Illness and Recovery

This *Will* Happen to You. by "Kendra":

Traveling in China is one thing, but deciding to live here is another thing entirely. During my rather lengthy time in China, I've met a huge array of expatriats that all go through the same process on their route to being psychologically adapted to life in the PRC.

All of them. One for one. Every single. Each and every. Myself included. Same process. I call it "The China Curve", and I'm curious to see who else has had the experience, or, strangely, if anyone has not. And it goes like this:

Months 1-3: Fascination. Your mama taught you that you live in a big wide world, where all people of all nations should hold hands in peace and harmony. There is so much beauty buried in the cracks of this exotic nation! So much fascinating culture, so much that is different. Every day's a new adventure, and you're damn proud of yourself for your spirited nature and culturally tolerant behavior. You don't understand the bitter rantings of those who've been here longer. That will never, ever be you. If you leave now, you'll never come back, and you will forever think of China in wistful, unrealistic terms.

Months 3-7: Somehow, you've become a borderline racist, and some of your days are spent in states of rage, your nights in misery. You don't know how it happened, and you really don't care. The mere thought of going to buy a pair of socks fills you with defeated dread. The shoving and pushing, the haggling. You scream at someone in public and feel first justified, then vindictive, then stupid. The simplest things are so *difficult*. You cling to the few friends you've made, though your social circle hasn't solidified, and you know in your heart you'd never be hanging out with these types of people back home. No one here knows how to eat breakfast... god, you'd kill for a decent breakfast. You tell all your friends you're going home, and you can't bloody wait. If you leave now, you'll likely never come back.

Months 8-12: Here, the path splits. You either:
1) Go home with the intention of never coming back only to discover that while your life has been upturned, your friends are doing exactly what they were doing the day that you left. Their lives, you think, will always be this way, while yours... well, you don't fit in anymore. All your sentences start with "In China...", but no one's really listening to you. It's like you unwittingly joined some kind of brotherhood, and however hard you try, you can't break the ties you made. You start plotting your return, and wonder if you're a masochist.

2) Stick it out like a real veteran, waiting excitedly for your one-year visit home. But after the first week back, when you've eaten your fill of butter and cheese, you realize that your friends are all doing exactly what they were doing the day you left. All your sentences start with "In China...", but no one's really listening to you. You realize you can't wait to get back on the plane, and wonder if you'll ever feel at home anywhere in the world ever again.

THE RETURN

You set foot on Chinese soil. At the airport and around town, you watch all the first-timers and tourists with hidden self-satisfaction and a little pity. You easily navigate the hustle and bustle, speak a few words of Chinese to your cab driver, and experience a deep contentment. Somehow, the friends you made and never really expected to keep have solidified into life-long pals, while your friends from highschool and college recede into sameness and nothingness. After so much emotional investiture and hard work, somehow, this has become Your Country.

And wherever you go from that day onwards, China will be in your blood.

On the night of September 1, 2007 I sat in the warm heat of a Memphis summer night among the lawn-chair powwow outside the Hills’ house in Cordova. Having returned just hours before from eight months abroad in the People’s Republic of China, I was strangely more than willing to entertain discussion about my experiences there despite having been traveling nearly twenty-four hours straight. Strange because my body and mind should have been weak. Stranger because for the last eight months, I had rarely broached the subject at all with parents or friends. Had you asked me that night (which someone must have) if I planned to go back to China, I would have hesitated in ambivalence. I would have thought, No, never, but I would not have had the courage to say so. Instead, I’m sure I said, We’ll see. or I have to see how I feel after some time. Right now, I’m happy to be home.

I do not think I was unprepared for China. While I studied and dreamed of ancient times, I read plenty of articles and watched many films about the issues and struggles of the modern moment in the mainland. I thought I knew it would not be pretty. That parts would be backward. That culture would be different and—shocking? Culture shock, it seems, is not something you can prepare for, despite pre-departure packets outlining symptoms and stages. Culture shock is not freaking out about squat-toilets. It’s an infection more akin to a mental illness, a side effect of some strange medicine.

Less than a week after my arrival in Memphis, I found myself back in Middlebury among old friends and classmates. I felt reticent and a little overwhelmed. I could understand everything everyone was saying. My best friends were there, to whom I ashamedly had maybe written a sentence or two if anything at all. I had not heard any of their voices in eight months—longer for some. Strangely I felt closer than ever to them. I felt warm in their company.

For most of my life, I have been fiercely individualistic. I felt constrained in group projects, impatient when others called on me for help. In China this became my undoing. I established myself early on as an independent force that travels on his own, that doesn’t depend on slow-moving, cumbersome groups of foreigners to explore the nearby restaurant, alley, or temple. When culture shock started to seep in, I realized I was alone. How could I bother these people now? I buried myself in books. My ipod’s earplugs were always in my ears. My computer was always connected to Facebook. I was shielded as best as could be against any interaction with the locals.

Underclassmen asked me about China. Was it amazing? I bet you had so much fun! I laughed and began to explain. I bet your Chinese is awesome now. Is Hangzhou nice? Did you make lots of friends? How were the roommates? I somehow perfected my diatribe of negative feelings about China into a 2 minute speech that shocked and awed any unassuming young Chinese students, turning their excitement into bewildered horror. It’s hard. It’s lonely. Everything’s off. Everyone’s out to get you. It’s dirty. You will be unhappy. It wasn’t amazing. It was not so much fun. My Chinese is awesome now, but I never made any friends. Hangzhou is boring. The roommates were juvenile and annoying. After a while, I thought I was going to die any day and never make it home. I have a hard time lying.

I talked with the head of the department shortly after my return to Middlebury. He smiled at my confusion and emotional ambivalence. That’s why we don’t let you go for more than a semester. Everyone hates it. It’s only after you come back that you start to miss it and become ready to go back. My thoughts lingered on my last memory of China: hazy sunrise in Beijing. My last days were spent in Beijing waiting for my flight home. Things felt full-circle. I had survived. I had randomly reconnected with old friends—ships passing in the night. I wondered during the silent cab ride to the airport, absorbing the pink-lit city around me—would I ever come back to this place? It becomes a blessing—or a burden. It becomes a part of you for the rest of your life that others won’t understand, he said.

After recounting a short China story one wintry night in early spring, my friend mentioned that it seemed I rarely told stories about China. I felt strange. They’re hard to tell, China stories. You have to explain so many different things, and you see people’s attention drifting so soon. By this time my most visited websites had become China blogs and vlogs. By this time, when I was asked about China—I told them it was hard, and I told them it was ridiculous. The food is so good. I tried to leave it at that. I gave them the advice I never took.

In late summer the smell of cilantro being picked was as strong as a bowl of Lanzhou pulled-noodles sitting in front of me. There is a lot of time to think working on a farm. There is a lot of time to talk working on a farm. Weeding, hoeing, picking, washing, sorting, packing. In China… this. In China… that. Green mountains and small towns. Good work. Good food. I could have stayed. But I’m young. I needed adventure. I needed real Chinese food again. I needed that part of me to be understood.

An Analysis of Beijing Traffic

Firstly, I'm sorry I've turned into a terrible blogger. I hope I will make this up to you. I cannot promise such things you.

But here's something to interest you for now:

Beijing Traffic Lesson: Left Turn

Traffic rules-mayhem* is one of the more fascinating-bewildering-exasperating** aspects of China. I continuously assert that traffic in Beijing is comparatively tame to other places I've been in China, namely Hangzhou and Kunming. In Hangzhou taxi drivers regularly challenged oncoming traffic in opposing lanes to pass cars (in speeds in excess of 40 mph). I dreaded taking taxis in the city for the activation of danger-response chemicals in my body. In Beijing on the other hand, taxi drivers usually do not drive in speeds excess of 30mph, and everything moves in a generally more leisurely fashion. But do not mistake leisured pace for order. Crossing the streets demands awareness of maybe 4-5 traffic flow patterns--and that's when you have a green walk-light. You have to watch for right-turning vehicles on both sides, left-turners, u-turners, rogue bicycles/scooters/motorbikes crossing when they don't have the light, etc. And don't forget not to collide with any pedestrians or two/three-wheel traffic moving in the opposite direction.

* I think I'll coin this compound word for describing aspects of China...because it is really a place of duality and contradiction, where there are rules, there is also mayhem.

** another compound

Two Holidays: New Year's Eve and Valentine's Day

Chinese New Year 2 from cui ruide on Vimeo.

My batteries were dying just as it was going off. I hope 5 seconds gives you some idea...


D-22 Hedgehog (2) from cui ruide on Vimeo.

Rock band Hedgehog 刺猬 playing a packed crowd on Valentine's Night at D-22.

Snow in Beijing

Today it snowed in Beijing, and I walked a mile for a taxi. Apparently Beijing is the one place where a 20% chance of precipitation means it will precipitate, as it did with today's morning flurries and last week's afternoon drizzle. These two occasions I suppose signal a pause in the 100+ days of drought afflicting the North China Plain.

Other things I don't understand: how so many Chinese men go without hats in this winter weather. And why the subway is sardine-packed at 2:30pm on a Monday. Why are these people not working on my day off?

The holidays are at last over. The fifteen days of explosions ended with one final night on which I dodged low-exploding mortar shells, roman candle snipers, and the ra-tat-tat fire of those long ribbons of crackers. The Mandarin Oriental hotel burned to its skeleton in a fiery saturnalia that night.


The winter camps are over, and now we're starting the new semester. From now on, things are supposed to be "normal."

Archived

I happened to make the discovery the other day that my senior work has finally been digitally archived, and to my delight, they successfully pieced together the 4 or 5 separate documents that when printed out and placed together made the entire project in hard-copy form (this was a necessary evil for two reasons: page numbering and a hard-to-explain printing issue). So now, should you desire, you are free under Creative Commons license to download a PDF version of "Studies of Women and Love," Yuan Zhen's Yanshi: Twenty-Three Translations. Please excuse the complicated title and subtitles, it looked better on paper. For a more accurate abstract (as opposed to the first paragraph as quoted on the archive page), I'll draw out one paragraph from the introduction:

In the twenty-three poems here translated, we find a world of flowers—one filled with the fragile beauty of maidens—young but fading, the enchanting figures of dancers and goddesses, close description of the ornaments they wear, the heartaches of parted lovers, and perhaps most poignantly: tender portraits of one woman left in the past. These yànshī are most accurately described as a study of women in all of their aspects, complimented with the personal meditations and experiences of one of their greatest admirers—Yuan Zhen himself.

And for a taste, here is one of the translations published in a campus art/writing magazine called The Sweatervest:

閨晚
紅裙委塼堦
玉瓜剺朱橘
素臆光如砑
明瞳艷凝溢
調絃不成曲
學書徒弄筆
夜色侵洞房
香煙透簾出

Her Room at Night

Her red skirt is yielded to the bricks of the floor.
There's jade melon and cut tangerine.
White silk 'cross her breast shines as if polished,
and her bright pupils' beauty is heavy, brimming.
She tweaks a string, but doesn't make a tune;
tries calligraphy, vainly playing with the brush.
Night-color invades the deeper room,
incense smoke passing through the screen and out.

Beijing, Beijing

I’m a few days short of a month in-country, and here I am only now writing an introductory post. My time home in Memphis was at first difficult, readjusting to familial cohabitation, suburban lifestyle, and discovering Memphis life for a post-21 post-grad. Ultimately, I came to find a face of Memphis I suspected may have existed, but which I had never before experienced myself. The winter holidays afforded me a chance to reconnect with old friends and glimpse something of what adulthood in Memphis could be like. The first days of 2009 found me reeling not from a New Year’s hangover, but from an overexposure to what must’ve been the smokiest bar east of the Mississippi that night—the endearingly decrepit P&H on Madison. My physical infirmity was matched by a mental semblance, in which my January 3rd date of departure to Beijing seemed a horrible mistake. For so many reasons, I found myself unable to sleep the night before my 6:00 a.m. departure, but morning did come, and I did embark on a generally sleep-deprived but sleepy 22ish hours of travel. The journey’s culinary and celluloid aspects do not merit mention.

January 4th found me more than 12 hours in the future, and arrived to Beijing International Airport, still squeaky clean and gleaming from those glorious August days you may have remembered everyone talking about. I was met by “Andy,” a 30-something Harbin native and one of the Chinese teachers at the private, extracurricular English school I will be working at for the next year, E-Plus. A bus ride and taxi later, I found myself in an overheated and windowless 4-star hotel room, attempting to remain at least in a shallow REM state from the hour of 8:00 p.m. onward. I eventually rose at 6:00 a.m., figuring that the city would be honking and alive in the early morning light. Not having a window, however, I was surprised to find upon exiting the hotel that it was in fact still dark and absent of honking or life outside.

Nonetheless, I headed for the small supermarket around the corner I had found the night before. To my delight, this small chaoshi (literally “supermarket”) had a kitchen in it preparing my favorite breakfast item from my previous sojourn in Beijing, a jidan guanbing, best described as an egg-pancake, slathered with a salty sauce and spicy sauce, served folded with some suspicious lettuce. It was not long before I had collected a complete breakfast of water, instant coffee, yogurt, and the glorious egg-pancake. It was then, however, that I was informed that the store had not technically opened yet, and none of the cashiers had money to cash me out. I muddled about before some manager-type finally came up front with some money to ring me up. In my suffocating room, I quickly enjoyed some Nescafe and yogurt along with China Central Television’s stalwart English-language option: CCTV 9. I reemerged sometime later into the now honking and alive Beijing, lit by early morning light. As I made my way down large avenues toward the suspected location of an internet café, the doubts of previous days were absent. Somehow, that slight haze in the air, the cacophony of morning traffic outside an elementary school, and the unnerving chill of winter on the North China Plain aroused in me a sense of calm and nostalgia. This was China, and it seemed unreal that I was both suddenly here again and that I had left two years ago.

In the four weeks since that moment, I have settled somewhat into a capital city of an estimated 19ish million that is both distinctly Chinese and international—with denizens representing not only every part of China, but probably every country in the world, all the while maintaining a uniquely individual character and culture of its own. I think most everyone who has lived in Beijing for some period of time will, if not praise it, at least concede that this city has an individual character and something of a special charm despite its harsh environmental circumstance. Bitterly cold and dry winters are juxtaposed with gruelingly muggy and hot summers, all the while under threat of sandstorms from the encroaching Gobi Desert and devastating air pollution. The city manages to mingle century-old history and some of China’s most well-known tourist sites with internationally recognized adventures in modern architecture. Between gleaming skyscrapers, hide aged hutong lanes, grid-like, winding alleys of single-story, traditional housing—growing fewer and fewer under the wrecking ball of progress. In some you find a pausing silence and insulation from the bustle outside, attracting the glances of old men and women walking small dogs or various Beijingers carrying their groceries home. Others are populated by a noticeably more international and younger crowd, home to many of the hipper stores and small bars.

I spent 4-5 weeks in Beijing in the first months of 2007 at the CET Janterm program, and my first few weeks back has largely been a re-familiarization and rediscovery of the city. I have returned to many of the restaurants and entertainment spots I haunted while studying here, reliving old memories and reuniting with old classmates that are here working now or passing through on break for Chinese New Year (Spring Festival). My new coworkers have also shared their discoveries and my new explorations including such places as a hidden Mongolian bar with a horse-head fiddle player, throat-singing, and beautiful songs. China is a place of coincidences, and my first weeks in Beijing have only given me new encounters to add to the tally, including randomly running into the current group of Middlebury students studying abroad at one bar and bumping into a Middlebury grad a year ahead of me in a café on the east side. There has been no shortage of things to do outside of work whether it’s food, music, culture, or simply good company. Now if only I can start forcing myself to read my Chinese novel I picked up and get in the hang of this teaching thing…

Throat Singing, a Horse-Head Fiddle, and Balloons

GiYan - Matouqin and Throat Singing from cui ruide on Vimeo.

GiYan - Matouqin and Lin Lang Singing from cui ruide on Vimeo.

Beijing Balloons from cui ruide on Vimeo.