A Month in Old Peking

 It's frightening to realize that I've now been here an entire month. I spoke with an acquaintance at some length earlier this week, and made the customary protests of "oh, no, I've gotten so little done in all this time," but in actuality I think it's been a month fairly well-stuffed with activity! Here are a few of the things, recorded in anticipation of dark moments of self-loathing in my future, that I've managed somehow to pull off, research-related and not:

-Locate, rent, move into, and make "home base" an apartment that, for its flaws, is a quiet, comfortable, convenient one at a very reasonable cost
- Keep healthy enough to enjoy the briefly delightful burst of autumnal Peking weather with some long runs (a luxury I will never forget to take for granted again)
-Organize and begin follow-up work on nearly all the material I had already gathered and begin work on a digitized archive of all sorts of sociological, legal, and memoir-y goodness
-Get back in touch with all my closest contacts from previous expeditions and obtain letters of entry to archives
-Had my first bicycle stolen (every denizen of Old Peking has to have this happen to them--surely it is a rite of passage when estimates of bicycles pilfered run to over 9 million a year?)
-Apply to go to Taipei in the winter
-Visit a new city (Tianjin--more on my fleeting impression of that town in future)
-Pay filial visits with regularity to grandparents
-Meet up with colleagues and friends, some of whom I had not realized were living in town
-Meet up with--heavens forbid!--entirely new people, some of whom I hope might become friends

Maybe the most important conclusion--certainly the most heartening one aside from the larger realization that this month has been anything but idle--is that I like the city I have chosen. On bad days, its murky, acrid air and endlessly oppressive piles of dull-faced people blur into a bleary Monet fogscape. On a beautiful day, or even at quieter parts of the bad days, I think I love this town.

 Yes, it's the city into which I was born, but I have spent perhaps a total of a year and a half in it--I come to Peking quite unpickled in her brine. On top of that, I have spent most of my life in various spacious, unbelievably safe, and brightly-lit suburbs. It's somehow intrinsically romantic to return to my birth-city for my longest stint urban dwelling, ever, and for my longest research stint, ever. It's like going to live in the house of the birth mother you, the adopted child, only just relocated and about whom you are also planning to write a biography!

Will I leave an old soggy salted Napa cabbage-stalk? Will I leave with another case of imminent pneumonia lurking like a spot of quicksand in my lungs? For now, I relish the transient glory of the Pekingnese autumn as I run around manmade lakes in which emperors once punted. I stare at the tawny streetlights over my head during quiet nighttime bicycle rides home along the twelve-foot moat. I inhale deeply the delightful smell of roasting chestnuts, corn, and sweet potato from vendors' tricycles and carts clogging the mouths of subway stations.

On a night lit by a tallow-colored moon and the haze of fluorescent lights scattered in the dirty taupe sky, if I squint in the direction of the old Inner City as I ride along the moat, I can pretend that the ugly concrete pillars of the elevated Second Ring Road are the dark red City Walls, their gates shut after the evening drums began the night watch.

(Deshengmen, or Virtue and Victory Gate, c. 1880s. One of the few survivors among the city's many gates. I enjoy cycling or running--hobbling more like--past it and imagining it in its imperial glory, but the stink of the public toilet that's been built near it and the burden of avoiding the cabbies pulling out from their break hour--they have claimed the underpass near the Gate as their own--makes it tough to keep up the illusion.)