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Smells

As you know if you've read any of my other blog posts, I remember place and time very well by scent. (Music, too. It is some kind of sentimental shit.) I'm in Hangzhou, China right now. I lived in China around when I was four with my sister, mother and grandparents. As with any place, there are smells of things that only exist in Hangzhou. Smelly tofu is one. The smell of construction is another, because things are constantly being built here.

Today I smelled something. I think it was the smell of dinner, but what was cooking I don't know. What it reminded me of specifically was coming home from preschool to my grandparents' house and waiting (usually upset) for my Mom. What it reminded me of more abstractly was the feeling of homesickness and distance. I guess I missed the States when I was in China, and I guess I was capable of missing places when I was four.

Now I know that the way that these familiar smells are encoded into my memory must be through the vehicle of intense or stressful emotion. For some reason, I did not know this when, for example, in Seoul the natural gas emanating from the ground of the street reminded me of 1990s developing China. It did not remind me of the feeling of intense stress. Must think some more on that.

Cultures of fear

One day two years ago, I was having water cooler conversation with a biochemistry grad student. She was talking about the looks that she gets from medical students working in our building.

"It's like they think they're better than me! In smarts, I could take on any one of them. We just have that curiosity that that they don't! And that's why we chose this path."

She wasn't bitter, but she was a little indignant. Sure, she's probably right. The context is that science graduates have two primary options these days - graduate school or medical school. And grad students are a curious bunch, if I say so myself. I remember this person to be brilliant. But her reaction is a kind of feeling that never requires a full conversation in order to percolate.

Many conversations about identity start this way. These days, I overhear Korean Americans here talking this way all the time. Someone has some momentary experience passing by another person. A quick summary is conducted during which there is an understanding, a feeling of judgment.

It's like a form of telepathy, but it doesn't truly matter if the judgment actually exists. Or does it? Whether the feeling exists in the field of socially transmitted thoughts or whether it exists only within the mind of the thinker, who can say that one is more real than the other?

중국사람이에요

There used to be moments talking to my mother about nationhoods when she would respond to my grasping claims of American identity with:  "周为, you can be as American as you want to say you are, but at the end you're still 中国人."  It's ironic because these days I say 한궄사람아니에요 almost every day, and likewise 중국사람이에요 is more important to me than ever.  Tricky positions.

This was how it became clear to me why I couldn't spend the 추석 holidays in Seoul.  The costs to bring myself to 杭州 for the holidays were more than discretionary.  This was the frame of my week, the root of my impressions of my fifth trip to China.

My 中国 is mediated by the people whose experiences I try to access.  It lies in a frame is held tenderly by my parents, who deny the leaks that happen at the corners when I reach for cultural ground outside of their reach.  Europe, Latin America, the American West and the American city.  I call them leaks that's what it feels when language comes to you and leaves from you - a trickle, a flush.  While I stood at the train station at 杭州 gathering the hundred characters or so that I know, I re-saturated myself with Chinese as a month's worth of Korean trickles and fifteen years of English sweat a little, too.

Things I did: Entertain family friends.  Feel awkward about my educational privileges.  See family.  Talk international politics with my cousins.  Eat a little 月饼.  Visit the Shanghai Expo.   Learn the 上海 metro and the 杭州 buses.  Wonder a little about my place here, but everywhere really.  Six days.

한궄사람아니에요 = I'm not a Korean person

중국사람이에요 = I'm a Chinese person

The thing about expats

I hang out a quite a bit with American expats like myself, almost all of whom are teaching English.

Once a long time ago, someone asked why people never call Western expatriates immigrants.  And while that was a deeply thought-provoking question, there are indeed profound differences.  Subjective differences that lie in intention rather than circumstance.  (Or maybe not, since class is so central.)  I still wondered if I knew what they were.

My first weekend, I met a few college grads the night after they had a training exam for their positions.  The ones who failed would go home.  And while most passed, the ones who went home would return to their parents' homes and places that don't hire anyone anywhere, not even the fast food chains.  Some people come here to Seoul because of this.  Because they can save and go back and maybe pay rent for a year while looking for jobs.

My second weekend, I met a man who would leave following week.  I asked him what he'd do back in the States.  He shrugged his big tattooed shoulders.  "Seoul is great," he said.  And I wondered in what way, since earlier in that day he was talking shit about the guy with the grin on his face charging 2500 for bottled water.  Why if so much distrust?

That day, I met a man who came to visit his former colleague, who is now teaching adults.  They used to work at a company that gives financial advice lectures to retired folks around the country.  "There were months at a time when she would not have any gigs.  For her, it was like being paid to sit around, but that's not her.  She had to do something."  Enough said.

And when the sun went down, I went to Hongdae, near Honggik University.  I remember it like it was the LES, but on crack.  A lot of college students starting their year.  But also a lot of foreign faces.  A lot of plastered faces.  Some European accents.  A lot of twenty-something white folks in their going out clothes and heels.

In the cab home that night, I talked to another recent grad who used to study philosophy.  She said that there were only two things she really wanted to do after college - community/labor organizing or teaching kindergarten.  Her current job is far from those things.  "I had to really reconcile that before coming here.  What I was adding to."  She works for a publicly traded corporation that charges middle class families exorbitant amounts to learn English afterschool.

But ultimately, there is money here.  I'll talk about that soon, since I seem to be in the middle of much of it...

ATWP, AWOL

hey hey, atwp is gone. i've renamed this blog and changed the url. changes changes!

please update your shit correspondingly!

Summer on Wheels

I did two things really new this summer. Well, three things. The first two were biking from home and learning to drive. The third was flying a few thousand miles away from New York, leaving perhaps indefinitely. But this post is about the first two things.

When moving out of my senior dorm, I swiped a Pacific Aries mountain bike from the courtyard. (Now, I took it from near the heap of trash to be thrown out, so I'm pretty sure that wasn't stealing.) The bike is pretty standard. Shimano brakes, 27-speed. I roped it onto the hood of our minivan and drove it home. Over the next three months, I put over $200 into that bike. I fixed the gears, pumped the tires (free), replaced the clamp, bought a chain, another lock, a security cable, two seats and seat posts, and three safety lights. I took it everywhere - Flushing, DUMBO, Prospect Heights, Jackson Heights, everywhere in between.

I learned where the hills in the city were and why some neighborhoods are called the "Heights". I learned the meaning of traffic signs and street lanes. I learned where and how fast people like to drive. Where I could go fast and take my feet off the pedals. Where I could go slow and respond to a text with one hand on the handlebars. As a 20-year New Yorker, I think it was one of the last things that I haven't yet tried to do in that city.

Then I started driving, another culture entirely. Someone once told me driving depends on this field of social interaction. (If so, biking is an incredibly solitary activity.) So I learned to signal with others, watch others, follow laws and (less explicitly) neighborhood norms, and literally personify other cars as people. I drove a blue Toyota four-door on my test, but since then I've only been in my parents' red Mercury minivan from 2005. I got my first ticket. (Broken brake lights.) I resolved that ticket within 12 hours afterward. I felt awesome. Then I stood in front of the DMV judge and felt like just another law-abiding citizen.

If I had to choose? Biking, definitely cooler.

(This is a blog post that deserves pictures, but alas, I'm in another country already!)

Adults

When I started first grade in the States, I was a little puzzled by my first grade teacher. She was so... interesting. I want to say it wasn't because she was the first white person I ever got to know, but who knows? I was a five year old who just came back from a year and a half in China. (Read "adjustment issues".)

But from an early age I learned neither to trust nor identify with adults. It's not that I didn't think they knew what was best for me. I didn't even trust how they got their information to begin with.

Firstly, they're imprecise. When I was five, the attention to detail that I paid to my surroundings came down to half-millimeters. Adults? They couldn't tell the difference between one inch and two inches. I asked one of my teachers once to show me how long an inch was. She spread her thumb and index finger apart until they could hold a strawberry. "This much." She held her fingers probably two and a half inches apart, not one.

Secondly, they're dirty. Once during arts and crafts in first grade, I got some glue on my fingers and didn't know what to do to clean it. I showed it to my teacher. What did she show me to do? Wipe it on my pants. No doubt my mom did not appreciate that.

Thirdly, they don't know how to move themselves. Their bodies were bulky and generally all over the place. Why did I have to follow them around? They should be keeping up with me!

Lastly, they bend truth. That's just true. I still think that's true. In fact, I'm starting to do it.

So those are a few of the reasons why I'm dreading graduation/adulthood.

an experiment in unconscious processing

make a list of friends. friends who you have different relationships with, and some of whom are more dear to you than others.

place that list somewhere on your workspace (or somewhere you face quite often). but not right in front of you. somewhere just below where your line of sight is typically, so that you often have to move your eyes past it pretty quickly to where it belongs or where you want it to be.

some of those times, your attention will land on certain people's names. i don't mean when you blankly end up staring at the list and observe multiple names. i mean you end up staring at one name before you realize you're staring at anything at all.

= unconscious cognitive processing calling your attention.

Such a thing as regret

Say you might have changed some things in the past of your forward/causal/time-specified life. Okay. You regret.

You deeply regret. You ate a poisoned doggy biscuit and then pitiably fall dead the next day. That really sucks. You shouldn't have died.

You say, I don't want to die! I want to live! I want to not have eaten that doggie biscuit! I want to fix this state of affairs.

Well, doggie, you can do it in a number of ways. We can rewind the tape. You'll be dead doggie T minus one day. That's great! Don't eat the biscuit this time. But you do. Because this time you are still hungry. And you still didn't know that biscuit was poisoned. Who would?

No, you want to do it a different way? Okay. You're saying you want to go back and know that this is a poison cake. Sure, do that. But after this turn, you can never reasonably assume that any doggie biscuit won't make you choke. That sucks. Your friends are really bewildered; they ask, why is that dog not eating biscuits all of a sudden? But you've changed. In fact, it's hard to eat anything. You have new knowledge, but you're a different doggie - not as carefree as you were that time you died. Life is something else now entirely. (But is life ever not?)

Not acceptable. You need it all back, and nothing else can change. You need to intervene without engaging the system. Through a wormhole you jump to T minus a day and a half and land on the bad biscuit. With a swipe of the paw, you slide it into a furnace. Hide in the bushes for a day. A naive doggie trots along, sniffs some crumbs and leaves. You never see him again. And you're still dead. But where was the dog whose poor life I just saved? You float toward him. He's licking another biscuit. He doesn't recognize you. He doesn't even act like you, because you act like dead.

Is there such a thing as regret?

(Or time travel?)

Can you ever wish to have known? Can you ever wish to change things? Can you tell that I want to watch Lost again?