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.
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