Home  |  Art  |  Writing  |  Travel  |  Shop

March Journal

In which I explore the countryside and note some Chinese characteristics.

March 1st, 2005
    This day my ear cleared, Hamdulillah. I also obtained a large portrait of a complacent, tortoise-like communist official, apparently Deng Xio Ping.

March 3rd, 2005
    Have I remarked here that the Chinese feel no guilt at flagrantly laughing at people who hurt themselves? Once here on a crazy bus ride from Datong to Taiyuan, the bus driver slammed on the brakes, causing passengers to impact into the dashboard. Everyone laughed. Also when I was hiking in the mountains near Dali, I encountered a group on men up there, dressed in full-on business uniform with polished shoes and shiny ties. One of these slipped and fell into a deep mud pit, and was monstrously befouled. His companions all found the incident hilarious. Today walking around Yilong I saw a tiny girl, about two or three years old skipping merrily about. She chanced, however, to skip in the direction of a large pile of shit. She stepped directly in it and slipped, landing square in the main pile. A passing group of old grandmas all started laughing uproariously. Momentarily after the main impact, I expected the grandmas to rush over in sympathy, so it was particularly hilarious when they just busted up laughing instead.
    Perhaps this phenomenon is related to the extremely gruesome photographs of traffic accident victims posted up all over. Often police stations will feature startling expositions of these appalling images, apparently taken fresh at the scenes of accidents. Hacked off mangled limbs, collapsed skulls, oozing pools of blood, limbless torsos crushed into mechanized wreckage- all are on display. In fact, I saw one of these posters tacked up in the middle of an elementary school playground! Similarly, a nearby hospital in Yilong has a big outdoor display of absolutely horrific photographs of advanced stages of malignant breast cancer, posted up in a glass case by the main entrance. Also various endoscopic images of diseased innards. I can see no explanation for this frank rejoicing in horror. Of course, these are exactly the sorts of images we secretly want to see. In China, no moral or aesthetic qualms prevent their flagrant display.


March Fourth! 2005
    This day I leaned that our school will have no electricity for two days next week, so we’ll have to teach over the week-end, then have a shortened week next week. Uh. Seven days of straight teaching. Perhaps this will give me an excuse to purchase some of those inverted red conical candles sold at Buddhist temples everywhere. Maybe also the school’s vexatious bells and canned music will be mercifully terminated.
    A strange moment occurred today. I finished teaching my last class, and was walking home through the school grounds. The students clean the school themselves, and hundreds of them were sweeping the stone pavement with long brooms. Music was playing over the loudspeakers, but it was so distorted and echoing that it sounded very like the eerie calls of whales. Sunlight of the late afternoon slanted down. The faint pings of ping-pong balls could be heard, as well as the tingling music of the stonemasons. It seemed almost a holy moment. I walked out to my skyship on the mountain and watched the sunset.

March 6th, 2005
    It’s early afternoon, and I’ve just gotten back from a long walk in the countryside. It turns out we do have this weekend off after all, so I set off a little after dawn, walked down the ridge, into the valley, then hiked up the big ridge on the other side. The highest part of this is a prominent knob, upon which I found a very old and dilapidated abandoned temple. It was full of litter and all overgrown. Several of the gods and guardian demons were missing heads or limbs. This only made it all the more atmospheric. I sacrificed a piece of bread to a goddess, and then climbed up a rickety staircase to a small elevated platform where I ate the rest. It was a beautiful day in the early spring. Next I hiked over to a white pagoda on another mountain. It’s quite interesting walking through the countryside here, as most of the paths are narrow ridges between flooded fields. Sometimes there’s quite a drop on one or both sides. As the land is all terraced, walking along the contours is easy, but it can sometimes be difficult to find a way down to a lower level. Lots of people were out there, working hard, hoeing their rows, or gathering sticks from the bits of forest. Ducks and piglets wandered freely. I’d seen this white pagoda from all over Yilong, and was quite determined to reach it. I crossed a road and headed up the opposite hillside, through scattered houses. The kids were scared of me and ran away, but later gathered up the courage to yell “Hello!” and “Good Morning!” from behind bushes. I was disappointed to find my way up hill blocked by a huge line of cliffs extending in both directions. Not really knowing what else to do, I followed a very small path up through the woods to the base of the cliff. There in the rock was a large triangular entrance to a cave. I climbed in and perceived a dim glow emanating from the back. I climbed up towards it, and soon emerged from a hole in the ground into a meadow leading right up to the base of the pagoda! A small, poignant, abandoned amusement park stood at the pagoda’s base. Happily, the pagoda was open, and I was able to climb to the top. Each level had a small shrine and a strange painting. From the small windows at the top, I could see all of Yilong and the surrounding countryside. I also met two of my students near the pagoda. I walked back to Yilong past the horrific town dump and bought candles. Indeed, the power is out now.

March 7th, 2005
    The second week of teaching is underway. I don’t feel the students are really learning too much from me though. In fact, I’m not really supposed to teach them anything at all, only to help them practice speaking what they know and have learned in their “Chinese” English classes. I have yet to discover an effective way to do this to 80-90 people at once.


March 10th, 2005
    Last night I went out to dinner with my roommate Arron and his friends from the hair salon. It was a Hogo, or hotpot restaurant. Nine of us crowded around a little table with a vat of boiling oil in the center. The small trays of meat and veggies were dipped into the oil, then fished out. Fortunately, there were a few non-meat offerings as well. All the meat was very weird looking-the sort of stuff you’d throw away in the West, like stomachs, gizzards, piles of reeking offal, unidentifiable internal growths. There wasn’t any actual meat, as in muscle tissue. It was quite good and very spicy. We drank beer and baijio from little glasses. The modus bibendi here is very amusing. It seems like some demented combination of hard-core Slavonic boozing contest and a little girl’s imaginary tea party. Every time you drink, you must make a toast and drain the glass, but the glass contains only about 1.5 ounces of beer. A few misty droplets of the hard liquor baijio may be had from a thimble sized glass. Thus despite all the toasting and slamming of glasses, you end up having the equivalent of two drinks in an evening. This seems about right for the locals, but it made me want to go home and just drink a beer by myself.

March 15th, 205
    I’ve managed to acquire an amazing, high-octane, version 27.0 supermax cold. Snot production has octupled this quarter. Every cold I get is subtly different, perhaps like fine wines. The most virulent begin with some degree of throat soreness, and progress downwards from there. My favorites are of course the ones that dement my cognitive powers. Such is the one I’ve got now.
    It’s no wonder all of the world’s most virulent viruses originate in China. The conditions are perfect. In fact, China is an ideal natural laboratory for the creation of powerful colds. It is cold and damp. The buildings are drafty and unheated. Millions of people live crammed together in close proximity, and the local etiquette strongly encourages spitting, hacking, and flagrant roadside snotshots. Also, animals live right alongside the humans. At least sinus-draining hot peppers are included in every meal.




March 18th, 205
    Yesterday the weather dried out a bit, so I went on a walk beyond the mountain into the countryside. I had to stop and rest every so often, because I’m still sick. I found several interesting little stone staircases up the steep hillsides, between the buildings and mini fields. I walked out past some beehives and down a long slope. It’s interesting how dog’s reactions to me are so exactly dependent on the subtleties of my mental state. I stopped to read Dostoevsky in a small burned field, then continued down into the valley. The steep clustered apartments of Yilong looked strange propped up on their concrete pillars. At one point, I rounded a corner and came across a large group of children standing near an earthen building. I smiled at them, and they stared dumbstruck, shaking their sticky-out pigtails. Then I came around to the front of the building and saw it was a school. All the kids standing there had a serious spazz when they saw me, like I was a UFO. A few of the braver ones ventured to shake my proffered hand. I continued up another narrow and steep staircase, past a massive sleeping hog, and into town. I’ve noticed that some people stare at me with this special expression that seems to say “OK, I knew things like you existed, and if I saw you in a textbook or a zoo, that would be alright, but you’re just walking around on the street? What?” Most people gaze inscrutably though. Many seem about to burst with excitement when they see me, like they just found a four-leafed clover.
    It can be difficult for Americans to imagine what it must be like to have lived your entire life in a place where everyone you’ve ever encountered has been from the exact same ethnic group as you.


March 21st, 2005
    I’ve been walking around the countryside, and it’s very beautiful now. The little fields are filled with intense yellow flowers. Also, something purple is abloom. Possibly peas. The air smells wonderful. At least when it doesn’t smell like raw human shit. I’ve been trying to memorize the locations of accursed dogs. A surreal occurrence occurred this morning. As I was passing a school building, I heard the mass chanting that characterizes Chinese educational methods, but thought it sounded like English. Listening more closely, I detected the syllables of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech being subjected to mass chanting. …to be self-evident… TO BE SELFEDIDNIN! …I have a dream… I HAVE A DREAM!… that even in the state of Mississippi…THAT EVENIN DASATEOF IDIBIBIDDY!... and so on. It was so weird to hear something like that being chanted by hundreds of people in unison. Such is Chinese English class.

March 24th, 2005
    This day I again had a nice long walk in the countryside. I hiked across the valley, and up to the dilapidated temple, where I left some flowers. I had much trouble with dogs along the way, but drove them off by picking up stones, or pretending to do so. The farmers were busy preparing the muddy fields, and planting seeds. People often look at me like a ghost, and rarely respond when I say “Hello” or “Ni Hao.” I think the American equivalent would be if you turned into the frozen foods aisle of the supermarket and saw a fully armed Roman Centurion looking through the TV dinners. It just doesn’t process for a long time, if at all.


March 29th, 2005
    I haven’t had much to write in this diary lately, as my life has been quite repetitive. I arise at 8:30, go out to get some greasy buns for breakfast, come back and check my email, teach classes, work on my painting, go out to eat spicy noodles on the main street at 6:30, come back and drink a few beers, get thrashed a few times by the computer at chess, and go to bed a little after 10. Occasionally, I go out walking in the mountain or the fields. I’ve been trying to find new things to do, but there’s a pretty limited set of things to do around here. I’ve also been reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. It seems a bit unusual for him, as it’s quite comical in many places. Still, it has the usual Dostoevsky scorpionic nature. This is what the world would be like if everyone was a Scorpio.

March 30th, 2005
    A curious dream: I received a fascinating package, and was about to open it up, when I woke up, still aching with curiosity to find out what was in it. This led to interesting meditations. Whatever was going to have been in the package would have been a product of my own mind, since I was the one dreaming. Yet once awake, I was powerless to have learned what I would have invented a few moments ago. Anything I came up with afterwards, say a book or a talisman would have been a spurious interpolation, not the “real” contents of the package. Had I managed to stay asleep a moment longer I could have known the real contents. This dilemma seems to me to be an indication of the unreality of the self, or a suggestion that multiple selves are streaming through our consciousness. Lately, I’ve been conceptualizing consciousness as something like a hole or pinprick in a membrane, through which a heavy liquid like mercury is flowing. I picture a vast balloon filled with mercury, which is leaking out of numerous pinholes. The mercuric fluid is undifferentiated in the interior of the balloon, but creates an array of dynamic individual consciousnesses as it pours out through the holes. Thus consciousness is neither a thing, nor merely a process, but a relational dynamic resulting from the leakage of a superabundant unitary reservoir.


April Journal


Home  |  Art  |  Writing  |  Travel  |  Shop