My Adventure Concluded

It is a great relief to be back in my own room again.

After I made the previous post, I checked the lost and found again (still no luck) and then after some reflection wrote an e-mail to Pillar. Pillar is my classical Chinese tutor, a friendly and very conscientious young graduate student, who was expecting an e-mail from me and probably would be checking. You might not think it would be such a rare thing to expect someone to be checking their e-mail on a Thursday evening, but although people's cell phones are constantly with them here, internet access can be restricted, inconvenient, unreliable. Things are done through cell phones, which is a convenient limitation on international communication, given how expensive overseas calls are. In any case, the other advantage of e-mailing Pillar was that my classmate Hammer had mentioned that he might be hanging out with Pillar that evening.

And why, of all the people I know in the city, did it feel most comfortable to impose on Hammer? When Hammer introduced me to Pillar, only the third time Hammer and I had ever met, he introduced me as tong bao, the one who comes from the same womb as I did. Actually in Chinese it is a perfectly conventional term meaning something like "my fellow countryman (or woman)", as I was perfectly well aware. But that didn't stop me from feeling small familial glow when he said that. And in truth, Hammer is my brother in study. Our areas are so similar that we'd step on each other's toes, if it weren't for the fact that our backgrounds, goals, views of the world, and methodologies are completely different. We can talk about texts. We indulge in a little friendly competition and sizing each other up. But we don't have to be at each other's throats. We both feel safe to share what we know.

Besides, I think Hammer has been in China long enough (seven years) that he has absorbed the Chinese way of closeness with one's friends. And yet, it has also made him almost larger than life in his American-ness, an ex-pat contrary motion of personality so to speak. Or maybe he just reflects the influence of a ruder side of Chinese manhood than I ever see. In any case, he can be most coarse and unmannerly at times, and I have no more attraction to him than I do for my actual brother. (My actual brother is a study in refinement by comparison!) However, while he is not always the most satisfying company, Hammer can be entertaining when he bothers to try, and underneath that he strikes me as deeply trustworthy. Not to mention that he lives just down the street from the library.

The solution came together perfectly, though the frenzy of worry that my e-mail provoked in Pillar was a perfect example of why I didn't feel like going to any of my Chinese friends. However, he dispatched Hammer to the library with precise directions about where to find me, and I was both glad and deeply sheepish at seeing him. Hammer persuaded the guard at the lost and found to get bring his enormous bolt-cutters, and come with us to my locker. Most fortunately, I remembered with certainty its exact location. I floundered for a minute when it came to describing its contents in Chinese. Blue backpack, yes, but there wasn't much inside it... The guard with the bolt-cutters already poised around the lock hesitated. Two brown notebooks, I finally stammered out. This was more to satisfy Hammer than the guard I think! Hammer is used to a higher level of distrust from people than I am. The guard was perfectly ready to cut the thing with only my "blue backpack" but looked deferentially to Hammer. It was kind of funny.

It was a great relief to have my wallet and phone back, and to not have to carry my computer under my arm any more. We made our triumphant way out of the library with "closing time" music just starting up behind us. This was when I had to explain to Hammer that ALL my keys were gone. He wouldn't hear of me getting a hotel room, as I had sort of been planning to do. He lives on a Chinese income and doesn't quite realize how far my stipend goes here. It had been such a relief to see him that I didn't really want to decline his offer of hospitality. Of course, we had to walk all the way to his house, but he pushed his bike with a reasonable approximation of gallantry. I could tell it didn't come completely naturally, but it was there. I was glad I had been there before, so that I wasn't discomfited by the series of shabby alleys we had to make our way through.

The street outside his complex was exceedingly lively for 10 PM in China. I had confessed to not having had dinner but had denied being hungry. Still, he greeted by name the guy who was roasting meat on a little portable grill, and enthusiastically recommended his fare to me. "I'm going to have some anyway," he said, which overcame my resistance. We got drinks from the little wide-open convenience store nearby, which was populated by an entire extended family, all of whom were on familiar terms with Hammer and had to be introduced to me. Then we sat on a couple of low stools (I mean, like six inches off the ground) eating delicious cumin-spiced chicken on skewers and talking (in English) about the life of scholar, trading quotations from Confucius and Mencius (in Chinese), while the man grilling the meat and the family in the store eavesdropped with wonder and amusement. Hammer seemed to know by name every person who went by, and was liked by them all. It was such a small neighborhood feeling, I felt quite amazed. As if I had suddenly wandered into a completely different city.

Lately I have come to realize that a city has many faces, and which one will predominate depends most heavily on where you choose to live, though also partly on who you are. There's Hammer in this cheerful squalor (we were entertained watching the denizens of the "beauty parlor" across the way, and Hammer said filthy things about them in English though I am always doubting his confidence that no one understands), a neighborhood curiosity eating street food and living in an apartment... well, we'll come to that. There's the Lama in the cleaned up hutongs, which are foreigner friendly but still underlyingly very Chinese, an area full of cool coffeeshops and quiet places to sit and drink and talk, casual restaurants with delicious food, bright colors to delight the eye and long winding walks through lively alleys to distract the mind. But where am I? Where have I been? Never mind, next time I live abroad, I'll have the leisure to choose more carefully. Confucius says, make your home in the neighborhood of benevolence...

Hammer was the benevolent one yesterday, though. For someone so generally boorish and intolerant, he was remarkably patient with my fairly brainless state. I almost wandered off and got lost in the complex while he brought his bike around, but he kept his sharp tongue in check and only laughed at me a little bit.

He had a fold-out cot. When folded out, it filled the entirety of his sitting room. He shuffled sheets and blankets around. To the great wonder and curiosity of the family in the little store, I had bought a toothbrush. "I'm sorry," I wailed half-jokingly, "I am totally ruining your reputation here!" The bathroom had a squat toilet, the shower was an afterthought, just a showerhead, no curtain and the entire bathroom smaller than a shower stall anyway, just one sink (in the kitchen). The kitchen just as rudimentary as mine but grubbier. A mosquito coil burning with a not-unpleasant smell. The place was a bit small for two. He sat me at his computer with an interesting flashcard program he has--to keep me out of the way while he set up the bedding. We talked for a while, companionably enough. I looked at some things he had written in Chinese, and at some of his books.

Around midnight, I finally lay on the "cot"--a wooden board on a frame, the hardest bed I've ever slept on if you can call it a bed, but padded with the double layer of his comforter--still wearing all my clothes, which were fortunately quite comfortable. Though of course if I'd worn jeans I wouldn't have gotten into this mess in the first place. He retired to the bedroom to read classical Chinese before bed. He is ten times the scholar I am, I'm afraid. I think I fell asleep before he even put out the lights.

But I woke up only a few hours later because it was raining. Hard. The sound of rain is very different in his two-story building than in my 18 -story one. Rain on the roof. Rain pouring off the roof and hitting the ground in a loud continuous spatter. I woke up all the way and full of almost unbearable anxiety. Landlady! Keys! Argh, and I had forgotten to post the update saying that I was fine--what if my dad read my post and worried himself to death! My classes tomorrow! What if Pillar was put out! What if I had to go to the bathroom, and woke Hammer up! What if I fell sleep and snored! And so on. One thing that also occurred to me: it was a very good thing that me and my computer were not out on some park bench.

I must have dozed off some, but I spent quite a lot of time conscious of being awake and lying in bed. Around 5 the birds started up. The construction noises started at 6. Around 7 I got up and did things. Hammer slept on oblivious. At 7:30 I could hardly bear not to be up and about and trying to solve my key problems. I timidly attempted to wake him up but he was out cold. So I left him a chatty note and struck out on my own.

No sign of the keys still, but I called my landlady and she was most understanding. She would copy the key this afternoon, she said. I had coffee and a sandwich for breakfast in the coffeeshop where I sometimes go to work. Then I went and bought myself a $10 pair of jeans. You'd think that after 24 hours in the same clothes, it would be the shirt that'd be unbearable, but in my case you'd be wrong. I needed pockets, even though I didn't have anything to put in them. I needed to look at least partially presentable. To kill time, I went to calligraphy class, then lunch, then the library. I was too tired to work though, so I started packing up. Just then I got a call from the landlady. Could I come pick up the key at such and such an address. Gladly! So I jumped in a taxi, made it there and back in time to get reacquainted with my apartment and even shower before my meeting with YHz, had a terrifically self-indulgent evening, and here I am. Barely worked a lick all day, but feeling incredibly grateful not to be homeless anymore.

This key? I'm guarding it with my life. I'm taking a leaf out of RS's book and getting an enormously long and large chain and chaining it to my body. I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm doing something.

And people who pick up someone else's keys, but fail to turn them into the lost and found? I wish Dante had invented a suitably horrible punishment for them in the inferno, because that's where they deserve to be.