Re: Last post and feeling validated by a web program.

uhhh...
"for expressing myself in this media"
"this wily experiment called the internet"

I don't take it all back or anything, I do like We Feel Fine, but that last post was uncharacteristic, somehow, maybe the over-joyed language, I was in a mood. I don't feel so validated as much 10 hours later. Maybe becuase I couldn't hone the WFF application to find shoesonawire. Suppose what I wanted to find was for the quote about being "heard as extraterrestrial" to be layered on top of an image of the WFF graphic. To imbed a message to WFF itself about it's own design. And that this bubble would link to my post about WFF and vice versa, like a self-awareness loop. Or product placing WFF in its own self. But it didn't work, yet. Also, I was in a mood, and from reading those last few sentences, maybe the mood lingers

I feel validated! Please, find me We Feel Fine!

"It's a bit like sending radio waves into outer space, like there is no expectation that someone will respond, but there is the slight hope that keeps you beaming things out. Why else would one do it, right? But then time trods on and you forget that hope." After having just typed this sentence about blogging in an email to a special person I haven't heard from, or written to, hardly ever since coming to China, I stopped. I left the email unfinished, and unsent, it was turning into a letter I didn't really want to send, into a letter that made me feel sad and pitying just typing it, and I didn't even know if what I wrote was true to how I felt, out of touch with everything and everyone. I went to take a shower and I started to cry just a little. Then I caught myself in the mirror (it's a small bathroom). I frooze my expression just to see what it looked liked when I cried. My faced was a little squished, eyebrows sunken, nostrals astride, comically sad, like a child whose fallen and having belatedly realized it supposes it should cry, then forms its face as such, then automatically the tears begin to roll as if it were just a matter facial configuration, what happens when the face is like this. Then I felt like I was in a pathetic student art film about a wayward girl in big strange city. Then I thought "That's dumb. Stop it... I wonder if the new episode of Theory of Everything is up yet." I dried up went back to the computer. It was. I listened, I looked, I linked, to this "We Feel Fine" And now I feel oddly validated for expressing myself in this media, like the hope to be found and heard is not so extraterrestiral.. This is no doubt one of the most beautiful and fascintating pieces of art and technology I have ever seen/used in my life. It's everything I love about the potential of art and analytics to reflect, bring together, and lend validity to the feelings that we (I) too often leave unsent. Hoping to be heard.

I know you will love it, too. It's worth your time to see what we're capable of doing with this wily experiment called the Internet. The application "mines" the entire internet, or at least it's vast global network of blogs, for the word feel. Then it gathers information about that person's location, gender, age, information that is typically displayed somewhere on a personal blog. Then it plucks that sentence containing the word feel and assigns it a shape and color. It is a circle if it is a just text and square if the sentence is accompanied by a photograph. Colors correspond to thousands of adjectives for emotions. The little packet is then spewed out onto a flying universe of other little packets containing their own feelings. Click on a little colored shape and the quote from the blog, and sometimes a photograph arrive on the screen. Click on the quote and you are taken directly to that blog. The We Feel Fine application continues to baffle and amaze as it can sort and search this data by a multitude of variables such as country, state, city, gender, age, individual emotion and even the weather at the time the particualr blog was posted. So you can ask questions like, "How many 20-something women in Beijing posted about feeling validated when it was cloudy outside?" The movements: madness, murmurs, mobs, metrics, montage, mounds at the bottom of the screen allow the user to play with way this data can be analyzed and displayed. The feelings scramble and coalesce and scramble again in a lovable way over the black space-like field. It's funny and incredible. Please, Please, click on the above image, then click again on "Open We Feel Fine", then wait for it to load, look at it, and play with it. And keep in mind, it's all true, these are real people and it's all happening right now! Listen to this week's Benjamin Walker's** Theory of Everything for the project's explanation.

**He does it again!

Popping the Skin, Glue Hands, Toward Entropy: Amusing Oneself on a Shoe-String

High, I started and maintained it through the weekend, but alas the week began in a quiet, uncomfortable desperation. Something was sitting in my stomach, and inviting friends. The weather has turned damp and mild, which is welcomed, but… well, there are no complaints. I prefer the grey cool to any of the prior suffocating humidity that kept me indoors bored and restless in front of the air conditioner. I can now again ride my bike to school without walking into class with sweat rolling down my temples. Without subsequently interrupting my own lesson to take swigs from a liter of ice water, (which, it seems, is some kind of miniature spectacle because my students say “Whoaaa!” every time I take a drink ).

The end of the month has come and I am living on the equivalent of $4 US dollars until payday next Friday. Which is sufficient but certainly not enough to be confidant about my purchasing decisions, (I.e. baozi for lunch or bus ride home?). Consider that: I am saving bus rides for ‘special’ occasions (like it’s pissing rain). I am also soaking in all the free internet entertainment I can get. On my downloading list are random episodes of the mediocre British TV show, This is Alan Partridge, the HBO comedy Curb your Enthusiasm, PDF e-books of author Phillip K Dick in particular “Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said” “A Man Whose Teeth were all Exactly Alike” and “We Can Build You”, another PDF I don’t remember downloading but apparently did is ambiguously and portentously titled “Tips on Controlling your Symptoms.” I am afraid to open it, what if I start controlling a symptom I always liked about myself, such as being a Night Person, or being simultaneously lazy and ambitious when I need to be, or being both selectively apathetic and selectively passionate in proportional quantities.

I went running about 45 minutes ago and came home to find after taking off my shirt that my dark sunburned upper back was speckled with small glistening bubbles. I rubbed my hand over my back shoulder and they burst and sent thin spray of water onto the mirror. I then rubbed a towel over the area and the skin rolled off like glue on my hands when I was a kid and would secretly squirt glue on my hands in class so that I could spend Math or History lesson peeling it off under my desk while pretending to pay attention. Speaking of pretending to pay attention, I am the Teacher now. And now I am wise to such schemes, but I can also recall how hidden I used to feel when ever I got away with it, or whatever else I did back then. My back is hideous. I am rolling off skin in-between sentences.

My students, despite their wiggly 9 year old instinct toward entropy, are shimmering glorious children, comparatively so. They listen when I snap them to attention. They get jumpy and high-five each other when they get the right answer or when I announce they are the winners (BTW, I let the students pick their team names. Incidentally, today, it was “Italy” vs. “Building”) But despite, again, their shininess, it may never make them excited as me to hear a turn of the century prison song from the American South. Never as enthusiastic as I was, today, when I sang KTV-style to a recording of Leadbelly’s “Rock Island Line” and “Midnight Special.” I sang excitedly, but contained…teacher-ly. We were picking a song to sing at the Summer Show Case and the choice were the two above, and one other (the winner), “Nine Million Bicycles in Beijing,” It’ a lovely love song, but it’s performance will be not nearly as entertaining as seeing twenty Chinese 9 year olds singing a song about asking Governors about pardons and prison bells and sitting down to a plates full of nothing. I adore singing Leadbelly songs. They’re always in the perfect key. They’re about places that I know like Houston and Sugar land, but they make those places seem more sultry and Southern than I have ever known them. They’re sorrowful, but sassy, and I like that; but seeing Teacher in her ZONE is not even enough to get them excited about that. “Grieving, Whooping, Hollering, and A-Cryin” It’s not their fault. They had there arms outstretched on their desk with their chins digging into them by the time I had come to. It’s not their fault. I was just in for amusing myself today.

I am announcing a Contest! Guess whose photographs are on my television and I will send you a homemade postcard! All the way from China!

A Bike Ride to Where?

I've been teaching 30 classes a week, summer sessions are intense so it is given me a regular 8 to 5 schedule. It's been rather exhausting, but my new students are fantastic. With all the work, the weekends take on a higher significance, I must do something special. Yesterday, I headed out on my bike with no particular destination, at least no cities in mind, no expectations of what I would find. But I knew I would find something beyond the mountains around ShiJing Shan. So I headed north through the frustrating city streets, riding kind of grumpily because of all the traffic. About an hour later, finally out of the city I was at the foot of Fragrant Hills. I found a pretty road and went up and gloriusly over (My first chance to coast down a hill since being in monotonously flat Beijing). On the other side I found a blue sky and green hill paradise, as far as Chinese mildy-populated countrysides go.

I have noticed that a few Chinese factories can be some of the more lovelier places around town. Highly manicured gardens and gates surround some complexes. I think this has something to do with the pride of industry. The streets around some of these more successful factories tend to be really clean and beautified with landscaping.

A street fight that no one did anything about. I watched these three move around the sidewalk in a three way arm lock for about 5 minutes. Cars would stop and watch in the middle of traffic. Its stupendous! Its Chinese! that is gawking about a scene not doing anything. If someone, for sintance a fruit seller is having a loud arguement with another fruit seller, People will just encircle them from a close distance watching with their arms crossed like like looking at a sculpture in a museum. I've seen crowds gather around several bike accidents, crowds around someone speaking very loudy with other people. Its bizarre, but I suppose I do it too now.

The green river bed caused by the daming the river. The city in the distance is an island (but of course now there is no water surrounding it)

The front of the dam. Behind it of course is the river.

 

New Trees
Cleanest unattended public bathroom in China.

 

 

 

A little village outside of Shimenying Island city.
From the picture behind the chinese characters one might infer that the village might have once flanked the now dammed river.
This is a poster mural for the future vision of the city surrounding Shimenying Island.
This guy was across the street from the poster.

I arrived home after four hours on the bike, a nice afternoon ride, with a red back and a couple obnoxious white tan lines. We don't get many clear blue days like this. I was lucky. The sunburn is a badge of adventure. So I took my sunburn into Salitun in Beijing and met some friends for some drinks and dancing till morning. A day was had.

The Hill Park in pictures

I live behind those behind those towers.

(She's not mad. We are neighbors! and after I took her picture she smiled.)

That day there was some Chinese Wrestling in the commons:

The entrance to the community garden and nursery.

These are the Whizzy Whirlers. And this is their Whizzy Whirling Court. I don't understand whizzy whirling (nor do I know its real name), but I do know it is the adult version of a extreme mega yo-yo. It's really big and requires a huge string and elaborate whirling arm movements. And the whizzy whirler makes a loud whirring sound like the drone of a landing space ship. You can hear it from far away such as when your walking on the sidewalk outside the park and when you mistakenly think this is the sound of an air raid.

One sidewalk, three scenes passed.

Fiddling bike lot attendent.

Unattended sack of tubule shaped prawn crackers.

No chiggers, but hard vs. Chiggers, but soft.

The Painter.

I cannot explain why I wrote this story. Tonight, I was walking home from the subway, about a 20 minute walk, and it or something similar to it, just mulled about in my head. I wanted to tell a story with the details and incomplete pictures that I was passing on the street: Salons, young women, old women, men crouched playing cards, a boy and girl fighting under a street lamp, casting shadows of themselves on the ground. Not quite a story about the details themselves, maybe more about how the details make one feel. I don't quite know, yet. Anyway, it is complete ficton:


The Painter

I stood in the rain underneath the flashing red salon on a quiet midnight corner. I wore a silk scarf around my hair. It was pouring rain. I used the pay phone at the newsstand. The owner insisted that he dial the number for me, but I begged him to do it myself. What if he recognized the number? He answered, drowsily like he had been napping before I called. In the background I heard the sound of a women with a deep voice singing. I told him I was here.

He arrived under a yellow umbrella and, softly without looking at my face, told me his name. He took my hand and wrapped my fingers around the handle, securing my grip. I could not tell if he was handsome. He was slender, but I could not tell his stature. He was hunched over as a man who knows how to serve-- a hotel man, a bathhouse man, a stick-stick man, a man who waits on another, whose business is to be polite. I said thank you. He stepped aside tucked his head under his jacket collar and ran bouncing ahead of me, over puddles. Eventually he stopped cold beneath a stoop of a grey concrete building. He straightened up and brushed the water from his shoulders and fixed his hair with his hands. He was not far.

He waited patiently until I arrived. Then he took the umbrella from my hands and briskly shook the water out. As I stood next to him I felt his true stature; tall with broad, but narrow shoulders. He made me feel like a bird. "Thank you", I said. “Please,” he said, motioning into a unlit stairwell. We walked up five floors in the dark. He unlocked the top bolt on his outer metal door and pushed in the wooden inner door. He had lit a sweet incense, it immediately warmed me. The music I had heard on the phone had lingered in the room, emanating from somewhere. I was disoriented in the smallness of his many little rooms, which seemed to flow into another.

He led me by the hand to his back sitting parlor, near the laundry-hanging porch. The lights were very low and cast a red glow. His walls were covered in colorful silk paintings. He had a printed landscape paper dressing screen, the kind my grandmother had when I was young. He picked it up and placed it in the middle of the room. In front of it he placed two small squatting stools. I stood against the threshold, half into the room, half unsure if I was ready. But his methodical, quiet, sensitive preparations about the room enlivened a faith and trust in men I had only felt once before, and but for only a momentary instant. I stood in the memory of this instant, incense heavy in my lungs, everything heavy and dissolving, like hands sinking into the sand beneath a tide.

It was my regular bus, not particularly crowded. I was reading a rolled up novel. Instead of holding the bar I straddled my legs to keep my balance. The bus, it lurched violently and unexpectedly. I felt nothing but a strong thick arm around my waist. I turned to find an older man standing behind me, holding me with one arm and grasping the overhead bar with another. He had stopped me from falling forward. This happened so so briefly, but I looked in his eyes and felt like he was my father, then I dropped my eyes and looked at his jaw and neck and thought he was my husband. I wanted to believe this forever. Then reality came into resolution as he released me. He said that he was sorry for touching me, but he thought I might have hurt myself. The bus began to roll again. Reality was that I had neither.

“How did you find about me?” He asked, as he continued to gather brushes, bowls and sat them around the stools. The deep voice of the foreign woman seemed louder than before.
“The girls in the salon shop. They always joke about you. Few people think you are real…”
“It‘s better if I am not.”
He came up to me and again took my hand with his two. He guided me to the center of the room, to the stools under which lay a papery drip cloth and on top scattered about were small ceramic bowls of oily paint.
“Stand here,” he said. I stood in front of the paper screen.

It was beautiful and bizarre music, such that I had never heard before with swelling violins and strange clanging cymbals.
“Who is this woman?”
“Far Oz…Fur Ou..I am sorry I cannot properly say her name.”
“What language is she speaking? It makes me quite sad, her voice. Like she is crying for a dead person.”
“It is the language they speak in Lebanon.”
Sometimes, like at that moment, it frightens me when someone says a thing that I have no idea about. My chest becomes cold, but my face is hot. I say nothing, but I laugh.

“What did I say? I thought you were sad?” He laughs.
He crouches in front of me arranging the stool and the bowls. Then he turns his head up and looks into my eyes for the first time. He has enormous grey eyes, with double eyelids.
I said “You are not from here, are you?”
“It is apparent, no?” He looks at my shoes. “I am from Turpan, Xinjiang.” I moved my foot slightly. “But, don’t let that fool you” He laughed and placed both of his hands gently on each toe of my dirty black dress shoes. “I lived all of my life in Hong Kong. Up until now of course.”
With his head bent I looked at the swirl of hair at the crown of his head. Flex of it were grey, but he couldn’t have been more than 35, but then again I can never tell a man’s age. What do I know about men, especially this one from the edges of the land?
“And that‘s where you learned how to do this?” I said.
The music fell quiet.
“I’m still learning,” he said while removing his hands and standing up and then he leaving the room.

He came back in with a cup of tea in one hand and a taro popsicle in the other. He asked if I wanted either and I said I suppose I will eat the ice cream. He placed the tea on a small table.
“Please, put your right foot here,” He patted the stool and crouched on the other in front of my foot. He guided my foot onto the stool and brushed off my shoe with a soft bristle brush. He did not touch my skin at all. He told me to relax. I tried, but this was closer than I typically come to a man. Or at least a man who was like this one, gentle. Those others were not men. Had I ever known a man? My back was ramrod straight. With my right leg propped up, knee bent slightly, my dress fell to the sides at the knee. He was crouched low, low enough to be impolite, but he kept his eyes and attention upon my right shoe. I licked the sweet cream popsicle

“Listen to the music” he said.
My shoulder’s began to fall slightly. I could not see what he was doing to my shoe, because my skirt fell in the way. He was hunkered over it as if he were building a fire and my foot was the smoking ember and he was shielding it from the wind.

The incense billowed from a thick lavender stick in a red bowl on the window sill. It was only lightly raining now. The drops pattering on his porch screen windows. I was relaxing, he was kind and delicate, all I could feel , with my toes, was a slight tickling of a brush on the outside of the leather. I had finished the popsicle. I had only the wooden stick left.

“That was delicious, thank you. Shall I throw this away?”
“I will take it. Please, just relax.” He took the stick from me and wiped it dry with a cloth then dipped it into a pot of purple paint. Then he brought it out and used the small dab of paint on the end as a tiny pallet for a fine tipped brush. A brush so small and thin, it looked as if for painting eyelids. I imagined the wailing women from Lebanon with thick dark lines painted upon her eyelids. He worked quietly for ten minutes, not a word, barely a breath.

I stood so still I felt somewhat asleep, at least in my mind. I was afraid to move my toes in my shoe, though I desperately wanted to. But I found myself wafting in and out of awareness of my toes ,which when I was aware, were crying out to wiggle in my shoe. Instead, I curled my big toe in my left shoe the one that was free. I clenched and released it repeatedly, as if trying to scratch beneath my toenail.

“What is wrong?” He asked.
“There is so much attention on my foot that I feel I must move it. I am sorry. I can’t help it. I am like this sometimes.”
“No,’ it‘s okay. Here I am done…But wait, do not look. Only put your right foot down and place your left here as before. There you go.”
I switched legs and did as he said .I didn’t look at my right shoe.
“Would you like another popsicle?” He laughed.
“No a girl like me shouldn‘t eat so much”

“You are not a girl,” he said.

It seized me, what he had said. The hot feeling came to my face. I felt embarrassed because it was true. I felt sad for a time that I was. When I was the carefree girl on the back of a bicycle clutching my classmates thin waist. I wanted it all back, when there was so much time ahead of me, when I could see a future as crisp and clear as the edges of a red New Year’s paper cut-out on a sunny window. Where was it, all that I had wanted?
Then he said while continuing to look down at my foot, the wailing woman crescendoing, “Like I am not a boy.”

The heat in my body grew. I wanted to move my legs, I wanted take off my shoes. To look at my shoes! But I couldn’t resist the resistance to do anything other than do as he asked: To not look until the end, To relax, To listen to the music. I was beginning to boil with anticipation. I wanted to look. I wanted him to finish. The minutes lurched. I managed to contain myself outwardly. I kept my toes still, but inside, the other women’s gossip and laughter echoed in my head. A salon howling with laughter. Who did you see? Who did this to you? That man who paints women’s shoes, a man who…There were rumors about him, that’s partly what brought me here in the rain, in the lonely summer rain. But these rumors scare me. Who is he in this dark little apartment, with music from another land, with beautiful smells and gentle, kind ways of touching my shoes as if they were eggs. I couldn’t bring myself to think it. Was I this women -- a women who needed this kind of attention, this level of detail? Painted shoes! What would I do with them? I couldn’t wear them. I’d put them under the bed with everything else I have carried around with me all my life, I thought. What is he doing with me?

“Here. They are done.” He placed my left foot gently back on the floor. I stood with my feet awkwardly splayed slightly in the position he placed them in. He stood up and collected the brushes and bowls.
“Can I look now?” I still looked ahead at the rained splattered window.
“Not yet” I could here him place the bowls on the table behind me.
“When can I look?” I was motionless. The music was but just a tremolo.
“When they are dry.” He moved behind me.
“When will that be?”
I could feel the warmth of his voice. My back fell soft. He was behind me. Then, he placed a strong thick arm around my waist. My toes unclenched. He lifted me up and out of my painted shoes and whispered, “In the morning.”

One Big Complaint

The only whole-hearted complaint about China so far, mom's gonna hate this, but this truly makes me angry and sends me howling whenever it happens, is that I keep on finding myself in throat-lumping near collisions!! It happened twice day. The first time the bus, cramped as always, came to a screaching halt when a big truck decided just to pull out in front of us a mere 5 seconds before we came upon it. People lurched forward and several yelled out in a brief panic for their lives. I am sure arms, those attached to fists clenched to hand rails, like mine, were nearly if not fully wrenched from their sockets. Arg! Its just carelessness and the false expectation that if you pull out in front of something, that something will slow down and let you go ahead, despite it being a huge crowded bus! Its some preference for chaos and allowing others to bed to your whim, the order of the impatient cut-in-line winner mentality.They also honk at anything moving. If a pedestrian is in the cross walk, walking, and a car decided to barrel through, for sure the driver will lean on his horn till you kindly start scuttle-jogging and get the hell out of his way. This might even happen in a little quiet alley-way, whereever there is human to machine contact there is frantic honking and bell-ringing. Maybe, it's because they don't have breaks.

(This is probably one of the nicer san lun che, motorcycle taxis. They come in inventively patched together, rusty varieties, such as the one I was in while taking this photo.)

The second time I screamed for my life today: I had taken a motorcycle taxi (a motorcycle with a enclosed box to sit attached on the back) about 2 blocks home. Upon locking myself in the little tin box, he pulled out of the subway entry way on onto the street, going the wrong direction in the bus lane with oncoming buses and cyclists (me yelling "Don't Do That!"). Then he turned and sped down this busy hill, with lots of cars pulling out and people jay-walking, and bikes everywhere and many 2 point obstacles to challenge and tantalize him. At the bottom of the hill was a large intersection, as it happens it was a red light, so obviously he sped right through it (me screaming "NO!!!!!!" in the back) Thankfully going up the gradual hill his crap engine allowed a reprive from bouncing all around in the tin box. But he failed to relent all the needless weaving in and out between bicyclists and pedastrians. Even worse, everytime I would scream in horror, the driver would turn around, while driving straight ahead, and look at me as if concerned that I was choking on something rather than just stopping the behavior that sent me howling in the first place. Then I would yell (Look! Look!) and he would turn back around. The box was jittering and felt like at any moment, the slightest turn or bump would send us rolling on the pavement. The entire taxi ride took less than one minute but it was replete with horror. Just slow down, for Heaven's sake! Inevitably, and I am not typically like this, but I fumble my way out out of the taxi box in huffy White Laowai Lady scene and throw 5 kuai at him, and gesture lecture him about his driving. I am sure he couldn't be more confused by my dissatisfaction, afterall he did get me home without having to stop or slow down once.

How to be Alone.

About 3 years ago I went on a Jonathan Franzen kick, after reading one of my favorite books, The Corrections. The kick had concluded with his lastest book, How to be Alone, a collection of essays on the subject. I had read the book at a time when I wasn’t alone (as it happens, in both the physical and romantic sense). I was living with someone and ‘we’ were enjoying the hyper-active social life of students. I remember feeling a tad self-conscious to read the book in bed (with its title showing) with someone lying next to me, as if it were an indictment of the state of a relationship, or worse, perhaps it would be perceived as a self-help book of some post-break up variety, perhaps my partner might falsely foreshadow an impending end. But it was neither. It was just another Franzen book that I had to read.

Despite, our familiar association with aloneness as being “single,” the book isn’t about romantic relationships at all, its about being alone with your ‘self’ and the phenomena which then play out. I remember that to read How to be Alone in such time felt like I was living vicariously through it, recollecting my past. Even in college, I had lived alone previously for a few years. No doubt being an only child raised by a single mother has something to do with it. Alone has always, and potentially always will be, the baseline, the normative state. Conversely, to live in close proximity with others had always felt like an instructional experience, maybe “How to be Not Alone.” Despite learning from it, always I felt tested by it, how to get along nicely, how to assuage, how to maintain what it is that makes a partnership good to begin with. To say no more, I had read the book at the wrong time. But now, it seems right.

I came across the book surprisingly the other day in the Bookworm (an English language café and lending Library in Sanlitun). I didn’t necessarily want to re-read it again--despite the conditions being perfect: young foreign women, newly in China, speaking little Chinese--here, the state of aloneness is real and welcomed because daily life in a new and alien place can be exhilarating and challenging. Seeing the book did remind me that I should re-listen to an NPR interview with Franzen. See, since being here--furthermore, since keeping this blog and the basket of mixed-feelings I have about writing so personally, and so visibly--I had been trying to recall a particularly on-the-mark comment he had made about the difference between alone and lonely, most in particular what he says about aloneness. Despite not remembering the exact phrasing, the idea has hovered around me I write (sometimes), and photograph, as I merely walk and listen to music and take in this new thing I call my Life in China. Genuinely and often I feel like I am within something, like a movie, that’s stereoscopic and reflective.

I am re-listening to Franzen’s interview. The quote in its exactness :
“Alone, in a way, simply means there is some story that you are telling about yourself. You are actually a character in a narrative, rather than passively absorbing other narratives. Aloneness in that sense is a pure good.”

Alone and Loneliness. I have felt both here and like to believe I am pretty aware of the difference. My bouts of loneliness have been mostly triggered by the missing of old friends, rather than not having any new friends. I like to think that these ‘bouts’ are all healthy and formative. An only child has his/her strategies to evade loneliness, anyone who knows me, knows I have many hobbies and means of amusing myself. And now, that I have my own place with ample space to lay them out, I feel ecstatic to enliven the Hannah I was when I was 8, the girl with bedroom and a playroom and a dancing loft because again I have all three, and then some. Right now I write this looking out onto my sun porch, through my cluttered laundry line, cold air conditioner blowing directly on my forehead, outside there are birds and crickets, and the sounds of a season that reminds me even more so of aloneness, Summer. It’s a pure good.

New Apartment.

The peaches are in season. I've bought a large bag full. Life is officially anew here in China. I now live in my very own apartment. I feel very Hannah here. And I am the luckiest girl. I found an amazing 2 bedroom apartment in my favorite tree-lined old neigborhood, behind my Hill Park, and outdoor market, and everything worth anything in ShiJingShan. And its a bargain, technically I am paying only 40 U.S. Dollars to live here! The landlords are insanely generous. She accepted me to live here because she believes I am "good girl." She replaced all the appliances, fixed every little darn thing, its furnished down to the 5 iron woks, rice bowls, and chopping boards in the cuppard and the linen closet bountiful and clean.
Take a look at new place. Wo ai ni, wo de jia de xin.

Its feels kinda hip to be rejected...

...at least by McSweeney's.

RE: California City Police Log: List

Hi Hannah,

Thanks for the chance to read your lists submission. We're going to have to pass this time, but we look forward to reading your future work.

Jess
------------------------------------------------
On Sun, 18 Jun 2006 22:18:07 -0700, hannah pierce-carlson wrote:
> A List of Real-Life, Totally Not-Made Up, offenses reported, verbatim,
> from one weeks worth of the "California City Police Department Daily
> Police Report"
> Read to the tune of Bad Boyz (Watcha Gonna Do) from the TV series COPS!,
> delivered via streaming audio on the CCPD website

A neighbor dispute over a floodlight flashing in yard disturbing the dog. Contact made.A snake in the garage. Contact made. Snake in custody and released.Juveniles throwing rocks at a street light. Contact made. Subjects in custody.A sick dog.Stopped a suspicious pedestrian. Vandalism to picnic tables at the pavillion. Report taken. Cows running on the open range. A flat bed truck with a container about to fall off truck. Contact made, container secured.A sheep wounded from a dog attack or subjects shooting at objects. Area searched. Picked up a deceased bird. A subject carrying a cane, knocking on doors in the area. Unable to locate.A snake still in the kitchen. Cows in the roadway. Contact made, cows in the creek. Checked on a dog at location. Warned and advised on dog grooming Vandalism to the Outlet Store, the Professional Building, and Pizza Factory. Report taken.Cat trap dropped off for lizard.Requested an officer to keep the peace while subject leaves residence. Contact made. Peace kept. Juveniles with fighting pitbulls. Gone on arrival. Area checked. Unable to locate. A possible hit and run accident to fire hydrant. 2 subjects yelling at each other. Gone on arrival. Unable to locate. Wife attempted to run over the husband with a vehicle. Contact made.Stopped a pedestrian. Subject in custody and arrested.A reckless driver weaving in and out of traffic and off and on the road. A red scooter driving slow on road. Gone on arrival. Unable to locate. An abandoned ATV in the bushes.

(Note: This was originally in a list format)

This was something I spent five minutes to put together and subsequently email to McSweeney's, and then promptly forgot about. It was gleaned and inspired from the California City Police Log as was posted about on David's Blog. I like that I pre-faced the list with an enthusiastic air of incredulity, as if no one would believe that "Cows running on an open range" would be an actual police report. Truth is, McSweeney's Lists are replete with wacky Security and Police Logs, (umm...I like to believe that's way they passed on mine, but..) They typically contain strange occurances, like rambling lunatics etc. But that's just too obvious. I thought my list was unique because it was the opposite of wacky. Apart from its dullness, each uneventful entry ended anti-climatically, as if watching the sinking dissapointed expression of the bored cop that responded to the scene expecting something, anything, to have happened, but, alas... I will keep sending in stuff I "wrote" in five minutes until I get a nibble. Maybe next time I might actually "write" write something. Anyways, it makes me feel neat, like a Writer or something, to have a rejection email. I've sent in stuff to other journals only to have no response at all. I especially like the bit about my "future work." Whoo-pee. Well at least I do have this one publication under my belt.

Journey to Ms. Hannah

http://hannahinchina.blogspot.com

It's way better than my blog.

Shopping is a Feeling.

Jackie and I headed to Xidan, the maddening teener paradise of crap for a bit of shopping. Jackie had a mission for shoes, jeans, and the standard fare. I, with little money, took fotos, but somehow ended up buying more stuff than her, and spotted some insanity later to be purchased after payday (Get ready, Ed!)

I found a couple cheap shirts that will do for variety in the summer. They came with unraveling holes in the hand-sewn seams and the obligatory haggle. The holes, the shopgirls sewed up for me after I paid. The haggle was ridiculous and tedius, and expected. (i.e. They start at 200, I start at 10 and we work our way 2 kuai at a time to something reasonable (i.e. 15 kuai)).

Horrible ethnic dolls.

Horrible ethnic dolls (detail).

Jackie's fruitless pursuit of WWJW Sandals (What Would Jesus Wear).

It's so true. (....3x !)

My favorite place to shop is still this place....

...my witt'l grocery store in Shi Jing Shan.

The Night Park

Why have I never written about the Night Park? It is essential to my daily life here in ShiJingShan, the necessary ingredient which lends authenticity and richness to my “China” experience--which can too often seem astoundingly similar to regular life.

I routinely pass by the Night Park (otherwise known as the Hill Park, during the day) while jogging or biking around my neighborhood. I shop at a little grocery store across the street from it: a manicured, strikingly green hill amidst a canyon of white-tiled apartment towers. The hill is coursed by little red-tiled footpaths, along which there are stone benches and clusters of trees and flower bushes. I often sit on the benches and grade papers while the other women around me do knitting. During the day its over-run with grandmothers, young mothers and pants-less babies. And when the sun goes down around 8: 30 it rings with music and the playfulness of adults that is only witnessed at night.

I boast possessively about the Night Park to my poor colleagues who lack such charming places, (besides the 24 hour “massage” parlors they reside above). Once, I heard myself saying something I would find a little awkward and cringe-worthy to hear someone else say, “I have to stay near Bajiao station [the subway nearest my neighborhood] when I change apartments. I cannot leave my little Chinese park.”

So, why have I never written about the Night Park? Maybe because it’s so quintessentially the “Charming Chinese Park” that I find it challenging to write of it in a way that convinces others (who know me too well) of its pure sweetness. I find it tricky to write in a way that convinces even myself that I am above leaning toward the ironic self-awareness that usually characterizes my writing, or the dry sarcasm that characterizes me in general. Or, can even write of China in a way that doesn’t make it sound like either a dazzling neon spectacle or a grey austere landscape punctuated with colorful, strange happenings? But this self-inflicted impasse must be passed. It’s time for some colorful travelogue-esque sketching of my “little” exotic, charming, and vivacious neighborhood park.

I am always in a great mood after my adult conversation class. Teaching my small night class of six adults (apart from the two precocious 14 year olds) is hands down the best way of earning money I have ever had. They are shy, but willing learners. They respond animatedly to my clumsy repertoire of facial expressions, charades, and terrible drawings I use to demonstrate the meanings of new words. They seem to like my childish games and act intrigued when I go into a mini-lecture about something random like gendered divisions of labor or eXXtreme weather. All in all, I leave the class feeling like something of a success, like a skilled grown-up type, which is a markedly different feeling from when I leave my naughty grade school classes, like a Jekyll and Hyde nonsense speaking school marm type. So in this warming self-satisfaction I get on my bike and ride with a leisurely pace home, taking the busy boulevard, hesitating behind pokey old men, dodging watermelon trucks and finally making a detour at the Night Park.

On the east periphery of the park, outside of the hill, is a wide common area where two separate troupes of middle-aged to senior women dance in dense line formations. I headed there first and take a seat on the steps with the other spectators. The two troupes are similar in appearance, but contrast comically in terms of skill and music choice. The troupe to my left dances lethargically to techno-fied, oldish Chinese tunes. When they jump, it’s at most, about an inch off the ground, and their timing is so off that it reminds me of that carnical game where you hit the squirrels on the head with a mallet as they pop out of their holes. Their arm movements are heavy and imprecise and I wonder if they are just warming up individually, or if it were actually doing a choreographed dance. To my right, is the liveliest bunch of 60 year old women I have ever seen in my life. They are dancing synchronously to what seems like a fast-tempo Worker’s song. The music was so great, I wished I had a mini-disc recorder to capture it. It was emanating from a little home karaoke machine that was strapped to a rusty bike cart. The volume was turned to full strength, which made the speaker filament buzz and rattle, making, for me (a lover of eccentric field-recordings) the experience grittily low-tech and sublime.
I watched the dance troupe a bit and moved on, weaving through the clusters of old, shirtless, dress pants-hitched-to-the-armpits old men that gathered in circles around card games. I am ignorant of card games, but these seemed like something I, if I were Chinese person, would call Vigorous Energy Go Fish, where you slap the cards down as hard as you can and yell “Huh” just as vigorously. I get a few strange stares loitering around these men’s games, so I proceed.

Upon entering the gate to the park I am enticed toward the small amphitheater by some yonder meowing of string instruments and bamboo flutes and singing elder-people. I walk up and watch from a distance, then get a little closer. Soon an old women was ushering me to stand in the middle of the circle of spectators and sing along side the animated singers. I can listen and understand more than I can speak Chinese, but I managed to grasp bits and pieces of all the conversations around me, and they were all about me. I was in the middle of the circle. The high shorts, sleeveless undershirt wearing flautist was bobbing up and down playing quite virtuositically as the seated old man on the Chinese banjo tremelo-ed. They were, and I can’t explain why, waiting for me to bust out with the tune, in Chinese, which they thought I would know. I made an open-mouthed attempt at humming the melody. Pleased enough with my good-sportsmanship, about seven incredible singers chorused in saving me a bit of face. There was an encompassing hug of musical strength around me. I looked up over the group. There were two young men in shorts and sandals midway up the hill. They were playing Vigorous Flutes, having what seemed to be a flute stand-off. It was superb.

Ducking and xie xie-ing myself away from the choir, I walked up the steps of the hill, where couples were crouched pretzel-like around each other. There were kids with green glowing necklaces playing on the Moon-shaped statue. I looked up at the real moon hanging between two apartment towers, whose faces were a mosaic of different colored interior lighting. Sublime.
Music was everywhere. I left the choir and the battling flutes to find as soon as they diminished into the background of chatter and laughing, a gleeful female aria accompanied by zithers coming into resolution. And soon thereafter I came across a old couple practicing a sung passion play for a group of laughing onlookers. And not far from that a large meandering group of ballroom dancers, skirts swirling, and barrel-chested men pointing their dress-shoes in Tango fashion. Now, the pervasiveness of music and chatter was unlike anything else I had heard before. I had been to Mexico walked amidst a music-filled town square and slept in a raging all-night carnival. That is a sound I will never forget: a cacophonous rousing, and indecipherable alien mess of street hawkers screaming into microphones, carnival ride sirens, discos, and the oompa-oompa of Tejano music. But the sound of this Chinese Park is unforgettable for it’s entirely different quality: amid the dance troupe amplifiers, and loud choirs, and seven-piece string bands, and wailing Chinese soloists, and battling flute players, and children with their bizarre humming sound-making yo-yo’s, and ballroom muzak, the music worked together like a kaleidoscope, pulsing and mixing in and out of pleasing arrangements as I walked. It was as if I could hone my hear and bring the far-off zither into resolution while standing in front of the loud jovial choir.

I made my way toward the gate, passing the children’s area where there is a mechanical merry-go-round featuring a loved character from Chinese lore, the goofy-faced Monkey King. It was next to a combination trampoline/ball pit, with the ball pit in the center so that you can leap off the trampoline and land in a cushion of plastic balls! The whole life-loving-affirming portrait of the park was without seedy-adolescent blemish, no malaised looking groups of teenagers loafing about looking bored. All the teenagers seemed to be engaged just as much in the goings-on of the older people and their old people activities. I saw daughters dancing with fathers and teenage boys playing with glow-sticks, and clamoring up the hill with their sound-making badminton rackets. I resisted the thought that this place was, to use a trendy buzz-word, an “Urban Paradise.” But really the Night Park is the closest I have ever experienced in an urban space that so successfully, in design and in actual use, to bring a community together in a pure and imaginative way, like a way only seen on a child’s playground. Where the children are imaginative and playful not just on the physical equipment, but induced by the spirit of the playground itself, by its way of whimsy. In this huge city reknown for its austere governments and inward facing, guarded, massive facades, its Forbidden City and Great Wall, the Night Park welcomes its opposite face, outward joy.

Finally, I’ve written it.

Happy