Amy Adoyzie Enjoys Life and Junk

This one's for fans of good ol' fashioned cliched music. The soundtrack to my life in the past months as told through records that keep ringing in my ear.

Months ago, Bent Outta Shape's Stray Dog Town rang true with songs about mop buckets and closing up all alone, leaving town and chemical dependencies. It's a record of aimlessness, feeling lost in other people and desperately seeking something because you have nothing else to do.

* * * * *
The Get Up Kid's Four Minute Mile was another constant, right up until I left for Bangladesh. An emo staple of loves lost and disappointment. The most pertinent tracks were "Don't Hate Me," an oddly self-referential number with the lyrics "Oh Amy, don't hate me for running away from you," and "Fall Semester." The latter song struck a loud chord, with words about trying to cope with disappointing others ("Everything I see, everything I do, everywhere I've been, these mean nothing to you?"), since my last days in America were spent on tense terms with my folks.
There's something unsettling about your entire family questioning the very thing that you're about to devote a year and a half of your life to doing.
My parents version of support came in the form of not physically restraining me from leaving, and a departure gift of familial guilt when my mom accused me of not "doing anything for the house" since I moved out.
My brother thought I was overreacting about the guilt trip. "That's just the culture they come from, man."
"That doesn't mean it's right," I argued.
"But can't you see where they're coming from?"
"Of course I can, but they don't even try to understand what I'm doing."
Alan thought for a moment, "You're just having fun though."
My mouth fell open. "You think I do this because it's so fun?" It became apparent that my family assumes that the only reason someone would do work for so little pay is because it's a party.
"Isn't that why you do this?"
I was speechless. The experiences that I've had and will have are fun, but they're also trying and exhausting. Not to mention all that I've left behind to be here. It's fun, but it's also built from sacrifices and nestled in loneliness.
"You have no idea what I'm doing, do you?"
"It's like you can make money, but you just choose not to." Because somehow I'm obligated. If I'm not being compensated, I must be not be doing anything worthwhile. It all circles back to money and my obligation as a child of refugee immigrants to earn it as payback for their hard work.
"Why you gotta help the world before you help them?" Alan asked.
Which brings up the question: Everything I see, everything I do, everywhere I've been, these mean nothing to you?

My parents let up my last night home. They cooked a big feast of a dinner as their passive Asian way of saying "We love you. Goodbye." But it turned out they're actually capable of real sincere goodbyes.

I was at the Bangkok airport, in the middle of a six-hour layover before jetting to Chittagong. We were killing time by leeching free wifi when I caught my brother on chat. He told me that my father turned up to LAX looking for me, to give me some cash and well wishes before I left. To imagine my father, who is barely functionally literate in English, trying to navigate around the labyrinth that is LAX in search of me just broke my heart. He left, disappointed- just as I left disappointed. But now, across vast oceans, we're making amends.

* * * * *
I haven't yet decided what's scoring these present moments. Candidates include M.I.A. (obviously) and Against Me! (not so obvious).
The enormity of all of this has yet to sink in. The Asian University for Women is an amazing venture and our role in its inaugural year at the Access Academy is much more important than we're capable of understanding at this moment. The University is taking care of us beyond our expectations and we're grateful. Even as all of this is beginning to become more and more real, I still have my heart firmly planted in the Pacific Northwest of North America.
A boy, his mix CD, and memories keep me tethered to Portland. Thirty tracks to keep me distracted. Distracted from what? From the enormity of it all.

My teenage-hood was plagued with enough cringe-worthy awkward moments to fill to make Welcome to the Dollhouse look like a light-hearted romantic comedy. There is a stack of wire-bound, college-ruled notebooks yellowing in my old bedroom at my parents home to testify hat I was an angry, demented and totally bizarre teenager.
While rummaging, I did find one piece of paper that provides as much answers as it creates questions:


Answers:
See? Asian girls being into white guys isn't like this intrinsic feeling we thrust ourselves towards. When I was in junior high, in school with majority Asian kids, I crushed out on about a dozen Asian boys! This list was made during my 1993-94 school year, right in the middle of eighth grade, where a young girl toes the line between playing with dolls and dealing with her period. But I digress.
My point is that, beyond my subconsciousness, I believe that my dating of white dudes is based on the group of young adults that I hang out with and our similar interests in a particular space and time.
Why am I letting that security guard eff with me much?
And yes, as this list was amended in 1999, it does shed light into my lameness.

Questions:
Where are these dudes now?
Do they wanna hang out?
Why haven't I changed much in my crushing practices?
Does it really say School Boyz with a "z"? (Yes.)

In response to the recent spate of gentlemen friends and acquaintances with whom I have encountered, Gus had this to say: "You're like retard flypaper."

I've only done it twice.
Once, two years ago, during my first stint at Green Noise Records. It was early spring and I was ringing up another regular customer, a young man with short blond hair and rectangular eyeglasses. He came into the store a couple times a month and only bought vinyl. We never introduced ourselves because there's a threshold of time where we could have done that and awkwardly avoided it.
As I swiped his credit card through the slot, an idea sprung into my big boxy head. I surreptitiously made a mental note of the dude's name.
The second he set foot out of the store, I MySpace'd him. (Yeah, I used it as a verb. Don't pretend like you don't either.) Turned out he was in a loving relationship with a girl who was not me and I moved on. Until yesterday.
Another regular, with longer shaggy hair, brought two 45s to the counter. His card was approved, he signed the slip, I slid it into the cash drawer and read his name. I logged onto MySpace, but he was not to be found.
Maybe I should just try talking to him. There's an idea.
I wonder how long it'll be before our local news station does an expose on a new type of identity theft.
Tonight at ten.
You just wanted to buy that Compulsive Gambler's Live LP, but what you didn't expect was that someone was going to MySpace you. Stay tuned to learn about the latest threat to your e-life as record store clerks log on to check you out.
And more about Lindsay Lohan's cooter.

I've been told that I possess the foul mouth of a sailor, with curse words spilling out of my face like lukewarm beer. I admit that I enjoying cussing and don't see anything wrong with dropping the F-Bomb whether I'm talking about a good piece of pie or to a SUV-load of drunken frat boys riding inches from me on my bike.
But since my return, I've been referred to as a sailor for another reason- the sailor at port. It isn't inaccurate, except for the fact that I'm not spending nights in brothels or wearing maritime garb. But I am enjoying myself.
There has been a few occasions where I've drunkenly scrawled my phone number for someone, and not content with just leaving my name and digits, I also jot down directives like "I think you ought to call me" or "Call Me & Shit."
It's amazing how well that works.

Apparently, I'm raunchy.
Daniel's in touch with former volunteers and heard that an ex-teacher, who taught at my school a couple years ago, deemed my blog raunchy.
I've been called lots of adjectives, but I've never been called this.
Thank goodness my moms doesn't read this thing.

* * * * *

An excerpt from a chat between Nat and I about the boys I saw my first time at Changsha's underground punk club 4698.

amyadoyzie: there were seriously like a dozen dudes i woulda wanted to make out with
a DOZEN of them in MAINLAND CHINA!
can you believe that?
natalie: making out is A-OK in my book
but aren't you a little curious about the China peenie???
amyadoyzie: not really
because once i see it, i'll have to do things to it
natalie: hahahaha
true
amyadoyzie: and i'd REALLY REALLY rather not do anything to a pee pee that doesn't have an american passport
natalie: HAHAHAHAHAHAH
amyadoyzie: its true girl
natalie: like your grandma warned you
about those Chinese men trying to kidnap you
amyadoyzie: fo shizzle

Before leaving Portland, I made a short list of Goals of Chance, things that I wanted to happen base solely on happenstance. Four of five happened, not bad.
In my last few months in China, I came up with another list of to-dos. So far it consists of two things:
1. Make a cheesy Chinese wedding album.
In an average Chinese person's life, there are a handful of milestones that everyone strives for: pass the Gao Kao (the college entrance exam), go to university, get married, have a baby, rinse, repeat. Folk's will go all out and spend a month's salary on garish wedding pictures, set in exotic locales provided by pull-down backdrops and a half-dozen costume changes. It's total ham and it was something I needed to do before leaving China. I asked Daniel to be my faux-groom and last weekend we haggled for a cheap package deal that fit into our volunteer budgets and got our fake China wedding pictures on.
We had three costume changes and I got to sport a sparly turqouise, strapless prom dress ditty; a traditional Chinese cheong-sam dress; and a big, strapless, poofy white wedding gown stuffed with two shoulder pads in each boob. This was probably the only time in my life where I'll wear a wedding gown.
The ladies at the studio dressed me, and I made a personal rule to not refuse anything that they draped, stuck or mooshed onto my face. I wanted to be Chinese, for real. As a result, I was heavily made up with long plastic eyelashes flappin' away. They also sprouted some curly hair onto my head and wrapped a large gaudy fake diamond necklace around my collar bone. I was a sight for sore eyes.
Daniel and I mimed booty hip-hop videos, he crawled under my skirt and he didn't wear pants during the last set of pics.
I can't wait to show these to my mama.

2. Make out with a Mao.
I have a crush on a boy named Mao Wen Hao, which means that somewhere in the long history of his lineage. he's related to Chairman Mao. That makes him make-outable. He's also this tall, lanky, nerd kid who drums for Ten Bottles Heart, my favorite Chinese band. Kid doesn't speak a lick of English, but damned if I don't go home without hittin' some Mao action!
I'll keep ya'lls updated on that one.

Working and living in a small developing rural town in China has afforded me lots of free time to watch excellent television programming and cultivate a huge crush on the 6'7" goggle-eyed freak that is Stephen Merchant. He's half of the genius behind The Office and Extras, the latter of which I have watched about a dozen times in the last week.
My schoolgirl infatuation with him grows evermore when he says that Mandarin Chinese sounds like goobly gook and he's only seen Chinese people in kung-fu movies and in Chinatown (not really a town, more of a novelty street).
And this quote from imdb.com makes me wanna whip together a batch of fresh spring rolls and we could have a stay-in date and watch episodes of I Love Lucy and Small Wonder.
I wouldn't mind being a divine dictator and having a stab at running China. You know the concept that if everyone in China jumps up and down at the same time it'd start a tidal wave that'd destroy America? I'd phone the U.S. President and say 'We're all on the great wall of China and we're going to jump off unless you send us the girls from "The O.C."
He doesn't need those skinny bitches from The O.C.. He's got me, from the suburbs of Los Angeles! I don't pine after celebrities, but SM brings back all those fluttery feelings that I used to have for Erik Estrada (from CHiPs) when I was 5-years-old. All's I wanna do is to go on a date with him, at a pub, maybe on trivia night and swoon.
To watch this man dance, is to watch a dream in motion. I mean, if the dream were about a hella tall, lanky white English dude swervin' about, yeah, it is a dream in motion.


And if you haven't been fully saturated with gunky SM love just yet, ( here's a screenshot of his butt after the cut! )

It's been a long time.
Like a stretch of barren desert, baked dry by heat so intense it leaves goosebumps on your skin and nothing can survive there.
It's me sex life. Or lack thereof.

So, that's why, if for some reason you've flown all the way to China, knew exactly which buses to catch, found building 16 on the Huarong Yizhong campus and climbed into my third-story window to spy on me and caught me perusing the Portland Mercury Personals ads, please refrain from judging me. I'm merely checking my prospects for my return to that beautiful city.

It's been a long time.

One of the suckiness with my internet downage is that I'm unable to download the latest podcasts from ChinesePod. I've been boning up on my Mando (cause I ain't bonin' up on anything else that's Chinese... Oh! Bada-bing!), because it would be a shame for me to return to the States and disappoint my mama with my ineptitude.
If I wanna learn Mando, I need to be proactive about it because I can definitely get away with living in Huarong for a year and not have improved my vocab because they're all about dialect. There's the local Huaronghua and a more regional Nanbianhua (Southside dialect), both of with are completely undecipherable to my untrained ear (I can barely make out Mando, for goodness sakes!).
Dialects totally floor me, and they flourish in south China. It's astonishing that a Chinese can travel across this country and not be able to communicate with their fellow country(wo)men. Mandarin, the common language, is taught at all Chinese schools- but that doesn't mean that they actually speak it. Whenever my kids chatter in class, they do it in Huaronghua. Even if they're talking about me, I'd prefer they do it in Mando so at least maybe I can learn some new words like boring, useless, uppity, She makes me wanna die.
Some of the classes even taught me useful Huaronghua phrases like, "Hao dou qian?" (How much?). In Mando it's pronounced, phonetically, like "How doh chee-yan?" but with the Huaronghua accent it becomes "How da cheen?" Who can keep track of all this Oriental tongue trickery?!
Sometimes I'll say some Mandarin phrases in class and the students will correct my pronunciation. But lately, I've realized that I shouldn't heed their advice to openly because their Mandarin pronunciation may not be any better than mine since they don't speak it fluently.
I'm not the only one who's disconcerted by the lack of Mando fluency. I've had students tell me that they believe that 30-40% of the students can't speak Mandarin well, a Chinese English teacher said that the number is probably closer to 50%. Half! Half of these Chinese students are unable to speak their nation's language at a satisfactory level! It probably doesn't help that some of the older teachers will teach in dialect.
There are 16-17 year-old kids who still buy Mandarin tapes to study and listen. I might have been ESL in America, but I can confidently say that I had a pretty firm grasp of speaking and listening to English by the time I was in high school without the aid of instructional audio tapes.

Besides ChinesePod, I've also been obsessed with vintage podcasts of The Ricky Gervais Show. Rick, another volunteer, had let me ripped them off his iPod before we left Changsha in August. I've been listening to Mr. Gervais, Mr. Karl Pilkington and Mr. Stepehen Merchant faithfully every time I go for a run. It's super hilarious stuff and takes my mind off everything because they're constantly talking nonsense and Karl Pilkington is the most genius functionally stupid person ever, and I heart him. I also have a mad huge crush on Stephen Merchant and want to marry him and make tall-short babies (he's 6'7"!).
As I was climbing Huanghushan, the hill behind the school, I was listening to episode 19 of their XFM first season show. Stephen and Ricky started to discuss the intricacies of Chinese, here are some of the highlights:

SM- "When it's written down it looks like little children's drawings of those little paper houses that Chinese people live in. And there's loads of em."

SM- "For wont of a better word, when I listen to Chinese it sounds like gobbly-gook."
RG- "That's a dialect. I think it's the main dialect. That, mandarin and orangutan."

SM- "It's just because I'm very ill informed. I've only seen Chinese people in Kung Fu movies..."
RG- "...In Chinatown."
SM- "Not really a town, more of a novelty street."

SM- "They are unscrutable."
RG- "You can not scrut a Chinaman or a Chinawoman."

Is it wrong that this made me love Stephen Merchant even more?! I've uploaded the track and you can right-click and save here for your listening pleasure.

In all my few years of retail experience, I have never had the capability of e-stalking a customer as I do now. I am only slightly embarrassed by this act because I'm sure I'm not alone.
There's this dude that comes into the record store on a regular basis and has cute eyeglass frames. Yesterday, he bought a Sonic Youth CD that I had been listening to the day before and it was like a Eureka moment! I didn't think of doing what I did until he handed me his debit card and I made sure to note his name. Then I MySpaced his ass!
Yee-haw! I heart the internet!
It turned out that Brandon is "In a Relationship," a student at PSU and a bit of a feminist. Sounds awesome, too bad he's taken.
Gus said that maybe I'm not the only stalker and that perhaps he's like majorly stalking me too! Maybe he doesn't even have a girl/boyfriend and he only says that he's "In a Relationship" because he's so deep in his stalkerdom that he thinks we're going out and that he has a mini-Amy shrine! HA! I should be so lucky as to have a stalker as adorable as this dude!
It's way possible.

After watching Incident at Loch Ness tonight, I have to make a couple confessions.

#1 I'm totally crushin' on Werner Herzog. This film, in combination with a recent New Yorker story on that crazy motherfucker has really got my googly girl eyes going! He's sooo nuts! And who doesn't love a lunatic?! [And an aside, if any of ya'll wanna get me an international subscription to The New Yorker while I'm in China, that would hella rule. I didn't used to like that magazine because I was under the not-so-misguided semi-mis-conception that it was just some high-falutin' highbrow stuff that I wouldn't understand- but I've been reading Gus's subscription and it made me realize that I really like their informative stories that keep be abreast on things I probably don't need to know about, like the latest in fake sugars and whether the Donner party really ate folks for fun, and they're the perfect length for my short attention span! But I do wonder if China would allow such material to touch their precious soil.]

So, back to the film... there's a character who is a crypto-zoologist, one Dr. Michael Karnow, a wacko "scientist" who explains that he doesn't wash his clothes because it degrades the fiber and thus destroys them. Instead he just hangs them on a line to air out. Like dry cleaning without any cleaning whatsoever. This notion seems ridiculous to everyone because soiled clothes don't clean themselves with wind blowing through it, duh! Anyway, it's a funny bit and Gus said that I reminded him of Dr. Karnow.
"Why?!" I asked puzzled.
"Because he doesn't wash his clothes and you don't use soap."
"He doesn't wash his clothes because he's a nutjob! I don't use soap because my skin's too sensitive! That's different!"
"Not really," he said.
There you have it, confession #2 I don't use soap. Most of my friends already know that, but I realized that the internet had not yet been privy to this information. But it's true, I don't use soap, not on my body, not on my face and only on my hands if need be. I really don't understand why everyone thinks I'm like some dirty dish rag because as far as I'm concerned I don't need to use soap. I don't have body odor or a dark sheen on my skin from years of scum accumulation, so what's the big deal? It also probably helps that I don't have a significant amount of body hair to trap all that yucky shit that the soap is supposed to battle. Actually, I feel sorry for all ya'll who are prisoners of suds and soap, just a buncha suckers who are victim to the monstrous hygiene industry.

P.S. Something may be happening soon, and I ain't want to jinx it, so I ain't gonna mention it till it does. But I just had to mention it because I'm a twerp.