I’m spending the afternoon with a friend who has chosen to go back to college. While I understand her motivations, I have to say it’s a move I have never seriously considered.

While I cherish the learning that happened in college, I always found the American academic community a little too isolated from the real world. As a result, it seems a little too self-serving. Rare is the teacher who will tell you, “Here’s something you’ll need to know when you get a job.” More likely they are going to say, “There just aren’t enough people in this world with a functional understanding of Breton’s contributions to modern mores.” And that’s where we differ. I can’t see how such an understanding would be functional, much less why, with all the troubles in this world, a person would choose that to complain about. I do, however, know I bought into this sort of thinking back when I was college myself. I drank the Kool-Aid, as they would say, for at least the first couple of years. But then the facade began to wear a little thin. College started to feel like that person who always knew all the answers, the one that would always trump your stories with a better one.

At the time, I wasn’t really concerned with figuring out what I didn’t like about college. Instead, I just focused on getting out. It doesn’t matter what’s wrong, I told myself, if I’m not a part of it. So while a lot of my peers trudged on through the chaos, anesthetizing themselves with alcohol and garden-variety inhalants, I took the pain full on, worked hard and freed myself a semester early. This nose-to-the-grindstone attitude may have made me miss some good times, but I definitely avoided a lot of bad. And once I was out, I never looked back. I swore off further education, and blessed the eyes of those who struck down the path of post-graduate degrees. After all these years, I’ve never looked back, never bothered to get to the root of what didn’t like about college. Well, this afternoon the chickens have come home to roost.

My friend and I are sitting around a huge dining room table that is covered with papers—her schoolwork and my writing. We are sitting inside, drinking coffee on a day better spent on bicycles, because we are each dedicated to what we’re doing. My friend has a mid-term coming up, and part of it is three take-home essays. The class is economics. It’s a core class—meaning it has nothing to do with her major, it’s just something the college board thinks she should know a little something about. She’s an artist, gone back to school to learn skills that will help her be successful in her career. This article is called Fairness and the Assumptions of Economics.

Halfway through my first cup of coffee, my friend hands me the article with a frown. “Does this make sense to you?” she asks. I take it and read the opening paragraph:

The advantages and disadvantages of expanding the standard economic model by more realistic behavior assumptions have received much attention. The issue raised in this article is whether it is useful to complicate—or perhaps to enrich—the model of the profit-seeking firm by considering the preferences that people have for being treated fairly and for treating others fairly.

Have I mentioned she’s paying for the privilege of reading this nearly indecipherable article? Because that’s really the icing on the cake here: the salary of the idiot torturing her with this useless reading is paid directly out of her own pocket.

Anyway, after a long and arduous conversation, we manage to translate this into English. To save you the effort, it basically means:

Lots of people are talking about what would happen if economics considered human behavior a factor. In this article, we'll talk about how a policy for treating people fairly might affect a company's profits.

That’s all. Really. But if this is all they meant to say, the question remains: why the hell didn’t they just say what they meant? Almost half the words in that paragraph are eight letters or more. It feels like the product of an obsession with complication. Instead of spending so much time with their thesaurus muddling what they’re saying, why don’t they just attempt to communicate clearly? I can only think of two reason why the author didn’t: they are either mean or they are weak.

To be clear, I don’t mean to imply that this particular person started out that way. No, this isn’t that personal of an attack. What I’m saying is they are a product of too much education. My suspicion is that academic environment, and especially the language they use in there, makes people that way. Why not? If you spend a lot of time time in roadside bars, chances are, after a few years, you’ll be given to cussing and smashing people in the face. And the truth is, thanks to internships, fellowships and the sort, very few people whose name bears the trailing letters of higher education got to spend much of their formative years outside of academia. I’m sure many modern scholars, while perhaps good people going in, inherited these small-minded personality traits during their tenure.

Later in the afternoon, we’re onto an article titled How Neuroscience Can Inform Economics . There we encounter a clue:

Parallelism also provides redundancy that decrease the brain's vulnerability to injury. When neurons are progressively destroyed in a region, the consequences are typically gradual rather than sudden ("graceful degradation").


Translated to English, this says that when your brain is functioning on both the conscious and subconscious level, it suffers less wear and tear. Took a lot of effort to do that translation. Wasted effort, because that statement is completely off-topic. The article’s subject clearly states it’s about how Neuroscience can inform Economics, not about brain health. And I think that’s one of the reasons it’s written in the cloudy way that it is.

See, I can’t help but remember what sort of snide, bright-red comment would get dashed my own paper if I were to stray off-topic as this person did. Mistakes like that don’t just lower your grade, but your ego as well. But here I am seeing someone go completely off subject, and not just in some undergrad’s paper, but one that was written by one PhD and handed out by another.

What’s the difference? Why can they get away with it when I couldn’t? Because somewhere along the path to “higher learning,” this author determined that if they hide everything they write inside a pandemonium of fifty-cent words, they are camouflaging their mistakes. After all, what college professor would invest the time to translate one complicated paper when they have such a big stack of them on their desk. Besides, how much real interest can they have in their student’s point of view on a subject the professor wrote, or practically wrote, the book on.

There’s a Hemingway quote out there, I can’t remember it verbatim and can’t seem to turn it up, but it goes something like, “When you write plainly, anyone can see when you fake.” That says a lot about Hemingway’s straight-forward way of writing, and it also says a lot about those who obfuscate what they are saying with the smoke and mirrors of complex language (obfuscate, by the way, means to muddle or to perplex.) In they end, people who write in such obfuscating language are weak because they won’t take a clear stand on what they are saying, and mean because they make others suffer for their own lack of confidence.

The same sort of weak and mean as the professor who handed my friend this printout, who could easily been motivated by the need to prove how smart she was because she could understand things the students couldn’t. Or maybe she was just trying to distract her classroom, give them busy work so they couldn’t take up too much of her time. After all, the teaching of students is really just a irksome distraction from the college teacher’s most important job: writing their own horrific jumble of Oxford-unabridged confusionness.

The mood in Brooklyn was sedate even before the rain came. In coffee shops and restaurants I ease drop on conversations, but people are only chatting about everyday stuff: their lives, travel, and health. The door of my favorite bagel shop has one of the last remaining posters around, a faded picture of the twin towers with the words emblazoned at the bottom, “Never forget.”

In Manhattan, no less than three presidential hopefuls attend the ground zero ceremony. But this year they have little to say about the war on terrorism. Some don’t say anything at all. These days, the news is Iraq and the mess we got ourselves into over there. I think many of our politicians would prefer we do forget, not about the attack, but about the panic and selfish actions that followed. For months now, candidates on both sides have been scrubbing the blood off their hands. But while some may seize at the higher ground, for America there’s no way to clean the slate. The number dead from our retaliation dwarfs that of the World Trade Center collapse. As promised, we pushed back hard. And on a rainy day like today, it’s hard not to feel guilty about that.

Most of us are no longer angry, or even sure who we might be angry at. The easy answers have been muddled and the call to arms is over-tired. I know that will never forget, but I feel differently this year. What started as national tragedy has become a quiet, personal thing. I find myself remembering the events of the day as images, feeling again the emotions I felt that day but no long ascribing greater meaning to them. Now, finally, I am content to just be sad about those who are gone.

And to softly hope it will never happen again.

It had been a rough day, but that’s no excuse. And though it is no excuse, it had still been a rough day.

It started the day before, in Xi’an, checking out of my hotel at noon and dilling around for six hours, too uninspired to be productive. Then I went to the train station for my overnight train.

On the train, the bed is surprisingly comfortable, which isn’t to say actually comfortable, just less uncomfortable than expected. There are four beds in my berth, but only one other is occupied. My roommate is a plump Chinese woman who leaves the strobe-like TV on, but not too-too late. So I get some sleep, in tiny stages.

We pull into Beijing at dawn. I have to get across town to catch my next train. This is a big town, four times the size of L.A. Twice the population of New York. My schedule is tight; there’s no time to spare.

There is some confusion at the taxi stand, I can’t get my words recognized. There is a lot of noise. My Mandarin is poor, and no one is making the effort to understand me. Finally, one man tries: he digs through my bad accent and my mispronunciations. He uncovers where I want to go and tells my driver. This hasn’t been an exceptional effort, comparatively, but after two months in China, I’m sick of the confusion.

My connection is missed by minutes. This was the morning train. The next will be mid-afternoon. And it’s the slow one, taking almost twice as long, arriving after dark. There’s some confusion buying the ticket, but it gets bought. There’s some confusion storing my luggage, but it gets stored. I dill around Beijing for five hours, too woozy to be productive.

As I dill, I consider my train ticket. It seems too cheap, but I can’t be sure. Everything is too cheap in this country. It’s like playing with monopoly money. But I get worried, nervous. I’ve heard stories of the hard-seat class.

Back at the train station, I grab every railway uniform I meet, ask them about my ticket and seat class. Much confusion, no results.

I calm myself. It’s my tendency to worry, often when there’s no reason to. I see my train number displayed over a glass double-door. There’s a bike lock between the two door handles, holding them shut. Through the glass, I can see the track, thirty feet down, at the bottom of steep stairs. My train is right there, waiting. It’s big, thirteen cars. There are only about twenty people standing with me. There are only thirty minutes before departure. So it isn’t going to be so bad: I’m going somewhere remote, and the train will be nearly empty.

I hear my train being announced. I move to the doors, but no one comes to unlock them. People around me get anxious. We wait. Then I see it: A stream of people, a bubbling mass flows across a raised walkway on the other end of the platform. They pour down the steps.

The guy next to me curses, takes off down the hallway. I stare through the door. I watch in horror as the dingy crowd floods onto the platform, spilling out like paint, covering it completely. I can’t believe how many people there are, how small the train; it’s only thirteen cars. My eyes fall on the bike lock, holding the doors closed.

“Shit,” I say, and follow the guy who just left.

Across the station is the entry hall, the way down to my platform. People from the next train have spread out to block those of us trying to get to this one. They don’t move, rather they laugh at our efforts to get past them. Everyone is pushing, so I push. Everyone shoves, so I shove. I drag a chunky roller-bag stuffed with fifty pounds of junk. It’s wider than I am. It bounces and jounces behind me, rolling across shoes and bare feet.

Finally, I break through the crowd.

I’m on the raised walkway, heading to the stairs. Thirty feet below me, the platform is empty but for a trickle of people, an ant line of stragglers. Whatever happened is over. Only the shouting is left.

The train is old and green, like something out of a war movie. Black smoke wafts from rusted chimneys that jut from the roof of every car, coal fires for heat. I look at my ticket. My assigned car has a high number; it’s toward the back. I stroll down the platform, trying to convince myself there’s nothing to worry about. I brave quick glances into the cars I pass. They are full, overfull. The last car is the worst. The last car is my car.

My car is so full that people are sitting in the doorway. They don’t offer to stand or try to get out of the way; they might lose their seat. I haven’t even stepped on board and I consider aborting: the train, my destination, everything. But I press on, push myself forward. All or nothing. No giving up means no regrets.

I hop my roller bag over the guy sitting in the doorway. I get two steps into the car, turn into the main cabin, and stop. This car is the car for everyone else. Everyone who can’t get afford a seat. Or just doesn’t care. For a measly twenty yuan—two dollars and fifty cents—you can cram in here for the seven hour train ride. The seat number my ticket is useless. People and baggage overflow the wooden benches, the aisle, the tables. People are probably hanging from the ceiling, but I can’t tell because up there the cigarette smoke is too thick.

I stand frozen as four hundred people grow quiet, turn to me. They stare, watching, anticipating. They know something is coming. The joke has been set up, nothing left but the punch-line.

The mega bitch takes over with a flash of white. I am outside the train in a few swift jerks, leaving behind laughter and a couple complaints.

I am outside of me, watching myself tear across the platform, dragging my large roller-bag, as large as the American ego.

A conductor stands outside everycar: alert, attentive, blue uniforms as sharp as the military in dress. The mega bitch demands of each if they speak English. She does this twice: first in English, then in Mandarin. Further down the platform, only Mandarin; she’s seen the futility of the other way. At the center of the train is the top guy, the Train General. He’s older, his uniform is decked out. He doesn’t speak English, he is no help. But inside the train, the seats are getting better, and the cars less crowded. Forward is where we wants to be, so forward she goes. The car numbers count down.

She asks the next conductor if she speaks English. The answer comes in English: “no.” The mega bitch is confused, the conductor laughs. It’s a good laugh, not making fun of me, but sharing the joke. I am back, no longer outside watching myself behave. The mega bitch is gone. Diffused, I think at the time, but I am wrong.

After some confusion, the conductor gets me on the train. A decent car, low number. There is no seat yet, so I stand in the corner. The train pulls out. I stand for another half-hour, leaning against the window. The General arrives, tells me to give him money. I do and I’m led further forward still, all the way to car number one. The best class, with a bed to boot.

I relax. I nap. My three roommates are curious about me, friendly. We cannot talk beyond a few broken sentences, but we try and have a good time trying. The scenery becomes beautiful, I can see why I came this way.

It’s a long journey. I phone my hotel to let them know I’ll be checking in late. They speak some English. This is a good sign, a lot of them don’t. But they only speak some English, and there is confusion. I am quoted a price two and a half times what is on my reservation, and the hotel wasn’t cheap to start with. I worry I’m being ripped off. The mega bitch rises inside me, but she finds no outlet: the phone is too limited, the connection isn’t good. I shove her aside and say we’ll figure it out when I get there. I tell myself this will be easy to work out in person, but myself is a cynical one, and remains unconvinced.

The train chugs on. The sun sets. My destination is reached. I disembark meekly, wary of those who saw my earlier performance. I know I am easy to spot here, white and tall. I don’t need more pointing and laughing. China has provided plenty of that already. I escape into a taxi, and to my hotel.

It turns out there has been a little confusion at the hotel. Just a little. They’ve not yet matched my name with my reservation, so they are insisting I pay more, the walk-in rate. It could have been all worked out politely, but it’s been a rough day. I know that’s no excuse. It could have been worked out politely, but the mega bitch is on a hair trigger: she comes out shooting.

I watch it all happen. I watch the screaming, the disgusted looks, pent-up anger released like a tornado. I watch the innocent, frustrated hotel clerk lay her head on the counter over and over again. I watch all of this, but I’ll never repeat the details. Trust me, they are bad.

I think anyone who has traveled a long time, perhaps longer than they should have, has been here, where I am, watching myself make an ass of myself. I think I’ve probably been here before, but I’ve blocked it out, neither caring to nor seeing the reason to dwell on my own failures.

Somehow I end up in a room. A nice room in a nice hotel full of nice people. I don’t deserve to be here, but deserving has nothing to do with success. Sometimes this works in my favor.

This undeserved reward only punctuates that I have committed a crime. I should have known the Chinese staff would be nothing but helpful. I did know. I have been here long enough to learn that.

I am unable to atone. In my rage, I didn’t see my victim. And now I can’t distinguish her from the rest of the helpful staff. I glance over every time I pass the reception, hoping for a look of scorn or a scowl. Something to mark the one I must apologize to.

But the hate I merit is masked beneath rigid politeness. I can do nothing but add the burden of my guilt to my already overstuffed roller bag.

 
look at me, like you’ve never seen a white man
look at me, like a relative back from the dead
look at me and rubberneck, or stop in your tracks
look at me, China, not as a country
but as a billion pair of eyes

look at me closely
see the emblem
and not the man

Not 40 miles from bustling high-tech Hong Kong is sleepy crumbling Macau. You wouldn’t notice much difference to look at an atlas or a history book; the two places seem similar enough be twins. But in the flesh, they are as different as night and day.

Geographically speaking, they have sprung from the same DNA. Both of these city-states are comprised of a cluster of islands. Both were acquired by European powers through force, Macau by Portugal in 1557 and Hong Kong by England in 1842. And both of them were returned to Chinese control in the late nineties as Special Administrative Regions (SARs.)

Each has only a narrow stripe of water, no wider than the Mississippi, dividing them from China. But they have more in common with each other than with the mainland. They both speak Cantonese. They both drive on the wrong side of the road. They both have a large number of European residents: about one for every five Chinese. They both have local TV stations that broadcast in English. Their people idolize the Japanese, whereas the mainlanders shun the Japanese and favor the Koreans.

So I was shocked to step off the Hong Kong ferry and into the strange world of Macau.

The first thing I noticed about Macau is what it doesn’t have. Gone are the rude and inescapable crowds. Gone is the glow of shiny towering buildings, competing with each other in height, radical design, and candle-power.

In only a few parts of Macau do you even notice a crowd, and it only gets cramped around some ill-conceived repair work, where the sidewalk is reduced to a splinter. The only tall buildings in Macau—with the exception of the cement-cast Macau Tower—are casinos. Most of the casinos are the sort of two-bit joints one associates with sin and poverty. But right now, the island’s principal occupation seems to be building huge new gambling palaces. Many of these have a Vegas pedigree, like The Venetian and The Sands.

As for the rest of Macau, well… Both cities have economically turbulent areas, but Macau is dominated by them. Leave the small but tidy path that runs through the casinos, the main shopping district, and the few historical offerings, and the place becomes an endless ghetto. Cement high-rises are stained with dirt and paint. Road are filled with as much gravel as the original pavement. All around the islands, there are giant inexplicable holes in the ground.

Evidence of crime is everywhere in Macau, from the security cameras all over my hotel to the fully barred apartment porches—even six stories up. There is a piece of paper taped to the windows of Macau’s only Starbucks declaring, “Burglar Alarm Installed.” The sign feels personal, telling whoever it is that broke in the last time they had better not try it again. No doubt the west’s largest coffee chain—with branches smeared across Hong Kong—were shocked to find that ten years of Chinese rule had done little to against the four centuries of Portuguese influence.

And I think it is in the lineage of these two cities where we can find the answer to their deep-rooted differences. The British like to make money, and they are good at it. They turned Hong Kong into the gateway to Asia, a neutral ground where manufactures of everything from clothing to electronics clamor to get their good into Western markets. And the British took their modest cut.

Portugal, on the other hand, is often referred to as the “the third world of Europe.” They have enough of their own troubles without having to worry about some run down island on the other side of the planet. No doubt the administrators they sent ran things the way they did at home, with little more aspiration than to squeeze a few patacas out of their ancient colony. In fact, walking around Macau, I experience déjà vu from my trip to Lisbon. Even half-way round the world, the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree.

And perhaps this is why, while the British had to be cajoled into giving up Hong Kong, Portugal offered Macau back several times before China begrudgingly took it from them.