sept 6

I feel most of all lucky that I'm teaching english as literature and not just as a basic system. After a week of classes, I know all of my students by name and temperament, enough that I had a 30 minute discussion about one with a chinese teacher yesterday afternoon. I don't know if I mentioned that whenever I feel mildly bummed out about some problem here, I tell myself that nowhere else could I make this much money, live in such a weird place, get to travel, and learn a trade, etc etc. Anyway surprising to report, maybe, because I feel that I gave relatively little thought to it before, but I really enjoy teaching, for the most part. Some of it- grading standardized tests, for example- is totally bogus, but the hour or two of reading students writing per day I've been doing is really wonderful actually. Its strange too because I'm so close to where these kids are- three 12th grade girls from tokyo asked me how old I was, guessing 23 or 24. I don't know what other teachers do, but I know that, when I'm getting dressed in the morning, its as much to impress [M.] and [S.] （two students) as anything else. or in my 10th grade class, where everyones a lot more moody (unsurprisingly) and I see echoes of myself. Strangely or not, I expected strangeness to be characteristic of at least the first little while of being here and so am almost taken aback, still, by how easily I, who 2 weeks ago was in a virginian slumber of lierary magazines, am now wearing a tie to banquets in Gubei- the adjustment has almost not even been one. I havent eaten western food (with the exception of some psuedo- french fries served at one banquet held by the school- but i dont really count that cause they were weird, and also given to me without me asking) since I got here, and typically eat for lunch delicious things like bowls full of dumplings or noodles with spinach and tofu cakes or shrimp with the shell still on.

as far as my social life goes- well- little exaggeration to say that a lot of my needs in that direction, actually, are fulfilled by the dialogues I have with my students,- but I have picked up a few friends, I mean I am superficially friends with all of my colleagues, and theres one or two somewhat smug women who are basically fag hags, except I'm not gay and theres a smidgen maybe of sexual tension. But they take me to places and then take me home and on one occasion even tuck me into bed. One of them is a greek girl from suburban detroit. On the other hand, last night I was at a nightclub in a former bomb shelter, really stupid in the way that all nightclubs are really stupid, and was talking to this one woman- she's a taiwanese from orange county who quit her stockbroker job to open up a store for her fashion designs here, she lives in fuxing park, which is where we went around 2 am to drink tea and kvetch about whether she should break up with her californian boyfriend or not. she lives, for those of you who have seen this book, in one of those cool looking houses memorably captured in greg girard's 'phantom shanghai,' outside all ornate, rotted plaster and woodwork, inside dusty wooden brown hallways strangled with various electrical wires and staircases and tea leaves, leading to, i guess, apartments furnished with ikea by LA fashion designers. I think that tonight I may go with her and some of her friends, also older people (late twenties) and having lived here for a while, to another bar I went to last week, run by a parisian who likes anime and techno and owning a bar full of deadbeat nigerians trying to sell bad drugs.

I remember the first time I came here (to china, not SH specifically) my reaction was, this is so weird, its not like my home, but now my reaction is, this is so normal, this is exactly what I would have predicted shanghai be like. which is, not like home, at all- life feels more exciting here if only because somewhat stranger, and everyone has money, or at least I do. there's a weird sense of the avant garde scene here in that its so undergirded by kind of subpar foreigners, foreigners=hipsters by default here if only in that hipster denotes, 1, especially phyiscally attractive and notable to all strangers on the street, 2, having a tendency to spend money on unusual or only semi necessary things, and 3, possessing a vast deal of cultural capital that everyone else wants to have. so the night scene here is like, half the coolest people in this megacity and half drunk australians. I think thats got to be notable, if only because this country that everyone says is going to be a cultural behemoth is producing a generation of filmmakers and artists and rock musicians and DJs etc who go to the same kind of boliches where I meet taiwanese fashion designers and have headaches. the paradigm of alernative culture here is firmly set to a kind of weird pan-anglophone hip but not too hip level, a city where all of a sudden moderately attractive bob marley fans become high spenders at the cities nicest club. I was thinking about this yesterday at a banquet- leaving a vast hall full of probably 1000 people (my colleagues) all seated at tables for ten, a janitor probably from the provinces was staring in with hungry eyes, at this event which I had been more annoyed by than anything else. its a weird feeling to have a life that I assumed so easily, like donning an article of clothing, be the acme of what everyone here aspires to, to have things I take for granted be seen with ferocious desire. this morning was about to aska policeman for directions, when I saw him interrogating a straggling guy in front of me, rifling through some dirty papers and handcuffing him- I guess he must have been from some lonely poor town, and came to the big city, as immigrants everywhere do, in the hopes of abusive employment as a fry cook or something. All foreigners are required to keep copies of their passport on them- I havent yet made the copy,- but I've never had, nor known anyone, a problem yet. For sure a sense of unreality permeates everything that I'm doing, a woman I went on a date a cold manhattan evening last january lives in beijing now (its her hometown) and we were going to meet up- we couldnt, cause of my work, but she passed on to me the contact information of her friend, director of a modelling agency, who I may potentially work for? I take these events the only way a person possibly could do, which is, basically to ignore them because they have no correspondence to the reality I grew up believeing in. I still feel dissolute- I mean obviously, I'm waking up with headaches on the couches of people met the night before- but in many ways I'm treated, by my students for sure but by the whole society, with a marked respect and interest. I may go to beijing this mid autumn festival, or seoul, where I got into touch with some old military school friends who are from there. its strangely exhilirating, too, to make these cities- bangkok, tokyo, seoul, etc- from wikipedia articles into familiar haunts, in the way that I know and have friends in most big american cities, and some european ones. I really don't know what I'll do after this, I'm still a a loss as to what would offer me most resistance.