We should have a word in English for the feeling you have the morning after you stay up late watching Goldfinger on ill-gotten DVD in your apartment in subtropical China while a Tibetan scirocco blows in through the bug screen and you shower and dress in 15 minutes despite which your wife says you look handsome even though you’ve been wearing the same 3 pairs of pants and 5 shirts and 3 pairs of shoes for two months and you rush to the bus where you plug into your iPod shuffle which you’ve programmed to select 20 songs completely at random from your 10,000 song library and you hear a heavy/bluesy live Led Zeppelin song about fornication and then Lauryn Hill unplugged and then the Beatles’ “For No One” while you pass motorcycle taxis and old women with rickshaws as you descend into the dusty yellow suburbs in the dusty yellow sunshine and then you hear some perfectly anonymous techno song which makes you feel like you’re living the soundtrack to a really surprising Wes Anderson movie and the last song you hear as you pass through the center of the town whose name in English means Apricot Groves but which lost its actual apricot groves 10 years ago to uniformly awful apartment blocks and light electronics factories and shoe factories and metal recyclers and walk-in clinics and plumbing supply stores and international schools is none other than Monty Norman’s “James Bond Theme’ so you realize that your life is better than all but one of Wes Andersen’s movies. We need a word for that feeling. How about liquacious? Salugrious? Help me out here.

The day gets even better when a Chinese colleague asks you to define “sub” and you say it’s a kind of sandwich which is the first thing you think of and she looks at you crosseyed and you say it can also mean substitute teacher and she says that makes more sense and you say it can also mean a boat that goes underwater.

Life is slow and frustrating in Xiamen lately. Warm and dusty. I’ve about had it with nothing working right, shoddy design, and everyone basically being OK with those things. I’m also really missing autumn, my favorite season. There is no autumn here. The weather is cooling but still low 80s (mid to upper 20s C), and humid. And yet, still dusty. Everything is coated with a thick layer of fine dust. In the countryside, the dust is from the mountains and fields, which are drying from the wet season. In the city, the dust is from the construction.

Construction is really out of control. We picked our neighborhood in part because it had many single-family houses, we figured we were immune from more construction. Boy we could not have been more wrong. Every other house is being renovated, which in China means “all but demolished and then completely rebuilt.” But the really fun part is the degree of care and professionalism being invested in this construction.

For example:

There’s a switchback west of our apartment where the road climbs the hill behind us (to the south). On this switchback someone is shoe-horning a new house. The construction site is perhaps 30 m long (east to west) and 15 m wide (north to south), with an elevation change of up to maybe 10 m. Previously there was a stone retaining wall on the downslope (south) side of the switchback. The construction company literally removed this retaining wall and excavated the space inside the switchback. So now there’s an open pit inside the switchback, level with the downslope side, with a 10 m unretained loadbearing dirt wall directly under the road on the upslope side.

It gets better: To the east is the building immediately next to us. It has a two-story side-wing with no foundation, built directly against the slope to the south and west. So this pit also has an unretained loadbearing dirt wall for a six story apartment building. They did this excavation in literally two days. I’m not an engineer and I don’t know bupkiss about construction but even I can see this is a spectacularly bad idea. Maybe the dirt coheres when it’s dry (doubtful), but God help us if it rains. Oh wait, yeah, it’s typhoon season. Holy crap. The hasty nature of all this construction suggests the sort of bender a gambler takes on his last $1000, when he knows he won’t stay in another hand. “Let it ride!”

I heard that Fujian province is renowned for its shoddy construction and I hope for the safety of the Chinese people this is true. I hope that elsewhere in the country they wouldn’t remove a cliffside retaining wall which bears weight for both a road and an apartment building.

• “The Hero,” Queen
• “Baja,” The Astronauts
• “Thoroughfare Gap,” CSNY
• “Back in Black,” AC/DC
• “Kill Your Television,” Ned’s Atomic Dustbin
• “Roadrunner,” Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers
• “Immigrant Song,” Led Zeppelin
• “History Lesson,” Minutemen
• “Dead Heart,” Midnight Oil
• “Fox on the Run,” Sweet
• “In a Big Country,” Big Country
• “Common People,” Pulp
• “Baba O’Reily,” The Who

OK, so maybe “cry” is a strong word, but power chords definitely make me teary. So do bagpipes. I think this has something to do with being white.

We’ve been back in Xiamen for a week now. This set me to thinking about my own peculiar notions of what constitutes “home.”

First (and this is kind of obvious), we went away on a vacation, and while we were on vacation, we were thinking and talking about “back home,” meaning Xiamen.

The second thing is a little harder to pin down. It occurred to me while I was talking to Peter, a British expat, at the bar on Friday night. He’s from Manchester and proudly so. He’s the kind of person who, when talking about where he comes from, lights up. His whole demeanor kind of rose when speaking about Manchester. Simultaneously, he has a kind of adventurous attitude about Xiamen. I said something like “I think that knowing where you come from makes it easier to move somewhere else.” I know that, no matter where I live, or how long I live there, I will always be an American. Specifically, a Western American, with frontier notions of individuality, anti-snobbery, and self-sufficiency. I could live the rest of my life in China and those parts of my personality will never disappear.

Third, I have always kind of carried a homelike mental space around with me. Maybe I get this from my parents. For example, when I was a kid and we’d take vacations, my parents were in the habit of calling whatever hotel we were staying at “home.” So we’d be out looking at museums or waterfalls or whatever, and when we started to get tired, Mom would say “are you ready to go home?” which we understood to mean “the hotel.” I took this attitude with me in the two years before I started graduate school, when I was doing archaeology and living out of a backpack.

Which is all a roundabout way of saying I simultaneously have many “homes,” and I love them differently.

So maybe it’s like this:

I come from Nebraska, but I haven’t lived there for 11 years. I love Nebraska the same way I love my parents. I don’t live with my parents any more, and I wouldn’t want to again, but I always feel at home when I’m visiting them. Furthermore, if something happened that I couldn’t ever return to Nebraska, that would excise a major piece of my identity. I would be really sad, but I don’t know that it would destroy me emotionally.

I also come from Oregon, but it’s not the land of my birth. I chose to be from Oregon. I love Oregon the way I love my wife. In the long view, I cannot imagine ever not living in Oregon. Being separated from Oregon generates a kind of romantic longing for me. If I never returned to Oregon, it wouldn’t shred my self-identity (as with Nebraska), but it would exact a really heavy emotional price.

In Singapore and Malaysia we found ourselves saying we are “from Xiamen.” No one took this to mean anything other than what it was: Xiamen is where we are living, but not where we’re from. I love Xiamen the way I love a really great co-worker, or maybe a friend I’ve had for a few months. It’s a relationship with potential, but I don’t have a lot of myself invested there.

p.s. I bought a bike today for about 1800元 (US$220). It’s a Giant mountain bike, with what would be bottom shelf components in the U.S. Still, I reckon this bike would cost around $300 or more in the States. I rode about two hours today and covered a lot of ground. I saw about 3 new neighborhoods. I really regret not buying a bike sooner.

Jenny’s dad was in town for the weekend. He arrived about two hours after we got in from Singapore, so we just waited at the airport for him. His visit gave us a good excuse to visit Gulangyu island, for which we were woefully unprepared. We had no idea where to go or what to do, other than a vague knowledge that there was some kind of aquarium on the island. Which there was. We visited the aquarium and...I know I shouldn’t compare aquaria in the first and second worlds, but until I saw the Xiamen aquarium I had always rated aquaria as among My Favorite Places. But then, the Shed Aquarium and Monterey Bay Aquarium have pretty much spoiled all other aquaria for me.

Actually, if they had dispensed with the sea lion and dolphin show, and exceedingly sad penguins, it would have been pretty nice. It had a walkthrough aquarium with an acrylic tunnel, which was downright capacious. but some of the fish literally had no room to turn around.

We did find a slightly fantastic junk/antique shop on the island. It felt a little bit like a set from a theoretical David Lynch/Kar Wai Wong movie. When I rustle up a few hundred 元 I think I might buy me some Chinese antiques.