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.
Monday, November 09, 2009
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!
Friday, October 02, 2009
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.”
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