XVII

One of the reasons I came to China was because I assumed that being here would give me time to work. And by work I mean read and write. Of course I came to China to work in the usual sense of the word, which in my case is to teach and be part of the university. But I also came because I assumed that the lack of immediate comfort and familiarity would push me into a hermit-like mode, one where I had ample time and space to work without distraction. In this sense then, my time so far has been successful. I live alone, stay in most nights (and free days), and generally spend my non-teaching/administrating time reading or writing. That is not to say that I am unsocial, or that I hide in my apartment. I socialize outside of work and have fun doing it. I go for bike rides and take short trips when I can. This morning I played basketball as part of a tournament that I've participated in along with other staff, faculty, and some graduate students at my school. I'm learning Chinese, and other things. Yet, if I am being honest, my plan in coming to China was never to completely immerse myself in China because China wasn't entirely the focus of my work. Instead I'm writing articles for publication, editing and revising, and reading the things I didn't have time to get to in graduate school. Being in China helps me concentrate on these things because being in China can be hard.

I knew this coming in. A few of my friends, including a friend from China, said to me, "I think you'll be lonely there." This however has not been the case. Partly because my work has been engaging and challenging in good ways, partly because of the good people at work, and a little more than partly, because I speak with my girlfriend at length on a daily basis. That said, in response to the presumption of loneliness, I too presumed I would be a little lonely. That was part of the plan though as it has always been my experience that the sometimes unpleasant edge of loneliness is a spur for a particular kind of productivity. When I was younger this was certainty the case. The prototype, or, proto-experience where I learned this was my time in Japan where I holed up in my bedroom in my host family's house smoking cigarettes, drawing pictures, and pretending to do my homework. Looking back it is easy to trivialize the alienation I felt as a shy nineteen-year old living in a country that I knew not all that much about, and where I could not comfortably communicate. At the same time however I took solace in reading, and it was then that I began to establish the "creative" habits that I've more or less been practicing since. The habits that first lead me into poetry, and then academia. "Writing."

These habits then; this form of production, is born out of a coping mechanism, a defensive strategy to survive in a foreign country. My intention here is not to self-mythologize, but to highlight an intention to be apart from the world and how that intention has manifested itself in my experience of being foreign. To not be entirely of China is a part of my experience here, and further, the difficulty in deeply engaging in a place that I only have a superficial knowledge of makes the work of reading and writing seem like an escape of sorts. Or in other words, I planned on being somewhat alienated for the purposes of motivation and concentration. The less I know about China, the less investment I have in being here, and the easier it is for me to engage in "my work." Now, that sounds like a terrible thing to say, but there is some truth in it: the less connected I am to the community the more I can do a particular kind of work. And so I go back to my time in Japan, and the possibility that one of the intentions underlying this particular mode of production is the intention to disconnect from my immediate surroundings, wherever they may be. Sigh. But to be clear: creating space is just one of many reasons that I came here. I am merely trying to make visible this small aspect of being foreign.

XIV

In February I took a somewhat spontaneous trip back to the United States to see loved ones. It was the first time I had left China in the last six months, a two week break for the Spring Festival / Chinese New Year (新年快乐!) and coincidentally the day I left was exactly six months from the day I arrived, an anniversary of sorts. To be honest, I haven't really missed being in the United States. I mean that in a matter of fact way that may be more of a reflection of my relationship to language than anything else. Meaning, I don't tend to miss places in that I don't often think about places; past, present, or future. Instead I think about people, conversations, obligations, desires, and more "social" kinds of things. And indeed, this was what I came back to do, e.g. to see people. Maybe this is true for everyone, and the word "home" or a specific place, e.g. Wisconsin, the U.S., etc. is simply a synecdoche for something too complex to get at in one pass with words. Regardless, I went and came back, and now there's eight weeks left of classes (nine minus the week that just passed).

A kind of test that I use towards understanding how I "really" feel about something is contrast: I pay attention to what it feels like to not have something that I've gotten used to. Do I miss them when they're gone? Do I think about it when it's not there? If so, this "inductive" kind of reasoning can tell me things that are too bodily for my conscious mind to pick up.  By this criteria then, I haven't missed being in the United States in terms of things like food, transportation, media (thanks VPN!), apartment, and shopping things like corner stores and pants. Further, the people I've been away from I've been in touch with. Not just through email, but through video on WeChat and Skype. In some cases I've been in more touch with some folks while I've been in China than I was furiously trying to finish my PhD in Indiana, and of course in some cases I've been less in touch, specifically with my rapidly growing nieces and nephews which bothers me more than anything else. At any rate, the big question however is not how I feel about the United States, but how it felt to come back to China, e.g. a test of how much I have settled in. I wondered then even before I left, what will it feel like to come back? 

There were times when I lived in San Francisco and other cosmopolitan places, where after a holiday with family and friends, I would fly back and think to myself, why do I live here? The short answer was always because that's where I have a job, yet in those instances, there was rarely someone to meet me at the airport, and the long ride over public transportation would be met with an empty apartment and no food in the refrigerator :( . I'm sorry to to dramatize, but all that is to say, coming back to China felt like coming back to work in a good way. A driver from school picked me up from the Pudong Shanghai airport, and though my refrigerator was empty, and my apartment a bit cold, it felt like I was going where I needed to be. What we're building at DKU is exciting to be a part of, and for the first time in my working life I feel like I have real responsibilities. China does not feel like "home," however I cannot think of a place that I'd rather be in that I cannot think of a place where I'm integrated into the community as I am here. This pivot to China then, has for the most part been successful in its early stages. My Chinese sucks and I have a lot to learn about being here, but I do not feel, most times, the kind of alienated foreignness that makes me question my life choices. Thus, so far so good. 

[A note on this blog: You may have noticed that my postings have slowed down. Two reasons: 1) In the academic writing course that I'm teaching at present we have a class blog (two actually, I have two classes). Thus, I've been writing in another blog, sometimes twice a week, which uses up some of my weekly writing gas. I want to write a little bit about monolinguals in the coming weeks in this blog so I will post again quite soon, however the ideas that occur throughout the week that I nurture towards the ends of blog posts have been oriented towards the class blog. Or in other words, I've been thinking more about academic writing more than foreignness lately. 2) I've been furiously trying to finish an article for publication, and though I am very close, especially after this two week break, this also takes up some of my writing bandwidth. So, FYI, that's what's going on. Unless otherwise noted, this blog is an on-going project.]

XIII (Suzhou's Gardens: Part 2)

Linguistic relativity, popularly known as the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis," is the idea that the structure of language determines thought. So as, there is an English way to think, a Chinese way to think. etc. that is either entirely determined by the possibilities of a given language (e.g. it's vocabulary, grammar, and other structural features), or at least influenced by it. By the 1960's this idea had largely been debunked through experimental research; tossed out by linguists, applied linguists, second language acquisition researchers, cognitive scientists, and others. Wikipedia can tell you more if you're interested. That said, the idea remains popular, and there is something about it, at least to me, that feels like common sense, that if I don't have the language for a thing, that I can't talk about the thing. Of course the "hard" version of Sapir-Whorf doesn't feel like common sense, that thought is determined by language, but the "soft" version does, that there is interplay between thought and language. Last Fall, my Chinese teacher, as well as others, taught me about some of the common taste words in Mandarin: 咸 (xián) salty, 甜 (tián) sweet, 辣 (là) spicy hot, 苦 (kǔ) bitter, etc. And though I had a general sense of what these words mean, of course, translating from English, I wondered how different my sense of what these words meant was from say, my teacher's sense.

Take for example 苦 , or bitter. I understand bitterness as something that leaves a particular aftertaste in my mouth, somewhat "sharp" and "dry." I don't know why these connotations come to mind. When I was a kid I remember biting into a pill I was supposed to swallow. I was maybe four years old. I didn't know how to swallow the pill without chewing, and so my mom wrapped it in a piece of bread. I remember when I bit it, there was a yellowish stain on the bread and it tasted so terrible, and strong, and I remember my mom asking me if it tasted bitter, or perhaps I asked her what it tasted like, and she said bitter. Or maybe I said it tasted like metal. I have a memory of a memory of this event. Regardless, this is my earliest association with the word bitter. Since then, I've come to use it mainly to describe two things: a Japanese green tea (煎茶), and the metallic taste that sometimes follows a pilsner style beer. Yet, I don't feel confident that I truly understand the flavor of bitter. Growing up I don't think it was a common taste, and it wasn't until I came to enjoy green tea that I also came to enjoy the bitter taste. There is dish in China called 苦瓜 (kǔguā), or bitter melon. It's not really a dish but a plant that can be cooked, green and innocuous. When I tried it in the cafeteria one day it I was unable to eat more than a single bite. If that is bitterness, I thought, I don't understand what bitterness means. My tutor told me she loves to eat 苦瓜, especially in the summer.

A few days before the new semester started, a co-worker came into my office and we started chatting about Suzhou's gardens. I told her about my experience, about my difficulties finding a means to appreciate what I was looking at. She told me that each window and each door was a like a picture frame. That as one moves through the garden, each position's view might also be a point of observation, the architecture framing and shaping one's sensory experiences. One views three-hundred year old bonsai through the circular opening, the curled and gnarled root of the tree frames the pagoda, or you're suddenly struck by the shadow of the window on the stone floor: every angle a result of an intention one part human, and one part the changing seasons. The tree that only blooms in the winter and its small yellow flowers is also part of this sensory composition, its scent barely legible but present in the cold air, as well as the echo of the water splashing. Thus one way, an immediately accessible way to understand and appreciate these gardens, is not through history, but through the senses. According to Sapir-Whorf, this could be a problem, that my senses must be pre-tuned to notice these features, to appreciate a particular kind of beauty, or recognize the smell of the little yellow flowers that only bloom in the Winter. Yet, this also means that in learning these new tastes, these sight and smells, I am also developing an experiential base from which novel ways of being in the world become possible. This, I believe, is one reason why being foreign is appealing.

XII (Suzhou's Gardens: Part 1)

Over the winter break I visited Suzhou, an old city near Kunshan famous for its gardens. I went to two of them, The Master of the Nets Garden (网师园), and The Humble Administrator's Garden (拙政园). Though they were beautiful and seemingly special, it was difficult to know what I was looking at. The Master of Nets was located thorough a series of winding alleyways in the south of Suzhou's old town, an area cut through and surround by water canals. "The Venice of China." We arrived in the morning, paid, and proceeded to wander through the buildings, courtyards, and open areas, taking in the synthesis of architecture, plant life, water pools and rock formations all constructed with great intent. Later, traveling to up the Humble Administrator's Garden, the confusion grew as not only was the second garden much much larger, but that there were hundreds of people there wandering around taking pictures. My idea of a garden is a cliche: a space to relax, a quiet place where one can take a break. Yet here this was not the case, moving through crowds in search of space. In both gardens there was very little explanatory material.

Obviously I didn't know enough about these gardens to make sense of them. The solution to this problem is seemingly easy: get a book, hire a guide, read some history, etc. This is a way to do it, to experience the garden through the lens of stories and symbolism, to understand who built it and why, what the peacock mural represents and which great poets lived in which pavilions. And then there is the long game, the literary references and the paintings inspired by the place. Like seeing one's campus on TV, it looks different in real life, and vice versa, one can connect the fantasy to the reality. Like finally meeting the person that you've been reading about for so long, and there is much to talk about. All said, both of these options requires an investment in a particular kind of learning, one that is probably best done over a long period of time where through reading and learning about all things China, different contexts illuminate the picture. Like studies on reading comprehension show, reading is much easier and faster when you already know something about what you're reading. And so the more I know about China and Chinese history, the more I can appreciate these gardens. 

I've been in China for five months as of a few days ago. Though I've certainly studied China in the past, I never did so systematically outside of a Chinese history class twenty year ago in high school. But even with that, anything before the 20th Century is a great mass of crumbling statues and disembodied dynasties. Since I've been here, I've been listening to podcasts, studying Chinese of course, and reading as much as I can in terms of contemporary China because I do love reading newspapers. But the long, long past of China is something that I have yet to start really digging into (Yes, I will read Jonathan Spence sooner than later. I swear). And I'm not complaining here, but I am saying that I don't know nearly enough to understand these gardens.  My point however is not about history, or my ignorance, but about learning and the presumption that underlines this entire discussion: that to understand these gardens I need to know stories and facts, such that I can read these gardens like I could a book, the garden held as an object of contemplation, frozen in time and D.O.A. Which is odd since it's a garden. It's alive. I wonder then if there might be another way to approach the wonders of China without needing years of study, one that does not reduce the experience to a series of exam questions.

XI

There's an idea floating out there that I had written about back in the day that goes something like this: one notices difference. For example when discussing moving from one place to another, one notices the difference between these places. Because we can acclimate so quickly to different places, we quickly loose the ability to notice what is different about these places because we've forgotten what it's like to be outside of them. This can be applied to different kinds of feelings or states. For example if I am happy, I often don't notice that I am happy unless I become unhappy, and vice versa. It is easy to get comfortable with discomfort and fear, just as easy as it is to get comfortable wit  being in charge. Or from the reverse, once a state has "stabilized," we cease to notice it, like the weather. It gets cold or hot, but when it's comfortable it doesn't exist. And so it goes with the body on the level of physiology, or sensation, or what have you, that we only notice deviations.

It has been four months since I got to China. For me to notice my foreignness and write in this blog I have to assume that my vantage is stable. Of course I can know changeability as an intellectual construct, something to know, but I can't "experience" this changeability on a moment to moment basis without also tuning into my sensations. I can't be "happy" or "unhappy" from one moment to the next because happy is not something that one feels. Instead it's a matrix of all kinds of experience and ideas (including the passage of time and linearity) that is too broad to experience directly. What does happiness feel like? It's impossible to describe using a one-to-one equivalency or definition. Only a metaphor can get us there because only a metaphor can point at the holistic sum of happiness: Happiness is a warm puppy, is a warm gun, etc.. Happiness then is a synecdoche of sorts, a single word that stands in for a whole. (All this writing about happiness I suspect will make people think that I'm not happy, which is not true, or at least, I don't think of myself in terms of being happy or not happy, and so I don't really know if I am or not since it's not on my mind. At any rate,) Being happy and being foreign are the same in that they both describe a state.

Sensation then on a moment-to-moment basis may appear to be the only metric for change, however this is complicated by the role of language in shaping the experience of the moment. Because the types of sensations I might experience are also intellectual constructs (heat, cold, itchiness, warmth), there is no noticeable experience unaccompanied by language. Or in other words, I find what I'm looking for. All this is to say, what exactly am I presuming when I say that I am foreign? What am I looking for? Already I've been pointing to some of the ways I've been conditioned and have conditioned myself to notice foreignness, e.g. my experience in Japan and with the Chinese language thus far. It makes sense to me that if I really want to go further into the phenomenon of being foreign then I will need to go further into my presumptions of being an outsider, or "strange." This means going further into narratives of being both in China, and also of where I come from, i.e. being "native." To see foreignness then, I must contrast it with another state.

X

My previous experience of being a foreigner in Japan colors the experience of being a foreigner in China. The most immediate manifestation of this happens in language, like when I am searching for the right thing to say and all I can think of are Japanese words. If I were a computer (I'm not), then my "default" foreign language settings are set to Japanese: ちょと まって (chotto matte), "wait a second"; お願いします(onegaishimasu), "please"; ありません(arimasen), "there is not,"; いいえ (iie), "no," and a thinking noise that goes something like, "eh-to-ne...." I imagine that the surge of panic I experience when confronted with an utterance I don't understand is somehow neurologically linked to a storehouse of stock phrases that I can use to buy more time for me to think of the appropriate response. As I've already said on this blog, I never knew how much Japanese I knew until I came to China. I thought I had forgotten all of it, but there is still so much there, including the way I verbalize bafflement.

Part of the problem I encounter as a beginning learner of Chinese is not just the habit of another language, but that in Chinese there are not equivalents of some of the everyday phrases that people say in both American English and Japanese, or at least I haven't learned these equivalents. For example, there isn't really a "no" in Chinese but a negative form of the verb to have, "没有"(Méiyǒu), a negative form of to want, "不要" (Bùyào), or a negative version of X verb. Also, "please" isn't nearly as much a part of everyday speech as it is in English and Japanese, and if there is a "no, thank you" I have yet to hear about it. There doesn't seem to be a lot of "filled pauses" either, an "uhhhh," "um," or its equivalent. I have no idea why this is or how people avoid it, or maybe I just haven't noticed it yet. Granted I am still a beginner learner, and I don't want to presume to much about something that I'm only beginning to learn. The theorist in me wants to make connections between some of these particular linguistic features of Chinese and Chinese culture, but I know enough about this tendency to know that my generalizations are not to be trusted, and that if I wait for a bit my meaning maker will move on to other theories, and other generalizations.

Outside of language however, I've wondered if the lack of "culture shock" I've experienced settling into China is in part because I had already died my foreign cast (so to speak) in Japan, where I got comfortable being foreign, mute, and illiterate. It does not seem like a new experience to me to get on the bus, to be stared at, to sit down and listen to, and not be able to understand, the conversations happening around me; to be unable to read the adds posted over my head or the messages above the seats. It is not strange to me to go into a grocery store and not recognize half of everything for sale. What's different now however, and maybe radically different, is that I have twenty years of other experiences. In some instances I can accurately guess what people are talking about based on my little bit of Chinese and the thousand other conversations that I've been a part of where we said the same things. I can guess what the messages on the bus might say based on the other buses I've been on. Perhaps more importantly though, when I was in Japan, smart phones and all their wonders did not exist. That's a whole other subject that I'll write about later. But my point here is that I've been prepared, already, to experience China in a particular way.

IX

I received two packages last week. The first was for my birthday which was about three weeks ago. My sister sent a rum cake as she usually does on my birthday. So delicious usually, the kind of cake that can be eaten with one's hands entirely because it doesn't have frosting, because it doesn't need frosting, because it is perfectly sweet all the way through. Pretty much every year she sends me one and in the last three or four years, these cakes come along with birthday cards from my eight year old-niece and my six year old nephew. The backward "y" and "r" in their kid-print handwriting of my name make it all so charming. The trouble began however when my sister informed me that USPS had informed her that the box had been delivered on November 11th. At that point it was November 16th, and there was no sign of the cake. About five days later I got a message from the mail room saying that I had a package. And so all said, it was about 10 days since the cake was delivered to China, and when it was delivered to my work. So the question is where was it? The answer is a mystery, though it's safe to surmise that the cake was inspected thoroughly by customs:

The cake was no longer in a round cake like form, but instead was a mass of cake like nuggets, wadded up at the bottom of the Styrofoam shipping container. Though I may have been able to eat it, it seemed like a bad idea, as I imagined a customs official in a drafty airport hanger poking through the cake with a rusty metal baton and cigarette dangling from his mouth. If my sister had sent me any contraband, that guy must have gotten it. On the bright side, I did receive birthday cards from my nice and nephew, and two stylish dishtowels that my sister had also packed.

The second package came on Sunday morning. I knew it was coming as my landlord had told me it would. A few days previous, her and I had been messaging over WeChat along with the real estate agent. The rent was due and I needed to send my landlord the money over WeChat. Of course we're not really talking, as I can't write anything beyond a few stock phrases in Chinese and my landlord has zero command of English. WeChat however can translate, and so I write in English, and she writes in Chinese and most of the time we can understand what each other is talking about. At any rate, after paying the rent, my landlord, who refers to me as "little handsome" (she is an elderly woman), said that she would send me a chicken in the mail. Not knowing what else to say, I wrote back, “好的,” or, "Ok." And so on Sunday morning it arrived:

This is the first time I've confronted an entire chicken. I typically don't cook chicken, but when I have in the past it has already been cut up. So I thought, I don't know what to do with this, I don't know how to cook it, I don't have the write tools or a big enough pot, and I wonder if anyone I know wants it. So I messaged a number of my colleagues and waited. The first colleague passed, but the second took it, and then a third wanted it, and then another, my neighbor, suggested we cook it together. So that evening I went over to his apartment and watched as he cut up the chicken: cutting off its head, its' feet, tearing out its guts and then breaking into smaller pieces. We used a pressure cooker to cook it along with potatoes and onions, and then mixed everything with Thai curry. It was delicious, and I have an entire pot of it left over that I'm looking forward to eating over the course of the week.

There is one easy takeaway from this story: don't send cakes to China. My sister said she would try it thinking her chances were 50/50. I think they were much lower than that however. The internet tells me that food must be packaged with a complete ingredients list and have a shelf life of 6 months (or in other words, "non-perishable"). One must follow the rules, especially in China. And so at the same time I receive another message from this destroyed cake, one that is a bit more ominous. Incidents like these are offset by my charming landlord and the wide spread everyday kindness that I routinely experience. And so I didn't get to eat cake, but I did get to eat chicken.

VIII

When I was nineteen I spent a year in Japan living with a Japanese family, attending the international division of Waseda University as part of a study abroad program during my junior year of college. It was a transformative experience in many ways, not so much because I immersed myself in Japan and Japanese, but because of how alienating and difficult the experience was. It was during this time that I rediscovered how much I love English and reading, and spent many hours up in my room when I could of been out there, talking to people and being in the world. Instead I was reading Haruki Murakami novels in translation, smoking cigarettes, listening to American indie music, drawing pictures, and doing just enough homework to get by. I was unskilled at Japanese, but more than that, I was shy, had no social skills and not much motivation to reach out. My host family was very kind but not the most talkative people. They generally let me do my own thing. Tadaima, itarakimasu, Gochisousama deshita , and that was about it. I had friends, two close American friends who were both fairly skilled at Japanese, and we spent our time in the arcades, wandering the streets of Tokyo, or at karaoke singing to each other.

During the ninth month, on a break from school, the program sent us out to families in western Japan, in Shimane province, outside of a small town I don't remember the name of anymore. I got along much better with the new host family, and the host family got along better with me. In the span of a month my language ability improved ten fold, talking with the host mother and father, and the elder daughter who I had an unrealized flirtation with. That's another story. But I liked this family. In part because they required that I hang out with them. They insisted. I would sit around drinking with the father and his neighbor trying to understand their jokes, or go for hikes with the mother and the younger siblings. I don't know if it was a difference between small town people and city people, or that fact that I had been studying Japanese for the previous eight months, or just the change in scenery, but I figured something out about learning a language in Shimane: that for me, connecting with others is essential for my language learning since I don't have strong intrinsic motivations. When I came back to Tokyo, my host family was impressed, but we quickly returned to the silence, my Japanese stagnated, and I came back to the States.

In retrospect, my time in Japan was not very successful from the standpoint of language acquisition. The problem was not my aptitude for learning, or my teachers, or the differences between English and Japanese, but that I was utterly unmotivated. I wanted to speak Japanese, but I had no intrinsic motivation, no vision of who I wanted to be or direction I worked towards. My lack of language learning vision has not really changed. I don't have an idealized version of myself as a multilingual cosmopolitan globe trotter. I don't have an immediate economic need to communicate in Chinese. And though I might appear to have more intrinsic motivation in the form of my job and my broader academic trajectory, I'm not sure this kind of motivation is all that different than having homework to do. Thus if what really works for me is connecting with others, then I need to be patient in terms of sifting though relationships towards lasting ones while steadily improving my basic Chinese such that I can be ready to engage. Little things then, like my desire to read the Chinese names of NBA teams because I find them amusing (e.g. the Philadelphia 76ers are 76人), or joking around with my Chinese tutor are in part what has been pushing my Chinese forward. I do not wish to bask in alienation such as I did in Japan. But then again, I am a much more productive writer when I do. 

VII

Last Friday I went out with a co-worker, her cousin, and a Major in the Republic of Korea Army (ROK) who my co-worker met at semi-random work related event. The Major is attending a government run Chinese language school located near my university, where many other folks from many different countries are also intensively learning Chinese. At any rate, he knew how to drink, and it was my first odd and somewhat out of control evening in China. Not that it was actually out of control, but it was the kind of evening that was hard to come by in Indiana: going to new places and meeting strangers who in all likelihood I will never meet again. The kind of evening that one can only have living in a city, which Kunshan most definitely is at 1.5 million people. We had feast of Korean food, drank soju, beer, and a milky liquid the Major referred to as "mosquito bite." After eating we went to a bar named "Wonderful Too," where there was a band consisting of two people: a woman singer and a guy who played guitar and manned the karaoke like machine on the stage (I was told they were from the Philippines and that they played at that bar every night). They played American songs from the 70's and 80's to a mostly Chinese audience, though I saw more foreigners there than any place I've been to yet in China. We talked loudly over loud music, and opted to leave at eleven (we started at six). Had I stayed out longer, I probably would have drank more and who knows where the evening would have ended up. I'm playing things close to the hip these days though, and by that I mean I'm not comfortable enough here to completely let loose.

Earlier that I day I went out to lunch with a different co-worker and two students. They took us out to a restaurant just off campus and we ate duck with lotus root and a few other side dishes. Fried dumplings too. It was delicious, and after it was all over my students brought out a birthday cake. It was my birthday earlier in the week, and I had told my students through a small writing exercise.. Simply, I tell my students its my birthday and then ask the students to write about what they think they'll be doing when they're thirty-nine years old. Of course, nobody really knows, but I think it's rare that we actually articulate these things to ourselves, much less to each other. As I said to them, and probably wrote about in my other blog at some point, I never really imagined my life past the age of thirty-two or thirty-three. But after getting over the existential hump of feeling like I was no longer young (yes I know reader who is older than me, thirty-nine is young. yeah yeah. yeah yeah yeah. thank you for your wisdom), being older meant that I could be free of the vague visions of my future that I kept when I was younger, though in a strange way I became what I wanted to become, e.g. a writer-teacher/teacher-writer (minus the famous, respected, and comfortably settled part). Meanwhile, while they're writing I'm writing about what I was doing when I was the average age of the class, and then we share. It's fun, and sweet, and I'm always touched by what my students say. Interestingly, most folks, in a very unAmerican kind of way, in addition to their individual plans, mentioned that that would be around the age when they would be taking care of their parents.

On Saturday I worked, but on Sunday I rode my bike out to Yangcheng Lake, about a half hour West of where I live. I explored the little park on pedestrian paths that were inappropriate for a bike, but I had started down them so saw it through. I found a spot by the lake and sat out reading a book. The sun was out and the skies were mostly blue and clear, though occasionally a cloud would pass and it would get a little chilly. Others were sitting by the lake, some on blankets and some with tents, which is new trend for me: bringing tents to public parts to have a semi-private place to lie down. Two couples did this near me, but at some point a security guy came by and told them they couldn't put tents there. I least I assume that's what he said since they put their tents away after that. I continued riding my bike up along the lake, though a large urban farm, and further North for a bit, and then I turned around and came home. On the way I took pictures. Mostly of the trees painted white around their trunks. I don't know why they do this here in China and one day, probably soon, I will find out. I imagine it has to do with pest prevention, or something like that. But they do it everywhere, and very thoroughly. It is getting to be Fall here, but there are still some nice days left.

VI

In the States, some of the Chinese students that I worked with would refer to any non-Chinese person as "foreign." Technically this is correct. Or as the dictionary tells it:

for·eign
/ˈfôrən/
adjective 

1. of, from, in, or characteristic of a country or language other than one's own 

Since I am an American who identifies as an American, anyone who is not an American is foreign. Anyone who does not speak English, by this definition, is foreign. And likewise, for a Chinese citizen who identifies as a Chinese citizen, anyone who is not Chinese is foreign. Yet, in practice, in the United States at least, the word might be more likely to be associated with the negative connotations of its second definition:

2. strange and unfamiliar

As a language or writing teacher, I consider my job as to help students become more skilled communicators, thus raising awareness of their rhetorical choices is part of what I try to do. So when a student would use this word, and we were in a tutoring or other one-on-one setting, I would let them know that Americans might take offense, that it tends to mean something bad, "strange," and that they should be aware of this connotation. People are called foreign as a derogatory term, though perhaps in legalese, medicine, other instrumental uses of English, foreign might be more descriptive (foreign governments, foreign bodies, foreign language, etc.).

This potential danger of the term was particularly important to communicate to the graduate Teaching Assistants I was working with, as referring to an American undergraduate as foreign is to risk insulting them by mistake. Of course, we were in Indiana, a rural state where many of the undergraduate students at Purdue came from places where they had little exposure to diverse communities. This coupled with the occasionally present red state rhetorics of the problematic immigrants, underexposure to racial and cultural diversity, and a distrust of "liberal academics," made the teacher/student power dynamics a zone rife with potential conflicts. Not that I heard about an excessive amount of incidents from these TAs, but I've heard enough to know that these problems exist. With the word foreign, I'd point out its potential interpretation under the pretense that I was doing my students a favor. Then again, these kinds of responsibilities could swing the other way, and we could teach the undergraduates to approach their foreign teaching assistants with an open mind, or better yet, expose them to different varieties of English and other kinds of cultural knowledge to meet these TAs half-way (my colleague at work is involved in study doing just that; to see if giving students training in different English varieties makes a difference in teaching evaluations, which tend to be lower for international TAs).

Just as importantly, or despite the rationale of trying to be the conscientious teacher I discuss above, the word foreign has a negative connotation that reverberates through my system, and this is also why I bring it to the attention of students: Because I recoil at being referred to as foreign in my own country. Part of me thinks, who are you to call me foreign? Which of course I don't say, or even articulate fully to myself. I'm too polite to do that. Yet here in China, I don't mind being foreign since it's true: I am foreign, both by definition #1 and #2. And further, unlike in the states, a faint pride emanates from this designation. That I am not of this place or these people entirely, and thus this designation grants me a particular kind of freedom, one where I have the option to engage or not. We could call this "privilege," i.e. "a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group," which in this case I'm defining as an immunity from the trials and tribulations of being a Chinese citizen, whatever that may mean. I am insulated not only from the legal definitions that my nationality provides, or the social responsibilities of not being Chinese, but also of things like the language, which my ignorance and illiteracy allows me to easily disengage with. Of course from another perspective these aspects of foreignness are not privileges, but avenues of alienation. A few nights ago on my way home from work a man on a scooter pulled up to the stop light, and looked at a map on his phone. He seemed a bit lost and turned to ask me something, but I could not understand him. On the one hand I was a foreigner free of any obligation. On the other I was a foreigner of no use to anyone. 

V

From the outside looking in, I suppose the way I look is the most obvious thing about being foreign; that I am most obviously foreign to others here in China. People will stare at me when I walk down the street, ride the bus, walk around a grocery store, and generally, in whatever it is I do. Some folks will stare boldly, non-stop, and when I look back at them they keep starting. I wonder if they are being confrontational, rude, oblivious, amazed, or some combination therein. Some folks look more slyly from the corners of their eyes and when I look back they stop. Once on my way to work I was stopped on my bike at an intersection next to a man on a scooter. He looked at me, and I looked back at him. Usually this prompts the person to stop provided I hold my gaze for a few seconds, but this man would not look away. After a long four seconds I spoke: 你好 (Nǐ hǎo), hello, and he looked away. I don't know what he was thinking or what he wanted. On Friday I went to dinner with a few co-workers, and a few of the folks who worked there took pictures of us. This is not unusual. I like to think it doesn't bother me much, but I am somewhat oblivious to it when walking down the street or riding the bus. It's possible that this obliviousness is a defense mechanism: people may be looking at me but I don't want to look at them. This is some combination of shyness, or willful ignorance. I'd rather look out the window, or read a book, or scroll through my phone.

For now I'm still enjoying the novelty of being novel, and rarely has this attention been hostile or confrontational. On Saturday I went to play basketball at a private gym with one of my co-workers. I don't know if I attract extra attention on the basketball court because I am foreign, or if it is because I am taller and/or heavier than most of the other players. Of course its both, but part of me wants to think that the player guarding me takes special delight in blocking the foreigner's shot or shooting over his outstretched hands. Then again, back in the States, I would think the same thing playing in Indiana, though instead of being foreign it was being older that made me paranoid and alienated. There are a million ways to other each other, and I am certainly capable of making the smallest distinctions in search of injustice. Regardless, the other people at the gym were generally friendly, though for a while there was a group of mid-20 something dudes that were really good and really arrogant. They laughed and chatted while they tore through the competition as well as any group of fraternity brothers I encountered in Indiana. There are bros everywhere in the world, including China. In this instance, maybe a few of them took special joy in showing up the foreigner, but they seemed to enjoy showing up everyone they faced.

One area where it's more problematic being foreign is in language.  The other day at my universities little cafe, I ordered some tea but forgot to pay. As I took my tea and turned away the cashier called me back, saying something I could not completely understand, but understood well enough to know that I had forgotten to pay. The man in line behind me, not a student or faculty or staff at my university, a man who was probably there for a conference being hosted on the campus, said to the cashier that I did not understand. The cashier then said to the man, yes, he doesn't understand. Flustered, I said to them both, "听不懂" (tīng bù dǒng). This was not what I should of said, since 听不懂 means "I do not understand." What I should have said, and what I meant to say was "我明白" (Wǒ míngbái), "I understand." Alas. In that moment I got it wrong. I hope that at least they were confused as to what I meant, since I tried to say it defiantly. Or back at the gym, I asked the clerk at the desk for water in Mandarin, and my co-worker quickly translated for me without giving the clerk the opportunity to make sense of what I had just said. Yes my pronunciation is a work in progress, but what I've noticed is that many attempts to speak Chinese sometimes go unrecognized. My foreign accent, plus my anxiety inducing presence will seemingly, for some, preclude the possibility of generously listening; a presumption that I do not speak the language. 

IV

About a week ago I noted an insect, about the size of a thumbnail, crawling up the curtain in my bedroom. It looked like what in Indiana I would call "stink bugs," though they were about half the size of this bug. Its shell resembled a knight's shield, a grey and black diamond shape at the bottom and squared off at the top. With legs. In my old apartment they would crawl up the curtains, and sometimes fly from one end of the room to the other with a loud, not particularly graceful buzzing sound that ended in a thud when they landed on their target, which was usually the reading lamp behind my couch. Maggie (the cat) and I would look up from what we were doing, and then go back to our business. They were completely innocuous. They never landed on my person, touched my food, or multiplied in gross ways in the nooks and crannies of my apartment (though I would find dead ones in all the corners, on their back with their legs curled in). I mostly let them do what they did because there were never very many of them and they moved so slowly. They were almost cute. One day I asked my entomologist friend about them, where he thought they might be coming from. He said that they probably came from the trees outside, whose foliage was on the same level as my second floor windows.

These associations in mind, I regarded this Chinese stink bug similarly. It looked the same though a little bit bigger. I don't see very many bugs in my apartment, and generally haven't seen many bugs here in China asides from mosquitoes. I'm not sure why. At any rate, I tried to brush him into a cup, and therein, I would proceed to toss him out the window. I reached up to get him with the edge of the cup but he moved up the curtain just a little faster than I anticipated, out of reach. I got a chair and stood on it, but he had already moved to a place where I couldn't see him anymore. I opened the window and thought that maybe he would see himself out. He didn't. The next day when I woke up and walked into my living room he was walking slowly across the interior window ledge, halfway in-between the Pocari Sweat bottle that I'm growing an eggplant in and the window on the far end. The sun was shining. Wary of our last encounter and not wanting to dink around with him, I opened the window he seemed to be heading toward and went off to work. He didn't exit that time either. Over the next few days I saw him daily in my living room. Always in the morning. It felt like we were roommates, like an old friend. He also lived here and had his routines. And there he was again, walking slowly across the white tiled floor in a beam of sunshine. It was comforting and I imagined he was living the life he wanted.

Yesterday, Saturday, there he was again. I was washing dishes, making breakfast, and watching basketball. As my dishes were soaking in the sink I leaned against the couch to watch the game, and he seemed to be heading towards me. Unnerved, I got up to do things, and when I came back he was gone. For whatever reason, I wondered what he'd been eating or drinking. I wondered if the white tile floor was a good place to be, or if it was a strange landscape to him, a barren desert with no food or water or other creatures that looked like him. I wondered if he wanted to be here, or just didn't know how to get out. I thought about how he got inside, since my apartment on the 12th floor was too high up for the trees to brush against, it seemed unlikely that he had crawled up the side of the building. I thought that maybe he had hitchhiked, on my bike possibly, which when at school would be parked close to some dense bushes. Maybe he was looking for food, or a mate, on the underside of my bike, and suddenly his whole world began to move. By the time I had these thoughts he had wandered out of my view and I resolved that the next time I saw him I'd put him outside. And so this morning as soon as I opened my bedroom door there he was. I pushed him into a cup, took the elevator down, walked into the bushes, and shook him out onto the ground. Now you are where you belong, I said.

III

The last week we've been concentrating intently on tones. Mandarin Chinese (for those who don't know) has four "tones," which essentially means changes in pitch within the space of one syllable. English, or at least American English, generally doesn't change pitch within a syllable, but from syllable to syllable, going up and down. Of course in Mandarin they are not called syllables. Instead a unit of sound is divided into what's known as initials and finals. Initials resembling what in English are called consonants, and finals resembling what in English is called vowels. As I explain to students when I teach English pronunciation, a vowel is the breath and the consonant is the rudder to steer it (actually I don't use such poetic language when I teach), and so the tones come into play on the final, controlled by the rising and falling of air. As in 西, which in pinyin, the sort of English alphabet version of Chinese, is pronounced "xī," and translated as west, or the West. In pinyin then "x" is pronounced like the /s/ in she, and "i" like the /ē/ in see. Xī then sounds like she, except for the tone, the line over the i that bumps up the pitch a few notches. So instead of she, it's xī, and there is no way to write what it sounds like in English without resorting to metaphor. Meanwhile, the high pitch vibrates the back of my throat, and contrasts with the low vibration of she. I have to stretch my cheeks to get it out.

The tones are tricky to hear. In Mandarin there are four. The first tone I just described. The others involve rising and falling, a / over the letter indicating a tone that that rises like a question, a \/ over the letter indicates a rising and falling, and the \ indicates a falling only, a sharp and quick tone that is easier for me to distinguish than the other two I just mentioned. The first one, the line over the letter described above, is more comfortable to say, like singing a high note. It doesn't bend or drop or demand me to do anything other than raise my voice within the imagined space of a syllable. After three months the child begins to distinguish individual phonemes says the language acquisition scientists. And for the rest of its life it will continue to hone its ability to make finer distinctions of the world around it, from sound to shape to color to faces to voices and then when it gets older, to words to people to things. We get good at specializing and are rewarded for it, each one of us an expert in seeing the things our sense have been tuned to see. When I was a kid my brother liked to fall asleep with the television on, and though I was in another room, and two closed doors away, I could not tune it out, laying awake in rage. Today at the crowded cafe doing class prep for the week I had no problem concentrating. Everyone else was Chinese.

This last week my tutor helped me work on finals. We spent the bulk of two hours repeating the sounds of a - o - e - i - u - ü. Though they may look innocuous on the computer screen, they are quite difficult. Part of their difficulty is that I have to unlearn how I read those letters in addition to learning the sounds. "a" is easy, like "ah," provided I keep my tone up. "o" is like saying "whah" except the top of my jaw is tied to the bottom jaw and I've found that if I take a minute to uncouple them, and only open my lower jaw to make the sound my tutor gives the signal that I've done some thing right. "e" is like "uh" and in the context of the rest of the sounds, when practicing, at first gave me fits but it no longer does. "i" is easy, pronounced like the Japanese video game "Y's," that Aaron, when we were kids, insisted was pronounced /ē/'s, and though I was never really sure, I did it anyway. "u" is like "ooh," but higher in tone and it takes me as second to find the form, my lips rounded and protruding. "ü" is like "eww," gross, except is held longer and vibrates, and doesn't have the e part of eww. My ears then don't work, and instead I rely on my ability to string logical directions together (i.e. thoughts) and the shape of my face; the muscles in my mouth and their memory. If I'm working hard my jaw and lips are sore and my brain is tired. Like and athlete, it seems to me, some soreness is a requisite of progress. Which in this case is a foundation of intelligible and manageable pronunciation upon which I can build the rest of my language skills on. I've been told that this is the way to do Mandarin.

II

Language is the first and most noticeable thing about being foreign. At least from the inside looking out. I am illiterate in China, and I have a little knowledge of the spoken language. Over the summer I took a Chinese 101 class but it was on-line and also, I didn't finish it, opting to marshal my resources towards more pressing academic obligations, packing, and trying to catch my breath before coming here. A week into the semester I started taking Chinese courses in my department, the Language and Culture Center, and I meet with one of our Chinese teachers once a week for an hour. Additionally I meet with the intern in our department for three hours a week for additional tutoring, mostly practice and pronunciation. It's a good amount of direct attention I believe, and though I haven't learned much, or then again maybe I've learned a lot. I don't know. I've learned some, and can form simple sentences and answer simple questions.The other day in the elevator a neighbor, I think, asked me where I was from and I answered him. It was the first successful bit of communication in Chinese that didn't involve the exchange of money.

Today I traveled to Suzhou to look for a new bike. Using a mapping program, it was pretty easy to find the right bus. I got on the C1 and rode it for about fifty minutes, where I then transferred to the green subway line, rode it for about five stops, and then got out and walked, following the directions on the map. The software is exactly like google maps. I push the button that looks like a bus, and the map pops up, showing me my different public transportation options. I choose one then I get a list of step-by-step instructions.

I don't need to know the rest of the characters on the map, or at least it seems like I don't. Instead I'm riding the bus, looking out the window at the lake to the north; watching the old man fall asleep in the seat in front of me. Across the aisle there is a little girl sitting in her father's lap, and she squirms for a while before she too falls asleep.

In Suzhou, when I got to where the lines had lead me, I discovered that the bike store I was trying to find was located in a shopping mall. Further, I found that it wasn't a bike store at all, but a cluster of high-end apparel stores that for some reason had about five bikes in glass cases. I double checked the rest of the stores and the mall directory, looking for a hidden bike retailer, and eventually asked the security guard in my simple Chinese where the bike store was. He led me back to the cluster of five bikes. I thanked him, and then left. All said, the trip was not a total loss. I found my way to Suzhou on my own, and was able to navigate both the inter-city bus and the Suzhou subway system. On my way back to Kunshan I thought about what my boss told me, that when I plan to do something in China I should plan on two trips: the first to find out how to do what I need to do, and the second to do it. Tonight when writing this story, I started to write about language but ended up inside my experience. To find out how to do what I need to do, and then to do it.

I

I arrived in China on August 12th, 2017. I'll be here for at least three years, working at Duke Kunshan University as an assistant professor in the Language and Culture Center, teaching academic writing and speaking, along with my other duties as faculty. This blog is about the experience of being foreign in China. Of course this means it is also about China, as much as it is about my experience. It also means that this blog is about being American, and to subdivide further, about being a white male American in China. And even further, about being in Kunshan, a city about 19 minutes via high speed train outside of Shanghai. A "suburb" as it's called, though there are 1.5 million people in the area. Already then I offer a definition of foreignness: that of the solitary figure in a large impersonal landscape hanging somewhere on a panel at the Asian art museum. For now though I will have to start here, as my foreignness is fledgling and indistinct. 

I am a novice when it comes to China. I have not studied its history, asides from a course I took in high school; nor its language asides from the intro to Chinese course that I took over the summer. But I have worked with many Chinese students over the last twelve years of teaching writing and ESL, which is partly why I was qualified for this position. Further, I have been reading about China in the newspapers for many years, its trends and economics and politics, and I have, more generally, always been interested in East Asian culture, literature, and philosophy. I spent a year in Japan when I was an undergraduate student and this had a profound impact by leading me down the path of working with international students, which maybe not so surprisingly, has lead me back to Asia nearly 20 years later. China, as we all know, is a happening place. And so this is another reason why I am here: for the sake of novelty, a vain desire to gain knowledge through experience. 

There are other reasons, and as I write further into this blog, as relevant, I will share them. If motivations are the root of experience, then it seems necessary to explore them further. On that note, I do not want this blog to be about me sitting on my couch and looking out at China from the window of my 12th floor apartment. Which points at another motivation, i.e. that I wanted to try again to live outside of the United States. When I was in Japan I was more interested in tending to my own thoughts and feelings than I was in tending to Japan. Now that I am here, I have an opportunity to experience foreigness again as a semi-competent adult, and so getting out into China is an essential part of why I am here. I am still terrified of the outside world as I was when I was 19, but the difference now is that I have some confidence that no matter what happens, things will be alright. This is a kind of freedom, and it allows me to take the kinds of risks, be it speaking to a stranger or venturing out alone, that I would be reluctant to take when I was younger. And now I am in China.  Welcome.