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The English office doesn’t have a printer. I’m not really sure how an entire school functions without ever printing anything out, but I’ve gotten used to it. I keep all my lesson plans and notes in digital files, or I scribble them out into a notebook. Saves trees and ink, I guess.
But for tomorrow’s plane flight, I figured I should first print the tickets that my…grandmother’s cousin’s daughter-in-law (an aunt, right?) emailed to me. Where to go? The first time I had ever needed something printed was when I got my wall decorations – a bunch of resized album covers – done up. I spent a lot of time cutting the blasted things out and precisely taping them together but they’re still up on my walls today, so not a bad investment of $250 RMB, I guess.
It had taken me a few tries to find a place that would do it. Mostly because the dictionary entry that I had looked up for “print” steered me in the wrong direction. The girl at the first shop looked at me like I was crazy when I used it to ask her about printing. I later found out that I had asked her if her shop did block engravings.
That time I had eventually found a place that helped me through it and didn’t mind my tortured Chinese. After a few miscommunications the shopkeeper had settled down with me at their computer benches. After he attempted a few questions with Mandarin that even I could tell was heavily accented and I replied in nonsense sentences that I didn’t understand him, he had good-naturedly pushed a bowl of soggy peanuts in my direction and invited me to eat them while the printing was going. I thought that maybe months later he would recognize me again, which would help the process along a lot. I wouldn’t have to do the I’m-Actually-A-Foreigner dance all over again.
But when I got there, the guy wasn’t working today. Instead there was another dude who glanced at me and asked what I wanted. “想把一张图片打印，” I said. He grunted and took my flash drive from me. He looked at me quizzically a few times, but probably just because I was speaking a little softly. That’s my usual tendency and I normally try not to do it, but this guy didn’t seem too friendly today. Which meant that he wasn’t going to be interested in prancing around in a “oh you’re foreign” conversation. I knew enough Chinese, I realized, to get through this transaction and get out of there without having to offer a “其实我的中文还很差” confession. I’ve found that in these scenarios, I unconsciously speak more quietly. I think it’s so that if the other person can’t understand me, they’ll assume it’s because I’m speaking quietly, and not because my Chinese sounds really foreign.
Sure enough, I was out of there in half a minute.
I walked away a little uncomfortable. While other expats would probably be excited that they could get through an entire conversation or transaction with only Chinese, every time I do it I feel like I’m flying blind. I’m always worried that the other person will start speaking at a level I can’t keep up with or comprehend, and then if they do then I’ll have to own up to being foreign – and every time that happens it feels like my cover’s been blown. It’s not so bad if the other person seems friendly (and most are) but the few times that they don’t seem interested I just feel foolish.
Maybe a personality profile is wiser to this than I am. When I was researching character types for my fiction writing, I looked into the enneagram business. Here’s what it says about a particular personality category:
Behind Fives’ relentless pursuit of knowledge are deep insecurities about their ability to function successfully in the world. Fives feel that they do not have an ability to do things as well as others. But rather than engage directly with activities that might bolster their confidence, Fives “take a step back” into their minds where they feel more capable. Their belief is that from the safety of their minds they will eventually figure out how to do things—and one day rejoin the world.
(From The Enneagram Institute.)
I’ve been thinking about this description’s relevance and, if it is, what the implications are.
Flight’s tomorrow. Fuzhou is a much different place from Shenzhen. I’ll deliver the whole spiel – historical and familial – another time.
I always liked the word “interstitial.” It used to pop up occasionally in my critical theory books in reference to abstract in-betweens that post-structuralist theorists liked to expand on so very much (evidently the world’s demand for abstract concepts is beginning to outstrip supply). I always thought it had surgical-Tim-Burton-esque connotations too. Spindly!
Skeletal connotations aside (unless we’re talking about the recent update schedule of this blog…sorry), today and tomorrow will be interstitial time. Yesterday I returned from about six days spent in Hong Kong with family, and on Sunday I’ll be navigating Chinese domestic airspace to visit my grandmother and extended family in Fuzhou, Fujian Province. Today I’m sitting in a Starbucks again, attempting to get some writing output done with Enrico (another CTLC teacher based in Luohu District). We’re back in the COCO Park Starbucks and we’ve found a corner and we’re (supposed to be) taking no prisoners. But mostly we’re just chatting and not getting done what we intended to (fiction for me, political commentary for him).
I’ve been reluctant to write about my time or observations in Hong Kong here, mostly to preserve my family’s privacy there. Otherwise they would become recurring characters here for how often I venture over, and I don’t know how they would like that. So instead of writing those experiences into this blog, I’ve been saving them for my fiction, working them over in my head until I can get some kind of anonymous honesty balanced out. Hopefully you’ll see the results in a few months’ time, outlined in a first draft!
So the phrase “你吃饭了吗” I know means literally “have you eaten,” but I also know that it is often used like a passing hello. An acceptably ordinary response would be “吃了,” or “I have.” Like saying “not much” in response to “what’s up?”
But here is my question:
If a guy is walking briskly past you and throws out a friendly “你吃饭了吗” but you have not, as a matter of fact, 吃饭了’ed, do you stop him from the jog he is taking to tell him all the details about how and why you have not eaten yet, or do you just say that you have, smile, nod and walk away? What if he spots you five minutes later digging into a bowl of 饭? Then you have explaining to do!
Is it like in English where if you ask someone how they’re doing just as a greeting and then the other person decides to share ther life story with you, whether you actually wanted to hear it or not?
Having two weeks off before I begin traveling around China to see family is nice in that without morning classes to worry about I can get out of my corner of Shenzhen and make sure I’ve actually become familiar with this place and how it works. They say Shenzhen doesn’t have “culture,” but surely something must have developed? Yesterday as I was wandering the subway, I found a little piece of what might be something: a corner of the subterranean hallway where a few boys still in blue school uniforms were spinning and breaking on the smooth tiled floor, laughing as they videotaped each other and heedless of passerbys, curfews, or no-loitering laws.
I was moving through the Metro system to get to COCO Park, which I’d heard a lot about from the other expats but had never actually visited. Other CTLC teachers will laugh at me, but after I got there did I realize that COCO Park is actually not a park. What is it? Of course, another mall.
On malls in Shenzhen: if you have nothing to do on a weekend and you’re in the mood for exploration, at some point (if not for the entire duration of your day) you will spend time in a fancy Chinese mall. Despite being surrounded by the monolithic concrete slabs of apartment buildings (which if not for lack of trying would look like a run-down Bauhaus) or towering glass monsters of office highrises (something you only see in downtown Futian District anyway), malls in Shenzhen have an otherworldly, transportative feel to them. Even their names establish them as microcosmic self-focused entitites separate from the rest of the world around them: “Garden City” and “Coastal City” are the two closest to me. Their interiors look like some kind of surreal hybrid of Final Fantasy palaces and Dale Chihuly glasswork – an organic kind of modernism made with curved glass and smooth steel. The Beverly Center in Los Angeles looks pretty bad compared to these places.
Interior design is big here (go to any bookstore and that section takes up half the store), possibly because the Chinese might be conscious of the dreariness that a badly aging Communist aesthetic of functional minimalism wrought out of concrete and cement bunker buildings. But two things are still lacking: a sense of warmth and common sense. After hours of wandering through “ritzy Chinese malls” (as Hunter once described them) I got pretty tired of the superficial wow factor of being able to see through every wall and surface, as well as wondering which way to turn to get from one place to the other (I walked in circles following the arrows for bathrooms for a while). One thing that I haven’t seen much of in even these fancy megaplexes is wood. I might be more sensitive to its use in both architecture and aesthetics because I come from the Pacific Northwest; I don’t know. The malls are quality stuff here, but without the wood I can’t help but think that they feel a little cold. The obvious emphasis on form over function (the art is more important than your need to go to the bathroom!) doesn’t help that feeling.
At one point I finally extricated myself from the COCO Park maze and took a step out towards the street. I took a look around to see if there was something I could walk to outside of the confines of COCO Park’s artificial garden, but there wasn’t really anything for a long distance. Shenzhen seems to be unique like that: it’s so big and so spread out, that unlike most claustrophic Chinese metropolises each COCO Park that you come across ends up feeling a little bit like an oasis. Especially for China’s emerging upper middle class, for whom these malls must be playgrounds: while I use the term “Chinese mall,” the only thing distinctively Chinese about them is their location. Every shopping space is like a door to Western capitalism, whether it’s a fancy jewelry shop or trendy clothing outlet, and there is almost as much writing in English as Chinese sometimes. I’m also invariably able to stop at a Starbucks to check my email every time. It’s always a different Starbucks, but it’s Starbucks nonetheless.
I’ve accepted the Starbucks-es of Shenzhen as just something to not quibble over too much when arguing about authenticity, but the Coldstone Creamery that I found in COCO Park got me distinctly weirded out.
But what also struck me with ill foreboding while I sat at the Starbucks stirring my green tea latte and reading my English book was that I seemed to be doing inventory of Chinese malls like this every other day on my own. If the Chinese mall experience is meant to be a social one, then of course my impressions and analyses aren’t worth as much when I’m going to them so frequently by myself.
Edit: The grammar in this post is kind of atrocious, I know, but I dashed it out in a hurry. I might or might not fix it later.
After my last class of the morning I decided to go exploring. Heck, it’s a nice sunny day and I need to get out.
An easy option was to look around the Sea World area, a few miles south of my neighborhood. As all Shenzhen expats know by now, our Sea World does not have dolphins or otters but instead bars and expats. It is also quixotically not by the sea, but instead does offer a grounded old Russian cruise liner, the insides of which have been gutted and converted into bars. Around this landlocked ship has sprouted a strange square of classy teppanyaki restaurants, assorted Western culinary sins like Dunkin Donuts and KFC, and much-too-obvious escorts hanging on the arms of white guys.
I’ve been a little wary of frequenting this place before, even though most of the other CTLC teachers seem to dig it. There’s something about how it works that makes me feel awkward. Like the time I went to one of its bars with some of my American friends here. I find it strange to see a mostly white clientele being served by a mostly Asian waitstaff – and a mostly female waitstaff in short skirts and go-go boots at that. Even the male guards who came in to break up the one bar fight that began while we were there (fun story in and of itself, that) were wearing stupid little sailor hats (it was a nautical-themed bar on the boat). And here I am, the only Asian face amongst Team White, feeling an odd mixture of guilt and disgust every time a Chinese attendant in a dumb costume brings me a drink laden with sycophantic servitude.
But at 1pm today it was a bright sunny day and most of the ridiculous antics of the night wouldn’t have begun yet, so I went to check it out. Besides, I’d been craving those Western culinary sins.
Now, a funny thing usually happens with me when I’m ordering food or drinks at a cafe. The clerk register will usually greet me in rapid Chinese, and I will usually try to go with it until my fluency erodes (my knowledge of the flavor spectrum for milk tea is improving, but give me a break). When it does, the clerk will become visibly confused and sometimes impatient, and there is not usually enough time for me to go into the whole “I’m foreign” spiel when there’s a line behind me. I’ve worked out the perfect method at Starbucks, though, where I come up to the counter and go “请来一杯green tea latte.” It’s polite to the clerks (”hey he’s trying”) and they know enough English (hey, it’s Starbucks) to hear from my own spoken English that I must be foreign after all. Things go smoothly after that.
Not being able to speak your first language gets old after a while, though. It’s like I’m always trying to pretend to be a native-born Chinese speaker (and always coming across as a retarded one). So it was with some relief that I could order my four-piece chicken meal with just a “你好” and the clerk, used to attending to ridiculous foreigners in the ridiculous Sea World, just smiled and went on as if it were perfectly normal to have a China boy not speak Chinese. Normality. Something I’ve been missing and was glad to find today, even if it were in such a ridiculous place.
After sampling coffees, teas, and donuts to the point where I realized I couldn’t leisurely sit around and read if it meant stuffing yet another blissfully sugary donut into my face, I picked up and left. Before the night came and again turns Sea World into a strange nocturnal zoo.
My writing project didn’t end with NaNoWriMo, but then it hardly began with it, either. Every time I write a sentence down, I go back and hack away at the rest of it until I remember that the rest of my plot is in shambles anyway and I should probably fix that first. Then I wander away to think it over, which consists mostly of coming up with outlandish ideas and rejecting them one after the other. By the time I come back to the computer, I’ve given up on planning ahead and just try to write as it comes to me – but inevitably I get frustrated by the fallacies of being forcibly spontaneous, and the whole thing starts over again.
I tell myself that before I spend a lot of time on a blog entry, too, I should really get some writing done with the novel.
3 aborted beginnings later, I have no novel and I’ve missed out on writing a ton of blog posts, too.
Frustration is building on more than a writer’s front. I’m getting a little tired of being here – learning the language is proving difficult, and I’ve fallen off track on my rigorous schedules for working out and practicing music. I wonder sometimes why I don’t just power through these challenges, but I know: I have a bad tendency to clam up and withdraw from worlds that I think I can’t interact in very well, as opposed to challenging them. I hermit up. And that’s what I’ve been doing lately. Yesterday I slept for most of the day, because of the nausea induced by that bad dumpling, but it felt like just another day where I spent most of it in my room doing nothing.
Going out seems like too much trouble. Making friends seems like a lot of hassle. The adventuring spirit that I had in the beginning of the year is gone and now I just want to find a way to live by myself tucked away in my corner.
Well, the Chinese New Year month-long break is coming up, at least. Things will get better.
I think I ate a bad dumpling yesterday. This is going to be a problem, because as you may know, once you upchuck a kind of food once, you never want to eat it again. This is why french toast and italian sodas are off limits for me. Then, though, I had other foods to choose from, so I didn’t starve and die. But dumplings are the only kind of food I know how to cook for myself here!
Time to buy a rice cooker :\
I know it’s been a while since a good quality post. I’ll get back to it after I take care of some correspondence business.
The sonic hedgehog homolog gene “is one of three proteins in the mammalian signaling pathway family.” It also has a repressor protein. Guess what it’s called? Robotnikinin.
If I were a biology PhD student my life goal would be to discover a molecule just so I could name it Pikachu. Oh wait. That’s already been done too.
Some people are really upset by quirky gene/protein names like this, with a list out for the top ten offenders. The big argument is that it would suck to tell a patient that their sonic hedgehog gene is malfunctioning. I guess I should be more sympathetic to this argument seeing that I’ll be a physician and all one day, but if it were me, I would at least be gratified in knowing that my disease name had a personality and but for its deformity would have been the fastest thing alive.
Also, I spent a year and a half working with a gene called “chk1,” the full name of which was “Serine/threonine-protein kinase Chk1.” While a lot of my lack of results is probably because of my lack of laboratory skill, I sometimes wonder: if I had spent the year working on a gene instead called sonic hedgehog homolog, or lunatic fringe homolog, or death executioner Bcl-2, would I have been inspired by the ironic poetry enough to produce something?
In other relatedly unrelated news, I have been having a strong craving for ice cream lately. I guess I don’t eat much of the usual Western vices here (it’s been months since I had fast food).
Edit: Hey comparative literature students; that protein name thing would make a great essay. Maybe you could win a prize. Throw in some Deleuzian identity theory and say a few big words out of a molecular biology textbook and you should be set.
Whoa, so i hadn’t even realized when leaving for the teacher’s party (which ended up being in Longgang District, an almost two hour drive across Shenzhen) that it was December 31st! So I may have missed my own New Year’s (though details of how that went down soon to come), but even though I have only now just returned at almost 3 o’clock Friday afternoon on the first of January, December 31st still has one hour to go for everyone in the Pacific Time Zone, so:
Happy New Year!
To continue the story of the last post would mean that I have to skip ahead of telling the story of my actual Christmas spent in Hong Kong in the pleasant company of family there. For making you feel at home in the wintertime of a country that ostensibly doesn’t celebrate Christmas, there’s nothing like watching a two-year old rip open his presents under a tree in Hong Kong (the one ostensibly Chinese place that does celebrate it).
But that would delay things too much, and I owe you more frequent updates, so here I am again in the lunch break of my Thursday back at the dashboard. Except today’s lunch break is a truncated one (though it is hard to say a 1 1/2 hour break is short), and my last class of the day has been cancelled. All this to allow all the teachers of Yucai Third Middle to leave, in three buses, to go celebrate New Year’s in….I don’t know where, actually. There’s a lot of things that I only find out about at the last second here. Like how this was going to happen over the weekend. Like how this was actually going to happen today instead of over the weekend. Like how I was supposed to learn that dumb dance, then learn how to sing the song, and then learn the dumb dance (in a series of unfortunate fake-out mistranslations). I have stood my ground on not learning the dance (see the last link in the last post and you’ll sympathize), but tonight we will see how my vocal chords hold out while crooning to those middle-aged lady teachers some Korean pop songs of the most atrociously saccharine variety (when I asked why they didn’t just use a recording, the English teachers pretended not to understand me.) At one point in the choreography that Nana seems responsible for, they all swoop around me in a circle and throw up their hands in an adulating ring. I think I’m supposed to belt out something like “HONEY YOU KNOW THAT I NEED YOU” at that point.
Now, consider this. Nobody in the audience is going to really understand what I’m singing. So the only one suffering through all of this will be me. Trapped in my own head. How very metaphorical and appropriate for illustrating my Chinese battles with insecurity! Although in this case, I don’t know if there’s really any redemptive quality to it, because whether or not I get a nice little moment of personal empowerment out of it, in the end I’m still going to be singing a really godawful song – and not even ironically. Hipsters, take note: it turns out that irony is a quality that your audience is responsible for and not you. Ergo: you’re not postmodernly cool like you thought you were. Boom.
Anyway, I have to stay the night wherever it is we’re going (probably a hotel), so I’m hoping that I can crawl into my room and hide there with a book to read or something right after the performances. The last time that the Yucai Third teachers went out together for a “meeting,” everyone got pretty drunk. It’s one thing when you’re at a party with your friends…and kind of something else when it’s with a bunch of teachers who are mostly older than you. (That time, one old guy had to be piggybacked to his room comatose by a PE teacher.)
I would so much have rather written a nice post about Christmas trees and family dinners.
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