I show up at 7:00am big eyed and chatty, wide awake. Suddenly I am UP, too up to shower, too up to run a brush through my hair, detangling in the elevator and exchanging ni haos.
I am Eloise in a world where her stomach lining is vaguely split open and people keep giving her black coffees and chili oil. I am not quite Ann Patchett in that essay I can’t stop reading where she holes up at the Hotel Bel Air. I am seduced…by a hotel breakfast buffet.
It seems bizarre, and yet here we are, ten days in, eating wet hunks of amaranth watermelon flesh with my hands. In Chengdu I run around all day by myself, pointing and eating, eating and scribbling, clutching my stomach and eating some more. I forgot about hot summers, the way they make me vaguely wild, sweaty and big haired, wearing small clothes and collecting bug bites, my calves plumped with insect poison.
The mornings are slick, quiet. I wake up at 5:30am and read and wait for 7:00am. I sit in the gentle hotel buzz, soundtracked by jazzy standards and clattering chopsticks. We rarely stay at hotels, but this is the work of the university, stowing the professors and faculty spouses in a glossy labyrinth to rest between classes and meals.
At breakfast it’s easy to sit behind a pillar and chomp in silence, but I am trying to remember the hazards of not speaking all day, another easy thing to do when you can only say “Hello!” and “Thank you!” and recite a few noodle dishes, then pantomime your delight, your hunger, an imaginary watch strapped to your wrist. At breakfast I join tables, motion to strangers, exchange pleasantries and bossy instructions on what to get next (“The cold noodles are much better than the hot” is practically “good morning.”) I order a black coffee and grin with the stunning pleasure of having after an hour of wanting. Having and the having is paired with a basket of egg tarts, the flaky skeleture of pastry, crust stuffed with wobbling golden custard.
I sit under the bright lights and lick and chomp my way through a glutton’s paradise, a plate of sponge buns stuffed with salted pork drizzled with buzzing golden ash oil, the kind that makes your lips and organs purr and hum several seconds post-mastication, a mouthful of lightning. I sit under the bright lights and drink four coffees, consume a heaping platter of passionfruit and yellow watermelon, so honey fleshed and crisp sweet it’s like eating a brick of honeysuckle nectar.
I let the chili sweat wash over me as outside the air goes from 75 to 85 in a cool hour, thickening, soft as muggy cashmere. I eat cold noodles coated in crushed peanut and coriander and scallions and peppers, tangled on top of oily slick cabbage laced with hollow red pepper skins, greens limp with oil and salt. I eat slippery congee with pickled vegetables and fried nuts, soft salted meat stuffed buns and buzzing oil. I sit with professors and talk travel, Baltimore, Philadelphia, the cult of productivity, how to teach in Shanghai, compare notes on a favorite childhood rock station (“This could only happen to you,” Josh’s brother says when I tell Josh that upon arriving in China, I immediately found a fellow old school HFS fan.) One more coffee, then another. My mind expands as my hair splinters into a elder-statesman-dandelion’s pale fuzz.
I rush upstairs to write, coated in a patina of smell and grit, last night’s grime still clinging to my sweaty, chili hot skin, every pore open, every vein plumped. Szechuan peppers, making you feel bowel-to- eyeball alive since the beginning of time.
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annaxmalina
vaporwave
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turnnoffyourmind
