Blogger’s dilemma

 I’ve become hard to please, at least when it comes to books about China and maybe all non-fiction. I read fellow Columbian Peter Hessler’s River Town long before I had any inkling I’d be walking in his footsteps, a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in a mid-China river town. His book certainly wasn’t boring, but I couldn’t quite understand why it was so well received. Nor could I understand how he could get away with quoting his students’ writing as extensively as he did. (I, no doubt, have a peculiar perspective of such things, having been tortured by so many Institutional Review Board consent forms in my day.) And perhaps I’m just jealous—he was a “China 3” and enjoyed a degree of independence as a writer and traveler that is perhaps more limited for us “China 18s.” More on that in a minute.

I reacted even more strongly to Paul Theroux’s Riding the Iron Rooster, partly because Theroux writes so much more strategically and powerfully—and partly because what he writes so well is so outrageous. If you had only Theroux to go on, you’d think all Chinese people were spitters and hawkers and total philistines. I was unforgiving, even though Theroux wrote over a quarter of a century ago and drew most of his conclusions from his berth on a train, as if that is the way to get to know a people and a culture. But Theroux would be the first to admit that travel writing, his anyway, is essentially autobiographical—and maybe he was less interested in what was outside the window than in his notebook. But again, I find myself jealous. He wasn’t afraid to be rude to anybody or anything.

What would he say if he were less independent, if were, say, in the Peace Corps writing a blog, perhaps monitored on several fronts? And then I remembered! Ah! He was in the Peace Corps! And he was kicked out—long before there were any such things as blogs. And, as if we were in a conversation, I read on and found Theroux justifying his negativity by saying it’s simply too hard for writers to make nice people interesting. He doesn’t deny that decent human beings exist, even if they don’t make good fodder for stories.

So just as I was wondering if you have to be a misanthrope to be an interesting writer, especially about China, I happened to read Mark Salzman’s decades-old review of Theroux’s Riding the Iron Rooster. Salzman nailed the thing that bothered me most: Theroux writes masterfully about “the barren deserts of Mongolia and Xinjiang, the ice forests of Manchuria and the dry hills of Tibet” but not about the Chinese people. He doesn’t seem to know them. This gripe is from a writer who has also written a book about China. Salzman’s beautiful memoir Iron and Silk lightly and tightly describes his experience teaching English in China while pursuing his passion for Kung Fu. It’s delightful reading—and Salzman doesn’t seem to be a misanthrope.

Glad to have my faith in humanity restored a little, I found myself reading Will Schwalbe’s End of Life Book Club (not about China) and suddenly wishing that he could be a little more Therouxish. I’d given the book to my son because, based on reviews, I thought it described the book-loving mother-son relationship we had. But I found myself agreeing with what another reviewer said (wishing I’d read this review first): “Discretion and familial loyalty are fine characteristics . . . But these are not qualities that make for a scintillating memoir. To paraphrase Joan Didion, a writer is always ratting somebody out. A great memoirist, even one moved primarily by love and devotion, must possess a certain amount of ruthlessness — toward himself if no one else. Schwalbe’s book contains little of the lacerating honesty that marks Didion’s recent memoirs of loss.” Hmmmmm.

So here’s the conundrum: how do you aim for some sort of truth, truth that is also wise? Could I—should I—write with more “lacerating honesty” even if I weren’t in the Peace Corps and serving in China, with all those constraints? I’m not sure I could. Frankly, though, I’m not sure that either Didion or Theroux give us lacerating honesty, let alone wisdom, even though they both give us memorable prose.

It’s the biographer’s dilemma, the autobiographer’s dilemma, every creative non-fiction writer’s dilemma. And a blogger's dilemma. To their credit, neither Theroux nor Didion think they can tell us anything other than how “it” appears to them; both admit they’re ultimately, in their notebooks at least, writing about themselves. Didion says, “But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.’” And others, Lynn Bloom among them, see that that implacable “I” as an ethical stance, one that doesn’t pretend to be saying anything other than what “I” think. But what is the writer seeing from that “I” stance? What, for example, is being seen in China?

All I’m doing is keeping a little ole’ blog—but I’m keenly aware that I am in the Peace Corps and serving in China with those constraints—and I’m conscious of the tension between art and non-fiction everywhere—and the tension between regard for loved one’s feelings and unexpressed observations.

Mid-Autumn Festival on JinYun Mountain

. Holidays come with trade-offs. We celebrated Mid-Autumn Festival today with our share of moon cakes, but we will have make up classes on Sunday, followed by a straight week of classes, and another weekend full of classes to make up for the upcoming National Day. So! Ou Yang, Martha, and I figured we better make the best of today's breather while we could. At nine o'clock we found ourselves shoulder to shoulder with dozens of university students waiting for Bus 585, bound for JinYun Mountain, the ridge that lords over all of Beibei. 

We're only halfway up the mountain here, looking down onto Beibei.

Bamboo groves are plentiful all over the mountain.

The noodle and ice cream ladies sell Ou Yang a bottle of warm water.

This family is more interested in relaxing with their tiny dog
than hiking the rest of the way up the mountain.

I admit that I'm surprised I don't witness more accidents, given what might be called free-form driving habits. Fortunately, nobody was seriously injured in this motorcycle/car collision at the foot of the mountain.

White hair, white chalk

I thought nothing of the fifth or sixth day of round-the-clock rain, so excited I was to start my own lessons. To be a student again--more than an occasional student! Xiao Kairong had kindly arranged my teaching schedule this term so that all of my classes will be in the afternoon or evening, leaving my mornings free to enroll in a five-day-a-week, four-period-a-day comprehensive Chinese course for foreign students.

Monday morning found me a tad bit disappointed that we were just ushered into a large hall, where I sat shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of foreign students from all parts of the planet. Interesting, though, was which parts of the planet were most heavily represented. There were lots of Koreans and Indians, as I would have found at a similar gathering at home, but also hundreds of Thais, a good many Russians, people from various --stans, and many Africans. The president of the student union, a big, striking man from the Congo dressed immaculately in an all white suit, addressed us in several languages.

I elected to start at the beginning again, partly to build confidence and partly because, at the rate these courses torpedo along, I might be hopelessly behind in just a few weeks if I had enrolled in an intermediate class. Moreover, my tones are bad and my listening is worse. So, there I was, happy to be a conspicuous white haired lady in a beginners' class, along with people from Surinam, Malawi, Vietnam, Korea, Russia, India, and the Congo.

With the rain hitting the glass window and thoughts of other world troubles tentatively far away, I just enjoyed feeling like I'd stepped into a time machine. We stayed put in our brightly-lit classroom, while  three different teachers rotated through, each coming to us--one to teach speaking, one to teach listening, and one to teach reading and writing. Such a fragmented philosophy of language teaching might have struck me as crazy until I was saddled with the job of having to distinguish by one little stroke this character from dozens of look alike characters--or having to distinguish only by tone or context a word from others that sound similar. It takes Zen-like concentration for me, at least, and I need the temporary focus on just this or just that.

Today I was sent to the blackboard along with a chubby guy from Vietnam with orders to write everything we heard the teacher say, her earrings flashing in the light of the overhead projector. As the chalk dust flew,  my nervous classmate slid his eyes over to see what I was writing. He was the one, after all, who had had a devil of a time distinguishing "h" and "k"and had been whacked with a pen every time he made a mistake. It was a friendly enough whack, delivered with giggles, but enough of a whack to send the Russian ladies' eyebrows up. If others found this friendly corporal punishment surprising, they didn't let on. I'm not sure what the Indian thought, the one who delivers every syllable in a monotone. He, too, had received his share of friendly swats. The man from the Congo with a booming voice, conscientious about his role as our class monitor, was chided at one point, "Don't shake your belly!" which he had rubbed for only a second.

The whacker was the littlest and giggliest of the three teachers. Beautiful, immaculately groomed, and otherwise friendly. She gave us her cell phone number and invited us to call her 24-7 with questions about our Chinese. The others, too, eagerly coaxed us along with an fascinating mixture of charm and Chinese teaching methods.

I sit near the window in front and all three teachers tend to start with me--"Pan Jing, . . ." and I have to set the example. It's a good thing I'm doing things that are ridiculously easy for me at the moment, because I'm capable of being a deer in headlights when asked the simplest of questions.

Eventually, though, the rain did turn my thoughts to faraway places, including Boulder, my probable future destination. I have no idea if my family there and my friend (and possible future roommate) who lives in Boulder Canyon are okay. Here's hoping they are.

Those two meta-narratives

Who is Eric Li?

If interested, check out his June 2013 TED Talk , timely for two reasons. One, as one of my fellow teachers noted while we were zooming down Tiansheng Lu to a before-school dinner, TED talks can be lively conversation starters in language classes. Two, we were fuming over the possibility that Congress had already voted to support an air strike in Syria. Someone in the front seat had heard (mistakenly) that it was a fait accompli,  and our Chinese colleague "Sparrow" thought the US could learn a thing or two from the Chinese: resist assuming it has the answer for everyone else's problems. Resist assuming it has some universal moral supremacy. Someone in the back seat said why that was precisely Eric Li's point in a TED talk last summer.

Mind you, in his June 2013 TED Talk, Eric Li was not addressing Obama or an air strike on Syria; rather, he was chastising what he considers Western hubris and the wrong-headedness of imposing Western-style democracies on everyone, whether they want them or not. Also, please bear in mind that none of us in that car is planning to use that particular TED Talk for reasons I could explain later.

In this rhetorically-savvy fifteen-minute or so talk, Eric Li first trashes what he calls two meta-narratives, one the prevailing ideology during the Cultural Revolution (when he was born), and two the prevailing ideology of many Western democracies, each one tracing a linear progression of political systems to the culminating "best one"--whether communism or democracy. The fallacy of both is universalizing a progression that places one and only one system at the top. After saying he had been a Berkely hippie who thought this and that, the venture capitalist proceeds unabashedly to defend China's one-state policy on the grounds that it is characterized by "adaptability, meritocracy, and legitimacy." He somewhat paradoxically calls for plurality of viewpoints about political systems elsewhere while vehemently denying the need for any such thing at home. The venture capitalist doesn't pretend to be defending communism; he is defending the firm grip of a one-party state, which is not quite the same thing.

The speech is fascinating partly because it is slick. He is a gifted orator. His casual tone at the beginning might soften some of those who wouldn't otherwise hear him out. But the speech is full of contradictions and paradoxes, all the more provocative because the issues are so important.

Just days before the vote on the Syrian air strike, I find myself in a curious position, agreeing heartily about some things with people I might take serious issue with at other times on other points. Since when would I align myself with Tea Party members against something Obama wants? And when would I align myself with some of Eric Li's claims, even as I find very problematic some of his other assertions?

And yet, brutal and horrible as the activity is in Syria, I think it would be a grave mistake for the US to intervene. Worse than breaking one's word about a threat, the infamous red line, is assuming that we have the answers for Syria. We don't. And we don't have the prerogative to ignore the will of the UN.

With this, I'll give Eric Li the last word: "If [Western democracies] would spend just a little less time on trying to force their way onto others and a little more on political reform at home, they might give their democracy a better chance. China's political model will never supplant electoral democracy because, unlike the latter, it doesn't pretend to be universal."