at home, he's like a foreigner

Apparently, it's hilarious when I show people my name-card, because I hand it over with two hands and bow my head a little. I understand that that's a presentation specific to HK, but how do Americans exchange cards? I can only envision some kind of oh-too-cool wrist flick or something, like a way that is somehow ironic and a little contemptuous of the role of the name-card in business/daily life. But I honestly have no idea.

You know when you're in a foreign country, and you accumulate huge amounts of change because it's easier not to try and pay with correct cents? Well, apparently I do that now in America. I now have an in-pocket reserve of several dollars in mixed denomination because I'm no longer familiar with American coin denominations or something.

a white Christmas!

hooray!

It definitely snowed like four to six inches today. And it was great. Happy holidays!

five minutes of random thoughts

because I need to get up at 6am to fly to boston and visit my grandma tomorrow morning (yay!)

-- we spent a week in Guangzhou just before I left for the US. lots to say, but not at the moment.

--home is a lot colder than HK, which was colder than GZ. Boston will be coldest of all. *nervous laughter*

--America is confusing. Especially American air travel.

--I will begin writing and mailing holiday (post)cards from Boston. Somehow, I failed to do so during my 11 1/2 hour flight from HK to LA, during which I managed maybe two hours of sleep.

--I'm reading Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum, which is an acknowledged influence of Midnight's Children (self-acknowledged by Rushdie). It's kind of weird seeing similarities between the two because I am seeing them backwards, in reverse-chronological order (I read Midnight this past summer), and so it feels like I'm misattributing the balance of literary genius between the two. How to reconcile this?

--I kind of just want to take a lot of photos of the mountains (snow-capped, now) and downtown from where I live, mostly to hold on to for when I return to HK, in order to prove that air this clean *can* exist.

--Driving back on the right here is fine 98% of the time, but every so often I have to check myself (like when I think, "why is that bus on the wrong side of the road!?")

--I would be happier spending more time reading and less time on the internet.

--Rich Rodriguez strikes me as a pretty good choice. Hopefully the Big 10 coaching model will stick with him and he'll stay for life/until retirement/reassignment to the AD's office. I liked Les Miles as a coach, but the SEC is too big-spender and cutthroat with coach recruiting. That kind of instability seems like a bad thing.

advice

A bad paraphrase of Sartre: you are always solely responsible for your own decisions. Even if you ask someone's advice, planning to do what they say without condition or qualification, who you choose to ask is in some sense based on your knowledge of them as a person, and what you think they'll say. Example (his): you can't decide whether to collaborate with Vichy France or join the Resistance. You don't know what to do, you're not sure who you can confide in, so you decide you'll ask your priest, and do whatever he tells you you should do. Except that the priest already has some kind of side in the debate--some priests were collaborators, some resisted, and so on--and so no priest can provide an "objective" decision. Though the priest may choose for you whether to collaborate or resist, you have already chosen whose authority you will defer to, and so have already made up your mind.

My interpretation: when asking someone for advice or giving advice to another person, there is never just an objective problem, but also the subject position of the advice-giver. Remember that nobody, no matter how good a friend, can give you objective advice, and remember that the advice you give anybody will be boxed-in by your own subjectivity, so please by all means acknowledge your limitations before advising.

The reason I bring this up is because I was recently asked for advice by a friend. It was advice about something pretty serious, like a course-of-beginning-of-adulthood decision, and there definitely wasn't any clear-cut answer. Of course, being a sensible person, this friend had asked other people besides me for advice, and in the course of our discussion, the opinion of a mutual friend, "X" (to avoid ambiguity with the confidentiality-preserving noun "friend"), was mentioned. I wasn't trying to completely discredit X's advice to my friend, but as soon as I heard what ze had recommended, I thought of what Sartre had written, and immediately responded by undercutting X's advice with the line, "Well, that's a good point, but X would say that, since [ze] made a similar choice when faced with a fairly similar decision a few months ago. I mean, look at where X is now." I then proceeded to offer my own advice, while hedging a little, because I didn't want to discredit X's advice, only to recognize where it came from.

After talking to my friend, I started to think more explicitly about what Sartre actually said. I hedged my own advice, but I didn't really think about it as coming from a subject position of my own. This is to say, at the time, I didn't see nearly as similar a decision at any point in my life, so on the surface, it's not like I had an "obvious opinion" that I was sharing. But, in fact, it was a *big* decision that I was talking about with my friend. Even if I hadn't come across the same situation, those first steps away from college and into adulthood are still composed of analogously-large decisions. Even if mine aren't the same as my friend's, I have a subjective orientation already.

Thus, the question that was raised is, if X is "the friend who will recommend [specific course of action after college]", which friend am I? Am I the friend who recommends not jumping straight into grad school because of fears of burnout? (yes) Am I the friend who recommends moving out of the house because it feels responsible and grown-up? (probably, although I haven't ever actually gone apartment-hunting) What else am I?

In other words, what does my being here, in Hong Kong, in my job/life situation mean? What does it say about the kinds of decisions I make, the kind of advice I would be expected to give? It's not too egocentric to bring the discussion from a serious decision a friend is making back to my own life, is it? (maybe, but maybe not if I'm writing about it as a generally-applicable example) Is where I am now why people don't ask me for advice very often? (probably) Is it weird that I look for excuses to apply Tiger Balm just because I like how it smells? (uh, I got distracted)

the opt-out

I should really go to bed (I have to give a presentation for the Chinese University of Hong Kong Women's Association bright and early tomorrow morning), but I just wanted to throw something out there, since I was encouraged to write more by the way friends actually commented on that last entry. [*cough*]

Basically, I've been kind of trying to stay in touch with the news back in the States. Reading the NY Times every day, staying abreast of Denver sports news (you can listen to the hometown radio announcers over the internet for every nuggets game), following the development of the election season while remaining a comfortable distance away from the awful ads, etc etc. The funny thing is, although this wealth of information is definitely interesting to me in the same way it has been since whenever it was in middle or high school that I started reading more than the comics every morning, I'm not feeling as, well, affected by it as I used to. It's like, regardless of when I'm planning to return to the US (and how long I want to stay there), what was "current events" has become "political and economic problems that are happening somewhere else". I feel only mildly disgusted at the lack of substance to the incessant Decision 2008 coverage, only a little ashamed of how badly Congress is failing to reverse some troubling agri/energy/gov't assistance practices, only moderately offended by the rhetoric surrounding the immigration debate.

It's like by simply not being physically present for these events, I've tricked myself into believing I won't have to deal with the consequences down the line. Like I'm not going to go back and have to deal with whoever ends up getting chosen out of the "Double Guantanamo!" or the "I'm Less Unelectable When Attacked by the GOP" caucuses, however low the dollar is going to sink, how xenophobia is ascending towards Most Socially Acceptable Form of Bullshit (this even keeping in mind how often I got/continue to get mistaken for Mexican in places like Mexico City and My High School), I'm only a little shocked at how unstoppable the Jazz seem to have become (this keeping in mind that they play in our division). At any rate, the chances of me actually settling permanently in another country aren't really that high (are they???), so these problems are still my problems, whether I'm there or not. But somehow, I can't bring myself to get indignant, only flippant about how ridiculous everything seems.

Maybe it's because I, product of a media-critical education, have no source except the media to ascertain what the heck is going on. I've read coverage of health care proposals without reading the actual policy statements, I've read commentary on the Nuggets without seeing them on the court a single minute. Subconsciously, I prepare myself to disparage these reports even before getting the full impact of what they mean for me, for the life I will, eventually, return to in the US. I'm not exactly comfortable with my relationship to the news, but at the same time it's a bigger concern whether I'm going to have something decent prepared for the lesson I'm supposed to teach the next day and why I fail, day in and day out, to write the emails I'm losing touch with people over not writing. Maybe the last one is as important as macro-level problems, but the "work excuse" seems like something I'm not going to be able to avoid for the rest of my life. Echoing Cathy's logic, if I can't stay passionate about things like Habeas Corpus when I have a silly part-time english teaching job, how am I gonna be engaged when I have a real, full-time job?

If this disengagement is a product of "adulthood", instead of geographic displacement, I'm worried for what that says about type of "adult" I'm already transitioning toward. Though it may be the only way to make 16 months of non-stop election coverage bearable, I'm not deep-down comfortable with that kind of complacency.

um, jeez

I kinda just realized it's december. Why was I deceived? Well, Thanksgiving this year really didn't feel like Thanksgiving. I mean, there were pies (which were delicious, so kudos to Diana and Sarah for that), but somehow the holiday turned into an American Cultural Event, for which small gatherings were held throughout that week (none on thursday). My sense of holiday date was thrown off (Thursdayness is quite important to the holiday), and so despite making hand turkeys and telling students about what my family (usually) does each year, it had a kind of surreal non-holiday feel to it. So now it's december, and I can't help but feel like a month is missing in there somewhere. I've made the transition from "I've been here almost three months" to people telling me "Oh! So you've been here almost half a year!" without knowing it. In the meantime, a lot happened, don't get me wrong, but somehow I've been thrown off a bit as far as the passage of time goes.

Summary:
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I went to Singapore for a holiday weekend, and it was really great. I asked for advice from Steph and Vicki about where to go and what to do, and they gave me lists of what to eat. It was the most successful travel strategy EVER. I tried more new foods in three days than I have since... oh... maybe going to Mexico City this past summer. Subsequent discussions with a native Singaporean have indeed confirmed that eating my way through hawker centers was definitely the way to go. Also, I got to see Tori, who I met last year during AAMP training, and that was really great. We met up with her parents for dinner, which by the most ridiculously favorable coincidence happened to be a really nice Teowchow-style six-course meal with their business partners. The food was unbelievable, and I only embarrassed myself a few times trying to eat it (but at least I now know how to eat crab). I regret that I did not have business cards with me to distribute, as that seems to be the polite thing to do. Also, their dinner conversation was 98% in Mandarin and 2% in "So, Sam, what work are you doing in Hong Kong?"

Singapore was quite interesting--it has historical parallels to HK, it has a lot of Chinese people living there who associate their identities with the PRC at all (and in fact both places have some scorn for mainlanders). Other things were interesting, like the four major languages (English, Mandarin, Bahasa Malaysia, Hindi) that were irregularly dispersed through the city, depending on the predominant ethnicity in the neighborhood -- i.e. some subway stations had signage in Malay while others did not, based on who the "target users" were. There were many anti-crime ads, and one of the subway lines played a video over and over again about some passengers who thwart an attempted bombing of their train by being vigilant about a young man with a suspicious bag. And, the young man in the video was Chinese, not visibly Islamic, which was kind of a thoughtful touch.

Overall: visit was delicious. I enjoyed traveling alone for the most part, but also it was great seeing a friend from college somewhat unexpectedly. Oh, and I have a SIM card for Singapore now with like US$5 in stored value.
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Monica came out to visit! Her semester in Japan ended early, so she and Lauren (from CMC) were in HK for a few days. I guess I needed an excuse to get back into the city again; I definitely went to some new places. It also turns out that Tammy, an acquaintance from college, has been studying at CUHK this whole semester and we had no idea. So I got to see her, meet some of her study abroad friends, etc.

Monica, Lauren, and I also went to Macau. It was really dirty the day we were there, although friends here say it can be quite nice. It had a much more European feel to it than here or anywhere else I've been (outside of Europe), but it was like just Chinese enough to clearly not be "just like" Europe. Also, I noticed a lot of motor scooters, public smoking, and spitting in the street, all three of which are either strongly discouraged (the first) or outright banned (the other two) in HK. It makes a difference, for sure. Food was also pretty good.
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I think I'm starting to get a handle on how I should be using my year here. Yes, I know it's half over, thanks, but a lot of the frustration I'd been feeling before was, essentially, unnecessary, caused by expectations that were for lack of a better word flawed. I think I have a better idea of how I can turn this job and this year from a sort of vacation from career-track/grad school decisions into something more positive. I know it's not enough to answer adults' questions about what I'm doing with, "I'm living in Hong Kong," and leaving it at that. It's going to require a little more discipline than maybe I've shown so far, but in the end, I can't stall adulthood, real jobs, adult friendships forever, and so I may as well get used to it.
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I owe a *lot* of people emails or snail mail (if you're special/you give me your address). I can't get a do-over on being four months late, but hopefully it'll be water under the bridge.