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| 371 days later......I lean forward in a squeaky office chair, page-worn eyes adjusting to the digital glare, unwashed hair drooping further with the rising steam from a foam coffee cup, chapped lip tucked under worrying teeth, mouse snuffling feverishly through summer job listings.
Yep, little has changed.
Except the veins on the backs of my hands are a little thicker, I have a cup of Oikos vanilla greek yogurt almost every day, I've taken up smoking and I no longer feel like I'm wasting away sucking up all the pollution of China into my lungs.
Kidding, I don't smoke, probably never will.
But this here ditty about cigarettes is my new favorite thing-- and considering it combines two things I have always disliked: cigarettes, and poetry-- I consider this a significant gander in a new direction. Join me on my newfound poetic appreciation of the little deathsticks, courtesy of Billy Collins, animator David Vaio and youtube.
Reflecting on things past always results in a self-applied sense of self-satisfaction, because we would rather see our progress than our stagnancy, or decline. I find the best way to evaluate my own footprints is by reading between the lines.
"Then I would be my own locomotive,
trailing behind me as I returned to work little puffs of smoke,
indicators of progress, signs of industry and thought,
the signal that told the nineteenth century it was moving forward.
That was the best cigarette, when I would steam into the study full of vaporous hope and stand there, the big headlamp of my face pointed down at all the words in parallel lines."
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| AAAAAHH what am i going to do with my life and AAAAAHHH I'm incapable of finding a summer job and I have to wake up early tomorrow morning to pay the bills and it's already late, and aaahh...aaahh....i just want to goto sleep and have everything solve itself for me overnight. somebody else tell me what i should do; i'll do it. zzzzzzzzzz
*brief moment of consideration for the lemonade stand thing. I'm afraid I'd be bullied by other children.*
AANND of course when I get to the bank this morning I end up waiting in line for 2+ hours because the stock market crashed on Tuesday and made a significant fraction of Beijingers decide to storm the bank, talk really loudly and withdraw all their rmb to stuff under their mattresses at home and not earn any interest or rise in value.
And can I just say-- to many a Beijinger (who is naturally never going to read this)-- that due to the massive quantities of raw garlic and Chinese chives that you daily consume, you should be aware that your burp (thunderous, unabashed, frequently toward my facial area and often accompanied by a breathy yawn) could make a baby commit suicide. You might as well lift your ass high up in the air and waft your fart in my face. Dirtygusting.
In other, equally tragic news, I think my butt is becoming flat as I physically adapt to the nation. F*CK. Without it I am nothing. There has been many a better Thursday...
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| the act, sense or power of hearing
Two weeks ago, if asked why I was going to SF/LA for 10 days during the Chinese New Year holiday, I would have responded: "auditions." A handful of drama schools screened applicants within the same 10 days in these two cities, and since I'd never been to LA-- where my brother also lives-- I booked the cheapest flight I could find and got packed without as much as a second thought. And as with all 12-hour flights, time flies [pun intended] when five movies are shown back-to-back and interrupted only by the serving of (occasionally alcoholic) refreshment.
Alex picked me up at the San Francisco airport; his nearly wordless greeting was a (self-proclaimed) "toothy" grin under carefully spiked hair; he tossed his jacket over one shoulder before taking my suitcase and pointing toward the exit signs. The hallway, quiet but for the uncomfortable squeak of my rubber-soled boots and the lower-toned accompaniment of rolling wheels, was soon filled with our small talk. The city was gray, and windy enough so that the drizzle hit the windshield with an audible patter, and I was eager to take a hot shower and a long nap. But check-in was postponed by the lobby clerk and minutes later we were back in the car, having decided to get a view of the Bridge and kill some time. The Bridge was seen; brunch was had; time was killed; eventually I showered and slept.
Two days later, on the way to Los Angeles, I reclined the seat to its deepest incline and a multitude of stars came into view in the passenger-side window-- more stars than I had seen altogether during 6.5 months in China. There were maybe fifty stars, no-- forty, at best-- in Lijiang when I slept one fitful, mosquito-festered night in the "Harry Potter nook" of a windowless cabin, and now, cruising at 80 mph down route 101, the earth was suddenly not alone. Alex offered to open the skylight for a better view, and did so-- causing a noisome burst of wind-- and we laughed, and he closed it again. Later, the highway deserted, he accelerated to 120 mph and though the engine raged and though I affected high-pitched anxiety and asked him to slow down, the stars remained-- still, and numerous, and resting heavily in their aerial amity.
The sun was bright and the atmosphere breezy for the eight days I relished the posh nosh, swank shops, high art and higher materialism of West Hollywood and Beverly Hills. My eye chose to skim past the misplaced tattoo parlors and motorcycler grunge of touristy Hollywood and the shabbier streets of downtown LA; my ear cordially missed the throbbing of helicopters circling cautiously over Compton at night. My gustatory experience peaked at Crustacean, on my third night in LA, when my brother and I pecked clean two, 1.8-lb Dungeness crabs stir-fried in a garlicky, buttery, peppery Vietnamese sauce, and one heaping plate of similarly buttery garlic noodles. (No one voluntarily talked to us for the next two days.) I made a number of half-hearted strokes in the name of fitness in the leaf-strewn, outdoor pool at the 24-hour fitness on Santa Monica, stocked up on semi-sweet chocolate and Bear Naked granola at Trader Joe's and bagged (in embarrassingly opaque, black plastic bags) the last issues of Harper's and The New Yorker at the (gay porn) magazine shop on Sunset.
Parked somewhere off the road in the upper reaches of Mulholland Drive on a starry weeknight, Alex and I re-lived gross and traumatic childhood tales of aural hygiene. "Yeah, she'd chase me around the house, force my head in her lap and go in with the tweezers-- and when she got a big one she'd wave it in front of my face so I could admire the girth." "Mine had one of those tiny ear-spoons, you know, imported from the motherland." "No one's done that for me in a really long time." "I bet my hearing is pretty bad right now." And indeed, the night was soundless except for the quiet crumble of gravel under the tires of a patrol car as it eased behind us and eventually shooed us on with flashing lights of red and blue.
The rest of my time went quickly. As expected, I heard nothing too positive, or too devastating from schools, and began to miss western affluence/consumerism (and my brother, but only a littttle) even before I left it. Nine hours into the flight from LA to Beijing, I lifted a window shade on the left-hand side of the jet and squinted through the blinding sliver of incoming daylight. Siberia, maybe, and the Sea of Okhotsk, glimmered far below. Inland, a spread of white terrain peaked and valleyed here and there like an imperfect surface of whipped cream. It looked alternatively hard and soft, utterly tree-less and hospitable only from my distant, entirely unrealistic perspective. I wrote it down in my book of faraway destinations: Okhotsk.
Nothing looks different in Beijing. The same street vendors occupy the same corners, the same queue of dust-covered taxis waits outside the subway station in the same, dry chill. By late evening, however, the difference emerges. Street vendors lay out boxes of sparklers and, with a hiss and a pop, light a stick in each hand to thrust in the faces of passersby. Taxi drivers in the queue roll down their windows and tune their radios to gong-heavy, cheerfully whiny New Year's music-- each to a different station so that one wonders whether they do this to spite each other, or to spite everyone within earshot. The newest sound, however, is the popping of exploding strings of firecrackers. Every five minutes, someone will light a long string of these and the popping will reverberate in the air for about ten seconds-- like roaring applause-- until it stops abruptly, or until someone squeals in the distance and there is the pounding of running feet on the sidewalk. (as another migrant worker is rushed to the hospital with second degree burns.) Save for the small piles of burnt paper that are quickly swept away by street sweepers, the difference in Beijing is aural.
I left this city two weeks ago for auditions, and returned yearning for a higher sense of the lesser definition of the word, "audition": the act, sense or power of hearing. It is quieter in the US. In particular, the barely audible mumble of the auditor in San Francisco as he thanked me out the door, the silent, starry expanse over route 101, Alex whispering over the darkly verdant brinks of Mullholland Drive. Here, as I type to the clapping and popping of handheld explosives just outside my window, one has to strain to hear things. Not because American auditors are more small-voiced and reserved, or because there is more pollution in Beijing and smog obscures the prettiness of the night sky, or because the city is utterly devoid of attractive, affectionate men-- but because Chinese people are loud. And here, even when I strain my ears, "Okhotsk" doesn't sound nearly as foreign. | | |
| how i roll (and how they accumulate, on my stomach, and on my ass, like whoa.)a list of the things i have done in the past week/month/2months.
. eaten a lot of ice cream and chocolate, gotten fat, eaten a lot of ice cream and chocolate, gotten fat(ter), repeat.
. gone to dinner with friends, came home and tooled around on my laptop until 4 am, slept 6 hours, tooled around on the laptop until dinnertime, repeat.
. hung out in various awkward social situations with my Chinese tutor, a PKU senior who may want to be my more-than-friend, or may just be playing nice to the big dumb ABC with no Chinese friends. it's all so frickin ambiguous if you're not accustomed to the subtle, juvenile romance games they play here, so basically my only clue has been that he seems to sweat profusely quite often. he's also a damn good tutor, so if the signals are more than suspicions then i'm stuck in between a rock and a hard place, since he-- whether convenience or curse-- just happens to live down the street and we see each other every day.
chillin' awkward-style at the Civilizations Museum
. gone to class. occasionally. rarely. barely. ohh it's all just such a blurrrr, wha? where am i? Hey look, over there!
. become obsessed with acting as a career intermittently between sleeping, laptop use and eating.
. subscribed to the PKU gym. key word being 'subscribed,' and very little beyond that. although i did find 15 minutes between milling my tread to stare mockingly at the hordes of coin-skirted eager beavers thrashing hips in the gym's free, biweekly bellydance class.
. revised PKU students' grad school statements of purpose. 33 of them, to be exact.
While I'm on that topic-- and at the risk of being a huge b*tch and having my client find part of his personal statement online, here's a 100-word, introductory example of why I have nightmares regularly:
Life is a journey on a thorney road pursuing beauty in the faces of uncertainty. No creature can ignore its beauty, no creature also cannot avoid the thorns. With bags and dreamings, artists make masterpieces; scientists create theories; but, real travellers would never be afraid. They believe in the power of all beauty, that can turn pains into gains.
While choosing statistics at my major, I started my journey. I was the top ten students in Anhui Province to take the National Examinations, and upon being accepted to Peking University, the best university in China, I began the first few miles. The miles dramatically catalyzed my curiosity. It is amazing to see the magic power of statistics to solve concrete problems. Then when I realized that the whole of statistics kingdom was built on the basis of rigorous mathematics, I was totally shocked. I knew that the world is disordered, unsystematic but beautiful and ruled by undeniable laws of power and magic.
. toyed with the idea of writing my own statements of purpose...as in, applying again to grad schools and seeing if i can't self-validate/find more half-random opportunities-- more out of a need for purpose (and self-validation) than an existing passion. though the idea of film school DOES make me flutter.
. saw a colorful, frenzied, fantastical excuse for a ballet at the Great Hall of the People-- which at least gave me an opportunity to admire the building's massive grandeur, stare up at the ceiling and inhale a deep whiff of chinese patriotism. i fluttered.
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