Sequences
(photo by Ken Driese from his bathroom window)
It's 7am on a blustery morning. The plastic taped to my wooden lattice windows downstairs is flapping. The sky is a dark, thick, smudgy indigo as I peer out of my upstairs glassed bedroom over the rooftops at the hills silhouetted in the distance.
My muscles are full of fresh aches from the previous night's Tae Qwon Do session. Walking home from class, jubilant as usual after all the kicking and shouting, I'd learn't, 'will the pain ever go away' in Chinese, and taught the same phrase in english to my friend Chen Hui. In between, we'd practised parts of sequences, punching the air and saying 'wo ai tai qwian dao!' (i love tae qwan do).
I lumber down the steep skinny dusty staircase to a small alcove where I flick on my electric teapot. After heating a circle of bread over the element (a clay base supporting a wire-coil), I return upstairs with my coffee and toast, and open the door onto the rooftop courtyard. The sky is growing light as I put my breakfast down on the wall and climb up onto a ledge, grasping the edge of the roof, then swinging out on the clothesline at an angle which enables me to get a view around the neighbour's house to see what the mountain (Yu Long Xue Sahan) is doing. Transplendant as usual. Soon the summer rains will come and it might not be visible for weeks at a time.
Mostly, that's what it's like living here.
The water will glisten in the canal as I walk my cobble-stoned path to the bustop on a day when I have a 10 am class. Someone will be washing a pig's leg, and further upstream another person will be thwacking clothes on the stones. Any spare patches of dirt along my way are planted out in neat rows of vegetables. When I get near the shops, the canal becomes wider and scores of goldfish fight the current, swimming energetically just to stay stationary. I might briefly wonder why they bother putting all that effort in, why they don't just let themselves be whisked away, as I might if I were a goldfish. Then my thoughts will return to the lesson I'm about to give.
But there are other times. They appear out of nowhere. When I will arrive home and it's late and I'm tired and I take out the key to a small padlock which links the two brass rings on my door, sometimes - those times - I'll stop, and lean my cheek against the mudbrick wall where the white wash has worn away, and push my skin into the gravel so I can feel it, and whisper melodramatically into the silence, 'I'll never learn Chinese, all my friendships are superficial, and I'll never fit in.'
Even as I say it, another, less indulgent voice in my head responds, 'fit in? fit in? Is that what you came to China for, to try and fit in? Are you crazy?'
It's 7am on a blustery morning. The plastic taped to my wooden lattice windows downstairs is flapping. The sky is a dark, thick, smudgy indigo as I peer out of my upstairs glassed bedroom over the rooftops at the hills silhouetted in the distance.
My muscles are full of fresh aches from the previous night's Tae Qwon Do session. Walking home from class, jubilant as usual after all the kicking and shouting, I'd learn't, 'will the pain ever go away' in Chinese, and taught the same phrase in english to my friend Chen Hui. In between, we'd practised parts of sequences, punching the air and saying 'wo ai tai qwian dao!' (i love tae qwan do).
I lumber down the steep skinny dusty staircase to a small alcove where I flick on my electric teapot. After heating a circle of bread over the element (a clay base supporting a wire-coil), I return upstairs with my coffee and toast, and open the door onto the rooftop courtyard. The sky is growing light as I put my breakfast down on the wall and climb up onto a ledge, grasping the edge of the roof, then swinging out on the clothesline at an angle which enables me to get a view around the neighbour's house to see what the mountain (Yu Long Xue Sahan) is doing. Transplendant as usual. Soon the summer rains will come and it might not be visible for weeks at a time.
Mostly, that's what it's like living here.
The water will glisten in the canal as I walk my cobble-stoned path to the bustop on a day when I have a 10 am class. Someone will be washing a pig's leg, and further upstream another person will be thwacking clothes on the stones. Any spare patches of dirt along my way are planted out in neat rows of vegetables. When I get near the shops, the canal becomes wider and scores of goldfish fight the current, swimming energetically just to stay stationary. I might briefly wonder why they bother putting all that effort in, why they don't just let themselves be whisked away, as I might if I were a goldfish. Then my thoughts will return to the lesson I'm about to give.
But there are other times. They appear out of nowhere. When I will arrive home and it's late and I'm tired and I take out the key to a small padlock which links the two brass rings on my door, sometimes - those times - I'll stop, and lean my cheek against the mudbrick wall where the white wash has worn away, and push my skin into the gravel so I can feel it, and whisper melodramatically into the silence, 'I'll never learn Chinese, all my friendships are superficial, and I'll never fit in.'
Even as I say it, another, less indulgent voice in my head responds, 'fit in? fit in? Is that what you came to China for, to try and fit in? Are you crazy?'
posted by jacqueline b at 12:36 PM
4 Comments:
i've been waiting for another post jacq. tell ken i love his photograph. quite surreal, i thought.
hmm. . . . just wondering: what would happen to the goldfish if they did quit swimming?
so exhausting, being bombarded by contradictory thoughts/feelings as you seem to be. guess it's just an unavoidable step in the 'decision' process.
cheers my friend!
adagio
Spectacular photo (well seen, Ken. Are they any good for climbing, or just piles of choss?) and a great post, Jacq — an evocative insight into life in your part of the world.
Hi adagio,
(i dont know how to make this comment appear under yours).
I dunno about the goldfish... but I'll pass on the compliment to ken.
jacq
Hi Pete,
Ken has a blogsite called 'Ken, Ellen and Bei in China', with lots of wonderful photos and great text. I don't own a camera over here on some kind of principle, so hypocritical plunder ken's, or occasionally borrow a camera. I've just given him your blogsite address, and asked him for a technical appraisal of Yulong Xue shan. He said, 'the limestone on Jade Dragon LOOKS good, especially in canyons on the lower flanks, but i've not checked it out up close and i've read that the stone at least a bit higher up is choss. There is potential for good limestone sport climbing all over the place, but the logistics are difficult - climbing is scattered and hard to get to. But, there may be concentrated areas. There is some potentially interesting climbing on hard sandstone at Liming and Shibaoshan not too far away'. Jade Dragon has been summited, but it's not exactly a daily event.
jacq
Thanks for the investigative reporting, Jacq! Ken’s blog is great, as is yours. I'm getting a fascinating insight into life in parts of China.
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