Watching Doodle play clumsily in my new apartment in my new city after which my new dog is named gives me a sense of calm which I haven't felt since I left slow and sunny Sanya. The past week or so has been a tornado of tasks, all contributing to the ultimate goal of creating a foundation for residing in Chengdu for the next year.
Jobs: Check.
Apartment: Check.
Phones: Check (well, at least until this morning when mine enjoyed a stimulating ride in our washing machine)
Internet: Check!
Accomplishing these things wouldn't necessarily feel so good or be so miraculous if it wasn't all happening in China. It feels good, to rely on one's own skills and see these kinds of results. It all feels very much like a story – one I might be able to publish if I were a better writer. Here's what the synopsis on the back flap would look like:
Using the only skills they have (native English and passable Mandarin Chinese), a privileged and somewhat sheltered interracial American couple encounter the trials of everyday life in the thriving Chinese provincial capital of Chengdu. They eat new foods (some incredible, some unbearable); discover new philosophies (some reasonable, others utterly confounding); and deal with familiar situations with a Chinese twist (haggling with landlords over payment plans). The experiences they have instill in them a newfound appreciation of the luxuries and familiarities of their life in America, while simultaneously opening their eyes to the diversity and viability of other world views and ways of living.
Or something like that. But since we arrived in Chengdu, I've been feeling that the story I could tell - the one unfolding now about living in a city that is so suitable for Westerners and their habits – isn't a story that would pique the interest of readers other than the one's whose duty it is (either through blood or friendship) to read my writing See, I started reading books about foreigners in China when I was about 14 years young. Books like Mark Salzman's “Iron and Silk” and Peter Hessler's “River Town” were the tomes that gave me my Beijing Boner pretty early on. These books informed my perception of China from then on, for better or for worse. For better in the sense that if I didn't read any of these books I wouldn't be half as interested in China as I am now; for worse, in that I got the idea from these books that, to have a meaningful and share-worthy experience in China, you needed to go to the underdeveloped China, the non-materialist China. In other words, the hard China. Now I can't blame the authors of these esteemed books for filling me with these ideas; I mean, when they were in China (80s, early 90s) a much greater portion of China was hard China than is now. China, at this point, no matter how bad a rap it gets in international news, has come a long way in both economic and egalitarian terms.
But now more than ever there is a China that in so many ways reflects the consumer culture in America that many people will take one look at this China and think there's nothing so special about it. Just another culture absorbed by the consumer impulses that come hand-in-hand with (nearly) free market economic policies. And I admit, the ubiquity of couture dispensaries and products sometimes makes me wonder what this generation of affluent Chinese values other than designer products, fashion, and staying on the cutting edge. But I refuse to believe this consumerist China is not a resource for interesting writing or research. This side of China is not as immediately strange and foreign as its poorer and perhaps more culturally rich counterpart, which makes total sense: the more Chinese society represents our profligate one, the less we're disposed to dissect and inspect it.
Of course it isn't nearly as one-sided as I make it sound: also residing in the bustling metropolises of China are the bootstrap pullers, the ones who eat some bitterness and hardship in the name of attaining a better lifestyle. I'm not too sure I'll get to meet those kinds of folk, since my job in Chengdu caters to the more affluent bunch, something our superior/liaison Mindy managed to mention several times during our informal post-interview dinner. When mentioned the types of customers the school draws, it immediately brought to mind the offer I turned down last Spring. I got a job for the China Education Initiative, an organization that sends American graduates to teach English in impoverished parts of China where the graduation rate from middle to high school is less than 50%. I turned that job down for various reasons which themselves could constitute their own blog post. Anyways, the thought that went through my mind as Mindy rattled off the exorbitant prices for different kinds of classes was: “I turned down a job in a remote village whose sole purpose was to close China's egregious education gap, only to take a job in a big city where I help sustain that gap by teaching China's most privileged.” Joining CEI would have been a noble pursuit, no doubt about that. Also, that experience would have been ripe with opportunities for writing and experiences similar to the kind that I read about, which made me fall in love with China in the first place. But would that be the only way to come away with a shareable and interesting story? Chengdu may provide the kinds of amenities and products that make a Westerner feel more at home, but does that mean it's any less fascinating and hold any less potential than the less central places my idols covered with their brilliant writing? I am determined to come out of Chengdu knowing more about it than just the plazas where Pizza Hut sits across Starbucks which is next to a Louis Vuitton which is situated under a Tiffany's; I want to get beyond its reputation as a city of leisure and see the human potential that China has in spades more than any other country. I think that is something you can find in China, no matter where you are. It might just be a little deeper below the surface in a city like Chengdu.
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