Argus Article 4

About a month ago on a tropical night, steamy and close, I sat in a small, dimly-lit tree house in the heart of a southern Chinese jungle and listened to a familiar song (“Aqueous Transmission” by the alternative rock band, Incubus, for those who might wonder) on my iPod. This particular song was one I had listened to countless times before, mostly because of its calming effect. Whether I was in the library studying for finals or in a sleeping bag on the Montana Plains, the quiet refrains of the chorus fading into a full two minutes of the sounds of frogs never failed to help me stop and take a breath.

On that particular night as I listened, something thrilling happened: as the song drew to a close and the chirping of frogs filled my ears I had the sensation of amphibious harmony, a depth of sound I had never before noticed. It was then that I realized that the frogs chirping in the jungle surrounding me were mingling with the comforting, familiar sounds at the end of the song. It was a moment of sublime cooperation between the old culture I had left behind and the profoundly new settings with which I had surrounded myself. I’ve written in this column before about the frustrations of cultural difference, but such bridges over the cross-cultural gap are also notable and, indeed, essential in the life of a person living in an alien place.

Not all moments of cultural cooperation have settings as seemingly mystical as a tree house in the middle of pristine jungle. In my home stay in Kunming I often experienced fleeting moments of such cultural symphony, mundane but still powerful: my home stay mother would call her daughter for dinner, and the daughter would reply “Coming!” When the exchange was repeated again thirty seconds later, I would hear echoes of home. And when I would forget to turn out the lights to my room, the bathroom, or the kitchen, I would often find my home stay mother trailing behind me, shutting them off in my wake. Then I would feel the sides of the gap between my idea of home and my experiences abroad closing, coming together, straining to touch.

We all strive, I think, to reach across that void, to feel the other that we perceive as so different from ourselves—in anthropology we call this “exotification,”; abroad, I call it the desire to connect, to feel that sublime cultural symphony for at least an instant. And it isn’t just we, the visitors, who feel this pull toward connection. I catch a glimpse of it manifested in the embroidered shoes my Bai minority (one of 56 minority groups in China) homestay family insisted on giving me after three days of awkward but well-intentioned exchanges. I see it in the note my friend’s homestay father gave her after three similar days of silence, with the words “If you ever come back to China, welcome to Shaxi [the village we stayed in] and our home, I am very glad to have met you” written in painstaking English. I feel it in the quick and embarrassed but earnest hugs given by those unaccustomed to such contact.

And so, in a way, we are united by that pull for sublime connection, reaching across the void to face the other and, perhaps, unexpectedly, see ourselves. At a rural market in that same Bai Minority Prefecture I found myself mesmerized by Yi people (another minority in the area) who came down from the hills to buy supplies. Their colorful vests, intricately embroidered with spirals; their brightly striped skirts; their octagonal headdresses draped with black velvet—in them I saw something profoundly Other and found myself simultaneously compelled, and ashamed at my compulsion, to take pictures. As I wandered the market, inspecting corn and trying on Chairman Mao-style hats, a young Yi girl approached me, watching me with a look of friendly but potent curiosity. Reaching across the veritable rift between my blue jeans and her mountain life, I donned a cap and asked “Hao kan ma?” (“Does it look good?”) She giggled and assented, dallying to watch me wander and pack up my things, shooting me a series of shy smiles that reminded me of the things we might have in common.

It is this spark in the face of the vacuum that I think drives us to take pictures as I was, to buy souvenirs as my tripmates have as we’ve traveled around Yunnan province this past month. No doubt the Communist government would say that our woven bags, wall hangings, and photos of snow-capped mountains are indicators of our capitalist culture—and no doubt as well that this opinion would have some merit. But lately I’ve been thinking that really, behind the materialism is that same human urge, to be able to say “I was there, I felt things, I saw things-- I faced the void, and here I stand.”

Argus Article 3

It's been three weeks since I arrived in China, and our rusty van continues to carry our group down winding country roads, but now I don't look out the window so much anymore. I've found myself stabilizing, getting comfortable in the most foreign circumstances. Nevertheless, the differences here are continually overwhelming, and I am constantly faced with the cultural discrepancies between China and United States. The bed I sleep in feels too hard; I look different than the people I pass as I walk to class, and their curious stares say as much; I eat unusual food using new utensils; the stores sell sometimes outlandish merchandise and the signs advertising these items use a foreign writing system whose depths I am just beginning to plumb. But I've found that, after a while, some things have become more comfortable. Somehow, I think it has to be that way. As humans we seek out oases of comfort in this unfamiliar desert.

My classmates and I discovered a street lined with coffee shops serving Western Food (or, to be more accurate, the Chinese version of Western food-- quesadillas, cheeseburgers, and a healthy helping of grease.) There's a little baozi (dumpling) restaurant I've found, really just a few mismatched benches and rickety tables piled high with dumpling-filled woven bamboo steamers, where you can get enough lunch for two people for Y6 (about US$0.75). I go there before I check my e-mail next door at a perpetually smoky internet cafe. I'm used to strangers calling out a cheerful, heavily accented "Hello!" to me when they pass me on the street; I know the protocol for bargaining to buy meat kebabs, jewelry, or tiny cacti from the vendors that line the streets.

Lead a life so sodden with strangeness and eventually you start to adjust to people looking at you curiously, staring, and pointing. You get used to the feeling that everything is profoundly different: even that sensation of the alien begins to seem the same. And so it is that on recent bus rides to different parts of the city I've found that I don't feel quite so obligated to look out the window. But at the same time, I wonder if this slow numbing (they call it "acclimation") is altogether good. I came all the way here to this place on the other side of the world-- shouldn't I always be seeking to absorb more?

But then just when I'm convinced that my New York Times crossword book now holds sway over any horse carts or Buddhist temples the streets might offer up, there is a change in the scenery, or something more imperceptible than that, and everything is washed again in a sheen of newness. This past weekend I went on an adventure with some friends. We took an early-morning trip to a market two hours south of the city, motoring through the foggy post-dawn toward the Chinese dustbowl, tractors and endless rolling fields keeping pace with our bus. At one point, as we crawled hesitantly up a mountain slope, I could see across a wide valley to a lake that was slowly materializing out of the morning mist. A village fringed with rice paddies perched on an overlook by the lake. As I watched, minute people moved around the paddies, completing their everyday chores.

I was distracted from this tranquil scene by a sudden movement out of the corner of my eye-- two tiny horses were galloping up and down a path on the border of the paddies, running and playing. The view caught my breath, although I didn't know why, and I gasped. There was something incredibly powerful about seeing the horses, so small, so far below me, playing on a dust path in a village in rural China. It felt that I was looking at something real, truly different, something I could never see up close-- something forbidden.

This feeling leads me to two conclusions about the nature of difference and that of living abroad. One of these is related to the topic I discussed in my last column-- that of the experience of foreign culture. Perhaps the sight of those horses, that village, thrilled me with a sense of the forbidden because of the perpetual tourist experience that is international travel. For foreigners the seed of doubt is always present, even in the routines that grow up like vines around our days. We must constantly deconstruct our time here, wondering if this is the "true" experience, what roles our pre-established biases and other people's judgments of us play in this new world we perceive.

For me, then, the running horses were special because they were too far away to be touched by the taint of my own foreignness. In this way they were the embodiment of the China I can never experience-- forbidden and alien in a way I will never truly understand. And yet they can help me to comprehend and to banish the encroaching numbness of my acclimation to this country. After clambering off the bus and enduring a further ten-kilometer ride in a small van whose manufacturer had apparently neglected to equip it with shock absorbers, we arrived at a market bustling with Sani minority people who, clad in indigo, black, and magenta dress, were buying their groceries for the week. I walked through the market with freshly-minted eyes, overcome with awe at the sheer newness inundating my senses. Whether the required separation lies in the view across a valley or in a 150 kilometer bus trip, perhaps one only needs distance to be reawakened to the beauty of difference.

Smoggy mountains

For those of you who don't know, I am writing a column in the Wesleyan paper this semester, from abroad. Here, for your amusement and intellectual betterment (or whatnot) I present to you my second Argus Column. I forgot to post the first one. Oh well.

A rusty van, filled to the brim with eager American college students, hurdled along a southern China expressway, whipping past fields full of musturd seed crops flowering yellow and farmers in old-fashioned woven straw hats tilling land for new plantings. Inside, I baked slowly in the hot sun and stared out the window, trying vainly to see the mountains surrounding this fertile plateau through the smog.

For the orientation period of my study abroad program in China, the group leaders took us to the rural city of Tonghai, located about three hours, or 200 kilometers, south of Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan Province. For three days we bonded, drinking bai jiu (extremely strong Chinese rice wine) with the local officials. We explored, ate new foods, climbed mountains with 800 year old Buddhist temples tucked among the trees. We learned to get lost and find our way again.

Once, on the way back to the hotel, my roommate and I found ourselves in an unfamiliar part of town. We stopped to ask an old man by the side of the road for directions, but he didn't speak Mandarin. During the painstaking process of written conversation that allowed us to get directions (Chinese dialects, while pronounced differently, are written the same), we noticed people stopping to look. During our first few days in Tonghai, we had seen not a single other Western face. Now, people
stopped to stare in full-out curiosity or paused and pretended to be interested in something nearby. One or two called out, "lao wai, lao wai," a Chinese slang word for "foreigner." Tonghai introduced us to China's difference, but in this way it also taught us about our own foreignness, through China's eyes.

I thought about all of this as we travelled from place to place in the Tonghai area, taking in the sights. But the image that kept returning to mind, almost of its own volition, was that of the smoggy mountains. The farmland on the way to Tonghai had been picturesque on its own terms, with horses, and donkeys wandering on terraced hills, but it had felt incomplete without the mountains that I only recognized by the faintest grainy outlines in the gray-blue air. Wanting to take in as much as
possible, thirsty for more landscape, I strained to see the land humping up into peaks on the horizon, but the harder I tried to see the more frustrated I became. I felt that with this smog China had, in some way, let me down. Why wouldn't she let me see her? I was here to understand, to experience. Even though I knew full well about Chinese overuse of coal, about the proliferation of cars, about how rarely the sun comes out in Beijing, my ideal of China had no room for air pollution.

During my first week in China I saw and experienced a great deal, and in my state of confusion and sheer sensory overload I became aware of an interesting parallel between my attempts at cultural processing and my frustration at the smoggy mountains. The most pressing question in my mind this first week as I "re-Oriented myself" (pun intended) became: What is the real China? Is it the students I met who told me their favorite shows were "Friends" and "Prison Break"? Is it the ethnic groups who are paid to wear their traditional costumes to draw tourists to particular
destinations or entire cities? Is it the naked glances of curiosity I got while walking to buy water in Tonghai? Is China in its history-- is it among the Buddhist temples in Xiushan park, where an old man taught me to play a scale on the Erhu (Chinese violin)? Or is it in the representations of itself, in cultural "performances" like the Tibetan dinner dance I went to, where tradition lives on? Perhaps it is the excitement of the Tibetan waiter, Dlma, with whom I made friends and promised to have dinner. Maybe it is in the internet cafe where I'm typing this column, surrounded by teenagers playing World of Warcraft. Can I experience the real China as a "wai guo ren" (foreigner)? Where can I find her? Where is she hiding?

Here is where I come back to the van ride to Tonghai. I knew those mountains were there, but try as I might, the smog hid them from me, much to my disappointment. I felt I was missing something of the landscape, not seeing those mountains, the equal and opposite response to the alluvial plain below. I think perhaps those of us seeking to learn about another culture encounter this same problem. The smog is there, rendering everything hazy, gauzy, and vague. It keeps we, the interested and
intrigued, from reaching out and touching it, from seeing the "reality," if there is one to be seen. Instead of seeking to see the mountains, perhaps the goal of cultural studies is to keep on looking in hopes of occasionally catching a glimpse of a peak or a verdant mountain flank. Maybe the object is not to see but to continue to try to see.

On the return ride from Tonghai to Kunming, the weather had improved some, and I discovered that what I had thought was all smog blanketing the mountains had been, at least partially, haze. I still couldn't see the mountains clearly, but they had color and depth that had been absent on my first viewing. Sometimes, I think, things can become clearer when you least expect it.