I Love All Twelve Of You

I have an average of 12 readers for each post. I can name some of them: Sissy, Lulu, Virginia, and Suzie Q. However, I'm not sure about the others. An anonymous contingent of eight might not sound like a lot to you but it tickles me no end. I'm sure it's not Mom and Dad as we are having round 2,347 of "Just type in the address if you want to read the damn blog" and I can assure you I know no one in Romania. (Yeah, I check the stats.) If you feel like posting a comment and letting me know you who are, I'm thrilled. In fact--since Valentine's Day is coming up, why not be sweet and drop me a line? I make the following promises: unlike any contestant ever on American Idol, I will not refer to you as "my fans." Unlike my usual behavior after three Dirty Mothers at Quiz Night, I will not comment upon your wit and then ask if your Dad is seeing anyone. Finally, just as I remain semi-anonymous so I don't get sued/still get invited to places like Elvis One's Superbowl Party, I promise not to blow your cover.

You can refer to me as Zanne, let's just say it's short for Alexandra, a name which suits many but somehow is as pretentious on me as the other moniker my mother saddled me with. Ok? Ok. And yeah, I could spell it "Xanne" but it leads to too many comments about Xanadu and Xanax and was I a Buffy fan perchance? (Yes on that one.) Oh, Sweet Baby Jesus. The asshat nation I live in is setting off fireworks  right outside my big picture window and something flew by which looked suspiciously like a severed thumb. There's a little screaming and a  LOT of laughter. It's only eight-thirty in the morning. Pray for me.

PS: Fortunately, it's not a comment. Who else had 12 friends? Huh? HUH? Who's on a high horse NOW?

"Oh Yeah, I had Culture Shock For Like a Week and Then I Got Over It!"

The above title is the deathless sentence I heard uttered far, far too many times, usually by Rich White Kids Who Have Been in Asia for a Whole Semester. Culture shock isn't a case of diarrhea which you get over in a few days' time: it is an ongoing process of adjustment-and readjustment--that cycles throughout your lifetime. People here have what's referred to as a Bad China Day, which is often the result of a tangle with the local foreign visa office as well as with the electricity panel. Quite often the effects are compounded by culture shock: for example, as you're standing in line at the Foreign Visa Office, and simultaneous fighting to keep your place while negotiating on the phone with the guard at your apartment building to open up the locked panel that hides your electric meter so your friend can put the pre-paid card into the meter thus restoring your electricity --but the guard doesn't want to let your friend in to the panel because he's not registered to live there and by God you CANNOT leave the line to run home and take care of this because if you do you won't get your new visa paperwork filed in time which means you'll be kicked out or fined but the only guard allowed to open up the panel is about to leave for his wedding in his hometown and no one else will be allowed to hold the key which means a week or more of no electricity unless you solve this now...and you then bang your head on the marble floor of the Visa office and scream I FUCKING HATE THIS PLACE thus reducing your chances of being allowed another six month stay nil...well, yes, that's a Bad China Day compounded by the frustration of culture shock. Had you grown up in a developing country where such things are the norm you'd be a little more able to handle the less-than-straightforward methods of getting anything done around here. But no, you grew up in a time and place where electricity was billed monthly and regularly, where you had some grace days to pay a bill, where your meter was not kept under lock and key (unless you held the lock and key) and where you spoke and read the language.

The phrase, "Had culture shock for a week and then got over it" is often used by tourists as well: what they're really describing is jet lag. I don't know how sheltered you'd have to be for the usual tourist experience of "get on a bus, go to a hotel, eat a meal picked out for you" to be a total shock but there you go--it sure would be for me, regardless of what country I was passing through at the time.

 I do know that even the long-timers like me (about 20 years) still cycle and have very very bad moments that are attributable to culture shock rather than just a lack of breeding. The other day I got onto an elevator: instead of taking me downstairs to the exit it shot up to a higher floor, where some tall asshat with a cigarette in his hand got on. I saw the cigarette and snapped, and started screaming, "Get the hell off the elevator!" while pushing him off.  He was in such shock that he let me physically push him OUT of the elevator without protest while I rambled on in Chinese about the stink and danger of second hand smoke. I finished with "CHILDREN RIDE THIS ELEVATOR!" just as the doors closed. Since this happened in the compound where I live, it was an especially stupid thing to do, but so far, no one's come to complain about it. My friends Di and Suzie Q have reported similar incidents--just snapping at what is considered acceptable behavior here and plunging straight into Crazy without so much as a detour to "Let's Discuss This First." Di grabbed a cigarette out of a speaker's mouth and crushed it under his shoe: sadly, she was at a job interview at the time. Suzie Q also went berserk on an elevator, screaming at someone who lighted up in her presence. (She also grabbed a man and threw  a punch at him when he was beating his dog, but that's another story and yes, she lost her job over it.)

I'm sure if I were in a nation with a culture slightly more similar to the US I'd still have my moments, and I'm sure if I had never left the US I'd have moments where I flipped out due to frustration (or bad manners) but trust me when I say this; no one adjusts totally and perfectly to a new life situation, whether it's marrying up, or changing your socio-economic status, or picking up and moving to a new country. Once in a while, your past and your past expectations just catch up with you and you may or may not flip out. If you do flip out, take a deep breath, apologize, and remember: no one here is going to remember you in ten weeks' time, so get over it, and next time, don't punch anyone. (Especially since you are no doubt being filmed on someone's  iphone.)

Lu Decorated My Life

I actually have a few days off and I am celebrating by cleaning out boxes o' shite that have accumulated from 27 moves in 19 years, 11 of them in the past six years alone. I have boxes full of power cords for cell phones long since lost or broken, plastic sacks full of unwashed and unmatched sox, and several cute Ikea fabric boxes full of uniforms from expensive private high schools my daughter no longer attends. (She's in college where,  judging from the photos she sends,  she wears nothing but miniskirts.) The washing machine is straining under a load of knee-highs which have followed me from move to move, growing skankier by the month, and the big carpet from the living room spent 24 hours in the shower being gently massaged free of a year's worth of dog hair trapped in its stinky polyester blend fibers. In short,  I'm spring cleaning, and while my house currently looks like hell it will be lovely and clean and ORGANIZED when I am done.

Several boxes yielded real treasures, such as the tea set my daughter bought me, and some little heart-shaped porcelain candy dishes which I like to have out on Valentine's Day. In fact, as I look around the apartment, my favorite and most expensive things were all gifts from my daughter. In addition to the two things I mentioned there is my beautiful floor lamp, Chinese style, with two different shades: a mah jong set: a red satin pillow with a hand-painted cover, and finally an oversize cup and saucer which has like-minded guests begging for me to fill with hot cocoa (it would be too big to lift if filled--I can barely manage to lift it when empty, that's how big it is.) There are other things too, but these are ones I love and look at daily. I also have other small things, such as my grandmother's gingerbread boy cookie cutter, which is out on display all year.  Art? Some paintings and art work, again done by Lulu, such as the Auntie Mame painting I requested, and the abstract art done from magazine clippings. I look around and see the result of her handicraft and her thoughtful attention and her love and I'm again bowled over by how lucky I was to have such a wonderful daughter. I sleep every night on the pillow case she embroidered for me with a free hand design: it says Mom, and it took her a month of working on it in secret.  Granted, I often wondered what she was doing in her room with the door firmly shut, or why she snarled at me when I threatened to clean her room, but it's my complete surprise when I opened her gift  that I recall. She, of course, may have a different version of that story to tell: what I remember is the love, and her drive, and her need to make me something special that showed she loved me, even though we were snippy with each other a lot at that time.

Do I resent having to cart around boxes of her stuff while she's on the other side of the planet? No, although I can't see a reason to hold on to old uniforms, but guess what, that's her decision to make. I can't imagine what my life would have been like without her, and as I open up yet another box, and plunge inside, I can't quite get that old Kenny Rogers song out of my head, "You Decorated My Life." I'm not crying--I am somehow accustomed to her being gone--and while I'd like more emails and phone calls I'm ok with the amount I receive. It's all good: she has been launched successfully into adulthood and whether she makes it or not is now up to her. She has baggage too, emotional stuff from the times I failed as a parent and a human being. Hopefully she learns to sort through it and throw away the bad and keep the good, as I'm doing with box after box after box of Important Papers I've forgotten I had, old school uniforms, and half-used tubes of Hello Kitty lip gloss.

Small Town Girl at Heart

Sissy just emailed me to say that Dave died. I had to send an email in reply, which read in part, "Which Dave? Dave the Chubby Chaser Who Killed His Mother with an Axe, or Dave Who Fathered Rainbow?" You see, we grew up in a small city--hardly the country, as my Brooklyn-bred friends decry--and while we knew just about everybody, eventually, there was usually more than one Dave, and many many Debbies. Last names would have helped but in the 70's and early 80's, when Sissy and I were fairly young and still had social lives, people seldom used them, and those of us who did were instantly branded snobs.  Back then, loser men who were super afraid to commit would introduce their dates as "This is my lady." Ugh. As for fathering Rainbow, a lot of uptight attorneys in town had wanted to be hippies back in the 60's but never had the balls to cut loose and wear a dashiki: many of them became attorneys for the State and made up for their lack of freedom by giving their kids names like Orion, Rainbow, Harvest Fairchild (actually born in a van at the Country Fair) or Buckminster Fuller Quinoa.  Let us not forget Freedom, whom I met when she was a two-year-old running around naked in the front yard.  For the record her parents were very nice and she grew up to be a delightful human being.

People do ridiculous things and my family delights in the odd, so we created the nicknames--Jerry the Crazy Pervert, Dave the Chubby Chaser--as a way of keeping order. Obviously, you don't want to openly pine after someone who has a moniker that hints of a darker side (Dave Who Axed His Mother, for example) while other names--Mr. Honey--suggest sweetness and purity and a green light for lustful fantasies.  I  write "fantasies" as I never have actually dated anyone from my home town, really, other than a few abortive attempts at dates which were usually ruined by the ill-timed arrival of someone I knew crying and/or throwing up (once or twice,  it was me). The nicknames changed as we knew more about the person--Mr. Honey had a penchant for marrying women who went crazy, so his nickname changed to Ted the Crazy Maker--and all of them reflect the very small-town sort of stunning insight into the worst of human behavior, boiled down to a simple name,  that says it all to us.  Never work for someone Sissy refers to as "Elizabitch" and for God's sake keep away from Grandma Debbie because at 49 she's a great-grandmother several times over and still fertile to boot.   

I miss these nicknames, and the revelation into character that come from having grown up with a fairly limited cast of characters. Here in Beijing, the expatriate community comes and goes. A long-time friend might be here for three years, tops, then one of you goes. I find myself having Thanksgiving dinner with people I met only three months before. Now that my daughter has grown up and established herself in the US  I am more rootless than ever, and as glad as I am for the chance to reinvent myself if necessary with a larger cast of characters, I am also aware that my personality is pretty well set. I have no idea what my nickname might be--it's probably Old Bitch from my refusal to cook green beans at yesterday's saturnalia-- and I understand why our rituals have become so important to us, like walking into Quiz Night at the local pub and having some idea that you will see roughly the same faces, even if you don't know the names. We're wanderers, here for a short time, and yet we come from people who tended to stay put and raise gardens and plant trees. Sissy has done precisely that, although she lives in a larger city than our home town. She still has many of the same friends she had 35 years ago but thank God newer ones too: and yet, when we reference the past, it is the nickname that sums up what we knew of other people and sets the tone for conversation. I am sorry to hear of Dave's passing--whatever Dave it was--not only out of compassion for his family and friends, and perhaps for Dave himself--but also I know that he takes with him his memory of me, and this diminishes whatever impact I made.

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Get in the Kitchen and Cook Them Beans, Woman!

Phrases you don't expect to hear from enlightened people, much less enlightened people living in Beijing:

Phrase Number One:  "I knew it was fucked up, but I just let you go ahead and FAIL because THESE PEOPLE have GOT TO LEARN somehow!" (Speaker: American Boss. Situation: Missing IT equipment before large, large presentation. Result: Egg on my face. Boss's assessment: Well, since you ended up looking so bad, it only reflects badly on the Chinese people who can't organize anything! They need to learn from this! Real result: I look like an ass. No one learned but me, and what I learned was largely that I couldn't trust my boss.)

Phrase Number Two: "Our driver can't speak a WORD of English! I send him to English class every week and if he still can't say how long it will take to get to Betty's Nails then I say we get a new driver!"  (Speaker: Wife of someone who works in a major firm in the US who was sent to China while that nasty Sexual Harassment suit against him is working its way through the legal system. Situation: She's been here for six years but still can't speak a single word of Chinese, hence she has handed me, a total stranger sitting one table away from her in a restaurant,  her cell phone to call her driver to get him out of that English lesson to take her three blocks away to the nail salon. Result: Her pedicure looks great, I'm sure, but the only English the driver learns that day is from me, the useful catch-phrase, "Crazy Bitch!")

Phrase Number Three: "The problem with the French is that they're Catholics, and the Catholics have forgotten to look at Jesus. They're all wrapped up in that Mary person." (Speaker: Wife of Leader of Study Tour I was on in Graduate School. Comment:   Apropos of nothing--and made on a long bus trek to Kanding, back in the day when a single lane road connected Kanding to the rest of the world. Traffic flowed East one day, and West the next. Looking back, I realize now that she just wanted to remind us that she had studied French which therefore somehow made her "classy" and that for the same reason--"class"--she wanted us to know she had been Born Again. (Hey, there's a certain governor in US what would just love her right now.)

Phrase Number Four: This situation is oddly related to Number Two.  I'm at someone's house for dinner: the phone rings. The host, who speaks fluent Chinese, reaches into his pocket, answers it, says a few phrases in Chinese which I don't quite understand--or worse I think I understand but which are so foul I don't want to--then hangs up. "That was Rock," he says with a chuckle. "Been here 16 years and he still can't tell the house madame what kind of hookers he likes."  Dear God, it has been proven to me that I do indeed know how to say "rimming" in putonghua.And worse: I went out with Rock once--just once--and my face burns with shame as I recall how bad I felt when he didn't call me for a second date. (For the record I did NOT put out--which probably explains it.)

Phrase Number Five: This one deserves a longer explanation. I went to someone's house for dinner. I arrive, meatloaf in hand, and find a couple of young stoners playing a video game, while the host and his very young, very thin girlfriend (not to be confused with his wife, mind you) sit in glassy-eyed silence. Rock music pours out of the speakers. (At least it was a band I like). The Host finally looks at me and utters these deathless words: "I'm hungry. Get in the kitchen and cook them beans, woman!"

The kicker: He was serious. The beans were those six-inch-long green beans. There were perhaps twelve of them. Dinner was to consist of my meatloaf, one orange sliced into quarters, two eggs scrambled with about eight cherry tomatoes, and half of those beans, sliced and cooked with one-quarter of an onion. For five people. The host (who ended up cooking the damn beans himself) realized part way through the meal that perhaps it was a bit on the scanty side, so he went to the kitchen, and came back with a single-sized serving bag  of potato chips, which he ripped open with his teeth. He dumped the contents on top of the quartered orange and said "There! Eat!" And we did, the conversation as scanty as the meal. Dessert: host flossed his teeth at the table. I did not regret not bringing a carrot cake.

I realize that I am being a horrible guest, a really rotten human being, by commenting upon a meal where I was a guest. Guests are supposed to put up and shut up and help with the washing up, not post mean comments about someone of whom they are really quite fond. (And yet I still write about my sainted mother...) However, it's just that it was all so unexpected: how often is a guest commanded in the most offensive and sexist of language to get in the kitchen and cook a meal AFTER SHE HAS ALREADY BROUGHT THE MAIN COURSE? I do love those meals when we get together in kitchen and cook and laugh together but to pull this off you need a little communication before hand and a lot less ganja. For the record I had never cooked for this person in his kitchen before--nor he in mine--so it was all very unexpected and unprecedented and just plain bizarre.  I am remarkably cranky when hungry and hardly a sweetheart when I'm not: I felt like someone had handed me a pair of tap shoes and said, "Go, Little Darky, Dance!"  I was older than everyone there--even older than the host--and three of the people there were younger than my own daughter. Just because I pushed one human being out my nether bits does not entitle everyone to my services as Chief Cook and Bottle Washer.

Solution? I washed the dishes (except the greasy pots and pans, yeech) then got the hell out. I vowed never to cook there again, not so much for the weird attitude of "You are old and you are a mother therefore you will feed us" but for the fact that he cooked the beans in margarine. An eater of margarine will never be a friend of mine. Butter, olive oil, or bacon fat: these are acceptable. Expensive fake spread that doesn't even have the grace of being cholesterol-free: never. I may be a bitch but I have my standards. And that's  Phrase Number Six of today's countdown.

Chun Jie Downer

It's Spring Festival, aka "Chinese New Year" or "Chun Jie." Now that I have down time I found that I am down indeed: I have the time to play, but everyone is out of town. Most foreign people scamper off to their home countries, or at least to Thailand (if not the uber cool Cambodia/Vietnam trek) or if they're married to Chinese people, to their spouse's home town. Me? Here in Beijing. Alone with dogs. Fretting. There's lots to do, such as going through all those damn boxes and finding the cord so I can use my camera, or going through all those damn boxes and finding the cord so I can use the scanner, or going through all those damn boxes so I can find...you get the picture. I could even go crazy and wash the dishes, or brush the dogs. What I really want to do is eat huge dripping steaks and mashed potatoes and oh, junk food! While sitting in front of a telly and laughing my ass off with a couple of friends--or shagging my ass off with just one of my friends--but neither one is likely to happen. I was invited to an orgy but I declined: I will go over to Elvis One's house, but I am bringing a towel to sit on and will decamp should any of his puppets make gestures in my direction. I can't believe how dull I am right now: I have time to laugh and have fun and there's no one to play with. It's too late to book a ticket anywhere (plus what would I do with the dogs?) and I will have to Make My Own Fun. Damn. Is THIS what it's like to be retired? Remind me to never quit working. As my grandfather told me once, "I have all this leisure time but my friends are all dead. What the hell am I supposed do now?" His solution: Tom Clancy novels. Mine: I'll probably whine and post. May God have pity on us all.

Followers, Puppet Sex, Bad Bad Dreams

I have two followers, and I had to give birth to only one of them. The other is not even a relative, which is sweet. Evidently my family will catch up on my life via my posts, but they're not going to go so far as to commit to being a fan by publicly declaring they read this shite. I have more Twitter fans and followers--nine! Whoo-hoo!--despite the fact I have an average lag in posting of 97 days. Ah, well. The fame will find me, I'm sure.

I've had WAY too much to do recently, and the stress of it all leads me wide-awake and buggy all night. I fall asleep, then jerk awake  for no reason. Secondary insomnia, you are a bitch on little cat feet. In addition to the random jerking-awake-for-no-reason, I also deal with two moronic doggies who bark at the neighbors coming home, at spiders, or at me if any part of my body flops over the side of the bed. I also wake up when they sneeze, roll over, or walk across the bare floor, little toenails clicking like the devil's tiny castanets. One snores. The other has asthma. I don't get much sleep.

So last night, in between bouts of wakefulness, I clocked not one but two horrifying dreams. In the first, I was trying to get into a taxi in a crowded area with my friend The Rose. We live in China yet the dream took place in the US--go figure. We were separated on the street--I found a taxi and jumped in and asked it to circle the block to get back to The Rose and as it circled I tried to text him to say I was in the taxi ahead of him on the street. My cell phone, however, wasn't working--all these things I had never used before kept coming up and I was screaming with frustration, frantically trying to get out of that weird app and into a simple text or even a damn phone call--we circled the block and he was gone and I kept struggling with the phone, screaming, FUCK ME! with anger and frustration. Suddenly we were in the taxi driver's home--I was still struggling with the phone, and the driver, Chinese,  came out of the back room quite naked with a huge erection and announced that he was going to ahem, take me, as I had been screaming, "FUCK ME!" in rage. I ran like hell, still trying to text. I woke up to find Princess Doggie staring at me thoughtfully. She licked me on the face then curled up delicately against my back in an effort to soothe me. After some time--a long, long time--I fell asleep again, only to have a dream about working in a school--again, set in the US--which sucked, and a staff member who is also on a favorite TV show jumped out the window. I saw her fall from the side--and the dream got weirder from there.

There are triggers for both dreams--I can't tell you how many cell phones I have burned through in the past four years, and The Rose and I had had a good laugh a few days ago about Puppet Sex (a story I'll get to) which relates to the "FUCK ME!" theme of the first dream. What really bothered me in both was the sense of menace. I am running a new, potentially very interesting project and I have quite a bit of trepidation about it. I shouldn't, but given my track record--scholarship checks that are never dispersed, paychecks that are withheld for some cockamamie reason, bosses that get arrested before they sign the pay roll, companies that disappear with finished product, and just a lot of general getting screwed like no one else before or since, I carry a lot of tension around. I get that. I will be social this week, it's Spring Festival, after all, and I have only two more projects to launch this week and then I can take it easy (if you call being a slave to two lap dogs easy) for the next eight days.

All right: Puppet Sex. I have the pleasure of knowing not one but TWO Elvis impersonators here in Beijing and only one is gay. The other makes a living in a variety of performance pieces including some brilliant work with puppets. So, The Rose is over there one day, just hanging around and watching TV with Elvis Impersonator Number One, when a Chinese girl comes over. They sit and chat for a moment, then Elvis One disappears into the bedroom. The Rose knows there's a bathroom back there and he figured oh, hell, he just nipped back there for a quick toke. But no: within a minute or two, Elvis One slips back into the living room, clad in clown pants, clown shoes, and a cowboy hat. One of his puppets, a Muppet-like creature that is mounted on Elvis One's fist with arms controlled by two thin rods manipulated by Elvis's free hand, beckons to the girl suggestively. The Rose is startled: reckless hedonist he may be,  even he is appalled by the presence of a clown-clad puppeteer soundlessly beckoning a stranger for sex through the seductive come-hither gesture of a knock-off Muppet. The girl jumps up, strides to the bedroom, and within seconds the sound of hot monkey lovin' fill the air. The Rose wonders if he should leave--and is very very relieved they didn't ask him to join them--but fortunately, after ten or so minutes, the girl wanders back into the room, a fist full of 100-kuai notes in her hand. She nods goodbye and leaves, as silent as the Muppet which sprawls open-mouthed in post-coital abandon across the door sill. Elvis One reappears, freshly toked. "Ah, she's a nice girl," he remarks. "She's not a whore or anything, we just hook up when I have an extra thousand."

That brings me to the last thing I want to say: I have never, ever had a man I was involved with give me money (hell, not even rent!) or anything more expensive than a decent cut of meat, or once (birthday gift) a pair of shoes. However, reared as I was on bad Hollywood films, I realize that in the back of my mind I have always been wanted to be gifted with two things: they are not The Gift of His Name, or Sweet Sweet Love, but rather, a mink coat and a big-ass diamond. I want to be given a mink and diamonds for being very, very good at being very, very bad. My PC sister is screaming as I type this--she doesn't even have to read it for her to be in my head about it--and yes, I can buy my own mink and diamonds, but WON'T, because of animal rights and cruelty free diamonds (and frankly, my own incipient poverty) but dammit it, give me some portable status! Will settle for trip to Paris.