If you stand on platform 13 at Zhichunlu Station just opposite the stairs, you'll see a number of posters lining the divider between the inbound and outbound rails. One of them shows a pair of elephants walking away from the viewer across a wide, green-brown plain. The sky is streaked with pink. One of the elephants is full-grown. The other is a calf.
When I first saw the poster, I thought it was intended to provide metro passengers with something pleasant to look at while they waited for their trains. "Well done, Beijing!" I thought. "What's nicer than elephants?" Then I saw the copy:
Mom! I've got teeth now!
Mom, I've got teeth now!
Hey Mom, I've got TEETH now!
Mom?
Mom, aren't you happy for me?
And, to the far right of the poster: "It should be a happy event, when a baby grows its first teeth. But, because people are greedy for ivory, countless elephants are needlessly slaughtered."
I've loved elephants all my life, and I'm on about a hundred lefty email lists, so I'm familiar with the story. Nevertheless, as I looked at the poster and read the copy, I felt my eyes begin to water and my throat begin to swell. The feeling lingered long after I had boarded my train and left the station.
No doubt this was partly because that's precisely the effect the ad was intended to elicit. The spectacular beauty of the picture, too sweeping and glorious for sentimentality, the rhythmic economy of the imagined dialogue -- this ad's authors really knew what they were doing.
And I think that's another reason I felt such a substantial response. I'm the daughter of a former speechwriter and communications consultant. A powerful respect for the friendly art of persuasion is bred in my bones. When I was eleven or twelve years old, I memorized Mario Cuomo's keynote speech at the 1984 Democratic Convention. This had nothing to do with political commitment -- I didn't have any at that age, apart from a transient and imperfectly formulated regard for the Communists. I memorized the speech because very little makes me happier than really good rhetoric.
But I'm pretty sure it wasn't just the combination of quality advertising and a sympathetic message that left such a marked impression on me. I think it was something else, something altogether larger and at the same time more personal.
On my first trip to China in the summer of 1990, I lived in a student dormitory at the Harbin Institute of Technology. For no particular reason that I can think of, except that conservation was much on my mind in those days, I decorated my door with handmade notices advising their readers to "Protect the Planet: Plant a Tree," "Save the Rainforests," and, in pride of place, "Protect Our Elephants: Don't Buy Ivory."
I suppose I wanted to practise writing slogans in Chinese. That was probably the main part of the attraction. But I think I also wanted to put down roots, short though my visit was to be. I think it seemed to me that if I transplanted, through communication, the thoughts and wishes that I had at home, then I would somehow be at home in Harbin as well.
I don't know that I ever felt at home in Harbin -- I was only there about a month. However, I did communicate; I did elicit a response of sorts. A student in the English department, a very nice young man who came to visit the dorm quite frequently, eventually scrawled the following riposte: "Protect Young Girls: Don't Let Them Go Crazy." Shop-worn at home, my slogans were apparently too eccentric to be taken seriously in a Chinese context, even on a college campus.
Later on the same trip, my classmates and I were taken shopping in Beijing. We visited all sorts of places selling all kinds of Chinese artifacts. Eventually a shop assistant led me over to a counter selling exquisite ivory carvings -- figurines and palaces and rural idylls, all in the most meticulous detail imaginable. Small wonder that some have said, "Wisdom hath alighted on the hands of the Chinese." But when I saw the carvings, and the shop assistant's pleasant smile, I pitched into her. "How can you sell this stuff! Don't you know that elephants have died for these things? Do you really think they are worth the life of a beautiful animal! How can you think I would buy this trash!" She was quite surprised, but she nodded politely. I wonder if she still remembers now.
If she does, I wonder what she thinks about it. Was I just rude? After all, she wasn't the one who killed the elephants and hacked out their tusks. She was just working in a shop that sold the results, and it's not as if she had a lot of choices in her life. No one had invited her on a summer exchange program to study language and culture in a foreign country.
Or does she look back and think that she saw one of the first pebbles drop into the pond? Does she pass that poster, ever, and think to herself, "This is commonplace now, but I remember when it was as bizarre as the blue-eyed foreign ghost who came from across the ocean to wave her finger in my face and tell me what she knew?"
Of course, I wouldn't really claim to have thrown one of the first pebbles. I have played virtually no active role in environmental conservation. I sign petitions, that's about it. But I do have this funny feeling, being in China now and seeing the stupid, pen-and-ink ads I posted on a door in a dormitory in Harbin nearly twenty years ago done properly, done by experts, and posted in a bustling metro in the middle of a world capital. I feel rather as if I had been waiting for a friend to arrive, waiting a long time, and now at last I am hearing a knock at the door.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
"The Heart That Must Not Be Lonely"
One of the maids is leaving tomorrow night. She's going to catch a night train to her hometown in Shaanxi so she can spend the New Year with her husband and young son. I don't know how long it has been since she last saw them. Months, anyway. Maybe a year.
To celebrate her visit home, we gathered around the kitchen counter -- my host, her two children, the other maids and I -- and opened a big crate of lucky tangerines. They were round and tiny, bright as carp. Most of them still had their stems and leaves. My host urged us to eat as many as we could. "I bought three boxes," she said. She also told the maid to take some on the train with her. "Even if you don't eat them, take them for the sweet smell."
Then my host asked the maid what her son's baby name was. Baby names are nicknames that Chinese families use -- nothing to do with a child's real name. I think the tradition stems from a belief that evil spirits who might wish to harm the child will be confused by the multiplicity of names and end up leaving the baby alone. "Kaikai," the maid said. I thought I heard her voice catch, but when I looked over she was smiling.
This kind of scenario isn't at all unusual in China. The other maids both have families at home too. They are part of the huge population of migrant workers who flood the cities in search of jobs. Conditions in the countryside must be very hard, for these long stretches away from their families to seem worth the cost.
The maids' uncomplaining acceptance of their situation makes me ashamed of my own intense homesickness. Or partly ashamed, because of course we can't help what we feel, and after all I suppose the maids feel it too. Even their stoicism, praiseworthy as it is, may be as much a matter of necessity as it is elegance of character.
It also makes me wonder about the nature of home, and homesickness, in these nomadic days. I suppose people's minds configure the idea of home in all sorts of different ways, really, so perhaps there is no single, critical difference between the way we thought of home in our more parochial past, and the way we think of it now that seas and deserts are no longer any real barrier.
A couple of days ago a middle school student who is applying for admission to my old boarding school asked me about my experience there. I found myself telling her that, while I was there, Andover always seemed the best, most important place in the world for me to be. I never had any real wish to be anywhere else. Sure, sometimes I wanted my cat and a fireplace and my mother's cooking, but I never felt that sense of dislocation and desolate rootlessness that marks a real, desperate longing for home.
Later that day, my thoughts kept alighting on my answer to this young student's question. This was partly because it seemed to me to encapsulate what had been most important about Andover to me. I was glad to have been able to articulate my views, and glad to share them with someone who might find a use for them. But I think it was also because it suggested a possible answer to my own questions about home and homesickness: when the place you are in feels like the proper center of the universe, you feel no pressing hunger for the far away. You may admire distant mountains, or firelit windows, or ancient cities, but only as possible "adventures and contentments," not as a cure for the sense of being cramped in a narrow and unworthy place, or forsaken where "her nis non hoome, her nis but wildernesse."
Because that's the other thing. Even far-flung travels are essentially earth-bound. I suppose some people still feel that there's a certain romance to air travel, but, even if you are one of those lucky ones -- one of the ones who actually taste the pleasure of being aloft in the clouds -- quite soon you always have to land again. Then you are back on the ground. Unless you feel that the place you have landed is now the center of the universe, how are you to escape the sense that you have merely exchanged one wilderness for another?
But then this conflict between the desire for far travels and the yearning for home, for a focus of understanding and in-placeness, is nothing new. If old poems are any gauge, warring centripetal and centrifugal forces have always ruled our interior compasses. Even assuming all Odysseus really ever wanted was to get back to Ithaca as quickly as possible with no adventures on the way, he was not, after all, the primary character in his story. It is the rocks and spray, the circuit of islands in the wine-dark sea, that chart the blueprint of his days.
One of my favorite poems, sometimes called "China's epic," though it is only 92 verses long and is in every sense a true lyric -- modal, reflective, interior, musical -- touches on a number of these ideas. In this poem, the idea of home is characterized in two ways: it is at once the ideal seat of trust, of understanding and being understood, and the scene of a terrible sense of deceit and betrayal. Between them they produce an intense bitterness. Still more importantly, the poem speaks to the imagined power of unfettered journeying, featuring a magical itinerary through the sky. And most importantly of all, that journey is halted, in the end, by an overpowering longing for home:
陟升皇之赫戏兮，忽临睨夫旧乡。 仆夫悲余马怀兮，蜷局顾而不行。
But, in the aurorean glory ascending,
I glimpsed, on a sudden, my home far below.
My coachman was saddened, my horses were longing
And back their necks buckled; they would not go on.
I wonder if perhaps the key -- the key for our times, anyway -- is not to have a center of the universe, but to rather regard everywhere as a part of everywhere else. Of course, this is hardly a new thought, but it is comforting. And, the more we understand the material nature of our cosmos, the more true it seems.
At any rate, Caleb Milne seemed to think so. In his last letter to his mother before he was killed administering first aid to a wounded soldier during the Tunisian campaign in World War II, he described his surroundings abroad as "a vivid, wonderful world so full of winter and spring, warm rain and cold snow, adventures and contentments, good things and bad." But the strangeness of it all -- such a remarkable time, such an outlandish place -- apparently had no power over his capacity to think himself elsewhere, at other times, beyond longing:
How often you will have me with you when the wood smoke drifts across the wind, or the first tulips arrive, or the sky darkens in a summer storm. Think of me today, and in the days to come, as I am thinking of you this minute -- not gone or alone or dead, but part of the earth beneath you, part of the air around you, part of the heart that must not be lonely.
To celebrate her visit home, we gathered around the kitchen counter -- my host, her two children, the other maids and I -- and opened a big crate of lucky tangerines. They were round and tiny, bright as carp. Most of them still had their stems and leaves. My host urged us to eat as many as we could. "I bought three boxes," she said. She also told the maid to take some on the train with her. "Even if you don't eat them, take them for the sweet smell."
Then my host asked the maid what her son's baby name was. Baby names are nicknames that Chinese families use -- nothing to do with a child's real name. I think the tradition stems from a belief that evil spirits who might wish to harm the child will be confused by the multiplicity of names and end up leaving the baby alone. "Kaikai," the maid said. I thought I heard her voice catch, but when I looked over she was smiling.
This kind of scenario isn't at all unusual in China. The other maids both have families at home too. They are part of the huge population of migrant workers who flood the cities in search of jobs. Conditions in the countryside must be very hard, for these long stretches away from their families to seem worth the cost.
The maids' uncomplaining acceptance of their situation makes me ashamed of my own intense homesickness. Or partly ashamed, because of course we can't help what we feel, and after all I suppose the maids feel it too. Even their stoicism, praiseworthy as it is, may be as much a matter of necessity as it is elegance of character.
It also makes me wonder about the nature of home, and homesickness, in these nomadic days. I suppose people's minds configure the idea of home in all sorts of different ways, really, so perhaps there is no single, critical difference between the way we thought of home in our more parochial past, and the way we think of it now that seas and deserts are no longer any real barrier.
A couple of days ago a middle school student who is applying for admission to my old boarding school asked me about my experience there. I found myself telling her that, while I was there, Andover always seemed the best, most important place in the world for me to be. I never had any real wish to be anywhere else. Sure, sometimes I wanted my cat and a fireplace and my mother's cooking, but I never felt that sense of dislocation and desolate rootlessness that marks a real, desperate longing for home.
Later that day, my thoughts kept alighting on my answer to this young student's question. This was partly because it seemed to me to encapsulate what had been most important about Andover to me. I was glad to have been able to articulate my views, and glad to share them with someone who might find a use for them. But I think it was also because it suggested a possible answer to my own questions about home and homesickness: when the place you are in feels like the proper center of the universe, you feel no pressing hunger for the far away. You may admire distant mountains, or firelit windows, or ancient cities, but only as possible "adventures and contentments," not as a cure for the sense of being cramped in a narrow and unworthy place, or forsaken where "her nis non hoome, her nis but wildernesse."
Because that's the other thing. Even far-flung travels are essentially earth-bound. I suppose some people still feel that there's a certain romance to air travel, but, even if you are one of those lucky ones -- one of the ones who actually taste the pleasure of being aloft in the clouds -- quite soon you always have to land again. Then you are back on the ground. Unless you feel that the place you have landed is now the center of the universe, how are you to escape the sense that you have merely exchanged one wilderness for another?
But then this conflict between the desire for far travels and the yearning for home, for a focus of understanding and in-placeness, is nothing new. If old poems are any gauge, warring centripetal and centrifugal forces have always ruled our interior compasses. Even assuming all Odysseus really ever wanted was to get back to Ithaca as quickly as possible with no adventures on the way, he was not, after all, the primary character in his story. It is the rocks and spray, the circuit of islands in the wine-dark sea, that chart the blueprint of his days.
One of my favorite poems, sometimes called "China's epic," though it is only 92 verses long and is in every sense a true lyric -- modal, reflective, interior, musical -- touches on a number of these ideas. In this poem, the idea of home is characterized in two ways: it is at once the ideal seat of trust, of understanding and being understood, and the scene of a terrible sense of deceit and betrayal. Between them they produce an intense bitterness. Still more importantly, the poem speaks to the imagined power of unfettered journeying, featuring a magical itinerary through the sky. And most importantly of all, that journey is halted, in the end, by an overpowering longing for home:
陟升皇之赫戏兮，忽临睨夫旧乡。 仆夫悲余马怀兮，蜷局顾而不行。
But, in the aurorean glory ascending,
I glimpsed, on a sudden, my home far below.
My coachman was saddened, my horses were longing
And back their necks buckled; they would not go on.
I wonder if perhaps the key -- the key for our times, anyway -- is not to have a center of the universe, but to rather regard everywhere as a part of everywhere else. Of course, this is hardly a new thought, but it is comforting. And, the more we understand the material nature of our cosmos, the more true it seems.
At any rate, Caleb Milne seemed to think so. In his last letter to his mother before he was killed administering first aid to a wounded soldier during the Tunisian campaign in World War II, he described his surroundings abroad as "a vivid, wonderful world so full of winter and spring, warm rain and cold snow, adventures and contentments, good things and bad." But the strangeness of it all -- such a remarkable time, such an outlandish place -- apparently had no power over his capacity to think himself elsewhere, at other times, beyond longing:
How often you will have me with you when the wood smoke drifts across the wind, or the first tulips arrive, or the sky darkens in a summer storm. Think of me today, and in the days to come, as I am thinking of you this minute -- not gone or alone or dead, but part of the earth beneath you, part of the air around you, part of the heart that must not be lonely.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
La Belle Superpower
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that practically the second you become an expat you find yourself cultivating new attitudes towards your homeland. This can happen in a lot of different ways. Sometimes the changes are pretty subtle -- just a slightly altered set of emphases on the things, positive and negative, that you consider important about your country. Decent ice cream, say, or an insufficiency of municipal parks. But sometimes the changes are more drastic. Ferocious critics of the way the home store is run suddenly find themselves lobbing mortars in the other direction. Doves get hawkish. All kinds of stuff starts to sound different when it comes from people who grew up singing a different national anthem.
This thought occurred to me during my English lesson yesterday. In a review of the word "powerful" and the different ways it could be used, I found myself discussing the idea behind the word "superpower" and its various implications. It was all rather over my students' heads (hey, they just turned eight last month), but sometimes I like to talk to them about things they can't possibly understand. Just occasionally. You never know what will stay with them, after all.
So, I told them that America was, for a time, the world's sole remaining superpower (they liked hearing this, as they are very pro-America), but that China was also a rising superpower (naturally, they liked that too). Then I mentioned the Cold War and invited them to guess who the other superpower had been. I thought they might know the answer, actually -- might have heard their parents or grandparents talking about it, perhaps -- but in any case I have noticed that when they don't know something they like to guess. What I wasn't prepared for, though, was one of the first guesses: France.
Actually, what I should say is, I wasn't prepared for my reaction to the idea that France might have been the Other Great Superpower, the US's rival in the Cold War. I mean, "derisive laughter" doesn't begin to describe it. I just hooted.
See, the thing is, back home, I don't make fun of the French. I mean NEVER. It would break my Proust-reading, Paris-map-memorizing parents' hearts. But this time I laughed so hard I almost fell over. I was wiping the tears from my eyes. I felt so American -- so classically "freedom-fry"-eating, flag-waving, SUV-driving American -- I had to resist the urge to rush to a mirror to see if I looked any different. (People over here often ask if I am French, English or Russian and even quite frequently if I am Chinese -- I suppose they must think I am one of the Turkic minorities or something -- and they are always astonished to find I am American. "You don't look American," they say.)
I clearly remember the first time this sort of expat Americanization happened to me. It was during my last sojourn in China, right after college, and it was much more dramatic and sobering. Bill Clinton was President then and the US was riding high. But I knew that we still had plenty of critics. I was one myself. And so I wasn't too surprised when a grad student at the university where I taught began to voice anti-American views. One day, though, he stepped over the line. He told me that if he were President of China he would order an air raid on some random US cities, just to give us a taste of our own medicine.
"Well, that's awfully civilized of you," I said. "Very mature."
"Yes, that's right, that's your civilization. You boss everyone else around. You should see what it's like on the other end."
Being told that the US is bossy and overbearing (which is actually a fairly polite description) didn't really bother me. What bothered me was my interlocutor's phenomenal, staggering refusal to think rationally or argue fairly. After all, I wasn't the one proposing to bomb random cities. He was. It wasn't my civilization; it was his twisted, childish thinking. And while I was ready to engage in a real discussion of the complexities that inevitably attend the conceptualization and prosecution of any foreign policy in a geopolitically interdependent world, this grad student didn't even know what real discussion was. I guess that was really the scary part. He was a grad student at an excellent university, and he didn't even understand how far from the rational he had strayed; he had no concept of rational thought in the first place.
So, perhaps it's not surprising that I snapped. But what is surprising -- what surprised me at the time, anyway -- is the way I did it. Without warning, I switched from Chinese to English and said, coolly, "You want to take on the US? Good luck." The chilly arrogance in my tone startled even me. It was as if some brooding external force had been lying in wait and seized the moment to transform me from an individual person, a liberally-educated citizen of the world, into a living epitome of American power and American will.
Then the moment passed, and things shook themselves right again. Or almost right. I did lose contact with that particular grad student, though we had once been very close. I also developed a keener sensitivity to the national chauvinism that seemed to be becoming endemic among China's young people. Then I went home and startled all my friends with my endless complaints about China: how rude and unfeeling people could be, how ruthless in their pursuit of personal advantage, and, most of all, how determined to regard world culture in a competitive context, as if it were a contest they felt entitled to win and injured at having to entertain any doubts about. You're a rising modern power built on a five-thousand-year-old civilization, I wanted to shout. You have nothing to prove! But I never said it, or not to the right people, anyway.
Things have been very different on this trip. After eight years of the galactically unpopular Bush administration, I had dreaded playing the part of the American abroad, but I should have known better. We're too easy a target now. Bashing us is no fun anymore. Besides, now China is the one to be riding high. If it's a competition, China won it -- she's got the Olympic gold to prove it. If it's a question of personal advantage, well, there's nothing like the threat of a global depression to shift one's perspectives. We're all in a ditch; no one has the advantage now.
But of course now things are changing once again. As I sit here gazing out my window at the bright moon hanging over Beijing, I think about the coming inauguration of Barack Obama and the renewal of America. Of course, I don't know what this renewal will mean or what shape it will take. No one does. But the prospect makes me think of a strange question one of my students raised in our lesson yesterday. When I said that China was becoming a superpower, my tone must have left room for some doubt about whether I meant to say China would take America's place on the world stage, or merely join her there. I can still see my student's great, big, anxious eyes fixed on me: "China and America, right? China and America?"
As I said, I don't know what will happen. No one does. But, as I listened to the implications behind my student's question, one certainty suddenly shot through me. A lot of people have been suggesting certain parallels between Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy. Maybe they're valid, maybe not. But here's the thing. I don't know what kinds of dangers will prompt President Barack Obama to dispatch aides in the middle of the night to seek audience with heads of state in foreign lands -- maybe to France, maybe to China. I"m just pretty sure there will be such perils. And, for the first time in a long while, I think there's a good chance that those heads of state will find it reasonable to say, as once before, "I don't need to see pictures. I trust the word of the President of the United States."
"That's right," I assured her. "China and America. Both of us."
This thought occurred to me during my English lesson yesterday. In a review of the word "powerful" and the different ways it could be used, I found myself discussing the idea behind the word "superpower" and its various implications. It was all rather over my students' heads (hey, they just turned eight last month), but sometimes I like to talk to them about things they can't possibly understand. Just occasionally. You never know what will stay with them, after all.
So, I told them that America was, for a time, the world's sole remaining superpower (they liked hearing this, as they are very pro-America), but that China was also a rising superpower (naturally, they liked that too). Then I mentioned the Cold War and invited them to guess who the other superpower had been. I thought they might know the answer, actually -- might have heard their parents or grandparents talking about it, perhaps -- but in any case I have noticed that when they don't know something they like to guess. What I wasn't prepared for, though, was one of the first guesses: France.
Actually, what I should say is, I wasn't prepared for my reaction to the idea that France might have been the Other Great Superpower, the US's rival in the Cold War. I mean, "derisive laughter" doesn't begin to describe it. I just hooted.
See, the thing is, back home, I don't make fun of the French. I mean NEVER. It would break my Proust-reading, Paris-map-memorizing parents' hearts. But this time I laughed so hard I almost fell over. I was wiping the tears from my eyes. I felt so American -- so classically "freedom-fry"-eating, flag-waving, SUV-driving American -- I had to resist the urge to rush to a mirror to see if I looked any different. (People over here often ask if I am French, English or Russian and even quite frequently if I am Chinese -- I suppose they must think I am one of the Turkic minorities or something -- and they are always astonished to find I am American. "You don't look American," they say.)
I clearly remember the first time this sort of expat Americanization happened to me. It was during my last sojourn in China, right after college, and it was much more dramatic and sobering. Bill Clinton was President then and the US was riding high. But I knew that we still had plenty of critics. I was one myself. And so I wasn't too surprised when a grad student at the university where I taught began to voice anti-American views. One day, though, he stepped over the line. He told me that if he were President of China he would order an air raid on some random US cities, just to give us a taste of our own medicine.
"Well, that's awfully civilized of you," I said. "Very mature."
"Yes, that's right, that's your civilization. You boss everyone else around. You should see what it's like on the other end."
Being told that the US is bossy and overbearing (which is actually a fairly polite description) didn't really bother me. What bothered me was my interlocutor's phenomenal, staggering refusal to think rationally or argue fairly. After all, I wasn't the one proposing to bomb random cities. He was. It wasn't my civilization; it was his twisted, childish thinking. And while I was ready to engage in a real discussion of the complexities that inevitably attend the conceptualization and prosecution of any foreign policy in a geopolitically interdependent world, this grad student didn't even know what real discussion was. I guess that was really the scary part. He was a grad student at an excellent university, and he didn't even understand how far from the rational he had strayed; he had no concept of rational thought in the first place.
So, perhaps it's not surprising that I snapped. But what is surprising -- what surprised me at the time, anyway -- is the way I did it. Without warning, I switched from Chinese to English and said, coolly, "You want to take on the US? Good luck." The chilly arrogance in my tone startled even me. It was as if some brooding external force had been lying in wait and seized the moment to transform me from an individual person, a liberally-educated citizen of the world, into a living epitome of American power and American will.
Then the moment passed, and things shook themselves right again. Or almost right. I did lose contact with that particular grad student, though we had once been very close. I also developed a keener sensitivity to the national chauvinism that seemed to be becoming endemic among China's young people. Then I went home and startled all my friends with my endless complaints about China: how rude and unfeeling people could be, how ruthless in their pursuit of personal advantage, and, most of all, how determined to regard world culture in a competitive context, as if it were a contest they felt entitled to win and injured at having to entertain any doubts about. You're a rising modern power built on a five-thousand-year-old civilization, I wanted to shout. You have nothing to prove! But I never said it, or not to the right people, anyway.
Things have been very different on this trip. After eight years of the galactically unpopular Bush administration, I had dreaded playing the part of the American abroad, but I should have known better. We're too easy a target now. Bashing us is no fun anymore. Besides, now China is the one to be riding high. If it's a competition, China won it -- she's got the Olympic gold to prove it. If it's a question of personal advantage, well, there's nothing like the threat of a global depression to shift one's perspectives. We're all in a ditch; no one has the advantage now.
But of course now things are changing once again. As I sit here gazing out my window at the bright moon hanging over Beijing, I think about the coming inauguration of Barack Obama and the renewal of America. Of course, I don't know what this renewal will mean or what shape it will take. No one does. But the prospect makes me think of a strange question one of my students raised in our lesson yesterday. When I said that China was becoming a superpower, my tone must have left room for some doubt about whether I meant to say China would take America's place on the world stage, or merely join her there. I can still see my student's great, big, anxious eyes fixed on me: "China and America, right? China and America?"
As I said, I don't know what will happen. No one does. But, as I listened to the implications behind my student's question, one certainty suddenly shot through me. A lot of people have been suggesting certain parallels between Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy. Maybe they're valid, maybe not. But here's the thing. I don't know what kinds of dangers will prompt President Barack Obama to dispatch aides in the middle of the night to seek audience with heads of state in foreign lands -- maybe to France, maybe to China. I"m just pretty sure there will be such perils. And, for the first time in a long while, I think there's a good chance that those heads of state will find it reasonable to say, as once before, "I don't need to see pictures. I trust the word of the President of the United States."
"That's right," I assured her. "China and America. Both of us."
Friday, January 9, 2009
Milkshake
Earlier today my lesson was cancelled on me without explanation. This happens a lot and it ticks me off every time, even though I know no rudeness or disrespect is intended. It's just one of those cultural things. The Chinese operate in an ad hoc fashion. Advance planning is not a popular concept. In many ways this is a terrific national characteristic and I would do well to learn from it, because I'm about as flexible as a two-by-four.
Which is probably why I can never seem to get past the initial stage of my response: "How can these people just up and cancel my class without telling me? What the bloody hell do they think they're playing at? What about my plans? Doesn't my timetable matter?"
On this particular occasion, as so often in the past, I'd orchestrated my day around the scheduled lesson. I could have gotten a lot else done if I'd known I wouldn't need to hang around this afternoon. In particular, I could have returned my books to the library. In fact, that's what I had originally hoped to do with the afternoon -- they're due tomorrow and I am so frequently ambushed by bad health that I am really, really chary of letting anything with a deadline run right down to the wire -- but then I was asked to teach my lesson instead. The lesson that never happened.
The thing to do in these situations is to find some nice activity to take your mind off how irritated you are. After a while, you look up from your tea in a cafe or your walk in a park and wonder how you could have gotten worked up over such a piffling little thing in the first place. My problem today was, I was too tired to go out and treat myself to a nice dinner or a movie or some other cheerful little adventure.
So here I was alone at home -- only not at home because I am sort of a hired guest -- wondering what to do with my extra time and my bad temper. Alone, that is, except for the maids, who are very nice indeed. On the whole I try not to bother them too much. I'd like to be friends, and we do sometimes have nice chats, but I don't want to intrude. They work hard, and I have the feeling that when they have any time off they'd really just like to relax with each other and not be forced to take part in a cultural exchange.
I felt too tired and cross to start working on anything productive, so I just sat at my desk feeling sorry for myself.
Then I found myself thinking about milkshakes. I started wishing I could just hop in my little yellow Beetle and take a trip to one of the many first-class creameries that are sprinkled across Eastern Massachusetts. Well, all of New England, really. But my car is in Massachusetts and I am in Beijing. There are milkshakes here, but I would need to go downtown to get one -- probably an hour on the metro, and I've never been to any of the establishments that serve them, so there'd always be the risk that whatever place I chose from an internet directory would have closed or moved or changed its hours or gotten pregnant or something.
Then I thought, "Hey, wait. We've got a blender here, and the local supermarket is still open, and I know they sell both ice cream and milk. It's probably terrible ice cream, but still, it's likely worth a shot."
So I told the maids I was heading off to the supermarket for some ice cream because I was going to make milkshakes and asked what kind they wanted. Nobody specified a kind, so I bought both chocolate and strawberry.
We finished the chocolate up and left the strawberry for another time. One of the maids, who has quite a sweet tooth, drank two glasses. As she poured the last of it into her glass she said, laughing, "I'm not being at all polite." Only she said, "Like a guest," which is the most common Chinese way of saying "polite."
"That's right," I told her. "We're all mates here."
I was right: the ice cream was absolutely terrible. But it was good enough for us. Our party had no guests.
Which is probably why I can never seem to get past the initial stage of my response: "How can these people just up and cancel my class without telling me? What the bloody hell do they think they're playing at? What about my plans? Doesn't my timetable matter?"
On this particular occasion, as so often in the past, I'd orchestrated my day around the scheduled lesson. I could have gotten a lot else done if I'd known I wouldn't need to hang around this afternoon. In particular, I could have returned my books to the library. In fact, that's what I had originally hoped to do with the afternoon -- they're due tomorrow and I am so frequently ambushed by bad health that I am really, really chary of letting anything with a deadline run right down to the wire -- but then I was asked to teach my lesson instead. The lesson that never happened.
The thing to do in these situations is to find some nice activity to take your mind off how irritated you are. After a while, you look up from your tea in a cafe or your walk in a park and wonder how you could have gotten worked up over such a piffling little thing in the first place. My problem today was, I was too tired to go out and treat myself to a nice dinner or a movie or some other cheerful little adventure.
So here I was alone at home -- only not at home because I am sort of a hired guest -- wondering what to do with my extra time and my bad temper. Alone, that is, except for the maids, who are very nice indeed. On the whole I try not to bother them too much. I'd like to be friends, and we do sometimes have nice chats, but I don't want to intrude. They work hard, and I have the feeling that when they have any time off they'd really just like to relax with each other and not be forced to take part in a cultural exchange.
I felt too tired and cross to start working on anything productive, so I just sat at my desk feeling sorry for myself.
Then I found myself thinking about milkshakes. I started wishing I could just hop in my little yellow Beetle and take a trip to one of the many first-class creameries that are sprinkled across Eastern Massachusetts. Well, all of New England, really. But my car is in Massachusetts and I am in Beijing. There are milkshakes here, but I would need to go downtown to get one -- probably an hour on the metro, and I've never been to any of the establishments that serve them, so there'd always be the risk that whatever place I chose from an internet directory would have closed or moved or changed its hours or gotten pregnant or something.
Then I thought, "Hey, wait. We've got a blender here, and the local supermarket is still open, and I know they sell both ice cream and milk. It's probably terrible ice cream, but still, it's likely worth a shot."
So I told the maids I was heading off to the supermarket for some ice cream because I was going to make milkshakes and asked what kind they wanted. Nobody specified a kind, so I bought both chocolate and strawberry.
We finished the chocolate up and left the strawberry for another time. One of the maids, who has quite a sweet tooth, drank two glasses. As she poured the last of it into her glass she said, laughing, "I'm not being at all polite." Only she said, "Like a guest," which is the most common Chinese way of saying "polite."
"That's right," I told her. "We're all mates here."
I was right: the ice cream was absolutely terrible. But it was good enough for us. Our party had no guests.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Encounter
A couple of days ago I found myself in the vicinity of Maizidian Road, home to a truly outstanding dumpling restaurant. It was midday. My only trouble was, I couldn't quite remember which way to turn on the Third Ring Road after emerging from the metro. So, I asked a passing woman for advice, and it turned out that she was headed for Maizidian as well.
At first we walked along in a kind of companionable silence. Then I asked her what she was doing in Maizidian. I thought she was probably going to meet a friend for lunch, or perhaps she was heading back to work after a morning out, or something like that, but she told me that she was going to visit her father in the hospital.
I didn't like to ask what the matter was, so I asked his age instead. The answer surprised me. I'd have thought my companion was some years older than me (and perhaps she was) but her father turned out to be nine years younger than mine.
She explained that they were from Inner Mongolia. I still didn't like to inquire too closely about her father, so instead I asked if she thought they would be able to get home for the new year. She said no, that seemed unlikely. "They still have to take the tumor out. It looks like it will be a while before he can stand up to surgery, and then after that -- you know."
Thinking perhaps I might take her mind off things for a minute, I told her, "You know, when most Americans hear the name 'Inner Mongolia,' it conjures up quite a romantic image."
She laughed. "Galloping horses."
"Yes, and grasslands, with the grass waving in the wind."
We parted at an intersection. I wanted to ask her to pass my greetings on to her father, but somehow I didn't get a chance. I suppose she must have gone straight into the hospital, probably up some stairs, past a nurses' station, into a ward. Or maybe she stopped and bought some flowers or a card.
Earlier that morning I had met a young man who volunteers at his local hospice, bringing medicine to terminally ill patients, sitting and chatting with them to raise their spirits. "I've learned that some people are unlucky," he said.
My dumplings were delicious: wood ear, forest mushroom and bamboo shoots in one kind, garlic chive in another. Not too far away, a daughter was sitting by her father's bedside. They won't be able to get home for the new year. I don't think I really have anything to say about that. I just wanted to mention it.
At first we walked along in a kind of companionable silence. Then I asked her what she was doing in Maizidian. I thought she was probably going to meet a friend for lunch, or perhaps she was heading back to work after a morning out, or something like that, but she told me that she was going to visit her father in the hospital.
I didn't like to ask what the matter was, so I asked his age instead. The answer surprised me. I'd have thought my companion was some years older than me (and perhaps she was) but her father turned out to be nine years younger than mine.
She explained that they were from Inner Mongolia. I still didn't like to inquire too closely about her father, so instead I asked if she thought they would be able to get home for the new year. She said no, that seemed unlikely. "They still have to take the tumor out. It looks like it will be a while before he can stand up to surgery, and then after that -- you know."
Thinking perhaps I might take her mind off things for a minute, I told her, "You know, when most Americans hear the name 'Inner Mongolia,' it conjures up quite a romantic image."
She laughed. "Galloping horses."
"Yes, and grasslands, with the grass waving in the wind."
We parted at an intersection. I wanted to ask her to pass my greetings on to her father, but somehow I didn't get a chance. I suppose she must have gone straight into the hospital, probably up some stairs, past a nurses' station, into a ward. Or maybe she stopped and bought some flowers or a card.
Earlier that morning I had met a young man who volunteers at his local hospice, bringing medicine to terminally ill patients, sitting and chatting with them to raise their spirits. "I've learned that some people are unlucky," he said.
My dumplings were delicious: wood ear, forest mushroom and bamboo shoots in one kind, garlic chive in another. Not too far away, a daughter was sitting by her father's bedside. They won't be able to get home for the new year. I don't think I really have anything to say about that. I just wanted to mention it.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
"Tell Them Stories"
About a week ago I began introducing my seven-year-old students to a few Maori legends. We started with Te Ika A Maui ("The Fish of Maui"), in which the many-counselled trickster Maui fishes the North Island of New Zealand up out of the sea on his magical fishhook. Τhen I told them how Maui took fire from the toenail of the Fire Goddess Mahuika and imprisoned it in the kaikomako tree, where it lies ready to burst into flame whenever it is needed. Today I'll be telling them about how Chief Rata wanted to build a canoe but neglected to sacrifice to Tane, the God of the Forests, before cutting his timber.
I started on the Maori legends mainly because I wanted to take advantage of my students' fascination with New Zealand. (They've never been there, but they have heard about tuataras, and that's enough.) We must talk about something in our lessons, after all, and Maori legends are as good a conversation-starter as anything else.
But I did have other reasons for wanting to incorporate legends -- not just from the Maori tradition, but legends generally -- into our lessons. For one thing, I think my students ought to know what people who live in different places think, and what they have thought over the centuries. They ought to begin to see patterns, or at least be offered a chance to see them. They ought to see that nearly everyone has a flood myth, for example, and that we all take warning from the arrogance or imprudence of our heroes, and that most "just-so" explanations are far stranger and more convoluted than they need to be.
This is partly because they live in the world and should know something of what it is, and what it has been. We have it on good authority that there is one fairly simple way to placate the harpies who guard the gates at the Camp of the Dead, and that is to tell them stories. The idea (as I understand it) is that stories stand proof of the life that generates them, and a soul that has lived deserves free passage through the Camp of the Dead and into the sparkling, particulate cosmos that lies beyond it.
But it is also because knowing these things will help them know other things. Stories represent not just a kind of learning, but a way of learning. If a lifelong accumulation of stories is the hallmark of our respect for what John Updike calls "the marvel of being alive" -- evidence to show the harpies that we have not wasted our days -- it is also a mechanism of that respect. We learn stories as we learn language, because stories are language. They tap a primeval convergence of all knowledge and experience, a time when all learning was magical to one degree or another, and might be fittingly be called "gramarye" -- a time when, as Updike puts it, "history was geography and giants engendered races."
When my students first heard about Maui, they thought of the Hawai'ian island that shares his name, where their parents had taken them for a vacation the year before. Now they know of a person called Maui, and a place called Maui, and great fish that is both the name of a place and the story behind that name. As their understanding of the world becomes more richly textured, they develop a multivalent sense of language. They begin to net words together, names and stories and allusions that ricochet from pole to pole.
A few days ago, thinking to take a break from the Maori stories for a bit, I showed them a map of the world and pointed first to New Zealand and then to the British Isles.
“Look down here,” I said. “Here is the North Island of New Zealand, where the tuataras live and which Maui fished up out of the sea. Now look up here. This is Britain, the countries of England and Scotland and Wales, and now I will tell you a story about a boy named Arthur Pendragon and the sword he pulled from a stone.”
You would think that they’d balk a little at the old-fashioned lexicon. I mean, come on, they’re seven. They’re also still pretty much beginners at English. Advanced beginners at this point, but still not even close to proficient. But by the time I got to Whoso pulleth this sword out of this stone and anvil is rightwise King born of all England, they were hanging on every word.
And, of course, they now have a new island to place amidst the others in their interior landscapes – Avalon, the island of the apple trees, ringed about with moonlight at the back of the North Wind. Since it has the same compass bearing as Tir Na Nog, the Irish Isles of the Blessed, I reckon they will have to be our next stop.
I started on the Maori legends mainly because I wanted to take advantage of my students' fascination with New Zealand. (They've never been there, but they have heard about tuataras, and that's enough.) We must talk about something in our lessons, after all, and Maori legends are as good a conversation-starter as anything else.
But I did have other reasons for wanting to incorporate legends -- not just from the Maori tradition, but legends generally -- into our lessons. For one thing, I think my students ought to know what people who live in different places think, and what they have thought over the centuries. They ought to begin to see patterns, or at least be offered a chance to see them. They ought to see that nearly everyone has a flood myth, for example, and that we all take warning from the arrogance or imprudence of our heroes, and that most "just-so" explanations are far stranger and more convoluted than they need to be.
This is partly because they live in the world and should know something of what it is, and what it has been. We have it on good authority that there is one fairly simple way to placate the harpies who guard the gates at the Camp of the Dead, and that is to tell them stories. The idea (as I understand it) is that stories stand proof of the life that generates them, and a soul that has lived deserves free passage through the Camp of the Dead and into the sparkling, particulate cosmos that lies beyond it.
But it is also because knowing these things will help them know other things. Stories represent not just a kind of learning, but a way of learning. If a lifelong accumulation of stories is the hallmark of our respect for what John Updike calls "the marvel of being alive" -- evidence to show the harpies that we have not wasted our days -- it is also a mechanism of that respect. We learn stories as we learn language, because stories are language. They tap a primeval convergence of all knowledge and experience, a time when all learning was magical to one degree or another, and might be fittingly be called "gramarye" -- a time when, as Updike puts it, "history was geography and giants engendered races."
When my students first heard about Maui, they thought of the Hawai'ian island that shares his name, where their parents had taken them for a vacation the year before. Now they know of a person called Maui, and a place called Maui, and great fish that is both the name of a place and the story behind that name. As their understanding of the world becomes more richly textured, they develop a multivalent sense of language. They begin to net words together, names and stories and allusions that ricochet from pole to pole.
A few days ago, thinking to take a break from the Maori stories for a bit, I showed them a map of the world and pointed first to New Zealand and then to the British Isles.
“Look down here,” I said. “Here is the North Island of New Zealand, where the tuataras live and which Maui fished up out of the sea. Now look up here. This is Britain, the countries of England and Scotland and Wales, and now I will tell you a story about a boy named Arthur Pendragon and the sword he pulled from a stone.”
You would think that they’d balk a little at the old-fashioned lexicon. I mean, come on, they’re seven. They’re also still pretty much beginners at English. Advanced beginners at this point, but still not even close to proficient. But by the time I got to Whoso pulleth this sword out of this stone and anvil is rightwise King born of all England, they were hanging on every word.
And, of course, they now have a new island to place amidst the others in their interior landscapes – Avalon, the island of the apple trees, ringed about with moonlight at the back of the North Wind. Since it has the same compass bearing as Tir Na Nog, the Irish Isles of the Blessed, I reckon they will have to be our next stop.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Du Temps Perdu
The shop around the corner has finally gotten its act together and started selling date biscuits. They have a crumbly exterior, something like shortbread, and a paste filling made of Chinese jujubes and crushed walnuts. I fell in love with them the last time I was in Beijing, when I came here right after college.
Actually, back then they were not quite my favorite kind of Beijing sweet. My very favorites were little pastry shells filled with rose-flavored sugar. They were so evocative of their Central Asian origin that, biting into one, you could practically hear the bells jingling on the camels' harnesses as they humped along the Silk Road, tramping over grassland and desert, plodding across wind-riven ridges and picking their way through stony valleys haunted by lizards and tumbleweed. They were most inspiriting. "How very wide the world is, and I am at large in it." That was how they made one feel.
But the more pedestrian date biscuits were almost as good in their way, and much more readily available. They were to my first sojourn in Beijing what Carr's Digestives were to my years at boarding school: they both marked and epitomized my days here with the placidity of a sundial.
I'd been trying to find them ever since I arrived back in Beijing a couple of months ago. Then a few days ago I finally saw them in the bakery section of the local grocery store, so I bought some and ate them dipped in tea. They were even better than I remembered.
But that was all. They didn't bring the past back to me. As I ate them, I didn't really think about my earlier year in Beijing at all. I just thought, "Boy, these are good."
Well, Nature may imitate Art now and again, but I guess she can hardly be expected to do so on command. Besides, it is surely a good thing to be able to enjoy date biscuits in such absolute terms, to be able to take them as such a thoroughly present pleasure that one feels no particular reliance on whatever history one might happen to share with them.
Still, the incident left me feeling puzzled and a little uneasy. I've always thought of myself as practically defined by a powerfully nostalgic bent. My "senior quote" in my high school yearbook , taken from Book II of Vergil's Aeneid, reflected this view:
forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Perhaps hereafter even this will be a pleasure to recall.
Of course, it's a common enough reference for graduating seniors, and, with its wry applicability to the travails of school life, its general appeal is easy to understand. But I meant it seriously. Even at seventeen, I had already had plenty of experience with an apparently unbounded capacity for affectionate regret, which was usually directed indiscriminately towards whatever lay behind me. More significantly, my understanding of both the past and the present often seemed to be principally delineated by that feeling, and by its attendant sense of irretrievable loss.
The years since then have introduced me to many variations on this sensation. Life in one place has repeatedly given way to life in another; with each transplantation I am little more laden with retrospection. Last week my students asked me what my favorite word in Greek was (we were doing Favorite Words as a conversation starter) and I found myself replying, without hesitation, "εντροπαλιζομενη," as Homer says of Andromache, who "turns and turns again" as she leaves her husband on the walls of Troy.
I don't quite know when my periodic visits to the Harvard campus began to leave me feeling rootless and dispossessed, but it happened fairly soon after graduation, certainly while I was young enough and connected enough feel that I still belonged there, had I been able to find my way to that point of view.
Yesterday I went to a conference at Beijing Normal University, where I taught English right after college. I wondered if the visit would produce the same forsaken feeling that I had come to expect from my trips to Harvard. In a way it did, but what I really felt was just rather numb and dreamlike.
Actually, back then they were not quite my favorite kind of Beijing sweet. My very favorites were little pastry shells filled with rose-flavored sugar. They were so evocative of their Central Asian origin that, biting into one, you could practically hear the bells jingling on the camels' harnesses as they humped along the Silk Road, tramping over grassland and desert, plodding across wind-riven ridges and picking their way through stony valleys haunted by lizards and tumbleweed. They were most inspiriting. "How very wide the world is, and I am at large in it." That was how they made one feel.
But the more pedestrian date biscuits were almost as good in their way, and much more readily available. They were to my first sojourn in Beijing what Carr's Digestives were to my years at boarding school: they both marked and epitomized my days here with the placidity of a sundial.
I'd been trying to find them ever since I arrived back in Beijing a couple of months ago. Then a few days ago I finally saw them in the bakery section of the local grocery store, so I bought some and ate them dipped in tea. They were even better than I remembered.
But that was all. They didn't bring the past back to me. As I ate them, I didn't really think about my earlier year in Beijing at all. I just thought, "Boy, these are good."
Well, Nature may imitate Art now and again, but I guess she can hardly be expected to do so on command. Besides, it is surely a good thing to be able to enjoy date biscuits in such absolute terms, to be able to take them as such a thoroughly present pleasure that one feels no particular reliance on whatever history one might happen to share with them.
Still, the incident left me feeling puzzled and a little uneasy. I've always thought of myself as practically defined by a powerfully nostalgic bent. My "senior quote" in my high school yearbook , taken from Book II of Vergil's Aeneid, reflected this view:
forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Perhaps hereafter even this will be a pleasure to recall.
Of course, it's a common enough reference for graduating seniors, and, with its wry applicability to the travails of school life, its general appeal is easy to understand. But I meant it seriously. Even at seventeen, I had already had plenty of experience with an apparently unbounded capacity for affectionate regret, which was usually directed indiscriminately towards whatever lay behind me. More significantly, my understanding of both the past and the present often seemed to be principally delineated by that feeling, and by its attendant sense of irretrievable loss.
The years since then have introduced me to many variations on this sensation. Life in one place has repeatedly given way to life in another; with each transplantation I am little more laden with retrospection. Last week my students asked me what my favorite word in Greek was (we were doing Favorite Words as a conversation starter) and I found myself replying, without hesitation, "εντροπαλιζομενη," as Homer says of Andromache, who "turns and turns again" as she leaves her husband on the walls of Troy.
I don't quite know when my periodic visits to the Harvard campus began to leave me feeling rootless and dispossessed, but it happened fairly soon after graduation, certainly while I was young enough and connected enough feel that I still belonged there, had I been able to find my way to that point of view.
Yesterday I went to a conference at Beijing Normal University, where I taught English right after college. I wondered if the visit would produce the same forsaken feeling that I had come to expect from my trips to Harvard. In a way it did, but what I really felt was just rather numb and dreamlike.
This detached feeling was itself a little frightening. The vague sense of disorientation associated with the date biscuits and their failure to evoke my first year in Beijing quickly crystallized into a specific concern. I found myself wondering whether, without being aware, I had begun to protect myself so thoroughly against memory's incursions as to become a kind of fortress.
I thought these things as I found the conference hall and settled into my place. But then something rather unexpected happened. One of the other participants came over to me and asked me if I were on the foreign languages faculty at BNU. "Didn't you come here right after graduating from college?" he asked. "I remember you. I was in your class. You've hardly changed at all."
Once I had got over my initial flutter of pleased surprise, something else captured my attention. My former student told me that he was now a professor of history at a university in Shandong province and asked if I had been all this time at BNU. Well, he has only made a few trips back to campus since graduating; I suppose for all he knew I could have been a fixture here for the last dozen years.
I think one reason returning to an old school can be so fraught with emotion is that schools seem so unchanging. Some faculty do come and go, of course, but many of them stay for whole lifetimes -- or whole careers, anyway. We are the ones who change.
It gave me quite a start, thinking that I might have assumed the character of an institution -- temporarily, at any rate -- for this professor from Shandong. I found myself spending a long moment wondering how he felt about coming back to BNU.
I felt a little sad on the bus ride home, but not as sad as I might have felt, and not as numb as I had been feeling. I had spent a little time thinking of someone else, and of course that is almost always the answer.
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