Drugs in the Grass

Usually our lives are centered around work, and we're either sitting at the computer or, well sitting at the computer. I get to toss it up a bit, but then I'm just sitting at the easel, which is kind of a change of scenery, but I'm still sitting. The funny thing is that we're all adventurous people. We like to venture into unknown territory, climb all over things, poke around, play with Shanai, and we like to do it well. We'd like nothing else than to have a rock wall in our home with an obstacle course and sections devoted to boxing and martial arts training and gymnastics, but we don't have it and that makes it difficult because then we have to go out into the world to get it.
When we work we really devote ourselves; we're talking days without sleep and nonstop around the clock work where you forget to pee for 6 hours because you're just too wrapped up in it. And we always work. This doesn't lend too well to being active people.

So for the past two weeks or so, I've been trying to get into the habit of getting off my ass and doing anything but sitting. There's a park a few blocks away, so that helps. Of course, our last apartment was across from the stadium with free tennis courts and a full gym, but we never had a chance to go. Now that I am going, our current park is a little lacking. There's no tennis courts, so we play together against a wall which is good enough really because none of us are really all that good. There's a "gym" of sorts outside, but it's just a bunch of rusty metal toys really and I can't see ever using it. They don't even have a bar so I can attempt a pull over.

But the park is beautiful. I don't have great pictures yet, but I will soon. There's a large river that winds through it, with island pagodas and a fishing hole where you can fish for shrimp for 10 yuan an hour. The last time we went, we didn't actually do much. I wanted to take pictures of a statue so that I could make a 3D version of him and animate him in the music video we're doing right now, but by the time we got there the sun was already set. I tried to draw the statue and the lily pad filled river (complete with thousands of croaking jumping frogs) but after 5 minutes, my legs were covered in mosquito bites, so we packed in the drawing pad and went over to our trusty wall to just play some badminton before going home. (I'd never played badminton before China, but it's incredibly popular here. At any time and anywhere, you can spot someone playing. I personally only get into if there's a bit of competition to it, but most people just practice volleying).
This turned out to be a pretty cool night for me.
In our last apartment, every night the stadium would blast the same music and we could see clouds of people down there doing something, but I couldn't tell what. It turns out what they were doing was dance Tai Chi. A little while after we started playing badminton, someone turned on that same music and suddenly people started to gather, line themselves up and started all coordinated dancing to the music (in a relaxed aerobics kind of way). We moved over a little to give them room, but little by little, the whole area was soon filled with over 200 people lining up to do this so we put our rackets down and just watched for a while.
"Do they know each other?" I asked my Chinese friend Sue who answers most of my Chinese related questions. She looked at me confused.
"No."
"How do they know when to come?"
"It's the same at every park. Everyone just knows."
"How do they all know the dance moves?" (there were dozens of different songs and dances they did).
"They do it everyday."



Here's the interesting part. Apparently after SARS, the Chinese people were told that they needed to be healthy and somewhere somehow, someone said this park Tai Chi was the good way. Suddenly the whole country got into it and this is just what they do to stay healthy. It's mostly women, and mostly 30s and up, but there were also quite a few young people, children and men of all ages joining in. I'm not sure how to explain why this seemed interesting to me. There was this old woman close to me who looked like she could be my grandmother if my grandmother was a bit smaller and Chinese, and there she was, often leading the people around her by starting off the appropriate dance to the new song, and then jiving to the song (one song said shake that booty), and all around her, everyone was doing the same thing, all straight faced, none of them knowing each other, with no celebration to it. No one clapped after a particularly well done song, no one really smiled (accept for the teenage girl on a cellphone). They were just doing their thing; organized and strange. There are a lot of things I don't like about China and you can get frustrated arguing with people about superstitions and out of date medical/political/historical/artistic/technological topics, but this is one of those things I dig about China. Hundreds of people all over China line up at the same time to practice Tai Chi with strangers to be healthy. There's something to that. There's no teachers, just people who've been doing it longer. (Andy has just told me that this didn't in fact start after SARS, and that he saw it when he was in Guangzhou before SARS. Maybe it just got more organized and popular after SARS....damn)

That same night Sue told me something that made me love China a little bit more. I've noticed before that most of the parks don't have grass, instead they have this short dark leafy stuff. They also plant this at the hospitals. Apparently it's medicine, used for coughs and small colds and illnesses. The government plants it at the hospitals and parks so that people who can't afford medicine can still get well. It's in these ways that you can respect that China's crazy rules and laws are put there in a desperate effort to take care of all of it's people at once and is intent on not leaving anyone behind. Of course many are left behind and I have horror stories too, but who doesn't? Planting medicine for the public; that's just genius, and it's something America would never do because it'd rather have a sic country whose paying out their nose for medicine than give cheap or free health care.

It's nice being able to see China without a jaundiced or rose colored eye. I have the benefit of neither having the predisposition of thinking China is the villain and also not idolizing China for it's western sold philosophy or ancient secrets. From this position, I can almost see clearly, though being an outsider, I can only see so much.

It's amazing the things you can see if you get away from the computer sometimes, and hell, I've even dropped a few pounds. Of course I'm sitting here again, compelled to write from talking to a woman in Hawaii from this same sitting spot. Hmm.