Life is Beautiful.

(Originally published in HTML in 2004)

I woke up feeling like a piece of fried banana this morning, a new feeling for me. It was my first morning waking up inside my new mosquito tent, and being inside it strongly gives the impression of being a piece of food left out in a tropical place, with one of those fly net umbrellas covering over all the plates. I savored this feeling, imagining what it would feel like to get dipped into some of that Viet Namese sweet hot sauce, or maybe condensed milk and then bitten into. If it would feel significantly different for not having any bones, just being a slice of fried banana? I was unsure if the sogginess that happened as a result of my having been exposed to the air made a significant difference in my experience of getting eaten (even though regardless of freshness I wouldn’t have any bones) or if it all would feel the same to me. I imagined the teeth sliding smoothly into my flesh like oiled machine parts clicking into place. My consciousness slowly faded with each bite, until Pop! no more thought on the last bite. I didn’t imagine getting masticated, when the last bit of me left the toothpick or chopstick or whatever, my consciousness as a piece of fried banana would be done.

The Chinese government propaganda about ethnic minorities is not all wrong, despite the fact that it seems intensely xenophobic. There I was sitting in a park at one thirty in the morning, doing my soup-kitchen for mosquitoes impression, next to this girl from Chang Chun in the Northeast. The Yi boys suddenly jumped up and started singing and dancing in a circle, while the Zhuang boy tried to follow along, with a different Zhuang song and dance. She sighed, “I don’t want to leave Yunnan, and go back North. It’s so boring up North.” I nodded in agreement, while they started trying to tickle each other to make that person stop singing and dancing. Like macho only different. The majority Han Chinese paradigm on ethnic minorities, especially of the Southwest is that all they want to do is drink, sing, dance and screw. But really, is that an unhealthy lifestyle choice? I mean what’s the difference in terms of assigned value between that and sitting in an office stamping things, chewing on large chunks of meat, chain smoking and telling dirty jokes like Beijingese Chinese? Drinking, dancing and singing under the stars seems like the most natural thing, which should naturally be followed up with a nice organic screw, like glace naturally follows fatty meats in French cuisine. So I don’t know why the Hans would look down on this lifestyle choice, except that it doesn’t produce any capital, which is what many Hans are interested in. The boys diverged into two different songs, not really noticing they weren’t a chorus anymore, started to get tired and need more beer, so they slowly came over and squatted down with us more reticent girls. After a few rounds of toasts to the moon, the stars, the fact that they were lucky enough to have two girls to talk to while they drank and sang, and a song or two more, Nekkid Mike jumped up and started to practice his Kung Fu. One of the boys that just came up to the Big City from their village (to be a “comfort assistant” – whatever that means – at a sauna) jumped up and they started going at it. But it wasn’t about macho: it wasn’t about hurting the other person, or embarrassing them, it was about causing the other person to laugh and fall over so that their opponent could catch them. The guy new to town would attempt to do a fancy Kung Fu kick at Mike’s butt and Mike would catch him, pulling him off balance, and he would use his weight to get Mike to fall off balance and catch him and hold him so he could tickle him. I asked the Northeastern girl, “Is this what you’re going to miss?” “Yeah,” she said, “nobody knows how to have fun up North. You pay a lot of money to get bored.” Good point. I realized this was the second time they had talked me into trekking across half the city in the middle of the night to hang out in a park with them, when I lived next to the prettiest park in Kunming, and abhor getting eaten alive by mosquitoes. And I was having a great time.

I realized my only real complaint about life for the last two months is that mosquitoes have been driving me insane, preventing me from sleeping well, and making me uncomfortable. But this complaint, it is so minor! Life must be beautiful to have time to obsess about mosquitoes, and think about doing a series of large oil paintings of what they look like smashed onto the wall, after engorging themselves on your blood. One night, I killed a mosquito that couldn’t move it was so full of blood, and the giant red blood stain, and the black mangled mess on the white wall was so beautiful that I keep looking at it, and am loath to chip the corpse off the wall. That which annoys you can be beautiful; I still have so much to learn.