Ride for a While

The bathroom book of the autumn season is “Of Human Bondage” by Somerset Maugham.  We’d stayed at a hotel he’d frequented in Venice during our anniversary and I’d read his “On A Chinese Screen” essays at the time and secured this larger novel along with it.  Philip has a hard luck upbringing.  His parents are deceased and his uncle is a vicar who wants him to spend time reading about Jerusalem rather than looking at the pictures of the Holy City.  He has a clubfoot and can’t play sports and has an even worse English boarding school experience that most.  He’s grown suddenly and is off in Germany, flirting with Germans, meeting Chinese and Americans, drinking with Englishmen, there at the eve of the Great War.

The Genius Bar is a smart place to go.  But not, perhaps if you’re Macbook Air is over five years old and out of warranty.  It doesn’t take a genius to know how that will play out.  After the wait, she’ll tell them it just sort of conked out, overlooking the mention of the glass of Valpolicella that fertilized the keyboard the other night.  They’ll look it over, and confirm that it is two years out of warranty and that it will probably cost just a bit more than half the price of buying a new one. 

Or you could head to Zhongguancun.  Dutiful readers will note that we were just over there a few days ago, getting games, replacing batteries.  “I’d take it there.  They’ll fix it on the spot and charge you a third the price.”  She makes a few calls and is soon on her way, leaving the house to the girls and myself.

With some persistence I manage to talk the younger one into a bike ride.  We almost go our separate ways when I insist that we are not going right, to the mall, but rather left to the river trail.  There’s a busy road to cross, but once we’re safely on the other side, one can ride for a while and pretend they’re not in a busy city.  The landscaping is lovely but the water is notably polluted.  I remember canoeing in the Housatonic River during camp as a kid.  We called it Housy-rot when we touched the water.  I would imagine it's a bit cleaner these days.   For now, I’d say they’ve done a nice job on this riverside park.  So glad there are no cars. 

Thursday, 10/05/17

Tallest Building in Town

What do you do during the Mid-Autumn Festival?  It doesn’t even feel like Autumn’s properly begun but OK, as per the name, we're already in the middle of the season.  The Mrs wanted to head out this evening, take in the city, invoke a bit of celebration.  All good.  She decides we'll all heading to the tallest building in town in honor of the day.  It's not my holiday, so I don't have much to say.  "Yes.  I want to go to that building, look out at the city and have a drink."  And so it shall be. 

This top floor restaurant, the eightieth floor of China World Three, is a dull, predictable place for dining.  An alluring magazine menu suggests an overpriced room-service selections.  But the drinks are fine and the view is, for now, one of the best in the capital.  Across the street we have the audacious new “Respect,” tower of Zun.  Our cab driver told us it was supposedly going to be the biggest new tower in the world.  That’s the first I’ve heard that.  “Yes, it’s only half done. It will be twice that height.”  If that is the case and it still has another hundred floors to go, that will be remarkable.  And odd.  (In fact, upon completion there will still be at least seven other buildings taller than the Zun tower.  And while the "zun" is the same zun as respect: 尊 the reference seems to be to that character's original meaning of wine vessel.)

I manage to talk my wife out of the reservation she'd made at an overpriced hotel duck restaurant two exits up the ring road.  Let's go into the old city.  I'd just eaten a farm to table joint near De Sheng Men just the other night and it was fabulous.  Slowly, patiently, I am able to steer things in that direction.  Crosstown traffic?  Not during the holiday.  Driving is merciful and soon we're hooking around the second ring road, spinning about the clover leaf of the imposing De Sheng Men tower.  I want them to see the lake with the moon and soon it's before us at the far end of Hou Hai.

Over dinner I asked my wife about her own memories of Mid Autumn festival from when she was young.  She recalled the story of her uncle who returned from Shanghai for the holiday, so concerned that the kids might steal the moon cakes that he hung them up on the wall where they stayed for more than a year, while the oil in the cakes leaked and stained the wall.  There they remained, up on the wall, away from the kids.  My daughters rolled their eyes when I push for more.  I always do this.  But I didn’t grow up with moon cakes.  And stories are all they'll ever have of that world that wont be there when they look for it.

Wednesday, 10/04/17

Give the Kid A Break

 The National Holiday break.  Just listen to that.  It's a now-now time.  A fine time to shop for video games.  When else am I going to do that?  We’re off to Zhongguancun to find games for our Play Station 4  My daughter’s birthday present has been sitting there inert since got it sans any games to insert.  Driving along the highway the road was completely devoid of traffic and soon I'm asleep.

LSSSSSSSSSSN

Now were getting close.  There is always the chance that it may not be open.  It is a national week of rest, after all.  That would be unfortunate. It’s a bit less hallowed than Chinese New Year,  but with seven days in the balance, most people, the ten-million people migrant people who’ve come here from somewhere else, have all gone home.  The rough old hutongs looks closed.  The mom&pop market is closed.  Lights off in the Seven Eleven,  That's not good.  At least there won't be mobs of people.  We’re going to have some rather unhappy girls if the beehive of Zhongguancun is closed for business.

The first tower may as well have been closed.  Half the shops were blanketed over.  I asked and after one guy yelled to another I was directed to a third gentleman who clarified that what I wanted could not be bought at his shop.  "Go across the street." Yes. You’ll need to buy the disc.  Pirated copies?  I don’t think they have them for that Sony game.  Interesting.  

We head down and out and up across the walkway to from the Hai Long to the adjoining, we-sell-everything-electronic mall across the high street.  Across and in we search for a while.  I know how to say what I'm looking for clearly now and I ask everyone.  Everyone is rude.  To be expected.  Onward.  Someone says go there.  We go there.  There they are!  "Hey where's the guy that owns this stall?"  "He's not here.  He went home or the holiday. " "Really?"  We look on in vain.  I find a guy who'll replace my anaemic iPhone battery.  "You guys keep looking.  Come back here in 15 minutes either way.   

While the young gentleman is working on my phone another guys comes along and asks a question.  Nothing wrong there.  But now he seems to have started a dialogue.  The young kid, delicately trying to remove my battery is now looking up at this oaf, trying to answer his rambling line of inquiry.  "Hey young fella.  Give the kid a break.  He's working on my phone, there."  Absorbing that I just spoke to him in Chinese he is silent for a bit, but then decides to begin chatting me up instead.  Fortunately the girls return.  Unfortunately there are no Sony Playstation 4 Games to be had here in this mall, today. 

The phone-fixer is done quickly.  I leave him and the other gent to their budding conversation.  Zhounguancun has plenty of other large malls to explore.  We're back on the walkway, heading to one a bit further south.  Literate, my daughter spies a sign in Chinese across the street that says “Gaming Center.”  That is a very good sign.  As we get closer we note that there is a blue fence that has been erected around the entire building.  The guard confirms, it’s under reconstruction.  The store that’s open only has phones to sell, but there is that place over there you might try, that building on the northwest corner. 

Fortunately I recall this place as we draw closer.  I have bought games here before.  Five years ago, as I recall, when the girls used to play with an Xbox.  The folks on the first floor suggest I try the basement and its all coming back to me.  I remember.  Straight through to the back room. One stall points us to another and soon my younger daughter and her friend have narrowed their gaming choices down what they want.  Nothing pirated available.  In fact, most of the newest games are not available either.  Something has changed over the last few years.   Did the industry get smarter or China get more strict?  Someone is enforcing something, or else these discs would just be copied. 

Starbucks is still here, back up on the first floor.  It's a pleasure to visit, while it is empty.  They have the mala chicken roll I like and I wash it down with kiwi juice.   

Tuesday, 10/03/17

The Fatalism Is All

 Ahh, its one of those days when all is not well back home.  You feel unsettled that you aren't physically there.  You’d like to be able to do more that type messages into a message window, or have choppy calls into the darkness. 

Putting the phone down I return to what's been updated on the New York Times home page, as I'll do a dozen times more today.  There's an editorial that was there before, but I read it this time.  The writer suggests that readers should be careful about precisely what message it was they were deriving from the new Ken Burns series.  Everyone is talking about the series.  My mom has written me about it.  Another business partner of mine has suggested it was powerful.  "Hey girls . . . come here for a sec . . . 

My accelerator, scrambler box lands me internet connection somewhere in Hong Kong and the U.S. servers noting this tell me:  Sorry, you can’t watch a PBS documentary in the country you are residing in.  Why is that?  If you make it free to the American public, why wouldn’t you make it free to the rest of the world?  I guess there are (modest, surely) licensing rights that might be secured in countries whose tax dollars didn’t help to pay for the program?

But if I use a different tool and land my browsing in a U.S. server, I’m suddenly all cleared to watch the program.  My daughters and I watched the first episode together.  And though I know the narrative, it is powerful to absorb it visually rather than simply read it again.  They actors, the setting, the fatalism is all so familiar.  I never have very good viewing manners and regularly yell out “Dien Bien Phu!”  “Geneva Accords!”  etc., when the story is building up to the proper moment Mr. Burns wants to reveal such information. 

America's Vietnam War narrative is intimately tied to China.  It is linked forever to the Korean War, during which my father-in-law was a Chinese 'volunteer.'   And the framing builds towards America’s involvement, fittingly for an American documentary, though the story of Viet resistance to invaders seems back to the Tang Dynasty that I know of and beyond, far beyond certainly, marking somehow what it means to be Vietnamese.  I notice that my daughters are caught up in it and that they have a number of points of entry into this narrative. 

They need a break after the first ninety-minute episode.  I get it.  But I watch the next two ninety minute episodes in succession, unconsciously driven towards the point at which my life begins and the color footage begins and things all get much, much worse for everyone involved.  

Monday, 10/02/17

Ferocious Zealot's Solo

Friend off early to the station.  I’m glad I’m not on that train.  I don’t want to go anywhere.  This friend slept over.  He had trouble getting a flight out during National Holiday.  All the flights out to anywhere had long been booked.  He left our house early for the South Station to get a train heading all the way south.  From there, he was able to find a flight home.  “Do you need any cash,”  I asked?  “No.  I’m good.”  “He later told me his card wouldn't work at the station ATM and he rode for ten hours with no loot to buy food with.

Last night we'd talked about him making dinner and my wife making dinner and going out to dinner, but in the end I decided to make some spaghetti and meatballs with some lentil veggie balls as well for my older daughter.  Garlic bread and eggplant.  It wasn’t bad.  The red wine went well with the meatballs, in my mind’s memory.

Red wine also lends itself to loud rock n’ roll if its the right kinda friend.  We retired to my office where we could turn up the volume.  He played  something on Youtube.  I did as well.  He'd mentioned a cover band he'd seen do Chicago when he was last in the Philippines.  "Have you seen the show at Tanglewood from 1970?" Before long we're there with everyone else, under the summer stars. 

Terry Kath in particular is majestic to watch.  Long hair, lurking, blue jeans but man can he chew up the fretboard.  I queued to a mid-point in “Better End Soon."  The anti-war anthem has a remarkable break, where he rises from the flute solo, shedding scales and rhythmic fills faster and faster like moulting Smog, till all is quiet.  And Kath speaks to the audience and the nation suggesting that all the people out there, who work hard at a forty hour week and think they're free in this land.  Free because they can work all the time.  Hey, you know, you're paying for this war.  "You are paying for the war so they can carry it on some more, with your bread."

Widely noted as an undeservedly underrated guitarist, Kath came to an untimely end at his own hand, seven years later, as some of the band's more regrettable legacy was being recorded.  This evening though it's all his show and there are no compromises.  The band effortlessly follows his call to pick it up and change the world, steadily filling in and quickening the pace.  "Do it for your kids!"   And his Ray Charles growl and ferocious zealot's solo all suggest the intensity of someone who thinks that if they just played hard enough, he might actually arrest the bloodshed, from there under the stars in 1970.  

"Can we hear the '25 or 6 to 4'?" Asks my friend.  "Let's."



Sunday, 10/01/17