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.

Today I closed my bank account after getting a bank statement printed. I watched as flurry after flurry of paper receipt documentation flew behind the window counter, and signed about a dozen different slips. With a glance the girl took some scissors to my debit card and snip! It had lived out its life of usefulness to me. She left, and then came back with a long sheet of paper like those used in old-fashioned printers from the 1980s. “Here’s your bank statement,” she said. It was stamped with a red seal, the only thing that made it look any different from a piece of office rubbish.

Anything can become official here as long as it’s got a seal on it, it seems. I realized that the important part is really all there – the promise and the ceremony that the seal confers. It really is like a speech act. Every debt is just a speech act. All money is a trick of language and literature.

—-

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.

There were some dancing people advertising a clothing shop (”they dance all day long, I think” said Niko) and street hawkers on the crowded pedestrian skybridge who collectively yelled out a panicked alarm and hustled off in a mad dash with their quickly-bundled goods after us and a cop passed them by (”that was awesome,” said Niko).

I followed a phone-inspecting Niko as he wandered into a gigantic complex of fabrics and tailors right next to a gigantic complex of butchers and meat markets. Inside he zipped through a maze of textiles and I tried to keep up. (”Call me if you need directions on how to get back here next time,” he said.)

The tailor lady was nice and very efficient; she helped me pick a color, fabric and then quickly measured me. I’ll go back in a few days to get fitted for the suit. Overall, it comes to about 580 yuan, or about $85 for a custom-tailored suit. We’ll see if it’s worth it – I figured I already had a black suit, so I picked a gray fabric that I’m worrying now isn’t quite dark enough. But if that’s the case, I suppose for $85 I could always get another one done and save this gray one for ridiculous occasions.

On the receipt she gave me: all my measurements in Chinese, a quick sketch of a suit and the address (B473/F Meat Market Dongmen Shenzhen). Meat tailor!

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.

Suzanne was an elegant lady who lived on her own in our hometown, Olympia. She was an extraordinarily classy individual, with an appropriate background: degree from the French Sorbonne, practically an aristocrat of family-established industry in the neighboring town of Aberdeen, better-versed in art history than most professors I knew. On top of it all, she was one of the most vibrantly warm and earnestly sincere people I’ve ever met. On one of last year’s occasions seeing her exiting from a checkup in my father’s office, she told me very excitedly about her planned trip to visit Iranian archeology digs with her curator friends. Her entire home was also like a museum of Chinese art. It had everything from vases and dishes to tapestries and furniture, and I will always remember the day she invited our family to look through it. She took a few pieces of pottery down from their shelves so we could look at them more closely, and she explained to me and Matthew about the rarity of the China blue pigment and how to use it to distinguish authentic relics of ancient history from imitation pottery.

She went on after that to ask my mother, in the flowing cursive of her hand-written letters, if she wouldn’t mind letting her “adopt” us as her adopted grandchildren. She had no other family, with her husband having passed away some years before we met her, so Suzanne had “adopted grandchildren” all over Olympia. We who were lucky enough to have her as an adopted godmother periodically received her letters asking us how we were getting on, in addition to big hugs and cheek-kisses whenever we saw her at home. Somehow Suzanne could make you feel, in one hug, that the entire town was welcoming you back, and her smile was always the whole town’s pride and love for their own smiling at you.

Without any family members of Suzanne’s to write condolences to, I still wanted to write, to say something, to convey my feelings about her somehow. Sitting around in this coffee shop and quietly contemplating the news like a grown-up, or going about what I was doing, didn’t seem to be the right thing to do. Then I remembered that Suzanne always read my blog. Between her and Dad, I think they accounted for most of this thing’s readership, and she would ask my parents whenever she saw them to pass along her well wishes to me in China and that she was eagerly looking forward to reading more about it. I got to thank her in a message I passed into Mom’s hands months ago in October, at least. But I think it would be better to make her a part of something of mine that she so kindly checked every day, to wrap her into this narrative of my life now as warmly as she embraced all of our lives.

I still remember Suzanne’s toast at Tom’s 60th birthday, a good-natured accomplishment in injecting some ceremony into Dr. Wu’s party following the gift of high-speed derby racetrack lesson vouchers (to scare the daylights out of him, my father had chuckled) and the mention of golden speculums (professionally related). Older people can be wild, I learned that night, but unlike us most of us twenty-somethings they can be classy at the same time. So I just can’t help but think that if Suzanne has passed on, then whatever comes next for all of us must be a lively and sophisticated engagement, just because she’s there now.

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.