Season X

This post was originally written in December, 2007.

Outside, the mist is so thick I can barely see the building across the alley. The grape vines that overhang our bank of windows have grown scrawny and brown with cold, and the birds no longer hang from them to pick berries, although I can still hear them chirping from the bushes nearby. Today is freezing cold, blinded, and luminous. Winter is difficult to understand in a city so lush and jungle-like; the trees are green and leafy still, huddling along the river promenades in their chilly cloaks of grime and dust; bushes and flowers still spring from walkways; and the endless mobile gardens are constructed at night by geometer-gardeners whose plants never enter the ground. Instead, they rest in individual pots, which are organized and reorganized in unlikely patterns: a yellow spiral traveling up a column of green; a dark background for an auspicious character in lucky red; spherical hedges with pink and purple saturn rings.

Further evidence of the season has been provided by our building, the Office of International Education – a seedy, concrete affair with broken awnings, a spitting, flaring electrical system and otherwise all the thoughtfulness and charm of typical communist architecture. There are eight apartments in this building, two of which are taken up by administrative offices, so in effect, we live with our boss sitting right beneath us. This was disconcerting at first, when assistants would feel free to come upstairs at all hours and knock on the door to announce some bureaucratic requirement or another, often entering without being summoned. This practice has been curtailed, thankfully, and now they usually call first (to request surprise meetings with very important people 11 minutes in advance). The building has an in-house handyman, a grumpy gnome of a fellow who only speaks Sichuanhua and therefore refuses to listen to my baby Mandarin. He communicates through grunts and points, with occasional exasperated bursts of wordy yelling, as when he educated us about the practice of not throwing toilet paper in the toilet. He is a self-appointed expert in all things “fixable,” apparently, and is the one who arrives to rescue tenants from anything from burst water mains to clogged bathroom pipes, broken curtain rods to our electrical kitchen disaster. He always wears a weathered baseball cap and reminds me in an offhand way of my grandfather, which makes me adore him in the way that I adore all grumpy, cantankerous old men. He always has a cigarette burning in his hand or the corner of his mouth, even when he’s working on something in our apartment, which makes me crazy. He’ll ash on the floor and then grind it out with his boot without the slightest thought about how clean we keep our home, or the incense burning, or the fact that neither of us smoke. I’ve nicknamed him Mr. Roper, which has not only stuck, but has spread to other tenants, including one from Fiji who almost certainly led a childhood deprived of “Three’s Company;” the first time I heard Andy refer to Mr. Roper, I almost died laughing.

Mr. Roper has taken it upon himself to adorn the building with Christmas decorations, a thoughtful gesture of multiculturalism, made somehow more poignant by the fact that none of the occupants in the building are technically Christian, although one or two were raised as such. Two are B’hai, and the rest fit along a spectrum from pagan to atheist, but we are all somehow “Western,” and as such fit into a stereotype of Christian symbolism and television-inspired practices and the assumption of wealth for our Chinese hosts. My students asked me to advise them on how to perform a Catholic mass. I told them I hadn’t the faintest idea, and asked why they wanted to know. They were performing one for their English-language festival, and thought it would be a good example of American culture. I found this assumption fascinating, and apologized for my ignorance, but added that, as far as I knew, many masses were, in fact, conducted in Latin, or once were, and said too that there were many different kinds of religious practices allowed in the United States, and that it was difficult to pick one that could be considered representative of the nation as a whole. This led to a brief discussion of pluralism, none of which interested my students – they simply wanted to know what to say for their mass.

In any case, our building has been transformed from a dreary grey cinderblock into a weirdly-festooned carnival of blinkety lights and tinsel, with a dazzling range of Santa imagery and other pirated icons: Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh sharing a sleigh with Hello Kitty – that sort of thing. Santa holding a basketball that says “NBA Action;” Santa in a hot air balloon with distorted features and an evil leer; Chinese Santa with Asiatic eyes and a sack full of food, or another holding a red wedding cake. Plastic roses are another addition that I’d never considered “Christmasy” before – they are draped all over the entryway near our bicycles. The walkway to the building itself is crammed with decor, the trees littered with dangling Santa heads still in their plastic packaging, with an effect eerily similar to the air fresheners crowding the ceiling in the Sloth scene of the movie “Se7en.” ‘Tis the season – I’m just not entirely sure which season that is.

~ by knifemaker on March 17, 2008.