I like this idea, however, because these are all writings that would have ended up on this blog anyhow, at some point or another, in some form or another. All of the stories are related to what I will be doing on the Errant Terran--maybe if I gather them all together, I'll figure out what that is. I'll start by introducing some of them to you and giving a bit of context.
The first five stories are all from a "collection" I had in my head, and collected mostly in one notebook, called Pictures of China I Never Took. They were written about my first trip to China, and to Kaifeng specifically, in the Fall of 2009 as an exchange student from Beloit College. Note, they were not written while I was staying in China--most of them were written in France, in the Spring of 2010, on the backs of pages scribbled over in desperate franglish[i] which were my class notes for that semester. I was having a rough time with my language skills and subsequently my studies that semester abroad, and looking back upon what seemed a much simpler semester in China became one of my favorite past-times. It also just seemed to take me that long to sort through those experiences in China and start putting them to definite words.[ii] Thus, Pictures of China I Never Took was already a sort of backlog even when I first wrote it; I suppose most writing is, barring some stream-of-consciousness and prophecy.
I always intended to write more than five stories for this collection. I had vague aspirations that they would be published as a sort of 'series' in a travel magazine (or better yet, a book), which at one point I attempted to see through, but with no result. The second story, "My Darling Clementine", I did recently submit as a writing sample to another travel magazine, Glimpse, and I am waiting to hear back from them.
The next two pieces, "So Three White Guys Walk into a Condom Shop" and "Narrative Essay", were written almost two years later, during my current stay in Kaifeng, though neither with any intent of publication larger than my classroom. I was teaching narrative essays, but the class was still having difficulty distinguishing "narrative" from "narrative essay" (in my basic definition, a narrative tells a story, while a narrative essay tells a story and explores an idea from that). So I decided to go ahead and write an example of my own--both a narrative and then a narrative essay expanding on it, to show how you could move from one to the other. The problem was, the only narrative I could think of that was interesting enough to write about was the time, fairly recently, when two other foreign teachers and myself had walked into a condom shop just a block down from campus and what we saw there. It was a funny story, maybe rated PG-13 for some "sexual themes", but not what I'd had in mind when I assured my class I could give them an example later that week. Still, true to my word, I sent them the narrative, and maybe a day later an even more condemning narrative essay about what I'd observed of the 'sexual culture' around college campuses in China. I'd taught that you couldn't write an interesting essay about something that didn't interest you; maybe I should have tried then, in the interests of political correctness. Still, nobody called me out on it, and Adam, the other writing teacher, reported that it at least garnered some interesting discussion when he introduced it to his writing class. And now that upwards of 300 students in China have read my views on sexual culture in China, I don't have many qualms left about putting them on my blog for you to read as well.
So, those are the contents of the backlog thus far. They are chronological, though with a 2-year gap somewhere between them. From here it should get interesting--anything 'new' that I add will probably actually be older, and more specifically relevant to what I'm writing elsewhere in the Errant Terran. I won't just add old materials willy-nilly, though not all the connections will be to China specifically. So we'll just keep going and see what else is unearthed in this blog.
[i] There is no satisfactory term for the undiscriminating mixture of French and English; though I suppose, historically-speaking, the term could be “English.”
[ii] This also seemed to be the case for my language acquisition—I did not speak such fluent Chinese until I had arrived in France a month or so later.
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