仕方が無い Nothing You Can Do

We have been on break these last few weeks.  Many of us have decided to go traveling, myself included.  I went to Beijing, Harbin, Mingshui (a town outside of Harbin where Ben, Ben's old friend Garth, and I stayed with a friend, Casey's family for new year), and now, Osaka Japan.  I bought a new camera with money I made from tutoring and made sure I had it with me for this trip.
Though I know I haven't put up photos nearly as often as I intended, the original idea for this blog was a place for pictures.  I really love taking pictures, and take great pride in them.
Today, in a moment both of great distraction and even greater stupidity, I erased all the pictures on my camera.  I have not taken my computer with me for this trip, and none of the pictures I've taken these past few weeks were backed up. 
I'm not going to lie.  I literally cried when I realized what I'd done.  I had to then walk a great deal in order to get back to the train station, which helped a great deal.  I've managed to think of a good many philosophical things to console myself.  And fortunately, I was already planning to go to Beijing again in the Spring.  As for Harbin, I will just wait till Garth and Ben upload their pictures to facebook and look at them if I want to remember.
In lieu of showing them, I am just going to describe a couple that I wish you could see.  It may sound a bit silly, but I feel this is the best way to say good bye to them.
I took a panorama shot of the Great Wall, the section beyond the "do not enter" sign, which was overgrown with weeds so high you could easily hide a fully grown person.  From there, outside the brush, you could see older parts of the wall, parts that have not been repaired and are too dangerous to climb.
I took a short video of Ben lighting a firecracker and throwing it.  Casey had shown us how to take apart a string of firecrackers, light an individual section with a cigarette, and throw it before it exploded.  We walked and threw mini-fire crackers in temperatures below zero Fahrenheit.
I took a picture of my friend Ting eating Korean barbecue, looking incredibly happy, even though we spent the afternoon talking about uncertain futures in romance and careers.
I took a picture of my friend Dana, eating pizza.  She is busy studying advanced Japanese.  As always, she is full of stories that are almost to incredible to believe.
I took a picture of my friends Risa and Yuko, as we ate okonomiyaki together.
I took pictures of Lu Xun's house in Beijing, pictures of strange varieties of goldfish in Zhong Shan park, pictures of various turtle statues in the Forbidden City and in museums.

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Just before I returned home from Japan, two years ago, my hard drive crashed.  I lost all of the photos from the whole year in Japan.  I remember thinking at the time that I at least had the memories.  I can still hold onto that.  There's really nothing else I can do.

The Ones Who Walk Away

My title today comes from the Usula K. LeGuin short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelos.”  In this story there exists a perfect society.  There are a few flaws, but they are the most benign blights a society could have.  There exists only one fundamentally unfair, unchangeable thing – a single child is kept in a small dark room and is left there with only just enough food to eat for its entire life.  Each citizen is brought before this child, without which society could not exist, in order that they understand.  Some stay, and appreciate the sacrifice.  Some walk away.  We are asked to contemplate just what they are thinking.

When we were asked to contemplate this story in class, I remember thinking rather bleakly that such was the cost of living in any sort of society.  There wasn't really a way of walking away from Omelos.  The ones who did were really just kidding themselves.^*

People who have known me for a short time see that I am very optimistic.  People who have known me for a longer time know that I am also very cynical.

Another idea I would like to play with today also comes from Ursula K. LeGuin.  In high school, I read 'A Wizard of Earthsea,' in which magic stems from the true name of each object, creature, and person.  LeGuin is not the only person to use this device, and I would guess it comes from older Celtic or Druidic traditions.  I remember at the age of sixteen thinking about how powerful language was, and playing a mental game in which I tried to disassociate words from their meaning.  The fact that signs made up of lines, curves, and circles could create images in my mind was a miracle I had taken for granted.  I would try to force myself not to imagine their meanings, to look at the words as only what they were – images.  In an elective creative writing class in high school, I remember our teacher talking to us about the power of words and how the very sound, even without its meaning could have the power to create an image.  Her example was the word 'pus,' which she thought produced a visceral image purely through sound.  My friend Emily pointed out to her that the word 'bus' sounds almost the same and produces no similarly gruesome image.  Four years latter in Japan something reminded me of this idea – of an object's essence lying within the name, and I remember thinking how small and limiting that idea was.  It seemed to understand theoretically that languages could be complete yet unrelated, yet not understand its actuality.  Language is a human construct.  Without humans the world has no names.  There are no words, no power, while the physical world remains undisturbed.  But this does not mean language is not powerful.  It is so powerful as to tie the world together in all of our minds.  It does not tie them in a way that mimics reality, but in a way that is whole and entirely original.

Recently I talked about homesickness.  Homesickness affects different people different ways.  Before we start, I think I have to make it clear that while I sympathize with people who have very strong homesickness I have trouble empathizing with them.  I remember feeling homesick only two times in my life – the second time I have described already on this blog.  Both times were around a holiday, and both times I recovered as soon as the holiday had passed.  I feel I should explain this about me before I continue, because what follows may not ring true for persons with different personalities from myself.

Humans rely on predictability.  When things are predictable, then we feel secure.  This makes evolutionary sense.  You don't need to run.  You don't need to starve.  You can plan ahead to avoid both situations.  A great deal of socializing is based on predictability.  We only recognize social patterns when they are absent.  We avoid people who behave in an unpredictable way, a way deviating from social norms.  Ostracizing these people also, I believe, unfortunately makes evolutionary sense.  Patience, understanding, behavior therapy are all luxuries of stable societies, several steps away from primitive man.  If the rules change – if suddenly we are the ones who do not understand the social signals or norms when previously we did, it can give one the feeling of going mad.  It can feel as if the physical world itself has altered itself somehow.  An alternative is to declare that everyone is mad except one's self.  Others have the 'correct' 'natural' way of interpreting the world hidden from them, but one is able to intuitively understand it so it must be true.  This I believe is analogous to language and the physical world.  Without language the physical world would still exist.  Similarly, I believe that without social norms human personalities would still exist.  Our mental framework is fundamentally rooted around perceiving one using the other.  It would be a mistake, albeit a very easy one that everyone makes, to think the two equated each other.

Most people, cultures, etc. interpret one's ability with language to equate one's ability to think.  As teachers it is difficult to predict at times what sorts of things others are exposed – and plenty of times information that is commonly available in the United States, such as sexual education, critical thinking, hostile debate, is not accessible in China for cultural or political reasons.  But we are very young, with limited life experiences ourselves.  We are separated by a few years, not decades.  We are older brothers and sisters, not uncles and aunts.

So who are the ones who walk away from Omelos?  They are the ones who are not comfortable with what they saw, and cannot live with themselves once they have that knowledge.  They have seen what they consider to be a fundamental part of humanity to trampled upon.  I sympathize with their discomfort.  I disagree with their observations.  I disagree with their premiss – of ideas being as directly connected to speech as objects are to words.  I disagree with their conclusion – that humans are not beings filled with contradictions, that some values might only be different but not less valuable to each human.  And I do not believe we can escape these things by walking away.  

Afterward:  There is a pink elephant in the room as I write this, and that is the question of values.  What are values?  Are they universal or culturally specific?  No one really believes them to be on the extremes, but it is easy to make emotionally satisfying arguments about why absolute universalism and absolute cultural relevancy are wrong.  I heard my Uncle Matt say once, “Academics fight so hard because there is so little at stake.”  I am cautious to talk about cultural relativism in this essay because I am afraid of having to then defend myself against arguments similar to those I have made in the past against cultural relativism.  Really, everyone should have the same degree of universalism and cultural relativism as me, and I am sure my views contain no self contradiction on this point.

*Please debate me on this story and interpretation in the comments.  I encourage you.  I really enjoy these kinds of debates, and some of you I know enjoy them too.

Kites of Nanjing

I have a set of photos all taken the same day in Nanjing at Zhonghuamen.  Will and I had arrived the evening before.  We explored a bit together then, and together in the morning, we parted ways in the afternoon, a few hours prior to these pictures being taken.  I had chosen to go to Zhonghuamen because of its proximity to our hostel, curiosity, and a desire to walk and observed independently.  At the top of Zhonghuamen were at least half a dozen people with kites.  I assumed they were connected and that they had all planned to be there at the same time, but there was no sign or announcement to the public and on retrospect they may have had no connection at all.  These are some of my favorites of all the pictures I've taken so far.  I showed a few of them before, so I am properly showing them here now.  Usually when I don't add explanations for individual images I don't put them in any particular order.  These ones I have ordered specifically to recreate the feelings I had while taking them.

Never Forget

I'd like to build off the theme of 'the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves' I touched on when talking about television, and talk about the Nanjing Massacre Memorial.  Professor Paul Scott at Kansai Gaidai taught all of his classes how to 'read' museums – how to interpret what political message a museum tries to tell.  When we hear people describe historical and politically sensitive events we often take things with a grain of salt, allowing for personal bias.  For the most part we do not practice this with museums.  Part of what made me interested in visiting the memorial was a chance to 'read' this museum.  In Japan, I visited several World War II museums including the museum on the grounds of Yasakuni Shrine in Tokyo.  Yasakuni's museum denies that the Japanese army engaged in any kind of aggressive attacks anywhere in China.  My hobby is to try and collect these stories told about World War II in Asia as well as I can understand them being told to the people who live there.

There were two indoor museum areas.  The smaller of the two is built around the archeological site where a mass grave was discovered.  The team, comprised of Chinese scientists but in cooperation with Japanese groups, were able to identify bodies as being executed, and then attempts to destroy the evidence.  The exhibit was coldly descriptive, which made it all the more horrifying.  Bone fractures and pieces of metal were noted as causing death by driving nails into people.  Wounds were counted.  But the actual words were emotionless, written as though the writer was trying to avoid accusations of bias.  At the end, a pile of paper cranes lay on an eye-level shelf.  Each string of cranes came with a small banner declaring it from a school from Japan and a message in Chinese or Japanese promoting peace.

The much larger building, the more popular building, I believe was arranged and organized by different people.  The larger building used photographs and artifacts to create a time-sequence narrative.  The nature and tone were very different.  There were clear villains.  One villain who caught my attention was an officer who made a bet with a fellow soldier as to who could cut off the most heads.^*   It was specifically noted that he was sentenced to death during the International War Crimes Tribunals.  The Guomindang were grossly ineffective at protecting the city.  The details of the slaughter were described in detail, but not as much detail as the feelings of loss and fear coming from survivors who wrote about the experience.  One pair of pictures that stands out in my memory is toward the end of the museum, where there are two quotations on China and Nanjing and their roles in World War II as a whole.  One quote is from Mao Zedong, the other from Chiang Kai-shek.  The content is almost identical.  Each quote is accompanied by a picture of the man who said it.  The picture of Chiang shows him standing stiffly for a formal picture facing the camera straight-on.  He appears old and uncomfortable and inanimate.  The picture of Mao shows him at an angle with his arm outstretched while giving a speech.  He appears young, hansom, and comfortable.

I can't say that the larger museum lied.  They didn't lie.  To use just the example of the photographs, those were both real photographs of real people.  But it created a forceful narrative for how an event is to be remembered.

I have two other thoughts that are related to the location, and to the theme of memory.  The memorial entrance has a series of statues based off of photographs of people fleeing the city while it was under attack.  Beneath each statue is a piece of poetry about the massacre.  Above them on the wall in large metal letters is the name, 'The Memorial Hall for Compatriots killed in the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Forces of Aggression', written in half a dozen languages.  Beneath the name, in large metal letters is inscribed 'AAAAA.'  Tourist attractions nearly all have a rating.  I'm not sure if these ratings are how culturally important somebody thinks the location is, or how highly recommended the location is.  The ratings are between one and five A's.  The Nanjing Memorial is a bit less discrete in displaying it than other places, but not by much.  It is a stark contrast to see.

The second thought is where the title for this essay comes from.  Though most of our time in Nanjing William and I explored on our own, we both decided to go to the Nanjing Memorial on the same day.  It had struck me as strangely ironic that the area were were in seemed to be nothing but malls, with a space carved out for an out-of-place memorial.  The creates an odd, but emotional reaction in me.  So many people felt so intensely at the same time so much pain.  And now, fifty years latter, nearly everywhere outside of that small island, all of that had disappeared.  While we waited in line to go into the larger building I wondered aloud about how that could happen.  William disagreed.  He felt the memorial and the attachment to its history were more artificial than the malls surrounding it.  The natural tendency is to move on and live normally, especially after so much time after an event.  So what is the nature of remembering, and what is its value?  I had thought given time I would be able to come up with a satisfactory short term answer that could conclude this vignette, but unfortunately I cannot.

*Do you remember in 'The Two Towers', Legolas and Gimli have a bet as to how many orcs they can kill at Helms Deep?  Remember how that was comic relief?  I wonder why I have a harder time getting into classic fantasy stories than I did when I was a kid.

CCTV Z: Television and The People's Republic of China

There are two kinds of TV stations on mainland China – Chinese Central Television (CCTV) channels of which there are easily a dozen, and all of the others.  For most of the day, there is not much difference between them; CCTV stations tend to specialize in something like movies, peking opera, or documentaries, while the other stations are more likely to have soap operas and game shows.  Except, for half an hour between seven and seven thirty pm, every channel shows CCTV 1 news – every channel except CCTV channels.

The news itself I cannot give a detailed account of.  Aside from a few names, like Hu Jintao, and a few common words like afternoon (xiawu) and work (gongzuo) and CCTV, I can't understand the commentary.  What I can understand is the imagery.  Lots of flags, political figures busily at work^*, and  a large sickle and hammer figure prominently on the screen.  Ballet dancers perform in the United States, while singers do a translated Mama Mia for a Chinese audience.  On the local news show, African children sing in Chinese.  Children compete on the local news station on 'red' contests, doing various communist related activities, like racing to pick up apples.  Aside from this very patriotic half an hour (an hour if you count the local news) this channel will show a romantic drama taking place during the Han Dynasty^**, and a dating game show^***.  Commercials will sell makeup and moisturizer.  A soccer team whose goalie appears to be a frail classical beauty, will pass around Snickers bars and the beauty will turn into a young man who is no longer hungry.  Babies will wear disposable diapers, and cell phones will play one's favorite music.  A hansom father takes his son to KFC for dinner while mom is out of town.  A young woman chews a piece of Winterfresh gum her father gave her, and magically is transported back home to visit.  I have picked mostly American brands to talk about in order that my American readers will quickly be able to imagine the advertising landscape, but Chinese brands also have very similar commercials.

A great deal can be learned about people and their perceptions by looking at media and advertisements.  My father taught me this in high school with subway billboards.  It was latter emphasized by Professor Paul Scott at Kansai Gaidai when he would show and discus films in political science classes, both fiction and documentary.  Rob LaFleur at Beloit put it the most articulately: “the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.”

China seems to be telling itself two very different stories.  There is a story about socialist ideals that are genuinely valued and respected.  It includes things like technological development and cultural and global respect.  But there is a much newer, sleeker story that, though it does not contradict, has a very different tone.  It is a story that does not quite match the outside world in Kaifeng, but is being beamed into ever person's television set.  And in the outside world stores, new city policies, the use of decorative English on every kind of product, move reality closer to that sleeker image every day.  It is one thing to read about this in the newspaper or for class.  Here it is really happening right in front of my eyes in front of my TV screen.

I can really only describe this by using an anecdote.  Two years ago I visited a friend who's parents live just outside Jinan in Shandong province.  One day we were watching a television program dramatizing Mao Zedong's battle with the Guomindang (KMT)^**** for control of China and the survival of the Chinese Communist Party.  Without warning or pause, as is quite common, the show cut to a commercial.

*date 10/17/11 TV showing politiburo.

**MeiRenShinJi was for a while my favorite show to watch.  I learned how to say 'shut up' (zhukou), your royal highness to the queen mother (taihouniania), and what to say when you are about to be killed or if another man is with your lover (buyao, literally 'do not want').  It also was a good thing to chat about with other girls my age.

***My father has informed me that according the the New York Times, these dating game shows are a governmental concern because they do not promote approved social values.  But they are everywhere on the dial, and I've had a large number of people ask me if I've watched them.

****There are two romanization systems for Chinese.  One of them, Pinyin, was developed by The People's Republic of China.  The other, Wade-Giles, is still used by Taiwan and other areas.  Using Wade-Giles, Guomindang is Kuomintang.  Using pinyin, Kuomintang is Guomindang.  One of them is showing up as a spelling error on my computer, but both are in my Apple Dictionary application.

Afterward:  In a conversation that is referenced in my post about the Nanjing Massacre memorial, William and I talked about the time it takes to process the ideas that form around what one sees when one travels.  This is one of the contrasts I've noticed when I did my post about our different blogs – different people wait different periods after an event, and post with different frequency.  This post was originally started in October during a week when I was sick.  I wish I could say the fact I hadn't worked on it since then was intentional, but I kept meaning to go back to it and edit it and finnish it, but I didn't until now.

Also, bonus points to anyone who can spot the B-52s reference in the title.

Fish 鱼魚

Outside Oracle Bone Museum, Anyang Henan 

Anyang Henan

Small Town Outside Kaifeng

Anderson Japanese Garden, Janesville Wisconsin

Anderson Japanese Garden, Janesville Wisconsin

Anderson Japanese Garden, Janesville Wisconsin

Millenium Park, Kaifeng Henan

Some Long Overdue Photos of Nanjing

For some reason I kept expecting that I must have put up pictures, but now I realize that I didn't.  Here's a handful of pictures, and I will try to upload more soon.  Also, I would encourage you to click on the pictures to see a larger version of them.  These ones are a bit more artsy than others.

Pictures from Around Kaifeng

No stories to these photos.  They have been building up, so I want to show them.

新年快乐！ Happy New Year!

I'm going to try to write as much of this as I can, while I'm still in the moment and before the excitement wears off.

Adam insisted we go and celebrate New Years Eve by going to a bar.  We went as a group of seven – Adam, Will, Alexis who is a good friend and is a senior English student, Allan who is a freshman German major with very good English, Mary and Sally who are Adam's students, and myself.  We arrived just after eight pm.  The place had a black and white floor, a series of booths with white cushioned seats, and tables with plastic bar stools.  Heart balloons decorated the booths and bouquets of pink balloons decorated the walls.  There were at least two different screens showing two different American music videos, neither one of which matched the song the DJ was playing.  We sat in a corner, and Adam treated us to beer and some fries.  We were given an extra set of fries and popcorn for free.  We were also invited to come again to parties the bar was planning to throw latter this year which we were told we would be allowed to go to for free.

The first portion of the evening was dedicated to people watching.  There were a number of young men with hair styles which, had we been in Japan, I would have said they were Yakuza (gangsters who tend to have very gelled and bleached hair).  The booths and tables slowly filled up.  Most of the people I spotted seemed to be young men and women and middle-aged men, though latter I saw middle-aged women as well.  There were a number of different people working for the bar, each job with a different style of outfit.  Waiters and waitresses had blue and white stripped shirts, and tended to be young, probably in their twenties.  Older women who were probably fourty or fifty at least wore khaki belhop jackets and occasionally swept the floor.  At least a dozen young women wandered between tables, each wearing white furry boots coming up to at least halfway up their thighs, a short white furry skirt, white furry arm warmers, and a sleveless shirt with a hood with cat ears.  They tended to go to tables that were filled exclusivly with men, but they did also attend mixed gendered tables.  I can't tell exactly what they were doing, but they talked and socialized with patrons.  My own guess is that they were a bit similar to Japanese hostesses.^*  Our neighbors played a drinking game with cups and dice.  And occasionally the waiters would carry to various tables a bucket filled with ice, a bottle of liquor, a lilly, and a sparkler.  The ceiling was covered with lit up plastic tubes, and a giant disco ball hung above the dance floor.  At one point several people sang live – I'm not sure if the volunteered or if they are hired by the bar.  Then, two dancers came out a guy and a girl.  The girl was wearing a black bra and the guy was shirtless, but both were wearing black hula skirts.  After they finished, the tiny dance floor was open and peppered with dancers.

At some point we moved out to the dance floor.  I really enjoy dancing, and had been dancing in my seat almost since we arrived.  However I was a bit apprehensive about going to the dance floor.  I have been warned before that foreign women usually get swarmed by Chinese men who've had a little bit to drink and don't want to give the girl much personal space.  I will say though, I experienced very little of this myself.  The first time we went out about half the people dancing were a circle of women in their thirties, which probably helped.  The only really weird thing that happened was one guy who was trying to get Will to poke my breasts.  But by that point we had danced quite a bit, and I had enjoyed myself.

Adam was in his element.  He walked around and got treated to beers, wished everyone a happy new year, and patted people on the back.  

We saw the tail end of the New Year's Gala the school threw, and Adam and I walked Alexis back to her dorm.  On the way back he shouted Happy New Year, or Xin Nian Kuai Le! To nearly everyone we passed.  It was by far the most memorable new year's eve I've had in my life.  It was quite a rush of adrenaline.

*Hostesses are women in evening gowns employed by hostess bars.  The women are basically like human icebreakers.  They compliment patrons, tell jokes, encourage them to drink more, and the men who come in can bond over their common attraction.  If a group of men come together, for example several businessmen who are planning a transaction together, they can identify themselves as part of the same group – men who tease each other about the women around them.  In a number of respects, hostesses are like a modern version of geishas.  There are also a number of variations of hostess bars, including maid cafes where each woman wears a costume fitting the cafe's theme, and host clubs in which young men compliment and flirt with female patrons.  Though some hostess bars are fronts for brothels, generally no actual sexual contact takes place between hostesses and their patrons.

Indulgences

I have three photos for you, of things I have treated myself to.  The first is a solar-powered bobble head of a Peking Opera player which I bought on sale when a store was going out of business.  The second is a hand-warmer, which has holes on the sides so you can stick your hands inside like a muffler.  I was originally going to buy a Totoro doll that seemed to be calling to me 'please buy me!  I'm much cheaper than anything like me in Japan!  Buy me!'  When I actually looked at it though I started thinking about how difficult it would be to take it home.  But I saw this hand-warmer, and thought it could double as a small pillow!  And I think it is more original than the Totoro doll, so I am pleased.  The third picture is Cheese-Lobster flavored Lays.  It really does taste like cheese and lobster.  No lie.

Unmentionables

There are two events in the news lately that I would like to mention.  The first is the death of Kim Jong Il.  The second is the protests going on in Russia.  If you are not interested in politics, you may want to skip this one.

Friends from high school may recall that I liked talking about Korea.  I am sure I more than annoyed several people, and am glad they decided to remain my friends regardless of my fanatical facination.  Other readers may be interested to know that my interest in Asia began with a project comparing North and South Korea.  I remember I created a cartoon slideshow showing the history of Korean leadership since the country was split in two in 1945.  One of the main themes I tried to show was that drastic changes have taken place in South Korea, while everything in North Korea remained almost exactly the same, including their president.  Well, today still the president of North Korea has not changed.^*  The big question is whether anything else will.

I personally don't think anything will happen soon.  All the major, shadowy figures in North Korea, as well as all the global powers outside North Korea have too much to loose if the area falls into chaos.  But given that Kim Jong Un is very young, and that he has not had much preparation for the position he is about to take, I could see the potential for collapse.  Though many have predicted this sort of thing in the past.  North Korea watching is exciting and boring because so much of it is based on speculation on shreds of evidence.  Any second could be the end of the country, the peninsula, or the world as we know it.  But that potential, which is highly intoxicating, has so far remained only potential.  We have no way of knowing until it is too late whether any of it has turned into anything.

In other news, there are the protests in Russia.  I remember as a teenager hearing my Uncle Matt talk about how they stuff the ballot boxes in Russia.  It is such a common occurrence, that it is little more than an annoying chore.   But now business as usual political corruption has lead to middle class protests.

The biggest question that comes to mind for me is the middle-class democratization theory.  I don't remember its formal name, if it has one.  Basically, this theory stipulates that in a society that lacks a middle-class, most citizens care more about their own economic well-being and don't care if that economic well-being is supplied by a democratic or non-democratic system.  Once there is a middle-class, however, that middle-class is comfortable enough that they don't need to spend as much time worrying about day to day expenses or the near future, but they are still concerned about the long term future, and want more control.  The middle-class tends to be filled by educated professionals, such as doctors, teachers, and business owners.  Such people hold more clout in society than other common protest groups, such as unskilled laborers or students.  Countries that have grown middle-classes that demanded reforms to liberalize their governments include South Korea and Taiwan.  There are other countries in the world that are developing their economies and suddenly have a middle-class.  I personally don't think change will happen soon in these countries, but if Russia should carry out reforms, it certainly would persuade me to think that it is possible in other countries too.

Also, I think I should mention I have read about these events on the New York Times and on The Economist.  I can't say for certain why they are not blocked.  I think it's a PR campaign to show how free information is here.  Adam has speculated that the people who check for inappropriate material on the internet probably don't have the best English.

I won't be home for Christmas – Two Christmases Two Years Apart

Due to similar sounding names in Chinese, many people give friends apples on Christmas Eve.

Christmas is a big holiday.

Christmas is the day that airports are clogged.

It is the day families see each other again.

Christmas is when people are most stressed.

All of the stores are decorated and play music for two months in preparation for it.

Christmas is Christian, yet it is so widespread, so popular, so much a cultural monolith, that it has almost, though not quite, been separated from its religions origins.

Christmas is when many people who are not home become homesick.

The timing of Christmas is almost perfect for homesickness abroad.  Throughout one's time abroad, or at least for the first year or two, one experiences an emotional roller coaster.  One meet challenges and on alternating occasions succeed or fail at overcoming them.  On some days the triumphs seem larger than the failings, and one feels brave, smart, and confident.  On others, the failures pile up and everything seems too large, too different, and the small gains feel pointless.  It's strange, but I have had some weeks where my entire outlook on life turns a full one hundred and eighty degrees over the course of just seven days.  One of the larges downturns most people experience happens about three to four months after first arriving in a new country.  Among other things, there is a feeling of being tired, and just wanting to go back to where everything was 'normal' and made sense.  One's first time, you could wonder if coming to this new country was the biggest mistake of your life.  That was my thinking last Christmas I was away from home.  This year I just feel like I need a vacation for a week, then I'll be back for more.

Christmas can make these feelings more poignant since it has such sentimental value.  If one has friends who are going home for the holidays, it might not help matters.  In Japan, many of my friends were only staying for one semester.  Some of them were especially homesick.  I had managed to feel almost no homesickness for nearly four months, but after hearing them talk about how excited they were to go home it started to hit me.  I had also had some person difficulties and was beginning to doubt not only my language ability, but whether I was likable as a person.  In addition, my mother had been planning to visit Japan during Christmas, but since the plane tickets to visit for New Years Day were significantly less expensive, her visit was delayed a week.  I left my host family on Christmas Eve and moved into a hostel in Osaka.  My memories of that Christmas Eve and Christmas day are of feeling isolated, lonely, and free at the same time.^*

I walked through downtown Osaka, where expensive stores for suits and books had classy Christmas decorations that would have been at home on 5th Avenue.  The trees down the boulevard were wrapped around the trunks with lights.  I passed columns of yellow, blue, and magenta as I passed clusters of people on their way to underground restaurants.

I strolled through the Osaka Illumination, where lights of every color wrapped every individual branch of the trees.  Food stall employees shouted their welcome as a much quieter audience slowly shuffled through the assigned pathway, stopping occasionally to take pictures.  Music played and the lights flashed in time to match it.

I stood on a train platform, waiting for the train to Doubutsuen station.  One of the trains that stops at my platform is completely packed.  Through the window I see a man dressed in a Santa Claus suit.  He appears as nonchalant as the other passengers.  In a moment, the train has vanished and the man in the Santa suit with it.

I sat at my computer checking my facebook page as a church down the street from my hostel played Christmas music out onto the street.  I could hear silent night being played, the tune familiar, the lyrics entirely alien.

The afternoon and evening of Christmas day I spent with my friends Maarika and Rose.  We decorated Christmas cakes, the only widespread Christmas tradition in Japan, with Maarika's friends from koto club.  Then the three of us went to karaoke.

This year's Christmas was in almost every way different.  Most of the people I interact with on a day to day basis are not going home to the United States for the holidays.  We teachers wouldn't be able to go back even if we wanted to – or at least we wouldn't be able to go back for more than a single day if that.  Though I feel myself retreating into English a great deal of the time and know that I could potentially improve my language skills a good deal more than I have been, I am confident in the fact that I have progressed a great deal since I first arrived.  I am getting along well with all the people I interact with on a daily basis.  I find myself actually becoming homesick for Japan more so than for the United States, and can recognize the negative feelings I do have, of being bored, as being very similar to two years ago.  Not only do I recognize it, I know the cure.  Travel and vacation.  Both of which are coming so soon I can almost taste it.

Today we, the five foreigners in the compound, had breakfast together.  Adam made french toast, which we all enjoyed.  I had lunch with my student Sydney.  Adam, Ben, and Ben's girlfriend visited a church, an experience which I will not do justice to in the retelling, so I would encourage people to look at their blogs. We exchanged Secrete Santa gifts.  And we had peking duck for dinner along with four Chinese friends.  Our conversation traveled quickly over some very dark or dirty topics, but the atmosphere was warm and light.  We got to watch our duck being carved.  We bemoaned the fact that there are no longer any sanlongche.^**  We retired to our rooms.  

And I found myself looking at the past, as if the years are layered on top of one another like stacks of paper or a folded blanket.  It was as if I could remove any number of sheets and see whichever Christmas of my past I should want – as each day is connected to itself in the past.  I have done this with other days, not only Christmas, but Christmas is special since so many of us look back then.  I remembered fragments of things I remember writing which have since become lost to cyber space.  I feel content, nostalgic, and a bit restless all at the same time.  And it is this feeling, this nostalgia mixed with restlessness, a restlessness I can explain, while feeling at the same time so lucky to know the people I know, it is this that I want to share with you, dear reader.  Merry Christmas, dear reader, even if you don't celebrate Christmas.  Merry Christmas from two countries that have embraced the trappings of Christmas without ever absorbing its religious meaning.

*There are several videos and photographs from this time which are on my facebook page, including a video of the illumination in Osaka.  I no longer have the hard copy to upload here, but I would encourage family and friends to watch it.  On an unrelated note, though these memories all happened within a few days of each other, I don't remember the order.  I know for certain they did not all happen the same day, though I realize the phrasing may make it seem otherwise.

** Sanlongche are three-wheeled motorcycle cabs which have recently been banned in Kaifeng and replaced with a more tourist friendly but available bicycle version.  For more details, including a song about them, please visit Eaaf or Ben's blogs, as both have written very good posts on the topic.