Yi, Thriller, Purity

I feel like I’ve finally experienced the real China.

Staff banquets are often a painful event for me here in Bijie, but this one was different. This time, the balance of foreigners to Chinese people was equal. This time, I felt renewed. This time, I connected. This time, I almost got sacrificed to the Yi god on a bonfire.

First: nature walk in white boots. Creatures encountered: millipede (ew!), ponies, gnats, butterflies, poop. Benefits: renewal, nature, flowers, fresh air, silence.


















Second: eating, singing, and people dumping some kind of vinegar-flavored beverage into my mouth. Outcome: cool, smiles, men “happy”. Favorite quote from the night: “It’s okay if his juice goes into my cup. We are brothers. He does not have AIDS.”


















Third: the sacrifice. People grabbing me, turning me, twisting me, making my arms and legs go in ways they aren’t supposed to bend. The fire blowing its ashes and sparks at me as if it knew I needed to engage in this purification ritual. A chant like two birds seeking their mates in darkness. Spinning. Turning. Channeling Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”? The dancing frenzies then mellows then frenzies again in a ocean’s tide of happiness and sorrow. Finally, emptiness. Release. It’s over.

















Fourth: dirty songs in the van.

China is beautiful on this night. Maybe I did need the purification ritual.

(For a better account, go here.)

The beetle

I’m a murderer.

He came innocently into my home, announcing his presence with a flourish. He was beautiful, once I got over the shock of seeing him. Big and metallic red. Majestic, really. A god of his kind. But the sound and fury of his entry was like a war cry and I retaliated by grabbing the weapon closest to me. I closed him in the guillotine of my window.

In the morning when I opened it again, he was still alive. He’d endured the night of torture. He stumbled away, his legs and back broken, but made strong by his desire to die in the beauty of nature. He walked to the edge of the sill, hovering over the precipice where he knew he’d meet his death. After a moment, he spread his curved, red wings and fell.

Where my blood lives—a continuation of the last blog

I’ve learned to not look too closely at my apartment. If I do, I start to notice things—smears on the white tile floor, splatters of paint on the wood, nails in places where no sane person would hang things, the crappy engineering and architecture…

But today, I looked. I stared blankly at the stark bluish-white walls and I noticed. What did I notice? Bugs. Mosquitoes, to be more precise. They’re everywhere. Stuck to the grease on the kitchen windows because the last tenant didn’t bother to clean them off. Smashed on the walls. Dead in the windowsill. My apartment bears the signs of being an ongoing battleground for the war between humans and those blood-sucking, pesky, buzzing-in-your-ear-at-3-in-the-morning-when-you-have-to-get-up-at-6-and-teach mosquitoes. I’d like to say that the humans have been winning the war, based on the carnage covering my apartment, but I know it’s not true. Because my blood’s splattered on the walls right along with the mosquito that tore it viciously from me. It’s right by my bed. And the mosquito that lost the battle is squashed right beside it. That was a particularly joyous victory against the mosquitoes, despite the battle wound that I woke up with the next morning when my eye swelled shut from the bite on my eyelid.

But I find that little splatter of blood morbidly fascinating. It’s not red anymore, but a dull brownish color. Now I’m looking at all the squashed mosquitoes on my walls and wondering if the blood of past fighters in this war-on-mosquitoes is also smeared on the walls. I’m both disgusted and interested in this idea. Part of me wants to clean the smashed bugs off the walls, but part of me wants to leave them up there along with the blood that they sacrificed their lives for as a kind of monument to the war. Plus, I’m lazy. It makes me feel better to have an excuse to not clean up the war-carnage.

And why is it that mosquitoes in China seem smarter than their comrades in the U.S.? I’ve said before, and I still believe it, that they must have some kind of ninja training before they’re allowed to go out and join the war. They have this amazing ability to disappear the second the lights come on. They seem to know that if they land on a dark spot somewhere in the room and wait patiently, the humans can’t find and kill them. How are their brains even big enough to have that kind of survival instinct?!

Grrr. I hate mosquitoes.