My Dairy:Lost
Updated: 2006-08-08 09:30
Saturday, 5/19/07 |
At 10 pm, 25 hours since I'd left my home in the United States, the highway from the airport to my northerly Beijing neighborhood was unglitzy. Yellow fluorescence floated around dotted lines of streetlamps, punctuated by occasional red characters lining office buildings, the electric light diffused by heavy, humid air. Once we found our off-ramp, eateries and bars were buzzing, brightly lit and full of aggressively fashionable younger crowds and the ambivalent-looking elderly. Every restaurant looked like a textbook transplant from the West: adorned with token vases, lanterns, dragon sculptures, scenic wall hangings and faux-bamboo decor. Apparently American Chinese restaurants are less parodic than we think.
I was driven to my place, a few minutes from the office where I'd be working. It wasn't far, but as the van took three right turns - street'side street'alley'unlit alley - my confusion dial crept from Adventurous to Lost. My roommate would not arrive for two more weeks, meaning 14 days of living alone in this very dark, very foreign alley.
Turning the last corner, our headlights illuminated a hundred-yard stretch ending at the butt of another apartment building and lined with parked cars and outcroppings of construction material, abandoned mid-task. Stacks of bricks and sacks of tiles mingled with ladders and faded orange markers of varying shapes, the whole scene coated in the heavy, gray snowfall of broken concrete, as though the buildings and shrubs had sprouted up from under a demolition site. Through one of the building's metal doors, the stairwell hummed with echoes that betrayed its smallness. My hosts helped my luggage up six flights of unfinished concrete stairs slick with dust. Only darkness filled the broken windows, but in the first three flights, where the timed light switches worked, I noted that the apartment doors were a glossy chestnut, fake but elegant and oddly clean. I'd heard stories of interns living in chalky semisqualor, three bunks to a room with a kitchen the size of a bathroom and a bathroom the size of a toilet, but hope glimmered the in the doors' mahogany sheen.
