This Little Sweetie Took My Photo, I Took Hers

You’re probably sick to bloody death of reading about China, with the Olympics coverage, and all. But, many of you guys have asked to see photos. Polite fools you.

For you guys, click on the individual cities listed here for the smoggy photos: Beijing, Xian, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Shanghai & cute English language signs.

If you’re still reading, I’ll try to document some stuff you mightn’t have already heard:

There’s not a lot of smoking in China, as you’d expect.
But there’s lots of hawking and yes, very productive spitting.
There’s no graffiti anywhere in any city.

★

Hotels are more luxurious than you might imagine. Showerheads rain water impressively from the ceiling. There are oversized pillows and silk comforters. There are hung flat-panel TV screens. There are do-not-disturb-light switches. Doorbells even.

★

Cars flaunt “Baby on Board” signs while the baby sits casually on the lap of unbuckled parent.
Baby bottoms and toddler tushes grin from deeply slitted pants—the better to go potty whenever, wherever.

★

The days are so hot, so humid, so white, even the aspen leaves refuse to tremble.
A fan is a necessary accessory for men and women. Boys!

★

Sun is the devil. It is the villain that makes perfectly normal women on scooters wear hand-made doilies for their arms and shoulders. Younger, hipper folks wear, simply, long-sleeved shirts backwards. White cotton gloves are de rigueur. So are big-brimmed hats. And, on the fashionable, iridescent sun visors that cover the entire face, like welding masks. The unfashionable swath their faces swathed in some unidentifiable garment. Umbrellas are ubiquitous. Saw more than one grafted on to a bicycle.

★

Construction is a 7-day, 12-hour-a-week proposition. With the workers so ready for work, they squat in makeshift housing beside the job site.
Almost all working folks tote Neoprene bottles of homemade tea.
There are people broom-sweeping the highway.
There’s plenty of WPA kind of make-work: plenty of dusting, plenty of rail polishing, plenty of weed pulling.

★

Cops salute drivers before demanding that they move along.
There are no road rules.

★

Neon races, drips, pulses on buildings in Shanghai, Nanjing and Beijing as it does in Times Square.
Out of the cities, cicadas seethe in the trees.
Some middle-aged men wear their pajamas on the streets.

★

You can push through the hordes to boost your ldl levels at KFC, Starbucks, Dairy Queen, Häagen-Dazs, and, of course, Mickey Dees. Where they will look at you in amazement when you bus your own table.

★

According to our guide in Nanking, you can really impress your date by taking her to Pizza Hut. Would I lie to you?

★

And, of course, as I’ve already chronicled on Facebook, I sweated the gasps, the gapes, the gawps, gawks, the titters, twitters and slack stares as I walked the streets. Not that I wasn’t expecting it—we’ve been to Hong Kong. But. Lord. Have. His. Mercy! Zoological. I will absolutely have to write a long piece about the nudging and the pointing.

Technorati Tags: Xian, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing

You’d think I feel an enormous sense of relief.

You’d be so wrong.

I’m still waiting for the elation. I’m not even close to feeling it. Maybe I haven’t internalized that the enforced morning march to the computer is over?

Although. . . It was kind of delicious to kick back in the reclining Queen Anne and, without a speck of guilt, read the bitch of a Sunday paper. In one sitting—comics and all. Did a crossword puzzle, even. On a Sunday. How remarkable is that!

Even more remarkable is that now I have anxieties out the wazoo:

Thank the good sweet stars we’re off to China. Plenty of ancient and beautiful things to distract me. New folks to meet. And, now, I can shift my worries to 14-hour flights, summer heat, squat toilets, soup for breakfast, and, the ever popular: children pointing at me. Okay, then. Ni hao. Coming at you. To relax, hear?

Been thinking a lot about China lately. The earthquake, most particularly.

But, my friendship with my Shanghaiese neighbor and cardio-walking partner—heightened now that she’s on the brink of moving to the South Bay—has also pulled China into a unique kind of focus. At the end of our morning walk, Fei-Fei and I stop in a eucalyptus grove in Golden Gate Park where, laughing, she teaches me to count in Mandarin while we see-saw our arms and rotate our necks and fight dizziness and talk and talk about Chinese culture, mores, norms.

Been also going to the Chinese Consulate and waiting on block-long lines (about 20 percent of San Francisco’s population is Chinese), because of our impending trip to Beijing, Xian, Nanjing, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Shanghai.

So, you know. Took three visits.

One visit to take a number and wait, only to discover from an lcd monitor that new requirements in this Year of the Olympics oblige every visitor to present firm documentation of all hotel bookings and plane tickets.

Second visit to turn in said documentation with the applications. And also to be questioned nicely but firmly about the “Writer” designation I’d filled in under “Occupation.” Uh-oh. (At least I hadn’t checked the “Journalist” box, buddy. Bugs in my green tea?)

Third visit to wait again in a ragged line, monitored as usual by two tall, firm-faced Russian private security guys. I turned over the $300. And, Je-sus, finally had the two visa-stamped passports hot in my hands.

Less than a week later, I found myself back at the Consulate. This time waiting on a solemn line to pay respects to the more than 60,000 people dead in Sichuan province. The Chinese Consulate-General bowed as attendants handed me a white paper carnation to signify death and mourning. I am the only non-Chinese person. My first reaction is to balk, wait outside. But my friend gently pulled me in.

As we shuffled on line, she whispered to me that I am going to be on the Chinese news channels. Indeed I can already see the photographers eyeing me. I could not feel any more Black. The attendants broke out a fresh condolence book because, I suspect, I’d be writing in English. They bowed and handed me a votive candle, the little light like a gem. My friend and I clasped it in our prayerful hands, bowed three times to the altar. Emotions rush me so hard I am only vaguely aware of the camera flashes, the video recorders. I set the candle down to join the hundreds of votives already set out. I bow, bow, bow again, my legs tea.

Isn’t it supremely paradoxical that a piece so flagrantly autobiographical—vintage photos and all—should butt right up against my blogged denial that my current novel is sheer fiction? “Blue Black Berry” is all me. Fiction only lightly filigrees this willfully-blurred, kind of meta piece.

I hope to God I’m done writing about the event that has so colored my life. (Accidental pun acknowledged and unedited.) For this is the third time I’ve written about a subject that is deeply personal. It’s a low and steady thrum in my life. It is raw and honest, and will probably make some of the people in my family uncomfortable.

But writing about it is my way of exorcising, I’ve come to see. For I’ve rid myself of The Nasties before by setting them down:

One late January morning in 1988, I went with my brother, my sister, to fulfill the Jamaican requirement that bodies be officially identified before they are released for burial. The image of my dead mother being sat up to be dressed by the mortuary’s two wizened women attendants was a short and ugly loop of film that disturbed me and iced my gut for a very long time.

The moment I wrote about it in my abbreviated memoir, “Horse Dead, Cow Fat,” I was free. (Until I called it up just now, of course.)

Perhaps I need to write down something else that has been haunting me since Christmas. On the plane to Rio de Janeiro, I woke up to find my husband gone from the seat beside me. In my fog, I looked around and saw him a couple of rows back in the darkened cabin, intently reading in an aisle seat’s small round of light. I get up, find my shoes, and go to say hey, hi, to him on my way to the loo. In passing, I tenderly rub my knuckles on his overnight bristles. He looks up at me, polite and stricken.

Awk. Wasn’t him. I’d caressed the face of complete stranger, his wife beside him giving me the same half-fearful look you give crazy folks. In the heat of my profuse apologies, she slightly rolled her eyes as she almost wagged her head. Her man, embarrassed for me, ever so mildly smiled.

Crap, crap, crap, crap, cringe!

Okay, I’ve set it down here. We’ll see how well my theory of demon-beating holds.

Jennifer Coke

Technorati Tags: Blue Black Berry, Fringe Magazine, Jennifer Coke

I’m asking, because more than three times already, someone has slipped and called me by the name of the main character in my new piece, “Grace Notes.” Oops.

Okay, she’s a Jamaican woman who lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. These are my unescapables. I’m protesting into the wind, I know., but she is so not me. In a way she’s almost a stranger. Odd to say, clearly. Yet she’s a woman I’ve seen on the streets. I’ve watched her on a plane. I’ve watched her buy magazines. She’s this tall and too-lean, brown woman, younger than me (naturally), prissy, who never swears. She seldom says what she’s thinking; she forgets to breathe.

It’s a little off-putting only because of the events that happen in the story. Grace Notes is a kind of domestic, literary novel about sex (there’s a fair amount of it), and the fallout of one brief sexual encounter. Sometimes when I’ve come together with folks for a critical reading, there’s an exaggerated dancing of eyebrows at the naughty bits. Which has prompted me, embarrassed, to remind folks, Hey, now, guys, this ain’t me. I just know, though, that everybody’s picturing me there in that bed. Or wherever.

I feel sorrier for my poor husband. People ask me about the book at parties. I give a thumbnail of the plot line. And without fail—without fail—someone will turn to my husband and say, Uh-oh, what do you think about this, then? My Beloved, smiling very broadly, gives them his standard line: I’ve already told her if the guy in her book has anything resembling me, I’m calling the lawyer. I’m so glad his eyes twinkle as he says it.

He needn’t worry. I don’t think. The husband in the book is a PR guy, a big ole sports-obsessed, Midwestern Italian man, impulsive as all hell. Not even close, dude.

You know, I believe in my heart that I would acknowledge if the character were me, or if the circumstances were particular to me. Fact is, this novel spored while I was a juror in a murder trial. I wondered about the wife of one of the witnesses, the conversations they would have to have. It never crossed my mind that people would assume it’s my own damn life.

Perhaps it’s an inevitability that people will assume your fiction is autobiographical. Here’s a quote from the San Francisco Chronicle’s David Wiegand in his review of “Miss Austen Regrets” on PBS’ “Masterpiece:”

What we know for sure about [Jane] Austen’s 41 years on the planet comes from the few letters her sister failed to burn after the author’s death and from a memoir written by Austen’s nephew many years later. With such a dearth of facts, it has been left to her readers to fill in the blanks with whatever clues they believe they find in her six novels.

Jesus. Thank God he goes on to say, though, “In the end, however, they always have to wonder if their construct is true or not.”

Then just yesterday, tooling around, I stumbled across this article by Sue Miller, Virtual Reality: The Perils of Seeking a Novelist’s Facts in Her Fiction. She opens her essay with:

Before my last book tour, I made myself memorize a quotation from an interview with John Cheever that began, “It seems to me that any confusion between autobiography and fiction debases fiction.” Thus girded, armored, I hoped to silence forever the questioner who sits there in the third row waiting to ask, “How much of your work is autobiographical?”

Maybe I’ll just shut up now. And eat it.

Technorati Tags: David Wiegand, Jane Austen, Grace Notes, Sue Miller, John Cheever

Squandering an hour or more making an avatar of myself. As we say in Jamaica, cu ya (look at this):

It made my husband laugh–he thought it was cute. I only WISH I looked as good as this chickie! And, wasn’t it genius that one of my choices for a background was SF’s own fabulous Palace of Fine Arts?

Hey, go to Meez.com and give it a try. Will you be like me and try to put together someone that kinda looks like you? Or would you go for your alternate deep, cool and damn goofier self? I want to see it!

Many of the beautiful baroque buildings in Rio have a faded kind of gentility. The long stretches of beautiful, well-used beaches? Clean and wide and inviting. Because it rained every day of our visit, the ocean reflected the pale, disappointing gray sky instead of the rich indigo and marine green I’d anticipated. But it won’t be easy to think about Copacabana without remembering the brown, athletic men playing soccer volleyball in black, tight Speedos. Maybe what I meant to say was I won’t soon forget the undulating black and white mosaic sidewalks of Copacabana and Ipanema.

A party lies just beneath the skin of most everyone here, I’m sure of it. More than three times at the first sound of samba drums, Cariocas spontaneously stood up, hooted, danced. Even our very professorial-looking guide with his thick lenses. It’s not hard to catch a glimpse of how outrageous the pre-Lent Carnivale must be. Of course, for a small fee you too can have the opportunity of trying on some of the actual costumes deep in the gift shop of the Sambrodromo, the long parade strip with its luxury boxes and spectator stands.

I’d be so lying if I said I got a true sense of Rio de Janeiro. There never was an overt sense of menace, ever. But it was strongly “not recommended” to walk after dark—even with the heavy presence of tourist cops. Neither was it “recommended” to take the local bus three or so miles in a straight line to Ipanema Beach. The metal detectors at the entrance to the bank and the ATM machines were also just a little intimidating. So was ostentatiously-armed guard watching every twitch. We’d planned on taking an escorted tour of a favela, a shanty town high on the hill with a million dollar view. Lost our appetite for adventure, have to say.

Yet, you know, I’m looking forward to going back in a couple of years. Locals report the threat of crime has already eased significantly. Rio may not be ready for prime time without escorted day trips. But I’m confident things will change eventually. Besides, in Rio, nobody stole my new camera.

It was also interesting to me that I have all along had a Brazilian in my novel. Now that I’ve been there, I think my character’s looks wrong. I also must remember to try and use the two little Portuguese words I learned—Oi. A casual word for “hello.” obrigato: thanks. And, of course, Ciao!

Some photos:

Add to that the green smell of the rainforest which teems with wild bromeliads, and Tarzan’s rainforest vines, ferns, delicately trembling orchids, and full-throated cicadas. Vividly-colored butterflies perch and preen, short mud-colored alligators try to hide, raccoons try to shepherd their young, lizards work their throats, iguanas stare, a rainbow peacocks over everything. Look for birds, birds, birds. Wheeling vultures. A silly flock of giggling green parrots. Toucans!

La Recoleta Cemetery; Iguazú/Iguaçu Falls; Christ the Redeemer Statue

[Click photos to Enlarge]

It wouldn’t be Christmas without me and the Sweetie chasing down summer, right? This year, Argentina and Brazil—and the stunning Iguazú or Iguaçu Falls, depending on which side of the border you happen to find your feet. (For more photos, click on the name of the country.)

We had to look hard to find Christmas, boy. In Catholic countries yet. Buenos Aires, for example, had slim, slim festive pickings. There was an almost total absence of Christmas decorations—lights even—along showpiece boulevards or stores or parks. So, true, we did find Father Christmas in a mall, and a lone extravagant Christmas tree. But we saw not a single Santa line. Heard not one note of Christmas music. Saw not one red Salvation Army kettle in all the time we were in Argentina.

Christmas did pop up momentarily in Rio de Janeiro, though. Coca Cola sponsored an hour’s worth of a spectacular Feliz Natal Parade, which obliged that there was a lead pack of Coke trucks outlined in white lights. Like this:Coke in Lights

Human Christmas Tree

It’s Copacabana, and Cariocas have been to samba school for their Carnival—they’ve had years of practice putting on a scene. This time mostly for kids? Hundreds of folks paraded as characters from cartoons and children’s books dancing PG-sedately and synchronized to music from “My Fair Lady.”

It rained like the dickens, and the parade started three hours later than advertised. Nobody grumbled. Except for, well, maybe a few North American tourists. Wussies, we watched high and dry from the tenth floor.

Little Guy Dropping Off His List

So, all right, to be fair, we also did glimpse Christmas at the Crystal Palace in rural Petropolis, a two-hour, gorgeous drive from Rio through mountains and valleys and lush forest vegetation. Again, no long lines for Santa. Only a handful of kids smiling for a parent’s camera, the kids getting one piece of candy from Papai Noel and a chance to deposit their little lists in a box. Pretty cool, pretty low-key.

Toy Soldier (Deceased)

Still. Here I am again, looking for the Christmas of my fantasies. Of course, it ain’t anywhere. It’s never going to be anywhere.

And, yet, something absolutely special happened. We got to spend some time with my eldest brother and his family in South Beach, FL, and got a glimpse of how incredible it would be if we knew them better. And we surely did nyam up the groan of great Jamaican food they laid out for us. First taste of ackee, mashed green bananas, bammie—any Jamaican food for that matter—for Mr. Sweetie. Oink. Oink. Snort!

With Niece Extraordinaire, Camille

We dodge homicidal Porteños drivers. Jesus, if you think crossing the streets in Athens and Rome is bad. It just sheer madness here. And don’t even think it’s possible to cross Avenida 9 de Julio(allegedly the widest avenue in the world at 400 feet wide and six lanes one way) in a single traffic light cycle. Look out or get squashed. No pedestrian right of way regulations here, dude.

Most striking to me, and not hard to miss, are the very passionate lovers. They kiss and kiss in the streets, in parks, in porticos; they give slow caresses to faces and hair, to backs; their eyes tango. Something else that’s immediately apparent is that there’s no cleaning up after any dog. And it’s hard to ignore the young mothers with filthy babies and small children begging at the entrance to subway. No exaggeration—only the women’s teats are clean from breast-feeding. Also, on two separate occasions, beautifully-dressed women have sidled up to me and told me not to wear “that watch” in Buenos Aires. They tell me about the thieves on motorcycles. My watch is a mongrel Seiko.

Instead they should’ve reminded me that you don’t wear your camera bandoleroed across your chest in the damn subway. I used to have a lovely Canon Sureshot until some fleet-fingered ládron picked it clean from the closed case. Ai. Lástima. Undeterred, we continue with the tourist things, although it took me a day or more to let go of that angry, ripped-off feeling. (All my photos! Gone.)

If you go, do not miss a trip to the ritzy La Recoleta Cemetery to visit the iconic Evita Peron’s grave. Follow up with trip to The Museo Eva Perón. Buy a snack at the small restaurant run by Madres de Plaza de Mayo and feel like you’ve contributed a little bit to support human rights. Kick back at an outdoor cafe and watch sidewalk tango dancers perform and sell sidewalk photo-ops to onlookers. Reach for your camera, if you’ve GOT one.

Here are a handful of photos I scavenged from my husband’s portfolio: