I’m not dealing very well with my impending departure. And I really do want to write about it, but the words won’t seem to come.
When I left melbourne, I was leaving a life and it was hard, it was so, so hard. And then I came to beijing and I made this whole other life for myself. I built this life, with this person, who I love so much, and it’s unbelievably hard to leave it again.
I made this life. I built it. I love this person and I love this life that I have with him and now I have to leave it and I can’t write about it because it’s too big, I can’t process it.
When I was a teenager, which seems like a long time ago when it actually really isn’t, my favourite quote was:
Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say and not giving a damn. – Gore Vidal
I would repeat it every time I felt threatened by something, someone, some idea or ideal that I felt I could not live up to. I repeated it to myself when I felt like it would never end — the boring monotony of school, tuition, sleep and the ever present humidity. No one who has never lived in that sort of heat has the right to dismiss it. It is pervasive and and thought-corrosive and can ruin the best days.
I repeated it when I looked in the mirror and saw a face that wasn’t pretty enough, when I looked at my school uniform and longed for some originality, when I read book after book like a hunter tracking an animal — only I was tracking that elusive something that would tell me the truth through a lie. I literally wandered through fiction to look for the truth.
So what was my point? My point was that somewhere along the way, I forgot all about this quote. Back then I didn’t even know who Gore Vidal was. He was just some guy whose name sounded cool, whose philosophy about self-identity was one which I’d adopted myself, for lack of any of my own.
When I was sixteen years old I knew who I was, I knew what I wanted to say and most importantly, I didn’t give a damn.
I am now twenty-two years old and somewhere along the way I have forgotten to be who I am, to say what I want to say and to not give a damn.
Sometimes I wonder how much worry in life could be avoided if we could all accept loss forever.
If we could all just accept, before-hand and without fuss, that there will be a certain and unpredictable measure of pain that will be experienced during the course of our lives, then wouldn’t you think that we could all just get on with it?
One night we went out with a french friend to have dinner by the old drum tower. After a good deal of oily northern food and great wall wine, he suggested we check out a bar he liked which featured live mongolian music.
I’m not the biggest fan of live music, for some reason. I find it tiresome because you’re forced to sit through the parts you don’t like whereas with recorded music you always have the option of skipping or replaying. I know, it’s dumb. I also don’t like going to concerts. They are the domain of the much more energetic.
Anyway, I ended up being totally blown away by this band. They specialise in mongolian throat singing and traditional instruments and the video doesn’t do them justice.
It’s hard to describe — sitting in that cramped bar, with it’s stools of leather harnesses and ropes, hessian cloth tacked onto the ceiling ,smelling of dust and chinese cigarettes, beer and hot tea. The people kept pouring in from the cold outside, a few laowai but mostly young chinese people, chain-smoking and chatting in low, lazy voices, that drawn out beijing drawl that I have come to love and hate.
And then the music began and the dark bar fell silent, lit by the glow of dirty oil lamps fixed to the walls while the guttural mongolian voices rose in melody. No one called for more beer, no one yelled for the harassed waitresses. They just listened. In the music, that dim cavern of a bar seemed to transform into a yurt in the grasslands, black night and starry sky above and old ways of life which we can never know.
Cigarette smoke curled to the ceiling and outside, the full moon rose over beijing.
I would just like to point out that ‘allah’ is the arabic word for god, not the muslim word and certainly not the malay word.
It was used in pre-islamic, polytheistic (read:pagan) mecca and to my humble knowledge (as well as the google search engine’s) no arab-speaking country has as yet filed for a patent on the word.
Therefore, I don’t see why a malay speaking one should attempt to.
It snowed again today. I took my bowl of pasta and sat cross legged by the window, watching the children and a few adults playing in the thick, powdery whiteness. The snow looked good enough to eat. The world looked so clean.
It was one of the few times that life in china seemed truly beautiful.
I read somewhere about a woman who, every morning and every night offered up her prayers to god and they consisted of ‘whatever’ and ‘oh well’. I think they are the most succinct prayers ever.
So its finally 2010 and its strange. This year lived in my imagination for a good long while. I wondered what it would be like, what it would feel like, who we would be when it finally came. It seemed so far away. Now here it is and it is not like anything I thought it would be.
What did I do this year? I moved to beijing. I learnt (a little) chinese. I fell in love. I adapted (albeit rebelliously) to a life entirely different from the one I used to have. I lived in such sub-zero temperatures as I never thought were possible. I learned more about myself than I cared to. Beijing no longer scares me. I don’t love yauchuan anymore. I no longer feel sad about the friendships I lost because life is long and unpredictable and who is to say that when people walk out of your life, it is forever?
I came here for answers and I am still more or less lost. I didn’t figure out my future. I’m still paralysed by indecision. I’m just as lazy as ever and yes, ten in the morning IS early to me. I put on weight.
The thing is, winter to winter, it hasnt been an easy year but then again, which year ever is? Life goes up and life goes down.
It’s been a significant year and although it’s been more or less a happy one, I’m not particularly sad about it ending. There are things to be sad about, but the year ending is not one of them. It’s just time. For a new year, new days, new happiness and new pain.
I look forward to 2010, not with the breezy optimism of the very lucky but with trepidation and excitement and a healthy dose of fear. Because now I know how much happiness a year can bring and how much heartbreak and isn’t that how it is? We cobble together the good days and the bad days and the in-between days to create the years of our lives.
It’s not such a bad thing and I try to tell myself that it’s not so scary after all.
I can’t remember when reading a book made me this angry.
You do NOT have a baby only to treat it as an organ donor. You do NOT assume that your fourteen year old daughter’s blood, bone marrow and kidneys are yours to give away to whoever you like, EVEN IF you intend to give them to your other dying daughter.
Newsflash, this does not make you a good mother, it makes you a terrible one.
