On the fourth floor of the southern building, there was a long long counter with various stations. I decided to play apologetically innocent. "This is the first time I've been here and I'm not sure what to do. I'm looking for this book--" They glanced and waved me on down the counter before I even stopped talking. At the end of the line, there was one beleaguered woman whose desk might have read, "The RMB stops here." She took my card, typed in the system number of the book. Meanwhile, I watched the conveyor belt behind her issuing forth from a half-hidden room full of bookshelves. Did they actually deliver books by conveyor belt? But not to me. "Go there! Left! The fourth doorway!" Where? What? She manifested great impatience, so I wandered off. I realized I may have requested the wrong book, came back, requested my other guess (the online catalog's a bit chaotic). Said, "Where do I go again?" "Go straight! Then left! Fourth doorway!"
I wandered off again. Then I noticed that there was a stealth corridor suddenly visible if you jagged slightly to the right. I went along it, turned left, and started counting doors. Do the girls and boys rooms count? No. This is the courtyard view I saw on my right and very surreptitiously photographed. (There are "No Photography" icons everywhere in that building.) Doesn't it look somehow like a toy courtyard with toy terraces and a toy building? But it's full size, newly renovated, which I could tell by the construction debris around the edges, and the remains of some grubby and highly cheesy yellow and red painted metal dragon sculptures that had clearly been recently retired.The place I was supposed to be was the "Foreign language reading room." How carefully foreign stuff is segregated off from the rest. And careful track is kept of everything you look at, via this complex system of ordering. No one told me that the sliding red LCD display would include the last four numbers of my library card when the book I had ordered arrived. I just figured it out by guesswork and probability. The books took a very long time to come: Chavannes' French translation of the Shiji, first published in 1895, although reprinted in 1962. The National Library had the 1895 edition, in rather battered shape.
I read and took notes for an hour or more, and then returned the book and went off in quest of the other two. It was a quarter to twelve and I had to meet someone at two, but I thought I would probably have enough time.
I thought I could retrace my steps and do everything again but this time without floundering. As it turned out, no. The "buck stops" lady was having her lunch break. Another person I approached said I must go back to the reading room and order it there. I tried to do that, but the system number wasn't good enough for them. Go back out to the counter. I said they had sent me here. We need the suoqu number; get it from the computer. A slow elderly lady was using the computer. I went back out to the front, used one of the computers, which required an agonizingly slow log-on process, looked at all the versions of the record, finally found the long one, paged through until I found something called the suoqu number--the call number. I copied this carefully, then went back to the reading room. This isn't the right number. It's too long. But it said it was the suoqu number. Go back out to the front desk and get someone to help you.
This whole process had taken more than 45 minutes, given also the time it took to shuttle back and forth between the counter and the reading room. By this time, I was ready to give it up as a lost cause. The whole thing was purely Kafkaesque, like K. trying to get into The Castle. Also, I was getting really hungry again.
I took a crowded bus back to campus and had a regular ol' American meal, hamburger, fries, a coke. There was something suspicious about the ketchup--kind of reminiscent of barbecue sauce or plum sauce even though clearly intended to be ketchup--but I ate it anyway. I met NT at 2 as promised. Some confusion about the place, because of language barriers. I thought of suggesting we use Japanese, but I suspect my Japanese is even worse than her Chinese. She gave me the mysterious tickets. It turns out our class was being treated to a free performance of famous traditional play, The Peach Blossom Fan in two parts, even late-coming auditing idlers like me. Good deal!
Then I looked at NT's photos from her vacation trip to Sichuan. Beautiful mountains, blue water, and many tourists. We chatted about the photos, the difficulties of travel, the landscape. And before I knew it, I was late to my Tuesday afternoon class. Somehow I couldn't extricate myself without feeling rude. Then I was very late. Still I had a hard time escaping. The photos seemed multiplied into the hundreds! I got to the end without realizing and back to the beginning. Oh, that's not Sichuan, she said. I made to hand the camera back to her, but she obviously thought I had misinterpreted her remark to mean that I wasn't welcome to look at the other photos, so she insisted it was perfectly fine. Then I felt like I had to look at them or it would seem I wasn't interested! It reminded me of Waiting for Godot.
The Tuesday afternoon class is small, and I didn't want to go in late. By the time I finally managed to leave, I was already twenty minutes late, so I just decided to head home. On the way, I saw the strange sight of this little girl writing a long message on the sidewalk in white chalk. Her characters were incredibly beautiful and regular and precise, better than mine will probably EVER be. And it's a far cry from all the sidewalk-chalkings I've ever seen kids her age do in the U.S.! I didn't take time to read the message, though, because I was really tired and didn't want to get drawn in and more bemused than I was already.At home, I had been planning to do work but instead I fretted about North Korean nukes. I had been planning to go to the literature class at seven, but then somehow I didn't. I went to have pulled noodles for dinner, which usually cheers me up, but I was having a bad communication day, left my favorite noodle chef looking bewildered, and ended by feeling awkward and sad. It was the kind of day that makes you go sigh.
My news pick for yesterday... hm. Serial rapist in Arizona seems too gloomy (he told his victims they were under arrest, put them in handcuffs, and then did his thing). No one even reported it because they thought it was a real policemen and no one would believe them. So I think I'm going to go for the Lesotho Promise, a $12 million diamond. The article is very awkwardly written, but diamonds are better than bombs and rapists.
Oh but geez, I just have to say that CRice comes off sounding like a weird combination of shifty and dumb in trying to make a statement about NK. First she says that "there is no intention to invade or attack them. So they have that guarantee. ... I don't know what more they want." The she says that Bush "never takes any of his options off the table. But is the United States, somehow, in a provocative way, trying to invade North Korea? It's just not the case." Maybe what they want is to know that the U.S. won't invade North Korea, somehow, in an unprovocative way either. Maybe they want some of those options off the table! Not that I sympathize with them but I don't see how we sound any better.
And then: Rice said Iraq "was a very special situation."...."Iraq was a desire to finally deal with a threat that had been there for too long," she said. And the North Korean threat hasn't been around way too long? How could this garbage possibly sound to them anyway? Like deceitful the self-justifying crap it is. I think a good analysis of the situation is here: in short, everyone screwed up.
But I'm going to go back to thinking about gigantic diamonds, and stop slamming the government that's paying my rent and the government that's paying my tuition, however richly they both deserve it.
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