Winding Down

We’re in Guangzhou (nee Canton) for the day. It was hard on us leaving Beijing. I can’t really describe why the city touches me so much. It’s drab, dreary, poor, regimented, and characterized by bureaucratic, over-size architecture. Yet it’s so full of life and a sense of its own future, its own becoming. New York City, Lor’ bless it, is a great city but it already is what it is. Beijing isn’t. Beijing is becoming. And it’s doing so from a past that reaches back immeasurably and to times so radically different than its present that it took a revolution to get here.

Then there’s the people. There’s every reason not to trust my tourist’s perceptions of them. I don’t speak the language. I met a very limited swath of them. They recognize me as a Western tourist from a mile away. But I nevertheless do trust that something that I’ve seen in them is in fact there: elan, openness, friendliness, confidence. Sure, this type of generalization is ridiculous. And yet…

We come back to the US on Friday.

Categories: Uncategorized dw