Cleaning off the dust, and the Xining saunas.

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.

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.

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.

Askin' the Hard Questions

It seems that no matter how far I want to run from the uncomfortable aspects of my job, the more glaring they become. Knowledge is a slippery subject. How does one know what they think they know? If you look at beliefs as more than true or false/ black or white, then you run into an entire gradient of beliefs, and it is hard to determine which side of that gradient is the good, and which is the bad.
Absolutists would believe that there is a right and a wrong to everything, while relativists would believe that there can not possibly be a right or a wrong, since any opinion about about morals is inextricably tied to one's culturally specific value system.
Many people pride themselves on being "cosmopolitan." The more one knows about the world, the more globally aware one is. In fact, it is chic to be enamored with foreign cultures and foreign belief systems. One can justify nearly any social or moral shortcoming (in relation to their home society) by appropriating some sort of value (which may or may not exist, and certainly isn't completely understood) from a borrowed culture.
If one wanted to, by looking back at history or at nearly any science of the humanities, one could find cultural justification for nearly anything. The Aztecs sacrificed humans, the Ancient Greeks had a long running tradition of pederasty, prostitution was an industry in feudal Japan, and pimps in Cambodia will tell you that little children would love to do anything that your money can by.
Now, indeed, some of these things would seem quite absurd. But, if one were to take a firm standpoint of true relativism, it would be hard to reject any of these cultural realities as bad.
Yet, most people who do development work, or want to "help" other cultures who are based from an "enlightened" academic position in the West will tell you that most facets of a culture
should be "preserved," while other facets should be developed.
Things that should be developed are education, access to basic resources, such as water, food, fuel, etc., health services, improving / raising women's roles in society, and aiding / giving loans (kiva.com) to small businesses. The average proponent of changing these aspects of society would probably be OK with removing pederasty and sacrifice from them as well.

The problem I confront comes in when academically oriented people allow themselves to exploit an aspect of a culture that either does not exist, or from their own value systems, can not exist as moral.

If one were to be abusing their power position among a weaker, poorer culture in a poor area, what would they do to justify what they were doing? If we take a brief glance, we could look at knowledge / ignorance and justified / unjustified beliefs. If someone of relativist leanings studies a culture and sees that a certain issue of moral question is lacking from it, introducing it to that culture would clearly be morally questionable. If a child is ignorant about a sharp blade, it would be unfair to give that child a sharp blade, because it might cut itself.
If the culture has knowledge and customs surrounding this issue, it would be fair to work within that context.

The problems balloons if there is an existence of a certain issue at a small, perhaps discriminated against, scale. If one wanted to justify their participation in a questionable event, they could convince themselves that a scattering of historical precedents was enough to justify their actions. A sex tourist in Phnom Phen very much wants to believe that what they are doing is actually beneficial to their victims and for the communities. What other work could they do? And in a very perverse mind: Perhaps they enjoy it. One must justify their actions in order to extinguish guilt. If one were to concentrate harder on the inconsistencies in their argument, perhaps they would find that their beliefs were indeed unjustified.

I mentioned that such an abusing individual might be violating the mores of their
"home society." This might seem absurd to bring up, as many people pride themselves in how
different their values systems are from their families or from the "mainstream," but humans are often more rooted then they like to think they are. Preferences for food, for beds, for clothes, and for books and media still strongly permeate most expat communities.
It is doubtful that any person who has embraced another religion or culture system different from that of Western secularism would find beating a child OK. Many people simply use alternative, exotic cultures and others' ignorance about them for their own gain.
Once again though, it is important to remember that most people are not trying to get away with doing something bad. They might fully justify their cursory beliefs in another value system as de facto proof that they are part of something that is fair and fully understood by people other than their accusers. If one wants to believe that everyone else besides them in a Starbucks is a consumerist hack, it is very easy to do so.

A threat of modern anthropology that it has turned exoticization into a science. Still people
and their cultures are being picked apart like biologists do to animals, but now it a fully defendable fortress. To accuse it is to be guilt of cultural insensitivity and to be anti-relativist.
But why do these cultures even interest foreigners? The same sorts of things that interest Western researchers here in Xining are what Chinese tourist companies superficially peddle to their tourists. The NGOs here rely on the fetishization of Tibetan culture in the West to attract donors and aid. People who come to teach here, typically come on similar, if less touristic grounds, to see the real Tibet. And recently, to document it before it "disappears." Despite heavy, anti-exoticization rhetoric, most people here are given in to accepting such self-defeating donations from groups perpetuating these "ignorant" ideas about such areas and their people. Students are taught to despise tourists and modernizers as violators and destroyers of culture. Development projects here largely aim at providing modest work alleviation (such as solar cookers, water pumps, etc.), as they won't harm the pristine traditions of the culture. Student here clearly love there cultures and want to see them endure, but can they think of the motives of the Westerners helping them? Or the consequences to their villages if they continue to accept such gifts from outsiders? In the end the Chinese are ballooning around the Tibetans and beating many of them out of home and work.
The mostly highly educated of our students, on the other hand, become well trained in sociology and literature, and hope to get jobs at NGOs that rely on foreigners to extensively correct their English and find grant opportunities for them. Who is learning Chinese laws to work within the system? So many successful Tibetans in the area are themselves tourists, yet the students won't even consider that work as of now. Many teachers are too afraid to lose their roles and jobs here by admitting that their work is either ineffectual, pointless, or contributing to greater evils. How far will one go to justify their roles in a corrupt system?

Teaching, Suicide, and Metaphor

Teaching can be a real mind-bender sometimes. I don't consider myself an adept educator by any means, and after three months on the job, I have realized just how insane this job can become!

Each of my classes is remarkably different. I teach a total of 4 different classes of children: quick-learning Tibetans from all over ethnographic Tibet, inattentive farmer kids from Qinghai, attentive farmer kids from Sichuan and Chongqing, and insolent adult students from various nearby townships.

Every week is full of surprises. Early on in the semester I was a pretty strict teacher and strict grader. I was constantly swirling around, barking at loud-mouthed kids to shut up if they were going to speak Chinese and splattering their papers with red ink proclaiming "plagiarism" and "0." This was quite early on for such cruelty, but I was afraid that the students would fall out of line; they would notice what an unsure and inept teacher I was and rebel against me. And of course, I was (and am) a terrible opponent of Chinese pedagogy - lecturing and silence, complete servitude to the laws uncritical text memorization.

When I pushed too hard, the female students in my Qinghai Chinese class produced on a number of occasions some disturbing poetry. "I am sad like the rain; I want to die." I forgot how the poems go exactly, but they were all more or less along these lines. I recognized a growing problem, and figured that my ruthless pursuits of personification and metaphor probably weren't helpful at all. They would painfully writhe in their seats as I would hover over and deter them from the most mundane of starting lines: "The sky is so blue; the flowers are beautiful like baby."

No, no! Too easy to rime that first line with something as equally vacant (an indeed unrhyming) , and what kind of a metaphor is a comparison between a flower and a baby! Hell, that isn't even a metaphor!

Their lines would shift under my scrutinizing gaze. I , the sweatshop foreman, punishing my workers for misprinting with brushes they couldn't even hold, prowling the grounds looking for the weakest links, and outing their foolish mistakes. The weaker girls started to panic, and their poetry got more and more morbid: "My quite face turned blue; the flowers are dead too; Oh, you - teacher, are so cruel!"

This week I assigned an essay to my students. The assignment was to write a persuasive essay. The example I gave them was of some sad soul trying to promote plastic windows over glass ones. "Glass windows are so expensive, and they break easily! Plastic windows, on the other hand are both cheap and durable!" The students got a kick out of the example, but as soon as
I gave them the assignment to come up with their own idea - things got messy.

One girl, lets call her Cathy (for all I know, that might actually be her English name, what a great teacher I am!), wrote her paper proposition as follows:


Topic: The changes in myself.
Thesis: I have noticed a lot of changes in myself in the last few months.

1. I don't want to get up in the morning, I get up very late.
2. I will not go to eat by myself.
3. I miss my home and parents very much.
...

WHOAH! Danger, Danger! "Uh," I said, "that's actually not a persuasive arguement. Can you really convince someone else about the changes in yourself? You have to choose a topic that people would argue with you over, that they might a different opinion on." Awkward pause - Cathy was staring into her desk very hard. A crushing silence enveloped that corner of the classroom. "Well, you know, a lot of people feel different in the Winter. They don't like to go out so much. You could write about how people change in the Winter. Many people feel the same way." Sidestep out. That was intense, and I felt a little dirty.

Many of the children in these classes act as 20-something year old preteens. They giggle, yell, and refuse to do work. It reminds me of middle school in the US! But, in actuality, these kids are adults, in their third year of college. They are dealing with some realistic and intense issues, a large one of which is that they are far from home for the first time, and that their absence puts a stress on them and their family. Add that to the pressure that they have from that very same family, and then add on regular school pressures - and you have students who grow their English writing skills through goth poetry.

Oh, yes, my blog

Dear Journal,

I have a lot of catching up to do. Its been a long and tumultuous ride this past month, and its all wound up right here, with today, and the following INTERVIEW EXPERIENCE:

Ligaya and I swung by early, just after my 10:20 ending of class and subsequent baozi run came to an end. We swung by the office of our employers - Mr. Yu and Ms. Wang. Yu seemed to be wiping tables with a dirty rag when we walked in. Ligaya called him out on this rather uncharacteristic action, and he sheepishly recoiled at the suggestion. We sat down and he prodded us about the post exchange. Ms. Wang arrived a few minutes later, in a bustle as always, knocking around documents and fumbling with the office's various dial-able objects.
They joked with us and we joked with them. It was a disarmingly cheerful environment.
What the hell was going on? Where was the pretense of botched classes, complaining students, angry landlords, or the suggestive rhetoric for self-correction?
Found it, the pretense had been gobbled up by a request to humor a media tool for an interview. An interview on the "future of Qinghai Province." Wang paid us our monthly salary and spend an extended period of time searching for the english word for "weizhi" a term which expresses when one pays someone before the payer goes to the bank for the withdraw of the money, with connotations of paying someone slightly ahead of their regularly scheduled payment time. The closest term decided upon was "prepay."
After being prepayed, I went home and graded 3 papers out of a stack of 30, and drank a pot of coffee.
I arrived back at the office building an hour later. I was joined by Josh, a pink-clothed American studying Chinese, Tibetan, and TCM (with connections to an unclosed US agency), and Abe Sensai, the resident Japanese teacher. We were now informed to inform the reporter about our impressions of change and development of the province in the wake of the recently ended People's Congress in Beijing. I assumed that a whole lot of nothing happened there (in public) and so this would just be a chance to sucker us into complementing Xining, Qinghai, and therefore China. Mr. Ao, another school official, told me that now that China had freedom, issues could be discussed. In the past, he told me, when teachers had issues, they came to this office, and the issues were taken care of. This office, I realized, was a miniature version of the Chinese government, and it itself expressed all of the great things that modern China was capable of! This truly was a multi-scaled harmonious landscape!
Five minutes later the other foreigners and I were trapped in a room somewhere between an interrogation chamber and a sleazy motel room with a young Beijing girl nervously shaking a digital recorder. We were to be interviewed for China Radio Int'l (CRI)!!
Moments later I was complementing Xining, Qinghai, and therefore China. I stressed the convenience of my university life and the good traffic of the city. I had the mic on me twice, but every-time my soliloquy went astray, I lost her attention and CRI's recorder. The first misstep was a brief diatribe against the dearth of helmet wearers in China and the absence of public education about the dangers of head injuries. "There must be a law-" I was saying. The second misstep was when I mentioned the shamefully low English levels of most of my students, which I said was a geographic problem resulting from lack of lower education funding in more remote provinces. "My students can hardly speak a sentence of English-" Yoink!
Abe droned on twice to her about the dangers and deplorability of the hormones and pesticides used to increase food yields in China. He did this in both Chinese and Japanese. The young lady gave an empty smile as Abe drew over his body with his hands the negative influence of contaminated meats. The hormones mainly affect the human lungs in sort of a pumping action, apparently. A negative pumping action.
After the interviewing was done we were all released. Josh discovered our little CRI representative had studied Burmese in Beijing, a fact which prompted him to get her phone number. She motioned him with a thumb-pinky phone and mouthed as we departed. "I've always wanted to learn Burmese," Josh said. Abe dottered about a bit and ran on ahead. Some fuwuyuans were doing exercises in a parking lot, a Christmas song blurted out of a garbage truck somewhere in the distance, black smoke bellowed out of an inconspicuous smokestack poking above a sign about preserving the "Green Homeland." Another morning in China.

Where am I?

I'm in a grassland. I'm in a city. One minute I'm surrounded by white capped Muslims, the next I'm up to my gills with American Christian missionaries. I'm in a market selling monks' robes and horse saddles. I'm in a giant shopping mall eyeing overpriced counterfeit khakis.
I'm with a Tibetan. I'm with a Han. I'm with an American.
They all operate in independant spheres, showing indifference to one another.
Smiles are indignant or do not occur at all.

None of the Chinese students want to be here. For them this is a third rate college in a third rate city. Their writings tell of the anxiety of reaching Xining, their anger and frustration at first seeing the "dusty, yellow mountains" as bear as "a monk's head." Why have they been banished to this end of the earth, this border town in a province once only seen as a prison cell on the government's maps.

The Tibetans want to go home, or they want to go somewhere else. It is but a period of fun and freedom before they end up doing all sorts of things - or doing nothing at all. The rate of success for graduates of Qinghai Shida is not to be envied. Most students will go home to their villages to teach English, a few will work with NGOs or non-profits, and a pinch will go on to study in the Philippines, or (with some sort of God's good grace) in the US.

Is the simple life a better life? So many of my students in all my classes are either from farming communities or from nomadic families. The Americans preach a good "simple life" and tout their babies, cookies, and pasta as a carving out of the simple and the pure.
They come from a privileged position, the students from hardly any position at all.
Yet they all agree that the family is to be missed and they all agree that life can be very difficult and very sad.

So maybe Xining is actually united by qualities of longing. Longing for the simple, for family, and for change. Be it change of scene, or change in others' religions, change is in the air. Its a change that is being inspired by people's desires to create the better and from their frustrations with the status quo in their uncomfortable new homes. Perhaps the largest difference is just what they gave up to experience this discomfort. Many Tibetans gave up a hard and abusive life. Many Han gave up a generational pattern of farming. Many Americans gave up all of their creature comforts to come live in a place so foreign and so challenging to their ideas of the mundane. Does this make the Americans more brave? For they were the ones who gave up the best to pursue the less desireable. However, the safety net of a land far away lies with them, not with the citizens of China. For many of the students, if they fail at this college, they may never have another opportunity for a college education again. They may end up as taxi drivers, waitresses, low ranking government officials, or as owners of convenience stores, selling cigarettes and pumpkins seeds late into the night.

Xining is a place which defines discomfort. It is a place that calls for bravery. It is a place that strives for the sea but remains, firmly, rooted deep within the mountains, rivers, fields, deserts, valleys, and wastelands of China. Far from its sea.