My two homes-away-from-home encounter each other

Over at The Believer, former Jehovah's Witness Amber Scorah writes about her time proselytizing (illegally) in Shanghai. The article is worth your time for a number of reasons, but the part that I read over and over was about how Scorah was introduced to Ikea by a Shanghainese friend, Jean:

We finished eating, and Jean refused to let me help her clear the plates. “Sit, sit,” she kept ordering me, physically restraining me with one arm. When she finished stacking the dishes in the sink, she mentioned there was a surprise. Dessert and coffee, she said, beaming. Both already seemed like a rarity to me in China.

“At IKEA.” Her eyes shone. “Do you know, you can keep taking as much coffee as you want, for free? For Chinese people, we don’t understand this, we think they are very crazy.”

...

The cafeteria offered some Chinese food items, but was identical in every other way to any IKEA, cheap and bright. I could have been in Vancouver if not for the chaotic queue-jumping and diners installed at tables with rice brought from home. Many of the patrons were residents who lived in the ramshackle alleys behind the giant yellow building. The locals made the best of it, enjoying the free air conditioning, making IKEA the living room they had never had.

I chose a mini cheesecake with gooseberry preserves; Jean took a chocolate pudding. I paid, in spite of her violent protestations, and we proceeded to the coffee station with our mugs. People were stockpiling the powdered creamers and the packets of sugar. An older lady chastised me for not participating in the looting. “It’s free,” she said, urging me on.

I've talked to a number of Swedish people recently about my time in China, and their reactions are almost uniformely a mix of awe and bafflement at a place so different from their own home. And it's true--China and Sweden are extremely different, especially if you stick to surface-level observations, like the number of people, the noise level, the government, how privacy is defined, and the general aggressiveness of old ladies. (When my mom visited me in Ningbo, she nearly had heart failure watching me defend my place at the postal counter against old ladies with their elbows out. "Do you want to be here all day?" was my response.)

That said, I'm not convinced that there aren't similarities. This isn't a post wherein I identify and dissect such things; just one to say that I'm giving some thought to how similar the preservation of face and the dislike of open conflict might be, when you really get down to it.

Tonight!

Everyone onto the Google Bus

Over at The London Review of Books, there's another recent Rebecca Solnit piece, and this one is provoking a lot of discussion in my previous home, the San Francisco Bay Area. Titled "Google Invades," Solnit, a San Francisco resident who emphatically does not work in the tech industry, describes the migration that takes place every weekday:

The buses roll up to San Francisco’s bus stops in the morning and evening, but they are unmarked, or nearly so, and not for the public. They have no signs or have discreet acronyms on the front windshield, and because they also have no rear doors they ingest and disgorge their passengers slowly, while the brightly lit funky orange public buses wait behind them. The luxury coach passengers ride for free and many take out their laptops and begin their work day on board; there is of course wifi. Most of them are gleaming white, with dark-tinted windows, like limousines, and some days I think of them as the spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us.

She goes on to describe the unintended side-effects of this type of commuting, not the least being that rents are skyrocketing in a lot of previously working or middle class neighborhoods, making them essentially unaffordable for anyone who is not a part of this particular socioeconomic class. And that's when you can find and respond to a vacancy quickly enough to even be considered as a tenant.

Full disclosure here: while I do not work in tech, I used to live in San Francisco myself back in 2005-2007, and for a year's worth of time, I lived with my computer engineer boyfriend, now husband. And a large part of why we stopped living in the city and moved down to the South Bay was because the commute, which he did using his car, Caltrain, and a shuttle bus, was grueling. Solnit writes that "I overheard someone note recently that the buses shortened her daily commute to 3.5 hours from 4.5," and I believe both that the speaker wasn't exaggerating and that this statement was entirely free of sarcasm.

One of the things that we noticed immediately when we moved south--as in, the very day we arrived, while still sitting in the car after pulling up to a grocery store--was that there were kids around again. And not just babes in carriages or ergonomically-designed babyslings in Noe Valley, either, but honest-to-god elementary school students. People like to joke that there are more dogs in San Francisco these days than children, and while this may or may not be true, it captures one of the qualities of the city that is growing more accute: this influx of new tech money is, as Solnit makes painfully clear, starving the city of its celebrated diversity. It's not just that you can stand on a street corner in the Mission or the Marina and watch three versions of the same person walk by (plastic rimmed glasses/skinny jeans/flannel; polo with collar popped/sunglasses/unironic baseball cap); it's that there's an eerie sense that everyone in the neighborhood lives essentially the same life as everyone else. It's the kind of creepy uniformity that used to drive mid-century novels about suburbia. 

Click to read more ...

Repost: A Manifesto

“It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all.”

From Blue Pastures, by Mary Oliver

My college professor, perhaps my favorite, one who led me to write in such a way that my own writings, unbeknownst to me until far later, dovetailed uncomfortably with her own life, assigned her students this passage from Blue Pastures. Mary Oliver is never a bad way to begin a course on writing, but I can’t help wondering now, ten years later, whether she was intentionally frontloading us, giving us tools and information that would not come to fruition until, aptly, just now.

Let me explain: we were good writers, all of us, in a freshman year non-fiction writing class. We knew how to put together a sentence; we knew how to construct a line that would knock the socks off of our high school English teachers. And this knowledge had brought us to where we were, curled up awkwardly in stiff wooden chairs around an enormous wooden seminar table, deep in the bowels of institutional intellectual history--not far, in fact, from where the brave new psychologists of the 1950s had found that people not unlike us would shock others until the point of near-death if the man in white coat said so. That happened just around the corner, down a flight of stairs, back when the building had been the psych department.

But now it was the English department; the psych people had moved over, appropriately, to the base of Science Hill (always aspiring to be taken seriously by the hard scientists running down towards Commons from the nuclear labs), and we were there, at least twice a week, with our essays printed out and phrases turned and barely tamped-down egos. (The tamping would come, more fully, later on, after the towers crashed down and took the economy with them.) And we sat there, discussing Mary Oliver, as though we knew what we were talking about. My professor read her favorite passages as though the words had a taste to them, and we listened, nodding, professing awe at how she had gotten it right, just right.

Except. We had no fucking clue.

Click to read more ...

Gratitude

From the most recent To the Best of Our Knowledge podcast comes Aaron James, who, while talking about the subject of his recent book, made one of the more profound statements about artists and the larger world that I've heard (any transcription errors are mine):

Often the big mistake [artists make] is not realizing how grateful they should be to larger society for giving them the gift of creative opportunity, without which they would have never achieved or been successful. I mean, artists who have to fend for food all the time, or fend off foreign armies, or whatever, aren't going to get a lot of art done. But many of them, when they are successful and produce great artworks, everyone's very grateful for that, and then they sort of just take credit for it, you know, I did it. And then they think even more should be coming to them, or something like that, [in addition to] the great benefits that they've already got.

I usually do feel pretty grateful to get to do what I do in the way that I do it, but after this gentle reminder I'm overflowing--thank you to everyone, especially the people whom I don't usually think to thank, from the road builders to the pilots to the food safety inspectors to the nice people who remove our trash. It also makes me think of Obama's much-maligned comment about the collective power of community--and the need to appreciate every level of specialization that makes our world, and our own individual endeavors, possible.

I won't argue that it's the best of all worlds in which we live; I've read too much Voltaire for that. But in the spirit of gratitude, I appreciate a whole lot of people these days, people whom, whether they realize it or not, allow me to carry on with my peculiar obsession. I hope to be able to pay it back, or forward, one of these days.