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April Journal

In which I participate in a kung fu battle.

April 1st, 2005
    So, I managed to go almost five days without a cold, when last evening I was working on my painting, when I was stricken with the usual intense sore throat, followed in the morning by massive snot cloggage, fatigue, and chills. Amazing. Surely this school is an influenza research facility.

April 3rd, 2005
    Yesterday was strange. I had been planning on going to Chengdu, but was sick, so I stayed home to rest. At about 4 in the afternoon I was in my room working on a massive schizophrenic doodle, when I heard an extensive tumult at my door. I felt a strange sinking feeling in my stomach. I went out and found Arron collapsed on his bed, reeking of baijio. Someone was pounding on our door. I opened it to discover an extremely drunk man flailing around and waving a cell phone. The neighbors were all gathered around to watch. The man kept trying to get in. I told him to fuck off and displayed the middle finger .5 decimeters from his face. He tried some drunken, sloppy kung fu on me to no effect. I disarmed him of his cellphone. At some point Arron got up again and staggered off with the cellphone guy. A large group had gathered to watch their display of screaming, fighting, hugging and so on. I hate conflicts of this sort, so I went off to walk on the mountain. They were making a scene by the pingpong tables, and many administrators and teachers were trying to calm them down. I met our boss Mr. Liu rushing to the scene. Arron was covered in blood, his arms flailing. I tried to convince him to go back, but he eventually told me to fuck off. Eventually I left for a long walk on the mountain. When I got back from dinner hours later, I found Arron collapsed in bed with his shoes on. Mr. Liu came by, worried that Arron might be “drunk to death.” I had been told by the agency that the personal repercussions for Mr. Liu, should any injury happen to us, would be severe in the extreme.
    I went to bed, and woke up a little before 4 AM, filled with energy. I put on my boots and went out. It was a beautiful, warm spring night. The stars and an old orange moon were out. I could hear the frogs in their ponds down in the valley below. The only form of pollution the Chinese have failed to excel in is light pollution. At night, they turn out the lights and go to bed. In the states, every miserable extruded plastic hovel and empty parking lot is constantly lit by buzzing, high intensity mercury vapor halide lamps. Even people’s plastic homes are studded by high-voltage searchlights. Supposedly this is for “security.” In China, it is dark at night. Indeed, this was the first thing I noticed about China when I was flying into Beijing, and is one of the things I like best about China.
    So, the school campus where I live was entirely dark, and I could see all the stars. The main gate was locked, but when the garbage truck came by, the gatekeeper got up and came out in his slippers to open it. I slipped out with the truck. Farmers were already in the streets, bringing their produce to the market. They use a split bamboo shaft to balance two baskets across their shoulders. As I walked up to the mountain, I passed many such farmers, some with little lights attached to their baskets. I particularly liked one young husband and wife walking with their produce, talking quietly in the dark. There was something so noble and simple about them carrying the things they grew to market, across the fields and through the village, out before dawn, not even using an animal or machine, not even a cart. I went up and sat on the giant staircase for a long while, and came back as the first birds were just beginning to sing.
    Another weird thing about yesterday. Just as I was about to go to bed, I saw on my curtain the largest spider I’d ever seen in a non-tarantula context. It was huge, at least 4” across. I love spiders, and am usually honored to have them, but this one was a bit extreme, so I went to get a glass to put it outside. When I got back from the kitchen, it was gone. I think the manifestation of the giant spider was a sort of epigram of the day’s dark tumults.

April 4th, 2005
    This day I finally finished a large painting of a girl sitting before a round window. I’m happy with it, but I had all sorts of difficulties with the paint, and getting it to be opaque without beading or clumping up on the paper.
    Man, my immune system just cannot deal with being here. Having a succession of different intense colds for weeks on end sucks. Last night Mr. Liu came over and taught me to play Chinese chess. It’s quite interesting, in that it obviously derived from the same ancestor as international chess. It has Chinese characteristics though. It’s much faster moving, and easier to mate. Telling the pieces apart is a bit difficult though, they are just characters engraved on wooden discs, and the equivalent pieces have different characters on the red and black sides. Also, Mr. Liu told us our semester will be over at the end of May! I was thinking it was going to be in July. I can’t quite believe this, and keep an open mind.


April 5th, 2005
    This day the power was out all day. This made no difference until around 7 PM, when a feeling of gentleness and subtle quietude began to come over the town. Small candles appeared in shops. As the darkness grew, the usual carnivalesque atmosphere grew, which manifests whenever humans are liberated from their contrivances. On the streets, everyone was chatting outside. Forms moved softly in the dark. Without electricity, everyone’s faces became warm and alluring. Back at the school, the younger students were riotous. I was momentarily mobbed by them. How old are you? What is your name? What do you like? The older students were still in classes illuminated by candles. There seemed to be something special about how they sat quietly in their crowded rows, candles jammed in their inkpots, scratching away with their archaic pens. I walked by their rooms. From the first time I saw them there, I detected something larval about the scene, a quiescent brooding, like pupae nourished in their cells. I stood on the dirt soccer field and observed the candlelit rooms. The light of candles is so soft and warm, mysterious and gentle. The ghastly blast of electrical bulbs seems a screech made visible. The processes of growth and attraction cower from this high-pitched vibration. How is it that we live enthralled to our own creations, to whose parasitic, viral needs we constantly minister?
    A frantic trade in candles now passed through the shut school gates. I walked back to my flat, and drank a few beers outside, looking over the school wall to the darkened countryside. All the stars were bright and clear. I thought of my summers on Wassaw Island, following sea turtles up the beach in total darkness. Swift satellites passed overhead. All that dark, warm, vague and indistinct I love for it fosters growth and is human. Only insectoidal, facilitating mere and mindless reproduction of forms, are those things bright, cold, and exact.


April 8th, 2005
    Yesterday I was walking on the mountain when I happened across a few good citizens cleaning up the ubiquitous plastic trash that litters all horizontal surfaces. I was shocked to see, however, that instead of carrying the plastic away, they just put it in a big pile and burned it. In the west, burning plastic is just SO WRONG. It still shocks me to see it here, although I should be used to it. From their point of view, I guess it makes sense, as the plastic just goes “away.” Actually, I’m not sure which is environmentally worse, burning plastic, or just letting it sit in the ground forever.
    In other news, I am continually staggered by the amount of snot my nose can produce. It seems like at least a gallon a day. If this cold is like the rest, I should feel better by the middle of next week, during which period I may experience a brief window of health before the next version sets up shop. I can hear thunder now. A dark day.

April 11th, 2005
    Very sick and weak all day. Classes were grueling.

April 14th, 2005
    I’ve been feeling better, indeed well enough to walk in the countryside a bit again. I’m not exhausted after erasing the chalkboard anymore.
    I’ve been reading my roommate’s copy of Marco Polo’s Travels. The book is just staggering in its dull repetitiveness. The depictions of the cities are all wearily identical, the piling on of empty superlatives. It’s like it was written by a particularly dull twelve-year-old boy. Maybe that’s just how everything was in the 13th century. How could anyone have traveled all that way without any real reflections on what he saw? It’s just – “Here they produce many fine silks, here so much salt can be had for 50 Venetian grossi, here is a desert three day’s march across.” A constant refrain is “there is nothing else worth mentioning.” This appears at least once on every page. Almost every third sentence is “there is nothing else worth mentioning.” Marco Polo was a great blockhead.

April 17th, 2005
    The latest agricultural announcements- The rapeseed has finished flowering, and is now growing its pods. Mushrooms are disappearing from the markets. A certain tree with silver bark is flowering white and pink. It can be seen all across the countryside. Small corn and melon seedlings are being transplanted. I found a series of stickers of this shrimpy, cross-eyed girl. Lots of the more vacuous girls in the school like buying and peeling off these stickers. I guess this girl is a famous actress named Liu Li Fei. I’m not sure what they see in her. Aside from being walleyed, it looks like a stray leaf blowing in the wind could break her arm. I’ve started working on another painting in a mad, last attempt to stave off total boredom. I was even driven to the extreme of turning on the television, but it was mostly static. Both the AM and FM dials are totally blank here. Sometimes I listen to the shortwave radio. There is lots of jabbering in Chinese and Russian. At times, I can get a few stations in English, such as Radio Japan, Radio Australia, Radio Holland, and Radio Russia. Also the sublime BBC and the staggeringly moronic Voice of America, which seems to just play “Yankee Doodle” over and over again. Certain frequencies also broadcast sublime oceanic static, which can be interesting for a while. I’m certainly anticipating my vacation in two weeks. And now having told you of these things, I will tell you of something else. A smoked pig’s face can be had here for four Chinese Yuan. The people are idolaters, use paper money, and are subject to the great Khan. There is nothing else worth mentioning.

April 21st, 2005
    I’ve been working on my painting of a white Nagini or serpent girl whom I saw in a dream last October. She was in a cardboard box, shopping for vegetables. Being isolated out here really allows me to complete meticulous tasks like painting or reading Maco Polo, which otherwise I would lack the patience to do. Here there is only walking, painting, the internet, and facing the massa confusa of students four of five times a day.

April 22nd, 2005
    It’s a beautiful evening in spring. The moon and Venus have risen in intimate proximity through a faint mist, and a lovely smell of blossoms mingles strangely with the constant reek of shit. Last night I watched an awesome thunderstorm for hours.


April 24th, 2005
    This day while walking on the mountain I diverged up an obscure side path, and discovered some awesome eroded Buddhist carvings in an eroded cliff face. All of the heads had been knocked off, but people had still been making offerings of incense and flowers there. The whole place had a wonderful abandoned and overgrown feeling to it, all covered in ferns and mosses. Full moon today. Only one week left before my holiday! My parents sent me a Dickens book David Copperfield, which I have been devouring like the starved man that I am. Actually, I think that might have been another planet near the moon, as it was too high to have been Venus.

April 26th, 2005
    The temperature appears to have risen above some point crucial to the metabolism of insects. An issue of ants, resplendent with wings, pours from a bathroom groutcrack. Stylish beetles in orange and black waft about. A butterfly alights on my shirt, and probes a stain with curled tongue. Heavy bugs bumble against the screens at night. Meanwhile, I notice many strange and new plants. Something like a fuzzy Belladonna, and another shrubbery with mitten-like leaves, reminding me of Sassafras.
    For the past few days, students from other schools have been coming here to take exams. They have evidently never seen laowai before. Today about a hundred of the gathered around me, staring moronically and laughing hysterically when I said “Hi.” They tried to invade my class, and I drove them out. They all crammed in to peer through the windows. I sometimes feel bad that I’m not more friendly towards this type of behavior, but there is such a strong temptation to lash them all thoroughly.

April 28th, 2005
    I’ve just bought my bus ticket to Chengdu, with the help of many people around the station.

May Journal

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