The Passage of Time, The Kingdom of China, The Art of the Web Log

I haven’t shared a proper life update since October. That was only a couple months after I built this website, when I was still settling into my new routines in China. Now it’s August and that school year has already ended; this week, the next school year starts. An outsider reading this blog only has access to my opinions at the very beginning and very end of my first year in China, and none of the development in the middle. I confess to feeling a little guilty about this, as though I’ve robbed my readers of some grand narrative. In fact, though, there is no grand narrative. If I had successfully churned out consistent entries on my everyday life, I would have run out of content quickly. My everyday life is not very interesting. Most days, I go to work and sit in the office. On the weekend, I go downtown. Before coming to China, I naïvely assumed that merely being foreign to my environment would render my life exciting enough to warrant some account of my travel, like a modern day Richard Francis Burton. After coming to China, I no longer feel that way, and in fact I am a little disillusioned with travel in general.

A few months back I screened a video on “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” for my students. I realized then that, by transitioning from my familiar world to an alien world, I had inadvertently initiated the hero’s journey. I even thought to myself, “for my next blog post, I should write about how my experiences in China reflect the hero’s journey!” It didn’t take long, though, for me to realize that wouldn’t make for an excellent post, because my experiences don’t reflect the hero’s journey. An adventure involves making discoveries, overcoming challenges, and earning rewards. I’ve hardly done any of that, and what’s more, I don’t think it was possible for me to do it in the first place. I navigated my arrival in China through a series of premade systems specifically designed to facilitate people like me. The trials involved in this journey had already been cleared long ago by those who came before me, and in the intervening time, China had been made more comfortable for foreigners. By the time I came along, travelling to China was nearly pointless, because there was so little it had to offer me that I couldn’t find elsewhere. It’s not an exotic, undiscovered culture, or an opportunity to sharpen myself against unique challenges. It wasn’t even a good place to study Chinese, as the system squeezes English into my life at every turn, for the sake of my “convenience.” No, China is just another place to work, and my being here feels no more special than my being in any given suburb in the US. Burton wandered into untamed wilderness; I wander into my apartment after a nine-hour shift.

After a long time away from my blog, there are three concerns in particular I’d like to address. First, I’d like to ruminate on my relationship with time, which is the greatest struggle I experience in my everyday life. Second, I’d like to elucidate on that “development” I described earlier, explaining how my feelings towards China and life as an American expatriate have changed. Finally, I’ll consider this website itself and how I feel about it now, including what I expect to do in the future. I admit that it’s a little bit silly. I don’t think many people are waiting with bated breath for the answer to all the questions I set out to answer here. But I’ve been mulling these questions in my mind for long enough that I feel compelled to verbalize my thoughts, such that I might understand them better. Let’s start from the beginning.

The Passage of Time

Why did I abandon this blog in the first place? It certainly wasn’t that I was “too busy.” I actually feel as though I’ve hardly done anything at all for the past year. To be fair, I did hold down a job. I showed up every day and fulfilled my obligations. But it’s not a very demanding job, and there’s no reason it should take up so much of my time that I can’t write. Further, it’s not as though I was using that time for anything else important. If you navigate to the office, you’ll see that all of the creative projects I uploaded in August are still there, but nothing new has been added. That doesn’t mean I’ve done stone nothing, but only a very small portion of my time goes towards avocational labor and hobbies - not nearly enough to account for all the time I spent not writing. As I said, even though I never capitalized on my time, I was still starkly aware that it was passing and that I should have used it to write. I never made the conscious choice to stop writing for my blog, but at each individual moment I made the choice to do something other than write, and as enough of those individual moments compounded, they slowly accumulated into a character of inactivity. So the question isn’t really “why did I stop writing the blog,” but “why am I so sensitive to inertia,” and this question extends to cover many more domains of my life.

I don’t recall precisely when I first realized how bad my relationship is with time. As early as primary school, I recognized that my productive output lagged far behind my aptitude, and I performed somewhat poorly in my classes despite exceptional scores on standardized tests. It’s easy to dismiss this situation. My parents would always claim that the school didn’t “challenge” me enough. A cynical outsider could justifiably argue I neglected my schoolwork because it just didn’t interest me. As I grew older, though, these explanations felt less and less plausible. In high school, I started my first long-term creative project, a script for a feature film named Gas Man. I learned that each page of a script averages to one minute of screentime, and understanding the typical movie was around two hours long, I figured that if I wrote at a rate of one page each day, I would finish the movie after 120 days. I think this is the first time I realized how far afoul my behavior runs of my motivation, because writing that movie took me an entire year. Distressingly, I never finished another feature length screenplay. In junior year, I wrote the pilot to a TV show. In college, I made four short films: two for class, and two electively. I also did a small amount of editing work for a feature film as part of an off-campus study program. Those few projects, and perhaps this website, represent the bulk of my creative output over the past ten years.

I sometimes wonder whether it’s even fair to call myself a creative. I abandoned the term “artist” long ago, for fear that it might speak to a prolificacy that I do not have. Most artistically inclined people I know feel a ceaseless compulsion to make new things, which translates into overflowing portfolios. In contrast, although I believe that I have compelling and important work inside of me, the process of extracting that work often feels so laborious as I must avoid it, even if I feel the theoretical product is so magnificent that I’m obligated to output it by some nebulous point in the future. I started using the term “creative” on the grounds that it feels more aspirational and, crucially, more avocational. Yes, I like to make art, but that is secondary to my true and less self-centered calling. There comes a point, though, that even “creative” is too generous a term. You cannot go around calling yourself that if you never create.

Creative work specifically suffers because, as there is no deadline, and no consequence for failure beyond feeling like a bit of a loser, it is always one of my lowest priorities. But other areas of life suffer as well, of course. You will recall that I had difficulty in school because I so rarely completed my assignments in a timely fashion. As an adult, I sometimes struggle with work responsibilities for the same reason. I’ve thrown together a few slapdash lesson plans over the past year. I don’t always take good care of my health, nor do I always pay attention to my hobbies. Even activities that are supposedly “fun” and carefree, like playing video games, grow stressful because they feel wasteful in light of the many important tasks I’m procrastinating, so I avoid them as well. The worst example of this, though, is domestic labor. Poor time management renders it nearly impossible to keep a living space clean and tidy, and if you’ve ever had the misfortune of dwelling in a depression nest, you know how toxic such an environment is to the soul.

I’ve wondered for my entire life why I struggle so tremendously to accommodate the passage of time, and therefore researched the topic quite extensively. I have within my brain a veritable encyclopedia of more and less useful terms that relate to inaction: laziness, apathy, lethargy, sloth, acedia, psychomotor retardation, abulia, avolition, anhedonia, akinesia, the umbrella term “Disorders of Diminished Motivation,” and many more that I can’t name off the top of my head. Some of these describe my situation well, and others don’t fit me at all. One element of my condition that seems not to present in most people with diminished motivation is that my problem is not with desire so much as initiation; that is to say, I very much want to engage in some tasks, but there is a disconnect in the part of me that wants to do something and the part that actually initiates it. I have no trouble setting goals and in fact do so quite proficiently, which serves to frustrate me further when my well-articulated goals don’t translate into well-executed action. The symptoms I’ve just described map very cleanly onto avolition, whereas the other terms I listed generally describe disinterest or fatigue. That said, avolition is also a somewhat troublesome diagnosis, because it is heavily associated with schizophrenia. If you’ve seen my short film Schizo, you’re aware that it’s not strange for a person with schizotypal personality disorder to struggle with the negative symptoms of schizophrenia without also experiencing the positive; however, I no longer believe I have STPD (and I find that film embarrassing), and I have had a doctor correct me when I described my condition as “avolition.”

I suspect some readers may feel it’s inappropriate to pathologize weak motivation. I’m certain my parents do - as a kid, they seemed to believe that I would finally clean up my act if they scolded and screamed enough. If this isn’t an illness, though, then I don’t know what it is. A healthy person should never have a disconnect between wanting to do something and execution. The inability to control one’s own actions is so bizarre and inexplicable that there must be some psychiatric issue in effect here. As such, the only workable treatment would be psychiatric. However, these treatments are largely inaccessible. Therapy has never proven effective for me, as a therapist cannot change the circumstances responsible for my condition. The efficacy of motivation-enhancing drugs (such as Adderall or Wellbutrin) is questionable, but I have taken them in the past and perceived some moderate improvement. Unfortunately, they’re expensive relative to my salary, and doctors in China are generally incredulous of foreigners’ medical needs. After once undertaking the kafkaesque nightmare that is filling a prescription in China, I no longer feel it’s worthwhile. I hope one day someone invents a miracle drug that solves the problem forever, but until that happens, I might have no choice but to tolerate avolition.

The Kingdom of China

My peers often find it strange that I choose to study and live in China. This criticism comes from two separate camps. There is an oikophiliac camp who has no interest living abroad at all, and especially in a place so alien to Western sensibilities. Alternatively, there is an orientalist camp who agrees that Asia is appealing, but strongly prefers Japan, Korea, or southeast Asia. Both groups act as though China is such a bizarre choice as to border on foolishness, and I therefore feel compelled to defend myself against them. In so doing, however, I risk adopting too conciliatory an attitude towards China, which does earnestly deserve much of the scrutiny levied against it. Further, there is an element of self-reassurance to these conversations. I’ve already sunk considerable cost into living here, so I’m incentivized to justify my life in China for the sake of my psychological well-being. All of these issues together confer some difficulty upon the seemingly simple task of evaluating my own opinion of China. Having given it some thought, I will outline my feelings below.

There were two reasons that I moved to China in the first place. One was pretty simple: I wanted a better job. Before moving to China, I was a teaching artist in Philadelphia. Schools in Philadelphia are characterized by endless and often violent conflict between teachers and students, most of whom refuse to learn anything and regularly engage in destructive and antisocial behavior. The cost of working under these conditions was much, much higher than the actual salary Americorps paid me, which was minimum wage. Unfortunately, there aren’t many opportunities available for a young person in the US right now, and I had done myself no favors pursuing a fine arts degree. I couldn’t reasonably expect to achieve financial independence in America, and I was aware that there were many programs designed to place English-speaking college students in English teaching positions after graduation, so it wasn’t difficult for me to find what I needed. The reason I chose China specifically is that China had been a significant part of my lifestyle and identity since I was a child. I took my first Chinese class in middle school and minored in Chinese in college, which made it a little odd I had never actually been here. My two attempts to go in college were both aborted after outbreaks of Covid-19. Like Mary in her black and white room, I knew about China without having experienced it, and I wanted to rectify that. At the very least, I wouldn’t have to sheepishly explain at cocktail parties that my interest in China was purely theoretical.

In terms of material wealth, my move to China was successful. Although my income is low by US standards, it is above average in China, where I’ve secured financial independence for the first time in my life. I enjoy the freedom to make occasional luxury purchases. In terms of pay per working hours, I am doing phenomenally, as I only spend a small portion of time each week teaching, and the rest is discretionary. I would prefer to spend more time working and earn more, but this arrangement is really not bad. I set out to get a better job, and although teaching can be tedious, I think I got one.

This puts me in a better position than my peers living in Korea or Japan. In those countries, foreigners genuinely receive very little pay relative to native teachers, and enjoy a relatively low quality of life. It’s no mystery why. China has a high population and a poor reputation in the west generally and America particularly, so not many foreigners want to come here. The demand far outpaces the supply, and schools are willing to reward those who take the plunge quite generously. By contrast, Korea and Japan have lower populations and leagues of Western sympathizers interested in their pop culture. The supply is much greater than the demand, and schools can afford to be picky and even abusive. From my experience, it seems like most expatriates in Korea or Japan dislike the experience and only live abroad a short time. Of greater interest to me is how this situation came to be; why is the attitude towards Korea and Japan so much more positive than China, even though expats can earn more money in China?

Anyone close to me in age already knows the answer. Korea and Japan are pop culture juggernauts in the West. Except for Israel, I can’t think of any foreign countries that exercise as much cultural capital in the US as they do. Anime and K-Pop are colossal institutions with no Chinese equivalent, and China’s great firewall (as well as its isolationist policies more broadly) preclude cultural exchange with the West. The only information most Westerners ever encounter about China is negative: China has no freedom, Chinese people have no rights, the quality of life in China is very bad, etc. In this environment, it’s not surprising that so few westerners choose China. China does, however, have a remarkably ironic advantage over Korea and Japan. Most Westerners who move to Korea or Japan are primarily motivated by their culture, but their conception of “culture” is usually quite superficial, informed mostly by an otaku perspective. I would argue that the real beating heart of these countries’ culture is found in their religion, philosophy, history, language, and art — and in Korea and Japan, all of these domains run downstream of China! The most historically important religion in Korea is Buddhism, which is also critical in Japan, and which came to both countries through China. Both countries draw on Chinese philosophical schools like Confucianism, whose teachings are now embedded in their culture. Korean and Japanese were both originally written in the Chinese script 汉字, and Japanese still is in many contexts. Much of the food in Korea and Japan — including sushi! — originates in China. Chinese art and literature is enormously influential. Dragonball Z, the most popular anime of all time, is a science fiction reinterpretation of Chinese classic Journey to the West. It is probably most appropriate to classify Korea and Japan as peripheral civilizations in a broader Sinitic “macroculture,” and from that perspective, China is the superior cultural destination.

That accounts for the orientalist camp. Addressing the oikophiliac camp is a lot harder, because now that I know China firsthand, I do prefer home. It’s good to experience living abroad for a time, but the perspective I’ve gained is useful to return and work at home, rather than an endorsement that I ought to stay here forever. The conclusion I’ve reached after a year is that China has its ups and downs. I enjoy that I can live comfortably without having to work very hard. Everyday life is convenient, and I can have food or useful goods delivered to me with minimal cost and effort. Above all else, while there is much about the Chinese lifestyle I dislike, I will never regret that I came here because I would not have met the most important person in my life otherwise. All that said, there are many elements of the Chinese lifestyle that are unpleasant, and I would even go so far as to say they are deleterious to a man’s soul. From my perspective, as a person very well educated on China, it seems like the grand objective of contemporary Chinese society is to maximize, i.e., to produce as much material wealth as efficiently as possible. While this may initially sound appealing, it has some obvious consequences on the general population. The most serious is the effect it has on labor. Chinese workers suffer extraordinarily long hours and poor conditions with weak benefits. This flagrantly contradicts China’s professed commitment to Marxism, but makes perfect sense in the context of a state performing optimization analysis. That’s how this all works: mathematically, with no concern given to the human. It’s no wonder that China faces a sharply plummeting birth rate. It’s unreasonable to expect parents to have and care for children without the requisite time and money to do so. Yet nobody with the power to distribute that time and money will do so, for fear of losing profits, so the official solution to this crisis is to subject the average Chinese person to further stress with constant demands.

While I don’t experience the same hardship as a foreigner, I am immersed in this culture and feel its effects. After spending most of my summer outside China, I could tell that there was something present in other countries that was absent in China. The best word I can think of is “soul.” For example, China is very much a “quantity over quality” type of country. That maximization I mentioned earlier has produced multitudes of malls, restaurants, bars, cafes, stores, and parks, but it is hard to differentiate any one from the other — most malls have the same set of shops, and most restaurants serve the same kind of food. Very few places in China have a proper identity, or for that matter, much “soul.” They are spaces to inhabit before they are places to be. There’s also not a lot to do. When I go downtown with my girlfriend, rather than going anywhere or doing anything in particular, we wander aimlessly between cafes and clothing stores. There’s not much of an alternative. I am particularly interested in academia and culture, both of which were of great importance to China historically, but which are now inaccessible. In downtown Guangzhou you can find an art museum, a history museum, and a library, but these spaces are surprisingly sparse and uninspiring. There’s one big theatre that mostly does international shows and pop music, and a number of Buddhist temples scattered around the city. But the real “soul” of the country is missing, with few places to appreciate the “religion, philosophy, history, language, and art” that I praised above. In Philadelphia, I kept a list of all the places that felt special to me. I can’t do that in China. Everywhere is the same, and everywhere is plastic and fake. Even the food is low quality. And should we be surprised? Why bother constructing marvelous third spaces in a culture where work occupies almost all of your time? Most of the people I know don’t go out except to drink. This is the real problem of China: the comfort and efficiency that I enjoy are ultimately poisonous, offering no opportunity to grow and flourish. In spite of its constant advancements in wealth and technology, China is stagnant. It is stagnant in the heart.

I love China, and I really do think it doesn’t get the respect it deserves as the beating heart of Asia. I am unfortunate to live at a time that the CCP excised all that made it special. The CCP hates traditional Chinese culture, and the common Chinese citizens, and western culture, and even socialism. They only love themselves, and they are willing to impart great suffering in furtherance of their personal enrichment. My only respite is that China is thousands of years old, and the CCP is fewer than one hundred. I don’t know how long the situation in China will last, or how it will end, but it will end. One day, China will be great again.

The Art of the Web Log

In light of the difficulty I’ve had updating this blog, I have to make some decisions about how I plan to approach it in the future. As mentioned above, my everyday life isn’t interesting enough to warrant continuous updates. While I initially planned to write mostly about my travels in China, and may in fact continue to do so, there’s less to mine on that topic than I expected, and I will eventually leave China anyway. I see no reason to stop writing for my book club, although I can’t make any promises as to the consistency of those posts.

Sometimes people ask me why I write a blog at all. One of my friends says that I should start a Tiktok (or Douyin) account and post videos about life as an expat in China. I have no interest in doing this. I despise short-form content and I expect that market is oversaturated already. I would be okay with running a Youtube channel, and in fact I already do, although it hosts film projects rather than essays or vlogs. Either way, making videos is substantially more effort than writing blogs, which I already have trouble doing consistently. I have considered hosting a Substack, which is more or less the web 3.0 successor to the blog, but I think that format lends itself to the pressure of constant updates. I dislike making promises such as “I will do X or Y every week,” on the grounds that it’s quite crushing when avolition or circumstances out of my control render me unable to follow through. I submitted two of my previous blog posts — on language and everyday life in China — to Delaware Valley Mensa’s monthly newsletter, but failed to get one in the following month, and felt great despair with the growing failure of each passing month, even though I doubt anyone other than myself really cared.

For now, at least, the blog is the best format for me. The issue that people most frequently cite is that the blog has no reach — not many people are liable to come to my website and read it. While they’re correct, I really don’t believe the format is the problem. My Youtube videos also have few views, as does the great majority of work I’ve ever published online. I’ve always found the old moniker that “everything you put online stays there forever” ironic, given that the vast majority of content on the internet is never viewed by anyone and vanishes without getting archived. The reason nobody sees my content is that I have no platform. I have no means by which to make others aware that I post work online at all. I confess some interest in being a public figure, if for no other reason than that I am powerless to effect change on a scale larger than myself unless others listen to me. I am unfortunately clueless how to actually solve this problem, but I suspect that if I ever were a public intellectual, then I might feel compelled to post more consistently, and talk more seriously about issues I consider important.

This informs where I want to take my blog in the future. Even though I know that not many people listen to what I have to say, I find it much more interesting to talk about politics, academia, aesthetics, and culture than to talk about my everyday life. While I don’t want to make any promises I can’t keep about exactly what I will write or how frequently I will publish it, I think that in the future I might pivot towards conversations that matter more to me. Because they interest me more, I might feel compelled to write more frequently, and the blog will start to feel like a real creative and intellectual output rather than a pointless chore. I hope that my readers are ready to undertake this journey with me.