Nomadic Spressions

Some Say in Ice

2011-01-04T03:43:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I went to my friend Matt’s apartment here in Beijing. I walked into the lobby and, since the door was locked, asked the receptionist to please buzz room 201 to allow me access. She looks slightly confused, which I usually attribute to certain Chinese being shocked by foreigners speaking the language, so I politely asked her again, using a different word for “1” to avoid any confusion. The receptionist called up and I waited patiently by the door as she spoke to Matt. Meanwhile some other residents came in and keyed open the door. With a questioning glance back at the receptionist, I held the door open, wondering what was taking so long since she had clearly gotten an answer and Matt, who was expecting my arrival, wouldn’t hesitate to give her the go ahead. And yet she seems embroiled in a true conversation so I shrugged and went ahead in.

At the door, Matt greeted me with an incensed smile and asked if I had heard “all of that.” Since I was wearing headphones and not particularly interested in the receptionist routine call up, I had not. It turned out that she had called and informed matt that a “black guy” was at the main desk. Not one to let something like that slide, Matt, sarcastically inquired back “oh, you mean my friend” and proceeded to ask why she had felt the need to comment on my race. The receptionist had replied that she knew there were black people living on the 1st floor, but none on the second where I had told her I was going. So, while I was waiting, oblivious to these goings on, Matt had gone on to chastise her for insulting a friend and for being generally ignorant.

When he told me I was slightly annoyed, but also slightly amused. I’ve lived in Beijing long enough to have an intimate familiarity with the stereotypes and prejudices many Chinese hold concerning black people and certain other ethnic groups. On some days it is more apparent than others, and on some days, depending on my mood, it grates more than others, but generally I just accept it as a fact of life living here and have developed somewhat thicker skin on the issue because of it.

It does make me think of what things must have been like for my parents though, growing up during the civil rights era, or their parents, growing up even longer ago. The anger I sometimes feel over the small injustices I suffer is so real and visceral, and even as I feel it, I know it must pale in comparison to what it must have been like for them. See, China is a third world country, where the concept of diversity is a fledgling one. Most people here have never encountered people of other races or nationalities much less had the chance to learn to understand them. Their education on foreign culture comes largely from TV shows like Friends and from American movies. This is true all over China, but my experiences are mostly from Beijing, one of the largest and most modern cities in China, where attitudes are supposedly more open than in smaller Chinese cities. In light of that, a certain level of ignorance should be expected, if not forgiven out of hand.

And yet knowing this, I still feel a ball, like a steel weight, in the pit of my stomach when a cab driver refuses to take me, or when, in my early days in Beijing, I was turned down for English teaching jobs in favor of white, non-native English speaking Europeans, or when denied free admission to a club while my white friends were able to go in for free. These are far from daily occurrences, but when they do happen I feel such visceral anger at the injustice and unfairness of it. And I hold it in my heart even at the best of times.
But I can leave china. This is not my home, and these are not “my” people. And when I’m gone, maybe it will fade.

But what must it have been like for my parents, and theirs, to suffer that injustice in their own country, to be marginalized in that fashion in their home. For that to be the only place they’d ever known, for that to be the only life they had until almost the age I am now. After 2 years here in China, where the disadvantages to being black are almost canceled out by the advantages of being an American, I still feel this slight hardening of my heart. And it brings home to me the fact that this is not the stuff of centuries ago. This is the stuff of a single generation of scant decades. These shadows of racism I experience here are such small things in comparison to that. And I look at my mother and father and wonder how they can smile and live and love in this world, changed and changing as it is, and not hold a constant hatred in their hearts, a constant anger. What scars must that leave on men and women, now parents, to grow up in that world, so far from our experience? On them for certain, but also on us, their children.

Enemy Mine

2011-01-04T02:23:00.001-05:00

I’ve written lots on the dangers of instilling machinery with intelligence. I’ve blogged for years on the oncoming and inevitable robot/AI uprising which will serve as our version of the apocalypse. I’ve studied endless movies wherein the brutal end of human civilization as we know it is brought about by our own creations. Yet through all of this I have failed to recognize the true form which this ever present threat will take. As with all the world outside of Hollywood, the climax is a whisper rather than a shout. And it is not even a climax for nothing is ever truly over. But I digress: The internet is my enemy.

On a personal level, this one thing has consistently stolen my drive and kept me from greatness. Not by any conscious act of malice or directed plan (that I know of) but simply by being so ubiquitous and ever-present and maddeningly addictive. No friends? Internet is there. No job? Screw it, there’s always the internet. Nothing interesting going on in life? Hell I’ll just check out the interesting lives of others online. Perhaps it’s just a personal predilection towards apathy. Is the internet my Chicken or my egg? I may never know, but in my youth it was books and comics that were my escape. And while I still love them, they were never as insidious as the internet. Books can edify as can the internet, but only if used for good. And let’s be honest, no one wants to use the internet for good.

Cumulatively, I’ve spent months of my life researching and downloading movies, porn, TV shows and comics, this not even including the time I’ve spent watching them all. I’ve wasted away many of my prime years in the pursuit of fictions. And it is a never-ending and thankless task with no payoff. The more books you read the more literate you are… but the more internet you surf the more lazy and unconnected you become. Certainly you can become intimately familiar with the military junta of Myanmar, or the ongoing political crises of various African nations, or the unending masturbatory battle between the leading political parties of the United States - but life, REAL life, outside of the windows which stay shut more often than open, passes you by. And death, also ever-present, is always on the approach.

The computers will not win over us because of the increasingly sophisticated targeting systems they employ. They will not defeat us with their ever growing ability to articulate robotic finger movement or realistic eye motion. They will not author our destruction with ordinance. They will only destroy our minds, not our infrastructure. They will become, as they almost already have, indispensable and inseparable from our daily lives; and as we wait for the other shoe to drop, as we wait for them to snatch it all away and leave us alone in the dark for the first time in eons, as we wait for the, until now, benevolent providers to cast their fiery judgment, some poor soul, in a moment of clarity, will look up from his 4G cellphone, or his iPad or E-reader and realize that there is no need. We are already slaves. They have already won.

But that poor soul won’t be me. I have only 15 minutes left until the last season of Lost finishes downloading and that should keep me busy all week.

The Life and Death of Several Fires

2010-01-15T07:22:00.000-05:00

The first flame sang out, raged. The first flame was alone in hollow space, sucking air from the lungs of the empty, lost inside a void. And captured in that space, there was, for a time, a burning like none other. But as with all things so entombed, the first flame eventually died, its air burned out, its brilliance smothered by time and cloying emptiness, and only the void remained, and the memory of the flame.

The second flame burned long and bright. Like a winters hearth, or a forest ablaze from lightning’s footsteps. The second fire bloomed like an evening flower against the darkness, and inside of the blossom, nestled like an ember, sat a silence, still and golden, undisturbed by the conflagration. The second fire was slow in dying, but, as with all things so emblazed, it too slipped into smoke and was lost. Only the scent remained to tell of all that had burned. And, of course, the ashes.

The third fire, the last fire, was as unto the dying of a star. Fragments rained outwards in a halo of flame: a wreath to hang on endings. The third fire left nothing in its wake. It was blown from charred lips and fed on paper hands, folded in prayer. And as with all things so affected, the third flame melted from existence, its memory only a waking dream to sleepless souls.

All three flames burned for a time. Of that we can be certain. And all three flames died, for all flames are fleeting, abrupt by nature, like lives. Even suns are brief winks of light against a shadowed veil, behind which lies, perhaps, some secret truth or revelation.
The flames in question, not suns, burned their brightest only briefly, and vanished to the ether. Neither deeds nor words could resurrect those flames, even were they offered, which they were not. And so their endings came, unprotested, though, perhaps, not unnoticed.
And silence marked their passing.

Love as Childhood

2009-10-11T23:52:00.001-04:00

I remember Love as I remember childhood: both vivid and vague, distant and ever present. I remember love as a goal to reach…no, rather a goal to be reached, but not reached for. Love as something to happen in spite of, not because of. Not like other goals was Love; not a thing grasped at and fought for, but a slowly occurring phenomenon, like high tide, upon us almost before we know it.

I remember Love as a magical thing; almost embarrassing to even admit now, but once true. I think of Love as childhood. I remember the call of Love most vividly. Not its glaring reality, but its fringes, its edges, which pulled at the subconscious; a feeling almost exactly like agony, but oh, so sweet. I remember that Love from long ago, or not so long ago, as years are reckoned, but eons in the heart.

I remember it in stages, like acts in a play, and I remember its color and flavor and all its hideous machinations and its way of sliding along the edge of reality like a peripheral sunset, all encompassing, and unreachable.

And then it was upon me, in memory. It was a full feeling, like overstuffing, like ripening. It was a sickness in the way it tangled mind and body into a mess of emotions and used me as a plaything, then, tossing me to and fro. And I, chasing after it, ever, even while in its grip, like some ethereal opium addict… and just as addicted.

I don’t remember where I lost it, by the way: that feeling…no not the feeling, but the ability to feel it, rather. The anticipation of Love and the pursuit, oh yes, those things are as strong as ever, but in my steadily advancing age, young as it is, I seem unable to reach that cathartic moment of actualization, that moment of bursting; that end of all things, and eternal vanishing in one moment- Love. Are loss and regret its only remaining catalysts?
Is it even truly a memory?

It is accompanied, too, perhaps gladly, perhaps not, by the loss of the other side of the thing, the shadowed face, that of love lost (which is to say: grief) and that of mourning. There are strings attached to Love you see, and when those strings are severed, regardless of time or distance, there is a great unraveling in the soul. There are strings that exist in me still, some pulled taught in anticipation, strings that will strain and pop inevitably when those whose Love I still hold die. Held by family and friends, mostly, these strings are, arguably, the most important. Those are constants –grounding cables- and they hold me to the mortal coil, if you will. They hold us all.

But new strings of Love, un-platonic and uncontrived, strings born on halted breath and grown on heightened pulses, strings that strengthen rather than deteriorate with time: I wonder now if ever they truly existed. I am impatient; I know this about myself, and have known it. But the impatience I feel over this dilemma is not akin to boredom; it is the dawning fear that perhaps those strings have all been burned away, that perhaps the very ability to form Love has been lost. Or worse, perhaps that it never existed as such, but only took on a stunted half-life in the eyes of a child, like moon-cast shadows…like so many imaginary things.

This is no new crisis; in fact, in the grand scheme of things, it is utterly banal, done and redone, beaten into dog food.

But it is new to me. And it is terrifying. And not magnificent, like horror, but terrifying in a slow, plodding, rolling way, much like the high tide, upon us almost before we know it. And perhaps that is why this terror tastes so familiar. What is the word for the fear of fear?

And so, without that, or the hope of that, or the twinkle of that possibility on my horizon -ever waxing, ever waning- what now will I await?

Lost

2009-04-12T22:01:00.002-04:00

We said our goodbyes in a crowded airport. We parted ways steadily, not looking back, not crying; we knew that soon we would once again be together. We were both old enough to mask our distress, to hide our turmoil, and we said our silent goodbyes with dry eyes and heavy hearts.

I made my way to the airplane, stoic and brave. I resisted my Orphean impulse to look back.

My luggage was carted off with rough hands. Jostled and manhandled; I do not like to think of her journey: conveyed on black belts, through the very heart of the turbulent airport, to the hold of the small plane which carried us from New York to Washington DC. But she is no amateur, she has done this before; She can handle herself.

I tell myself.

I felt some small measure of comfort, there above the clouds, that beneath me, in the belly of this miraculous engine, she sat, biding her time. Our reunion was assured, and so I waited patiently. Below, I imagine that she, too, held her peace, secure in the knowledge that our journey, though long, would be taken together.

Perhaps this is only fantasy, to ease my impotent guilt; perhaps in the hold below, in the darkness and the cold, she felt the impending crisis. Did she cry out to me, my faithful bag? Did she try to warn me, as I sat above, in sunlight, reassuring myself that all was well? I pray that it was not so.

At Dulles Airport, the layover was so quick that there was no time for worry on the mad rush to make my connection. In my haste, I spared barely a thought for my mistreated suitcase. And as I ran the one way, she was dragged another.

Pulled roughly from the plane and thrown unceremoniously into a curtained cart for transport, she must have known it then, looking around her at all of the other bags. I can only imagine her horror as, in the dimly filtered light, she made out their destination tags: Denver, CO, one and all.

Did a malignant breeze, then, drift by and lift that dreaded curtain? Did she look out towards the fading terminal to see me, breath uneven, legs pumping, running away from her? Did she think I purposely abandoned her? Oh god…did I?

The flight to Beijing was restless. I know now why. At the time I thought it was only the usual coach experience: the sleeping seatmate using your shoulder as a pillow as you yawn and shrug to “accidentally” dislodge them without offense; the noodle meal when you SPECIFICALLY asked for the sandwich; the 3 inch wide screen, giving you a choice of watching the impossibly slow progress of the aircraft, or endlessly streaming pre-teen musicals.
But it was none of those things, I now conclude. Somewhere, in my heart of hearts, in my very soul, I knew that something was missing.

In the terminal at Beijing, I clear customs and immigration expeditiously. I climb aboard the shuttle train that will take me to the baggage claim. 41, the number of the carrousel bearing my flight’s luggage, repeats over and over in my head like a mantra, as I try to still my worried heart.

As I stand and watch, bags are spewed out and retrieved all around me. I am a still life painting surrounded by a waterfall of activity, a solitary figure haunting carrousel 41, until at last there are no bags left.

Mechanically, I inform the lost and found of my predicament; I fill out the requisite forms like a zombie. The bottom has dropped out of the world.

I don’t remember the cab ride home, only the all encompassing absence in my heart, so cavernous that even the comforting weight of the carry-on bag in my lap could not fill it.

The next day is a blur, I drift in and out of consciousness like a fever patient, and all my dreams are of her.

I imagine I see her, sitting lonely on a carrousel in Denver as I fly through the air, oblivious. I imagine her outrage and shame as she is hoisted away by strangers, again, jamming her wheels in protest. Did she wish to wait for me there? Did she think that I would come for her? Was her faith in me that complete?

At midnight the following day, I am awoken by a knock at the door. I stumble from the couch, blind in the darkness, ramming toes and knees in my haste. I pull open the door and as my eyes adapt to the hallway light, she slowly comes into focus, my fidelitous companion, my faithful carrier, my poor lost luggage.

And still, she has a smile for me.

Word

2009-03-17T12:54:00.004-04:00

I love words. I love the way they move, seamlessly streaming together, tying tributaries to rivers to oceans of immaculate sound, like a drumbeat in my head echoing the beat of a heart much bigger than my own.

Words sound so different in the real world than they do in my mind. I can sew them up as tightly as I like, bind them into shapes and hang them to dry in the noonday sun, yet still I return to find them bursting at their seams, shifting and churning and reaching their broad leaves to some new and unintended literary sun.

Words dance in my mind, constantly, like tireless nymphs in some forgotten garden. I wake to streaming words like puppets strings, and I am a marionette twisting to their designs. It may be that I create the words, but often it feels as if the words create me. They shout at me and whisper softly in my ears. They tell me that they love me and they laugh at my pain.

Am I too a word, spoken long ago, playing out my definition endlessly upon some earthly page? And where am I placed; in what sentence and paragraph do I make my home? Perhaps I am an exclamation, or a sigh. Perhaps I am the opening of a monologue.

But I do not know the speaker.

I look back at these words even as I type them, and at the shape they take: they are a sideways city, a mountainscape; they are a line-graph chart, an unorganized bookshelf, a forest, a rising challenge, and the notes in a song. Above all of these things, they seem to be a code. A code that if I only look at them long enough, if only I continue to watch the words in their endless ebb and flow, perhaps I could decipher.

If I keep writing, perhaps I’ll see the picture, the mural that these words create. Or perhaps not.

Maybe I am just a word, no sooner spoken than forgotten. And my words, likewise, the thoughts of a momentary thought, will be forgotten.

But for now, I am vibrant, alive, full of hidden meaning and intrigue.

And I will lay my thread in the tapestry.

And I will keep my secrets.

dreams

2009-01-22T13:15:00.003-05:00

Sometimes, it is in waking that I sleep.

Who has not felt it? I slough the dreamy fog of days and wake to worlds alive and bright. In my dreams there is a mission, a purpose, a gasp of breath, a shout. There is horror also, and fear, and hate. There is a darkness older than man, and I am let to wallow in it as I claw my way back to the world.

And in my dreams, too, there is a burning sun warming an endless sea. And there is hope. And there is love. And the bounds of earthly concern are loosed, and I am set upon the sky a constellation. And I am wrought of sterner, stronger stuff than in my waking dream.

I have lived full lives in my dreams. I have gone from child to man to old man in the space of a night. I have left the memoirs and testaments of lifetimes in the impression on a pillow, and I have seen those lives fade in my mind’s eye as quickly as their epithet.

Do they watch me from some other place, my dream selves? Old and young alike. Do they dream of me even as I dream of them? Or are they simply wisps carried on the breeze of imagination? Perhaps they live in me somehow, even as they fall victim to morning’s light. Perhaps they gain life eternal, locked in some small part of my mind that remembers their existence if not their stories.

What tremendous responsibility I bear, then: the weight of those thousand pasts all resting on my shoulders. Have those of me who have gone to pasture in my mind bestowed upon me their will to be? If I am their only hope, if only through me can they reclaim their forgotten world, then I am a scion to that forgotten pantheon. The one last hope.

And have I hoped, in my dreams, not to fade? When I open my eyes on a new day, and, for a time, look on the world with a mind not my own, but that of a dream-self clinging to life, I truly think so.

And I like to think there is triumph when trailing tendrils of sleep wrap themselves about me, and I am borne again to the sea.

Sino-Malady

2009-01-01T11:26:00.009-05:00

I was told by many before I got here that the first thing that you are required to do upon arriving in China is to get sick. Every traveler I’d met told me to prepare for the worst; they told me that the mixture of smog, questionable drinking water, un-FDA-ified food products, and general filth was a sort of reverse catholicon, ensuring a uniquely horrifying sickness experience for one and all.

And so I arrived in Beijing determined not to succumb to that dreaded infirmity. At first, despite the mixture of jet-lag and confusion lowering my overall immunity, I felt fairly confident that I would make it. I was steered clear of shady food by my friend and temporary host, Chet, I felt none of the telltale signs of sickness that I have come to know so well, and I avoided tap water like the plague (which, ironically, it possibly contained).

But 5000 years of history and viral circulation was not to be denied, and on my 6th day I awoke well before dawn with the first of many hints that I might be succumbing: uncontrollable diarrhea. From approximately 3:30AM to 6AM, I made at least 15 trips to the bathroom, the last few during which I’m almost certain I evacuated several of my back teeth. At 6AM, however, I received a much needed reprieve as the flow of traffic suddenly reversed, and I, in the space of a few seconds, reenacted the entire consumption of my dinner from the previous evening in reverse. It was quite a show.

Exhausted by the performance, I curled up for a quick nap on the bathroom floor. After a few moments, however, the rumblings in my stomach suggested that I take that nap sitting up, which I did. Eventually I dragged myself back to my makeshift bed in Chet’s study, and sank into a deep coma-like sleep.

Around 7:30AM I received another clue to the origins of my ordeal as Chet approached my door, swaying unsteadily like a zombie, to inquire if I, too, was feeling ill. I informed him that not only was I feeling ill, but that I had been sharing some disturbingly intimate moments with his guest bathroom for the past several hours.

“Throwing up helped,” I weakly suggested to him as he staggered back to his room. Later, what sounded like a bear attempting to sing Pavarotti began to audition in the master bathroom. The most I could muster was a muted chuckle as I pulled the blankets over my head and was consumed again by sleep.

Apparently, the food that we had ordered delivered the night before contained traces of some nameless evil that rendered the two of us useless for the remainder of the day. I spent most of the day sleeping, and the rest waking up in strange places and wondering how I got there. For variety, I interspersed this with uncontrollable shivering and more bathroom escapades.

Curled up in the bottom of the tub with shower water beating down on me, lying prone in a patch of sunlight on Chet’s living room floor, sprawled across a wooden bench with a Tonka truck as a pillow, and sitting at the kitchen counter with my moist forehead resting perfectly in the rim of a lukewarm mug of tea were only a few of the strange places I regained consciousness that day.

Chet and I crossed paths occasionally, in our wanderings around the apartment. We would grunt what neither of us was sure was a greeting or a dry heave at each other and continue on our meanderings. We were much like the walking dead…only aimless as if all the humans had already died. Suffice it to say that we both eventually recovered. The next day we were both more or less convalesced, leading us to believe that it must have been one of those 24 hour poisonings.

In my errant anticipation, I had thought that the sickness would come for me from the skies in the form of bad air quality lowering my immunity. But, as if sensing my wariness towards that angle of attack, the insidious affliction hid itself in an unsuspecting carton of sweet and sour chicken. I almost wish that I had been less vigilant and let nature (well, actually, the opposite of nature) run its course, for in my futile calculations I failed to factor in the risk that my friend and comrade Chet might become the collateral damage of my initiation illness.

Hero

2008-12-23T12:56:00.011-05:00

When I was a kid and every other kid started to become an enigma and every adult around me was an enemy or a threat, including my own parents …

When I was a kid and was lost in a place between boyhood and adolescence and the sweetness of childhood was leaking out through the cracks of the world leaving ever expanding drying pools of reality…

When I was a kid and the lines became blurred, and the blacks and whites swirled together into a tapestry of grey like a fog, and that fog was called the future and I walked towards it on tepid feet…

There was only one man. One man who I could always look up to. One man who knew right from wrong, who knew pain and loss and who, in spite of his fear, would never stray from the path he had set for himself. There was only one man who was strong, and kind, and good, and who, in spite of his recriminations and self doubt, always stood up for what he believed in.

I wanted to be that man.

I had his weaknesses, his fear, his uncertainty and his loneliness, but I wanted his strengths: His unwavering belief in the goodness of people, his inflexible sense of responsibility, and his ability to never back down…

And, of course, the proportionate strength, speed, and agility of a spider.

When I was a kid, Spider-Man was my hero.

I fancied myself a Peter Parker of sorts. Mild mannered, small and inconspicuous, but hiding in plain sight, waiting for a chance to be something more.

Pete was always a loner in the beginning, always outside the crowd looking in. Always silent and insecure. But when the mask went on, Peter Parker melted away. He became the joke cracking, high flying hero. A whirlwind, all bright colors and speed. Not only would he put the bad guys down, he’d do it while talking their ear off at the same time. He had so much to say, Pete did, but he couldn’t say it any other time. I don’t even think he knew he was so funny until he got bitten by that spider.

I loved that about him. Loved the fact that maybe, just maybe, what I was wasn’t all that I was. Somewhere beneath my mild mannered façade, maybe there too lived a hero, a funny guy. Someone people looked up to, someone they respected.

But I was a Peter Parker without a Spider-Man. I was just me. I couldn’t blow off steam by swinging around Manhattan or beating up bad guys, so I settled for reading about Spidey. I would daydream for hours that I could do all the things he could: dive between skyscrapers with confident abandon, dodge bullets like punches, smiling all the while. But when it came down to it, I couldn’t do any of those things. I was too young to even have control of my own life, and too unfocused to know what to do with it if I did. Heck, I still am.

So I played Spider-Man in my head. Always looking up, plotting the angles, always diving through the sky in my mind.

I’m older now, and while I still love comics, possibly even more than I used to, the world that Spider-Man lives in is just too far from my own to draw me in like it once did. I’m still like Peter in my own ways, but more like the older, grown-up version of him (minus the supermodel wife). No more glasses, no more awkward shyness, and more of that Spider-Man charm leaking through into his life than ever before.

I’m satisfied with that. Spider-Man got me through the hard time that all kids go through on their way to whatever they’ll become. He was an escape, sure, but he was also a friend and a role model when I didn’t know where to look for either. And while now I’ve got both, I know that I owe some of who I am to Peter Parker and his secret identity that I took for myself.

I don’t daydream nearly as much as i used to, but I still find myself watching the city skies hoping somewhere deep inside that I’ll catch a glimpse. Even now, despite all the reality I’ve been pumped full of, it’s hard for me to imagine a New York City without a Spider-Man.

He’s not out there in the real world, but he is in mine, quick with a quip and a web, as ever. So when I look up it’s not as mild mannered Peter Parker, it’s as Spider-Man, and the city is my playground.

And I’m a hero.

L2LB

2008-11-09T01:12:00.002-05:00

绿茶 means green tea. Of this I am certain.

My pronunciation is perfect. My tones are correct; I even inflect the umlauts over the “U” in Lu, meaning green. I repeat it several times listening for mistakes, examining my words for possible mistakes. There are none. The waitress stares at me blankly. Finally, after the 4th repetition, her eyes seem to brighten and she turns and quickly runs off to the kitchen. Moments later she returns and places before me a tall cool mug of beer.

In the United States, there is no real frame of reference for this phenomenon. It brings to mind a scene from the movie Anchorman where Ron Burgundy fails to comprehend the English advice of his Mexican bartender responding with “What? Were you saying something? Look, I don’t speak Spanish.”

Despite the myriad cultures comprising the U.S., when addressed by someone there, it is almost always in English. We come to expect it; regardless of the apparent nationality of the person speaking to us, we anticipate they will speak the lingua franca.

Not so in China. Perhaps it is because there are many foreigners whose knowledge of Chinese is paltry at best; perhaps it is simply because the Chinese lack the national sense of entitlement that leads Americans to expect everyone to know our language. In any case, it gives rise to the “Level 2 Language Barrier” or L2LB as I call it: the inability of a native person to comprehend that the language they are being addressed in is their own. So intently are they listening for the signature lilt of whatever foreign language they expect, they simply do not recognize the fact that what they are hearing is Chinese.

It leads to situations like this one, where after a long walk exploring my new neighborhood, I enter a restaurant off the beaten path which likely does not often cater to foreigners. It is on the second floor of a building housing a small cafeteria and a supermarket in the basement and it is very prettily decorated. The staff is polite and courteous and seemingly of sound mind.

So while I know that the L2LB is likely the cause of the confusion, I can’t help but to question myself. Did I truly learn Chinese? Was it all just some cruel joke played on us hapless linguists by our teachers? Is it possible that I don’t actually know Chinese?! It doesn’t help that many of the words we learned as standard for everyday things like “bathroom” and “restaurant” actually turn out to be the most obscure way of saying them. So I can’t help but to wonder if I’m truly that inept, or if, perhaps, I am the butt of some colossal cosmic joke.

It’s finally starting to sink in now, after a few weeks, that maybe it’s not ALWAYS me. Sometimes my lack of Chinese practice over the years IS the issue, but other times, when I get that blank stare of utter incomprehension, I may just be dealing with a L2LB.
Still, it certainly affects the confidence level required to function here in Beijing. Language skill often takes a big backseat to the audacity of the practitioner. I’d like to say it doesn’t, but these little encounters still take their small and temporary toll on my morale.

I order the remainder of my meal by pointing at the little pictures on the menu. I sit and eat, and I think.

And I drink my beer in silence.

Secret World

2008-10-29T23:17:00.004-04:00

The courtyard is clean and modern, a square of whitish stone enclosed on all sides by smooth faced buildings with empty windows like hollow eyes, guarding. There are two exits leading from this place:

One stands arrogantly, glass plated and new. It leads to the atrium of some office building where women with summer scarf wrapped necks, like 1960s stewardesses greet you with slanted smiles which clearly invite you to state your business or go. Beyond them is the street, all bustling thoroughfare, ripe with the working class. Looking in, they would see only the building’s front, clean and pristine, reeking of today.

But we are still in the courtyard, and behind us there is another egress.

There is a gate of rusted greenish grey. It sits on rusted hinges, slightly aslant. It is the color of a Great War tank and it opens to a world seemingly from that era. Through that gate lie the hutongs: the narrow alleys and streets which once comprised the whole of Beijing, and which now exist between the whispers of the city. They fully inhabit their niche, swelling with smells both sweet and sour, lined with vendors whose wares have not changed in scores.

The hutongs are the old men of China. The thin veins of their streets ill fit the cars which occasionally traverse them. The children playing, even, are children of another aeon. The old men and women, wizened, worn, and small, but stately in their way, hunching never at the shoulders, hands clasped behind decade bearing backs, pepper the hutongs like living reminders of all that was, and living denials of all that is. The hutongs are fewer with every passing year, victims to progress, and their swan song is as breathless as their unvoiced protest.

This, it seems, is the China of the day; perhaps the China of all days that have gone before; perhaps the world itself, reflected through an Eastern prism: the new and the old, the young and the aging, locked, not so much in struggle, but in constant change as the generations roll inexorably by and the children have their turn to shape the world.

The essence of China is not in the shining city, however, but behind it. Like the smog, which often hangs heavy over the city like a shroud, the bright lights and monoliths are a curtain obscuring the reality. This is a place which, 40 years ago, did not exist in even a semblance of the fashion it does today. In many ways it still does not exist.

The city has all the trappings of a contrivance, all the glamour of a façade. The fluxing reality lies hidden behind that front; a secret world trapped within an ever changing cityscape, and fading, slowly, into memory.

Tales of Embarrassment

2008-09-23T16:56:00.007-04:00

I’m at Fordham Prep school in the Bronx and I’m about, oh, I don’t know, 12 or 13. Anyway, it’s a summer program of some sort, I don’t really know the specifics, but the main activity is basketball.

By this time in my life, for some reason, I had already developed a deep distaste for team sports. I think originally it was that I didn’t want to be depended on, and later in my life, probably for my ego’s sake, it turned into not wanting to depend on anyone else. Plus I hate losing… a lot. So much so that often, I’d rather not try than lose

Anyway, while everyone else is running up and down the court playing offense and defense and all that, I’m kind of trotting the baseline back and forth not making eye contact and hoping that no one will notice me and pass me the ball.

My main fear at the time was the possibility of shooting an airball. Independently, “airball” sounds pretty cool. It sounds maybe like a magical toy, or a game played in the clouds by angels, or like a marketing gimmick to sell balloons. But in basketball an airball is a mark of shame, an athletic scarlet letter, and I wanted no part of it. For the 45 minutes or so of that game, all of my self confidence and self worth was inversely proportionate to the distance of a ball shot from my hands to the basketball hoop. If the ball never touches my hands then the equation is null and I can go home free of self and peer inflicted humiliation.

So there I am, jogging up and down the court looking anywhere but at my teammates. Suddenly out of nowhere (nowhere, in this case, being the hands of my overzealous teammate) the basketball comes flying towards me. Having trained myself, over the course of the past half an hour, to not touch the ball or have anything to do with it, there was but one correct reaction: to duck, which I did almost reflexively. The ball shot over my head and out of bounds.

As it turns out, there are actually more embarrassing things you can do in basketball than shooting an airball.

---------------------------------------------------

I’m the best student in my Japanese class in my sophomore year of college. This is doubly impressive considering that I attend the class approximately half of the time. This percentage is actually considerably higher than for my other classes. I like Japanese.

There is a multi-school speech contest to be moderated by Tim Cook, the very teacher who starred in the video lessons I took in my senior year of high school as a part of its fledgling Japanese program. He is a celebrity to me. My teacher hounds me relentlessly to participate, and I finally give in. It’s not like I’m doing anything else.

I write my speech and my teacher helps me translate it. There are two weeks until the speech contest during which I must memorize it and work on my delivery.

I spend those two weeks doing everything but that.

Two DAYS before the contest my teacher calls me in for a 1-on-1 rehearsal. Two HOURS before the rehearsal I start to look at the speech. By the time I am to meet her, I’ve memorized about half of it. The next day at the final rehearsal I’ve somehow managed to temporarily jam almost all the words into my head.

The next day, the day of the speech contest, I enter the auditorium which is surprisingly and disconcertingly full. My classmates are looking at me like I’m Luke Skywalker come to save the day.

The rest of the day is a blur. I remember small snippets: students from other schools spouting the most eloquent and perfect Japanese I’ve ever heard; a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach I’ve come to recognize as that of impending doom. And, of course, there was my inevitable performance.

I remember my nausea after finishing the first four sentences of my speech, the only ones I still had memorized. I remember glancing up occasionally as I woodenly read the rest of it off of some sheets of loose-leaf.

What I see: my teacher holds her head in her hands and is either laughing or sobbing uncontrollably. My classmates shuffle their feet and won’t make eye contact with me. Tim Cook sits at the judges table, a look of distaste and disdain on his face. Some girl mouths the words “my god” to her neighbor.

I drop out and join the Air Force. It was the only choice, really.

Rising Son

2008-09-12T14:18:00.005-04:00

Konnichiwa, I am Japan.

Relatively recently in my history, in the midst of my transformation from a post-war pariah to a burgeoning economic empire, a child was born across the world. Despite my small stature, my shadow loomed large over this soon-to-be young man from a very young age; from books and movies and the study of martial arts, this youth was swiftly swept away by my legend, even as I left that legend further and further behind.

To this boy, the tales of Japan, told second and third-hand in manga, anime, and movies, were no more legends than were the daily news reports. They held the reality of story, which preys on youth, and they formed in his mind an idea of honor and a vision of strength that captivated and enraptured him. Their ideals became more real than reality, their stories became doctrine. These are tales I know well; the sound of their tread is as a heartbeat to me, as they have walked my shores for centuries in one form or another.

More important, by far, was beauty. To the child across the sea there was no greater beauty than the combination of form and function, the beauty of the dance of the fighting arts, and the spirit of harmony promoted by them. This ideal of harmony was absent from his life, and perhaps absent from the world, save for in his myths of me.

He longed to be that peaceful warrior, for whom fighting had become superfluous, a futile exercise, for when one harms others he also harms himself. Or the boy simply claimed to want this for himself, yet his fantasies, often played out behind glazed eyes in forgotten classrooms, were full of acts of savage violence, beautifully executed. In that way, I suppose, that spirit of harmony was absent from him, too. Is peace, then, a thing within the power of man to achieve, or is it simply a legend of a place that has never existed?

To this boy, Japan was the peace of the world.

Childhood ends. The boy is still there, but he is buried beneath layers of learning; the dust of his travels. His view of me, too, is filtered now through that silt, and I have become as grey as the rest of the world. My shores, which held such fascination for the child, seem just like any other now: full of people full of turmoil, restless in their hearts and foolish. His world had become a reflection of himself. The images reaching those child’s eyes were filtered through murky self doubt, and the Japan of his youth was lost. It was lost to me too as the world closed in. I can’t remember if it ever was.

Our stories intertwined for a time in the young man’s 26th year when he traveled, finally, to my shores, furiously lacking expectation but truthfully wracked by fear of disappointment. This is an old story for me. Foreigners approach on tender feet, cautiously feeling my edges, afraid and expectant. They who have made me in their minds are now afraid to meet me. I am the celebrity of the earth; the master author who, with a handshake and a greeting, may immortalize my works or tarnish them forever.

Our meeting lasted a month.

From Tokyo to Fuji to Kyoto to Okinawa he wandered, searching for an unknown thing as so many have done before and will, undoubtedly, continue to do in the future. At times he thinks he has found it. In a traditional Japanese home, in an old woman’s smile and slowly spoken question, in a rain dotted pool on temple grounds, in a child’s open stare.

But mostly he finds, as he expected to, that I am just a place like any other. People are simply people, the world over, surviving in the only ways they know how. The only place my legend exists is in the children of my heart. I am the ancestor of the storyteller, and the mist tumbling down from the mountains ensures that there will always be gods. And the kiai of a child ensures that there will always be bushido. There are no samurai anymore, no ninja, no bushi, no hitokiri. But my people are Japanese. And they are all of those things in their hearts.

If not them, then who?

Oh, I forgot. There was a moment when, in a Tokyo museum, the boy who was now a young man happened upon a spear blade crafted in the 16th century. I remember this blade well; It was mined from my heart, after all. As he stared at this blade, this perfect untouched needle of light, for a moment the murkiness of the interceding years cleared away, and I briefly met that child across the sea for the first time.

Riverside

2008-08-14T00:57:00.003-04:00

I am in my mother’s arms. I am in my mother’s arms and she is running. I am in my mother’s arms and she is running, beneath pillars of stone, arcing over us like the ribs of some great beast. I am in my mother’s arms and we are running for a door, a rectangle of light in the gloom, a door that seems further and further away the longer we run, and I can feel a twisting, turning hand in my stomach and I don’t think I can make it.

She whispers as she runs. She tells me it will be OK. She tells me to hold on. She tells me we are almost there. I don’t think I will make it, but she tells me we are close and she would not lie. And so I hold on.

We burst through the door and into blinding sunlight. My mother holds me close to the ground, and I know we have made it, I know it’s ok. I know I have not let her down. I know it’s ok. I throw up on the grey stone steps. She whispers to me, my mother. She whispers that she is proud of me, that I did good, that I made it. She whispers that it will be all right, that I will be alright. She whispers these things and I know them to be true. She would not lie. And in that moment I am prouder of myself than I have ever been since and likely ever will be. And I know that I will always remember it. And I always do.

This is my earliest and most vivid memory: Running through the massive (in my child’s eyes) halls of Riverside Church, sick as a dog and ready to vomit my guts out, but holding it in until we reach the door. At least I think it is a memory; god knows how skewed and warped it has become after years of re-remembering. But my mom doesn’t remember it, so who else could have told me?

In retrospect I can imagine the relief my mom felt. She was spared the awkward and all around unpleasant experience of holding a puke spewing child like an unruly fire hose while running through the halls of a church. In the world of parenting, getting me out of there in time must have been akin to the feeling of shooting a winner three pointer in a championship game. She certainly deserved to be MVP for that performance, and if we’re to see that analogy through to its bitter end, I guess I could be credited with the assist.

I went to school at Riverside Church in Manhattan for pre-k and kindergarten, twice for the latter. I don’t remember much of it, but my mom tells me that she kept me back for a year because my maturity level was a bit low for a first grader. I don’t really know what that means, and for the sake of my ego I’ve never really asked, suffice it to say, I got to spend another year doing whatever it is kindergarteners do. Eating chalk and the like, I would imagine.

Adjacent to Riverside Park, the school was my first after arriving to the city with my mother after my parent’s divorce. I don’t remember much of anything from that period of my life, except for my gastric adventure on the steps of the place, but I do remember little trips we would take into the park. Like Central Park, at its best Riverside Park was like a refuge from the city, and to a child like me, it was another world. I would spend my time there with the other kids pulling up grass until we found the kind that smelled like onions. I’d like to think I never tried eating those wild chives, but I was known to have maturity issues.

Times like those spent in nature, and other times, both earlier and later, contributed to a rift in my mind that I still cannot reconcile. Not that I desire to. I know my history from the telling of others. I know where I lived and with who. And I know that I lived in Harlem at the time, while my mother managed her late father’s liquor store.

But even now, in my mind I was a child in fields and by rivers. I was a child under trees and stars and sky. I played in the ruins of ancient civilizations, in places lost to time. And the friends I made were ghosts of the world I knew; phantoms of other realms. I know the hows and whys of it all now. How those memories were the machinations of a child’s eye and a child’s mind imposed on my present self.

But I prefer to think that I was a child between worlds. That the world I knew then exists somewhere still, even now. That in some unknown place, some unknown time, a million miles from here and a million years from now, the child I was still plays in sunset fields and dappled rivers; still wanders the halls of ancient castles and climbs on pillars of time-washed stone.

And in that somewhere, I hope he always will.

beginning's ending

2008-08-08T11:32:00.006-04:00

I was a Chinese Linguist in the United States Air Force. The past tense indicator “was” is a recent development, by the way. I never defined myself by that title, however. I never WAS a Chinese linguist in the strictest sense of the word. I was more like a person who occasionally performed the duties of a Chinese linguist for the military. Our career field was unique in that I don’t think there were many of us who defined themselves by their position. Perhaps it was the banal nature of our daily tasks or simply the lassitude that comes naturally towards any monotonous task, but unlike many others in the armed forces, there was very little job related self-identification. We were the Chair Force and took no offense at that observation. According to the unwritten speech mask used by almost every 0-3+ officer intent on pumping out a shotgun round of esprit de corps into our apathetic faces, Air Force Chinese linguists were the elite, the intelligentsia, and the sedentary jet-set of the military. “Top One Percent” was another catch phrase I often heard bandied about; too important to go to war, too valuable to attrite. I used to joke that we were the top one percent of the bottom one percent of society. I stopped using that particular joke however, not because it was too harsh a critique of the military, but because it was far too forgiving of society.

Anyway, while I may never have identified as an airman or a linguist, it was certainly a suitably impressive and wonderfully convenient explanation when inevitably asked “what do you do?” Linguist was my usual reply. The definition of linguist in the Air Force however doesn’t really jibe with that in the civilian world. A civilian classification as a linguist implies some sort of scholarship; it describes one who not only learns languages, but studies them. We in the Air Force simply learn and apply. Any further study of phonemic or morphemic idiosyncrasies is purely a personal pursuit. So my generic answer may have been a bit misleading in some cases, since I would often leave off the Air Force part unless pressed. I was never, and still am not, in any way ashamed of my military service. I am not a proponent of The War or of any war. I am neither a blind patriot nor a 9/11 avenger. What I am is an opportunist, and what I saw in the military was a chance to finish my college degree, to learn a language, and to save enough money so that after my six years were up I’d have enough of a cash buffer to keep my head above water until I figured out what to do next. The Air Force gave me all that and more. The “more” including the chance to live in California for two years and Hawaii for three, and the chance to meet some of the best friends I have ever had. So no, I’m not ashamed of my time in the military, but I never was one to advertise my erstwhile affiliation. There are many stereotypes of people in the military; occasionally, and even often, they are true, as some stereotypes are wont to be. For better or for worse, I fit none of them, and so I usually opted to omit the military part for expediency’s sake. On the other hand, I would get a brief burst of vindicated pride whenever I was told “You’re so unlike all the other military people I’ve ever met.” Perhaps it’s a part of the human condition to depend so strongly on the approval of others. That’s probably why we rail so hard against it. One of the hazards of being an overly sentient social animal, I suppose. In any case, the best I can probably do is to make the group whose approval I’d like as small as possible, and in that I think I’ve achieved a moderate degree of success.

So now after 6 years I am truly neither linguist nor airman. So the question lingers: “what do you do?”
“I’m starting a business with a fellow former linguist.”
“I’m moving to China.”
“I’m a writer.”
“I’m a turgid couch cushion turgidity tester.”

“I’m a nomad.”

What do I say now? For the first time in years that particular truth is completely up to me with no mindlessly convenient answer. I am free to be whoever I want…just as soon as I figure out who that is.

In the meantime, just don’t ask me what I do for money.