From the Underwater Foreign Correspondent
I’m not sure what to write about. Writing travelogue-style is easy, entertaining, effortless. I can write a thousand columns with cute titles like
“As Easy/Life-Threatening as Riding a Bike”
“101 Reasons Not to Buy Food from Street Vendors (and Why You Should Do It Anyway)”
“You Know You’re in China When…”
“My Boyfriend is a Space Heater”
“Superman is a Cross-dresser (and Other Frightening Halloween Tales from China)”
I could be a one-woman cutesy-travelogue factory, cranking ‘em out fast enough to oversupply India.
But - I don’t really want to. Those kinds of feather-light surface-material funny-haha blogs seem so meaningless to me lately. Not meaningless, really. I’m searching for the right word, but cranking the rusty English cogs is getting harder and harder. It’s like this (shi zhei yang de!): Those witty pithy snippets of daily life in China are authentic cultural experiences, yes; the average short-term traverser of Chinese cities can relate to them, yes; but I’m not the average short-term traverser. I live in China. I moved here. I’ve abandoned my snorkel, donned scuba gear, and made my home on the bottom of the ocean, right beside the coral, sea cucumbers, and stinky toufu (wait, how did that get down here…).
I want to write about the deeper things, not just how Chinese people hock loogies (I have no idea how to spell that) every 2 seconds, or enjoy gnawing on chicken feet, or clean toilets while wearing high heels. I want to write about what it means to be a life-long friend here in China, and how different that is from the Western idea of best-friendship. I want to write about how Chinese grandfathers dote on their tiny pig-tailed granddaughters, and how a young Chinese woman deals with the death of her mother. I want to write about post-modernism among China’s youth, and the movements that might become post-post-modernism (I’m hoping some wordsmith more talented than I comes up with a better name for it).
So who’s stopping me? There’s obviously only one answer to that - my greatest enemy, and really the only enemy I have. Me. Wo. Moi. Mich. Ngo.
-Bethany Allen
