Ancient Culture Street

In Kansas, if you go to Dodge City, people put on cowboy shows, and tourists are able to see a "real" Western town. I imagine that "Ancient Culture Street" is a little like this in Tianjin. That sounds horribly cynical, and I don't mean it to. I think it's interesting how different cultures all over the world create little areas to reproduce some time period, or place in their history, which they consider to have been a high point. What exactly, or really, "when" exactly a culture chooses to reproduce might be very telling about that particular culture. I'm not going to think about what recreating a gun fight and the graveyard of Boot Hill in Dodge City might mean for my own country. Wait, it's too late. I did think about it. Here are three videos I made in ancient culture street. One is just to show what it looks like, the other is to show this really cool stand where an artist would make little characters out of clay very quickly, and the last one is of a food vendor. I thought the noise coming from his steamer was some kind of musical instrument at first, which was what made me walk over to the area where I made the movies.



Hm. Two of my videos had some trouble uploading. Hopefully I can add them to this post.



I think I fixed it.

pictures of people

I have this pet theory that people should take fewer photographs of "scenery" when they're traveling, and more photographs of people. I think that when I return to the states, the pictures I'm going to want to look at are of the people I got to know in my daily life here. So, with that in mind, I took my camera with me yesterday. The other impetus for this was that Erin chatted with our friend Elliott online and he mentioned that I should post more. This made me miss Elliott like the Dickens, so here you go Elliott. Erin just got off the phone with her sister Megan, as well, and Megan mentioned being curious about what other foods we've been discovering here, after she read the post about the breakfast thing I ate. I'll try to take more pictures of food. If anyone else has suggestions of things they'd like me to post about on this blog, just leave me a comment. Like Mark Twain, I have a "truant disposition", so I need people to help me keep on the blogging straight and narrow.

Picture descriptions: 1) This is a picture of all the flags in front of apartment buildings in our neighborhood, in honor of the holiday for the founding of the PRC. Many women also wear a red berette in their hair for the holiday. I'm going to try and find information about what that's all about. 2) This is a picture of a waitress and one of the owners of the little restaurant that's around the corner from where we live. This place is very close to our apartment. People eat out a lot more frequently here, it seems, than in the U.S. Restaurants are loud, and lively, and social. We frequently see a large number of people from our neighborhood also eating out at this same place. You can see on the wall this gigantic block of pictures of food from their menu. The menu is written entirely in characters, without images, so I think Erin has set a challenge for herself to try and order just from reading the characters in the menu, but we sometimes break down and walk over to the wall to point at things like ignorant Laowai. I really wanted to take a picture of the waitresses, because they're very funny and we've gotten to know them more, but when they saw I had a camera, three of them scurried off. The remaining waitress in this shot is pretending to organize the chopstick and cup sets, but really, she's avoiding having her picture taken. After I took this shot, the guy I assume is one of the owners ushered me over so that I could take a picture of the woman behind the counter. We'll get to her eventually. 3) This is a picture of the lady running the cigarette and booze shop next to the restaurant. These shops are everywhere. All they sell are cigarettes and booze. We've never actually bought anything from this particular lady, but she seemed nice. You can't see him, but there's this guy sitting on the floor behind the counter to this woman's left, dead asleep and snoring loudly. He's the man we wave to who usually runs the shop. Also, I wanted to take this picture so that you could see the insane cigarette lighter they have for sale. Click on the picture to make it bigger. The cigarette lighter is the gold-looking...uh...elephant? I think it resembles those things the Riders of Rohan fought in The Lord of the Rings movies in front of the white city. Anybody want it? I could probably ship it, or fit it into my suitcase on the return trip. 4) I love these guys. These two men run the bicycle repair stand on our corner. There are bicycle repair carts all over the city run by men like this, but these two particular guys run the one in our neighborhood I walk by on my way to get a cab to work each day. I think they might actually be upstart bicycle repairmen, because there's another little shop deeper into the neighborhood that looks more elaborate. One of our friends here said that you should be careful of some of the stands in the city, because some of the ones close to the university sell bicycle locks for a very specific reason. They sell locks that they have the master key to, and then they go bicycle "shopping" after you have one of their locks. These guys don't strike me as running that kind of operation, though. They don't sell locks. And seriously, how could you not trust them? Look at how amused they are. I envy these guys. They get to sit on this corner all day. 5) This is the aforementioned "lady behind the counter" at our local restaurant. I would like to draw your attention to three things. First, there is a nice bust of Mao on the counter. Second, you can sort of see my head in the mirror. Third, this lady's ensemble is not exceptional; in China, feather boas, sequins and see-through, knee-high socks are adequate business attire. Also, pajamas are acceptable if you're just walking along the side of the street for a few miles.

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.