Trees That Tall

Over to Xuanwumen on a Saturday.  It’s so rare that someone asks to meet on the west side of town.  Optimists need not apply.  It wasn’t twenty minutes to get across town.  The full half hour was required.  Texting and texting again that I’m en route, in traffic, will be there soon.  One gets to go through Tiananmen and consider its grand vacancy and further on spy ghostly Republican era buildings that still stand on the west side of town, beneath the glass towers, beside the everyman housing of the early eighties. 

Returning now before Qianmen, circling on the flow of the ring roads.  I’m surprised by how tall the blooming apple trees are beside the east second ring road, above Changanjie, in front of the DRC accommodations. Trees that tall suggest how long it is now that Beijing has worked on beautification, since it ended the program of radicalization. This road used to have so many embarrassingly ugly constructions.  Trees all seemed new and fragile.  That is not the case anymore.

What is this confrontational building?  Some government office, singularly committed to the portrayal of impenetrability.  One doesn’t come to these buildings to debate.  Openness, transparency are not even faintly suggested It is the same with government buildings across the country.  They testify to august might, infallibility and the subtext is fear.  Just like our friend Ta-Nehisi Coates points about when he considers the bravado of African American hip hop culture: what rappers are really saying is that they are afraid of bodily harm.  Government buildings in China look unimpeachably mighty as they fear that chaos is imminent. 

Back now to the same outdoor seat I had when I visited this place the last time.  Before the waiter could leave from sitting me down, I told him what I wanted.  It was the same salad and the same vitamin drink I had eight days ago when I was here.  There is a table of laughing twenty somethings beside me.  Another young table is before me.   They all seem so marvelously carefree.  I remember when going out to a restaurant that way felt like an assertion, more than a necessity. 

Getting here I passed the main square where a group of men with high power phallic cameras were aggressively photographing the young woman that walked by, the one’s whom they deemed attractive.  I watched for a while as I chatted with someone on the phone.  And I strongly considered walking over to them and photographing them photographing people, just to annoy them.  If they photographed my wife or my daughter I would do that and more.  But they hadn’t.  And as one so often does in China, it decided that their behaviors didn’t ultimately concern me.