13/10

Traffic contests for road space in Xi'an

I am not coherent. As a speaker, when I speak, I am not able to get my ideas in line. I just have too much conflicting stuff, too many questions, not enough answers. I do not know whether what I am saying is pleasing or just stupid. It does not help that I take the worst view of it that I can: that he is not talking to me because I said something off (and not because he just can’t think of anything to say), that she ate in another place because she finds me boring (and not that she did not even know that I would have liked company).

And I am so fluent a writer! I don’t consider though that what I write is equally confused. Or, rather, I do but I think that it will somehow be more charming, or ignorable.

It is an interesting conflict to be away for a short time. I wish it were longer, so that I could see more, be free, go further, have more experience of the whole thing, yet I miss my family enough that I will be very pleased to go home in a couple of days. I often find I have conflicts like that: I am not one kind of person, one kind of thing. It means that I am not good at any of the things I should try to excel at (or at anything at all — and what a terrible thing for a person to be no good anything: no wonder I want to become a fantastic poker player).

Anyway, I didn’t like Xi’an at first. It is bananas, the definition of it. Traffic is a snarling mass, with people seemingly hellbent on destruction crossing wherever the urge takes them. It is not quite so easy to find what you want as in Beijing, say, and not as attractive as Suzhou. But it grew on me, because the hostel is lively, the attractions are interesting, and the people, as they have throughout China, have seemed genuinely warm and decent.

South Street leading up to the Bell Tower, Xi'an

I do not have any special insight into China and I won’t invent one. I know only a tiny bit more about it than I did before I came, and I can’t claim to have understood it. But I have appreciated it. It is endlessly fascinating, always a new little something to see (and you do not write in your journal about the small child pissing in Tiananmen Square, the excitement of the crowd at the flag-lowering ceremony there, the woman practising her kung fu in a Xi’an back street, how beautiful the girls handing out leaflets about a whisky brand are, how filthy the river just outside Xi’an is, the shy smile of a girl on the bus from the Great Wall, the delight of the hawkers who added an Aussie 20¢ and 10¢ coin to his foreign coin collection — previously consisting of an American quarter, the women with big flags on poles waving flies from the meat, the smell of sewers that is everywhere in Shanghai or how weird it is to visit an archaeological dig — such as the one at Banpo — that is housed inside a huge hangar-like museum).