Emoting

Something very disturbing has happened to me here in China: I've started using emoticons. I mean everywhere. Email, instant messages, text messages....I suddenly feel that a message is incomplete if it's not adorned with a little smiley or frowny or winky face.

I blame China, 100%

I was never like this before I came here.

I tell this to Paul, a coworker of mine, another one of our 'foreign experts'. He's British, middle-aged, professorial. I thought he was standoffish at first, then realized he was just sort of awkward in that distinctly British, professorial way. He exudes a slight air of "What the hell am I doing working in this place," but no more than the rest of us.

He says he spends most of his monthly paycheck on books. He says he has over 600 books in his apartment. He's always reading something at his desk like Kafka or Pynchon or the collected works of Elizabeth Bishop.

He tells me that he, too, has caught the insidious emoticon virus. He tells me this on MSN, in an instant message. And then he attaches a blinking little smiley face.

Who have we become.

National Day

All the guards everywhere in the city are now in full military uniform, standing straighter than ever (how this is possible I don't know, since their posture seemed impossibly perfect beforehand), and men have been hanging from ropes off the roof of the giant white-tiled buildings that comprise the China Daily offices with rags in their hands, scrubbing the accumulated grime of the city off the tiles until they gleam like new.

Patriotic posters in vivid red line the walls of our apartment lobby, and there is a 20 foot billboard in front of China Daily, and all the gates to all the neighborhoods have been repainted and hung with banners and silky red lanterns, and our next-door neighbor who spends all day smiling vaguely and chain-smoking in the hallway has taken out his buckets of bleach and scrubbed down the hallway.

For National Day!

There are vibrant flower arrangements on every stretch of green grass along the major roadways and intersections; there are old people in yellow polo shirts directing traffic or sitting on low stools to, I don't know, keep the peace I suppose, and one of them, an old man who is posted at the gate to the apartment complex directly opposite ours, plays an accordion and little children run up to him to dance or stare. The music is very lovely and filters up and down the street, the red lanterns on the gates bobbing whenever a breeze blows through.

As for the general preparatory attitude, the New York Times captures it pretty well:

♫ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/world/asia/29beijing.html?_r=1&hp

Sunrise from our apartment

An actual pleasant surprise

I went to have a glass of wine at a little French bistro after work one night, and Mathilde Deffieux stepped out onto the street to hand me a menu.

I haven't seen this girl in six years, since we worked scooping ice cream at a second-rate sundae shop on Martha's Vineyard the summer of 2003.

Back then, she was at university in Bordeaux, studying languages, and I was one year into college with no idea what I wanted from school or from life. We were getting these muscles--maybe triceps?--on our right arms from digging into the giant vats and hauling up perfectly rounded, baseball-sized hunks of ice cream. We worked mainly with broad, motherly Jamaicans who were partial to rum raisin. They came over on an annual work program that took them away from their families for six or eight months and gave them a chance to earn much more money than they otherwise could by working essentially like slaves from sunrise to midnight in a series of back-to-back full-time jobs. They were all from Kingston. They were all trying to move to Montego Bay.

Mathilde and I (Mat, we called her) spent many, many hours together behind the counter that summer. We talked about boys, of which there were none, and the beach, a place we never seemed to have time to get to. She told me about Bordeaux and it sounded magnificent. I figured I could take my ice cream earnings and visit her there someday.

At the end of the summer we exchanged information and parted ways and neither of us ever kept in touch. We meant to, of course. Everyone always means to. Years passed and I suppose I forgot about her, more or less.

Two weeks ago Peter had vacation and took a solo trip to Dali, a scenic hippie town in Yunnan province. Bored one night alone in Beijing and not quite ready to succumb to TV, I started digging through old documents on my computer hard drive to see if there were any hidden treasures, or at least salvageable paragraphs amid the detritus. I came across a fairly large file that hadn't been opened since 2004. It turned out to be a collection of stories and vignettes and character portraits I'd written for a fiction class I'd taken that year, based on the people I'd met on Martha's Vineyard.

Reading it reminded me of Maxine, my take-no-bullshit Jamaican co-cashier at the supermarket I worked at by night. I remembered the whimsical children I'd babysat in the early mornings, Virgil, Mabel, and Cosmo. And of course I thought of Mat from the ice cream shop.

The next day was payday at work, when we 'foreign experts' get unseemly fat envelopes stuffed with multi-colored cash. A few of us, feeling rich and fancy, decided to meet after work for a drink at this chic French place R. used to frequent a lot back then, before he got in trouble for groping a waitress and was summarily disinvited.

The restaurant was in an alley noisy with shops and street vendors and motorcycles. I spotted R. waving from a table on the curb and went to join him, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a pretty blonde girl swinging out the front door of the restaurant with a menu in her hand. She passed it to me without really looking at me, but I caught her in profile.

I know you, I said. I'm usually not that confident, especially with people I haven't seen in years, especially when they show up in the most unexpected places, but I'd just the night before been reading stories I'd written about her and there wasn't any doubt.

You're Mat, from Martha's Vineyard, I said.

She turned and squinted at me, and then her eyes widened. Oh my God, she said, Ariel.

She's been living in China for 3 years now. At the time when I last knew her, she'd studied in Taiwan and was learning Chinese alongside English and Spanish. But China never came up as a topic of conversation between us, I suppose because at the time, it meant nothing to me. Just another place I figured I'd most likely never get to.

In the midst of our incredulous reunion, I turned to R. and said, Can you believe this!?

He was sitting back in his chair watching us with mild bemusement. Sure, he said, finishing off his wine. Happens all the time.

Correspondence

Latest email announcement from The Person in Charge Who Pretends She Isn't and Always Throws Up Her Hands and Says "But What Can I Do? I Have No Power, You See," at Critical Moments:

Hi, dear friends/colleagues,

Due to new work arrangement, dear Paul and Ariel have switched positions. Now Paul is in charge of copy editing all the Senior Teens articles, Ariel in charge of Junior Teens/Kids articles, as well as writing for teens editions. Hope everyone could be happy with their new team, and work with fruitful results.

Chiefly, and like always, Dear Roger is the king in copy editing all the articles, making all the brilliant headlines, and helping Ms Li to get all the pages done with perfection.

Moreover, we are very happy to have dear Nicola, who writes with efficiency and excellence, contributing great articles for our teams.

Hope everyone is happy and finds sense of fulfilment in our big team.

Happy Monday!

The build-up

National Day, October 1, is just a few weeks away. It will be the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC, which is apparently a Big Deal--I guess until the centennial, every decade-anniversary will be.

On Friday the government shut down all the subway stops and traffic around Tiananmen Sq. for a practice march, which I'm pretty sure involves lots of tanks rolling down Chang'an Avenue and soldiers marching in perfect synchronization.

I watch CCTV sort of vacantly while at the gym, and see, in their 60th anniversary extravaganza coverage, what looks to be footage of soldier training. PLA officers line up and kick out one leg again and again, each one bringing his leg up to the exact height of a wire that would cut into his calf if he lifted any higher. They repeat this motion, one leg at a time, maybe hundreds or thousands of times.

I guess it's to train muscle memory--not just when to lift your leg when you're marching in time, but by exactly how much, so that all the soldiers' legs snap out like a single moving part and then snap back. I don't know much about soldier training, or about marching for that matter--maybe this is a very ordinary thing that all soldiers do. But it's quite striking when the camera pulls back and goes to another shot, this one of approximately a million soldiers marching, and their legs are all bending and extending and retracting exactly the same, like it was just one soldier on a green screen with duplicates of himself all around. I've heard Disney did that for the herd scenes in The Lion King. That's what I'm thinking of, jogging on the treadmill at my very swanky orange-fiberglass-and-artfully-cut-mirror underground gym.

In my office, everyone is suddenly running to line up their trashcans against the wall. One minute I'm just working like usual and then next, I look up to see this towering stack of personal trash cans looming by the doorway to the layout and design room. I ask my coworkers why everyone is bringing their trashcans over, and they say it's because of National Day. Apparently we can expect many Important Party Officials to come strolling through our office over the next few weeks, and everything has to be in ship-shape around the offices of China Daily. We've been told to clean up the clutter on our desks, and now the trashcans must be scrubbed. But if we stack them against the wall, the gloomy-faced cleaning lady will do it for us.

I am not really sure why Important Party Officials care about the cleanliness of the trashcans, which are a) designed to hold trash, after all, and b) stowed deep in the shadowy recesses under our desks, anyway.

Impending National Day is also why the office admin. girl came over to check out the serial number and IP address and whatever else it was on my computer the other day. At the time, she told me it was because the tech guy was complaining that someone keeps leaving their computer on overnight, so she was checking everyone's computers to see whose numbers matched and thereby locate the culprit. This made me very nervous, because I've left my computer on a few times overnight, not intentionally, but it has a tendency to freeze just as I'm mid-shut-down, and I don't want to wait around forever to see what will happen.

So here I am feeling nervous about being called out by the tech guy for my reckless waste of electricity, but it turns out that I can relax on that count, because that was all just dissembling on the part of the office admin. girl. She actually wants our computer serial numbers so that Important Party Officials can track all of our movement online and locate us if we post anything sensitive or seditious on any websites in the coming weeks.

Hmm, yes. Happy National Day!

Somewhere quieter

My anger is quick to surface here. At the people: for being too many, too pushy, too rude, for never waiting in line, for cutting in front of me on crowded streets and then walking so slowly. At the barber shops with speakers set outside their doors that blare pop songs so loud the music just sounds like tearing, like it's ripping the speakers apart. At the heat and the humidity and the toxic air and the street vendors trying to sell me pirated copies of get-rich-quick books; at the swarms of little pale brown flies or whatever they are that come zipping out of my shower drain.

I feel this seething rage just below the surface and I don't know what to do with it.

And then we go for a stroll in the park.

The park runs east to west along Beitucheng Lu. There are sweeping willows on either side of a little canal, arching bridges over the water, remnants of an old wall that was once the northern border of the ancient city. Some pieces of the wall have been punctured by cannon fire.

It's quiet in the park. It's like a secret world in the middle of the city. Old men and women do tai chi in striped pajamas. Young couples lie with their legs intertwined on park benches. Men gather in groups to watch each other playing cards. They smoke, they flap paper fans in the air for a breeze, they lean in over each other with their elbows propped on their knees and their chins propped on their fists. People bike and dance and sleep in the grass. There is an old woman sitting by herself under a little pagoda, staring out across the canal. A little girl playing with a rabbit in the tall grass. The Olympic buildings are visible in the hazy distance outside the park. But here there are no tourists. No cars. Nobody trying to sell anything. Nobody in a hurry.

And so I feel my anger dissolving and something slowing down in me that always wants to rush. Walking through the park makes me feel generous and expansive, and I think, people are lovely. The end of summer is the perfect time for a walk like this, in early evening when the day is cooling off and the sun, if it breaks through the haze, is rust-colored going down. It's still hot enough to make ambling the best mode of locomotion, and that's what I want to do: amble through the park, watch all these quiet people doing something or nothing.