I had come to China with the perhaps naive notion of primarily carrying forward my doctoral studies in symbolic framing and in cultural knowledge systems. I had been three years away from the project of my doctoral work. I came under the guise of an English instructor in a small four year teacher's college. I was conscientious enough to take on the problem of second language acquisition in English, in theoretical, methodological and applied sense, as a natural extension of the previous symbolic framing research, and this proved in fact a fortuitous and somewhat serendipitous combination.

I had chosen this school in a more rural setting over a medical university in a larger city, somewhat regrettably in hindsight. The year of small pay was seen as a sacrifice for the research context I was gaining--a sacrifice perhaps too dear in a world that does not really care if one sinks or swims in life. But I had been used to surviving against the odds and to boot-strapping successful projects under situations of stress and strangeness. I was, after all, a cross-cultural anthropologist, and a damned good one in spite of the policies of racial discrimination and globalization that disfavored my white American complexion. There was also a slight lure of the strange and exotic, perhaps somewhat romantically exaggerated by media and news reports showing all of China to be like the Bund in downtown Shanghai or Tinniamen square in Beijing, prosperous, revolutionized by big business and a new kind of capitalism.

I had worked and lived with Overseas Chinese, in fact a clan organized community in Penang, Malaysia. Though my wife was also this kind of traditional Chinese of the Southeast Asian context, nothing in our previous experience could have prepared us for what we would encounter in China. We felt little relation to the people of China in the same way that we had with the Chinese of Malaysia. Our daily and ethnographic experiences were born out in the numerous comparative tests that I conducted, which revealed to me fundamental differences of culture, cognition and symbolic behavior between not only Americans and mainland Chinese, but between mainland Chinese and the overseas Hokkien Chinese whom I had previously studied and so thoroughly tested with the same and similar sets of projective tasks.

I believed in my research enough to risk a year abroad in an uncertain context, even if no one else seemed to believe in it. Behind this research stood the applied models of artificial intelligence, and in particular the somewhat vague standard of the Chinese room. The Chinese room is a model of the Turing test, one that is hidden from view except for an input-output slot. One cannot tell who or what is inside the room. One puts in a question, one waits for an unspecified amount of time, and then one receives an answer from the room. The challenge, from an AI standpoint, at least according to Turing, therefore, is to guess whether or not there is a person on the other side of the slot. The real China is not unlike the model of the Chinese room. It is very much an analogy of intelligence, turned inside out.

We came to China to find ourselves boxed in a Chinese room. We traveled little, hardly at all. We remained mostly within the vicinity of our small rooms, venturing only to the market, to find a quick meal, to class, or on occasion, downtown which was about 10 minutes by taxi or bus, to take care of some necessary business.

 In fact, the entire China became something of an inverted box for us, as there were only walls and doors that stood between us and the sense of truth and reality on the other side. The door would knock, questions would be asked, answers given. Figuring out what was going on in China, how the communists operated, how control was maintained and people were managed, was something like guessing the mechanisms of Einstein's pocket fob just by seeing the consequences of turning hands on the dial. At the same time, I came to the gradual realization as well that I was being studied, indeed dissected, more intensively than I was trying to dissect the world that surrounded us.

Thus it was that from the confines of our little rooms, the daily rhythms of China would beat around us on a rather regular schedule, always marked by the blaring loudspeakers that sat several floors up just above our rooms, and that were attached to the poles just beyond the court yard of our room. It was marked also by the irregular tempos of the basketballs that bounced continuously on the uneven concrete pavements beyond, from the earliest hours of the morning until the latest hours at night.

If I were to describe a metaphor for a room in China, I would describe a strange kind of experiment in which all information coming into the room and leaving the room is controlled, or at least managed. Attach to the room from above listening devices and put strange, silent and unseen people at the other end of these devices, and then add to all this the imperfections and sleazy contradictions of Chinese society, of the afternoon and midnight sexual rendezvous, the alcoholism, the chronic, insatiable hunger. In short, add all the human foibles of imperfect people attempting to put together a perfect communist system, shake it all together, and see what comes spilling out the other side.

I maintain that crossing cultural boundaries is more than a geographical fact of traveling. It is a state of mind, or, more importantly, a state of being and a process of becoming. Maintaining ourselves in a stable position in the central most regions of China, we were able to watch as time went by the entire orchestra of modern Chinese society swirl and articulate around us.

Thus the Chinese room is an allegorical metaphor, just as is the Great Wall, and though the physical presence of the Great Wall may be imposing and lie to the north, its reach spreads throughout all the villages and homes of China in the hearts and spirits of the people, much less in the mind and somewhat sinocentric worldview.

*****

The rooms were long and narrow, about eight feet across and about 16 feet long. Long and narrow facing the street was typical of Chinese style rooms that I had been familiar with in Malaysia. Row after row of shop house door lines the little streets of Georgetown to belie the cavernous and spacious rooms within. Chinese homes are built largely like French style settlements, opening onto the streets as if the streets and roadways were like the rivers of the Old west, bringing in the forces of change.

Our rooms were in the basement of the guest hotel, a six-story structure that was built in two wings. One wing had been turned over to classrooms, mostly, as well as to the main administrative offices of the campus. The rooms, being in the basement, were partially subterranean and were thus chronically cold and damp. We were daily invaded by mosquitoes, centipedes, rats and other unwanted guests. They crawled in and out of the drains and through the numerous holes and nooks and crannies of the walls. The only light that shown into these rooms was from a single pair of windows on one end and the door that was some times left open in the daytime. Because the rooms faced to the Northwest, and were overhung outside by a balcony from the ground floor, we only received a little sunlight that streamed through in the late afternoon, the shadows of the bars cutting a strange slant onto the gray tiles below.

These rooms were to become our haven, the focus of our lives, for the year we spent in China. We rarely ventured during that year far from the rooms, except to the market or to buy back some food, or to class or an occasional trip downtown to take care of some business or the other. The only respite we had from these rooms was an unplanned trip to the nearby lake during that we had the pleasure of treating several of my students who had hung around during the spring break during February.

We were not well traveled in China. I had become an expert in Malaysian society and culture, even though I had barely ever left the somewhat comfortable confines of the tiny island of Penang. We hardly ever left the secure walls of our host school to venture into the wider world of Chinese society. But there is a sense in my mind that even if we had traveled about the countryside, there would have been some things that we would never have learned. It is the nature of the Chinese, after 5,000 years of Sino-centrism and xenophobia, to keep many secrets secure behind closed and locked doors. The Chinese have long prided themselves on their Great Wall to keep out the barbarian invaders. Little do any Chinese realize that the Great Wall is more significant as a cultural metaphor of the Chinese than as an engineering feat, for the symbolic great wall of the Chinese is every fence and every gate throughout the land.

So it was that in the course of sitting in our little rooms, we came to learn about a side of China that perhaps few foreigners get to see. It was something that if we had gone looking for it, it would never have been revealed to us. It was a side of the Chinese that was revealed to us one layer at a time by our students and other people who, on a daily basis, knocked on our door and tramped through our little rooms wearing nothing but their smelly nylon socks. In this manner, we established bonds of trust and friendship enough with individuals, given and receiving face, that ineffable and invaluable Chinese commodity, enough to have many people confide to us their secrets.

China, beyond the walls of our small rooms, became something of a great mystery for us, a riddle begging to be solved. The curiosity of China is at times overwhelming. For the most part, the reality of China behind those walls remained locked and hidden from view. We were only permitted to see some things, and only serendipitously discovered other things. Though we did not travel far and wide in the interior of China, we managed in the course of our year to learn a great many things about China. It is amazing, if one pays attention to them, how many small things will come to one's door.

Signals we were receiving, daily, begging to be understood. As is typical of a year of ethnographic fieldwork, small clues lead eventually to larger realities. We did not have to go searching for these clues. Chinese curiosity brought them to our doorstep on a daily basis. We ourselves, the only Americans for perhaps a two-hundred kilometer radius in one of the most densely populated and long settled regions of China, were enough of a curiosity that many Chinese could not help come to check us out and to see what we were all about. The fact that my wife was an Americanized Malaysian Chinese (in many ways she had become more American than even myself) and our daughter was half-Chinese added to their curiosity. They were more often interested in the reactions and attitude of our daughter than they were of her middle-aged parents, who were usually ignored.

These rooms were both our place of security and our prison. We looked through the bars every day, checking off our calendar until the day we would be freed. In the process, something happened, a gradual transformation occurred in us, such that the people who left China in the summer of 1999 were very different than the people who had arrived there a year earlier. This sense of transformation even became a part of the mystery of China for our selves. We had changed somehow, and the world around us had changed, and we could scarcely say why except for some vague anthropological notions about making the strange familiar and the familiar strange.

Anthropologically, the lesson I learned in China was that one's sense of place is always mediated by the people who chronically inhabit that place. Whether one has a positive or negative experience of a particular place will largely be determined and mediated by the quality and nature of the social interactions that one encounters in that place. We found ourselves afterward missing people, not places, except that these people were somehow organically attached to these places. We found ourselves missing the habitus and situations that we were part of in relation to others, in spite of the frequent frustrations and the banality of so much we endured through. We hardly missed those little rooms at all after we left, but we found ourselves missing some of our friends and acquaintances, and many of my students.

We came home oddly crazy from China, and to this day this sense of craziness has not gone away completely. It was a sense of craziness that affected our entire family, and took several years and several relocations to mend at all. It affected us in a sense of chronic displacement and perhaps, dare I mention it, "reverse culture shock." We frequently felt disoriented as if we no longer belonged in our new surrounds. Residually, this feeling lingers on with us even today, though it is no longer in the forefront of our lives influencing all that we do and see.

Others have written recently and in the past far more eloquently and in a more sophisticated manner than I could ever hope to muster in a 1001 rebirths. For interested readers I recommend especially the books Rivertown: Two Years on the Yangste, and the book Coming Home Crazy as what I would consider to be realistic, relatively unbiased, first-hand narrative accounts of what it is like to live for an extended length of time in China under circumstances that are far less than ideal.  Neither can I claim to have any special expertise in Sinotopia or the refinements of Sinitic civilization. If I have something new and unique to offer to the reader, it is only the shallows of my own Americanisms and personal limitations, cast over the depths of a culture that is so old and so elaborated that it is without a fathomable bottom to sound. I came to China as an anthropologist, and I left there more as a human being. Even four years afterward, I still cannot say clearly or in an entirely unconfused manner if this is a necessarily good or bad thing.