Chinese Riss: The Memoirs

Di michele -

Sottotitolo: short lateral streams of consciousness during the fortnight-long Beijing experience.

Il Terminal 2 alle dieci di sera è deserto. In programma ci sono solo un paio di voli, entrambi tra qualche ora. Uno per Mosca, uno per Bruxelles. Cammino per gli ampi spazi tra i banchi abbandonati. La pressoché totale assenza di persone, unita al sottofondo di aria condizionata e di un cicaleccio lontano, mi fa pensare di essere in un film americano di serie B degli anni '80. Là fuori esisterà ancora qualcuno?

Il mio telefono dice che il segnale di China Mobile arriva forte e chiaro, quindi mi rassicuro e aspetto.

-----

- Which airport? One, two or three?
- èr!, dico perentorio.

In taxi con me c'è un ragazzo sloveno, anche lui studente alla Summer School. Non l'ho mai visto, e non ho voglia di vederlo ora, quindi guardo fuori dal finestrino. Non so come, ma sento un raro magone.

Pechino diventa pian piano periferia e autostrada, mentre l'autoradio trasmette i programmi del sabato sera, che tutto a un tratto mi sembrano familiari.

-----

- Hey, the Koreans should know this song!!!
- Yeah, maybe they are NORTH Koreans!
[laughs]

Sono seduto su un divano comodo e ampio, probabilmente unico cittadino italiano a conoscere la canzone. Davanti a me ci sono una ragazza di Calgary e un tipo di Long Beach.

Madison, la ragazza, ha un viso carino, capelli lunghi rossi lisci e occhi chiari, esattamente ciò che mi aspetto da una ragazza canadese.

Yao, il tipo, è di origine asiatica, direi sud-est asiatica, ma il suo legame con Los Angeles si vede lontano un miglio.

Lei canta Michael Jackson, lui balla. In realtà stiamo tutti cantando sul divano: loro sono queli che si esibiscono. Il karaoke è appena iniziato, 200 yuan per un'ora.

Con dieci persone in sala, tutti i continenti rappresentati tranne l'Africa e la consapevolezza che là fuori c'è Pechino di sera, non ci si può che divertire da matti.

Commenti

davide ha detto…
Bravo, Riss.
Mi mancavano post così.
Bentornato!
6 settembre 2010 alle ore 10:51:00 CEST
Posta un commento

Post popolari in questo blog

Fredric Brown - Solipsist

Di -
Walter B. Jehovah, for whose name I make no apology since it really was his name, had been a solipsist all his life. A solipsist, in case you don't happen to know the word, is one who believes that he himself is the only thing that really exists, that other people and the universe in general exist only in his imagination, and that if he quit imagining them, they would cease to exist. One day, Walter B. Jehovah became a practicing solipsist. Within a week, his wife had run away with another man, he'd lost his job as a shipping clerk and he had broken his leg chasing a black cat to keep it from crossing his path. He decided, in a hospital, to end it all. Looking out the window, staring up at the stars, he wished them out of existence, and they weren't there anymore. Then he wished all other people out of existence, and the hospital became strangely quiet, even for a hospital. Next the world, and he found himself suspended in a void. He got rid of his body quite easily and...
Continua a leggere

The Meaning of it all

Di -
There are videos circulating in WhatsApp and YouTube. Facebook too, maybe. Twitter? They have medium-long texts, nicely divided into frames, with calming pictures in the background and a soft male (or sweet female) voice that keeps the pace. As for the images, it's usually a mix of running children, blossoming flowers, two women of different ages on yoga mats on top of a hill at sunrise, people laughing heartedly, people crying, waves of the ocean, impossibly green forests, aerial views and views of the earth from space, extreme zoom-ins into the green left eye of a beautiful woman and extreme zoom-outs of planers, stars, and galaxies. Apparently this virus came to teach us something. Or it came because we had lost our ways (who knew?), we were not kind to the planet nor to each other. And we are getting what we deserve. Or a mix of the two. The virus came because it wants us to be more polite to each other. Spend less time on our phones. It really wants that we talk more ...
Continua a leggere

This is not what keeps me awake

Di -
For some days, now, I haven't been sleeping at nights. I have statistics in my head, projections, exponential curves and numbers of deaths coming from all around the globe. I think of stock market dives, draconian measures of isolation, closed shops, closed parks, closed borders and empty airports. I think of the hospital beds we don't have. I think a lot about the word "triage". I play endless conversations with myself. I think of what it might be in one week, in two weeks, in six months. But mainly I think of what it might be in one or even two years. And numbers keep coming in, every evening, and people say things like: "wow, that's the highest death toll ever for one single day!" And then comes tomorrow and the deaths are more. Maybe double. And I know they will be more. Of course they will be more. This breaks my heart, but that's not what keeps me awake. Most people think of tomorrow. Of how tedious it is to stay at home, of how one misses...
Continua a leggere