En route to the
airport, stuck at just the wrong second on the Tian Bei Lu and Jing Mi Lu
intersection. A cop car with flashing
lights has just turned to the left in front of us. No one cares.
A red JD.com truck just headed off to the right. In the time it takes to read about me sitting
there, it hardly counts as a moment. Waiting the two minutes it took to write the passage were interminable.
More shops are coming.
We are passing what will apparently be a new Carfour. Well.
Who am I to say the neighborhood doesn’t need one? I’ll probably be reluctantly queuing up there, for bulk toilet paper.
Talking to a friend over lunch yesterday about his twenty-year
college reunion out in Sichuan how nostalgic and dreamy it had all been for him. I’ve missed every reunion that’s ever been
clocked over here in Beijing.
Vicariously, I imagined what it had been like for him. He was back in Chengdu and he, like me,
hadn’t been to the city in over twenty-years.
Many people had done well. Many
had become officials of one sort or another.
They were necessarily all biding their time now, he said. More than ever, people were disinclined to do
anything that might interrupt a happy retirement. The country needed big things done, but
nothing big would, he reckoned, actually be done, until more clarity had been established.
Now. Is it a now-now time’? One assumes a different
posture when one writes about the present. Now . . . this means describing the
food cart going up past me to the left of my aisle seat and pausing at the front
of the cabin. It’s 9:00AM. Air China will either offer gruel or sprayed
scrambled eggs and a hot dog. I knew
this when I got my coffee and bought a sandwich and a juice for the ride.
Miles of moving walkways and inter-terminal trains, cleared immigration,
cleared customs, and my bus departs in five minutes. It is now, again. I’m on a mid afternoon ride
into Seoul. The low coastal hills are
still mostly green, but there is some color that has now started to turn. It’s autumn here too though the weather seems
mild. The bridges are all painted blue
and green and crisscross over the low
lying towns without any logic. I wonder
if that is a field of rice with that now golden color down below to the
right. What does “barley” look
like? I’ve the front seat on the bus and
though it’s hazy out, I can see for miles in every direction.
If we had a hazy day like this in Beijing we’d have alarm
bells and masks out, but because it is Seoul, you’re wiling to imagine that it
isn’t pollution, but rather just a hazy day.
Then of course you consider that what has properly happened is that the nasty
weather of Beijing has just blown over here on this fine day. I like the Han River though. It’s off to the right. It’s big.
It is central. It defines the
capital. I’ll have a view of it from my
room, tonight.
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