Love

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”

These words by James Baldwin, from The Fire Next Time. For nearly four or five years now, I’ve found a point mid-semester to bring the sentences into my freshman composition class. I read the quotation out loud, and my students write it down, their pens tracing each word. Then we look at the quote and they shout out words that they don’t know. “Grace?” And I admit that word trips me up too, then stumble through defining it. “Infantile?” Whether in classrooms in America or here in Shanghai, my students always seem to appreciate Baldwin’s dig at Americans. “He’s writing about race relations in the U.S. in the 60’s here, about his own vision for a way forward; this was when he still had lots of hope.”

Then I push us on, to the lesson: “What is the key term?” “Love,” they say, just off unison--it’s obvious. “We generally think of ‘love’ as what?” I pause. “And how does Baldwin help you re-see it?” They look at me, like they always do, their eyes searching. Most often I move on to get them to think about their own key terms, because there’s no point in talking about love this way with them. Whether on a personal level or a collective one, it’s an idea worth noting but useless to talk about, unless perhaps you’re Baldwin, and you have touched something so big, for so long, and your voice has stayed with so many.

But this time, in Shanghai, we stay with Baldwin’s words, and I say, “Do you think love should be ‘tough’? Is it something you should be daring for?” A few of them nod. “Really?” I ask. “Don’t you like the idea of ‘love’ being safe and making you happy?” Some shrug and murmur. Then one of them asks me, point blank, “Well, what do you think, Ms. Pierce?” The question is simple enough but it kicks me in the gut; deep breath: “It’s not about what I think it should be,” I say, “in my experience, it has been tough…and I’m talking about all kinds of love, loving my family, loving ideas, romantic love—yeah, it’s been really tough.” Why am I telling them this? “But grace is possible. And safety and happiness and joy are parts of it too. And this whole losing-your-mask thing? It suuuucks.” My eyes well up and I smile. “But so worth it! I swear.”

The day I taught Baldwin this semester happened to be the day that Lee--my boyfriend of just over a year, and a friend since our early twenties--was arriving in Shanghai. And I was terrified--ahem, excited. He is coming all across the world to spend two months with me! Just me! What if it’s a huge mistake? What if….? When he appeared on my doorstep, it wasn’t the glorious moment I’d wanted to imagine. And in those first hours and days the thing that I could feel most my resistance at giving up my (often) happy loneliness here, my awed alienation at being in China and not knowing anyone, and no one really knowing me. And since, in Lee’s month here in Shanghai, Love has been all the things: infantile, and mature, tough, and safe, American, and foreign, boring, and exciting, masking, and a revelation. And the sum of all of it, I suspect, is that we have been gaining, gradually, some sense of grace, together.

This semester's bittersweet end barely set, off we go now, my love and I, together for three weeks across parts of south and central China—a quest.

On Not Learning Chinese

"Are you going to learn Chinese?" : A question asked of me again and again upon sharing the news that I was going to be living in China for five months. And even though it's the hardest language to learn in the world, sure, I thought I should at least try. So a few weeks before coming here I bought a Mandarin phrasebook and downloaded some apps. Three months in, I have yet to touch either one.

In my first days in Shanghai, upset stomach longing for American food, I go to a restaurant called Mr. Pancake and mime everything else but ask for "shway." "Shway" means water in Chinese, and it stuck because it also means "little bit" in Lebanese. "Xenali shway", "I'd like some water" : my rough translation, my haphazard transliteration. "Shway" was the first word I learned from Xiao, a good friend who moved to New York from his home in Fouzhou ten years ago. When he volunteered to cat-sit for me in Brooklyn just a month before I left, he came over to meet Mojo collect the keys and we ended up talking for an hour, about Chinese, and so many other things, like: Mandarin and Cantonese aren't variations of one language but entirely different languages. And: they are two among hundreds spoken in this country. My heart sunk as Xiao told me all this cheerfully, insisting on teaching me a few phrases that I did my best to write down and say after him, even though I swear it felt like they were entering in one of my ears and falling right out of the other.

"Shi-shi" and "nee-hao" : "Thank you" and a greeting. In my first days, I catch on to these basics; it seems like the least I can do. I want to say "shi-shi" so much of the time, but something that's taken me a little longer to learn is that it's rude to be too polite.

The first time we Skype when I'm in Shanghai, Xiao re-teaches me the five tones, which feel impossible to hear, even as he uses his hands to indicate the pitches and tells me again and again I’m doing well as I repeat them after him. He shares with me links to a page that explains pinyin (which is the official way of transliterating Mandarin into English, was going to be officially adopted over the characters at one point, though that never happened) and another page that shows the evolution of the Chinese characters over the years. We look up "turtle", "fire", and "fish" and the revelation of a written language based on ideograms and not sounds strikes me anew.

"Tung" : Pain. This, I learn from my second masseuse in Shanghai, a Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner with ten years experience I was told by the cheerful women who up-sold me, but you doesn't speak English and insists on muttering over me in Chinese as he hones in on all of my most painful parts. "Tung chullee?" Yes, pain here, but don't stop.

On Skype, Xiao listens to me patiently. I tell him how frustrating his language is. He talks me through my student roster, pronouncing the names I don't know. He says and I repeat words for spicy, pork, sesame, words I barely remember. I do remember "nyonai" which I figure out on my own when ordering and Americano one day. I record a message for him, saying this word, triumphantly. He writes me back with variations on what else I might say. There’s always more to learn.

"Context is so important" : so says my friend S who was born to a Chinese mother and an Australian father and grew up in England. She sort of knows Chinese but is here for a year to learn it for real. She has been taking classes for tells me that all the simplified Chinese characters fit on one sheet of normal sized paper, and I've already learned that most words need two characters. She says, "I mean context is soooo important. Confidence too."

"Chullee": Here. Useful and empowering when I manage to hail a cab and he understands my pronunciation of the intersection I want to go to. This, after failing many times. Now, I say it loud and deep. Fifth tone. X road and Y road. "Lu": road. Drop me off here.

I am terrified the first time I go to yoga class at the gym in my apartment complex. Will this even work, I wonder, as I angle for a spot where I can both see the teacher and not be in the way. Turns out it's easy to follow along, and the teacher treats me like everyone else, adjusting my stance with exactness, pushing me to my limits, no where near as kind as yoga teachers in Brooklyn, but that feels really good. Like everyone else, she takes photos of me in my poses to post god-knows-where, saying "douye" as she walks by me. "Douye, douye" : "Yeah, you got it, yeah." And "had-haw" which I think means "how good." Throughout the class, she repeat four words, again and again. "Ii, er, san, si." One, two, three, four, and we all drip with sweat. The other day, one of the yogis right next to me, looked over and said something right after I fell out of a pose. I'm pretty sure it was, "You are awesome."

What am I saying? Something about language and belonging, something about things that feel impossible being the most fun. And I'm definitely not learning Chinese, but I'm learning so many things I never knew before.

The first written character I've started to pick out of blocks of texts I see everywhere is 人 : "ren" : person. Xiao taught me this in our first or second meeting, I realize as I look back over my notes from Brooklyn, chicken scratches I jotted down hopelessly lifetimes ago, and here I am swimming in the language, and I see it every where: ren, ren, ren. 

Too Much Too Much

I have kept on with saying Shanghai is too much; it's too far away, it's too intense, too insane, it's so future, so past, so alienating. And it is starting to wear thin, this constant awe at difference. But I think I'm getting somewhere new. This past weekend, as I was aimlessly biking on a too-short shared bike through half-built neighborhoods and over canals, desperately in search of an address my phone just would not translate, I decided that dense is what Shanghai really is, so dense with experience you can barely recognize yourself, especially not right away. But if you take deep breaths (only recommended on days when the AQI is below 150), if you have, if you make the time and the space, the density might start to dissipate.

I was on a bike on may to meet a friend, and coming from the third event in the last three days where I’d gotten to hear a genius woman writer talk about her work. On Thursday, there had been Gish Jen, a US-based fiction writer and visiting professor at my school. At our weekly faculty lunch series, she presented the essential ideas of her new nonfiction book, The Girl at the Baggage Claim. Her notion that we can think of two kinds of selves--Avocado-pit selves and Flexi-selves--on the surface had sounded to me simplistic, but is truly visionary in understanding the human tension between East and West, between individual-centered cultures and more collective ones. And on Friday, a friend suggested we meet for lunch at a restaurant where the Foreign Correspondents' club was hosting a talk titled, "How the West Got China Wrong," given by veteran journalist, Melinda Liu, sharing her experiences living and reporting from Beijing since the late seventies. Though Liu's throat was raw from a sickness, she persisted, regaling us with the moment she got shot down in a press conference by Deng Xiaoping (when the access was unimaginable compared to the tightness now), and reflecting on how her process has changed as she's seen the stories of China's recent history unfold. And on a lark, I'd just ended up at a Shanghai Literary Festival event. It was on the top floor of a beautiful old building on the Bund, where a sold-out crowd of Chinese students and older expats watched Hao Jingfeng in conversation with a local author and translator Austin Woerner. I had only started her award winning story, her only one that has been published in English that morning, called "Folding Beijing" (which you can find online in Uncanny Magazine). Jingfeng spoke at length about her inspirations, her fears, her process, her life as a scientist, as a mother, as a founder--with money she received for sponsorship after she was translated into English got some fame--of a company training kindergarten teachers in one of China's poorest mega-cities in curriculum centered on critical thinking.

As I biked, I made periodic stops, to check the GPS on my phone, just to confirm that I was on the right path, each time being sorely disappointed at how far I'd gone out of the range of my aim, each time putting the phone away and getting back on the bike and certain I got it this time, then again, after a few long blocks and a turn or two, stopping nad seeing I was wrong. The sun went from pleasant to punishing, my legs started to get sore, I felt more lost than I ever had, why had I agreed to this? Would my friend care if I missed her? This inner voice, a familiar tone of thinking for me, a way to hurt myself without facing the issue. But I would miss her, and this day. Here I was, finally, with nothing else to punish myself with, my phone finally at 10%, nothing left to do but keep on. Here I was in the Middle Kingdom, in 2019, able to ride a bike on a first day of spring; it was a very personal moment, but powered by something collective, too, something both magnificent and terrifying. And finally, late, sweaty, and blissful, I found my new friend and we meandered slowly, catching up as if we'd known each other for years, before we finally got to the art opening she'd wanted to go to. 

(Pictured, a tiny slice of said exhibition, a tiny pyramid of silk worms whose DNA had been injected with phosphorescence, by the conceptual artist Liang Shaoji. The exhibition is called "Growing" and it features "four pioneering artists working at the intersection of living organism, synthetic biology and ecological activism" and is showing at Chronus Art Center at M50 Artspace through June.)

Middle of the Middle

Context: "With text," from the Latin, "to weave together." In nearly seven years of teaching college composition, mostly to freshman students at NYU, "context" has emerged as one of the most important and difficult concepts to get across in the classroom, to put into practice, to put in context. Part of the problem and also the necessity is that the context of what you are writing about, thinking about, experiencing, discovering exists whether you see it or not, but it's also something you must acknowledge, create of your own accord. 

Currently, living in Shanghai and teaching freshman composition at NYU's satellite campus here, I am some way in context but also very much out of it. In my nearly too months here, I have developed small routines--of yoga on Mondays, groceries on Sundays, massages each week, video calls to friends and family back home. These actions no longer feel revelatory. I can no longer count the times I've done downward dog after the command in Chinese, but still I do not know the words. I can't say my stomach is fully adapted to the richness of the food, but I'm also using chopsticks like a pro (and I've always been the one who asks for a fork) and demanding more spice. This middle space isn't like the elation of first having arrived and thinking, "Wow!" with every step, even when people are barking at me, and I imagine this middle space is not like being here a few years, or a little more, the "trap" so many expats talk about, where you get used to the massages, where your family grows and gets comfortable here. This middle space in the Middle Kingdom--it's been a difficult and exhausting week, finding myself smack-dab in that middle-ness, seeing my context-less-ness in context.

Often, when we teach context, we talk to our students about picture frames: "You need to limit context to make it digestible, but you want to make sure to put enough inside the picture to make it beautiful, to make what you are showing feel whole and real." But how do we choose? And how we teach making the best choices? And how best to critique the choices others have made--including other writers? Politicians? Our students? Ourselves?

Last week was an exhausting and week in Shanghai--feeling both tired of it and also still utterly bewildered--and I pushed myself past the gauntlet of the rush hour subway and the commuter train to visit a new friend in Suzhou, a city full of traditional Chinese gardens, just a half hour down the high speed track. And, in a slow morning spent at Lion's Grove garden--just one of the 9 in Suzhou listed as UNESCO world heritage sites, that I chose for its small size, and ease of finding, having been warned of crowds--I was happy to discover twisting passageways and hidden corners like treasures, so many frames and angles, where the context was created for me, over and over, created so carefully so many, many years ago, where I could simply wander and admire the choices that someone else had made with no complaint.