But I Was Sitting There

Talks on China.  The discourse of decades that is never completed.  Chats are like a chance to practice a sport one has skill at.  With most people, they generally remain interesting.  One chat usually informs the next in ways unexpected.  Last night a friend who knows China well was insisting that young people who want a crack at internationalism must leave early.  Otherwise they will return home to China later and it will be as if the never left. 

Tonight I dined with some business contact who suggested that many people they knew were against ever leaving at all.  Twenty-somethings who were convinced that there was no good reason to leave.  China had it all.  In the middle of all this, I dined with my niece.  She left China when she was eighteen.  Now she is continuing, in grad school at Columbia in New York.  I’m so proud of her.  And I also wonder sometimes, if this is a brief sojourn for her overseas or if she will use this a spring board steep herself in America and never return. 

Tonight, Japanese food.  It wasn’t very good.  I didn’t pick the place.  It was someone else’s idea of how to please the client.  Of all the international food to eat in China I think Japanese is the most consistently disappointing.  I know what the tastes should be.  And these were not even close.  Cardboard pizza is no fun, middling Indian's a bore.  But bad sashimi is especially revolting.  These oysters should never have been shucked.  This Asahi doesn’t taste a thing like the one I’d have with the aerated head in the Bamboo Lounge of the Miyako Hotel.  I suppose the maodou (aka edamame) were OK.  I’m glad I stopped when I did.  There was a surfeit of food that just kept on coming.   I should have stopped earlier.  But I was sitting there. 

Now I’m in the back of a cab.  We’re driving past lots of people on electric bikes.  Everyone is on an electric bike.  I don’t see anyone peddling.  Wait, there is one person who is using their body to move the vehicle.  Good-on-ya.  This area is filled with traffic, even at 9:00PM, it feels like rush hour.  I’m full of bad Japanese food and sweet sake, trying to reckon with my day, on the ride home from Wang Jing.  Soon, very soon, I shall drift off.

Monday 8/20/18