books

Books written in English that I've found for sale in Tianjin:

The Castle, Franz Kafka
Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence
Emma, Jane Austen
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
The Red and the Black, Stendhal
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
The Complete Stories of Sherlock Holmes
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
Sons and Lovers, Ivan Turgnev
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

Right now I'm reading Winesburg, Ohio for my non-comprehensive lists book. I'm trying to find a copy of Moby Dick that isn't abridged, because I've seen shortened ones floating around. I don't know why I find this so interesting, but I'll keep posting the titles of books that I see for sale in case others are curious as well. One of my students is reading The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin for fun. I saw some other student had my student's copy in a different class, later in the day on Friday. They're passing it around. It's sort of a hot commodity. I never imagined this happening with that book.

more pictures of the neighborhood

Here are a few more pictures of our neighborhood. I particularly wanted to take a picture of the sidewalk with the leaning trees along it. One of my favorite moments of the day is the moment when I am walking past the entrance to the magic alley, on my way home, along this sidewalk with the leaning trees. There are also some pictures of the entrance to our building, our stairwell, and our front door.

the story of an American Ben in a Korean High School in China

These are some pictures of my daily life teaching at a Korean High School. Blogger is doing some strange things of late, when I try to post pictures and move them around or add captions, so I'll just try and summarize up front. The first pictures are of the entrance to the school where I work, along with some of its signs. There's a bust of someone to the right as you walk in. I'm not sure who this is. Does anyone know? Basically, the bust of this bearded guy is the only other Western-looking face I see in Tianjin during most of my days. I've become affectionate towards him. It think it might be Plato or Socrates. Later in the group of photos are a couple of pictures of my co-teachers. I would consider these people to be my friends. Casey, the woman wearing yellow, is another English teacher. She moved to China a couple of weeks ago, just like me, from Korea. The rest of the teachers don't speak English or Chinese, and I don't speak Chinese or Korean, but we all eat lunch together, and make jokes, look exhausted, or roll our eyes at similar things. We take turns buying juice boxes for each other. We let people jump in line at the copy machine. We share the instant coffee and take turns buying it when it runs out. These past few weeks have taught me that actually being able to speak to someone is highly overrated, in terms of forming a friendship.

One note: click on the photos to see larger versions of the images

the symbol using/symbol creating/symbol misusing animal

Kenneth Burke is one of my favorite rhetoricians and he once said that man is the symbol using, symbol creating, symbol misusing animal. One set of symbols I find curious in China are cartoon characters. The associations are different for cartoon character images here than they are in the west. Maybe this is partially the west's fault, or the new vortex of meanings are tied up with the west in some way. I'm not sure. I'm not sure if it's even possible for me to figure out entirely what they mean here. Western cartoon characters carry some connotation of wealth and "western-ness" in China. It might not be wealth exactly, but some feeling of "modernity" that isn't easy for me to grasp. Here's what I can figure out:

These images aren't as heavily associated with children, but with something new, or the new way of life. Just to clarify, I'm not talking about manga, or images from graphic novels. Manga and graphic novels here would be a whole other conversation. A long one. What I'm referring to are images we might code specifically as children's images. Loony Toons characters. Disney characters.





I don't know how to convey the prevalence of these characters in a variety of strange places here. They are everywhere. I will often pick up an object in the store and groan when I find that Mickey Mouse is on it. It's hard to find things without cartoon characters on them. There are a variety of different cartoon characters on objects in our apartment, in order to make the apartment seem more upscale, or attractive. For instance, there is a curtain that we draw in the bedroom of our place to shut out the light from the glass-paned door. Mickey and Minnie are on that. There's a light fixture in our bathroom. Pluto is chasing Tweety Bird on that. There's a Hello Kitty light switch cover in our bedroom. The strangest one in our apartment, by far, is the cartoon image of two little boys in briefs eating ice cream next to each other. This is actually the brand label that is on our fridge. It's the company's symbol.

batteries schmatteries

I haven't posted anything here in about a week. I remember vaguely, last weekend, taking my camera with me out of the house to get some more shots of Tianjin with actual people in them, only to discover that my camera batteries were dead. I still don't have any batteries, but why would that prevent me from writing? When I think about posting something to my blog, do I imagine that this must necessarily include posting pictures? Why do I feel compelled to put pictures up here all the time? Is it because of our visual culture? The commodification of culture? (i.e., I'm in a "foreign" place, therefore I must "get" something from this place to show people, and images somehow seem more tangible) I don't want to become reliant on a camera. Also, it bothers me when people are constantly photographing things. It always has. You can ask my family, or Erin--if I'm in someplace that I think is really fascinating, I get very annoyed at having to stop experiencing to take pictures of it.

When I was teaching composition at Washburn a few years ago many of my students did not respond well at all when we discussed writing in terms of "voice", or the "sound" of a certain writer. This made me curious, so I asked them if, when they read books by different writers, they hear a voice in their heads reading the text, or if they imagine the writing of different people "sounding" different, because of style, word-choice, etc. I think this sound model of discussing writing has been around for a long time, but maybe it's lost some of its usefulness. Out of three or four classes, in successive semesters, none of my younger students said they thought of writing in terms of voice, or sound. I frequently taught evening classes and my students ranged in age from 17 to 55. The older students in my class did tend to discuss writing using words associate with sound, like "tone", "voice", etc. Did the older students feel more familiar with this because writing has been taught to them for so long using this sound vocabulary, or is the difference a result of an actual shift in culture to something more visual? Do people experience writing more visually than they used to? I know I'm kind of going on and on about this, but it's been in my thoughts a lot this week. Some of the reading I've been doing for my PhD comprehensives, and other things I've stumbled across, has mentioned how different groups of poets and writers, at different times, have taken issue with the privileging of the "sound" of poetry, prose, words, etc., over their visual characteristics.

I've read about this tension between the visual and aural qualities of poetry, specifically, a lot, and I thought that I was relatively comfortable in a neutral position, or rather, wanting both qualities to function harmoniously without championing one over the other. My former position of neutrality has been complicated by my daily life here, though, in a place where I have absolutely no written language. I have been experiencing, simultaneously, a renewed sense of respect for the sound of language, just as sound, and a renewed sense of respect for the visual that is not associated with written language. I can try to read the pinyin for a word in Chinese--for example, the name of my neighborhood--but without listening to native speakers say the name over and over again, I can't repeat it in a way that a taxi driver will understand. Also, something strange is happening to the way I encounter the world around me visually. In the states, I have a relatively bad sense of direction. This hasn't really changed in China. What has changed, though, is that my visual memory seems to be kicking into high gear. I will remember a certain bench, or a specific type of lamp post, or what kind of brick the streets in one area have, and as a result, I find that I know what part of town I am in most of the time here, whereas, if I were in a large city I'm relatively unfamiliar with in the states, like New York, maybe, I think it would take me a lot longer to recognize places, because my brain would be somehow lazy, relying on all of the English words everywhere to help me orient myself. Here, I have no understanding of written language, and this is causing me to remember how everything looks. The way things look is vitally important to me in my daily life, because if I don't know what things look like specifically, I won't be able to navigate my way around even my own neighborhood, much less find my way to the school I teach at, which is about twenty minutes by car from where I live. Enter conundrum. Finish very long blog post.

You know that scene in the first Harry Potter book...

...where Harry goes to the train station, and he's all "It's just a normal train station. I don't see what the big deal is," but actually, it's a magic train station? (I'm paraphrasing here. I hope that Phil Nel isn't reading this.) That scene from Harry Potter is sort of what the alley branching off the left of our little street is like. Yesterday morning I had to get up before Erin and catch a taxi down to my doctor's appointment, and when I left our apartment I smelled this amazing food, peered down the alley and saw several street vendor carts had magically appeared there. I've been bugging Erin all of yesterday and today about getting up and going out there in search of breakfast. Today she relented, and we ate the most amazing food. We also explored more of the magic alley. Forget Carre Foure. I'm never going there again. Our magic alley has everything in it--a traditional open-air market, a building with a bunch of different food shops, produce salesmen, a meat vendor, and a place to get ice cream. The magical alley has old men on stools playing Chinese chess, little twisting branching streets full of people with blankets selling things from Converse knock-offs to Pokemon toys, tea shops, you name it. It was such an unassuming alley. It might be my favorite magic alley that I have ever encountered, including the strange one in Port Townsend, WA that leads to the hidden bar with the half-door, hobbit-sized entrance, and the alley in Seattle that leads to the youth hostel and the Alibi Lounge. This alley blows those magical alleys out of the water. I feel like I'm a character in Pan's Labyrinth, only less terrified of everything. At the top of this post is a picture of the most amazing 0.439149 USD breakfast (that's right...43 cents) that I have ever had the pleasure of eating. I bought this at the mouth of the magical alley. Erin is trying to find out what the name of this thing is. Basically, the little cart has a flat griddle surface on it. The first part of the process is kind of like the process my French friends use for making crepes. You start with some batter, and smooth it into a circle with a tool just like the one used with crepes. Next, you crack two eggs onto the batter before it solidifies, and mix them in. Then, some sort of salty plumb sauce is applied. While this is cooking, fresh green onion and cilantro gets chopped up and tossed onto it. Next, this fried, dough thing is put on top and crumbled. Red pepper sauce is added, and then the whole thing is folded twice onto itself and placed into a little bag. I'm going to try and make a movie of the very nice lady who runs the cart making one some time soon. It was fascinating to watch.

American History will never be the same...

I did two interesting things today. First, I had to go to a Chinese hospital and have a full physical examination, even though I paid to have one completed in the states before I left. My physical examination forms from the states didn't have a giant, red stamp overlapping a photograph of me. Seriously. That was the reason the exam report wouldn't work. So, today I had to go to another physical examination, and have the following performed:

--blood drawn
--a chest x-ray
--an ekg
--a urine sample taken (after being told to drink anything or eat anything
--blood pressure checked

etc., etc., etc.

The whole experience made me a little uncomfortable. I would have been uncomfortable, even if I spoke any Mandarin. Not speaking Mandarin made me extra uncomfortable. If you ever happen to come over here and need to go through a government physical examination, I'll let you in on what to expect:

Basically, you go in, go to a desk, give them about four passport photos which you MUST have purchased ahead of time, then you get a form. Then you fill out the form, wait in a line, and have them take a digital picture of you that they check against your passport. This is so each of the different doctors in the building, at the six different stations, will be able to pull up your picture on their computer in the six different rooms and verify that it's you, as you continue on your merry way. After your digital picture, you go to the window and pay, and then you go around to each of the different doctors' rooms as fast as you can. All of the rooms branch off of the same hall, and there are a ton of people scurrying in an out of all of the rooms.

The hall reminded me of the Franz Kafka novel The Trial. It also reminded me of the Orson Welles movie-version of that novel ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXA7RtM_GFY ).

Each time you go into a room, to...let's say, take off your shirt, lay down on a table and get slathered up with that weird ultrasound lubricant they use for EKG tests,--wait, I'm getting confused--I had BOTH an ultrasound and an EKG test performed. Both of them had lubricant. Anyways, there will be several people continuously appearing in the room, waiting in a huddled line for you to finish and hop off the table so that they can have their turn. Everyone will be speaking Mandarin. Constantly.

So, here was the most hilarious part of the experience--I was a little bit stressed out, what with the scurrying and the lubricant, and when they took my blood pressure in the blood pressure room (I think it was room 3) it was a little bit high. I told my Laowai-wrangler Sylvia, who told the doctor, that I check my blood pressure regularly, and that it's normally very good; it was probably just a little high because I was nervous from running around for the examinations. SO, the doctor talks to my Laowai-wrangler saying something I'm not sure about and we continue on to the blood-letting room. While we're waiting on the bench in that room for the spot where the needle pricked me to clot, Sylvia keeps saying to me "Don't be nervous. It's okay. You should not be nervous with the exam," and making sort of soothing hand-motions to me. I thought at the time that this was really nice of Sylvia. She works for my employer and has been helping me out for the past week, so we're sort of getting to be friends. I thought the concern was sweet on her part. THEN she asked me "Well, are you ready?" I sort of blinked at her. Basically, the blood-pressure people told her that they were going to let me try the test again. That's why she was telling me not to be nervous. SO, we go back into the blood pressure room and I stick my arm back into the machine. Sylvia stands directly in front of me the entire time, this second go-round, and says "don't be nervous, don't be nervous, don't be nervous" over and over again. This makes me nervous. But, I eventually got out of there and I think everything went alright. After we left, I scurried over to the building that my employer's office is in and went up to the 11th floor to meet with the woman in charge of the contracts/teaching-jobs, etc.

This leads me to interesting thing-of-the-day #2:

I found out from her that I am going to be teaching American History to groups of Chinese students instead of English grammar, as I previously thought. I am intrigued by the idea of this, even though I am probably not qualified to do such a thing. I will research. I will "bone up" on teaching American History, even though I am full of questions, so that I will do a passable job. How does one teach American History in English to students whom are all under the age of 12? Will we sing "Yankie Doodle Dandy?" Is it appropriate for me to teach them to sing "The Battle of New Orleans?" I mean, I am living in a city that factored significantly in The Boxer Rebellion. Suggestions are welcome. It will all be fodder for poems, or critical essays, I say. This second interesting situation of the day is the reason for the picture of William Cutting. Also, here are the lyrics to The Battle of New Orleans:

Well, in eighteen and fourteen we took a little trip
along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip.
We took a little bacon and we took a little beans,
And we caught the bloody British near the town of New Orleans.

We fired our guns and the British kept a'comin.
There wasn't nigh as many as there was a while ago.
We fired once more and they began to runnin'
down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

Well, I see'd Mars Jackson walkin down the street
talkin' to a pirate by the name of Jean Lafayette [pronounced La-feet]
He gave Jean a drink that he brung from Tennessee
and the pirate said he'd help us drive the British in the sea.

The French said Andrew, you'd better run,
for Packingham's a comin' with a bullet in his gun.
Old Hickory said he didn't give a dang,
he's gonna whip the britches off of Colonel Packingham.

We fired our guns and the British kept a'comin.
There wasn't nigh as many as there was a while ago.
We fired once more and they began to runnin'
down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

Well, we looked down the river and we see'd the British come,
and there must have been a hundred of 'em beatin' on the drum.
They stepped so high and they made their bugles ring
while we stood by our cotton bales and didn't say a thing.

Old Hickory said we could take 'em by surprise
if we didn't fire a musket til we looked 'em in the eyes.
We held our fire til we see'd their faces well,
then we opened up with squirrel guns and really gave a yell.

We fired our guns and the British kept a'comin.
There wasn't nigh as many as there was a while ago.
We fired once more and they began to runnin'
down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

Well, we fired our cannon til the barrel melted down,
so we grabbed an alligator and we fought another round.
We filled his head with cannon balls and powdered his behind,
and when they tetched the powder off, the gator lost his mind.

We'll march back home but we'll never be content
till we make Old Hickory the people's President.
And every time we think about the bacon and the beans,
we'll think about the fun we had way down in New Orleans.

We fired our guns and the British kept a'comin,
But there wasn't nigh as many as there was a while ago.
We fired once more and they began to runnin'
down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

Well, they ran through the briars and they ran through the brambles
And they ran through the bushes where a rabbit couldn't go.
They ran so fast the hounds couldn't catch 'em
down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

We fired our guns and the British kept a'comin.
But there wasn't nigh as many as there was a while ago.
We fired once more and they began to runnin'
down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.