shee system is radically unlike any other society’s way of doing business, it is only more pronounced. They assume the power of social relationships from the get-go and discuss it out in the open, whereas other nations might delude themselves that private affairs are all work and talent-based, and public systems are all equal access. I think people everywhere could agree that that is the way that things should be, but our world is not so neat or fair. Or, as they say in China, only the gaokao is fair.

People Mountain, People Sea
The Chinese idiom for their phenomenon of crowded cities is “people mountain, people sea.” I remember, as a university student taking a class on China, when my professor announced that his home country’s official population had surpassed 1.3 billion people. That figure was astounding. How could I comprehend it? What did it look like? How did 1.3 billion people translate into a daily reality? I had read about mega-cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, but what did it feel like to take the subway in these cities or walk the streets? Was it possible to find peace and quiet? Was there personal space?

“Has anyone seen my personal space? No? That’s okay, I’ll just keep milling about until I find it.”

I didn’t have a concrete expectation of what it would be like, but I knew it would be congested. I found out that the presence of crowds was a constant in Chinese life. Note that I stayed mostly near the East Coast; the further one travels west in China, the more rural and open it is. The daily reality of crowds, like the pollution, was an inescapable and unwelcome hassle impinging on every aspect of life.

In my hometown in Iowa, I can walk downtown or walk across town and cross paths only with cars on major streets and- maybe- see a few people also on the sidewalk, here and there, or out in their yards if the weather is nice. Even then, people are only outside to walk their dogs, go running, or do yard work. Almost no one goes out on foot for basic transportation. A select few go by bike instead of car, but this has caught on only with a thin-slice of the population because the majority wouldn’t be caught dead walking into a store with a bike helmet on, not to mention tight black shorts and clunky riding shoes. And, why forsake the car, that ultimate conveyor of convenience?

Of course, the situation in the U.S. is different depending on where you live, but I think the large majority of cities are less like Manhattan and more like my hometown- desolate except for cars.

In China, and I mean the full thrust of this hyperbole, people were everywhere. Imagine the United States’ population was increased fivefold and most everyone lived in a dingy apartment complex, except it was 90% less cars and many thousand times more motor scooters- that is China. The first time I went to the Carrefour department store nearest to my apartment in China, it was a typical Sunday afternoon The aisles were more congested than any stateside Wal-Mart I had ever seen between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The Carrefour only provided small, half-sized shopping carts because it would have been nearly impossible to pivot and turn a large one through the stream of people in every aisle. It became exhausting being in the midst of it, my eyes could never rest from scanning the people walking past me, and I was constantly turning my head and stepping out of the way.

Note that, even though I checked my blind spots and gave way or walked around other shoppers, the courtesy was not returned. If you are standing between a Chinese shopper (or pedestrian) and the thing they want, they will push you. Standing in a supermarket aisle, scanning the shelves for the best produce, a Chinese shopper would butt in front of me or slip in and grab their choice without saying a word to excuse themselves or acknowledge my presence. For anyone offended that wants to argue, “Not all Chinese people do that!” I have to say that pushy people pushing people was the rule and not the exception. They pushed like pigs at a feeding trough whenever there was a line or bottleneck. When I tried eating at the school cafeteria in my university, I had to vent my frustrations in the crush of students vying for the server’s attention by sarcastically asking myself if Titanic were sinking behind us.

Walking the same as they drove, the Chinese would only look at what was immediately, directly in front of them. Anything outside that five-foot cone of vision was ignored, meaning that even if I could have reasonably expected passersby to walk around me as I stood to the side of the main path and gave way, I learned from experience that boorish men would regardless still shoulder into me, and at times a thin, bossy woman might still shove me in the kidneys from behind.

Besides my apartment, there was no personal space and there were almost no private places of solitude. Often, when young Chinese students approached me to ask a question, they would lean against the side of my arm, or they would stand so close to my face that I could smell the bitter tea they had for breakfast. If I went outside for exercise or a leisurely walk by the river, I would be joined by hundreds of others who were also fleeing cramped apartments for exercise.

The Chinese, as a people, were diligent about exercise and took responsibility for their own health (not without necessity; they could not all expect quality medical care), so it was refreshing and somewhat inspiring to see so many exercise groups meeting in public places. Again, just like everywhere else, this meant park spaces got heavy use and one could expect to find crowds there daily. Only during afternoon nap time did public places clear out.

Joining an outdoor kung-fu club for “push hands” practice.

Even when the skies were filled with the dark clouds of the local farmers’ straw burning, I saw people on the running track, on the exercise equipment, and on the basketball courts. I wondered how so many people could tolerate the noxious air outside, but the odds were that even though the outside was filled with people, nine out of ten were probably taking shelter inside.

Conclusion
Truly, nothing would have completely prepared me for immersion in China. I would have to endure it- the bad and the bizarre- every day. And, in a way, that was the intent. To leave the familiar and be confronted with different ways of doing everything. I find it an irresistibly fascinating thought that other nations of people have grown up and built a civilization without any similar foundations in Western thought, belief, customs, language, or practice, and only anciently sharing culture and technology with foreign cultures through trade or conquest. But times have changed. Since opening its doors in the 1970’s and embracing modernization, China has been eager to adapt and (what’s a euphemism for copy and steal?) um, appropriate foreign business practices and technology. Outsiders like me are welcomed.

I went to China somewhat expecting everyone to be wearing gray cotton jackets and chanting Maoist liturgy, so I was a little stunned to see so many “Angry Birds” t-shirts. American culture has spread far and wide, even to China, either by way of capitalist trading or by Chinese larceny. Much of the Middle Kingdom was familiar because I had already seen the original t-shirt or television show in America, and much was familiar because an apartment building can’t vary all that much in essence from place to place.

Still, making a parallel between similar facts of life between China and the United States (e.g. food, crowds, school buildings, driving a car, any of the topics in my writing) is like stepping in front of a fun-house mirror. The reflected image is real, but it is warped.

Now that I’ve discussed the things I expected and my blood is heated after thinking of the aggressive stampedes of people, I would like to turn the focus next onto some real situations in China that I never anticipated.

The Real China: Preparations

August 27, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 2 Comments

When I was a boy, I thought Chinese people were straw hat-wearing duck herders who grew their rat tails long and delivered their punishments swiftly, reed in hand, on any delinquent ducklings caught lollygagging. I also told my parents that I wanted to eat all the rice in China. I did love steamed rice.

All this farmer is missing is a switch and a misbehaving duck with which to whip it with.

My ideas about China changed as I grew, of course, yet with my departure for the Far East mere months away, I had the impression that my imaginings were still somewhat cartoonish and definitely murky. I had made a large commitment in coming to live there for at least a year. What was I really getting into?

My arrival and first day of classes were scheduled for September 1st. At the moment, Lent was beginning and I was headed to New York City. I had enrolled in a four-week intensive course through a satellite school of the University of Cambridge to prepare myself to teach English as a Second Language (ESL). My ESL-experienced friend recommended this as the best preparation for its respected reputation and straightforward teaching lessons. So that was that, my decision was made easy. Only, I would have to travel quite a ways from my Midwestern abode to get to a school.

Making ready for the culture shock of China in the not-a-little shocking confines of New York City, I spent my stay there as a detached observer, touring only a few places over the weekends and mostly studying and preparing lessons for my student-teaching. Coming from a small city in Iowa, sharing a subway train with someone talking to themselves (or to the voices in their head), surrounded by the most colorful mass of humanity on earth, and being routinely given a dead stare or evil eye by all service employees and most passersby made me wonder what was wrong with America’s most famous city. And yet, by the end of my stay, I had learned to enjoy my temporary home. Would I learn to appreciate the weird, the irritating, and the wild in the world’s most populous country, the same as I had in America’s most crowded city?

While at the ESL teacher training course, I met some English teachers with experience and tried to pump them for opinions on their time abroad.

Sitting with two teachers who had lived in China, I asked them about the food and other areas of life there. I received the same response from both: a shell-shocked grimace and a slow shake of the head.

“What does that mean?” I nervously questioned.

They struggled to find words to describe the food, so one just cautioned me that I would probably lose 10 to 15 pounds there.

“It’s that bad, huh?” I commented.

They shook their heads lamentably again. “I would find a place that you like, where you know the menu, and just go there to eat. That’s what I did. Find a restaurant you can trust and stick with it.”

It went unspoken, I think because their grief was ineffable and intricately connected to the many complicated facets of life in China, but I suspected a deep reserve of bad feelings, expressed wordlessly, towards the country neither seemed eager to return to.

In our student-teaching classes, my fellow trainees and I taught lessons to city residents and foreign tourists on an “English holiday” who wanted a free English class. It was kind of like a discount haircut from beauty school students, only we couldn’t make anyone ugly, only bored. One student, an enthusiastic and jovial man named Hui (rhymes with “way,” that is, “h’way”), came from Nanjing, and he had me believing I would get along great with his countrymen back in China.

Hui at a rock garden in his hometown, Nanjing.

On the first day of class, I observed Hui during another teacher’s lesson and nearly interrupted it with guffaws. Each student had drawn a card with a mystery occupation, and their partner had to ask them questions to determine their identity (example: Construction Worker. “Do you work in an office?” “No.” “Do you work outside?” “Yes.” “Are you a construction worker?” “Yes.”) Hui was partnered with a young Japanese woman who looked terrified to be standing up and facing her classmate instead of listening to a teacher talk.

Hui was eagerly rattling off questions and getting shot down by her negative responses, but having the time of his life nonetheless. Her card read “Ballet Dancer,” probably the trickiest of all the occupations in the exercise, and Hui ended his series of questions to her by asking, “Do you make seengs weess your hands?” He was told curtly, yet softly, again, “No.”

Then Hui exclaimed with his whole voice and body, “Oh! How secret you are! Teacher, she is being so secretive!” And you have to envision, while Hui was making big, happy gestures- playfully pointing his finger at his secretive partner- his Japanese counterpart stood there unflinchingly, as stiff as a corpse.

Happy Hui

I smiled and shook with silent laughter, trying not to disturb the class. Hui had won my heart. A week later, I was able to interview him for a class assignment, and later still, he and I went out to lunch together. We talked about his time in America and his family, and I was able to ask him how he thought I would fare in his homeland.

Hui told me I would have many “advantages” over Chinese citizens. For one, I would be treated with a lot of leniency as a foreign guest, forgiven social missteps because of my ignorance. Also, I might be able to find work at a big company because they needed Americans to handle international business.

I asked him about the girls in China, because I thought I would have a disadvantage in a lopsided population without enough marriageable females to go around.

“Oh no!” Hui corrected me, “I think the Chinese girls will like you very much! He, he, he!” He tended to end his sentences with laughter, and one of my fellow teacher trainees nicknamed him “Happy Hui” because of it. Happy Hui predicted that Chinese girls would like a tall, fair-skinned foreigner with blue eyes, and even though I never took “advantage” of this, it turned out I was as fortunately conspicuous as he thought.

Hui also said that I would be able to get away with things in China because of my advantages. If, for example, my actions would get a Chinese citizen arrested, I would probably only be cautioned. A penalty of imprisonment or worse would likewise be downgraded to deportation. Later on in China, I had the sense that Hui was correct, but I never felt the need to test my boundaries.

Back in Iowa, in that interim before my late-August flight to Beijing, I did more online research, scouring ESL forums and websites related to life in China, and had more conversations with friends and family about my journey.

One friend, whose family emigrated from Hong Kong when he was a small child, confirmed one of Hui’s points, using a different style of speaking. “The internet is restricted there,” he told me about a familiar fact, “so you can’t use Facebook or YouTube or anything like that. In China, there’s no freedom of speech, but they don’t care if you start a fire in the street. It’s a really different place.” Once in China, I found out he, too, was right. The people started fires in the streets (not that big, just curbside fires of paper mostly) and did whatever they pleased.

What else could I expect in China? After culling through countless internet sites, I noticed that commentators said several things in common.

China-ready with my own straw hat.

Spitting
Nearly every complaint on China mentioned indiscreet public spitting. In my later travels throughout the Middle Kingdom, I observed this to be very true. I did not see groups of people spitting simultaneously, but I witnessed individuals spitting wherever they felt like (in a classroom, in a hotel lobby, inside a restaurant, anywhere outside, and every place they felt like except inside someone’s home- in that case they would use a waste basket), spitting about as often as one hears sneezes in public. And the worst part was they didn’t just lower their head to spit and let saliva fall with a gentle “ptooh” sound, they fully hawked their throats and launched it- an ugly little stain that would splat against the ground. Even worse, they did it shamelessly, replacing their cigarette in their lips in an unconscious habit, returning to the conversation without missing a beat, or, in the case of the classroom, getting right back to their notes.

I read that the Chinese believe swallowing the phlegm was unhealthy as it was supposed to collect impurities in the environment and in the body. I would also come to find out that Chinese home cures and medical advice were largely based on a generations’ old collection of old wives’ tales (e.g. the common cure-all was to drink a glass of hot water). Several times throughout the year I was forbidden by my aunt or some minder from eating certain foods based on the season (e.g. no peanuts in hot weather, they didn’t say why).

Pollution
Anyone with even a passing interest in China has doubtlessly read about the unbearable levels of pollution in Chinese cities. The people wear surgical masks in China, sometimes when they are ill or afraid of catching an illness, but often to filter the incredibly filthy air.

When Aunt Fong was walking with me once in Iowa, I asked her why she liked my hometown so much, and she told me because of its blue sky. I was taken aback. Wasn’t the sky blue everywhere? Not in China, where cloud and atmosphere are indistinguishable, and the sun appears as a dim flashlight shining through dirty dishwater.

In the summertime, being in China felt like living in a greenhouse with smog walls. The sunlight wasn’t beating on your back, but the bright heat covered you like a moist blanket. Throughout the year, the sky was a lurid wash of grays, yellows, and browns, and I quickly longed for clear, open skies. The pollution was an oppressive pall that darkened every day. It had a continuous, crushing effect on my morale.

The worst the pollution ever got was in late April-early May, when the local farmers had gathered in the wheat harvest. Once the fields were gleaned of their grain, the farmers would set fire to the remaining straw. Multiply the effect of one small field by the thousands of farms in the area, add that to the significant mechanical pollution already saturating the air, and the net effect was the smell of burning, an acrid, stinging sensation in the nostrils and eyes, and all that you might expect if you held your face above a campfire.

That intense forest fire-like period lasted for about a week and a half. It was comparatively clear after that, which doesn’t say much. Simply breathing was a health hazard in China.

Loud Talking
The Chinese have a reputation for speaking loudly and directly. I read from several people online who said that people would address a stranger at full volume and the two parties would immediately get into a near-shouting match. When I witnessed this with my own eyes, an English-speaking Chinese friend on a couple different occasions tried to explain it away by saying that foreigners often think that Chinese are arguing when they are really only having a simple discussion of common exchange. “They are only talking!” my interpreter tried to laugh it off. I was left unconvinced.

From what I had read while in America, I expected the people in China to be noisy most of the time. In reality, they spoke in a normal tone with friends or in private (around a dinner table with a big group they would start to get uproarious, which is not really remarkable). The loud voices emerged whenever people called for strangers or talked in public places. Then, commands issued like impatient line cooks shouting over the clamor of a busy kitchen.

Continued in Predictions

Aunt Fong and Caili Ma – Part 2: Not My Real Aunt, My Chinese Aunt

August 14, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

Sunday morning’s routine again, with everyone in the church repeating their rituals, except this time I could not have been the only one whose vision kept returning to Ann’s pew as I silently wondered who the other Chinese woman was sitting next to Caili. Since she looked about the same age, I puzzled over what her background might be. As far as I knew, any of the young Chinese international students involved with a church group went to the campus Wesley Foundation, and the small collection of Chinese families who lived in town and gathered for Chinese language church met in another Wesleyan church a mile away. Our church was neither Wesleyan nor international, and we had taken no official steps to attract any Chinese people, yet somehow two middle-aged Chinese women were now part of our otherwise constant assembly.

After the formal worship, over coffee and cookies, I was joined at my folding table by Caili and her friend. Unlike with Caili, I was not very receptive to my first meeting with this stranger, having sunk into a very low mood over my fast approaching job’s end, which added heavily to what I saw as my life’s accumulated woe. So, I only lethargically responded to Caili’s back-and-forth Chinese questions as a favor to my good friend. Caili’s new friend, on the other hand, was delighted by our demonstration of my babyish Chinese skills and giggled with my every pronunciation.

While she relished watching me, one of the American natives, try to speak her language for once, Caili’s friend wasn’t much for conversation in return. Everyone who met her that morning, it seemed, could almost instantly pick up that she only replied to questions by happily nodding and saying, “Yes,” or earnestly attempting a semblance of an answer that was nevertheless incomplete, unintelligible, or at best a tin eared stock response. Depending on the question and the clarity of the speaker, she would either let the words pass over her head or try to come back with a rehearsed phrase I assumed she had picked up from a Chinese English conversation book.

Caili, whose English people correctly described as “broken,” had worked very hard on her studies, and it showed to me that, even if her English seemed “broken,” she had climbed remarkably far up the language ladder. Her friend was a true novice whose dabbling with English allowed her to passively listen with barely discernible comprehension and repeat a few words she had committed to memory, yet she very much wanted to talk with me.

The answers came slowly and I wasn’t sure of them, but for starters I learned that she had visiting professor status at the university, like Caili, which meant she was free to study unattached to any coursework or degree program, and her name was Fang Zhu.

“Fang” was not pronounced like a dog’s tooth, but more like “Fong,” so from here on out I’ll write it “Fong.” And “Zhu” was like a cross between “chew” and “zoo,” or just simply it could be rendered “joo” (the pronunciation was pretty fuzzy to me for awhile, and even now I am never completely confident I am saying it clearly, or that it is even possible to say it clearly), but “joo” doesn’t look very Chinese to me, so I’ll keep it at “Zhu.” “Fong Zhu.”

Fong Zhu seemed briefly elated by our meeting, but I thought that would be the end of it. In fact, I was so jaded that dreary morning that I thought very little of it. Fong Zhu didn’t show up the next week or for the next several weeks, and during that time Caili left for California and I lost my job. Fong Zhu didn’t come back until (I would be told by her much later) Ann sent her an e-mail, asking her where she had been and telling her she missed seeing her. Somehow, I assume through an online copy-and-paste translation tool, Fong Zhu understood enough of the message that she was touched by it and returned to church the next Sunday.

With Aunt Fong

After the service, she came right up to me, chatting away in words I sifted through with much mental computation. One sentiment of hers stood out to me: she wanted to invite me over for a Chinese lunch. Now, I still knew very little about this woman, I was unsure of who she was and why she was so interested in me, so I tried to softly decline the offer. Then, I realized she wouldn’t really understand what I said, so I just mumbled something non-committal and let the strained conversation break off like a strand of cobweb as I searched for something else in the room I could focus my attention on.

So, besides my regular trips to the gym, I mostly stayed home that week. Fong Zhu’s dinner date wasn’t even a thought on my mind. But come the next Sunday, Fong Zhu was back in Ann’s pew, and as soon as people had filed through the pastor’s handshake line, she found me and approached me with a wounded look in her eyes.

“Why?” she asked me tenderly, why didn’t I come over to her home? I was stuck for an answer, taken aback that she was not only seriously expecting me, a relative stranger, to come to her home alone, but that she was also insistent on inviting me again. Seeing how much it meant to her by the plaintive tone in her voice and the look in her eyes, I took note of her address and made a firm yet doubtful promise to join her for lunch that Tuesday. Being unemployed, I could not honestly have said that my schedule was full.

Tentatively, I drove over to her university apartment and rang the doorbell. Fong Zhu had a Russian roommate named Olga, who was gone at the time, so after she cheerily greeted me with a “Ni hao!” and invited me inside, all I saw in the unlit interior were newspaper and magazine ads sprawled across the kitchen table and hard floors, a couple lamps on end tables, a world map pinned to the wall with American travel pictures posted around it, and a couple pots boiling mystery items on the stove. For lunch, we had a mound of pork dumplings that far exceeded what we could possibly eat, and Fong Zhu introduced me to boiled chicken feet. The first try left a bad impression- all sinewy and you had to chomp the little toe bones in your mouth to grind off the meat- but I’ve since grown to like them depending on the seasoning.

At a (birthday) dinner with Aunt Fong.

At another lunch at her place, she served me ham hocks (basically, all the meat and fat around a pig’s knee joint) which I honestly found to be exquisite. I asked her where she found all this exotic food, and she told me simply, “Wo-er Ma.”

“Walmart? You found all this stuff at Walmart?”

I checked up on this and found out it was indeed true. It was just unusual to find them on my local Walmart’s shelves because the small number of feet and hocks were snatched up, usually, by Chinese families or other outre diners.

Anyway, Fong Zhu and I chatted away despite our mutual incomprehension, she peppering me with questions and I doing my best to give the simplest answers in the clearest English possible. I would struggle to get her to answer my own questions, but would more often than not become frustrated by her clumsy English and loose, wandering thought patterns. Still, when the sputtering dialogue came to one of its frequent impasses, I felt comfortable enough to sit quietly with my new companion and bide my time. I couldn’t tell why, but she was motherly attentive to me, and I felt fascinated to be speaking at length with someone so completely foreign. Plus, I had no pressing job responsibilities or social obligations, and I was so unsure of how to proceed in our meeting- petrified of trying to break things off and make my exit- so I had all the patience in the world.

That would come in handy, as Fong Zhu and I started meeting about twice a week for intermittent conversation fragments, her cheery and zany speeches that would turn into singing and dancing, and our bumbling efforts at language study. For that last part, we would review Chinese vocabulary lists and Fong’s sheets of simple English sentences with their Chinese translations. I think she was just printing free materials she found online, and we would just jump around the word sheets, but we would spend a whole afternoon doing it, so it gave me the hope that I had the discipline and opportunity to actually learn Chinese- reputed to be one of the hardest languages in the world for English speakers to acquire.

I never complained about the time spent or the indeterminate way we studied. I was just so thirsty to learn a foreign language and enamored with the fact that a new strange person had come into my life and offered me so much attention. The day she told me it was impolite for me, a younger person, to call her by her given name or her family name unadorned, it felt only natural to use the Chinese term she taught me for “aunt.” And when Aunt Fong started proposing to me, “You… come to China?” I felt enough trust in our friendship that I began to put my confidence in coming to China as the opportunity I had been looking for.

Of course, I had my doubts that caused me to hesitate, but I had been set for so long on coming to Asia that I could not turn away from a real and tangible offer that had the benefit of a friend’s guidance. It did not matter so much to me that I had never heard of the university where Fong Zhu’s professor husband was able to get me a job, and it didn’t matter so much that every other detail was foggy either. I had been trapped in a pit of loneliness and unemployment, or wrong employment, for so long that I was ready to rocket out of it, and I felt certain that my hopes would be met. It was almost too perfect that this woman, my new aunt, came into my life right at the time the sagging trough I had bottomed out in broke open and dropped me into a void of thought I could only have dreamed my way out of.

After Aunt Fong left Iowa on a snowy December day, I spent plenty more unemployed time thinking over her offer and hashing it over with her through e-mail. As unknown and exotic as this adventure was, it began to seem more and more real to me, the obvious and only choice to make. And, for years, I had been starving for someone to pay me close attention, mentor me, and give me their full friendship. Aunt Fong was too flighty to be a mentor, and not really the kind of person I would look to for that, but she and I already had bonded inexplicably like relatives, and I trusted her to be my guide in the supremely populous People’s Republic of China.

China had to be the hopeful thing I knew it would be.

The next months passed as a period of waiting and preparation before the beginning of the fall semester in China. I felt ready because of what I had known all along- it was time to leave.

Aunt Fong and Caili Ma – Part 1: From Iowa to Chinatown

August 13, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

Suddenly, there was a Chinese woman in my church. In the midst of a sea of German surnames, half-strangers repeating their Sunday routines of sleepy sermons, handshakes with ho-hum greetings, coffee and juice and cookies and bars over featureless pleasant talk of football games and school holidays and college majors and soup suppers, and me having the same words on the Ten Commandments and free grace being shuffled through the same worn paths in my mind while my heart ached like young Joseph in Egypt as a slave, seemingly denied his grand dreams, or Moses in Egypt as a young man yearning to flee the glut of sensual opulence for a humble place out past the wilderness with the children of God- there, in the midst of this rut we were all ready to customarily cycle through again, sitting in a pew beside the 90-year old former school teacher whose slowed speech and movement belied her keen wit, sat a middle-aged Chinese woman, whom I vaguely dreamed of but never expected to find, in my church.

Of course, that first week, I was too meek and shy to approach her, and I could think of no excuse to broach a conversation besides my teeming curiosity. But all the traditional church routines repeat themselves without variance- week after week, no questions brooked- and this Chinese woman seemed to be getting along quite well with the oldest member of our church. Strangely, it seemed as if she would be returning next week and becoming part of the pattern. And maybe, just maybe, I thought within my timid soul, I would meet her, and I would have my stepping stone, or my bridge, to something new.

Me with Caili

A year before, I had made a desperate attempt to escape my inertia. I could find no social or business chain to link me to my dreams, but a thought had been growing in me since college that my way out to a new world, where I would have the chance to work and pursue the life I believed in, where I would have the chance to be someone, where I could experience the far-off lands I was secretly infatuated with, was through teaching English overseas.

While this daydream grew and I nurtured it by scouring websites and forums online, I stumbled in that I had no outside experience to justify taking the giant leap from my local part-time job at a failing small business to a teaching position at a school in the Eastern Hemisphere.

At first, I thought I could only justify such a venture by going to graduate school. I had studied English in college, which was a good fit for teaching English as a second language (ESL), but I avoided any teaching classes at the time, thinking that becoming an average public school teacher meant becoming an average person. It would mean a trade-off from aspiring to advance my own work and beliefs in whatever adventurous frontier I might find myself, towards subordinating myself to the soft ultimatums of my conforming, contemporary society. Teaching in America would mean a respectable job, yes, and insurance and health benefits, job security and a strong résumé, the chance to be an upstanding member of the community and form a social network and start a family and buy a house and get fat and have vacations and plan a retirement and live a middle-class life with conventional middle-class opinions and aspirations and all that. But at what cost? Live a predictable life because I knew it would be safe and insulated from risk or challenge or isolation or failure? And let my greater beliefs quietly cool and die? Live and die the easy way? No, that was not what life was meant for.

Except, now that I had reached the conclusion that overseas English jobs were my best gateway to opportunity, the value of teaching training had become so much more sensible. I began to have regrets and considered that the only way to rectify the situation and prepare myself for a life abroad would be a master’s degree.

I went so far as to complete an application at my local university and alma mater when a chance meeting with an old acquaintance changed my course. He advised me from personal experience that grad school for teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) was, like all master’s degree programs, time-consuming and very expensive, and considering all the overseas schools that were hiring American teachers with any and all undergraduate degrees, largely unnecessary.

“Don’t be like me,” he said playfully, “because then you’ll have a lot of student loan and credit card debt, and you’ll feel stressed, and you won’t be happy.”

To be happy, he suggested, take a 4-week intensive ESL teaching course instead, one that is nuts and bolts in scope, and comes from an internationally well-respected school. Or, just apply directly to the English program for public schools in South Korea.

Since Korea had already been on my mind and my friendly adviser assured me about it from his own experience, I thought why not? What is there holding me back now?

I let my acceptance letter to grad school sit unanswered, and right thereafter I began filling out forms online, working through the months long, fastidious process of gathering documents like letters of recommendation, a federal background check, and a notary-stamped diploma.

I wavered along the way, still without any teaching training or classroom experience yet to prepare me for the looming test of being stood in front of a group of Korean students and occupying their attention for forty minutes in a foreign language. And each week, and each drawn-out task of document collecting, seemed to chip away at my initial enthusiasm. I had a struggle to raise my confidence to explain this foreign quest I was up to whenever anyone asked about my work plans and why I was biding my time at a hole-in-the-wall retail shop. This adventure seemed to be receding further away into fantasyland, more and more remote in possibility.

It certainly lost urgency for my then manager, who took weeks of diffident prodding to finally sit down and write me a recommendation letter. In fact, he took so long that I missed out on entering Korea’s national program- the number of applicants was already full.

As consolation, I was informed that I could switch my application to a similar program for the province outside Seoul.

At this point, I was faced with another unexpected choice. Immediately after I heard that I had missed the initial intake, a friend from my gym started talking to me about a job referral at the the company where he worked. By this time, my doubts were beginning to eclipse my eagerness to teach overseas. My original prayer was that God would pull me out of the forgotten pit I was in, set me up with respectable work and a clear mission in life, and make a real man out of me. So, when I went to go have a look at my friend’s local company and saw fast-talking adults dressed in business wear, shuttling around the smart expanses of a new building, busying themselves on their computers, and calling owners and managers across the country with seemingly urgent business, I felt the pull. The chance to be a respectable adult looked so immediately before me. And when the hiring manager told me a good first year would mean $50,000, I reasoned that not only would the experience give me the chance to prove myself, the money I made would allow me to travel Asia however I wanted- self-sufficient.

I turned the pending job offer in Korea down.

It would prove a mistake I had to live with.

The next nine months I spent tenuously hanging onto a hated job that my friend summed up as “glorified telemarketing.” The dirty business was all about breaking through the defensive lines of secretaries and middle men, then pressuring the checkbook holder at whichever car dealership was being called to sign up for a junk mail campaign designed by our company. I look on the whole enterprise now with complete revulsion, and also I react with disbelief that I could have been so naive and weak to think my continued employment there meant I had a no-quit attitude like a real man should, when I see clearly in hindsight that since making pushy cold calls was so loudly against my conscience it would only have been in keeping with my integrity to have walked into my manager’s cubicle as early as I sensed so and quit on the spot.

And while I state this with indignation, to my shame I followed my managers’ and co-workers’ aggressive advice as best as my unsure, awkward self could. I harried many weary secretaries, and in the off-chance I didn’t end up in voicemail, I made modest and embarrassed pushes to follow my boss’s instructions to harass the dealership managers into buying until they either did so or I “made them hang up on me.”

Midway through my futile struggle to maintain employment is when I was introduced to Ma Caili, or following Western conventions of family name last, Caili Ma. Sure enough, as I had predicted, she was back in the church pew the next week with her elderly friend, Ann. And my hope to meet her did not go unfulfilled. Caili Ma was spirited enough in her pursuit of learning English and meeting Americans that she had already met with the church pastor for language exchange and Bible study. He told me all about it when he suggested to me that, given my background as an English major and interest in teaching overseas, I might be the best person to meet with Caili.

So, I happily did, albeit nervously and without a clear idea of how I should proceed.

Our first Sunday afternoon meeting, I struck out after attempting to have Caili read a Dr. Seuss book aloud while I critiqued her pronunciation. She must have been less than impressed with my lesson (I feel embarrassed looking back on it) since from then on she initiated teaching Chinese lessons to me. This arrangement worked itself out naturally for the rest of the Sunday afternoons that summer. I was very curious to begin a language study of Chinese, and come to find out, Caili had been a Chinese language teacher over the past six years when she had been living in South Korea, so she already had a methodology worked out to teach me. She thought I was a clever student, I felt very lucky to have her tutor me, and so we progressed through the basics of Chinese until I could have back-and-forth conversations with her by speaking the simplest of phrases like “Who is he?” and “He is a man.”

Meanwhile, I helped Caili out with favors like rides to the supermarket, taking her around used-car shopping, and eventually, giving her driving lessons. In all her years living in China and South Korea, Caili had either relied on public transportation or her rich Korean boyfriend’s chauffeur. Living in America, without owning a car, meant Caili was dependent on others for not just simple errands around town, but also in determining what work she could do and where she could live.

Caili had told me that she wanted to live permanently in the United States. She assured me it was a better country to live in than China by far, it would give her the grounds to sponsor her teenage daughter and bring her to America for college, and now that Caili was a baptized Christian, she would no longer be welcome to resume her professorship back in China among the officially Communist faculty.

But life in Iowa didn’t have enough to offer to keep Caili in place. Sure, she had her close friends like Ann and me that she would have to make her tearful goodbyes to, but her student visa at the local university was about to expire, and she needed to find work and a home of her own.The obvious choice to Caili was to join up with one of her friends in Los Angeles and find work among the network of people she was bound to meet in Chinatown.

And although her friends in town rightly told her she was crazy for the idea, Caili was determined to drive herself in her new (used) car all the way out to the West Coast. So, I mapped out the tamest route of six-hour driving days I could find for her, booked six nights of hotel stays along the way, and just like that, after only a couple months of driving experience and a couple seasons of brief but bright friendship, Caili was off to California.

Our quiet college town couldn’t keep her in place, and I couldn’t say it had much attraction left for me either. My time at my sales job was clearly coming to a close- I was at the point where it was obvious not only to myself in the dejected way I dialed the receptionists I knew would mechanically send me off to a voice mailbox without any confrontation, but also to my formerly friendly manager who had lost sympathy for me as the not even lukewarm leads I used to bring him dried up. I was making neither progress nor money for a company whose lifeblood, vision, and creed were all money and its making.

The only things keeping me in my place were my inability to muster the courage to outright quit and my lack of another job to transition to, so I can’t say it came as a surprise when my manager called me in for a late Friday afternoon meeting, accompanied by the Human Resources lady.

After drying my tears in the bathroom, I went out to the empty sales floor to shamefully clear off my desk as upbeat pop music softly echoed from the speaker system, then drove home with the familiar gray horizon of unemployment before me.

In my doldrums again, I had no thought for another job or career track- nothing I could realistically approach- and I suppose I would have been left to my own listless devices if it had not been for another unlikely meeting just a few weeks prior.

A gray horizon and a mysteriously winding path.

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Tag: Iowa

The Real China: Conclusion

The Iowa Caucus: Going and Gone

The World’s Best, Worst, Most, Least, -est, -iest, and -un’s*

The Real China: Predictions

The Real China: Preparations

Aunt Fong and Caili Ma – Part 2: Not My Real Aunt, My Chinese Aunt

Aunt Fong and Caili Ma – Part 1: From Iowa to Chinatown

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