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.
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.