Refugees from China (cont'd)
My guests have settled in quite comfortably. Last night after meeting Gordon for a night cap at Shakespeare and Sons, I got back to the flat and everyone was asleep. Tonnie and her boyfriend were curled up on the wood floor in my room, and Carl was crashed on the sofa.
Today we were all up and around about noon. Tonnie was already on the computer. The guys, in that daze just after awakening, sat on the sofa in the kitchen. 'My toes are freezing,' Tonnie's boyfriend remarked. 'It's an old apartment,' I said, by way of apology.
Later they cooked themselves breakfast. They took turns shredding potatos to make a heaping pan of hashbrowns. Since leaving China last week they've been living largely on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. At one point I suggested they buy a big economy sized sack of rice. 'No, thanks,' Tonnie's boyfriend said. 'We had more than our share in China.'
They'd been living in Daqing, way up in the north part of China, where temperatures were well in the minus. Tonnie's boyfriend (I forget his name, I'll just call him Jeff from now on) went to use my toilet. It's one of those old-fashioned kind, with the box and chain. 'Wow, this is an old apartment,' Jeff said, upon returning. 'But you should have seen what we had in China. It was just a hole in the ground, you had to squat. And you have to bring your own toilet paper. They don't supply the bathrooms with it.'
So much for the next great superpower, I'm thinking. I've been in discussions recently with a couple of schools. Of course, I know it's not all like that. One of my students, an EU affairs attorney named Daniel, returned from a month-long hiking trip through 11 provinces. Judging from his photos, it's a country of astounding, mysterious natural beauty, and across the country steel-and-glass skyscrapered cities, looking like new money from the mint, have sprouted up overnight and tower toward the heavens.
Later we talked about Chinese food some more.
'It was really weird,' Jeff said. 'The chicken there. They eat every part of it, and it's all laid out -- all the chicken parts -- right out in the open, they don't even use bags.'
'Did you eat any dog?' I asked, somewhat niaively.
'No, but we brought our dog there, and we worried about him sometimes.'
'Where's the dog now?'
'In China. We had to leave him there until we either get settled here or go back to the States.'
'Oh.'
Being New Year's Eve, I decided to head out for a while and leave my guests to themselves. I went down the street to Dobra Traffika, a cozy student cafe that offers a ham and egg plate, with fresh tomatos and zuccini, for about two bucks. Then I walked down the hill from Vinohrady into Vrsovice. Earlier the sun had come out for a while but now it was gray and dismal again. Pavels was closed, to my dismay. Maybe he'll open later. Or maybe he's spending the New Year with friends.
I went down the street to Shakespeare and Sons. Kristina, the pretty brunette with a dancer's figure, was working.
There were only a few people there. One was a very old man, gaunt, with stringy long grey hair. I could be mistaken, but I think he used to play saxophone for Plastic People of the Universe, the Velvet Underground-inspired band that made waves here before the 1989 Revolution. He was sitting with an American woman, and they were talking in English. The American woman was friendly, but had that (for me anyway) annoying characteristic of replaying the whole Bush/America debate, as though it had never been discussed by anyone ever before in human history.
'I feel really embarrassed, as an American,' she announced, 'about George Bush and the 2000 election. And the election after that.'
Her older Czech tablemate listened, nodded. He spoke English well, with a deliberate, thoughtful manner.
'A lot of Amer-icans,' the woman went on, 'Said 'I like George Bush because he's just like me. He's an ordinary man. Well, I don't want an ordinary man to be president of the United States. He'd better be a helluva lot smarter than me.'
I was trying to tune out the conversation, and buried my head in a book I'd brought along. It wasn't that I disagreed with the woman, it's just you hear these conversations so many times, and by the way people talk you'd think they thought posterity was standing closely by at attention, and that worlds shifted on their opinion, and that they saw themselves as emissaries from the better angels of American nature, called upon to explain America to the world. I'm guilty of it sometimes too, I know. It's not until you hear someone else you realize how presumptuous and grating it can sound.
'The thing I can't understand,' our pleasant pundit went on, 'is that the world has nothing to do with electing the president of the United States. Only Americans can vote. But the president's actions can affect the whole world!'
'Yes, it's very complicated,' the old man observed.
I fell into my book and soon tuned out the conversation. After the tea, Kristina came back and I ordered a beer. The book was 'This Side of Paradise,' by Fitzgerald. It was the book of burning, post-World War I youth, and generally considered the first literary shot fired into the Jazz Age. It's in many ways a very poor novel, immature, the first novel by a brilliant, but unfinished master. I was almost through with it, the last scenes where the protagonist, the handsome romantic egotist Amory Blaine, returned from the war, disillusioned by the loss of his fair Rosalind, emotionally at sea, confronted by a new world, rejecting the superficial balms of 19th Century Romanticism, his faith in the Church at best a wavering connivance, seeing even sacrifice as 'arrogant and impersonal.' At the end, Amory realizes that for him lays only the labryinth, and that his best path to salvation is 'not to be admired, as he feared, or to the be loved, as he made himself believe, but to be necessary to people ... A new generation ... grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in men shaken ...'
Back in my late teens, growing up, Amory Blaine had been an ideal, and the book a kind of refuge from the blind turbulance of late-1980s adolescence. It was interesting reading the book again, nearly twenty years later. Back then, Amory's struggles, his vanities and poses, his egotism, his hopes and loves and disillusions, had represented to me everything that I thought life was supposed to be. The funny, or maybe sad thing, is that even now, after so many years, after I have also known something of ambition, of love, of success and failure, of youth and disillusion, I can't bring myself to laugh at Amory Blaine or think patronizingly about him. And I still marvel at the flawed, overly histronic, but nevertheless prescience of the young Fitzgerald, who was only 23 when the novel was published, an overnight success that immediately catapulted the author into the position of spokesman for his generation (a role he never felt comfortable with).
How much do young Amory Blaine's strivings, ambitions, realizations speak to today? I would say as long as there are people who are young, who aspire, who pose and dream, who burn to live and love, who struggle to comprehend a turbulent, chaotic world that's constantly changing, I'd say quite a bit. And I can't help but think he'd find my compatriot, the earnest, well-meaning woman at the next table, equally annoying.
I finished the beer, paid and went up the hill. Pavels was still closed, but it was only four. New Year's Eve. Maybe it would be a good idea to head to the center. The Chinese kids would be out on Wenceslas Square, exploding all their illegal fireworks that go off like carbombs in Baghdad. Then there's the Chateau, or maybe even the Tulip over in New Town. Forget about everything, get out and have a good time.
I got back to the flat and my guests were curled up again on the couch. They were watching 'Lethal Weapon IV' on their portable DVD player. They looked warm and comfortable, so I didn't disturb them.
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