TRASH MEMORY

Shan Wan in Nanjing

I’m part of a new trend.

Li’s “meet and split” idea has proved so attractive because it is an “all fun, no obligation” arrangement.

Thousands of young Chinese have joined online shan wan forums.

Shan wan groups are usually made up of two to six people, called shan you. They go Dutch on their outings, which pack in activities like sightseeing, eating, singing karaoke and shopping. The ‘players’ do not need to reveal their real names if they choose not to. And since they are meeting each other in a third city, their privacy is protected.

Some say they find the prospect of spending a day with strangers exciting — liberating even, because they can let their hair down.

I had a premonition of meeting Kong Shao Han – “Alex” – or someone like him an hour before. It was one of those unaccounted for moments at the start of a short journey to a new city, where you know no one. My first stop on my evening walk was the DVD shop – part of my lightning Nanjing history lesson would be the film about the massacre here by the Japanese, Nanjing Nanjing, and the woman at the shop convinced me to get the Founding of the Republic too. And it came to me as I left: the time I had spent at the stupid DVD shop had determined the rest of my night, and it seemed more important than any other thing that had led me there – the timing of leaving my room, or the time it took at the front desk to sort out my payment and visa. Because the DVD shop was not expected, and it was really a distraction from the city I was trying to see. But the exact number of minutes I spent there would at a certain moment put me in a spot of significance. Similarly, if I had left at another point, if I had never gone into the DVD shop, if I weren’t even in Nanjing, all of those variations would also have led to an intersection of coincidences that would change my life – if not soon, later. I was sure of that if I thought about it, but I couldn’t. It was too mind boggling to have to consider – much less choose between – a menu of “fated” occurracnes. I believe in fate only to the extent that I believe in coincidences and belief – the belief that we don’t control everything we think we do, the recognition that there are two many other things out there to worry about; fate ultimately tells us to just, well, forget it. Fate. Forget what was and what you think will be and let what will happen happen.

(Forgetting is one of those things this country has to be pretty good at, I realize, thanks to all the cranes and chai and the nauseating spin forward.)

Shao Han was a revelation. A guy my age working for Philips walking past me and asking something – I forget what, but nothing prying or annoying or persistent. He was reading Memoirs of a Geisha and for the third time. He was wiry, even frail, even petite, and wore a t-shirt with an image of a cute sheep on it, with the words “little sheep” emblazoned on it in a strange orientation, the kind of shirt that girls and I also might wear. He loved his mother but spoke little of his father, who was a professor of literature and yes, a descendent of the original Kong (the great philosopher). He too had studied literature but had reconciled himself, in the way many Chinese people do, to a career as a business person, vaguely speaking. A consultant, translator, writer, I’m not precisely sure what he did for the company but it involved reaching out to retailers in China, connecting with them. Clearly he was a good connector – the way he insinuated himself into my walk was guileless and unthreatening – but the notion that someone as irrepressibly curious and sympathetic and thoughtful has he could be doiong some kind of marketing work seemed like a smal tragedy. He might not have been here at all, he said, if not for his college teacher from Australia, who encouraged him out of his shell, told him he had every right to speak up in spite of a system – passed down from his great ancestor – that preached docile adherance to tradition, to the instruction of teachers, to a self-effacing academics of what mostly amounted to brain-numbing note-takings.

For instance, he proudly recounted the time, after a meeting with his boss and a rude colleague from South Korea, how he told the South Korean man that he had single-handedly ruined Alex’s impression of the county and its people. Later his boss asked him to next time maybe not be so abrasive.

I thought maybe he was talking about a hypothetical situation, but he confirmed that, no, it happened.

Another time, when he was near the end of high school, a teacher spotted him reading a kind of samizdat novel by a young underground writer, Han Han. The novel was titled “The Three Doors,” which referred to school, parents and the government. He was eventually reprimanded by the school’s principal, a supposedly enlightened woman who called Alex’s father in for a meeting. How dare you let him read something like this, this unhealthy garbage, she scolded the father, who may have smirked but eventually sat there taking it, staring forward, this professor of literature being lectured on the evils of a book by this starchy character type of Chinese education.

The joke of course was that Han Han – who is now a famous blogger and, in the vein of a number of wealthy young people (albeit often sons of wealthy people), is now a race car driver – was precisely right, and in classic China style, the principal’s excoriation was only proving it.

We talked about a lot, and with no boundaries — about his disgust with Japanese people (he was from Qingdao and he seemed to have no strong connection to Nanjing, but still), about his hero Chen Lulu (“the Chinese Oprah”) and his fatigue with CCTV, about his interest in comics and especially in the Twilight series, about how he had been let down by a system in which very basic attempts to learn and ask questions were met with denial, or at least “Page not found“‘s.

Once when a site he was trying to use to study English was blocked by the Great Firewall, he got so mad that he picked up the phone and called the local police station to ask why. How old are you, the police officer asked him. You don’t understand. This is for your own good, and for the strength and health of the motherland.

The stare in his eyes and the sound in his voice still had echoed a significant defeat.

Do you have a positive outlook, he asked me. It seemed that I was supposed to ask him that question. Do you believe in fate, he said. I hesitated, but then said no. I asked him.

He had a girlfriend, he said, when he was in college. His only girlfriend. They met on the internet and grew their friendship there, true wang you, internet friends (love that word). When she suggested she leave Shijiazhuang, her hometown near Beijing, to come visit him in Qingdao, where he was studying at the Ocean University. That made him nervous, so he suggested he come visit her. She let him know the next time her parents would be away. But that too made him nervous — was it right for a boy and a girl to be alone in her house for a weekend? He really wasn’t sure. But he went, and things developed. They continued talking online, but fell distant. He tried to rebuild their connection, but she only grew more despondent. Then, near graduation, he learned that she had gotten married. The groom was the son of a government official, who drove a nice car. Shao was heartbroken, depressed.

To Shao’s surprise, she got back in touch with him a year later. The marriage was terrible, and she needed someone to talk to. Their friendship was slowly being repaired. And then one day, he received a note in the mail. It was from the girl’s mother, and it said simply,

Forget it

Shao repeated that sadly, almost like an entreaty.

He seemed to take those words as a reminder of how little control he had over his world. But it was equally a symbol to him of the only way he and so many other bright people in China could survive: to accept the limit of the individual’s domain, and to do what he could to make himself and hopefully others happy.

He was somewhat happy, he said. The girl was getting happier too, he reported. She had recently been divorced.

I had to go and do write some stupid article. We said goodbye, we said we’d see each other the next day. He wanted to cook me lunch, go shopping for vegetables at his local market. The next day I was meant to leave, and had no time. I was admittedly also a bit uncomfortable about meeting again; I enjoyed our talk so much but worried that the next time would be different. But I would have gone had I had more time.

The next day I thought of him when I went to the Nanjing massacre memorial museum. It is really a breathtaking place. Probably the finest historical monument I’ve seen in China (that’s not saying much, but it’s really great), to one of the country’s worst tragedies (and there are many many of them). I only got a few photographs before a security guard told me photographs are not allowed. Could it be because the directors are worried visitors will depend upon flash memories rather than their real memories? The message of the museum is captured in its domain name

www.neverforget.com.cn

I emailed Alex but I didn’t hear back surprisingly. Still haven’t. I wonder if he was heartbroken. I also wonder if, just as I imagined I would meet Alex, the way I dreamt I was fated to meet him, if maybe he wasn’t just my imagination.

What word I am thinking of

Trying desperately to remember a word, a simple word, especially, and especially one that is everywhere evident around you — that once involved sheer thinking, like the kind you used to break out of an underwater safe. The Internet changes things. I couldn’t remember the word ‘terror’ somehow, so I turned to Google. It is a very appreciated site, but how really terrifying is the center of the Google universe: not the tender chicken picata served alongside wilted escarole, salad with kohlrabi, radish, lemon, and Parmesan that is probably the favorite dish of many an engineers in California, nor the small Cambodian women who transcribe the Internet, but the unliteral thing at the very literal center: the blank box. I stared for a minute before trying some approximations of the word I could not remember. “Drab, serious, frightening, cantankerous”, “would kill you but …”, “aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrr mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.” Finally, I landed on just the proper name I needed to backwards engineer the word from a vague mental library of academic trivia. I typed it, and at the bottom of the page, was this:

La-Z-Boy story puts Proctor on the world media’s map‎ -

14 hours ago
Proctor Deputy Police Chief Troy Foucault was supposed to be off work Thursday. … Foucault said he fielded at least 30 phone calls, including from …Duluth News Tribune (registration) - 608 related articles »

A fantastic story, which in 300 words or so manages to proffer salvation for places seeking the recognition they deserve, police officers and even the dying phenomenon of the local American newspaper.

Then again, I can’t open the Duluth News Tribune to search for the word I’m thinking of.

(The word was actually not ‘terror’ after all, but ‘tyranny.’ I can’t remember why I was trying to think of it.)

Stupid idea about the future (chatblogmailsearchessay)

It occurred to me tonight while I was speaking to someone who was occasionally staring into their phone, pressing the buttons hard as I spoke, presumably transcribing my amazing idea about the future to someone else, or maybe actually sending an email that I inspired with the word “vertical,” that someday, given the way artificial intelligence is going, we’ll all have one window in which to type everything.

The computer (presumably, of course, google) will be in charge of figuring out where it should go (email, tweet, blog, chat, search, essay). It’s like a reverse news filter. You speak andwhatever you say goes in the appropriate direction.

Maybe we’ll even have a pen, and whatever we write anywhere will do that. We’ll all have to relearn handwriting, except instead of following the instructions of our third grade homeroom teacher, we’ll need to go by google’s rules. (The l has to start at the top, not the bottom!!)

There’ll be more writing on bathroom walls again.

Because really, who wants to have to think about WHERE to write your thoughts. Just for WHOM and WHAT.

And yet, what if the system malfunctions? What if instead of going into a private email to one person your message about last night or your big pet store business idea or your illicit love letter or secret plot hits twitter or whatever? Entire relationships, economies, shipping fleets, are ruined with the stroke of a laser pen.