Movement and Stillness; Silence and Sound

There is a magic in traveling, whatever the distance. It takes me out of myself and gives me permission to look at the world. Even taking the bus home from my school a few towns over, feeling the landscape rolling past me puts my place in the world into more perspective. I can see more clearly how far I have traveled and how much world there will always be left to explore.

In part I owe this to the motion sickness that I sometimes view as a tragic irony. I can't read in cars or especially on buses and only sometimes on trains or planes. I sometimes can't hold conversations well because I can't keep turning my head to look at the person I'm talking to.* I have always gotten motion sick, as far as I can remember, which has meant that car rides (and more recently plane and train rides) have left me with nothing to do but be in my mind. It makes me a less-than-ideal travel partner; as soon as I sit down in a car, my brain sets to meditative work.

I love thinking about the world without being altogether in any one part of it. I love tracing a line that has connected who knows how many other people. And I love that my responsibility is just to be wherever I am. "I'm on the bus, dude." or "I'm on a train, dude. In China." and "I'll deal with it when I get there." It is an opportunity to turn off my responsibility/stress mind and just think about whatever comes.

It is often when I am traveling and staring absent-mindedly into the distance that I am able to articulate myself the best.

This year has probably been my richest ever in terms of travel. I was on Jeju staying with Christian for six weeks just after the year began, then I went 'home' to Nanjing for Spring semester. Afterwards I traveled to Chongqing by 25 hour train, then to Yichang by three-boat on the Yangtze river, then by 13 hour train to Beijing. There I was picked up by Xiaoxuan and her father's entourage, and hosted in Langfang and Guyuan, near Inner Mongolia. I went home for three and a half short weeks, and zigzagged my way all over the Mighty Midwest seeing people I love. I've been in Korea for a few months now, spending most of my time on Jeju but some in Seoul, and Christian and I have another trip to Busan and Seoul in just over a week. **

What matters the most, of course, are people. It is wonderful to travel with or towards people I love, but I also like to travel alone. I have had some lovely conversations and even made friends on trains and waiting for them. It is very easy for me to feel isolated sitting home alone, or when I am at work with no one to talk to. But even if I am by myself on a bus, I feel connected to the people riding it and to the places I pass. And as I begin to learn the history of whatever place I live in, I begin to be able to trace lines back through the reasons for and implications of what people say and do, what kind of work they do and where. It is magic that there are so many lines to trace and to continue.


*I was recently lovingly reminded that much of this may be in my head. I am better in motion if I am not struggling with anxiety, if I have been taking care of myself mentally and physically. I am better if I have someone's hand to hold, and that has little to do with my inner ear.

**that was a really long brief overview...

Words, words, words.

I read a lot, and have since I learned how. I must say that part of my motivation to read when I was a child was the praise it got me and, as Christian can attest, I still want someone to witness my reading progress. Another reason is often escapism. I prefer novels-- the longer the better-- because they allow me to spend the most time in a world outside my own, and especially when I was young loved most to re-read favorites, because I knew I could be prepared for whatever happened. I still like stories that are long enough for me to spend time in a world, and I still love to relive stories-- but maybe not quite as often as I used to.

I also write, but less confidently (naturally, I suppose). I journaled more or less regularly through middle and high school, but have had trouble keeping a regular journal since then. Most of the time, though, when I sit down to write I have to write my head into order before I can even pretend I am writing about anything other than the state of my mind. Hence most of the contents of this blog. I am trying to write creatively, but with my current project am teetering on the line between knowing I have a story I want to write that will give me room to explore all the things I want it to, and feeling that all the pieces of it are spiraling out and should never have been connected. That's a little melodramatic but, y'know, I live in my mind so little things in here often seem pretty big to me.

I brought almost all new books with me to China last year, and decided halfway through the year that it had not been the best plan-- the living on the other side of the world business was enough 'new'ness and I wanted familiar stories. So, I brought more with me this time-- in large part through that previously mentioned e-reader, though I am filling up the shelves here with books anyway.

I have been reading a lot on Jeju, in between the teaching, spending time with Christian, and large amounts of sitting and thinking which fill my days. I have read:
1) the remainder of Red Mars, and about half of Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson.
2)The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle (again)
3) The Man who was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton
4) The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (again-again)
5) Briar Rose by Jan Yolen (again)
6) about half of Anne Frank's diary in German
7) about a third of 藏地密码 by 何马
8) a couple of stories in my 科幻小说集 (science fiction anthology)
9) One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey (again)
10) most of China Mieville's The City and the City
11) The beginning of Tintenherz by Cornelia Funke

Goodness, I was thinking to talk about each of them a bit but that's a long list.  They are all recommended!

Thoughts on 'race' and living in Asia

Living in Asia has been a lesson in living as a minority-- on getting extra attention and being treated as not quite a real person. Don't get me wrong: My experience bears little or no relation to the experience of underprivileged minorities in their home countries. I am a very privileged minority here. And there's something more than that: this is not my home. I do not have to take responsibility for the demons here, and even if they did affect me negatively, it would be more like the misunderstanding of strangers than the disapproval of a parent.

I learned during my first two months in China, over the summer of 2006, how much I used 'race' to define people in my mind, despite education and good intentions to the contrary. You see, whatever the majority of people in a person's life look like is what they will spend the most time defining. Growing up in predominantly White Iowa, I noticed a lot more about the variations in skin, hair, and eye color in white people I met than I did about others. For the most part, I probably would not know more than a couple people in a given minority in any particular social group, so their being Black or Asian or Latino/a or Native was enough to give them a unique identity in my mind.

I'm not sure that this tendency itself qualifies as racism*, but it is definitely a convenient jumping-off place for discrimination. When I have put everyone who is not The Same As Me into handy categories, it is very easy to attach any label or stigma to all of them at once, instead of having checks built into my mind to remind myself that no one characteristic, even one as defining as heritage, can tell you what is most important about a person.

So, when I came to China, at first everyone just looked Chinese to me. Everyone had black hair and skin a different color than mine, and my mind was overloaded. There were simply too many people to fit into a convenient Minority category, and I had to start paying attention to what they actually looked like.

What I realized was that Chinese people look a lot like the White people I was used to describing more carefully in my mind's eye (and, I have since had time to confirm, a lot like people from many other races and backgrounds). There are Chinese people with long faces and thin noses, with melancholy eyes and mouths that droop in the corners. Tall and wide with booming voices, thin and pale so that it seems an unkind word could knock them over. Over and over again I looked at someone and realized that if their skin was a just a little lighter, or the lines in their face had slightly different angles, I would think of them as White rather than Chinese.

I am always afraid when I attempt to voice realizations like this that it will sound like I have been amazed to find that other humans are human, which feels horrible. What amazes me is to find that despite always having known and professed that all humans are human, I still use racist shortcuts in classifying people in my mind. I am sure that I do this is all kinds of ways. Living in China and Korea, and especially trying to function in Chinese, has made it easier for me to remember that a persons ability to express themselves in a language I understand is not a good indicator of their intelligence, but it is still much easier for me, in a frustrating situation, to think of people who I can't communicate with as stupid. I know I make assumptions about people's gender or intelligence or even just interests based on things that are simply convenient and not all that meaningful. Perhaps all of the evidence I use does mean something about a person's identity, as race certainly can, but they are not all-meaningful.  I am grateful for my constant opportunities to re-learn how to pay attention to who a person really is.

*so I'd love to hear what you think!

我整天做梦 (a beginning exploration of Chinese language)

My first introduction to China was through language. I chose to start Chinese my sophomore year of university because I had studied German and a little Spanish and wanted to try something away from Europe, and farther historically, culturally, and linguistically from the US (Europe and the US have a lot of important differences, but many of our differences take place upon common assumptions and values).

Chinese is very different from English, and leaves many points in studying it that one can either be frustrated or enraptured with the language. You don't get many breaks-- there aren't the same familiar patterns to find as there are in Romance languages or German. Sometimes this makes things easier: you don't have to conjugate verbs, so there are fewer boundaries to expanding vocabulary. You don't have to spend hours memorizing different forms of a verb-- once you've learned it, you know it. The same goes for articles; there's none of this "der, die, das" or "el, la" business. Simple. Clean.

There are also two dimensions of language in Chinese that no European language has, and I'm guessing many people reading this can name them: Characters and Tones. The fact that one can see a Chinese word written in the Roman alphabet, for example "ni", and yet not know what it means or even how to pronounce it correctly is baffling at first. It's also invigorating.

Tones are an extra factor in Chinese sound. They multiply the number of meaningfully different sounds that can be made from a relatively small phonetic array. It's perhaps more confusing because English does use tones as well, but in English they are used as a factor of emotion or intention, not the simple meaning of a word. An English speaker's tone rises at the end of a question*, and can be used to put extra emphasis on key words. Quite a few native English speakers who visit China, especially if they haven't spent much time studying the language, feel like everyone is shouting angrily at each other. But they aren't. Tones just mean something very different in Chinese than they do in English. They are harmless and important indicators of meaning.

Characters are magic. They are a whole new dimension of meaning that we simply do not have in English. One of the things I spent the most time on at first was spending time with characters to get used to the fact that words must be represented by more than a sound-- if you don't know what a word looks like, you don't know what it means.

Some characters are very straightforward: 一, 二, and 三 mean 'one,' 'two,' and 'three' respectively. 上 means above and 下 means below. 凹 means sunken and 凸 means protruding (though neither are very commonly used. Thus far I haven't seen them outside of historical fiction). Some characters are a poignant description of the meaning of a word: the characters in 目前, or 'present' (as opposed to future or past-- do you see how we could use another clarifying layer of meaning in English sometimes?) mean first 'eye' and then 'in front of.'

The etymology of many Chinese characters is less than obvious, especially since the standard Mandarin taught in most schools in China and in the US is simplified (though other Chinese speaking countries and many Chinese speakers in the US use traditional characters)。漢字 (Han letters, or Chinese characters) became 汉字, for the sake of improved literacy rates. And they are indeed easier to learn and easier to write, but they are not always as clear about their meaning.

A linguist or psychologist would be able to more clearly analyze it, but I like to think about the different ways that Chinese and English are constructed. In my mind,  English words flow together more. Words can contract into each other, and concepts must be pinpointed by a squadron of "of"s "when"s "who"s "which"s, prepositions, and articles. I've heard Chinese described as more contextual, eg, the lack of verb conjugation: you know who the verb relates to from the rest of the sentence or conversation.

Chinese characters are stronger entities than English words; they pull in meaning and carry the ghosts of their neighbors into other words. The example sitting on the cover of the book next to me is its title: 藏地密码。西藏 [Xizang] is the Chinese name for Tibet, and 土地 [tudi] means land (土 means earth and 地 means place, though the word for 'place' in full is 地方). 藏 implies 西藏, 地 implies 土地 so that in two characters you can fully represent the meaning of four. Consequently, Chinese friends are always asking me what the "short way" to say something is. Do you really have to say all those words to get your meaning across? Yeah, you generally kinda do.

*as does, according to the members of Monty Python, a Welsh person's tone when they are upset, as opposed to British person whose tone goes down at the end of a sentence emphatically.

The title is from 我不是黄蓉 by 王蓉, and it means "I spend all day dreaming"

China Series Introduction

Okay, here is my first writing goal for the next year.

Every Monday, I will post a China-centered article. I have a lot of China study and experience to process, and writing is my best hope.

I have been trying to figure out who I am as a traveler (I am almost resigned to the fact that I will be fervently trying to figure out who I am for the rest of my life, in one way or another). I am often unsure of how to talk about my experiences to others-- to Chinese people, to other foreigners in China, and especially to other Americans who haven't traveled, or have traveled only as tourists. I am realizing that much of the time what an outsider says about a country is about 90% a reflection of themselves and only 10% a reflection of the country they are describing.

I come back to the quote in "84, Charing Cross Road" (which I don't remember precisely and can't look up from the dorm room in Korea where I'm writing this) in which Helene Hanff tells Frank Doel that when she comes to London, she will be looking for the London of Classic English literature. Of Shakespeare and Austen and Dickens. He replies that if she looks for it, it is there.

This is a lovely moment in a sweet story, but outside of Helene's story, I am torn about what to think of it. It is very true, for just about any version of any country. If you go to China expecting to see a country ravaged by the evils of socialism, you will find evidence to support that and could easily come away with a renewed love for capitalism. If you go to China expecting to find a country where people value community and avoid the isolation and greed of the West, you will find it. If you come to China looking for an economic wonder, the next global superpower in the making, it is there.

Of course, if a traveler in China has meaningful conversation with anyone while in China, they will have some of their horizons broaden and some of there understandings deepened, but I don't think it's by any means necessary that they will come away with even the beginning of an accurate view of what China is, or what it feels like to live there.

I am hoping to put down on paper (or, well, the internet) what I experienced studying about and living in the Middle Kingdom, and in doing so begin to sort out what's me and what is China. I will choose a topic a week- a place, a concept, a tradition, a historical change.