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.