My Time as a Human

At this point, I don’t know what’s causing the problem. I feel like I’m constantly dizzy, not spinning, but like I’m about to fall asleep. I think very slowly. It’s worst in the morning for some reason. Classically, I seem to gain a little speed if someone gets me into a conversation. Very Kai. I do, however, have to pause for my brain to catch up even during those. It’s like my mouth is the powerboat in the distance and I’m behind on water skies, sometimes watching the boat continue as the line goes slack and then having it snap into tension again, yanking me back into motion.

About two weeks ago I went to Hong Kong to visit Steve March and Donna Chang. We had a fantastic time just being together, Hong Kong being the giant shopping mall that it is. We did find a really nice spot to sit in a little garden one night during one of our philosophical rants and had Chinese squirrels throw little nuts at us. More on that later, along with stories about monks bending steel rods with their necks and a beautiful young dancer who showed me the heart of the city.

kissing Michelle Yeoh

I took an overnight bus back to Fuzhou. The bus terminal was thick with exhaust, but faced the outdoors. I eventually stood out on the street to avoid it, but this is what gave me the idea to look into carbon monoxide poisoning later. I rode 12 hours, sleeping a little roughly, bouncing along in my tiny bunk-cot. These cots are sized just below the length and width of a small Chinese person and so it takes a bit of folding and twisting to tuck in an American. I actually love these busses because they’re, well, hilarious. And dirt cheap. I was riding with business people and young travelers alike, all in their socks and checking their cell phones one last time before before pulling up the tiny blankets.

I woke up as we rattled into the bus station in Fuzhou. I was groggy, but I’m always groggy when I wake up. I also had a bit of a headache, but I decided it was because of the lack of good sleep and went to class. The headache became… intense. It filled my whole head, mostly across the top, and made it very difficult to think. Understanding Chinese was even worse than usual. I went back to my room and slept. The headache lasted for two days. Everything felt fuzzy. Pains started in my lower right front of my body and in my lower back, and seemed to migrate around as though moving with my blood. I never threw up or fell over. Eventually the headache and pains dissipated and vanished.

From then until now I am constantly dizzy. It’s hard to concentrate. The severity comes and goes, but it’s always there. At certain times, over the last few days, I can’t even fill out online forms. I mean, online forms for cripes sake. I’ve been creating those things for eons! In the end, when I finally admitted that things were serious, Gabriela Jovanny was kind enough to help me figure out how to select a credit card from a drop down list so that I could buy a flight to Taipei.

The realization that it was time to get serious came over several trips to Chinese hospitals, thanks to help from Angela Zhang Meng and Sisca Limento. When we finally found our way around an insane maze, including going around back to find stairs to get up to the emergency area, we pushed through the clouds of cigarette smoke past the broken open-hole toilets to a doctor who then sent me from one test to the next. A competent doctor scanned my brain. Far less competent 12 year old nurses checked my heart by attaching giant clips to my toes and fingers, rubber clips covered with what looked like hello-kitty stickers. I watched as three such nurses tried to put a gurney in place. The gurney was a little rusty and one of the legs was broken, although they couldn’t seem to figure this out as they fussed and argued about how to put it into place. They couldn’t get the wheels lined up, nor figure out how wheels worked, and so I stood there in a fuzzy daze, giggling my fool head off at the circus. Someone threw them a cover and they spent several minutes trying to put the tiny elastic bedsheet over the little mattress. Yeah, sure, even I have trouble late at night, exhausted, trying to put a new topsheet onto my bed. Some corner always ends up folded over in the wrong direction… But it was noon.

Honestly, the doctor herself didn’t seem terrible, just overworked and distracted. She mostly kept sending me from place to place and refusing to listen to my demands for blood checks or oxygen.

In my second trip I eventually had one of the 12 year olds try to give me an IV. She told me to clench my fist. That part wasn’t hard, thanks to my psychotic paranoia about needles. Punch me in the face. Beat me with metal rods. No problem. But a tiny needle or a sliver?! She stabbed my hand repeatedly trying to find a vein. Anyone who’s seen my veins knows this is ridiculous. My veins are as big as my muscles. She then blamed me for me for not being relaxed enough. She finally got it working by the second hand; a good thing because I only have two. We got the blood flowing out and then the glucose flowing in. It was then that I discovered that the process was going to take four hours. Four hours?! I had already wasted enough of Angela’s time. I’d also been stabbed in the butt with a needle full of Antihistamine an hour earlier and it was hard to sit. It was time to make a break for it.

We pretended to be heading to the bathrooms and then ducked down the stairs and out to a waiting cab. I jumped into the back seat still holding the IV bag above my head as Angela carried my backpack. If the bag ever got to the level of my hand, blood started flowing back up into the tube. A bad idea.

Angela ran back to her place and I was left to my own ingenuity to get into my own room. I figured out how to hang the bag from the fire extinguisher box using my teeth. I then used a low, wide martial arts stance (that didn’t use my injured knees) to stay just below the glucose bag while using my one free hand (the one without the protruding needle) to pull out the key. With my teeth on the bag again I was able to use the key and get in. I got the IV bag attached to a coat hanger and hung it from my clothesline. Angela eventually came back and used a bathroom suction cup hook and my duct tape to attach the bottle to the wall so that she could keep an eye on me until the drip was over. I was worried about falling asleep with the damned needle in my hand. I hate needles. We watched “Mad Men”.

“Mad Men” is a fascinating thing to share with a Chinese girl and I paused it often to explain, “you see, that’s funny because…” Lots of interesting history there, all of the jokes based on the understanding that we Americans, for the most part, just don’t think like that any more. We don’t treat women that way. We know about the dangers of chemicals and cigarettes. It was a great moment of perspective to see how much of these things are still getting worked out today in China.

So yes, it’s terrifying thinking that I may be losing my mind. The long term effects of CO poisoning, if that’s what this is, are varied. Sometimes things clear up. Sometimes they don’t. I have moments where I still seem to be able to write, like this, although I have to pause here and there to get my bearings. That gives me hope that I’ll be able to write some more before my turn is over, even if I’m stuck like this. Sharing perspective with people… it’s always been the most rewarding for me. Making people smile, laugh, or look at themselves or the world with fresh eyes. I hope I can go on manufacturing rose-colored glasses for the masses, even if this passes.

photos link to photographer’s sites

There are a lot of things you can’t get in Fuzhou, China but what’s much more interesting are the things that don’t even exist as concepts. I remember reading a great science fiction story about a portal between two universes where the civilizations on each side realized that they couldn’t exchange physical items but they could exchange ideas. Like the idea of paint. When you think about it, it’s pretty ingenious. Without the idea of a coating that you can spread over a surface to protect it and make it fuchsia, there would be no quest to figure out how to make it.

Here in China, I was desperate to find a way to learn the new vocabulary being taught in our classes. I couldn’t seem to use a simple list, and I remember how powerful flashcards were for learning. Of course, to make flashcards you have to have to scribble on little blank cards. The concept of the notecard… doesn’t exist in China. Trust me, I’ve looked and asked everywhere. Of course, when I think about it, why would they? Notecards are something that was very useful in America when people had piles of addresses or recipes. While Americans filed piles of neat little paper cards the Chinese people were all still farming. By the time everyone here in China was building offices, they had computers to keep track of their addresses. The only reason notecards still exist in America is because people found thousands of completely different uses for them. Like making flashcards. Eventually I found an art shop with thick water color paper and a rusty paper cutter in a back room of my school. The other students marveled at my bizarre way of learning and, as they laughed, they picked them up and used them.

There are a lot of other things that don’t exist as concepts. My friend Fay Lee could not be convinced that the thing I described, something called, “paper towels” could possibly have any use. Toilet paper was clearly just as good. “Look, I know it seems strange and wasteful and, well, just plain doesn’t make sense but… they’re thicker. And sometimes when you clean certain things you don’t want to use the same towel again.” She wasn’t buying it.

There is one concept, though, that brings foreigners to hysterics almost as fast as the Daoist driving. When I arrived this semester, just in time to start classes, I heard through word of mouth that classes were starting a week later. There was no reason given, and I would have sat in a room by myself if I hadn’t bumped into another student to hear about it. I heard a rumor that it was because some admin through that not enough students had arrived in town yet. My friend Martina Zucker scheduled travel after having a school administrator, after a lot of pushing, give her a date for final exams. When the time came, the exams were randomly pushed back and Martina had to either miss them or tell her parents to stay home in Germany and cancel all of her plane tickets.

Then, suddenly, after many complaints and a huge increase in foreign student enrollment, something completely unprecedented happened. An otherwise normal day of classes ended with the teacher suddenly passing out neatly printed calendars, with nice photos, on cardstock. We couldn’t believe it. We… didn’t believe it. There were dates marked for vacation time and the start of classes. (Nothing about exams.) After some wonder and cautious delight I quickly asked, “wait, so are these really the dates these things will happen?” “Well,” my teacher replied, “of course they are likely to change. They are already talking about pushing back the start of classes next semester.” So in response to our desire for a schedule, they gave us, well, something resembling a notecard.

There’s something that so many Chinese people tell me about myself that makes me very sad. I know that a lot of different flavors of people from many different countries travel the world and they all have their own motivations. They also have their own hangups, preconceived notions and cultural expectations of how things are supposed to work in the world. I’ve worked really hard to stay completely open to whatever situation and culture I arrive in, observing and interacting with, as often as possible, more curiosity than judgement. I feel like this is the best way to extract the beauty in differences between the way that cultures have evolved. Ultimately, this allows a greater understanding of what got them where they are and, ultimately, how I came to be who I am.

Yes, it seems crazy that African people are cooking inside their huts with no ventilation. They’re “doing it wrong”. But it turns out that if you move the cooking outside, the smoke from the stove doesn’t rise up through the roof. If the smoke doesn’t rise up through the roof it doesn’t keep away the termites and, in literally a matter of days, they’ll go into a feeding frenzy and you’ll have no roof on your house. Every part of a long established culture is woven into a network, an integrated ecology of systems, methods and beliefs that impact each other in uncountable and unpredictable ways. Certainly more ways than can be quickly discovered by an outsider who immediately attacks each separate piece of a place that is unlike their own.

There was an Australian who wrote a long post on an expat board recently about how angry he was that, in China, peasants were allowed on trains, especially standing in the first class area. He had several people agree with him. His idea of how an experience of riding on a train should be was in conflict with the reality of another world he had chosen to enter.

He was also unable to take a moment to revel in the countless fascinating implications of this. Those peasants are now able to move quickly from place to place, filling roles essential in the rapidly growing cities of China. The growth of industry couldn’t happen without them. By “them”, of course, I’m talking about people who are exactly like every other person in China only a few years ago. Everyone was a peasant and only recently have the Ferraris appeared. The difference between the two was not desire and hard work but location and opportunity. He might as well complain that there are Chinese people in China, and too many mountains.

With every conflict between your expectations and the reality of another place or culture there is also this fantastic moment to see yourself for the first time. There is a moment to wonder why it bothers you that people walk shirtless down the street when it’s hot. If you think about it, it’s quite practical. There is no health or safety concern. But if it’s tugging at some part of you that you didn’t realize was there, now you can go talk to it and ask for its justifications. You may not decide to change your belief or action, but for the first time you can transform what was formerly an unconscious decision implanted by culture into a choice you yourself have made.

I used to live in a large old house with seven unrelated housemates. In America, this is not very common. When people would step into the house they all had the same first response. “Wow this place is amazing!” Next came, “how many people live here?” Then their brains kicked into gear. A new choice was suddenly visible that had not been before. They had to think about how they lived and why they lived that way. After a moment of thought they would end with either, “I could never live like this” or, “are there any rooms available?!”

So when I talk to Chinese people and again and again they tell me how absolutely different I am from every other western foreigner they meet (and some of these people meet quite a few), I would like to believe that they are referring to my amazing ability with chopsticks. Unfortunately, it seems like my desire to understand, instead of blame people from other countries for doing it wrong, is much more rare than I could have ever imagined. I can only hope that this myriad of travelers looking out from their carefully sealed cultural boxes, with the fingers they use to point, complain and laugh, accidentally punch a few holes in those boxes.

Image links to photographer’s site

I have achieved the first major step in language acquisition: a spontaneous pun.

There was no planning, no thought, just the arrival of the moment in its pure form. The ping pong ball pinged and ponged its way back and forth between our paddles as I tried to push our feeble skills to the limit through the thrill of counting. “Yi, er, san… oops… Yi, er, san…” We couldn’t seem to get past three rounds before the ball hit the floor. Then out it popped. “Yi, er, san… sǐ.” Ha ha ha! See?

Uh, OK. So that’s funny because the word for “four” sounds a lot like the word for “dead”… like the ping pong ball.

Of course, I wasn’t the first one to notice this. There have been thousands of years for billions of Chinese people to figure this out, and thus today there are discounted telephone SIM cards. I was confused as to why certain SIM cards were cheaper than others and after a lot of back and forth, I finally discovered that no one wants a “4″ in their phone number. Being a westerner who, at the time, couldn’t even speak the language, I was happy to save a couple of 块 kuài (bucks).

There are a lot of uses of puns in Chinese, including a whole festival based on the fact that the date sounds like “I make money/luck”. Hey, any excuse for a festival. I’m just stoked, after all these years of my puns growing ever more stale, to open up a fresh batch of terrible new possibilities. This might keep me learning languages until I’m 44!

As always, click the image to reach the photographer’s site