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Two Questions. Two Footnotes. (And a half-sheepish postscript.)

Posted by :James Howden On : February 4, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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 2:58 a.m.

What am I reading from, or whose is the voice I hear, when I wake in the darkness and, in the super-lucid moments before so-called full consciousness (so dim is it, so ponderous after the clarity of leaving-sleep), but still vividly in my racing memory, I hear an over-voice reciting1 – yes, and there was music to it, multimedia aspects, like an ultra-magazine from some attention-deficit future – and the voice and the repeating crescendo of the music2 spoke of things the movies have taught us, such as how we cherish the idea of retraining ourselves, remaking ourselves, perhaps learned from the example of American army training videos, or the joy of (what was it?) making curving paraffin candles dripping with arcing light, yes, like the ones in that Tom Cruise movie where his daughter (Kelly McGillis, in an uncredited role) [waking mind: waitaminute!  Whothehell has heard of Kelly McGillis in alltheseyears? but in the dream this fact is wonder full] is, blue-eyed, something, there was dripping light, SOMETHING, the connection is breaking up, the voice stutters and sparks but I can still (almost) recall it: I ask again, what is this text? Whose is this voice?

Does anyone read to you like this in your half-light moments, words spooling out as if revealed?

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The Howdy TOP 10 (as chosen by, well, me!)

Posted by :James Howden On : January 31, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you…”

That was Walt Whitman, the famous “Song of Myself”, encouraging me from beyond the beyond not to be shy to tell you what I like, even if it’s me. Alrighty, then.

Even by Chinese standards, I’m a little slow to jump on the New Year’s Look-back train. Still, it was a good excuse to browse through some of my 2012 posts, and enjoy them as a reader. Here are ten JH.com posts that might be worthwhile reads for you, too, in reverse chronological order. )Some of them have pictures, my newest baby-step into on-line competence.)

1. February 1. “Not My Brother’s YMCA” starts as a Hong Kong travel piece, and ends in memory of a friend.

2. April 12. “Hessler’s Rivertown“ is a book review, part of a series I call “Better Read Than Never”, about a young American’s first two years in China. Peter Hessler went on to write two more books on this country, and he’s graceful and good. I reviewed four other books under the “Better Read” rubric last year.

3. May 19. “Why Do Men Love Sports So Much?”   is a lengthy answer to a question that is more important than it may sound. I put it in the “On Second Thought” section, ’cause it’s long and I’ve sweated over it. I should sell it. I should develop it into a book. I think it’s pretty good, but be warned: it’s not a tweet.

4. June 16. “NBA Finals: It’s Morning in China” is another long piece, but sits in the “It’s All About Sports” section of the site. It’s a play-by-play, commercial-by-commercial, digression-by-digression log of watching a big NBA game from the other side of the globe. It tells as much about me, and about my views of China, as it does about LeBron. It’s a bit wacky.

5. August 15. “Driving Miss Piggy (Crazy)” is a light-hearted account of my pitched battle with the Chinese language, and some of the collateral damage from it. (Again, apologies to the lovely Ms. Zhu.)

6. September 19. “NINE-EIGHTEEN: Face to (Losing) Face in Asia” is a local glance at a consuming, nervous-making bit of political intrigue in the East.

7. November 17. “Is China Really Upside-Down?” takes a look at childish ideas of geography and global orientation in the light of my lived experience of what makes China deeply the same and profoundly different than my ol’ Canucky home. It got me thinking so much I had to post “Another Thing!” a few days later.

8. November 23. “Afternoon on an Overpass” brought me face to face with injustice and the bitter banalities of every day.

9. November 28. “Old Guy Glory: Still Got It! (One day.)” recounts the stirring and inspiring tale of an old guy showing the youngsters a thing or three. (Well, I had fun.) One of these days there’ll be photo evidence. This giddy piece makes a good counterpoint to my recent court misadventures, and my scarred forehead is a fair argument against further foolishness. (But not a persuasive one!)

10. December 8. “Lightning in My Living Room” is my retelling of a remarkable, head-scratching, where in the world is this going evening in Apartment 902, a close encounter of the sectarian kind.

Are these my best? Heck if I know! as they may still say in the valley of the Grand River, back home in corn country. They’re ten I’ll stand by, anyway, which makes it a little easier to sing along with Walt.

 

Edith Hamilton (Weston) Main

Posted by :James Howden On : January 29, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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The picture I remember best is an old black-and-white that I only saw a couple of times. Her hair is long and loose, her smile carelessly radiant, and her eyes draw one’s gaze again and again. She’s young, and she’s gorgeous, and it surprised a teenaged me to see the middle-aged, slightly doughy housewife – the one who had so lovingly welcomed, guided, and cared for me – looking so confident and free. I had known her as a quiet, self-effacing baker of cherry cheesecake and dispenser of tea, but here she looked like a screen star. This was my future mother-in-law, likely at about the age of her daughter when I married her. She was Edith, “Mother Main” (and not just to me), but I mostly called her Mum. I still do, though it’s been years since I’ve seen her.

The other photo comes 50 years later, I guess. It is more formal, a rather conventional studio shot that can’t hide her silvered, warm-eyed beauty. She is again slender, and her quiet dignity is clear. By this time, she was my ex-mother-in-law, marital fortunes being what they are in these times and in this heart. I was grateful when that same daughter, re-married, as I am, emailed from afar to let me know that Edith was preparing for take-off. She had turned 89 weeks before, and her life had become a smaller and smaller thing. She hung on for another week, and last Wednesday flight confirmation arrived. Friday’s funeral was not a tragic one.

Except that for me, it partly was.

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Are You Fashion?

Posted by :James Howden On : January 2, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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It was time for a Walmart run. Our local “Friendly Shop” grocery store, so named by our son to distinguish its family ownership from the surliness across the street, doesn’t have everything. Salted peanuts to decorate my corn flakes, plus a large bag of Tide, were on the agenda, but I really wanted one more look at a pink fuzzy pyjama shirt I’d seen the week before. It had been my favourite linguistic delicacy of the winter.

Like most women’s nightdressing in China (well, at least so far as I can tell), the emphasis was on cute, preferably with animals. (Earlier, I’d been looking for a housecoat my wife had casually mentioned, and that’s why I was there, I swear it!) “Love My Bear” had adorned a neighbouring nightie, but I was looking for a stronger, more probing motto: STYLE IS MY GENETIC, the rosy shirt had announced. ARE YOU FASHION? This wasn’t something I could actually buy for my bride’s mid-winter birthday – besides, the pink slippers with the black polka-dots so perfectly matched her black PJs with the fuschia ones! – but I had stood and repeated the sentences. One mysterious statement, and one inscrutable question that I wanted to remember. Tragically, when I’d reported my find back at headquarters, I was convinced that the Chinglish had been even better, even more delightfully flawed. I cursed my mouldy mind.

I shouldn’t have waited a week. Up and down the aisles of women’s clothing I went. I looked in sales bins. No luck. I found Skippy and some pleasantly mediocre jam to spread with it, and everything else I needed for comfort breakfasts and tolerable laundry. Vacuum-packed salted cashews offered crunchable and linguistic solace – TRADITIONAL FOODS WIN ZEN PRESENT – but there was no my genetic, no are you fashion? I left the basement emporium, overheated and slightly claustrophobic as usual, but mainly with that feeling of having missed a chance that won’t come again. Back in the cold air of a December Dalian street, bags in each hand, I trudged on to my next duty, arms heavy but heart heavier at the lost phrase.

(But wait: Chinese neighbours often wear their pyjamas outside! Who knows, maybe come spring I’ll find it on an after-supper stroll! Hope springs.)

Lightning in My Living Room

Posted by :James Howden On : December 8, 2012
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Category: At First Glance

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This is a metaphor. Isn’t everything?


I was suspicious, right off the hop. My bride is a brightly inviting sort, so it’s not unusual for us to have a houseful. She mentioned that a young woman in our neighbourhood, someone whose good English has made her a go-to person when we can’t figure out how to pick up a parcel or find a decent loaf of bread, wanted to come over and visit. Hmm. Interesting, but we’ve never been exactly chummy before, and she didn’t say why she wanted to come.

“So Cindy wants to come over and won’t say why.”

“Yeah, and she wants to bring a friend, too.”

“Did you ask her? And she won’t tell you? And this doesn’t strike you as weird?”

I instantly smelled vacuum cleaner demonstration, but that’s a memory trace from a long-gone episode of injured pride and free-flowing anger. Chinese apartments are seldom carpeted. Gotta be selling something, though. I was sure of it. I got my back up a little, bluntly reserving my right to disappear into the bedroom at the first sign of a product demonstration. My wife inquired again, and the mystery remained, except that Cindy (an English name, and not her real one) would now have two friends with her. The secrecy irritated me, as did my bride’s apparent lack of curiosity. I even thought, What is this? A swinger’s club?

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Afternoon on an Overpass

Posted by :James Howden On : November 25, 2012
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Category: At First Glance

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We don’t see many beggars in Dalian, at least not in my neck of the asphalt jungle. Yesterday, though, on an elevated bridge over one of the busier bottlenecks of traffic, at Heishijiao, was a doubleheader. I am eternally conflicted, and all the more so in China, where most people are convinced that beggars get rich.

Or get someone else rich: the popular belief seems to be that every beggar has a pimp who preys on the helpless sympathy of passersby – in my view, most people are quite well fortified against this! – and of course the pathetic needs of the (often-handicapped, or apparently so) “collectors”. I’ve seen and chronically misunderstood or misread enough of this country to believe that there could be truth to this urban dogma, but also feel compelled to ask those who spout it a head-tilting zhen de ma? (Really? Really?)

I was on my way to McDonald’s, lately my go-to spot for a little (not so) quiet thinking, reading, writing and people-watching. But I didn’t plan to watch that: pedestrians on the bridge parted in oblivious avoidance of a long-haired man, half-naked on a zero-degree day, lying on his stomach on the concrete, muttering as he flopped his head and torso violently up and down, up and down. On the downward stairs at the other end of the bridge, a bundle of clothes (possibly old, possibly female) was kneeling, unseen forehead nearly touching the concrete landing.

I read my novel. I ate a McFlurry. I made plans. I scribbled notes for a draft of a proposal to supplement a project I’ve been avoiding. I read encouraging non-fiction. McChicken and fries followed. I watched the young woman two tables over, hunched over her needlework . (She outstayed my three hours, and ate less.) My introvert-in-the-crowd engagement over, I walked back to the bridge, heading for the number 28 bus back to family, sweet music and fresh hot conversation.

Still, in the darkness of a late afternoon, the kneeling shape silently begged. Still, more than three hours later, the spastic figure wearing only pants jerked and muttered. I put a little money in their hats, and didn’t feel better at all.

And Another Thing! Heels Over Head In China

Posted by :James Howden On : November 23, 2012
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Category: At First Glance

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Yes, and sometimes they ARE upside-down. And BENT.

I posted, a few days ago, about the ways in which China is upside-down, at least from a Canada-centric point of view. I missed an obvious one.

Here’s the ‘nother thing: people here don’t sing sentimental anthems, a la Bryan Adams, or make nostalgic carpe diem speeches to adolescents, saying that university and especially high school are “the best years of your life”. (Lies the Adults Told Us. I could go on and on, and often did with my students  back home, but let me say this: high school is a painful and confusing period for many Canadian kids, and those early-bloomers for whom those really were the best of times are doomed to chronic disappointment.) China is really upside-down about that whole wish-I-was-young-again thing. They don’t miss high school a bit!

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Is China Really Upside-Down?

Posted by :James Howden On : November 17, 2012
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Category: At First Glance

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When I was a kid in southern Ontario, our favourite mind-altering impossibility was to imagine digging, not to unearth potatoes or worms, but straight down “until we get to China!” We understood, in a five-to-seven-year-old way, that since the world was round – there was a globe in my brother’s room, so that part was obvious – then the Chinese people must be upside-down. (And their children were starving, as I knew from my mother’s frowning over every uneaten vegetable.) In places like Canton, Ohio, or Pekin, Illinois, or half a dozen other American towns, apparently even the grown-ups nurtured the same fantasy about the inscrutable other side of the planet.

We’ll be there by lunchtime, I think.

Now I live in northeastern China. I don’t feel upside-down, well, not most of the time, and my little family is proving the old global-awareness mantras: yup, people are pretty much people, wherever they are, and they love to eat and sing and laugh, and they love their families and get mainly-unexplainable pleasure when “one of theirs” wins a game or a race or the Nobel Prize for Literature. They want peace and a better life for their kids. The usual.

The longer I’m here, though, the more I think of my old backyard dreams, because in ways mostly silly and insignificant, there is a definite strain of oppositeness. It starts with food. (Doesn’t everything?)

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Have a Try

Posted by :James Howden On : November 17, 2012
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Category: At First Glance

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I repeatedly get this gentle Chinglish invitation (or request, or bold affirmation: I will have a try!) from my students and friends here. That’s what JamesHowden.com has been since 2006 — me having my fitful, false-starting, good-intentioning and stubbornly labouring try at getting my writing out there. (There are other ways, and I am even less confident about them, but I have a try along those roads, too.)

Here I am again.

Just a note, in addition to the apology/plea/declaration above, that you can find stuff related particularly to fun ‘n’ games in the “It’s All About Sport!” section to the right. Below that is a recently updated, growing collection of quotes I have loved under “He Said/She Said”, as well as a collection of usually longer pieces, often with a narrow audience in mind, that I call “On Second Thought”. There’s some great stuff in this last category, but it’s a little scarier sort of reading adventure.

Thanks for dropping by. Welcome anytime. Wish you happy every day.

 

 

Seasonal Migrations of the Coal-Dependent Kind

Posted by :James Howden On : November 6, 2012
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Category: At First Glance

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My former student Lizhu sent an email in mid-October. This son of northeastern China  friend is now living in Montreal, pursuing a Doctoral degree in something I only vaguely understand. One of his surprised observations was that “the heat is already on here even though it is above ten degrees”. My reply explained that, in Canadian cities, home heating is not administered by local authorities. In China, most homes north of the Yangtze River are heated centrally, mainly by municipal coal-fired plants. (South of that, you’re on your own, and there are occasional runs on electric space-heaters. Walmart be praised.)

A week ago last weekend was our area’s coal-truck Grand Prix. From our apartment’s south windows, we had a clear view, within easy range of the throwing arm I used to have, of the delivery doors of the furnace for our district. Its chimney will soon belch black, but our welcome to winter was the sounds of the dark-humped coal trucks barrelling up the hilly ring-road that serves our apartment complex. A small band of arm-wavers, from the complex’s guard crew and from the central heating department, guided the trucks up the narrow lane and dissuaded the cars that think they live here. The turning radius was small, the incline steep, so there was a lot of gearshift grinding, but these guys know what they’re doing. No Toyotas were crushed, no Benzes were dented, though I’m getting coal grit in my sneakers when I run down the hill, late for school.

Some preliminary whiffs of black have come from the chimney, and not long afterward we heard waterworks in our main radiator most of one day as the building’s hot-water pipes were flushed and tested. In our usual ex-pat ignorance, though, we don’t know what the plan is for when heat will be available in our apartment. Two falls ago, the date was a clearly mandated November 15 1, but the first last two weeks of November October were snappin’ cold, and we were bundling up (even though we’re chauvinists about our Canadian resistance to chill). Parts farther north have had some brutal cold and snow, so I can only hope that their mandarins have seen fit to move up the best-be-warm date.

A cold wind and lashing rain yesterday brought fantasies of hearth and woodstove, but we settled for hoodies. One of my teaching rooms at school was particularly chilly yesterday, so I spent part of the lesson in my parka shell. (Yes, a bitterly shameful pill for Tough Guy Canuck to swallow.) Today, the sun is back and our living room window is giving some warmly passive solar on a 10 degree day. Soon, though, we will have an official, red-stamped governmental confirmation that winter has arrived in Dalian.

[With editorial revision from the Punctuality Princess added after the original post. D’oh.]