Dear Sister (FedEx: The Clubbed Thumb of Bureaucracy)

I must define something: When you are in the FedEx in downtown Brooklyn with a dog that is neither yours, nor your companion's (the FedEx customer) and a guy in the line of approx. twenty-three people pets it and compares it's neck muscles to those of the Moray Eel, which he claims was exported form China to the USA (by this time you suspect Cocaine to be involved with his enthusiasm) as a threat to not monkey around with the Trade Deficit, you might just be 'lucky'. But when a woman who appears to have minor leprosy of the face--that is the only part of her body that is visible, due to her heavy winter bundling, so the disease may spread further for all we know--proceeds to talk to you eloquently about everything from the French Revolution and Marx to Neoliberalism and Egypt (all after her ice breaker about electing the dog in your carriage as the next president), AND another character enters the store engaged in what can only be described as the human equivalent of mildly unannoying, yet very present barking, directed towards none other than the Leper, the Cocaine user, and the dog... you have to start asking yourself some serious questions about what is going on in said FedEx.
The dog was being walked, as a job, by my companion, so the easy mystery is out of the way. And now for the real investigative report: Why were these and the other twenty people in line? Mailing packages for Valentine's Day in some cases, but for the most part, making copies and filling out forms; the unsaid torture that is a very real torture and a very real part of the interface between Citizens and Government. As to the question of whether or not these requirements of bureaucracy are suitably sadistic as to define them as torture, I think that the time that human beings are forced to squander in the name of official stamps can be described as mental anguish, and the methods of disorientation that are part of going from one building to the next in order to obtain the appropriate signatures to receive said stamps are arguably taught at the School of the Americas.
And Why were these people talking to me, anyway? 1) I had a dog, which apparently adds significantly to one's approachability and 2) there was only one person working in the entire store, alas... What's the rush? Why only one person working? I would have to do more field work, perhaps visiting the store at several different times of day, even different seasons, investigating it as though I were Monet against a field of haystacks. My educated guess tells me that the proprietor of the store knows that these people are completely reliant on this branch of FedEx for the clerical chores they must complete in order to escape deportation, rescue money owed to them, or heaven forbid make a request for contact in order to allow the government to better serve them. Economically speaking, it may not be in the owner's best interest to schedule another worker, despite the crowd. If someone else is on the clock, cutting the line in two, yes it would make things more efficient... for the customers. But is that really the point? FedEx is going to get their business one way or another because of their proximity to key Government operations. Very few people will decide to take their business elsewhere, because they can't imagine that things will take as long as they do, and by the time that they become aware of the reality, it will take them just as long or longer to go somewhere else! So it makes no sense, in business terms, to have someone else on the clock, draining profits. This of course, is proximity-based speculation. Other FedEx stores are most likely different, in order to meet the needs of a different client base.

Now to take malfeasance even further in conspiratorial speculation--not one that I am on board with, simply a proposition--I would argue that it is also in the Government's best interest that the processing of their documents be carried out INEFFICIENTLY. After all, a net result of most scenarios in which paperwork must be processed by Citizens, is to waive payment of a fee or fine, or at least reduce it. Money. To suggest that the government request the sloth pace of FedEx would be to go too far. It is much more likely that FedEx has learned this behavior from the government after years as it's thumb.

Dear Sister (Chinese New Year)

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

Dear Sister (China February 2011)

I am newly returned from China, which is a country that both attacks and seduces you in successive waves. I felt a bit like a member of a government in exile after the 16 hours on the plane followed by a 4 hour car ride to Da Qing. We had tickets to Da Qing, but lost our places on the flight due to a delay in Newark, snow of course. We instead got the last two tickets to Harbin and were driven from there, past the ice palaces famous of the city. It was a nice redemption for the hours spent waiting at the Beijing airport, myself a bit worse for wear at not having been able to sleep on the plane. My red eyes looked begrudgingly at the comfort of the luxurious fur-laden men and women that would be my flight neighbors. Once arriving, my final arduous task was that of carrying three 50 lb. bags up five flights of stairs, but at having accomplished that I was completely full of life and enjoyed some of baba's beer and mama's cooking before going to sleep.

The reference photograph that I have provided you with shows what I hope to be my new vehicle for writing. I hope that some of the better phrases can make it you here as well, but, I must say that the slope of the letters on a typing machine are such that they take the fingers along in such a momentum that one cannot help but continue writing. Which is why it is necessary to change paper from time to time, so as not to have such a fit as to digress...

As you know I was in the orient for Chinese New Year, which, in any other country is the aural equivalent of a coup. The fireworks are of such a design as to be loud, more so than to be bright, though there are some that light up the sky from time to time. Paired with our location in Anda--a city under development, paused I presume until the ground thaws--it felt very much like a functional apocalypse. There is rubble everywhere, as though old buildings have been leveled, as they have, but by grading equipment rather than bombs. Maybe this is somehow influenced by my having watched 'Gone With the Wind' en route. Such a tragic film. At a certain point it is a cruel ping-pong of tragedy, and all after having survived the Yankees! It all started out so care-free with the Negress yelling out of the window, and the cripple finding his freedom in the equestrian jump, large windows with great tumult beyond, and then they burn Atlanta only to blame her for being backwards, not remembering that it was they who retarded her. Unlike the south, It is so cold that two layers of long underwear be worn, one of a normal quality, and one quite thick, feeling a bit like a ski-bib. The face is the hardest to keep from freezing, and most of the locals have a permanent rouge to their chicks from the blow of freezing wind. I attempted to cover my face with my scarf, but as soon as my breath came out, it froze, and then I no longer had cashmere against my skin, but a wet layer of ice. The moral is that there is no real solution other than to wearing a mask tight on your face or gaining a rosy complexion. I suppose staying inside is also a viable alternative, which as a necessity must happen anyway to some degree.

More later. I must collect laundry and be off to work soon, but as I have been awake since four A.M., I can't imagine doing much effective work today.

Love,

Bradlee