Academically, this American teacher is indeed a super Hollywood actor. During our first class, his phone rang, “Oh, Mr. Obama …”he said. As we heard this, all of us kept silent instantly, wanting to know whether we heard him wrong. “Yes, I am now in Xiangnan University, China, and I’ll get to know Chinese students better to give feedback to you…” he continued. This time, we all chuckled and we knew it was just a joke. However, Matt was a conscientious and responsible actor. He continued his performance, regardless of our laughter. “But Mr. Obama, can we talk  next time? Because now I am giving class…”After he hung up, he explained to us seriously that     he was sent by the President to teach Chinese students. This time, he had us rolling in the aisles successfully.

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It was a dismal cold day in March when I met with the vice dean of the English Department.  A frigid mist blanketed the campus.  The college itself clung to the sides of a green karst peak.  It was the day before the official start of the Spring 2010 term.  Students were still arriving from holidays spent with their families in the countryside and the cities.  And I had just returned from a tour through Yunnan, Laos, and Vietnam to prove to myself that a nuclear winter had not in fact descended upon the heartland of China, and that this information had somehow been censored by the government in order to a maintain its grip on social harmony.

The vice dean, a short well spoken Chinese gentlemen with a Mr. Clean sheen on his bald head, told me that I would not be teaching the junior English majors Literature this year, and instead would just teach Oral English to the freshmen.   Though I had received glowing reviews from a handful of students who appreciated my efforts to cultivate creativity, free thought and critical thinking in a culture based on rote-learning, conformity and obedience to authority, a majority of students were not impressed with my western pedagogy.  In their eyes I was just a foreigner teaching in a manner foreign to them.  I was an obstruction.  They wanted me to teach literature as a history class to prepare them for an exam they would have to take after they graduated.  They wanted answers to multiple choice questions and fill-in-the-blanks.  And they were not impressed when I told them that literature as in life cannot be neatly defined by simple answers, that life is not a multiple choice exam.  Let’s just say I don’t like to give it up so easily.

By the middle of last term, I had compromised and gave them lessons that offered the best of both civilizations: stuff to count and memorize (i.e. what are some symbols in <em>The Great Gatsby</em>? Describe the structure of a sonnet, etc.), stuff to talk about (What do you think Hamlet means when he says, “To be, or not to be?”), and image laden PowerPoints about the life and times of particular writers (correlated with dates in Chinese history).  But in the end, there was nothing I can say or do to persuade the vice dean to let me teach what I had come to China to teach.   It did not matter that the one reason I chose employment in this third world city (students often asked me with incredulity why I came here of all places, some having surmised that was trying to hide from a checkered past) over one of the “Chinese Ivy League” schools located in one of the more first world touristy cities was that Xiangnan University was the only one that promised me a position as a literature teacher.  I was beginning to suspect that vice dean had taken a bribe.

Some students clapped and cheered when I announced I would not be teaching them for the spring term.  Instead they would be dropped into a supersized class taught by a Chinese teacher.  I told them they could at least pretend to be disappointed.  But I could see their perspective – this is what happens why you actually read too much literature: you begin to see and feel the world through the eyes of others, a point I had hoped to indoctrinate them in the second term, along with a unit on gothic literature, vampirism, and Marxist criticism).  After all, a large class size had the advantage of allowing any student to get away with murder: you can sleep, listen to your MP3 player, text message your heart out, do homework, and plan your song list for a night out at the karaoke bar while tuning out the Chinese teacher informing the class in Chinese about the family tree of Elizabeth I or James I (as opposed to me asking questions about Hamlet’s soliloquy, and then letting an awkward silence fall upon them as I waited for someone to find enough courage to say something, anything in English).  So that was the death of English Literature.

But I did not let this deter me.  I had a plan to bring my class back to life.  This time I would only use the most brilliant minds I could find.

I had taught five literature classes.  Each class had about 2-5 students out of 40 who participated fully.  The rest either skipped class, zoned out, or dutifully attended class on the offhand chance I would call roll.  Another portion of the class was either just too shy or lacking in confidence to speak out.  Out of these classes, one class in particular outshone all the others. It was this class, Class 2, that I harvested the souls of six students to join my underground literature class.

Class 2 was a professor’s dream team in which I learned as much from the students as they learned from me.  So when I told all the students the bad news some were actually disappointed.  They did not want to be taught by Chinese teachers – many of whom, it was said by the students, just read aloud from the text book, brooked no questions, and discouraged free thinking – or a system that in the words of one university English major, “killed your passion for learning.”

And that is how I came to find myself surrounded by six Chinese girls who came to my apartment every Wednesday evening to share my love for literature.

I had three goals:

1. Find a beach in south Vietnam before Chinese New Year (Tet) makes travel impossible.
2. Spend my first days of the Year of the Tiger in the ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia.
3. Make it back to China via her back door in the jungles of southwestern Yunnan province: That is, bus and boat through Cambodia, Thailand, Laos via roads and waterways of the Mekong River Basin.

I spent my last weekend in the academic fastness of Xiangnan University purchasing last minute items, packing gear, and tinkering with my will.  Traveling in Asia was not for the meek.  I wasn’t worried so much about landmines and bandits and pit vipers as I was about the insane crowds.  Half the continent went on holiday around this time.  Even the public transport and hospitality workers disappeared into the woodwork and red tape for Chinese New Year (aka Spring Festival).

Imagine traveling during American Thanksgiving.  Multiply that experience tenfold and you’ll get an idea.

Then take into account there was no queuing.  The Chinese and East Asian mainlanders in general were anti-queue.   Credit them for inventing gunpowder, compass, paper and printing.  Unfortunately, Confucius had never inculcated the value of queues.  Nor would queuing ever take root here.  Oh, but computers and cell phones and cars have been embraced by the Chinese.  But not so the fine art, science, and etiquette of queuing.  Such behavior was characteristic of lower populated barbarian societies on the outskirts of the cosmos.

In other words, getting a ticket or getting on a bus or train was akin to a Black Friday stampede.  It seemed some holiday behavior was universal.  Even Granma Lu and Granddaughter #2, suddenly infused with adrenalin, will bat policemen aside in order to secure a ticket and a seat.  Everything was “first see, first serve” – as opposed to say, something as strange as “first come, first serve.”

I have been mentally rehearsing the possibility of acquiring Adult Onset Agoraphobia during this time.  If in the event such a condition should make an acute appearance, I hoped to find medical attention with minimum loss of face.  According to the DSM-IV, symptoms of agoraphobia was prevalent amongst those suffering from pathological wanderlust.

So here goes nothing.

My journey included the following places of interest:

1. Guilin, China
2. Hanoi, VN
3. Hue, VN
4. Ho Chi Minh City, VN
5. Phnom Penh, Cambodia
6. City of Siem Reap & Ruins of Angkor Wat
7. Vientiane, Laos
8. Luang Prabang, Laos
9. Jinghong, China
10. Kunming, China

The clockwise route took me through some of the most beautiful and rugged terrain in Southeast Asia.  And this neck of the woods was one of those places where taking the road less traveled was ill-advised.  I planned on blogging & tweeting along the way.  And I hoped that my tendency to write in the past tense was not an ill omen.

My latest rendition caught the students’ attention.  Girls stopped texting and boys ceased roughhousing long enough to look up and shout “pig!” in unison.  I asked the teacher if they’ve played this game before, adding, “They’re very confident.”  Either the blood of Shakespeare coursed through my veins or the children were very smart.

I spent the next ten minutes striking curious poses.  I shapechanged into a frog, duck, and cow.   By some feat of thaumaturgy, I even managed to turn an ordinary seat into a flying bicycle, which I rode around the room.  But the archfiend boredom was in the room as well.  It stalked the children.  One by one they fell prey it.   I wondered if I could win their hearts and minds back if I showed them the wonderfullest trick of all – the coffin trick.  That is escaping from a coffin after it had been nailed shut.

Then the Chinese teacher, the boss of the private school – a smoking hot Celestial maiden rare and radiant with skin as fair and pure as a tube of skin whitener – showed me the Card of the Goat.

“Don’t be shy, just have a try,” she said, smiling, hoping to instill confidence in my Performative English.

My heart skipped a beat.  Her words thrilled me.  I looked into her brown eyes.  But alas, it was just a phrase drilled into her by previous instructors.    Only this and nothing more.  We skipped to the next card.  Dog.  Pavlov’s dogs came to mind reminding me exercise some self-control of my salivary glands.  I asked her to skip that one too.  It was becoming clear to me that I rapidly descending the evolutionary ladder.  Then came the Card of the Cat.  Now there was a flash of inspiration: To crawl on all fours, rub up against her brown leather boots, growl like a great cat of the Serengeti, and kiss that sacred erogenous zone behind her knees.

Each card turned me into something bestial.  I discarded my impulse and decided on something more appropriate for this conservative audience.  So I meowed and made a clawing motion at some phantom menace.  The students shouted the answer.  We played this game some more.  Students learned some more words, while I fell down some more rungs.  And I wondered for perhaps the bazillionth time this afternoon what the hell I was doing here.

Today’s field trip had started with a simple yes.  My philosophy was to volunteer for anything and everything.  I had been grading final exams when the dean called for a favor.  Translation: Somebody asked him for a favor so I had been farmed out to his favoree.  That is how I found myself walking with a university student whose English name was Ivyl one Sunday afternoon at the end of my first teaching semester in China.

It was another cold and wet day in Chenzhou.  It seldom down poured.  But if you left shelter then you would be saturated in microdroplets of freezing water which no amount of fleece or gortex could keep from the marrow of your bones.

Ivyl waited for me at the front gate of the university.  She wanted me to get on a motorbike taxi.  I had come under the impression they had arranged a car me.  But traffic was so bad today that we would have to take a motorbike taxi in order to bypass the gridlock to where our driver waited.

I did some quick calculus.  Perhaps in some parts of China riding motorcycles without helmets through the urban chaos was a relatively safe gamble.  I had even resorted to this method of travel in Changsha as a kind of Christmas-gift-to-myself thrill ride.  The adrenalin rush had been exquisite.  There is nothing like hanging on to the Grim Reaper, his jaw clamped down on a cigarette, as we whizzed through, by, against, and around hordes of iron beasties and hapless shades.  The Scooter of Death had a velocity of 10 near death experiences per kilometer.  Good times.  But that was Changsha.  That was a 2^nd tier city.  And this was Chenzhou — a 4^th tier city with 3^rd tier aspirations.  Chenzhou rated on my Urban Quality of Life Scale as somewhere between New Haven, Connecticut and Monrovia, Liberia.  The answer was simple.  My chances of survival were greatly increased if we walked.  Of course I had to simplify my explanation for Ivyl.

“I don’t ride motorcycles in China,” I said.

“No, you do not have to ride motorcycle,” the freshman said, “You just have to sit.”

We actually haggled back and forth; until it became clear I had no problem with losing face and the only alternative was to cancel the whole damn thing.

“No. I won’t go on a motorcycle.  Maybe we can walk.”

Chenzi Highway was the only road to the city’s center from my university.  And it was choked with traffic.  The green hills to either side of the road were being dug up in a wild orgy of destruction and construction.  Bathroom tile high-rises, karyoke bars, clothing stalls, and noodle shops sprung up like bioengineered, insect and climate change proof weeds sown upon a fertile, freshly bulldozed plot of cesspools and landfills.    It was the road to hell before it was paved with good intentions.

Drivers protested and exercised their right to blast their horns in futile protest.  They did so with wanton abandon as if they knew that this freedom too would one day be taken away.  People in bright colored winter coats and weather-beaten skin bore baskets of goods that hung from a bamboo stick balanced on one shoulder.  Mothers with babies bundled up and strapped to their backs carried groceries.  Men in camouflage pants, mao jackets, and straw hats carried barked into cell phones or hauled sacks of rice or live chickens.  Some pushed red carts of brown, dried meat.  They heaved and puffed like steam engines; smoke billowed out of their noses and mouths.  Children walked, their oversized, puffy coats forcing their arms to stick out like penguins, their eyes level with the bumpers and tires and tailpipes of trucks creeping ever forward.

The constant winter rain finished off whatever the yellow growling vehicles didn’t destroy.  Rumors had it that this section of Chenzi Highway would be fixed within two months.  Some netizens even whispered that now that the Middle Kingdom had successfully leveled off its population growth, they would even build tunnels or bridges for pedestrians.  I mentioned this to Ivyl as we picked our way through the charcoal grey mud and pot holes.

“China is still developing country”, Ivyl said, confirming  that it was just speculation.  She pointed to either side of the road where freshly built high-rises with Grecian columns stood empty and lifeless. Adverts showed happy, shiny, light-skinned family units enjoying “Mid Level Luxury.”

“Why do people not live here.  Why have businesses not started?” Ivyl said.

“I don’t know,” I said, scanning the apocalyptic landscape.

“It is wastefur.”

“Yes.  I agree with you.”

We trudged onwards in perfect harmony.  Small talk ensued.  She told me that in order to get a job at the private school she told them she was a junior.  Noticing that I journeyed with a smile and had an easy laugh, she told me that she thought I was very warm hearted and optimistic.  Maybe.  Maybe not.

Meanwhile vehicles idled and belched black exhaust.  Scooters and motorcycles flitted about, squeezing between behemoth coal trucks.  Men in conical straw hats huddled over fires in front of the empty buildings as yellow bulldozers smoothed gravel and dirt about.  I felt like I was in a movie like The Children of Huang Shi or The Road. But instead of soldiers or cannibals there were poor, ignorant, careless people who had been taught that population was a major problem, and had exchanged a water buffalo for a car.  Their sense of freedom and progress was measured in muddy rice paddies, gridlocked roads, and the godlike power of a motorized vehicle.

We finally made it to the choke point where vehicles drove around a police officer.  He would have been bored if he wasn’t so busy shivering.  His eyes had that distant far off look of one who has dissociated from the present.  Who the hell did he piss off to have been stationed here where it was nigh impossible to supplement his income?

I was very lucky that I was here as a favor for somebody.  And I knew there was a chance that this excursion would supplement my income.  Life worked out in strange ways.  And then there was probably someone who pitied my rootless, exiled life shackled by deep thoughts and tough decisions and self doubt, as they lounged by a pool behind high walls – the toughest decision they would ever have to make was where to go shopping and what to buy.

As for me I was bogged down in self doubt.  What the hell was I doing here? Now that we were about half way into the city, there was a part of me wished I had put my foot down at the front gate and said no to the whole damn thing.  Another part of me adhered to a credo to volunteer for everything and suck it up like a champ.  Who knew what dreams may come?  I told myself that if nothing else I was sacrificing myself on the altar of education.

After all, I was a philologist.  Or was it logophilist?  I couldn’t remember which.  But this is what we lovers of words did to earn our bread and butter.  Just as archeologists found ancient treasures and battled evil doers, and symbologists deciphered codes and foiled dark conspiracies, I shared my love for words and literature, and figuratively battled monomaniacal motorists and bitched about the dehumanizing effects of a mechanized society.  It was dirty, tough work.  And children would learn some words today.  Maybe tomorrow they would learn Celine Dion songs.  And then one day they would read the English translation of Don Quixote.  I was a pioneer in the new Wild West, laying down a foundation for freedom and democracy.  Maybe within the next decade this city would even have a Pizza Hut.

I taught English literature and drama at a university in a dingy city in southern Hunan.  Mos Eisley has nothing on this city which, despite being about a hundred miles north of the Tropic of Cancer, was continuously shrouded in bone-chilling brown fog.  The sun appeared once or twice a month in the form of an ochre smudge.  Snow dusted the green, egg crate peaks that surrounded the city.  The city itself had a Wal Mart, several KFCs and McDonalds franchises – all signs of its glorious ambition to become “The Tourist Capital of China.”  These outposts were good places to go to the bathroom if you didn’t mind coming out smelling like an ashtray.  The rest of the city was an eyesore – the kind of eyesore you get from gonorrhea in the eye.

Instead of looking at this as menial weekend task, I decided to look at as an opportunity. It was a chance to observe pre-gao kao Chinese students.   The gao kao was the exam of all exams – the kind of exam that determines the rest of your life.  Apparently, college was viewed as some kind of post-gao kao afterlife where shell-shocked students recovered from the exam’s psychological trauma by catching up from a childhood of sleep deprivation and hanging out in smoky internet cafes, chatting online and playing first-person shooter and role-playing games.

We made it to the private school where Ivyl introduced me to her boss and the number one teacher.  The first order of business was to play charades with the high school students.  Then the teacher wanted me to sing and dance.  I knew some classics by NWA, LL Cool J, and Tribe Called Quest, but I didn’t think they were ready for such advanced Hip Hop English I had picked up during my sojourn in New Haven.  My complete uselessness was revealed when I told the teacher I didn’t know any good songs, not even the “Merry Christmas” song.

I told her I could tell stories.  It was my last ditch effort to redeem myself.   But I had to think fast as the children were waiting.   They weren’t just waiting.  They wanted salvation.  They were bored.  (As an aside: If China ever goes to war, then it will be branded as war to keep children safe from boredom.)  A semester’s worth of English literature flashed through my mind.  There was Huckleberry Finn, The Glass Menagerie, The Alchemist, The Giver, The Waste Land, and The Great Gatsby.  Maybe I could toss these stories into the crucible and distill something simple?  There was no time.  So I made a split second decision to just tell the Story of Myself…

“A long time ago, in a beautiful country far, far away—”

“Wait,” the teacher said, “Do you understand him?”

There was a chorus of nopes.   And the teacher told me to slow down and to simplify, simplify, simplify.  Alas, teaching university English majors had spoiled me.

“Okay,” I said, “Where was I?  Oh, yes.  There was a boy.  The boy had a dream.  His dream was to go to another country.”

“Maybe they do not understand you.”

“And there was a cat,” I said, redoubling my effort to speak Hemingwayesque dialog.  And adding an anthropomorphic cat would make for a side kick.  I also revised the rest of the story to incorporate the words they had just learned.  Maybe the boy and his cat (or was it, the cat and her boy?) would journey to the animal farm in the center of the earth…

“The cat was the Cat in the Hat.”  Pleasure rippled from the class as soon as I mentioned this.  At last I caught their attention. “The boy and the cat wanted to go to a new world.”  I lost them again.  Maybe it was time to give the boy and cat some swords and some trolls to use them on.

“Maybe you should hurry.”

Boredom was coming.  You could hear its growl in the children’s restlessness.  It’s roar shook the cavern, and rocks and rubble began to shower down upon us.  It was up to me to lead the children to safety. There was a glimmer of daylight ahead.  It was the cave’s exit.

“Okay,” I said, steeling myself for the last leg.  I lifted my torch.  Follow me.

“The cat and her boy sailed across the ocean.  They had many adventures.  And they met nice people.  The end.”  We made it.  The children were safe.  And just then the cave collapsed in upon itself and the yellow-eyed monster, boredom, was contained for now.

However, I neglected to mention that the daring duo went to the concrete island where the polite things are, taught a village of hobbits the secret alchemical process of separating quicksilver from milk, and discovered that the dragons who laired in the cosmic center were wingless, corrupt bureaucrats, almost the opposite of their western counterparts, a species of aristocratic fire-breathing capitalists who called the ragged edge of the universe their home.  But that was a tale for another day.

Now it was time for another game.  It was the “Learn Chinese Game.” It was also known by its traditional Chinese name “Civilize the Foreign Monkey.”  This is when the children actually, surprisingly got in line in front of the player – me — and proceed to impart the famous wisdom of great thinkers from Confucius to Mao upon him — that is, me.  But the children in the back of the line lost their patience and soon ran riot and threw up bunny ears behind my instructors.  All the while the teacher oversaw my education, completely oblivious to the world swiftly crumbling around us.  A student would tell me something.  I’d listen, nod, and say okay, next one.  But the teacher would not let me off so easy.

“Do you remember?  Do you know it?  Try again.”

A heathen child pulled his mouth open and let off a blood curdling scream.  Meanwhile some of the boys played Soldiers and Uigers (kinda like cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians in the America) in a corner.   Girls turned on their music players and added Chinese pop to rising din.

“How do you say, ‘good morning’?” I asked.  My face begged for mercy.

“No.  That’s too easy.”  Hers was an unreadable mask.

“How about, ‘Will you be my girl friend?’”  My face transformed in hope.

“No, that’s not very useful in everyday life.”  Annoyance flashed upon her face.

Then a boy came over and consulted with the teacher in Chinese.    I tried in vain to read their expressions.  They were plotting something.

“He will teach you some Chinese,” said the teacher.

“Oh, okay.”  That was my mantra.  A little something I had picked up while on a pilgrimage to Hengshan Mountain.

The boy said some words.  Many words.  There were many words strung together in a seamless singsong rhythm I was so powerless to decipher.  The teacher explained to me that it was a famous Chinese saying that meant something like, “May God bless you with happiness and good fortune.”  Then we went over the phrase one word at a time.  Actually we went over this several times.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the dark recess of my mind, Rod Sterling informed me, “You’re traveling through another dimension — a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination…”

The room spun and I heard The Twilight Zone theme song.  Please, God, let that be somebody’s cellphone.

“Do you understand?” the teacher piped.

“I think so.”  I had spent my first five months in China struggling with tones and pronunciation.  Each word had four different tones.  And then there were letters and sounds my speech organs were powerless to make.  Now I realized this game was too advanced for me.  Plus, I was a visual learner.  Meaning, I needed adult female(s) wearing lingerie to help me learn Chinese.  So when I saw that the teacher had a ring, I lost my motivation to learn even in this, the antithesis of my ideal learning environment, where bourgeois young ‘uns had transformed the room into a jungle island Where the Wild Things Are, shouting, singing, laughing and dancing around a wild pig.

I suddenly longed to be back on that bleak road to hell where at least the purpose of life boiled down to one simple question: Do I feel lucky?

I stuttered and stammered through the student’s “lesson.”  I found out what it meant to be a Chinese student in China.  I never would have made it here.  I would have been one of those students who realized quite early that the gao kao was a fate worse than death.  Such a lottery system would condemn the likes of me to the underworld.  Had the Fates planted my soul in China, then I would have packed up my Hello Kitty™ backpack with mooncakes and dried chicken feet, built a bamboo raft, and floated down the Yangtze with a noble Uighur savage to seek my fortune as a river pirate.

The end was near.  Students now had an opportunity to field questions.  I got the usual assortment and by now I had fine tuned my answers to something they could all understand.  They asked me if I liked basketball, knew how to use chopsticks, liked Chinese food, the quantity of cash and girlfriends in my possession.  and one girl asked me about “the global economics.”

Then the interrogation was over.   I sighed.  Apparently I had forgotten to breathe.  But then somebody asked one more question.  A girl asked something that was mostly incomprehensible to me.  Earlier in the afternoon she had said that it was her dream to become a writer.  Now I gave her a tip of the hat for adventuring even further beyond the borders of the Mediocre Realm in the Center of the Earth for asking such an impolite question.  I was only able to pick out three words from her question: “war” and “poor people.”

I asked for clarification, but the teacher cut her off.  The girl looked down to hide her blush and was about to go back to her seat.   I stopped her and asked again.  Sometimes conflict was a good thing.  Actually, the easiest way into a foreigner’s heart was to sow conflict.  There was hope for this generation yet.

“She is asking about war in general,” the teacher said.

“Oh, okay.”  It was one of those damn oppressive Confucian moments when conversations were monitored to maintain harmony and preserve stability.  But I knew which war the girl wanted to know more about.  Images and emotions flashed.  My own military service came to mind.  And that of my cousin’s whose blood now mingled in the sand beside another road to hell.  Where should I begin?  How could I simply explain things?  Could she understand that I didn’t support the war, but supported the troops — even as a fourth front opened up in Araby.  How do I explain collateral damage and flying killer robots?  How do I explain madness?  In the end, I settled on, “War is bad.  Very, very bad.”

Later that night after the teacher drove Ivyl and me back to the university, and after she had probed my feelings about teaching cute, adorable children eager to learn English during my evening, weekends and holidays, I watched The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.  It was the Jan. 6, 2010 episode with Admiral Mike Mullen.  Mullen, a Vietnam veteran, said Afghanistan was “America’s War.”  He had a government issue smile; crooked like somebody with Bell’s Palsy.

The audience cheered.  And I remembered that little girl’s question war and poor people.  Or was it the “wall” and “pool peopre?”

Maybe I had read too much into her question.  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Whatever the case it made me wonder.

“Here’s your moment of zen,” said Stewart.

I finished my latest dispatch from the Middle Kingdom, posted it, shut off the computer, wondering if that old refrain heard so often across the Pacific, “I don’t support the war, but I support the troops,” had devolved into a meaningless, thought-terminating euphemism.  Like the boy in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, I wanted to know, “Are we still the good guys?”

Sometimes when I hang out with other expats we cannot stop saying, “I can’t believe this,” and we pinch ourselves to see if we are in a dream.  It is as if we all had met Morpheus in our pre-expat lives and took the red pill.  We tell ourselves this cannot really be happening.  We have it too good here.  And if China becomes untenable we can always relocate to Vietnam or Thailand or Bali or any other country where good old fashioned pioneer spirit and a liberal arts education are valuable commodities.

As soon as I stopped pursuing happiness, it came to me.  Now I flee happiness because I know it is too good to be true.  It cannot last.  Happiness is a vampire that will suck you dry leaving you shriveled like a desiccated husk in a spider’s web.  That is why it is better to fly from happiness, string it along, let her have a taste, and then run away so you can regain your strength for the next round. I know this cannot last so I read American newspapers and Stephen King stories to mentally rehearse for day when there is nowhere to run.

They say China brings out your inner entrepreneur.  It’s true.  Maybe one day I will go into the crucifix business.  I will manufacture high-quality cadmium free crucifixes and export them to vampire-plagued America.

Just beyond the dingy metropolis, my university was nestled at the feet of a jagged, tent-like mountain, green with bamboo, shrubbery, and leafy sword blade foliage.  Students roamed the campus in packs on their way to classes, parties, or speeches.  Every day at lunch and dinnertime a campus wide loudspeaker system blares out happy-go-lucky pop music, advertisements and announcements in Chinese as well as English sound bites.  Stray dogs – enough to provide a respectable cast for a Disney movie – scampered to and fro on errands with or without some tasty piece of trash held in their mouths.  Somebody’s chickens pecked at piles of trash.  There was the smell of burning trash in the air, and students sang, and played flutes and erhus .  They smiled and practiced their hellos on me.

Occasionally a student will ask me more about the week’s reading assignments.  One student was worried that I was going to suffer from being away from my family during Christmas, and still another wanted to know if she could talk to me about James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man even though it wasn’t on the reading list.  Even though I had the reputation of being a “serious” teacher, students greeted me by name, waved happily, and made me wonder if they were all just part of some Communist counterintelligence network trying to trick me into thinking that China was really a nice place.  Meanwhile other students, non-English majors, often ran up to me to ask, “Where are you going,” which is the Chinese equivalent to the western greeting, “How are you?”

I spent Christmas in Chenzhou and Changsha.  Stores pumped out Christmas music and overemployed stores had their clerks dressed in red elf hats.  Ubiquitous card board Santa faces, disembodied with jolly red cheeks, decked store front windows.  It was as if Santa himself had replaced Mao – despite the latter’s birthday being Dec. 26^th.

About 20 students from my classes produced a play for the university’s Christmas Party.  They call it a party.  Americans would call it a performance.  One of my colleagues worked with her students for half a semester to sing “We wish you a Merry Christmas.”  The party featured many students dancing and singing.  Christmas was an excuse to have a “party.”

During the rehearsals I saw many students performing stuff that has very little to do with the Christmas or even being nice to the proletariat.  Thus, girls in short shorts chair danced to Brittany Spearsesque pop, or still more Celestial maidens danced with canes.  They did things with their bodies that will cure dry mouth regardless of your sexual orientation.
Weeks ago, I got my ass in gear to fulfill my promise of getting students to produce a Christmas play.  I adapted a Charles Dickens’ short story, “The Christmas Goblins,” adding a platoon of goblins, simplified the prose, added a scene or two to make a quick 15 minute play.  I also added a goblin chorus to sing the “goblin song” from The Hobbit as they whisk the protagonist Gabriel Grubb from the cemetery to their goblin cave.  Maybe next year they will be ready for my adaptation of another Christmas classic called The Shining?

There are only a couple hours left before the Year of the Ox yields to the Year of the Tiger.  I find myself a stranger in a strange land.  I spent half the year as a medical assistant in a rural family practice in a town of 1,200 or so in northwestern Pennsylvania, U.S.  Prior to that, I spent most of my life as a beast of burden — a dumb talking ox on a farm.  There I dreaded the future, spent much of my time wondering how to make ends meet, and graduate school was my only hope that would save me from falling further down the socioeconomic ladder.

Now, I am in the heart of China where I have time to read the classics, form my own opinions, and do meaningful work.  I am doing all things I was going to save for retirement.  Now I spend my time wondering where I should go for winter vacation.  I prepare lessons for students and indulge in creativity.  America raised me to become an artist, inventor, and healer.  But offered little but despair and indentured servitude — an ailing dream kept on exorbitant life support in an ICU.

For the first in my adult life I found out just how easy it was to live and love and pursue happiness.  My mind is free.  I can’t even imagine going back to the U.S. now.  I see America like I imagine poor immigrants once saw their oppressive old countries as they came to the New World looking for a new start.  They had come west for new opportunities, a fresh start, and hope for a brighter future.

I can either be a victim of a declining empire oppressing its citizenry, or I can rediscover the American Dream abroad.  I choose the latter. America is not just a country.  It is an idea born like a grail through throngs of foes both foreign and domestic.   Now I wonder what dreams may come in the Year of the Tiger.

As for my 2 fen:  I had no clue what I was getting into when I first stepped into the blast furnace of a summer day in southern China.  I knew little more than that I was going into a part of the country known only for its honorable mention on Chinese takeout menus across America.  Only after doing some homework did I realize that it too was Mao’s home province.  It was my second day incountry when my employer drove us from the coastal megacity of Gaungzhou to Chenzhou, a “small” city farther inland in Hunan province.

I will never forget the festival that sprung out of the tarmac.  Traffic came to a dead halt three hours into our drive north along Jingzhu Expressway.  There had been an accident, and a policeofficer told us everybody was expected to wait at least an hour before our we could move again.  That was when a festival sprung out of the tarmac.  People got out of their cars.  Truckers dumped out greasy bags of KFC chicken bones.  Children played tag.  Boys passed out cigarettes and hawked up loogies.  You heard pop and traditional Chinese competing from various sound systems.  Girls shielded themselves from the midday sun with parasols and strolled along in high heels.   And peasants from a dilapidated village capitalized on it all:  They came out of the rice fields in their pajamas and conical hats bearing goodies by the bucket loads.

This was the first of many puzzles pieces in a larger jigsaw that seems to indicate that China had become more capitalistic than America.

I was in the university gym and recreation center.  It was below freezing outside and Crazy English Mountain was dusted with snow.  There were no heaters in the school, and you could see your breath in the air.  I had been working up a good sweat.  Steam rose up from me.  An exotic mélange of hip hop and Persian traditional came from the aerobics floor — and there was a sharp crack as somebody broke an eight-ball rack.  A dying treadmill droned and squeaked.

Now the student wanted to touch my biceps.  “Can I feel it?” he asked.

Preserve the harmony at all costs.  That was the cowardly lion inside me.  “Oh no, you better not.  I have a bad cold right now.  Maybe H1N1.”  By now, I had been in China for three months and had grown used to the Chinese practicing weird English.

Stuff like, “Do you have a girl friend?  Who is the most beautiful/handsome girl/boy in the room?  How much money do you make?  Do you know how to use chopsticks?”

What in the West would be deemed with cynicism is and should be taken at face value in the East.  For now, while China still claims to be a “developing country.”  I’m still trying to figure out if these questions are born out of sheer ignorance (perhaps there is a lack of vocabulary) or a societal preoccupation with superficiality.  Only time will reveal the answer.

I went to the university gym several times a week to weight train and practice yoga.  Since there wasn’t any heating, girls — I would say “women” because I’m talking about college age females here, but the Chinese prefer to be called “girls” out of politeness and for its connotations of youth and beauty – girls practice yoga in jeans, coats, scarves, hats, and mittens.  Deemed a “girly thing” for its weight loss benefits, Chinese boys eschew yoga.  Instead, they play video games, pay billiards and basketball, smoke, and find excuses to wander into the gym to scope out the ladies.  American men, however, are exempt from Chinese social norm.  In fact, we are expected and even paid to be strange as professional foreigners.  But I digress, for this is the subject of another post…

I tried to educate people about the origins of yoga and expound upon its benefits which go above and beyond the mere physical world.  And if I were to just short cut this esoteric explanation and just say that in America it’s okay for men practice yoga (just like it is okay for men to be nurses and women to be doctors) then I would receive giggles and grins — in the same universal giggle co-opted by Trix breakfast cereal, “Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids!” — except here, they will say, “But you are in China!”  Regardless of my strange, foreign behavior, the girls and yoga instructors welcome me and tolerate me.  And it is a privilege for me to get hot and sweaty with a bunch of Celestial maidens.

Weight-training on the other hand was problematic.  The weight room contained filthy and shoddy equipment.  It shared the same space as two pool tables.  Cigarette butts, ghost turds, and dust littered the floor.  The room and equipment made you glad your vaccines were up to date.  There was an unenforced sign that said, “Please, No Smoking” or “Qing, Bu Yao Xiyan.”   It was a far cry from Gold’s Gym where a band of Hispanic workers continuously spit shined the barbells and sterilized the tread mills.  The gym consisted of some 3 barbells, 10 dumbbells, 4 benches, 1 nautilus machine, 1 treadmill, and 3 non-functional stationary bikes.  In theory, I could use all the available rubber-lined lead plates to squat my max.  In other words, they had about 270 pounds worth of free weight.  Unfortunately, only half the plates had holes that could fit the squat rack’s barbell.  So I lifted for endurance rather than strength.

It was a typical evening in the gym.  A class of girls belly danced.  A bunch of guys played pool.  A girl jogged in high heel boots on the tread mill.  And then there were a couple gym rats like myself just trying to build some muscle and burn some extra calories.   I circuit trained, moving swiftly between benches and machines, yoga poses, and side-straddle hops.  I focused on my exercises and disregarded the vivacious girls shaking their gluts, swerving their hips around in sinuous rhythms.  Perspiration shimmered upon their midriffs and necks despite the cold, wintry air.  Their neck muscles flexed.  And I pumped out another set.  Midway through my workout I realized I was burning up so I stripped off some layers.

But my breath burst forth in as I breathed hard, pressed or squatted.  And the girls did things with their shoulders that would make a man forget his old country and feel young again.  But we all – pool players and gym rats alike pretended to ignore them.

Ah, hell no.  The pool players passed out cigarettes, lit up, and then I had to point out the “No Smoking Sign.”

They smiled and tolerated me and laughed at the foreign devil.  I had just made a good joke.  But this was the one place where I would not tolerate smoking in China.  I stood my ground.  The boy waited with his cigarette lit.  He finally realized I was willing to lose face, and prolong the conflict and continue disrupting the harmony.  That’s when he put it out.

I resumed my exercises now that the pollution had been dealt with.  The girls danced and I built up some muscle.  Many of them wore form-fitting classroom attire.  Not that I noticed.  Strappy leather boots, skin tight pants, and bright girly shirts.  Their nails were filed and painted.  Some wore jewelry and metallic hip belts and shiny beads that jingled and jangled and dazzled.  Their hips and pelvis writhed and whirled while their thin, arms extended laterally, proudly inviting the entire world to view their come-hither beauty.

Meanwhile, a guy had been watching me all this time.  He was the guy who wanted to feel my muscles.  Since I was a nice guy from America I made nice.  Plus I was a teacher trying my best to emulate my best teachers.  He told me I was so strong.  I actually stopped watching — I mean, working out – the girls, and allowed him to practice his oral English.

So I gave him some exercise tips: strength train at least 3 times per week, walk at least 30 minutes a day most days of the week, and be sure to eat well.

Culture tip#234: There are two definitions to eating well.  The Eastern definition:  Keep eating fruits and vegetables, decrease your rice and soybean intake, and increase your meat intake.  The Western definition was simpler: Increase fruits & veggies, decrease meats & breads.  And one more thing.  Tobacco does not count as a vegetable.

His name was Wang Yan Wu.  He was an engineering student, and “Can I make friends with you?” was his most burning question.

This was how it was back in kindergarten too.  My best friend in the whole world at that time was somebody I had met during recess.  I asked him what his favorite cartoon was. This was during the early 1980s, The Golden Age of Saturday Morning Cartoons, when many children had gotten up early with the rising sun and a box of their favorite cereal on “Cartoon Day.”  We both enjoyed The Smurfs.    It featured a commune of diminutive fairy-like creatures wearing blue and white uniforms.  Every Smurf had a talent and worked together to forage for Smurf berries in the surrounding woodlands.  They lived in a mushroom hut commune, and were led by the wise, red capped Papa Smurf.  And they were continuously under assault by the evil sorcerer Gargamel who wanted to grind up their flesh, blood and bones to make gold.  My friend knew he wanted to be like Handy Smurf, but I had trouble deciding which Smurf I wanted to be like.  I wanted to be Poet Smurf one day, Doctor Smurf another, and Painter Smurf the next.   And then there were some days I didn’t want to be a Smurf at all.  I wanted to be like Johan, a human knight allied with the Smurfs, who defended the weak and powerless during the Dark Ages.  But despite all my confusion, my friend and I shared one thing in common: Our crush on Smurfette.  It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.  Our mothers saw to it that Cardinal Forest Elementary put us in the same afternoon kindergarten class.  His name was Andy Heinz, or as I liked to call him when I wanted to be like Jokey Smurf, “Andy Ketchup.”   But I digress as I am want to do.

Wang Yan Wu had just asked if he could make friends with me.

What the smurf?  Were things really that simple here?  “Of course,” I said.  “But the best way to talk with me is by email.” I preempted his request for my cell phone number.

This was a big problem in the Chinese ESL environment.  Give your number to one student and within a week it’ll go viral with a 1,001 texts saying, “How r u?”, or “W’sup?!”  They wanted to practice their Teen Text English.  Only the most die hard ESL students communicated by email.  In which case, they wanted to know if Jesus Christ supported communism, or if the President Obama knew how to use chopsticks.  That narrowed it down to less than ten emails a day.

Just in case, I made sure that Wang Yan Wu saw me ogle the belly dancers.  Not that I noticed their thin, lithe bodies shimmy and writhe to the music.  Not that I was thinking about them at all:  Their black hair or chestnut brown hair bouncing lightly upon their shoulders or back, as they thrusted their chests forward and shoulders backward, holding me captive with their pendulum swing.  These were short, happy days.  Every day was a movable feast that would last a lifetime of famine in the waste land.  And I decided that it might be a good idea to watch the girls carefully in case I ever wanted to them in a story.

I went back to my domicile all hot and bothered.  Do I swing back to America where people have finally begun to realize that smoking was a form of oppression, and begin another arduous journey to become a physician assistant?  Or do I stay in China because the girls – no, not girls, women, dammit! – were so stunning that I needed to stay for scientific purposes in order to observe whether their beauty was more than skin deep?

After a year at Yale’s PA program I took some time off from graduate school to serve my community as a medical assistant in a rural health center in the wilds of Pennsylvania.  Medical assistants should not be confused with physician assistants.  MAs are similar to nurse assistants.  They receive training on the job or in certificate programs, and their duties depend on the particular clinic or institution in which they work.  For instance, one clinic I interviewed with in Virginia had their MAs perform pap smears.  They wanted to know if that was okay with me.  No problem, I had told them.  Yale had even educated me in the fine art of pap smears, digital rectal exams and obtaining specimens.   But I wanted to know if it was okay with their patients:  How did their patients feel about somebody other than a provider performing such an intimate exam?  And how did the clinic’s providers justify ceding such a vital component of the physical exam to position requiring only a high diploma and a certificate?

In the end, I joined a rural health center in my hometown where I spent most of my time measuring vital signs, drawing blood, and honing my vampire comedy routine.

One day last April, a patient came in for a physical exam required by her college.  She had been accepted into a master’s level PA program and was very excited.

I was glad for her.  And we would be colleagues someday.  That my small town was home to another future healer was great news indeed.  Feeling professorial, I then thought to help her in her aspirations, and narrated the process.  “So right now, I’m taking your pulse, that’s your heart rate,” I had said, explaining that anything less than 60 beats per minute is considered bradycardia, and anything more than 100 is tachycardia.   Now she would be one baby step ahead on her career path.

She told me that feeling a person’s heart beat made her squeemish.  She had worked as candystriper at a local nursing home.  She sang songs and read them newspapers.

I had reassured her.  Yes, it was a full contact sport, but you get used to it quickly, especially when you see a patient in pain or tears.  Once you don that white coat and stethoscope society empowers you with the privilege to cross the boundaries of personal space and break the touch taboo.

She will be an excellent physician assistant someday.  But for me April was the cruelest month.

Now it was almost Thanksgiving.  I recently skyped the director from Rocky Mountain College PA program for a followup to the October interview.  I was investigating the reasoning behind the admission committee’s decision to “not select me.”

Dr. W told me that I had high marks all around for my interview.  I was above and beyond the cut off.  But the admissions committee was skeptical about my lack of academic science background.

I refuted this claim by asking him take to glance at my transcripts and resume.  Did he see that I had served as a research assistant with Dr. Rathmell when he was head of the University of Vermont Department of Anesthesiology?  That I had helped one of that department’s pain fellows write a history of medicine paper on the use of intrathecal opioids?   That I had graduated with honors from that university’s post-baccalaureate premedical program?  Or that Yale’s PA program director had heartily endorsed me in her letter of recommendation?

Then Dr. W said that I wrote like an English major.

(Ah, hell no!  Snap, son!  No he did’ent  He did not just go there!).

Of course, I had been an English major once upon a time at Thomas Jefferson’s alma mater, The College of William and Mary.  And by the the fucking way, since we were now bullshiiting, I might as well say that I had even minored in Hip Hop English.

He then tried quoting some of my prose to illustrate his point.

Chagrined by the scientist, I disregarded the fact that he just butchered a quote from my CASPA narrative.  Instead, I told him I wrote this way to illustrate that I am in the vanguard of a movement to humanize medicine.

Then he said that I was a very personable guy.  But it came across as being “too familiar.”  He let this last statement hang like an ominous implication as if perhaps he had just announced with prophetic doom that it had been my risky lifestyle that led to such a dire diagnosis.

Now upon further reflection I should have replied to Dr. W that this was my way of showing I would not have an autistic bedside manner.  Moreover, I would not gaze at patients like the way one interviewer had gazed at me.  She had looked at me the way you look at a bug smeared upon a microscope slide.  And I should have told him I was looking for answers not excuses.  To be fair, he sounded very kind.  But he was giving me the shaft, and his words were coated in a thick layer of Vaseline.

The follow-up with Rocky Mountain College was not unconstructive.  Dr. W suggested that I can improve my chances of getting into PA school by continuing my education.  Perhaps I can go to paramedic or nursing school?   In essence, he was suggesting that I should go back to college for another two years just to get into college.  Then the doctor conjured up the specter of fear, warning me that staying in China and teaching English would be frowned upon by admissions committees.  At the very least, I should come back to America and get an entry level position in health care.

Oh, to come back to heaven and breathe again the clean air and ride my bike upon safe clean roads.  Maybe by the time I got back the service sector would be hiring again?

There was no evidence to support this, but it flashed in my mind that I was speaking to a man little versed in adversity.  His kind suggestions were disconnected from the reality experienced by those less fortunate or even those of us just trying to eke out a life during the global economic downturn.  I had been in college for ten years already.  I had served in the Marines.  And still had to beg, plead, and volunteer just to get noticed, and be interviewed for such highly sought positions as Emergency Department Technician or Nursing Assistant.  These were jobs that paidy $9.00/hour, lacked benefits, and carried the risk of back injuries.  And human resource departments kept files upon files of applicants desperately seeking these highly coveted jobs.

Even if I did – by some miracle – come back to America to work in entry level healthcare, there was obviously no guarantee it would pay off in winning this crapshoot lottery:  I already had 2,400 hours of patient contact experience (over twice the prerequisite amount for most porgrams), I had been accepted into Yale’s program with just 800 hours, and programs were also accepting students with negligent amounts.

Dr. W also suggested I contact CASPA – the centralized application service for prospective physician assistant students – which acts a middle man between prospective students and PA programs.  RMC PAP originally thought I lacked academic science background because CASPA categorized UVM post-bacc work as “professional” and left it unverified.  “It says here you have 3.5 G.P.A at UVM,” Dr. W had said.  “You graduated with honors, did well in immunology, microbiology, genetics, organic chemistry.  These are all heavy duty sciences courses.   But CASPA didn’t verify them so it appears you don’t have the right stuff.”

I finally got what I needed from Dr. W.  I put his words in a battered old cup, and fired off the first opening salvo of emails to CASPA.  The saga will continue in a future post.

In the meantime, I was just thankful to have a meaningful job where I could teach, write and travel.  A meaningful job in a hellhole sure beat groveling for a pittance in paradise, where I was invisible to the scowling, time crunched angels and cherubs flitting about in their daily grind.  But here were mortals happy and kind.  The Middle Kingdom may be hell, but it was a heavenly remedy for an American’s anomie.  And I would have more time to perfect my vampire comedy routine for my once and future patients.  There was no chip on my shoulder.  Not a single crumb.  There was only fear in a handful of dust.

All I wanted to do was rest my eyes and mull over my recent trip to Hengshan Mountain.  But every time a vision of green pines and vast blue skies manifested within, one of the boys would try to practice his oral English on me: “Ah, excuse me, sir.  Who is the most handsome boy?”  He giggled.  The other boys laughed.

I opened my eyes and saw that the boy really wanted to know.  In his eyes it was a legitimate and innocent question.   But such a question failed to capture my interest.  For some people it was hard to get their attention when the television was on.  I was one such person.  My television set was on so I returned to my visions.

Hengshan was one of China’s five holy mountains, sacred to Buddhism and Taoism.  The slopes and ridges were lined with tombs, temples, and a monastery or two.  A lone pagoda stood aloof on a nearby mountain.  Chinese tourists came to pray for an increased return of their stock investments, extra babies, a second car, a safe journey to the shoppers’ paradise of Hong Kong, and other things that promised happiness.  I was the only odd ball here.  A stranger in a strange land seeking nature, spirituality, and some traditional Chinese architecture.

We had set out on a brisk autumn morning.  I packed light for a two day journey.  I brought layers, Chinese trail mix, moon cake and a canteen of green tea.  My two guides – who shall remain nameless but one whose claim to fame is due her favorite movie being American Pie – went above and beyond the call of duty.  They refused to let me pay for anything.  In fact, I had to fight in order to treat them to dinner and pay for the cab ride home.  “What made the mountains holy,” I asked them.

“Many famous peopre came here,” said one.

Oh, okay.  It seemed the concept of religious experience was too alien.  Either that or my students lacked the vocabulary to describe the concept in a meaningful way.  I had a theory that sometimes English-speaking Chinese people sometimes found it convenient to misunderstand or feign ignorance.  From my research Hengshan literally meant ‘balancing mountain.’  Though I still wasn’t able to find out why exactly it was holy, other than the fact that many temples had been built there.  I wondered if anything special happened here.  Like maybe some holy man had received a vision or some divine inspiration here.  But my internet sources were full of useless information.

The students arranged everything.  One student’s uncle was a higher-up official in a nearby town — which meant he was a member of the Chinese Communist Party.  So — via the guanxi of relationships and connections — I was given the royal treatment.  They would not let me pay for a thing.  That included transportation, food, hotel, and touring fees.  I did not even have to use my passport the entire time.  Being transported from the city to the mountain in a luxury car with tinted windows instead decrepit public transport was a highlight.

All this effort touched my heart.  So when I tried to pay for things or express my gratitude I was told to just relax.  The student’s uncle told me that since his niece’s teacher we had a relationship.  And that was that.  I got the impression that making a fuss about hospitality was unseemly – perhaps even causing me or my benefactors or both of us to lose face.

After about three months in a city that makes Mos Eisely seem like bucolic desert utopia of order and cleanliness, I was looking forward to a good hike in the Chinese countryside.  Imagine communing with Mother Nature: blue skies, mountains and old growth pine.  It was the perfect place to cleanse your soul and lungs.  It would be a much needed respite from my current residence — a Dickensian hive of scum and villainy crossed with a Blade Runner technocracy — with its dismal miasma of noise and air pollution.  But your guides cannot enjoy the silence – such a thing is as remote a concept as religion — nor can they appreciate the sound of wind against the pines.  They remedied this abnormality by singing Chinese pop songs or turning on their combo cell phone/mp3 player to “Break up the sirence.”  So much for nature therapy.

Our path was a ribbon of pavement that wound its way up the mountain.  Tour buses and motor bikes careened down the hill.  Their horns continuously blaring like morse code warnings: “Beware, beware. Pedestrians beware.  Walk with care.  Get out of the way.  Go ahead punk, make  my day.”  Stone stairways short-cutted the switchbacks.  Enterprising villagers set up stands where they hawked drinks, corn cobs, eggs, medicinal roots, and trinkets.  They advertised their wares with plastic slide whistles – the kind that made an asinine “yo-yo” sound.  These dunce whistles echoed throughout the mountain sides like the bizarre mating calls of some long thought extinct dumb-dumb bird.  I asked my guides about this peculiar phenomenon.  Was it some kind of Taoist tradition to ward away devils and fox women?

No, they explained.  They smiled, charmed by my naiveté.  You see, one student explained, the adults who come here are parents who have children, and part of the job of being a parent is to give their children something to do.  So they buy their children whistles.

“Oh, okay.”  That was becoming my new mantra.  “Oh, okay,” and sometimes, “Oh, I see.”  Seldom ever was it “Om.”

We climbed the holy mountain, our lungs heaved and legs burned as we took the stone stairs through a bamboo grove.  Pine trees flexed with the wind against a blue sky.  Blissful moments of solitude came and went.  And there was that idiot sound of dunce whistles in the breeze.  Great temples with their gently sloping gables sprouted from the sides and summits of the mountain. A pagoda sprung up from a hill in the distance.  I wanted to go off trail and bushwhack through the woodlands and explore the pagoda.  But there it stood:  A taunting dark tower never to be entered in this life.

We explored other temples along the way were gods sat crosslegged in their inner sanctums .  Candle light glinted off their golden skin. Women in high heels genuflected before something that looked like a three-eyed  Blackbeard with a piractical grin.  Normally I would call them statues.  But my guide scolded me for taking pictures, “With every picture you take you take something away from God.”

“Oh, okay,” I murmured appreciatively.

Some gods had gold skin and black, bushy beards.  People folded their hands and kneeled.   Outside, people threw firecrackers into brick ovens.  I was curious as to what all this signified, but by now, I had stopped asking questions.  My guides were as clueless as I was.  Inside, incense burned and gods with painted eyes glared at me.  There was a god for everything.  There was a god for wealth.  One for longevity.  And still another for making babies.  This latter was explained to me by the girl who loved American Pie.

“Want to go in the temple to see the god for babies?” she asked. She spoke in a soft, conspiratorial tone that reminded me of women back in college when they had asked if I wanted to come over to watch a movie after a night out at the bar.

“No.”  We were burning day light and I wanted to climb and feel its ascent in my legs and relish the fresh mountain air.  Such an experience was precious to me.  While making babies was always on my mind – or rather the preliminary business at least – today was different.  Additionally, going into a dark, stifling womb-like structure, cloudy with incense was getting quite old.

“No, you don’t want to go in?  Or no, you don’t want a baby?” she wanted clarification.

Of course I was always up for going in.  I just didn’t want to linger on this precipice any longer.  Earlier, I had indulged her request to ‘sing to the mountain.’  It was a Chinese tradition to make you feel good she had explained.  Furthermore, this explained why I had seen students at the university shouting with an opened book in their hands.  They thought it somehow facilitated learning and induced happiness.  And it was why the mountain behind Xiangnan University was known as Crazy English Mountain to the laowai.  She suggested we ‘sing to the mountain’ by screaming, “I love you.”  Normally, I am all for sounding my barbaric yawp across the rooftops of the world.  But this time I did it and felt like I was being nice.  I was making nice to preserve the damned harmony.  And she had been miffed that there was no echo to bring my words back to her.

Now she wanted clarification.  Christ, I barely knew the girl and it felt like we were married already.  I liked her as a person.  She was nice.  She was curious and intelligent.  And she wanted to talk about sex.  But all I wanted to do was enjoy the scenery.  I answered her question.  “A little bit of both.”  It was far more convenient to be mean than try to explain that at this critical juncture I currently found the bourgeoisie concept of the M word to be a despicable materialistic enterprise.  Plus culture shock was setting in.  But how does an American capitalist roader explain all this to Chinese communist?

We made it to the top two hours before sundown.  The white stone walls of Zhurong Gong, an 8^th Century Buddhist temple, jutted out of the rocky summit above the pine clad mountain side.  It perched upon one of the seventy two peaks of the Hengshan range.  I got away from tourists with their dunce whistles and claimed a new precipice of my own to meditate upon.  My eyes closed and the sun warmed my skin.   Pine trees and fresh air made for wonderful incense.  Mountains beyond mountains wound away in jagged ridge lines below me.  I reigned in my breath.  I inhaled the sunwarmth and expanded my ribcage to its outer limits. I exhaled toxins – both real and imagined, both physical and metaphysical.

I communed with nature and the zeitgeist.  I dreamed of sublime jungles, all asteam with the rising sun, and ancient ruins still somewhat recognizable with their crumbling weathered obelisks amidst emerald plains teeming with bison—and the farthest reaches of known space where brigands and fiefdoms and transnationals clashed over trade routes, water rights, minerals, whole worlds, ancient ideas, heaps of broken images.  Men, women, posthumans, and automatons all clamored to find their destiny in the stars, finding only the cold, desolate vacuum of the outer reaches—a tabula rasa devoid of reality, the perfect reflecting glass for the dreams and nightmares of civilizations to come and the wildspace primeval.  There would be wars, quests, bloodshed, intrigue, socioeconomic tumult, heroism and villainy, mass extinctions, as well as their macrocosmic correlates—all indicators that the cosmos had come to another particularly unstable, disorderly period of the time.

Only time would reveal the subtleties of the pattern.  It was another period of turbulence, when nothing appeared as it really was, when there was beauty in death and decay, and there was truth hidden within illusions and deceit, when all that glitters was not gold, and when the living would sacrifice everything in order to secure a paltry place in a dying hierarchy in the great chain of being.  And for many, their place lay on paths unimaginable yet preordained.  Souls asail on a sea of dreams could only fathom what shores their ships would sight let alone what storms and scourges or sojourns and salves lay ready to tip the scales of samsara.  And so too I wandered afar in flight seeing what I could see, immersed in wonder, astral currents of the great vastness coursing through me, imbuing each living cell with a hint of greater awareness, so that the whole became greater than the sum, which enabled the formation of a conduit for all knowledge and experience of everything, and culminating in a continuous ebb and flow of information so overwhelming and astounding  that I would drown and sink one moment, then float and swim the next, and only by focusing on one intersecting nexus between weft and warp of the weave, I was able to plunge into one moment of the here and now: a rose growing out of the stony rubbish a vacant lot.

Crowds formed around me like specters.  They congregated behind me and upon the rocky slopes below, laughing, talking, and snapping pictures.

Later that day we sought dinner in that town at the foot of Hengshan.  I told them to order whatever they wanted.  We had beer, mandarins, lotus root, and spiced pork with green beans.  And then a bowl of mystery meat and peppers came out.  “What is this?” I asked investigating the strips of ruffly gray meat with my chopsticks.

The girls exchanged glances.  “Just eat it,” they said.

Earlier they had asked me some staple questions.  What do I like to eat and do I like Chinese food.  Of course, I loved Chinese food.  And I loved vegetables.  This was because you always knew what the hell you were eating.  Meat on the other hand was sketchy.  It was cut down into minuscule, unidentifiable pieces.  I had told them that I did not eat organs, feet, face, ears, tails, tongues or brains.  I was willing to try any animal – but only cooked skeletal muscle tissue would do.  Now I saw a bowl of mystery meat and I was skeptical.  It took all my years of medical and anatomy education to realize that it was bowel tissue.  Pig bowel to be exact.  They enjoyed their bowl Hunan Pork Bowel  and I contented myself with lotus root and green beans.

The streets were clean and it was safe for your children to play in the alleys and side roads.  Cars drove by without oppressing pedestrians with their horns and tyranny.  Most of the buildings had distinctive Chinese architecture.  Just as my current city specialized in clothing shops, this town too had its specialty: fireworks, beads, and trinkets.

By midnight we finally made it home.  Instead of paying for tickets my students bribed our way back.  I had asked them why we didn’t get tickets.  “It’s very easy to sneak on,” she said.  It didn’t occur to them that being with the only foreign devil on the train would complicate matters.  But I wanted to observe Chinese behavior so I let them Shanghai me.  (Plus they made their plans in Chinese and without my input – just one more reason for me to learn Mandarin if I ever want to have a voice here).  They gave money to conductors and security guards – which helped me to understand why being a train conductor was a highly coveted job in China.

It backfired when we got to our destination.  The guard saw that we didn’t have tickets.  It was the last checkpoint.  He wanted to charge us for tickets from the train’s origin twelve hours away in Shanghai.  And I was worried that he would expect more since they were with a “rich foreigner.” Luckily, we had written proof we had just come from Hengshan just two hours away.    The girls gave him the money.  He pulled out his wallet from the back pocket of his uniform trousers, gave back some change, and then tucked the renminbi into his wallet.  “They are working very hard tonight,” one of the girls offered in explanation.

My guides finally let me pay for the taxi ride back to campus.