Warped Mirror Memory

I can remember going and visiting that Pakistani embassy over there, nineteen years ago.  One of my classmates from Fletcher had us over to a dinner there.  There were guest from a number of countries in attendance as I recall.  South Korea, Spain, Germany and Indonesia along with myself and my wife with the U.S. passports.  And the classmate from Pakistan was frustrated because of some slight on the part of the American government and his tone was not of anger but of profound humiliation  “All we’d ask for from our allies is some respect.” 

Suharto had just been overthrown as I recall.  Indonesia’s future was completely unraveling at that moment, as I recall.  Now with twenty years of relative stability, relative prosperity it is difficult I think to really remember how uncertain things were.  This other classmate from Jakarta may or may not have been associated with the Suharto regime as anything other than a citizen, but he was shaken and it was unnerving to hear him say that the one minute he had a stable pathway within his world and now it was upended. 

Beijing can leap out unexpectedly with its warped mirror, memory trove after all this years.  Some memory long buried suddenly rises up, unsolicited because of how the sun hits a building as you drive by it.  Much of the cityscape is bland and disposable, but the blocks remain and the names remain and the arteries’ and central organs are comparatively immutable.

What the hell is this thing they’re building now off to the right on the airport expressway here in Lido?  One can only imagine this will mean dozens more of these scale buildings here in this used-to-be-quiet neighborhood, now that this has been approved. And to think that this overbuilt madness feels like overbuilt madness but that at some point in the future it will simply be another memory of this city when it was quaint, before it was a built out to accommodate sixty million people and extend to an area the size of Connecticut, such as what they're planning.

It’s been said that a pre Colombian squirrel might have once upon a time been able to scamper up a tree in the Bronx and jump with ease from tree to tree without ever needing to descend until he reached Chicago.  Beijing is too arid to have ever had tree cover like that even when it was still a Yen Kingdom backwater.  Will buildings someday serve as the canopy that thick, for the city this place is becoming?   These are to be cities like the world hasn’t seen yet.  And people will burn with curious nostalgia for all that is before me now, just like I do for the Beijing of 1917.

Tuesday, 12/05/17