Editor’s Note: The following is the first in a new fencepost series by Chris Amico, RedFence’s first foreign correspondent. Chris recently moved to China to teach English, and maybe learn some things as well. We look forward to walking the paths of the East with him, maybe for years to come.
Getting my Head Around China
by Christopher Amico
The street corner seems as good a place as any to start writing about China. Standing at HeiShiJiao and Zhongshan Lu gives an observer most of what he needs to understand this country. Cars pass in reasonable order, taxis being the major exception. Buses chug by, coughing smog like buses everywhere else in the world. People hoping to cross huddle on the curb, stepping tentatively into the street, as if testing unfamiliar water for piranhas.
But it’s the cold that has my attention. It demands it. The wind grabs fleetingly at my fingers, reminding me that I have a pair of gloves in my jacket pocket, telling me I’m not from here, that I’ve never lived anywhere where it snows.
The wind comes from Siberia. It blows south across Russian-built Harbin with its illuminated ice sculptures in Heilongjong Province (Black Dragon River). It cuts through Jilin, which has little to give it meaning. It chills Shenyang, where the Manchus made their capital before launching their assault on Beijing to rescue China’s rulers from a peasant uprising. They stayed and founded the Qing Dynasty.
By the time it reaches me, the wind has lost much of its Russian spite. Dalian isn’t supposed to freeze over the winter, but I come from the desert in Southern California. To me, single digit centigrade is freezing.
And that’s where I start: The Siberian wind tugs at my fingers, reminding me that I’m not accustomed to the cold, telling me to put on the gloves in my left pocket. I do, then step gingerly off the curb, checking for Chinese pedestrians on either side of me, the ones who have never known crosswalks unviolated by taxis. We skip from white line to white line toward the relative safety of the far sidewalk, where motorcycles clad in Christmas lights idle, awaiting passengers to shuttle around the hurried city, and overstuffed buses cough brown smog, like they do everywhere else in the world.
