Big Star Bound

Foreign Devil in China #12

2007-12-20T01:47:20Z

Dated 29 Nov, 2006.

way up north I took my day
all in all was a pretty nice
day and I put the hood
right back where
you could taste heaven
perfectly

Ni hao,

And the cannon again goes bang! And the 5^th Symphony starts up through the microphones. The world can be strange and sudden, when you look at it right.

I wish I could give you a coherent picture of my life for the past week or so. But I can’t. I have twists, but no ties.

Friday night, I was debating whether to go out or stay in. It was decided for me when I got a phone call from my boss inviting me out for huoguo he pijiu (hotpot and beer). Fond memories of Chengdu , of Casey and I being two laowai on the loose with loose morals, came flooding back. So I next found myself dismounting the 716 in Xiaozhai, asking all and sundry the direction of huoguo, Sichuan huoguo. I finally found it, and found company in the Company. The hotpot was spiced so thick, I could taste the numbing pepper as it hit my tongue, then taste the hot pepper through the numbing pepper. The room practically frothed with the sweat, spice, and steam of huddled masses yearning to breathe prosperity. It tasted like Chengdu .

One fellow was keen to know all about America . We got to debating the philosophies and peoples of China and America . He said, “I hear all Americans have a dream?”

I replied, “Yes, it’s true, all Americans have a dream. But many of them have forgotten what they are.”

Later that night, after the taxi had dropped me off a block from home, I stopped by the ice cream shop as it was just about closing. I’ve been eating an ice cream cone a day to help with my voice, which due to pollution and shouting is now almost constantly sore. I stepped out and watched my breath qi crystallize around the cone in my gloved hand. Suddenly and strangely, I saw something white dance in the sodium light. I looked up, and it was snowing.

I stood there, licking my ice cream cone and watching my first snowfall, meditating quietly on what I’d said in the din and furnace of the hotpot restaurant. I could taste heaven perfectly.

I’ve been bumming around Xiaozhai a lot, really. Street level is just for cars, footfalls only touch the four-span bridges across the flows of traffic. They’re lighted with neon cash, old-style cash from the Dynasties. I spent my last, crumpled, dirty, Mao-faced hundred yuan bill there, buying the workbook and accoutrements that go with my Chinese language textbook.

Every time I go there, I have to stop at this one little stand. Three friends from Ankong have come from their tiny hometown to Xi’an , and camped out in an old ice cream booth. Their stated and unabashed intention is “money!” their one English word. The second night I was here, I went to Xiaozhai for the first time, and smelled this wonderful smell like home at the Lighted Boat Parade. I followed it to the crowd, and met them. I struck up a conversation and peeked at what they were making.

Xi’an food is heavily Muslim and almost Western…there’s plenty of bread products around, even things that look a little like calzones. What the Ankongese serve is a slice of home, for them and for me, a salty pancake cooked on site and slathered with mayonnaise (which, inexplicably, they call “salad”), ketchup, meat and/or eggs. I ordered one with the works, and ate it out of a paper bag. The night, the cold, the lights, the people…it tasted like home.

The course of true work never does run smooth. After cooking myself some dinner improperly, I was laid up with the dreaded Traveler’s Curse all day Thursday. I could hardly pick up after myself on Friday, having lost my schedule…even going to the wrong classroom. Finally, someone found a new one, and I only woke late the once, yesterday, when my alarm stopped. But I have next week’s lesson plans done now, Wednesday, and I mean to leave lesson plans for the incoming teachers to use, as well as a detailed note on how to survive China . They’re…fresh from school. I owe it to them.

I’ve discovered a little something about leadership. When I do it well, I can hear the 1812 Overture in my head, and I feel like a conductor for a great symphony. This happened to the one class that the vice-principal was sitting in on, my second class of Monday morning after the first class (and my proposed lesson plan) had turned out disastrously. The second class could not have been more perfect. I asked around later, as is the way in Chinese offices, and the word is that the administration finds me honest, earnest, and effective. They respect me.

I just hope I can make lightning strike twice tomorrow. And I have Daily English to worry about, as well. The other teacher keeps asking me, “why are you nervous?” I always say, “If I weren’t nervous, it would mean I wouldn’t care.”

But, I never complain my life is boring…only that, sometimes, I can’t think of things to do.

One thing that has been quite interesting is Scholar’s Street, just behind nanmen (south gate) in Xi’an . Down one end, a refurbished but funky cobblestone street without any cars, full of Venus’ tourist-traps, art supplies, and artists. You can wander past Xi’an University, née the Confucian Academy of Xi’an. I shook my fist at them for daring to not hire me, all those months ago. You can also wander past tiny alleys, glimpses into the steamfogged clay past of old China , and past the Confucian temple-turned-museum. The name of every graduate of the Academy is written there, alongsides the heaviest collection of books I’ve ever seen…stone stele, in Classical Chinese, of every one of the fourteen Confucian classics and some of the other traditions as well. There’s even the stele commemorating the Christian town built near Xi’an in the 600s (they were Nestorian heretics, for those keeping count.).

And, if you’re very, very lucky, you might wander into Mr. Huang when he bumps you with his umbrella. Mr. Huang is the kind of man I thought China was scrupulously clean of: formerly an accountant, this affable, middle-aged gentleman gave up pursuing numbers in favor of perfecting the art of calligraphy. He rented a studio off Scholar Street , a real garret, and with some likeminded students and a master who survived the Down-Going into the Country, they formed an organization for teaching and learning. They sell their works as low as they can, cost if they can manage, and give any proceeds to the beggars of Xi’an .

I talked with him for hours. In exchange for teaching me discernment in calligraphy, I introduced him to the Western opera I carried in my coat pocket. If you want any calligraphy or paintings, or want to give some, let me know so he can get them to you. If you want to get in contact yourself, call 001-86-13892838034 and ask for Mr. Huang. Tell him Mr. Jiang sent you.

Down the other side of Scholar Street is a pailao, an old-fashioned street gate, that looks like an outgrowth of the monstrous and classical Xi’an Hotel off to one side, looking like Chinese gingerbread. You follow it a ways and you find the bars and teahouses and coffee shops, this is the hipside, it seems to cry out. And they’re all bunched up there against a triangle-shaped block of wall, hiding some miniature Forbidden City within. Down the other fork lay the family restaurants with the family living room inside the business, the laundries and barbers. Still backed up against the wall, now the Revolution’s long-gone.

I haven’t seen the north gate of old Chang’an yet. But I will.

I wonder what that experience will taste like.

Zai jian,

Roscoe Mathieu

HAT STATUS : Sitting on Romance of the Three Kingdoms, vol. IV.

Foreign Devil in China #11

2007-12-20T01:41:43Z

Dated 21 Nov, 2006.

Going eight miles a minute for months at a time,

Breaking all the rules I could bend,

I began to find myself searching,

Searching for shelter again and again...

...against the wind.

Ni hao,

Back and forth like a bang-bang pinball, bang bang bang! Thursday, Thursday, Thursday, never the same town twice. One Thursday outta Chengdu , one Thursday outta Beijing , one Thursday outta Guilin . If I make it in Xi’an to next Friday, I’ll be doing a lot better now than I have for a month of Thursdays.

Scratch, reboot, all that other post-ironic computer clap jazz.

I was looking out the window, the inside of my head quietly humming without distinction, the way you do when you’re looking out the window in the passenger’s seat of the car. Sudden mountains shot from the ground, calcified limestone lightning, the trees scrabbling to the sheer face as best they could. And I could not think at all.

I dragged my disintegrating luggage through the Floridian afternoon to the bus to Yangshuo, backpack mecca, where I’d run out of hundreds and other useless change and had to go to the bank. When I opened my wallet and saw the change, and the ID, and the bills still there…I didn’t see any bank card. I got bailed by a traveling Swede who took me out for a Bailey’s afterward. My phone had run low on money and batteries, so I decamped at Lisa’s Café (half price in the penthouse) and prepared for the next day.

I woke up around six thirty, and stumbled to the bathroom. I sat on the throne, and looked out the window. The sky was a delicate blushing pink like a girl you just told a naughty joke to, over the limestone skyscrapers and graceful curves of the buildings, the fresh, harsh dew drying on the cobblestones and the corner stalls just putting up their muslin awnings.

I reckoned I’d made it to the right place, to that China that’s vanished in the smoggy Shanghai mist and sent down to the fields back in the late 60s. I showered and shaved and almost caught malaria, refilled my phone with money and called Owen Buckland of Buckland International Group.

He taught himself English by catching lao wai in the Guilin train station and giving them supper and sympathy while they waited for their connection. He’d been studying from books he could filch and foreigners he could find for six years before he could afford English classes. Now he and his four brothers run each of the four biggest schools in Guangxi province, his the largest of all, with sixty-four schools spread across China and a hundred more he’s cut deals with. From pariah to business of the year in seven years, like they say.

They set me up in the garret above the offices. The next five days were a haze of training videos on my laptop and cutting loose in Yangshuo, that backpack mecca, on West Street, Xijie, where the young and beautiful come to meet the rich foreigner and where Chinese and lao wai match tongues. Nobody lives in Yangshuo, they’re all here for a year or two to pick up some English, then go home to kin and castle to use their newfound language skills to get themselves a better job. I feel an eerie kinship with these frightened and inspired sons and daughters of the gongren, clawed their way through college and trying to grab an edge even if it cuts them. I came to a lot of the same reasons.

Along the way I met Finns and fairies, Frenchmen and Fangshanese, found the Moulin Rouge and more schools than you can shake a stick at. Xijie is an educational exchange disguised as a tourist trap, and that gives it a bite and a life someplace like home can’t really cut. Lao wai come to learn kung fu, Mandarin, calligraphy, culture and costume, the Chinese come to learn about the lao wai. It’s a small town, a tourist town, a live town, a beat town.

One morning as the fogs stroked the karsts sensually, Owen called me into his office. Cut and trim in my best and only pair of pressed khakis and starched shirt, I sat back in his chair.

“So, I hear you want to travel.” He said, measured like a zhongwen noun. “You like Xi’an ?”

“Yeah, tomb of Qin, the city walls, the Muslim Quarter, the Terra Co…er, the Clay Soldiers.” I said, switching to International ESL English.

“Then I have good news! We send you free to Xi’an , three weeks!”
“Cool, when?”

“Tomorrow.”

With some quick juggling, we bought a plane ticket even though my money is still in hock to the last state-owned industry in China . I packed what was essential and left the other suitcase back in Guilin, and flew to the home of thirteen dynasties, where Cao Cao betrayed his Emperor and where Qin Shi Huang pulled together the four corners of China like Doc Brown holding the wires together. The city that was old and windswept, world-class, two centuries before Homer and five centuries before the enlightenment of Siddhartha.

Xi’an .

The city has spread over the plains, forming, on my ring, American style suburbs devoid of character or unseemly lower class. There are no gongren here. There are no hole-in-the-wall restaurants here. There are ambassadors’ children, Korean businessmen, and highflown apartments belligerent to the constant cold and wind. But to drive for the heart… Xi’an is one of the few cities in China whose city walls still stand. Tomorrow, I go to walk the city ‘round across them. Within the walls is the heart of the old city, the city once called Chang’an, where Bell Tower damn near thrums with the power and blaze of city life. It is a playground for the rich and powerful of zhong zhong, of the inner China , the seven stories of capitalist cathedral never quite equaling Bell Tower ’s height.

I’m now teaching first, second, and third grades under the benign auspices of a female Muslim vice principal. My exile in Beijing and my sworn vow to act professional have paid some dividends…I have my lesson plans in on time, and I’ve grown the skill to control the pace and rhythm of the classroom. Now if they’d stop throwing books at my head, I could really get to work.

The lock between me and my rightful and hard-won money remains, and here I am in China without my picks. The bank sends me back to my old company, the company sends me to the bank, the bank says go to Chengdu, cost 2500RMB, to cancel my card and wait a week to maybe get my 2400RMB out of the bank. I’m sure there’s a way through the dark wood, but I haven’t found it yet, I’m still lost like Hansel.

Just have to keep picking the lock.

Zai jian,

Roscoe

Foreign Devil in China #10

2007-12-20T01:38:41Z

Dated to the 11th of November, 2006 this is where it all started to change. I swore to hold to the truth in my writings home, and all these upheavals happened...

It's really all become too much, I'm not sure what I should feel.

I guess I've finally had enough, I don't know if this is real.

I'm crashing in and out of touch, can anyone explain?

Ni hao,

Let me start this one off, late as it is, with a quote:

"Once upon awhile ago, I was never afraid of art. Jumping into the chool white page, anything could come up, and it might be shit or it might be brilliant. China is a fresh page, every damn day is a fresh page. The difference between a craftsman and an artist is the craftsman never does deliver too low...but never too high, either.

Last Thursday, I got a call from the head office in Beijing resulting in my termination. I was fired for skipping classes, chronic lateness, and reviewing material too often. I have a train ticket for this Thursday, bound for Beijing...this time overland. I've been networking and hitting the bricks of the Information Superhighway, casting around for another job.

For two nights in a row, the school feasted its outgoing teacher, first a buffet at the brightest light in town and then real Sichuan hotpot. I felt like I was sitting down to a dinner straight out of Temple of Doom, complete with snake-based cuisine, waiting for the other shoe to drop...but with some sympathy, and some courtesy, and some taste, they gave me back my passport and my pink slip. My passport has no work visa, only a tourist visa good until November 17. I have so long to find myself more employment, or come home.

I've sat at home, here. I've played video games, done the lanudry, packed, read old writings. And asked of myself, of Mr. Yu, and of Casey...what is professionalism? What is it to be a good worker?

I've been unemployed and depressed, a path beset on all sides by the iniquities of the well-meaning and the worried. When I go out, I see cold and cloudy days. By cheap psychological tricks, you're more aware when you're a little hungry and a little cold. The same shopfront full of smoke and light two weeks ago can be dingy and oilstained and sooted now, with the iron bars of the window disbarring those gong ren from the exalted life of the Middle Class in their tuna-fish towers. The twisty little maze of tree-lined passages, all alike, that pass for roads this side of town. The beauty of the neighborhood crane at night.

I fought hard and sought clear to get this job, then threw it away when it wasn't what I expected. I've known since at least 14 that my crime is getting distracted. I tried hard to make habits, confine myself to them, fit myself into them, hoping they were shaped like dedication. But each page is a new, white page. Each sentance is a new page, each hour, each word and each minute.

I need only jump, and keep jumping at each white page. I am no craftsman, at life or writing. Sometimes, I will futz it, and sometimes it will be beautiful. But if each minute is a white page, why in hell should I be bored?"

So said I, myself, on Holloween night, just before bounding back for Beijing. What a difference a day makes, and here I am a whole week later, just before bounding onward to the wicked South. I've been fired, hired, left behind the walk home, cold, sleepless, in transit, not paid, paid, eating erratically, sleeping erratically, afraid, worried, in hope, tired, and sometimes lucky.

The train ride was a glorious old-fashioned overland traverse across the Chinese landscape. It was the old-style cars with six bunks in a storage-unit-size room, the hall snaking along one wall to sun itself in the light coming in through the vast windows. The dining car was six cars down, and I was standing in the sleeper. Days on a train, days in a monastary on the mountain...the only difference is that regular folk can get on a train.

I had a lot of time to think and meditate. Meditation made me feel less confused, thinking made me more so. My passport was running out of time, should I be running out the door? As any intelligent human being would advise me, I made lists of pros and cons of going home and implementing my America plan, or staying in China to face the unknown but definitely difficult.

I kept running into problems as notions swam before my vision, versicolor like an afterimage, flittering between pro, con, and neither. The easiest place to learn the discipline and dedication I so desperately need would be aloft, on the tall ship Lady Washington. It would be hard in China, a difficult and worthwhile task. But is that a pro, or a con?

The decision to stay came suddenly...or maybe not. I'd half-planned it all along. To come home now would leave me ashamed, in debt, back home and reliant on my parents. Some of you may yet remember twenty years old...and maybe understand why I've chosen to stay. In spite of my disappointments, I'll give it another shot, train in the heart of the fire as the Buddhist saying goes.

I had a job almost before I reached Beijing, arranged through a placement agency based out of backpack-mecca Yangshuo. I'm headed, today, for Guilin, just across the river from Canton, and an hour up the river from Yangshuo itself. I'll be teaching in a middle school, with a textbook and permission to teach literacy. I told them the truth, about how I acted and how I feel, and they'll take me on anyway, and throw in Mandarin lessons for free (which are much less useful n the heart of the Cantonese-speaking region...but is that a pro, or a con?).

My second day back here, I remembered the beautiful route out to Yunju temple, on bus 12...and went to find it again. I fell asleep, and they left me at the last stop, so I had to walk home.

Thirty-two kilometers. (20 miles)

Across the most beautiful landscapes I'd seen anywhere near Beijing.

In a raging sandstorm from off the Mongolian steppes.

A strange clarity settled on me, understanding exactly what needed to be done, one foot in front of the other. The sky-carving mountains and the fields of dead corn, the little clusters of building where the peasants still lived and sang and worked their fields, the afternoon sun baking my face like clay, the harsh grit and harsher winds...the collapse of clarity, when I came to the first crossroads. And the Mathieu clan's inside line to chance, as a bus (which should not exist) returning to Fangshan passed by me and stopped.

Before I left Sichuan, we went to see the Grand Buddha of Leshan. The preserve is a renegade holdout of subtropics on the great river. The fishermen, with their graceful power, still toss their nets in the great Yangze, now hundreds of feet below us as we dined on Oreos and beef jerky in the pavilion on a cliff. Into the grottos and dark tombs we wandered, Casey and I entertaining our Indiana Jones fantasies. The Buddha was as big as you'd suspect...actually quite a bit larger. But it didn't strike me, as I only saw parts (for its size). I made the three thanks before each shrine, but my heart didn't reach out to them, no matter how much my brain nudged it. Mr. Yu wandered off, before coming back and advising us to go see "the other temple" with all the good-natured charge of a Mafia don. So Casey and I trekked another few miles to see...

The Thousand-Handed Bodhisattva, Guan Yin. When I first ducked my head beneath the electric lamps pitoned into the cave ceiling, I almost fell to my knees. In a vast grotto, the stained hands of generations of bhikkhus and bhikkhunis have carved the image of Guan Yin, saint of mercy and saint of circumstance, with every one of her thousand hands reaching out to bless another. The radiating aura of helping hands wrapped around the two side whiles while she herself came partway out from the wall, as if stepping out of a mirror. Bare bulbs and oil lamps gave her the earthy unreality of an Indian saint given life in China. The natural pillars holding the ceiling aloft had been carved in her image, too, leaning to the four directions to spread compassion over the whole earth.

I knelt at the pilgrim's pillow, and dusted my head on the floor as I felt thanks radiating from me. I was overcome with beauty and awe, and could not think for several minutes. My first rational thought was, "when I return, I shall bring my mother to pay homage to her patron saint."

But this, too, shall pass.

By time I got to Beijing, I was worn out, culture shocked, and teetering on depression. The week I've been here, I've spent most of my time eating at the McDonald's and playing video games, sitting in my room, still afraid of China, still unsure where I stand at home, still somewhere in between. Rootless, a vision of the floating world, crashing in and out of touch. And I understood, too, little of what was going on inside me.

Last night, I understood the real reason I've chosen to stay. The hard beauty of the walk home to Fangshan, the overwhelming awe of the thousand-handed Guan Yin...I believe in beauty, I believe in adventure. I swore to seek it out, and I planned and saved and wished for over twelve months, to go to China and live there a year. Getting on the plane was an act of bravery and foolishness.

Going out my door, every single morning, is precisely the same.

It is the principle of adventure, made manifest. The beating heart and iron soul of the better things I know to do...get up early, do my kata, practice the hanzi, act professionally...is the same thing that makes me weep for awe, that inspired Indiana dreams in my as a child, taht makes me fight so fiercely to do something else, something strange. It can inspire, also, dedication and discipline just as easily as gypsy-eyed aimlessness and satyric self-indulgence.

Today, I go to Guilin. To do better.

Zai jian,

Roscoe Mathieu

HAT STATUS: Firmly planted on my brow

Foreign Devil in China #09

2007-12-20T01:34:34Z

Dated 15 Oct, 2006.

Ni hao,

First, I think I've fixed the newsletter so it will go out, and you can SEE this one. Kudos to Kevin Rice for letting me know.

"They're selling postcards of the hanging, they're painting the passports brown..."

Three times over, three blank pages. Writing, rewriting, this morning I put in a comma, this afternoon I took it out. Remembering a week, all that sticks are the failures and missed appointments, the arguments and the strange moments of beauty. I saw the sun dancing through the mingled smoke of hotpot and spice, cheap cigarettes, and kerosene breath. In a dingy brown hollowed-out storage unit, two beds and a TV in the back and a restaurant out front, a harmony of smoke and mirrors that never will be again. I had enough time to breathe it all in, the smoke and the dappled sun and the scrunched faces of the gongren (working class) waiting for business to finally reach them, to trickle down from the Chengdu and Shanghai heights...and then it was gone, I was gone down the road and time was gone down the river.

Back to work between holidays, between the celebration of communist liberation and the private jubilization of the holiday called Pay Day. After the fast, the feast, before Pay Day there's the last week of the month. Money has dominated my thoughts, from my first baozi (steamed bun) of the day to the last tap water at night...how much, how little, duo shao chien. "How much is it?" is made of much/little/money: duo shao chien. I've lived on twelve dollars a day or less, 100RMB, save for buying a Bible and gym membership, and taking out a loan to buy a phone.

I've fallen in behind Casey, and it gives me time to think. We head out, and he draws attention, all the Chinese want to say, "hello," "where are you from?" and "your Chinese very good" to him. He puts on his mask, his smiling Guy Fawkes, he talks for half an hour with people he doesn't really want to meet. And I play my part, the mute, dumb and deaf...I hear but don't understand, try to speak but speak only gibberish. I pick out a word or two, from the sometimes when I copy down characters and poems, but mostly I sit by and worry if I've copied down enough characters and poems. Practice sits on my thoughts, wrapped around my head like my fedora, and just as forgotten when it comes time to pick up the pen, the pencil, the hand. The I Ching speaks of movement in the toe, the first move towards crossing the Great Water, and sometimes I remember to move my toe...sometimes.

Rumpled could-haves cross my thoughts. Mr. Yu came back, I asked to learn taiji, then never got up before eight. I said, I will teach myself to draw, and never looked up to see. I want to learn kung fu, but needed Casey's help to go chase down a rumor. In search of a Bagua Zhang hall, I found a post office and town square and two giggling girls on their bike. They grew up in northern soil, cornfed and baozi'd and fighting their way up toward a capitalist heaven. The banks feel like cathedrals, as the old song goes, and stride higher than the Temple of Heavenly Virtue in its cultivated Culture Park. Along the way home, another moment caught me and threw me down, the vision of a Hui Muslim in a black turban, his whiskers dangling to his belt and making him look like a Confucian scholar. He sat leaning on his cane and telling stories to the gongren, cast in the blue dappled light of a tarp hung for an awning. You never do find what you were looking for, do you?

"We're foreigners, dude. Everything's a fucking inconvenience."

I'm living on Desolation Row, and all I can see is my own limits, problems, twisted metal dreams. Things forgot, things left behind, things rising out of the dark depths like whales and Leviathans to topple my daylit mind. I want to speak, I want to give voice to the rancid frustration, but I speak neither Chinese nor English any more. All I can taste is the sour bile that I'm too polite to spit, the way the locals do.

Zai jian,
Roscoe

HAT STATUS: At home, on the bed.

All material © 2006 R. Jean Mathieu.

Foreign Devil in China #08

2007-12-20T01:32:04Z

Dated 8 Oct, 2006.

Ni hao,
...and that was vacation. I have no entries in my journal from Oct 1 until today (Oct 7), which should say something in itself.

I'll leave the camping trip out...suffice to say, it didn't happen, and you don't want to know about the vomit anyway.

"As we learned on the train, there's no tomorrow, man...tomorrow never happens! It's all the same fuckin' day, man." - Janis Joplin

In twitchy recovery, I'm coming back from possession. Two days ago, I nodded off on the couch around eight...and did not sleep until three last night. In the intervening time, some chuckling diablorie powered me and kept me wired. I spent the whole night reading, practicing my Chinese characters, reading, writing fiction, practicing my picking... I just had to keep moving. I went down to the Internet cafe and spent three hours focused on Buddhist scripture and leadership literature. I went home, and found Casey going out for Western food to settle his sick stomach. Tagging along, I had the steak (for a good price) and we picked up movies at the seediest skyscraper in Computer City. We got lost tryinjg to get home, and found ourselves at Shamrock's pub, the land of "lao wai and lao wai LOVERS" ... I played pool, practiced a little picking, and tried their Inferior clam chowder. We proceeded to Le Cafe Panama, the French bar, where I enjoyed a fine sweet white wine and toasted to Casey and his friends, a sante to you. We hit the clubs around one AM, where fire happened. The bar was on fire, sparklers were in every hand, and you could chew the lust like beef jerky.

Casey said, bars are where people go to sin. I say it's a lot easier in nightclubs.

Proving indeed that white guys can't dance, I watched the walls undulate like a sea while the floor remained flat and stiff. Reality started feathering at the edges, puckering like a back pocket. It was then that I knew, sleep would be in my future. By two thirty, I'd found Casey and Able and we were on our way back home. Strange thoughts echoed strong like dreams with none of the cham, and as the cab rounded our corner I saw a man run behind a light pole and disappear into shadow. Literally disappear.

Bed was soon after, I having not slowed down until the cab ride. I have no idea why.

All I know is I feel like Jack Kerouac at a rave.

Zai jian,
Roscoe Jean-Castle Mathieu

HAT STATUS: On top of the trash cans.

Foreign Devil in China #07

2007-12-20T01:24:22Z

Dated 2 Oct, 2006.

What is real? What is real?

Ni hao,

God opened to me an understanding, as George Fox would say, on Tuesday night. I saw suddenly the point on the future's horizon line, where the lines of passion, skill, knowledge, curiosity and potential converge on a single point, a goal, a Nameless City in the desert to get to. The 'aha' cracked me a blow to the head, and left me laughing as the rain splashed around in my soup.

Before enlightenment: teaching children, hauling water.

After enlightenment: teaching children, hauling water.

Imparting a Western chivalry on Chinese children, I plowed through my week's work and wages. On Wednesday, as I sat deciding to waste my money and time on Western food, they told me we were leaving for dress rehearsal in five minutes. We sped all the way to the other side of town, to the best and oldest-looking new hotel and its' open air stage. The teachers and schoolmarms practiced their dance moves, accountants ate fire and the children called for Mashu. I sang my piece, the ballad of Serenity, you can't take the grey and sunless sky from me. Before the darkness, they dropped me off back at my door.

But Wednesday was a dark and small reflection of Thursday night. "It was the sort of day where swingin' hepcats passed Litang horse-Amazons on the kindergarten stair," where accountants again ate fire, the Amazons became tigers and comrades, pet bellydancers passed you in the hall, and the leading actor hurried by in the costume of a monk. Once you've been backstage long enough, you never can leave. The wild exhuberance infuses you with a manic energy, like fine chrysanthemum tea shot through an espresso overdrive.

In our room alone, barbarians became gentlemen became Captain Pantsless, shutterbug joined the party, the nine girls fought with swords and inflated hammers to batten down inflated egos...when the children are away, the teachers will play.

And then, suddenly, I was there in the lime, alone, faced with dark and drunken faces and blinded by the spotlights. I had nothing, no backing, no daners, no honors for good king Spectacle who ruled this night. I felt like Bob Dylan guesting at the Grammys.

And I felt totally at ease.

My point made, I bowed in thanks to the audience, and stepped backstage again.

For a night at the opera, a day at the races: Casey Schober has come to town. The long awaited 'OTHER lao wai', he's had a year on, year off relationship with Chengdu...a 27-year-old veteran of the Army, China, and university. He knows his way around guanxi (reciprocity), rusty Chinese, good times and "roommate situations." An hour's walk and talk with him, and I stopped worrying about having a roommie.

On Saturday, the school tried to con me out of a day's worth of unpaid overtime as a National Day present. Casey said bluntly, that's bull...I got a free lesson in not being so damned nice. We walked the length and bredth of Chengdu instead, our own little Long March with two laopengyou (old friends) of his.

We ended up at a party thrown by an American student...how to explain it? Laowai, laowai everywhere. Even the Chinese were acting like laowai. Afterwards, we discussed what it was that unnerved us about it...about them. It wasn't the expensive electronics, or knowing the cost of coming the study in China, it was how cavalier they treated it all. We're in China, wanna go smoke some weed?

We two fought long and hard to get here, and for the life of a gongren, of working stiffs. We want to make the most of our time here. They ...don't. And, as Casey pointed out, "those are the representatives of America." It disturbs him quite a bit.

On the way home, we had the bad luck to catch a black cabbie, who covered up the meter (but never put it down) and charged us double and worse what we should've paid. We were both locked in the back seat, like the back of a cop cruiser, busted by bars and by the fact that the cab never came to a full stop. Despite all this, we argued the cabbie down to only half-again the right cost. And then swore.

National Day dawned to find us again crossing Chengdu, in search of my rightful cheese and Casey's ex-girlfriend. He tread the old streets, looked 'round the old tumbledown tenaments, his memories of green. Not happy memories, he said, but more like where he learned the ropes. Street savvy...on crooked streets with no names, where we got ourselves lost and found the heart of the city. We met up with the nice young woman that Casey had treated right first time around, and ate hotpot for dinner (finally).

They spent awhile in Chinese, as I slowly stopped listening and started watching. Eyes, brows, leaning in, leaning out...I can't say, I can't see, was I lost in thought instead? Less like lovers now and more like brother and sister, gege and meimei...at least until we all three came back to Longquan. Her name is Able, and, yes, she is her brother's keeper. My only companion now is the muse that I landed with, and idle wishing that I could feel my muse with my hands. The only time I really live in my body, it seems, is the minute when I taste that first bite of food. If every minute could be like that...it would be backstage again, the sensuality of spectacle, the ache to put hand to that man's back, as if my palms could work moxibustion, or slide fingers along her hair, to see what it feels like holding those hairs in my fingertips. When I was a little boy, I put my arm up to the elbow in a box of birdseed, because it felt strange and interesting...now that I'm a grown man, any such actions would be, of course, scandalous.

In loneliness, I miss living in my own skin. My joints are twisted, my senses dull, my muscles cacaphonous and my movements disjointed. My body is not a fit place for man or beast. But, I remember grace and harmony and speed, nights when my fingers were alive with power from my heels and open like an all-seeing lens to what they beheld. Casey and I have discussed finding a gym, starting Shaolin together...with his experience, I'm no longer as bound as I was by my own ignorance. He's trying to teach me.

In the three weeks since I recieved my paycheck (5000RMB), I've spent over 3000RMB...mostly on Western food and taxis. I've been agonizing, on account of letting down myself, Katie, and my old man...and more, Casey has been showing me how completely and how often I've been getting ripped off for my white face and pleasent personality. I'm now dipping into the strings of cash I wanted to reserve for savings, and it's disappearing almost as fast as it was. I've been keeping records, stumbling now and again, but fairly good records. I've been lax in trying to build good habits, like not chewing my nails, being aware of the world around me, and practicing Chinese characters. Most of them I've done maybe five times since I started. I'm a lot less a man than I thought I was, when I came over.

But, last night, I was smooth enough to ask Able over for a game of xiangqi, and savvy enough to sit shotgun and put down the cabbie's meter for him.

I'm learning.

Zai jian,

Roscoe

HAT STATUS: On my head.

Foreign Devil in China #06

2007-12-20T01:14:22Z

Dated 26 Sept, 2006.

Ni hao,

When I first moved into my apartment, with its’ three spacious bedrooms, two bathrooms ,vast living room and kitchen besides, my head began to swell with visions. Visions of green-grown verandas, where I could while a morning over Chinese chess and tea with someone; of a rich-paneled study glinting in the late afternoon sun, lined with books and mirrors, large enough to gather a desk and a space to practice kung fu; of dark, sturdy and rich furnishings accented with strange things of all lands.

I spent Saturday sweeping and mopping, and grappling with a bureaucracy perfected before the death of the dinosaurs. I spent Wednesday reading Walden. These things have put paid my cluttered notions, and now all I desire (save what is already here) is some way to store my books, and a mirror to observe my posture in. Old-fashioned Oriental furniture is simple in form and complex in use…I’ll take that as my guide.

I had a moment of pure, honest work Saturday. As the washer-dryer in this apartment is not functional in several ways, and as the launderers of the neighborhood refuse to do whites, that left me with but one option:Ｉhad to hand-wash all my shirts and socks. When my laundress suggested it, I thought she was joking. But, after, I spoke with some friends and they explained handwashing to me. After work, I went into my bathroom, filled a pail, and went at it. It took about an hour, and I am now certain that the socks are now neither fully clean nor fully free of soap…but I did not ask to be good, only better than I was before. So, on my next try, I should certainly do better (rinsing, for one).

And it lessened the feelings of helplessness, of inability, that have been plaguing me. The day I tried to work the washer, I also discovered that I had plugged the refrigerator into the wrong outlet and that everything in it was spoiled, couldn’t figure out my phone card, and wasted two hours trying to get the DSL in my apartment to work…on top of which, I had four bad classes out of five.

Afterwards, I ranted to friends over the Internet for about an hour, before asking, “Am I weak? T. E. Lawrence [Lawrence of Arabia] and Heinrich Harrer [Seven Years in Tibet ] suffered so much worse…I can’t get to Chengdu, when Lawrence marched to Aqaba and Harrer trod over the Tibetan plateau in winter…and they complained far less than I am! Am I still a child, crying and wailing about skinning my knee?” One fellow commented that all I needed to do was to leave this part out of my memoirs. Another, an Australian gentleman who aided and abetted me when I proposed to Katie, calmly pointed out that “ Lawrence and Harrer’s stories are really about THEM, about how they started their journey as one man and came out a changed man. The worst case is that you die in China . The best case is you return a changed and better man than when you left. Which do you think is more likely?”

With this philosophy, I found the bus stop, and the bus to Chengdu , and I went in search of a hamburger to slake my savage culinary lusts. How can I describe it…? I haven’t had cheese for a month, and it was hot and dripping mozerella coating my tongue, tasting animal and thick. I haven’t had beef since arriving in Beijing , and here was a patty five inches around of medium-rare ground beef. The burger tasted salty, a little musky, the pickles shocking a Sichuan-peppered tongue back to life, cool lettuce brushing my gullet as I swallowed. I observed my grace with a vengeance: sitting in silence, letting my mind follow the simple twists of fate that lead to the meat, to the cheese, to the vegetables and bread, to their arrangement, to their presentation, until my mind boggled at the complexity and connessione. Then I brought all my faculties to the present moment, willed my attention to my mouth, slowly raised the burger, and bit.

I think, running on the memory of that moment, I could forsake Western food for two months and be happy. Wrapped in that bun was not just beef, cheese, lettuce and pickles, but also victory. I had triumphed over my own helplessness, over the language barrier, over the pall of bad luck that had followed me all the day. And with reverent attention, I had enjoyed a meal, truly dined. I spent four times on this meal what I usually spend in a day on food, but I had made it worth the price to myself. A prize hard-won, and dearly enjoyed for the brief span it oculd be enjoyed…a good day.

So there you have it…on the one hand, a vow of simplicity in my living arrangements, and on the other, a cultivation of sensuality. Perhaps the great change on this adventure will be reconciling the two halves.

As I wrote this newsletter, I was startled by the sound of drums outside. I poked my head out my window to see a line of young men and women, colorfully clad in traditional outfits, banging gongs, beating drums, and passing out flyers. Chinese gypsies, wandering through, and the girls winking. I wondered if I hadn't stuck my head into a performance of Carmen in Wonderland. I didn't bring my camera to work today (BUT I SHALL DO SO NOW!), I was too flabberghasted.

So I sat down to write again, and then became aware of something even more curious. There's a woman across the way who's washing her windows...without a shirt on.

I think China is going prematurely insane for National Day.

Zai jian,
Roscoe

HAT STATUS: On my desk.

Foreign Devil in China #05

2007-12-20T01:07:54Z

Dated to September 17, 2006. Good god.

Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes,

Five hundred twenty-five thousand moments so dear.

Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes,

How do you measure, measure a year?

In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee?

In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife?

In five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes?

How do you measure a year in the life?

Ni hao,

Here I am, trodding foot in Chengdu, ex-capital of Shu, last outpost of the Kuomintang, land of hot tea, hot food, spice girls and laundry fluttering from ten stories up. This is where I will love for the next year, until August 14, 2007.

And, as of today, I've been in China for one month.

It all seems so ... transient. Like I'm only passing through. I wonder if this is what Buddhism feels like.

The flight was uneventful and marked chiefly by cloud cover. But when the clouds were punched through...it was like a green blade of Damascus steel, the land laid before me, a puzzle sword of intricate folds and furrows. The land itself has been carefully turned and troped into a complex diagram that makes the vast quilts of Kansas cornfields look like child's play.

I was picked up and housed by Mr. Yu, an interesting old Chinaman. Old enough to remember the bad old days before Mao, he's spry and sprightly through dedicated practice of tai chi chuan, tai chi chin, and walking to work every day. For thirty years, he taught Chinese history in university, before retiring to teach kindergarten. He lives and breathes old-China respect...and he invited me into his house, whenever I felt the need of a meal and company. His wife, currently in Beijing for an operation, teaches Mandarin and Cantonese for adults. Wish her luck.

Any of you who are confused at the Chinese concept of 'guanxi' can use this as a perfect example: I have found a man who will teach me tai chi, a woman who will teach me Chinese, and they happen to hold positions of authority at the school. All of a sudden, I don't have to pay better than 1000RMB (a fifth of my income) per month for classes in those two subjects.

Chengdu is much nicer than Beijing...it looks actually lived in, rather than thrown-up-last-week or carefully-presented-for-the-laowei. On every balcony, the lady of the house has flown the laundry and planted some houseplants, so both spill over the sides and creep down the building face. Trees sprout from the sidewalk or from the middle of low-slung stores. Old folks practice tai chi on the garden path and play mahjongg in the plazas. Young folk whizz by in the back of bikeshaws. They sift through the throng of the night market, which blooms like a desert poppyfield every evening from four to eleven and puts San Luis Farmer's Market to shame. Wives wait for the truck to come from the farm and deliver, then toss half the vegetables for insufficient freshness.

I stood at my window, in the fan-spun darkness, watching the bare bulbs and the neon clash and feeling oddly like I was in Blade Runner. My one bedroom at Mr. Yu's was lit by one lone bulb, but, I've decided, I wouldn't trade that one bulb for all the neon in Shanghai.

After supping and watching Mr. Yu the next morning, we walked to school together and I got a long chat in with Mr. Connor, the outgoing teacher. With a reassuring, unsettling frankness, he uncovered some of the less seamy sides of China...the beatings that go on in school and in the home, working parents and little Emperors. He spoke of children he'd known who grew up and started losing their hair in their teens to get into the right middle school, to the right high school, and to the right college...and losing to the other sharks. How they would have to come home, and hear how lazy they were, and how they need to study more, think more of their future...

He spoke of being farmed out to the farm, out into country where the entire town turned out to see the white man teach, and where the lucky boys and girls got to shower outside together, summer and winter, before coming into class...and the less lucky would cry and hurt, because they wanted so hard to come and learn English and escape...and they couldn't. He talked about what happens to the kids we teach, how a lot of them grow up to say "I like English, is interesting," and then, when asked why, grimace fearfully, turn red, and finally say "I no remember." And that's all that's left, of the 900RMB per month their parents paid to this kindergarten, which is 800 more than the all-Chinese kindergarten down the road.

No matter how far down on the Chinese food chain I visit, there's always somewhere deeper. But even up in the lofty realm where laowei tread, there are strange and unsettling things. Capitalization has brought pollution to China, and children like Moses. Larger around than he is high, he refuses vegetables or rice...he only eats meat and sweets, but plenty of those to make up the margin. His mother and grandmother are cut from the same cloth, making their way from one end of the table to the other. But who can blame them? The grandmother remembers the days of "vegetables, if you're lucky" and the mother remembers the five year days when there was no food at all. And now, they are rich, and China is rich, and they are getting richer and what are they to do? Say no, to all this bounty?

China is joining the industrial nations. Your grandparents remember days without food, too.

Connor spoke of tragedies of other ladies, as well. A common lie of common sense is that women have sex once, in wedlock, and they bear child, and that is that. Many folk know better...but most of the young women don't. Even bright young things of fine character, with their gifts, they can go abroad and study English or even go to Western university...and get found somewhere dark and forgotten, through no worse crime than naivete. And for this crime, they don't go home again. You're all worried for me, a Westerner over here in dangerous China...I say worry more for the Chinese who come to the West.

I could and should end it there, telling the story of the Intrepid Westerner describing the horrors of the undeveloped world. Certainly, careers have been made on it, and it encompasses most of the books written about Africa nowadays. But that would be a lie, it would be putting lie to the cheerful old men walking their songbirds, and the corner chess champion, and all the hard-working souls I see around me every day. Shadows play on the edge of vision, but most people here are making it, free in some ways and bound by others...just like you and I, really. What amazed me, first time I came, was the sudden and disorienting REALITY of China...that it was the same earth and gravity, the same sky and sun, the same sort of people that you find at home, the kind who smile back when you smile at them. This, from the land of storybook Cathay and mountain monks and inscrutable, clannish launderers and restauranteers. It still amazes me. China is far stranger than given credit for. And that's the China I see, every day, modern mandarins brushing bikes with toothless construction workers, mahjongg from forty stories and storage-unit storefronts that turn into wooden, cloth-covered stalls if you squint at 'em right.

Zai jian,

Roscoe Mathieu

HAT STATUS: On the desk.

Foreign Devil in China #04

2007-12-20T01:02:55Z

Dated to the 10th of September, 2006.

No sex,

No drugs,

No wine,

No women,

No you,

No wonder it's dark

Ni hao,

It was Monday noon, Beijing time, when I sent my last update that arrived fresh and toasty in your email boxes Sunday evening, and God it's apazing how fast information moves these days, huh? Monday, I was riding high, with two days of lessons planned and half a notion for the rest of the week. Emotions! They¡¯re basic, essential, and make for lots of songs and games. The only fly in the ointment was trying to teach three-year-olds at five in the afternoon, and the resulting "discipline issues."

By time Wednesday came 'round, I could look way out west and almost see the high-tide mark where I broke and started to fall. I walked into my second class o' the mornin' without a notion, nothing, except a blue ball to protect me. Like all children, those five-year-olds gobbled my fear like candy, and on that sugar high they ran amok. Ostinate rigore, and I bulled my way through.

Over lunch, I practiced a lot of juggling, but it's hard to juggle when you keep forming a fist.

Muddying my way through three-year-olds, first class of the afternoon, and that's when the second strike came. I stepped out of Mickey class* to a puff of smoke and a foul magic trick...I wouldn't be going to Chengdu that week, maybe next week, and no, he didn't know how long it would take to finish with my visa, ecept that it took fourteen working days. In the darkness by my wrathfulness, I couldn't open my mouth to ask why I hadn't been told that fourteen days before.

And then came Winnie class. Three of the boys, and the teacher, came to apologize later over dinner, but I knew it was my responsibility...I hadn't come prepared, and they acted as children do. The I Ching calls men either gentlemen, or "the small man." I had been small.

On the way home, I fell from the bike, trying to carry leftovers on one handlebar, a jug of ice tea on the other, my camera, overstuffed backpack and CD case dangling from my shoulders like Atlas' burden, and the I Ching clamped tightly in one hand. In the vernacular, I pedaled my ass home, and took the hydrogen peroxide and the triple antibiotic to my oozing knee before aught else.

After, I treated my bruised, bewildered and bothered psyche to the delights and frustrations of a new story. I revisited an old plot of mine, a parallel of English teaching in a foreign land, concerning a demon come to Earth to teach humans magic. He falls in love with one of his students, thus running afoul of his contract's No Fraternization policy, and proceeds to woo her despite her being engaged to a nice young man from college who makes Satan look like a choirboy. There's also lesbians, lesson plans, and Hunter S. Thompson with the power to bend reality to his will.

In short, (too late!) I got over my wrathfulness. Every word I wrote gave me the giggles.

Thursday dawned China's National Teacher's Day (guoji laoshi doujia), and the first rays found me throwing strikes and blocking shadows. I could feel sweat bead on my freezing brow, the particular roll of the hips allowing power to travel up from my heel into hard fingers. I meditated, afterwards, on applying that practice to my teaching, trying to ignore the annoyed barks from my knee.

I don't feel entirely comfortable with the children, I'm inexperienced, and I'm at the whim of a strange bureaucracy. But I shall improve. I don't ask to be good, only better today than I was yesterday.

The kids and I found ourselves pressed between their names and the names of the week, but with plan in hand, Thursday passed by in a daze, as the students were quickly herded out to celebrate the teachers.

And these are the things I learned 'neath the deep, bright Holloween-orange moon:

1) Leave the party when you know it's going downhill

2) Stop drinking when you know you're tipsy

3) Get up from the computer when you can feel your back start to hurt.

The greater part of the good life is knowing when to stop: This is the lesson.

Friday tore everything out from over me. I had a great lesson planned out, with games and stories and songs, all together, and just long enough, not too long, not too short. I only wish I'd gotten to use it.

Class with Sunny, the five-year-olds, went to my Teacher's Assistant, Cinderella, and writing the days of the week. As of lunch, I had meditated, eaten, written in my journal and done some freewriting to do my "mental housecleaning." I told Christine later, "My day was perfect at 2:30...then it got interesting."

Smashed together like a fused atom, I found myself teaching one-half apiece of Mickey and Winnie class, my two afternoon classes. We started ten minutes late, moving chairs, and they found each other so interesting my lesson was drowned out before I was unceremoniously thrown out.

I started throwing the balls and shooting the shit with Nikki, the native English teacher, when Cinderella came in and told me that Fridays are ... special. All of the new kids, the ones who didn't have English names or at least didn't know them, would be collected for an hour-long special lesson, that I was to teach. No child in this school can concentrate for an hour. I motioned to my watch, and we tried to establish what time...4:20. At that moment, it was 4 o'clock. She suggested we spend the entire lesson on "A."

I was still blinking thereby, and sent her to fetch supplies for some quick thinking, when she came back with a phone number and a note from the principal to call it. Now.

I made the call, knowing the head office when I saw it, and finally got the hash on my visa. It's the double-cheeseburger of tourist visas, so it can't be changed until next October, when it must be changed. More than that, they're booking a ticket for next Tuesday, a soft-sleeper train ticket bound for the heart of China. They set up my business in Chengdu, bank accounts to deposit my salary and an apartment to deposit my effects.

I concluded that business rather quicker than I would have otherwise, and ran to the library with my blue ball, expecting nothing more than trial by fire, to find...nothing. No students, no Cinderella, no nothing. I inquired one of the staff, and she haltingly said Fridays are special, no last class, the kids go home early.

And I blinked thereby. And then sat down, and started to juggle, as Christine and I had Chinese lessons with Nikki. She taught us to say, "May you live in interesting times." (Ju yochu shijian)

Saturday, I'd reckoned to go to the Buddhist temple five miles out from Fangshan, but couldn't find the bus and went roundy-roud a huge "supermarket" (think three-storey shopping mall) in Fangshan Ximen. I did find some nice presents, and, finally, some yellow shirts to go with my blue zoot suit. As we were eating lunch, I asked Nikki the name of the river going down to Guangdong (Canton), and told her my plan to purchase a boat and float all the way down there for Spring Festival, then sell it. Her response, verbatim:

"Is...a little crazy."

"What, really? Oh good, I was worried that-"

"More than a little. Very crazy."

"Oh good."

But my leg started to hurt, so I caught the bus back to the school, where by chance a visiting kung fu master was chatting with the guard, Joe.

No, not a typo.

In halting Chinese, I asked him to show me something of what he knows. And, despite his complaints about his new shoes, that boy showed me a trick or two. They said that Shaolin was just the beginning of everything kung fu could be, but¡I could vaguely place it as something in the northern-Chinese family, based on the high stances and kicks. But wow! It was half acrobatics and half Jeet Kune Do, and it got the better of my rusty Uechi-ryu quick.

Sunday, I did make it out to Yunju temple...at least, that's what I stepped out meaning to. I finally found the number 12 bus, and it took a leisurely two hours to travel the five miles. But what a ride¡we left the environs of Beijing for high mountains, deep forests, and waving cornfields. Corn noodls, corn dumplings, corn fields, CHINA IS CORNY! And as we wove back through roads that would make a man from Errol, NH, weep, we passed through one tiny village with no name, like a shadow out of time. It had a past. I can't put my finger on what it was¡the roads built for feet, the shucked corn left spread across the road like a demented barricade, the whole families of aunts and uncles and grands and brothers and sisters sitting on the front step, the men smoking their longstem pipes, the low-lying, curved-tile-roof houses and small front shops, the village wall, or the profusion of greenery in, out, and between all spaces...but there's a place worth visiting, a look however brief at China's long past.

"I like a man with a future, and a woman with a past." - Groucho Marx

The past is important, it provides meaning and context to now. And I've been plagued since I arrived because I cannot trust the Chinese past¡is it really old, or is it a fabulous fake thrown up in the 1980s? Is that a Ming vase, or a Jiang Zemin dynasty impression? I fear that the past, here, will be cleaned up and leeched of context and made presentable for tourists. I fear it will be replaced.

But replacing the past is exactly what's allowed it to survive in China for so long. Yanju temple has been rebuilt four or five times over, the most recent to pick up after the Cultural Revolution. But it has been rebuilt as a tourist destination with a temple inside¡to borrow a phrase from the I Ching, strength inside and plastic without. Both official and unofficial business go on every day: I passed eight rosary vendors before getting my 40RMB (five dollar) ticket and going inside.

It seems like the only place I saw yellow-robed monks was within the Buddha halls themselves, the grounds were otherwise occupied with nice ladies in matching white shirts selling this or that or watching this or that room. Not that I mind¡although 10RMB for the holy carnival game was a little much. No kidding, holy carnival games¡you get ten brass coins to try and hit a small bell from ten feet. Very Auspicious if you hit it.

Katie, I tied a red ribbon 'round the tree for you, one that blesses for a strong heart. I put up a Chinese lantern in the tea garden for you...I wish you very good luck.

It was all busy and chaotic like a Midstate Fair, except way up at the top at the very last temple¡they had relics of Siddhartha Guatama himself. I looked, and the China carnie at the door said it would be a 5RMB donation, which I gladly paid. He gently took my arm and led me inside.

It was a dark room, illuminated by high windows and the light from within the chorten, the tower the relics were kept in. I climbed three stairs, and was on level with the remains of Sakyamuni Buddha. As I stepped over the bar, I doffed my hat. The man pointed at the no-photos sign...but I knew that the moment I stepped in the door. I sloughed my effects, and set them to one side. I knelt, as I had in all the other halls, and my brow kissed the stone floor three times. Then I sat back, and straightened my spine. "Faith is the sense by which we reach out for the divine."

The reverence was what seperated that side chamber from all the others. There was nothing to buy here, nothing to take pictures of. There was only the pilgrim and the pagoda. And I knelt, and felt equilibrium. The reverence and sincerity were unearthly. And, quietly, I slipped one foot out and slid aside, so that the nice Chinese couple who had come in could pray. I gathered my things, and departed, and went to the great hall next door.

There were many things I couldn't photograph, only live with. Many of the halls were dark, and the idols draped under kingly curtains, so it was too dark for the camera to see what I saw. The monks refused to be photographed, for that would instill pride in their humble natures. Three acolytes in grey pants, next door to the relics, knelt and prayed with me towards the threefold Buddha. For my trouble, they blessed a rosary and gave it to me along with a book I can't read.

I now have three rosaries, and they all have stories attached. But the other two stories will go with the rosaries to their recipients.

The sun was setting over the mountain as I stepped out of the great bronze gate. I asked one of the vendors if there was another bus. The confounding that followed brought the attention of a nice middle-aged couple who spoke little English, but more English than the vendor and more Chinese than me. There was no last bus, but they would be glad to take me home as they were going that way.

I said when I left the house that morning, either I will go to the temple or I will get lost. Either outcome is good to me.

The wife and I had a nice little conversation, the likes of which you all remember from your hitchhiking days so I won't bore you with it, until I stepped out of the car, and she said:

"You have real American spirit! One person alone in strange place!"

By time you get this, I'll be bound to cross the line, four days aboard a train across China from the northeast to way out (south)west. What a trip for a first train ride...and good practice for taking the Trans-Siberian home.

Zai jian,

Roscoe Mathieu (Jiang Maotian)

HAT STATUS: Perched at a jaunty angle on top of luggage.

-----------

*I wonder...there's a Tintin class, and a Mickey class, but no Sanmao class. Why ignore China's contribution to children's visual art?

Foreign Devil in China #03

2007-12-20T00:47:42Z

Dated 3 Sep, 2006. This is where I figured out what my voice was.

"I'm living in a foreign country, but I'm bound to cross the line." - Bob Dylan, "Shelter from the Storm"

Ni hao,

I started teaching last Monday. God, has it been a long week.

I came knowning nothing of teaching, little of children, and a damn sight less of China. Monday was a bad dream, the kind where you talk and want to make yourself understood to a roomful of people, but all that is is gibberish, just gibberish, and they stare at you...

I still have classes like that. But I know who they are now.

It's like high school all over again...long stretches of boredom three-hole-punched by moments of sheer terror. The breaks are numbingly long, moreso for a laowei lost and a little afraid. Into the void, I've tried internet, when I can get it, and practicing...juggling and drawing, mostly.

Christine moved out the next day, for her know digs in Fangshan proper (I'm staying in a suburb, Yancun, of a suburb, Fangshan, of Beijing), and I'm now the only foreign face in the school. I inherited a large backpack, a pair of slippers, and a broken bike. "I'm livin' in a foreign country, but I'm bound to cross the line." Culture shock slapped me around like a Shaolin sifu and left me shivering and morbid by midweek.

Why can't I see spaces aright?, I asked myself. I'm trying to teach myself to juggle and draw in those yawning off-hours I've got and I just can't get distances to work. My balls collide into one another and my images come out squished and lopsided (although the horse was pretty good). I was depressed because I have to stay in Beijing at least another week, because of vaguely worded "visa problems"...it seems like their answer to "I won't work in Chengdu without a working visa" is "okay, then, you'll work in Beijing while we hold your passport." Of course, I might just be paranoid. A creeping paranoia has been eating at me since I landed...why is this person being so nice? What's the ulterior motive for that action? etc. ...it was probably contributing to keeping me in my apartment most nights. That and the bus schedule.

I'm not putting down roots, either, and that hurt. I'm essentially camping inside my apartment, and it's wearing thin. I don't know how much longer I'll be there, a year or a week. I was frightened and scared and didn't know when I'd stop.

And then...

Walking along the thoroughfare cut through a cornfield, under the hazy halo of sodium lamps lining the path, I hear the drum. Dash dash da-dot dot dot. Thum, thum, tha-thum-thum-thum. Crashed by cymbal shock and graced by gongs, a monad dialectic, cycling over and round. In the orange haze, it comes through, five men parked by their bikeshaw, one slapping the vast red drum with wood chocks you could park an airplane with, one sliding the handheld gongs against one another, the bits of wood and tin and leather make this glorious ancient noise. Sitting on the side of the thoroughfare, the edge of some farmer's cornfield, they play together, no name, no donation box, no buskers. And here I am without my camera.

The only thing an artist can do is pray, please God, let them play on. Keep playin', mick! Keep playing! And run home, huffing into the dark across the field, towards the apartment farm three blocks away. The gate was too far, to get over and back and up and down and back and over would take endless minutes. So I snuck into my own apartment, scaling the Pearly Gated Community like the Great Wall covered in nettle to prevent just such tricks and nonsense. Praising God all the while, praying that the band plays on.

Camera loaded, whispered words down four flights of stairs to the Gods of Serendipity which did not strike, but yielded and threw me to the ground. And down and over the faux-cobbled paths, to that onerous fence, camera slung crosswise like a bandolier, monkeying my way up and over like it was nothing but a mizzen rigging.

Feet pounding the ground to the rhythm, thom thom tha-thom-thom-thom. Cars whizz by, crazed Chinamen drivers at their wheels, all light and noise yang slicing through before dark and silent yin creep back in. And what am I hearing? Is it the redstain lether drum, or the ghosts of a passing backbeat, the ghosts of my own footfalls and wishes?

No...pushing through the darkness, one foot in front of the other, sweat pooling in my hatband, it comes clear. The band plays on...and half the lane for the ladies. Thirty strong or more, wielding gold and azure and crimson fans in the washed out orange light, backed by the drums and the dark. They dance in rhythm, grand old dames, middle-aged mothers, farmers' wives and street cooks. Four by four, they mix fans, let them loose to fly like songbirds, wave their edges with the grace of killers. I hurry my camera open, and two starving kids catch my lens, running and laughing, throwing punches and kicks and pretending they're Jet Li or Guan Yu, or Bodhidharma. Finally, I angle the lens around to the ladies, the throm, throm, tha-tom-tom-tom lighting up and orchestrating this half the street, the whole scene. I watch for ten minutes, first this way and that, and my camera draws the attention of all the curious, free-floating Chinese...construction workers and farmhands jostle to get a look at my screen, asking questions I cannot and will not understand, not right now, not before I've got it all down.

And, after a dozen dozen false starts, the end comes, and the ladies pull together in a single breath of qi and raise their fans towards their tian, their Heaven, as the last wood strikes the drum. They're all wondering now, wondering what this white ghost out of the dark has come for. For my glass memory, I catch a picture of the band with a "qing? qing?" ("please? please?") while one fine old dame pla ys at scolding me for wasting film on them. My assertions of "mei li!" ("beautiful!") draw laughter, for this is only Wednesday night dance for them. The art comes ... as the men and women all crowd around, come to see the spectacle of my spectacle, I play back the film, and the drum shakes out and the ladies are serene and masterful in their flying colors. They line up for me, and I take a last picture of the Ladies and the Band before I head home again.

And I remember what I came to China for.

The next day, I finally got the bike repaired, getting hosed at two whole dollars for the job. But, God, what a difference a day makes...it's like evolution, the change to sight and gravity and movement, from bellydown to mobile. I feel extended...

Three of the native teachers (only one of whom spoke English) took me out for honest Beijing street food (I waved nihao to the nice cook I recognized from the fan dance). I spent my stained, crinkled yuan on chicken necks and octopus legs, and recounting death-defying tales through the windshield glass, picking up a little Chinese as I went.

Mosquitoes biting
Buzz of good conversation
Life is beautiful

The next two days, I taught myself to teach. Coming to China was easy, compared to the great task of doing my job well. But, as Leonardo da Vinci wrote repeatedly into his notebooks, "ostinate rigore!" ("Obstinate rigor!") Christine taught me to write a lesson plan, and whenever the two great cycles of my work schedule and the capracious Internet connection align, I've been scouring the 'net for ideas, games, songs, and even whole lesson plans. I've introduced some new tricks myself, like tongue-twisters to help the pronunciation, which is horrible in both teachers and students (it says "zhonason" on the back of one little boy's chair...it's supposedly "Jonathon"). "Rubber baby buggy bumpers" seems popular.

On breaks, I looked into Taoist temples and ordination...I have my certificate from teh ULC, but ordination does not make one clergy. And the path to being truly Taoist is littered with things I love...philosophy, the I Ching, martial arts, qigong, pomp, circumstance and ritual, deities and demons and strange spirits. I just want to learn more of these things, and they are on the way to the Way...

My interregnum has truly arrived: now that I'm here, I wonder what else I could do or could have done. I could move to a monastary, and study the mysteries of the Tao for a year. I could get my pilot's license, learn to fly floats, and become a bush pilot a season or three. I could even become an archaeologist, if I wanted to. The possibilities make me tipsy.

Reminds me of the passage in Snow Crash, where Neal Stephenson discusses how every man, until he reaches the age of about 25, thinks that just may be he can be the world's biggest badass.

Friday night was Christine's housewarming. On the way, I felt pangs for home, and started to sing, quietly. Such an act isn't a sin in China, the way it is in America. And the songs...whatever genre they put on ya, the song remains the same. Not hearing Lucy in the Sky for three years, I recounted every word...and felt the invisible string fasten home. No longer loose at the moorings, jostling the other boats, I'm safe and tight to the dock...I just listened to Barenaked Ladies' "Leave," and it was January 2004 again, and I'm riding the green-flourescent bus home from Katie's, the chill fog cutting through my trench coat as I get off at Morro Bay Park. The music stays the same, memories of green, a part of me. We got off in Fangshan, halfway through Sgt. Pepper's, and went up to see Christine's new apartment.

Hard and fast, slapjack till midnight, then catching a cab off the sidewalk, the director of studies and the bus driver bumming along for the ride. I slipped off and tumbled into bed, not waking until far into the sleeping in...all the way to eight AM. Meaning to write, I read instead, from the autobiography of the father of modern magic, Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin. I saw behind my eyes the watchmaker's son, teaching himself to read a book while juggling three balls, as prelude to his true studies. Robert-Houdin inspired me as he inspired Houdini, and I spent the next hour, stripped to the waist, all muscle, sinew, touch and tension, weaving balls through teh air as Vivaldi's Four Seasons filled the apartment like good scent. Sweat pooled in my temples while I meditated on objects in space, one two one two and fetching the balls back to try again.

In one hour, I learned more of juggling than in the eight or ten hours I spent at it during the week. I must learn to bring this devotion to all of my practice.

And how did I feel by the hour's end? My heart beat a mile a minute, my veins were filled with a fresh and vibrant blood, and I had work before me. I threw on a new shirt and the signs of my station (hats, boot, battered notebook) before riding the 28 into Fangshan with confidence to buy a harmonica.

While whittling through a hobnail hutong, I found the gamesa maker, an old Muslim with a crook nose and Cokebottle frames. He talked me into a deck of cards and a Chinese chess set for ten yuan.

And that was the lesson: For a dollar and change, I have bought a door into China, any China I want. Old men and young women of every layer of Chinese society wanted to know what a laowei was doing weilding a guo ji sung ji set like an old master. When I got home, the ever-friendly guards at the school invited me in for drinks and a game. We squeezed the four of us (and the fan. And the desk.) into a space built for two, set up the table and I learned to play. Like every Mathieu boy, beginners' luck blessed me, and I took the man's August Emperor in a few moves...after spending the first score or two learning whta the moves were. After our game, one of the other guards walked me home. It was peculiar, walking home with this barechested comrade, lean, wiry, and strong, codeswitching English and zhongwen as we passed the Saturday night dancing in the street.

The guardhouse is tiny, stained, dirty, hot. The guards smoke, spit and squat. Any wonder, then, that Monday I didn't like them...or now, that I do? Beyond the Beijing-esque other teachers and the parents, upperclassmen all, there are these boys: squatting together in the shack, smashing bugs with their fingers and trying not to fry, laughing and joking, smoking and drinking, playing guo ji sung ji till the sun comes up. It's an aspect of China I'm rubbing up close to: The low-class alchemy of ancient and new, defiant of the China Daily line, "the old must go that the new may come." Less than modern, less than cleaned up for Beijing 2008, getting along as they always have, the 21st century peasents and proletariat that Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping fought and lived for.

And then I remember what I came to China for.

Zai Jian,

Roscoe

HAT STATUS: Sitting on my desk

Foreign Devil in China #02

2007-12-20T00:43:23Z

Dated 27 Aug, 2006.

This has been the Week of Sickness. The first day of work, I was pretty okay. The school is a huge, three storeybook castle, where all the cute little preschool kids (some are only two!) come and go. It's a Montessori school, except that most of the teachers are unfamiliar with the Montessori method. I followed an outgoing teacher around on his usual rounds, watching him speak softly and let the native teachers do the shouting. Classes are half an hour or forty minutes, and we only have four per day, but we're there eight to five...loooong breaks. That's either a blessing or a curse. I had enough time to ruminate on how awesome a responsibility it is I'm taking on...what with the TEACHING CHILDREN and all. I really have doubts about my ability to do the job effectively.

I ended up going home with one of the other foreign teachers, a nice girl, Christine, from Mexico City. I'd felt a bit under the weather, and I was shivering a little. When I got home, it became readily apparent I had the Chinese equivilent of Moteczuma's Revenge.

I spent the next two days visiting a local Chinese hospital (they're rated like hotels,
and I can say that 3-stars are clean and tidy) and resting at home, slowly going mad with boredom. But, I got a lot farther in Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.

By Thursday, I was going stir crazy, so I went to work. I wasn't allowed in the classrooms, so I worked on lesson plans for this week (and what a prudent idea that turned out to be!) and called Katie, figuring out how the phone worked. I helped Christine, who'd injured her knee on the first day, home, and showed her pictures of y'all and played cards.

Friday was much the same as Thursday, except that I put together my plan for the weekend: going into Beijing and seeing the Peking opera. Pretty much only Christine, still limping, was excited about the idea, so we put our heads together and made plans about busses and such. I called up a name some of you might recognize, Alex Chen, and we agreed to meet him in Beijing proper.

Saturday dawned bright and early for us as we missed our bus not once but twice. Finally, we made it to Beijing, met up with Alex, and had squid for lunch. Alex thinks China will, one day, look a lot like Singapore...prosperous, clean, and all that. I expressed my doubts that the government as it is could survive the economic upswing China's going through, especially if it spreads out into the western areas. I hope it does, though.

We went to the Ancient Observatory, and marvelled at five thousand years of Chinese astronomy. We were the only souls there, which was kind of nice. The bronze observing instruments were originally designed by Jesuits, before being stolen by the French and Germans during the Boxer Rebellion and then repatriated. They're dwarfed by the Beijing skyline.

We went down to Wangfujiang, the main shopping thoroughfare (and official White Person Zone) of Beijing. I got some books of Chinese poetry I'm loving. Like the following:

With the thread in her hand, the kind mother

Is making clothes for her son leaving home.

She sewed with stitches close to each other

For fear he might about the world long roam.

Who says grass that bathes in the spring sunshine

Can repay it with hearty feelings fine!

Unfortunately, by the time we could buy tickets to the opera, they were already sold out (what?!) so Christine and I took our leave of Alex and enjoyed a wonderful Peking duck dinner. Christine kept calling them Peking tacos. On the way home, I saw chess champs in abandoned buildings and pool tables in parking lots. Chinese chess is very popular here...I can see old men huddled around boards all over the sidewalks.

Sunday, I spent the first half of naked (for the heat) and talked with Katie and my parents over the phone. I miss my sexy fiancee. Afterwards, I went into town to buy supplies and gawped for awhile at the Chinese McDonald's, and the Chinese goth girl eating within. I discovered a wonderful little covered alleyway, and there ate a hearty lunch for about a dollar. Afterwards, still looking for that massage I meant to get LAST Sunday, I asked directions, and a kindly fellow gave me a ride on his bike. We took hairpin turns through occupied little hu tong at 30 MPH without helmets or safety equipment. Finally, we found the masseur, where I got a wonderful two-hour massage for ten dollars.

By that time, the sun was setting, so I went home to work on this email. I got a call around ten at night that one of the teachers was still AWOL and could I take over their classes Monday? I said sure, secretly cursing her name.

Teaching five year olds is not as easy as you'd think.

Zai Jian,

Roscoe

HAT STATUS: Somewhere in my apartment

Foreign Devil in China #01

2007-12-20T00:39:06Z

As many of my friends know, I went to China to work as an English language instructor for one year. I landed August 15, 2006. I emailed this on August 20, 2006.

Ni hao,
My first day in China, I was locked in the apartment and began a daredevil escape eleven stories in the air before the cook returned and opened the door. My first impressions of China are mostly how amazingly hot and humid it is in Beijing. I am ill-prepared for the weather...I have NO SWIM TRUNKS. All the flags are tattered, both here and scattered across northern China. The yellow's washed a little to grim mustard, and there are holes, rents and tears in the far edges to make it look a little like an old Mongol banner with streamers.

Outside the window of the room where I stayed with the cook, you could see new hu tong, maybe fifteen years old...there was rubble where more used to stand. They're tearing down the old-style construction, the hu tong, the tiny alleyways and two-storeys to make room for expensive apartment developments on time for 08/08/2008 (the Incredibly Auspicious first day of the Olympics). All the apartment developments have the little upturned roofs and the tiles and they're really Chinese, right?

...I finally figured out what bothers me about it. I've been reading "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain," so that one day I can draw as well as T. E. Lawrence, and the author discusses the "tyranny of childhood [symbolism]"...essentially, instead of drawing what you see, you draw the stock picture for "eye" or "nose" and it leads to these very stereotyped, childish drawings. What I'm seeing is that Beijing is erasing hundred-year-old good drawings (the original hu tong) to make room for one of these "childhood tyranny" pictures writ large.

But there I am, the American come to solve everyone's problems.

My second day in China, I made ethnographic notes in the light of a techno-thumping neotraditional Chinese bonfire dance, wherein our earstwhile shy young guide proceeded to let loose in a wild drunken whoop with about four hundred other Chinese. (Crowned heads of Europe were amazed.)

We picked grapes in a Chinese vineyard, where the terraces are laid overhead, and you stumble down into the gulleys to pluck whole bunches straight from the vine. It was like a brief visit to the Garden of Eden, except somehow alien...perhaps Adam never saw those kinds of broken, misty mountains. I have a new name, "sour grapes," because I kept picking the purple grapes, preferring their taste to the long green grapes the others took.

We drove onwards into the afternoon, and I composed a brief list of things I wish I'd brought (pocket knife. pocket watch. Katie's locket. change of clothes. toilet paper.) as we made past the terraced hills and sudden swatches of poverty into the great grasslands of Eurasia. We made it to a small town next to a large theme park a few minutes before dusk. For dinner, we'd been promised Mongolian lamb, the kind they bury in clay to cook. One of the other lao wei was worried we'd be eating the same lamb we could hear bleating from the courtyard. In addition to the bleats of wildlife, we could hear explosions as we ate. Around darkfall, the power shorted out in the tiny greenhouse-cum-restaurant we were eating in. And then twice. One girl wanted to go to the bathroom, so we went out into the vegetable garden where... I tell you, nothing in this world will make me forget watching those fireworks with the other lao wei, over the low redbrick wall, in the vegetable garden where Jessica was squatting and doing her business.

I don't think she will either.

After dinner, we made our way back to the van in teh darkness, punctuated often by the harsh light of fire, and onward to Mongol Land. It's strange to find oneself walking teh same windswept, dustswept grassy plains as the khans of old. Those hard men had their savage, merciless gift: these plains and freedom (nothing left to lose). Stranger still, a theme park over the hallowed cairnes where those same hard men lay mouldering and humbled before the Chinese peasents. The customers dress up in fantastic "historical" costume, while employees throw tattered grey coats over their vibrant attire of this Far East Neverland. Planes drone overhead, rented for less than five dollars per flight, while the erhu, feathered spear, mighty steed and khan's cairn are paraded on...what does this say of our Renaissance faires, our pirate stories, of our Roman days? Would you dress up your child in front of King Richard's tomb?

As I mentioned, there was drunken bonfire techno traditional dancing. I note for Jessie's sake that there was no sign of patapata, even though everyone had heard of it. Also that one dance involving holding "fire sticks" of red bamboo and red ribbon, beating bunches of them in both hands together and running to and away from the fire, may be related to the lion dance. Maybe, I'm not sure.

We spent the night in a yurt. I dreamed in Franglishhua. The beds were hard, and morning was gloriously chill. High plains drifters, we rode off into the sunrise on our charter bus, only to stop an hour out and, because we had a tire out of alignment, proceeded to change all six of them. This involved at least five men at any one time standing around and smoking intently. "What can be done by one man, the Chinese can do with at least a dozen."

Finally, we get to Beijing and I'm moved into the new apartment, where I drew the attention of Beijing's own secret police because my passport was Not in Order. It was a typo on their part they were too proud to cop to, but it all worked out in the end. Do understand, I was a little worried...especially as I'm not in possession of said passport. (Ironically, the regular police have it.)

Right now, I'm being serenaded by some of the best French accordion music I have ever heard, being practiced across the way by a kind young gentleman as his mother looks on sternly. I called from across the alley, 'hao tun!' ('good playing!') which brought forth a 'sanku' and a smile.

I've finally pegged this sore throat and cough. According to Ian, the outgoing teacher, the air in Beijing is *just that bad*. Glad I'm going down to Chengdu and the Nine Valleys. Everyone tells me it's much prettier out that way.

So, to sum up...

Day 1 - locked in apartment, went ledge-dancing

Day 2 - drunken bonfire revelry

Day 3 - drew attention of secret police

And tomorrow I start work. I wonder what else the day will bring...

Zai jian,

Roscoe

HAT STATUS - present