2012 Annual Update

Dear Friends, Family, and Other Onlookers, 

We have no clue how to write annual updates. (Last year's theory proves this.) Probably the most eventful change in 2012 has been our new found lifestyle full of non-eventful things (notable exceptions include birthing our new wonder-baby Maya, traveling for work to Ukraine and China, taking a 3,500-mile road trip through the East Coast while eight months pregnant, and acquiring a nifty new blender). So, since settling into everyday life in Tulsa is in fact the big news of the year, we thought we should report on that. 

Were you to knock on our door at any random moment (Please do! We'll take you out to to-die-for hole-in-the-wall Mexican or BBQ), you would probably find us in varying states of settledness and unsettledness. In what follows, we spell out what we wish you would find us doing (the ideal average moment) as well as what you would probably find us actually doing (the actual average moment). 

Our ideal average moments look something like this: 

Kourtney, after eating a seared tuna steak with par-boiled asparagus and a spinach salad, is reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to all her children snuggled around her. 

Ben, after sending the boys off to school with the daily reminder to ask good questions, is in the home office hard at work on his book with a Freckles chocolate custard in hand, wearing his PJs. 

Aaron, camouflaged in a forest, is releasing a broadhead-tipped arrow through the heart of an unsuspecting deer, planning all the while the minute-by-minute process for preparing, serving, and storing the meat. 

Elliot, after playing lava man on the playground, is beating the entire family at slapjack, with a chocolate chip cookie in hand, and entertaining all with an endless string of jokes.  

Libbie, after having her dolls over for tea, is playing knight-batman-princess dress up with friends, orchestrating their complex social roles, and eating lightly salted avocado slices.  

Maya, well-fed, is sleeping in her crib. 

Our actual average moment looks more like this: 

Kourtney, after unclogging the kitchen sink pipes, is baking bread, preparing borscht, taking inventory of, planning, and budgeting the next week's meals, while listening to a Diane Rehm podcast. 

Ben, after running five miles to school, is in his work office, revising some less important but more pressing side project, forgetting to eat all day, rehearsing deadlines to anxious students, and in fact wearing his PJs under his dress shirt and slacks. 

Aaron, after attempting a filibuster in the kitchen about his hopes for the day's dinner, is lying in his bed reading novel after novel, after novel. 

Elliot, after diligently completing his checklist of chores, is curled up on the couch, rereading a short novel for the umpteenth time, memorizing all its jokes. 

Libbie, after snuggling Maya to the edge of smothering, is sitting at the table with her dolls, creatively repurposing scraps of paper and broken crayons into beautiful works of art, while singing softly to herself.

Maya, well-fed, is sleeping in her crib. 

So, all in all, daily life is pretty good. It may not be ideal, but sometimes we're not far off. Kourtney is surrounded by good food and finds joy in finding new ways to afford and produce such. In fact she has taken a volunteer leadership role with a local produce co-op to ensure that remains the case. Ben has found a PJ-casual Ultimate Frisbee pickup group on the campus where he works and, with proper progress on the book, does treat himself to the occasional chocolate custard. Aaron, although not harvesting deer meat, still talks and reads a lot (his school recently invented a new award to recognize his reading appetite); cub scouts, admittedly, is only a first step. Elliot has his jokes and focus, always. Libbie has her friends, dolls, mom to read stories and do "home school." Maya, her mamma and five other adoring faces: oh, and Maya really does sleep in her crib most of the day and all of the night. (No idea how that one worked out!) 

All in all, it's a wonderful life.  

Wishing you a very merry Christmas and happy holidays all!

A trave(b)logue: Beijing

Ben here. A few hasty notes from my recent Beijing trip follow. The trip lasted from October 31 to November 11. During this time I attended an international academic conference hosted by the Beijing municipal government (the 2012 Beijing Forum), gave a few lectures at Peking University, and spent a week exploring Beijing with friends old and new (see the photos below). The trip was also bookended by, on Halloween eve, a 13.5 hour direct flight from Chicago to Beijing and, on the return trip, a 12+ hour plane that wonderfully left Beijing at 5:30 pm Sunday afternoon and arrived at Chicago before 4:30 pm, one hour before I left. (Space travel is time travel!)

Touring the Forbidden City with best friend Zachary Rogers.

Promo shot for the Beijing Forum (which really knows how to choose controversial themes!)

The PKU people were delightful. 

Below a few working observations and moments from my whirlwind trip, some of it adjusted from the notes I wrote for myself and for my family report, whom I missed dearly. If I have my way, next time I am in China, we will go together. 

1. Whatever else it is, China is big. People. People everywhere. Everywhere. Even the country is called the People’s Republic of China. China has 1.4 billion people. America has 0.3 billion people. Pause on that. Yet the style of the scale and press of people in public--modern, urban, and lively--surprised me. In Manhattan, people press down on you wherever you are, and the landscape matches it: towering skyscrapers, loud bustle, crowds everywhere. In Beijing, it's different: people press down everywhere as well, but it doesn't have the matching bustle of the big city. Buildings are shorter, with very few over six stories. It is as if, because indeed there are, more people everywhere, not just in the busy city centers.


2. Whatever else it is, modern China is no black box. Like all modern nation states, China is an imagined hybrid mishmash of fractally stacked other identities: the closest thing I came to identifying Chinese food, for example, was a mixture of Mongolian, Korean, and Szechuan influences. Chinese mainstream Buddhism, similarly, boasts clear Tibetan and Indian influences. The history of modern Chinese politics, a strange mixture of Soviet socialist rhetoric and American capitalist policies, all carried out by an ancient patronage-style bureaucratic state; the National China Museum, one of its arms, was overfond of claiming that the "foundations of the modern Chinese nation" were laid dynasties ago, thousands of years before the modern nationstate existed as such. No matter how convenient it may be for the West to emphasize the long-standing tradition of mutual unintelligibility between the West and Eastern Asia, and no matter how convenient it may be for the Chinese to emphasize the "Chinese characteristic" as a catch-all term for describing difference, in fact, modern China appears just as intelligible as any other country. Just like every other nation, it is a readable nation in ways more helpful than the reductions close at hand to clueless foreigners and proud natives. China seems anything but isolated, anything but unique, anything but coherent, anything but possessing a single defining feature or essence. As for articulating those differences, alas, I remain firmly in the clueless foreigner camp, reduced to stammering through replies like, "well, China was not like Japan, or Korea, or Russia, even though it had elements of all of those." My colleagues, many of whom played the "Chinese characteristic" card, too, stammered at times: all of them were Communist Party members for professional, although not for ideological reasons; some of them tell jokes about South Koreans, don’t know any North Koreans, await for apologies from the Japanese, and have a pleasant, at-arms-distance attitude about Thailand and Vietnam. Where that leaves China is not much clearer than my response. The point remains: however hard China may be to understand, this is not abnormal. China is not beyond understanding. 

3. The Chinese language is crazy fun-hard. Chinese is not really a language: it is a family of languages, where there are maybe a dozen different languages or dialects—Mandarin, Cantonese, Shainghainese, Wu, Han, Hunan, Qin, and others, several of which I was lucky enough to hear briefly and compare.  This family of languages shares a common genome in its writing system, but that is it. As spoken languages, dialects are mutually unintelligible. Suppose you, like many other native speakers, decide you must learn the Beijing Mandarin dialect: when an English-speaker learns Spanish, things will be pretty straightforward. You hear the word, you write it down, you read it out loud, and then you remember the sounds and the symbols as one. La familia, el libro, etc. Chinese is not so simple: sounds, tones, and characters do not converge. First you hear the word, “Jia1ren2”; you write it down in phonetic English “Jiaren,” then you quickly discover the pinyin system for transcribing Chinese sounds into English offers nothing near a one-to-one mapping. Sometimes my ears (brain, really) would play tricks on me: I would ask a native to repeat the same word three or four times in a row, and each time I would register the same sound as a different English consonant. Then you need to layer into each syllabus one of four tones: (1) rising, (2) fall-then-rise, (3) falling, or (4) flat. Thus, you can learn that Jia (1) ren (2) means "family" or "household," although here again the relationship between fixed symbols and meanings are new, inventive. Then comes the written characters (家人, or jia-ren), which have no bearing on the sounds memorized, exercises a whole new mental muscle for optical recognition, and must be read out loud repeatedly to be remembered. Put all of these together, a new sense of sound, symbols, and semantics, plus diverse, non-converging relations between all three, and you now know a word in Chinese. Congratulations! Try it out on a super simple example: “Shu1/书” which means "book/letter/style of calligraphy."
         So learning Mandarin would be undeniably hard. To learn to read Mandarin would require memorizing tens, then hundreds, thousands, and even tens of thousands of characters. Learning to write Chinese would require a lifetime of practice. In Beijing, I was consistently reminded, as my dear friend Zachary noted, that visiting a foreign culture, may be somewhat similar to what it is like to live with a disability: one may learn to be functional, but only in one’s own way, failing to understand or become responsively aware and engage many of the complexities that surrounds oneself. I bought dinner from a street vendor one night through a series of pointing, smiles, and grunts--any more than that comes only with the assistance of my abled local friends.
         There's the other side of the grammar coin as well. Once comfortable with the new sound-symbols-semantic arrangement entrance barriers, then Chinese spoken syntax turns out to be quite easy. Quite a bit easier than English at least. For example:

In English, one needs to say all these words: I want to learn how to speak Chinese.

In Mandarin (or so I've been told: correct me please), one says this: Wo shu zhou chen Gongzhen.

Or literally and simply, I want learn speak Chinese. None of those pesky small words to mix up like “to” “the” “a” “how.” Instead, just say the keywords in order. The fact that Chinese has so few base sound syllables also means that, within a day or two, one can imagine hearing Chinese in one's head; those sounds may be gibberish, but the limited set of them makes for very plausible ear-training exercises. At a slightly cooler level, Chinese is super poetic. Everyday speech is full of metaphors and productive pun potential. Each sound syllable can mean five or six things, depending on the context, which means that while the density of English letter redundancy might let you sustain a three dimensional crossword, my sense is that a Chinese character crossword might theoretically sustain four or five dimensions simultaneously. The language is an endless opportunity for puns and word play. One more piece of awesomeness: as I toured the imposingly large National China Museum, I began to recognize a payback to Chinese literacy I did not initially expect: if you learn to read English, you can read back through maybe three hundred years of history in the original before the writing changes too much to understand easily. By contrast, if you learn to read Chinese, you can read back about ten times that, maybe 3,500 years of history in the original before the characters change too much to understand easily. Imagine reading bronze age symbols. Also, if you learn to read Chinese, again, you can read all modern dialectics of Chinese—no matter how it sounds. Everything written by the whole Chinese language family and everything in the whole of Chinese history is yours to grapple with: and that is a serious passport to intertextual space and time travel. 

4. I really enjoyed the Chinese people I met. The hospitality was unparalleled: there was always someone to talk with or someone to show me around. A small horde of volunteer, and very bright graduate students accompanied me to the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, and the National China Museum. They did not have to, but they wanted to spend the day doing stuff with me. As I sat in the airport in Beijing, a friend called me at the airport, just to make sure I had made it safely, while another friend called me the day before, and two others wrote emails checking in on me. And yet, alongside all this individual hospitality and warm generosity in private relations came, in public, an interpersonal register that was refreshingly tough-minded and urban. Perhaps because there are so many people everywhere, and because people are busy and fast-moving, toughness is a survival mechanism. I was surprised how often native Chinese laugh at each other, not to be mean or heartless, but because it is acceptable to laugh and insult people in public in China. According to the reports I received, unlike Japan, and probably more like Israel or Germany, Chinese kids are OK with foreign kids in their classrooms. They might laugh at foreign kids, but they also laugh with and play with everyone equally. The Chinese seem to enjoy laughing and joking; they are surprisingly fun people to be around. Even when they are laughing at, they don’t seem to mean to hurt. As I told my kids, if someone calls you fat or slow, it is simply because that is what they think: everyone laughs and then nobody worries about it. Analogously, no one accepts spare change. Gratuity, good and bad, is gratuitous in China, and that's refreshingly straightforward. At least two cheers for that. 

5. Then there's the no-cheers bad. As Grandpa John Milton Peters pointed out in his journal back in 1984 on a trip, the air quality in Beijing was very poor--terrible at times. Some mornings I declined to go running outside because the air smelled so bad. How can one exercise regularly, without doing more damage than good, is an open question. 

On the Great Wall, and wildly alone. 

A Snapshot: the Great Wall: Friday, November 9, 2012. 

Today’s highlight came with three new PKU graduate student friends--Water, Forest, and John: a morning walking on top of a half-mile stretch of the battlement-ringed Great Wall, which rose between two snowy, wind-swept valleys about 85 kilometers north of Beijing. I don’t mean to wax too poetic, but the experience was stirring and striking. We even had the good fortune to happen first upon a just opened stretch of the wall that climbed the length of three towers, which left me (see photo) alone on the wall for a moment. The wall, so clearly immense and imposing, is not a thing that can simply be built. It can have no single date. No single length. It must be rebuilt before it can ever be built. (This thing is too big, too old to be anything but postmodern.) According to some estimates, parts of it stretch more than 5000 miles and dates back more than 3000 years. The wall follows the precipice of mountaintops, zigzagging through oxbow after twist and turn, winding its way into two horizons stretching out on either side of you. In my view, that horizon--itself repeatedly swallowed in the quick, short rises of these mountains buried under a thick blanket of smog-fog--surrounds me. I'd blame the poetry in the Chinese language for my impulse to pen a few lines here: 

Mountains, short yet sharp,
Leave valleys, wind-swept and cloudy,
Sunk in the snowy continental climb.

Friends in front of one of the wall's countless towers: Water, John, Ben, River. 

From http://www.crystalinks.com/chinawallarge.gif

The One-Winged Bird: Elliot's First Comic Book

Alert, alert: proud parent alert! 

Elliot drafted the following comic book last week. Just sat down and wrote it out with no help, although he had just seen Aaron briskly sell off one of his own comic books for 50 cents. 

Moments to look for: the narrative buildup, the embedded parenthetical phrase, the ad for the next issue. 

Read on. 

The one-wingd-bird. By Elliot Peters. 

Onse opon a time there was a one-wingd-bird who was very sad becaese he was the only one-wingd he coad find. (Hes very lonly.)

 Sinse he had no wings, he wallkt by and by until he met a peakcak, he bragd, oh yeah Im the best you have one-wing and I have a lot! (Peacock laughs, Ho ha hee)

 Next he met a roben who lhafd and said, I rule! (Robin laughs, Ho hee ha)

 Next he met a vet. I will fixe you up he said, and he did. And the one-wingd-bird, (who was now a two-wingd-bird) lived happaly ever after.

The end. Comeing soon, the one-wingd bird v.r.s. the four wingd vutlshere!!!!!!

---

Send your orders today! Available while supplies last! 

(Coming soon: more boys' comic books...)

Tulsa State Fair

We recently learned the Tulsa State Fair brings in about a million people over its 11-day span every September. A million is a lot, at least for Oklahoma. Perhaps its enough to generalize a bit: as someone wise recently told us, there are in fact two kinds of people in the world: those who love the Tulsa State Fair and those who do not. 

Eager to discover to which group we belong, we gave it our first shot this year and found the whole experience--a collusion of county fair homeliness and crazy alien madness competing for all our senses: bright lights, loud noises, intoxicating aromas and stenches, vertigo and dizziness, fiscal solvency, and at times our sense of decency (Krispy Kreme bacon cheeseburgers were among the most modest offerings: the Tulsa State Fair will deep fat fry your GUM...)--we found all this, all things considered, more or less agreeable. The kids enjoyed the fun house, its quaking hallways and mazes, repeatedly. The grownups, the fresh-squeezed lemonade. We did not enjoy the forest floors of stroller-stumping electric cords, the spikes in ticket costs for rides, and the crazed-ness of the evening with the kids (which is somehow different than the ever-enjoyable craziness of this fair, like all fairs). The night, equal parts exhaustion and exhilaration, proved a family walking tour in Tulsa ethnography: we saw large men in overalls yelping as wild rides whisked them about the night sky; evangelical clowns with serious balloon skills; endless vendors pushing your next American-made pickup truck and the stuff to fill it with; and all things, edible and not-so-much, fried on a stick. This may sound extravagant or somehow Tulsa-stereotypical, which is right: that's what the Tulsa Fair is all about. It's also about homespun arts and crafts, rowdy and gutsy and folksy music, cultural and agricultural exhibits, and play equipment for all ages. The food is too exotic to be all negative, and too dangerous to be all positive. It is really its own category. But don't believe us. Read on here. Or here. Or here. 

Here are a couple photographic highlights:  

Among a warehouse full of pungent farmyard animals, here we have newborn piglets hanging out with their mommas in undersized pens. Humans were apportioned exponentially more space to pass through than the animals were to live.

A wild roolet.

Ben's favorite part of the fair. A platform covered in thousands of blocks.

A "pie"-eating contest, in which Ben pulled a close third in the race to devour a plate full of chocolate pudding.

Proud spoils of the match.

Our one culinary abomination for the day: one giant, BBQ turkey leg. It was delicious! In the sprawling category of semi-edible foodstuff on a stick available that day, it was also one of the less barbaric.

Even with Libbie, the comparative less barbaric status of this snack still holds.

An iconic six-story carousel sunset.

Aaron and Kourtney riding a hang-glider ride.

To repeat the signage: by "fried," think "deep fat fried": shrimp, grilled rib-eye steak, goat-fat fries, oysters, boneless rib sandwich, alligator bites, watermelon, half-pound lamb burger, onions, mac & cheese--all this, all deep-fat fried (watermelon, mac & cheese!), all available under one pavilion, among dozens more.

In short, there seem plenty of reasons to want to go back, maybe even more than there are reasons for us to dread the thought. All in all, it seems we're not yet sure which of the two kinds of people in the world we are. Check back with us next year, sometime around September (or maybe December if we keep up this blogging lag).