(Written 9/3)
AND THE RESURRECTION

So Friday (last entry and September 1, 2006) sucked. (Today is Sunday, September 3, 2006.) It was the crash before the reset. I was pushed to my edge and lost my mind, though I am left to remember that a coworker has her computer desktop set to give her a daily English expression and the one she happened to have on at that point was “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” I like to think of it as a brief sign from the universe that I needed to get through that moment without going home.
For me, giving in to the bleak darkness is the only way to get past the culture shock. I can avoid, I can dismiss but it eventually catches up with me and so the only way for me to fully begin to move past the stalling out and general haze of fear caused by culture shock is to submit to it. It’s not pretty and I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone but the best way for me to handle the situation is to lance the boil and submit to the sinking feeling of awfulness shadowing me.

Fortunately for me, but perhaps not for her, my mother finally was able to reach me on Friday night (or Saturday morning, depending on whether or not you think 1am counts as Friday or Saturday). The Jude works at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital (or New York Presbyterian or whatever they’ve renamed it for this year) on the Northern tip of Manhattan and it is a veritable United Nations for all the various nationalities working there. When her daughter is living in another country, this serves as an invaluable resource and on Friday, it most certainly did.

Apparently, while everyone thinks the country code for China is 29, it is really 26. So, the Jude had been trying to call me for the better part of a week and couldn’t get through. We had had sporadic contact via email but when school started for everyone else and I still didn’t have internet in my home, I was ostensibly cut off. She was freaked out because I wasn’t contacting her and I was growing increasingly culture shocked in my isolation. She spoke to one of the doctors she works with who explained the country code was wrong and then the doctor called my apartment from her cell phone (dear god I love technology). I was out having noodles at the dinner my beloved colleague set up for me but the call finally went through.

Then, at midnight/1 am, the Jude called me from New York. I heard the phone ring in the living room and it pulled me from my fevered sleep. I knew instantly it was the Jude and, half asleep, I flew down the hall to get the phone. I picked up and it was the comforting sound of mom on the other end. I started crying immediately and, though she claims we spoke for an hour, it felt like a brief moment. I completely unloaded on her couldn’t stop crying about what a mistake this was.

The kind woman told me that whatever I decided, she would stand by me completely. She said if I needed to come home we would do whatever it took to get that done. She told me that she would go to the Chinese consulate at home if they gave me a hard time here. I told her it was just the stress talking but more than anything I just wanted to come home. I told her that I couldn’t stop dreaming that my old paramour was next to me and I don’t understand what’s going on with my head.

She listened to it all and was very supportive. She told me how much she loved me and that she supported any decision I wanted to make. I blathered on a bit more, about what, I have no idea. We finally got off the phone and I went back to sleep, feeling so much better.

The next morning, Saturday, I got up and got ready. I decided to play my least favorite but most crucial “Worst Case Scenario” game. Usually, it involves “being fired” which is something I fear because I’ve never really been fired. Granted, I’ve been in positions where I would have been fired had I stayed but I generally know when to bail. On rare occasion, I’ve set out to be fired but always ended up getting promoted in some weird, “Office Space” turn of events.

The closest I ever came to being fired was being pushed out of a production company I was in the midst of founding with two other people. The girlfriend of my female production partner met me on a Friday, my female production partner not only didn’t get back to me all weekend (we had been speaking daily up until that point), she blew off a meeting we were to have on Monday and then Tuesday she called me up to let me know she didn’t think I fit in the direction “we” were planning on going. Our third partner was there in a completely “equipment and technological knowledge” capacity; he had no interest in direction. Consequently, the only “we” I could deduce was my partner and her girlfriend (who, though highly opinionated about all things and very been-to-the-mountain had never worked a day in film and had no idea what a film business model looks like). I reasoned that if I was being pushed out of a company I was helping to found because of a jealous, divisive (whenever my partner left the room, the woman would recant stories of my partner’s “ridiculous fantasies” of continuing her work in entertainment and then roll her eyes; to my partner’s credit, she has a long list of impressive entertainment accomplishments, she’s no teenager with a dream) girlfriend, it was best I know before things got too permanent.

So, this episode of “Worst Case Scenario: China” went a little like this: I asked myself, “Self, if you’re horrible and they hate you, what’s the worst that would happen?”

“Well, they would fire me, pay me my wages and the penalty and send me home… which would send me home anyway.”

“So, the absolute, worst case scenario is that you will be sent home, right?”

“Right.”

“What do you have to be afraid of?”

“Ultimately, nothing.”

“Exactly.”

“So why not give it a go? You can go home having done little more than kick around a (bug free, thank you) swank apartment in China for a week or you can go home after having spent a year working in China. Either option ends with you going home but the year offers you a lot more stories.”

“Self, you’re right. I think I’ll stay.”

And then I thought about the tearful conversation I had with my mother over the phone. I instantly felt like a heel because the only thing that sucks worse than having the culture shock is being the person on the other end of the line listening to their child have the culture shock meltdown and feeling completely helpless. I reasoned that the breakdown I had was my equivalent of cold feet at the altar. As I’m not really comfortable with the notion of a big wedding with lots of witnesses (and in fact am only comfortable with the notion of matrimony as a way to translate “We’re two grown adults allowed to play house” abroad) I doubt there will come a time when the music begins to play, the double doors open, I find myself in a corseted gown with the horrific sensation of “Institution” bearing down on my sex life as I gasp for air and become the deer watching the lights grow closer as the horn begins to blow, unable to move. I’ve always seen marriage as something you do only if you can’t not. How it is that you could be so desperate to marry someone right now that you have time to reasonably, rationally plot and plan a massive theatrical production seems a bit counterintuitive to me. (And by “to me” I mean to me. To each their own and if that works for you, more power to you. Considering the popularity of the wedding day as “her special day,” I am more than aware I am in the minority.)

As I was snickering to myself about the moment being a bit like preparation for my (non) wedding day, my mom called again. I apologized for my doomsday perspective the night before and she told me not to be silly. I then joked that it was preparation for my cold feet on my wedding day.

She laughed and told me, “True, but all I would have to say to you then is, ‘RUN’. I think you should give this a try. I think it will be a very rich experience for you.”

“I agree. I think if I wrote a thesis at Reed, I can get through this.”

“If you can write a thesis at Reed, I know you can get through anything.”

“Remind me of that in the delivery room.”

We talked about the advantages and disadvantages of marriage and how, currently, in America, simply living together results in many of the same divorce-esque responsibilities if you split up. We then talked about the fact that one of the few advantages to being married is that you’re the defacto healthcare proxy, to say nothing of the fact that, abroad, you’re not always guaranteed rights to your partner unless you’re married. When then talked about the minutia of contacting each other, the wrestling puppies (the Emma-nator and Billy-boy), and life in general.

It felt good to be back in my own skin.

One of the many things that working in film has taught me is that movies take a lot of effort. It takes at least six months of work and hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars to turn out two hours of product. Consequently, those moments where the hero comes back to herself are always punctuated with crescendo music and edited within an inch of its life. What rarely makes it on to the screen is that the hero always needs some down time once a resolution has been reached. So, I gave myself Saturday. I decided to exempt myself from expectation for Saturday.
I did my laundry (with the Takeshi Kaneshiro-free washboard) and hung it to dry on my clotheslines above my balcony. I took a stroll in the nearby alley where the fresh food vendors, “hole in the wall” local eateries and reasonably priced grocery stores are.

It’s a fascinating place to wander. The streets are narrow, perhaps ten or twelve feet across and a winding few feet across at that. Men and women with their fruits, vegetables, fish and nuts park their bikes and carts on either side of the alleyway. This is a place where adults regularly sleep and live three to a five hundred foot studio apartment and so personal space does not really exist. They measure the food with everything from a hook, a weight and a stick to an electronic scale. The man from whom I buy my grapes places the grapes in a small plastic bag, attaches the bag to a hook and picks up his single weight. About five pounds of grapes costs me less than two Yuan (1 Yuan being about 11 cents currently) and they are the best globe grapes I’ve ever had. They have the depth of flavor of a dark concord grape but the dilution of the Italian globe grape. Depending on where the merchant must put the weight to counterbalance the grapes on the hook tells him how much to charge me. The woman from whom I buy my apples has a small electric scale to do the same. Ten apples costs me less than three Yaun and the apples are the lightest thing I have ever tasted.

The sound of the alley is the lilting song of the colloquial accent that utterly eludes my quasi Taiwanese-Mandarin trained ear but it does not echo as the alley is dense with people and the doors are long, heavy-duty plastic strips. The ground is always wet and made of a combination of cement and very pale brown dirt/mud. There are huge puddles where the cement has broken away and the constant flow of water to keep shop steps clean has pooled. My Western face is quite the novelty and all the old peddlers call out “Erza” which means “Girl” to catch my attention so I will look at them.

Though the ground is a light, muddy brown, the walls are alive with bright color. Each stall sells a combination of things, be it bread and cigarettes or wash pans and pillows, but everything is beautifully colored with dark reds, pinks, deep purples, brilliant oranges, blacks, light blues and hearty greens. Given the color palate in the area, it is no wonder that my ancestors risked life, limb and immortal soul to come here.

And though the alleyway is always busy and I am constantly stared at with a sea of “Erza” following me, I am remarkably peaceful there. It is not unlike an out of body experience, the likes of which listening to Simon and Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair” creates. It is a combination of complete comfort and complete exoticism laced with profundity in the hazy mist around you.

So, at the end of my first week and the beginning of my second, my pendulum has drifted back into the “ready for this” space.


****

Having just gone for a stroll deeper into the local area than I’ve ever been before, I must admit that being “foreign” is exhausting. I would like to comment on how weird it is to have people staring at my crotch constantly but to be totally honest, I come from New York and I’d be lying if I said it was entirely out of the ordinary. The difference is that here, when I look up and some woman or man is clearly checking out my crotch, I can’t respond with something to the effect of, “Can I fucking help you?” Here, I have to pretend not to see it. I am already self-conscious enough about the fact that, in a city filled with Kate-Moss-Framed women, I am all breasts, hips and thighs; I don’t need to be consistently reminded of my blatantly obvious sexuality. One boyfriend once commented that I had a body that was built to, “you know, take a good slamming. I don’t have to be nervous that I might seriously injure you in the heat of the moment” and I hear his voice now as the Asian gaze run over my body and pools at my crotch.

Regardless, I walked around for merely a half hour and now I am ready for a nap. It’s difficult to maintain that neutral balance of polite cheer. I don’t want to seem snobby and therefore imperialist and I don’t want to seem too friendly and therefore touristy or slutty. I try to carry myself as if I belong, simply taking in the sights and nodding to anyone not-dating-appropriate (much older men, children and women) who stares at me extensively. Teenage women see me and are giddy with excitement to try out their English, which usually consists of “Hello, nice to meet you.” I try to return their excitement with a pleased, “Hello, nice to meet you.” Whenever the rising sensation of “oh lord, not another ‘hello, nice to meet you’ conversation” hits me, I remind myself of what my friend Annie (she’s from China and now lives in New York City; she’s my fairy godmother/angel) once told me when I laughed at how exotic she told me I would be. “You’re very exotic. You travel the world. Most of these people, they do their job, they have their family and that’s it. They can’t go anywhere. They are tied to their job and will never see the world.” Annie then told me this story of a woman who worked at a hotel where Annie was staying while she was back home visiting. The woman bent over backwards to take care of Annie and as they were chatting, Annie discovered that the woman lived on the 3rd floor of the hotel and that was it. She never went anywhere outside the city except to see her family and she would live her whole life in that job. “You’re the closest thing most of them will ever see to the outside world,” she told me.

I know I live a life of great indulgence and the least I can do is humor people when they try to use their English but good lord, the whole package is surprisingly tiring.