Muddy

It was our last night there, so that called for a last round of lamb sticks and Beijing beer poured into plastic mugs.  We headed out to town, and that was when the waters came down.  The sound overhead was soothing, steady, and heavy — and we ignored it because this was our last moments together before the inevitable would tear us apart and spit out on opposite sides of the globe again.  Here we were — three Chinese natives, and a good friend I met when I was in Cambodia, under the pouring storm, and enjoying the last of salted boiled peanuts.

Was it really three summers ago when we rode in that smog-laden city of Beijing, when we found ourselves in that foster home in that strangely gated community, when we learned how to hold a blind child, guiding her along as she clutched our elbow?  We learned how to breathe, how to ride on that tandem bike and jump into the pool, how to spend endless hours learning that we are so different, so similar, so tied together. We are now on opposite ends of the world — and I guess that was bound to happen.  Perhaps even that was what drew us together — that need for the wind in our lungs.  Only Rosa and I are here, bound together with only a block apart, in the pulsing neighborhood in East Oakland, teaching the young ones still deeper east.  Last I heard, Isaac had married a French girl, moved to France, and was looking to be a cook.  Isn’t he now a father?  Jude, still traveling in planes and serving drinks and seeing the world, finding home again in Macau, or is it Germany now?  And Didi — that free spirit of a girl.  Who would have known that one day, after that fateful summer in Lang Fang, she would join my friends and I on a camping trip in the Pacific Northwest? She came with us on that trek northward, and then flew out of Portland, for Spain.

When we left that restaurant, those many nights ago, the relentless rain was in the streets, making rivers up to our thighs.  And so, we divided ourselves by personality — three of us sharing a bottle of beer outside the edge of awning, and the other two inside, staying dry and worrying about how to get home.   After many long hours, when it was soon early morning, we paid a restaurant driver to drive us back in the open back of his truck — us crouching in the back with the backlights shedding diffused yellow light on the swirling water, holding on as the vehicle gingerly made its way through the flooded streets.  We then waded our way through, shoes in hands, laughter in our mouths, and came back to our home, devoid of electricity and full of sleeping children.

There is still a Polaroid photo of the five of us that I slipped inside an embroidered frame and left on my bookshelf.  We took it that last night, five materializing shots each — leaning against each other, together.  I had once walked with Isaac under a street lined with illuminating street lamps, and he asked me about my next year.  I do not remember why, I only remember saying,”I don’t know, I don’t know.  Each year is a surprise.”  I miss that tree lined street, lighted with that pale yellow light.

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