Final Installment?

Saturday, April 17, 2010, 4:40 PM

There’s a lot of stuff floating around in my head right now. In a good way. It took a while for me to allow myself to find this second portion of the trip educational and inspirational and something I should be absorbing, because of how totally awesome Shanghai was, and how absolutely different this feels from that. So while parts are pretty illegitimate feeling, and über-touristy, I’m getting some good thoughts out of it.

And I feel like I owe you some Xi’an recollections, but there really wasn’t all that much that was crazy inspiring or interesting to me. I mean, the Terracotta warriors where pretty freakin amazing, and were a real highlight. But I can’t really expand on anything that a series of facts wouldn’t tell you. There are 8,000 of them currently unearthed, 6,000 of which can be found in Pit 1, the first pit discovered, which is that one that you’ve seen in the pictures. The craftsmanship is unreal. (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/TerraCotta_Color_and_Detail.JPG note the detail on the feet. This is the only perfectly preserved warrior. All others were destroyed by the emperor immediately following Qin [more on him below], because no one really liked him at the time [more on that below].)

Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, who is one of those awesome mixed-bag sort of figures, had them built around his tomb. He unified China and the currency system and the writing system, and is basically the reason the country exists at all, but he also killed a bunch of people and scholars especially and burned a bunch of books and things. (A really oddly clean parallel to Mao, now that I think about it. Mao  instituted simplified script, which is a real big deal, but he also killed a bunch of people, scholars especially, and destroyed a bunch of history. A connection worth thinking about.)

Qin also had one of the raunchiest armies in history (I think I remember hearing from somewhere, but I no longer remember if it’s a reliable source. I suspect I’m just getting it from Hero. Ya know, the guys with the arrows.), and so he instituted a policy that rewarded people for having a bunch of kids, so that in the future he’d have a gigantic army. Which is a big reason why China’s population is so gigantic, and  is why Mao (who I see more and more as a historical brother, of sorts, [how was that grammar? not so good?]) had to institute that  Of course, he died before that whole generation could get through, because everyone wanted to kill him, and a Daoist (I think I remember that, too. We learned it just the other day, but I forget if it was a Daoist monk or Buddhist monk, but it was one or the other. Not that they’re interchangeable.) monk told him if he ate a little mercury everyday, he’d become immortal. Which wound up killing him. His tomb hasn’t been excavated because his coffin is said to be floating in a pool of mercury, which is a pretty good way of keeping people from robbing your tomb.

But so anyway, that was really cool, but I feel I don’t have anything original to contribute to it.

These few graphs should be looked at. (sort of a continuation of the “China’s future doesn’t seem all that bright, sorry to say” theme from last time.)

Current(ish) age distribution of China (Population Pyramid): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Pyramide_Chine.PNG

Previous, current, and predicted age distribution of US: http://www.nationmaster.com/country/us/Age_distribution

Trends of population pyramids: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/DTM_Pyramids.svg

The future is a tricky thing.

Today was our first day in Beijing. (Which is to say, I don’t have much to say about Xi’an. It was cool, and our foot massage was awesome, and we saw a lot of really old things, but it didn’t quite get my gears going. It was like a really cool nature show, or something. A lot of fun to watch, but you can only talk about it for so long, before you  realize that there’s nothing really to be said about it. We saw pandas, which were cool, and some of the pieces in the big museum in Xi’an where really nice. [Okay, there’s a point: I like how you could see the maturation of the art over time. Take horses, for example. At first, in the early societies, they were just doing little clay figures, content with making a simple horse figure, without any frills or details. Later on, though, as you got closer to and further into the Tang dynasty {the golden years of ancient China, I think}, you get a larger, more stable society, that can support artisans and craftsmen to sit around making horses all day. So the horses became more and more detailed, larger and larger, until eventually, instead of just making a lump of clay that basically looked like a horse, you got really detailed horse. And then you got a horse that was doing stuff. It was waving its head about, it was racing other horses, it was on its hind legs, it was carrying hunters about. The jaws were lovingly carved, as were the leg muscles, and the many situations and body positions dreamt up to put these raw, muscular bodies in were really spectacular. The maturation of art was in direct proportion to the stability of the society. And it was also freakin beautiful.] So sorry for boiling down 4 days of pulse-pounding travel into a couple of paragraphs. [Also we had a truly hellish gauntlet through which to pass in order to get to our train on time, which requires too much gesticulating, too many choice words, and rather a lot of stress on my part to recount, so maybe just the fact that I wound up sweating far more than I had in years while getting on a single [bleeeping] train can do for now.] Also I’m tired [from the train!] and apparently remembering things that happened 3 days ago is far too difficult for me right now. What a hellish slog that was.)

It’s a cool place, I guess. I haven’t got much of the actual city life, and I don’t expect to. Tourism keeps me from that.

I would be playing guitar right now.

Oh, and we biked on the ancient city wall of Xi’an. Which was really rather awesome. There are 4 gates and we only got to 2 of them, including the one that we started on, but it was still cool and fun. Nice and odd to be back on a bike again. No one does the standing walk bike technique sort of thing like we in America seem to do constantly, so I felt weird for doing that on the wall, and may have gotten more stares (than usual) because of it.

I’m not sure if I want to blend in or stand out anymore. People ask me to take pictures with them, just randomly, and it’s weird and fun. I usually let them, because how weird is that? I wonder if I’ll wind up on someone’s mantle place or something. That’s a weird thought. (“Weird” count: 3)

Or they just want to sell me stuff. In Beijing especially, the shopkeepers and the random people selling random stuff are really aggressive. They’ll walk in front of you and try to make you hold stuff. (I’ve used “stuff” in the past 3 sentences, mostly to refer to useless trinkets and the like. On a totally unrelated note, I have a sunflower that bobs back and forth in the sun.)

So, being a white-skinned dude in China, I’ve really no idea if I’ll ever achieve an air of legitimacy. Even if I wind up hanging with a good group of dudes for most of the time, and I am, for all intents and purposes, immersed and functioning in China (in my surely fictitious future vision), to the average shopkeeper or man on the street, I’m a dumb foreigner, I think. Which is probably just me demonstrating how little I can understand what it’s like to grow up in China.

The phones in this hotel have little video screens on them, and they play advertisements periodically.

At this point, with just a very few days left in the trip, I get to start wondering if this has all been more in the spirit of escapism than anything else. Creative frustration can only take you so far. Cleanse diet from all the crap of suburbia, or something. (These statements make sense to me.)

When I was in the throes of the college essay process, I was told not to write one of those went-to-costa-rica-and-I-saw-how-people-lived-over-there-and-now-I-appreciate-my-life-more essays, because everyone writes those. But isn’t that the single most important point someone can possibly  bring up? Am I being redundant and irrelevant if I want to talk about how much the world sucks outside of The Bubble? Will I be dismissed as a fool if I want to see what’s outside of The Bubble? Does anyone on the outside want a bubble boy like me living next door to them?

I just hit page 70 in my Pages document. That’s pretty cool. At the beginning, I set out to hit at least page 70, and here I am. 10 pages a week, for 7 weeks. I feel like I’m going to keep writing once I get back, to get to all those things that I forgot about, and maybe to do some editing and word smithing and things. It’s funny, my first post doesn’t sound anything like they tone I’ve (sort of inconsistently) struck upon. I’m not sure if I should leave it as is, or if I should make it more consistent with what I think I meant, and how I think I meant to say it.

We went to the Forbidden City, which I enjoyed a lot, but some people said it was sort of a let down, which I could almost see. It was sort of in disrepair at parts, but I sort of liked the fact that you could look at this or that pillar, or those stones, and realize they’d been there for over 500 years, and a good number of emperors had walked under over and around the very same structures. Not consistently pleasing to the eye, but I got a good kick out of it. I was psyched that I could read “The Hall of Supreme Harmony,” in Chinese, and realize that the literal translation is “Hall of Excessive Harmony.”

(excerpt [I kept thinking “excerpt” doesn’t have a “c” in that one spot, but I guess it does] from a chat with Mom [hi!] when she asked me how visiting Mao’s mausoleum [I’m also unable to spell that after 5 hours on a plane] was. His body

so there was this weird sense of tribute and festivity and mourning and commercialism [and capitalism! gift shops!]
8:39 PM
[mom: so what was your overall impression?]

my impression is that life is an interesting thing

Sunday, April 18, 2010, 9:13 PM

Just got back from a really weird “kung-fu” show, which was 90% interpretive dance, and the other 10% some unsavory combination of kung-fu exposition, dramatic master-talking-to-young-student dialogue, and scarf symbolism. Everyone else seemed to like it, but I really didn’t. Then again, comparing a bunch of dancers who do 5:30 and 7:30 weekday shows pretending to be monks with the legitimate, for serious Shaolin Monks I’ve seen a couple times at the the Orpheum isn’t exactly fair.

I keep winding up in really, tremendously touristy places, and it’s making me feel dirty.

So you know those restaurants with the Lazy Susans (is that a proper name?) in the middle? And they just bring out a bunch of food, and you spin it around and it’s a grand old time. Well, that’s how you usually eat at restaurants, unless it’s a hot pot. So, now that we don’t have any native chinese dudes eating with us, when we wind up in those restaurants, the Lazy Susan etiquette just goes out the window. You can clearly see that we’re all inept at getting it going around nice and smooth. We go around in both directions, and it speeds up really fast and slows down randomly, and people don’t check when someone else is trying to grab some food. There’s an elegance in the way native chinese dudes can wield these things. There’s a clear sense of flailing about when we use them.

Monday, April 19, 2010 6:54 PM

Well Beijing has been interesting. Summing it up would go something like this: “We’ve been sold stuff.” Sold touristy (I really don’t know how to feel about that being an actual word) trinkets, sold watered down versions of Chinese history, and sold sugar-coated and poorly fictionalized versions of China’s current condition.

Being a tourist sucks. I think we’d all much rather be in Shanghai right now.  Our tour guide is pretty lame and we're being taken to all these really tremendously crappy touristy places where foreigners wear matching hats and have laminated name tags. We get taken to places just to get stuff sold to us. "You want to go to a 'silk factory?!'" "No, we've already been to a silk mall." We’re pretty sure she makes commission on all the crap we buy when we get there. Today we started saying we didn't want to go to this and that place, and now we think the driver and our guide are mad at us, which is a weird sort of predicament.

We've been served American Chinese food in China for the past 3 days straight. It's really absurd.

Right now is when I should be packing.

The Great Wall was pretty awesome. We took a chairlift up, because apparently the most exhausting part is just getting up there in the first place. And then we set out on the crazy up-and-down-and-up-and-down portion of the wall, as opposed to the nice and flat section, which turned out to be totally amazingly worth it. I’m really not sure if I can begin to capture it.

Awesomest news in a long time? http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20100416/sc_space/nasasnewasteroidmissioncouldsavetheplanet

P.S. Bill Nye is quoted, who turns out to be the Vice President of the Planetary Society, “A nonprofit organization devoted to the exploration of the solar system and the search for extraterrestrial life.” Yes.

April 23, 2010 10:15 PM

The plane actually has XM radio stations, which means I occasionally luck into a good song or two. “Get Back,” (Beatles, doi), and “Us and Them” (Pink Floyd, also doi), are the latest choice selections.

So. Leaving China? At this point, not such a big deal. The main shock came from leaving Shanghai. I didn’t become too attached to either Xi’an or Beijing, although I’ll say that Xi’an was a lot better than Beijing, and leaving now seems more like stopping the misery than anything else.

Oh man, I caught the last 3 songs of Dark Side. Ahh yeah. Wow, this last song is crazy fitting. “And the sun is eclipsed by the moooooo-oon”

Oh, I got sniped by the checked baggage x-ray machine thing. They called my name over the loud speaker and everything. I had some lighter fluid fuel in my bag, and they made me take it out. Which is funny, because I have another lighter nearly as big as my forearm, (filled with even more fuel), and they didn’t make me take that out. (Hi, mom!). I’m pretty regularly stopped for security checks wherever we go, because I’m an odd looking foreigner. The people where giggling when they saw my passport picture, which is always interesting.

I’m tired and excited to get back to life and things. Make good use of what I learned and all, but I’m also mildly wary of all the crap that I’m gonna wind up putting up with. One more month of high school, anyone? Prom? “Where are you going to college?!” etc. But then it’ll be done, and I’ll actually be living, for a while, and that should be good.

“All Along the Watchtower” Thank you, Jimi. Thank you, Bob.

It’ll be weird being plugged in again. Cell-phoned and facebook-ed. I was able to avoid that, to a certain extent, (except I got a cell phone from the family [I said that, right?], which made me sort of text-y, but mostly with Jason and peeps, so that was cool. Much less plugged in than I am at home, at least.

The other day (and by that I guess I mean lunch from today, which seems like it was a long time ago, for a variety of reasons), we went to perhaps the worst quality touristy lunch buffet ever ever ever. They didn’t have chopsticks, and tried to make pizza on toast and made juices out of powder, etc. etc. But so they didn’t have chopsticks, and I’d had a solid month straight of not having used western utensils, so it was really freakin’ annoying have that record broken by my very last meal in China. But my point: I used the fork like a pair of chopsticks. I nudged the food in the way that I would’ve to prepare it to get picked up by my chopsticks. I kept trying to put a whole big chunk of a thing in my mouth, take a bite, and grab it back out of my mouth, as is SOP with chopsticks, and really the only way to eat the bigger things, because knifes are exceedingly rare, and even unnecessary. But so I kept trying to pop a chunk of meat or something in my mouth, and then stab my fork back onto that chunk, while it was in my mouth. Which doesn’t work so well with forks. And I only noticed it after I kept trying to do it a coupe of times, and even after catching myself I tried once or twice more. I’m working out the logistics of bringing chopsticks to school, for lunch. We all lifted a pair from the hotel this morning, because they were pretty good quality, and we felt justified, because the hotel was expensive and not that good. (That’s reason enough, right?)

American Idiot just came on the radio. I’m generally unsure how to feel.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010, 2:33 PM (Back in American time, I guess.)

Maybe that’s a good thing, overall. To really not know how to react. Being assured of anything means you’re wrong, on some level. For some reason, James Gatz of The Great Gatsby comes to mind. “Personality” was sort of described as “a long chain of unbroken gestures,” or something, and the sentiment makes a good case for how being definitively sure of something is a sure sign of idiocy, instability, or some combination of the two. There will always be another shade of meaning to consider, another tiny implication that’s been forgotten or out of our reach.

Which I’m struggling to make less abstract, get it a little more tangible, but I don’t know exactly what case I’m addressing. When I’d find something new, experience something I’d never experienced, meet someone I’d never imagined existed, have to do something that had never been asked of me, how can being perfectly decisive benefit anything? I’d known essentially nothing of what there is to consider. So you exist in that gray area. And while the examples are less clear in more familiar environments, the same basically holds true in all of our experiences. No matter how totally familiar we are with a certain situation, there is at least a small chunk of knowledge that eludes us. And so there is a gray area, and we exist within it. So becoming comfortable with uncertainty is a pretty good course of action. I think I’ve learned that on this trip. That for a gigantic portion of life, you’ve no clue what’s going on. And that’s okay.

Revisiting albums is always fun. I listened to Tera Melos’ unnamed album yesterday, which is always immensely satisfying. (But if you want to get into them, which you should, I’ll start you off on their demo.) And now I’m listening to Blink 182’s Take Off Your Pants And Jacket (please don’t look to hard for the sexual innuendo, mmk?), which is really an excellent album, which I haven’t listened to in its entirety for a long time. A couple weeks ago I went on a Captain Beefheart binge. I’m not sure why I’m writing about this. I like music. I wish I were playing guitar. I have so many things to play. My callouses just started peeling, which is sad. And it means I’ll have to play a lot before I’ll be comfortable enough to go through my whole song writing process thing, so that’ll be interesting. A Cake phase a week or two ago. “Cake Phase” is a really good phrase.

Here’s a funny story. So we went to this market in Xi’an, which was one of the better markets we’ve been to in China. So we went around buying a bunch of stuff. So I spotted this pretty cool (but mostly sort of lame) Starbucks Coffee Shanghai t-shirt, so I figured I’d get it for the pops (cuz if you know anything about Dad...) So I pointed at it, and bartered for a minute or two, and got it for a reasonable price, and I was all satisfied and everything. But I missed a step in the whole process, which was to check the size. I checked it the other day, and it turns out it just sort of barely fits me, which means it won’t fit Dad (cuz if you know anything about Dad... I jest, I jest), so I have this pretty lame Starbucks t-shirt now. And then, packing up last night, I realize that it’s my only clean t-shirt. So now I’m wearing a loser-y touristy shirt, and feel silly, in general. Like that Onion headline, (I have a lot of those memorized... I’m oddly proud) “Shirt Demoted to Night Shirt.” Anyone want a red and green Starbucks t-shirt? (P.S. Now that I’m home, it got sent through the wash, and sort of made all of my socks pink.)

Tuesday, April 20, 2010, 6:07 PM

So we just arrived after that (I can’t think of words now. I’ve been awake for 22 hours straight. Don’t tell anyone.) flight. I talked to a bunch of random people on the plane, which was interesting. A chinese dude, a swedish girl. Okay, just the two. And then once we got off, there were a bunch of Chinese dudes being subjected to the rigors of American airport assistance. So I hopped up, and spoke what little I could, which wound up being really helpful. There were a couple of people being told to GO UP THAT ESCALATOR, TURN RIGHT, GET ON THE TRAM, TAKE 2 STOPS, TAKE A RIGHT, AND WAIT FOR 4 HOURS, so I thought it appropriate to intercede, saying (in mandarin, essentially), “follow us until we tell you to go over there.” An old couple was going to Memphis, and another women was going to Kansas City. Cool stuff. I’m useful. It was sort of a magical couple of moments.

It’s really weird to be able to overhear conversations. I find myself listening to entire conversations, fascinated that I can understand it all. And then I catch myself, and pretend to not be able to understand anyone, like the good old days, but it doesn’t work so well.

I’m really glad I bought some good chopsticks. I’m not sure how adjusting to western utensils will work now, because I’m totally going to be using the chopsticks whenever I can.

I just went to the airport bathroom here, and I had a moment of hesitation as I wondered if they were squat toilets. It’s going to be weird adjusting. Little things will sneak up on me, I think. Things I’m sure I didn’t even notice, as I was adjusting to them.

I just realized that the internet isn’t blocked over here. What should my first youtube video be? Answer:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lt34aHAFkV8 (It’s a clip from that movie that I found playing in a movie store, but the guy didn’t know what it was. Thank you, IMDB.)

Anyone ever heard of a guy named Michel Polnareff? He’s this snazzy french dude. I got a random song of his while trying to download a random song of someone else’s. Good stuff.

I just did a bunch of mandarin homework, typing some essays in Chinese. (By the way, I’ve tried to refer to the written language as “Chinese,” because the writing is unified across all dialects of the Chinese language, and I’ve been referring to the spoken language as “Mandarin,” because that is the dialect [is it considered a dialect if it’s the most common form of the language?] I am learning to speak. Using “Chinese” to refer to the spoken language is ambiguous and ignorant to the fact that there are tons of ways to speak the language. I’ve at least tried to be consistent with those semantics.) Writing in chinese was disconcertingly (and wonderfully) easy. Yeah know, relative to before.

That basically covers it, right? I’m tired and I smell and I learned a lot and I’m glad to be home but I’ll go back in a heartbeat.

Home again?

So, it being my last night in Beijing, I'm probably obliged to make some sort of update that addresses all the interesting things I've done. Which won't happen mostly because only some of them were interesting. Those that were interesting were tremendously interesting, and those that weren't were incredibly frustrating. And I'm kinda sick, and I'm really jaded, and stuffs. 

So I hope to have a good something or other to post once I get back, by which time some of you will have already heard my bathroom stories and other unmentionables, as well as whatever I'll wind up putting in said upcoming post. Hold tight, my kittens.

I've taken to carrying around rolls of toilet paper in my jacket pockets, for nose snifflies, but it really just winds up making me hobo-esque.

Oh right, the internet

Thursday, April 8, 2010, 4:38 PM

We just realized that we have, like, a solid 3 [Update: now 2. Further Update: now negative 3 or so] more school days over here, so we walked around town as much as we could. 

I bought a donut on a stick. It's everything I wanted and more. 

I can now sort of carry on purchasing conversation pretty excellently, sorta. "How much is it? Do you have a new one? Can I have a discount? I want to buy a bunch, so I should get a discount. How many (insert item) are in the package?" What's more, I can understand what they're saying, and respond in real time. That's pretty snazzy, if you ask me.

I dropped off a couple CDs of awesome music to give to Xun Gang, the guitar store dude. He wasn't there, but his friend was, so I was like, "you know Xun Gang, right? Can you give this to him?" And he was like, "yeah sure." I tend to be able to communicate. 

I'm getting H+M (Hannah and Malia, not to be confused with the clothing store of the same name) into They Might Be Giants. I'm proud. Violin, I am a Grocery Bag, I am not your Broom. Start them off with them the kids stuff. 

Sprite has this awesome new flavor over here: Sprite + Iced Green Tea. It's great.

http://images.encyclopediadramatica.com/images/3/37/Omnomnom.gif

I wonder how many security cameras there are in China. Everyone makes jokes about London having all those security cameras, but over here there seems to be a camera pointed at every camera pointed at everybody. 

Aunt Missy section:

I'm actually going through my pictures and boiling them down to the very best. Maybe this is a good thing, maybe I'll sort of forget some other very good, second-place sort of pictures. What may be uninteresting and normal to me can be wonderful and enlightening to another. Who knows. 

Also, Chinese Uncle Jeff. I meant to write more about him, but I sort of forget to, somehow. I met him at this family party dinner thing that I talked about briefly. There were 4 families represented there, and the dads of the group had grown up together in High School, I think. They talked about their first words in english class: "Monkey, Banana." Anyway, he was one of the dads. 

For the first 10 or 15 minutes or so, I sort of kept looking back at him, to figure out why he looked so familiar. The way he sort of titled his head down and looked at his drink and then looked up to say something tipped me off. And yeah, he didn't just look like you, (cuz I guess I'm mostly addressing this to Uncle Jeff at this point), he sort of and the same mannerisms and things. He liked his Heineken, and sort of approached it in the same way, if that makes any sense. I guess he was quieter than you, Uncle Jeff, (which isn't meant to imply anything, yeah know), but was lively and smiley and sort of tall and gangly-ish, and had glasses and long hair by Chinese-standards. Not quite mini-ponytail-able hair, but close. And he gave me a big, Uncle Jeff-y hug at the end, which was rather a lot of icing on the cake. I don't know what else to say about him, except I'm awed by what seems to be the fact that I will never get to see him again. 

I saw an amazing kung-fu movie clip in a store today, (P.S., End of Aunt Missy section) and I asked the guy what movie it was, but he didn't know and sort of screwed up the dvd player it was saved on in the process of figuring out. I think I recognized one of the actors in it, (the early bad dude, the older master guy, from Fearless), so now I'm on a mission to use my internet/mandarin skills to get myself that movie. Wish me luck. [Update: Found it! It's called Ip Man, and it has Donnie Yen in it, and I found the movie online. I win at interdisciplinary movie bounty hunting.)

Good news! I'm about to make $700,000!

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Is there someone I'm supposed to send this to? Spam police?

Saturday, April 10, 2010, 10:34 PM

Just had another good conversation with Jason about governments again, sort of about one-party vs. multi-party, like I wrote about earlier. We have some good conversations. It's cool because I'm a sort of (sort of) worldly American, and he's a sort of worldly Chinese dude. So we meet on the same level, a lot of the time, but in very [Chinese/American] ways, which is interesting. I'm trying to give an example to explain exactly what I mean, but it's a more subtle thing, I think. I dunno, maybe I'm just making stuff up. 

Two kids talking political theory. We essentially know nothing, and our conversations represent more who we are as people and as products of our respective societies rather than anything original we can add to the discussion of Politics. But it's satisfying and interesting nonetheless.

I made what may be the best playlist I've ever made for the guitar guy. That was a bad sentence. I cover absolutely all of the bases. Tortoise, Streetlight Manifesto, Cake, Tim Armstrong, Charles Mingus, Zach Hill, Steely Dan, Captain Beefheart, Rancid, Hella, The Cardigans. Battles, Bad Religion, me, Blur, Ghosts and Vodka, Melt-Banana and Ahleuchatistas. And it works, somehow. (If you know half of those bands, you're officially my favorite person ever.) (also that last band is spelled right. Ah Loo Cha Tees Tas). I want him to know everything ever. I found I had to explain psychedelia to him. It's weird how people here just don't have access to culture. I mean, period. They simply have no chance to be exposed to basically everything that has shaped me into the person I am today. If I were identical biologically, but raised in China, I feel like I'd be a totally different person, simply because I couldn't find my own cultural likes and dislikes, and things. Find what inspires me. I guarantee the vast majority of guitarists how would've heard of, been devotees of, Steely Dan, have not heard of them at all. Same goes for any other bit of culture you want to look at under a magnifying glass. Artists wouldn't have heard of Pollock. Authors wouldn't have heard of Vonnegut. The list goes on. 

It's easiest to find examples with movies and things. Jason said he liked Denzel Washington, and I was like, "Wasn't American Gangster awesome?" and he'd never heard of it. "Inside Man? Malcolm X?" Nope, nope. The list goes on. Half the shows on TV in America. (Not that, ya know... they're worth watching.) They just get this odd, not very inspiring mix of so-called "American" things. Linkin' Park, 'Prison Break' and Basketball. It doesn't really add up to much. I dunno. I wish everyone had access to everything, so everyone could think whatever they want, etc. etc., but it doesn't work like that, and it won't for quite some time. I want to get these guys' addresses so I send out music I think they need from time to time. "Remember me from 6 years ago? I think you should listen to this album. P.S. Don't let the bastards grind you down." (by then I hope to be able to say that in Mandarin.)

Which isn't to say that I'm not enjoying myself.

Monday, April 12, 2010, 7:21 AM

So I guess this is it. I'd mistakenly assumed that my ramblings would sort of find their own natural structure; would make sense of themselves. They haven't, though, I don't think. So if you've been reading along (and some reports say there are a rather lot of you guys out there,) I thank you, but it's a little too late to warn you that this doesn't have a story arch. I showed up in China, I was a little lost for a bit, and then I got progressively less lost. And now, before I can legitimately say "I have a handle on the workings of Shanghai," I'm getting out of here. Just a story that I really want to be continued. 

I do have the one last observation, which may sums things up nicely. 

I've said before that we're all basically the same, and I've said before that our (i.e. me and all of the people I met in China) only basic differences are the language we speak and they many fine distinctions between our cultures. We're all human, and we all exhibit humanity in basically the same way. Now my goal is to be able to truly communicate, eventually. Having said that, I don't want to sound all Pocahontas-y. (The white man is a-comin' to save you, savages!). I'm just realizing that it's crazy presumptuous and ignorant to be content with living in America and speaking English all my life. (Not to insult all you guys who do. I'm not sure how to bail myself out of this one... I don't want to insult you guys, but it seems a little unavoidable.) In order to be good and honest with myself, to develop into what I could consider "fully realized," I'll need to spend some solid time outside of suburbia, outside of America. (This is where you collectively say: No sh*t!) And then there's the whole Emersonian "why travel, you should be able to take full advantage of yourself wherever you are," thing, which should basically hold true. But isn't that not the case when you can't access any non-homogenized culture hub? When you'll be exposed to the same things, over and over again? Maybe I'm just pretending to have a legitimate philosophical argument for "get me out of Needham, please," but I've at least got context for whatever follows in the next few years of my life. 

Monday, April 12, 2010, 9:27 PM

Kae-por and I agree that Needham is a good place to raise kids. It's an equally good place to shelter them.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010, 10:35 PM

China officially broke my mind today. We watched TV in the hotel room, and that was odd. We watched the part of True Lies where Arnold makes the alligators eat those guys. Then we watched Future X-Cops, the script of which contains, "this time the hitmen are cyborgs," "Have a good hug now... I am afraid this will be your last hug," "Dad... why am I a robot?" and "Sorry I didn't tell you that you are a robot." I'm not sure if I need to say anything else, except that I'm going to make all of you watch it when I get back. Everyone. 

So really, though, we left Shanghai today. The place I'd been pretty comfortable calling home. I woke up early after a long night of packing, and the family and I all rode together in the car to the school. And then we piled into the school van, and that was it. The ride to the airport is just a little longer than you expect to be. It was this long, drawn out buzzing sound. When we stopped at the airport, I realized I'd curled up into the ride, hoping it'd never end. The sounds and constant Shanghai-highway fear and the unending apartment complexes looming and stabbing out had become my comfort zone. 

We went into the airport with the ceiling that gave you vertigo, and rushed through security checks, getting busted for little cartons of milk, but not for bottles of liquor. We ran the length of the terminal to catch the plane, and that was it. 

We've been telling ourselves we'll surely return to Shanghai someday, to go back to this or that store to check in with our favorite shopkeepers (who we tend to dub in relation to their trade, i.e. "baozi lady" or "dvd lady," or "awesome guitar store dude,") but we all wonder a little, (rather a lot), if we're fooling ourselves. 

That I'll see Jason again, that we'll see Ms. Gao again, that we'll come back and pick up from whence we left. 

I gave Naiyi a bunch of the pictures I took, which he appreciated a lot. 

Now I'm in a hotel that's perhaps far too spacious just me, and far too swanky for anyone, really. Modern art hangs on the wall and the decor is themed and the plants aren't fake but certainly low-maintenance. Toilets: western. It's hard to say anyone belongs anywhere, and it's hard to say anyone will learn anything from anywhere. I really want to play guitar. I'm getting Jason to say a proper-er goodbye to my guitar store friend than what I gave him. 

We all agreed that it felt like we were leaving for home, rather than just leaving for somewhere else in China. All there is is the fact that we are no longer in Shanghai. 

Xi'an is actually pretty great, and I'm glad that I'm here. But I won't be able to play volleyball with the kids from Shanghai No. 2 anymore. That girl named Encore won't play me in ping-pong, and I won't walk home with the kid who really wants to build robots. We can't take Jason to new places in his home city, and DVD lady won't wave to us from down the street. 

It's much quieter here. For some reason no one honks their horns. I got used to this wonderful soundscape pouring into my room at night. I should've recorded it. Now there's all this silence, but for the mini-fridge and air conditioning. There's a touch-screen button I can press in my wall to turn on the reading light on my bed, which shines from the ceiling down to exactly where you'd want to read a book. The beds are soft, which generally isn't the case in China. I feel like I'm in a cocoon. We'll be whisked around in a tour bus for the next few days, and then go to Beijing, and be whisked around some more. I'd been living life before, right? Being a city kid, spending my time how I like, jammed into buses and taxis and restaurants and being loud and silly and self-reliant and learning so much more than I thought was out there. I think I'm going to wind up writing some more on this topic, sort of in the abstract, but it always amazes me how people seek out inauthenticity. How that is comforting. The streets of Shanghai are authentic. There are beggars who have cut off their own hands to make more money off foreigners, who are smiling every day. Immigrants from far off in the country side peddling bicycles filled with fruit, trying to make it in the city. Kids studying until they convince themselves they're idiots, and their peers who skip school and know they're on to something. A government that seems like it's selling something, at all times. It's all very jumbled and grey and authentic, and no one really knows what to make of it or themselves. And that's where we should spend our time. In that grey zone. But now I'm here, propped up between to incredibly comfy, identical chairs, contemplating which of my incredibly comfy, identical beds I should sleep in, and whether or not my wake-up call will be automated or not. Here there is a system, a tangible structure, that is sold to me, and it says that I am on top. Back home, (America, this time), I'm also told that I'm part of system. Of schooling and civic duty and citizenship, and it says that I am on the bottom. None of it's true. I knew that before, but now I know what being in the middle can feel like. 

Wednesday, April 14, 2010, 10:38 PM

Today was pretty great, actually. Started off not so great, because I couldn't get to sleep last night, because the impossibly spicy food we ate (just a bit of, the rest of the food was splendid. Up in the more northern part of china, they eat a lot more noodles, because you can grow wheat up here, whereas down in the south [Shanghai is considered southern, but it's all relative] they eat a bunch of rice. So now I'm eating crappy rice but delicious noodles, and before [even though I didn't realize it] I was eating crappy noodles but delicious rice. Nothings better, all in all. Just different.) made me whip out the Alka-Seltzer, and I had some residual Xi'an cuisine hangover or something in the morning, so that wasn't that great. But then we went to our pretty excellent buffet, and I knew how to order coffee. Coco Crispies. Ahh yeah. Which makes me think of the home made egg/Chinese-pancake concoction I'd probably be having back "home," so it's still a pretty thoroughly mixed bag. 

And having said that, I probably owe you guys a tangent on my final impressions of Shanghai, now that I'm some sort of cultural ambassador, or something. 

Kae-por asked me, on my last day there, what I thought of China's future, now that I've gotten to know the kids so well. It was a really good question, and one that I hadn't given any thought to, before. But the answer is basically that it's really muddled. It's all murky and odd, and saying anything definitively (tends to be, but especially in this case), is ill-advised. But I'm not all  that hopeful. There's all these directions I want to go in with this. 

First. Jason captured this well, I think, when he said "the students are looking for the answer key, not the answer." In the Chinese school system, there is always an answer key. In a written test, where they ask you to respond to something, or give "your reaction," there is a "correct" view point to take. He said there was this famous poet or author or something, who got an excerpt of his published in a popular text book or something - as part of a test, maybe. And no one could get it right, the answers where so hard. So they called up the guy, and had him take the test about himself. And he got it wrong. "What do you think the author intended to convey by writing this passage?" 

It's so easy to point out the flaws of the American school system, as I go about being flung about within it, but now that I see the idiotic pressure-cooker schools that they have over here, I'm beginning to realize the strengths of our American schools as well. No one is asked what they think. No one writes what they believe. Like that Onion headline, "Decency Accidentally Bred Out of Human Race," it seems like a by-product of the school system is the breeding out of creativity. 

I saw my very first street musician (who wasn't selling something) on the subway the other day, and I immediately emptied my pocket change on him. I couldn't believe it. I was in a rush, so I couldn't stop and listen, but I totally would've chatted and things. I thanked him and ran off. 

And the state of music in China. Don't even get me started. I talked earlier about the financial conundrum any potential musicians find themselves in, as told by Xun Gang, the awesome guitar store dude, so I won't really go into that. But all of the music that people listen to in China sort of scares me. Absolutely every band you can hear on the radio is selling something. It's surprising to find a sugary juice fruit drink that doesn't have a popular band on it. And the American music is just the very top few bands of the past decade. Lady Gaga, Backstreet Boys, Michael Jackson (who is huge over here, but, even so, no one can recognize "Thriller." I think his popularity is limited to "Beat It," but it could just be his dancing, or what he represents that captures the imagination."), Jonas Brothers, etc. It's frighteningly uninspired and corporate, just like back home, but to the nth degree. There is nothing original to take in, even if the population wanted to. Which I want to say is an exaggeration, but I'm really not sure if it is. 

Which is to say, while the country seems to be "on the rise," their population seems to be pretty stagnant. There's hope, sure. I meet a bunch of kids who are really talented and have legitimate thoughts in their heads, but have no idea how to go about it, or how to get recognized, and before they can give it any thought, they get told to do their homework, while being forced to listen to audible money. The system can't grow with their kids in this situation. Everyone talks about "the workforce," and how awesome China's future is, in terms of sheer numbers. But what if no one can problem solve? Or think creatively? Then what? I feel like I read somewhere that the American worker is the most productive individual worker in the world, which I originally discarded as bollocks. But I may be beginning to see why. We're pretty well trained to figure things out, and be flexible and creative and things. The way China is structured right now, they're going to get a gigantic workforce of second and third-tier workers. I'm afraid all of this smatters of racism, and I really don't mean it like that at all, and it pains me to say all of this, but it certainly seems true and the people I've talked to seem to agree, and it's all very sad and stupid and one big waste. 

Xi'an is awesome; it really is. But I'm really not in the mindset to talk about how cool this stuff is. I'm enjoying it all, but I wind up juxtaposing it against what I learned in Shanghai, and all that makes for these sorts of thoughts. So I'm sorry, I guess, but you'll get some good, juicy Xi'an updates soon. This is where I cop out to Briggs' blog, because there are good pictures and things of the awesome artifacts and things I should bring myself to write about soon. And things.

(Also it was hard to work out the internet for the past few days, so sorry all you guys who have been trying to get in touch. Internet is back now, but my time tends to be short. I'll be doin' my best. Don't you worry, kids.)

My named, stamped

Suzhou blossoms

Pro-tip:

Don't eat the corn.

Mandarin class

"It's pronounced like this"

(teaching each other internet-invented words in our respective internet tongues)