—-

I was waiting at Immigration in the line for foreigners, one of the few Asians there.  I had my nose buried in a book I had just brought back with me from Hong Kong when a white guy carrying a full load of suitcases stooped down to grab a bag I almost bumped into without seeing.  ”Oops, sorry,” I said by reflex.

He grinned.  ”Must be a hell of a good book, you’ve been reading it this whole time on the ferry from Hong Kong,” he said.

I smiled.  ”Well, you know, it’s a hell of a boring trip, too.”  He laughed and walked forward in line.

We came up to the immigration windows side by side and kept up our conversation.  He was in Shenzhen for a trade show, just in from a month of travel around the world, and was due to go home to Atlanta soon.  I told him I was finishing a year of English teaching here.  The eyes of the Chinese immigration officers darted from me to him, and back again.  We were cleared, and parted amiably at the baggage inspection station.

At the exit of the ferry terminal there was the usual crowd of men holding signs for just-arrived people and others lounging around who perk up seeing you come.  I noticed that the man I was just talking to was accosted by one of the perky latter, who summarily took his suitcase for him and began leading him and his wife towards the parking lot.  They looked confused but game and followed, seemingly more to chase after their suitcase than anything else.

Something clicked in my head and I gave chase too.  ”Hey, did you say you were going to Futian?” I called out.  The couple stopped and turned in their tracks.  ”Uh, no, we’re going to Shenzhen,” they replied.  Confused, certainly – Futian is a district of Shenzhen.  I felt, weirdly, like a local, just for a brief moment.  ”We’re supposed to go to the Marriot?” the man added.  By now we were beside the Chinese man’s car, a bright red sedan with the trunk already popped open, the driver in the middle of stuffing the accosted suitcase into it.  He too was looking at me quizzically.  ”Well, I’d recommend going by one of the official taxis,” I said, and pointed over to the line.  ”He’s a black cab driver,” I added when the man pointed at the driver.  ”Oh, well, thanks a lot, then we’ll get a taxi then,” said the man.

But I was already moving away fast and barely acknowledged the thanks.  I wanted to get out of the Chinese driver’s gaze as soon as I could, having plucked his day’s wage from him – for a foreigner!

—–

The Starbucks experience in Hong Kong is much different from that in Shenzhen.  In Hong Kong, the inside of a Starbucks feels much the same as the outside of one.  It’s all the same, everywhere, there – clean surfaces and modernist tendencies.  But in a Shenzhen Xing Ba Ke, the difference is like a pressure gradient, catching you up in a sweeping gust towards an interior space that feels like an oasis of Western cleanliness, predictability, and manners.  I spend a lot of time in them.  By now the baristas at the Coastal City location recognize my face, and at SeaWorld they greet me by name.  Not my proudest accomplishment in traveling the world, but it makes things feel a little more like home.

As I was settling into a chair and wiring up my electronics for a session of writing, the decibel level of the place suddenly ratcheted up, like it had become a Chinese bus at rush hour.  But the brash, grating yelling was in English.  I was confused and looked around.  A gaggle of adolescent boys had stormed in, speaking loud obscenities with the arrogant confidence of those who assume nobody else in the room can understand them.

“Fuck you!  Let’s go hang out at Matthew’s place.”

“No, you pussy.  What, you actually got something?  You don’t need to get something at Starbucks to hang in one.  What?  A muffin?  God, you’re such a nerd.”

“Screw you!”

They must have been expat kids from the nearby international schools.  The civilized Chinese patrons of Starbucks glanced over and visibly tried to ignore them.  The staff awkwardly buffed tables around the little gang of ingrates.  I tried to also, but the snatches of conversation insisted on hurling themselves into my ears, especially when one boy called out both mine and my brother’s name.  ”Andrew, Matthew, come on, let’s go.”

“Fuck you!  We’ll stay right here for now, this is cool.”

“He’s an AMERICAN, so he for sure knows!”

“Well, YOU did it with a BLACK GIRL!”

The noise quiets for a moment as if the group is mutually weighing the severity of this accusation.  On the other side of the room I am mentally slapping my forehead in disgust.  Separating the world into racial lines has been, I have found, a characteristically Chinese habit, borne out of centuries of willful cultural isolation.  But I shouldn’t have forgotten that Westerners, especially bratty kids, have already perfected the art.

The group briefly digressed with a show of hands as to what exactly constituted second base.

Punks.

—–

I had returned to the tailor for a third time, to get fitted for two suits: a gray one with a hatched pattern, and a navy blue set with thin dark pinstripes.  Luohu Commercial City, where the Chinese woman named Stephanie Lark operates her shop, has been painted to me before in terms essentially amounting to a “wretched hive of scum and villainy,” but some of the best tailors and deals can be found there all the same, and Stephanie with her excellent English and trained eye has made it into the tourist recommendation books even in sartorial Hong Kong.

“I think I’d also like to get a suit made with a Mandarin collar, and a topcoat as well,” I mentioned to her in passing.  I was standing in the hallway with half a suit on, and two of Stephanie’s assistants poking and pinching it.  ”这样合适吗?” one asked me.  ”这样不错.可不可以把裤子弄断一点?” I responded slowly.  In a manner more professional than I’m used to here, they didn’t bat an eye at my Chinese.  ”可以,” they affirmed.

Stephanie passed by.  ”Sure, we can talk about another suit,” she breezed.  She noticed the assistants talking between themselves about my fitting.  ”你听得懂他们说什么吗?” she said, asking if I understand anything they said.  I laughed and replied in Mandarin that I got a little of it, but maybe it would be better if she parsed over things again with me one more time.  She smiled and I took the suit off behind a jury-rigged curtain in their tiny office, and jumped back into my casuals.

Together we looked over my options.  ”What kind of material would you like for the topcoat?” she asked me.  She pointed to three fabric samples pinned to the wall.  ”This one is very heavy, but the herringbone pattern is very nice.  Will you be in a warm or a cold place?”  After some discussion we settled on a medium weave.  ”Send me a picture of the design you want,” she told me, switching to Mandarin, and then we started in on the Mandarin-collared suit my mother and grandmother recommended that I try.

“Of course we can do a Mandarin-collared suit,” Stephanie had said when I asked her about it a week ago.  ”This is the traditional Chinese clothing!”   Now she was taking my shoulder measurements for it.  ”Do you want satin buttons?  If you want a very traditional look, we can do that for you.”  I hemmed.  ”No, that is okay, I am fine with regular buttons.”  ”Ok, what about the pockets?  Do you want two or four?”  I thought of the four-pocketed military jackets that Mao was always seen in photographs wearing and hemmed again.  ”Two is going to be okay, thanks.”   She looked at me and laughed.  ”Oh, so you want to be both East and West with this, right?”  ”I have to be,” I said a little sheepishly.

After the measurements were done, she wrote everything down on a sheet of paper and then paused to look in the air for a bit.  ”Hmm…”  She scribbled down a number, and then handed it to me.  ”I will give you a discount on the topcoat, but please do not tell anybody else I sold it to you for this little, otherwise I will get in a lot of trouble!”  I voiced my thanks.  ”Oh of course – you may have an American passport, but you are still one of us, you are still Chinese!”

—–

In the end, I guess it’s not absolutely necessary that I figure out what exactly is down these tunnels.  It’s been a privilege that I had the chance in life to just uncover their presence at all, maybe.

You can’t conquer every mystery and paradox you see.

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.  <Don’t go back to America,> he implored me once.  <Stay here.  China is changing and is strong.  You are one of us.>  I told him that my contract would expire in June and that I already had plans for next year.  <No, stay here.  Find a Chinese girl.  Get married and have many little babies.>  I raised an eyebrow but he just went on.  <Out there in America, people treat you so badly!  And they are so tall!>  He motioned with his hand to demonstrate for me just how tall.  <It’s so embarassing.  But here, you are among equals,> 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.  <What if China and America get into a war one day?> he said, then cast a weighty look in my direction.  <Fighting your own people!  What a terrible thing!>  I just sighed.  Su Ming looked a little disturbed and said something quickly to him that I didn’t catch.  <Well, who knows?> he replied with a shrug.  After a small silence Su Ming said “well, I am going to go back now.”  <I will go back to the dormitory with her,> I told Chummy Guard.  <Ah…> 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 <Going out to find a girlfriend?> 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.  <Find a Chinese girl!  Don’t go back!> 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.

<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 <Why aren’t you interested in girls here?  Su Ming treats you very well.  And there is another teacher who is single and needs a boyfriend.>  I sighed again and told him <too troublesome!> with a laugh and tried to go.  <Do you something something something?>  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.  <Hey, give this useless thing to me and I’ll throw it into the dump for you,> he grumbled.  After another five minutes we managed a translation, and I understood it when he repeated <Do you look down on women?>  I was a little flabbergasted.  Before I could collect my wits, he punched in another sentence into the iTouch.  <Is something wrong down below?> 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.

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.

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.

Amidst the beating of basketballs against pavement, cries in Chinese and crackling of my dumplings, then, I was a little surprised to realize I also heard violins and flutes.

I leaned towards the window a little to hear better. Maybe it was the PA system playing some patriotic tunes again. A little odd for basketball background noise, but not uncommon. But if it was a recording piped through the outdoor speakers, why was there that vibrating feeling every time I heard a kettle drum? And a recording’s pitch wouldn’t be off-kilter like this, would it?

I never knew my school had an orchestra!

I asked Tiantian about it, whom I found coaching a student through some weekend exercises in the office. “Maybe you can play with them!” she laughed.

It’s already a little strange to think that I actually like to hear pitches clash if only for nostalgic reasons, but even stranger is the thought that there are people who never knew that I actually identify with music so strongly. Many people. Makes me feel a little older realizing that now there are “phases” in my life that divide the people I know.

The dumplings were decent, I reflected as I munched on them, but if I ever cook for other people I should probably work on getting them to be a little less slimy.

I walked up to the counter and asked in halting Mandarin if I could use the phone to call a room. The attendant looked confused, corrected my speech and then handed me the receiver. I talked to my Dad in English in front of her and the Chinese guy in a business suit, who stiffened and looked over. I thanked the lady in Chinese after I was finished and walked away to find the elevator. The fanciness of the place just astounded me as I kept walking through it – its fountains, pillars, immaculate surfaces and wide open spaces were more luxuriously over the top than anything I had seen in Shenzhen so far. Only the best for the foreign guests who frequent the Kempinski, apparently. I wondered if the waiguoren also thought of the attendant girl by the elevators, dolled up in a red skirt, coat and hat that made her look more like an instrument of the hotel than a human, as the cherry on top of the deal. She stood like a service sentinel and watched me until the elevator doors closed and I shot up to see my parents.

After many happy hugs, my father asked me if I had had any trouble downstairs. Aside from the vaguely creepy feeling of being over-watched, I couldn’t think of anything. He then told me that when he and Mom had first arrived two hours before, he had spoken Chinese to the attendants and received a cold stare and rebuffs. When he spoke English, however, the same attendants immediately became fawning and obsequious. He was still a little bothered by it. But we quickly started talking about other things – a reunion is a reunion! – and we went off to find some lunch in the nearby mall area.

Except every restaurant we tried to find was closed (it was already 2:30) and eventually we just retreated to the basement food court. I was a bit abashed by this planning failure and stayed a little quiet. By now I know that I evidently become anxious whenever I have to host people, in the sense that I feel obligated to make sure I am rolling out a good dinner party / tour experience, but today my mom and dad were guests better suited to surviving here than I was, of course. “Have you tried that place, Andrew?” “No, I don’t know how to read that sign.” “Poor thing.”

While trying to lead my parents out and around the maze of the Coastal City megamall, I realized that I had just recently felt this same kind of frustration – in the Chinatown of San Francisco, when I was with my friends on a college graduation road trip. Then I had had some kind of strange anxiety attack after my friends, none of whom were East Asian, kept asking me questions about the culture and knick-knacks they found in San Fran’s touristy Chinatown shops. One was also peppering me with questions about Taiwan and Mainland relations. I had actually been to this Chinatown once before a month ago, and could guide my friends around the more interesting shops based on that, but their questions about culture, history and the like made me feel like an impostor who could not actually guide or host as I thought I ought to be able to. I wished furthermore that my friends would stop assuming that I knew these things, however innocently. I started to go quiet again. Most of my friends noticed this and stopped defaulting to me for their questions and commentary, except the one who kept going on about Taiwan. I tersely corrected most of his misconceptions about the history that I knew about, but I felt like I was also trying to defend something that I myself had no real and authentic connection to. It all came to a head at the Chinese restaurant, where, when confronted with a menu completely in Chinese, I had absolutely no idea what to order and certainly couldn’t help my friends, most of whom took matters into their own hands and ended up with better meals than I did. The entire incident was written off as a strange wrinkle in Andrew’s psyche, but I was shaken because I knew I hadn’t felt like that since growing up in the Griffin School District forest as the only Asian kid for miles. I did indeed know a little bit more about Chinese culture than the next guy, but that scant amount made me feel obligated to play “expert” at something I knew that I was no authority at all in. The dissonance messed me up.

This feeling must have passed in high school, when I became less of a racial abnormality amongst the Vietnamese faces, and in Los Angeles, where of course the vast Asian-American community made it so that nobody had to bother going to the whitewashed Andrew for cultural information, and left him happily alone. I had already been planning to go to China before the San Francisco Chinatown thing happened, but afterwards I knew I had to go through with the sojourn, for whatever reason. If I am feeling like I need to be a better spokesperson for my cultural roots but I can’t because I don’t know where I should set my feet down in the soil, then I need to find out for myself where I stood.

My dad was thinking the same thing, but in relation to his own China story. Thirty-seven years ago to the day, he had crossed the Lo Wu border point into Hong Kong and started his life anew for the third time, and coming back was making him think hard and deep about the ways the China he had lived and watched had risen, progressed and stayed the same. In my room now with my mom hovering around poking at my cabinets and drawers looking for signs of dilapidation that she could fix, my dad and I looked out my window at the masses of students playing basketball in the school courtyard, and we began to talk about how popular this particularly-American sport was here. The conversation went back to the Kempinski hotel staffers’ cold stares and how the Chinese seemed to bend over backwards for foreigners, and then to a repeat story of my aunt’s bad experiences in China a few years ago because of this seemingly anti-Chinese Chinese bias. Dad started telling me about his life growing up in Beijing, his perceptions of China while away and China’s current place in both the world and in its peoples’ hearts. He described his understanding of China’s relationship with materialism and the state of its current culture. While he was speaking I realized that I was averting my eyes and thinking of other things. I posited a half-hearted and rambling attempt at a counterargument for something he said. I wondered why I was being so uncooperative, and tried to rein myself in to respect and listen to him better. I’m still wondering why I was like that, especially since I usually agree with him on most things of my own accord anyway. I was still wondering when I started writing this post, hoping that writing things out would help to clarify my thoughts (and explain my behavior to Dad!).

Writing like this is always cathartic for me; it is the structuring of events and impressions into stories, which is essentially what I am trying to do in China, I think – to find my own China story. I came here looking for answers for the questions about my own relation to China and Chinese culture as a second-generation Chinese-American, but when I try to present this as a valid and distinct cultural territory of my own, I still do not have a firm enough grasp of even the language to be able to stand on my own ground without it collapsing under my feet. I am still so insecure about it that my own father’s recollections of his own China story initially sound to me like somebody else stepped into the path of my questions and said “hey those are silly questions, here are some real answers.” And to further frustrating extent, it is irrefutably undeniable that my own China story really is pretty stupid. While my generation and I get all twisted up over superficial identity politics, our parents’ generation endured real turmoil, both eventful and psychological, throughout social upheavals and the challenges of immigration. Their story is going to be the story that defines all subsequent stories. Compared to that, being Chinese-American is always going to mean being the privileged child unaware of the nature of your own privilege, no matter how far into China you try to go. Or it means not being American enough for the Kempinski Hotel. Or it means being a yellow commie rat fink to most everybody else.

Okay, so that last sentence was a little overly bitter, but you get the idea (and I like how it looks so I’m going to keep it there). It doesn’t matter. Because what I have realized recently is that the only thing that can banish these concerns is to develop a genuine individual sense of security where your sense of self-worth rests comfortably deep within your soul, and isn’t pegged to any kind of particularly cultivated behavior, cultured letters, or worthy accomplishments like I previously put mine into. All those things are for shit here, where I’m deaf, dumb and illiterate. I need to remember how to really be comfortable with myself (without taking the shortcut of escaping from myself, of course) and then maybe one day I’ll be so free and unconscious that I really will be able to join a new Asian-American community while still paying my respects to the generations that came before me.


These guys seem to know how to go about doing that pretty well. (It’s a promo video for this – I went to the one in Los Angeles two years ago. Most of its backing is from the Korean-American community, but it’s for APAs in general.)

Anyway, on to tomorrow! My classes have been cancelled – the kids are taking examinations again – so I have the whole day free to adventure around Shenzhen with my poor tired parents. Their feet are still hurting from their Hong Kong adventures, I think.

Edit: I felt pretty good right after I wrote this, but as usual now I’m wondering if I actually clarified things as well as I would have liked. I guess there is always room for a third draft, some other day.

Inside the court I saw Guan Laoshi, but she was already busy playing with another teacher friend. I went over to the bleachers to sit down and wait, unsure of how to go about this. The last time I tried this I ended up being herded into a match by Hu Laoshi, who had spotted me and told some wayward students to play with me. Becoming a bored 12 year old’s charity case had been a little irksome, but in a land where I’m dumb, mute and dumb dumb I’ll take what I can get.

Eventually a tall guy, a teacher maybe, walked over to where I was sitting. “Xiang wan yixia?” I asked him with a smile. (I think I asked him if he wanted to play for a bit.) He grunted something and pointed at an empty court, taking out a racket. He then proceeded to school me – I think I spent most of my time picking up the birdie from the floor of my side of the court. I tried laughing it off, but he was unreactive – neither smiling, laughing, or nodding at my ineptness. He just kept hitting the thing over.

As I attempted to mount a vain defensive net (which mostly resulted in hitting into the actual net), I wondered if he knew whether I was the foreign teacher or not. I wasn’t sure which way I preferred it. If he knew I was, then he could be thinking to himself “man, this guy – do they play sports in his country? Totally lame.” But on the other hand, if he didn’t know, he was probably sneering “man, this guy – totally lame. And he keeps smiling like an idiot. Who the hell is this moron?” I wondered if he kept glancing at the other entering people because he was hoping that he could switch partners soon.

I batted the birdie and these thoughts around for a while until somehow I realized something.

Whether or not I am good at badminton or proficient in Chinese or can even get what I want in this country or any other place, it doesn’t matter. I am still standing right here, I am this guy’s opponent, whether I am bad or good, easily dismissed or formidable, I am still standing in front of him on the other side of the net. I’m even sending him back some volleys now and then. I need to get out of my head and understand that it doesn’t really matter what the impressions of others are, because whatever those impressions might be, I will still be here, and they will still have to deal with me. I am like anybody else who could be here standing against this guy.

Strangely, the pivotal moment in this realization came when I became aware of the empty space right behind where I was standing. Somehow a spatial element was involved in finding myself as an individual and respectable entity. I’ll have to work this out in a literary conceit later.

Anyway, it would be nice to do that too because it’s stupid to just say “I just realized today that I should have some more self-confidence” because that is honestly a pretty dumb realization. I’m annoyed that the issue is still dogging at me and that I haven’t outgrown it yet. (To be fair, it could be that I learned to compensate for it in America through language and culture, but without those here in China I need to build my sense of security over again from the ground up.)

This ties in with a certain attitude and carriage I have noticed among Chinese men. More on that another day.