There are times, especially at night, when I feel as if I am living in a computer chip. The odd black skyline shapes, the blinking, bending streams of smooth neon light, the roaring electric density, the unexpected quiet of the squat residential apartment blocks with their dark, narrow, maze-like private streets, protected by guarded gates, the square Lanzhou street grids broken up by random angular byways, all fold into a William Gibson dream of a computer city plexus of pulsating, artificially lit intensity. This is not necessarily a bad feeling, in fact it’s often energizing, occasionally alienating, always interesting. Whenever I feel the need to bring it back down to a more personal level, day or night, I hit the streets and wander about like a demented monk. The streets always reconnect me, revive me, engage me. So, I thought I would take you along with me on a walk through my neighborhood. I leave my 3rd floor apartment, walk down the clean swept but dingy concrete stairs and out into a courtyard surrounded by the buildings that make up my apartment complex, with parking spaces for the cars my neighbors own and a small playground where residents practice a tai chi-sword dance most mornings, where groups of school children play in the evenings, and over which, sometimes, the moon playfully hangs. I turn left, right, left, walk along a brown wall covered with climbing vines turned reddish autumn, unlock the gate by the guard shack with a small, blue plastic disk, hold the door for whomever is waiting, pass the shop with the boiling metal cauldron out front where you select delicacies from the refrigerated case, pre-skewered on long wooden sticks, the offerings include meat, mushrooms, seaweed, veggies and tofu in various shapes, then hand it to the cooker who drops in into the steaming pot, select your noodles, then wait a few minutes, after which it is whisked into a bowl and wham-bam the cooker scoops spices into the mixture, with broth, cilantro, and things I can’t name and serves it with a flourish, charging approximately 13 RMB (US $2.05).
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“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.” – George Eliot It’s been years since I’ve seen a proper fall. I caught the end of one last year in New England, but an early snow took the green leaves by surprise and shocked them into withered brown chaos. Before that, I had spent years in Costa Rica, a riot of a thousand shades of green during the rainy season that runs from mid-April to mid-November, and before that, in Alaska where it’s more a surrender than a season. I came to Lanzhou in the spring, watched summer take hold, bake the dazed and delighted earth, sprout watermelons and corn and sunflowers and onion stalks that ended up being sold out of flatbed trucks parked everywhere along the willow-shaded boulevards. Now, as the Mid-Autumn mooncakes have all been given out, on my walks through the city I see the first leaves turning yellow, and thorny climbing bushes turning slowly scarlet, to the slow motion beat of sad autumn earth music, I am basically ecstatic. Walking along I saw an advertisement for some product, and the tag line was written in English and read, “Being Compressed Happiness.” I felt like compact happiness and walked along wishing everyone happiness in return. Some smiled back, others looked vaguely resentful, others suspicious. Too much happiness makes people nervous. China’s talking on the cell phone, loves pandas, eats chicken feet. China squats, China stares, China spits. China is rudely courteous. Doesn’t need deodorant. Carries its own tissues. Indulges children. At night, people gather in large groups in public squares and parking lots to dance, they also love to hear themselves sing, are constantly hawking trying to clear their throats, smile and laugh more often than not. China eats pig snouts, thousand year-old eggs, duck tongues, deep-fried honeybees, cow stomach lining. A cuisine fashioned by famine. Chinese women favor Converse Hi-Tops. Chinese words look great lit up in red neon. China is severely myopic. Is a gathering tsunami. Are building the world's biggest yak dairy processing center. Write great headlines like: Mubarak in comma, but ‘not clinically died’. Consume 20% of the world’s beer. Use about 40% of the world's cement. Have grown peaches for over 3,000 years. Raise half a billion pigs a year. Smoke 50,000 cigarettes every second. Cinderella first appeared in a Chinese book written between 850 and 860 A.D. China is a bicycle kingdom and manufactures 60% of the world’s bicycles. I am forever trying to keep up. Follow through. Get swept away. Persevere. Maintain. Discover. Wish me luck . . . . |
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