Last Days

For those who don't know, these past few days have been my last in Beijing.  I'll be moving back to New York City after a seven-year hiatus, which fills me with joy and trepidation and excitement and basically All The Feelings, which will have to wait for another blog post because this post is about Beijing.

I just reread my post from my first days here, and it's a little odd (but completely satisfying) how these last days have been their echo.  It is mildly-to-grossly polluted, just as it was when I arrived.  I went to Tiananmen Square on the way to the Forbidden City yesterday, and still managed to be bewildered by the place: surely I'd never gotten that close to the portrait of Mao before?  Was the flagpole always that far away?  (Answer:  you came into the square from a different subway exit, Crawford, ya ding dong.)

I went to the Wall on Saturday, took the ski lift up, and the toboggan death-trap down.  As before, I was pretty sure that I was going inhumanly fast on the way down, and as before, there was a line of toboggan riders stacked up behind me.  I went to the mall.  I had duck.

It really is funny how the days are accordioning themselves:  when I first arrived in Beijing, I had duck.  I went to the mall.  My first big achievement was to cross a busy Lido street by myself (don't laugh, it was terrifying at the time).  Directly thereafter, I went to Tiananmen Square for the first time.  In the next few days, I went to the Wall.  And now, purely by accident, I'm doing all these things in reverse, and the similarity of the pattern brings into stark relief the things about my life and myself that are different.

For one thing, as my Chinese teacher cautioned me to five days into my life in Beijing, I've learned to slow down.  I got back from Tokyo on Tuesday night, and I've spent the last few days moving slowly about the city.  I'm staying in Lido, a different neighborhood than I've ever lived in, and spending a lot of time with my eternally pregnant friend (not that she is often pregnant, just that this particular pregnancy seems to be eternal in nature).  I'm not pushing myself to see and do everything I might one day miss, because it seems impossible and doomed to devastating failure: how can you fit two years into five satisfying days?  Answer (Chinese-style):  Bu cuille.  Cannot.  

(Oh, did I never mention this? For some reason, Chinese sometimes -- but not always! -- transliterates French-phonetically in my head, so, sorry about that little bit of pretention/enjoy and mock at will.)

What I can do is this:  Walk gently through the city.  Wear headphones sometimes, because it separates me enough that I can observe without being drawn in, and the music links to the world around me:  Florence + the Machine's latest stomps around the Line 14 subway to Jintailu, The Five Stairsteps wind through the ticket line for the Forbidden City, and Taylor Swift's "Shake it Off" will eternally be dancing down Fangyuan Xilu.

I can not wear headphones all the time, because the sounds are a part of it, too: honks and too-loud cell phones blaring Chinese pop songs and children giggling and the sudden breathtaking silence when I close myself into a taxi (or, alternately, the shrieks and declamations of a Chinese radio drama).

Mostly, I can let the city toss me about.  I can not plan.  

On Wednesday, I ate Indian food for lunch with the aforementioned pregnant friend, watched Pitch Perfect 2 on the couch with her and my other pregnant friend, ran some errands together, had Korean food at the mall, and walked home to pass out.  It was an absolutely normal day for anywhere in the world, precious because it was only at this time and in this place that I would ever be able to have such a day with these friends.

Thursday, I met Pregnant Friend #2 in the previously unexplored Southwest Beijing to try to find the Tea Market.  In true Beijing expat style, we collabated to become hopelessly lost, turning erroneously left when going straight would have brought us to the tea market in about five meters.  After an hour-long fool's errand, a taxi brought us back around to our original starting place and we just laughed sheepishly, shrugged, and walked into the Yashow of Tea.  In Beijing, flexibility reigns: if you decide you need to get places efficiently and with zero complications, move to Germany.

We drank tea, ate hand-pulled noodles from a noodle shop (delicious and $1.40 for more noodles than I could handle), and met up with Pregnant Friend #1 that night for my last in-Beijing Beijing Duck.  The duck was delicious, but again, I'd had duck in those first five days.  What tugged at me was a sense of friendship, belonging:  these people, this place.  I barely remember what the duck tasted like.

In many ways, other than the friendships I've made and the ways I've grown as a teacher, I'm tempted to think of my time in China as a failure:  I don't speak Chinese, I'm still not brave enough for street food, and it still makes me nervous to be in unknown parts of the city without a working VPN (and therefore Google Maps) on my phone.  I'm leaving too early to really be a Beijinger.  I know that.

I have learned some things, though.  When I went to the Wall two days ago, the circumstances were almost identical to my first visit.  It was Saturday.  It was polluted.  It was crowded.  It was, excuse me, hot as balls.  Rather than wearing a black cotton t-shirt and jeans, though, I was in a light blue shirt with shorts and flip flops, and rather than rushing through the visit to grab photos and toboggan down, I hiked along the wall for a bit, found a reading nook on the outside of a watchtower, and curled up in the ancient stone to finish my book of Yu Hua stories.  

And reading that first Beijing post reminds me how afraid I was initially of things that seem normal to me now.  I took four subways and a public bus to get myself from Southwest Beijing to school the other day, without a single nerve twanging at me.  I can navigate myself around neighborhoods that are only semi-familiar.  When a taxi driver gave me an up-front price of 300 RMB for a ride from the Forbidden City to the Lido Hotel, I knew enough to laugh in his face.  "Are you kidding me?" I asked in English, incredulously, and then switched to Chinese: "Wo shi Beijing-ren."

And I cross streets, all the time:  big ones, small ones, scary ones, safe ones.  This morning -- my last one in Beijing, probably ever -- I am sitting in Indigo Mall in Lido writing this blog post, and in order to get here, I had to re-cross the first street I ever crossed by myself in Beijing.  

I wish I could say that I crossed it without thinking, or realizing its significance, which would then indicate the distance I've come and the airy nonchalance with which I live my life, but I've always been way too self-conscious for airy nonchalance.  I knew very well the significance of this street.

It's still a difficult street to cross.  There's no pedestrian light, and the law in Beijing is that cars don't have to stop on red if they're turning right; this means that traffic doesn't exactly slow, even if you have the right of way.  I -- as usual -- foolishly waited until the light changed in my favor, and then had to wait while two trucks and a car turned right onto the busy Jiuxianqiao Lu.  I saw the hole in traffic that I would walk through, planned for it.  An old man impatiently strode by me, brushing past my elbow and knocking my hand off my hip, and I followed him, grinning.  

And just like that, I was on the other side.