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.

Chirpy

Excerpt from a consoling email I received from my pseudo-boss, after being transferred from a job I loved to one I sort of hate:

Thank you, dear Ariel, for talking with me. I feel happy too with our chats.

I hope that we could all work fruitfully but with a happy, chirpy mood.

No problem, we could overcome all the difficulties!


Gee, thanks.

China Daily article

My newest (okay, first) freelance story for China Daily can be found here.

Elsewhere featured in the Wednesday, August 19 edition of China Daily: a page 1 story about how Australia has caused a souring of relations with China by "granting a visa to Rebiya Kadeer, the mastermind of the July 5 Urumqi riot."

-A brief entitled "Brat held after smashing house, injuring mother"

-An article about a boy who has suffered liver and kidney failure after being beaten at his "Internet Addiction Boot Camp."

-A story about Xu Zhijong, a prominent human rights lawyer known for representing families of children killed by tainted milk powder. He seems to have been disappeared by the govt. shortly after the riots in Urumqi. Now the article reports that he has been arrested on "tax evasion charges." The article ends with this: "Information about Xu has been blocked on the Internet yesterday as the search for "Xu Zhiyong [Chinese characters]" on Google.cn and Baidu, two major search engines, generated: 'Your search results don't conform to related laws and policy.'"

My article shares a page with a brief about Britney Spears (whose boyfriend apparently dumped her) and another about Miley Cyrus (who has been fighting with her ex-boyfriend via obnoxious Twitter postings).

Admittedly

I just started this blog. I had been uncertain about the idea of myself blogging, for one; I also wasn't quite sure about the mechanics of the thing. This is a place where it would appear that most forums for posting independent thought are blocked by the government. Anyway, I've gone and done it now.

Because I waited two months, and had things to say over that time but didn't say them, I'm going to be updating in both directions.

Time isn't linear in a horizontal sense in China, anyway. It's up and down. I can't keep those straight. The past is up, the future is down... I think. I asked Peter late one night how Chinese schoolchildren create timelines in their history classes. We almost always made ours horizontally, left-to-right, past to present. It fits with the way we conceive of time--forward and backward. I realized if i were asked to make a vertical timeline rather than a horizontal one, I wouldn't be quite sure where to start. The top, or the bottom? I know I've made them before, but I can't remember now.

Peter was well on his way to sleep and mumbled, What are you talking about, before rolling over.

Anyway all I mean to say is, now that I finally have this page up and running, watch for backdated posts.