12.10 - 11: frost and flakes

12.10 - first day of snow
like a soft rain
melting over fingertips


12.11 - sitting in the smog in Tiananmen Square

Along the walk to the subway, a woman sells a tarpful of these shelled tre-nuts my aunt let me try once which look like glazed wood carvings. They steam like banked coals on the sidewalk, and I wonder what'll happen to her later this afternoon when the warmth is gone, when the only steam is the polluted breath from our mouths.

I keep thinking about the little snack gifts the kids gave us last weekend. Kate saved the German chocolates another teacher gave her for more than a week and brought it to plop in our gloved and chalky hands. Harry had saved four almonds--which he proudly knew to be an American delicacy--he got in Shenzhen I don't know how long ago (halfway down the country) to give us. Of course, I totally dropped them on the ground when he gave them to me. These kids have heart that a large part of the world will never come to understand.

The pollution is getting worse every day. It's as if the government officials in charge of controlling this stuff just went home once the cold started to hit. Things get gray even before a third of the way to the horizon. The sun is a radioactive color. But I'm still happy for those few minutes of super-light snow, even if its melting point never lasted past touching the earth.

--

Today was goodbye to my language partner Lindsay, 徐苏晨, my Taijiquan "哥们儿/homeboy" 邱昊, and my former roommate Maximilian the actual Austrian aristocrat. The kids in Henan (and that semi-awkward hug with tragic Harry when we were all freaking out that he hadn't gotten home yet when we had to leave him behind on the mountain only to find him geting off a bus just as we were getting on the one to leave town) were the biggest goodbyes for me.

Most people I plan on seeing again in a year or two. I like the rush of Chinese goodbyes, the unsentimentality of them. The affection is deep, the display is light. We don't even say "bye" so much as "see you again."

I will miss the barenessof that Taijiquan dojo (though not as much as the still autumn leaves when we practiced outside) in the dark, bare basement of the parking garage. I learned a lot of anatomy vocabulary and a lot of idioms I don't quite remember anymore. He told us one that really sums up the practice of internal arts: when you're young your stances are so deep and long that you can practice under the table, wen your'e old you're so stable and need to move so little you practice on top of the table.

At the end, he said to me, "抱着缘分," which is super-hard to translate. A dictionary would say, "Embrace your destiny," but he meant it as this karmic relationship between the two of us, to maintain it and keep it close so that opportunities to meet again will appear. I'll see him again next in Tibet, where he'll be teaching mathematics for the long-term.