Half past dusk on a winter’s eve in November, the alleys in Lanzhou were alive with fires for the dead. It was already a Poe kind of night: coal smoke and the skies a velvet violet lining, startled at the stillness broken, other friends have flown before, she shall press, ah, nevermore! All that was missing was the talking raven. I was out walking my thoughts, as one would a dog, harming no one, ignoring all, hiding behind an inward smile as if saying, “Good doggie, good boy,” when there came a tap-tap-tapping on my door. I barely noticed it at first, but odd things were definitely afoot. A well-dressed woman squatting in front of a wall was struggling to light four paper cups containing liquid. An urban family, poking a small mound of black ashes with a stick, huddled together as if they had decided to camp out on the asphalt. Further on, a full bottle of Chinese beer with its label singed placed beside some fruit around another smoldering mound of sooty black ashes. Predictably, my first thought was—what a waste of good beer.
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I would’ve liked to report that Thanksgiving in China is an uproarious and festive day, but the truth is, it’s not a recognized holiday, and is as empty of promise as Geraldo Rivera’s opening of Al Capone’s vault, or Donald Trump’s 2012 October surprise, or the red states post-election threat to secede from the Union, or the new Cracker Jack’D line of caffeinated candy coated popcorn. These days, giving thanks multiple times everyday is as natural to me as breathing, so the whole idea of setting a day aside to give thanks is kind of superfluous, yet, in my past the day has offered profound joy, strangeness, contagious gratitude, misery, compassion, cerebral hypoxia, regret, love, hostility, and the committing of each and every one of the seven deadly sins. I wanted to share the meaning of Thanksgiving with my students, but after doing a little research, I didn’t know exactly what to say. The official version is this: Oppressed Puritan Pilgrims fled England to establish freedom of worship in the New Land, coming ashore at the newly-named Plymouth Rock, where the spiritually well-fed but physically starving newcomers were embraced by the local heathens who broke open their storehouses and fed the Pilgrims throughout the long winter. The day is set aside in honor of the Indians, who with this selfless act allowed democracy to take hold and flourish, conglomerates to be formed, industrialization, Hollywood, Coca-Cola, genetically modified corn, tuna melts, Cheese Doodles, Black Friday sales, and enabled McDonalds to morph into a creepy noun form, i.e., “We ate McDonalds.” It’s a nice, tidy myth—the pumpkins, the strange black hats and oversized buckles, the overflowing cornucopias, the cranberry sauce, disposable aluminum roasting pans, but according to historians, the truth was an entirely different affair. The Pilgrims originally set sail for the New Land in two ships, the Speedwell and the Mayflower, but the Speedwell was a leaky wreck. Half the voyagers turned back, and the rest boarded the Mayflower, which set sail with 103 passengers and crew. Their original destination was the mouth of the Hudson River, but storms and assorted other catastrophes forced them ashore at Cape Cod in what is now Massachusetts (cue the Bee Gees song). Once ashore, they were starving and without provisions and plundered Indian graves to steal the corn buried with the departed, ate their own leather shoes and belts, and dumpster dived around Indian settlements. They were a sorry lot, and indeed the Indians pitied them, occasionally tossing them a dried cod or some freshly popped popcorn. But the newcomers were relentlessly odd, and stubborn, and it eventually came down to survival of the religious; they found rationalizations in their doctrines to seize land, to plunder and pillage, then the diseases they brought with them did the rest. Mather the Elder, father to that fun guy Cotton Mather, preaching in a thanksgiving sermon in 1623 offered up thanks to God for the smallpox epidemic that wiped out a prior Indian settlement. And still other historians claim the real first Thanksgiving Day was held in 1637 as a celebration for the safe return of colonists who had recently marched south and slaughtered 700 Pequot Indians—men, women and children, in what is now Mystic Connecticut. The anniversary is still mourned by a group called the United American Indians of New England who gather each year at Plymouth Rock to remember and reflect. As far as my students, I kept the explanation short and sweet: It’s a day we give thanks for all we’ve been given, when we share with those less fortunate, feast, and applaud life. Somewhere long ago, in the ribboning ebbs and bends of time, the first cavemen met on neutral ground for trade, and ever since then we’ve been confusing each other with language. When I first arrived in China, so completely and absurdly alone, stunned into a linguistic stupor, grasping for an aural kernel of meaning, searching—frantic for a gesture to convey—well, everything, retreating behind a dumb smile, chastened, humbled, depending solely upon luck to once again pull me through, but later, reviewing what happened made me realize how thoughts could form words, intentions, communicate needs, and convey them in a quantum language that everyone subliminally understands and responds to, although I’ve yet to become fluent in it. For me it’s similar to how bees perform instructional nectar location dances to give the rest of the hive a fix on the locale of newly discovered flowers, or schools of fish communicating the need to turn collectively—in an instant, over and over again, or birds stopping automatically in the exact same trees on their migrations, generation after generation, or how dogs learn to distinguish and respond to human words like, “Walkies,” By the way, I’d like to share my new favorite quote concerning dogs: “Did you ever walk into a room and forget why you walked in? I think that is how dogs spend their lives.” – Sue Murphy Anyway, I figured where there was a will, there was a way to communicate, and China was the perfect place to field-test some of my wackier theories. I combined the belief that thoughts are actions with the accepted theory that language was originally developed by our hairy ancestors mimicking sounds animals made. There are times, especially at night, when I feel as if I am living in a computer chip. The odd black skyline shapes, the blinking, bending streams of smooth neon light, the roaring electric density, the unexpected quiet of the squat residential apartment blocks with their dark, narrow, maze-like private streets, protected by guarded gates, the square Lanzhou street grids broken up by random angular byways, all fold into a William Gibson dream of a computer city plexus of pulsating, artificially lit intensity. This is not necessarily a bad feeling, in fact it’s often energizing, occasionally alienating, always interesting. Whenever I feel the need to bring it back down to a more personal level, day or night, I hit the streets and wander about like a demented monk. The streets always reconnect me, revive me, engage me. So, I thought I would take you along with me on a walk through my neighborhood. I leave my 3rd floor apartment, walk down the clean swept but dingy concrete stairs and out into a courtyard surrounded by the buildings that make up my apartment complex, with parking spaces for the cars my neighbors own and a small playground where residents practice a tai chi-sword dance most mornings, where groups of school children play in the evenings, and over which, sometimes, the moon playfully hangs. I turn left, right, left, walk along a brown wall covered with climbing vines turned reddish autumn, unlock the gate by the guard shack with a small, blue plastic disk, hold the door for whomever is waiting, pass the shop with the boiling metal cauldron out front where you select delicacies from the refrigerated case, pre-skewered on long wooden sticks, the offerings include meat, mushrooms, seaweed, veggies and tofu in various shapes, then hand it to the cooker who drops in into the steaming pot, select your noodles, then wait a few minutes, after which it is whisked into a bowl and wham-bam the cooker scoops spices into the mixture, with broth, cilantro, and things I can’t name and serves it with a flourish, charging approximately 13 RMB (US $2.05). |
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