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.