XXX (Pentaptych)

Assimilator and assimilated interact through the catalyst of a script of words, which powers the engine of transformation. Perhaps it is a creature living in perfect symbiosis with a host of other creatures. Perhaps it is "merely" a machine. But in either instance, if it has intelligence, that intelligence is far different from our own. It creates out of our ecosystem a new world, whose processes and aims are utterly alien -- one that works through supreme acts of mirroring, and by remaining hidden in so many other ways, all without surrendering the foundations of its otherness as it becomes what it encounters. 

Jeff VanderMeer, from Annihilation

**

Ever since I was small, every once in a while, laying in bed, my body would feel like it's made out of stone, or perhaps a very hard plastic. Now as an adult, usually during extended periods of sitting, I still come upon this same sensation. It's very peculiar but also uncomfortable. During, I always receive the vision of a red plastic seat booster, the kind that used to be found at fast food restaurants in the United States during the 80's. I imagine scraping the seat with my finger nail, and that the feeling of the brittle plastic under my finger nail is the same feeling I recognize throughout my entire body. Once I move the feeling goes away. I've tried to sit with it and study it, though I've never been able to make much progress before the discomfort becomes unbearable. And so I wonder what it is. Is it a feeling? An affect? A mental state? How can I describe it, and what's the use anyway?

**

The Envoy

One day in that room, a small rat.
Two days later, a snake. 

Who, seeing me enter,
whipped the long stripe of his
body under the bed,
then curled like a docile house-pet. 

I don’t know how either came or left.
Later, the flashlight found nothing. 

For a year I watched
as something—terror? happiness? grief?—
entered and then left my body. 

Not knowing how it came in,
Not knowing how it went out. 

It hung where words could not reach it.
It slept where light could not go.
Its scent was neither snake nor rat,
neither sensualist nor ascetic. 

There are openings in our lives
of which we know nothing. 

Through them
the belled herds travel at will,
long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.

Jane Hirshfield

**

To name something as a "contamination" is usually to imply that its presence somehow devalues a context that would otherwise possess some "pure" or "authentic" state of existence (...) The intention here is to reconsider "contamination," to think of it not as an undesirable quality but as a productive process of cultural exchange, beginning from the premise that we cannot know what an "authentic" state of existence is (...) Thus the world is a contingent, partly perceived, partly understood web of relations and alliances in a state of flux, connections whose duration may be short-lived and almost imperceptible, or so extended that we do not perceive their rate of change, or indeed, the full implications of their contexts.  

Jean Fisher, from "Some Thoughts on Contaminations (Incorporating Parts Of The  Syncretic Turn)," as it appeared on a wall at the 12th Shanghai Biennale

**

Hold still, lion!
I am trying
to paint you
while there's time to 

Robert Creeley, from "Drawn & Quartered" 

XXIX (Freedoms: Part 3)

Back in August I wrote about starting to feel somewhat at home here in China. Not exactly settled, but no longer feeling like everything was new. This semester I taught the same class for the first time and witnessed a doubling of new faculty and quintupling (5X...I had to look that word up to be sure) of students. I'm comfortable getting a cab or a Didi, to aggressively stand in line to pick up a ticket for the train, and generally can speak enough Chinese such that I can find my way around without too much trouble. At home I am the proud owner of two space heaters, two air filters, and have learned how to acquire sufficient amounts of nuts, dried fruit, and bread to make breakfast the way I'm used to making it (though I also really like eating 包子, bāozi in the morning). At any rate, I've gotten comfortable to the point where I don't need to stress the everyday bits and pieces that consciously or unconscious push all the little buttons that make me feel I'm getting what I need. Yet, because this struggle to adapt is no longer front and center, I've begun to get a little bored and restless. What this has meant has been a return to, or at least, a craving for, cigarettes, my old friend. And though I've been varied forms of quit for the last five years, more off than on for periods of a year or longer, my default method to treat existential anxiety is still to smoke.

In this broader discussion then I want to turn to another variety of freedom, that is, deliberately seeking out varied forms of repression in order to stay out of trouble; a personal freedom, "idle hands are the devil's playthings." Another way to put it is the difference between submitting to an internal discipline vs. welcoming an external authority to exert the kinds of discipline one is rarely/sometimes/often/never unable to exert on their own. A simple example of this might be not buying sweet things such that I won't have to deal with the urge to control myself around said sweet things. The fact they they are not in my cupboard is a kind of material control over my behavior, a disciplining force. A more complicated and relevant example in relation to being here in China and smoking is that moving to a new place means that I inevitably will, at least temporarily, be forced into new habits. And in fact, that is one of the many reasons I wanted to come here, that is, to make my choice not to smoke easier to execute. Upon initially arriving here, I did not know where to find cigarettes, much less how to ask for them, or even what kind of cigarette to ask for since Chinese cigarettes are entirely different than the American kinds. I was also too shy to bum one from the random guy walking down the street and certainly didn't know the polite way to do that. All this, and maybe more importantly, I didn't want to be known as a smoker at work. Now however, asides from the work thing, none of these constraints still apply.

My foreignness then served, and still can serve, as a kind of amulet to ward off these old habit patterns. Not to be overly dramatic about it. My experiences with addiction pale in comparison to what others go through, and frankly, no matter how unhealthy smoking is for me, I doubt that I will ever really completely let go of it, even if it's just the idea of it (it it it it it). At any rate, the larger point here not being freedom but its opposite. It is actually easier for me to fall back into old habits and the old challenges for overcoming these habits (quitting, starting, quitting, starting) than it is to seek new frontiers. Maybe this is the ebb and flow of foreignness? A kind of forgetting and remembering of past selves qua habits? If this is true, than foreignness can be had in one's own country, and in one's own mind(/body complex). I think of the now old Smog song, "River Guard," where Bill Callahan sings of the prisoners enjoying the delay of their sentencing. i.e. the trial that precedes the judgment, a kind of freedom in itself. Or the more recent Jeff Tweedy song, "Having Been Is No Way To Be," where he sings about the freedom one finds in dreams and the costs of those  dreams for others. Note how the question of language disappears when these discussions turn political. Ok. That's it. I'm going to go outside now and mail a Christmas package to my brother. Happy New Year.

XXVIII (Freedoms: Part 2)

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XXVII (Freedoms: Part 1)

A couple weekends ago I went to a party hosted by a colleague and his wife. At the party I talked to other colleagues from work and also met some folks who worked with his wife at a preschool on the other side of town. Conversations in China between foreigners meeting for the first time, as I've experienced them, usually touch on how long a person has been living in China (about 15 months) and how one's Chinese is progressing (level 1.1). At any rate, I was having this conversation with one of the preschool teachers (four years, "pretty good" [okay then]), a person originally from Los Angeles. I asked her what keeps her in China and she said, "the economic freedom." By this she meant the ability to make enough money to live (eat, pay rent and bills) and also have enough money to travel and do stuff. Of course, any janky cost of living website will tell you that its cheaper to live in China than the US, and though I am certainly not qualified to talk about economics, it's stunning how economically painless it is to get on a train, get a Didi (China's equivalent of Uber), or even rent an apartment. Of course there are things here that are more expensive, relatively speaking, like buying an apartment or a tank of gas or a Ford or a pair of "real" Nikes, but generally, its easier to move about here in China and do what one desires, so long as one's desires are within the bounds of acceptable behavior: "Economic Freedom," that is, the freedom to not have to devote all one's time towards the ends of survival.

There is already much that complicates this experience of Economic Freedom so instead of a straight line, a series of incidents and a few facts:

• Just last week my neighbor, upon entering the elevator with me, asked me how much money I make.
• When talking to a friend about how things like travel and long term planning are difficult to do in the United States, instead of sympathy, she raised the issue that Americans are too caught up in the short-term to do long-term planning and this is why they are not able to make ends meet.
• Last year a student said to me that she had bought a water boiler for her dorm room to cook eggs because the hard boiled eggs in the cafeteria were too expensive.
• Via Wikipedia: "The total GDP of Kunshan was 316 billion RMB, listed as No.1 of all Chinese county-level city in 2016."
• My second to last year at Purdue a colleague and began collecting some preliminary data about the perceptions of fair wages for graduate student TAs and found that international students, especially those from China, had different views than Americans about compensation. 

A few things are going on here that needs to be acknowledged: The first is that people's perceptions of money are weird, vast, and connected, somehow, to culture. This a is subject for another time (or better yet, a sociology study), and that discussions of money spur all kinds of emotions. Second, of course I must acknowledge that I am making more money than average here in China by a wide margin, and so my experiences of Economic Freedom are colored by this fact. That said, it has been quantified and well-documented that both a) economic mobility in the US has been declining for some time, and that b) it has been rising in China for some time. Please have a look at this short, info-graphic heavy piece about the "China Dream," in comparison to the American Dream.

Economics aside, inseparable from the experience of being foreign in China has been the experience of my new found economic freedom: freedom to take trips, to make plans, to think about what I want to do rather than what I can do based on my available resources. If I want to go to Shanghai and buy a pair of pants, for example, it is not a question of how much I can afford but what kind of pants do I want to have (within reason, and if I can find my size). For me, this is a stark contrast in lifestyle that I'm still not sure what to make of. That is, a contrast in how I imagine the future in that the goal, for now at least, is no longer survival and making ends meet. Arjun Appadurai in The Future as Cultural Fact, argues, at points, that folks primarily concerned with survival do not have time to plan for the future. This suggests those born into favorable positions, and those who have gained a degree of financial stability, will gain more practice making future plans, and therefore will become better at the task of dreaming. I'm "lucky" to be in this position, as I am supposed to say, but at the same time I have been working continuously for my entire adult life to put myself into this position. Last month I turned 40 (!), and so it's been 18 years of financial insecurity up until this point. I regret nothing, and have no desire to construct a narrative of victimhood. But I do want to make the point that the experience of economic freedom is one that many in China, including myself, have experienced as of late. Much has been said about China's lack of political freedoms, but I can attest to the fact that an economic freedom is also a life changing force.