I am enjoying waking up at 5 A.M., coming out to the living room to have a glass of hot honey water and watching Chinese television and dubbing the voices over with my own imagined language. Sitting at countless meals with people has been good practice for this and I think with a few more years under my belt, I could have my own 'What's Up Tigerlily'. I turn my head from the television to watch Baba shuffle by to the bathroom in his house shoes and long underwear. By no accident, the exact same version of long underwear that I wear myself, under my tiger robe. We fit similarly in these pajamas, except that he has a long hardened buttocks from his years of work in the Da Qing oil fields. He has shown me several of the wells that he himself drilled among fields of thousands of oil derricks. They pump very little oil these days, but Da Qing used to be a very rich city when the oil was flowing freely; making Manchuria (Hobei) the prize of the Chinese Industrial machine with its resource rich Earth. The very reason that the Japanese tried for some time to include annex it. The past aside, there is no better way of seeing the present reality of wealth-retreat than the lake park in Da Qing. It has the feeling of 'Return to Oz'; A crumbled land which was once manicured and fussed over, once gilded, now stripped. It still retains an inescapable beauty, but there is a clear memento mori in the precarious lay of the bricks underfoot. Does Baba feel any sting of betrayal that the Earth did not yield in accord to his labor? I doubt it, but maybe that is why he left Da Qing for Anda. To let his mildly palsied footsteps fall on the bricks that will be laid in the future, as Anda is a wasteland that can only become more beautiful in his lifetime. And if I begin my day to the rhythm of Baba's shuffle, then I should say that I end my nights engaged in the very activity of drinking too much which led to his stroke, and thus the palsied shuffle. He has within him the spirit of a cowboy and he has the lonesome face to prove it. If his health weren't so poor he could best all of his wife's brothers and nephews at their own drinking games. One very nearly finds Baba's antonym in one such relative: Do Do Dia, Do Do's father, Yu Yang's Uncle, who is a tiny jubilant man. It is enjoyable to see him cooking at a stove that reaches higher than his navel and a pot that comes to his chest. This handicap does little damage to his skill as a chef. One would never know what poverty he lives in, given his joie de vivre, but one need only see his wife and daughter's permanent expressions of disappointment to begin lifting the veil on the fact that they live without running water and earn only 200 RMB per month. And here I am worrying about whether or not I can get a raise. My goal in the near future is to be able to send them and the other poor family--that of Go Dar, Yu Yang's cousin--enough money each month that they could more than double their standard of life. After all, it wouldn't take much, and for what it could afford me in exchange in the states, it is more logical in terms of an economic value equation.
Love,
Brother Bradlee
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