I’ve been walking a lot lately. The weather is nice if a little cold; clear as a bell as long as you ignore the dull grey horizon that extends about ten degrees up the sky (note that I wrote this post before the previous one, and that right now the weather is not as good and thus I’m not walking nearly as much). Yesterday I made the loop down Zhoushan Dong Lu to Shangtang Lu, past the Auchan supermarket and back down Daguan Lu (or whatever it becomes as it approaches the other end of Zhoushan Dong Lu) and back to campus. It took perhaps ninety minutes of leisurely walking, just enough to make you feel like you’ve done something but not so much as to leave you crippled the next morning.

Walking gives you perspective on things. Forced to smell the garbage heap in all its glory, to step over the vast and surprisingly deep puddles, and endure the inevitable stares of awe and amusement that constantly follow, walking takes away that thin layer of insulation between you and your environment that buses and taxis provide. You can also see all manner of interesting things that happen on China’s side streets and alleys — the woman cleaning a dozen chicken carcasses on a stone table beside a busy little restaurant, the businessman in a cheap black suit trying to light a cigarette in the cold wind without pausing a loud conversation conducted via a hands-free microphone connected to the mobile phone in his pocket, a heated argument over the price of dirty, misshapen eggs — that you would miss otherwise.

One image in particular is burned into my mind as a constant reminder of why I should never ever leave my apartment without my camera. As I approached the end of Zhoushan Dong Lu and old woman waddled toward me on the other side of the road. She was a postcard image of an elderly Chinese woman, dressed simply in a blue blouse and grey pants, a brown jacket of dubious quality wrapped tightly around her, cane in one hand and plastic bag full of things in the other, moving along at a pace just slightly faster than standing still. Her face was tanned and weathered, her taut skin wrinkled heavily around her eyes and mouth.

She came to a stop and stared at me as Chinese of all ages are wont to do. I smiled to her and she returned an absolutely toothless grin. She looked old and tired. In all probability her seventy or eighty years of life have been harder than I could possibly imagine, having seen Japanese occupation, civil war, the Great Leap Forward and its associated famine, the Cultural Revolution and its associated madness, and finally the often difficult transition to market capitalism that has seen the elderly increasingly forced to face the ravages of old age without a mature social system to help make ends meet. I felt bad for her because she could be my grandmother, and she is almost certainly someone’s grandmother, but where my grandmother is living in a comfortable and expensive assisted living facility this old woman is out in the cold on a noisy, dirty street, able to walk at most twenty-five feet per minute.

Her stare followed me as I closed the distance between us, and just as I passed I saw her head swivel, tracking me like a lion tracks a gimpy zebra. Then, as if on cue, “Auld Lang Syne” erupted from the old woman. I stopped looked back to see the old woman searching through a cavernous pocket for a few seconds before producing a small blue mobile phone. She stared at the phone for a moment as if unsure of what to do, then stabbed at a button with her thumb and held the phone to her ear. She repeated “wei?” four times, loudly, before proceeding to hold a conversation in a dialect that I do not know (which means any dialect other than standard putonghua).

I smiled and shook my head. Welcome to the New China, I told myself, and continued on my way.

Posted by John on Wednesday, December 17th, 2003 at 5:34 pm.