a wilting china rose

Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001
From: Ceels
Subject: a wilting china rose

'Just answer your damn phone mister, before I do something irreversible with it.'

Stupid phones.

'Scuse me. The man over there won't answer his phone. It has the most irritating ring tone.

Living in Beijing is very interesting. You are as likely to be run down in the street by a front-end loader as a bus (they move at about the same speed) and even going to the supermarket has become an adventure. There is a saying in Beijing about their roads being like zippers. Apparently this time they have opened up the road to put in a new subway line, but it looks suspiciously to me like they are just digging big holes and filling them in again. There is a deep trench in front of the supermarket that you cross by means of three muddy planks tacked together. They bounce. And I am much larger than your average Beijinger. I have a good imagination.

Actually my imagination is getting out of hand lately. I keep thinking of doing things and imagine so strongly that I have done them, that I don't. And then the other night when I was having dinner with Aiyi (one of the reporters at the paper) I made a remark about wanting to learn Chinese better and he said something along the lines of 'well, when you have been living and working here for four or five years...' and suddenly I had a very clear vision of myself married to Aiyi, with six or seven Chinese babies. (Well, one Chinese baby of course, but while the Chinese government can stop up a girl's loins, they can do nothing about her imagination)

Maybe it IS time to come home.

I saw some foreigners near the school today, but they were Russian, so I couldn't talk to them. I can spot a foreigner a mile off. It is even getting so that I can pick people who are not from Beijing, sometimes.