BEIJING — As the maroon-clad massage therapist propped my foot up in one hand, and began exclaiming enigmatically in Chinese to the woman tending to Kristina in the neighboring chair, I needed no translation to understand the problem. She looked at me, her words a demanding waterfall of intonation, and pointed, exasperated, at the dry, cracked, dermatological desert that is my heel. I can only assume she was saying, "What the hell happened here?"
Kristina, who has been giving me shit about my disgusting feet for as long as I've known her, was delighted by this development. So much so, that when the young woman pulled out some sort of straight-edged device, and waved it questioningly and insistently at me, Kristina yelled, "Yes! Do it!" Just to double check, the attendant pointed to the massage menu, tapping on the extra service option called 'scraping,' to which Kristina again nodded and shouted her approval, pulling out her camera.
For fifteen minutes, this poor woman scraped dead skin off my tired feet, grinning and shaking her head, her co-worker laughing each time she had to switch arms when they got tired. I find Chinese women particularly attractive, with their fine skin and artfully arranged hair. My unkempt nature seemed off-putting in comparison. Not that I dwelled on it.
"I wish I could tell her that I'm a commercial fisherman," I said to Kristina, "that I'm not just some sort of swamp creature that can't lotion her feet."
Kristina, who does not believe in language barriers of any kind, sat up straight and began to mime rod-and-reel fishing, pointing at me, then recasting her imaginary line. The message didn't get through, and I suppose even if these city girls had determined that I did indeed live the life of an angler, I'm not sure they would have understood how this might cause one's feet to be so afflicted. And maybe it's not the fishing. Maybe I am just a swamp creature at heart, surfacing for these brief days in Beijing to terrorize a few local girls before skulking back to my cave, surrounded by endless bottles of unused lotion.
Swamp creature or no, there certainly are some major differences between this sweltering city and the rural north I come from. That first full day in the Chinese metropolis, we wandered between national landmarks — Tian'anmen Square, the Forbidden City, Jingshan Park. We bought hot, gooey rolls on the street across from our hostel, and bowls of cool watermelon from roadside vendors. We navigated the tightly-packed subways, and quickly learned the haphazard rules for safely crossing busy intersections, motorized bicycles being the most immediate danger.
A Saturday crowd at Tian'anmen Square.
The Forbidden city, as seen from Jingshan Park
There are endless ways to paint a picture of the urban Chinese landscape, but none that were so marked to me as the overwhelming presence of umbrellas. So many colors and shapes and patterns of every kind of umbrella. While we were slathering on sunscreen, women were popping open their favorite parasols, this sizzling, smoggy city a veritable mushroom patch of individual canopies. My favorites were the grown men wearing those tiny umbrella hats, secured with elastic around their sweaty domes. And I don't mean the conical woven basket hats, which I might associate with a more traditional image of China. I mean bright rainbow colored nylon and wire umbrellas, but a hat. And as far as I could tell, it wasn't a joke.
It was about 90 degrees on this day. Umbrellas, umbrellas everywhere.
People propped them up in the square and squatted under them, laid their sleeping children under them, prepared lunch under them. It got really fun in the congested areas, like the crowded lines leading to ticket booths or the subway entrances. Never before have I been so actively concerned for the safety of my eyeballs, as hundreds of people my exact height bobbed around beneath their sharply-spoked sun protection. The wire ends hit people in the face, got caught in people's hair, and still the madness continued. Perhaps this is a concern in large American cities as well, but it's new to me. I come from Alaska, the land of no umbrellas, a phenomenon I have only recently begun to realize as I travel more and more, realizing they are common household items pretty much everywhere else.
Alongside the moat skirting the Forbidden City.Maybe it isn't fair to describe a brief stay in another country by pointing out the apparent quirks of its customs. Because of course to the people that live there, these are not quirks, but just the way things are done. But this is the fun of moving through new places I suppose. I'm curious to know what quirks of ours people notice first when visiting American cities. Is it our love of coffee to go? Cups that are often to hot to hold, prone to spillage in cars and buses, and fillers of endless garbage cans.
One of my favorite moments on that first full city day was a collision of pop culture quirks, encountered as we wandered through the beautiful Jingshan park. Throughout the park, mixed in with the age-worn lion statues, blue-tiled roofs and soft greenery, were posters with Pixar minions, beckoning walkers "this way." We didn't realize what "this way" entailed, or what the minions could possibly be doing in the historical park, until we reached the screeching border of the children's entertainment area. At the center was a precarious carousel, decorated with Disney princesses and roosters, blasting 80s dance hits. Mothers, tucked neatly under their deadly umbrellas, cheered on their slap-happy offspring, who bounced on wild-eyed, paint-chipped horses to an apropos chorus. You spin me right round baby right round like a record baby right round round round...
And all I could do was picture Adam Sandler circa the Wedding Singer, propped on a carousel with a gaggle of smiling Chinese children, surrounded by ancient landmarks, and I was very pleased with my day.
Jingshan Park.
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