Do I do Art?

Eason

When I arrive at the university’s guest apartment, I am greeted by Eason, a graphic design student on a quest to improve his English and hang out with the foreign teachers. His interest makes him exceptional; he is also fearless and overeager. My compact camera has been dropped too many times, and a lot of shots are out of focus because it is kaput. I’m spending a lot of time walking around GZ, and I need a good camera. I want to capture images for my collaged book, which I’ve been working on since college, 45 and counting. I’m asking him to come with me to look for a new one.

So Eason and I are taking a DiDi to a giant electronic mall. Inside, it’s cramped, and we very quickly lose sight of what we saw, the prices, models, and even which floor we are on. They are all fixed prices, so it’s nice not to have to haggle, but I appreciate Eason’s translator skills. I notice that there are quite a few Women and Men from other countries that I could have asked to translate because they speak fluent Chinese. From the looks they seem to be West African, maybe Nigeria or Ghana. I assume they have some kind of resale business, because they seem to know the vendors and each other. The prices are quite good. One stall was repairing electronics. I wish I had had a camera already to capture the mountain of tiny circuit boards and cases, all sorts of hardware and plastics piled up, while in the midst, a guy is slurping noodles out of a container. In Guangzhou, the main activity seems to be eating Cantonese food.

In one even more stuffed section in the far end, there is DJ equipment, mixers, strobe lights, speakers, and fog machines. And at one of such piles, Eason touches what he thought was a wig. As he runs his fingers through the long strands of shiny black hair, a young girl, sitting on a stool, turns her face and stares at him, bewildered; it’s her hair.

We keep hurtling through the narrow path between the desks, speakers, boxes piled up, but not wigs, and end up buying one of the cameras that was on my list. Now I can take photos again. The one camera that I love to own was not to be found; it’s kind of expensive anyway.

Mickey

Mikey said to go to the Dongshankou area to look for fashion labels. I took a taxi from the DiDi app and let myself drift, asking a few people who seemed to know. Cool spots like that remind me of girls dressed up in Japan’s Harajuku Kogalu style, which translates to “child girl.” I am not sure if the Chinese style takes inspiration from that, but it’s similarly theatrical with intricate rules that I don’t know of, all I can see is a princess-like look. On the streets I see some very well-dressed people, even though they are a little overdressed for this tropical weather; sometimes, a lot of more is what’s trending in China.

At Donghua E Rd, which has rows of beautiful colonial manors, I entered a small café under the palisades. After a few minutes, an intellectual-looking guy drawing abstract diagrams in his notebook offered me a seat at his table after his girlfriend had left. His life as a studio musician for movies sounds cool. I don’t usually smoke, but I tried one of his. We talked a bit, then I ventured and looked at some shops, took photos like the one above. Could have made more of it if I ever go back, like activate that mirror in the photo, and the fashion models were eager to be photographed by a foreigner. And the locations with the mansions were super cool. Most people probably look more than buy. Somehow, I rounded back to the cute café, the attractive friends on the table across had left and Josh had smoked almost the whole pack. We talked more about art, China, Guangzhou, and after a while, Didi’ed back home.

There is another, and very funny moment with Mickey in class: She is working on her “Me” poster, an assignment of a portrait without using a face. I usually give this assignment first to get to know the students. A picture says a 100 words, especially when we don’t share the same spoken language.

From her set of sketches, she decides on one with spread legs of a lady with wings on top. The whole thing looks like a scissor with an eye in the fulcrum crotch. I tell her that this concept would make a great lesbian dating app icon because scissoring girls is a lesbian term, in case she didn’t know. Kind of clever with the wings and eye. As the background, she wants something with the future and time travel, and I tell her to think of how that would be solved in movies. We both rave about how much we like the movie Interstellar.

After a while, she asks me to take a look. I suggest setting the scissors with wings further from the background. But somehow she has merged the two layers already. As she clicks off the imaging app to see if she can track back any earlier versions, a video player appears on her desktop. The video that is playing are two boys and naked butts in the shower. She starts to squeak and almost falls off her chair, “I can explain, I can explain, it’s a TV show.”

It’s the end of the class and the day, and I am exhausted, but I am laughing so hard as I am getting ready to leave.

Mickey is really creative and funny and speaks amazing English, I reckon, from visiting an international school in GZ. The next class she skips, I got used to this here, but I skipped classes in high school, too. Only, this is supposed to be college.

The next day, Mikey posts the poster with the text. Honestly, to me, this is one of the best “Me posters”. She spells it “I am my hole world”. I explain to her what a Freudian slip is: an unintentional error that reveals a person’s hidden unconscious thoughts or desires.

Nanhai: Children of the Feed

Scene 1

Everyone looks tired at the the shuttle bus riding the bus from Guangzhou city to the Nanhai campus. My seat neighbor said she can’t read or get work done because it makes her dizzy when the bus is shaking and breaking, it’s a stop-and-go in the rush hour traffic. She stared, almost without blinking, mesmerized, hypnotized, into the brick in front of her for the entire two-hour ride. Because of traffic in the evening, it took a bit longer, twice as long, and everyone is eager get home. The bus turns and arrives through the wide gate with about 30 students and and hand full of faculty and administration. They check their phones after getting off the shuttle bus with one hand and roll their spinner carry-on with the other.

Scene 2

They merge into hordes of shuffling feet, all trotting in unison, illuminated faces bent over their devices, their faces motionless, glow faintly blue and red, lit by the endless feed of Little Red Book, thumb after thumb dragging upward in the same unconscious motion. gnaw, gnaw, gnome, can’t look into others’ eyes, must keep scrolling. Every head is down. Scroll. Pause. Scroll again. Their eyes flicker, unfocused, absorbing nothing, and they barely look alive. No one looks up. It’s quiet, no laughter, no screaming girls, and posing boys. There is no sound.

Scene 3

They file into the cafeteria, trays barely clattering, bodies sitting down, screens stay on. Necks stay bent. Lunch shuffled in, friends sit next to each other without any contact. It’s so quiet. I look around, and enjoy my tray of food, no communication, no laughter, mind-numbed zombies, not rotting, not violent, just… gone.
students, first clss (me being still sick), gifts from students: bean porridge, seaweed snacks, ginger candy

The campus is enormous, laid out in a ring, circling a low hill. Dorms and classroom blocks face inward, separated by ponds and sports fields. Google says there are somewhere between twenty-four and thirty-six thousand students here, but you wouldn’t know it by the silence.

My classes last three and a half hours. Halfway through, we’re released for a twenty-minute break. Twenty minutes is not enough time to reach the cafeteria across campus, where the only reliable coffee machine lives. There is a vending machine, technically, that is closer. Cue in the sad string quartet. It’s out of order. Always out of order.

At the center of everything, on top of the hill, stands the tower.

It looks like a UFO landing platform with a metallic sphere on top and a large needle extending upward, like a radio transmitter. The tower is abandoned and sealed off, a relic from another time. I tried to walk up once, but the paths were blocked, fenced, and watched by cameras everywhere. I didn’t dare cross the barriers.

The tower is decaying. Panels of its outer skin have fallen away, others hang loose, clinging by a final bolt, creaking in the wind. On a campus that prides itself on technology and efficiency, the rot feels deliberate, like something everyone has agreed to leave and not touch. Maybe there has been contact?

Students whisper theories. It used to be a restaurant. An observation deck. A landmark from a time before digital. When attention wasn’t harvested, and silence felt accidental rather than enforced, when a quite in a student cafeteria meant the tension in anticipation of the punchline.

I have another explanation. Whatever once happened on that hill up there at the tower required people to look outward, look up at the sky to the tower, or at each other.

The aliens came. They hovered. They scanned the campus. They saw the crowds moving in silence, eyes down, glowing blue, feeding endlessly. And whatever their plan was, they changed it.

They left.

One night, I hear some drums in the distance; this means hope.

Cafékaesque

In my 20-min break from teaching class, I run across campus to get a coffee. I’m really running; it’s that far to reach a Luckin Coffee branch, praying to get there before the line, but hell, they’ve already ordered ahead with the app, which only works if you have a Chinese phone number. So, the barista, not showing that he is annoyed with me holding up the line, hears me ask for a regular coffee, black, no sugar, not that kind of despair with foam of smancy ‘chinos, just coffee, black, yes, hot, of course, it’s coffee; I mean, I just want a coffee.

He explains how I can download the app; yes, a-p-p. He switches gloves to touch my screen, needs to link a bank card, gets approval from my bank, wow, it works, and the next several steps, all in Chinese, which I could never do. He eventually comes across a menu, more of a meadow, and scrolls through the menu. He waits and, yes, he finds the coffee, then selects the options: none, then hot or cold. Well, we established that, and now he just has a few more steps to go to payment: approve, enter face scan, but it doesn’t work. He considers using the code or switching to Alipay or Apple Pay, but not using credit cards. The line gets anxious; he’s about to give up and give me the coffee for free. Oh, wait, I connect using his phone’s hotspot, he unlocked it from his phone, and his face scan works flawlessly. Oh, then I had to disable my VPN, it loads, maybe I just need some coffee, for the face scan, and wait, it goes through. I will dance for this coffee now; I can cry. Let’s run back to class. i trynna not be f**in laté.

Facial Recognition

Entering and exiting the campus, one lines up for the face scan, no ID card required, easy.
The only snafu: I am, much likely, taller then the student in front of me. So, I have to duck, otherwise it scans my face before theirs. The guards already have a laugh about it, every time that happens.

Kingpin

At the last class in Nanhai, the department head asked if he could have a few minutes. I like having a guest, everyone pays extra attention, we get into it easier, and that makes me look good. He also seemed like a competent teacher himself.

Earlier, he had warned my translator and co-teacher that some students were slacking, especially one “chubby” guy, as she put it.

After I finished my presentation on storytelling, a topic that I always get quite excited about, the department head steps to the front and launched into a 15-minute tirade, like a stampede. In Chinese, I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but I already knew that it was about the attendance issue and taking classes more seriously. The students in the large class get smaller and smaller. They are somewhat immature, but I don’t blame them; as they say, “don’t grow up, it’s a trap.” Some of the students started to look quite frightened.

A few minutes in, a large guy suddenly ran into the classroom and sits down at the last row, shoving some other boys out of the way, He is wearing slippers, a black baggy sweater and jogging pants. His curly hair is wild, as if he just got up. I didn’t remember ever seeing him in class before. This had to be that elusive student, and someone must have alerted him that the department head was here. Still, apparently, he hadn’t been marked absent before. I’m pretty sure I would have noticed him, he was twice the size of some of the other boys. My guess is that he’d had other students attend class for him. With 56 students, who can really tell?

Pages of the collage book I keep making