Beijing In a Day: Part III
Trip Start
Nov 29, 2008
1
10
16
Trip End
Jan 03, 2009
Beijing,
China
Monday, December 15, 2008
Peter pointed out a red neon sign, the Chinese character for satay, a specialty of the Uyghur people from western China. The sign for "satay" literally looks like pieces of meat threaded on a stick.
Chinese is the language for art lovers. The beauty of it is that the characters are pictures abstracted from the object or idea they represent
Lantern light
. Peter told me of a study conducted on the brains of Chinese people. The study found that the Chinese language engaged the readers' right side of the brain, used for creativity and nonlinear thinking. In Western culture, the left, or logical side of the brain is used. So much for the stereotype that Chinese people are all business.We turned right and found the Donghuamen night market, a line of hawker stalls near Beijing's up-market shopping district, Wangfujing Road.
Wearing red smocks and matching visors, the hawkers tried to entice us with their wares, holding up creatures both mysterious and vile impaled on wooden skewers as if they were the most delightful delicacies on earth.
"Snake! Snake! Snake! Try it! You like it!"
"Silk worm! Yummy silk worm!"
The snake meat lay on trays, pale, glossy bellies hacked apart and exposed. The silkworms appeared fat, brown and crispy. Scorpions, spiked through the mouth and arranged in neat rows, looked like something I would rather spray with a can of Raid than put in my mouth.
Other strange edibles included starfish and organ meats shaped conspicuously like livers and kidneys. I noticed that while the tourists showed off their daring by eating this macabre cuisine, the Chinese seemed to be eating normal things like soup and candied fruit kebabs
Satay sign
. We moved on to Wangfujing Rd., open only to pedestrian traffic, which was almost as bad as a real traffic jam, and infused with western tourists. All the usual suspects can be found here-McDonald's, KFC, Versace, Burberry. But Peter had something else in mind-the Foreign Languages Bookstore.
I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. English books abounded, from the usual large selection of classics, safe from China's censors, to history books on China and the latest literary selections. I'm careful when buying books. Where I live in Sumatra, Indonesia, English books are hard to come by. I could easily spend all my money on them and go over the luggage weight limit if I'm not careful. I don't want to buy something I could borrow from a friend, I and also want reference material for my writing.
I settled on Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, by V.S. Naipaul, a writer from Trinidad who won the Nobel Peace Prize for literature. The book portrays Muslim people living in various Islamic countries, including Indonesia. The portraits of the people seem intimate and revealing, the result of a six month journey of interviews. I am curious if his view of Islam is in any way similar to mine. Some of my closest friends in Indonesia are Muslim and are among the gentlest, most humorous people I know.
I had to stop myself from buying any more books, but we spent well over an hour there-Peter is as much of a bibliophile as I am. So many books, so little time. I could (and do) spend all day with the beauty of language as a teacher, a writer, a book lover. And in language-the rhetoric of the Revolution, the artful characters, the colourful "Chinglish" spoken here-I have found both Beijing's dark side as well as its creative, humourous side. I have found food for thought, food to turn my stomach, and food for the soul.
Not bad for just one day.
