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Here’s the update I sent recently:

Hi everyone!

I’m sure most of you know that there are twelve animals in the Chinese zodiac, each one corresponding to a year. This year (from February 9 onwards) is the year of the rooster. According to Chinese folklore, the year you were born in will be an unlucky one, and each time it rolls around, it’s prudent to invest in lots of red underwear that will protect you from harm. I was born in the year of the rooster, so this is my year. Looking back over the events of 2004, it’s easy to see why I viewed the upcoming year with some trepidation. First there was the kidney infection that wouldn’t go away for six weeks, then there was the neck injury, and after my move to Shanghai, there was the worst thing yet.

I’d moved to Shanghai for a change of scene, to work at a better school, and to hopefully get out more and meet more people. When I got to ECNU I found the campus attractive, with plenty of streams and willows, and a three story tall statue of Chairman Mao. My stuff, which I had mailed from Shenzhen, got there ahead of schedule with no problem at all.?

Then things seemed to take a turn for the worse, with an unfortunate Japanese teacher getting squashed by a city bus right outside the school gate. A week or so afterward, I tripped over a curb and went crashing to the sidewalk. I was completely ignored by a foreign student standing nearby, and got up myself and limped slowly home. I put my foot on ice, hoping it was a sprain, but when it turned purple and swelled up, I went to the hospital for an X-ray and found out it was broken. I ended up in a cast for the next six weeks. Since my apartment is on the third floor of my building, getting around was a big problem. My students solved the dilemma by sending a classmate up to my dormitory every day to carry me down the stairs, take me to the classroom building in a wheelchair, then carry me into the building. I was very grateful to my students, but really frustrated at the same time, because part of the reason I’d come to Shanghai was to get out more. I’d intended to make friends through some sort of Democrats Abroad-type group, but that proved impossible. The first time I was able to go out, other than just to wheel to the store for groceries, was to attend an election party on November 2nd, after I got my cast off. Of course, that was a disappointment.

Continuing the run of unfortunate events, a woman who lived in the apartment building in front of my dorm hanged herself, after which her father-in-law screamed for two hours, and wouldn’t let the paramedics take the body away. Another student of mine had to go home for two weeks because his wife had suffered some sort of psychologically-caused attack of facial paralysis. Two students leapt from windows, and another man was run over by a bus by the school gate.

Despite my broken foot, I still managed to vote, but only after a lot of frustration and expense. In the beginning of September I paid 40 RMB to my absentee ballot by seven-day priority mail, only to find that due to some weird regulation, Indiana “can’t” send out absentee ballots until the beginning of October. This means it would be impossible to receive and send back my ballot by using normal air mail.?When my ballot didn’t show up by mid-October, I downloaded one off the Web, and mailed it express, for 180 RMB. Then the government released a new emergency absentee ballot form, which meant the one I’d sent was no longer valid, so I had to download the new one and vote again. I was able to send it for free through Fex Ex, but had to take an expensive taxi ride to their Shanghai headquarters to hand it in personally. With all the fooling around, I ended up spending about $33 US dollars to send in my ballot, which could have bought me 92 fried noodle dinners, 34 plates of dumplings, 46 cafeteria lunches, 13 boxes of copy paper, 138 cans of Coke, 345 domestic stamps, 1,380 fill-ups at the local bicycle pump, 2,760 pieces of gum, one extremely nice bicycle (or three mediocre ones), or about six weeks worth of groceries. My real absentee ballot still hasn’t arrived.

Rounding out my first semester, the foreign affairs office took all the teachers on a free trip to Hainan Island on January 20th. It was balmy (almost 80 degrees Fahrenheit) and reminded me of Shenzhen — there were lots of palm trees, mangoes, cocoanuts and stuff, which made me homesick. I swam in the sea a few times, ate lots of crab, stayed in a five-star hotel, and visited Monkey Island, where, putting the lie to what a crotchety co-worker had claimed would happen, none of the monkeys attacked, bit us, stole our glasses or tore off our hats.

So far the second semester’s gone a lot more smoothly. I’m teaching a new crop of doctoral students. I’ve moved into an apartment off campus. The city has redone the intersection outside of the school gate, which will hopefully prevent any more people from getting run over. I just took a brief trip to a town in Zhejiang Province called Shoxing, where I was the only Caucasian, and at least fifty people yelled, “Hello! OK!” at me, as they rode by in cars, on bicycles, in pedicabs, etc. I also visited the former homes of Zhou En-Lai and Lu Xun while I was there.

As for movies, I’ve mostly been enjoying Japanese ones lately, my favorite being Kiriya’s CASSHERN, which seems to be either loved or hated by the people who see it. The film is really over-the-top, jam-packed with ideas and filmic references, yet sincere and moving at the same time. The film is like what you get if you mixed some IVAN THE TERRIBLE, some APOCALYPSE NOW, some animae and some video games all together and then poured it all out. It also featured an excellent performance by Karasawa Toshiaki as a baleful mutant king. I finally saw WILD ZERO, which I found sweet and enjoyable for a zombie movie, and the sleazy-sounding but tame and thought-provoking STRAY CAT ROCK: SEX HUNTER.

To be honest, I don’t like Shanghai too much, and sometimes I rue coming here. The food is better, everything is cheaper, and the salaries are higher in Shenzhen. I have to remember, though, that there aren’t many opportunities for tertiary school teaching there, plus the nonstop blazing heat from March to November was having a big impact on my health. We don’t have poisonous snakes, huge spiders, bugs with audible footfalls or Dengue fever in Shanghai either, which is a relief.

Socially, things haven’t panned out as I’d hoped. I’d thought in Shanghai I could make a lot more friends than in Shenzhen, but I was wrong. I’d really counted on meeting people through AmDems in Shanghai during the run up to the election, but since I was stuck in with my broken foot that didn’t work.?I tried hard to make friends with other foreign teachers, but with little initial success. The trainee teachers from St. Olaf’s College even quizzed me pointedly about why I wasn’t married.?I initially was buddies with an Israeli teacher, but found he had a habit of going berserk suddenly, and made friends with a Japanese teacher, who unfortunately had to go back to Japan at the end of the first semester. Lately I’ve been hanging around a little with an American teacher, and chatting with a Russian teacher and his wife, and we’ll just have to see where that goes.I do have a couple Chinese friends, who are often busy because they’re writing papers and going to conferences and stuff.

I’m planning to go to my first ever academic conference soon, as a listener rather than a presenter. It’s the ACSS conference, about Asian film, and will be held jointly in Beijing and Shanghai. I’m going to go to the local portion, where Professor Zhang, who used to be one of my professors at IU, and Neepa Majumdar, who was my teacher for Introduction to Film in like 1993 will be presenting a paper.

Well, that’s all for me.?Stupidly, I didn’t watch my finances and didn’t save money this year, so I probably won’t be coming home in the summertime. I may just stay here and work to put something away. So, I can only send a long-distance hello to all of my friends and family. My computer is a little gimpy lately, but I’m able to go to a nearby net bar to read mail, so just e-mail me back if you want to make contact!

I recently posted a yearly update of what I’ve been doing to all the people on my China list. It included some of the bad things that happened in the fall, and explained that things have been better this semester. Then my mom sent me an e-mail including this:

Your annual message to all your friends was interesting –
how come you never think to tell us all those traumatic events that
happened since you got to Shanghai??Don’t you think we’d be interested?

I’m irritated by this. I don’t know if she’s serious or not. I didn’t mention the Japanese guy getting run over, or someone in my neighborhood committing suicide, because I thought she’d just get all upset about it. Plus, what could she do about it? Nothing. So I didn’t tell her about it at the time. I guess I forgot about her reading this when she got the e-mail.

Nobody can make you feel horrible and insane like your family can. Lately I have this big quandry about whether to go home or not (I think not, because I want to earn more money), and whether my mom should visit me here (I’m thinking yes). Anyway, the whole thing has been a drain and I feel like it all takes a lot of thought and planning, and is hard to coordinate because I don’t know what I’m doing for the summer yet, and because my brother sent me an e-mail that contains the subtext (if I’m not being paranoid) that I’m a selfish bitch for staying away from home. Then again, according to my mom, when my brother comes visits (which is no big deal for him, since he lives a mile away, not on the other side of the planet), he just eats dinner, does his laundry, and lays around on the couch.

Yesterday I was browsing in a DVD store, and the proprietress asked me if I was Japanese. I said no, that I am American. Then she asked, “But why is your face so yellow?”

I just read about a guy whose final blog entry led to the arrest of his and his sister’s murderer. He wrote it while the man was in his house, not knowing the man was about to kill him. The killer didn’t know about the blog entry either.

Here is the blog:

Here is the story:

Is this the most insignicant news story ever? It was on the front page of Yahoo News when I logged in a minute ago.

I used my removable drive at the library and now there’s a virus on it!

Today I peeped into a sex toy shop about ten minutes’ walk from my school to see what they had. A minute or so after I walked out, contemplating whether to go back and buy something, who did I run into but one of my students and her boyfriend. Luckily, I don’t think they’d seen me come out of the store. The moral of the story is that I should keep out of sex shops that are too close to anywhere I might run into my students.

Today I sent an e-mail to Shanghai Airlines asking if they would like a native speaker to copy edit their inflight magazine. I’ve been thinking of doing that for a long time, but kept putting it off. I finally did it! A pat on the back for me!

I’ve been going through a quandry lately regarding my therapist. She always wanted to see me only every other week, although every other therapist I’d ever had thought once a week was good, but twice was better. I really felt like every other week was not enough, as there were a bunch of things I wanted to change about myself and my thinking. I was interested in something more intensive. I finally broached the subject with her, and told her I thought we should meet every week. Afterward, we talked for some time about when we would meet again after the holiday. I showed up on the agreed-upon day, and the maid opened the door, telling me the therapist had gone shopping and wouldn’t be back for several hours. This was a huge pain in the butt for me, considering that I’d taken like an hour and a half to get there, and that she lives in an isolated expat community, so I either had to pay 40 RMB for a cab ride to the nearest subway station, or wait an hour and a half for the community’s next shuttle into town.

I’d been thinking that maybe the woman wasn’t too serious about seeing me as a patient. I thought that maybe she was just seeing me occasionally for some extra money. I wasn’t sure what to do, because I felt really frustrated with her, but I felt I really needed someone to talk to about the whole Mom visiting/going home situation. In the end, though, I decided to write the therapist an e-mail and tell her I wanted to suspend our therapy for a while. If I don’t feel, deep down, that she has a committment to me, what’s the sense in going?

So that’s one worry dealt with, and one to go.

Last night I saw Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS, with live symphony accompaniment. The print featured a TON of footage I’ve never seen before, including the race in the stadium right at the beginning. There were a lot of new subtitles too, which were all in German, and some of which, unfortunately, I didn’t understand. I found that the first third or so of the film, which had been my favorite part, dragged, and I wasn’t sure if this was because of the extra footage, or because of the music, which was formless, clanky and atonal. The second two-thirds of the movie was tauter, more dramatic and more involving than I had remembered. The music that accompanied this was more traditional symphonic music, and I wonder if that made a difference in my enjoyment of that portion.

I have this girl in one of my classes who always has kind of a sour, contemptuous look on her face. It makes a bad impression on me, and I’ve been trying to stay neutral toward her, to just think that maybe that’s just the way she looks. Well, yesterday she kept doing a crossword puzzle in class. I asked her to put the paper away before class, then I asked her the same thing later, and finally I took it away from her in front of everybody. I also criticized her and another student’s behavior (she was talking to another student, who also had a newspaper page), telling them as doctoral students they should surely know how to behave, and I was especially embarrassed because we had a student sitting in from another class that day, who saw them behave so disrespectfully. The most ironic thing about this is that the student is a high school teacher! Would she let her students do crossword puzzles in class? Maybe she would; I don’t really know. She made me really angry, though.

I found out yesterday that T.L., who drives the Bentley and who made the snake-wine video with me, just had a heart attack! That’s pretty freaky, because he’s not a lot older than I am. I’m hoping he’s okay.

I have this really anxious feeling, like I’m about to find out bad news. My stomach feels weird, like I’m getting an ulcer. I haven’t had this vague but upsetting anxiety for a long time. Maybe I’ve been worrying too much about losing weight, what to do next year, what to do in the summer, whether I should go home [:(] or my mother should come here [<:( ]. I just had fun when Curtis was here, and now I feel all freaked out. Maybe the stomach thing is because I ate different food when he was here?

My friend Curtis Hayes finally came to town on Thursday, and in the evening we went walking down Nanjing Lu. Two people approached him and tried to sell him hashish. The next day somebody else tried to sell him some. Nobody ever offers me that! They just try to get me to buy handbags.

I really liked some aspects of Shaoxing, like how a lot of the new buildings were made in a traditional-looking style, so the looks of the ancient and modern parts of the city didn’t clash. But one thing I got really sick of was all the people shouting hello at me. This is a common occurance in China — people yell hello as foreigners go by. Usually, I don’t mind it at much, but it really got on my nerves in Shaoxing. More than 40 people (probably 50 or more) yelled it to me as I went by. I was staying at a cheap hotel populated mostly by Chinese guys running around in their underpants, and some of them started yelling it whenever they went by my door. MOST annoying. I only saw one other white person in the city proper, so I guess the helloing is the price I’d have to pay for living somewhere with so few foreigners.

Another thing is that recently I realized how much I say OK. I’ve been thinking about it lately, and in Shaoxing I was more aware of it, because some people laughed when I said OK. Then I got frustrated when I tried not to say it. Some of the helloing strangers even yelled, “Hello! OK!” as they went by, so I guess I’m not the only American who does this.

I’m here in Shaoxing, which I saw described as a small town, although it actually has four and a half million people. It seems pretty prosperous, and its prosperity probably comes from the fact that it’s a center of “Red Tourism.” Lots of Communist Party members come here because it’s got the ancestral home of Zhou En-Lai, Lu Xun’s house, Cai Yuan Ping (sp?) house, and the houses of some other significant revolutionary figures. I’d meant to go on to Ningbo from here, but I was unable to reserve a hotel room, so I think I’m just going to go back to Shanghai tomorrow. When one and a half billion people are all going on vacation at the same time, it’s tough to find someplace to stay.