Futility and Productivity
What makes a day productive in China varies. Some things that should be simple are hard. Some things that are hard are surprisingly simple.
Especially as Fulbright provides no structure for my time, I often ask myself: “Was I productive today?” This is very different from asking, “What did I get done today?” because in China, asking this question will drive you to madness.
For instance, last month, I spent a whole week travelling across town to gather paperwork that would allow me to take an expensive cab ride to the fifth ring road to subject myself to physical fitness testing so that I could obtain a piece of paper that let my affiliated college file for permission to accept me as a student so that I could go to the visa office to wait in line to apply and then pay for a student visa.
Was I productive? Well, I needed to get those things done, so I was certainly checking items off the to-do list. But if I asked myself, “What did I get done today?” then things take a mental turn for the worse. I “got done” cab riding, spending money, and filling out paperwork. Quite a few steps down from making the world bend to my creative whims.
Today I wanted to get down to work. I cleared off my big table, lit some incense, made some tea, and sat down with a pen and paper. My mission was to transcribe a Xiangsheng script that I’ve been trying to memorize. Master Ding insists that the best way to memorize a script is to write it out by hand, and it seemed to be a good way to protect my written Chinese skills from atrophy.
And so I whiled away, looking at the printed script and then back down at my kindergartener’s Chinese handwriting, transcribing sentence by sentence. An hour passed. My incense burned low, and the tea grew cold as I neglected it. Smiling, I looked back at my handicraft—and found I had transcribed not even two dozen sentences.
Was I productive? Definitely! What did I do? Almost nothing.
Frowning, I flipped open the pages of my Master’s new book on Xiangsheng. The result of a lifetime of teaching foreigners Chinese through comedy, he had given me an advance copy, entitled “My International Promotion of Teaching Chinese.” On the front page was his signature, a short message to me—study hard!—and a stamp labeled “Do not Distribute.” The book documented his journey from apprentice to master, and all he knew about the history and techniques of the art form.
I opened the book and got sucked in immediately. I learned about the origins of Xiangsheng as a street art, about the first practitioners, who had stage names such as “Fearless of Poverty” and created the art form from the techniques of Beijing Opera. I learned about the changes that occurred during each generation of performers, and of the changes in performance setting, from streets, to private homes, to teahouses.
Another hour had passed. I smiled again… until I realized I’d made it through only eight pages.
Granted, Chinese text is more content-dense than English text, but still, the same issue arises: Was I productive? Of course! I’d just learned a great amount in a short time. What did I do? Again, almost nothing.
Living in China and learning humor is a series of little victories that sometimes cascade into life-changing moments. Eight pages here and there do add up, even if it doesn’t seem like much, and I have nine more months left (and after the scholarship ends, a lifetime) to continue to improve.
I will learn to read and write faster. Even the poor pace that I achieved today was the result of years of study—I understood all the content, only being stumped by obscure adjectives and the occasional complex grammatical structure.
Productivity is a tricky thing to pin down as a stranger in a strange land. By the metrics of foreigners trying to do things in China, I don’t do badly for myself here. By the metrics of a Chinese person, I probably achieve a laughably tiny amount of work in a day. Is it possible to live—and thrive?—in a country where there are 1.3 billion people that don’t even need to break a sweat to outpace you in nearly every topic imaginable?
Maybe the best way forward is to take small steps. Write twenty sentences, read eight pages, and come back the next day for more. Do the little things right.
That being said, I still have trouble with those—while I was writing this article, I ran myself a bath, only to realize that the water had been draining out the open stopper the whole time. Now, I’m out of hot water.
No bath, but I did write a blog post. Was I productive?