10 tagged with #gbff

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rivers


i thought it might have been snowmelt, or a leaking water main; those happen a lot in the spring. but when we got closer, the smell rose from the cold earth and signaled a sewage leak. i looked down at the dog, his short, fluffy white legs scrabbling on the pavement as he strained to inspect the thing that repelled me.

this smell brings me back to summers at my grandmother's; for my daily lessons, i crossed a small bridge that spanned a canal. it was an open sewage channel, where butchers dumped their slop, tenants dumped their chamber pots, pedestrians chucked their cigarettes. in the baking dry beijing july, not only would my cousins and i cover our faces and mouths, but sometimes closed our eyes. the smell clung to our clothes and hair.

one year, that i spent at home, i heard that the sewer had finally been covered. i looked forward to crossing campus without the stench during my next visit. in my dismay, though, i saw that there was a constant low trickle of sludge over the covered channel; rather than getting access to the underground sewage system, people continued to heave their refuse over the railings of the bridges, down along the concrete canal sides. there was a second, new sewage channel now, several feet closer to the footbridge than before.

i tightened my grip on the leash, dragging the dog back out into the street, rather than trying to lift him over the brown rivulet flowing from my neighbor's front yard to the nearest stormdrain seven houses away.

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08 April 2018 22:42


muscles


'you cannot wear these!' my aunt yelled in distress, when she hefted the hiking boots i had worn to her house. 'no no no no!'

i couldn't understand why, until she started passing them around to my other aunts.

'oof, these are too heavy,' said another aunt, nearly dropping one.

'you will get tired,' the first aunt said. 'maybe this isn't the same as it is in the united states, so you don't understand, but we walk everywhere here. we don't have cars. so you will get so tired walking with shoes this heavy.'

they started rifling through the closet, looking for adequately light walking shoes they could loan me for the duration of my visit, while i laughed a little, trying to think of a way out of this problem. my cousin sat next to me, wanting to help, but not knowing how.

'here,' i said to her, flexing my leg and encouraging her to poke my thigh. 'do you think my legs are strong?'

she made an exaggeratedly impressed face, bringing my aunts closer. 'feel this muscle! it's so big!'

my aunts crowded around, jabbing my thigh with skeptical fingers.

'wow, you must be a real athlete!' one of them conceded. 'you are definitely strong enough to wear heavy boots. good job!'

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07 April 2018 16:37


soup vendors


there was a particular kind of tofu soup that my father craved. my cousins and i followed him from vendor to vendor. "tofu soup?" he'd ask, before being invited to sit down at one of the small tables.

"sorry, we're out of soup already."

this went out all up and down the street. "i can't believe it," he lamented. "how can everyone be out of soup?"

after a while, my cousins couldn't take it any more. "look, uncle," one of them said, gently. "they all have tofu soup, but no one wants all four of us to take up a table just to sell you one bowl of soup. you have to sit down and order other food, and then ask for a bowl of soup."

"i only want soup," my father said, frustrating rising in his voice. "i only want soup."

we passed a turtle soup shop, where you could pick out a turtle from a live tank and have soup served in the shell. we passed steamed dumpling shops that would finish cooking in bamboo cases on the table. we passed candy shops, and i remembered my father telling me a story from his childhood when he convinced his youngest brother to eat sheep droppings by saying they were candy.

later, we settled on having a full lunch just so my father could have his tofu soup.

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29 March 2018 16:33


rituals


this was how we went to sleep at my grandmother's house:

the apartment had two bedrooms, but we all piled into hers; mats rolled across the floor, windows were tightly shut, lights extinguished. for fifteen minutes, the air conditioning was run at its highest setting, circulating incense. the incense was a hot plate that had a small slot for a piece of felt soaked with mosquito repellent. the room needed to sit with incense and air conditioning without us, while we stayed in the moist living room in our underwear, waiting.

in my later life, this memory feels like banishing spirits. we'd enter the room after the prescribed purification time was over, my cousin and my grandmother and i all slipping through the narrowly opened door in one quick motion. i was armed with the electric mosquito racket, because my job was to kill any remaining insect that didn't faint in the sticky fumes.

some of the bigger mosquitoes spanned multiple cables on the racket, and i could hold the buzzer until they ruptured, spraying a mouthful of blood into the air. the blood was probably mine, or my kid cousin's.

we kept a chamber pot in the bedroom, because once we had sealed ourselves in, the door was not to be opened until morning. i only remember needing to use it two or three times during that entire summer, because i'd try to use the toilet before starting our bedroom-sealing rituals. it didn't matter for the smell, though; usually, someone else in the room would fill it in the night.

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26 March 2018 22:28


troublemakers


the family housing block always fell silent for a few hours after lunch; during the hot beijing summer, afternoon naps helped pass the roughest time of day, leaving more energy for activities after sunset.

but i wasn't accustomed to daily naptime, and neither was the other us-raised kid visiting her grandparents on the ground floor of our apartment stack. so when everyone fell asleep, we met in the courtyard, tiptoeing and whispering once we learned how much sound carried.

the empty lot next to our building held a stack of coal two stories high; all through the year, a few cartloads at a time would be added for the winter stash. we were strictly banned from playing in it, so of course we did, carefully walking up the sides without stirring up black dust onto our clothes. later, we'd rinse our legs and hands and wipe smudges off our faces.

what i didn't notice, though, was that the coal dust worked its way into my sandals, coating the bottoms of my feet so i'd carelessly leave black footprints in the entryway between changing my sandals for house slippers. of course i'd get scolded, of course they'd call my mother back in new jersey and tell her what i got up to when everyone was asleep.

there were some things they didn't report home, though; the times i'd ride on the back of my aunt's bicycle when she'd drop me off at my wushu lessons on the other side of campus, or the time she let me take her motorcycle around the block for laughs, or the times the other american kid and i confessed to missing lunch because we had snuck into the undergraduate dorms to hang out with college kids.

i can't imagine what i would have done in college if a couple of fifth graders caught a door wedged open for the smokers and casually walked into the first room occupied by people having a good time.

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17 March 2018 15:31


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