Big feet

This entry will be very short, but the topic is very big: my feet. So big are my feet that I would have to go barefoot if I hadn't brought several pairs of shoes and boots with me to China. The entry is very short because, well, I had another problem with translation, leaving me with little spare time tonight.

(The translation problem: I clearly understood the message from university officials saying that there would  be a make up day tomorrow, Saturday, for one of the days that would otherwise be missed because of our upcoming holidays. I didn’t realize, however, that the make up class applied to the Friday morning class I had just I taught, a three-hour seminar. But I now realize that I'm expected to teach another three-hour seminar to the very same students tomorrow. Ouch! I will be up late tonight! After class tomorrow, students will disperse to far flung corners of China for several days of holidays: National Day celebrating the 63^rd anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, immediately followed by Mid-Autumn Festival, one of the most important Chinese holidays. This is the holiday for eating moon cakes.)

But my big feet: Although nobody makes shoes my size, my favorite cobbler is happy to fix my well-worn Ecco shoes for the equivalent of 50 cents. These are shoes that should have been retired years ago and are totally unlike any of the spike heels that most college women seem to wear anywhere and everywhere—to class, to the grocery store, to JinYun Mountain.

 You can’t tell in the picture below that I’m standing in the doorway of one of the many shops lining a big city street or that the shops make an elbow, leaving just enough room for a tree from which the cobbler hangs his umbrella like a porch roof, a little stool about six inches high, a little post with a metal platform on which to place an upside down shoe, a little iron contraption, and assorted pouches with needles, thread, hammer, nails, pliers, superglue and the like. The cobbler is never out of work for long, and as you can see in this photo, half a dozen women have recently dropped off plastic bags full of things for him to repair. You’ll occasionally see some Deedle Deedle Dumpling perched on the step, one shoe on, one shoe off, conversing with the cobbler while the cobbler mends the shoes.

Noise

I might not live through another night of this noise, and now I'm given to understand that there will be two more long days and nights of it.

True, this noise isn't the very loudest noise I've heard since being in China. The loudest noise happened to erupt at Sichuan Shifan Daxue during language class one day last summer, when suddenly my Chinese teacher stopped talking about measure words for "piao" and "ke" and the four of us seated in a U-shape around him were frozen by a piercing scream. The single scream escalated and more voices joined in. We just couldn't imagine who or what was being dismembered next door. Nothing on a maternity award or a psych ward or any such place could match this screaming as far as I knew, and it kept escalating. We, of course, shot into the hall to investigate, only to bump into a dozen other anxious Peace Corps volunteers and the three screamers, who just happened to be the other three teachers.

These three teachers are exceedingly intelligent women, kind, too, but they apparently don't like little things that move and there apparently was just such a little thing moving under one of their desks. In the hall, they held hands, as is common for Chinese women of any age to do, and started backing toward the stairs.

Ever curious, several of us got down on our hands and knees, eager to get a glimpse of the wayward mouse or beetle or whatever it was. We spotted the suspect under a table leg, and I finally cupped it in my hand and stepped outside, only to trigger another round of screams from the women who had not yet reached the stairs. The cute but anticlimactic answer to the day's mystery was just a tiny green gecko.

But no gecko could account for the explosion I heard yesterday morning. I was talking to Christopher, who heard it from his couch in St. Louis, and thought it sounded like a truck dumping a load of gravel on my balcony. I thought it sounded like an explosion of guns. Unlikely though it would be, could it be something to do with the thousands of freshmen donned in brown shirts, red ties and military caps, flanked in formations across the soccer fields for a month of compulsory military training? No, they wouldn't have guns, and this noise was close, on this side of the big city avenue. Fireworks? But on a Saturday morning? National Day (think Fourth of July) isn't until October! But then, Missouri has firework stands going up two weeks before the Fourth--maybe the firework sales were underway?

Every ten or fifteen minutes, I'd hear another round of earsplitting racket. So, I trotted up the hill to find my landlady Mrs. Niu to make enquiries but found only a note on her door with a telephone number. Not long after, though, when I was headed to market, she stepped out from behind a sewing machine at the tailor's to shout out a greeting. I stopped, glad to see her. My Chinese served me well enough to ask her what the loud racket was but didn't serve me well enough to understand her impassioned answer. That it had nothing to do with the university students I did understand, but nothing else.

For the rest of the day I tried to ignore the periodic bursts of sound, but by nightfall irritated cats and babies were joining the ruckus and, spliced in between what could only be fireworks, were other unhallowed noises and unmusical instruments, some screeching and eerie, all loud and persistent.

Way below the road to the foreign teachers' apartments is the park where ladies do Tai Chi most nights, and there I saw a huge white tent with tables under the bamboo. Again, maybe they were selling fireworks early before National Day, but why blast off the goods all day and night? Thousands of kuai must have gone up in smoke already. Why all night? Why so much?

At three on Sunday afternoon my beloved tutor showed up, one of the ex-screamers from summer training (who happens to be a grad student in linguistics here at Xi Nan Daxue during the school year and who happens to still be my tutor). And, finally, from her, Xiaodan, I learned all about Chinese funerals, which typically last three days and are as elaborate and often as expensive as Chinese weddings. (If you have a noisy child, you might consider a future for him or her as a professional noisemaker to be hired out at Chinese funerals.) Between dialogues focused on tones, we talked about the history of Chinese funerals, some of which have the spirit of an Irish wake.

I got little sleep last night and am unlikely to get much tonight or tomorrow, but the noise irritates me much less now that I know what it's for. I can imagine how the constant ripping off of firecrackers and other noisemakers for days could be comforting to the bereaved. It's a madness that makes sense to me, an intensity and drama that must be cathartic. So I probably won't rest well tonight, but I will wonder about the one who just died, and I will wonder about the mourners under the tent who are trying to get a grip on life without their newly lost one.

Alice's Rabbit Hole

Step over the threshold into Room 513, Teaching Building 5, and it’s like sliding down Alice’s rabbit hole. Before stepping into the room, I’m a giant, a good head taller than some of the male faculty and possibly two heads taller than laborers weaving rickety barrows through the streams of students down on the street. But when I step over the threshold of 513 (and every doorway has something to step over—I’ve tripped in many), I'm dwarfed by my two teaching comrades, both in their twenties and both haling from St. John’s in Minnesota.

Still, Room 513 is nothing compared to the the brick path from my apartment in the foreign teacher village (Ban Zhun Cun – bamboo village). That brick path leads to two radically different time zones.  If I go down the hill and cross the big city street, I’m at Gate Six of the university, an awesome entry to a walled campus formally designated a botanical garden with magnificent buildings, lily ponds, and fifty thousand students, many of whom are talking on cell phones as they speed by on motorbikes. It's very much the 21st century.

 

If instead I go up the hill and cross the ridge behind the apartments, I find myself in another world, on a mountain path high above the Jialing River, with dwellings hugging the mountain on one side. It could be 1300. Nothing about the dirt path or little dogs running under the mahjong tables suggests that there are skyscrapers, lots of them, less than two miles away. The old men with bamboo shoulder poles or simple buckets move along steadily, seeming to see everything and nothing as they go. (More. . . way below.)    

Back in Chengdu, aesthetics could shift with the snap of a finger. I spent two months in Chengdu at Sichuan Shifan Daxue, a smaller campus, where we studied Chinese and taught English in Model School. I could spin on my heel and one minute face the dirty photocopier shown on the right. If I needed photocopies for teaching, I would use this machine (with directions in Chinese, of course), one of many old photocopiers wedged under stairways or in between jiaozi shops. Many of the tiled walkways were uneven, possibly a reminder of the 2008 earthquake, and sometimes the nearby squat toilets reeked in the summer heat. And yet, if I spun around on my heel and looked forty feet behind the photocopier pictured here, I'd see the beautiful little garden, one of many throughout the campus, pictured below. Competing with the hum of cicadas in the lush, magnificently groomed gardens might be the steady rhythm of voices . . .a student under this tree, another under that, reciting lists of exam terms. 

1962

It isn’t the year 1962, tucked away in the past, that I think about while here in Western China a half century later, but rather the dynamic double-edged-ness of everything.

To be sure, it’s not just a matter of the past—for China holds its own on this side of the digital divide. It has a techno-savvy culture and can point to astonishing feats of engineering—think of the Bird’s Nest (of 2008 Olympics fame) or the Three Gorges Dam (the largest in the world) or the sheer magnitude of infrastructure in any of its scores of cities with many millions of people. Even in the countryside of Sichuan, a train zipping through green terraced mountains and rice paddies might suddenly come upon a hamlet featuring a dozen thirty-story buildings under construction. And whether at badminton, ping pong, or piano, the Chinese push for excellence, doing their best. So the point isn’t that China is low-tech, uncultured, or stuck in the 1962 that I knew.

The 1962 I experienced was decidedly low-tech. I had never seen a computer, we opened the windows wide on hot summer nights, and my mother still darned our socks and hung our clothes out to dry. We never trooped into a restaurant unless Great Aunt Ruth was treating us to dinner in Ithaca, New York—and McDonald’s had yet to make a big dent in American culture. Not surprisingly, my mother didn’t need Michael Pollan to educate her about the slow-food movement or the virtues of eating local produce—slow food was the only food.

I can wax nostalgically about all of these things, and I see that they aren’t entirely lost here in China, where I eat one peeled grape at a time, one shelled peanut. (For clumsy me, chopsticks slow down eating, too.) Chinese women take their bags to market, haggle for the best prices on a stunning array of fruits and vegetables (none of which is wrapped in plastic or Styrofoam), and head home to prepare up to four dishes per meal, each featuring multiple veggies and herbs. The steps are slow and deliberate. The food is fabulous. Nothing is wasted.

In hot and muggy Chengdu (where I lived in July and most of August), most apartments have a tiny washing machine and room air conditioners, but these are seldom used. Instead, most people hand-wash the day’s clothes and pin them up on one of the clotheslines gracing every balcony in every complex. To minimize excessive laundry, most ladies change into simple cotton housedresses at home.

Here – there – wherever – whenever – this attention to doing things slowly and living lightly on the earth is something I cherish. But 1962 wasn’t always pretty, at least in my hometown of Trenton, Michigan. Trenton was in the armpit of the industrial Midwest, the land of “pink chemical nights” (thanks, Eugenides). Trenton’s graduating class of 1962 couldn’t have been more clean-shaven and clean cut, but the nearby Detroit River was multi-colored and toxic. Rachel Carson was with Silent Spring about to draw attention to the effects of DDT on birdsong, and the horror of Love Canal was about to mobilize a new era of regulations and protections.

Paradoxically, Trenton may have witnessed the best and the worst of a largely unregulated culture in 1962, still seemingly simple enough and do-it-yourself at home, while chemical and auto industries were transforming our airways and highways. People still had primarily sustainable, green practices, but other forces were at work, about to radically transform the environment. Likewise, I see in China quaint one-lane mountain villages about to be transformed by the appetites of automobiles. Big box stores are coming to cities. My good sense of direction is challenged by the fact I can never see the sun through the bright metallic haze. I must boil or distill all of my drinking water; I must peel my fruits and vegetables, one grape at a time.

So, if it’s not the year 1962 that I think about, it’s the paradox of progress. At the foot of the hill where we foreign teachers live in Beibei is the jiaozi woman’s tent. I watch her throw handfuls of fresh xincai into the pot gurgling over her open flame. Her elderly father sits at a nearby table, nimbly pinching together trayfuls of dumplings. From under the flap of that tent, I can see the Beibei skyline, scores of skyscrapers piercing the orange evening haze.