January 19, 2000
Swimming in Manchuria
I'd like to start off this edition of the Budget Files with Benet Vincent, who wrote 'A Farewell to Russia' in the Budget Press Review #3. A Brit, he has spent the last few months teaching in China, and he sent in this report.
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Richard has got a puncture. I think he got it making a short cut across a field. This would not be so much of a problem if we were in town, where bicycle repair men lurk on virtually every corner, but we are on the outskirts of a small village some 25km away, it is 3 o'clock on a Sunday afternoon, and we have still some way to go to reach our destination, the 'local' swimming pool.
It is ironic that something as mundane as a puncture should hold us up at this stage. We are on bicycles rather than some motorized form of transport because our hosts would not allow us to buy motorbikes or a car, saying they are too dangerous. My limited experience of travel on Manchurian roads has convinced me they are right. If there is any rule to using the roads here it is the bigger your vehicle, the less attention you have to pay to other road users. Crossing the road can be hazardous in any country, but when you are not sure which direction traffic is likely to be coming in it adds a new dimension to this everyday experience. If you add to this the sheer variety of vehicles using Chinese roads, from ox-drawn carts and tricycles to high performance cars and large lorries, not to mention that the use of pavements seems to be an alien concept to many pedestrians, then it really is amazing that there are not more accidents.
Fortunately, once we are out of town the roads are much quieter and on the main road there is a special lane for bicycles. We are only held up by the cornhusks which are strewn over the country road at various points, and by our lack of fitness.
One may wonder why we have had to cycle so far to reach a swimming pool, but for some reason the only one in our town is closed. The next nearest pool is found in the middle of a leisure complex in the middle of the countryside and maybe it is there to preserve its exclusivity, but at 30 yuan, or just over $4, a time, which represents about a day's pay, this hardly seems necessary.
Our most immediate problem, however, is how to travel the last few kilometers. Fortunately we come across a rickshaw for hire which is not only able to accommodate Richard but can also carry his bicycle by means of two hooks attached to the back of the chassis. One would have thought they had been put there for just such a purpose. They drive off and I follow, checking that the bicycle does not fall off, and sincerely hoping it does not as it will be rather difficult to avoid.
At the swimming pool we collect our locker keys and get changed. In the entrance lobby some prostitutes are waiting for potential customers. Although prostitution is by all accounts illegal the authorities seem to turn a blind eye to what goes on. In every swimming pool, sauna, and karaoke bar I have been to there are rooms which one can retire to with a girl and no attempt is made to conceal this- the price is just added on to your bill when you leave. Our host's brother, a prominent local judge, hearing we wanted to meet Chinese girls, even offered to treat us but we declined his kind invitation.
The swimming pool is in fact very well appointed with a karaoke room, a shop, a sauna, and a hairdresser. We relax between lengths at a poolside table drinking tea brought to us by the attendants and smoking cigarettes while we admire the huge mosaic on the wall at the end of the pool depicting naked Chinese youths sporting in a lily pond. I cannot work out whether the stir our arrival has created is due to the fact that we are foreigners or because we can swim quite well. The few Chinese in the water seem most ill at ease and one man is even wearing inflated armbands to keep afloat. Amongst these people Richard spots two of his students but they are too shy to say anything more than hello. They can however solve our problem of how to get home. On our way out they see that Richard is handicapped by his puncture and offer him a lift in their car. His bicycle dangles precariously out of the boot as they drive off, leaving me to find my own way back, this time by a shorter route. I will suffer for this tomorrow.
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In case you haven't noticed, recently there has been a marked increase in outside writers in these Budget Files. This has actually been a lazy effort on my part to bring in other people's experiences, and to therefor lighten my load. But besides the purely selfish reasons, this is an attempt to return, in a way, to what the Budget Files kinda started out as, which was a travel journal. Since I now have two jobs, I don't really see myself going anywhere for awhile (although I really need it!). I used to get letters from friends who told me they were travelling vicariously through me. Now I am travelling vicariously through others, and you can too.
With all this in mind, I am sending out an open call for submissions to the Budget Files. If you're on the road and have a story to tell, by all means send it in! If you have an old travel story to tell, send it in! If you have some political manifesto that you fell the world (or at least the few hundred that get this) need to hear, send it in! Whatever you want to say that you feel fits in with the general theme of these Budget Files, don't hesitate to e-mail it on over.
But don't worry, even if other writers do send stuff in, I'll always continue to throw in my two-cents on whatever I feel like as well.
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Well actually, I got a little travel thing that I find interesting.
I live in San Diego, but my friends all live in Rivercide, about 100 or so miles north. About an hour and a half drive. And about five hours on mass transit.
Now whenever I am lucky enough to get a ride there, I get bored out of my mind. I have driven this road so many times already, and all I can think of doing is taking a nap and hopefully waking up when it's all over.
But when I take public transit, (which consists of a bus ride {or two}, two trains {or three}, even though it takes forever, I actually feel like I'm travelling. So what if I'm just going from one Southern California suburb to another, from one suburban train station to another, hell, I only leave the suburbs for twenty minutes, there's just something about it that in some small way makes me feel like I'm taking a trip. I'm travelling. Maybe it's just the clackity-clack of the train. Maybe it's the multiple transfers. Maybe it's sharing a seat with someone. I don't know. But it's there. I can feel it.
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And last, but certainly not least;
A BUDGET PRESS ANNOUNCEMENT
OUT NOW! A NEW BUDGET PRESS PUBLICATION!
Budget Press ushers in the new millenium with PISS TALKS by Harry R. Wilkens. Harry was born in an American garrison town in Germany following WWII, and never left Europe. He now lives in Geneva, Switzerland, and is the editor of the 'Dockernet' poetry newsletter. This collection combines my two favorite things, poetry and politics. Harry sucks out the truth hidden in the world and throws it in your face in a no holds barred manner that can't help but enter your brain and fuck shit up. The hypocrisy inherent on this planet is fair game for Harry's sharp poetic words, starting in Albania, to Palestine, to Africa, to Helmut Kohl's dick. But he leaves his sharpest jabs for the US and the West, the 'Land of Peace and Freedom'. I cannot recommend this collection any stronger. This is the type of stuff that I wish I could write. And included are two poems accompanied with Spanish translations. Order your copy today, and remember it's free! All you need to do is send me two stamps and it's yours! Check out the cover and one of his poems at www.angelfire.com/ca/bpress, then send your stamps to Budget Press, 2764 Caminito Cedros, Del Mar, CA 92014.
I also want to recommend you send away for an issue or two of the 'Dockernet' newsletter. This is a truly international publication, with poets from America, Algeria, Denmark, Switzerland, Japan, India, Colombia, France, England, Germany, Chile, Portugal, Ireland, Canada, Spain, Palestine, Turkey, and Russia having appeared in past issues. The newsletter is an offshoot of the 'Docker Movement' for free, non-academic poetry accessible to everybody. It was started in 1997 in response to a poetry festival Harry and his co-founders attended in Macedonia, which left them with a bitter taste in their mouth.
The Docker philosophy of free poetry is a philosophy that I share, and, like Budget Press, all they ask for is some cash for postage, which from Switzerland can be quite expensive. But for any of you that truly love poetry and/or politics, this newsletter cannot be missed. The address is Harry R. Wilkens, 86 rue de Montbrilliant, CH-1202 Geneva, Switzerland. You will not regret the cost of postage. I guarantee it.
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No letter land today. I guess nobody loves me. Until next time.
#39
February 2, 2000
The Street I Called Home
One of the goals I've set for myself before I start grad school (soon, I hope) is to read all three volumes of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's three-volume work 'The Gulag Archipelago'. I had a student back in Moscow who kept telling me that I could not really know anything about Russia until I read it all. And I had kinda already figured that before he told me. It is such a seminal work that there could be no way that I could study Soviet history without having committed the book(s) to memory. So last month I started volume one. At the rate I'm going, I should be finished with it all in April.
Briefly, the work is about the string of work/death camps strewn about Russia, mostly in Siberia, during Russia's time. Of course, in a work that covers some 1,800 pages, it gets a little more in depth than that, but I wanted to point out the one thing that has most stuck in my mind after reading the first 400 pages. It has nothing to do about torture methods, or Soviet law (or lack thereof), or prison conditions, all of which I have read about. No, it's something that hits much closer to home than that. And when I mean home, I mean it literally.
It seems that the street I lived on in Moscow was named after the co-founder and second-in-command of the Checka, better known by its final Soviet moniker, the KGB. My street was named after a Latvian named Latsis. A man who wrote 'In the interrogation do not seek evidence or proof that the person…acted …against Soviet power. The first questions should be: What is his class, what is his origin, what is his education and upbringing? These are the questions that must determine the fate of the accused.' A man who compiled the statistics of the secret polices activity during it's formative years and concluded that 'only' 87,000 people had been arrested and 8,339 of them shot without trial. And these are the numbers for a year and a half in about 1/3 of Russia. And he helped to create it all. He helped to create the organs and methods of fear that Stalin perfected, and which would soon enslave an entire country. Yeah, and I lived on the street named after him.
I guess this shouldn't really surprise me, since I lived only a few blocks from the Moscow-Volga Canal, which was built by forced labor and during which I'm sure tens of thousands died (see Budget File #21: The City as Graveyard). Or considering the bloody, repressive sweep of Russian history, the thousands of place names named after people with far more blood on their hands. But, even though I'm now seven months removed, I realize more and more just how much Russia is fully saturated in the cult of blood and power, and how this cult continues to seep in closer and closer to me. Sure, the beaches of San Diego are far removed from the graveyard that is Russia, but still it hits me just as deep as if I was still there.
I mean, living in Moscow, theirs is absolutely no way to avoid being constantly reminded of your brutal history, of how for hundreds and hundreds of years the people have been treated as nothing more that cattle, to be used and disposed of as seen fit by whoever is in charge. The war in Chechnya is just the latest example. And even though one might not even notice it, that one lives on a street named after a mass murderer, I would think that it does slowly sink into the subconscious, and create a cynicism that we in the west only think we have. And the willingness, throughout history, to allow oneself to be treated with the utmost disdain and lack of respect, not only of your spiritual of intellectual self, but of your right to live.
But I am just an outside observer, relying on stuff I've read and memories of a very short period of time walking the streets. I can try to comprehend and make sense of things, but I know it's really impossible. There will never be a time when I will truly be able to say that I understand Russia, it's history, politics, or people. And I think that's the reason why I love it all so much. It's just so damn crazy. Unfathomable. I will never be able to find the answers, but at least I'll be kept busy trying. And I'll never get bored looking for the one thing that might finally make the puzzle complete. That solves the riddle that is Russia. Reading Solzhenitsyn answers a lot of questions I had about the Soviet system, how it was created, how it worked. But it also leaves open the questions that really matter, the questions that even he cannot answer. And they are the simplest questions that exist.
How could this happen?
Why did the people allow it to happen?
My only hope is that the Russia people have finally, or will soon be able, to answer these questions themselves. And that the history that is still to come may be drastically different.
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The one thing I love the most about my job is that I teach all kinds of people from all over the world. This allows me to learn about places and things that I would never learn elsewhere. I learn the most when I give the students a writing assignment (which of course they love) and I then read what they've written. And every once in awhile, I get an essay back that really makes me think. I want to share one with you now. At the conclusion of one lesson, I asked my students to describe the 'soul of their city' as homework. I got a lot of cool essays, but there was one that hit me the most. I would like to share it with you (albeit with the grammar cleaned up a bit). It was written by Kaoru Nigaki, a lady in her mid-twenties from Japan, and it reminds us of one of many instances that when it comes to mass murderers, the US has a history as well.
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My city, Hiroshima, has a sad and cruel memory. As you know, many people died and the city was destroyed by an atomic bomb. Because of the war, we have some unique rules and ideas.
On August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped. Many, many people died and still now some of them are sick. So every August 6th, we have a ceremony to respect them. At 8:15 we have to pray for one minute even if we are working. All of the public buildings are closed (for example, the library, pool, civic center).
The patients who are sick [from radiation] have received money from the government, and there are many places to take care of them. Of course they can use them for free. Taking a bus is free.
Recently, the patients are getting older and older. We still need to respect them and continue to have the ceremony.
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So there's an uplifting Budget File. Don't you feel all happy and stuff? I just want to say one thing before heading off to letter land. I called John McCain months ago! See how smart he was to skip Iowa all together, going back to that stupid straw poll this summer! I mean, look how Bradley got whacked in Iowa. If he had skipped it, he would have been hailed as a victor in New Hampshire after only losing by percentage points. Now he's lost two in a row and his campaign is going down. I wouldn't be surprised if in four years the Iowa caucuses became even more irrelevant than they are now. It would continue the trend that started quite a while back. Remember Tom Harkin? He won the Iowa caucuses a couple elections back. And do you have any idea who he is? But history always remembers the New Hampshire winner. And now, off to letter land.
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I'm still reading the Budget Files, still passing them along to the alt.culture.cyber-psychos newsgroup for everyone there (we temporarily fell off Usenet, but made it back). Thought about them on New Year's Eve when the public radio station I listen to nearly choked me. They had BBC News on, and the news topic was Yeltsin's resignation. Then they said not much about New Year's was coming up so they were going back to the music. I thought "What the Hell? They're so caught up in the New Year's hype that Yeltsin's resignation isn't big enough news?" Turned out they were switching over to BBC once an hour for brief Y2K reports, and had stayed there for some of the Yeltsin news but then left the rest for the regular news hours. *Phew*
Reading about travel is nice for me right now. Ever since the first year I began planning my Death Equinox convention, and for every year of it, I haven't been able to go ANYWHERE. Fortunately I live close to the mountains, so at least I can escape into them, but leaving the state hasn't been possible.
Much like I keep thinking "Maybe I'll win a sweepstakes and go to..."
*Sigh*
You know who you might find interesting, who is also in San Diego, is my friend Mike H. I don't think he's really been much of anywhere, besides out here for my convention, in a while. He used to write travel stories though. Wrote some very heart-breaking ones on Brazil, and on Rwanda during the "cleansing". He returned from the latter with severe shock trauma after wading through all of those dead bodies and living in the desolation. I was a bit ticked off when he told me he was going there right when they were killing Red Cross and journalists (fortunately it "calmed down" by the time he arrived), but also glad in that news coverage which isn't pandering to SOMETHING can be so difficult to come by.
Of course when he returned I was trying to kick heroin and flipping out over a dying friend-mirror, and he was burning his clothes in the park and taking long showers because he couldn't get rid of the smell of death. Interesting year, that was.
# Jasmine Sailing # The Blasted One #
# We are the Streets of the Jellyfish # Become a Blasted Disciple #
# http://cyberpsychos.netonecom.net/cnidaria #
# "Think Cnidaria" # Extend your Cnidocytes today #
# Our Blasted Lady of the Jellyfish, First Church of Cnidaria #
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Until next time.
Budget Files
