quote of the day: error

"... or perhaps we've made the crucial error of confusing pornography with reality." -- Mr Spoon

on not meeting johnny yesterday: (im)probable close encounters

There was Beijing. Cambridge. And then there was the inevitable moment when I would meet Johnny Yesterday.

Between him and I, nothing seemed to go right. For a start we were introduced by Crooner when the handsome jazz singer and I were still a couple. JY was just another anthropologist back from China -- a person of interest, certainly; but not what you would call special. Yet I still remember the first moment I ever saw his face. The light seemed to shine from his eyes. Or did I sprinkle on the magic dust in retrospect?

At first I wooed Johnny for a graduate society. Would he be interested in giving a talk at our PhD seminar? I chatted with him at the dinner table. He did the social touch thing very well. I thought a Chinese visitor was the girlfriend he had mentioned from his fieldwork -- she wasn't. He explained he had just touched her hand because they bumped feet under the table. It was a custom from her native area. Every one of Johnny's touches could better be described as a caress.

We began to spend more and more free time together; then time that wasn't free. We talked, sneaked into hidden corners of Cambridge, talked some more. He would always look at me as though I was the most fascinating person ever to list what she'd just bought at Sainsbury's. It was only later I noticed him doing it with others; a bit like Bill Clinton perhaps. Flattery will get you anywhere.

At every step of the way we discovered new correlations: our common Jewish heritage; French connections; memories and inventions; and something indefinable, a shared perspective on life. A constellation of moles on his forearm mapped exactly onto mine. It seems trivial now but at the time we felt we were the same person, seen through the looking glass.

M tried to warn me. "There's something very wrong about JY. His heart and his soul and his head aren't joined up." Somewhere on the way to Girton College to retrieve a bicycle, Johnny and I stopped at a cemetery haunted by a sleek ginger cat where we paid our respects to Frazer and Heidegger's graves. He told me Brad Pitt had hooked up with Angelina Jolie while I was in China. I asked him: who would he choose, Angelina or Jennifer? "Definitely Angelina." I took that to mean he would leave his girlfriend. After all, I was the other woman.

What followed -- does it need to be said? All the absurd pain of our breakup was worth it to drum in a valuable moral lesson. Never date someone from your college. Never go out with someone from your department. Never, ever kiss a guy in a monogamous relationship with someone who isn't you. As a matter of mathematical certainty, it turned sour.

Six months later we were cursing each other's existence in the way only the French or Jews could, making vows to utterly ignore one another other except in case of the most dire social necessity. I even heard a rumor he'd refused to go to Beijing because of my presence there -- Beijing, a town of 15 million people. So upon my return to the UK it was with a sense of dread mingled with curiosity that I looked forward to the inevitable moment when we would cross paths on King's Parade or in the college bar or worse yet, in Boot's buying prophylactics, as in Cambridge any of these occurrences increases in statistical probability for every word not spoken to an ex-boyfriend.

Imagine my surprise when on the day of my arrival, I heard he'd just left for China. Beijing in fact. The Haidian district, where I'd been living all along. To marry the ex-girlfriend he cheated on with me.

There's a sense of poetic proportion in all this and not a bit of farce. One or two of my more robust friends have offered to beat him up should he ever appear in the neighborhood. Pangs of guilt aside, it's likely the worst I have to fear from his wife are some sharp scratches -- and even in Haidian it's hugely improbable that he and I would recognize each other amid the mass of dark-haired strangers. Still, I hope this time the numbers are on my side and our close encounter remains improbable.

photos: springtime by the water

(Top Left) One man serenades Nice's Flower Market...

(Top Right) ...and the sun shines on Villefranche-sur-mer, Jean Cocteau's favorite town. (Some scenes from his film Orphee aux enfers were filmed by the ramparts seen in the background.)

(Lower Left) Beneath Cambridge's Magdalene bridge, there are always punts waiting for customers...

(Lower Right) ...and by the banks of Lake Zurich, there's a man who earns his keep piling pebbles into natural towers.

photos: religion

Statue of Mary and Jesus above an archway off Cavendish Square, London.

Statue of Buddha in the Poly (Baoli) theatre, Beijing.

a curious affliction

Quoted from the Cambridge Dictionary of Academic Symptomology, Revised Edition.

Anthropologist Syndrome

Chronic affliction whereby an anthropological, ethnological or other ethnographic researcher is transformed by his/her object of study. An Anthropologist Syndrome Sufferer (referred to hereonafter as an "ASS") may rant about a shift from etic (exterior) to emic (interior) epistemology or even ontology. He or she characteristically emits unusual odors because of a new-found belief in the ritual dangers of soap, and the application of fragrant shaman-made potions to cope with secondary medical problems (see below).

Symptoms include a habit of referring to native culture as "my people" and frequently quoting the "wisdom of my people" in the form of obscure sayings on any available occasion. The presence of incongruous artefacts in the presumed ASS's home, such as an ebony phallus or bamboo spirit rattle, adds further weight to the diagnosis.

This syndrome is often accompanied by secondary medical problems such as malaria, bird flu, alcohol poisoning (from drinking with natives) or gonorrhea (from fornicating with natives). It is thought to arise spontaneously after prolonged (six months' or more) exposure to native culture, particularly in cases where the sufferer has been deprived of daily necessities such as wireless internet. The disease is thought to bear a close relation to Stockholm Syndrome and Borderline Personality Disorder.

Side-effects, such as loss of English fluency and inability to use common table implements, can be debilitating in the extreme. Anthropologist Syndrome may even be fatal to a victim's chances of leading a normal conversation. Fortunately, it rarely manifests as a lifelong affliction; in most cases it clears spontaneously once the ASS has handed in his or her final thesis draft, although a few symptoms may persist until post-doctoral employment. Recovery can be speeded up through judicious viewing of Big Brother in any European language.

Other entries: please refer to "Apologitis" (particularly widespread in cultural anthropology departments in close proximity with colonial studies groups), "Armchair Anthropology" (affects mainly the aged, aristocratic, and those taking their first anthropology module in liberal arts colleges). See also "Anthropologist Syndrome by proxy" for rare documented cases of teacher-student transmission.

two oxbridge graduates walk into a bar... college kinship and culture shock in the uk

M warned me it would be difficult being back in the UK. I thought it would be strange to return to the village that is Cambridge University, but I didn't quite get it. The culture shock is something you have to experience first-hand.

At Beijing Capital Airport I ran into Dan O., an old Asia hand who has spent several years in Japan, Korea and now China. Dan and I got to know each other as many Oxbridge graduates do, through a chance meeting in a pub. A first conversation between two ex-Oxonians and/or Cantabridgeans goes something like this:

(Graduate 1) Annabel Erithea Smothers: So you went to Oxford then? Which college?
(Graduate 2) Rupert Whyttington-Price: Read history at St Edmund Hall, actually. Graduated in '02.
Annabel: Oh, you went to Teddy Hall. Did you know Harry St John* Smythe, coxed the Oxford women's IVth in '01, very tall, grew a ginger beard in his third year?
Rupert: Oh, good old Farty Smythe. Yes, we attended lectures on Turnip Husbanding in Feudal Luxembourg together, had that old Trotskyist chap, what was his name? Good man, Farty, good man. And yourself? Which was your college?
Annabel: I read Italian and Linguistics at Magdalene Cambridge, actually. My father was awfully miffed, he went to Magdalene Oxford, you see. Bit of a row there, he wouldn't take me to Proms** anymore until the year I went to Cambridge for an MPhil in Saxon Wool-Gathering. But I know an awful lot of people at Oxford, all my brothers went, of course.
Rupert: And how do you know Smythe? The two of you aren't...
Annabel (snorting): Oh goodness no! Last I heard he shacked up with an Argentinian hedge fund manager in a semi-furnished in NW1. No, Harry and I met on a Whitehall internship this summer. His uncle Jules was the MP for Tenderton-on-Laye, charming fellow...

Or, if you're not of the genteel classes:

(Graduate 1) Sarah: You went to Oxford? Which college?
(Graduate 2) Matt: Somerton. Did PPE*** there. Couldn't decide what to do afterwards, so I came out to China to teach English. What about you? Did you go to Oxford?
Sarah: Actually I was at Cambridge. Went down to Oxford one year to see the Greek Play.**** My friend Talliver was in the Chorus.
Matt: Oh yes, Talliver Knorr, I know her. We were in Banjo Soc***** together, she was Officer in Charge of Bagels.

Dan O. and I share no such Society kinship. Maybe that's why I like him -- in general Oxford and Cambridge are about as incestuous as your average Mormon trailer park. It makes a nice change to meet someone who didn't snog your ex-boyfriend's one-night-stand's supervisor's sister.

Dan's spiky hair stood out in the BA check-in queue; he was wearing a yellow t-shirt with a picture of a bikini-clad lady and the words "188 RMB". He explained that he'd flown back from Beijing just a couple of weeks before to visit friends in Oxford and London, without telling family. But somehow his parents had heard about this so he was flying back again immediately to placate them.

I asked him which was stranger, coming back from China or Japan.

"Definitely China," he said. "It's like stepping into the future."

After one night in a soft queen-sized bed, I knew exactly what he meant. But I was confused: why did cars stop for red lights? What time would they shut off the hot water? Could I really drop paper inside the toilet bowl? My hand kept hovering over the bin instead.

But the real shock was personal. It's not that my old life has changed; on the contrary, aside from three or four new yuppie cafes, Cambridge looks as it did the day I left. I'm the one who's different. Yes, I'm suffering from... Anthropologist Syndrome...

TO BE CONTINUED



*pronounced "Sinjun".

**not the kind where you dance to rock music and have miscarriages in the high-school toilets. It's a British thing -- once a year, they drink wine instead of beer and go listen to classical music in a park somewhere in London. The BBC puts it on the radio and television. Everyone is very happy if it doesn't rain, otherwise the audience gets damp.

***Philosophy, Politics and Economics. It's what everyone does who wants to become Prime Minister. Usually they end up writing editorials for the Daily Telegraph instead, or, if they did very well in their debating days at the Union, they might become lackey to some backbencher in the House of Commons for a couple of years before going back to Oxbridge for a law conversion course.

****Every few years, Oxford and Cambridge alternately put on a play entirely in Ancient Greek. But that might stop now that we have Youtube for entertainment.

*****Short for "society". Notable (real) examples include G&S [Gilbert and Sullivan] Soc, Sikh Soc, and Pole-Dancing Soc. Rumors abound of secret societies such as the Assassins' Club, but so far I haven't seen anyone wandering around Oxbridge in a silly black cape and sword who didn't have a perfectly good reason for it.

photo: hello kitty

Panties on sale at 77th Street Shopping Mall, Beijing. The third pair from the top says, "I want it, baby!" Or maybe "I want a baby". It could be either.

quote of the day: english courtship

"English courtship is essentially an elaborate face-saving game, in which the primary object is not so much to find a sexual partner as to avoid offence and embarassment." -- Kate Fox, Watching the English