sometimes it hurts

When I come back from Sichuan, my colleagues say, "You look good, happy. Sichuan made you prettier. You should go more often."

(These pictures are by Justin Unrau.)
I can't really argue. Fresh canola plants and pea shoots fried Sichuan style are good for the soul. A Saturday morning group bicycle ride - me, Deb, and Michelle on the three-seater - bumping past fields of bright yellow canola flowers. Our spirits were hardly dampened when the people at the soy sauce factory (after a call to their boss) couldn't give us a tour. We played and walked until we exhausted ourselves, then ate like we had earned it. The Muslim restaurant on Saturday night had crispy spring rolls that tasted like tacos. Easter lunch was noodles at another Muslim restaurant.

In the morning there were absolutely no seats inside the tiny brick church. The old ladies tried to force us to take theirs, but I followed stood with William outside and we stood our ground. A man seated on a folding chair in the doorway near us carried the makings of a lunch in a sturdy plastic shopping bag that read, in English, "Graceful."

The 33-hour train ride, apart from my minor depression (sparked by the news that I would be three hours from ZX and not seeing him) was more or less unremarkable. We didn't really talk to anyone, though the hallway seats were lined all day and into the night with chatter.
The girl who slept above me, a migrant worker I put at about 22, was strangely both polite and obnoxious. Once when she wanted to walk between our bunks to grab her cellphone from the second bunk, she asked our permission. I was so confused I didn't answer.

She bought food from the train attendants, and once, a noisy hand-held video game in plastic to play an hour or two. She talked non-stop, mostly about her boyfriend and how beautiful he said she was. She wore bright pink high heeled shoes that looked like they were made of plastic. At night when they rested under my bunk next to the aisle it was easy to find my way back from the bathroom. In the morning of the second day she applied full make-up, mostly in pinks and blues. I assumed she would get off soon, but apparently it was just for the short sloppy guy in the compartment next to ours. They joked and flirted by flinging insults the whole day and into the evening after the man had changed into his long underwear and was holding court on (from what little I could understand of his dialect) all affairs economic and political. I kept hearing "Taiwan" and "US" popping up in heated discussion. I didn't find out until the next day that elections (though it was called "leadership selection" or something by Beijing) in Taiwan had been held and the non-pro-independence party won, much to all of China's delight.

A prisoner with an empty eye socket was handcuffed to the lower bunk two compartments down for the length of the ride. Every few hours he'd be released to shuffled down the hall to the bathroom, shackles dragging along, his guard trailing behind him. Once when they passed I took the opportunity to go fill my water bottle when I wouldn't have to go by them. It made me uncomfortable to pass the staring red eye cavity.

Tibet. Still makes me want to cry. It's clear that the protest/riots have spread and involved a lot of people and places, and it's clear that there's been a lot of violence against the Han people and property. Apart from that, not much is clear, and for me that's frustrating, and scary. China has basically closed down everything west of Chengdu, and shipped in LOTS of troops. They claim that there are far more Han people being hurt than Tibetans, and that six hundred protesters have "turned themselves in" but how is anyone to know?

We rode the bus through the Tibetan area of Chengdu, and there were, literally, police cars on every corner. I asked two taxi drivers what they thought (taxi drivers are usually pretty honest and willing to talk) what they thought of the situation, and both of them just spewed prejudice against Tibetan people. When the meter reads 15 Y, they want to give 10 Y, one said. I can only take four people, and they demand that I take five. "Sounds pretty normal to me," I said. "I'm guilty of the same thing," and he laughed with me.

"We help them so much," I keep hearing over and over, "they get even more privileges than the other minorities." You don't get in a fight with a Tibetan, because they get more leniency than everybody else. That and how it's all under control.

ZX and I discuss Tibet almost nightly. Both of us bring hard core concern for justice . . . and the gigantic assumptions of our cultures. I want no government "protecting me." I argue that its our responsibility as world citizens to care about what's happening to other world citizens. For him avoiding chaos trumps a lot of things, and the hypocrisy of the Western governments and media is as bad as that of China. A lot of people here are pissed about the Western media's biased reporting, and I would agree that a lot of it is biased. I've been impressed with what The Guardian's been doing, and that's what I read. I don't go near something like CNN, and will not defend it.

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?