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.