Long night out

Chinese food was way better than the fake Western food, and one third the price. Kerri had been forced to drink wine and she launched into an explanation of the education gap in the US, which somehow led back again to my parents' many divorces. Oh well. Laughs all around. Teachers get paid one eighth as much in China as in the States. They can’t have two kids, but businessmen and farmers can—if you have a girl or a kid with a disability, you can have a second one. I banged my head on the ceiling of the hallway in the teachers living quarters. Ow. I kind of loved it though. Everyone had a square, clear bottle of cologne on their dashboard as an air freshener.


It was 3 PM and I'd neither had a sip of water nor gone to the bathroom yet. Both Kerri and I are from a city we like, Boston, but where we rarely felt like everybody else. Now, where do we go but a place where we stand out ridiculously.



The next night, our taxi driver made no attempt to avoid the oncoming motorcyclist in the merge, leaving the adjusting to him. We dined with Mr. Yu, a squat but respected older teacher who had spent 3 years in prison during the Cultural Revolution, and even talked about it. I guess he felt, at his age, what more could they do to him? He admired how we criticized our president. He was a welcome break from the people we kept meeting who ran companies that produced hubcaps and cardboard.

We arrived home and Dee started calling people to go out. Oh no. Kerri said she needed to 'drop a doogan,' which was her brother's word for voiding the bowels. She had impeccable taste in film , literature, and French wine, but she was still a Southie girl.
"Your first of the day?" I asked. I liked to keep her on her toes so she wouldn't fall and get hurt, by acting like I monitored everything.
"Second. The first one was just a little one."
"A dooganette?"
She nodded, as Dee paced and talked on the phone, and a shiny bald man revealed lottery #'s on TV.



At dinner with more people at a large round table with a glass lazy-Susan in the middle and 15 dishes, Shushu told me, “You're not a man if you don't smoke." I just waved no thanks. Kerri eschewed the shark intestine soup, but I didn't. A man poured water into his wine. There was a little glass for toasting, big for drinking. I followed Dee and ordered corn juice. Business cards went around-everyone was president of something. I ate abalone.

They all liked and missed Bill Clinton, and one asked us to tell him so, leading to laughter and toasts. Kerri asked about their feelings about the famous and dead Chairman Yao (actually starts with an "M" but I want to avoid the censors), and she had previously told me she didn’t like when I clipped her wings, so I didn’t kick her under the table for bringing up this taboo topic.
“I don't like him,” said a beautiful CEO named Ching Mei.
“For women, terrible,” said a male CEO.
I'd toasted everyone individually at the table, and was feeling the effects again. Long noodle soup came around, and with spoon and chopstick I did my best to get them into my bowl. Some fell and unrolled on the table. The young businessman in round glasses on my left named Mr. Fan, who'd been joking how people over 60 should be killed, pointed to my spilled noodles and said to me, “Like with girlfriends, you have some on the side.”
People said that was funny, but didn't laugh, as they had just been doing.
The beautiful older woman with a son in college told him, “Timeout."
Mr. Fan was turning red anyway from the wine. I realized he was our ride home, and I got half-concerned.
“Tall men are dumb,” it was agreed, a philosophy I appreciated. Kerri shook her head.
“No energy," said Mr. Fan, who was short and rotund. "The blood doesn't make it up to the brain.” He excused himself.
A version of Richard Marx' influential song "Right Here Waiting" played on panflutes from the speakers. Our host and driver Mr. Fan was gone for so long I thought he was throwing up, but he returned apologizing and pointing to his phone, saying “Customer.” Hmm.
Everyone talked about the hassle of getting to the airport for Kerri's luggage. Turns out the suitcase we got belonged to an old woman who needed her medication, yet nobody seemed in a rush to get it to her. A propos of this, Mr. Fan said he felt sure I would have many girlfriends. I asked him how many he had. “30,”he said, and told Ching Mei, the older woman I had a crush on, that she was #13 and Kerri was #14. I loved him.

Ching Mei brought in 4 of her Basque clients, the first Westerners we’d seen, 2 couples fresh out of college who'd signed on for 5 years in an automotive factory here. You may know how Chinese people are such good hosts that they will never let you pay for anything, if they've invited you, but they will also not let you stay sober without an argument. I'm not much of a drinker. I was invited upstairs to drink with Mr. Fan's 12 friends, and was pressured to “Gahng bay”—bottoms up—the red wine with each one, so I drank 12 times as much as they did, a source of great pleasure to them. I returned in a haze down stairs with red fake velvet, entered the private dining room, and said, "next." The two Basque guys, and then Kerri, got the same treatment. Hazing by the CEO's was a lot of fun, actually. As the timid waitress poured beer, one of the big boss men grabbed the bottle from her and waved her away without looking at her. He was imperious when he spoke to me, asking me about my life, and I felt interrogated and small. So I ate beans and tried to keep the room from spinning like the lazy Susan. I hadn't drunk this much since a summer night in college.

The urinal started to flush as I walked up to it. This crowd goes out every night, but is home by 10 PM, said Kerri. Good plan, with regard to working. I was pleased Mr. Fan was no longer our ride home. My older crush woman drove a Honda too. I thought the Chinese hated the Japanese. For the first time in my life, I felt acute pressure to open my own business.


We went out to a dark and loud night club, and Mr. Fan gave Kerri a wad of cash to buy Budweisers. Mr. Fan again told me I was good-looking even with my beard, and laughed a high-pitched laugh. This party-loving CEO who looked 19 years old offered me brotherhood, like Shushu had.

Ching Mei was so cute, and had a son in college. We watched the go-go dancers twirl their heads and hair in an infinity symbol. I looked around the club and every woman was doing it, a modified version of heavy metal’s “Bang Your head” dance, with hair flying and no faces visible, as everyone gave themselves over to the rhythm. Her drink spilled on my leg and she wiped it with a napkin, so I wiped hers too, for a few drops had fallen. I went to the bathroom and as I walked back out again, I saw her leaving the woman’s room. I redirected her to a darker corner where we danced. It went from waltz to lambada, and then we were kissing. I looked around for her Basque clients. I feared her reputation would be taking a hit, and that everyone would think all foreigners were rascals, so I guided her out of the club, to find a private spot. I heard the tallest Basque guy call my name, and saw a circle of people waving me over to the parking lot. Kerri had fallen badly, just like three years ago. I let go of Ching Mei's arm. Again, our whole year in China was in serious danger. I checked Kerri's foot, and this time it appeared to be a sprained ankle. I put her arm around my shoulder, and lifted her up with Dee's help, being supportive though I began preparing my lecture for the next morning about high heels and drinking. Ching Mei got into her Basque client’s car, looking at me forlornly. Mr. Fan stumbled toward the driver’s seat, and I started trying to coax the car keys from him as he laughed hysterically. This man’s son would be an orphan one day. The Basque guy ran up and snatched the keys from him with what I considered to be a jai-alai move, and then suddenly Mr. Fan was asleep in the back seat. I like people who know how to handle a situation. Dee was a bad driver, but she didn't drink, so she got the keys and I got Mr. Fan leaning on me in the back.

At the hotel, I put Kerri on her bed, and sat on the toilet. As I relaxed there, I suddenly saw Kerri through the sides of the frosted glass bathroom door, with no clothes on, running towards the bathroom I was in. It was terrifying. “I’m in here,” I said, watched her naked body turn to the side, where I heard her throw up in a trash can. When I came out, there was undigested Chinese food on the yellow rug, and I grabbed a hotel towel to clean it. The next morning, Kerri woke looking haggard and used three of her favorite expressions in one sentence: “I feel like ass, Doll, I'm not gonna lie.”

(Kerri's swollen ankle)



The next night we requested a night off from dinners with Dee’s big boss friends, and they obliged with a home-cooked meal. Dee’s old classmate, Bomi, who was staying with Dee because her husband had just left her for a prostitute, did the cooking. We all picked with our chopsticks at the ten plates of food in the middle of the table—delicious roast pork, noodles, three unidentified greens, and stinky tofu. The stinky tofu had blue spots on it like bleu cheese. I tried it, over Kerri’s warning. Everything else was delicious. I was sort of joking when I told Dee afterward that maybe Bomi and I should get married, cause her roast pork was so good. Dee said she would tell her. Sometimes a man needs to be forced. (This is Bomi teaching me Chinese characters.)


(Old friend, your time has come)

1st Week in China

(The Mall)


When I complained to Kerri that my laptop took longer to start up than hers because of all the data I'd transferred onto it, she said, “You have to some shit get rid of.” I agreed, noting that our English was already deserting us.

The written language I'd committed myself to learning was beautiful here, and I liked that writing a word--a character-- could be art. The closest we came to that was the "LOVE" sculpture from the 60's, with the sideways O.



The beds had no give when you kneeled on them, however, in our four-star hotel with a neon top like all the mini-skyscrapers here in Jinhua. I like a firm bed, but I woke up with my right arm dead after sleeping on my side, and feared permanent paralysis. I had to struggle to move the desk to get the Ethernet plug into the wall, and Kerri called me “Muscles McGee” which made me feel good. This was wise on her part, considering we'd have 8 hours the next morning of round trip borrowing of a car to get her suitcase and return whoever's this was that she'd taken.

When I returned to bed I was a little freaked out to see my shape preserved under the comforter where I’d been lying on my side. Simply arranging the comforter as though I were under it, made it look as if I were under it, but I couldn't think of a use for this, beyond scaring Kerri, which I resolved to do. If a stiff comforter was all that was needed, people wasted time when they put pillows and such under blankets to fool their parents or gaolers into thinking they were still there. It must have been all the tea that kept my thoughts from letting me sleep: for example, who was that a-hole at Ellis Island that changed everybody's name? Was he the worst hire ever or what?

I learned a few things about food the next day at dinner with Dee's friends and family: pigeon is good--ground up on a piece of lettuce, frog is bad, hot soy milk is bland. Been in China almost a week, and haven't had much rice. At dinner with a bunch of businessmen, it was my turn to eat the live shrimp soaked in dark vinegar. As I corralled it toward my mouth, it jumped off of my chopsticks and sprayed my face in vinegar with its whipping tail. I bit it and killed it but got almost no meat out of the shell. Everyone laughed supportively. “If America is so powerful, why doesn't it have its own language?” asked the smooth old dad as I wiped vinegar from my shirt. Only thing in English he'd said all day, but he was my favorite.

Shushu was Dee’s husband with the dumpling face and watery eyes. I liked him too, and we agreed we’d be brothers, though he sat around the house wearing only a purple speedo, like his smooth father-in-law, who wore gray undies. He asked at the dinner table how much money I made back in the States, and how much here in our job as 'foreign experts.' I low-balled it, to not rub it in their face, while Kerri rounded up. She knew them better. Shushu said maybe we were "too old to dance," since Kerri usually got hurt. I reminded my new little brother that he was just a year younger.


(Singing "I Believe I Can Fly")


Shushu made me join a group of musicians outside the restaurant, and play some Chinese violin. They pretended to think I was Chinese because I managed to make four bad notes and not break the 2-string instrument. Shushu drove on the wrong side of the yellow lines until traffic approached. There were seatbelts, but once again, nowhere to plug them in. We went for full-body massages, which I thought was a great idea. Dee said her father was afraid to have a woman touch him. I said I was afraid to not have a woman touch me, Dee translated it, and a moment later her family laughed. I didn't mean it homophobically, and grew concerned they liked the comment for the wrong reasons.

A picture of Donald Sutherland in a bathrobe with full white beard and long hair, surrounded by Chinese massage gals, was on the stairway of the massage place. I hoped it wouldn't be too rough. Turns out they only did feet and arms. We left. There were a ton of foot massage places, but K couldn't do that with her sprained ankle. At a second place, there was the same Donald Sutherland picture.

My gal kept looking at the guy massaging Kerri for ideas. She stuck her fingers in my ears, and tugged on them hard--how Edison went deaf. I was open to new techniques, but it was not very sensuous the way she assaulted me. Mostly I was trying to avoid getting injured. I asked her to slow down but her training could not be defeated. No trust was established, so I tensed up every area on my body she visited, was ticklish as a result, and giggled. Everything that felt good, she passed by, skipping my sore muscles and instead shaking my knees, and going so fast that I wanted to kick her in the head. Dee got rubbed and scraped with a hot ox bone and had purple bruises all up and down her back, visible above the neckline; she felt she needed to let out her cold, and said the bruises would heal in a few weeks. That I respected. I realized I’d seen other women in the streets with this condition, and wondered whether they were beaten at home.

When we left, I was in a bad mood from the woman sticking her fingers in my ears. Did they treat Donald Sutherland like that? Reflectors on the bikes at night would be a good idea, as we nearly widowed someone. Back at the hotel, a man yelled into his cellphone in the tiny elevator with us. I yelled, "Hi Doll!" to Kerri, and she yelled back, to send the message for him to quiet down. He looked at me. I was in no mood. Not all aspects of a culture are good, to paraphrase Claude Levi-Strauss. I felt that the focus here on education and family was right, everyone was in good shape, the food was great and the people had personality, but 5000 years and that's the best massage you can offer? Why did they think the only way to get people to feel anything dramatic was to pound away? I recalled an ex of such ancestry who had felt this way about all things amorous. Kerri called from the bathroom, "What's with the toilet paper dispenser that doesn't let you tear it, and only gets in the way?" I went to sleep grumpy, missing my own country, where things more easily made sense to me.


(They call foreigners "lao wai", which means "long nose", and not without reason.)

The next morning at the hotel, I went to work out in the gym and I only had spandex boxer briefs and a shortsleeve button-down left to wear, which I hoped would not be scandalous. I had to walk by the administrative offices and people in suits to find the gym because I couldn't read the signs. I thought I'd be alone at last, but a young woman who worked at the hotel came in, and told me to put more weight on the machine. I said, “Okay” and lifted it, and another woman came in and the two of them clapped. They added more, but it was too much for me. “Tai duo le,” I said. They said, “Ohh,” disappointed. They set me up on the treadmill, arguing with each other about what was the right speed. I was self-conscious about my tight undies, but I sprinted. The culture gap was seeming more funny than upsetting this morning. They got me tea and finally left. Hot liquids while working out would not have been my first choice. Again, I had no idea how to get back to our room, and ended up walking through the crowded lobby without my knickers. (This is a guy at the beach, not me, but it's how I looked.)


At lunch, the wife of a Communist Party higher-up was very nice and told us in good English about a trip to the States, but Kerri didn't trust her because she’d known things about Kerri she shouldn't have, during Kerri’s previous stint in China. Whenever anyone asked how I knew the pathetic few sentences of Chinese I knew, I'd been saying my stepmother got me interested and taught me a little, which took some explaining. Eventually they would get it out of me that she was my father's third wife. When the Communist Party lady asked me the same question about learning Chinese, Dee cut in and said I was a good student and wrote everything down. I followed her lead and revealed nothing more.

However, I was able to access an article on Yahoo critical of China for allowing an entire village to sink into toxic sludge, so the censors were not up to snuff. I just couldn't open the article my friend emailed me about a funeral in China where they hired strippers, nor anything else from the BBC, which must have done something to piss them off. In our hotel room, we watched the only channel in English, CCTV9, which had long documentaries about local innovations in watermelon-cultivation and ingenious engineers who dealt with the problem of unstable silt by bombing it all away, set to nice music.

Day 1 in China

(Dee's husband ShuShu. Kerri, and Dee)


Kerri had worked for half a year in China three years ago, and had left on bad terms with her employers after breaking her foot and flying home for treatment. Her good friend from that previous stint, Dee, picked us up in a court officer's police van. Dee was a friendly 26-year-old Chinese woman, both pretty and plain in the light blue dress she seemed to wear every third day. My middle school students would not have let this pass unnoticed. Dee commented immediately that Kerri had gotten fat, but said it so sweetly that Kerri just had to agree.

Our driver weaved in and out of highway traffic without much use of the blinker, during the 4-hour drive to Jinhua, and Kerri couldn't sleep for fear of death. Chinese signs had English near Shanghai, but this faded as we headed South. We drove by what looked like things I'd seen my mom protest against in the mighty 70's, and miles of high-rise apartment buildings.



A typhoon hit, which the windshield wipers couldn’t handle. We stopped at a roadside restaurant to flee the rain and Dee ordered us pyramids of sticky rice cooked in leaves, and soup. The urinal was a glass wall and trough with flowers behind it. Bad water makes it necessary to have soup and tea and to not swallow what falls in your mouth in the shower. I complimented Dee's looks, then the sticky rice, then her hometown of Jinhua. I wondered if a well-placed putdown might increase my credibility.

Arriving in Jinhua, Kerri pointed and said 'rickshaw’ but I never saw one. It was totally first-world. The older men were nerdy with tucked-in shirts, and pants pulled up too high, but young guys with attitudes rode mopeds. Kerri saw, and I heard, a guy spit a wad of phlegm on the rug in the lobby of our fancy hotel. He had called it up with such noisy gusto before spitting.

We wanted to sleep, but Dee, our sweet and efficient hostess, who had used her contacts to get us a swank hotel room for free and the police van as well, said, “Shall we meet them for dinner?” We got it that we had no choice but to thank them by going out to eat with them.



A man in a tucked-in polo shirt, showed up in a dark luxury Honda, with soft Chinese music. Mr. Hu spoke no English, and Dee said he was an important man in the court system. We went to a restaurant that had 'coffee' in the name, which meant 'Western' and struggled to make conversation when Dee stepped out for a phone call. Mr. Hu offered just me a cigarette, which I turned down, and I whispered to Kerri we would have to start at a later date our plan of asking people not to smoke around us. I imagined I'd never feel right doing it.

We ate noodle soup, and Mr Hu's wife--a judge--and their kid showed up, along with a balding doctor friend and his kid. It became clear the point was for the kids to get exposed to us, so as they translated slowly for their parents, we talked about school and what judges wear here--the same--and they asked if ours had “white hair” like the British. The doctor was nice and laughed after he said everything-his daughter whispered to me, “He likes to speak English” and I was thankful that he did, but mindful not to neglect our patron who didn't.

They asked if we wanted to go home to sleep early and I was surprised when Kerri said yes, wondering if that had been an offer we weren't meant to accept—they seemed surprised we were tired and we wondered whether they had ever experienced jetlag. When we got home, I made the bathroom uninhabitable for a while, and then lay down. I heard Kerri say, “Shit.” The heavy square red suitcase that I'd had to bump past a man at the airport baggage carousel to get for Kerri when she pointed it out, turned out not to be hers. The airport was 4 hours to the north in Shanghai, and we had someone else’s bag. Mishap#3. When we woke up in the morning, the problem remained.



(Here is how the local men cool themselves, rolling up their shirts to reveal their midriff like Britney Spears. Kerri yelled at me when I started doing it. She always wears black, and you can see the man in the photo seeming to stare in awe at her imposing Western bosom, stage right. I got yelled at for this photo too, but it was an accident. Below is me at the lake, trying the shirt cooling thing; it works, but then the sweat from your belly gets on the fold of your shorts at the groin and when you stand up, you appear to have peed yourself.)

Night Before Leaving the US

My old friend Helen drove me to Boston in her mom's car. She sat on my bed as I packed up the suitcase my stepmother had given me, and carried the guitar as I trudged down the stairs. We rested my stuff against the brick wall of the parking garage, on East 11th street, and then off we went. It took an hour to get out of Manhattan. It came up that she had left the guitar against the wall, and hadn't I put it in the car? We looked at each other, and I began to hum. Mishap#1. We turned around and headed back to the city as the sun set, knowing guitars don't last on Manhattan streets. Helen felt bad, but we just hadn't communicated. When we got there, the old Puerto Rican man said, "You are lucky. A man tried to take it but I chased him away." I couldn't believe it--I gave Helen the thumbs up as she sat in the car, and thanked the man. "You are VERY lucky," said the guy. Okay, okay. I gave him ten bucks. Helen drove off with us at her usual grandmotherly pace, and I controlled the music, arriving in Boston at 1AM. She is such a good friend. I was happier for her than for me that the guitar had survived, and then felt guilty when Kerri and my mom convinced me to leave it after all that. It was more at risk in Boston, however, because I could picture my mom over-watering plants above it.


Similar to this over-watering, my mom has this hobby where she likes to diagnose everyone around her with mental illnesses. One person is OCD, another ADD; her favorite one for me is that I am bipolar, because sometimes I have more energy than other times and I like to give her unrequested, annoying neck massages. Her previous hobby was knitting bulky sweaters for us, and I never appreciated it until she replaced it with badgering us all to go into therapy. She reads enough about these disorders that her diagnoses make enough universal sense to seem to apply to you, like your horoscope in the newspaper. (Here she is shouting, "Both of you, go to therapy!" and trying to crush the brains of me and my sister under her dry, crackly thumbs.) I mentioned this to her on my last night in North America.
“I should get you a t-shirt that says, ‘I'm not happy unless I'm undermining my children's confidence,'” I said with a smile.
“I don’t think you're mentally ill,” said my mom. “I just think you get depressed sometimes.”
Never mind that that's a mental illness. It meant something to hear that from her, more than even getting an oversized red sweater. Faint praise is the only kind I can believe anyway. I felt levers sliding into place that had long dangled unused. I was ready for action. Give me problems, I thought.
I heard a thump from the other room, and walked in to see my laptop bag with my brand new expensive laptop in it had fallen off the white formica table to the floor below.
“I'm so sorry,” I said to the CPU.
“It's okay,” I tried to hear it say, “I'll still do great work for you.”
I knew if I really believed it could have a relationship with me, that would be mental illness, and me mum would be right. I wouldn't tell her I quarter-believed it, standing there talking to pricey equipment the way some folks talk to plants.

In the morning, my mom sweetly drove me to the airport and joined me in the line. I saw Kerri stumble up in a turquoise shirt with several giant red suitcases. The huge and beloved radar golf ball on top of Logan airport was gone and had been for years.

Mishap#2: The mean-looking lady behind the counter asked for an invitation letter that the Chinese embassy had kept. I’d insisted that the embassy make a copy for me, but I’d unforgivably neglected to bring it from New York to Boston. My mom turned to me and said, “You WHAT?” just as I was going to try using charm on the menopausal lady. Mom was my kryptonite. The lady said, “You can't go then.” I was tired, humiliated and could see my whole year in China going up in smoke. Without charm, all I had was anger. I glared, shook my head, and resolved to go to another counter. The woman went and got somebody else, and after a while, they let me board.



We watched “Bringing up Baby” on the plane, because I'd long known Kerri wanted to be Katherine Hepburn. Then, in preparation for non-Western toilets in China, I sat on the little dirty airplane toilet and whispered to myself over and over, “Can't be prissy.” I prepared for a year of dehydration, since a glass of clean water wouldn't be as easy to come by. We switched planes at O'Hare, and I said to Kerri, “Let's just stay in Chicago." She didn't go for it.
18 hours later, we landed in China, and neither of us appeared to have developed deep vein thrombosis. Kerri said, “Do you want to deplane?”
“Deplane, deplane,” I said.
“Okay, Tattoo,” she said, which I didn't appreciate because I'd been much shorter than her when we met. (see picture below)
She rifled through a red bag in the overhead compartment, and then zipped it shut suddenly and spun around.
“Oh, that's not my bag!” she said, and burst into laughter. I really enjoyed her ability to laugh at herself. I also liked taking buses on the sunny tarmac, but Kerri didn't like the crowding.
As we stood smushed between forty Chinese people, I said, “It's a joy being with you here. Let's say that now in case that changes.”
“Don't say that, doll,” she said. She called everyone “doll,” in a Katherine Hepburn way, and I in turn called her that. (Here's me and Kerri and friends at our high school graduation, and then with Helen, my father and stepmom facing the other way.)

Bearded in China

I like this pic because it looks like I'm a singer in 1978, singing love songs only you can understand. Dan Foolgelberg. Matt Demon. Falafool.