My first Goldeyes game of the season last night in ridiculously good seats. For Christmas Sean got the (in Winnipeg) DJS5ers a mini-pack of baseball tickets. We’ll rotate through who gets to go to the games and stuff so we’ll each get to go to a few. Last night no one else could go so I got to bring my mom along. (I thought about calling Dave, but my mom actually enjoys baseball. And she bought me dinner. And beer.)

The seats. You know how people say there isn’t a bad seat in our ballpark (for my non-Winnipeggers, they say that a lot)? Well there sure as hell are great seats. We’re in the first row directly at the end of the third base line. So when people are running in to score, they’re running at you. We can hear the umps even when they aren’t shouting. On right handed batters we’re all over the height of the pitches. And you know how a right handed batter pulls the ball for the double into the left field corner? How the ball arcs off the bat and around? We get to watch that perfectly. I love those seats.

The game was pretty great too. The Fish got a run-scoring triple. We also had three errors (on eminently catchable balls - you could tell this wasn’t the majors) including the left fielder dropping a fly in the top of the ninth with two outs, allowing a runner on while we were up by one. Next batter that run scored, tying the game, but the hitter tried stretching it into a double and got put out at second. So we went into the bottom of the ninth tied.

Max Poulin comes to the plate. He’s the shortstop and a bit of a fan favourite. I think he’s local. Last year in a game I went to I watched him fuck up two or three double plays and just got angry with him. He’s the David Eckstein of the team. So he’s leading off the bottom of the ninth, and I’m going on to my mom about being glad he’s up because he’s the #9 hitter, so we’ll get the top of the order up and maybe be able to do something. He’s in there for a couple of pitches and mom’s asking why everyone is cheering and I’m going off about what a crappy player he is, how he can’t hit and is only kept around for … and then the crack and the ball is in the air and oh my that hit has legs and it’s a walk-off home run and he’s the best ball player ever.

It was a superb game.

That’s what the crazy beard lady was shouting at people on the second floor just before close tonight. Shouting before going on at length how that’s the only holiday she celebrates.

This morning I discovered I’d bought my mom five yellow roses in a neat little vase for Mother’s Day, and then I made her the best omelette I think I’ve ever had the good fortune of creating. It’s no pork wellington, but was still very tasty.

Yesterday was Reyn’s non-stag party (non- because he’s already married). We went paintballing which involved a lot of waiting around and then a good amount of shooting people. I didn’t get hit in the face, which I’d been dreading. Once in the top of the head. Then there was drinking and reliving past times.

And that was my weekend.

I’m shelving picture books in Children’s and there are two young women with a stroller and a little kid running around/being carried. The non-stroller pusher is obviously pregnant.

Stroller: So you ready for all the diapers and shit again.
Pregnant: Eh, it’s not so bad this time. Jamie’s pretty excited. Not like last time with Marcus. He and my stepmom wanted me to get an abortion so bad… but I told them no way.
Stroller: Man, I wish my mom had told me to get an abortion.

The conversation went on with so many names being thrown around of kids step-fathers, step-siblings, exboyfriends’ girlfriends/stepmothers. I was trying to keep it all straight but it was like the first time reading a Russian novel where every character has 17 names. Though I don’t think anyone in the conversation was referred to twice.

The previous post should not be taken as indicative of my mental health. I am capable of realizing that if this company wants me to teach children there are probably others that would not require such thing. I’m diversifying my options, not marrying the first girl I sleep with, all that jazz. This is the calming realization I had at work today. And it’s dumb of course but was something I didn’t alize the first time. So don’t worry, if you’re the type to. I’m not melting into a puddle quite as much as it may have sounded.

Plus I figured out my Dean Moriarty/Captain Ahab for the China book. Which feels really really good. I’d talk more about that now but I’ve had a couple of beers (thank you Reyn) and I want to get it down in fresh type in the morning. Clearly and unmuffled.

The other day I had a short interview with a company about going off to teach in Japan. Just a preliminary thing before they finalize my application. And it actually freaked me out. Not on the phone, on the phone I was all laughs and amiability. But afterwards all the lying I had just done made me want to vomit. The woman asked if I’d be comfortable teaching kids and I said yes. Little kids. As young as three. I remember Mel and Margaret having to teach little Chinese kids and Caroline talking about the Korean kids and the hellishness of it. And I remember thanking all that was good in the world I didn’t have to do that. And she asked about my energy levels in the class, how I’d feel being all bouncing around silly and shit. “Oh that sounds fun!” Would I be okay with being clean shaven and wearing a suit? “You bet!” Because swearing off ties 5.5 years ago doesn’t mean anything.

Why do I have to lie? Because I know if I tell the truth no one will pay me to go anywhere. And I’ll be stuck here in this place I don’t like. But it’s not like I actively hate anything I do here. Maybe I shouldn’t sell myself off like this. Maybe I should remember how much I didn’t like teaching. Maybe I should go to Japan on my own terms, in a way I don’t have to lie and hate myself for doing all that. Do this the hard way. Like the writing.

I worry though that if I do that I’m falling into the “once in a lifetime” trap. That then going off somewhere on the other side of the world becomes something strange and exciting instead of just part of my life. But if part of my life involves that much deception and self loathing, ech. I don’t want to feel trapped here, that Winnipeg is all I’ll ever know. I need to be different places. Being in China this last time made me feel content, and I’ve been wanting to push on to work in Japan because of that contentment. But I was in China as a travelling layabout. A person without work or schedule. That’s not what teaching would be, no matter how many weeks of vacation I got.

I don’t know. I’m not withdrawing my application but I don’t know if I can go lie my face off as a fake-smiling teacher just to be somewhere else. I already feel like I’m hiding all the time. We’ll see what happens.

I woke up early. As usual. Just in case my alarm decided not to go off my body (or is it my brain?) gets me ready to check it an hour beforehand. I made coffee and waited for Holly. We then waited for Xiao Meng to finish washing her face before leaving so I could say goodbye. I said the same kind of “Nice to’ve met you” sort of polite insincere thing you say to someone whose place you haven’t been living in for a month. There was too much of a lineup for he good baozi for me to feel comfortable waiting.

In the subway I bought my ticket (the little blue RFID poker chip) and hugged Holly goodbye. “See you soon,” I said, and it’s possible. Sooner than this was at least. 20 months? Easily doable. If I don’t go to Japan that could be spring. If I do go it’s on her way back to China and she does really want to visit. So yeah. Not so long at all.

I made the train to Shanghai in plenty of time, but not enough to make me wish I’d waited for baozi. I took a window seat and my seatmate was unconcerned (she and her blaring cell phone). On the ride I slept a little. Near Suzhou or Kunshan there was a rabbit strung up by its ears next to the tracks. Brownish with a bit of ginger colouring. So yeah, it still had its fur which is odd for a strung up Chinese rabbit. There were a couple of young men climbing over the wall to the tracks. Did they have anything to do with that rabbit? Wo buzhidao. Reminding me of it was a beggar in Shanghai who looked like a skinned rabbit. He was horribly burned, hairless, eyelids over black pool of eyeball, mottled skin, no lips, stumps of digits beckoning from his cardboard mat next to the church on Renmin Guangchang.

Coming out of the Shanghai train station to the Line 1 entrance was horrible in its own way. The two ticket machines were out of service and hundreds of people were stuck between the train station gate and the subway turnstiles with the only possible escape being through a couple of harried clerks behind plexiglass. I’m glad I wasn’t overly paranoid about pickpockets because then I could abandon myself to the crush of people. I was in no particular hurry but could use my elbows enough to maintain my relative position.

I rode to the People’s Square and sat for a few minutes before eating delicious ice cream in a waffle bowl. Then off through the unterwelt to the MagLev station which cost 50RMB but went 431kmh. Which was pretty awesome even if I was in a backwards facing car. It felt like being in a plane that just wouldn’t take off. Sort of sad really. Like it was held down by magnets instead of levitating on them. At the airport I checked in quickly (showing my hand luggage to the suspicious Air Canada woman), chugged my 1984 and proceeded to wait for the plane to arrive to take me back to Canada.

Planes are very sad machines. Or maybe the sadness is just in sitting in the middle so there’s no sense of distance. Not being able to see the ground you’re covering slip away, just sitting alone in a room with a bunch of chairs and video screens. From Shanghai we were on one of Austin’s planes which meant I spent a lot more time watching movies than I would have if it was on only one screen. But this way I could watch the movies I wanted to see (Michael Clayton, The Assassination fo Jesse James… and I’m not There) and stay awake so I’d be able to sleep on arrival in Winnipeg. There was a massive high school group on the plane filled with noisily happy sounding people. I sat next to a tiny, no not tiny, big fat infant. She was cute enough though. Didn’t scream too much.

And eventually we touched down safely with a few clouds on the mountains. I changed my HK dollars from three years ago into Canadian to supplement my cash on hand for the month. And yeah here I am back in Canada. Still a few hours till my flight to Peg City. I don’t know if I have any better a handle on China than I did when I left, but I do have a few more experiences and things I’ve seen. I think these notes will be useful as a good base for the book (which may be titled something like The Hangman’s Harmony), at least in combination with the other sources, the blog, the travel notebooks primarily but the chapter structure may go back to the Wittgenstein disc. A couple of months to finish it [Ha!]. That’s the plan at least.

I hope all this will be useful to someone. No, not useful. This is no practical document, merely a recording of stories that may not be entirely true or accurate. What else is there to say while I’m falling asleep on an airport chair?

The wind feigned apocalypse, knocking down rows of bikes so if your field of vision was exceedingly narrow it would look like the city had been long abandoned. We needed a good thick layer of that Gobi Desert dust that covers this part of the world every once in a while swirling across to Korea to age everything that’s outside immensely.

I ducked into a courtyard for shelter, grey brick, very neat, only to be accosted for money. “Ticket! Ticket! Ten kuai!” The man wasn’t young and when I nodded my consent he shufflingly beckoned me into the guardhouse. The sign listed the variety of prices one could pay for the privilege of this courtyard (and house, I learned) from Free for retired cadres to 10RMB for me. He tore the end off the ticket himself. It was a pretty, quiet place, very clean. Obviously I’d be hard to lose while the wind pushed through beyond the walls.

This was the restored former residence of John Rabe, the Good German of Nanjing. I liked how in one of the photos that was the title of his diaries or his biography or something, but in all the rest he was the Good Man of Nanjing. And really, he was quite a man. An “unremarkable businessman he turned to heroism” or something similar is how one card put it. There were phtos of his achievements, a case for his medal (the card said it was the medal but the box was closed - I assume it wasn’t actually inside) he received from the Nationalist government for his work saving people in the International Safety Zone during the city’s rape. The house/courtyard that made up this small museum held 600 refugees, some of whom needed personal defending from charges they were de-uniformed soldiers. It was a big Western style house but not 600 people big. There were pictures of him with his Nazi flag (carefully labelled as NDSP or whatever the acronym is) that kept them from being bombed by the Japanese.

He had a rough time after the war getting de-Nazified. The museum stressed he was only a member of the part to get funding for some school or something, he wasn’t a Jew-killer or anything. There was a poem in the airraid shelter about women and kids getting the centre seats while the men should stand around them. The poem called the listener Curly in a sort of affectionate way. I don’t know what the original language of the poem was, Chinese German or English. The English had a singsongy rhyme to it so maybe that was an international concession. Is Curly a Chinese nickname?

The second floor held a shrine to Siemens (the company Rabe had worked for) and all their fine products. A strange ghostly blown up picture of Mao and his buddies from 1950 when China and Germany began official relations sat on one wall. That room had no mention of the countries being enemies in WWI (or WWII). They’ve always been One World One Dream.

I ate well yesterday. Sweet meat sacks for lunch at the place where the employees (almost) all wear their green smocks. I sat in a row of people and gobbled them down quickly, dropping only one or two into my sauce bowl. Old ladies sat to my left and then a business man with a plate of rice and vegetables. They asked how much his food cost and seemed impressed with his six kuai answer.

Out in the lane just to the north as I’d approached the restaurant were four women with identical twin baskets on shoulder poles sitting on the ground (the baskets not the women - there was a guy in Chengdu wearing an excellent fedora who sat on the wheel well on the bus without any newspaper to keep the dirt off his ass. He was part of what seemed a family group. They all carried shopping bags filled with yoghurt). The baskets were filled with mangoes. When I left 20 minutes later they were gone and only a cop car remained.

I saw more mango ladies scattered through Xin Jie Kou in the evening when we went to satisfy Holly’s dream of eating Papa John’s pizza. Some of them were on the steps leading to the underground. We’d left the apartment early after an afternoon of sitting and talking about our various cousins. Holly was wrapped in blankets after a nap but still feeling a little sick. I perched in a huddle on a chair, as is my wont. We killed some time up in the Suning looking at the cutest computer in the world plus some Apple products. The MacBook they had was running Windows XP. Oh China.

Pizza was good though low on sauce compared to my preferences. I felt bad finishing it but Holly said her dream had a lot more to do with the first bite than the last piece. She felt the employees had a good working relationship compared to many restaurants she’d seen.

And then it was off to Zhi Mian where Myrrl’s friend was giving a talk that ended up lasting two and a half hours. He discussed psychology and family run businesses I think. Hong Tao did the translating and everyone asked good questions. I guess. I hung around outside that jam-packed room with James talking cameras cats and comedy. Holly said she could hear us laughing sometimes. James is a pretty cool guy. He wants to be doing work at Chuan Da in comparative literature dealing with Sichuanhua writers and those of the American south, talking about languages of exclusion instead of just local colour. But. Chuan Da doesn’t have anyone who knows American Southern literature. So new plans are being formulated. And as always he asked what I might be doing. I did tell him about maybe going to Japan, and my theory that I’ve got a good number of characters for learning and not too many to freeze out the Japanese sounds etcetera. He didn’t laugh in my face at my naivete, so that’s a plus.

I was telling Holly my fear that going to Japan to teach in a place I’d have to shave and wear a suit and possibly even a tie might be giving up the freedom of my expectationless life in Winnipeg at the library. That somehow not wearing whatever I feel like would compromise me deeply. She doesn’t think I should worry about that. But wouldn’t she say the same thing if I were saying I was getting a PR job for some company in Canada? I hate how I feel like everyone is always lying to me, telling me only what I want to hear. This is why, I think, I hate telling anyone what I want. As soon as you make that known there’s no way you can possibly achieve/acquire it. To go back to an overused and misunderstood analogy, the cat’s both alive and dead until you check. Until you say something and let everything sort itself out into truths and lies.

I learned yesterday that Xiao Meng’s brother was really expecting me and her to hook up the other evening. He bought fancy 15RMB cigarettes because of it, which his sister made fun of him for. When Holly first got here she and Zhao Xing weren’t together and her other roommate tried to fix Holly up with a cousin in Beijing who “makes lots of money and speaks really good English.” Holly had to explain how things didn’t work like that.

Myrrl and his friend David are here. It’s funny to see Myrrl with someone so clueless about China. You feel sort of bad for him talking about his views of Chinese culture. He’s got a PhD in Psychology and wanted to talk about diagnosis and stuff like you’d find in the DSMIV. But he also runs an Amish restaurant. So family-owned business is a good topic too. Holly really hopes he hits some sort of too-close-for-comfort issue about Zhi Mian.

Myrrl’s telling stories of back in the day when the Jin Ling Hotel was the only skyscraper in the city, and only foreigners were allowed in. People would gather outside and just stare up at it. There was a piano bar inside with air conditioning that CEEers would retreat to during the six week SLPs when it was 42 degrees dropping to 37 at night. It was a hellish summer and no good food anywhere. Ruthie had a miscarriage. They’d drape themselves in soaked towels to try sleeping.

And Myrrl talked about Sebastian and how much money he makes playing poker. Thousands. It’s hard to motivate him to go get a job. I wouldn’t want one either. Holly talked a bit about her dream for this organic farm/guesthouse and Myrrl was dismissive, as expected. He wants Zhao Xing to learn to cook and then start a Sichuan restaurant/teahouse/massage place in Harrisonburg. “Now there’s a man with a dream,” I said. I think when he dismisses things it’s sort of an implicit challenge to show him the goods. He’s heard too much talk to put a lot of faith in it till it’s done. That’s my impression at least. Holly gets so insecure with him, even though she doesn’t want to work for MPC anymore. She’d still like to work with them but to be her own person outside that “mission field” (which is a word they use so much he laughed).

The idea of existing outside all the guanxi is so attractive to her and to loads of young people she thinks. Myrrl was saying the simplicity of life is why so many Chinese people end up going to the States. They just don’t have to play all those games. Myrrl says he intentionally subverts a lot of that with the visiting scholars, so much so they’re surprised he knows how to toast and do all that Chinese stuff when they have their farewell banquet.

He has fun trying to figure out the relationships though. If you treat it like a game it’s interesting. Peter Yuan is supposedly a really smooth political operator, as Holly saw in Kunming’s PIC this year. That was surprising but not, as he is the president of the Sichuan CCC or something. And he has the support of MPC and that gives them their connections. And Fuller wants Xuefu to go back grovelling to the seminary before he can study in America. Oh politics!

Holly went to the seminary to hear Mark ? speak and to bring him to the Zhi Mian office. He’s part of this visiting delegation from Fuller Theological School’s psychology program, and was excited to hear that Holly’s thinking about their program. As he said it, they want someone who has some language and would be in China. Holly would fit in well on both counts. We talked about what it means to be part of an organization working in China and how MPC is built on the guanxi of the teachers towing the line so the higher ups have the ability to do cool stuff. Of course, the teachers get no access to the privileges, just bear responsibility. Being here completely independently would give people like Holly more freedom to make relationships with whoever she wanted than fitting into the MPC “here’s who we deal with” structure.

Especially about Zhi Mian and the seminary. Last year around this time is when all the shit went down that got Dr. Wang all disliked over there, and things are only slowly returning to normal. But Holly has to keep a low profile as a Zhi Mian employee so as to keep the peace, which is frustrating. She lives three doors down from it and yesterday was the first time she’d gone on the grounds. “If we’re trying to make connections why do I have to be invisible?” is the question.

Yesterday her plan was to be an English teacher at the seminary and work at Zhi Mian part time. That way it would be even and open. Who knows if that would actually work. But the bouncing between school and business, work and study is a big issue for Holly these days.

We ate with Wang Jing and Zhang Guo Xian again at the porridge place last night. But we also had Guo Tie, the big fried jiaozi. So good. The porridge guy is round and sort of friendly. I got all confused with the ordering which made Holly realize I don’t understand nearly as much as she thinks I do.

At the seminary in the evening Al Dueck from Fuller was doing a pastoral counselling session with a bunch of pastors. The topic was grieving and how a pastor counsels people through the process. He sounded like such an NPR voice with the languid pace and innumerable pauses. “Lake Wobegone” Holly said. His translator seemed to be a seminary student who was quick but after an hour and a half his attention was flagging and he had more trouble. Especially on the “wife withholding sexual relations” and the technical genetic talk about Dueck’s daughter’s baby who she brought to term so it could live for three hours instead of aborting it. “This is a life,” she said. “It’s sacred.”

He also talked about a counselling survey done last year about what the biggest issues were. I was so happy that when he asked for stories the pastors gave him nothing. They could have been in Chinese even, what with the translator, but they behaved like my students always did. Not a peep. He was good at waiting for them though. They talked about loss and grief and made a loss line for Jesus. I realized that that was the Christ I liked, the one who God had forsaken, who no one understood.

There were a couple of pastors who as the session went on got involved in their cell phones, one beeping really loudly. And Holly got pulled out to take calls from Sun Wen and Xiao Meng about something Sun Wen hadn’t been listening to her about earlier. I’m so glad I don’t have to work for those people. Holly goes on about Xuefu’s genius but since I don’t see that part, they just seem like a couple of jerks. Not very fair of me I know but them’s the breaks. After the thing at the seminary we watched Little Miss Sunshine down at Zhi Mian with Xiao Meng and a couple of counsellors. I do like that movie.

I love Buddhist nuns. Maybe it’s not the nunnishness, maybe it’s just their shaved heads and simple gray clothes that put everything to notice in their faces. I suppose if you watched with care there’d be body language, expressive gestures and the like but for me everything rests in those faces. The Ji Ming Si was filled with nuns. Most of them young. One with big eyebrows who reminded me of my cousin Corina was taking donations and giving out small pins or other trinkets. She was very deliberate, sucking her lower lip back in concentration before smiling.

There were a couple of nuns in the expensive Buddhist trinket shop. Both were young and they were examining prayer bead bracelets and the like. Working in the shop were dozens of young Chinese girls who did not seem to be nuns what with their red uniforms and long hair. Right next to each other each in service to inscrutable ends. I doubt many friendships are made across those professional lines.

It was a tall temple, loads of vertical and attached to the city wall. Many halls were built in the ’80s and ’90s. There were loads of security guards in the temple’s upper levels where the crowds were burning their incense everyone received upon entry. I never spend a lot of time inside Buddhist temples. Unless it’s raining. There are only so many Buddhas and bodhisattvas and arhats and dancing black bearded man statues one can take in without real knowledge of the details to make them interesting.

For me, in China at least) temples are all about the pilgrims and the monks/nuns/functionaries. Loads of red armbanded people inthis temple, keeping an eye on things? And all the sweeping was done by middle aged women in sweaters of maroon. Parishioners maybe? Dedicated volunteers? I would think keeping the temple clean would be the work of the nuns/monks who lived there. Sweeping meditation and such. There were nuns helping people fill out their prayer notes in the sun. My pictures of them didn’t really turn out which is too bad so sad.

Before Ji Ming Si I took the subway out to the Kong Zi temple. There I didn’t go in because it was so expensive and gaudied up (for the Olympics it seemed, oddly) with pink and yellow streamers and dragons and such. The whole area was a huge shopping pavilion filled with the touristy junk shops you find in Beijing and Shanghai. You could tell this was a major stop for tourbuses. Why they’d need to go shopping at a Metersbowne here instead of one the outlets on every major street in every town in China beats me.

There’s a canal with bridges over it and you could rent boats to drink tea in by the hour. On the dragon screen wall facing the temple from across the canal the two yellow dragons were bright plastic. I’m sure at night they’d light up very festively but it all seemed a cartoonish parody of an old city, even down to the rickshaw men in their yellow silk suits. I took pictures of them at work or at least waiting for work. One saw me and came over to drag me around the district “very cheap.” He wore a fedora-ish hat and spoke no English. He drew out the looping route we’d take on his palm and grabbed my wrist, but I shook him off.

Soon after, I left that part of the square and found a place to read in the Examination School garden (where the schools were demolished to make way for shops). Out in front there were bronze statues of what I assume were famous students who passed their exams there. The early ones wore the boxy little hats, then robes and hair in long queues. The last one wore glasses and a western suit. One guy was getting his girlfriend to take a picture of him between two of them. I wonder if he hoped some of the studiousness would rub off on him. In the shops around, there was tiny octopus on a stick. I didn’t feel like eating any but it was somehow comforting that tourist trap food is the same across China.