This is the most frightening part: we walk for hours at a time and never get hungry. Whether it is the constant adrenaline rush from being out of our element or the body’s revolt against the jet lag to which we cannot admit—we eat breakfast and do not get hungry all day. We guzzle bottled green tea and water but food is not appealing. I get small bouts of dizziness, though, and so X exhorts me to get some food at four o’clock.
My food at ten was a mushroom-egg sandwich consisting of three pieces of bread, a chopped up hard-boiled egg (yes, one egg!) and some thin, tan slices of canned mushroom. I removed the lettuce and avoided the salad. So far I have remembered to avoid all raw greenery [because E.Coli risk is so high, it is widely recommended that tourists not only avoid drinking water that is not in a sealed container, but to also avoid foods that have a high water content or may have been washed in water, like lettuce] and I am suffering withdrawal from my usual foodstuffs—so I go down to ‘Food Thought’ at four, in the basement of the hotel, and purchase the biggest bowl of happiness in the form of brown broth, buckwheat udon, seaweed, green vegetable leek-things, and one piece of fake crab. It pains me to waste it, but I leave the melon on the tray, untouched. Everywhere we see people buying fruit, the rinds and peels in white shopping bags or on the street—but I fear my stomach is not that tough.
18 May: I want to call people and tell them: You have got to try this China thing, man! It is so cool. We walked to the Friendship Store [government-run stores that sell things at higher prices, but haggling all the time can be exhausting] and bought some souvenirs for friends at home, as well as some lovely silk scarves and goofy handkerchiefs and cute pens. On the way out of the store we run into Itamar [X’s colleague] and his friends and son, who are on their way to the silk market. We should feel guilty that X did not attend Itamar’s talk, but we don’t—despite the fact that everyone else has apparently been attending several conference sessions a day. “But it’s China!” says X.
We meet up with Patrick and Molly and it turns out that Molly wants to go to the silk market, too, despite having been there yesterday. I talk down a vendor from ¥280 to ¥130 for a funky red backpack. It is shaped like an egg and functions with one back strap, two, or as a tiny briefcase with a handle. And did I mention that it has a massive zipper, at least ten times the size of a normal zipper? We are thrilled by its bizarre appearance. X purchases silk ties. Happily, I do not see any scarves for sale that I like better than the ones I purchased earlier. Then we retire to Haagen-Dazs for ice cream at ¥24 per tiny scoop, which seems very frivolous to me. The only Chinese people there eating ice cream are wearing very fancy clothes; it is obvious that this is something only very rich locals or silly tourists do.
After that we take the metro to the Lama Temple, Yonghegong, which turns out to be the least peaceful Buddhist temple I can imagine. At least ten buses idle in the ‘parking lot,” which is bounded on all four sides by red walls that are topped with ornate painted sculpture. Tour groups are absolutely everywhere, in every language imaginable; it is their buses that fill the parking area and turn it into a cacophony of motors and drivers yelling at other drivers to get out of the way. And there is of course a horrible stench of gasoline, helpfully held in by the tall brick walls.
The tourists (an identity we also share, lest we forget) flow across the walkways and into temples of ‘peace’ and ‘harmony.’ Mingling with the tourists are visitors there to light incense and prostrate themselves before the golden Buddha statues. It is beautiful, their bowing, the way they hold up the incense, shake it in each direction, close their eyes, and then place it in the enormous burners shaped like big barbecue grills. There is a statue of Buddha eighty feet high, carved from a single sandalwood tree. It, too, is beautiful, but there are such masses of people crowding all around that it is difficult to feel any real emotion.
Also, we are weak from heat and hunger. We visit an empty restaurant just down the street from the temple and order a bowl of millet-corn soup to share and 2 big bottles of beer [it really sounds like we drank a lot of beer, doesn’t it? We did. But it seemed thinner than American beer, and often it seemed the safest bet. Maybe that’s why we had so much fun]. The two waitresses working there alternate stalking flies with their plastic swatters; one spends a lot of time standing very close to a large mirror mounted on the wall, staring at herself and picking her teeth. We are flagrantly overcharged for our snack (¥45) but we are so glad to be refreshed that we do not care. As we leave I say to X, “how dare they charge us five dollars?” I am kidding. I am kidding.
Things are exactly the opposite at our dinner. We go off searching for a dumpling restaurant I had read about in my guidebook, but there are no Pinyin characters on any of the buildings and we cannot find any numbers either. We have an idea that we are on the right street, and finally we spot a restaurant packed with Chinese families eating out of bamboo steamers. We walk in and the waitress does everything in her power to get us to go to the upstairs portion of the restaurant. “This is Chinese fast food. Upstairs, bigger menu,” but we had been warned against this by the guidebook. We insist on staying downstairs, which seems to irritate her, and order steamers of incredibly good vegetable dumplings at ¥12 per steamer, guzzle beer, and laugh way too loud. Had we gone upstairs we probably would have been the only diners; down here we feel like we are a part of things. Afterward we go across the street to a CD shop and purchase the new Björk album, U2, Beatles, Jimmy Smith, and Ben Webster CDs at ¥15 each. It is truly sick how cheap everything is. Sick and all too easy to take advantage of with our wads of U.S. money.
I am judgmental enough to scoff at the other tourists who pride themselves on taking home polo shirts and ties at dirt cheap prices. Does anybody really need four Chinese robes? I fear I am looking at this all wrong, that we will have nothing nice to give to X’s mother because we simply cannot think beyond being jaded by the merchandise you can get everywhere in San Francisco’s Chinatown. We so easily forget the days when we clamored for resin Buddhas and wooden beads.