Bicycle Cart Rodeo

The wails of vendors began an hour before dawn. A rhythmic pounding of steel on steel, the grinding of axles overworked. There are women down there, in long sleeves, power-walking with baskets on their heads and dogs at their heels. In public squares groups of people dressed in red practice strange movements, synchronized, graceful. Within an hour the messengers are flying on motorcycles. They own the streets now; they can cross town in less than an hour. By nine A.M. one would be lucky to make the trip in less than a day. Because when the sun comes out and heats the dirt to the point of cracking, people will flood the outdoors with all manner of goods, myriad objectives, their paths crossing repeatedly and filling the air with dissonance. The walls are orange and catch the early rays like magnets. They are concrete, the many sounds bouncing off them like a trampoline. It’s a nightmare for the day sleeper. In another hour the roar will be unbearable. The poorest of the city don’t notice. They don’t attempt to reconcile their desires with the conditions of the megalopolis. The richest don’t notice either, relegated as they are to penthouses on the thirtieth floor and above. The skyscrapers are soaked with slime. Industrial slime, the slime of a million automobiles and a thousand factories and a hundred coal and oil burning power plants. Though it is hot the sky matches the color of the buildings. Ashby wraps a wool blanket around her head, but has the resolve to fight the sonic confusion for less than another full spin of the clock’s heavy hand. You can trace the shape of her body precisely when she rises, as it is evidenced in the mattress by the dark stain of sweat and the indentation of her weight. She walks around on the linoleum, the soles of her feet sticking, ever so slightly, to the colorless surface. Still pulling on her pants, she crosses the threshold into the concrete stairwell and descends. The streets see her foreignness even at this early hour.

She’s meant to buy a bicycle for as little as possible. The money her mother left her is nearly gone. What she makes at the magazine is swallowed quickly by rent, utilities, all the time she spends at Café Meng, communing with distant personas from distant climes, and her penchant for giving generously to the beggars. Her friend Jian Yu claims to know a place, an unfinished neighborhood, where there is a massive market of stolen bicycles. Of course, it’s possible, if the cops show up just as the cash is changing hands, you could be implicated, but it’s rare the cops care about business such as that, their hands are full with drugs and guns and ensuing violence. Likewise with political dissidents, who are many in a remote city such as this is. Anyways they’d rarely bust a foreigner for anything, maybe just require some crisp large bill to grease the rails of justice.

The bike was cheaper than she expected, but it was stolen a week later. The street is full of bicycles. The city is full of bicycles, some of them carrying whole families. Sometimes they are pulling carts stacked twenty feet high with goods and sundries. It’s like a rodeo, trying to hold your own out there, amongst all those bicycle carts.

Ashby beat the rain by seconds. There was always some question as to whether she’d be soaked in the five minutes it took her to walk the distance from the intersection of the Second Ring Road and Kehua Beilu where she disembarked the bus returning her from work and Café Meng, where she met friends and coworkers from around the city to drink coffee and absinthe and listen to foreign music, three things not always readily available in Chengdu. The rain would strike with quickness, at any time, out of the blue sky. And though it never rained for long, it rained with a strength that made the texture of the storm like a falling wall of water; one could scarcely differentiate individual drops. A magazine she’d read the week before in Kuala Lumpur referred to Chengdu as “a city where the weather’s so shite dogs bark at the sun.” She’d never seen a dog bark at the sun, and in the spring the weather was beautiful, but the writer had a point. Conditions were often extreme. Pollution was always extreme. And then there was the earthquake. In the weeks leading up to the famous Sichuan tremor of 2008 tensions were high in city due to unrest in the Tibetan Quarter. Military police had burst into a prominent hotel near the Wuhouzi Temple and trashed it. Their explanation: there are no explanations as such, in China. But the place was said to be an organizational hub for the Tibetan resistance. Ashby couldn’t say for sure. Regardless, any concerns, from the local to the international level, there had been about Tibet, about human rights, and further, about modernity and the legitimacy of political states, they were all silenced by that rumble from the deep.

They had a pool table at Meng, and a projector. Anna, the bar’s Parisian manager, went regularly to a dealer she knew at what the expatriates called The Tech Towers and bought piles of classic films which she showed for a one Yuan cover charge most nights of the week, after the bulk of the clientele had gone back to their apartments to sleep off their high and go to work or school in the morning. When Ashby walked up to the bar to kiss her on the cheeks and ask after the quality of her day Anna proudly showed her the new Eclipse set of silent Ozu flicks she’d bought. “That ought to keep everyone buying drinks” Ashby said, but the sarcasm was lost on Anna, who was on her way with three espressos and a Gimlet for a table of businessmen from Seoul. Ashby went upstairs and dropped her bag on the bright red couch in the back, her usual spot. She went into the water closet and washed her hands, splashed hot water on her face and neck. She didn’t have hot water at her apartment, and most days she didn’t feel fully awake until this ritual. Luckily, evening was her preferred time to wake up anyway. She returned to the couch and let herself fall deep into the cushion. She closed her eyes. Fennesz was on the stereo, an album called Black Sea. She fell about twenty-five percent asleep, just enough to forget everything but the music, until Anna set a cup and saucer down on the table in front of her. “Now we are getting coffee from Tuan, from Laos, and it’s so good, I’m not even drinking any absinthe now because the coffee is so good I just drink it all day and then when I want to relax I add some baijiu and you can’t even taste the baijiu, just the coffee.” Anna sat down across from her and offered a cigarette, Ashby refused with a horizontal movement of her hand. They were quiet. The rain was torrential now, and the music so ambient sometimes they couldn’t hear it at all.

Ashby was raised in Los Angeles and she still missed the light of that place. No matter what was or wasn’t going on, the magic and energy of the light was everything to her. It was what drove her to start writing in the first place, so obsessed she became with that light she felt she couldn’t live without at least attempting it’s articulation. Her mother was from Hong Kong but never taught her any Cantonese, except at Chinese New Year she’d rush in in the morning and Ashby would be reading John O’Hara or Marquis de Sade in bed and her mom would yell “Gong Xi Fa Cai!” and run back out. And they eat more than she ever imagined wanting to eat. Her dad was born and bred in Hollywood and had done about everything there was to do on film sets except make big money. He didn’t care about the money. Neither did he care about making his vision manifest in reality. He wasn’t looking to become some great set designer or editor, he didn’t want artistic license. He wanted to be a cog in that machine every nut and bolt of which he knew was magic. So Ashby grew up believing in MGM endings. She grew up with household names like Lubtish and Sirk and Capra and Wilder. Houston and Ford and Mann and Hitchcock. Chengdu didn’t have that light, and it didn’t have those cinematic ghosts lingering on every corner, but it had a hum. A hum that was changing and maybe growing louder as the city grew, as the metro (the fifth in China) neared completion, as money and information poured in from all over the globe and people poured in from all over the country. It wasn’t Los Angeles but she felt she could keep her finger on the pulse here in a way she never could there. She could articulate this light as she was remembering that.

Bruno walked in just as Ashby was hitting her stride writing characters. Her Mandarin was horrible considering how long she’d lived in China and the fact that she operated a weekly publication with readership in the tens of thousands. Of course the magazine was mostly in English, and she had bilingual coworkers ready to do the linguistic lifting for her, and she spent most of her nights in Meng, where English, though often broken, was the primary parlance. Bruno occupied the other room in her apartment. He was Swiss, had been a professor of literature in Zurich and then in Stuttgart, but academia had alienated him from what drew him to the word in the first place, and when he lost his wife he headed east. He wore this hat, a Uyghur hat, leather with earflaps, and nobody, not even Ashby, had ever seen him without it. Anna had been planning for some time to steal a look at Bruno’s passport and see if he was wearing it in the photo, but Bruno didn’t carry his passport, as he was afraid of getting mugged, even though technically, foreigners were required to carry passports at all times. He had a girlfriend who worked at the French consulate and Ashby thought he must have enlisted her to keep it there. Bruno was Ashby’s right hand man at the magazine, he was a master of organization and managed most of detailed administrative work of running a magazine, without an official publishing license, in a country where none of the primary operators was native. He was obsessed with the new. He loved Los Angeles and admired Ashby for her roots there. “Everything is new there” he’d say. “New and the same, like you can walk to any corner and look up and down and it might be hard to tell you are there instead of somewhere else, you know what I mean?” Ashby had heard a few arguments in defense of corporate culture, but never one in such aesthetic terms. Bruno had purchased a Kindle, which he was showing off to everyone in the bar, working his way back to Ashby. Evidently, he already had ten great novels he’d never read downloaded on the thing. Austerlitz, The Red and the Black, Dead Souls, Playing for Thrills, Under the Volcano, Dream of the Red Chamber, The Dead Father, Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Cairo Trilogy, The Baron in the Trees, and Berlin Alexanderplatz. Fassbinder’s adaptation of the last had played over a two-week period at Meng and since then Bruno’d had Döblin on the brain. He sat next to Ashby, reading and drinking absinthe.

Katrina was from Cleveland, originally, but she’d been all over. The daughter of career military folk, she attended no less than ten different high schools. She moved to Chengdu on a lark to teach English and one of her students, a Tibetan named Sonam, got her pregnant. At first she’d planned to get rid of it, but he convinced her to move in with him and raise the child speaking three languages and understanding modernity and Buddhism and America too. Sonam was from Shigatse, the second largest city in Tibet, and he’d come to Chengdu to work and study Mandarin and English. Katrina went up there with him once, before the baby was born, and they stayed with his family and none of them said a word to her. She went outside to take a piss and their yak was standing by, looking particularly docile and adorable for a large and ferocious animal. Slowly, she edged up to it, intending to pet it, for at least a second, on the downy flat between the eyes. It looked at her closely, but it didn’t move. When she was less than a foot away, Sonam’s youngest brother whistled at her from the other side of hut. She jumped back. He wagged his finger and shook his head but smiled, and then he put his two big pointer fingers above the crown of his head a made a ramming motion. She got the picture. They named their baby Cosima. The three came into to Meng not long after Bruno, laughing and soaking wet. Anna brought them towels. Sonam went back into the kitchen to make Yak Butter Tea, something he did whenever the family came in, which was once a week. Anna began giving Cosima a French lesson, even though the baby had not yet mastered a single word in any language. Katrina went to the computer and put on a new Camera Obscura album, My Maudlin Career. The men from Seoul left, tipping Anna generously and trying to teach Cosima a Korean farewell. Ashby gave up writing characters and started dancing with Katrina and Anna and Cosima, whose eyes were wide and wild in the dim, multi-colored bar light.

Sasha and Chip came in together and started playing pool. They were both writers. Sasha wrote for Ashby’s magazine and was translating a famous Sichuan novel into English. Chip wrote restaurant and film and art reviews for the city’s rival English language magazine, which Ashby liked to think catered more to the vulgar business-minded crowd than to the students and travelers and otherwise lost souls amongst the semi-permanent semi-English speaking population. Chip wrote crazy flash-fiction and meta-fiction which he didn’t even try to publish, “not yet” he said. It was such a joy, such an extreme transcendental joy, his writing, he was very superstitious to fuck with it in any way, lest it become something other than what it is. Perfect. Every time they played Chip destroyed Sasha at the pool table, and every time Sasha continued to bet him books, English language novels, which were a hot commodity. When Bruno heard their competitive cries he rushed down to show them the Kindle and was immediately formulating a program for them to borrow the piece and partake in The Dead Father. Chip was always really stinky and wore a trench coat and didn’t shave. When he woke up at noon he reached over and poured tea he’d prepared the night before from the big thermos beside his mattress. He stay in bed nearly until dark, reading and writing, rising only to piss. Finally hunger would drive him to the street, and he’d take Sasha out to eat, every night at a different restaurant, courtesy of his magazine. This meant sometimes an hour on the bus before eating, but it was on these bus rides that the two of them had their headiest conversations, plotting movements or at least scenes, talking about theory, practicing Mandarin. And they met many people and occasionally interviewed them. Someday, they thought they’d turn these interviews into a book, organized into chapters by which line they were on when the interview was conducted. And the food was the best they’d ever had. They ate Uyghur, Tibetan, Yi, Mongolian, Cantonese, Sichuan, Hunan, Indian, Thai, Japanese, Korean, Turkish. That night they’d eaten at the city’s first Mexican restaurant.

Akubi rolled in always around midnight, just as Katrina and Sonam and Cosima were on their way out. Her real name was Fei Fei but everyone called her Akubi, which was a Japanese name, which was strange, considering the common Chinese attitude towards their neighbors. She was from Meishan, a city south of Chengdu famous for literature. It was said to be the home of Su Shi, also known as Su Dongpo, one of the O.G.s of Song poetry. She was the epitome of new Chinese youth. She liked to drink coffee, not tea. She like hip-hop. She smoked American cigarettes and drank alcohol as much as possible. Most of her closest friends were foreigners. She had plans to go study in Vancouver British Columbia but, as of yet, had failed to obtain a visa. Some Russians she knew were at the bar and she began drinking Vodka with them before bumping into Chip, causing him to sink the eight ball and lose to Sasha for the first time in history. The three of them went upstairs and drank coffee, Sasha describing a recent trip to Myanmar.

“These days humans sense an end. Terrorism, climate change, political and spiritual extremecy or bankruptcy, gluttony and sloth and poverty and starvation. Myanmar is no exception; in fact it may be a particular of uncommon disposition to accurately represent the universal. The horrors of old, ethnic conflict, natural disaster, and so on, gave way to the horrors of occupation, of colonialism, which in turn gave way to totalitarianism, now threatened by the seemingly well-meaning but dangerous forces of democracy, which have been seen time and again to be synonymous with neocolonialism, consumerism, with that fast paced over saturated style sweeping the globe so thoroughly the last few decades in the name of peace and humanity. My friend Kaspar, a good leftist, a Wells Fargo sub-prime lender and debt consolidator, a registered democrat, a proponent of conscious consumerism, discouraged my travels. He supports the boycott. Thus I went in part to spite him. First these people are enslaved by the British, as Orwell witnessed and recorded during his tenure as a policeman in the very town in which I spent the most time. Then, having been gifted a non-refundable and infinitely problematic modernity, they fought about what to do, dabbled in socialism, even elected a Nobel Peace Prize-winning intellectual as a leader, but the military, having grown used to being the only glue strong enough to hold together the ailing nation, won’t let go. Monks protest. The junta’s grasp tightens. The international democratic community responds with economic sanctions and a travel boycott. The people suffer as they always do, not only materially but psychologically. As Marx articulates so well, we humans are a species being, we are social animals. In the global ecosystem we may each have or at least pray for our own special niche, but to pretend autonomy, to pretend isolation, is impossible, saddening and, to some, maddening. I saw Fred Astaire on the way to Mandalay. He was at once more masculine and more feminine than before; eyes bulging as in my dreams. At the Cabaret he loved resurrecting Porter, itemizing all the dark countenances. For a moment I even thought he smiled my way but it was merely the jest of the stage, the thrill of too many mirror balls which unleash glances everywhere and nowhere at once, like the Mona Lisa. Something in those old movies, Funny Face, Tophat, songs, Rose of the Rio Grande, living histories of an America long gone, fills me with a child’s joy, awesome and unpredictable. It’s the simplicity, isn’t it? There is nothing controversial about tap choreography. The power of such cultural material persists even after the most profound and proud dislocations. In China, which is now in the throes of what Slavoj Žižek recently called something like the most significant and efficient centrally-planned development and installation of advanced capitalism the world has ever known, you walk down ill-lit concrete stairs, flights upon flights, and there next to the broken elevator on the ground floor is a high definition LCD flat-screen television pinned up on the wall playing the most familiar moment from Singing in the Rain over and over and over again, or else offers a neon leotard wearing hip-swinging Leslie Fiest on a new Ipod commercial. We cannot approach these images in innocence anymore; we can’t even approach our pets in innocence. I knew that tune from Stanley Kubrick before I ever knew it from Gene Kelly, and I’m not the only one.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Akubi held his gaze for a moment, and then they both burst into laughter and started drinking absinthe. Chip put an Impressions record on and slow-danced with Akubi to “People Get Ready.” At one Jian Yu came in and Akubi, Sasha, and Bruno took turns going into the water closet with him to snort heroin. Jian Yu lived in Chongqing but it seemed like he was always moving around. He always had a lot of money and it seemed obvious he was a drug dealer though he appeared to have connections in the Party as he was often engaged in government business. He was always giving gifts. He loved China, believed Tibet and Taiwan and Xinjiang were rightfully part of China, but at the same time, he was vocally opposed to the government’s violence and its aggressive, haphazard economic privatization. An openly gay man, his fearless attitude toward contemporary Chinese society was admirable. He was always sending Ashby polemics which she never published for fear the powers that be would shut her down. He’d worked as a journalist in the past. She knew some of his work on Sri Lanka. He’d gone to Bhutan somehow and written on it. Word on the street was he was a major player at Tiananmen, but nobody could confirm this. There was something about him which made people shy. He was everywhere and nowhere at once. His politics were at once fierce and unpredictable. He was a very good dancer.

photograph by Joshua Willey
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