Tokyo, two thousand seven

From Narita, several days past the four-year anniversary of leaving it.

I lived here for two years. Those words sound strange, as the Japanese that flows out of the speakers does not impart meaning in my mind. Two years. September seventh, two thousand one to August eighteenth, two thousand three.

My plane is delayed, Singapore airlines, widely regarded as the world’s best, does not start our relationship on a high note. Forty five minutes though, “due to late arrival” is not enough to diminish my desire for the flight onwards. Narita. For two years Tokyo was home, and now it is a space I return to in transit, lost in the system, understanding that I am here for scant hours, and that my requirements are few. Electricity. Internet. The same things Pudong cannot provide, Narita overflows with. Five hundred yen for the day’s internet. A steal compared to some airports in Germany. A steal compared to Shanghai’s utter lack.

GSM cell phones still don’t work here. I will distrust the entire system on this basis a few weeks later. I will be forced to rent a phone, expensive yet foolishly trusting, a few weeks later.

Some days the whole world is filled with echoes, and the day itself cannot get through the mesh of time-lag and personal history. Tina Dico’s voice, lilting:

Watch my neighbors go to work
and look exhausted and burned out when they get back

Saitama rings out of the corners of my ears, my eyes, the train station emptying it’s bicycle-stealing salarymen out into the night, free of the beer-breath-filled train. I stumble home, in these visions, grateful for the peace of that small space I rent, of that small corner of Japan I inhabit.

A dinner party in Shanghai, years later, someone’s mother commenting on taste, on patience, as the Christmas lights sparkled white, which allows them to survive year round, out of all seasonality save for this evening. Gentle splashes of light into shaded swatches of night.

I’ve been blind, too blind to tell false from true
I’ve been so busy running
never stopped to think where I was running to

Now Tina’s voice is live, in a coffee shop in Copenhagen, and the memories are of a vacation, one May morning, sitting on the steps of a church in a Danish square, bleary-eyed and missing Korea.

The memories pile up, and only an onward push can rid them.

But what’s a man without a past
We love him for his lies
and then we try to break him down to make it last
’til they come true

Standing on a train platform in Ueno, past midnight two weeks later, the strings of people homeward bound linger only until the doors close. Machine-purchased coffee tastes the way it did at eighteen, the way it did at twenty two. The stations change as I head east, across and then out of Tokyo’s heart. The train, a crowded mass of smells so distinct and so familiar, gives way to lonely commuters hanging from the hand-rests, gives way to solitary exits from deserted stations, to the chirp of crickets and the crunch of gravel. To a suburb of small towers, balconies creating the odd shapes of houses past. My head a swirling fog of izakaya alcohol and my heart awash in solitary gladness, I remember what I loved here, long after I’ve remembered why I left.

It’s the order that’s elusive, not the memories.

Thank god for this beautiful view

Quoted lyrics from Tina Dickow/Dico’s ‘Room With a View’ off of In The Red (2004) and Tina Dico Live at the Copenhagen Jazzhouse (2007)

Sweat and storms

It is July, a month filled with sweat, with uncomfortable sleep and itching eyes and 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 malaise 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 the rain’s end their pace slows again. Men become once more 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, and a smaller room with no balcony three blocks to the west. In that room lived a boy as uncertain, as young, as anyone can be who has traveled so far. That boy packed and drank, planned and read. He sat in the sweltering heat unable to afford a decent air conditioner. His apartment, lengthy and narrow, conducted wind well from kitchen to bathroom, bedroom to desk, but did not release heat.

In the winter the same room could not store it.

That boy packed in between conferences and crisis, after working hours, of which there were few, and before late nights. His books, clothing, and prized possessions, all became cubic space in green boxes he ferried home from the post office on a scooter he’d purchased for seventy kuai, the cost of replacing it’s starter. The scooter puttered and sputtered and did neither with safety or speed. He adored the scooter for its cheapness, this boy of two thousand four, and waited constantly at corner stalls where boys far younger disassembled it’s fuel line and poured liquid through that thin rubber tube, dissolving clots, cleaning away years of accumulation. They did this same repair 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 were complete, and the parcels ferried back to the green storefront of China Post, he left, this boy of two thousand four. Backpack on and shoulders back, he stepped out of his apartment for the last time, locked the door, gave over the key, and wandered 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 of his existence given to friends, old traveling companions, and roommates.

He is not going anywhere. At least until the storm breaks.

Whistle blow

As he holds up his hand, palm facing the oncoming traffic, yellow brim of his hat covering his eyes, the tenuous nature of his position becomes clear.

These men and women who hold traffic at bay with their white-gloved hands, day in and day out on Shanghai’s chaotic streets, inhabit a strange strata. Neither police nor street sweepers, not quite civil servants, yet not volunteers, they are paid the bare minimum and endure disasters. In torrential downpours they stand sheltered beneath swaying umbrellas anchored on the corners. In the sweat of August they hide behind sunglasses, beneath the uniformed hats. Their khaki pants are sometimes tucked into rain-boots, sometimes into dress shoes, sometimes hanging to the ground un-tailored and unfitting. They have no power save their whistle, it’s lanyard presence their baton. They give no tickets, have no higher authority to call. The police do not heed their shrill cries, and so often neither do I.

They are , these capped and uniformed whistlers, between forty and ninety, products of a China that is struggling before the tide of age. They are passed over by children who stand idly beside them, licking ice-cream, lolling from foot to foot, waiting for the light to change. Beside the children stand the cell-phone-staring masses, the bustling business men of degrees and financial mobility. Around all these rushes the never-ceasing crush of scooters, bicycles, odd machines, precisely the traffic these whistles were designed to tame. And ever more cars, overflowing small streets, jam-packing elevated highways, ignoring waves and yells, whistles and vague hand-waved persuasions.

Will this job exist in the Shanghai of 2030? Once this generation fades, and the next, with far fewer children and far grander desires, floods in to take it’s place, who will take these jobs of a dozen hours in the summer’s sweltering heat? Who will stand on curbsides swallowing exhaust and putting out noise for a few hundred kuai a week?

Will these jobs, created in the late eighties, early nineties, late nineties, after the car’s first private introduction, before the pulse of electronic sign boards indicating the average time to Xujiahui, to Zhongshan Lu, fade mysteriously into the labor shortage, into the rising economic prospects, into the disguised waste of a half century?

By the government, for the government, to organize and protect the people. To organize, protect, and employ the people. An entire generation brought up without schooling, and placed into jobs that demand nothing but arrival, persistence, and time.

“My children will have more than I did,” words not unique, both true and sad as may be anywhere. In Shanghai they are tinged with the idea, new and startling in scope, that perhaps no one will have what he had, what he has. An entire system, created with a generation’s rise, may disappear with it’s fade.

Attending parking spaces

Some of the people I talk to most often, and enjoy greatly, are those who demand money of me. Not large sums, which is how we survive the irony, neither troubled by the transaction. They watch my scooter for 1 kuai. I, a creature of great habit, frequent few establishments but with incredible regularity.

This job, clad all in blue, slightly above street sweeper yet slightly below whistle-blowing stoplight watcher, is done by machines in the land of my birth. There are no wizened men there, sitting on the flower pots waiting for an approaching cyclist. No women swapping stories to lift the boredom in between progressing up and down their lines of scooters, cycles, oddly motorized contraptions. No one spends their days escorting, re-arranging, directing, in a twelve hour shift of two-wheeled motion. In time lapse the patterns would be mesmerizing.

Perhaps my home town lacks this service not because of the people to machine transformation of so many jobs that has granted the developed world it’s label but because of the lack of two wheeled travel. My home town has no need for rows and rows of carefully restrained and individually locked bicycles. My home town has instead towers of concrete that stack four wheeled machines, in strange and ever-more-increasingly complex patterns. Turn right to exit, turn left to proceed, do not go straight. I re-learn their mazes often.

These men and women, though, do not provide me with some over-arching insight, they provide me with a place to leave my cycle, and I know them well. The woman who watches in Hongqiao, outside Zoe’s cafe, where I eat on Tuesdays, often with a friend since moved away. In rain, she huddles under her umbrella, wondering at my soaking clothes.

“It wasn’t raining this morning, was it?” To which I nod and shrug, and we laugh. 1 kuai. Thank you. One day her friend is lounging on the planter, and observes my approach.

“He’s a foreigner,” she says, as I park and lock, “two kuai, two kuai.” Massive inflation hidden with a half-toothed grin. The parking lady waves her away.

“He knows what you’re saying, he comes here every week, stop it, stop it,” and they laugh.

“You do, don’t you,” she questions me.

“I do.”

“1 kuai.”

This is not a foreign story. This is not a story of monetary influence. This is a story of habit, of repetition, and of small interactions that embody places.

The two men who share duties outside the ICBC in Zhongshan park are full of smiles, their spot a prime location filled with shoppers, with building guards, with hotel workers, with bank guards, never silent or empty.

One of them speaks English, a result of living in Australia for four years, he tells me. He offers to share a beer when off at eight pm, shares stories, and asks about my day each time I arrive.

His colleague, who works every other day while he rests, barely speaks. He takes my coin, gives me my receipt, and heads back to his office chair, it’s wheels long gone, that leans against the building’s wall nearby. He is rarely alone, someone else sitting on the low ledge, usually the parking garage attendant, his legs swinging idly while his friend collects my money. This man, his job consisting of twelve hours of tedious patience, smiles hugely at all times.

Parking next to a snazzy new electric cycle one week, my own a battered wreck, sans rearview mirrors, sans seat, sans locks, starter twice changed, headlight busted in, I wonder at this flashy machine’s make, and cost. The characters scrawled on it’s frame are unfamiliar, have no meaning, convey nothing. As he approaches I ask the grinning man how they are said, what they mean. He looks at me and shrugs. I ask what brand this is, what is the name of this brand, what cycle, what characters, how are they read.

He pauses, looks at them and then again at me, his smile never changing, and shrugs, and walks away, his one kuai collected, his receipt distributed. Back to his chair, and his friend.

“I don’t know how to read them either,” I say, my Chinese vague and tones wrong, and likewise turn away.

The last mile

Cities. These hubs, these networks of people, piles of houses, thousands of miles of roads. Humans able to live at complete abstraction from food production, from waste removal, from power creation. Invisible networks of wires buried, of tunnels built, of pipes laid. Yet late at night these networks become visible. Early in the am Manhattan fills with trucks, with men whose jobs, though mostly invisible, are necessary to feed the vast spread of stations where things are dispensed though not produced. Newspapers, fruit, alcohol, power, gasoline, clothing. The weather warms, and I sit in a park watching rollerblading lessons. None of us, not me, not the children stumbling in padded falls, not the teacher, closest of all, not the swarms of parents paying watching worrying laughing gossiping, have grown food for tonight’s dinner. None have made the clothes or skates they now wear.

Yet none seem concerned, this breezy Sunday afternoon. Starvation does not threaten, nor nakedness. We, after all, lie at a hub, a spout of a vast spread of human effort geared to provide. Like New York, Shanghai. Much that is sold in each is made in the same places, the goods that arrive in New York shops, in Shanghai malls, have common hands on them, far back up the chain. Only the network differs. In Manhattan, late night trucks, the gruff voices of loading docks.

On my scooter in the morning I pass a man pedaling a cart across town. 300 dozen eggs, stacked carefully, wired down. A case of beer on the back of a motorcycle. An entire city’s worth of Coca-Cola distributed by bicycle. As he pushes past a BMW I marvel at this telling difference between places. The factory, brand name, profit earning shareholder may be the same, but the last mile, this vast human network of distribution does reflect it’s place.