Did you ever love her?

In 2016, in August, I went to China. This is just one chapter.

I got on the plane and things, as always, are sacred place. I just didn’t sleep, and reached this liminal state between sleep and wake.

By the time the layover landed in Shanghai, I was under waves of tiredness, but a core of me was wired. I felt like the crew of the pirate song pilgrims on a long journey, that as long as I moved without speeding up or slowing down, I would make it. I’d arrive physically and spiritually. Not mentally, since my mind had gone by then.

I was struck by how the Shanghai Pudong airport was just an ugly place. With fuck all to eat.

Back on the plane, still no sleep. I took out my iPad and started scribbling down math.

The plane touched down. I wasn’t in the window seat, so I stared across, leaning past the guy in the window, looking at the lights, the orange haze from above in Beijing.

I called a cab. It wound its way into the very heart of the city on the inner ring, into the fanciest looking shanty town I’d ever seen. It’s not like it was made out of falling apart houses, but it just looked like a shanty town. Thick crowded alleys, kind of squat multi-story buildings, like only dispossessed college students lived there. That’s what it looked like.

My host Michael, I don’t remember his Chinese name, came out and greeted me. He had a cat named Dog. I don’t know if this is a thing in China, but I swear I met like three other cats with the name Dog in the month there. He seemed to think it was pretty funny. He said his girlfriend was asleep, and showed me the couch. I put down my stuff, pulled on new clothes to spare me a bit from the humidity and the stickiness, though I didn’t take a shower. It was about 2 in the morning at this point.

I asked him where to eat, but he didn’t know. I just walked until I found a place.

I saw one of the first Uyghur influences on China in the kebab shop I ate at. One of those places that has loads of skewers. I noticed all the tables were lacquered, and a bunch of people would spit bones onto them or any scraps. The staff would just sweep them in one clean motion. I wonder if the lacquer was for that, or just because it’s pretty. And it is pretty.

I got a bunch of skewers and started eating. Then a boy that looked like he was 16 came up to me and asked if I wanted, or rather if I could eat these cricket skewers. I don’t remember the Chinese word for cricket, but that’s what he said. I’m like, if you’re paying for it, sure. His friend seemed pretty surprised by this. But hey, a free five skewers for me. I inhaled them. The boy’s English was pretty good, so I got his WeChat and then went ahead.

The shopkeeper stopped me as I was walking out. He tapped away on his phone and then flashed a translation, saying it’s not safe at night. Kind of him, but unnecessary. I just nodded very carefully at him and left.

Something about the mist and the orange light made me feel a bit more wakeful, or at least dreamy in a more fun way. So I kept walking instead of going to sleep.

I encountered a guy who was fishing in Beihai, the North Lake. Maybe illegally, but whatever. So I tightrope-walked the narrow line of the canal and started speaking to him in pretty broken Chinese. I don’t remember what we talked about. He tried to show me how to cast a line, which I sucked ass at, at least then. He offered me a fish, which I smiled and shook my head at. Thanks, guy. It was nice of you.

The night walk continued. Along the ring of the lake, there were even more skewer vendors and a guy doing portraits. I got some enoki mushroom skewers and watched him do someone else, and then asked the portrait guy to do me. I sat on a stool and just sort of blinked amiably at him.

After a while, he showed me myself. He asked if I was Uyghur, and I said Yindu, the Chinese word for Indian. I said I was from California, and he asked where in California, and I said Berkeley, and he immediately asked if I went to UC Berkeley. Which yeah, I did. He seemed pretty excited by that. He asked my name, and then wrote it in the corner of the painting.

Painting in hand, I walked back. The host still awake. Michael still awake. He asked if I wanted to hang out later, and I said sure, to wake me up at like 10 or 11.

And I shuffled into humid sleep. Sticky sleep.

Morning came with a self-imposed trivial mission to get some Beijing yogurt for drink and a jianbing for food. So I asked Michael. We took a cab to another part of town closer to the Forbidden City and walked around the stalls. Watching a vendor make the jianbing is pretty exciting. I had him dump a lot of chili oil into it. He skimmed some yogurt from a clay jar and gave that too.

Then we went to a hill that overlooked one of the central portions of town and a bit of the lake.

And then he started talking. I wonder if that’s why he had stayed awake late last night in the first place, in hopes of this. I had some sense of something. So I just asked him, what is it?

And he started telling me about his life. That he had studied in America and met a girl there, and that he loved her. But then he went back to China and she didn’t. Later she would come, but by then a girl who had been interested in him back in China had started dating him.

So I just asked him outright, do you love her? Speaking of his girlfriend, the second woman.

And he said in a way, and I told him, doesn’t sound like it. And he just stared, not at me, maybe not at anything in particular, but he stared.

Somehow this had run until early evening. It was starting to get dusky out. So we started walking back. A hell of a long walk. On the way, we saw an injured white cat with a bloody paw, and Michael tried to get it. A kind man. He sure does care about animals, at least cats. It bit him, and then he was the one bleeding. He said, I’ll probably need a rabies shot, and I asked, was it worth it? And he just said yes.

We stopped for dinner at a Peking duck place. I started Googling the dish and found that one of the early recipes for it was from the year 700.

Chinese culture is a lot more comfortable than American culture, or cozier, that lots of everyday conveniences are in fact more convenient. From the macro scale of subways to the micro scale of little stuff in restaurants. Their food culture is incredible.

But there were homeless people shuffling through the city like unseen slime, forced to move on and on, transient slime. Heavy smog and a sort of invisible atmosphere.

I decided something there for the first time. I booked a train ticket to Chengdu the next morning, and then went to go and hang with the boy. I forgot his name too. He had rich parents and had studied in America, but was now back, and seemed burnt out by life or at least blunted by it. Yeah, I’ve been there, man. It sucks.

I had him take me to a shoe store and I bought a pair of blue sneakers. I was wearing hiking boots and I had some anxious tic where my cadence was off in them, which made me aware of it, which made my cadence more off, and so on in a loop until my left leg hurt so much I could barely walk. I hoped the sneakers and their lighter familiar weight would help. And they did. Also the back of my leg was very chafed.

After that we said our goodbyes, and I’ve never seen him again.

The next morning, I took an Uber, or I guess a Didi, to the train station. I pulled out my passport all quick like, just to find out that I’d booked it for the wrong day. Sorry, not day, the wrong way. That I’d booked it from Chengdu to Beijing and not the other way around.

Even though I was totally alone, I felt so embarrassed. Now that I’m dredging my old feelings, I felt shame rather than guilt, which at the time I thought was strange. Like there’s this whole distinction of shame versus guilt societies. And at least at the moment, I was feeling shame, like there was some invisible pressuring hand above me that was disappointed.

But there is no such hand.

I breathed a few times and then made another decision. I called a cab to go to the airport and just bought a ticket to go to Chengdu immediately. Where I got to encounter one of China’s problems immediately: that the planes are not on time at all. They close the gate some number of minutes, I think 20, before. But it’s all fake, because they’re late anyway, reliably.

Flying over China was magnificent. I got to see the whole middle and western half of the country as we flew over, hyperventilating like a kid on too much sugar. There was just so much of it. I came to digest China’s true size and population and desolate places. Even from above it was far more beautiful than Beijing.

Then the plane landed.

Originally posted at alok.github.io.