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Jon at the Cock and Bull bar, Kota Kinabalu, October 2010

Here’s the second column from our straight guy columnist, Jon Morales.

polaris: Jon, have you ever seen any Richard Linklater films? Like Wong Kar-wai, Linklater doesn’t seem to appeal to heterosexual men’s cinematic taste. Maybe it’s the talkies.

Jon: I’ve seen Before Sunset, Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly, and The School of Rock. They’re not bad, I especially liked Waking Life out of those but as you said, they’re very verbose. I tend to prefer movies and literature that lean towards understatement and ambiguity, like WKW’s films or Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory of Prose. In my opinion Linklater’s films tend to spend a lot of time talking at the viewer rather than showing. Many of them feel more like a lecture than story to me.

sirius black: i’m currently in love and in a relationship with this wonderful, wonderful girl and gawd knows i couldn’t ask for anything else at the moment. what i am afraid of, however, is that the love spark we both have for each other will eventually die out. i know i shouldn’t be thinking that way but i just can’t help it, what with all the relationships i had in the past going the same route. the question is: how should we keep the fire burning?

Jon: You can’t. It come when it come, it’ll go when it go. The things that she does that thrill you may do so until tomorrow or until the day you die and vice versa; just treat what you have now as a gift. I believe there’s only a very limited set of things in life that we can control as people; feelings and attractions are not among them. I know it sounds rather sickeningly Zen, but don’t waste your todays worrying about tomorrow. That’s how you ended up regretting your yesterdays. I should send that to Hallmark. I’ll make a mint.

The Bund, Shanghai, 2008. Photo by JZ. Carlson of the Empire of Snacks gave us a tour of the city: we went to all the places mentioned in Lust, Caution and Empire of the Sun.

geekwad: You’ve mentioned living in China. I just got an offer to work in Shanghai for a year for onshore assignment, but I’m having second thoughts. My hesitation seems to come from my unwillingness to give up censor-free internet, cleaner air, talking to people without using flash cards or hand signals, and personal space. Are my fears unfounded? (Also, is RMB 13,000 monthly allowance enough to survive, or should I ask for more?)

Jon: The first month I moved to China I didn’t own a bed. I had to pay three months of rent on a single month’s pay. I couldn’t front the money for a bed so I spent the first couple of weeks sleeping on the couch that came with our semi-furnished apartment. My roommate, my former co-captain on my university rugby team, would come into the living room every morning, glance out the window at the smog as I rubbed the previous night’s back-alley Tsingdaos from my eyes and greet me by saying “Just another beautiful day in paradise” before stepping out into another ‘cloudy’ Beijing morning.

When I arrived in China I thought I could speak and read a little bit of Chinese after two semesters of Mandarin in college. My first meal was a rude awakening. Looking for something safe I recognized the characters for water, boiled, and pork on the menu. I thought to myself, “water-boiled pork, that sounds nice and safe let’s go with that.” When the bowl came out and it was blood-red with the amount of chili peppers and spices in it, my face went pale. Out of pure pride I got through half the bowl with the waitress standing over me looking smug before I turned to my roommate Ed and said, “We have to go home. NOW.” I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.

So no, your fears aren’t unfounded. Saying that though, I loved my time in China. In fact, 5 years later, Ed is still there, and, though I ended up in Manila, I was actually trying to get back to Beijing (took a wrong turn somewhere). Yes, the air is awful, yes sometimes in Beijing dust storms and government-induced rainstorms happen at the same time and mud falls from the sky (they don’t even have weather like that in the Bible!), yes, it’s crowded, and yes, your access to Facebook and Youtube are curtailed, but it can be a great time if you have the right attitude. Our mission for the first 3 months of living in China was “finding new and exciting ways to embarrass ourselves every day.”

The dynamism of the coastal cities in China is dizzying. When I went back to Beijing for the Olympics in 2008 the city I walked into was almost unrecognizable from the city I arrived in in 2005. Skyscrapers go up in a matter of weeks, new restaurants, bars, shops pop up, burn brightly, and flame out within months. Every other week you hear another crazy story about someone ‘taking a runner’.

Of the problems you mentioned only the pollution and the crowding are insurmountable and have to be endured. You can easily get a VPN and have uncensored internet. The only drawback to those is really that your access to porn sites slows significantly, and while we all know that’s what the internet is for, you get over it pretty quickly. In my experience, being thrown into a place where you can’t communicate in your native languages really accelerates your learning, even if you have no natural gift for languages. The sheer pressure of needing to have something puts your brain into overdrive.

Don’t forget sound effects either. Hand gestures are simply not enough. I still have an entire internal dictionary of common sound effects for basic requests like salt, the bathroom, fried vs. boiled, and drinks. They also seem to be universally applicable as far as I can tell. And, if you’re in Manila, let’s admit it: living in Manila isn’t exactly a slice of pie either.

13,000 kuai (RMB) is enough to live on I think. I lived fairly well on 9,000 kuai/month post-tax in Beijing in 2005-2007. I assume some inflation has occurred and I think Shanghai is slightly more expensive than Beijing but the currency has appreciated a bit since then so you should do fine. I lived in a high-end condominium there, ate out every meal, and went out at least 2 times a week, if not more. I didn’t save a dime but I lived well. But if you think you can get more, hell, why not ask for it?

I think it’s a great experience to be a stranger in a place. If you don’t have the right mindset it can be overwhelming, depressing, and lonely. On the other hand you can see it all as a challenge to your resourcefulness, cunning, and charm. Even small victories like buying electricity (it’s prepaid there) can make you do a dance out of exhilaration the first time you succeed. Moving to another place gives you the opportunity to try out being another person too. You can reinvent yourself completely, act out a completely different persona, which can be somewhat addicting. So I say jump. That may not be reasonable advice, but then again reasonable people lead reasonable lives.

I have a question for you readers. I was sitting in traffic today in Manila and there was an ambulance behind us with its sirens on not going anywhere. Have any of you had direct experience with having to use an ambulance in Manila? If I am bleeding out and need to be taken to the hospital immediately, should I just go ahead and call it a life? Because right now that’s what it seems like.

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Got a question for Jon? Post it in Comments and he’ll get back to you next week. If not sooner.