The needle has landed again

It's been both overwhelming and anticlimactic, this return. I now understand why so many run back to their far-off overseas outposts almost as soon as the jet lag of return wears off -- "real" life is fucking hard. There are the financial strains of life in the first world (the recession an added bonus), the sobering realities of flat tires and other mundane troubles, the maddening exactness of job ads. One is responsible for so much more when one speaks the language and can't just hide behind a foreigner's privilege, the charmed ignorance of the expatriate. It makes one almost miss the staggering strangeness of the days when making oneself understood in a restaurant without resorting to pictures or charades was enough to make the day. Almost.

I've been slack on updating here because I haven't had much to say. That's the anticlimactic part of the return: comfort, normalcy, reclamation. Familiar faces, and access to as many delicious burritos as I can stuff into my face. It's all been good. I'm studying for horrendous and unreasonable standardized tests and starting to get things together for graduate school applications. Not working, because no one's hiring, but that was expected. Hence the goal of retreating into academics. But for now, while my savings still make for a comfortable enough cushion, I lay low and enjoy the calm that comes before the next inevitable wave of wanderlust energy sweeps me off to the next adventure.

Will you take me as I am, strung out on another man?

Back in Bangkok for a couple days before flying out, and I've got to say that the city is not as impressive to me on the second go-round. Then again, the elation I felt when I was here before had more to do with not being in China anymore. Since then, I've cleared out my lungs and brain in the wonderful, fresh sea air. It's hard to get excited about any city after spending more than a week sitting under the shade of coconut trees, breathing along with the tide. I'm now having serious Koh Phangan withdrawal. But perhaps it's better this way. If I were leaving directly from the island, I might never actually get on a plane, just disappear into the wild hills and turn up several years later as the proprietress of a guesthouse on a remote beach, my hair in dreadlocks and my feet rough from never wearing shoes.

I've returned to the cultural airlock of Khao San, the necessary step for the leavers and the arrivers, bars open all night for the jet-lagged and the party-till-you-drop crowd, playing the same music they've been playing since they filmed Cheech and Chong there, interspersed with bad techno. I got in last night and somehow ended up drinking with South African sailors until nearly dawn. That's the kind of effect Khao San has, somehow: staying up late with people you don't expect.

About 24 hours left in Thailand before two overnight flights in a row deliver my exhausted and miserable self back to San Francisco. My bags are packed (not hard to do, I feel like I haven't unpacked in years), my mouth used to the taste of travel. The soundtrack is Joni Mitchell, the consummate melancholy woman on her own in a strange place, always Joni Mitchell singing in my ears when I travel alone. Here she is, singing a song that rings perfectly true.

... But better

So, I'm in the tropical paradise of Ko Phangan. I got my pasty foolish self sunburnt to a crisp within 24 hours of being here, of course. But no matter. The lobster look will soon enough turn itself into a tan, and by the time I come back home I will be a nice attractive bronzy color, rather than my current sick-looking bright red.

Everyone who recommended this particular island to me said that reservations were absolutely not necessary. You just get off the ferry, they said, and you will be swarmed by people bearing pictures and all kinds of other information about their guesthouse or bungalow operation. Unfortunately, when it rains, everyone on the island scatters off to a bar or under a rock or something. So I was left on the pier with all my awful luggage and no place to go in the rain, all after traveling on buses and boats for the past 14 hours. I'm kicking myself for shipping my nice, light backpack home from China and traveling with a suitcase. I did this so I wouldn't have to leave the suitcase behind in China, but damn, I'm so kicking myself now for having to lug this unwieldy thing around hills and rickety island piers and unpaved streets, not to mention looking like a total fool compared to the all the glossy-tanned carefree backpackers.



So I caved and spent the night at the overpriced and shabby little "resort" right by the pier for the first night. Then I went exploring and found a better place to stay. But not before collapsing on the beach and turning myself around in the sun like a rotisserie chicken. Asian people don't ever do this. Asian people are scared to death of the sun. They apply all sorts of horrible toxic whitening agents to their skin so they can be whiter. It's only us Westerners who strip down to next to nothing and do our rotisserie chicken impressions until we're burnt to a crisp. Everyone wants what they don't have...

Incidentally, I had been worried about traveling about Thailand in the rainy season, but I am actually very glad that I am here now and not any other time of year. There are not as many people, things are cheaper, and the weather is cooler (though still quite hot -- this is tropics, after all). Every day, it rains for an hour or two, then the skies alternate between beautifully cloudy and mostly sunny. It's perfect.



Today I went on a "reggae boat tour," which was a boat ride around the island with stops at various points to hike up to a waterfall, go swimming, have lunch, get really stoned on some very nice Thai weed, then go snorkeling. It was wonderful.

Same same

The predominant sound in the Thai language, which is a tonal one much like Chinese, is "ka" -- or at least, it seems like the predominant sound to my untrained ears. As a result, I feel like I'm surrounded by a huge flock of some exotic species of tropical crow. I can't quite call it a pretty language, but it's certainly mesmerizing.



On my second day in Bangkok, I met another American girl traveling by herself on a ferry-bus down the Chao Praya River. For her, Bangkok was the staging area before she went south to teach English in a city near the Malaysian border. We got along, and hung out together for the next few days until she left. It was interesting to compare perspectives, her in the initial oh-god-what-have-I-done panic of arriving at her work-abroad post, me with my jadedness at the opposite end of the same experience. She hated Bangkok for its servility to the West, which is what I (somewhat guiltily) appreciate about this city.



Despite the wild-eyed craziness of Bangkok, I have managed to find many pockets of peace and tranquility for myself, despite staying just half a block off Khao San Road. On Sunday I took a boat tour on the river, and somehow ended up being the only person on the boat. I've also found a chill little coffee shop nearby; most of the time I am the only person there.



I do have to admit that the tourist trap aspect of Khao San is getting to me a bit. The other night I was walking down a busy side street when a man complimented the tattoo on my back. I thanked him and kept walking. He continued trying to talk to me, until I got a little creeped out and ducked into a shop. When I came out he was still there, and continued following me and trying to talk to me until I turned around and said, "You are following me. Stop it." He left me alone then, but I can't stop thinking about the fact that there are many women out there who will be too clueless, polite, or unaware to face a man like that and tell him outright to leave them alone, and they will be taken in and have devil-knows-what happen to them. The thought of it is chilling.



On Monday I took a cooking class, which was one of the goals I had for Thailand. It was amazing, and I learned a great deal. Overall, I am completely enchanted by Thai food. I have not had a bad meal the whole time I've been in this country, between all the curries and the heaping plates of Pad Thai and the fresh fruit.



Tonight I take an overnight bus, then ferry, down south to Ko Phangan. Stay tuned for updates from tropical paradise. In the meantime, more of my Thailand pictures are up on Flickr.

Greetings from the Banana Pancake Trail

BANGKOK - Let me tell you something about Khao San Road in Bangkok: it's a huge and horribly touristy stretch of bars and shops catering to hippie children and other lost souls who are trying to drink away the memory of their real lives across the ocean by vacationing in a type of resort only an acid trip could dream up.

Let me tell you something else: I ABSOLUTELY LOVE IT HERE. Not because I have any illusions about this being "real" Thailand, but precisely because it's not. I've spent the past half a year in "real" Asia, gawked at by everyone I passed on the street, constantly lost and confused. Traveling around "real" Asia, not even to mention living in it, is f'ing DIFFICULT. Khao San Road is easy. Blissfully, carelessly, stupidly easy. Stay in a guesthouse and eat pad thai and banana fritters and pineapples off the street for pennies. Drink super strong iced coffees thick with condensed milk. Bargain in English for T-shirts and necklaces. Stay up all night drinking, then eat breakfast in the gathering sunshine.

My first day in Thailand overlapped with my friend Julie's last day, and we met for breakfast near her hostel. She told me about riding motorbikes around some remote part of Laos, and complained of how touristy and insulated parts of Bangkok appeared to her in comparison. And of course, for those searching out the hard ground of authenticity, this city will ring hollow. But for me, weary from the authenticity-overload of living in provincial China, this is perfect. For the first time in six months, I can blend in. With my dirty sandals and ripped jeans and hair messy from the humidity, I look just like everyone else here. No one questions my presence. I cannot even express how good this feels. I'm tired of having travel experiences that feel like work.

I'll be here at least a week before going to Ko Pha Ngan, the hippiest little hippie island in the Gulf of Thailand known for holding massive raves on the beach, and laying on the beach frying myself in the island sun until it's time to go home. Oh yes.

Chinese moving in, building discoteques

In 24 hours, I will be in Beijing, probably in transit from train station to airport. In 48 hours, I will be in Bangkok.

The horrible, oppressive heat of summer has subsided. The rain no longer steams on the pavement, but collects in cold, muddy puddles. It's fall. A change of season, and the familiar taste of leaving on my tongue.

Last night I went to dinner and then clubbing with some friends. Chinese clubs are weird. People dance in one little spot, packed in like sardines, doing the same ridiculous hopping-and-head-twitching dance. The was a trampoline dance floor; it took a minute to get used to, but then I started really dancing. And for just a couple minutes, I was so glad so feel the bass reverberating through everything, to move and not care about anything else except moving. But then random Chinese men started trying to grope me, and it killed the mood, and I stopped.

New teachers are arriving now, still wide-eyed as they drag their overpacked suitcases through the mud on the unfinished driveway to the apartment building. I've been giving penny tours and survival tips to the newcomers, and this more than anything else has really made the passage of the last six months seem real. I've been here long enough to count as a veteran, and my survival Chinese is good enough to tell others to just get in the taxi and let me do all the talking.

For the past few days, I've had a lot of moments when I got ready to be sentimental about things -- my last day of work, the last time sitting in the teachers office talking about nothing, the last time loitering outside the McDonalds by my school drinking coffee and scowling at passerby, my last jaunt through the city square, the last time I'd see certain people -- then realized that I would not actually miss any of these things. Except the food. I will miss the food.

Next update will be from Thailand, where the Internet actually works. I have a feeling that it will take a lot of willpower to go sightsee instead of spending too much time online.

Straight into the face of time

There are many things I am not allowed to discuss with my students in China. In teacher training, we were warned against saying four particular words in class -- Tibet, Taiwan, Tiananmen, and Falun Gong. TTTF, the forbidden topics. (Apparently, an Aston teacher once drew a rough map of China on the board but forgot to draw the island of Taiwan. A kid went home and told his mom, and the teacher was deported.) The word Communism, also not so advisable, and basically any real discussions about Chinese government.

I spent several weeks carefully talking about news with my brilliant teenager class. I found some short, simple American news stories and radio broadcasts, which we read or listened to in class, and later discussed. I had been itching to talk to them honestly about the state of news and media censorship in this country, but, well, the risk of deportation made me bite my tongue.

One day, I asked them about the Great Firewall. I focused my questions on YouTube and Facebook, which are both blocked, trying to test the waters and see what they had to say about the matter. I got their standardized, drilled responses that the censor measures were for the people's own good, to keep bad content away from innocent eyes. Then it was time for the class break. When I came back to the room, one of the girls had pulled up a search on her cell phone, and read me the results.

"China blocks sites on the Internet because Tibet and Taiwan want their independence, and the Chinese government doesn't want people to read about it," she said, stumbling over the longer words. The she looked up at me. They all looked up at me with puzzled eyes. "Is that true, Teacher?"

I froze. In my head, alarms were going off. Two of the four forbidden words were just uttered in my class, by my students, outside the context of tourism! I changed the subject. I couldn't do it, couldn't get into that kind of discussion, didn't have sufficient background knowledge to even try. The looks on their faces of what I thought at the time to be innocence and confusion stayed in my mind.

The last day of class was on Sunday, and they gave their final presentations, which were on pre-discussed topics of their choosing. One girl chose to talk about the changes that have affected China over the last 30 years. She brought in pictures to show how people's lives have improved, and an amazing little stack of Cultural Revolution-era food ration coupons she'd borrowed from her grandfather.

I was more prepared for a discussion this time. I'd brought in "Wind of change" by The Scorpions for them to listen to, and told them about some of the Russian history around that song, and asked them if they thought it could apply to China. We brought out the word Communism, and they told me that China was Communist in politics but capitalist in business. They asked me whether I thought this was good or bad, and whether I thought that China should get rid of Communism completely. I looked at my watch. We had 45 minutes left of the last class of the semester. So I told them that I wasn't really supposed to talk to them about it, but hey, they don't any time left to deport me, so what the hell.

We had a fantastic, honest discussion in which they revealed that they know perfectly well why certain websites are blocked, and they know ways around it, and they hope China will change and move closer to the West. They told me that they get their news by message boards where people post things that are really happening, but they have to be quick and lucky in their reading because they know that a lot of information gets quickly deleted by censors. They also told me that people who can read English are sort of like town criers, because they can read news from the West and tell their families and friends what's going on.

Those looks I mistook for innocence and confusion? They were really a challenge. They wanted to see what I would say. These kids are damn smart. They know just what they can and can't talk about, and were waiting for a green light from me to speak their minds. I wish I had been braver sooner.

I walked out of that class with tears in my eyes, because I will not see these kids again. Teaching them and getting to know them has been hands-down the best part of my time in China, and I will miss them terribly. They have confirmed for me that I want to be a teacher, and I will always remember and be grateful to them for it.

How I spent my summer vacation

Nothing has tasted the same since Sichuan hot pot. It was like dunking meat and vegetables into a lake burning with hellfire and damnation, then eating it. I believe I started hyperventilating after some particularly spicy bites, and between strangled breaths squeaked in broken Chinese for someone to bring me a goddamn coke. But then the horrible heat passed, and left with it a set of taste buds forever changed. But, you know, if you're going to burn off your taste buds, might as well do in the place that's world-famous for its impossibly hot peppers.



Most people go to Chengdu to see the pandas at the Giant Panda Research and Breeding Center. And sure, we saw the pandas, but my big goal was the food, the infamous heat of the food. We stayed at the greatest hostel ever, which offers its patrons Sichuan cooking classes. I paid extra to get a one-on-one lesson with a local chef, and it was amazing. Many things about the approach and methods of Chinese food make sense to me now, and I feel like I'll be able to replicate something authentic when I get back. But other than all that deliciousness, Chengdu was a really nice city. Very laid back and mellow, with an awesome Taoist monastery and temple, a Tibetan market area, and a lot of outdoor teahouses everywhere.

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Before Chengdu, R and I spent a week as tourists in Beijing, running from one overpriced attraction to another. It was exhausting, but mandatory.

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And THEN, after Beijing and Chengdu, we went to Qingdao for a few days to relax -- Qingdao is the beach town famous for beer (Tsingtao). It rained much of the time we were there, and R had a cold, but we had a nice time anyway.

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Now R has gone home, and I have six weeks left of my contract. I am done with China. I have seen all the things I felt were essential for me to see, and am now ready to leave. I've picked up an extra summer class to earn more money and occupy myself. It's hot as hell here, and muggy. This last bit here, it's all about gritting my teeth and getting through it. After the semester is over, I will go to Thailand and lay on a beach for a couple weeks.

(BTW, the entire photo set where these pictures are from can be found on Flickr.)

Where some have found their paradise

People will tell you where they've gone
They'll tell you where to go
But till you get there yourself you never really know
Where some have found their paradise
Others just come to harm
Oh Amelia, it was just a false alarm...
-- Joni Mitchell, "Amelia"

An old friend of mine spent five years living in India, and she always regaled everyone around her with wild stories about life in a place that was so inconceivably different from anything I knew. Too many of these stories ended abruptly, with her shrugging and saying, "I just can't explain it. It's a completely different world. You can't understand it unless you've been there." This used to always anger me -- everything can be explained, I would think, along the finite range of human behavior.

But it can't. I've learned that now. Because I find myself wanting to tell stories about the strange, strange world around me, and they never come out capturing it. Not in this online format, anyway, not without pages and pages of background and clarification, and it's been so damn debilitatingly hot here that I can't be bothered to do all that explaining.

I had hoped that moving across town to where all the other foreign teachers live would help me deal better with living in China, and it has, a little bit. But it hasn't made me actually like China any more. If anything, my distaste for this place grows with every passing day, with every incredulous stare from the locals, with every time I step outside and end up covered in a thick layer of dust that coats this entire damn city, with every time I come home and can't take a shower because they've turned the water off again, with every time I realize that someone's seeming kindness is only the manifestation of their misplaced sense of Confucian propriety.

Fuck you, moral relativism. I want to go back to the USA, where things are done right.

But on the plus side, R will be here in just a few days. I will take some time off work, and we will play in Beijing, then go to Chengdu. After he leaves, I will only have six weeks left in this damn country.

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On a different note, I am posting this from a still-active Great Firewall of China, thanks to the wondrous proxy-wrangling powers of H2B. Suck it, firewall!

Birthdays, blocks, and Beijing Duck

In honor of my birthday, the Great Firewall of China has blocked
Blogger. Thankfully, I set up email posting before I left the US for
this exact purpose. But it's still damn annoying that I can't even
read my own damn blog on the damn Internet. Even RSS feeds are
blocked, so I can't even read any of the blogs I like through a
reader. Damn you, China!

I blame the swine flu, actually. China is on super alert about it. All
of our students get their temperature taken by a ray gun-like
contraption every time they walk into school. They usually wave us
foreign teachers through, but we insist on having our temperature
taken anyway. (Mine has been normal every time, in case you were
worried.) The really disconcerting part is that we all have to carry
our passports with us at all times now, in case we get stopped for
questioning about whether or not we belong here. Because obviously,
we're evil and foreign and might have come to China with the express
purpose of spreading the pig flu.

Despite all of this, I had a lovely birthday. My C12 students (the
really brilliant teenager class) got me cake. My younger students sang
me the birthday song. Then a bunch of people came out to eat delicious
food at one of my favorite restaurants in town, and to a bar
afterwards. I got a bottle of Scotch that's actually from Scotland,
courtesy of a Scottish teacher. The remnants of it are making this
morning a bit hazy, but not necessarily in a bad way.

Oh, and I am not at the beach this week due to the combination of pig
flu precautions making travel a pain in the ass, and simply not
feeling like going anywhere. I think I will spend the next few days
engaged in one of my most common Chinese activities: scouring the city
I live in for a decent cup of coffee. I have yet to find one.