Pro: warm weather.
Con: doing sweaty laundry three times a day.
Pro: expanded subway system.
Con: dealing with a subway system that’s essentially one dumbass loop.
Pro: Beijing duck.
Con: ducking through Beijing traffic.
Pro: backpacking in Mongolia.
Con: buying a new backpack.
Pro: Houhai.
Con: getting to Houhai from… anywhere else.
Pro: mocking bread vans.
Con: being mocked when in a bread van.
Pro: cheap stuff.
Con: haggling for “Louie Buitton.”
Pro: putting “er” at the end of every sentence.
Con: listening to “er” at the end of every sentence.
Pro: practically everyone I know will be there.
Con: practically everyone I know will be there.
Pro: walking distance to the Forbidden City.
Con: the city’s FORBIDDEN, helloooooooooo?

How did this pro con list just backfire?





Is it even possible that one person can be so inefficient, even with the help of so many bullet points?

Just want sum1 2 luv me 4 who I am~

1. Count how many times you flashed the green card only to realize that instead of acting as an instant consent of marriage from a Latvian bride, it’s now a bone-crossed skull tarot card.

2. Snicker at the fact that “swine flu” is an anagram of “Elf Win Us.”

3. Pray that it’s all an illusion and that the female Japanese tourists aren’t actually wearing nylon socks with their sandals.

4. Count the number of times the Chinese immigration officer disturbingly hocks into a paper cup. (Eleven.)

5. Cough. More fun when everyone else is wearing a hazmat suit!

Life reminds me of sushi sometimes—a little raw, and occasionally, you slurp a glob of wasabi up the wrong tube. And then it’s awkward as you try to sniff it out with a tableful of disappointed 30-somethings, all wearing cheongsams, staring at you, eyes frosted over. There you sit, hoping that you could’ve said something profound and wise beyond your years instead of acting the part of the unsophisticated kid from abroad who clearly doesn’t know how to appreciate akami. Later, they will whisper about you in hushed tones. “And all that hullabaloo about MSG… that’s what American fast food will do to your manners.”

When I was 12, I visited Hong Kong for the second time. In a sense, it was more like my first time, if I choose not to count a fanny-pack romp around Ocean Park (which I don’t). My parents and I, the lost tourists that we were, walked through some neighborhood. Victoria’s Harbor? Kowloon? Not quite sure, but whichever one houses all the pornography studios, adult video stores, and strip clubs—Wikipedia, work your magic! It reminded me of stories I had read about Montmartre, but in Cantonese and minus the windmills and Nicole Kidman. As the three mainlanders wandered around looking for anywhere—anywhere—to sit down and eat, posters of perky young women with their unmentionables pixelated tried to seduce us into dumpy shops that were lined with grime and dust on the outside. I couldn’t see inside the doors covered with dark cardboard, but I imagined the inside to be lined with cheap linoleum. Neon signs buzzed haphazardly above us, clamoring, “Sexi ladys!” After milling around the area for a while and soon realizing that maybe the “friendly stranger” in the hotel lobby didn’t exactly understand what we meant by “family restaurant,” we got back on the metro. My parents bickered for a while as I stared off, making eye contact with a middle-aged selling newspapers. I was about to come up with a reason as to why he was leering, but then my mother interrupted my thoughts. As we zipped down the east rail, she asked me if I was OK, as if under the assumption that I hadn’t been exposed to anything sexual at that point in my adolescence. Yes, mother, I am ALL RIGHT. I’ve grown up with Fox television since I was five. I’ve been sneaking off to my best friend’s house to watch MTV every day after school for the past three years. I’ve been all right since that time you accidentally rented that movie for me where Thora Birch’s best friend tries to seduce her own father in a suburbia full of “dark” secrets. It amazed me how much time Mena Suvari had on her hands to lie around in beds of endless rose petals, but regardless, I had asked for a movie about horses. BLACK Beauty, Mom.

When I was 15, I went back home in July. On days when we were bored, I would walk over to Xing’s house to waste time on Nintendo or on the Internet. They lived near the train rails in town, the one that served as the main relay out of town. On nights, when the train rumbled by with its horn blaring obnoxiously loud, no one would wake up because they had gotten used to it after 20 years. One day after dinner, my aunt, Xing, and I took a walk near the tracks, treating it as our guide back to my grandmother’s house. Along the way, we spotted a speck of a man sitting on the tracks while we were maybe 100 yards away. When we got closer, we saw that he had his pants unzipped and was peeing, quite literally, into the wind. My aunt was horrified. Like a clucking hen with chicks to look after, she quickly gathered the two of us and averted our eyes, pushing us forward and away from this bizarre homeless man. But before she had the chance to shelter us, I caught a glimpse of this apparent public disturbance. What could be described by others as cognitive dispossession appeared to me as sheer triumph. Wielding his manhood below his unsightly muffin-top with determination that could have put Olympic athletes to shame, I felt embarrassed that, hours before, my thumb couldn’t even react fast enough between the A and B buttons to make Mario save Princess Daisy from impending doom. Good God. How long had he been holding it in?

When I was 17, I frequented a sushi shop in my hometown that summer. A conveyor belt in the middle of the bar that fed from the tiny kitchen of the hip new Nippon café sent funny little plates of food around and around for lunch and dinner. The plates were color-coded to match prices on a universal menu hanging around the small stand in the middle of Zhengyang Pedestrian Street. On most occasions, Europeans with their huge backpacks dumped precariously on the floor surrounded us. Sometimes, we saw a few of Jia’s classmates from high school, back for the summer from all over the country. Hip and young, they would stop in the restaurant for a quick sashimi before going to band practice in the dingy book market a bus stop away. On an afternoon in August, we were sitting next to each other at the bar, watching the plates of fish eggs and California rolls glide past us. When the time was right, we would each snatch a plate that looked delicious. I took a blue plate which, according to the menu, cost 12 yuan. Sitting on a chunk of rice and strapped down to it with a strip of salted dried seaweed, the raw, seemingly dead shrimp looked complacent enough. Too bad it’s dead, I thought at the time. With its seatbelt all buckled, it looked ready for a illustrious, astronomical takeoff… into my stomach. As the chopsticks moved closer and closer to my mouth, a sudden twitch of the antenna stopped me mid-motion. While it’s more likely that it was anger at its own measly 12-yuan worth that sparked the little guy to come back to life, I told no one for a long time of my personal conviction that I, in fact, could resurrect the dead.

When I was 19, I tried to predict what would happen that summer, but per usual, I could only fill in the blank.

It’s hard to stay in one place for a long period of time. I’ve never done it before. I have never lived anywhere for more than a few years, and even then, my time was spent elsewhere. Beyond the not uncommon nomadic tendencies that all young adults harbor, however, it’s probably the reason for the always impending restlessness from which I actually suffer. I wake up, I remember my destination, I pin the tack on the corkboard. But when I get there, I always want to leave for somewhere else, maybe for the simple sake of being somewhere else. Not because I’m disappointed by where I end up, but because I’m always compelled by the lighthouse beckoning beyond the seven-degree curve. Albeit naively, I sincerely believe the world is for my taking—that’s what makes me self-righteous. I want to take pieces of it and stuff them in my pockets until they fall out of the holes created from strain. This may or may not ever happen.
___

I was never one of those anarchist youths who was influenced by Che Guevara or grunge music. I am a child of the Chinese generation post-revolution, which can be translated as post-activism/pre-apathy. It also probably has to do with the fact that I grew up in a decade of neo-Popstars, political idolatry, and Furbies, so I never felt a strong antagonism against authority. I never thought black eyeliner was that attractive, nor did I worship flannel-wearing Kurt Cobain worshippers. My phase for rebellion was over after I realized I had never experienced it in the first place. I was earnest, and I liked it that way.

But maybe the roots of rebelliousness are only starting to grow right now. Admittedly, the routine of everyday life is never boring because I’m always reading, writing, walking, and seeing. The waking hours of my life are determined mostly by myself, and my determination to experience the absolutism of being awake persists through the possible grind that we so easily fall victim to. But even I get sick of the institutionalism that comes with finding my place in society. I don’t have experiences and memories to help me understand some of the more complex questions that I have been forced to ask myself. There is a path in front of me, but I have no stones to pave it with. Naiveté afflicts me in the most painfully obvious ways. For that, I regret not taking a gap year. Yes, even that has been trivialized. I would feel silly, somewhat finding the reason for a year off hard to justify. I imagine a conversation about my motives to go something like this.

Them: “Oh, you’re taking a gap year? So you mean, you’re taking a break from…?”
Me: “Well… I guess, a break from… life.”
Them: “So you must be recovering from a traumatic situation, like a genocide, right?”
Me: “Er… no. But, uh. I guess high school was pretty tragic.”
Them: “What happened?”
Me: “Emmm… well, I was always picked last for dodgeball.”
Them: [silence]

Regardless, I have never felt the need to “get out of this place” more than I have this year. The three months before college, I was 100% peripatetic. I still remember the dead cat lying on the side of the street in Hangzhou while I was buying a popsicle from the stealthy vendor who was reading pornography. After riding 20 kilometers across the Chinese countryside, I was glad that I could get off the bike at any time and hide from the sun, unlike the peasants who stood with rice paddy water rising to their hardened, calloused knees. I was scared to eat the baozi I bought on a hot day in Fuzhou. I ate it anyway. (I was fine, until 3 hours after the fact. Thank you, Pepto.) Through traveling in the three months, I discarded traces of myself, throwing bits of personal bait everywhere I went, hoping to lead someone back to the origin, wherever that was. More accurately, though, I was leaving evidence behind for myself, all the time thinking that I would come back and retrieve these pieces someday.
___

When I was sixteen, I met Jun in a mediocre dim sum restaurant. He was my age and was living in my hometown. He had just moved back after spending four years in Canada. When he was 12, he moved to Toronto after his mother finally got a visa approved for him. One year later, his mother got into a car accident. Bedridden for months, she depended on Jun to take care of her while he continued to go to school. Jun was in the eighth grade then. His English had been getting better, he told me, but it was still hard because it was just the two of them. Eventually, his mom recovered after a local church fundraised around the community to help her pay the medical bills. Later, she converted to Christianity.

During his sophomore year of high school, Jun fell in love with a girl. They were good friends. He was shy and sensitive, so she never knew. His mother even encouraged him to talk to her. He never did.

Shortly after, their visas expired. It was time to go back home, regardless that their idea of home had changed. Jun had to repeat junior year (the Chinese education system was never generous to him). He still continued to practice his English, but he had lost a lot of it by then. It’s so hard when you stop writing, he said. 我经常在想那几年的事。I’m always thinking about those few years. He told me that in his free time, he liked to work on building his computer and rigging pirated video games that he bought on the street with misspelled English translations on the back. When we talked, he had this habit of looking at his food, poking at it with his wooden one-time-use chopsticks, never really looking at me. But even if he talked more to his rice than he did to my face, I always knew he was fully invested in our conversation. He couldn’t not be; his baozi couldn’t have been that interesting. But even so, I knew he liked confiding in me. We haven’t spoken since then. Sometimes, I wonder how he is doing and I want to pick up the phone and dial for a transcontinental call, wishing that my voice across the wire will teleport me to wherever he is. But I always stop worrying about him after a while. I’m not sure why.
___

In the span of a few months, the clock has become the authority figure in my life. This is hard to deal with. I prefer to use the sun as the yardstick to how time is changing—and how I am changing along with it. As a collection of thoughts whenever I was tired of the minute hand dictating what I should have been doing or thinking, this list (the mathematical and only way I can organize information) is where I’m going, going, going. And will be gone—hopefully soon. I like to believe that when you’re moving, time has a harder time catching up to you. That is a wonderful thought.

Florianópolis, Brazil

via Halley Pechecho
The Catedral Metropolitana in the city circa 1972.

One of my best friends was almost pelted off a cliff while riding a bus on Santa Catarina Island off the south coast of Brazil. I really didn’t need more justification that this was exactly the kind of place I needed to visit, but out of sheer curiosity, I researched it a little more. At first glance, it’s a capitalist playground for rich expatriates who don’t want to see the “old crowd” down in Fiji or Tahiti, but its cultural identity is still very much intact. As the capital of Santa Catarina, the city offers the typical tourist adventures, like paragliding (although I’ve never tried canyoneering before). I mostly want to go to windsurf in the crystal-clear lagoons; out on the water, I probably won’t have to use what I have been told as my atrocious, French-accented Portuguese. Desculpe… euh?

Reykjavik, Iceland

It’s so easy to fantasize about Aurora Borealis swallowing me whole. The idea of secluding oneself on an island of chalet-style and turf houses is something I’ve already embedded into my plans. Basically, it’s like traveling to Scotland without certain nuisances, including windy moors that prevent skirt-donning, creepy-looking Shetland ponies, and memories of bad Sean Connery impressions cropping up all over the place. Moreover, I have to figure out for myself whether the Hallgrimschurch is really man-made or just the Icelandic government trying to cover up a Roswell-esque incident.

Macchu Picchu, Peru

As of now, I have nothing valuable to contribute to everything that has already been said of this place. But still, number one destination for my backpack and me.

Oslo, Norway

via A Doll’s House
This is me in 5 years? 10 years? Minus 84957 croissants from cafés in the square.

I have a weird penchant for Scandinavian mythology, OK? Besides that, I need to visit the homeland of the greatest acoustic duo known to my generation and figure out if it’s something in the water (and if so, defy the Norwegian customs for all they’re worth). Witnessing first hand the legendary street style is number one priority. Also, imagine me renting one of those super-green bikes lying all over the city, forgetting to lock it and having it being stolen by some criminal, fighting to the death to get it back in front of some beautiful northern European architecture, and promptly riding it off the pier on the Oslo Harbor. Oh, fjords. What power you have to make us love Scandinavia.

Kathmandu, Nepal

Stemming back from a sixth grade social studies project that took up way too much time and way too much super glue, I have developed this horrifically maladjusted attitude that Mount Everest isn’t that hard to climb. But even if I’m not going to be ice-picking my way through the country, the Boudhanath in Bouddha should keep preoccupation at a high. But hilarity ensued when I checked up on entry requirements, including proof of Yellow Fever vaccination—apparently, the Nepalese want to make sure no foreigners are taking from their dearth of women. Goal at the end of my Himalayan trip: grow a beard and claim it as a souvenir. (I’ve always been somewhat of a closeted misogynist anyway.)

California

via p940e’s Flickr
Do you know the way to San José? Because I’m from Wisconsin and I sure as hell don’t.

Yes, I still have my California v-card. And the west coast, really. But despite all the hoopla that I’ve heard about the tumor of the United States, I’m still optimistic that I’ll enjoy the land of uncontrollable wildfires. At this point, I’m pretty open to San Francisco and excited about seeing some of its modern architecture, including its beautiful loft apartments. But Los Angeles has yet to convince me, due to lack of stars visible on any given night (pollution, lighting—both not good excuses).

I conclude with the admission that I’m not sure if I can make all of this happen, at least not within the near future. There are technical issues to be resolved. But in a world free from the constraints of institutionalism and from the stringent adherence of social limitations and responsibility, I would be packing my bags très bientôt. Eventually, when I get there, I will remember to send a postcard to Jun, wherever he is.

The other day, I was perusing my old photos of my backpacking trip over the summer and realized two things. Number one: I didn’t use sunscreen all of last summer. Revelation of the millennium—I AM BIONIC. Number two: if I don’t write down all the things I learned now, I will probably forget all the glory of the sweet (and nasty) details as time goes on. Here goes wisdom spewing out like throw-up.

-> If there’s a choice between taking a train and taking a plane, always take the train. When you’re sharing a compartment with three rowdy Asian men who only speak the Hunan dialect and step on your lower bunk with their smelly nylon socks that say “Louise Vuitton” on the sides, it builds character.

-> To-go cup ramen is divine intervention and has saved many lives, mine included. Kow-tow to it and invest in it.

-> Delicately walk the fine line between trust and suspicion. While it’s definitely a requirement of any traveler to be wary of his/her surroundings, sometimes amazing experiences take the backseat if you’re too worried about whether every single person passing you is trying to steal your wallet. (No one wants that picture of your favorite Korean pop star with your face poorly plastered next to it. Er, wait, that’s just me… Moving on.)

-> That said, do not carry your passport or other important documents around your neck in one of those ridiculous traveler’s wallets that are advertised as “safe.” If you really wanted to, you could just have someone write on your forehead, “Over here, mug me!” Plus, you’ll just look stupid with a sketchy, misshapen lump under your shirt.

-> A Swiss Army knife, no matter how overrated it is, is a serious serious serious necessity. Off the top of my head, some situations that it has gotten me out of: a locked bathroom, explicit blackmail from a Vietnamese criminal selling fake visas, and HUNGER. Self-explanatory.

-> You can subsist on less than you think. I regret bringing more than a few shirts and two pairs of shorts because it just took up space that I could’ve used for extra film, batteries, and journals.

-> Don’t. Forget. Socks.

-> When in a village, go to establishments that look run-down from the exterior. They usually have the best food.

-> Do not trust hostel pillows.

-> Leave notes behind at every significant place you stop over. Pin it to the corkboard, leave it on the table. You have no idea who will pick it up, and they will have no idea who wrote it. It’s awesome.

-> Make a good playlist for when you’re stuck on public transportation during your travels. It’ll act as the soundtrack, and every time you listen to that same playlist after your trip, you’ll feel again the sweat drenching your back from 8 hours with a backpack on.

This is all more applicable for a backpacking trip in China, as I’m writing solely based on personal experience. But I’m pretty sure the universality stands; let’s see if they all still work this summer.