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Mould makes me cringe. I have a psychological reaction to it like some people do to the sight of raw fruit being bitten into. It is my one and only request when we stay at hostels in China: “Is there mould on the walls?”

About a month ago ago, we were in a town I did not like. It made me itch. The walls of our rooms were white, but mouldy. I stared down at the market below, waiting for rain and watching women whose faces had been blanched by make up too white for their complexion, their eyes shimmering with mint green eye shadow. They were feisty though, and this gave their widened eyes enough color to be convincing as they rambled about below yelling at street vendors over Chinese veggie pancakes. I stole glimpses of them from behind the predatory mist.

I’ve heard that it is a law in the United States to repaint the walls of an apartment after a tenant moves out. To start out fresh, white and mouldless. I think of this wistfully beneath the safety of the white comforters. Peter said that there is mould in the bathroom of the next room and that I should steer clear of it due to my “problem”.

I shudder at the sound of the word cracking like sunflower shells in my ear.

This is sensory overload. Density of life (Kundera). Too many things coming at me at once. This is China. TIC. Better keep it in its acronym form, or else images will burn your mouth like a steaming baozi eaten too soon. Like a high orange persimmon broken into with teeth. Orange innards gushing everywhere like a late morning sun just breaking through the clouds. Like my bladder after fighting with it for an hour before getting up to pee at 5am.

China is like this. Unsolicited intimacy like flies crowding a table full of food you want to eat. Over lunch, we talk about them cathartically as if to face our outhouse fears where the dark holes in the ground hum with wet moving things. Dogs step on our feet looking for food beneath the table and cats scratch their flees against our legs as they chase rats, which they will devour wholly, mirroring us as we hold our chopsticks of glistening pork midway to our mouths, watching carefully. They remind us of the life that used to be lived in the morsel of meat neatly sliced and stir-fried with lively peppers and carrots that make our mouths hang open, slobbering with anticipation.

This morning, I stopped, stunned at an orange cat holding gray, anemic eyes into its smushed misshapen head. I remember the head of my childhood cat that seemed bilious and bony when wet. She hated water, and shivered and sneezed, and hated us for washing her. We loved her more in this emaciated state, and gave her kitty desserts when she was dry.

Life is short. Even cats slip and die on cow blood as we sit and watch through the steam of noodles we blow at before eating. Hot breakfasts take the edge off.

We ate five feet away from a bucket of crimson blood sitting silently like paint before the paint thinner is added. A pig’s four hooves lay broken and exposed on a table next to it. I followed the sallow pink to breathing red to greasy gray to an endless market of hooves and legs that fuzzed into a lentil salad of flesh and silver knives and the slowing lives of cold fish sliced open, their gills still flapping as if they do not know they are dead.

Everything is out in the open.

Mingy chickens dart around gas stations poking the dirt for bugs. Dead pigs are held upside down by four men washing the dirt from their bellies, scarlet blood dried up on their snouts like smudged lipstick. Heads of pigs look upward from kitchen floors with the hallowed eyes of scared ghosts as we snap pictures from the balcony, feeling big like the friends of boxers. Cows lay stretched from skin to skin on the black asphalt, darkening the city dirt with their smeared blood. Animals take up little space when they die. Everything is eaten.

Then we shit them out and fertilize cabbage, a dish we’ve been eating a lot of lately.
Everything is out in the open.

Like the fat rolls in my midriff that deepen in ashen folds when I look backwards into the mirror to examine my weight. Sometimes I reach around to touch them incredulous that they are there: enough fat to make secrets in my skin. Dark secrets. Like the cabbage I ate for lunch yesterday. I shiver, invading myself with cold fingers and cold reality.

We pee out into the open. The boys can do it standing up and into the air with perfect aim, sometimes from the peak of a mountain as they make echoes with their voices into the hallow humanless valley. I have to look for dry bushes, sometimes dried trash. 2 weeks ago, I crawled beneath a bridge and found a dried out, cracked leather belt near a trail of needles that once tapped dried flaky skin for red blood. I made a neat puddle next to them, careful not to get the dusty blankets at the edge of the platform wet, conscious that there is human life here, however faint. However hidden in the nook beneath a bridge.

Something flapped in me like a page of an open book flailing in the breeze. Something cracked. I’ve been cracked. My defenses weakening.The walls between me and China are eroding like a Bahamian shoreline after a hurricane has smeared its white sand onto the black road blocking the passage of SUV’s freshly washed by joonsers with bare backs and teeth that have rotted from thier mouths.

I cringe daily.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 11:14 pm and is filed under
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