Shanghai, Part Six: Nine Temples in 27 Hours

1

I woke up early on Saturday and took the shuttle into town so I could go to Jing’an Temple, a Buddhist monastery in the heart of downtown. It was pouring rain and it took all of two minutes outside before my shoes, socks, and the cuffs of my pants were soaked, a condition in which they would stay all day, but I was undeterred; this marked my last two weeks in Shanghai, and I was determined to soak in more culture than my shoes soaked in rainwater.

The rain fell in sheets from the side of the sweeping gabled roofs as I weaved between chanting monks and praying tourists, taking in each shrine and feeling filled up with a sense of solemnity. From the lower level, the walls of the temple obscured the sight of downtown, but the upper level afforded a view of the nearby skyscrapers and illuminated billboards.

2

Around the corner from Jing’an Temple, I came across a house in which Mao Zedong lived, which had been converted to a two-room museum. He only lived there for a few months in 1920, during which he hobnobbed with several poets and wrote an important speech to the CPC. One wall of the museum featured calligraphy of Mao’s poetry; the other wall featured photos from that period in his life. Glass cases housed various artifacts: his tea set, his cigarette holder, the pencils with which he wrote the speech. Most significantly, one case held Mao’s copy of the first Chinese translation of the Communist Manifesto, published in August 1920. In a moment of perfect symbolism, a child about nine years old leaned against the case playing a game on his iPad.

Old China, meet new China.

3

Across the street from Mao’s house was a mall. This city must have the densest concentration of shopping malls in the world, sprawling in every direction and always packed. Directly across from Mao’s house you could see a DKNY, and next to that, several restaurants. I stopped by Element Fresh for lunch. Element Fresh is a chain found in many malls here that serves pastas, salads, and sandwiches. As the name suggests, it boasts the freshest ingredients you can find just about anywhere. As I’ve noted before, in most Chinese food, the quality of the ingredients is quite low, especially the vegetables.

Note: I didn't take this.

After a while, it leaves you feeling fairly vitamin- and mineral-deprived, so on a couple of occasions I’ve sprung for an overpriced salad for lunch.

4

After lunch I took the subway to meet Bill and Sara at the China Art Museum, a giant structure in the shape of an upside-down pyramid. I found the artwork inside less aesthetically pleasing than the building itself, but it did provide an insight into China’s cultural development throughout the twentieth century. The early decades of the century were marked by rather uninspiring imitations of French impressionists. Thosee exhibits focused heavily on the rather obscure French artists who came and taught at Chinese schools, as well as their local students. The middle portion of the century, unsurprisingly, was dominated by rather silly and obvious Maoist propaganda; art venerating revolution or a simplistic vision of the pastoral. My favorite piece was titled, “Workers Bring Chairman Mao Good News.” Well, you wouldn’t want to bring him bad news!

My favorite works came from the past 30 years or so: large murals featuring abstract images constructed out of bold brush strokes and dark colors. They were beautiful and haunting in a way that didn’t feel imitative.

5

Then beer aficionado Bill took us to the Boxing Cat Brewery, a brew pub he had discovered where we could get a hamburger and a proper pale ale--a difficult thing to find in this, the land of flavorless beers with 3% alcohol content. The place boasted large portions and a healthy mix of locals and expats.

6

From there, back to the Bund to view Pudong at night. Shanghai rests on the delta of the Yantze River, and the Bund sits on Huangpu River, its main tributary. Stand with your back towards the water and you’ll see the Bund, a series of beautiful buildings from the days of European colonialism, now pointedly adorned with Chinese flags. Turn around to look across the river and you’ll see Pudong, an area that, a few decades ago, boasted little more than farmland, but that now boasts a skyline to rival any city in the world. It’s a sight during the day, but it’s really something after dark, when every building twinkles with lights. Meanwhile, illuminated ferries carry passengers up and down the river. If Manhattan and the Las Vegas strip had a baby, it would be Pudong. We stood for a while under our umbrellas as it continued to pour down rain, and we took in the sight.

7

A cocktail aficionado as well as a beer aficionado, Bill had been frequenting the Waldorf Astoria’s Long Bar, and the bartender had recommended several of the best places around town to get a craft cocktail. Bill’s son being a bartender, he has a foothold in that world, so after taking in the sight of Pudong, we made our way to the Library Distillery. The Library is a speak easy style bar located at the back of Light and Salt, a restaurant which is itself tucked out of the way behind a hotel. It’s the kind of place that is too cool to advertise; you only find out about it if you know somebody and you can only get to it if you go to Light and Salt and ask.

The manager, Rick Starr, might be the most epic hipster alive. Wearing a wide-brimmed fedora and a nice tie tucked into a tuxedo vest over a black shirt with the sleeves rolled up, revealing elaborate forearm tattoos, he looks to be about 24 years old. He’s a thin, soft-faced white guy from Brooklyn who had apparently made a name for himself as a mixologist and was invited to Shanghai. He brought with him a fellow Brooklynite, a raven-haired woman in suspenders and a polka-dot shirt, and the two of them manned the bar alongside a Chinese man who never spoke but looked really intense while shaking drinks.

The small space was mostly empty except for the three bartenders, a lone man smoking in the corner while wearing a nice business suit, a young couple that left shortly after we arrived, and a young guy who managed another nearby bar, who had come to have some dinner with his 6-year-old daughter. It was possibly the coolest room I’d ever been in.

Bill, Sara and I sat at the bar, a square island in the middle of the room, and chatted with the bartenders while sipping cocktails. I would need to leave after one to make the last subway home, but Bill and Sara talked me into a second with the promise that I could crash on their pullout. It admittedly didn’t take much cajoling. For my second drink, I told Rick to surprise me, and he supplied me with a large, tropical-themed concoction of his own invention served in a coconut.

8

High rise apartments litter the sky like flotsam floating atop an ocean of shopping malls. Bill and Sara’s building looks much like all of the others. It’s certainly a nicer location than where I live, and boasts certain amenities, like maid service every two weeks, that my place does not. But, on the other hand, they pay a lot more for it and have a longer commute into work. While living in Xuhui would have made the early weeks here less disorienting, it might not ultimately have been worth it.

I pulled out the sofa bed and immediately crashed. Whatever was in that coconut, it knocked me right out.

9

In the morning I made my exit as quickly as politeness would allow and took the train back to my neighborhood. I spent the whole long train ride worrying about my fiancée worrying about me; I hadn’t gone a full 24 hours without checking in since I had gotten here. Sure enough, she had worried, but once I explained, she agreed that it was worth it. She knows Bill, so she enjoyed the tale of his cocktail exploits.

So we chatted about our days, sharing a space in my favorite place of worship, the internet.

Shanghai, Part Five: Teaching

The Campus

It's about a five minute walk through a street full of rather foul-smelling restaurants to get from the front door of my apartment to Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Main Gate, which some people refer to as "The Slipper" because, well, it looks vaguely like a slipper. Past the main gate there is a small parking lot, on the other side of which there is a small hill on which you can see SJTU's seal--an anvil with some books on top of it. To the left is the campus gift shop, where the shuttle to Xuhui picks up; to the right is a long row of bicycles and a small stand from which you can rent one. I have never seen as many bicycles as I have seen here. The campus is large and sprawling, with roads cutting through it every which way. In front of the seal is also where students and faculty can catch the free campus bus, which comes around about once every ten minutes on weekdays. Nonetheless, most days I walk.

It's a fifteen minute walk from the main gate to my office. Behind the seal is a small grassy field with a large statue of an eagle in the middle. Beyond that is a large pond with a small island that boasts a small pagoda. This is the most characteristically "Chinese" part of campus. Walking to my office in the morning, it is common to see old people doing Tai Chi in the grass by the pond. A tree-lined path takes you around the pond and to a road that passes numerous class buildings and dorms, two large cafeterias, and a pretty nice little cafe. The entire campus is impeccably landscaped; for how dense the city is, Shanghai in general has done a very good job of maintaining green space throughout the city. Every day you will see numerous landscapers, all wearing the familiar conical straw hat to keep the sun off their faces, sweeping up leaves, trimming branches, or cleaning up trash.

In many ways, the buildings are designed in the boxy, industrial aesthetic that characterizes mid-twentieth century architecture on so many campuses in the U.S.; it’s similar to brutalism, only the buildings here are made of red brick rather than concrete. More than anywhere else, the campus reminds me of Michigan State University. One positive difference, however: accommodating the warm weather, most buildings have outdoor hallways and stairways, with classrooms that feature large windows on both sides. It's a bright, sunny aesthetic befitting the climate.

Also, feral cats : SJTU :: squirrels : UM

Everything about the classrooms suggests that they were designed to enforce a top-down approach to teaching. Every classroom I've seen, even the small ones fitting only 30 students, has rows of desks that are bolted in place, forcing students to look forward at the instructor. The front of the classroom is raised on a small platform, on which there is a desk with a full A.V. setup. Each classroom has two CCTV cameras: one behind the instructor, looking out at the students, and one behind the students, facing the instructor. When I had my students read Foucault's "Panopticism" and asked them for examples of modern panopticons, they all laughingly pointed at the cameras without hesitation.

Class sessions run for 45 minutes, with ten minute breaks in between, though most classes run for double sessions--effectively, 100 minutes, though my lessons are budgeted for the UM standard of 80 minutes, and I find students are pretty fatigued after that, so I've had little qualms dismissing early most days. At the start and end of every 45 minute session, a loud bell will ring, a high schoolish condescension interrupting discussion at which students regularly roll their eyes.

The Joint Institute

Arrive at my building and you are greeted by the somewhat uncanny sight of The University of Michigan's familiar maize-and-blue M beside SJTU's seal. This is the Joint Institute. The Institute occupies three floors in what used to be the law school. The second and third floors house the administrative staff, tech support, copy machine, and full time faculty. The first floor boasts offices for graduate students and visiting faculty, including myself. Mine is an extremely large office with high ceilings and a large window with a view of the neighboring graduate school. I share it with Manuel, a Belgian computer scientist who actually teaches full time in Shanghai, but at a different university. Bill and Fred, the other two visiting faculty from UM, share the office next door.

Much like I would at UM, I spend much of the day in my office, writing lesson plans, answering emails, grading papers, feeling disappointed that students don't visit my office hours, checking Facebook, and watching crappy science fiction TV shows on Netflix.

The Joint Institute was established by an Engineering professor with appointments at both universities. Most of its full time faculty are Engineering professors, and its Engineering curriculum is both highly regarded and, I gather, in good sync with UM's. Only in the past couple of years have they begun to branch out and offer courses in Literature, Science, and the Arts. Most of those courses are 300-level electives that may fill a general distribution requirement, but that aren't prerequisite for anything else. Those are all taught by full professors who have taught the same course at UM before, and the grades consist primarily if not entirely of quizzes, a midterm, and a final. Consequently, professors enjoy a great deal of freedom in how they design the course, and the class can accept as many students as want to sign up without sacrificing much of anything. Bill teaches "The Biology of Sex," while Fred teaches a course on the history of Western thought. Both are primarily lecture-based courses, both were capped at 50 students, both filled at 50 students, and both have T.A.s to do the grading. This arrangement works well for the Institute because it requires no accommodations from them other than what they do in their Engineering courses.

Of course, humanities courses need to operate somewhat differently, especially introductory-level humanities courses, and especially writing courses. The Institute hasn't quite figured that out yet. I was hired to teach two courses--Vy125, which was intended to fill the requirement of English 125 at UM for students interested in study abroad, and which at UM would be capped at 18 students; and Vg501, a writing course for Master's students in the Engineering program who would be writing their thesis in the Fall, which I had intended to teach as a workshop similar to Vy125. Like Bill's and Fred's classes, both of my classes were capped at 50 students, and I was told I would receive a T.A. if over 25 students enrolled. On my first day of Vy125, 20 students showed up, but a surprising number of them had thought it was a technical writing course, and several others were intimidated by the reading and writing load, so by the end of the first week that class was down to 7 students. At the end of the second week, an eighth was a late addition. Vg501, meanwhile, had 33 students, which eventually went down to 30. The staff spent the first week of the semester trying to find me a T.A., but only one person applied for the position--a Chinese Engineering student who was enrolled in the course. I turned down the offer.

Vg501

I would discover that the reason Vg501 was so large was because all second year Master's students were required to take it, and the course also fulfilled a technical writing requirement for Ph.D. students. Now, a total of 38 students across two classes is by no means unmanageable in terms of grading, etc., but 30 in one writing class drastically changes the classroom dynamic. It doesn't help that (a) the class meets on Wednesday and Friday night from 6:00 to 7:30, (b) the class is held in a lecture room with fixed desks, making both full class and group discussion extremely awkward, and (c) neither the students nor the instructor knew what the course was supposed to cover.

Now, another difference between a 300-level elective and an introductory-level required course is, professors will typically write their own course objectives for upper-level electives, while departments typically provide the learning goals for required courses, allowing for some standardization across sections (with a lot of wiggle room). I had not been provided with any course objectives and had never written any myself, but I had been given the impression by the instructor who taught here last year that Vg501 was a rather informal workshop of students' theses-in-progress. With that model in mind, I canceled class the first week in order to schedule individual conferences with all 33 students. At 15 minutes per conference, this took a substantial chunk of two days, and from the conferences I learned that most students had not begun writing, nor would they be prepared to begin writing until the Fall, as many were still running experiments. Their more immediate writing concern was not their theses, but their thesis proposals, which were due in July. When I asked them what was expected of them for their theses or their thesis proposals--how long they were, what sections they included, how they would be evaluated--not a single student could provide me with a straight answer. If the class size weren't enough to make my original, workshop-based approach impossible, this certainly was. Problems with language skills was one thing (and many have those in spades), but an utter inability to explain the genre in which they were writing was a complete surprise to me. And many of these were students who had presented at conferences or coauthored papers with their advisers.

It was only after the first week of the term that I realized these students did not need a class on "Writing a Thesis," the lofty title that this course had been given. What they needed was a general introduction to technical communication, built not on longer writing assignments and workshops but rather on shorter writing assignments, in-class activities, and quizzes. This was information that would have been useful two or three weeks before I arrived, not one week after I started teaching. It doesn't help that I have no experience teaching technical communication and that, even though I've identified their needs, I don't have the resources at my disposal here to meet them. So instead I've settled on a course structure that is built on (a) having them turn in short pieces of writing every week from whatever work they have in progress, be that their thesis, their proposal, or another paper, (b) lecturing on a technical writing concept for about half an hour--almost always a concept that I only just taught myself the day before (if not that same afternoon), and (c) having them workshop each other’s writing in small groups while I look over their shoulders and answer questions. Their final grades will be based on a portfolio of their writing and, as long as they show signs of effort and improvement, they will almost assuredly get an A. I sense the course is of little pedagogical value and that the students do not take it seriously in the least. But that’s okay because, from the way they organize things, neither does the Institute.

Vy125

As poorly as Vg501 has gone, Vy125 is going superbly. A big part of this is the class size. An eight person writing class affords one the luxury of engaging with each student on a personal level--we workshop every student’s rough draft as a full class, and when their final drafts roll around, I have the time to provide detailed written feedback that feels like a genuine conversation. When I was a lecturer last fall, I felt like a grading machine who could manage little more than the standard three sentence end comment. Students’ learning, and my evals, suffered as a result.

Even more important than the class size, I think, is the students themselves. They are an impeccable bunch. They are all in the sciences, but they show a tremendous faculty for humanistic thinking and a surprising knowledge of the Western canon. One student is obsessed with Jack Keruak and Allen Ginsberg. Another can quote long passages from The Count of Monte Cristo. Several students have admitted to me their wish that they could have majored in literature or another more humanistic field, but test scores and/or pressure from parents pushed them into the sciences.

The gaps in their knowledge are perhaps just as interesting. They all have read The Great Gatsby, for instance, and know it as “the great American novel,” but they hadn't heard of Mark Twain, J.D. Salinger, or Edgar Alan Poe. They've all seen a fair number of American blockbusters, but none had seen any of this year’s big releases--not Godzilla, X-Men, or Captain America. They actually have more interest in American dramas. For instance, apparently several had taken a class last year that showed Twelve Years a Slave, and that is now an important touchstone for them in understanding American history.

They are also all men, which is strange, but not entirely unsurprising--while young women seem to have plenty of opportunities for education and advancement in China, it’s hard not to notice that they are underrepresented just about everywhere you look, and it's hard not to speculate how much of this is a result of sex-selected abortions.

The students have some difficulty with the English language, but far less than ESL students I have had in the U.S., and far less than my Vg501 students, who spend all of their time running engineering experiments. These Vy125 students are clearly practiced at spoken and written English. In the first week, they showed a bit more reticence than the average American student when it came to class discussion, but they quickly overcame that. Three have emerged as the real discussion leaders--I would be lucky to find three students who contribute this readily in a class of 18. Four others contribute regularly, and only one seems slightly more shy, I suspect due to confidence in his speaking skills, but even he chimes in at least once per class.

When we get past the nuts and bolts of writing and delve into more analytical concepts, they really start to shine. Last week I was assigning their “definition essay,” and I gave the example that I've given several times of a student who wrote her paper on the word “plastic.” This student only used a handful of examples--the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition, the movies The Graduate and Mean Girls, and several personal anecdotes, but she wove them into a paper that traced how the word had shifted from meaning “malleable” (in the sense of “plasticity”) to connoting futurity (as in The Graduate) to signifying artificiality and homogeneity. Her argument tied all of this to capitalist ideology and the shifting values of American consumerism. When I give this paper to American students, they either don’t get it or their minds are blown. But my students here were unimpressed. One said, “Well, the argument that everyday language is tied to ideology--that’s fairly obvious, isn't it?” Marx would be proud.

I teach Vy125 four days a week, and there is at least one moment like that every class. The students hold themselves to a tremendously high standard of insight and analytical rigor, both in writing and in discussion. It’s probably my favorite part of the whole experience.

Sketch from one of my students.

The Walk Home

On Wednesdays and Fridays, I get home after dark from Vg501. At night, the campus is transformed. Mostly it’s quiet, but much like you would at UM, you will occasionally find student groups practicing dance numbers in the alcoves of campus buildings. And students are always playing basketball on the university basketball courts. The most striking sight, however, is all of the public displays of affection. Walking down the street, standing in front of dorm buildings, sitting along the pond where old people do Tai Chi in the mornings--in the evenings, everywhere you look you will find couples holding each other, stroking each other’s hair, kissing affectionately. I get the sense that, for their parents’ generation, this would have been a far less common sight. But it’s cute to see these kids who are clearly so smart and so driven just being hormonal kids.

Shanghai, Part Three: On Not Being a Tourist

I spent my Junior year of college studying abroad at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England. In the summer after that year, having already seen much of Western Europe, I and two of my friends decided to backpack through Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey. While in Istanbul we stayed at a hostel across the street from Hagia Sophia. Rows of bunk beds spanned a large terrace with a canvass roof where sordid travelers rested. Hagia Sophia was a literal stone’s throw away; the Blue Mosque was right around the corner, and the Grand Bazaar could be seen in the distance. One night, sitting up in bed, looking out at this sight, I found myself in a conversation with a French man who had set himself up in the bed across from mine. Many months earlier, he had flown to southern India with the plan of spending the next year slowly making his way back to France. Most recently, he had been in Iran, which is the sort of thing I suppose you can do when you have a French passport. This man went on and on about his desire to experience the real cultures of these countries, not the tourist traps—to eat where locals ate, to visit people’s homes, to be authentic. “You think any Turkish people actually shop at the Grand Bazaar?” He asked me.

I thought his philosophy was bullshit. People’s everyday lives were pretty much the same everywhere, I surmised, but there was only one Grand Bazaar. Visiting only the landmarks might not be “authentic,” by this man’s definition of the term, but it was an experience that was unique to the place. By contrast, fetishizing an authentic experience of the other seemed weirdly colonialist, a kind of poverty porn for a well-off dude from the developed world.

---

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, because, since my year abroad in England, this is the first time I’ve traveled to a new place not as a tourist. I’m being paid to work here—and I’m working hard. I teach two classes, one of which meets four times a week, the other of which meets twice a week in the evenings from 6:00 to 7:40. They are both writing classes; one has eight students; the other has 32. And one is a course I’ve never taught before.

One consequence of this work load is that, four days a week, I am on campus, either teaching, eating, or working in my office, for at least eight hours a day, and most days, closer to twelve. Another consequence is, when deciding where to live, I felt I needed to be close to campus, in Minhang District. I could have lived in Xuhui, near the university’s old downtown campus; there is a shuttle that runs between the two campuses, and it takes between half an hour and an hour, depending on the traffic. But the evening class meant that I would only narrowly be able to catch the last shuttle home two days a week, and I wasn’t inclined to risk it. Shanghai boasts an excellent modern subway system, but there are no stops anywhere near SJTU’s Minhang Campus, and while cabs are far cheaper than they are in the U.S., they still aren’t exactly cheap.

I knew that Minhang was far out from downtown and that there “wasn’t much to do” in this neighborhood, but the way it was explained to me by the people I talked to who had done this program before, I had taken that to mean there weren’t tourist attractions or bars or nightclubs, all things I could do without. That’s true, but what’s also true is, there are no grocery stores, there are no signs in English, there is inadequate street lighting at night. Living here has made me realize how full of crap Sophia Coppola is. Scarlett Johanson was staying in a luxurious hotel in a wealthy downtown part of a major cosmopolitan city—she may have felt alienated in her marriage, but she was not lost in translation. You want to get lost in translation? Travel 7,106 miles away from everyone you love and everything you find familiar, and move to the suburbs.

Me, my entire first week.

On my second weekend here, I finally took the shuttle in to Xuhui. Around the corner from the old campus I found a shopping district that looked like Times Square, complete with a Hershey’s store, a McDonald’s, a Starbuck’s a Pizza Hut, and a KFC (I would soon learn that, in just about every district of Shanghai but Minhang, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a KFC). I found a massive shopping mall where virtually all of the stores were familiar European and American brands—H&M, Calvin Klein, Toys ‘R Us, hell, even Ed Hardy. And in the ground level of that mall, a grocery store. Not a Family Mart or a produce stand featuring strange and wilted vegetables, but an honest to goodness grocery store with bread and cereal and pasta and trustworthy-looking meat and produce, and best of all:

Globalization has never tasted so good.

I honestly teared up when I saw that peanut butter. I spent my entire first week operating on a very low point along Maslow’s Heirarchy of needs. Having this mall and this grocery store meant that I could feed myself and that, maybe two days a week, I could come to a place that felt familiar, where I could drink Starbuck’s, read a book, and feel not quite so isolated.

---

Of course, I knew that I should spend some of that time “being a tourist.”

There are two other Michigan faculty members here. Both are full professors in their sixties. They each are teaching only one course that meets twice a week, for which they each have a TA, meaning that they are doing a fraction of the work I am doing while making at least twice as much money. One lives in Xuhui while the other lives in Huangpu, another downtown district. They spend almost all of their time being tourists. It’s sometimes awkward discussing this experience with them, because while, to a certain degree, there’s a spirit of “we’re all in this together,” it’s also abundantly clear that they are getting a much different view of Shanghai than I am. They get to go to the fancy restaurants and the museums and the gardens and the temples. They have the luxury of money, and of geographic proximity, and most importantly, of time, that I simply don’t have.

Admittedly, I could try harder, and I’m trying to make a point of visiting at least one sight each weekend. But the work is exhausting enough that I sometimes, like today, don’t want to push myself to spend my free time as a tourist. Tourism is hard!

I’ve struggled with anxiety most of my adult life, and the first time it really became an issue was that year I spent in England. And a lot of that came down to the tension I experienced between the pressure to succeed academically and the pressure to “make the most of this experience.” The expectation to keep up with my reading, to write papers, to attend classes, while also finding new restaurants and taking day trips to different towns every weekend, was just too much for my introverted mind to handle.

I was chatting with my fiancee the other week and I said to her, “I know this is crazy, but I need you to tell me that it’s okay if I don’t make the most of this experience.” She obligingly said it was okay.

Ironically, I am having an authentic experience, and I feel validated in my suspicion that it’s pretty much the same. I’m living in Shanghai the way that most Chinese people do, near as I can figure—I go to work, I come home, I cook myself dinner, I spend my evenings reading or watching TV or chatting with friends and family (the main difference being I do the last two mostly on the internet), and once or twice a week I use my day off to visit downtown. I’d rather be a tourist, but once you get past the initial sensory overload that comes with the intimidating unfamiliarity of the suburban life, being an everyday resident of this place isn’t so bad.

---

Today was the Duanwu Festival, or “Dragon Boat Festival.” Apparently there are boat races throughout China today, but I didn’t know where to go and didn’t have the means to get there anyway, and was suffering from fairly severe sleep deprivation in any case. So I stayed home. From my apartment window I watched kids shooting off fireworks. And yesterday one of my students gave me a zongzi, a rice dumpling wrapped in bamboo leaves traditionally eaten during the Duanwu Festival. It was delicious, and it seemed pretty authentic to me.

Shanghai, Part Two: Five Senses

Touch

Sticky. Always sticky. It's actually not as hot as I had feared, but the humidity is constant. I would be taking two showers a day if my hot water worked more consistently in the evenings.

Sight

The sights that have stood out for me in this past week have been the sights of bureaucracy. In my first post I compared it to a Philip K. Dick story, but Terry Gilliam might actually be more accurate. Virtually every building features desks with stacks of paper, shelves with binders of paper--forms in triplicate, stamped and filed and gathering dust. When I went to register with the police, the DMV-esque police station featured a row of six desks behind a glass wall. Four of the six desks were marked "Occupant Registration." The other two were marked "Public Order," meaning the Chinese police devote twice as much space to keeping track of where everyone is living than they do to maintaining public order.

Obtaining a cell phone and a bank account were equally surreal experiences navigating a paperwork dystopia. At first blush, the cell phone store looked like an American electronics store, with designs for different models of phones and large cardboard advertisements. But the back of the store was the same mess of forms, and all of the employees were dressed in what looked like police or military uniforms. In fact, this quasi-governmental appearance of many professions that you would expect to be "private" is the strongest visual signal that you are in what is at least nominally a Communist country. But the bank was the absolute strangest. I had to fill out a form that asked for my first and last name, which I turned in to the teller along with my passport. This prompted a dramatic freak-out, including lots of pointing at the paper and grimacing, and a five minute exchange between the teller and my "student buddies," who were there as my translators. Apparently the fact that I had put my name down as "Brian Matzke" despite the fact that my passport said "Brian Severin Matzke" was the source of much consternation. Eventually I was allowed to simply write the "Severin" on the form, but I got the impression that my initial omission was still looked upon as a grave error. Neither of my student buddies had ever heard of "middle names" before, and when I tried to explain that while middle names appeared on government IDs, it was common not to use them on other documents, they were thoroughly perplexed.

I find these encounters with bureaucracy to be scary and hilarious in equal measure. Much about this place seems like chaos with a superficial veneer of centralized control. The traffic is insane, but at many intersections you will see a traffic cop standing and, as best as I can tell, doing absolutely nothing. I was walking with an American professor teaching through my same program here who pointed to one the other day and said, "I guess that's what full employment looks like."

Gestures towards organization inevitably coexist with the grime and messiness one would expect from a city of this size. People spit on the sidewalk constantly (I can't really blame them for that--the humidity does cause some crazy mucous buildup). And they don't just spit; little children still wear bottomless pants, so seeing kids relieve themselves outside is common, and once I saw a grown man pee on the sidewalk. Not on the bushes next to the sidewalk; on the sidewalk. I think he was doing landscape work for the apartment complex he was next to. He was wearing a uniform.

Smell

All of this public urination contributes to the second most overwhelming sensory experience I've had this past week: the smell. Everything smells very overwhelming, very different, and often very bad. It's a combination of air pollution, street garbage, unfamiliar flora, and pungent foods. Fortunately, I've mostly adjusted to it. During the first 72 hours though, it made me dread having to go outside. As my fiancee explained it to me, we are hypersensitive to unfamiliar smells, so over time it has come, not to smell better, but to smell less. And the campus is remarkably clean, smelling mostly of different, not-unpleasant trees.

Taste

It's time for my confession: I don't like Chinese Chinese food. I've tried and I've tried over this past week, and I've found some dishes that I tolerate, but not one that I like. If you asked me a week ago, I would have described myself as an adventurous eater with a diverse palate. This week has made me aware of how sheltered I have been, having only eaten in America and Europe.

I find the food unappetizing due to a complex combination of factors. It's not that the food looks strange or exotic--it's mostly pretty straightforward: stir fries, shellfish, noodles, etc. But the spice palate is radically different. Not hot, not sweet...honestly, it's unlike anything I've had in the U.S., and not in a pleasant way. The olfactory senses are connected, of course, so the ambient smells don't help any either. Nor does the fact that I once saw a man washing his woks with a hose on the sidewalk in front of his restaurant where the previous night I saw a child pee. But I suspect that the chief factor is the low quality of the ingredients. Whatever I order, the vegetables look wilted and sickly. They feel wrong in my mouth.

Of course, another contributing factor is the social dimension. When I'm in Michigan, I'm perfectly content to eat a meal alone in my apartment or at my desk. But even in the U.S. I would feel awkward eating alone at a restaurant or in a cafeteria. But here that's my only option. I have yet to be able to make it to a grocery store, so cooking for myself has been impossible for the past week. That has left me with three options: eating alone in a restaurant, eating alone in a cafeteria, or buying a ready-made meal from the "Family Mart" (basically Chinese 7/11) around the corner and eating alone in my apartment. None are enjoyable, though I prefer Family Mart because at least then I can eat while watching Netflix.

Sound

Hearing only Chinese when I go out often leaves me feeling pretty intensely vulnerable. I'm comfortable while on campus, but everywhere else makes me feel very anxious. The experience gives me a new respect for linguistic minorities. I may have been foolish and impulsive in coming here like this, but those who decide to move to a place where they don't speak the language--for work or family or whatever reason--are tremendously brave.

The ambient Chinese is easy to get used to, though. Here's what's harder: over the past several years I came to manage my anxieties--around the dissertation, the job search, what have you--by filling my life up with noise. I'd quiet the voices in my head by steaming video while home alone and by listening to podcasts through my iPhone on the commute into campus. Here, I can still do the former some of the time, but there are hours of the day when my connection is too poor to stream videos, and I left my iPhone back in the U.S. That leaves me with multiple times during the day when I'm forced to face the silence. That's the most overwhelming sensory experience I've had so far.

Shanghai, Part One: Arrival

I wanted a teaching job, and for my sins they gave me one.

In late March I was still struggling with uncertainty as to where I would be living come August, having been on the job market since September with no bites, when I got an email asking for Michigan instructors to teach writing in Shanghai over the summer. I met with the director of the writing center to find out more. It would be two months teaching two courses--a version of the intro-level writing course I'd taught again and again at Michigan, and a graduate-level workshop for Master's degree students writing their thesis proposals. I told the director I was interested, but that it would be difficult to commit to  going overseas over the summer without knowing what employment status I would return to. It was a truthful statement, but also a deliberate one--I had applied to be a lecturer with the writing center and hoped to leverage this China gig into an appointment for the Fall semester. The director was able to assure me that I would be interviewing for the lectureship, and I got the sense that my chances were good. Sure enough, soon after I got the job for the Fall.

April was a whirlwind of logistics--renewing my passport, obtaining a visa, getting vaccinations, writing syllabi. The condensed time frame meant I didn't have time to dwell on how crazy this was. I get awkward talking to the guy making my sandwich at Potbelly. If saying "hold the mayo" filled me with anxiety, how did I expect to handle two months flung onto the other side of the world with no knowledge of the language and culture?

Having managed to avoid that question, I boarded the plane on May 8.

---

It's hard to explain why I jumped at the opportunity to come here, given that I had no prior experience with, or even any particular interest in, Chinese language, Chinese culture, or the Chinese educational system. I was going for the money. I was going for an adventure. I was going to make new professional contacts both at Michigan and abroad. I was going because it was a "CV builder." I was going for the lectureship in the Fall.

But mostly I was going because I saw it as an opportunity to press a reset button on my professional life. I'd spent the past eight years in Ann Arbor pushing towards an extremely narrow sense of my professional self. I wanted to be a professor, and for the seven years I spent as a graduate student that never didn't feel like an attainable goal. But one extremely dispiriting year on the academic job market while working part time as a lecturer and text editor made me question whether that goal was attainable--or, looking at the stresses faced by many friends who had academic jobs, whether it was the right goal at all. I blamed myself for not having a better understood the job market years earlier, for not having done more to cultivate my identity in a way that fit the jobs I was applying to. But I also blamed the University of Michigan. I don't want to sound ungrateful, because UM has provided me with many amazing resources and opportunities over the past eight years. But only after a year of failure on the job market do I appreciate how little of my graduate education was actually devoted to professional training, and how there were several tangible things that UM could have done to help me become more appealing in the eyes of employers (that's a subject for a whole other post). I haven't given up--having learned as much as I did about the process this past year, I intend to go on the market again with a better sense of how to present myself and with a far less romanticized perspective. But I still felt some resentment. A lot of that resentment became attached to the place, and if I was going to do the job market again in the Fall, but approach it with a better mentality, I would need to get out of Ann Arbor for a while.

I guess what I'm saying is, a year on the academic job market will make you want to move to the other side of the planet in order to get away from graduate school.

---

I'm still amazed by the fact that the other side of the planet is one movie marathon away. In my case, that marathon consisted of American Hustle, Saving Mr. Banks, Captain Phillips, Philomena, and The Conjuring. So sue me--I was going to read the whole time but half way through The Lathe of Heaven they turned off the cabin lights and I was too tired to focus on the book anymore, but too awake to sleep, so, movie marathon it was.

I love to fly, and I love airports. I think they're a wonderful way to be introduced to a new place, because they're so standardized and familiar. There are always clear signs telling you where to go. It's impossible to feel lost in an airport, and I find that tremendously comforting.

After immigration, baggage claim, and customs I was met by my "student buddies," two undergraduate students from Shanghai Jiao Tong University who served as my liaisons. Their Anglicized names are Susan and Penelope. It was their job to get me from the airport to my apartment, help me register with the local police, and provide me with a packet of information about the campus.

Taking a cab was my first sense of minor cultural shock. When I motioned to buckle my seat belt, Penelope said, "Oh, that's a good idea" in a way that conveyed that buckling a seat belt was an activity that had never even occurred to her before. Of course, my seat belt was broken, so I had to go without, a condition that was only mildly terrifying, as the aggressive driving that characterizes Chinese roads is somewhat mitigated by the fact that nobody is capable of traveling faster than maybe 12 miles per hour in the bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Eventually, we arrived at our first stop, the police station. China requires that all new residents register with the local police. It felt very much like a Philip K. Dick story. The station was a small building with the front doors open, but with a curtain of dirty vinyl strips in front of the entryway, like you would expect to see at a warehouse or body shop. The inside was small and looked like a DMV. A tired looking man in a police uniform sat at a desk behind glass, and Susan and Penelope handed him some documents and told him who I was. They had a long back and forth, which I didn't understand but got the clear impression that it took much longer than it needed to.

From there we went to my apartment complex, about a block away from campus. The main campus of SJTU is located in Minhang District of Shanghai, which was described to me as "rural," but that is very misleading. "Suburban" would be accurate by Chinese standards, but to this American, Minhang is still denser than most cities I've seen. From my initial impression the main difference between Minhang and Xuhui, the downtown financial district, is that Minhang is more residential and somewhat run down. When Penelope and Susan took me to my apartment complex, it felt very overwhelming--building after building of apartments arranged in a dense, messy fashion. But the inside was gorgeous, boasting two bedrooms, an office, kitchen, dining room, living room, and bathroom, and hard wood floors. I don't even want to think about how expensive this apartment would be if located one block from UM's main campus. The contrast between the inside and outside of the complex is one of several examples I've encountered of the dissonances that I sense are what people mean when they talk about China as a developing country.

---

I'm sitting in the office of my apartment writing this. It's ten thirty in the morning on Sunday, May 11 (To all of you back in the US, I'm writing to you from the FUTURE!!!!). I'm still adjusting. I need to get over the jet lag, need to figure out where to get food. Sadly, all of Shanghai's famously great food seems not to be in Minhang, so my day-to-day eating will be less exciting, but at least there's no Potbelly, so I don't have to learn how to say "hold the mayo" in Chinese.

Teaching starts tomorrow. That's the part of this whole experience I'm most looking forward to. And since I'll be teaching two writing classes, one with 17 students and another with 30, and one of which meets four days a week, it's the part of the experience that likely will dominate my time here. I'm not here to be a tourist; I'm here to be a teacher.

And I'm here to press that reset button. I'll let you know when I find it.

My Engagement Ring

I can't wait to get my engagement ring back from the jeweler where it's getting resized. That's right, I said my engagement ring. I'm part of the five percent of men who wear an engagement ring (and I refuse to use the ridiculous portmanteau by which that Atlantic article refers to these rings).

I got engaged a little over a month ago, and in the lead up to that event, I noticed a surprising amount of verbiage being expended on the material and symbolic meanings of this little metal circle that betrothed women wear. Amanda Marcotte believes, "It's high time to end the tradition of the engagement ring, along with other wedding rituals that are built on the assumption that a bride is dependent and virginal." And Shannon Rupp writes, "I’ve always thought giving engagement rings was a slightly unsavoury custom, given that it began in an era when women were chattel, more or less." Kay Steiger says, “Honestly, I’d rather have an iPad.”

I get their points, but to be fair, all of their arguments about the negative historical connotations of the engagement ring apply just as much to the institution of marriage itself. Just as the social and legal institution of marriage has changed in meaning from a proprietary exchange to a partnership, so too can we change the meaning of the engagement, and with it, the engagement ring. The arguments put forth in Slate, Salon, and XOJane are built on a false dichotomy--either we do away with the engagement ring, or we hold onto it as an ironic vestige of the patriarchy.

Of course, it IS an ironic vestige of the patriarchy, but that doesn't mean it can't also have a new meaning, a new meaning conferred on it in no small part by the fact that it was a mutually exchanged gift. I don't currently live with my fiancée, and while we see each other almost every day and message each other throughout the day, I like wearing the ring as a reminder of our partnership. If I'm, say, bored or stressed out at work, it's comforting to know that I can always depend on her and she can always depend on me. And it's fun to think about how a little over a year from now, we'll have all of our close friends and family together for a big party where we'll stand up and declare our intention to jointly file our tax returns for the rest of our lives. And I know that she feels the same way.

She's my constant.

Side note: Remember how great Desmond and Penny were on LOST?

I'm not the only one who feels this way, and particularly given the shift in views towards same sex marriage in recent years, the idea of keeping the engagement ring around as a gendered institution is becoming increasingly silly. (Though as my fiancée noted when she was shopping for my ring, it's hard to find a men's engagement ring that does not look like it was designed to be given to a man by a man. Many of those ones look nice, but I'm just not that flashy. Clearly, this is an untapped market for the jewelry industry.)

But the thing that I most like about mutual engagement rings is the way it changes the proposal. I don't know how the rest of the five percent of guys came by their rings, but I came by mine through a mutual exchange. We got engaged in February, but we knew it was coming for about three months before that. It was a decision we had arrived at through ongoing discussions about our goals and our plans, and once we both knew that we wanted to get engaged, we spent the next couple of months buying rings for each other and making plans. Then in February we both took three days off work, went to Traverse City, ate good food and drank good beer, sat down at a nice restaurant, told each other why we loved one another, exchanged rings, and asked each other to marry us (wow, English pronouns do not make it easy to construct that sentence in an elegant way).

By comparison, "traditional" engagements seem tremendously stressful. As I understand it, you have to arrive at a point in your relationship where you're ready to commit to one another, which might be different for each party. Then, you either don't talk about marriage or only talk about it somewhat surreptitiously. Then the guy is obligated to plan a surprise proposal on his own that accords with his girlfriend's romantic sensibilities, while she has to wait on pins and needles for this life-altering surprise, possibly for maybe many months. The whole thing sounds crazy-making for everyone. Remember Charlotte and Harry in the sixth season of Sex and the City?

Our "proposal," on the other hand, was essentially a very romantic vacation. Weddings are a public event, a communal affirmation of your commitment for friends and family to share in. Getting engaged in this way made it into a personal event--not a surprise, but an affirmation in its own right, only one that was just for us. There's no reason why any ring would have to be a part of that affirmation, but I nonetheless feel good wearing my little metal circle.

Brooding White Dudes on TV

A few weeks ago I posted this status to Facebook:

Attention TV: if your show stars a pensive-looking 40+ year old white dude in a suit and he's not fighting aliens or robots or something, I just can't bring myself to care.

The status was a response to the chatter that week about the second season of House of Cards, a show that I've tried and failed to get into several times now. I made it most of the way through the first season. It consistently struck me as a caricature of what "serious" TV is supposed to look like. It's dark and atmospheric, with a cast full of powerful characters who speak deceptively to one another, hiding agendas and double-crossing one another. I can't decide what I find more ridiculous about it--the fact that it's a show about political power that cares very little about how American politics actually works, or Kevin Spacey's self-important soliloquies. Actually, that's not true. Of course it's the soliloquies that I find more ridiculous. But the misunderstanding of politics is what bugs me. The mechanics of the characters' political machinations seem consistently off in one way or another. That's almost forgivable given that the Washington, D.C. setting seems more like an excuse for the creators to make a big existential point about...something or other. What's less forgivable is the fact that, for a show ostensibly set in the present, Frank Underwood's version of the Democratic party sure boasts a lot of white southerners.

But this isn't a post about House of Cards, nor is it a post about the politics of representation (not entirely, at least). Countless essays have been written about the overrepresentation of white men in media and the ways in which it contributes to a general cultural perception that white men's stories are more deserving to be told or occupy more space in the cultural landscape. I have little to add to that point specifically, though I consider it extremely important. I'm more interested in the question from a creative dimension. Because, politics aside, I'm genuinely bored by the "brooding white dude" model of "serious" television represented by House of Cards. And Mad Men. And Boardwalk Empire. And Justified. And Dexter. And The Sopranos. And 24. And most procedurals (House, Sherlock, all of the CSIs). And, admittedly, Breaking Bad, which I nonetheless love.

I often like to think about culture in quantitative terms. So much about humanistic analysis is subjective, and that's a good thing--culture is complex and ambiguous and deserving of multiple debatable interpretations--but I still like to start from a relatively objective place when I can. So, with that in mind, I'm going to return to my initial complaining Facebook status and do a back-of-the-envelope calculation. In that status, I identified six variables with which a TV show is constructed. Let's look at each of them in turn:

1. Affect ("pensive-looking"). This is what I mean by "brooding"--the tone of the show, as dictated by its lead's primary emotional state. When you poke at it, it's striking how often TV shows rely on their lead's brooding affect to convey the Importance of its subject matter. I don't care how many cigarettes you smoke while staring out of a window, Dick Whitman, your identity theft still isn't that big of a deal.
• There are a lot of ways to categorize emotions, but let's go with Love, Joy, Surprise, Anger, Sadness, and Fear as our basic six. It seems pretty clear that we tend to associate Anger and Sadness in our fiction with Serious and Smart storytelling, while undervaluing Love and Joy (more closely associated with comedy than drama), as well as Surprise and Fear (more closely associated with "genre fiction").
2. Age ("40+ year old"). Maybe I'm just too old for them to be on my radar anymore, but it seems like there is no equivalent to My So Called Life, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or even Friday Night Lights on TV right now. Again, Serious and Smart storytelling seems to be associated narrowly with one life stage--adult with kids who has attained some degree of professional status, but isn't yet retired. In other words, someone in their 40s or 50s.
• A "generation" is roughly 20 years, so let's break age demographics into four generations: Under 20 years old, 20-40 years old, 40-60 years old, and over 60 years old.
3. Race ("white"). Pretty straightforward.
• It's notoriously difficult to come up with a list of categories for this field. For the sake of our back-of-the envelope calculation, let's use the five categories used by the US Census Bureau--White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander--and simply add Multiracial and Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish to make seven (I know, I know, I'm grossly oversimplifying, but bear with me for just a minute).
4. Gender ("dude"). Also pretty straightforward.
• Let's go with three--male, female, and third gender/genderqueer.
5. Number of protagonists ("dude" singular). People tend not to notice this, but these serious "antihero" shows tend to feature a single protagonist, even those with strong ensembles.
• In addition to the "single protagonist" model, plenty of shows employ the "duo" model, with two leads who are either romantic or professional partners, or both. Plenty of other shows employ the "ensemble" model, where anywhere from four to a dozen main characters are sufficiently well established as to serve as the protagonist for a plot line. Remarkably, I can't think of any trios, perhaps because in any show with three leads, one is likely to stand out as the primary protagonist. So let's say there are three models.
6. Class ("in a suit"). Just as serious TV tends to be associated with a certain life stage, it's also associated with professional success, featuring a hefty dose of middle- and upper-class white collar professionals.
• Let's keep it simple and go with a white collar vs. blue collar dichotomy.

6 x 4 x 7 x 3 x 3 x 2 = 3,024

There are myriad other variables one consciously or unconsciously considers when crafting the premise for a narrative, be that a television show or anything else. I didn't even touch on the genre question implied by my "fight aliens or robots" comment. But just using these six variables, and my very rough estimates for the different categories falling under each variable, yields over three thousand possible permutations. So why the prevalence of the archetypal pensive-looking 40+ year old white dude in a suit?

But, you may say, the categories aren't evenly distributed in real life, so of course you can't expect every permutation to appear as if they were randomly distributed.

Of course not, but (a) it's still pretty obvious that the pensive-looking 40+ year old white dude in a suit is overrepresented, and (b) as I said at the start, I'm not talking about the politics of representation; I'm talking about creativity. People whose experiences are less common can be, for that very reason, more creatively interesting. The guy who goes broke paying for his cancer treatment is far more common than the guy who becomes a drug kingpin to pay for his cancer treatment, but I'm not interested in his TV show. Tell me you wouldn't be curious to watch a show about two 70-year-old underemployed genderqueer Hawaiians living in a haunted house.

Now, I don't want to fall into the "Why are there no _______?" fallacy. There are PLENTY of shows featuring more creative permutations of these variables (American Horror Story and Orange is the New Black come to mind, and of course, the reason so many people are still obsessed with The Wire is because it subverts the "pensive-looking 40+ year old white dude in a suit" model so well). But when you think about the shows that (a) get made, (b) get made well, and (c) attain enough critical and popular attention to become part of the zeitgeist, it's surprising there isn't more diversity.

One reason why I decided to write this post was to illustrate the usefulness of some simple quantitative methods. If I had the time and the resources to survey the TV landscape, it would be easy enough to pin down this lack of diversity in less impressionistic language. I wish people with more time and resources would do that.

The other reason I decided to write this post was to make a confession: A couple days after posting that status I started watching True Detective, a show about two pensive-looking 40+ year old white dudes in suits (Hey, a duo! That's a different permutation!). And I. Love. That. Show. I justify my bit of hypocrisy largely because I'm invested in pulp fiction tropes, and the show provides a very smart spin on both the detective fiction and weird fiction genres. Its use of weird fiction tropes is particularly interesting--I'm not convinced that tomorrow's finale won't end with Marty and Rust fighting aliens or robots or demons or something.

But more importantly, I don't think there's anything inherently "wrong" with True Detective simply because it's another iteration of an overly represented permutation of variables, nor do I think there is anything wrong with the other shows I listed earlier (except for House of Cards, which I still think is simply ridiculous). Approaching this issue from a more quantitative perspective helps to distinguish between a problematic trend and an individual instance of that trend. I'm disinclined to hold the former against the latter.

Circling back around to the politics of representation, this is a problem that often comes up in feminist pop culture criticism, particularly around discussions of the Bechdel test. But I tend to think that the Bechdel test is most useful for looking at a problem that exists in culture macroscopically. That so few films pass the Bechdel test (while, simultaneously, so few fail the reverse Bechdel test by focusing on female homosocial spaces) illustrates an inequality in the pop culture landscape, but I'm not necessarily going to use the Bechdel test to evaluate the feminist sensibilities of an individual film.

(Side note: One way in which I think about the usefulness of the Bechdel test in evaluating individual films is by asking, could the movie have passed the test without affecting the story? In a movie like The Shawshank Redemption, for example, the fact that the movie takes place almost entirely in the homosocial environment of a men's prison is pretty central to the story, and I'm not inclined to call its lack of women unfeminist. On the other hand, a film like Pacific Rim, Mako Mori test aside, probably could have flipped the gender of one or two characters and passed without changing the story, and that seems like a missed opportunity in an otherwise strong film. This isn't the only thing to consider, but it's a place to start.)

I have plenty of feminist friends who rail against this cultural imbalance while loving Hannibal or Supernatural or Sherlock. We all have our preferred brooding white dudes, and that's okay. So, on the one hand, I'm not going to say that anyone should watch True Detective. I firmly believe that there is no such thing as "must watch" TV, just like there are no "must read" books. And if your only reason for not watching it is you can't bring yourself to care about pensive-looking 40+ year old white dudes in suits, more power to you. But I still can't wait to find out who the Yellow King is.

I hope it's an alien or robot or something.