Artem Druzhinenko. Chinese diary

Chinese diary
Artem Druzhinenko

Publication date: March 28, 2000

Path

Anyone who has not traveled in a common carriage in China is unlikely to know this country to the end, or rather to the bottom, in the sociological sense of the word. When you travel on a domestic train from the border to Beijing, there is still the illusion that nothing much has changed, that you seem to still be at home. But this is until you are sucked into the dark hole of the Chinese common carriage, until you ride through at least several provinces in the cheapest way, which is why it is so popular among the scum of Chinese society.

* * *

Frightened, I take the train from Beijing south to Enzhou. I am sitting on the bench of a common carriage, in which a mystery begins to play out with the same name for this unit of rolling stock. The fear is caused, of course, by the number of passing Chinese, who grow in impenetrable dense bushes from the floor and hang in heavy clusters from under the ceiling. Fear turns into horror when I realize that in the next two days I will still have to go to the probably monstrously dirty toilet at least once. Nausea is added to the horror, because a few hours ago, while we were passing through the Beijing suburbs, an old Chinese man treated me to kaoliang vodka, the mere smell of which makes an unprepared person’s stomach want to go for air. I drank it, firstly, out of politeness, and secondly, because before that, at the station, I had already drunk 200 ml of ordinary vodka from a green, flat bottle with white hieroglyphs on the red label, which gave me the strength to continue. While I was sleeping, the bottle of unfinished kaoliang, which I had placed under the bench, spilled, and now I am in the epicenter of its enchanting aroma. I am a poisoned bee in the corolla of a yellow gaolian flower.

“Slept”, by the way, is a strong word. Only the most notorious individuals from the Chinese lumpen can sleep in a Chinese general carriage. In general, there are three options - depending on your location. If you are sitting by the window, you can try to take a nap either by resting your temporal bone against the frame, or with your nose in your arms crossed on the table. If in the middle, then lower your head on your hand, lying on the very edge of the table, while a sharp metal edge will cut into it. If you are unlucky and you are sitting on the edge, then only in the position of a coachman, and you will be pushed by those walking along the aisle.

Music here also promotes relaxation and a good mood: half a meter away from me in the aisle, a dirty-looking grandmother in blue traditional clothes, apparently from the village, perched on a tiny chair. It must be said that it is customary for the Chinese to carefully take care of their health; if something accumulates in the nasopharynx, then, in their opinion, urgent evacuation of the accumulated is necessary. Therefore, the grandmother rhythmically coughs up with a minute pause, spitting protractedly at my feet. She is apparently in charge of the drums. When the train approaches a station, a heart-rending chorus of hawkers begins selling on the platform. On the train itself, too, someone in white drags a narrow stainless steel box on wheels along the aisle three times a day, which is accompanied by his solo part - periodically he howls and hits the box with some kind of metal thing. So he suggests buying "he fan" - paper or plastic tubs with a lid containing meat, rice and vegetables. After the respectable audience rustlingly dined, some throw the garbage out the open window without even looking at it, and the majority simply throw all the scraps, bags, paper, napkins, packaging, lids, crushed plastic boxes on the floor.

I'm sitting ankle-deep in garbage and starting to hallucinate. It seems to me that at the end of the carriage a tall Chinese conductor appears in a uniform cap with a shining cockade and a dazzling white shirt. For some reason he extends his gloved hand to the side and takes out a large broom from the void. He begins cleaning with stern and confident movements. He moves in my direction, the pile of garbage in front of him also rustles and moves and grows. The nasty trash hydra is approaching and becoming frighteningly huge, I close my eyes, then open them, and close them again, because the guide is now standing in front of me, his face is evil, his narrow eyes are burning with satanic fire, he points at me with a broom and shakes it from bottom to top, clearly letting me know that it’s time to get up, maybe it was in vain that he came for me. At that very second, some force begins to pull my leg, I jerk nervously - and the elderly Chinese man sitting next to me recoils from me. Then he gently grabs my pant leg again and pulls it up slightly - I have difficulty understanding that I need to lift my legs so that the conductor will sweep the garbage out from under the bench. Having lost his infernal features, the latter bends down with a dissatisfied look and for some time wields a broom under our feet, scoops up what he has mined and again moves his harvest further along the aisle to the garbage cans standing in the vestibule. Then he goes through the entire carriage in the same way, but with a mop. It becomes almost clean.

Under the swaying of the carriage and the sound of the wheels, I calm down and fall into suspended animation. Through my drowsiness, I feel the dense Brownian motion inside the car shuddering and quietly humming; at stops it becomes more intense, preparing metamorphoses. And when I open my eyes from time to time, my neighbors are different every time. About an hour ago, a handsome, overweight rural teacher was sitting opposite me, who still wanted to communicate with me in English and gave me his email address, so that, as he said, he could practice his English with the help of my letters. Now he, apparently, decided to appear in his real appearance: he is a small and thin laborer of unknown age. He sits comfortably on a bench with his feet still holding the vestiges of socks, his shirt of a cruelly degraded white color does not have a single surviving button and is open. Underneath is the T-shirt in which he was recently shot with a shotgun for all the good things he was wearing: it is covered in brown spots and looks like a sieve. From time to time he yawns, showing fragments of blackish teeth. Once again I woke up to the fact that my neighbor on the left, a pleasant-looking Chinese woman, also traveling from Beijing, as it seemed to me, was gently stroking my knee with a fan. Unfortunately, as soon as I squinted my eyes, she immediately turned into a wrinkled old woman who was immersed in peeling the egg - the white shell from under her brown fingers fell either onto the floor or onto my pants.

When dozing is no longer possible, I look out the window. Moving from north to south, the train had already passed several provinces, but the landscape had not changed much during this time. Right next to the canvas, however, there began to be ponds full of pink and white lotuses, and sometimes the green plain suddenly rose up into a lonely steep hill. And so - endless rice fields continued, approaching almost the very rails; closer to the stations they were interspersed with a dreary urban landscape.

Only by the end of the next day the landscape outside the window changes - the greenery becomes tropical - solid banana palm trees and a forest of bamboo and some kind of horsetails. And the next morning I look in surprise at the soil, which has become a strange red color, this is especially visible on the steep banks of rivers with muddy yellow water - a country of mountainous hills begins, covered with some kind of prehistoric damp forest. In places, misty vapors creep and swirl, hiding it; to complete the picture, the only thing missing is the appearance from behind the top of one of the wooded hills of a pair of hunting pterodactyls.

By this time I had become somewhat accustomed and began to notice more what was happening around me. For example, I noticed that although the carriage is packed, you can walk completely freely - they will definitely give way. Secondly, those who have a ticket without a seat do not have to stand the whole way - those who have a ticket with a seat allow them to sit down to rest and even take a nap. In general, if it weren’t for the dirt, stench, stuffiness, drafts, fatigue from sitting in one position and lack of sleep, then I would be ready to recognize the conditions and atmosphere as bearable.

About seven hours before arriving at my destination, I met a very polite, very young and very serious student. He spoke reasonable English, but was incredibly self-conscious about his pronunciation, and from time to time I had to encourage him. With his manners and restrained goodwill, Tsang Kai Hsien - that was his name - for some reason evoked in me an association with some ancient Confucian, I amused myself by imagining him in a black official’s cap and robe with wide sleeves. He wanted to give me a map of Enzhou. When I thanked him and said that I didn’t know Chinese, he became very embarrassed, apologized, took the card and left for his seat. About forty minutes later he appeared again and handed me a map - all the main names were signed in English, after which he said goodbye and soon left at his station. Using this map, I got from the station to Enzhou Da Xue - Enzhou University.

* * *

It's a hot and humid spring in Enzhou. The university grounds are like a park. There are many tropical plants here that are unfamiliar to me. I look at a large tree, its bark a steel gray color. There are no leaves on it yet, but with discreet sophistication, like the hand of an ikebana master, it is decorated with large carmine flowers. Nearby are several palm trees with bottle-shaped trunks.

Not far from the house where I live is the territory of another university. It is also quite green there, but there is a special place - an alley sprinkled with small stone chips, on both sides of which an incredible accumulation of clay pots with flowers is lined up on the green lawn. They are never removed, even in a rainstorm. I don’t know who put them here and why. They stand in long ranks of two, in some places their formation expands into an irregular square, in others they simply scatter across the lawn - the emperor’s motley guard, caught at the beginning of the formation. Flowers in pots are predominantly red. In general, people in China love the color red. According to Feng Shui, it brings good luck and wealth. The same goes for gold. Therefore, the most reverent feng shui item is a goldfish, because they come in both red and gold. In the seaside neighborhood where I live, here and there they swim in the tiny aquariums of street vendors.

* * *

What comes to the mind of a person who finds himself in China for the first time? It occurs to him that in a country known for its adherence to traditional culture, at first glance there appears to be only naked modernity. For example, the train stations in Beijing differ from the Russian ones I have seen precisely in that it seems as if Russia is a country in which a very ancient culture has been preserved. Traveling in a general carriage, of course, gives you a slight taste of the water in Chinese Summer, but, alas, only at the surface, where the real flavor is overwhelmed by the turbidity and impurities of civilization. It begins to seem that it is better to come to China for a person who knows nothing about the antiquity of this country, who has not been spoiled by cultural studies, while for those who have read Lao Tzu, Pu Songling, Hung-Ren, almost everything will only cause sadness and nostalgia for the country’s long past, his impressions are poisoned by book poison, he will no longer get the bright apple of paradise of spontaneity...

Similar thoughts were inspired by a conversation with a Buddhist monk. He came in to drink fruit juice, which is squeezed in front of customers in a special cafe; there are many of these in Enzhou. My friend Marcel (the only student from Russia in Enzhou before my arrival, a Tatar by nationality) started talking to him, and he sat down at our table. Having learned that I was practicing wushu, he delivered a short sermon, which Marcel simultaneously translated.

It turned out that since I train "my kung fu", I will beat people, so first I must learn to heal them. “First there must be morality,” he says, and continues with a parable about how two thirsty people could not share a glass of water and ended up spilling it because no one wanted to give in. “We must give in!” Satisfied with this, he notes that Russia has good wushu - he heard from other monks - and moves on to practical recommendations: “You need to train your kick on a sandbag and stuff your body with a special pestle,” and in that spirit. (He does not know, of course, how many books have already been published by the Chinese from Taiwan and emigrated to America and Europe, and about Shaolin Qigong, which includes the exercise he mentioned for the “Iron Shirt,” and about many other secrets of Wushu, which are theoretically already probably no secret to anyone.) In short, in about five minutes he would have already demonstrated a couple of techniques if I had asked him about it. In general, it became unbearably sad. Our conversation (the character “monk” and the protagonist “student”) has already taken place more than once in Chinese classical literature - I, unfortunately, have been spoiled by reading... The only interesting thing in all this is that I felt some strange aroma of the Middle Ages. And the monk also said that he meditates even in his sleep.

In general, as I already said, the conversation with the “real Buddhist monk” left a rather gray impression. Only over time did I begin to notice what seemed to be lying under my nose before. For example, that right in the center of the city a green dragon of a small mountain range was freely located. It divides Enzhou in half; from the western part to the eastern part you can get either through a single tunnel or by taking a detour along the coast. Animals and birds thrive on this completely forested mountain; it is not built up. The secret of inviolability turned out to be simple - this is one of the 9 sacred Buddhist mountains, at its foot since the 14th century there has been a temple and monastery of Nanputuo.

The gates of the monastery and the gates of the university are separated by only two hundred meters. On the alleys of the university campus you will always meet monks walking and talking. They are in the same traditional clothes as centuries ago, and in the heat they open umbrellas. Monks wear yellow, novices wear gray or beige.

One day I saw two huge, bald-shaven novices in their monastic robes running around the basketball court of the university stadium with the students. Then I was angry that it was not a rosary, not a deadly Shaolin staff, but a decadent basketball bubble - that was what was in their hands. At the same time, I was told that the monks of the Nanputuo Monastery are known as skilled fighters of the “Southern Fist” (nanquan), many know several “fists”, that is, styles.

Later, the sight of monks using the stadium for its intended purpose became common. Moreover, more and more such symbioses of the traditional and the new were gradually discovered: at the university stadium, monks teach wushu students, there is a Buddhist college in the monastery, many fo-jia know English - life forms are in constant contact, the old and the new penetrate each other.

City

With some exaggeration, it can be said that the old and new in Enzhou are separated topographically. The western part of the city is quite modern, the spirit of the latest reforms is in full swing there, it has firmly settled in the landscape and architecture. There are many high-rise buildings here; they house transport, tourism, industrial and other companies, private and public, many large and small firms, supermarkets, just large stores, expensive hotels, banks, etc. In some places, skyscrapers even of ultra-modern design stick out arrogantly (I’m afraid that over time they will win over Chinese architecture and displace other forms of buildings - it’s trivial, but there really are a lot of Chinese.)

The eastern, seaside part of the city is much more traditional, not only because it is the Old Town, which in some places has retained its purely architectural flavor, but because the difference in subcultures is clear.

What gives me the right to think so is, firstly, geometry. Cities have their own shape, configuration. Naturally, a specific cultural archetype manifests itself in this form.

Like European cities, the new Enzhou, through the traditional Chinese friendliness of green spaces, hostilely bristles with geometric shapes, depresses with dreary long avenues, and sticks the corners of “modern” buildings in your eyes. This is almost absent in the old part of Enzhou, where a specifically oriental image of the city is visible, the streets here are not wide and everything is proportionate to the person. Geometry has not yet taken control of the situation here, there are no frighteningly open spaces, the streets bend all the time, gently draping the perspective. There are no buildings that are overwhelming in size. True, there is asphalt underfoot, but in the narrow alleys there is in some places real cobblestone pavement.

Among the alleys there are chamber ones - with one or two shops on the lower floors and balconies with greenery and bonsai on the upper ones; there are tea tables near some doors; cells , where in the stone walls of high fences every ten meters there are small lattice gates of dull shiny metal, on top and on the sides they are surrounded by strips of paper with inscriptions of red hieroglyphs, and behind them through a tiny, all green courtyard you can see through an unlocked door, how in a dark room an altar lamp glows with a blind red light in front of photographs of deceased relatives; intimate , where only low windows open on both sides; absorbing - crooked, with blank walls cracked by time (nevertheless, you can still walk into them with your shoulders turned); causing suffocation - like a convulsively contracted birth canal, squeezing you sideways into an almost illusory opening, into at least some kind of life.

However, not a single street, not a single alley ends in a dead end; you can walk everywhere or go straight to someone’s door. The shortest paths here are not straight, but the most curved. If you think that you are lost, this is a deception; around the corner there will be a familiar street (at the same time, approaching the same house from different sides, you will not recognize it and will think that you have not seen it before). From any place you can get to any place. It cannot be said that the streets generally lead somewhere, they simply exist, and therefore this “somewhere” does not exist. Places are illusory, the Old Town is also illusory, it is always a concrete nowhere. This is Chinese chaos, hun dun.

When viewed from a more detached perspective, the Old Town gives the impression of being softly rounded, that is, it follows an organic rather than a geometric pattern. This organic nature of our environment is ideally called “good Feng Shui” by the Chinese.

Secondly, the very way of life in Old Enzhou often makes one feel, it seems to me, something of the spirit of old China. In the western part of the city, people go to work in offices, offices, institutions, etc. In the old town, they often don’t go anywhere because they live above their shop. In the morning, the owner or hostess simply goes down from the top floor to the bottom and spends the whole day here - cooking or trading, eating here, communicating with clients and friends, drinking green tea in the evening - either by placing a small table with a traditional tea set right on the sidewalk, or by rising to the open veranda of the upper floor.

Street fruit vendors, on the contrary, actually live at work - all day long they carry a bamboo beam with two baskets of mangoes or bananas on their shoulders, stopping at busy intersections or stopping briefly for a snack at some tavern. They leave the goods right on the street - no one will steal, but they can sell them without looking up from their food.

Here you can often see local residents walking around the block in pajamas - a blouse and trousers made of thin cotton, sometimes these trousers barely reach the knees and are decorated with some kind of frills - the impression is as if their owner has just left bed. This, in general, is not far from the truth - they walk the same way at home, and when they need to go to the store or to a neighbor’s, they simply do not change the toilet. However, for a foreigner at first there is something schizophrenic in the vision of an elderly Chinese woman dressed in night pajamas, briskly riding a bicycle along a busy street.

* * *

Most buildings in Old Enzhou have three floors. The lower floor, as I already said, is reserved for a bench, a store, a snack bar, a restaurant, a dumpling shop, etc., it does not have one wall - the one that faces the street, it is hospitably absent. Only at night a metal curtain with a lock is lowered in its place. An endless row of such establishments stretches along both sides of the narrow street, where you can buy almost everything. The owners live on the upper floors. And partly - on a flat roof, where a canopy can be built, in general the roof is often used for other purposes than its intended purpose: they build a greenhouse on it, practice Tai Chi in the morning, dry clothes, maintain workshops, that is, they do whatever they want. There is only one limitation: everything on the roof must either be instantly evacuated if necessary, or be very waterproof: the rainy season lasts almost two and a half months, and tropical rain is more of a kind of waterfall. During the rainy season, I often saw how, before the onset of a typhoon, the owner of the house opposite ran to move pots of flowers from an open place under a canopy.

I lived on the sixth floor, and the houses opposite, as I already said, were three-story, so I observed many interesting details. For example, a small white dog is common in these houses. She busily darted around the rooms and relieved herself wherever she liked, for example, under the leg of a chair. I didn't see her punished for this. These dogs are exclusively indoor creatures; they almost never go outside.

I was also amazed at the cleanliness of the housewives - every single day they washed the floors two or three times, they always had a huge amount of freshly washed laundry drying on the clothesline. In general, only the Chinese lumpen and representatives of the lower social classes that I met at train stations and in general carriages were dirty. Street sellers of vegetables and fruits can also be dirty, but this is understandable - firstly, the specifics of the work, and secondly, they come from the village, and they sell all day long on not very clean streets.

In my opinion, hygiene in Enzhou is decent; almost every city house has running water and sewerage. However, nuances emerged here too.

At one time I lived in a student hotel, where the bathroom was equipped almost in a European way. But one day a student friend invited me to visit, I stayed overnight, and they offered me to take a shower. I went to the bathroom where I made a discovery. In the tiny room, tiled from floor to ceiling, measuring one and a half by three meters, at first glance there was only a toilet at the end opposite the door and a sink with terry towels hanging next to it. The throne-like toilet was located on a raised floor like a wide step. I was thoughtfully trying to evaluate this, as it seemed to me, a purely artistic decision, but suddenly I noticed that there was a hose hanging along the electric titanium fixed directly above the drain tank, ending with a shower head. As it quickly became clear, the length of the hose made the person washing hostage to a not very pleasant proximity to the toilet. In the corner farthest from this bath and entertainment complex, under the sink, there was a drain hole covered with a grate right in the floor. In my opinion, such a layout, in terms of saving space, clearly surpassed the Khrushchev project. Then I visited other apartments and was no longer surprised when I encountered the same thing.

* * *

The first thing a foreigner probably notices when he sets his eyes on some, even dilapidated, dwelling in Enzhou is the abundance of fortifications.

For example, if you turn from the street of the old city into some alley, it will immediately greet you with blank high walls. The top edge of the walls is often studded with large shards of broken glass; they are stuck into liquid cement mortar, then it hardens and - welcome. In addition, in all of Enzhou there is probably not a single window that is not hidden behind an openwork grille. The same applies to balconies - in almost all houses they look like ostrich cages. The Chinese home begins with bolts, bolts, locks, door chains, second doors, steel bars, etc.

Behind all this, as a rule, there is an oasis: in the twilight of the room the air conditioner is silently working, very comfortable low furniture in a traditional style offers itself, on the tea table there is the scent of freshly brewed, excellent grade of wu-long; in the corner on a stool, the seat of which is covered with crimson velvet, sits a white cat, chained to a leg with a leather leash on an expensive collar, on a shelf there is a dark red altar lamp burning in front of a small gilded statue of Guanyin and portraits of ancestors. From the window you can see a tangerine bush, strewn with bright orange fruits that serve solely for decoration, enjoying the hot sun on the open veranda. His tub is adjacent to a dozen flower pots, containing either bonsai (I don’t know the Chinese word) or ordinary ornamental plants.

In short, a Chinese house is a small Celestial Empire, and inside the Celestial Empire everything is located: nature, people, gods. From the north (i.e. from the “cold”, hostile side), however, it must be protected by the Great Wall.

* * *

There are many ancient (200 years old) and simply old houses in Old Enzhou. Enzhou was once a colonial port and the seat of embassies and consulates of European powers. Many colonial-style buildings still remain. Their bizarre facades are adjacent to traditionally curved roofs, griffins from bas-reliefs angrily open their beaks at a stone dragon curled under the eaves.

The unusual shape of the roof of a Chinese house is by no means an artistic delight. The corners of the roof are curved upward so that if a demon - "mu guai" - falls on it, it will not roll into the yard. Recently, modern houses have been built in Enzhou and there are fewer and fewer such roofs. This is not in vain: in my opinion, Enzhou is now full of moo-guai.

The change in political course led to changes not only in the Chinese economy - the totalitarian culture as a whole is being replaced by a more or less democratic, US-style one. And from the cornucopia of America, the well-known demons of mass culture are raining down on the defenseless Chinese - like snow, like cheap popcorn.

The transition to a different, open form of cultural existence, instantaneous by historical standards, put the Chinese mentality in relation to the Western standard of living in the position of a child who suddenly found himself in the wardrobe of adults. The child, of course, will be joyfully surprised and, in a fit of childish curiosity, will begin to try on the most eye-catching outfits. But this interest and imitation is caused only by the factor of novelty. Subsequently, he realizes that it is much more comfortable to walk in his own pants, although not so bright and exotic, but suitable in size. Therefore, I am convinced that the Chinese will not be flooded with Coca-Cola, so to speak. This happens more or less on the surface and does not, and cannot, affect the depths of Chinese culture, as ancient as the pre-heaven chaos itself, although it makes the mixing and piling up of forms on the periphery often offensive to the eye. Well, the Jinan Taoist was known to fool people in the market square by performing all sorts of wonderful tricks...

In the very center of the Celestial Empire there is an invisible cauldron, the breath of each new day (or century, era) ignites it, old and new, foreign and our own, fashionable and ordinary, ancient and ultra-modern, foreign and traditional - everything is cooked, digested in it, boils the magical vessel of the alchemical tripod of Chinese culture, everything penetrates everything, reacts, is melted. This is the container of chaos, or chaos itself, giving rise to more and more new forms. Chaos is as ancient as myth; new forms can be born while chaos lives. No Mao or Jiang Qing can drill seven holes in him. This is the key to the incredible flexibility of Chinese culture and, consequently, its immortality. “Young and flexible,” as is known, is what lives, “old and hard is what dies.” “Lao Tzu” can mean not only “old sage”, but also “old baby”; China is, in fact, an old baby - an immortal being.

I think about this when looking at city traffic. He moves exactly as the monk of the Nanputuo monastery advised me - according to the principle of “you must give in.” Very early in the morning, a race opens under my windows in all weight categories: bicycles with and without an attached cart, motorcycles and mini-motorcycles, red taxis (for some reason, most of them are domestic VAZ 7 models), a white bus with a green stripe, expensive and cheap cars and a variety of trucks and vans. On my narrow University Street, however, there is enough space for everyone. I witnessed the following episode with my own eyes. A cyclist was riding right in the middle of the street, and a bus overtook him. The bus driver, oddly enough, did not press the signal with all his proletarian foolishness. He did not stick out of the cab or address the cyclist with obscene words. He simply began to slowly drive around it, steering into a crowded oncoming lane, and both taxis and motorcycles calmly gave way to him. This is not something unusual, but ubiquitous, this is the main rule of the road in China. For this simple reason, there are virtually no traffic accidents in China.

* * *

The rainy season is coming, the sky over Enzhou is white with evaporation. Everything is blooming wetly, and overnight the buds of exotic flowers swell and open their giant petals on tropical and subtropical trees. The hot and humid climate makes not only fertilization, flowering and growth rapid, but also decomposition, weaves them into one ball, they pulsate in a single stream, this is a single chthonic deity with two faces, it is beautiful and terrible and often manifests itself in the form of smells. This phenomenon in the earthly world, as usual, in the olfactory organ of a European breaks down into opposites.

On the street, you are either enveloped by the tantalizing and delicate aroma of pale lilac flowers, with which a lonely, still leafless tree is strewn, or the monstrous aroma of rot from the nearby sewers hits your nose. You walk, always getting from layer to layer, the topography of each block has its own aromatic correspondence.

My house is next to the market, and the narrow gutters along it are often full of blood. The poultry is not stored here unless it is alive and is slaughtered in front of the buyer. An elusive movement that blinded you with a solar flash on the blade, a short agony with a farewell salute of blood and feathers - and the product is sold. They can also pluck right in front of you. In my opinion, a lot of what seems oriental exoticism is, in fact, deep pragmatics, in this case the obvious one is the heat, and additional expenses are needed for the refrigerator. In addition, the Chinese are sensitive to food and try to buy everything only the freshest. The merchant throws away vegetables - say, tomatoes - if they are not even slightly dented, but scratched. The waste is raked into huge piles, waiting for the scavengers to arrive with their baskets. The smell of blood mixes with the smell of rotting vegetables.

In general, the Chinese market is a real gastronomic Babylon, since, according to my observations, the Chinese eat almost everything that has at least some signs of edibility: herbs, grains and legumes, vegetables, fruits and berries, mushrooms , mold, roots, insects, amphibians and reptiles, trelobites, sea urchins, cephalopods, algae, crabs, lobsters, jellyfish, turtles, rodents and all other animals, all types of birds and fish. All this, mostly in raw and live form, is sold on the market.

In Enzhou there are separate shops specializing in dried products. In them you can see, for example, a huge dried manta ray or flattened rats hanging on a line like laundry, hanging by their tails. Sometimes fish for drying are placed in rows right in front of the shop on the trampled sidewalk, hot from the sun, where it dries all day, filling the air with an unimaginable fragrance. The leaves of some suffocating herbaceous plants are also dried.

If you carelessly enter a shop where they sell spices, you can forever lose your sense of smell or go crazy, realizing the infinity of the spicy aromatic spectrum.

Owners of seafood restaurants in their small windows place silver and multi-colored fish, turquoise-orange crabs on sparkling ice, using bright greenery and freshly washed vegetables to bring their still lifes to wondrous perfection. Often in front of a seafood restaurant there is a large number of aquariums, basins and low baths in which future dishes float and swarm. To ensure that no one dies, a compressor continuously pumps oxygen into the baths through tubes, and the water bubbles thickly and cheerfully. When you order, you simply go to the bath and point to the one you like, for example, a small, tasty shark. In no time at all, it will appear on your table in its best form - toasted, topped with herbs and accompanied by a small retinue of sauces.

If you try to imagine the deity of Chinese food, then what appears before your eyes is something thousand-faced, grotesquely polymorphic and colorful, while dancing on a mountain of boiled rice. Whereas the image of the god of drinks will be extremely laconic. This is probably why the strictest of all the shops and shops that I have seen are tea shops. They also sell utensils for tea drinking, they have some kind of meditative look, just looking at them immerses you in a contemplative mood, on the clay sides of small elegant teapots there is clearly a stamp of cha dao - the Way of tea. In the province of Fujian, where Enzhou is located, mainly wu-long tea grows, a variety of tea that all residents of the province consider, of course, to be the best in China. The most magnificent and, accordingly, expensive types of wu-long are obtained from the leaves of tea bushes in those areas of plantations that are located on the sunny slopes of the mountains and are fed by spring water. They are said to be extremely beneficial for health. In any case, the life-giving alchemy of the natural elements is evident in the tea made from leaves that have absorbed the purest essences of the heavenly and earthly elements.

Beauty

I rented an apartment on Da Xue Lu - University Street - in the old city.

One day, when I climbed the dark and dirty stairs to my sixth floor, I met two boys about eight years old on the landing. I walked around them and had already taken out the keys, when they suddenly began to say something to me, laughing and interrupting each other (foreigners receive increased attention, not always polite). I turned around and froze: a girl of piercing, achingly unearthly beauty was approaching us, even more likely a girl, about thirteen or fourteen years old (she probably came out of one of the neighboring apartments). Slender, fragile, she moved gracefully, flexibly and surprisingly naturally. Her face was not round, like most Chinese women in the south, but oval, with the most delicate outlines, its wonderful matte-swarthy color delightfully set off by long black hair, slightly pinned at the back of her head. Quietly and majestically twinkled two dark precious stones - her eyes. (I believe that some fairy from the pantheon of Taoist celestials should look something like this). She said something quietly to the most grimacing of the boys, probably something like: “Come on, it’s impolite to pester a foreigner,” and, gently pulling him by the hand, she led him away - it seems that this heavenly being, by some unnatural chance, had a relative in the form of a completely down-to-earth younger brother.

Young Chinese women in the south, if not beautiful, are most often pretty, they have a childishly rounded face, soft features, large eyes; They are short, but generally slim. In general, the secret of the charm of Chinese women is in the naturalness of their movements, gait, and gestures. The gracefulness of Chinese women is natural; it is not achieved through physical exercise. However, following “naturalness, the nature of things” is still a fact of Chinese culture. Nevertheless, the grace of Chinese women seems surprisingly artless. With the exception of one thing - their step, as a rule, is small - it is surprising to me to think that perhaps this is not an imprint of the pre-Manchu era that has faded in the darkness of centuries, and on their legs there are traces of bandages that decayed several centuries before their birth.

The coming Western fashion does not spoil Chinese women at all, it’s just that their choice has become wider, especially since for them the Western lifestyle is still exotic. They are happy to dye their hair (sometimes you can meet a completely red one) and wear miniskirts. In these miniskirts, they calmly ride bicycles or motorcycles - it is already clear that the spectacle is not for the faint of heart, but they often, while riding their Japanese-made mini-motorcycle, wear (like men) a khaki-colored army helmet. The reason is simple - these helmets are much cheaper than special ones and are in great demand. (The owner of my apartment - a small and plump southerner - once brought me to aesthetic frustration by appearing on my doorstep in a pouring tropical rain in such a helmet and a military khaki-colored waterproof raincoat to the toes. Round, like the full Chinese moon, his face glistened with drops and it was unusually harsh, he looked like an invader, a soldier of a hastily put together (at night while I was sleeping) local junta supporting Taiwan.)

After

My student friend Jeong Yong and I are sitting on the balcony and enjoying the evening breeze; evening is the only cool time of the day. Below us is a small harbor, I call it a trading harbor, where fruit and other goods for the markets are unloaded from moored junks. The water in the harbor is muddy green. This harbor is a mecca for the sewers and sewers of the entire area. At low tide, fetid vents hidden below the water level open up. During high tide, children from nearby houses calmly swim in this water among drifting pieces of paper, plastic bags and other things. One day, in the rain, I saw several adults in family shorts join them. They had a lot of fun jumping into the water from some ancient fishing boats anchored.

The quarter was already shrouded in darkness. Low tide. On the dark bottom of the harbor, only infernal rivers of sewage now run along their channels. Reflected electric lights play on the gloss of bottom manure, their liquid gold streams and dances with reflections in streams of waste water, carried away with them into the dark South China Sea.

We lazily peer into the face of the approaching night, sitting in soft chairs and resting our outstretched bare feet on the posts of the balcony railing. The balcony is on the sixth floor, and when looking down through the iron bars against which our feet rest, it seems that the latter are comparable and could pose a threat to a couple of illuminated houses on the opposite shore of the harbor.

Jeong Yong suddenly points to his toes and mutters something, it seems that his foot is bigger. I answer that it is natural because he is taller. "What's natural?" - he doesn’t understand and points at his fingers again. Only then do I notice that although the size of his feet is indeed larger, his toes are shorter than mine. He calmly says that as a child, his father forced him to wear shoes even after his feet grew out of them. Walking was painful, but Jeong Yong was getting used to it. This was before the reforms. Father didn't want Jeong Yong to be plus size. Larger shoes were more expensive, and his family lived poorly. After the reforms, the family began to live better, but Jong Yong had already stopped growing.