On wanting to stop writing in this blog has been a topic on my mind. Not because I have no desire to write, but because the subject of foreignness has not occupied my imagination enough to spur the act of creation. As I've been alluding to over the course of last Fall, the idea of foreignness has felt remote and indistinguishable from other kinds of experience. The goal of this blog was to outline foreignness as I've experienced it moving to China and thus it follows, if I can no longer track a distinct set of experiences that I can attribute to foreignness, then the theme can no longer be explored. Instead, this blog might become simply a curated view of my life here in China, of which foreignness is simply one of many pretexts, such as my nationality or job; a ready-made identity upon which the acts of observation and meaning making might go unquestioned. There is nothing wrong with taking this blog in that direction, and even if I tried to document my experiences here without making conscious attempts to bring the mechanisms (read: rhetorics) that bring these experiences to light, I doubt that I would be able to resist the impulse to discuss rhetoric in some way. That said, part of the work of this project is to sustain a thematic cohesion. "Work" being the key word here because as a construct it gives me permission to set aside my immediate desires of what to write in service to the abstraction of my original intention. In the very first post I wrote about not wanting to sit in my 12th floor apartment looking at China from a perch on my couch. Right now though, it seems to me that if I want to remain faithful to my intention, one way forward is to better understand my changing stance towards this intention.
When I lived in Oakland I spent five years going to psychodynamic therapy. At the time I was teaching and writing, not making much money and pretty much all of my "disposable" income went towards paying my weekly $80 bill, which I always paid, though not always on time. I like to say that it was some of the best money I ever spent. Not because I had some great breakthrough, or solved the catastrophe of my personality (RE: Frank O'Hara), but because I learned a great deal about the dynamics that I created in the midst of relationships. Pyschodynamic therapy is similar to classic Freudian derived psychotherapy in that it's about establishing a relationship with a therapist over a long period of time such that the relationship itself becomes the subject of discussion. The (hopefully) well-trained therapist's job is to listen, ask questions, and lead the person's attention towards the aspects of the relationship dynamic that have gone previously unnoticed, or in many cases, thought but unsaid. An example of this is a discussion I once had with my therapist that grew out of my long unsaid thought that I didn't think he was a very good therapist. Only over time, for me at least, will I get to a place with another person where I trust them enough to say what's on my mind in the same language that I say it to myself. A psychodynamic therapist is trained in not bringing their own relationship dynamics to the sessions such that comments like mine don't further complicate the relationship. There's more to say about this, but the reason I bring it up is that a couple times over those five years I said to my therapist that I wanted to stop coming. These conversations would lead to the question of why I wanted to stop, and inevitably, through a discussion of this lack of motivation arose new questions and dynamics to explore; new motivations.
I tell (retell?) this story to offer a kind of parallel for why the experience of being foreign must also discuss the experience of not being foreign, or at least, discuss the changing dynamics of being foreign even when those dynamics omit overt notions of foreignness such as the fact that I am living in China. So goes the theory anyway. In other words, experiencing a lull in foreignness is also a part of being foreign. I think of U-shaped learning/development, the idea that when learning language one can easily see progress at first, but after a time, this progress slows, and the learner seems to revert to a previous state. Say, for fluency, a person may be able to produce language but after learning a mess of new grammar and vocabulary, their fluency seems to decline. On the upside of the U, however, presuming that they weren't too discouraged by the seeming regression and kept moving forward, their fluency comes back as it was with a richer means of language production. Or when driving, that is, driving before the days of Google and Baidu Maps, following directions as I wrote them on a piece of paper. I was not able to look at a map because I needed to pay attention to the road. More often than not, when I got the feeling that I had missed my turn, I learned to hold that interpretation at bay and be patient rather than turn off at the first exit and check the directions again. Most of the time what I had initially read as being lost could also be read as a sense of getting closer to where I needed to be. When I did stop to check my directions, four times out of five, the way forward was just around the bend and that yes, I have been going in the right direction (Of course, on the fifth time I was very glad that I stopped because I was going in the complete wrong direction). Having lost this sense of foreignness then, for the moment at least, I will choose to read this loss as an indicator of the way forward.
