"Phoo. I'm exhausted. ... So what're you doing?"
"Well I'm waiting for the guy to give me eleven more poison apples so I can kill eleven times as many people. See, with one poison apple you can only kill one person at once. And I'm in the assassin's guild, so-"
"...so you're supposed to kill people. Yeah."
"Yeah, and if i have more apples, I can kill more people."
"..."
"..."
"Actually..."
"Huh?"
"...that's a good question. How would you poison an apple?"
"..."
"I don't mean in your game. I mean - in real life. That's just not..."
"..."
"I guess you'd have to paint it."
"But then - hang on, I've gotta get this... -yeah. But then it washes off."
"I mean, you know how they wax apples for display. You could get some kind of poison in the wax."
"...I guess... Maybe you could inject it?"
"Nah. Then you'd have a hole left. Also, apple fruit - you ever looked at how it grows? It's not porous, the poison would be localized. So if they didn't eat the whole thing-"
"...yeah."
"..."
"..."
"... sorry, I'm actually really, really paying attention to you, I just-"
"No, I know."
"-I can multitask really well, so it looks like I'm just playing but-"
"I know, I know, you're listening."
"No, I mean - this game is so easy, it should not be this easy."
"..."
"... so yeah. Poisoned fruit. I guess apples'd be hard. What about oranges? Nobody ever poisons oranges."
"I know! And oranges you've already got a bumpy rind, kind of holey-"
"-so nobody notices if it's injected with anything."
"Exactly. And the fruit is pulp, so the poison could squish between them..."
"-yeah."
"You know what? I am never eating food around you two ever again."
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Margacska profile
In the summer of her 95th year was when I first saw my great-aunt's hair its natural color. For all my 23 years she'd dyed it, back to what was, presumably, its original color. Dyed, it was a sort of orangish brown - paprika-colored, hearkening back to its original pale auburn. It was a good dye job, slightly varied in shades, like real hair, colored down to the roots. My aunts helped her dye it.
The first sign that she was getting tired was when she refused the dye job. Somewhere around Christmas it was; an aunt offered to help her with it, and she said, "hát, talán nem." Well, maybe not.
After that, my aunt told me, they watched her hair go white. I wasn't there - I only come there in August, with my family - but my aunts around her watched. They said it grew out first into a pale gold, almost a blonde, like a halo around her head. Then, time turning, it lightened and lightened into pure, dandelion-fluff white.
When I saw her that August it was cut and styled, combed and washed. It was a cloud arranged around her head; I could see scalp through it at the front, but it was still full enough that she didn't look old-old. The rest of her body did - from changeless-thin she'd become, over one year, delicately thin, bird-ish bones and skin laid wrinkled over them. There was a chestnut-sized clump of vein in her arm that I'd never seen before, blue in her papery skin. Her eyes were gummy but searched me out; her acne was better this year than I'd even seen it, with only one huge, burst-open pimple on her forehead. She dressed in lace and blouses, and sat upright in her chair, one leg crossed over the other. Motion looked painful, or at least like a huge effort, but when she sat still she looked out at me like an English princess.
~:~
Margácska was born one of twins. I know that. One of those twins died young, I know that as well. This is where my family history lies - in a pile of geneology, a few dates, and a lot of stories. If she died on December 27th of 2009 between 6:00 and 7:00 in the morning at 95 years, then she was born in 1914. She was my grandfather's older sister, and there was an older or younger brother, too, somewhere.
I know nothing about her childhood. 1914 in Central Europe was a hard time; it was Austria-Hungary, then. I know my grandfather, Margácska's younger brother, fought in a war, but it must have been the next one. In between wars my great-aunt grew up, from child to woman. I know she never married - I don't know if she never met anyone or just never got around to it.
She worked, I know that. There's stories of her as an accountant, helping bring money into the house. When my mother and her siblings were being born, Margácska was working, during the change from WWII to Communist-era government. Here my knowledge takes a sharp leap, as it's here my mother enters into the picture.
Margácska lived with her younger brother - my grandfather - and his family. In a five-room house, she had one of the rooms. My mom's five siblings slept in one room, my grandfather and grandmother in another, and my mom out in the hall by the heating-stove. Margácska's room was blocked off by a white-painted glass-paned door. In the mornings she would take up the bathroom to herself - my mom and aunts and uncles would have to scramble to use it before Margácska got her turn. I can only assume she worked during the day, all day, as my grandfather did; one of my mom's stories tells of her coming home early and, finding my mom staying home sick from school, exclaiming, "na, már megint beteg vagy?" Well! Are you ill yet again?
Perhaps it was my grandmother who called her the English Princess, or maybe it was my mom and her siblings. It was accurate: Margácska dressed even then in laces and blouses, kept her room neat and tidy, sat primly up in her chair (perhaps from learning good posture at work). She was princessly-prudish, too: she would would protest to my grandmother about my mother reading books Inappropriate For Young Ladies. Once - my mother tells me, laughing - my mom came home with a hickey; Margácska wondered, "Márikám, megsérültél?" Márikám, have you hurt yourself?
~:~
There's another blank in there for me, between my mom's growing up with Margácska around stories, and the time I came into the picture. That's a twenty-some- bordering on thirty-year gap. In there, Margácska grew old. She went from forties to seventies; by the time I was consciously involved in life, she was in her eighties.
The house that my mom grew up in was always, to me, Anyóka's house. Anyóka was my grandmother, and it was always her, one of my aunts, and Margácska living there. After my grandmother passed on it was only Vera and Margácska; now, for a time, it's only Vera. My Hungarian family's houses are in constant flux - building, adding on, rebuilding, rearranging. one family will live in a few rooms for ten years or five kids, then move on. The family expands out like a ripple from the houses on Táborhegy - two houses close, a few hosues further, some out in Pilis, some out in Sárospatak ("Muddy Creek").
In Anyóka's house, though, one room was always Margácska's. She worked no longer, but read a lot. Now and then she'd walk down the mountain and take the trolley into town - to get her hair done, to buy necessaries, to go to church. We had lunch with her, my parents and brother and I; she never cooked, but came out and joined us once we were at the table.
And, as years went on, she walked less. The Carpathians aren't steep, but a mile of hill is a long way for a woman in her eighties, eighty-fives, nineties. She stopped going into town, and slowly, slowly, she stopped having lunch or dinner with us. Walking down the hill - even down the two levels of gardens it took from my aunt's house to Margácska's - was hard, and took long, and a woman in her nineties will take long in doing it. She puffed and wheezed while eating; her acne made her hard to look at, and her deafness made her hard to talk to. She had sympathy in front of her and covered, embarrased frustration behind her.
~:~
"Margácska" is a diminuitive, in Hungarian. "-ácska" is like "-y" or "-let" in English; it makes things small and cute. Könvyecske: little book, booklet. Kiskutyácska: little doggy. Királylányka: little princess.
Her real name is Marga. Maybe when she worked she was Margit - that's a more formal version, and in the forties a woman accountant had to show her competance. At home she was Németh Marga, since she never married. To her peers, fewer and fewer every year, she was Marga. To those of us younger than her, more and more all the time, she was Margácska.
There's another Margit in the family, now, a grinning, curly-haired seven-year-old. I don't know if she was named after Margácska, or if her parents just liked the name. Her nicknames are Margó and Pampi, but never, never Margácska. Margácska was someone else.
~:~
When I returned from China for the first time, in 2006, I brought pictures. Hundreds of them. I was brimming with stories and enthusiasm, and I wanted to tell everyone in the family about my adventures there. I was excited, and so were they - they'd never had someone in the family speak Chinese before.
I showed pictures. I made shows of them, bringing out my clumps of albums, handing photos around a circle, telling stories. The photos of one story always returned to me before I'd finished, though, and the kids would get impatient, or the cousins would pass photos from hand to hand and then stand up, not actually waiting for me to be done, but restless and energetic.
Perhaps it was because Margácska was a captive audience that she listened. Standing up was work. Restlessness was a distant memory. She had all the time in the world. But I know she was fascinated, because she told me: I'd always wanted to see the Great Wall. Oh, I see pictures of it, and it's so beautiful, it must be huge! It always looks so grand!
So, enthusiastic that she was listening, I showed her my pictures. I stopped for a half-hour at a time over some pictures, explaining, gesturing, getting up and waving my arms to show the size of things. I halted and started and staggered in my Hungarian, but got more fluent as vacation went on and I talked more; I told her what I'd seen in China and where the pollution was and how the markets worked, and what the great palaces looked like. When she couldn't hear, I scooted my chair closer and talked. I didn't mind the pus-y blister by her nose, or her smacking her lips as she breathed in, because she looked so close at the pictures I'd brought. I could tell her all my stories, and even though she was close to deaf, she was trying to listen.
~:~
Now, I imagine her room. It is square, with a high ceiling. Directly in front of the glass-paned doors is her couch - she would lie, feet facing the door, head propped up on a pillow to read (and, I suspect, to see people approaching the door because she couldn't hear them). To the left is her bed, that she made every single day of her life, except for the last two. In the center, a table, lace-clothed and with flowers, and holding the most recently letters or gifts from kids who stop by. Behind it, my aunt's old, out-of-tune piano, its notes plonky and graceless but whose sound even Margácska could hear.
The windows are open. In the summer, the hot winds of July turn into the northern, cooling winds of August. Eighty degrees is called hot; breezes slam doors if you aren't careful. Geraniums line the sill, in good Hungarian tradition; between them portula catch the sun, and plants whose English names I don't know. Under the window, on top of the radiator, an old lemon-juice bottle is half-filled with water for the plants.
How weird it'll be, I know, to go there this summer, with Margácska gone. How weird, to wander my aunt's garden in the morning and not hear the tank-tnk-tnk of her windows opening, see her dyed hair and bloused back shuffling away from the window. How weird, to get back from being in the city all day, put my feet up and rest, and remind myself, "ah! I have to spend some time with Margácska," only to remember, "oh. Wait."
Perhaps there were harder parts of her life, that I never saw. Well, certainly there were - given Hungary's recent history, I'm certain of it. But all I saw of her and heard of her was old. I'm glad I learned to spend time with her - maybe it was only three months of time, but at ninety, love counts. And mabye I don't have the frustration with her that some had - but then, my experiences of her growing up were very different than my mom's, or my aunts', or my uncles'.
Margácska was a fixture. She was the great-aunt you had to say hi to every year. She was the one room in my grandmother's house. She never went hiking with me and by brother, nor ever cooked with us, nor ever told us stories..
But she listened.
That, I guess, was the end of her life. I never saw her in motion, only the gradual, ten-year winding down of an old clock. I tried to deny it, but only out of politeness - when I saw the white hair, I knew I wouldn't be surprised when we got the phone call or email. After that it was mile-markers. No more reading. No more eating. No making her bed. No getting out of it.
She told me, over the summer, I'm sorry I can't listen. It's just so black, you know? Every time I finished a conversation, it was a goodbye - I never knew if I'd see her the next day.
She lived long enough to see a new baby be born, though, and join in that celebration. She lived through Christmas, the time when all the family came to that house on the mountain. That was good. She got her goodbyes.
My family, in constant flux, plans to move my cousin into her room. My aunt will move elsewhere. The geraniums will stay on the windowsill; the glass-paned doors might stay or might go. I don't know. I don't know how they'll reconstruct and rearrange who lives where.
Maybe, when they clean out her room, they'll find a three-year old, sticky-glossy photograph of the Great Wall of China.
The first sign that she was getting tired was when she refused the dye job. Somewhere around Christmas it was; an aunt offered to help her with it, and she said, "hát, talán nem." Well, maybe not.
After that, my aunt told me, they watched her hair go white. I wasn't there - I only come there in August, with my family - but my aunts around her watched. They said it grew out first into a pale gold, almost a blonde, like a halo around her head. Then, time turning, it lightened and lightened into pure, dandelion-fluff white.
When I saw her that August it was cut and styled, combed and washed. It was a cloud arranged around her head; I could see scalp through it at the front, but it was still full enough that she didn't look old-old. The rest of her body did - from changeless-thin she'd become, over one year, delicately thin, bird-ish bones and skin laid wrinkled over them. There was a chestnut-sized clump of vein in her arm that I'd never seen before, blue in her papery skin. Her eyes were gummy but searched me out; her acne was better this year than I'd even seen it, with only one huge, burst-open pimple on her forehead. She dressed in lace and blouses, and sat upright in her chair, one leg crossed over the other. Motion looked painful, or at least like a huge effort, but when she sat still she looked out at me like an English princess.
~:~
Margácska was born one of twins. I know that. One of those twins died young, I know that as well. This is where my family history lies - in a pile of geneology, a few dates, and a lot of stories. If she died on December 27th of 2009 between 6:00 and 7:00 in the morning at 95 years, then she was born in 1914. She was my grandfather's older sister, and there was an older or younger brother, too, somewhere.
I know nothing about her childhood. 1914 in Central Europe was a hard time; it was Austria-Hungary, then. I know my grandfather, Margácska's younger brother, fought in a war, but it must have been the next one. In between wars my great-aunt grew up, from child to woman. I know she never married - I don't know if she never met anyone or just never got around to it.
She worked, I know that. There's stories of her as an accountant, helping bring money into the house. When my mother and her siblings were being born, Margácska was working, during the change from WWII to Communist-era government. Here my knowledge takes a sharp leap, as it's here my mother enters into the picture.
Margácska lived with her younger brother - my grandfather - and his family. In a five-room house, she had one of the rooms. My mom's five siblings slept in one room, my grandfather and grandmother in another, and my mom out in the hall by the heating-stove. Margácska's room was blocked off by a white-painted glass-paned door. In the mornings she would take up the bathroom to herself - my mom and aunts and uncles would have to scramble to use it before Margácska got her turn. I can only assume she worked during the day, all day, as my grandfather did; one of my mom's stories tells of her coming home early and, finding my mom staying home sick from school, exclaiming, "na, már megint beteg vagy?" Well! Are you ill yet again?
Perhaps it was my grandmother who called her the English Princess, or maybe it was my mom and her siblings. It was accurate: Margácska dressed even then in laces and blouses, kept her room neat and tidy, sat primly up in her chair (perhaps from learning good posture at work). She was princessly-prudish, too: she would would protest to my grandmother about my mother reading books Inappropriate For Young Ladies. Once - my mother tells me, laughing - my mom came home with a hickey; Margácska wondered, "Márikám, megsérültél?" Márikám, have you hurt yourself?
~:~
There's another blank in there for me, between my mom's growing up with Margácska around stories, and the time I came into the picture. That's a twenty-some- bordering on thirty-year gap. In there, Margácska grew old. She went from forties to seventies; by the time I was consciously involved in life, she was in her eighties.
The house that my mom grew up in was always, to me, Anyóka's house. Anyóka was my grandmother, and it was always her, one of my aunts, and Margácska living there. After my grandmother passed on it was only Vera and Margácska; now, for a time, it's only Vera. My Hungarian family's houses are in constant flux - building, adding on, rebuilding, rearranging. one family will live in a few rooms for ten years or five kids, then move on. The family expands out like a ripple from the houses on Táborhegy - two houses close, a few hosues further, some out in Pilis, some out in Sárospatak ("Muddy Creek").
In Anyóka's house, though, one room was always Margácska's. She worked no longer, but read a lot. Now and then she'd walk down the mountain and take the trolley into town - to get her hair done, to buy necessaries, to go to church. We had lunch with her, my parents and brother and I; she never cooked, but came out and joined us once we were at the table.
And, as years went on, she walked less. The Carpathians aren't steep, but a mile of hill is a long way for a woman in her eighties, eighty-fives, nineties. She stopped going into town, and slowly, slowly, she stopped having lunch or dinner with us. Walking down the hill - even down the two levels of gardens it took from my aunt's house to Margácska's - was hard, and took long, and a woman in her nineties will take long in doing it. She puffed and wheezed while eating; her acne made her hard to look at, and her deafness made her hard to talk to. She had sympathy in front of her and covered, embarrased frustration behind her.
~:~
"Margácska" is a diminuitive, in Hungarian. "-ácska" is like "-y" or "-let" in English; it makes things small and cute. Könvyecske: little book, booklet. Kiskutyácska: little doggy. Királylányka: little princess.
Her real name is Marga. Maybe when she worked she was Margit - that's a more formal version, and in the forties a woman accountant had to show her competance. At home she was Németh Marga, since she never married. To her peers, fewer and fewer every year, she was Marga. To those of us younger than her, more and more all the time, she was Margácska.
There's another Margit in the family, now, a grinning, curly-haired seven-year-old. I don't know if she was named after Margácska, or if her parents just liked the name. Her nicknames are Margó and Pampi, but never, never Margácska. Margácska was someone else.
~:~
When I returned from China for the first time, in 2006, I brought pictures. Hundreds of them. I was brimming with stories and enthusiasm, and I wanted to tell everyone in the family about my adventures there. I was excited, and so were they - they'd never had someone in the family speak Chinese before.
I showed pictures. I made shows of them, bringing out my clumps of albums, handing photos around a circle, telling stories. The photos of one story always returned to me before I'd finished, though, and the kids would get impatient, or the cousins would pass photos from hand to hand and then stand up, not actually waiting for me to be done, but restless and energetic.
Perhaps it was because Margácska was a captive audience that she listened. Standing up was work. Restlessness was a distant memory. She had all the time in the world. But I know she was fascinated, because she told me: I'd always wanted to see the Great Wall. Oh, I see pictures of it, and it's so beautiful, it must be huge! It always looks so grand!
So, enthusiastic that she was listening, I showed her my pictures. I stopped for a half-hour at a time over some pictures, explaining, gesturing, getting up and waving my arms to show the size of things. I halted and started and staggered in my Hungarian, but got more fluent as vacation went on and I talked more; I told her what I'd seen in China and where the pollution was and how the markets worked, and what the great palaces looked like. When she couldn't hear, I scooted my chair closer and talked. I didn't mind the pus-y blister by her nose, or her smacking her lips as she breathed in, because she looked so close at the pictures I'd brought. I could tell her all my stories, and even though she was close to deaf, she was trying to listen.
~:~
Now, I imagine her room. It is square, with a high ceiling. Directly in front of the glass-paned doors is her couch - she would lie, feet facing the door, head propped up on a pillow to read (and, I suspect, to see people approaching the door because she couldn't hear them). To the left is her bed, that she made every single day of her life, except for the last two. In the center, a table, lace-clothed and with flowers, and holding the most recently letters or gifts from kids who stop by. Behind it, my aunt's old, out-of-tune piano, its notes plonky and graceless but whose sound even Margácska could hear.
The windows are open. In the summer, the hot winds of July turn into the northern, cooling winds of August. Eighty degrees is called hot; breezes slam doors if you aren't careful. Geraniums line the sill, in good Hungarian tradition; between them portula catch the sun, and plants whose English names I don't know. Under the window, on top of the radiator, an old lemon-juice bottle is half-filled with water for the plants.
How weird it'll be, I know, to go there this summer, with Margácska gone. How weird, to wander my aunt's garden in the morning and not hear the tank-tnk-tnk of her windows opening, see her dyed hair and bloused back shuffling away from the window. How weird, to get back from being in the city all day, put my feet up and rest, and remind myself, "ah! I have to spend some time with Margácska," only to remember, "oh. Wait."
Perhaps there were harder parts of her life, that I never saw. Well, certainly there were - given Hungary's recent history, I'm certain of it. But all I saw of her and heard of her was old. I'm glad I learned to spend time with her - maybe it was only three months of time, but at ninety, love counts. And mabye I don't have the frustration with her that some had - but then, my experiences of her growing up were very different than my mom's, or my aunts', or my uncles'.
Margácska was a fixture. She was the great-aunt you had to say hi to every year. She was the one room in my grandmother's house. She never went hiking with me and by brother, nor ever cooked with us, nor ever told us stories..
But she listened.
That, I guess, was the end of her life. I never saw her in motion, only the gradual, ten-year winding down of an old clock. I tried to deny it, but only out of politeness - when I saw the white hair, I knew I wouldn't be surprised when we got the phone call or email. After that it was mile-markers. No more reading. No more eating. No making her bed. No getting out of it.
She told me, over the summer, I'm sorry I can't listen. It's just so black, you know? Every time I finished a conversation, it was a goodbye - I never knew if I'd see her the next day.
She lived long enough to see a new baby be born, though, and join in that celebration. She lived through Christmas, the time when all the family came to that house on the mountain. That was good. She got her goodbyes.
My family, in constant flux, plans to move my cousin into her room. My aunt will move elsewhere. The geraniums will stay on the windowsill; the glass-paned doors might stay or might go. I don't know. I don't know how they'll reconstruct and rearrange who lives where.
Maybe, when they clean out her room, they'll find a three-year old, sticky-glossy photograph of the Great Wall of China.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
outline for profile
Will feature my great-aunt who lived til 95.
- "the english princess"
- accountant in the 1940's-'70s ('80s?) - brought money into the house (of 6 kids and 3 adults)
- her own bedroom
- one of twins
- her prudery/victorian-ness
- her appreciation of the family
- the kids
- showing her pictures
- what it will be liked coming back this summer, seeing her room without her there.
And that's it! not necessarily in that order, but I know how to figure this out.
- "the english princess"
- accountant in the 1940's-'70s ('80s?) - brought money into the house (of 6 kids and 3 adults)
- her own bedroom
- one of twins
- her prudery/victorian-ness
- her appreciation of the family
- the kids
- showing her pictures
- what it will be liked coming back this summer, seeing her room without her there.
And that's it! not necessarily in that order, but I know how to figure this out.
Revised: Bar Fight at the Prop
Well, then there was the time I got into a bar-fight stone-cold sober.
For an American, China is cheap. It was cheaper in the summer of 2006, when it was 8 kuai to a dollar. When we of my study-abroad group – all Americans, all students – went to dinner on campus, the cost came out to maybe 20 kuai a head. If you don’t want to do the mental math, that’s $2.50 per. A dish of gongbao jiding, a dish of su shao tudou, a huge bowl of suan la tang, a bamboo dish of chicken fried in red sauce, two veggie dishes, and a rice each between ten of us – 200 kuai for the whole, so 20 kuai each. We didn’t even finish all the food.
And of course, since China was cheap, and we were all students, it was fairly inevitable that on the way back to the rooms someone or other would suggest, “hey guys! Wanna go to the Prop tonight?”
Most of us did. Some people were here to study; others were here to “study”. It was pretty easy, looking at our group, to pick out who didn’t come along to bar nights. Two married women. One geek. The chaperoning professor. Everyone else piled together near the glass doors of the Foreign Students’ Dormitory, waiting impatiently for the rest of us to drop Important Things off in Rooms and run back down the rickety stairs. Then, in a conglomerate amoeba, we rounded the dorm’s corner, passed through the campus’ South Gate, and started down Chengfu Lu toward Wudaokou.
Any and every city has its own districts, each with its own reputation to uphold. Wudaokou is widely known as the student district, for the ten-some major colleges within walking distance of its metro stop. Its neighborhood is built on what students want. Restaurants. Tea shops. Clubs. Clothing stores. Food stores. Cheap eateries and expensive cell phones. Stores for everything: a textbook store, a comb store, a store for wispy and fashionable clothing. Food carts stop in the middle of the sidewalks – or, if they’re more enterprising, the streets, and there vie with slow-moving traffic that considers bicycles in the same vein as cars. Rows of more bikes and food stands and tiny buildings and parked cars and potholes all herd people into swirling currents on the once-white but now spit-grey sidewalk tiles. The metro line runs overhead, and proper train-tracks run below-beside it; trains run by periodically.
This being a city, nothing stops running at night. Wudaokou picks up, in fact: the night market opens. People drag out blankets and spread them out like picnics on the sidewalks. Each blanket is a shop: clothing, books, baby toys still in plastic wrapping, candles and homemade holders, mass-produced scarves, piles of cheap shirts with English letters in random formations. Food carts park by the metro doors, selling foods and fruits that change with the seasons. Bicycles park in long, rusty rows, and outside the Cool Hangouts crowds of young people stand and smoke and talk.
The Prop was definitely a Cool Hangout. It stood up from the sidewalk on a waist-high step faced in black rock, and couldn’t’ve been more than fifteen feet wide. Once side squashed some restaurant’s stairs into the side of a teashop; the other side butted up against a 7-11. (The 7-11, incidentally, was deemed almost as cool as the Prop.) It served as club and bar for bother foreigners and locals – for any students coming by, and for anyone who’d read their Lonely Planet guide and decided, “this is the place I want to get drunk tonight.” The cover charge was 25 kuai – in the summer of 2006, $3.
Its full name was The Propaganda.
Propaganda outside was small, city-soot-stained, with a big red star hung by the door and tall iron shutters rusting against the second-floor windows. Propaganda inside was smaller – there was a bar, there were booths, and the space between the two was just enough for one person to walk, or two to squeeze awkwardly past each other. Everything was done up in blue light, and at the back, there were stairs down.
We, still in our tight American group, took the stairs down. A huge, heavy steel door was at the bottom; shoving it open brought a blast of music and red light. We, still grouped, piled through.
A bar is a bar is a bar, as Gertrude Stein might say, and so what people did was start drinking. I didn’t. I didn’t drink at all in those days, which, for a college student was weird. People wanted to know why, though a couple gallant souls would lead into it with, “hey man, leave ‘er alone. She doesn’t wanna drink, it’s cool. Incidentally, why don’t you?”
To avoid all that, I danced. The downstairs was about the size of my bedroom back home, only a little longer and a little fatter. Lights sat under the tables and under the bar-counter and along the walls at waist-level, making weird, bottom-lit triangles on people’s faces; the dance floor was where the bar and booth weren’t, and lit up red and blue and strobed over the massed, bouncing dancers.
Eventually I got tired and sat. There were tables and chairs, and our group had commandeered one. Our group was five-sixths boys, massive American guys, and they huddled around that table territorially like it was Home Base. They tagged foreigners to come and talk with us; they mostly ignored locals, since none of this group spoke Chinese all that well. (Of course: we’d left the geek back at the dorm.)
The evening wore on, and got drunker and drunker. I was on my second “naw, you go ahead and dance, I’m tired,” my third “aw, is that beer on the floor?” my fourth “no, go ahead, keep talking, I’m listening,” – everyone tells their life story to the sober person – and my two hundredth “no, I don’t want to drink.” Finally, and probably understandably, I accepted. “Fine. If you really want to get me a Coke, sure. No rum okay? Just a Coke.”
The boy who’d been badgering me pushed his way to the bar, pleased as punch he’d finally gotten me to get something. Well, gotten to get me something, actually, but when you’ve had sixteen shots at 30 kuai apiece, you don’t mind details like that so much. He came back to the table balancing two more shots in one hand, and stretched the Coke out to me in the other. “You sure y’don’t want something in that?”
“Yes,” I said, smiling patiently (god! boys!) and took the drink.
Here, of course, shenanigans struck. As will often happen at exactly the wrong moment in crowded rooms, there was a break in the noise, or maybe in the drunk/listening continuum. What happened was that Dan, the guy next to the one who’d gotten me the Coke, heard that it wasn’t spiked.
“Aw, man, that’s no fun!” he exclaimed, and tipped his own drink into my cup.
Both drinks were overfull; Coke and vodka poured down the glass’ sides and splashed my jeans. I didn’t want it all over me, so I shoved the mess back at Dan. “Dude, what the hell’re you doing?”
Dan probably thought – well, I don’t know what he probably thought. Maybe he got knocked forward from behind, or maybe he was just annoyed his Clever Plan hadn’t worked. Anyway, he pushed the glass back at me, “I ain’t takin’ that, it’s yours.” Then I shoved it back and he got angry and I got angry and somewhere in there someone dropped the glass, splashing Coke and vodka and broken glass over both our feet.
Summer, and we’re both in flip-flops.
Dan, of course, barely noticed. He just kept yelling, and I, not about to be out-yelled by a drunk, kept yelling back. Someone with more sense than both of us shoved us out of the room, through the heavy steel door, up the stairs, through the blue room, and out onto the sidewalk.
And that’s where we both shut up. Because in the crowded night market, Chinese people selling and buying and walking three abreast and stopping to smoke by the Prop – yeah, they were all interested in seeing a tall black guy and a small white girl yell at each other while picking broken glass off their jeans and feet.
And as drunk as Dan was, he didn’t want the stares any more than I did. So we simmered down. We stood outside the Prop, among the streams of people, ignoring the neighborhood beggar and having a civil discussion about drunkness and China and coming here and childhood the existence or nonexistence of ADD and ADHD and our places in school and the universe and why we were here and where everyone else was.
Everyone else was back inside, except for the guy who’d steered us out. American as he was, he was off smoking with the locals, watching us, and being watched in turn.
The two of us talked. Dan, exhausted, or maybe just drunk, sat down, then lay back on the sidewalk to continue the discussion. And I, smelling like smoke and bar and Coke and vodka, tiny scratches on my fingers from picking glass slivers out of my jeans – I was just spiteful enough not to tell him: Chinese sidewalks are spit-grey for a reason.
[words: 1571]
[due: 3/17/2010]
For an American, China is cheap. It was cheaper in the summer of 2006, when it was 8 kuai to a dollar. When we of my study-abroad group – all Americans, all students – went to dinner on campus, the cost came out to maybe 20 kuai a head. If you don’t want to do the mental math, that’s $2.50 per. A dish of gongbao jiding, a dish of su shao tudou, a huge bowl of suan la tang, a bamboo dish of chicken fried in red sauce, two veggie dishes, and a rice each between ten of us – 200 kuai for the whole, so 20 kuai each. We didn’t even finish all the food.
And of course, since China was cheap, and we were all students, it was fairly inevitable that on the way back to the rooms someone or other would suggest, “hey guys! Wanna go to the Prop tonight?”
Most of us did. Some people were here to study; others were here to “study”. It was pretty easy, looking at our group, to pick out who didn’t come along to bar nights. Two married women. One geek. The chaperoning professor. Everyone else piled together near the glass doors of the Foreign Students’ Dormitory, waiting impatiently for the rest of us to drop Important Things off in Rooms and run back down the rickety stairs. Then, in a conglomerate amoeba, we rounded the dorm’s corner, passed through the campus’ South Gate, and started down Chengfu Lu toward Wudaokou.
Any and every city has its own districts, each with its own reputation to uphold. Wudaokou is widely known as the student district, for the ten-some major colleges within walking distance of its metro stop. Its neighborhood is built on what students want. Restaurants. Tea shops. Clubs. Clothing stores. Food stores. Cheap eateries and expensive cell phones. Stores for everything: a textbook store, a comb store, a store for wispy and fashionable clothing. Food carts stop in the middle of the sidewalks – or, if they’re more enterprising, the streets, and there vie with slow-moving traffic that considers bicycles in the same vein as cars. Rows of more bikes and food stands and tiny buildings and parked cars and potholes all herd people into swirling currents on the once-white but now spit-grey sidewalk tiles. The metro line runs overhead, and proper train-tracks run below-beside it; trains run by periodically.
This being a city, nothing stops running at night. Wudaokou picks up, in fact: the night market opens. People drag out blankets and spread them out like picnics on the sidewalks. Each blanket is a shop: clothing, books, baby toys still in plastic wrapping, candles and homemade holders, mass-produced scarves, piles of cheap shirts with English letters in random formations. Food carts park by the metro doors, selling foods and fruits that change with the seasons. Bicycles park in long, rusty rows, and outside the Cool Hangouts crowds of young people stand and smoke and talk.
The Prop was definitely a Cool Hangout. It stood up from the sidewalk on a waist-high step faced in black rock, and couldn’t’ve been more than fifteen feet wide. Once side squashed some restaurant’s stairs into the side of a teashop; the other side butted up against a 7-11. (The 7-11, incidentally, was deemed almost as cool as the Prop.) It served as club and bar for bother foreigners and locals – for any students coming by, and for anyone who’d read their Lonely Planet guide and decided, “this is the place I want to get drunk tonight.” The cover charge was 25 kuai – in the summer of 2006, $3.
Its full name was The Propaganda.
Propaganda outside was small, city-soot-stained, with a big red star hung by the door and tall iron shutters rusting against the second-floor windows. Propaganda inside was smaller – there was a bar, there were booths, and the space between the two was just enough for one person to walk, or two to squeeze awkwardly past each other. Everything was done up in blue light, and at the back, there were stairs down.
We, still in our tight American group, took the stairs down. A huge, heavy steel door was at the bottom; shoving it open brought a blast of music and red light. We, still grouped, piled through.
A bar is a bar is a bar, as Gertrude Stein might say, and so what people did was start drinking. I didn’t. I didn’t drink at all in those days, which, for a college student was weird. People wanted to know why, though a couple gallant souls would lead into it with, “hey man, leave ‘er alone. She doesn’t wanna drink, it’s cool. Incidentally, why don’t you?”
To avoid all that, I danced. The downstairs was about the size of my bedroom back home, only a little longer and a little fatter. Lights sat under the tables and under the bar-counter and along the walls at waist-level, making weird, bottom-lit triangles on people’s faces; the dance floor was where the bar and booth weren’t, and lit up red and blue and strobed over the massed, bouncing dancers.
Eventually I got tired and sat. There were tables and chairs, and our group had commandeered one. Our group was five-sixths boys, massive American guys, and they huddled around that table territorially like it was Home Base. They tagged foreigners to come and talk with us; they mostly ignored locals, since none of this group spoke Chinese all that well. (Of course: we’d left the geek back at the dorm.)
The evening wore on, and got drunker and drunker. I was on my second “naw, you go ahead and dance, I’m tired,” my third “aw, is that beer on the floor?” my fourth “no, go ahead, keep talking, I’m listening,” – everyone tells their life story to the sober person – and my two hundredth “no, I don’t want to drink.” Finally, and probably understandably, I accepted. “Fine. If you really want to get me a Coke, sure. No rum okay? Just a Coke.”
The boy who’d been badgering me pushed his way to the bar, pleased as punch he’d finally gotten me to get something. Well, gotten to get me something, actually, but when you’ve had sixteen shots at 30 kuai apiece, you don’t mind details like that so much. He came back to the table balancing two more shots in one hand, and stretched the Coke out to me in the other. “You sure y’don’t want something in that?”
“Yes,” I said, smiling patiently (god! boys!) and took the drink.
Here, of course, shenanigans struck. As will often happen at exactly the wrong moment in crowded rooms, there was a break in the noise, or maybe in the drunk/listening continuum. What happened was that Dan, the guy next to the one who’d gotten me the Coke, heard that it wasn’t spiked.
“Aw, man, that’s no fun!” he exclaimed, and tipped his own drink into my cup.
Both drinks were overfull; Coke and vodka poured down the glass’ sides and splashed my jeans. I didn’t want it all over me, so I shoved the mess back at Dan. “Dude, what the hell’re you doing?”
Dan probably thought – well, I don’t know what he probably thought. Maybe he got knocked forward from behind, or maybe he was just annoyed his Clever Plan hadn’t worked. Anyway, he pushed the glass back at me, “I ain’t takin’ that, it’s yours.” Then I shoved it back and he got angry and I got angry and somewhere in there someone dropped the glass, splashing Coke and vodka and broken glass over both our feet.
Summer, and we’re both in flip-flops.
Dan, of course, barely noticed. He just kept yelling, and I, not about to be out-yelled by a drunk, kept yelling back. Someone with more sense than both of us shoved us out of the room, through the heavy steel door, up the stairs, through the blue room, and out onto the sidewalk.
And that’s where we both shut up. Because in the crowded night market, Chinese people selling and buying and walking three abreast and stopping to smoke by the Prop – yeah, they were all interested in seeing a tall black guy and a small white girl yell at each other while picking broken glass off their jeans and feet.
And as drunk as Dan was, he didn’t want the stares any more than I did. So we simmered down. We stood outside the Prop, among the streams of people, ignoring the neighborhood beggar and having a civil discussion about drunkness and China and coming here and childhood the existence or nonexistence of ADD and ADHD and our places in school and the universe and why we were here and where everyone else was.
Everyone else was back inside, except for the guy who’d steered us out. American as he was, he was off smoking with the locals, watching us, and being watched in turn.
The two of us talked. Dan, exhausted, or maybe just drunk, sat down, then lay back on the sidewalk to continue the discussion. And I, smelling like smoke and bar and Coke and vodka, tiny scratches on my fingers from picking glass slivers out of my jeans – I was just spiteful enough not to tell him: Chinese sidewalks are spit-grey for a reason.
[words: 1571]
[due: 3/17/2010]
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
sketch
Under the grey Beijing sky, under the Yellow Number Three aboveground metro line, under the pillars and heavy concrete, catching the crowds that come every time a train rumbles over-past, is the chestnut lady and her cart.
They're all over the raods in Beijing, these fruit and vegetable vendors. Wide carts, wood-bottomed, iron-wheeled, grimy and so covered with blankets. They change according to the season: peaches in the summer, bright or pale yellow, with leafy peach branches stuck in-between the fruits to contrast and make them look more appetizing. In the fall, apples; in the spring, winter-dates. In the winter, tangerines and mandarins and oranges anywhere from two-fist-sized to the size of a human eyeball.
Chestnuts come in the fall and the winter.
The chestnut-lady's cart is not wood, but pale aluminum, or maybe tin, with bicycle-wheels. It's a box-on-wheels with a tiny stove on one side; over this stove sits a wide, shallow iron wok pan. It's filled with black gravel and chestnuts. On the cart's other side, a scale and a pan of chestnuts.
The chestnut-lady doesn't need a coat. In the fall, she wears short sleeves, while everyone around wears jackets. In the winter, she wears long-sleeves, and takes her tall wooden scoop, and leans close to the wok-pan, twisting and shoveling the hot gravel over the cooking chestnuts. She takes oil and drizzles it over everything, and then goes back to turning the rocks, over and over.
When you go to her, and ask for chestnuts, you specify a number -chabuduo shi, ershi: about ten, twenty - or a weight. It you ask by number she leans over her wok to the tray, picks up a scoop, and expertly divides ten, twenty oil-shining chestnuts from the rest, and drops them into a waxed-paper bag. If you ask for weight, she nods and puts the bag on her scale, adding as asked, or shaking nuts out - not into the tray, but into the wok.
The waxed-paper bags darken as you walk, eating: this is how you know they are good. Lots of oil. Every now and then you come upon a chestnut that rattles in its shining shell: the nutmeat is shrunk away from the shell, a dark-brown unchewable raisin. This does not happen often, and people never complain.
They're all over the raods in Beijing, these fruit and vegetable vendors. Wide carts, wood-bottomed, iron-wheeled, grimy and so covered with blankets. They change according to the season: peaches in the summer, bright or pale yellow, with leafy peach branches stuck in-between the fruits to contrast and make them look more appetizing. In the fall, apples; in the spring, winter-dates. In the winter, tangerines and mandarins and oranges anywhere from two-fist-sized to the size of a human eyeball.
Chestnuts come in the fall and the winter.
The chestnut-lady's cart is not wood, but pale aluminum, or maybe tin, with bicycle-wheels. It's a box-on-wheels with a tiny stove on one side; over this stove sits a wide, shallow iron wok pan. It's filled with black gravel and chestnuts. On the cart's other side, a scale and a pan of chestnuts.
The chestnut-lady doesn't need a coat. In the fall, she wears short sleeves, while everyone around wears jackets. In the winter, she wears long-sleeves, and takes her tall wooden scoop, and leans close to the wok-pan, twisting and shoveling the hot gravel over the cooking chestnuts. She takes oil and drizzles it over everything, and then goes back to turning the rocks, over and over.
When you go to her, and ask for chestnuts, you specify a number -chabuduo shi, ershi: about ten, twenty - or a weight. It you ask by number she leans over her wok to the tray, picks up a scoop, and expertly divides ten, twenty oil-shining chestnuts from the rest, and drops them into a waxed-paper bag. If you ask for weight, she nods and puts the bag on her scale, adding as asked, or shaking nuts out - not into the tray, but into the wok.
The waxed-paper bags darken as you walk, eating: this is how you know they are good. Lots of oil. Every now and then you come upon a chestnut that rattles in its shining shell: the nutmeat is shrunk away from the shell, a dark-brown unchewable raisin. This does not happen often, and people never complain.
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