cerebrate good times » culture comparisons

in-between, this is how we do

Andrew Pouw — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 14:16:45 +0000

On my last day in Shenzhen, I woke up early and sorted through my things. I cleared my desk of the things I had made ready for the single day and ran a final check through my suitcases. Even though I was leaving them here for a few days, I wanted all to be ready when I returned from Fuzhou, so that when I returned I could just swing by my room to grab my luggage and quickly be off on my way to Hong Kong and America a week from now. I checked through another bag, too: one full of chocolate boxes and messages on index cards. It was this one that I lugged with me towards the English Department office.

I spent the last day at Yucai Third Middle gifting these boxes to teachers and administrators as farewell presents, and taking group photographs with students who requested them. All of them have treated me very kindly this year, so while the Center for Teaching and Learning in China, the organization that brought us foreign teachers to Shenzhen, did not recommend or mention procuring farewell gifts, I still wanted to show my appreciation. I even got some wonderful farewell gifts of my own from some administrators, including a miniature crystal replica of an ancient imperial vase and a long scroll inlaid with calligraphy and paintings from Kaifeng. Students were coming and going as well, asking me to sign “yearbook” like sheets and giving me class photographs with warm goodbye messages written on their backs. One student even gave me a dual-language book, a handmade card proclaiming how moved his heart had been by my casual coursework and a little Chinese flag upon which he had written “No matter where you go, you will always be a Chinese!” And two hugs.

So you can imagine how my heart sort of fell when I woke up this morning in Fuzhou to two emails from unnamed students.

“Do you like bitch?You always sleep with bitches!!
Fuck you!!!
You deserve a foreign teacher!!!
You are so ugly!!
你还以为自己很帅是不是？！！自恋狂！！其实你丑的要死！！还留胡子干嘛！！丑死了！不要脸！！中文又不会说！！亏你还是中国人！！死在美国算了！！就好别污染了中国的土地！！
天天make love小心得Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome！！
还那么矮！！矮子一个！！
快点死到美国去吧你！！
傻子一个！”

Here’s the bottom half via Google Translate:
Do you think you handsome is not it? ! ! Narcissism! ! In fact, you die ugly! ! Why has a mustache! ! Ugly dead! Shame! ! Chinese can not speak! ! Loss you’re Chinese! ! Death in the United States forget! ! Like not pollute the land of China! !
Make love every day of getting Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome! !
Also so low! ! A dwarf! !
Early death in the United States go you! !
An idiot!

[I assume that it's Google Translate that makes it more incomprehensible.]

The second email had a picture of a dog, and some Chinese underneath it that mentioned something about the inviolability of my dog-ness and that I eat shit.

After some initial shock, I began wondering what to do. At this moment my grandma came in the room and asked me in Chinese if I was ready to come join breakfast. I smiled for her and replied in my shoddy but improving Mandarin that I would be there in a second. When she turned around to leave, I signed onto QQ, the Chinese version of AIM and GChat, and sought out a Yucai teacher to lodge a complaint.

The teacher I found on QQ was perhaps the one I had the best relationship with. She said “Oh, maybe it is because they love you too much…I have some students who hate me too.” She would look into it, she promised me, and with that I left her alone. I think I am Chinese enough to know that it’s embarrassing to drag others in to do my disciplinary work. But I was tired of these students constantly harassing me, and these words nettled me to the core.

After leaving QQ, I wondered again if this was really the best way to deal with the situation, and thought about one past episode that had also left a bad taste in my mouth. A few months ago as I was finishing a lesson for Class 12 and bidding them farewell, I overheard a girl mutter in Chinese “and don’t come back.” I raised an eyebrow and indicated my understanding. The girl flustered. “You didn’t hear anything!” she and her mates yelled at me in English. I was less than pleased. Insult me first, and then deny my displeasure the next? But I left it alone and left.

Class 12 is the one which I have the most peculiar relationship with; they were the class that claimed me the most, and simultaneously aggravated me worst. Clever and rambunctious, they were unimpressed with my lessons unless they were games, which I could sympathize with – given the circumstances of our employment, all of us foreign teachers were quite aware that our teaching was for surface appearances only, since our once-a-week “communicative language teaching” techniques are too soft and fuzzy to really help Chinese students tackle their difficult entrance examinations. At the best of times, the classes we each taught were passed in frivolous fun as ways to let kids blow off steam. Some students appreciated this levity more than we expected and more than (English) words could describe. But at the worst of times, our lessons were considered laughable, and ourselves, as foreign goofballs who were wastes of clumsy effort.

Class 12 embodied both the best of times and the worst of times. Usually they paid as little attention to my lessons as they could, chatting with each other loudly while I lectured, playing video games, or making fun of me in Chinese. Only competitive games could get their prolonged attention, and to be fair, they excelled at them, showing the full range of their cleverness. But they also treated me like a celebrity buddy instead of a teacher, always reaching out to shake my hand and calling my cell phone at all hours of the day (I never found out how they discovered my telephone number, and they refused to tell me). Even the videos you saw from Monkey Ray on this blog came from that class. It was all a lot of affection, but a little too much and was starting to get in the way of work, I thought. So after “don’t come back” girl opened her mouth, I decided to try an experiment to see if I could draw a line in the sand. That evening I logged onto their QQ chat network and started ruffling feathers, asking for the name of the offending girl. My inquiries were met with some alarm. “Why is he making such a big deal out of this?” they typed to each other in Chinese they assumed I didn’t understand. “andrew, just forget it, OK? u are being sensitive to much,” a few told me in English. Eventually, a few students came forward. “Andrew, the girl is a friend of a friend of mine, and they tell me that she was only joking, and that it is not a big deal, OK?” I was dubious, having actually seen her disposition in person. But if they were going to play Spartacus, there wasn’t much I could do.

After that episode I warily retreated again from dealing too much with Class 12 outside the classroom. But the celebrity idolizations continued. My phone kept ringing, and they found new phone numbers to call from faster than I could log each number into phone memory. A few girls tried to bully me into having lunch with the class, and they kept badgering me about it till the end, refusing to accept my explanations that I had no time. My email inbox filled. That was okay; it was less of an intrusion than the phone calls, especially since I had given them my email address, but some of them seemed more like love letters than regular emails, one girl even going so far as to dedicate a post in her blog to me. It was nice to a point; after which it became a little worrisome (especially in the comments where I noticed they were trading my phone number around like it was a Pokemon card). I recognized that I was not only dealing with some cultural gaps; in teaching middle school students, there would also be a maturity difference, and while communication might help bridge the first, only about five years could fix the second. So I decided to try to put some more distance between my students and I.

But distance hadn’t worked, as this email evidenced. I reflected again on that time, and how uncomfortable my sleuthing around for the girl’s name had seemed to make them. The teacher on QQ to whom I had reported today’s email had also seemed to want to downplay it as much as possible. Maybe my raising a scene was just as culturally off-putting for them as their evasions were for me. I suppose it is, after all, pretty American to raise hell. In China, maybe it’s better for everyone’s pride if the conflict can be dealt with quietly, and as few people implicated in public as possible. And Andrew, shouldn’t you know how to deal with these things? You’re a Chinese, aren’t you? According to the mystery student’s email, no, I’m evidently a lousy excuse for one. But Chinese or not, I can still play anthropologist.

Maybe it would be better if I engaged with the surly kid myself. I replied to the email telling them that I was very upset, and asked if they really meant these opinions. A more thought-out, cordial reply came back. “In China,do not reply another’s email is a very not polite thing. I know, I am a little 过分。So, I am sorry. I hope you will reply your students emial in the future.” Well. It is so “very not polite” that it’s worth telling me that I sleep with dogs, that I’m narcissitic and that my beard is ugly? I mean, come on! My beard is quite handsome.

Then I thought that perhaps the kid just didn’t think that he or she had really been that offensive, as terrible as it sounded to me. I recollected that every day in class I routinely overheard my students telling each other in casual Chinese to fuck off, or that they’d fuck each other’s mothers. “We were never like this when we were growing up,” my parents noted. “We were very good.” Be that as it may, I also remember one day speaking to one of my favorite students from Class 7. She was in the middle of telling me about her family when a boy came by to tease her in Chinese. She whipped her head around and let fly in Chinese “I hope your baby is born without skin” and then turned back to me sweetly without missing a beat. “Oh, you understood that?” she said, not very shy. The class laughed around us.

After a few more emails exchanges, the kid sent one that read “And,you are a Chinese,but you said you wasn’t a Chinese,and I think you don’t love China. I am very disappointed……
Ok,goodbye…I don’t want to talk to you either…”

Arguably, this is the point that bothered me more than threats of fucking (the word is so cross-cultural) or AIDS-getting did: that I wasn’t “Chinese.” (I don’t think I ever actually said that I wasn’t Chinese to my students, but for that matter I also never claimed to be handsome – they said that of me, and I always demurred. Very perplexing, and possily pathological.) Anyway, it’s not that I think I have anything to prove in that department. But an accusation of my un-Chinese-ness is not exactly how I wanted to end a year in which I was trying to explore my Chinese-ness and Chinese society. It is such a narrow-minded, jingoistic thing to hold against me. Suddenly things clicked together – crazy people who jump off buildings, crazy people who stab kids, crazy people who emigrate and raise Amy Tans and Maxine Hong Kingstons and crazy people who torture landowners and intellectuals with public beatings. The feeling was as if, upon being kicked out of the circle of hospitality and told to fuck off, I saw all of China’s shames and pathos as an outsider might. I didn’t want to consider this the definitive picture of China. But as I’ve walked through the haphazard and gritty market streets of Fuzhou with my grandma clutching at my arm, I kept wondering if my time in Shenzhen had been spent being entertained by a pleasant fantasy, a superficial veneer of politeness underneath which still lay a distrust of my belonging, my loyalty, and my identity.

If so, it might be because much of the treatment and goodwill towards me here has been extended on a perhaps shaky basis: the assumption that I am just like them, and that my Chinese blood speaks for the rest of my body and mind. On occasion, these same kinds of all-encompassing assumptions on the part of Americans have bothered me too, though they manifest in an opposite way – because my thinking and behaviors are American, my foreign colleagues sometimes maintain that they ought to override whatever ancestry I have. When you come to America, you’re expected to speak perfect English or at least be learning to, and you had better assimilate into American culture, otherwise you’re a lazy immigrant. If you’re one of the Overseas Chinese who is returning to the Mainland, you are forgiven some eccentricities, so long as you can already speak your “mother tongue” perfectly and you fervently proclaim your love for your “mother country.” Both of these attitudes are so narrow-mindedly tiresome.

America and China are opposite sides of the coin in ideology and culture, but in the demand to assimilate with the majority to the exclusion of all else, they are just the same as the rest of the worst of humanity. “You’re either with us, or against us,” said Bush, and Minutemen rednecks and the Arizona legislature nod their heads in agreement. “You’re either one of us or you’re not,” says this student, and every Chinese guy who told me to shave off my beard to look “more Chinese” and the students who whispered that I was “a Japanese” in class think the same. How terrible our tribes can be.

Interestingly, though, while America’s worst will villify and persecute the “other,” mainstream Mainland society seems to not care to deal with it at all. Cultural isolation and holding us “foreign experts” at a polite arm’s reach away from doing any real work/damage in class demonstrates this. In fact, it seems to be that it’s the things that the Chinese don’t consider as “other” that are threatened instead – me and certain contested geopolitical territories. (If they can read between lines, that should be the dig that gets this blog banned for good.)

I had realized this a few months ago, but my student’s accusation brought it to mind once again. It touched a nerve because it was right for all the wrong reasons – all of them offensive in their narrow-mindedness. It’s true that I don’t love China – that would imply a blind devotion. I’m an independent thinker, like the best of Americans. Hell, I don’t even love America (though I appreciate it). But isn’t it a very Chinese characteristic to still be proud of your family, no matter how shitty it is? I am proud of China. I’m proud to be a part of the singular, magnificent heritage and culture it has stewarded, even if I am wary of the racial homogeneity and circular logic that also sustains this pride. I can’t love faults like those. And the longer I have been here, the more I have seen. But I became teary at the Olympics opening and I still defend China’s perspective when Westerners bludgeon it with their neoliberal New York Times accusations. No matter what you think, you can’t escape your ancestry. Blood is thicker than water and rhetorical arguments.

I told the student this. “I am proud of China, but it is different. You grew up in only one country, with one culture. I do not think you understand our feelings.”

He or she responded with an ameliorating “well, can you tell me now if you are already back in America?” and “Are you really going to report me?”

Hahaha, you’re a funny kid. Little fucker.

friendly fire

Andrew Pouw — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 10:33:10 +0000

In the Malaysia post I talked about China’s racial homogeneity and how it is a far more definitive element of the Chinese identity than most people realize. After 6000 years of inexorably assimilating minority tribes and even conquering outsiders (the Mongols and Manchurians) into the Han culture, the Children of the Yellow Emperor all harbor a kind of cultural superiority complex that is at the same time extremely isolationist. Think of American exceptionalism without the Manifest Destiny expansionism, mix that with your knowledge of the Imperial Chinese tribute system in the Middle Ages, and you’ll kind of get what I’m talking about.

What I didn’t talk about was how this affects me personally.

A few weeks ago the chummy gate guard waved me over for a chat again. I had just been returning from a shopping expedition and had a plastic bag of goods with me. “Let me see what you got,” he chuckled, and summarily started rooting around in it. He had helped me carry some luggage up to my room when I returned from the New Year holiday and since then it’s been chumtastic. He has occasionally shown me how to say a few Chinese words and also too has offered to call me up to hang with his friends (”of which I have many!” he assures me). Making friends in China can be so instantaneous. One second you are exchanging names and the next you are having your shopping bags poked through and your purchases criticized.

One of the odder things though is how insistent he is that I should be dating someone here. he implored me once. I told him that my contract would expire in June and that I already had plans for next year. I raised an eyebrow but he just went on. He motioned with his hand to demonstrate for me just how tall. and motioned again with his hand at our shoulder heights. I was starting to get kind of annoyed. Good intentions or not, he didn’t know what kind of morass he was stepping into with me. At that moment one of the Junior 1 English teachers who I will call “Su Ming” (this blog apparently has Chinese readers now) passed through the gate. “Oh hello!” she chirped at us and hesitatingly came over to see what we were talking about. Chummy Guard just kept right on going. he said, then cast a weighty look in my direction. I just sighed. Su Ming looked a little disturbed and said something quickly to him that I didn’t catch. he replied with a shrug. After a small silence Su Ming said “well, I am going to go back now.” I told Chummy Guard. he said and smiled.

Well. I have been plenty irritated with Americans who only see China as a Communist threat or a trading imbalance to be contained and pressured, and to have found the same kind of alarmist attitudes in China about America was dismaying. But Chummy Guard’s preoccupation with my love life was a little more immediately pressing. I had been fairly certain that his eyes had been jocularly drilling into my back as I walked away with Su Ming, calculating potential matchups. After that, every time I walked out the gate he would call out and I would always try to brush it off with a laugh. Once in an effort to get him to stop I tried to tell him that I already liked someone at home. He listened dubiously for a moment and then dismissed it. he repeated.

Let’s take a moment to study the following quote, which Kamolika shared with me:

[In America,] only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks. Only white culture had individuals. And we, the half-breeds and the college-degreed, take a survey of the situation and think to ourselves, Why should we get lumped in with the losers if we don’t have to? We become only so grateful to lose ourselves in the crowd, America’s happy, faceless marketplace; and we’re never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we’re bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives-although that’s what we tell ourselves-but because we’re wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger.

Maybe surprisingly, it was written by Obama in his memoir Dreams From My Father. I thought about it for a while after this encounter with Chummy Guard. How dare he just dismiss my possible ideas, opinions, and desires by insisting that I stay here? What was I, just some kind of Chinese baby-making daddy? Did it ever occur to him that I might actually have a life somewhere else? The comment about tall foreigners lingered with me too. You try all your life to ignore racial slurs about your difference, and then your own “people” go and stab you in the back by telling you to just give up on it. I am not like you, I wanted to yell. You can’t swallow my identity. You’ve mistaken me for an ordinary Chinaman…

…hey, wait a second.

Obviously Obama’s quote is not about the problems of Chinese American identity; it’s about how America’s politically correct racial sensitivity still can’t escape its own Eurocentrism. But those of us “half-breeds” and in-betweens who have to always negotiate through this racial sensitivity also work with this bomb of enlightened Eurocentrism planted within us, and we find it difficult to figure out just who exactly stole our identity first. When I was little and my hick classmates made fun of me for the food I ate, the clothes I wore, and the last name I had, it wasn’t immediately apparent to me that their accusations were unjust because they were inherently untrue. All I knew is that they weren’t true of me. (To whit: the food was raisin bread, the clothes were sweat pants, and the last name is Dutch.) And just like this, it happens. As soon as the question changes from “why are you making fun of me for being who I am” to “why are you making fun of me when I am so much like you,” your ethnic identity has just been hijacked. For many of us born in between, we never knew how to phrase the first question at all.

Even now, when I am here in China with my American colleagues, sometimes I become annoyed by listening to their discussions about the backwards practices of the Chinese. Mockeries of the nation unconsciously and all too easily slide into mockeries of the people, and in my presence one of my friends even slipped with a “what a crazy race.” When I complain about it, the Americans look at me curiously. What? Don’t worry, they say, we know you’re different.

You’re one of us.

said Chummy Guard again one night when I came back.

He looked me up and down and then rather reproachfully asked I sighed again and told him with a laugh and tried to go. I didn’t know what he said, but somehow his tone was reproachfully sly. I looked at him funny. He looked back at me with an even more odd expression. I pulled out my iTouch dictionary to translate, which he immediately grabbed and poked at for ten minutes, successfully managing to delete two of my saved word lists. he grumbled. After another five minutes we managed a translation, and I understood it when he repeated I was a little flabbergasted. Before I could collect my wits, he punched in another sentence into the iTouch. it read. I looked at him and he smirked at me cheekily, and discreetly pointed towards my crotch.

People really do get chummy fast here.

—–

When I tell people here that I am spending this year in search of my identity, I have a feeling that some of them nod politely and dismiss it as a hippie pursuit of fuzzy humanism that has no valid justification. But those of us whitewashed Asian Americans, the ones who grew up in the boonies and dealt with the racism of small-town America, really did have our cultural identities stolen. An example: a kid singles you out and says you eat dogs. “I don’t eat dogs!” you say, and you try to distance yourself from such barbaric practices. Then you come to China and you see everyone in fact does eat dogs. What are you supposed to think now? Another example: an American comes to you with a mocking expression and facetiously bows, then toddles away laughing his head off in the floral print bedsheet he has used to imitate what he thinks is the customary dress of the exotic East. Edward Said would have a field day. You aren’t going to be caught dead in this shit. But then you come to China, and you realize that this is indeed the local culture. Your culture. And there is nothing ridiculous, facetious, or small about it at all. It is old, it is marvelous, it is so inherently rich and vast and you have let someone else steal it from you by taking mocking advantage of your insecurities.

But you also have diverse experiences and American ideals that should not be waved away by the Chinese.

I told my mom about this episode on the phone one night. She sounded sympathetic. “It is like being caught between two parents who both want you for themselves,” she said.

malaysian honeymoon

Andrew Pouw — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:09:02 +0000

(Hopefully, I’ll have pictures inserted throughout this long-ish post soon.)

The first stage of cultural exchange is commonly called the “honeymoon” period, the time when baby expats get moonstruck by being in a brand spankin’ new place. But when I first got to China, I didn’t feel particularly excited. It could have been a lot of things… maybe it was because I’d been to Beijing before, or because I had just left a relationship at home, or because the tepid identification I had with Chinese culture was making me feel dissonant instead of secure, or something else, or a combination of these and other ethereally uneasy feelings. The point is, I never felt that “wow!” when I first got to China.

And after that point I never really left China either, barring the occasional culture-twisting trip to Hong Kong. So when Hong Kong cousin William and his wife Kim invited me to spend a week of the Lunar New Year vacation in Malaysia with Kim’s family, I thought it would be a nice change of pace.

And as soon as I stepped onto the dull tarmac at Kuala Lumpur’s Low Cost Carrier Terminal airport, I could feel it. The change was in the air, which weighed heavy on my suddenly damp clothes. Shenzhen had been decidedly nippy at 11 degrees Celsius, but Kim’s brother Thye, who picked me up at the gate, mentioned that the Malaysian weather always stayed around a nice 35, give or take a few degrees depending on the time of year. I asked him if a 33 degree winter actually felt any different. “Yeah, the sun doesn’t hurt as much,” he replied.

As we drove under the clear blue sky along the (left side!) of the highway flanked by green hills and oil palms towards a reunion with the rest of the family, I noticed that the ad billboards here kept up the polyglot practices of the airport we had just left. Product placement flashed by us in combinations of Malay, Chinese, English, Arabic, and Devangari. Now, normally when I see English in a place like Hong Kong it’s like finding water in a desert. I can read again! But to have four other languages on top of English, too? Awesome!

The excitement finally beginning to flutter in my chest didn’t just come from liking linguistics, too. Running through the mall with Thye to clock in a belated appearance at his family’s New Year banquet, I saw more shades of brown than I had seen for months, even possibly ever. It wasn’t just skin tones either: maybe a third of the population was decked out in varying degrees of head scarves. Malaysia is a majority Islamic country after all, and the Malay (Muslim) majority exists side-by-side with one of the world’s most substantial Overseas Chinese populations and a large Indian contingent as well, each even having their own established political parties and seats in the Malaysian Parliament. Something about this diversity just jazzed me up like I hadn’t felt for a long time.

I ended up staying in Kim’s parents’ place, which was a large airy 3-story suburb house across from which was Thye’s. It seemed that the neighborhood was like a gated community of Overseas Chinese. We had arrived on the night right before the Lunar New Year, and even though the Chinese are 26% of Malaysia’s population, that is sizable enough to give the entire country a set of official holidays and festive moods. Our sleep kept getting interrupted by the bangs and pows of fireworks exploding to herald the year of the tiger.

In these Chinese enclaves, with red lanterns and the kind of intricately detailed teak wood furniture that I can never accurately describe in words but you always know is Chinese when you see it, I sensed an authentic culture preserved to a degree I’d never encountered before. Maybe it’s because the Malaysian Chinese possess both the cash to maintain their arts and letters as well as an immigrant reverence for the old country, and their dislocation shielded them from the ruinous revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries on the Mainland.

Which isn’t to say that the Chinese haven’t had problems in Malaysia. From what I hear, there are plenty of tensions between the Malay population and the other ethnicities, mostly the Chinese, and extremely intense affirmative action-type laws ensure that Chinese must cede many positions to ethnic Malays just to ensure that Malaysia retains its Malay character. But at least there weren’t any ethnic massacres like in Indonesia. Amongst the Southeast Asian countries, it seems to enjoy a relatively harmonious peace.

That’s what we had in mind for the next few days, at least. We drove up the North-South highway from Kuala Lumpur to Penang Island and stayed there for a few days. According to Kim, Penang is known for its authentic Malaysian food sold in “hawker” stands next to which you eat at plastic tables under umbrellas shading you from the daylight heat. We got to do that a few times too, and my tummy was much obliged. I also played in the resort sand by the beautiful beach with William, Kim, and Aidan, their 2-year old. (Playing with a 2-year-old is the most awesome thing in the world. Your worries just melt away!)

Now, I know that Penang in particular is a tourist destination so it’ll obviously have a lot of different people coming in from all over the world, but as I floated around in the pool and lazed about the open-air lounge, I of course kept marveling at how diverse the people were there. It honestly had been a long time since I’d seen anything like it. Why was that? I wondered. Oh yes – I’d been in China all this time. At that moment I realized how incredibly homogenous China is, and how much of my good vibes over Malaysia’s diversity really came from my relief at seeing other diverse peoples again. The next thought: Am I more used to identifying as a minority than I am as actually Chinese?

At this point in my wicker chair ruminations, Dad sent me a link that I browsed through on my iTouch. It was very well-timed, as it was an interview with Martin Jacques that included a segment about China’s homogeneity in the context of its imminent rise. I could think of plenty of my own experiences that demonstrated it, like the time I had been with my American friends in a Bao’An District skate park and two 12 year old boys came up to ask me if I were a hunxue, or half-blood, just because I was with all the white people. The substance of Jacques’ interview (and his book) is actually mostly geared towards pointing out incorrect and arrogant Western perceptions of China, which I appreciate very much, but this homogeneity gives him pause as well:

Martin Jacques: Well, I think that China will in time project itself in all sorts of ways around the world. I think in that sense it will have some of the characteristics of a global power, whatever that global power is. But it will be also expressed in different ways. One of my greatest concerns about the rise of China—in fact, my greatest concern, not one of them, but my greatest concern—is the question of the attitude of the Han towards cultural differences, different ethnicities. Because, as you point out, it’s certainly true—very unusual, quite different from any other populace, nation like India or Indonesia or the United States—the Chinese overwhelmingly consider themselves to be of one race: the Han. This is a product of a long—once again, back to the civilization-state, 2,000 years and longer of a sort of ethnic construction of China, which has seen the Han-ization of China. Now, in a way, for China, that’s been a great strength, because it’s essentially held the country together. That’s why it’s never divided, that’s why it was nonsense in 1989 ever to predict that China would break up. It was never going to happen, for this reason. But on the other hand, the negative side to this is the Han have a very weak conception of cultural difference and the respect for cultural difference. And the reason they have such problems with the Uyghurs and the Tibetans—and it’s very, very serious; I mean, we’ve had really serious racial riots in Lhasa last year and Urumqi this year—is because, essentially, the Han notion of handling other ethnicities is to Han-ize them. To assimilate them. To civilize them.

Scheer: Yeah. I mean, they claimed they were doing the Tibetans a favor.

Jacques: Yeah, of course. You know, we’re raising—and in some ways they have been …

Scheer: It’s what you Brits tried to do in India, right?

Jacques: (Laughs) Yeah. Yeah, we did, and not just in India. But, you know, to raise the Tibetans or the Uyghurs up to the level of the Han, and thereby Han-ize them, that’s of course what’s happened, historically, with the Mongolians and with the Manchus and so on.

People are always talking about China’s 56 ethnic minorities…yes, they exist, and yes, they’re culturally different, and yes, China handles it sensitively (perhaps too sensitively sometimes, judging by the policies that essentially amount to consenting segregation of Uyghur children from Han children in Bao’an District schools here) but come on, they’re all ASIAN. To actually quote the words that some Chinese people have told me, they are all yellow (a guard once explained to me how there are four types of people in the world: black, white, brown, and yellow). Another guy in Beijing once told me that America always had to invent enemies abroad because they had no cohesive racial identity, and that China was always automatically united because everyone was yellow.

Remembering these interactions and then reading what Jacques had to say made me realize something well enough to finally put it into words, at last: the Chinese do not distinguish between the Chinese people and the Chinese nation. There are drawbacks to homogeneity but also a big, gigantic plus: an enormous feeling of cohesion, pride, and almost familial relationship with your other citizens. I have heard two things: the first is that while people in the West see strangers as “in” or “out” of social “boxes,” people in China see strangers as merely removed from them by a few nodes in an interconnected network and therefore think in terms of “near” or “far” instead of “in” or “out.” Secondly, I have also heard that nations can be categorized by how they emphasize three factors: blood, language, and citizenship. The United States considers you an American if you possess citizenship and, for the most part, English proficiency. The Japanese require all three before they consider you one of them. The Chinese care only about the blood.

After Penang, we spent a lot of time wandering about Kuala Lumpur’s malls and bookstores, pushing Aidan around in his stroller and waiting for the grandpa generation to make up its mind about where it wanted to go for dinner. All the while I kept noticing the display of diversity. Islamic women in headscarves sashaying around in extraordinarily capitalist malls buying items from Indians who rubbed shoulders and joked around with Chinese people all while speaking English (who were they speaking English for, I wondered?).

Of course, one could say “Andrew, don’t be stupid, you’re making a big deal out of a nonissue. After all, it’s not like Western capitalism is mutually exclusive with other cultures; just look at Dubai.” Sure. But what is interesting about that is that I’m in Malaysia, walking through megamalls that successfully rose again after the entire economy collapsed with George Soros’ shorting of the Malaysian ringgit while pillaging the Asian Tiger economies in the early 2000s. After that disaster, what did they do? They went right back to capitalism, albeit this time with protective regulations. Those measures aside, it still seemed to be an admission that progress and modernity automatically equate to the Western model. For all of this cultural diversity, I wondered, does it all just amount to the same way of life? Do Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and Taoists all just go to H&M for their clothes and Baskin Robbins for their snacks? Is all we are walking and advancing towards just a multiracial mall complex?

Which is where a reading of Jacques seems to yield revealing insights again. He contends that “modernity” does not equate to “Westernization,” and that when China fully rises, we will see a different model, a second successful one that nobody conceived of before in the West:

Scheer: Why use the word rule? You know, “When China Rules the World”? Do you mean it in the sense that they will take over, they will tell us what to do?

Jacques: No, but I mean it in this sense: that when a country of power becomes globally hegemonic, it basically sets the rules. It designs the major institutions. It has a huge reach, not just economically, but politically, culturally, intellectually, morally, militarily.

Scheer: Yeah, but the Chinese are in many ways becoming more like us. Would these rules really be so very different? …

Jacques: No, I think this is, to be quite blunt about it, balderdash. I mean, it’s certainly true that the Chinese are learning English, but they don’t learn it to speak in China, they learn it to speak with foreigners who speak English; it’s an interlocutor language. ….And while it’s certainly true that China has learned heavily from the West over the past 30 years in terms of technology, in terms of markets and so on, at the same time it remains profoundly different. And this is the point about modernization. People think of it as a process of Westernization. Well, maybe in part it is a process of Westernization, but only in part. Because modernization is also shaped by history and culture, so if your history and culture is very distinct and very different from that of the West, which in the case of China it most certainly is, the result will be a very different kind of society, a very different kind of identity.

After a few days I bid my goodbyes to family and set off for Shenzhen again. Vacation was over and it was back to teaching. Many American teachers here in my program are now feeling a little blue, having had a taste of the outside world again and seeing what they’re missing out on by staying in China. I suppose that for most of them, the novelty of China is starting to fade away. Thankfully, I feel better than I did before, as my problems were in my head and my travels only helped to clarify them. How do I develop a more stable and cohesive self-identity in subjecting it to the unknowns that I have always been associated with, and how can I find a way to fairly view both Chinese and Western societies? Seeing more of China, and seeing its reflection just outside of its borders too, helped. My language skills are better now than they’ve ever been, too. More about that, another day.

the decade of the mall rat

Andrew Pouw — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:38:40 +0000

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.

expat watching

Andrew Pouw — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 09:27:43 +0000

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.

kdrama

Andrew Pouw — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 04:44:29 +0000

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.

christmastime is here

Andrew Pouw — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 15:11:50 +0000

At almost the eleventh hour the Shenzhen Education Bureau – that is, that peculiar section of the Shenzhen municipal government that is “responsible” for us in the way an insurance agent is “responsible” for your medical bills – has decided to throw us a Christmas party after all. Magnanimous! Us “foreign expert” Americans+Assorted British Commonwealthers will get a day off on Friday and return to the Silver Lake Hotel from where we all initially sprang into Shenzhen months ago in August, this time to have a banquet and put on “performances” that the Bureau requested us to prepare individually. Many of the other CTLC teachers grumble at having to do these monkey dances from time to time (some work for schools who ask that they give speeches to the student body, on top of teaching them.) I was never before asked to show myself off like that (nothing new to see here folks, just another yellow guy) but I confess that in this I kind of see things the way the Bureau might: if I were a city official of a country whose future was armlocked by the West’s combination suplex of financial derivatives and Copenhagen cuckoldry, and around a hundred of those silly Westerners wandered into my hands, I’d probably get a few chuckles out of dressing them up for fools on the stage myself.

But now I’m not so sure. Faced with the prospect of a forced performance, I would kind of just shrug and compare it to any other time I was asked to play the piano for guests as a child – more casual than the apocalyptic insecurities exploding in your young head make it out to be. In fact, I’m even now considering a (kind of ridiculous) morning trip into Hong Kong tomorrow to find some Vince Guaraldi sheet music (you know, A Charlie Brown Christmas and all that good stuff.) I wouldn’t mind at all playing some of those things if I had to (the annual problem just being that by the time I’ve practiced the tunes to snuff, Christmas is usually over). But instead of a nice and classy piano shindig, my office teachers have asked that I instead learn a dance with them for a holiday celebration in which all teachers at Yucai Third Middle must enact a performance.

This would be a separate deal from the Bureau’s Christmas gathering. Since I had made some vague plans with my cousin’s family in Hong Kong to go to a theme park for the holidays, I had kind of assumed that I could wiggle out of it by claiming family obligation and disappearing, so I had kind of only half-listened to the appeals of Nana and Wang Laoshi on behalf of the less loquacious left side of the office to learn this dance with them. But one day when I was sitting at my desk at the front, Wang Laoshi swept into the room and hurriedly closed the door behind her, laughing something about not wanting to be seen. I looked around behind me. Four lady teachers looking like they were conspiring something diabolical suddenly noticed that I was in the room with them. “Aiyah!” yelled Nana, who rushed forward and turned me bodily around. “Andrew! Don’t look!”

What would you think was happening? I didn’t have to guess; actually, once before already the lady teachers of the Third Year English Department had turned our office into a quick changing room and forgotten Andrew the Foreign Teacher like just another piece of mute furniture, so they fixed the problem in much the same way. But when I heard the tinny lightening bolt sounds of Asian pop music clatter out of a cell phone ringtone, half-heard dots connected in my head and I suspected the dance.

Turning around yielded the sight of four middle aged Chinese ladies sashaying to the clashing sounds of that cell phone and to Nana’s relayed instructions. “You have to thrust your hips to the side while throwing your hands up,” she was coordinating, just like an aerobics coach at the front of the office and next to my desk. I sat there in some bewilderment watching them all for a moment until I recognized the music. Oh the horror. Anything but this. No.

It was a popular song in South Korea that I had heard about only by virtue of associating with too many Asian people in Los Angeles. The Wonder Girls may be the girliest girl group from a country that beats out even China for putting superficial American materialism on a pedestal: Julia had delighted once in subjecting me to a YouTube video of their single entitled “Gee,” which had faintly horrified me. The song that my Chinese colleagues were now dancing to, and asking me to participate in, was the girl band’s other song called “Nobody,” which more than faintly horrified me since the only time I had seen it had been in this video here:

I found it truly monstrous.

Suddenly two other lady teachers burst through the door and watched my office wiggle around on their heels for a while. One of them cried “too complicated, I’ll never learn this!” and promptly fled. I considered my own escape options. “Wiggle your butt more girls!” yelled Nana, who evidently did not think first about whether I understood her Mandarin or not.

Somehow I got out of there, but the next day Nana and Wang Laoshi were badgering me about this again. “This is not just a girly dance,” protested Nana to my complaints. “See, look, I will find a video of boys dancing it for you.” I looked away. I knew what she was going to find and I knew it would not help to ease my mind at all. Maybe there’s still a way that I can claim family obligation.

Nana found what she was looking for. “Look, here it is,” she said.

Yes. Not a girly dance at all.

holiday questions

Andrew Pouw — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 11:38:22 +0000

I’m sitting in a Starbucks – the one at the Coastal City megamall complex a few blocks north of my school. I took the bus to get here thinking that I needed to restock on frozen dumplings and could also use another space heater since it’s getting a little chilly again. But I guess I also just wanted to get out and move around a bit.

For that reason I feel a little silly every time I wind up in one of these Starbucks cafes. It’s guaranteed wifi for my itouch, but still – sometimes I wonder, what am I doing, why did I come thousands of miles to sit in a Starbucks when I am practically from Seattle (close enough)?

It looks like home and feels like home and tastes like home, but it doesn’t sound like home. The ever so slight dissimilarity might be what is getting under my skin.

That or the red holiday cups. Yen asked me if I was going to be lonely over Christmas. I replied that I didn’t feel like it yet since it didn’t FEEL like Christmas – having warm weather unchanged since October, coworkers that don’t mention it and not yearning for a cathartic break after an apocalyptic finals season; these things made me forget that it is already December and that I’ve been in China for more than four months now.

But a gust of cold wind and the darkly sweet taste of a grande toffee nut latte both sink into my bones like home, like reminders that shimmer imperfectly against the traffic fumes along the bus stop and the glittering neon of Chinese mall advertisements, like the Chinese that I hear in the air always flickering in and out of the borders of my understanding, with differences ever so discreet and mild but still like the whispers of a simulacra telling me that I’m not quite in the right place after all.

Hum. ‘Darkly sweet’ is kind of a poor descriptor there. A lightning bug compared to the right evocative word (although I’m aware that the consumer charm of the words ‘toffee nut latte’ kind of spoil the effect from the start). Something to work on, I suppose.

the grass is always greener in some other country’s soaps

Andrew Pouw — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 15:49:05 +0000

I have been wanting to watch television in Mandarin for a while so that I could improve my vocabulary, but the news isn’t suitable (the words are too hard; I can’t imagine translating ‘bilateral trade negotiations’ on my iTouch and feeling very much accomplished) and the Chinese soaps I find on TV are too silly for me (no way those three ladies all gave birth on the riverbank at once) or too specific (I doubt I will get much practical conversational Chinese from a Revolutionary War soap).

If you are thinking of watching dramas in Asia, it seems that Korea has the monopoly right now with the most sophisticated industry and products. In college I would visit some friends and find them avidly downloading and watching Korean dramas. A few months ago I saw a report in an Asian newspaper about unsuccessful government attempts to ban Meteor Garden, one of the older and more famous Korean dramas, in China because of its “encouragement of materialistic pursuits and desires” or something like that. And even in the latest Chinese novel I read (Brothers by Yu Hua, it was okay) there is a character who talks big about making fortunes but is too busy watching Korean soaps to successfully begin his enterprises. I wouldn’t mind trying them myself (after taking the MCAT last summer I ended up watching a particularly silly Taiwanese drama, rationalizing to myself that I would do it to learn Chinese). Again the rationale is that I would learn Chinese from the practice, but it doesn’t seem like the Korean soaps would help much with this.

It turns out, however, that my aunt and uncle are fans of Korean soaps too, and actually as I’m writing this they are sitting beside me watching one. “It’s in Chinese too,” my uncle showed me. I hadn’t realized that they were all dubbed and subbed in Mandarin and Simplified Chinese – of course they would be if the market for them here was so huge, I belatedly realized. I was used to seeing the English fansubs that my friends furtively downloaded and hadn’t thought that I could get any such useful translations.

So here is a dangerous precipice that I am standing over. Before I fall in, does anybody have any recommendations so that I know at least which cliff is the best one to jump off of?

Daily Summary Update: I spent the weekend here in Hong Kong again with my family. At this point, my parents have left and are home in Olympia already, but my grandmother is still visiting Hong Kong and my aunt/uncle as well as my cousin’s family all live here. Aidan was particularly rambunctious today – he’s learning a lot of new words.

Nanowrimo Update: If I’m going to finish, I need to write about 2000 words a day at this point. I don’t know if I can make the deadline anymore.

double ninth on the twenty-sixth

Andrew Pouw — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 08:29:08 +0000

My parents have come for a visit and are currently staying in Hong Kong. They’ll be visiting Shenzhen this weekend, to see just how their son is eking out his illiterate existence, and maybe even watch a class (those rare hours of the week when Andrew gets to turn the illiteracy tables on his host country).

“Oh, your parents are here – they must have known that it was 重阳节!” say the other teachers. Today is the Double Ninth holiday (according to the Chinese lunar calendar). When I ask them what the day marks, nobody seems to be able to tell me (”Hmm…actually I do not know, maybe it is just a traditional holiday?”) but whatever it is, it somehow involves old people (”sometimes it is called Senior Day”) and climbing mountains (”we’re going to climb the mountain now! Are you coming?”). Those two associations seem kind of contradictory to me, but oh well, that’s how the paradigm shifts, I guess.