returning from another rendezvous with yingying (my chinese tutor) where we spoke of chinese perceptions of american culture, gender roles, etc... I met on the train a rather pretty woman, celine, who wants to practice studying english with me in order to emigrate to australia, where she'll work as a plastic surgeon...
a vision of her frantically driving through the muggy night to a suburban home, like the one in which Dr Roberto, his lover, Jordana (my ex) and I ate pizza...
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
sept 17
(a response to my virginian friend)
i've decided to go on a date with a chinese girl every week. the main benefit i've gotten from these dates so far, apart from not being lonely, is that i hear all these crazy stories about peoples lives, in the social medium that i am best equipped to draw people out; i'm trying, as something that will be the subject of whatever i write, to comprehend the results of this syllogism:
1, every person is almost an infinity of lived experience, emotion, etc (learned from having been in love with a few people)
2, there are 7 billion people alive today
doing this stuff with girls here instead of virginia makes the second part a lot more real. i'm trying to understand how precious human emotion is to me, when there's so much of it... so the other night in an anonymous chinese cafe i drank beer listening to a woman with long, straight black hair hold back tears as she told me about her alcoholic father from anhui province, and her dj boyfriend (he likes dj cam too, made me think of your adolescence). i'm not interested in being a reporter collecting these facts, because facts seem to be too concrete- these feelings are not, they are preserved in aspic. i just want to write a biography of the emotions that zip around this city along with wireless internet, subway trains, police cars...
in some ways, this place is a perfect backdrop because it is so urban, but in an almost less threatening way, i can do whatever i want without fear of any kind here, silhouetted against gigantic neon buildings and handing roses to women and drinking brandy in smoky expensive nightclubs. but its like gotham because its not really identifiable in some ways (even beijing has a more reconizable urban form than here- here, as i suspect bangkok, jakarta, etc, is very repetitive, a constant iteration of the same form).
i've decided to go on a date with a chinese girl every week. the main benefit i've gotten from these dates so far, apart from not being lonely, is that i hear all these crazy stories about peoples lives, in the social medium that i am best equipped to draw people out; i'm trying, as something that will be the subject of whatever i write, to comprehend the results of this syllogism:
1, every person is almost an infinity of lived experience, emotion, etc (learned from having been in love with a few people)
2, there are 7 billion people alive today
doing this stuff with girls here instead of virginia makes the second part a lot more real. i'm trying to understand how precious human emotion is to me, when there's so much of it... so the other night in an anonymous chinese cafe i drank beer listening to a woman with long, straight black hair hold back tears as she told me about her alcoholic father from anhui province, and her dj boyfriend (he likes dj cam too, made me think of your adolescence). i'm not interested in being a reporter collecting these facts, because facts seem to be too concrete- these feelings are not, they are preserved in aspic. i just want to write a biography of the emotions that zip around this city along with wireless internet, subway trains, police cars...
in some ways, this place is a perfect backdrop because it is so urban, but in an almost less threatening way, i can do whatever i want without fear of any kind here, silhouetted against gigantic neon buildings and handing roses to women and drinking brandy in smoky expensive nightclubs. but its like gotham because its not really identifiable in some ways (even beijing has a more reconizable urban form than here- here, as i suspect bangkok, jakarta, etc, is very repetitive, a constant iteration of the same form).
sept 20
my shanghai life is shaping up so fast and is quickly spiralling out of my control, but pleasantly, because it's spiraling upwards into a life that seems lavish but i can afford with ease (and I'm still planning on saving 20K, my grad school plans in london are shaping up pretty well). last night I went to a house party some french guys were throwing with my friend michael, whose party I went to recently, and my other friend ted from sichuan, and a girl i know named chelsea. i'd heard about it from some guy I met named ukachi, a nigerian who grew up in new york city and takes party pictures for a living now, his girlfriend has her own perfume. I'm getting job offers in text messages while we're drinking chinese plum brandy on a balcony that looks over a gleaming mass of metal that stretches for miles in every direction, an infinite maze of dirty small streets full of sleeping shirtless men and brothels and dumplings burning over charcoal. thursday night i saw some DJs and met some people, an afghani girl who lives in frankfurt, somehow i talked to her in german for an hour while michael talked to her friend who makes pornos in germany and came here to look for talent- the night ended in a soup restauraunt with my friend and I running into, by chance, 2 chinese girls he knew who slurped beef intestines while I wearily drank tea for my throat. last night i was babbling in french for an hour to a thai girl about architecture. this all feels like a big shift from the aimless adolescence i was living so recently; its kinda aimless, maybe, but certainly not adolescent anymore, even if I still am. tonight I'm seeing some chicago DJ with all the 15 party promoters I've met in the past couple of days, I'm trying to charm my way into the poisonous bosom of this city's nightlife and pretty successfully as far as I can tell- though everyone I meet is 5-6 years older than me. All this is frivolous on a surface level but the moments where I find myself staring into the mass of buildings and people from a nighttime rooftop have convinced me that what I am doing is systematically integrating the metropolis into my heart and thoughts. I think nathaniel might move here, which is really exciting, and I'm trying to convince hunter to spend some time here also, though I know he won't.
my work is going great, almost habitually now. I'm scoping out potential jobs in beijing and even other places like moscow; I don't know if these parties are a good enough reason to stay here forever, and I might find more art kids in Beijing. But I'm super happy on a daily level with my work and I think my kids are learning a lot. mostly I'm making everyone write constantly, which has the effect of causing me to have the english language on my mind all the time, and I find I have an instinctual adeptness with grammar points- like when kids get something on the PSAT wrong I know the right answer instantly, and why. there's not been any real new developments in my job; I sit in an office drinking tea and complaining about american politics and scuttle out sometimes to talk about Goethe with 15 year olds, or to eat the delivious noodle lunches that are free for me. My week is really consumed by working, actually, but thats fine- I spend evenings watching HBO movies, to get a better vocabulary of american images, and reading haruki murakami and baudelaire (which I'm trying to do in french, without much luck). I havent done more than a lesson yet, though I'm constantly picking stuff up here and there, but I'm planning on buying some chinese books today even, and working on that very seriously. I think my ambition I had prior to coming here, to become a translator, is pretty stupid; it'd be very hard to get my chinese that good, and plus, why, if I already have an easy and relaxing job that pays me enough to live so nicely and save so much money. however the etymology of chinese characters is really fascinating and once I get a deep enough grasp of things I'm sure I'll be fascinated by it for the rest of my life (I guess I already am, anyway).
I've been thinking a lot about the strange structure of this cities social life, but I don't know if any of you would be interested in that, or have a frame of reference. I do believe especially if our homeland is stupid enough to even consider electing john mccain, that this place is the place to be, compared to the USA or europe even here feels so much more real and happening. like in techno clubs in germany, the club itself is an idea of a city, for consumption by people hungry for the city, or at least it is for me. but here the whole city, and not just those places that seek to be, is hugely urban and fast, which in turn makes the dance parties seem somehow more compelling, as if instead of being a cultural footnote they were an essential expression of a place that is advancing in myriad ways every day. I mention that just cause I like techno and go to parties a lot but in general its like that too, I mean- the streets here are alive in a way that they just arent even in big cities at home, nobody is excited to live in chicago except maybe kids from madison wisconsin but everyone here is excited to live at all in this time and place. living for so many people here seems more tenuous, the poverty of citizens reminding me of the poverty of my friends, so that people of all ages do the things I associate with 20 year olds, frantically rearranging their lives from one day to the next.
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.
first post- a letter to friends
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
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