An Evening Visitor

Karma, sweet karma. A few days ago, one of the students found a huge spider in their room. As far as I was concerned, though, they were on the ground floor (I’m on the fourth) in another building, so it seemed pretty remote. Still, I had my fair share of laughs at other people’s expense as they squirmed at the thought of behemoth arachnids showing up in their bedroom. I didn’t stress about it.



And then tonight, I was woken up from 2 minutes (literally, I checked my clock) of sleep by some noises in my living room. I looked, and there were no robbers, which was a relief. Unless they were afraid of half-naked white guys, I think I might have found myself a bit unprepared for any sort of intimidation. I laid down for another minute, and then heard strange noises in my bathroom. All of a sudden, I was stressing about the spiders.

I turn on the light once more, look in the bathroom, and thought, possibly for the first time in my life, “Thank God, it’s a rat.” I tried to close the door, but the rat was faster. It streaked out, and into the little crevice between my bed and the wall. As far as my apartment furnishings go, the only possible instruments of death that I could think of for a rat this size would be my knives; I’m not about to sully my kitchen knife on rat, and the thought of me chasing a rat with a military-issue search and rescue knife seemed a bit absurd. And messy. So that was out. I had nothing to catch it with, and besides, it was raining outside and I didn’t want to take it all the way downstairs. So I moved my nightstand to block off his entrance. With him trapped, and the hour so late, I laid down and went back to sleep, lulled by the faint bumping noises coming from 8 inches below.

UPDATE:: I woke up this morning, and lifted my mattress to make sure the rat was still there. He wasn’t. However, three of my saltines were. The little bugger stole my crackers! Then on the way out, I saw that he gnawed his way through one of my hackey sacks. This means war, rat. This means war…

Echoes of the Past

Before we could get to the Terracotta warriors, perhaps the most famous testament to a man’s desire to fight until the end – and beyond, we had to do our own battle with the Xian traffic. Later on that day our bus would get into a honking battle with another bus, only to have the other bus violently cut us off and then stop so that their driver could walk back and yell at our driver. Despite our high hopes, there was no kung fu fighting. On that front, China has been a bit of a letdown.

But back to the morning. As we were clawing our way through the traffic, we were afforded an excellent view of Xian’s old city wall, the best preserved city wall in China, running 9 miles around the center of the city. It was old, it was beautiful. It only had four openings, one in each face of the wall. Our tour guide Cindy indulged in a rare moment of criticism, and informed us that while Xian traffic is normally very efficient, the wall tends to create bottlenecks and back the traffic up a bit.

I think her statement might have managed to sum up all of China. It is a place where the future’s greatest impediment is the past. And yet the quandary is, were they to give up the past in search of a better future, would they actually be gaining anything?

There are few things as outmoded and obsolete as city walls. Most old artifacts are still capable of performing their intended function. Old pots still hold water, old cotton gins can still do whatever it was that they originally did (1). This wall keeps people neither in nor out, but it does keep them in gridlock. Somehow I doubt that was part of the plan. It would be unthinkable to destroy it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if every single Xian citizen with a driver’s license hasn’t, at some point, wished that this particular national treasure were located a few miles outside of city limits.

China is China. It is almost a mantra that I have occasion to repeat daily. It is full of quirks and inefficiencies that have equal capacity to either enrage or endear. In the end, it boils down to being China. I don’t anger easily, but recently the quickest way to raise my ire has been to assume that the American way is normative without taking any time to consider the vast cultural and economic differences that make the two countries, in some ways, incomparable.

What angers me is that people come and refuse to take China on its own terms, ignoring its charms and crucifying its weaknesses. They see how it could be improved, but fail to see the cost to the national identity. And yet, where do we draw lines? Where must they sacrifice being Chinese in order to fit into the currently western-dominated business sphere? What is the price tag that we put on an identity? What should I give up of myself in order to go forward? What should I hold onto and allow to shape the way in which I advance?

Later I will get the opportunity to walk the wall. The day will be cold and eerily clammy, the sky misty and mysterious. The wall will fade into the fog about a hundred feet in either direction, and even though I know it is only 9 miles in circumference, at that time it will seem like it could stretch on forever, implacable and solid as the stones of which it is comprised. I will stand there on the wall that has stood against armies and traffic, the wall that has stood against time itself, and I will look down at the cars as they honk and scurry through the city, and I will wonder which I would prefer to be. Then I will turn and walk along the wall, through the fog, into the fog, trying to find the point where the mist touches the stone, because maybe at that point things will begin to make sense.


(1) Which, I have been told by a reliable sources, is not ‘make gin out of cotton.’ Sigh…

Eroticism

Chinese romance, like Batman, is a creature of the night. It is a thing of darkened alleys and forgotten corners; night falls and gives light to the passions of 80,000 students. It seems like every open space is filled with silent couples embracing, single shadows with four feet, barely talking and barely moving, content to just be there, on that patch of earth, together. They are doing nothing that an American third grader would balk at, and yet here, in this place, I think it might be more intensely erotic than the most debauched film that Hollywood could ever produce.

In a country without private spaces, these young lovers have created an aura of privacy by pure force of will. Despite what my eyes tell me, I am not seeing a field covered with hundreds of students, but a series of couples utterly alone in the dark that just happen to be three feet from the next couple that is utterly alone in the darkness.

Somehow the pressures of Big-Brother politics and cultural primness have pressed out a diamond. Walking through campus, I see couples just … sitting there …, and yet I think I want that for myself far more than any of the acts of conquest that poker table conversations have rendered mundane. Denied the anything-goes milieu born of American liberty as well as the private spaces that might allow for deviant acts, Chinese couples are restricted to secret unseen touches and whispers in the dark: acts of romance so small as to be insignificant if not for the repressed intensity with which they were committed.

It makes me wonder. Can we pursue a liberty, gaining the freedom to do something, without cheapening the thing that we have freed? When the kiss moved from the bedroom to the shopping mall, did it become something else? More importantly, did it become something less? Have we, in our great quest for sexual liberation, in our war against Puritanical prudishness, inadvertently cheapened romance into something that isn’t worth having? Have they, with their rules and morays, with their stipulations and restrictions, inadvertently enhanced the very thing that they were trying to repress? Have they nailed down a carpenter and created a Christ?


(Aside) I in no way am wanting to inadvertently insinuate that Christianity is solely a phenomenon resulting from a poorly handled political situation. I am only trying to relate my hypothesis to a historical series of ecclesial events, as seen through an objective and non-religious lens.

Dear Haixia Bay Resort, I Hope The Earth Opens Up And Swallows You Whole

It’s 2:30 AM. I am tired, hot, and grumpy as hell. I have no good will left, and so am stalking around the resort (1), a big white half-naked ball of smoldering fury, praying that someone challenges my presence. Not surprisingly, no one did. Matters were not improved when I finally emerged from the unnatural darkness and peered into the familiar glow of streetlights. I was right. It was only us.

The electricity went out at 11:00 last night, and hasn’t been back since. This means that we don’t have air conditioning in a climate where you can break a sweat while laying motionless on top of your covers. The secondary problem is that now I’m awake, and thirsty, the stores are closed, and I can’t use the electricity to boil myself some clean water. Thanks to my walk, I now knew that it wasn’t a regional blackout, but in fact very much the fault of our hotel. Ignorance may be bliss, but knowledge is a fiery inferno that keeps you company on a lonely night.

Generally speaking, I don’t consider myself a diva. I have been in much more discomfort than tonight, and in truth, my anger was not at a hotel that couldn’t keep its power on (2). My anger was at a hotel that has, over the past three days, gone out of its way to charge us for damages that we clearly did not incur, begrudgingly fed us sub-par food at inconvenient hours, closes its grocery store (our only access to water) during the “rest hours” of 9:30AM-6PM, and in general has tried to do its best to insure that we have as unpleasant an experience as possible. And now it has no power.

Allow me to widen the scope a bit.

In many ways, this vacation was a comedy of errors. Or perhaps a study in cultural contradictions. Mostly, though, I think it is just a big fatty monument to what an incompetent tool Mr. Dai is (3).

There is a great chasm that separates the Chinese and American perceptions of what a vacation should be. Americans want to “get away,” to barricade off a few days from their daily life and forget that there are such things as schedules and deadlines and bosses. Though the students have been having a lot of fun, they have spent a whirlwind three weeks blowing through the major cities and sites of China, and are ready for a little sedentary living.

Unfortunately, that is not the Chinese way. As best as I can tell, they go on vacation to get away from the routine of their days, to experience the excitement that can be found beyond the borders of their regular life. A Chinese vacation is a study in this-to-that-to-the other thing, trying to frantically squeeze it all in before the vacation ends and they board that last flight home. It might be because Chinese take fewer vacations, and so try to pack more into whatever time off they can get. It might just be a straight up inexplicable cultural thing. I don’t know. Either way, thanks to Mr. Dai’s maverick incompetence, we were saddled on a tour that we didn’t want, that wanted to keep us busy from 8AM-8PM with things that we didn’t want to see (coffee factories?), and kept us on a bus several hours a day. Thankfully we talked our way out of most of it, but every step was a struggle, every compromise the result of exhaustingly emphatic “discussion.”

It was an “all inclusive” tour, and so we couldn’t get away from the poor quality and money-grubbery that seemed indicative of every establishment that we patronized. I’m sure Hainan has delicious food, nice people, and passable accommodations, but we didn’t see any of them. We went to the tour hotels and ate the tour menus, where no one worried about what the customer wanted, because there was an endless string of tour groups still to come. Because everyone was getting kickbacks from everyone else, it was impossible to break the cycle and try to find something passable.

Which is why, at 2:30 in the morning, I was walking around the complex, livid. As a goodbye gift, the hotel tried to charge us for a toilet seat cover that someone didn’t notice was broken because they never tried to move the lid. Awesome.

(1) Ha. While technically, Haixia is, in fact, a resort, it is stretching the language to the limit. This refers strictly to the architectural layout of the facility, and is not meant in any way to infer the comfort, service, or general overall pleasantness usually associated with resorts.
(2) Or maybe who turned their power off to save energy. This was a hypothesis presented by a local, not the paranoid delusions of an over-entitled waiguoren.
(3) The Waiban representative who supervises the foreign students. In this case, he did not plan the vacation through Grins as he was asked, and did it himself. Much to our surprise and chagrin…