correction

S called complaining that she is not Republican. Said she: "I prefer right-wing reactionary." Then she muttered something about the right of the citizenry to bear arms against the state, should it come to that. "I am just saying I see some sense in that ideology."

as is

Friday at a work meeting about a case where "a quarter million documents" represents apparently not a funny anagram of "squirt a ironclad nut, eel mom" but the yield of e-discovery, a very important partner said, "Pull up a mattress! You'll be billing 200 hours per month at the least, if you're doing it right." At least one grown-ass attorney in the room suppressed whimpers, and then felt the salty, wet sensation of nausea leading to indigestion and constipation form around her upper esophageal sphincter. Twenty minutes later I was going at unsafe speeds north on Highway 101 wishing I had the balls to tell everybody to suck them, and drive all the way to New York with nothing but the extra-large white t-shirts Dad pulled on the driver and passenger seats of my sand-colored economy sedan to protect them from the inability of my hand to locate my mouth - people, I dropped a BAKED BEET onto my khaki lap last week! - and never come back to California, except on holidays and Boo's birthdays. Then I spent the weekend irritating my Republican girlfriend by nearly starting an olive oil fire whilst charring gyoza in her studio apartment and nearly ruining her very sensitive computer by setting her homepage to porn. Things dear S said to me this weekend included, "The great thing about your body is that it seems able to accommodate lots of fat," and "Hey, where did all those wrinkles come from?" It was okay because she runs like Mr. Burns. We spent time with our witty and amusing friends, e.g. R, who noted that "Tears of a Clown" was the only R&B song to his knowledge referencing Pagliacci, and M, who flicked us through twenty pictures on her phone of people photographed while shaking their heads violently, we drank nigori and ate lemon wafers to prevent S from becoming a raging green hunger monster, we held hands and looked at things, we argued whether the brain was a pie and whether "hipster"described a set of actual aesthetic preferences or mere vapidity, but mostly we just spent time with each other, in her apartment, sitting across the table from each other or lying in a heap. What a time, my S. At 4:30 this morning, I left in a livery cab. S's silhouette waved goodbye in the window. The cab driver told me that it was only "sicks, drunks, or men getting kicked out of their apartments by their girlfriends holding duffel bags wanting to be taken to mommy" calling cabs on the weeknight graveyard shift; I feigned interest. On the airplane, I covered the scrota under my nighttime eyes with complimentary eye shades, and slept until San Francisco. Work was not awful, but I am daunted by the thought that in the area defined by a radius of a quarter million documents laid end-to-end one can find 55 In-and-Out Burger franchises, if one is based in Los Angeles. I was supposed to study for the New York bar tonight but instead I have been playing with anagrams and Googling ways to make Boo's life better. The question is: a leather or nylon collar? Leather? Or nylon? My goal in writing this blog post was to reference testicles in four different ways. I WIN! This post is a testesment to my genius.

point reyes

A weekend backpacking trip. R, C, O, Point Reyes. Drenched or damp for 60 hours. El Niño-like storm dropped 2" on us from Sunday night to Monday morning alone. Waves up to 20' in Pacifica. I vomitted twice on the winding road there, coffee and bagel.

(They took photos while I did this.)

Coast camp was 2.8 miles from trailhead parking lot, 200 yards from the beach. The land was rolling California scrub, grass and hardy-leaved low brush, but there was a solitary seventy-plus foot tall eucalyptus tree right where the trail forked to the beach. C called this "home tree."

We stood underneath it for an hour, showing each other moves. O the Roger Rabbit, me the pantomimes for walking, pulling a rope, being trapped in a box. C described workouts and we attempted to recreate them as rain dripped off the leaves onto us.

I wrote S's name in seaweed on the beach; I wished she were there. R and C took arm's-length photos of themselves and attempted handstands. O went to the cliffs and declared them "conglomerate rock," a lesson from her geology class. Later R read aloud from the map: "Standing near or under cliffs invites catastrophe."

Dinner was boiled and served. Night fell before 6 p.m. No one wanted to be out in the dark and the rain, so we passed the time supine, damp and defrosting in our sleeping bags, playing 20 Questions and Botticelli. O's crowning achievement was choosing "breadbox" as her object, to nullfiy the question "Is it bigger than a breadbox?"

A solitary female hiker had been missing for a week. Her car was still in the lot. Authorities said she must have been washed away by the tide. O told vague and terrifying stories while we were drifting off to sleep in our tent: "Now is a bad time to tell you this, but two people were shot in the head while they were sleeping in their tent, and the police never found who did it." We did not find the female hiker. We were not shot in the head while sleeping in our tent.

We walked for six hours on the second day. Twelve miles along the coast, up through the scrub, past occasional piles of gray stone, into the forested hills, then back down a rocky trail to home tree. It was at first overcast, then it was raining. At Arch Rock, I stood on a cliff a hundred feet over the waves and worried that a gust would blow us all into the foam. We ate tuna out of polyethylene bags as rainwater traveled down our necks into our raincoats and spray from the ocean muddied the trail. At the highest points, we walked past foggy meadows surrounded by dense stands of very tall, very straight Douglas fir trees with nothing but dead branches until the tufts of canopy at their very tops. There was light drumming all around. We walked all together, in pairs, and, toward the end of the day, alone, with distance between us.

We sang at times: bluegrass songs, Simon and Garfunkel, Everly Brothers. We played a familiar trail game, where participants take turns singing lyrics containing an agreed-upon key word. O won during the "rain" round. The game degenerated into grousing about Alanis Morrissette during a later round. We ate a container of Alouette cheese spread between lunch and dinner. Mice ate through a bag of nuts, pretzels, and gummy penguins.

I had strange dreams Sunday night. There were many, but I remember only two. In the first, a former best friend and I had reconciled at the local swimming pool. I kissed her, but she became a digital clock connected by flexible metal tubing to other robotic/electronic apparati and two ovoid rubber breasts. Her form did not faze me, but the perceived lack of intimacy did, and I said to the digital clock, "It's hard for me to know what you want me to do, because I can't see your eyes or hear your voice." The time on her face read 12:something. In the second, O drove the four of us down a long, narrow pier, at the end of which dozens of great white sharks thrashed and spasmed. The water level rose and O did not have the driving skill to reverse off the pier without driving us into the water. The water filled the car, and the sharks danced around us. When I told O about this dream, she said, "I love killer whales!" She had misheard me.

Monday we struck camp in a downpour and walked uphill two miles along a fire road-turned-stream to the car. Thousands of annelids swam in the channel. O remembered a mnemonic, Kings Play Chess On Fine Grain Sand, for kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. We drove in a downpour to the city, where the sky was clearer, and brunch was served.

work life

At 1 p.m., I sent this email to IT: "Some of the vuttons on my keyvoard stopped working! Can I get a replacement keyvoard soon? I have an ergonomic keyvoard with the split down the middle. Thanks! Sorry for the typos!"

At 2 p.m., I sat on a brownie.

At 6 p.m., I was rolling around on a 36" foam tube on the carpet.

nunc pro tunc

A sudden memory from late 2007. We are in a meeting with Nancy. We are discussing a possible nunc pro tunc argument in the case S is working on. I write it down on my notepad; it is the only entry I make during that meeting. Afterward, S says, "You wrote 'nunc pro tunc' on that notepad, didn't you? I knew you would." We are both very pleased that she had said this.

I see it now, nunc pro tunc, as evidence that we were MTB.

oath

The patent bar requires applicants to swear an oath to "abstain from all offensive personality." WTH.

Fuck you! Plaids with stripes! Kittens for dinner!

automated system

I called Fidelity to ask a question about my account today and was routed to an automated customer service system. When the mumble that came out of my mouth was unrecognizable as "Get a new PIN," the female voice on the recording said, "Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't catch that." There was a little bit of hesitation and breath on "Oh," as if it were a real, live woman with wet legs apologizing, in earnest, while bending over the arm of a low couch. Lord, how a 401k was enrolled in then! I said there was no need to apologize, just to hear her apologize again.

resolutions

Because I never grew out of my infantile fascination with the erogenous zone of the anus, I not only made thirty-six new year's resolutions but also divided this list into Daily, Weekly, Annual, and General goals, and then put it all into a spreadsheet with check boxes so I could track my progress.

A representative sample:

Create something daily.
Visit Grandma once a week.
Learn three new skills or crafts.
Avoid boredom.
Do not let my job age me.
Learn to cook fifteen dishes from Mom.
Err on the side of kindness.
Encourage Dad to relax more.

I am counting the skill that I learned this week toward my 2010 resolutions. I made a shoe rack and a multiple guitar stand out of PVC pipes without cutting any of my fingers off. The new year is looking good.

decade in review

R and I spent equal amounts of time not working and exchanging emails last week. It's just hard to pay attention at the end of the year. One day she sent me a chronological list of 33 actions she had taken before 2 p.m., including: "11:15am: get to work. read my email and gossip news about brittany murphy's 'inner demons.'" and "2pm: wonder if we won any prizes from bowling party."

When we realized that the decade was ending (GOOD LORD), she sent me a list of the highlights of her life in the last decade. It was a fun exercise, so I tried it too.

2000 Think I upset lots of girls this year
2001 Had life transforming experiences
2002 Felt older than I was
2003 Felt even older, graduated from college
2004 Think I was very fit and underemployed this year
2005 Ditto 2004, law school, marriage, divorce
2006 I studied very hard, my heart was a soggy mattress
2007 I was happy where I was
2008 I was happy where I was, then suddenly very unhappy
2009 I started very unhappy, but ended happy

Try it! Feel free to post results.

christmas

I spent last Christmas visiting the concentration camp in Dachau. My flight from Chicago arrived in Munich after dawn. I took the train to the Hauptbahnhof; on the way, four brown men and a brown child were harassed by polizei for not having validated tickets. I stowed a backpack and a guitar in a luggage locker, took the train to Dachau, and then a bus to the concentration camp. There were a few tourists and the sky was gray. I was freezing - I had underpacked - so I tried to stay indoors, but that meant spending more time in rooms where thousands of people had lived briefly before they died. I snapped pictures of "ARBEIT MACHT FREI" and the photos of Nazi rallies in which well-meaning vandals had scratched Hitler's face off, then found a small church lit with candles where suddenly a chorus of nuns appeared and sang. There was nobody in the pews besides me and one other person, but I suppose they weren't singing to an earthly audience anyway. I fell asleep. I tried to stay as long as possible in the church because I had to wait until 8 p.m. to meet the person I had flown to Germany to meet - he was spending the day with his sister and father - but the church closed at four, so I left. I walked back to the train instead of taking the bus, and on the way passed the former plaza of the army camp (now a soccer field), a deflated inflatable Santa, and the word "BITCH" spray painted alongside German graffiti on a walking path. Back at the Hauptbahnhof, I pointed at something that looked edible and said, "Ein," and was rewarded with a small wheel of pizza-like substance. I asked for a "Wasser"; the cashier coughed out a stream of Teutonic noises; I said, "What?"; he said, "Mit Gas?"; I said, "Oh, yeah, mit," and then he handed me fizzy Wasser. After this I only ordered tea. I sat in the station for two hours and applied my cold brain to filling pages in a yellow spiralbound notebook, and then I collected my guitar and backpack and waited in front of platform 24 until a tall old man embraced me and told me we would be off to Regensburg soon. I barely spoke a word to this stranger on the train except to ask how to translate some colorful phrases into German. In Regensburg, he walked us around the medieval streets pointing at closed shops and darkened Christmas decorations before leading us to Geibelplatz. In one room was overhead lighting and dishes piled in the sink, in another was flannel shirts hanging off a lamp and an opened futon with a deep, body-shaped depression on one side. The last room was strewn with boxes. This is how I spent last Christmas. I didn't know then what I was doing and I guess if pressed I still couldn't say.

This year, I woke at 2 p.m. in the room I grew up in, tidied for four hours, and then went to Chevy's Fresh Mex with my parents and grandmother. Afterward, we found an open 24-hour CVS and poked around for forty minutes. My blood pressure was 94/64 and my pulse was 59 bpm.

epistles

My room is thirty years of junk. So that I can live there without feeling seventeen, and so that S might not be horrified at my unroommateable clutter when she arrives, I must tidy my space.

I started with my drawer of correspondences. Seems like I have saved everything written to me since at least 1993. Very rarely do I look at them. The closest analogy I can find for the feeling they give me is that it is the same one I feel when browsing in rural health food stores, you know, community postings for cleansing retreats and hand-knit custom clothing, fruit flies in the pesticide-free kitchen, haze of sky light through flax dust making it hard to see.

Whatever. Sometimes it's nice to revisit. Here are some of the things I have found:

From O, 1997. She had covered the entire envelope with yellow highlighter ink. "Ain't highlighter pens cool? Love the color!" was written on the flap. The return address was "The Great One."

From M, 1999. General delivery from Block Island. The postcard was of a lighthouse; the caption explained, "The Southeast Lighthouse is a perpetual reminder of the dozens of shipwrecks over the decades." She added a sarcastic note to this: "Hmm...do stoplights remind you of car accidents?"

From R, 2008. A four-page roadmap of the evolution of our friendship during law school. Line drawings of India and China, touching at the borders, representing us.

A flyer from Seals' Cove Bar and Grill. The music calendar from August 1998. On August 13, 1998, my band, Sketch, followed by "Soul Debt." The next day: Mojo Madness, The Heavy Petting Zoo CD release party. The next week: Soul Detour, Drool. The band names of the late nineties.

From KC, 1998. A sad note on a bad day. "Last week as I was driving home from Campanile, actually two nights, I imagined myself crashing . . . I don't know why, I just wanted to see how it felt."

From O, 1997. An envelope upon which she drew the Oasis box logo 59 times.

From OMC, 1998. An abstract oil painting on canvas with the words, "Happy 18th Year of Life."

From A, 2000, writing from a nature reserve in East Madagascar. The stamps celebrated some landmark of Madagsacar's family planning agencies. A related note ("Yay, family planning!") closes the postcard.

One envelope with a strange cancellation stamp. An image of a carousel horse, and "For the ride of a lifetime, collect stamps." The envelope has no return address and the letter inside has no name, only "I would never have remembered to give this to you in person. I hope the postal system is trustworthy." Whatever was enclosed is gone now.

From KF, 1998. A Valentine's day note backgrounded by abstract blue Adobe Illustrator shapes. Right around the time when she was learning graphic design in the late nineties, David Carson style. She wrote a self-conscious, sardonic note about love, and then quoted two paragraphs of e.e. cummings on Krazy Kat.

West coast zines from 1992-1999. Ben is Dead, Fibre, names I can't remember. Publications that shaped my interests for the decade.

From MB, 1999. I had to peel the letter apart to look at it; there was decade-old electrical tape keeping the folded halves together.

From KF, 1997. Letter from the last week of her senior year: "I'm going to ask you a really large favor. Can you live in limbo for two more weeks?" She wanted to finish up the year before turning her attention to the relationship I wanted to have with her. In retrospect, her request was very practical; it shows emotional clarity. In retrospect, I had no idea what was happening, and thought it all very poetic.

From D, 1998. The flap reads, "OPEN IT," then, half an inch below that, "GRUNT."

From Kristen Johnson, 1997. Mysterious correspondence from Deerpath, MN. Apparently I had read something she had written about a music composition machine and wrote to her about it. It started a penpalship. Her letter was filled with easy typos, but she had a lot to say about how she thought we must be alike.

A letter from James Franco's mother inviting me to submit something for publication in an anthology of young womens' writing.

From J, 1996. A note reminding me of what I had said while drawing graphs during precalculus: "Never forget the stinkin' arrows." She had drawn arrows capping every stroke of every letter in that sentence.

A 1999 letter from a Harvard varsity women's water polo player. She wrote only in verse, or, actually, regular sentences with irregular enjambments.

Notes from Truth or Consequences, NM; Amsterdam; Deerpath, MN; Chandler, AZ; "Bionic Freak #6"; Irvine, CA; Edinburgh; Paris; Haifa; Antananarivo; "Ansel Adams Wilderness / Third Lake to the Left / & Over the Mountain"; Oaxaca; Ashland, OR; "A Pathetic Artist"; "Somewhere in Yosemite"; but more frequently from Loma Verde Court, St. Francis Drive, Edgewood Road, Byron Street, Melville Avenue.

From R, 1995. An 18" blue scroll for my birthday.

From SH, 2007. A postcard from Chicago, not so long ago. "A lovely image of our future home." Tiny, neat handwriting, plus two drawings of her face, one embarrassed, one depicting her hair "feminized" for professionalism. "Guess the MLA vibe is joykill in general."

A lesson from the end of 2009. If you write me a letter, I will save it, and I will love you forever.

dancing pants

You know, S, just as soon as I declare my intention to get rid of my tschotchkes to make myself more desirable to you, I discover that another one has come in the mail for me. Thank you, C, for this awesome pair of wind-up hopping lederhosen. Sorry, S, a thirsty horse can be led away from a trough filled with real estate-consuming crapola, but in the end it will still trot back and grab a few, or however that saying goes. I just remembered that I have a cockroach-shaped pillow. I'm going to dig it out of my boxes and send it to you!

r and o

Here I was, feeling all sorry for myself and my weird new life in the California suburbs -- I drove alone to Walmart tonight, to buy an accordion file to organize the papers in the glove compartment of my Toyota Corolla, then ran on a treadmill while reading closed captioned updates on the 49ers game alone in a gigantic 24-hour gym, near midnight -- rummaging through thirty years of accumulated crap trying to figure out how to clear enough space for set up a life in my parents' house that feels different from the life I had when I was seventeen, accidentally encountering and then crying over trinkets from failed relationships (one moldy Nalgene can do so much), worrying about my wasted potential, fretting over retirement savings, growing annoyed at the mat of black dog hair covering the dirty thirty year-old carpeting;

then! In the pile of ancient artifacts, I find two gifts from two old, old friends, R and O, friends I adore. And let me tell you, readers, it is hard to feel sorry for yourself when you have friends like these.

I met R in 1989. She was walking up my grandmother's street, looking at the sidewalk, and singing a folk song (after a fifth grade lesson on Americana), and my memory is hazy now, but I think we just introduced ourselves and became friends; isn't it nice how nine year-olds can be? I might have first met O in 1992. I think she had a consistent underhand serve and was therefore among the most valuable members on our seventh grade volleyball team. I don't remember much about the first few years of our friendship except that often we called each other on summer afternoons complaining of boredom, and arranging to play one sport or another to pass the time.

Then R was self-described as a "non-conformist" (she taught me this term, and also introduced me to Morrissey), excellent at complex card games (often she would sigh with boredom when I requested a simpleton's game, like Four Blind Mice), and appalled at the people around her (a favorite catchphrase of ours in middle school was "Go pump your sunshine elsewhere"). O was also very intelligent, but more inward-directed and a little obsessive, so that when something captured her curiosity, like a bad joke or Liam Gallagher, it became for her the fixed point around which everything revolved. (For example, O's senior yearbook page was a photo of Liam captioned with a bad Manchester-related joke; this particular obsession went on for years.) I would describe both of them, then as in now, as very bright and deeply weird.

On Saturday, O invited us to a Taboo party that a colleague of hers was hosting in Fremont. We, of course, dominated. R and I were on the same team and the others complained of unfairness because we have twenty years of shared references, and R could simply say "Izzy's" and I would guess the clue, "bagel." But I actually attributed our domination to R's limber mind, not our history. We were playing with linguistically hapless biologists who couldn't think of synonyms for "fruit" and described "tongue" as "like a butt on your face." In contrast, smart, fast R fired off "When we win something, I put my appendage near your appendage to celebrate" for "high five."

We took a break from the game and O sat on a rocking ottoman in the middle of the room and told a nonsensical joke, cracking herself up in the process. She was indifferent about baffling the others. I recalled suddenly that one of O's twelfth birthday gifts was a handmade book compiling terrible jokes, and that after that gift there were many scenes like the one above; jokes about ketchup and Bob Saget come to mind. O texted me out of the blue tonight to say "monotremes=platypus and echidnas." She takes on dares when they are practical; once she sat through a Korean dinner with a bald cap on because I said I would pay for her dinner on that condition; on Friday, we had to stop her from drinking a pint of salsa for $25.

I digress. I wanted to write about the two things I found tonight in my drawer of yellow paper. The first is a birthday gift for me that O must have made around 1996. It is a homemade book entitled "[Bananarchist]: Gone With the Hay," with the epigraph, "A debut novel by aspiring chair-designer and writer now traveling the universe, O the Great [last name]." It is a loosely told tale of me eating hay, having hay stolen from me, and then O eating me, written in promiscuous rhyming couplets. Most illustrations are atrocious line drawings, including one of a formless lump that even O recognized to be unrecognizable (the word "monkey" is written above it, with a line pointing at the drawing), but a glossy photo of Liam Gallagher appears halfway through. The things that O was good at drawing at the time -- a seal, a hyacinth, and the rear end of a hippo -- make appearances in the book, though these illustrations are not related to the action. In the final episode of "Gone With the Hay," O comes to visit me on my island of hay and she suddenly turns into a Sweet Valley High book. Her head is drawn as a square with these words inside: "Sweet Valley High: Wakefields Sniff Glue!"

The second thing is a letter that R wrote me sometime in 1996. Apparently we wrote letters to ourselves to be used in case of friendship emergency; freshman year had been a hard time for us. On the envelope, R wrote, "to [bananarchist], not to be opened until you realize you hate me, or 9/9/99, whichever comes first." She also enclosed a Simpsons trading card depicting Bart Simpson writing "I will not undermine traditional American values" on the blackboard. I'll just copy the letter below:

dear [bananarchist],

while you read this, smoke is probably pouring out of your ears and the last thing you want to do is listen to something i have to say. but hear me out. apparently, i have done something so unconceivably awful that you would just be clicking your heels in excitement if you heard that i was dead. but wait a minute. didn't we say on march 6, 1996 at approximately 11:00 pm that this would never happen again? i think so. so why are we letting this happen again -- wouldn't we like to think that we are in control of ourselves and can keep our word? i am probably a little peeved at you right now, too, because generally that's the way things work when the silent treatment is occurring. but as you are reading this letter, i am probably sitting on my bed crying and reading the letter that you wrote to me on march 6, wishing that we were still on good terms. now i don't know what terribly retarded thing i did this time, but whatever it was that i did to cause you to hold such anger toward me, is it really worth it? i mean it's not as if we have all the time in the world together. in a couple years/months/days/hours we'll be leaving each other for college or whatnot, and the last few times we spend together shouldn't be times of resentment. [bananarchist], we have shared some of the funniest, craziest, and wonderful times, that unless i went and killed your dog or something, we should get over it. how could anyone forget our trips to great america, or walking home from school in fifth grade, or singing "when the saints go marching in," or talking late into the night every friday or saturday, or flipping each other over in the grass, or dancing at sadies with our liked ones, or sitting on the grass in ninth grade drawing the kiosk and having orange feet, or cutting art to get in line for yearbooks, or dancing like a bunch of maniacs at those retarded dances, or simply being in each other's presence? how could we just throw out all of those fond and silly memories for some retarded squabble that we are having? you have been one of the most influential people in my life, ever, and the thought of not growing old and gray with you has never once crossed my mind. so i'd like for us to think about the situation; is it worth hating each other for another six months and going through hell avoiding each other? is what i did bad enough to sacrifice all those nostalgic memories? it is unimaginable to me that you are even reading this letter now, since you aren't supposed to read it until we are hating each other, because i cannot imagine us not being anything but some of the best of friends. please, please please, try to patch things up. i'm always here and won't hang up on you or anything. chances are by the time you finish reading this i'll have called you to apologize because i just read the letter you gave me way back in march. take care and don't be afraid to call me because i do not want this to last for another minute. you are my sunshine and the wind beneath my wings and i love you. dear to my heart you are, r. (just in case) 415 858 XXXX.

Well, aw.

This was back when the area code on the peninsula was still 415, when we had long summer days to craft elaborately silly gifts for each other, before we became self-conscious enough to be embarrassed by big statements. I had forgotten about these treasures until just now, and I think I will put them right back where I found them, so thirteen years later I might be delighted by them again. Thank you, dear R and dear O!

training week diary

day 1

On my notepad: sketch of a panda sitting on a bed, flipping channels on a TV with a remote control, with a thought bubble reading "I forgot my LexisNexis password" over her bespectacled head; "I got a fantastic education"; "Strunk and White"; "what a stupid thing to say"; "widows/orphans." All the notes after the panda indicate that I found the writing workshop tiresome. It was as if nobody had written a document before. Somebody said, "Footers are hard to change because the text is grayed out." I found it hard to suppress my urge to disrobe and defecate on the table.

day 2

On my notepad:

• My eyes are closing. My eyes are closing.
• Possibility of death by videoconference.
• Woman speaks primary in key of E.
• A little table, two cardstock name tags struggling to stay tented, red suit jacket, a projection screen, two thin microphones, a clear, heavy glass pitcher of water. Four associates visible in the foreground, including one Asian girl with embarrassed body language.
• Now man in pink tie, Ambien in a suit.
• I may have to kill myself. Implements available: plastic fork, wrung out Darjeeling tea bag, paper plates, first year associates.
• Core values: excellence, expertise, collegiality, teamwork, integrity.
• Pink tie shifting around so much his microphone can't adjust to volume changes, we hear only volume extremes.
• "We are in the service business."
• XNOR, XOR, AND, and OR.
• Prosaic. Cross fertilizing.
• "I’m a restructuring lawyer, an equities lawyer, a capital markets lawyer, but primarily I do lots of death." I think he said "debt," but the videoconference equipment gave him that fatal lisp.
• "We're a business. We sell our time and our expertise." Brothel slogans.
• Surveillance footage of man in Dongbei parking garage getting assaulted by two men, tied up and placed in trunk. Mom said he was found dead. Bland, dull, so unlike fiction. The struggle between the two men and the victim, the stationary angle of the black and white camera: all unglamorous, heavy, slow, terrifying.
• Man eating chicken. We check BBs.
• In New York they can see me drawing pandas on this notepad.
• Misuse of "good for goose, good for gander" idiom.
• The thrill of a red BB light.
• [drawings of pandas]

Ways I have thought of to kill myself during training:

1. Rube Goldberg machine ending with logroll of associates into pool of water where I am bound to a chair with only my nostrils above water; the associates raise the water level and I drown.
2. Wireless mouse slammed against forehead; forehead slammed against desk.
3. Plastic cup cut into conic sections; sharp-edged ring pressed into body like a cookie cutter until cookies of flesh pop out.
4. Blackberry; discover keystroke sequence on Blackberry that kills associates instantly, like cyanide capsule for spies, hara-kiri, peanut allergy.

day 3

Just survived the most boring videoconference in the history of mankind. The man to my left kept his thumbs busy sending emails. The woman to my right achieved level 9 on Brickbreaker. The man across the table from me fell asleep. I couldn't see what the others were doing, but circumstantial evidence (laps stared at, thumbs moving; eyes closed, heads resting on hands, breathing even) suggests they weren't paying much attention either. For my part, I drew 23 panda heads on a pad of paper, then seven panda arms, then played a round of Brickbreaker, using my left hand to increase the challenge.

day 4

Found another reason to kill self: diversity training. The kind of situation where people describe individuals as "diverse," as in, "If you are diverse, you might find yourself at a firm mixer wanting to eat ligaments off pigs' feet while the other associates delicately carve slivers of expensive cheese onto wafers"; "diverse" as an HR concept and a butchery of English; how can one person be "diverse"? It was such that halfway through it, I found myself declaring, "A bunch of white people sitting around laughing about diversity training makes me feel uncomfortable." I said this loudly to make the people making me feel uncomfortable feel uncomfortable. We had discussed nonconfrontational ways of telling other people they had offended us, but sometimes a direct confrontation spoken clearly works better than a peacemaking statement spoken with a mouthful of croissant.

Oh, but it was not all bad. There were some bad apples whose insincere affect cheapened the training -- e.g., those people who breezily concluded, "Yup, offensive!" to speed along discussions of "diversity" scenarios that required higher order thinking -- but there were also the sincere efforts of generally nice people who generally try not to hurt other people. One confessed that he "didn't know how to pursue diversity." I liked this comment, it seemed honest to me. I know that my sort of glowering humorlessness about this subject can drive people away, but I do recognize that it's hard to be a human, in this world, with other humans.

I took notes during one exercise. The presenters directed us to write our names on a sheet of paper, and then write five identities that we associated ourselves with. The answers were illuminating. A mid-20s white male said that he had just done this exercise, since he had recently met a stranger on a plane; the stranger wanted to know him, and he had said: John Doe, Los Angeles, lawyer, one brother no sister, and his birthday ("For women who like to ask about astrological signs and stuff," to general laughter, to my glowering). A mid-20s white woman said that she didn't know whether what she had written ("sarcastic," "blonde") were identities. A mid-20s white man confessed he didn't understand the exercise and described himself in adjectives alone ("hardworking," "fun"). An early-30s South Asian man refused to distill himself or others into five identities, since that encouraged stereotyping. A mid-20s East Asian woman failed to speak. A crone with the lovehandled body of a late-20s East Asian woman complained that this exercise could only be taken too seriously or too lightly; this notwithstanding, she listed her five identities: S's partner; a beautiful and funny unicorn; a good friend/daughter/sister; a considerate and concerned citizen; a phenotype comprising size 8 pants, size 10 shirts, black hair, slanty eyes, small face, abnormally large sinuses, green skin, no taste in clothes.

Later the mid-20s East Asian woman to my right looked at me wide-eyed and asked, "Are you taking notes?!" I wanted to remember what we said about ourselves.

I can offer one concrete action that companies serious about diversity training can take: have someone high up in the organization sit in the room during training. The person need not participate; presence alone can send the message that the company wants employees to pay attention to the presenters, rather than chat about the room temperature. It was cold, but not that cold.

discovery of the week

Sweaters are business casual!!

sacramento weekend

I took the Capitol Corridor Amtrak from Great America to Sacramento on Saturday night. R was running a marathon from Folsom to Sacramento on Sunday; I was heading up to cheer for her. There was nothing to see out the windows, since it was dark, but I had an ale and a cup of instant noodles in the cafe car, read The Year of Magical Thinking, and chatted with S, and I was happy. S said my liquid intake was "salty and dehydrating," and told me to drink more water.

O was in plaid pink pajama pants at G's house when I got there. We traded back massages as we watched the end of Bewitched and the beginning of The Rock, then ate corn that G exhorted us to condiment with any of seven spice mix bottles he placed on the counter, then made a sign for R ("You're Ruthless!"), then collapsed, O in an airbed, and me on a frameless mattress set underneath a University of Nebraska Cornhuskers throw.

In the apartment also were a University of Nebraska Cornhuskers slipper set, flag, poster, calendar, beaded necklace, hat, t-shirt, and an extensive collection of Oakland A's bobbleheads. Later, I overhead this statement from the bobblehead collecter to the Cornhusker fan: "Man, you should've seen the fucken game. We were up by fucken two points until the last second, then they scored a fucken field goal, I couldn't fucken believe it."

G, O and I intended to ride our bikes along the American River, find C halfway, and then meet R for spiritual uplift at miles 10, 20, and 26.2, but the freezing weather put a snarl in our plans (it was 35 degrees at the starting line). We left the house at 7 a.m. and rode 17 miles through Sacramento and along the American River to meet C. G rode a 1980s era red Specialized Sirrus. Both members of the L family wore $1 gloves from Target. None of us dressed correctly; G was in shorts, O in thin trainers, I in jeans, and C, when we found him, was bleeding from his gloveless hands. C called a few minutes before we got to our meeting point to say he had been in a bike crash, his hands had been too numb to operate the brakes. We found blood on his hands, face, pants, and handlebars. I offered my fingerless bike gloves, Richard's purchase from Bike Nashbar in 1993, to C; for some reason, C and G each wore one of my gloves, and one of G's.

We rode on. It was much better between miles 18 and 30, because we had stopped for coffee and biscuits in a half gallon of gravy, and because we slowed the pace so that I could ride with O as she explained the debate in the anthropological academy about the human ability to run for long distances. Harvard says it is an adaptive trait (not the term she used) resulting from a need to go long distances to track game; Wisconsin argues that long distance running is an ancillary result of bipedality rather than an adaptation in itself; the two schools bicker like girls.

I took some photos while biking. G noted that the bikers on the American River path were insane. If you happened to veer across the dividing line, they would shout, "Get off the trail!" and "Learn how to bike first!"

We met R at the town of Fair Oaks, at the top of a hill around mile 10. She came five minutes after we arrived, and as she sprinted downhill she tried to take something off her hand to give to George, but could not get it off before momentum took her past us and down to mile 11. Later, after her post-marathon bloat had subsided, R pulled a ring off her hand and dropped it into mine. She had made it just for me. It was a wide silver band, dimpled with a ball peen hammer, with [BANANARCHISTA] carved out. R has been calling me [BANANARCHISTA] since 1996; in 2001 she made me a balaclava with the word stitched on the back. I wore the ring on my middle finger and said that R and I were middle finger-married. Since C proposed to me in neck-marriage, only a few of my body parts are left for life partnership. Form a line, ladies.

We wanted to meet R at mile 20, but we missed her, and then we rode along the marathon looking at people's backsides, trying to find her. Our bike posse reminded me of Critical Masses past, in Chicago with R, in New York with L. R finished twenty minutes faster than expected. We searched for her among the throngs of limping people and turned to our combined 50+ years of experience with R's hyperrationality to deduce the most likely place she would be: on the sunny side of the capitol building, probably in the grass, possibly trying to borrow somebody's cell phone to call C. We found her on the grass on the sunny side of the capitol building, borrowing somebody's cell phone to call C.

O, G and I rode back to G's to get the car and drive over to meet C and R at the pick up point. G doubled up on bikes, riding one and steering C's home alongside his own. The ride was fast, sunny, cold, and among California drivers, and at several points I thought G and his tagalong bike were going to spill, including once when a Pontiac was tailing six feet behind him.

We tried to find lunch at three different places in Sacramento, and they were all either closed or overcrowded. A committee chose In-N-Out Burger in Rancho Cordova. I split a chocloate milkshake with G, who said, "I wish I always had somebody to split a chocolate milkshake with!" He meant that the portion was too large for just one peson. It was sweet. R walked as if her legs had been battered by clubs. C finally recovered from the shock of his fall, and had two cheeseburgers.

On the train ride back to Great America, I showed O the menu from the cafe car and asked what she would get if she could get anything from the cafe car. Her order: "Chicken wings, chicken nuggets, a pot roast sandwich, and a Cup o' Noodles to dilute it all." The landscape from Davis to Fairfield looked like my imagination of 1980s Russia. From Fairfield to Richmond, the Capitol Corridor runs ten feet ashore from the dreamy, industrial part of the bay that O called the "Delta." We made plans to tube on the American River with floating coolers of beer, but I said I was scared of the rapids; O heard "rabbits." She read Fahrenheit 451; I finished my time with Joan.

Mom and Dad picked me up. We had family dinner at a salad buffet. Richard explained to Grandma why Second Uncle's teeth were so screwy; we all noted his excellent Mandarin vocabulary; Mom said afterward, in Chinese, "Enamel!" I snapped a photo of a 6" turd of soft serve left dangling from the machine by the last user. Upon arriving home, I shuffled around Palo Alto, walking Boo, whining to my sleepy S. C called to announce: "These are the teams I now hate: the Jazz, the 49ers, the Chargers, the Cubs, and Utah." She proclaimed that men who did not understand sports were unattractive. She predicted Cal's victory over Utah in the Pointsettia Bowl, and declared it "a fitting end." As she explained this all to me, I punched myself in the face over and over with the boxing kangaroo pen that I had bought in Sydney.

diversity training

The most eventful thing that happened today, besides a conversation with S that left me listing against a post in front of Chevy's Fresh Mex, stricken with lust, was that I nearly fainted from hunger whilst sitting at my desk and paging through competing health insurance plans. Lunch is catered every day at the office, but one must pay $6.50 for the meal; if one waits until 2:30 p.m., the leftovers are free. Obviously, one waits. My parsimony today was rewarded with one piece of sushi, white rice, the onions and scallions from a Mongolian beef dish, and two golfball-sized cream puffs.

Last night, Kathy and I swapped stories about our workplace harassment trainings. Hers included a skit in which a white man says to an Asian man, "Hey, a really great Chinese food place just opened up downtown!" and the Asian man responds, "Man, what makes you think I even like Chinese food? I'm Korean." The best part, according to Kathy: "The actor playing the Korean man was flagrantly Filipino!"

baby caribou

Two hours of training in the morning, how to create and save a file in the complicated document management system. I wrote notes in my pad only because everyone else wrote in theirs, but notes were social scientific rather than functional, more "Procedure appears important to this firm; why?" than how-to. Then there was an entire day of unstructured time. I sat through a two-hour sexual harassment web training comprising video clips of actors reenacting harassment scenarios, including a woman recalling the details of a date to a female colleague ("Oh, his body was just gorgeous, and after dinner, we went back to my apartment, and he started kissing me - oh wait, where are you going? - and then he took my clothes off -- " "No, stop. That's just TMI. God, some people. They don't know when to stop!"') and a man classically harassing his female subordinate ("Hey Sarah! We have to stop bumping into each other like this. Or we could bump into each other some more and go into an empty office"; I was somewhat horrified to discover that this sleaziness kind of turned me on; a sexual harassment video!). Around 2 p.m., the sun came straight through the windows and into my eyes, so I asked my officemate to adjust the Venetian blinds. He broke off the adjuster rod immediately, and then took his shoes off and got on his desk and manually flipped all the Venetian blinds up; the sun came in through the two slats he could not reach and went straight for my retinas. I wrote S to ask why the circus follows me, but she declined to respond. Later in the day there was an ice cream social; I met some nice people, but I also described my bar experience as "me being half-naked in the backyard eating chicken on a trampoline." I think the person I was speaking to thought I was coming on to him, and he said, "I studied for the bar in Chicago to be near my wife." Whoops. After work I drove to Mountain View to buy a third-hand folding bicycle off a nice Silicon Valley professional named Jedd. I texted Olympia that I had bought a bike, and she wrote back: "I just bet Karen that it was a folding!!! She says our new band name should be 'freaks on the same wavelength.'" Richard and Aimee called to ask if I was game for dinner at Chevy's, but I refused secondarily because I had to go to San Francisco to see an apartment, and primarily because I had butter-sauteed butter for lunch, then three chocolate chip cookies, then a bowl of strawberry ice cream with whipped cream, and I am afraid that a few more heavy meals and the witch will be ready to push me into the oven as I peer into it saying, "Wait a minute, I don't see any malomars -- wha...? - NOOOOOOOOO!!!" [cracklings]. At home, they ordered pizza and we ate it at our little kitchen table in our little kitchen. The table is shoved into the corner so there were five of us sitting around two sides of it; we had Round Table and drank lager from tiny, shot-sized Dixie cups. I gobbled a slice, then drove up to the city to see an apartment in the Mission. Later I described to Kathy why I didn't think I would want to live in the apartment; I'd met girls like this before, girls who were perky and tended to work in marketing, girls whose bathrooms had a haze of vanilla-scented candle smoke badly obscuring the cloying sweetness of recent, delicately-delivered shit, and I didn't think I could thrive in such an environment. Also the place was a trainwreck of disorganized crap, poorly lit, and carpeted: yuck. Could not imagine bringing my Brooklyn bride back to this. Kathy's apartment, four blocks away, was infinitely cooler, as it included a spice closet and a fireplace that Davey used for storing two skateboards. Kathy told me that her firm had worked her so hard earlier in the year that she literally thought she would die. She said, "One morning, at 6 a.m. after I had stayed working the entire night, I was washing my hands in the sink and thinking to myself, 'So cold, so cold,' and I had to run my hands under hot water to keep my body warm, and I looked up at the mirror and I looked so bad I thought that I was just going to die." She said this while laughing, of course, and peeling apples with a knife against a thumb. We had Coronitas and talked about death by law firm and what clothes failed as business casual attire. Then it was late, and I had to go home. The volume knob in the car is broken so music can only be played at a low hum, and my howling of "Sweet Child O' Mine" drowned out Axl Rose's in the stretch between Burlingame and Redwood City. I came back to find Dad watching Planet Earth on the new Bluray player that Richard spent lots of time price comparing to find. A wolf was chasing a baby caribou; for a while it looked like the baby caribou might outrun its hunter; but it stumbled, and the wolf caught it by the leg, and then both sat down, and the wolf took a second to catch its breath before biting down in earnest. Dad shook his head, saying, "It's so cruel." Why has nobody told me about Planet Earth before?!?! It is as beautiful as the day is long.

job

I spent almost no time in the last three months thinking about my job; last week, my preparations were entirely sartorial. I wore my suit pants and a button down blue shirt today. Each of the five associates starting today wore this uniform. To this I added the $25 canoe shoes that I bought in a frenzy last week - immediately after the purchase I called Sonia and described the shoes as "canoe shapes with jiaozi-like crenellations," and then complained that I knew nothing about buying shoes and that God punishes the weak - but I discovered to my horror that they squeak, so while taking a tour of the offices, I affected a conspicuous limp so that my squeak would go unnoticed. The day was spent in orientation meetings where I gleaned such information as We no longer carry Diet Dr. Pepper in the lunch room soda fountain because we could never get the carbonation right, Follow these forty-five mandatory yet unmemorable steps to save a file to your remote desktop, and Best practice is to put your computer on standby when undocking. Unparseable information causes my contacts to dry, so I spent a lot of time today blinking. I met my officemate and decided I really liked him; the first thing he showed me this morning was his Excel spreadsheet compiling different commute times for different combinations of bike/Caltrain/BART; calculations included ten minutes for changing clothes, 22 minutes for biking downtown (stoplights inclusive), and the proportion of train time to "lost time," defined as time spent walking from bike rack to station when reading or Blackberrying was not possible. There was a lunch with my officemate and two associates. We talked about Malcolm Gladwell and my contribution to the conversation was either to say conversation-deadening grim things ("9/11 was conducted with box cutters, not explosives," yikes, or "Don't you think Malcolm Gladwell is making it all up?" whoops) or to speak too quietly so that even the person immediately to my right had to smile and say, several times, "Excuse me?" I ordered a salad for fear of getting too fat (remember what the witch wanted of Hansel and Gretel) but by mid-afternoon was ravenously hungry, and then weighed the relative merits of eating my office-wide phone directory and preserving my reputation as a person who did not eat office handouts, the latter winning by a nose. I suddenly remembered thoughts I had during my summer associateship - e.g., looking out the window at trees and imagining them broccoli, me giant - and the unicorn clip art I had printed and posted next to my monitor to remind myself that God was mysterious and wonderful, it all came rushing back to me. I stayed late because I wrote my address incorrectly four times, not exaggerating, on one particular form and had to print and recycle, print and recycle, print and recycle, print. I drove home chatting with beloved S, who listened to me whine and then unrelatedly referred to herself as "little retarded S" and "a freak" (speculating about what her colleagues must think of her), and at home I discovered that Richard, Aimee and Mom had bought me a double-double from In-n-Out burger, Dad wanted to take a photograph of my first paycheck, and Boo could not wait to wriggle over to me and push his body against my legs as a demand to be loved. This too I noticed in 2007, how the contrast between a scary professional new work environment and the warmth of friends and family makes me appreciate so much more the love that I have. Reena identified this emotion as the one to exploit to get me to pay for her Quiznos subs. Tomorrow I have to go back to work, but I have run out of clothes.

gulp

Apparently I put this into my Google Calendar a few months ago:

November 30: Start job.
December 1: Quit job.
December 2: Apologize and restart job.

S likes to remind me that my blog is public, so JUST KIDDING, job, your new employee is a kidder!

Somebody please shoot me.

JK!

(JK about the JK.)

my friends, my habits, my family

Time has been passing here quite nicely. I have started to build the routine that I have been craving; the days have started to feel the same. I wake earlier than my parents and my brother and his girlfriend. I have minute oatmeal with nuts and dried fruit; I fill a ceramic mug painted with a tree pattern with Milo and hot water and evaporated milk and add a dusting of Iguazcu instant coffee, only to fool my senses; the smell alone should convince my brain that its hunger for caffeine has been met. I put on my vitiligo sun hat and my vitiligo cream and vitiligo sunglasses and my vitiligo suit and my lesbian low hiking boots and I bring my dog boyfriend to the field at my former middle school, where we play versions of our favorite games, Dog Soccer and Let Mommy Pick Up Poo. (Good grief, so much. What is he eating?!) We come back, I trot a loop around the Baylands, I feel unfit. I nibble things around the house. Mom sometimes leaves Tupperwares full of Chinese food in the fridge - tea eggs, greens sauteed with garlic and her special Japanese flavoring powder, green beans with ground pork, soy saucey tofu skins. I fix a bowl, nuke it, and eat it lying on the floor holding The Year of Magical Thinking over my head. In the afternoons, I find friends for California casual dining (so far, pupusas in Redwood City, fish tacos in Palo Alto, noodle soups and ice cream in San Francisco) or watch clips of movies and TV shows (Up, Inglorious Basterds, a New Zealand nature show in which a volleyball-sized parrot attempts to mate with the photographer's head) with Richard and Aimee on their computer. Sometimes there is a little adventure in the city (zoo, apartment hunting); more often there is nothing but poor posture and an Internet connection. S and I chat; while we do so, family members come into my room to offer fruit, talk about Black Friday electronics purchases, and proclaim that prolonged telephone talking leads to brain cancer. After this, I approximate brushing my teeth and climb in bed and whine for Richard to come and turn my light off. Boo army crawls under my bed, and then we sleep.

vocabulary practice

Melisma - vocal technique of changing pitches on the same syllable
Cloaca - a single body cavity serving reproductive, digestive, and urinary functions

Melisma Cloaca traveled across the mouth of the cave.

traveling

By a miracle of modern technology, I am writing from outer space. I am in the sky on my way from New York to San Francisco. Earlier today I fell asleep, leaning against this oval window next to me, cataloging the methods of transport I have experienced since August 25: twenty-two flights, ranging from one to fourteen hours per flight, nine to 72 rows per plane; a bumpy ride through southwestern Colorado in the storage space behind the driver's seat in the cab of a fifteen year-old Toyota pickup; a 45-mile slog by blue bicycle on a 90 degree day; a chairlift, a gondola, and a monorail; a commuter rail heading east to the Sydney suburbs; many nauseating bus rides; swift yachts, diesel motorboats, ferries; tuk-tuk, songtai; long-haul trains, Singapore-Kuala Lumpur, Kuala Lumpur-Penang; Penang-Prachaup Kiri Khan; Beijing-Shanghai (averaging 110 mph for 900 miles in a brand new exemplar of China's rise to economic significance); blister-inducing lesbian sandals; Reena's baby blue Yamaha motorbike (apparently somehow different from a moped); a single-speed Mantix commuter bike with snow on the fenders, books in the basket, and Wu Fei balanced on the rack; an uncle's, an aunt's, and a cousin's sedans; a train from the station in Zhongli where my mom was fined for fare-dodging thirty-five years ago, to a station in Taipei that didn't exist until five years ago; a filthy, lurching car with an uncooperative manual transmission; rush-hour subway rides pressing Beijing commuters into enoki mushrooms; four cab rides past the roadside stand of Platonic trees that reminded me each time of a beloved forest bear; more subways, more buses, more places to hold one's breath to avoid the mist of swine flu molecules sneezed out by fellow travelers. Now I am on my last flight, and in two hours, after my loving father takes time out of his work day to shuttle me from the airport to home, my three months of travel will be over.

On one of my days in Chiang Mai, I wandered into a Buddhist temple complex and took photographs of the aphorisms nailed to the trees: "Selfishness is the real enemy of peace"; "It's easy to know a man's face, but difficult to know his thought"; "If there is nothing that you like, you must like the things that you have"; "Anxiety shortens life"; "Today is better than two tomorrows"; "Clean, clear, calm: these are the characteristics of a noble person." I share these here in lieu of my own travel-gleaned wisdom, for I have none, reader, I have no takeaways, I end three months of travel empty-headed, linguistically garbled, bewildered by references to balloon boys and Fourth Circuit judges and the severe angle of sunlight in November, unable to remember the habits that used to structure my days. I have eaten take-out for 89 days; I can't remember what dishes I used to cook, or whether I knew how to cook at all. I saw lots of things but if not for the photos and the journals, I would remember nothing. For weeks I talked only to myself, to a new friend in a tortuous parody of a second language, or to the thumb-sized screen image of my beautiful constant in front of a camera seven thousand miles away; now I am unsure of what to say in the company of even my closest friends.

None of this is bad, of course. One travels to induce homesickness; the cost of this is giving up one's home, at least for a while. I come back now to a home that is in my parents' garage, in twenty-two boxes packed by moving men three months ago. It's not even a metaphor to say I am eager to unpack and organize my life. I am thirty, in spirit if not in body, five pounds fatter, and in clean, clear, calm love. One must start from somewhere. California here I come.

奥普拉

Can't believe it took me so long to discover the television in my room. Tonight I have watched:

1. A New Agey Taiwanese artist explaining how he locates and repurposes Taiwanese driftwood into large abstract sculptures. He had long salt and pepper hair and a long salt and pepper goatee. He spoke with an atrocious Taiwanese accent (Hs for Fs, Ls for Rs, "uh"s for "er"s) and dramatic pauses. He told a story about how his childhood was filled with love and how he can't sleep at night if he comes across a nice piece of wood and doesn't buy it.

2. A lottery drawing. The final number was 18.

3. Some domestic drama where a woman was arguing with another woman in front of the second woman's parents and brother. Woman 1 slapped Woman 2, causing Woman 2's mother to yell at Woman 1 for hitting her daughter. Then Woman 2's brother confronted another woman at a beauty salon and held a pair of blunt scissors toward her, demanding to know who was spreading rumors about Woman 2. This woman, in curlers, swatted away the scissors and explained that Woman 2 had been having an affair with a married man for four years, waiting for his divorce, which he never intended to seek.

4. A fantasy television series from Yunnan taking place at some floridly-garmented period in Chinese history. The main characters were a coquettish girl and her companion, a man in an iron mask that she called 铁丑 (Ugly Ironman) whom she ordered around like a servant. Ugly Ironman appeared to die, and his body was dragged into the woods by some lazy soldiers to be buried, but they were too lazy to dig a grave and just left Ugly Ironman out saying that the wolves would take care of the body that night. But Ugly Ironman woke up, discovered a kung fu book near him, trained himself in a day, and then returned to the coquettish woman. She was delighted, and then she ordered him to reach his hand into a jar containing a poisonous spider. He writhed around in agony after the bite, but otherwise appeared eager to please. Then she ordered him to capture a magic, forearm-sized silkworm that had the capability of freezing large snakes.

5. Six people wearing glasses sitting around a table discussing, in great detail, something called 奥普拉. The set design suggested entertainment news (zany patterns, big text sculptures in the background, starry animation in the scrolling text at the bottom), but the people were speaking in earnest, without interruption by sound effects, without uproars of laughter, with only the most unobtrusive use of the studio's cameras to capture each person as he or she made a point. It wasn't until they flashed to images of Oprah Winfrey from age 7 until 50 that I understood that this was some sort of popular culture salon. So far they have been talking for twenty minutes, marveling at Oprah's ability to influence American tastes and her ability to express empathy, and then they started about Chinese culture and I lost track of the conversation.

Now it is a commercial for a television series. There are alternating images of people walking slowly, with purpose, toward the camera, and people with tears slowly trickling down their faces.

on chinese language learning

Modern English's "Melt With You" came through the headphones two weeks ago while I was nodding off on a subway ride from Taipei to Danshui, and I noticed for the first time how my method for learning melodies was similar to my method for acquiring language. Let me share this with you.

"Melt With You" has a simple, ringing guitar solo that plays under the vocals during the verses, and I was attempting to commit this to memory. This is how I did it: first, because used to have perfect pitch but three years of playing a Bb instrument ruined it, I designated the tonic note of the melody's key as C. I did this because I can identify relative pitches best if I take C as a starting point. Second, I listened to the sequence of relative pitches. Third, I sought a visual cue; I closed my eyes and imagined not a musical staff but black and white keys in front of me, and saw what the melody looked like mapped out on a piano keyboard. Fourth, I needed motor memory to supplement the visual and aural memory, so I imagined the movement of my fingers playing the melody, i.e., the first three notes of the melody I think of as E5-C5-G4, which would require me to cross my index finger over the thumb to hit the G. Even though the melody clearly sounds in the timbre of plucked string instruments, and my primary instrument now is guitar, I must recall the 88 black and white soldiers of my childhood instrument, not the indistinguishable notches on my fretboard.

What struck me as strange was that I had to refer to my other senses - primarily visual and tactile; I wonder if there is a way to assign tastes and smells to Rachmaninoff's "Prelude in G minor" - in order to recall the sound. I don't consider the sound analogue, for example, that the E5-C5-G4 series of relative pitches occurs several times in "Reveille." If I try to remember melodies by conjuring sound analogues, I just get tripped up; this explains why I have such difficulty remembering the Indiana Jones theme and the Star Wars themes in sequence, because they are both rousing, loud, uptempo melodies composed by John Williams emphasizing the tonic and dominant tones of their keys (which is strong, simple C, I think), and too difficult to differentiate by sound alone. I was so taken with this sudden understanding of my process for memorizing music that it was not until right now, in writing this entry, that I could delight at the small coincidence of the band's weird name and my thoughts on language acquisition.

Although I grew up with Mandarin in my household, it was only until I came here to study in earnest (for two weeks, at least; the last three weeks of my time here has been devoted to obsessing about my vitiligo, exposing my vitiligous skin in other parts of Beijing, and feeling nervous flutters of joy about flying off to New York) that I realized how limited my ability was. I could get by when making simple requests or broadcasting simple opinions, particularly frustration with one's parents' meddling, and although I had random vocabulary words for things that occurred in the course of a childhood in Palo Alto, like "screwdriver," "forty-four dead stone lions" and "pinky finger," I didn't know many basic words, like "recommend," "intend," "politics," "study," "about," "traditional," "weekend," "engineer," "government," etc. The latter are things one acquires in order not to sound totally inane all the time, to be able to say "This weekend, I intend to study Chinese politics" rather than circumlocute using only future tense to say, "On Saturday and on Sunday, I will read books about important things" (though apparently I still sound inane, as Wu Fei pointed out today that for half of the things she says I respond with either "Is that for real?!" or "Very interesting!" because I am too lazy to take the time to retrieve higher order reactions). I also could understand some words spoken to me, particularly conjunctions like "although," "however," "furthermore," "especially," "as expected," and different versions of "but," but had gotten into the habit over the years of just using familiar, simple conjunctions, so even my aural recognition did not translate immediately into vocabulary that I could make mine; my mouth was not accustomed to the rhotic torture of "而且."

I started off five weeks ago by putting the pot lid on my stew of Chinglish expressions. It had gotten very easy over the years to say things like, "我今天要去很fashionable的eighties party跟我的law school朋友," not that I ever announced to my parents that I was going to a very fashionable eighties party with my law school friends, but the point is that I would swap in English words for the challenging phrases, leaving me with the skeleton of an ungrammatical Chinese sentence fleshed out by English words. (I see also that learning another language cannot correct problems of the imagination; apologies for the cannibalistic mixture of metaphors in the above sentences.) There were other impediments, too; I could understand certain phrases but not the words out of that context, e.g., I understood the words for "pass" (过) and "time" (时) but I didn't immediately understand that those two words together meant "out-of-date"; or I knew individual words but couldn't manage to figure out why they fit in a sentence in any particular order, e.g., "到时我介绍你们认识一下" ("When it comes time, I'll introduce you all"); or, I knew the words but would say the tones all wrong when I opened my mouth. My brain held a bin of plush, glassy-eyed made in China words but the retrieval claw would tenderly fail to take hold of anything, over and over again.

I write about these problems as if they're past, but I think this simply may be a result of my sudden inability to conjugate English verbs - my five weeks of Chinese study seems not to have made me any better at Chinese, only worse at English - I actually mean to say that these problems are ongoing. Not to say that the barriers to my progress are disheartening. I actually find it very fun to try to get by with a combination of intermediate beginner Chinese, histrionics, paging through the dictionary, and my special version of Taboo. The last often entails me circumlocuting, sometimes in a totally off-the-wall manner, in order to make my point. When trying to explain the Western tradition of streaking college campuses to Wu Fei, for example, I couldn't think of the word for "costume mask," but knew the words for "Halloween," "face," and "zombie," so I said, "You run around naked and then put on your face the things people wear on Halloween to make themselves look like zombies." I think this also sometimes has the effect of making me seem incredibly profound, because I speak in tortuous Confucian metaphor rather than directly to the point. When trying to explain to Wu Fei how I wanted a relationship of equals, but couldn't find the words for "evenly-matched," I said, "A relationship should be like a tennis match; if one person is much better than the other, it's not fair; but if they can hit the ball back and forth, that's what people like to watch." I know the word for "euphemism" but not the actual euphemisms, e.g., for sexual activity, so I say, "They lay in bed, doing euphemisms." Wu Fei thinks its fun to listen to and guess my meaning, and I think it's fun and challenging to invent metaphors, so it's so far been win-win.

Chinese is a difficult second language to learn, for the reasons amusingly and accurately described here: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html. The biggest difficulty is that because the words are pictographic rather than alphabetic, there's no real way to know what a word will sound like. If I wrote, "lacanophobia," you could sound out the word even if you didn't know the meaning. (Fear of vegetables.) You don't have to memorize the way the word looks in order to be reminded of its sound. However, you could look all day at "鼻孔" and not even come close to its sound. (Bikong, nostril.) Chinese is a language requiring lots and lots of memorization.

Different kinds of memorization, at that. First, there are words I know how to read, write, say, and comprehend (aurally). No work to be done here except the task of figuring out its position in the grammarless, punctuationless Chinese sentence.

Second, there are words I understand aurally, but cannot write. The task is then to remember what the written words look like. Examples: 钥匙 (yaoshi, keys), 护照 (huzhao, passport), 麻烦 (mafan, trouble). For this, I generally compose a mnemonic that references the way the word looks. To remember the way the word 棒 (bang, good) looks, I wrote, "很棒的冰" ("very good ice") because "冰棒" ("ice good") means popsicle, and the word 棒 kind of has a verticality reminiscent of a popsicle.

Third, there are vocabulary words that I don't already know, like 修辞 (xiuci, literal) and 鼓励 (guli, encourage). These I cannot write nor say nor understand, so I must remember what the word looks like, what it sounds like and what it means. Most often these come up with conversation, not in reading. These are by far the most difficult.

I kept learning and forgetting the word for "weekend." All I wanted to do was learn the sound of the word; I didn't care about learning to write it; but even memorizing only the sound was proving very difficult. This is where the analogy between melody and language learning comes in. I realized suddenly that my previous method, saying the word over and over again to impress the motions into the muscles of my mouth, provided no mnemonic for future recall. I was relying on motor memory alone, but just as when learning a melody, here I needed visual and audio cues as well.

So this is the process I ended up with for learning vocabulary aurally. First, I listen to the word and repeat its sound, so that my mouth can remember the way the word forms. Second, I imagine the Romanization of the word, and the general shape of that word: weekend, zhoumuo, I remember to have a "z" and an ascender, and then two low sequences in the "ou" and "uo." Third, I search for the sound analogy. "Zhou" happens to be the same sound as "rice porridge," which I have no problem remembering. So I must make some stupid mnemonic, like "This weekend I'm eating rice porridge." Only with the combination of the visual, aural, and motor cues can I recall a word.

I applaud your patience, reader, for I am losing even my own attention. Let me turn now from one baffled monkey's idiotic comprehension of simple memorization to another aspect of language learning that I find interesting: how one's personality changes when presented in different languages. From Second Language Acquisition: An Introductory Course, Gass and Selinker:

"There are social psychological reasons for why adults learn languages less readily than children do. There are many different versions of this hypothesis. Some suggest that adults do not want to give up the sense of identity that their accent provides. Some suggest that adults are not willing to surrender their ego to the extent required to adopt a new language, which entails a new life-world."

(I would post the link but the online proxy server I use to access Blogger from China doesn't permit links; just Google the title if you're interested.)

In some respects, I agree that learning a new language entails accepting a new life-world. Chinese changes my personality. I think I am more obedient and traditional when speaking Chinese; Ana says my Chinese voice sounds less coarse than my English voice. This could be simply because I find it very difficult to think while translating, which in turn takes the bite out of anything I would want to say; Wu Fei asked me my opinions on abortion yesterday, and while fumbling for the words, I completely forgot my ideas and spewed forth some room temperature platitudes about morality, choice, and caution. I can say I want a memo book, or note pad, or sketchbook, or scratch paper, or a pad of virgin growth birch barks, any number of variations to tailor my request in English, but in Chinese I can only say, "I want a book" or "I want paper"; I can say "I'm conserving real estate in my stomach for dessert" when refusing to eat more at meal with English-speakers but with Chinese-speakers I can only say, "I'm full." The blunt instrument of my Chinese hammers out only the blobbiest fertility-sculpture likeness of my finely-chiseled personality, or something.

But the change in my personality also reflects the values in the culture, as expressed through language. I have this great book called "什么时候说什么话" ("When To Say What") which describes itself, in the preface, as teaching students about Chinese speech-acts (言语行为). Just as how in English the "Thank you"-"You're welcome" call-and-response is politesse expressing a cultural value (gratitude should be expressed, and also should be received), there are essentially scripted dialogues in Chinese that one is expected to follow to express your conformity to Chinese values. Take, for example, compliments. In English, the polite sequence is compliment ("You're great at playing piano!") and reception ("Thank you for the compliment."). In Chinese, the polite sequence is compliment and then refutation. Lesson 11, Compliment and Praise.

A: 这孩子真讨人喜欢。("Your child is really adorable.")
B: 哪里，你不知道，可淘气了。("Not at all, you don't know how naughty he is.")

A: 这顿饭好吃极了。("This meal is so tasty.")
B: 哪里哪里，过奖了。("Not at all, you're exaggerating.")

These are normal responses in Chinese, though in English they would be considered puzzling deflections, perhaps even rude. On the other hand, the English habit of simply accepting compliments with "Thank you" seems immodest in Chinese. What is graceful reception of a compliment in one language is not so in the other.

One of my goals in studying Mandarin in China was to learn enough vocabulary to become not inane, by which I mean I wanted to learn to say what was actually on my mind, not just be the polite, silent, possibly retarded, phenotypically-similar alien dropping chopsticks at gatherings of extended family. So on the one hand Chinese language expresses cultural values that are not exactly mine, and thus changes my identity; on the other hand, the expression of my non-traditional Chinese personality becomes stronger the more language I learn. Who knows how this equilibrium will actually tip.

K, who is much better and funnier with words than I am, just wrote an email to say, "I'm sure your Chinese is much less bad than it was when you arrived and your English is still beautiful." Thanks you, glorious hero K, warmings of the heart forever gladness towards long yearning! I apologize to all of you who have suffered to the end of this long, tiresome exposition on patently obvious things. I had hoped to reward you with some satisfying examples of Chinese wordplay, but now it is nearly dawn and I want to flush my language-stuffed head in the leaky toilet a few times and then go to sleep. I'll only offer this pleasing and utterly fatuous coincidence between English and Chinese: the word for cat in Chinese is "mao1," so you can swap out a word in Mao Zedong and make it have the same meaning as "Chairman Meow."

a lesbian bar in beijing

There are a few terms in Chinese to describe lesbians: 女同性恋 (nu tongxinglian), which is clinical and outmoded, in the same way that "female homosexual" might be in English; 女同志 (nu tongzhi) which literally means "female comrade," "comrade" having been appropriated in the last twenty or so years by the Chinese gay community to have roughly the same connotation as the English word "gay"; 蕾丝边 (leisibian), which is an English sound-cognate that literally means "flowery-edged," like lace; and 拉拉 (lala), which is the most modern of these terms.

The literal meaning of lala ("pull pull") is less apropos than the phonetic effect. The words start with an L sound and thus allude to the word "lesbian," and the repetitive phoneme is cute in the way that Chinese girls like to be. (For example, last week my roommate texted to say that the snowstorm that blanketed Beijing last week was too severe for her to "开车车回家家," sort of like "drive the car-car back homey-womey," except much cuter than and not disgusting like baby talk in English.) Lala is mostly a noun, and sometimes an adjective.

I Googled "lesbianism in China" and came across this article (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7085/is_49/ai_n31585221/), which is pretty good if you can plow through all the polysyllabic pork floss that academics apparently must heap on their ideas in order to tickle the tenure-granting organs of the academy (e.g., while searching for the author's other articles, I came across a description of a symposium entitled "Pedagogies in Praxis," which, if you think about it, could also be called "Teaching"). But the article takes as its premise the "basic fact that there are no neologisms for the term 'lesbian' in Chinese lexicon"; the author only discusses the first two of the terms for female homosexuality I described above; then he argues that the definitional indeterminacy of these terms suggests that a clam-loving clam in China is the queerest kind of queer you can be.

But term "lala" seems to be the kind of homegrown neologism that the author of this article claims not to exist. Maybe this is just an oversight? I can't claim to know much about Chinese culture but this: the girls I met at the lesbian bar I went to in a trendy part of east Beijing on Friday night called themselves lala. They asked me if I was lala ("你是拉拉吗?"), to which I replied, "我当然是拉拉啊!" ("Of course I'm lala!"). On my second day of class, my 26 year-old Hui Muslim morning teacher found reason to explain to me the difference between "tongzhi" and "lala," with a plain facial expression that betrayed no judgment, only the smug beam of pedagogy in successful praxis. Sitting across from me for six of the thirteen hours I waited last last weekend at Hongqiao Airport was a seemingly-heterosexual woman (she was leaning her head on someone I presumed to be her husband, and minding a naughty boy I presumed to be her son) reading a book whose English subtitle was "A Report on China's Lala Population." I came out to Wu Fei last week using lines I had rehearsed beforehand many, many times ("采篱是我的女朋友,我是拉拉"/"Hedge Plucking is my girlfriend; I'm lala") and dear, sweet, sheltered Wu Fei, who knew no homos before me and may never know another, who didn't know the vocabulary word to describe heterosexuality, who reluctantly calls the ladyboys she met in her year in Thailand "人妖" (literally, "human goblins") because she does not know the politically-correct phrase for transgender people, even open-minded but still traditional Wu Fei knew what "lala" meant.

The neologisms don't end with lala. Butch and femme identities exist here as they do in western LGBT communities, though in China it is T and P. Butch is T, for the English word "tomboy." Femme is P. P is for 婆 (po), which kind of means "wifey." Calling someone your 老婆 (laopo) is about the same as calling somebody your "old lady." If you're neither T nor P, you can say you're 不分 (bufen), which means you have no preference. 铁T (tie T) means literally "iron T," or stone butch.

(Also, apparently the phrase 断背 (duanbei) has also come into vogue recently as a way of referencing gay people. It literally means "broke back"; guess which Ang Lee movie this term comes from. Thanks to C for the tip.)

All of this I learned from my friend Ana, a first generation Chinese-American whom I first met in August, at a conference where she delivered this presentation of vocabulary words to a room full of enthralled Asian-American queer folks. Imagine how delightful it would be if archeologists discovered Sumerian tablets bearing the cuneiform equivalent of "ROFLMAO" or a set of texts from the Library of Alexandria describing a mopey teen named Bella who falls in love with a handsome, century-old blood sucker named Edward; Ana's presentation in Seattle was greeted with the same pleasures of recognition and cultural validation by her American audience. Not only were we Asian-American curtain parters among our own for the first time at this conference, we were also learning about the tofu-eating habits, so similar to our own, of the allogrooming pandas of the Orient, from whom we were ourselves so recently descended, but whose popular culture was derived from our own. Majesties of coincidence!

Ana and I became friends at the conference. We were pleased to discover that we had lived in the same hippie co-op in college, but six years apart, though the whiteness of the food and the society in the co-op drove her to leave it, whereas I, being a bananarchist, just never noticed. She referred to me once as her "ancestor." My vanity believes this word was an ESL idiosyncrasy rather than a report on the slack skin on my wrinkled face. She lived in Fujian until she was ten, then moved to the social and linguistic Siberia of Houston, and adapted quickly enough to get herself into a good college and to become essentially an artsy lefty. She has since spent some time in China, and made a short documentary about a few of her friends in the lala community here that she screened for us in Seattle. Her Internet handle is euphemistic and slightly obscene. She is short, short-haired, and totally adorable; she dresses like a boy; she has a labret and a sweet, polite voice which pronounces the Fujian accent, Ls for Rs, "len" for ren. Now she's in Beijing for the year, killing time.

I found Ana last week. It took a little finagling to find her email address because I had only contacted her through Facebook, which is still blocked in China. We had a meal of pig's feet hotpot last week - no wonder she didn't want to live in our vegetarian co-op, where tarragon-flavored stew reigns supreme - and made plans to go to a lala bar the following Friday. I invited Wu Fei to come along, but even her voracious curiosity could not overcome her obedience, and she declined by text, advising me, for S's sake, not to be taken in by the slutty temptresses of the lesbian bar. (Wu Fei has never been to a bar.)

At 8:30, I left my apartment for the hour-long subway ride to Hujialou station, where I had arranged to meet Ana. There we also waited for her friend whom she only knew as Tongyidao, which can loosely be translated as "Same Stab"; but when her friend showed up, direct, tall, and intelligent, she introduced herself as Fan Fan. Fan Fan is in graduate school for cultural anthropology, and her specialty is China's lala population. She looked at me straightaway and said that my speech inflection had a "Taiwanese flavor." I admired how fearlessly she spoke to people: at the bar, she looked bored for a minute, and announced that she was going to plumb a waiter for information about the bar's clientele; on returning, she spied a new person dressed in a scarf, glasses, and short-brimmed hat, in the style of will.i.am., walked over, extended a hand, and said, "I'm Fan Fan, and I would like to know you." I wondered again about career cause and effect: do people become outgoing as a result of the methods of anthropology research, or does the field attract people who are naturally extroverted?

In a San Francisco morning fog, we took a cab from the subway station to the bar. The bar was called Paw Paw. It was on the first floor of the 城市宾馆 in 呼家楼区, in the flashy, expensive eastern part of town where the concentration of expats is high. It is only a lala bar on Fridays and Saturdays. Special waitstaff are called in on these nights. The rest of the time it's just a regular bar.

We paid 21 RMB ($3) at the door for a fluorescent stamp on the wrist and free drinks all night. The bar was large, with long couches along the wall for group seating, and a DJ station and out-of-sync projections of recent American music videos dominating the visual space, but there were only a few dozen people inside, at least when we first got there. A waiter seated us on a couch, and then brought over a plate of watermelon cubes and a mixed plate of salty nuts and sugary peanut balls. I drank gin and tonics, because I could read and pronounce the words for "gin and tonic."

Ana's third friend was already there when we arrived. She introduced herself as "Rebecca." I learned later that her real name was a near homonym for the Chinese word for "waiter." We then quickly made plans for her to lead me through the 798 gallery district over the weekend. She withdrew this offer, in a "sorry"-filled text message, on Saturday night.

Right away Rebecca broadcast herself to me as a young Chinese person much more interested in Western popular culture (and much wealthier) than any other young Chinese person I'd met so far. There was the English name, first of all. Then she told of flying to Amsterdam to smoke weed (whereas the other people I've spoken to seem horrified at the idea of any drugs), and said that tickets were a mere 4000 RMB (about $590, not terribly much for a Beijing-Amsterdam flight, though still shockingly high for my understanding of China, where a smart, experienced graduate from the third best university in the country like Wu Fei makes 3000 RMB a month teaching English). She described her expensive trips she'd taken around North (alone, by plane) and South (with her mother, by slow boat from Peru to Antarctica to Brazil) Americas. She said she was applying to graduate programs in art history in American, and NYU was her top choice. She was dating a nice T, but she wanted to have fun and didn't want to commit to anything; this too struck me as a very non-traditional point of view.

The four of us sat around the sofa and my experience of it was very much like my experience of bars elsewhere in the world. The music was a terrible racket, and I was unable to hear or comprehend much of the conversation, so I sat still, looked alert and smiled, and alternated between reluctantly sipping my cheap beverage and shouting "What?" (although in Taiwanese-flavored Chinese) at people's faces. Several Lady Gaga songs played, followed by "4 Minutes." At this, Rebecca proclaimed three syllables very loudly in my direction. I said, "What?" She said these three syllables again. I said, "What? McDonald's?" She said, "No! MA! DON! NA!" And then she fell back on the couch, exhausted.

There were moments when we all ran out of things to say, and sat murmuring things along the lines of "Where are all the people today?" and "These nuts are the tastiest." We spent some time nervously eyeing, though not approaching, the other group of girls sitting nearby. Eventually there was some interchange. This is how I learned that they were 16 and 17 year-olds in Beijing for a high school filmmaking program.

There were moments when I participated as a non-scintillating conversational assistant, doing the unsexy work of asking where people were from, what they did, how long they had been doing it, what they planned to do, what their girlfriends were like. There were a few self-satisfied moments, too, when I felt that my language learning had progressed to the point where I could actually represent my sloppy enthusiastic personality in Chinese as well as in English. One such moment occurred when I asked about pick-up lines in Chinese. Apparently "Do you come here often?" translates, but in China one does better talking nonsense about delicious food than talking nonsense about the weather.

Around midnight, a plume of smoke from the fog machine was released to signal the start of the night's performances. There were two performers. The first was an extremely skinny campy male singer who performed his first song, a slow traditional ballad, wearing a black dress and a wig; these he cast off for his other three songs, which were upbeat, dancey songs that moved him to bounce around the DJ platform. His stage presence was fun to watch. He flirted with girls in the audience who screamed "Tuo!" ("Take it off!"). When he coyly lowered a zipper, they taunted him by screaming "你能不能脱?" ("Are you even *able* to take it off?"). It says something about how uptight I am that during this sexualized performance, my thoughts were predominated by the fight Stephanie and I had last year about the sexlessness of Chinese culture; thoughts on performance theory; and the puzzled recognition that a first tone word like 脱 could be screamed imperiously. One ends "Take it off!" with a downward inflection. Imagine shouting "Take it off!" in a high monotone!

The second performer had a strongman act that was difficult to watch, and not many people did. He seemed to have no bearing on queerness, except in the loose sense that queerness accepts what adults choose to do with their bodies. He first shattered two beer bottles with a hammer, and then lay down on the shards of glass, and invited two people to stand on his chest, compressing him further in to the glass. The audience responded with appalled, weak applause, when beckoned to do so. Then he invited a person to come up and twist a nail through his elbow skin with a pair of pliers. I left at the point when he shoved two corks attached to strings deep up his nose and attempted to haul a person sitting on a sled through just the strength of the skin on his nostrils. I shivered outside and watched Rebecca smoke a cigarette, because the performance had become unbearable.

After this, we returned to our depressions on the couch and continued our desultory discussion about things here, and things there. Rebecca noticed that Dan Dan (another member of the party, not Fan Fan) noticed a lone white girl sitting at the bar; they descended upon her and appeared to be very interested in her slow, simple, Russian-flavored Chinese. Ana and I sunk in further and talked in English amongst ourselves, and I fear I did that obnoxious thing when I talk to people slightly younger than myself with a tone of undeserved authority, on manners relating to important life choices. She seemed to take it diplomatically, and at 2:15 all of us rose to hail taxis for home.

As mine traced the northeastern bend in the fourth ring road, I called S, who was sick in New York with swine flu. She was happy to receive my call, though she didn't recognize my voice and it was hard to hear each other across seven thousand miles. The taxi took me to Wudaokou station, where I had left my bike. I biked the five minutes home blowing on alternate hands to stay warm. It was so late in the evening, and the only people on the pedestrian paths were plastered girls and boys leaning into each other, looking at their phones. The gates of my university were closed, so I parked my bike outside them and walked down two dark paths, past the tennis courts, past the posters advertising rooms to let, on my way back to my warm little room here in the frigid foreign north of China.

two more memories from thailand

Waking up from a mid-afternoon drowse, I suddenly remembered this from my time in Thailand:

Reena had a very special alarm clock. It was a four-inch cube made of translucent white plastic that transitioned between several beautiful glowing colors when you pressed a button on its underside. It ran on batteries, so there were no intrusive wires. The light was bright enough that you could use it to find your way to the water bottle or your ointments on the dresser, although because Reena guarded this cube carefully (I think even referring to it as "my precious" or "my baby"), I didn't have access to it for this purpose and often woke her up with my fumbling around in the dark on the dresser, knocking over bottles of things trying to find the chapstick. On my bike ride yesterday I came across such a clock, but its faces were plastered with ugly screens of Betty Boop, so I declined to buy.

Reena punched me in the mouth one day. It was an accident. We were play-fighting during a break in a Body Combat class led by an instructor with whom Reena was infatuated. We were attempting to attract this instructor's attention. It was all fun and games, and then Reena punched me in the mouth.

just a sunday

Today I biked 21 miles, to 798 gallery district and back. (It's called 798艺术区.) The bike ride was unremarkable, although even unremarkable bike rides are enjoyable for me. I was on my bike for about three hours altogether, cutting a more or less straight line west to east just north of the fourth ring road in north Beijing. This took me past Bird's Nest Stadium on three sides, so that I had a 270 degree view of it. Each time I see it, I like it even more.

The scenery by bike in Beijing no longer impresses me as a novelty, although today was the first time I took such a long trip around the city. I have written elsewhere about why I love my bike, and why I find biking in Beijing so enjoyable, so I will just say now that the chaos of traffic is humane and therefore manageable; Ana says she's never seen an accident, and I believe it, because people obey no rules but pay very close attention to each other's movements; and that I find the cheap, sturdy urban single-speed style of Chinese bikes to be exactly suited for my needs here.

The art district is a few square blocks in northeast Beijing devoted to gallery spaces. I don't know how many there are, but maybe something in the dozens. Somewhat reminiscent of the Chelsea galleries in Manhattan, because it consists of abandoned warehouse-like spaces claimed by art, although the concentration of galleries in 798 is much higher than in Chelsea, and there aren't other businesses, parking garages, storage units, or jails like there are on the west side of Manhattan.

It was interesting as a way to peep on China's population of artsy hipsters, which I haven't seen before. There were many foreigners, too. Maybe those people with the fashionable mohawks were Japanese, but I heard at least some of them shouting in Mandarin. Hearing them made me think that know so little about modern Chinese popular culture.

What I want to know: are young people anxious? What makes them anxious? How many of them are anxious? How do they express their anxiety?

To find the emotional life of a Chinese person, as if such a thing can be essentialized and known, I look for the American analogy, which is easy for me to understand, e.g., I know how the twitchy energy of young, creative, vain people might end up in a place like Williamsburg, but I don't think that the art I saw today was a product of that kind of culture, although I couldn't tell you why it felt that way.

So many things I see around me provoke this feeling; China can look so modern, and if you looked around at the shining hotels and expensive bars and sexy fashions and kids sending texts and graphic design and new buildings and flashing colored lights, it's tempting to think that the values of youth culture, and their expression, are exactly the same here as in America. But I don't believe that the analogy is so easily drawn.

I remember that Stephanie and I got into a fight last year after we'd read an article about how many Chinese gyms were starting to offer pole-dancing classes as a form of aerobics. She scoffed at this, and thought it was a phony and neutered presentation of what ought to be raunchy and sensational. That bothered me, because I felt like she was saying that Chinese people were sexless. It's very important to my world view to believe that people everywhere experience the same range and depth of emotion, e.g. that people say filthy things to one another while screwing in Jordan or laugh at jokes about their neighbors eating beans in Mali; it was also important to me that the Western stereotype about Chinese people being *not fun*, which I saw so often repeated in the press during the 2008 Olympics, not be seconded by my Chinese girlfriend. In reality, that's not what Stephanie was saying, but I was eager to believe that I had been insulted, and we fought somewhat senselessly about it.

That is neither here nor there. All I am saying is I am outside this culture, and I would like to be inside, but it is not easy. I take for granted my familiarity with American tropes. Let me never forget henceforth that a blowsy, underwearless, hoarse-voiced girl with glittery eyeshadow who tilts into a cab on E. 72nd Street on a Saturday night and the orange-colored Chad with the popped collar who pays her fare may not be types cognizable to, say, a Chinese person learning the contours of American demography.

At 798, there was much to see. I liked one oil painting of a rainbow over Tiananmen Square. The people in the plaza were blurred and the image was painted in mustard brown tones, so that the scene looked sinister, like a surveillance image, instead of pleasant. Other than this, no other pieces of art made an impression upon me, but then again, one memorable artwork per gallery/museum experience is all I ask anyway. I was interested enough anyway in the district itself and the people strolling around in it.

I had a meal of duck fat over fat-fried vegetables and fat rice, and because I hadn't eaten for five hours, and even then only had a half cup of yogurt and coffee, I poured my meal down my throat in five minutes and then sat reading Murder on the Orient Express until the feeling of acute nausea passed. I biked home, ninety minutes, getting lost only once, and stopping to buy a pomelo from a street vendor.

Yesterday I had intended to bike down to the Forbidden City, but I quarreled with S, and then had only two hours of daylight to bike into a traffic snarl just south of the second ring road, shouting curses in English. I felt foul. I came home and found a variety of ways to distract myself from the foulness, in descending order of effectiveness: composing two melodies for voice and guitar, entitled "Why Do Girls Make Me Cry?" and "I'm So Happy I Could Die"; taking my roommate on the back of my bike to eat Guangzhou rice porridge near Wudaokou; jogging five miles on the BLCU track; reading the news. But S's patience and good temperament steered us out of the turbulence, and the day ended with six hours of expressions of love, delivered by webcam until dawn.

The day before was Friday. I didn't hang out with Wu Fei as is customary, because she was dogsitting for the weekend and had to go pick up keys. Instead, I came home, fa dai'd for several hours, then went to a lesbian bar at night. I will write about that presently.

wu fei

A funny thing happened tonight when I went to go write an entry on my blog describing the personality of my new friend Wu Fei. I remembered that she had a blog, and I went to go check it.

The second entry down on her blog was one describing my personality. Maybe the coincidence explains in part why in only three weeks we've become such friends as we have become. We both like to observe things, particularly marvelous ridiculous things, and write things; now I have learned that we spend four to five hours a day together observing things, and then retreat to our separate computers and our separate languages to write about them.

Wu Fei is one of my two teachers at the language school. I vastly prefer her over my morning teacher, not at all because my morning teacher is subpar, but because Wu Fei is such an excellent teacher. I call my morning teacher my listening comprehension teacher, because we rush through the textbook, neither of us with any interest, because the dialogues are easy and inane, and then I probe her about her feelings on Mao Zedong, the Tiananmen Square protests, North Korea, Hui Muslims, the twenty-four seasons of the Chinese agricultural calendar, the linguistic games that Chinese people play with each other, the facial features of Westerners, and so on, and because she is a well-educated, opinionated, powerful, and straightforward person, she then delivers a 15-20 minute soliloquy and I focus on keeping up with the language. This is fine for me, since part of why I was interested in coming to China was to hear young Chinese people talk about their understandings of the world.

But Wu Fei I find a better teacher as well as a better companion. To the first, she is patient, clear, and diligent, so that her classes are just better planned and executed. She also pays much closer attention to the way I learn than my other teacher; e.g. she will cajole me into dialogue by asking hopelessly open-ended questions such as "How you do think children should be raised?" and "What is your opinion on money?" because she knows it is more challenging and useful to me to voice my opinions in Chinese than to listen to a Chinese person's soliloquy. She also expresses her delight in funny things much more passionately, so that when I relate my linguistic and cultural mistakes (like going into a shoe store and asking, very politely, for lack of better entree, "Do you sell shoes here?"), she giggles at me but in a way that makes me feel like I'm entertaining China with my physical comedy, not simply making an ass of myself. This I find very encouraging.

What makes her a good teacher also makes her a good companion. She is curious, open-minded, fair, and eager to listen to people who may know about things she hasn't experienced. She has had experiences that make her more mature than her twenty-five years, including a year spent living alone in a rural farm preparing to retake university entrance exams, and a year spent living outside of Bangkok teaching Chinese to Thai kids. These may be the pseudo-adventurous, predictable psychosocial moratoria of rich Westerners, but I think they are genuine novelties, hardships, and curiosities in a culture that doesn't prize going off on larks as mine does, and they speak to Wu Fei's character. Wu Fei has stories about living with wild pythons hiding in her bedroom, and stories about studying from 6am until midnight almost every night for a year.

She is quick and she remembers and connects things: three weeks ago I mentioned something about how I assumed that the other Americans she was teaching were evangelical Christians because they told her they reviled Obama and home-schooled their children. Later she confirmed this, and today she noted the irony of the Chinese government's desire to have foreigners learn Chinese (as a way of spreading Chinese culture) and foreigners' desire to learn Chinese (as a way of penetrating Chinese culture with Christian evangelism). Today we slowly walked around the campus of Qinghua University talking about how to stand up for yourself against catty, strong-willed people (i.e., a certain well-educated, opinionated, powerful, and straightforward teacher), which led to a long discussion on how to find the proper balance between being kind enough not to hurt other people but demanding enough to get what you want out of life. Later topics of discussion were: bananas (the term is the same in Chinese as in English for people who are yellow on the outside, white on the inside), how what was wrong with traditional Chinese ways of thinking was the same thing that was wrong with conservative American ways of thinking, Han dynasty clothing, how loudly Chinese people talk in public and how fastidiously polite Thai people are, and East Asia's highly-developed culture of cuteness. She asked me if it was true that Harvard students took all of their clothes off and ran around during stressful periods in the semester; I affirmed my own participation in this and explained to her the Western ritual of streaking.

It was 20 degrees today - a sudden snow dump in Beijing left me stranded at an airport in Shanghai yesterday for 13 hours, enough time for me to finish both Pride and Prejudice and 4/5ths of a Michael Connelly thriller - and we walked around for the two hours before twilight, occasionally pelting each other with crummy snowballs, but mostly just chatting, chatting, chatting. As much as we are both loath to speak in generalities about our respective cultures, I think we've found cultural guides in each other. I play up my American openness, and she receives it with some degree of admiration. As we passed by piles of fallen leaves on the quad, she said, "Oh, it would be so fun to roll in these leaves, but I'm so embarrassed. So many people are watching, they'll think I'm an idiot," and it was then my turn to say, "Who cares what they think? It'll be fun!" and then it was up to me to take the lead in rolling around like an idiot on the leaves. She tells me that her boyfriend doesn't let her dance, swim, or ride elephants because those activities are too sexy/dangerous, and then laments how Chinese guys are controlling of their girlfriends, and then it is my turn to bite my tongue and accept that Chinese culture puts a stronger emphasis on coupling younger and for life and with possibly not 100% perfect partners, instead of saying DTMFA as I would to an American friend.

Anyway, this is not a very good explanation of who this new dear friend is or what it is like to spend time with her. I have notes on a bunch of anecdotes that I was meaning to type up into an English language biography of her before I chanced upon her Chinese language biography of me. I will get to those some day. But for now, let me delight in this coincidence, that her teaching ability has brought my reading ability to the point where I can translate her biography about me at the end of my biography of her:

[Bananarchist]

[Bananarchist] has a J.D. from Harvard*, and I'm really a bit proud of this. Even though I have nothing to do with this, I am still proud, haha.

The first time she opened her mouth, I nearly jumped back in surprise. Her voice was so coarse, more like the voice of a man. Big feet, big hands, broad shoulders, flat butt: she didn't make an objectively very pretty girl. She said it herself: "I'm a big-footed crone, and it's hard for me to find shoes that fit in China," and "I'm a tomboy, and men aren't going to be attracted by that." Each time she uses these idiomatic Chinese phrases, I'm always left rocking back and forth with laughter.

She really cares about the environment. On the first day that I met her, she told me that she was vegetarian for ten years because she was concerned about protecting the planet, but because she loved roasted pork buns too much, she eventually gave up this noble pursuit.

After she bought a bike, she pushed it to a bike shop and said: "Please attach an animal cage!"**

When we got to the part of the textbook on buying and selling things, the homework I assigned her was to go to one of the street vendors downstairs and practice buying something. Then when we went down there, she said to one hat sellers, "Can I try dressing my head with this?"***

Another class, I asked her to give her opinions about money. She said that before she turned 27, she was very good at saving money. I said, "Can you give me an example?" She said that when she got to college, she discovered that her bed did not come with sheets, blankets, or pillows, but because she wanted to save money, she didn't go buy these things. She just put her sleeping bag on her bed and used that both as sheets and as a blanket. For a pillow, she used a plush doll stuffed into a t-shirt. This way she lived for four years.* My god, I just found that incredible. I said, "You must be the most thrifty person I know. There must not be anybody who can save money like you can." She said, "There is! My friend is even more thrifty! He didn't even have a bed,* he just used a yoga mat!" When I heard this, I was speechless.

She is such a real, admirable, and vivid person that I can't use words to describe her. On cold, still nights like these, thinking about her makes me feel wonder and warmth. Thank you, life, for giving me such feelings that I haven't felt before.****

*It only speaks to my poor Chinese speaking ability that her entry has factual errors such as this. It is not a J.D. from Harvard. It was not four years; it was hardly four weeks. Roona bought me a pillow and I found a sheet in the free pile, though I did continue to use that sleeping bag until graduation. And Albert didn't go without a bed because he was cheap, but because his room was small.
**It only speaks to my poor Chinese speaking ability that I was unable to remember the words for "bike basket."
***I am struggling to find the suitable English translation for the cultural and linguistic error I committed on this particular occasion. I used the verb for wearing clothing (chuan1) instead of the verb for wearing accessories (dai4), which was apparently very funny, because the four people buying hats from this vendor all laughed uproariously when I opened my mouth.
****Yikes, now that I've read to the end, I am thinking I might revisit my resolve to come out to her this week. Perhaps too weird. Or maybe the effusive language at the end is just idiomatic, and I only get its literal meaning? Wo bu zhi dao!!

zhongli

I am in Zhongli or Neili in Taiwan right now, staying with my parents in my mom's older brother's apartment, which he doesn't live in because he lives in Shanghai. It has been family time here. There are family members here I haven't seen since I was eight. Two nights ago I had dinner with my mom's older brother's ex-wife, their daughter, her husband, their son's wife, her daughter, my 96 year-old grandfather, my mom's older sister's husband, and my parents. All of these people have different terms of address, but sometimes it's more expedient to refer to people in my generation or lower by their name, which means during our ridiculous banquet of - well, I wrote it down - a plate decorated with a lobster shell with the lobster meat scooped out onto lettuce covered with Kewpie mayonaise next to a dozen shrimp in the shell, an enoki-filled clear soup with green globules of something and shredded pork floss, another clear soup heated with sterno cans and filled with seafood, a big white-fleshed fish on a sterno-heated platter, a dish of shiitake mushrooms mixed with cooked lettuce, eighteen raw oysters with lime and hot sauce, more mushrooms (mu er and something else) mixed with chopped up bamboo root, a tempura plate with shrimp, potato, yam, etc., beef steak, giant bright-pink peach-like mantou filled with sweet red bean paste, sour berry drink, and regular old oolong tea - during this ridiculous feast that we did not come close to finishing, I asked and forgot everybody's term of address half a dozen times.

I have these general thoughts about Taiwan versus China: it's easier to negotiate than what I have seen of China simply because there are 1.28 billion fewer people; food here is somehow more delicious than food in China even though it is actually just Chinese food; the crap sold on the street is somehow cuter even though it is all crap made in China; and Cyn, I disagree with your assessment of Taiwan's rate of development, because it sure seems like things are developing here. Ten years ago in Taipei, there was one subway line with about ten stops on it. Now there are six lines, and one of those lines can bring 3/4ths of a Chinese-American family from the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall to Dan Shui for a sunset and a street vendor binge in less than an hour. (What was binged upon: hats, sunglasses, those special Taiwanese face-covering Darth Vader visors, fried squid, ice cream cones, red thread for jade necklaces, oranges. We also sampled many fried things and artificially sweetened things, and some massage implements, without buying.)

On the train from Zhongli to Taipei today, these evenful things happened: a man stood in the aisle next to my mom's seat and released a ten-second fart next to her face; a man getting out at the Bang Qiao stop upended an entire crate of lotus fruit that he wasn't able to fully retrieve before rushing off the train, so after he left, other passengers went to pick up this most delicious of tropical fruit from the floor of the train, and my mom got a bag. Dear god, fruit in the tropics. This particular fruit happens to be red with white meat, bell-shaped, seedless, sort of lightweight and crisp like a starfruit, not too sweet, but very, very heady. They tasted like daydreams about kissing. We ate them while walking to my dad's family's old neighborhood on Tong Shan Street in Taipei, and then we walked to a men's dormitory at Taida University and ate buffet-style, fiber-rich dorm food in order to release the previous night's banquet's death grip on our intestines.

So pass the days, eating and noting family, and eating again. I decided against going to Wenzhou to see my cousin and her baby, because it would mean getting on my 19th and 20th flights in 65 days, and I have four more flights coming up in the next three weeks, and this growing pigmentless patch on my hand a Taiwanese doctor diagnosed yesterday as stress-related-immunodeficiency-caused vitiligo, which stressed me the f-bomb out, so I don't think I'd better cool it if I can.

Traveling with my parents is great, but there are also some vitiligo-catalyzed stormy clouds relating to my realization that I can never fully please them and will only be disappointed and very sad and maybe even a touch humiliated when my attempts to do so are read exactly the wrong way, and that their way of communicating their affection to me will be sweet and pushy until it becomes intolerable, and that's when the skies open. You can read about that on my secret blog, which is published in a dark locker in the sweaty basement of my heart. Now it is nearing midnight and I am in an Internet cafe among sour-smelling young men with video game fevers, and my parents just called to say that there are lots of wild dogs on the walk back to the apartment, so I'll be on my way. More later, from down home Beijing.

where i live in beijing

For the past two weeks, I have been living teachers' dorms at the China University of Mining and Technology, in Beijing's Haidian district. I will be here for three more weeks, although next week I will be traveling to Taiwan to see my 95 year-old grandfather, and then to Wenzhou to see my cousin's newborn baby next weekend.

On the weekdays, I take four hours of language class at a private Chinese language school right near the Wudaokou subway station. It happens to be in the same complex of pink buildings where my dear someone lived four years ago, so sometimes I walk out to Chengfu Road at lunch and wonder which of these third-floor terraces, all decked with clothes hung out to dry, used to be hers. I have class until 3 p.m., and then I am free. Usually I spend the afternoon hanging out with my teacher, but I'll write more on that later.

I did nothing to find the place I am living in. Somebody from my language school went around nearby college campuses and responded to an apartment listing for me, and set me up with my roommate, Hejun. It is a half mile, fifteen minute crowded walk or ten minute crowded bike ride through the campus of Beijing Language and Culture University and down Chengfu Road to class. I have no idea how many universities are in this area of Beijing -- at least ten? Maybe twenty? In any event, everywhere one turns one finds a different campus. The streets are full of young, trendy people talking into cell phones or taking one another for little trips on the backs of their sturdy, junky old bicycles. There are only a handful of mopeds, which I find surprising and pleasant. BLCU is mostly for non-Chinese students studying Chinese, so it's not unusual to see lots of different types of people around.

My room is about 10' x 10' and has everything I need to be happy with a room - a desk, a bed, a reading light, and a place to do push-ups when my back can't take the endless inscribing of endless characters on endless flashcards - and many things I don't, like a television (which I haven't turned on), a guitar I bought in Thailand (which cannot be tuned and which I haven't had much time to play anyway), a melodion that I also bought in Thailand and haven't played, various bottles of sweet drinks that my roommate gave to me, and three huge, furry mouse hats that I bought mostly to entertain my dear someone during our webcam chats. Hejun has clipped a little bit of philodendron and left it in a Tom and Jerry cup on my windowsill. There is an alarm clock shaped like an egg that does not work, and another one shaped like a house that also does not work. There is an ironing board and an iron, a dozen of my language, culture, and history books, plus a black market copy of Pride and Prejudice, by "Jane Ausetn." I have a window but it opens onto the terrace, which is enclosed, but which in turn has a little window that can be opened. This means that even if Beijing had fresh air to give, which it doesn't, I could at best hope for a little bit of it to blow through the yangtai window and into mine, which never happens.

The pollution is fearsome on some days and not bad on others. To my California eyes, on the day I landed it looked like the heaviest San Francisco fog imaginable had the city hidden, but my Chinese had not yet gotten to the point where I could ask anyone whether it was fog or exhaust that prevented me from seeing any farther than a hundred feet ahead of me. Today, I biked through Beida en route to the Summer Palace, and the far side of the pretty campus lake was barely visible from the near side. The smog gave the world a romantic bronzing but it can't be good for my lungs to live here for long. Other days, though, the air looks clearer. It's been getting colder here, and to equip myself for this I bought a pair of mittens with pink strawberries crocheted on the back.

There are four rooms in the apartment. Mine, described above. The bathroom, which, in the Asian style, does not have a separate compartment for bathing. One flips a switch on the water heater, and then half an hour later, one stands in one's roommate's flip flops under the showerhead and drenches the entire room with water. Hejun has mastered the art of not spraying the toilet paper with the shower, but I have not, and when I am done the roll is as useless as the wet, bloated copy of the Analects next to it. The toilet handle needs to be jiggled just so. This is also the room in which one stands for ten minutes, naked except for flip fops, trying to understand which of the two identical bottles of L'Oreal shampoo that an insistent shopgirl bullied one into buying is shampoo and which one is conditioner. One figures it out, finally, based on the orientation of the caps and not the mysterious lettering on the bottles.

There is a small kitchen. When Cynthia and I traveled through Penang, we took a guided tour of the Cheong Fatt Tze mansion led by a hilarious, dry, flamboyant, extremely intelligent Chinese-Malaysian man, who said things like, "This portrait of Cheong Fatt Tze has been consumed by termites. We've sprayed it with pesticide. We are all hoping for the best," "This house was called La Maison Bleu, parce que...c'etait bleu," and very slyly, at the end of the tour, "This tour, like all other well-planned commercial tours, ends...in the gift shop...where we try to squeeze just a few more ringgit out of you." During the tour, he also found reason to say, "If you look into any Chinese person's refrigerator, anywhere in the world, I guarantee you will find Tupperware, but not name-brand Tupperware, generic Tupperware, old take-out containers, washed out margarine tubs. Chinese people waste nothing, and I am rather proud of this." I, too, am rather proud of this. Indeed, in the fridge right now are many tubs of leftovers, including some with delicious braised fish and soybean pods that Hejun's boyfriend's mom prepared for us when we went over there on Monday. The appliances not in use are kept unplugged.

In the apartment is also Hejun's room, which is kind of a living room also, but which I seldom enter because I want to give her her space. I don't know whether I am importing western ideas of privacy, though, because she keeps telling me to enter and use her TV and the living space, and we have the kind of nice roommateship where she brings me cut up pieces of fruit as I study and leads me around campus by the arm to get a haircut or to register my residency. She and her boyfriend lived in this room together until the day that I arrived; the next day, he flew off to spend a semester studying business in Germany. We bought packaged ramen together for him to take to Germany. He's since Skyped to tell Hejun that everything except potatoes are ridiculously expensive in Germany, and that he is subsisting on a diet almost entirely of potatoes. In Hejun's room is another yangtai, where I hang my handful of wet laundry to dry once or twice per week. In order to
reach the rod for hanging clothes, one must step on a "Twist and Trim" stair stepper contraption that forces one to swing one's hips like a tart while hanging decade-old socks up to dry. Beijing is dry, S says, and you can wash your shirt one night and have it ready to wear the next.

The apartment is in teachers' housing, but it doesn't mean that it's fancy. I think I live in what people describe as Soviet-style architecture. I never knew what that meant. It is a run-down old building about twenty floors high. Some days there are lights in the hallways, other days it's completely dark. When things are lit they are lit badly, either with bald incandescents or with sickly overhead fluorescents. The elevator downstairs has a "2" instead of an up button. It constantly smells like turpentine all around the building. At around 7:30 each morning, somebody starts hitting something; it sounds like intermittent hammering, but it just continues stuttering on for an hour or two. This is when I turn on the fan for white noise and put my green bean pillow over my head. There are two crowded rows of junky bikes parked out front. In the elevators, I see vivacious old people going out in pairs with badminton rackets, or dragging large gooseneck squash from floor 12 to floor 5. They pay visits to each other and greet each other warmly in the curling argot of down home Beijing. In one of the elevators sits a bored, plump young woman with crimped hair who plays video games on her cell phone, reads grocery store advertisements, and occasionally presses the button for your floor. She was the second person after my cab driver that I met in Beijing; I asked her, "Is this West Second Lou or West Second Yuan, or is there no difference?" It was 7:45, and she was leaning her mass of crimped hair against the elevator, and she was asleep. I asked her again, and she said, dreamily, "That I don't know, that you're going to have to ask another person." A one minute bike ride through BLCU takes me to the running track where I rapidly inhale car exhaust for half an hour every other night; this is usually crowded with girls walking along at a crawl and large Westerners playing with their balls. At dusk a broadcast of the school radio station plays all over campus. Topics of talk radio conversation have included "How is your senior year different from other years?" and music played has included "Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone" and "Disco Stick."

I study until late at night in order to have some overlapping time on Gchat with those on EST, wake at 9:35 and leave the apartment at 9:45. The air was brisk last week but it has gotten warmer. For this I am grateful, because I tried to buy a jacket last week and met with these impediments: 1) I am afraid of shopgirls, 2) jackets are expensive even in China, 3) I can't bargain to save my life, and 4) I am a size XXL in China. I bike down a pocket road through BLCU and join the chaos of commuters on the main road. Both coming and going I see a homeless man who, unlike the others, does not kneel with his forehead touching the ground but lounges smiling on a blanket next to two little puppies. A few days back I saw a woman walk twenty feet past him, turn around, and walk back to drop a one yuan bill into his bowl. She had headphones on and didn't seem to look particularly empathetic or struck by the cuteness; it was just a matter of fact redistribution of her kuai.

On the north side of the road are the yam seller, the orange seller, and the jian bing seller whom I occasionally patronize. I also have to cross under the subway station, where the mess of bicycles, pedestrians, three-wheeled cargo bikes, electric bikes, mopeds, and yam-, book-, exhaust mask-, trinket-, corn-, glazed haw berry-, and chestnut-sellers forces things to a standstill. This happens also to be where high-speed trains come roaring by, once every few hours, and then the vendors scramble to get out of the way. The bookstore where I bought my dictionary and the grocery store that Wu Fei led me through (during our lesson on vegetable names) are in the complex across the street; the department store kept heated to a stagnant 80 degrees is a bit further down. There I buy individual servings of yogurt, corn-flavored Pocky, and yogurt drink three times a week.

Next to the school are a bunch of Chinese fast food places. It's now getting into my third week here, and I've started to eat a little better. But in the beginning, all the words on the menu were incomprehensible, and all the people pushing around made me feel nervous to ask anyone what anything was, so I ate by going into a place and pointing to a random, medium-priced dish and saying, "That one." This once resulted in a dish that was green peppers fried with about twenty slices of bacon; another time it was an odd bowl of cold Yunnan noodles. Today I found a rice porridge place with both English and pictures on the menu. This is very promising. The place downstairs from my school specializes in Taiwanese breakfast, so one morning when I was able to drag myself out of bed earlier, I got hot soymilk and fried dough sticks and thousand year-old egg and shredded pork porridge, and then I walked upstairs and had diarrhea.

During my lunch breaks, I usually just get to work putting down all the words I've learned into my notebook. Two days last week, I ventured out by bicycle, first to Qinghua University and then to Beida. Both are beautiful campuses with long, car-free boulevards lined with tall shade trees, and the best students in a country of 1.3 billion. Neither are very far away. I haven't escaped Haidian except a brief excursion to a frightening shopping mall at Xidan last weekend, where a PA played MIA's "Paper Planes" at an extremely loud volume and gunshot sound effects echoed all around me, and a trip with Wu Fei to the Olympic Park area last Saturday. Today I attempted to find the Summer Palace but only started at dusk, and I had no idea where I was going, and ended up tracing aimless circles in northwest Beijing with my bike for two hours. There must be something very wrong with my grammar or pronunciation because each of the four people I asked for directions met my request first with an, "Ehhhh??"'

Next week I hope to have more time to explore Beijing outside of Haidian, maybe even meet up with my Chinese lesbian friend and learn a little bit about being a comrade in China. I like that - the gay community here has appropriated the word "comrade," so that it now refers to a homosexual comrade. However, first I must fly to Taipei and then drive to Chungli and then fly to Beijing and take a train to Shanghai and a flight to Wenzhou and a flight back to Beijing. I cannot remember the name I'm supposed to call my uncle, who is my mom's older sister's husband, and it is a source of anxiety. Otherwise, this is my quiet, bewildered little life here. It is ting hao. It is ting nice to live for a bit in Beijing.

a saturday in beijing

Today I woke up at 8:23 after going to bed at 3am because there was someone hammering nails next door for two hours, and the old people living in the apartment next door started slamming and reslamming the door, and also there was some sort of music being broadcast across the campus. I don't understand why there needs to be sound broadcast all over the campuses here, but there is. But it was okay. I used a variety of techniques, including earplugs and a fan for white noise, and eventually green pea pillow draped over my head, in order to sleep a while longer. Hejun says she can sleep through anything, and that going to a 酒吧 makes her even sleepier, because the loud noises make her dizzy. I wonder if this is a Chinese skill, because there are so many damned people here that it's hard to find space for yourself, so you have to learn to accommodate noise.

Feifei and I have talked a bit about ideas of privacy in America and in China. We say the stereotypical things: I say Americans aren't accustomed to the Chinese habit of asking questions about income and marriage status; she says that Chinese people ask because they are concerned about your wellbeing and want to take care of you. She grabs me by the arm and steers me around in the grocery store; I say that American people guard their personal space very carefully. I tell her that if you bump into somebody in America, you immediately say excuse me or sorry or something; I tell her this as people nudge and elbow and sidle past us in the store. I think I want to let her understand that I feel both Chinese and American, and that am Chinese enough to understand that when she protests against me paying for entry to Bird's Nest Stadium, she's being polite, and I should insist on buying the tickets, and that my reactions to things I experience in China isn't
going to be the same as the experience of other Americans that she meets. I wanted to tell her about not minding the plate of undead headless eels still slithering over one another at my hotpot dinner with Hejun yesterday...well I don't mean to sound like I'm bragging, I just don't think I'm very typically American. This is why when she asks these curious, profound, difficult-to-answer questions, such as, "What are the conditions for Asians in America like?" and "Do you love your country?", I don't really know how to answer her.

I really like that she asks these questions, though. I told her, "我认为我们的想法很像" (an attempt to say, "I think we think alike," don't know if the grammar was right) after she responded to my question about whether she loved her country by saying that before she left for her year of teaching Chinese in Thailand, she thought that China had too many problems to love, but after her year abroad, she decided that she must love her country in order to feel compelled to improve the things she found problematic about it. I think she's very smart and thoughtful and sweet, and I really like her. Conversation in both English and Chinese is slow with her, but she's very patient with me. There was a moment as we were walking into some car safety expo at the Olympic Park (where we watched a trivia challenge for a moment) that I was fumbling for a word to describe my roommate. I was telling Feifei that Hejun had called our waiter "帅哥" (shuaige,
handsome bro) and I asked her if this were normal. She said that she was too 害羞 (haixiu, shy) to do that, and it wasn't normal. I wanted to say that Hejun was flirtatious and extroverted, and both of those words required me to stand in the park and page through my dictionary. After we found these words, Feifei got an "Aha!" look on her face and we talked about shyness and introversion for a little bit. She said she was an introvert and sounded surprised when I described myself as an extrovert. I really like how engaged she is. She's very intelligent; I can tell from our topics of conversation. I feel very lucky to have her as my teacher.

As Feifei spoke to me in English, all the while I thought of how difficult it must have been for my parents to move to America. I am ashamed to admit that I have been socialized to find the Chinese accent in English unattractive, and the Chinese style of dress fobby, and Chinese habits rude or coarse. (I guess to answer Feifei's question about what the conditions are like in America for Asians, I would have to describe how recent immigrants are viewed as social inferiors in America.) But being in China among young Chinese people - for the first time among intelligent young people instead of among expats or Chinese-American kids or old tourists or my relatives - has helped me realize how shameful and culturally contextualized these beliefs are. I am seeing so much here. I find Hejun's way of being totally flirtatious, cute and fun. She did all manner of ridiculous things over dinner, not only calling the waiter "Hey, handsome! Handsome, come here!" but
pouting when the chopsticks wouldn't come and shouting for the soup to be refilled while gesticulating with both arms stretched extremely high above her head. I found these imperious manners totally appalling when performed by my unloved uncle, he of the rotting nose tip and the special dog-beating stick in the trunk of his car, but now that I see a cute young person doing it, I find it charming. Hejun was also a funny driver, saying things like "同志门,灯是绿的!" ("Comrades, the light is green!") in a singsong voice when tooting her horn at a crowd of pedestrians crossing the street against the light. In contrast, Feifei is a little shy, a little introverted, but not serious and quick to smile. She sometimes will speak very slowly and patiently to me, and sometimes when I do something stupid (like if I write "太好！好死了!" in the comments section of her evaluation form) she will either look over her glasses at me in bemused disbelief, or
sometimes she will bend a bit with laughter and move to cover her smile with her hand. She invited me over for lunch and cooked for me today, moving around the kitchen in a very practiced and relaxed manner even though I was hovering over her and observing her in a way that would have made me feel uncomfortable if so observed, shaking spices out of a little spice spoon, washing the wok with a brisk movement of the brush, bending over to peer at the flame. We ate the dishes she cooked (radish and ribs in broth, mushu eggs and pork, bell pepper and [white root] stir fry, and mala thousand year old eggs) sitting on opposite sides of a high table at seats that were inappropriate for both of us, she on a bed that was being used as a day bed in the living room, me on a sofa about 8" too low for the table. We ate and slurped and talked with our mouths full and spat out the bones from the soup onto a piece of newspaper she'd dragged over; I felt self-conscious
and clumsy, but after a while I realized there was no need to, and I just enjoyed the delicious meal she had prepared. After lunch we sat together on a single chair and looked at her photos on her laptop. I saw that she had written "vampire" on a post-it in English, with the International Phonetic Alphabet spelling next to it, and asked her about it; this got us to talking about how cute she thought Robert Pattinson was and had me looking in my dictionary for the words "overacting," "dramatic," and "histrionic," none of which were suitable for what I wanted to say. She hung up some underwear on the yangtai and I tried to wash the dishes.

Bringing this back to my immigrant parents. All to say that I find it really delightful to be going around with my two new Chinese friends and experiencing their vastly different but equally interesting and idiosyncratic personalities. It made me think of how much of their personalities my parents must have felt they had to suppress in moving to America, where they were perceived by Americans as two of an undistinguished mass of black-haired, small-eyed, funny-talking, funny-acting dog eaters. Mom told me when they first moved to America, she tried to buy some meat at the butcher section of Lucky's, and she was called an "animal" and a "beast" by the butcher when she requested some cut of meat he didn't have. Then there was that lonely, emphatic note I found in a notepad in the garage that must have dated to the mid-1980s, in which my dad had written, "American women are BITCH. They don't care. They are BITCH," or something like that. I found this in
1998 and kept it for a while, but it's lost now. I don't know what circumstance triggered my dad's anger. So now I imagine cute and earnest Feifei in my mom's place, Feifei as pretty and young and small as my mother must have been in 1978, just looking for ingredients to make familiar dishes, and getting snarled at by a total asshole. What did the butcher see in my mom thirty years ago that would make him treat her that way? And how much senseless cruelty, or even just disinterest, could a person withstand before feeling utterly defeated?

I don't know what these feelings add up to. Hejun says she's interested in moving to Canada, because she has some friends there, and she wouldn't think it very lonely (I asked her if she would), but I feel like warning her away from moving. Things are so rich here, I want to say. You can live like you've always lived. Of course there are problems, major problems, with China, but least in the day to day, if you are a Chinese person and you grew up with your Chinese habits, you can go on enjoying your chaotic bike rides through Beijing and your delicious food everywhere and your underwear on the yangtai and your casual conversations and flirtations with strangers, because that might not exist anymore for you once you leave. What are these, thoughts of sacrifice? Idealistic thoughts of affection for a motherland that is not really mine? Second language learner's syndrome?

Who the hell knows. Must study now.

and another

Even as OZ was posting his comment, my dad was sending this next gem to me, again all in the subject heading:

dear mandu, don't get the wrong massage! it could cause "SPINAL STROKE"!!! there are so many case come up now... sympton: nausea, headache, stomach ache, then totally paralyzed!!! warning.. you need to pickup right massage service, don't let them twist spine...

"Mandu" is his name for me.

yet another email from dad

[The subject heading:]

don't drink coke... very melt cockroaches in seconds...

[The text:]

don't drink coke... it melt cockroaches in second... you can clean toilet withit!it has 13 cubic cane sugar per can......

fast noodle ... is killing you.....

read this.....attached...

etc...

dad.

dialogue #1

This is an approximation of a conversation that occurred in China today, between a shop girl and a buffoon, translated into English: "Do you need me to help you find something?" "I look for the simplest soap for the washing of face." "Do you mean face soap?" "Yes." "This works [pushes expensive imported product toward buffoon]." "Mm [assent]. I too need a hair lavage tonic." "Shampoo?" "Yes." [More products pushed toward buffoon. Buffoon then patiently queues to pay.]

test from beijing

Blogger is blocked in China, so this is a test to see if the blog-by-email function I set up five years ago still works. Test, test.

Since I can't actually see my blog, could one of you be so kind as to email me at my gmail account if this posts successfully?

I am in Beijing and a little terrified!

personality quiz

to determine whether you will like being a certain type of tourist in a certain type of bar in Thailand:

1. Old people having a good time playing in a rock band together are:

A. pathetic.
B. cute.
C. heartwarming, because all joy is heartwarming.


2. Attractive young people having a good time flirting with one another in a bar are:

A. sexy.
B. appalling.
C. aliens.


3. When you are minding your own business, listening to old people playing in a rock band together, and the wispy, meter-long hair of a hippie woman walking by brushes across your arm, you feel:

A. intrigued.
B. unclean.


4. Billowing Aladdin pants are appropriate for:

A. any occasion, if you are a westerner in Thailand.
B. Halloween.
C. kindling a fire.


5. Aussies* on holiday are fun. [* I mean Aussies, not immigrants to Australia.]

False.

Thank you for your participation. [The answer to 1) is obviously A. Don't pretend otherwise.]

reena in chiang mai

On Wednesday, I asked Reena what she missed about the most about America. She took a minute to think about it, and then answered, "Black people."

She also said that the only time she missed America was when Michael Jackson died and she couldn't mourn properly with Thai people, who didn't get it. Obscure Jackson 5 and Michael solo songs have been the soundtrack to my week in Chiang Mai - this and Reena's distracted singsong commentary on her preoccupation of the moment, "Spiii-der . . . sol-it-aaaiiiiire . . ."

Now she has just declared, "It is impossible to have a favorite Michael Jackson song because they are all so good."

We sang the quarter of the chorus from "Man in the Mirror" that we knew while zipping (helmetless!! gack!) around residential Chiang Mai on her bright blue motorbike a few nights ago. And as I sloughed motorbike exhaust particulates off my body in the shower, I heard through the transom, "Standing here / baptized in all my tears / Baby through the years / You know I'm crying / Oo oo oo oo . . ."

In the daytime, I have been getting massages, reading, writing ardent messages to my dear someone, and eating by the pailful. After work hours, Reena finds me and takes me through her life.

For example, yesterday we went to an expat gym where everybody seemed to know her. I forgot my shorts and so did half an hour of Stairmaster in a floral print skirt and low hiking shoes until her friend Patrick offered me the shorts that he was wearing. The friendliness here is almost sickening.

We also went to a spinning class led by a hooting sadist who spoke only Thai except when exhorting, "Big turn! Big turn!" We sat in a sauna; Reena chastised me for bringing in a smoothie.

Sometimes I feel that I should be walking from reclining to Buddha to reclining Buddha in linen Aladdin pants and snapping discreet photos of monks doing the boring shit they do, but Reena says that the best part of Asia is motoring from entertaining place to entertaining place with friends and eating delicious cheap foods, being half inside and half outside, shopping for disposable things, and hanging out. It's why I came, anyway: to see Reena happy in her life here.

There are people all around her. One night, when we were getting desserts at a bakery late in the evening, two of her friends emerged from nowhere and joined us. Everywhere we go people stop to chat with her. We did a zipline in the mountains north of Chiang Mai a few days ago. My most vivid memory of this is not of dangling like a kitten carried by the scruff of the neck a hundred feet over the trees, but of Reena belting out the chorus to "Hotel California" with our Thai guides, who thought she was just about the funnest person on the planet. It's humbling, educational, and incredibly fun to be going around with someone whose warmth draws so many people close.

"Rock With You" just came on, which made Reena declare, "Oh, this is my favorite Michael Jackson song." I had to remind her of what she had said only twenty minutes ago. See above. She then said, "Oh, true, true," to her own wisdom, quoted back to her.

Then she squinted at her computer and declared, "I'm a Swiss Miss-aholic."

I like it here.

more emails from dad

This one begins in the subject heading:

use cell phone , and always call some body wherever you go or taking a taxi , leave the tracking for other .. f[Fwd: Re: also]save this message...

And continues on in the body of the message:

dear [bananarchist]... always call first, to report your new enviroment (taxi name, license plate, company, new person ), social encounter to your trusted one,
make it visible to people around, they might mistake you to be a relative of some big shot in (Bei ) jing ---- capital city
etc....watch out needle and watch your liver/kidney too.... they rip your organs.... be very careful...... unless your in downtown Jing or UpperSea ( shanghai )

love you... ...

Dad and Mom


nan-jing : south capital
to- kyo : east capital

[The line about the needle references my dad's concern that Uighurs will stick me in the buttocks with HIV-infected needles, which apparently they do to Han people. I was briefed extensively on this before I left home.]