Actors' Resumes at the Shanghai Consulate

August 17th.

I have 278 RMB in my wallet, the equivalent of about $80. It goes a long way here. At a roadside vendor, I can buy a kebab for about 9 RMB. Bottled water costs 2. Bottled water is a must because you can't drink from the tap without boiling it first. It's just not sanitary.

The 278 is my ticket home. That, plus the 65 refund the hostel will give me for forfeiting my last night here, will get me a taxi to Shanghai Pudong International Airport, the same hub I landed in on August 7^th, the same place where I walked out of the terminal with high hopes for a new start in a new country, the same place where I spent two hours sweating and pacing waiting for the person that was supposed to meet me at the gate. The same place where I almost had to call home and say I had made a huge mistake. It didn't happen then. I found the little man holding my name sign after 33 hours of travel time, no sleep, lots of adrenaline, and not much food. The moment I found Kevin (his English name), I felt a wave of sweet relief. I wouldn't feel another wave like that until today.

And now it's August 20^th. I've traveled over 16,000 miles in the past three weeks, lived in two apartments, one hotel, and a hostel. I've been offered massages five times, groped once and hit in the nuts. I ran out on/quit/turned down a job, accidentally bought beer thinking it was soda, almost accidentally bought beer thinking it was water. I was able to understand Chinese many times, most notably an incident where the cashier at the store said “ta tingbudon” or “he doesn't understand.” I rode on the back of an E-bike across Ningbo to catch a bus to Shanghai. I nearly vomited on the bus to Shanghai because someone was eating something that smelled like ripe diarrhea. And then I saw the city and met the people and fell in love, all at the end. I found the right place just as I was leaving it.

So now to your question: What went wrong?

Don't get bad ideas about China from me. I love it there. But the people I met on the job were a confederacy of not-like-minded individuals who were a bit cowed and also willing to hire a complete criminal nut even after I told them about him. Looking back, I should have issued an ultimatum – You can hire him or me. But also looking back, I didn't know that any of this was going to happen and as much as I'd like to say I'm quick on the draw and can make good solid decisions in the midst of wrenching weird circumstances, I can honestly say there came a point where it was all too much. It was just too much.

The initial moment I realized this was when I was sitting in the first apartment and the conversation with Steve went from iffy to, “Courts are black magic.” When you realize that one of the only people you have to speak English with is insane while you yourself are going a little nuts as well after lack of contact for a week, it feels like falling, a sucking funneling hole in your chest that culminates in the flight response and the unrelenting thought: I have to get out.

But then there's nowhere to go.

So family and friends advised me to call the consulate. The consulate advised me to get out and head to Shanghai. At 1:20 PM on Thursday, I was walking across the plaza to work. At 1:22 PM on Thursday, I turned around and walked back into my apartment. At 1:30 PM, I walked out with everything I had packed in a suitcase and backpack. By 2 PM, I was at the Ningbo East Bus Station, which was the wrong bus station. A group of men yelled in my direction for a good ten or fifteen seconds before I realized they wanted to know where I was headed. I pulled up Google Translate on my iPhone, incurring about $10,000 for every bit of international data consumed, and showed them that I wanted the bus from Ningbo to Shanghai. The bus station was across the city and one of the men offered me a ride on his E-bike for 50 RMB. It wasn't much money but I would have paid anything to get out of there. The entire time I had this worry someone would stop me, that something would happen to keep me in that city. It was a good city; it's a good city. But for me it was prison.

I was on the bus with my Chinese cell and my iPhone trying to call hotels from a list that the consulate had given me. I was frazzled, overtired, overheated, and completely baffled about what country and city codes I needed to dial before each number. The only place I could reach was Mingtown Hiker Hostel. I made a reservation for three nights since the consulate said that it could take up to a week to get me back to the United States. I had hardly any money and no place to go but I did have enough to stay at the hostel. It turned out to be a wonderful place, like the universe's apology at the end - “Sorry you had a shit time of it. Here's a little consolation and a sign that you can find much better people and a much better situation next time.”

It wasn't heaven. Staying at the hostel would have presented its own type of loneliness, namely seeing all the nice people you meet come and go while you are stuck. It was more like a pleasant purgatory.

And now it's August 23^rd. There's been some time wonkiness. These dates are skipping across boundaries but for part of the world, it's August 23^rd.

I had run from my apartment to the Ningbo East Bus Station by taxi, from the bus station to the Ningbo to Shanghai bus stop by E-bike, up the coast three hours to Shanghai by bus, and straight through downtown at night by taxi again arriving at the hostel around 7:30 PM. I started my escape at 1:30 PM, not a bad jaunt for someone who doesn't speak the language. For a while I was worried that the bus was actually going to Hangzhou. It would have been a little more than disheartening to end up in the wrong city at that point.

At 1:22 PM I was going up the elevator to the office to go to work. If I had stuck it out for another sixty seconds, this story would have turned out differently. If I had run into someone in the lobby either time, someone that I worked with, this would have turned out differently. If I had connected on some meaningful level, as a person, with anyone in that office during those two weeks, this would have turned out differently. As it was, at that moment, pushing the 1^st floor button felt liberating. Walking out of my apartment with everything in hand felt like a prison break. Having the taxi driver understand my directions made me feel capable, and having a group of non-English-speaking Ningbo natives arrange an E-bike ride to whisk me across town to the bus station felt just damn angelic.

Going into Shanghai, I expected another cookie-cutter, imposing and dingy city. And it wasn't. There's something to be said for expectations. Most of the people I knew in high school and university are married and have children. We're all in our late twenties and thirties, a time when there's usually less room for risk. You're early in a marriage with a baby. You've got a serious job and the term “putting down roots” has significance. It's taken me until now to realize that's what most people plan all along. They plan marriage and family based on what they've seen as kids and teenagers and what they want as adults. It's pretty simple and I missed it. I never planned like that. Why am I mentioning this?

Drive into a Chinese city and you see quick, ambitious plans. You see ten of the same apartment building going up at once with ten adjoining cranes. You see skyscrapers built in record time. You see farmland jutting against commercial plazas. You see people farming ten feet away from backhoes that are digging up their crops. Incredible ambition paired with quick planning for a fast build. So much is a facade. My second apartment, which looked like the Ritz, was stunning and slapshod. The building was barely two years old and there were already repairs going on in the lobby. It's like that all over the country. It's as if the nation woke up one day and realized it could just develop develop develop. So it is developing recklessly.

Two years ago I was in so much pain that I was miserable. And then one day I wasn't. It had been chronic for years and then I was free. So I got ambitious. Quick plans, new horizons, just go go go. Develop. In 2010, left the girl I loved because we no longer shared the same dark cloud. Even years later I despise her for her anger because I shared it. It walked hand-in-hand with my misery. We lived in little apartments in little towns like Nacogdoches and Georgetown and Bryan and cast great big shadows with our little hearts everywhere we went. This went on for years after I graduated from Stephen F. Austin in 2007. And it's not like we were horrible people, more like whimsical downers, your jaded hipster friends.

Then the pain disappeared and I wasn't miserable anymore and I felt like I could do anything. So I moved out. I moved to Austin. Everything became very comfortable. Scary comfortable. Like “is this all there is to life?” comfortable. I got antsy and moved to China, a place where BMWs follow you on the sidewalk, people lie to you with impunity because it's a cultural imperative to save face, a place where no one know what the hell Texas is, a place that the entire United States thinks is communist but is actually a burgeoning capitalist bureaucracy with full-on corruption at every level and police officers that are afraid to run intersections because nobody stops for them. It's a place where women carry parasols and wear masks to stay pure and white, a place where there are provinces bigger than most of the world's nations that most of the planet has never heard of. Karaoke bars have prostitutes. All the drinkable water is bottled and the cities go on forever. It's a place that lays claim to the world's longest traffic jam, hundreds of miles and it lasted eleven days. It's a place that actively tried to destroy its own culture and is now trying to adopt ours.

Going there was my way of leaving everything behind, of clearing the ground. I remember sitting in front of The Highball cocktail bar in Austin just a few days before I left that city, looking out over everything wondering what that place would be like when I return. And when you look longingly at a city, you always look at the lights. You always do it at night. You do it alone when it's quiet. That's the easiest way to take a mental picture. I did it in Ireland sitting on a fence. I did it in Austin sitting on a sidewalk. I did it in Shanghai riding in a cab. I'm addicted to running and going. So in that respect, it's no surprise I pushed the button in that elevator in the office building in Ningbo. It's no surprise I felt like the freest man in the world zipping through the city on the back of an E-bike in my ridiculously orange shirt and shorts, like a glaring foreigner flag in the middle of a city full of people with a lot less choice and much less mobility. It was a familiar easy feeling: going.

I'm saying this because I know a lot of people have this dream, this urge, this need to get out and go. I hope everyone reading this has some notion to go and explore and maybe you'll do it smarter than I did, taking someone along, saving more money, but not hesitating to dive deep. That wasn't a mistake. Going wasn't a mistake. And now I will tell you where I made mistakes. Then I'll describe the last night.

Mistake #1

Leaving my sense of humor behind. That sense of whimsy, that sense of goofiness, that sense of ridiculousness that I think has followed me like a good old fashioned companion my entire life disappeared somewhere between my two-hour wait for Kevin at the airport and the moment I realized I didn't connect with any of the English speakers in my crowded little city. Somewhere in there I lost the ability to just sit down and laugh about nothing and part of that was because I didn't have someone there to remind me.

(Possible) Mistake #2

Leaving days too soon. I was sitting at the consulate in a room full of patriotic blue-and-red chairs with pictures of the President, VP, and Secretary of State looking down on me, and I met a woman who was also from Texas. She lives in Hong Kong and hasn't been back to the States for seven years. I also served as a witness for a couple getting their joint trust double-stamped. The consulate offered the way out: a plane ticket. And I have a regret. I regret not staying long enough to go completely broke, beating down every door looking for a job even though I was on a tourist visa, milking the international travelers at the hostel for information on how and where and when to go. Maybe I would have only had a few days but I could have done so much in those few days. But I was losing it. I was lost. I was getting more comfortable at the hostel. But it was like one big party staying there. I met a lot of people, and I made a lot of fly-by-night fun friends: Thomas from Austria, Sanesha from Iran, Kathryn from China, Emily from Ontario, Phoebe from the UK, Ricky from San Francisco. Even the other two Iranians that didn't speak English bought me a drink and tried to match me up with Kathryn who had been staying at the hostel for a month while searching for an apartment. I read stories of people staying at those places for six months at a time. I even think when I go back, that would be my first stop.

The phone call with my contact at the consulate went like this: “This is a last resort.” In Ningbo, this didn't faze me. In Shanghai, all the “Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure?” questions finally started to break my armor. Walking down Nanjing Road between Gucci and Zales and Starbucks and the Hyatt, sitting in a London-themed pub in the French quarter across from the U.S. Embassy looking at the Chinese guards with their automatic rifles, I thought to myself, “If they ask me one more time, I'm going to relent.” They asked one more time, “Are you sure?” And I didn't relent. The scales were so even and I have to say the overwhelming sense of everything, the day-to-day survival, the feeling of loss and disconnection still had to weigh on me with herculean force against the excited sense of simply living in the midst of all that energy and absurdity. It was a good time that opened up my life's possibility and potential like a brand new horizon. Give me a few more days, few more weeks to process everything, but this one thought has already come through on the post-landing ticker: I can survive on my own in a place where I understand almost nothing.

Mistake #3 (and then I'll tell you the ending, I promise)

Not giving myself a place, finding my place.

I didn't bring a book to the consulate. And their reading material was scant, let me tell you. There was only one piece that even resembled a magazine: Actors' Resumes. I thought it was a book of resumes by famous actors. It's actually a how-to manual for aspiring actors written in 1994. Confused about how to properly format your resume when searching for acting gigs? The book was in pristine condition. Guess there aren't a lot of aspiring actors doing their business on the 8^th floor of the 1300 block on W. Nanjing Road.

Funny thing is, I wasn't the only person that day who picked it up. I realized that's what people do in the American Services Center waiting room in Shanghai. They sit and wait and pick up that book and set it back down. It's not an odd duck; it's a wrong duck. Why is it there? Who put it there? Apparently everyone working in the consulate refuses to replace it or throw it away. They probably just don't know what to do with it. But it's still there and probably will be for years. Unless someone deliberately goes all the way to the bargain basement bottom of their priority list and replaces it, Actors' Resumes will always be at the Shanghai consulate.

I was something of a novelty in the hostel. When walking back to the pool table to check how Thomas and Sanesha were getting on, Thomas said, “Hey, we were just talking about you.” And of course I asked why. His response, paraphrased, was along the lines of, “We didn't expect someone from Texas to be like you or to treat Iranians so nicely.” And only this morning while writing this at 4:30 AM while my body tries to decide what side of the world it's on, do I realize that doesn't happen. You don't meet a Texan at the Mingtown Hiker Hostel in Shanghai. I guess when you do, they're not what you expect. Going to China I could have been whoever I wanted, could have started the process of reinvention or whatever romantic thing you can imagine but to actually be yourself, to maintain identity in a place full of so many characters and so much Other, is a feat. Not to reinvent, not to replace, but to find your place even when it all seems weird. I thought it was hard enough to find myself when everything was normal.

So, the last night.

I enjoyed myself. It went something like this.

Ordered a “Canadian Beef” hamburger at the hostel. Still not sure what the beef actually was. It looked like beef strips laid out like bacon but I'm still not entirely sure what I put in my mouth there. Was listening to a blowhard at the booth behind me give a couple the entire rundown on how the country works and what you should expect and watch out for and what's good and what's bad in Shanghai. It was like listening to an “Oh, look at all this stuff I know” speech rather than someone giving actual advice. After eating, it took me about two minutes to get fed up with that. So I asked the curly-haired guy at the next table if he wanted to play pool. That's how I met Sanesha.

We shot pool and talked world politics. He's convinced the US will attack Iran. I told him it's possible but that the American people are still pretty sick of war. Sanesha had come to Shanghai with his partners to buy construction equipment. They left him alone in the hostel to go do some business and he wasn't too happy about that. But when they came back it was a grand old time. They bought me a drink and tried to pair me up with Kathryn. Then his partners left again to go get massages. There was a foot massage place about fifty yards down the road.

Then I met the Austrians. I only caught one name: Thomas. And the Chinese guy sitting at the booth with us thought they said “Australians.” So he went into a whole spiel about how he had taken a vacation to Australia last year, which prompted Thomas: “No, we're from Austria. Not Australia. Fuck kangaroos.” I also asked the cookie-cutter question: “What are you doing here?” “We are drinking. We are professional beer drinkers.” I shouldn't have been surprised when I excused myself to go buy a drink and they just offered me one of theirs. Thanks, Austria.

When I told Thomas I was from Texas, he immediately wanted a steak. I said that I'd go home and bring one back. We got on really well and then that thing happened. There was a girl sitting at the booth directly in front of us pretending to read a book and looking bored. There was a guy sitting opposite her also looking riddled with ennui. They turned out to both be from Britain. The girl was Phoebe and I forget the guy's name but they didn't know each other. So, introductions all around. Austrians, Brits, Iranians, throw in Kathryn, and then Ricky from San Fran who was several hours into flirting with Emily from Ontario. There's your crowd.

We alternated playing pool in teams and sitting and joking. The one Chinese guy in the place, whose name I didn't think to ask, kept asking me, “You like snook? You like snook?” He meant pool. He was a funny guy, kept smiling. Emily, who had a boyfriend, laughed at Ricky's most awful jokes. Clearly she was into him. When I sat down next to her I got the side-groping treatment though, so I don't think Emily was being too particular. I think it was her fun night away from the boyfriend. Phoebe became enamored with the other Austrian. Kathryn kept trying to get Phoebe and Emily to go to “a Chinese bar.” It was fun all around.

And people kept buying me drinks.

It was my last night. I hadn't had a loose or fun or relaxing anything since landing in the country. So when Ricky mentioned going downtown to get tacos, I thought sure. Why not tag along? What Ricky didn't mention was that the place with the tacos was an expat superclub way downtown and that it would be packed.

He also didn't mention that he planned to get completely and utterly fall down drunk by 2 AM.

After almost two weeks of going and planning and sweating and walking and nail-biting and freaking out, I got out of a cab into a sea of white faces which was shocking, and walked into a two-tiered club complete with a balcony and upstairs dance floor. Emily and I both went through minor reverse culture shock. We didn't know what to do when surrounded by all these not-Chinese people. But then we did what you do at clubs: we danced. Ricky wasn't so much of a dancer. But I also didn't know that he was seriously into Emily. By the end of the night he was spinning “I love you” full well knowing she had a boyfriend.

The good thing is, whenever I wanted to escape their flirting and banter, I could just wait until the bar played “Tequila” at which point the bar girls would pour free tequila right into your mouth. So, you know, more free booze. Emily said the tacos were good, not great. But of course, she was still pretty sober. It reminds me of something I read once regarding one person's opinion of Taco Bell food: “If you ain't wasted, you can't taste it.”

So there we were, sitting outside after dancing and dancing and dancing. There was a French girl eyeballing me. Ten feet behind her was a Chinese guy making tacos. And sitting next to us, Emily was saying things to Ricky like, “I think I gave you the wrong idea.” It was really just your typical bar night. By about 3 AM, Ricky was droopy-eyed fall down drunk and every time I told Emily we should take him home, she'd say, “After this song?” So we danced and danced and Ricky got droopier, not just his eyes but his whole body. Oh, and I danced on the bar with Emily at one point.

Somewhere in there we also spent about thirty minutes watching the rhythmic stylings of a Chinese little person. That guy was ripped and he could move. I think this is a thing worldwide. If you are a little guy and you can tear it up on the dance floor, you've got it made. Imagine a bar packed full of white people, two of which looked like Oompa Loompa twins from Bavaria, taking straight tequila from the bar girls and watching a short Chinese guy breakdance and that should give you an image of what the party hard expats do in Shanghai.

Eventually Emily and I had to carry Ricky to the taxi. Then we had to convince him to get in the taxi. That took a while. The cab driver was much more patient than he needed to be but then I noticed the ride back cost almost twice as much as the ride there. 3 AM must be prime time for cabbies.

The cab driver dropped us off an intersection too early. And I swear if that hadn't happened, I wouldn't have the weird image/memory of China that I have now. Let me explain.

Imagine the Van Gogh cafe scene. Now imagine the lights are off and one of the tables is sitting in the middle of the street. Now imagine there are about six guys, all Chinese of course, sitting around that table eating and drinking beer out of bottles. All are clothed but some have their shirts off. That's what was between us and the door to the hostel.

So Emily and I are walking with Ricky and just as we get to that table, another expat comes bounding around the corner behind us. He may have been in his early twenties, pretty young looking. And he's happy drunk. He doesn't know the guys at the table but he knows Ricky. So he says, “Hey, guy from San Fran! How's it going!” But he doesn't wait for a response. This happy-go-lucky kid walks over to the table, says something like “food” or “eats” and grabs a huge strip of meat from one of the guys' plates while they all stare at him. He proceeds to try to drop it into his mouth from up high like he's inhaling Fruit by the Foot and since he's drunk and looking straight up in the air, falls into the table and knocks over a bunch of beer.

Emily and I just turn around and start walking toward the hostel. Ricky lags behind. I'm sure Emily and I were thinking the same thing: “The guy just stole food and knocked over beer. I don't want to get in a fight.”

Then I hear it.

Not fists flying or people yelling or anything angry.

It's a squeak.

More like: SQUEAK. SQUEAK. SQUEAK. And it's close.

I look down, fully expecting to see a rat run across the road. That wouldn't surprise me. No, I look down and I see a mouse in the middle of the road with its guts hanging out, writhing in agony in a pool of its own blood. And even though I'm not drunk, I'm buzzed enough to blurt out, “Don't look down.” So of course Emily looks down. It's at this point we started running. We made it all the way into the hostel lobby and then realized Ricky was still out there.

I don't know how many minutes had passed but when we went back outside the crazy food-stealing expat was gone. The Chinese guys didn't look any worse for the wear and Ricky was peeing on the side of the building.

That burned in my mind. I wanted to stay in China but I didn't want to stay like that. I felt bad for the image people were giving of foreigners, for the way they were treating the locals, for basically everything from the taxi ride home. I could have stayed at the hostel a few more days maybe and refused to go out, or refused to go out and act like that. In the end, I suppose it's not a huge deal but now I understand the recent Chinese 100 day foreigner crackdown a little better.

And that's it. I slept maybe an hour, showered, caught a cab and rode down The Bund to the maglev station and rode that 300kph wondertrain to the airport.

Now I'm back in Texas.

A few last notes here. Nothing necessary but stuff you might want to know.

I began studying Japanese last year with the idea to teach in Japan. My friend Miya at the University of Leeds, who I helped with a few school projects – one involving a voiceover, and you can laugh imagining a Texan voiceover for a Chinese girl presenting a project for a group of Brits - told me that if I wanted to be reminded daily about the absurd nature of life, I should teach in China. So I took her advice and changed my mind about where to go. One of my Spanish students in Lockhart, Angel, recommended offhandedly that I should use LinkedIn to find more students. Instead I found my first contact that offered me a spot in China. I ended up spending almost two more months in East Texas than I had planned this summer, jobless and spending money, because that contact dithered and eventually just disappeared on me and left me to scramble to find another contact quickly. At that point I was committed. I had put in almost seven months preparing and I was eager to take the first decent place that offered. When that place failed to mention additional costs and then paired me with Crazy Steve and then tried to tack on even more costs for me not wanting to live with Crazy Steve and hired him to work with children, I knew it was time to go.

I did a week and a day of work in Ningbo. The kids were wonderful. It turns out that the teachers get to name new students. So there's a Lost-themed class and there's a Chinese kid somewhere out there named Land Rover. I learned some simple and effective methodology for teaching that I will apply. I was trained. I just never took on the classes myself, which wouldn't have been much of a problem. And yes, one of the kids did come up and flick me between the legs while I was standing on a chair. And one girl groped my arm hair.

One of the two teachers I shadowed sent me a consolation email. Here's a bit of it:

From what I've seen you'll be a great fun teacher.

I understand that you may want to delete this email and forget the whole troublesome experience you had in ningbo; I just wanted to let you know that I can tell from you as a person that you'll be a great teacher. I'm sorry we didn't have longer together.

And then when I got back to Texas I received this from the last student I prepped before I left Austin:

I just wanted to let you know that I passed my test with ease. Thank you for the help and support.

As of now, the school I worked with in Austin has offered me a spot on board again.

I guess that brings us to today. Simply put, the whole months-long plan and the extra time not working plus the apartments overseas and the whole not working there thing has left me broke. I have a great family and people helping me out but it's funny. This is the first time since I can remember that I'm basically sitting on nothing. It's scary, humbling, liberating, and a kick in the pride I needed. I spent a lot of time in Austin having fun and wondering if there was more to life than just having stuff and being able to afford overpriced drinks. Turns out there's a great deal more. It might roll into you like Loneliness and Awe riding blindfolded on a tandem bicycle but there are most certainly some horizons out there still ready to push back and open up new possibilities when life gets too comfortable.