expats

I hate saying “goodbye.” I don’t mean that I never want to leave places I know I should leave, or part from friends I don’t want to part with. Those things have to happen, they’re part of life. Ending and leaving and quitting and parting are the bitter notes of life’s ephemerality; if you live your life honestly and with clear eyes, you find that the sweetness comes from knowing that all things will end, so you’d better enjoy what’s immediately at hand. I hate to leave or be left as much as the next guy, so in the same sense that everyone hates saying “goodbye,” so do I.

No, I hate the actual word “goodbye.” I hate the business of leaving. My favorite exit is the French Exit. I like to think that, if I attend a party for example, about half an hour after I’ve left someone is asking someone else, “hey, wasn’t Souders here? Where is that guy?” That’s the best-case scenario. The worst is when you start saying “goodbye” half an hour before you actually leave, with lots of this-has-been-great and see-you-next-Tuesday and thank-you-so-much and other parting chitchat.

This reluctance comes, maybe, from my midwestern aversion to overt emotion. Or maybe it’s just denial. Certainly some of it comes from not wanting to make a scene.

I kind of hate saying “hello,” too.

With the end of the school year comes night after day after night of farewells. One last coffee date, one last Doggy Play Date, one last night out with friends. We’re not the only ones leaving, so this isn’t all about us. But I’m finding it all a little tiring. Two nights ago damn near every expat in town was at the new club in Dongdu park. A Farewell-a-rama. I clearly drank too much (although when I count it up it couldn’t have been more than 6 beers — Tiger beers, at that); yesterday I was too hungover to make the beach-themed doggy goodbye Jenny arranged with our dog friends. In fact, I slept (more or less) until 3 pm. But frankly, I was glad for the day off. Too many goodbyes.

Years ago, a friend who was studying Lakota claimed that the Lakota translation for “hello” was “what do you want?” and goodbye was something like “well, OK then.” This smells like an Urban Legend to me but I like it. I wish English had multipurpse words like “salaam” or “aloha” that express a warm sentiment without getting specific about temporal directionality.

Jenny completed, in the span of two painful days, the paperwork necessary to transport Bismarck out of the country. It was horrible. Thursday night Jenny was in tears. Mercifully I was busy with work and thus not very involved. The large hangup in the end was over Bismarck’s health certification. Which required (by Jenny’s) count, seven trips between the customs office/cargo agent, and the city-approved veterinarian. Contrast with the health certification we obtained at literally the eleventh hour in the US, wherein the USDA vet met us at the airport for an inspection.

The reason this is so painful, by the way, is that Chinese bureaucrats don’t want to do anything they haven’t done many times before. This isn’t just a fear of novelty, it’s practical. The first person to advance a piece of paperwork is then responsible for the final result. If Bismarck winds up transporting the Canine Flu to America the vet in Xiamen is now responsible. Processes in China are intended to diffuse culpability, so no one is responsible for anything. When there is no process (for example, the first large dog shipped via cargo out of Xiamen, ever), the bureaucrats express their reluctance by passing you back and forth. The buck never stops.

The flip side is that, for highly routine tasks, the paperwork is surprisingly efficient (because the process of responsibility-diffusion has developed completely.) We witnessed this at the emergency room when Jenny hurt her foot running, or when we registered as resident aliens. (This efficiency, however, does not apply to banking, where simply making a withdrawal will consume one or two hours.)

At any rate <knocks wood> everything is good to go now, so come Wednesday we won’t have more than a few hours of bureaucratic pain as a prelude to our 35 hours of airports and airplanes.

Much of what passes for “Western” in Xiamen would more accurately be called “Sinicized.” A good example is the local version of “coffee shops.” These are actually restaurants that serve Western dishes like sandwiches and french fries (and perhaps actual coffee), in a setting that is vaguely Western ( e.g. white tablecloths), but with Chinese notions of service (i.e. a bevvy of beautiful xiaojie welcoming you before you order, after that: does anyone actually work here?), and the food has a weird “Chinese” flavor. And of course the menu is seldom in English or (more likely) the “English” on the menu is Bizarro-English and only tangentially related to the menu items (Roman letters are purely decorative, natch). It’s as if someone saw a movie about a coffee shop once and decided to open their own coffee shop, but without ever having been in a real European coffee shop, or having eaten Western food, or having actually drank coffee. All of which contributes to a strange “let’s pretend” feeling for a Westerner who braves such establishments.

For example: Last week, my boss took our group out to a new Western restaurant near the office. This was a farewell lunch for our intern, an American college student who was working in our department for the past month. This particular restaurant — a new one, I think — had brasswork and linen napkins and photo-murals of Paris and a piano floating in a pool surrounded by ersatz rain. The Chinese notion of “Fancy Restaurant” is usually summarized as “hot and noisy,” which are regarded as Good Things. This place, for example, seats perhaps 200 patrons, all within eye- and ear-shot of one another. Eating out in China is a festive, social, and above all public affair. See and be seen. Westerners’ desire for privacy (in restaurants and all other situations) is regarded, as our guidebook poignantly observes, as variously “eccentric, arrogant or sinister.”

So this restaurant had some of the details right: linen tablecloths, a menu with items called “steak” or “pork chops,” a piano, etc., but the entire gestalt was wrong. It was like a fancy Chinese restaurant, but with European accents. For example, I ordered a sirloin, which arrived smothered in a black pepper sauce atop a bed of spaghetti with a fried egg on the side. And a glass of iced green tea. This all tasted good enough I suppose, but “Western” only in the most oblique sense. Our Chinese coworkers, like most of the patrons, cheerfully shared out their meals to one another; sharing food is a basic fact of eating.

I wonder what the typical Chinese person would make of P.F. Chang’s. Probably the same as above, but in reverse.

A rash of putative “coffee shops” have sprung up along the lakeshore near our apartment. They are all uniformly bad and overpriced, but have at least figured out a) how to make espresso and b) the notion of a coffee shop as a place to hang out. The older “coffee shops” (described above) are more accurately restaurants, and don’t brook much with hanging out. Interesting, though, that half a dozen or so nouveau-cafés have opened literally side by side along the same block. It’s almost as if opening a truly European coffee shop (let’s call them cafés, to differentiate from Chinese-style ersatz-coffee shops) was all the novelty the proprietors could stomach. “What kind of establishment is this? Where are all the xiaojie? Who will obsequiously and noisily greet the customers, then ignore them for two hours? Your strange notion of café frightens and confuses me.” Best not to push our luck by putting them, you know, somewhere far away from the other cafés. It’s like we have our own, brand new, Café District. This is not only really unhandy (because when you want a coffee, you have to take a taxi to the Café District instead of hitting the corner café), but also strikes me as hard for business. Everyone gives the same two or three cafés (the best ones) all the business, walking right past their unfortunate competitors.

Culturally, such novel ideas seem to happen “all at once.” This is what happened in our brand new Café District. Another example: apparently a year ago you couldn't get a cake anywhere in Xiamen. Then, all of a sudden, all the bakeries and coffee shops started serving cake. It was like, everyone was waiting for someone else to start selling cakes, then all of a sudden everyone was selling cakes. Kind of like how penguins jump off ice floes in nature documentaries. The cakes, by the way, are gorgeous and taste like air.

The easiest way to cope is just to pretend that these new putatively Western things are actually artifacts of a third culture. For example when adjusting to the local beers. All the local stuff tastes the same: like Miller Lite. There’s a profound aversion to hops (and to “bitter” food in general). A few imported beers are relatively widespread: Erdinger, Carlsberg, Heineken, and Corona. So it’s all lagers. There’s one restaurant that serves Sam Adams. I used to hate Sam Adams, but now it tastes like sweet, sweet manna. I would miss PDX beer but our lives are so different from Portland that, in this regard at least, it’s easier just to readjust my expectations. When all aspects of X are completely unlike America, things that are like 50% the same are actually more noticeably different. (This is why you seldom see actual Westerners in “Western” restaurants.) So having beer that’s half good is worse than drinking Chinese pisswater.

So I just pretend I’m not actually drinking “beer,” but a different local beverage, a slightly alcoholic wheaty unsweetened soda. Viewed in that light, Qingdao is actually a good beverage, and a steal at 5 kuai (65¢) for 620 ml (20oz) — much cheaper than Coca Cola. There are, by the way, actual sweet beers. Pineapple beer, for example, or a really horrid product called Blue Cowrie which features a drawing of an Aussie swagman in one of those pin-up hats.

I can’t believe this Kilkenny costs 50 kuai. I am gonna nurse the hell out of this beer.

Why is every bar band in Xiamen Philipino? Everyone says this one is the best in town. They’re OK I guess but they are really hard to distinguish. They all have a tiny “lead singer” in a tiny miniskirt who is in actuality the backup for a big guy with an actual voice. And all they ever play is covers of top 40 hits and oldies from the late 60s.

They drew the Kilkenny all wrong. All I taste is nitrogen. The head looks like memory foam.

Someone just informed me they charge 300 kuai just to sit at a table. Holy cow the dude who owns this place is a genius.

...she’s like the Davy Jones of this Philipino bar band...

50 kuai...that’s like seven bucks. That’s what beer costs at clubs in New York. I bet clubs in New York have better bands than this. Let’s see, at the corner store half-liter bottles of Qingdao are 3.5 kuai. So this is like the equivalent of 7 liters of local beer. In Bizarro world.

This Beatles medly is surprisingly danceable. Although when the club owner takes the stage to “help out” the danceability quotient drops pretty rapidly.

If I were a single guy, I would never ever trust a Chinese girl I meet at an expat bar. They are visibly selling. Alternatively, if I were a Chinese girl, I would hope to do better than the 50 year old balding (and likely married) Aussies you pick up at expat bars. If I were a Chinese girl looking for a laowai boyfriend, I’d join an expat-favored fitness club.

Holy shit they’re playing “Misirlou.” This is so far outside this band’s ability...I must say I’m impressed. It sounds exactly like Dick Dale. Luckily the only dance I know is the Twist. Wait a minute...they’re singing. Singing words. There aren’t any stinking words in Misirlou. What the hell is this? I bet there’s some lame Puff Daddy “I’ll be Missing You” bullshit song in the top 40 that ripped the hell out of “Misirlou.” [That would be the Black Eyed Peas’ “Pump It” — Ed.] That’s like saying, “you know what’s the problem with the Mona Lisa? Not enough glitter paint.”

And now that I think about it, there’s only one guitarist on stage, and yet I hear at least three guitars. He’s barely even moving his fingers. You can’t play “Misirlou” exactly like Dick Dale without moving your fingers so fast up the fretboard you make tiny sonic booms. This band is doing fracking karaoke. The band everyone calls the best bar band in Xiamen is a damned karaoke act.

The hell of it is, it’s a karaoke act for the guy who owns the bar. I am so not wasting my time in this place ever again.

I can’t believe that beer cost 50 kuai.