Beijing + Jinan

"Welcome to China: nothing is real here." This was the Israeli hikers conclusion, which he confided to me while we were climbing the steepest stretch of the Great Wall. He was short and thick, very athletic. "I've been here six weeks, and nothing is real." His sweat streamed down her arms and fell from his fingers onto the white stones. "How long have you been here?" he asked.

"Three days."

"See. You don't know yet. But it's the same everywhere. Nowhere is anything real."

I saw him the next day, by chance, at the Night Market. He was wearing a fanny pack with a polo shirt and pleated shorts, and seemed much less believable. He was looking for "good" sports supplies. I told him I didn't know where to go to shop, but that the Market had some good fried shellfish. Real good. He winced a little, and excused himself, looking quite ill at ease.

What was real: workers sleeping on cardboard strips in their worksites during the middle hours of the day, covered in brick dust and mixing lime. Old men baring their potbellies and fanning themselves while playing Chinese chess on low stools and beautiful acne-scarred girls dressing in the Western nightclub fashion and high-heels but without the promise of sex, making the style seem false, a message translated from an attenuated signal degraded from its original state by distance and by the spots of vacuum in the language that cannot parse such lurid idiom. Yoghurt is popular. 

The most "real", in fact, was what the Israeli meant when he called it false: the selling of rebottled tap-water to tourists by elderly Mongolian transplants  along the Great Wall, the most real of which was still wearing his red star, rolled cigarettes from a saran wrap bag of reclaimed tobacco in squares of newspaper, and ate a cucumber with the side of his mouth where he still had teeth while laughing at the Americans. I owe that Israeli, for forcing me to think about what real means here.

We left Beijing the next day. It was overcast, and raining. The buildings receded into the fog and vanished, resembling toy towers. 

In Jinan, 2 hours away, the same residential towers vanished into the same fog. My friend lives in one. In the morning, I went out to smoke, and from among the bright impenetrable fog at the base of the buildings that were only just barely visible came a ghastly carnival melody that was the combination of a hurdy-gurdy busker pied-pipering children on broken bicycles, a ghostly big-top show appearing on an inauspicious day at the site of a massacre, a dial-up modem dopplering digitized calamities in and out of the real world, whichever one that is.