koue

You know that part of American Splendor, where he wakes up suddenly in a sweat, breathing heavy, then the nightmare falls away, and he wipes his brow in relief, sighs and says, "Thank god! I gotta job....I gotta job."

True. Painfully true.

After a month of dicking around - too literally - I got my ass into a fulltime job. "Sucker" I may be, as a few friends have pointed out, but my life needs some fucking structure. Back into the Chinese office. Having to adjust to the northern accent. Which is a bitch. A friend recently said my accent sounded like a "lao guang", which is kind of like a "Yankee" except it means southerner.

But it means back into a world of people. I feel like I have reason to be in China again. In the past three days I've met some really interesting people. A dude who runs a IT company that didn't speak a word of any language until he was 12. At 1 and 1/2 his parents sent him to England with a French and Italian nanny and he didn't speak a word until he returned to China 11 years later. A met a random Brit, who runs a jazz cafe in the boondocks and is selling ancient swing jazz to China. Meanwhile my boss is a woman (back with the deadly female boss) who does film production, but also seems to have her fingers in every other pie: tobacco export, a future home shopping channel, personal loans, god knows what else...

Of course the best part of the job is returning home. I've been returning home the back way, past the Lama Temple, the Confucian Temple, and the National Scholar's Hall (yes I live one foot in ancient China). At night the old people are still sawing away on musical instruments at the old age learning center, a drunk guy needs help with his bicycle chain, a little girl is wandering searching for her parents, construction workers are returning home, the local security watch does a patrol. I'm happy to be where I'm standing for the first time in a while.

At home my girl is waiting with salsa music.