Mineral Point (Part 1)

On the way to my father's farm for the weekend, as my brother and I would always do on the weekends of the school year prior to high school, sometimes with my sister, sometimes not, an hour from Madison to Mineral Point on Friday after school, an hour from Mineral Point to Madison on Sunday afternoon, we'd usually stop in Dodgeville, eat out, and go by the Farm & Fleet or later when it was built, the Walmart. Farm & Fleet was and still is a wonder of a store. One part farm implementations such as feed and ropes and tractor tires and tools, one part general store with household products from sporting goods to candy to sponges, and one part clothing store selling jeans, boots, gloves, and flannel shirts. To this day when I am back in Wisconsin I try and make a pilgrimage for the jeans (nothing fancy but a lot of sizes that are a bit bigger, to comfortably fit my hockey player thighs and butt) and sometimes a flannel shirt, plain styles in durable if not particularly soft fabrics. My father took frequent trips to Farm and Fleet as he was always working on something out on the farm, sometimes the buildings, sometimes the tractor, sometimes out in the fields. Sometimes he'd just go to find something to buy, like one goes to the mall. The farm was not a horse farm (though in the early days Susan kept a few horses there) or a farm to grow food, but the farm was originally a one-hundred fifty acre plus expanse of rolling hills that we planted Christmas trees on, first in the Spring of 1985. I was seven years old. 

My brother and I were standing at the cash register with my father at Farm and Fleet. The registers in those days had a coin machine that would distributed the coin change. So as, one gives the the clerk cash (though my father would usually write checks) and then to the right of the customer was a coin machine synched to the register that would release the appropriate amount of change once the clerk opened the register cash tray. I remember the machine as a slim beige rectangle whose front was partially opaque deep brown such that you could see the coins stacked up inside it. On the right of the machine was a kind of slide that curved around to the front of the machine into a little cup such that when the change was released the coins would roll down the slide and land in the cup. Because my father always paid in checks, and later, used credit cards, I didn't often see this machine close-up and in action. Also attached to the machine was a little metal lever at the top of the right side. One day, standing to the right of my father with my brother, waiting for my father to finish the transaction or finish talking to the clerk or finish whatever it was that was taking him so long, I reached out and switched the little lever on the side of the coin machine. Suddenly a set of alarms went off. Red lights on the walls above the exist and entry doors started flashing and spinning and a loud alarm, not a ringing bell but a siren, blaring. I don't know how long this moment lasted, perhaps not more than a second or two as I quickly switched the switch back down, and the noise and lights stopped.

What happened after this moment is what I always return to. What happened after was nothing at all. Nobody said anything. Not the clerk and not my dad. Not my brother, to my memory. I've always wondered if anyone saw me switch the alarm on or if they saw me switch it off, and if they did, why didn't anyone say anything? Underneath this memory of what happened and this question of why, if my flipping that switch caused the alarm to go off, is an uncertainty that this actually happened. There was no confirmation, either though some kind of admonishment or joke or observation. No eye contact or smile or frown. Part of me wonders if my switching this switch caused the alarms to go off or if that was just a random event that my action happened to co-occur with, or if it happened at all. This doubt then is kind of a reoccurring theme, a question as to if what I remember and what I felt is real, that if the way I experience an event shares any resemblance to how anyone else experiences the same event; a question of if my experience is entirely singular. This lack of confirmation then is a constant, one that underlies much of this kind of writing, these attempts to reiterate an experience a confirmation of my own existence. As an adult I've since asked my brother if he remembered that day and he did, yet I still wonder. Endless wonder. 

On the Phenomenon of Basketball (Part 2)

In China pick-up basketball works different than it does in the United States. Full court is rare in public parks. Most of the hoops are set up as half-courts and when there is room for full court it is typical to see two half court games playing simultaneously rather than one full court game. I imagine that this is for two related reasons: the first is that there are more people that want to play then there are in the United States. This is about population density and the urban spaces here as much as it is about the popularity of basketball in China which, like the popularity of basketball in cities in the States, has to do with the fact that basketball doesn't require much space or resources in comparison to other sports such as baseball or swimming. One only needs a ball to play, without or without a crew. Though of course, basketball's popularity is also because it's cool; hip-hop, black athletes and musicians, Nike, and the intersections between basketball and style, style and status and swag.

The second related reason for difference in pick-up games is less geographical and a bit more cultural, that is, that folks here seem to come with a group of friends and play only with those folks. This is not a rule but a tendency I first noticed at Purdue, where some groups of Chinese students would prefer to play with the group they came with. If you needed someone to run with you in a full court game and asked one of these folks standing by an adjacent sideline, they'd decline in order to wait for the next available spot in their game. It was the rare Chinese student who preferred to play in the pick-up games rather than show up at the Co-rec with a crew. So 'culture,' maybe, but I think this tendency of young Chinese men attending college at a large American mid-western university to play basketball within insular groups is more complicated than essentialized notions of a particular orientation towards thinking or acting. Case-in-point, over the Summer in Shanghai where I’ve been playing pick-up on invitation from friends, two different regular games, the half-court that the group rents for two hours is only so big. If anyone could just walk on and play then the folks who organized would get less chance to play. Maybe this particular geographic and demographic fact, one defined by a high population and a lack of space has as much to do with the groupish-ness of Chinese pick-up games as a particular way of thinking or relating to others.

Regardless, and in contrast, pick-up basketball in the States is a winner-stays system. So as, if there are enough people to run five-on-five and have folks waiting, then the rule is that the winner of the game stays on the court while the losing team waits in line for the next game. Though this is how it worked at Purdue, this is also how I've experienced it in San Francisco and Oakland. The next in line is whoever claims next, which is usually a gentleman's [sic] agreement depending on who got there first. So as, for example, if there are thirteen people on a court, ten playing at a given time, upon the completion of that game, typically “1 & 2s to 15, win by 2”, then the eleventh person, however determined, would have the right to form the next team. So as, they could choose the team who they want to play with which would include three people waiting and two from the losing team. The reason I put all this into words is to make a contrast with from how it's done here, which is less winner-take-all and more oriented towards the broader participation of those in the group. Thus, in the half-court games favored here there are shorter games played such that everyone will have a chance to play. If there are twelve people then maybe three teams of four will be divvied up playing quick games to 5 or 7 points. Plus, at least in my experience here, the 3-point line is usually not used, so as, each basket, no matter where it is scored from, counts as 1-point. Another more mysterious difference is that it's always 'loser's ball,' meaning, the challenging team or the team that lost will start with the ball. Like giving more people more chances to play, there is a common sense here that is easy to grasp but it speaks to assumptions of who should be given the advantage. Whether this difference was a conscious choice or historical inheritance is probably impossible to know.

A more significant difference in Chinese half-court pick-up is the absence of check-ball ritual which instead is replaced by a non-stop flow that more closely resembles football/soccer. That is, in American pick-up when the ball goes out of bounds or after a point is made the ball is returned to the top of the key, just beyond the three-point line where the team who does not have possession of the ball initiates play by passing to the opposing team, usually as a bounce-pass, sometimes accompanied by the phrase, “ball-in,” as in, the ball is now in play. This allows the defense to get set; to find their man [sic], and initiate the start of play. The check-ball-less game creates ambiguity as to when to start playing defense as it’s unclear, at least to me, when play actually starts. For example, say the ball has gone out of bound on the hoop side. In the American game the ball would be returned to the top of the key, checked in by the opposing team, and play would resume. In the Chinese game, say the ball went out on the hoop side. The ball hits the wall or fence and bounces to the ground nearest a teammate of the team who just threw it out of bounds. This teammate then picks up the ball and throws it to their teammate who is out of bounds and then this teammate in-bounds it to their team and play resumes. So as, in this example nobody from the opposing team touches the out of bounds ball. Or, a person from the opposing team picks it up, passes it to the person out of bounds who ten inbounds the ball to his teammate to start play. Sure. This is fine. However, what tends to happen when this convention is followed is that it’s ambiguous when the defense should start playing or when the offense should start moving, i.e. cut towards the hoop or set screens or just stand there, anxiously waving their arms around. So as, it is not until the person gives up the ball after the in-bound does it seem that play actually starts. Though in some cases, the person who gets the ball on the in-bound will shoot or cut towards the hoop. In broad terms, what this means is that a bit of space is given to the person who receive the inbound which then may or may not be taken advantage of. Or in even broader terms, it lessens the importance of defense and physical contact. All said, if I am playing a half-court game on my ‘home court,’ i.e. the university court or with a group that I played a part in organizing, I will insist on playing with check-ball conventions. I get stressed out by the constant motion and ambiguity.

These conventions then also set parameters for styles of play, though style is always case-by-case, ungeneralizable to the individual or the specific situation. Relating to the constant flow of Chinese pick-up and the idea that more folks should have the chance to play is generally less defense and more room for shooters, where the unspoken goal of basketball is a beautiful jump shot on an isolation play more than winning the game. It's possible that I'm just bitter because I don't have a reliable jump shot, but the joy in this style comes not from an unrelenting control of a given court but from the opportunities for all to have their moment, no matter the winner of the game since even if one loses they will get back on the court in no time. So as, the game is less physical, less closely played when amongst friends in good spirits though there are many exceptions to this in that if the game takes on a more competitive edge, more at stake as far as who wins and loses such as in the tournament, the intensity picks up. But the causal game, the common game, resembles folks standing around taking their turns at making a shot or a drive. It is important here, as I've been told, that in any given game that one ends on good standing with everyone, that this is more important than winning or losing. If one is playing half-court games and one team is beating the other team consistently the winning team won't intentionally lose the final game, but it might not play as hard to give the other team a chance such that everyone can leave with some feeling of accomplishment. Maybe this is culture, maybe this is basketball. Maybe this is a function of playing mostly with your friends and acquaintances who you will inevitably see again, and soon, but it is a different than how pick-up works in the States and these conventions effects how the game is played and the experience of the players therein.

On the Phenomenon of Basketball (Part 1)

Though I cannot say that I am "good" at basketball, I’ve come to love the ritual of playing during PhD school and my last four years in China. I’ve become addicted to the bonding, dopamine when a shot goes in, sweat, luck, and variations of a kind of bro-ness that temporarily dissolves my ego. I started playing basketball sometime in high school, during the swimming off season with Aric and Nate and sometimes Aric's brother Jake and Aric's neighbor John, who Aric and I also knew from the arcade and the side-by-side cabinet days of Street Fighter II. I played a little bit of pick-up basketball in college with my friend Makoto and occasionally in San Francisco and Oakland with a group of middle-aged engineers who lived in my neighborhood but didn't really get into a regular game where I made genuine basketball friends until PhD school when I started playing at the luxurious and well-populated Purdue Co-rec. After early flirtations with regular games with people within my department that maybe weren't all that into basketball, I found a regular Saturday morning game with international graduate students and professors. The main crew was a group of late 40's Taiwanese guys joined by younger graduate students like myself; Americans, Indonesians, Malaysians, and a few Chinese students. Most of these folks attended the same church so it was fairly collegial game that wasn't punctuated by the argument-driven stoppages that typically accompany American pickup games involving fraternity brothers and ball-is-life gym rats (respect to the gym rats). That, and the Saturday game was a bit slower and had at least some half-court orientation in that there was more to the game then fast breaks and 3-pointers, which at least at Purdue was the pick-up style of play most favored by the undergraduates.

Asides from the immediate pleasure, the joys of spending time with a familiar group and of the game itself, of exercising until exhaustion and the emptiness of mind the comes with it, was a kind the intellectual and social exercise of asserting myself on the court. So as, I would tell myself that part of the reason I played was to perform a kind of aggression, one that might transform my non-predatory nature into something/one more competitive, more fearsome, less nice, polite; less deferential. In basketball one's habits of personality emerge in elemental forms, confident shooters, aggressive rebounders, passers as leaders, reactive defenders or vice versa, self-conscious shooters, timid rebounders, those-who-never-look-to-pass, defenders that lose their man or woman, unwilling or unable to keep track of the moving bodies or unsure how physical one should be. Like dancing, one exposes parts of themselves without knowing it when playing basketball. Being aggressive as a defender is something I can do as I generally have an awareness of what the person across from me is doing. This tendency one part paying attention and one part a habitual mechanism to avoid revealing my own intentions. That it is easier to ask questions than to talk about yourself. Being a physical defender is also something I learned playing with Aric who has about three inches on me, is a skilled shooter, and has always had a lot of patience with me climbing all over him to get at the ball or push him off the block.

As an offensive player then, I am much more comfortable playing a supporting role, setting screens, rebounding, and passing rather than taking the ball to the basket or shooting. If I have the ball I also have the spotlight, a critical form of attention where my lack of confident aggression is not just an passing observation but an articulated strategy to take advantage of in that one is to exploit another's lack of confidence. Self-consciousness, especially the kind of self-consciousness that accompanies doubt, is not to one's advantage. Instead, a shooter benefits by a ruthless indifference to others accompanied by an ability to quickly set aside failure. That and actual skill. Thus, I should also mention that my shot appears hopelessly broken in that my shooting mechanics involve my hands and arms going back over my head such that every shot resembles a kind of lob. In the past I've attributed this to the fact that my right shoulder is "double-jointed" which means that I can pop my right upper arm out of the ball socket and there isn't enough stability to shoot the ball in the stereotypical arms extended and elbows bent in front of the body. This shoulder is incredibly flexible but also seems to lack the kind of muscles to generate enough torque (?) to keep my arms in front of my body when shooting the ball. In the last year or so I've been doing strength building exercises and have noticed that it makes it a bit easier to shoot, so perhaps my odd-looking shot is something that can be rehabilitated. My deference to others and self-consciousness, however, is in the architecture of my personality.

That said, I can find comfort in my lack of confidence as much as one can be or not be confident; confidence a dynamic that emerges depending on the situation. Confidence then is not a binary, to have or not to have, but situational and wrapped up in perception and performance. That one can perform confidence when they don't have it, 'fake it till you make it.' Or vice versa, one can perform unconfidence, to humble oneself or be deferential because that is what our role calls forth. All of this at the base of the habit otherwise known as personality, wrapped up in gender, race, class and the hierarchies of status we consciously or unconsciously surf from moment to moment. We might use these performances to accomplish what we want or to help others accomplish what we think they want, that is, if they are even remotely under our control. Or more simply, in basketball, we might use the performances of confidence to win the game--the point--the moment, which maybe is a very contemporary American way to understand the goal of sport. Regardless, that I flit in and out of confidence, in basketball, in life, sometimes intentionally but usually not. In basketball then my lack of confidence, anyone’s lack of confidence, becomes an expression of self.

**

One Hundred Hands Slapping Five

For Kobe & Phil

He grabs the ball, the ball

already in his hands.  He runs

towards the bench.  Coach!

is nowhere. 

 

His arm cocks back: he goes in

for the dunk— The Man is a function

of the game. There is only one

ball. Pay attention.

 

In the center, the court opens

in every direction. He’s open.

He spins around

nobody. Nobody can stop him.

 

The best ones already know,

most are already known. Sweat

pours from his face. Master

of what?

**

The problems come when one’s performance becomes total, that one is or is not a something eternal and unchangeable. Which is what happens when the dynamics around us don't change, either because have a vested interest in maintaining them or because they are forced upon us, or both. We think that we are confident or not, that another is this way or that, which is a natural and necessary trick of language: that this computer I write on is a computer and not a indeterminate mass of waves and particles but a real thing that is there. That solidity and consistency is a necessary presumption to live, to hunt and gather, and further, that a given situation brings forth the need for this solidity. One is good or not good at basketball and this is useful when choosing your team, your clothes, your words to describe yourself. Yet, that choice to judge, oneself or others, on the grounds of confidence is an act brought into existence by exigence, that a given situation calls forth this judgment and the articulation of the judgment then makes it a fact. The other night I was playing with a group of guys and the guy guarding me was fairly big, wearing a grey t-shirt. He played in the post but did not take any shots, instead deferring to others around him. It seemed to me that he hadn’t played a lot of basketball and didn’t have much confidence. When there was a break in the action I said to A, “pass me the ball, the grey guy can’t do anything.” I would not have said this out loud if we weren’t playing a competitive game. I certainly would not have said that out loud to this guy (though with my current Chinese ability I would not have been able to say that anyway). I’m not sure I even would have articulated that thought to myself. What I noticed about this particular moment is that upon saying this, upon making this judgment I felt a kind of guilt for taking advantage of what I imagine to be this man’s struggle.

And so these materials self-perpetuate, a life form reproducing itself. In basketball I can perform as predator, cloak myself in a wolf’s skin when the situation allows. I have told myself that this is what I want. At other times I am devoured, by my opponents, teammates, myself, or some combination therein. At other times I am neither predator or prey but egoless and free. All three of these states produce a kind of pleasure with a beginning and an end, a game that can be stopped. Also in these states are the means of their production, the projection of my imagined likeliness into the interior of others. The grey man’s lack of confidence symbiotic with my fullness, that somehow I am responsible for how he feels. Thus, I become trapped in my past performances, be it the immediate past or the matrix of performances I've seen before and apply in comparison. My performance of unconfidence and this particular register of vulnerability I write in is not the entire story but a necessary starting point. In professional basketball the announcers on television talk about 'getting to your spot,' meaning, getting to a place on the court where once can make the kinds of shots they are confident shooting. Thus, here, I mark a ground to stand on.

Summer

I sit in a foreign language bookstore empty of anyone but myself and the guy working here, slightly hung over and tired from a night out with friends in Shanghai. Nights like these usually appear in my mind the next morning in one of two ways, either as closeness or alienation, the former a deepened intimacy with friends and the latter an embarrassment that I said too much. What started as an aside about Hong Kong turned into a longer conversation about the parallels between the protests there the Black Lives Matter movement, and then later, when it was just me and J, an endless back and forth about China and Covid and travel bans and politics. We left the empty bar near three in the morning and I walked back to my Airbnb through the then quiet streets of a city that had gone to bed. 

It's been a year since I last wrote into this space, a long year where much happened, from spending last summer in the States to starting the school year online to navigating the tricky requirements of getting back into China, to quarantining for a month, to settling back into a semi-normal life--minus the unending adjustments necessary at an overtly international university during a global pandemic. I'm not entirely sure where to start or what stories to tell or even if this is the right forum to pull on the threads of ideas that have been gathering over the last year, to what end and why. So, I will start here, at a foreign language bookstore, now with a few customers. A young American woman sits chatting with her Mandarin tutor at an adjacent table. This afternoon I will have my second meeting with my own Mandarin tutor who I have plans to see for an hour a day four times a week until the end June. Thus, the plan for my summer in China, to write in the mornings and study Chinese in the afternoons. I rented a little apartment in the French Concession, the first time I've spent an extended period in a city since before I moved to Indiana to get my PhD nearly ten years ago. 

Underlying these still developing aspirations are my reasons for being in China this summer, which is primarily because I don't want to risk leaving. In past summers I left China to see family and friends in the US or to travel within China with my girlfriend who was more or less free to come and go. Right now travel outside or into China comes with a mountain of restrictions. Maybe these restrictions are more about fear than reality, but from hearing of the experiences of others and my own troubles getting back in, friends and faculty at my university who have not been able to get back into China and thus needing to continue working remotely, teaching unsatisfying online courses at odd evening hours, I'd rather not take the risk and go through the process of getting visas, planet tickets, multiple Covid tests, and endure a month long quarantine a second time. That, and the strong discouragement from my university to leave China and risk not being able to get back in. 

Part of me is excited to see what life is like on my own in China, to dedicate time to study Mandarin and hang out in this city, population 26 million, with the time and resources to enjoy it. These restrictions have forced me to think a bit harder about what I would do in China if I wasn't bound to my work place, a kind of thinking I'd be less likely to do while living part time in the United States, physically and mentally between two places. Yet, another part of me harbors a growing dissatisfaction with life in China, these travel restrictions one of the more tangible manifestations of my limitations here, from language to travel to the internet to what seems to me a less welcoming environment for foreigners than when I first arrived. During the mess a Covid, Trump, China, travel, elections and politics in the States, and my inconsistent social life, it's difficult to know what exactly is the cause of my unrest and if blaming my dissatisfaction on the macro structures of culture and geo-politics really explains anything at all, much less puts me in a position to change it. 

Thus, for the next month I've committed to this; that is, trying to pull out some of these threads in the hopes that I will be able to tie at least some of them together, from the macro to the granular, so to speak. At the same time, however, what writing into the blog this summer is also about speaking to speak, to see if there is stable ground somewhere beneath the mass of uncertainty in which I live. This post, for example, has taken me two days to write, doubting what is and is not okay to say. And so this is what I mean by the mass of uncertainty, that I am increasingly disposed to doubt the validity of my beliefs and the words I choose to construct them. How did I get here? Writes George Oppen, "...it is the nightmare of the poet or the artist to find himself wandering between the grim gray lines of the Philis­tines and the ramshackle emplacements of Bohemia. If he ceases to be­lieve in the validity of his insights—the truth of what he is saying—he becomes the casualty, the only possible casualty, of that engagement" (from "The Mind's Own Place"). Between the non-believers and believers, between the hyper-politicized identity politics of the United States and the looming state security of China; between my sphere of Western media consumption and my everyday life in China, my being is infused with a sense of audience, that my actions and words are often being read for their intentions. Where exactly has this particular kind of paranoia come from? From these macro political and culture structures or from somewhere more immediate?

And so again, I start here. In this foreign language bookstore café but also in this headspace, so called, that I write in part to make real my own existence, in part to make a record of my time here, and in part to continue exploring the phenomenon of being foreign, whatever that now means.