Drinking from a Guacal in Foshan

I am sitting in a movie theater watching a black and white animated girl march around her living room. The theater is in Tacheles, a much-graffiti'd old warehouse that used to be an anarchist hangout in East Berlin. Thanks to the effort of millions of people, the building is no longer in East Berlin, but the little girl is still shouting in German "Weg mit dem Shah!" In the English version of the movie Persepolis which has been redubbed she shouted "Down with the Shah!" The book upon which it was based was written in French. And of course when Marjane Satrapi was marching around a real living room she was shouting in Persian But though the sounds are different in the different language, the cri de coeur is the same. Persepolis is an intense story; mixing revolution and exile and puberty. When the teenage Satrapi plays air guitar to a bootleg Iron Maiden album, what is the "objective" meaning of her actions, is it: ordinary teenage rebellion, a blow for freedom against authority, Western decadence tempting pure Islamic youth? And while I identify with her, there is also a lesson about the limits of my contemporaneous search for an alternative identity in record bins in the 1980s. In Tehran Michael Jackson and Kim Wilde are just as subversive as Black Flag or the Dead Kennedy's—and top-40 hits are much more subversive than anything shaven head anarchists can get up to in a Vienna prep school.


I am drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon discussing Good Will Hunting with an Irishman. We are sitting on plastic stools in a small restaurant off a street where people sell sugar cane and oranges from the back of bicycles. The image on the label is the same, but the rest of the words are in Chinese. The beer costs $0.40 and the Irishman is from Melbourne Australia. He talks about guys he used to weld with before he got a chance to go to University in his mid-twenties, and how much they liked the scene where Matt Damon harangues the Harvard Student for paying tens of thousands of dollars for "an education you could have gotten for a buck fifty in late fees at the local library." It helped them to find more value in the life they lived and take ownership of it in the face of people who might look down on them. Of course Matt and Ben were seeking the goodwill of a different tribe of Irishmen on the other side of the world in South Boston—hoping that the community would be known for something other than riots over busing. Some one else I knew, a working class Italian, saw the story as a sham because Matt and Ben came from educated backgrounds, and contrary to the attitude the janitor has in the movie, the real Matt Damon paid for to go to Harvard (only two years, so he got it for half price). His cynical attitude made his life harder, but the attitude of the Melbourne welders helped them keep their self-respect.


I am in a Karaoke Bar—a medium sized room with a large TV. There are dozens of these rooms in the night club. people like to sing Karaoke here—but each clique of friends has a room to sing to each other, rather than getting on stage for an audience of strangers. I catch a familiar tune and look at the Chinese characters. I read very little Chinese, but I know that 巴比伦 means Babylon. I sing along: Chinese characters, English words, Jamaican tune and rhythm. But the sentiments come from 25 centuries ago. Although China is my ancestral homeland, the language and songs of this land have not been part of my life. Like Marjane or a Melbourne welder my heart stirs to something crafted by people no blood kin to me. The ones crying in captivity would find only meaningless babble in my song, even those who translated their words into English would probably find it unrecognizable. Only the Jamaicans who translated their words into song might find what I am doing in the Karaoke bar comprehensible. All of us remember different Zions in contrast to a different Babylons. But it is what happens within our hearts, rather than the sounds from our mouths, which creates the continuity across the centuries.


In the dusty Guatemalan town of Rabinal I like to drink Atol in the marketplace. The hot corn mush is served in a guacal: a hollowed out half gourd painted with red and yellow and black designs. I learned enough of the local Achi language to be able to ask for white atol with Chili: "hooch saq ruuk ik" I brought a guacal with me to China to use as bowls: to store hot peppers and garlic. The guacal is yet another cultural element: handmade, specific, and a centuries old local tradition I have carried across the globe.


Here in Southern China I see so many mechanically reproduced items which are elements of a shared global vocabulary: DVDs, flat screen TVs, jeans, cellphones, cars. I have a visual dictionary listing their names in Spanish, English, and Chinese. Will the circulation of these commodities sweep us into a single engulfing cultural matrix of Franchises and Freeway Exits—will they be repeated elements in millions of local and independent matrices governed by idiosyncratic rules like a neighborhood full of one-way streets?


I am teaching English and think sometimes about what makes a language: vocabulary of course, but also grammar, the system for how we put these elements together. You could make a visual dictionary for all the globalized elements in this essay: "Michael Jackson pin, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Karaoke." But language is more than vocabulary, and culture is more than these elements—there are also the rules which tell you how to put the elements together so that a group of people can find shared meaning in it. Like many of the sentences I grade, the warning "When people aware, the damages has been done," contains meaning. But even without consciously referring to the rules, I want to change it. There is something uncomfortable about the sentence. Where does our sense of grammar come from?


In Rabinal I drank atol from my Guacal—a hot beverage made from corn, with deep resonance for the Maya. Here in Foshan I fill it with tea, a hot beverage with deep cultural significance for the Chinese. I raise the guacal to my lips. The hot liquid passes my lips and warms my heart.