So I find myself at Starbucks, and you know how Chinese people aren’t that great at making lines. I was the only one in front of these three men that had come in after me, and although I had already placed my order but not yet paid they thought it was OK to yell out their order. Two of them were on my left, and one on my right, I felt hemmed in and more pissed off than usual. I said nothing. They yell out their orders, not caring if I was done or waiting for the employee to ask them for their order. I felt contempt. One guy asked the other “do you want to a cappucino,” and the other replied “what’s a cappucino,” which only further enraged me. I know it’s a dumb thing to be snobbish, and to be snobbish about coffee at that, but when you get these people that think they’re hotshots come in to Starbucks and they don’t even know what a cappucino is…but I said nothing and fumed inside, as I’ve become accustomed to doing in China.

I sat down with my coffee and began to read Taiwanese playwright/filmmaker/writer Stan Lai’s book on creativity. Books like that, about the process and philosophy of creativity, are quite interesting, especially coming from someone like Lai–I’m not a huge fan of his, but he’s man of certain achievement and his diagrams illustrating the creative process are interesting because they are, at once, a phenomenology of the creative process as well as distillation of his thoughts on the relation of how we take our memories, sensory experience, knowledge, and values and make art out of it. In other words, he makes claims about what good art is and how it’s made.

Anyhow, I’m having a good time reading this until I notice that even with my mp3 player on I can still hear a noisy group of Shanghainese people next to me. I look over and sure enough it’s a bunch of men (and a few ladies) jabbering loudly, as they do, giving the impression that they are somehow trying to outdo each other. I can understand some Shanghai dialect, but if I can’t hear it that clearly and trying to concentrate on something else, it all ends up sounding like gibberish. I think that if you don’t understand a language, or even if you do and it’s not your native tongue, you’re going to find something off-putting about the way that it’s spoken by the natives. I find that with American English as well–I sure as hell don’t have a problem with the language per se, but there are some teenage girls that speak American English in a way that makes me want self-immolate and jump off a building.

I looked over, half hoping that my typical passive-aggressive strategy of glaring might make them stop, but of course, why would they notice me? Then I noticed that, in addition to their ugly striped short-sleeve collared shirts, one of the men was wearing shorts with white socks and black leather shoes, which made me even angrier than before.

If you read just up to there and didn’t know who I was, you might think I’m a complete asshole, and that’s not altogether false, but what’s interesting is not that I get pissed off about these things, but why–know enough about a person’s various pet peeves, and the relative intensity with which they peeve the person, and you can learn something fundamental about who they are and how they interact with the world.

I, for example, was listening to Elliott Smith’s beautiful “Pretty (ugly) Before”, which I think is a beautiful song, a shining example of the talent that Smith had, and a song in which there are so many things–the languid acoustic guitar in the verse, the electric guitar in the solo, the lyrics–that make this the kind of music that feels “real,” i.e. the opposite of the cookie-cutter, manufactured shit music that rings false because it doesn’t feel like it’s just hypothetical stuff that some corporate song-writing hack made up. I was in this perfect world and then the reality principle kicked in: the people upped their volume, and made it hard for me to hear my music, read, and think.

Ironic thing was, in Lai’s book I read this thing about how the Europeans “discovered” Bali and thought it was paradise, because not only was the weather great and the place beautiful, but because everyone there was an “artist”–they could all dance their local and ritual dances and make handicrafts. Yet they had no idea what the word “art” meant, and no conception of what “art” was, because they were so far from a modern division of labor wherein there are these people called “artists” whose job it is to create art. Lai claimed the Europeans said this was paradise.

I thought about this, and it seemed that the reason why I’ve been so infatuated with Greece, France, and Europe of late is that the people, culture, and environment strike me as being closer to some ideal conception of how people should be. And this is where I glimpsed something fundamental about my own identity, and my way of interacting with the world. I am always going to be annoyed by people that, like many Shanghainese, have that nouveau riche air about them–they have money to throw around but are, as someone (perhaps Sartre?) in the Parisian establishment remarked of Camus–”a peasant in his Sunday finest.” That’s a cruel thing to say, but again, that’s why I liked Hong Kong and Taiwan seemed so much better–making a generalization here, people are more polite, more cultured, more sophisticated. These things are embodied in the behavior an demeanor of people–it’s not something that you can fake altogether.

And i think that’s what drives me to keep looking for cool places to hang out or live. That’s why I love reading about Austin, Portland, Berlin, Buenos Aires, and other meccas for creatives, indies, and dropouts. The act of reading the articles about these places, followed by the act of imagining myself traipsing around these places, is purely fantasy–but that’s what some people are driven by. Maybe “fantasy” is the wrong word: you are driven by the sense that life is still big, and possibilities abound, and that you are free enough to craft, shape, mold that life into something that fits you. You know that you can’t change people (in Shanghai, everywhere) but you dream that there is some kind of place where you can just “fit in.” A place that resonates with you, that somehow possesses the kind of people and culture you need to thrive, to do your work, to relax and enjoy life properly, to lead a good life.

As i just explained, this too is the source of my discontent with China–it’s just too far from my fantasy city-state world where everyone is cosmopolitan and educated, stylish and cultured. Of course, I have never been anywhere that really comes close to that ideal. And even places like Paris and Athens that do come close only do so because I’m viewing them through the rose-colored glasses of the stranger, the one-time tourist. Delve deeper and you’ll no doubt hit a strata of complete asswipes too.

In the meantime, I have to find some way of reconciling myself to the world as it is, to the reality that surrounds me right here and now: sweltering and disgusting Shanghai of the summer. I have to try to find something inspiring about this place, something from its natural environment, built environment, culture, and people–or from everyday life, which combines all of those. And really，I can’t. In Seattle, I had the snow-capped Cascades and Mt. Rainier, as well as the beauty of Puget Sound. In southern Cali you have the beaches and sunshine, the nice malls, the food…

I just read an article about why the French and Americans are obnoxious tourists–because they expect too much. The Americans expect the same kind of service they get in the US everywhere else, and the French, who live in the country which is supposedly the world’s #1 tourist destination, are so accustomed to vacationing in their own country that when they leave it, and find that not everything is as nice and not everyone speaks French, start throwing hissy fits and being obnoxious.

Somehow, I think that being an expat in China for so long has not changed that aspect of me–I expect certain things, from people, probably b/c I expect a lot from myself (excuse the pop psychology here but you know it’s true). It’s that perfectionistic streak. It’s that thing that is never satisfied with who I am, and what I am. I will never be able to sit down next to a table of noisy and garrulous Shanghainese and not think anything of it. I suppose I might prefer the loudness of Italians, but probably not. I like that boisterousness and joie de vivre but honestly, only in small doses. There are plenty of times that I prefer the quiet, diffident, hushed tones of conversation that you might find in England or Japan, where everyone covers their mouths when talking and looks straight down as to avoid unnecessary eye contact.

So where you can find people like that, who are loud and cantankerous or soft-spoken and polite when you want them to be? Nowhere. What you want is for people to be like you. What you want is for people to act the way you want to act given your particular mood and circumstances in life that moment. The realization is that this is the emotional field of gravity in which I now–and perhaps will always move in. What makes things different for me is that I am probably a bit more sensitive about these things than other people. Most people have a larger emotional buffer zone than do I–I get riled up a lot easier and that’s why I will sometimes seem melodramatic or mercurial: what I am doing is making adjustments, trying desperately to get out of a place or situation that offers no hope of real gratification, and trying with all my will to move some place closer to what it is I had in mind, some place where everything is going to feel like a pair of old slippers, some place where I will fit in, where I don’t have to explain myself, where I don’t have to be relegated to the margins, where I belong and know it and everyone else does to. It’s quite puerile, in many ways, and yet I think that’s how human beings, on a certain level, operate. It might not be a good idea to give into it, but I think
we ignore such impulses at our own peril.