BERLIN

 “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” (Kierkegaard)

When I tumbled out of my overnight bus onto the hazy streets of Berlin it had been thirteen years since I’d set foot in that splendid city. I have grand memories of the month I spent there at the end of 1999, exploring, cocooning, falling deeply in love with the place and all its scars and possibilities. It was Berlin I thought of when I went to China for the first time and knew I wanted to spend my life trying to understand it.

While there were plenty of places I thought I might return to I didn’t feel a burning desire to tour the city. The main reason for the trip was to see Henrike, a friend I’ve known since high school and to meet the family she has built.

Henrike has held onto the English she acquired as an exchange student in Seattle almost 20 years ago but my German is in a sorry state, any and all space in my brain’s language center now dominated by 普通话. While I can comprehend a good bit my ability to communicate is limited to scattered nouns and a handful of poorly conjugated verbs. It was easiest to communicate with 19 month-old Paul, who speaks only baby (but tolerated me reading books to him in exaggeratedly guttural Deutsch) and had christened me “Gika” by day two. 

Henrike’s 9 year-old son David is learning English in school but preferred to correct my mangled German and drill me in proper pronunciation. For conversation more complex than where to find the gelato shop we turned to technology. After I picked him up from school one day he used google translate to ask me if he could use my computer to watch a Harry Potter movie online.

I joined the family in leisured, nutella-rich brunches, park strolls, and museum visits and had two afternoons to myself to wander Kreuzberg and Schöneberg while Henrike and her husband ran errands. I sat outside at cafes strategically built to catch the afternoon sun, bought tea, browsed bookstores, and covered as much territory by foot as I could. 

This really is what it says it is (click for bigger)

It was just enough to take me back a decade and some – not to get nostalgic over how things were but to reflect on how very different, thank god, things are.

And of course I reveled in all the German and all the Germanity, eating fancy yogurts

  marveling at a shop entirely devoted to mustard

and giggling over personhood-ascribing marketing messages in translation. 

 lit: “Here I am a person, here I shop”

It’s always a treat to travel when you have a home base that is really a home and I enjoyed getting to know Neukölln, a lefty neighborhood with a visibly activist population and beautiful art nouveau architectural details.

Just two and a half blocks south of Henrike’s home is Tempelhof airport, the historic site of the Berlin Airlift and now an enormous public park. You can bike or roller skate down the old runways, till a plot in the p-patch, or just take in the wide horizons and growing collection of public art.

The old terminal, formerly one of the twenty largest buildings on earth, now hosts a dance school, a mini golf course (!), and events of all sorts.

I did not take this picture.

Rents are quite a bit higher in Berlin than they were 13 years ago but the city remains a place of enormous creativity and considerable possibility. I can’t wait to go back.

ODENSE

“To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.”

(Kierkegaard)

“What is your final destination today?” asked the elfin old man at passport control in Copenhagen airport. “Odense,” I replied confidently and with some pride. He looked up from my passport. 

“Do you mean ˈoðˀn̩sə?"

I nodded with sheepish bewilderment. 

“You had better know what town you’re going to or you might never get there,” he winked, sending me off to baggage claim.  

Thus began my first day in Denmark, a day on which I was not infrequently reminded that the considerable time I’ve spent living or traveling outside my home country does not mean I can parachute into any foreign context and expect smooth going.

Au contraire imbécile! Within an hour of my arrival I was baffled by an ATM that offered Danish Kroner rather than Euros, perplexed by train platforms, and attempted in all earnest to pay for a bottle of water with a coin half the needed value. Once on the train I sat in first class till kicked out by a conductor, required assistance in opening the automatic doors into the next carriage, and finally, finding all the standard seats filled (some with better-prepared visitors nose-deep in their Lonely Planets) resigned myself to sitting on my suitcase in the vestibule.

Luckily the ride was not long. We crossed the sea to the island of Funen and shortly reached its jewel, the town of Odense.

Odense is best known as the hometown of Hans Christian Andersen, reportedly born in this cheery little cottage:

Here are his dentures:

Here is the rope he always traveled with to assuage his neurotic fear that fire might trap him on a second or third story:

Here is the screen he painted to gaze upon from his deathbed:

What a fantastic weirdo. 

Odense is also the home of the decidedly Gothic Saint Knud’s cathedral (the saint himself is viewable in a glass box below the altar).

I’m not sure if the cathedral was built before or after Odense was the home of a successful cattery. [Any cattery experts among you please step forward and explain this.] 

Here is the cute historical museum where I learned not-nearly-enough about the town and its historical catteries. 

I was in Odense (I expect you are still saying oðˀn̩sə in your head as you read along) to give a talk at the local university, a gig set up by the excellent Jessica, presently employed there as an assistant professor. 

I had nearly a week between my arrival and my talk, giving me ample time to savor designer diet coke and sweet mint soda

 hang out in a borrowed apartment above a flower shop

cook and watch tv with Jessie and Rick, and explore the exceedingly cute downtown.

The talk went fine and I enjoyed the town and its phantom consonants very much. But the story doesn’t end there my kittens…

(to be continued)

POST-DISSERTATION Q & A

Q: So I hear you finished your dissertation -- wow, that's so exciting!

A: Yeah, sure [rolls eyes]. I need a job.

Q: How long was it?

A: 239 pages, weighing in at about 2 pounds and measuring 1 1/2" thick when I forgot to print it double-sided (apologies to the committee member about to receive a giant box of paper).

Q: So are you a doctor yet?

A: Nope. I still have to go back to Indiana to defend the dissertation (at the end of April), then I'll have about a month for revisions before the final submission.

Q: Yeah, yeah, details. Did you get any presents for finishing the dissertation?

A: I'm so glad you asked. I bought myself a new [refurbished] camera, with which to take more pictures of my cat.

Q: She looks like the greatest cat that has ever lived.

A: Yeah, pretty much. I also got a few wonderful packages of chocolate, Chairman Mao pins, and coloring books from friends, many well-wishes, and this amazing card from my housemate:

Q: I don't really understand that. So what did you do to celebrate?

A: What else? Mini golf.

 Q: Not my first choice. Was it fun?

A: Yes indeed. The "grand heist" room was worth the price of admission alone. I've always wanted to dodge laser beams.

Besides, not many mini golf courses have lounges replete with creepy ceramic animals.

 

Q: What else did you do?

 A: Caught up on correspondence and craft projects, daydreamed, read fiction, saw friends, and made scones, of course.

Q: Of course. 

A: I also spent a pretty great day frolicking in a friend's hat collection. She gave me eight to take home. I am very excited about this.

Q: So what's next?

A: Oooh, this is the best part: next week I'm going to Denmark to give a talk, then to Berlin for a few days to see a dear old friend. And I am going to see the hell out of that Lego museum in Copenhagen. Soooo excited.
Then I have to get a job. It happens to the best of us.

Q: Youth's end?

A: Something like that. AUF WIEDERSEHEN GRADUATE STUDENT LIVING!!!

SOME THOUGHTS ON BILATERAL RELATIONS AND THE WAY FORWARD (hint: it involves libraries)

Like just about everyone else I know, I am depressed by the news. I try to stick to a self-prescribed diet of only things that give me information I can act on and while that allows me to tune out some of the tragedy and political folly that saddens and enrages rather than informs it still leaves me with the responsibility to learn a great deal: to understand how it is that big money has come to play such an enormous role in this ostensible democracy and whether it can be reversed, how my government acts in international affairs, whether business can ever be entrusted with working to protect the environment and workers’ rights, or to improve global parity.

Of course I fail miserably to grasp all of these things in their entirety, and not only because I am consumed with digesting all things China and that keeps me in overtime as it is. And while I can’t keep up with all the news and views on our red friends, I do follow trends and I do so with considerable dismay; there are so many attacks and insults and behind almost all of them is ignorance and fear. It is little consolation that my mission, if it can be called one, is to teach and mediate, to suggest simple shifts of perspective that mutually humanize and familiarize the people of the two nations. When my Chinese friends express their horror at what they see as the abdication of familial responsibilities by Americans who put their elderly parents in homes or cut off support to their adult children I do my best to explain the individualistic values that make these decisions not only justifiable, but prescribed. When I encounter taxi drivers shocked that I would dare to criticize my government I attempt to explain American civic values while expressing my respect for Chinese culture and politics.

I don’t know how successful I am in these attempts, but I do feel confident that my attempts to reach out have had a positive, if teeny tiny effect, on bilateral relations, if for no other reason than many people I’ve met had never before had an actual conversation with an American, and they liked and respected me.

But having spent half of the last five years living in Beijing (which of course cannot wholly represent China – even less than D.C. represents the U.S.), I’m much less concerned by the insularity expressed in Chinese attitudes towards America than by that visible in American attitudes towards China. The belligerence of politicians and talking heads astounds me: who, if they consider it for a moment, can believe that being openly critical of China’s domestic policies or its favoring of economic growth over revaluing the yuan or refusal to sign on to Kyoto will have any positive effect (aside from short-term political gains)? Do I agree with all of the policies of the Chinese party-state? Absolutely not. But I can say with confidence that if any Chinese politician or pundit visited the U.S. and criticized superPACs, fracking, or encroachments on abortion seeking to deny women’s rights over their bodies (I’m looking at you Virginia), or if Chinese citizens held protests against American racial profiling or police brutality it would have the very opposite of the desired effect on policy change, setting off instead a massive wave of reactionary nationalism and taking us very far away from the cooperation and mutual respect that is the only way forward.

To clarify, it’s not about the legitimacy of the complaints or the ethical validity of either side, it’s about the wrong-headedness of an attack that insults the other party and leaves them with no choice but self-defense.

What concerns me more immediately is that while going on the offensive in criticizing China, we (politicians and citizens both), seem to be losing touch with the ideas and institutions that have made this nation so great, those that continue to attract creative, ambitious, brilliant students, entrepreneurs, and artists, feeding back economically in the innovation and drive that are even now staving off economic depression.

On my last trip to China I had a long talk with a dear old friend about some of my most perplexing research/dissertating questions, expressing my thoughts about the expectations Chinese citizens have regarding the rights and protections owed them by a government which calls itself socialist, yet has a consumers’ association with 150,000 branch offices, and yet fails to significantly empower consumers to act on their established legal rights. My friend had spent a year in the United States teaching Chinese on exchange and told me that her trip helped her to understand both countries in a new way: Americans, she believed, expected certain things of their leaders as their representatives, while Chinese tended to see their own interests as divorced from that of the government (this echoed what I heard elsewhere on the subject of taxes: instead of seeing themselves as having vested interests and claims as taxpayers many acquaintances told me tax revenue was “the government’s money”).

The thing that had left the deepest and most positive impact on my friend was America’s public library system – there is simply nothing like it in China. She and her husband had been ardent users of their local library during their stay, checking out movies and children’s books to help them improve their English skills, and when they spent the holidays with me in Seattle I took them to our architecturally stunning and art-filled downtown library, after which they spent a considerable time in the gift shop finding souvenirs for friends back home. They joked later that they had been sold a false bill of goods: while socialism had promised a worker’s utopia it had never produced anything like the temple to the public good they saw in the libraries that capitalism built.

I hope we can continue to demonstrate that we as a nation still value equal opportunity by supporting schools, libraries, parks, and vital social services. The trends aren’t encouraging, but you can still make your voice heard in support of what you believe in and you can still inform yourself as a citizen, courtesy of your public library.

And should you wish for more extensive and erudite analysis on contemporary China I recommend checking out this fine book: