Weather-vane

I really shouldn't be a travel writer.

I'm realizing now how useless this blog will be to any baby Light Fellows (and Greenberg Scholars-- represent!) who happen to stumble upon it via the forum. I definitely creeped on some veteran blogs during the chaos of the application process, found all the commentary on academics and student life really helpful. I've totally failed to provide any of that, which makes me think I should do a round-up post sometime soon. Just not tonight.

I also start almost all my sentences with "I", which must be really annoying. That, and my bottomless love of navel-gazing. What I've provided you with (Dear imagined Reader!) is not so much a tour of Harbin via the transportive power of the Written Word, but rather a tour of the dream-mists and wildflower angsts inside my head.

Dream-mists. Wildflower angsts. What. Even I don't know what I'm talking about sometimes.

I'm not actually as bitter, as emotive as I might come across in these posts-- still the same ossified heart, the deep glassy moods like Lake Baikal, just couched in all this maudlin metaphor. Sometimes I feel so disingenuous, like I'm affecting this performance of sensitivity or something. So then I backtrack, reel in the rhetoric, qualify it into a even-dictioned moderation that better befits my emotional obtuseness. Which is also kind of annoying, all this pomo baring of the device.

Of course I remember that curve Kelly and Erica showed us. Mine is flattened out-- the little bumps I can meditate (literally or metaphorically) away.

But sometimes I catch myself watching myself in this stupid, unproductive way-- marking the driftings of my mind the way the wind is marked by a weather-vane. It's interesting. Despite all my avowed faith in mental self-discipline, I instinctively view everything I think, feel, believe as external forces, no more under my control than that gathering of dark clouds in the distance portending rain. When I ask myself whether I believe in God, or love, or Palestine's right to self-determination, I can take my answer and construct some clumsy, ill-informed justifications around it. But to find the answer, I use this inarticulate I-Ching mechanism, studying my own emotive drift with augury intent.

This is the mystic in me. It's hard to explain. A lot of the time I don't actually think in words, but in this rush of images accompanied by sensations of recognition or confusion-- there's nothing more frustrating than the feeling of really knowing something I can't articulate.

None of this explicitly relates to Harbin-- these are just little inanities I happen to have realized while I'm here. Maybe this is a side effect of the language pledge. I'm starting to realize how deeply I distrust language as a vehicle for the communication of anything truly worthwhile-- this, even though I love words, hope to be able to use them with something approaching grace one day. I think this is the secret Taoist inside me, who didn't understand the Dao De Jing, but nevertheless views with creeping contempt any Way that can be shoved inside the tiny box that is language. And so I grow increasingly uncomfortable with the rhetoric of transcendence. Which should provide much fodder for self-directed irritation, considering the undisciplined way I use big words.

I've been detecting other subtle shifts in my... Weltanschauung. Like how I've started identifying as Manchu, inexplicably, making me the Chinese equivalent of your blue-eyed blond who calls himself Cherokee on the basis of one ancient great-grandfather. My father's ancestors rode in with Nurhaci, if I understand right, under the Plain Red Banner-- all that's left of the Manchu warrior in this pampered daughter of the suburbs is my insistent stoicism, I guess. I feel kind of cheap, claiming that heritage without the language, but that's not my fault-- only fifty old guys in some village really speak Manchu anymore. Someday, if I really have a lot of time on my hands, I think I'll find someone to teach it to me.

Or maybe this is just one of those phases, a brief bout of collegiate hyperpostcolonialism.

And another thing-- I've started romanticizing Texas. Not just the grassroots-activism-and-indie-rock eco-urban beat of Austin but all of it-- the sunbeaten rocks and megachurches and even that imaginary line cleaving that western corner from the rest of the state, dividing Mountain Time from Central. These are things I've never experienced, obviously, so I can only lay claim on them the way I lay claim to being a Manchu. Probably this is my own fauxetic, emotionally distant brand of homesickness.

Doldrums

I was sick last week, spent most of Sunday bobbing in and out of syrupy slumber, the thick sleep of the infirm. I kept time by the jar of jasmine tea I’d steeped before succumbing to the doldrums, watched it go from pale to umber. By the time I woke up for real it was river-bottom colored, lukewarm and too bitter to drink.

I wasn’t the only one. Of course I remember the old joke, the words of Harold Bloom (on the other end of Ellen’s phone line, smoke-frail and punctuated by wispy little coughs, I assume): “These are dark days for Yale indeed.” Well, these were dark days for CET Harbin, everywhere ashen and trembling Americans, clutching their bellies and sipping at congee . It must have had something to do with our trip the weekend before, the Sunday we spent on Phoenix Mountain. Climbing a mountain before lunch will do that to you, I guess, especially if you’re fed questionable preparations of raw vegetables right after, and the mountain sky rains all over your sweat-drenched clothes just before your homeward journey.

So that was fun.

Not that I regret going. I didn’t even make it to the top. But for someone who's fiercest tussle with gravity was, until two weeks ago, the fifteen-minute trek up Science Hill, I think dragging myself halfway up those craggy steps by the cataracts is good enough. I mean, I’m the most spoiled specimen of suburban princesshood I know. I once brought high-heeled boots and a full complement of makeup to a monastic retreat in the Catskills— imagine my surprise when we ended up picking our way through these tangled paths by Woodstock, me rocking ridiculously on uneven ground with sequined hairbows in my braid. I haven’t had unpainted nails in at least three years.

I'm cool with nature, in theory. I think photos look best when they're not marred by human figures, and my favorite cliché is the sea. But I like to admire it from a distance. Give me painted sweeps of moor, or postcards prepackaging desert for enjoyment without sweat. I’m the kind of person who’d rather read a panegyric to Yellowstone than visit the place myself. No need to experience it, really— someone else, with finer sensibilities, has already done it better.

I wish I could say that Phoenix Mountain changed my mind. It was beautiful. But it was that sort of richly exploitable beauty, more thoroughly picked over by the creators of Romantic canvasses and Hallmark cards than any other iconography, except for the lone rose and the simpering cherub. The heaps of tourists, who shoved their elbows into our photos and punctured the stillness with their chatter—they just furthered my suspicions that the faux-pristine natural vista was so boorishly cliché.

Still beautiful, of course. Universal appeal. I could have been looking at Avalon, or Middle Earth, or… Ithaca. Which is part of the reason I would’ve rather been at the Summer Palace maybe, feeling another kind of anticlimax altogether. My approach to travel becomes, at times, a chain of tiresomely pseudointellectual defenses against disappointment. Someday, I’m afraid I’ll stand in front of the Hagia Sophia and feel nothing.

So maybe Yale has desensitized me to pretty things-- not to the sharp, concentrated charm of a rococo masterwork or a graceful turn of phrase, but to being immersed in prettiness all the time. Just a year of living in this unreal bubble that looks like a snowglobe in the winter and a period piece still the rest of the time. I can't describe beauty except in the most cynical terms.

I’m getting off track. That’s not at all what I meant to say— I’m still a little bit sick, probably, have had non-vegetarian meals only three times in seven days. Maybe part of the reason I didn’t get much out of the mountain on a visceral level was how aggressively I processed the whole experience, filtered it through all these layers of language and self-consciousness and memory-in-the-making. The whole time I was aware of how I would think about it afterward, what I could maybe write about it, how many photos I’d be able to take of the mists and rolling grasses to make all the sweat worthwhile. It’s really weird to ostensibly enjoy nature with an eye on the bottom line, but that’s what I was doing— robotically running the impact calculus, computing the psychological profit.

I just used the phrase “impact calculus”. Yeah.

Of course the whole time I’d shoved the experience back one remove, was watching myself from this insulated vantage point of narrative and disingenuousness. And it was stupid. I kind of forgot to really feel things— the way the glossy cold permeated my skin, gave it the chill smoothness of a river rock. How impersonal the babble of the cataracts sounded, as if we could do anything to the running water and it wouldn’t matter. See, this is the romantic in me, willfully submerged behind layers of hard-lacquered rationality (itself a pose, at least at one point) most of the time. My letting it show here is its own kind of disingenuousness, milking ossified emotion for the rhetorical possibilities. Really, I just like exploiting myself. And the results aren’t even that interesting.

Memorial

This will be my last 731 post, I swear.

Professor Hu asked us about our visit after lit class last week. Some of the kids last year weren't too impressed, she said. They didn't think it was objective enough to be credible as a museum.

I didn't think of it as a museum, I said. I thought of it as a memorial.

Stale

I feel this lingering obligation to revisit 731, even though my impressions of the place have long since gone stale. Well, I've got a few minutes, and my laundry hamper's empty. Otherwise I'd probably snatch my blouses out and start running them under icy water-- China makes a domestic out of me every time I try to dodge the usual vocab lists and essay prompts.

So I figure, why not take the time to pound out some dada? I'm sure I can dredge up some angst, indignation, or ignorant presumptuousness, and serve them up warmed-over in some very ponderous sentences. Side note here, but I actually hate what China's doing to my writing style, which was admittedly always rather precious and brittle-- like those blue-eyed shepherdess figurines you see on retirees' mantle-pieces, all nostalgia and nausea. Fine Chinese prose is known for its succinctness, a compressed, high-concentration elegance like good brick tea. Not that I've managed to pick that up from reading motherlandic literature. (I cling to hope-- after reading White Oleander I emoted in sentence fragments and fragrant analogies for weeks.)

Instead, I find myself stalling, sometimes translating back from Chinese-- in which my style is arid, academic, and dead on top of being unsophisticated, wobbling between toddler and fossil to tragic aesthetic consequences, I'm sure. And I'm always untangling these syntactically ridiculous sentences that make me want to forfeit my right to the English language.

Blogging in this state of mildly farcical dissatisfaction-- no one angsts this much about their prose style, not even really me-- is actually kind of depressing. It draws attention to the floaty faux-profundity of my thoughts (How very small my mind!) as well as the pretentiousness of my prose (Stop that alliteration!). I go back and cut out words, and still there's this mass of modifiers and tongue-tied imprecision, growing out like a cancer. This is, I guess, a kind of stylistic anorexia-- resenting my sentences for their flabbiness, trying to starve them down. (I can't.) Healthier than some alternatives, I guess, since China makes me feel virtuous when I don't eat. (I do.) Not that I actually want to churn out Good Modern Prose-- what n+1's Elif Batuman calls "a nearly unreadable core of brisk verbs and vivid nouns". I'm with Batuman. Thank you, Hemingway, for being publishing's Kate Moss.

So I just quoted a literary journal in a blog post. And wrote too much about my tendency to write too much. And none of it was about Japan.

I should probably go back to the tea treatises tonight-- no more time for groundless ruminations on one of the most soul-crushingly depressing topics available to the East Asian intelligentsia. So I'll just say this, all pigheaded obviousness and fortune-cookie cliche:

It makes no sense to conflate the policies of the WWII-era Japanese imperial government (and the often reprehensible conduct of the associated military personnel-- ugh, total war) with the character of the Japanese people today. I hate that sentence, but whatever. It's not the same nation. Japanese schoolchildren-- against my expectations, actually-- are briefed about the atrocities in the classroom, and I'm told that Japanese newsrooms positively hum with debate about the extent of civilian culpability in the war crimes of the imperialist era. By raising its children to hate blindly-- broadcasting exploitation flicks set in Nanjing, boycotting Japanese goods-- China won't accomplish anything but win Japan's bewilderment and contempt. They're forcing the mask of enmity over Japan's face-- if we become what we pretend to be, don't we also become what others insist we are? It's especially annoying now that the generation flinging insults and accusations back and forth don't have any authentic memories of the war. They're mining TV show caricatures in order to manufacture evidence of one another's cruelty and incompetence.

I'm aware that talking about "China" and "Japan" as implicit monoliths is imprecise and stupid. It's a shortcut, a metonym, or something.

Dana and I talked about this on the bus over to 731. We were more or less in agreement about China's stubbornness-- Sichuan's being rebuilt using Japanese dollars, my one-on-one professor says. I claimed it had something to do with the old Confucianism-- the rectification of names. What China wants is for Japan to make everything right by calling a spade a spade. That's a crude oversimplication, sure. But would it kill Tokyo to use some more emphatic rhetoric in the various expressions of "remorse" they've already released? Maybe I don't understand because that's the way of the US-- this masturbatory performance of GUILT, theatrical and choreographed as a dance. I'm a consequentialist. Writing a poem about the Trail of Tears is easier than making change. (But is it easier than blindly tossing money at a problem? Also, I hate it when I find myself talking about "change" in such fuzzy, rhetorically shallow terms, as if I'm writing a pat political poem of my own. Blame it on ignorance-- I've got no idea what sort of change should be made.) You can bow your head before all the shrines in the world-- such actions are often significant as signals broadcasting the acceptance of accountability, and as gestures of humility. But they're not actually useful.

But I sometimes feel this stupidly personal sense of victimhood when someone brings up Manchukuo or Nanjing. My identification with China is visceral and blood-deep, even though intellectually I don't think much of the nation-state as a marker of identity. And I also have this weird thing about the medical profession-- romanticizing it to the extent that I could never be the doctor for fear of tumbling down dear old pedestals, venerating the Hippocratic Oath as a sort of personal Nicene Creed (even though I interpret it in this possibly problematic, lunch-buffet way-- support legalized abortion and euthanasia, after all). So I view the 731 experiments with the appropriate amount of horror, even if it's a horror of the intellect rather than of the tingling spine. Medical expertise was perverted for murder, shattering the doctrine of nonmaleficence which I'm wont to hold sacred.

Room 11, which I think of as the Redemption Room, holds artifacts related to the testimonies of former 731 personnel, who renounced their past crimes, released previously suppressed information, and tried to atone. They did things like give up their pensions, seek solace in Buddhism, allow themselves to be grilled by Chinese journalists. But I'm still wondering how they could have lived on after working 731. Primum non nocere.

Unreal City

I don't cry a lot.

Wikipedia says the average frequency for women is five times per month. For me, it happens maybe twice a year. The last time it happened for real was a year ago-- Beijing in the summertime, silken whirring of a restaurant fan, jasmine tea and thin-sliced Manchu wraps spinning atop a Lazy Susan. Some of those details are probably confabulated. But I had cheap plywood chopsticks in my hands, and my dad was talking. I'd heard it before-- World War II history, Japanese war crimes, Manchuria and Nanking. I had a western in my purse, Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. That detail is not confabulated. I'd just gotten to a good part so I kept fingering the pages, while my dad waved his hands with the violence of a helicopter blade.

We make the same kinds of gestures in debate, my dad and I, but though he relishes those kinds of confrontations I try to avoid them. There are things I disagree with my parents about. I'm not the kind to let them know. They called me when I was in Portland, canvassing for Maine's No on 1 campaign. When I told them what I was doing there I got this spiel on anomie, but I just slunk into silence and looked at the sky. Disagreements make me so uncomfortable-- that's probably really bad. I think it's because I'm so terrified of being wrong I'd qualify all my assertions into absurdity anyway, and my relativism is the relativism of a coward and a fool.

But that time-- Beijing in the summertime, teacups and flatbread on the Lazy Susan-- I didn't go quiet and look away. And then I was sitting with my shoulders hunched, trying to read Lonesome Dove with tears blurring my vision. My face was swollen red, people in the restaurant were looking, but I couldn't stop. I remember feeling horrified, in this floaty, outside-myself way, trying to remaster my own rebellious body. I wasn't even thinking about war crimes anymore.

And honestly, it's not the kind of thing I spent a time thinking about anyway. I'm a petty person of rather impoverished empathy, something I feel guilty about all the time. So at least there's that. But I'm still not sure why I got so angry, there at the dinner table. I'd made my opening statement in a vague offhand way, contesting my father's broad-brushed vilification of the Japanese people (probably just a sort of rhetorical pose). It was just a throwaway comment; I didn't want to launch a debate, especially one I'd quickly make personal with those strange, shameful tears-- shameful because of the misrepresentation.

I never meant to masquerade as a person of passion. And I can't tackle Sino-Japanese relations in a single post.

Yesterday we went to a museum, a little block of brown-brick buildings where Unit 731 once operated-- the Imperial Japanese Army's germ warfare division. The dim gray enclosures where rats were bred, germs cultured, and men killed by other men trained to heal (I reminded myself), had been scraped clean and fitted with explanatory placards in Chinese, Engrish, and Japanese. I'm still not quite sure what I felt, walking the silent perimeter in my sunglasses, holding up a pink-edged parasol. The sun beat down over a tumble of rocks and yellow-green vegetation. I thought of the heatwaves shimmering past Lost Alamos, and the scientists vomiting into scrub-brush when news of Hiroshima reached their desert labs, and Oppenheimer with his remorse and beautiful eyes. That resonance didn't jar anything in me. I reminded myself that I was walking around what was once a charnel house, but the slaughter was too distant to be imagined (too wicked to be imagined), and there was no weight in my chest or sting in my eyes.

Inside they'd stocked display cases with ceramic bombs, medical instruments, old documents, and dioramas. I was glad they hadn't depicted the Japanese doctors with leering faces, depersonalizing them instead with surgical masks. They looked like hastily made sculptures, impressionism in 3-D, just a twist of limbs in agony and the steady-handed slash of a knife. They were vivisection scenes.

And I kept thinking, they should've used white light instead of yellow. More jarring that way, in the sterile vein of medical horror-- they'd kept the walls rough for the verisimilitude. Maybe there really is something wrong with me.

I'll write a little more later. I'd got other tedious thoughts, about groupthink and redemption and memorialism and the potentially masturbatory nature of guilt-- tedious because someone has thought them all before, with more finesse and less confusion, and my own ineloquence will surely betray me again. But it's late, and I'm tired, and though my eyes are dry (and will be), I'm starting to feel a little...