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.

Anyway, I brought them up because not only are they cute new roommates, but I can crassly use ‘em as a metaphor here. Like, “Andrew has not posted for such a long time – perhaps he has withdrawn into his hermit shell again.” I had previously been averaging a good rate of posting 5 days out of the week, and this is the first time I haven’t for an entire week – I did better when I wasn’t even here.

The reason for this is that I’ve finally settled into a good solid routine aimed at achieving all those goals and enjoying all those hobbies that I wanted to try for here. During the school days when I’m not teaching, I sit in the English Department office and study Chinese and write my book. After class I go for a run on the school track and to the gym a few blocks north to lift weights, and next week I’ll probably start going to that hip hop dance class that they offer just to see what it’s like. I’m also practicing erhu and guitar, and when I can manage to get into the music room, piano too.

I think I’m doing all these things to forestall a future midlife crisis (hello, hip hop dance) and also to fully enjoy all these hobbies that I wanted to explore and appreciate before I shelve them for medical school next year. I also want it to be time well-spent in a useful way, with hopefully a finished book, good health, better Chinese and better musical skill being tangible results of the year (of course I am also hoping for an elusive answer to questions like “why am I here” and “who am I,” but those are slightly less tangible, especially when I am unsure how to phrase those questions anyway). After all, even though this is a “year off,” it’s still real time spent and a real year of my life.

But these self-improvement and self-fulfillment activities do take up a lot of time, which is why I’ve posted less frequently here. More worrying, though, is that they’ve also been distracting me from being here in China. Other Chinese teachers who I had earlier met on promising terms have recently been saying “Oh, where have you been? We haven’t seen you for some time, you must be very busy.” I should probably work harder to integrate myself with the school teachers more, and that means among other things playing basketball with them after class (even though I hate basketball because I suck at it, plus the childhood fear of jammed fingers – try playing the piano sometime with jammed fingers). So far I’ve had a good cover; many of the teachers here are too busy preparing for a rigorous professional test that, if they pass, would bump them up on the income bracket with better pay, better benefits and something like tenure, I think (it seems like the graduates of certain universities get this automatically, but others have to work for it). That test is tomorrow (加油!) so I better get back into the social groove quickly. Maybe I’ll make some cookies for people with my toaster oven…at a pokey rate of six cookies a batch….

Talking to the teachers here and opening up to them more would take some additional effort on top of the nice schedule I’ve lined up for myself, but it would be worth it for the Mandarin practice and the sense of inclusion into the community here. But no matter how integrated I become here, I am starting to realize that my little life here in the Shekou neighborhood of Nanshan District in Shenzhen – read, the most westernized neighborhood of a particularly new and affluent district in a special city experiment with capitalism – is probably not going to give me a good answer for the question “what is China like,” although of course there is no discounting that Shenzhen’s situation is to be uniquely appreciated as part of that answer. Even harder to grasp is a general answer to the question “what is my place here in China, and who am I when I am here and who am I when I am not” – because so far it seems like there isn’t too much of a difference, and not to the credit of whatever erudition of self I might have. My parents are coming to visit in two weeks, and I can just imagine the look on my dad’s face when he gets here: looking quizzically around for signs of the poignantly complicated China he remembers leaving, for the smell of nightsoil and the yells of roadside cart vendors, and warily thinking of all the things that a father knows and would rather his son not. He will look around at the Nanshan suburbia with some puzzlement and then might laugh: “Well Andrew, it seems China came to you instead.”

The instruments came from the HuaYueFang music store that I’ve scoped out multiple times before, and where I got the free erhu demo lesson last week. The two young storekeepers, who by now I know as Benny Fang and Miss Ye, always look happy when I walk in and have been very friendly and helpful with both my music questions and Chinese. Actually, the guitar and erhu together should have cost 1280 kuai and the erhu case that they threw in another hundred kuai or so. But both Miss Ye and Benny (both of whom can’t be much older than me) immediately said that they’d discount them for me, and afterwards Benny said in his fledgling English “of course I’ll discount it; I think you are a good person.”

Of course I was happy with getting the instruments at all for any price, and the discounts were certainly nice, but I wonder if I could have gotten the price down even more by being a hardass. On the other hand, what I may have lost in further price reductions, I’ll gain by having good relations with those two shopkeepers for the rest of the year, which may be very useful considering I’ll be taking lessons there too. This episode made me wonder about the two modes of getting what you want as an expat in a foreign country (especially China) – bully your way through or smile and hope for the best. By nature I avoid confrontation like the plague, so I always default to the latter. It has its pros and cons – I feel like I build a sense of community among new friends who will be much easier to deal with in the future, but I could also be suckered (for instance, if Benny and Miss Ye are actually not as beneficent as they seem, it might be feasible – though unlikely – that they are still getting a hefty profit from me). My approach also just plain doesn’t work in some environments (I absolutely hate going to Dongmen, the clothing and electronics bazaar market where the sales clerks can only be called hawks and from whom a stupid smile will get you nothing).

But there are certainly other expats who are quick to assert themselves defensively. I dislike it because I think it makes us all come across as jerks, but I’ll concede the street smarts that accompany it.

Anyway, whatever, what am I overthinking for! I’m a musician again!

It was a very interesting weekend, and I should really dedicate the time to write about it, but I just don’t really feel like writing a blog post (still got this weird laziness towards blog writing that’s been with me since four days ago.)

But the obligation exists, so here it is in a very non-literary bullet point list:

Saturday
– Traveled to the Dongmen shopping bazaar in Luohu District with Hunter in search of some cheap shirts. Couldn’t find any. Instead, found a lot of frustrating shop clerks with sub-par wares. My Chinese isn’t good enough to bargain aggressively, yet. My usual way of dealing with people – getting on their good side, which here means playing the fool very often with my bumbling Chinese – certainly won’t work on the jaded hawkers of Dongmen. We didn’t get any shirts.
- In the evening the Yucai School Group foreign teachers were picked up by our contact teachers and taken to a fancy evening dinner at the Garden City megamall. There we were ushered into a private room, which by Chinese standards isn’t uncommon, but even by Chinese standards this was an extraordinarily fancy room. My suspicions about the fanciness of the evening were proven correct when Roots (the head headmaster of all the Yucai Schools; real name Liu Genping, but “Gen” means “roots” so that’s what everyone calls him when he’s not looking) showed up. He was accompanied by a few secretaries from the main Yucai office and the headmaster of Yucai Second Primary. Also in attendance: not only our handlers, but our handlers’ handler, another office lady in the main Yucai office named Lily. Then Judy from the Shenzhen Education Bureau. And finally, to top off the evening’s list of important VIPs, the Shenzhen Foreign Affairs counsel, who alone was responsible for every single foreigner in Shenzhen (probably more people than are in all of Wyoming).
- Going to a Karaoke bar with said VIPs.
- Singing ridiculously with said VIPs.
- Dancing to My Humps with said VIPs. Most mortifying experience of my life, watching Roots shimmy to that.

That karaoke bar, by the way, was the most ostentatiously extravagant place I’d ever been to, almost as large as one of my 50-student classrooms and done up like a Vegas hotel lounge. A long way from LA’s Koreatown, boys and girls.

Sunday:
- Teaching a day’s worth of classes on a weekend, because in China, school missed due to holidays is made up for on the weekends.
- Going to meet up with Kami, Hunter, Murray, Emily and Katie for an evening foreigner rendezvous.
- Remembering only when I got there what they had been planning to do on said rendezvous. Walked through the door of Milan Hair Style and laid down for a spa hair treatment and massage along with the other prone and satisfied Americans. Struck up a mostly one-sided conversation with my own amused hairwasher/masseuse guy.
- Remembering only when I was called while having said hairwash that the Yucai Third Middle Single Teachers’ Midautumn Festival Dinner banquet was that night. Ran over to the restaurant after hair wash and joined in the eating of such delicacies as pig faces and chicken bones. Nana and Tiantian were not enthusiastic about the pig face, but remembering the marshmallow turtle shell and snake hoods of the fancy banquet yesterday, I felt like I could do anything.
- Dreading the much-talked about karaoke session rumored to follow the dinner. Apparently last year’s was pretty riotous and all the teachers got absolutely wasted.
- Escaped from having to go to it when it turned out that this year, most all of the teachers were studying for a professional exam.
- Came home early and decided to go shopping in the evening.
- Visited again the music store at Gongye Ba Lu to ask if it was possible to rent guitars there. No, but I could get a discount on a cheap guitar. Tried a few out and chatted with the girl there as I did so, who by this point remembers me from all my previous bumbling-ins. Conversation was all in Chinese!
- Walked over to the grocery store to find eggs and butter for my cookie baking experiment (I have one of Shenzhen’s rare toaster ovens in my apartment) and agar powder for a coconut jelly recipe. Asked an attendant about the agar. No luck. Asked another attendant about the butter. One 15 minute search and 5 other consulted attendants later, the response: “We don’t have butter here, because this is a Chinese grocery.” I did find the eggs, though. And another pack of dumplings with Jackie Chan’s smiling face on them.

And that was my weekend, in bullet form. Ta da.

To help the process I carry around a little steno pad. I think other people must think I’m crazy when I randomly stop walking down the street, pull it out and jot some notes to myself before I forget them. Maybe I am.

Like many other days, I wandered around Futian with some of the other CTLC teachers after our group Chinese lessons (that is, the classes that we go to learn Chinese in, not the ones we teach in English). I ended up spending the entire evening with them just meandering around and playing board games at the NYPD pizza stand again in central Futian. While it’s been nice to get to know my friends here (last night Hunter hosted dinner for 8 of us in Nanshan District at his apartment nearby the Walmart, and we chatted late into the night), I am a bit concerned that my Chinese isn’t making as much progress as it could if I were to “go native” as another CTLC guy (whom I don’t know very well, but don’t feel like that’s a problem) kind of condescendingly put it once.

Tomorrow the Yucai Group schools are making their foreign teachers go to dinner together for some function that they only told us about a few days ago, so I’ll see Katie (Yucai First High), Emily (Yucai Second Primary), and Hunter (Yucai Third Primary) again while I rep for Yucai Third Middle.  Following that is a Sunday of teaching Wednesday classes…what?  On Thursday the week-long October holiday begins…and so I have to teach Wednesday classes twice in one week?

Who knows why that makes sense.  Thing is, it probably DOES, but I’m just illiterate.

The bus rounded a corner and whizzed past a construction site that was blocked off by some temporary walling. As we zoomed alongside it, a picture of a little girl happily holding a seashell to her ear rocketed towards me, followed by some Chinese. After that, the English translation that I could read:

THOUGHT AS COMPREHENSIVE AS SEA.

The wall was full of them.

DREAMS ENRICH THE WORLD.

WONDER PRESENTS THE FUTURE.

FASCINATION SPREADS THE WORLD.

And, if you were beginning to laugh,

SELF-CONFIDENCE REJECTS HESITATION.

POWER OF LIFE CONQUERS EVERYTHING.

READY FOR THE WONDER.

Charming! Even poetically compelling in its own way.