This Morning

The weight of my blankets pressures me to stay in bed. I know the tiled floor is frigid, so I drop my hand to scoop up socks before moving another muscle. The steam from my water boiler fogs up the kitchen windows, trying to escape to the deceptively warm-looking sun.

My cell phone reveals the millionth message from David, our persistent, needy high school friend. “Hi Whitney. Weather is turning colder and colder. You must take care.” Maybe it’s all the Hollywood movies, but the Chinese refuse to believe that I’ve experienced cold before. I’m met with looks of pitying disbelief when I tell people that my home in Iowa is, in fact, colder than here. At least it was. Now it’s warmer. Tomorrow it will probably be colder again. Chengde’s weather is on some sort of steady axis I’ve never experienced. Once a warm temperature drops away, it won’t be reached again. If anything, it’s easier to deal with.

After breakfast I layer on the sweats and venture outside. The path inside the apartment wall is lined with the vegetable of the day, harvested from some hidden garden—last week it was leeks, this week it’s arugula. The wall, the windows, the stairs—everywhere, arugula.

I’ve never lived in a city that I didn’t prefer in the morning. I walk past the school, where parents and grandparents mill outside the gate, watching their kids meet up with friends or form rigid, green-uniformed lines to listen to the morning’s announcements. I laugh out loud at a small dog strolling by in a leopard-print suit with rhinestones.

On the corner of a busy intersection, men have an impromptu birds-and-cards gathering. They come out early in the morning carrying two wooden birdcages, connected by a board slung over their shoulders. Six or eight birds are lined up in their cages by the street, while the men play mahjong, chess or cards on a cardboard box. I don’t know why this is the meeting spot. Maybe it used to be something else—everything here was something else just a few short years ago—maybe the busy intersection was a park, and old men don’t care for change. When I walk past in an hour, they’ll be gone. The noise of the high-rise going up behind their post replaces the birds.

I’m pretty great at crossing the street now. The trick is, as I’ve suspected all along, to understand that your life is not as important as getting to your destination quickly. I step into traffic, preferably sandwiching myself between old people or small children, because drivers really don’t want to hit them. I shrug at horns and sing aloud whatever my iPod releases into my ears.

Across the street, fortunetellers on small stools line the sidewalk, the yin-yang that was emblematic of friendship necklaces in my childhood printed carefully on the posters in front of them, holding untold secrets. I don’t know if there’s a reason they congregate in front of the city hospital, but from my ear-plugged and ignorant American viewpoint, it sure does look like preying on the vulnerable. Occasionally I see them working, an elderly man squatting in front of a stool and extending a wrinkled palm to be deciphered.

If I brought 10 kuai with me, I could easily spend it on this 10-minute walk. Without splurging for an unintelligible palm reading, I could buy a whole, steamed-on-the-spot sweet potato or ear or corn, fruits both recognizable and exotic, toys dancing their way out of green plastic bags, socks, slippers and nail clippers laid out on strips of fabric. There are tiny caramel apples lined up on a stick, a fall delicacy, next to newspapers, magazines, and the omnipresent, vehement beggars—the same three every day.

No one else uses the gym in the morning. The gym is hilarious, and I love it. Every wall is adorned with cheap posters of (American) body builders, even though the only other patrons I’ve encountered are middle-aged women. When I walk down the stairs, a black man with bulging muscles grimaces at me. Upstairs, it’s Baywatch girls on steroids. Lots of steroids.

I run by natural light and the glow of the treadmill, pondering the billboard that hangs inside the retail building just across the alley. A grossly anglicized Chinese couple stands in sailing attire, ala Ralph Lauren or Tommy Hilfiger, and raises their eyes to the front of their yacht. Near the billboard, a Chinese flag whips in the wind. Above it all, some other community’s arugula is laid out on the roof.