baby oranges

I hope that the pen that I accidently stole from the kindergarten yesterday came from the same classroom where I accidently left the big apple and the big orange. Big apple as compared to small apple. Big orange, small orange. Big book, small book. Is it big? Yes, it is! Is it big? No, it's SMALL! So much fun. 

Nearly three months in I can still say I love kindergartners. Most of the time. When I walked into the first class of three-year-olds yesterday I caught my breath at their adorableness. They are so adorable. Every Thursday morning I see six different classes on two different campuses within the space of two hours. It's quite a rush. I'm still figuring out the best way to entertain, control, and hopefully teach something to twenty or thirty (and sometimes even forty) 3-5 year olds. Those teachers are saints. Though you can feel a few are harried, and the difference when you walk into a classroom exuding warmth and calm. 

Nanchong Baby

It's been heart-achingly beautiful out, when the morning fog clears, and I've slipped down the steep muddy banks of the river to watch the sunset, and ridden my bike all around the campus looking for love. Shelley and I arranged to meet for a short (but wild) frisbee toss. Mmmm, Sunday afternoon. There were nine boys playing volleyball like they knew how, and I made ten. They let me serve a bunch, and every one flew true, but I didn't get close to the front row, apart from my faithful block-covering 马步. I may as well not have been there since they missed few hits. They set high and the outside hitter cooly switched his cigarette from his hand to his mouth before the approach.

A yoga teacher from India talked about smoking that evening in a first-floor classroom decorated with pink balloons. He confirmed that we (and the boys especially, since they're the smokers in China) know it's bad for us, and then asked why we still do it. Like all the other things we know are bad for our bodies and still do. Like the delicious cranberry scones that I made this morning and shared with Shelley and Phil and Hainan coffee. Two and a half teaspoons of margarine, almost a teaspoon of sugar, and a whole lot of cream in each one. For five years I've been listening to Chinese people, and mainly middle-aged woman, talk to me about food, and health, and I'm starting to listen. 

When Kathi came from Beijing we talked about eating whole foods instead of the derived nutrients and "enriched cereals" we Americans try to pass off as healthful. This time of year people in Sichuan eat a lot of sweet potatoes. Street vendors roast them over coal in a fifty-gallon barrel and sell them when they're so soft and caramelized you eat them walking home straight out of the little plastic bag. People cut sweet potatoes into chunks and steam them along with the rice, piling them into the bowl with the reminder that they're very "nutritious". And rarely more than that; there's no explanation of vitamins or minerals, or fiber, just, "Yogurt helps digestion. Dates are good for women. The chicken broth is full of nutrition. Bitter melon is good for you. Here, have more."

brewing

This is a start. 

In the afternoon I drank tea. Really, really good 铁观音 from high on a bedroom shelf in Sam's house. His mom insisted on sending it home with me a few weeks ago  when she found out I liked it. After this incredible search to find the right stuff. She climbed up on the ladder and pulled out all the boxes. Fancy gifts in fancy oversized packaging, tea and alcohol and who knows what else, all of it looking appropriately expensive cradled in the red and gold fabrics. Five minutes in, I found she and the aiyi in the unused bedroom juggling boxes. I instinctively jumped to catch the one that fell to the floor, and made a few attempts to dissuade them from the trouble . . . but in the end I left them there because I could see that's what she wanted.

Then coffee with Johnson at SPR so we could go over his IVEP application.

These are probably the reasons that I'm still wide awake at 3, surfing baking websites and trying to keep a promise.

last saturday's joy

Shuai Ye

It's better to walk to the yoga place - find yourself five minutes away at 10 when the class is to begin - and back, than to not go out at all, I think. In the park I met Teacher Liu with his wife and granddaughter, and another erhu player who urged me to pick the instrument up occasionally so as not to lose the skills. I think I've already lost the skills, I told him. Nonsense, he said. You can't lose them, they're still there in your head.

nothing wrong with that

Yesterday I bought an electronic (sorry Tim, but I AM still grinding my coffee by hand?!) scale. Back at the tiny shop that I'd found before. The exceptionally friendly boss recognized me right away. Her husband was there this time, and funny! He thought I was English. I said US. He said, mmm, the US and England "耍得很好" (play well - the way you talk about the relationship between close friends or a couple). I laughed hard with them and found myself opening up when they asked the usual questions. I'm not married, but I have a boyfriend. He's from Nanchong. "Does he treat you well?" the immediate question from the woman. And then the usual about how Sichuan men “下厨房” (enter the kitchen) and are "怕耳朵" (fear being pulled around by their ears). I avoided the potential extent of that conversation, and let myself delight instead, in how she loved his jokes. I didn't really get any more after that first one, but I enjoyed them all, watching her eyes light up as she laughed.

we two both foreigners here

I take it as a compliment that the couldn't-have-been-13-year-old (he claimed he was 15) overdid the grilling of the two tiny lamb kebabs . . . we were having such a fine time chatting. American movies and such. When I climbed up out of the underground Uni-mart,  he had taken off his belt and was swinging it like numchucks, but quickly held it down beside him when he realized I was going to be a customer. 

We talked, me open and gently prodding, his curiosity getting the best of him. He was born here, but it's obvious that Mandarin is not his first language. Mine neither. It took us long minutes to try to communicate simple ideas. At first I mistook his shyness for disgust; he would turn his head down and away when I utterly missed the point. . . . but I was in that mood where laughter comes freely, and in the end we were friends.

every American has a dream

My students still don't have their textbooks, so I'm scrapping the whole idea of loosely following the content. I'm searching online for that poem about sweeping. How it is the cure for every ill. Justin had it scrawled on his kitchen, white tiles in Wanzhou. 

The other day Phil and I were trying to piece together our memories of the Wanzhou trips . . . piece together enough to separate the train rides and bus rides, tacos and icecream turkeys, sleeping on Justin's couches or where did we stay? a Thanksgiving, an Easter, hikes to the mountains, a terrible awkward birthday party we never wanted to attend, the Tujia pizzas, that time I cried the whole weekend about making Johnny move out. Memories that involve Scott and Emily, Jen, Christina. We never went after Justin left, did we?

Couldn't find the sweeping poem, but I found this one. Which I like very much.

Like Lilly Like Wilson
By Taylor Mali 
www.taylormali.com 

I'm writing the poem that will change the world, 
and it's Lilly Wilson at my office door. 
Lilly Wilson, the recovering like addict, 
the worst I've ever seen. 
So, like, bad the whole eighth grade 
started calling her Like Lilly Like Wilson Like. 
ŒUntil I declared my classroom a Like-Free Zone, 
and she could not speak for days. 

But when she finally did, it was to say, 
Mr. Mali, this is . . . so hard. 
Now I have to think before I . . . say anything. 

Imagine that, Lilly. 

It's for your own good. 
Even if you don't like . . . 
it. 

I'm writing the poem that will change the world, 
and it's Lilly Wilson at my office door. 
Lilly is writing a research paper for me 
about how homosexuals shouldn't be allowed 
to adopt children. 
I'm writing the poem that will change the world, 
and it's Like Lilly Like Wilson at my office door.

She's having trouble finding sources, 
which is to say, ones that back her up. 
They all argue in favor of what I thought I was against. 

And it took four years of college, 
three years of graduate school, 
and every incidental teaching experience I have ever had 
to let out only, 

Well, that's a real interesting problem, Lilly. 
But what do you propose to do about it? 
That's what I want to know. 

And the eighth-grade mind is a beautiful thing; 
Like a new-born baby's face, you can often see it 
change before your very eyes. 

I can't believe I'm saying this, Mr. Mali, 
but I think I'd like to switch sides. 

And I want to tell her to do more than just believe it, 
but to enjoy it! 
That changing your mind is one of the best ways 
of finding out whether or not you still have one. 
Or even that minds are like parachutes, 
that it doesn't matter what you pack 
them with so long as they open 
at the right time. 
O God, Lilly, I want to say 
you make me feel like a teacher,
and who could ask to feel more than that? 
I want to say all this but manage only, 
Lilly, I am like so impressed with you! 

So I finally taught somebody something, 
namely, how to change her mind. 
And learned in the process that if I ever change the world 
it's going to be one eighth grader at a time.

Trying to meet up with Charity in the big station is the first exercise of many during the trip in challenging cell phone culture. My "little smart phone" only works in Sichuan province . . . and we ain't in Sichuan anymore. I use a public phone to call Charity and tell her I'll wait at the Northeast exit. But when I climb up and out the exit is complicated, with three floors. I choose the middle one, and wait. The weather is much colder than I brought clothes for. Wind. I watch the other waiters play with their many-featured cell phones, wonder if I could charm them into letting me send her a message.

When she doesn't come I wonder nervously downstairs to see her (I think it's her) squinting at a map of the station. She begins to walk away, and I follow after, disturbed by how unsure I am that it is her. When I touch her shoulder to turn her around, our reunion is underwhelming, like meetings of loved ones here are. I don't hug her, though I want to.

She has come more than an hour to the train station to meet me, but she dismisses her own hospitality, saying, "I've never seen the Shanghai South Train Station" - a backwards excuse we delight in making to our friends. No one ever means exactly what they say and you're not SUPPOSED to take anything at face value.

We bus back out to the outlying district of Shanghai where she is stuck in (forgive me) nothing of a life. Just work (and nothing to hold her there) and trying to make it another year or two when the college loans will be paid off and she can return to Sichuan. An older cousin and his family but she doesn't see them often. No money to go out on the weekends. No ping-pong in the common room because someone would call her boyfriend and tell him she's hanging out with other guys. You could mistake the place for any small city, China. We spend two days between the hotel room they have rented for me and the restaurants where we eat lunch and dinner with her boyfriend, who is nice, and gentlemanly in every patronizing way. She stays with me at the hotel and finally we have someone to whom we can tell everything.

On the second night we gang up on her boyfriend about the dinner choice. We want dumplings. He wants to go back to the same Sichuan restaurant where we had (granted, a very tasty) lunch. We win. The dumplings are terrible. I buy microwave popcorn and we go back to the hotel to watch TV. 

losing trains

I once loved trains. The rocking sleep, the instant noodles, the intimacy of strangers taking turns at the window seat and stumbling on each other's shoes in the night. I've crawled all over this country on her trains (though only twice outside the comfort of the hard sleeper). 

Dr. Wang hates trains. He took too many as a student, back when you had to fight your way on and maybe even through the windows. He'll drive himself, and take the cost and stress and inconvenience over those emotional memories any day. I always understood . . . but also felt no small self-satisfaction at my preference for trains.

And this time it was supposed to be the same. I bought puffed rice cakes, oranges, bottles of tea, packed the sudoku bathroom reader and study materials for the settle-in. I didn't fear the stretching out hours, though everyone but ZX and his parents said I was crazy. A few hundred kuai more and you'd be there, they said increduously, when they'd done the math. 

But I chose thirty-eight, and a five-minute walk around the corner to the station. ZX argues with the woman guarding the gate to let him in, too stubborn to buy the platform ticket. But the whole place is remodeled, shiny; there are free-standing boards with the new rules posted, and she is staunch. I am sure he is just letting off the unsettled tension of me leaving for tend days and neither of us feel good, or even sure about it.

 

The train came from Chengdu and the boarding was sweaty and trying. All of us from Nanchong in two or three cars, no empty bunks, and everybody trying to shove their three or four big bags under the seats or in the small space overhead. I had to wait to get into my compartment. Then there were two small babies. 

I reacted badly, said something sarcastic aloud about how great it was that there were two . . . and later felt bad because they turned out to be really great babies, nothing like the five-year-old spoiled boy one compartment down. They were three and five months, and their mothers were sister-in-laws. True country folk. Great patient women.

At seven o'clock in the evening on the second day it's all a haze. The stainless steel food car coming by again. The babies feeding again. The little boy is a man at three years old. He wears grey long underwear and brown man's dress shoes in his size.  Mama follows him to the bathroom. Outside the window the yellow flowers of the youcai everywhere. The graduate student is traveling to Shanghai and Suzhou to spend a few months. She and her mother, who wears skin-tight pants painted to look like jeans. She does her make-up on the second day for no one but us.

It's the third morning that gets to me. We are all ancy as it is, and the spoiled little man argues for a hotdog until, and even after, it's promised. I haven't talked to the other passengers like I used to when my Chinese was crappy. I feel so alone, like I'm floating suspended in between yet more of these worlds, and will never belong. I know the three mothers are having a conversation about the suffering of women, but they are down on the bottom bunks talking too low for me to hear. I can't remember it ever feeling so long, and think I'll not take another long one like this alone.

so mom knows where I live

For a few days we thought maybe we'd have to move out of this apartment. And if I haven't made it clear, I love this apartment. Especially in the spring. And summer and fall. The big open air windows. The street down below. I literally can lean over the balcony railing and look down upon the vegetables that I might consider making into dinner. The landlord's mother, who was going to move in, will now stay with another daughter. I am left with relief, and an even deeper appreciation for this place.

The view from the front balcony (and some cinnamon rolls).

february

This is what I will remember of late February:

opening The Land of Women each noon.

slipping into the mist-swept fields and emotions.

discovering Fiona's trembling hunger as my own.

The irony of this book of deepest longing

in this month of longest waiting.

a Lenten discipline unspoken and barely conscious. 

It is his, not mine.

I am left with only this desire, 

doubt, and emptiness to hold.

sunday tulips and table tennis

Sam (the boy I tutor) and his parents took me out to West Mountain on Sunday morning.

My adorable student . . . and the flower he eventually found for me.

He looked for a really long time for a fallen one.

I got creamed by the long-underwear-clad twelve-year-olds.

The girls were shy, and apparently just delighted to be watching.

When I got tired of table tennis, I went back to the edge of the lake to drink tea with Sam's mom, who, it turns out, used to run a teahouse/coffeeshop that served Western food. Helpful conversation. And she's just nice. Father is also gentle and kind. He works for city planning . . . and manages to squeeze his car pretty well between the commoner folk hiking on foot up the not-so-wide mountain roads. They're good parents, and demand of Sam an above-average level of consideration for others. They have a woman who cooks and cleans for them, Sam's mom tells me, but she still asks Sam to wash his own clothes. She wants him to learn to 动手 ("move his hands").

saturday

Cinnamon rolls in the morning and Phil's birthday hotpot in the evening. And in the middle there was the strength of a three-legged skype conversation and the leisure of long sun on the balcony as we chatted and shelled peanuts. Unfortunately, I don't have pictures of those.

I just sit back and enjoy

I quickly learned that the eight AM class needs SOMETHING right away unless I just want to stare into sleepy faces for the first half an hour of class . . . and this morning, the "ice-breaker" role-play worked nicely. The girl with the big spiky hair was easily my favorite, as I think she might continue to be. Her eyes crinkle closed when she smiles or laughs and she was doing a lot of both when her partner - a male classmate with a much smaller measure of both English and confidence - wasn't quite understanding the details of the situation. At "Sarah's birthday party" she asked, "Is she your cousin, too?" and laughed with abandon when he gave a confused nod. But not without kindness. Between the bursts of mirth, she coaxed him, "You should say, 'No, she's not my cousin. She's my co-worker.'" I watched from the edge of the deskrow, scattering supportive smiles and nods with my own barely-reserved laughter. And again, when the same girl, acting in front of the whole class, leaned up against the wall with a fake cigarette. The class was delighted with her audacity (smoking is much more a man's thing in China) and, I think, the sense of "cool" that emanated from her nonchalance. They laughed harder when she offered a cigarette to the other girl in the roleplay, though I doubt they were laughing, like me, at how she'd asked if she needed "some fire." I forgot how fun this can be.

为了梦中的橄榄树

There are (relatively) cheap new apartments way out in the middle of nowwhere going on sale at the end of this month and ZX's parents want to buy one for him. Which is pretty normal; parents buy apartments for their kids if they can afford it.  But ZX's mad about the high prices of the housing market in general and says even if he had the money, he wouldn't buy a house, on principle. And he doesn't want them to buy one for him. You could start ten businesses with that money, he says.

And when we meet HF (who buys and sells houses for a living) for tea in the park, he's on our side. Don't buy a new house, he says. There's the added cost of the interior decoration, and the location's terrible. Buy a used apartment downtown - a good location, and already decorated, for a sixth of the cost. 

When they ask me what I think, I say, "I'm a wanderer, what do I want with a house?" At the price we're renting now, it would take us 100 years, literally, to make even a low-priced apartment pay off. And for now we're happy with our open-air, plaster-peeling, pull the lights on with a string little place. Homemade strawberry jam tastes just as sweet here, and it's still no chore to squeeze by him to get to the sink.

high hopes for this one

The boy is relieved that his tutor will be a woman. Because they're, you know, not as "fierce-stern" as men. He is not shy but also very smart, and that makes me happy because it will be easier. His mother is obviously rich but also very sweet, and that makes me happy because, while I have and will work for real jerks, I prefer nice people. 

The father is not present, and I guess he will likely remain a mystery. When we're exchanging info the boy whispers to his mother, "Don't give him my dad's number," and later when we leave the teahouse together he tells me - in Mandarin - how his father takes him to school and picks him up everyday in the car . . . and how he envies the classmates he sees walking home by themselves. 

He promises to teach me to skateboard. Then he tells me that he thinks I speak the best Mandarin of any foreigner. I think he probably means "in the world." He's twelve. (His frame of reference includes one foreigner who taught in the English training school last summer). But still, who says I don't like kids?

early fruits

The tiny kitchen where I'm learning to bake bread.

My second attempt at ciabatta. I felt more comfortable with the wet dough, and it did turn out a bit better . . . but still a long way to go!

Almost everything possible is broken on this old, stolen, well-traveled oven. But it still bakes!

 

The poolish baguettes made me proud. Textured flavor, cool crumb, crispy crust.  Yay!

I would've bought all the lemons for one picture

The bagels turned out less than perfect. But they're bagels, I tell myself. My first try. And look at the oven I have to work with! A real bakery with a real oven, ZX and I agree, is going to feel like heaven after three bagels at a time in the boiling pot and the baking pan.

Meanwhile the freshman are so easy and fun that I'm asking for more classes. Willingly hanging around after the bell with patient smiles and the expected advice . . . but in the end I sail back into my anonymous life in the city. Where every day people I meet - the McDonald's workers waiting in line in the women's bathroom, the teenage girl and her father come to Nanchong to visit relatives, the girls selling dried snacks on the street - are friends for a few minutes. But it's not like I can invite them over for dinner.

On the busy market sidewalk this evening, one basket held less than ten lemons, and some ginger root. Behind the basket, the seller sat, but he was half-turned away, fully absorbed in a game of chess (or something like it) with another old man. Normal street activity. Like the crowd of seven or so clustered around the regular game down the street. They'll be there all day, only thin out later in the evening, and the die-hards will stay into the wee hours of the morning. Down the street they've got a real board though, and stools, to go with their real players and their real audience. Here behind the lemons there are just a few scratched lines on the sidewalk, and torn bits of lemon and orange peel to serve as pieces. Just two old men, but no less a game of chess.

it'll grow

ZX was invited over by the American (and Canadian) students for dinner, but I felt weird crashing the party again (even though it means third night in a row eating alone). So after a scary ride home after class in the private (read: illegal) van-taxi-bus thing and not buying fake perfume by the gate of the old campus, I ducked into the 送包子 by the school for some xifan and cold dishes. 

It was busy and they plopped my metal bowl down beside a mother (her son across the table) who had some sort of relationship with the money-collecting aiyi. There was a slight scene when mom wanted to pay that involved aiyi forcing the purse back down onto her lap and lots of discussion about who would be more embarrassed . . . In the end there was a five-yuan compromise - so she'd at least be left with enough face to come back some other time.

Meanwhile the little boy (he's in second grade) has been scooping loads of xifan into his mouth, and has emptied the mushroom plate. He's picked up the plate and looks like he might just march over to get more. Argument done. The mother fakes embarrassment but laughs affectionately, with the aiyi, who's taking the plate to get it refilled. Aren't kids great? Later he asks me how to spell his name in English and what places I've been to. I tell him Thailand (that's a country) and Beijing and when he prompts me to keep going his mother says, "She's been to lots of places that you've never heard of. Now keep eating." Earlier she'd been telling him not to lick his fingers. "This foreigner is going to see you doing that and say, 'this is what little Chinese boys are like!'"

The other day I was checking out a bakery near the center of town, one of the nice ones, and suddenly this bagged roll falls off it's plexiglass shelf and onto the floor. There was no one near it, so we all kinda laughed quietly, and the fuyuan put it back. One minute later, it falls again, and we (I, at least) laugh loudly. And this time when the fuyuan puts it back she mutters with perfect dry humor, 它不给我面子 - It won't give me face!

I've been making it my habit to stroll through every bakery I see. You know, research. Since I am newly poor (relative to before, at least, when I was a "volunteer") everything seems ridiculously expensive and I manage to restrain myself. I prefer the little misshapen cakes from ZX's market street. The ones you buy by the pound, or for one yuan, instead of five. The crispy sesame cookies that get tossed in one of those thinner-than-thin plastic bags (production of which was supposedly stopped a year ago) instead of coming all hard plastic binned or shiny plastic bagged.

On the other hand, it's encouraging to see a growing diversity of baked goods being produced (and bought) in Nanchong. When he was in high school, says ZX, there were just a few bakeries in the whole town. Now there are bakeries - and nice ones - on every corner.

And oh, Regina Spektor. Oh my, she sings pretty.

friday night there were roses

Up at five and six to manipulate hunks of dough make it feel like I'm working hard, but then at 7 and 8 I'm back in bed with that giant tattered gray sweatshirt that once was Robbie's and the laptop, appropriately, on my lap.

As expected, the teaching schedule has been changed one week in and Tuesday I will have an unknown percentage of new students and never see again an unknown percentage of the old ones. They rearranged everything so the classes are thirty-some rather than forty-some. Which is really good. The slightly more questionable detail is how one class gets four straight periods on Thursday afternoon. That's 2:30 - 5:30 and a heck of a lot of oral English. We're going to have to do yoga in the middle or something. I can't really imagine that it will work well. I pushed a bit to see if schedules could be switched, but Mr. Z the secretary wasn't budging.

LW and a cousin talked and talked and talked over tea by the river. ZX listened, mostly, and occasionally wondered over to stare at the water. I pulled my chair out into direct bright sun and studied radicals. Thought I should like to tell Tim about 思, which is a field over a heart, and means to consider or miss deeply.

After xifan at ZX's parents' we lingered a bit longer than usual in the dining room drinking in the warm, scented air of spring by the window. The TV showed long shots of HuJintao being greeted in Mali by great cheering crowds. The Chinese expats and then Malians dancing on the sides of the street. We didn't actually hear how much money had been loaned, only that it is interest free, and probably includes plenty of infrastructure projects (for Chinese contractors and workers to complete, of course). ZX's father said with humor, "My money goes to Africa, and your money goes to the banks in the US" . . . then tied on the apron and moved into the kitchen to wash the dishes.

all these good things

My sweet boy cooked dinner and washed the dishes after we got back from the mountain tired, and put on the new headphones he bought exactly for this reason, so while he is on the computer I can enjoy the night sounds, and the sound of the erhu somebody is playing drift in the open door.

And this morning he and ZG went out and bought a wireless router and set it all up for me. I hugged ZG, who accepted it gracefully, and took us over to the medical college in his car.

It was a gorgeous day, once the morning fog burned away. I especially loved the return bike ride after the afternoon class. The street shared with other riders and walkers. The green off the sides of the little bridges. The first class went well, though, as always, there's a steep remembering curve about how to speak slowly and how much less they can handle than you imagined.

new path

An old racing bike, a destination (and a purpose) of my own, and sun after two days of none. We went to see the old bike guy on YiXueJie (though the shop is a new one I didn't know, down the road). He's worked on at least four different bikes for me, and always works for almost nothing. Raise the seat and they both think it's too high. But it's just how I like it. And there are curved handlebars and all. The hole-in-the-wall jewelry shop owner stopped me to say hello. Explained that her shop was closed for the holiday until next week but wouldn't I come by? And could she have my phone number? I told her I didn't have on yet, my first lie. "What if she asks again?" I worried for a minute. Then I realized that she won't.

In the afternoon I loaded mildew-smelling clothes into a duffel bag and headed out on the bike for Karen's apartment. She had soft cushions on the coach and stories of spring festival travel to laugh to.

in my new life, I blog every day

The apartment is smaller than I remember, but there's a freezer full of xiangchang, and it's so good to be starting the new life, finally. By this second morning the suitcases are unpacked and coffee is going. I set the school desk out on the balcony where the sounds of the street almost manage to overpower iTunes at full volume. Classes could begin as early as tomorrow, but I haven't been in touch yet with Y at the foreign affairs office. ZX's mother says I can buy whole wheat flour from the little cart at the gate of this building. She calls ZX's cousin back to try to convince her to come to the house to see us. We laugh at her enthusiasm, and again later, when SanJie calls us to say we should go out instead. She and her husband are near forty, roosters like me, but look so much younger. Except for his eyes, where you can see the work harder than he wants to at his research job with the oil company. They were classmates in elementary school. They live in Shandong but come back each Spring Festival to see their parents.

planes and things

ZX sleeps, burning off the cold I think I brought from the plane. How do you travel twelve hours in that tiny space with a couple hundred other people (some of them sneezing) and not pick up something? The tiny Chinese woman in the seat in front of me bounced constantly (to keep up her circulation, I'm sure) leaned forward and swayed back and forth until I wanted to smack her. I was trying to watch Sex and the City and then The Banquet. I listened surreptitiously to the couple who shared the middle four seats and thought I might go the whole way without speaking to them. the woman alternated between sudoku puzzles she'd clipped from newspapers and sleeping stretched out across the empty seat between she and I, her own seat, and her husband's lap. They were affectionate in a way that I'm not used to seeing in China. When the man finally asked me if I was going to Beijing to travel, I answered that no, I was going home, without explanation. He and she were both Beijingers, who led tours for Americans, and so kind. the winter season isn't that busy, so they'd spent three weeks traveling in the US.

ZX was at the Chongqing airport, along with his friend ZG, who had driven his old black sedan. He stepped from the crowd saying, "Laoshi hao!", his hands jammed in the pockets of his trench coat, and his eyes that are never quite serious. They'd come up on the two lanes, ZX explained as we tried to navigate the maze of concrete that would point us toward home. Like my father, ZG prefers the back roads, and they don't have to pay the tolls. The natural gas tank takes up most of the room in the trunk, so I slept beside my big suitcase in the backseat and it only cost 25 yuan to fill up when we stopped halfway home. So ridiculously cheap. ZG asked why we don't use natural gas in the US? "We don't have that much?" I suggested. ZX said, "because Americans like to spend money."

one home for another

Ryan and Christen took the morning off to take me out for breakfast and drop me off at the BART. I shouldn't have been surprised at their selflessness - the characteristic that has surprised me over and over again these three weeks that I've squatted in their kitchen, pulling out the foldout couch mattress at night, hopping up on the bed and squaring up my shoulders with theirs to watch Jon Stewart and the Office on the laptop.

Christen shifted her day off to today, and after we hugged goodbye drove then the hour with Ryan to work, where they would spend the night and she'd have the commute in the morning for a change. I love this couple who have learned, as much as anyone I know, to think outside the boxes. Move into the VW van for the two interim summer months. It snowed the first night, but later htere were plenty of sky blue lakes to reward long hikes. They hosted evne in that small space, and still seem to think of the Sierras as "theirs." Ryan, eXpecially, loves the land. Like John Muir and Wendell Berry, with a sense of stepping into the slow movement of centuries.

At Holly and Andrew's we all fit onto the wide couch with mugs and cookies and turned off the lights to watch Being Caribou with proper awe. As a twelve-year-old, I thought nature documentaries were so lame, but last night it was as exciting as any feature film, maybe more. The story of a sweet young couple and their six month trek in  Alaska wilderness after the migrating caribou. The calving lands near the coast - threatened by US oil-hunger - still looked quiet and remote in their footage. There was warped time and dreams that held in reality, and when canoeing out they bumped into the Gwich'en hunter who'd sent them off, and I felt flare in me the desire to believe. In DC no Congressperson seemed to care, but at least a small George W. had been there to see it all.

slow ferment

It feels good to sit in the kitchen waiting for the ciabatta loaves to finish their final proof, and the onions for tomorrow's "Roasted Onion and Asiago Miche" to finish roasting. Ryan and Christen do food like I want to - bright vegetables from grocery stores that feel like markets; oatmeal and flour and dried cranberries scooped from the big plastic bulk food bins. Homemade salsa and homemade hummus. The food processor stays out on the tiny counter that wasn't big enough for a toaster. 

Fresh bread we sometimes buy and slowly I've been attempting to make it. I created my own wild yeast (the Bay area's supposed to have an extraordinary strain) starter, and after babying it for a week, it's finally ready to start going into bread. The first sourdough loaves will be ready to shape within the hour.

Christen's off for most of the afternoon, and we catch a few NPR shows between job-searching and cooking and laundry and dishes, but nothing to Ryan's seven hours each day. We laugh at his intensity over dinner. Last night we went back to the class on suffering at the Presbyterian church. It was suggested that the kingdom of God might be built with a lot of laughter. We all thought we ought to work on that.

Another glitch in the visa-getting. John from the visa-service in DC said the embassy sent it back to them asking for the original documents . . . which were attached. He said he's submitting it again - this time for one-day service. I think about the prayer in Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, which was actually a petition to the Universe, and think I might try. I'm signing you all on.

up, up, and up

Three out of the last four days on the hill to watch the sun set over the bay  - not too shabby, even if it did take me 'til this week to get up there. This afternoon there were all sorts of people out. A wild and gray-haired auntie talking adult with the not yet teenage girl who held onto the back of her shirt as they hiked. Two men and little matching black and white speckled dogs, one of which was scared of me. The golden retriever puppy ignored my outstretched hand and got reprimanded by his owner. "Luca, come back here and say hello to this girl!" he scolded. Later we passed again and he said, "Look Luca, it's the girl you ignored before!" The shirtless man who jogs in hiking pants and boots and long gray hair and beard greeted me when he passed. On Wednesday evening he was the tiny figure picking his way down into the jaws of the great gorge. The bigness of the trees and the hills, and the littleness of the man. The scene was a Chinese painting. On Friday I saw it again and Ryan said he could see it too.

This afternoon I came from around the hill and scrambled down and down near the big tree and down into the cover of the brush and then up just as the orange sun was being squashed into the city haze by the line of smog overtop. I hurried up the path past the blanket holding members of multiple small-kid-families. Past the guy set up with his camera and tripod on a boulder facing out over the city. I liked that he gestured meaningfully toward the horizon, concerned that I was just going to walk on by. I smiled and sat down to watch.

C.S. Lewis wrote we are kids who refuse a trip to the beach because we're content making our mudpies. He was thinking about sin, and grace, and GOD!!! I think. I'm just thinking about life, about every day that I wake up and the world's offering me these chances, but it's just that - an offer - and no one's gonna make me do anything at all. There've been a lot of those days recently. Sometimes I choose to go out and see. Sometimes I fail.

I realized recently though (with surprise) that I haven't done a single Sudoku since I left Harrisonburg. Nope, not true. None except for the one I found on the single sheet of newspaper on a street near Chinatown. It had been used for sitting and was dimpled all over with the sidewalk impression. I bought a $1.00 bottle of fake orange juice to sit in the little bakery and filled in the numbers easy while I tried to figure out what language they were speaking.

Chinatown, as expected, was significantly not-familiar, because everything there is Cantonese, or dialects a lot like it. I did buy a bag of fresh green beans for $.90 at a tiny little market-grocery. Smiled to myself at being pressed in the line for the counter with all the aiyi's.

Today I almost convinced myself it'd be just as good to sit in the little backyard soaking up the sunshine comes in just as hard. With Zantu on my lap, stretching into every caress. (I thought, "I want a husband who craves my touch like this cat.") Reading about biga, poolish, sourdough again. I could have stayed contented.

But I put on my Chacos and found Arden steps and climbed up and up and up, and then up the steepest, sharpest hill in the history of everything, I'm sure. Lots of other people climbed up there too, but that didn't stop me from feeling pretty great about it. When I stood at the top and breathed my weight down into my feet-roots, and up through my straight hard back, stretching, breathing, it wasn't even happiness like a surge but happiness like underwater don't move and feel the water quiet around your legs.

Is the first line of Regina's "Samson" not the most beautiful line in such a long time? It floated just under my breath the whole walk. The towering Eucalyptus dropping it's bark reminded me again how different this place feels. Different from the American landscape that I know.

and here I am

It's New Year's Day and I'm wishing I could be on a plane back to China (as the plan went) instead of wandering another afternoon down the hill toward gorgeous blue bay water (what is wrong with me?) and into lively downtown Berkeley.

I haven't even kicked my butt in gear enough to get into San Francisco, though I will, I will. There was a "dragon-awakening" ceremony in Chinatown on Saturday. The parade on Feb. 7 is supposed to be pretty big. Alas, I will, hopefully be on a plane by then.

I searched for signs of people celebrating the first day of the lunar year, and saw an under ten year-old boy and his grandparents boarding the bus. And up by the college a young man holding his mother's hand as they wove down the busy sidewalk. 

The bustle of this place, at least, is comforting, not to mention all the ethnic and vegetarian food, the coffee, the Obama buttons, the artsy bookstores, all the liberal leanings. I could stay for awhile. If ZX, and so-long-awaited language study, and a city I have called home, an so many unexplored possiblities, were not waiting.

At Peet's by the bus stop on Shattuck I remember how much I love public transportation - the encounter with PEOPLE and LIFE. A heavyset man with baggy jeans and a striped toque on the slightly raised sidewalk landscaping box. He smiles and gestures to the street like he's giving a speech, or a tour. A skinny man with a black duffel bag, a red plastic five-gallon bucket, and a caulking gun. He sets them on the metal bench with green paint but does not sit down.

I also love that Ryan and Christen have driven me to Sonoma County to climb rock faces by the coast, camp in a damp forest, and walk through giant redwoods, to Marin County to hike overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and yesterday, to Yosemite for six hours of snowshoeing. Their piles of gear cheap from REI used gear sales. Even though I felt slightly ridiculous about our ski poles when we passed other snowshoers, I was grateful for them while my hip flexors groaned the last three miles. And the waterproof gators wrapped round my ankles were so nice.

didn't make myself a last cappucino

On my last day of work Josh made a delicious modified sierra turkey with extra soup and extra sides. I ate every bit (because that's what we do), even though it made me uncomfortable and sluggish.

Carl told me about how the Bible is coming true. And about how he sprayed a mothball mix at the copperheads that had nested in his yard.

Another coworker told me how her last boyfriend broke up with her with a badly disguised, "I don't want to a slut for a girlfriend." How she drank too much afterwards, she said, and slept with too many guys. How her new year's resolution was less of both.

Rhoda and Jill showed up and we went next door to peruse the fifty percent off stuff at the bookstore. Rhoda bought a ball of guilt and I wish I could joke like that. I bought a journal that got purged on the first round of packing. They'd thought to take me out for dessert, but I took a ride home instead. I'd left the lights on in the car again. Oh how will you ever make it on your own?