Chinese new year. The afternoon before the fireworks began, I stopped on campus to chat with my friend, Liu Bing, a genteel man who had been to Skagit Valley College years ago and who loved to speak frankly of his country. The campus was very quiet, as the students were on break. We talked about this and that, the CPC’s moves against corruption, the great swell of people traveling back to their home town for the Spring Festival, clogging the highway and rail system. He said fireworks in Beijing were banned for a thirteen-year period in the 90s and early 2000s and that netizens demanded the return of booming fire, as it was an important part of their tradition. He said that with all the bad pollution lately, letting people blow off fireworks was no way to solve the problem.
“Fireworks,” I said. “I can’t imagine they’d have that much effect on the air.”
He closed his eyes and nodded.
“But where do we go, you know, if we want to see them?”
He waved his hand at the sky. “Anywhere.”
Starting from about 8:30 and crescendoing at midnight, there was a battering of the air like I had never heard before. Incessant, cracking, exploding fireworks. Big-time stuff blooming in the sky every second all around us, gushing white behind buildings, cloaking the city in a smoky haze. I walked outside just after midnight and breathed in a sulfurous odor like smoke bombs on the 4th of July. I spoke words out loud into the night and found that I could not hear my own words over the boom, crackity-crackity-crack, the boom again, followed by rocket noises and mortar fire noises. Sometimes it was a Doplar whistling as in war movies. Sometimes it was like a child’s rocket. Now a bazooka blast from a Copolla film, now M-80s in Wisconsin—with the difference being that in Wisconsin the kids would have run off after two detonations. Here there seemed to be no laws.
I won’t deny that the adrenaline rush felt good. The possibility of a fire starting among the pine trees on campus added to the energy. The constant flashing over this city of 20 million gave light to the air. The percussion set off scooter alarms. Green and red fountains of fire rose up behind the TV tower. Amber spokes of light shot up from the workers’ plaza on west campus. Some booms were big and swollen, resonating deep among the buildings. Others rippled forth in volleying assaults.
Part of me loved the stimulation. Part of me felt creeped-out by the large-scale group behavior, as though the energy of the masses could be released at once for any purpose good or bad. You see the same thing in America or Egypt. Viewed from the outside, any common thrust of a culture looks frightening. And yet, I wanted to be out there roaming the streets in the celebratory war zone.
A rooster crows in Beijing. The 110 bus follows the 394 bus into the main throb of traffic. Along the sidewalk yesterday’s snow remains in patches in the shade. Shovels lean against brick walls, their lips curled badly from last year’s beating. Call it the first day of winter though it’s not. Today is Monday and therefore the beginning of something. All the big coats at the bus stop are last year’s big coats. Faces clench in the cold. A woman wearing ear muffs tends to her delivery tricycle, flipping latches on the rear container.
On my pink bicycle I turn onto Third Ring Road, having just dropped my daughter off at school in her green Monday morning track suit. I smell oil baking on a grill. Bus exhaust. Clear blue morning. First day of winter in Beijing and it’s not even December. According to government policy the heating season begins November 15th, the day all buildings in the city get heat, though there is talk of stoking the power plants early this year in response to the cold snap.
Why am I so happy to be riding home when I know there’s no more coffee left? Why is pedaling a bicycle such an exquisite pleasure? I don’t think about my father-in-law in the hospital or the fact that my child doesn’t understand a damn thing in the Chinese school. A motor-powered tricycle overtakes me on the left, hauling bags of longevity noodles in clear plastic bags. I hope the noodles don’t freeze. I watch the tricycle race away down the crowded street, past campus and into a gray crush of distant shapes that make up the faraway intersection.
At home, pink roses hang in the courtyard.
Sheepshank
Sheep Testicular
Cockscomb
Roast the Bullwhip
Chicken Gristle
Sheep Lumbar
Flesh and Bones
Scalded Aorta
Lamb Chop
Stringy Meat
Goat Penis
Chicken Neck
Chicken Wing
Yellow Croaker
Drumstick
Pig Kidneys
Codfish
Sheep Tail
That is all.
September evening. Clear blue sky. Moon rising behind a distant building. I ride a pink bicycle across west campus and bumpity-bump down the ramp into the underpass, up the other side and across east campus with its tiled path and students walking in twos and fours, past the lighted volleyball courts on the left, the dorms on the right, through a construction zone where the ground is covered with steel plates, and finally out the back gate manned by a youth in a pale green uniform. A little speed now on the open street. It’s the first night of the Mid-Autumn Festival vacation, so there are comparatively few people out. I’m feeling free and loose after a frustrating day in the parenting world.
The air feels good on my face. I pedal hard and the iron fence passes to my right in a prison bar blur. I turn left onto Stinky Street and it’s the same crush of people and the same one or two cars honking their way through the throng, nudging, rolling forward at steamroller speed, never stopping, and the people swinging their bags or dismounting from scooters, all of us now bottlenecking as we try to squeeze through a two-foot-wide space between the car on our left and the produce vendors on the right. I finally have no choice but to hop off the bike.
The vendors are dark-skinned and shouting. It doesn’t take a translator to get the gist. “Best apples from Shandong Province, good eats, good eats!”
“Sweet potatoes, three for five kuai!”
“Spinach, bok choy.”
“I have grapes, good eating grapes.” “Best apples from Shandong Province!”
Here is where the bile smell hits me, half-way down the block where some function of the sewer system or refuse system produces a smell not exactly like garbage and not exactly like sewage but an odor of puke that isn’t puke. It is strong enough to make me gag. I make no expression, matching my face to the faces. Nobody winces, and why should we? We move on together and against each other in a common effort not to get our toes smashed under car tires.
Why is this street always so crowded? Stinky Street runs between the campus of BFSU and a middle class neighborhood of apartments and condos. There is a Chao Shifa grocery store with its logo red and green like the Mexican flag. There are beauty parlors and grubby nightclubs, clothing shops, a bakery, and a thousand cheap places to eat. You can smell the hot oil and sizzling meat, the brothy noodles and roasting corn. At night, the area gets hit from two sides by college students looking for calories and neighborhood folk just getting off work. The fruit and vegetable vendors park their carts on the sidewalk or along the edge of the street.
I push my girl bike over the curb. Gray and grimy. Cracked sidewalk with cars parked at odd angles and young people slurping noodles from low tables. Now the stench is behind me and the blue dome of sky seems magical and clean.
In the grocery store, two women in white uniforms stand at a dumpling station smearing filling into little dough patties about the size of sand dollars. They giggle when I ask, “Is this pork? Is this mushroom?” They laugh at my pronunciation. They laugh because I am slow to understand that this lump of filling with the green chunks is pork, that one with bits of corn is shrimp. The dough looks supple and dusty with flour. They slice off a portion with a spatula, smear it onto a wrap, fold, twist. They work fast, hands twitchy and unthinking. Slice, smear, fold, twist. Plastic shields cover their mouths.
I ask more questions. More giggles. In my fumbling effort to order the right number and kind of jiao zi, the ladies grow impatient, using all manner of gestures to communicate that I must order at least ten. I ask for sixteen and believe this makes them happy.
They get to work, folding and twisting the dough. One of the ladies points to a shallow pot of hot water, wanting to know if she should cook them here or pack them to go. Lacking the words for “boil” and “home,” I check my dictionary and respond with “I’m going home to boil” and “to go.”
I want to say that jiao zi is my daughter’s favorite. This is comfort food, slick and salty on the tongue and warm in the belly. I will bring them home, set a pot of water to boil, and ladle the slippery buggers onto plates so we can chase them with our chopsticks.
They line up sixteen little dumplings in neat rows on a plastic tray. They take my damp bills into their plastic-gloved hands; that’s seventeen yuan, or the equivalent of $2.75, for handmade dumplings enough to feed my family. They are of exceptional quality, not too fatty, full of good stuff like bok choy, ginger, mushrooms, or Chinese cabbage. I have eight pork, four shrimp, and four mushroom.
What does it mean to bring dinner home to your family? Nothing heroic, though it is every bit as good as any act of heroism. It is pleasure to do the essential thing. All ye rock climbers and tightrope walkers boasting of supreme focus, of “being in the zone,” take this: I’m bringing perfect food home to the ones I love.
But first I have to brave Stinky Street. The wind whips through a corridor between buildings. Papers fly along the pavement. There’s no way I can ride through all those people, so I bang the kickstand and push into the crowd with the bike astride my dirty shoes and the plastic bag dangling from the handlebars. I go along at a satisfied pace, breathing through my mouth.
September 15
Every morning around seven o’clock, I hear a cleaning lady hawking spit into a sink. There’s a little utility room next door, where the women clean mops and fill buckets of water. Every morning she makes this noise, getting rid of the phlegm and the previous day’s grit.
On a crowded street full of the hard sounds of Chinese and squealing brakes, the voice of a child rises above the din. I look to my left and see a little boy doing his math homework on the seat of his mother’s scooter. She sells socks in plastic packets by the stairs of the pedestrian overpass. The little boy has a chubby face and a buzz cut. He happily blurts out his equations as he writes the numbers in a little notebook spread out on the vinyl seat.
On the other side of the overpass, I come upon two midgets performing karaoke by the entrance to the Line 10 subway. They sing through amplifiers that come to their waist, a squat man in his late thirties and a midget girl in her twenties. They have good pitch. They sing sentimental pop tunes. The concrete environs make for good acoustics. If you were a busker of average height who wanted to perform in the street, I don’t think you’d want to compete with them. The sounds of the bass line and vocals fade as I turn the corner, as I say to myself in a loud inner voice, “Do people still say midget?”
Below is a letter that one of my students wrote in class as a midterm break from formal essay writing. I have only lightly edited the composition so as to keep the original flavor.
Dear Father,
It’s the first time and maybe the last chance for me to write a letter to you in English. You said you missed the opportunity to learn English well during the Cultural Revolution, which stopped you from further study in college, but I’ll be delighted if you can recognize just a few words like “father” and “love” when you receive this letter.
It’s said that fathers want their sons to be what they feel they cannot themselves be. I’m sure you can’t agree more with that. I remember that when I was a child, you’d like to tell me your experiences of your childhood. Grandpa passed away so early that Grandma struggled to raise you up. When you reached the age for schooling, the Cultural Revolution started, which broke most Chinese students’ dreams about universities, including yours.
Now I understand that you’re glad for me, that I with the new generation can encounter this god-given time to boom our ambitions in China, yet there are regrets in your mind for the era you lived in. I’m lucky to be accepted by BFSU after being brought up in a rural village. I can observe that you and Mom are gratified even though you never betray your true feelings. So I’m endeavoring to live a rich and colorful life here to accomplish what I dream of and what you expect.
I love my friends here. I love the library here. I love sitting on the campus reading books. Most importantly, I love you and Mom living peacefully in our hometown. I will be pleased if you can read this letter to Mom.
Your son, Kaiming.
You should be careful bargaining with street vendors, or you could lose an arm, or worse, your novel. On my fourth day on campus, when I was still running a little stupid from jet lag, hungry and hot in the middle of the day, I happened to spot some merchants selling a kind of sticky walnut snack that I love. They wheel these huge blocks of pressed nut/honey/apricot something into the neighborhood and cut you a chunk with big cleavers. The blocks are about eight inches high and two by three feet in size. The men who sell this food seem to belong to one of China’s many ethnic minorities who work in Beijing but do not enjoy full resident status.
Two years ago I had got overcharged by one of these guys, and I remembered Julie being annoyed with me because she could tell from a distance that I was being taken. It wasn’t the money that bothered her so much as watching her husband appear vulnerable. At the time, I didn’t mind spending eight dollars for a snack that lasted several days, especially when I considered the price of Belly Timber Bars in the States.
So I kind of knew these guys were opportunistic, but as I approached the vendor cart on this blazing September afternoon, I was too stupid to look in my wallet and see what kind of bills I had. I asked for “xiao,” small, and the cross-eyed man sliced off a 1 x 8 inch piece. He was swarthy. He had thick forearms and a jagged scar on his thumb knuckle. His eyes were pretty messed up. He put the nut cake on his tin scale and said a number. I was still at the point where numbers didn’t register with me all that much. I then understood “40 kuai” and it didn’t seem like a lot, but because I was tired and nervous, I hadn’t yet made the conversion to seven dollars. Later I would realize that this was slightly less than I paid two years ago for a bigger piece, meaning that forty-something must be their bi zi price (bi zi meaning “big nose,” roughly translated as “gringo”). I had a few fresh 100 yuan bills in my wallet and two tens. I took out the 100 and must have hesitated. This seemed like a bad time to be giving out (relatively) big bills.
The thing you should know about 100 yuan bills is that they seem really valuable. The notes are big and pink, usually crisp, with a flattering portrait of Mao gazing into space and the number “100” repeated seven times. “100” always looks big. Maybe I can’t divorce myself from the value of a Ben Franklin note, but I always find it hard to part with a 100 yuan bill, even as I know they’re worth sixteen dollars.
A Han Chinese guy in a white shirt stopped on his mo-ped and shouted to me: “Hey friend, hey friend, don’t take it! It’s a trick. Don’t take it. It’s a trick.”
“What? How’s it a trick?”
“Don’t buy it. They put it on the scale. They tell you the wrong price and they try to blackmail you.”
By now the vendor had wrapped the walnut cake into a plastic bag. With my book bag slung over my shoulder and my wallet still out, I walked over to the man on the mo-ped. He was a short pudgy man with an honest face, acne scars, and silver glasses. He would have looked jolly if not for the situation. He said, “Trust me. I work here. I work for the university. Don’t worry, we’re safe. They don’t understand English. Don’t do it.”
Now the vendor came at me yelling, thrusting the plastic bag at me, grabbing my arm hard, grabbing my black bag. His voice sounded like all the other sellers I’d heard barking in the street, a distinctly male Chinese tenor that is strong on the vowels, long and yodeling. I had an Apple laptop in my bag along with Julie’s iPhone. I realize that on the playing field of sympathy, a college instructor with multiple Apple products is no match for a man who trundles a metal tricycle for a living, but it could also be fairly said that this guy was a dick. Cross-eyed or not, I had decided not to buy his product, so tough shit. That’s business. Maybe in his culture it is a great insult to agree on a price, to say “I’ll take it” and back out of the deal. Maybe after he’s cut a chunk off the block, he can’t sell that piece. If so, he’d have a right to be angry. He could have bargained with me, but I didn’t get the sense that we were going to practice our “I” statements in the street. The fucker had my bag. I had the strap. My novel was on that laptop.
Fine, so maybe this guy sleeps on cardboard at night and ye readers ought to root for him and against the man with the leisure time and education to write a novel. He was stronger than me. His grip on my arm made it obvious he had put his muscles to good use through hard labor. I was aware of the wetness in his mouth, the crooked eyes that looked mad. He did not have his cleaver, but he seemed angry enough to use it. I seemed to have the feeling—though it may only be in retrospect—that this guy was desperate enough to do something violent.
I was in China alone. I was in my own panicky bubble and unaware of anyone but my foggy self, the two other men, and my wife and daughter across the ocean. It must be said that Beijing feels flat dangerous sometimes. Cars will run your ass over. Moterbikes come flying the wrong way down bicycle paths at night, with no lights on. You read stories about huge panes of glass falling out of skyscrapers, about toxic milk, about highway ramps that collapse under the weight massive trucks illegally overloaded with freight. It isn’t the stories in the China Daily that get to you—an elevator at a construction site fell 100 meters, killing 19 workers—but the things you can see: exposed electrical wires, the sedan’s tires rolling inches from your toes, the hot cooking grease flying out of a doorway. When your wife and child are thousands of miles away, the last thing you want to do is get miserably hurt.
As I tugged free of the man and ran off in my hipster suede shoes, down the ramp and into the underpass, I kept looking back to make sure the man wasn’t following me. Students had been watching. I felt stupid and embarrassed and unreasonably afraid. Nothing was going to happen. I was a jerk. He was a jerk. Julie knew these guys were bad news and now twice I hadn’t listened to her.
Now it seems silly that I felt such fear for my safety, and clearly it would have been better to forfeit sixteen bucks than to get in a street fight. I only now recognize my physiological reaction as a feeling from childhood: Eddie Gunter with his broken beer bottle, wanting to kick my ass. A sick feeling in the gut. You reach a certain point in life where “street fight” gets filed in the “never” category along with “beer bong”—the way a woman past menopause checks “baby” off her list—but you can be wrong about this. If we are ignorant in such a way, that ignorance knows no bounds. Either we’re unaware of our actual safety (the guy was only trying to scare us) or we’re unaware of the danger (a mentally ill man with a cleaver could do anything).
Which is it?
The body doesn’t know. It only runs away into the stream of International Business students with their pink sneakers and chunky glasses and bookish smiles—runs away on adrenaline and shame, looking back, watching for the guy.
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