A Life Takes Form
I lay in bed staring at the beige walls of my new apartment for thirty minutes, 'relentlessly beige.' I fell asleep. At 6:30am a watch beeped me awake. Sitting upright and leaning against the wall, hugging the covers over my elbows, I pulled myself together under my crappy overhead light. For the last month days have begun to my cute wrist watch and my cute little meditation thing.
Walking from the bus to the school takes me fifteen minutes. Everything on the way is empty and grey. I turn left where two large streets, but very little traffic, intersect. I walk along a grey wall for a long time and turn right at construction site. Grey streets stretch under grey skies. This spaciousness and greyness kind of sums up Chengdu for me. The middle school is right outside Chengdu proper and the spaciousness and the greyness are both exaggerated. It's a foreign landscape that reminds me of Ohio if the fields were cement. Stretch out that greyness China.
In between classes the students and I get ten free minutes. The students attack each other and I try and hide. There is nowhere to hide so I lean against the balcony and stare at the weird field across from their school. Its a big messed up field that is doomed but simultaneously lush. Its like a bigger version of those ghetto yards in Harlem. The plants are dense and little areas of the Rapeseed (Brassica napus), which I think I talked about last time, give the field a depth of color. It also reminds me of an Andre Tarkovsky movie or what Russia might be like.
The lilting music starts and its back into another class. The entrance and the gage of restlessness. 'Hello class how are you?' 'I AM FINE THANKS.' Then I'm staring at the spectrum of Chinese junior high school facial expressions. Hopefully I can rustle these expressions toward warmth. If they give me the benefit of the doubt from the start, mostly they do, its not too difficult to squeeze grins from class, to teach some words, to play some games and to keep things painless.
A life is taking form. Inside the pervading greyness of Chengdu I have a nook and cranny with beige walls. There is a gym with giant windows ten minutes away from the apartment. The light pours onto the running mills and the few people working out on Sunday morning. I found a giant stress knot in my shoulder so decided to go relax in the sauna. The gym is clean, uncluttered, relatively quite, naturally lit, calm. These are rare and precious characteristics in China.
But things here take three times to make work. So with the sauna. Once inside I realized the sauna was off. I re dressed went and asked the staff to turn it on. After pretending to work out for thirty minutes I returned to what I thought would be a hot sauna. It was in fact a warm sauna. Another thirty minutes passed. I sat trying to relax. Finally I discovered some nob, turned the nob and things fell into place.
The gym light reminds me of a grey morning light that sometimes comes into Hillsdale. Sometimes riverside is the same color. After a long time in the sauna followed by a cold shower I sit relaxing and drying myself in the locker room. I can feel endorphins rush through me and the room is perfectly clean and empty.
