Back to Basics

A laptop with a wireless connection is pretty much the perfect significant other, and these days I can't seem to go anywhere without it. In The People's Republic, mobile coverage is breath-taking, so, instead of fretting that I have too much work to do and can't get away on the weekend, I now just throw the office in my Macpac and walk out the door.

A few weeks back, Ken, Ellen, Bei and I spent the weekend at a Buddhist monastery up in the hills south of here, about 2 and1/2 hours away by bus and then mini-van. There were five elderly nuns, a few old men, and a couple of younger men who turned up for meals and then disappeared. My two friends being of scientific backgrounds sought assiduously to uncover the workings of the place and how the non-nuns fitted into the picture. Did they have families? apparently yes. Did they all live at the monastery? Unclear.

When we asked about staying the night I got the impression that guests were uncommon, let alone three foreigners and a child. But we were absorbed into this relaxed loose 'family' without any fuss. We all felt immediately at home. The atmosphere seemed to pervade us, and the places was big and rambling enough that we naturally dispersed in different directions. Ken disappeared for a walk up in the hills, while Ellen sat at a table on the verandah in the main courtyard reading and marking. Four and a half year old Bei did what she always does in restaurants, guesthouses, shops, homes, anywhere, and took charge of the domestic management as if she'd been there for years.

I initially settled into marking at a little low table in the corner of a deep concrete verandah located in the second smaller courtyard by the kitchen area, which consisted of a sink and a huge wok set in a tiled bench over a fire place. For a while the oldest of the old nuns crouched on the skinny bench beside me and made occasional comments in a local dialect.

Later in the evening I approached the woman whom I'd designated as top-nun. She spoke mandarin, was the only one dressed in a grey Buddhist nun-like outfit and seemed to be the spritual representative for the others in that she lit the candles, insense and did the praying at the main alter. I asked if there was a handy power point I could use. By this time most of the community was in a bedroom off the main verandah gathered around the TV and a bowl of burning coals. And soon I was settled in the room next door on the bed, tapping away very happily. Occasionally I'd look up at a few nuns sitting on the couch outside my doorway. Once I was beckoned to thread a needle for one of them, who wanted to patch up a sleeve on her blue Mao suit.

The photo of me was taken by Ken the next morning after breakfast. I'm expounding how one doesn't need anything else; it's all here. I' m full of golden bread which I'd been plied with further down the verandah at a little fire set in a hollow in the concrete. There's my indispensible insulated Kathmandu coffee plunger/mug on the table. I can hear Ellen and Bei still down at the fire, laughing and talking with the old men who adore watching Bei feed her Barbie doll, while Ellen suggests that maybe Barbie's had enough and Bei should start feeding herself.

In a few months my latest foreign friends will be going back to where they came from. It feels like they haven't long arrived. They will be the second pairof teachers I've farewelled. How odd to be in the position of the one waving goodbye instead of walking away. I'm about to sign on for another semester, maybe even two, which would bring me up to the three year mark...

Now mid-semester exams are almost upon us and I'm worrying about Holden Caulfield. Yesterday afternoon - as is more and more often the case these days - I stood in front of my class, perplexed. We'd just read a scathing description of the boys at his elite prep school who were just studying so they could get money to buy a stupid Cadillac.

Aaagh. How to generate some sympathy for this alienated rich kid from Manhatten who distains the opportunities his birth has afforded him? To these students, of course you go to university in order to get a good job so you can buy things, maybe even a car if you do very well. Why else would you? If I broach the possibility of following one's passions or dreams, they can play with it as a game, but draw a sharp distinction with real-life. 'Normally' I'd despise an outlook that sees education as simply a means to an end. But here and now I actually feel a bit sheepish, even respectful, before their very pragmatic aspirations, and their intense loyalty to the parents who work so hard to keep them at university.

How can I draw on and explore this discrepency? How can I give the experiences of these students relavence in this class and bring them into the picture? I want to come up with a dynamic, creative exercise... but I can't think of anything and am utterly frustrated with myself.

Maybe tomorrow I'll have a flash of genius...

The Grapes of Wrath

Steinbeck writes during a time where the land was undergoing a violent transition from small farm holdings on which families eked out a living, to large, commercial, technologically advanced operations which leached the land of nutrients with repeated cashcrops like cotton, and then when it was no good for anything else, subdivided much of it into suburbs.

The modern, gleaming, tractor which methodically punches seeds into the ground is an iron monster 'raping methodically, raping without passion'. Its driver, a robotic extension of the machine he operates, 'could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the land as it smelled: his feet did not stamp the clods or feel the warmth and power of the earth. He sat on an iron seat and stepped on iron pedals...The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.' (ch. 5, Grapes of Wrath)

My students are at first innocently perplexed that the description of the tractor driver's lunch in the story is intended to be derogatory. How could he not 'relish' his white bread sandwiches wapped in waxed paper, the 'spam' and 'pie branded like an engine part'? Surely this is a delicious and privileged lunch? I pause, looking over their faces, before attempting to defend my understanding of Steinbeck's intent. And in that pause I feel my otherness, and I sense the harsh, peasant life that snaps at their parents heels, and from which consequently those parents have strived to free these - their children.

Often the culture gap is also a time warp. I grew up in the '50s when this same adulation of modernity which I see now before me, was at its peak, when parents, still haunted by the depression of their childhood, embraced TV dinners and instant cake mixes as fashionable and time saving advancements.

Soon I'll walk down to the market and buy bokchoi, broccoli, mint, lotus root and aubergine. The brown wrinkled hands that place these dripping purchases in mine, will most likely also have picked and washed them this morning. My students smile indulgently if they happen upon me returning home wearing my Naxi cane backpac which I have adopted as the most practical way to transport my produce.

Progress. Nick's ardent lines give it such a rosy hue:

Out of sorrow empires have been built

Out of longing great wonders have been willed.

I've actually misquoted the great man. It should be, " out of sorrowin' towns..." but you have to admit my take is an improvement.

(Nick Cave; 'Are you the one that I've been waiting for' from 'The Boatman's Call.')

Weddings, Parties, Anything

Her cleavage was astounding. It had grown a good three inches. She herself was equally unrecognisable in a face as white as the hue of her bridal gown which adopted Western rather than Chinese tradition. Bride and groom stood side by side at the door offering sweets and cigarettes. Rising to the occasion, I took one of each, anticipating that both nicotine and sugar hits might come in handy in the imminent future.

I was very pleased to be invitied, but I do tend to become skittish when locked into any kind of remotely official occasion that it might not be possible to escape from at whim. I wasn't too worried though, as I knew that Chinese weddings are generally far more no-nonsense, pay, eat and run affairs, than their Western equivalents. Still, I took some long, rasping drags on that high nicotine cancer-stick just to be on the safe side. The non smoker's head rush is truly a thing of beauty.

As we were about to pass from the vast hotel foyer into the equally vast banquet hall, an officious member of the wedding party asked us briskly for our (red) envelopes. She immediately tore each one open, recorded names, and counted the money. There was the distinct implication that it was these little envelopes, and not the invitation, that gained us entry, but I found the pragmatism of that upfront approach strangely appealing, especially at a big fancy wedding which is often so couched in all sentiments fake.

Once inside, scanning the sea of peopled round tables, it seemed that every staff member of the university had been invitied. The foreign teachers of course were hearded together at one table so no one would have the burden of having to make conversation with them. I sank into the last empty seat, and after that it was a blurr of good food. This was actually their third wedding - the first was in her home town, the second in his, and now the third, in theirs - so bride and groom moved comfortably within their parts, and clothes. How daunting would it be to divorce after a three wedding marriage? I wondered.

After some speedy speeches and lethal baijiu toasts with guests at every table , the happy couple proceeded to dismantle her 3 foot by 3 foot bouquet of lilies and thorny, fat red roses. Both of them fired single stems like lethal darts into the crowd. There was quite a flurry to clutch them, as each lucky recipient would consequently be married within 6 months of possession. Interestingly, roses which seemed set on a course in my direction would suddenly veer away just before hitting their inanimate target, as if bouncing off an invisible force field.

I find long good byes harrowing, and thus at the earliest acceptable point in the proceedings, I saw my moment and was gone. Outside, everything was reassuringly normal. It was daytime, a sunny saturday afternoon. I was back at the wheel of my life, cruising along a buzzing Chinese street, breathing the mountain air, hearing the horns and conversation, brushing against people. 'Free, free, free', in the criminal words of Kate Chopin's Louise.

Sequences

(photo by Ken Driese from his bathroom window)

It's 7am on a blustery morning. The plastic taped to my wooden lattice windows downstairs is flapping. The sky is a dark, thick, smudgy indigo as I peer out of my upstairs glassed bedroom over the rooftops at the hills silhouetted in the distance.
My muscles are full of fresh aches from the previous night's Tae Qwon Do session. Walking home from class, jubilant as usual after all the kicking and shouting, I'd learn't, 'will the pain ever go away' in Chinese, and taught the same phrase in english to my friend Chen Hui. In between, we'd practised parts of sequences, punching the air and saying 'wo ai tai qwian dao!' (i love tae qwan do).

I lumber down the steep skinny dusty staircase to a small alcove where I flick on my electric teapot. After heating a circle of bread over the element (a clay base supporting a wire-coil), I return upstairs with my coffee and toast, and open the door onto the rooftop courtyard. The sky is growing light as I put my breakfast down on the wall and climb up onto a ledge, grasping the edge of the roof, then swinging out on the clothesline at an angle which enables me to get a view around the neighbour's house to see what the mountain (Yu Long Xue Sahan) is doing. Transplendant as usual. Soon the summer rains will come and it might not be visible for weeks at a time.

Mostly, that's what it's like living here.
The water will glisten in the canal as I walk my cobble-stoned path to the bustop on a day when I have a 10 am class. Someone will be washing a pig's leg, and further upstream another person will be thwacking clothes on the stones. Any spare patches of dirt along my way are planted out in neat rows of vegetables. When I get near the shops, the canal becomes wider and scores of goldfish fight the current, swimming energetically just to stay stationary. I might briefly wonder why they bother putting all that effort in, why they don't just let themselves be whisked away, as I might if I were a goldfish. Then my thoughts will return to the lesson I'm about to give.

But there are other times. They appear out of nowhere. When I will arrive home and it's late and I'm tired and I take out the key to a small padlock which links the two brass rings on my door, sometimes - those times - I'll stop, and lean my cheek against the mudbrick wall where the white wash has worn away, and push my skin into the gravel so I can feel it, and whisper melodramatically into the silence, 'I'll never learn Chinese, all my friendships are superficial, and I'll never fit in.'
Even as I say it, another, less indulgent voice in my head responds, 'fit in? fit in? Is that what you came to China for, to try and fit in? Are you crazy?'