A Jump to Heaven's Gate

Taylor was born and raised in Grayson, Kentucky, a rural, scenic little town with a population of about 4,000.

He'd had a fairly typical small-town American life, was handsome, outgoing and popular and played wide receiver on the football team in high school. He'd dreamed of playing in the NFL, being a superstar athlete, marrying a supermodel, or marrying his namesake, Taylor Swift, Taylor & Taylor...

Oh, he could see them, hand in hand, walking on a glistering beach, under a crimson sun, their names written in the sand... Taylor & Taylor...

He'd marry Taylor Swift, and he'd be making millions, playing in the NFL, breaking all of Jerry Rice's receiving records. He'd be on TV commercials. He'd be somebody. Somebody GREAT. That was his dream...

But that dream didn't pan out, and his varsity teams stumbled to losing records, didn't even qualify for the playoffs, and he wasn't recruited by any colleges, and his grades weren't high enough to earn him any scholarships.

Aside from football, it was largely parties and girls that occupied his time in high school, not too much else. Books had never been a priority.

However, he had developed an interest in science, and became infatuated with the field of neuroscience, obsessed with the idea of him becoming a world-renown neuroscientist, having taken a shine to the topic after watching a few Sam Harris YouTube videos.

After enrolling at Eastern Kentucky University and failing to make the team as a walk-on, he completed his bachelor's in pre-med (with a minor in frat parties, binge-drinking). Upon receiving his diploma, though, he again didn't have the grades for a scholarship to med school and went further into debt as he struggled through a neuroscience PhD program at his alma mater and worked part-time stocking shelves at Walmart.

His drinking, which had been a weekend, party thing through high school and college, became an everyday thing for him. He'd begun drinking his coffee splashed with Jameson Irish whiskey, shotgunning 3 or 4 Busch beers with lunch, and pounding 6 or 7 shots of Jack Daniels or Old Crow or Jim Beam bourbon alongside dinner.

Despite his heavy alcohol intake, he was functional, never getting too buzzed where he couldn't show up to school or work, get his tasks done, though the quality of his PhD research, papers was erratic, and he'd regularly be involved in shouting matches, sometimes shoving and in minor physical altercations with coworkers at Walmart, but nothing severe enough to warrant termination.

After eking out his thesis, completing his PhD, his dissertation, his defense, which he considered to be a work of unparalleled genius, an ingenious work severely misunderstood and maligned by his advisors, Taylor packed his belongings into garbage bags, crammed all his stuff into the trunk and backseat of his blue Ford Focus, and drove from Richmond to Louisville to seek work and fulfill his dream of being a famous academic or a wealthy researcher or highly regarded scientist at a multinational corporation. But, to his chagrin, he had trouble finding ANY work in academics or research. At all.

He lacked work experience in the neuroscience field, yet he had just graduated, and many employers wanted a candidate with prior work experience.

This infuriated him. How was he supposed to have 2 or 3 years of work experience when he'd spent the last few years completing his studies? It was indeed quite the conundrum...

The job search left him with a sour taste, and soon he'd developed a disdain for his country, America.

His whole life his parents, teachers, the TV told him of the virtues of a college education and that once he had a diploma in his hand, then he'd have a great job, a house, wife, kids, picket fence, et cetera.

And he'd done that.

Yet here he was, with a fucking PhD, and still no one was giving him an opportunity. No one was giving him shit, and door after door slammed in his face, application after application was rejected, and no one seemed to recognize the brilliance of the online research he'd done and published on his blog and spoken of on his YouTube channel, which had nearly THREE HUNDRED subscribers...

Further and further he sank into credit card debt, trying to simply pay his rent, car, buy food, and his debt compounded, started piling high as a Himalayan mountain- this on top of the six figure sum he already owed in student loans.

Shit...

It made him more and more bitter every day.

It wasn't only the economics of America, it not being the meritocracy he thought. He also hated the atmosphere, the political correctness, the bickering, the Twitter battles, the liberals and conservatives whining at each other while people like him barely made end's meat. It was gross. It was stupid. What had this great country become?

二

Fed up, Taylor began to look elsewhere, look eastward, far east, to China.

China was the next great superpower, he posited. It was inevitable, with its large population, 600 million strong middle class, its manufacturing base and high-tech society and bullet trains he'd seen on YouTube videos.

He marveled at China's ever-expanding economy and ingenuity and admired how the government of China got things done. How the people there were so united, so together, had such purpose. China reminded him of America back in the 1950s, when the country really was great.

Taylor had read online of the abundance of work, business and financial opportunities in China and began to study Mandarin.

He started applying to jobs at companies and think tanks, thinking he'd be highly prized, considering his PhD, but all he could find was work teaching English, mostly at training centers and public schools, and many of those jobs consisted of singing songs, dancing and playing games with children, which wasn't for him, someone of his abilities and education.

Initially he was disappointed, but his spirits lifted when he came across a job for a position at a university near Beijing.

The job was for a "university lecturer", and while it consisted mostly of teaching conversational English classes, it did offer possibilities of "research" and grant money for projects. Taylor figured it could be a gateway to bigger and better things and sort of liked the idea of being a "college lecturer." It sounded very distinguished. Surely, he'd be highly respected.

After a brief Skype interview, in which he was asked only a couple basic questions about himself, he was hired, sent a contract.

The work visa process for a "Z Visa" was a pain in the ass, cost him nearly $700 in assorted fees, but he thought of the old adage, "It takes money to make..." and he sucked it up, went further into debt, deeper down the hole after shelling out an additional $1000 for his plane ticket.

Finally, though, after 2 months, he had secured his visa and boarded a plane, for the first time ever, and sat squished into the middle seat, in coach, and flew from Louisville to Beijing, on four connecting flights, for a total of 6,853 miles and 28 hours, crossing clouds, mountains, oceans and timelines, on a preternatural journey to begin his new life...

三

Despite seeing videos, pictures online, Beijing was nothing like he could have imagined. It was colossal and awe-inspiring in a way that was almost like prestidigitation. He was overwhelmed, speechless as he groggily walked through and out of the sprawling, shiny new Beijing airport.

He then boarded a lemon-yellow cab, handed the cagey flattop driver a slip of paper with the school's address and buckled up as they roared off into the brownish dusk, en route to his school.

Taylor whiplashed and shook with the vehicle as the driver tore through the city streets and highways like a bat out of hell. Panning his jetlagged gaze around in the backseat of the cab, he couldn't believe how many people there were in Beijing, people in such massive clusters, swarming and teeming everywhere and anywhere, streets, roads, buses, buildings, everything peopled, jam-packed, huddled masses, bunched in, packed like sardines, fucking swimming, brimming, spilling oceans of humanity. There were probably more humans on one city block, bus or subway train than in the entirety of his hometown.

(These Chinese people must really be horny and fuck a lot, he pondered. How else could there be such masses of them...)

Beijing city went on for infinity and was eclectic, varying the spectrum from battered weather-worn gray blocks of Soviet style apartments that sat directly adjacent to ritzy high-rises, and towering glass office buildings, KFCs, shopping malls and supertall skyscrapers situated next to squarish traditional Chinese homes, Hutongs and pagodas and slanted roof Asian temples, the city a truly extensive mix, a striking contrast of old and new.

Taylor's eyes lit up when he thought he spotted a UFO. But it was in fact a circular black drone that whirred by his taxi's window and soared off and sliced into the gray haze of the chunky sky, and Taylor sat enthralled, his head cocked back, staring out at the cityscape full of flickering neon glows from endless rows of immense structures, the city's dusky radiance like something from a sci-fi movie...

It was truly mesmerizing for him, a small-town kid, to arrive in such a dizzying, bustling metropolis...

I mean, he'd been to New York City once, but this was another thing altogether, a place this alien, busy, populated and massive...

For the first time in his life, he felt like he was on the verge of greatness. For the first time, he felt like somebody, and he thought of his classmates from high school, still in his hometown, still at the same DQ. Those nobodies still not doing shit. If only they could see him now! He was in fucking CHINA!

四

His university was on the city's satellite outskirts, Beijing's never-ending, expansive edge. The campus in what used to be a farming community that was becoming urbanized, developed. Along the roads were tiny lots growing vegetables and ramshackle tin houses and restaurants, small groceries, street side vendors and boxy crumbling concrete buildings.

On nearly every street were newly built mobile phone stores, at least one or two phone stores per block.

Red banners and Chinese flags hung from nearly all buildings, and there were giant billboards featuring Chairman Xi smiling and PLA soldiers saluting at nearly every intersection.

The most prevalent thing, though, in the area had to be the construction. Construction on a scale Taylor couldn't have exactly imagined.

There were half empty, half torn down, half constructed, newly constructed and about to be constructed structures situated on each street. There were newly built, mostly empty houses, office buildings, office parks, schools, stores, and some of the stores had fake "Starbucks" signs plastered on their fronts and mannequins standing inside the vacant buildings.

Constant cavalcades of mud-caked construction vehicles, semitrucks rumbled around every road, their tailpipes belching big black clouds of fumes that floated and dissolved upwards. The trucks drove furiously, honking their horns at one another, with purpose.

The trucks' cargo rattled like storms and the trucks' clangor bled into and mixed with the ubiquitous construction sites' drilling, the clanking of heavy machinery, and the two harmonized, sounded a mechanical din.

The half torn up buildings and rubble all around first reminded Taylor of a tornado hit town, but the gray skies and ocher dust and local people in ratty clothes and facemasks sort of gave the place a Mad Max vibe...

五

The university was nice, though. Like a little oasis amid the bipolar fracas of construction and decay.

The campus was green, with many willow and poplar trees, lush foliage, violet and pink flowers dotted about its sprawling grounds.

The buildings appeared sleek and modern, Taylor thought, at first, while being given a tour of the campus by the middle-aged gruff admin lady who'd received him upon his arrival to campus, the lady's lips not moving much as she spoke and her conservative, long gray pleated dress and her bowl-haircut, her bottle size eyeglasses reminding him of a Mormon, or a cult member...

Peering, looking closer into the buildings, though, as they walked briskly, Taylor discovered that many were empty or half-built inside... The school was only 10 years old and still developing, he figured, like the surrounding area, like anything, really; it was a work in progress...

At least his apartment, on the far edge of the campus, was, well, suitable. It was a basic but clean, spacious 2 bedroom on an upper floor of an 18 storey building.

But it had a few issues...

It as well looked a lot more posh on the outside than it was inside, its outside like a tall red-brick building, maybe a hotel or condo; but its inside had wires hanging from the ceilings in the hallways, and the hallways weren't lit at night, one needed to use a flashlight to navigate the corridors, and the elevator kinda freaked him out because it still had peeling plastic wrappings on its inside walls and was plastered with ad stickers and graffiti scrawled about and phone numbers written randomly about the elevator car's silver metal walls.

The elevator also had a persistent odor of secondhand smoke as security guards from the building, as well as Chinese university teachers, would smoke cigarettes in the elevators, and hallways, too. There were often cigarette butts strewn, stubbed out on the elevator floor.

(Fire hazards had always freaked him out, and the fire hoses in the hallways didn't appear functional, and where a fire extinguisher was supposed to be encased, in a glass box, next to the elevators, there sat only a 1-liter plastic bottle filled with water... It unnerved Taylor, but the building was built of concrete and likely less flammable, or so he hoped...)

The building's construction was sorta scary too. Although the apartment building was newly built, there were several cracks, fissures running up the walls in Taylor's apartment, which he hoped were only superficial, those cracks.

The furniture, especially the bed, was hard and uncomfortable. Buying several additional pillows, cushions, and a bed mat, helped.

The road next to the apartment complex was a two lane highway, and it was a bit annoying, with semitrucks and construction vehicles barreling down it, at all hours, and the trucks would constantly pop jake brakes and blare, honk, and beep high decibel horns at one another and at every other vehicle nearby.

Earphones, earplugs, and a white noise app helped with the beeping from the trucks, but the sounds were so high-pitched, they could still be heard slightly...

What's more, Taylor had several bouts of diarrhea upon moving to China, nearly once or twice a week, having loose sloppy shits or other stomach issues, and he quickly developed breathing problems, too, chronic coughs likely attributable to air pollution in the area, the air leaving layers of brownish dust that coated everything in his apartment, especially out on his balcony, the dust stubbornly present and persistent, no matter how much or how often he cleaned.

Still, despite the flaws, his life in China was an improvement, a big step up from Walmart and the shithole apartments he'd lived in, with their paper-thin walls and bowing ceilings that squeaked and squealed like a pig being slaughtered. Even the slight rattle and squeal of the honking trucks was better than hearing that neighbor lady's baby's shrieking and crying or the young couple who were always screaming and cursing at each other, and for sure better than hearing and smelling his last roommate's farts.

And it was WAY better, too, than the double-wide he'd grown up in.

For the first time in his life he was able to live alone, with no family or roommates. He finally had a bathroom all to himself.

Best of all, the apartment, utilities were free, so he couldn't complain, and he enjoyed that he was the only foreign teacher at his school, the attention it gave him, how tall it made him feel, and he loved his light, 10 hour per week schedule teaching classes of docile Chinese students, most of whom just slept or played on phones while he stood at his podium, reading from the class textbook or from a university provided PowerPoint.

Upon reaching China, Taylor was so elated, so high on the country, he barely drank, cutting back to a beer or two, maybe, at night, sometimes not drinking anything for the first time since high school. Of course, it did help, too, that the local beer tasted like piss and the national hard liquor, baijiu, tasted like foot fungus sieved through a stinky sock.

Taylor found himself enjoying his semi-sobriety, was sleeping far better at night and had gone down a couple pant sizes.

Life was good. He was in China! He was out in the world. He was a man of the world. An international traveler. A somebody. He was finally on his way to doing something, something great!

六

One of the best parts of his job was living on campus and not having to drive or own a car. Not needing a car was a blessing. He was saving tons of cash not having to pay for gas, insurance, maintenance, and all the other shit car owners get raped for, and he finally was earning enough money to pay off a portion of his student debt.

Thanks to his light teaching hours, he had enough time to study Mandarin, and was at it, diligently, swiftly becoming much more conversant, discovering he had a flair for the language, its syntax, characters and tones coming naturally to him. Perhaps he'd been Marco Polo in a previous life...

With his rapid rate of improvement, his linguistic skills were soon up to snuff, and he'd decided to venture out, see the local sights. But, after the lengthy trip via bullet train and several subway stops, Taylor'd been dismayed to discover that Sanlitun, and most of the expat bars, foreign restaurants in Beijing had either been shut down or had gone out of business.

"Where were all the expats, the parties?" he pondered. The few expats he did encounter on the streets looked paranoid, with eyes of shit, or they looked dead, more like zombies than humans, walking hollow with thousand-yard stares...

Beijing turned out to be far more boring as a city than he expected, no parties or much going on. There were police everywhere, many in riot gear, and he'd been stopped twice by the police, randomly at subway stations, to have his passport checked, questioned like a criminal on his comings and goings.

He left disappointed. He decided to stick more around his local area and be more adventurous, have a "real China" experience. Fuck those walking dead expats and fascist cops in Beijing. He'd learn more Chinese, anyway, talking to Chinese people.

Inspired after seeing a video on YouTube by a South African guy called Winston, who'd explored China via motorcycle, Taylor decided to do a bit of the same and bought a secondhand motorcycle from a Chinese coworker, a short guy with a weirdly sloped forehead, and Taylor excitedly strapped on a Nazi SS style helmet he'd gotten along with the bike and revved up the engine and set out to explore the local village near the school, riding off feeling like he was Indiana Jones.

七

To Taylor's surprise, even in the village, there were security cameras everywhere, several, atop poles, on every block, cameras attached to buildings, cameras hanging from bridges. He wondered what could be happening here in the outskirts to warrant such surveillance...

Also, to his surprise, he discovered the local townspeople weren't very welcoming of foreigners. Whereas his students or the city dwellers were either friendly, polite, or at worst apathetic, those in the village, stared and pointed at him like he was a zoo animal, and many gave him dirty looks, were passively aggressive, and one toothless old man in raggedy blue slacks and blazer spit at him, shook his fist and yelled something about "Panmunjom!"