break

what would the sound be, when that thick bowstring comes apart? it’s tight like a weave of fishing threads, and pulled apart they break tight fiber from tight fiber, carbon from carbon, giving birth to the sound, which my body is too small for, so it’s growing inside me like a foot trapped in a wooden shoe and I can’t let it go, I don’t fucking know how. i can’t fucking make the sound. If I could just make that sound, the fucker would disappear.

more beijing

Beijing. The smog robs slick new buildings of their shine and me of my health. Beijing covers buildings with bathroom tile. Entire buildings covered in bathroom tile. An abandoned shopping cart next to a pile of pavement rubble in a wide hallway behind a line of shops.

This way to Line 2, this way to Line 13. Masses of Chinese scurry through grimy subway halls like the great Yellow River, rushing, colliding. I am mystified and irritated. Some pre-reform instinct to beat the queue. The trains come every 2 minutes. I walk leisurely, letting the river curve around me. A stout older woman shuffles quickly without straightening her knees to keep her backpack from bouncing. Her thin slippers slip and slide on the dust-slick floor. A teenager with porcupine hair and black earphones in his head overtakes her on the stairs. He leaps two at a time.

They rarely stare on the train. This is Beijing. Foreigners everywhere. Once in a while I catch a curious glance. Gives me an excuse to stare back. I love their eyes. The top eyelid, long and sharp, the bottom one a smooth bend rounded at the inner corner. Tear-shaped incisions in smooth skin. Few Asians have truly unpleasant faces, unlike Europeans. Smooth, chiseled, they age slower. They rarely lack chins, unless fat. But there are too many of them, all black hair and black eyes. They want white skin, big round eyes. Not all, just most.

BEIJING BLOG!!!!

....FAIL.

dream 2

I dreamed that I must have been in China. I was inside a café, it was a decrepit but spacious and well-lit room with wooden dividers between seating spaces. There were tall windows with tattered velvet draperies. I was sitting at a short table next to a wall, on an armchair that looked a lot like those red armchairs at Stairway to Love. I was having coffee.

I was acutely unhappy. I’m not sure why, but I was hungover or depressed or extremely tired. Suddenly, insanity possessed me. My logic might have been that I could purge the unhappiness if I said a positive thought out loud, a thought that equated to a piece of a plan. So I got up and yelled at nobody in particular: "I want to open a bar in China.”

I immediately felt silly because I noticed two pairs of western eyes measuring me with amusement. There was a long glass counter in the room, like they might have at a jewelry store, and there were two middle-aged Russian women behind it. Both of them were tall and thin, wearing waisted gray dresses. They looked like aging Soviet commune beauties from the 50s. One had blond hair in a voluminous bun on top of her head, the other had short black hair in 20s hairstyle.

“Of course you are going to open a bar in China,” said the blonde in Russian, who was seated on a backless rotating chair, possibly filing her nails. “And I’m going to help you.” She beckoned for me to come towards the counter with a friendly smile. Some of her teeth were gold. It was unsettling.

“Oh. I didn’t mean, open one right this second...” I replied, walking towards her. I remembered I still had to graduate from college; think about opening bars later.

My apprehension did not convince the women. The blonde placed a square piece of napkin on the glass counter and began charting out some kind of plan with a blue pen.

The next thing I remember, the three of us were in the backseat of a green and yellow Beijing taxi, floating down a countryside road. The road was foggy. Suddenly, even with the fog, I noticed a dark figure walking towards our car, far down the road ahead. I could see his silhouette through the windshield. Then I realized that he was holding a camera, he was filming me and the Russian women through the windshield of our car. I don't think we even had a driver.

Then, suddenly I became the camera lens. The mind-boggling logic of the dream was suddenly painfully clear. I knew exactly what was happening and it terrified me. I knew it: the man had been filming my life. He had filmed the scene at the coffee shop earlier, where I'd declared my desire to open a bar. I saw bits and pieces of his footage like a flashback – he had a few interesting angles of me and the blonde Russian from beneath the glass counter.

In the world of the dream, the man was a famous avant-garde filmmaker. He filmed people's lives. He must have been a ghost; an extraordinarily stealthy character. I could not think of what his face looked like. I just knew it was a man, a tall and shadowy figure. His films were not like reality TV. He captured people's solitary rituals; random conversations they had throughout the day; odd aspects of their daily lives. Nothing sensational, no drama - just a lot of information about a single person's specific life.

In the dream, I knew that I'd heard about the filmmaker before, and I was mildly fascinated by his work. However, I was happy that I was not one of his subjects. The thing that seemed most terrible to me in the dream was that if he chose someone as his subject, their name and their life up to the current point became written, recorded, set in stone. They lost the freedom to be who they wanted in front of the new people they met. It was as if the minute this man tapped your life as one of his subjects, everything about you was exposed to the world forever, it became public knowledge. It was almost as if everybody came to know every single detail of your life automatically, without ever having to actually watch the film. Friends, family, potential employers. This man was filming me.

Feelings of panic and paranoia overwhelmed me. I tried to explain to the Russian women what was going on. But their presence was melting away. I could hardly communicate with them anymore. They were quickly becoming ghosts in the backseat of the car. Soon enough I was alone.

The car came to a slow halt next to an enormous drop-off. We were on the edge of a massive quarry with walls of red earth. It must have been a mile deep. Mist settled below, so I could not see the bottom. Many people dressed in orange jumpsuits were scurrying about the edge of the quarry. They were directing a long line of regularly dressed people who looked like they were waiting for a ride of some kind. Some were young, some were old; some looked rich, some looked poor. All were men.

I got out of the car and it sped off into the fog ahead.

One by one the men at the front of the line were jumping into an opening of huge metallic tube that began at the drop-off and appeared to be reaching down to the very bottom of the quarry.

Then I had a flashback. Greg was telling me: "It’s really cool, I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time. It’s called passing through 200 burning iron bricks." I realized vaguely that he was talking about some kind of extreme sport activity, like bungee jumping or sky-diving. Except this was "passing through 200 burning iron bricks."

Back at the quarry site, I noticed that further along the road there was another concentration of people in orange jumpsuits. They were pulling what looked like large cocoons out of a smaller tube that came out of the quarry. The cocoons were the men who had jumped, returning from the bottom of the quarry. I hurried down to the spot.

The next cocoon the jumpsuited men pulled from the "return tube," I realized all of a sudden, was my friend Greg. They cut the crusty white fabrics away and his body was suddenly exposed.Hot steam was rising from it. It was blue-white in color and unmoving, but somehow I realized he was alive. He looked like a perfect but lifeless sculpture, with long black hair frozen into form. He looked nothing like the real Greg in fact, but for some reason I knew it had been him. The body had a smooth, marble-like surface, covered with a thin, uneven layer of liquid grime, like a piece of pottery before it’s fired. His skin was glistening. Then he opened his eyes; they were beautifully-shaped but black empty slits. A beautiful stone face with black slit-eyes. I was fascinated and horrified.

Suddenly the hands of the jumpsuited workers swarmed to his body and began to crack and peel and chip off bits of the top layer of grimy white marble, the smooth stone, as if Greg had been encrusted with it. like in that. What fell to the earth, however, were not pieces of white stone-shell, but gleaming metallic bricks. Lots and lots of metallic bricks. His body was shuddering and breathing heavily. I remember vaguely thinking that a woman's body probably wouldn't survive the 200 burning iron bricks experience.

At that moment I had a profound sense that the situation was a significant metaphor, but that sense never crystallized into a coherent thought and I could never put it into words. It was just this "cool thing" Greg really wanted to do, a painful process involving falling down a tube into a bottomless quarry, fire, and 200 burning iron bricks.

I don't, in reality, want to open a bar in China.

Who knew it could feel so intensely physical, like a giant lymph node tightening under the diaphragm, I’m sinking into the chair, sinking all the way down my legs, clinging to the soles of my feet, tight between the heel and the shoe, down to the floor, to the ground, where there’s no longer any space to sink further. Inhale again, a tight bowstring in the lungs, it would be easy to let it go, but for all the endeavor of holding it tight. It's tough to let go of the endeavor.

dream

I dreamed that I was still packing when my flight to Beijing was going to take off in 15 minutes. I panicked, but not intensely, because in the world of this dream I knew that the airport was just across the road from where I lived, and neither check-in nor security existed.

I scurried about the apartment – a darker, bigger version of the one I had back in Voronezh – trying to find things, and shouting at my grandmother, who was the only other person present. As I heaped clothes and books into multiple bags, I grew frustrated with my sudden inability to find anything or even remember what I needed. I don’t think I packed any toiletries. I hovered over the bags in a sort of paralysis, not knowing where to shove a pair of pants to maximize efficient use of space.

My grandmother was bickering at me in a very uncharacteristic way. She was trying to guilt trip me into washing her clothes right there and then. I would have to hand wash them, seeing as we didn’t have a washing machine at the apartment. She was saying something along the lines of “you owe me this much.”

I was exasperatedly trying to point out to her the fact that my plane was taking off in 15 minutes, and I hadn’t even finished packing yet, so there was just no way I was going to wash her goddamn clothes too.

I can’t remember whether I made it onto the plane or not, but the next thing I knew I was on some dark street in a crowd of strangers with bags, waiting to get on a big bus. Were we in China? I’m not sure. It was dark all around, except for a few streetlights, which created dramatic shadows. The wide road in front of us was empty, except for the giant decrepit bus that stood waiting. Suddenly I heard someone yell: “Ana, you insane motherfucker.” It sounded like something Matt would say. I looked around and saw the head of my ex program director from IES, Brian Eyler, soaring disembodied somewhere in the dark space behind the bus. He yelled again. Dumbstruck, I waved at him. Then he stepped down from the sky onto the road and was lost on the crowd of students.

An engine roar approached from the left and soon a smaller bus full of people came into view. “Ana!” I heard someone shout. I saw that it was Matt, hanging out of a window of the small bus as it rolled by. “Fucker!” I yelled back, as would have been customary between us.

“Quick dude, get on the bus!” Matt said, stretching his arms out to me from the window of the bus, and I suddenly realized that I had to get on that bus, because it was going somewhere good, and Matt was there, and I had no idea where the fuck the big bus was going and when. I tried to run after the bus, stretching out my hand towards Matt’s.

Then suddenly, just when I was about to reach his hand, I dropped my bag. There was something very important in the bag that I knew in my dream mind I simply couldn’t leave behind. I’m not sure what it was. I jerked my body back towards the bag and I tried to seize both the bag and Matt’s hand at the same time, but I couldn’t. I missed Matt’s hand and the bus surged ahead of me.

I was devastated for a split second, but then I remembered that Matt was going to be in China as well. (Weren’t we already in China? I don’t know. Why did I suddenly think that then?) “Anyway, I’ll see you soon!” I shouted after him, thinking that we’d be in the same place soon enough anyhow. As soon as he heard me though, his usually insane smile faltered in a confused sort of way. Hold on, I thought. What does that mean? Where the hell is he going on that small bus? What the hell is really going on?

Then I woke up.

Need That

Need it.

Small painting I just did instead of sleeping.

The Only Way to Be Decadent

It’s 9 p.m. on a Sunday night. I’m behind the kitchen bar, cutting parsley and tapping my foot to a reggae tune by The Groove Armada. Ayesha is next to me watching over the couscous and dal on the stove. The smell of boiling chickpeas floods the kitchen – warm and sweet like freshly baked bread. A whiff of parsley – cool and slightly bitter – arrives at my nostrils as I slice up the brilliant green herb.

Tonight’s stir-fry: tomatoes, carrots, radishes, sweet peas, yellow bell peppers, eggplant, coriander, and a little bit of every spice and sauce in the house. Another day it might have been red cabbage, cucumber, squash, mushrooms, broccoli, and lemon juice. The combination is different every day.

We take time to wash and cut all of the fresh vegetables carefully, make certain everything is just so. Procrastination meets efficiency. We’ve perfected our cooking routine: dal cooks the longest, therefore it’s the first on the stove; next is couscous or rice; finally we cut up the stir-fry and sauté the vegetables in the biggest pan. While everything simmers to perfection, we lay bread, cheese, carrots, and hummus out on a plate, set the table, and pour wine.

Few things bring such thorough satisfaction as cooking a first class meal and consuming it in a cozy atmosphere. We eat unhurriedly in silence, savoring every bite, thinking about the music.

I dip a piece of bread into the bright yellow dal in a half-circle motion and take a bite. I lick my fingers. Then I sink my fork into the colorful mound of vegetables on my plate. The spice is heady and makes me reach over for the wine glass. The couscous and dal together are like a warm hug. Ayesha and I exchange smiles and little moans of pleasure across the table. Expensive hummus. Expensive bread. Expensive cheese. This is the only way to be decadent.

We finish eating, clean the table and wash the dishes. We take several minutes on the couch to enjoy the food-coma-afterglow. If we hadn’t quit last week, we’d be smoking.

It is now after 10 p.m. Both of us have colossal backlogs of homework to take care of. We could have wolfed down a sandwich and maximized study time, but instead we chose to spend the precious hours making food. But who really gives a fuck about what Philip H. Pollock III has to say on Bivariate Regression? Time enjoyed is never time wasted.

Schedules

Schedule, what the fuck? Where did I rub you the wrong way? I got you a classy black leather-bound planner, nailed you to the wall next to my high school diploma, organized you all good and proper, week by week, day-by-day, and programmed you into my Outlook calendar, but still you tease me with momentary cooperation and then go on eluding me like the fucking cure for AIDS. Well guess what? I’ve had enough. I’m not taking any more of your schedulistic shit. No more. From now on it’s pure academic apathy, movies, and MSN, 24/7/365. What’s that? Oh. I suppose you’re right: that wouldn’t be shaking up the current routine, not exactly. In fact, that’s exactly how how things have stood with us for the past few years. But I figured it was time one of us got up and said it, came to terms with the relationshit, you know?

Time

They say time goes by slower when there's nothing to do. But I've experienced the opposite. Time goes slowest when you have several very different things to do in the day, especially if one of them involves going somewhere far away and then returning. It always seems like the journey should have taken more time than it did in the end. The journey stretches time out, makes it seem like you did something considerable. Even simply getting up early in the morning, moving around, lots of talking, turning in papers, writing tests, going to meetings, going to work-study at the Language Resources Center - feels like I'm getting shit done, like I'm busy, but not in a good way. I trudge through it, I wait for it to end.

I only ever have class a couple of hours a day, but every day of the week that I have class somehow feels filled up and tainted, like it's not a good clean segment of time that I can savor and use for something I'd actually like to do. Whenever I take time out to paint during the week, I feel guilty, like I should be studying instead. But I can never actually bring myself to study, so I break up the unfilled pieces of time in the work week into surfing music blogs, going for a smoke, having a cup of coffee. The things in-between. The things which would be okay to do between studying, if I ever got to that part. I avoid studying as much as I avoid the guilt of doing something that's not for a class, like art, by filling up my day with moments-in-between. Somehow they never make me feel guilty.

So I 'get through' the week. And then it's the weekend, like a long stretch of freeway, and it goes by just as fast. I can sit in the living room of my apartment all day, typing, writing, youtube-ing, and playing scrabble online and before I know it it's dark out, my roommates have changed into their pajamas and emerged from their rooms after a good evening of studying for a chat over late-night cereal and a cup of tea.

Procrastination. It's not an art. It's a phobia of feeling time passing, and guilt. The fear of spending time doing something you don't want to do, because you'd never want to waste more time than you need to doing something unenjoyable, but you can't quite figure out how to cut it down to the minimum.

It's 3 a.m. and I'm drinking coffee, but I won't be utilizing the time it's giving me. I'll split it up between cigarettes, chatting online and writing down random thoughts like this. It's been three months since I left China and I'm still living on the Beijing schedule. I'm failing to seize the day. I'm just waiting for the time to pass. That's one thing I can always count on.

Time-management skills. I'd like to take a class on that, but then I'd probably end up procrastinating on it.

Davidson kids, you know the feeling

Last week I got a minor paper back, but didn't look at the grade right away, since I was having a good day. So I shoved the thing in my bag and forgot about it. I've just now re-discovered it to discover that I, in fact, got an A- on the small, insignificant paper. So it's 6 a.m., I'm still up translating 50 pages of block Chinese for a class - this is what Davidson does to one's sleeping patterns - and I just did a victory dance to no one in particular and reread the miserly paper 3 times in delirious joy. This is what Davidson does to one's sense of self-worth.

The Flood - A China Story

Wrote this little blurb during my semester abroad in Beijing this fall.

The Flood

Since I didn’t have class on Wednesdays, I gradually slipped into a habit of staying up late every Wednesday and taking the whole day off on Thursday. I did it again that particular Thursday, and slacker’s guilt gnawed at my brain as I walked from the bus stop to my homestay.
Thursday turned out so unpleasant that I may have as well gone to class. Beijing was freezing cold and exceptionally smoggy that day. It was mid November, and the weather was only going to get colder and dirtier.

Early in the morning my $350 ipod died, having been dropped one too many times. Whenever I tried to turn it on it displayed a little icon of a dead-looking ipod with X’es instead of eyes, which I thought was an unnecessarily cruel bit of programming. Friday I had a weekly Chinese test, but I knew I wouldn’t study for it, because I’d been coming down with apathy for quite some time.

Despite having developed bronchitis, I chain-smoked my way through registering for next semester’s classes at an internet café, where I also discovered Bank of America had charged me a criminal amount for a late payment. Normally I succeeded in pushing my progressive slide into credit card debt to the back of my head, but that day I experienced it so acutely that the feeling was almost visceral. I had visions of myself frantically clinging to the edge of a crumbling platform suspended is space like the Bridge of Khazad-Doom, with chunks of it breaking off and plummeting into the abyss below as I scrambled for a firm grip.

I wasn’t too thrilled about my birthday next week either. In a country where drinking age is irrelevant, twenty is no cause for celebration as that final step before the big booze day. In China it just felt like older. No longer a teenager. A teeny voice in the back of my mind suggested that it was about time to get my act together, but I didn’t listen, because I was busy getting horrified by my awful new haircut in the elevator mirror.

I was depressed.

Ipodless and alone in the arctic desert of the inside of my head I trudged through the basement parking lot and made my way up the stairs of my host family’s building, which always astonished me with its gleaming marble spotlessness and dead silence, as if it occupied a separate plane of existence from the rest of Beijing. I turned the key. The heavy front door swung into the apartment with a groan.

My host family’s apartment usually smelled like mandarin oranges, which they’d kept on a giant tray in the living room and consumed while watching late-night Korean soap operas, but this time a thick swampy smell assaulted my nostrils. Even in the near total darkness I noticed the floor didn’t look right. It was way too glossy.

It took me a couple of seconds, but as soon as a realized without a doubt what had happened, I experienced a mix of emotions. On one hand I suddenly cheered up. The shock of discovering the household disaster hauled me out of self-pity and left me mildly fascinated. On the other hand, I felt sad for my unsuspecting host parents who were about to come home from work exhausted, only to discover their living room was now fit for deep sea fishing.

Before proceeding further I took a few moments to admire the scene. It was quiet and dark. The living room was large and rectangular, so that the two-inch thick layer of black water on the floor created a surreal effect. Bright streetlights visible from the floor-length window opposite the front door reflected in the still water. Mao gazed over the whole debacle from his giant poster on the wall, looking pensive and vaguely pleased as usual.

I took a few photos, turned on the lights, and dialed jiejie, my host mom, whom I called “older sister” because she was only 28 and looked about my age. I said: “Jiejie, wo gancai hui jia le, zai ‘floor’ shang you hen duo hen duo shui.” I just got home and there’s a ton of water on the floor. My Chinese was not good enough to try and break the news gently. “Keneng ‘pipes’ huai le,” I added as an afterthought. Perhaps the pipes broke. “Oooooh! Wo kuai hui jia,” jiejie wailed unhappily, I’m coming home soon, which made me simultaneously overjoyed that she understood my Chinese bits over the phone and distressed at her obvious distress. A few minutes later she was in the doorway, looking pretty distressed. I was inside the equally flooded kitchen, trying to rescue some of the rice. My host parents kept it in a cardboard box on the floor. Water had soaked the whole box, but some of the rice bags on top were still dry. As I lifted one of the bags it suddenly came apart in the bottom, spilling hundreds of rice grains onto the flooded floor. I cursed and had a sudden vision of the kitchen floor as a rice patty. “Duibuqi,” I said, feeling unhelpful. Sorry. “Oh it’s okay, don’t worry about it,” jiejie dismissed me and continued wailing in English. “Ooooh. This is awful?!” Her tone half-expressed the point she was trying to make, half-asked me whether she’d used the correct word, as was her habit whenever speaking English to me. I nodded, confirming her choice of vocabulary. I was impressed. If I came face to face with domestic disaster, I wouldn’t be speaking English. What is the Chinese word for “awful”? Zaogao. No. If there was any Chinese expression other than zaogao more worn out by giddy overuse in the halls of my program’s building then it was “wo you la duzi. Zaogao.” I have diahrrea. Awful. There had to be another word. Gouqiang?

“Dui, hen gouqiang,” I agreed. Jiejie gave me a puzzled look and nodded, which could only mean my tones were off or perhaps I’d gotten the word wrong altogether.

“This happened before,” jiejie said. “But never so… serious. Now the floor is completely destroyed!?” She had a point. The living room floors were hardwood and water would have seeped through the cracks by then, which would eventually cause the boards to warp. “Yinggai mei shi’r.” It should be all right. I tried to sound cheerful. “Women keyi kuai da dasao?” Could we perhaps clean up very quickly?

“Ooooh. Shui zai wo de fangzi.” Water in my house. She wailed again, then picked up the phone and dialed the building service.

A man in a dirty green jumpsuit with miscellaneous tools gleaming impressively on his belt showed up promptly and busied himself in the kitchen. As it turned out, water came from the kitchen sink, which was filled with chunks of dark-gray dirt, like bits of cement and black soil, smelling vaguely of mold and oil. It overflowed due to a glitch in the piping system. From the plumber’s thick beijinghua I discerned that a certain pipe had been getting backed up periodically on the second floor, because a section of it was too long.

I tried to think of something to do to help but of course there wasn’t anything I could do. At the same time, shrugging and retiring to my blissfully unflooded room to prepare for my test tomorrow seemed insensitive. Thus I continued to stand awkwardly by the open door eavesdropping on the conversation between jiejie and the plumber. I learned that guan (third tone) meant pipe, and du (third tone) was used to describe a backed up pipe – the same word used to describe backed up traffic.

The flood puzzled me. How could it happen? The complex was only three years old. It shouldn't be getting spontaneously flooded just yet. I thought back to the words of Dr. Kumar, a Davidson economics professor from India, known for his less-than-positive view of China. His traditional response to comments on China’s economic miracle was: “You shall see, China has rat-sized termites under the rug, yar.” The mistake in the piping system was surely a result of quick, careless building – unsurprising, considering buildings sprung up around Beijing faster than mushrooms after it rains. After asking around later on I discovered that flooding in apartment buildings was quite common around the month of November. This was also the time heating switched on in Beijing. As most buildings were heated by hot water radiators, there must have been a connection between the floods and the extra pressure exerted on pipes around this time.

A human noise in the doorway behind me interrupted my reverie. I turned around and saw a thin little girl in jeans and a bright red woolen vest looking up at me. I put my hands on my knees, leaned in closer, as one does when talking to children, and grinned at her. I asked whether her family were neighbors. She didn’t grin back. “You called for help?” she asked morosely in Chinese and splashed past me into the apartment. Then I noticed her platform shoes and the unchildlike, weary slouch of her body. She turned around briefly and gave me a somber look. With intense embarrassment I realized that I mistook a tiny adult woman for a little girl. The situation was getting more bizarre by the minute. Here was the Chinese version of Claudia from the Vampire Chronicles, trapped in a little girl’s body, which ceased to age after receiving the bite from the vampire Lestat. I watched her walk into the kitchen and loudly join in the conversation there. I shuddered and continued to stand by the door.

Next came an official-looking man wearing a black suit and tie. He took one look at the flood and emitted a drawn out “oooooooaaarr,” then suddenly whipped out a cell-phone and pretended to be making a call, doubtless due to the fact that jiejie came out of the kitchen at this moment looking ready to pounce.

After three more plumbers showed up, dressed exactly as the first one down to the last screwdriver, a policeman with a notepad, and five more cleaning ladies, my gege, my host father whom I called older brother, finally emerged in the doorway. He surveyed the damage, said “ai-yaaa,” and lit a cigarette.

Feeling strengthened by numbers, the cleaning ladies suddenly sprung into action under Mao's approving gaze from his poster on the wall. They procured dustpans, brooms, and a large plastic basin and began shoveling the water off the floor into the basin. My jiejie joined them, and I would have too, but thankfully there were no brooms or dustpans left. So I lit up next to gege on the couch and spied on the tiny vampire woman out the corner of my eye. There were about fifteen people in the apartment at this stage. Progress was slow at first, but as gallons of water were shoveled off the floor, gege got progressively more cheerful, bless him.

My gege grew up in a poor peasant family in southern China. He was 32, born sometime in April or May. His parents didn’t keep track of his exact birth date, because he was the seventh out of eight children, all of whom – hopefully by chance – were boys. He recalled often going to bed hungry as a child, but had since then managed to attend Beijing University, secure a job in the city, and acquire property in the Haidian district, the value of which has sky-rocketed since he bought it (despite the occasional flooding). Gege maintained diplomatic opinions on many sensitive issues such as The Great Leap Forward, The Cultural Revolution, and Tiananmen, the sole exception being Japanese people. “Chinese people very very hate Japanese people,” he said to me once in English. “You as well?” I asked. “Huhm,” he nodded vigorously and gave me a thumbs up, which seemed comically out of place then, but over time I learned there was a method to his usage of the thumbs up. He used it as a kind of affirmation, for example if I asked whether he’d like another beer from the fridge, or whether he’d seen the latest Prison Break episode.

“Ni kan!” I said, pointing to the yue lai yue - more and more - un-flooded floor, “Yinggai meiyou wenti.” Looks like there won't be a problem. He emitted a close-mouthed chuckle, as he often did, and gave a thumbs up. We smoked another cigarette.

“Gege, weishenme you zenme name duo ren a?” Why are there so many people here?

“We are owners of the house, so we are god,” gege replied in Chinese, looking pleased. I understood that in China, the more people were sent to deal with a household situation, the more pleased the afflicted owner ought to be, regardless of necessity for so many hands.

While gege and I unwound on the couch, jiejie argued animatedly with the suited cell-phoned man.

“Shi jingli ma?” I asked. Is that the “manager”?

Gege chuckled.

“This is the vice-manager,” he said, and gave me an ironic look that seemed to express my exact thoughts. There was probably an “associate vice manager,” “assistant to associate vice manager” and a few other “managers” down the line. We laughed.

After the water was cleaned up and the service personnel cleared the apartment, gege and jiejie decided to treat ourselves to a dinner out, since it was too late to cook.

“Jiejie, what were you arguing with the vice-manager about?” I asked as we walked toward a hot pot restaurant.

“We want to get compensation from the management to change the floor, but the vice-manger is saying it’s not their fault. It’s never their fault.”

“I see. Well I think that’s really unfair,” I said indignantly, jumping on the chance to use my recently-learned word for “unfair” (bu gongping).

“What can you do?” gege shrugged, “Hei shehui.” Black society. “Bad people,” he added in English, making sure I understood. “They make money for themselves and don’t care about other people’s problems.”

We decided on a nearby zhou restaurant in the end. Zhou is a type of hot grain broth, made salty, spicy or sweet. We ordered three different bowls and shared. Westerners often find the Chinese tradition of sharing plates of food gross and unsanitary – licking one’s chopsticks and then plunging them back into the common dish, or eating out of the same bowl. But when you get flooded out of your apartment in the middle of winter with nobody to complain to, it’s the little rituals of comradeship one finds comfort in. To hell with sanitation.

Nostalgia for China

It’s that sore feeling you get in the back of your throat, when you puff on a mangled Hong Mei cigarette you found stashed in a pocket of a jacket you haven't washed for years, and recall the apocalyptic vision of a dirty-orange sun straining through the smog. Like a portkey, the taste transports you to a narrow back-alley of a hutong in west Beijing, where you used to hang out late at night, drinking 2-kuai Tsingtao beers and sucking on 1-kuai chuanr (various barely identifiable chunks of meat on a stick). You realize that that sore feeling has nothing to do with the cigarette's excessive tar content. Oh Zhongguo. Tian tian wo xuyao ni ai.

men with skinny legs have nice legs

This will eventually become my Beijing blog this summer. Until then I'll use this space to post random music/musings/comics/art and procrastinate for my Poli Sci Stats and Methods class, because it's imperative to begin immortalizing the retardedness my brain spouts off when cornered by a horde of statistical formulae and lists of elections data.

Shoes.

Omg.

Shoes.

Goddamn Kelly. I can’t go past a rack of shoes now without throwing people maniacal stares and going like: “Shoes. Omigod. Shoes.” I know at least a couple other people with the same problem. It's an epidemic. And I’m not even into shoes. I wear an old pair of docs pretty much all year round. (I tell everyone I got them back in middle school before they have a chance to tell me that ‘docs are so middle school,’ but I actually only got them last year after losing the original pair in Bombay. RIP.) I look decent in heels, if I can avoid moving completely, but that’s usually a prob, since I don’t own a vehicle. My toes get tired from gripping onto flip-flops, especially since I’m constantly walking up hills now, and my chucks are so old they stink up a 50 cubic foot area. I wish I could just take pleasure in shoe shopping when I feel fat, like normal women do.