No. 10

The cacophonic free-for-all of a multitude of conversations. The smell of cigarettes and coffee. The students, the artists, the tourists and young couples. Jazz music played too loudly.

Nighttime at a café in Osaka.

An old Japanese man, seventies, wearing heavy-rimmed glasses and grey tweed blazer; one renegade lock of his comb-over has broken free and hovers about his shoulder like a wisp of cloud, a haunting ghost. He is missing a front tooth. Entering the café he is preceded by two young women carrying shopping bags in each arm. The old man takes their orders and heads for the counter. The women sit.

The women are dressed provocatively enough to draw stares: garters and fishnet stockings; very high heels and very short skirts; one girl has a tongue ring, they’re both peroxide blondes.

The old man returns and the women take their drinks. This old man is shabby in every way. He reminds me of a dusty, watermarked book no one has bothered to open in many, many years. He is a profligate, a degenerate. You wonder what he is paying these girls for their company; what they are taking him for.

One girl alternates sips of an iced caramel macchiato and drags from a cigarette as she solves a Sudoku puzzle in the back of a magazine. The other is looking about the smoky room, bored, a quick flash of lime-green panties as she works down the hem of her dangerously negligible skirt.

This old lecher is nearly beside himself. He can’t keep his eyes, or his hands, off either of them. The women play their roles apathetically: now humoring their patron with a smile or an occasional glance; more often ignoring him and texting on their cell phones.

By now you can hear snickers and muffled giggling throughout the café aimed at this pitiful burlesque. The old man doesn’t seem to notice; the young women don’t seem to care.

After a few moments of groping about these two disinterested dolls the old man gets to his feet and shuffles off.

What is longing if not memory made self-aware?

Longing is memory’s awareness of the limits to its mimicry. It is memory’s recognition that it is not a duplicate, not a representative – hardly even an echo – of what it seeks to imitate but rather a sort of vendor that ultimately peddles in deception.

Longing is memory’s attempt to replenish a past that never was through a present that cannot be.

When the old man returns from the restroom the two women and their many shopping bags are gone.

Standing he takes one final drink of his coffee and surveys the crowd. Some are blatantly staring, others secretly dart their eyes at him and then away again; he does not lower his face; he will not be judged in either victory or defeat.

The old man puts his blazer back on and leaves the café, that renegade lock of hair still bobbing defiantly about his shoulders.

China: Day One v.2.0

I did manage to take the right bus this time (really, after more than a year in Korea this shouldn’t be a problem) and after just two short hours (it takes me longer to get from my house to the airport than it does getting from the airport to China!) I touched down in Hangzhou.

Waiting at the airport for me – snacks and colorful “T. Paul Buzan Welcome to Hangzhou” sign in hand – was my friend C. Unfortunately, C. was also waiting for me at the airport yesterday (I couldn’t get a message off to her until after she’d left her apartment) so I was all kinds of apologetic at first.

I promised to make amends through dinner and/or drinks and the ever amiable C. seemed satisfied.

My little bus hiccup at the start of this journey notwithstanding I’ve gotten to a point where essential day-to-day Korean – getting around by cab, ordering food, telling a girl she looks pretty – isn’t too tall an order. So it is strange to be back in a place where I have all the linguistic aptitude of a babbling infant. Bacon once wrote, “He that travels into a country before he has some entrance into the language goes to school and not to travel”. With my Mandarin limited to just “hello” and “thanks” I reckon I’ll be putting Bacon’s maxim to the test.

C. on the other hand, who is on her fourth year in China, was wheeling and dealing in sounds that only confused me and before you knew it we were being herded (along with more people than I thought reasonably safe) onto a very crowded bus.

My view from the bus gave me my first taste of China: narrow, three and four-storey buildings built along the highway (they reminded me of tenement housing in NYC) with scraggy looking gardens in front of them (popular housing with the nouveu-riche, I learned); an incredible number of people riding about on bicycles; a preponderance of Western establishments like Starbucks and McDonald’s; lots of big, shiny buildings with men in suits milling about them; foreign cars of every make and model – Mercedes’, Fords, Audis – on the road.

I try my best to travel with no expectations or preconceptions about a place. In travel, as in much of life, these tend to lead to disappointment; or, at the very least, they can obscure the true nature of a thing making it hard to appreciate it for what it is. But I couldn’t help finding myself surprised by my first impressions of China: everything was so new, so modern, so moneyed. I don’t know what exactly I may have been expecting, but I guess that wasn’t it.

On our way into Hangzhou proper C. and I made a couple of transfers and each bus (improbably) was more crowded than the last. Despite the crowds I noticed a serious reluctance on the part of the locals to sit next to the two chatty foreigners. That much is similar to Korea. I wouldn’t call it rudeness so much as a certain shyness. And perhaps, at least in my case, it is well-founded: I usually reward the brave or desperate soul who sits next to me with a (no doubt obnoxious) degree of talkative friendliness.

When we arrived at Hangzhou Normal University (where C. lives and teaches) a light rain was falling – more like a mist, actually. We made our way through the drizzle and throngs of students to the dormitory C. shares with her friend J. Although J. has her own (by Korean standards) ridiculously spacious apartment she shares one with C. (they refer to their set-up as a “trial marriage”) and a grumpy, overweight cat named “Xiao Fu”. After introductions (J. offered me the sole use of her apartment during my stay – awesome!) the three of us headed off with another teacher for dinner at a local French restaurant.

The food I ordered – salmon pasta and an incredible tomato basil soup – was excellent. There was also wine. I couldn’t give you the specifics (my tastes are provincial: I eat like a Viking and drink like a peasant) but it was tasty and complimented the meal very well. And it was so good to be eating something that wasn’t rice or fermented cabbage for a change.

Now don’t get me wrong: I love Korean food. I mean I L-O-V-E it. When I finally make my way back to the States it is gonna be hard to go without my daily dose of gimchee. But when you’ve been eating one type of food pretty exclusively for a year-and-a-half a little variety, and especially variety of such a delicious quality, is awfully nice.

A few hours and a full belly later we headed back to the dormitory. Decided to keep things chill the first night: I got a big week coming up.

China: Day One

NB: In early-February 2009 I took a trip to China. Although I wrote my impressions down as I travelled, I am only now getting around to posting them.

China Day One:

I missed my flight.

In my haste and excitement I took a bus to Incheon City instead of taking one to Incheon Airport. Sadly the two places aren’t as close as their shared name might imply and I arrived at the airport just moments after they shut the gate on China Air Flight C34.

Not exactly an auspicious start to my travels.

Luckily I was able to reschedule my flight for tomorrow (thanks Lottie! You’re a gem!) so it isn’t exactly a disaster. Just an extra four hours on the bus.

But, hey, so long as I take the right bus next time you won’t hear me complaining.

No. 9

The boy standing in front of my desk at school is in the third grade. Nine years old. Smaller than the other boys his age; his friends call him “anchovy”. He’s a good kid: listens during class and gets a kick out of using English.

Today, like most days, he’s all smiles.

But it isn’t just his good nature that has him grinning. Today he’s showing off. There’s a gap right in the middle of his mouth; a hint of white pushing through the cradle of an old baby tooth.

Only in childhood (and maybe among some professional fighters) is a missing tooth cause for jubilation, a badge of honor. My little friend wears it well. He is all semi-toothy grin and exuberance; obviously elated at this rite of passage and (perhaps?) the prospect of having less territory to cover toothbrush in hand at the start and end of his day.

He couldn’t be excited about a visit from the Tooth Fairy.

Her wings don’t carry her quite so far as Korea. Over here there is a custom in which children take their lost teeth and pitch them with all their might onto the roof of their home or a neighborhood building.

There is something about the idea of these milk teeth in gutters or on rooftops, orphaned, cut-off from the current of other childhood mementos – school pictures, a stuffed animal, a blanket – that makes me sad.

A tangible reminder of innocence and youth surrendered to the unreliable services of memory.

No. 8

The thing about most figures of speech is that they don’t typically signify anything in a literal sense.

For example, are clams actually happy? If you “sleep like a baby” wouldn’t you in fact be waking up hourly to squall and suckle? And what about the familiar expression “I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck”? That old chestnut bantered about during flu season or after a night of heavy drinking. I mean, people obviously aren’t likening a hangover to being smacked by a Mack, right?

Of course not. Well, not most people anyway. But I imagine there are a handful of folks out there who can lend credence to that worn-out platitude through their own personal experience.

As of last Saturday I can count myself among them.

Lucky me.

It was one of those early-summer weekends that are vouchsafed to us as gift, an apology maybe, for the imminent heat and humidity of July through September. The breeze was fresh and cool, the temperature temperate, the sky painted in the blue of childhood summer vacations; the kind of weekend that screamed, “Ride em if ya got em, boys!”

That was all I wanted out of my Saturday: a nice, leisurely ride about town on my bicycle. It had been raining the weekend before and the one before that I’d had friends in town so it was going on the better part of three weeks since I’d last been out. And with the weather about to take a turn towards the hellish I admit to feeling a touch of desperation.

Maybe that was the problem. You want something too badly and it clouds your judgment; impairs your perception and makes you susceptible to being blindsided.

I didn’t see the truck coming. There were two vans parked at the curb and I – incredibly stupidly – took the crosswalk blind. Sure I had the green but this is Korea. The Koreans are a lot of great things, but safe driver’s aint one of them.

When he hit me – flush on my left side – I went airborne. No doubt through years of action movie conditioning it was like I could see my body in third-person spinning, none too gracefully, head-over-heels and spilling, with equal awkwardness, all over the asphalt. I rolled a few times and staggered to my feet. I’d been hit with enough force to have my wallet knocked outta my back pocket; coins were gleaming in the sun. My bike was totaled. I was bleeding hard from my foot.

I was pretty banged up and would need near twenty stitches in my heel but, rather miraculously, no broken bones. In fact, I’ve yet to break a bone, so I’ve still got that going for me. But I think this has effectively put the kibosh on my dreams of becoming a professional foot model.

All in all I count myself lucky. Well, as lucky as you can count yerself when getting hit by a truck is involved. It sure could’ve been a lot worse.