Good at Losing

"I'm good at losing things": a text message I wrote to a new friend here yesterday, a follow-up to asking if I'd left my kuffiah at her apartment the night before. A kuffiah being a traditional scarf worn by men in middle eastern countries to protect from sun, from sand, from cold. The kuffiah having been considered a symbol for uprising and revolt and coopted by hipsters from Madrid to San Francisco years ago now and reproduced in rainbow colors and with slogans. This kuffiah one of many I've had, and the only one I haven't lost yet, purchased nine years ago now from a Moraccan man from his stall in Grenada. We'd gotten to talking--a mix of Arabic, Spanish, English--and he said the scarf came from Syria. This kuffiah something of my uniform in Brooklyn, doubled up with scarves in winter, worn on it's own in spring and fall, put on the sand at the beach, on the lawn at the park. This kuffiah getting me attention from Arab men in the bodegas across Brooklyn and an Israeli once, each one of them: "Do you know what that means?" And: "Where are you from?" Here in China, people don’t seem too aware of Lebanon; the few people I've spoken to about it--the man at the passport office when asking me to verify my birthplace, the young Chinese couple I made friends with one night at a restaurant in the mall near where I live--haven't known what it is. 

I'm good at losing things, and when I woke up thinking about my kuffiah yesterday, and looked in the few corners of my sparse apartment and found them all kuffiah-less, I started getting pretty angry at myself--just like last weekend when I realized I'd left my only sweatshirt I'd brought with me to China--a cool one a good friend helped me pick out on a special trip she made to see me in New York before leaving--in Hangzhou, and then on Monday when I went to deposit cash into my Chinese account and noticed my US bankcard was missing, remembering I'd used it the afternoon before. It wasn't still there, at that ATM in the corner of Carrefour, where all the women working at the counters nearby got my phone in their face, with a slurry of sentences translated by Google via VPN. "Where is the lost and found?" Right here, the woman who couldn't help me seemed to say, pointing at herself with the banana she was eating and unable to help me find anything but a deep sense of frustration, the likes of which I had yet to feel here.

I'm good at losing things, from things that I need in order to function as a responsible adult to precious things, passed down from the generation before, sweet gifts, friendships, ideas, intentions, motherlands. Oh loss. This is the moment I'm supposed to say that it's actually a gain, that the things we lose teach us about ourselves, if we pay attention to them just so, if we let ourselves notice the pain of losing them and also realize what those losses have given way to. My friend, who texted me back a half hour after I confessed my superpowers of loss currently has my kuffiah at her apartment and will reunite me with it tomorrow, she was pretty interested in Lebanon, in me, and we talked late into the Shanghai night, with her husband too, about many shades of this world and also other worlds we've known--where we're from, where we've been in between then and now, the landscapes and characters that fill our imagination even though they're gone.

The Lake is Everything

I'm ashamed to admit it here, but it took quite a bit of effort to get up my nerve to go to Hangzhou last weekend. I was planning on going alone, and there seemed to be a lot of logistics to consider. Navigating the train, finding the hostel, not disappearing into the country. But I saw sun in the forecast, and I was ready to get out from under the cloud of smog and see what else this part of China might have to offer.

West Lake. That was the starred site in the day-trips-from-Shangha section of the guidebook. Just this whole huge empty blob filling up most of the city map of Hangzhou. What would it bee like in real life? Not like the absurdly technicolor photos in the inset, not this time of year. Maybe like nothing at all.

The train station at Shanghai's western edge was like Penn Station at rush hour times twenty and still somehow more logical, vast. I wanted to turn around as soon as I got there, but I pressed on, through the station where the multitudinous signs told me everything and nothing, in both English and Chinese. Arrows took me in circles, electronic voices asked me to look up from my phone, to respect the property, to separate my recycle waste from my other waste, to keep my tissues out of the key hole toilets, to queue, to not recline on the benches.

On the train I got a window seat, but the country I looked out on was nothing to write home about--just more developments petering out into agricultural land, and before we could have gotten very far at all, we were there. The subway station in Hangzhou was almost as ridiculous as Shanghai, the old woman behind me in line at the ticket machines kept shoving her body into me as if that would make it all go faster, and I shoved back. Ridiculous. Who gave a crap about this lake, this place? What could be worth all this?

It was only when I finally got off the subway and began to walk into the old part of the city, and towards the direction my hostel supposedly was that the air stilled some, and I looked up to see see meat hanging from doorways, laundry drying in trees, a woman cooking a mysterious something in a tiny room fronting the alley, people lined up on the concrete stairs to buy her secret. I almost walked on, ever the oblivious outsider, but some force that we'll call the idea that I MIGHT NEVER HAVE THIS CHANCE AGAIN pulled me into the line that was rife with happy chatter I couldn't understand, and the thought that they were making fun of me rolled off, and I just stood there, smiling. "I am here," I thought, "It's me. Here."

When it finally came to be my turn, she said something to me and I shook my head. Then she switched to English: "Spicy or sweet." "Both," I said. Definitely both; She squirted an orange sauce and a purple sauce. Speaking Chinese again, she wished me happy new year--one of the only phrases I know. How were we still celebrating this? I thought, and in the same beat returned her wishes with a sense of cheer that was surprising to me. The food was rolled up in a newspaper and in my hand. And it was good. So was everything else I ate and drank in Hangzhou: sweet sesame beef jerky, preserved duck, spicy beef noodles, steamed pork buns, french-style elephant-ear cookies, braised fish head in stew, a whisky cocktail with a charred cinnamon stick, a beautiful pot of fresh ginger tea.

And it was when I had the cocktail on an impulse stop at a mysterious place--called Sunrise Lounge--on my lovely mobike ride back to the hostel which now felt like home that I realized I had been playing a game with myself all along, a game of withholding the lake from myself. Because when I had gotten to it, after the tea and before the fish, in the hour or so before sunset, it was clear the lake was everything--the amoebic expanse of it, the silver light reflecting off it, on it, the hills in the hazy distance. I can't even really tell how it's true that there were many of us crowded around it, but still, when I looked out, I felt like I was alone, like I was no one, and that was a miracle, it felt.

I played the same game the next morning too. Wandering in a new direction from my hostel and into the Sunday market where they were selling every kind of fish and every kind of tangerine. And eggs and plungers and dumplings and finally in the back of the wet market I found some yogurt and then went to sit in a park where I watched street sweepers gossip over their cell phones and children play badminton and a man go on and on with some terrifying form of beatboxing and two women dance with swords and time kept ticking by and I pushed on to the lake. And even though the map on my phone showed me walking towards it, I felt like I would never get there, finally finding a park with hills the map didn't show and twisty paths and then more roads and everyone and then, finally, after I was out of breath and sore and sweaty and the sun had finally come out from behind the clouds, there it was again, that blessed lake. There were so many more pagodas and paths and temples and vistas and and and ...

I missed my train home. I wish I could tell you I had stayed in Hangzhou and am writing from there now but the nice people at the train station shoved me on the next one, where it was standing room only, and somehow through the sardine-crush of all the Sunday people finally coming back to this massive city I made it back to the quiet of my temporary apartment with all my temporary things, and since then it has been a really intense week of work filled with classes, meetings, emails, conversations, so many meals and drinks, so many steps and thoughts and plans, so much good news and bad, but just above it all, floating somewhere just out of plain sight, this vision, this lake.

Deep Breath and Go!

There is an existential dread that comes with getting out the front door. I know this was true for me in Brooklyn, but it's even truer here, with the still-constant gloom, the seemingly impenetrable language barrier, the unknown world I've chosen to come to. It takes a while to really get myself together: I look up what subway station I need, where I'm aiming to go, look for tips in all the articles for expats in China on-line, check the weather, make sure a million times I have the money I need, the right keycards. Umbrella? Gloves? And then, deep breath and off I go, out in these new neighborhoods again.

Always, there is the tension between how much you keep to yourself and how much you share. Often subconscious, this tension comes to the surface for me now. As I'm walking down each sidewalk that's new to me, peering into shop windows--this one selling sea cucumbers in glass cases, this one electronics, this one fancy clothes in shades and patterns that feel both familiar and utterly strange, so many banks I don't recognize, so many more banks than home--wonder if my boyfriend, my mom, my sister, others I think of often who are far away would like this place, how it would feel to experience it like this, for the first time, with them. I know my dad, the bookworm, would be tickled by the book vending machine and want to go inside the cafe it fronts that's full of books, even though none of them are in English.

As I figure out that the temple I thought I'd go into costs more than lunch will and besides I haven't the time, find out that the Mao museum I read about in the guidebook is closed and tiny anyway, I wonder, for a minute, what to do with myself--but then I walk this way, cross the street, look up, there, follow my nose, walk into this slightly open gate into this hidden, empty garden that some one has taken a lot of care with. I consider taking out my phone, to use Google Translate to figure out what this or that says, take a picture that I might post for you or maybe delete. Sometimes I can lose myself and really be here, and sometimes I'm recording to remember, living outside myself and this experience. Sometimes I notice many of the photos I took while enjoying my Thursday walk were of reflective surfaces, and I'm there in the frame, however flimsy my likeness, I am here somewhere, I must be.

The Gray Won't Let Us Go

The only direct sun I've seen in a week came out for a couple hours in the morning on the first day of class, a nice way to ease the new-beginning jitters. The classes went really well, and it was easy enough to complain about the weather as part of my teacher-patter. "I didn't expect Shanghai to be like this," I say, in front of my new students, "this Seattle gray." I annoy myself when I find myself going on about the weather back home, but here, it gets me in my soft spots, it's all new.

In my apartment building they leave the windows open in the hallways, to keep the air fresh in the humidity, I guess, but when it's cold outside, it means it's cold inside, and when it's raining, it echoes. I'm on the ninth floor of sixteen. I'm always feeling drafts, always adjusting the heating units. There are floor to ceiling windows most places I go. Home. School. Work is on the 9th floor, classes are on the 6th. It's a vertical, gray life, for now.

The people here have amazing umbrellas--and not like in New York where just a few colors pop up in the sea of those cheap black ones we all buy every time it rains. Here we've got all sorts of patterns and colors. I saw one today with flowers on the inside, so the guy using it could appreciate his own flair. It's almost as if people don't mind the rain, there's a relaxed flow to all the traffic--cars, bikes, walkers. The motorcycle delivery guys are heroes with their various rubber armors and their hauls. It all seems so unsafe, but somehow it's working.

It's been raining, raining, and cloudy and gray, like we're all submerged in something that doesn't want to let us go. And I've been planning classes and getting massages and figuring out how to use my rice-cooker to make all sorts of non-rice things, like Shanghai Chili, which goes something like this: sautee veggies and tofu and Szechuan spice mix in my nonstick pan on my induction hotplate. Combine in rice-cooker with rice-cooker black beans I made the other day, a can of chopped tomatoes, some crushed garlic. Go email some students, lay on the floor and stretch out my achy back. Come back to the rice cooker and ... yowza.  

They tell me spring comes early here. I can't wait! But I will.