Notes From Xi'an 西安随感

I am about to break Elmore Leonard’s 1^st golden rule of his

10 rules for writing fiction: “Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people.”

However, I suppose as one, this isn’t fiction, two, I am English and the weather holds a place dear to my heart, three, that this will indeed involve my reaction to the weather, and four, that people will be along shortly, it may be ok to kick off with a bit of a weather report. Although now I have gone and begun with a quote from Elmore Leonard, my concerns about the weather really are unfounded. Thank Leonard for that.

It was warm and hot a few days ago, it has been overcast for a few days now and last night the rain was torrential; leading me to believe that this really must be that short-lived time of year in Xi’an known as Spring. Don’t let the false sense of cool temperature security lull you into the belief that these weather changes will go on for ever, for good or bad those hot and humid summer months are on the way. The positives may well certainly outweigh the negatives, but it does get particularly hot and debilitating here in the summer, especially for the Chinese; who express a preference for sleep during the cold winter months and who, for different reasons, continue sleeping during the summer.

There we go, kicking off the turn to people with a sweeping generalization about a whole multicultural/social race, it doesn’t bode well. Back to the weather, maybe on safer ground there after all, I was caught in the downpour last night while riding my bike to a class of Chinese learning and then when heading downtown. There was hardly another cyclist or moped rider to be seen, so the roads were clear and once you’re prepared to get wet it really is a great feeling getting soaked.

Rain that just continued to drive down onto my face as I peddled on into that annoying wind, my attention was though repeatedly diverted from the road ahead by the multitude of brightly coloured Chinese characters woven into the shop fascias and restaurant exteriors, neon advertising hoardings and plasma screens, that stood out so clearly through the layers of fountainous spray. While other poor souls found themselves waiting hopefully by the side of the road for the open light of a taxi, or just a driver happy to make some extra cash by adding passengers to those already seated inside.

I arrived in town and ended up at the Soup Kitchen, dismounting to positive mutterings from the locals, seemingly winning points for English endeavour. There weren’t too many around last night, so a few of us headed out into the Kai Yuan area, armed with baozi and hot soup, looking for those sheltering in some hopefully dry corner or other. We found them, or some of them, giving out 60 or so bags of baozi, an impromptu queue forming not far from Kai Yuan itself. The other volunteers then headed for home and I headed back to the Kitchen to rescue my bike.

The clarity of rain soaked nights is quite something, and by that point I felt most certainly a part of this rain soaked night. However, as I strode along the wet streets I gained in equal measure a comforting and disconcerting feeling, emanating from the multitude of bright shop fascias and restaurant interiors; from the plethora of fashions and styles within clothing stores; from the gleaming chrome cars with their dry and beautifully upholstered interiors and from the neon advertising hoardings and plasma screens that bedeck the west side of the downtown area.

I got back to the kitchen, now, without the life of the people inside, a damp and cold concrete shell, to find one of the locals actually still there. They are not supposed to sleep inside the building but that night I certainly wasn’t going to be bidding him farewell by ushering him out onto the streets and so I turned off the lights and left him there alone. A good turn? maybe, every thing’s relative, haunting? strange you ask but yeah you could call it that, as I can’t say I took a positive sense of self and society from leaving this solitary soul in this dark, damp concrete hall alone, no matter the gratitude he may or may not have felt. We can only do what we can do, but sometimes…

I enjoyed riding home in the rain.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 2nd, 2010 at 15:53 and is filed under More General/ Personal, Voluntary Work/ Volunteering, Xi'an Related with a More Socio-Cultural Twist, Xi'an Specific. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.