just a sunday

Today I biked 21 miles, to 798 gallery district and back. (It's called 798艺术区.) The bike ride was unremarkable, although even unremarkable bike rides are enjoyable for me. I was on my bike for about three hours altogether, cutting a more or less straight line west to east just north of the fourth ring road in north Beijing. This took me past Bird's Nest Stadium on three sides, so that I had a 270 degree view of it. Each time I see it, I like it even more.

The scenery by bike in Beijing no longer impresses me as a novelty, although today was the first time I took such a long trip around the city. I have written elsewhere about why I love my bike, and why I find biking in Beijing so enjoyable, so I will just say now that the chaos of traffic is humane and therefore manageable; Ana says she's never seen an accident, and I believe it, because people obey no rules but pay very close attention to each other's movements; and that I find the cheap, sturdy urban single-speed style of Chinese bikes to be exactly suited for my needs here.

The art district is a few square blocks in northeast Beijing devoted to gallery spaces. I don't know how many there are, but maybe something in the dozens. Somewhat reminiscent of the Chelsea galleries in Manhattan, because it consists of abandoned warehouse-like spaces claimed by art, although the concentration of galleries in 798 is much higher than in Chelsea, and there aren't other businesses, parking garages, storage units, or jails like there are on the west side of Manhattan.

It was interesting as a way to peep on China's population of artsy hipsters, which I haven't seen before. There were many foreigners, too. Maybe those people with the fashionable mohawks were Japanese, but I heard at least some of them shouting in Mandarin. Hearing them made me think that know so little about modern Chinese popular culture.

What I want to know: are young people anxious? What makes them anxious? How many of them are anxious? How do they express their anxiety?

To find the emotional life of a Chinese person, as if such a thing can be essentialized and known, I look for the American analogy, which is easy for me to understand, e.g., I know how the twitchy energy of young, creative, vain people might end up in a place like Williamsburg, but I don't think that the art I saw today was a product of that kind of culture, although I couldn't tell you why it felt that way.

So many things I see around me provoke this feeling; China can look so modern, and if you looked around at the shining hotels and expensive bars and sexy fashions and kids sending texts and graphic design and new buildings and flashing colored lights, it's tempting to think that the values of youth culture, and their expression, are exactly the same here as in America. But I don't believe that the analogy is so easily drawn.

I remember that Stephanie and I got into a fight last year after we'd read an article about how many Chinese gyms were starting to offer pole-dancing classes as a form of aerobics. She scoffed at this, and thought it was a phony and neutered presentation of what ought to be raunchy and sensational. That bothered me, because I felt like she was saying that Chinese people were sexless. It's very important to my world view to believe that people everywhere experience the same range and depth of emotion, e.g. that people say filthy things to one another while screwing in Jordan or laugh at jokes about their neighbors eating beans in Mali; it was also important to me that the Western stereotype about Chinese people being *not fun*, which I saw so often repeated in the press during the 2008 Olympics, not be seconded by my Chinese girlfriend. In reality, that's not what Stephanie was saying, but I was eager to believe that I had been insulted, and we fought somewhat senselessly about it.

That is neither here nor there. All I am saying is I am outside this culture, and I would like to be inside, but it is not easy. I take for granted my familiarity with American tropes. Let me never forget henceforth that a blowsy, underwearless, hoarse-voiced girl with glittery eyeshadow who tilts into a cab on E. 72nd Street on a Saturday night and the orange-colored Chad with the popped collar who pays her fare may not be types cognizable to, say, a Chinese person learning the contours of American demography.

At 798, there was much to see. I liked one oil painting of a rainbow over Tiananmen Square. The people in the plaza were blurred and the image was painted in mustard brown tones, so that the scene looked sinister, like a surveillance image, instead of pleasant. Other than this, no other pieces of art made an impression upon me, but then again, one memorable artwork per gallery/museum experience is all I ask anyway. I was interested enough anyway in the district itself and the people strolling around in it.

I had a meal of duck fat over fat-fried vegetables and fat rice, and because I hadn't eaten for five hours, and even then only had a half cup of yogurt and coffee, I poured my meal down my throat in five minutes and then sat reading Murder on the Orient Express until the feeling of acute nausea passed. I biked home, ninety minutes, getting lost only once, and stopping to buy a pomelo from a street vendor.

Yesterday I had intended to bike down to the Forbidden City, but I quarreled with S, and then had only two hours of daylight to bike into a traffic snarl just south of the second ring road, shouting curses in English. I felt foul. I came home and found a variety of ways to distract myself from the foulness, in descending order of effectiveness: composing two melodies for voice and guitar, entitled "Why Do Girls Make Me Cry?" and "I'm So Happy I Could Die"; taking my roommate on the back of my bike to eat Guangzhou rice porridge near Wudaokou; jogging five miles on the BLCU track; reading the news. But S's patience and good temperament steered us out of the turbulence, and the day ended with six hours of expressions of love, delivered by webcam until dawn.

The day before was Friday. I didn't hang out with Wu Fei as is customary, because she was dogsitting for the weekend and had to go pick up keys. Instead, I came home, fa dai'd for several hours, then went to a lesbian bar at night. I will write about that presently.