Report #31

Last October I was sleeping on a couch, confused about what to eat for breakfast, searching for housing, taking Beijing’s busiest subway to work everyday (something I vowed never to do again), and unsure of how I fit into this new world. I’ve come a long way since then. I found an apartment, started taking Chinese lessons, switched to a better job, but I somehow ended up on that damn subway again. A two-hour roundtrip commute is doable when you have to do it, but it is on my list of things that are deal breakers between Beijing and me, like:

-sanctioned smoking in the stairwell and bathroom at my office
-coughing and sneezing without covering one’s mouth
-snorking, hacking, and spitting (indoors and outdoors)
-polluted air
-overpopulation
-the neighbor child who cries at 5:30a and 11:30a and various times in the day
-non-yielding motorists

When I think back to the decisions that brought me here I was zoomed much farther out. I thought it would be interesting to live in another country for a year. It has been. I also wanted to learn another language, which I’ve been working on although I’m nowhere near fluent as I naively predicted in my cover letter to OPEN. I think I told them nine months…I guess I mistook working at architecture firm for an intensive language immersion program of fulltime study. But the last ingredient in all of this was that I had no office experience at an architecture firm. Finding work in China was easy compared to the States when the health of each economy is on opposite ends of the spectrum. The first place I applied to in Beijing hired me, and so the story the goes.

People call what I’m doing a ‘great experience’, which is rhetoric I bought into as well, but now I hold it at a distance with some suspicion. Perhaps this is particular to me, but what has been the encompassing experience of living here is a form of resistance. The first couple of months were like being thrown out to orbit where everything was foreign and all of my routines were uprooted. Vacations are like that to some extent where you put yourself outside your daily routine, but it’s usually pleasurable because you don’t have to work, you spend at least three to four times the amount of money you would on a normal day, and you’re probably somewhere of visual interest. In short, vacations are like being rich for a week or two in a nice place. Here in Beijing I feel like I’m rich, even though I probably only square up on the middle-class rung of the ladder, but the place is not that nice. Interesting is a better word for it. And what I’ve found myself doing since I got my feet on the ground was trying to reestablish my routines in some form or another…this has been my form of resistance.

It starts with the basic things like figuring out what food you like and where to get it, then shelter –my apartment was a huge victory on the resistance front. Finally comes the creature comforts –the internet, the ikea bedding, the wireless router, the microwave, the space heaters, the water dispenser (and the men who laboriously carry the bottles up five flights of stairs) and so on. While I was sitting in my apartment the other day something dawned on me, which was that I was completely insulated from Beijing. If I didn’t look out my window I would have no clue that I was in China…I have everything I need and it is all very familiar –internet, good food, comfortable space, etc. For me, the ‘experience’ of Beijing is not augmented by living in some beat down apartment and having to eat dumplings on the street corner. While that may call up a more authentic experience westerners imagine it is not my reality. However if I want to walk around some dilapidated hutongs and eat street food I can do it, but on my own terms and it has an off switch.

When I started thinking about this notion of resistance and how it’s really a form of control it seemed neurotic. But I actually think it is the process of ‘experience’…. getting thrown into something (deliberately or accidentally) and getting out of it or getting back into your comfort zone. Figuring out a routine in a foreign place is the experience and the irony is it’s precisely the antithesis of the place. Just looking at my progression in grocery shopping is telling of this transformation:

-Early Days at Carrfore: I show up with big ikea shopping bags on foot, and wield a full size cart around the crowded aisles. I’m nervous about giving the old peasant ladies my receipts when I leave. What would they want with them? Identity fraud?

-Junior Days at Carrfore: I show up with a granny cart on foot, and thread a small shopping cart around the aisles with the granny cart ingeniously placed on the cart as though the two were married. I start giving my receipts to the peasant ladies. They just need bonus points.

-Senior Days at Carrefore: I show up with the granny cart in tow on the back of my bicycle, I’m in and out within 30 minutes for a week’s worth of food and I tow it home with my bicycle. I only give my receipts to one peasant lady in particular, whom I have adopted in my mind as my Chinese grandmother, and have even started stashing pocket change inside the folded receipts.

While I’ve successfully figured out the basics of living here and continue to find comforting ways to do so, what I’ve failed at is really living here. This has always been a temporary project that had an end date off in the distance. Living in anticipation of the next thing is something I’ve been doing for almost as long as I can remember…I guess it’s inevitable when you’re trying to get into school, then going to school, and starting new jobs etc. But this leaves you with blank apartment walls, no possession too big to put in a suitcase or too expensive to abandon altogether, and a general level of disconnect that prevents full engagement in a place. I can see why Buddhism is all about living in the present…it’s a much healthier way to be in the world than counting days on a calendar and combing through job postings, although I might still be possession-less with blank walls if I become a monk.

Zooming out again, I have accomplished the things I set out to do by moving to Beijing; the year in another place, the work experience, and some new language skills, but not all was gained without losses. The one thing that I cannot reengineer into my routine is proximity to friends and family. Being far away from those you love is probably the most difficult thing. I find myself thinking about all the people I want to see when I get back home, all the visits I’ll make, old friends I want to look up and familiar places I want to revisit. Nostalgia.

Many people have asked me if I’ll miss Beijing when I leave and I’m quick to answer no. Not because I’m miserable here, but I’m really not in love with this place either. The one thing I do think I will end up longing for is the routine I’ve established because it’s simple and authored in isolation. It’s the kind of routine that leaves evenings open for anything, yet my energy levels have waned to the point that the internet often overpowers my motivation to read books or do anything of creative worth. I’m sure I’ll look back and wish I’d done more outside of work because the only positive thing about being away from friends and family is that there are no distractions. This is as close as I’ll get to being on a writer’s retreat, but I’m ready to go home now.

I’ve crossed the threshold I made up in my head: just get into December and it will be down hill from there. I have four weeks of work left starting now. Four weeks I can wrap my head around in the same way a little kid understands Christmas Eve to be just one night to get through before Santa comes. Waiting for the Camino to arrive last summer was felt with the same anticipation…and it came…and it went. While part of me doesn’t want to fully develop the skill of comprehending large chunks of time the way old people can throw around years like days, it would be nice to have right now. But I’m also happy to accept my position closer to the squirmy, writhing kid that can’t wait for his birthday to come around or only understands sleep as closing his eyes all of a sudden it’s morning…which is much closer to living in the present where pain is great and joy is greater, because those are the moments in life you really remember.

Report #30 Podcast #5

A self-organized flea market in the northeast corner of Beijing persists over the years despite its status as an illegal market.

Report #27

Consider this Report as notice that Reports From Beijing is currently on vacation. Ellen and I are walking the Camino de Santiago for a second time and I will be migrating over to that blog, which is also linked at the top of Reports From Beijing...just follow Peregrino on the Camino: a 500 mile walk across northern spain. Once there, please sign up for email delivery, which will feed each entry into your inbox when I make a post. If I can get really advanced...I will make a new domain name, like theamateurcanaffordtolose.com and point the blog that I´m currently operating under to the home page. More on that later. But for now, please follow peregrino on the camino, and sign up via email. And so it begins....

Report #25

As a creature of the night you’re either prey or predator. At least that’s how I feel during my long walks around Beijing. I’m training for the Camino and my evening strolls are pushing the three-hour mark at this stage in the schedule. By the time I finish with work, go home, eat dinner and check my email, I’m hitting the streets past nine or ten at night. And with that, I’ve really learned my area, which I won’t deem as a neighborhood because there is nothing remarkably characteristic of it, just never ending sameness. My area covers roughly an 8 mile diameter, and is growing wider as my schedule demands more time.

The area is surprisingly quiet past 11p. The traffic wanes, pedestrians are few, and often I’m the only one on the sidewalk. This is especially true if I let my route take me through a park, like it did tonight. I wasn’t feeling like charting new territory beyond the current boundary so I stayed close to home winding through the long park that runs parallel to the airport expressway. The parks in Beijing are well manicured with brick-paved paths and pruned shrubs. Despite the tamed landscape there is still something wild about the isolation it affords in such a bustling city.

On this particular night just after a long rainy day, the park was foggy and smelled clean like a forest. Headlights from cars shone through the trees and cast jesus style beams in the air. I turned along one of the meandering curves and spotted a small sapling that I mistook for a person. Chills ran through my body and I wondered to myself, why am I so freaked out?

I was, like I always am during these walks, listening to This American Life podcasts through headphones. My brother gave me all 400 episodes that he downloaded and I started at the bottom working my way up. The nightly walks have me moving through the episodes at a steady clip. But as a creature of the night, and as a species’ with poor nocturnal eyesight, my only other worthwhile sense is sound, which I’ve obfuscated through this podcast habit, and most certainly rendered myself as prey. My body knows this.

It wouldn’t take much for me to kick into full flight mode and shriek like a schoolgirl if someone or something jumped out of the bushes. I actually consider this a possibility and speculate on the availability of weapons the park has to offer like stacks of old paving bricks. I also question my ability to run, to run really fast, faster than most predators. Would I even notice the weight of my own backpack? Or would I chug along the way an obese person is encumbered by excess? Of the few stray cats that crossed my path tonight, each one gave my heart some extra juice. This got me thinking as I looped back and forth along the linear park. What would it be to take up the role of the predator? Speed? Yes. Arms flailing? Yes. Growling? Yes.

On my long walks there are others like me too. Often it’s a couple, enamored with one another on a park bench feeling like they have the whole place to themselves, and I approach stealthily only breaking the silence with the scuff of my boot on a lump in the path or kicking a stone to cause them to jump. Arrrghhhhhrrrrooowllllllalalalalala! I run towards them, flailing. That’s all it would take. That’s all you need to simulate a predator, and then I’d just keep walking like nothing happened, while they considered death in a gust of fear. A boogie man, who prowls at night boogifying unsuspecting strangers; feigning an attack, but swooping away reducing his victims to nervous rodents narrowly missed by the grasps of talons. I could do that. I could really scare people in the park, and I would no longer be prey.

Jesus. What two hours in a desolate park will do to the mind.

I think I’ll stick to the streets next time….

Report #24

(This story makes the most sense if you listen to part 2 of my last podcast)

It’s funny how we put things off…like the battery that you know your car needs and promise you’ll get soon, just after the engine barely turns over. You accept this lurking threat but keep hitting the snooze button of ‘later’ to prolong the inevitable. And then, when you go out one morning, it just clicks when you turn the key…and you think, damn, why didn’t I get the battery?

To append my last report, Podcast #3, the saga of the electro-magnetic door continues: it started working again. I noticed the LCD display next to the keypad was turned on last week. Someone had also taped cardboard over the metal part of the doorframe to keep the electromagnet from engaging. It seemed appropriately tailored to my needs; my key swab still didn’t work as I verified by swiping across the sensor and confirmed the audible quadruple-beep as ‘denied’. No problem, that’s why the cardboard is there…

A day later the big piece of cardboard had been traded for a smaller piece that wasn’t taped to anything, just wedged into a little gap in the frame. It still did the job, but looked sneaky and far less official. The next morning on my way to work the door was locked and the only way to exit the building was to hit the button to release the door for a few seconds. I looked down and saw the hopeless piece of cardboard on the ground. I naively wedged it back into its previous home, tested the door a few times, and left for the office. We were in the middle of deadline for the Lagos Hotel.

Snooze.

It’s one in the morning, and I’m in the exact same predicament as before. This time there are only two neighbors with lights on: the annoying neighbor and someone two floors below him. Now that I’m explicitly aware of my two neighbors apartment numbers I make sure to get it right this time. I dial the annoying neighbor and it just rings and rings and rings. I hang up, hating him even more. I sit. I think. I think about climbing. I think about electrical wires and why my building has so many and how they could be old and frayed. I call the annoying neighbor again and nothing happens. Then I watch his light go off and stay off. I try calling the neighbor at 303 and it rings and rings, and then someone picks up…

“Eh?”
I run my script, the same one that worked last time.
“Ni hao, wo joo zai wu bai r how, kuyea kai ma?” (Hello, I live at 501, could you open?)
“Huh?”
“Um, Ni hao, wo joo—“

Click. He hangs up.

I sat out front for thirty minutes not ready to accept the fact that I had put off the inevitable; that this wasn’t going to work, not twice. I had actually gone home early that night. Back at the office, 4 of my co-workers were still going hard. T.T, a Chinese girl with hair down to her waist, was acting as DJ and rocking out to her death metal music, which is basically fast drums and lots of growling. The other three, Flavia, Liqiang, and Ben just sat there motionless, staring at their computer screens, clicking away as if there was no music at all. It felt like I had walked into a dream. It was loud and certainly not conducive to sleep. I couldn’t bring myself to do work, at least not real work. Instead I cranked out an essay for an internship application that was due the next day, one that I had threatened myself I would get to but kept hitting the snooze button on.

Locked out of my apartment, sleep deprived, satanic growling in the background. Snoozing was no longer an option.

This story continues….

Report #22

Dear Chinese Neighbor,

Our walls are thin and you must know this. I can hear your TV so you should be able to hear mine. I find this acoustic problem troubling because one night when I angrily banged on the wall I nearly crippled my hand against the concrete. Yes! Concrete! You’d think we’d be sealed up like prisoners in solitary confinement alone with only our thoughts behind walls like these. Maybe our ceiling is made of straw. I don’t know. In any case I need you to pipe down a bit, especially that girlfriend of yours. How can you stand her whiny voice? I liken it to a mosquito or a crow cawing at sunrise. You’ve been inviting her over more frequently these past few months and I can tell it’s not going very well. She seems to do all the talking and sometimes her whininess becomes so intense it sounds like you’re arguing with a child over there. I suppose with all that stress you’ve taken to smoking an occasional cigarette in the hallway. This is the real purpose of my letter, to inform you that our little platform at the top of the stairs is no lounge. Actually it’s not the street either, so for god sake don’t spit on the ground and don’t ash your entire cigarette where we walk. I should also inform you that in addition to our building’s thin walls we have large cracks under our doors, which act like high-powered air intakes. I get about 25% of your cigarette under my door if the little window in the stairwell is shut. Damn you for this. I’ve tried to catch you in the act, but when I smell the scent and explode out of my door unprepared for what I might say to you, you’re gone, just a plume of smoke, ashes, and spit.

I have little hope for correcting this cultural fault of yours, but do note that in 40 years or so this act will be considered a faux pas and with luck will get you kicked out of the building. You see, in America, we used to be able to smoke everywhere too, in airports, grocery stores, restaurants, even bars! But then people realized that only smokers like smoke. Your days are numbered.

Sincerely,

Your neighbor

Report #21

It is rare to find individuals who are uniquely their own character. I think the Coen brothers can say this better than me:

Now this story I'm about to unfold took place back in the early nineties--just about the time of our conflict with Sad'm and the Eye-rackies. I only mention it 'cause some- times there's a man--I won't say a hee-ro, 'cause what's a hee-ro?--but sometimes there's a man. And I'm talkin' about the Dude here-- sometimes there's a man who, wal, he's the man for his time'n place, he fits right in there--and that's the Dude, in Los Angeles.

I went out on the 2nd ring again, this time to the Northwest section at Xizhimen. There is a large public plaza that spans across the entire highway as it dips below grade. On top of this land bridge are kite-flyers scattered throughout the square and a few kite vendors. There were also inline skaters blasting dub-step through a tiny boom-box while they weaved in and out of plastic cones and did fancier versions of hockey-stops. Four or five tricycles with boxed enclosures rolled up and began unloading dozens of roller skates and inline skates, laying them out in an orderly array. These were mobile roller skate vendors, unaffiliated with one another, but cooperative in that they kept their prices fixed: 5 RMB for a pair of skates for the evening.

The real treasure of the visit was this Dude, an old Beijing man who also had a tricycle (pickup truck style, no box) with four ‘Wangtong Birds’ tethered to a homemade perch on the handlebars. At first I was drawn to the birds, which are a cobalt blue and grey with bright yellow beaks, a little bigger than a cardinal. It wasn’t clear whom they belonged to until Jenny spotted a man casually strolling about 10 feet away from the tricycle who was wearing, not by accident, a blue and yellow jumpsuit. This man was in his 70’s, his white hair wind-blown, but he was fit and the jumpsuit and fanny pack he wore made him look the part too. He had the swagger of guy who was completely at home.

We wanted to get a photo of him with the birds to show the matching outfits, but his purposeful vibe made him seem unapproachable. Then he walked over to his four birds and took one off from the perch, grasping its body in his hand. He took out some sort wooden tube, which he stuck under his bottom lip pointing it up in the air. With both hands he hurled the bird into the air and it began to fly about 30 feet up. He blew into the tube and bird came flying back to his hand. It was though the bird was attached to string like a yo-yo. Once it returned to his hand he fed it some seeds. We watched this routine several times until it was clear that the tube was actually a miniature blowgun and there were no strings attached, the bird is trained to catch a plastic bead that the man fired into the air, return it to his hand, and get a reward of seeds.

The man went through his birds one by one, giving each one a turn. He put away the blowgun and took out a slingshot from his fanny pack, and hurled the bird into the air. This time the bird really took off. It flew about 100 feet up in the air making large circles around the plaza. The man walked about 20 paces away from his trike and fired the sling shot straight up just as the bird was circling around. Its wings flapped haphazardly for a moment and it maneuvered off course, then loyally flew back to the man’s hand as he walked back with his arm extended not even looking as the bird approached from behind.

This was his act. He didn’t have a tip jar asking for money, he just did his thing, and then rode home. Jenny and I tried to interview him, but he wasn’t very talkative, which my white face and long microphone didn’t make any better. We did manage to get a few tidbits out of him: he’s retired, he just does this when he feels like it, he lives in the neighborhood, it takes a year to train one of the birds, and his birds are about 4 years old. There wasn’t enough time before he began riding away to ask: How did you become so cool? Do you wear the jumpsuit all the time or just during your routine? Are you a wizard? Do you want an apprentice?