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.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
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."
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."
Thursday, May 22, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, May 16, 2008
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).
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).
Thursday, May 8, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, May 5, 2008
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")
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.
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.
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