Summer Heat
It is Lydia’s birthday and she is playing in her room with three of her friends and Elisa. A loud scream comes from the room. This isn’t anything unusual by itself and I keep working in the other room. The scream continues. I walk into the room and see Lydia’s tall friend pulling the hair of another friend. It is that friend who is screaming. Lydia stands to the side, one eye on the hair pulling and one eye on me as I enter the room. The tall friend who is pulling the blond girls hair is intense and stoic, showing no signs of letting up. The ayi breaks it up and while the tall girl stays for the birthday cake as the other three girls distance themselves from her.
I think it was in high school when I read that the murder rate in LA increases during the Santa Ana winds. That in one particularly bad year in the 40s the LA Times ran a box score of murders on page-1. I am thinking about that this today, after a month of heat and humidity in Beijing, and the small incidents that have cropped up.
A couple of nights ago Yang and I were crossing the street when a taxi flew through the intersection making a left turn and almost ran us over. This is not so unusual here but because of his speed and how close he came to hitting us, I lost it a bit. Or maybe it was the heat. As he passed us I reached out and slapped his back window. He stopped. Got out of the car. Started yelling at me in Chinese which is not very effective. So I started walking up to him yelling in English to similar effect. I figured if he was yelling he wasn’t going to try and punch me, if he wanted to hit me he would have done so already. No need to back down, better to step it up a notch. But what do I know, I haven’t been in a fight since the forth grade and even then it’s not like I was a very eager participant. Fortunately, I had Yang standing between me and the taxi driver. Yang did not want to see a fight, not because she is afraid to fight but because she is afraid to see me in a fight. Smart girl. Eventually the driver got back in his taxi and drove of, berating me one last time in Chinese and me him one last time in English. Such an effective use of language. Yang later translated that he was saying he had as much right to the cross walk as us and that since he didn’t hit us, I had no right to hit his car. (A bit off topic, but when I get angry or for that matter under extreme work review pressure my brain’s language center kind of shuts down so while I’d love to say I zinged the taxi driver with a flurry of clever insults he couldn’t understand, I in fact just said things like “No! What? You!” really loud.)
The next day, Yang was driving and was caught behind a bicycle driving too slow. Instead of honking or forcing the bicycle to the sidewalk, she waited her turn only to hear the honking of a white woman and an electric scooter behind her. The honking persisted even though Yang had no where to go. When the lane finally freed up, the woman on the scooter gave Yang a dirty look at which time Yang unloaded her own special verbal assault.
A week or so before that we are walking near Beijing Normal University having just finished a street side BBQ lamb meal. On the street were a bunch of pink balloons having spilled down from the grand opening of a store. A friend of ours decided it would be fun to pop one so he reached down and did just that. It was a kind of childish thing to do but one tends to do childish things after eating lamb on the sidewalk. Problem was it surprised and scared a young couple walking in front of us. The young man and our friend exchanged some heated words, the scared young man getting disproportionally upset to the point I thought they were going to fight. However, our friend, for seemingly the first time kept his cool and did not escalate. Which was good because Yang was ready to throw down.
Just today I am working and I hear Lydia make a scream/yell. I get up to see what is wrong and that same tall girl has locked herself in a bedroom with Elisa. The ayi is trying to get her to open the door, which we’ve never locked before. I go fetch the keys, unlock the door, and tell the tall girl to go home. In English, which again, isn’t real effective. The girls start to head out nevertheless. Before they reach the front door the tall girl is grabbing another one of Lydia’s friends arm and twisting, that same stoic/intense look on her face. I separate them and hold the tall girl’s arms until they can all leave in peace, only to fight downstairs I’m sure.