It is July, a month filled with sweat, with uncomfortable sleep and itching eyes, with abrupt transitions from air artificially dried and cooled to air filled with water held in only by surface tension. In the afternoon the winds swirl and, on good days, the air breaks open in rain that wipes away, for a moment or ten, the dirt and slow motion that creeps otherwise over everything and everyone. For fifteen minutes people scamper, as though the water poured down upon them provided power for their footsteps. With it’s cessation, their pace slows, and men become immobile, sitting again on steps with their shirts up, bellies bulging slightly in the posture-slackening heat.
It is two thousand and seven, and a man sits on his balcony, re-reading a work of fiction he first found a decade before, half a world away. Re-reading a book that has been quoted endlessly by friends who now live in Los Angeles, in San Diego, in New York, in London. The beer by his shoulder is cheap, and pretends to be Japanese. His feet are covered in bug bites, the sacrifice necessary for the small area of grass at the base of his building. His balcony, on the fourth floor, is not high enough to avoid them. Perhaps no balcony is.
In the coming weeks he will travel, to Beijing, and it’s famously forbidden palace of previous governments. To the wall, a barren portion long ruined, untouched by the repairmen who have installed handrails at Badaling. At least, he hopes so.
It is July, two thousand and seven, and he cannot stop thinking about the same month, three years before, a smaller room with no balcony, three blocks west. In that room lived a boy as uncertain, as young, as anyone can be who has traveled so far. This boy packs, and drinks, plans, and reads. He sits in the sweltering heat unable to afford a decent air conditioner. His apartment, lengthy and narrow, conducts wind well from kitchen to bathroom, bedroom to desk, but does not release heat.
In the winter it could not store it.
This boy packs, in between conferences and crisis, after working hours, of which there are few, and before late nights. His books, clothing, prized possessions, aged necessities all become cubic space in green boxes he has ferried home from the post office on a scooter purchased for seventy kuai, the cost of replacing it’s starter. It putters and sputs and does neither with safety or speed. He adores it’s cheapness, and waits constantly at corner stalls where boys far younger than he disassemble it’s fuel line and pour liquid through that thin rubber tube, dissolving clots, cleaning away years of accumulation. They do this for less than ten kuai each time, a cost of ownership affordable even to twenty four-year old boys working twelve hours a week. Or less.
When these strangely sacrificial rituals of boxing and re-boxing are complete, and the parcels ferried back to the green storefront of China Post, he leaves. Backpack on and shoulders back, he steps out of his apartment for the last time, locks the door, gives over the key, and wanders off, to Thailand, Malaysia, and out of sight.
Sitting on his balcony, age almost twenty eight, the man with bug-bitten feet finishes his beer and steps inside. He is not packed, he has more possessions than ever before, though they are scattered delicately across the globe; mementos to his existence given to friends, old traveling companions, roommates.
He is not going anywhere, at least until the storm breaks.