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.