I spent parts of the last two weeks researching the census and looking into the stalled nomination of Robert Groves to lead the Census Bureau through the 2010 count. President Obama had nominated Groves on April 2, and, though he sailed through his confirmation hearings in May, anonymous Republican senators have maintained holds on his nomination since then. Today Roll Call revealed the senators who had placed the holds and reported that Majority Leader Harry Reid would try to bring Groves up for a vote this week or next.

My story had to change quickly: I had planned on writing about why an anonymous hold might be placed on Groves and how long it might last. And though much of the original inspiration for the post was voided, I jumped on the new story. I got Reid’s office to confirm late this evening that the senator would be filing for cloture on the nomination vote, and I broke the news.

My friend Dylan, about whom I recently wrote, is just one of my friends, and just one of my astonishingly intelligent, thoughtful, interesting, and inspiring friends. (Those words are used frequently, but I mean them literally and with all their original power. Read them again and stop on each to see how highly I think of my friends.) The people I met in middle school and high school–people who are slowly becoming adults and building on their youthful energy and passion with mature perspective–could be the people who most motivate the life I live, drive me strongest to use my time and skills maximally. Dylan’s just one of them. So I single him out here (again) because he provides the proof, because he writes. In his writing, he overwhelms me (again) with his intellect and his insight. (And, as I’ve said before, I have another high school friend who I think is an even better writer.) I’m usually satisfied with my writing, and my communication skills across media. Now I feel I’m putting shit into my computer and onto the internet with each word I type, having just read this blog post Dylan wrote to summarize (if that is possible) his final thoughts on his semester in China.

Because I’m pretty sure neither Blogger nor Dylan will sue me, and because he has deleted the blog he kept years ago (the first blog a friend of mine ever maintained), I’m copying his post in full below. I don’t know that this will last forever if I don’t preserve it, and it needs to, because Dylan has written something amazing here. Though he writes about China (where I have never been) and himself (from whom I am wildly different), he hits on feelings I believe have to be universal to people who travel abroad, who spend any extended period of time in a new culture, away from familiar people, places, and customs. Without any more quaint and pedestrian reiteration, let me direct you to read what Dylan wrote, here on his blog or below the jump.

Monday, July 6, 2009

7/6/2009, Final Thoughts

I’ve resisted, if you haven’t noticed, posting my final thoughts on China. I said I’d do it a week after I came back, and then I figured I’d do it once I was done posting my photos. So that was my plan, but in reality, I think it was a stalling tactic. Because even though I have now been in America for more than a month, I don’t quite know what to make of my experience in China, and even now, as I write this, I am fully aware that it will take a while for me to make sense of it all and determine what really did or did not happen to me in China. But something I read today made me reflect on the whole experience and what it meant to me, and I figure that I will write that reflection as my final thoughts.

So people ask me three questions. They ask me, first and foremost, how China was, or what China’s like, or some variation on that question. And my response has been repeated so many times I have it memorized and ready to pull out at a moment’s notice. China’s a big country, I say, which is mundane, but probably the truest observation I have of China as a whole, and something that people who have never been can’t really understand, I think. The key fact is that it is a country the size of America with four times the population, and that doesn’t sink in until you go. Outside of that, it’s hard to say what China’s “like”. Which part? When? For who? So I neglect to go any further than saying, China’s a big country. My response can either be that, or the entirety of this blog; nothing in between would be quite accurate.

Then they’ll ask me if I miss China, and that one’s hard for me to answer. No, not exactly. Parts of it I certainly don’t miss. And even the parts I have fond memories of, well, I’m just not really the missing type. Life moves on. But more to the point, I have a hard time integrating the memory of that time with the rest of my life. China was so different, and feels so distant – and is so distant, in so many ways – from the rest of my life that it sometimes doesn’t feel like it actually happened. I feel like I went to another planet for a couple of months and then came back. So no, I don’t quite miss it, when I’m sometimes not even sure it actually happened.

And then the hardest question, which is rare, but I still get: did China change you? Now that’s the hardest one to answer. No, on one hand. I still feel like me, just with a slight disruption. I have the same flaws, and the same problems. I don’t feel like I really changed. I’m still as stubborn and convinced of myself as I’ve ever been, and still very skeptical – perhaps more so now than ever – that that kind of experience can really change people.

But then, I also feel like it was a big experience. I feel like I saw things differently, at least for a time, that I got some glimpses of a different way of being. It affected me, I am sure. When I talk about how China was rough sometimes, people often counter, but you were in a pretty comfortable position, being a Westerner, with access to Western things and hell, even the internet. But that’s not what was hard to me about China. There is a distinct, unbelievable isolation that comes with being a stranger in a strange land, cut off from your language, your culture, your family and friends. And no matter how many comforts you may have, you are still cut off, you are still not at home. It really is the sensation of the Freudian unheimlich (not coincidentally literally translating as “not at home”), uncomfortable even though nothing is all that different. I don’t know if that’s any lessened by having this experience in a culture closer to one’s own, since I haven’t had that experience. I just know it was intense as all hell in China. When I was lonely in China, I was lonelier than I’ve ever been.

Do I feel like I have a better understanding of China? On one hand, on a superficial level, obviously; I mean, I’ve been there. But then, I think about it, and my observations and thoughts based on my limited experiences in China, interacting with the Chinese, are only slightly less superficial than my thoughts before hand. So I spoke to some Chinese. So I visited some places. I still can’t tell you what China is, or what it will be. I doubt that’s even an option for the Chinese. So what can I say? I don’t know what I got out of the experience or learned from it, either about myself or about China or the Chinese. Yet I feel so sure I got something out of it…

Today, in my reading, I came across a quote written by Ovid when he was in exile that finally encapsulated how I feel about China, at least in the immediate aftermath. Ovid writes, barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor illis, translating as, “I am here a barbarian, because I am not understood by them.” On one hand, it is the nightmare of exile, and it was the nightmare of being in China. It was the feeling of “what the hell am I babbling about, anyway?” Not just when I was trying to make myself understood in Mandarin or in English, but when I was trying to convey my feelings, what was important to me, and trying to explain why it mattered to me and why it should matter to them, trying to explain the touchstones of my culture. What the hell was I talking about and why? I looked like an idiot. I felt like an idiot. Because, in that context, I was an idiot.

But with that nightmare also comes a sort of lucidity and an opportunity that you can’t have in America: the opportunity to understand oneself. With Ovid’s nightmare comes a certain identity: he is the barbarian. I came to realize that all that stuff that I was babbling about, all those needs and basic desires I suddenly realized I had, all the stupid pop culture things that suddenly became so vital to me when I left home, well, they were me. They were what I was. The thing about the unheimlich that is so uncomfortable, after all, is the fact that you are looking at yourself, as nakedly as possible. So I do think that I received a better understanding of myself from China. Not that it’s something that’s actionable; understanding yourself and being able to change are two different things. And it may be something that I no longer possess. Ovid wisely uses the qualifier “here”; when he returns home, he’s Ovid again – whatever that means. So it might not mean anything, and it might no longer exist, but while I was in China, I got a better sense of who I was. And that is why this blog, despite my desperate efforts to document China and not me, ultimately became concerned mostly with my thoughts and feelings. The thing I experienced most wasn’t China, after all – it was myself.

With that observation, even though it likely isn’t my last thoughts on this whole weird semester, I conclude the writing on this blog. I’ll continue to post photos until they’re all up there. It just takes me forever.

I spent Independence Day in Philadelphia, where I spent time with friends, saw my Mets play the Phillies, and caught a free concert and fireworks on the Parkway with tens of thousands of fellow patriots. As good and American a Fourth of July as any I’ve had.

Pictures here. Low-quality example below.

On FOX this morning, Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) showed he knows how to play the manufactured controversy game, accusing President Obama of a Watergate-level scandal for something Zack Roth showed yesterday to be a non-issue.

My post on Barton’s comment (my first with a solo byline) is here.

I started blogging a year ago to share my summer in Peru without having to sort through the people I know. Without a blog, I figured, I’d have to rank and evaluate friends and family if I wanted a useful and appreciated email list. I posted extensively, if not regularly, while abroad. And in the ten months since I returned, I’ve posted less frequently. For much of the year I found myself busier than I had known life could be. And early on I made the choice to avoid writing much about my activities of the day, week, or month. Those of you who’ve read know I like to share the things I’ve done, seen, or read in the context of thoughts I’ve had, thoughts I have. My experiences (especially those at school) aren’t interesting in themselves, even to me most of the time; when they’re interesting, they are so because of that to which they connect, and because of the other things between which they allow me to make connections.

I expected I’d have more time to write this summer, and that I would. No such luck. I’ve been working 50 hours a week at my internship. I squeeze in several hours of socializing each evening to recharge between work days. I try to read a little, to spend some time with my parents. This schedule was hard to adjust to, and it has meant a difficult first month–in a lot of ways. I’m enjoying the lifestyle more, but I’m not finding any more free time. So while I’d like to post more frequently this summer, I won’t be writing much. Expect a few pictures, a few thoughts, maybe some links. But personal essays will have to wait. My spring semester and my weeks in Tanzania never got written up. Hopefully they will be at some point. And my time at Talking Points Memo, as fascinating as it has been so far, won’t be described here until after I’m gone, if even then.

But, as I’ve done for a year, I’ll share my accomplishments, especially those already public, here proudly. Blogging is, after all, an undeniably exhibitionist activity, as modestly and discreetly as one tries to do it. This shit is on the internet, basically a glass box with contents that go in, never out, and become permanent immediately.

That’s a lot more than I’ve meant to write. In short, I’m really busy these days. I won’t take the time to write the backstory behind my work, but I will share it when there’s a finished product, as there was for the first time today. Here is my first (shared) byline in a professional publication–albeit a blog. Seeing it when it went up was very exciting. And equally exciting was this shout-out from the boss, which greeted me when I got home tonight and helped cap off an up-and-down month with one final up. More of this is, hopefully, to come.

Since I was 10, I’ve made memories of headlines. Some are vague; others are detailed and fresh. My first such memory dates to early 1999, when NATO forces began bombing in Kosovo. I remember seeing the headlines, with big accompanying photos, day after day on the front page of The New York Times. The news fascinated me, even though I was completely ignorant about the history, context, or implications of what was going on. I remember asking my parents to explain to me what I was reading, and I remember beginning to learn history and about geopolitics, for the first time, by discussing with them the stories I was reading in the newspaper. A month later I saw the first specific headline that became seared into my memory when I read about a soon-to-be infamous school shooting in Colorado.

Two and a half years later I had grown up enough that, when my city was in the news for even more historical events, I was a regular newspaper reader. No longer did individual days’ headlines grab me and get lodged in my memory the same way, but the events unfolding before me affected me even more as I grew up. My adolescence was framed–even defined, in some ways–by a series of events that could only have been covered on A1. After wars, murders, and terrorism in 1999 and 2001 came a war in 2003 and elections in 2004, 2006, and 2008. Each event was important in world history and equally so in my coming of age.

Given how powerfully these events have affected me, I’m fascinated by other historical events that happened in my lifetime. I’ll never really be able to believe the Cold War ended after I was born, or that apartheid in South Africa fell apart when I was in elementary school. Without memories of those events–of seeing them written about the next day, or over weeks, on the front page of the Times–they feel like history to me, rather than the current events they were not too many years ago.

Another such event was made current again today, on its twentieth anniversary. As with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of apartheid, I’ve also never understood the Tiananmen Square protest, I suspect because I didn’t experience the event as it happened. The narrative as I’ve learned it after the fact–students and intellectuals in China protested for more freedom in 1989, the protest was quashed with a massacre, little more freedom arrived, and twenty years later no one protested–doesn’t make sense. Then again, I can’t expect China to make a lot of sense to me. In every way, it’s as foreign, as far from what I know, as anything on Earth.

I’ve loved learning just a little about China over the last year from a few sources. James Fallows, the Atlantic writer and editor who has lived in China for the last few years, maintains a blog that I’ve read religiously since last summer. He writes about technology, aviation, the craft of journalism and the life of a journalists, and China. All of his writing is interesting; his observations and understanding of China are enlightening. And since January a friend of mine, Dylan Suher, has been studying abroad in China. He too has kept a blog, where he has given a mostly personal account of his time there, but through which he has shared impressive insight into a country he is just getting to know. I’m glad he has blogged so regularly while abroad, disappointed his dispatches will cease when he returns to the U.S. this weekend, and most happy his wisdom will last in his writing. Trusting him to have something interesting to say in response, I recently sent him this Atlantic article by Mark Hertsgaard about China’s balance between economic development and environmental protection. The article is especially interesting because it was written in 1997, and yet it reads as if it could come out tomorrow: all the issues it covers seem as relevant, if not more so, today as they were a dozen years ago. Being the good friend and smart guy he is, Dylan replied to the article with a surprisingly long and thoughtful response, which I’ll assume his permission to reproduce here:

I was only too happy to read this article instead of reading [sic: missing word], although I was sad I couldn’t watch the YouTube video (damn you, China, don’t you know seeing the “Leprachaun” video is an inalienable human right?). I think it’s really right on. I think people who are not here can sometimes get the impression that the Chinese government and the Chinese people just don’t give a shit about the environment. But actually, compared to the Americans, the Chinese lifestyle is much more environmentally friendly (air drying, no heat below the Yangtze by government order, great public transportation, lots of biking). What we’re really worried about is that more and more Chinese will start to live like us, which would undoubtedly lead to a world environmental crisis. Also, the sense I’ve gotten is that in recent years (since this article has been written), the government has taken serious steps to improve the environmental situation. This of course varies from province to province and city to city (Yunnan has a particularly good party boss, according to people I’ve talked to), and some cities are still absolutely awful (I had a hard time breathing in Tai’an in Shandong province and in China’s coal centers in the Northeast, and the smog in Xi’an is really sad). But the government is limited in what it can do, both by corruption and by the economic/demographic situation.

I’ll give you the example of Kunming, since I know a bit about it. Kunming has about six million people, and is growing at an insanely rapid rate. The government expects it to reach ten million people by 2012 or so. Kunming’s main source of water is the filthy Dian Chi lake. Now, in America, most water pollution is agricultural or industrial. However, this is not the case with Dian Chi. Years ago, fertilizer and tanning plants did a number on Dian Chi, but most of those have been shut down; now, the main source of pollution is literally household sewage. But what can you do? It has to go somewhere. It doesn’t help that the marshes that used to clean Dian Chi were drained during the Great Leap Forward, but it’s now not an option to restore the wetland: it would mean the relocation of thousands of people who now live in the reclaimed land. So what can the government do? It can’t stop the migration. All it can do is really what it’s doing now, which is throwing millions at sewage processing plants and punishing people who violate plumbing regulations.

Which brings it back to the point that this guy made that I think is the most insightful and right on. China’s problem is a world problem. We have a billion very poor people, and the real question is, can we fulfill the promises that modern, liberal, capitalist society has made to allow every human being on the planet live a life of unprecedented comfort without destroying the planet. It’s something to lose sleep over.

With friends like these, who needs professionals to tell you about the world? Nevertheless I appreciate what professional journalists do (of course). In addition to Fallows’ writing and the Hertsgaard article, I recommend today’s column by Nick Kristof, in which he recounts his experience in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago, when he was the Beijing bureau chief for the Times. Here is a fascinating recent blog post by John Pomfret outlining China’s relationship with North Korea, explaining why it may be that China watches happily as North Korea antagonizes the United States and the West. (H/T to Fallows for recommending it.) And here the Times runs down the stories behind the iconic photos of Tank Man in Tiananmen Square during the protest. (Here too is a follow-up post with a never-before-published picture of the event.) All interesting reads to learn just a little more about the Middle Kingdom in the modern era.

At work today, with the TVs on the cable networks, an MSNBC afternoon anchor said the following as the channel cut to a commercial break: “A dark chapter in China’s history: Tiananmen Square, twenty years later. What do you remember about the event?” This was followed by a call for viewers to send in their recollections of the protest and the massacre. The line was completely in character for cable news, and had I been barely less attentive I would have missed it. But I heard it, and it struck me. This simplification was just one example out of hundreds I must have heard on TV today. Yet it perfectly encapsulated a source of sadness in me: Here was “coverage” of a truly fascinating historical event that–by the choice of the “journalist”–removed all the elements that could have educated, enlightened viewers. Instead, we were given a vague allusion (”dark chapter”) and encouraged to be egocentric, to share our memories of the event, as if they were, are somehow relevant, as if they mean anything at all. Nothing before or after that teaser gave viewers any better understanding of what happened in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago, or what has come since. For that, one would have had to look elsewhere, far away. Cable news is pitiful, but the 2009 media landscape includes more media offering the same antisubstance. I’m saddened that so little attention is given to the most interesting parts of the news, which also happen to be the most valuable to know. And I’m fearful of a media that is ever receding into a universe of headlines.

Update 6/14/09: How many of my friends will go to China? With one high school friend recently back, another is leaving for Beijing in two days. And a friend from college will be there all of next year, taking a year away from Yale to study Chinese more in China. He’s a tremendously talented guy, as can be seen in this video of him speaking Chinese, playing cello, and beatboxing:

On this weekend a year ago I wrote about Manhattanhenge, the twice-annual phenomenon of the sun setting directly down the streets of Manhattan. Last night, out for dinner with friends, we noticed people stopped in a crosswalk, looking down the street at the burning disc at the horizon, and I was able to explain the significance of the coolness we saw. I also took photos.

Update 6/1/09: An earlier version of this post said Manhattanhenge happens once in spring and once in fall. In reality, as I just learned here, it happens twice in spring. New Yorkers will see the same sight again in under two weeks, on June 11 and 12.

I got home yesterday. I’ll try to write some about the trip soon, but, for now, here are photos.

Wow: It’s been a year since my first post here. I haven’t blogged too seriously (read: too often), but this has been a great outlet to share pieces and thoughts that wouldn’t otherwise be published, to promote my elsewhere-published writing and my photography, and to occasionally break down into the trivial and juvenile. To those of you who’ve read, thanks. Please keep doing so. Hopefully I’ll make that easy for a while longer.

Now begins year two…

Check out the beautiful irony of this op-ed piece in The Times. The author argues that the Supreme Court and the F.C.C. should get over their prudishness and stop, as it were, giving a shit about certain common “fleeting expletives.”

LAST Tuesday, the Supreme Court upheld the Federal Communications Commission’s crackdown on the use of dirty words on the airwaves.

That the justices managed to do this without actually uttering either of the words at issue — one refers to a sexual act, the other to a bodily function — exemplifies both the court’s tact and its lack of connection with contemporary English usage

Take a guess as to which words the case dealt with. And notice please that the author, bound by the superior standards of the paper in which he writes, must himself leave unnamed the words he chides the Supreme Court for avoiding. He tries to work around the limitation, but the charade gets a little ridiculous:

Writing for the majority last week, Justice Antonin Scalia stated that it was “entirely rational” for the F.C.C. to conclude, as it did, that one particular curse “invariably invokes a coarse sexual image.”

Does it? The evidence is mixed. Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary and the author of a book on swearing, described the F.C.C.’s argument as “rubbish.” Although the word in question originally referred to a sexual act, Mr. Sheidlower argued, it has now taken on an independent “emotional” sense. The nonsexual use of the word can be seen in countless contemporary examples, as when Vice President Dick Cheney used it in 2004 to recommend that Senator Patrick Leahy do something that is, strictly speaking, anatomically impossible.

Nowhere does the column mention that The Times, by its own rules barring any usages of certain especially foul words, is forced to be as tactful and disconnected from contemporary English usage as the author claims the Supreme Court is. By author or editor’s choice (I guess the latter), an opportunity for light self-criticism was missed, and silly affectations (”strictly speaking, anatomically impossible”) are forced into the piece.

Such blind adherence to verbal cleanliness hurts a newspaper’s coverage when its stories are specifically about unspeakable words that have made news. An article in the American Journalism Review late last year examined newspapers’ policies regarding news-making profanity, encouraging papers toward more revealing coverage and explaining the power in printing the unprintable.

Count me a supporter of the crude, the dirty, the vulgar. Not in life, at least not to excess, but when obscenity is the story, it’s got to be in the story. The Times and other “family papers” following excessively prude standards do their readers a disservice by protecting the delicate minds of hypothetical young readers.

For my part, I was proud to beat the censor (who was, I should note, my higher-up at the paper, not a government agency or a court) a few times this year in my role as newspaper editor. I didn’t write the offending words, but when they popped up in appropriate places, I did my best to get them in the paper. Once was a slip-up: Challenged by the boss, I agreed to change the offending word, but I forgot, so it appeared in print, granting me a little undeserved pride. (In the Times‘ cutesy style, the word refers technically to the excrement of male cows.) Earlier in the year I got the word “asshole” into a column six times. The piece, on “section assholes,” would have been a barely readable farce without the simple and widely used term that served as the subject. That was a battle I didn’t have to fight too hard to win, but in which I’m still grateful to have succeeded.

And this whole business about publications being family-oriented? Screw that.