intelligently cheeky, possibly offensive

This is the fifth blog that I will invest substantial time into,which has necessitated the fifth time I’ve had to think of a title for one.  What verbal signpost could capture your own identity when you hate reductionism?  Thinking that I think too much (uh oh), I spit out the first thing that comes to mind.

Yeah, weird, right?  I wonder why I came up with that.  Well, despite disliking reductionism, I certainly enjoy overanalysis, so allow me to elucidate the workings of my inner mind – for your benefit and mine!

The raison d’etre of writing Blog 5 was to mine the experiences of living and working in Shenzhen, China for a year as an English teacher at one of its municipal schools.  The year will unofficially serve as a break from exam cramming before I enter USC’s medical school, but it’s definitely going to have its own challenges – like teaching from the other side of the classroom, being reduced to illiteracy and muteness for at least the majority of the year, becoming displaced in a foreign land, and – as the only ethnically Asian foreign teacher in my program – trying desperately to convince everyone, both American and Chinese, that it really is a foreign place to me.  I don’t anticipate an easy or enjoyable year.  But I’ve felt compelled to spend this time this way, in China to prove something, to grow up somehow, and to reacquaint myself with my heritage in some way.  It’s a secular pilgramage and a sequel to my Los Angeles bildungsroman.

To experience the full extent of what life can possibly offer, both good and bad – that is why I chose to go to Shenzhen, the “modern miracle” of China that owes its explosion to the worst of rampant capitalism and can sometimes show that decadence on its sleeves.  I’ve been cautioned by friends and family against foreign abduction, elevator organ-theft, hookers with hepatitis, and would-be wives with green card ambitions.  But the willful dive towards full-spectrum living isn’t survivable unless you adopt a good attitude towards what you might see.  Optimism has to prevail, even if you enjoy – and hell, I sure do – exploring the boundaries of pessimism.

So, comedy and irreverence come to the rescue.  A theory book I once read in a comp lit class said that laughter is a response both to and made out of nothing.  Some kind of abstraction of unbelievable and incomprehensible substance generates our impulse to laugh, often at the absurdity of present circumstance.  And in all absurdity, good times can be had, if you don’t take yourself too seriously.  Celebrate them.

Or cerebrate them!  To track as closely as you can the path you took towards this cliff of irreverence, and to try to understand what you can see right there, and beyond into the uncertain chasm.  Just don’t jump off.  Then you’d end up like quite a few academics I know.

Examining all of this from a metadiscursive vantage, of course, would show you that maybe I am just making a funny about the Chinese accent. I wouldn’t dream of doing that, would I?

(No, actually, I wouldn’t.  But the writing process sometimes draws out unintended results, and I better develop a thicker skin than that.)

I leave in two weeks. In the interim I’m making my preparations, spending time with family and friends, calculating impending medical school debt and tweaking this site with my friend Mark O’Neill, the generous provider of this site’s hosting and the reason why I will (hopefully) be able to continue updating from behind China’s internet censors.  Stay tuned.