Nankai Rob

You know, I really did have grand ideas for this blog this semester, but time defeated me. I even started writing a few intriguing, penetrating cultural studies, but then other things popped up. Like a trip south to Guangzhou for my wife’s visa interview, numerous  errands related to that, and, well, you get the idea. And the truth is, I just don’t have time to write what I want. So let’s streamline this process. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what I’ll miss and won’t miss from China. In the past I posted regular lists under the heading “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” and that worked well enough, so I thought I’d just go ahead and rely on that format. This time, though, I’m putting a twist in it. Instead of “Ugly,” we’ll have “Your Friendly Survival Tip.” Why? First, because there are only so many different riffs a person can compose on pollution and hideous architecture before the whole aesthetic concept of “ugly” starts to seem pointless. Second, I see things all the time that a newbie in China really should know if he/she is to survive. So. . .here we go.

The Good (What I’ll Miss)

#1:  The food – Many, many moons ago I was in Shandong province, and I taught for a semester with a much older American man who had been in China for a LONG time. Someone asked him once, just before he left, what he would miss about China. He just said, “food.” I thought at the time that was awfully superficial, and maybe even insensitive, China being so rich with culture and history. Why would you not say something about the country’s glorious heritage, or the wonderfully relational way people act towards each other?!  The thing is, what you learn after years in a country rich with culture and history is that on a daily basis you never see the culture or history. Even when it’s there. There are certainly still ancient buildings, traditional tea houses, Peking opera theaters, and the like, and those are enchanting for a while, but eventually they stop being enchanting and become part of the landscape. And the virtues you begin by attributing to the local people at large you realize are actually diffused pretty widely across the society, and that the country is in fact filled with individuals who are as unlike as they are alike. Which is how it should be, of course. One of the things I’m happiest about is that I lived in China long enough to know how foolish it is to say “the Chinese” with reference to just about anything. People might have cultural traits in common, but never to the same degree across the board, and never with the same implications. What’s deceptively profound about saying you’ll miss the food is that a statement like that is precisely what a Chinese person would say if he or she lived overseas for a while. When’s the last time you met an ex-pat who said, “What I miss is my country’s glorious history and heritage” or “I miss the warm camaraderie of the farmers in my country”? You know what you will hear? “I sure wish I had a plate of dumplings right now” or “I would kill a baby penguin for a change to have a bowl of my mom’s noodles tonight.” Maybe not a baby penguin, exactly, but you understand the sentiment. So when I say I’m really going to miss the food here, I want you to understand that not as a superficial statement, but as a declaration that, just like a long-term resident of any country, it’s the little things that make you look back.

The Bad (What I Won’t Miss)

#1 The Pollution – There really is no way to properly express how polluted China is. I’ve bought several air-filter masks over the course of the last year, and within a week even the best of them–the kind with breathing valves and aluminum clips to seal over the nose–turn a nasty gray color. The air here beats everything into submission. White shoes become dark gray, buildings look like they’re several decades old even though they were built last year, and when you wash your hands, the water always turns gray or some other drab color. In fact, if you were to describe how this part of China looks and feels, “drab” wouldn’t be a bad word. I’ll never forget a trip I took once from Tianjin to Beijing when I was listening to an album by the spooky electronic duo The Knife. I had listened to it a few times and was intrigued, but it was awfully bleak music, so it was hard to identify with. But then I stuck it on when I was taking the train through the countryside during winter, and all of a sudden the music made sense. Hebei and the countryside around Tianjin and Beijing really does look like it’s recently been bombed, and in the winter it’s the closest thing to a post-apocalyptic landscape that you’re likely to see before the actual event. It’s horrific. It looks the way frigid Swedish electro sounds. And it goes on forever. Scott and I used to make long-ish distance bike trips (50+ km.) outside of Tianjin, and every time we went it got a little worse. The last time we set out, we rode along what used to be the Grand Canal centuries ago, and which a few years earlier had featured some halfway decent clusters of trees (not really forests so much as planned orchards). This time, though, the entire stretch of trees had been clear-cut, leaving a miles-long beige strip of dirt running from the inter-city expressway to. . .well, coneivably another province. We didn’t bike far enough to find out. And in case you’re wondering, the recent “airpocalypse” you probably read about (or experienced) was every bit as bad as it sounded. I’ve never experienced anything like it. Everyone I knew had headaches or sore throats, even if they only went outside for a few minutes. Unreal.

The truly remarkable thing is why I’ve tolerated it for so long. I can remember commenting wryly in the past, with my circle of friends, about how polluted it was. We never acted horrified or concerned. We mostly just laughed about it, with the unspoken caveat that we couldn’t wait to horrify people at home with our stories. It really wasn’t until this last year that saying, “Yep, it sure is polluted today!” became a statement of concern. I don’t know why it took me so long. I mean really, how ridiculous is it to say, “Yep, it sure is polluted today!” with a grin? That’s just like saying, “Yep, there sure is a lot of strychnine in the water supply today!” or “Yep, there sure is a lot of salmonella in this hamburger!” I have no idea why I used to be like that. It’s always been bad, although I think in recent years it’s gotten worse.

People have had enough, too. Any Chinese people with money are trying to get their kids into schools overseas, and one big reason is because of the pollution. Nobody wants their kids growing up in a place whose air feels like it’s been piped in from a coal refinery, especially when anyone with an ounce of common sense knows it’s not going to get any better. Don’t believe the green-technology hype. If 90% of your nation’s waterways are so polluted they’re completely unusable, it really doesn’t matter what kind of technology you develop. Re-building nature isn’t nearly as effective as people like to think, and it also generally doesn’t happen. After all, there’s just no money in rebuilding nature. Not in the short-term, anyway. Shutting factories down and redoing them with a view towards a healthy, life-giving environment would take many years, and no politician on the planet is willing to risk having the national economy slow to a halt just for something silly like sustainable existence. (That includes American politicians, too, by the way; let’s be fair.) But there’s significant tension in China over this fact. I’ve been in China off and on since 2001, and I can tell you right now that people are a lot less optimistic than they used to be. The dominant attitude is beginning to be: “When do we get to reap some of the benefits of all this development?” Real-estate prices are still sky-high, food prices rise precipitately every year, and there still are no reliable health care options for most people. Economic figures are only convincing for so long, and then a person looks outside and says, “That’s great that we have such robust economic growth, but I’m still breathing poison and it’s getting worse, not better. I really don’t think it’s worth it.” It’s not for me, but then that’s why it’s good I’m leaving now, not later.

Your Friendly Survival Tip #1: Ask Multiple People for Directions

I remembered this when we were asking for directions in Guangzhou. I asked a police officer, who assured me the street I was looking for was on the other side of the city. I asked another person in a magazine store who assured me it was just a few hundred yards away. Marie and I walked a few hundred yards, asked someone else, and that person had no idea. We finally bought a map, had someone in a convenience store point out the place we needed to go, had another person write down the exact name in Chinese, got in a cab, and finally got there. Remember, people, that about 90% of Chinese people will tell you where to go even if they have no idea what they’re talking about, because saying “I don’t know” in China can look bad. Always, always, ALWAYS ask at least three people, no matter how sure they seem.

Again: something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. Recently I’ve had to go to one of the local notary publics to get some documents translated and notarized. It was quite an experience, and I would say if you want to understand anything about China or Chinese people, you pretty much have to have spent several hours sitting in a tiny government office waiting to get something done. Or if you want to broaden your net, make sure you wait several hours anywhere. The grocery store will do, too, and if you don’t think it’s possible to wait several hours in a grocery store, you’ve never had to buy groceries the week before the Spring Festival. I had to, and I experienced something I would have previously said was impossible: a traffic jam inside a store. Not with cars, obviously, but with shopping carts. I eventually had to abandon my cart and get a hand-basket, because there was literally no way you could get through the store with a cart. It was gridlock. That kind of thing is educational. I’ll explain why, with a quick trip to the notary.

Quick being, of course, the absolute opposite of what it was. The office itself was really nothing more than a glorified shed. There was a series of service windows, and separated from them by not even two meters was a row of chairs where you could wait. The entire building (such as it was) was probably 10 meters long altogether. People, that’s SMALL. And when you think about this same place being crammed full of people, you’ll get some idea of what it might have been like to wait there. I had brought along a good book, knowing ahead of time that I’d probably be there all afternoon. China teaches you to be pessimistic that way. Assume something’s going to take all day, plan appropriately, and you’ll always be good to go. Most of the other people there, however, didn’t bring anything. And everyone was involved in what seemed to be the most complex business known to humanity. When I got there, an older man and what appeared to be his son were at window three, and when I got up to finally get to my business two hours later, they were still there. I have no idea what they were doing. Registering land rights for a plantation on Mars, I guess. Most other people were at the window for a good twenty or thirty minutes at the very least. Those not at the window were clustered around one harried employee whose job was to explain to each customer what paperwork they needed and what they needed to do with the paperwork.

A sidebar here. In the pantheon of all-time worst jobs, this guy has to rank somewhere in the top ten. Imagine working in an office where no customer has a clue what to do, every affair is life-alteringly important, and no one knows how to wait in line. It would be like working as the postmaster general for the Mongolian Horde. Only with less patient customers. God bless him, this particular public servant did his job about as well as you could ever hope: he had seemingly infinite stores of patience, and spun from one customer to another every few seconds, each time with a different piece of information, and only raised his voice when the din required it. I have no idea why they didn’t have another four or five people stationed outside in the courtyard working with other customers so as to lessen the load, but then there are approximately eight million other things I don’t understand about organization in China, so whatever.

And what of the customers themselves? During my first year in China, in Shandong province, I used to think Chinese people didn’t mind waiting in huge lines because every time I was in a huge line people just stood (for the most part; this wouldn’t be during national holiday time) patiently and calmly. Nobody yelled, nobody snapped at anyone else, nobody fidgeted or seemed to be the slightest bit impatient. Wouldn’t you think that was patience? I did. But here’s what I’ve learned: Chinese people LOATHE long waits in lines. They hate waiting with the burning heat of a thousand suns. They hate waiting more than you’ll ever hate waiting, even if you visit the DMV every day for  the foreseeable future. You can’t imagine it unless, as I said before, you’ve spent an entire afternoon just waiting to do something like notarize a document. At some point in my second hour in the notary public office, it occurred to me that although I was definitely tired of waiting, I only had to wait like this once in a while. I grew up in countries where you generally just don’t wait very long. (A “crowded” American mall deserves the qualifying quotation marks around the adjective. An American mall is to a Chinese train station what the Gobi Desert is to downtown Hong Kong. People in China wait longer in lines for cheap cabbage at the grocery store than Americans do at the most crowded mall in the country.) If you’re Chinese, you grew up waiting. At grocery stores, at the post office, at restaurants, outside your classroom, everywhere. I mean every. . .where. Waiting in an overcrowded country is just a necessary evil.

And again, don’t kid yourself into thinking people get used to it, or at least not in the sense that they no longer mind it. If someone smacks you in the face with a fresh mackerel every morning, after a while you’ll adapt such that it doesn’t catch you off guard, and in that sense you’ll have gotten used to it, but you’d have to be off your nut to enjoy getting smacked in the face with a fresh mackerel every morning. Chinese people react violently or at least impatiently in crowded places only when there’s a lot at stake. So, for example, if you try to buy a bus ticket to a different province during the Spring Festival, get ready to throw some elbows, because people don’t have a lot of time off during the year, and if you lose 12 hours because you weren’t able to get a ticket in time, that’s too much. Otherwise people will mostly just mutter under their breath or vent their feelings to a friend nearby. There’s nothing else you can do, and in China that’s the guiding principle: react only in such a way that you’ll benefit from the reaction. If you freak out in a post office, it’s because the employees are sitting around not doing anything (which happens pretty frequently) and if you don’t go nuts, no one will do their jobs. If you complain to an official, it’s because your business is so important that you can’t wait any longer. Nobody rebels on principle in China. Nobody would ever say, “It’s extremely unprofessional to have only one person helping us with our business. I’m going to complain to the manager.” Nope. You cut in line or elbow someone or yell at a cop because that’s literally the only option left to you.

I have to give a shout-out to the people at the notary public, too. They were thorough and professional and even, dare I say it, pleasant. I got my stuff down and I was out the door a mere three hours after I got there, but then the wait really wasn’t their fault. It was largely due to the guy buying land on Mars or whatever, and even then, if you’re Chinese and you finally get your turn at the window, you don’t give a crap WHO else is waiting; you waited a billion years, and you’re going to take care of every single jot and tittle on your contract. Period. I can appreciate that.

A disclaimer: I meant to post this several weeks ago, so my apologies if it’s now a bit dated. Also, I keep promising I’ll post pictures, and I will, but I need to go someplace to scan them first. So for now: text only.

Ah, the Spring Festival, that wonderful time each year in China when you can expect to have the best dumplings you’ve ever eaten, and also to be woken up at 4:00 in the morning by fireworks that are only not battlefield munitions because of a semantic technicality. This is a good place to start, because if you want to gauge your attitude to China, and also take the pulse of the nation generally, look no further than this one festival. I was talking with a friend a few nights ago who’s been in China for not quite a year, and he told me, “I really do think the Spring Festival is the most fun holiday I’ve ever experienced, and that includes Christmas.” That’s one approach. Then there’s me. It isn’t that I hate the Spring Festival; it’s just that after a certain amount of time the massive fireworks and crazy traffic really aren’t funny or interesting any more. But here’s the interesting thing: that particular attitude isn’t too far off from the Chinese mindset itself. I’ll illustrate how this is so with two Spring Festival memories, one in 2003, my first full year in China and the other 2012, last year, which I figured was going to be my last in China but which ended up being the penultimate. So let’s dive right in.

The first was in Shandong province, in a little village near the coastal city of Penglai. When I say “little” village, by the way, I don’t mean “relatively little,” as when the Chinese chuckle about my having lived in tiny little Taian, a city whose official population is up around a million, because “big” in this case is a city like Shanghai or Beijing that has upwards of 12 million people. No, this was a village of around 100 people, all of whom were either related or at least intimate with someone in the Zhang clan. This guaranteed that my presence there was so far into the realm of the bizarre that most of the villagers weren’t even startled by my presence. All except my friend John’s aunt, whose house we visited the day after the official advent of the Spring Festival. She hadn’t been told I was coming by, and when John and I  walked through the door she smiled and nodded familiarly to John without at first noticing me, then turned to face me and started like a frightened horse. Her eyes shot open and her jaw dropped. I just smiled and said “Happy new year” like I belonged there and walked right past her. I have other vivid memories of my time there. We had dumplings many, many times, which I have no problem with. Homemade dumplings are hard to beat. John’s parents also bought several large bottles of Pepsi because they’d never met a foreigner before and had no idea what I’d want to drink. All they knew was what they’d seen on TV shows and in movies and in those cases Americans always drank booze or soda. I smiled and drank every glass they gave me, even at breakfast. Even at that early date I’d learned how important it is to enthusiastically accept hospitality in China. That was a crucial lesson to carry with me when we ate leftovers for breakfast. In the Chinese countryside you eat what you’ve cooked until it’s gone, and that means if you have a clam-bake for lunch (which we did one day) and don’t finish it that day, you have it for breakfast (yep, I had clams for breakfast; I don’t even like clams for dinner, and for breakfast it’s about like eating a shoe-sole. . .with a glass of Pepsi). Don’t let that fool you into thinking the food was bad, incidentally. People in the Chinese countryside REALLY know how to cook.

I also remember not taking a shower for 10 days because it was cold on a level you can’t imagine. Outside it was probably in the 20’s (fahrenheit, which puts it below zero for all of my metric-system readers), which is not exactly frigid, but as this was the Shandong countryside, there was no central heating, or any other kind of heating for that matter, inside the house. It was warmer than outside, but it wasn’t WARM. There wasn’t a bathroom, either. For that, you had to go to a little wooden shack with a single unshielded lightbulb dangling from the ceiling and a hole dug into the ground. As for a shower, that came down to a choice: do you take a basin of hot water out into the courtyard and rapidly scrub yourself down before you freeze to death, or do you just keep your many layers of clothes and hope they stifle the stench? I chose the latter. And that was a wonderfully comic choice because when I left John’s village I spent a few nights at a nice hotel in Beijing, and walking into the lobby carrying my military kit bag (that my dad had bought me at Fort Leavenworth before they moved) and looking and smelling like a boxcar hobo was funny on every level.

This visit was also why I started learning Chinese. No one in John’s family treated me like a visiting foreigner. When the family gathered on the kang (a large bed heated by the kitchen cookfire through a duct in the wall) to play cards because it was the only warm place in the house, I played right along with them, even though I didn’t understand the rules of the game. Uncles clapped me on the shoulders and enthused loudly about one thing or another without caring in the slightest that I had no idea what they were talking about. John’s parents joked with me and even played jokes on me (“The bus is coming!” “It is?!?!? Oh, no! I’ll run and get my things!” “No, actually it isn’t.”) as though I had been a member of the family for years. And yet. . .I couldn’t say more than about ten phrases to any of them. I had already decided by that point that I wanted to stay in China beyond that year, and as I sat with John’s family in their very simple country house, I came to the conclusion that being unable to talk with people so warm and outgoing was unacceptable.

I remember something else, too: joy. In the countryside, at least in the Shandong countryside near Penglai, though I expect it’s similar in most rural areas, the chance to link up with family is rare, and likely the only time during the year when you’ll be able to see certain people in your family. That kinship is extremely important because life is hard. Even fairly well-off farmers are dependant on the weather and the whims of the urban markets, and things can go south quickly. Keeping up with family isn’t a convenient, check-the-box-every-few-years reunion after which you can assure yourself that if someone dies soon, at least you saw them before it happened; it’s insurance and retirement fund and social stability, all rolled into one. If your aunts, uncles, and cousins still come by to say hello during the most important holiday of the year, then regardless of what convulses the central government or the local party apparatus, you’ll survive. So when you set off firecrackers, eat dumplings, and walk the dirt roads to visit the rest of the clan, you’re not just celebrating simply for the visceral enjoyment good food and loud noises provides, but also for the sake of still having family, still having a place to live, and still being able to look forward to spring, which is coming in two months or so.

And trust me, if you live in a village with no inside heating, spring is a big, big deal.

Today was the first day of class for the new semester, and after introducing myself and the class (The latter took about five minutes because a speaking and listening class with no textbook and no required exam is a self-contained phenomenon; if you know what speaking and listening are, then you know what to do in class. Expanding on that would be like expanding on a class whose title is “Walking Laps Around the University Track.”), I let the students ask questions. You never know what you’re going to get when you do that in China. The majority of Chinese students are petrified on their first day of English class because although they’ve studied English for years already, they’ve spent about five total minutes actually SPEAKING English (none of their teachers stress conversation; there are lots of reasons for that). Today’s class actually did ask me some questions. Good questions, as it happens. I made a comment early on that in the beginning I had a hard time teaching Chinese students because no one talked or reacted to me in any way, so I had no idea if they understood anything I was saying. I then said that after ten years of experience, I really do enjoy teaching Chinese students.  A student popped right up out of her seat and asked, “Why?”

My immanent departure from China has reminded me of a few things, one of which is that I really do like Chinese students. For that matter, I really do like ordinary everyday Chinese people, too. What has frustrated me to no end over the past several years has not been my classmates at Nankai, or the students in my class, but rather a system which is so top-heavy and overcrowded that few if any of my students and classmates have had the opportunity to demonstrate how gifted they are. Almost all of them get crammed into whatever opening they can find. But that doesn’t answer the question of why I like Chinese students.

So let’s flip the microscope around. There’s a certain sense of entitlement with American students in college, as though higher education was one of those things that just happened, like gravity or the seasons or crappy music on the radio. This is partly because America has so many institutions of higher learning and so few students who apply to go there. I say that from a comparative standpoint, as in China it’s the exact opposite problem. American univerisities require a fairly extensive dossier of everything from exam scores to class grades to teacher recommendations, while in China everything comes down to a single exam. In the first case the institution is trying to make an educated decision between a few thousand candidates, while in the latter the choice would be impossible if it required so much information because it’s between tens of thousands of candidates. The exam system, whose specific content is new but whose position at the center of Chinese society is about as old as China itself, is intended to streamline the process. That’s a labored way of saying that your entire life, as a Chinese student, is determined by a single exam. If you get a high score, you enter a top university, get a great major, and likely end up with a great job. If you get a low score, or don’t pass, you go to a lower-tier university and end up in a factory or a restaurant after you graduate. Still, though, regardless of the practical considerations after graduation, students who get into a university in China have a sense of excitement and relief that no American student can possibly understand. This is not due to the guarantee of a great future so much as the knowledge that for the next four years life will be more free, more interesting, more active and stimulating, than anything that will follow.

That might sound odd considering these same students still end up taking about double the course load an average American college student would, but again, comparison is everything. The average American student is entering college after what was likely a pretty relaxed, active high school experience, and probably finds the academic workload at the higher level very difficult. The average Chinese student is coming off of a final year of high school in which the work load alone (something on the order of 70-80 hours of study per week, with no breaks) is a major reason for the predominance of eyeglasses. Students are under such stress, and have to work so hard, that they start to lose their eyesight. Compared to that, college life is a dream come true. You live with your friends, you get to run around campus and play basketball during your free time, and unless you do something monumentally stupid you’re guaranteed to graduate.

How does that help answer the question I was asked earlier? To begin with, there’s this fact: here, I’m needed. That sounds a little ego-centric, but every teacher and artist likes to know that his or services add something to people’s lives, and regardless of what kind of semester I’ve had professionally in China, my students have always been vocal about enjoying what I’ve done with them in class. That has nothing to do, incidentally, with whether or not I’m intelligent or more qualified than a Chinese teacher.  Think about it for a second. There are foreigners all over the education system in America, and almost limitless options for recreation and academic pursuits; in China, most students have never had a foreign teacher before, and don’t have nearly as many options. That means when I do an exercise in class that has them out of their seats running around the room, or creating a story in a small group, or merely preparing a discussion, they’ve never done anything like it. Any good educator or artist has a touch of the missionary about them, so introducing someone to something they’ve never seen or done before is fulfilling in a very different and more fundamental way than, say, a well-prepared and executed lecture in their home country.

This isn’t self-serving, either. The goals of education tend to be either too abstract or too practical in America. A class is set up for a purpose no one rightly understands, or merely to help someone find a job. Oftentimes teachers themselves are only aware on a theoretical level what the point of education is, but in an environment like a language class in China, where students come from an entirely different tradition, you’re brought back to something so fundamental it gets passed over in every pedagogical seminar: the need for wonder. I myself am a student of literature, and I maintain that if you read Hamlet or Anna Karenina or Watership Down with no sense of wonder at the feats of creativity and insight accomplished in those works, you’ve missed the point completely. I first became aware of this in Shandong province, where at my university I was given a reading class and made it my personal mission to introduce students to the sheer joy of reading. This led to moments I’ll remember for the rest of my life, like when one student read a novel all the way through in English, the first time she’d ever done that, or when another student was a ball of excitement becaused he’d gotten lost in The Count of Monte Cristo. None of them had ever had the chance to just read. Not read for an exam or read because a teacher told them to, but just. . .read.

I have come to see that sense of childlike (yes, childlike; not childish, but childlike) wonder as not an optional extra, but as key to any good class, and it’s changed how I teach and study. If you’re a teacher, and you’ve lost the ability to rediscover what you’re teaching, either through your students or on your own, then either your pedagogy or your subject is wrongly-chosen. And I owe Chinese students a huge debt here, because in opening doors for them to read and think in my class I rediscovered just how wonderful education could be. Talking about Hamlet with students in Shandong who had never understood a word of Shakespeare in their Chinese classes made me excited about Shakespeare in ways I never was in the past. Poring over Emily Dickinson in preparation for students who had no frame of reference for her poetry made me approach her in a way I never would have before.

So why do I like Chinese students? Put simply, their need for wonder, and their willingness to discover it if you’ll guide them towards it, has infused that same need for wonder into my own studies. If I’m a successful student at the University of Oregon, it will be largely because Chinese students have taught me how to teach.

So. . .how long has it been since I actually posted anything? A million years? More? I’m  not really sure. I could give you a host of reasons, but this is the blogosphere we’re talking about, where attention spans are about those of a swarm of gnats at a Michael Bay premiere (assuming, as I do, that gnats do in fact have short attention spans; I can’t imagine it would be otherwise), and it’s likely the people reading this blog noticed my absence for perhaps a few days, then shrugged and just moved on to the rest of the entries in their blog feed. Or not. Maybe your life fell to pieces and you took to drinking fortified wine in a homemade bomb shelter, reading Camus, and waiting for the darkness to come. If so. . .well, sorry, I guess.

But by way of excusing myself a little bit, I’ll just say that I got married, and present this picture as proof, then we’ll move on.

Barring a world-ending cataclysm, I’ll be leaving China, possibly for good, in four or five months. If you’ve read more than a handful of my posts, you’ve probably noticed a distinct upward curve in my cynicism. My relationship with China has been a troubled one these last few years. I burned out big-time on the education system when I was a teacher, then I got excited again when I started my master’s degree, then burned out bit-time on the education system again, only from the other side of the teacher’s podium, then I got excited again at the possibility of spending a year just studying and writing here, then I got burned out big-time on China generally. The latter was the most insidious because there really wasn’t anything left within the culture or the country itself to keep me going. Actually, maybe I should rephrase that. It isn’t that the culture just ran out of interesting things, but rather that I stopped being interested in them. There are lots of reasons for that, but the simplest way to explain is that I’m ready to move on. Ready to move on to a place where I can breathe again (the pollution here stopped being funny a long time ago, and this winter reached truly absurd limits), ready to be in an academic atmosphere where I’ll be stimulated and challenged, and really, just kind of ready to move on generally. I’ve done everything I meant to in mainland China, and once you’ve reached a point like that, the little everyday things just don’t have any wonder left for you, so you start lashing out at all the things you don’t like. And I’d gotten to a point, last semester, whenI didn’t like much of anything.

But here’s the problem with attitude, quite apart from the fact that when you let yourself go more than a few meters down that rabbit hole you end up sounding like an annoying, grumpy old man: it leaves too much out. Through a variety of circumstances I’ve been reminded this week of a whole lot of things I’ve forgotten about my time in China. Yes, it’s true that there’s nothing left here that I want to do, and yes, it’s true that I find lots of things annoying (I for one maintain it isn’t humanly possible not to be annoyed at Chinese traffic or the pollution in the air), but it’s also true that I’ve been involved with China, either full-time through living here, or part-time through thinking about it or studying the language on my own, since roughly 2001. That’s a long time to do anything. Anyone whose blog on a place he’s lived willingly for over 10 years is nothing but cynical is a giant hypocrite. That’s like going to same restaurant every day for a year and complaining to your friends about it every single day, the response to which is always a simple one, “Dude, go somewhere else.” Or even better, it’s like that joke Woody Allen tells at the beginning of Annie Hall, in which two old ladies go to a restaurant and complain about it, saying, “There are two problems with this place: the food is terrible, and the portions are so small!”

Accordingly, I’m going to try to write a lot more this semester, and the tenor of what I write is likely to be a good bit different from what it was. It’s hard to get your head around something like leaving for good a place where you’ve lived for over ten years, especially when it’s had so many memorable experiences. I’ll be exploring a lot of those memorable experiences over the course of this semester, and asking a few questions. One, what does it do to a person’s thinking to live overseas long-term and then return to their home country? Two, what can we understand about where China’s heading, socially, politically, and spiritually, from something as simple as an informal autobiography written by an outsider? Three, and I’ll put this simply: what’s China like? You can’t answer that last one if you’ve only been here a few months, or honestly even a year. You have to have time to fall in love with a place, fall out of love with it, then learn to love it in a warmer, longer-lasting way.

 I’ll also do my level best to keep things entertaining because this is still a blog (of sorts) after all. The last thing anyone needs in this insane world is another long, dark journey into the self. If that’s what you’re looking for, you can find any number of high-quality novels and poems on the subject with content profound enough to actually get you to think, as well as even more low-quality blogs with content less profound than a game of Frogger. There will be a certain amount of necessary self-exploration, but it will always be coupled with something about China generally, because who I am has been tied to this country for a long time. So keep reading, and if it gets frustrating, I understand fortified wine is easy to either buy or manufacture.

While in France this summer visiting my girlfriend’s (now fiancé’s) parents, we visited the medieval city of Provins, which has a 12th-century cathedral that is still in use. I don’t know if that amazes you, but it does me. In the U.S., if something is two hundred years old we organize tours to see it; in France, a 12th-century cathedral is barely even a tourist attraction. This contrasts sharply with China as well, where a tourist attraction is a tourist attraction with a capital T, with tee-shirts, costume photo sites, and in the case of the Badaling section of the Great Wall, a long slide by which visitors can get back to the bottom. And if we’re going to learn to relate to each other, it’s important to think about some of the reasons for this state of affairs.

Look a little closer at the perspective on old and new in France, China, and the U.S. and you come away with some interesting realizations. After I left France this summer, I went to the States for a few weeks, beginning with a three-day stay in Chicago to visit some friends. We took the architecture tour downtown, and if you’re ever in Chicago I highly recommend it. It’s a boat tour down the river that takes you past the famous skyscrapers and other buildings in the downtown area while a guide narrates the story behind their construction. It really is fascinating. And yet it’s fascinating in a completely different way from France. One of the unique characteristics of the U.S. over the years has been the almost obsessive encouragement of new things and ideas. Take Chicago, for instance. In the fire of 1870, roughly two-thirds of the city burned to the ground. During the succeeding decades the city leadership took this cataclysm as a chance to remake Chicago as something completely new, and if you ever take the tour you’ll get an appreciation for just what it meant to build a twenty-story building in the late-19th century. The idea that they should rebuild the city in roughly the same image, or at least by preserving the historical buildings in the city, was trumped easily by the idea that the new Chicago should look nothing like the old.

The trouble is, Americans tend to have a hard time with their history. It’s a giant mélange of immigration, expansion, and highly disturbing clashes between peoples who would not have ever mixed in any other place. Everyone in America came from somewhere else (even, if you hold to this particular view on prehistoric humanity, the native Americans themselves), and when the defining characteristic of your nation’s history is the idea that everything is, and should remain, new, then it’s awfully hard to know what to do with your history. Do we honor the architects of our Constitution by capitalizing the words Founding Fathers and demanding everyone march lockstep to their vision, as though Thomas Jefferson were Moses, or do we honor the current needs of the nation by branding the same men a bunch of racist bigots and reduce their contribution to a minor page in the grander political story? If you’re constantly updating, there’s not much room to learn how to live with your history.

Interestingly, roughly the same level of destruction occurred in Paris after the end of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 as occurred in Chicago. The civil war that followed (I’m using the term loosely because it really only involved Paris) added to the destruction wrought by the Prussian artillery, especially with the fall of the Commune, the members of which burned whole sections of Paris as part of their defense strategy. The cathedral of Notre Dame itself was only saved by a bureaucratic technicality. Yet if you go to Paris today you’ll be immediately struck by how historical, how OLD the city feels. Nor is that due to the historical landmarks, like Versailles, or the Parc du Luxembourg; there’s an obvious air of historicity about the city, as though its inhabitants have spent generations making sure it felt that way, which isn’t far from the truth. Rebuilding the city after the Commune so many years ago, the government and residents didn’t see it as an excuse to experiment with the new, but as a duty to venerate the old. Anything that threatens to alter the proud historical character of Paris is either hotly debated or, if carried through, quite often detested. People still alternately writhe or purr over the Centre Georges Pompidou, for example.

Then there’s China. Chinese people have a stormy relationship with their history. While they are intensely proud of the intellectual and creative legacy of the Tang and Song dynasties (rightfully so), they are intensely embarrassed by the past two hundred years or so. The former birthed stunning art and innovation, and the poetic works of people like Li Bai and Du Fu, while the latter birthed the Opium Wars, the Japanese Occupation, and almost a century of deprivation and oppression. During the nine years I’ve been in China, I’ve found very few things that are true for a vast majority of Chinese people, but one of those things is an almost desperate need to prove to the outside world that China belongs in the pantheon of great modern nations. As such, although there are TV shows and movies about ancient culture, nobody really celebrates it. Saying you enjoy the TV adaptation of the classic novel Dream of Red Mansions is not at all the same thing as saying you appreciate that part of your own history. Nowhere is this more evident than the massive renovation projects currently underway at countless historical sites around China. Now when I, or for that matter most westerners, go to a place like the Temple of Heaven or the Great Wall, we want to get a sense of age. We want to see cracks in the wall, whole sections of some of the buildings crumbled into heaps, paint faded and dusty, because for us that carries an air of authenticity. It’s as though, by walking over an unrestored section of the Great Wall, with weeds poking through the untended stone steps, we’re actually standing in a distant century. This is not the way many other people in China see it. For them, the Temple of Heaven is far more beautiful if the paint is vibrant and new, the walls sturdy, and the buildings like they were in the beginning. A crumbled building doesn’t indicate venerability and age; it indicates workmanship that couldn’t last through the centuries. An unrestored section of the Great Wall isn’t a passport to a distant century; it’s a reminder that China’s history is full of things that broke and didn’t work, and if you want to be seen as a modern power, a host of broken-down ruins is something to fix, not something to display. Put another way, people want to visit the past, but in the fullness of its glory, not its venerated old age.

And here’s the thing: crumbling relics are all fine and good for people whose history has been a more-or-less steady ascent from (pardon the simplification here) undeveloped to developed, from ancient to modern. You can stick your chest out proudly about the cathedral at Notre Dame when you’ve also been at the forefront of intellectual innovation for most of the modern era, but an interesting aspect of historical pride is that it’s often closely connected to present contentment. Mainland China has really only had a period of steady ascent for something like 35 years (I would argue that the events in the late ’80’s count as a pretty major hiccup, but I’m simplifying for the sake of argument). Before that? Check out this roll call, going in reverse order from 1976: The Cultural Revolution, the catastrophic famines of the 1950’s, a civil war, World War II, well over a decade of active occupation by the Japanese, political corruption and upheaval during the period following the collapse of Sun Yat-Sen’s dream republic, more upheaval under Yuan Shikai, a few years of relative stability under Sun Yat-Sen’s leadership or tutelage, another war, the Boxer Rebellion, the forced establishment by foreign powers of treaty ports and concessions on Chinese soil, and pretty much the same kind of thing all the way back through the Opium Wars. People, that’s about 150 years of chaos, violence, oppression, invasion, and starvation. How would you approach that? A better question is: if that’s what your country had on its recent history docket, would you be more interested in “preserving” history or in kicking open the doors and letting in as much fresh air as possible? If you’d care to put it crudely: when your country has been keeping pace with modernization for centuries, a Starbucks is reason to gasp in shock and dismay, but if you’ve been ground under the bootheels of foreign powers and your own government for centuries, a Starbucks is a pretty exciting thing.

This is important to bear in mind as we move into a period of history when, frankly, no one can possibly predict which nation will emerge as the new power, or even if a single nation will so emerge. We have the U.S., which I would say is constantly looking forward while trying to figure out what it means to have the history we do; we have France (and along with it the EU), which looks forward tentatively, not convinced that the future is an improvement on the past; and we have China, which is almost desperate to keep its eyes fixed forward, so much so that it modernizes its history. As Americans, we would do well to remember a lot of this when approaching these nations. Just because it’s new doesn’t mean it’s inherently good, and just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s inherently honorable.

Lots of things still perplex me about China. That much probably stands to reason. Currently, because I’m at the university all day, I’m occupied once again with the question of music, specifically why it is Chinese society doesn’t seem to mind playing one song so many times that it begins to qualify as torture. At this university, for example, every time there is an official break in class (after 45 minutes) or it’s time to change classes, loudspeakers in the hall and on the campus play the first thirty seconds of Strauss’ “The Blue Danube Waltz.” I don’t have any grudge against Strauss or that song, but any song, if played partially and ad nauseum, can become a thing of nightmares.

And actually, I’m fairly lucky. It could be much, much worse. It could be Kenny G, the Carpenters, Celine Dion, or The Eagles. If I had to listen to “Yesterday Once More” every 45 minutes, I’d give myself a month before I went insane and bludgeoned a student to death with a pair of language-lab headphones.

But here’s my question: why does it have to be the same song every time? Why could they not play the first thirty seconds of a series of fifteen songs in rotation? I’d enjoy coming to school and hearing something different every day, like, say, one of Chopin’s Nocturnes or a Brahms cello sonata, and I can’t imagine it would take that much more effort to program it. I realize that’s a stupid question, of course. Every public place in China plays something awful, and frequently it’s the same something awful as another place. I’ll probably go to my grave never knowing why people like The Carpenters, for example, and I imagine there will be a visual picture of a Higgs-Boson particle before I receive an acceptable explanation for the ubiquity of “Hotel California” or “Country Roads.” I’m not even sure there is a reason, and if there is, it won’t matter because no one will ever do anything about it. There are bigger things at stake than one waiguoren’s displeasure at the music in the Tianjin West train station.

Another question, too, one I haven’t succeeded in answering: do people in China truly not hear background noise, like the same annoying song played fifty times a day, or do they simply not respond? I’m perfectly willing to accept the fact that I’m overly-sensitive when it comes to music, and therefore can’t tune out something hideous mewling from the speakers over my head at a coffee shop, but is everyone else in China truly oblivious? Do they legitimately love The Carpenters? Is it something else entirely?

Forget research into the origins of the universe. Someone needs to figure this out.

One of the truly annoying things about everyday Chinese people when there’s a huge political flap on (like the one right now over the islands) is that they always, always, always drag America into it. Now it doesn’t usually bother me when someone criticizes America. It happens in lots of places, and at lots of times, so you can’t let it get to you. The annoying thing in China is that people will bring it up a propos of nothing at all. Let me give you an example.

Yesterday I took the bus to the post office so I could pick up a package from my sister. I got it with no trouble, then went to the bus stop to go back. I had no sooner walked up than a middle-aged Chinese man who was probably a construction worker or some other laborer (he had dark, tough skin, which is always an indication of someone who doesn’t have a lot of money) said, “Where are you from?” I told him, and he immediately said, “America and Japan are always doing terrible things to people!”

See what I mean? It isn’t that the sentiment itself is inherently annoying, but rather the timing. Who in the world introduces themselves and immediately says, “Your country sucks”? It wasn’t even a question. He didn’t ask, “Why do America and Japan do terrible things to other countries?” There was no request for information; there was merely the expression of an accepted fact. It was as though he had said, “America is a country bordered by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans!”

I immediately answered him, “Do you think my government represents what I think?”

“Oh, no.” (Which begs the question why he would even say what he said in the first place.)

“Good. Don’t assume I agree with my government.”

Preachy, yes, and it didn’t really have much to do with what he said, but one gets tired of that thing after a while.  It’s hard, too, because you can’t really get angry at people like the man at the bus stop for their opinions. The ideas are being drilled into them by a very active and insistent state-controlled media. Take any newspaper off the rack these days and you’ll see multiple stories about Japan’s perfidy, and several going after America, too. More insidious, though, is the way these days Japan and America are inherently linked in the media. Many headlines merely say Mei Ri (the characters for America and Japan, but put together) when referring to political powers intruding into China’s affairs, which in its tone makes it seem as though the two countries are intrinsically linked in their policies, goals, and even character. I find this helps me to be more patient. If everyone you meet is being fed the same line of propaganda, getting angry at them for their opinions is a little like getting angry at a computer for executing a command someone else gave it, especially here, where it’s very hard indeed to get a hold of media that doesn’t toe the party line.

It’s been a while since I was a full-time English teacher. Sometime back in 2009, if memory serves. So it’s back in the saddle again for me, at least for this year. I thought some observations about that might be in order.

First, it’s both wonderful and sad that Chinese students of all ages take such joy in simple interactive activities. For my first class, I always like to do an introduction exercise called “Find Somebody Who. . .”, which includes a series of statements for which the students have to find a classmate who fits. For example: “Find somebody who has traveled outside of China.” They have to move around the room and ask questions of each other. Every time I do the activity, the students enjoy it so much that it’s evident from my spot at the front. There are smiles, laughter, noise, and in short, a party atmosphere reigns. The thing is, it’s about the simplest activity you could devise. If I did the same thing in an American classroom, I’m willing to bet most of the students would find it stupid and not want to do it. I say this is both wonderful and sad in China because on the one hand it’s immensely rewarding to know that people are able to so enjoy something simple, and on the other hand, it’s sad that their educational experience prior to this class has been so devoid of anything truly stimulating or interactive. The vast majority of my students’ classes (they’re freshmen, so this is their first university experience) have been teacher-focused lecture courses where the only major activity is the exam at the end, with absolutely no interaction included.

Second, the old jokes still work. Here’s a tip for all you new English teachers out there: include the names of some local Chinese food in your class and you are GUARANTEED to get a laugh. Every time I mention da bing ji dan, which is a local street food consisting of a fried egg and special sauce in rolled-up flatbread, the class cracks up. Being an English teacher in China is a lot like being a stand-up comedian. After you’ve been doing it for a few years, you can predict what’s going to make people laugh, and if you want to, you can figure out a lecture or a short class that will consist entirely of side-splitting humor. Not even clever or witty humor, either. Make a few faces and funny noises, reference local food, tell them how much you suck at ping-pong, and they’ll think you’re a comic genius.

Third, the students are getting younger. I know, I know: I’m getting older, so maybe I’m the problem. But I swear to you, I have freshmen students now who look like they’re twelve years old. They’re so quiet and vulnerable; it’s like a class full of baby deer. Imagine you were teaching Bambi or the puppy from The Fox and the Hound and you’ll have some idea of what I’m talking about.

Fourth, man do they hate Japan. I’ve only had a handful of classes so far, and I’ve already had two students stand up and express their intense hatred of Japan, even though what they said had NOTHING to do with what we were talking about. In one class, I was doing a creative activity where I put the students into small groups and had them pretend they were a superhero team. They had to decide what their power was, who their enemy was, and what their goal was. I called on one student and said, “So what is your special power?” His answer: “F*&k Japan!” I answered, “Is that your superpower?” Which, sadly, he didn’t understand. I would have loved it if he’d said, “Yes!” because I’m pretty sure we could successfully market a line of “F*%k Japan Man” superhero tee-shirts. The other statement I heard, in a different class, was similar. I had asked the students, after reading in our textbooks about the importance of protecting your possessions when in a crowd (it’s a unit on law and order), if they’d ever had anything stolen. A cell phone perhaps, or a wallet? A student raised his hand and said, “Japan is trying to steal our islands from us!” Which, like the other, has nothing to do with anything, but whatever. Is it surprising? No, but it’s still disturbing.

Fifth, there are still surprises. In one of my classes I asked the students who wanted to study abroad someday. Several raised their hands. (Though I should point out that in China, that’s not an indication of how many people WANT to study abroad. If something is considered impossible or close to impossible, it’s common for someone simply to not “want” to do it, by which I mean they figure it’s not even worth thinking about.) I asked these students where they wanted to study. One said, “Japan.” This was, of course, followed by gasps, loud muttering, and general consternation. I politely reminded them that China has a very long tradition of sending scholars to Japan. Lu Xun studied there, after all. If you ever want to inject some perspective into an angry conversation about Japan, just bring up Lu Xun. Lu Xun is one of the only figures in Chinese history EVERYONE agrees is a hero, and the fact that his time in Japan was one of the great turning points in his life can be hard to grapple with if you’re convinced the Japanese are all evil.

More observations as they arise.

When it comes to symbolic representations, one could do worse than the loudspeaker announcements at a Chinese train station. I’m currently sitting in the Tianjin West station, a gargantuan place which, when lit up with its distinctive blue color scheme at night, looks like the interior of an alien spacecraft. It’s got all the trappings, too, including half a dozen international franchises which are all closed today. That’s probably because it’s a national holiday, but as it means I’m reduced to getting MacDonald’s again, I’m still going to go ahead and resent the fact in my standard pampered western way. I’m also rebelling against the ubiquity of Kenny G’s mewling soprano sax in Chinese public places by sticking in my earphones and listening to one of the year’s loudest and oddest releases: Swans’ new album The Seer. (For Swans, this is actually a highly listenable bit, though it includes two pieces that are over 20 minutes long. If you think I’m off my nut, you might take a quick listen to their first album, Filth, produced in 1981-ish. If you put it on the radio now, it would still sound much angrier and and much weirder than anything else.)

But that’s neither here nor there. What is, however, is the fact that like all Chinese train stations there are innumerable announcements sounding over the station loudspeakers. Most declare when and where a particular train is leaving, like most stations, but others advise travelers on station regulations. A recent one, for example, just said, “In this station, there are many travelers who are coming and going, so do not lie or sit on the floor because it will obstruct traffic.” And it will, of course. The trick is, people sometimes do it anyway. The Beijing South station also has announcements about ever five minutes telling people not to smoke, but again, everyone does, including the security personnel. Why? The simplest explanation would be to point simply to the mechanism of the announcements. They’re mysterious, echoing things that sound from some unknown source high above. For all we know, they could be coming from the walls themselves. The point is, they’re distant and detached. They’re not even being issued by live personnel; they’re pre-recorded messages signaled by a digital arpeggio. By the time they filter down to the ground, they’re completely without any human analogue. They’re just words. And quite often people treat them as such. Not always, of course; there are plenty of people who refrain from smoking or sitting and lying on the ground, but most of those are closer, both psychically and actually, to the power structure. They’re students or urban professionals, people who have grown accustomed to massive new train stations and automobiles. But then you have, well, about 90% of the rest of the country, the farmers and construction workers and beggars for whom the growing number of space-age train stations and suburban villas are  just another manifestation of distance. Here’s where you have the crux of the problem with modern Chinese society. It isn’t simply that there are rich and poor, or even that there are very rich and very poor, with little in between; it’s that there’s a mutual sense of alienness and unreality from one to another. To the poor, the rich are the ethereal voices on the loudspeakers, which are to be followed only under compulsion; to the rich, the poor are the people you have to keep off your nice, new floor so that the country can flow more efficiently.

And this distance is enforced everywhere. The vast majority of people in China used to live in the countryside, which means the geographical distance between those in power and those who aren’t, between those digging in the earth with rudimentary tools and those riding in chauffeur-driven Audis, would appear to be lessening. But as people flow into the cities in greater and greater numbers, the rich have begun flowing out of it. The idea of a suburb in China used to seem incongruous, like a riverboat port in a desert. But over the past few weeks I’ve had multiple opportunities these past few weeks to take a drive out farther than I usually go in Tianjin, and the differences are stark. The apartment buildings start going from thirty and forty stories to ten or twelve, and in quite a few places the apartment buildings give way to independent villas and gated communities. Nor is this an isolated incident. If you’ve got lots of money in China, in all likelihood you’re looking for a way to get it out of the country into banks in the U.S., Canada, Europe, or even offshore accounts in the Caymans. You’re also trying to get your kid into boarding school in the West as soon as possible. This is the case for some friends of mine who just had a daughter. They’re already talking about sending her to boarding school when she’s old enough, largely because they don’t want her to have the education they did.

Now this is totally understandable. If you have a great job, with plenty of money to ensure your daughter goes to the absolute best possible school, why would you send her to a school you knew would waste her talents? The tricky thing about China is that the class separation is so stark that the poorer classes by and large have a hard time even understanding that there’s something to be jealous of. It would be like me getting jealous of someone who kept a permanent city in orbit around Mars. I don’t understand that concept any more than a very poor farmer in Ningxia province understands why a boarding school in America would be a good idea. But ignorance isn’t always bliss, especially because when you’re poor enough, you don’t need to understand Das Kapital to get angry. You might think people on this level are cowed by those in authority, but that isn’t exactly true. For them, the government really is an ethereal voice. It’s entirely conceptual. What isn’t conceptual is whatever local cadre is in charge of their business. This means, too, that if things get bad enough, negotiation is out of the question. What is there to negotiate? As you’ve never been introduced to the finer points of civic responsibility or allowed to participate in some way (voting, for example, which, although oftentimes just a symbolic exercise, is still at least an exercise) in the process of governance, for you the problem is black-and-white: we are being pushed around for no reason by these people in front of us, and if we don’t want to get pushed around any more, we have to get rid of them. This would be why most of the emperors who’ve been overthrown in Chinese history have been overthrown popularly. The mystique and subtlety of power gets a whole lot less mystical and subtle when you don’t have any food, or when your village’s land or water rights have been sold off to some huge real-estate developer.

Which makes the train station example all the more vivid. Is there any actual Law in the train station? In one sense, yes. People still buy tickets, and adhere to some sense of order. But you still have plenty of people, even after so many years, who don’t line up and just walk right to the front, elbowing people out of the way. Most people don’t resort to sleeping on the floor, but plenty still do, just as people still regularly smoke. For them, and in fact for much of the society, there’s no Law (I’m using the capital letter on purpose), but rather authority, which incidentally is not the mysterious voice from the loudspeaker. That might as well not exist. Authority is what you can see and hear right in front of you. Authority is the train station security personnel, or the police if they’re necessary. Authority is entirely physical, and entirely based on will, theirs vs. yours. For the most part, the security personnel are clearly the stronger entity, and so people do what they’re told, but believe me when I say that the vast majority of Chinese people don’t do what they’re told because the police represent the government. They do what they’re told because the police are stronger and can have an actual, quantifiable impact on their lives. And insofar as the police also carry out government policy (which isn’t as clear-cut as it sounds), they represent the government, but my point is: that’s not why people obey them (when they do).

What this boils down to is a reminder of sorts. Western people read the news about China, which centers almost entirely on what is done at the national level, and worry about that. We should be concerned about what the national government does, of course, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves into thinking they’re the ones running the country. They’re the voice on the loudspeaker, but the people who actually decide the fate of the country are the ones who have to keep people from sleeping on the floor.