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.