When I first arrived in Xining two summers ago, I fell in love.
At 2,300m above sea level, it is referred to as the "Summer Capital" where emperors came to escape from the heat of the east coast. I felt like an empress taking a much needed respite from the heat, noise, lights, glamour of Beijing. Xining is the capital of a poor western province. It has all of life's necessities (reliable electricity, Internet, transportation) and none of its amenities (martinis, coffee, Mac service). It is slow paced where people walk aimlessly on the streets, stop and chat, eat long lunches. I liked walking in the markets, watching old Hui and Tibetan women haggle over vegetables, smelling roasted yams, listening to the Qinghai-accented Mandarin that is as foreign to my ears as Portuguese.
I recently spent another two weeks in the same city. But this time, I saw none of its charm. The streets are dusty and dirty. The hills surrounding the city are bare. Bad music is every present and blaring. Respite is nowhere to be found.
Men walking aimlessly in their polyster suits actually hurt my eyes. I looked in another direction only to see more walking polyster suits. Suits are by definition well-fitted, elegant, making any guy (tall or short, fat or thin, old or young) look sharp. Polyster suits are ill-fitted, displeasing on all the senses, making any guy look...cheap. But it is not just the fashionista in me that is indignant, it's the developmentalist in me too. Why do you try to look Western? Even worse, why do you add in a Chinese touch to Western dress, which adds nothing but cheapness? Why do you disdain traditional, comfortable, or practical clothing for any foreign style that turns out to be ill-fitted and displeasing? I understands it is near impossible to develop your own sense of style and being when every single man wears polyster suits. I lament that the environment in which these men reside does not allow them exposure to other possibilities and suppresses actions deviating from an imposed norm.
This long tangent is meant to show that the polyester suits that grit on my nerves now were completely lost on me before. Hence once I get past the preliminary introductions to a city, how I feel about it is almost entirely based on my moods. I find that I can no longer say I love or despise a city. I can only say that under certain conditions and times where the city (sunny, no construction) and I (lack of stress, desire to have fun) were in sync, I liked being there. It is with sadness that I lost the romantic notion of identifying and feeling myself a part of a place. I realize that I'm not one who can feel a city's energy, feel it in me, make a judgement on whether I like that energy or not, and conclude decisively that I love it or not.
Much as I'm an admirer of Romanticism, I'm not a romantic. Much as I admire carefree spirits, my thoughts are governed by careful rational, calculations, risk-aversion...
I totally understand the suit thing!
ReplyDeleteBut the one that gets me is when things, (buildings, apartment complexes, restaurants, stores etc.) are named after western places. For example, the luxury apartment complex in Dalian named, "Eastern San Jose, " or "Eastern Camp David," as if adding the venerated title of someplace that has no connection to the actual site (other than an idea in the residents' heads of developed and luxurious) would somehow make it more respectable.
Another thing that gets me:
Chinese youth that boast about their adopted western habits and thinking (drinking milk in and eating bread in the morning, and being direct in negotiations) while complaining about all traits "Chinese" (mostly drinking tea, being indirect in negotiations, and being otherwise "traditional").