The long walk home

It’s evening in Beijing. Ten fifty. Foggy. The night air has a bit of a chill to it—what more tolerant people would describe as “brisk.” It’s fall, but you wouldn’t know it walking on this side of town. The only trees in sight are buried in the small yards that dot the side streets of Third Ring Road.

Tonight is a full moon. The first since the Mid-Autumn Festival last month. It seems like forever ago.

Maybe it’s my mood. Maybe it’s the pollution. Tonight, the streets don’t seem as friendly as they usually do. On the west end of the overpass, a gang of seven or eight guys are surrounding one girl on her knees. She’s not crying, but they still give me dirty looks as I round the corner.

I step off the other side, walking past a Holland Bakery where two ladies are engaged in the world’s oldest business.

“Hello honey~, ma~sa~ji?” they coo.

The left one is wearing a dark brown jacket and matching boots. Fur trim. Chinese clothes are always deceptive that way: even the thinnest windbreaker is topped off in a furry ring—fur is status, not warmth.

Her coworker is sporting that bad perm job with the fucked-up brown highlights that’s been so popular the last few years. Face caked in chalky white makeup, looking like a ghost. The only color is the red lipstick she laid on clownishly thick.

Fashion is beyond me.

The cooing hookers aren’t a normal part of my trek home: usually the only denizens of the night on this road are the expensive Russian call girls I bump into in the 24-hour marts or the occasional ernai. The world’s oldest line of the work in the world is sorely under-represented in this city.

The last time I saw hookers, I was on Sanlitun, the city’s infamous bar street. Outside its bars and down its darkened alleys you can find any vice—for a price. The African guys walk the streets, eyes bugging out on God-knows-what and white lines down their pupils as they peddle their “shit”: good times available in every letter of the alphabet from “K” to “X.”

Diplomats’ kids. The law says they can bring in 40 kilos of crack—as long as it’s in their suitcase.

It’s foggy.

I can hardly see the CCTV tower they’re building on the east side, the ones that look like they’re going to fall over. That’s a real trip. Every time I look at those fucking things I think they built it so when they crash, they will fall away from the other buildings. Won’t take out anything—just a couple hundred dead people on the main. With how they’re slanted, you could bomb the west side and they’d still fall east.
Cars are popular. No one ever stops in this city. The headlights cast a glow that goes on for miles. When the drivers nearly hit you, those lights turn night into day.

I’m crossing Chaoyangmen. I miss the traffic lights in Nanjing. They have a little animated guy for the walk signal. It’s like he’s saying, “Haul ass or you’re pavement pate.” They also have these little count-down meters that tell you how many seconds are left till you are mowed over. Here in Beijing, the street lights are the same as they are in New York City. Detroit. Really every city.

The little flashing guy.

These lack character.

Workers stare at me. A guy in a blue jacket pauses a minute before burning his next smoke. They all look at me. I guess it’s strange seeing a foreigner walking the streets at night. “Our kind” prefer taxis.

Private cars.

I don’t have that kind of money to burn.

Not if I wanna get anywhere.

Scraping by and making just enough to pay the bills every month gets old fast. It doesn’t do much when you wanna get married. It ain’t gonna put a kid through school. Won’t help you take care of your parents or any of the other shit you’re expected to do. ‘Specially here.

You can take care of numero uno. Get yourself up to your ass in debt. Buried in house bills. Seven credit cards chaining together a nice 80,000 yuan debt like an ernai living off the government through her minister lover. The guy who keeps telling her they will get married and have a baby next year but drops her when she hits 29 and her looks go.

Back when I was working for this company, this girl Jeanny—weird name, sounds like “genie” and looks like “Jenny,” but it sure beats the English major named Mephisto—she was telling me how Chinese students, they go to England for those one-year study abroad deals—you know, pretend they’re learning something and come back as a tour guide—get a bunch of credit cards, and on their last day, hit the ATMs. They run out the machines pulling all the pounds of credit their plastic allows, burn the cards and board a plane.

The Brits eat the debt.

Advance-cash debit card are great. They’ve give them to, well, anyone with a picture.

Wish I had it that easy. If I pulled a run on Visa like that in the US, bounty-hunters would be after my ass even if I was living with the penguins.

Heading towards Guomao, the “World Trade Center.” There’s always construction going on by this little mall. Cooper’s? I don’t know. Doesn’t sound like a shopping center.

The taxi drivers are lined up along the side of the street. They’re starting work or getting off. Sitting in the front seat, leaned back with his newspaper open and jar of roughage and hot water in his coaster. Guys have been angsty lately since the gov passed a new law. It’s one of those “Green Olympics” laws because—sweet fuck—everything has to depend on the Olympics. If it can’t relate back to the Olympics, it’s not getting done.

They passed this great law saying, “Hey, if you’re a taxi driver, you can’t smoke in your cab.” Hah. Yeah, that’s a nice slap in the face. I wonder how many of these guys started a couple years ago. Back when the government-owned cigarette companies were promoting cancer sticks as a source of vitamin C and magic networking tool.

Drivers are bitchy. One climbs out to light up. He doesn’t want to, but he knows his next fare could bitch. They put out a bounty on smoking drivers. Anyone with a cell phone can snap a shot and nab 100 out of the guy’s next pay check. Man’s pretty portly. Obesity is getting to be a big deal here. That and diabetes are the new fads everyone is in on.

These shopping malls are amazing.

Beautiful dresses. A Beijing Olympics sign.

A Spyker store. Saw a Ferrari store in Shanghai, but at least that made sense. Who’s buying the James Bond car in this city? I live in Chongwen District, or I call it, Qiongren District, the city’s poorest, most forgotten area. The buildings are a mishmash of 1930s architecture reworked for the Cultural Revolution and face-lifted in the 1980s to look like Wyandotte Michigan after a riot.

Neighbors are grannies. They get home when I do. Working late. Working as bus drivers. Working as the guys ripping tickets at the subway. It’s the job they’re gonna have for life. Don’t have to worry about losing it. Don’t have to worry about skill. Probably why they do such a shitty job.

Still, doesn’t pay.

I climb in the elevator and what do I see? Yeah. A smiling guy with a cigar trying to tell me I need to buy a Bentley.

A Bentley?

You’re trying to sell a Bentley to people who take in two-hundred-and-fifty dollars on a good month? Like that’s gonna happen. I take in a good salary by local standards. I can make nearly a thousand. If I really push it and kill myself, and if the month has five Fridays instead of four, maybe I can bump that to fifteen-hundred.

Street’s getting busier.

Got a bulldozer parked in a handicap spot on my left. He’s gonna fucking move? Just try to ticket that.

There’s this cool tower over here too. The “e” tower. Don’t think it has anything to do the “head shaking pills” Xinhua loves writing about, but whatever it is, it ripped off the Enix logo.

In front of the Enix building is a five-floor cement cereal box residency. The old-style air conditioners hanging out of each window are a telling sign of what income bracket lives here. Five floors. That means it doesn’t even have an elevator. I can see the old women, feet broken back into position, tottering around on canes trying to get up the stairs. The outside is flat gray. Two trees. Cats play.

Those hookers remind me of the US. I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit. Born in Taylor-tuckey—Downriver where most people have more fingers than teeth. A consequence no doubt of their unique way of launching bottle rockets: orally. Moved up north to Rochester before it became the overflow destination for the new rich.

That sure fucked me on financial aid.

My dad worked for GM. Everyone did. It was that or Ford’s. He started at Fleetwood, back when Fleetwood existed and Flint was more city than shit hole. Fleetwood was shut down and he moved over to Hamtramck making Cadillacs. I went and saw the plant a couple times. You take I-696 out to I-96 and head south. Roll off the freeway and pass by a lane of Polish whorehouses. The women are scary. Forties to fifties and still trying to hook Johns. No teeth and lipstick on their eyebrows.

Another car rushes by. Almost hits me.

The car is a new thing here. They swerve across three lanes without so much as a second thought.

People wonder why the traffic here sucks.

SOHO is on the right—another proud construction. My parents came to visit this summer. When my dad saw SOHO he nearly asked “What the fuck is that?” I ask myself the same thing every night.

This is colony of cereal boxes with windows. Each cereal box is the same area, but the height varies. Character comes from what gets stuck in the windows.

Running machines.

Learn English.

Guten tag! Come study in beautiful Germany.

The signs burn bright in the night, but no one is inside. I’ve passed those second-floor gyms a hundred times. There’s never anyone there. Are there are even offices, or do companies just rent the sky space?

I hear SOHO is named after some arts area in New York. Never seen it. This vapid hole has as much art and character as Lord and Taylor.

On the ground, it’s another story. A lady is working in a Japanese noodle shop. Stocking the tables with imported Kikkoman for the morning rush. The walls are caricatures of sumo wrestlers. Wonder if Japanese people even eat here. China offers a fishbowl view of foreigners—foreigners are fish in the bowl. Anything marketed as “foreign-friendly” ends up fucking offensive to someone.

Darkie toothpaste.

Emperor Yonghe’s Noodles.

The stores here all look the same. Trendy. Chic. Starbucks.

On the floor below me, two guys in suits kick back. They rock back on antique-looking lacquered furniture. I want the legs to break. I want them to find out the chair costs as much as their car. A waitress scrambles to keep up with their drinking. They switch off between tea and Maotai.

This is SOHO. This is success.

I’m coming up on the south side. My recorded cuts out. Must be a message.

A couple offices are still open. People working late. Working as much as they do.

In a system where the laziest get promoted to keep the lazy looking good, no one really works. You can see ‘em every day. They struggle to scour the Web for new Flash games. It takes a lot of effort to accomplish nothing. Toeing the line. Smiling. Reading fashion articles. Contemplating which phone to buy this month.

The power to shop is that most exercised.

It’s a Bar Every Time.

UBC Coffee.

The little ramen shop has its lights on. Marukaya. It’s still open for business. I see them every night when I come home. Doesn’t matter how late. One lonely waiter pacing back and forth. Keeping the lights on for the two drinking in the back.

Everyone walks in groups. No one walks alone. Walking alone makes you think. Unless you have voices to keep you company, a walk alone is a long one.

I walk home most nights. Coworkers can’t believe it. Most of them, they live around the office. Never more than a block or two. Only a few care when they get out. Go home and take a shower. Come in drying their hair.

I live out by Guangqumen. An hour if you truck it: two if you don’t.

When I moved out here, this whole Tonghui River Road didn’t exist. That junction used to be a fireworks stand. The road was dirt. At my first job, I walked by here every day. Every day, I saw it grow.

There was no freeway.

There was no shunting onto Second Ring.

No noise. No loops.

I walked this way to work. Grabbed two baozi. Ate at the office.

Not anymore.

The little bridge over the river goes over the old city moat. It stinks like shit. Green stuff growing everywhere. Can’t blame the government. They do their best. They put fish in the water to keep it moving, but the old people and hobos come by and pull ‘em all out every night. Their blankets are tucked up under the bridges where the overpass and the dirt meet. Cold nights you can see they have a fire going. Shantytowns.

A couple is hugging on the bank down there. The girl is a high-schooler. Guy’s a little older. Not many options for privacy in a city of 15 million. Even that’s not a private space.

I can see them.

She leans up to kiss him.

Her hair’s pulled back in a ponytail.

He’s wearing a red jacket.

Roller blades. Shoes. Towels. T-shirts.

I used to come by here every morning. The man on the right by the meat stand is the hardest-working guy I’ve ever seen. He looks different from most people in the city. Might be from a western province. He bakes all day long. He makes Xianbing. Shaobing. Dabing. He makes all the short eats that the people in this area get by on, and he does it all day.

I come home at eleven and he’s working. I come home at one and he’s working. I go out looking for food at four in the morning and he’s working.

The lights here are never off.

In the summer time, men with their shirts rolled up to their nipples sing and pound firewater while the kebob grillers blanket the street in their coal smoke.

A guy comes up to me to say “Hello Mister.”

What does he want?

I do a good job of projecting anger. No one bothered to talk to me in the US. Not even the Rochester women whose jaws waggle endlessly with their pretentious nonsense. Here, it doesn’t work.

Maybe he thinks I’m lost.

A homeless man is sleeping in the tunnel under the train tracks. His hair, thick and thin, has formed into natural ropes after months without a shower. His beard is dense and shaggy. Blanket pulled up to his chin. All that keeps him off the cold concrete is a straw mat.

There’s more and more homeless people here. In the summer, I used to play sax under the bridge. The acoustics were great. The walls gave a beautiful echo. Even if you suck, down there you sound like gold. It got harder and harder to find a bridge to play under with all the guys sleeping under them.

Girlfriend told me to play in the park. People are sleeping there too. Even past midnight there are couples making out on one bench and grimy woodsmen on the next.

Too many people.

The walls here got a coat of gray paint. They looks worse than before.

I take a piss.

Steam rises up.

Chilly.

It’s harder and harder to make that two hour walk home without taking a leak. I’m getting old.

The walls are all topped with cement and shattered glass. It beats Inner Mongolia—there they just lashed together spears. I’ve looked on the other side of these walls. There’s nothing there worth climbing over for.

Adidas man crawls out of a taxi. Looks like he’s getting back from the bar. Cabs roll by. I keep heading down the street. Close to home, but I’m not headed there yet.

Going a little further.

Getting a little tired.

Slowing down.

The walk isn’t long, it’s just the loneliness of the city at night. No one to pass time with. No one to walk with. No one but the voices. The ones who dredge up my past—every mistake I ever made—everything I wish I hadn’t done. A bad cable channel running the same shitty movies you wish you never saw.

I hate walking the city. Mind wanders.

I look up at the striped buildings. I look up at the air conditioners.

Sparrows are going to be endangered here in 20 years. When winter comes, the sparrows don’t go anywhere. They just look for somewhere new to hang out. Apparently the backs of the air conditioners seem like a damn good spot for a sparrow nest. They stick it out through the winter. Have a couple babies.

Summertime comes.

BWAAAAARRRRR.

Feathers in your living room.

Not a nice image, but reality rarely is.

Lately they’ve been grabbing steel threads. Magpies are doing it to. Heard one get into a bitch-fest with his wife the other day. I can see her side of it. Stopping fan blades isn’t a worry when you’re in the middle of a tree.

There’s still a couple people out. Another guy is grilling meat. Closing up for the night.

Pepsi.

Coca-Cola.

That’s not my neighborhood. My neighborhood is the Middle School.

I live right next door. Every morning I can hear the kids head out for exercises as the recording chants “One two three four, two two three four.” The backdrop is a revolutionary-sounding march. If the students had any concept of synchronization, it might look like something out of a Red Terror propaganda video. Then they bust out their PDAs and cell phones to start “texting” each other.

I love juxtaposition. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be in China.

This wall is a better. They sprung for barbed wire.

Scratched up paint. Branded with the dreader chai. Ripped down tomorrow.

The government has been trying to clean up for the Olympics. Used to be you could walk down this street and get a jianbing in the morning. That’s gone. Used to be you could get a bowl of noodles. The shop’s chairs and tables? That’s where I’m walking.

Cats are still here.

I look up over the trees to my right. Neon lights. “International” apartments. The advertising sluts slap “international” on everything here. I want “international” toilet paper.

The mart’s lights are on. It’s 24 hours. Turned that way a few months after I moved in. Used to be that if I got hungry in the middle of the night, I had to walk back to the river. Across the river. Back up to the big street.

I head inside.

Their selection never changes. Croissants a couple days old. Bread. Eggs brought in god-knows-when.

No one buys them.

I did once.

Dried meats. Pringles. Lays. I settle on a bag of dried fish. Grab a cold pop.

Digital shit dies. You find out 20 minutes later when you go to stop and name a file.

Despite that, I’ll go home to dick around with Linux. I seem like a geek. Fucking around on an operating system nobody’s heard of.

Behind it all, I hate technology. It only gets worse.

In the 80s, they draw cartoons by hand.

They had character.

Character.

Shovel the driveway, it builds character. Eat shit, it builds character.

I am Calvin’s dad.

I have character, and so did those cartoons. Maybe they didn’t have character, but they had something modern cartoons don’t: more than four frames of animation. I miss when more than mouths moved on my TV.

The shows have gotten worse too. I go back and watch those 80s sitcoms. ALF was funny. Family Ties was endearing. The antics of Kernel Potter’s crew. Cheers will be funny when that era appears in fourth grade textbooks right after the Kennedy assassination.

My brother was born after the Cold War was over. I grew up in it. I remember when Americans believed everything outside their borders was tanks running people over and Ivan Drago ready to bash Rocky’s face in.

They still believe that.

They cut Zelda on Friday to show the Berlin Wall coming down. I wanted Zelda back.

It never sense to me. When Americans hear “China” they think Red Terror and chaos. They hear “America” and think “the greatest nation on the face of the earth.”

They don’t think of starving.

They don’t think of unemployment.

They don’t think of people dying because they can’t afford care that was free a half-hour east of my house.

My dad made about what I make here when he started in the factory. Probably less. Gas cost a lot then. The Ayatollah was the man of the hour and the Iran-Iraq war was ongoing.

Back when Saddam Hussein was our buddy.

Back before we hanged him.

Cat’s not out tonight. Orange cat. Used to feed him. Friendly little bugger. I tried to take him in one night, but he howled and howled.

The door beeps and I’m into the apartment.

Check my mailbox. Easy to spot. It’s the one with a big hole where the key cylinder should be. Owner took off and never left the keys behind. Bugged the rental company for months. Threatened to jack up the rent if I didn’t hush.

Turns out no one is paying the taxes on this place.

Inside there’s a “massage” ad caked in dust. Shit’s so thick I could pass it off as Vegemite.

Elevator opens. Water on the floor. Dog pissed in it. Someone mopped.

The elevator shakes, creaks and squeaks its way up to the twelfth floor.

My neighbors want nothing to do with me. Couple times they said “Hi”; most times they don’t.
Two and a half turns and the door swings open. I’m home. Another two clicks and I have light. Two and a half turns and I’m “safe”.

Apartment’s not big. It’s not much to look at, but it’s home. My brother said the hallway looks like the set of Hostel.

Drop my bag and head for the kitchen. Grab a glass. Two ice cubes. Rum on the rocks is the only thing that knocks me out after a production night.

I think back to the hookers. At least they have a job where they are making someone happy. I’m just getting a paycheck and another line on my resume. I have no illusions about my readership. Too much time in both the American and Chinese media smashed any starry ideas school taught us about the role and power of media.

The coworkers who left? Some were still starry-eyed. They wanted to make a difference.

Not here you can’t.

Here, you don’t make trouble. Taking pride in your work is making trouble. The one thing people here want less than responsibility is accountability.

This place invented passing the buck.

If you want to shoulder that burden, but all means do it. You won’t be thanked, and everyone else can breathe easily when you’re the goalie taking the hits.

That last sucker punch sends me to bed.