I checked into one of my regular reads this morning and found…myself.

OK, not me, really, but this blog, and a ringing endorsement of it from China Law Blog. That came off a recommendation from the Granite Studio, who linked to my post on Monday, We’re all on the same bus. These are two of my favorites, so what can I say. Thanks guys, I’m honored.

And I’m especially thrilled considering that CLB’s Dan Harris openly hates this kind of blog, an ESL teacher getting a first look at China. He says it right in the first sentence, and he’s said it before. He makes a good point:

More often than not those blogs seem to focus on how dirty an apartment is, how cheap their last meal was, how they saw some Chinese guy peeing on the street, how they are having trouble making friends, have too many friends, are treated differently because they are foreigners, miss the people back home (who invariably have trouble understanding why they are in China), etc., etc., etc. They also typically lack staying power.

Then he says some gratuitously nice things about me and this blog that really shouldn’t be repeated. I’m a writer with a writer’s ego, fragile and fickle, easily flattered and easier frightened, so such things go to my head.

It’s funny, though, because I almost wrote a post yesterday about the noodle shop on campus, and what a horror it can be sitting at a dirty table, listening to a dozen people slopping noodles down their throats, making the kind of noises my sister would make to tell me I’m eating too loud and making her sick. I endure this because it feeds me for 5 RMB, or about 64 cents.

In fact, everything Dan mentions as the pitfalls of teacher blogs are things I’ve considered writing–in some cases actually written but never posted–but eventually decided against. Sometimes a better blog post came up and I forgot what I meant to write, other times a subject is just overdone elsewhere, or everywhere. It happens a lot, including the last post, when J. and ESWN and James Fallows were way ahead of me. There’s probably little I can observe here that someone hasn’t already seen.

Paul Theroux said something about this in Riding the Iron Rooster. (I don’t have the exact quote, because the book is in my apartment, a 10-minute walk through the snow from here.) All travel literature, he said, is essentially about the traveler more than the destination, since everything has probably been covered before.

I don’t know if I agree with that. What I can say is that there is a far greater commonality in what is seen by observers than I expected when I started this project six months ago, and maybe that’s what keeps us all talking. We’ve all lived in shitty apartments with toilets that don’t work and paint falling off the walls, been stared at and told how great our Chinese is because we can say, “Nihao.” No one who commented on my student’s swipe at the Japanese sounded at all surprised.

We’ve all been through it. We’re all going through it. Not to be repetitive, but we’re all on the same bus.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 20th, 2006 at 11:00 pm and is filed under self-indulgence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.