Much They Understand Everything

Well, Thursday is your day.  I’ll take it.  Roof top place in San Li Tun.  Why do we still come to San Li Tun?  It used to be gritty and, now it’s antiseptic.  People come through.  That’s good enough perhaps.  People like to watch people.  I suppose that’s all the reason you need.  There are lots of young people who are quite happy to bounce around this place.  What was cool has been mandated as cool by the authorities, invested in as cool by the developers and so is necessarily uncool. 

This roof top place has a flashy menu and I’ve now confirmed, uninspired food.  There is a waiter who seems Eastern European who is speaking good Chinese.  He intrigues me.  I recognize the former Maître D of what had been the city’s poshest French bistro.  Bald, French, not so young any more.  Does he work here?  I can’t tell.  I consider making eye contact, starting a conversation.  He’s talking to a loud guy from L.A. who talks about Beijing the way people do when they have been here for a few months and need to let people know how much they understand everything. 

I requested and they’ve moved me to a couch area that lets me look down on all the pedestrian traffic below.  James Baldwin used to do this, with his fingers propping up his cheek into one of his enormous eyes, sitting there on the Terrace of the Village Gate.  Music comes on suddenly.  Clichéd lounge loops, amplifying the aspirational quality of this perch.  I consider telling them to turn it off, but that’s a bit too imperious for this public venue, even if it is my day. 

There is the wonderful line from “In My Bed” on the first Amy Winehouse album, wherein she comments that “everything is slowing down.”  That’s about right.  Life is somewhere over there, with those people, perhaps them.  Not here at this roof top.  Look at the silly restaurant down there, that tries to be a diner, that tries to be something important and authentic.  Perhaps someone had high-hopes for that facsimile.  Over to my hard left there is a place that wants to suggest Kowloon neon.  But it isn’t neon, it’s just wall paper.  Dozens of people are chatting away, outside.  Does everything necessarily seem more derivative as we get older?

I need to head home.  The guy just tried to take my plate of spinach pasta.  Slow down bro.  Amy and I are taking it slow on purpose. This music is trying so hard to reach my core.  It’s knocking on the reinforced steel door.  There is a minor descent and a voice that is almost credible.  But the door is encrypted by logic your efforts cannot pick so simply.  “Stay out.  I know what you are.  You weren’t made for me.”

It will be a ride home to remember.  Robert Service “Trotsky” has waxed to poignancy.   It isn’t graceful.  It isn’t artful.  But the leaden point is noted:  Trotsky wasn’t overly concerned with the interiors of those around him.  The world around him?  Sure.  He was fearless and recondite with voice and pen and prognostication.  But him or her?  That guy?  His son?  His old comrade?  Trotsky struggled to empathize and connect emotionally with most of the immediate world around him, and in so doing missed Stalin’s treacherous potential until it was too late.

Thursday 4/19/18