Chinese shadows

1

It's easy to forget that you have a good thing going. You have an apartment on the sixteenth floor. You've got enough money to eat at restaurants every meal. People treat you better because you're white and American. You have a girlfriend that's much fitter than you. But you forget these things all the time.

On the 15 minute walk to work you see peasants in sandals, worn men in worn suits, white stray dogs, new buildings, scooters, Cadillacs and every other symbol of wealth and poverty you could imagine.

The first week you were here people seemed to stare at you but as you stopped looking for staring, staring stopped looking for you. Now you look at the dirty streets and the dirty air and the faded buildings, and you feel like you are a part of that dirt. Faded like an old picture, you are part of the nostalgia that is your present environment.

It's real and it's not real. The old women dancing by their building in the evening, the fat, black cockroaches, the sweet taste of opal, these are flowers pressed in your book. If you were to guess, the smell of it won't wash off your skin.

But where you're from the people are dead. They meet because there are holidays. They talk because there's space to fill. They hate because they are hated. But here when people are sad they don't smile. And when they do smile it's not through the glass of some idea.

2

When you kiss your girlfriend no real feeling comes up. When you teach your students your language it's as if you taught them nutritional facts. Every day for two months you think how much happier you'd be sitting on a couch smoking weed in your country. You shower to be clean for work.

It isn't easy being a real man. To take things serious and hard and as matters of life and death. It isn't easy shaving everyday even though it hurts your face. To feed the big bad machine coal. But now is the time to test your strength. To forge yourself into someone who deserves whatever flowers life will scatter across your path.

The universe is waiting for you to cast a stone. It is waiting to throw back its ripple like a quivering pond. It is saying you're just a centimeter away from eternal salvation. Salvation in the silk net of god's sure hand. "Go ahead, jump," it says. But your whole essence and instinct points you towards safety.

But you are a human being damn it. You have a hot, beating heart. You have keen and thirsty eyes. You project your dreams ahead of you. You have made this whole world and reality. You were made for more than compliance and safety.

3

You walk like a man with polio walks. Down to work and up a slimy staircase lined with advertisements to keep out the rain. Everyone walks around you. Everyone walks too fast. You skate around the city on a metro with no seats and you stand on tired knees. You walk down the gray streets singing Hail Marys and counting your breaths. Trying to become the image of desirelessness.

Pan says if you want to have a girl you're going to pay 5000 a month maybe. You're going to take her shopping, feed her, bring her to other cities. But you can't even speak well enough to tell a doctor what hurts. You never told your landlord the hot water's broken because of your lack of language competence. All the signs look like angular scribble.

Every day you're scratching at the back of your front door. Trying to fly straight down to the airport and back to your native, smoky, dark room. Sometimes you wake up from the sensation that you're being dragged across the bed in the direction of your home town. Sometimes you want to start walking for the Bering Strait.

4

But everything isn't as bad as it seems. And if it seems that bad it's because your mind is replaying "I don't want to do this." You're not moving towards an explosion, a crash, or a meltdown. You're barely even moving. You just read this book to these students and talk to them about their day. All your stormy insides and the shaking earth beneath your feet are just the waves of your mind. All your palpitations and extra cups of coffee are from that little tension in between your eyes, your self, not from some terrible judgment day outside.

You find solace in those little moments sitting on your couch and thinking "why bother?" Here's why you bother. You know that working will bring you more work in the future and that if you don't work you might not be able to find work. Working keeps you away from your moaning head that gets louder the longer you listen. But most important, working puts you on the path to a "successful" life. Without work where is the life you imagined as a boy? Where is your house, your vacations, your family? Where is that deep-set instinct that you are in the right?

5

You throw it up like a fountain jet. You sweat it out like a fever. It beats in your head like a tribal dance. Pulsing and throbbing and drifting on. It's your family dog, It's your mother tongue, it's the thing that beats your heart. Oh swollen and holy god in the sky bringing your head against a girl's like a child makes two dolls kiss. Up and over and into that hole where you are banished to sleep that last sleep. But you are not dead yet.

You wake up in the morning to the subtle dread of being expected somewhere. You bathe, watch TV on your computer, and then walk to work. You go in and say good morning to everyone. Your heart is banging around the door frame trying to float back home. But you sit down and open your text book. You go down the hall. And this is what you've come to, speaking loud and making hard eye contact so the students don't see what's behind the shell. But they know what you are. They see the soft and shriveled nut behind the shell and they despise it.

6

You just need a back rub. To have a clean, white, Asian girl gently squeeze your back. To exhale in a smoky room with a Chinese violin squealing through the mist. So she can walk up and down your back and you can feel how light her weight is.

This country has seen simpler and better days. It has seen days where after toil and work the people could rest honest. When a weary traveler could rest by the fire and listen to the wailing of the one-stringed violin. With his pack on the dirt he could take real nourishment from his dumplings. Times when a country house and strong family could put an end to the hunger of desires.

The great hungry ghost of Western culture got here long before you were born. Gone are the silk kimonos, the shining paintings, the pursuit of god. Come are the disposable clothes, the garish make up, the advertisements, the automobiles. The harmony of nature has been replaced with receding forests, polluted lakes, and clouds of smoke.

So, you go walking in the night and like what you see. The neon signs and fast restaurants excite your senses. The draw of people being pulled this way and that, walking like the electricity of jazz, they almost hit you. The chicken cadavers and cuts of pig dangle from the side streets. The stray dogs eat dirty porridge from the gutter. The women who are both tough and girlish glance at you from the corner of their eye. It keeps your heart warm. There's still something crawling and spreading out of this used-up place.

7

You have a dream with sex plastered all over it. To lace up your boots and drive west towards a real life. A bartender job on the weekends, the open road during the week, and writing in between. To sleep in your traveling bed and penetrate your country's sacred groves and holy mountains. And that's where your heart sleeps. It is waiting for you to dig it up and set it to work again. You are waiting for the desert sun and the idle hours to plug some part of yourself back in.

You can't go now. You have to sweat and dance and shout English words to an audience. You must sit there eight months while your mind pokes your shirtless back with a stick. And hold your head up while your world feels like it's hurdling towards some star.

Because you need money. That thing that we all need. That thing that people trade their youth and smile for. That thing that makes people think their lives are making sense. The new furniture, SUV, clean apartment, dinners with friends, useful smart phone, plastic clothes. Somehow people trade their dreams for that.

8

Your girl friend tells you to drink more water. She tells you not to drink too much beer. She tells you to eat tomatoes to keep your skin white. She tells you not to walk so fast. You tell her "thanks mom," or "fuck your sister," in her language. She replies that you never buy her flowers.

She likes to call you fat and poke your stomach.

She has a low, forehead and a wide face and dry feet. She doesn't wear deodorant. When you tell her that she's mean she shouts "I'm good for you." And you let the argument die off, there it is, she's good for you.

9

And then you breath out a little. You take a couple of weekend trips and your nerves settle at work. You start to forget about the life on the road and workless days you could have next year. You almost forget that barking feeling.

What could you do with your money if you saved it? How could you work at a university next time and relax? What jobs could you get with a master's degree? What about going to Brazil or France?

You leave your nagging hound of a girl friend. Your attention goes to your belly and how it keeps the girls away. Your body is an out-of-focus pile of clay even if your personality could charm a potted snake. But everyone knows biology beats poetry. Girls want their guys to be just a little less fit than they are.

So you get sulky and morn the girls that you could have wined dined and eaten. And you think about the guys that are half the man that you are but get twice the women. And the failed diets and platonic friendships and sex droughts. And you hold it over your head like you failed and what matters in life is how often your penis is wet.

10

There's a girl on a rebel island, far away from your empire. You talk to her every week but you think about her more often. Through your social media conversations a dumb hope opens slow like a flower.

Her boy friend, from his desktop in France, gets more and more unnerved about your supposed emotional intimacy. He knows you offered her French lessons. He knows you talk a lot. He doesn't know that before they were dating you saw her naked.

One day you tell her that you are going to her island. She says she might come see you when you do. Then she tells her boyfriend to be honest with him.

From across the world, he brings down his paternal gavel and forbids her from talking to you. He doesn't talk to her for two days. She asks herself who is this strange and nervous man.

You talk her through it for days. She is having second thoughts. You try not to bad mouth him or steer her, but you say that he is insecure and childish.

Finally she asks if you love her. You say yes. She thanks you for your love and says she likes you a lot but that's all the satisfaction she will give you now.

11

You marvel at your students' legs. Great expansive naked legs. And skirts and leggings and every kind of conservative stocking-covered schoolgirlish outfit one could assemble. And they sit cross-legged and in front of you with their legs just hanging out.

Your student takes you swimming after work. You swim for two hours back and forth, very slow and then you get changed. Your student is the one whose eyes are always a little too open and you can never tell if he's going to smile or threaten to break your legs. He brings you to a late night barbeque. You ruin your diet and you start drinking. His two friends bring out a two-dollar bottle of white liquor. "Can you drink white liquor?" they ask. You want to show you are open to other cultures. You say yes and after they pour everyone's drink there's some left over. You take that too.

All of a sudden you're 10 drinks in and flying down the road in your student's Porshe. He stops in the middle of the road and spouts out some of his language. He sometimes sways around the road and when he goes slow the cars fly around him. He looks to his right to see if you're scared. You try to observe the fear and be detached from it.

You get to the club after failing to get your student to take you home and you start on the hookah and beers. You drink four more beers and stare at the DJ's leather cleavage. She raises her fist and the music slams down. Between the prostitutes and the men hugging you can see layers of smoke. You raise your glass and drink several more toasts.

He drives you home at 2:00am all over the road again.

You wake up at 4:30am and piss out your headache.

You're never going to drink again this week.

12

There's something lasting and wrong with your heart. One of your organs is just two inches too far to the right and it is missing its blood flow. In the corner of your mind there's always a fire that springs back once it is put out.

And a thought always arises in your mind. What if this is the first year of the rest of your life? What if you are getting used to this life and setting a pace for the future? Would you want to live in a world like this? Where you spend the majority of your time and energy serving a company that throws away employees like rags. A world where a constant stream of unhappiness and work flow like a river that connects your days. What about your scalding passion? Wouldn't it be better to follow your heart through poverty and desperation than to follow convention?

13

Every day you get more comfortable. Every day your muscles get more tone. Every day you ascend two inches towards God. This stable life, as your father said, profits you. It brings you closer and closer to money, closer to praise, and closer to a blank, even expression.

But you crave the idle life. You want to work every now and then for gas money but your real work would be going from town to town and writing in a van. With your pen you would forge a soul.

You could smoke weed and work weekends from your father's house. Spend the time getting in shape and working your craft. Try to make new stories with a free schedule and hardened body. You would bite your tongue while your dad brags about something he's changed about the yard. You would do chores and feel 15 again.

14

So coming here has made you lose a little faith that traveling was the way around your troubles. You thought you might outrun them but they clung to the souls of your shoes. And sometimes the idea of a Brazilian beach or a smoky Indian jungle still entice you. But you found another route up the mountain that leads back to the ground.

Loving a girl until you forget who is who is an addiction. Drugs don't last or erase pain. Family is a changing and cumbersome narcotic. Hedonism always turns gray in the morning. God hides behinds rocks and at the bottom of rivers, always out of sight. So what do you pursue?

15