Beijing

So here's a cliche: life is not art. It's messier.

I can't help but find this distressing. I'm the sort of person who adores coincidence, who sifts through the raw material of happenstance in search of patterns with some narrative potential. (It's the aspiring novelist in me, whom I've been killing inch by gentle inch for the past three years or something, a kind of euthanasia of which I'm not proud. The only thing I value more than useless pretty things is utility.) I love arc words, use them frequently and clumsily in writing. Because experience doesn't come with its own leitmotifs or ominous echoes, my interior monologue provides a suitably gaudy score.

Even by casting myself as this compulsive orderer, Rumpelstilskin spinner raveling the undifferentiated minutes into storied thread (ouch, tacky metaphor), I'm committing the exact sin I'm talking about. It's more complicated than that. I like the aesthetic of chaos. There's nothing like the studied randomness of falling glitter, grab a handful and let the spangled flakes scatter. Snowstorms, nebulae, Yale housing: I just can't pull that off. So, crystal lattices instead.

But I guess my time here in Beijing (slate-colored, muggy, the full-length jeans I packed for Harbin damp with sweat-- but hey, I'm a Texan, it isn't heat till you think of Hell) won't lend itself to that kind of pretty order. Here there is no even pacing, Freytag's Pyramid, that sort of thing. (Someday, I'll stop thinking of myself as the shy, Prufrockian protagonist of some modern novel. Storybook heroes don't act like me anyway-- they emote more, and have prettier eyes.) Maybe instead I'll adopt a vaguely stream-of-consciousness approach, which'll be a nice excuse to have my slavish adherence to conventional mechanics drop away a few paragraphs down. A few years ago I texted in MLA style. All points of pride soften; all habits lose their shape with time. (Looks like I interpret stream-of-consciousness as "the generation of tacky truisms". I'm a cliche factory. If I lampshade it, it's okay.)

I'm wondering if I sound a little bit insane. I've been in Beijing for three days now, and I haven't talked to a person under forty since I taxied into the airport next to fellow Stiles sophomore Jason Kuo. I guess that's a decent coincidence-- I sat the first leg of the journey next to my little sister's bandmate, who visited my house for at least one Asian party, the sort where expat engineers guzzle iced Tsingtaos and attempt Celine Dion karaoke. The flight I took from Austin to Newark was aswarm with family friends, the other full of Light Fellows. The twelve hours in flight were less painful than I remembered from similar motherlandic journeys with the nuclear family, sister asking for ETA at hour-long intervals while I tried to read. This time I bobbed in and out of a syrupy sleep while Jason next to me looked over his textbook, reminding me of exactly how much vocabulary had likely leached out of my head since finals week. My PRC passport exempted me from filling out the arrival card-- lucky, since they pretty much ran out of pens two rows in. A bilingual flight attendant with a Taiwanese accent and a Jay Chou haircut came through repeated with a beverage cart. Each time I asked him for hot tea, which I hadn't drunk since Yale, in Chinese.

Beijing itself seems to have clung to its hard-won post-Olympic sheen. The flashbulb image of it I carry in my head is something like six years out of date, from the first time I visited, when muddy styrofoam cartons half-full of food littered the roadsides and what looked like mules mixed with Mazdas on the streets. Probably it's confabulated with Tianjin, Harbin, Jiamusi-- one of the other cities I visited. My aunt's property in Lumingyuan is especially well-appointed. Olympic pairs figure-skating champion Zhao Hongbo was a neighbor; maybe he still is. We met him the last time I was here, and he signed a publicity photo after we watched him glide around the local rink to a flashy orchestral arrangement of "Nessum Dorma". Not realizing the depth of his celebrity, I seem to have misplaced it.

One thing hasn't changed. My hair is the right color, and I go around shielding my face from the sun with a scalloped parasol, just like a native girl. So when I ask someone to repeat what they said or can't manage to read a menu (in Yale L3 they give us the dictive tools to talk politics and revolution, not order dimsum), I probably give the impression of being rather stupid. Or hey, maybe they just think I'm Korean.