Iron Goddess of Mercy

Thousand-armed Avalokitesvara, lord looking down from the Pure Lands toward the faithful at their prayers, moved northeast to China and became a woman-- Guanyin. In Fujian province by the South China Sea, they pick a tea named after her, Iron Goddess of Mercy-- tieguanyin. She's actually a bodhisattva, but whatever. I almost bought a cup during Reading Week at Jojo's, the little teashop near Davenport run by two Chinese women, who took my order in its hesitant Mandarin and asked me where I was from. I've got a little sitting on my bookshelf now, an inch of dark green looseleaf sitting in two nested paper cups. When I shake them, the tealeaves inside wash against each other with a cool sound like beads. They're twisted in shape-- misshapen origami stars, broken paper cranes.

I used to read perfume catalogs, collecting the adjectives. I was charmed by the idea of their transience, top note to base note, mimosa fading as the minutes passed so you could smell the amber underneath. (Does fossilized resin have a scent? That's got to be a metaphor.) The obvious analogy is music, but I usually thought about it in terms of how planned the whole experience was, the fragrances unraveling as preordained. Cue tacky metaphor-- choreographed chemistry. But when I lift the cup of tieguanyin over my face and inhale, I don't have the right words for the scent. Musky? Oriental? A salt tang and an evocation of mist. None of that's right. I won't be able to get a job writing copy for those catalogs, have yet to learn the dialect of perfume.

But I'd like to bottle that scent, wear it in two dashes along my wrist. Iron Goddess of Mercy. I'll leave it in the cup for a while, exuding inert scent.

I got it at a guest lecture a few of us went to last week-- an expert on tea culture expounding on the variations of China's favorite drink (making ever finer distinctions) to a PowerPoint that flashed past so quickly I could never make my way to be bottom of the text. I understood about half. Then a woman from the Center for Tea Culture (rough translation) performed a short tea ceremony, made a small pot of tieguanyin and poured it out for the first row. Her mandarin-collared top, singsong declamations, and dance-like movements (down to the way she flicked her wrist to release a carefully controlled stream of hot water) were so obviously performative, it was hard to connect her actions to anything I might do in a Yale dorm with a bag of Tazo and a hot water heater. Afterward, we were given cups of fresh-brewed tea to sample, allowed to scoop some tieguanyin to take home.

The lecture was planned by one of the student orgs, a group of material engineers to which fellow Yalie Dana's roommate belongs. When we got there, the room was full, but a nice berth at the front had been cleared for us (Dana's the only blonde head in the room, a photographer with his Canon Rebel pointing his camera at us and snapping publicity photos again, again, as I strive to look attentive). After the lecture, the good-natured engineers circled Dana and Aisha and quizzed them over the six different types of tea. Chishio and I, being obviously Asian in phenotype, were given less notice, although I did get the usual. (Are you Korean? No, but everyone thinks that.)

Being mistaken for Korean was already kind of a running joke with me in America. Something about the thick, square-framed glasses, the straight-cut bangs and permed hair? But in Harbin, it happens roughly twice a day-- every time I make the acquaintance of someone new, every time I strike up a conversation with a fuwuyuan as I'm being served food or directed to the right aisle of the supermarket. On the one hand, I'm faintly flattered-- Young, another Yalie with whom I took Tina Lu's Chinese lit course, said she thought I was Korean all term because of my clothes. Hey, that's pretty cool, Korean women are famously stylish. On the other hand, I wonder what it means about my Chinese. My aunt (actually the wife of my father's cousin) claims there's something off in the rhythm of my speech-- too even, as if I'm chanting sutras or intoning aloud a freshly memorized text. I don't have the jarring tones of an American accent, but there's still that element of foreignness.

I'm wondering if that foreignness is being reinforced by the language pledge. I find myself speaking really slowly so the other students can understand me, sounding singsong or robotic by turns. There's a trade-off-- it forces me to think more about my diction, makes it more precise. It's not that I'm better at Chinese than anyone else-- there are plenty of students who read at a higher level, students who used more polished syntax in speech even if their pronunciation is less accurate. It's a form of cultural privilege (a word I can never say without smirking slightly, because I'm aware I've... got it? Because my use of it will mark me as something admirable but typically, fashionably collegiate...?).

Both my parents were Dongbeiren who spoke CCTV-standard Mandarin; I grew up without the linguistic baggage of a Southern accent, a Tianjin twang, a Cantonese intonation. It means that, when it comes to Chinese, the things I'm good at are fairly showy-- so much so that I worry about becoming a section asshole. The things I suck at, though, are easily hidden away. You'd have to watch me struggle over my readings to find out how few characters I actually recognize, or ask me how many words in that essay I had to look up online. I think my proficiency at spoken Chinese may be masking my actual linguistic deficiencies. And it's faintly humbling that what I'm good at, I'm good at through an accident of birth-- running start, no doing of my own.

I'm grateful, though. It makes this whole language pledge thing a lot less painful. In our last minute of English, Rusty gave an extemporaneous speech compared it to having a cigarette put out on your arm for two months continuously. We all clapped, glanced sideways at each other. Young wished me good luck, and I told her goodbye.

But honestly, it's been a week. It's not that bad. Sometimes I wonder at its efficacy-- great for learning to communicate at any possible cost, potentially problematic if you want to master legit shu1mian4yu3 because we default to ridiculous circumlocutions and sometimes even buffoonish gesturing. I actually feel slightly guilty about how not-restrictive it feels, as if I'm not experiencing enough adversity to grow as a person, or something. I guess I've got some faintly masochistic tendencies. The pain the feels productive becomes an anticipatory pleasure. Also, I overuse the modifier "faintly".

Of course I've slipped a little. Not in conversation-- just letting loose filler words, curses, uncaught. Don't have any viable Chinese-language replacements, yet. What's interesting, if not entirely surprising, is that I'm more talkative in Chinese. There's no pressure to be articulate. In English, I always felt the need to make my every comment not only accurate but also eloquent, so that I rarely spoke in class. My standards for myself are lower here. Come to think of it, I may have the language pledge to thank for that. I think on balance it's still a useful thing, although we're all slightly unclear on some of the details. Are loanwords allowed? Proper nouns? At a Korean restaurant, we had a tortuous but amusing conversation on western philosophy during which we tried to Sinify a bunch of names likely to show up on a DS syllabus, unsure whether "Lucretius" counted as a violation of the pledge.

Retrospection

I've been awfully remiss about taking pictures in Harbin, despite previous claims to compulsive photography, so I'm photodumping Beijing again. More text to come on coursework, language pledge, culture shock (or a surprising lack thereof), Marxism, New Modern Confucianism, oolong tea, translingual friendships, or some combination thereof.

Tardy

I'd been late to every activity so far, so today I overcompensated by showing up disgusting early to most of my classes. Finally made it over the Great Firewall here in Harbin, the alleged "Paris of the (Chinese) Northeast", a designation born of wishful thinking and Small Reference Pools. Taking a study break to post some pictures from Beijing.

Habit Formation

In middle school, I was part of a drill/dance team.

It's a Texas thing. Fight songs, Friday night lights, and stadium heat-- our curricular calendars revolving around the glitzy triad of football team, marching band, and red-lipped ladies in jazz shoes. I remember applying to my face a very precise permutation of warpaint, dictated by our director to the very brand and color (on the waterline went a Maybelline highlighter in some wintery shade, maybe "Alpine Snow"?)-- a hassle that put me off makeup-as-streetwear till sophomore year of high school. I could kick pretty high, struggled with sticking my double, showed very discernably almost no dance talent. I still have my right split, but whatever grace I might have accrued has been outgrown, just like I've outgrown those spangled red gauntlets and flesh-colored tights.

Since I've come to China, I've noticed an old drill team habit resurfacing, in the supermarket aisles and the smoky plazas crowded with pedestrians. I stand with my hands at my waist, thumbs pointing forward and fingers braced at the small of my back-- the way I filed into so many high-kick lines to brassy music, on that little yellow field by the high school. It's whatever. My stint as a Crimson Cadet wasn't a very formative experience in general. I can only guess this has something to do with how awkward I felt, shaking my silvery poms around the field lines and being told to "project"-- to smile my disconcerting jack o'lantern grin at the highest row of the bleachers. I feel awkward like that in China, a little helpless and vaguely like performing. My American-ness, unverifiable by yellow hair or obvious accent, slips on and off me like a drill team grin.

We went to the local market, which has changed surprisingly little since this time last year, the same fashions still arrayed on the silvery mannequins. The puff-sleeved dress in which I posed in front of a snowy Branford courtyard with Laura and Caroline still hangs on its rack, in mint-green, slate, and purple. I bought another dress, its bodice proclaiming in felted all-caps, "NO ONE SEEMS TO UNDERSTAND THE PROJECT." I find it charmingly cryptic, and anyway it's neither obscene nor (gasp) ungrammatical, so yeah.

In my perpetual quest for little beauties I found also this: a bin of lovely apples, with a matte satin finish and a porcelain pallor, as if someone had dragged them onto a .psd and toggled the saturation bar far to the left. Which is exactly what I'd like to do with my world, most of the time. "Life," I've said out loud a lot-- it's the sort of social misstep I make with alacrity in good company-- "looks best lightly desaturated and tilted towards blue." We didn't buy any. I didn't think they'd be as good to eat as they were to look at.

I've started wondering about CET Harbin. As a newbie Light Fellow, I've got no idea with it means to attend an intensive language program. When I try to picture it, I get some composite of Xu laoshi's L3 heritage class (a cult) and TASP (the only sleepaway camp I've ever been to, though hardly representative of that summery genre of experience... also a cult). I hate making generalizations based such a scanty sample of n=2 (which hasn't stopped me in the past), but I guess it'll be cultish? I'm a little bit afraid I'll bomb my placement test with such aplomb that the resident director (a biffle of some cousin of my father's, apparently-- Harbin-as-homecoming means for me a very small world) will mournfully rescind my acceptance. And there's the matter of full immersion. I've developed the boorish habit of volleying curses in sotto voce when I can't make myself understood. Usually this happens when I try to explain something internetty to my grandmother (something that'd be nigh-impossible even if I spoke perfect Chinese or she perfect English), a situation unlikely to arise in Harbin. But still. I won't have that luxury under language pledge.

As least blogging is becoming (almost disturbingly) easy. I've got this tendency to navel-gaze when I'm not surrounded by more interesting thinkers, who keep me flitting around the edges of their ideas instead of submerging myself in my own banal ones. Without that constant hum of distraction, that tendency's coming out. I've discovered something about myself as a result-- I've got a really irritating prose style. It seems to get at once primmer and doughier by the day; eventually I'll find myself producing the most impenetrably convoluted Victorianesque fare (because my soul strains naturally towards more decorous times), as my engagement with the English language fades. So, sorry, Dear Reader. (Isn't that whole direct address thing the most annoying Victorianism ever?)

My rampant consumerism is a constant no matter where I go.

I just spent a very long car ride singing along to Lady Gaga with my cousin Siran (alias Christina), who will leave for a study abroad program in Washington, D.C. four days after I depart for Austin. Things other than "Bad Romance" to rise in Chinese popularity: OPI nail lacquer and the Twilight saga. According to Siran, one look at Robert Pattinson's pearl-dusted jaw and Kristen Stewart's insomniatic eyes will cause the high schoolers of Beijing to start frantically tan lian ai. That's the Chinese idiom for dating, which I guess transliterates to something like "discussing romantic love". I find little quirks of speech like that charming (condescending of me?), picture powdered belles and dandies draped in rococo silks, sipping coffee out of crystals and talking eros a la salon. I just wish I knew some more.

I went shopping with my aunt, Jingxue, my father's youngest sister. First we made the obligatory trip to Hongqiao, the ostensible "Pearl Market" glutted with all manner of Maoist kitsch, knockoff Burberrys, and Guanyin pendants in addition to the titular pearls. It's a kind of soft landing into Chinese culture-- the place is always full of foreigners, negotiating the matrix of temptations in English whatever their native tongues. (How lucky I feel to speak commerce's lingua franca.) All the shopkeepers are savvy to that, shouting out words like "price" and "low" (not in that order) they probably plucked from some phrasebook. Next we went to Wangjing, where my aunt lives. I'm not sure whether it bears to Beijing the same relation Cedar Park does to Austin or Manhattan does to New York, whether exurb or borough. I do know it has a high Korean population-- we wandered around a commercial center in one of the Koreatowns looking at hairclips too gaudy and slips too narrow for me to wear.

My aunt commented that, even when I spoke no English, the shopkeepers could sense that I wasn't quite Chinese. Maybe I should set a formal goal of working on that or something. I don't want to get ripped off for the weird treacherous foreignness clinging to my face (or whatever), even if I figure getting hoodwinked in a Beijing flea market has gotta be more cost-effective than bargain-hunting in Texas.

I've got two more days in Beijing, one of which I'll spend at the Qianmen Hotel with the CET group. I'm ready to go. I've spent the past week being treated like a not-quite-person, with all my relatives' kindest intentions. I love my extended family (or something; not knowing them too well, it's the kind of abstract love distilled out of obligation and respect for tradition, only slightly more felt than my love for the US Constitution). And I'm not saying I'm totally ready to navigate China without anyone holding my hand (metaphorically, except at busy intersections.) But all the attention, the well-intentioned advice, the warnings repeated again and again by different concatenations of concerned voices-- it's getting oppressive.

Beijing

So here's a cliche: life is not art. It's messier.

I can't help but find this distressing. I'm the sort of person who adores coincidence, who sifts through the raw material of happenstance in search of patterns with some narrative potential. (It's the aspiring novelist in me, whom I've been killing inch by gentle inch for the past three years or something, a kind of euthanasia of which I'm not proud. The only thing I value more than useless pretty things is utility.) I love arc words, use them frequently and clumsily in writing. Because experience doesn't come with its own leitmotifs or ominous echoes, my interior monologue provides a suitably gaudy score.

Even by casting myself as this compulsive orderer, Rumpelstilskin spinner raveling the undifferentiated minutes into storied thread (ouch, tacky metaphor), I'm committing the exact sin I'm talking about. It's more complicated than that. I like the aesthetic of chaos. There's nothing like the studied randomness of falling glitter, grab a handful and let the spangled flakes scatter. Snowstorms, nebulae, Yale housing: I just can't pull that off. So, crystal lattices instead.

But I guess my time here in Beijing (slate-colored, muggy, the full-length jeans I packed for Harbin damp with sweat-- but hey, I'm a Texan, it isn't heat till you think of Hell) won't lend itself to that kind of pretty order. Here there is no even pacing, Freytag's Pyramid, that sort of thing. (Someday, I'll stop thinking of myself as the shy, Prufrockian protagonist of some modern novel. Storybook heroes don't act like me anyway-- they emote more, and have prettier eyes.) Maybe instead I'll adopt a vaguely stream-of-consciousness approach, which'll be a nice excuse to have my slavish adherence to conventional mechanics drop away a few paragraphs down. A few years ago I texted in MLA style. All points of pride soften; all habits lose their shape with time. (Looks like I interpret stream-of-consciousness as "the generation of tacky truisms". I'm a cliche factory. If I lampshade it, it's okay.)

I'm wondering if I sound a little bit insane. I've been in Beijing for three days now, and I haven't talked to a person under forty since I taxied into the airport next to fellow Stiles sophomore Jason Kuo. I guess that's a decent coincidence-- I sat the first leg of the journey next to my little sister's bandmate, who visited my house for at least one Asian party, the sort where expat engineers guzzle iced Tsingtaos and attempt Celine Dion karaoke. The flight I took from Austin to Newark was aswarm with family friends, the other full of Light Fellows. The twelve hours in flight were less painful than I remembered from similar motherlandic journeys with the nuclear family, sister asking for ETA at hour-long intervals while I tried to read. This time I bobbed in and out of a syrupy sleep while Jason next to me looked over his textbook, reminding me of exactly how much vocabulary had likely leached out of my head since finals week. My PRC passport exempted me from filling out the arrival card-- lucky, since they pretty much ran out of pens two rows in. A bilingual flight attendant with a Taiwanese accent and a Jay Chou haircut came through repeated with a beverage cart. Each time I asked him for hot tea, which I hadn't drunk since Yale, in Chinese.

Beijing itself seems to have clung to its hard-won post-Olympic sheen. The flashbulb image of it I carry in my head is something like six years out of date, from the first time I visited, when muddy styrofoam cartons half-full of food littered the roadsides and what looked like mules mixed with Mazdas on the streets. Probably it's confabulated with Tianjin, Harbin, Jiamusi-- one of the other cities I visited. My aunt's property in Lumingyuan is especially well-appointed. Olympic pairs figure-skating champion Zhao Hongbo was a neighbor; maybe he still is. We met him the last time I was here, and he signed a publicity photo after we watched him glide around the local rink to a flashy orchestral arrangement of "Nessum Dorma". Not realizing the depth of his celebrity, I seem to have misplaced it.

One thing hasn't changed. My hair is the right color, and I go around shielding my face from the sun with a scalloped parasol, just like a native girl. So when I ask someone to repeat what they said or can't manage to read a menu (in Yale L3 they give us the dictive tools to talk politics and revolution, not order dimsum), I probably give the impression of being rather stupid. Or hey, maybe they just think I'm Korean.

Et, O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole!

I’ve had that line stuck in my head all day, something about the voices of children singing in a dome. Had to look it up, because I don’t know French— just the dregs of Spanish (Texican, really) that stayed in the sieve of my mind after that AP test. The one meek protest I can still trot out thanks to all those readings, Neruda and Marquez— “Ya no hablo español despues del examen de AP”. If I’d had to guess, I would’ve figured “couple” for coupole, “dance” for dans, forgetting that extra “e” that goes with macabre, russe. False friends, Blind Idiot Translation. For Matthew 26:41: the vodka is good but the meat is rotten.

Today I helped my mom find a Russian-to-Chinese translator, to riddle out some Cyrillic sig left on her coworker’s email. She went to high school in Jiamusi, just a pinkie’s span from the Russian border on this map I just googled; she fell into Russian classes the way this Texan fell into Spanish. But she’s forgotten by now the words for “goodnight”, forgot even the phonemes link to the script, couldn’t sound it out.

Spanish at least uses the Latin alphabet. But if math is a language like any other (its poetry I never learned to parse, O boorish bathos of a silly “humanist”, trying to romanticize things she’ll never understand!) then I’ve lost it the way my mom lost Russian. Even the signs grown foreign, can hardly sound them out. Never mind what all those symbols mean.

I keep Chinese I think because it’s a matter of blood, a matter of pride. (Self-styled rational obsessed with honor, because it comes in a double dose, I’m Southern and Chinese. And neither a belle nor a junzi will bow for the wrong reasons— I like this story, pretty if untrue.) If I close my eyes to it for just a little while, a week a year or three, it’s scary how quickly I start to forget.

Just think of this as a prose poem, a license for pretentiousness. Pretension? Whatever. And I forgot the most important part: two days till departure.