ACADEMIA

I’ve been avoiding writing because I’m feeling amorphous again. I’m exhausted by the emotional toll of the year. I’m exhausted by the disappointments and the joy. I’m exhausted by my own humanity and I’m exhausted by always having to ignore the role of “freak” I am constantly, actively given.

The simplest of tasks has become monumentally difficult. The joy of teaching my classes to interested students has abated and to reveal dread at the thought of yet more hours of my life purchased by the highest bidder. I have begun to feel like a high-priced whore. I loathe meeting new people because it invariably means having to calmly, tactfully remove myself from the inevitable wooing for a favor. They will buy me an inordinately expensive meal in return for the ability to ask if I might be so kind as to simply exist near them, making them more desirable to those around them. Frankly, I am most often, socially speaking, little more than an escort. I’m even exhausted by going to the gym, though the social payoffs of Tank and several other trainers with whom I am friendly is large enough that I’m willing to deal with being gawked at like a circus freak in the locker room by every single woman. My particular favorite is being stared at for minutes on end, mouth agape in a neutral fashion of awe (but would be interpreted by most Westerns as horror) while the stare-er fails to finish changing her sanitary pad because watching me for minutes on end is more important than her own dignity. That my nipples are pink and not brown is far more important than her menses flowing freely. I wish I could say that was a singular event but it occurs with surprising regularity; at least once a week.

Nevertheless, as much as I fight it and as much as I disagree with the assessment, I am consistently called an “academic” and an “intellectual” by those who know me best. And, the truth is, while I’m not built out of academic stuff, I do adore the learning process. It is precisely what cheers me up when I’m in a funk; like I am now. Granted, I loathe fighting for a grade or concerning myself with the opinions of a professor about my worth as a human being but I adore learning. I love the process of fleshing out new space, new ideas and forcing myself to wield the unwieldy. To me, learning is the equivalent of life; the end of learning would be death to me.

Given my current situation (no full-time work and no close friends currently in China as my Brazilian Angel’s back home in Brazil) I’m languishing. I’ve got nothing to challenge me and nothing to work towards. I teach one, three-hour class a week at one of the more prestigious universities in the area and the students are good enough that I start them on talking and they simply go. I loathe that I am considered a good enough teacher, a fine enough instrument, that I am not given any sort of curriculum. The fact is that, once I understand a language, I am highly talented with it but I need structure of some sort. I can come at language from an infinite number of ways because I am, at first, so infinitely bad that I learn all the mistakes there are to make. Given that bulk of knowledge, frankly, I need to be limited. I’m slowly learning the mindset behind the Chinese’s English lexicon but I’ve grown bored with that struggle as it has very little rhyme or reason because it is primarily a hodgepodge of native French speakers informing the Chinese of what English is and what the Chinese dictionaries tell the Chinese “experts” “real” English is. (I cannot begin to express how frustrating it is to be told what your language is by people whose only exposure is limited to an electronic dictionary; I have long since given up.)

So today (7/22/07) I woke up bright and early on a Sunday morning and headed to the South of the city about an hour from my home to take my entrance exam for my Chinese class. Out of ten students, I was far and away the worst student there and none of them live in China. Most of the students are Western European and have been intensively studying Chinese in their respective countries for at least a year. This trip is for them to refine their already-excellent Chinese. Frankly, after a year here, my Chinese is embarrassing.

It’s inspiring.

I feel like I’m waking up. I feel like I’ve been resurrected. I feel like the gauntlet has been thrown down and I, at last, really have to work for something valuable but nothing of great importance is on the line. When I first got to China, everything was of essential importance. Frankly, it was sink or swim time and if I messed up, my well-being was at stake. It was unbelievable pressure to be under but I’ve made it through. The Westerners I know that live here are amazed that I managed to survive at all much less as well as I did. I know I can get around and live in China with no problem on the minimal Chinese I speak, read and write. I have the confidence to deal with my life here. I know the bus system, I know the colloquial speech and I know the accent. The other Western students, I can see, do not. In many ways, Xi’An has become a home-away-from-home and there is something to be said for that unquantifiable way in which I have come to understand, not really the language, but the life here. I’m so excited to begin studying the language because I know it will enhance my experience. I know it will offer me shades and subtleties to my life here that I didn’t have before. The ability to exist will not change because I’ve won that through hard work already. No, what will change will be the quality of life.

I cannot express how excited I am to be getting back into a classroom as a student. I’ve had enough of being the teacher!