sushipanda

The Cloud

I know of a world that never retreats
it returns with grace, it returns with fury
it clings to the bottom of my familiar steps
it erodes and evolves and endures, but it does not escape
it never leaves

I sit in the back, the China sun masked in a haze of yellow rememberance
and I remember how it aches, how it can throb and beat and bleed
and after so many times, I am still soft
and easily wounded

I sit in the back, I clench my fist and search for something to grasp
my eyes are in a vise, and I try to open them only to see pain
and hear the sounds of a sorrowful breeze
the cloud of the past and of a heavy heart remind me
that though age has been a constant companion
I still remember how to be frozen in the cool, fierce arms of being broken
It never gets better, especially when you never expect to glimpse it again

My brother and I were only in the same school once. That was back in ‘90, when I was a sixth-grader at Chaparral Elementary School in Claremont, and he was in first grade. Being six years apart made it difficult to do things together, and even as we both adapted to our new environments (I to a new school, he to school in general), we rarely saw each other except for those few occasions during the gap between our recesses.

Now, we’re once again in the same school together, only this time “school” is the metaphor for all the painful vagaries of adult life. He had his graduation ceremony last weekend, and though I tried to arrange it so that I could attend, I ended up only able to think about it from far away as my parents made the trip to watch him undoubtedly scurry from one photo to another, cloaked both in sartorial tradition and pending trepidation at what lay ahead.

I can remember so vividly the day of my own graduation; the heat, the droning commencement speech, the hypnotic insistence of capturing every possible moment on film. Six years have since passed, and while I often claim that my mantra in life is to always look forward with no regrets about the past, it’s difficult to avoid looking back during these moments, when those close to you pass through those same rites and ceremonies.

On one hand, I hope that the next six years of my brother’s life will be filled with the ease of life and careless fun that I’ve had. On the other, I want him to do better than I did in all aspects, to appreciate the richness of being young and energetic and excited. I want him to avoid the mistakes that I’ve made, even though I’ve learnt from them. I want him to love people and things the way I have, even though it will break his heart. I want him to indulge in culture and burritos, even though it will make him seem small and hurt his intestinal system. I want so much for him, even though I’m limited by the physical forces of distance and the metaphysical forces of life. I guess the most I can do is want those things, and be available, and be proud, and to invite him to Shanghai for a drink and a conversation as equals, as two students who once again are in the same school, albeith with no grades and report cards and disappointed parents. Far far away from Chaparral Elementary, school is back in session.

My kick-ass brother Andrew with mom and dad…wish I could have been there!

In an effort to be more dedicated to this blog, I’ve decided to try to allocate some time every work day to pontificate a little bit on the state of the world and my quite exciting life (not sure if the sarcasm is coming through over cyberspace). This means that the time that I usually devote to refreshing ESPN.com and walking around looking for snacks will be reduced by about 15 minutes a day (which still leaves me with about 5 hours and 45 minutes to refresh ESPN.com and walk around looking for snacks).

*Ok, so I just typed the above 10 minutes ago, because I got a phone call asking for information and had to walk over to another coworker’s cube to answer a question. How dare they ask me to work while I’m here in the office!*

Well, that leaves me with less than 5 minutes to post today’s entry before I have to snap up my belongings and head down to the shuttle — which is always the best part of my day. I will stay long enough to tell you that the extended battery on my work laptop that I ordered a few days ago arrived today, so I’m happy to report that the back of my computer now has a huge bulge. Huge bulges excite me. Morever, I have a black IBM Thinkpad, so the bulge is black. Huge, black bulges excite me even more. I plan on going home, recharging the thing, and then lying on my bed staring at my battery meter before I drift happily to sleep.

I also ate lots of cookies today. You can see how fulfilling my life is. And with that, my fifteen minutes is up! Comments, please?

Alex was back in town and I had been MIA for all of two weekends, so I heeded the call of the wild and made my way out to Guandii. There was, after all, much to celebrate in life.

So once again I’ve been MIA for a week, and there’s no way in hell you guys can correctly guess why. No travel, no laziness, and only one hangover…I have actually been doing work! In fact, I’m taking a break from my spreadsheet to write something in this space. How dare the people who are paying me expect me to actually contribute so much to work?!

Needless to say, I’ve been tired, which is a direct result to our low stock price. Depressing. Darron blew by town a few weeks ago and tantalized me with his “start my own business” ideas, but with suddenly 90% of my take-home pay now devoted to paying down the apartment I had no business buying, I’ve decided to divert my energies (previously invested in valuable things like lying down for hours at a time) to actually trying to make something myself, lift my company out of the doldrums, and alleviate some of the burden on myself. At the same time, I know that I won’t really be able to make a huge financial leap if I kept on the same path I am on now, which basically discredits everything I just said in the previous sentence. Damn it, I wish I were David Beckham…with a deeper voice, that is.

Still, I’m super happy these days because various important parts of my life are falling into place, and my long-term strategy of buying one piece of furniture at a time and practicing yoga in my new apartment seems closer and closer with each day. And this is true for other people in my life as well. For instance, I’ve never seen Betty happier…AT ANY OTHER TIME OF MY EXISTENCE! Congratulations, Betty, on graduating from law school, and hopefully for changing all those terrible anti-drug laws they have in New York.

I don’t usually do shout-outs on here because, well, I chew my toenails and have very few friends who accept that about me. Therefore, consider this a big deal. And how dare they accomplish so much while I’m here at my desk, staring at my massive fake DVD collection and wondering if it represents the pinnacle of my achievement here in Shanghai.

But I have three copies of Spider Man 2, what do YOU have!

By the way, new photos have been uploaded.

While the partying was supposed to be curtailing, we couldn’t pass up this opportunity to dress to the nines and pretend like we were rich, champagne-enjoying folk. Once again, leveraging our massive guanxi of guanxi, we were all able to enjoy free-flowing champagne and feel like we deserved it.

I’m trying to do something slightly newer here by showing pictures from Flickr from this point on, as now I’ve officially become a Web 2.0 believer. Go ahead and look at some other classy photos on Flickr here.

“I once was lost, but now am broke.”

After finally completing the May holiday chronology, I was prepared to start posting more frequently some of the incessant ramblings of the mind that plague me throughout the day; sort of moving away from the theme of being an expatriate in China to something more broad and encompassing. After all, in September I’ll be celebrating my 3 year anniversary in Shanghai, which is nothing to sneeze at and, more relevantly, is as clear an indication as any that it’s time to let sushipanda.com start maturing into a different groove.

However, as always life intervenes. After many many many months of announcing that my carefree youth was coming to an end and that it was time to start focusing my priorities on the long view, I finally started to take those first tender steps in that direction. And, as with most of the happenings in my life, it all started with someone else’s stomach virus.

You see, many weeks ago my default consigliere was the unfortunate receipient of a violent stomach virus that rendered him incapable of wasting time. Mike had gotten sick prior to our Sichuan trip, and was diagnosed with something so awful that I can’t possibly mention it here in this space, partly because it prevents him from drinking copious quantities of beer, but more because I can’t remember what it’s called. It was during this period of relative calm that he realized that if we were to continue down our current path of decadence, we would never be able to achieve our long-term goals in life (he of being a wealthy investor with property all along Hong Kong harbor, and I with my plans of being the flamboyantly metrosexual pioneer of some underwater sport involving rubber balls and tube socks). Mike can be prone to the occasional bout of wisdom, and as he looked straight into my eyes and said: “You’re about to be an old, miserable failure,” I could sense that this was one of them. Right then I there, I decided to step over the line from “man-childhood” into the realm of “something resembling manhood.”

He’s right, of course. You’re only young once, but you can be a lot of things once, including a badly-dressed doughy 36 year old dancing at Babyface VI trying to pick up on girls who could pass as his 21 year niece. I didn’t want to be that guy in another 8 years.

Hence, I did what any rational human being would do in a quarter-life crisis: I bought an apartment. One wildly beyond my affordability levels. With a little help from my parents on the down, however, I have now entered the sexy class of people known as “home-owners.” The title sounds so magesterial that it is literally forcing me to grow up. I guess there’s no better motivation than having millions of RMB on my shoulders. Where once I was lost, now I am found…and will be a lot broker to speak of. Gone are the party days of yore.

Goddamn stomach virus.

I believe the ancient Chinese saying goes something like this: “See the Big Buddha once in your life, find peace; see it twice in less than a year and wait in line for hours while doing it, you’re an idiot.” Thus, I was happy for my idiot self to be whisked away by the tour bus from the seemingly millions of people looking for peace at Leshan, and finally on the path to sights yet unseen.

Of course, I didn’t expect that they’d take us to see a demonstration of the lost art of martial tea-pouring. On the road between Leshan and Emeishan, our next-day destination, was an exquisite tourist trap. Our tour guide, ever so slowly offsetting her initial cuteness by referring to herself in the third person, worsened our take on her as she started talking up this depot for country-wide famous tea. I’ve traveled too enough places in China to know that EVERY city is famous for it’s tea. I was pretty peeved that I had to drop 10 RMB to look at pieces of plant in hot water.

Imagine my surprise when we arrived at a newly constructed, air-conditioned auditorium and tea museum! We were all so tired and sweaty from traipsing up and down that Big Buddha that it was heavenly to just sit our big American (and skinny Canadian) asses down in plush seating and be cooled from the AC gods above. Things got sweeter when these costumed kids got up on stage and start demonstrating their mad tea-pouring skills. Basically, they used teapots with elongated spouts that appeared to be up to almost 3 feet in length and contorted their limbs in various weird angles to shoot the tea out into the cup. I was absolutely amazed! Mostly at the fact that they could build a brand new complex to house a display of such a useless martial art. I mean, what happened if the Mongolians invaded the place? How would these tea-pourers counter-attack? Maybe the strategy was to pour the enemy a bad tasting cup of tea to scare them away. Or maybe they’d start waving around their super long tea pots and leave the enemy confused and bewildered, like it left us.

They could make a work-out video out of this. Tea-Boe

I also wondered how they pee’ed.

That night, we learned that paying less than 400 RMB for a package tour basically means that there would be a lot of squatting, whether it be playing cards while waiting for our broken-down bus to get repaired, or relieving yourself in your own hotel room. As we set our bags down in our respective rooms at our “hotel” at the base of Emeishan, the 5 star treatment we had been getting at the Crowne Plaza in Chengdu and the Marriott in Chongqing seemed as far away as the days when my entire knowledge of the female body was based off a stripped down Barbie doll (basically, two years ago). Still, as any family consisting of four grown males usually are, we were happy that we had each other. After dinner, we decided to take a walk and slowly realized that, since we were basically in the middle of an ancient Chinese holy mountain, it wasn’t going to be likely that we would find a hip hop club anywhere, so we went back upstairs, played some cards and ate some nuts (*snicker*), and rested up for the long hike the next day.

Here’s where “receipt man” comes back into the picture. When I first got a glimpse of the man who had held up the bus for 20 minutes, screaming unintelligibly for a receipt that was impossible to provide, my first reaction was: “Aw, he’s an old man, I should go easy on him.” Soon thereafter, I realized that he was the youngest of his crew of nine; the rest of his posse were absolutely ancient. Combine that with the fact that we were about to hike up a really tall mountain, and anyone could foresee that something was going to go awry (something not consisting of Clint wearing his baby-T and dry-humping all the security guards…at least, not this time).

Keith and receipt guy’s groupies from the 19th century

The four us ended up attracting the attention of another foursome, consisting of two youthful couples from Chengdu. History will show that the merging of the two fouresomes was a result of two distinct cultures wanting to learn more about each other. In reality, I truly believe that they were simultaneously amused by Keith’s “interesting” Chinese accent (”this hot pot is so ma-laaaaaaah”) and grotesquely intrigued by my tendency to rest my head on Mike’s lap when on the bus (hey, four guys traveling alone might as well be prison!). In any case, we departed from the rest of the tour group to go wandering on our own, but not before our nervous Emeishan tour guide asked us to sign a waiver form. Apparently, this was her first day on the job, and from her decision to wear a shirt that said “I love free sex” we could sense that something wasn’t quite clicking right in her head. We signed our respective fake names in English and left her with a sense of false security and a load of monkeys, including “receipt man” himself.

Not only was she a shit tour guide, she false advertised!

Emeishan is famous for its several temples and the varieties of apes and monkeys scattered around the mountain. After we left the rest of the group, we wandered through one of the bigger temples, and then promptly decided not to set foot in another temple again. This decision efficiently took care of about 70% of all the remaning sights on Emeishan, so we proceeded to take the scenic route through the various canyons and above the creek.

I must say, all joking aside, that the place truly is beautiful. This is in spite of the fact that snack and souvenir stands were waiting for us every 3rd meter. Oh, and also the fact that every few minutes we’d have to stop and lean to the side as lazy and fat wealthy tourists zoomed by, carried on the shoulders of the buffest little Chinese men we had ever come across.

It had been a while since I had seen such lush foliage in one place; the last time was probably crossing over the Himalayas into Nepal (THAT was pretty damn cool, too). So it was great to take in the fresh air and all the greenery. Even when we came across the tiny waterfall surrounded by tiny Chinese people, were excited enough to be close to nature that we took as many pictures as possible, complete with pointy fingers and mock peace signs (we got less and less creative with our poses and the trip dragged on).

Four with nature

Eventually, we came across plenty of monkeys and scenery, and by the time we finished our super long walk back down to the meeting point, we were all looking forward to returning to high life of Chivas and Crowne Plaza. We were about 15 minutes early, so we settled in and started playing cards with our new Chinese friends, and waited for the rest of the camp to show up.

And show up they did, four hours after the designated meeting point. At that point, I was so angry that I was devising ways of cramming long-spouted tea pots up the ass of whoever was responsible, whether it be Free Sex tour guide or whichever tourist decided to hold up the rest of us. Eventually, our original guide showed up and failed to do anything to remedy the situation, save for explaining that one of our tour comrades had gotten him or herself bitten by a monkey.

Now, everyone knows monkeys are our brothers, and by that logic they are intelligent enough to not just bite any humans. Science has proven that they only bite humongous assholes who don’t know any better than to get too close to a monkey. The four of of quickly went through a mental inventory of people who could potentially be assholes from our tour group, and we all agreed it could only be one person; that’s right, receipt man himself. And imagine our delight when he finally walked by, gripping his bloody arm in consternation. Not only did have the bright idea of dragging his practically mummified family up a mountain, but he literally got injured monkeying around. Doing what, only Big Buddha knows.

Finally, 4 hours past schedule, we crawled into our bus and began the long ride home. Mercifully, receipt man and his crew had extended their stay in Emeishan a bit longer, perhaps because they saw my face and realized that if they had stayed I would have bit his other arm in the name of vengeful symmetry. Their absence on the bus made everyone just seem jollier, and as we pulled away I looked out the window at the sun slowly easing down behind the beautiful hill, and I was at ease with myself. Sure, it had been a tiring day, with crazy old people and tour guides who didn’t know how to do anything except point the fingers at each other and call for free sex. All in all though, it was a pretty cool ending to a fun and exciting trip with my friends, and a smile slowly crept across my face.

Then, I noticed receipt man walking with his old mother along the side of the road. I realized that he was now the sole reason that I would be spending extra money on my future trips, just to avoid the likes of people lik him on a local Chinese tour. Depressed, I screamed for the bus driver to stop, scrambled out of the vehicle, ran to receipt man, started making out with his mom, and then threw him off the ravine into the dark precipice below. All the while, everyone on the bus was cheering, and I turned around, ripped off my shirt and flexed my bulging muscles. Then, free sex tour guide came running out and threw her arms around me.

Well…ok, so that didn’t happen, my eyes were closed and I was daydreaming as we headed back to Chengdu…but it sure would have been damn cool!

The first and last temple we would see on this fantastic adventure