Aventurina King

After nine months of absence, the duo is back: Aventurina and her faithful steed: pink bicycle junior (for information on adventures with senior, please see last summer in Beijing's blog).

Number 103 was the arts box.  I purchased A Complete Collection of Famous Chinese Paintings. I have eternally been confused about Chinese painting, yes they are beautiful, graceful, elegant additions in newly furnished New York apartments, but what more?  This book may have started to shed some light onto my desperate situation.  I have translated the following excerpt from mandarin(there being no English edition or equivalent on the www)(if there are any mandarin speakers that wish to make amendments, don't hesitate to comment):

Modes of Expression of Chinese paintings:

The Five Faces of Ink:

In Chinese painting, ink is not only considered as a monochrome parcel.  It can complete the painting on its own and therefore can change appearance.  These appearances belong to five categories:anxious, strong, heavy, thin and clear.

The taxi pulled up in front of the wall of stairs at about half past seven. I awkwardly wriggled out of its belly after paying the fare and hurried up under the iridescent drizzle. The doors opened before me, I took a reticent breath and silently rolled in.

This is where I cut the narrative off and eloquently leap backwards in time for a few paragraphs (eloquently enough to prevent the reader from skipping down a few lines) . This apparently cuts the narrative with suspense.

Relevant flashback information in this case would be the development of my distrust in the concept: "alcohol as a social lubricant".

Camera action: Aventurina's first night in her freshman dorm room at Columbia University. Light that pushes through the windows onto illuminated crescents of carpet, the plastic of the bare mattress against her pyjamas and her life-long companion--the faithful stuffed goose--folded within her clutch. Neither the barrier of the door's fake wood or of her jetlagged sleep can keep out the sound of fellow freshmen reveling on a five dollar gallon of Californian wine outside in the common area. She opens her eyes, and hops off of the bed (Columbia students are like frightened cats, they like to perch up high or hide down below which translates in raised beds or bare mattresses on the floor). The acrid bleached light radiates out of the ceiling. She tries to concentrate on Homer.

Camera action: Aventurina's first college party. An elegant flat opposite the school, polished wooden floors that feel whole under a sandled foot, T-shirts and hands brandishing plastic cocktail cups everywhere, the unsettling sounds of human society in action, couches brimming with legs. Even she has a plastic cocktail cup in her hand, the sip of sugared alcohol hangs on her tongue like a wart, her drunk conversation partner sways precariously, like the Eiffel tower seen against a sky poka-dotted with racing clouds. His words are redundant, she still doesn't understand what drunk is.

Which brings me at last to the final camera action, what I eloquently backed up and drove around to come at from the informed side angle.

The final camera action takes place in Beijing, it isn't one weighed down by an exasperated nostalgia, but a realistic description of the drinking culture in China. Dinners are made for drinking, the heavy drinker is the dinner's king. It doesn't take much to imagine why I don't fare well at these events.

As I was writing before I was cut off by the imperatives of suspense: I silently rolled in through the doors of the restaurant. More fancy than Beijing's usual side of the road establishment, it had red gauze curtains suspended from the ceilings and black-costumed waiters wading through the sea of tables.

The guests seated at large round tables, their positions, a subtle nudge at their relationship with the host. After tea, the first round of cold dishes were wheeled in and deposited in a ring on the tables. The guests play timidly with their chopsticks, stomachs are growling. But wait! The first round of toasts. Gan Bei, bottoms up. "How come Aventurina is only drinking tea?" "Aventurina's not old enough to drink."

Twenty minutes for food and superfluous conversation. Silence. Small speech, everyone bottoms up. The substance in the shot glasses is crystalline, stronger than vodka.

Gradually the collective 'bottoms up' disperse. Groups of young ginger girls clack clack with their high heels over to the neighboring tables to toast. Groups from other tables, come over to ours with increasing boldness. I start wondering whether the food is only a very temporary exhibit. The volume escalates as taunts become more vehement "drink with me" "drink with these girls, if you don't drink with them, shame on you". Sometimes taunts are insidiously quiet, whispered suppliantly into one of the girl's ears "why won't you drink with me?" "promise you'll drink with me."

Eyes glaze over, cheeks fill with blood and hands grasp for bottles with a giggled-off feverishness. I'm already outside in the drizzle, wriggling into one of those metallic bellies.

Il pleut des chats et des chiens, il pleut des cordes...

Well I never thought that it could rain dust, but as I ran out of my apartment complex this morning (late for work as usual) the whole of Beijing was covered with dust.  It almost looked like one of those forlorn desert towns in Westerns except there were cars and newspaper vendors.

Taxi drivers in Beijing don't like me.  And I can't blame them.  When you pick up a foreigner from the side of the road, I imagine, as a Chinese cab driver, you would expect a silent, eventless snail-crawl through the suffocating Beijing parking-lot traffic.  Unfortunately, not so with me.

In the kitchen of a chinese friend of mine, I discovered a cluster of round covered pots on the floor.  I knelt down and asked him what they were.  He took off the lid of one of them, and there it was, a huge cricket.  Along side of it was a tiny bowl, the size of my thumb's fingernail with water and an even tinier container of cricket food: "rice" explained my friend.  With a blade of hay, he started teasing the insect which immediately showed its fangs and bit at the enemy.

Apparently, cricket fighting is a tradition in china.  Individuals raise them in their homes and then take them outside to compete with their friends' crickets.

Another lid covered an even larger cricket, leaning on it's powerful hind legs.  "who do you think would win if they fought?"my friend asked.  I pointed to the bigger one. He took the opposite bet and spilled the content of the first pot into the second.  Somehow, vicious images of blood and broken limbs had come to my mind when i first heard the words fight.  But the cricket fight was to be nothing of the sort.  My cricket (the one i had bet on) bared its fangs, made a lot of noise (it sounded like the opera star renee fleming when she reaches the high A), turned over the other cricket, once or twice.  After that, it seemed like a game of cat and mouse, the opponent running around the bowl as my cricket chased it. "my cricket lost" said my friend, he took a small cricket net, delicately caught and placed the cricket back in his home.  Both crickets were rewarded with some water and food.

I just came back from my second and, I swear, final visit to a chinese hospital.  Early in the morning, I accompanied my chinese friend to Renmin Yiyuan (the people's hospital, the largest one in Beijing).  She was pregnant and didn't want to be anymore. 

From what I gathered, even though China is the number one country of child birth control (strayers from the one family, one child policy are heavily fined) pregnancies are commonplace.  Unlike in the States, one low-dosage brand of birth control pills is readily available over the pharmacy counter and condom packages sprout up in front of the cashier of any local supermarket.  But Chinese seldom use contraception, there is no sexual education in China.  Such non-chinese medecine as birth control pills is enveloped in a halo of suspicion.  "They make you fat", "They're not healthy" chinese girls snap out.  So instead of preventing, they remedy.

As I walked into the tiled, greenish light of the hallway hospital, the first thing i noticed were the beds strutting out perpendicularly in the river of people the two of us were wading in.  There were people in those beds, old men lying on their side twitching, others changing the position of their bones restlessly.  We followed one branch of the river up to the third floor.  The room was cut diagonally by a crowd of women waiting in line to be diagnosed.  My friend had already come yesterday to receive her diagnosis, and her abortion: a pill which causes instant menstruation.  But she had thrown up part of the potent medecine, she lost blood, but not the embryo.  She came back this morning to get another pill.

I waited outside the auxiliary diagnosis room on a row of hard blue plastic chairs, women kept on pouring in through the doors.  A minority were accompanied by men, harsh wrinkled fathers, or round faced husband listening to their mp3 players; most were alone, looking away from each other. They were all there to get an abortion.  White hefty nurses dawdled across the tiled floor carrying dirty bags of ustensils, a set of dirty scalpels lay on the table in front of me.

My friend came out, walked to the other side of the corridor and entered the operation room. Two minutes later, she came out, drank some water, slowly sat down next to me and said she was going to get an operation.  "You can't take the pill twice."  I suppressed a frown and tried to smooth out the warble in my voice as I placed my hand on her shoulder saying everything would be fine.

She led me in another auxiliary room, light crept through a large opaque glass panel and radiated a warm green.  Three beds flanked the walls.  She sat down and looked through the opaque light.  We remained silent, another woman came in and lay down.  Her face was expressionless, behind her black eyes, there was nothing apart from the faintly flickering apprehension of what was to come.  Both of them had their hands on their stomachs, as though they were trying to sooth, not harm what was within.

Gradually, more women came in, crowded the beds.  One paced across the room rubbing her stomach, asking how the others were doing, spurting out her everlasting distrust of men.  One, a skinny statue of marble, panic in her eyes, stood up and covered her mouth, desperately trying to suppress the urge to throw up.  "don't throw up" my friend said calmly "if you throw up, you will have to get an operation like me."

I sat on one corner of the beds, a quite observer, I didn't know what to do to make things better, so at minute intervals, I caressed my friend's hair, to remind her that I was by her side.  It was only when she came back after 30 minutes of operation and I saw her eyes, that something snapped in me.  Without a word, she groped for the bed, the other women helped me pull the covers over her.  She lay on her side, her eyes wide open, void, staring into the emptiness in front of them.  Her face was clear as a windless sea, but it was inert, lifeless, that of a being that had been wounded beyond pain, as in a shell shock.

I exited the silent room and fainted on the blue plastic.  Later, as we slowly walked down to the first floor, she patted her hand on my back and smiled at me, I was still crying.