Jottings from the Granite Studio

I have a secret. A horrible heroin-like addiction to the sounds of 70s singer-songwriters. Seriously. A surprise visit to my house will yield only heartbreak and the sight of a grown man rocking out to the sax solo on Gerry Rafferty’s immortal and timeless “Baker Street.” There must be a support group for things like this…

Last week was hideously busy–mostly with the inane crap that passes for bureaucracy here in the Middle Kingdom. In some ways your average Chinese bureaucrat and I are pretty simpatico: They don’t want to deal with me and I don’t want to deal with them–and we work together to make sure that this is exactly what happens.

Needless to say, this pattern makes YJ crazy. For example I just switched my visa over which means a trip to the local police station to change my residency permit. (Welcome to China–Your Life in Triplicate.)

YJ: He’d like to change his residency permit.
Police: Why? We can’t right now.
Me: See honey, they can’t right now. Let’s go get lunch.
YJ: (Staring daggers at me, speaks sweetly to the police officer): Why not? We have all the paperwork.
Police: Lao Wang handles this. He’s not here.
Me: Of course. We’ll come back when Lao Wang returns.
Police: Yes, return when Lao Wang gets back. We must rest now.

By which point YJ is contemplating which one of us, the police officer or me, would succumb quickest to a choke-hold….

Finally, I had an unusual experience in central Beijing yesterday…complete solitude. I was walking back from yet another appointment with yet another branch of your local PSB and wandered through Ditan Park (just north of the 2nd Ring). It’s 2 kuai to get into the park but it costs 5 kuai to get into the central area, where the actual “Temple of the Earth” is located. It’s not nearly as impressive as the Temple of Heaven and 5 kuai is usually sufficient to keep the curious elderly from “Tai Chi”-ing in there, so as I wandered around the Altar–really, a large stone platform surrounded by two sets of low stone walls–I realized suddenly that I was the only one in there. No tourists. No gawkers. Not even–gasp–a bao’an (security guard). The Temple/Altar is really not much to look at, but the experience of being alone in any Beijing historical landmark was wonderful. Even during the halcyon days of SARS, there were always a few stragglers in what parks and sites remained open.

I rambled through the Altar area to the Hall of Storing Things for the Imperial Sacrifices. It’s a modest little pavilion with some really cool items including the ancestral tablets (牌位) for the Qing emperors. The relatively good condition of the tablets and the rather cavalier way they were displayed (you could reach out and touch the actual wood if you dared risking the Curse of Nuraci) made me think “reproduction.” But one never knows. All in all—not a bad way to spend 5 kuai.