early April

I have been, since last November, actively pursuing a teaching job in South Korea. The position would likely begin in late August 2015, depending on whether or not I end up being hired. My hopes are entirely set on this job. It is ideal for several reasons: I move out of Orange County, I travel, I enter a job where my creativity and experience are both relevant and useful. People keep telling me to have a plan B, but I am unable to do that. I will deal with it when it comes, I guess. If it does. 

Today I am working with about six or seven recruiters actively, and out of these, I really really enjoy my interactions with four. I have high hopes that one of them will help me find a good job. Unfortunately working towards an E2 (full-time working) visa for South Korea is an extensive and frustrating process. Before I started working with these recruiters I looked for at least an hour before I was able to feel like I wasn’t 100% confused about what documents were needed and how to get them. 

Anyway, there is a lot of hassle and cost involved in preparing visa documents. Right now I am attempting to acquire two FBI background checks. Since I have been working on this for several months now, I know exactly what I need. Finding these things is more difficult. 

I went into a little tiny Sheriff Services office in San Juan Capo’s downtown and was directed to a different location to be fingerprinted. The woman there wrote down the address and phone number of the place I was meant to go. Today I finally had time to go over after doing some online courses in the morning and headed over. When I park my car and walk towards the building a man passing me in the parking lot says hello, so I smile, then he says how are you? And I pass him without saying anything. I am not here to chat, Mr. Stranger, I am just minding my own business. I can already tell this is going to be a horrible day.  

I get to the building and it’s a city-council building. I know I am not in the right place, but I head into the first manned office I see to ask where to go. The lady there points me in the direction of two places: first, the sheriff’s office across the street, where she tells me I need to have an appointment (so it is not an option--the lady in SJC told me I did not need an appt, but she also told me the wrong place to go, so...), and then there was a building across the parking lot where they took walk-ins. 

I head to the location across the parking lot and walk into Live Scan Services. It’s a stuffy, small suite. I sign in and sit down. I listen to the man working there as he interacts with prior clients; he is kind of curt and impatient, and I think, great. I just know this is a bad idea. But I wait it out, call me dumb. He comes out and asks me who sent me here. I am thrown off by this question. That isn’t any of your business, how about you ask me what I need? I end up saying I am here because I need fingerprints done for a background check, and he asks why, and I say for a visa, and then he asks for what kind, and I tell him for a working visa for South Korea and he says so you need an FBI background check... and I just say yeah. Then he goes to get a plaque off the wall to show me what an FBI background check looks like. I want to say, look, Mr., you’re talking to me like I’m dumb and don’t know anything, but I think I actually know more than you. What I do say out loud is that I have been working on this for a couple months, so I am familiar with the process. Then he goes on to say that for South Korea I will need an apostille and shows me what an apostille is and explains that it’s costly etc etc, as if I don’t and couldn’t know already. Both are wrong. I know exactly what these things are and how to get them and how much it will cost me. Does he think I just woke up this morning and decided to teach abroad? 

It gets to the point where I confuse him so badly by making logical, concise statements about what I need, that he makes me come into his office while he works on his next client’s paperwork to tell him again that I need two FBI background checks, to send to different places, but that I am not here for those, just for fingerprints. Then he wants to know about the places I want to send the background checks. I tell him at first, and then I give up when he starts to tell me things that don’t matter to me and do not pertain to my situation. I say, look, I just need fingerprints. It doesn’t matter on your end where the background checks go after I get them. I will deal with that. And he finally says, well you’re just not speaking my language so I don’t know what you want. But I guess I can just give you inked prints. (WHICH IS WHAT I CAME IN SAYING I NEEDED!!!!!!)

He speaks to me disrespectfully, assuming I know nothing, and assuming that I am dumb because I do not understand what he’s saying. I feel like I made it clear that I didn’t care what he was saying because it wasn’t relevant to me, not because I was like, wait, what are you saying, you’re making too much sense. I understand him perfectly, except when he goes into vague broad statements like well every school has their own background form, so I don’t know who your employer is, and I’m confused about what to give you. 

He handed me two forms for inked sets after deciding I was an imbecile incapable of listening to reason. I went to sit down and fill them out, but then I thought, I don’t need to do this here. On top of everything else, his fingerprint cards were more expensive than I had been told to expect. So after a moment I stood up and threw out the form I’d filled out partially and left. I felt like standing in the doorway and shouting by the way! I am at least twice as smart as you!!!! But that’s not really like me, and he would have just been confused anyway. 

((Moral of the story: do not, ever, go to Live Scan Services in Aliso Viejo, CA, if you are a young woman without anyone else with you. I have a distinct feeling that if my dad had been with me, the man there would not have treated me like he did. I often have this experience. I have a young face and I am a woman, so people automatically talk to me in a certain tone and lack a certain respect for my ability to comprehend more of a situation than they are probably able to. But whenever I bring my dad with me, they don’t even try it with him. This is extremely frustrating. Women with slightly more aggressive attitudes are also taken a lot more seriously, but even then, I’ve experienced with my younger sister (who is definitely kind of intimidating when she needs to be) that men, especially, and even male peers, do not take her/me seriously. They always assume that we know less than we do and that what we want is unreasonable somehow. Yet my dad makes the same exact request in the same language and they don’t question him at all. Part of this is because he is notably older. Part of it is that he is a man, more expected to know about this stuff. Anyway. NIGHTMARE.))

Anyway, today. After leaving Live Scan Services, I drove across the street to the sheriff’s department to ask to make an appointment for a later date, or to see if it were a possibility they didn’t actually require appointments and the lady at city council was just wrong. Of course, I step in there and within two minutes the front-desk people are joking with me and smiling, friendly, and telling me I don’t need an appointment. They were even willing to make prints for me that day even though it was already 4.30 and they usually stop doing prints at 4. Unfortunately since I didn’t have exact change on me (or any cash / check) I wasn’t able to do it today. But I know that I’ll walk in there tomorrow and out within an hour or less and have everything I need, hassle-free. 

There are so many things wrong with what happened here that I can’t even tell if any of it was my fault. The information online about getting fingerprinted is a bit outdated. The information that the lady in San Juan gave me was just flat out incorrect. (I mean, not all of it. The prices and the fact that they take walk-ins was helpful even though it was contested later. And the correct address was across the street. But still. Come on.) The Live Scan Services was a nightmare. The sheriff people were so helpful and nice I almost cried all over them. I may still do this tomorrow. 

It's also extremely difficult to find information online about the process of getting your Criminal Background Check through a channeler and then apostilled after that. But it isn’t that I didn’t do my research. I did. I am pretty comfortable with research and I always do my best to find out everything I can before asking someone for help. But I still only feel like I know what to do because I am working with very helpful recruiters. I decided a while ago that after this process is over for me and done with and problems are kneaded out and I have a helpful point of view, I’ll just write an article about my experience and find a way to put it online. It’s really ridiculous how hard it is to find info online. The process is complicated, yeah, but when things are explained orderly and correctly, it doesn’t seem so intimidating anymore. 

There have been times like today throughout this whole process that make me just want to give up because everything seems stacked against me and I am doing this alone, I don't know anyone who has done this before and even when I know I am headed in the right direction I still run into so many difficulties. Why is it so difficult? Even if the rest of my life were happy and calm, this would still be disturbing, but beyond this, nothing in my life is easy right now, everything is turbulent and frightening. 

I’m trying so hard to enjoy this time before I leave, but I’m not having much help with that. People make decisions about me and then treat me a certain way based on these ideas--but they’re wrong so much of the time, not having taken the time to try to understand me or what I need or want. I am used to this--I’m quiet, so people think I’m unfriendly or I dislike them. I’m not social, so people think I’m unfriendly. I’m young, so I must not know anything... I am used to this, but I am getting tired. How much can I take? I feel bad about being glad to leave. But given certain things...how could I not be? 

Despite everything, I am still determined to make this happen. I feel so much that I could be useful and fun as an English teacher, that I have something to offer as an English teacher--and beyond this, that Korea has a lot to offer me, as well. I’m waiting right now for my life to start. 

Transitions aren’t ever easy, are they? I think about this a lot. I visited UCI recently and watched students in the student center enviously, fondly, in other ways that I couldn’t name. I think about it. Transitions.... I think and I come to this--it makes sense. It simply is. Even our bodies are full of strange contraptions at the joins, a lot of tendons and bundles and sockets and irregular shapes. 

the great wall

It’s now October. I recently revisited Beijing for a piece of fiction. I was trying to write my second-ever (poetry) piece for spoken word, but I keep getting caught up in the loping energy of long sentences, the way they move in compact bursts, and fold up like a loaded spring. I like sentences. I’ve come to know this about myself recently—during the last year of college I figured out that I was actually hopelessly confused about line breaks in poetry despite having taken so many courses in poetry and that instead I was confident in and curious about syntax, so it’s just happened that I return to the sentence when I really, really want to say something, or when something’s asking me to say it. So the subject matter of my spoken word piece will turn out to be something other than China, I believe. 

I’m listening to Clair de Lune. I think I’d like to go back to the Temple of Heaven and just sit there, listening this way. While I was there I was reminded of the view from the Sacre Coure in Paris. You can just see…everything, but nothing in detail. And that kind of dual vision puts an auditory damper on everything, so it seems like it’s just you and that endlessness that was waiting for you there.

It’s difficult for me to write about my experience in China in direct words like I did for the first two Beijing posts you can see here. Instead, when I go to write about China I find myself immersed in the world I’ve created, safely apart, a distance precisely controlled and occasionally, purposefully, violated, of my characters. Last March, additional to the work I did for the short stories that I included in my senior thesis, I spent two days (nights, more truthfully) writing a three-chapter short story that I have, this summer, reworked and to which I find that I continually return when something about my experiences over the summer occurs to me. The story’s always had the same rough outline, which has always, even in March before I’d set foot in Asia at all, included description of Beijing. Now I just have the experiential memory to pad out (or, more often, completely change) the scenes I’d already written.

For example, the Great Wall of China. Thinking about this without having ever seen it, I thought it’d be maybe even fun to climb it. And I thought that, maybe, the word “climb” was just a word you had to use in conjunction with “the Great Wall” because it was a phrase, not because the actual activity involved … climbing. So when I wrote of it, I wrote of it wrongly. I forgot the most important things about the Great Wall in the summer—first, it’s over 100 degrees. Your skin is probably melting off your bones. People’s umbrellas are getting ing your face. Second, parts of it are nearly vertical tilt and required the use of arms as well as legs to ascend. You look like a monkey rambling up certain giant steps. Third—it is really, really, really high up. It’s in the mountains. As someone who is afraid of heights, I quickly found myself getting queasy looking down from the low heights to which I was actually able to climb. The hand rail was really low, too, so using it was more difficult than the weird crab walk you had to do to get down the stairs without using it. 

I didn’t write about any of that last March, during those midnights in which I imagined something flatter and less full of domestic tourists and walking upon which didn’t induce the types of exhaustion that it in fact turned out to. In my story there was too much chatter there, too much bodiless gazing out. I forgot the body. In fact the real experience was only and all about the body. The body’s interaction with culture, history, itself. For me personally it may have been metaphorical for the mental struggle I constantly re-encounter when I ask myself to justify my interest in a culture or set of cultures that doesn’t belong to me at all and the struggles to encounter the culture beyond its commodities, or the obvious. Still, though mentally I am pretty qualified to tackle these struggles, physically I am too afraid of heights and too weak and short-legged to have climbed high enough to reach one of those little stalls on the wall where you can purchase a plaque that says that you are a “real man,” now that you have climbed the Great Wall. Declaring that until you’ve climbed the great wall you are in fact, incapable of becoming a real man. It’s a comfort to me that I’m not, and have not been, concerned with becoming, or proving to anyone that I have officially become, a real man….

When we were first entering the landmark, there were a few nice areas to walk around and look out at the mountains before heading into the actual wall through the gates. While we were there I was approached by a boy with his parents. He didn’t speak any English but I understood that he wanted to take a picture with me. His dad made eye-contact with me that I will probably not ever forget and I don’t know exactly what he was thinking, but his son chattered something to him that made him take off in the direction of the gate without a glance back at us. My roommate for the trip managed to catch a picture of the picture-taking from a little ways off. After that the boy said more things to me in Chinese and I just nodded. He could have said anything. And then he asked to take one with my roommate, too. 

Several others asked me for photos while I was on the wall. Some didn’t even ask. Some wrapped their arms around my shoulders, some stood primly next to me. One young woman came out of nowhere and asked if I’d pose for a photo with her mother. The fascination of certain Chinese with foreigners is something about which I am still largely undecided. Of course fundamentally I will never understand the motivations: I grew up in a country of considerable diversity, while China, on the other hand, despite being comprised of fifty-something native races, is 95% Han…. So while I wasn’t thrilled at the attention, and while this experience has made me more wary of relocating to China for any considerable amount of time like one day, a while ago, I thought I might have liked to do, I can be amused about it, thinking back. 

Opposed to this were the people who tried to carry on conversations with me in Chinese on the wall—when I was walking back down, alone, there was an old grandpa in a straw hat, to whom I’d motioned to use the handrail and had grabbed the sleeve of his jacket to move him over to the edge of the wall after he’d stood for a few seconds longer than necessary staring down at the next step…there were a couple groups of small children, one woman selling kites down outside of the gates, and the already-mentioned selfie-boy. Other than not knowing what to do while this was happening—just smiling and nodding if I thought I should—I found these encounters bizarre and kind of sad. 

More than the Great Wall, I keep thinking and revisiting taxi rides, subway rides, walking miles and miles, a little lost, while sick, through the inner city and night markets. The peculiar and piquant scent of Beijing summers. The white dust in the inner city that falls from the sky like snow. And most of all I keep thinking about the Temple of Heaven, the gaze out from that place. Maybe because it was the first place we went, while everything was still new, magical, and yet while I was still waiting for this to feel like I was on the other side of the earth.

motherboard (daft punk) / interlude (laura marling)

beijing day one

I looked back through my journals about London, the first couple days I landed there, to see if I might have experienced the same kind of waiting sensation there that I experienced for the first couple days in Beijing. I don’t have a record of it anywhere. I remember London—smelled like hot metal and tarmac the first day I was there, and when I surfaced from the underground bits of dust and lint got caught on my greasy face and in my eyelashes and people looked at me like I was a sewer monster as I hauled my luggage first half a mile in the complete wrong direction, and then back after consulting my map for another mile. It felt real. It felt like a whole new world.

Maybe because we hear so much about how the East is different, I expected to feel like I was in outer space or something. So for a while, when there was more greenery around than I had expected, and when the sun was whiter than I’d expected, when the air was cleaner than I’d expected—I kept waiting to feel like I was in China. I was still isolated at this point, like a little Western virus caught up in quarantine, on the tour bus. I couldn’t wait to step out.

The first stop was a restaurant where we climbed up to the second floor and, next to a window display full of dried-out Peking Ducks, ate dim sum. I have no idea what is in that loaf thing but I ate some and then someone at the same table decided that there was fish in it. I thought, great, we’ve only been off the plane for an hour. (I would later eat fried fish/eel thinking that it was fried mushroom…but we didn’t get a lot of help distinguishing what was what. Also, for those of you reading who didn’t know, I’ve been a vegetarian for a while now, since about half-way through high school.) 

dim sum for breakfast: morning 1 :')

After breakfast we took the bus back to the hotel. It wasn’t too hot yet; I’d already fooled myself into thinking that the weather wouldn’t be as bad as they’d warned me, and this delusion persisted for the first few days. 

mysterious mushroom buildings

I don’t know what these little mushroom-looking buildings are, but you can see them from really far away if the air is clear. Beijing is full of high-rise apartments—not as many as Shanghai—but enough so that early views of Beijing reminded me of the first views of London from the surface-level areas of the underground. For some reason I cannot feel as romantically about Beijing as I felt about London.  

Below is the view from our hotel window. We stayed at the Taishan Hotel for the duration of our Beijing stay; my roommate “A” and I were on the fifth floor. Because she attended an optional event that I did not attend on the first morning, I checked in to the room alone and was left to explore all its strange plugs and devices on my own. Unsurprisingly it took me five whole minutes of pressing the light switches to realize that there’s a slot near the door where you have to insert your room key for the power to even come on. After I figured this out I turned the air down as low as it would go which was still too hot, around 28C—I think A came back later and figured out how to get it to go lower than that. 

Our bathroom was really nice, but one whole wall was made of window. I could see there was a blind but I couldn’t reach it. At this point there were two hours left until we left the hotel for lunch and I’d just been on a long international flight and I wanted to shower, so I just undressed and showered with the window open. We were on the fifth floor. Hello, Beijing…

view from hotel window

Later, after lunch (Peking Duck, which I heard was good), we went to the Temple of Heaven. Thinking back about it, this is still one of my favorite stops that we made in Beijing. Flocks of tourists, of course, but there’s also a lower level where a bunch of locals gather to play chess and blast music out of boom-boxes (yes!). Some people’s game stations appeared to be permanent—some chairs were chained to the ground… I liked walking at ground level. I didn’t like being part of a tour. I’ve had the feeling before about other things but I feel kind of …fake? For being interested in these cultures to which I have no real claim other than my own interest…walking around with a tour wearing bright yellow tags did nothing to assuage these feelings. I took mine off after a while and held it in my hand. 

The Temple of Heaven was built in the 15th century, and was the site of heaven worship, the place where Ming and Qing emperors would come to pray for good harvests. There’s the temple, but then there’s also a park around it. I’ve experienced the feeling before in Europe, but more here: how strange that it’s places like these and the things that happened here a long time ago that shaped the culture of the domestic tourists who were coming to visit them… Americans don’t know what it’s like to live in a country where there’s a cultural rule of any kind—our culture is freedom of speech and back-porch barbecues, cheap fast-food and football season’s extravagant chex-mix-filled parties….Southern California is about healthy living, clean seafood, being in the water as much as you can, being bronzed and happy…. But those are all things of right now, we don’t have anything to look back on. And I think it’s why we can feel a little lost sometimes, just as a generation, especially us millennials, for whom the internet has so compressed space and time that we might as well have not been born into anything at all… 

The first person who asked to take a picture with me asked while we were at the Temple of Heaven. I thought I heard him wrong. But I wasn’t wrong. This continued to punctuate my experiences in China…something I’ve been struggling to think of fondly rather than as too strange to enjoy in memory. Just another bit of culture shock…more on this later. 

The sun set on us in Beijing after a long, long day. I kept thinking about “Concerning the Wild Goose Pagoda” by Han Dong on the bus ride back to the hotel. When we reached the hotel A, my roommate, figured out how to use all the things that I had failed to, including how to lower the blind on the bathroom wall…

I discovered the poetry of Han Dong this last Spring, just picked up a book at random in the library and it wouldn’t leave me alone, haunted me… I’m still in the process of writing up a paper about Han Dong’s poems. I sent my dad a few of his poems after we watched a documentary called “Wild China” a few months ago; Han Dong is a contemporary poet, and I started to think a lot about contemporary vs. ancient China. I wrote this:

• This came to mind while we were watching the "Wild China" series last night...I think that a lot of Western understanding of Eastern Asian culture(s) is rooted in an understanding of the "Ancient" Chinese or ancient Korean or ancient Japanese. It's true that a lot of this ancient culture has, because of the culture's age as a whole, managed to dominate even parts of modernized culture, but I like reading these "contemporary" poems as a comment on contemporary Chinese life. I think in a culture as old as the Chinese culture, a perspective on contemporary life probably isn't possible or meaningful without a comparison to the culture's history. I hadn't thought about what you said about the peaceful tone I perceived in the poems before you put it the way you did; that culture and life have just existed in certain ways that have persisted for thousands of years; and now that I'm reading again through them, I'm reading the poems less as a comparison of old and emergent, but as the ways in which an ancient culture reforms itself to fit the current era...it reappears in forms that are familiar and strange, but it's all part of the same, ancient cycle. "Concerning the Wild Goose Pagoda" draws the most noticeable parallels between the past and present; even in a place of so much history, how much can we really know about it just by being alive there today? It's something I experienced in England, when I was amazed by the buildings and how old the streets were, and people just went around living because life changes even if landscape doesn't. SO the poem reframes bravery as the ability to enact vision or to respond to desire and not to disappear into life as though you hadn't climbed to the top of the ancient building at all.

Despite the obvious dark tones (which went over my head the first time I read this poem), I love this piece. It may just be Han Dong’s writing in particular, but reading Chinese poetry often leaves me feeling peaceful, but awakened. It haunts you for a while afterward, too; from the first time I read “Full Moon” by Du Fu last year I haven’t been able to think of the moon without thinking of it (not yet flawed, it drifts...). I can’t go to China, therefore, without thinking of Han Dong… This piece caused quite a stir when it was first published in 1982. 

From Eight Contemporary Chinese Poets by Tao and Prince from Wild Peony Press in 2006:

“Concerning the Wild Goose Pagoda” (Han Dong) 

Concerning the Wild Goose Pagoda

How much can we really know

Many people rush here from far away

To climb to the top

And be a hero for once

Or in some cases twice

Or even more

The frustrated and the disconsolate

The plump and the prosperous

All climb to the top

Play the hero

And then come down

Walk into the street

And immediately vanish

Some work up the courage to jump

And leave a red flower on the steps

That's the way to be a real hero

A hero for the modern age

Of the Wild Goose Pagoda

How much can we really know

We climb to the top

Gaze around at the scenery

And then come down again

writing music: “Icarus Walks” by Epik High

Daedalus made a pair of wax wings for his son, Icarus. After that we remember what happens: Icarus uses his wings to escape captivity and then realizes that he’s curious for the world; over the ocean he flies too close to the sun. When he turns around to see that his wings are melting and realizes what’s happening, he begins to fall; he drowns in the ocean below. 

Pieces, part one is an album that I have really come to love recently. At the end of the school year when I was starting to really wonder about what to do and who I am, I could really only see my love for writing as the thing that grounded me to the world and that would allow me to relate to and interact with others. My world kept getting darker. I feel like I’m still sitting in blackness. Pieces, part one also includes “연필깎이” and “낙화” which are about living through the blindness (연필깎이) and maintaining your dreams despite them being impossible (낙화). The album rewards belief and hard work, but also curiosity and positive attitude. It doesn’t do it in a way I’ve seen before—not a YA anything is possible if you believe kind of message. It’s about being in a time when you feel far away from yourself and imagining what you must look like, wherever you are, and continuing to walk even in the darkness, when there’s no way to tell where your foot will fall.

“Icarus Walks” retells the myth we all know. The greeks were obsessed with hubris, the ways it could kill a person. If you angered the gods you were dead. But Pieces, part one is a different framework. We’re not in ancient Greece anymore; this is a world of cities and shadows and facade and noise that muffles the heart’s own language, where the choice between what mask to wear can consume the face that would support it (re: “nocturne” and many others from Remapping the Human Soul, the last album prior to p.p1). In this kind of landscape, the gods may have forgotten us, or found a better world. It’s now humans with the capacity to inspire and help each other through ugliness and periods of fugue. In Pieces, part one, when Icarus falls to the water, something else happens at the surface, and when we realize it, something else can happen inside us, too. 

beijing airport

Beijing Capital International Airport is bigger and hotter than I would have expected. The ceilings are arched and white, planks of wood criss-crossing over something orange behind them. When we landed at five-something AM the first morning, it was also nearly empty. Beijing Capital is the most highly-trafficked international airport in Asia. ...Maybe because of this, someday, they will decide to invest in air conditioning. 

It took five minutes, maybe a little longer, maybe closer to ten minutes, to walk from the plane to immigration. While I was there the officer helping me talked with the officer at the other booth about something that amused them both. I’d just spent twelve horrible hours not sleeping at all but being the couch cushion for the little boy in the seat next to me; whatever they said didn’t amuse me. I don’t like flying. 

I do like airports. After you pass through immigration you walk through this wide part with a bunch of banners in different languages welcoming you to Beijing, then go down escalators to wait for a train that will take you to customs and baggage claim. I can’t remember exactly what it’s like when you get off the train. I think I may have walked straight to baggage claim and then strait out into whatever the part of the airport is called where people can wait to pick you up. 

I have a few impressions of what happened next: it was too hot in the airport, I needed to shower, and I got accosted by a taxi driver immediately after claiming my baggage. Several others asked me if I needed a ride while I walked the gamut. We’d been told someone from the travel agency would be waiting for us when we go there. There was nobody there. I went and stood with a couple people I recognized as part of the same group. Around us a man got into a loud verbal argument with someone a little passive until a girl maybe my age went up and pushed him around until he quieted down. Couldn’t tell if they were siblings or just star-connected strangers. 

Other than the fact that all signs were in Chinese and that announcements were made in Chinese first and in English second, I kept waiting for it to feel real. I think because when I was in Europe, the weather was so immediately different from what I’ve ever experienced, it really did feel like the other side of the world. It was just hot in Beijing, heat that I’ve felt and hated, too, at home. 

I watched people gather each other, walk aimlessly through the airport’s lower levels. Everything shines in airports. It’s all cleaner than you think it would be. Whiter, too. Feels a little like you’re all passing through some giant animal’s body, just for a time, until you exit into the world full of weather and dirt. 

The view from outside the airport is different. There was this small, shiny, pancake-shaped building across from our bus. It turned out to be a small introduction to a city full of strangely-shaped or strangely-decorated buildings. My first thoughts of Beijing were that I was waiting for it to feel real, but it’s a vigorous city, robustly itself, populated in part by one of the most technologically advanced generations in the world and in part by older men and women with traditional haircuts and who still wear those little black fabric shoes. People ride bikes and electric scooters right into traffic. People walk right into traffic. There’s more greenery—shrubs, trees, parks—than I had imagined. The city is larger than I ever thought. Its people are friendly and interested. Chatty. I wonder how long Beijing will sustain the traditions of its long history; how long it should; how people like me affect what happens there; will we continue to be a pest to the kite-sellers from whom we will not buy…

late July

Some changes: I’ve reverted several posts to drafts while I clean them up. In the meantime, I plan to continue to review music and books (I recently began reading A History of the World in 10 and 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes and recently finished reading Black Aperture by Matt Rasmussen and 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami; recently dug up old writing on Laura Marling’s Once I Was an Eagle and Epik High’s “Icarus Walks” —), and to write a little bit about my recent trip to Beijing and a few cities in Southern China. 

I keep applying for jobs. We’ll see what happens. I recently told some friends that if money was no issue, if getting the jobs I wanted was no issue, the life I envision for myself: I’d like to go to art/fashion school, study textile design or menswear design, work my way into the product acquisition/styling industry; at some point during this time I’d travel to Eastern Asia again to teach English for a year or two. I’d attend foreign language school in Seoul like I wanted. Write that paper on the link between portrayal of women in modern/contemporary South Korean literature and the disappearance of the homeless women during the IMF crisis. Then I’d like to go back to school for an MFA in Creative Writing and enter the literary professional world. 

I spent a long time thinking that writing was the only interest I had, and time with nothing to do has given me the understanding that I’d like to do other things, too. I’m realizing more and more that a single “calling” is another myth that we ingest and promulgate to keep our ideas of our own selves from going out. At a certain point myths don’t convince us anymore. 

From Robert Frost’s “On Looking Up By Chance at the Constellations” —

The sun and moon get crossed, but they never touch,
Nor strike our fire from each other nor crash out loud.
The planets seem to interfere in their curves
But nothing ever happens, no harm is done.
We may as well go patiently on with our life,
And look elsewhere than to stars and moon and sun
For the shocks and changes we need to keep us sane.