Shanghai
is where I am right now.
this city is so great and so weird being in china again feels not difficult but refreshing, now that the initial phases of what I've been doing (hs, college etc) i am thinking of even staying in this so cushy job I have somehow landed in. Though I don't feel an adult or at least not drasically different than before I am treated as one; wearing a jacket to work, I tell kids a couple of years younger than me whats up and they haev to listen. (PS max, natron, I would suggest you spend a good amount of time thinking about how to teach as much or more so than being in asia- i studied china a lot and that was word and actually I am well prepared for teaching anyway- took a course on ESL teaching by coincidene as well as doing some volunteering but i'd say the better prepared you feel for the first day the better).
Anyway I have a really big apartment now and a lot of money. My classes are going to be about charles dickens and imperialism and high school stuff like that (actually awesomely am not really going to have to teach ESL- my least advanced english class, will probably go on to american universities as those groups of asians who study science and hang out with other asians exclusively).
anyway I really don't know what to say, the urban fabric of this city is what's been most captivating to me. the skyline of shanghai is preposterous of course, we took a boat ride prior to a banquet and saw the city lights- but tons of cities have skylines, and the thing that makes this place so great is more the general atmosphere of my kinda ghetto neighborhood (but its not like the ghetto cause theres no crime here, so instead of being scary like south side chicago or whatever its just like, people are dressed more weird and have stranger jobs (ladling night soil onto patches of cabbage growing in alleys, selling slaughtered ducks wrapped in rope, etc) I keep thinking that this is what american cities felt like in 1900- everyones face is raw with poverty and the countryside, chinese men are very masculine and hard- even if shorter or smaller, their faces are ferocious and lit up with ambition and scars, instead of the idiocy i see in american adolescents or the smug obesity in middle aged men. there are lots of beautiful chinese girls too of course but i havent really gotten to the point where my environment is something I can do more than wonder at- theres a few senoritas in noodle shops and in front of the bank and etc whom I've made eyes at, and the other night I went with a couple of amigos to a bar run by a parisian playing dubby tech-house full of nigerian drug dealers and thai prostitutes and 'une fille dijonaises qui faisait mes vacances ici pour voir mon frere' (the owner of the bar)
this city is so much more rancid with opportunity than american cities, revolution and not just in a political way or even at all in a political way is happening. maybe more a potential for a million resentful teenagers to sniff glue and straighten their hair and zoom around on motorcycles with their toylike girlfriends clutching their back.
I feel dislocated for sure but thats just because I have always in my life anticipated a sense of resistance- at each phase of my life people mention that the next one is dreadful and difficult- middle school t high school, high school to college, college to the 'real world.' but i'm not n the real world at all, i'm toppling from barstools in streets lit by neon and draped with vines, waking up to sip yoghurt and tea and eat lichees by the pond next to my home. I'm trying to figure out what, if anything, I could reasonably hope for next, and I'm taken aback at how totally feasible my wildest ambitions have seemed to be to achieve. I'm thinking its pretty certain that I'll shoot fr a masters in london next year but afterwards will probably come back here, hopefully with my brother max, to see what we can do, and whether we should go to beijing or not.
jacob
1 comment:
aug 31
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