Like most kids, when I was little I dreamed of growing up to be Spiderman. But unlike most kids, I actually had the chance to achieve my dream.
During my junior year in college, I was bitten by a radioactive spider. I soon found myself in possession of amazing superhuman powers, including an armour-like back and a stiff, slick abdomen that punches would just slide off of. “Wowee,” I thought, “This is my big chance to be like my hero Spiderman! I’ve been reading about him for years, but now I can actually be like him. Little kids will read stories about me and dream of having super powers like I have and beating up bad guys like I do.”
You can’t imagine the liberation, the elation of having super powers. It made my head swim. Picking up cars with my bare hands, listening through solid walls to secret conversations beyond, standing erect on the edges of rooftops and staring out at the city before me. Who else in the world could do that but me and an elite group of powerful beings? And what awesome responsibility came with this power: responsibility to help those in need, responsibility to fight injustice. Responsibility to benefit mankind.
So I did the obvious thing when you find you have super powers, I changed my major from economics to super heroing.
The super heroing program at Humboldt State University wasn’t famous, but it had a few good teachers who were pretty inspirational. They hadn’t exactly been super heroes themselves, per se, but they really got the super hero mentality and they were good educators. The super hero / super villian scene in Humboldt wasn’t much like what I read about in Spiderman comics; we didn’t have a Kingpin of crime, no Dr. Octopus, barely even any muggers. Mostly me and my classmates workshopped our heroing skills with each other, critiquing each others’ round-houses and super jumps. Every now and then we’d get a touring super hero in for a lecture. Some of them really were world-class heroes, like the Blue Beetle who gave a good talk in 1995. If you haven’t heard of him, the Blue Beetle had previously been a member of the Justice League of America and was a contemporary of superheoes like Batman and Superman. I felt like we had a lot in common, both having bug things going, and I got to ask him a few questions after the lecture. He was a really down to earth guy, and it was cool to see that super heroes are just people too.
After graduation I lived up to that saying, “Nobody ever does what they studied in college.” I kept doing roofing with my friend’s dad in Eureka for two years after college to get a jump on paying off my college loans (and, honestly, to enjoy that Humboldt Green for a little while longer). After that I looked into getting my teaching credentials, took the classes, and did a year and a half of classroom work under one of the emergency creditials that California was giving out then. It was a lot of fun, and I still keep in touch with a few of the 8th graders that I taught. But it wasn’t really for me, and by that time I was feeling like I needed to settle down on a career. But what do you do with a splotchy work record and a degree in super heroing?
So I decided to take a year off and do an English teaching stint in China. A high school friend introduced me to the school in Guangzhou where he’d worked after graduation, you just needed to be a native speaker and to have a degree in anything. While in Guangzhou, I also got lots of other gigs in addition to my teaching. These were some of my favorite things that I did during that year; it was stuff that you would need genuine super powers for back home in the States. But there in Guangzhou, you didn’t actually need any super powers, you just needed to be white. They’d put the cape on you, airbrush your abs, put some dramatic wind effect behind you and *poof*, it’s like you’re really a super hero. Of course, I was in actuality a genuine super hero, with a degree to prove it, so they had lucked out getting someone with real qualifications instead of the regular stream of Joe Shmoes who usually roll into China looking for the chance to be a super hero without having any of the actual powers.
But after I moved to Chengdu, I did find that there were some other real super heroes here too. Real super powers and everything. One guy could make the most amazing electrical blasts out of these antennae on his head. There were a couple good super-speeders too.
It was really heady meeting a bunch of other people like me, and we figured that we’d been given a unique chance here in China to make a real go of the whole super power thing that we’d been gifted with. So we did the obvious thing and started meeting weekly to workshop each others’ super powers.
And that’s the story of how I joined the Chengdu Bookworm Writing Group.