Half A Winter

Time In Beijing

The City

 

I came to Beijing to make a name for myself. I'm always trying to make a name for myself, in my self-narrated world. Love doesn't come by waiting.  I came also to prove something to myself. I've said this before I know. Maybe it's the nature of my experience of Chinese cities. It's not all sparkles and warm oozes of the heart. It's a wilderness for me at times. While I could be feeling the rushing primal warmth of the real wilds and what they conjure in me, the city is still a wilderness. I feel alone at times, especially when the real morose contemplative self must produce those superficial interactions with other individuals. That true loneliness, away from oneself, faking a smile.

 

Isn't it funny that it seems as though we really do have to earn love, and yet it feels as though it's not really love when you have to earn it.  I decided a few years back that earning it was necessary; and that some imitation love was acceptable, if it gave my mind the required thrills and spills over into happiness.  

 

How many times will I iterate that Thailand was the most perfect time of my life. I will never denounce that abandon and joy and innocent sincerity mixed with the thrills. How did I mix the excitement and abandon with a sense of righteous endeavour? I veered to and fro edging the way of my moral compass. I loved those girls in Thailand. They loved me. This is true in the sense that we had an experience of something like love; of such synthetics our lives are made. The experience was primal love and affection.  Oh how I hate civilisation sometimes. The thing which separates us from our thrill giving pleasures. OK, families grew and joined together and tribes grew into societies and societies needed laws and taboos and guilt and shame. Granted.  One cannot honestly deny it. Society needs this. I'm grateful for the pressures that keep people smiling to me in the morning, showing decorum and etiquette. We will keep these things shall we? Yes, lets! But can I be carnal sometimes? I mean more than sometimes and more than normal. Truly, I'm glad if you shall obey the laws, but I shall not. I must live a little more than that. The death of it all kills me.

 

What drove me to the capital? The romance of the old world's whiz and buzz. Quaint, buoyant, brash, jovial.  I predicted a film's East End of London. Chatty taxi drivers, inquisitive students, and the odd loose woman. What did I get? Well some of that. But it was all slightly more suave than I'd hoped. The western world has hit here in manifestations of preposterous mimicry and imitation, advertising, reaching for the stars, “heaven or space,” while the rustic paradise I sought fades and evaporates before reality. I'll perhaps need the hills of Yunnan for my dream. Though I know, the further I get from innocence the harder the dream. There are only so many times you can act out the scenes of adoring love and sentimental slosh. In fact, I think sometimes our atheistic or agnostic delusions are as grand as the religious. Our very sense of being is based on it, beyond the hard bare bone facts of cause and effect. And though I will tell of how I enjoyed the suave, my heart aches for the animal breeds who live with their hands and hearts, and only use their heads to find food, clothing and shelter. Ah, but this is slosh too, you know it. One flitting moment after another. What has my time bought me?  My romance with Beijing.  Bitter, like the delicious sting of a dark chocolate Beijing.

 

 

Art 

Cindy.  What a girl!  When I first met her in Beijing seven months before, we hung out a bit. That was at the Candy Inn hostel.  She was lustful, artistic -- a curator, with past galleries in Buenos Aires and New York. We did some walking and night clubbing together. Nothing more. On my birthday, over tacos, she told me she often wanted to kill herself. That annoyed me a little, for it seemed like self-indulgence to tell me at such a time. I think people have the right to take such action, as a reserve remedy. I am not for it. It is a hundred times illogical, considering the fact that we all must die. Why not prolong things a little anyway, just to see what happens? There may yet be some flourishes of joy and vitality. But it's a choice available. Just be tactful and loving about it. Of course in reality such an action can only be made under extreme suffering where hope and logic no longer exist, suffocated by an intolerable despair. I won't hold it against someone that they told me on my Birthday. She did, however, tell me at a later date, that my hopeful life annoyed her, with my plans of study and travel, and that it was a kind of revengeful impulse to bring up such a macabre topic. She knew it was wrong and that she should like me, even though, as she said, “I don't like pretty boys!”  Well, there's some kind of hidden compliment. To such heights I'd like to reach.

 

That first spell together, she offered me her floor if and when I were to return to Beijing. I was going back to England for the summer, for some free medical examinations (seizures in Nepal and Thailand you see) and some delectably important time with family; and the hard English roads beneath my feet, as I ran and pondered and hoped and planned, while also fearing insurmountable health issues. Ah, but they would be surmountable internally. Perhaps, that's when I'd finally look more headlong into the lights of the Buddha automotive, not in faith but in recognition of some truths -- suffering is caused  by desire. I might find presence of mind, learning experientially that that which is now is reality. It warms me cockles, on out to the tips of my breasts, to think on these things. Oh, and the running was so good.  And I was happy for some months in the then sunny and beauteous Britain. But the good times with my beloved mother and brother and family close by began to wane a little. Depression set in after a fairly inconclusive report from the neurologist -- yes their was some increased level of electrical activity in the front left part of the brain. But these machines are very sensitive, I thought.  And so I could leave my verdant England for Beijing once more.

 

The city in September was warm and sunny. Cindy smiled for me, wandering around her arty apartment overlooking 798 district -- one of the main art districts in Beijing, full of galleries and tourists. She wore little. I could have gratuitously gorged on her curves with my eyes. I glanced a little, but I was decided upon not going wayward with her. She was an interesting, slightly unpredictable friend, who had told me she didn't like me. Quite a situation. She was amiable as we sat on the floor and chatted. Sometimes I lay on the wooden floor boards, except for some thin foam. The enchanting romance of it made me feel somebody; and her lying nearby in her oh so short nightie smiling with round face and round boobies and round bottom curves when she got up to wander for a drink and such like. 

 

I had my eye on a friend of hers who came to stay one day. I think we flirted a little one drunken night and I lingered in her room, as Cindy took a French musician to her room. I lingered in hopes with the European girl. But the stillness of the early hours came and it seemed Cindy and her lover where asleep, or he was gone, and my gentlemanly self finally grasped the necessity of bidding Europe girl goodnight and retiring to my picture strewn wooden floor boards in the living room. To sleep soundly in an artists abode is something now ticked off my inventory of what my life's final document should consist of; from the imagined to the real.

 

Earlier that night we had gone drinking and I chatted with a young Bolivian, passionate and idealistic. He denied that he was a Marxist. Maybe he wasn't in the sense of its connections with a bloody 20^th Century, and yet he very much seemed it in his moralistic thinking. I admired his faith in the good; in the need to go beyond mere hedonism; in the need to create a good society. He criticised art, saying it was meaningless and diverted people from the real changes needed to be made to their lives. Others of us argued that it was meaningful to be diverted from the suffering in life. For me everything is about being diverted from pain towards pleasure. Therefore, art is most useful and helpful to the well-being of humans. We had to agree to differ, this firebrand and me a cynical hedonist. I admired his stand and the art of the occasion itself. Goodbye to the Marxist and up the elevator Cindy, the Frenchman, the European flower and I.  Soon after it seemed time to move on from this little tryst in the art world.

 

 

Student

 

Something I missed in my chaotic rise to what I am now, a reasonably educated bum rebel -- no there's no innuendo in that! Although, as Leonard Cohen sings, “I'll do anything you want me to.” Jokes! -- was a good formal education.

 

In Beijing I stayed in Wudaokou. Prim and ambitious, verging on the s****y, with tights and “f**k-me” boots, girls confidently walked in curb-dominance conjuring up in me a response of, “why oh why do you take my look and not my body?” This wall of separation between the hot blooded virile bodies of the twenty somethings, oh so ready, with that resistance plus enough give, the perfect fruit.  “Bite me,” I wanted them to say. Sometimes they took the glancing worship and brushed it off like a fairly insignificant piece of confetti that showers them before their pragmatically designed twenty something marriage. Oh, so organised and practical and sensible, while behind there lies a fire of carnal sensuality welled-up within their loins. I knew it. We could have done it, I told myself. And they do do it. This veil of innocence they maintain to cover the hot steamy acts of the night.  This is what it means -- how it feels -- to not be able to get laid in Beijing.

 

I studied three hours, five days a week. I studied outside of class when I was tuned-in to my original motive in coming to this place of romance. Other times I slept late and drank late, the cycles enforcing ever faster spiralling into a necessary collapse and skipping of class and avoiding of people -- because I felt so crappy and tired and guilty. I was ashamed at the distance between longed for, planned for, and that being lived.  Drunken abandon loosened the strings in my mind most nights.

           

 

Sushi

 

Her lips were fresh. Again the fruit analogy works here -- like plums, plump and reddened, protruding like a Brazilian bottom from a thong. Her tongue was warm and moist within that oral ravine.

 

We talked about love over Sushi. 

 

“Why is it OK for a Chinese man to have slept around before marriage, but not OK for Chinese women?”

 

“Because we like them to be experienced.”

 

I knew this was an answer which came with some cognitive dissonance. In truth, some Chinese woman will and do sleep around if they can. It's just the expectation that they must be virgins at marriage that keeps it so hidden, and made it so hard to pull a girl in a nightclub. If they are with friends, as they frequently were, they couldn’t afford the loss of face or the future rumours. So I've been told.

 

Later, we sat together drinking coffee in Starbucks. Suave people smiled and posed around us, with intelligent looks and serious talk.  

 

“Of course...”

 

“Well, if only more people would grasp that fact then...”  

 

This was Beijing. This Coffee shop was a place for the relatively affluent to pose, if one is to indulge in a bit of cynicism.  Ah, but I like to pose too. 

 

I, myself, felt boastful due to my association with the woman who worked for BMW. I was surprised that she had wanted to meet up for coffee after our drunken dance the night before. My inebriation the previous night had loosened my tongue and made for a sense of fluidity as we moved to the music. It wasn’t so easy to make an impression on coffee alone.

 

The sun descended to the tops of Skyscrapers in obeisance to my piquancy and success up until this moment. An elegant lilac dress was drawn tightly against her knees and down a further few inches. Upwards it stretched around the curves of her hips, tight up against her honed belly and cushioned mounds. I was attracted to her form. She looked towards me. Her look was only the background. Her presence was my foreground.

 

Her face was pleasant. Serious. Playful. Slightly rounded. Educated. There is such a thing as an educated face. She was definitely marriage material, I thought. And there I was, good enough, I thought, but potentially seen as a mere pretender. Just a backpacking bum on an extended residence in the huff and puff of a city. The sun bowed its bow.  And our date drew to a close.

 

 A few texts that evening.  

 

“Did you get back safely?”

 

“Yes thanks, enjoy the cooking party tonight desirable lady.”

 

“Thanks for calling me desirable :)”  

 

She called me a gentleman.  But there was not enough response from her in the coming days and week. I sent a text the two days following our date and one about a week later. She was sweet to me. Suave. Sex in the City like. I knew she watched that programme. And then a couple of weeks later she got in contact. I wasn't on form. I responded that, yes, coffee would be good at the weekend if she was, as she said, going to be in Wudaokou.  I didn’t want to work too hard or jump through hoops for a girl.  Perhaps it's a power thing.  No one will run me, without strongly demonstrating their own charm and desire.  However, the real reason that I didn't meet up with her and her friends was that I didn't feel up to scratch. I was feeling insecure.

 

 

Clubbing           

 

One night, on the dance floor in, in a club called Propaganda, a young woman deliberately brushed my hand three or four times.  I made a little turn towards her. I gave her a couple of glances.  Up a little closer as the thud thud of the bass made us brazen. In! Damn! Her flesh sunk into mine, turned from me, but her derrière humps writhed and jostled a little with my thighs and on we went. Like a sea. Like an imaginary boat on a sea between the mid-sections of our bodies, flowing up and down to our breasts and arms. We got some good flow going. I must say we felt right for each other, barring her height (or mine), and moved together with the boastful glee of the humble. We danced well. The waves came in our souls and the waters withdrew through our skin.  I pressed her fingers; held her hands; put my arms in tight around her. I clasped just below her breasts, very conscious of them. And then, after a little hand movement, in she drew my hands, subtly into the lower part of her feminine mounds.  Soon I was directly on one of them and she turned to enter my mouth with her tongue.

 

What went wrong?  She went to find her friends after some long and hard dancing.  Later, upstairs in the bar section I talked of her to a Japanese comrade, before seeing her sitting near. Perhaps she saw me rejoice in my adventure. Perhaps there weren't incredible amounts of chemistry in our kiss. But, no, it was that I didn’t think to buy her a drink. I know that now. The night conformed to the frequent scenarios I'd found myself in. Girls come and go together. They toy with us in the intervening moments. I sound like a self obsessed chauvinist. This was all in my hedonistic abandon. My failure was perhaps in not buying the women drinks. Nevertheless, I remember one night a woman asked me to walk her home. I thought the moment had finally come. We got to her door. She briefly went in, found that her flatmate was home, then hurriedly saying goodnight to me, she closed the door. I was angry that time.