Beijing

Apartment buildings put up only 15 or 20 years ago look tired, sooty, monotonous, ramshackle. The bus we are in goes past mile after mile of them, and of much older ones of similar design. The older ones are truly depressing. Newer white buildings are gray, older brown brick ones are rust. This city is so polluted that my eyes water on the first full day in it. The physical world needs soap and a brush. There is lots of new construction going on in anticipation of the Olympics, but the new construction doesn’t look any more interesting than the old. Apparently creativity in building design is not rewarded. There is none to be seen.

After an hour of this we reach what feels like countryside, densely foliated and hilly, then mountainous. We see glimpses of the wall and then stretches of it. It is improbable, a worm of unacceptable size wriggling across the mountain tops, settling into the valleys, rising again to a newer, grander peak. We watch it for half an hour or so before pulling into an accepted tourist stop, where the merchants are clustered, waiting. We have driven north for an hour and half, starting in northern Beijing, and arrive at this incomprehensible wall only to learn from our tour guide that we are still in Beijing.

I begin to realize that the scale of things in China is too large for small town Minnesota boys to get around.

We make our way through the din of merchants’ t-shirt one dollah watuh heah veah good quarity rorest plice to the wall. It is no longer a worm. It is stone. The world’s largest graveyard, the bodies of those who labored on it long ago merged with the stones they carried. It is impossibly large.

I look up the mountains for a mile or so. Every inch of the wall’s top is covered with moving people. I’m looking at a hundred thousand people walking their ancestors’ wall. The moving people and the rise and dip and further rise of the wall they walk on create an illusion that the wall is rippling, like the undulations of a water snake.

My senses cannot accept such numbers, such mass. This is my first day in China, and already I have seen more than I can take in.

I came in to the office at 6:30 this morning, to find Renee, a graduate student, already in her office. We made knowing, self-mocking laughs at being at work so long before class.

That made me realize I miss Jessie, another grad student now gone on to better things and bigger city, who for the past two years was in the office adjacent to the one now occupied by Renee. Jessie also was often in early. She cared about her teaching, and we got to have highly satisfying conversations about what we were doing in the classroom and why. So far this year I haven’t found another person to have such talks with.

China travels

One of the first things I noticed once I got to my first hotel room in Beijing was that I couldn’t read any of the labels on things in the bathroom. The bathroom looked like a bathroom in an American hotel, but the characters on the shampoo and soap and whatnot were illegible. Close examination revealed, in small print, “shampoo” and “soap” in English. No “whatnot.”

Poetry and creative nonfiction–together

This afternoon I will conduct the first meeting of a new, cobbled-together course. It combines the advanced section of poetry writing and creative nonfiction writing. It’s a first for the university and for me. The grad students are especially puzzled about how it will work.

So am I.

So we’ll work it out.

New blog

I’ve had to give up on CrustyProfessor, my first blog, as Blogger will no longer let me log on. No idea why. Ever since I got back from China it has not let me access my blog, except to read it. My thanks to Jessie for clueing me to Write Post.

In half an hour I meet my first class of the year. Even though it’s now thirty-one years since I met my first class, I’m still nervous. It’s even the same class with a different name: College Writing I now; Freshman Composition I then. You’d think by now I’d know what I’m doing. Maybe I do, but right now I don’t feel like I do. Very little sleep, sweaty palms, upset stomach.