A Week Slipped By (Part I)

Time goes unrecorded, like the span between "happily ever after" in first installment and "here we go again" in the sequel. I presume that CB doesn't strike anyone as particularly angsty, but still it's the underlying tension of holding sadness and loneliness at bay which keeps me writing every day. For now, that has evaporated and I realize my shoulders are fully unknotted for the first time in months. (The back-rub might also have had something to do with that too...)

Still, in the interest of tidyness, and so you'll know what I've been up to, I thought I'd mention the highlights of what we've been up to lately.

The Friday before Christmas I biked to my Chinese lesson. The new poem I was to memorize had a really good first line: "You ask my return date--no date yet." (Sounds better in Chinese of course.) I don't have a return date yet either. I say tentatively late June or early July, and it would feel better if I had a specific date to get used to. But what stops me is the worry that there will come some point when either Colin or I (or both) can't take it any longer, and I simply have to go home.

Anyway, as I was biking home I happened to hear my phone ring and it was WW. "Why didn't you answer my text message?" she demanded. Probably something to do with the fact that I was in the middle of my forty-five minute bike ride home… In any case, she was inviting me and Colin to dinner that night with her and YHz.

We went. It was a hot-pot restaurant. Surprisingly, if one isn't took picky about what the broth is made of, hot-pot has a lot of good vegetarian options. Colin was impressed.

WW said that Colin looked like Karl Marx. (The picture at left is from here.) I think from a Chinese person that's a nice compliment! In any case, it was really funny.

I did running translations, which wasn't really that hard once I got the hang of it.

Both YHz and WW teased us and said we would have beautiful babies and that we should have at least two, and send pictures. (They each have one only, both daughters, and seemed envious at the fact that we were potentially free to have two or more.) Colin weathered this teasing very well, and the whole thing went just fine. Also, I got Colin to show off all the Chinese I had taught him to date, and he did brilliantly, getting many compliments on his accent.

Colin said that it was clear YHz liked me very much.

We found out that WW is a great admirer of Hilary Clinton, which was very funny somehow.

Saturday was not an especially eventful day except that we tried to go and explore Chaoyang district. Apparently we went to the wrong part, and there was nothing much there but a long line of depressing bars and a series of nested shopping malls selling nothing we wanted.

One thing we did manage to acquire was a small metal head with four faces. I bargained for it from one of the "Tibetan" vendors that sell junky jewelry from yellow blankets spread out on the sidewalk. Not all the heads were metal: there were some decaying heads of actual animals as well… not sure which animals… I am not good at bargaining, and never manage to down to much below 60% of the asking price. So it was more expensive than it should have been, but at least I bargained some.

The head is a nice size to fit in the palm of one's hand, and has a pleasing weight. I'm not sure what its story is, but underneath it says in characters blurred (no doubt) through the process of multiple copying: Imperial Goods of the Qianlong Emperor. So it must be a copy of some little objet of his.

Another strange thing that happened on Saturday was that my favorite Korean restaurant, which we had gone to only a few days before, suddenly got crushed by a pneumatic wrecking crane. By the time we saw it, it was pretty much just a pile of rubble. It was so strange, so completely without warning.

Sunday, Christmas Eve, we went to see the Forbidden City. Considering that I had been there before, I felt I was not as good of a guide as I should have been. My teacher AL, during Friday's lesson, had suggested going along the east side of the complex, so we did that. But overall, there were some worthwhile things on the west side I regretted missing. Too tired to go back though. For some reason, the taxi brought us to the north gate, and since we were planning to take the subway home, we went straight through and didn't backtrack. Still, we saw some neat stuff, bronzes, and Tang sculptures. I always have a particular soft-spot for Tang sculptures, even though it's so cliché. I just like them. The ox-cart with its magical door turned out especially well, I thought.




We ate instant noodles in the emperor's flower garden.

We got really tired out.


Also, we (and especially I) got very angry at people trying to talk to us in English and scam us. To the point where being addressed in English made us instantly wave our hands and cry in chorus, "Bu yao, bu yao!" (Don't want it!). One offended young lady, ("Hello: where are you from?") said disgustedly that she wasn't a tour guide, but that didn't cause us to stop ignoring her. I felt guilty--what if she really was just a random friendly person hoping to practice some English--but still angry too. Why should any random person feel they have a right to ask me where I'm from and force me to help them practice their English. I should be like the wife of a Professor I once knew who would tell people (in Chinese) that she was from Iceland and didn't speak any English. Besides, I think the girl was actually one of the fake art students, and probably was still trying to scam us.

On the way out, we paid a little extra to climb one of the gate towers, but it turned out to be the wrong one, not much view at all, and a lot of scamming tourist crap (get your picture take with "the emperor") at the top. We went grouchily down and felt sick of all commercial activity.

Still, we thought we'd take a turn around the square and try to find some little red books (no luck on that, by the way--they're expensive and hard to find nowadays it seems!). We got more and more angry at the Chinese merchant way of harassing shoppers, which on a slow-business winter day was aggressive bordering on desperate. Ugh.

The only store we enjoyed being in was a grubby hole-in-the-wall "2 RMB" store--yeah, basically a Chinese dollar store. We were both tickled, and made many hilarious purchases, including a deck of nudy-girl cards, a chin- and ear-warmer, an almanac style tear-off 2007 calendar, and more. Most fun store in the city, as far as we were concerned.

I also learned what my favorite Chinese pastry is called. After looking for them longingly all week, we finally saw someone selling them at a big table. (Of course we got one.) Everyone was crowding around! I asked, what are these called, but didn't quite understand the answer. I asked for clarification, and a helpful bystander tugged on his earlobe, grinning, and I figured it out: they're called "Sweet Ears," because they're kind of ear-shaped when you think of it. Good to know!

Snapped this picture of Colin on the subway, and really like it.

We'd planned to have our Christmas Eve dinner at a good vegetarian restaurant in the Qinghua Science Park. I'd never been there, but a friend with good taste had recommended it. It looked nice. But they were having some kind of Christmas Eve activity, and apparently reservations were mandatory, grumble. Tired and discouraged, we got a cab to the Famous Chef from Jiangnan restaurant I had gone to on Thanksgiving.

That's a good restaurant for holidays and special occasions. It just never disappoints. They even served me a small complimentary dish of turkey--real turkey! imagine--with a dish of opalescent sauce. There had been some worry about whether they had enough vegetarian stuff for Colin, but there shouldn't have been. There were more than enough choices, including an entrée-style vegetarian roast duck that was beautiful enough to get its own picture on the menu.

The meal improved our mood immeasurably. (Five courses and drinks for about the price of lunch at Panera!) But unless you've been here, it's hard to realize how grating it gets going to tourist sites, where you get picked out of the crowd and approached every five steps just because being a foreigner makes you look a like an easy mark. It's tempting but useless to get mad at any one of them, because the 389th one to approach you is no more culpable than the first. I could tell I was still jumpy, because halfway through the meal, a restaurant employee in a Santa suit came over and offered me a Christmas wand. Totally without thinking I snapped "Bu yao!" He was totally at a loss, and I confess I felt guilty about it for days afterward. We were the only foreigners there, and here he was--his special job was help us to celebrate our Western holiday, and I shot him down without even a no thank you. I don't even know why, except maybe I was having a flashback to how sometimes in European restaurants people selling roses for deaf orphans get in, hand you a rose first, and then demand payment with a heavy dose of guilt-trip.

Sigh. I felt so bad when I saw the poor Santa again on the way out… Colin said to comfort me that maybe because I hadn't taken the wand, someone got it who would give it to their little kid who really wanted it and then the kid would run around ceaselessly, waving the wand and screaming "Merry Christmas" at the top of his lungs, annoying his parents tremendously. For some reason this bit of silliness made me feel a little better.

Monday, Christmas Day. We slept in. No stockings, no Christmas tree, but a modest little pile of presents. Christmas is such a family holiday for us both that it felt very strange to be just the two of us. We opened our presents, which were all small so as to be portable, but quite touching. I've felt for a long time about Christmas presents that I care very little about getting something I want or anything like that. But I like Christmas presents a lot, because I like the feeling that someone thought of me. People always say "It's the thought that counts" as a euphemism for "I hate it." But for me, it's really true. Homemade presents, presents that are just especially me-like, even if not something I need, or presents that have some personal meaning, that's really what I like best. (Note: Mom's knitted leg-warmers prominent on me in the above picture!)

One of the sweet things that Colin brought me was a big candle in a glass jar like the ones we had when we lived together but Christmas wreath scented. It made the room smell just like it would if we'd had a Christmas tree. (We could have had a fake tree fairly cheaply, but neither of us are into them--lack of the right smell, for one thing--and real trees seemed a lost cause.) It's burning now, and making me smile.

Of course the best present Colin gave me was being here, which was a little hard for him in fact--it was his first Christmas away from home! We talked to my parents and his mom and Skype, which made us both feel a little better, but we promised ourselves we'd have a more family-intensive Christmas next year.

Next year. It's so pleasant to think of it. Forward-thinking types like ourselves, I sometimes think, have a worse time in the anticipation of hardship than actually living through it. Last year I spent inordinate amounts of time struggling with the dread of being apart, but this year I spend more time day-dreaming about how this time next year we'll be together again. Funny!

In the afternoon, Colin said he wasn't feeling too well. At first, I thought maybe it was psychosomatic homesickness, but actually he really did come down with something and even had a fever. So we had a quiet and restful day at home. Instead of having another fancy dinner, therefore, we went to the Yonghe Dawang across the street. I've mentioned it before, possibly mispelled--wherever you see a KFC, you also see a Yonghe Dawang, offering a healthy delicious Chinese fast-food alternative. On this particular occasion, I discovered that they have really good vegetarian fake-meat and noodle dish. That's all it took to make Colin happy, woozy and under the weather as he was. I had one too, and it was quite a nice meal, though a far cry from most people's Christmas dinner!