Links to my newest Facebook albums
Portland
Taiwan
Hong Kong
Friday, August 29, 2008
I Used To Have Religion, But Then I Had A Few Beers, And Then I Was OK
“I used to have religion but then I had a few beers, and it was OK.” Perhaps Zhang Ge (Older brother Zhang) summed up the evening the best, but we will get to him later. I think it would be best for me to preface with this: I did not get drunk. I say that for two reasons, the first of which is to set this story slightly apart from the story you might be expecting to hear. Second, to say that it was indeed a night in which such caveats are rare and hard won.
The night started as an afternoon coffee with Mr. Lee, a Korean teacher here at Southwest. We ended up sitting long past the point when the coffee pot emptied, because the coffee was not the point. We were getting to know each other, even if that often involved long and somewhat awkward silences as people felt around for common ground. Conversation was not the point. We were getting to know each other. And so we sat, coffee cups as dry as the conversation, getting to know each other. Getting to know each other is important to Mr. Lee.
The strange thing was that somewhere in the middle of the pregnant silence and the awkward shuffling of feet, we did get to know each other. Though we had little in common, certainly nothing that engendered anything approaching a lively conversation, by sitting in that living room we demonstrated that we wanted to get to know each other, and maybe that is enough. As I type this my Western mind is screaming profanities at my Eastern experience, because what is the point? To give legitimacy to the awkward silence is to deny the Western truism that we can only get along if we are alike; that, at least to start off, we can only appreciate in others what we already appreciate in ourselves. But here, that is not the case. Friendship demands only the desire for friendship, and the commonality can be built later.
That is neither here nor there, though. That was only an awkward two hours in a living room. We decided to all go and eat dinner together, at a type of restaurant known as “stick pot.” Stick pot is the commoner’s hot pot, where the ingredients are all on sticks that you then put into the hot pot in the middle, and at the end of the meal the cost is determined by the number of sticks. Without any fancy buildings or lavishly adorned servers, by not bothering to offer exotic ingredients or even fresh “pots” or spices (they tend to be used several times before being replaced), stick pot strips away the veneer of civility that has grown up around the hot pot so that it can be enjoyed by all in the fashion in which it was initially created: A bunch of people huddled around a steaming pot, fishing among the spices for the last hidden morsels of food. It is delicious, it is lively, and as of now, a day out, I am not sick, so it was a success.
Chinese culture is a toasting culture. Perhaps toasting creates the common ground that they do not require in initial friendships. Either way, Mr. Lee is a great one for toasts. He toasted the table, he toasted us as a group, and he toasted us individually. He encouraged us to toast each other. Barely five minutes would pass without hearing him say something like, “Come, come! You are from Seattle. We will toast to Seattle. I love you. Gan Be!”
Gan be is translated literally as 'dry glass,' and that is what it means. When you are toasted, you empty your glass or risk offending your toaster. The gan be ritual carries at its core the duality of the Chinese person. It is friendly and it is hospitable, but just beneath the surface beats a warrior’s heart. Gan be is one of many testaments to the China that every Kung Fu fan knows exists, where peace and tranquility lie only a very short distance away from the Dragon’s Five Fists of Flaming Death. There is “great face” in having a high alcohol tolerance, and there is greater face in drinking your friend under the table. And so each toast is made in the spirit of friendship, but drunk in the spirit of competition.
Luckily the beer is weak and the glasses small, barely bigger than two shot glasses. However, stick pot does not have glasses, or rather their “glasses” would be more aptly described as small metal bowls, slightly smaller than a rice bowl. The meal was long and the toasts were frequent; as soon as your bowl-glass was emptied someone else would promptly fill it, in part because it is good manners, but also in part so that you were ready for the next toast. At the end the floor was host to an impressive number of bottles and an even more impressive number of sticks.
We never found out how much we ate or how much it cost though, because that’s when the chief of police showed up. Somehow he was a friend of Mr. Lee’s, and wanted to eat dinner with us. The chief of police does not eat stick pot, so he showed up, paid our bill, and then we all went to another, far more fancy establishment, where the price of a single dish would probably rival our entire stick pot tab. The table was arranged carefully and precisely, the chief of police in the seat of honor, with the locals interspersed amongst us foreigners, with our Chinese student friends the furthest away from the chief. I was sitting next to his second-in-command, who went by the name of Zhang Ge, who I quoted at the beginning of this anecdote-turned-novel.
Thus began our second dinner, and our second round of toasting. Thankfully here the glasses were normal-sized, and held only a half to a third of what the bowl-glasses held. The food was exquisite, and served to provide as distraction while our group warmed to these new and powerful guests. Though I would have preferred to make the switch to tea at this point, it is hard to refuse a toast by the police chief. I was also harboring secret hopes of making sufficient connections so that, were I to apply for a motorcycle license, that it would pass quietly and uneventfully through the proper offices with the added weight of my newfound friend.
At this point I had to make a strategic decision. I was not going to get drunk, and so I needed to find the best way to stop drinking without causing any offense. This is where the competitive and sometimes predatory nature of gan be comes out. At the first sign of weakness, the table will turn as one to try and cull the herd. The key was to determine when all the important toasts were done, and then declare that I was done drinking while I was still in a good enough spot to weather the flurry of toasts that would surely come.
I briefly harbored hopes of being able to bow out on the grounds of religion, but you already heard how that turned out. Upon hearing my reasoning, his face lit up in possibly the biggest smile of the night. “Yes! Religion! I once had religion, but I had a few beers, and then I was OK. Let us drink to religion!” It was not the response I had hoped for.
Another key to avoiding toasts is remaining active. While intuition might lead one to try and fly under the radar, it is not an option left open to white folk in China. Quietly sitting back is another form of weakness, and can occasion a barrage of toasts, so should be avoided. Towards the end of the second dinner I started making tea toasts, ludicrous toasts whose purpose was simply to keep people off balance enough to not toast me. There were the standard toasts to Beibei, to the USA, to new friends, but there were also ridiculous toasts: “To Love!” “To World Peace!” And my personal favorite, “To Cute Chinese-American Babies!” Occasionally people would try to call my bluff and demand a beer toast, but faltered when I would steadily and quickly empty my glass without hesitation. I would not be an easy mark, and my goal was to show no weakness, only discipline. The toasts slowed and then eventually stopped, and I was able to leave without having to flat out refuse anyone anything, so I considered it a success. The perfect end came to the evening when we all squished into a police van to return to our apartment. I love China.
The night started as an afternoon coffee with Mr. Lee, a Korean teacher here at Southwest. We ended up sitting long past the point when the coffee pot emptied, because the coffee was not the point. We were getting to know each other, even if that often involved long and somewhat awkward silences as people felt around for common ground. Conversation was not the point. We were getting to know each other. And so we sat, coffee cups as dry as the conversation, getting to know each other. Getting to know each other is important to Mr. Lee.
The strange thing was that somewhere in the middle of the pregnant silence and the awkward shuffling of feet, we did get to know each other. Though we had little in common, certainly nothing that engendered anything approaching a lively conversation, by sitting in that living room we demonstrated that we wanted to get to know each other, and maybe that is enough. As I type this my Western mind is screaming profanities at my Eastern experience, because what is the point? To give legitimacy to the awkward silence is to deny the Western truism that we can only get along if we are alike; that, at least to start off, we can only appreciate in others what we already appreciate in ourselves. But here, that is not the case. Friendship demands only the desire for friendship, and the commonality can be built later.
That is neither here nor there, though. That was only an awkward two hours in a living room. We decided to all go and eat dinner together, at a type of restaurant known as “stick pot.” Stick pot is the commoner’s hot pot, where the ingredients are all on sticks that you then put into the hot pot in the middle, and at the end of the meal the cost is determined by the number of sticks. Without any fancy buildings or lavishly adorned servers, by not bothering to offer exotic ingredients or even fresh “pots” or spices (they tend to be used several times before being replaced), stick pot strips away the veneer of civility that has grown up around the hot pot so that it can be enjoyed by all in the fashion in which it was initially created: A bunch of people huddled around a steaming pot, fishing among the spices for the last hidden morsels of food. It is delicious, it is lively, and as of now, a day out, I am not sick, so it was a success.
Chinese culture is a toasting culture. Perhaps toasting creates the common ground that they do not require in initial friendships. Either way, Mr. Lee is a great one for toasts. He toasted the table, he toasted us as a group, and he toasted us individually. He encouraged us to toast each other. Barely five minutes would pass without hearing him say something like, “Come, come! You are from Seattle. We will toast to Seattle. I love you. Gan Be!”
Gan be is translated literally as 'dry glass,' and that is what it means. When you are toasted, you empty your glass or risk offending your toaster. The gan be ritual carries at its core the duality of the Chinese person. It is friendly and it is hospitable, but just beneath the surface beats a warrior’s heart. Gan be is one of many testaments to the China that every Kung Fu fan knows exists, where peace and tranquility lie only a very short distance away from the Dragon’s Five Fists of Flaming Death. There is “great face” in having a high alcohol tolerance, and there is greater face in drinking your friend under the table. And so each toast is made in the spirit of friendship, but drunk in the spirit of competition.
Luckily the beer is weak and the glasses small, barely bigger than two shot glasses. However, stick pot does not have glasses, or rather their “glasses” would be more aptly described as small metal bowls, slightly smaller than a rice bowl. The meal was long and the toasts were frequent; as soon as your bowl-glass was emptied someone else would promptly fill it, in part because it is good manners, but also in part so that you were ready for the next toast. At the end the floor was host to an impressive number of bottles and an even more impressive number of sticks.
We never found out how much we ate or how much it cost though, because that’s when the chief of police showed up. Somehow he was a friend of Mr. Lee’s, and wanted to eat dinner with us. The chief of police does not eat stick pot, so he showed up, paid our bill, and then we all went to another, far more fancy establishment, where the price of a single dish would probably rival our entire stick pot tab. The table was arranged carefully and precisely, the chief of police in the seat of honor, with the locals interspersed amongst us foreigners, with our Chinese student friends the furthest away from the chief. I was sitting next to his second-in-command, who went by the name of Zhang Ge, who I quoted at the beginning of this anecdote-turned-novel.
Thus began our second dinner, and our second round of toasting. Thankfully here the glasses were normal-sized, and held only a half to a third of what the bowl-glasses held. The food was exquisite, and served to provide as distraction while our group warmed to these new and powerful guests. Though I would have preferred to make the switch to tea at this point, it is hard to refuse a toast by the police chief. I was also harboring secret hopes of making sufficient connections so that, were I to apply for a motorcycle license, that it would pass quietly and uneventfully through the proper offices with the added weight of my newfound friend.
At this point I had to make a strategic decision. I was not going to get drunk, and so I needed to find the best way to stop drinking without causing any offense. This is where the competitive and sometimes predatory nature of gan be comes out. At the first sign of weakness, the table will turn as one to try and cull the herd. The key was to determine when all the important toasts were done, and then declare that I was done drinking while I was still in a good enough spot to weather the flurry of toasts that would surely come.
I briefly harbored hopes of being able to bow out on the grounds of religion, but you already heard how that turned out. Upon hearing my reasoning, his face lit up in possibly the biggest smile of the night. “Yes! Religion! I once had religion, but I had a few beers, and then I was OK. Let us drink to religion!” It was not the response I had hoped for.
Another key to avoiding toasts is remaining active. While intuition might lead one to try and fly under the radar, it is not an option left open to white folk in China. Quietly sitting back is another form of weakness, and can occasion a barrage of toasts, so should be avoided. Towards the end of the second dinner I started making tea toasts, ludicrous toasts whose purpose was simply to keep people off balance enough to not toast me. There were the standard toasts to Beibei, to the USA, to new friends, but there were also ridiculous toasts: “To Love!” “To World Peace!” And my personal favorite, “To Cute Chinese-American Babies!” Occasionally people would try to call my bluff and demand a beer toast, but faltered when I would steadily and quickly empty my glass without hesitation. I would not be an easy mark, and my goal was to show no weakness, only discipline. The toasts slowed and then eventually stopped, and I was able to leave without having to flat out refuse anyone anything, so I considered it a success. The perfect end came to the evening when we all squished into a police van to return to our apartment. I love China.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Pictures of my apartment
We're going to try something here. I will be posting pictures on Facebook, and then I will post a link here for people who don't have Facebook. So... Johanna Knudsen, that means you.
On to pictures of my apartment
Monday, August 25, 2008
Beginnings
I arrived at Southwest University expecting… something. It represents the end of my prolonged unemployment; the beginning of the next phase, whatever that may be. And so, at 8:13 PM, I stepped out of the taxi into the dark and the rain. A solitary light lit the entrance and framed Mrs. Niu, who runs the Foreign Experts housing. Except for her initial mutterings of “ta jong wen hai ke yi,” we walked up the four narrow flights of steps in silence and darkness, the sound-activated lights turning on late and dim, really only highlighting the darkness that they briefly interrupted.
It has been a long time since I have ever walked up a flight of stairs without knowing my destination. Mrs. Niu didn’t offer, and I didn’t ask, choosing to savor yet another small mystery. Without knowledge of my destination, the steps seemed as if they could have stretched onto into the darkness forever, and I was content to blithely chase the dark, one step at a time, forever. The lights faced down the stairs, but were rarely triggered until I was right under them, with the effect that I would walk through the dark, and when the lights did turn on, they would illuminate barely more than my heels and the flight of stairs that I had just finished climbing. It seemed appropriate, strangely analogous to my recent history, walking blindly forward, clarity coming only infrequently and retroactively.
We did not climb forever; we only climbed to the fourth floor, into an amazing apartment, with hardwood floors and high ceilings, a double bed, and a fuzzy Bugs Bunny blanket, though I would not find that until later. Mrs. Niu let me into my new home and then she and her husband, Mr. Liu, set about connecting the appliances and turning on the water heater. I was left in the living room, the sparse furnishings only calling attention to my abundance of luggage in the middle of the room. I brought very little, and yet… I have too much crap. With promises to help me with any problems that I might have, they left me standing in the living room – my living room – feeling that I should be feeling more. Some excitement, maybe some fear, wonder, appreciation; even hunger would have at least been something to latch onto. But I just felt… right, maybe even satisfied. Alone, but satisfied.
This past year I have been forced to wring the meaning from every day, because there has been nothing external to do it for me. As opportunities did nothing but dry up, plans did nothing but die, the fertile landscape of my everyday life also dried up and died. There were no 5-year plans to cultivate, not office projects to nurture, and so I found myself in a wasteland with nothing to do but set fire to my expectations and revel in the unexpected, sometimes treacherous, freedom that twisted and curled out of the destruction. There was no slow-and-steady for me, I was either active or I was a lazy, unemployed bum. I think I came to depend on that fire, that burning resolve to keep myself from fading away into insignificance, and I would do it by pure force of personality if necessary.
So it was unsettling for me, so accustomed to fire and passion, to feel… I don’t know. Was it the grind of machinery? The sense that as I moved, something would move in response, that what I did now made a difference? That my next actions would have lasting consequence, if only for a year? And so I unpacked for the future, folding and stacking my clothes in the way that I would want them for the next year. Should the shirts go in a drawer or a shelf? The shelf was unorthodox, but did I really want to bend down every morning? And that was the thing. In the smallest of ways, I was preparing for the future. I have no doubt that a balance will eventually be struck, that the machinery and the fire will alternate and intermingle, enhancing and interrupting each other; they always do. But for now I am content to stand in the stillness, slowly folding and stacking clothes, sure in the knowledge that things are changing.
It has been a long time since I have ever walked up a flight of stairs without knowing my destination. Mrs. Niu didn’t offer, and I didn’t ask, choosing to savor yet another small mystery. Without knowledge of my destination, the steps seemed as if they could have stretched onto into the darkness forever, and I was content to blithely chase the dark, one step at a time, forever. The lights faced down the stairs, but were rarely triggered until I was right under them, with the effect that I would walk through the dark, and when the lights did turn on, they would illuminate barely more than my heels and the flight of stairs that I had just finished climbing. It seemed appropriate, strangely analogous to my recent history, walking blindly forward, clarity coming only infrequently and retroactively.
We did not climb forever; we only climbed to the fourth floor, into an amazing apartment, with hardwood floors and high ceilings, a double bed, and a fuzzy Bugs Bunny blanket, though I would not find that until later. Mrs. Niu let me into my new home and then she and her husband, Mr. Liu, set about connecting the appliances and turning on the water heater. I was left in the living room, the sparse furnishings only calling attention to my abundance of luggage in the middle of the room. I brought very little, and yet… I have too much crap. With promises to help me with any problems that I might have, they left me standing in the living room – my living room – feeling that I should be feeling more. Some excitement, maybe some fear, wonder, appreciation; even hunger would have at least been something to latch onto. But I just felt… right, maybe even satisfied. Alone, but satisfied.
This past year I have been forced to wring the meaning from every day, because there has been nothing external to do it for me. As opportunities did nothing but dry up, plans did nothing but die, the fertile landscape of my everyday life also dried up and died. There were no 5-year plans to cultivate, not office projects to nurture, and so I found myself in a wasteland with nothing to do but set fire to my expectations and revel in the unexpected, sometimes treacherous, freedom that twisted and curled out of the destruction. There was no slow-and-steady for me, I was either active or I was a lazy, unemployed bum. I think I came to depend on that fire, that burning resolve to keep myself from fading away into insignificance, and I would do it by pure force of personality if necessary.
So it was unsettling for me, so accustomed to fire and passion, to feel… I don’t know. Was it the grind of machinery? The sense that as I moved, something would move in response, that what I did now made a difference? That my next actions would have lasting consequence, if only for a year? And so I unpacked for the future, folding and stacking my clothes in the way that I would want them for the next year. Should the shirts go in a drawer or a shelf? The shelf was unorthodox, but did I really want to bend down every morning? And that was the thing. In the smallest of ways, I was preparing for the future. I have no doubt that a balance will eventually be struck, that the machinery and the fire will alternate and intermingle, enhancing and interrupting each other; they always do. But for now I am content to stand in the stillness, slowly folding and stacking clothes, sure in the knowledge that things are changing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
