Weekdays and Weekends preceeding Classes

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Classes start tomorrow. Just got back from checking my schedule, and picking up a couple things at a campus supermarket. In one of my stranger collection of purchases ever, I just bought ping-pong paddles, mosquito repellent candles and a jar of sesame seed butter.

Anyway, I wrote this last night. It'll be weird but informative for y'all back at home to read.

9/5/09
This past week is a smear of raw experience across the porousness of me. The absorbent parts of my brain spill over.

Sensually, the things and ways I’ve felt, I’m incapable to translate into language.
At a bar a short walk from campus, the bartender was excited to see me. I’m a foreigner, and I speak English. He had only been attempting English for a month, apparently using some tapes or books that only teach “key phrases,” and not grammar, pronunciation or extended meaning. Therefore, while trying to talk to some French ex-pats, I was interrupted by a series of taps on the shoulder.

“Excuse me. Are you American?”
对，我是美国人。
“ You speak Chinese! ...
“Excuse me.”
“Yeah?”
“You look-a like a million bucks!”
"Oh."
...

There is a nightlife district of Chengdu a 5-minute walk from my dormitory with a surplus of too-expensive bars and no dance clubs. This is typical of all Chengdu nightlife, I hear. All socializing, no place to exclusively dance. My roommate and I went out anyway on Thursday, out of pioneering curiosity. Foreigners are a rare commodity at these bars, it seems, for both the Chinese (who have not seen anyone who looks like you before) and the ex-pats (to whom you are someone to talk to in native tongue). We drank for free all night. It was just okay, though. The lights and the music dizzied me, the culture confused me, the lack of sleep dizzied me more the next morning, and for some reason, I went out again last night.

Foreign student orientation and placement test day was interesting. 200+ people from 20+ countries in one room. Two days later (yesterday) we received our placement results and met our teachers. I’ll be in 中二, second-tier Intermediate level Chinese. This is roughly equivalent to upper-300 level courses in America, so I’ll be jumping up a semester, basically. The textbook and class will be completely in Chinese. I’m ready. I’m already tiring of exploring Chengdu clubs and anticipating my studies. I didn’t come here to not learn Chinese. After all, classes haven’t even started yet, I’ve only been here perhaps 10 days, and already I’d say my speaking is 25% improved.

Key phrase: 好球！”good play!” (or, alternately, “Ballin’!”)
I’ve been playing basketball often this past half week. It has become by far the most popular sport on Chinese campuses. The basketball court culture here is a peculiar, but appealing, one to me: all pick-up games. Often, you don’t even keep score. If you do, it’s out of necessity, not competition: There are so many people wanting to play on one hoop, that you split into 3 teams of 3, 4 or 5, and play until 4 or 5 points (counting by ones). Winners stay, losers sit. A foul, 手打，means you take the ball back and start the point over. You call fouls yourself, and people take your word for it. Everyone is playing to learn what skills they have, to hone them, then test them in sport against others. The hoops don’t even have nets. They play in the rain and play for hours.

…
“Excuse me.”
“Uh, yeah?”
“ ‘I prefer tea to coffee.’”
“Okay. Me too.”
…
Some people look at me with suspicion or wariness, I cannot tell which, some look at me with pleasant surprise and try to get me to stop whatever I’m doing to help them practice English or tell me how much they like Steve Nash. Some people don’t even look at me at all.
At one of the clubs Thursday night, while a Mary J. Blige music video played in the background, I asked a worker what the job was of the large Simoan man wearing Chucks, shades, faded baggy jeans and an orange and blue (?) Peyton Manning jersey. For the past twenty minutes, I’d watched him just stand in the middle of the club, bouncing his left hand to the hip-hop music being played and doing nothing else.
“He’s ‘cool.’”
“That’s his job?”
“Yes. He’s ‘cool.’”
These club-bars are ridiculous and almost depressed me. They’re ridiculous, near-toxic facsimiles of an idea for American popular culture that barely even exists in the States. But they play good music with loud bass and shine concentrated, neon-hued bright lights through dark places into dilated eyes. They provide a subconscious, self-gratifying sensory overload that humans seek. The tastes and touches we crave intuitively and conveyable only through action and not thought. Literally unspeakable.
Last week I bought a bicycle for roughly $13 American in a back alley with my room mate and another friend, and last night it was already stolen. It was my fault for leaving it outside and unlocked. I could probably return to the same back alley tomorrow and buy it again for a discounted price.

…
“Excuse me.”
“Hmm.”
“Can you help to say this?”
“Say what? What you’ve written here?”
“Yes, how to say this?”
“…你明白这个意思没有？”
“Yes, but you, help me to speak?”
“ …’I’m crazy about American movies’.”
“…I’m. Crazy. About. American. Movies?”
“Yes. ‘I’m crazy about American movies.”
“I’m crazy about American movies.”
...

One of the people I’ve met through my “foreigner magnetism” (through which random Chinese people ask to speak English with me: “Uh, where you come from?”…) is notable. Shaw (his English name a self-given derivative of Sean Connery) has, by his own count, watched 2,666 movies in English as self-practice. He’s at Sichuan University on full scholarship for a Master’s program in art history, but still works two jobs to put his younger brother through school. One of them is at the English resource study center on campus, which has thousands of books, movies, tapes and magazines for students to check out and/or use on-site. He said I can use it for free, once I have me student card. Sounds good to me: their copy of Norman Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead” caught my eye. Anyway, Shaw is the only person I’ve met so far here who will openly talk about Chinese recent history, in particular, the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Massacre. He wants more than anything else to travel to an American Ivy league university to research modern Chinese art for his Doctoral degree. There are some things about art and about China that you simply don’t have access to in China. He wants to study abroad to learn more about his own country. But despite his high English proficiency, he was turned down by all of them: Harvard demands a language proficiency beyond fluency. I’m now invested in his activities and want to help him succeed in them. Shaw and I have become friends.
Shaw has been involved in establishing exhibitions and art galleries on campus, as well as running a gallery in Beijing. He also organizes a weekly discussion during the semester called “English Salon,” where a guest speaker comes to set conversation topics, in English, about American political, historical, or social topics. I may be his first host this year. The pressure to choose and proctor a discussion about something I know more about to impressionable, eager crowds is almost unbearable to me.

Shaw accompanied my room mate and I tonight to a indie folk concert in a tea shop/student hang-out on campus. The walls were covered with pictures of Jimi Hendrix, the Hives, and movies I haven’t heard of. The first time I went in, the Beatles were playing over the stereo. The acts were impressive at the concert, which was free. They were all some combination of singing, electric-amped acoustic guitar and bongo drums. One band named themselves “Elephant,” were extremely talented and didn’t take themselves seriously at all. Another singer had the absolute perfect singing voice and attitude for an American college-top 40 chart act.

Me, sitting on a mat on the floor, listening to folk rock played live on a Saturday night with several dozen Chinese of mixed age, in a country where half the toilets are still squatters. Doing this and then amicably discussing the fall of the Berlin Wall, East-West Germany relations, North Korea and George Bush’s “Axis of Evil” with a German in English while walking back to our dormitory hall, where Hungary, Slovakia, Germany, Portugal, Nepal, Laos, Korea, Japan and three sections of America live pleasantly within 100 feet of one another and with shared purpose, having just been taught the word for “fiction writer” in Chinese by one of my new friends, this was one of the unimaginable experiences I couldn’t possibly have forseen this summer when trying to visualize my semester here in Chengdu, the experiences all of us foreign students are having and will have. Some of these humans I’m witnessing, they’re beyond with I’d visualized humans could be.

My roommate, just now, perhaps accidentally summed up my experiences this week: “I don’t really like it when a person is too normal. If you’re a little weird, at least it will be funny.”

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Comments

[Saili]

enlightening
What will you speak about at English Salon?

[Meaya]

huh
it is really lots of imformation~~i hope you can get what you want here in China!! Here do have some funny person to hang out with!! huh!