This is Jack, my Chinese teacher. Each day at lunchtime he determinedly teaches me Chinese and, in exchange, I teach him sardonic retorts.


Older women and a few men gather daily for some exercise. I don't know why they wear colorful, matching clothing, but it does make for a lovely sight. Live musicians stand aside and play the tunes to which they perform/exercise in synch. Something to still get excited over when I witness it.


Evidently Pepsi is in the business of covering up the naughty bits in China. I wonder if you buy them in aluminum or plastic.

Some of the girls after they embarrassed themselves singing a song about Beijing to teach me about their culture. A moving moment, for sure.


This is a proud papa of a Little Emperor. He and his family were just a few of the hundreds of people watching me and Daniel at the XingCheng train station as we tried to purchase train tickets and find a 25-yuan cab into Huludao. The entire train depot was watching us. Another time when you're not sure if you're an extra-terrestrial alien or a celebrity. After prolonged moments of this you start to feel like Sean Penn with paparazzi.

Little diddy about the girls

The Chinese are plagued with bad eyesight. So much so, in fact, that the government wants schools to implement daily eye exercises. Any teacher may estimate that half her or his students wear classes. (And many Westerners purchases glasses here because the frames and lenses are comparatively inexpensive.) The predominant need for eye glasses has caused them to be a favorite accoutrement. Not many boys male students do it but several females– despite their good vision– wear frames sans lenses. Then there lies a contradiction. It’s not clear whether they are too poor to procure them, too “busy” to procure them, or too reticent to admit the need for them, several students simply won’t change their prescriptions or even buy any glasses at all. It seems to make as much sense as going for a nude walk in the midst of a blizzard, yet it’s ubiquitously apparent.
“I can’t see it clearly,” several female students say about words they’re asked to pronounce from the board. Now, there are various angles from which to consider this act. You don’t ask why they don’t merely move to a spot from which they can see the board. You don’t ask why they sit in the very back of the class (the answer: they’re uncomfortable with the subject, their abilities or the teacher). You don’t ask anything. Instead, you wait. The class grows uncomfortable, shifting half-blind eyes from the teacher to the mute, defiant student. Quickly enough a nearby student prods her lazy counterpart with the answer, clandestinely slipping her dictionary or the answer on a torn piece of paper across the desk.
There are several similar tricks to try to force the teacher to proceed to the next student. Each time they’re used it begs the question: how dumb do they think we are?
“I didn’t bring my book,” is another common method of thwarting the teacher’s efforts. This is usually when a teacher will simply look at the student, laboring not to demonstrate how disgusted with boredom she is. “Then share with another,” is her response, loathe at the fact that these students wouldn’t have done this already after reading aloud for 25 minutes.
One personal favorite is the defense, “It’s too difficult”. Students frequently use this one when they can’t pronounce a word or don’t want to flex the grey matter between their skull bones. “Lots of things in life are though. But look at me, I’m still going.” It sounds like something your parents would have said when you’re learning to ride a bike or learn calculus. It’s not quite a “Go on, champ. You can do it!” It’s more like “The arrogance of youth is a privilege that you’ll eventually relinquish.”

Mental travels through a window

“A mental traveler hasn’t the need to eat or sleep... or entertain,” says Karen Blixen, played by Meryl Streep in Out of Africa. In more recent words, Frances Mayes wrote, “When we put ourselves down in a foreign place for a period of time, we begin to change, like it or not. We begin to see how the people who live there were shaped by the place, even as we feel ourselves being shaped.” Sometimes we do witness these changes in the process of being shaped by another one. Be it through a window, a camera lens, a pen, or an email we reflect on these changes and share them with the world.
I’m sitting in a college classroom, preparing to teach Chinese students about Earth Day, when I lose myself in the folds of a red flag fluttering in the spring wind. It’s one of those stolen, unstructured moments that transports you. It’s not one of daydreaming, per say. It’s one of mental travel.
I think back to the hours, the days, the weeks and months spent unemployed and alone in my Chicago apartment. In this state your mind has nothing but space and time to travel to places you wouldn’t likely visit in more lucrative conditions. Thanks to the nondimensional frontier of the Internet, a brief journey led to the rediscovery of a former flame. Suddenly I’m transported thousands of miles and 14 years into history. We are celebrating the fruits of our efforts on planning Earth Day 1995 at our university. Why was he so surprised when I called it quits? At that time in my life I guess I thought everyone knew what I thought by virtue of the fact that I thought it. (I’ve since learned that no, not everything I think or do is as common as I figured it to be. Neither is everything I feel obvious to everyone– or in many cases, to anyone. Verbal communication has since become my ally.) We grew apart when I began shaving again, using makeup, and wearing clothes less hippie, more young professional American girl. “He’s never going anywhere. I have big plans,” I thought to myself, already planning where I’d venture after college life. He left, going home first to New York, then out to California, and finally back to New York. There he practices massage therapy and related healing arts. The hippie side is still present, even if his long hair and dough boy physique aren’t. Here I’m teaching English. My hippie side is present, obviated by unshaven underarms and legs, though my 21-year-old physique isn’t.
Flying 30,000 miles high in the sky on a 26-hour flight between Chicago and Beijing, my thoughts sway from the new chapter of life awaiting me. The uninhabitable scenery below reveals nothing but small white mountains and icebergs upon icebergs. But like the red construction flags across from the university building, I don’t see it. I see myself on another international flight, this one to India from Miami. The 30,000-foot elevation offers views resplendent enough to bring tears to my eyes. Who knows where we were except to say the Middle East. Dirt roads wind around sandy mountains mentioned in the Bible and the Koran. I imagine horse-drawn carts carrying millet and various beans. Time seems to have stopped there and I get lost in it. A split second of sorrow flashes through me: everyone else on the flight is asleep and therefore missing this divine image. Time gets lost somewhere, and the next stop on the journey, a restroom or exercise break, shifts the scenery below to reveal water with heavenly brightness and clarity. This is the kind of beauty that inspires home-owners to laboriously beautify their multi-million-dollar houses in Florida, where I lived at the time and wrote about as a freelance journalist covering architecture and interior design. Little did I know when stealing these sublime sights of the beguiling sea that I would welcome a new kind of love, a love found only in the world’s spiritual center: India.
The university where I’m teaching is undergoing a facelift. Crews dressed like an army troop chip away the quarter-inch-thick brick tile facade off the administration buildings. A second group labors on the skeleton that will be the new gymnasium. Yet another group, dressed in what looks like more formal military gear, replaces the sand-eroded and wind-blown landscaping. Cranes rise on the neighboring, non-university property in a number seemingly large enough to be called a sedge. I cannot help but find myself a vantage point where I watch it, mentally traveling out of time and space. After who knows how long, something happens to jolt me from the bliss of watching development and change take place before my eyes and I’m turning, walking to catch the bus which will carry me to my temporary home– but not before I’m mentally journeying transported to another country and another time. For hours one day in India, watching the construction of another storey on the guest house where I’m staying, I become a self-imposed babysitter for a little girl and boy. They are evidently the children of the women who work with the precision of an automated assembly line on the construction site. How could anyone watch these women, sweating with the heat and humidity of a South Indian summer, with anything but awe and admiration? Fascinated with the precision at which they carry to each other plates of wet concrete on their heads, I begin to stealing the moment though my digital camera. These I show the children who in turn watch me with honestly sweet wonderment, a wonderment that grows when shown the photos I’m shooting. They begin monkeying around like the little ornery monkeys I’ve learned to steer clear of in this country. It’s a Virginia Woolfian circle of entertaining one another until the construction hours seem over and I relieve myself of my duties to check email.
I am in an Internet bar. Emails are flying in from all over America. Friends and coworkers are desperately concerned for my safety after they’d heard of the terrorist attacks in a train in Mumbai. Thinking that they haven’t bothered to check a map and see that where I am in Chennai is too far across the country to be shaken by a bomb, I chuckle. I cannot, however, claim to be coldly unaffected by their love and attention. The right thing to do is to send them some seconds-old shots of the children and the sari-adorned women. This is my way of answering their call. This is my way to tell them what I’ve learned: if I hadn’t made this journey halfway across the world alone, if I hadn’t been able to absolutely leave behind the career that had become my husband, I wouldn’t have been able to experience the love that palpably permeates India. I may never have found the love within myself to think emails like those of my friends were anything important at all. India marked the furthest I’d ever gotten away from my homeland. It also marked the closest I ever got to the home within myself.
On the sidewalks of many more countries I will travel, and through the windows of taxis and trains. Other buildings I will watch rise and fall. Other excursions into the past and future I will make on the Internet and books. More pictures will be taken, blog posts typed. Changes will come and I will get further from my American self as other places shape me. And forever will I be somewhere with a moment stolen to mentally travel somewhere else.

An ESL recommendation

Check out my roommate Keith's ESL web site. Not only is it visually appealing, it's a sensitive and informative site about what classes and teaching are like, without being droll or self-absorbed. Plus it has cute jokes and changing daily tidbits.

Generosity Abounds

I’ve discussed the duplicity of the Chinese in earlier posts, but it would be unfair to ignore the generosity of this culture, too. In most cases I have witnessed this with my students.
The students often add a bit of grace to my days here in semi-rural China.
They often bring me snacks or treats and sometimes have even been known to buy me a Coke from the campus convenience store. It’s not uncommon for students to ask me to lunch and then to pay for it before I even get my wallet out!
“Oh you use chopsticks so well,” one student says during one of these lunches.
“Really?” I think of my supervisor’s wife who can use chopsticks rather than her own hands to make spring rolls. “Well, whenever we eat Chinese food in America, we use chopsticks. So maybe I’ve had some practice.”
“Oh, I see. Some Chinese people can’t use chopsticks well as you,” she says, still watching me.
The other day I misstepped on the bus and have been hobbling around since. I couldn’t take one clumsy hobble into class without my students’ excitedly and concernedly asking “What’s wrong?” “What happened?” Two of my male students went to their dorm room between classes to fetch a bottle of Chinese medicine. Its smell is similar to Tiger Balm (a natural form of BenGay) because it contains camphor and menthol-like herbs and other ingredients. They instructed me to pour some of the thick red liquid on my palm and rub it briskly onto my swollen ankle.
“Do this in three hours. Not more than three times a day,” says Tony, who looks like a rock star meets Chinese Elvis Costello with his spiked hair and glasses. Wouldn’t you know? The fluid, which literally contains Chinese spices such as those I like to fuel my homemade spring rolls, really works. I felt relief the first time I used it. After hobbling around for three more days, I finally put some of it in a bucket of hot water to soak my foot, again to more relief.
Over Qing Ming (sounds like tsing ming) Day, a three-day holiday that includes a tomb sweeping day, I invited a foursome of girls, who are not in my classes though they sit in on them every Thursday, to my apartment. They were so honored that they brought dumplings, dragon fruit (because they know it’s my favorite) and beer. We played mah jong, watched a film and enjoyed dinner and conversation until they had to return to their dorm before lights out. (More about the ringleader of this foursome in a later post.)
When I’m having trouble figuring out how to use some of my newly learned Chinese or can’t recall a word, they’re eager to help, always cheering me on, often clapping with large smiles.
“I teach you English,” I say, sometimes blushing with their exuberance of my childish efforts. “And you teach me Chinese. See, we’re both learning.”
I still have a lot to learn about this culture, I hope to reciprocate their assistance and generosity.

Testing and health

This weekend I’m thinking about a number of my students because they will take a nationalized test. The test wearies them, keeps them up for days, and worries them into believing they won’t get their degree. Most won’t pass it. In fact, most will have to take it multiple times.
The students can’t be bothered to do homework, let alone to study for the benefit of it. Americans would reconsider their complaints about their own school system if they spent one week in Chinese schools. Studying and homework is not a part of their culture. (You ight have read my earlier post on preaching to the inmates.) Nevertheless, these students are concerned enough about this test that they buy numerous study guides. They try to sneak extra study time in my classes.
One group of my students asked earlier this week if we could skip the lesson I’d planned to focus on their test. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t initially appalled by the idea. But because I’ve talked with them and practiced with them for weeks for this test, I opted to delay my lesson plan until next week. The focus instead was on writing and vocabulary, the parts of the test that will surely overwhelm them.
Weeks ago I began to research this test. How could I implement practice for the test into my weekly plans? They were not thrilled by practicing during class over the first few weeks. Yet they learned. And their efforts will surely pay off. How glorious I felt when I began to see a marked improvement in their writing and vocabulary!
Over the last school week, for my favorite students, my lesson plan and the course book coincided beautifully. We came to a chapter in the course book on physical and mental health. I rounded out the book work, implementing some yoga and meditation practices, teaching them to pay attention to their breathing, and encouraging them to eat healthily this week to aid their test performance. For two nights before the test I’m thinking about them, meditating for their good performance and confidence, for their health and achievement.
They have, after all, become “my girls”.

Diplomacy and fireworks

“They are just so sensitive about their culture,” says the Western teacher from Ohio.
“They asked me what I did for Spring Festival (the two-week-long Chinese New Year), and I told them I was in Panjin when the fireworks started. I was. They started around 9, 10 at night, and they went on all night. I mean all night. They started at one part of the city and soon enough the fireworks were coming from all directions. It was around the clock,” he says. “My students looked at me with big smiles, nodding their heads. ‘Yeah! Yeah!’ they said.”
“Fireworks all night? Must have made it difficult to sleep,” I say, imagining the loud booms, the cracks, the bams, the sizzles.
I quickly recall thinking it silly that the Chinese light fireworks in the middle of the day, despite the fact they cannot see the sky art. But they don’t care. They do it for simple reason: because they can. They do it because they like the sound. It’s almost a daily occurrence to hear firecrackers. On my first nights here I was transfixed by the glow of ephemeral light against the myriad windows of the identical rows of residential mid-rises surrounding me. The colors illuminate the windows, which already seem phosphorescent to me because each unit bears seemingly different colored lights for each room. Looking at the residences was like looking at an art installation of light, like a painter had placed his palette on vertical glass and sprinkled luminary spices on it from the heavens. The echoes through the rows and rows of buildings added an aural background, rounding out the experience as percussion rounds out an acoustic band.
“Well, I don’t remember sleeping badly, but I did have a helluva headache the next day, and the air was awful. All the sulfur from the fireworks was just so thick,” says the Ohioan, his ice blue eyes like another color from the fireworks spectrum. “But when I told my students that I thought they were going to cry. Their faces just sunk like they were crestfallen. They were so sensitive because I had indicated anything other than some sort of jubilant excitement over the fireworks.”
The Chinese, as we Westerners vaguely know, have many symbols of luck and prosperity. One of them is the dragon. I’ve read in numerous places that the Chinese use fireworks to awaken a mythological dragon who flies across the sky to make it cry, therefore commencing spring and its rains for this highly agricultural culture. The noise of firecrackers wards off evil spirits (if not a few Western spirits), too.
The Chinese are indeed sensitive about their culture. I’ve witnessed what the Ohioan meant. But then again, when someone comes to your country and doesn’t praise one of its customs, you’d be a bit miffed to, eh? You can always follow American’s Republican stance: If you don’t like it, get out.
The Ohioan is a tolerant, open-minded guy with lots of life experience. So don’t assume that he was being an arrogant American. Let his experience serve as an example that in some places even diplomacy doesn’t rate compared to faux praise.

Judging Distance

On the bus, the Ohioan among our group judges where he is in relation in our apartment by stops. That is, coming home from teaching we exit at the fourth stop from the university. However, it wouldn’t occur to me to judge distance that way. I place my location by architecture.
Our residential complex, a labyrinth of oppressively identical three-story buildings, take their one and only optimistic cue from n occasional and erratic gable painted pastel. Metal arches bearing colored lightbulbs arc over the mini-streets throughout. We have as of yet to see them alight; they do not light my way home at night.
The complex is the building to come after what looks to be yet another college, at the front corner of which is a police station no bigger than a bus. It’s not officially a stop, but people who evidently work in the possibly academic building, usually get on there.
We can take the same bus into the commercial center of Xingcheng (sounds like Sing Chung). I don’t know to count how many stops it is from our apartment, but I do know that, if we wish to get on another bus that takes us to Huludao, the next and bigger city, we get off adjacent to a public park and a billboard apparently advertising the joys of military life.
If we take a bus into Huludao from the university we can get off at the public sculpture that decorates the roundabout, and from there we can walk to a single-story strip-mall like building to get to the bar that caters to Westerners.
It’s not just that my life compass used to revolve around architecture, it’s something perhaps more practical. I can’t convince myself to count stops when the bus often stops at undesignated places. Sometimes one or a few people, who are far from the nondescript walls that indicate a bus stop, will simply signal the bus as they see it coming.
I wish my fellow Ohioan ease and utility in counting stops. It sounds a good idea in theory, one I likely would have used in Chicago when riding the El (if I weren’t so busy making visual love to that great city’s architecture). For me, however, architecture signifies regions and countries, socioeconomic levels and public-versus-private, it’s a way of gaging where life has taken you and what’s around the bend.

What is racism?

As an American woman of German-Irish descent I’ve never experienced racism. Even in my travels to other countries. I certainly didn’t expect to find it in China. But then again, the thought had never crossed my mind. Heck, I’m still getting used to the fact that people stop and stare at me when I pass.
Several incidences, however, have brought racism raining down on us Western teachers. While the locals want to stare in amazement and try their best to speak even one word of English to us, they can turn around five minutes later and stab us with the racism dagger.
It became most apparent when four of us Western teachers were banned from the bus that takes us to from school. Weeks after the fact, we still don’t know exactly what broke the camel’s back of the Chinese teachers who shared the university’s bus. We are told repeatedly that they’re frustrated because we make more money than they do, which is in fact true.
I noticed a storm brewing when we were repeatedly relegated to sitting on the sticky, dirty floor that has evidently never met a broom or mop. It escalated when none of the attractive young teachers would even speak to the equally attractive Latina of our group who wanted to more than befriend them. (In Asian countries it’s considered quite a feat for a man to shag a Western woman, and lately I’ve witnessed that young Asian girls will do anything to get a Western man’s attention.)
About 20 people, four of us Westerners crammed onto the bus at 7:20 am and 5 pm. This bus has been arranged for us. It takes us the 25-minute route from Huludao to Xingcheng, where our university is. Usually the Chinese teachers at our bus stop would ensure their seats, suspiciously always finding ways to always beat us to them. No matter where we stood at the bus stop. No matter how early we arrived there. One teacher from New Zealand never once had a seat, which proved quite a hassle for his tall stature and quite dangerous as he’d be the first to fly through the windshield in a wreck. Latina Laura always sat on my lap if we did per chance have a seat. The other Westerner, an Irish woman, wouldn’t have conceived of sharing a seat when she did in fact secure one. Standing meant trying to make your neck and knees limber like sailors with sea legs or tennis fans. The rickety, speedy metal contraption that bore a can of instant engine started in the broken open glove compartment might ram into another vehicle or a person at any point. Or so we noticed on numerous occasions.
Many bad looks were exchanged. Nary a word was spoken– kind or otherwise between those Chinese teachers who teach English. I finally asked our supervisor, a fellow American, why we were treated like second class citizens.
“You are?” he asked, despite having witnessed several English teachers who’d ridden the bus with almost jubilant glee and legendary popularity. “I’ve never had this problem before. Let me get to the bottom of this.”
Finally after some five weeks of sharing the bus with locals frustrated by our wage difference, word had spread that they were trying to ban us. It happened after school on a Monday afternoon.
Get off the Bus
Through some finagling of our schedule that day, three of us Western teachers manage to land individual seats. This is a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. Some local teachers ware already on. Some seats remain open.
Audibly entrenched in the song streaming into my ears from my headphones, I glance out the window (which also may never have seen cleaning materials) and see the ringleader of the local furiously dialing on her cell phone. She’s steps away from the bus. But instead of talking directly to us about her group’s peeve, we soon enough learn that she’s calling our supervisor.
The locals start filing out of the bus. As they walk past Laura’s front seat perch, the little Latina Who Could yells at them like the second coming of Rosa Parks.
“Go ahead. Get off! You.. now you... yes, you too. Come on! Get off!” Her deep brown eyes are open only slightly smaller than her angry mouth. Her voice is bigger than both.
I remove my headphones, fully reentering the scene’s atmosphere when Laura answers her phone, still shouting. The Irish teacher and I watch in shock and humor.
Then there goes the bus driver.
While I’m trying to figure out why the only people left on the bus are white, Laura’s still shouting into the phone as she slams the bus door shut, and the Irish teacher indicates something she thinks is gold.
“Look! The keys are still in the ignition,” she says.
I look at her as if to say, “And do what with them? Speed off? Do you expect us to instantly learn how to drive this thing– through reckless Chinese traffic no less?”
This is how you turn a boycott into high jinks and mayhem.
“It’s too crowded?” Laura shots into her phone. This one takes me for a loop. Having ridden the local buses I’ve witnessed their overcrowding. This excuse is so invalid I’m beginning to see why China isn’t yet more powerful after thousands of years of history. In the most overpopulated country on the planet, the teachers’ excuse that the bus was too crowded doesn’t carry weight.
I look out the window to see all the teachers standing beside the bus, their collective countenance somewhere between cowardice and frustration.
At this time, fortunately, our fourth bus-riding Westerner arrives and sticks his head into the bus. Because he speaks Chinese he discovers quickly that there’s no way we’re getting home that day– or likely ever again– on that bus. He manages to talk Laura and Ireland off the bus with no harm or foul and I follow, riding a wave of confusion that preempts any sense of personal affront I might have felt. And just as quickly the four of us are scuttling away in a taxi.
Laura’s still prattling on. Ireland’s still talking about escaping with the bus. New Zealand teeters, making comments like “Someone’s going to pay for this” on one hand, and “Well, you just can’t negotiate with the Chinese once they’ve made up their mind.”
The cost of racism
It might be wrong of us to blame it on racism. But then it might not. (We may never know what was the real cause.) We know for sure we’re being discriminated against when we’re overcharged by taxi drivers, street vendors or retailers.
If a native person asks the rate between places x and y she will pay a rate, say 15 quay. (RMB), whereas if a Westerner asks for the rate, it’d be 20, 25 if you appear absolutely new to the place. Rather than take the fare at the local rate, taxi drivers prefer not to take you at all. This amazes me to the point of frustration. I tell the drivers or vendors or retailers this constantly, though of course because they don’t speak a word of English, they cannot and will not understand. In part I speak as a thwarted Westerner who refuses to be taken advantage of; I also speak as one who comes from a capitalist society. “Fine,” I tell them, “if you’d rather sit in this cab and not make any money, it’s your loss.” Fortunately to this point there has always been another cab driver who isn’t as greedy, or racist, or whatever else you might call it.
This weekend a fellow Midwesterner accompanied me to the electronics market to locate an external hard drive. We searched in three stalls in the flea market-like shopping center. The prices ranged from 380 to 450 RMB (about $57 to $67). Later that evening the Australian teacher in our group said that in another town he’d purchased his, with twice the storage space, for less than 250 RMB.
“How did you do that?” I asked, still amazed and somewhat more hopeful that buying this device wouldn’t deplete my whole monthly earnings.
“I speak Chinese,” he said. “You walk in there and they see a couple of Westerners. They’re gonna take advantage of you.”
This from a guy who’s skin color is somewhere between builders white and milk white, and whose Chinese (I’m told) is terrible. Then again, I’ve seen this silly guy try to convince cab drivers that he’s Chinese.
“Even if he had yellow skin, slanted eyes and almost black hair, no one from China would believe he’s Chinese because of his bad Mandarin,” one Westerner told me.
Again, there is no telling why the price difference was so escalated, but I do plan to bring a Chinese person with me the next time I seek a major purchase.

Money woes: an international woe

"I didn't come to China to be worried about money," my supervisor lamented Friday night on the way to too much baijo. "If I wanted to worry about money, I'd have stayed in the States."
The baijo Friday night certainly helped to numb the reality of being impoverished in a third-world country. The liquor I would call something as wretched as Everclear or Maddog 20/20 but my North Carolinian supervisor can give a dissertation on how it's much more like moonshine. I'll take his word for it.
Worrying about money has become conversation du jour, especially for some of us.
Some of us haven't yet been paid after six weeks of work by our employing university. One Western teacher discusses his woes of having 300 RMB (about $50) before being paid last week for a month's work at his employing school.
I haven't had a paycheck since my last freelance project ended in September, 2008. Thanks to the help of some friends and family I got by, but not before being evicted from my apartment and having my car relocated. Thanks also to the help of welfare services that provided free psychiatric/psychotherapeutic and food assistance. That was what it was like to be broke in America.
I hadn't asked for it but one friend was smart enough to give me some cash before I came to China so that when I arrived I had a whopping $89. That was eight weeks ago. Since, I've continued a life so frugal I could show ascetics a tip or two. It sucks not having wine, but if it means I can eat the next day, so be it. It's beguiling using my feminine wiles (and other less gender-oriented methods) to finagle a beer or even lunch. I'm accustomed to doing myself a great disservice by paying for my own drinks during dates or otherwise proving my extreme independence by shelling out bucks when someone else is more than willing to pay. I never learned the things my parents, both bankers, taught me about money when growing up; that is, I never learned to like money enough to keep it around. I did, however, learn to buy food, gas and cigarettes with $3.
I used to say that money is the root of all evil until someone helped clarify that: love of money is the root of all evil. That's nice. Yes, I concur. That must be why ascetics never carry a cabbage roll of it. Penniless is next to godliness. Does that mean I'm closer to god? I hope not, because carrying around $.50 in China doesn't make you feel holy. (Albeit it keeps your capitalistic sentiments at bay.)
Meanwhile, waiting for payday, which is three days from now, I have accepted a friend's loan of 50 quay (about $8). It's been split smartly between transportation, food for three days, and (of course) cigarettes and beer. I await the opportunity to have a full cabinet of food. I await the chance to buy toilet paper and pay utilities. I await the ability to repay my friends while sipping what's called wine here in China.
And if my roommates decide my momentary inability to help pay for transportation to and from work get annoyed, well, they can go make themselves feel better by continuing their consumer lifestyle here in this third-world country.
Too many arguments begin over financial matters, and I'd rather not pursue that convention. After all, it's a matter of priorities. Money will always come. Money will always go. Priorities and patience will persist, regardless.

The Divorce

The opportunity to move to China deserves a word none other than serendipitous. The caesura between the happy marriage that was my freelance journalism career and solitude and the life I lead now didn’t come overnight, jsut as a divorce doesn’t; the end of the line was visible as a day’s disappearance in a sunset. “For without death how can there be spring?” Thomas Mann wrote in The Black Swan. Something had to change. i knew it did, and I knew it would. A void stared at me through the misty peaceful haze that meditation and yoga brought. It stared at me when coming up for air from the intense focus that is writing, giving me the bends. It stared at me from the space of my queen sized bed, though I knew it wasn’t just loneliness. This void felt like a blank wall I couldn’t find the right art piece for. Only in moments of travel and planning for yet more travels did the void close in on me, warming me like a fire on a wintry Chicago night or a humid day in India.
There was something soothing about the anonymity of travel. Traveling is the only proper way to lose yourself in the pursuit of answers to life’s quandaries. It is only when leaving home that you can understand what home is, just as it is when medical emergencies bring you closer to appreciating the preciousness of your own shell. The ambitious years I spent tying to make a name for myself in the world of architectural journalism involved trips around the States. I foolishly continued that ambition when visiting India and Costa Rica and nearly ruined both trips until (again) medical situations forced me to stop working. I coudl not separate my career from the rest of my life. My life was my career. It caused the demise of relationships and financial devastation. My ultiamte goal was to travel the world, writing aotu architecture. I was jsut learning how to make my career pay for my travels and had almost year’s worth of travel plans to various cities across the States when teh structure tht was my life started crumbling around me. Now matter how hard I worked at it, I would not work myself around the economic downturn.
I moved from a spacious apartment designed by a bona fide architect in Sarasota, Florida, to my uncle’s cabin in rural Indiana. That was a strangely good thing. It would save money and free me from worry about paying a large chunk of my income to the expenses fo complete self-sufficience and I could focus on th job offers that were coming in from around the country. I coudl get my name in bigger publications and expand my international contact list. I could save some money to start traveling abroad again. That’s not how life saw it. The offers ceased and my established contracts were drying up. Then my uncle made sexual advances and threw me out for thwarting them. My own father, with whom I’d been trying to resurrect an all-but-defunct relationship, denied my account, opting instead to defend his brother and blame it on me. Those were bad things.
I manifested the silver lining of that cloud by moving to Chicago, where I was ironically supposed to visit and secure a freelance contract three days later. I secured the contract and an apartment within a few weeks, which were good things. But there was no work to be found, not in freelance or full-time journalism, not even in third, fourth, fifth– tenth– choice income sources. i sought work in bartending and at homegoods retailers. Alas, I doubt I coudl have gotten work as a prostitute or drug pusher.
The cost of self-sufficiency was choking me, draining what little retirement investments I had left. My beloved career had failed me. The five years I’d spent married to it (and countless years dreaming about such a life beforehand) seemed as wasted as my energy. Then the depression reared its head like never before, and I fell into an abyss that ended in a psychiatric ward.
The week of Christmas found me back at my computer, blogging a little about architecture to find some semblance of intellectual pleasure and trying fervently to upgrade my professional skills by becoming Web 3.0 savvy. Flipping for the 232nd time through Craigslist and other employment outlets I spotted an ad seeking English teachers in Asia. Within a week I had two job offers. I stopped blogging about architecture. I stopped reading about it. I tried to stop thinking about it, which was virtually imposible while walking through my neighborhood full of Victorians. Remorse set in about our love affair coming to an end. But it let me down in too many ways. I couldn’t continue giving to something that seemed determine to abandon me. There coems a time when pursuing one’s ambitions becomes foolish. If I was to travel the world and write, it would not be abotu architecture. I might marry an architect. I might visit certain cities or live in them because of my inspiration from their architecture. We could be friends. We could no longer be lovers.
Somehow, like the first indications of a new day that slip into your windows at sunrise, the void began to dissipate. Six weeks later I took my first steps toward a new relationship, one of travel and writing. Seven weeks into my residence in Huludao, a small city in northeastern China, a fellow English teacher, who hails from New Zealand, stopped me to poke into my lexical mind, which seems to trouble and intrigue him.
“What is a fenestration?” asks the lanky, dirty blond 20-something with speech so articulate it’s sometimes confused with a British dialect.
A twinge of emotional pain felt like a thorn prick. “An architectural term.”
“Of course. Leave it to the architecture writer,” quips my Texan roommate, a gorgeous Latina with a temper that rarely but entertainingly arises.
I kept my green eyes lowered, preventing the Western teachers around me from seeing that even the mention of an architectural word hurts. I won’t tell them that I also love the words aperture, turret, demilune, curvilinear. I won’t tell them I miss the sexiness of walking onto construction sites with builders, developers, and engineers and the semi-sexual stimulation I feel just hanging out in design offices. if writing about architecture was my marriage, scouting out architecture is foreplay and talking about architecture is full-blown sex. No. I won’t tell them this. For, just as years after a divorce some people find themselves trying to figure out when their marriage started slipping away, I could not escape that I was still in love with architecture. I will be for life.
As I explained to my university students the next day, on long drives my favorite thing to do is think about the architecture of words, the ascenders and descenders of my favorite words, allowing myself to brainstorm on words and finding the architecture within. Words to me look like miniature buildings. In a page of text I see rivers and skylines, great lakes or canyons. Words house me. They are my refuge, my recreation, my profit and my pride. They are the very reason I awaken every morning. They were the source of my recovery in the psych ward.
Words are my vehicle. Writing have been my fuel since I was able to write the alphabet. Now, however, they are not confined to buildings. Now, the world is my space. I’ve removed the walls I’d formed between myself and words through the objectivity and linearity of journalism to let them curve and swell like the very globe itself, the globe that is my new desk.
This love isn’t perfect. None are. Yet it is one that has been longer coming than a dream of making it as a freelance journalist. It is one that has persisted as long as my writing.