• The Australian crawl
• The backstroke
• The Four-in-Hand
• The half-Windsor
• The non-necessity of training wheels
• If you’re bored, read a book
• Shake hands firmly and make eye contact
• It’s who you know not what you know
• Grill a steak less than 1 minute/inch on each side, on a very hot pan
• Build a fire from the bottom up, inside out
• Treat every gun like it’s loaded
• Chew with your mouth shut
• If you don’t know which utensil to use, look at what everyone else is doing
• “Righty tighty, lefty loosey”
• Hitting never solved anything
• That said, if a bully is picking on you, hit him first and hit him hard
• Your hick second cousins on the farm are worth millions but those kids at school with the fancy cars and plastic houses whose clothes you admire so much — their parents are bankrupt
• Your parents had interesting, fulfilling lives before you were even imagined
• Every human being has dignity and is worthy of respect
• It’s OK to ask questions
• Lots of questions don’t have answers
• Don’t ride the clutch

As I was typing this I thought, “if someone ever asks me to give a commencement address, I will know exactly what to say.”

Thanks to my fine Nebraska education (note: not ironic), I will always and forever know that Nebraska became the 37th state on March 1st, 1867.

We’re about two weeks away from Chinese New Year, which is the largest (by American standards, only) holiday in China. The upcoming year is Year of the Pig, which is my year (1971). Apparently, good things happen on “your year.”

Everything’s coming up Paul! I am gonna own Lunar Year 2007.

One of our neighbors has purchased a rooster. He was rising really early, like 5 am, but he’s getting lazy. I didn’t hear him until about 7 today. All the laowai in our building hope he’s for the New Year feast, because somehow a rooster is much more annoying at 5 am than construction noise.

A morning cock-call (heh heh, I said “cock”) is a sound from my childhood. My grandmother Souders (in Merna, Nebraska, population 400) had neighbors with chickens. So it’s actually kind of a comforting sound, especially as China does not appear to share any birds with North America. Bird calls, like the sound of freight trains in the distance, are the kind of noise that I never noticed until they were absent.

So there are two circumstances that must obtain before I get up the energy to post to the blog:

1. Boredom
2. An elevated sense of well-being

Funnily these things seldom coincide. My sense of well-being plunges with boredom. (This is why I don’t care for TV. It drains my energy yet does not relax me.) OTOH I am seldom bored in China. Daily life is still too interesting. And by “interesting” I mean “maddeningly frustrating.”

I’m writing this now because I can. The week between Christmas and New Year was a toxic combination of boredom and deflated ego. I felt completely defeated by China. I couldn’t stop looking backward at Oregon and America, and every daily interaction utterly enervated me. When I discovered axoplasm.com was on the blacklist that was pretty much the right hook that KO’d me.

I remember waking up early sometime around at that point, after a fitful night of poor sleep. I trussed up Bismarck for his morning walk and stepped out into the icy cold filthy dry pitch black morning. We made it about three blocks and I had one of the lowest feeling I’d had since we arrived. I don’t know why. Bismarck kept sniffing around the park, unable to eliminate because his timing was off. Something in me snapped, and I didn’t feel human. I can’t explain the feeling any more than that, I can’t find human words to describe the sensation.

The closest approximate feeling I’ve experienced was this one time when I was camping and high as a kite on psilocybin...I crawled out from under a bush, filthy with mud, and saw the Milky Way sprayed across a night sky aglow with stars. I had an indescribable sensation that I wasn’t lying on my back looking up but standing with my back to a wall looking out. Everything about my life as a human being felt hollow and false: why would an animal wear clothes, use tools, ride around in a car, sleep under a roof? I mean this all in a mind-expanding Kerouackian Buddhist kind of way.

Well about two weeks ago I had the same sensation, stone cold sober, but in reverse. The pollution, the unheated apartment, the shitty job, the allergies that just won’t quit already, the profound isolation from all the people and places I love, it all conspired to make me feel, I dunno, not human. OK here’s the profound revelation: human beings are tied to places. You are where you come from.

My soul is always a big empty place with clean skies and clear water you can drink with your bare hands. I will always be the smell of fresh cut grass and black earth and rain on pavement. China won’t beat that out of me, and I won’t ever shed it. I can’t shed where I come from like dead skin. I will always be the English language, shovelling snow, ice cold milk, barking dogs, beer with friends, baseball on the radio, freight trains in the distance. That stuff is who I am, sure as I’m five-foot-six.

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.