Welcome Back to Beijing
2023–10–12
Yuanyuan has been bouncing up and down for the last two days, she’s so excited to get back to China. I can’t remember the last time I got so visibly or even invisibly excited about anything. It might have been in Grindelwald. Should I give up on 20 years of hard-won apathy to feel something? I would, if I could just get excited about that prospect.
We spent the last hour or two relaxing in the park near our hotel in Shinjuku, then headed for the airport. Everything went smoothly. Almost. We got an extra seat on the plane, it took off on time, it landed (phew), there was no line at customs, there was no traffic on the road from the airport and dinner was yummy. Yuanyuan’s sister and her father in law collaborated on a impressive spread that could have rendered a less experienced binge eater comatose. Having participated in 3 food eating contests daily in Japan for the last 10 days, I was more than up to the task.
Sleep was where things got dicey. First I was asked if I wanted to wash my feet before going to bed. I looked at my feet and tried to smell them using smellokinesis. They smelled great. I shook my head a bewildered no. To my relief, they accepted it. I could see the wheels turning though: “hygiene’s probably not a thing in America. They probably don’t wash their hands before eating either, or blow their noses after pooping.”
Then we rolled dice for who was sleeping on the floor in the living room. My brother in law and I won that honor. He pulled out a thin mattress pad and some blankets and by the time I was done wondering if I could get comfortable on that, I was asleep.
Not for long though.
First a mosquito visited, strafing my ear over and over like he was auditioning for North By Northwest. Then I assume he ate me for lunch because he left. But not before he sent in the cavalry. My brother in law started snoring like he was trying to prove something. Probably how well he washed his feet. Falling asleep to the sounds of trench warfare was out of the question. I spent ten minutes mustering the courage to poke him when he suddenly stopped, like he’d lost the signal to the mothership. An hour or so later he woke me again with a different snoring tune, equally discordant. He cycled like that until 7am, when he finally woke himself up and went to wash up for work.
When I got up a few minutes later, we had a funny conversation:
He: oh hey, you’re up! Did you sleep well?
Me: not too well
He: there was a mosquito at some point, did you hear it?
Me: oh yeah, it got me
He: I thought about getting up to kill it but I was afraid I’d wake you
What a sweetheart. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he was the mosquito.
Now that I think about it, it reminds me of a Vovochka joke:
Vovochka comes home with a huge red welt on his face.
Mom: oh my goodness, what happened to your face?
Vovochka: a mosquito landed on it.
Mom: and it bit you that hard?
Vovochka: oh no, don’t worry, it didn’t get me. Dad got it with the shovel.
After breakfast, we went to our old stomping grounds near the Yonghegong Llama Temple subway station, fishing for memories. Like throwing a grenade into an aquarium.
“Heartbreak noodles,” circa 2010, that were so spicy I thought I could see my HP points draining away with every bite. (This was before augmented reality. Today that might make a cool advertisement for Apple Vision Pro). That day I found the limits both to my appetite and my tolerance for pain. I quit but Yuanyuan finished, and her kisses have been 3 times spicier ever since.
The narrow alleyways that form a labyrinth across Beijing, the most distinguishing feature of the city in my opinion. The alleys where Yuanyuan and I used to hide and make out. The alleys where I’d play kick-the-feather (Chinese hackeysack) with other tourists and locals. Mr. McDonalds and his friend, the wall scaling Kung Fu artist. The doctor who could read tongues. The fragrant melange of a thousand breakfast treats wafting out into the street in the morning. The indecipherable yells of locals hocking wares and collecting recyclables from their overburdened tricycle cars that look like little trundling landfills.
The subway trains that can always fit one more person than they could fit on the last stop, begging the question: is water really incompressible? This never gets old.
The subway stop where I sold my skateboard to a guy whose negotiation tactic was to show me pictures of an artist friend of his painting with her breasts. At the time, I thought nipples were for sucking on. Oh the naïveté.
But I also saw some changes: signs pointing out emergency shelters (were they always there?), a bunch of new subway lines, WeChat accepted even more ubiquitously, more security checks in subways (though Yuanyuan claims they were always there), including “random” spot checks. I was asked to show a photo of my passport on my very first trip.
Your choice of mildly or highly air conditioned subway cars. This I haven’t seen on any other subway menu. Nor did I feel much of a difference, so it might have been a marketing scheme or a placebo trial.
After Tokyo, Beijing felt poorer, dirtier, more alive but less safe. The streets were clean, but many of the buildings were old, with the dirt soaked into their very bones. There was often a haze in the air. The traffic on the streets was chaotic. This became even more pronounced when we got to Yuanyuan’s hometown. The roads there are messy streams of people on bikes, electric scooters, motorcycles, motorized tricycles, cars and pedestrians. The dividing line between your side and incoming traffic is a suggestion. A red light is a slightly firmer suggestion. You merge into lanes, pass other vehicles and cross intersections by coordinated bullying. Push a little harder and they’ll let you in. Pull back and wait for someone to let you in and you might wait forever.
You’d think that with traffic this wild, they’d be more concerned with safety but it’s just the opposite. The first thing I do when I get in the back seat of a car is put on my seatbelt. I’m always the only one, and I often get told “oh, you don’t have to do that in China!“ If the car is beeping because someone’s seatbelt is not buckled, they just buckle it behind their back. I don’t know if it’s a macho thing or if people don’t believe seatbelts actually work.
They also haven’t gotten the message about cigarettes and alcohol. As my binge-drinking chain-smoking brother in law poured himself some boiling water into a flimsy plastic cup, I though “oof, that’s a megadose of microplastic…but the cigarettes will probably kill him first.”
In Japan, I felt like I could walk down a dark alley at night and I’d be perfectly safe. At worst, I’d be attacked by a bowl of ramen. Certainly no local would go so far as to say hello to me. This is not the case in China or in the US or anywhere else. In Yuanyuan’s hometown people are friendly and quite willing to approach a stranger. Many have said “Hello” to me in the street. A few have walked up to me and asked for a photo. One asked to shake my hand. People openly stare and point me out to each other and say “blah blah blah foreigner.” Which isn’t so crazy when I might be literally the only non-Chinese guy out of the million or so residents.
I’m also kind of a giant baby here. My in-laws drive me, feed me, constantly ask me what I want to eat, constantly shove bottles in my face and saying “drink!” I’m abstaining from drinking while in China, it’s too dangerous. My hosts try their best, bribing, guilting, whining, begging, you name it. I have to resist accepting that first drink very firmly because once they get a foot in the door, I’m done. These are old hands who’ll split a liter of vodka for lunch easy. I can’t possibly keep up with them. Getting fed sounds more innocent but it’s also non-stop. Have some steamed pumpkin. Good, huh? Oh, you have to try this giant dumpling. Giant, huh? Oh, we also have this fried egg and bread snack, here, finish it. No, please, finish it, you’re our only hope.
It’s kind of like being back at grandma’s house.
Next week Yuanyuan, her parents and I are going to spend a few days in the place where they filmed Avatar. I’m hoping for another Grindelwald moment. Also, I might get to meet Guten, a fellow dev from Exodus.
