The Citizenry Have Waited

On a plane and shortly I will be landing for the very first time in the city of Beijing  . . . This is terribly exciting . . . and it is the first of April, fool.  It is the three hundred and seventy-ninth time I will land in Beijing.  No worries.  I’m going home.  I have some infectiously perky Guinean Guitar playing up in the ears.  Tired, for sure.  There is a week’s worth of work I’ve yet to do.  And it’s all right.  We’ll get a bit of it done tonight. 

I realize, as I get older, the degree to which I rely on the approximate status quo of international relations.  It has worked within certain predictable parameters for most of my adult life.  I am able to come and go as I please, with little hassle.  It all works remarkably well for an enormous minority of humanity.  This fluidity is buttressed for some and beyond the means of most.  This election cycle more than any I can recall, brings all this to mind. 

Is it ever not nice, to be in Tokyo?  Surely the 1930’s earthquake and the 1940’s carpet-bombing are two times that come to mind.  But generally speaking, it is a consistently pleasant experience, to visit the eastern capital and mill about in a rather different version of urban density, urban refinement.  I always leave with a tinge of regret.

The train out to the airport is so remarkably convenient. From where I stay I need only budget thirty minutes.  And on the train I gaze out at Tokyo’s vast suburbia.  This hamlet and now another has a center square with cherry blossoms fully ablaze.  The citizenry have waited all year for this to pass.  Is the start date on all these trees, the end of war?  I was so busy watching and texting people that I almost missed the Haneda Airport stop.  Double check . . . yes, this is most assuredly the airport.

I get some last-chance sushi after checking in.  I haven’t had any this whole trip.  I convince myself that I should enjoy the taste of saba and aji before I leave.  I do and it is nice, but not as tasty as the place I always used to visit in Narita Airport.  That one is certainly not worth the extra thirty minutes of travel, just to get better quality last-chance sushi.  But I do miss the Narita joint.  This piece of kohada is rather plain, I’m noticing now, with my second bite.  My waitress, like all the staff call out a greeting in Japanese.  Later I hear her speak to another patron in Chinese.  It is the second time today this has happened.  So much restaurant staff in Tokyo seems to hail from China. When she was speaking Japanese, I had a whole Japanese identity I’d constructed for her in seconds.  It disappears in a blink.   “So, where in China are you from?”  “Dongbei?”

Sakura Ground Zero

I’m lost.  There is a tree out my window.  The petals area already full-flashing white, extended.  But the green leaves that follow the petals have already made their way out into view, as well.  Normally I would triumph the green.  But there is a sadness here, when green begins to overwhelm the brilliant white of the blossom petals.  The white that yields to green.  This is the undeniable wind down of the sakura season.   I must have missed most of the grand show. 

Someone looking out the same view suggests that the tree I am seeing is a plum tree and not a cherry tree.  The cherry trees have yet to peak, you see.  Plum blossoms always come a few weeks earlier. Oh.  That’s very different.  That means it is still very early.  This is an umei and the sakura is all pending.   Outside, in front of the hotel, I stand beneath a tree that is panting white radiance.  There is no green.  “You are here at just the right time.”

Later I went to sakura ground-zero.  I did not go to Naka Meguro to see the cherry blossoms.  Friends live there, right off the canal and we’d long since planned to meet.  Arriving I got spun around and walked off in just the wrong direction:  “Where’s the canal?”  One more block from here?  No.  This can’t be. Turn.  Phone.  Confirm.  OK.  You are moving in the wrong direction.

Cross the high street and now I am on the canal.  It is full of nighttime cherry blossom gazers.  The trees?  They are resplendent.  Surely this explosion of white for tree after tree is worthy of consideration.  I hear so much Chinese spoken as I dart along the canal, weaving in and out of people.  Ever more Chinese tourists of means, rather than simply migrant workers, can only auger well for Sino-Japanese relations.  Some are used to veering right, some are used to veering left and it is all a big mess trying to walk along through the crowds.  I’m late and I’m not moving with much of any rapidity.  People are on the side of the canal and selling wine and snacks.  I wish I wasn’t in a hurry.

Standing beneath a brilliant white tree, in the dark evening time I take an improbable picture.   And then another.   So does everyone else.

Cherubic Little Flutter

OK.  So we have about thirty minutes till landing.  Bad time to begin an entry.  I was bounced up to biz on this flight.  This is always a boon.  But that I’m on an ANA flight bound for Haneda, rather than on an Air China flight, makes adjustment that much more favorable.  Outside it’s foggy.  That’s OK.  Japanese fog has a nice air about it.  Up in my ears the eternally distinct Eric Dolphy whose beautiful name is only surpassed buy his sui generis smooth, goose honk. 

How many times is this now?  65?  75?  I actually used to know the count.  My old passport had so many big stickers showing entry to Japan, it was a quick trot through and an addition or two for what happened before and it was clear.  It doesn’t matter.  This is something I’ve done many, many times.   And characteristically, reliably, there is cherubic little flutter, every time you walk out into this country.  It is a wonderful place to visit. 

Now, is it a place to live?  I won’t be moving here any time soon with my family.  But it is clearly an upgrade in civic sophistication.  Beijing has been a work in progress since 1906 or so.  There is no end in site.  We have our JingJinBei megalopolis to work towards. You can marvel at the ripping edge of time-lapse-photography, amid the cranes and drilling and dust.  It will be sometime after I have passed that this city finally has a chance to exhale and buff and polish all that it’s constructed.  Meanwhile, Tokyo’s upkeep has more to do with pruning than blunt plastic surgery for some time now. 

There is a copy of “Time Out Tokyo” that I snatched as part of my business class goodies.  Flipping through, you can pretend to be a local and consider what it would be like to have sophisticated opinions about why Waggu beef tastes the way it does and where it is you can sample the best of the best.  It’s a young person’s game for sure, until it becomes a nesters game, perhaps.  Can see some compromised version of that antique train, barreling round the mountain?

Down below, off to the right, is Tokyo.  The city that does not really love its waterfront very much. No. You wouldn’t either if you lived with a few millennium’s worth of tsunamis.  That cherubic flutter is starting.  I’m getting ready to bow and dust off my limited vocabulary and consider this fractured gem from the Confucian mirror of civilized order.

The sun is bright through the fog. 

If You Lived Right Up There?

Down into the city.  Inert.  Grumpy because a cabby won’t break the law and ride up on the service lane.  I don’t press.  I stew.  I’m late.  No surprise.  I am like a bad lab rat that won’t learn a basic piece of shock therapy:  the way you usually use to get into the city ain’t working.  Because that entrance is under repair it will take much, much longer.  Hence you need to budget more time than it takes to travel to the capital of a nearby province on a train.  You need to budget two hours for something that would take twenty minutes at 2:00AM. 

This prospect is one I’ve had many meetings with over he last two years since my first visit when the paint was still fresh on this new building.  Elevators are particularly jammed.  This has been consistent, with every visit.  To go down we capitulate and ride the elevator up and up first.  Otherwise we wouldn’t stand a chance of boarding this box on the way back down.  Pull your ID sticker off.  Go through security.  A photo by the logo?   Sure.  And that lunch place you recommended?  It’s just down this way?  Next block?

Nearby is the 798 Art Zone.  Unexpectedly we’re visiting in the middle of an intoxicating spring day.  The feeling is that sharp, because our alternatives are so dire.  What we’ve been through was so glum.  We were told to find a Hunan restaurant but it’s not on the first corner where it’s supposed to be.  Nor is it on the second.  Who cares?  I know another place.  The trees are all yielding.  Everyone is dressed for spring.  Suddenly everyone in the jungle wants to be seen.  Much of the jungle wants to look.  We find a table out of doors.  Last time I visited this place we were huddled back indoors, near the heating duct.  I consider, as one does, whether or not there wasn’t some hipper-than-though bargain right here in 798.  What if you lived right up there?

I get my salad.  I get my soup.  One colleague does, as well.  But the other gentleman is left hanging.   So those of us with food stare at it and sip at our drinks.  I want to ingest that sliced avocado.  I try not to stare.  “Yes.  Precisely!  I agree.  Good point.”  The chicken has dressing on it.  Behind: “you go ahead!” To the man beside:  “No.  We’ll wait.”  We do.  Eight hairy-eyeball stares at the staff, three interjections later, my neighbor finally has his noodles and soup and we formally dive in.  I’m staring at a wall full of very purposeful graffiti.  It is better than staring at a wall.  And people are walking by, pausing, strolling on and three old Beijing laowai have a jolly little lunch of it.  We all know this won’t last long. 

Get No Vacation

It’s vacation.  But I get no vacation.  Spring break’s a bit broke from the full-on home office cellblock.  The kids are up but they aren’t out.  Everyone is walking around whimsically, slowly.  I know this is a terribly grumpy old-man thing to say, but they seem to get a lot of vacations.  They get Christmas, then they get Chinese New Year, now they get “spring break.”  We’d had it rougher, we did.  Our family had gone on a proper vacation last month for Chinese New Year.   We most assuredly ain’t going nowhere, this time.  This despite the fact that “the Jones’” and everyone else from the kids’ world is off somewhere alluring for the next week.

I went to the gym.  The middle-aged lady at the desk is usually glum.  It is a rather glum gig.  If I’m not feeling glum myself, I’m usually as chatty with her as a sign-in process will allow.  Today she gestured to a large binder.  She suggested I should enter a comment. “Good or bad.”  The comment or two before was about a broken rowing machine or a troublesome staff person.  I considered what annoyance I might contribute.  I wrote something about how the staff at this desk was always very helpful.  Then I told her as much and this elicited an unexpected smile.

Back home, great things were underway.  The kids had begun the Herculean-stables-like challenge of cleaning their rooms.  One gets the sense that this could involve much more than this day.  My wife began full-gestation challenge of cleaning up the dusty back yard. It all felt very spring like, but I’d pre-packed my Monday as a regular workday.  Another call on the hour.  Calling, typing out emails, with all this activity afoot, right outside my window, I can only feel guilty and disconnected.   

“I want to visit my friend.”  “I presume you want to leave immediately?”  A car ride will do me good, on this sunny day.  My maximum-exertion mix from the gym is preloaded on my phone.  “You play a song and I’ll play a song.”  “ OK.”  She puts on something I haven’t heard before called “New York Go Easy on Me” by the Chain Smokers.   I tried to dig it and some of it was digable.  Then I played “London’s Burning” and successfully resisted the urge to provide a long editorial on the first Clash album.  “Make falafel for dinner”  “OK.  I’ll see you at 6:30.”  On the ride home CS&N’s “Judy Blue Eyes” came on and I turned the dial to forty, which is the highest it will go in a Honda Odyssey, and I rolled down the widows to sing along haphazardly as one does on a sunny day of hooky from work and spring cleaning.

Full-gestation challenge