The House in XinChengPu

Written on August 11, 2006

My mind was elsewhere.  Too many random events had worked together in quick succession to slam me onto the ground with such force that I wondered when I’d be able to move again, but I’d told RongJun that I’d be up and ready to go by nine o’clock, so I attempted to push the immediacy of my thoughts towards the back of my mind and wait for her to knock on the door.

The Company seemed to be very close to furnishing apartments, but after four months, I found the idea of saying goodbye made my head ache.  I wasn’t happy about it.  I didn’t want to be cast out into the desert again, not when I’d just barely begun to allow myself to admit that these people were as much of a family to me as any form I’d experienced previously.  I didn’t want to leave them and they could smell it.

We had discussed the issue until there was nothing left to say on the subject.  It seemed to me that options were not only limited, they were nonexistent.  This was it.  We were going to be forced out of the Hotel as readily as we had been forced into it. 

Then, one evening, RongJun piped up.

Somewhere, on a main road in XinChengPu, rested a nearly vacant, four-bedroom house whose three uninhabited rooms, if we were interested, would be made available for us to rent.  The fourth room housed her Mother-In-Law, who, she promised me, would give us our privacy.

I had been warned that this place was unsafe.  We would be a target for robbers, kidnappers, and Lord only knew what else, but RongJun assured me that such threats were merely the elaborate fears of over-protective souls who didn’t want to see any harm befall us.  She felt the neighborhood was a good one, and seemed confident that we would not run into such troubles. 

Either way, I saw no harm in looking and she agreed to take me there the first Tuesday of May.

Initially, I was extremely excited about the idea.  Perhaps the opportunity to spend some time with RongJun out from under a microscope presented a welcome change, or perhaps  the relief of having an option, however unexpected, had triggered an endorphin rush, I don’t know, but now that Tuesday had arrived, I didn’t feel particularly up to the trip.

My body was still aching from the miscarriage of two days previously; my spirit hadn’t yet begun its recovery.  The prospect of bouncing along a dirt road while clinging to the back of a bicycle didn’t especially thrill me, but I hadn’t wanted to cancel.  Something in my heart kept insisting that RongJun and I needed this time together. 

In any case, when, at nine-o-two I heard her drum her fingers against to door of Room 205, I should have been ready to go. 

“Aren’t you going to get that?” Rod asked as I looked at him quizzically.  “You can’t just leave her standing in the hall.” 

“Right, right…” I muttered feeling as though I were still on some other planet, but the sight of RongJun’s ear to ear smile helped to momentarily clear the fog from my brain.

After a brief hello to the family, a short jaunt down a flight of stairs, and a quick goodbye to the smiling faces of those on duty in the Lobby, we took off along the main road on which the airport, a couple of hotels, and various other businesses where located.  It was wide and rather unappealing at first glance, but soon narrowed into a tree-lined, shady stretch on which the cottonwood seedlings would swirl about in the air like snow and it was quite lovely in the morning light. 

We passed many Instructors en route to the Academy.  Some smiled, some scowled, some just stared at us, unsure of what to think, but they all noticed us.  They all recognized RongJun and they had all heard about me.  Whether they approved or not, I knew we were giving them something to talk about… 

For reasons I don’t entirely understand, I found the fact that many of the Instructors would sit around for hours, clucking like old hens as they gossiped about various subjects, extremely hilarious, but I had become very protective of RongJun.  She wasn’t used to being stared at and I could feel the tension in her muscles steadily tighten as we drew nearer to the campus grounds. 

“Please, God, don’t let any of these people do anything stupid.” I prayed as we wheeled by the school. 

She visibly relaxed the instant our backs were to the Academy and, sprawled out in the distance, rested XinChengPu.

To either side of us were fields of newly sprouted grain.  The pumps were humming and the water was flowing through the irrigation ditches as dragon flies and swallows darted about the travelers on this narrow dirt road leading to the outskirts of the community. 

I half hopped half fell off of the bike as RongJun slowed to a halt.  Apparently she too felt that to transverse this terrain might be a bit much for a novice bicycle passenger to cope with. 

She began to walk towards the village as I struggled to regain the feeling in my legs which had been lost to my poor positioning on that wire-framed cargo-rack seat of mine. 

As I limped along behind her devoting much of my attention to the convincing of my uncooperative appendages that they ought not to fail in their support of my weight, I found myself really seeing RongJun for the first time. 

She wasn’t looking at her feet, nor did she appear uncomfortable or awkward in any manner of movement.  The stoop was absent from her posture and her stride seemed almost confident.  The sunlight caught her black hair in a remarkable reddish sheen which, when combined with the shadows the morning light was creating, sharpened her features to a very lovely contrast with the softer shades of white and salmon colored clothing she had wrapped herself in to ward off the nippy morning air.  Her eyes, though drawn into an extreme almond shape, were very expressive.  Her face was round, her lips full and her nose was shaped much more along the lines of your average person of European descent than that of your average Chinese.  She stood at about five feet in height, and had a graceful figure which she didn’t seem to be terribly aware of and, though the image of this person before me painted an endearing picture, it saddened me.

In her eyes I still saw traces of the discomfort which had been readily apparent in her behavior as we rode past the Flight School and as she glanced back in my direction, I found myself wondering what she truly thought of herself.  

“You look very pretty today.” I attempted to say as soon as I caught up with her. 

She paused for a moment, looked at me as though to confirm that I had actually meant to say those words and not something entirely unrelated, before shifting her focus to the road ahead of us.  A beat later, she began moving forward again, shaking her head as she muttered, “Me?  Pretty?”

“Yes.” I said in English, “You.”  She again stopped to turn an appraising eye upon me, but, after a few seconds, the corners of her mouth curled up into a dazzling smile. 

“There you are!” I thought, “There’s the RongJun I know and love.”

Within a matter of minutes we had reached the concrete paved streets of XinChengPu.  I again mounted the contraption fixed above the rear wheel of her bicycle and she began peddling her way through a maze of houses, past a small shop, and a group of old women who RongJun greeted as we rolled by. 

Finally, we arrived outside of a large, rust-colored door set into a brick wall which ran the length of the block.  Torn and flaking paper banners left from the New Year’s festivities still clung to the tiles around the entrance, which stood slightly ajar. 

The sun had not yet lost the golden glow of morning and swirls of dust danced lazily in the shafts of light filtering through the tree branches and awnings of various structures placed strategically along the interior walls of the courtyard.

In the midst of these rays, sitting on a flat yellow cushion, fiddling with a brick’s relation to a drain she was trying to block rested a tiny, hunched, toothless woman rich in years. 

Her hair was a mass of salt and pepper colored frizz, she donned very traditional, yet tattered clothes of dark blue and she seemed, at once, to be both set in her ways and, perhaps, a little lonely.

RongJun smiled profusely as she mimed an introduction of sorts, but her Mother-In-Law never looked up from her work or acknowledged my presence in any form aside from a short huff, which could just as easily have been intended for the uncooperative brick in her hand.

Though her smile remained steadfast, RongJun’s eyes darted towards mine apologetically before she decided the time was ripe to enter the interior of the house.

At first all I could see was dust, everywhere, but after a few minutes, I began to notice the home under the grimy layer vacancy had left undisturbed. 

All of the areas of the house were connected through a series of doorways leading off of the room which the front doors opened up into.  One bedroom and a small store room to the left, a kitchen, dining room and two further bedrooms to the right, both of which held large brick beds built over fire-places. 

This very traditional style of architecture, the situation of the windows, even the cracks in the walls and the dirt on the floor quickly wound its way into my heart.  The place felt right, for me, but I knew that, barring an act of God, Rod would not be able to cope with this level of culture shock in tandem with the pressures of his job and the decision was not mine to make alone.  He’d have to see the house with his own eyes.

“This is a good place,” I thought, “A solid structure, a benevolent atmosphere…”  I liked it.  In fact, I felt much of the same attachment to the house as I did to the owner and her fingerprints covered every square inch of the dwelling.  While standing beneath its roof, I seemed to be finally able to relate to that which had drawn me to RongJun in the first place. 

How all of this translated into Chinese, I don’t know, but faces seem to be multilingual when voices find themselves utterly useless and RongJun had long since proved she possessed the uncanny ability to know exactly what was going through my mind before my thoughts had aligned themselves in English, let alone my frighteningly minimal Mandarin.  Something as obvious as delight could not escape her powers of deduction and my expression was practically screaming, “I love it!”

We stood in relative silence for an untold number of minutes.  Any thoughts requiring words could be handled through our mutual friend and occasional translator at a later date, but, for the time being, we understood one another.

Soon enough though, her Mother-In-Law broke this strange little bubble of ours with a needle which required threading.

The ride home contrasted sharply with the morning’s expedition.  We bumped over the stones and potholes scattered along the dirt road between the village and the airport’s cluster of businesses, giggling about the fact that, when on the several occasions I did come very close to flying of the back of her bike, I’d clench my arms around her and call out, “Man yi dianr!” rather than tensing up with fear.

When we again found ourselves met by the confused stares of transient Instructors, we greeted them with the impish laughter of two friends who knew the joke was on everyone else.

Man yi dianr - Can mean "Slow down a little!" or "Be careful!" depending on the context.  Sometimes both meanings are employed at once