Bright Lights, Big City

Warm greetings from snowy Tianjin! All is well; I’m safe, healthy, alive, etc. All of my needs have been tended to, and most of my expectations have been exceeded. Really, I’m a little embarrassed by the expectations I had for this country and for this city. This is modern China. If reading the NY Times every day for the last three years has taught me anything, it’s that this is the future of our world. I still can’t tell you if that’s a good or a bad thing; no one can, I don’t think. But it’s fascinating walking around in a place like this, where the oncoming millennium seems to be converging (or colliding, I suppose) with an ancient world. A subway that feels like an Epcot ride, an airport that looks like the set in Synecdoche, New York, and an ocean of history just below the surface, bubbling up in small, strange, unexpected ways that I might be cognizant of only because I'm new to it all and always vigilant. To be sure, Tianjin isn’t Shanghai, or Tokyo, or Seoul, but it’s huge. It’s immense, almost overpowering; so much so that I can’t imagine living in a city bigger than this one (how could one of those super-cities not be overpowering?). 10 million. That’s how many people live here. I’ve heard 8, 10, and 12 from various anecdotal sources, so I’m averaging them when I say 10. But I’ve heard, also, that no one knows how many people live here, that no one can know because so many new residents are unregistered. The twenty fastest growing cities in the world are all in China—and this is one of them. It’s alive and chaotic like no other city I’ve ever seen.

I’m ashamed of how nice my apartment is. It’s nicer than anything I need, and better than what I’m conditioned to think a teacher should have the means to attain. I can get lost in the view from the 20th floor—the neon cityscape at night, the sea of skyscrapers that goes on for miles—and I do, often. There’s no such thing as a “downtown” here; skyscrapers are built wherever they’re needed, wherever they’re wanted, and the effect this has on pedestrians, I can tell you, is disorienting. Getting my bearings will take time. So far, my approach has been to walk in one direction till I’m out of the forest, so to speak, till the buildings shrink down to normal size—and I can’t do it. You can walk for miles (or km, here) and a ways off in the distance, behind the haze, wherever you go, there are invariably more buildings looming, silver and gray and forbidding.

None of this is bad news in the least, mind you. The sooner I begin to understand this place, the sooner it will no doubt start to bore me. For now, it’s bewildering and magnificent and only slightly oppressive. From my window, the flashing lights, the ceaseless din of car horns, the fireworks at night all call out like a harsh challenge from a bully: dig deep, adapt, show me what you’re made of, there’s nowhere to run, you’re a part of all this now. Testing my mettle, both in the classroom and every day in the streets, for right now at least feels really, really good.

There’s been snow on the ground here since before I arrived, and tonight it’s snowing again, so in honor of that, here’s a poem called “The Snowbound City” by a poet who survived on his own on the Alaskan frontier for decades, sort of like a less tragic, less puerile version of the kid from Into the Wild. I like it and hope, as always, that you do too.
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The Snowbound City

by John Haines

I believe in this stalled magnificence,
this churning chaos of traffic,
a beast with broken spine,
its hoarse voice hooded in feathers
and mist; the baffled eyes
wink amber and slowly darken.

Of men and women suddenly walking,
stumbling with little sleighs
in search of Tibetan houses —
dust from a far-off mountain
already whitens their shoulders.

When evening falls in blurred heaps,
a man losing his way among churches
and schoolyards feels under his cold hand
the stone thoughts of that city,

impassable to all but a few children
who went on into the hidden life
of caves and winter fires,
their faces glowing with disaster.
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