changping

Blogger blocked and Internet access crappy so I'll write when I can.

First two days were in Beijing, Changping district, with WF and her husband WM. She's pregnant and married now and we're two years older but we're still both nerds fascinated with each other's cultures. I try to disabuse her of starry visions of America as land of free and home of the fair. She's dissatisfied with human rights in China and she tells me horror stories of rich people's kids running over poor people with impunity and the burial of the evidence of the high speed rail crash this May. She's reading books on the O.J. Simpson trial and employment law and Walmart in America. It all seems like roses to her. How does she know about the five love languages? I don't know, but she does. I thumb through my dictionary looking for these words: analytical, leftist politics, discrimination, prejudice. WF reminds me that I was reading "Pride and Prejudice" last time I was in Beijing and she taught me the words for both. I tell her about Troy Davis, per M.W.'s suggestion. WF says her dreams growing up in rural Hubei were (1) open a women's bookstore, with a cafe in the back for people to talk about the books they were reading; (2) open a children's library, so that rural kids would have a place to play together. She asks me whether it's true that in Europe and America people go to cafes and talk about politics. I say it's more likely that people go to cafes to stare alone at photographs of their ex-lover's new girlfriends on Facebook. Then she brings me to a woman-owned bookstore/lending library on the road between Wudaokou and Beijing University - a road we've gone down many times before, with riding the rack of my bike - that has a cafe in the back where WF says she goes when she needs to escape from the crush of city life. It makes me wonder whether she will ever find the American dream she is looking for, because it appears to be in front of her in China. She says she's become more Buddhist since I last saw her, Buddhism to her meaning serenity about the things she can't control, like the heightened possibility of birth defects with her soon-to-be-born child and her sister's estrangement from the family. That, and she begs the old men with slingshots not to shoot down robins and she says an amitofo prayer before closing the lid on a hundred tiny live shrimp she's about to bring to death by boiling. I find a five RMB bill on the ground on our way to the market on the second morning. We're there to buy buns for breakfast and veggies for lunch, and she says, "Look! Five bucks!" I pick it up and hand it to her and she buys jiao bai with it. Later she recalls the story to WM, who cannot believe I would accept the bad luck of taking money from the ground and spending it. He says, "Chinese people believe if you gain something you lose something too." I say, "Zhendema?! Let's go back to the spot and put a five on the ground." WM says, "Don't worry, I took care of it." Meaning he has flung a five RMB bill out the window already. My first two days in Beijing are spent shopping for food, preparing food with WF, playing ping pong with WF and WM, and walking slowly with WF and talking and talking and talking. We try to go back to a memory we have both cherished - a giant bell next to a picturesque pond surrounded by gingko trees on the campus of Beijing University under which we stood and onto which I etched some sort of graffiti. Neither of us could remember what I wrote. WF is in a heavy mood, so she tells me that this pond was the site of many suicides during the Cultural Revolution. I ask her how it is possible that a person could drown in a pond only six feet deep, and she speculates that the suicides dove in headfirst and held onto the bunches of grass at the bottom until they died. The campus is closed, and we can't return to our spot. Qinghua University is closed, too, so we just go back to the bookstore and rest a while. We take buses from place to place and meet WM and her cousin for Yunnan hotpot, yak meat in hot stew, which is surprisingly delicious but leaves my clothes smelling like hotpot for days. So many reasons I love WF. It is her birthday in two weeks and I'll be back in Beijing to celebrate.