Shanghai, mooncakes, and cockiness

9-15-06 We ate teppanyaki all-you-can-eat Japanese food in Shanghai. Good lord. They set the beef on fire and our faces burned. Oktoberfest tomorrow. French, German, Chinese, Italian, American, Japanese at the table, gorging ourselves on buttery greens, peppery filet, and coconut-covered fried banana. I ate an entire plate of bok choy by myself-- the Germans said the butter, oil and salt negated the health benefits, but one whispered to me I'd live 5 seconds longer because I'd eaten it. I aimed to enjoy that 5 seconds.

Shanghai apartment buildings were massive. It felt like New York, winding through them on an elevated highway at night in the rain, their tops all lit in blue or yellow lines.



Outside one club, there were Chinese guys punching and pounding and kicking each other in the face, our first violence. We walked up the block to not be hit. That stuff fascinates me, then upsets me for 2 hours. The girls were giddy and ready for the next club. We went to Zapata's, an outdoor club with a million foreigners. A man bumped me rudely, and I tried to bump him back when he walked by again, but I missed. At the Mint Club, I went acrobatic in my dancing. A Chinese girl tripped on the ministage and nearly spun into the corner of our table. I caught her late, and her friend laughed at her. You don't do that to a friend. It made me attracted to the girl who fell, since she kept someone close to her who didn't give a damn about her.

My legs swung so fast as I was dancing that it felt like I didn't have any, like I was just a floating torso. A woman named Geeni came over to dance with the legless man, but I felt constrained then. I adjusted my movements to a smaller sphere, as friends watched and thought I was hooking up. Eventually she sat down, and I went back to jumping around. My back hurt the next morning though.



Kerri and our pal Diana wanted to pay Western prices for Western food, though we were making a Chinese salary, so I was unamused when my linguine with pesto came 20 minutes after Diana's tortellini. I further sulked because the girls went on about how they liked cocky guys. Last night, I'd enjoyed talking to Michael, the good man they rejected as "a little boy" because he was a bit shy and couldn't dance. It was my first sulk in 2 months: I was upset both by the sight of the men beating each other's heads in, and my two female friends here putting down nice men. There was so much cruelty, and their attitude felt like more of it. I felt like avenging all the men who didn't have what these two women wanted by flirting with and then abandoning some girl I met tonight. Wow, I thought, giving myself over to what was clearly a real sulk. When Diana asked whether the woman that tried to dance with me last night was not my type because she was "too big'"or "too old," I was tempted to say "yes," to push their buttons back, but I didn't. I just hadn't wanted to spend all night dancing with someone.



I sat on the toilet, and nothing! I asked the girls if they'd put a cork in my ass last night while I slept, and they said they hadn't, but I suspected. I was impotent from my ass! "This never happens to me," I said to them, ashamed. We walked by a family on the street with something cat-sized moving inside of a tied-up black plastic bag. Kerri stared, aghast. Oliver said "This is horrible." I felt like getting punched so I reassured them that it takes a "few minutes to kill a baby," but it would end soon. Diana punched me.

Kerri and Diana wanted to spend the day eating and spending money, while I wanted to walk around, so we separated. The mango smoothie with sweet tapioca nodules was excellent. In Shanghai, might makes right of way; couples step in front of a car, but not in front of a truck.
A man next to me on the street did a demonstration hitting a tennis ball with a string attached 15 feet and then it would pop back to him to be hit again.A huge sign claimed that the new building showed "Pulchritude."

At the Renaissance Hotel, we went to the Oktoberfest celebration, and I said to Kerri, "I didn't like the way you two were talking about men." There, I expressed it, between standing and clinking glass steins together, as the man in lederhosen urged everybody on under the huge tent. The sulk retreated, and I ate weisse wurst with kraut. Oli spotted his idol from the Bayern Munich soccer team, Carsten Yanker, who now played for Shanghai, and was too scared to approach him. To me he was just a bald good-looking guy, so I pushed Ollie to do it. His two fat managers joked by putting their hands in front of my camera, as Oliver sat there under the guy's arm, turning red. Afterward, Ollie said, "I tried to start a conversation, but I think he was not that much interested in this!"


A sweating German guy with a moustache brought out a long horn, maybe 13 feet long, rested it on the ground and began to blow into it. A drunk Chinese guy sat on it, pretending the end of it was his penis. A Chinese man in lederhosen that were too big for him lifted the drunk guy off the horn, cursing at him, and the guy got up with a smile. The German guy looked enraged however, and took the long pipe and made it crash up into the face and teeth of the Chinese guy, who held his face, and raised his hand in apology. I still could not crap. I pictured Metamucil--was this the week I turned the corner and got older? During the big raffle, Diana confessed in her German accent that she wanted to win a "voucher for the booty saloon." I smiled and said I needed a haircut too.

Kerri left me dancing on the bar at the big outdoor bar Zapata's. I stepped outside to look for someone I'd been talking to, and two gals with a lot of makeup said "hi," and grabbed my crotch. "Excuse me," I said, and walked briskly back inside. Shanghai was different! Still, I liked the feel of it. "The feel of the city, I mean," I said to myself. I had no one to joke with.

I talked to a nice Chinese woman for a couple hours, and I unzipped her purse, suggestively. When she zipped it up, I looked down at it, unzipped it again, and looked away. But I was just happy to talk with someone, and it turned sweet. We took a half-nap on each other's shoulders at a table in the club. I got her email and put her in a cab, then I headed to the hotel to crash. Kerri came home at 7:30AM, after getting splashed with champagne at the swank Bar Rouge when one hooker hit another in the face with a bottle, making her colleague bleed everywhere.

I could see the vague sparkle of sunblock on my arm, as we walked to a French bakery, our first sunny day in a week. They don't let them off first on the trains, so there's bumping at every stop. The West is right on that one. I like the curved green plastic guards they have up on the highway to block the lights of oncoming traffic at night, however. Score one for the East.




In the middle of us debating whether she'd paid me back all the kuai I'd loaned her, Kerri learned her favorite aunt, the woman who raised her father, had died. She couldn't call her Dad now, so I got the call, and was ashamed to take it, in the middle of a stupid argument about money.


Back in Hangzhou after a 2-hour crowded train ride, French guys dragged me to an empty bar they knew, the dice came out, and suddenly a Chinese girl was sitting next to each one of us. I talked to the one next to me for a while, who was having a terrible day, and said she felt sick. When I looked up, all the French guys were kissing their girls. Mr. Bean-looking Samuel looked at me, and said "Kiss her." The Olympic boxer next to me was making out with his girl, and nobody was playing dice anymore. I felt like I was letting Samuel down. He looked at me like he had vouched for me with these guys that I was cool and here I was being the kind of pathetic, nice guy that Kerri and Diana mocked. I felt like I was the last one in the swimming pool. The girl looked like she really hoped I wasn't going to try anything. "She wants you to," Samuel said, and went back to kissing. I had spent a good section of my life trying to kiss any woman who would kiss me, but... I didn't like this at all. I didn't want kissing based on economic domination. I liked the French guys, but when Sam left with his girl, I took a taxi home and SKYPED my ex at home, needing to talk to someone who liked my sweet side.



At our university, I had such a wonderful experience talking for hours in English with students, about attitudes toward love. They were wise, and made me have such respect for them. Then the man at the Mongolian beef stall let me bargain him down to 1 kuai each, and then the fruit lady did too, when I suggested it. Then the cabbie taught me how to say "pretty." His breath was metal-melting, but we bonded, talking about girls in Chinese. At least I think that's what we were talking about. You always sit up front with the cabbie here if it's just you. There was a maggot in my apple, which crawled out onto my hand, and I threw the core into the street. He reached into the glove compartment and gave me a napkin. I felt so good. Decency is the antidote to witnessing cruelty. Resiliency--sometimes a maggot will crawl onto your hand, but your mood survives.

In discussions, students told me Chinese women say "no" when they mean "yes," and that they threaten to move back in with their parents, and their white husbands take that literally and take out the suitcase, when what the wives meant was "I need an apology" and "be nice to me."

Kerri came up to my room to extract me from my letter to the Editor of the Times about hypocritical US attitudes toward Iran and nukes. On our way out the door, she reported that whitebread Greg from California was playing Christian songs on guitar with a bunch of students next door again, with his door open.
"Got everything?" She said.
"What do I need?" I said.
"Condoms," she said, too loud, then laughed. I didn't want to turn my head and see if the prayer circle were looking up.
"You're going straight to hell," I said.
At a new little restaurant, Kerri offered my phone number to a slightly annoying older Canadian woman, desperate to meet other foreigners. I got revenge by telling Kerri our mystery meat was her dog Abby from home. Kerri was upset that her family had waited a week to tell her that her favorite aunt had died, and when they did, it was with an email.

The man next to us used his chopsticks to turn over the fish with the dumb expression on its face. Chinese Fishermen never do this, apparently, because it means your boat will turn over. Additionally, never give your lover shoes or an umbrella, since they imply a breakup. And never, ever, give someone a clock as a gift, unless you want them dead.




Kerri's old pal Dee visited us, and she had news: Bomi's husband wanted to come back, since the bargirl he'd left her for wanted to go abroad to Italy. Bomi had started her new job and liked it. Dee and Kerri both agreed she shouldn't blow that and take the husband back. We hung with sophisticated local Chinese guys, and small-village girls Dee and her sister didn't know how to play the dice game everybody played here, repeatedly getting corrected for not raising the bid.
Kerri had told me Dee's sister always went for bad boys, and told her at the bar she should find a "good man," hypocritically I thought, after her speech of the day before. I told Dee's sister her father was a good man and that she should therefore find as good a man as him.
Dee looked confused and said, "You know her father?"
I did know Dee's father and I thought they were one and the same. I decided all along that Dee had been calling her "sister" the way you call a family friend "Uncle." "I made a mistake," I said and lied about what I'd meant.
The sister looked pained anyway. Dee explained that she really was her sister, but they'd been poor and had given her up to someone else to raise. I was embarrassed to make assumptions like that, considering my 4 parents have 10 marriages between them.
It was wonderful to see Dee in Hangzhou. She'd taken care of us when we first arrived in China, and now we could reciprocate. We introduced her around at parties and bars. She and Kerri talked about promiscuity.
Dee: Kiss-to-kiss keeps you young forever.
Kerri: Yes, I think you have to keep kissing people to stay young.
Jeremy: But hookers age badly.
Kerri: But hookers never kiss.
Somebody had seen "Pretty Woman." A worker emerged from a manhole in front of us like he'd escaped from New York. Operation let-em-know-I'm-not-interested continued that night, as Erika the cool and stylish Argentinian lawyer cooked for us. She looked like a more average-shaped Penelope Cruz.

I really admired the way she'd deftly rejected the drunken French guy when he'd made a play for her in front of four of us as we left a party; I trusted and liked her. Oli said Erika never liked anyone. When I left the Latin dance club, tired and feeling anti-social, her friends all tried to grab me and keep me there, so it was obvious everyone wanted us to get together. I didn't want to, and felt apologetic about it, even considering dating her just because I felt flattered.
It was difficult to speak Argentinian Spanish all day. It was easier with photo-gal Viola because I didn't speak a word of German, so it was English all the time. However, Viola's first words were always, "You didn't call me for so long," so I knew this wouldn't work.

Oliver let a girl take his attention and lean in too close. I told Kerri how pained Kim looked to witness this-- the nice Dutch girl with an obvious crush on Oli, and Kerri took him aside to let him know he was misbehaving.
Later, Oliver came and whispered to me, "Big trouble in little China," and then laughed so much his eyes closed. (see below)



I went to the courts and ended up playing tennis with two students and a teacher. My serve was terrible. Then in the second set, it was suddenly dominating, and I was embarrassed, and started hitting it softly. My aunt Carol was supposedly in town, though I'd never known her to make a plane on time. Then, the dreaded invitation came: Had dinner at Peppino's in Shangri-la (say Shanger-li-la to the cab drivers) with Aunt Carol, who has lymphoma but no health insurance. She was waiting until she could get Medicare. Even the Tory British girl from Marlboroughshireham, or some such place, said the US welfare system was off. This came after a rant about how immigrants were ruining council neighborhoods. When racists think our country is too conservative, you know something is wrong. When I ate a mooncake on a causeway on the lake with Carol, it was delicious except for the dried salty yokes in the middle.

Kerri and I went for massages by blind people. Not bad. At the end, the woman, who I suspected could see just fine, did the sudden head-twist on me that I've seen kill people in movies, but it merely made a chiropractic crack and I saw a few colors. I seemed to be able to still communicate with my toes.

It'd taken me all of 3 weeks to recreate my life in NY here: trying to keep up with too many people, hoping people would cancel on plans. Kerri said she needed to get a boyfriend to keep her out of trouble, and I felt the same. "Like a baby being born, I'm heading out," I said to a couple friends, trying to coin a term. It didn't stick.

I went to play tennis and this skinny, friendly student had asked me to play doubles with his friends. He would one day be a big boss, over-praising my serve but also delivering devastating backhands. He'd insisted on exchanging numbers. Later, he texted me that his mom had sent him a bunch of mooncakes for the national holidays, and would I join him and his friends for a picnic? Ex-pat friends here had warned me about these fish- and meat-filled frequent regifts. The fruitcakes of China. I said no.

At a party, Kerri and I met a really cool Chinese guy named Kevin who had gone to the college where we teach, ZUCC, and I'd gotten his number. I looked up Kevin ZUCC on my phone and text-messaged him. We made plans to get a drink Thursday. Kerri found him attractive, and she dressed like it that night. When we arrived at the bar, instead of the tall, muscular and funny guy, the person who showed up was twerpy Kevin, who I'd met on the tennis courts, the one who'd been trying to pawn off on me some of the mooncakes his mom had sent him. .I'd forgotten that Kevin was his name, too! Kerri glared at me. "Sorry," I mouthed. We had unwittingly agreed to a night out with some undergrads. Thank god they weren't our students. I didn't tell Kevin that I'd thought he was someone else. We played the dice game, drank one beer, and said we had to leave. The taxi was on me. At the Maya Bar, there was a Mexican contingency of 15 people there, which felt like home for me. I introduced myself to every one of them, and then they started buying tequila and singing songs, because Mexican Independence Day was in 5 days. Chopsticks were jammed into the lock on the bathroom.



The next day, Kerri was pissed at herself for getting too drunk and instant-messaging her ex-boyfriend, and could not find a log of what she might have said to him.
K: I need a strong man who can keep me in check. He was good at that. He once told me, "You and your American ego, stop it."
J: Why don't you call him and tell him you want to follow through on your engagement of last night?
She kvetched about the washing machine ruining her clothes. I continued to worry about reports of formaldehyde in local beer, and told her she was upset because she'd been embalmed. She had this great habit of admitting when she'd done something dumb--like have big emotional talks while drunk and a continent away. She cursed her lack of common sense, and told me her father had always said if she were sitting on the sink, she'd ask for a glass of water.