On friends, lovers, and couchsurfers.
Living in a foreign country is obviously going to change ones interpersonal relationships. First of all, depending on the size of the ex-pat community, your fluency with the local language, your desire to spend time in bars (where you can’t talk anyway), and your ability to cohere with the local culture, you may have significantly fewer friends. If you’re a social butterfly this can be a problem (but then you probably hang out in bars, so not really). Alternatively of course, you may be a loner and not really care about friends. I along with most people, I guess I fall somewhere between being a loner and being extremely social, but not being able to talk to be everywhere; on the subway, on a street corner, in every restaurant, etc. has teased out my social side. The way that I have come to deal with this is by having a few good friends (normal for me) and having couchsurfers almost every night.
Ex-pat communities are made of people who for one reason or another are not in the most natural place for them to be. There is a test for English teachers that is probably applicable for anyone applying to be an ex-pat. It’s called the ABC’s of English teacher employment.
Are you:
- An alcoholic?
-
- A Criminal?
- Divorced?
- I forget this one too…
- All of the above?
I guess I say this to emphasize the importance of bar culture… My alcoholic friend just told me this about an hour ago as he was explaining how hard it has been to quit because all of his friends drink.
How does sex and love fit into all of this? In China - It’s a tight squeeze.
In recent history China has been notorious for its strict “traditional” repression. It’s been an almost ascetic place since the beginning of the communist dynasty. Through the early years of the party reign these tendencies were pushed to their extreme, and only in very recent years has the party been more delicate in its attempts to mediate the inevitable pendulum swing towards western mores. Young people are caught in a confusing purgatory between traditional, stable, boring, missionary position relationships and western (modern?), liberal, exotic, exciting, and flexible, though unstable affairs.
I have for the most part stayed out of the issue altogether. I have met and dated a few Chinese girls; but being largely uninterested in traditional relationships I have not gone very far with many. I would bet that a white man who behaves like any rational individual, but has too much time and money on his hands, could have sex with a new Chinese girl every night for the rest of his life. As for me, I don’t have the time or money to spend in such pursuits. My MO really hasn’t changed much, but it has been a far less successful strategy here in China then it was in the US and Thailand.
How do couchsurfers fit into all of this?
Most importantly, couchsurfers fulfill my need to meet new interesting random people on a regular basis. If you estimate that 50% of couchsurfers are awesome passionate people and that 50% of that awesomeness will shine through in their profiles, then by carefully selecting your surfers you have a 75% chance of meeting one of the most interesting people you will ever meet in your life every time you invite in a new surfer! In practice it works out that about 75% of my surfers are such people, so I made up the figures… you get the point.
Now to put it all together:
Although you may find every nuance of my life extremely fascinating, and you may have endless time to pour over pages and pages of my eloquent prose… I don’t have the patience to allow you such an opportunity. So I am not going to go into fine detail.
However, I will tell you of one particularly touching situation, and to get there I will have to set the stage一下。
Last week was my birthday and, as many of you may know, each year on my birthday I evaluate the course of my life and set or reset a course. I don’t know when I began doing this, but a few notable movements in my life relating to this have been: my decision to become homeless, my decision to stop talking, to spend a year at the ashram, and to travel to Thailand.
Some years ago I decided to spend more time focusing on so called ‘worldly’ concerns and a little less on ‘spiritual’ pursuits. The shift here was due to the glaring philosophical conundrum of dualism. My thought has gradually moved to a position of radical non-dualism. Being a yogi, one concerned with the actualization of truth as well as its realization, thinking about philosophy is a next to useless pursuit, because thinking and action should be in concord, and one should realize the other. This ‘non-dualist’ line of thinking has lead me into a slowly creeping neglect of serious ‘practice’. The main causes of this being on the one hand a lack of time and on the other a confusion of priorities. I have learned that every aspect of life has to be cared for and “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
This year I am deciding to move back towards practice, to learn about Taoism, and to continue the pursuit for an understanding of my place in the economic marketplace. Since these priorities are not social in nature due to limited time I was expecting my social life to take sharp blow. On top of these priorities shifts Bryan who has been my closest friend here who I could talk to for hours about anything from Buddhism, to poetry, to politics, just left for graduate school in Texas. Allocating my ‘dinner with friends’ time to practice time seemed like the obvious shift, the problem with dinner with friends time is that it often became hang out for the rest of the night time.
Anyway, Bryan, along with a few other friends and a long term couchsurfer has moved away, and I now have only one good friend living near-by… In my ideal world all of my friends would live in the same building so that I could hang out with them all the time without taking time away from practice, studies, etc. but in this world, in China, it’s not going to happen.
So, I got a new couchsurfer after a night alone. I went to work in the morning only to find out that my class was canceled and when I arrived back home she was in the shower. I always hide a key so that surfers can arrive without inconveniencing me, and often the couchsurfers show up at unexpected times... When she got out of the shower I was Skypeing with Mom and Dad for my birthday. It was the first time speaking to them both in an unfortunately long time. Tanya sat on my couch doing her thing and laughing at me until I finished. Then we talked for a bit before getting lunch. I could tell immediately that she was a very sexually liberated person, and so within the first hour I made a pass at her. She responded in kind and so we made out for a while, but we were both very hungry.
At lunch I invited David to come over to hang out. I had something of his at home, and I thought that we could walk back and pick it up after lunch. Tanya wanted a beer after lunch so we went to a nice relaxed bar to chat and drink. I was not drinking because I find it to be a mostly worthless and wasteful pursuit, unless of course it’s at the rare drinking party. The hanging out was pleasant. I let David do almost all the talking as is my custom with people who are just meeting each other and before I knew it I had to run off to class.
After class I got a call from David, “You mind if I fuck your couchsurfer?”
I was livid.
That night Tanya stayed over at David’s house. By night fall I had already calmed down considerably, but I was still a little upset. I thought it fate that I was alone practicing yoga when my couchsurfer was off fucking my friend! Slowly through asana, meditation, and rational thinking I calmed down and slept well. Tanya came back in the morning while I was doing yoga. We hardly said anything before we where in bed. Only “stupid bitch” and “you’re too cool to care”, are the only words that stick out from the brief exchange. After the best sex I have had in a very long time I had to run off, late for work.
That night Tanya spent the night at David’s again. I asked her why and she said that although the sex with me is better. He offers her the kind of emotional connection she needs. The difference being that we have no emotional attachment to each other and she liked the way that David looked at her, etc.. I think she’s great, but… Maybe the old tired words “I love you, but I’m not in love with you” says it best.
The third night Tanya stayed with me. I gave her a massage and pretty much blew her mind. We cuddled and talked for hours. As far as I am concerned we had the perfect relationship. After getting over the initial sense of rejection I could see that I was getting everything that I wanted, and so was she. It was magic. I had my space to myself most of the time for practice without distraction and study, and I had great sex everyday, and even a threesome with a good friend.
Tanya decided to stay in town for a few days longer. Having accepted couchsurfers for a long time coming I already told two girls from Germany that they could stay at my place. This was not a problem because Tanya was spending 2 nights at David’s for every one night at mine.
When the couchsurfers arrived I was very hungry! I had spent most of the day doing yoga, studying, and writing. I offered to meet the girls at the subway and to take them out to dinner. From the first time I heard their voice on the phone I was annoyed with them. It was partially that I knew their presence was going to impede my chances of getting laid, partially related to the fact that they were an hour late and my stomach was digesting itself, partially due to the confusion caused by their poor English, and partially because they seemed just plain dumb… Upon meeting them at the bus station my first words were “Hey! I’m Daniel! Ready to eat!” to which they replied “Can we stay at your house”… I said “Yes, of course”, but what I wanted to say was “What!?! Are you fucking stupid? We have already gotten past that point!”
David came to eat lunch with us and was dumbfounded by the girls as well. I kept wanting to write off their silliness as being due to their lack of English fluency, but I kept finding more and more idiocy. It is odd to me, but understandable they thought that “spending the night on the great wall” meant finding a hostel near the great wall, but after David and I went into details about climbing steep sections, hiking for hours, the necessity of a sleeping pad, etc. I was really surprised to watch them packing cell phone chargers… I reminded them that there was no electricity where we were going, but I think they brought the chargers anyway; they certainly brought a lot of other useless heavy crap.
We left late for the wall. My work kept me over an hour when I was hoping to leave, I stayed because work has been unstable lately and I need to fill up my schedule. My class that day was about marginal cost/benefit analysis; it should have been a course in the sunk cost effect. At whatever time, after wading through Beijing traffic, waiting for over half an hour in a bus line, and the hour long bus ride we arrived at the city where my ‘friend’ the taxi driver was waiting for us. Another hour and a half later, after the sunset I so desperately wanted to see, we arrived at the small town with the trailhead to the great wall. Somehow, and I am still confused about this, we ended up at the wrong trailhead. It was not a problem per se, but it would have been if it had rained because there where no shelters in the area. The hike up in the dark was awesome! At first I was disappointed with myself for forgetting my headlamp, but later I couldn’t help thinking of Jaz as I cursed Tanya under my breath for using her headlamp in such brilliant moonlight. Tanya set the pace and the Germans kept up pretty well.
Once we reached the wall Tanya and I slipped off into the darkness to find some alone time as the Germans ate their dinner, and after our explorations we set up camp and told stories before sleep. The night was very pleasant. Hours flew by along with bats hungrily pursuing the various not-mosquitoes also enjoying the cool mountain air. I set my alarm for 4:30 which was unfortunately only three hours after we finally made it to sleep. Even if it was the shortest rest of the past 6 months, which it wasn’t, it was the most thorough. I woke feeling as fresh as the air at 4:10, just about first light. After a few moments I woke Tanya and the Germans and we climbed to the top of the guard tower with our breakfast to await the dawn. And it was glorious! I am more of a sunset person then a sunrise person… but I always do love them when I see them!
As we strolled on the back of a sea dragon over tumultuous crests of mountains rising above the steam from an ancient boiling ocean I was filled with peace broken only by the occasional fit of wonder or laughter at the Germans who where carrying one pack among them with far too much bulk and weight and more often then not saying something utterly retarded. I forget many of the gems, but not all of them. This one I remember because it was so long in coming...
Sara kept asking me questions about why the wall was constructed in the way it was. “Why does it follow the ridges”, “Why is it so tall”, “Why does it go to the highest peaks”, and so on. My answers were almost always the same, each time going into a little more detail. Basically I said it was so that people could better see enemy coming from the sides, shoot arrows at them, etc. After a sporadic conversation of over an hours length she said, “I just can’t believe that this is the easiest place to put a trade road”. I was stunned, Tanya’s jaw was on the floor, and I just simply said “The wall is not for trade, it’s for defense.” She was only slightly surprised by this fact. She obviously wasn’t paying attention to my remarks about being amazed that Mongolians were such bad asses that the Chinese had to build such an impressive wall out of terror and the annoyance of getting their women stolen… I asked her how much about China had she studied before coming to China. She had only read about modern China… All in all, considering my feelings, which had shifted from annoyance to pity, I was not very condescending. Even when Sara looked as if she was about to die from exhaustion but still would not let me carry some of her weight. When I finally stopped in front of her and took her pack using kind words and a little force, I opened it to find two purses filled with only god knows what, and not only warm cloths for the night but a full change of cloths. I felt continuously guilty for not preparing the girls enough, but I am not sure how much more I could have done aside from packing for them.
By the end of the hike all three girls were very tired. I had overestimated their ability based on what gigantic packs they all brought to my house. I would never want to carry a pack as large as any of theirs from a hotel to a taxi! But girls need there stuff, I guess… The girls were exhausted, but I was feeling vibrant and alive. The slow pace of the hike had let me appreciate the small details of the wall which I had missed on other trips as I tried to keep up with Bryan.
When we came off the wall, again at Mutianyu, among all of the drivers asking if we wanted a taxi was a man who called out to me using my Chinese name! I was very confused for a fraction of a second. The situation became clear before he explained it. My driver, his friend, was unable to come and so sent him in his stead. The driver was as nice as my regular driver. He stopped at the cheapest places around so that we could buy water and fruit on our way back home, and of course offered us a fair price without the need for haggling. This friendship of course ties back into the beginning of the blog and therefore marks the end of the blog.
