Folk vs. Elitist Art

“The attempt to reach the public directly through ‘popular’ art assumes that criticism is artificial and public taste natural. Behind this is a further assumption about natural taste which goes back through Tolstoy to Romantic theories of a spontaneously creative ‘folk.’ These theories have had a fair trial; they have not stood up very well to the facts of literary history can experience, and it is perhaps time to move beyond them. An extreme reaction against the primitive view, at one time associated with the ‘art for art’s sake’ catchword, thinks of art in precisely the opposite terms, as a mystery, an initiation into an esoterically civilized community. Here criticism is restricted to ritual masonic gestures, to raised eyebrows and cryptic comments and other signs of an understanding too occult for syntax. The fallacy common to both attitudes is that of a rough correlation between the merit of art and the degree of public response to it, though the correlation assumed is direct in one case and inverse in the other.”

From “The Anatomy of Criticism” by Northrop Frye

I find myself in the strange situation of disagreeing with Frye in the first insistence. There are many instances of folk art being the creative inspiration for high art. Classical composers would take folk melodies and turn them into symphonies.  Two of the four big, fat Chinese classic novels were collected from folk stories about the Monkey King and the rebel bandit Song (China’s Robin Hood). The superhero movies work as well as they do because comic book writers and artists experimented with these characters for a century before movie technology caught up enough to capture them. I am not saying that all high art comes from folk art, only that enough does that the theory is useful.

As for art as a mystery, here I agree that the idea is overblown PR for artists who don’t wish to, or perhaps cannot, explain themselves. All minds collect data about our universe, correlate that data, and express their conclusions. People express those conclusions in different ways and specialize in different subject matters, but the basic brain anatomy is the same. I’ve read thousands of books and had uncountable experiences from the dull as dirt to the rare and wonderful, and they are all grist for the mill of my muse. The inspiration of an artist is little more surprising than that of a scientist.

Emerson had a different take on this question. He believed in the creativity of the common folk, and that poets were simply those brave enough to go around telling everyone what everyone quietly worried about. Emerson and the Transcendentalists wanted a philosophy, a literature, and even a religion suitable for democracy. All other philosophies, arts, and religions had been born in a state of monarchy, and assumed a top to bottom status, while Emerson wished for a reverse, which is why his educational system stressed the release of students’ creativity…it is troublesome that our government now wish to establish an educational system based upon testing, much like that of China and Japan (whose system of education is originally based upon China’s pre-Communist educational philosophy). 

What Frye wants is a system of art that is neither mysterious nor democratic, but a system of experts. This makes perfectly good sense, and not just because it keeps academics like him employed. I do use book reviews to help me figure out what books to read, almost as often as friends’ recommendations, and I trust my friends’ judgment because I trust their taste and critical judgment; taste might be to critical judgment what intuition is to rational thinking: a subconscious, quick and simple version of the latter.

I do enjoy reading books more if I understand them, and if a book is too far from my personal experience some expert help is useful (the first time I purposely read criticism was to understand Sylvia Plath). But unlike Frye, I accept the fact that this system of experts, as useful as they are, will always be an overlay over the hustle and bustle of writers inspired by the culture around them, the bubbling folk art from which high art and commercial art alike arise.

“The Honorary Consul” by Graham Greene

So I’m up at the lake in a cabin while everyone else is off fishing and I found on the shelf a novel by Graham Greene. I thought to myself, “I’ve heard a lot about this guy. I should read him.”  

So I did, and had the opposite sort of muffled reaction that I did to “Twilight” by Stephanie Meyer. With “Twilight,” I read it because everyone was arguing about it and I was starting to draw conclusions about a novel that I had never read, which I don’t like doing. After I read it, I mildly agreed with what people said about it, but didn’t see why people were so upset. It was the logical conclusion of decades of turning parasitical spawns of Satan into desirable boyfriends crossed with the delusions of Christian romance industry and sweet teen romance: a perfect marketing storm that revealed the nonsense of the first two (I haven’t read any teen romance for comparison). And for the record, it was written at the same level of craft of Nora Roberts, the bestselling living romance novelist.

When I read Graham Greene, it was because book reviewers kept saying great things about him, but in the context of reviewing other books; just enough to get me curious. After I read it, I mildly agreed that he was a good writer, he had all the elements of literary writing, but I didn’t see the magic. Maybe it was because the main character’s emotional dilemma was worrying about his lack of emotion; a nearly emotionless POV is going to suck the life out of the prose right there.  He seems to be trying to help save another man’s life just because if the other man dies, his widow might try to marry the main character because she is carrying his child.

Let me back up: the POV character is an emotionless doctor who is sleeping with the twenty-something prostitute that his friend the sixty-something ‘honorary consul’ has married. The doctor becomes involved with a plot to kidnap the visiting American ambassador (this story takes place in South America) to trade for the exchange of ten political prisoners, including the doctor’s father, but the terrorists, for lack of a better word to describe these misfits, accidentally kidnapped the ‘honorary consul’ who has no value as a hostage whatsoever.  The story would have been funny if the characters weren’t so sad.

The dialogue is at its most interesting when the atheist doctor and the ex-priest (fired by the Church for his liberation theology, a socialist vision of Christianity) are discussing the viability of the old duelist God heresy which the priest has adopted, the idea that God is equal parts good and evil as explanation for both, but you have read quite a ways to get to it. The internal dialogue is most interesting when the two male leads are trying to puzzle out the wife’s true feelings; years of prostitute have taught her to show men only what they want. In this very unfunny book, the lies men and women tell everyone to be a part of society is described as a comedy people should give up to avoid the tragedy of never being true.

Except in the plot, the lies work. Lies are as much the bread and butter of the prostitute as sex, they allowed the ex-priest to control the doctor, and the media to control the people. The most successful character (in that he gets what he wants) is the police detective, a secondary character, who knows how to successfully navigate a world of lies to find the truth, and then he lies to make himself look better.

So really, “The Honorary Consul” is almost Taoist. It’s a nearly passionless book about love, with a plot showing how tangled truth and lies and good and evil are in our world.

 

 

 

 

“A Thousand Splendid Suns” by Khaled Hosseini

I don’t know why he titled this novel “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” but that mystery aside it has the same hypnotically beautiful sadness I found in “The Kite Runner,” and perhaps more. There was less relief from the cruelty of Afghan culture for these women characters than the boys of “Kite Runner.”  Despite the goodness in many of the people, Hosseini’s assertion, via a character, that the only enemy the Afghans cannot defeat is themselves rings true. You know something is wrong when being ruled by a Soviet puppet was the soft option.

Mariam is a good representative of how hard it is to be good. Growing up, she is the focal point of other people’s generosity and hypocrisy, love and bitterness, and then is married off to a man who becomes abusive after she can’t have children. Her husband nearly beats the love out of her, until he marries a younger woman whose tragic separation from the man she loves is the tale of part two. How these two women rebuild each other is the rest of the story, and I will tell you no more.

There is little quoting of the Koran in “A Thousand Splendid Suns”; the actions of the men express the divided feelings within Islamic culture concerning the status of women. That individual men either cherish or oppress women seems to have more to do with their individual natures rather than scripture, but the easy success of the oppressors speaks volumes to the cultural interpretation of Islam.

Riffing off a Northrop Frye quote

“The dialectic axis of criticism, then, has as one pole the total acceptance of the data of literature, and as the other the total acceptance of the potential values of those data. This is the real level of culture and of liberal education, the fertilizing of life by learning, in which the systematic progress of scholarship flows into a systematic progress of taste and understanding.”

 

“…the fertilizing of life by learning” strikes me as the most powerful metaphor for the value of learning I have ever read or heard. What is the process of fertilization? The feeding of the soil and the killing of weeds.

 

The soil is our minds, minds that without education are the conglomeration of and attempt to understand random life experiences. I will concede that some people have more varied experiences and some people put more effort into understanding their experiences, both of which leads to often useful “folk wisdom,” but on the part of the intellectually lazy leads to prejudice and inflexibility.

 

And education is not always beneficial, I know. Prejudiced teachers pass on their limitations. Bigotry is the virus of the intellectual eco-system. But a good faith intellectual effort to understand the world must involve more than just one’s own experiences, because those are always very limited and random, while reading can exponentially expand one’s horizons.

 

And if we attempt this good faith effort, the process of learning enhances one’s life. I, for one, do appreciate paintings better after my brother explained how to look at the light. I do enjoy books and movies more after I gain an understanding of them. I am more patient with my students and friends after reading about the psychology of family dynamics and how they influence all of us. I am more humble intellectually thanks to Kant and more ambitious in my art thanks to Nietzsche, Cao Xueqin, and now perhaps David Mitchell.

 

Sitting here by the lake, I sometimes wonder if my conscious mind is like those waves and my subconscious is like the lake proper. The waves are what I’m paying attention right now, who I’m talking to, what I’m reading, what I’m watching…but as I absorb it into my mind, it sinks back into my subconscious to play with until it comes out, or not, in future conservations, essays, or fiction. Learning feeds my life.

 

"Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell

“Cloud Atlas” is a puzzling book, in part because I can’t tell if it is optimistic or pessimistic. After all, the backstory is always one of human progress chewing up human individuals for more fuel for the flames, be they planation slaves, broke artists, or cloned waitresses, yet at the same time the plot is one of the triumph of the human spirit. Each story is of noble resistance to that machine, but each following story implies the ultimate victory of that machine, right up to environmental destruction and the self-destruction of capitalism after it runs out of resources and starts feeding upon itself. In this sense, it is one of the most visionary novels I’ve ever read. 

The connecting devices, however, seem contradictory to me. One of them is the transmigration of the soul from character to character, yet many of the stories imply that they are fictional stories in each others’ worlds. How can a character be a reincarnation of another character if that first character is also a fictional character in the world of the second? Either device would have been interesting, but combined I’m a little muddled. Perhaps I missed something, and given the strengths of the novel I don’t mind too much.

He has an admirable writing style, describing things the way the characters would see them instead of the way he would. This skill comes through most through the clone, who sees everything as something very new, and the composer, who often relates thing by music.

Thanks to my enjoyment of Nietzsche’s style and audacity, I caught several references to the German philosopher in this book. One of the ironies of these characters is that while the villains would espouse “will to power” as justification for their actions, it is the heroes and heroines who buck society and its soul crippling status quo who actually live the concept, defying social power with will power.

His last line, “Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?” is a possible resolution to a philosophical quandary that’s been bothering me for a long time, mostly that of my own unimportance. I don’t recall exactly when I realized my own unimportance, but I’ve never adjusted to it. I sometimes tell myself that it is a negative source of freedom; I can do as I like with my life because of my own unimportance. Mitchell believes while individuals are unimportant, they come together into something important. In the context of the ending of his novel, it might be a moral imperative to transcend one’s unimportance by joining something that is important, like the fight for human rights and dignity, even if you are just licking envelopes.

Reading Chinese Literature

When I lived in Taizhou, there wasn’t much for an intellectual guy to do for fun. It was a boom town, which meant lots of KTV, bars, and restaurants, and I only liked the last option. The clubs and bars were all just too noisy and smoky. So once a semester I went to Nanjing and loaded up on cheap editions of Western classics and expensive translations of Chinese literature. It was an opening up of a new mindset.

 

Two of the great Chinese works of literature, “Outlaws of the Marsh” (aka “Water Margin”) and “Journey to the West” are compilations rather than original works. The stories about their characters had been floating around, expanding, and evolving to the needs of generations until the authors of the novel form brought them together into unifying story lines. Most of those stories can be told in pretty much any order, so in novel form almost all the development is in the beginning and end.  What was most interesting for me was that at the end of “Outlaws” the heroes have purified the empire (internal corruption is a more common theme in Chinese literature than external threats) and retired only to then watch the empire descend back into corrupt due to the nature of humanity. 

“Romance of the Three Kingdoms” by Luo Guanzhong is a historical novel (and play, and opera, and now movies) about the Han civil wars that has also evolved with the times.  Different dynasties needed different political justifications, so “Three Kingdoms,” in particular the plays and operas, changed their tone, raising or lowering the moral virtues of different characters depending on which side of history the present dynasty felt itself to be on. “Three Kingdoms” may have had its greatest influence through Chairman Mao.  When I read that it was Mao’s favorite book, it explained why Mao was so paranoid – the characters in the book, mostly generals and ministers, are constantly being tricked or betrayed.

 

“A Dream of Red Mansions” by Cao Xueqin is the empress of Chinese literature. Imagine for a moment that Shakespeare had expanded “Romeo and Juliet” into a novel the length of “The Lord of the Rings” and added so much thematic and symbolic layering that you could specialize in just that one work (the study of the book is called “Redology”).  Unfortunately the author died before finishing his book, so his friend Gao E finished it. So many people were dissatisfied with his ending that it spawned an amateur industry of fan fiction, people scribbling out their own endings to the novel. Since most writers in Chinese history, indeed most of history, have supported themselves by either day jobs or patronage, there was no conception of ‘copyright.’  Copyright is something necessary for a capitalist society, in which ideas can be turned into money, whereas for most of history the source of wealth was either land or government positions. In China, most writers were government officials who left the work of governance to underlings and focused upon literary achievements, which is probably why their four great novels are so very long.

I can understand the impulse to correct other writers; since I was so dissatisfied with the ending of “Battlestar Galactica” that I wrote my own crossover novella about the characters of BSG and “Star Trek Voyager” stumbling across each other and working together to get to Earth. I believe my version makes more sense than the endings of those shows, but oh well.  I’ll never be able to sell it, but it was only a week of evenings out of my life.

The more important aspect of “Dreams” was the attention it paid to women. The author was disgruntled with the lives of men, his family’s political and therefore economic future on the decline, and one of his themes was the corruption of men and the purity of women, a theme diluted when the women came into conflict with each other. But even the conflicts between women were over their access to the resources of men. “Dreams” was a water shed in Chinese literature, for both before and after “Dreams” men were portrayed as violent alcoholics and the women as sexual beings, but before “Dreams” the writers were on the side of the men and after “Dreams” the writers were more on the side of the women, especially the writers who are remembered like Lu Xun and Ba Jin.

Lu and Ba were early twentieth century writers of a generation of scholars educated in Europe.  In Europe, socialism, feminism, and modernism had grown up separately, with distinct and sometimes contradictory goals.  But for Chinese students, all three were Western reforms, and so were introduced to China as a package, so Chinese male authors were often more sympathetic to women’s issues than Western male writers. Even when Lin Yutang wrote novels about China in English for a foreign audience, he wrote about women in flattering terms. The weird thing for me is that he wrote about both feminine and feminist women in a positive light. The traditional and modern women are both positive ideals for him, as long as the women are good people.

Once Upon a Time

I basically watched the first two seasons of "Once Upon a Time" within two weeks, thanks to Netflix. I'd never seen the show before, being out of the States more often than not these last nine years, and I have to say I was really impressed. There's little problems here and there, but I barely notice them.

These writers could give lessons on the effective use of back flashes. Most writers just use back flashes to explain what is going on it the past, but these writers apparently summed up their philosophy with one quote from a character: When you can see the future, irony is everywhere. Their back flashes weren't just explanatory, they were revelatory. They made my jaw drop with the shock of understanding. They set the seeds of future surprises several episodes in advance, and yet those clues didn't prevent the surprise, they enhanced with surprise with an "ah ha" moment.

Another interesting thing they've done is make so many central characters women. There was an entire plotline in which Emma, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Mulan were off on their own adventure, sans men. It swept gender politics right off the table and let the women be heroic. I've also noticed that when women are fighting men, there's quite a lot of hapkido or aikido thrown in, soft style martial arts that use agility to over come brute force.

On the other hand, when Snow White is on her own, she's a bandit, a revolutionary leader, and an archer. But when she's with the men, somehow the purity of her heart becomes the central issue. When she tricked the Evil Queen into using dark magic against the Queen's even more dangerous mother, I was thinking, "Wow, that was really cunning of her." I was impressed, but the show wasted no time in turning it around into how it corrupted Snow's heart, as if all that warfare against the Queen in fantasy land wouldn't have.  It's a puzzle, and I think the writers are trying to have their cake and eat it, too.

What is most vivid in my mind right now is how they combine the season plot line resolutions with the season cliff hangers. Watching the Jolly Rogers pirate ship take our main characters, villains and heroes alike, into a magical whirlpool within minutes of saving the town just blew me away. It is now my favorite season cliff hanger in television history.

China's Super Power Strategy

Since the Opening Up of China until roughly 2010, China has followed what I would call the "American Plan" of rising to superpower status. I'm afraid now it is switching to the "German Plan" of rising. You'll see what I mean quite soon.

Once upon a time, the British Empire was the world's superpower, it's navy by law required to have as many ships of the line as the next two powers combined (for most of that time the Spanish and French navies). But as the British economy matured, London bankers looked for new places to invest. Naturally they thought of the United States and started pouring money into our economy. Thus began a gradual shifting of the economic power, but even as British economic resources stagnated, their military and political commitments increased. Despite winning, or being on the winning side, of most of their wars, they went bankrupt paying for them and the debts. Adam Smith in his "Wealth of Nations" explained and predicted the economic factors that brought the Empire down even in the midst of their victories, particularly the increasing expense of technological improvements. And who had loaned them the money? America.

Now America is the superpower, by having absorbed British investment and avoiding costly wars when possible. Until the World Wars, the biggest war the U.S. fought was the Civil War, which cost so much that the Federal government could have bought the freedom of all the slaves instead and saved money on the deal, but I digress. Now America has naval and air power greater than the rest of the world combined. Now America has been investing in China, and then China started loaning us money. The parallels are striking.

But now I fear China is giving up the American Plan for the German Plan, with more aggressive stances and actions against its neighbors. Chinese national news broadcasters have at least one report every day about military improvements. The Chinese have a lot more history to feed their self-perceptions of importance than the Germans did. Chinese officials talk about how their nation "will not be contained." 

Fortunately China doesn't have much room for expansion. With neighbors like Russia, India, and Japan and the smaller nations banding together, it has limited room to maneuver. The more aggressive China becomes, the more the others unite. China also has domestic limitations, with predictions of such severe environmental damage that the Chinese economy might start shrinking about 2040, not to mention a population that doesn't believe in them. Beijing might be able to whip up nationalistic fever over foreign policy, but for domestic policy its people resist either actively or passively.  So while I believe it will be rough sailing in Pacific waters for many years to come, as long as America doesn't panic, the rocks can be avoided.

A Hint About Chinese Foreign Policy

Henry Kissinger wrote a book about China, basically asserting that China's mindset is that it must be acknowledged as the center of the world, even if it doesn't do anything with that respect. For most of Chinese history, it has had two foreign policy goals: buffer zones between itself and barbarians (you know who you are) and to make barbarians understand and bow to Chinese superiority.  The difference between China and other empires is that imperial China didn't actually care if it ruled those other countries. As long as Korea, for example, acknowledged China's dominance, China left it alone.

Today, China and Taiwan have basically the same relationship. As long as Taiwan doesn't make noise about being independent, China is content. I submit that Tibet is a buffer between China proper (the part of China that is culturally Chinese) and India. In a world in which naval and air power are more important, China has been making noises about controlling far more sea and sky than international law allows, again as buffer zones (plus resources to be drilled for with China's ever thirsty economy). All of what is happening today is consistent with Chinese history.

Kissinger also pointed out that much of Chinese foreign policy is a game of chicken. China makes noise, people appease China, China declares victory and goes home.  Stalin threatens Mao, Mao says bring on the nukes; I've got people to spare. (most people don't realize how close the USSR and China came to war because of the Clash of the Titanic Egos between Stalin and Mao. If there is a war between China and the US, I'm betting it will be an accident during one of these psych games.

I've these problems on a smaller, more personal level when living in China. I observed two car accidents happen right before my eyes because the drivers were playing chicken over who will get to drive down an alley first.  I've noticed Chinese drivers glance at each other and then determinedly ignore each other so they can cut each other, or me, off. Chinese universities want to high more qualified western teachers without giving them tenure, so try to figure out what sort of high sounding PR they can offer.  And many times I've been used as the token white guy for PR for schools and English corners, just so parents can see me and be impressed.

So the next time you see China on the news, think of them as playing poker, and you'll understand what's going on.

Feminism in China

Feminism isn't an official movement in China because the Communist Party is officially feminist. While the Party is run by a good old boy's club, in many ways it is feminist. There are increasing numbers of women in government, it is illegal to determine the gender of a baby before birth so parents won't try to get abortions because they want a son instead, and just like as in America women are numerically superior in colleges, which means employers hire more women whether they like to or not. 

Partly this is historical. Every reform movement in China going back over a hundred years has addressed women's concerns. I think this is because while in the West feminism, socialism, and 'modernism' grew up as separate issues, sometimes in conflict, when Asians went to Europe for education (Europe had the best universities until the Nazis kicked out or killed so many of their best intellectuals), they were exposed to all three reform movements at the same time, bundled them up as "Western" and brought them back as a package. This is one reason why the pre-Communist reform writers like Lu Xun and Ba Jin were more sympathetic towards women characters. Another reason is "Dreams of Red Mansions," considered by most Chinese to be their greatest novel, is mostly about women and their difficulties (even if sometimes the difficulties are each other).

And all of this leads to my experience in China. China is still run by the "good old boy's" network, but women can squeeze into leadership positions if they can hold their liquor and make friends. Many powerful Chinese men have ambitious daughters and want to see them do well, in part because they don't have a son. Women do well in school, and education has always been the main ladder in Chinese society.  But at the same time, just as in America, women are more likely to be too modest for self-promotion and more likely to take time off for family concerns. But even in the family, I've seen commercials that joke about women running the family and Chinese has two slang phrases for obedient husbands, one that visualizes a woman pulling her husband around by the ear and another about the husband kneeling before the bed.

My most recent example with the potential power of feminism in China was in a high school class. When they had a speech competition, they chose to give speeches by feminist politicians and actresses (One of them gave a speech by Hillary Clinton better than Clinton had) and pro-gay rights activists, and they gave these speeches in front of their parents and the school administration. Nanjing University also has a gay and lesbian student organization.

I had also asked my classes what sort of job they would most like their foreign teachers' to have before coming to China to teach (both classes were majority girls). One class was serious about the question and said lawyer or doctor or professor.  The other class said 'wizard,' 'Bill Gates' and 'spy.'  So we talked about James Bond as an ESL teacher, and then what would a female Bond be like, and then I said, "She'd be like the Black Widow from Avengers," and twenty-five young women broke out into applause. It looks like this next generation of women has found their icon.

Working Out in China

There are advantages and disadvantages to working out in China. Let's start with the problems.

1: It's hard to find a gym with dumbbells over 50 pounds in weight. I only found one and they went up to 100 pounds so I joined up immediately. It was also the cheapest one I found in three cities, so I'm assuming rich Chinese guys are wimps.

2: Personal trainers can be a pest because they are working on commission. Seeing the chubby American, they instantly see cash, and don't leave me alone until I dead lift two or three times their body weight. Nine years in China and I only met one trainer stronger than me.

3: A gym in China can cost from 800 RMB ($130ish) a year to one I found that was 30,000 RMB, or $5000. The expensive one had a spa, a swimming pool, and light weights.

4: The air pollution is so bad in some cities I can't imagine how people don't fall over and die walking up stairs, never mind jog.  In Chongqing I had to add an extra minute to my rests between lifting sets to compensate.

5: The cute girls behind the counter don't speak English. If they did, they'd be college students instead of working a counter.

Advantages of working out in China.

1: The food has a lot less sugar and grease. My first month in China I ate as much Chinese food as possible and my only exercise was walking: lost 10 pounds.

2: So few people know how to use the squat rack that it's always open for my use.

3: I get a little ego boost because I'm always one of the big guys.

4: There's always a Tai Chi club in any city park or college campus, and Tae Kwon Do is freaking everywhere now.

Dating in China

Dating in China is becoming more complicated as society opens up and gender dynamics change. Women have more economic independence, but the one-child policy means parents put them under more pressure to marry and set higher standards for son-in-laws. City parents are slightly more likely to want a daughter than a son so they can stick the potential husband's parents with the start up costs of their daughters' marriage (many parents won't consider a son-in-law who can't buy a house, and in China that's a huge expense, especially for younger men; it's a common joke in China to refer to being a slave to your house payments).  The same parents who tell their kids not to date until after graduating from college (to focus on their studies) then soon after graduation start pestering their kids about "where's your b/f//g/f?"  I could go on about how parents are probably the number one reason for their kids' divorces, but I digress.

As a westerner, I probably wasn't going to be set up with a girl by her parents (which is a very common method when parents see their daughter in her late-twenties and yet no grandkids), and I can't read the Internet postings, so the most common ways to meet young women were bars and English corners.  The Chinese women in bars are usually looking for a western lifestyle, but since I never liked the taste of alcohol or smoky environments, that fertile scene (based upon other western men's stories anyway) wasn't for me.

The women I met in English corners took a more traditional approach towards dating, by which I mean dating was a process of getting to know each other, and the "third date rule" was for holding hands. When my college students (mostly female) asked me if I dated much, I dodged by asking them what a "date" was in China, and their playbook was right out of the American fifties. A date might be anything a man and woman did without other people, from going to the movies ("because in it's in the dark and anything can happen") to a dinner to a walk in the park. So I conceded to my students that by Chinese standards, I dated a lot, but not so often by American ones (which seems to be something Americans do after sex now, and I've often warned my Chinese students about to go abroad about the general dishonesty of the American dating scene). And all that dating was a great excuse to go to restaurants and let them order the dishes, so I ate a wider variety of food than I might have based upon my limited Chinese ('going Dutch' is a popular English phrase in China).

While I enjoyed the company of many Chinese women, ultimately I failed the 'seriousness' test so there was only so far the relationships would progress. Sooner or later, they would ask me where I wanted to spend the rest of my life, and the correct answer was their hometown (so they could watch after their parents). I'd admit my life was too mobile to answer the question, and I'd be back to friendship status. Many of my college students decided not to date until they returned to their hometown to avoid inevitable argument between in-laws about where their kids would live.

One of the more interesting parts of talking with so many women in China was that they felt they could talk to me about things they couldn't talk with their Chinese friends about. They could talk to me about Tibet, Taiwan, or the historical context of Chinese international relations and what exactly is democracy anyway? And even more often, they would talk with me about relationships, since most of them knew I was divorced (a highly educational experience). I know a divorced person discussing marriage with a single person could be a one-eyed man leading the blind, but I also grow up with parents who are still married, so I did the best I could.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KTJ10D8

Eating in China

Most of my experiences eating in China were groups of friends and colleagues sitting around a big table sharing the dishes. This is why they can bring out only one or two dishes at a time; everyone is sharing everything. This gives Chinese cooks an advantage over western restaurants in that they can have recipes with different cooking times. Sometimes no one will touch a dish until I've had the first bite because I was the foreign guest, so try everything you can. I enjoyed these round table meals so much that I would have three birthday meals the week of my birthday, because 8-10 people was about as many as I could fit around a table at the same time, and I could give my friends the options of which days and times they could come.

Beijing roast duck is a favorite of foreigners, and in China restaurants will sometimes advertise it as their specialty. It is slices of duck you can roll up in a thin pancake along with sliced cucumber or onion and dip in a special sauce. I liked the Beijing duck in Nanjing more than in Beijing because in Beijing the duck is cooked a little drier, but I'll never have it in Shanghai again. They charge three times as much (for everything in general) and then served me only the skin of the duck (the meat was extra). The customers in this high end restaurant were amused at the fright of the staff of a westerner complaining in Chinese "no have meat, no have meat" which is a too literal translations of my complaint.

"Chicken and peanuts" is a very common dish, but I've had ten different kinds. Sometimes it's just chicken and peanuts, but sometimes they add diced vegetables which may or may not include carrots, potatoes, and onions. And sometimes the vegetables are soft and sometimes a little crunchy.

They also like stir frying eggs with either green onions or tomatoes. Scrambled eggs and tomatoes is also a common soup. While I lived in Chongqing, I started buying the spiced up cooked potatoes, taking the cartoon home, and stir frying them with eggs. My Chinese friends found my "potatoes stir fried with eggs" amusing; I told them it was a more American dish.

While in Chongqing, or in southwest China generally, you should try either hot pot or dry pot. Both are equally hot, but the preparation is different. With hot pot, you order a large pot of boiling water with spices already in it along with raw ingredients, and then cook them to your liking. Warning, I drink a lot of juice and eat a lot of rice to counter the extreme spiciness. With dry pot, there is a lot less water and the meat is already well cooked and spiced up. I used to go to one such place at least once a week with a weight lifting buddy after our workouts.

My favorite "potatoes and beef" was in a little dinner in Taizhou, on a corner strategically located between three colleges (at one end of a street more or less dedicated to student customers). It tasted like the slices of potatoes and beef had been dipped in candy before they had been cooked in spices.

While China has most of the fish recipes I like, I eventually gave up eating fish in China because I found out that their rivers are so polluted that most of them are dying if not dead. I couldn't stop thinking about fish swimming in pollution.

Last and least, you will find yourself surrounded by American options. When I went to Wuxi, western or western-style restaurants had crowded Chinese restaurants out of the downtown area. For the record, American food in China is as inferior to American food in America as Chinese food in America is to Chinese food in China. Seriously, I couldn't find a decent steak in China for under 150 RMB. McDonalds in China is worse than in America, KFC is about the same quality, and Pizza Hut is more like an Italian restaurant.

On Teaching ESL in China

Teaching in China can be a lot of fun as long as you avoid teaching remedial English for lazy rich kids classes.  Those kids will ignore you while putting on make up or goofing off on their phones. I spent a year teaching AP classes in which the majority of students were from rich families, and it was very easy to tell which kids were raised by their parents, because they were serious students and good kids, and which kids were just given money.

The easiest way to ensure yourself good students, and thus an easier, more enjoyable time teaching, is to stick to the university system. The more famous the university, the more serious the students. For five years, I didn't have to teach "English." Instead, I was teaching composition, both fiction and non-fiction, the bigger issues of writing. I was also teaching debate, so had my Chinese students debating, in English, issues as diverse as women in politics, the environment vs. economic development, if a bad government was better than no government, and if teaching should be more than just a job (the students pretty much believed so).

But even secondary universities are still good options. I taught at a second tier college for three years, which gained me the experience for my CV to teach at a top tier university. Those kids chatted a little too much in Chinese, but most of them were so likeable it usually didn't bother me. I did have to teach them some grammar, but making boring but necessary topics interesting is the necessary burden of teachers.

Good relationships with your students is the most important aspect of teaching in China. Your Chinese colleagues will be too busy to help you with most things, but Chinese students, as a rule, love helping their foreign teachers. It gives them real world practice with their English, and most Chinese still have a lot of respect for their teachers.

On Weight Lifting

If you read my massivityman.livejournal.com postings, you can tell I’ve been pretty serious about weight lifting. I don’t just lift, I wear a stop watch to time my rest periods, I read books (mostly Mark Rippetoe) and blogs about lifting (T-Nation.com is a favorite of mine), and I even get annoyed when people hog the equipment I need for the next exercise I planned to do, because I plan carefully and don’t do things out of order. At my age, staying healthy has to be more science than art.

I’ve learned a lot over the years, and being a writer have a desire to share. My focus when I was a college kid in martial arts was on increasing my punching power, so I benched a lot. My bench reached 300 pounds and my leg press 500, which I thought was cool because I didn’t know what I was doing. I was young and any program could make me stronger. Then the chaos of adult life interfered and I lost most of that muscle. When I decided to get serious again, the Internet made information freely available. I started doing squats and deadlifts. I read about so many different exercises that I was driving myself crazy trying to fit them all in, then decided to ‘keep it simple stupid’ and my focus is back on the classic compound exercises.

Once I decided to work every muscle group every day just to see which muscles gave out. The shoulders gave out first, I suspect because the shoulders are so complicated; they have to move our arms in so many ways that they can only dedicate so many fibers to any particular direction. The chest gave out next, but the back muscles had surprising endurance. I suspect this is because we do use our back so much more often than our chest. Our back holds us up and lets us pick things up, and let’s face it, picking things up is what strong men are asked to do the most often.

But the legs have even more strength and endurance, being big, simple muscles with the primary purpose of carrying us around all the time. I performed the 21-day squat challenge one month before a fall semester began and lost 8 kg in those three weeks while my legs got stronger. Walking up stairs got easier. Back in college, I had a “leg day” but now I was squatting on Mondays, doing power cleans and leg press negatives on Wednesday, and dead lifting on Fridays, and the numbers for all three went up.  Today, my bench is only 275 pounds, but thanks to all those squats, my leg press is 750. It’s not that I think the leg press is more important than the squat, quite the reverse, but it’s instructive to compare the forty-something me to the twenty-something me and realize I’m over all stronger now than then.

The dead lift verses the squat is a matter of debate among serious lifters; I’ve realized that if your bench is your priority you don’t really know what you’re doing, just as I didn’t long ago.  As far as I can tell, the advantage to the dead lift is that it exercises the greatest number of muscles, basically every muscle behind your body. The great disadvantage is how long it takes to recover. Guys with heavy dead lifts might only practice the lift every other week. The advantage to the squat is more biochemical. It’s longer range of motion and its being equally, if not more, difficult on the way down as up, stimulates your heart, lungs, and hormones more than other lifting exercises, but it stresses the muscles less so it can be practiced more often than the dead lift. I do both, of course.

A couple of years ago I did have the goal of lifting my own weight over my head. At the time, I weighed 275 pounds and my overhead press was only about a hundred. So I did a lot of Olympic training lifts (not the stuff on TV, those are the competitive lifts) and lots of squats, hoping my weight would drop and my strength increase until they met somewhere around my college weight of 210, preferring 200. I lost 45 pounds while increasing my strength to lifting 165 pounds over my head. That brought me over a hundred pounds closer to my goal, but then my leg muscles started growing faster than I was losing fat, so I gained ten pounds back and now my weight keeps bouncing between 240 and 250.  Somehow I doubt I’ll ever lift 250 over my head, but I’ll make do with this progress for now.

There’s a lot of advice about lifting out there in the world and on the Net, and most of it is for people who aren’t very serious about it. The important thing to remember is that most of that advice worked for someone, which is why they are passing it on, but everyone’s genetics, goals, and gumption are different. You are your own experiment in health. Even if you don’t take care of your health, you still get results, just the results of too much sugar and sloth. It’s hard to be healthy in this world, when everyone is trying to sell you junk and steal your time, but all acts of individuality are acts of will to empowerment.