Julia was looking through the head teacher’s desk drawers for a piece of red or blue or green chalk this morning when a roach surprised her and scurried across the top of one drawer in order to leap into the almost shut crevice of another. Julia jumped and seeing the terror flash across her face, I felt for an instant, atavistically connected to her, no matter the variance of our upbringings: for she sees the pure horror residing in such a tiny - SEEMINGLY insignificant - creature as the cockroach.
I’m marking the Grade 1 activity books this evening and I come across Petunia’s. She is an extremely bright, vivid child who maintains almost complete silence in my classes even though she has yet to make below a 94 on a test this year. This little girl is magical. Though she rarely speaks, her smile, when she flashes it, fills up the room. She’s tiny, has elfin features and dark bags under her eyes. Her activity book is completely neglected and the last time I was marking, I asked Christy to talk with her parents about stepping up their involvement in class. Christy appeared as I was flipping through Petunia’s un-touched pages this evening and told me about Petunia’s parents. Recently, they have stopped writing comments altogether on her weekend homework. Christy asked her why they stopped writing and she replied, “They sit in front of the TV all evening. They tell me not to bother them. They tell me to do my work on my own. I’m a big girl.” She’s six years old.
I finished my work a little late this evening and though I know the bus routes well, decided to splurge for a 12-kuai taxi that would take me right to the gate of my apartment building. I walked to the street at 6:50pm – just as school was letting out for the students who don’t get to leave at 4:05pm or 5:30pm. Jeifang Road was clogged with motorbikes, pedestrians, taxis, bicycles, buses, vans and cars. There was a traffic jam right in front of the school. Usually, I have to walk to the corner to wait for taxis but the traffic jam had caught an empty one in its wake. I scooted in while the driver paid careful attention to a woman in a Peugeot backing out of the school’s driveway and into the already crammed road. As soon as the Peugeot had taken the five inches the driver was greedily eyeing, he realized I was in the back seat and turned to ask, “Where to?”
Driving the “back way” to Nanhu Garden from the main school, one must traverse a long side street belonging to the pink ladies. This evening, they were all out, as if smoked or flooded out. Although I had my eyes wide open in order to absorb as much detail about their usually private lives as possible, there were simply too many and we were going too fast. What I recall seeing was a snaking of long white limbs, entwined and ignoring the humid wetness that hung in the night. Girls folded over other girls’ laps. Bare arms embracing bare arms. Long fingers lacing in and out of thick black hair, combing or braiding it half-heartedly. Frills and ribbons flowing from mini skirts and half-covered bodices. Their movements struck me as fetid and drippingly-dank. And the women moved lugubriously, staving off heat exhaustion. Although I felt what I feel whenever I look at Picasso’s L’Demoiselles D’Avignon, the women couldn’t have visually been further from his unfortunate heroines: remove the sour smirks and the intense makeup and place them among kinder circumstances and they’d be the lovely beauties they almost conjure for the men who buy them.
It’s been raining a lot in Wuhan these past several weeks. I arrived in Wuhan on June 20th of last year and if it plans on jumping to the roasting temps of those first days in China, the weather’s got a long way to go. Actually, it may be figuring out that it’s the first week of June yet, as it was wet and hot and cloudy and thick as pea soup out there today. The rain does little to freshen things up around here though. I can always smell the garbage and steaming refuse piles more acutely after a good rain. I’ll keep my nose blocked and breathe through my mouth for what seems plenty of time to let the smells clear themselves from the moving vehicle and as soon as I open the olfactory outlets, hoping for “clean” air, I find several more noxious smells have replaced the malodor. Today, driving home, the streets were slick with an oil-trash-juice-water muck that sprayed up from every vehicle. The three buses my taxi was stuck behind belched, vomited and discharged thick clouds of pungent diesel exhaust as we inched our way through traffic. The grime and particles clinging to the heavy, humid air found their way to my sweat-smeared face, arms and hands and the horns and shouts of irate passengers, drivers and pedestrians drowned my thoughts in a murk of wishing to be somewhere else, somewhere calm, somewhere quiet and somewhere clean and just as I thought I’d have a hysterical fit and melt into a puddle of oozing goo, we arrived at my gate and I paid the taxi and he left me fumbling for my keys. And there, in the moment of forced pause, my nostrils flared at a delightful yet wholly unfamiliar memory wafting in: the scent of gardenias. I looked to my left and saw hidden among some carefully pruned bushes, three gardenia blossoms giving off a divine and welcoming fragrance.
On the one hand, it would appear that I am too manic or exhausted to write an involved entry, but on the other hand, I am giving you what much of my life has been like in China: pieces of a bigger picture that seems to be shrouded in mystery, when I know that the only thing keeping me from pulling the curtain down is a language spoken by 1.6 billion strangers. With any luck, I’ll be one of those strangers two years from now.
