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 is the same as the series that begins "Taps." 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 Biro, 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. It's not like it won a prize or anything.")
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."
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, November 09, 2009
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.
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.
Sunday, November 08, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, November 02, 2009
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!!
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!!
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
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.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
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.
Friday, October 16, 2009
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.
Monday, October 12, 2009
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!
Saturday, October 10, 2009
personality quiz
to determine whether you will like being a certain type of tourist in a certain type of bar in Thailand:
Thank you for your participation. [The answer to 1) is obviously A. Don't pretend otherwise.]
- Old people having a good time playing in a rock band together are:
- Attractive young people having a good time flirting with one another in a bar are:
- 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:
- Billowing Aladdin pants are appropriate for:
- Aussies* on holiday are fun. [* I mean Aussies, not immigrants to Australia.]
A. pathetic.
B. cute.
C. heartwarming, because all joy is heartwarming.
A. sexy.
B. appalling.
C. aliens.
A. intrigued.
B. unclean.
A. any occasion, if you are a westerner in Thailand.
B. Halloween.
C. kindling a fire.
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:
And continues on in the body of the message: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...
dear [bananarchist]... always call first, to report your new enviroment (taxi name, license plate, company, new person ), social encounter to your trusted one,[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.]
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
Thursday, October 08, 2009
penang to bangkok in haiku
They tried to rob me,
Motorcyclists in Penang,
But I was too fat.
Over a weekend,
Thirty-six hours on slow trains,
Perhaps a bit much.
On a sleeper berth,
"Golem was once a hobbit!"
Cynthia exclaimed.
We were served two meals.
Coconut soup, saran-wrapped.
Then diarrhea.
Sometime before dawn,
on our tracks, a train derailed.
Where the hell were we?
Prachaup Khiri Khan.
Our train could not go forward.
So Bangkok, by bus.
Then we parted ways,
just as soon as we arrived,
vowing to email.
Saturday, October 03, 2009
how to avoid a robbery in penang
- Eat six meals a day.
- Gain 2.2 kg in three weeks.
- Outweigh your robber by thirty pounds.
- Watch out for traffic as it comes from behind you.
- Stand to the side when you see a motorcycle swerve toward you.
- When shopping for handbags, opt for the lesbian cargo sac instead of the purse.
- Spend no more than $6 on said lesbian cargo sac. This way, the seams are weak, and when a man on a motorcycle swings around to grab your sac off your arm, the strap, instead of your arm, rips off.
- Save 10 ringgit for a hurried cab ride back to the security of your locked hotel room.
It was startling and violent to have a man on a motorcycle attempt to snatch my bag, and a small triumph that he failed. Had the strap been any stronger, I might have been more badly injured, but God has blessed me with lesbian style (and fat and muscles too), and in the end it did no more than bruise my arm and leave me speechless and bewildered, holding what was left of my bag. By the wild swerve of the motorcycle as it puttered away from me, it was clear that my would-be robbers had misjudged the truck-ness of my body. So...hell yeah, everybody, let's eat!
singapore - kuala lumpur - butterworth
I am on a lower berth in a second class sleeper train heading up peninsular Malaysia from Kuala Lumpur to Penang. Cynthia and I are traveling together, and she seems to be asleep in her bunk, which is directly across the aisle from mine, although I don’t know because her curtains are drawn and she could be just as sleepless as I am.
We left Singapore at 7:40a this morning, after almost missing our train. It was somewhat stressful to run out of the apartment, take a cab the half mile to Tanjong Pagar train station, gulp down hot tea at the railway terminal, run (literally run) through immigration, and then run down the length of the platform to our first class seats way at the front of the train. The station is old and somewhat worn, unlike seemingly everything else in rich and clean Singapore, and I would have liked to linger in the white waiting room admiring the vaulted ceilings, but there was no time to do so, as we were immediately on our way.
Our seats were comfortable—wide, large, and with plenty of legroom—but not as cheap as I would have expected (about $45 USD, still a very good price for our morning’s eight-hour journey), and they carried a smell of septic solution and mildew. We ate our takeaway parathas and sambar in the restaurant car and I then wrapped my handkerchief (on which I had just wiped my sambar-covered hands) around my face to take away the septic smell. Cynthia and I chatted idly for a few hours, although I can’t remember much of what we talked about. I told her that there was something about my face that made strangers want to tell me their life stories, and she told me that what I said echoed something that Nick Carraway said in the opening pages of The Great Gatsby. She also told me a story about Ling visiting her during a hot spell in Geneva, where Cynthia was interning, and Cynthia not permitting Ling to crack the window (because Cynthia was deathly afraid of Geneva's aggressive spiders) and instead instructing Ling to “lie very still” in order to stay cool - ridiculous, funny, ineffective advice.
Although I tried to dehydrate myself in order to avoid having to use the train toilets, I used the toilets twice. (We are now rolling backward, although apparently nobody else on this train is awake to notice.) Cynthia had lent me a skirt in order to normalize my gender presentation and also to relieve the heat rash that my plastic travel pants had caused on my thighs, and I was afraid that in squatting to use the toilet, I would touch the hem of the skirt against the wet, fragrant surfaces of the washroom. This did happen, the second time around, and I made a noise. When did I get this squeamish? On the way back from the toilet, I noticed that the exit doors were flung open, so I held onto the handrails and leaned out the train into the wind, a totally exhilarating experience that reminded me of being thirteen and on the far rear end of the cruise ship from the Bahamas to Florida, looking out at the dark void of the sea and not so much seeing but feeling and hearing the rush of our progress, and thinking that if I made any slight error, I would be lost into the sea forever. Later I told Cynthia about this, and she said that she would’ve come looking for me had I been gone longer than half an hour. And anyway, dropping off a train in a crowded country is not the same as dropping into the Atlantic Ocean at night, two hundred miles from shore.
Our train arrived at 3:30, an hour past schedule, and after a brief stop so that Singapore immigration control could run its exit procedures. Cynthia pointed out that no other country she could think of controlled the people leaving as well as the people entering its territory. We found the left luggage storage at Sentral KL station and took a cab straightaway to the Petronas Towers. We were unable to ascend to the viewing platform on the connecting gangway on the 41st floor, but nonetheless I was very excited to be outside it and looking up at it. I expected it to be sheathed in some sort of sandstone—I don’t know why; I guess I never looked very closely at the pictures—but instead it is made of large rings of wide gauge steel tubes, stacked up to look like an outdated vision of the future. Each cross section of the towers is composed as such: two superimposed squares, one rotated 45 degrees to the other to create an eight-point star, with small circles centered on each of the four points where the two squares intersection. This creates a perimeter that alternates between sharply angled and rounded edges. The effect is that each cross section looks like a dimpled circle, and there is more surface area, glass, and light inside the building. Apparently this mimics patterns in Islamic art. Cynthia called it Art Deco, but it felt more futuristic noir to me than that appellation could capture. Cynthia sang “The Jetsons” as we walked past it, but she mistook the tune, and sang the Jetsons words to “The Simpsons” melody instead.
After our stop inside the Petronas Towers, we found a Malaysian restaurant in the adjoining high end mall and had curry laksa (me) and asam laksa (Cynthia). True to what I had claimed earlier, our waiter, a well-built and handsomely-featured young man from Kolkata, struck up a conversation with me after we ordered our meal and hung around our table for a few minutes asking about my place of origin, my job, my age, my plans. Cynthia and I whispered to each other about his body movements, because he had a special graceful swagger that immediately caught my attention. Cynthia said, “That never happens to me. Nobody talks to me like they talk to you,” which led us to speculate about the relative friendliness of our faces, Cynthia’s New Yorker distance, and my tendency to look at strangers and smile. But these were temporary distractions, and we forgot about all this and left after finishing our meal.
We had planned to walk around Kuala Lumpur, but we found it nearly impossible to negotiate. First we wanted to take a subway to the colonial center of the city, and we spent ten minutes buying subway tickets, but we were intimidated by the rush hour crowd. (People actually queue up to get on the subway, instead of massing in a free-for-all around each subway door like in the States.) So we left the station and tried to hail a cab, but none would take us for a reasonable price, because traffic was too intense. Then we set about trying to walk there, but traffic was so bad that it took us eight minutes just to cross one particular intersection, and pollution was worse than in Singapore on account of the moped distribution, and it was already near our departure time, so we decided just to hail a cab for the train station. Of course, our cab just stood still for half an hour in the traffic jam. I was nervous; our train was leaving in an hour, and we had made no progress. Finally, we asked the cabbie to drive us one block to the subway station, where we finally just took the subway one stop to the train station. This whole process was again somewhat stressful, though also an adventure, and everything turned out fine, as we got on our train without incident. Although I am perhaps undeservedly proud that I am very good at the mechanics of travel (I can decipher maps and train schedules, orient myself in a city based on the locations of the tall buildings, locate left luggage lockers, and solicit more help from strangers than they are initially willing to give), I hope that my hyperfocus on travel logistics did not intimidate Cynthia or make her feel stressed out.
This is my first time in a sleeper car since 2001, when Deepa and I took a sleeper just like this one from Kannyakumari to Kochi. There were no first class sleeper cars available—those would have put us in an individual cabin, Euro-style, with just two bunks and a washbasin—so instead we are in the second class sleeper train, which is just fine. There are about forty bunks on this car, two bunks per stack on either side of the train. I guess the lower berths can be folded up into seats and the upper berths can be stowed away during the day time, but we won’t find out, as we will be disembarking at Butterworth at 4:30 a.m., when everyone else is presumably still sleeping. The bunks are soft sleepers, and each comes with fresh sheets, a pillow, and curtains for privacy. I don’t trust leaving my luggage on the far side of curtain, so I have been lying in bed with my backpack, my shoulder bag, and my day bag lined up alongside me like a companion. When we boarded, we thought we would be staying in a car full of soldiers. There were a dozen men in camouflage uniforms hauling bags off the bunks. Several of them had assault rifles; one man had three slung over his shoulder. I told Cynthia that there would be nothing we could do to avoid being killed in a hail of rifle fire, should it come to that, but the soldiers appeared to be leaving. Anyway, they don’t seem to be on this ride to Butterworth.
For the first two hours of this ride, two children were running back and forth this car screaming with delight, so that the Doppler effect from the world outside my window was being echoed in the crescendo and decrescendo of these kids as they ran past. Now people appear to have settled in for the night. Almost all the curtains are drawn, and I can hear that someone else is playing Solitaire on a laptop, and someone else is watching a DVD at a low volume. I contemplated masturbation about two hours ago, but was deterred by the thin sheet separating me and forty of my best friends. Now it is 1:20 a.m., and I have eaten an entire box of orange-flavored Tic Tacs, the most delicious meal substitute available in southeast Asia. This train, after a fifty minute standstill (and five minutes of gently rolling backward), appears to be moving forward again, though not with much gusto. I will go attempt not to pee into my pants or let my pants touch someone else’s pee in the bathroom now, and then I guess it will be time to try to sleep.
We left Singapore at 7:40a this morning, after almost missing our train. It was somewhat stressful to run out of the apartment, take a cab the half mile to Tanjong Pagar train station, gulp down hot tea at the railway terminal, run (literally run) through immigration, and then run down the length of the platform to our first class seats way at the front of the train. The station is old and somewhat worn, unlike seemingly everything else in rich and clean Singapore, and I would have liked to linger in the white waiting room admiring the vaulted ceilings, but there was no time to do so, as we were immediately on our way.
Our seats were comfortable—wide, large, and with plenty of legroom—but not as cheap as I would have expected (about $45 USD, still a very good price for our morning’s eight-hour journey), and they carried a smell of septic solution and mildew. We ate our takeaway parathas and sambar in the restaurant car and I then wrapped my handkerchief (on which I had just wiped my sambar-covered hands) around my face to take away the septic smell. Cynthia and I chatted idly for a few hours, although I can’t remember much of what we talked about. I told her that there was something about my face that made strangers want to tell me their life stories, and she told me that what I said echoed something that Nick Carraway said in the opening pages of The Great Gatsby. She also told me a story about Ling visiting her during a hot spell in Geneva, where Cynthia was interning, and Cynthia not permitting Ling to crack the window (because Cynthia was deathly afraid of Geneva's aggressive spiders) and instead instructing Ling to “lie very still” in order to stay cool - ridiculous, funny, ineffective advice.
Although I tried to dehydrate myself in order to avoid having to use the train toilets, I used the toilets twice. (We are now rolling backward, although apparently nobody else on this train is awake to notice.) Cynthia had lent me a skirt in order to normalize my gender presentation and also to relieve the heat rash that my plastic travel pants had caused on my thighs, and I was afraid that in squatting to use the toilet, I would touch the hem of the skirt against the wet, fragrant surfaces of the washroom. This did happen, the second time around, and I made a noise. When did I get this squeamish? On the way back from the toilet, I noticed that the exit doors were flung open, so I held onto the handrails and leaned out the train into the wind, a totally exhilarating experience that reminded me of being thirteen and on the far rear end of the cruise ship from the Bahamas to Florida, looking out at the dark void of the sea and not so much seeing but feeling and hearing the rush of our progress, and thinking that if I made any slight error, I would be lost into the sea forever. Later I told Cynthia about this, and she said that she would’ve come looking for me had I been gone longer than half an hour. And anyway, dropping off a train in a crowded country is not the same as dropping into the Atlantic Ocean at night, two hundred miles from shore.
Our train arrived at 3:30, an hour past schedule, and after a brief stop so that Singapore immigration control could run its exit procedures. Cynthia pointed out that no other country she could think of controlled the people leaving as well as the people entering its territory. We found the left luggage storage at Sentral KL station and took a cab straightaway to the Petronas Towers. We were unable to ascend to the viewing platform on the connecting gangway on the 41st floor, but nonetheless I was very excited to be outside it and looking up at it. I expected it to be sheathed in some sort of sandstone—I don’t know why; I guess I never looked very closely at the pictures—but instead it is made of large rings of wide gauge steel tubes, stacked up to look like an outdated vision of the future. Each cross section of the towers is composed as such: two superimposed squares, one rotated 45 degrees to the other to create an eight-point star, with small circles centered on each of the four points where the two squares intersection. This creates a perimeter that alternates between sharply angled and rounded edges. The effect is that each cross section looks like a dimpled circle, and there is more surface area, glass, and light inside the building. Apparently this mimics patterns in Islamic art. Cynthia called it Art Deco, but it felt more futuristic noir to me than that appellation could capture. Cynthia sang “The Jetsons” as we walked past it, but she mistook the tune, and sang the Jetsons words to “The Simpsons” melody instead.
After our stop inside the Petronas Towers, we found a Malaysian restaurant in the adjoining high end mall and had curry laksa (me) and asam laksa (Cynthia). True to what I had claimed earlier, our waiter, a well-built and handsomely-featured young man from Kolkata, struck up a conversation with me after we ordered our meal and hung around our table for a few minutes asking about my place of origin, my job, my age, my plans. Cynthia and I whispered to each other about his body movements, because he had a special graceful swagger that immediately caught my attention. Cynthia said, “That never happens to me. Nobody talks to me like they talk to you,” which led us to speculate about the relative friendliness of our faces, Cynthia’s New Yorker distance, and my tendency to look at strangers and smile. But these were temporary distractions, and we forgot about all this and left after finishing our meal.
We had planned to walk around Kuala Lumpur, but we found it nearly impossible to negotiate. First we wanted to take a subway to the colonial center of the city, and we spent ten minutes buying subway tickets, but we were intimidated by the rush hour crowd. (People actually queue up to get on the subway, instead of massing in a free-for-all around each subway door like in the States.) So we left the station and tried to hail a cab, but none would take us for a reasonable price, because traffic was too intense. Then we set about trying to walk there, but traffic was so bad that it took us eight minutes just to cross one particular intersection, and pollution was worse than in Singapore on account of the moped distribution, and it was already near our departure time, so we decided just to hail a cab for the train station. Of course, our cab just stood still for half an hour in the traffic jam. I was nervous; our train was leaving in an hour, and we had made no progress. Finally, we asked the cabbie to drive us one block to the subway station, where we finally just took the subway one stop to the train station. This whole process was again somewhat stressful, though also an adventure, and everything turned out fine, as we got on our train without incident. Although I am perhaps undeservedly proud that I am very good at the mechanics of travel (I can decipher maps and train schedules, orient myself in a city based on the locations of the tall buildings, locate left luggage lockers, and solicit more help from strangers than they are initially willing to give), I hope that my hyperfocus on travel logistics did not intimidate Cynthia or make her feel stressed out.
This is my first time in a sleeper car since 2001, when Deepa and I took a sleeper just like this one from Kannyakumari to Kochi. There were no first class sleeper cars available—those would have put us in an individual cabin, Euro-style, with just two bunks and a washbasin—so instead we are in the second class sleeper train, which is just fine. There are about forty bunks on this car, two bunks per stack on either side of the train. I guess the lower berths can be folded up into seats and the upper berths can be stowed away during the day time, but we won’t find out, as we will be disembarking at Butterworth at 4:30 a.m., when everyone else is presumably still sleeping. The bunks are soft sleepers, and each comes with fresh sheets, a pillow, and curtains for privacy. I don’t trust leaving my luggage on the far side of curtain, so I have been lying in bed with my backpack, my shoulder bag, and my day bag lined up alongside me like a companion. When we boarded, we thought we would be staying in a car full of soldiers. There were a dozen men in camouflage uniforms hauling bags off the bunks. Several of them had assault rifles; one man had three slung over his shoulder. I told Cynthia that there would be nothing we could do to avoid being killed in a hail of rifle fire, should it come to that, but the soldiers appeared to be leaving. Anyway, they don’t seem to be on this ride to Butterworth.
For the first two hours of this ride, two children were running back and forth this car screaming with delight, so that the Doppler effect from the world outside my window was being echoed in the crescendo and decrescendo of these kids as they ran past. Now people appear to have settled in for the night. Almost all the curtains are drawn, and I can hear that someone else is playing Solitaire on a laptop, and someone else is watching a DVD at a low volume. I contemplated masturbation about two hours ago, but was deterred by the thin sheet separating me and forty of my best friends. Now it is 1:20 a.m., and I have eaten an entire box of orange-flavored Tic Tacs, the most delicious meal substitute available in southeast Asia. This train, after a fifty minute standstill (and five minutes of gently rolling backward), appears to be moving forward again, though not with much gusto. I will go attempt not to pee into my pants or let my pants touch someone else’s pee in the bathroom now, and then I guess it will be time to try to sleep.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
singapore
In the 48 hours since landing in Singapore, I have eaten: baked scallops, raw salmon spring rolls, deep fried white fish strips, a cocktail called Gingerbread Man and a shot of Johnnie Walker Black Label, four Asian pears, seven chocolate covered macadamia nuts, roast duck with egg noodles and Chinese broccoli, a green tea drink, two cups of kopi (espresso coffee as pronounced in Singlish), pickled mango on a stick, starfruit on a stick, a mangosteen, winter melon drink, laksa (which is like a Malaysian coconut-based noodle soup with fried tofu and clams and other such deliciousness inside), a cup of golden kiwi juice, a cup of Thai young coconut water with coconut meat slices, a vegetarian zongzi, fried doughballs with octopus, ham and cheese, and shrimp inside and all smothered in kewpie mayo and some brown liquid and dried fish flakes, a wedge of light Laughing Cow cheese, three glasses of German chardonnay, half of a mushroom and leek flammkuchen, half of a potato and sauerkraut flammkuchen, chrysanthemum tea with honey, noodles with ribs, some other noodle soup dish with very salty deep fried squid bits, a yogurt drink, a box of grape-flavored pastilles, toast with kaya (coconut jam) and thick slices of unmelted butter, soft-boiled egg with white pepper and dark soy sauce, braised beef over rice with oxtail broth and hot sauce for dipping, a deviled egg, Belgian cheese, mackerel on toast, onion rings, a slice of salami, and 330ml of Leffe.
I find it totally refreshing to be sweating and porking in hot tropic Asia. The muggy haze and the confusing streets and lively markets and endless eating feels familiar to me even if I am perceived as a transgender-sandal wearing, truck-built outsider. My last day in Australia, I felt like an autumn leaf being blown this way and that in an unpredictable wind. After a very long and very productive video chat with my dear sweet bun, I set off to wander around Sydney. Stores were shut because it was already late on a Sunday night, so I walked into one place that was open - a convenience store, to buy some souvenir license plates with friends' names on them - and ended up having a forty-five minute conversation with the cashier, a Jordanian man named Abraham, about how poorly he felt white Australians ("Uzis," he called them) treated people of color. He called the Uzis "close-minded, like villagers," because they were so isolated from the rest of the world, and mocked their "three television stations and four newspapers" that only report "woman eaten by crocodile, kangaroo car crash, the weather is so hot." I felt sympathy for gregarious, gesticulating Abraham and stayed chatting with him even as Uzis lined up to slap down their funny money in exchange for bottled water, and tried to disabuse him of his fantasy of America as a promised land of racial harmony where white people actually perceive people of color as fellows rather than as imported labor, as apparently white Aussies do. Abraham sucked a pint of milk through a straw as we drank. Then, after a scary night walk on the Sydney Harbour Bridge pedestrian walkway, I found myself at McDonald's at midnight, siphoning free wifi, and getting chingchong'd and slanty-eyed by a group of German 18-22 year olds. I said, "Are you talking to me?" when they did this, and then muttered a "Stupid!" in their direction, but otherwise I just felt helpless and foreign in even 40% immigrant Sydney, and then I knew it was time to leave.
Thanks to the international date line, celebrations for my 29th birthday started at 11 a.m. EST on September 28, and have continued for two days. This is the closet to the equator I have been and I have prickly heat rash at my elbow and on my thighs, so I have taken to wearing (around Cynthia's house, at least) the sarong that Connie mocked me for buying in Cairns and smearing Tiger Balm on the bumpy itchy parts of me. I'm broader of shoulder than every woman here; yesterday, when I ordered my roast duck with noodles, the man at the register repeated a sentence several times to me. It took me a few seconds to decipher to the Singlish. He was saying, "You like a-sport, ah?" which then put me in the position of repeating a sentence in return: "Oh, no sport, the muscles are natural, the muscles are natural." Since sodomy is illegal here, or so Cynthia says, I decided it was time to switch my sports sandals into something more Asia-appropriate, and then I made it my mission yesterday to buy a passably feminine Asian woman outfit during my circular wanderings around four square blocks of the Raffles Place region. (It took me two hours to locate Cynthia's office building because I was unable to cross the street.) But lesbian habits are hard to break, and instead of buying girly things I bought 1) a white necktie, 2) a USB cable, and 3) a cargo shoulder bag that prompted Cynthia to say, "Oh, that looks...comfortable."
Cynthia rates bonds for a very large credit risk researching organization, so she lives and works in the western parts of Singapore. Of the country, she says, "Nothing out of the ordinary ever happens here." I think this means that she prefers her cities a little riskier than Singapore, where people are more obedient and similarly-dressed than in a messy froth like New York. I have liked so far that Singapore is very diverse, at least for Asian faces, and the subway announcements are in English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil. Cynthia also says that Singapore is nearly a mature economy, which I guess means there are less squat toilets here than one would expect, and also that there are giant air-conditioned shopping complexes where one can buy a very expensive Louis Vuitton purse and then descend five steps on an unnecessary escalator and then buy a very expensive Salvatore Ferragamo - oh, whatever it is that that store sells.
This evening we took a whirl on the Singapore Flyer. It is the world's largest Ferris wheel at 540 feet high. It is built like a bicycle wheel, with cable spokes coming off a central hub to a wide rim; this way the spokes disappear at night and the rim, which is lit up like a Christmas tree, floats in the sky as a standalone ring. Viewed from a distance from this glowing, gigantic circle looks like some sort of signal to other life forms that humans are peaceful, beauty-seeking, and technologically advanced beyond your wildest alien fantasies. You sit in pods that hold about 20 each for a slow half hour churn around the circumference. Constance, how awful that after our hunt for Ferris wheels in three cities, I should find it here! I wish you were here.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
jenolan caves
I am in Katoomba, a freezing mountain town 100km west of Sydney. I have come to chase the blues away. Last night, I stayed up until 2 a.m. chatting with Sonia, and then followed our mutual agreement with one ear cocked to make sure the snoring from the Canadian in the next bunk over remained unbroken, and then fell into some sort of half-sleep, half-waking dream state until it was time to rush to the grocery store for yogurt and then rush back to the hostel for the bus trip to the Jenolan Caves.
On the way there, I put in my headphones and listened mostly to Queen and then a little bit to Marvin Gaye and James Brown. I’ve been traveling already for over a month, and I have learned so many facts, useless facts, facts about founding dates and founders and hotel draperies, facts that crowd out my marginally more useful knowledge of judicial estoppel and how to tie overhand knots and the number of bushels in a peck. One fact that entered my head today, and will be gone by tomorrow, was that a man by the name of McEwen escaped the penal colony and lived in the Jenolan caves region for ten years, until he emerged to steal a horse. Then he was pursued by the authorities and he decided, instead of surrendering, to ride himself and his stolen horse off a thousand foot ledge now called Govett’s Leap. Or something like that—I didn’t want to pause for too long from Freddie’s voice, so I only occasionally tuned into the bus driver’s commentary.
We passed by a non-functioning Volkswagen Bug that had been painted pastel colors and bore a sign reading “LOLLY STORE.” Morrissey came on my headphones and, for the second time this trip, made me laugh aloud. He is describing a horrible seaside town where it is silent and gray every day, where your clothes were stolen, a place that they forgot to shut down, wondering why Armageddon passed by this place, and then he invites you, “Come, come, you’d be appalled."* Everybody, give “Every Day is Like Sunday” and “The Last of the International Playboys” (“I never wanted to kill / I am not naturally evil / Such things I do make myself more attractive to you / Have I failed?”) a fresh listen.
The drive to Jenolan Caves was frightening, down a winding road next to a cliff that had blind curves and only enough room for one car. The driver laid down on the horn every time we went around such a curve, but I didn’t believe that our tooting would be enough to stop a coach coming in the opposite direction from caroming into our front end should it drive in any way besides the most prudent. For this section of the ride, I looked down the cliff to the side, and focused on Freddie. We made it just fine.
I did two ninety minute guided tours, one of Lucas cave, the other of Orient cave. Another useful fact that I have learned is that the limestone in these caves were created from the fossils and chum and coral and exoskeletons on the sea bed being pressed with mud by the weight of the ocean into sedimentary rock, a process called diagenisis. Then the oceans receded, and streams came in and cut away the softer bits of this rock, and the caves in which generations of tourists have hit their heads on such cantilevered bits as “Head Rock” and “Concussion Rock” were thusly formed, 450 million years ago. Other than this—it’s very dry in Australia; I’m very dehydrated; I had a headache all day; so I remember almost nothing else of the tours except for the impressions that the formations left in the part of my brain used for visual processing. I snapped blurry, uninteresting photos and scribbled madly into my memo pad these nonsense words, all in a stream: “Head Rock, Concussion Rock, House of the Tooth Fairy, The Bishop, I am surrounded by vulvae, shawl rock, Cleopatra’s Asp, petrified forest, Hercules’ pillar, sparkling that cannot be located, kangaroos and emus cannot walk backward, skin tags, flowing, droopy, rippling, melting, popcorn, crystal, shawl, clear, muddy, columns, helactites, stacks, nativity scene, cones, rim pools, ripples, cupolas, holes, ruts, pits, sheets, slides, boulders, canyons, pancake batter, ochre, turkey, kangaroo’s backside, tonsils, curtains, baleens, orange, translucent, Medusa.” This is a shopping list for the best fucking party in the world; come, come, you’d be appalled.
A Japanese woman befriended me and we had lunch together and made small talk and took photographs for each other and walked near each other in the caves. On the bus, two Aussie women from Newcastle whom I suspected buttered each other’s toast if you know what I mean (I mean lesbifriends) befriended the two of us and told me a story about the minor scandal when Belinda Neal, the wife of some important minister, made a ruckus in a restaurant when she didn’t get seated as she wanted. She actually said, “Don’t you know who I am?" Sonic directed my attention yesterday to the clip of Ernie Anastos saying “Keep fucking that chicken!”, so I am up to date now on the viral hits on both sides of the Pacific.
We all sat up front on the equally hair-raising bus ride back up the winding route and the two Aussies and the bus driver took turns exchanging quips and lusty cackling. The ride back to Katoomba sounded like this: “A coach bus is a smoother ride than a minibus. So – size does matter!” “Ah ah ah ah ah!” “Another coach driver, poor guy, drove a minister down to the caves and halfway down a woman in the back started screaming hysterically. Poor driver was sweating all the way down!” “Ah ah ah ah ah!” “We made it to the top! Drinks on me!” “Ah ah ah ah!” “I like the adrenaline rush, don’t you?” “Adrenaline? Ah ah ah ah!” I fell asleep to this and woke myself up with whimpering.
* A Google search reveals the lyric actually to be, "Come, come, nuclear bomb." Morrissey is inviting bombs to erase this pitiful resort. Still I prefer my version of these misheard lyrics.
On the way there, I put in my headphones and listened mostly to Queen and then a little bit to Marvin Gaye and James Brown. I’ve been traveling already for over a month, and I have learned so many facts, useless facts, facts about founding dates and founders and hotel draperies, facts that crowd out my marginally more useful knowledge of judicial estoppel and how to tie overhand knots and the number of bushels in a peck. One fact that entered my head today, and will be gone by tomorrow, was that a man by the name of McEwen escaped the penal colony and lived in the Jenolan caves region for ten years, until he emerged to steal a horse. Then he was pursued by the authorities and he decided, instead of surrendering, to ride himself and his stolen horse off a thousand foot ledge now called Govett’s Leap. Or something like that—I didn’t want to pause for too long from Freddie’s voice, so I only occasionally tuned into the bus driver’s commentary.
We passed by a non-functioning Volkswagen Bug that had been painted pastel colors and bore a sign reading “LOLLY STORE.” Morrissey came on my headphones and, for the second time this trip, made me laugh aloud. He is describing a horrible seaside town where it is silent and gray every day, where your clothes were stolen, a place that they forgot to shut down, wondering why Armageddon passed by this place, and then he invites you, “Come, come, you’d be appalled."* Everybody, give “Every Day is Like Sunday” and “The Last of the International Playboys” (“I never wanted to kill / I am not naturally evil / Such things I do make myself more attractive to you / Have I failed?”) a fresh listen.
The drive to Jenolan Caves was frightening, down a winding road next to a cliff that had blind curves and only enough room for one car. The driver laid down on the horn every time we went around such a curve, but I didn’t believe that our tooting would be enough to stop a coach coming in the opposite direction from caroming into our front end should it drive in any way besides the most prudent. For this section of the ride, I looked down the cliff to the side, and focused on Freddie. We made it just fine.
I did two ninety minute guided tours, one of Lucas cave, the other of Orient cave. Another useful fact that I have learned is that the limestone in these caves were created from the fossils and chum and coral and exoskeletons on the sea bed being pressed with mud by the weight of the ocean into sedimentary rock, a process called diagenisis. Then the oceans receded, and streams came in and cut away the softer bits of this rock, and the caves in which generations of tourists have hit their heads on such cantilevered bits as “Head Rock” and “Concussion Rock” were thusly formed, 450 million years ago. Other than this—it’s very dry in Australia; I’m very dehydrated; I had a headache all day; so I remember almost nothing else of the tours except for the impressions that the formations left in the part of my brain used for visual processing. I snapped blurry, uninteresting photos and scribbled madly into my memo pad these nonsense words, all in a stream: “Head Rock, Concussion Rock, House of the Tooth Fairy, The Bishop, I am surrounded by vulvae, shawl rock, Cleopatra’s Asp, petrified forest, Hercules’ pillar, sparkling that cannot be located, kangaroos and emus cannot walk backward, skin tags, flowing, droopy, rippling, melting, popcorn, crystal, shawl, clear, muddy, columns, helactites, stacks, nativity scene, cones, rim pools, ripples, cupolas, holes, ruts, pits, sheets, slides, boulders, canyons, pancake batter, ochre, turkey, kangaroo’s backside, tonsils, curtains, baleens, orange, translucent, Medusa.” This is a shopping list for the best fucking party in the world; come, come, you’d be appalled.
A Japanese woman befriended me and we had lunch together and made small talk and took photographs for each other and walked near each other in the caves. On the bus, two Aussie women from Newcastle whom I suspected buttered each other’s toast if you know what I mean (I mean lesbifriends) befriended the two of us and told me a story about the minor scandal when Belinda Neal, the wife of some important minister, made a ruckus in a restaurant when she didn’t get seated as she wanted. She actually said, “Don’t you know who I am?" Sonic directed my attention yesterday to the clip of Ernie Anastos saying “Keep fucking that chicken!”, so I am up to date now on the viral hits on both sides of the Pacific.
We all sat up front on the equally hair-raising bus ride back up the winding route and the two Aussies and the bus driver took turns exchanging quips and lusty cackling. The ride back to Katoomba sounded like this: “A coach bus is a smoother ride than a minibus. So – size does matter!” “Ah ah ah ah ah!” “Another coach driver, poor guy, drove a minister down to the caves and halfway down a woman in the back started screaming hysterically. Poor driver was sweating all the way down!” “Ah ah ah ah ah!” “We made it to the top! Drinks on me!” “Ah ah ah ah!” “I like the adrenaline rush, don’t you?” “Adrenaline? Ah ah ah ah!” I fell asleep to this and woke myself up with whimpering.
* A Google search reveals the lyric actually to be, "Come, come, nuclear bomb." Morrissey is inviting bombs to erase this pitiful resort. Still I prefer my version of these misheard lyrics.
emails from dad
Recent emails from Dad, all within the subject heading instead of the body of the message:
love , thanks this makes my day... love you...love
...lov....lo...l........Re: doing great!
we're doing just fine... neve argue... except mom's blood pressure shot up
at 155 Sunday at stockton ca, need input/idea to lower it.. . please send if you
have..: doing great!
dear, .... mom and i went to the same zoo last time..it the view on the
ferry boat was beautiful...the zoo was quiet ... animals are gorgeous...
beautifulRe: doing great!
Re: doing great! please don't go hiking at blue mountain.. it's not
everywhere! please think of you parents...brother...
"get the heart rate up" got you... the best advice... i've started to hold
the dog leach so mom can walk much faster, swinging her arms too.. thanks,...
love you..your mom will live 107 years old...Re: mom , love you... your both
your heart and letter are so warm and beautiful ... love you all, i'm the
happiest man in the world...Re: doing great!
Thursday, September 24, 2009
vhy are ve vearing vetsuits?
Connie left yesterday. We spent much of the last day speaking with fake German accents, which really just meant repeating the phrase "Vhy are ve vearing vetsuits?" a thousand times and saying, "Oh, vatch out!" when crossing the street. We told each other's fortunes by directing each other to point to random sections of the Gideon Bible in our hotel room. Mine was Deuteronomy 11:30: "Are they not on the other side of the Jordan, toward the setting sun, in the land of the Canaanites who dwell in the plain opposite Gigal, besides the Terebinith trees of Morah?" (Awesome that my fortune is to be in Lord of the Rings!!) Everywhere we went, we declared ourselves co-queens of the place. I flexed in front of a mirror wearing no pants and told Connie I had the body of a Greek god, an Adonis, a Roman god, a Roman soldier, and that I had the kind of physique that would have been killed by a spear, and Connie turned away from me and said that she wouldn't dignify my behavior with an audience. I was whining on about being tired and Connie said suddenly, "I am awesome! God! I'm awesome." She had been ignoring me completely and had just finished threading a string through the hood of her hoodie. Connie also recalled the entire plot of the Twilight series to me over the course of ninety minutes, sparing few details. Renesmee? Really, Stephanie Meyer?
In Connie's last ninety minutes in Sydney, we sat down at the bar on the harbor next to the Opera House and drank three champagnes and three beers and attempted to write a journal entry together. Then we staggered through Hyde Park and videotaped ourselves singing and dancing along to the chorus of Rihanna's "S.O.S.", which Connie had been steadily choreographing ever since we arrived in Australia. Connie split her pants open on "It's not healthy for me to feel this way." There was an 18" tear down the ass seam of her beloved gray jeans but it was worth it for the awesomeness. I am alone in Sydney for five days and missing the split pants off of Connie.
This is the journal entry we wrote together. The subjectivity keeps changing because Connie and I alternated writing it:
In Connie's last ninety minutes in Sydney, we sat down at the bar on the harbor next to the Opera House and drank three champagnes and three beers and attempted to write a journal entry together. Then we staggered through Hyde Park and videotaped ourselves singing and dancing along to the chorus of Rihanna's "S.O.S.", which Connie had been steadily choreographing ever since we arrived in Australia. Connie split her pants open on "It's not healthy for me to feel
This is the journal entry we wrote together. The subjectivity keeps changing because Connie and I alternated writing it:
Things we have done since Melbourne
We had a day of travel from Melbourne to Cairns. We stayed in one hostel in Cairns for four days, the Tropic Days. There was a bulldog that looked like a wombat. Charges were applied for every amenity, including air conditioning by the hour. There was a horrible mean bitch woman who was really condescending to us and a Dutch woman. Our first night in Cairns we went to a place called Bull Bar for beer and food and a terribly loud drunk Australian band, and then Woolshed. About Woolshed, Lonely Planet wrote, “If you can’t get laid in Woolshed, you will probably never get laid.” The LP also described the Sydney Harbour (sp?) Bridge as a coathanger that might give you a spook. We both thought this was stupid. Today, Wednesday September 23, 2009 is Connie’s last day in Australia. It is making me very sad. We went to the Australian museum in the morning and then went looking for donuts that gave me instant diarrhea. “Dude, non-white kids are so cute,” Connie has just said. The museum was interesting. People’s sisters (like Kylie Minogue’s sister and Nicole Kidman’s sister) are stars here because there are only 20 million people in the country. We own this country. The animals in this country are insane because they shit in cubes like the wombat. We started saying “suck my dick” to each other and then gesturing lewdly toward our crotches. We bought kangaroo boxing pens and made them box. Also, Connie will announce to her stepmom, “I love you” using the kangaroo boxer to emphasize words.
Yesterday we walked very slowly to the Opera House. Then we walked very slowly to the Museum of Contemporary Art. Then we went on a ferry. Then monorail. Then Japanese noodles at ichiban because Jimmy’s Malaysian was closed.
Over dinner, Connie posed a series of horrible hypothetical questions to me, such as “Would you rather give up rice or wheat?” and “Would you rather give up rice-based foods or all foods shaped like noodles?” Then we went to Kinokuniya, which is a huge bookstore with lots of Asian language books. I bought a music box for Raj. Then we hid from a thunderstorm and attempted to find Starbucks. Although we might have been directed to “Star Bar,” by the fobby people we asked, there was actually a Starbucks across the street from "Star Bar." Then we journaled separately for an hour. Then we walked very slowly back to the hotel, where Connie fell asleep and I went to an internet café to research lesbian bar options. Connie and I are lesbifriends. We say to each other, “We are lesbifriends,” and, "Hey, les be friends, okay?" Sonia was online and we chatted for half an hour, which put me in a state of bliss.
Mandy hates Germans. She is very good at a French accent. “JJ, ni zai na li?” It’s really cool that Sydneysiders hang out everywhere outdoors, including right in front of the Opera House. We devised a system for crossing the street where we look on our side and say “clear.” Some times we have said “Woah, NOT clear!” But generally we are co-queens of this country. When one of us says “This country sucks” we mean that we are hungry. Then we find food immediately and one of us says, “I guess this place is pretty cool, huh?” I start work in 5 days!
Our last day in Cairns we got $.50 cones from McDonalds. We had an enjoyable lay in the shade until Connie screamed because there was an ant on her arm. We recreated photos from Connie’s lost camera in the Thai restaurant where we ate lunch, including Connie snorkeling and me eating the king-sized Twix bar. Yesterday I took off my shirt on the monorail because from one stop to the next nobody was riding in the car. Anyway back in Cairns, all we did was shuffle from spot to spot. We went to a mall where the teens go, and then the Green Ant Cantina where we were the only customers but the cashier still insisted that we take that little number clamped to a stand that Australians use in lieu of waiters. We had a kangaroo burger and prawn fajitas and then dashed to the hostel.
Mandy has been talking to me about Sonia nonstop but I ignore her. Mandy jumped off the pier at Fitzroy Island and looked like an uncoordinated orangutan. Right now I am drinking Opera House Brut and Mands is drinking Bees Knees (or whatever it’s called). It was 30 degrees yesterday and today it’s about 22. We’ve been using my calculator watch to figure out the conversion. We are both extremely scared of the sun right now. There are tons of Asian people here. We decided that pandas are a zillion times better than koalas. MASTER RACE BITCHES! This country is a poor imitation of others.
Today because we were so scared of the sun, I wore a surgeon’s mask and sunglasses and pulled up my hood, and Connie wore my bandana tied around her face and sunglasses and pulled up her hood, and then we walked around Sydney with our coats zipped up. We looked like Unabombers. Connie told me a story about her high school friend who aspirated his Hs and chose “Hwhat?!” as his tagline his yearbook, but the yearbook editors thought it was a typo so his high school yearbook quote is just “What.” And then she told me a story about Sarah freaking out about seeing two of the same pair of earmuffs. I tried on a sarong dress and Constance cut off the top of my head in the picture she was taking because she was laughing so hard. The man at the New South Wales state parliament building started singing the Star Spangled Banner when I said I was American, and his friend called him an idiot. Sometimes state parliamentarians wear wigs but not much any more. Connie says I smile all blissed out when reading emails from Sonia, and I say that she gets that way when thinking about Vanilla Coke. Connie first didn’t want any of my Vanilla Coke, but when I said, “Mm, this Vanilla Coke is delicious!” she thought for a moment, and then said, “Okay, give me a sip.” Connie is very responsive to advertising.
Everything is a lawsuit in this country. A rat can bite people through a gap in the display case, and there’s just a little sticker that says “Rat will bite!” Also on the Opera House steps children can climb on the side of the steps and fall to their death. Mandy LOVED the Great Barrier Reef. She was waving her arms around and looked like a kid in the biggest candy store in the world in the middle of Disneyland. Mandy thinks that doing the Australian accent just requires sticking out her front teeth farther but she is dead wrong. We keep saying “Yah, yah” which is a line from Blood Diamond. In Cairns, Koaland was our North Star. Mandy has been washing her hair with dish soap.
I washed my hair with Connie’s shampoo and conditioner yesterday and today she has marveled at the quality of my hair. “You have really nice hair!” she keeps saying, as if surprised. She said I could be a Pantene Pro V model, with a before and after. “I used to wash my hair with dish soap!” she says, modeling the commercial that I would star in. Connie and I have been calling each other “Stupid!” and “Idiot!” and saying “Shut up!” to each other, but in a loving affectionate way. She made me take the love language quizzes in the Cairns hostel except I didn’t get reception in our stupid German-voice-capturing room so I had to hold the laptop up over my head near the window and take the quiz. The quiz’s questions are impossible to answer, because they’re like, “Would you rather breathe air, or drink water?” Connie accused me of not taking it seriously. In the end our love language needs are the same except Connie values physical touch more and I value emails from Sonia more.
It’s three drinks later! Yeah, bitches! Partytime! Whoo hoo! Suck my dick! (Just kidding.) Mandy went to the bathroom. Now she’s coming back.
Constance says, “When I get excited, I produce a lot of saliva.” This is why when we stood at the front of the boat back from the Great Barrier Reef for ninety minutes trying to balance while doing the Muppet dance, she said “This is so pppfffun!!!” and spat all over me. When she got on the ocean trampoline, she screamed, “This is so much fun!!!!!” involuntarily and made the people around us laugh. Bazz the kayak guide who might have stolen Connie’s camera said the water I was jumping off the pier into was “deep enough” and then threw in a half chewed pizza crust, saying, “Here, let’s attract some fish first.”
vulcan high five
Sorry not to have posted in a while. Connie and I have been busy being idiots in Australia. In lieu of a blogpost, you get my diary.
Thursday, September 17, 2009, 10:48am
Waiting at Tullamarine Airport for our flight to Cairns
This is what we have done in the last few days. We got in on Monday at 10:45am after a fourteen hour flight from Los Angeles followed by a two hour flight from Sydney. On the fourteen hour flight, Connie and I watched Star Trek, the best movie on the planet, and devised a special Vulcan high five to celebrate Starfleet victories. We learned that the in-flight entertainment system permitted IMming between seats, and Connie wrote me immediately to say, “God these kids are so annoying.” There were six kids sitting next to us. We slept, and also played cards. I had told Sonia about my plan to surprise Connie with the $4.99 pack of cards that I had refused to buy from the newsstand. Sonia had said, “What is the point of your performance?” Art, Cup!!! The point was to entertain Connie, and it worked.
Waiting for our flight at Sydney, I found a discarded Daily Telegraph and we read it and learned about Australian culture, which is exactly the same as American culture except in their version of football the ball has rounded ends, and about Serena Williams’ outburst against the line judge in the semifinals of the U.S. Open. We have so far repeated the phrase “If I could, I would shove this fucking tennis ball down your fucking throat and kill you” thousands of times, and taken pictures of ourselves posing with tennis ball packages at W Mart saying the same.
We took the shuttle in from Tullamarine to the city, saying that we had spent a thousand dollars and taken a fourteen hour plane ride to land in Missouri. I am convinced that the fourteen hours in flight we just circled over the Midwest before touching down in St. Louis. We ate soft serves at Hungry Jack’s, which is Burger King. I just looked over at Connie just now and told her that my bowel movements were “All or nothing,” meaning I have been drinking lots of milk trying to induce diarrhea since apparently I can purge no other way. Connie method of dealing with me has been to ignore me, which I just think is funny. She has pointed out that I say “Stupid!” in a disdainful tone of voice about Richard quiet a lot, which I do, and which is surprising to Connie because I am careful not to express disdain about the other people in my life. I do this to Richard when he says genuinely stupid things, like when talking about a Victoria’s Secret model who apparently has "not only a perfect body but a really cute face too." I like that when I said “Stupid!” about this particular comment, he insisted that I look before I judge, as if I called him stupid because I disbelieved his assessment of her hotness rather than because he was being a stupid gross boy (and in front of his girlfriend, too!).
Anyway, let me recount our activities before I forget. On Monday, we first dropped off our stuff at Richard and Aimee’s apartment right in the central business district. They live in a nice new apartment building with a small pool and gym and central heating and carpeting and other nice things. They had bought a bed at Ikea just for me and Connie, which was really sweet of them. Richard’s apartment was full of Gloomy toys that Richard had won at a midway arcade in Sydney. [Incidentally, I just went to this arcade and lost $5 trying to win a digital camera to replace Powershot. Sorry I didn't get it, Con!] Connie and I posed pretending to eat their giant plush hamburger, their giant plush ramen box, and their giant plush yang le duo. Our favorite activity thus far has been posing like idiots and taking photos next to statues, sculptures, signs, etc. Then we had sandwiches at the café down the street from the apartment. I learned that a "flat white" is milk with a drop of espresso in it. Then we walked down through the tiny CBD, to the library to see Ned Kelly’s armor (Ned Kelly being an asshole who killed three cops and made armor out of ploughboards and then became a figure of heroic libertarian antiauthoritarianism), to Chinatown for a pearl milk tea, to Flinders Street Station, to Federation Square, to Richard’s dental office. Along the way, Richard acted as a tour guide and made pronouncements, a third of which were informative, a third of which were wrong (such as his declaration that Max Brenner was a Sydney shop), and a third of which were just plain crazy (such as making up shit about deadly “drop bears” that drop from branches onto the heads of unsuspecting, gullible tourists).
Richard no longer does drill-and-fill dentistry but orthodontics now. [ . . . ] Richard strapped our heads into a standing x-ray kiosk and took three-dimensional x-rays of our heads that produced many creepy and wonderful images, such as colored 3D images of our skulls and bones that could be scrolled through like a Google map. Richard talked to Connie for a long time about the source of her jaw pain. He noted that Connie’s TMJs are unevenly spaced. He then looked at my x-rays and said that we have the same problem with the collapsed arch at the front of our upper jaws, and pointed out that my sinuses are “huge,” occupying much of the space where my brain should be. The roots of my molars poke up into my sinuses, actually. There was a set of toy teeth that chattered when wound up. It had feet.
We then walked to the top of the Shrine of Remembrance. Richard complained that the walk was “Really, really far away, like thirty minutes.” It was half a mile and about ten minutes away from his workplace. Richard also wanted to take a tram four blocks down LaTrobe street to his apartment, because the road was “uphill.” Richard is the O.G. lazy fucker; I realize this is why Oliver seems so familiar to me, because he is just like my brother! At the Shrine, we tried to decipher the three flags on the flagpoles, then we stood at attention while the Australian flag came down. The hapless soldier first allowed the flag to drap in an undignified, curtain-like manner over his head, and then to drag on the ground. Some French people failed to stay silent and stand for the flag ceremony, which caused Richard to curse at them in Chinese. Richard says “we” when he means Australia. I think it just means that he is proud to live here.
It was so sweet and nice that we hung out for three days, and that Richard had prepared the room and had specially bought wines for me and Connie to try, and that he wanted to show us all his pictures from New Zealand and the videos of the Japanese spitz they had for four weeks, and take us through his daily life on Google Maps’ street view of Sydney, and that he shared his special peatsmoke-infused expensive whiskeys. I also find Richard really funny, such as when was making fun of a post-pregnancy, newly-fat Kimora Lee Simmons by calling her “gravid,” which describes lobsters who carry egg sacs around their exoskeletons, and appreciate that we actually have similar tastes and experiences (such as when he sings “I have no legs” and I can follow up by making the sound of coins rattling around a can, a Kids reference). He also told me that he remembered the day that we heard the news that our grandfather died, and how Mom was leaning against the wall crying and Dad was crying hysterically. This was 1983, so I don’t remember any of it, but he was almost six then, so his memory is better. He also remembered them crying about Tiananmen Square. We have actually shared a lot as siblings even though we have not been in the same place in a few years. [ . . . ] Connie and I have been talking about the best strategy for convincing Richard that two more years of school is not a prohibitive reason not to move back to America. I have been applying the Hu method of criticism (e.g. "Stop being stupid and move back to America"), but Connie suggests less vinegar, more sugar. It was nice also to spend time with Aimee, whom I like because she laughs at every single thing I say, and because she is really generous with her time and did incredibly thoughtful things like pack us food for our day trip and wake up earlier to cook dan bing for us.
Back to the recollection of the days. On Monday, after the Shrine, we took a tram back to their apartment. I had to ask for change from a stranger since the ticket machine did not take bills, so I applied my Yankee charm and confessed to being a stupid tourist. I am holding up my end of the bargain I struck with Connie: she makes travel decisions, I talk to strangers. We relaxed in the apartment for a bit watching some television, and then walked past Victoria market to get Korean barbecue. We crashed.
On Tuesday, we woke around 4:30a and slept fitfully until 6, and then had breakfast with Richard and Aimee. Aimee steamed us chao shao baos – more thoughtfulness! After they left, Connie and I ventured out to find Pancake Parlour, which we had difficulty finding because it was on Bourke Street, not Little Bourke Street, which was labeled “Lt. Bourke Street,” which Connie and I both thought was Bourke Street because we just assumed that Bourke had been a lieutenant. At Pancake Parlour, we had Ragu sauced poured into a pancake that cost us $30. Then we walked down the Yarra River, a closed Ferris Wheel, and then the Melbourne Cricket Ground. There we posed as cricket bowlers and batters, and then tried to charm our way into the stadium (failing), and then proceeded to touch every single thing in the gift shop, including stressball versions of cricket balls and Australian footballs, giant pencils, loser team jerseys, and keychains. We grilled the cashier about who to root for for the upcoming finals. I have chosen the Bulldogs because the other team, the Pies (Magpies), is the Yankees of Australian football.
Then we met Richard for lunch. We went to his workplace, which was very busy. I liked seeing Richard in his business wear, but I criticized him for his pineapple hair, which made him a little prickly (HAHAHA). I saw him leaning down and talking to a little boy about orthodontics, which I liked. I said to the receptionists, “I am here to see Dr. Richard Hu…my brother!” and everyone laughed. We had Thai food that gave me diarrhea in forty minutes. In those forty minutes, Connie and I walked to the Victoria markets and bought fruit. Then we went back to the apartment. Connie fell asleep and I had diarrhea and then watched half of The Fellowship of the Ring, and then all of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and remembered the very important role that franchise played in forming my curiosity about the world and about travel and my romantic but completely unrealistic expectations for the weirdness of faraway cultures. Richard and Aimee came home, and we watched Twilight, with Richard making disdainful comments about having butt sex with Edward Cullen. It was his way of expressing displeasure about Aimee’s crush on Robert Pattinson. He also muttered, "Why didn't I delete this movie?" right when Edward Cullen and Bella started to suck face. I realized that that movie is terrible but perfect, and I instructed Richard to pay attention because that movie represented everything that a woman wants, including a lover whose desire for you so overwhelms him that he shakes and furrows his brow when he finally kisses you. Later, Aimee was singing along to the Iron and Wine song, and from the toilet, Richard called out a low, reprimanding, “Aimee.” This was very funny. We ate noodles and crepes, and then bought a pillow from W mart and came home to sleep.
On Wednesday, yesterday, Connie and I did a twelve hour nausea tour of rocks along the Pacific Coast Highway a.k.a. the Great Ocean Road. A nice Irish woman named Imelda whom I was sure was going to elope with Peter our tour guide gave me a tab of ginger to ease my roiling stomach, and the LA girls sitting behind us gave me two ibuprofen tabs to help me with my sinus headache. Connie says I am hypochrondriac and that learning that I have huge sinuses has made me believe I have sinusitis, but it is true that I have sinusitis. The views were spectacular in exactly the same way that views along all of the California coast are spectacular, so Connie and I grumbled all day about this. We counted time by saying, “It is now 11 a.m., and we have an entire workday of nausea ahead of us” or “It’s noon, so it’s as if we have just finished reading nytimes.com for the first time in the workday and we still have a workdaylong of nausea ahead of us.” We continued in our tradition of taking idiotic pictures and complaining. I did a b-boy freeze on a post and Connie pretended to eat two of the Twelve Apostles. Connie paid $3.90 AUD for a Sprite. I told her about my “What the fuck!?” reaction I had to the first time I had an orgasm, which she thought was extremely funny. We returned to Melbourne at 8p, bought wine and Jack Squire porter (pretty good! No head, though) for Richard and then half-assedly watched Blood Diamond with Richard and Aimee and did Aimee’s MASH for her (Brooklyn, Brad Pitt, three children, one of which will be named “Panda”). We watched video footage from Richard and Aimee doing their bungee jumps in New Zealand, and laughed at Richard’s rag doll fall off the ledge and Aimee’s screaming. Richard poured out two wines and a whiskey for us to try.
Today I took a jog around Flagstaff Gardens while Connie woke up, and then we got ourselves to the airport. We got here two hours early, and I have been writing and drinking milk in an effort to induce diarrhea.
I have also discovered that there is no Dr. Pepper in this country so the pepperoni pizza Combos I bought in LAX are still going unpaired with their perfect complement.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
kimora
Richard is describing Kimora Lee Simmons being fat as "gravid," like a lobster. Lobsters that are gravid are pregnant with egg sacs around their abdomens. Now he is telling us about a documentary he saw about it and is acting out lobsters dancing on the beach and shaking out their eggs.
MASH on the great ocean road
Here in Melbourne at Richard and Aimee's for only a few more hours. I will blog more about C and me getting our heads 3D x-rayed by Dr. Richard on the first day and discovering that my sinuses occupy roughly one third of the volume of my head, repeating the phrase "If I could, I would take this fucking tennis ball and shove it down your fucking throat and kill you" about a thousand times, taking photos pretending to eat Richard and Aimee's amazing collection of oversized plus food simulacra, and other Aussie adventures, tomorrow from Tullamarine Airport. Until then, let me leave you with the insights I have gained on the Australian accent:
- Short "e" and "i" sounds are pronounced like the long "e" sound
- "O" is a dipthong pronounced "oir"
- "Er" is non-rhotic ("uh")
- The long "i" sound is not exactly "eye" like the American "I," but more like "oy"
The best way to practice the accent is to repeat the phrase "Like a bridge over troubled water." Say it: "Loike I breedge oiva trebled wadda." Try it! Also, the phrases "We are going to recycle some bottles in Cairns" and "We are going to recycle some bottles and cans" have exactly the same pronounciation. Furthermore, today C and I did each other's MASHs on our twelve hour bus tour of rocks along the Victoria coast. In the future, C will be living in a shack in the Great Barrier Reef with Edward Cullen, enjoying her second career as a fishmonger. She will have an internet affair with Takeshi Kaneshiro eight times a week. An interest she will unexpectedly develop in her 40s will be making wire bicycles. She will hike the Appalachian Trail. I will be living in a house in Brooklyn with Olympia and working as an untenured professor of English at a community college. I will have a constant, one-sided love affair with OZ. I will take up antiquing and will raise well-behaved, conscientious children. Now we are doing Aimee's MASH. Will update on the results soon.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
venice beach
I'm not starting work until November 30 so I have some time to travel. For the last week I was in North Carolina feeling so much love for a person it was at times literally nauseating; at other times it felt like being supine with a hippo standing on my chest; but most of the time it felt like riding a beach cruiser in the surf with a warm tailwind on a sunny day. More on this later.
Right now I am in J's place in Venice. J and E picked me up from LAX last night saying that they had almost gotten into four car accidents in the hundred yards of the arrivals loading zone, including with one cab driver who looked over and gesticulated with two fingers at his eyes in the "Look where you're going, asshole!" style. We stayed up in J and R's apartment taking turns with the guitar (E: Buddy Holly and Willie Nelson covers; J: two JayMay covers; me: two originals from The Cleaver Streeters' repertoire) and very slowly drinking gin and tonics. J is doing fine in her doctoral program but suddenly thinking about being a doctor; E just left television writing for comedic film writing and is already wildly, wildly successful; she left early to rest for her Saturday meeting with a very famous ex-SNL actress-turned-film-star who is shepherding her newest screenplay.
J and R and I walked the dog around the neighborhood and J invited me to sniff a large white ginger flower, which produced a scent like falling in love for the first time. We passed by another man with a dog who pet J's dog and kept saying, "You look just like Bambi. You reincarnation - you look just like Bambi." Then I spent the night on the click futon with a golden pit bull mouth-breathing on the Ikea Poang next to my head. This morning J and R and I walked to a coffee shop where the baristas and baristos all wore black vests and tattoos and served espresso drinks with great flair. We passed by a Gold's Gym and they told me about a man who walks up and down Venice Beach boardwalk in an American flag speedo, white socks, and white tennis shoes, and invites tourist ladies to walk arm-in-arm with him down the path; apparently Speedo Man also works out at Gold's Gym at midnight on weeknights.
Later we walked the three blocks from their house to the beach, passing by a woman who sat in her fenced-off front yard and passively sold billowing batik shirts and a hundred people with skin of sunny cowhide. I told J and R about S, and J recalled that she had excellent, "voluminous" hair and perfect skin, and was skinny and smiley. She remembered what S wore on the day we went to improv comedy in July 2007, the same day that J and R mocked us for realizing we knew the same person with the same highly-trafficked political blog. We lay on a king-sized towel looking at the surf. J and R are both surfers. R is newly interested in sailing, and as we lay on the towel he explained the semaphores for different types of storms: one red triangle for small craft warning, two for storm warning, one square red flag with a black square for gale force winds, two such flags for hurricanes. R explained the concept of a nautical mile.
R left for his job; J and I bobbed in the surf and she taught me how to dive under breakers. I still got swept up in a couple and tumbled all around in a panic, so we were not in the water long before I wanted to go back to shore and drain my sinuses of saltwater. On the sand we talked about readiness for relationships and R's family; on the boardwalk we walked along eating badly melted ice cream, buying miniature bicycles made of twisted wire, touching knick knacks, and fondling $5 underwear in the American Apparel factory outlet store. We passed by a medicinal marijuana store, and J opined, with no basis of knowledge, that all marijuana did was make a person speak in a whisper and then apologize profusely for speaking too loud.
We shuffled in sandals back to her apartment and then shuffled around Venice eating things and looking in stores. J bought a ridiculous pair of slippers covered in beaded tendrils, and I bought a tin of anchovies for the plane ride to Melbourne. Back at the apartment, J spent a few minutes researching used hybrid bikes and I strummed some disgusting sounding chords on the guitar. Now J is on the guitar playing Ben Harper ("This guitar is impossible to play," she has just said, and now, strangely, "Hey, this piece of muscle is riding a bike like the one you just bought! This piece of muscle is taking the path of least resistance for powerful treatment of insulin resistance!" (her atlas is pharmaceutical swag from her surgeon father, and its cover depicts of muscle cell riding a teal bicycle)) and I am ticking away on this tiny laptop.
I'm meeting C in 2.5 hours for our 20 hours of flying and laying over. First, I must go eat ramen. This city is paradise! I will write next from Melbourne.
Monday, August 31, 2009
national park
Here: a very, very long way of saying that I had a good time in Colorado. Read if you'd like.
I had made plans to meet up with a bus tour on Friday morning, but because of national park regulations, the bus wouldn't stop at the campsite to pick me up, and I had to get back down to Highway 160 to wait for it. I started out walking the four miles but saw that I wouldn't make it in time, and I stuck my thumb out. It was 8:45 a.m. in a national park and there wasn't much traffic. Five cars passed me in a hurry before one finally stopped, twenty minutes after I first started trying. (At least it was not the hour and a half I had to wait on the Blue Ridge Parkway.)
It was a white SUV with Virginia plates driven by a nice dad named Jim in the front with two toddlers strapped into car seats in the back. Jim said they were from Northern Virginia, his wife was stationed in Afghanistan with the State Department, and the two kids had one German name and one Spanish name; they were excited and gregarious, and they chirped, "Our mom usually sits there!" when I got in the car and then showed me their backseat TV screens, on which they'd watched Clifford the Big Red Dog and Madeleine in Paris on the drive across the country. They dropped me off on the wrong side of the highway, since Jim said his GPS narrator, which he referred to as "the voice of my conscience," would scold him for deviating off the route, if he had driven me all the way.
I walked across and found a concrete block in the sun upon which to sit and wait. While I waited, I called Connie, to congratulate her on her last day on the job, and then Stern, who said that she was in midair skydiving when I called her and then later said that she couldn't make time to see me when I am in New York in November because she planned to be washing her hair from November 17-23 ("By the 23rd, I'll probably be only on conditioner"). I moved to the shade and continued to wait; after two hours of this, and a sunburn on the tops of my thighs, I gave up and hitchhiked back up to the campsite. The first car I approached stopped for me; Chuck and Rosemary, originally from Madison, retired in Hot Springs, Arkansas. I kept up the friendly prattle but can't remember a thing we talked about.
I wasn't too disappointed about missing the tour, even though it meant that I wouldn't see the cliff dwellings that day. The cliff dwelling sites were twenty mountain miles away from the campsite, and I didn't think I had the legs to do the forty miles roundtrip of biking. I'd have been biking at an altitude of 7500-8500', on steep single lane roads, and have expected to do a couple thousand feet of climbing; there's no way I could've done this the day after my Durango-Mesa Verde ride in my state of unfitness and altitude sickening.
But I knew I would be in Mesa Verde a few days, and I'd see the cliff dwellings later, so I spent Friday afternoon hiking and learning about the plants, animals, and geography of the region. In twelve miles, I didn't come across a single person; I guess people go into Mesa Verde to drive to the ruins, not to hike on the mesa, so I had the overgrown trails to myself. The eight-mile hike in sandals ruined my feet, so I did the last four miles in my bike shoes, with my cleats spinning me all over the sandstone. (I had a stroke of inspiration after returning to camp: remove the fucking cleats.) I dodged what I thought was poison oak all day until I came down from my hikes and picked up a trail guide that revealed the plant to be gambel oak, a scrubby low oak that produces little low-tannin acorns that can be eaten without much processing. I spent about two hours sitting still during these hikes, to eat lemon bars and beans from a can under pine trees and to write in my journal. I hooted a bit on the far side of Knife Edge, and listened to the echoes. On Point Lookout, I got some miraculous cell reception and I called my mom to tell her I was fine. She asked if I had located any Jeffrey Dahmer-types in the campsite, and I said I had to get off the peak in a hurry because I could see lightning touching down in the valley below. This was true.
In this way, I had a lot of time to myself on Friday. As always when outdoors, I got distracted thinking about my sensations: where I hurt, what I could see, the slope of the ground below my feet, the mysterious rustling in the trees, petrified branches that looked like gopher snakes (and the one gopher snake that I came across, threw rocks at, and ultimately dashed away from whilst squealing like a kettle). From my journal entries: "I am very hot. I lifted my shirt up to my bra for just a moment on Prater Ridge and immediately got two bug bites in the formation of Dracula's fangs on the fattiest pt of my stomach. I am very dusty all over. It is very quiet up here except for the flies. My bowels continue to digest (very poorly) the calzone from Wednesday. I counted switchbacks (32) to pass time and took my heart rate each time I stopped. On the uphills: 164 max. On level ground: around 120. Saw a big lizard/toad thing - too fat for lizard, too many toes/joints/not-toad features for toad."
During the mesa top phone call, mom asked me why I was doing this, and I was anxious about not having an answer. I thought lots about this on the hike, but my brain was uncooperative all weekend: when I tried to think about my motivation to come to Mesa Verde, I would become distracted singing a hybridization of Beautiful Dreamer lyrics over the Moon River tune; when I tried to force myself to think about Stephanie, the abstraction I once called my lover who ostensibly turned thirty two Fridays ago, I could only think about Boo. I stared giddy-drunkenly at a flashing point on the horizon for a few long moments on Friday night, and then tumbled into my tent and said, in the manner of lovingkindness meditation, "I love you" to everyone I could think of whom I loved, and thought about how nice it was to not be in a hurry to do anything and to be responsible for almost nothing and to be outside and to work up a sweat just for its own sake and to run away from snakes for a few days, before passing out. I woke up the next morning with the right side of my body numb from my deflated sleeping pad. These to me seemed as good of reasons as any for my trip.
-
I got a seat on the tour the next day. The driver felt bad for having missed me yesterday and agreed to pick me up at the campground, so I didn't have to hitchhike back down to the highway. In our green SUV was just me, Robert the tour guide, and a retired couple from Chicagoland, Trudy and Klaus. Everyone was nice and friendly, but I felt very disoriented the whole day. This could have been because we were moving three times faster than I had moved in five days, but I think it was because I felt that the mainstream values of national park tourists were at odds with my moral and politcal identity. This feeling was exacerbated or caused by the crazy-inducing nonsense coming out of the mouth of the tour guide. In describing the culture of the ancestral Puebloan people, Robert made lots of absolute statements, many of them about gender and sex differences. "Spin ten men and ten women around in a circle and nine of the men and none of the women would be able to locate magnetic north without a compass," and so on. I couldn't tell how he'd cast his vote; he said things like, "Well, you see the way things are going in our society, we're going to reach a breaking point like they did in Rome, or Greece, or whatnot, because people get fed up with authority and the government getting in their business," which sounded very reminscient of those dirty teabagging protests from earlier this year; but he also said leftish things like, "Patriarchy and patrilinearity causes all of our problems," and professed that if we could go back to the matrilineal systems of the ancestral Puebloan people, the globe would stop warming and people would be happy as maize and squash farmers. I asked Robert how the resource distribution or geography of the southwest could have caused ancestral Puebloan peoples to form matrilineal cultures, and his response, I quote in full, was "Women are better at nurturing, so these people didn't have wars." He referred to me and Trudy as "ladies," as in, "You two ladies probably wouldn't have wanted to cut down and haul all this juniper." All of this was vigorously assented to by Trudy, who also suggested that tuberculosis could have been caused by the low percentage of protein in a maize-based diet. Robert also misused words constantly, or said "utilizations" and "reasonings" when "uses" and "reasons" would do, and said "lo and behold" in the way that people say "um." I know I am a perfect little bitch for fixating on these things; Robert and Trudy and Klaus were so friendly. But after nine hours of captivity with my deeply untrustworthy narrators, I wanted to fling open the doors of our moving Ford and escape like a wild turkey into the gambel oak. Also, the forest ranger ingratiated himself to our little tour group by choosing one girl from the group and one boy, and making them pretend they were married, which everyone thought was so funny and cute, and Trudy instructed me that I should find a husband because they were helpful in retrieving lost glasses cases - all in all, I felt like a fraud being so broad-shouldered and masculine and pussy-loving but telling Klaus that my last boyfriend was a German like him. Technically not a lie, but a self-betrayal nonetheless.
-
Josie and her new boyfriend Kevin were sitting on each other on the picnic bench next to my tent when I got back to the campground from my tour. Josie is my ex-girlfriend's ex-girlfriend who in 2000 almost became my ex-girlfriend, except that I was sleeping with our co-op roommate while conducting a relationship with my ex-girlfriend, who almost became Josie's ex-girlfriend one night in Boston Common after a bottle of whiskey. Two of these characters had worked at a car-themed lesbian cafe in Davis Square where baristas with regrettable tattoos (e.g. "CHARLIE DON'T SERVE" across the neck) shot me icy looks whenever I walked in, because they hated outgroup girls; it was all so childish and so long ago.
We escaped this period of hormonality. She grew out her hair, took out the lip piercings but left in the tattoos, and in 2005, she stayed with me a month in New York and I stayed with her a week in Moab. I went to law school and lived in New York and Chicago and bought and adored an expensive suit. She is the only friend I have who has opted to live rural and poor, but it is where she came from.
I had written Josie a few weeks ago to tell her I'd be staying in Mesa Verde for a few days, and never heard back from her, so I didn't expect that she'd turn up, but she called on Friday night to say that she'd be driving in from Moab the next day. They drove up in Kevin's ruined old blue Toyota Tacoma: the seatbelts were all knotted up because they no longer retracted; the tailgate window was held open by a pair of clamp pliers; odd bits of rusted metal from DIY repairs were bolted into the chassis; the spedometer stayed at 30 when we were moving about 10mph; and the interior was littered with climbing and sleeping gear, bags, tools, carabiner-handled travel mugs, golf balls, cutoff Metolius gloves, dirty shoes, plastic tubs filled with canvas sheets and lumber scraps, a woven basket carrying Josie's homegrown vegetables, cast iron fry pans, a mirrored medicine cabinet, and a book called "One Heartbeat Away," about confronting one's own mortality.
I offered them my remaining bottle of Black Butte Porter, but Kevin only grinned and said, "Oh, we brought our own favorite local brew" and hauled a case of Miller High Lifes out of the bed of his truck. We drank and they watched as I ate my evening gruel - canned beef stew with instant rice, made palatable by the addition of Josie's zucchini and okra - and then we moved to seats inside the tailgate so they could roll their cigarettes without being fined for having an open fire in a very high fire danger zone. We talked until late, and they unfolded a foam pad in the truck bed and fell asleep very soon. Kevin had lived out of his truck for a while in Moab, and Josie had lived out of her van for a while in Somerville. Kevin called this the "dirtbag lifestyle," and they seemed very pleased to have found each other.
I realized afterward that they didn't ask a whole lot about me - I haven't seen Josie in years but she didn't even learn, e.g., what I was doing in Chicago - but I didn't mind that we filled up the evening with stories about their cast of characters in small town Utah. I liked to see how wrapped up they were in their little patch of desert (despite the tattoo around Josie's wrist that says "wanderlust" in an elaborate script font). Josie works in a community garden and a bookstore part time; Kevin produces mountain bike races in Utah, Vermont, and West Virginia. They know people whom they call names like "Knees and Elbows," "E-O," "Icy Mike," "the methhead with one of those names that can be pronounced more than one way, like Brianna," "Big Gay Larry," "Sticky Nick," and "The Bleeder." We spent four hours on Sunday morning sitting under an oak tree thinking about business ideas for Moab; it needed a sushi place, a strip club, an independent movie theater, and a machine shop. They told stories like the one about the guy who got stabbed in the liver at Lollapalooza with a syringe filled with port-o-potty fluid - there was no more information to be known; Kevin said, "If this guy who got stabbed told me 100% of the information he had, I've told you about 85%, and there is nothing more to the story" - about attending town council meetings to convince the city to permit chicken on residential property, about Utah liquor laws, about smoking out the brakes on a big rig on Molas Pass and expecting to die, and about catching rattlesnakes with tubes and rope. I asked Kevin if he killed the rattlers after catching them. He responded, "Hell no, woman, that's my spirit animal."
I kept wondering if their knowledge of the geography and cultural history of the southwest were a result of them being avid rock climbers, or if people in the rural southwest just cared more about their natural environment than people in big cities, or what. Kevin told a story about stumbling across a painted potsherd in the middle of nowhere Arizona while scouting out a climbing location. He had dropped down into a chimney, and his friend above him was sending rocks onto his head, so he hid under a boulder; there, he found a portion what must have once been a beach-ball-sized Hopi pot. He said the climbers don't touch sites with petroglyphs or artifacts, whether out of superstition or respect for culture or federal law.
As we drove to the less-trafficked half of Mesa Verde, they pointed out geographic features in the Four Corners states. We could see the La Sal mountains near Moab, the San Juans, the La Platas, the Navajo reservation in New Mexico. Way in the distance was a flat stretch of land with a very tall chunk of rock seeming to rise from nowhere. Though the day was hot and clear, the air in the distance was hazy and it looked as if this big rock were floating in the sky. This was Shiprock, they said. A big old fucking rock in the middle of nowhere, apparently very sacred, apparently very tall.
I couldn't imagine the places but I liked the names they rattled off: Monument Valley, Valley of the Gods, South Mesa, Indian Creek, Big Mitten, Lone Cone. They discussed the difference between a mesa, a butte, a tower, and a spire, and ignored my lawyerly questions about how to classify buttes that were taller than they were wide but the size of mesas. Josie played some mixes but the speaker next to me kept giving up, so we got Doc Watson and Belle and Sebastian from only the right side of the cab. I sat cramped up in the passenger overflow spot behind the driver's seat, and let the wind whip my hair into a dusty tangled mess around my head.
-
Wetherill Mesa had about a thirtieth of the visitors that Chapin Mesa had. This is because it is a forty-five minute drive from the visitor's center to get out there. We passed two cars going in and three cars coming out. To me it felt that were were driving to the end of the world.
I always thought mesas were table-flat on top, but this one was rolling and hilly. Mesa Verde is not a mesa after all, but a cuesta, because it has a seven percent grade from north to south; this kind of information means exactly nothing when you are on top of a huge rise of soil and cannot tell one end from another. Portions of it had been scorched in wildfires; in these places, all you could see were burned our husks of juniper trees and the low grass that pushed up in the decades after the blaze.
We made tortillas with peanut butter on the tailgate, but I ate sitting by myself in the roasting cab because I could not bear to be under the sun. After lunch, we scurried down the path to Step House, as much to get in the shade as to see the ruins. Josie and Kevin kept looking up at the sandstone overhang and saying, "Yep, this could be climbed." It was a half mile to the alcove.
I have said almost nothing about the cliff dwellings that give Mesa Verde its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage site. I find it difficult to explain, even through pictures, because the experience of the people who lived here 800-1000 years ago seems so remote from mine. So this is a mesa or a cuesta about 7500 feet above sea level. The mesa top is dryland farmable, and here ancestral Puebloan people would grow that special combination of corn, beans, and squash that could coax the right balance of nitrogen out of the land. But water on the mesa top is very scarce, this being the high desert of the southwest, and the atmosphere is harsh. The mesa is comprised of a layer of crumbling, porous sandstone on top, underlaid by a layer of nonporous shale. Rain and snowfall leeches through the sandstone and hits the shale and then comes out through seep springs; these springs carve away alcoves on the sides of sandstone cliffs, creating what would be ideal locations for human habitation - water and natural shelter from the elements - except that they are high up on a canyon wall. But humans will do what they can with what they have, so these ancestral Puebloan people decided it was better to live in an alcove 120' high and 200' wide and 60' deep, hundreds of feet up on a steep slope or cliff, and carry fifty-pound pots of water on their heads up and down near-vertical rock faces, than shrivel up and die on the mesa top. So they cut bricks out of the sandstone and piled these up and made apartments and plazas and streets and social and ceremonial spaces and lived out their short lives on the side of a cliff.
This is totally fucking insane. I am glad I went to see them because it is totally fucking insane. The ranger-led tour of Long House gave us the opportunity to step through the ruins and actually go all the way to the back of the alcove, where it was possible to touch the sandstone roof and see how hundreds of years of fires created soot that survived to be pet hundreds of years later by tourists, and to see the corn-grinding slabs where Puebloan ladies ground up sand with their maize and eroded the teeth of their people. I asked all sorts of inane questions of the ranger, such as "Did they wrestle instead of playing ball sports because you can't retrieve a soccer ball that goes bouncing off a cliffside?" and "What is the purpose of this square hole in the ground?" and pulled juniper berries and acorns off bushes and put them into my mouth, and stabbed myself on a yucca spine.
I learned that sitting every day of your life in a covered pit with a fire burning inside will kill your lungs pretty quick, and that adobe could be made of sand, clay, ash, and urine. One could stand at the edge of the alcove and see down into the valley, and then look across to see the canyon walls a few miles across the valley. Inside the alcove was very temperate and very quiet. There wasn't much sound except for the swallows.
-
Our day on Wetherill Mesa also restored my faith in American friendliness, after my day with Robert and Trudy and Klaus had made me so nervous about democracy. On our tour of Long House were several midwesterners, my new favorite kind of people. One older man who took a liking to me was Michael Kearney, a retired computer room cleaning specialist from St. Louis. We walked down into the alcove together. I saw his Cardinals hat and said, "So you're from St. Louis?" and he immediately broke out into a huge smile and laid his hand on my shoulder. He was about 75 and wore a towel wrapped around his neck and tucked into his collar. He said absurd things, like telling a group of visitors passing by us "Watch out for the ice!" (it was 90 degrees out and sunny out) and made jokes about his wife driving off with his car and abandoning him in the national park, or about how he would pitch his kids off the cliff dwellings if they had lived there ("Or I'd say, where's the orphanage, hm?").
He asked me what I did, and seemed very concerned about finding me a non-lawyering job because I had expressed some doubts about my career. I told him I liked plenty just listening to stories. He said that as a salesman he was a story teller. He said that he stole lines from other salesmen, one of which was to say to customers in a very solemn voice, with a slight South Carolina accent, "Sir, a data wave is as reliable as a cement driveway." He said he had no idea what a data wave was but it didn't matter, because you knew then that it would be reliable.
I didn't tell him very much about my personal life, but I also felt that I could have, and he would have understood. Mom warns me about Jeffrey Dahmer, and Olympia writes to say that I am too old to hitchhike and be discovered cut up into pieces in the trunk of a car, but I haven't yet learned not to trust strangers the way I do. It only seems right that in my experience of a national park, my connections with other Americans are just as prominent as my time seeing the sights.
-
Josie and Kevin gave me a ride back to Durango. Thank God; I wouldn't have been able to stand the hot, scary ride back and would've had to hitchhike. I didn't want to do that. In Durango, we ate bad sushi that was still infinitely better than the zero sushi they had in Moab, and then they dropped me off at the hostel, where a Bernese mountain dog named Kodiak was delightedly wriggling around in the parking lot. Josie and I hugged and promised not to let years go by between seeing each other again.
Well, I don't know. We don't have that much in common anymore; each day she spends in rural, white, local, poor, outdoorsy Moab makes her experience more remote from mine, in the city, among yuppies, among politically active queers and people of color, with no sense of whether it is sandstone or shale or granite or gneiss or arkose or God knows what else lies beneath the asphalt. I don't romanticize the former, and I don't want to live in it. Happy as I was to be whipping around single lane roads in the cab of a fifteen year-old truck, I am scared of shotguns and big utility cars and racial homogeneity.
But it was very nice that my short trip to Colorado, and my time with Josie and Kevin in particular, gave me some access to this. It made me focus on something entirely different for a few days, not Chicago, not moving, not missing my old lives, not making travel arrangements for the next three months. I have been sleeping very well. Many of my muscles are pleasantly sore. I have been writing now for four hours; when I finish this paragraph, I will walk to town, eat pizza, find a bike box, and get myself on a plane home to San Francisco. It has been a fine week here, and I am ready now to go.
On Thursday, I biked west on Highway 160 to Mesa Verde. I woke early, dawdled, talked to Terry, and then packed up my stuff and rolled my bike down Goeglein Gulch Road. It wasn't until about 9:15 a.m. that I started my trip; knowing what I know now about how hot it gets between 2 and 5 p.m. here, I would tell that unsunburnt, untired enthusiastic Thursday morning biker to start a few hours earlier to avoid the midafternoon brain bake. And how I baked on Thursday. It got to be about 85-90 degrees by midafternoon, with no shade at all in sight, only tan ground covered in low scrub oak at the side of a two- to four-lane highway with cars going by around 75mph. The scenery was lovely - first curving around the edge of the San Juan Mountains, then down through the Mancos River Valley, then the long downhill approach to Mesa Verde and then the final climb up through the sandstone and shale verticality of the park - but the speed of the cars and the poor quality of the shoulder, which varied from a comfortable 6-7 feet to a frightening foot or so in the descent into Montezuma County, made it hard for me to think of anything else except my proximity to death. Drafts from semis blasted me off the shoulder. I was already feeling pretty shaky because the panniers rattle at high speeds and make my handlebars wiggle under my hands. I braked a lot on the descents - probably didn't get going much over 25mph, although there were places that a better biker could have just gone screaming downhill.
I made stops in Durango West, an eight-mile climb out of Durango, to sit in the shade of the post office boxes and eat granola, in Hesperus, the peak of the eleven-mile uphill west of Durango, to eat a chili dog, 20 oz. of Dr. Pepper, and a king-sized Snickers ice cream bar, Target Tree Campground, the midway point between Durango and Mesa Verde, to stand under a pine tree, and Mancos, a town ten miles away from Morefield Campground, for chai with soymilk and a Colorado peach. By the time I got to Mancos, around 3pm, I was worried about brain damage. I had a headache and I couldn't cool myself down. I had slathered sunblock all over myself, but I was sunburnt all over anyway, and the spots I had neglected (under my wristwatch and the top of my left ear) were glowing pink. I also don't believe that sunblock is sweatproof; as the sweat beaded up along my arm, I could see the chalky substance lifting away from my skin. Maybe I shouldn't have mocked Olympia so mercilessly for her SPF 30 long-sleeve travel shirt.
-
At 4 p.m., I rode down the final stretch of the Mancos River Valley before hitting the turnoff to Mesa Verde. It was flat scrubby land with ranches on either side of the road, and a roadside store selling Indian trinkets with 20' fake arrows shooting into the ground. I got to the base of Mesa Verde, snapped a few photos of my bike and peed behind the National Park sign, scattered some skinks to sit in the shade, and poured water on my head for a few moments before attempting the last four miles up into the campground. I had thought earlier that it was only my aerobic fitness holding me back, but by then my muscles were also spent and I was tired as hell. The grade was very steep, as it was the approach up into the mesa. I walked the bike for three of the four miles. Cars drove past me and the drivers either looked puzzled or delighted. I got lots of thumbs ups. I got into the campground 50 minutes after entering the park and then fell down on the gravel pad of my campsite and poured water on myself until the sun went down; I wasn't able to function until the heat receded.
-
The campground was huge: there were apparently 400 campsites stretched along two miles of road. It was also fully equipped with showers, laundry, all-you-can-eat pancake breakfast, and a general store that sold spinning LED pens painted with skink images on the left side and groceries (including some fine microbrews) on the right side. I made friends with the West Indian ladies manning the cash registers, and stopped in over my four days in the campground to make conversation. I gave the three of them three of the beers of my six-pack, since I couldn't possibly have finished it all, and they were really friendly to me after that.
I stayed in the campground three nights. The first night took a little getting used to; it was also the most crowded of the three nights. Half of the people coming through seemed to be middle or northern European tourists. Lots of Germans, Belgians, Dutch families whom one could tell were not accustomed to making eye contact and nodding hello to strangers in the American fashion. There were also some American families, and groups of college-aged American kids; two of the last parked themselves at the faucet next to my campsite and washed dishes for forty-five minutes on Thursday night, and made loud declarations that made me hate them ("All rap is basically the same, except with different sound effects, which I could probably make on a drumset," and "For beetles, it's phyllum, and then class, and then species...Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what it is - oh, and plus order," and declaring that certain kinds of insects were better than others) and plug my ears with Durango Hometown Hostel's free earplugs and stew in my tent for a while. There were fewer people the other nights for me to feel curmudgeonly about, or I just got more settled in my site and started to focus more on things - like the fact that I was sleeping on a beautiful sandstone-capped mesa that was under swampwater 90 million years ago - other than the people around me.
I had a little gravel pad for my tent and a picnic bench where I locked my bike up, and an adjacent empty campsite, where I did my cooking and eating. No sense in luring critters to my own campsite; a family of deer stared intently at me several times over my stay in the campground; I saw lots of squirrels; and there were many posted warnings about black bears, although I didn't see any traces of those.
In front of me was Prater Ridge, a steep 1000' hill capped with a shelf of beige sandstone whose silhouette blacked out a quarter of the sky in front of me at night; behind and to the right were Knife Edge and Point Lookout, other sandstone features lifting out of the top of the mesa. I walked the twelve miles of trails on these on Friday, which gave me exotic and abundant blisters but also a panoramic view onto the valley two thousand feet below. On my first night at the campsite, I walked around trying to find a place that wasn't crowded by camper vans or where the dull vibrations of acoustic guitars were muffled or where the stars weren't dimmed by the lights of the camp bathrooms, but when I found this stretch of road, I was frightened by the solitude, and by the threat of being watched in the darkness by a hungry mountain lion, and I went back into my site.
The next two nights I was nervier. This transition made me happy. On the second night, I bought the aforementioned six-pack of Black Butte Porter (Deschutes Brewing Co. from Bend, Oregon, God bless you) and a packet of Handisnacks from the camp store and sat by myself for two hours, getting buzzed and spreading fake cheese on crackers with a little red plastic stick, feeling unhurried, half drunk, and totally pleased with myself.
-I had made plans to meet up with a bus tour on Friday morning, but because of national park regulations, the bus wouldn't stop at the campsite to pick me up, and I had to get back down to Highway 160 to wait for it. I started out walking the four miles but saw that I wouldn't make it in time, and I stuck my thumb out. It was 8:45 a.m. in a national park and there wasn't much traffic. Five cars passed me in a hurry before one finally stopped, twenty minutes after I first started trying. (At least it was not the hour and a half I had to wait on the Blue Ridge Parkway.)
It was a white SUV with Virginia plates driven by a nice dad named Jim in the front with two toddlers strapped into car seats in the back. Jim said they were from Northern Virginia, his wife was stationed in Afghanistan with the State Department, and the two kids had one German name and one Spanish name; they were excited and gregarious, and they chirped, "Our mom usually sits there!" when I got in the car and then showed me their backseat TV screens, on which they'd watched Clifford the Big Red Dog and Madeleine in Paris on the drive across the country. They dropped me off on the wrong side of the highway, since Jim said his GPS narrator, which he referred to as "the voice of my conscience," would scold him for deviating off the route, if he had driven me all the way.
I walked across and found a concrete block in the sun upon which to sit and wait. While I waited, I called Connie, to congratulate her on her last day on the job, and then Stern, who said that she was in midair skydiving when I called her and then later said that she couldn't make time to see me when I am in New York in November because she planned to be washing her hair from November 17-23 ("By the 23rd, I'll probably be only on conditioner"). I moved to the shade and continued to wait; after two hours of this, and a sunburn on the tops of my thighs, I gave up and hitchhiked back up to the campsite. The first car I approached stopped for me; Chuck and Rosemary, originally from Madison, retired in Hot Springs, Arkansas. I kept up the friendly prattle but can't remember a thing we talked about.
I wasn't too disappointed about missing the tour, even though it meant that I wouldn't see the cliff dwellings that day. The cliff dwelling sites were twenty mountain miles away from the campsite, and I didn't think I had the legs to do the forty miles roundtrip of biking. I'd have been biking at an altitude of 7500-8500', on steep single lane roads, and have expected to do a couple thousand feet of climbing; there's no way I could've done this the day after my Durango-Mesa Verde ride in my state of unfitness and altitude sickening.
But I knew I would be in Mesa Verde a few days, and I'd see the cliff dwellings later, so I spent Friday afternoon hiking and learning about the plants, animals, and geography of the region. In twelve miles, I didn't come across a single person; I guess people go into Mesa Verde to drive to the ruins, not to hike on the mesa, so I had the overgrown trails to myself. The eight-mile hike in sandals ruined my feet, so I did the last four miles in my bike shoes, with my cleats spinning me all over the sandstone. (I had a stroke of inspiration after returning to camp: remove the fucking cleats.) I dodged what I thought was poison oak all day until I came down from my hikes and picked up a trail guide that revealed the plant to be gambel oak, a scrubby low oak that produces little low-tannin acorns that can be eaten without much processing. I spent about two hours sitting still during these hikes, to eat lemon bars and beans from a can under pine trees and to write in my journal. I hooted a bit on the far side of Knife Edge, and listened to the echoes. On Point Lookout, I got some miraculous cell reception and I called my mom to tell her I was fine. She asked if I had located any Jeffrey Dahmer-types in the campsite, and I said I had to get off the peak in a hurry because I could see lightning touching down in the valley below. This was true.
In this way, I had a lot of time to myself on Friday. As always when outdoors, I got distracted thinking about my sensations: where I hurt, what I could see, the slope of the ground below my feet, the mysterious rustling in the trees, petrified branches that looked like gopher snakes (and the one gopher snake that I came across, threw rocks at, and ultimately dashed away from whilst squealing like a kettle). From my journal entries: "I am very hot. I lifted my shirt up to my bra for just a moment on Prater Ridge and immediately got two bug bites in the formation of Dracula's fangs on the fattiest pt of my stomach. I am very dusty all over. It is very quiet up here except for the flies. My bowels continue to digest (very poorly) the calzone from Wednesday. I counted switchbacks (32) to pass time and took my heart rate each time I stopped. On the uphills: 164 max. On level ground: around 120. Saw a big lizard/toad thing - too fat for lizard, too many toes/joints/not-toad features for toad."
During the mesa top phone call, mom asked me why I was doing this, and I was anxious about not having an answer. I thought lots about this on the hike, but my brain was uncooperative all weekend: when I tried to think about my motivation to come to Mesa Verde, I would become distracted singing a hybridization of Beautiful Dreamer lyrics over the Moon River tune; when I tried to force myself to think about Stephanie, the abstraction I once called my lover who ostensibly turned thirty two Fridays ago, I could only think about Boo. I stared giddy-drunkenly at a flashing point on the horizon for a few long moments on Friday night, and then tumbled into my tent and said, in the manner of lovingkindness meditation, "I love you" to everyone I could think of whom I loved, and thought about how nice it was to not be in a hurry to do anything and to be responsible for almost nothing and to be outside and to work up a sweat just for its own sake and to run away from snakes for a few days, before passing out. I woke up the next morning with the right side of my body numb from my deflated sleeping pad. These to me seemed as good of reasons as any for my trip.
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I got a seat on the tour the next day. The driver felt bad for having missed me yesterday and agreed to pick me up at the campground, so I didn't have to hitchhike back down to the highway. In our green SUV was just me, Robert the tour guide, and a retired couple from Chicagoland, Trudy and Klaus. Everyone was nice and friendly, but I felt very disoriented the whole day. This could have been because we were moving three times faster than I had moved in five days, but I think it was because I felt that the mainstream values of national park tourists were at odds with my moral and politcal identity. This feeling was exacerbated or caused by the crazy-inducing nonsense coming out of the mouth of the tour guide. In describing the culture of the ancestral Puebloan people, Robert made lots of absolute statements, many of them about gender and sex differences. "Spin ten men and ten women around in a circle and nine of the men and none of the women would be able to locate magnetic north without a compass," and so on. I couldn't tell how he'd cast his vote; he said things like, "Well, you see the way things are going in our society, we're going to reach a breaking point like they did in Rome, or Greece, or whatnot, because people get fed up with authority and the government getting in their business," which sounded very reminscient of those dirty teabagging protests from earlier this year; but he also said leftish things like, "Patriarchy and patrilinearity causes all of our problems," and professed that if we could go back to the matrilineal systems of the ancestral Puebloan people, the globe would stop warming and people would be happy as maize and squash farmers. I asked Robert how the resource distribution or geography of the southwest could have caused ancestral Puebloan peoples to form matrilineal cultures, and his response, I quote in full, was "Women are better at nurturing, so these people didn't have wars." He referred to me and Trudy as "ladies," as in, "You two ladies probably wouldn't have wanted to cut down and haul all this juniper." All of this was vigorously assented to by Trudy, who also suggested that tuberculosis could have been caused by the low percentage of protein in a maize-based diet. Robert also misused words constantly, or said "utilizations" and "reasonings" when "uses" and "reasons" would do, and said "lo and behold" in the way that people say "um." I know I am a perfect little bitch for fixating on these things; Robert and Trudy and Klaus were so friendly. But after nine hours of captivity with my deeply untrustworthy narrators, I wanted to fling open the doors of our moving Ford and escape like a wild turkey into the gambel oak. Also, the forest ranger ingratiated himself to our little tour group by choosing one girl from the group and one boy, and making them pretend they were married, which everyone thought was so funny and cute, and Trudy instructed me that I should find a husband because they were helpful in retrieving lost glasses cases - all in all, I felt like a fraud being so broad-shouldered and masculine and pussy-loving but telling Klaus that my last boyfriend was a German like him. Technically not a lie, but a self-betrayal nonetheless.
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Josie and her new boyfriend Kevin were sitting on each other on the picnic bench next to my tent when I got back to the campground from my tour. Josie is my ex-girlfriend's ex-girlfriend who in 2000 almost became my ex-girlfriend, except that I was sleeping with our co-op roommate while conducting a relationship with my ex-girlfriend, who almost became Josie's ex-girlfriend one night in Boston Common after a bottle of whiskey. Two of these characters had worked at a car-themed lesbian cafe in Davis Square where baristas with regrettable tattoos (e.g. "CHARLIE DON'T SERVE" across the neck) shot me icy looks whenever I walked in, because they hated outgroup girls; it was all so childish and so long ago.
We escaped this period of hormonality. She grew out her hair, took out the lip piercings but left in the tattoos, and in 2005, she stayed with me a month in New York and I stayed with her a week in Moab. I went to law school and lived in New York and Chicago and bought and adored an expensive suit. She is the only friend I have who has opted to live rural and poor, but it is where she came from.
I had written Josie a few weeks ago to tell her I'd be staying in Mesa Verde for a few days, and never heard back from her, so I didn't expect that she'd turn up, but she called on Friday night to say that she'd be driving in from Moab the next day. They drove up in Kevin's ruined old blue Toyota Tacoma: the seatbelts were all knotted up because they no longer retracted; the tailgate window was held open by a pair of clamp pliers; odd bits of rusted metal from DIY repairs were bolted into the chassis; the spedometer stayed at 30 when we were moving about 10mph; and the interior was littered with climbing and sleeping gear, bags, tools, carabiner-handled travel mugs, golf balls, cutoff Metolius gloves, dirty shoes, plastic tubs filled with canvas sheets and lumber scraps, a woven basket carrying Josie's homegrown vegetables, cast iron fry pans, a mirrored medicine cabinet, and a book called "One Heartbeat Away," about confronting one's own mortality.
I offered them my remaining bottle of Black Butte Porter, but Kevin only grinned and said, "Oh, we brought our own favorite local brew" and hauled a case of Miller High Lifes out of the bed of his truck. We drank and they watched as I ate my evening gruel - canned beef stew with instant rice, made palatable by the addition of Josie's zucchini and okra - and then we moved to seats inside the tailgate so they could roll their cigarettes without being fined for having an open fire in a very high fire danger zone. We talked until late, and they unfolded a foam pad in the truck bed and fell asleep very soon. Kevin had lived out of his truck for a while in Moab, and Josie had lived out of her van for a while in Somerville. Kevin called this the "dirtbag lifestyle," and they seemed very pleased to have found each other.
I realized afterward that they didn't ask a whole lot about me - I haven't seen Josie in years but she didn't even learn, e.g., what I was doing in Chicago - but I didn't mind that we filled up the evening with stories about their cast of characters in small town Utah. I liked to see how wrapped up they were in their little patch of desert (despite the tattoo around Josie's wrist that says "wanderlust" in an elaborate script font). Josie works in a community garden and a bookstore part time; Kevin produces mountain bike races in Utah, Vermont, and West Virginia. They know people whom they call names like "Knees and Elbows," "E-O," "Icy Mike," "the methhead with one of those names that can be pronounced more than one way, like Brianna," "Big Gay Larry," "Sticky Nick," and "The Bleeder." We spent four hours on Sunday morning sitting under an oak tree thinking about business ideas for Moab; it needed a sushi place, a strip club, an independent movie theater, and a machine shop. They told stories like the one about the guy who got stabbed in the liver at Lollapalooza with a syringe filled with port-o-potty fluid - there was no more information to be known; Kevin said, "If this guy who got stabbed told me 100% of the information he had, I've told you about 85%, and there is nothing more to the story" - about attending town council meetings to convince the city to permit chicken on residential property, about Utah liquor laws, about smoking out the brakes on a big rig on Molas Pass and expecting to die, and about catching rattlesnakes with tubes and rope. I asked Kevin if he killed the rattlers after catching them. He responded, "Hell no, woman, that's my spirit animal."
I kept wondering if their knowledge of the geography and cultural history of the southwest were a result of them being avid rock climbers, or if people in the rural southwest just cared more about their natural environment than people in big cities, or what. Kevin told a story about stumbling across a painted potsherd in the middle of nowhere Arizona while scouting out a climbing location. He had dropped down into a chimney, and his friend above him was sending rocks onto his head, so he hid under a boulder; there, he found a portion what must have once been a beach-ball-sized Hopi pot. He said the climbers don't touch sites with petroglyphs or artifacts, whether out of superstition or respect for culture or federal law.
As we drove to the less-trafficked half of Mesa Verde, they pointed out geographic features in the Four Corners states. We could see the La Sal mountains near Moab, the San Juans, the La Platas, the Navajo reservation in New Mexico. Way in the distance was a flat stretch of land with a very tall chunk of rock seeming to rise from nowhere. Though the day was hot and clear, the air in the distance was hazy and it looked as if this big rock were floating in the sky. This was Shiprock, they said. A big old fucking rock in the middle of nowhere, apparently very sacred, apparently very tall.
I couldn't imagine the places but I liked the names they rattled off: Monument Valley, Valley of the Gods, South Mesa, Indian Creek, Big Mitten, Lone Cone. They discussed the difference between a mesa, a butte, a tower, and a spire, and ignored my lawyerly questions about how to classify buttes that were taller than they were wide but the size of mesas. Josie played some mixes but the speaker next to me kept giving up, so we got Doc Watson and Belle and Sebastian from only the right side of the cab. I sat cramped up in the passenger overflow spot behind the driver's seat, and let the wind whip my hair into a dusty tangled mess around my head.
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Wetherill Mesa had about a thirtieth of the visitors that Chapin Mesa had. This is because it is a forty-five minute drive from the visitor's center to get out there. We passed two cars going in and three cars coming out. To me it felt that were were driving to the end of the world.
I always thought mesas were table-flat on top, but this one was rolling and hilly. Mesa Verde is not a mesa after all, but a cuesta, because it has a seven percent grade from north to south; this kind of information means exactly nothing when you are on top of a huge rise of soil and cannot tell one end from another. Portions of it had been scorched in wildfires; in these places, all you could see were burned our husks of juniper trees and the low grass that pushed up in the decades after the blaze.
We made tortillas with peanut butter on the tailgate, but I ate sitting by myself in the roasting cab because I could not bear to be under the sun. After lunch, we scurried down the path to Step House, as much to get in the shade as to see the ruins. Josie and Kevin kept looking up at the sandstone overhang and saying, "Yep, this could be climbed." It was a half mile to the alcove.
I have said almost nothing about the cliff dwellings that give Mesa Verde its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage site. I find it difficult to explain, even through pictures, because the experience of the people who lived here 800-1000 years ago seems so remote from mine. So this is a mesa or a cuesta about 7500 feet above sea level. The mesa top is dryland farmable, and here ancestral Puebloan people would grow that special combination of corn, beans, and squash that could coax the right balance of nitrogen out of the land. But water on the mesa top is very scarce, this being the high desert of the southwest, and the atmosphere is harsh. The mesa is comprised of a layer of crumbling, porous sandstone on top, underlaid by a layer of nonporous shale. Rain and snowfall leeches through the sandstone and hits the shale and then comes out through seep springs; these springs carve away alcoves on the sides of sandstone cliffs, creating what would be ideal locations for human habitation - water and natural shelter from the elements - except that they are high up on a canyon wall. But humans will do what they can with what they have, so these ancestral Puebloan people decided it was better to live in an alcove 120' high and 200' wide and 60' deep, hundreds of feet up on a steep slope or cliff, and carry fifty-pound pots of water on their heads up and down near-vertical rock faces, than shrivel up and die on the mesa top. So they cut bricks out of the sandstone and piled these up and made apartments and plazas and streets and social and ceremonial spaces and lived out their short lives on the side of a cliff.
This is totally fucking insane. I am glad I went to see them because it is totally fucking insane. The ranger-led tour of Long House gave us the opportunity to step through the ruins and actually go all the way to the back of the alcove, where it was possible to touch the sandstone roof and see how hundreds of years of fires created soot that survived to be pet hundreds of years later by tourists, and to see the corn-grinding slabs where Puebloan ladies ground up sand with their maize and eroded the teeth of their people. I asked all sorts of inane questions of the ranger, such as "Did they wrestle instead of playing ball sports because you can't retrieve a soccer ball that goes bouncing off a cliffside?" and "What is the purpose of this square hole in the ground?" and pulled juniper berries and acorns off bushes and put them into my mouth, and stabbed myself on a yucca spine.
I learned that sitting every day of your life in a covered pit with a fire burning inside will kill your lungs pretty quick, and that adobe could be made of sand, clay, ash, and urine. One could stand at the edge of the alcove and see down into the valley, and then look across to see the canyon walls a few miles across the valley. Inside the alcove was very temperate and very quiet. There wasn't much sound except for the swallows.
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Our day on Wetherill Mesa also restored my faith in American friendliness, after my day with Robert and Trudy and Klaus had made me so nervous about democracy. On our tour of Long House were several midwesterners, my new favorite kind of people. One older man who took a liking to me was Michael Kearney, a retired computer room cleaning specialist from St. Louis. We walked down into the alcove together. I saw his Cardinals hat and said, "So you're from St. Louis?" and he immediately broke out into a huge smile and laid his hand on my shoulder. He was about 75 and wore a towel wrapped around his neck and tucked into his collar. He said absurd things, like telling a group of visitors passing by us "Watch out for the ice!" (it was 90 degrees out and sunny out) and made jokes about his wife driving off with his car and abandoning him in the national park, or about how he would pitch his kids off the cliff dwellings if they had lived there ("Or I'd say, where's the orphanage, hm?").
He asked me what I did, and seemed very concerned about finding me a non-lawyering job because I had expressed some doubts about my career. I told him I liked plenty just listening to stories. He said that as a salesman he was a story teller. He said that he stole lines from other salesmen, one of which was to say to customers in a very solemn voice, with a slight South Carolina accent, "Sir, a data wave is as reliable as a cement driveway." He said he had no idea what a data wave was but it didn't matter, because you knew then that it would be reliable.
I didn't tell him very much about my personal life, but I also felt that I could have, and he would have understood. Mom warns me about Jeffrey Dahmer, and Olympia writes to say that I am too old to hitchhike and be discovered cut up into pieces in the trunk of a car, but I haven't yet learned not to trust strangers the way I do. It only seems right that in my experience of a national park, my connections with other Americans are just as prominent as my time seeing the sights.
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Josie and Kevin gave me a ride back to Durango. Thank God; I wouldn't have been able to stand the hot, scary ride back and would've had to hitchhike. I didn't want to do that. In Durango, we ate bad sushi that was still infinitely better than the zero sushi they had in Moab, and then they dropped me off at the hostel, where a Bernese mountain dog named Kodiak was delightedly wriggling around in the parking lot. Josie and I hugged and promised not to let years go by between seeing each other again.
Well, I don't know. We don't have that much in common anymore; each day she spends in rural, white, local, poor, outdoorsy Moab makes her experience more remote from mine, in the city, among yuppies, among politically active queers and people of color, with no sense of whether it is sandstone or shale or granite or gneiss or arkose or God knows what else lies beneath the asphalt. I don't romanticize the former, and I don't want to live in it. Happy as I was to be whipping around single lane roads in the cab of a fifteen year-old truck, I am scared of shotguns and big utility cars and racial homogeneity.
But it was very nice that my short trip to Colorado, and my time with Josie and Kevin in particular, gave me some access to this. It made me focus on something entirely different for a few days, not Chicago, not moving, not missing my old lives, not making travel arrangements for the next three months. I have been sleeping very well. Many of my muscles are pleasantly sore. I have been writing now for four hours; when I finish this paragraph, I will walk to town, eat pizza, find a bike box, and get myself on a plane home to San Francisco. It has been a fine week here, and I am ready now to go.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
hermosa
I fell asleep at 9:30pm and slept very fitfully until 7:45am, and in between had very vivid dreams, all of which I have forgotten except the one in which I was playing either a bone flute or a clarinet very loudly from my hostel bed. This morning in the hostel I made friends with a Durango divorcee named Terry who was very kind to me and who burned me a CD with four albums of music from the Irish and Scottish highlands; then he took out two dozen carbon fiber arrow shafts and let me hold a razor-edged titanium elk-hunting arrowhead and instructed me on the hubcap-sized patch of animal that one must hit in order to get a heart or double-lung strike to kill the animal there. I peppered him with questions about weapons while he sat at the kitchen table scraping the plastic feathers off his used arrows. I had a cup of coffee and waited, to no avail, for my bowels to move yesterday's Wendy's breakfast meal out of my body, and then slowly shoved unnecessary supplies into a pannier and made my slow way through Durango, up Highway 550 to County Road 203 to Hermosa. My chain fell off immediately -I'd overshifted - and then my left shoe got stuck to the pedal because a bolt fell off my cleat and I was flailing about trying to figure out how to stop without freeing my foot before I remembered that my other foot was free. Also, the altitude is still not easy to overcome; walking up a flight of stairs leaves me breathless, and today's flat, 28-mile ride with only one half-loaded pannier should've been pretty easy but wasn't. Other than these little glitches, all goes well and I have not been leveled by one of the millions of SUVs or trucks out here. I probably should've known that Colorado would be this full of rural white people. Maybe it's that Colorado people aren't as friendly as midwesterners (i.e. not as responsive when you grin and wave at them or when you want to make conversation with them), or maybe it's that my season of playing bluegrass has tricked me into thinking that I actually have access to the all-white world of country strangers, but I admit to being a bit disappointed by how many people either walked away from me or blankly stared when I did my friendly midwestern jawing to them today. Whatever, I had a delicious five-pound calzone for lunch and that was enough to make me happy. Also making me happy was the scenery; it was sunny almost all day today and the Animas River valley was very lush and the weird reddish rock formations shooting up around it - I wouldn't really call them mountains because they come from nowhere and appear to be made out of rock, not earth - were very pleasing to view from a slowly-changing angle of approach at 12 mph. When I bike alone I think mostly about sensations - leg pain, back pain, neck pain, sun burn, fear of cars - and then I think about next steps - distance to destination, tasks to be completed at next destination - and when I drift from this, I think stupid things like Will I be superheroically fit when I return to California now that I am acclimated to Colorado altitude? and Did the Anasazi from Mesa Verde ever take trips to the Animas River valley, and if so, how long did it take, and did rival groups of Pueblo people live there or were they relatives and friends, and did they ever get over to Moab where the red rocks must have seemed so different and strange? Ordered thinking almost never occurs when I am biking. I can't tell if this is good for my brain, which is crowded from an emotionally taxing move from Chicago, my new love, my job ending, my ex's 30th birthday, or whether I ought to be using this time to make general conclusions about vexing life questions. I started at 10am after handling Terry's arrowheads, took a two hour break to wait for my calzone and write in my journal, and got back into town around 4pm. Roadkill seen today: many birds, many chipmunks, something that looked bigger than a chipmunk but was similarly furry, and a totally flattened black (and now also red) garter snake. Food eaten: oatmeal, calzone, banana, handful of trail mix, Colorado peach, soup from a can with instant rice, two Reese's peanut butter cups from the hostel free pile. I got in bed at 8:30pm but couldn't sleep, so I got out of bed on a premonition that SL might be online, and she was! I am a shaman. It made my night so sweet to talk to you.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
durango
In dry, high Durango, Colorado now. Got to Durango in after two flights and a migraine. Movers took my stuff away yesterday. Spent the night camped out in the living room with Olympia, woke up, shipped off stuff, ate last breakfast on the stoop and was surprised to find myself overwhelmed with emotion when thinking about leaving. The altitude here is making me verrrrry dizzy. Just gave away my fourth copy of Professor's House this month to a man at the hostel who shared his dinner with me. Altitude recovery tomorrow. Very, very dizzy. Bed now, more later.
Monday, August 24, 2009
the weekends after memorial day
I found this old journal entry that will fill up space on my blog until I have more free time to put down some thoughts about what I have been doing recently:
7/1/09
The weekends after Memorial Day:
One weekend after Memorial Day: C in town. Bike ride, Cubs game. C and I dominated the karaoke place in Chicago's Chinatown that we went to upon O's advice. It was a meeting of TAP, the Taiwanese American Professionals organization. I was on my game. We sang "Total Eclipse of the Heart." (We'd watched some funny YouTube spoof videos, where the lyrics were rewritten to describe what was literally happening during the video, so we were prepared for the song.) We rocked the house. Strangers applauded. Everybody paid attention. C and I walked out of there saying, "Total domination."
Two weekends after Memorial Day: Thursday night flight got in delayed, crazy hotel (Hudson - more like a hunting lodge-cum-nightclub than a hotel, tiny little room, sleeplessness), watched the Lakers win the championship in a deli, watched men watching women. Friday, ridiculous last meeting, they had no idea what to say about me besides generalities because I never did anything for that organization, I left for C's and slept for five minutes on the futon on the ground while she slept (in the middle of the afternoon) in her bed because she had swine flu. I met up with R. Massage in Chinatown, S met up with us. S and I then went to Guitar Center for tambourine, then Center for quickie in and out glance at older lesbians playing card games (we declined to join), then to Cubbyhole for some mass flirtation. We then went down to IB's apartment and spent three hours just chatting and sipping beers and whiskey and smoking cigarettes and forcing each other to mime scenes ("Okay, now you're walking down stairs...now every other stair..."). We inspected the weirdness of the former tenant of IB's apartment, who left behind an advent calendar composed of chocolate squares, a cabinet filled with diet pills, a fridge filled with diet Red Bulls, cat posters (I brought the white Bengal tiger one to S in Brooklyn), high heeled shoes, photographs. What was even weirder was that IB kept all of these things around despite having lived there for four months already. I snagged the high heeled shoes that C later told me probably cost $200. I look like a tippy clown in them. There was some sort of Swedish or German or Austrian or Irish low-budget porn-like movie being filmed directly downstairs. We watched rats run around; IB called it his "favorite game." I walked back uptown to C's. On Saturday: I dropped my bags off at S's, then met up with JS for 2-3 hour walk around Prospect Park, restoring our confidence in one another. Met her friend Jen. Went back to S's for dinner party with Connie and Raj. We sang in harmony. Everyone left. S and I had soft serves, discussed our business plans ("Zen Cone" [get it? Zen koan, zen cone?!?!], which would have a pastry skirt on the lip of the cone to catch drips before they reach your hand), and walked around Park Slope for two hours in a light rain. We walked by Ginger's, went inside momentarily, and left. It was a replay of the night before, at the Center. We found an erotica book on the cement and later read bits of this to each other, which, I was embarrassed to find, turned me on. I thought I might want to make out with S. We didn't; she fell asleep. In the morning I awoke late, and then I took the train up to Harlem to see K and IB. I've described my lazy Sunday reading with IB in an entry a few posts back. That was a good weekend.
Three weekends after Memorial Day: T and K's wedding in Boston. New York, night at Connie's. Trip up on Chinatown bus. D and AK's Brazil photographs. A Sikh man handed me a Mountain Dew and a Coke through the window of D's car as we drove past him in Union Square. Took a death cab to the wedding; nearly dead throughout the evening. Cambridge Common. AK and J and I played guitar into the night. I admired their mastery of Brazilian-style guitar rhythms. AK had to close four doors between the living room and the bedroom so that L and her brood would not be awakened by the noise. I felt inadequate all weekend and realized that my last six years have been very unlike the five years that preceded those; the people I have surrounded myself with in recent years are brilliant, but less competitive about their intellects than the people I went to college with. This may implicate the difference between people who go to grad school to develop ideas and people who go to professional school to develop skills. I didn't mind, in the end, although I felt like I was wasting something. The following day was brunch at T's house, which was nicer, smaller, and more low-key. We chatted, played with SM's babies. I asked RR to be my friend again. She hasn't written since then, or called, so I guess that's not going to happen; this is a source of sadness for me, and I cried a week ago when I realized that she wasn't going to respond to me. Still I am proud of myself for having reached out to her, because it is better to be rejected in my friendship overtures than never have made them at all.
Last weekend: sleep, B and RI's bridal shower, and then karaoke event. I played some Beatles songs and "Take Me Out To the Ballgame" with B's mom Marti for the crowd. I bought 96 kazoos so everyone had one to play along with. Marti loved it. B later told me she'd said, "What a rush! I didn't want it to end!" I found this so endearing. She asked me for advice about buying guitars and I just wanted her to hurry up and buy anything and make music because it obviously brought her so much joy. It was out in Oak Park. I wore new sandals that I returned the next day at REI. Later I met up with SL on the first car of the Blue Line and we went up to Montrose for karaoke at a seedy, huge suburban small-town bar that nonetheless was within Chicago limits. There are worlds out there I know nothing about! We didn't stay long. Somebody bought SL a drink. She looked pretty. Sunday: puttered, band practice, puttered, pride parade dregs, an hour of laying on the pier at North Avenue beach, reading a New Yorker, then all-you-can-eat sushi with Asian homos at Sushi Para Two on N. Clark. Didn't really connect with anyone, was too hungry and sunburnt, went home. O wasn't around this weekend and I couldn't be bothered to call anyone up so I missed having someone to goof off with. C'est la weekend.
A backpack button I saw and liked last weekend: "My karma ran over your dogma." Clever, I thought.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Monday, August 10, 2009
since feeling is first
There is some stress; work is ending in two weeks and I haven't nearly enough time to do everything I need to. There are three summary judgment motions, a two-bedroom apartment to clear, three months of unstructured time (and health insurancelessness) to plan for, and my parents are in town and would like me to accompany them to floor 103 of the Sears Tower and other such Chicago landmarks. There is some triumph; my roommate and I performed many times in the past week, quite well, and it feels good to find a music-making partner whom I respect so much and with whom I feel so comfortable and compatible. This I will miss above all when I leave Chicago. Finally, there is happiness; I am in love with somebody who is in love with me. We spent a week in Chicago being a pair of fools. Although my happiness often comes with neurotic fear about losing the source of my happiness, right now the giddiness is overwhelming the anxiety. How did that happen? Who knows? What will happen? Only God knows which way the wind will blow. Does it matter? I had a stunning week, y'all.
Anyway, I think I will cool it on Bananarchist for a bit. After I get myself through the next few weeks, I'll have some time to write about the entertaining preoccupations of summertime in Chicago: the improv class, the week of music performance, the friends who have come through, stories about Brahms, the elements of a cause of action for a breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing in Colorado. Until then, I leave you with a something my dad said to me, in English, totally out of the blue, as we walked along Lake Michigan on a 98 degree Saturday: "Believe it or not, [Bananarchist], when I was younger, before I met your mother, I thought that when a man married a woman, if it was a time of famine, he could cut off her feet and eat them, and they would grow back. So I married your mother because I knew I would never be hungry."
Anyway, I think I will cool it on Bananarchist for a bit. After I get myself through the next few weeks, I'll have some time to write about the entertaining preoccupations of summertime in Chicago: the improv class, the week of music performance, the friends who have come through, stories about Brahms, the elements of a cause of action for a breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing in Colorado. Until then, I leave you with a something my dad said to me, in English, totally out of the blue, as we walked along Lake Michigan on a 98 degree Saturday: "Believe it or not, [Bananarchist], when I was younger, before I met your mother, I thought that when a man married a woman, if it was a time of famine, he could cut off her feet and eat them, and they would grow back. So I married your mother because I knew I would never be hungry."
Thursday, August 06, 2009
whoa
I haven't written in a bit because I've been somewhat unexpectedly demolished by love. It's a new wonderful development and my heart is singing a sustained note of happiness right now. I'll write some more when I find some more time.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
a long time ago
New song. Olympia on the violin. I tried to be genuine with this one since all of my other songs, I've been told, are farces, which is in keeping with the fear of emotional expression that I wrote about yesterday. Anyway, here are my innards, have a look.
Half of my heart’s on a holiday
Half of the night I’m lying awake
All of the summer I’ve been running on low
Feels like I knew you a long time ago
From your last letter, I should have known
“Don’t bother to find me, for I have just flown
“I know where you’re going, but I will not go.”
The things you said, darling, a long time ago
Life in the city goes on as before
This part of the story I don’t know anymore
I can’t be bothered by what I don’t know
Someday it’ll all seem a long time ago
I’m easy to love and I am easy to know
I’m a wary old rover with a long tale of woe
I’m full of confession but have nothing to show
Someday we will all seem a long time ago
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
you've got me feeling emotions
I have been thinking recently about how to become a better performer. Generally, in life, and also specifically, a more mobile and expressive music performer, because the Corvairs’ first show was last Saturday, and although I felt triumphant about the quality of our amateur musicianship and with bantering with the audience, which was composed mostly of kind friends who guffawed generously no matter what was said, a trusted adviser on musical performance offered this criticism as soon as I asked for it: “You might want to work on lower body movement.” I had thought I was doing a fine job emoting with body language, but a later viewing of footage shot at the show confirmed that what I had thought was emoting involved subtle movements of the eyebrows that did not register to anyone else besides me, and that the four of us moved almost nothing except our wrists while standing on stage.
Performing emotion has long been difficult for me. My improv instructor announced at the start of last Thursday’s class that the evening would be devoted to “emotional work.” This struck a tritone-filled chord of sustained terror in my heart. I can pretend to stuff a nonexistent owl. I do great with exquisite corpse word games. I can describe invisible mise en scène like a champ. But tell me to convey the feeling of being wildly in love with someone who will not return your affection to a roomful of people simply through movements and nonverbal sounds, and I will excuse myself and stay in the bathroom until it is time to go home. I guess this is why I am taking improv, to get over this desire to flee from emotional performance.
The first exercise was simple. The class stood in a circle and pretended to pass an invisible ball. Each time you got the ball, you were supposed to respond with an emotion; any kind of emotion was fine, as long as it was exaggerated. One boy did a fine job of this, crying on the ground until a long, viscous string of saliva descended from his mouth and touched the carpet. Most people, on the other hand, failed spectacularly at this task. The anger was unenthusiastic, the ecstasy was obviously mimed, the grief was undermined by nervous, self-conscious smiling. When it was my turn, I choose disgust, because the emotion invites satire – even genuine expressions of disgust are often laughable in a way that genuine expressions of sadness or anger aren’t – yet even so I could not commit to more than a modest “Eeeeew!” and some tensing of the upper body.
It’s hard to communicate in words why it’s so hard to communicate without words. I find that I am turning to statements like “It makes you feel vulnerable to open yourself up” and “You really have to let go,” which, like all clichés, fail utterly at describing something to someone who has not experienced exactly what you are trying to describe. So look at it this way. Imagine someone who irritates you. Say, a person who talks incessantly, about herself, and talks much more than she listens. You suspect that she doesn't just exaggerate her stories but flat out lies from time to time, usually to make herself seem stronger or more heroic or more charming or more modest than she actually is. Now imagine this irritating person telling you about a new puppy she has just rescued. And it’s so cute. And it makes her coo. “It’s so fwuffy!” she says, in a dolphinesque whine. And she leans her head against the imaginary puppy and an expression of post-coital bliss crosses her features (which, by the way, are all compacted in the center of her face). And all you can do to keep yourself from vomiting is imagine a cold giant octopus coiled around her head, its expressionless goat eyes watching yours, its eight tentacles gripping different percussion instruments, as she says these things to you.
Now you see what I fear about emotional expression. There’s a chance that your emotions will be so obviously insincere that you will make people revile you as a fraud. I think this is what “it makes you feel vulnerable to open yourself up” actually means. Of course, the better you can express emotions, the more interesting your stories and music and presentations will be. But if you don’t succeed in conveying that emotion, your audience takes pleasure at the image of an octopus occupying the space where your head should be. Expression is high risk but high reward, and expressionlessness is no risk; your reward is the steady state, which is often not so bad. It’s much easier not to express at all.
I don’t think it’s my destiny to be a timid Asian woman. My trusted musical performance adviser performed a lion dance in the living room as an example of demonstrative body movement, and I learned a lot from it. I intend to lay down a rubber snake on the stage and leap back from it with leonine surprise at the next Corvairs show. I have also done some Googling today along the lines of “how to be a better performer” and “how to move your lower body when playing music.” It was interesting to think about things I'd never thought about before. This is what I have learned.
Five Steps to Becoming a Better Performer of Poetry.
Performing emotion has long been difficult for me. My improv instructor announced at the start of last Thursday’s class that the evening would be devoted to “emotional work.” This struck a tritone-filled chord of sustained terror in my heart. I can pretend to stuff a nonexistent owl. I do great with exquisite corpse word games. I can describe invisible mise en scène like a champ. But tell me to convey the feeling of being wildly in love with someone who will not return your affection to a roomful of people simply through movements and nonverbal sounds, and I will excuse myself and stay in the bathroom until it is time to go home. I guess this is why I am taking improv, to get over this desire to flee from emotional performance.
The first exercise was simple. The class stood in a circle and pretended to pass an invisible ball. Each time you got the ball, you were supposed to respond with an emotion; any kind of emotion was fine, as long as it was exaggerated. One boy did a fine job of this, crying on the ground until a long, viscous string of saliva descended from his mouth and touched the carpet. Most people, on the other hand, failed spectacularly at this task. The anger was unenthusiastic, the ecstasy was obviously mimed, the grief was undermined by nervous, self-conscious smiling. When it was my turn, I choose disgust, because the emotion invites satire – even genuine expressions of disgust are often laughable in a way that genuine expressions of sadness or anger aren’t – yet even so I could not commit to more than a modest “Eeeeew!” and some tensing of the upper body.
It’s hard to communicate in words why it’s so hard to communicate without words. I find that I am turning to statements like “It makes you feel vulnerable to open yourself up” and “You really have to let go,” which, like all clichés, fail utterly at describing something to someone who has not experienced exactly what you are trying to describe. So look at it this way. Imagine someone who irritates you. Say, a person who talks incessantly, about herself, and talks much more than she listens. You suspect that she doesn't just exaggerate her stories but flat out lies from time to time, usually to make herself seem stronger or more heroic or more charming or more modest than she actually is. Now imagine this irritating person telling you about a new puppy she has just rescued. And it’s so cute. And it makes her coo. “It’s so fwuffy!” she says, in a dolphinesque whine. And she leans her head against the imaginary puppy and an expression of post-coital bliss crosses her features (which, by the way, are all compacted in the center of her face). And all you can do to keep yourself from vomiting is imagine a cold giant octopus coiled around her head, its expressionless goat eyes watching yours, its eight tentacles gripping different percussion instruments, as she says these things to you.
Now you see what I fear about emotional expression. There’s a chance that your emotions will be so obviously insincere that you will make people revile you as a fraud. I think this is what “it makes you feel vulnerable to open yourself up” actually means. Of course, the better you can express emotions, the more interesting your stories and music and presentations will be. But if you don’t succeed in conveying that emotion, your audience takes pleasure at the image of an octopus occupying the space where your head should be. Expression is high risk but high reward, and expressionlessness is no risk; your reward is the steady state, which is often not so bad. It’s much easier not to express at all.
I don’t think it’s my destiny to be a timid Asian woman. My trusted musical performance adviser performed a lion dance in the living room as an example of demonstrative body movement, and I learned a lot from it. I intend to lay down a rubber snake on the stage and leap back from it with leonine surprise at the next Corvairs show. I have also done some Googling today along the lines of “how to be a better performer” and “how to move your lower body when playing music.” It was interesting to think about things I'd never thought about before. This is what I have learned.
Five Steps to Becoming a Better Performer of Poetry.
STAND with your feet slightly apart, ground yourself. If you stand, it is easier to draw the poem, and your breath, from your whole body and not merely from your mouth. Later you will perform from a wheelchair, or from somewhere in the air.Your Speaking Skills Can Make You a Better Performer.
Step Five (bell)
TALK to the audience, not at them. Before you start look at them, and without a word tell them, with your body and your eyes: thank you and fuck you. Read the poem for yourself as well as for them, conscious of every word. Weigh the words as you read, perform to discover your words as if anew, find new false notes not visible otherwise. Use performance to defend and stand behind your words, and to defend yourself against your own private self-enchantment.
(end with three bells one after the other, played clearly but much softer than above, with a one second pause between each bell; the last bell should be played to linger and echo slightly.)
Speech writers know that you have to grab the audience's attention in 30 seconds. That's where you make your biggest impact. If you ever see a musician get up on stage and fumble a "Hi. Um. We're the Barnyard Owls," you know what I mean.This has nothing to do with how to become a better performer, but a lot to do with the Futurist Movement and performance studies. Performance: A Critical Introduction.
As musicians, we can grab the audience's attention with a song. But it helps to think about other ways to captivate your audience too.
Wasn't it KISS who used to shout, "Are you ready to rock!" The phrase might sound cliche now, but it serves the point. KISS knew you had to draw your audience in fast to make an impact and put on a great show.
Or perhaps you prefer non-verbal hooks. You can use a light show. Or imagine band members quitely meditating next to their instruments before they jump up and rock the house.
Despite a strong interest in the physical body in such manifestos as these, futurist productions very often emphasized the mechanical, surrounding (and even hiding) the actor’s body in the trappings of modern technology, for which futurism had an inexhaustible passion. Turning bodies into machines or replacing bodies by machines certainly can be found in modern performance, but the tendency of futurism to move toward theaters of puppets, machinery, even colored clouds of gas, on the whole ran counter to later more determinedly body-oriented performance. Most futurist performances also followed a variety format, with a sequence (or a simultaneous presentation) of bits of short performance material – skits; acrobatics, mechanical, lightning, and sound effects; rapid display of movements or objects. This dazzling and quickly moving variety was essential the futurist aesthetic of speed, surprise, and novelty, but it resulted in a presentation format that on the whole looked backward to the performances of cabaret, the vaudeville, the circus, and the variety stage rather than forward to the performance art of more recent times, which has been largely devoted to the display of individual acts, even if these are of very short duration.Fundamentals of Stage Movement.
The actor must develop grace in movement...opening and closing doors, answering the telephone, picking up objects, rising, sitting. While these are daily activities in home, school,etc...they are also common business for the stage, television, and films. The actor must use the upstage hand or foot for the aforementioned, because it is more graceful to watch, BUT there will be exceptions.And, of course, one learns from Freddie Mercury. Riot At the Opera: Queen Triumphant.
These methods have been found to be the most graceful ways of accomplishing simple actions, and so they have been called BASIC TECHNIQUES. They are simply techniques because they accompish the movement with the least amount of action and commotion.
Freddie is not pretty in the conventional sense of the word; like Mick Jagger of '64, he is his own convention. Also like the Jagger of that time, his stage persona and action is unlike anything else. Although it borrows - like most of the group's plagiarisms - slightly from Zeppelin, in tandem with Freddie's supreme assurance and belief in himself - he always refers to himself as a star - it explodes into something that is a constant delight to watch.It is wonderful to be alive! You can learn a new way to embarrass yourself every day.
He reacts to his audience almost like an over-emotional actress - Gloria Swanson, say, or perhaps Holly Woodlawn playing Bette Davis. At the climax of the second night in Bristol he paused at the top of the drum stand, looked back over the crowd and with complete, heartfelt emotion placed his delicate fingers to lips and blew a kiss. Any person who can consume themselves so completely in such a clichéd showbiz contrivance deserves to be called a star.
Freddie's real talent, though, is with his mike stand. No Rod Stewart mike stand callisthenics here, just a shortee stick that doubles as a cock, machine gun, ambiguous phallic symbol, and for a fleeting moment an imaginary guitar. He has a neat trick of standing quite still in particularly frantic moments and holding the stand vertically from his crotch up, draw a fragile finger along its length, ever closer to the taunting eyes that survey his audience.
Monday, July 27, 2009
coffee table
It is the second consecutive Monday morning that I have stumbled out of the house at 5 a.m. to go to work after a sleepless night. I got to work at 5:20 a.m. exactly at the moment that my judge walked in the door. It's all fine; in two hours I will be slumped over my desk, fast asleep. Meanwhile, this feeble brain gets to make some decisions affecting litigants in federal court.
During the very early morning hours, I puttered around the apartment, picking up random books and reading a few pages of each in no particular order, eating peanut butter toast, throwing away electronics packaging, cleaning out the fridge, and so on. I also decided that it was the right time to document everything on my coffee table. The objects are in bold.
The coffee table itself is composed of two $12 birch veneer particle board end tables from Ikea; I pushed two together on a brown rug left behind by Erica Christoff, the former tenant. It was $60 cheaper to arrange my living room this way than to pay for a real coffee table. Underneath the table is Olympia’s mandolin, rented from the Old Town School of Folk music for an eight-week course in bluegrass mandolin. She has so far missed more than half the classes, but it is no big deal because Olympia’s familiarity with the violin, which is tuned just like a mandolin, puts her left hand capabilities far above those of her classmates. We made improvements on this mando: I bought new strings for it and together we spent a few minutes cutting a length of orange parachute cord into a shoulder strap.
There are also 2.5” inch DKNY tan embroidered high heels, size 9.5, which I rescued from the Hungarian swimsuit model who was the former tenant in Ilya’s apartment. When Sonia and I visited him there in June, we discovered that Ilya had left untouched many of the swimsuit model’s ornaments, including a dressertop full of elephant figurines and other southeast Asian iconography, a jewelry tree holding many rings, posters of cats (including white Bengal tigers, lions, and a drawing of a cat looking in a mirror (posted next to the bathroom mirror)), and had not thrown away the diet pills, diet Red Bulls, photographs, high heels, and clothes that the woman left behind. All her possessions were so gender normative as to be exotic, and they became even weirder when left in place in Ilya’s apartment. The heels fit me just fine and have given me hours of delight, although I have yet to wear them outside the apartment.
Also under the coffee table is my first tambourine, the $10 “economy” one that I bought in 2007, which cradles ten thimbles, which I bought to play my washboard with. Just to the left of this is my percussion rig for the bluegrass duo: one of Erica Christoff’s leftover pillows, with my brass cymbal tambourine (much nicer sounding than the economy model and four times the price) resting on top, and a big hardcover book (The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Knots and Ropework) on top of that. I stomp on this. It is calibrated just right: the hard surface of the book acts like a pedal platform, and the springiness of the cushion restores the tambourine to its resting state in preparation for my next stomp.
On the left side of the coffee table are two sets of Martin acoustic guitar strings, an A major harmonica, my Rubik’s cube, a purple egg shaker, and a set of postcards that Desiree took from her librarian conference as a gift for me. They read “Hawai’i is a Book Lover’s Paradise!” and show images of white people from the early part of the 20th century riding surfboards; none of them depict reading, except for one in which a woman resting on a surfboard in the surf looks over a hardcover at the photographer. There is a quart-sized Ziploc bag filled with Olympia’s inedible Asian candies, including a red bean-flavored Kit Kat bar from Japan, a fistful of hard coffee suckers, some azure suckers, squashed Lindhoff chocolates, and melted mini-Snickers bars. The books on this side of the coffee table are Bluegrass Fiddle, Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, and Poetry (which I turned to for inspiration in writing a song this weekend), Acoustic Rock for Guitar, and Rise Up Singing. There is a short length of bike chain that the kind worker from Rapid Transit Cycles gave to me. There is a sleigh bell bracelet that Stephanie and I bought close to Christmas 2007 to entertain Malcolm with (with great success—he loved it), and sixteen miniature kazoos leftover from Bridget and Raul’s wedding shower, where Bridget’s mom and I directed the crowd to buzz along with us as we sang “Yellow Submarine.”
On the other side of the coffee table is a papier mache watermelon half that I bought from the Museum of Mexican-American Art, in Pilsen. Olympia and I have filled this with our guitar and mandolin picks. There is the Mason jar that I usually keep full of peanut M&Ms, but that I have let sit empty since mid-June because I don’t know whether we’ll finish another jar before I leave. More things related to bikes can be found on this half of the coffee table: Olympia’s long road bike pump, her pedal wrench, her allen wrench set, a bungee cord for my bike rack, my Harvard Cycling Team water bottle (which, because my diploma is lost, is the only non-testimonial evidence I have that I went there; but the letters are rubbing off, so all this evidence says is that I went to "H RVA D"), my small crescent wrench, my SPD pedals, a saddle maintenance kit, and spare saddle tensioner. There are two spent AA batteries that I keep around until I can find a place that takes batteries for recycling. There is a half-eaten bag of trail mix that Desiree left behind last week, which I have been steadily reducing since her departure. There is a pencil made from recycled Chinese newspapers that Olympia quarried from one of her recent meetings or conferences. The books on this side of the table are The Professor’s House, which I have read intermittently this weekend, Learning Through Listening: An Introduction to Chinese Proverbs and their Origins, Hot Licks for Bluegrass Fiddle, The Fiddle Fakebook, and Mandolin Chord Book. There is also a lot more sheet music on this side of the coffee table, including a badly photographed copy of Bach’s Concerto no. 2 in E major, which Olympia must have studied when she was younger because it is covered in markings and stars and has a little rainbow sticker in the upper right corner of the first page. There are also Partita no. 3, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Op. 3 (Concerto for Violin and Orchestra), Spring, Mendelssohn’s Concerto for Violin and Piano, Op. 64, Forty-two Studies by R. Kreutzer, Introduction et Rondo Capriccioso, Op. 28, by Camille Saint-Saëns, and many photocopied pages of fiddle music bearing titles like “Jenny Lynn,” “Evening Prayer Blues,” and “Pig in the Pen.” Under Olympia’s music is my tablature for the ragtime and blues songs I have attempted to learn over the years.
Up until Saturday there was a pile of unread Chicago Tribunes under the coffee table and by the front door—Olympia got suckered into a subscription because somebody came to our front door with a sad story about how paper delivery routes gave troubled children a way to make money and stay out of trouble, and the papers just piled up unread day after day. On Saturday, I got sick of kicking newspapers out of the way to reach my shoes, so I filled a garbage bag with Tribunes and dumped it out in the recycling bin behind the house. There is now a newspaper-free path from the front door to the shoe pile to the coffee table, which will never look this way again.
During the very early morning hours, I puttered around the apartment, picking up random books and reading a few pages of each in no particular order, eating peanut butter toast, throwing away electronics packaging, cleaning out the fridge, and so on. I also decided that it was the right time to document everything on my coffee table. The objects are in bold.
The coffee table itself is composed of two $12 birch veneer particle board end tables from Ikea; I pushed two together on a brown rug left behind by Erica Christoff, the former tenant. It was $60 cheaper to arrange my living room this way than to pay for a real coffee table. Underneath the table is Olympia’s mandolin, rented from the Old Town School of Folk music for an eight-week course in bluegrass mandolin. She has so far missed more than half the classes, but it is no big deal because Olympia’s familiarity with the violin, which is tuned just like a mandolin, puts her left hand capabilities far above those of her classmates. We made improvements on this mando: I bought new strings for it and together we spent a few minutes cutting a length of orange parachute cord into a shoulder strap.
There are also 2.5” inch DKNY tan embroidered high heels, size 9.5, which I rescued from the Hungarian swimsuit model who was the former tenant in Ilya’s apartment. When Sonia and I visited him there in June, we discovered that Ilya had left untouched many of the swimsuit model’s ornaments, including a dressertop full of elephant figurines and other southeast Asian iconography, a jewelry tree holding many rings, posters of cats (including white Bengal tigers, lions, and a drawing of a cat looking in a mirror (posted next to the bathroom mirror)), and had not thrown away the diet pills, diet Red Bulls, photographs, high heels, and clothes that the woman left behind. All her possessions were so gender normative as to be exotic, and they became even weirder when left in place in Ilya’s apartment. The heels fit me just fine and have given me hours of delight, although I have yet to wear them outside the apartment.
Also under the coffee table is my first tambourine, the $10 “economy” one that I bought in 2007, which cradles ten thimbles, which I bought to play my washboard with. Just to the left of this is my percussion rig for the bluegrass duo: one of Erica Christoff’s leftover pillows, with my brass cymbal tambourine (much nicer sounding than the economy model and four times the price) resting on top, and a big hardcover book (The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Knots and Ropework) on top of that. I stomp on this. It is calibrated just right: the hard surface of the book acts like a pedal platform, and the springiness of the cushion restores the tambourine to its resting state in preparation for my next stomp.
On the left side of the coffee table are two sets of Martin acoustic guitar strings, an A major harmonica, my Rubik’s cube, a purple egg shaker, and a set of postcards that Desiree took from her librarian conference as a gift for me. They read “Hawai’i is a Book Lover’s Paradise!” and show images of white people from the early part of the 20th century riding surfboards; none of them depict reading, except for one in which a woman resting on a surfboard in the surf looks over a hardcover at the photographer. There is a quart-sized Ziploc bag filled with Olympia’s inedible Asian candies, including a red bean-flavored Kit Kat bar from Japan, a fistful of hard coffee suckers, some azure suckers, squashed Lindhoff chocolates, and melted mini-Snickers bars. The books on this side of the coffee table are Bluegrass Fiddle, Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, and Poetry (which I turned to for inspiration in writing a song this weekend), Acoustic Rock for Guitar, and Rise Up Singing. There is a short length of bike chain that the kind worker from Rapid Transit Cycles gave to me. There is a sleigh bell bracelet that Stephanie and I bought close to Christmas 2007 to entertain Malcolm with (with great success—he loved it), and sixteen miniature kazoos leftover from Bridget and Raul’s wedding shower, where Bridget’s mom and I directed the crowd to buzz along with us as we sang “Yellow Submarine.”
On the other side of the coffee table is a papier mache watermelon half that I bought from the Museum of Mexican-American Art, in Pilsen. Olympia and I have filled this with our guitar and mandolin picks. There is the Mason jar that I usually keep full of peanut M&Ms, but that I have let sit empty since mid-June because I don’t know whether we’ll finish another jar before I leave. More things related to bikes can be found on this half of the coffee table: Olympia’s long road bike pump, her pedal wrench, her allen wrench set, a bungee cord for my bike rack, my Harvard Cycling Team water bottle (which, because my diploma is lost, is the only non-testimonial evidence I have that I went there; but the letters are rubbing off, so all this evidence says is that I went to "H RVA D"), my small crescent wrench, my SPD pedals, a saddle maintenance kit, and spare saddle tensioner. There are two spent AA batteries that I keep around until I can find a place that takes batteries for recycling. There is a half-eaten bag of trail mix that Desiree left behind last week, which I have been steadily reducing since her departure. There is a pencil made from recycled Chinese newspapers that Olympia quarried from one of her recent meetings or conferences. The books on this side of the table are The Professor’s House, which I have read intermittently this weekend, Learning Through Listening: An Introduction to Chinese Proverbs and their Origins, Hot Licks for Bluegrass Fiddle, The Fiddle Fakebook, and Mandolin Chord Book. There is also a lot more sheet music on this side of the coffee table, including a badly photographed copy of Bach’s Concerto no. 2 in E major, which Olympia must have studied when she was younger because it is covered in markings and stars and has a little rainbow sticker in the upper right corner of the first page. There are also Partita no. 3, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Op. 3 (Concerto for Violin and Orchestra), Spring, Mendelssohn’s Concerto for Violin and Piano, Op. 64, Forty-two Studies by R. Kreutzer, Introduction et Rondo Capriccioso, Op. 28, by Camille Saint-Saëns, and many photocopied pages of fiddle music bearing titles like “Jenny Lynn,” “Evening Prayer Blues,” and “Pig in the Pen.” Under Olympia’s music is my tablature for the ragtime and blues songs I have attempted to learn over the years.
Up until Saturday there was a pile of unread Chicago Tribunes under the coffee table and by the front door—Olympia got suckered into a subscription because somebody came to our front door with a sad story about how paper delivery routes gave troubled children a way to make money and stay out of trouble, and the papers just piled up unread day after day. On Saturday, I got sick of kicking newspapers out of the way to reach my shoes, so I filled a garbage bag with Tribunes and dumped it out in the recycling bin behind the house. There is now a newspaper-free path from the front door to the shoe pile to the coffee table, which will never look this way again.
Friday, July 24, 2009
the professor's house
I am in the midst of planning a bike trip in southwestern Colorado, starting in Durango and ending in either Durango or Montrose or Grand Junction. I'll be going alone, right before Labor Day, and hauling all of my camping crap with me. This may be a very bad idea. Yesterday a cab grazed my right arm as it sped past me on Dearborn Street. I caught up to the driver and asked him why he hadn't given me more clearance. I took a tone that was more wounded than angry. He screamed at me. "This is a city! What do you want me to do!" he said. "Give me six more inches so you don't kill me," I said. "Why would I want to kill you!" he said. His eyes were red. He gunned the engine and sped off as soon as the light changed. This is the scariest part about biking, the drivers who refuse to acknowledge that their recklessness could scatter you like the seeds lifting off a dandelion head.
Nonetheless, I feel very compelled to go to Colorado. I want very badly to see the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde National Park. I didn't understand where this irrational feeling came from, until I recently remembered that one of my favorite passages in one of my favorite books, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, focuses on the protagonist's discovery of and relationship to cliff dwellings in the southwest. Willa Cather traveled to Mesa Verde National Park in 1915 and stayed for a week. Out of that experience came Tom Outland's story (in The Professor's House) and an article on "what Mesa Verde means" for the Denver Times. I know my imagination is more romantic than reality, and my experience of Colorado probably won't be revelatory but dangerous, exhausting, or merely banal - maybe I will focus more on the clouds of gnats swarming at dawn than the sunrise - but I haven't anything better to do and I might as well see.
I bought another copy of The Professor's House because the first was Stephanie's. It arrived today. The quality of the printing is so poor that it is intrusive - it is like the Dover Thrift edition of the Dover Thrift edition. The publisher put an unnecessary statement underneath the title: "This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today. Parents might wish to discuss with their children how views on race have changed before allowing them to read this classic work." Also, all the diacritics are messed up, as if the document was created in one word processing program and opened up in another, and nobody bothered to edit it: "That summer Charles kept him for three weeks in his oleander-buried house in the Prado, until his little brig, L'Espoir, sailed out of the new port with a cargo for Algeciras. The captain was from the Hautes-Pyrénées, and his spare crew were all Provençals, seamen trained in that hard school of the Gulf of Lyons." This is distracting.
Still, what a pleasure to read:
You're welcome.
Nonetheless, I feel very compelled to go to Colorado. I want very badly to see the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde National Park. I didn't understand where this irrational feeling came from, until I recently remembered that one of my favorite passages in one of my favorite books, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, focuses on the protagonist's discovery of and relationship to cliff dwellings in the southwest. Willa Cather traveled to Mesa Verde National Park in 1915 and stayed for a week. Out of that experience came Tom Outland's story (in The Professor's House) and an article on "what Mesa Verde means" for the Denver Times. I know my imagination is more romantic than reality, and my experience of Colorado probably won't be revelatory but dangerous, exhausting, or merely banal - maybe I will focus more on the clouds of gnats swarming at dawn than the sunrise - but I haven't anything better to do and I might as well see.
I bought another copy of The Professor's House because the first was Stephanie's. It arrived today. The quality of the printing is so poor that it is intrusive - it is like the Dover Thrift edition of the Dover Thrift edition. The publisher put an unnecessary statement underneath the title: "This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today. Parents might wish to discuss with their children how views on race have changed before allowing them to read this classic work." Also, all the diacritics are messed up, as if the document was created in one word processing program and opened up in another, and nobody bothered to edit it: "That summer Charles kept him for three weeks in his oleander-buried house in the Prado, until his little brig, L'Espoir, sailed out of the new port with a cargo for Algeciras. The captain was from the Hautes-Pyrénées, and his spare crew were all Provençals, seamen trained in that hard school of the Gulf of Lyons." This is distracting.
Still, what a pleasure to read:
The thing that side-tracked me and made me so late coming to college was a somewhat unusual accident, or string of accidents. It began with a poker game, when I was a call boy in Pardee, New Mexico.Now go and buy this book, and then read this informative criticism.
One cold, clear night in the fall, I started out to hunt up a freight crew that was to go out soon after midnight. It was just after pay day, and one of the fellows had tipped me off that there would soon be a poker game going on in the card-room behind the Ruby Light saloon. I knew most of my crew would be there, except Conductor Willis, who had a sick baby at home. The front windows were dark, of course. I went up the back alley, through a tumble-down ice house and a court, into a 'dobe room that didn't open into the saloon proper at all. It was crowded, and hot and stuffy enough. There were six or seven in the game, and a crowd of fellows were standing about the walls, rubbing the white-wash off on to their coat shoulders. There was a bird-cage hanging in one window, covered with an old flannel shirt, but the canary had wakened up and was singing away for dear life. He was a beautiful singer - an old Mexican had trained him - and he was one of the attractions of the place.
I happened along when a jack-pot was running. Two of the fellows I'd come for were in it, and they naturally wanted to finish the hand. I stood by the door with my watch, keeping time for them. Among the players I saw two sheep men who always liked a lively game, and one of the bystanders told me you had to buy a hundred dollars' worth of chips to get in that night. The crowd was fussing about one fellow, Rodney Blake, who had come in from his engine without cleaning up. That wasn't customary; the minute a man got in from his run, he took a bath, put on citizen's clothes, and went to the barber. This Blake was a new fireman on our division. He'd come up town in his greasy overalls and sweaty blue shirt, with his face streaked up with smoke. He'd been drinking; he smelled of it, and his eyes were out of focus. All the other men were clean and freshly shaved, and they were sore at Blake - said his hands were so greasy they marked the cards. Some of them wanted to put him out of the game, but he was a big, heavy-built fellow, and nobody wanted to be the man to do it. It didn't please them any better when he took the jack-pot.
I got my two men and hurried them out, and two others from the row along the wall took their places. One of the chaps who left with me asked me to go up to his house and get his grip with his work clothes. He'd lost every cent of his pay cheque and didn't want to face his wife. I asked him who was winning.
"Blake. The dirty boomer's been taking everything. But the fellows will clean him out before morning."
About two o'clock, when my work for that night was over and I was going home to sleep, I just dropped in at the card-room to see how things had come out. The game was breaking up. Since I left them at midnight, they had changed to stud poker, and Blake, the fireman, had cleaned everybody out. He was cashing in on his chips when I came in. The bank was a little short, but Blake made no fuss about it. He had something over sixteen hundred dollars lying on the table before him in bank-notes and gold. Some of the crowd were insulting him, trying to get him into a fight and loot him. He paid no attention and began to put the money away, not looking at anybody. The bills he folded and put inside the band of his hat. He filled his overall pockets with the gold, and swept the rest of it into his big red neckerchief.
I'd been interested in this fellow ever since he came on our division; he was close-mouthed and unfriendly. He was one of those fellows with a settled, mature body and a young face, such as you often see among workingmen. There was something calm, and sarcastic, and mocking about his expression - that, too, you often see among workingmen. When he had put all his money away, he got up and walked toward the door without a word, without saying good-night to anybody.
"Manners of a hog, and a dirty hog!" little Barney Shea yelled after him. Blake's back was just in the doorway; he hitched up one shoulder, but didn't turn or make a sound.
I slipped out after him and followed him down the street. His walk was unsteady, and the gold in his baggy overalls pockets clinked with every step he took. I ran a little way and caught up with him. "What are you going to do with all that money, Blake?" I asked him.
"Lose it, to-morrow night. I'm no hog for money. Damned barber-pole dudes!"
You're welcome.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
a pensioner going shopping
A hilarious but probably not very productive exchange.
Clinton Trades Jibes With North Korea
Clinton Trades Jibes With North Korea
On Thursday, the Foreign Ministry in North Korea issued a statement criticizing remarks Mrs. Clinton made this week to ABC News, in which she said the best response to North Korea’s behavior would be to ignore it, as one would a child clamoring for attention.
“We cannot but regard Mrs. Clinton as a funny lady as she likes to utter such rhetoric, unaware of the elementary etiquette in the international community,” the North Korean statement said. “Sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping.”
not right in my head
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