I came back to Xining a few nights ago to find my door locked. My. God. Locked out again.
Over the last few months I have developed a reputation of locking myself out one way or another, leaving my house keys in Beijing or using magic to lock my inner door ("It has a lock?"). This time though, my key simply wouldn't open the door.
Fortuna smiled, the next morning the final turn of the key released the bolt. I entered. A former student of mine had crashed at the place for an undisclosed period during Losar, and the whole place reeked of subdued debauchery. Traces of party were scattered like clues at the scene of a crime. Some cigarette ash here, empty beer bottles neatly placed back into their boxes and hid behind couches, playing cards snowed all over the living room, disposable chopsticks in piles: what went on here? I opened the windows and allowed a breeze to carry out the stale air; I had told Bryan to keep clandestine, in case this would be an issue with the University. Now I was eating my words, the place smelled like my late Grandfather's apartment - he was taken by emphysema - in which, by the end, the curtains were so tarred they could serve as table legs.
Only a few days remained to plan classes. Throughout my vacation I reviewed lesson plans in my head, previewing myself delivering them to skeptical students. Some of the ideas weren't so bad, and I encouraged myself to write them down, but I couldn't be bothered to reach for my bag for a pen and paper. Luckily, my schemes weren't so complex, and most of them rushed back to me once I got here. One syllabus now stands planned, one ready to be typed, one to be dug up from last semester and recycled, and one has yet to take any shape at all (that's the first class of the week, tomorrow morning!).
A few major changes will take place: 1) No more poetry for the Chinese students; trying to teach Ozymandias (it's in the book!) would be like forces them to whittle chess pieces out of dry sand. We wasted enough of our time with archaic, confused rhymes last semester. 2) No more homework writing assignments. Unless I come up with a really enigmatic idea, all writing will be done IN class. Last semester ended with flawless end-of-term papers. I grew skeptical at their technical perfection and ended up googling sentences from many of the papers; at least 1/3 were plagiarized.
About the sauna. One of the luxury hotels here has a bathhouse I won't hesitate to call Roman. You descend a pseudo-marble staircase and walk onto a mosaic of centaurs eating grapes. Before you lie three giants baths of naked frolickers, framed by plaster columns, stone basins, and flatscreen TVs. The sauna is hot, and a motion sensor shoots jets of water onto a fake stove heated by fake coals. Sinks with giant rococo mirrors stand in rows around the baths. You let the water run, shave, brush your teeth, and lotion your face. Everything is disposable. A waste basket nearby brims with single-serving toothbrushes, razors, plastic cups, and all of their wrappings. Totally decadent. You can get a gown and go upstairs, where overpriced drinks, massages, and prostitutes await.
Meanwhile, my home and everyone else's in the city is a patchwork of concrete, plaster, wood and steel. The refrigerator freezes the vegetables, the water heater hardly supplies four minutes of hot water, the furniture is shabby, the windows streaked in dirty and misapplied paint. The culture worries itself sick about unpolluted women. The land is slowly drying into crumbly dirt, the clumps of which are crested with the oily excesses of medival factories and energy plants.
This week I will be teaching Lord Byron (in the book!) to a choir of blank faces and one word answers, hoping that someday, these kids too will have the chance to piss away their livelihoods and their world just like the Romans did not so many centuries ago.
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
KFC
I couldn't find anyone to eat dinner with, my teacher friends all unavailable, and my students all dodging out on me before I could ask for an escort. So, I down what is left of the Black Label that Hytham and I bought weeks before and hang my ratty black overcoat over my shoulders.
Outside, Xining is growing crueler and crueler. The sun is banished at six thirty PM, and only wan light emerges from behind the heavy hills in the morning. Everyday, I take a bitter mince to the 文科 building and back, keeping my eyes glued to the ground, making sure to avoid any run-ins that would result in my further finger numbing.
At night it is only colder, and so, this night, I head out expecting to eat at the first restaurant I see, and not spend any more time freezing my ass off. The restaurants on "Educational Establishment Alley" all serve dishes that I have eaten dozens of times, and all of them lack heating, a prerequisite for tonight's dining. So I press on into the stripping wind and turn towards the square that, after a long boulevard of anaemic trees, leads to a Kentucky Fried Chicken. The wind is harsh and the the air nipping, a few scattered souls accompany me on a few segments of the walk, but most of them abscond from me quickly, running to huddle near coal stoves or collapse near a radiator. I want to join them, but the promise of chicken, real ersatz bread, creamy fatty mayonnaise, and lank strips of lettuce called to me. When I finally make it to the restaurant, I am absolutely delighted to find it nearly empty.
Upon seeing me the cashier pulls out the idiot menu (for children? foreigners? a city that hasn't been indoctrinated by fast food terminology their whole lives?) comprised of mendacious photographs of giant symmetrical waxen burgers. I feel insulted and defiantly ignore it. Moments later I catch myself mocking the cashier's unintelligible accent. "Meh meh wehhh..." I mutter at her garble, hoping for a slower, clearer repeat. Its hard to know what is going on, if they are snickering at the foreigner, or if my Chinese is really that bad. I felt a tad guilty. We figured it out, - what would I like to drink? Using pantomimes and broken Chinese I pinpoint the Mountain Dew dispenser on the soda machine. I then demand an extra packet of ketchup in a similar fashion. My chicken sandwich is unready; somewhere behind the metal lattices and food transmogrifiers a lady has yet to refill the mayonnaise gun.
The irony of the Chinese American fast-food chain will never fail to amuse me. I often find myself getting up with my tray and walking towards the trash cans. And then, from across the slippery plastic dining room a lady in a pink shirt and silly baseball cap rushes towards me and expropriates my tray. She dumps its contents into the trash bin and ads the plastic board to the stack. I head towards the door remembering, "In China, this is a fancy restaurant!" Some new arrivals pass me on their way in, they smile knowingly, I have reaffirmed their belief that this is a sign of Westernness and prosperity!
My burger arrives. I open its thin red (auspicious) cardboard box (they definitely outsell their blue-boxed non-spicey counterparts). The brown bun has been violated in five spots by the mayonnaise lady's fingers, its form more like a crumpled tissue than a machine pressed bun.
I pause for a moment, and then hungrily devour it, playfully contemplating a piece of comparative literature between Cornell West and Tadeusz Borowski that I will never write.
Such is the life of an apathetic casual academic. Whiskey, cold, fried chicken, pocket the last packet of ketchup, back into the cold, onto a bus, ignore a student whose name I don't know, get off the bus, dodge piss-poor taxi drivers crossing the street, talk to some students I do know, and escape back home under the foggy coal smoke of a Xining winter night.
Outside, Xining is growing crueler and crueler. The sun is banished at six thirty PM, and only wan light emerges from behind the heavy hills in the morning. Everyday, I take a bitter mince to the 文科 building and back, keeping my eyes glued to the ground, making sure to avoid any run-ins that would result in my further finger numbing.
At night it is only colder, and so, this night, I head out expecting to eat at the first restaurant I see, and not spend any more time freezing my ass off. The restaurants on "Educational Establishment Alley" all serve dishes that I have eaten dozens of times, and all of them lack heating, a prerequisite for tonight's dining. So I press on into the stripping wind and turn towards the square that, after a long boulevard of anaemic trees, leads to a Kentucky Fried Chicken. The wind is harsh and the the air nipping, a few scattered souls accompany me on a few segments of the walk, but most of them abscond from me quickly, running to huddle near coal stoves or collapse near a radiator. I want to join them, but the promise of chicken, real ersatz bread, creamy fatty mayonnaise, and lank strips of lettuce called to me. When I finally make it to the restaurant, I am absolutely delighted to find it nearly empty.
Upon seeing me the cashier pulls out the idiot menu (for children? foreigners? a city that hasn't been indoctrinated by fast food terminology their whole lives?) comprised of mendacious photographs of giant symmetrical waxen burgers. I feel insulted and defiantly ignore it. Moments later I catch myself mocking the cashier's unintelligible accent. "Meh meh wehhh..." I mutter at her garble, hoping for a slower, clearer repeat. Its hard to know what is going on, if they are snickering at the foreigner, or if my Chinese is really that bad. I felt a tad guilty. We figured it out, - what would I like to drink? Using pantomimes and broken Chinese I pinpoint the Mountain Dew dispenser on the soda machine. I then demand an extra packet of ketchup in a similar fashion. My chicken sandwich is unready; somewhere behind the metal lattices and food transmogrifiers a lady has yet to refill the mayonnaise gun.
The irony of the Chinese American fast-food chain will never fail to amuse me. I often find myself getting up with my tray and walking towards the trash cans. And then, from across the slippery plastic dining room a lady in a pink shirt and silly baseball cap rushes towards me and expropriates my tray. She dumps its contents into the trash bin and ads the plastic board to the stack. I head towards the door remembering, "In China, this is a fancy restaurant!" Some new arrivals pass me on their way in, they smile knowingly, I have reaffirmed their belief that this is a sign of Westernness and prosperity!
My burger arrives. I open its thin red (auspicious) cardboard box (they definitely outsell their blue-boxed non-spicey counterparts). The brown bun has been violated in five spots by the mayonnaise lady's fingers, its form more like a crumpled tissue than a machine pressed bun.
I pause for a moment, and then hungrily devour it, playfully contemplating a piece of comparative literature between Cornell West and Tadeusz Borowski that I will never write.
Such is the life of an apathetic casual academic. Whiskey, cold, fried chicken, pocket the last packet of ketchup, back into the cold, onto a bus, ignore a student whose name I don't know, get off the bus, dodge piss-poor taxi drivers crossing the street, talk to some students I do know, and escape back home under the foggy coal smoke of a Xining winter night.
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Bianpao and German Folk Tales
2008, the year of the Olympics, was ushered in by an ear-bleeding cacophony of firecrackers. All around Xining, large amounts of gunpowder wrapped in pink tissue paper were set alight with leaky cigarette lighters and thrown into the air, on the ground, at friends, or simply run away from.
Everywhere I go fire crackers are cracking. On the street little boxes erupt in slow motion, one every few seconds, the instigator apparently no where to be found. From my window I watch little boys and girls tease the wicks with lighters and drop them just in time to save their fingers. Their parents are long gone, probably behind another building setting off an entire wreath of the damned things. Hardware stores are the main proprietor of these miniature bombs. Whenever Chinese people build things, they need to scare off the demons that frequently plague substandard building materials with powder's frightening crackle.
If one goes outside on any given Xining afternoon, shuts their eyes, and remains quiet for a few seconds, he may be treated to the distant rat-a-tat of these little red cylinders. As construction is out of control in this Western Chinese outpost, so is the ignition of firecrackers. I often curse out loud at groups of smirking workers who take me by surprise with ancient and annoying tradition. Frequently, during prolonged outbursts, I scan the skyline for an imploding building, a sign that the inevitable has finally happened. Never, however, I am so lucky.
Children in my housing complex do four things, two of them have been relegated to dusty closets by the winter - riding bikes and playing with sports balls. The other two are a bit less constructive, one is playing with bits of broken glass and trashed cardboard, the other is to, of course, play with firecrackers. I often curse under my breath at these little kids' parents. This is the antithesis of Struwwulpeter, their parents are the bleeding heart liberals of child discipline, they could blow off a finger for God's [or gods', depending on your inclination {or neither}] sake. Perhaps, it is a thing of pride, the sons and daughters of the Kingdom of the Four Inventions could never possibly hurt themselves with their own creations. There is an innate sense of control that is hereditarily inherited by all children of China, and none of little ones can be scorched by the sudden combustion of this explosive.
Perhaps the prevalence of this dangerous game stems from a lack of education about playing with fire? Or perhaps its related to the spoiled generations of New China that are demanding firecracker allowances and whining their parents into submission when the elders do venture forth to stop them. With the news about undisciplined only-children calling the shots, the latter would make more sense, but I have seen various toddlers suckling on crumpled cigarette packs they've rummaged from the ground. Wait, so then maybe the former makes more sense. Oh, what the hell am I talking about sense for.
Everywhere I go fire crackers are cracking. On the street little boxes erupt in slow motion, one every few seconds, the instigator apparently no where to be found. From my window I watch little boys and girls tease the wicks with lighters and drop them just in time to save their fingers. Their parents are long gone, probably behind another building setting off an entire wreath of the damned things. Hardware stores are the main proprietor of these miniature bombs. Whenever Chinese people build things, they need to scare off the demons that frequently plague substandard building materials with powder's frightening crackle.
If one goes outside on any given Xining afternoon, shuts their eyes, and remains quiet for a few seconds, he may be treated to the distant rat-a-tat of these little red cylinders. As construction is out of control in this Western Chinese outpost, so is the ignition of firecrackers. I often curse out loud at groups of smirking workers who take me by surprise with ancient and annoying tradition. Frequently, during prolonged outbursts, I scan the skyline for an imploding building, a sign that the inevitable has finally happened. Never, however, I am so lucky.
Children in my housing complex do four things, two of them have been relegated to dusty closets by the winter - riding bikes and playing with sports balls. The other two are a bit less constructive, one is playing with bits of broken glass and trashed cardboard, the other is to, of course, play with firecrackers. I often curse under my breath at these little kids' parents. This is the antithesis of Struwwulpeter, their parents are the bleeding heart liberals of child discipline, they could blow off a finger for God's [or gods', depending on your inclination {or neither}] sake. Perhaps, it is a thing of pride, the sons and daughters of the Kingdom of the Four Inventions could never possibly hurt themselves with their own creations. There is an innate sense of control that is hereditarily inherited by all children of China, and none of little ones can be scorched by the sudden combustion of this explosive.
Perhaps the prevalence of this dangerous game stems from a lack of education about playing with fire? Or perhaps its related to the spoiled generations of New China that are demanding firecracker allowances and whining their parents into submission when the elders do venture forth to stop them. With the news about undisciplined only-children calling the shots, the latter would make more sense, but I have seen various toddlers suckling on crumpled cigarette packs they've rummaged from the ground. Wait, so then maybe the former makes more sense. Oh, what the hell am I talking about sense for.
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