BLURT 9: Reveille plays from the sports field next door: it’s megaphones, and marching, and martial music, and hundreds of young college students in uniform by 6:00 am. Yi! Er! San! Se! It’s frosh week in China.
BLURT 8: Returns and returns: this modest collection retrieved from electronic limbo, this Canadian family walking the now-familiar paths of a Chinese life.
BLURT 7: Days and nights hiking Banff, Lake Louise, and on into British Columbia is a jaw-slackening reminder: this here Canada, it’s big and beyond beautiful. And almost nobody lives here, according to my China Eye. Happy day(s).
BLURT5: Vietnam remains in my mind a mythical land of napalm apocalypse, while I lounge by a pool near Hoi An.
BLURT6: Son the Second celebrates his birth, far from mother, farther from dad. (No great mischief for the son.) Imagine. 27.
BLURT4: Haven’t read Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Freedom, but delighted to learn How To Be Alone, meditations upon writing, justice, much else.
BLURT5: Transcontinental Skype: disjointed, blurry, blurty, inaudible, peevish. But OH, the loveliness of family-ar faces, even metallic voices.
BLURT3: My name is Jay, and I am addicted to Snickers® bars. They are everywhere. Other favourite sweeties aren’t. I blame China.
I challenge grad students: why do Chinese (grand)parents carry kids’ backpacks on the walk to school? Outrageous! Most are blank with incomprehension. Everyone does that, Jay.
BLURT 2: What do you do when you’re brilliant, anxious, Chinese, introverted, and a city dweller who doesn’t much like people? Books. Cigarettes. Wondering.
China is a very civilized place, I tell my wife.
No Twitter.
No Facebook.
There may be other reasons for that, besides simple national good taste and refined judgement, but there you go. She rolls her eyes. She yeah yeah yeahs. And she reminds me how Facebook has been useful to her, a mature professional woman with no time for silliness but a considerable desire to connect. Okay. I make a grudging concession, and she goes back to the VPN (Virtual Private Network) that allows her access. Apparently, all the cool ex-pats do it. But not Jay Cool.
Long story short: you can’t follow me on Twitter
(And for the life of me, why would anyone want to? Right now I am typing. A moment ago I was eating. I plan to read. In an hour or so, I’ll turn in early. Several hours later, I will wake up to pee. Several hours after that, repeat. And tomorrow will be another gripping day of doing.)
But I AM considering doing some Twitter-esque blurting on here, mostly things that I wonder about, notice, or remember. This, mind you, is not out of any sense that the world needs my thoughts on this or that, but just as an excuse to record what is usually quite fleeting (by the nearest thing I have to Tweeting). Just for the sake of an external challenge — playing tennis with a net, as Robert Frost might have suggested — I may even observe the 140-character limit that Twitter imposes. But I AM NOT A TWIT.
Blurt the First is coming. Warn your children. Guard your pets.
I commonly ask myself – usually when China has smacked me in the mouth or tickled my perspective – where AM I? But we’re well into our second year here now, and I’m beginning to accept the fact of my geography. It’s time, it’s “for everything there is a season”, that makes me wonder these days.
Thanksgivings come and go, and the Chinese New Year sparkles and bangs memories of January football Bowl games and Dick Clark into oblivion. That’s okay with me. But now it’s December, another December, but I’m far out at sea about what that means anymore. Oh, there are occasional sightings of a Santa Claus taped up by a shopkeeper who doesn’t know who he is (or what he sure as Jesus isn’t), and the foreigner-friendly restaurants have visions of sugarplums dancing over their cash registers, I’m sure. But my life here mainly revolves around Monday-to-Thursday, and then Friday-to-Sunday axis. When I have occasion to label when I am as December, it’s a head-shaker.
Until this morning, there was no snow. (And the Dalian-deranging white dust on the ground barely qualifies as snow to this chauvinistic Canuck, though I was pleased to see it anyway.) While I am a teacher here, as I mainly am back home, there is no two-week holiday bliss awaiting me. (And no pre-holiday basketball tournaments. No parties. No Turtles. Ah, Turtles…) There will be no family reunions, no homes with bright lights, no crèches, no Christmas eve candlelight service, no plum pudding. Here in Dalian, the only shadows cast by Christmas are the commercial ones, and even they are rather muted in the ex-pat-free zone that we mainly live and breathe in. And my bride’s birthday, traditionally lamented as being overshadowed by Christmas – it’s the 23rd, if you were planning to send a card – is in danger of being neglected when my main seasonal reminders are absent.
But at 7 a.m., my house was filled with the whoops and thunder-footed galumphing of 10-year-old bliss. My little snow goon remembered skiing and snow forts and toboggans. He hasn’t yet remembered that he likely won’t have any of those here, so he was joy en-boyed. He was as thrilled as the year when his southern Ontario father, at about the same age, acculturated into bitter laments over the dead grass of a late December, was transported into delight and renewed belief in the goodness of the Universe: I woke up one Christmas Eve morning to find snow, beautiful snow, covering every tree and house and disappointment. I’d been dreaming of a white Christmas, and apparently Sam had been hoping for a snowball December, too.
In our little nuclear unit, we didn’t make too much of a fuss over Christmas back home, but I still loved many of the feelings of that season. Those cultural warm blankets are harder to come by here. But listen, if you like non-stop fireworks in February, this is absolutely the place to be! (We’re going to Vietnam.)
I am a peaceful man, and a pretty obscure one, but I have always wanted to be on the “front lines” of life. The heat and the totality of athletic competition, even when it was just my small-town team against the runty evil empire on the other side of the county, helped me to feel that way. Being in China, with its astonishing pace of growth and change (constructive and sometimes not-so), its relentless shouldering into the fast lanes of life on Earth, reminds me of hearing the reports of war correspondents from mysterious locales. (Except that it’s me and I’m there, and it’s still too much to grasp.) And when I sometimes come nearer an understanding the vision and the work of the Baha’i community in the world, well, that feels like being an advance guard for a new kind of humanity — not out of any sense of deserving, but simply through having stumbled upon a spiritual revolution and, occasionally, acting like it.
I teach some of the speeches of President Obama in my English and Western Culture classes at the Dalian University of Technology. Today, thinking about this “front lines” mentality, I’m inclined to add parts of this one, by the 26th American President, Theodore Roosevelt.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Superb, yes? Roosevelt said this in a speech called “Citizenship in a Republic”, which he gave in Paris in 1910. The sporting undertones of his “man in the arena” metaphor no doubt contribute to the strong impact it has on me, and its exclusive language is only an arti, fact of its time. The women are in the arena, and challenging the men to share it with them.