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20 Ağustos 2020

X Years in China (0 & 1)

                                  

Copyright: Xinhua News Agency
                                   

                                                                                           Introduction

We all had our own valid reasons to be here, the reasons coming from our tumultuous past or from the history of failures. The personal wounds are well-hidden under our thick skins. The wounds that either we were ashamed of having them at first place or we were afraid of being labeled as pretentious pricks whenever we show them to others. Everybody has them, in fact, we are aware of the fact that the first lesson we learn from our mothers is one should not trust those who have never been wounded. We are all icebergs, that is it, big or small 90% hidden, 10% on the surface, glittering like precious diamonds, on the shoulders of those dark waters! Perhaps, we all knew that pain is the most subjective feeling in the realm of all other humanly experiences. They are incommensurable, incommunicable, and in most cases inevitable. However, we -a bunch of expats in Changzhou- were more like a group of survivors, each one of us is holding unwounded part of another’s body so that we will neither cause pain to the ones who offer help nor we will end up falling into an indefinitely deep spiraling void. It did not matter who kicked our stomach before we ended up here, who made us vomit blood on the sidewalk or who spitted on us. What mattered was we were in this self-proclaimed island, feeling free from the prying and judging eyes of the past and ready for a re-start, regardless of the fact that this also could be a short run for some of us and soon those who failed here will look for another salvation elsewhere. It is the endless cycle of history, the destiny of men and women who never understood that if the pendulum makes them happy by swinging from left to right, it will soon make them sad by swinging back. Our primitive minds, the ones that the evolution mistakenly developed to prepare its own suicide, can never accept the fact that the dream of the perpetual motion is nothing more than a high level of perpetual stupidity. The golden rule of life, a legacy of Cavafy, is simple and scary: if you fucked up before, you would fuck up again. If you are lucky, in this second time people can tolerate you so they will let you have a soft descend. Do not think you have changed, became a better person, or found the right place for yourself. If the seed is infected, the soil cannot help it no matter how fertile the land could be. Nothing ever changes since the beginning of time. Even time, the coolest illusion of the human mind never ceases to deceive its own creator! Then what can we expect from the feeble hearts of the losers? Change? Dream of a change? Story of a change? This book is about the illusions, the futile attempts of breathing under the water, the mirror which never shows the truth but gains value with the things it can hide...

Ohh, I hear you, my friend. Your lips curl, your face turns into a cynical form, your eyes roll like a pair of dice rolling indefinitely on a backgammon board. You want to say you are different, there is nothing you are running away from. You might be right or you might be away from admitting the facts, facing the reality of life. If you are running toward something, you must be running away from another thing. Every new beginning is a closure with the past and life is not possible without closures. We need to run away from certain things so we can feel alive, we can feel the change, we can be proud of ourselves for a simple fact of leaving things behind, completely forgetting them and not feeling nostalgic once in a while little details of daily encounters remind us of them. In this sense, running away is a virtue, a kind of privilege that many ordinary minds cannot achieve, cannot even dream of.

How did all start? Your China adventures! How did you end up here by a little prod of mere chances and how did you later justify that China is the right place for you to live 10 years of your life? Kublai Khan asked the same question to Marco Polo[1]: Do you only travel to the past? If you are a writer, there is no safer shores than the past for you. Because only the past has a complete meaning, a complete map that admits the defeat in the fight for fairness. The present is still developing so it is incomplete and insecure, the future did not happen yet, so it is ambiguous and scary. Only the past has complete stories that have new plots and details each time you narrate it again, to a new audience, on a different day. It is raining outside, so you should perhaps start your story on a rainy day. It is hot and humid, why can’t you imagine a nice cool day to make your reader more comfortable.

Ohh no, I must add one more thing. This won’t be a writing of chronology -What am I? A historian?-, it will be something between stream of consciousness and magical realism. The author of these lines will follow your steps; your daily routine will be his source of inspiration. The objects you touch, the air you smell, the flowers that you killed by negligence, the stray cats that you feed, the homeless man who thanks you twenty times for a bowl of noodles, the e-bike that lies on the sidewalk like a wounded gazelle... Take a long piece of thread, put it in your hand and squeeze it as hard as possible. That ball of thread is what you will be reading in these pages. If you want, you can entangle it and sequence of events in certain orders, the order which will satisfy you. In the end, memories do not follow the rules of the present. They are random dots in the vast hollowness of mind. The wise person understands that taming the wildness will be unfair to its natural beauty. Leave it as it is, let it guide you through in the dark forest of the past, or all possible pasts... As Nabokov[2] puts it nicely: I should allow only my heart to have imagination; and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn sunset of one's personal truth.   

Let’s start, it is a long journey...

 

1.       1. AMAN DA AMAN![3]

You pull the curtain; the entire city stretches outright at the tip of your feet. On the 27th floor of a large hotel in the city center, you enjoy watching the flicker of the lights coming from the sea of the buildings, disappearing in the dark sky only to reappear again from another nearby source. It is like watching the beginning of rain on the surface of a tranquil lake, each drop creates a small circle and soon the circles intersect, interfere, and interact with each other. Every drop is responsible for a small act, but the final picture is a modern art piece of chaos and insanity. There are large red Chinese letters everywhere; cars, people, and noise are galore. You read the few available English words and try to make sense of the things around you. Here is a bank, here is another hotel, that one is an insurance company, this one is selling house appliances... The ocean has millions of waves, millions of meanings, most of them are not open to you yet. You turn your face to the room.  The large room smiles at you with a mischievous smirk. There is a weird feeling in the middle of your chest that you cannot remove no matter how much your rational mind insists. The same question rings the suspicion bells in your head again: What did I do to deserve a room like this? Did I come to the right place? I am only a teacher. Why did they arrange such a large and luxurious room for me? A small room with a single bed would be more than sufficient.  Perhaps, some weird breakfast like frog legs, fish stomach, or chicken feet that you would never touch. You were ready for the worst, but this? A room with a jacuzzi?

There seems to be no mistake because the right girl came to the airport and picked you. She was carrying your name on an A3 paper, she knew your flight number, she even knew your passport information, so the room was booked and paid for in your name before you arrived. You asked her name once both of you got in a taxi. “My name is Amanda,” she said with a smooth English. “I will take you to the hotel and make sure you have a good rest.” You watched the city through the window. The roads seem comfortable, there are elevated roads everywhere and there is almost no traffic. This last one might be due to your late arrival time but still, you enjoy the ride. No bumps, no traffic lights, no congestion! The car runs like a sledge on the snow, but the ride is still long. The airport must be extremely far from the city you kept telling yourself.

“Thank you, Amanda!” you speak with a timid voice. You somehow do not feel tired after 11 hours-long flight. Perhaps it is the novelty of Shanghai, the city of 25 million people, one of the two cities comes to mind whenever someone talks about China. The excitement of arriving at a new place, the expectation of seeing the unseen, standing at the edge of a cliff before jumping off with a parachute! Fatigue will sit on your shoulders after you see enough and decide that this is another mega-city, not so different from others if you are only a tourist. “And tomorrow morning, I will meet you at the lobby at 9 am. We will take a taxi to the train station. You have a train at 10 am. I will walk with you until you get in the train. You must have your breakfast before 9 am and be ready to leave. The hotel is quite near the train station. So, one hour is enough to catch your train. When you arrive in Changzhou,...” You listen to her like the old Japanese tourists listen to their tour guide, with curiosity, impatience, and silence. She speaks like she is reading a text from a piece of paper, a well-prepared lesson. Maybe because she did this to every new teacher arriving in the city or maybe because this is the way she always speaks; you could not decide. In the end, she is the first Chinese person you are speaking with while you are in China. There are more than 1.3 billion more people out there. How do they speak? How do they smile? How do they eat? You know that they do not really look like each other but can you also be sure that they don’t talk like each other?  

“No, there was no mistake!” you convince yourself in the end. This must be the company policy. They treat the teachers with respect, with the dignity that the teachers deserve. You are bewildered because this never happened to you before. You feel like that you are that fat, short, old man but somehow the young hot girl at the other corner of the bar cannot take her eyes from you. This is why something in you is unbalanced, looking for a more reasonable explanation. In situations like this, your mother would be saying “Alışmamış götte don durmaz.”[4] You laugh at these words as they sound funny, especially when your mother says it with a burst of loud laughter. The expectations of the teachers must be high then. But what can they ask for? All you will do is to teach Mathematics, to make sure your students learn Calculus and get good scores in the exams. You sit on the corner of the large bed. It bends down a bit with your weight. You took your shoes and socks off, preparing yourself for a long warm shower. Then maybe some reading until you fall in sleep... You suddenly feel the fatigue on your shoulders, it spreads towards your arms and chest like heat traveling on metal pipes. After the shower, you do nothing except trying to connect to the internet. It does not work so you give up. In the middle of the pile of unnecessary pillows, bedsheets and blankets; you slide into the realm of sleep like diving into the warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea.

 

The first half of the night passes like long-lasting painful toothache. You wake up several times, try to connect to the hotel’s internet, after each failure you get back to the bed with swears. After countless attempts, you finally can connect to the internet, but the VPN does not seem working. At about 3 am in the morning, you manage to send messages to your wife and your brothers. Short and direct to the point as you are worried that it will disconnect again. “I arrived in Shanghai, in the hotel room now, everything is ok. I will give you more detail once I get to the city I will be working.” Then another sleep, this time deep and beautiful, like a flawless mathematical proof.  

 

In the morning, you wake up right before the alarm goes off. An ancient habit of yours, proving yourself that your internal clock can beat any external clock that works independently from you. A quick shower, shabby summer clothes -a pair of black shorts and a navy-blue t-shirt, a cheap baseball cap, slippers on the feet…-, no need to shave, it is summer anyway… You know you are in East Asia now and this is the part of the world where you feel the most comfortable. Being among Asian people makes you feel relaxed, less stressed, and less anxious. Being and looking different makes you indifferent to the stares of the people around you. All those social etiquettes that you must follow at home are peeled off from your skin and here you are closest to what you really want to look like. Simple, oblivious, absent-minded, and free!

 

Breakfast is a lot more colorful than you have expected, the majority are Asian dishes but there is a section with simple Western choices. The only fear you have is accidentally eating pork but there are a lot of vegetarian options, so you avoid the meat entirely. This saves you from wasting time in struggles of communication. Coffee, egg, bread, cheese, cherry jam, butter, tomatoes, and cucumbers… It is like being at home again, the only missing thing is the seagulls of the Bosphorus. You take a copy of China Daily News from the counter and sit at a corner, slowly devouring your food while reading the news about the achievements of China. New railway lines, new dams, and bridges, happy old people with their grandchildren, young people are content with what is being offered to them… You feel bored, all the articles are about the same thing and all the approaches are from the same angle. It is like a cheap novel! Good is good, bad is bad and there is nothing in between, no transition from one to the other…

You check the time, it is 8:40. Amanda will come at 9:00 so you still have some time to kill. Suddenly you realize that you don’t have any Chinese money on you, and you might need money during your trip, especially after separating from Amanda at the train station. You see an automatic exchange machine at the lobby, so you want to give it a try. It starts easy with language selection, ID information, scanning the passport etc… But near the end, right before you put 100 USD banknote in the claws of the machine and receive the equivalent amount of RMB, the machine gives an error and does not let you go any further. You cancel the operation a few times and start from the beginning. It always ends in the same way, right before giving you what you need, things get back to the beginning. The myth of Sisyphus is oscillating in your head like a tense string of a violin, you hear the voice of Camus saying, Torture isn’t pushing the rock, it’s pushing the rock toward a destination.” You are about to give up! The voice keeps its intensity with different words, with different tones, “You should not push that button, instead try the red one on the right. The one looks like…” You turn back and see a familiar face. “Ohh, Amanda! I didn’t know you were here!” She smiles, the morning sun shines on her pink cheek. She stares at you like you are doing something that you are not supposed to do. “Let me help you. It actually is an amazingly simple process.” She takes the passport from your hand and goes to the machine. Beep, beep, beeeeeep, beep… “How much do you want to exchange?”, “100 USD”, “Ok, please give me the money. I mean the note.” Buzzz, beep, beep, chir chir chir… “Here you are, it gave you 610 RMB”. You take the money from her and put it in your pocket. “Thank you very much. I wouldn’t be able to do it without your help.” She smiles again, “Never mind, it is a simple thing.” She walks to the reception and you follow her. “Are we leaving now? It is almost 9 o’clock”. She does not seem listening to you. “Amanda, are we leaving now? I have the key card for the room.” At that moment you feel a hand on your shoulder. A soft gentle hand, tapping your shoulder to gain your attention. You turn back and see Amanda again. “What the fuck!” comes out of your mouth involuntarily. “Hi Ali, I am sorry I am a bit late. Because of my stupid brother, I missed the bus and needed to wait 15 minutes extra for the next one.” You feel millions of ants walking on your legs, they are coming up, soon they will take over your face too. Who is this girl? Real Amanda? So, who was the first one, the one at the reception now? You took a deep breath, roll the whole movie in your head again, figure out what went wrong, and quickly explain to her what exactly happened in the last five minutes. While listening to you, she points at the fake Amanda and asks you if she is the one. You confirm. She looks astonished, her natural smile turns into a forced grin. “Ha ha, we don’t even look like each other.” she chirps like a bird, but you sense the hidden meaning in her words, “What a stupid, what a naïve, what a gullible man are you? If you behave like this, someone -a man or a woman- will take advantage of your absent mind sooner or later. This is China, you should never show weakness to the strangers…” You don’t respond, just laugh with her, laugh at your own silliness, laugh at your easygoing character.  At the reception, you talk to fake Amanda, try to explain her the entire misunderstanding but she seems indifferent to your apologies. “It is ok, you needed help and I helped you. I didn’t hear you called me Amanda anyway.” Real Amanda watches you when you talk to her copy. She checks her figure, her hair, her makeup… At that moment, the first time ever, you realize that they look completely different. You bite your upper lip to control your shame, you bow your head and fix your eyes on the black dots on the floor. You want the time passes so fast and this will be over soon. You want to be alone, walking on the sidewalks, getting wet in the rain or sitting on your seat in the train… Once the check out is complete, Amanda shows you the gate. Both of you say nothing until the taxi arrives. You, not knowing women very well, presume that Amanda has nothing more to say. It is over for both of you, no need to make a big fuss about it, no need to remember the bitterness again in this beautiful summer morning. However, it does not take long for you to realize that you are completely wrong.  After getting into the taxi, she opens her mouth and does not stop grumbling until you arrive at the train station. “How can you confuse her with me? She is short, I am tall. She is fat, I am thin. Her hair is straight and touching her shoulders; look at my hair, it is long and a bit curly… They are not even the same color! And, and, and she never claimed to be Amanda. You call her Amanda and she did not call your name. Don’t you think it is a bit suspicious? You need to keep your eyes open in China, trust no one! What if she takes your money and runs away? What if she …”


To be continued...

2.       



[1] Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, …

[2] V. Nabokov, Speak Memory, …

[3] In Turkish, when you see something surprising or extraordinary, you say “Aman da aman!” to express your astonishment. It is sometimes used in a sarcastic tone.

[4] Turkish proverb: If the ass is not used to it, the underwear won’t stay on.