I squeezed my eyes shut and thought of all my countless blessings: Eli and Finn, Austin, my health, my dear friends, my curiosity, my warm but crumbling Park Avenue apartment, my Chinese cleaver, Cafe Besalu, coffee, my pole. The five -week accumulation of frustration proved to be too much. It reared up out of my gut and boiled over. Too much fire in the body, the Chinese would diagnose. Too much fire. My Chinese sign is a rabbit, soft and velvety and cute. I should have born in the year of the dragon.
I just wanted to get home, a simple desire, really. The guilt of being gone all weekend at a photography workshop was gnawing away at my psyche, plus there were jiao zi (home made dumplings) waiting. I would catch a taxi home which was a straight shot east from the school. It was Sunday night, cabs should abound. There are 140,000 official cabs operating within Beijing's first 3 ring roads at any given hour. Make that 500,000 if you count the price-gouging and illegal hei che (hey chuh) black taxis. Yet I watched as 4 empty cabs rolled past. Then another. Then another. My Chinese competition hailed them successfully with their subtle "pat-the-dog" hand motion.
I nudged my way deeper into the traffic stream. I inserted myself deeper into the suggested traffic lane, cars, bikes, rolling toasters, scooters whizzing around me blaring horns. The arctic winds blowing off the Mongolian Steppe kicked up and blasted through my too-thin jacket. I looked down at my gloveless hands and thought of the cracked red earth of Northern China. If I had wanted this kind of cold, I would have moved to Chicago. At least in Chicago I could say "please do not add those Sichuan peppercorns that make my tongue conflagrate and my children cry to the pile of mystery meat." However, in this cold, even the Sichuan peppercorn tempts me.
My lips and cheeks pull taught in a frozen face lift. My dog-patting morphed into a more frantic dog-beating. A good thirty minutes later the traffic backed up enough to force a taxi to idle within pouncing range. I opened the door and inserted myself into the front seat. Just get in and tell the driver to go, people have advised.
"Go," I said.
Taxi driver eyed me with contempt, heaved a great sigh and drove. We were moving at a good clip when I showed him my address, written in Chinese characters. He slams on the brakes.
"I don't know it," he barks in Chinese.
I retort in my halting, four-word maximum sentence Chinese: "South Gate Chaoyang Park. Go!" I say.
"I don't know it," he lies again.
Bull shit. Chaoyang Park is the largest park in Asia. It's a giant tract of trees with plazas celebrating workers and rusted roller-coasters and chain-whipping martial arts students and colorful brides and a a 30-foot statue of Shaquille O'Neal and vendors hawking inflatible turds. Chaoyang Park covers half the fucking city. It is the diamond of "Civilized Chaoyang." There are 4 gates in Chaoyang Park. They are on the main roads. Everybody knows the Park, everyone knows that gates. Even I know the gates. Don't blame my pronunciation. I sound like a Beijinger when it comes to my address. Plus, I got my Chinese cell-phone all up in his grill with my address.
I repeat: "South Park Gate."
He points to the door and waves his hand. "Get out."
I shake my head no, because there is no word for "no" in Chinese. The Chinese don't shake their heads, but I cannot think what else to say.
"Get out," he says again.
I shake my head harder. He begins pushing me out the door. I am staging my next verbal comeback but the only Mandarin that comes to me is "My dormitory does not have air conditioning." Ten lessons into my Survival Chinese class and I am clearly not surviving. I cannot tell time, order food, or give directions to a taxi driver. I can tell Taxi Bastard and anyone else who is willing to listen that I am a clever international exchange student from Switzerland and my dormitory is not far from the library, only I'm not an exchange student, I'm not Swiss and I don't live in a dormitory.
I think how I've tried and tried to persuade teacher Zhang to help me blunder through more practical phrases like: "Ayi, can you please pick up my children at 4:00 from the bus stop in the event I have fallen in an uncovered manhole or have been hit by a bus?" Or, "Door man, how I can get the electricity back on in my apartment?" Or even: "Taxi driver," assuming I can hail one, "please rush me to the hospital, I've been hit with shrapnel blasting out of construction sites."
I think how my pleas to Teacher Zhang beget total bewilderment. Why would I not want to know phrases like "It's my secret?" Or "Paolo is very fat," that are printed in the text. I suspect she is a loyal, Hero of the People, unwavering in her charted course of teaching from the world's worst Beginning Practical Chinese textbook. I don't blame her. She does what boss man tells her and boss man knows what foreigners need to successfully navigate China.
The blaring horns resume and the wind blows back my eyelids and I'm pretty sure ice crystals are coating my irises. I lost my verbal kung-fu battle with Jack Ass Taxi and I'm wedged between lanes again, trying to hail a cab. Mission Taxi Redux is fruitless so I abort and dodge traffic to the nearest subway station.
The nearest subway station dumps me a good 40 minutes quick walk from my house. I decide to take a bus, only I do not know what bus to take. The schedule postings are all in Chinese characters but Chaoyang Park South Street is 10-lanes wide and arrow straight so I figured I could take any bus and get closer to home.
I wait and begin to see the beauty of having a full-time driver. The idea was to spend my money on travel not drivers. The price tag for cars in Beijing is steep. (You get a driver, you buy or lease the car that comes with him). You now gotta win a lottery; Government is trying to stem the tsunami of Chinese vehicular progress. Streets can't handle more congestion; air is already worse than in a coal mine. As I stand at the bus stop I wonder what the gawking Chinese are thinking. Why would this white girl even consider taking the "people's transport"? Lotteries can be won with power and money. They assume I have both.
Another ten minutes pass before a bus stops. It's this double decker structure that looks to have emerged straight from the Big Tent. It's the clown bus in a circus act; I have never seen so many people squashed into one space. It reminds me of a recent school bus accident in the Hunan Province where 64 kids were crammed into a nine-seater van. Van collided with a truck and in the twisted metal lay China's future, tragically juliened.
I still need to get home so I opt to get on, only there is no room. People push and shove and some little lady is smacking me hard with her bag. I can't breath and I can't get on or out so I start to scream. The people stop pushing long enough to stare at the crazy foreigner screaming the selfsame swear words they learned in their pirated Hollywood movies. For one moment in this GPS quadrant, ever-pulsing Beijing halts. The silence is broken by a police man that laughs heartily at me. I elbow my way back through the crowd, shouting more expletives, and walk all the way home.
