They Were Asserting in Lingala

I checked the website.  It’s usually accurate.  The kids school suggested that the gym facilities would be open during the New Year break from six to eight in the morning.  This message, precisely what I hoped to see, seemed too good to be true.   And it was.  I rolled up to the gate, as I always do, when they raise the gate without a second thought.  Today though, the guard stepped forward to speak to me.  I tried to invoke the authority of the web site, for a moment or two.  Another guard was brought out to reiterate though that the whole building was closed.  “We reopen on the nineteenth.”  I wished them all a “happy New Year’s Eve” at least, which they reciprocated and I backed the car up and headed home considering the consolation of at least having tried.

I haven’t done my homebody callisthenic routine in a while.  Bee bop is usually what I want to hear when I’m banging away at emails, no words to distract consciousness, hard bop wasn’t going to work for pushup motivation.  And where as at the gym I just have a simple mix of thousands of songs I throw on to set it off, I tried now, to find something deliberate.  I wound up searching out the eerie, incandescent, Kinshasa groove of Mbongwana Star with their gritty Congolese scenes of black and white alleys, purple smoke, knee flexing dance, lumbering space men.  As I’ve done before I was soon yelling out absurd manipulations in English of things they were asserting in Lingala.

Now it’s a long drive out beyond the surety of the ring roads.  Passed the hulking power plant and then an abandoned factory as one heads south along the fifth ring road.  I’m impolitely on one call and then another with people who have no concern for the fact that it is effectively “Christmas Eve” here in China this afternoon.  No proper Chinese person is doing any work.  I, of course, will never be Chinese, and work on.  I hit the mute button and confirm for my wife that we are indeed taking the G3 Highway south, “Yes, this one here.  Now just continue on for seventy kilometers.” 

Hebei is dry and yellow.  The day is cloudy.  But it does not feel especially toxic.  All natural melancholy.  There is smoke up ahead.  Someone suggests it might be a factory, but it is only the burning of farm waste on an artificial mound, showing me that, yes, there are still proper Chinese people working, burning waste, the night before the celebration.  Fireworks now above this village and that one.  And a solitary oil rig or two, the sort you might have seen in Texas in the 1940s, spinning slowly like a clumsy dinosaur bicycle on its back.  Next to no other cars are on the highway.  China is strange when it feels bereft of people.  My wife drives slowly.  Someone passes doing twice our speed.

Thursday, 02/15/18