Chengdu 2: A Life Takes Form

A Life Takes Form

I lay in bed staring at the beige walls of my new apartment for thirty minutes, 'relentlessly beige.' I fell asleep. At 6:30am a watch beeped me awake. Sitting upright and leaning against the wall, hugging the covers over my elbows, I pulled myself together under my crappy overhead light. For the last month days have begun to my cute wrist watch and my cute little meditation thing.

Walking from the bus to the school takes me fifteen minutes. Everything on the way is empty and grey. I turn left where two large streets, but very little traffic, intersect. I walk along a grey wall for a long time and turn right at construction site. Grey streets stretch under grey skies. This spaciousness and greyness kind of sums up Chengdu for me. The middle school is right outside Chengdu proper and the spaciousness and the greyness are both exaggerated. It's a foreign landscape that reminds me of Ohio if the fields were cement. Stretch out that greyness China.

In between classes the students and I get ten free minutes. The students attack each other and I try and hide. There is nowhere to hide so I lean against the balcony and stare at the weird field across from their school. Its a big messed up field that is doomed but simultaneously lush. Its like a bigger version of those ghetto yards in Harlem. The plants are dense and little areas of the Rapeseed (Brassica napus), which I think I talked about last time, give the field a depth of color. It also reminds me of an Andre Tarkovsky movie or what Russia might be like.

The lilting music starts and its back into another class. The entrance and the gage of restlessness. 'Hello class how are you?' 'I AM FINE THANKS.' Then I'm staring at the spectrum of Chinese junior high school facial expressions. Hopefully I can rustle these expressions toward warmth. If they give me the benefit of the doubt from the start, mostly they do, its not too difficult to squeeze grins from class, to teach some words, to play some games and to keep things painless.

A life is taking form. Inside the pervading greyness of Chengdu I have a nook and cranny with beige walls. There is a gym with giant windows ten minutes away from the apartment. The light pours onto the running mills and the few people working out on Sunday morning. I found a giant stress knot in my shoulder so decided to go relax in the sauna. The gym is clean, uncluttered, relatively quite, naturally lit, calm. These are rare and precious characteristics in China.

But things here take three times to make work. So with the sauna. Once inside I realized the sauna was off. I re dressed went and asked the staff to turn it on. After pretending to work out for thirty minutes I returned to what I thought would be a hot sauna. It was in fact a warm sauna. Another thirty minutes passed. I sat trying to relax. Finally I discovered some nob, turned the nob and things fell into place.

The gym light reminds me of a grey morning light that sometimes comes into Hillsdale. Sometimes riverside is the same color. After a long time in the sauna followed by a cold shower I sit relaxing and drying myself in the locker room. I can feel endorphins rush through me and the room is perfectly clean and empty.

Chengdu One: 'This Land Is Your Land'

So what happens when you go to a small Chinese town to teach English?

Do you know that scene in prison movies where the new inmate arrives? He follows the guard and holds his cloths while the seven stories of prison cells go crazy all around him. Balance that image with the Beatles arrival in America. That was kind of how it looked when I entered the school.

Fast forward one hour later and imagine me leading eighty twelve year old Chinese students in singing 'This Land is Your Land' and 'I'm Gonna Lay Down My Sword and Shield'. Once I got the swing of it I split the class down the middle and had a call and response with half the class singing 'down by' and the other half singing 'the riverside'. Every class began with me walking into a class of cheering and clapping students and ended with an applause.

Mary is the 'English name' of my Chinese friend. She helped me get this one time job and literally lead me through the entire process. She got me the one time job, took the bus with me one and a half hours outside of the city, she ordered the food, knocked on my door in the morning to wake me up, she translated the lessons for the students. She also walked in front of me when I entered the school - thus leading me.

There is a courtyard surrounded on three sides by four storied buildings. Each level has a terrace filled with Chinese kids hitting and chasing each other. The universal language of the 12 year old is hitting and chasing. As I glided through through the school gates, stunned at the reaction to me, the kids stopped hitting each other and started pointing at me. Then they combined hitting each other, chasing each other, and pointing at me.

Chinese students are respectful and hard working. Starting from about seven years old the teachers just lecture and the students just take notes. So what the teacher says and how the teacher looks are of chief importance to these poor little devils in their daily lives. As Chinese kids from a small town the fact that I look non-Chinese, my different skin color, my different color eyes - this is already very amazing. Being in the class room with a westerner, me, for forty five minutes basically blows there minds.
*Even Mary, (late twenties, married, fluent in English), who has spent a fair amount of time around westerners told me enthusiastically about meeting a girl with green eyes.

I understood my job like this; foreign teachers come to school about once a month. The school rents out a westerner, ideally a white person, to 'teach' the class. The school wants the teacher to provide some relief to these poor bored children, to be fun, and to demonstrate some correct pronunciation of English. I think the school sees it as a rare opportunity to show these kids with limited means a little peice of the world.

As a result the job combined a lot of things that I really appreciated. My presence alone was generally appreciated by the students. Also there was a magic formula at play; low expectations, freedom, and attention - not to mention money.

I also like the fact that in this teaching stint I taught twelve separate classes of seventy to eighty students. I spent about forty five minutes with about eight hundred to one thousand separate Chinese kids. Does that sound amazing to you? I realized that If I did twenty days of that I'd reach about as many people as my Automato album sold. There are clearly a lot of differences but its something I thought about.

The highlights of my class for you folks you read this writing was this. I reviewed the family words like 'Grandparents' 'Parents' 'Aunt' 'Uncle' and 'Cousin' by writing a simple family tree starting with Frank and Betty. "These are my... Grandparents" Then I wrote (95) next to Frank and the class always gasped with appreciation. I also wrote a couple anecdotes about the family to teach some simple words. 'Frank hates weapons' was one sentence and then I taught them 'weapons'. 'Harry wrote a book about beer' was another sentence.

Finally, Mary asked me to teach the class a childrens song as part of the lesson. I couldn't think of childrens songs so I taught them folk songs. I taught the first classes the first verse of 'This land is your land' and then later I tried teaching 'I'm gonna lay down my sword and shield'. The second worked so much better that I only returned to Woody Guthrie once again.

So I feel happy to report back to New York city progressives that after two days of teaching I have taught about 850 Chinese children not only how to sing an anti war song but also that Jesse's grandfather "Frank(95) hates weapons".

Some Things I See And Do

Babies do not seem to wear dypers in Chengdu. They have pants with a butt flap and the parents hold babies over sewers and toilets, and random places in the street, while the baby pees and poops. I don't really understand how the baby tells the parents its time to use the potty but it seems to work.

There is an expression I heard. "Dogs in Chengdu bark at the sun because they don't know what it is." It's almost always cloudy. When there is a bit of direct sunlight its kind of exciting.

The cars on the street are mostly nice and so are the roads. A lot of VW's and also BMW ride smoothly by. This give the city a quietness which is lovely. This is also because there are a few main streets which are almost like highways and then mostly small streets without too much traffic.

People play a lot of games. Badminton is played on many streets by people working in stores and mostly by women. Tons of people play mahjong in the endless Tea Bars which feature tons of smoke, round tables, and lots of Chinese people playing with domino looking things.

People don't seem to ever build just one building in China. Instead they build huge projects, often gated, with from 5 to 30 buildings. The higher buildings might just be sets of seven while the smaller complexes spread out much wider. I got a great view of this when I was in Kunming and hiked up to a great touristy viewing spot. The buildings often look filthy, and semi deteriorated. The complexes remind me of 'the projects' in New York in the layout but the buildings themselves are way different. There are no flat surfaces on Chinese buildings. Every building has weird terraces, and bulges, and it looks like one story houses stacked on top of each other. Also, pure, rectangular building are much less common then NYC. Buildings will often be strange non-rectangular shapes.

My apartment is in a gated complex of about six buildings and seven stories each. The buildings have the deteriorated look on the outside but every apartment has a little terrace like thing which is too small to sit outside but big enough to hang lots of plants - and cloths to dry. All the buildings have a roof and I hang out on mine. The roofs also have lots of plants and like most of the roofs in Chengdu they feature very strange looking water tanks. These are large, perfectly round, metal and painted white.

There are no trains yet but they are building a subway system. The buses run pretty well. There is a University in the City which is huge - maybe 50,000 thousand students.

Travels Seven: Fireworks

*When I ask question I really am asking. If you think I'm totally on or off base tell me.*

Midnight in China:
Yesterday at midnight i watched Chinese babies setting off fireworks and it made me so happy. On every street people were lighting big, July Fourth, Disney World, explosives. Grandmothers were there cheering under the rockets. People have been setting them off all week and it can get annoying because they are so loud. However, it was not so different then a good loud rock show and at some point last night the noise and explosions overwhelmed me. As the explosions reached a peak i felt kind of small and playful but also rebellious in the best way. This was running around naked when I was four, sliding down banisters, and sneaking to kiss girls at camp.

The amount of fireworks themselves brought out the adrenaline and awe but the communal aspect of it all really took the experience to a more special place. I loved the fact that despite a little danger, at least it seemed that way to me, there was no violence. The grandmothers and babies made the whole thing seem natural, and peaceful. The Chinese New Year reminded me of what New Years felt like a kid. When staying up until midnight and still felt rebellious and yet sanctioned at the same time. That's a difficult spirit to balance with a family party and in America it fails when the kids hit adolescence. I don't know if generations can party together better in China but I know that I felt more like a kid at midnight in the China New Year then I have for a long time.

A Train Of Thought
Maybe this is obvious or repetitive but celebrating and exercising that kind of power and spirit communally without violence or enemy's seems really healthy. I think it must have been the first fact I ever learned but fireworks came from China and became weapons in the West. That is so messed up and amazing. China invents a kind of magic and Europe turns it into gun powder.

Briefly - Why does this fact have so much meaning for me?

For me the story is about enemy's. I grew up in a world that viewed reforming the world as valuable and other activities as superfluous. A world that needs reforming is a world filled with enemy's - with good guys and bad guys.

To me, the Chinese culture that invented fireworks and didn't see it as a weapon is the same culture that valued sitting alone and meditating for long stretches of time. I would argue that appreciating the good in the world is at least as valuable as reforming the world. As Alan Watts says, "Perhaps a peaceful mind is the best solution to a world in turmoil."

Fireworks. Yeah that's what I'm talking about. It works. Point it at the sky and it works. Throwing some of our energy away into the air and watching happily works. Creating a world with less enemy's takes practice.

Travels Six: Two people in Chengdu are named Jesse Levine

This is a story that must be told. First a back story ; www.couchsurfing.com is a social networking website like Face book designed for travelers. The idea is to connect people with "couches" or empty beds with travelers looking for a place to stay for free. It works and most travelers use couch surfing - some of my best experiences in the last four months came from connecting with people via couch surfing.

About three weeks ago, in the end of December, I realized that I could email people in Chengdu, through couch surfing, and ask them about teaching English there. Its a fact that many if not most of people on Couch surfing are English teachers. In this search I came upon a girl named Jessie Levene. She's from America likes music and film and teaches English in Chengdu. Since my name Jesse Levine this was pretty surprising. So I told my friend in Dali, Jye Yang, who runs the Smile Cafe' and guest-house where I stayed for about three weeks. I tell her I just found a girl named Jessie Levene in Chengdu. Jye Yang says, she knows Jessie from Chengdu because she came to stay at the Smile Cafe'. "Really?!"

I write Jessie Levene to tell her all these coincidences and she writes back enthusiastically. She knows Jye Yang, she's amazed we have the same name, if she can help me she will, but she's leaving Chengdu and traveling for about over a month.

Moving forward a few weeks to several days ago. After a long struggle I finally pull myself together and plan to leave Dali. It's my last day in Dali and I'm kind of scared of moving to Chengdu. As I'm brewing on my unknown futures and eating some dumplings I notice a White guy with a Chinese girl lock their bikes and come into the restaurant. I was kind of taken by them because the boy reminded me of my old friend, Max Gold, and she was cute - so i was interested. And when they he made a comment in my direction I quickly struck up a conversation. They, it turned out, were teachers in Chengdu. As they were giving me some advice the subject of couch surfing came up. I mentioned Jessie Levene in Chengdu and the Chinese girl gasped. "Are you Jesse Levine?" she said. I AM! Jessie Levene had been so excited by my email she told her friends about it. Her friends were now sitting in front of me in Dali the day before I was planning to go to Chengdu. So I sit down next to them and we go on talking a while. About midway through the meal the Chinese girl, who I assume is the boys girlfriend, says that since she is not using her apartment, I might as well stay there. Her neighbor has the key and here is his telephone number.

Last night, my first night in Chengdu, I spent in a furnished but empty apartment. I have a key and will stay in the apartment for a few weeks until she comes back. Her neighbor is a nice dutch guy who is opening a bar. I met a couple other white guys last night at his bar liked them well enough. They play music out, are in bands, and seemed interested my keyboard playing.

Today, I woke up so happy to have my own place for a little while i spent most of the day at "home" watching movies. The girl whose apartment it is, Xiao Yu, has quite a DVD collection and I watched "An Inconvenient Truth" and "The Good Sheppard" before leaving the apartment.

That's the story. I realize coincidence stories can be boring second hand but I needed to share this one.

Travels Five: Dali City Forever

I arrived to my new home today. Chengdu City is grey, and bleak! I think I love it. My twenty two hour bus ride somehow lasted only fourteen hours. I love China's mysteries when they are to my advantage. I don't know much about Chengdu but the following are descriptions and thoughts about my home for a month and a half - Old Dali City, China. It's longer than most of my posts have or will be. Love To Those Who Want It.

It would be hard to leave paradise and go look for a job in dreary cities. Some people don't even even leave Dali City. Once a capital of one of China's specialest provinces, Yunan, then later captured by Kubla Kan, then maybe 1000 years later in 1998 it was rebuilt to look old. On New Years night I sat next to a stylish white guy from San Fransisco who calls Dali the best place in the world. I had no idea what that meant. I know that when I left three weeks ago I felt depressed and was back a week later.

Dali's mountains are a source for clouds. I think of them as big white hands and the they reach over and through the peaks and threaten to storm. The storm never materialized and while i was in Dali it never even rained. The clouds dissolve above Dali - constantly.

Speaking of clouds, my experiences of clouds in Japan verses China kind of mirror my general feeling for nature in the places - if not the places more generally. In Japan I saw two very distinct cloud processes. At the top of a mountain in Hokkaido I watched from within feet as thin clouds blow over the ridge and immediatly dissipated. This was clouds dying at close range. Much further south I saw the wind sweep mist laying on the trees and bring them into clouds. The clouds were being born. So in Japan my general impression was that things were very distinct. Mountains are triangles, the forest is filled with bizarelly straight pine trees. Hiroshige was barely exagerating.

In contrast to Japan in China, in Dali, I really don't know what to think about the nature I've seen. It's bizarrly impressive, and casual at the same time. The mountains look rugged and high but are mid height, the clouds look like they'll rain but they don't. In Japan I had a feeling of clarity and here that I'm being told powerful secrets in a language I don't understand.

In Dali the woman are stronger than the men and their bright headwraps are glowing. The fish jump out of the pink resevoire and roll on the surface. The man with a machine reels in two parrallel lines from the depths of the lake. Young women take photo's of each other wearing a wedding gown. I make the first soccer goal I can remember scoring.

Dali is between mountains and a big lake. The population includes a bubble of young travelers and settlers who run and feed the tourist infrastructure. Mostly though, these buisnesses make enough for the owners to continue living here and no more. Living is cheap, the weather is nice, the travelers generally unoffensive. The local people are famously diverse, industrious, friendly and the fresh and proud inheritors of a rich, colorful, humble, and extremely old culture.

Farm lands spread out from the mountains and surround the giant lake and moslty woman from the Chinese minority group Bai People work the land - the men have moved to factory towns. There is a big city 30 minutes away which also feeds the life of Dali. My feeling is that the area's 3000 year old culture survived the transition to modernity with integrity intact - the economy does not rely soley on tourism but allows and supports tourism. Because of the self sufficiency and self respect of the local people here it is possible to say the scenery is beautiful but the people are more beautiful and its the same with mystery as with beauty.

The strong backed women working the farms, and a functional Chinese city gives the place roots and stability. It's within this context that the bubble of Dali life can exist. The atmosphere is relaxed. Educated Chinese dudes, male and female mix with westerners and create cafe's with sophisticated DVD collections. You can sit around drinking tea and watching movies, playing ping pong, strolling the streets, playing soccer, making day trips around the lake, or whatever.

It's not unusual or unpleasent to let day after day pass by eating good food, sitting around with other travelers, reading and playing on the internet. It's not even unusual for several years to pass by in the same way. Like the other aspects of life in Dali its hard to get a feel for time. For example, yesterday I said, "maybe I'll leave Dali the day after tomorrow." I wont. Maybe I will leave the day after tomorrow.

The traveler community is by and large transient so its not so unlike Williamsberg Brooklyn or a college town. There is a neighborhood with roots somewhere, everywhere around you but it's ultimately not for you. Where did we come from and where are we going? What are we doing? The common bond of the Bai people might stretch out 3000 years but what do the travelers and settlers share? In Dali it might be something like wanting to escape modern life - to live simply and beautifully. They seek the experience of an authentically peaceful life just as the college grads in Brooklyn want a fresh vibrant city life. We share a search and the findings are tenuous.

We look to eachother to see if we foundit. At the good party in Brooklyn or Berlin, in the cafe' of Dali, we look at our neighbors and wonder if they are satisfied - we never know. The culture we share is of searching and not of finding, of traveling but not arriving. We all remind me of the Japanese tourists who would dress themselves in arctic gear, take a bus to a mountain, take a gondala to the top, take a picture from the top, look to eachother for the next move, and hustle back to the gondala, the bus, the next stop.

With the photo we hope to prove to ourselves and to others that we have found something. The 35 year old women have husbands and they travel to mountains in Hokkaido, the 20 year old boys have girls around them. But satisfaction and contentment are so evasive.

Dali city gives a small taste of what it might be like to be rich. It's a place where you can be rich for cheap. You don't have luxury or elegance really. You won't find a much of a park avenue crowd here but for college graduates, travelers, middle class citizens of the world, it can be a kind of honeymoon.

Also, there is no real presence of rich people here so travelers are close to the top of the economic ladder. Finally, you don't have much to do, you are not making, growing, taking part in something which you need or believe deeply in, except maybe oneself. All this leads to the regretable conclusion that despite the countless qualities of Dali, for the foriegner, be her Chinese or Israeli, life here can lack meaning.

I'm finding that the brilliance of things can confuse and even alienate me. I am surrounded by beauty and peace and am not satisfied? Why? Sometimes I think its easier to blame ourselves than to listen to the strange advice of our heart. "Leave this beautiful place" says mine. This is a fact which I really struggle with because there is so much I love here.

I have some ideas about solutions to the meaning problem but that doensn't mean I've incorporated them - and there are so many problems. Meaning must be grown and built. For me right now this means accepting city life. Meaning requires a culture that values work but a culture that values work doesn't value living. Good taste requires a culture that values good taste, but these cultures get so stuffy it's hard to keep caring about the music, art film itself. Fuck!

I've still never tried to live, with a job, somewhere really beautiful and peaceful - maybe it's possible for me get what I want in Dali or San Fran, or somewhere. But something is pulling me away - and its not just that I can't make as much money as I need here. Its the edge! The documentary about Joy Division, and Manchester in the late 70's I sawon my birthday a couple days ago gave me the inspiration i think i need.

It must be a romance with modern life, suffering, grey sky's, misery, and cold, science fiction, durability; 1980, Manchester, Ian swinging from a rope, the bleakness! And from this ground the hope for the return of Brian Eno, gems growing from sewers and future magic. This is all to say that I hope my teaching job in Chengdu City China allows me enough time to start a sweet band!

Travels Four: Nightmarkets and Roosters in Laos

I took to describing Laos as Asian Mexico. With darker, different looking people, some who live in tiny primitive villages, with palm trees, amongst south asian hills, its a very different environment and culture. I found it somewhere between, boring, peaceful, friendly, reticent, and primitive and lovely. There has not been much tourism in Laos and the village that my tour, you have to pay for tours, went through was fairly new to tourism. White people were amazing for the kids who despite being poor by any standard were very quick to smile and say "Sabadee!" The village was 200 people living in shacks in secondary forest. There were seven year old girls with babies on there backs next to five year old boys with machete's and lush green hills everwhere around them. It was amazing for me to walk through a village like this.

My days in Laos began at about 5 am when the roosters all over town began screaming at me. I tried to sleep untill about seven and then gave up. The Laos people are known to westerners as being some of the nicest people in South Asia. There is an expression; "Vietnam grows the rice, Cambodia watches the rice grow, Laos listens to the rice grow." This is just to say that they are
pretty relaxed in Laos.

My two favorite activities in Laos were drinking boat loads of tea from the balcony of my hotel overlooking a small street, sleeping dogs, roosters, an old couple, palm trees, and then the hills and sky. The other was going to the night market. The market was for three days lit by candles because electricity was out between 5pm and 7:30 - this was pretty normal. The night market was all food and it was beautiful, cheap and so good. I have no idea what i ate. Mostly i think it was weird vegetables and pork with hurbs, a lot of different rice cakes, and man I miss it. It was not so different from very good thai food from New York.

The bus ride from Laos back to Dali was very long but I had a bed which made it way better then my 48 hour ride on Greyhound a few years ago. We stopped for food and I slept and the 26 hours passed quicker than you'd think.

I'm back in Dali now and would love to write more about Christmas in Lao, and New Years in Dali when I have the chance.