Yell Out Through the Ages

Ominous rumblings.  I bought a ticket out of town or National Holiday.  I’ve had one and then another person tell me that planes won’t fly that day.  That would most assuredly interrupt my plans to return home.  I suspect I need to call United and ask them, but they are likely to be clueless until it’s too late.  Who do you trust, the cab driver or the airline?  Tricky.  I just called the gal at the United 1K desk.  Tracy was ever so helpful and even put me on hold to check with her supervisor.  "You'll be fine."  It won’t mater what they said if I wind up stranded at the airport. 

I just took a cab all the way rom Wang Jing into the city.  This same cabbie we suggesting it was highly unlikely I’d get all the way in to the east gate of Jing Shan.  We ended up getting there no problem.  But just as we were arriving the people I was to meet called and said, “we can’t get a cab or a Didi."  So I’ve just decided to bail on the sunset from Jing Shan plan and the dinner at the Chengdu City Government special Sichuan restaurant.  We just sped across Fuxingmen out and over to the west second ring road.  All along the way I was marveling at one and another old site that I didn’t properly recognize.  The driver couldn’t confirm if it was Xicheng or Xuanwemen.  (It's Xicheng.) Some other time I should come back here on a bike and take my time. 

Speeding around erhuan now,.  Reluctantly agreed to head up to where they are, at the Olympic Village area.  Doesn’t matter.  They’ll find a place.  That’ll do.  I have a gift for this young couple who have just moved to Beijing.  I’d like them to have a look at the classic book by Jonathan Spence on “The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci.”  He writes so well, the subject is astoundingly interesting and there are some timeless moment from his time in China when he gets home sick that yell out through the ages with irresistible familiarity. 

Heading north now.  Beijing outside erhuan, is only ever so interesting.  All these poor building are disposable.  I marveled today reading Arthur Smith and his assessment of how distinct and how seemingly intractable and cruel China was at the end of the nineteenth century when the Taping Rebellion was still a living memory, when the country was still under Qing rule, when the populace still wore queues and the Confucian exam was still held every year.  It is delightful to consider this time through the familiar perspective of a thoughtful western narrator like Mr. Smith with a fine balance of critical and sympathetic.  Some characteristics appear timeless: people’s delight with invective, the propensity to stand and yell about a wrong, long after it's meaningful, other traits perhaps more mutable, like people’s feudal ideas about women and children and how one is to treat strangers.  And unlike the martial arts approach to street fights that permeates every contemporary Chinese film treatment of the topic, he describes what was likely much more realistic:  two people grabbing each other's queues and pulling at them in an attempt to subdue the other whenever there was a brawl.  It reminds one of the enormity of what the Mao and Jiang generation faced and how imperative extreme, martial, revolutionary change would have seemed, to facilitate change that did ultimately take place.  The painful birth of modern China.

Later last night a remarkable bike ride around the Tsinghua campus.  I hadn't realized it was so vast, or that they'd done as much as they had to modernize it.  We passed on the idea of slurping beers in a Japanese restaurant and rode and rode and rode around with no cars to worry about.  Just want I wanted.  What a lovely couple.  



Sunday 09/22/19