Remember The Time?

Since sometime in late spring- around Memorial Day weekend and certain unspeakable events that happened twenty years ago around the first week of June- just about every Western blog has been blocked, leaving me unable to post anything without the help of a good proxy filter. Avoiding China's Great Firewall is not very difficult to do, but it's often a nuisance. I've been using Facebook and Twitter- two other blocked services- with much less frequency than the nearly hourly use to which I was accustomed. Like many other expats here, I was hoping this would all just blow over as the summer passed by notable anniversaries that could be exploited by overzealous internet users. Unfortunately, since then we've seen a steady stream of major blog-worthy events, of which several gave the monitors of the Great Firewall more cause to keep the current bans in place.

I fell ill and was treated at a Chinese hospital, giving me valuable insight into the current American health care clusterf*ck.

Michael Jackson died, which was a bummer but ultimately not world changing. His influence lasts, but them man was essentially irrelevant.

Chaos and violence in Xinjiang Province. The western province home to a substantial ethnic minority has been in a state of unrest due to ethnic and political tensions that spilled over into violence this July. Twitter got blocked again in the wake of this. I spoke to a guy from Xinjiang I know recently about this. He said that things out there are bad, but that his people are treated well in Shanghai. I found this curious, since many Chinese people I've spoken to stereotypically talk about Xinjiang people in racist stereotypes.

Friends and I formed a band and have our first concert scheduled for Novmember 4, the one year anniversary of the election of Barack Obama.

More ethnic tension across China as stabbings involving syringes and ethnic minorities occur.

I started working a second job as I learned the true face of working in China. Don't believe what you've read in the NYT or AP regarding working here. They're aloof.

Soon, we will have a major holiday: the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. Things should get ridiculous.

The Yankees made it back to the playoffs.

Keep alive.

Thanksgiving

About a bajillion years ago- relative to my own existence, at least- the Pilgrims and the Indians celebrated the first Thanksgiving. They had yet to become Native Americans at that time, so you can get over it now: I'm calling them Indians.

Anyway, back to the story. Then we went and killed most of them, stole their land, and sold the rest firewater. Which reminds me: the economic downturn means we should spend more time with friends and family, and a nice bottle of wine goes great with that. I recommend a little place called Post Wine and Spirits in Larchmont, NY.

Right, so the story. Somewhere around the time of the War of Northern Aggression, legendary human Abraham Lincoln began the movement to mark the occasion of our first Thanksgiving with annual wildly inaccurate pageants and family dinners. On this day, we count our blessings and take part in our two great American pastimes: forgetting the baseball is our national pastime and eating too much.

This year, because I couldn't bear to spend another cherished holiday watching the Detroit Lions lose, I moved to China. Here, I estimate that 99.9999% of 1.3 billion people don't even know the Detroit Lions exist. For those of Americans living abroad, however, Thanksgiving is still a fairly important occasion, and agree it is totally worth it to go out of our way and order an already cooked turkey from a hotel restaurant or supermarket.

Having set the scene, my holiday begins at 8:15 AM. This might come as a surprise to many of you, but this is an hour at which I am, by and large, unaccustomed to waking. All the same, my neighbors chose to eviscerate all hope of having a nice post-Thanksgiving Eve-revelry sleep by making the bold decision to use a power drill, a power saw, and a hammer for the hour following this wicked wake up call. Throwing up my hands, metaphorically since I'm actually trying to suffocate my ears with the pillows, I lied in bed thinking about how lucky I am to be in China.

Cut to the early evening. It's 6:30 PM and I've just left work early. The subway is crowded, which means it's actually not bad tonight. Usually it is absurdly crowded. I've got the new Guns N' Roses record on my iPod, which is a ridiculous sentence phrase for several reasons. It's illegality here in China is the reason I'll highlight.

I just lost my train of thought imagining how I would look wearing Slash's hat, so I'll just skip to the white meat and mashed potatoes of the story. The holiday was spent nicely at a friend's place, where we had a traditional Thanksgiving feast of turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and curried tofu. (There were a lot of non-Americans there, and they felt compelled to bring something. Silly Canadians.) We did the hokey thing and went around saying what we were thankful for, and we all lied and said our friends. But it got me thinking about what I actually am thankful for, so here it goes:

1. I am thankful for my family, who are wonderful in every way- especially their support and understanding. I am thankful that they are smart, sociable, moral people who have done their damnedest to make me so, too.

2. I am thankful for my friends, who are still really cool and who totally miss me, but would be mad at me if I came back early. I am thankful that they are all doing their thing, too, so that we can compare notes.

3. I am thankful that I found a job. Economic crisis, my left foot. I am also thankful that it is a job I enjoy, working with people I like.

4. I am thankful that I have this opportunity to travel the world and follow my dream.

5. I am thankful for Barack Obama winning. Particularly, I am thankful for Sarah Palin losing.

6. I am thankful for the Internet making most of what I do feasible.

7. I am thankful that I finally finished reading Cryptonomicon. As awesome as it was, 1100 pages is really just too long. Which is why the next book I'm reading will only be around 800 pages.

8. I'm thankful to the peoples of Spain and France for having languages that I found totally abhorrent in seventh grade, forcing me to capriciously choose Chinese as my language of choice. Since hypothetical situations are poor arguments, however, we will not go ahead an imagine the alternate reality in which I spend my adult life on the French Riviera as a successful importer-exporter/secret agent. "Will not," I said.

And that's it. I hope you all had a great holiday, too.

Timeline: Nov. 5, 2008

Because I live in Shanghai, I live half a day ahead of the action back at home in the States. Here's the recap of how Election Morning went.

6:45 AM: Alarm goes off. I'm ready to kill my supervisor, Jaret, with whom I'll be heading over to Malone's to watch it all unfold.

8:00 AM: The election party is well underway. Polls start closing as breakfast gets served. I pickup a cool Obama poster that will soon be the first bit of wall decor for my apartment.

9:00 AM: Second round of polls. Obama takes the lead from McCain. The entire bar is pro-Obama and, even this early in the morning, the place goes wild. We're all also totally confused by a) CNN's insistence on using hologram technology, and b) Wolf Blitzer's continual insistence that "these are real votes we're looking at."

9:30 AM: Sonja arrives, soon to be followed by Clemon. The bar is filling up, still rocking for Obama.

10:00 AM: Next round of polls, and Obama's lead becomes commanding. It feels like a Saturday night at Malone's. Soon after, John King more or less proclaims the night over and the place goes ballistic.

11:00 AM: Round four. As this hour goes on, we start really doing the math. It's now just a countdown to noon, when the West Coast will make it all official. We've got two more compatriats that have joined us at our corner of the bar.

12:00 PM: Explosion of jubilation and relief. It's all finally over: eight years of confusion and two years of diligent attention to current events, done in an instant. CNN gets turned down and the PA turns towards Stevie Wonder. It's now actually a party. The gang's now buying rounds of Budweiser to celebrate. I notice everyone in the bar is breathing very, very deeply.

12:30 PM: McCain concession speech is very gracious and the whole bar kind of develops a soft spot for old guy.

1:30 PM: Obama addresses 240,000 people hanging out in a park, not to mention we millions around the world. Malone's totally freaks when he address "those watching from beyond our shores."

2:00 PM: Jaret and I get back to the office, still in total disbelief. Every breath I take sounds like a sigh.

5:00 PM: Work moving very slowly. It's all still surreal.

7:30 PM: Teaching goes really well, but it's clear that I'm totally out of it.

9:30 PM: I'm on the subway, headed towards the Bund to meet up with my high school girlfriend. She's in Shanghai on a trip.

10:15 PM: We're at Glamour Bar for the official Obama victory party. Lots of foreigners, and they're all ecstatic. They're serving "Obama-tinis" and "Change We Can Believe Ins".

Nov. 6, 2008

10:00 AM: Wait, did yesterday really happen? This distance is really making it not feel real.

This has been such an incredible past few days. It's amazing how much support Obama has here among the expat community. I've met exactly one person that supported McCain, but we're pretty sure he's in the CIA, anyway.

I've spoken about my incredible love of country before, but, as of Wednesday morning, I've never loved it more. Feeling the excitement of a whole community rallying behind Obama was really special.