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Beijing Tap Water Museum

Listening to NPR the other morning, there was an interview with writer Catherine Price, author of 101 Places Not to See Before You Die, an anti bucket list of sorts. One of the places she listed was the Beijing Museum of Tap Water. The justification seems to be that the musem is a commemoration of what doesn’t exist yet, drinkable tap water in Beijing, an issue that was brought to the forefront of many people’s minds during the 2008 Olympics, and continued on in the vein of American feelings of schadenfreude towards China.

Price’s insistence on both the unexciting concept of a tap water museum and also its lack of importance through invalidity/contradiction is interesting to me. First, what strikes me is the relationship between people and infrastructure, and the essential invisibility of infrastructure until something happens such as a natural disaster or what we perceive to be modern inconveniences. Secondly, I find the attention to infrastructure building within Beijing and China overall a fascinating confluence of exponential need alongside a scurrying for completion.

Most recently in the news have been reports about the 60 mile traffic jam on the freeway from Beijing’s NW suburbs to Inner Mongolia, which has sparked a variety of proposed solutions. There are an estimated 4.4 million cars in Beijing currently, which is expected to skyrocket to 7 million by 2015. That’s roughly equivalent to the amount of cars in NYC, 250 cars for 1000 people, with a population of approximately 18,000,000 = 4.5 million cars. However, 54.2% of workers in NYC commute using public transportation. Beijing on the other hand, at its peak use boasted 4.92 million subway riders at its peak on August 22nd, 2008, out of a total population of appx. 22 million (NYC’s MTA has a daily ridership of appx 11 million). However, Beijing’s municipal government isn’t oblivious to these transportation woes; recently it announced that it would complete 30 lines by 2020. It seems that a simultaneous lessening of cars, increased freeway construction/widening and increased usage of subways (and increased convenience of public transportation) would obviously lessen some of the transportation woes.

The point being, I’m optimistic, or maybe I have to choose to be. The network of highways is incredibly intertwined with quality of life issues and our day to day living situations. Highways can carve pockets of neglect and blight into the urban (and rural) landscape. Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin is a frightening vision of modernity, a plan not surprisingly funded by an automobile company. Although the city planners of Paris laughed at Le Corbusier for his idea, it was actually the model for places like Chicago, and resulted in areas like the infamous Cabrini-Green housing projects. Could high speed rail and more accessible public transportation help trump the production of such neglected areas?

(Side note, On Point seems to have a steady series on these issues, ie http://www.onpointradio.org/2010/02/global-push-for-high-speed-rail)

Another interesting facet of infrastructure is how much of it we take for granted. This summer, I saw an presented and curated by Juliette Spertus with Project Projects, in conjunction with CUP on Roosevelt Island’s pneumatic tube system for trash collection. Other cities throughout the world are also adopters of this system, such as Hammarby Sjostad which has visible public trash collection systems as if to remind its residents that waste has to go somewhere.

But back to the beginning of this post, which was originally about the tap water museum. The tap water museum, in its defense is a lovely museum in which one can learn about the history of tap water in Beijing. The tap water itself is undrinkable due to metal levels, as opposed to any kind of disease risk. With so many pipes and so many buildings, it takes time to replace the old pipes with new ones that don’t leak, say, lead into the water, which is old news, and all of this is made more urgent by the fact that having new pipes will help with water waste since Beijing is constantly facing imminent water shortage.

All this say, the Tap Water Museum is an important place to see! Although occasionally full of nationalist fist pumping, it’s exciting to see how far Beijing has come, and how far it has to go..

In recent dreams, my emotions receive a kind of brevity that is hard to encounter in waking life. Try not to be so serious, says my inner self. And I’m not. But the complex whorl of colors and relations that expand on the mind’s eye at night never lent itself to easy explanation. I do not believe in symbols, I believe in gestures.

All those gestures point to a haunting, the traces and shadows of places I’ve yet to be. Someone telling me in German a vagueness about dolls, and how plumpness requires certitude. A red barn, a future landscape, glass, rain, the one person as always that I wish I could talk to in tense moments but can’t. Receiving phone calls from everyone by the one person I’d like to talk to. I become empty with desire, too easily pleased with emotional trinkets.

I can’t help but think deeply that my diet and complex set of current ingestions has something to do with it. Which helps that I’m starting, finally, on the diet that I was mentioning to everyone back in May about starting — slowly arching towards macrobiotic. After all, physical sustenance is related to spiritual and emotional sustenance. Let’s not deny our human selves.

My weird dreams are deeply correlated to the rich but odd and empty feeling diet of seafood as protein only, raw vegetables and lack of whole grains. There’s a base, a foundation that’s missing that I can only attribute to the fullness of whole grains, and too much dairy and yogurt which has led to (as my mother cautioned) an excess of mucus. Which makes me cough at night. Which makes me wake up in the middle of the night convinced that there is a moose in the backyard making noise.

More dreams + food experiments to follow.

Apparently I look generally a little “peakish”, with a lack of color in my face and ridiculously thin. At my current 98/100 pounds (depending on the scale, I guess), I am not as plump, healthy or energetic as I once was. The general consensus from people does make me wonder: if I look like this now, how sickly did I look while I was in Beijing? Is it a comparative thing? It’s true I have been startled by how…healthy everyone looks here. Tanned, creamed complexions, sturdy legs and arms, a general sense of radiance that I am slowly trying to reclaim. Visiting D, she looked startlingly gorgeous, even though Pittsburgh is one of the more/most polluted American cities. All her friends exuded a wonderful glow despite end of the school year franticness.

Also, my gain weight venture is a good excuse for me to make lists (which is one of my favorite things to do) of everything I have eaten/drank in one day. Hence:

Today, so far: Two farm fresh eggs, one piece of multi grain preservative bread that tasted strongly of fresh oats, 2 cups pasta, 1 cup kale, 1 cup ice cream, 6 strawberries, 4 glasses seltzer.

Yesterday: 1 cup collard greens, 2 cups quinoa + brown rice, Bulleit (this is the part where I say Bulleit has replaced Knob Creek in my favorite bourbons), Trader Joe’s red wine,  pasta, 1 cup kale, 2 slices smoked mozzarella, 2 slices smoked salmon, 1 vegan banana split, 1 vegan bacon sandwich on multigrain, 1 cup whole milk greek yogurt with honey and flax seed.

Day previous: 1 arepas filled with avocado, salty white cheese and plantains, plantain chips with guacamole, 1 rum with pineapple juice and coconut, 3 cups mint chocolate chip ice cream, strawberries, 2 slices smoked salmon, 2 slices smoked mozzarella, 3 cups arugula spinach salad with parmesan cheese, pasta, 1 cup whole milk greek yogurt with honey and flax seed, 1 nut bar.

According to gain weight guides, I should be eating 5 small meals a day instead of 3. I guess I will have to carry around boxes full of food for myself from now on…

From calculations at Calorie Counter, I should be consuming at least 1800 calories a day to gradually increase my weight, or, I can eat 2200 calories a day to gain a pound a week. And you’ll never guess, but a slice of smoked salmon has only 46 calories…

7 November 1979

You were reading a somewhat retro loveletter, the last in history. But you have not yet received it. Yes, its lack or excess of address prepares it to fall into all hands: a post card, an open letter in which the secret appears, but indecipherably.

What does a post card want to say to you? On what conditions is it possible? Its destination traverses you, you no longer know who you are. At the very instant when from its address it interpellates, you, uniquely you, instead of reaching you it divides you or sets you aside, occasionally overlooks you. And you love and you do not love, it makes of you what you wish, it takes you, it leaves you, it gives you.

On the other side of the card, look, a proposition is made to you, S and p, Socrates and plato. For once the former seems to write, and with his other hand he is even scratching. But what is Plato doing with his outstretched finger in his back? While you occupy yourself with turning it around in every direction, it is the picture that turns you around like a letter, in advance it deciphers you, it preoccupies space, it procures your words and gestures, all the bodies that you believe you invent in order to determine its outline. You find yourself, you, yourself, on its path.

The thick support of the card, a book heavy and light, is also the specter of this scene, the analysis between Socrates and Plato, on the program of several others. Like the soothsayer, a “fortune-telling book” watches over and speculates on that-which-must-happen, on what it indeed might mean to happen, to arrive, to have to happen or arrive, to let or to make happen or arrive, to destine, to address, to send, to legate, to inherit, etc., if it all still signifies, between here and there, the near and the far, da und fort, the one or the other.

You situate the subject of the book: between the posts and the analytic movement, the pleasure principle and the history of telecommunications, the post card and the purloined letter, in a word the transference from Socrates to Freud, and beyond. This satire of epistolary literature had to be farci, stuffed with addresses, postal codes, crypted missives, anonymous letters, all of it confided to so many modes, genres, and tones. In it I also abuse dates, signatures, titles or references, language itself.

J. D.

What would you want to write anyways in return? What does it mean to ‘take care of yourself’, the title of Sophie Calle’s 2007 piece, a piece that I seem to automatically shift to in places of moving, the inequity of time and place scattering itself into the many crevices of a day?

I spent last month, this time in a small mountain village, outside of Rushan (literally, Boob Mountain), in the province of Shandong. I witnessed a distant relative of mine drinking hot water directly from the spout of a metal teapot, ate in a tiny grungy restaurant where upon going to the bathroom, discovered the toilet was a shallow hole in the ground containing all previous excrement and detritus to see. I was there to sweep the grave of my mother’s ancestors, but somehow felt myself less connected through family, and more frustrated by the small injustices people bring against each other. Most of all, I was charmed by the cows, the elderly distant relatives of mine who held my hand and kept on muttering in dialect “You look so much like your mother”.

I don’t think I have a large family, but through conversations with others, I certainly have a dramatic one — a family whose interrelationships are fraught with economic disparity, jealousy, and odd politicking that only a very diplomatic person could navigate. Mostly, I avoid a large part of my extended family (and I suppose immediate as well). which isn’t a hard thing to do as they are in China, yet become occasionally wracked with guilt that I am bucking my filial duties.

All of this is roundabout. Meaning to say: the Derrida passage expresses eloquently all that I could wish to think of in these past few days.

Last week was the Bookworm Literary Festival, and I had the good fortune of running into two authors outside of talks. One of them encouraged me to write down things for record, for myself at least, after I told him a brief story. The story I told him was about my great aunt who is now 78 years old. She was sitting in the living room telling me about her life; her bad class background and how they wouldn’t let her become a doctor (she worked in obgyn) because of it, how two of her siblings killed themselves during the CR, and then her subsequent experience of being a harried, overworked nurse. Her main duty for awhile was performing abortions, and she was featured in the city newspaper at that time for performing 10,000 abortions in one year. I cringe at it, but she described to me the “15 minute procedure” that she would speed through, and how during these 10,000 abortions nothing bad had ever happened under her watch despite such rapidity. Once, she had an unwanted pregnancy that she kept to herself for awhile and at the end of her shift that day, called over a doctor, had them do a quickie, got off and was about to ride her bicycle home, until a fellow nurse intervened and suggested that she should, at least, get someone to drive her home.

So, I guess it is very sparsely stylized without adjectives and matter of fact, but I guess I should write these things all down before I forget them into the past.

I saw my friend Qu Yi Zhen the other day and sat and talked with him and his neighbor for several hours. I confessed that I secretly hold true the belief that the spiritual is greater than the material. I also felt in many ways, inadequate after seeing the bed he sleeps in (a small wooden platform on top of a desk, about 2 m long and 1 m wide), and although to others it may seem an idiosyncratic way of living that keeps one going, I couldn’t help but sense it as a gesture of denying life’s physical burdens in order to reach the spiritual center.

I told him that I felt so compelled to attempt to be a good person, but always failed, evidenced by my relatively high number of spiritual indiscretions. How could I ever become a good person if I failed to ever say no?

When that sensation comes along, I hear G’s voice in the back of my head muttering that same song about overtly arrogant, messy young women in a sarcastic way. “But I’m neither!” I would protest — instead I’m nothing but a brat, someone who floats in and out like the droves of other young foreigner freelancers of terminal importance that settle so smoothly in Beijing. One can stay for three years and have it seem like a month, under a dazed passing of deadlines, mastiffs, newspaper redesigns and missed opportunities. Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast never felt so relevant in the shadow of bizarre desires, highlighted by young ambitions and misgivings. Gertrude Stein, here’s to you.

“I’m a writer, I’m an artist, I’m a freelancer, I’m figuring things out”. For a certain set of young foreigners, has Beijing become the place to settle and kick up dust? Where else could a bunch of twenty somethings, partially unemployed live in a luxury high rise? Where else could you end up at 4 in the morning at the Raffles Beijing Hotel, drinking Moet, hanging out with two young British men who work in the furniture importing business, and some guy whose significance is a shared name with a friend from high school, who is from Brighton and all you can remember about Brighton in the moment is Graham Greene and Brighton rock candy? Rocking on someone else’s dime is seductive until you realize the only person you’re compromising is yourself. The stretch of Chang An Jie from Tiananmen to elsewhere is long and filled with a psychological emptiness, and only a slight completion of romance upon seeing Mao’s visage through hazy pollution. But, I’m babbling and not telling the story as it is.

Tuesday night I was supposed to meet my roommate and a friend at Green Drinks, as well as this guy who works at a Beijing Chinese green organization. Two hours and too many beers for that CGO (Chinese green organization) guy later, the friend and I went to their office to help make phone calls to various other green organizations in the US as promised. CGO guy had brought two very important government officials (one, a retired sociology professor from a university here, and another, dabbling in city planning) with him to green drinks, which is how we ended up sitting in a car getting driven across Beijing to the office that was in the construction/city design bureau. Helped by the typical haze of booze and compliments about my purported beauty confirming itself, we sat through the awkward car ride. After being dropped off, we were treated to everything and anything, the great country’s money being thrown towards a packet of Zhong Nan Hai’s for me, tossing things into a basket at the supermarket, while CGO guy’s wife called and demanded to know where he was. He obediently said he was at the office, rather than holding a shopping basket full of food for two young foreign girls and encouraging us to spring for a case of beer rather just two.

Later on, as CGO guy and I were walking to the WC, I asked him if he was the son of wealthy parents, a shaoye gaozi. He said his father was the head of a government owned business. I replied “Oh, so you are a shaoye gaozi”, and he reached over, fake strangled me and told me “Wo mai le ni” (I’ll sell you!). It became obvious he had practice playing too hard and womanizing (in his words, he grew up by playing in his educational stint abroad). He offered to let us stay in a hotel, he offered to take us to a massage parlor after making phone calls to the US, as “thanks”. Unfortunately for all his designs, not withstanding the inherent wrongness of the situation, L and I also could hold our alcohol far better than him.
After getting money stuffed into our pockets for a cab ride all the way back across the city, I ended up in bed and L’s voice in the cab ride home echoing in my head — “How does China not fall apart?” From every sketchy relationship you could think of to the smooth operators present in various levels of government, after every encounter, I have a sinking feeling equivalent to the sensation of eating a pile of greasy food.
In the meantime I’ve been on a path to calm myself down a little more. Night after night of random encounters and frail egos that need to be sewn together only leave me exhausted. Especially when they culminate into a pinnacle of hysterics; strange men telling you they’ve seen you somewhere and remember your name, pointing out to you that you are, indeed, unsuccessfully trying to get a cab home alone in Sanlitun at 3 in the morning, having to sit and eat with someone and their girlfriend you’ve embarrassed yourself so thoroughly with, running into an overly sexual art dealer from LA who radiates carnality, dressed in all black with a Star Wars backpiece who forewarned you about someone frail having “issues” but you didn’t listen. And in general wonder about the very few shreds of dignity left in you, what made you end up here, quiet, desperate, alone, and so suddenly sober.
Being spiritually civilized is a difficult course to chart on. I find myself slowly moving and slipping into territories that I don’t want to, that in the moment the reckless things to do, the acceptances of dinner invitations and drinks, being plunged into the world of objects all are so momentarily comfortable and sated. I somehow plan myself into circles: drinks and confusions, getting taken out to dinner by someone who mentions how people of their profession are full of sexual perversions, getting late phone calls from married men, and the mundane — reading art journals, Chinese class and spending time with my great aunt and uncle. Hanging out with Dongbei guys, eating but not really — more like drinking without end.

Which is not to say, a bad thing, but certainly one that does not allow for a very ‘productive’ day. Yet it always remains enjoyable to traverse the geographies of the mind, from a mountain to the airport, to the city sidewalk and gardens. The delicate blades of grass against hard, cool, rich black soil is a sensation so strong that reaching my hand out, I feel dizzy in my real life.

The other night, someone posed the question if a plentitude of adjectives where best discarded in writing. I feel that adjectives only allow for more rambling, within the linearity of storytelling. Either way, my mind has trouble these days logically performing from A to B to C, instead choosing for the entire circumambulation of the island.

Sometimes it just ends up this way. Listening to terrible house music at 2 in the afternoon always leads to the space of another, one that is filled with endless warmth from the brief, quick sensation of someone touching your hand. Moments stop congealing into some sort of possible meaning, into a general cloud of reckless ability that subsumes me every so often. The last time it happened was when my hand slipped while using a chisel, the point sliding into my left palm, a silent but deep cut propelled by my right hand, intent on its task. Twenty minutes later, bandaged and shook, my thesis advisor gave my hand a gentle squeeze; a sense of concern that I felt so deeply it still manifests itself now.

The problem is, I couldn’t tell you what exactly the point, where things happened, or why they took on new glazes and hues. I am not sure what I’m getting at in the first place, except that a few days of sensation and imagination have pushed me back into the odd state I occasionally encounter, that the heart may or may not have more to offer than other parts, and that physicality is so frighteningly real.

It’s that sense; that of hurt, of being spatially located while simultaneously lost that gives weight to days. During such days, the mere touching of a certain kind of cloth, a brief lingering scent, or the way light falls into my room moves me so deeply that I am constantly retreating into my imagined life, where a friend’s house is closer to mine than I thought, where coincidental run-ins with people I have loved become possible, where the feeling of fullness is never accompanied by desire or grief.

In this order, today, I’ve mulled already over a combination of different words for lament, re read the line “it’s 7:34 a.m. in Brooklyn still & silent & the snow won’t stop falling” over and over, read and reread some Tan Lin and Lorca. I thought about my reimagining of an imagined story, a Trotsky-ite living in Mexico. I read several stories about the earthquake in Chile. I imagine the South Pole in its glacial munificence. Spatially, I arrived at a place not very far from home, but psychogeographically, I ended up distant and agitated.