Post College Let-/Melt-/Slowdown

Dearest Bai Ji Tang is visiting me in Shanghai these two weeks. So lovely to summon the olden days: reclaiming our fast and luminous insider language, feeling exuberance beyond belief at times, wearily leaning on shoulders at other times. I think there may be nothing more precious than an old friend.It has been difficult to write and produce art in the same way I did in college. As BJT put it, there are so many things to reevaluate about how life works, beyond and alongside an intellectual understanding. And living alone means missing out on the smaller means of artistic expression: the scrawled-on collages of dismembered magazine models stuck to the Fridge with four Hello Kitty magnets; found objects modified into obscenities, MS Paintings, gifts made of trash, hair bows made of trash (Subtle Marcus)...there is a lovely transient communal joy in that shit.

Not to say that I am unhappy with my new loner-foreigner-observer status in Shanghai. Ships pass in the night, ships sit together at the dock. The ending is a bit dodgy. The end of the story, I mean.


“Hi, Da,” I said, amused by the Chinese syllables I’d used to greet Daniel as he opened the door. He was brushing his teeth and greeted me with a wide palm rub to my back. I took off my black dusty boots and coat, slipped into house sandals and scuffed over to the couch.

Today he wore tight jeans and a large knit sweater of oddly matched colors. I watched him as he walked into the bedroom with that familiar loping gait, how his jeans hugged his legs, listened to him as he spit into the sink. He brushes his teeth for so long. I never brush for more than two minutes, but he could spend ten minutes with a mouthful of foam. Is my mouth clean enough?

I couldn’t think of what to do, so I picked up a TIME magazine and waited for him to reappear. THE CHINA THREAT, I read with bemused anxiety. I’d read it before. I walked onto the balcony with the headline in my head, looking for some sign of the threat. Next door to Daniel’s service apartment complex in Shanghai’s French Concession was a construction site, well lit and still crawling with migrant workers despite the setting sun and rush hour deluge of cars and pedestrians on Fuxing Road.
Rising up to my eye level was the ever-present Tower Crane, now as much a part of the Shanghai skyline as the Pearl Tower. I saw the operator in his cab, lit by a single bare bulb and turning the jib a full 180º while pulling in a load of I-beams, an astonishing display of human authority over impossible machinery. Down below, a couple of migrant workers were hanging their pants and shirts up to dry outside on the narrow balconies of their temporary on-site housing.

A loud shriek drew my attention to back inside the white walls of Daniel’s apartment complex. A little toddler was chasing after a small dog, his ayi standing with arms folded nearby. Wrapped in all those layers, he was a precious little waddling ball of red. I watched him teeter in the grass until ayi ran over and briskly scooped him up in her arms.

“And how does she look to you this evening?” Daniel surprised me, poking his head out from the sliding door.

“Who?”

“Miz Shanghai, of course.”

“Ah,” I said smiling, nodding my agreement. “She is busy at life as ever.”

“What?” he said politely. At this I felt beleaguered. A native speaker of French, sometimes he cannot understand what I say. Or perhaps I mumble.

“Busy as ever.”

"Yes,” he said as he turned away and slid the door ajar. “I’m making tea…”

I took one more look over the balcony before going in. The waddling toddler and his ayi were gone. Another ayi was sweeping leaves with an outdoor broom, a tight bundle of dried leafy hay stalks. The sun had moved behind a skyscraper, and the last of the light settled over the courtyard and construction site in a fleeting twilight haze.