A lonely and desperate exposure in China
Posted: November 29, 2009 Filed under: BLOG | Tags: china, loneliness, love, madness 11 Comments »The students had always found this teacher to be intelligent, and thoughtful. He never censored them, and was interested in their opinions. They respected him, and thought him a good teacher.
On Thursday, he came and asked them, “can we just talk?” And so they put the syllabus aside and talked, about philosophy, culture, politics. The big stuff. But there were hints that all was not OK. He divulged embarrassing personal details: he was 30, still lived with his parents, didn’t have a girlfriend.
The next day he came to class, and started the same. He spoke of Nietzsche, Confucious, the Sino-Japanese war, liberty, equality, freedom, the past, the future – but these students weren’t at a level of Chinese where they could fully understand him. But still he spoke, he rambled, on and on. One of the French students described it as, “mettre son âme à nu” – literally, “undress his soul”.
And then, in the midst of this undressing of the soul, he undressed his body as well. For fifteen minutes, in front of a shocked, horrified class, he stood, talked, completely naked.
When this true and scandalous story rippled through the university that day, eventually reaching me in the afternoon, it saddened me greatly, and has haunted me ever since. How desperately lonely he must be. How shocking this act, how incredible, but also how human.
Isn’t that what we all want? For people, for someone to know we exist. Know that I am here. See me for what I really am.
And is this blog not a similar kind of sad, self-exposure?
Only days earlier I read this disconcerting story, of a lonely and isolated Chinese student in Sydney who went mad and stabbed a cabbie to death. There is madness in the air. Do we all stand teetering on the edge? What does it take for someone to so suddenly slip and find themselves falling?
I worry about what prolonged loneliness may do to me.
I met a guy at a party and thought him tall and attractive. I liked how deliberately he talked. He had a masculine presence, and when I talked to him I felt like he was really all there, a full person, giving me his careful, clear and undivided attention. And there was something intriguing about him, he didn’t seem like the rest. And I was certain he too was curious about me.
Then I felt a huge, angry sock in my stomach. No!
Why do I do this? Why do I over romanticise like this? Why do I see magic in a moment that has none? There was no special connection, this isn’t the beginning of a story, of which I am a protagonist. I and he are not interesting, sexy or worthy of writing about. There is nothing and no one in this. We are just two strangers sharing the same space. We are all alone together, not touching.
I blame novels. I blame movies, music and art. But most of all, I blame novels.
I am on the verge of finishing Jean-Paul Satre’s The Age of Reason, and I blame him. Life, and the people in it, will somehow never be as alive as the invented reality of that novel. Because in that fictional existence, every single element has a purpose. Every single thing serves a higher meaning, something concrete and purposeful – the beauty of the narrative.
But in my narrative – that is life – there is no point. Things are just there, for no reason, and they don’t give a fuck about me, and any need for something real, and deliberate.
When this guy saw me, he probably saw an empty body, and felt nothing. When I saw him, there was nothing beyond my projected desire for authenticity, meaning, connection, love, respect, friendship, – and a narrative that has some sort of point, some bracketed subtext where I could say “the reason why this happened is because …, and how extraordinary and worthy it was.”
Instead of being here, like a ghost. All of us living in suspended states, revolving door strangers, together alone, not touching.
I am not in China. Not really.
Posted: November 29, 2009 Filed under: BLOG | Tags: china, ex-pat life, foreigners, learning a language 4 Comments »“Wo bu zai zhong guo!” (“I am not in China!”) I cried.
My laoshi (teacher) was confused, and thought perhaps I hadn’t expressed myself properly. “Ni zai nar?” (“Where are you?”) she asked.
“Wo zai wai guo ren di fang.” (“I am in the foreign people’s place.”) I replied, gumly.
And it’s true. I’m not in China – not really. I am in this absurd Westerners’ bubble. I study and socialise only with foreigners, in foreigner populated places. I hardly ever speak Mandarin. I have no idea what is happening in China because I can’t read their news sites, and I’m not talking in a meaningful way to any Chinese on a regular basis.
Here I am, living and breathing in this bizarre parallel universe, and there are all these things happening here, so many things for me to learn about this place – and I am like a blind, deaf and mute woman in their midst.
There is only two hours a week that I am actually in China, and that is when I gatecrash the zhong guo xue sheng (Chinese students’) class. As I step into that room on a Tuesday morning, the effect is immediately transformative. It’s like crossing a national boundary: I enter a space that is inhabited by Chinese, for the Chinese, the Chinese being themselves.
Yes the class is in English, but they are all Chinese. The tutor is Chinese. The material is prepared for Chinese students. They discuss things among each other, as Chinese. Sure, when I speak up I’m like a foreign spice added to the mix, but most of the time I am just a fly on the wall.
Why am I here? I discussed this with an Australian friend, who, in agreement with my sentiment, commented, “if I was here to just have fun, there are better cities to do that. Beijing isn’t a very fun city.”
And it’s true. The nightlife and creative scene has nothing on London, New York, Berlin, even Sydney. The weather sucks. The city is monstrously big, and just cannot compare when it comes to the chilled out, happy-good-times lifestyle of home. Not to mention, most importantly, it has none of the people I care about the most in this world (although don’t get me wrong, potentially some of my new friends here will prove to be lifelong buddies.)
So why am I here? I’m here to be in China. To really be in China. Because I am interested in the people, the culture, and this nation’s future – that will, in many ways, become the future of humanity. And because there is a good chance that I will become so interested, I will want to become a part of what is “going on” here.
Well then, what to do? It’s time I entered China – for real this time, and at least for most of the week. I’m going to start off with the language. From Monday to Thursday, only speak in Chinese. And next semester I want to move out of university dorms and into a share apartment with Chinese – one of whom should speak no English. And I want to meet up with more language partners, and just generally be making more of an effort to speak, speak, speak, connect, bathe, drown in China.
Move over Kanye, meet Han Han (my new Chinese lover)
Posted: November 25, 2009 Filed under: BLOG | Tags: celebrity crushes, china, 韩寒, han han, love 6 Comments »I’m in love.
His name is 韩寒, or Han Han. He’s a young, Chinese novelist, blogger and, and, AND, A RACECAR DRIVER. That triple threat just made by brain explode all over the keyboard.
Oh and I almost forgot to mention, he’s gorgeous.
This all started when, yesterday, I asked the class about young, Chinese artists and writers today. Were their works political? Did they examine themes like class struggle?
The tutor answered that writers today covered a broader range of topics: gender, sexuality, and ethnic minorities (by that she was referring to this nation’s ethnic minorities, of which there are 55. But they’re greatly outnumbered by the 91% of the nation who fall into the Han group – of which I belong to.)
The class brought up two, exciting young writers, of the “post 80s generation” (the generation born after 1980, which is when the Chinese government began to strictly enforce the one-child policy.) Their stories were very “alternative” and highly relevant to the Chinese youth. Neither had gone to university, and one had even dropped out of high school. The tutor commented it was interesting that these writers, poster children of the new gen of Chinese, had always operated “out of the system”.
The next day, and reflecting on these two writers thought to myself, boy they sound sexy! I kicked myself for not having written down their names, so jumped on the internet and emailed my friend from the class about them. She wrote back,
The two youth writers we were talking about are 韩寒 (Han Han) and 郭敬明 (Guo Jingming), both of whom belong to the post-80s generation writers. Han Han is more realistic and thought-provoking (he is also an awsome F1 driver) while Guo Jingming is more dreamy and commercial. You may find them an interesting comparison.
I quickly Googled Han Han. Hot, I knew it! I found him on Wikipedia, and by the end of the page, was, am, desperately in love. (I’m going to pause here before this post descends into a rabble of Twi-fan proportion OMG HE’S SOOOOO HAAAWWWWT WE ARE TOTES MEANT TO BE TOGETHER etc. etc. So let me just say that if you read the Wikipedia entry, it’s like God made an imprint of everything my subconscious had been looking for in a soulmate. - OK that was a bit much.)
I was bursting to tell someone. I grabbed my Chinese friend on gchat and “announced” that I was in love. I asked if she knew of my lover, and of course she did, he’s quite famous here, saying “he’s pretty rebellious and has written many articles critizing the government and stuff.”
But I wondered how out of the system he really was. I found this article from the New York Times that focuses on Guo Jingming, but also mentions Han Han:
Guo is the most successful of a dozen young celebrity authors who make up the “post-’80s” generation, some others of whom have also achieved book sales in the millions. This group includes the high school dropout and professional car racer Han Han, 25, who derides China’s inefficient educational system in his novels and regularly insults older, more established artists on his blog, and Zhang Yueran, 26, whose novel “Daffodils Took Carp and Went Away” features a bulimic girl who falls in love with her stepfather, is mistreated by her mother and is sent off to boarding school.
While the Chinese government frequently jails dissident writers or forces them into exile, it mostly ignores the antics of Guo and the other post-’80s writers. For all their flamboyance, they exemplify the social ideals of the new China — commercialism and individualism — said Lydia Liu, a professor of Chinese and comparative literature at Columbia University. They “don’t pose any threat,” Liu said. “They collaborate.”
Without being able to read Chinese, it’s hard for me to comment. In any case, I have something new to motivate me when it comes to my language studies: I want to be able to read Han Han’s blog. I may even say that the next time I get answered the stock standard expat question: “why did you decide to learn Chinese?”
- “So that I’m able to read Han Han’s blog. …DUH.”
More interesting posts, about the interesting Han Han:
Which airline has the hottest flight attendants?
Posted: November 19, 2009 Filed under: LIFE & STYLE, TRAVEL, WORKS | Tags: airflight attendants, airlines, feature, ninemsn Leave a comment »ninemsn
There’s nothing like a bit of eye candy to help ease the pain of a long flight. And while anti-discriminatory lawsuits may have put an end to the days in which “stewardesses” were hired on looks and coquettishness (not to mention the short hemlines!), there are still some airlines that recapture elements of the long-gone glamour era of flying.
