weekend people

The people at the retreat in Pennsylvania made me want to be a Christian like I haven't in a long time. Not because of their piety . . . but because they listened, and like it came from some place deep. Sherry on the way up "Peter's Mountain" where we would shiver in the fog on the rock at the top, and her husband Larry on the way down. Katie, in our small group, and in her consistent counselor's insightful prodding. Esther at meals, in the circle of chairs, and late into two nights, later than I've stayed up for a long time. Like we were supposed to, we found surprising commonalities in our experiences. I can't stop talking. I am starting to heal.

Karl Bartsch asked, "what is your burning bush?" and taught us again about centering prayer. Harvard medical researchers found that meditation lowers blood pressure and raises metabolism. Twenty minutes is the time generally accepted as most beneficial. We tried five, sitting cross-legged against the thin wall that hid the diligent clarinet student and the teenagers playing carpetball, but not their sounds. My body, more than anything, settled quickly into the familiar position, the focused breathing, missed it.

Eunice, as warm as always, stirred Sunday dinner in the oven while her roommate from Shenyang cut turnips slower than I've ever seen any Chinese person with a chopping knife. I sat on the radiator and loved their mixed language and attention to each other, and the old wood floor of the Philly flat. She and Julie guided me through traffic between them. Nearly an hour at nearly a standstill near I-495. The dullness of a nice car, the music and temperature I choose, and enjoy only so much, alone. I will return with mixed welcome and dread to the shock of the snow flurries in my face biking into town on Tuesday, the surprise of the sun when I make the turn onto Kratzer.

what makes it real

I read during my break at work. My green apron beside me, toasted blueberry bagel, raspberry cream cheese from the expired samples, and this morning, tears. I am hiding back in the wi-fi user's cove, lost in the cruel world where Maryam will not have Ali, no matter how strong her spirit or beautiful her eyes. In a time and place women best marry and then develop their cunning, she suffers the for the dreams her father will not have her pursue, and the man. And he for her.

Then at night Laila and Mariam are brought back to Rasheed. I lay the book face down on the sheet and sob like a child - like a protest against all that is not just in the world - knowing that my emotion does nothing save build awareness in me, and resolve for change. The roller coaster of hope and terror, then we come to terms - both they and I - with the reality of the horror they cannot escape.

There is a third story, this one told, over the dinner table on Sunday. Another woman, another mother, another person who falls on the hard side of power and choices. Law in this country can protect her, but cannot force respect from a son, or the man who has taught him that women don't deserve it. This story, the most real of the three, somehow seems the least; there is no emotion on which we ache our way in. We hear and consider the practicalities - money, housing, where the children will live - and only thinking about it later do I detachedly remember how she must suffer. So unlike the fiction, where the colors and smells and the touch of true love torn apart grabs our hearts by both hands and shakes, saying, "This is her, this is you, this is every woman in every town on every continent. Pay attention." I do.

back in September

Every once in awhile, a favorite aunt or someone reminds me that people actually read this blog sometimes, and inspires me to write more, and more often. There is so much that got lost this summer and fall when I was away from internet and out of a routine. It's hard to write about life that happened months ago, but I'm gonna try.

In late September I spent two weeks with my brother Tim on the small organic vegetable farm where he's been interning since May. It was the kind of place you just sink into, and I could have stayed for months. Not just a place, not just work, but a whole way of life. We worked hard sometimes, but always pleasant, with others. Each morning I helped Tim haul water from the creek for the animals. I learned to coax the first streams of milk out of the three goats he milked each morning. I learned that "Castor" was nervous, but not strong; you could hold her leg away from the pail with your left arm. 

I learned that, theoretically, one can reach under a roosting hen to pull out eggs, but I only got up the nerve to try it once. I learned to speak "rrrr-bit" with Phoebe (the four-year-old daughter of the couple who own the farm), and which rules of frog world are non-negotiable. I learned that she likes stories involving pigs and princesses and can switch in and out of a Kentucky drawl.

I learned how to identify the "sticky amaranth" plants, and to get them, carefully, near the root, before they got me. I learned to be picky about what we harvested. Checking the underside of the bell pepper to make sure it had completely turned from green to red. Culling a bunch of cherry tomatoes for just one black spot. Only the slimmest string beans are sold; the others we fry with olive oil for dinner. Throwing out all the vegetables we can't eat. 

"This is what it is to live with a spirit of abundance," I thought more than once to myself. Talking and talking and talking in the shade of the tool shed. Two afternoon hours dedicated to the fiddle tunes we would play at the art exhibition on Saturday. Swinging Phoebe on the handle of the shovel. Walking slowly down the hill to the house to pick raspberries from the vine before dinner. Offer them by the handful to Phoebe, who says, "chubby bunny, chubby bunny" between fits of giggles. Eating quiche and Spanish frittatas three times a week. The chickens have been laying more than we can sell.

I learned that commercial fertilizer is petroleum-based. So not only is your typical grocery produce soaked in the oil of transport from California or Wisconsin, but in the oil used for production as well. Who knew? Not me? My brother reveals this in our, um, "discussion" about how we all could be educating ourselves better, in general . . . and specifically, about what we eat (as if we need more reasons to eat local and organic).

Because Tim makes just about enough to pay off his monthly college loans and to buy sugar, and because he is passionate about reducing personal oil consumption, he lives a life that rivals the "simplicity" of mine in China. I enjoyed it. It felt like home. 

I found an old typewriter in the trailer, and clacked away at letters to friends until my brother couldn't stand it. Most of the time we curled on the sofa and read companionably, with tea in the afternoons.

For breakfast, Tim made coffee, toast, and eggs. When the bread was all, we made more. We made homemade chutney out of the last of the tomatoes that Tim and Krista had planted . . . and discovered the difficulties of collaborating in the kitchen after four, six, eight years apart. There were spicy mustard greens with homemade balsamic vinagrette. Biscuits with homemade strawberry jam. Scones from "Crumb and Crust", which I'd brought from the Rockingham Public Library.

In the cool of the morning before we left for the fields, we'd roll down the thick blankets that were hung over the windows. Then when we came back at noon to broil slices of sweet potatoes and red peppers, the small trailer was blessedly cool. Later it got chilly, and Tim would sing out his excitement for the smell of fall as we cut across the creek to report to the barn for another day of work.

I was hungry for the physical labor. It's something I've always enjoyed, and four years of "English expertise" in China haven't held enough. My first afternoon at the farm my muscles were yanked awake on the top of the hill digging fence post holes. Tim and David, neither of whom are built especially big, could go at it for five minutes or more. I lasted for a minute before I was breathing hard and my shoulders were screaming. Tim's friend Micah, another organic vegetable farmer, taught him that you never need a gym to "get into shape". You will develop the muscles to do whatever work you need to do. "We're getting strong," we said to each other. "Soon we'll be strong enough to build a fence."

The flat rocks we flipped up out of the soil were imprinted with fossils of shells and sea creatures. These hills once lay along an ocean bottom. A closer history is tobacco all over these hills, and grown until the soil couldn't hold it anymore. We pile loads of manure from a neighboring farm onto one of these old fields, in some places five inches deep.

OBAMA!!!

It always delights me to discover a bunch of cultured rednecks. The kind who choose their hunkering, who build their houses out of recycled material way back off the roads, who serve grilled sausage and avocado dip, who teach you about the civil rights act over the second bottle of beer, and yell wild curses at the TV when bad politicians appear on the screen. We cheered so hard when they called Ohio blue. And Virginia. We had barely dared to hope, I think, and this new feeling of PRIDE - in my country, in my state - is very nice.

windy days

The wind is tougher than the cold. The cold you can beat with layers and exertion. The wind you can't.  Beat.  Just fight . . . and survive, in little ways . . . you keep going, you don't cry.  The whoosh of a dump truck flying down the hill as you struggle up, and your momentum is sucked away just like you hit the brakes.  Then on the next hill there's a big truck going with you, and you feel the pick-up as it passes.  Your eyes scan the face of the land with new eyes - measuring the dips and turns - seeking the tucks where there will be sudden peace. 

You breathe ragged so long you don't notice anymore, and try not to curse halfway up a slow incline. You see, impassively, the cloud shadows on the mountains, the subtle fall colors sharpened by the wind, and smile to yourself, but don't really understand how you feel or where this fits. 

Then, finally, a right turn and it's quiet. The stretch is steep, but blessedly still. The white house on the climb with four cars outside. A girl in camo sweatpants and a bright yellow jacket walks with a tiny dog on a leash, into the yard, with movements and a scowl that scream impatience, maybe anger. The little dog shivers with excitement, oblivious to her mood. I am almost home, still breathing hard, wondering what made this girl's day so bad, and whether mine is good or bad.

The next two days the wind stays strong, the bike stays overnight at the shop, I stay at my parent's house, and accept rides from them and from my aunt, from Alex. We stand outside for two hours and don't make it inside to see Obama. Others wait five hours or more. It was good, even so, seeing the crowd, if not the man himself. In the end we sat on the floor of a student lounge and watched the speech on the TVs on the wall. He talked about "choosing our better history." And I hoped.

somewhere near the edges

We listen to the daily worsening economy news on NPR, wonder vaguely if the demigods who run this country have ideas ingenious enough to prevent loss of homes businesses, jobs, a way of life. Suddenly the conservatives are all behind regulation . . . even something that looks like a partial nationalization of the banking sector. ZX jokes that while China and Russia move toward a privatized economy, the Europe and the West are moving towards socialism. We laugh with the freedom that comes from youth, and the knowledge that we don't need much.

The other day I went through the cedar closet at Mom and Dad's. It was packed thick with blankets and clothes, and the thought crossed my mind that if I needed to, I could easily clothe and keep myself for the rest of my life with the contents of this four-by-four closet. The blue polyester pants that my mother sewed thirty years ago I will wear, but not the velvety white skirt and sweater set. I tried on the yellowed lace wedding dress, and found the high neck and long, tight sleeves unbearably constricting. A concession for conservative relatives at the wedding? I wondered, but Mom says it was the style then.

Last night on "Fresh Air" the Nobel prize-winning economist admitted there is a sort of glee in being here in this place, this time, and getting to watch all the shit go down. Before he said, he had to fly to Indonesia or something to see crisis of the moment; now he just takes the subway downtown. (As a citizen, though, he's "terrified.") I don't really know enough to be terrified, but I know what fascination feels like.

getting there on skinny tires

Too much chocolate and sitting around this weekend; I gave up, got off the bike and walked up the top of a hill for the first time this morning. It was the first really cold day I've biked, but not as bad as I had dreaded from my barely-warm bed in the drafty upstairs of the farmhouse.

Trying to cross 33 from Sterling to Reservoir I discovered the helplessness of a biker facing a light triggered by a magnetic sensor. Tim had warned me. He said they sense metal at two places, so the only way to get a green on a bike is to lay it down wide across the area. Slightly inconvenient. Who knows what the woman behind me would have thought if I'd done that this morning. When she pulled up I'd already watched the cars opposite me get a left-turn signal, and the 33 traffic get greens twice. We waited through another cycle together and I realized that she needed to pull up to trigger the sensor. She'd (very kindly, I suppose) left a good ten feet between me and her. I motioned for her to pull up, and we finally got a green on the next go-around. 

Sigh. It's those kind of things that are discouraging, that make you feel small and like you're struggling with just a few allies, against a very large beast. But the people at the Blue Ridge Cycle Shop are helpful and friendly, and Wayne Teel said making this statement with our lives (by biking) is the way we start moving to lower carbon-dioxide production. 

And every afternoon when I bike back into this sloping land of Melvin and Betty's and the sun is lying all golden on the fields and the cows are rustling in the barn, I swear I'll stay here until there's actual ice on the road and I'm absolutely forced to move in close to a bus stop.

slowing down

Small leaves drift down Bruce, along with me and the bike. I'm glad to have started building on a paycheck, but it barely seems worth even going in to work for four hours on Wednesday and Thursday. They teach me how to make iced chai lattes and then two hours of "e-learning" on the dusty computer in the back of the kitchen. I laugh aloud at some of the test questions that come, but admire in a detached way the efficiency of the system I have entered. Food safety, dining room awareness, the "Panera Way." 

It's the "business model" approach that another group described in a recruiting meeting I attended on Wednesday. A more efficient way of making money than the time-for-money formula of a traditional job or small business. They started with an assumption that everyone wants more money. And time. But what good is time if you don't have money to spend enjoying it? Funny, I've found a whole lot of enjoyment out of watching the sunset clouds outside of Jill's window. Doesn't take a lot of money. I'm not opposed to earning money, but I'm cautious, wanting to take the slow way. The slow ferment that makes good bread, good cheese, good wine. Slow transportation that makes me notice the faces of the places I pass. Maybe even a slow approach to economic growth, Wayne Teel suggests in sunday school last week, might do us some good.

sweet ol' harrisonburg

I'm a sucker for color-splashed downtown. For the little potted flowers tucked in the curves of brick buildings on which you can still see the old names in fading white paint. For the people and the breads and the greens at the farmer's market. For the folks who take the bus, and walk, and bike.

It's my second early morning in a row parked at this coffeeshop with my new macbook, and yesterday I got spotted over on benches in front of the library by the same person who'd seen me here in the morning. He called me a transient, and I took it as a compliment. There are bikes all over this city, and a vibe I don't remember being quite so strong or so cool.

________________

I applied at Clementine and saw the "eat fresh, eat local" poster and felt the warm afternoon camraderie of the staff, and decided that's where I want to work. But they want commitment, and I am still young - commitment comes hard.  I went back out to to think in the sunshine, then leapt, and felt as if I was answering life again, same old formula, new freedom. We (women, mostly) have marveled at focus and a narrowing of interest that leads to "success and happiness" perhaps. I want that, or the passion at least. The women I was asking said for awhile they had wanted that too.

_________________

It's been barely three days of biking, but so far it feels good. There are sunsets and rolling hills north of town. There are burning thighs and the old questions about how much I can push. There are shops that I notice, and explore. The eight-dollar Keens at Granny Longlegs.

There are the hazards too. Glass shards scattered wide on the bridge on Reservoir. So wide I have to pick up my bike and carry it over them. Those damn train tracks on Country Club. So far I've swung wide to hit them at close to perpendicular. I hold my breath when the dumptrucks go roaring but, but Kratzer feels safer than 11, like Dan said it would. Sailing down that big hill out on Kratzer for the first time, I placed my fingers on a bee which had settled on my handlebars. I can't remember the last time I was stung. My finger swelled and ached. Somehow though, the fall air on my face and the view of the rolling hills lessened the sharpness. And Jill is waiting for me in the white farmhouse with walnuts in the yard and a hundred cookbooks on the shelf. There was a shorn field that I passed going home - I wrote this:

Round bales lie on the field

rolled so smooth they shine.

In the second afternoon I see

the tractor moving, the front fork,

the fast reverse, effortless lift, a line

made neat at the edge of the field.

Beyond it all - behind the bales

and the field and the tractor and

the invisible farmer, back behind

the mountains, the sun is setting.

I don't know this girl

While sitting for five hours of hair straightening treatment - wash, blowdry, apply softening chemicals, wait, wash, partially blowdry, apply straightening cream ("Dang you've got a lot of hair!"), keep applying, still applying, okay, wait, wait, check, wait, check, done, wash, blowdry - I read every word in the June issue of National Geographic. The vestige perks of belonging to an organization. In the mountains just northwest of here, snow leopards and their protection programs built out of Snow leopards hidden in the mountains just northwest of here. A little farther north, and a little farther west, heated indoor kindergarten swimming pools built from oil boom money and how long, exactly, will our cheap oil age last. The question everyone is asking, and even I, who swear by a bike or public transportation, dread a little the answer.

During my five hours at the hair place I also got really hungry, finished the candy I'd bought earlier and chugged water to fill my stomach until sweet ZX brought me bread from the apartment at 9:30. He settled back into the couch he'd tired of earlier and I settled back in to wait.

I asked the girl doing the last wash when they usually close. 10:30, she says, but when I apologize she points out that I'm not the only one still there. The woman with straight black hair (remember the old joke trying to identify one of our students) is having her hair curled. The white girl with thick waves is having hers tamed. There are cell phone snapshots at every stage, taken by the assistant, at the slightly sheepish and covert urging of the main stylist. When I think we're finally done the head stylist is there flipping through a very glossy, very European hairstyling magazine. I think at first that he is showing us how most Westerners have nice, soft, fine hair, and I am ready to agree. My hair is a whole lot of mafan. But he actually is pointing out that my hair straightened looks bad so long. I need one of these bobs. "I'll come back tomorrow," I promise when they continue to tsk-tsk over my unflattering style, "I gotta go get some sleep."

So it's about time for me to say that despite all my previous negativity towards China's event of the century, I have enjoyed the Games, from that crazy opening ceremony to the adorable weightlifter Chen Xiexia who won the first gold medal for China (which now has over forty, the US, less than thirty), to Tuesday night, when we packed in three hours of soccer and volleyball quarterfinals after dinner. ZX loves Nigeria Men's Soccer because they really "play" soccer as we say in English. Everything's one touch and go, and Belgium had a solid defense, but you just can't stop such incredible skills. Brazil and Argentina was a little rougher, a little closer.

But the highlight of the night for me was the women's volleyball in between the soccer matches. They played Russia, who they beat out in Athens for the gold, and it was breathless every point. We wandered out to a BBQ and beer garden and found the women into the thick of it. The second game they were down and Russia had matchpoint and they came back to vie back and forth for a close win. The channel got switched to soccer before the third set started, so I found an old couple in the back of their little corner convenience store who happily pulled up a stool for me to watch the final set. It was fun cheering beside them.

Obviously, they're good. But I also love the China team because they really act like a team. They seem to enjoy each other, and the talent is spread out all over the place. The energy feels really positive, they laugh, and laugh off mistakes, almost like little girls sometimes. The tall hitter Zhao Ruirui has a smile so kind you almost wonder how she made it so far in athletics. The coach too is known for his positiveness. Even when they're behind or he's protesting a call, he always looks like he's smiling. The difference between their open faces on the China side and the stern Russian women was almost humorous. I'm not one to get crazy about watching sports, but I think this is one team that has won me over.

The scores of the quarter-final against Russia were 25-22, 27-25, 25-19. Last Olympics China beat them out for the gold. Tonight at 8:00 they compete in the semi-final match against Brazil, who's supposed to be awesome. US beat Cuba, who had been undefeated in the other semi-final. I'll be cheering so hard for China tonight, partly because it'd be so fun to have it be the US and China playing for the gold on Saturday, and mostly just because I'm a fan.

Walk home the wrong way, the long way, on the dark, quiet street, under a perfect night sky. They say it'll rain again tomorrow and the next day. Turn, when suddenly the corner appears. I knew this town so well; the new angles are refreshing. Two tiny girls squatting at the edge of the curb, leaning over the street to brush their teeth under their mother's instruction. Walk slowly, against the pull of the new tight jeans. Too tight I said, but Amy said they looked good. I paid too much, went back later in the afternoon while the others slept. I like feeling cute. Anne Lamott said women shouldn't wear tight pants. Or maybe she just said she never would. Normally I'd listen, but part of the thrill of living is breaking the old rules, even when they're your own.

Buy a soft white loaf of bread for breakfast inside the warmth of the bakery. The other customer is uniformed, young and open-faced - a guard going off duty. He complains about the prices good-naturedly to the tired old woman. She's baggy eyed and unimpressed, a veteran of too many decades of giant baking sheets of breads and cakes. She says, "you want good stuff you gotta pay." She made icing flowers while we watched and then let me come into the tiny windowed cake-decorating room to add, "Happy Birthday Dan" to the tiny cake that night everyone was acting strange, but we kept acting, out of duty and habit and the warmth of old friends even strangers. The elevator shivered a bit on the way up to the 23rd floor, and those who still carried great fear from the May earthquake shivered too. There are tremors every other day or so still, but barely detectable. I had no idea they could last this long - four months now, and up to thirty years they say. In Chengdu Amy and I were in side-by-side showers on the second floor of the hostel when a 6-point something came. We weren't even sure it was an aftershock, but when I came out the conversations downstairs were all a-buzz with it and ZX couldn't bring himself to continue his nap.

The photographer we met at the next hostel commented with surprise about how the aftershocks were still such a center of conversation in Chengdu. And he was here, there, in Mianzhu, within 24 hours of the first one. It was he himself who convinced his boss that he and a writer - the standard team - should go. They were short on clothes, ate instant noodles like everyone else, had no place to sleep, but in the end, a week or so later, it was his boss who called him back to Chongqing; he would've stayed longer.

The night before he had to go to Mianyang to cover the torch relay he sat with us in the hostel courtyard, and we talked of China and the West over beer, and steaming water in my plastic travel cup. I was the one girl, the one westerner, the one faltering in the language, but we were all born in 1981, brothers and sisters of this generation inside China looking around, and out. I cried when I tried to talk from a very personal perspective about in and out-groups, that dark desire to see China fail that is so recklessly projected on every Western action and word, how it does exist, maybe, but it's not so simple, but deep and subconscious, and only a part of a complexity of values and understandings that come into play when we approach each other. Everybody was talking about all the trouble the Olympics were bringing to their daily lives. The highway between Leshan and Chengdu was closed for the whole day before the torch arrived in that small city. A friend who works in scientific research said Olympic-related regulations have made it tough for them to get the supplies they need for their experiements. Anyway, "this Olympics doesn't belong to us, it belongs to Beijing," I heard one person say. Tourism in Sichuan is a fraction of what it would be in a normal year . . . partly because of Tibetan riots, partly because of the earthquake, and partly because of the way it's gotten harder to get a Chinese visa.

The hostel people were complaining about their lack of business, and according toZX, Kangding, which is sort of the gateway to Western Sichuan, was a completely different city from the last two years he was there. We still had our Tibetan yak butter tea and met kind and generous ethnic Tibetans (and one lama who tried to con us out of our money). The sky was still gorgeous clear blue between the steep mountains, and the valleys and rushing streams deep and sharp and breathtaking. But the place had an almost deserted feel. The owner of the hostel where we stayed had left the place in the hands of another tourist - a college student from Inner Mongolia; there were only two other guests besides us. And military police were everywhere. It was obvious that they were extras since they were living in tents, and I was impressed, in a heart-skip-a-beat kinda way, by their large guns, which they shouldered in their little booth-stations. ZX couldn't stop talkign about how they wore bulletproof vests even for regular just-standing-there duty.

All the normal activities, including the big horse race/market/regional gathering in Litang, were cancelled. An Australian traveler told me he'd gone anyway, and so had hundreds of local people, many of whom had started out before news of the cancellation reached them, and traveled days or even weeks. They gathered, and traded anyway, he said, and many were angry. He saw a group of lamas in a central place grow into a huge crowd until they were loaded onto two of those big blue trucks and carried away. Probably taken out somewhere and left to walk back and walk their energy off, we both guessed.

packing

Up until yesterday my negative feelings towards Beijing's big summer 2008 event were general. Then they seriously got in my way. I know in the US it's the same thing with the removing of shoes at airports (not to mention fingerprinting at customs) but I complained hard about those too. Fear, mmm . . . it makes the world go 'round.

So I'm almost completely packed - books, clothes, cooking stuff, small furniture and appliances (including my precious little toaster oven that has to be at least ten years old) - we get in touch with five different offices for shipping five different ways . . . and find out that I can't send liquids or powders or electronics with the shipping company I used to move ALL my stuff ten months ago . . . or through the post office, or through the big, popular company Wuliu . . . so we frantically repack (which leads to Amy and I having our first fight) and then the next day she helps me drag the bags with all the dangerous materials into a taxi and then down the train station to the big cargo place and I send them away . . . where they will be "tossed around like pillows," my friends tell me. For the other four bags the nice guys from last year's company pul up in a van by our house, weigh them right there, and they're done. Everything's going to ZX's apartment, which feels really strange since it rested there for a few days last August too. More or less all the same stuff. I'm dealing with too-much-stuff blues, but also feeling relieved now that it's all done.

There was an earthquake this evening. Amy said she felt it and heard the roaring. I didn't. I was outside watching the new bikes we had just bought. It was an exhausting three hours at the used bike market to buy a bike for me, Amy, and Catherine. We're supposed to be leaving in the morning. It's been rip-roaring hot lately, so we're wanting to start at six.

searching and finding

Up until Tuesday, the only place I could find in Nanjing for bike-renting was the Fuzimiao youth hostel, where there are four big fat mountain-bike tired things leaned up against the wall by the pool table. The electric bike belongs to the boss; you can't rent that, the desk girl says, and then we laugh like it is a great joke . . . she turned friendly in a real way when I switched to Chinese. It's embarrassing how excited people can get about me being able to communicate with them in Chinese. Last night two guys smoking in a black car on the road called me back when I made some smirking answer to their half-greeting from the window as I passed. I gave my phone number, laughing at their forwardness, but I don't have much time to go out in the next few weeks, sorry, it's nice to meet them though. There are the ones like them that make a big deal as a power thing, and then there are the ones like the girl at the hostel, who really was just excited. People like those who work in a tourist area. In the bike store some European-looking woman smiled real big and said hello to me and before I was knew was doing I'd "ni-haoed" her back. She laughed and repeated the greeting, "ni hao", like, ha that's a good one.

It took my roommate searching online and then me biking through 新街口 and then all the way over to the 夫子庙 area to finally find the Giant shop on 太平南路 that sells bikes. It was huge and beautiful but they don't rent like Willie Gee thought they might.

The sleazy sellers at the sleazy secondhand market will rent, they said on Friday when I went. I may have been the first person to ask; I got estimates from five to twenty yuan a day. I was surprised at how easy it would've been to sell the bike that I was pushing. (At first I'd left it outside, but even with a lock I didn't trust it there. These people are professionals, I reminded myself, and when I went back out to retrieve it there was a man squatting next to it, maybe studying it intently. Or maybe he just needed a place to smoke.

When you see the stickers on the crossbar you try not to think about the kid who put them there the week before his bike disappeared, and you try to pretend the guy selling the tallest bike on the floor is not sleazy, because I have a friend - he's this high (measure with my hand way above my own head) - who might need this bike. I smile, and talk long, with the best mix of sweetness and toughness I've got. I learned a long time ago (when I was a waitress and had regular customers) that people can sense when you don't like them, so it pays to try to convince yourself that you actually do.

Finally yesterday I found two sweet shops that were both renting bikes, and seriously professional about it. And next door an outdoor shop where the guy answered all my questions about thermal sleeping bags and I bought two 10 kuai woolen caps.

Sunday morning I left the city in a taxi with a friend and went to the most beautiful temple I've ever been in. Guanyin tipped her delicate pitcher and poured love and mercy in the center of a small lake, and CXJ told me that she only looks like a woman on the outside, inside she's a man (and still looks like one in India). In Buddhism there is no differentiation between man and female. And man, I think, that sounds nice. Really?

Two of those trees that look like money grew huge and framing the main part of the temple. Back in the back there were carvings in hill's stone, and a big one of a sitting Buddha. We stepped inside to see the Guan Yin on one side and the old women didn't care that we weren't gonna buy incense.

CXJ's friend the monk I think was the maybe the top monk at the temple. He left home to become a monk after high school, and that must have been at least twenty years ago. His face has crinkled up around the eyes and he's the most genuine-feeling monk I think I've ever met in China. He has his own room for meditation and calligraphy and one with the happy Buddha and a whole bunch of Guanyins for burning incense and praying in private. We sat in the wooden chairs on either side of the tea table and he served us before returning to his place by the altar, doing some sloshing of water that led to a tiny mouthful worth of tea, but tasty. He is patient, and answers my questions and talks with me about the things I'm interested in. There are different ways to talk to every person says the Buddha, and this guy had that kind of wisdom.

Out of rhythm, crazy world

Last week I came across a girl who referred to those in her blogging communty as "blogren", which caught my attention since in Mandarin "ren" (人) means "person". Turns out that Chinglish hasn't taken over the world yet (it will though, it will), they're "blogren" is just a combination of "blogger" and "brethren" . . .

Reading other fine blogs about life in China translates into me writing less, for whatever (could it be confidence-related?) reason. And ZX doesn't help with his complaining about bloggers (mainly girls, he says) who write about what they ate for breakfast, and expect people to care.

This morning I did not have the best baozi in the world, as I'd planned - the place was closed for Dragon Boat Festival (and quite rightly, who would eat anything but zongzi anyway?) Instead, Starbucks mocha in a mug is my reward for working straight through this three-day holiday. Pleasurable work though, for the most part, a lot of it coming down to organizing - the files on the laptop, good teaching materials I've collected, the pile of papers on which half-finished poems are scratched sideways between a row of my practiced Chinese characters. Which stack do those go into?

It feels strange to be all collected and put together. It is not me, yet it is. I am pleased with myself, though I realize the trade-off is being out of rhythm with the life outside. Early on the morning of the third day, when I walk with my laptop towards wireless at Starbucks, the streets are nearly deserted. The exception is the piles of nearly round watermelons - on four different corners - and their squatting sellers, and buyers. If you're not still lounging in bed you're supposed to be preparing for gathering with friends or family. The watermelon is insanely cheap - under one kuai for a jin - but I will ignore them. Later I have a twelve-kuai cranberry-orange scone heated in an stainless-steel industrial size oven that bings when the allotted heating time has passed.

Outside the Starbucks an old man in a purple dress shirt stands on the sidewalk pointing and yelling at the bikes that come toward him in the fenced-off bike lane. I ask one of the workers if he often comes here, and if she knows what he's saying. She thinks I'm pointing to the American guy in khakis who's reading his little travel Bible under one of the green umbrella-d tables outside. "Do you know what he says?" I repeat, and she says, "Yeah, he speaks Mandarin, so we can understand him. He comes often, always drinks coffee and reads his book."

I point again, "No, the guy out there!" She hadn't noticed him, and doesn't know what he's ranting about. "I can't figure out if he is saying something specific or if he ..." I trail off, and she finishes for me, "has a sickness of the mind." Silently, we watch him yell for another half-minute, then he gets on the bike he is standing beside, and pedals away.

The moth that was fluttering pitifully around inside escapes with the couple that leaves, pushing the creaky glass door wide in their awkward slow exit, she hanging on his arm held limp. As they shift around the door, the jazz music playing on the sound system and the weaving of her hips in the silky dress make me think of that sexy Hong Kong movie all in smoke and mist and silence. (Damn, what's the name?) The moth flies just in front of them until they reach the street, and the beauty of it makes my throat tight.

Closer to lunch the place fills up. The couple beside me lay their sleeping four-year-old daughter face down on the soft chairs by the big windows while they comment on a magazine in a mix of Mandarin and English. But when she wakes up they add German? Is there a fourth language as well? No way. That'd be crazy.

The next couple is also caucasian guy-asian girl. When she goes to pick up his sandwich from the counter he jokes with the friend (who talks about how busy she is dealing with customers from Egypt and Russia and Norway) about the other English word for wife: "slave." Then the two girls do the standard "Can you understand when we speak in Chinese?" He can't.

He seems like a nice enough guy, but I am secretly pleased when the businesswoman answers his "You don't have an easy life!" attempt at conversation with an impassive "No" and then turns back to his wife and back to Chinese, to complain about the crazy training schedule at her work. The wife is sympathetic. "Wow, that really is too much," she coos before they briefly switch back over to English to joke about husband being like a character out of Prison Break.

(Though I will not renounce my pride about last night's delicious homemade tortilla chips and salsa), I am aware that I am, um, judgmental and arrogant. And I knew that even before I overhear that the blundering can speak Swedish and German. Knowing language impresses me . . . and businesswoman, who says, "Oh my God, it's a huge potential market!" (One of her associates evidently wants to set up some kind of deal focused specifically on Scandinavia!)

But he begs to differ and because the biggest city in Sweden is only 1 million people.

Businesswoman talks about how empty the streets are in Europe. Especially after five or six in the evening, you almost can't see a single person out and about. Yeah, everything closes pretty early, they all agree.

"How can the people go buy things?" businesswoman wonders.

"Saturday," he says.

"But what if they forgot to buy something? Say I forgot to buy, I forgot to buy an ... onion?"

"Oh, the food markets are open," he says.

"No," his wife disagrees. "Even the grocery stores close at five or six. Only 7-11 is open. If you're hungry, you have to go to 7-11 and get a sandwich or something."

Even the bars are closed by one or two o'clock, they say. What a crazy world.

these fears of conscious

ZX slipped the gateman a crumpled one kuai bill for letting us out so late-early in the morning. I like these departures done at unreasonable hours; the exhaustion is numbness that makes the goodbye bearable. The private car that was to take me and three strangers to the Chongqing airport was platinum-colored (like every third car in China) and plushy. Still, by the time we were halfway there my bum was tired enough of the middle seat in the back that it was almost enough to keep me conscious.

I held my bag on my knees and elbowed the fat girl beside me when she squirmed into a better sleeping positionon on top of part of my leg. The girl in the front seat talked loudly. It was 3:00 am, 4:00 am, five. I tuned them out and slept with my head stretched straight back. At some point the radio was playing the long song/recitation tribute to the good earthquake rescue effort.
Yesterday parents from Mianzhu started marching to Chengdu to find somebody to protest to. Their kids died because government officials stole the money that was supposed to build strong schools. Sometimes there's no steel rebarb at all. Sometimes the sand/concrete ratio is 7/3 when it's supposed to be 3/7.

It's no wonder that nobody trusts anybody, and especially the officials. It's no wonder that their attempts to ensure their own safety seem to me seem so random, and so wildly out of proportion with reasonable risk. They see dangers that people who grew up in Japan or the US would never dream of, ZX tells me. They know that a building (or a bridge) doesn't even need the slightest of tremors to collapse, they're built so bad. Like "tofu" they say. When a paper rustles on the wall his head jerks alert, and by the end of my time there, I begin to imagine, like lots of others, that I feel the floor, or the bed moving beneath me all the time.

Teacher Xie gathered with her middle-aged friends outside the cross stitch shop. The park, the streets, and the riverside are packed, and have been since after lunch, when the whole city rushed outside as soon as they were done eating. Except for those that have to work, says Teacher Liu, who've gotta be inside (poor suckers, his tone says). He says when the experts and the people both listen to each other, they CAN predict it.

He carries his three-month old granddaughter, and he cradled her when he ran down the first time from the fourth floor. Teacher Xie lives on the fifth, and she and her husband stayed in the bathroom on that Monday afternoon. Two weeks later, it's four o'clock in the afternoon, the end of the 1:00-4:00 timeframe that was supposed to bring another tremor, but she won't go back because her younger sister told her that there's supposed to be one after four. She whispers to me that you only pass this information on quietly, and to close friends and family, because the government has warned them about spreading rumors, and they could be held responsible for creating panic. I don't feel anything for the rest of the evening except the kind that you think are probably your imagination, or it's him rocking the couch.

The car got to the airport right at six. The driver was talking to another guy from his company, and I asked the three women, "aren't you going to get out?" The dumb girl beside me jumped and half woke-up, "what, we're at the airport?" I don't know what was wrong with the other two, they weren't even sleeping. I slept until 6:45, checked in, found the gate, and slept again until we boarded, still numb.

hometown stories

In Nanchong when you want a taxi around nine out by the west river, you saunter into the middle of the intersection and wave down the one making a wide arc around the corner, though he will pull to the curb for you to climb in. Tiny mutton kebabs near the back alley movie theater where ZX and his friends met their teacher one day skipping class. He can't believe that in high school we were free everyday at 2:45. Though not really, I explain, because there was always a sports practice to be at, or a club meeting, but he is not impressed. In high school they went home at 9:00 every evening, and had homework.

HF's parents' have flown to Nanjing, so he and his wife host us for Sunday dinner. Sausage that is a million times better than in Nanjing, and homemade grape wine. HF was a wide-eyed baby with a parasol, a soldier so skinny we barely believe it's the same boy, but when the building begins to shake he drops the picture album and bolts out the door. ZX is right behind him, and neither with a word, though I know, of course, that we are running out of gathered fear, that it doesn't matter that the shaking stopped before I'd made it down one flight. We slip down six floors of cement stairs in our house slippers. The old woman in front of me almost falls on the last landing in her hurry, though if there had been real danger she would have been too slow. Todd says later that there are lots of broken bones to be set in the hospital these days. Later HF's wife chastizes him for running first, for abandoning his guests.

In the courtyard another thin, gray-haired grandma shakes visibly, though she has a seven-year-old girl to comfort. She sits at the cement picnic table and clutches it strong across the wide part, not even a glimpse on her face of the self-depreciating humor that might lighten the situation. There were screams as everyone in the two facing apartments fled down the stairs and into the courtyard; ZX predicts that many people will sleep outside tonight. When we wake at four, or six in the morning and to fierce thunder and lightning, and rain in sheets that will drive down for hours, I feel sorry for the ones protected by their makeshift tarp tents. The next evening Dan and I see people working on their temporary shelters out by the west river. It seems the storm hasn't persuaded them to return to their homes, but only to make their shelters stronger, drier.

XXF used the word 后怕 which means something like "post-fear." Like how you wanted so badly to go on the art fieldtrip that you begged to be allowed to join class one, and did ... how you shake when you hear the news of your school collapsing. And on the others side, the tragic stories of those who should've come back a day earlier; they had a few more things to get done, and postponed the return. How a new branch had just been opened in that city; so many became managers ... but what is a promotion when you lose your life? The regret in her eyes is so honest, because she too put off, waited, lost, is realizing now what's important in life. It wasn't worth putting off a baby for a career . . . especially when hard work and talent don't earn you anything in the end anyway. There are certain ways these things go, and that's just how it is.

XXF told me too of a mother who kneeled to shelter her nursing baby, and gave her life. They found typed on the cell phone a message to the infant: "If you live, don't forget that your mother loved you."

I had no idea that Japan's constitution limited military spending to 1% of the GDP. Guess who's pushing them to make it more?

This weekend there's a Japanese "peace poet", Yori Yaguchi, hosted by our small organization in Chengdu. I'm going there to hear from him, and my colleagues who have been living this week of earthquake mess a lot closer to it. Then I'm going to Nanchong to see some people that my heart yearns to see.

Yesterday a bunch of the counselors from our center attended post-trauma counseling training, though only one is, that we know for sure, going to Sichuan to help. The others barraged him with advice and support. What about the dialect? He's got a talent for languages he said, and he had a professor in college that taught in Sichuan dialetct. Should he take a sleeping bag or will they be sleeping together somewhere? They give extra phone batteries in case there's no way to charge his. Calls are free right now for anyone with an out-of-province phone in Sichuan. Thousands and thousands of volunteers like him have swarmed to Sichuan to help. A bunch of

Last night on TV some dumbass young reporter stopped three Sichuan men who were making their way along a mountain road to find out things like they what they were carrying in the buckets balanced on a bamboo pole across their shoulders and that their children and homes were gone. They answered her with a lot of quiet dignity, and maybe that was the point, but I was so annoyed at her there in her army pants and sporty shirt, pity ooozing out through her "慢走" and token assistance as they again shouldered their loads and continued on. The camera remained on her for a full ten seconds as she covered her face and burst into sobs. I'm sure being there really is hard, and that her emotion was true. I'm just saying it's a poor excuse for news, and pity is a lot less pretty than real empathy.

I came slow into awareness of the horror of the past week, and still it comes slow, but heavier each day. There are stories and pictures and Wen Jiabao flew in, old and frail as he is, they all sigh, to give commands and tell the little girls not to cry. Still they cried. They're estimating in the end it may be more than 50,000 dead.

On Monday afternoon I was on my balcony, squinting at the sun which glared off my laptop. At 3:30 I got an SMS message from my Chinese tutor (who's always forwarding me messages) about Sichuan, where he knows I used to live and love. An earthquake, 7.8 on the Richter scale occurred at 2:30 it said. "An earthquake," I think, "hmm." And that's about all I think. I'm trying to write through my thoughts from the weekend's existential psychology workshop. The will-to-meaning is what keeps us alive, says Frankl.

At 1:00 before the world changed ZX had called, wanting to know if I had ideas about how to donate in China for Burma relief. We talked for just a few minutes while I sat in the sun on my balcony with my laptop and my coffee. The world was beautiful.

At 4:00 when he calls again the world is still beautiful; I'm baking perfect cookies. I try to answer, it cuts off, and I can't get through back to him. "My phone must be out of money," I think. "I'll have to run to the LianTong place before going to the office this evening." But time slips away, and I end up hurrying to the office at a quarter to 7:00 just in time for the evening's workshop.

But when I arrive there is unusual energy in the conversation and FR and GX have a crazy story. There was an earthquake in the afternoon, they say. We felt it, and evacuated the building. They tell their story - how the floor began to sway underneath them, how they looked at each other, asking "what's happening?" and ran out the door and down the stairs. One flight down and FR decided she had to go back for the center's money. GX didn't want to let her, but she fought her way back up through the stream of people on the way down to grab the center's money, her wallet, and her MP3 player. GX told the software designers in the office next to ours, "There's an earthquake!" but they didn't move. Everyone else, it seems, flew down and outside to stand around with their bags and their cellphones, or whatever they thought to grab.

Suddenly there was connection and fear and I tried to call ZX again. And again. And again. I used FR's phone, and finally got through. He's fine. There's a big crack in his parent's building. Everyone is out on the sports field, and afraid to go near buildings, some in their pajamas, but fine.

We don't talk until later about how they all were sure the buildings would fall. His coworker screamed, "It's over!", sure she was about to die. Others were so frightened they jumped from the seventh floor and, tragically, did die.

Everyone I know is okay, but still it hurts. Former students, who are mostly from Sichuan, have undoubtably suffered losses, though I haven't heard specific stories. I want to be with my friends in Sichuan. I feel helpless and far away (as many of they do too). The horror of how lives have been turned upside down sinks in more every day.

Someone finds online a teacher's blog from the high school in Beichuan where a thousand kids were buried in rubble. The last post is pictures of the kids and teachers enjoying a sports day twenty-four hours before the earthquake. I find myself fighting back tears in the middle of the afternoon.

I call my friend Iris, who is a fourth-year nursing student back in Nanchong. The school is sending a group of nurses into the harder hit areas. Hundreds want to go, but there is space for only twenty nursing students. Iris says if she is chosen, she wouldn't tell her parents, knowing they would worry so much. But she isn't accepted, and I'm a little relieved, because I would have worried about her too. We laugh about how I might have been accepted to go - they were mainly looking for sturdy-built nurses - ones that could work long hours and not collapse without food and water. My roommate, who in general gets bright-eyed about soldiers, told me reverently last night how a bunch of them fainted from overexertion, or lack of sleep, or food, or whatever.

A big rescue team from Japan was allowed in today, a few days late, if you're asking some people. Why do they even bother with money? FR asks. Who cares about how much money has been donated when people are dying? The instant noodle factories should just load their trucks up and drive in there to donate it themselves. This is China, they say, shaking their heads how at a time like this, there are still people who can only think about making a buck. (But it's not China, it's the world, I want to tell them.) At the office I get laughed at for having donated money through SMS. She can't believe that I would be so stupid as to fall for the scams. But I've grown used to the ridicule, and it doesn't touch me. (At some point, I want to tell her, you have to start trusting, and if I was wrong this time, 12 RMB is not much of a price to pay.)

My friend William writes on his blog about his experience in Jiangyou (close to Mianyang).

and still I love trains

There's freedom, sweet freedom, in coming back a day after Shaffer and SW leave for the training in Anqing. Freedom and do I actually prefer dirty public transportation to the straight tree-lined highways that fly by in the car? Whatever the reason, there's exhilaration in a trip to make on my own.

At 7:40 on Monday morning I realize there's a bus at 8:00 that I won't make. I could take late morning or the afternoon one, but I'd prefer to spend the day at the office where at least the windows will guaranteed be open to the gorgeous weather. So it's the 2:26 am train. When it turns out they only have hard seats I buy the ticket anyway. It was one of seven left.

I only half-way unpack and repack my dirty pink traveling handbag (instant coffee packets and roll of toilet paper stay indefinitely at the bottom) and with it swung over my shoulder and marching down the street I suddenly feel as if I was born for this. Trains and traveling light and half days at home. I wonder again how I can make it my job.

The best baozi in the world for lunch, pipa from the street, and still cheaper than those crappy plastic-encased boxed lunches. More freedom breathed.

I sleep 'til 1:15 then wait for almost half-an-hour for the middle-of-the-night bus, along with two worker guys also going to the train station. They got dropped off by two other guys on scooters who raced away after checking the bus stop sign to make sure it went to the train station. The time was close. I counted down bus stops, and at every one debated getting off and hailing a taxi. In the end I rode all the way to the train station, and arrived with ten minutes to spare. I ran through the gate in my waiting hall, but got stopped by a train station attendant. The train, which was coming from Shanghai, hadn't arrived yet; all the other passengers were still there in the seats.

A mother and daughter pair without seat tickets were asleep in my seat. They muttered about how they couldn't believe so many ticket slots were held for Nanjing. "Like this is a big place!" they said, more in gentle confusion than real disdain. I felt bad for making them wake up and move. The daughter made the mother take the seat, and when the other guy arrived for the seat beside me, the people across the aisle scooted over to give the mother a place, making it four to a three-person seat. I actually had the aisle-seat ticket and the guy the window-seat ticket, but by the time he got there I was already settled in, not about to volunteer to trade, and he didn't ask.

I slept decently, with my bag as a pillow on the table, and nestled in the corner. A male and female across from us, college students, not together. The intimacy of strangers, the way we move together. She stretches her legs out, I push mine between them and under her seat. When it's four o'clock in the morning, it doesn't matter how our knees are resting against the other's. In 2006 on a greyhound bus near Chicago, it was also past midnight when we settled into our seats. The sweet-faced teenager told me where he was going, and why. I've forgotten now, but I remember how he slept on my shoulder, and how I smiled in the night.

grounded by our ignorance

david gray sings the cat comes
and we're just birds without wings
restore the cement to green
not to impose standards of beauty
but make something beautiful to me.

wendell berry explains, and mourns
the loss of self-sufficiency in the US
everyone thought life would be better
in the city you lose your freedom
though there's a TV to fill the extra hours

if I cry tears for this people, for this world
she'll call me great, but I just want
a good life, train tickets cheaper than air
outside there's a store called 三枪
three guns? they sell clothing.

(I scrawled this in my notebook on the bus yesterday as the song accused us of being "guilty of neglect and disrespect and thinking small")

to peixian and back

Some thoughts on the "labor day" holiday in FR's hometown. On the first night, when we had come in late, then eaten mutton kebabs on the street with an old classmate, then talked a bit with her parents, and were at 3 am finally preparing to sleep she asked what time I would get up in the morning. I laughed and said, "I guarantee it will be before you" because she can sleep a whole day away, and does regularly when she has the chance. She told me she doesn't sleep late at home. I guess if getting up grudgingly, at 9:30, after Mom announces breakfast at 8:30 is not late, then okay, but I still got up before she did.

I got sick the second day. I think I may have experienced my first migraine, after waaaay too much food at Grandpa's 70th birthday party. They put me beside Grandma, who kept putting salty duck egg halves into my hand, and later, onto the little paper birthday cake plate (cake was first). And I was not prepared for the second course of delicious stewed chicken and mushrooms and mantou AND porridge. Later in the afternoon the two aunts teamed up in the kitchen to demonstrate the making of homemade tortilla chips (a treat that they usually make at the Chinese New Year). They make them with sesame seeds, and they're delicious, if a little greasier than how I think of tortilla chips. I'm anxious to try making a batch on my own, and see what baking does, and to make salsa to eat with the big bag we brought home.

I always call FR a true "product of China" and seeing where and how she grew up just increased my feeling on this. She's just so typical of how her generation is supposed to be. How she came from the countryside to the city for middle school and then Nanjing for college and for work, how she's caught between her family's heavy expectations and her own dreams, how she is sooooo apolitical but so certain that China is the best country in the world. I don't mean to put her into a box, but I really do think of her like this, and am fascinated each time I understand a little more where she came from and why she is the way she is, which we both agree, is sometimes sooooo different from me. Though her mom says we're similar. We both like to eat a lot and are somewhat ungirly. We both thought going out after lunch to sit by the wheat fields, under the flickering silver leaves of the birch trees was a fine way to spend the afternoons.

There was the loneliness that comes when you're surrounded by another family united and miss your own. There was the boredom that comes when hours are spent playing with babies on couches at houses of relatives you don't know, and when you only brought one book anyway. There was the doubt that comes when you think of ZX and the bittersweet pangs when the landscaped-sided river and spring in a mid-sized city reminds you of the other that you love.

Meeting FR's middle school classmates, who are the people she's kept most contact with through college and into this year, was fun. I mistook the huge lumbering guy who met us at the bus station in the middle of the night for another taxi driver trailing us in hope of some business - until FR abruptly turned to me and said, "Let me introduce..." The affectionate couple who laughed their way through lunch. He wants to study music at Berkeley in the US. She's a videographer. We just skimmed the surface of the Olympic/Tibet/Carrefour/China/West thing, but all knew better than to get into it with near strangers, and FR caring so little, unable to help smooth things over.

On the long, slow, hot trainride back to Nanjing I chatted with a youngish hydroelectric engineer for awhile. The urbanization movement peaked in the 80s, he said. Now it's so hard to buy a house, so people aren't so much staying in the cities, just going for awhile to make money, then they'll go home. It was obvious that he is planning to stay at his job in the Nanjing suburbs indefinitely, though he'll need a raise before he'll be able to consider buying a house. He asked repeatedly about where I've been and where I plan to live/travel in the future. He understood that I'm sort of wondering the world, living a vagrant life, which I guess isn't all that far wrong when you look at end results. But I'm such a serious person, I protested. He recommended novels by 舒童, with whom I share a family name. I surprised myself by expressing my hopes that the Olympics will go smoothly. Maybe I was just trying to balance a bit after saying a little too honestly that I'm not really interested in going to see the Olympics in Beijing. The tickets aren't hard to get or expensive, he said. You just have to have the time.

all the things you haven't heard

I can still feel the humiliation of the kindergarten cafeteria scene in which my friends discovered (to their dismay) that I did not know who Elvis Presley was, so I tried to go gentle with my astonishment when we found out FR had never heard of Adolph Hitler. GX was watching the propaganda film that he said was guaranteed to make even a Jew love the man. I wasn't so convinced - maybe it's related to all the propaganda I was raised on (and I mean this in the best sense) - the shivers I get from military marching tunes and videos of soldiers marching to them are much more horror than awe-inspired.

Anyway, I tried not to laugh too much, and told her to go baidu "hitler." I don't know if she has, but this morning she was baidu-ing away about the train wreck reported on the front page of the newspaper. She showed me the article and the website that provided a little box with a simulation of the accident. One train was going too fast, fishtailed a bit, collided with another passing train. 7o people died, just like that. Most of them were probably asleep.

Then we talked about how we always feel like trains are so safe, but was it ZX that said that you're safer on a plane? I think this is what my students meant when they wrote that news should be "close to my life." Tomorrow evening we take the train to her hometown (or to the closest town) for the labor day holiday. We ain't comin' back 'til Sunday.

Yesterday evening I reunited with my Chinese tutor after a strange three-week break. I brought him a bottle of water. He brought me a flower that he picked from a vine. At 5:45 we left the picnic table where we always meet near White Horse Park, and I headed towards the yoga place. When I ducked into a Lanzhou noodle place for supper, a young guy was reading a headline from a newspaper aloud to his two friends. Something about the US and Spain. I never did understand, but my curiousity won me some new friends (we exchanged telephone numbers, I invited them to English Island next week) and a gifted lamb skewer. Another guy waiting for his take-out order said, "Look at her shoes, look at her pants, they have a Chinese flavor. She's lived here for a long time." I told them that I bought the shoes in the US, and the pants in Cambodia.

My taiji instructor had met the Italian monk who lives in the monastery across the street and invited him to come practice with us. When he arrived, the middle-aged woman leaving after yoga was excited to tell him that she had read about him in the newspaper. BAO-ZHI! she said, real loud and distinct, even after being told (when she asked right in front of him) that he spoke excellent Chinese. I'm pretty sure the China Daily article that I read about him pointed out that he could speak Chinese, and I'd bet you a hundred yuan the one that she read had too.

just so you know

In case you aren't lucky enough to actually live here like I do, you might not know that...

Everything good in the world is orginally Chinese, everything bad Western.

For example, there's capitalism (bad) - forced on China in the Qing dynasty (1800's) by the eight foreign powers, who after using military might (or GUNS, which we must remember, were NOT invented by Chinese people though they had long before invented gunpowder) to force their way into China's market, proceeded to post signs on the land they had stolen in Shanghai that read, "No Chinese or dogs allowed". It's hard to argue that capitalism hasn't been fully embraced here, but we'll argue that we never wanted it, never chose it.

And the all-inclusive, "openness" (bad) - immodesty, loose morality, and sex on TV, in movies, in young people's lives, is learned, of course, from the West, and mainly from "America", where everyone knows people wear as few clothes as they can get away with and divorce, sleep around, and in general assert their (scarily-extreme) independence as easily as they deposit their parents in an old folk's home.

Anais Mitchell sings (I think) about being a "westerner" in a place other than the "west" in "The Belly and the Beast" and I understand the general feeling ...

I, in my longing, fly out in the night
unveiled and irreverently dressed
I'm lipstuck and liquored up, pickin' a fight
I'm the wicked, wicked witch of the west

See, I want to complain about how I'm misunderstood, but really, I work with amazingly open people who understand relatively much about where I'm coming from and the mutual misunderstandings that we're all mired in and, best of all, they like to talk about it with me. We're all thinking a bit more politically these days; even my poor, very apolitical roommate is aware that something is going on because of the unavoidable buzz about boycotting Carrefour because we've been having these hours of conversations about politics and culture. I really think I understand a lot about China. I say to my roommate, "I really think I understand a lot about China," and then add, "but not enough."

"That's right, a little humbler!" she admonishes jokingly, and I know she's right, but I also wonder if "understanding China" for her doesn't meant holding the same views that every "good girl" is supposed to, 'cause I don't think I'll ever get there. Today we conclude our lunchtime lecture saying peacework is helping people in China and the west to understand each other more. I agree, I agree.

We pick up later with why the officials can't engage in real dialogue, because they have no "culture". (A related article about why officials shouldn't read, and I read the other day that the Pope can speak ten languages, and thought, "Now that guy deserves to be a leader!") . I mentioned this article, which offers China suggestions on "Putting the PR into the PRC" .

This was sort of the author's summary advice to China on how to come across a little more positively to the rest of the world.

Be confident and honest, not defensive and secretive

The outright denials of the obvious, the virulent rhetoric, the strained historical arguments, the paranoid claims that foreigners cause your problems - all make China look bad. And China does not need to look bad. Moreover, the world needs China not to look bad. China has a great deal to be proud and confident of, with an unprecedented record of poverty alleviation, phenomenal economic growth, glittering new architecture, high-levels of education, a space programme, trillions in foreign reserves, a savings rate that is the envy of spendthrift Americans, and what is likely to be a rich harvest of Olympic gold - not to mention a long history and glorious culture.

Sure, China has problems - who doesn't? But no one is going to take Tibet or Xinjiang away from China. If you respond to disturbances in these regions with restraint, with a statesmanlike air "more in sadness than in anger", and demonstrate an interest in attempting to resolve, rather than deny, the economic, cultural and political problems underlying these disturbances, you could earn world understanding and sympathy rather than looking like a bully.

I like this article because what he's saying is true: China has a lot going for it, and if it weren't so frustratingly defensive and secretive about everything, and stopped thinking, acting, and talking as if it's AGAINST the rest of the world rather than dealing with a lot of similar issues (a giant rich-poor gap, environmental issues, a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society, etc), things could be so much prettier. SW agrees, but there's little chance of that happening she seems to suggest, "The problem is that the officials lack confidence to really openly engage" even this country's own intellectuals, much less the international community. They have too much pressure - they're clinging tight to their power because it's not just power, but their means for survival (they're not lawyers or businessmen that changed professions, they're peasants that fought their way into these positions). You can think of China like a person, she says. They've had all this trauma (fuedalism, invasion from the west, from Japan, the cultural revolution). What China's people need is healing, and a real understanding of all the good that China has and is ... that can slowly grow into real confidence.

Last night when I couldn't stand to look at Chinese characters any longer I went out for a walk in the misty rain. When I handed my vegetables to the malatang guy so he could stew them in the pot of savory broth, he asked what country I'm from. It's such a common question, but weightier these days, so after I'd said "US", I asked, "but if I were from France, what would you do?"

He didn't hesitate an instant. "不卖!" (he wouldn't sell me the soup!) and a big head-thrown-back laugh. I laughed with him, but couldn't resist a mini-speech about how he should know that the government isn't related to us common folk.

"Look at the American government, I said. They're bad, but I'm good!"

"I'm good too!" he said, and I said I knew. When the soup was done he brought it to my table, and welcomed me to come back again. When the girl at the table beside mine got up to leave she put the napkins from her table onto mine, and met my eyes with a smile. I was moved. Daily, I try to remember to worry less about these big things and go about the more important business of creating my own life.

My yoga instructor sweetly came to English Island on Friday night "second to practice English," she told me, and "first, to see you." She asked if I'd been busy recently, and I said I had (though not busy enough to explain why I haven't been to yoga in a good month). "I think you should practice more," she said simply, and I promised I'd be there tonight. Now that's love like it's supposed to be done.

economizing stories

When SW was young there were tall vats in which everyone in the courtyard would throw their food scraps. At primary school the teachers encouraged them to throw their leftover rice and dishes into them as well instead of into the regular trash. Peasants from the surrounding countryside would come daily to collect the scraps, dipping it up out of the vats into their barrels to take home to feed the pigs. Today they only do that for the restaurants, then it was everyone. The peasants would give the kids tickets (taomipiao 淘米票, lit. “wash rice tickets”) when they faithfully threw their scraps into the vats. The kids would then give their tickets to the teachers who would praise them; the tickets were like merits, to be collected; the more you had the better.

At the Suguo (the local convenience store chain), they are selling green light canvas bags for one kuai, which is nothing. The making of the super-thin bags has already been suspended (and factories closed, jobs lost), but the giving away of free plastic bags in the supermarkets ban doesn't start till June.

FR wonders if ALL the plastic bags in the land will be done away with. If that is the case, she thinks, then certainly there will people who will stockpile rolls of these trashcan-lining bags; they will fill rooms with them. We laugh at her.

Then they tell me something I’ve never heard before. That people had to be taught how to use plastic bags, and the change came all at once about ten years ago, as the result of extensive propaganda. At that time people just put waste straight into their small bins and then dumped them into the big bins, or trashpiles. Then someone somewhere decided that the people needed to be using plastic bags, and suddenly there was propaganda everywhere telling people to line their trashcans with plastic bags. At first everyone thought it was strange, because they were used to the old way. It took them a month or two, but after that, they all got used to the plastic bags.

The bags should be gotten rid of, SW argues. They litter the sides of the streams in the country. China has so much countryside, and so many rivers, and they’re all so dirty, she says. I want to argue that there are much worse things polluting those rivers than plastic bags, but I don’t.

We talk of how Chinese people used to (and even in Hong Kong today?) use paper to wrap meat when they bought it . . . FR says she remembers "oil paper" to wrap the noodles they bought when she was young. Chinese people truly had a good, economic way of life, now everything is “broken.”

I try to explain how I still can feel the knowledge (and the will) buried, even in the current young people. You’re closer to it than we are in the US, I wanted to communicate. My grandparents’ generation may have had it, and even some of my parents’ generation. I struggled to explain by saying, “I feel like here, at least, I can always use a “save and economize” argument and it’s somewhat effective, at the very least, understood. SW’s interpretation of what I’d said was a bit off, but interesting. She thought that I was talking about how I’m not allowed to speak into other people’s lives in the US, because of cultural norms that keep us distant from each other. Like I can’t tell someone that they should turn off the water while they’re brushing their teeth, even if I’m completely convinced that it’s the right thing to do. I’m not allowed to tell someone that George Bush is an idiot, even if my bones want to scream it. (Those are my examples, not hers). In China, she was contrasting, you can tell people to do something just because you think its right . . . (hmmm, that has implications for current political debates, doesn't it?)

It's true, and an interesting cultural difference to think about, but what I'm trying to get at, and appreciate so much about China, is the economizing mindset that the society as a whole seems to have. Obviously it comes from a mixture of culture and poverty, and obviously its slipping away, but it's also still here.

When we were listing adjectives in English Island last week for a "good" person, there was "handsome" and "reliable" and "warm-hearted" and "smiling", and those were interesting, but the one that I liked the most? "Economic" (in Chinese, lit. "saving") Yes. That's why I live here.

the ordinary

It's been weird reading Justin's blog recently, as he's posting stuff he wrote while he was here. It's weird to go back and read someone else's perspective on things that you witnessed and (especially) that you had conversations about. Still, weird in a not un-nice way. Cause Justin is nice and doesn't write how I talked for hours about myself and had no idea which ATM took international cards. He admires things about my life that I don't always see, just like how I admire things about his that he doesn't necessarily see. That he gets out of bed in the mornings to write, and walks to the library to stack books for food (and rent). I admire the freedom in how he chooses friends and his books, and the cat, and the tea, and the principles as he wants to live them, no danger of his job defining him.

On the Tuesday after Justin left, inspired by the stretching before me of months unmarked by foreseeable visitors or trips, I decided to register myself for the April HSK exam, the Mandarin proficiency test for non-native speakers.

On the way to the registration office I passed a hotel billowing black smoke, people gathered around to watch. The fire engine wasn't getting anywhere fast, so it stopped 500 meters from the intersection and the firefighters got out and jogged to the scene in their ill-fitting yellow uniforms. One had to slow slightly to fix his helmet when it slipped down over his eyes. They were young, and I was filled with a sudden affection for all of them, and for the familiarity of the people gathering on the street corners to watch . . . as they would an argument . . . or anything, really.

On the Nanjing University campus I asked directions for the building whose name I hadn't understood on the phone (after asking her to repeat it four or five times I had gotten embarrassed and given up). The worker I stopped took pity on me and walked me to the nearest corner (opposite of the direction he was going) and carefully explained the turns I'd need to make. In the awkward space of his kindness and the steps to the corner I tried to make conversation. "I hadn't imagined that NanDa was so big!" I exclaimed. He turned to me with a mixture of confusion and sternness, and shortly replied, "Nanda is not big. It's not big at all."

I found the registration office with ten minutes till closing. The man and the young woman behind the temporary office messy desk seemed bored, sharp contrast to my country mouse excitement. I tried to mask it, was glad I had everything ready, the two passport pictures and the money, and didn't have to ask them to help me read the form. It's good to taste once in awhile the expectation that I should actually be able to get along in the language of the land.

Later I went to the bookstore to look for books to help me study. Got mad that after almost four years I'm only ready for the basic level test. I was in the bookstore coffeeshop, looking at the prices of the desserts (thinking to buy time at the coffeeshop tables so I wouldn't have to buy the book) when a manager-ish man approached and asked if I would like to have a free cup of coffee. It was their first day, and they were doing test-runs, collecting comments. I asked him twice if he was serious.

In the end I had two different specials, and a chat with the actual manager, who was younger than me, as peppy as her hair was curled, a newly-gradeeaaated English major, and highly goal-oriented it seemed . . . but also (and why should this be surprising, really?) fairly pleasant to talk to. (It's probably just that she complimented my Chinese a lot. And she was from Gansu, which is closer to Sichuan than to Jiangsu . . . and she gave me free coffee.) She said a big part of their marketing is just educating people about coffee - where it comes from, how it's processed, different kinds, etc. We're different from the Starbucks kind of fast-food coffee, you know? she said. That's what we should be doing with psychology, I thought.

Which brings me to the little work I have been doing lately. Drumroll, please. That's right, "English Island" has been brought out of the garage, revamped, re-oiled and, with Holly at the wheel (less concerned about the actual driving than the re-adjustment of the driver's seat), we're off. Friday's second round went well. That old energy came, and it felt that they went away pleased, if that's the way we're to measure these things. The unfortunate thing is that the level is so low (with a few shining exceptions) that interesting conversation is spare-to-none. I guess I'll have to settle for fun, which it has been.

My uncle asked in an email this morning about my thoughts on Tibet. I've been wanting to write more for awhile, and hope to soon, but my mind's a mess. I've been reading and reading - news, blogs, videos - from foreign journalists, Chinese alternative news, bloggers in China both western and Chinese, some of it good, some of it labeling and/or emotional, some of it only worth laughing at. I've gotten overwhelmed and depressed, and been comforted and relieved, then numb and tired of it all. I've thought I understood then been shocked with a new side of it. And there's the personal emotion all wrapped up in it because this thing of China being criticized (consistently) by the West is me and these are my friends and this my home. Then swirl in the added stuff of the discussions ZX and I have done over and over, almost nightly for awhile, swept away in the anger and defensiveness, the cultural views, then forcing ourselves to step away, to separate . . .

To cope, maybe, I started looking up stuff about Daosim. (Sunday's sabbath was good. To leave the computer at work for a whole day, read and write on the balcony, make food in the kitchen.) Started reading a book by Thomas Merton The Way of Chuang Tzu. I like this from "A Note to the Reader" in which he's explaining his appreciation for the philosopher and the "Dao",

But the whole "way" contained in these anecdotes, poems, and meditations, is characteristic of a certain taste for simplicity, for humility, self-effacement, silence, and in general a refusal to take seriously the aggressivity, the ambition, the push, and the self-importance which one must disply in order to get along in society.

Yes, we have that taste, some of us, don't we. Breathe, sigh, breathe. Look up at the world in a new way all over again. Later in the afternoon I hold FR's hand (like usual) as we walk to the supermarket. I don't think about the places I'd rather be (this is rather unusual) and laugh deep when she says the air "smells warm". I argue, that air can't 'smell warm' even though I agree that the description is true. But FR being FR responds to my half-serious protests with a full-out lesson about how in Chinese this is a valid way of saying it. It's a metaphor, see, similar to how we say she has a 'sweet' smile. We don't actually taste her smile . . .

we're all fooled and fooling

When he called on Monday, it was April Fool's, a holiday that people here seem to take much more seriously than I'm used to. So FR was convinced that my leaping heart would be thrown to the ground and stomped upon come Tuesday morning, and just kidding, he wouldn't be able to come, again. But my weak faith managed at least this much - that I drew a line,shook my head insisted, "If the ticket prices suddenly rose (like they can do in the space of minutes) maybe. But not a joke, not this cruel, and I was right.

By Thursday the restoring faith had warmed me into lots of corners, like the sun subverting the weather reports for the holiday. We had two days off plus Sunday, went to bed late, like “睡得晚” and got up late, like "sleep late", spent other time on blankets on the ground overlooking lakes. The rain held off until we reached the restaurant Sunday night, seven of us young people come down from the mountain on a bus on a bike, giddy over how we occasionally met (I was sure they meant something closer to "happenstance") and running on the boardwalk and dirt paths around the small Pipa lake, backlit like the trees by floodlights the color of artificial spring green but still beautiful somehow.

We hung out with my favorite friends, and with others who just happened to be along, and it didn't matter, really. I saw the games, marveled, enjoyed them mostly. ZX says that it can be so intricately woven that no words need be spoken, not a sword raised. The spirit of the eye, they say. And this is why we all love China. And hate it too.

Draught beer and big-bottled beer and walking and the black squeaky couch, FR beside us, tiring of our lapsing-into-English, voices-get-raised, drawn-out-too-long "discussions" of media bias. "Do you feel love for each other when you're talking about those things?" she asks, and I stubbornly insist I do, knowing that something in me is wired to enjoy conflict, from time to time. I also know she's a little bit right, and repent everyday, and try to remember to back down easily. I love friends who rebuke me, and when two of them sit together and we all are close, I am happy. This is a part of the story of the weeks since Justin left. April flies by.

Nanjing, through a J-lens

So Justin is a good photographer, and when he wasn't on the balcony in my apartment writing, spent a lot of the time walking around the city. We joked about how he got more familiar with the place than I am after eight months, but it's mostly true. He also helped me to see the city in new ways, and get excited about it again.

A corner near my apartment . . . .

View from the counseling room in our office.

On the city wall

Boats on the Yangtze

Worship at the Buddhist convent temple

One of my favorities.

I have loved this second-hand made-of-iron stove-top one-cup coffeepot since Theresa gifted it in November. Like she told me, it can burn bad coffee to a pretty good taste. Plus I just like the sound of the bubbling, the routine of dumping out the old grounds, watching the blue flames leap around it's bottom. My roommate's brother came over and opened it up and peered inside and asked me to explain how it works. "I have a coffeemaker too," he then told me. "It uses electricity."

And this is just outside the door of my apartment.

Apparently, I've never looked up.