Volume 8, 2004
BLOOD AND CONDIMENT
Joshua Samuel Brown
It was a cold November afternoon in Beijing. The central planning committee hadn't turned on the heat, and I had the gout again. For three days I'd been treated to constant pain. It was like minuscule imps were jamming white-hot knitting needles repeatedly into the knuckle of my right foot's big toe. The pain was at its worst in the pre-dawn hours, when I'd wake in dark agony, the uric acid in my blood having crystallized in my foot while I'd slept. I'd chew up a few Chinese ibuprofen pills and curl up in a ball, pinching the swollen joint between thumb and forefinger to slow the throbbing to a tolerable level. Inevitably, I'd nod out, let go, and the pain would be on me like a freight train, shooting back into my foot as sure as if I'd hopped off a high curb and landed on a rusty spike. This could go on two, three times before the drugs kicked in and blessed me with a few hours of oblivion.
That morning I'd given in and gone to a hospital. I don't like hospitals in general, and Chinese hospitals are in a class by themselves. In a Chinese hospital, one is a piece of flotsam in a raging sea of people carrying every disease known to man, all pushing their way to the one open counter to fill out the requisite form that will allow them the privilege of waiting on another line for a few hours before being prodded by a doctor on the government payroll for ten seconds and being pronounced fit to wait on a third line for whatever medicines they happen to have in abundance that day.
I was lucky that day, and was given a bottle of Colchicine, an anti-gout agent, then directed to a bored looking nurse who gave me a quick shot in the ass of a long-acting anti-inflammatory. "You should feel less pain by this evening" she told me, and sent me on my way. I popped two pills in the taxi and went back home to my cut-rate Beijing tenement building, where I felt numb enough to pass out.
I woke up sometime before dusk, the pain having subsided from full throb to dull ache. I limped into the kitchen, determined to get a cup of tea and get some work done. I stood on the tip-toes of my one good foot, holding onto an unsteady shelving unit for balance. Bad idea. Gravity is a cruel bitch mistress, not to be tempted by the weak or infirmed. There was a bottle of condiment grade soy sauce perched precariously on the top shelf, and my unsteady hand was all it took to set things in motion. I remember watching the bottle wobble side to side for what seemed like long minutes before plunging towards the tile floor. In my mind's eye, I saw the bottle in all phases of its last voyage as an integral unit. It happened so slowly that I should have been able to stop it at any point. I might well have been trying to warn the characters in a slasher film for all the good my heightened awareness was to me as I watched the bottle approach the cold tile floor in slow motion, shattering into razor-sharp pieces of varying size in a near-perfect radius at my feet, and bleeding thick blood like a skyscraper suicide. The blood was black, a viscous black pool that oozed across the blue tile floor pushing translucent teeth in its wake.
I stood there for a moment, staring unblinkingly down into the mucky, shard filled minefield of my kitchen floor. Then the pain returned as my blood pressure doubled in the space of seconds. Then I totally lost it, screaming and flinging curses at the household gods. This did no good, so I flung a bowl - one of two I owned - against the wall, screaming "What the fuck do you want from me?" at whatever supernatural spirits might have been. By the time I'd regained my self control, the shards from two more glasses were mixing with the black muck.
But the madness was gone, replaced by an eerie, dazed calm. I took a deep breath, slipped on a pair of plastic flip flops, and set about mopping the treacherous mess into a bucket. By the time I'd filled the bucket, my hands were covered in tiny cuts and spots of blood mixed with swaths of filthy teriyaki sauce on the blue tile floor.
I hobbled down the cold cement hallway to the elevator, dragging a blue mop bucket filled with scum and shards behind me. The usually chatty old ayi whose job it was to press the elevator buttons took one look at me and went back to her knitting, saying nothing to me on the slow descent from the tenth floor. I remember thinking to myself that the day was almost over, and things could get no worse. And I remember thinking that you should never, ever think those words, lest even this small streak of bleak optimism leave you unprepared. So it went that I failed to turn back in time, and instead wandered blithely past the pack of uniformed red guards from the Public Security Bureau huddling for warmth by the entrance of my building.
Of course, they noticed me right off the bat, a bedraggled, dazed foreigner wearing flip flops on a cold day, blood dripping from numerous gashes, dragging a bucket filled with scum, blood and glass towards the dumpster of a Chinese housing complex. While it was all very innocent, to an outside observer, it might have seen like something ominous was going on. I had no idea why Beijing Public Safety were congregating in the lobby of my building. Did they want to check the gas meter? Would they understand that I was home with a bad case of the gout, a sick man on the edge, better left alone?
It was then, that I realized that I might be facing the prospect of interrogation. And not for the first time. I flashed back that horrible day, three years ago, when, the PSB had paid all the foreigners living in the Maidzedien neighborhood in North East Beijing an early-morning visit. It was just before the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the PRC, and one of the last holdovers of the day when Chairman Mao told the world that China had stood up and thrown off the shackles of imperialism was that round eyes were not permitted to live just anywhere. We were expected to live in the new hi-rises with price tags listed in dollars, not Renminbi. Those of us not on the cush expatriate package nipple had to live surreptitiously in regular housing, surrounded by Chinese neighbors who all knew that we were living on borrowed time. The PSB had me dead to rights that morning, and had served me my walking papers. But it was summer then, and I was fit. It was almost winter now, and I was barely even ambulatory.
But that had been three years ago, and three years in Beijing might as well be a century. The days of "foreigner approved housing" were gone, along with the sea of bicycles that used to stretch from curb to curb. Still, I was in for an official questioning. That much was for certain. The oldest of the three, a hunchbacked woman with a red armband and a green jumpsuit spoke first:
"What are you doing?"
I'd forgotten how to say "I cut myself" in Chinese, and was reduced to pidgin linguistics. "This blood...its mine" But how could I explain the trail of soy sauce flip-flop prints on the stairs? My brain had frozen up, and I could tell that I wasn't expressing myself eloquently. The guards just stood staring at me, and so I turned to leave. The hunchback from Beijing Public Safety Central Casting yelling at my back
"Tell us where you live!"
"1002! Please! I'm having a very bad day! I have gout!" I shouted, backing up the concrete stairs towards the cement lobby, dragging the now empty bucket, extremities still dripping blood and condiment.
"We'll come for you!" She warned as the elevator doors slid shut.
I limped back into my apartment and awaited the inevitable. I couldn't look at the kitchen. Defeated, I went into my bedroom and contemplated climbing out the window. Then I remembered that this was "the new Beijing". I was a legal resident of this building, with the paper to prove it. I looked in my little red Chinese dictionary for the words to explain my dishevelment. I wanted to claim epilepsy, but I couldn't find the translation. Finally, I found two suitable phrases:
"Soy sauce bottle plummeted" and "epileptic fit"
After a few moments, there was a knock on the door, and I opened it, and saw two of the three Public Safety Officers standing in my hallway, a man and a woman, the hunchback mercifully having gone somewhere else.
"We're just taking the census for the building. It's for everyone's safety" Said the man, whose thick Beijing accent was made nigh-impenetrable by some sort of speech impediment. I pointed to my swollen, enflamed foot with a bloody index finger, hoping that this might clarify my plight and excuse my earlier breach of decorum. Their faces showed no sign of movement, but they seemed to tread gingerly in deference to my precarious mental state.
I showed them my household registration card, a small yet invaluable slip of paper to any Beijing dweller. They copied down the particulars and began questioning me, asking me how long I'd lived there, how much I paid, and my landlady's name.
"Six months," I answered "2100 RMB a month, Chang Tai-tai"
"That is all we need. Thank you." They turned to leave. My hands and feet were throbbing again. What were they really after? I felt the need for closure
"Am I in any trouble?" I asked them.
"No, you are not in violation of the law." The woman replied. "Your landlady is. She's been cheating on her taxes, overcharging you while claiming her nephew lives here rent free."
"Do you have any advice?" I asked.
"Avoid Beijing duck." The woman said "It enflames gout."
The pulsating in my extremities lessened, and a wave of tranquility washed over me. Dazed and unwashed, I collapsed on my bed, warm in the knowledge that nothing - not the cold, nor the gout, nor the cuts on my hands - could keep tomorrow from being a better day. After years in China I had achieved a semblance of equality. The great Chinese bureaucratic machine was no longer after me. It had held me squarely in its claws before putting me down to go after my rent-gouging landlord. Now I was just another law abiding geek in the eyes of the machine.
Joshua Samuel Brown - 2004 - www.josambro.com