chinabecca

So THAT'S Why We're all so Confused....

2009-08-25T16:09:00.000-07:00

My gmail just gave me a quote of the day from Horace Walpool that said: "Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel."

This may explain why those of us who do both have all gone absolutely insane. Do I laugh or cry? Do I laugh or cry? Do I....oh wait, now it doesn't matter, because my head is going to explode.

Taipei 101, Revisited

2009-08-23T01:10:00.000-07:00

*A view down the street from my hotel. 7-11's are virtually ubiquitous here. You can even pay your cell phone and utility bills at your friendly neighborhood convenience store.

Well, I've gone and transplanted myself again. I arrived in Taipei at 5:30 am local time after a thirteen-hour flight on a cramped and sleepless red-eye; when I got here, it was already 85 degrees outside.

It's 4:15 pm, and I have never wanted anything so badly as I want to go to sleep right now, an urge I have to fight with everything I've got in me because an afternoon nap now would mean an extra day of jetlag later. My hamstrings are spasming from prolonged immobilization in a stiff airplane seat. My stomach is disoriented and angered by the sudden change in my eating schedule. And my heart is sore and bleeding from the beating it took when it was wrenched away from the place it was silly enough to fancy a home.

But with all of the upheaval and homesickness there comes - in brief, soothing moments - the peace that accompanies the familiar. The cinder block-hardness of the hotel bed, the haphazard collection of lackluster architecture, the cacophonous tones of the Chinese language echoing everywhere around me like the emotional ringing of an atonal bell. All things that in another time and place would have twisted my homesickness inside my gut until I felt nauseous, now somehow ironically mitigating it until it softens instead to a mere quiet ache.

It strikes me that in the midst of my struggles over the past couple of years I seem to have lost my ability to look exclusively forward, to dream, to lust after life the way I used to. Now these things seem far too troublesomely like attributes of the naive and the luxuries of people who have nothing else around to sap at their emotional energy. I feel weird and uncomfortably displaced, emotions that I've never before felt while traveling and which make me wonder if I've become too rigid, too trepidatious, too willing to sacrifice life for security. All the things I've always promised myself I would never, ever be. And I wonder how I came to this.

I feel with this trip as though someone has picked me up and knocked me hard against a curb, cracking open a fossilized shell to expose a soft and too long neglected underbelly. I would prefer to complete my statuary transformation, but some small, barely audible voice in the back of my head is calling me forward with the promise of potential. Of redemption, maybe. Of a way to be better.

And so....here we go. Onward to the next adventure.

Missing Fingers

2009-07-21T16:31:00.000-07:00

The first time I went to Beijing, our professor Yomi introduced us to the blossoming underground of modern art in China by taking us to a guard house perched atop one of the few remaining segments of the old city wall, which had been taken over by a number of socially inclined artists and transformed into an exhibition space. For all its apparent informality, for all its dark corners and dank shadows, I marveled at the way the ancient cave of a building had been transformed into a museum of social criticism, a shrine to free speech and self-expression that stuck out like a wart from the glittering skyline of a city in the midst of self-congratulatory pre-Olympics modernization. A wart which, I remember thinking with some irony, if someone could find a way to pop it, would ooze the slick and very dangerously colorful pus of creativity and independent thought until it rotted rainbows into the shiny façade of comfortable apathy that stretched out around it.

Yomi had arranged a speaker for us at the gallery, an artist named Sheng Qi. Sheng Qi stood patiently in front of us, white and American and jaded as we were, and spoke humbly and unaffectedly about the art scene in China, about its influence and its ramifications and its significance. About his memories of a childhood in a society where it was illegal to paint or write or sing anything that wasn’t a form of propaganda for the Communist Party. About how, even after twenty years in an “open” society, modern artists in China still had to carve their galleries out of abandoned munitions factories and the rotting remains of old courtyard houses. About being at Tian’anmen square and watching as his own government turned on him and his friends, in retaliation for nothing more than a desire to speak their minds.

I was absolutely starstruck. And this was before I’d seen his work.

After the Tian’anmen incident the government went after Sheng Qi, putting a warrant out for his arrest for his part in the uprising. He was forced to flee China. But before he left, Sheng Qi cut off his left little finger and planted it in a flower pot.

“So a part of me,” he explained as he raised his maimed hand to show us, “would always be here.” These days Sheng Qi makes much of his living off of pictures of his hand sans pinky, his palm cradling nostalgic-looking photographs.

I was touched then on a level of passionate youthful angst. I was standing in the presence of a real revolutionary. Not a middle-class white boy who’d been mad enough at his white-collar upbringing to grow a pink mohawk, not a dreadlocked vegan peacenick protesting wars she would never be asked to fight, but a real human being who’d been asked to stand up for something he believed in. And had done it. And had risked his life – really and truly risked his life - in the process. All I wanted was to be like him.

As I grow older, though, Sheng Qi’s work takes on a new kind of meaning for me. As I learn, as I travel, as I am forced to move forward through the sometime discomfort of a life left deliberately unpadded by complacence, I see less in Sheng Qi’s missing finger of politics and heroism and more of the bittersweetness that comes necessarily from living a life that is complete and worthwhile. Of the sacrifices one is inevitably forced to make in the pursuit of something greater. Of the pieces one must shed of himself before he can become whole.

It strikes me that every time I have arrived somewhere new and then left again, every time I have made a friend and then had to say goodbye, every time I have made the effort to move forward instead of standing still, I have cut off a finger and planted it in a flower pot. I’m haunted by the phantom itches in the amputated digits: nostalgic memories of the lights in a city, a sudden whiff of an old friend’s perfume, a familiar song on a random playlist, and the fullness of my still half-lived life presses heavy on my chest. I am not as brave as Sheng Qi or his ilk, and I will not pretend to be. But every now and again I still feel as if there are pieces of me scattered everywhere, sprouting miniature unheeded flowers in neglected scraps of pottery.

And so I’m standing here again with my hatchet raised over my mangled stump of a hand, preparing to go somewhere else. Again. To once again move forward, to say goodbye, to leave cherished pieces of my soul behind like the rejected branches left behind on the ground after a pruning. One wonders whether all this docking will ultimately serve its purpose of making room for newer, stronger things to grow. Or if, in the end, I’ll just be left having to play the piano with my toes.

In Memoriam

2009-06-17T23:07:00.000-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

I’ve been having a lot of trouble writing lately.

It isn’t writer’s block. It’s something more sinister, more oppressive, more suffocating. It’s a loss of myself in a world of corporate greed and social expectations and a system that tells me who to be and how to think and what to buy. It’s a fading away of everything I believe in against a backdrop of the cynicism and resignation that inevitably haunts adulthood. Growing up. That coming of age that is supposed to be the culmination of all the years we spent in our youth looking for ways to make ourselves whole, only to find that none of it took.

I’m tired. I spend all day pushing buttons I am told to push, saying things that I am told to say, subsisting because I am told that it’s the best one can expect from life. I come home at night spent and drained and another day older.

Wasted.

I am too tired to write. And even if I could, what would I say? Where would it come from? There is nothing left, because life is as cold and empty and worthless as I am.

And, what if it isn’t good enough?

And, what if it is?

And, look at me. Poor, miserable me, bent in two under this burden of needing to write even though I’m too frightened to do it. Of feeling that I could do something great, if only I had the courage to speak up. But I don’t. And so I push buttons and I recite scripts of inanity and I subsist. Wasted.

But this week, something happened. Somewhere far away, someone rigged an election. In a place I will never see, people took to the streets. People rioted. People gave their lives. All for their right to be heard.

People died for their right to speak up.

And here I sit in my safe, warm little bubble, feeling sorry for myself. Huddled under some asinine and illogical fear, held captive by the idiotic worry that I might not be good enough, that I might not inspire, that I might not rise to the heights of literary immortality even as people all over the world spill blood for a chance at the pen that I hold motionless in my hand. I watch my television, mesmerized, as people I will never meet in a place that I will never go, people who will never experience the comfort or the education or the security or the freedom that I have, proudly display a bravery that I will never achieve. And I am so, so ashamed.

It’s been five years almost to the day since the first time I set foot in Tian’anmen Square. I remember standing in awe, barely able to breathe, knowing that I was in a place where people had given their lives for something bigger than themselves. For freedom. Something so basic, so fundamental, and yet so easily denied. I remember thinking, in my youthful naivete, that I would never take my own for granted. And yet here I am, in the greatest of ironies, denying myself the freedom so many people are fighting for. Simply because I am afraid.

This cannot continue.

In Tehran, in Beijing, in the countless other places where people have sacrificed everything simply to be heard, to be granted the chance to stand up in a sea of the apathetic walking dead and claim the right to live by virtue of their own voices, the courage of those who have chosen to stand up for their right to speak makes it impossible for me to waste my own.

I will stand up for my friends who are denied the right to love, simply because they are different. I will speak out for those who don’t have enough to eat, a bed to sleep in, clothes to wear. Proper healthcare. An education. I will bare my soul until there is nothing left of it, until it bleeds out as though I myself were among those who sacrificed everything for the right to stand up and be heard.

I’ll be melodramatic and passionate and angry and alive if I damn well want to. Fuck the system. Screw pushing the buttons and reciting the words and going through the motions. I will write, and I will breathe, and I will cherish my freedom with every word and every breath.

I will not be afraid. I will not be wasted.

Silence is no longer an option.

About A Life

2009-04-28T00:47:00.000-07:00

It’s almost midnight and I have work tomorrow and I’m exhausted, but I can’t sleep. I’ve self-medicated again, the end knot of a string of attempts at self-anesthetizing competing with one another for degree of numbness. Each time pushing it a little farther, taking a little more, and each time wondering if this will be the time that I’ve pushed it beyond where it can go, and wondering – sometimes even hoping – that this will be the last time I have to do this.

My heart is pounding in my chest. I can’t even remember everything I took. They were all legal, all prescribed, all considered necessary for the advancement of my very tenuous mental well-being. But I am beginning to believe that while all of them have some effect in solidarity, in tandem they can turn what at first seemed a blissful anesthetic into the simultaneously frightening and freeing premonition that I might never feel anything again. If I close them tonight, will my eyes open again in the morning?

My hands shake and my toes tingle and the only way I can keep my head from flopping backward is to lean it onto one shoulder or another in an artifically pensive and thoughtful pose. And I think as I sit here, what if I don’t wake up, and then I worry that the thought isn’t as troublesome as I think it should be.

Every day I wake up, groggy and disinterested with my day. Every day I shower and brush my teeth and do my best to manage the anarchistic army of hair which sits foxholed firmly but uncooperatively on my scalp. And every day, just as I’m about to walk out the door - just as I’m about to perform my daily routine of selling out, of deliberately abandoning all I believe in and forcing my square self into a round hole – just before I do all that, like a fool I take one last glance in the mirror.

I am fading.

Every day I disappear a little bit more. In the mirror there are only shadows of me, layers of painted cellophane that are removed one after another after another, until I have become as translucent and as meaningful as saran wrap.

Soon there will be nothing of me left. This makes me a little sad. I was one of the lucky ones who are able to find a few small things to like about themselves. Not grand conquests or historical heroism, but just little things like the way my right eye twinkled when I laughed or the way my hands felt smooth on a keyboard. Now I never laugh, and the layers which kept me writing were among the first to be peeled away.

So I guess it’s natural, then, that I feel a little nostalgic, a little curious. If I were to die tonight, what is it I would miss?

There was a time when my life was so full. When the entire world sang to me, every city a calling siren, every mountain a beckoning nymph. The song has never stopped. But while it used to be sweet and tender and overflowing with the promise of adventure, its pitch has changed to an octave which is apparently audible only to myself and the dogs living one floor down. It grates on my spine like the scream of a dying cat and makes me want to gouge my eyes out with my own thumbs.

“I’m stuck!” I call to them. “I’m too old now to come when you call, and the walls around me are too high to climb! Call someone else!” And when they don’t stop, I can only curl up and rock in the fetal position, sobbing in silent, futile whispers, “Please, please call someone else.”

But oh, that call. What a life I have lived.

I have watched poor children at a coffee plantation fight to have their pictures taken with a polaroid, because it’s the first they’ve ever seen of either a camera or of their own images smiling back at them.

I’ve been there as a large load of second-hand sneakers were delivered to a Nicaraguan orphanage, after which the children, who have never in their lives had enough to eat, sat down next to us and shared their lunch.

I have wandered the streets of the Bund in Shanghai at sunset, watching as the lights across the river flash in every imaginable color, the bright intensity of a city which knows itself, which fits into its own skin, in a way I never have.

I have been to the Ming Tombs with a little Chinese girl who didn’t know me, but held my hand the whole time anyway.

I have ridden a camel on the Great Wall.

I have ridden on the back of the scooter of my friend Roy who, recognizing my constant searching for peace in the midst of the incessant siren’s call in my head, drove me far, far into the mountains above Taipei to a painted temple where his mother used to take him when he was young. And in that place, I have listened to that friend, that friend of undying devotion and love, say, “Here you can rest.”

I have gotten stuck climbing trees in tropical mountains after dark

I have wandered the streets of San Francisco and Seattle and Portland and Reno Shanghai and Beijing, all of them after dark, just to see how it feels when a city sleeps.

I have eaten boa constrictor and armadillo.

I have known love. Real love. The kind which is so fragile that when it hits the oxygenated atmosphere of the real world it retreats and evaporates as quickly as it came, and all you are left with is whatever you could grasp at as it pulled back past you into nothingness.

I will never see any of these things again. Seeing is a verb which necessarily requires an agent, and cellophane wrap cannot, by definition, see. There is no more of me. I am assimilated. I am every day the same. I am the television is my savior and beer, wine, and cocktails my holy trinity. I am save me, save me from the pain of this distortionism I have to perform every day, dislocating this moral and that standard and this most special part of who I am in order to fit into a box of conformity marked “This End Up” but which always seems to get tossed into the truck upside down anyway.

There is no happy ending here, no moral to be taken away, none of my typical reminders that life’s lemonade can truly be sweet when pressed the right way. There is only disillusionment, and the disgusting and gut-punching realization that I’m neither special nor capable nor destined to do anything, great or otherwise, with my life.

There is nothing but me. And soon there will be no more of that either.

Why I Love Seattle (or) Who Let the Goats Out?

2008-08-29T01:04:00.001-07:00

Yesterday afternoon, while driving near my home in downtown Seattle, we passed a hilly patch of grass on the side of the road that slanted downward beneath the overpass onto the freeway. On a normal day it's a particularly unspectacular parcel of land, and one that we pass not infrequently, but yesterday it took on new personality with the presence of a group of squatters.

Namely, a herd of goats.

A herd of goats, and a sign that said "Goats for Rent."

I find this curious for two reasons. The first - and I should think the more obvious - is that someone must have gone to a bizarrely large amount of trouble to get an entire herd of goats under an overpass, onto a patch of land which has no gate, in the middle of downtown Seattle. The second is that, no matter how hard I rack my brain, I simply cannot conceive of a reason that any Emerald-city condo-dweller would have for needing to rent a goat. Stranger still is the idea that said condo-dweller, having found himself in need of a stubborn and hairy four-legged lawnmower, would think to look for said creature under the freeway. Did someone really think of this as a viable business enterprise?

Love, Actually

2008-08-29T00:43:00.000-07:00

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

He will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’”

-Matthew 25:41-45

“Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

-1 Corinthians 13:8-13

I remember the year I was in sixth grade, coming to school the day after Bill Clinton was elected. I remember sitting on the steps to the portable classroom behind the swing set, hugging my knees to my chest, watching as my teacher approached, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“She’s crying,” someone next to me whispered.

Someone else said, “Are you okay?”

And she answered, simply – and I’ll never forget this – “We won.”

I didn’t understand any of this at the time. I’d been raised in a staunchly conservative home in a staunchly conservative part of the state, and the election the night before had cast a pall of gloom over our entire house that had persisted through the night. It hadn’t even really occurred to me, I don’t think, that there were actually people out there who had voted for a Democratic candidate. Not just now, but ever. These were theoretical agents of evil that existed, in my mind, somewhere in the realm of the monsters under my bed. Frightening, yes, and absolutely life-threatening, but invisible nonetheless. Now one of these aliens was standing before me, disguised as what had only the day before been an icon of knowledge and authority, and not only was she tangible, she was crying for joy. I was absolutely baffled.

Fast forward to 2008.

In 2008, I developed a severe health problem that drained me as much financially as it did emotionally; even with two separate insurance plans, I’m so deeply in debt that at one point I actually considered dropping out of graduate school. In 2008, the price of food in the United States became so high that for the first time I had to choose between fresh vegetables and paying my electricity bill, the price of gasoline was so high that my law student boyfriend could barely afford to commute the five miles each way to school in his beat-up Honda, and it was impossible to walk down any residential street in Seattle without seeing at least one real estate sign every two or three blocks. In 2008, even my friends who had good jobs engineering for Boeing or programming for Microsoft went to work every day fearing that it might be for the last time. In 2008, schools failed, factories failed, hearts failed. And we live in one of the more economically secure parts of the country.

In 2008, the US unemployment rate rose to almost 6%. This does not count the heads of families of four or five who were reduced to working at Burger King for minimum wage to make ends meet.

In 2008, the number of my brothers and sisters killed in a pointless, political war grew to total over 4,000.

In 2008, the number of Iraqi civilians killed as a direct result of the US invasion grew to total over one million. Which would matter, if anyone cared.

If a non-American child is hit by a stray bullet, does he still make a sound?

And still we bicker. We draw our proverbial lines in the sand and stand obstinately behind them, our ignorance and insecurity proving such threats to our egos that we are rendered utterly incapacitated. The food is at our sides, the hungry at our feet, but in the blind confinement of our need to be right we find ourselves unable to move in order to feed them. All good intentions are lost in our stubbornness. All potential for compassion is consumed by the void of our refusal to open our eyes for fear of what we might see. Before us, people are denied educations, denied rights, denied freedom, denied the very things the fight for which swells our chests with pride and patriotism when we call ourselves Americans. People are, quite literally, dying in front of our eyes. We could save them, but we won’t. Our drive to love others is nowhere near as strong as our fear of change.

So much of the status quo is built around the Christian “right”. (The potential ironically self-satisfied double-meaning of which phrase does not, incidentally, go unnoticed by this writer). But very often I wonder, should Jesus actually see fit to return to earth on a cloud of glory tomorrow morning, if he wouldn’t be just slightly startled by our current state of affairs. Try as I might, I can find nothing in the direct teachings of Jesus having to do with gay marriage or abortion. These petty, ambiguous issues we might be justified in arguing over only if every other evil in the world were already banished. These things we use to distract ourselves so we don’t have to think about the poor and the hungry and the sick, because doing so might require us to make more than the superficial sacrifice of a once-a-week visit to the guilt-assuaging congregation down the street.

What I do find, however, are almost nonstop admonitions to practice love and compassion. There are no caveats on the mandate that we turn the other cheek; this was not worded as merely a suggestion, nor is it a verse easily taken out of context for the benefit of pacifist rhetoric. We are not asked to turn our cheeks except when we are afraid, or when we are threatened, or when we think a potential enemy might be harboring nuclear weapons. We are asked instead to stand up for our beliefs by example, through love and through peace. Not the korny, acid-trip kind, but the love and peace borne of a true compassion for our fellow man, the practice of which is the only thing preventing us from becoming the very thing we stand against.

Jesus was a revolutionary. He spent his life fighting the status quo, the blind, frightened self-interest of a religious system, one with so many soap boxes beneath its feet that it had risen to an elevation from which the suffering of the humanity below it looked like the suffering of ants viewed from an airplane. Jesus dined with prostitutes and thieves. He touched lepers with neither fear nor loathing. He preached self-examination before judgment of others. Yet we studiously ignore these attributes of the man we simultaneously hold up as our ultimate ideal, because to acknowledge them would be an uncomfortable challenge to our own self-righteousness.

“My people,” I can picture him saying, “My precious people that I created with my own two hands, my precious people for whom I sacrificed my life, are paving the streets with their blood. They are sick and they are hungry, but you can’t be bothered to turn off your televisions. And you who I’ve blessed with everything I could possibly bestow on a human being, fully expecting you to extend this generosity to your fellow men in kind! You idiots are fighting over this?”

We have turned his Father’s house into a den of thieves.

We have a chance, now, to be better. Will we take it? Will we set aside the utopian ideals in which everyone sees things our way – six million utopias for six million people – even just for a moment, and look into the eyes of our sick and our poor and our hungry, not with fear, but with a resolve buoyed by a compassion free from conditions or judgments or prejudice? Are we brave enough to love our brothers? Such a love will require the courage to stand alone in the face of doubt, in the face of ridicule, in the face of a world in which compassion is a subversive and threatening concept. Are we ready?

Tonight, my life comes full circle. I understand why my teacher was crying all those years ago, because I find myself weeping. Shedding tears in the midst of daring to hope, because –maybe naively - I believe that we can be strong again. That we can once again find our capacity for compassion in the midst of a world of hatred. I believe that we can overcome the fear that tethers us and extend our hands, weak and atrophied though they may be, to those in need around us. That if we can admit our weaknesses, we can be strong in one another. That united we stand, divided we find ourselves in the midst of a hell we have created through our own blindness. And I believe we’re better than that.

Fireworks

2008-07-13T10:45:00.000-07:00

On the night of the Fourth of July we went to an outlook in a residential neighborhood on Queen Anne Hill to watch the fireworks. The city of Seattle is a light show in and of itself at night. Unlike a lot of other places I’ve been, it never really fades to black in the absence of the sunlight. Instead the rolling hills go to different hues of blue, deep shades of navy and sapphire and cobalt freckled with playful fireflies of light. They strike me as so unconscious of themselves, these pinpricks of iridescence; they wink at each other from behind the heavy brocade drapes of expensive mansions with the same innocent jocularity that they do the cheap plastic blinds of dilapidated basement apartments, and, in my overworked imagination, they laugh jovially at our inability to see past the difference between the two.

Every year, before colors begin exploding in space, a military helicopter with a giant American flag pinned to its belly makes a couple of strategic revolutions around the sky above Lake Union, a giant spotlight illuminating it from a barge below. The idea, one supposes, is the invocation of pride, a swelling of patriotic emotion, an overwhelming gratitude at having been born free.

This year, though, it was different. My first reaction wasn’t pride, it wasn’t patriotism, it was anger. And then it was anger that I had a reason to be angry. For some reason the Fourth of July is always a bit of an emotional holiday for me: standing underneath falling shards of glittering gunpowder for a half an hour always instantly takes me back to when I was a kid, to playing in the park with my brother and sister, singing silly songs about Henry the Eighth (I am I am!) and John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt while the giant blue and red explosions – much simpler then than they are now – cast long irregular shadows over the town.

As I grow older, I remember too how I was told as a child how lucky I was to be born an American. People here can be whatever they want, I was told. We can make a difference. We can change things if they need to be changed. And this is all because we’re free.

And I remember my grandfather last summer, talking to my best friend Lindsey as he sat rocking in his favorite chair, the naval tattoo on his arm faded from exposure to the years, saying, “I’ve always been a real flag-waver when it comes to our country.” And I remember feeling terribly proud.

And so as that arrogant helicopter strutting around with that arrogant flag strapped to its arrogant underside, I couldn’t help but feel betrayed. Lost. We don’t even try to be whatever we want (who has the money to pay for an education?). We’re skeptical of our ability to make a difference, and scared of what might happen if we do, so we don’t even try. And freedom? We’ve entered an age where criticism of our government is unpatriotic, and criticism of each other is mandatory. American community has become American isolation. American philanthropists have become American Enrons. The American dream has become the American trying-to-get-by. American hope has become American fear.

How dare they? I thought. The rich and powerful have taken what was once envisioned as a government for and by the people and used it to suffocate those it was meant to empower. How dare they ignore our poor? How dare they take the money meant to educate our children and put it toward a meaningless war? How dare they make political games out of the suffering of those in other countries? In our own? How dare they make me doubt my desire to create new life, at times even to live my own? How dare they turn their backs on the flat-wavers of this country, the grandfathers and fathers and mothers and aunts and uncles who have fought bravely, unquestioningly, nobly, and now find themselves – sometimes quite literally – without a leg to stand on?

And worst of all, how dare they rob us of our hope?

How do you impeach a government for the theft of optimism?

I stood there for a moment, seething. Disoriented. Wondering if this was even the same country in which I’d grown up, because really I recognize very little of it.

It wasn’t until I’d been standing there brooding in my self-righteousness for a few minutes that I realized that someone in the small crowd around us had been humming the national anthem softly as the flag passed. Someone else to my right was nodding – almost imperceptibly, but he was doing it – his eyes moist with tears. The closer the flag got, the more static the air around us became, until that great square of fabric hovered right in front of us. In the crowd of a hundred people, not one of us spoke. Even the drunk guy sitting in a lawn chair two rows up was momentarily dumbstruck.

What I realized standing there that night is this: we are not dead. Anesthetized, maybe, but not dead. Sometimes it’s easy to feel like we are; we watch the daily chaos on the news, the horror in Africa, the rising gas prices, the idiots in congress, the soaring prices of food, people losing their homes. And we feel lost because we can’t do anything about it. Not just for ourselves, but for others. We can’t help and we can’t make it better. So we go in one end of our day and out the other like zombies, numbed by our ineffectiveness, manipulated by our apathy. We look out on the world and all we see is gray. Gray, gray, gray.

But I think it’s also easy to forget how lucky we really are in spite of everything. My generation has only ever seen explosions in the sky in celebration of our freedom, never because we were fighting in pursuit of it. We have only ever had to associate the burning smell of gunpowder and charred meat with the lingering after-effects of a giant nationwide party. There are many, many people on earth who have far more sinister associations with such sensations.

I think, really, that deep down we know this. And I strongly believe that there is still something in us that dares to hope. However small, it is still there. And it will, I believe, transcend scandal and stupidity and greed and global warming. There is still a spark in each of us, a tiny grain of everything irrepressible about the human spirit, that clings to optimism, to the potential for good. But we have to make an effort to seek it out, and it’s going to take work. Barack Obama can offer us all the change he wants, but until we’re willing to work for it in our own lives, all the promises and all the blame of all the politicians and gurus and spiritual leaders in all the world can never hand it to us.

In America, the government is still the people, even if it is by a narrow margin. What I wonder is whether we will ever trust the government, no matter how brilliant, as long as we remain unable to trust ourselves.

Cheerleading

2008-06-19T21:42:00.000-07:00

My younger sister was born with a rare genetic displacement. From the standpoint of her DNA it’s almost exactly the opposite of Downs Syndrome; where people with Downs are missing a chromosome, Amy actually has an extra one swinging on the end of each of her genetic helixes. But from a practical standpoint the only real difference between the two is that Downs Syndrome, owing to the fact that it’s far more common, is more predictable. In terms of day-to-day functioning there’s very little difference. If you were asked to pick someone with Amy’s condition out of a group of people born with Downs Syndrome, it’s doubtful you’d be able to do it.

This is all really just to give you an idea of the level of cognizance at which she lives her daily life. By no means does it imply that she’s in any way dumber than I am (quite the opposite – she can memorize an entire movie after watching it once), but she does go through her existence on an entirely different mental plane than the rest of us, which can sometimes mean that she requires a different set of social circumstances.

Eager to both provide her with said circumstances and get her off of the couch, my mom signed Amy up with a local cheerleading team. It originally started out, apparently, primarily with the intention of cheering for the Special Olympics basketball games, but the cheerleaders have made such a stir in the local community that the club has evolved into its own separate entity. When I asked her what she cheered for, Amy just gave me a disdainful look and said, with the tone of a disinterested bachelor talking to a toddler, “Um, Helena.” Duh.

I was curious to see the group that had finally pried my baby sister away from the imaginary world of movies and books where she’s hidden away from the twenty-three years of the inaccessibility of her particular reality, so I tagged along when my parents took her to practice earlier this week. No sooner had we entered the door than we were swarmed with young women, all of whom possessed some degree of mental handicap and none of whom possessed any degree of social fear.

“Wow,” said Vicki, an especially friendly woman who works with my sister at a farm which employs people with special needs. She motioned to the bright yellow T-shirt I’d borrowed from my mom to work out in – a color, I might add, which does not flatter me – and cooed, “That shirt looks amazing on you! Where did you get it?”

I didn’t have time to answer before another girl, this one bearing an uncanny resemblance to Emma Thompson’s Professor Trelawney character in the Harry Potter movies, her heavily-lidded eyes magnified by thick glasses, approached and said seriously, “Excuse me. Do you have any animals? Say, for instance, a dog, or a cat? Or a hamster?”

“I have two cats,” I responded.

“Great,” said the Trelawney girl. “Do you know what I should do about a parrot with a biting problem?”

I said that I didn’t.

A young woman with bright red hair, meanwhile, was meandering around the room. She’s apparently not capable of talking, but she had an uncanny ability to mentally lock onto an object in the distance and go there, unlock, and then repeat the process with something else. She looked like the pull-back toy cars we played with as kids. I couldn’t help thinking that if someone took my own brain and whittled it down to its very essence, stripped it of all its petty mundane responsibilities and just let it to its own devices, it would very much resemble the ginger who was at the moment weaving her way randomly through other people’s conversations in pursuit of things of which only she was aware but which, I think, were almost certainly far more important.

Another woman, a little older than the others and with the thickest, darkest hair I’ve ever seen, and that sticking out so haphazardly in so many directions that she’d make Einstein look bald, came up to me and without any introduction said, “Where do you get your hair done?”

“In Seattle,” I said. I was about to add what I was sure would be a particularly witty comment about traveling to Seattle making for a very expensive visit to the salon, but before I could say anything more she continued.

“Hm. Yeah, I tried Great Clips last time, but I’m considering trying Supercuts next. I didn’t like it last time.”

And then she walked away.

“Are you going to take her home with you?” Asked another girl with glasses, motioning to Amy.

“No,” I said. “Amy will stay here in Helena.”

“No,” said the girl, raising her eyebrows at my stupidity. “I mean tonight. Are you going to take her home?”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, as far as I know. Yes. We’re going to take Amy home.”

And through went the redhead.

The leader, a volunteer cheerleader from the local college, called them to line up, and they did so with gusto, brandishing their donated professional-grade pom-poms with a special kind of pride, the little slivers of silver in the plumes of red sparkling as the girls shook their hidden fists in excitement. For them, this was barely even a rehearsal. This was a moment in their lives, and as such was to be treated with all the gravity that such an important event deserved.

“Which cheer should we do tonight?” asked the leader.

“I know!” Amy hollered. “Let’s do the one that I made up!”

I felt myself sucking in a little breath of pride. Amy? Made up a cheer? My Amy?

I should point out here that the members of my family are not necessarily genetically predisposed to playing well with others. We are born of a long line of cowboys and farmers and free spirits; it’s not inherently a bad thing, and it might even be one that has even served us well from time to time. But it’s certainly not something that leaves us naturally inclined toward team spirit. My mom said that when Amy first started on the squad she would insist loudly, “But I want to do things my way, mom!” This week, however, when it came time to leave for practice she couldn’t find her uniform sweat pants, and the ordeal nearly traumatized her. “It’s not okay!” She moaned. “If we don’t all look the same, how are we ever all going to look like a team?!”

“H-E-L-E-N-A! Helena! Helena! We’re number one!” Cried the cheerleaders. Then they waved their pom-poms, and Amy kicked her little foot into the air. She hollered at the top of her lungs, like someone had installed a bellows cramp in her stomach. I wondered, just for a moment, what she would have been if she had been born “normal.” And then I thought, God forbid. She’s a much better cheerleader this way than she would have been as a “normal” one.

The humanity, the innocence in the room was palpable, and it was all over far too soon. When they were done the redheaded girl tried to go in one direction until one of the volunteers caught her by the arm and redirected her energy toward different coordinates. Said coordinates turned out to be me, and she beamed as she gestured toward a button on my purse strap with a picture of a cat on it.

“Are you going to take Amy home with you?” asked the girl with the glasses a second time. I began to wonder if she’d been left behind somewhere at some point.

“Have a great trip home!” called Vicki. “Come back next year, okay?”

“Hey,” said Amy to Vicki, “I have an idea. Let’s don’t call ourselves coworkers anymore. Can’t we just be friends? I think that’s better than coworkers.”

Said Vicki, “Okay.”

And we got in the car to drive home, Amy sitting next to me in the back seat practicing her cheers.

“H-E-L-E-N-A.” She was whispering. “We’re number one.”

Metamorphosis, But not Kafka's

2008-06-18T07:06:00.000-07:00

In the last hundred years enough has happened to justify us in believing that the pen’s response to the challenge of force is at least not ludicrous and hopeless; indeed, it is perhaps the one serious hope we have.

- C.M. Woodhouse

I’ve been a bit moody lately.

Life this year, for those of you who don’t follow my blog lately, has come at me, to defer to the cliché because there’s no better way to put it, all at once. I won’t go into it all again here. But I have, quite simply, suffered.

Had I written that sentence a month ago, maybe two, I might have meant it just the way it reads, hinting at the bitterness with which we usually read such statements. But the past few weeks of my life have been defined by a drastic shift in attitude. Today, when I write that sentence, “I have, quite simply, suffered,” it is with a deep sense of gratitude and awe. The why me of six months ago, with all of the anger it entailed at the perceived solitariness of my pain, has transformed itself very suddenly into a why me of perplexed gratefulness. The question is no longer “Why am I the one who has to go through this?” but “Why am I the one who gets to go through this?” I feel my spirit getting stronger, the way an athlete watches her body chisel itself because of – not in spite of – sweat and exhaustion, and I wonder why it is that not everyone gets the same opportunity. I actually feel sorry for the people who have easy lives.

In an effort to quell my odd neurological problems, my doctors and I decided to experiment with taking me off of my antidepressants for a while. My psychiatrist was hesitant, since it’s become quite evident that depression is as much a physical and hormonal thing than a situational thing for me, but the physical pain had become so unbearable that I was desperate. I had to do something.

What I hadn’t expected, however, was the reversal of the other side effects, most noticeably my inability to think clearly. The medications seem to be effective on me because they block a certain part of my brain where the Sad Chemicals are stored. Unfortunately, due to what appears to be a result of the chaos typical of neurological bureaucracy, an oversight left the Smart Chemicals in storage in the same room. When the door got locked the Sad Chemicals got trapped, but we also had no access to the Smart Chemicals, which left us spending large parts of our days staring open-mouthed at blank walls and finding them, I must add here, much more interesting than they warranted. And so, when the door went and got itself unlocked I told my psychiatrist to just let it alone.

Staring at blank walls, especially when you have the constant and nagging urge to turn them to murals like the one in the Sistine Chapel, is no way to live a life.

The problem, of course, is that the Sad Chemicals got loose and have been wreaking a bit of havoc. It’s not necessarily that I’m ready to jump off a cliff, merely that life, both the up and down parts, are incredibly more intense than they would have been otherwise, and I’m having to hold on a good deal tighter to make sure the roller coaster doesn’t buck me off altogether.
And so I’ve been doing my best to struggle through this my next level of training, the part where they take away the net and force me to fly without it. It hasn’t been easy; I got my grades back yesterday – grades I nearly killed myself for, since I was in and out of the hospital – and they were C’s. The first two C’s of my college career. In grad school. My first reaction was to do things the old way and panic, to tell myself that any chance of teaching at Harvard has just gone out the window, that I’ve just lost the respect of the entire academic community, etc. etc. But when I stopped and reminded myself what I personally had had to do to get those C’s, they turned into Olympic gold medals. I could have run a triathlon, even with the headaches.

The point is, I am having to learn to live life differently. Every moment. And it isn’t easy. Especially since, because I am doing it out of a necessity very particular to my own mind, I’m having to do it very much by myself. It’s a baby step thing. But it occurs to me, even in my most difficult moments, that each of these baby steps doesn’t just teach me to be more compassionate toward myself, it teaches me to be a little more compassionate toward other people. If I want to be a fully empathetic person, I have to know what it feels like to be depressed and what it feels like to have a swollen neural membrane and what it feels like to get C’s. And then, because I’ve been blessed (and terribly, terribly cursed) with this need to write, I can put it on paper and reach even more people, and hopefully in the end it’ll all be a good thing.

I know there are a lot of people out there who love me and who would love to be able to help me. I know that there are also people out there who want to ‘fix’ me just because they like to fix things, and when they see me I kind of resemble the intoxicating temptation of a broken toaster. But I’m not broken. I’m just undergoing metamorphosis. What kind of butterfly I’ll be in the end is anyone’s guess. But at least I’m trying.

Airplane!

2008-06-18T06:01:00.000-07:00

I’m sitting in an airport, waiting for a strange-looking mechanical man-made artificial bird to take me to a place other than the one I currently help to occupy. It occurs to me as I sit here that over the course of my life I’ve taken up a good number of metaphysical spaces in a great deal of different physical ones. Was the Becca who sat in the airport in Taipei a year and a half ago waiting for a flight to Seattle the same Becca who is sitting in Seattle now waiting for a flight to Helena? It’s hardly likely; the challenges of this year have refined this Becca into what feels like such a solidly strong piece of metal that she hardly recognizes the flimsy coat hanger of that other Becca on the brief occasion that she finds enough free time or audacity to look that far backward. That, and I (being the Becca writing this) just read somewhere that on a biological level we human beings completely recycle all the atoms in our bodies every seven years. So if I’m not that metaphysical Becca, and I’m not that actual-physical Becca, which Becca am I? Really, factoring in all of the changes in life, is it ever actually possible to be any kind of Becca other than the now Becca? This is a gigantic paradox, because the now Becca is definitely not the then Becca. But the now Becca wouldn’t be here if she weren’t at least a little defined by the experiences of the then Becca. Should the now Becca bear the guilt and pain of the then Becca? That hardly seems fair: the then Becca got to share in none of the happiness and strength of the now Becca, and neither of us gets a piece of the satisfaction of the future Becca, who, we hope, will go down in history as the woman who finally discovered the social formula for world peace. And so it’s all quite complicated.

I was standing in the security line today when I had some brief flash of a memory, just an ephemeral shot of a picture in my mind, of standing in a security line in another airport, somewhere, and I realized that I don’t know which airport it was. It could have been anywhere, I’ve been so damn many of them. Beijing? Shanghai? Hong Kong? Tokyo? Spokane?

This brought two particularly poignant thoughts to mind. The first was that I am incredibly lucky. How many people can say that they’ve been to so many places that they can’t keep them all straight in their heads? We could, of course, posit that I can’t keep anything at all straight in my head, but let’s leave that aside for the moment for the sake of argument.

The second, however, was that for all the blessings I’ve had in my life, it’s a bit unsettling how much of it I’ve wasted trying to get somewhere else. Really, life is just moments, strung together like Christmas lights on a cord. When we’re children each of these moments is exciting and new to the point where we can’t even concentrate and our parents have to cling desperately to our tiny wrists to keep us from running full-speed into the nearest most colorful object. What is right in front of us is all that exists. This is why kids never worry about anything. Even eating is an adventure; as adults we see it as something obnoxious that must be done quickly so we can get back to writing our papers on rhetorical devices in the Confucian classics. But kids, when they eat they go up and down and around, they stick their hands in pudding just to feel it goop and they chomp on celery just to hear it crunch and they spread spaghetti around just to make art with the sauce on the table. Everything is light and sound and flavor and color and experience. And they don’t even think to appreciate it, because that’s the way everything is to them, because that’s the way everything should be.

When do we start getting to the age where our experiences begin to run together? When do the perfect individual blessings of our sensory experiences, the celery crunches of feeding bread heels to pigeons or splashing in puddles or that really cool gum someone left on the sidewalk begin to run together like a Monet left out in the rain? And why are we so willing to be satisfied with the gray formlessness of a muddled and neglected masterpiece when we could be looking at a Starry Night?

What's Wrong With Becca

2008-05-24T17:38:00.001-07:00

So they've finally figured out what's wrong with me. At least they think they have. I'm not holding my breath. This is partially because my experiences of late have shaken my faith in modern medical science to its very core, and partially because it simply isn't a good idea to hold one's breath for an extended length of time. If there's anything I've learned in the past year of riding the nauseating roller coaster of my genetic physical oversensitivity, it's that an ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure, and I would imagine that this holds especially true in the area of brain damage.

But - in keeping with my regular routine and as a sign that things truly are getting back to normal - I digress.

I had an encouraging visit with a bullet of a fireball neurologist on Tuesday who, after entering the room with the declaration "My name is Dr. Miranova, and I'm Czechoslovakian. The Czech side, not the Slovakian side, because they're different you know," proceeded to examine me with such speed and intensity that the examination was making me dizzier than my original headache. It was only after a whirlwind of tests that more closely resembled the grilling of a drunk driver that she sat down abruptly and said, "So here's what's going on."

They must not have a lot of time to poop around in Eastern Europe.

When she began with "So sometimes, when we're really stressed..." I had to fight to keep from rolling my eyes in exasperation. The reaction from most of the doctors lately has been less than encouraging, given their general tendency to write my pain off as tension headaches when they can't find anything else wrong. Forget for a moment that I'm a graduate student who works ten hours a day on a good day, that I've lived in China, that I was married and divorced by 25, and that by all rights if anyone knows what stress feels like (and this wasn't it) it should be me. We can also leave aside the fact that my condition in no way resembled any description of a tension headache that I was ever given. Apparently I just didn't know what was going on inside my own head. It's a criticism I've heard before and tend to believe, but never in the physical sense.

This time, however, the neurologist continued, "Sometimes when we get stressed out, we deplete all our physical resources. We don't realize how connected our bodies are to our minds. The lining of the brain gets inflamed and stops properly draining fluid, kind of like a stitch in your side when you're running is an inflammation of the pocket around the liver."

I nodded like I knew this. I didn't.

It was nice to be talked to like an educated adult, and by the time I walked out of her office I was halfway ready to change my specialty to neurology, an aspiration tempered only by the reality that the sight of blood does bad things for my constitution. I have, at any rate, a new found appreciation for the wonders of the human brain. It's an amazing thing. Too often, I think, we confuse psychosomatic illness with hypochondriacism, not realizing that the mind is kind of like an army private at the switchboard of a nuclear submarine. You can justify ignoring and even abusing it to a point, but neglect it too much and it has ways to show you it's irritated. Namely, blowing poop up.

I think the most interesting thing I learned was that our brains have a special way of dealing with certain kinds of stress. It's well documented that we're capable of almost superhuman mental tenacity, says Dr. Miranova, when we believe we're helping others or making the world a better place. But since we only have so much energy, the brain rotates like a magnifying glass in the sun, concentrating the normally scattered energy we do have on the task at hand, which in the end usually results in a meltdown. This is why, she said, medical students can work twenty-four hour shifts during their residencies but almost inevitably break down after the residency is over. Sometimes a day later, sometimes several years, but it almost always happens. I find this utterly fascinating and, in a way, incredibly inspirational. Human beings are literally biologically hardwired to be self-sacrificing, in the most ultimate sense of the term.

The problem, I've discovered, with psychosomatic pain is that it requires psychosomatic treatment. Aside from a deluge of pills and vitamins I'm being extolled to change my entire lifestyle, from the food I eat (no more soy ice cream!) to daily yoga and meditation. My mental and physical health - and not my academic status - has to be my primary focus, probably forever, if I want to feel better. I've been trying to hammer the idea into my neurotic overachiever of a brain, but it's been so molded by the relentlessness and competitiveness of the academic environment that it's been a bit slow on the uptake. That, and I'm starting to suspect that hammering anything at all into one's own brain might defeat the point of stress reduction in the first place.

When I asked Dr. Miranova why, if this truly is a physical reaction, all the students around me aren't suffering from the same affliction, she shrugged and said simply, "Genetics."

"Some people are just physically very sensitive to stress," she continued. "You're one of those people who's going to have to do something you love, something that makes you so happy you can do it indefinitely just for the sake of doing it. Does your job make you happy?"

What a question.

Chronicle of the Quiet Rebel

2008-05-10T16:07:00.000-07:00

I’ve just noticed how loquacious my blog postings have become lately. It’s not that I’m trying to wax philosophical, so much, but with everything that’s been happening lately I’ve relapsed into an overly pensive state of mind. If you think my posts are convoluted, you should see what’s going on inside my head.

A few weeks ago, I was in my weekly appointment with my psychiatrist. For the most part she just lets me talk and nods sympathetically; every once in a while she’ll offer some quiet observation, but it’s rare that she interjects into the one-sided conversations which, more often than not, amount to little more than hollow rivers of my subconscious spewing out of my mouth. Verbal diarrhea, I think they call it. I can’t shut up on a good day. Being in a small, comfortable room where I’m the undisputed center of attention for an hour affects me like mental crack.

At any rate, on this particular day my psychiatrist, sweet and quiet and barely older than myself, surprised me when she looked up from her notes to ask, “How do you think Jeremy deals with your rebellious streak?”

I stopped. I didn’t know I had one of those.

When I was young, my mom used to refer to me as a “quiet rebel,” someone who would smile sweetly until you left the room, and then rearrange your furniture while you were in the bathroom just to mess with your head. I like the term: it’s much more mysterious and romantic than simply calling me passive-aggressive. But I’ve never really thought of myself as a rebel. The word seems to imply a sense of antagonism that I’ve never really felt, a desire to make other people uncomfortable that I’m not aware of ever having had. I like other people, and I like being a productive member of society. I just don’t like being told what to do.

The older I get and the more I experience in life, the more conscious I get of the fact that we’re all just carbon-based life forms, that most of the people in charge aren’t any smarter than I am (and many cases are probably a little dumber), that tradition and dogmatic religion are artificial constructs designed to neatly package mores and morality so we don’t have to think for ourselves. That there are things that are universal, like love for our fellow man, and that these are the things that you have to search for; they don’t find you. Not while you’re watching TV in your boxer shorts, and not when you’re sitting in a church pew in your best Sunday dress. No preacher or political reformer is going to hand you a Bible or a Little Red Book with World Peace neatly hidden in a hole cut out of the pages inside. In my mind the realization of this isn’t rebellion. It’s just a willingness to go against the grain in the event that you realize that everyone else in life is wandering around as blindly as you are. The funny thing is that so few of us just cowboy up and open our eyes. Bumping into the sharp corners of metaphorical coffee tables is apparently much more fun, if slightly less spiritually rewarding.

Waiting

2008-05-01T17:19:00.000-07:00

In a few minutes, I will have my first MRI. I'm sitting in a waiting room at the hospital now.

It's the hardest part, the waiting, when you're not feeling well and they don't know what's wrong with you. It's a constant practice in the art of not thinking: not thinking about the unceasing and unexplained ringing in my ears and swelling behind my eyes, not thinking about the bizarre chemicals they'll soon be putting in my body and the long needles they'll have to use to do it, not thinking about my irrational but persistent fear of enclosed spaces and what it's going to be like in twenty minutes when I'm in a dark, whirring tomb, tied down by plastic tubes that artificially navigate through my veins. My precious veins, those tiny little freeways of life that spread like a spider web through my body and which, until just a moment ago, I have never in my twenty-seven years of breathing oxygen even stopped to consider.

This is the great irony of the practice of not thinking. The more you try not to think, the more you end up thinking. And practicing trying not to think only doubles the effort, which ultimately doubles the thinking.

And so all day long, in spite of constant attempts at defeating my apparently natural tendency toward mental masochism, I've been thinking of nothing but spinal taps and morphine drips and white lab coats. I've been hating doctors and nurses and receptionists and, more than anything else, the people inhabiting the planet around me who seem so destined to slide easily through life without so much as an ingrown toenail, while I struggle my way through grad school with a severe dopamine deficiency, a constant postnasal drip, and now a head that throbs so badly and so constantly that even my prescription narcotics no longer dull the pain.

I've been thinking, too, how frightened I am, in spite of all my efforts to the contrary. I've found it's much easier to soldier on when you aren't actually battling anything. One assumes, too, that winning the war would be significantly easier if it were a little more obvious who the enemy was. The worst part is not knowing, especially given all the thinking I'm apparently doomed to do, whether I want to or not. When you don't know, there are no limits on what your mind can make up; it's a situation which, when you have an imagination as wild as mine, is almost as frightening as the illness itself.

I don’t mind having to face my own mortality. It’s my inadequacies I’m not interested in confronting. The fact that I am weak enough to feel this level of pain – or worse, this level of fear – is unnerving. I like to pretend I’m stronger than this.

But I’m grateful, too, for the lessons this experience is teaching me.

Last weekend the pain became so intense that I ended up back in the emergency room. Convinced that I was suffering from an intense migraine, the doctor gave me an IV drip of something that was supposed to open the blood vessels in my head, but for some reason ended up shutting down the rest of me instead. All the muscles in my body contracted, and I had the most severe feeling of nausea I’ve ever experienced. I thought I was going to die. Jeremy’s in the middle of finals at school and couldn’t stay with me, so he called my good friend Aydin and asked him to come sit in the hospital with me.

When Aydin arrived he sat next to me, stroked my hair, and put his head next to mine on the pillow.

“You’re going to make it through this,” he said. “You’re a really strong woman.”

A few minutes later they came in and gave me a powerful dose of morphine. It’s impossible to explain the sudden and overwhelming sensation that it’ll have on you, if you’ve never had a morphine drip before. It comes on all at once, makes you feel hot and heavy and sore for just a moment, and then suddenly releases you downward into a state of absolute release. It slices through the pain like a knife, cuts away whatever it is that binds it to you and lets it fall to the floor, and you’re suddenly convinced that you will never be in pain again, that you might never have been to begin with, and that it’s quite possible that the concept of pain in and of itself might simply have been nothing more than a product of your imagination conceived in a moment of weakness.

But as difficult as that is to describe, it’s nothing compared to the comfort that can come from having friends by your side. Aydin’s presence that day, the way he simply sat next to me, quietly helping to shoulder a burden that by all rights I should carry by myself, was absolutely cathartic, the morphine to my emotional pain. The way he and Jeremy and my other close friends band together and pass around the responsibility of taking care of me makes me feel like something precious in a museum. Something worth guarding. I’ve been in a great deal of pain lately, and yet somehow I can’t help feeling like I’m one of the luckier people on the planet.

More Proof That the Truth is Stranger Than Fiction

2008-04-18T21:06:00.000-07:00

Today - as far as I know, and nobody has told me otherwise - is April 18th. Only twelve days to go until May. Another 7 days beyond that is my birthday, a day that usually dawns bright and warm in Seattle, and one that ordinarily functions as the culmination of a few weeks of steadily increasing temperatures.

My question, then, is why when I came out of the mall at eight o'clock this evening, there were two inches of snow on the car. It's freezing outside.

Things seem to be taking a turn for the strange lately. Not only has the weather been indescribably (and, as far as I'm concerned, uncomfortably) odd, although that would give me reason enough to complain. Jeremy and I were joking on the way home, as his little Honda braved the slush on the roads, that when we have kids we'll tell them stories about how when we were young it only snowed during the winter and they, in turn, will laugh and call us liars.

But no. Not content with environmental oddity, I decided to push the limits of the bizarre and - you may want to sit down - switch to a Mac. I am no longer a PC user. I'm frightened of this new alien technology. The button to close windows is on the left instead of the right, and there's no right-click on the mouse. Who does that? Surely dashboard widgets are against the laws of nature, and viruses are just God's way of teaching us patience. Apple computers are an abomination. And yet here I sit, watching out the window as snow falls on this crisp April night, and reveling in the fact that my keyboard has a backlight. I feel dirty.

Maybe Old Eleanor Was Wrong?

2008-04-12T18:35:00.001-07:00

Once again I'm writing from a coffee shop, this one an independent -- and usually absurdly crowded -- little joint in Tanglewood, not far from Greenlake. It's a beautiful day, really our first nice day of the year here in our rainy little corner of hippie heaven, and the sun is falling in at bright angles, illuminating an irrationally large number of very white legs and ugly sandals. We don't have much occasion to wear sandals here in Seattle, so we don't spend much money on them. As a consequence, most of our summer footwear choices are desperately wanting for taste in the area of fashion.

Aside from our handicaps of apparel, I love this city. It's academically alternative; one of those rare places where people not only believe that change is necessary, but also tend to believe quite pragmatically in making those changes a reality. Here, my eyebrow piercings are sexy, my veganism a perfectly valid lifestyle choice, my love of the Beatles universal enough to raise eyebrows when I dare to think it even warrants mentioning. In Seattle, I can have a tattoo and still be an academic. I can listen to rock and still be feminine. I can write irreverent blogs and still be considered a writer.

They're hosting a five-day conference on compassion this weekend. It's unfortunate to me that this is something that anyone anywhere would need to host a large conference to promote but, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut, so it goes. They keynote speaker is the Dalai Lama, and Jeremy and I had a rare opportunity today to attend a huge gathering at the Key Arena to see him speak in person. It was an amazing experience. He's a phenomenal man; there's no gravity or self-importance to him, only a sense of passion for the cause of peace and a jolly sense of humor that makes him seem more like Santa Claus than a religious leader.

So we're sitting here in this coffee shop, enjoying the first sunset we've seen since sometime in September through a plate glass window and, adding an ironic cohesion to my day, someone put a Beatles anthology on the sound system. A few minutes ago "Eleanor Rigby" was playing.

Ah, look at all the lonely people.

It got me to thinking. Mostly because I think way too much about way too many things (especially when it comes to the Beatles, I guess, given that a high percentage of their songs were reactions to a chemistry that had nothing to do with how well they got along), but it was an abrasively odd song to hear after the experience we had today. There were so many people there. And not a one of them looked especially lonely.

I know that it's impossible to know what's going on inside someone else's head. I also know that the odds that no one in a crowd of 30,000 people might be feeling isolated are rather small. But it's also hard to explain the sense of unity that permeated the crowd today. The fact that a large portion of Seattle's population would spend the greater part of their Saturday afternoons celebrating the mere concept of being nice to others - something which seems so simple on the surface but is apparently a rather difficult one to grasp - without any agenda other than basic altruism, was infinitely refreshing. I'm tempted to think that there may be hope for the human race after all.

I know there are a lot of people in this world who are lonely. But I'm starting to wonder if it's really as necessary an emotion as we think, if it's not something we might choose, however unconsciously. Could the simple act of treating others as you want to be treated - a principle as philosophically universal as it is theoretically ignored - end the cycle of isolation that seems to haunt my generation? It seems, at the very least, worth a shot.

The Birth of a Food Nazi (or) How Books Have Created a Monster

2008-03-23T15:50:00.000-07:00

A month or so ago, after suffering something of a nervous breakdown that actually landed me in the hospital for a couple of days, I came to the determination that I desperately needed some time off of school. Two years' worth of health problems, relationship problems, money problems, living abroad problems, and just life in general had exploded like a giant pimple on the already pock-marked face of my psyche. I did finally get hooked up with an amazing psychiatrist and an amazing prescription for pills that make me feel more clear-headed than I have in years, but the initial side-effects of the medication, which take several weeks to accumulate in your brain to the level at which they'll be effective, were close to debilitating. I was constantly nauseous and my brain was doing imitations of Speed Racer on...well...speed, latching onto irrelevant subjects and whirring them around in my skull like a salad spinner. One day at the bus stop I noticed a girl wearing black-and-silver striped sequined ballet flats, which induced a panicked and literally horrified mental analysis of people's fashion choices and the philosophy behind the phenomenon of social interaction that lasted the entire trip home.

So I plead health issues and took the last few weeks of the quarter off. I'll have to make it up later - next quarter is going to be torture - but having the time to do nothing but rest, something I haven't allowed myself in years, has been nothing short of cathartic. The Zoloft is finally starting to kick in, and the combination of chemical-induced mental clarity and free time has allowed me to do a great deal of recreational reading, something else I haven't done in ages. The great irony of getting an advanced degree in literature is how seldom you actually get the chance to ...wait for it...read.

In the past three weeks I've read more books than I have in the past three years combined. It's been so long since I've had the ability to focus on anything that I'm finding myself pretty voracious where books are concerned, devouring everything I see with words on it. This includes return policies on the backs of store receipts, street signs, the insides of CD jackets, ingredient lists on cereal boxes, and the manual for how to use my microwave. I've read a monograph on New Testament textual criticism, a defense of atheism by Richard Dawkins, and a book on the research of the effect of Buddhist meditation in neuroscience; raced through books on reading and books on writing; finished three of the Harry Potter books and one imaginative retelling of the Wizard of Oz; and consumed (no pun intended) a large stack of books about food.

It's really a pretty interesting subject, food, for as mundane as it sounds. It's fascinating to see where our food comes from, and depressing to see how political an issue it turns out to be. I suddenly consider myself enlightened. That, and unwilling to die of cancer induced by food ingredients I can't even pronounce. Call me rebellious. As a result of my new education I've been drastically changing my diet, slowly cutting out anything at all processed and opting to buy organic and local whenever I can. I can't say the move impresses my boyfriend Jeremy much, who already finds me difficult to feed because of my veganism, and I'm almost always broke because real food is twice as expensive as the fake stuff. But for the first time I actually feel like I have a relationship with my food. Eating is a pretty intimate action, when you think about it; I don't know of anything else you can do that connects you quite so directly to the world around you.

I also kind of see the whole thing as a bit of a microcosm for life in general. Maybe it's the medication. Maybe it's finding hope at the end of an almost lifelong tunnel of depression. Maybe I'm just being a melodramatic hippie. I don't know. But I do know that I'm finding living to be a much more deliberate pursuit than I have in the past. Rather than viewing the days as a mundane succession of minutes to be tolerated - or my meals as a mundane succession of calories to be consumed - I'm starting to see it as a string of moments to be appreciated and meaningfully navigated, to be, if you'll forgive the metaphor, milked for all it's worth.

And to be used to read. And read. And read.

Pigeon Hunting

2008-02-25T19:05:00.001-08:00

For the most part, I really like my place. It's huge for a studio, has a full kitchen, and is pretty reasonably priced for a downtown apartment. The only big complaint I really have is that it has no view at all; I'm on the ground floor, and the few windows I have look out onto a courtyard that I'm pretty sure no one's entered in at least a generation. There's some sort of big box in the middle of it - I'm not sure what it is, but it looks a little like one of those old green electrical boxes that used to pop up every once in a while on the side of roads in the suburbs - and the pigeons and an occasional seagull have adopted the place as a base of operations for what I can only assume are their strategic bombing maneuvers. I myself find the constant chirping and scratching slightly irritating. My two cats, however, both in the young adult stage of their development, are eager to see their share of the action in the War on Things That Move and Make Noise and see the situation as a call to arms.

We have, as a result, entered the War on the eastern front and embarked on a daily drama of alternating espionage and displays of military strength. I awake every morning to the rattling of the plastic window blinds as the kittens peek around, under, and through them in an effort to find the best vantage point from which to conduct their gathering of intelligence. Lola, the older of the two by a few months, then proceeds to give the smaller one, Bob, lessons on the art of pigeon hunting.

"First," she says with all the gravity of the expert, "you twitch the tip of your tail like it's on fire and you're trying to put it out."

"Like this?"

"A little faster than that. You want to show them you're serious. Stop beating mom in the face with your tail, though, or she'll throw us off the bed."

"Sorry."

"Shape up, soldier! Here, let's touch noses."

Whereupon they normally kiss. I suspect it's to make a show of their solidarity.

"Okay," Lola says then, "it's time for tactical maneuvers. Start making noises like you're possessed."

"I'm trying. I've never quite been able to get it."

"Just pull your whiskers back and chatter your incisors a little more. Try to look scary. It won't be long before we actually catch one, Bob, and then we can leave it in the kitchen as a present for mom."

"I'm tired," says Bob. "Now that we've effectively attracted every pigeon in Seattle and permanently woken mom up for the day, I think I need a nap."

"Yeah now that you mention it, I could stand to sleep a little too. Race you to the armchair!"

And so on and so forth.

We are also waging the battle, rather fiercely, against post-pubescent rebellion. Lola has entered the stage where the fast majority of her responses to the world around her involve rolling her large green eyes and - I swear it's true - shaking her head dramatically. Bob, slightly more gregarious and far more, well, male, has developed an oddly passive-aggressive side, meowing nonstop at me and getting into everything that could possibly get him into any trouble, only to roll over onto his back submissively when I get close. Worse yet, they've developed a system of cooperation to their rebellion. Lola has figured out how to open drawers and cupboards, and regularly does so in order to allow Bob easy access to the hidden treasures of the kitchen. For his part Bob, once again probably owing to his gender, will eat anything that even remotely resembles food, and has divined the fine art of opening packages with nothing more than his claws and a can-do attitude. Their favorite thing to pilfer, oddly enough, is dry spaghetti. I've come home more than once to a kitchen floor littered with half-eaten stems of uncooked pasta and shards of plastic wrapping.

The thing is that it might all be rather annoying, if it weren't for the tremendous company that the two little ratfinks provide. For all of their little idiosyncrasies, there are few things that can match the contentment I feel when I wake up in the middle of the night with two fuzzy little heads nuzzled into mine, even if the sound of their purring in stereo does make it feel like I'm at a motorcycle convention.

Agnosticism Defended

2007-07-03T17:07:00.000-07:00

Just for the record, in case no one's really figured it out by now, I consider myself, for lack of a better term, agnostic. Years of cautious and earnest moral inquiry have put me in a position where I find it impossible to reconcile the idea of a loving and benevolent creator with the inconsistencies that seem so apparent to me in the dogma of religion. That's not to say I haven't tried; when you're raised in the church, I think the hardest thing you'll ever have to do in your life is to admit to yourself that maybe it isn't exactly the perfect answer to everything that you grew up believing it was. It's far easier, really, to look for the loopholes in your own objections that will reinforce what you really want to be true. Religion simplifies your life. It codifies morality. It provides a social support system that, sadly, the secular world seems to be lacking. The idea of admitting the possibility - while by no means the certainty - that it might not be true is horrifying at best, because doing so also takes away that structure and the certainty, however misguided it has the potential to be, that there is meaning in life. Of course I miss those things. I dislike feeling like an outsider in my family because I hold a different belief system. And sometimes I yearn for the simplicity of having an entire world viewpoint already laid out in front of me. But if I am honest - an attribute we normally credit to morality, so a lack of effort toward that end would seem counterproductive - I have to admit that I simply cannot accept a dogmatic, monotheistic religion, no matter how convenient or comforting it may be. A complete explanation of the reasoning behind this would be pretty elaborate and take more space and time than I have for this post. For the time being, I'll simply say that I think by and large human beings take themselves far too seriously. What could possibly possess us to think, should an omnipotent and omnipresent being actually exist, that we would in any way pretend to comprehend his/her/its nature? Or at least that we would be able to do so to the point that we were so sure of ourselves that we were willing to kill for our beliefs? Do we really believe that those who believe the way we do are the only people endowed with any sort of capacity for the discernment of truth, and that those who believe in other religions are somehow spiritually stunted? And if so, what would possibly possess a supposedly benevolent creator to create the majority of the world to be what would essentially amount to a mass of spiritual retards?

By the same token, though, I have a great deal of difficulty swallowing the idea of atheism. The belief that there is no god is still a belief, and one that in my view has an equally small body of supporting evidence as does theism. I'll admit that the atheist's viewpoint seems slightly more logical to me at the moment (a stance which I reserve the right to change as life experience warrants it), but that in no way means that I'm prepared to make the staunch and unwavering assertion that there is no god at all.

There's been a slew of books in the past couple of years out of the atheist/secular humanist camp, written by intensely intelligent people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. The most recent is a book called God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens, which I just today finished reading. I think the trend and the growing popularity behind it is largely a backlash against the fundamentalist right, and what might have been relegated to the fringes of heretical left-wing society a few years ago has become a major movement as more and more people are growing disillusioned by the idiocy that inflexibility often tends to bring about. (God is Not Great, for instance, has raced onto the bestseller list in the short time it's been on the shelves; walking in downtown Seattle yesterday I saw no fewer than three people reading it as they waited for the bus). And by and large I agree with the general principle behind what these men are saying: religion, and its underlying attitude of I'm-right-and-you're-wrong, often does more harm than it does good, and if you're interested (which most of my readers probably aren't), these books are chock full of historical and modern-day examples. But the problem I see is that, for all of their railing against the evils of religion, they offer little in the way of an alternative. Building a belief system on the disproving of another belief system seems oddly circular and hollow to me. Alright, educated liberals, we know what you're against. But what are you for? It seems to me that we're pulling away the rug and not replacing the floor paneling underneath. Eventually we're going to fall through the hole.

What is wrong with not knowing? Maybe not even "not knowing" so much as admitting the possibility, however small, that we might not know? Is it simply too frightening to admit that we don't know completely what's going on around us, and that that lack of knowledge basically amounts to a lack of control? Maybe we're afraid of what happens after we die. Fair enough, but if I were God I really wouldn't want a mass of people following me - and killing and proselytizing in my name - with no motivation other than fear. Maybe we think that morality can only come from religion. But kindness to others seems to lose some of its moral weight when it's borne of coercion, supernatural or otherwise. When we force a child to share his toys, we are merely passing along proper rules of social interaction so the whole of society doesn't end up going to pot. When we see a child share his toys out of his own volition, we are watching real kindness, the kind that comes from nothing other than simply wanting to love another person. Do we really believe that there is no moral difference between the two?

My question is this: why can't kindness be enough? Why can't we simply teach that loving our fellow man is the pinnacle of morality, and leave it at that? Why do we need religion to reinforce the idea with dogma on one side, and the theory of self-interested altruism on the other? Doing so really just robs us of the satisfaction of loving other people because loving other people is a good thing to do and cheapens the idea of kindness for kindness' sake. One might argue that human nature prevents this kind of utopic idea from taking shape. But I can't help but wonder how much of this idea of human nature has been pounded into us by religion in the first place. We're constantly being told that people are bad, that they tend toward evil more often than good. Our media is constantly showing pictures of murderers and thieves. But do we really believe that these people are in the majority? Isn't it possible that we simply have our cameras pointed the wrong direction? And then we have to ask ourselves who created the conditions under which these "bad" people's personalities were shaped. I'd be willing to place money on the idea that what we refer to so condescendingly as "human nature" ultimately owes far more to human nurture, or lack thereof. Might we not fear other people simply because we fear what's inside of ourselves? And wouldn't that fear be mitigated if we could convince ourselves that we are capable of the kind of altruism that goes beyond self-interested motivation? Can we create a "religion" that is founded on nothing more than the belief in the good in people? This is, after all, the one thing in life that I've seen more than my share of evidence for.

Another Year Older

2007-05-07T09:20:00.000-07:00

Today is my birthday. Again. I'm another year older. Again. This might seem like the most obvious outcome of having a birthday, getting another year older, but I'm really rebelling. Maybe by the time I'm 24 + 6 (see last year's birthday post on Lindsey's brilliant math for old people) I will have succeeded in overthrowing the oppressive tyranny that is the onward march of time. Or at least the onward march of the persistent gray hairs that have suddenly started popping up on the top of my head lately. They're tenacious little soldiers, too, let me tell you; every time I think they're eradicated, more pop up. They're like roaches. I'm too young for this nonsense. It must be stopped.

Isn't it illegal to get gray hairs before you're thirty-five?

At any rate, the fact remains that today I am a very annoying 24+2. This is not a good number. This implies that I'm on the near side of thirty - or 24+6, for those who are adapting to the new and much more geriatric-ally friendly system - and the fact that I am on the near side of 24+6 also implies that I am on the near side of 24+death. This disturbs me greatly. I have not yet published my novel, finished my Ph.D., composed my symphony, run my marathon, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, or done anything else of note on my list of things to do before I die. Well except go to China, maybe, and I'm afraid that that might have actually helped to move me a little closer to old age by causing me to age prematurely. You try riding in a taxi cab in Shanghai and coming away without at least one new gray hair. I don't think it's been done. It might, in fact, be impossible.

And yet with as much as I joke about my impending demise, in reality I'm finding that in some ways this year my birthday is giving me a lot of opportunity to reflect on my life. So much has happened in the past year, it's absolutely incredible. I may not have run a marathon, but I did run two 5K's. I haven't finished my Ph.D., but I've been accepted to grad school and gotten a fairly decent fellowship to help pay for it. I may not have climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, but....ok, admittedly I don't have anything for that one. But I'm working on it.

My point is, God, I love my life. I love waking up in the morning. I love breathing in and feeling the air pass through my lungs. I love the sunrises and the sunsets and the rain and the sunshine. How could anyone believe that life is anything but incredible? How could we not cherish every passing moment as the perfect miracle that it is? And along with it, cherish every person that passes through those moments? What if heaven is actually right here in front of us, and we're just not looking at it? I have been so, so blessed. I have so many people who love me and care for me, so many really close and beautiful friends. I was born into a world of limitless opportunities, where I've never gone hungry and I'm allowed to be educated and I have freedoms that most of the people in the world only dream about. I've seen so many things and places and met so many people. Sometimes I feel like the luckiest person alive.

The only thing that depresses me is how powerless I feel sometimes to share that, to reach out to others who haven't had the same opportunities, the same love, the same enough-to-eat that I have. Am I doing enough? Am I doing everything I can to make the world a better place? This is the one thing that really does make me feel like I'm aging, I think: this feeling of impotence. There's so much good left to be done in the world, the thought of it exhausts me.

Spare some change?

2007-03-18T19:01:00.000-07:00

Part of my uber-monotonous job at King County has recently been to courier documents to the courthouse down the street from my office. A couple of days ago I was passing the tiny convenience store in the lobby when I noticed a sign posted in the window.

No Change Without a Purchase, it said.

The wording struck me as being a little ironic, and the more I thought about it the more overly philosophical I became about it. I know it's a little melodramatic and backwards on my part, but my life of late has been nothing but change. The idea that I might have to make a purchase in return struck me as odd, if only for the fact that I had never considered it before.

Being back in Seattle has been simultaneously deeply gratifying and emotionally exhausting for me. I longed to come "home" - the semantics of which I have questioned before and, for considerations of length and reader boredom will ignore in this particular post, although I do reserve the right to return to the issue at a later time - but it's become painfully obvious to me that the Seattle I left in the summer is not the same Seattle I returned to in the wintertime. Or maybe it's a little more accurate to say that the Becca I left in last summer is not the same one I returned to in the winter. Everything is different now: Lindsey's not here, I'm strangely and quite frighteningly single, and - maybe the most horrifying thing of all - I've grown up in ways that I neither expected nor in many cases necessarily especially enjoy.

All that, and the emotional roller coaster of waiting for graduate school decisions is starting to wear me thin. I've been accepted back to the University of Washington but still haven't heard from them on funding, and I've been placed on a waiting list at Princeton. The result of this scenario is that it is well past March 15th, the technical deadline for most schools' admissions decisions, and I still don't know where I'll be living in six months. This was supposed to be over by now. I am tired. And the more I think about it, the more I realize that no matter what happens I have no option of standing still in my comfort zone. If I go back to UW, it won't be the same as when I was there before. Lindsey and Andy won't be there, the school work will be of a drastically different format, and my personal life will have drastically changed. On the off-chance that Princeton actually offers me admission there are a host of life changes involved with that situation as well, not the least of which would be a move across the country to a mind-numbingly different culture. I'm more scared of living on the east coast than I was of living in China. Roy, my friend in Taiwan, used to always give me the same advice: "Just keep walking." As great as that advice is, it appears that at this point I have no choice but to keep walking, and that makes me slightly resentful of the path. Sometimes I look around me and get so jealous of the "normal" people, those who can be content to stand still.

At the same time, though, I know that in the end I could never be truly satisfied with that kind of a life. I can't make copies for the rest of eternity. I could never be content with myself if I sat here wondering what it was I could have been. I have to grow up, because everything inside of me still screams that there are things I need to do, that there's a reason I'm here, and that it is absolutely vital that I find out what that reason is. That I keep walking. And so I make the choice to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and to pay the price that entails.

No growth without sacrifice. No change without a purchase.

Sometimes I just wish they took returns.

The Ghetto Starbucks

2007-03-06T20:01:00.000-08:00

I am at Starbucks.

This is probably not surprising. I go to Starbucks almost daily, and sometimes even more frequently than that. I lug my oversized laptop here to think and to write, because nothing stimulates the brain like a half-decaf no-whip sugar free cinnamon dolce soy latte - a drink which, when the barista announces it at the bar, never fails to elicit a response from one of the other waiting customers.

"Whew," they whisper, almost invariably. "That's a mouthful."

What is a departure today, however, is the fact that instead of going to the Starbucks near Seattle University like I normally do, I headed the opposite direction from my apartment and ended up at a Starbucks that is much closer to my apartment, but at the same time sits precariously perched on the border between the posh newly-remodeled townhomes of the Capitol Hill neighborhood and, for lack of anything better to call it, the Ghetto.

The Starbucks near the University is always virtually silent, full of trust-fund kids who'd rather not talk to one another and law students huddled over piles of books that look really thick and really boring. But here it's bustling and noisy. Everyone is talking to everyone else. They're strangers, but they're not. I find this unsettling.

I'm sitting in one of the plush oversized chairs by the window so typical of Starbucks everywhere, my laptop in my lap, headphones in my ears. I'm enjoying the energy, but I'm not entirely sure I want to be a part of it. A large woman in a thin coat comes over and waves at me dramatically.

When I take my headphones out she motions to the chair next to me and says, "Is anyone sitting here?" I say no, and she sits down. I return my headphones to my ears and my attention to my computer. The woman next to me starts talking to a man at a nearby table.

Five minutes later she waves at me again. She asks me if I'm a student. She asks me what I study. She asks me what I'm doing sitting at Starbucks with a laptop. She tells me I'm a very nice lady.

I say thank you. I go back to my writing.

Another wave, and the lady motions to the man at the table. "He's drawing you," she says. And he is. He's got pastels and brushes and paints spread out around him, and he's going back and forth between studying me intently and scribbling furiously. I'm blushing. From time to time people are stopping to look over his shoulder. A man stops and looks at the drawing, motions to his own chin, and says something in a language I can't understand.

I love this place.

The artist asks me what my astrological sign is.

"Taurus," I say.

"Oh, you were born in April then," says the woman.

I correct her and say no, the early part of May.

"Hm," says the artist. "Do you know anything about your sign?"

"Not much," I say. And he says, "I think it's the money sign."

"Oh, is it?"

"I think so. Well I don't really know, but that's what my friend said. She said Tauruses are good with money."

I laugh because I am not good with money. Money involves numbers. Numbers are not my friends.

The woman has gotten up and gone across the street to Taco Del Mar where, after prodding me for every manner of information as to the nature of the food there, she has decided to purchase a hard taco. She's been replaced by a tall skinny man who sits holding on to the arms of the chair like it's a roller coaster car. The artist at the table just handed me a drawing of myself.

I think we miss a lot in life by putting up walls, by burying ourselves in books, by looking at everyone around us in suspicion. It's striking how much the atmosphere here, where in theory I might have reason to be frightened of the people around me, is so much more alive and friendly than it is in the "good" neighborhood a half a mile away. Right now I am the opposite of frightened. It's a good feeling.

Becca's E-version of a Chrstimas Newsletter

2006-12-25T08:57:00.000-08:00

So after a telephone conversation with my grandmother yesterday -

Grandma: (Telephone Rings) Hello?

Me: Hi, Grandma! It's Becca!

Grandma:........Where are you?

Me: I'm in Carson City!

Grandma:........Well how did you get there?

- I decided that I had better post another blog stat, so at least if I die my family knows where to come looking for my body.

I have finally returned to the States. I'm staying with friends in Seattle until I can find a place of my own and working in a somewhat monotonous but well-paying job at King County. Honestly, I'm not really sure what it is I do, except that it involves making lots of copies and playing around with MS Word. I've sent out my grad school applications, and have little to do but twiddle my thumbs while I wait to hear back on them in February or March.

In order to stave off the boredom of everyday life, to which I am not yet re-accustomed and with which I have never really been able to make my peace, I have subjected myself to yet another trip on an airplane. This time I'm on a weekend jaunt to my hometown of Carson City, Nevada, to "celebrate" Christmas with my brother (and yes I use the term loosely, my brother isn't exactly the most jovial Christmas celebrator ever, and Carson City isn't really a place that anyone would purposely go to celebrate anything). I've found that I've become more or less Zen about the whole airplane experience; while other people in the airport were freaking out about weather-delayed flights and the holiday crowds, I just shrugged, yawned, and fell asleep with the hood of my ski jacket covering my face. I wanted to stand on a chair and yell out the story of my last flight to Beijing, just for the purpose of telling people to chill out and that things could be worse, but to be honest I'm not sure anyone would have believed me anyway. The funny thing is that I don't really see my indifference as a good thing. I used to get so excited about flying that I couldn't sleep the night before a trip. Now I'm so used to it that even trips to China seem run-of-the-mill.

Flying into Reno was a strange experience, driving into Carson even more so. I rarely come home, and when we were hovering at 10,000 feet over the airport I suddenly felt like I couldn't breathe, like I was trying to squeeze into a pair of jeans I owned when I was twelve and have since massively outgrown. I've changed so much in the six years since I've been back to Carson that when I came back it was more like visiting a dream than it was returning to a past reality. Things haven't changed all that much, but I can't remember how to get anywhere or where to go to find anything. It's like I'm going back to someone else's past, and the feeling creeps me out. If this is someone else's past, then where is mine? If you don't have a past, can you even really exist? And isn't it a little strange that I feel more comfortable going to Shanghai than I do to my own home town?

Home....what a strange word. It has so many meanings that we never think about until we realize that we don't really have one, no matter how you define it.

Nate and I did, however, make the trek out to Fallon (if you don't know where it is, don't bother looking, it isn't worth the effort) to visit our grandparents yesterday, and had a nice visit. Pa was sick, but he says he's doing better now than he was before, so we pray for his quick recovery from whatever bug it is that's ailing him.

For all the complaining I do, I am grateful that my brother and his wife had me over for what would otherwise have been a very lonely Christmas for me, and I'm looking forward to a day of presents, navigating my way around the non-vegan food, and spending time with family members who I rarely see. It's not a white Christmas with a thousand people huddled around a huge tree and a fireplace, which is what I was really craving for the holidays (yet another definition of the word "home," I guess), but at least I'm with people that I love for Christmas.

蘇軾 - 水調個頭

2006-11-19T08:13:00.000-08:00

江小宗。。。我永遠不會忘記了。。。

明月幾時有
把酒問青天
不知天上宮闕，今夕是何年？
我卻乘風歸去，又恐瓊樓玉宇，高處不勝寒。
起舞弄清影，何似在人間。
轉朱閣，低綺戶，照無眠。
不應有恨，何事長向別時圓？
人有悲歡離合，月有陰晴圓缺，此事古難全。
但願人長久，千里共嬋娟。

What I Learned in Hualien (or) Under the Table

2006-11-13T07:18:00.000-08:00

Our devoted readers may have noticed a glaring absence of posts in myself and Lindsey's blogs of late. This is because of one single and absolutely annoying reason: it is graduate school application season. I can think of no worse way to spend my last few weeks in Taiwan than writing these asinine personal statements: advertisements that I crave the judgment of others and which do little more than re-package my long string of mediocrities until they shine like the brand-spanking-new attributes of a person worthy of studying at the world's most exhaustingly pompous institutions.

I have, due to some financial and personal reasons, decided to go home for some much-needed emotional down time and an even more desperately needed requisition of living funds. Determined that I have what she called "one really good memory before you leave Taiwan," last weekend Maini dragged me away from the rigor of selling myself for a trip to Hualien, on the eastern coast of the island. It is a beautiful place - pictures will follow, pursuant to the much-called-for truce in the war between blogger.com and the dial-up internet - and we had a beautiful time. We had foot massages, traipsed up and down the seaside on a rented scooter, and even had a personal driver (the result of some strange mix-up with the tour group regarding our vegetarianism; I still don't completely understand it) who took us on our own private tour of the breathtaking Taroko Gorge.

Over lunch at Starbucks on the second day we somehow found our conversation turning to the subject of censorship in the Chinese mainland. Fan though I am of the Chinese people (usually) no one will ever call me a proponent of communism, and I told her how sad it often makes me to think of my friends on the other side of the strait. China can get richer and richer, I said, but unless something changes I'm afraid that the friends I love so dearly still won't be free.

"Well at least they have you," she said, and with her sweetly innocent smile and in her sweetly innocent English she continued, "maybe you can make a difference under the table."

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it means to "make a difference," especially in the light of these retarded personal statements I have to write for grad school; why exactly is it that I want to study Chinese? I can vaguely remember wanting to use it to do some good in the world, back in the days before exhaustion, the GRE, and the Analects took over all of the free neurons in my brain, but is it really even possible? Or desirable? Who am I to preach the benefits of democracy or the delicious possibilities that arise when we focus on the good in people instead of the bad and actually give them the benefit of the doubt?

But when I looked at Maini sitting across from me, when I counted the amazing friendships that I have forged across some of the stiffest and most inflexible cultural boundaries in the world, I realized that yes, it was possible to make a difference. Not just me, mind you, but me and Maini. Me and Maini and everyone who makes the effort to step outside their own comfort zones and reach out to another person. Everyone who realizes that it really is possible to transcend our differences because we are, deep down, pretty much all the same. People like us, we're making a difference under the table. And if you're one of those power hungry war mongerers, if you think money is more important than world peace, if you're so attached to your own way of thinking that you find it impossible to love another human being not only in spite of their being different than you but actually because of it, then you'd better get out of our way. The best you can do is build the tables, but we're busy building bridges.

Hiking!

2006-10-23T06:02:00.000-07:00

I wanted to create a post with all kinds of neat pictures - today's topic is really better described with visual aids - but at the moment I'm using dial-up, and apparently dial-up internet and blogger.com are at war with one another. Blogger.com has imposed sanctions upon said dial-up internet, disallowing the uploading of any cool pictures taken deep in the jugles of Isla Formosa or elsewhere.

So, at least for the moment, you'll have to use your imagination. I hope that isn't too painful for some of you; I know there are at least a few engineers and computer programmers who read this on occasion, and we all know what happens to them when they use their imaginations too much.

And, having thusly warned my readers, I shall hereby continue with the theme for the day. One of the cool things about Taipei is its close proximity to some very large and very forested mountains, making it a great place to live if you like to hike. Hiking here is a unique experience too. Never before in my hiking career have I encountered old men hiking barefoot while singing old folk songs in Taiwanese. Not to my recollection have I seen altars to the Virgin Mary and to Buddha standing side-by-side on a sheer rock face on the side of a next-to-abandoned path, cigarettes propped up on sticks burning quite literally as offerings below them. And I do not recall having ever before seen - not even in California! - any signs warning hikers to beware of the monkeys.

On Saturday my friend Jeff and I took our most recent excursion, to a mountain out of town at a place called Wulai. It was a rather long trek, interspersed with random staircases carved out of the rock face on the side of the mountain and bridges made quite literally of twigs that had been nailed together, some of which were already snapped in two. After a couple of hours we were tired and extremely hot, so when we came across a river we decided to stop and dip our feet in the water, whereupon we were promptly attacked by psycho man-eating shrimp.

The tiny river shrimp literally descended upon us en masse, nibbling on our toes and nipping the arches of our feet with their little pinchers. Never one to be enamoured by slimy things, I retreated to dry land (where I was not entirely safe, I might add; a dragonfly did dive-bomb into my head). Jeff, on the other hand, took his revenge by capturing several of the larger shrimp and confining them to one of his empty water bottles. He packed them along with him, intending to relocate them to another river and thereby put an end to the insurgency*. A little further up the mountain, however, the path got quite steep, and became more of a mountain climb than a hike. Somewhere in the violent shuffle between man and nature the water bottle fell out of Jeff's backpack, and the poor little shrimp went plummeting several hundred feet. I'm certain they either died of shock or were boiled alive in their tiny plastic cage. It was really hot that day.

On the way back down the mountain we encountered an old man sitting under a tarp near a hut on the side of the path. He informed us that some men were bathing in the river, that they were naked, and that - because apparently we weren't aware of this - I am a girl.

"Is that ok?" Asked Jeff.

"Eh," I said. "I'm sure I've seen worse."**

The old man then said in broken English, "Wercum to here."

"Thank you," I said.

"Where you fum?"

"I'm from America," I said, and then added in Chinese, "You speak English very well."

He beamed. "Is becuz you ah so bootiful."

Unsure what my appearance had to do with his language skills but willing to take the compliment all the same, I thanked him and turned turned to follow Jeff down the path. We did come across a river, there were indeed men bathing in it, and they were, in fact, naked. When they saw me they stopped, blushed momentarily, and then made cat calls at me as I crossed a twig-bridge above their heads. After we had passed I could hear them behind us yelling, "Hey! Why didn't you warn us a girl was coming?!"

It was quite an adventure, what with all the naked butts and the murderous shrimp. When I got home that night I went to bed at 8:00 and slept for nearly twelve hours, and I'm actually still sore two days later. I'm pretty sure that entire hike was 500 miles, uphill the whole way. It's funny how you never remember the part of the hike where you actually got to go back down...

*I'm not entirely sure I understand the logic here, but I imagine he was thinking it was something akin to taking John Gotti away from the mob.

**I haven't.

Death is All Around Me!

2006-10-03T08:54:00.000-07:00

People ask me periodically whether I ever miss eating meat. For the first couple of years, I'll admit, I did. I'd smell a steak at a restaurant or pass the rack of roasted chicken breast at Safeway and have momentary, albeit very spirited, argument with myself as to whether my activism was really worth anything at all and whether that chicken didn't really want to be eaten in the end anyway. When your imagination is wild enough to anthropomorphize animals in the first place, it isn't hard to expand the concept to chickens willfully lining up to nobly and knowingly sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Or whatever.

But any long-term vegetarian will tell you that after those first couple of years, your mindset really begins to change. At first you simply find yourself not craving meat at all. Your friends eat it in front of you, and you are surprised to find that you are not only not jealous, but that what you see between the hamburger buns is less tasty morsel than it is quarter pound of saturated fat. Pass another year, and the very thought of meat is so nauseating that you have to cross the street when you encounter a Burger King just so you can avoid the smell.

So this morning on my jog, I was suddenly overcome by the nauseating, gut-twisting smell of MEAT. I should add that the air in Taipei at any given time is an amalgam of every kind of aroma, most of them originating in a food stand, and I like it that way. It adds to the atmosphere. But this was the most overpowering smell I have ever experienced in my life. I never knew that meat could smell so strong.

Not thinking, I turned my head to look into the restaurant, wondering what on earth they could be serving that would give off such a pungent odor.

They were butchering a cow! On the table! This chick was sawing off its leg!

My knees almost gave way underneath me. I looked away as fast as I could, but the damage was done: I was so shaken up that I had to walk the rest of the way home. It was only a block, but still...

I'm still not sure what to make of this. Just because I'm a vegetarian - and super sensitive too; I'll admit it - it doesn't mean that I don't know that death is out there or even that I'm overly offended by it. But a little advance warning would have been nice! It was such a creepy sight, and I wasn't emotionally prepared for such an upheaval. I'm an American. I don't want to know where food comes from.

Right now, I am mad at Taiwan. Every time I start to think I'm getting used to it it throws me another curve ball.

Taipei is Going to the Birds

2006-10-01T07:51:00.000-07:00

I realize it's been a while since my last post. This is because a) I'm lazy, b) I've been busy and c) I've been having internet trouble. I wish I had more valid excuses than these, but that's all I can come up with for the time being. It's 11:00 pm and I'm not feeling creative.

There is a bird in my air conditioner. He lives there. He wakes me up every morning with a song that would be beautiful any other time of the day but at six a.m. sounds more shrill than a fire alarm. Ned, far from being irritated at the presence of a squatter in his appliances, explained to me that the presence of a bird at one's apartment is a sign of good luck, and that we should be thankful that it chose to rest its overeager little beak here of all places.

And in keeping with this theme, when I was out with my friend Roy a few nights ago a bus passed us while we were waiting on a street corner for the light to turn green. On the door of the bus was a huge red sign that read, "NO BIRDS." Roy, misreading the confused look on my face, quickly sought to explain the prohibition: "It's because of the bird flu."

"Ok, but....you take your birds on the bus?"

"Sure," he said, as though it were simply common knowledge. "Lots of old people like to take their birds for walks. It's especially popular in Hong Kong. People there take their birds with them to eat dim sum."

Seriously? Birds like to go to dim sum? What if someone mistakes them for food? If I were a bird, I'd be terrified.

And while I can't say I'd like to see someone eat my air conditioner bird, I don't think I'd mind if someone put him on a bus to, let's say, Kaohsiung or something. Maybe then I could get some sleep.

Slippers (or) Here is Great!!

2006-09-11T08:46:00.000-07:00

I went with some friends on a weekend trip to a place called Ilan, which is situated on the eastern coast of the island. This should give you an idea of how small Taiwan actually is: Taipei is more or less on the west coast. It took us less than an hour to get to our destination on the other side of the country. (If you're interested, you can take a look at the map at http://www.tlfq.ulaval.ca/axl/asie/images/taiwan-map-admin.gif. I think it's a pretty decent one.)

At any rate, in order to kill time on what in Taiwanese terms amounts to the longest drive ever, my friend asked me if I had become accustomed to life in Taiwan yet. I answered that yes, for the most part things were ok. It was just the little things, I said, that still made me feel out of place.

"Oh," she said. "Like what?"

"Well, like, for instance, you take off your shoes when you enter the house here. In America we don't do that."

"Oh, I know," said her husband. "You wear slippers inside, right?"

"No," I said. "No slippers."

They paused and looked at each other.

"Then what do you wear?" he asked.

"Our shoes."

Another pause.

"What shoes?"

"Our shoe shoes."

"You mean your shoes from outside?" My friend looked troubled.

"Yeah, just our regular shoes. We don't take them off or change them when we go inside."

"Well that's weird."

The truth is, I really can't get used to what I am now referring to as the "slipper culture" here. They have slippers for everything. For example, in my apartment I have:

1. A pair of slippers next to the front door. When I come home, I have to take my favorite pair of Converse off and leave them vulnerable and alone outside the door, take an elephant step in through the door, and put on a pair of slippers. These are my Wandering Around the House Slippers. When I leave again, I must acrobatically and strategically find a way to step out of the house and directly into my shoes, since apparently walking outside in your socks - even if it's just in the hallway in front of the apartment door - is frowned upon.

2. A pair of slippers in front of the bathroom. They're bright pink with pictures of hippopotamuses (hippopotami?) on them. These are my Bathroom Slippers. When I want to use the bathroom I must first a) take off my Wandering Around the House slippers and b) replace them with the Hippopotamus Bathroom Slippers. This is due to another strange cultural phenomenon: the absence of any shower curtain in my bathroom, which leaves the bathroom floor literally in a puddle of water every time I shower. The Hippopotamus Bathroom Slippers both keep my socks dry and keep my feet from making muddy footprints on the floor, in the unhappy event that my Wandering Around the House slippers are not doing an adequate job of keeping my feet clean.

3. A pair of Semi-Outdoor Slippers for the enclosed patio upon which my clothes are hung out to dry. This brings to mind another cultural oddity: people here think clothes dryers are for sissies. It's not that most of them couldn't afford one; they just really prefer to hang the darn things up and let them dry naturally, which in the Taiwanese humidity can take three or four days. It drives me crazy, because not only do my jeans take a week to dry, but when they finally do dry they come out wrinkled and stretched out. And to add insult to injury, I must wear the Semi-Outdoor Laundry Slippers when I am hanging them up.

It sounds silly, but it's really those trivial differences - the no shoes in the house, the no shower curtain, the no clothes dryer - that make me feel homesick. This morning, however, when Ned sent me his daily message on the internet to check in on me, I told him I was missing home and he merely wrote, "No."

"No?" I typed. "No what?"

"Don't go back," he said. "Here is great!!"

I had to laugh in spite of myself. Here is, in fact, great. Even if I do have to wear pink hippopotamus slippers in the bathroom.

A Small Request

2006-09-10T18:15:00.000-07:00

I understand that there are people out there who disagree with me about a lot of stuff, especially in the area of politics. I also believe that these people have as much right as I do to express themselves. I don't mind my blog being used as a forum for political discussion either; as a matter of fact, I welcome it. Insightful, spirited debate is always a good thing.

But please, please, please, for the love of God and Pete and all that is Holy, don't post anything vulgar, offensive, uneducated, or rude. I've had to field a few nasty comments from mainlanders in the past few days, and I'm unimpressed. Educated, well-thought-out arguments are fine, but you're not going to win anyone over with snide, insulting remarks.

You Know You're a Foreigner When....

2006-09-08T03:24:00.000-07:00

Just about any foreigner who has lived here for any length of time will tell you that Taiwan is a great place. The people are super friendly, the food is amazing, and it has a certain charm to it that you can't find anywhere else. I would venture to say that there is not, however, a single expat who bears any fondness at all for the bureaucracy here. And it's especially bad for foreigners, because it seems like the government tries to make life as difficult as it can for us. You have to leave the country to renew, change, or generally deal with your visa. The rules regarding employment and studying are bizarre, unenforced, and nearly incomprehensible. You need a visa to come here, but in order to stay here you need to spend even more money and apply for yet another piece of paper. And really, that's all it is. Just a $30 piece of paper.

Today it was my turn to pay $30 for a piece of paper. I've been here for 15 days now, and it was the last day for me to apply for my Alien Resident Certificate - kind of the equivalent of a Taiwanese green card. So I got up early, collected my passport and some cold hard cash, and followed the directions in my student handbook to the police headquarters, which is apparently where they do that kind of thing here. The directions led me to a metro station, and then abruptly and dramatically ended. Long story short, the police station was nowhere near the metro station, and I had to ask a myriad of people for directions and walk around for two hours before I finally found it.

Then I had to wait in line for two hours.

Then the guy who helped me was watching TV while he was filling out my paperwork. Or should I say, instead of filling out my paperwork. While I was waiting for him I looked up at the message board on the wall and saw...

Pacman. Pacman was chasing some little monsters across the marquis at the foreign affairs office of the police headquarters of Taipei county.

So I left home at 9 am this morning, and when I was done with everything I had half an hour to make it to my 2 pm class. Sure that I would never make it in time if I took the metro - assuming I could even find the station again - I hailed a cab. The cabbie was super friendly and loved to talk, but he kept repeating over and over how pitiable he thought Taiwan was, as though I could do something about it just because I'm white.

"Lots of people thing we should join the US and become a state," he said, and whether he was joking or not I couldn't quite tell. "What do you think?"

They should change the official name of the country, he said, from Republic of China, which is too close to the mainland's People's Republic of China, to Taiwan. Taiwan is losing face because it's not allowed to carry its own flag in international sports competitions. It sucks to be a cabby in Taipei because all the business owners in Taiwan are moving their factories to the much cheaper mainland, which is affecting the Taiwanese economy, and it's all interrelated you know. These are the things I learned from my afternoon cab ride.

The problem is that in a lot of ways it's true. I haven't even been here that long and I can already feel it; there's a huge gap between the ambitious, optimistic attitude in Shanghai and the downtrodden, hopeless attitude I feel in Taipei. These people are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Most of their money now comes from the mainland: if they do something to endanger those ties, it would bode ill for the economy here. And yet their identities are wrapped up in their independence from the mainland. Most of these people see themselves as being as Chinese as much as Americans might see themselves as being British. They share a history, but in the here and now they are very much their own people with their own way of doing things and their own extreme love for their democratic independence, an independence which they see threatened by the potential of mainland interference. The differences between the two countries, and yes I'm being assertive when I phrase it that way, are overwhelming. Their traditions, their personal interactions, their ways of viewing the world, at least from my outsider's point of view, are not only disparate; I personally can't even see how they could be compatible.

A Student Once More

2006-09-06T06:23:00.000-07:00

The Chinese - especially the Taiwanese, who tend to be more traditional - still use their original lunar calendar when it comes to defining the dates for special traditional events and so forth. It's lunar July now. Actually, it's the second lunar July; for some reason this year is special and has two Julys. Ned tried to explain why, but he tried to explain it in his broken English and two weeks later my head is still spinning from trying to understand it.

At any rate, lunar July is apparently Ghost Month, and although most Taiwanese will tell you it's just a silly superstition they all still seem to look back over their shoulder whenever the wind blows wrong. Ned, who is getting married in December, even decided to wait until after lunar July ends to go get his wedding pictures taken, just to be cautious. And wedding pictures are a big deal here.

And me, I'm a stupid white girl. I live in a rather big apartment, all by myself, and when I got home tonight I was a little creeped out because a door that normally remains permanently closed for some reason kept opening itself. Forgetting that it is Ghost Month, and forgetting further that I am in Taiwan, I mentioned jokingly to a friend:

"I think I have a ghost in my apartment."

"Oh!" he said in all seriousness. "Do you need to come stay at our place?"

I can't seem to adapt my sarcastically playful personality to the local culture. Every time I try to make a joke, even a small one, I end up freaking someone out.

In further news (I mean further than its being the second lunar July, which I'm very sure everyone at home cares about) I finally started school this week. I am overjoyed, because having nothing to occupy my mind was getting slightly dangerous. I was actually originally placed in far too low a class - whether it was due to some administrative mix-up or my own incompetence on the placement test I'm not really sure - and I've had to spend the past three days changing classes and filling out paperwork and negotiating with teachers and etc. etc. etc. trying to get in a class that was more suited to my level. It's been exhausting, but it's keeping me busy, which at this point is the general idea. The class I ended up in will still be a little easy for me, but I think it's just at that right level where I can review a little without being too bored.

Lifestyles of the Taiwanese and Famous

2006-09-03T07:05:00.000-07:00

I was having tea at a coffee shop with my friend Roy and his girlfriend Cherry tonight when Roy caught me ogling an extremely good-looking man sitting in a corner in front of a laptop.

"Handsome, right?" he asked, nudging me a little.

I flushed, embarrassed at having been caught staring, and admitted that he was indeed rather attractive.

Roy shrugged. "He's a singer. He was a celebrity." He leaned forward and repeated for emphasis, "Was."

I find the celebrity culture in Taiwan a little baffling, to tell the truth. Here this guy who apparently used to be quite famous was sitting off to the side of some nondescript coffee shop minding his own business, and all the rest of the people in the place knew who he was and were just kind of ignoring him. No one was pointing or staring or whispering behind his hand like they would have with a has-been in America. He was just another guy who at one point happened to have been famous. Roy would never have even thought to mention it to me if he hadn't noticed me looking at him.

The thing is that for as small as Taiwan is - the population of Taipei isn't much more than that of Seattle - they still manage to produce a thriving pop culture that's almost on par with our own, if on a somewhat smaller scale. They have the beauty magazines and the pop stars and the famous models, and it's a culture that extends across the strait and into the mainstream on the super-populated mainland. What the Taiwanese don't seem to have much of, however, is the culture of idolotry that we tend to. My sneaky suspicion is that the size of Taiwan makes it a little more difficult to be high-and-mighty, because at any point any of your fans could bump into you on the street...

The Home of the Brave?

2006-08-29T10:08:00.000-07:00

People keep telling me I'm brave for coming here, a single woman all by myself in a big city in a VERY foreign country. Especially my Taiwanese friends. Chiawei keeps telling me she could never do what I'm doing, and Ned calls me at least once a day to make sure that I'm ok...

The thing of it is, I kind of wish they would stop saying it, because until people started calling me brave it never really occurred to me that there was anything to be afraid of in the first place. I mean sure there are emotional difficulties involved with being away from home for so long, but those are just annoying, not frightening. Really, living in a foreign country isn't that bad. Of course you find things that you dislike, but you just remind yourself that there are thousands of other people who have been living like that their whole lives and there's no reason that you can't do it too. Then you suck it up and move on. And there's always the benefit of making new friends and learning new things to make it worth the effort...

Still, it makes me wonder if I shouldn't at least be a little frightened, if there's something in my brain that kind of blocks the usually inherent need to be surrounded by the familiar, and whether I wouldn't be better off if that blockage could somehow be surgically removed. Is it possible that there could come a time when I'm incapable of forming an attachment to anything at all? Is my sense of adventure just damning me to a life of nomadic uncertainty?

Do I think too much?

Hooray for Malapropisms

2006-08-29T09:26:00.000-07:00

One of the more amusing things about interacting with people whose native language is so different than your own is the occasional ironically misused vocabulary. Take, for instance, the following: during a recent conversation with my friend Chiawei and her boyfriend Chiachi, Chiawei became curious about my motivation for being a vegetarian. She thought it might be a religion thing - lots of people here are vegetarians because they're Buddhist - but she couldn't think of the word for it.

"Do you believe in booty?" she asked.

Chiachi, whose English is near-native and who is somewhat more familiar with American slang, chimed in "I definitely believe in booty."

It took us a while to explain to Chiawei just exactly what it was that she had just said, whereupon she flushed a bright color of pink. Thank goodness she had a sense of humor about it, though; since then it's kind of become a running gag. It makes me wonder what silly and/or meaningless things I've said to complete strangers without even knowing it...

Taipei 101 (Literally Speaking)

2006-08-28T04:51:00.000-07:00

Taipei 101, the current tallest building in the world, at a height of roughly a billion kajillion feet. To be honest, in person it looks a little stubby for the title it holds. Then again, I of all people should know better than to automatically pass judgement on stubby things, seeing as how I'm not so tall or graceful myself...

I'm slowly starting to get settled in to life in Taiwan, and the initial shock of being here is wearing off a little. Ned went home to Taichung yesterday afternoon, leaving me with a large apartment and a lot of free time to myself, so a friend suggested that I ride the metro to a bookstore downtown.

I am no longer homesick.

This place was amazing. It was story after story of every kind of book you can think of in any language you could care to read. When I first walked in I had to stand in the lobby and let the shock wear off before I could even move. Suddenly a year in Taipei doesn't seem like long enough. Seattle? What is that? Never heard of it! Huge dictionaries, Tang poetry in the original and English translation, a whole wall of martial arts novels, and a New York Times Bestseller wall for the foreigners who are either less than inclined to be courteous guests and actually learn the language or who are courteous guests and simply need a break from going cross-eyed staring at Chinese characters. (I, by the way, belong to the second category.) This bookstore had everything. I probably could have slept in there, with a bilingual edition of Ding Ling as a pillow.

I spent the morning trying to get registered for classes, which proved to be quite a chore considering that (a) the school will only take tuition payment in cash and (b)no one working at a bank in the Guting district seems to have heard of a traveler's cheque before. ("Wait a second, I have to ask...Hey! Xiao Wang! Can we exchange traveler's cheques?"..."What? Who is traveler's cheque?" was how the general exchange went).

Usable funds finally secured, I had to go wait in line behind some fruitcakes from Nicaragua who had somehow arrived at the conclusion that it would be okay for the four of them to share the same scholarship certification letter, which incidentally belonged to a girl who wasn't even there. My patience was wearing a little thin by the time I finally made it into my placement test, which in itself was rather asinine. I suspect that even someone with only slightly higher than average intelligence who spoke no Chinese at all could have passed it:

"Mr. Zhang gave the book to you. Answer this question: who did Mr. Zhang give the book to?"

The experience was still better than the one I had at Fudan, though, in which the entire placement test consisted of a two-minute interview with a less than enthusiastic teacher who had been randomly chosen to teach over the summer.

And in keeping with this line of thought, I will hereby present a list of things that, at least so far, I like better about Taiwan than I do about the Mainland:

1. stinky tofu and the funny man who sells it on the corner who talks to me about everything under the sun every time I eat there
2. sit-down toilets
3. the bookstore
4. the bookstore
5. the bookstore
6. I can see, post on, and generally maintain my blog without difficulty, and do so without being labeled a selfish anti-communist foreigner
7. I have yet to be poked, prodded, elbowed, pushed, shoved, cut in front of in line, stared at like I have a foot-long beard, or be the victim of any other kind of physical, emotional, or mental abuse.

I like the last one best.

Taipei 101 (Figuratively Speaking)

2006-08-26T18:42:00.000-07:00

I've finally arrived in Taipei, which is both relieving and a little frightening. I'm stuck here for a year, which means both that I finally have a semi-permanent home on the positive side and that I am stuck here for a year on the slightly more disturbing angle. I'm tired. I'm homesick. I'm emotionally spent. And I really miss Lindsey.

I do, however, have some very good friends here in Taipei. Ned, who is letting me stay at an empty apartment he owns here, drove all the way up from his home two hours away to pick me up at the airport. He's been staying with me and showing me around the city. We also met some other friends for dinner last night, and afterward we went to a night market. It was crowded and it was hot, but I had a good time. It's been nice to see some familiar faces in this place that feels so foreign to me.

And on that note, it's remarkable to me how not like China Taiwan is. I really think that somewhere in my mind I expected it to be just like a more modern Beijing or something, but it's really not. This city has its own personality, and I think the shock of it feeling so unfamiliar is something that I didn't really expect. It's probably why the homesickness is so much worse than I had anticipated.

I'll post more when I have pictures. Right now I'm still settling in and stuff (including my camera) is scattered everywhere...

Leaving Shanghai (Reprise)

2006-08-23T07:32:00.000-07:00

I came home from taking Lindsey to the train station this afternoon to find that the maids had cleaned the hotel room and that there was a cherry pit stuck to the toilet seat in the bathroom. I am, and shall likely forever remain, slightly bewildered.

Lindsey left in what amounted to a panicked rush for Nanjing this afternoon; we left for the station two hours early and how it ended up being a rush seems a bit blurry to me now, though it had something to do with the fact that the fuwuyuan had taken Lindsey's luggage into a place where as a non-ticket holder I apparently couldn't go, and Lindsey was obliged to follow on their heels in order to keep adequate track of her things. They weren't the sort of people to stop while you said a sappy goodbye, so we ended up with a sloppy goodbye instead. Probably all for the best anyway. I'd hate to be the white girl standing lost and forlorn and crying alone in a sea of bustling Chinese in front of the train station.

I spent my last night in Shanghai with my good friend Max, who treated me to dinner at a vegetarian restaurant and then to a quiet walk along the Pudong side of the Huangpu River. It was a nice way to spend my last night here, even if it did make me sad to be leaving. I feel as though I didn't have nearly enough time in Shanghai. Still, I'm starting to wonder if any amount of time would have been enough. With all the friends I have here and all the little quiet spots I've carved out for myself in the city, I've started to think of Shanghai as a second home. It hurts a little to have to leave again.

I'm leaving my hotel for the airport at 4:30 tomorrow morning. It's 10:38 pm now and I haven't even started packing. My stuff is still scattered around the room, although there are hollow spots in certain chairs where the absence of Lindsey's stuff is a little too conspicuous right now. I'm excited to finally get to Taipei and to get settled down a little, but at the same time I can't help but drag my feet. I don't know if I'm prepared to go through any more changes in life. I'm sure that I wuld stay in Shanghai forever if I had the option...

Pondering a Child

2006-08-22T01:13:00.000-07:00

It has come to my attention that until now my blog has not allowed for anonymous postings. I've fixed it, so those of you who don't have a blogger account can post things if you want to. Just no spam, please. I'm tired of serving as an advertisement for blogs about hair restoration surgery and rapid weight loss products. Any relevant statements - or even the irrelevant ones, as long as you're not selling me anything and they're not too bawdy for a general audience - are welcome.

We went to see a friend's baby yesterday. She's a month and a half old and absolutely adorable; it's so amazing to watch her sleep and wonder what it is she must be dreaming about when she scrunches up her little hairless eyebrows and bites her lip with her little teethless gums. Everything about her radiates trust and vulnerability, and I find it equally reassuring and discomforting. She lives in a VERY well-off family and will live a very privileged life, but she doesn't know that. She doesn't know about global warming, doesn't worry about whether she will die in her next cab ride, doesn't understand that there will be some days that the sunsets take her breath away and others when she despises the sunrises.

She doesn't know that someday someone will break her heart.

There was a small but persistent part of me, a rock-hard tumor of disillusionment tucked somewhere in a shadowy back corner of my brain, that yelled at me that someone should tell her these things, tell her how much life is going to hurt her and how people are going to abandon her, before she has to find out on her own.

And then I looked at Lindsey, who was holding the baby at the time, and I realized how ridiculous it was. The truth is, I'm so lucky. I've had friends like Lindsey who have stuck by me even when I couldn't get out of bed, let alone return the favor. I've traveled all over the world. I speak one of the world's hardest languages (kind of). I've met amazing people and seen amazing things. Yes, life hurts me sometimes, but I think it's just because there's so damn much of it. And the reality is, I can only hope this little child is as lucky as I've been, and that in the end she'll have the strength to pay the price that such good fortune sometimes ends up costing.

Yu Yuan and Lu Xun

2006-08-20T21:34:00.000-07:00

One of the bad things about traveling with someone who also has a blog, who is on par with you in terms of writing ability, and with whom you are generally attached at the hip anyway, is the fact that whoever gets to her blog first has first dibs on the funny stories. This morning was Lindsey's turn. So I have nothing left that is either amusing or interesting to say. Maybe I can find a picture that she hasn't posted yet...(we're sharing all our photos too, so it might be a challenge):

This is us with some friends at a vegetarian restaurant near Huaihai Zhong Lu. Take that, Lindsey Victoria.

To get even with Lindsey Victoria - who I will address by her full name until I have finally forgiven her for not leaving me any amusing anecdotes to post on my own blog - I will hereby be the first to post about our day trip yesterday. We met with a friend for a tour of the Lu Xun museum and the Yu Gardens. Lu Xun, for those not quite so interested as I am in Chinese literature (and who I'm guessing comprises 99.9% of my readership), was a very famous figure during the literary revolution in the early part of the 20th century and, for my money, one of the more interesting Chinese people ever.

They didn't allow us to take pictures at the museum, but we went from there to the Yu Gardens and got some pretty nice pictures. It was beautiful, as most Chinese gardens are, and we did get some good pics there. At least I did; the zipper on Lindsey's purse broke halfway through the trip and her camera got stuck inside.

A Night on a Train

2006-08-16T19:18:00.000-07:00

It's amazing to me how Chinese people can at once be so incredibly rude and so incredibly friendly. Take, for instance, our train ride from Beijing to Shanghai:

Lindsey and I have a plethora of luggage. That is the only way I can think to describe it. We both panicked a little at spending a whole year abroad and I think we both brought everything we owned. At any rate, upon arriving in our taxi with our abundance of baggage, an old lady met us at the taxi with a small hand cart and offered her services in taking us across the very busy intersection from the taxi hub to the station. We agreed, knowing that we would never be able to carry it all ourselves, and suddenly a male counterpart materialized, who also asked to be paid. We shrugged - it was only $2 US a piece, and they probably needed the money more than we did anyway - and allowed them to take our stuff. Then they abruptly stopped a foot away from the crosswalk and demanded payment. Lindsey adamantly refused and told them they would get nothing until we made it to the station, whereupon they angrily (and loudly, and two inches from our faces) responded that they had no way of knowing whether we would cheat them. We finally arrived at a compromise where we would take the money and hold it visibly in our hands until we got across the street. When we finally got there, we somehow got mixed up and Lindsey and I both paid them the full amount, which meant we were taken for what ended up to be a good five dollars.

Then another lady charged us ten kuai a piece for the privilege of putting our baggage on a cart that we had to get on in order to go into the station. Then another man charged us another ten kuai for physically putting our bags onto the train. Only he did it before he told us he was charging us. When we finally got to the train, we discovered that our tickets were for two different cabins in two different cars, and the "customer service" agents were less than sympathetic. Honestly, I think they thought we were crazy for complaining.

On the other end of the spectrum, though, were our cabin-mates, who ended up being the nicest people on earth. I shared my room with an engineer from Microsoft and two Ph.D. candidates from Fudan, who amused themselves for a good portion of the ride by asking me questions about the U.S. and practicing their English with me. They apparently found it utterly humorous that a dog in the United States would be so spoiled as to have a place on his master's bed at night. Lindsey's roommates were also quite entertaining, one of them even treating all of us to dinner in the dining car. When we finally arrived in Shanghai, all of them banded together to help us with our luggage, each one dragging a different suitcase. One even went so far as to help us all the way to the car.

The train itself was really nice, with the obvious exception of the bathrooms. The beds where comfortable and the rooms were clean. I highly recommend them if you ever have occasion to travel in China.

Shanghai is just as I remember it: hot, muggy, and full of life. It's nice to be back and to see my old friends again. Odd how the once-so-foreign Shanghai would be the only thing that really feels familiar in my life right now....

Kids on a Wall

2006-08-16T17:57:00.000-07:00

Lindsey and I are quickly discovering that the best way to improve our Chinese is to practice with the xiaopengyou. Case in point: two of the kids on our hotel-sponsored tour bus yesterday to the Great Wall. One was a little ham of a boy whose surname Hou (which he explained to us in a very grave tone is also the word for monkey) fits him nicely. I don’t think he stopped moving until the last ten minutes of the trip home, when he abruptly fell asleep on Lindsey’s shoulder.

The other was a precocious little nine-year-old girl named Shuting who, although shy at first, quickly opened up to us and at one point during our tour of the Ming tombs actually reached out and held my hand. This was during a very heated conversation in which she was making it clear that she was absolutely certain that indigo (the English word) was a shade of green and that I must be mistaken in my assertions to the contrary. She entertained herself in the museums at the tombs by repeating “what do you want to learn? I’ll teach you!” and showing us how to read some of the more difficult characters on the signs; when we made tone mistakes in repeating it back to her she would respond with a disapproving grimace and immediately and sharply correct us. She also explained to us the phenomenon of foot binding, the fact that hats (maozi, not daizi) were worn by emperors, and taught us the word for comb. Her expression was so serious and intense that it was all we could do not to laugh.

We entertained ourselves on the hour-long bus ride home by both drilling them on their English vocabularies and being drilled by them on our Chinese. Both were very serious teachers. And curious, too: over the course of the day we were asked, among other things, whether we had chickens, whether we had ever eaten pizza or hamburgers or ice cream, how to say “shorts,” and where Seattle is. We were also instructed in such essential matters as Mickey Mouse’s Chinese name, how to say “crocodile,” and that a horse (ma) says his name (ma) when he speaks Chinese.

It’s a long, steep climb up the wall, and I got what felt like a life-threatening stomachache halfway up that would persist for most of the day. We were exhausted when we got home, and after going out for some food promptly returned to the hotel and literally fell into bed. An hour later, the phone rang.

“Hello?” I answered.

“Wei?” A small voice on the other end answered me in Chinese. “Who is this?”

“This is Becca. Who is this?”

“This is Shuting.”

“Who?”

“Shuting. I taught you some things this afternoon...”

“Oh, from the trip to the Great Wall?”

“Right!” She persisted to jabber away for a few seconds in a rapid Chinese that my half-awake brain couldn’t quite catch. Then she said, “So, what are you doing?”

“Lindsey and I were both sleeping. We are very tired from our trip today.”

“Oh,” she said, sounding a little disappointed. “Okay then. Good bye.”

And she hung up the phone.

Both children were absolutely adorable, and I think it was just what Lindsey and I, still a bit overwhelmed by the prospect of not only being in China but being here for so darn long, needed to help us settle in a little. Sometimes China is overwhelming, and in large groups the Chinese people as a whole can be even more so; it was nice to be reminded of the little things that make everything we’re doing worth it.

Worst...Jetlag...Ever...

2006-08-13T15:21:00.000-07:00

So Lindsey and I, suffering from unusually intense bouts of jetlag exacerbated by what I shall henceforth refer to as boy trouble,* woke up at a severely ungodly hour this morning. It's barely six o'clock, and I'm already completely showered and dressed, simply because I really had nothing better to do, other than lay awake in the dark staring at the ceiling. Because yes, and I'll be the first to say it, Chinese TV sucks.

We went to the Forbidden City yesterday. It was a little disappointing because half of it was under renovation, so a lot of the big elaborate halls were completely closed off. It was a nice cool day, though - there was a huge thunderstorm the night before; you should see the video Lindsey took of the lightning from our hotel room - and the air was blessedly and surprisingly breathable.

While standing in line we were halfway accosted by a mother and her dauther, the mother repeating things over and over in English, prodding the little girl to use this rare opportunity to practice her language skills with an American, and the child hiding bashfully behind her mother's right leg. She was not, however, too shy to reach out and curiously rub at the tattoo on my calf. She finally did say "how do you do" to Lindsey, and in the end we persuaded her to take a picture with us. I don't think she ever really did trust us, though. We're freaky, large white women.

Plans for today include the Great Wall and the Ming Tombs. If our nasty luck holds out, we might even get the chance to see a lightning storm from the top of the wall. I'm going to use Lindsey as my lightning rod.

*and which includes by definition any real or hypothetical situations which might be described using any combination of the terms "pity," "love," "China," and/or "waiting for one's significant other to finish her Ph.D. in another state and/or country"

Beijing (Again)...

2006-08-12T06:22:00.000-07:00

So we're finally in Beijing, after what amounted to the longest flight in the history of airplanes. Seriously, I thought my last flight to Beijing was bad, but it had nothing on this one. I'm actually considering initiating a self-imposed moratorium on flights to the Chinese capital.

Of course, in keeping with my recent string of bad luck, terrorists just had to get caught smuggling liquid explosives onto an airplane on the same day as I was booked to travel halfway across the planet, wreaking havoc on airports worldwide. (I mean the terrorists wreaked havoc, not me, although I have been known to do so from time to time). As a result of the chaos I had to wait in the security line for almost two hours, which made me miss my flight. Lindsey missed it too - she arrived three hours early, just to give you an idea of the insanity - which was the only positive thing to happen all day. We were miserable, but at least we were miserable together.

So after we had waited for 2 hours in the customer service line - and we were in the front of the queue - they rescheduled us for a flight through Tokyo that left now. We had to rush to the other gate, only to finally get on the airplane and be told that the flight would be delayed for the people who were more important than us, apparently, and still waiting in the security lines. They delayed it three times, and all in all we were stuck sitting on the airplane for two hours before it finally took off. Which might not have been so bad, I guess, if the flight itself hadn't already been nine hours long. They didn't have our vegetarian meals because they rescheduled our flight. We almost missed our connection out of Tokyo. And to top it all off, because we hadn't already had almost 30 hours of sleepless, foodless hell, when we finally got to Beijing we discovered that they had lost our luggage.

Again.

This is a running record. Every time I've been to China, three times total now, they have lost my stuff.

But they always find it again (thank heaven for computers), and thankfully it just arrived. "Just" being more than 24 hours after we first arrived, and almost 60 hours since we first arrived at the airport in Seattle. The two of us are awfully stinky; they took away all of our liquids and semi-liquids, including toothpaste and deodorant, and I checked my second carry-on, which conveniently contained my extra change of clothes, in order to save time at security. Which, by the way, didn't help one iota. In fact, I had to go through extra security, because when you get married they don't issue you a new passport, they just print your new name on a page in the back. This, apparently, makes you a terrorist.

Our stress levels have gone down, however, with the arrival of our luggage, and we're hoping that we can make up for the day we lost today; with no deodorant or extra clothes and no idea where our luggage was we didn't dare brave the mugginess and smog of Beijing. So we took a nap in the air conditioned hotel room instead, which actually might not have been such a bad thing. We're having fun practicing our Chinese with the hotel staff, and we had some really good tofu for dinner. So maybe things will start looking up.

I can say this, though: trips to China are never boring.

Graduation

2006-06-16T20:18:00.000-07:00

Well, it's official. I've finally graduated. And there's a big hole in my gut where all the stress used to be. It's not necessarily that I'm actually wanting for things to worry about - stress over problems with my scholarship and preparing for the big move are keeping me on my toes - but there's a sense in which I really just don't know what to do with myself now. I've spent the past five years barreling full-speed toward the goal of a silly piece of paper, and now that I've passed the finish line I feel like it was way too anti-climactic. Something else was supposed to happen. Fireworks, maybe.

Unable to satiate my lust for being evaluated, I've started studying for the GRE, which I plan to take before I leave the country. Thanks to a loan from a friend and some generous graduation gifts from family I was able to sign up for a prep course, which I'm grateful for because an initial practice test on Wednesday revealed that I am NOT as smart as I thought I was. In my mind the whole prep course is a little bit like steroids, artificially pumping myself up so I look a lot better than I actually am. But until they develop a better system than the current standardized test fiasco, I'm doing the best I can with what I have.

My New Favorite Quote

2006-05-27T16:40:00.000-07:00

"Only those who are crazy have both the will and the perserverance [that are necessary to achieve greatness]. Whoever is crazy about writing may become a successful writer; whoever is crazy about art may become a successful artist. Only the unsuccessful are not crazy at all!"

-Pu Songling, "Strange Tales From the Idle Studio"

Math for Old People

2006-05-15T21:24:00.000-07:00

Ok, well I have no idea who Nextday is, but he (or she?) left a comment on my last post, and he/she is right, I haven't updated the blog in a while. I've been working on my thesis all day, and my brain is absolutely fried. But I figured I'd give it a shot, partially since it seemed like a welcome departure from my hectic schedule of late, and partially because I'm curious as to whether anyone other than Nextday even reads this anymore.

Today is the 15th of May. It's a frightening day for me because (1) I've been 25 for eight days now and (2) I'm officially more than halfway through my last month of school. I will never be 24 again, and I will never be an undergraduate again. I don't know whether to be thankful or miserable on either count.

25 was a kind of depressing birthday. I've come to the conclusion that any birthday on a number with a multiple of five feels a little traumatic. 20 was intimidating, and turning 25 is downright scary. My insurance rates will go down, for crying out loud! No longer am I a child. This requires that I finally figure out the answer to the dreaded question "what do you want to do with your life?", which I'd just as soon not answer because I'm perfectly content living in the moment, but to which the rest of society demands a pensive, carefully-reflected-upon answer post haste. My good friend Lindsey decided that we could solve the whole dilemma by simply saying that I am not in fact 25, but rather 24-plus-one. So, for future reference, I never turned 25. On May 7, 2007, I will turn 24-plus-two. Until, of course, I reach 25-plus-25, after which I will have to find a different equation to help me circumvent my age.

The Jewish Guy

2006-02-22T15:53:00.000-08:00

I had the most bizarre experience at school today. I was walking across campus on my way home from class, headphones in my ears, when a tall guy in a yarmulke walked up to me and said cheerfully, "Hi!"

I hesitated for a second and didn't even bother to take the headphones out of my ears. My school is really big and really liberal, and it's teeming with all kinds of political nutjobs and proselytizers who fly just below the social radar but won't hesitate to mentally accost you and goad you into a heated debate when they think they can get away with it. At my school, the best policy is usually just to ignore the strangers who are trying to talk to you.

"Hi," I said at last.

With a big smile, he said, "Are you Jewish?"

"Um...I don't think so. Why, do I look Jewish?"

He cocked his head to one side and studied me for a moment before he wrinkled his nose and said, "Um, yeah, not really." He stood there like that for a full two seconds before I finally smiled and politely told him that I needed to go.

Ok, Seattle is weird sometimes. UW, even weirder. But I think that was probably the weirdest exchange I've ever had at school. I can't help but wonder what was going through his head.

Happy New Year (Again) !!

2006-01-28T11:43:00.000-08:00

Today is Chinese New Year. Or at least, in China today is Chinese New Year. In the US we have to wait until tomorrow to play with our firecrackers and annoy our neighbors.

Oh, how I wish I was there....this year, I have to settle for Chinatown.

But we're hoping that the year of the dog turns out to be a little more auspicious for us than the year of the chicken was - and I'm a chicken! what's up with that?! The car broke down last week, to the tune of $2200, which is almost as much as the whole thing is worth all by itself. We didn't have any choice but to fix it; with John working two jobs it was almost impossible to survive without the car. He was getting up at 1 a.m. to catch a bus to Costco and coming home from his second job at the Times around 5 p.m. I literally haven't seen him for a week and a half.

But with the help of some family and a little finagling with some payday loan places, we were able to scrape together the money we needed to get the darned thing fixed, so we've traded the stress of exhaustion for the stress of no money. Actually, it's not as bad as it sounds. When you're a student, you're used to both kinds of stress, and we've found that the no-money kind of stress is decidedly the more tolerable of the two. The thing I find especially ironic in a grim sort of way is the fact that I sold my piano last week - two days before the car broke - to get some money to put toward the impending move halfway across the world. Instead I got to spend it on rent and a new head gasket.

And I miss my piano. It may be the closest I'll ever get to having a child. And since it's been gone, I've had to get my stress out by banging on John instead.

Is This Blog Starting to Get Repetitive?

2006-01-14T22:01:00.000-08:00

Nothing new to report. Stop reading now. I'm very serious. I'm just going to bore you, because once again I've started school. Once again I don't know how I'm going to manage to pull through. Once again I'm going to do it, much as it exhausts me, I'm going to write some random self-important blog entries about the plight of the female college student and aspiring professor in modern-day America, maybe mixed in with a few playful anecdotes about multi-cultural interactions, and then you are going to fall asleep. Because, really, you've heard it all before.

Do I sound tired? Overwhelmed? Disillusioned? If I don't, I'm either not a very good writer or not trying hard enough.

Really, now that the new year has come, the focus is starting to shift from getting through school to getting through graduation, which may sound like the same thing but actually isn't anywhere close. Suddenly I'm faced not only with what I'm going to do after I graduate - which is intimidating enough - but also with how I'm going to make it through the entire process. It's a process which involves graduation applications, graduation announcements, finishing a nearly impossible honors thesis, and trying to keep my grades up high enough that I still have a reasonable chance of going to graduate school. It's piling up emotionally to the point where I don't really want to do anything at all, which is bad. I'm surprised every college senior in the United States isn't on a federally mandated daily dose of prozac.

I am, however, excited about graduating and eager to see what life has in store for me next. WHICH BRINGS ME TO AN ANNOUNCEMENT: my graduation ceremony is scheduled for June 10 of this year, just to give a heads-up to anyone who might want to come. I won't be sending out official announcements until probably April, and I know that that might be too short of notice for some of you. So....there it is.

A Brief Respite

2005-12-19T00:30:00.000-08:00

Well, the quarter's finally over. I finished both of my finals on Wednesday, an experience which makes me think that someone somewhere should introduce a bill prohibiting a department from scheduling finals from two of its 400-level classes on the same day. I walked out of there that afternoon as physically as emotionally spent; even fully-caffeinated coffee, which normally affects me so dramatically that it makes me physically ill, failed to do much more than increase the space between synapses in my brain. So now I'm in the part of the quarter that, ironically, in some sense I actually hate the most: vacation. Because even though I get to relax a little - kind of - I spend at least half of the break wringing my hands while I wait for my grades. Especially lately, because I'm so close to graduating. I'm watching my goal of graduating magna cum laude slipping further and further away. It's especially frustrating since if I do miss the mark, it will only be by 0.02 or 0.03 of a GPA point.

And even though I won't call it a "vacation" per se - I still have to spend the bulk of the next two weeks doing preliminary research on what is shaping up to be an overly ambitious honors thesis topic - I am finding myself with a little more free time than usual. John and I are at his parent's house this weekend visiting with the family. Randy and Jess and the girls are here for Christmas, which would normally make for a full house if the new house wasn't so amazingly huge. The new baby is sweet, and Abby is as precocious as ever. It's nice to get a chance to visit with them before the house is flooded with people for the holiday.

This evening I was chatting on MSN with a language partner in Taipei. When Abby discovered I was using the internet for communication, she asked me who I was talking to. I told her it was a friend from China (an a-political answer for the purpose of simplification; how do you explain the China-Taiwan problem to a three-year-old?), and she promptly asked his name.

"Jiang Xiaozong," I said.

And Abby, laughing hysterically, said, "I don't believe you.

"It's true. It's a Chinese name."

"No," said Abby. "It's a silly name." And then, noticing the picture of a giant panda that takes up the desktop on my computer: "Oh! Is that a panda bear?"

"Yep."

"Where can you see pandas?"

"I dunno. At the zoo?"

"Which zoo?"

"The one in China."

"Ohhhhh." Her eyes lit up with understanding. "Is it next to a Chinese restaurant?"

I explained that I thought, yes, the likelihood of a Chinese restaurant being somewhere near the Chinese zoo was pretty high. Abby then proceeded to type gibberish messages to my Taiwanese friend and ask me to translate them into legible English. Most of them said "I love my auntie" and "my auntie is the best." Well, I love my niecie too.

Thanksgiving 2005

2005-11-28T21:20:00.000-08:00

We spent a delightful Thanksgiving with our friends Ryan and Jackie and their son Charlie this year. I also dragged along my Taiwanese language partner, Ned, who insisted on helping cook. He made a delicious fried tofu dish, which ended up being more popular than the traditional food. Even Nate liked it. I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but Nate doesn't eat tofu.

I have to say that I have never seen so much food in one place in all my life.
After dinner we all watched a kung fu movie - the only thing we could be sure that Ned would understand - and Amy chased the 1-year-old Charlie around the house. Not a traditional Thanksgiving, I'll grant you, but one of the best holidays I've ever had. I am so blessed to have such amazing friends and such a wonderful family.

The Munch Man

2005-11-24T10:49:00.000-08:00

And you thought you liked your computer....

And now for something completely different: John Michael, who has always had a bit of a reputation for being a sleep walker/talker, always goes to bed before me because he has to work so early in the morning. Consequently, he was asleep when I went in to bed one night earlier this week, but it didn't stop him from having a conversation with me.

"Munch man has to pee," he said matter-of-factly.

"Oh," I said. "Who is Munch Man?"

"It's me," he said. "Because I'm carrying munch food."

"What is munch food?"

He gave me a look of utter disdain, completely repulsed by my obvious ignorance. "You know!" he said. "It's the food you eat to regain your health after you fight the bandits!"

I should add a little background knowledge here. We have a game for our XBox called Fable - really a fantastic game; even I'm hooked on it - in which you have to fight bandits in a mideval fantasy world. Throughout the game you find bits of food like apples and tofu, which you can eat later to make yourself feel better after the bandits have beaten you senseless.

"Oh," I said. I was trying to sound apologetic without outright laughing, even though I knew he wouldn't remember any of this the next day. "I didn't know it was called munch food."

"Well that's what I call it, anyway."

And then he went back to sleep.

After that I tried to ground him from video games, but when I came home from school yeseterday he was playing again. I'm afraid I'm suffering from the plight of the common wife: complete impotence as far as any influence over her husband's entertainment habits.

Chinese and the City

2005-11-19T11:54:00.000-08:00

Somewhere in the madness of the past few weeks, I've found time to finish a precious little gem of a book called Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. It absolutely stole my heart. If you have any interest at all in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, pick up this book. It'll be well worth your time.

During the week, during breaks between classes, I've been meeting with my good friends and fellow Chinese majors Lindsey and Leslie for lunch. I think the regular meetings were originally intended to be pseudo-study sessions (we all have classical Chinese together), but lately has morphed into more of a girl talk - slash - complain about the professors and compare homework session. It was a little odd to me in the beginning, since under the kung-fu influence most of my good friends in the past decade have been male, but I'm starting to settle into it. It's kind of like Sex and the City, if the girls in that show ate vegetarian soup instead of drank coffee and talked about academics and politics instead of men. I mean, we talk about men, but not that often. Smart girls have more important things to think about, I guess. Like how to save the world.

So the other day we were sitting in the campus lounge eating our vegetarian soup (Lindsey's a fellow vegan, and I think Leslie feels left out when she's eating meat), and a woman came in and sat down at the table next to us with two very small kids. The smallest one was maybe a year old at the most, and he was making all kinds of cute little-kid noises and banging his plastic spoon on the tabletop. And Lindsey said:

"Oh, look at the baby...."

I have to mention here that babies couldn't be a more foreign topic for the three of us to discuss, but we did find ourselves staring a little bit longer than I think any of us would have liked to admit afterward.

The thing of it is, all three of us have close friends with small kids. And all three of us, it turns out, have at some point wished that we were that kind of person. Not that we had kids, mind you, just that we were the kinds of people who could be content with that kind of a life. These women are women who have direction in their lives without having to scramble to find their self-worths in the pages of a book or between the double-spaced lines of an honors thesis. And the three of us - especially myself and Lindsey, who both plan on pursuing careers as college professors - are looking forward at another decade of school, followed by several more years of establishing our names in academic fields that still remarkably favor men over women. Do the experiences I've had and the people I've met make the sacrifice seem worth it? Yes, of course. But sometimes only marginally.

It's just that it's really freaking hard to be an American woman in the 21st century. It's not that I'm complaining - I'd rather be a woman now than at any other time previous to now; can you picture me cooking and cleaning? Pshaw! - but there's just so much pressure. If you want to be independent and have a career, people think you should be having a family. If you decide to devote your life to a family, people think you are wasting your potential. And of course you have no idea who to listen to, so you end up doing both, just to be on the safe side. And on top of it all, there's still some strange social stigma that keeps men feeling like pansies if they help with the housework. You can't win.

Growing Pains

2005-11-14T19:55:00.000-08:00

It's difficult to believe that it's been so long since I last posted. The quarter is absolutely flying by. I actually had to register for next quarter's classes last week, which always kind of throws me a little. It's one of those interesting little quirks associated with the quarter system: you register for the next term's classes just as you're starting midterms, and then as soon as you finish midterms you have to start studying for finals. I think it's more shocking this quarter than it has been in the past, too, because it's starting to hit me that this is my last year at the UW. Only two more quarters to go, and then I have to *gasp* start thinking about my future. So every study session I go to, every conversation I have with a friend, starts to take on the quality of being one conversation closer to the last conversation I will have with them. With as terrible as I am with goodbyes, this could turn out to be a very long year.

But by the same token, I'm definitely ready to get on with my life. College, while it's a great place to find yourself, starts to feel like a rut all its own after a while. Preparations loom for the trip to Taiwan, which means more scholarship applications and school applications and - in the grand Chinese tradition - miles and miles of proverbial and not-so-proverbial red tape. Am I crazy for applying to study Chinese literature in a Chinese-speaking country? Um, yes. But no one ever said I was compltely sane.....

Sunset in Kalama

2005-10-15T16:47:00.000-07:00

The view from the front porch of the Forland house, overlooking the Columbia River.

Update City

2005-10-15T16:09:00.000-07:00

A recent visit to John's parents' house rapidly turned into a visit to Noah's Ark. In addition to their own two cats and the two dogs, the neighbor's three dogs make regular appearances. One of them is a great dane, and you can literally hear him coming long before you can see him....

I'm approaching the fourth week of classes, which actually means that I'm really only a week or so away from having to tear my hair out over midterms. Already. I really like the quarter system - it makes the year go by so much faster - but there are times when it goes by so quickly that I can't keep up with myself. My body runs around and I just stand there watching it, utterly helpless. It's kind of like babysitting a five-year-old boy with ADD.

I ended up dropping my philosophy class, which was devoted almost entirely to 20th-century metaphysics and honestly had me lost in the first five minutes of the first day. So now I'm only taking ten credits, and yet somehow I'm still spending between four and five hours a day studying. All that, and I'm still coming away with atrocious grades on all of my tests. I'm starting to wonder: why exactly am I doing this again? It seems a little ironic, at least. One would assume that you would study a language so you can expand your horizons, see more of life. Not live so you can study the language. And with as long as I've been studying, it's kind of depressing how low my level still really is.

John, stressed beyond any real measure, ended up dropping his classes in the second week in favor of taking a little time off. He was so overwhelmed, and he's been working so hard for so long, I think he postponed burnout as long as humanly possible before it finally just got to him. What it means now, however, is that he has lots of extra time to throw pancakes across the room like frisbees, play with legos, and make farting jokes with Nate.

Once Again, It Starts...

2005-09-29T11:16:00.000-07:00

Ok, David, this one's for you. I told you I'd do it ;)

Yesterday was the first day of school. I actually passed my test, which means I start each morning bright and early with a 400-level Chinese class; we started out by reading a China-US joint communique, just to give you an idea of the workload I'm facing. I tell you, 9 am is WAY too early to be speaking Chinese. All in all, though, I've been pretty surprised at how well on par I am with the rest of the class, but I've only gone twice. We'll see how it goes as things progress. I'm taking Classical Chinese as well - which is about as close to modern Chinese as Latin is to modern English - and a 20th-century philosophy class that I'm already lost in. It doesn't help that, even though it's only the second day, I'm starting to come down with a pretty bad case of senioritis, which means I have no motivation to do anything at all. At this point it also means that, armed with my haphazard Chinese and inherent absentmindedness, I could be a little dangerous.

In other news, John finally got his Apple PowerBook and his graduation-present iPod, and now he's got so many little gadgets to play with that I haven't seen him for three days. He started school yesterday as well, and he says the classes at his new university may kill him. I remember the hell I went through when I transfered, and now I'm a little frightened to live with him for the next couple of weeks...har har.

The Stupid Stupid Stupid Stupid Test

2005-09-16T20:12:00.000-07:00

The greater part of the last two weeks has been spent in an almost valiant effort at re-acclimating myself to being both an American and and American student, neither of which has been either especially inviting or especially easy. I miss my baozi, I miss my friends in Shanghai, I miss speaking Chinese with silly taxi drivers. And I miss the sense of adventure that accompanies every step I take when I'm in China. It sounds odd, but I really miss that sense of not knowing that hovers over me everywhere I go, like anything at all could happen and very often does. Life here just seems so...normal, and I'm not entirely sure I've got a grasp on how to get used to it again.

Of course, part of the issue may in fact be that I wouldn't have the luxury of completely leaving China behind even if I wanted it. I wasn't a tourist, I was there because a big part of my life was already in China before I even set foot there. And I've had to spend a huge chunk of my time in the last two weeks reviewing for a Chi
nese placement test that I had to take today. So while I have no shortage of Chinese friends who are eager in every way to help me prepare - which I am eternally grateful for, by the way - and certainly have had no shortage of things to study, I'm finding that miring myself so deeply in such a stressful situation, especially one in which I have to tangle myself so completely in the culture that I just left, it probably doesn't do much for the re-acclimation process.

Tests, I might add, suck. I won't know the results until Tuesday, but let's just say I've prepared myself for the worst.

We did, however, go to the zoo on Wednesday, and the boys just stood and watched us with raised eyebrows as Amy and I had little conversations with and cooed over all the animals. It was a good day to go; a lot of the animals who are normally sleeping decided to get up and walk around, so we got good pictures of the grizzly bear and the wolf for the first time ever. It's kind of nice to have another animal-loving girl around. Now I can watch "The Planet's Funniest Animals" without feeling guilty.

I Can Breathe!

2005-09-08T11:31:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm home. And largely intact, unless you count the raging jet lag. I feel a little bit like Eeyore, with the minature rain cloud following me around above my head. It was exacerbated by the fact that I couldn't sleep on the airplane, so by the time I finally arrived in Seattle I had been awake for nearly 48 hours straight. And then they lost my luggage, told me they'd found it, and then lost it again. By the time I got home I couldn't hold my head up. I slept for the next two days.

But I'm alive and starting to feel a little better at least, which ought to count for something. Nate and Amy are living with us while they try to get their feet on the ground in Seattle, so the four of us are crammed into our tiny on-campus apartment. It's actually not as uncomfortable as it sounds, but maybe it's just because I haven't been awake enough to notice anything for the past week. Other than that I've just been studying; as fun as Shanghai was, the educational side of my trip left something to be desired. I'm a little nervous about my return to my Chinese classes. I'm afraid they will find me woefully behind.

The Baozi Girl

2005-08-31T20:08:00.000-07:00

Today when I went to get my baozi after class, the red bean ones weren't ready yet. They told me if I hung around for eight minutes or so they'd be ready, and of course I said they were more than worth it, which was greeted with a great amused guffaw from one of the guys behind the counter.

One of the girls there, my favorite one, came out from the little shop to get some fresh air and sat down on the side of one of the bicycle carts. "Have a seat," she offered, scooting over and patting the space next to her.

The first part of my brain, the spoiled American part, the first thing it thought of was the fact that I was wearing white pants and would be sitting on a space that was decidedly not white. But then the second part of my brain, the part that loves China and kind of likes dirt and knows that logically it can always buy another pair of white pants, looked at the girl and her dingy uniform and her sweat-covered face and thought, American brain, I can't believe you're complaining.

So I sat down next to her. She said, "so when do you go home?"

"Saturday, but I'm not really sure I want to yet."

"Why?"

"We don't have baozi there." This should have been a joke. And it was, kind of, but not really. The truth is that baozi is just another one of those little slices of China that I miss terribly when I'm away, and somewhere inside my head these little steamed rolls have become symbolic of everything I have to leave behind.

"What!" She looked at me like I was crazy, like people can't exist in a place where there's no baozi. And maybe she was right. Maybe this is why Americans are a bit cranky at times, they need their red bean. And she asked, as though it was in keeping with the subject, "do you have a lot of friends here?"

"Yeah," I said. "A lot. I'm going to cry when I have to leave."

"Oh," she said soothingly, "don't be sad. Ultimately every place is home, right?"

"Maybe," I said, but I didn't mean it.

She said, "Sometimes we get homesick too. Our family's in Anhui Province, and we only go home once every few months."

"Do you like Shanghai?"

She cocked her head and looked at me. "Yeah," she said, "it's ok. But you know, we don't get much time to go out and have fun. We have to work very hard. Maybe 12 hours a day. And it's so hot in the summertime...it's just really, really difficult."

And I looked at her and I looked at the baozi stand, at the guys behind the counter shuffling huge steaming containers around in a space that has to be over 100 degrees, at the dirt on their uniforms and the sheens of sweat that cover their faces. And I looked at her eyes, so big and kind and pretty and sad. She's my age, maybe a couple of years older. We always say there but for the grace of God go I, right? But what happens when you have to think, there but for the grace of God was I born and raised and stuck in a place I won't ever get out of? It could have been me. If life was fair, maybe it would have. There is nothing that I have that she doesn't deserve at least as much, maybe more. And there she was, so quiet and sweet, and she wasn't complaining at all. She was just simply telling me the way things are.

Sometimes, every once in a while, I wonder why I decided to take the path that I did. The Chinese, the traveling; as much as my choices have baffled other people, they've confused me almost as much. All I knew was that I was following my heart. But then I have experiences like I had today, tiny little episodes that look so ordinary but fill my head with awe at life and my heart with love for other people, and I think maybe I made the right choice after all. I am so lucky, so blessed. And people are just so darn cool. It's amazing to me how people can have such a powerful impact on your life and not even know it. I will never see the baozi girl again. But I know for a fact that I won't ever forget her.

Maybe she was right, maybe every place is ultimately home. Everywhere you go there are people who want to love and be loved in return, which is really the same thing I guess. Is this too philosophical? Next time I'll stick to the funny stories.

The Perpetual Armageddon

2005-08-27T23:11:00.000-07:00

So the countdown has begun to the end of the world. Well, the end of my stay in Shanghai anyway, which as far as I'm concerned is really pretty much the same thing. It's Sunday afternoon on my last weekend here, and I'm really starting to feel emotional about it. On Thursday night I went to a club with James and Sig and I went out with Norman on Friday and Saturday nights, and now that I finally have a bit of time to myself I'm wondering how on earth I'm going to leave these amazing friends that I've made. And I think life is so funny, the way things are constantly changing, the way you have to keep moving forward even though a lot of times you'd rather spend your effort and your energy looking backward. Or better yet, standing still. And every time you have to be separated from someone or your life has to move in a different direction or you find yourself looking at things in a different way it's like the end of the world all over again. And no matter how many times you go through the process, no matter how many times you tell yourself that things have to end so other things can begin, it still hurts a little somewhere deep down inside in that fundamental, central core part of your soul. And the really bloody ironic thing, the thing that makes it so truly confusing, is that the fact that the ending hurts is what makes the entire thing so beautiful to begin with.

On an entirely different and far less somber subject, I've decided to write a book: 101 Ways to Get Killed in China. The concept started out as a joke between myself and James, because he kept injuring himself on his skateboard and I kept nearly losing my life when I tried to cross the street, but it's developed into a sort of a game. Every time one of us comes close to dying we make a mental note of it and add it to the list. And the list, it's getting pretty darn long.

"What are you going to do if you end up with, like, 150 ways?" Norman asked when I told him.

"I don't know," I said. "Change the name of the book, I guess." Whereupon Norman pointed out that 101 sounds far cooler than 150, and we arrived at the conclusion that I most likely will be whittling a great deal of the list down in order to keep it at its 101-item limit.

"Maybe I can lump things together into subcategories," I said. For example, at least five things on the list have something to do with taxis and/or their drivers. Another good ten or so involve being run over by something or someone. A great many have to do with food and natural disasters of the stomach. I might be able to squish some of them together, in a pinch.

The last week here promises to be rather busy, what with saying good-byes and taking final tests and packing and shopping and etc. etc. etc. As much as I'm going to miss Shanghai, I am looking forward to getting home and seeing John and Nate and Amy and all of my friends and my soft mattress again. I'm ready to start school again so I can finally graduate. And I'm looking forward to the clean Seattle air. You know how when you hit twelve or thirteen or so you start going through this phase where you can't remember what it was like to really believe in Santa Claus? I'm starting to feel that way about fresh air. Like, I know at one point I thought it existed, but now I'm beginning to wonder if it wasn't just a product of my own imagination. At any rate, I'm all suited up for my next Armageddon, ready to move on to the next thing and find the blessings in that, too.

Life is such an adventure.

...And All of the People

2005-08-21T04:26:00.000-07:00

I just had a thought...we spend so much time and effort trying to find ourselves. What if we get to the end of the journey and find out that there was nothing there to find to being with? And would that really be so bad?

Ah, but I digress.

Most of my friends have now departed Shanghai; Carol left early last Monday morning and Haruka, who was supposed to stay here for a year, had to go home to Japan for emergency surgery. Of course I miss them terribly. In the brief time I knew her Carol became like a little sister to me, and Haruka...well, what can I say but you know you're good friends when you don't speak the same language and you can still communicate like there's no barrier there at all.

So I've been spending a lot of time talking to and hanging out with my language partner James, who really is the coolest Chinese guy I've ever met. He's completely taken with western music - real music, too, not the syrupy love songs that dominate modern Chinese culture - he rides a skateboard, and his English, in spite of the fact that he's never had a native speaker for a teacher, is at near-native fluency. Not only that, but he is one of the more conscientious Chinese I've met as well; in this time of dramatic change for the Chinese, it's kind of rare to meet someone with a well-developed social conscience. And he's got it in spades. He's incredibly concerned with the world around him. It's amazing. He's unique not just as a Chinese, but as a person, period.

I am blown away by the people I've met this trip. I think that never before in my life have I forged so many amazingly deep friendships in such a short period of time. Is it right that anyone should be this blessed? I hardly feel deserving of it.

Last night I went to the Shanghai aquarium with James and his friend Sig and, let me tell you, if you're one of those people who doubts God has a sense of humor all you need to do is visit this place and it'll clear that right up for you. I have never seen so many strange fish in one place before. And when I say strange, it's not the kind of strange where you cock your head and say, "hm, that's kind of weird." It's more strange like "oh, that's where all the dinosaurs went" kind of strange. And boy howdy, some of these suckers were ugly. The eels made me cry, they were so gross. And they had an underwater tunnel with sharks. BIG ones.

I liked the sharks. Although after seeing them up close I have to say I find the whole Finding Nemo fish-are-friends-not-food scenario significantly less believable.

At dinner last night James gave me an amazing present: a book written by his dad. It's a memoir of his experiences during the cultural revolution, which he spent in the fields in North China doing penance for his family's capitalistic past. It's signed, dedicated to me and dated, which is especially amazing considering there are only 5,000 copies in print. James says it's an underground book. I was so touched I almost started to cry. My Chinese isn't quite good enough to read it yet, but it gives me something to work toward. In the meantime it's wrapped in plastic and sitting in the back of my closet so the cover doesn't get bent.

I am, at this moment, completely in awe of life, of the beauty it has in its transcience, of the little blessings that lump together to make one gigantic - albeit slightly messy - lump of blessings. And it just sits there in front of us waiting for us to open our eyes and look at it, and most of the time we just sit there with our eyes squeezed tight shut. I am, at this rare and quiet moment, at a near-loss for words. Almost.

The Earth According to Google

2005-08-09T02:02:00.000-07:00

Just a small aside here...my friend Chia-chi turned me on to this awesome program called Google Earth. If you don't have it yet, well, where have you been? It's a program that allows you to view the earth via satellite and zoom in on pretty much anywhere you want. I can find my apartment in Seattle; Chia-chi used it to show me his apartment in Taipei. Seriously. Get this program. I've never seen anything so addicting. It even puts solitaire to shame.

http://earth.google.com

After the Storm

2005-08-08T19:47:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I've never been in a tropical storm of any kind, so the recent typhoon kind of threw me for a loop. I was trapped in my room most of the day, which gave me WAY too much time inside my own head. But it cleared overnight, and the next day Carol's family invited me to go with them to Hangzhou, a couple of hours away from Shanghai by car. In the morning all the streets in Shanghai were flooded - and so was the taxi I took to get to their house.

"Hey, siji, you have a small lake back here," I told the taxi driver in Chinese, but only after I'd accidentally stuck both of my tennis shoes ankle-deep into the puddle in the back seat of the car. The driver, his only response was to turn around and say, "a lake" in English, and then give me a proud grin. We ended up practicing our English for the entire 45-minute ride to Gubei.

Shanghai truly was a mess. Half the trees at Carol's apartment complex had been uprooted by the wind, and an uncomfortably large part of the city was under at least two feet of water. We actually saw people wading knee-deep in the water, using old bicycle baskets to fish in the streets. In the middle of the city. And they were catching things. I'm not making this up.

But the storm had benefits other than providing me with my humorous anecdotes for the weekend. In Hangzhou, Carol's mother's friend told us it was the clearest day she'd ever seen in the city. It was cool and the air was blessedly clean, a welcome retreat from the hot filth of the city. I love Shanghai, and it's ever so much cleaner than Beijing, but I can still wipe my face three times a day and come away with a black handkerchief every time. Hangzhou kind of reminded me of Seattle, only a little richer - yes, I can't believe it either - and a little more Chinese, obviously. But just a little, which may or may not be sad depending on your opinion on China's recent boom in development.

But either way, Hangzhou was truly beautiful. The Chinese have a saying: in heaven there is paradise, on earth there is Hangzhou and Suzhou. I haven't been to Suzhou yet - I'm working on that one - but I can definitely see where they would get that idea. The lake there is amazing. Carol and I took a boat out onto the water and just relaxed for an hour. Could be the first time I've relaxed like that all summer, to be perfectly honest. I mean, I love my yoga, but there's really nothing like an hour in a rickety old traditional Chinese boat on a traditional Chinese lake (even if it is in a no longer-so-traditional Chinese town) to loosen you up.

Carol and I also made an attempt to feed our fast car habit by visiting the luxury car dealerships which seemed to be all over the place in Hangzhou. I got to sit in the front seat of my beloved Porsche 911 Turbo, Carol tried out a Ferrarri Scaglietti. Once again we drew confused looks from the male salesmen, who I think were utterly confused by two girls so completely into race cars. But we figured it was probably the closest either of us would get to our dream cars for a long time, so we decided to swallow our pride.

Monday saw me back at school, where my classes are getting less and less organized and more and more frustrating. They moved us up a level after the first month, so we're reading long, academic essays on things that should be much harder to wax academic about: fashion trends in Shanghai, Shanghainese food, etc. etc. The lessons are far too long and complicated, with way too much new vocabulary every day, for it to be possible to completely prepare even if one were to spend every moment of her time studying. Which one is becoming less and less inclined to do, because one is getting very overwhelmed and slightly fed up.

Under the Weather

2005-08-05T20:54:00.000-07:00

And this time, it's not a metaphor. Shanghai is experiencing the outer edges of a local typhoon today, which means heavy rain and winds not even Nevada can equal. I tried venturing out for my daily baozi during a break in the rain, but ended up getting stuck in a torrential downpour with a broken umbrella. So now I'm confined to my room, which actually isn't so bad because I might get bored enough to actually spend some time studying. Unfortunately, it also confines my diet for the day to the culinary offerings of the convenience store in the downstairs lobby, most of which consist of Oreos and oddly flavored potato chips. The sushi and cucumber flavors have garnered the most attention here, though I can't personally vouch for them. I did try the green tea flavor - whether out of curiosity, bravery, or stupidity I can't really tell you - and found them decidedly not to my liking. They tasted like really crispy seaweed, just in case you're wondering.

Mmmm....baozi. The best food in China.

Carol and I went go-karting yesterday, which seemed like such a culturally backward thing to do in China that there was no way I could pass on the opportunity. The original plan was actually bungee jumping, but after John voiced concern as to the quality of most Chinese products and the general Chinese lack of attention to safety procedures, we decided that delivering our lives into the hands of a Chinese bungee cord didn't sound quite as intelligent as it had in the beginning. In the end it turned out that go-karting was quite the adventure in itself. The track was in a warehouse deep down a back alley somewhere in the heart of town, and the entryway to the building reminded me of an abandoned carnival in a horror movie, all peeling paint and broken statues. But once we revved those engines, man, we were hopping. We were getting funny looks from the guys who worked there; I can only imagine that, what with the slightly different cultural outlook on the separation between the sexes, they don't get a lot of business from girls. Especially girls who aren't accompanied by guys. Even more especially, girls who are wearing skirts and have to keep stopping on the track to tuck the hems up so they can keep their clothes on as they're flying around the curves. But Carol and I are both big car lovers, and we had an absolute blast. Fast cars, even the miniature ones, are super sexy.

So Kwai Mei left on Thursday morning, which makes me sad. I have no idea who I'm going to eat vegetarian meals with now. There are a few people who will grudgingly accompany me, but they spend most of the time asking, "where's the beef?" and giggling like it's a really original joke. Carol is also no longer living at school, though her parents are in town and she's staying with them at an apartment near Norman's place. But it's faaaaaaar.

Speaking of Carol, I met her parents and the rest of Norman's family when I went to dinner with them for Carol's family birthday party. It was fascinating; they have all these little Chinese birthday traditions, and it was the first traditional Chinese birthday party I've ever been to. Well, almost traditional: we did have a big very western-looking cake. I think Norman's dad had difficulty remembering my name or something, because by the end of the night I had a nickname. He kept addressing me as Meiguoren laowai: American foreigner. Or if you want to get even more literal, old American outsider.

Shanghai only continues to grow on me the longer I stay. It's not that there aren't flashes, brief nano-seconds of time, where the clean air and the personal space in Seattle seem a little too far away, but those moments are few and far between. All in all I'm fascinated by Shanghai, by the people I've met here and the experiences I've had. I'm learning as much about myself as I am about Chinese culture. I think this is what life is all about; the little experiences that make you up as a person. I am so, so blessed.

Mission: Accomplished

2005-08-02T19:43:00.000-07:00

CarolParty3
Originally uploaded by beccamozart.

Well, it's official: yes, you can buy a yoga mat in China. After traipsing up and down the greater Shanghai area for a little over a month and expending a great deal of my hippie energy points, I have finally come across the yoga mat of my dreams. I had to take a taxi across the river, get lost and found again, and climb four flights of stairs to find it, but I have it now. And actually, it's better than the one I have back in the States. I'm feeling quite miserably like a spoiled westerner at this point, but my bed is nothing more than a slab of wood with a half-inch pad on it. My back has been killing me, not to mention the fact that without my daily yoga pieces of my mind have been scattered all the way from here to Pudong. That, and it's just way too hot to be running outside every day. Gotta get the exercise somewhere.

My friend Carol had a birthday party last weekend at the Cloud Nine bar in the Grand Hyatt at the top of the Jin Mao tower, and it was pretty fun. Carol and Kwai Mei are both going home this week, which will leave me rather lonely, but at least I'll have time to study now. I've been feeling slightly under the weather - I don't know whether I'm dehydrated or the change in my diet has affected my blood sugar levels or both - and it's getting more and more difficult to get out of bed and go to class. Of course, if I went to bed at a decent hour it would probably help too. Darn Shanghai and its interesting things to do....

They Say You Can't Go Home Again...

2005-07-27T02:41:00.000-07:00

Pudong2
Originally uploaded by beccamozart.

Ah, yes, it's been ages since my last post. But Shanghai really is keeping me busy. Between studying and shopping and vegetarian restaurants, I can hardly keep my head on straight.

So I was talking to my language partner James today, who was telling me that during the cultural revolution his parents were displaced from Shanghai to a rural area in the Northeast. He said that after their "work study" people had difficulty returning to the city for much the same reason that Vietnam vets had trouble returning home: they simply weren't the same people.

So it makes me wonder if I didn't kind of catch the same bug after my last trip to China. Not that I have the unbearable audacity to compare myself to people who have experienced that level of suffering, but there is an element of feeling out of sorts in my own skin when I'm in the states now. And I've had nary a pang of homesickness since I've been here. I think my brain swelled in Beijing, and it wasn't until I got here to Shanghai that I found new clothes to fit it. Is it possible to have reverse-homesickness? I've heard that for people who live abroad for a year or two the process of returning home is infinitely more difficult than is the process of leaving in the first place, but I don't think I understood it until now.

I other less philosophical news, I've posted some of the pictures I've been taking. If you're interested, you can look at them at www.flickr.com/photos/chinabecca/. I'll continue to blog, but flickr is easier and doesn't take up as much space on my blog. Besides, now you can look at my pictures without having to read all my random miscellaneous ponderings.

Episode III: The Food in Shanghai

2005-07-20T01:47:00.000-07:00

Well, I was going to impress you with pictures of every imaginiable kind of food, all of which is readily available in Shanghai and most of which I have personally sampled, but for some reason the blogger website is being stubborn. So what you get instead is my simple and inadequate description. If the site's mood suddenly decides to improve, maybe the pictures will come next time.

So I met another vegetarian, and she and I have been hitting the Shanghai vegetarian restaurant scene pretty hard. (Which makes it sound a little like we've been smoking pot, I know, but our version of the pursuit of enlightenment doesn't carry a mandatory 15-year sentence in China...). The Chinese can do amazing things with food, and thanks in part to the Buddhist side of their long heritage - lots of monks who don't eat meat and have enough free time to play around with wheat gluten - they can do amazing things with fake meat as well. Really, this stuff tastes just like the real thing. Vegetarianism has apparently been enjoying a recent trendiness in the East, and Shanghai has some amazing vegetarian restaurants. We usually have to wait for at least half an hour for a seat, even on weeknights, which might irritate us if we didn't find it such a big part of the experience. It's rare to have to wait for a seat in a vegetarian restaurant back home.

Somewhat more intimidating curiosities consist of the dog meat served in the Korean restaurant down the street, which I obviously didn't try, and which nobody who did try actually liked, toast served topped with nothing but chocolate syrup, and pigeons served with their heads still on, eyes in and all.

There are plenty of western-style restaurants here too. I've never seen so many KFC's in one place before. Of course, I've never seen a lotus-root salad served at a KFC either. McDonald's has kiosks on street corners and on the banks of the river, like little ATM's for ice cream cones and french fries. They also serve taro root pies alongside the apple ones, which for the record are delicious. And in Starbucks yesterday I had a green tea and red bean mousse cake, which was great but which I'm also guessing they would have a hard time selling in the states.

Oh, and of course my favorite food in the world...red bean baozi, little steamed buns filled with sweet read bean ground into a delicious paste. There's a little shop down the street that sells the best ones ever, which makes me absolutely ecstatic because, to be honest, red bean baozi are 80% of the reason I came back to China in the first place. You just can't get them in the states. And so cheap! Three buns costs me less than 20 cents U.S.

Last year I lost ten pounds when I came to China. Somehow I have a feeling I won't be experiencing the same problem this time...unless, of course, people keep ordering dog meat. Then I may never eat again.

Settling in in Shanghai....

2005-07-12T07:16:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm finally at school and starting to get settled in. It's turning out that all my fears about a sudden drop in quality of life were ill-founded; the dorms are incredibly comfortable, in a brand new building, and we even have air conditioning and our own private bathroom with a western-style toilet. Which is truly a blessing, because try as I might I still can't for the life of me figure out how to use a squatter. I've tried. I really have. And I'm not a stupid person. I don't know how something so simple could escape me so completely.

I had my first day of class yesterday, which was quite an ordeal; I tested into too low a level, so I asked to be moved up a class. But they didn't have any space in the next level up, so they put me in the highest level. The textbook was do-able, but I couldn't understand the teacher at all. They finally found a spot for me in the appropriate level, which I'm grateful for, but all in all the experience was slightly exhausting. Over the course of the morning I had to argue with several people in Chinese, all of whom thought all of my problems could easily be fixed if I would just ask the teacher to please speak a little more slowly.

"You're talking to me now, aren't you?" one of them said. "So you must understand something."

So now I'm in the second-to-the-highest level, which is kind of alarming because I had no idea my Chinese was this good. Or at least I had no idea I could fake my Chinese being this good. I'm still finding it a little difficult, and I have to spend a lot of time studying every day, but it's definitely workable. I will say, though, that I'm going to be pretty darn fluent when I get home.

One other thing that seems interesting enough to mention: my roommate speaks no English. She's from Japan, and her parents are both from Beijing. So she speaks fluent Mandarin with a Beijing accent, but that's the only way we can communicate. It's been great for me, because the worst part of my Chinese is my listening comprehension. It's been great for her, because she keeps asking me how to say things in English. The only problem with that is that I'm finding more and more things that have no literal translations. But it really has been beneficial to both of us, I think. I spoke with a Chinese friend on the phone today who told me he simply couldn't believe how quickly my Chinese has improved. I have a feeling that the majority of what I learn on this trip won't be in the classroom.

We took a cruise on the Huangpu River tonight, which would have been beautiful had it not been for the pollution. Seriously, you have an amazing night view of the entire downtown area of Shanghai, old and new, but you can only see it for about ten minutes before it disappears behind a haze of smog. It's kind of ironic, really, because the price they've paid for all this modernization is that now that they have it, they can't see it.

So other than that I've just been hanging out a little. I bought a bike, which in a silly way makes me feel a little more Chinese. I've made a ton of new friends, all of us bonded by the camraderie of not knowing what the heck we're doing, which has been fun. I even went to a karaoke bar for the first time the other night. Shanghai feels weird because it doesn't feel weird. I feel like I already know this city, like it's already part of me. I must have lived here in a past life. I don't know how else to explain it.

The View from the Radisson

2005-07-08T02:33:00.000-07:00

A couple of the pictures that I took this morning from the window of my hotel room. (And you thought road construction was chaotic in the U.S....)

...And a word about the signs of affluence in Shanghai. In Beijing, this street corner would be nothing but old bicycles. Here, though, scooters are really common. The rows of second-hand bikes have virtually disappeared from the city.

It's raining right now in Shanghai. [One of the consequences of studying a foreign language is that now I'm critical of everything in English, too: what, exactly, is the "it" that is raining?] I'm on the nineteenth floor of the Radisson SAS in Shanghai, and it really is a beautiful view, if a little smoggy. I spent the better part of the day wandering the streets trying to find a power adapter for my laptop (unsuccessfully), and I just got back in. I feel a little strange, because in a lot of ways I feel like I never really left China. Everything feels so familiar to me, like I've been here thousands of times. I'll admit, though, that Shanghai seems a little tamer than Beijing did. Beijing seemed like it was constantly in a state of flux and didn't know what to do about it. Shanghai is more like it's in a flux, it knows it, and now it's time to settle back with a beer and put its feet up and enjoy the ride. Taxi drivers are friendly and cooperative, the streets are (relatively) clean, and nobody really gawks when I walk by. They stare, sure, but at least they have the common courtesy to pretend that they aren't staring. I'm not nearly the rarity here that I was in Beijing.

Which on the one hand is a great thing, because I'm finding it a little more comfortable of a city for a long-term stay than I think Beijing would have been. On the other hand, though, I'm finding it was the little things that annoyed me most that burned Beijing into my memory the way it did. It was kind of amusing to feel like a walking tourist attraction, and the availability of western conveniences here makes it feel just a little less like China and a little more like everywhere else.

Of course, ask me after I've moved into the (a/c-free) dorms tomorrow, and I may have a very different opinion....

Next Year I'm Going to Japan (or) Where do They Put All the Japanese?

2005-07-07T07:11:00.000-07:00

Well as of about an hour ago I'm finally in Shanghai, and I have to say that the flight was blessedly unremarkable. Absolutely nothing happened. Which, compared to last year, is a huge improvement. I have all my luggage, I got vegetarian meals on the flight, I managed to avoid getting completely ripped off...all in all, a pretty good trip. Not only that, but for some reason I now seem to be able to access my blog, which means that updates should be a little more frequent than they were last year.

So I had an hour and a half layover in the Tokyo airport today, and it gave me plenty of half-conscious pause to wonder two things: 1. why didn't I study Japanese instead? and 2. um...where are all the Japanese? The first question came because the airport was beautiful; even the bathrooms were perfect. They didn't have stalls, they had individual little private rooms. And even the kids' play area had a wall of computers so kids could connect to the internet. And here I go to a country that's absolutely notorious for its gross restrooms and it takes me half an hour to connect to the internet in my hotel room. The second question came because all of the signs were in English, and I could have sworn that there were at least as many white people as there were Japanese in the terminal. Add the Chinese where there, and the Japanese were probably outnumbered two to one. Granted I was in the international terminal waiting on a flight to mainland China, but still...is Japan just so great that the Japanese don't want to go anywhere?

In other news, Shanghai is murderously stuffy, I had a really strange meal on the flight today that tasted like sweet potatoes with mint chutney, and the bed in my room feels like I'm sleeping on a brick wall. And I love all of it. Well, maybe excepting the mint chutney.

More later...I'm going on my twenty-third hour awake, and I'm starting to drag.

The Cutest Baby in the World

2005-07-03T19:42:00.000-07:00

John and I spent the afternoon today with our good friends Ryan and Jackie, who just bought a new house. Their son Charlie is getting so big. He turned a whole year old on the 14th of June. I remember visiting him in the hospital when he was born last year! Quite frankly, I'm not sure I was prepared for his first birthday. It just makes me feel too darn old.

Ryan and Jackie are two of my favorite people in the world, and I guess it's only fitting that they should have given birth to my favorite baby in the world. So now they're my favorite family in the world. And Charlie really is the cutest child ever.

Gasp A New Posting

2005-06-29T21:06:00.000-07:00

Ni hao, everyone.

Well, I'm exactly one week to the day away from boarding an airplane bound for the other side of the planet, and I'm already exhausted. The upside of the situation is that I'll be able to kill most of the 18-hour plane ride sleeping. The downside is that I'll also kill most of the rest of my last week here sleeping. Materially, I'm ready to go, literally shopped out (which as most of you know is a considerable feat), but I'm afraid that when the actual day arrives it will find me woefully unprepared both mentally and academically. I keep having dreams that I forget my passport or I get stuck at the airport in Tokyo or I lose my luggage. Of course, whenever I start getting stressed out I just remember my flight to Beijing last year, which I survived with almost all of my limbs more or less intact. This year's flight might be as bad, but there's not much chance of it being any worse. And I've been chanting this like a Hindu mantra.

On a totally unrelated tangent: I was at the mall the other day when I saw an Indian family (Indian Indian, not Native American Indian) walk by me. The dad and mom were in regular American street clothes, but the grandmother with them was dressed in traditional Indian dress. It's not really so unusual a sight around here, but on this particular occasion it struck me - it's weird how random situations will do this, just walk up and hit me upside the head for the fun of it - that you almost never see a young Indian woman in traditional dress. It's always the elder women. I could certainly be showing my cultural ignorance here, but that's neither here nor there. The point is that I wondered how, if I ever have kids, my children's world will be different than the one I see now. Will my daughter ever stand in a mall watching a woman in traditional Indian dress, or will this sort of thing have died out by the time she's 24? Me, I take it for granted. If little Lucy (the pre-determined name of my future hypothetical daughter) sees a woman dressed like this, will she gape and stare because it's such a foreign sight to her? And what other things in the world will have changed? Will China be the new superpower, and will Lucy be forced to take four years of Mandarin in high school (poor kid)? Will they invent lima beans that taste good and chocolate ice cream that makes you lose weight? And how many of the changes will be for the good, and how much of it for the bad?

And of course the most pressing and slightly disturbing question: how much of the change for the good will I personally have inspired, and how much of the change for the worse will I have failed to prevent?

At Last...an Update

2005-06-17T00:22:00.000-07:00

I know, I know. It's been FOREVER. And I have to apologize doubly, because it's 12:30 in the morning and I'm about as punchy as they come. But I figured that I ought to try to write something, even if it's just to dispel the myth that I've met some untimely demise. As my darling Mark Twain wrote, the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

So my best friend Chia-chi, whith whom I've been practically attached at the hip for the past two months, left to go back to Taiwan yesterday, and he left a bit of a Chia-chi shaped hole in the pit of my stomach that I'm sure will last at least two more days. I'm finding all efforts to avoid thinking about it fruitless; everything reminds me of him, including the piles of miscellaneous household items that he left with us when he went home. It's just so quiet around here without him. He was over here so much that toward the end he was taking to just putting his groceries in our refrigerator, because lugging them back and forth the one block between our two apartments was becoming too much of a bother.

In other news, John finished his last assignment of the quarter this evening and is henceforth tentatively officially graduated from North Seattle, barring some unfortunate circumstance. I'm so proud of him; he's worked very hard to get where he is. Me, I leave for Shanghai on July 6th, and the stress of another international trip is starting to wear me a little thin. I only just got the paperwork to apply for my visa a few days ago, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that everything will be processed in time. In the meantime, the ever-present UW red tape is keeping me busy with every manner of paperwork.

More to come later, when I'm a little less tired.

Down With PETA and The Ravings of a Mad Vegetarian

2005-04-17T16:45:00.000-07:00

When I first went vegatarian, my naive little self thought that PETA was actually a good thing. I didn't know that much about them at the time, except for the fact that their tactics were a little guerilla-ish (pouring red paint on women's fur coats, etc.). But I thought a support group for compassion-minded people had to be basically decent and well-intentioned, even if their way of expressing it was a little socially...off. At any rate, I figured, it got the message out there. It educated people about vegetarianism. It got people looking at the food on their plates and asking questions. Whether they became vegetarians or not, it made people more conscientious about where their food was coming from, which couldn't be a bad thing. Surely if the ends didn't justify the means, they must at least have excused them.

But the longer I've been a vegetarian the more I've learned, and the more irritated I've become. I used to become so frustrated and hurt when people would get on my case about being a vegetarian; after all, what does anyone else care what I put (or don't put) in my own body? I couldn't figure out why it offended so many people. But the fact is, PETA's outlandish, over-the-top tactics haven't succeeded in opening society to a vegetarian lifestyle. All PETA has done is serve to further isolate it on the fringes of left-wing extremism. They do horrible things like stand outside elementary schools telling the children that their parents are murderers. They expose society at large to horribly offensive billboards, like one last Christmas showing Santa Claus looking unhappily down his pants and declaring in large letters that milk makes you impotent. And I'm sure everyone has heard of the campaign they mounted where they parallelled images from the Nazi concentration camps alongside pictures of slaughterhouses.

This is why people automatically distrust me when I say I'm a vegetarian. This is why parents have a cow (an especially appropriate pun, I thought) when their teenage daughters tell them they're phasing out meat. It's not because society at large is cruel and compassionless, as PETA would have us believe. It's because groups like PETA have made vegetarianism about fighting "the man." No longer is it simply a way to practice compassion. These days it's nothing more than an especially self-righteous form of social rebellion. A disproportionately large number of animal activists will out-and-out tell you that they fully sanction the use of violence if it means what they call "complete and total animal liberation." I'm not even sure what that means, and nobody's a bigger animal lover than I am. Regardless, these people have the audacity to compare themselves to MLK and Gandhi, saying that they're fighting for a cause.

But there's an oh-so-huge difference: King and Gandhi are famous for preaching non-violence. There were other people fighting for the same causes as they were, but these men achieved great things because they were full of compassion. And what I wonder is: how did we get to this place? How did something so obviously rooted in empathy become a cause that not only tolerates but endorses violence? You can't have compassion for animals without having it for humans, and ultimately you can't have compassion for humans without having it for animals, because it all comes from the same place in the heart. Why must they be mutually exclusive?

I want to go on record here: I am horrified at the fact that we even eat meat anymore, let alone at the way we do it in America. I am horrified at the way some people treat their animals. I am horrified at the fact that lots of animals are tortured unnecessarily at testing facilities. But what we need as compassionate people isn't another war. What we need is to take a pragmatic approach to the situation. We can't simply let every animal in captivity go; it would be mass chaos. We can't simply up and elimiate animal testing; there are hundreds of people (including the diabetic vice president of PETA) who rely on animal products for their survival. What we can do is educate people. The vast majority of people still believe that vegetarianism is horribly bad for them, despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary. We can offer incentives to scientists so that they can find techological and synthetic alternatives to animal testing. We can live our own lives in ways that make people realize that not eating meat doesn't necessarily mean giving up on life.

Look, it's just a fact that things have to die for other things to survive. It's the natural order of things. Our job is to cause as little suffering as possible. I don't eat meat not because I think it's inherently wrong, but because I believe that our current technology and wealth of food choices make it an unnecessary evil in America, especially with the way we go about it with our greedy little selves. I could go on about all the other incentives, how if we used all the grain we fed to cattle we could feed most of the third world and how the vast majority of the rainforests are being destroyed for cattle farms, but I'm sure PETA's already told you all of that. And if you really think that animals don't have a soul, come on over and meet my dog Hunter. He'll change your mind in one of his little heartbeats. Change - real change - takes time. I'd much rather it be slow and painful and lasting than a passing fad. To be perfectly honest, I'm not holding my breath while I wait for the rest of the U.S. to go vegetarian. I'd be happy just having people accept the fact that I've done it. After that, who knows? Maybe when my grandchildren are growing up this won't even be an issue.

Yes, I have a life. Yes, I get plenty to eat. I'm healthier than most of the people I know. Last time I got blood work done my protein and calcium was at the high end of the scale, even though I haven't eaten meat in four years and haven't had any milk in two. I've lost fifty pounds since I went vegan. I've already inspired two other people to become vegetarians without proselytizing or laying on the guilt.

All this, and I've never once poured red paint on a fur coat.

Spamalot

2005-03-18T20:10:00.000-08:00

For those of us who are looking for something a little different in our showtunes, Broadway now offers something for husbands with strange senses of humor, too. We were watching The Daily Show one night a couple of weeks ago and the guest for the evening was Eric Idle of Monty Python fame. Apparently the newest show to grace our favorite street is none other than a musical adaptation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, complete with coconuts and starring Tim Curry and David Hyde Pierce. Seriously. I couldn't make something like this up.

I had almost forgotten about it until tonight, when I saw a little blurb about the show's opening night on CNN. Word on the street is that it got rave reviews. I'm just wondering how they did the killer rabbit and the catapulting cows on a stage...

Granted, it's a little odd, but John and I are already planning for a post-graduation trip to New York just to see it. Just something a little different for those of us who eat ham and jam and spamalot :)

A Happy Day in the Peer House

2005-03-05T13:02:00.000-08:00

Many happy congratulations to John (my language partner Chia-wei, who has difficulty saying his name, calls him Joohhnnn), who today celebrates his three-weeks-as-a-vegetarian anniversary. I haven't heard him pine for meat at all, unless you count the time he commented that he wished he'd tried the new hot dot place up the street before he'd given up meat for good. He even threw out a half a bag of frozen fish sticks yesterday evening when he was cleaning out the freezer, declaring that he would no longer have any use for them. Now the only meat left in the house is a can of tuna and a package of instant turkey gravy, which John won't let me throw away in case the local food bank suddenly finds itself short one tin of mushy fish and something to put on their mashed potatoes.

I have to say that I am so proud of the man John has become, at the way his social conscience and his compassion have just flowered. He's gone from being a man who didn't care about anything at all when I first met him to being a man who wouldn't talk to anyone for a whole day after Kerry lost the election. You may or may not agree with his politics, his beliefs, or his now meatless lifestyle, but that isn't the point. The point is that John cares, about me most of all, and I am so lucky to have a man with such a huge, kind heart.

Girls Can Kick Butt, Too

2005-03-04T18:13:00.000-08:00

So I was having a little bit of trouble at Jeet Kune Do on Monday night. I was working with my sometime partner and alltime friend Travis, and I kept punching him in the head without actually meaning to. It'd be a useful tendency in an actual fight, but when you're not actually trying to hurt your opponent it can be a little frustrating.

"I'm so sorry," I finally said after I nailed him in the jaw. "Maybe I should be home knitting instead."

"Oh no," he responded. "Knitting is the last thing you should be doing."

Seeing it in print now makes it look like he thinks I'm a real tomboy (either that or just really uncoordinated with my hands, which may actually be the case), but I was pretty flattered at the time. It just illustrates one of the things I love about that class; never once have I been treated like a girl. I've always been encouraged by all of my 200-pound kung fu brothers to be the very best I could be, in spite of the fact that I lack 30% of their upper body strength and 90% of their physical endurance. People ask me from time to time whether it's ever been awkward being a girl and learning from Taky Kimura, one of the most respected martial artists in recent American memory, and it always throws me off guard because it's always been so extremely the opposite of awkward. It's been amazing; it's one of the few places in my life where I've actually felt like I fit in. The only thing that might make it a little awkward is that many times I'm the only girl in the class, just for the fact that I feel like a tabby in a room full of lions. I mentioned this to one of the instructors, though, and he just laughed at me.

"You're going to be one of the few females to come out of the Kimura camp," he said. "If anything you're doubly lucky."

I humbly, totally agree.

Drunk Birds?

2005-02-24T12:13:00.000-08:00

Apparently humans aren't the only animals who love a good time...here's a story about some birds who were - and I'm not even remotely kidding; who could make this stuff up? - flying drunk.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6982867/?GT=6190

...

2005-02-17T17:58:00.000-08:00

One more picture...I'm having trouble getting the hang of this picture posting thing.

...

A Cute Little Picture

2005-02-17T17:54:00.000-08:00

So I'm normally not the biggest fan of e-mail forwards, but my aunt sent me these pictures that she received by way of some e-mail chain and I just had to share them. Apparently this couple found the deer on their front step, seemingly motherless, and decided to take it in until it can get its strength back. As the story goes, the dog has completely taken over the task of caring for it; the fawn even sleeps in the dog's bed.

A deer with a dog. Think they're aware of the alliteration?

All Hail Mao Zedong...

2005-02-16T18:54:00.000-08:00

I got to see my friend Kaman today, who I've seen almost none of since I got back from Beijing. She's from Hong Kong, and helped me out with a linguistics project by recording herself saying all kinds of ridiculous sentences in Cantonese. ("He gave us two ducks. Is that hen yours? No, it's not mine. It's his." Etc. etc. etc.)

She's always wanted to go back to Hong Kong once she graduated. She just got hired on with one of the big four accounting firms (Arthur Andersen, I think?) and she's graduating this spring. When I asked her if she'd be transferring back home in her newfound capacity as an Internal Auditor she just sighed and shrugged.

"I don't know if I want to," she said. "These days if you work at a big company there three weeks out of the month you're in the mainland. And you know how much I hate it."

I do. When we were there together it was hard to miss her less than favorable opinion of her homeland's Big Brother (pun intended). The food was bad. It was boring. The people were racist. (They were, actually, especially against her ironically enough, but that isn't really the point.) What is the point is that she, like most of her fellow Hong-Kongians, are now subject to a corrupt government that they pretty well detest.

It got me to thinking about two things: one, why? China gives all kinds of political justifications for its reunification of Hong Kong, and I suppose from a political science standpoint a lot of them are probably valid. But why should a people have to be subject to a government just because it had been at some time in the past millennium? Most of them call themselves Chinese, but they don't identify with China. They identify with Hong Kong, which until the past twenty years couldn't possibly have been more different. So why is it so necessary, under some vast and sweeping pretext of unity, to subject a people to anything they don't really want to be a part of?

Okay, so Hong Kong is at least understandable, because there's some economic benefit to China in its reintegration. But how about Tibet? That's just greedy. There's nothing there but a bunch of Buddhists, and as much as we all love the Buddhists, how much national benefit could come of its takeover? It's not as though they're contributing anything to the gross national product. We're talking about a whole race of people whose lives are based on sitting around staring at walls and humming to themselves. If they'd rather chant in Tibetan than in Mandarin, why stop them? Who are they hurting?

Which brings me to question number two: what is it about our own patriotism that makes us want to force it on others? Why is it that Abraham Lincoln was so obsessed with not letting the south break away? Why can't the blue states form their own countries, if they feel so underrepresented? These aren't rhetorical questions, either, but genuine curiosities. After all government is, at least to some extent, just an artificial social structure. A necessary one, but not one set in place by the forces of nature. George Bush is still just a man. Jacques Chirac is still just a man. And the Chinese are starting to figure out that Mao was just a man. We support the governments of the people we think share our morals, we pooh-pooh the people who do things differently, and in the meantime my friend Kaman doesn't feel safe raising her children in the place where she grew up.

Maybe I've been reading too much John Locke, but doesn't this defeat the purpose of government in the first place? Isn't the whole point kind of a safety in numbers kind of deal? And how did it end up that, even in America, in the end it's still just the rule of the many by a few idiots with really white smiles?

中文版

2005-02-03T19:51:00.000-08:00

我剛才發現了我在電腦裏寫得到漢字。這個讓我很高興；現在我可以讓每個中國人哈哈大笑。是的，我的中文真的那麽懷。所以我對讀這封信的中國人說：非常對不起。我從來沒說我會說中文說得很好。哎呀，英文我都不會說吧。就是寫中文的時候可以玩一下，也讓別的美國人覺得我很聰明阿。:)

I just figured out that I can type Chinese characters on the computer. This makes me really happy; now I can give all the Chinese people a good hearty laugh. Yes, my Chinese really is that bad. So to all the Chinese people who are reading this I say, I am really sorry. I never said I could speak Chinese well. Heck, I can't even speak English. It's just that I can have a little fun writing in Chinese, and it makes other Americans think I'm really smart. :)

Untitled Because I'm Cool Like That

2005-02-03T19:13:00.000-08:00

I have to start out by apologizing for the fact that I haven't posted anything in almost a month; my parents were up for Christmas, and after that school started back up again, and to be frank I've had hardly a moment to myself since I sat down to write my last post. But I'm still alive - at least I think I am, though I'll admit I've been looking a little ashen in the mirror lately - and thought a small update would be appropriate for those of you who still either are desperately looking for ways to kill time on the internet or are serious gluttons for punishment. Because I should think, seriously, that by this time all the impatient riff-raff would have been weeded out from my readership. You all are the special ones. Or one, as the case may in fact perhaps be.

We've been keeping ourselves ridiculously busy; myself with a full courseload of Chinese classes (including a course in Chinese linguistics, which covers such course matter as all seven dialect groups and the memorization of the International Phonetic Alphabet), and John with his math, physics, and programming. I'm still mulling over the dilemma of whether or not I should apply to graduate school next year or wait awhile; the GRE's are rapidly approaching, and still I change my mind every day. John keeps telling me to make a list of the pros and cons, but I'm afraid that I'm so moment-minded that any foresight with organization of that magnitude completely escapes me. Besides, I can't much see the value in this methodology: it stands to reason that some pros and/or cons are potentially going to have more weight than their opposing counterparts. By the time I wrote the appropriate mathematical formula for figuring it all out and programmed it into my graphing calculator, I could have already made the decision the old-fashioned way. I'm starting to see the attraction in flipping a coin.

I'm reading two books right now: Carter Beats the Devil - so far intriguing, but I haven't gotten past the second chapter, so maybe not that intriguing - and Sourcery, one of Terry Pratchett's hilariously fantastic Discworld novels. Great stuff, those. John bought me a signed first-edition of Going Postal two weeks ago, which I ploughed through in two days before wrapping it in bubble wrap and putting it in a safe. I'm sure we all wish I was exaggerating. I've been writing, too, much thanks to John who pushes me endlessly (he says it's because he believes in me; I say it's because he wants me to write a runaway blockbuster so he can live high on the hog. Or tofu. Either way, his support is a lifesaver. I'd have given up on myself a long time ago if it wasn't for him.)

And that's it. I will try to post more often, though probably not every day. Which is more boring, a person who could fill the entire allotted memory of her blog with one long page of random information, or a person who feeds you small bits of random information on a daily basis? This isn't a rhetorical question, either. I'm a writer. I need to know these things.

FREEDOM!!!!!

2004-12-15T10:36:00.000-08:00

Well, I've finally done it; I've finished my finals. I would apologize for not posting for a while if I felt bad, but right now I don't. I'm so numb from stress that I won't be able to feel anything, much less guilt, for at least another two days. Next to finals themselves, this is the worst time of the quarter: I've become so adjusted to running non-stop that now my body doesn't understand that there's nothing especially pressing that needs to be done. It's like getting off of a roller coaster. It's fun (or in this case, tolerable) while you're on it, but after you get off you feel kind of nauseous.

I completely BOMBED my Chinese Lit test this morning. Which makes me wonder: do I really want to be this educated? All I really wanted was to learn another language, maybe stretch my brain a little. But just a little. I don't really care what Xi Kang ate for breakfast in Fujian provice on April 12, 485 CE. The thing about all these 400-level classes is that suddenly, for the first time in my entire fifteen years in school, they want me to think. Yes, that's right, ladies and gentlemen. No longer am I required to simply spew forth information previously spoon-fed into my eager young brain. Now - somewhat late in the game, if you ask me - I am actually required to think for myself, a practice at which I have virtually no experience. Why didn't anybody tell me I was going to have to do this? I'm disappointed and more than a little disllusioned.

Ode to a Si Bak

2004-11-29T17:43:00.000-08:00

I found out late last Wednesday that my kung fu si bak, Taky, had a heart attack on the preceeding Sunday and had to spend Wednesday on the operating table undergoing a quadruple bypass surgery. I think it was a little bit of a shock to everybody; he's one of the most amazing people I've ever met, really kind and a genuinely kindred spirit. He's also shorter than I am and can throw a man twice his size across the room, which makes him truly my hero; I've spent so long thinking that I and my stubby legs could never amount to anything remarkable, at least in terms of the martial arts. Taky, however, has proven me wrong, and has welcomed chubby little old me into his kung fu family with open arms. I would appreciate it if everyone would keep him in your thoughts and prayers: he's doing well and coming home from the hospital today, but he's in for a long recovery.

Ryan and Stephen went over a few days ago and completely redid si bak's room, laid all new carpet and everything, which I think was so sweet. I just hope that he's not so surprised he has another heart attack...

Strange Happenings

2004-11-19T10:28:00.000-08:00

Adventures abound of late in the Emerald City, where early yesterday afternoon a man ran into our car - with himself - in the middle of the block on a congested road in the center of the U-district. We were in the turn lane, John driving and I in the passenger's seat, when all of a sudden a face and a hand cracked the windshield inches in front of me. He flew backward and hit his head on the pavement. He was trying to sprint across one of the busiest roads in Seattle in the middle of the block in really heavy traffic, and -um - he hit us. We think he must have been high or something because the minute the cops showed up he split down a side alley, leaving a trail of blood that was dripping from a golf-ball sized lump in the back of his head. We were lucky, though, that no one was more seriously hurt. The worst damage of all was sustained by the car; the windshield has a crack shaped like an arm and the side mirror was ripped off when he slammed into us.

Easily one of the creepiest, strangest things I've seen in a long time.

A Disclaimer

2004-11-17T18:02:00.000-08:00

[The owner of this blog apologizes profusely for the gross, absurd, and utterly uncultured use of emoticons (i.e. :-) :-P :-S) in the title of the following post. She in no way condones the use of said emoticons, and begs you not to fill your e-mails with them when you write.]

Thank God for Student Loans :-P

2004-11-17T17:47:00.000-08:00

It's here again: the three-weeks-til-finals-I'm-going-to-pull-my-hair-out time of the quarter. I go through this every single quarter, too. Right about this time I start wondering why I do this to myself, because, let's be honest, who deserves this kind of stress? Sometimes I wonder if there really exists, in some other possible world (to use the philosophical term), a place where people actually live on more than PB&J and don't have to pull all-nighters twice a week. And while we're on the subject, are there really people who speak Chinese? Fluently? And, more importantly, are there really people who understand it? If I hadn't seen and heard it for myself I'm not sure I'd believe it. Sometimes I still don't.

So the only thing I can say - and I can't believe I'm saying it - is thank heavens for the ridiculous amount of my student loans. It's at these times, when I swear up and down that I'm going to drop out of school and go find me a paper cup (v. the styrofoam; I'd even be environmentally responsible as a bum) and a nice street corner, that they come in handy: quite frankly, I can't afford to drop out of school. I just owe too stinking much money, and there's no way I could make the payments on a salary from McDonald's. (Not that I'd work there anyway; it's kind of an exaggeration for the sake of rhetoric.) So I guess this is a classic example of how your worst curse can be your biggest blessing.

Of course, ask me again when I'm finishing grad school and you may hear a far less good-natured opinion...

My Friend the Scarecrow

2004-11-12T13:47:00.000-08:00

So the mood in Seattle, and especially in the U-district, has been decidedly somber of late, owing in part to John Kerry's loss of the election and the sudden and constant onslaught of midterms. I remember a day not so long gone when they were called midterms because they were in the middle of the term. Now I can't seem to be rid of them, even though I'm only taking three classes. I feel as though I'm in some creepy episode of the Twilight Zone. You know, the one where you just keep taking tests and taking tests and taking tests...

In the quest to cheer myself up I found myself stumbling into Scarecrow Video, this gigantic video store in Seattle that specializes in indie and foreign flicks. I am now officially in a perpetual state of bliss. They have more Chinese movies and bad Hong Kong kung fu flicks than I could watch in ten years, literally just walls and walls of them. I'll never be bored again.

Pixar Rules

2004-11-09T13:18:00.000-08:00

So, as Johnny promised (without consulting me first, incidentally, which I think was a plot to coerce me into posting something), I will now say something about "The Incredibles." I don't know why he couldn't just do it - he saw it with me and I'm pretty sure that there wasn't anything that I noticed and he didn't - but I guess until he gets a little more confidence in his writing ability (like that'll happen; what, a programmer write?) I'm going to have to pick up the proverbial slack. I guess it helps that I'm only literally the biggest Pixar fan that ever did walk the face of the earth...

In short, um, Pixar rules. This movie was so cool. Kind of a generic cliche of a description, but it works so well for this one. I've been waiting for over a year to see it, and boy howdy was it worth the wait. The animation was amazing and the story cute (if not entirely cartoonish). Incidentally, this is also my one and only complaint about the movie: half the time I didn't even feel like I was watching a cartoon. It was more like a spinoff (is that one word or two?) of Spiderman or something. I think they're just trying to confuse us; with more live-action movies using computer graphics and computer animation looking more and more like live action, how are we supposed to know which direction is up anymore? It's a conspiracy, I tell you.

I'm more excited than ever now to see what Pixar will do with itself once it's shed the restrictive yolk of the Disney empire (Pixar's next film, "Cars," is slated to be its last under Mickey Mouse's domineering demands) and struck out on its own.

Jumping up and down...

2004-10-27T18:11:00.000-07:00

It seems almost tasteless to start my first post in two weeks by bragging, but I'm too excited to care right now. I just got a letter telling me that a short story that I sent in to the Writer's Digest annual writing competition received an honorable mention, and this out of 18,000 entries. I am sooooo stoked. I just can't believe it. Of course the perfectionist in me wants to have won the whole darn contest (the winner gets a trip to New York to meet literary agents), but considering this is only the second short story I've actually finished, let alone submitted anywhere, I feel relatively justified in telling my inner critic to just shut up.

On a more morbid note, I was eating the most delicious tofu teriyaki for dinner tonight when I bit into -surprise- a piece of chicken (and yes, dad, you can tell by the texture). I promptly spit it out, but by that time I'd had dead animal in my mouth and the damage was pretty well done. This is the second time it's happened at two different restaurants; I'm afraid I may have to give up my beloved tofu teriyaki altogether, which somewhat tempers the excitement of the day.

Go See Hero

2004-09-24T16:24:00.000-07:00

Just a brief plug..."Hero," for so long in limbo in the U.S. due to a contract between Zhang Yimou and Miramax, is now playing in theaters nationwide. If you're a martial arts fan (you know who you are!) and/or you like a little eye candy, I highly recommend this movie. I was surprised to find out in Beijing that the movie's actually a little bit controversial among Chinese film critics, but hey, I'm not Chinese, so I can enjoy it without the slightest bit of guilt owing entirely to my blessed American ignorance.

A Short Apology and a Lot of Blabbing

2004-09-24T15:59:00.000-07:00

Well, hello again. I don't know if anyone's even reading the blog anymore, since I've been home for a little over a week now. Truth be told I'm surprised anyone's reading it at all, given I posted so little. I really have to apologize for that: I was so busy in Beijing, and when I could get to a computer it was truly a pain to try and get anything posted. It's just one of the things about going to a communist country. You can type in a web address, but it's a crap shoot as to whether you'll be able to go there or not. Who knew John's 'blog would be full of anti-socialist sentiment?

Some more promising news: I've created a photo album with pictures of the trip, accessible at http://beccamozart.zoto.com, so you can finally see some of the stuff. Here comes another apology: when I uploaded the pictures I added descriptions on all 150+ pictures, but for some reason a lot of them didn't save. I'll be going back and fixing them, but it'll take some time so if you're curious about a certain picture it might be worth your while to check back a couple of times.

My trip home was decidedly better than the one to Beijing; all luggage made it safely to Seattle, I got three very filling vegetarian meals on the flight, and no one gypped me out of anything substantial, as long as you don't count the guy who charged me ten yuan to carry my luggage from the taxi to the customs gate. I also made several new friends on my oh-so-adventurous flight, including a guy who grew up in Beijing but now lives in Fremont, CA (and kindly saved me from misguidedly getting on a flight to Singapore instead of the one to San Francisco); a girl who's studying at Stanford and was taking her mother to the States for the first time; and a professor from Fudan University in Shanghai, who offered to help me get into the school should I choose to pursue graduate studies in China. I'm starting to think that when you're a white girl in China and you can speak just enough Chinese to get yourself into trouble it's really not too hard to make friends, because everybody around just finds you so darn amusing.

The last week away was a little difficult, just for the fact that my dizzy little brain was starting to remember that there was a world where I understood other people and knew whether I was being complimented or insulted when someone told me I had such very white skin (in Beijing, by the way, it's apparently quite the compliment). I started feeling a little homesick and anxious to get back to my husband and my little apartment still full of yet-to-be-unpacked boxes. It didn't help that the class schedule was starting to wind down, so I had more time to myself, all of which I used to wonder where John was and what he was doing, even though the majority of the time it was the middle of the night in Seattle. We did do a few interesting things with the group, however, including eating at a very fancy Peking duck restaurant and taking a boat out on the lake. We met with an urban planner and an expert on public art (rather scarce as yet in the New China) and all the rest of the seminar-y stuff that we had to do to qualify the trip as a "class," but for the most part we spent the last week winding stuff down and - dare I say it - shopping.

Oh, but this is getting long. I may actually post a couple more times; there are some stories and things about my trip that I still want to share, since I had so much difficulty posting when I was there. Let me know if you like the pictures!

Becca

Hello Everyone

2004-09-05T09:40:00.000-07:00

Hello, everyone.I guess I have to apologize for the sporadic postings; I wonder if anyone's evenreading them anymore. Truth is I have difficulty spending any significant amount of time in the internet cafe here in Beijing, the air quality is so bad. I'm sitting right under a "no smoking" sign, but it doesn't seem to make much difference. Even the guy at the front desk has a cigarette in his mouth. It's eight o'clock on a Sunday night, and the place is so full up of wacky video game junkies that I got the last computer here. It's crazy.

My second week in Beijing has been slightly less exciting than the first, which I'm actually grateful for. Last week was so hectic that I hardly had the opportunity to sit down for five minutes at a time. I'm finding ways to fillthe extra time, though, and the whole experience just seems to be going by soquickly. I've done so much shopping it's embarrassing, had the best manicure of my life, and even went to see Zhang Yimou's latest film (ever seen "Hero"?) called "House of Flying Daggers." I was really excited, since "Hero" is hands-down my favorite movie. "Flying Daggers" is a pretty controversial film on this side of the globe; Zhang Yimou used to be a dissident filmmaker, but people are regarding him as a little bit of a sell out now. When "FlyingDaggers" opened the government promoted the film so heavily that they wouldn't let any Hollywood movies screen in the entire country for the first twenty days after its release. I have to admit that the plot was at once! slightly thin and layered on way too thick, but the cinematography is gorgeous in true Zhang Yimou style, and all in all it was fun. Besides, like I was telling my friends last night, since when does a Kung Fu movie have to have a plot at all, much less a believable one?

We've had a pretty exciting line up of speakers and such here this week,including two of China's most prominent fifth-generation directors and an"Americanist" from Beijing University. We also went shopping at Wangfujing, which is so outrageously expensive I couldn't believe it. It was very eye-opening as to the enormous chasm between the rich and the poor in this city; where we're staying near the Hutongs (old neighborhoods) a shirt in a littleclothing shop will cost maybe 30 yuan ($3 USD) if you don't bargain too hard, and from what I understand we live in a part of town that "normal Chinese" (I still haven't quite figured out what that means, but Beijingers use the phrase constantly) have difficulty affording. At Wangfujing a good shirt will run you a good 300 yuan (about $35 USD) at the cheapest, and there is no haggling. It's very western. We even ate dinner at Pizza Hut, which in China is a fancy restaurant, go figure. There are also McDonald's all over the city! , but here McDonald's is a status symbol, as are the Starbucks. It's comparable to what you would pay in the states, but when you're paying the price of a nice shirt for a cup of coffee or a hamburger it kind of throws you for a loop. In the US, nobody ever complains that McDonald's is too expensive.

The thing about Beijing is that it just simply accosts your senses: there's so much going on here at once that it's hard to get your bearings. The streets never have the same buildings two days in a row. There's the smell of overflowing sewers (you have to watch where you step) and the smell of Budweiser from the brand-spanking-new American-style bars. On Friday I had traditional flat bread from a street-stand for breakfast and Schlotzky's Deli for dinner. Then I had Chinese candy, green tea, and Pringles for dessert. People drive their cars like they're still on bicycles, driving in between lanes on thefreeway and going wrong-way down the one-way streets like that's the way you're supposed to do it. It's noisy and it's dirty and it's poor but it's also lavish and exorbitant and over-the top. I'm having a hard time getting my bearings here, always feeling like I'm floating around, and I've only lived here for two and a half weeks. I can't even imagine what it must be like to have lived here for sixty years and suddenly feel like the world is being pulled out from underneath you. How can anybody call this place home? Doesn't the very word imply that there's something there that you recognize?

Second Week

2004-08-30T06:20:00.000-07:00

Well, the start of the second week finds me pretty well exhausted; we've been moving non-stop since I got here last Saturday(or Friday, in Seattle time). We've watched several movies, toured parts of the old city, shopped at anenormous antiques market filled with tourists, etc. etc. etc. The past coupleof days I've been kind of keeping to myself. My body's starting to rebelagainst the sudden change in diet (although it wasn't so dramatic, since I ate mostly rice and veggies before I came), the upside-down sleeping times, and the stress of being around so many people ALL the time. I'm normally pretty congenial, but I need my alone time. And I just haven't been getting it.

We went to the Great Wall yesterday. Frankly, Richard Nixon's infamous quote("It sure is a great wall") pretty well sums it up. It is pretty cool, though,and quite a tickler for the imagination to think that you're walking on astructure that was there before Jesus. That's pretty old. And I'll tell you what, that sucker is STEEP. In some places there's a good 60% grade at least, I'd be willing to guess steeper in some areas. Sometimes it looks like it just goes straight up. And there were so many people! At one point I was trapped against a wall inside a guard house, pressed at from all sides by a flowing river of people, unable to move. Once outside I actually cried; I think I just narrowly missed an all-out panic attack, as absolutely claustrophobic as I am.

That's one thing about the Chinese: they really aren't afraid to shove you. I'm not sure it's so much that they're rude, but when you live in a city this large you get used to just going before someone else does. That and I'm sure that the fact that I'm a foreigner doesn't help much. For the most part they've become pretty accepting of a blue-eyed stranger, but there are still a few people who look at you distrustingly. And of course there are always those who will jack aprice up 500% because they think you don't know any better, which of course you usually don't. I'm embarrassed to think of all the times I've probably been taken. They always get a little surprised, though, when I start speakingChinese, and once I start haggling in their native tongue the price usually drops pretty dramatically. Either way, they're still a pushy people. I've hadpeople cut in line in front of my five or six times at the grocery store (which is pretty much every time I've gone). And you should see the way they drive!

This week I have:
1. spent an exhorbitant amount of money on shamelessly tourist-oriented crap
2. been hit on by a guy with a camel at the Great Wall, who told me in Chinese that he thought I was very beautiful, and whose friend followed me up the walltelling me the camel-guy wanted to kiss me
3. become a tourist attraction at the Wall in my own right: people wereliterally lining up to have their picture taken with me
4. slaughtered the Mandarin language more than any tourist ever had a right to
5. interpreted for a German family who didn't know how to order dinner and
6. not slept, studied, or done anything else even remotely useful, except forgorge myself on Chinese food. And, of course, shop, although whether it's actually useful or not could probably be debated. Here's hoping everyone at home is happy and in good health. I can't wait to get home so that I can get some pictures posted for everyone to see.

Zai Jian!

Hello (finally) everybody!

2004-08-26T19:07:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the delay in posting. I can't get onto the blogger website from theinternet cafe here in China (local controls or something?) so I'm having to e-mail the posts to John and have him post them for me. It's been quite a week- I can't believe I've been in China for a week, how's that for wild - and rightnow I'm a little tired.
My first couple of days here were pretty difficult. After THE LONGEST FLIGHT INTHE WORLD, and of course one on which my vegetarian meals were never ordered soI had to go fifteen hours without eating, I finally got into a very quietBeijing airport. Then the airline lost my luggage. Then I somehow got scammedinto a taxi ride to my hotel that cost 450 RMB (about $50). The actual runningrate should be somewhere closer to 100 RMB. I went for two days without any ofmy things, and although things are remarkably cheap here - and I do mean CHEAP -the Chinese just don't seem to make underwear in my size.
But I finally got my luggage back a couple of days later, thank goodness, andthings have kind of been looking up since then. China is an amazing place; ourhotel is right on Lake Houhai, Beijing's latest hip night spot - who knewBeijing had hip night spots? - and it's a really beautiful neighborhood. Itbacks up to one of the oldest neighborhoods in Beijing, rows of courtyard housesthat you'd probably recognize from Kung Fu movies called Hutongs, which has beenreally fascinating. Some of these houses are 600 years old. I've never seenanything 600 years old. Unfortunately one of the biggest hot-button issues hereis that these neighborhoods are quickly disappearing as Beijing makes a bee-linefor modernization. Every day we see crews demolishing houses, and a streetnever has the same buildings two days in a row.
We went to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square on Monday, which was trulyone of the most amazing experiences I've ever had. Especially the ForbiddenCity, which is awe-inspiringly vast and ornate in spite of the fact that it'skind of crumbling away. I kind of get the sense that the Chinese are in such aflux right now that they just don't know what to do with themselves. Trying tofind a balance between modernization and their own identity can't be easy,though to tell the truth they've been struggling with it in one form or anotherfor a couple of centuries now. These days it's just taking a different form, onethat's sort of hectic and stressed out because of the fast-approaching Olympics.
One final note before I bore everyone to death: the food here is seriously todie for (which is a good thing, because when you buy stuff on the street you'renever really sure what you're going to get). I really think that AmericanChinese food is ruined for me now; how will we ever go back to Bamboo Garden?
Ha ha.

Love to all of you,
Becca

I'm leaving tomorrow!

2004-08-19T13:59:00.000-07:00

Well, it's the nineteenth of August, the day before I leave. I'm VERY excited, but at this point I'm feeling a little nervous about being away from John this long. We all know what happened the last time we were separated for any length of time...

I think that everything's packed and ready to go, but who knows? When you're travelling there's always at least one thing you forget; it's Murphy's other law. I hope to keep this blog updated with all of the events from my trip, and hopefully some pictures as well if I can figure out how to make the Chinese-language computers work, so keep checking back!

Becca