XXXI

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.

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.

XXVI

The other night when I came home from work I pushed the elevator button and waited there with my bike as the floor indicator ticked down. When the door opened, my neighbor, one half of an older couple that lives across from me with their son and grandkids, saw me and said, "回来了" (huíláile), or, "You came back." In that moment, not knowing exactly what 回来了 meant I responded, "你好" (nǐ hǎo), or, "hello." We smiled at each other, she moved out of the elevator (in her hand was a bag of food scraps...I guess maybe she was on her way to throw them out) and I got into the elevator with my bike. As soon as the doors closed I took out my phone and recorded what she said three times ("huílaile, huíláile, huí lái le") and the next day, played the recording for my tutor. We talked about this particular greeting and when to use it (when someone has come back), what to say in response, (对, 回来了; yes, I came back), and when not to use it (if the person has not come back). It's all pretty basic, but it points at something bigger, that is, that in Chinese, when greeting people that you know, greetings are contextually dependent. Or in other words, one does not use generic greetings like "what's going on?" or "how's it going?" but greetings that express an awareness of what an individual is doing or going to do.

The most common example of this phenomenon then is "你吃了吗" (Nǐ chīle ma), or, "Have you eaten yet?" which is, so I've been told many times, a common greeting here in China. My apologies to anyone reading who has studied Chinese for more than ten minutes, but the larger point here is when saying hello it's important to consider where the person is coming from or where they might be going. In contrast, in the English speaking United States that I'm familiar with (Midwest, WASPy), asking if someone has eaten yet is regarded as a kind of invitation to eat. An invitation isn't bad, but it requires an intimate relationship between the individuals. In relation to what my neighbor said, in the U.S., if someone who lives across the hall with who you do not speak with regularly, said to you, ah, you've come back, a person might feel intruded on. As in, so, this person who I don't know has been keeping track of my whereabouts, and makes mental notes of when I am home and not home. Red flag. Of course, if you know your neighbor, and you both speak regularly, the expression that you came back would be regarded differently. At any rate, in China it is generally polite to assert an interest in the physical well being of a person if you have some acquaintance with them. I like this about being here. I liked that my neighbor said to me "回来了."

To further go down this road of generalization then, I'd say that in the U.S., it's polite to exclude context. Or in other words, that it's rude to presume something about someone unless you know them intimately. And even then, presumptions of whereabouts, desires, or doings might not be welcome. I think about living in California, talking with random people at bus stops or when carpooling with strangers from Oakland to San Francisco. It's was impossible to know by looking at someone where they were from, what language they might speak, what they did for a living, etc. The sheer diversity that exists in some place in the U.S. makes it difficult to guess accurately about an individual or what customs and cultures they have. The skill then becomes not "reading the air" (as it's called in Japanese), but in how one uses their words to draw a person out (i.e. classical notions of rhetoric). People who actually study this kind of thing might call this the difference between a "high-context" and "low-context" culture, where as the high-context folks, due to an assumed homogeneity, make presumptions based on non-verbal cues, and the low-context folks explicitly articulate (to name one difference). I'm not sure how I feel about these kinds of generalizations, but it's hard to get past the feeling that I am being rude by presuming an interest in a person's well being that I don't know well. This is not only a language issue, but is a product of deeply entrenched habits, i.e. my foreignness, 回来了.

XXV

It's Sunday night of the first weekend that I've been home for the last four weeks. Last weekend I went to a conference in Nanjing about writing and teaching writing. I was one of five foreigners among maybe 400 Chinese writing teachers. Before that I was at a conference in Tennessee about rhetoric and religion. I was one of four people presenting on work not related to Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. Before that I was in Indiana visiting my girlfriend. I was one of one person visiting my girlfriend. Now I'm home. This weekend I went to Metro, the big grocery store that carries a good variety of foreign food, where I bought some German sausages, some micro-brews, some salsa, and refried beans. I went to the local store and got some vegetables, fruit, fizzy water, and some tissue. I spent about an hour on Saturday dusting the surfaces in my apartment which had accumulated a thin layer of black dust that wafts in through the windows and even when the windows are closed. Last night I slept from 11 PM to 9 AM this morning and didn't wake except for once to go pee, and I think I'm finally over jet lag. The last four weeks have meant four different presentations and two writing deadlines. Up until now, from the beginning of August, there has been much to do, from orientation to teaching to writing deadlines to avoiding embarrassing myself while speaking publicly. I've been successful in some of what I set out to do and some not, but now however, the most urgent things have passed and I can relax a little.

Over a year ago I set out to write about being foreign, the experience of. In the previous 24 posts there was a kind of newness where, I guess, the novelty of this experience peeked through and propelled me to write. These days however, though I still feel "foreign," I don't have a firm grasp on the nature of this experience. To be sure, I am foreign in colloquial sense, a foreigner; but I am no longer as interested in what this experience is like. Maybe that's because I've gotten used to things, or maybe that's because I've become interested in other things. For the last two months, for example, I've been listening to podcasts on the way to school and feel like my ability to understand Chinese has increased exponentially. Not that I can really understand Chinese, but that my ability to listen; the time that I can pay attention, has been extended. This is enabled by knowing more vocabulary and set phrases, but also by growing that muscle in my ears that can hear things. The cognitive load, in other words, is a little bit smaller than had been, and that makes everything easier. Oddly, I've been listening to these podcasts outside of my routine, randomly playing one on my way to get groceries, for example. Dare I say that I'm becoming a little bit interested in the Chinese language, which is a first for me in that language learning has never been a "subject" I've taken to. Maybe being foreign is  an implicit assumption in the act of language learning, or even a necessary condition.

Outside of my window, the 12th floor of Times Central Garden building #3, pulsates the Kunshan Opera House. I write "pulsates" because when it gets dark its lights turn on and the thin vertical strips of LEDs that wrap around its body change color from green to blue to purple to orange to yellow to green again, and all the shades in-between. It changes not like a strobe or neon sign switched on, but like a gradient sloping from one tincture to the next. And so in between the green there is a lime green and further, an ocean blue, a pink, and a canary yellow. There are two layers to the building like a wedding cake; a wide round base supporting its smaller tier. Both are curved at unpredictable intervals and so its shape, heightened by the changing colors, vibes pleasantly outward as varied waves of light illuminate the evening's darkness. I wouldn't say its beautiful, or even really that impressive, but it's something, and peaceful, and it's always there and glowing. At night my living room floods with its optimism and only on a rare occasion, maybe a national holiday, does it not do its thing. In the daytime however, it sits unremarkably; a uniform white blob that appears water stained and mildewed in spots. From my vantage I can see the green AstroTurf roof on top the lower tier and the fenced off air-conditioning and solar panel units that disappear in the night. In the sun's light the Opera House resembles something more human, that is, something more familiar: a thing that gets older by the day. The experience of change then, in this classical sense of time, is terminal.

XXIV

I want to get back to language though. Tomorrow, the 12th of August, will mark a full year of living in China and of studying Chinese. My first semester here I spent four hours a week working one-on-one with either a teacher or a tutor and my ability, though not great, grew exponentially. Numbers, simple expressions, a small vocabulary, and a little grammar made me feel like I was making some progress. Rome wasn't built in a day, etc. but a discernible beginning had emerged. The second semester however I fell off these habits. Though I still met weekly with my teacher, I met considerably less with a different tutor (the previous one had left). This may sound like an excuse but this is my attempt to describe the situation: Simply, my teaching and service duties plus my writing schedule displaced my Chinese study. As I've discussed previously on this blog, I'm not a particularly motivated language learner and never have been. Combine that with a slow cooking brain, "shyness," and a deep-seated aversion to the kind of route learning that (I think?) is necessary for learning vocabulary, and I think it's fair to stay that my Chinese progress has stalled. I'm not too unique in this as many folks learning language tail off. That said, being surrounded by motivated language learners and professional language teachers I feel a sense of shame about this lack of noticeable progress and further, I fear that it comes off as a kind of disdain for their expertise. I apologize for the diary like tone of this opening.

In the present moment, since my ideal self tries to make choices that feel good in the long term (e.g. choices that don't compound the tiny grains of shame and guilt that build towards outwards expressions of insecurity and anger), I've resolved to build Chinese learning into my daily life. Thus in the mornings and, at least, half of the evenings when I ride my bike to and from work, I've been listening to Chinese Pod, a series of pretty great for learning Chinese resources. This means that I have to sacrifice listening to music while I ride which is one of my favorite things to do on a regular day. To give up one thing for another thing you value more, so I've been told, is the definition of sacrifice. And so the bigger theory here is that if I can't find a motivation within myself to learn, then I will slit the neck of the goat of listening to music while riding a bike and drink its blood, thereby communing with an otherworldly energy to imbibe the flaccid corpse of my language learning self. That, and working with a language coach, and maybe attending the introductory Chinese class again. I'd also say that I will study characters or use a flashcard app, but realistically that isn't something I can sustain. Reason being there are all my work duties listed above, but then there are also the entrenched habits of my personality, that is, talking to my girlfriend, reading, meditating, basketball, socializing, and writing in this blog. Huh. After writing that sentence it seems clear to me why I don't devote more time to learning Chinese. It seems more blood will need to be spilled.

Less violently however there are other ways to be in China and learn Chinese. Instead of reading about the insane and depressing politics in the United States I read about China. SupChina is a most excellent source for the newsletter (which aggregates a wide variety of articles relating to China from around the world), the podcasts, and original content. I read the Chinese newspapers in English, the left leaning (so I'm told) SCMP out of Hong Kong and some of the more state sponsored news sources just to see what's up (not listed here). In terms of academic like readings I wish I could say that I read history books about China but history in large doses always puts me to sleep. Instead I have recently been reengaging with a new (to me) translation the I Ching that has been quite helpful for philosophy as well as some history, and then there are always random scholarly articles about Chinese writing, education, and rhetoric that I'm lead to through teaching and research. All of the above is not language exactly but it's in the same neighborhood, i.e. culture. There seems to be difference however between riding a bike and watching a bike race, and in this metaphor, I've got a pretty good seat. Onward and onward, of being foreign. Two weeks until the semester starts and there is lots and lots to do.

XXIII (心: Part 2)

In the United States last Spring the public intellectual Jordan Peterson got a lot of press. And not just in the States, but in Canada and the U.K. as well. I can't speak for other places in the world but at least one of my Chinese students, a particularly media savvy one, had also heard of him. One can go to Youtube and find a thousand videos of his debates, lectures, and appearances on podcasts. Some of them have click bait titles like "Peterson Destroys SJW!" (repackaged from more official sites by god know who...Russian polorizers? Alt-right sympathizers? Fly-by-night internet parasites wanting to make a quick buck?) and some of them have descriptive headlines such as "Jordan Peterson Oxford Debate," posted by the BBC or Canadian public broadcasting (or its equivalent. Note: these are not real titles). The phenomenon of his popularity is one thing, and there are many different takes on his appeal. The dominant one, and one that he also acknowledges, is that people, mostly young men, are attracted to his bootstrapping message, where JBP provides folks with a way to be in the world, an "antidote to chaos" that pegs "neomarxist" identity politics and "post-modern" theory as major problems in the Western world. He is a clinical psychologist, professor, and academic who has published genuine academic research for the last twenty years. Controversy asides, it's amazing that a genuine researcher can become as well known as he's become.

Now, I don't want to talk about this person or the controversy around him. Instead, I want to illustrate how the political landscape in the States, and maybe even in the West at large, has become unrecognizable such that traditional left/right spectrums don't seem to apply. In painting this picture then, I need to acknowledge one of his arguments that I agree with, gulp, which is the idea that progressive identity politics sometimes goes too far. Meaning that just as extreme right wing identity politics (say, the kind that openly embraces racism and segregation) is gross and hateful, extreme left wing identity politics (say, the kind where people's careers and/or lives are destroyed by social media mobs because of a Tweet they made when they were a teenager) is also gross and hateful. A version of this then is Peterson's argument, that what he calls "political correctness" has gone too far such that in places such as academia free speech is being regulated to an alarming degree. His narrative suggests that one cannot say, "I don't believe in white privilege" without being accused of being a racist, for example. That's his argument, and generally I agree in that I feel that speech in the U.S. within particular spheres (academia, social media) has increasingly been watched and regulated in ways that, for better or for worse, remind me of ways that speech is regulated here in China. By this I don't mean in a "big brother" kind of way. I mean in the way that ideas are not harmless abstractions made of ethereal reasons, but that ideas are also moral. That there is such a thing as ideas that are good for us, and ideas that are not. The ideas that are not good for us then should be removed from the public sphere because they do real harm to people.

My point here is not about what constitutes a good idea or what right a person has to free speech. My point is that contemporary Western style debate, the kind built on science and facts, has been seriously challenged as of late. On the right you have Trump who continues to deride the media, claiming that all but Fox are liars not to be trusted. Fake news, alternative facts, and a polarized public has more or less "main streamed" what the post moderns pointed at a while ago, that is, that truth is a social construction. Cynics then (like Trump) have taken this idea to mean that if there is no ground for us to stand on, if the world is simply dog eat dog, then whatever it takes to maintain control is what's required. And as the world has seen, the guy seems to have very few principles outside of protecting his tribe of elites. At the same time, as Peterson's argument makes, there is also a contingent of this kind of thinking on the left, that facts are social constructions indicative of who has power. Because women, minorities, people of color were shut out, for the most part, of politics and power for much of the history of the West, the game has been rigged and therefore the rules need to change. I tend to agree with this view of history, yet, I also don't believe that everything is reducible to identity and power. My own conflicted views aside, the connection that I'm trying to make here is that both "sides" have seemingly adopted a similar relation to traditional conceptions of reality. There is not a right/left divide in this case, but a modern/post-modern divide. Peterson, his positivist psychology and Christian mythological framework, is very much a traditionalist striving to protect what has come under attack, which at its root are assumptions about a reality that separates the mind from the world. The challenge then is not choosing the correct side to take, but how to exist with others who see and act in the world in unfamiliar ways and more specifically, what rules, laws, and conventions we might abide by moving forward.

XXII (心: Part 1)

Last fall a potential faculty member (who is now a faculty member) gave a job talk about the dangers of assuming that a given word or concept in English will translate into Chinese, and then proceeded to outline some teaching practices that instructors could use to do a kind of cross-cultural interrogation of said word or concept. Specifics aside, the example they used to draw a contrast between English and Chinese was the word "heart," or Chinese, "心," (xīn). In English or more broadly, in the West, one's heart is the emotional center of a person. If one makes a decision with one's heart it means that one is making a decision with emotion. Letting your heart "speak" is to let emotion, whatever that is, dominate your thoughts. Thus implying that thoughts are not emotions but something else, a something else that usually originates in the brain or more abstractly, the mind. These kinds of divisions are fundamental in the West where Artistotle's ethos, pathos, and logos are still hiding in every corner of the modern world. A presumably rational mind creates abstract thoughts which are then translated into language for the purposes of communication. Emotion, or the heart, is presumed to be part of the body mass, a thing both unknowable and uncontrollable (except by those who are strong enough to marshal their inhuman desires a la the charioteer in Plato's Phaedrus).

Yet 心 in the Chinese is where both the emotions and the mind are located. What this means is that thinking is not necessarily separated from feeling and in fact, can be seen as one in the same time. 心 feels and thinks. That is not to say that mind/body separations are not also achieved in this image of Chinese philosophy and thought (see Slingerland and Chudek, 2011), but that the distinction between thought and feeling in the East, so called, are not so clearly demarcated as they are in the West. For me, understanding this difference has been helpful towards the ends of understanding why some things are done they way they are done here in China. For example, in May I traveled to Nanjing where I visited the museum and memorial for the Nanjing Massacre. The museum part, which already is an imposition that I'm not sure the creators of this place would make (i.e. if the memorial and museum can be separated), is essentially a history museum. There are artifacts from the battles and the occupation, narratives and pictures, a clear route to take through the building, and lots and lots of placards to read. What was interesting however in relation to the discussion above, at least to my American eyes weaned on Smithsonian style museums, is that the translated into English placards frequently described the horrors of the Japanese invasion in emotional terms. That is to say, they used adjectives like "brutal," and "terrible," and "horrible," and "awful" to describe what happened. To me this seems to contrast with the almost clinical view of history represented in American museums whose task is to present the "facts" of history, not editorialize them. Thus, the museum told the story of the Nanjing Massacre as well as how one should feel about these events. 

The broader implication here is that history is not just a series of events told through a sequence of facts, but that it also has a moral component: How one remembers is as important as what one remembers. One thinks and feels. Relating this back to 心, more generally then, every fact has an emotional component. Knowledge is not something that exists in the realm beyond but is tied to human intention. Following from this reasoning, in the case of the Nanjing Massacre memorial/museum it is not that the placards were poorly written, or that they were propaganda towards the ends of promoting negative public sentiment towards the Japanese (though I think many would argue that they do), but that a presentation of the correct facts also requires a presentation of the correct intentions through which to regard those facts. In other words, one always thinks with their heart and it is folly to pretend otherwise. Further, the law is not only about reason but about morality as well. In the West, or at least the United States, the post-moderns have hit upon a version of this idea for some time now, and at present, the lack of a publicly agreed upon objective reality is increasingly a major problem when it comes a shared public discourse. Though it is easy to see these disagreements through the lens of American politics and their competing factions (e.g. Republicans, liberals, progressives, alt-right, etc.), I think it is also possible to read this disagreement though the concept of 心, that is, that there is one side who believes in the province of objective facts, and thus, in the modern institutions of democracy and their laws, and that there is one side who believes that facts and feelings are inseparable. I do not think that these sides are divided along political lines. 

XXI (Returning: Part 2)

I write this in my sister's study in Washington DC, which is actually more of a toy room with a seldom used computer off to the side. Before I came here I had visions of writing this post at the airplane terminal in Madison, or Detroit, or maybe on the airplane itself, like the last post. But I decided not to bring my computer, and instead revised my vision to include this prelude, an exposition of decision making processes. Or in other words, a description of my writing process as an exercise in remembering, using a notebook and a few notes to plan what I will write, or simply reminding myself of the kernel of a thought of keep myself from forgetting. Like an egg in incubation, I try to keep the thought alive until I can find a space and time to hatch it. Part of this process then is to protect the idea, a protection that presumes a kind of stasis, as if the idea and the impulse to write the idea will not change. Of course somehow and some way it does change, but it's hard to say what this holding on does to it as I will either completely forget what it was supposed to be in the first place or when I finally sit down to write it, whatever does end up getting written replaces its memory. Returning to what then I don't know as I sit here and write, but I manage to hold onto something of the idea, even if that something is only the impulse to keep writing. And now that I've written this I have to set this post on hold, as I need to leave back to Madison in an hour.

The impulse then is a counter-point to the idea that being in the States is similar to being in China. It's been two weeks and of the time I've been back home in Wisconsin the experience is different than being in Shanghai or Ann Arbor or D.C. "Home is where one starts from." says T.S. Eliot but there is nothing like settling into the oldest grooves known, and thus I'd draw a distinction between being somewhere other than home, regardless of language and culture. I felt as "foreign" at the conference in Ann Arbor as being at a conference in Shantou China though everyone spoke English, I could read the warnings on the elevator, and I knew pretty much what to expect from the experience of entering a Walgreen's. It's also possible that everything feels a bit distanced when you're severely jet lagged but that's another story. Yesterday my mom and I went out to the horse farm where she keeps Theo, and as we stood there at the base of a valley looking up at the broadly sloping Wisconsin hills, it's hard for me to imagine feeling "at home" in any landscape other than southern Wisconsin. I lived for six years in California and every time I flew back to either Oakland or San Francisco (depending on which tickets were cheapest), I would ask myself why I chose to live in a place I didn't belong to; its air and hills still novel. Thus it was not just an idea, but I could feel this unbelonging in my person.

It is difficult to write about being home. I'm tempted to say its the opposite of being foreign, but I suspect it is just another point on the spectrum. I am also tempted to write about difference, about the things that stand out between here and there; the people in Chicago walk faster than those in Shanghai, that Americans are bigger, that their traffic flows move en masse without stopping and starting as quickly as the flows in China, and the trains and their stations in the States are old and slow and falling apart. There are less smokers here, more blondes and more diversity. There is more variety of bikes and beer, though there seems to be just as many super high end cars and Starbucks. I can understand what people are saying here but I'm not sure its particularly interesting and I'd probably just rather read my book or escape into my phone. In Wisconsin there are more bugs than there are in Kunshan, more birds and houses. More blue sky and the air is without question clean. All said, it is too easy to view these contrasts as competition rather than difference, and my noticing drifts into value-laden judgment. More importantly for my purposes though, I'm not sure these kinds of comparisons gets at the phenomenon of being foreign. Regardless of the details then there is something that remains of my old impulses born of habit and conjured by place. Returning to what then I don't know but it is easy to fall back into old grooves at home or in writing. I head back to China in a few days.

XX (Returning: Part 1)

I write this on an Amtrak traveling through Michigan. The train, amazingly, to me at least, has the internet. Right now I'm looking out the window at a water tower, blue on the stem and white around the bulb: "Wilson," it reads. Or at least I think that's what it said. By the time I finished the sentence and worked out the syntax of how to describe the tower I had forgotten what it said. At any rate, we're passing though a small town somewhere in the middle of lower Michigan. I came here to attend the Consortium of Graduate Communication Institute at the U of Michigan in Ann Arbor, getting in late late Saturday night, Shanghai to Dallas to Detroit to a really expensive cab ride. The thing ended today, Tuesday, though I had to skip out in the middle of keynote to get on this train; going to Chicago, and from there I will get on a bus to Madison. On Friday Buddyfest begins and after, will have two weeks to see family and other friends before heading back to China at the end of June. I'm a bit sick but it's nothing serious, run down from the jet lag and lack of sleep in combination with the business of the conference. All said I learned a lot and made a few connections. Swales and Feak, pretty much the biggest names in the field of graduate communication were at my presentation / "works-in-progress talk" (of course not to see me but the person before me), and that in itself would make it all worthwhile.

Being back in the U.S. feels surprisingly uneventful so far. Asides from my frequent encounters with cheese, and seeing a few old friends and acquaintances at the conference, there is an odd lack of novelty. Part of this is due to the fact that I was back in the States in February, part of this is due to the fact that I was at a similarly purposed and populated conference in China last March, and part is due to my relentless connection to the people I love via smart phone. One of the best days of my life, so the story goes, is the day I got back from Japan, a place that I was much more isolated in because there weren't smart phones or Skype or Wechat. I spoke with my family maybe three times over the course of a year. The only thing that was constant was email, and even then there was a delay between sending and receiving due to the fact that I had to travel an hour to get to a computer to check my email. Of course email was the beginning of instantaneous global communication (for those who couldn't afford to buy expensive international phone cards such as my 19 year old self), so I was lucky to have that. And of course it's not like I'm two-hundred years old, and kids these days, and etc. performances of the wizened and wow I was alive in 1998! My point though is that part of my joy upon returning to the States, of the thrill of being able to speak English and be "understood" again, was the fact that I had spent the previous year in a kind of seclusion, one where I didn't really ever really get to "be myself" though the expression of language.

Connecting this to the last post then, and the "privilege" of possessing these technologies that continually spin around us, is that I'm never very far away from anyone that I want to talk to (and who wants to talk to me). Seeing, say, my girlfriend in the flesh is certainly different than seeing her on the Wechat, but I don't forget what she looks like or the sound of her voice. Some of my most pressing needs then, the need of talking about my day or for goofing around, or the more "practical" needs of coordinating plane tickets or getting help with a recipe, are taken care of in the moment, and I don't experience much longing. The global economy, at least in the part of China where I live, is ever present, and though I can't get a good burrito, I can get a-good a lot of other things. All said, as I come back the States it doesn't feel like I've been gone a long time. During the entire time I've been in China I've also been in constant touch with most of the people and things I care about. "Wherever you go there you are," the title of a book I've never read but it's seems true in this case, that I feel many of the same things here in the U.S. that I felt in China since much of my immediate experience is similar. Further, I can even be foreign in the U.S. so long as I hold the idea of China in my head, or rather, the idea that I am a person who has been living in China for the last year in my head (and therefore the idea that I am different than a person who has not been living in China). This spirit of difference in mind then, I will say one thing: the trains here are quite old and a little dirty and slow, but they are quite comfortable.

XIX

Absent from these discussion of foreignness has been the idea of privilege, an idea that I have been intentionally avoiding in part because the usual suspects of privilege, e.g. race, gender, and in this case, nationality, can quickly become the main event. Or in other words, I don't think there is much to be gained by writing about being a white American male in China. Not because there is nothing to be said, but because there are not many things that have not already been said. Yes I benefit from being a white American male in China, from boosting my authority in the classroom to rarely having to worry about safety. The web of identities conjured simply by walking down the street is infinitely complex, and I cannot begin the approach the sophistication with which many have already written about privilege, patriarchy, whiteness, fear, and its connection to the English language and American hegemony. Yet, there is a difference between experiencing privilege and the experience of privilege. While the former is often connected to political discourses that, at their best, work towards strengthening liberal democracy, the latter discussion of privilege is difficult to enter without spinning off into guilt spirals or psychobabble. It is the latter that I wish to discuss in the context of foreignness.

Specifically I want to discuss the privilege of an ubiquitous American cultural presence, and being able to relate to that presence. For example last week I saw the new Star Wars movie Solo (I liked it!). This morning I watched game 1 of the NBA finals on my television while eating oatmeal and drinking green tea. Last night I played pickup games in a gym adorned with huge posters of Kobe Bryant and James Harden. I can walk into any corner store and buy a coke or a Snickers or have burgers and Budweiser delivered to my door in thirty minutes. Here I sit in my living room connected though a VPN to Google's Blogger, a site that is theoretically beyond the great fire wall of China. I can stream Amazon or Netflix (if I were willing to pay for them), and lately have been digging for episodes of the newest season of Westworld, which I am regrettably not as enamored by since Dolores broke bad. QQmusic allows me to download, mostly for free, all kinds of music, from the mainstream to the obscure, and I thus I plug in my headphones on my way to work pedaling my Trek  up the wide avenues of Kunshan. I don't spend all of my time immersed in these American entertainments, but I could if I wanted to, and sometimes, when I have the time and need to take a break, I can leave China for a little while and visit familiar places. 

Part of this particular incarnation of foreignness then is the privilege of not being foreign, if only for a little while; to have the ever present option of engaging in media and activities I am well acquainted with. In contrast, I think of foreign students in the United States from smaller, not as wealthy countries. I think about the difficulty in accessing television and media from places that don't create as much content, or whose foods and cultural delights have not been aggressively exported. Without one's "home" culture easily available, there is no choice but to engage with what's around them, which in most cases, will require putting oneself in a vulnerable position. This privilege however is not unique to me, or Americans. Chinese students in the United States have a similar privilege as where if they don't want to, they can engage minimally in American goings-ons because there is plenty of other Chinese students, food, and media options to keep them entertained. I know this because many of my Chinese students in the States have said as much. In an even broader sense, this privilege of proximity is the backbone of the internet, and enables anyone with a smart phone to remain centered in a safe place. Though it may not be a part of foreignness for everyone, part of my being foreign then is both deliberately stepping away from the ease of this ubiquity. It is not easy. 

XVIII

If intention is part of foreignness, then it follows that uncovering some of the roots of a particular intention can shed light on the phenomenon of foreignness. Further, if intention is not just a conscious action, and is also a result of habit patterns formed over time (perhaps unknowingly), then it follows that past intentions can be connected to habits formed in the past, which in this case I will call the habits of being foreign. To start then on uncovering my habit of foreignness, I grew up in two places that were quite different, and during my "formative years" never quite fully immersed myself in either. From the ages of 4 until 13 I spent every weekend and the summers on a farm just outside of a small Wisconsin town named Mineral Point where my father lived. During the week, Monday through Friday, I would go to school on the West side of Madison, where my mother lived. They were located an hour's drive apart in Southwest Wisconsin. Once I got into high school, my Dad rented a house in Madison, and I began to develop some continuity, but that's another story. And of course there are more details of this arrangement, and also, I should note, my brother also moved on the same schedule (my sister not as much), but I cannot speak for their experiences. All said, part of the intention that underlies my current foreignness was built through the normalization of a liminal existence, one where I traveled regularly between two different worlds and developed two different ways of living. 

Specifically, Mineral Point was the world of my father. It was (and still is) a small town, 2,500 people, famous for being the first European settlement in Wisconsin, and since the 20th Century, somewhat of a bohemian enclave known for pottery and tourism. My father worked in town at the power company, but lived on a Christmas tree farm that we all maintained. Coming to Mineral Point was not just a rural and small town experience, which I suppose could be thought about politically or sociologically, but was also the experience of being the son of my father. This experience contrasted with being the son of my mother: different households and different rules and expectations. In Madison I went to school and did homework, played on the old black and white Apple computer, or with transformers. I had friends from school but rarely had the chance to spend time with them on the weekends. My mom or Jerry cooked dinner and I had to do the dishes. In Mineral Point, I played with G.I. Joes and owned a rifle. I took piano lessons and went to Church. On Friday nights my Dad would often go by the Farm and Fleet on our way to the farm and usually we'd stop at Hardee's or Pizza Hut. My dad would put us to work every weekend, either doing something with the trees or some building project on the house or barn, or some other manual task.There is so much to say about both of these worlds, but the main point here is that I couldn't settle into either place, or set of parental expectations, for a prolonged spell of time.

I don't bring this up as an expose of my childhood (I did plenty of that in my old blog), or to paint myself as someone who was a miserable kid, which I was not. I am very glad to have had the experiences I had, especially those in Mineral Point, and further, had, and still have, a loving family that takes care of me. Smiley face emoji. I bring this up because the habit pattern of not fully being in a place due to the ever looming presence of impending change, both in terms of context and identity, seems to me a crucial piece of what my version of being foreign is. That is, of being a person who is not completely of the world they are in, a person at a slight remove; an other. And though I have tried to work against this habit or rhythm (see Derrida) by learning ways to be a part of groups/tribes, I have also come to accept that being on neither team is a set of relations that I am comfortable inhabiting. This has served me in multiple ways, the most obvious being that as a writer, being neither here nor there is a stance that can lead to novel perspectives. It's also served me as a teacher working with students who don't fit neatly into class cliques, and as someone who has worked with many "foreigners" in the States in terms of relating to the experience of fully belonging to a place (though whether or not my experiences are equivalent is another question). All said, this historical explanation was an attempt to reveal some of my intentions complicit in my assumptions and experiences of being foreign, though intentions is too conscious of a word, implying agency. Of course I don't have much of an immediate choice in the matter of how I experience the world.

XVII

One of the reasons I came to China was because I assumed that being here would give me time to work. And by work I mean read and write. Of course I came to China to work in the usual sense of the word, which in my case is to teach and be part of the university. But I also came because I assumed that the lack of immediate comfort and familiarity would push me into a hermit-like mode, one where I had ample time and space to work without distraction. In this sense then, my time so far has been successful. I live alone, stay in most nights (and free days), and generally spend my non-teaching/administrating time reading or writing. That is not to say that I am unsocial, or that I hide in my apartment. I socialize outside of work and have fun doing it. I go for bike rides and take short trips when I can. This morning I played basketball as part of a tournament that I've participated in along with other staff, faculty, and some graduate students at my school. I'm learning Chinese, and other things. Yet, if I am being honest, my plan in coming to China was never to completely immerse myself in China because China wasn't entirely the focus of my work. Instead I'm writing articles for publication, editing and revising, and reading the things I didn't have time to get to in graduate school. Being in China helps me concentrate on these things because being in China can be hard.

I knew this coming in. A few of my friends, including a friend from China, said to me, "I think you'll be lonely there." This however has not been the case. Partly because my work has been engaging and challenging in good ways, partly because of the good people at work, and a little more than partly, because I speak with my girlfriend at length on a daily basis. That said, in response to the presumption of loneliness, I too presumed I would be a little lonely. That was part of the plan though as it has always been my experience that the sometimes unpleasant edge of loneliness is a spur for a particular kind of productivity. When I was younger this was certainty the case. The prototype, or, proto-experience where I learned this was my time in Japan where I holed up in my bedroom in my host family's house smoking cigarettes, drawing pictures, and pretending to do my homework. Looking back it is easy to trivialize the alienation I felt as a shy nineteen-year old living in a country that I knew not all that much about, and where I could not comfortably communicate. At the same time however I took solace in reading, and it was then that I began to establish the "creative" habits that I've more or less been practicing since. The habits that first lead me into poetry, and then academia. "Writing."

These habits then; this form of production, is born out of a coping mechanism, a defensive strategy to survive in a foreign country. My intention here is not to self-mythologize, but to highlight an intention to be apart from the world and how that intention has manifested itself in my experience of being foreign. To not be entirely of China is a part of my experience here, and further, the difficulty in deeply engaging in a place that I only have a superficial knowledge of makes the work of reading and writing seem like an escape of sorts. Or in other words, I planned on being somewhat alienated for the purposes of motivation and concentration. The less I know about China, the less investment I have in being here, and the easier it is for me to engage in "my work." Now, that sounds like a terrible thing to say, but there is some truth in it: the less connected I am to the community the more I can do a particular kind of work. And so I go back to my time in Japan, and the possibility that one of the intentions underlying this particular mode of production is the intention to disconnect from my immediate surroundings, wherever they may be. Sigh. But to be clear: creating space is just one of many reasons that I came here. I am merely trying to make visible this small aspect of being foreign.

XIV

In February I took a somewhat spontaneous trip back to the United States to see loved ones. It was the first time I had left China in the last six months, a two week break for the Spring Festival / Chinese New Year (新年快乐!) and coincidentally the day I left was exactly six months from the day I arrived, an anniversary of sorts. To be honest, I haven't really missed being in the United States. I mean that in a matter of fact way that may be more of a reflection of my relationship to language than anything else. Meaning, I don't tend to miss places in that I don't often think about places; past, present, or future. Instead I think about people, conversations, obligations, desires, and more "social" kinds of things. And indeed, this was what I came back to do, e.g. to see people. Maybe this is true for everyone, and the word "home" or a specific place, e.g. Wisconsin, the U.S., etc. is simply a synecdoche for something too complex to get at in one pass with words. Regardless, I went and came back, and now there's eight weeks left of classes (nine minus the week that just passed).

A kind of test that I use towards understanding how I "really" feel about something is contrast: I pay attention to what it feels like to not have something that I've gotten used to. Do I miss them when they're gone? Do I think about it when it's not there? If so, this "inductive" kind of reasoning can tell me things that are too bodily for my conscious mind to pick up.  By this criteria then, I haven't missed being in the United States in terms of things like food, transportation, media (thanks VPN!), apartment, and shopping things like corner stores and pants. Further, the people I've been away from I've been in touch with. Not just through email, but through video on WeChat and Skype. In some cases I've been in more touch with some folks while I've been in China than I was furiously trying to finish my PhD in Indiana, and of course in some cases I've been less in touch, specifically with my rapidly growing nieces and nephews which bothers me more than anything else. At any rate, the big question however is not how I feel about the United States, but how it felt to come back to China, e.g. a test of how much I have settled in. I wondered then even before I left, what will it feel like to come back? 

There were times when I lived in San Francisco and other cosmopolitan places, where after a holiday with family and friends, I would fly back and think to myself, why do I live here? The short answer was always because that's where I have a job, yet in those instances, there was rarely someone to meet me at the airport, and the long ride over public transportation would be met with an empty apartment and no food in the refrigerator :( . I'm sorry to to dramatize, but all that is to say, coming back to China felt like coming back to work in a good way. A driver from school picked me up from the Pudong Shanghai airport, and though my refrigerator was empty, and my apartment a bit cold, it felt like I was going where I needed to be. What we're building at DKU is exciting to be a part of, and for the first time in my working life I feel like I have real responsibilities. China does not feel like "home," however I cannot think of a place that I'd rather be in that I cannot think of a place where I'm integrated into the community as I am here. This pivot to China then, has for the most part been successful in its early stages. My Chinese sucks and I have a lot to learn about being here, but I do not feel, most times, the kind of alienated foreignness that makes me question my life choices. Thus, so far so good. 

[A note on this blog: You may have noticed that my postings have slowed down. Two reasons: 1) In the academic writing course that I'm teaching at present we have a class blog (two actually, I have two classes). Thus, I've been writing in another blog, sometimes twice a week, which uses up some of my weekly writing gas. I want to write a little bit about monolinguals in the coming weeks in this blog so I will post again quite soon, however the ideas that occur throughout the week that I nurture towards the ends of blog posts have been oriented towards the class blog. Or in other words, I've been thinking more about academic writing more than foreignness lately. 2) I've been furiously trying to finish an article for publication, and though I am very close, especially after this two week break, this also takes up some of my writing bandwidth. So, FYI, that's what's going on. Unless otherwise noted, this blog is an on-going project.]

XIII (Suzhou's Gardens: Part 2)

Linguistic relativity, popularly known as the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis," is the idea that the structure of language determines thought. So as, there is an English way to think, a Chinese way to think. etc. that is either entirely determined by the possibilities of a given language (e.g. it's vocabulary, grammar, and other structural features), or at least influenced by it. By the 1960's this idea had largely been debunked through experimental research; tossed out by linguists, applied linguists, second language acquisition researchers, cognitive scientists, and others. Wikipedia can tell you more if you're interested. That said, the idea remains popular, and there is something about it, at least to me, that feels like common sense, that if I don't have the language for a thing, that I can't talk about the thing. Of course the "hard" version of Sapir-Whorf doesn't feel like common sense, that thought is determined by language, but the "soft" version does, that there is interplay between thought and language. Last Fall, my Chinese teacher, as well as others, taught me about some of the common taste words in Mandarin: 咸 (xián) salty, 甜 (tián) sweet, 辣 (là) spicy hot, 苦 (kǔ) bitter, etc. And though I had a general sense of what these words mean, of course, translating from English, I wondered how different my sense of what these words meant was from say, my teacher's sense.

Take for example 苦 , or bitter. I understand bitterness as something that leaves a particular aftertaste in my mouth, somewhat "sharp" and "dry." I don't know why these connotations come to mind. When I was a kid I remember biting into a pill I was supposed to swallow. I was maybe four years old. I didn't know how to swallow the pill without chewing, and so my mom wrapped it in a piece of bread. I remember when I bit it, there was a yellowish stain on the bread and it tasted so terrible, and strong, and I remember my mom asking me if it tasted bitter, or perhaps I asked her what it tasted like, and she said bitter. Or maybe I said it tasted like metal. I have a memory of a memory of this event. Regardless, this is my earliest association with the word bitter. Since then, I've come to use it mainly to describe two things: a Japanese green tea (煎茶), and the metallic taste that sometimes follows a pilsner style beer. Yet, I don't feel confident that I truly understand the flavor of bitter. Growing up I don't think it was a common taste, and it wasn't until I came to enjoy green tea that I also came to enjoy the bitter taste. There is dish in China called 苦瓜 (kǔguā), or bitter melon. It's not really a dish but a plant that can be cooked, green and innocuous. When I tried it in the cafeteria one day it I was unable to eat more than a single bite. If that is bitterness, I thought, I don't understand what bitterness means. My tutor told me she loves to eat 苦瓜, especially in the summer.

A few days before the new semester started, a co-worker came into my office and we started chatting about Suzhou's gardens. I told her about my experience, about my difficulties finding a means to appreciate what I was looking at. She told me that each window and each door was a like a picture frame. That as one moves through the garden, each position's view might also be a point of observation, the architecture framing and shaping one's sensory experiences. One views three-hundred year old bonsai through the circular opening, the curled and gnarled root of the tree frames the pagoda, or you're suddenly struck by the shadow of the window on the stone floor: every angle a result of an intention one part human, and one part the changing seasons. The tree that only blooms in the winter and its small yellow flowers is also part of this sensory composition, its scent barely legible but present in the cold air, as well as the echo of the water splashing. Thus one way, an immediately accessible way to understand and appreciate these gardens, is not through history, but through the senses. According to Sapir-Whorf, this could be a problem, that my senses must be pre-tuned to notice these features, to appreciate a particular kind of beauty, or recognize the smell of the little yellow flowers that only bloom in the Winter. Yet, this also means that in learning these new tastes, these sight and smells, I am also developing an experiential base from which novel ways of being in the world become possible. This, I believe, is one reason why being foreign is appealing.

XII (Suzhou's Gardens: Part 1)

Over the winter break I visited Suzhou, an old city near Kunshan famous for its gardens. I went to two of them, The Master of the Nets Garden (网师园), and The Humble Administrator's Garden (拙政园). Though they were beautiful and seemingly special, it was difficult to know what I was looking at. The Master of Nets was located thorough a series of winding alleyways in the south of Suzhou's old town, an area cut through and surround by water canals. "The Venice of China." We arrived in the morning, paid, and proceeded to wander through the buildings, courtyards, and open areas, taking in the synthesis of architecture, plant life, water pools and rock formations all constructed with great intent. Later, traveling to up the Humble Administrator's Garden, the confusion grew as not only was the second garden much much larger, but that there were hundreds of people there wandering around taking pictures. My idea of a garden is a cliche: a space to relax, a quiet place where one can take a break. Yet here this was not the case, moving through crowds in search of space. In both gardens there was very little explanatory material.

Obviously I didn't know enough about these gardens to make sense of them. The solution to this problem is seemingly easy: get a book, hire a guide, read some history, etc. This is a way to do it, to experience the garden through the lens of stories and symbolism, to understand who built it and why, what the peacock mural represents and which great poets lived in which pavilions. And then there is the long game, the literary references and the paintings inspired by the place. Like seeing one's campus on TV, it looks different in real life, and vice versa, one can connect the fantasy to the reality. Like finally meeting the person that you've been reading about for so long, and there is much to talk about. All said, both of these options requires an investment in a particular kind of learning, one that is probably best done over a long period of time where through reading and learning about all things China, different contexts illuminate the picture. Like studies on reading comprehension show, reading is much easier and faster when you already know something about what you're reading. And so the more I know about China and Chinese history, the more I can appreciate these gardens. 

I've been in China for five months as of a few days ago. Though I've certainly studied China in the past, I never did so systematically outside of a Chinese history class twenty year ago in high school. But even with that, anything before the 20th Century is a great mass of crumbling statues and disembodied dynasties. Since I've been here, I've been listening to podcasts, studying Chinese of course, and reading as much as I can in terms of contemporary China because I do love reading newspapers. But the long, long past of China is something that I have yet to start really digging into (Yes, I will read Jonathan Spence sooner than later. I swear). And I'm not complaining here, but I am saying that I don't know nearly enough to understand these gardens.  My point however is not about history, or my ignorance, but about learning and the presumption that underlines this entire discussion: that to understand these gardens I need to know stories and facts, such that I can read these gardens like I could a book, the garden held as an object of contemplation, frozen in time and D.O.A. Which is odd since it's a garden. It's alive. I wonder then if there might be another way to approach the wonders of China without needing years of study, one that does not reduce the experience to a series of exam questions.

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.

IX

I received two packages last week. The first was for my birthday which was about three weeks ago. My sister sent a rum cake as she usually does on my birthday. So delicious usually, the kind of cake that can be eaten with one's hands entirely because it doesn't have frosting, because it doesn't need frosting, because it is perfectly sweet all the way through. Pretty much every year she sends me one and in the last three or four years, these cakes come along with birthday cards from my eight year old-niece and my six year old nephew. The backward "y" and "r" in their kid-print handwriting of my name make it all so charming. The trouble began however when my sister informed me that USPS had informed her that the box had been delivered on November 11th. At that point it was November 16th, and there was no sign of the cake. About five days later I got a message from the mail room saying that I had a package. And so all said, it was about 10 days since the cake was delivered to China, and when it was delivered to my work. So the question is where was it? The answer is a mystery, though it's safe to surmise that the cake was inspected thoroughly by customs:

The cake was no longer in a round cake like form, but instead was a mass of cake like nuggets, wadded up at the bottom of the Styrofoam shipping container. Though I may have been able to eat it, it seemed like a bad idea, as I imagined a customs official in a drafty airport hanger poking through the cake with a rusty metal baton and cigarette dangling from his mouth. If my sister had sent me any contraband, that guy must have gotten it. On the bright side, I did receive birthday cards from my nice and nephew, and two stylish dishtowels that my sister had also packed.

The second package came on Sunday morning. I knew it was coming as my landlord had told me it would. A few days previous, her and I had been messaging over WeChat along with the real estate agent. The rent was due and I needed to send my landlord the money over WeChat. Of course we're not really talking, as I can't write anything beyond a few stock phrases in Chinese and my landlord has zero command of English. WeChat however can translate, and so I write in English, and she writes in Chinese and most of the time we can understand what each other is talking about. At any rate, after paying the rent, my landlord, who refers to me as "little handsome" (she is an elderly woman), said that she would send me a chicken in the mail. Not knowing what else to say, I wrote back, “好的,” or, "Ok." And so on Sunday morning it arrived:

This is the first time I've confronted an entire chicken. I typically don't cook chicken, but when I have in the past it has already been cut up. So I thought, I don't know what to do with this, I don't know how to cook it, I don't have the write tools or a big enough pot, and I wonder if anyone I know wants it. So I messaged a number of my colleagues and waited. The first colleague passed, but the second took it, and then a third wanted it, and then another, my neighbor, suggested we cook it together. So that evening I went over to his apartment and watched as he cut up the chicken: cutting off its head, its' feet, tearing out its guts and then breaking into smaller pieces. We used a pressure cooker to cook it along with potatoes and onions, and then mixed everything with Thai curry. It was delicious, and I have an entire pot of it left over that I'm looking forward to eating over the course of the week.

There is one easy takeaway from this story: don't send cakes to China. My sister said she would try it thinking her chances were 50/50. I think they were much lower than that however. The internet tells me that food must be packaged with a complete ingredients list and have a shelf life of 6 months (or in other words, "non-perishable"). One must follow the rules, especially in China. And so at the same time I receive another message from this destroyed cake, one that is a bit more ominous. Incidents like these are offset by my charming landlord and the wide spread everyday kindness that I routinely experience. And so I didn't get to eat cake, but I did get to eat chicken.

VIII

When I was nineteen I spent a year in Japan living with a Japanese family, attending the international division of Waseda University as part of a study abroad program during my junior year of college. It was a transformative experience in many ways, not so much because I immersed myself in Japan and Japanese, but because of how alienating and difficult the experience was. It was during this time that I rediscovered how much I love English and reading, and spent many hours up in my room when I could of been out there, talking to people and being in the world. Instead I was reading Haruki Murakami novels in translation, smoking cigarettes, listening to American indie music, drawing pictures, and doing just enough homework to get by. I was unskilled at Japanese, but more than that, I was shy, had no social skills and not much motivation to reach out. My host family was very kind but not the most talkative people. They generally let me do my own thing. Tadaima, itarakimasu, Gochisousama deshita , and that was about it. I had friends, two close American friends who were both fairly skilled at Japanese, and we spent our time in the arcades, wandering the streets of Tokyo, or at karaoke singing to each other.

During the ninth month, on a break from school, the program sent us out to families in western Japan, in Shimane province, outside of a small town I don't remember the name of anymore. I got along much better with the new host family, and the host family got along better with me. In the span of a month my language ability improved ten fold, talking with the host mother and father, and the elder daughter who I had an unrealized flirtation with. That's another story. But I liked this family. In part because they required that I hang out with them. They insisted. I would sit around drinking with the father and his neighbor trying to understand their jokes, or go for hikes with the mother and the younger siblings. I don't know if it was a difference between small town people and city people, or that fact that I had been studying Japanese for the previous eight months, or just the change in scenery, but I figured something out about learning a language in Shimane: that for me, connecting with others is essential for my language learning since I don't have strong intrinsic motivations. When I came back to Tokyo, my host family was impressed, but we quickly returned to the silence, my Japanese stagnated, and I came back to the States.

In retrospect, my time in Japan was not very successful from the standpoint of language acquisition. The problem was not my aptitude for learning, or my teachers, or the differences between English and Japanese, but that I was utterly unmotivated. I wanted to speak Japanese, but I had no intrinsic motivation, no vision of who I wanted to be or direction I worked towards. My lack of language learning vision has not really changed. I don't have an idealized version of myself as a multilingual cosmopolitan globe trotter. I don't have an immediate economic need to communicate in Chinese. And though I might appear to have more intrinsic motivation in the form of my job and my broader academic trajectory, I'm not sure this kind of motivation is all that different than having homework to do. Thus if what really works for me is connecting with others, then I need to be patient in terms of sifting though relationships towards lasting ones while steadily improving my basic Chinese such that I can be ready to engage. Little things then, like my desire to read the Chinese names of NBA teams because I find them amusing (e.g. the Philadelphia 76ers are 76人), or joking around with my Chinese tutor are in part what has been pushing my Chinese forward. I do not wish to bask in alienation such as I did in Japan. But then again, I am a much more productive writer when I do.