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I’m sitting alone amidst the pot clanging jangles of probably 12 year old Chinese boys. I say probably bc they could be 15. Chinese kids often look younger than they actually are. The shelf that makes my cubicle private is stained with old sugar and licked by flies. I honker down behind it to avoid eye contact with anyone. Kids can be scary, especially kids in a foriegn language. I might be paranoid though.

I left our lu dian this morning looking to wander around, find a spot to rock and watch and read and write and wring the chaos of winding rice fields out of my head. But breakfast was a fiasco. I sat down slowly, bushfully making eye contact with the laban (boss) before easing down on a wooden bench hastily made empty for me. The whispers snook up behind my ears, making them hot. Nimbly, I chopped up a banana to eat with my bean porridge and fried bread. Chagrined, exposed to the mustering masses, i began to shake, as maybe a gladiator would in his moment of self doubt, right before. They poured in as i sipped. They leaned in as I snapped the hot grilled bread in half to dip in my soup. I could hear myself crunch.

I looked up and smiled to escape the sound of myself eating. Faces, round faces, leathered and tanned, mouths threadbare where teeth had gone missing, eyes stuffed into smoldering holes like the lit ends of cigarettes, lips pressed into skulls like raincoats suctioned against wind, difinitive shock swirled above me in the form of large humans from my diminutive bug eyes. They talked to me, and after realizing that i could not answer beyond the five introductory questions in Chinese, they talked to themselves about me, prodding my hair with thier fingers, pulling it out and watching it spring back into its kinks, nodding in aggreement of some successful assessment.

This must be what Tibetans feel like when tourists storm into their monasteries and take pictures without asking. Only now, the Chinese have successfully turned tourist into attraction site, subject into object. I have become Invertibrata, like the flies prodding this cubicle for cover.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Nakia's Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.