Everything That Rises Must Converge

Mid-sunset, 02143. Post-fourth of July calm. Smoky air tastes of autumn and burnt hotdogs and hamburgers leftover from yesterday’s festivities. On one of the hottest days this summer, gnat clouds hover everywhere.

For a little city ten times the size of my own hometown, street activity is minimal. Cars line the one-way streets, but many are caked in pollen or dust. So incredibly still, except for the occasional streak of a car on a distant artery and the drip from the exhaust of the rusted truck parked in front of my apartment building.

I am not traveling the world and saving orphans or researching social unrest in excitingly unrestful cities, but with a huge Nikon hanging around my neck, I am inevitably a tourist. What kind of tourist would tour anytown, USA, I’d like to know? Regardless, peculiarity always seem to form in front of a camera lens, wherever it’s pointed.

Filed by Shan Wang at 10:34 pm under Photo reel,Random musings
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This summer I returned to China, but unlike the past few trips I’ve made, I spent most of my precious June, July, and August as an unabashed tourist. Some interesting things had been happening in China before I flew into Shanghai with a mountain of luggage and a huge Nikon D-whatever. Some interesting things happened while I was there. And some interesting things continue to happen as I sit in front of my MacBook uploading photos and eating water crackers.

As I have my late night snack and type this blog post, McCain’s acceptance speech at the RNC blasts from our television. Which is very much déjà vu, because while I was typing a blog post in China and snacking on cheap Shanghai scallion crackers, I listened to Jacques Rogge deliver the standard world-harmony-amazing-athletes-Olympic-spirit speech during closing ceremonies on August 25th. I’m not so politically apathetic that I don’t bother to distinguish between the two speeches, but very generally speaking and if I zone out just enough, I just hear a lot of well-wishing, a lot of delirious cheering and the occasional interjection of a catchy slogan, and most of all, many many many many promises of unity.

This abstract unity manifested itself everywhere this summer, primarily because of a little event called The Olympics. There is the bordering-on-terrifying patriotism of so many native Chinese. There is the pride of various countries’ tourists as they watch their athletes break world records. There is particular unity among critics–an event like the Olympics can partition thus–those who hate the weather in Beijing, those who hate the lack of attention the Tibet/Mongolia/Xinjiang issues receives from the Chinese media, those who hate the idea of the Olympics in general, and those certain indignant wrathful people who hate everything regardless of time or place.

As a cynical tourist, life is kind of hard, since cynics are surrounded by this cloud of highly-opinionated irony and hypocrisy. Maybe the Chinese “government” should do a better job in “dealing with” Tibet (Autonomous region…). Maybe the air is truly shitty and the sun is obscured by this impenetrable smog. Maybe the aftermath and the rescue process in Sichuan is really a continuation of disaster but the media conveniently chooses uplifting Reader’s Digest-type stories to report on the ten different strictly government-filtered channels of CCTV. Maybe the Olympic athletes are only jumping, or running, or swimming, or shooting, or kicking their way to million-dollar commercial deals and early retirement from the monotony of professional athleticism. Maybe the Chinese female gymnasts are really only SIX or SEVEN but in fact appear much older than their true ages.

I would think all of the aforementioned, if not for the fact that my front row ticket to see Usain Bolt’s 100-meter world record cost about 200 American dollars. And the minute fact that I was buying groceries and listening to my iPod and doing other very normal things in the very city hosting the Olympics. Inevitably the Olympic atmosphere (or the ubiquity of “Beijing 2008” Olympic flags) began to brainwash me. I drifted in and out of a scary mode of patriotism and nationalism. I thought the Fuwa, the five strategically marketed Olympic mascots, were cute. That was my lowest point. Or shall we say farthest away from cynicism.

For Bolt, I cheered and cheered and cheered. I told everyone I knew that I had tickets, authentic tickets to a track event. I took about a thousand pictures of this steel thing, also known as the National Outdoor Stadium. I took no less of a tofu-shaped blue bubbly thing, also known as the National Aquatics Center, also known as place where Michael Phelps won eight gold medals and hugged his mother. I even bought a Brazil jersey, expressly for the purpose of blending in at the Brazil vs. Nigeria football match. Who knows what else I did. Everything sounds out of character in retrospect. I watched the opening ceremonies the night of in a bar and ran around the streets trying to catch a glimpse of the closing fireworks. I bought sixty-dollar baseball hats emblazoned with nothing but a tiny Beijing 2008 logo.

Maybe my mood is exclusively influenced by location.

Filed by Shan Wang at 11:57 pm under China,Random musings
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Nerdily enough, the Chinese texts we’ve been reading have provoked me to write this post about heritage sites and the paradox of maintaining tradition through architectural preservation. The point of this post is, I’m a huge nerd.

First of all, the academic Chinese are obsessed with the idea of globalization, probably better defined in their eyes as the IDEAL of globalization. The essay we read claimed westernization and anglophilia were both at the root of modernization and also globalization, and perhaps the Chinese should redirect their cultural preferences and societal inclinations towards their own roots rather than towards western roots. It all made pseudo-sense, only the essay was written by a Chinese scholar. In English. It was then translated into Chinese, and that is what we read. Peculiar, and moderately hypocritical.

No one is against preserving the Great Wall, since it just looks spectacular and no one in their right minds is going to oppose preservation, and no one in their right minds is going to build another Great Wall the same way it was built before. Sometimes I believe in things very plainly, that is, if it looks cool and cost lives, it should probably be maintained if only for the sake of those who were forced to build it. Many of the sites in Beijing should be maintained this way, without doubt and without debate over whether preserving an ancient facade will really preserve and ground ancient tradition and history. We all go to the Great Wall for the sake of taking pretty pictures and proving how widely we’ve traveled; no one goes to the Great Wall to learn much. We all climbed as far as the twelfth tower, posted photographic evidence on Facebook, and spoke some Chinese. We admired inwardly that emperor’s insanity and some of us probably felt a little bad for the oppressed laborers who laid the stones one by one. Maybe it’s enough to know greatness exists; there is no need to pinpoint a source.

Monomaniacal pursuit of outward preservation is also scary. Political figures are using preservation of heritage sites as a platform. Scholars are arguing about it like they would argue about nihilism or something. We preserve the site, we lose the history. We insist on better historical education, we learn about sites vanished to dust and sand.

In conclusion, I don’t know what I’m talking about. But I am entirely dissatisfied.

Filed by Shan Wang at 4:29 am under China,Random musings
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Traveling, especially by air, is a fairly uncomfortable experience, but the idea of being airborne is great compensation for physical discomfort. The airport itself is a fascinating intersection of anything and everything—literal concourse junctions mirroring the tangible crisscrossing of individual lives. The terminal microcosm facilitates a sort of social experiment. How close can we sit beside someone, not speaking, not knowing who they are, but cramped into the same small space and traveling to the same place? Conversations usually carry in whispers and fragments of a foreign or familiar language punctures the steady murmur of speech. The observant—or perhaps the meticulous—make note of everyone’s luggage collections. I’ve always tried to catalogue and classify the blank-faced traveler sitting before me based on the little flowery carryon or the professional, sleek briefcase. I want to know the history of the single woman sitting in front of me with her arms crossed: why she is traveling alone, what brings her to this particular airport, why she wants to go where I am also going. It’s too simple to believe that our natures compel us to be gossipmongers; I prefer to think of it as an inclination for voyeur. That other person’s life is most fascinating when we see everything but know nothing. Capacity for unrestrained imagination transforms the people at the terminal, the infinite concourses that form an asterisk, and silenced sky and airplanes beyond the floor-length windows into concentric circles of orbit, of which I am the center. It isn’t human egoism that drives this thought, but my tendency to treat physical proximity as intimacy. And this is precisely how I feel sitting in terminal K19, listening to a disembodied female voice calling out names and instructions and watching tiny airplanes, as tiny as the little steel model planes I played with as a child, crossing dangerously close together.

Filed by Shan Wang at 3:31 am under Random musings
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For the past few days, I have been in a toothless lethargy. My cheeks are swollen, I look like Alvin the chipmunk after being slapped by his owner Dave, and I have consumed a whole bottle of Advil in two days. In a wisdom-teeth-extraction-induced frenzy to find and own every U2 song in existence, I found the following CD: http://www.amazon.com/Rockabye-Baby-Lullaby-Renditions-U2/dp/B000L22TAG.

“Rockabye Baby! Lullaby Renditions of U2,” the title reads. The cover is the same as the “Best of 1980-1990,” only the boy is a bear drawn in disgusting pastels. Why would any sane baby be lulled to sleep by a lullaby version of “Sunday Bloody Sunday?” That is my question. Please answer, and discover the meaning of life.

During quarantine/house arrest I have also discovered that I passionately love Mexican literature. I hate all other literature at the moment, especially books written by dead white men. I only want to read novels about Mexicans, written by Mexicans. Only not in Mexican, because I can’t understand. I mean Spanish. Then I read a little bit of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and all old white men were redeemed once again. Andrew Lloyd Weber was a talented fellow, because who reads fifteen children’s poems about cats and then decides to write a full-fledged musical about them? Someone should write an absurdist musical for “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” featuring Sir Ian McKellen as the stopper, Mike Myers as his little horse who thought it queer, and Cate Blanchett as the snow.

Filed by Shan Wang at 5:15 pm under Living,Random musings
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I have conformed and bought a pair.

Filed by Shan Wang at 7:35 pm under Photo reel,Random musings
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I am a fan of lists, especially cynical ones, pretentious ones, or undeniably weird ones.

Here is a list of oddities accumulated and behaviors adopted after my first year of college. No raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens here, though maybe the occasional bright copper kettle and warm woolen mitten.

1. Berryline, that irresistible little shop somewhere near the intersection of Bow and Arrow Streets in Cambridge. By most conservative estimates, I must have spent over $100 on little dollops of fruit-flavored yogurt.

2. Gchat, the indispensable replacement for AIM. I change my gchat status multiple times a day. Invisible is the new online.

3. Facebook stalking, incontrovertible proof that I no longer have social skills.

4. Large trashbags in the corner of the common room.

5. Reading nytimes.com obsessively in order to make up for lack of true political activism, then writing angry responses to extremist Facebook groups.

6. Singing all the time and everywhere, regardless of quality of voice. Or quality of song.

7. Eating veggie burgers with white bread from a panini machine. Only when the other option is congealed lamb gravy, of course.

8. Fretting nonstop about work and not doing any of it. Also known as procrastination.

9. Napping, oversleeping, and panicked calculation of how many minutes to allot to reviving oneself from a death nap.

10. All-nighters. I have all night (or morning). It’s all okay. I feel GREAT.

Filed by Shan Wang at 11:01 pm under Living,Random musings
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I start to blog. Because I need an outlet for pretentiousness and also because, although I know this is totally undermining the sole purpose of my summer program, I need English for my sanity.

So, I will type extensive posts about strong and uninformed opinions that no one will read and it will be cool. Maybe a sprinkling of eccentricity and inside jokes.

And some photographs: my dad recently surrendered his super-awesome-amazing-coolest-ever Nikon camera to me for an indefinite amount of time. I hold it in my trembling hands and have taken thousands of pictures, most of which are faux-artsy, of Williamstown, a town insanely boring at the moment, albeit always beautiful.

Filed by Shan Wang at 10:29 pm under Photo reel,Random musings,Williamstown
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