On the way home from work today, I remembered some details that I wanted to make sure I wrote down: The puppy, the rubble that was a village and the grey uniformed guards. I’m not sure in what order. The puppy- a tiny scruffy little thing about the size of two hands. It wandered into the courtyard where we were having our expatriate drinks on a Friday afternoon. We are right on the edge of a village or Hutong. When I say village- there is a very precise image attached. It doesn’t matter if you are in Beijing or the environs 200 km away (I don’t know about further from Beijing because I have never been.) the materials and the structures have little variation. Long thin single story constructions made of a weak brick and those narrow streets which look more like dirt paths. One “house “ abutts the next, there is no space between dwellings the size of small rooms. So here I am trying not to breath, in a dingy café on the periphery of a Chinese village, trying to relax and blend. And beside the fact that I can’t get the smell of human excrement out of my nose what is really killing me is the puppy who has wandered in alone and lost and obviously orphaned. And wagging her little tail.
That small dog didn’t know it was grey when it was born white. It didn’t even know that it was stumbling around as it advanced towards the feet of customers. Why was it that puppy wouldn’t let me unwind? I could forget the people I saw washing and hanging their whole lives in the dusty street, but that puppy. It wouldn’t let me forget and it wasn’t there to make me remember either. I can’t tell you what it was and what it meant, but I haven’t been the same since. That was two weeks ago. I can’t let myself think about it at all or about what has happened to it. I just can’t.
The village rubble is a reference to seeing a village off the road from home to work disappear in the span of a few days. All of a sudden a teacher in our shuttle bus cries out, “Hey, that was a village, wasn’t that a village?” And we look and see debris in piles. The feeble bricks are maybe more solid than soil, but not much. And now they are in small clumps which amount to nothing. Total and complete destruction and there is not even a sign of a ball. Everyday we drive by, fewer structures remain and more piles accumulate. And men sit around in circles in plastic chairs amidst the ruins and …talk? Men seem to do this here in the most unlikely places. You can look in the woods and see cinder blocks on end in a circle and bikes parked on the road nearby. Some men, usually older, have gathered to talk. I know, next I will have to imagine what they are saying.
Guards in grey suits stand at attention everywhere we turn. Most are skinny, so skinny their pants would fall down if it weren’t for their belts. Every time we come by they stand up straight with their hands firmly at their sides, when they greet each other they salute. In the compounds where westerners live they watch the front gate, the back gate and are stationed at doors. A little “Ni hao” here and “ni hao “ there gets the foreigners pretty far. But between Chateau Regalia and school is Merlin Champagne, Rits Garden, Lemon Lake, Capital Paradise, Dragon Bay Villas, Yosemite Park and Beijing Riviera. These are just a few of the compounds where foreigners live. And I am not kidding. All around there are guards, taking it very seriously. As if there were any real danger. I have never felt as safe in a US or European city. The only incident I know the guards had to deal with was when a neighbor in the apartment building next door set off fireworks on a Saturday night. Man, they have good fireworks here. It was like the Fourth of July and the Battle of the Bulge all in one, except of course without the causalities. But I was glad and went to bed that night with a smile because I thought, at least that will give them something to do.
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