Recently I have found it hard to communicate with people. I know that may be highly ironic for a man that lives in the heart of China when he was born in a small town of North Yorkshire, England.
Even amongst my laowai friends who like me, came to this land to teach English, I find it hard to communicate. I simply seem to have lost my ability to relate myself to what they are saying.
In thinking about this, I realised that most of the time I have trouble communicating with people. I can come across as aloof or cocky and then to other people I come across as closed off and shy. It is simply because I can never think of the right thing to say as whilst I have always been very good at predicting peoples behaviour, I can never think how they do and so whilst I find actions easy to predict, I struggle to think of what people will say. So I make a lot of mistakes.
I have never been all that successful, at least given my qualifications, professionally. And this has most often been because I can never relate myself to co-workers, because, basically, I am not a people person.
I did not think much of this as I have always been able, until recently, say the things that people expect me to say and act the way I am expected to behave and also to agree with people the way I am expected to, even when they are extremely wrong. Todays society requires people to be yes men/women far too much and it does not suit someone like me who questions everything.
And then recently I watched a film that made me feel a little more secure about myself. I watched The Imitation Game, a film about the life of Alan Turing. I really wanted to watch this film because Turing has been a hero to me since I first heard his story. He was a man that saved millions of lives and yet, because he was born in the wrong place at the wrong time he was treated horribly and killed by the the people he saved. I was moved by the film, and I feel that the fascist nation I live in moved me more than it would have had I been in Britain. But the thing that I found amusing and really set on this feeling of mine and led me to write this was a scene in which a very young Alan Turing is eating his food and was separating all of the foods on his plate by colour. This is something that I did for years. I am not at all wanting to suggest that I am anything close to Turing in terms of accomplishments, or character. But it was refreshing to discover, or at least feel (I understand its probably poetic license in a film), that if someone who achieved such greatness could have an eccentricity as I do, then I am not someone who is defective, but merely someone who is different and unlike Turing who had his mathematics to plough himself in to, I need to just find my niche.
I have always felt that my interest was in the written word. I have always been able to absorb books at a pace that at times is annoying to me as I am always struggling to think what to read next. I came to realise tonight that the reason I enjoy reading so much is because when reading a book, I do not have to worry that I cannot understand what the characters are thinking because it tells me. But yet I can nearly always predict the actions that they will take. This of course is an added bonus to the fact that reading allows me to see and feel things, and to go to places that I can never go. The written word is mankind's greatest accomplishment. And whilst I do not always feel that humankind is a good thing, or that we deserve all that we have, I strongly believe that the beauty that I have seen in the pages of books; holding fiction, biographies, history, technical manuals and poetry. I have visited numerous art galleries in my years on this world, and I have never been moved by something a person has painted on a canvas. But I have been moved to tears by the words printed in a book, or shown on a Turing device.
I have always wished for fame and fortune, like billions before me. But for me, I never wanted fame too much, because to be famous, is to become noticed. But I have always wanted fortune. People will assume that with fortune, means I can have nice things. A good home, all the gadgets I could want, etc. But for me it brings true independence, the independence from worry about bills and mortgages and pensions and all those rational fears and traps that hold society in place. If I never had to worry about money, then I could do what I have always wanted and open a second hand bookshop, regardless of their dying out, and I could spend my days doing what I have always wanted to do. Expand my mind through the writings of others. Learning has been my greatest pursuit in my life and even in works of science fiction, I believe that a person can learn a great deal, even if it is about themselves.
I have been blessed to have a child in this world, and although she was an accident, and I am not ashamed of that as she is a true miracle to me and I am very happy to know that there is something of my being in this world who will live on and maybe one day she will have a child and then a fragment of my soul will live on in my descendants, even though she does not bear my name (plus with her being a lady it statistically would leave to its eventual loss anyway) and my brothers soon to be born (hopefully in the next few hours, also on my owns birthday) it is nice to know that I will in a way live forever. I also have been published, so that thanks to the new technology (new to me as it did not exist when I was born) means that my name will forever live on, long after I leave life. So whilst it is true that after 100 years, people do not get named I can at least hold out a tiny bit of hope that someone after that time will see my name in print and then even for one second I will be alive again.
I am a man that fears both death and life it seems upon reflection.
I am going to go on a tangent now. I am an educator. I teach about a thousand Chinese students a year at a prestigious Chinese university. I lecture in history and in languages. I was giving a lecture on family and relationships a few months ago and I was going through vocabulary and I came to the word partner. I start by using it to describe how some couples refer to each other as partners rather than using girlfriend and boyfriend, etc. And I mentioned that gay couples also use this descriptor and was met by scoffs by the students. In another class, when asked to talk about who they consider to be their best friend was and a student referred to his best friend as a she. This is an easy mistake for a Chinese person to make as there is no distinction between he and she in their language. I myself did not think twice about the statement as two of those I count closest to me are ladies and I would never once think twice about calling them my best friends when asked. It made me realise that as these students mocked these things that I was living in a land that is not yet enlightened and evolved. I myself have been attacked because of the colour of my skin and that did not bother me anywhere near as much as the way my students acted. I wanted to fail them all on the spot but I was too cowardly to do so.
Maybe in the years to come I will find my niche and I will understand my place in the world more than I currently do. But for now, I will keep groping through the darkness, with my cat by my side, and I hope that my time in this fascist and often horrible country will improve it and make it and make some of its people, if even for just one moment, pick their minds out of the dirt of oppression and realise that they can be better.
