Skeletal connotations aside (unless we’re talking about the recent update schedule of this blog…sorry), today and tomorrow will be interstitial time. Yesterday I returned from about six days spent in Hong Kong with family, and on Sunday I’ll be navigating Chinese domestic airspace to visit my grandmother and extended family in Fuzhou, Fujian Province. Today I’m sitting in a Starbucks again, attempting to get some writing output done with Enrico (another CTLC teacher based in Luohu District). We’re back in the COCO Park Starbucks and we’ve found a corner and we’re (supposed to be) taking no prisoners. But mostly we’re just chatting and not getting done what we intended to (fiction for me, political commentary for him).

I’ve been reluctant to write about my time or observations in Hong Kong here, mostly to preserve my family’s privacy there. Otherwise they would become recurring characters here for how often I venture over, and I don’t know how they would like that. So instead of writing those experiences into this blog, I’ve been saving them for my fiction, working them over in my head until I can get some kind of anonymous honesty balanced out. Hopefully you’ll see the results in a few months’ time, outlined in a first draft!

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.

But what I enjoyed the most out of this month’s American GQ was most definitely Andrew Corsello’s excoriating article on Ayn Rand, who is GQ’s Writer of the Year for her “influence.”

To briefly explain my stance on the polemical Objectivist: I don’t buy her arguments and I was never very impressed. One of my father’s libertarian colleagues gave me my copies of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged with a note about cultivating the young mind that my father boasted of so often. They were decent reads to while away the summer hours of high school, but even then I thought it was more like pulp fiction than either Dickens or Rushdie, especially with the many cheap tricks it pulled (evidently if you want your son to grow up strong, resolute and masculine, give him the initials HR – and if you want your daughter to grow up strong, resolute and masculine, the initials DT will be fine too.) So many of my friends whom I had previously thought of as sensible people remarked how “unique” the Randian world view was though. My own political views disagreed and my aesthetics vomited, but until college there wasn’t much confrontation on the matter.

Fast forward to 2007 when Ann Coulter and the neoconservative punditry was working at a fever tilt spewing hatred and bigotry. The USC Objectivist Club, always hosting crockpot panels on how the West should nuke terrorists into cinders or how everything blue and green was bad all while trying to pass it off as academic discussion and debate (there is no such thing as debate with an Objectivist; there is only his or her linear thinking), was reaching out to the USC Young Republicans to co-sponsor a week they wanted to call “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” which would culminate with the hosting of Ms. Coulter herself. I was mordantly annoyed by this and tried to rouse my own tepid Academic Culture Assembly board members to stand up and fight for the “academic integrity” that the Randian lunatics were hijacking and calling their own, but in the end we let it slip by. I still wish that I had sent a letter in to the school paper’s editor or something.

But I don’t have to worry about voicing my opinions about Objectivism, Ayn Rand or her two puerile fiction pieces anymore, as Corsello did it all for me. I can hardly put it better myself, so here’s a sampler:

A weirdly specific thing happens with the books of Ayn Rand. It’s not just the what of the books, but when a reader discovers them—almost always during the first or second year of college. Rand grabs a reader at a time of maximum vulnerability and malleability, when he’s getting his first accurate sense of how he measures up in the world in terms of intellect and talent. The longing to regard oneself as misunderstood and underrated can be powerful; the temptation to project oneself as such, irresistible. But how? How to stand above and apart?

Enter Howard Roark, the heroic and misunderstood architect, square of jaw and Asperger-ish of mien, who at the end of The Fountainhead blows up his own masterpiece after a bunch of sniveling “parasites” and “second-handers” tinker with the blueprints.

GODDAMN!

Then enter Atlas Shrugged’s John Galt, the heroic and misunderstood engineer, square of jaw and Asperger-ish of mien, who, after persuading “men of talent” to retreat to his Colorado aerie while the country goes to seed (in order to show the “mediocrities” left behind what life is like without their betters), delivers a 35,000-word speech decrying bureaucrats and regulators.

SIXTY PAGES, BITCHES!

Finally, enter Objectivism, the name Rand gave to her moral defense of “reason,” individualism, and unfettered capitalism.

SCOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE!

The days during which that 19-year-old has Rand’s worldview vectored into his cerebral cortex are feverish and sleepless. Days of beautiful affliction during which the intransigence of others—roommates, a coed the patient has been hitting on, professors, parents, everyone—are shown to be the product of their shortcomings, their idiocy and sublimated envy of the patient’s intelligence and talent. Days during which the infected comes to see himself and Roark/Galt as avatars of one another: superheroically mirthless protagonists in a drama of historical import. It’s the damnedest thing. One day you’ve got a bright young kid dutifully connecting the dots of his liberal-arts education; the next, he’s got Roark and Galt in the marrow and has become…an insufferable asshole.

And a fairly good example of such an asshole:

does that moniker “Ayn Rand Asshole” strike you as a contrivance? Do you disbelieve the proposition that a person could read Atlas Shrugged almost purely at the level of injunction—taking the things John Galt says and does as straight as a biblical literalist takes the eye of the needle?

Then meet Michael Malice. No, really. That’s his name. He’s a New York City author and blogger who calls himself both a genius and an “elitist anarchist.” What’s that mean? It means that if a panhandler asks him for a little money or food, Malice says, “I could, but then you might live longer, so you see my dilemma.”
…

Malice also owns the domain name…eh, forget it. You’ll just think I’m making this stuff up. Here’s the interview transcript:

mm: It’s funny you should call me an Ayn Rand Asshole, because I happen to own the domain name assholism.com.
gq: Ah, now you’re fucking with me.
mm: Really. I own it.2
gq: Really?
mm: I really do.
gq: If that’s true, you are not a Randian Asshole. You are the Ayn Rand Asshole.
mm: Well, an asshole is just an assertive person you don’t approve of, right?

Oh, wait, I DO have something to say:
This kind of dead certainty is something you should be rewarded with after you have assessed all factors and been able to reach the best conclusion. This is almost never possible, but I’ll concede that some people are good enough to do it. But most Randians aren’t. Too many of them mistake a blind and lazy kind of self-confidence for this kind of enlightenment. This sort of cockiness lazily passes over analysis and argument and skips to the part where one professes the righteous correctness that helps to fuel his or her own compensatory narcissism.

A Randian would then get on my case about hypocrisy and using an elitist attitude to attack Rand’s support for elitist attitudes. But they’d forget one important difference: I don’t eat babies.

I’ll leave the rest for my own notes. But I do encourage you to read Corsello’s wonderful, vindictive, and visciously delicious article from top to bottom. By the way, I may agree with the bare bones of Corsello’s economic-tie-in, but I’m going to reserve judgment on more conspiratorial matters until I read some of the rest of what those libertarians are touting for myself.

I don’t want to do that.

But thanks to those of you who have been sticking around to read this despite the increasing lag time between posts. Since NaNoWriMo is almost finished (which is not to say that I am – with the laptop dying I think I’m officially out of the running to finish this novel by December) I should be back on track with things soon.

Hijinx of the day: In Hong Kong yesterday I bought one of those Nike+iPod sensors, which talk to your iPod while you run and keep track of how far and how long you run. They say that you have to buy special Nike tennis shoes to install them into, but I just took my trusty pocketknife (which I have thanks to Julia) and a hotel sewing kit (which I have thanks to Mom) and voila, my right shoe now has GADGETRY installed into its tongue.

I am immensely and disproportionately proud of myself for this.

Oh, and thank you Mary David for the letter I received today! Proof positive, folks: the address given in the “Contacting Andrew in China” page here on this blog is accurate and it takes about a week until I receive mail (provided that it’s a small, regular sized letter of about an ounce or so). I have some stationery (thanks to Mom) but I’m still on the search for Hello Kitty prints to send to an un/lucky few of you.

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

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

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

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

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

(You have no idea how much I am looking forward to upgrading to a new four pound laptop next year. I am thinking feathers and pixie dust weight. Like nothing at all!)

I’m starting to realize how variable teaching can feel like. Last Wednesday I became grumpy after I attempted to get the kids to practice their speaking skills in a game of Telephone (kids line up in rows and I give one end a sentence to say. They report the sentence up along the row like a bucket brigade might, and then the last kid runs up to the board to write down the sentence and I check for consistency). Cheating abounded, which was alright in and of itself (I can play marshal alright) but one of the better students started yelling “this is a dumb game, let’s play hangman.” Annoyed, I singled him out to copy sentences while everyone else played.

At the end of class I went to him and told him I wanted to talk to him. He ducked his head and opened his arms in an invitation that seemed too obsequious to be at all sincere. I asked him what he felt the flaws of the lesson plan had been, and what he thought I could do to better assist his education. He said in near-perfect English, “because everyone cheats at this game it loses its value and becomes meaningless. Vocabulary practice would be helpful.”

I had learned already to not mind the trouble kids who sit in the back and heckle in Chinese; they have decided to be lazy and I do not need to bother with them. But when the intelligent and studious ones develop an attitude, I do become very annoyed. I thought of a time long ago when I interrupted my sixth grade math teacher’s lesson to ask what the homework assignment would be. He stopped the class to reprimand me on my lack of respect and patience. I remember feeling ashamed but also rather unjustifiably upbraided; I had only meant to be more efficient. But I learned about propriety and how to behave under a certain code of conduct that day. On Wednesday I guess I learned the difference between a smart kid and a smart ass.

Yet, when I try to structure classes to challenge them better, I sometimes am met with absolute befuddlement, as I had been right before Smart Ass’s (which I shall now deem him henceforth) class. Then it is like pulling teeth, no matter how engaging I try to be and how many little hooks I lay (a lesson plan can have hooks just like a pop song can, I’m learning). I still need a class to be upbeat and to be paying attention to me. Today, for instance, I did a lesson on slang words and culture. The first class was rioting in choruses of “wanna”s and “gonna”s and fist bumping each other out the door. The second kept scribbling at their geometry homework and looked up to humor me with one-word responses only when it seemed necessary.

Many of my dear friends are engaged in teaching programs right now for their career ambitions of doing a real version of my fake job. (Emmo, your comments on previous teaching posts on this blog have definitely helped me improve my classroom-management schemes.) I Skyped with Preet, currently doing her Master’s at Columbia for bilingual education, the other day and also asked her if she knew what I could do better. “There are going to be days like that all the time,” she told me. Yen related a conversation she had with one of her own professors that seemed to echo my sentiments – “how am I going to teach in a way that will challenge the good students and pull up the slower ones?” “It’s a common feeling, Pouw,” she said.

I suppose what makes it all worth it are the days when an entire class seems electrified, and when quiet students come up later with questions in better English than you thought they had. I also have to place my course and this year in perspective, I’m learning: today I asked another of the brighter students “how can I make this lesson more interesting?” after a particularly distracted session.

“I think there are some students who just do not understand enough English to know what you are saying,” she chirped. “Do not worry about them though.”

“But even you were working on your math homework during class!” I pointed out.

She paused mid-chirp. “Well, we have midterm examinations next week and some feel that this class is not as important.” Smiles.

I really can’t argue with that – these kids are under a lot of pressure, and sometimes when I step into a classroom to take over from the last teacher I can’t understand what’s written on the board myself (does a physics introduction to levers and fulcrums really have to begin with a problem involving 3 fulcrum points at once?). If I were a real teacher, with real grades and real material that might be useful for most of them, I could deserve their respect and attention. But I’m the Conversation teacher. Not the English teacher. I should remember what this year is to me – an out, an escape route, a relaxing year off before medical school starts. The students certainly seem to treat my class as a relaxing 45 minutes off from their normally intense days. I guess I shouldn’t take it too seriously myself.