1/21/09, A Week Before I Leave

So, a week before I leave for China, I've decided to start another one of those increasingly ubiquitous study abroad blogs. I'm fairly negative on personal blogs, and I'm doubly negative on study abroad blogs. I used to keep a personal blog, and what I found was that I would spend more time blogging about my life than actually living it. I always have a lot to say, and if I had let a week or so go by without blogging, I would spend hours creating a blog post, so I'd get into the ridiculous situation of spending an entire day creating a blog post about my day. I would also get into multiple fights and bad social situations, because I would blog honestly, meaning I would talk about people in my life, and of course, inevitably, someone I didn't want to find the blog would find it, and it would be an awful situation for everybody. I came to the conclusion, after a while, that the personal, diary format blog is generally negative thing, feeding into the loathsome trends in this culture of insanely out-of-control egotism and the commodification of identity. I think there's something to be said for having a private self and for keeping your damn mouth shut sometimes. I still keep the article in the New York Times Magazine about Emily Gould from Gawker to remind me of everything in my generation that I hate and should fight. I'm doubly skeptical about keeping a study abroad blog. My experiences might be of some interest or value to other people, but they might be totally unremarkable in a larger sense. Although I will be taking quite a journey, I'll also be isolated in some way from actually living in the country. I won't be in the control conditions of the classroom, but I also won't be naturally experiencing life in the country; I'll be somewhere in between, and that's not necessarily a very interesting or unique experience.

So, here's my study abroad blog. I've decided, with all my misgivings, to keep one for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, anyone who knows me knows that I can be maddeningly difficult to keep in touch with. A mix of laziness, self-involvement, social awkwardness and general misanthropy means that it can take a great deal of effort to keep in contact with me and keep up with my life. Bottom line, I'm not a postcard sender, and I'm barely even an email sender. I figure, by starting a study abroad blog, I won't have to worry about compiling massive emails or forgetting to contact people. If you want to know what I've been up to, or see where I've been, you can just add this blog to your RSS feed, or check in every once in a while. Secondly, this blog will serve as a travel journal for my experiences, that I can keep and look back on. However, to overcome some of my misgivings about personal blogs, I will try and focus more on what I'm seeing and experiencing than myself, and I will absolutely refuse to write negatively about specific people, which will mean that occasionally, you might not be getting the whole truth. Finally, I'm someone who has always had great difficulties with foreign languages, and I feel totally enmeshed in English. The various details, quirks and oddities of English, I feel, are absolutely part of my personal identity. I am heading into an environment where English will not be heard routinely, and in situations where I am isolated from English, I often feel like I am separated from my true identity. So this blog will serve as a place where I can touch base with my mother tongue, as well as with my friends and family.

The first question is always, of course, why am I going to China? And I expect that the answer to that will change in midstream, just like the reasons for the Iraq War. Right now, there are two main reasons I can think of. The first is the reason I tell everybody, because it's the most practical: to learn the damn language. I have been studying Chinese on and off, with varying levels of success(depending on the year, and heck, the day), since I was in 8th grade. My Chinese right now is a big question. My grammar and vocab are ok, my pronunciation, ehh, less so. Sometimes I can have days of brilliance, but sometimes, native speakers just look at me blankly. What's more, I haven't been field tested, for the most part, except for the occasional intervention at a restaurant and helping tourists in Chinatown. So I really don't know how good or bad my Chinese is, but I hope that, by going and studying in country, I can bring it up to a level where I can at least read basic literature in Chinese, and talk with some level of fluency.

But the thing about the answer is that ultimately, the question remains, why am I going to China? And the real answer to that is complicated, to the point where I probably don't even know all of it. While I have a lot of experience with Mandarin, I don't necessarily have much of a grounding in Chinese culture, literature or history. I may know more than the av-er-age bear, but, especially while preparing for this trip, I realized that it's absolutely threadbare compared to my knowledge of say, the history/culture/literature of France. What bothers me more is that I may not really have an affinity for it, and I've invested a great deal of time in it. Part of the reason I'm going is to figure out how much I really am into this Chinese thing. Not the best idea, maybe, but I'm stubborn, and the sunk costs fallacy is a powerful thing. And I know that I do have an affinity for certain things: Wong Kar Wai, Tang dynasty poetry in the original, that kind of thing. So we'll see.

Along with that, I unfortunately must confess that I have some of those romantic, orientalist notions that accompany most study abroad trips, especially to the far east. I am hoping that this trip will serve as a shock to my system, that by seeing something so different, I will become different. I hope that being kinda by myself will make me into more of an independent adult. I hope that this trip, and the foreigness of where I will be, will give me the necessary ground to figure out myself, and what I want to do, and who I want to be. I want to come back from China and know exactly what I want to do, and have grown as a human being. Now, I am also aware that this idea is probably bullshit. But like the Hegelian notion of human progress, it may be one of those things that I am pretty much convinced is bullshit, yet believe in anyway.

I've tried to prepare in a variety of ways for this trip, some ways more ridiculous than others. I've taught myself to use chopsticks, which I've always avoided since they're far from optimum for someone with an essential tremor, by buying a pair of nice ones from the Broadway panhandler, and eating every meal at home with them. I have begun an intensive language review this week, which mostly consists, so far, of making a study sheet while watching House. I've been reading only Chinese texts in translation. I've read a collection of Chinese avant-garde fiction, the Analects of Confucius, the Dao De Jing, and I'm in the middle of Volume 1 of the classic Qing-era Chinese novel, Story of The Stone. It's been quite an experience for me, and given me at least a bit of cultural background before I go. Whether any of this stuff will do me any good, that, I don't know.

Like anybody about to set out on big trips, I have fears and some ideas of ways I typically screw up in similar situations. I do have a nightmare scenario where, isolated and unable to communicate, I finally have the mental breakdown I've always been half-expecting. Or, I just get lost in China, which would probably be bad too. I thought, before I went to college, that growing up in New York City would make me immune to culture shock. But after an awful first year, I realized that actually, I was more susceptible to it than most people I knew. With the typical New Yorker conviction that New York is the best of all possible worlds, I found it difficult to adjust to different ways of doing things. So I might have a lot of trouble adjusting to China, which is probably more dissimilar to New York than even St. Louis, although it also might be closer in some ways. I also know that I often fall into a couple of pitfalls when encountering foreign cultures. I often assume that people are the sums of their entire culture and history, and am puzzled when they aren't. At my worst, I can get into Conradian/borderline racist mindsets of the Other as completely impenetrable. And while I do believe that there are epistemological limits to understanding other people, not to mention other cultures, you can also, say, play mahjongg with them without that coming up a whole lot.

My first two weeks in the country, I am traveling. I will land in Beijing on the 29th, and stay until the 4th of February, seeing the sights and making day trips to the Great Wall and to the city of Chengde, a summer retreat of the Qing dynasty, where the world's largest wooden statue is. I will then take an overnight train to Taishan, the holiest mountain in Daoism. The next day, I will visit Qufu, where Confucius' tomb is, and then take an overnight train to Shanghai. I will stay in Shanghai until the 12th, taking day trips to Suzhou and Hangzhou. On the 12th, I will fly to Kunming, where I will spend most of the next four months. I probably will travel to other locales, but I haven't planned those trips out yet. I will try and blog every day or so while I'm travelling, with pictures, although I might have some difficulty with that, since my laptop is in the shop right now, and might not be repaired in time, and I might have some issues with the Great Firewall. But I'm going to try.

So, the title of the blog. I generally like to begin new journeys with a healthy dose of skepticism. My yearbook half page in high school had two quotes, one from Candide and one from James Brown, both expressing a general skepticism on the idea of big changes. The title of this blog, similarly, is intended to be a dose of healthy skepticism to protect against falling victim to those previously mentioned romantic fantasies of the revelatory power of the Other. The title comes from the Dao De Jing, and the full relevant quote is: 出彌遠， 其知彌少 (chu mi yuan, qi zhi mi shao), or "The further out goes, the less one knows". It was the Daoist belief that journeys like the one I'm about to take don't really tell you anything except what you already know, and at worst, they reinforce your beliefs in the various illusions of the material world. The only true journey is the inward journey of discovering the Dao within you.

But I'm a fan of oppositions, of thesis and antithesis, and this idea has its opposite in Daoism as well. The Dao advises that one seek to be "曠兮其若谷" (kuang xi qi ruo gu), "accepting/open like a valley". And so, despite all my grumpy convictions and doubts and epistemological concerns, I will seek to be kuang xi qi ruo gu. Because, as Lao Tzu might have said, ya never know.