dirty things

What do you assume when you see the cooks from the fancy restaurant on the first floor of the building dipping water out of the fountain with a cooking pot? I assumed that they were not cooking with the water. It was a sunny day – one of the warmest in a long time – I assumed that they were cleaning something. But there they were, young men in their medium-tall white chef hats lugging this huge 30-gallon pot between them. They dipped with efficiency, and without a second thought, avoiding the pipe system laid in the center of the narrow bed.

Last week I received a Valentine’s themed package from Rhoda and Jill. They sent me stupid kids things and circled “Made in China” on the back of every package. I’m glad they did, because my friends would have pointed it out anyway. They always look at the label and I’m not sure what they’re thinking when they notice it, but I know that it makes me uncomfortable. I’ve never been to a factory in China, but I’m sure there are some shady ones. China passed Mexico last year to become the exporter of most goods to the US. Yay, we win!!!

(I like it when Mom sends me stuff from Ten Thousand Villages – intricate paper reed Christmas ornaments and the rolled newspaper potholder - and my friends here ask if she made them herself.)

I had to walk a half an hour or so to get to the post office, down some streets I’ve never gone down before. On the way back on a whim I turned up an alley before I got back to the main road. It pointed in the right general direction, and Todd says that there’s always a way out of the twists and turns of China’s back alleys. It was mostly true. I was less than a block away from busy Shanghai Road that I walk every day to and from the office, but it was a completely different world, delightful.

I wove between the “bread loaf” vans waiting to take passengers from the long distance bus station, stopping to wait for three-wheeled carts coming threading through, clanging their metal-on-metal warning. There were dirty little noodle shops with three tables, young women squatting over piles of slightly wilted green vegetables. I bought some raw peanuts from a vendor with feed sacks rolled open at the top and pleasantly full of oatmeal, dried peas turned white and cracked open, tiny dried round green beans, cracked corn.

The alley rose slightly, and narrowed, and was suddenly a fully-residential area, and mostly old buildings – three or four stories - and far enough from tall buildings that the sun was slanting in everywhere. People were strolling about in the sunny afternoon; a few were on the purple exercise machines in the tiny cement park area. I wandered. Some tall bamboo, and a few trees had been knocked over by the snow and still lay leaned against a brick wall. Green onions in a tiny raised garden bed were bent and brown broken tipped, but still alive. Beyond the wall I could hear and see the top of the other city, the one where my coworkers waited in the cold office on the twentieth floor.

February 24, 2008

Sunday morning I walked ten minutes down the road to the Mochou Church for the 9:30 service. My body, I remembered (and this after phone conversations until past 1:00 in the morning), can’t sleep much after 8:00. I’ve decided that between the weird theology and how Chinese people are not allowed in, I’m done with the international church. It’s so much easier when I can’t understand the content of the sermon or the songs I’m singing and can just enjoy that vaguely pleasant feeling of unity that comes from sharing a hymnal with an old woman while we're both bundled against the cold and the hard wooden bench.

Turns out the service started at 9:00, though I was far from the last one streaming in through the gates at 9:20. It was the first time I’d been to this church since September. Innocent little me stumbled into the main sanctuary and the prayer was just ending and the ushers wanted to ask some old women to scoot closer together to make room for me, but there still wasn’t really room enough. The place was completely full. I’ll sit outside, I told the usher. It’s too cold! she protested, but outside there were other ushers to direct me into another building and an elevator headed to the fourth floor. The elevator was packed, and I was afraid there weren’t even enough seats in the overflow when we walked through one room completely full and there was another branching off to the left. But I found a place directly beneath the TV in the middle of the room so I could still see the TV in the front of the room. I thought about how if I had gotten here early and not had a chance to sit here with hundreds of others in the overflow section, I wouldn’t have this sense of bigness of communal worship that I have.

The pastor – a middle aged, round-faced woman, was preaching about the three things Christians are called to. The scriptures were Ps 27:4, Luke 10:42, and Mark 10:21. So there were those things, and I’m pretty sure she was saying, “It’s not about what you eat.” But then at the end she still talked about how Christians shouldn’t eat blood (Acts and Leviticus), which is a real issue for many Chinese Christians, especially here in Nanjing where duck blood noodle soup is a local specialty. When church ended and we all surged out of the gates and down the street, and I joined a bunch of others to wait in line for “Soup-bag” snacks (which are somewhere between jiaozi and baozi, with sweet pork juice that bleeds out when you bite into the little steamed balls) . . . and I wondered if any of us there who’d just listened to the sermon were going to order duck blood soup, ‘cause they were selling it in the same shop.

While I was mixing up bread dough in the afternoon, I re-listened to the Speaking of Faith program with Karen Armstrong, “Freelance Monotheism” and was duly inspired. She talked about how we should take as much care with our theology as when doing poetry, and as much care in performing our religious rituals as when doing theater. She talked about how the thing that different faiths have in common is not doctrine but the call to practice compassion which then transforms us, the individual. A kind of alchemy, she laughs.

I think about how easy it is to love my roommate, who loved me first. I think of how hard it is to love others, who seem so fine on their own, buoyed up by their own ego and beliefs about the way the way the world is.

I love my roommate even though she sleeps all day. Really. And watches TV. I realize I’ve grown when the guy all self-righteous about his habits (“I don’t watch TV ‘cause it’s a waste of time) on the Chinesepod “World Cup Soccer” lesson sounded silly and narrowminded to me. Or maybe I already had decided that since he said soccer was just “跑来跑去(pao lai, pao qu).” See how easy compassion is?