contradictions & homecomings

I can't read my own blog in China. "We're sorry. This site cannot be found. Please check the spelling of the address and try again". But I think I can still post, though now there is even less guarantee of grammatical accuracy. I'm not that freewheeling, unfortunately, painting in the dark.

Yesterday I sat at home and read a little Lonely Planet, ate some home-made dishes, and observed my extended family's shades of paranoia and overconcern regarding my safety, travel feasibility, the unchanging Dao of getting ripped off in China. My head bobs among their torrent of worst-and-most-probable-case-scenarios in vague incomprehension. I can't tell to whom or what I should listen/not listen. It's exhausting precisely because they mean so well and swim so well in this crazy tank whose familiarity I've outgrown and that has decidedly outgrown me and my antiquated decade.

It is a passive life, any way I look at it. My mother reminds me to be patient and understanding. I just want to walk out the door and see things for myself, without an escort or ride or a billfold of warnings. The oppressive heat and humidity also made me lazy to go out the last couple of days, but now thankfully it's the beginning tide of autumn and it is not quite so relentless. My eyes sting here at this faraway, smokey internet "bar" and I miss insistently my little pool at home with the placid face and an hour's luxury of quiet and relaxation I'd adopted as sole escape from 2nd year Japanese stew. Though as oddities go, I wrote a nonsensical entry in my new "Night Hawks"-emblazoned travel journal entirely in pidgin French and cobbled Japanese. I wanted something no casual traveler on the much delayed and swelteringly awaited plane could read. Herodotus sits on the night stand, but I have no heart for him at the moment. There is too much banqueting and inquiet due to this tension between selfish desire and loss of will and self-determination.

Everywhere my kind goes, there is Horace's long wagging tongue, a tablet in the sand with some unfitting name: you are and are not what I know to be mine. (pretentious, but I can't approximate it otherwise)

Buying a cellphone this morning was quite an odyssey. My cousin S took me scooting around town on his nimble little moto-bike and we covered so much distance covered in so much dust, we literalised Su Dongpo's elegy for his wife, but not quite so lovely.

A Dream: on the twentieth night of the first month in the year of 1075,

to the tune of "River Port Lady" by Su Dongpo

Ten years between the living and the dead,
a haze of rain.

I do not think;
I do not forget.

Lone grave a thousand miles from here,
where can I speak of the cold?

If we met again, you would not know me:
a faceful of dust, hair of hoar and frost.

Night came, I drifted home
suddenly in a dream,

The small carved window, you
coming your hair.

We looked at one another
without words, but tears, a thousand trails.

I expect this year after year,
the place where my heart breaks,

Bright moon over short pines
on the mountain, night.

(translated loosely by Luowa and "tears, a thousand trails" from sketchy Chinese site with original poem plus pretty savoury translation with no credit byline)

Over a lunch of abundant soy pork bones and Northeast cold plates, I gave him one of those wonderous Shiseido water-infused cleansing cloths. It was as refreshing as the first time I tried it with great satisfaction at Narita, after which I'd bought a stack for my upcoming trip with JN around Dust Country and the mouldy fold of mountains.

I thought cellphones would be cheap and easy here, but every one costs at least 80 dollars. The plan to get a working piece of plastic wasn't going well: we'd toured numerous cavernous cellphone stores, peered through what felt like national treasuries of flourescent content, but everything was expensive, even for US standards. And some of the most ludicrously ticketed ones, the 4-5000 RMB ones were particularly hideous. They looked like Soviet era personal radios. I wanted either something supercheap and disposable that came with a simple pay-as-one-goes plan or a really good deal on a nice one I could import to the US to replace my increasingly croaking specimen that came free with my first phone plan. The cute l'il pink ones were steep and made within the country (like everything else, but from where do the components and design come?) and the ugly functional ones were ugly and expensive as well. The fancy ones with cameras that I might want to use abroad were unaffordable and laughably masculine: everything black and blue and chrome. Is there no middle ground between Hello Kitty on holiday and 30-something computer programmer?

At the most promising and largest emporium, we browsed each glass counter with great, but rapidly diminishing patience. We met a young salesman in the standard white dacron shirt and black poly pants who explained to us in a militant draw that the cheapest thing for what we needed was a white Sony Ericsson. He showed it to us. It was handsome enough, but I had a feeling something cheaper was out there. Word on the street had it that Siemens was merging with some other company and so their flash phones were heavily discounted. The ones we saw were few and ill-abused for being display models. Looks like everybody in town gets the newsletter.

It was remarkable, but every new counter we came to we saw the same extremely "warm-sentimented" young salesman. The store was huge, at least the size of a few small supermarkets, but though we were pretty sure we hadn't been followed, every time we looked up from assessing a new counter, there were those dark pants and that white shirt (though all the sales staff wear white shirts) AGAIN... and that face! Ah! it's you again! He had us cornered. My cousin and I looked at each other, stunned, time and time again. It became a running joke. We left the store eventually partly because we were seriously alarmed by his helpfulness and his bearing, which unfortunately along with his voice did not match the touching words that came out of his mouth.

In the end, we had to go back to that store because they really did have the best deal, as not-great as it was. We had debated this: we did not want to surrender to him by giving him our business after such an overexposure to his face and pitch. Luckily, when we went back, we successfully avoided his eagle gaze till the checkout line. I averted my eyes as soon as I saw his head peregrinate in our general direction and giggled instead with S about What a Close Shave...

But everywhere here it is the same: stores hand out very promising flyers with delectable deals printed in a dizzying matrix of numbers and colours, but it is only after you have marched down those unworking escalator steps that feel unreasonably heavy on the heel, past the blaring loudspeakers and their decibellically diabolical spiel of Sure Deals, and plunked yourself into the sweltering belly of the massive market that you are told (after wrestling with a number of other customers) by a salesperson the flyer's advertisements are a week out of date and that you need a down payment of 600 RMB if you buy the 111 RMB phone, which happens to be the most basic Nokia models old people prefer...

Welcome home, my child who favors the ends of the world.