slurp slurp slurp he goes, maneuvering his chopsticks to take in the noodles one by one. They are oily, and slide pleasantly off his chopsticks. I’m across from him, waiting for my bowl and writing in this journal, wondering if he notices that I write in English, no way can I write in Chinese anymore, wondering if he picks out the broken Mandarin I offer the waiter (炸酱面 (zha jiang mian)? I offer wiltingly) (it slips out of my mouth and flops onto the floor).

He is methodical, I can see him in the same light in his lecture (Physics? Artificial Intelligence? Geology? Rennaisance Lit?), perhaps pausing thoughtfully after a student’s question (looking up at the flourescent bulbs, absentmindedly twirling the query around his chalk piece as it hovers over the board. So much hesitation: the students wait with bated breath). Then he writes something with bold forceful strokes, saying nothing, but it is profound! I can’t see the board, but it is brilliant and the classroom gasps (but not too loudly, for a Confucian respect of teachers). If you look closely, a wry grin tugs at the corner of his mouth.

Five minutes pass, ten, fifteen. He just keeps his eyes down and soon the eggplant on his plate is gone, the soup lays placid, the red chili oil pools on the plate. I reconsider: he looks uncomfortable, maybe even lonely.

He never looks up to acknowledge my presence, but perhaps that’s because that’s the custom here when strangers are seated at the same table. It was bound to happen (I walked in alone this afternoon; there was no way they would give me my own table at this crowded noodle shop).

That would never fly in the good ol’ USA (God bless the USA). We believe in personal space, as in spacious skies and as in amber waves of grain! God bless the USA where we have six-lane main streets and cowboys and hipsters and Wal-Mart™ and Cafe Gratitude (the Berkeley cafe where the cheesecake there is called “Beautiful”, and to order it you have to force yourself to tell the waiter I am… uh… Beautiful). God bless the USA where everything is Occupied and people are angry and proud and scared at the same time. I too am proud of being American, see my Reeboks™ and crisp English and my silent, snobby mental critiques and my Moleskine™ full of English letters, aye be cee dee yee whoops—a flick of a stray noodle stains a page with sesame oil.

Slurp slurp slurp, the Senior Gentleman in front of me takes it all in stride, which is to say he never notices me. Does he want to leave? I half hope so, because the foreign, American me is feeling awkward sitting across from this stranger. He rummages in his bag, composed as ever, smacking his lips. Standing, he takes an awfully long time to put on his windbreaker, buttoning from the top to the bottom, pop, pop, pop, shuffling as he walks out to pay the bill.

But no, I decide he carries an air of simplicity, not in a shortsighted or fumbling way, but in a sagely manner that quiets me and piques my interest. The way a laoshi should teach. I let that image float for a bit, then get up to pay my bill.

It’s been generally drizzly here for the past week or so, which is a blessing and a curse. I’ve felt self-conscious since arriving, noticing that nobody here runs, and I wonder if I’m being too aggressive, pushing too fast when I dodge the passersbys. I’ve decided there is no better feeling than running with the rain slipping off your skin, hot breath hovering between your chest and your shirt while dodging cars and scooters and disapproving old ladies. It’s a powerful feeling, and a very living thing to be doing.

—

Everything’s concrete here, and my knees are feeling it. It’s not like it used to be, when my dad would run barefoot on the banks of the Xindian River in his boyhood hometown. Nowadays the whole deal is paved over with asphalt and tile and basketball courts, a veritable concrete jungle.

“Let’s go see the river” my Dad announces one day. On the day we are to go, preceding events yawn and billow and suddenly we can’t work the visit in.

One morning I decide to visit anyways and head out early, stepping out into brilliant sunlight (it’s been raining the whole week). I’m taking the roads, out behind fuzhoushan park, down keelung road, past treasure hill and on out to the bike paths by the river. It’s exhausting, and an hour later I’m there. The river is muddled, uninspiring; it cuts a wide swath and lies flat and unperturbed (lifeless, I decide). Cars and city noise roar over bridges, expressways. Concrete frames the landscape, creeping into the banks of the river and damming its tributaries.

I try to imagine my dad as a kid again, playing barefoot in glassy waters and catching fish in a carefree Huckleberry Finn–esque existence. Maybe I’m in the wrong place. Maybe he lived in an alternate space, time, and riverbank where the factories and skyscrapers haven’t yet grown and his toes sink into moist earth. Whatever it is, the sun is in my eyes and I want to go home.

There was some sort of relief, I decided, in having set foot in the Occupy camp and finding it quiet. Wednesday, Oakland was paraded across the global consciousness as national news media displayed scenes of urban warfare, with ghostly images of terror-stricken faces sent helter-skelter across the airwaves. Zach showed me the frontpage of the BBC website (Occupy Oakland protestors disrupt city) and made a cutting remark about how the protestors were making fools of themselves on global media and how Oakland was going to suffer. The next morning we all got worried emails and well-intentioned text messages from friends and family: hey, you doing okay? to which we’d respond with sheepish grace that no, we weren’t part of the protests and no, Oakland hadn’t burnt to the ground. Yet.

That Saturday we walked the downtown Oakland area and stood among the protestors in Frank Ogawa Plaza and I tried taking it in, inhaling the hot, musty mess, sidling up to the sleeping giant. I’m not quite sure what I had expected: chaos, rowdier citizens, widespread aggression and disquiet? Instead we found sleepy-eyed campers, dreadlocked ponytails, and hand-drawn raggedy signs. You could smell the weed from blocks away. Nate confirmed the portable toilets were overflowing and rancid.

Self-conscious, I realized later, is how I feel, not knowing how to identify with this spectacle. My sentiments about the whole thing are less of explosive outrage than subtle helplessness. Here I was, middle-class and Asian-American, walking through the tent city of the dispossessed, and I felt both a repulsion to the sideshow and an isolating sense of guilt knowing that I was a stranger to racial and economic injustice.

We bumped into Bonnie on the way over, a homeless friend of ours who makes appearances often at the church. “You should have been there, they had us cornered” she exclaimed with wide eyes, giggling in her two-toned accent. “Pohh-leece got us trapped up on both sides. I got some of that gas stuff in me, and it make you tear up real bad.”

Bonnie had stayed with the protestors for a couple of days. “It was like a war, let me tell you, and the sad thing”–her voice dropped to a whisper–“is nobody can help you.”

I wondered what Bonnie must have felt; my mind replayed scenes from a Free Speech Movement documentary I once watched at Cal. Observe: an aerial shot from what must have been a tall building or a helicopter, riot police on either ends of the block, smoke rising from the street in lazy, elegant arcs. Notice: a couple of figures limp for cover, fumbling to cover their eyes. See: grainy film, shot black and white, viva free speech & the cause of justice, fin.

So I was relieved to find Frank Ogawa Plaza rather pleasant. A tent city had risen, built on fresh-laid straw, with hypnotic Native American drumming drifting through camp. Smiling stoners sat cross-legged in a corner beneath a tarp and gazed intently into the distance. A mini-rally proceeded in another, where a megaphone-toting Latina woman was organizing that afternoon’s march on Wells Fargo. In other words, it was amusingly like college. We opened our burritos and ate on the steps of the City Hall amphitheater and watched the tent city pulse as it awoke.

The Tuesday night that things got bad, I was running the lake under the assured hum of news helicopters, but I couldn’t tell you if things were out of the ordinary. It was strange, I suppose because I had imagined that should my city go down in flames, everybody should know about it and share in the panic and outrage. Women pushed murmuring babies by in fancy strollers. The wind whispered through the grove of trees around the lake’s finger-bend. Runners grunted to each other, pushing gravel through the ground. Starlight & Lake Merritt’s necklace, swan, geese, & ghetto birds all there to witness war, but somebody had forgotten to remind me.

Saturday, Kylan and Betty and I walked up Telegraph and prayed for Occupy Oakland and I felt rather foolish for not knowing what exactly to pray for. I remembered Silvia’s weight of sadness, when she showed up and wound up feeling lost and helpless and hurt for the brokenness of the world she lived in and the chaos unfolding around her and the need for Jesus to show up right there and occupy…

Proverbs 29 was a comfort, the words breathing and expanding in my thoughts:

When the righteous increase, the people rejoice but when the wicked rule, people groan

and,

The poor and the oppressor meet together, the LORD gives light to them both

Earlier that morning I dreamt we were evacuating our city in long single-file strands. We wound through our neighborhood, and I remember standing in our living room arguing with Justin whether we should load this or that couch into the U-Haul. People shuffled by outside in colorless clothing, feeling here and gone at the same time. Children whispered to each other in shy, hushed tones. The helicopters were there again, whirling lazily, watching overhead. In that moment I knew (though a dream) the question had become not how we would leave, but whether we would stay.

I woke far too early, thirsty, trying to recall how the air felt against my cheeks: thwup thwup thwup thwup thwup.

There is no time for thinking now, but the mechanical slapslap of feet against pavement. I can sum up Murakami’s book: what does he think about when running? Nothing. Justin’s been reading more about running lately and letting me read his books. I realize that I enjoy how mechanical it is: I like the forward lean, the rhythmic labor of breathing, driving forward, but not too far forward lest you tumble (where?). I’ve been feeling more aggressive with my run form, enjoying the feeling of being fast and the brushing of warm rays on my back. It’s going to get me in trouble.

I lean into the whoopsiedaisy turn lane and find that will be occupied in three-two-one but thankfully I reel back in and thank my lucky stars. A wandering Kia once leaned into me and gently lay my bike down in the bike lane. I am happy to report I didn’t go down with it, but wondered in a few panicked moments if people would do their better thinking laying down.

With much sighing, a flock of photons once barreled into the earth in a lazy arc, leaving tendrils of dirt-dust in its wake. The sun bathed us in a lemonade glow in the evening–I tried to catch it in the viewfinder, but decided to let the moment stand silent, solemn by my side, the way you would imagine you would feel in one of those movie-moments pregnant with meaning, voiced by a steel guitar. On the way back from Portland I imagined just that, feeling like our car was the only one in the world, leaning into thin slices of daylight. I caught myself singing along to the stereo, and at that moment thought that we should drive to the world’s edge, then go some more.

Listen, I ain’t gonna lie about it. I’m an alcoholic. I don’t drink because I’m sad. I drink because I liiiiiiike drinking.

I don’t know if I can trust you anymore, man. You lost my trust.

Hey, can I get a flashlight? There’s someone behind these bushes.

You got a bite to eat? Listen man I just need a bite. Did I come too late? What time is it?

I been all around Oakland, and this is the safest place to be.

Get out. You can’t just come in here and help yourself to our food.

Is she breathing? Yes? Okay let me call the ambulance.

Listen man, I feel hurt I don’t know who’s making those accusations about me but I’m telling you I ain’t selling the food. It hurts me that they’re saying these things.

It’s Essie’s birthday today! (singing of birthday songs).

I told you not to sleep on these steps but I saw you here last night.

Me and her are gonna get married on the 14th.

Rico thinks he’s gonna die. I think he’s given up.

Rico’s been doing real well lately. I think he’s turning a corner.

Listen man can I say a prayer for us?

at this point you would expect us to roll down our windows and expose our foreign skin, salivating mouths and lusting faces. you have girls for us, young ones whose virginities and sexual prowess you tout loudly, in broken phrases and sentences.

you know us; men who come through for innocent interludes and escapades. we want to feel flesh against ours and imagine the whispers of past loves. others will inhale deeply of the choking, snarling scent of lust, leaving inkdrops suspended in an ever-darkening pool of water.

you know how desperately we prefer to believe that these girls want us. we operate in fantasies. you provide them for us; you are the sultan of sex and the purveyor of pleasure. you feel powerful: the kick you get in offering the services of your women is unmatched by the wide-eyed grins of your customers. men now boys, they are pressing their faces against glass, drooling over shiny toys in storefront windows.

doggedly you chase after cars. or they run after you. your fingernails clack against the windowpanes and offer what you know your customers want, even if they don’t willingly realize it yet. you need us. you love us. you resent us.

you resent us because we come from outside and we take your women. you’ve seen how we use them like cheap change. but you too have participated.

you are not yourself. you grew up in a rusting city, its long, rambling corridors locking you in to your quarter-peso life. your life has never been easy. this is the only way you know how to survive in this rotting place. you know it too, but to see your girls as human is exquisitely painful. they hold a mirror to you and at the corners you can make out the crumbling images of your sister and your mother.

you pretend not to notice how the girls thicken after each session. quickly they become armored fortresses, silk buttresses over bronzed skin. it is too humid here; you cannot keep the patina from running down their shoulders.

Amens all around.

Cece is direct, and I like that about her. She’ll show up at the door and ask for a couple bucks for bus fare, or maybe a hot meal for the evening. No BS about your place burning to the ground, or needing travel fare to visit your newly-discovered relatives in Tuscon.

She reminds me of a bird, her beaked nose giving rise to sleepy eyes encased with gold wire-rimmed glasses. She waves her head about when she speaks, side-to-side like a pigeon’s. You can see it particularly when she’s off on one of her rambling episodes, going off about the weather, or about her Christmas, or the long bus route to Richmond, where she and her son Lamoine used to live in a shelter. Tonight–“I got two kids with me” — I am surprised to discover they are a little older.

Bear and Pancho, as far as I can tell, are Cece’s friends, mid-twenties men dressed in black, hands in pockets and (I think) looking dangerous. I heat the food and find the three of them are waiting on the railing off to the side of our front entrance, where churchgoers are warily exiting the evening service. I drop off the food before Cece, who along with Pancho begin rifling through the contents.

Pancho slaps my hand in greeting and immediately informs me he used to sleep on the steps out here. “You’ve seen me around.” Come to think about it, he does seem familiar.

“Sheee-yit” Bear exclaims with a smirk, “Can I tell you a story? Some spirits live out here.”

eveningtime, it is bitterly cold, he wakes to the sensation of being lifted and dragged. upward, upward he floats. he is flailing, someone, something has snatched him by the leg and he is now ten, twenty, thirty feet in the air (up by the tower, he gestures up overhead). he is let down and on his leg are finger marks, scratches, blood.

“I ain’t sleeping here no more.” He stares out into the parking lot, a blank expression on his face. Bear has found another place to stay by the McDonalds on 17th.

“Yeah right, you can believe a lotta things,” Pancho exclaims as he digs through a macaroni plate with his fingers. “You was just crazy.”

“I believe that,” I tell them. “That stuff happens.” Bear gives me a worried look, which turns to confusion.

Cece interjects, “the Devil is REAL. He come to get me in my dreams.”

she is a teenaged girl, though raised in a native american church out on 98th ave (her uncle was a priest) she left the Great Spirit to live the wild life, and oftentimes in her dreams she sees a figure, dark, red eyes, hovering. it is often hard to breathe and she has to try with all her strength to whisper the name of jesus, jesus, jesus. these days, the devil is after her nephew who presses a knife into her hands and tells her with a fearful smile: “you’ll need it, moms.”

“I believe that too,” I say, and Cece smiles, looking around, satisfied.

Pancho knocks me on the forearm and chuckles, gesturing to Bear and Cece. “Listen, I think the Devil ain’t what we see in the movies with the horns and maybe the pitchfork. He’s different.” He doesn’t elaborate.

“Yeah, that shit’s real man, I ain’t never coming out here again.” Bear interjects.

“The Devil is REAL. He come to me in my DREAMS!” Cece has gone off rambling again, her voice whiny and raspy and full of trembling fear. Her eyes dart about as her head bobs and her voice shrinks.

“We don’t gotta be afraid when we got God on our side.” Pancho finishes.

We talk about Jesus. It’s crazy, like a little church service.

Pancho: “You know, I think Jesus beat the devil by going to the cross we don’t gotta be afraid no more.”

Me: “I think that the name of Jesus is powerful and even the demons have got to submit to his name. I’ve seen stuff like this happen.”

Bear: “For real?”

Pancho: “Oh yeah.”

Cece is still rambling.

Me: “For real. You need to call on Jesus next time that stuff happens.”

Bear: “Listen man, can we have a prayer? I could use a prayer tonight.”

Cece quiets down and nods her head.

Without a word, everybody extends a hand. Bear starts the prayer (“Um I don’t know how to do this man”), Cece finishes us off (“Aaaaa-man!”). And amen.

His companion’s voice tugged at him from beyond the ether, and as such he slogged to break through his mind’s haze and drag an eyelid open. Days of travel through the treacherous Kaçkars had worn them through, and his companion’s ragged appearance was suddenly new to him again, like a dog or a beggar. Yilmaz tried to stifle a laugh (unsuccessfully) to the chagrin of his companion.

To his knees he half-rolled, half-crawled, his bones murmuring their complaints. He remembered the first time he had realized he was old: his son Asil had knocked him over in a playful attempt to wrestle him to the ground. Yilmaz had his back turned, and hadn’t been prepared for the full onslaught of the 12-year old. With the breath knocked halfway out of his lungs, he was surprised at the sinewy strength in his son’s arms. Though wiry, the boy possessed a strength of a man whose life work was in his hands. He had already begun to talk about going into town to go to secondary school, an idea Yilmaz had resisted at first without knowing why.

Ayla had reassured him that the boy was dreaming the right things; his wife was usually right. School would be right for Asil, who needed to be among children his age. She rarely made much of a fuss about anything, but her insistence about Asil’s schooling had caught him off-guard. They had danced around the subject for days, but her reasoning, motherly wisdom and effervescent charm began to win him over.

She held him in the years he lay in confinement. He’d often awaken to the sensation of tendrils of warmth, fast-fading, brushed against his back and chest. Under the evergreen canopy he walks to her where she takes his weathered hands in hers. Lightly kissing her forehead, he inhales the dewy fragrance of her hair long enough to steal it away for the morning ahead. She continues to anchor Asil firmly to the earth with slender, wise hands.

A thunderclap of pain pushed Yilmaz to his knees, and with a horse’s determination and much moaning, he straightened up. The setting sun glimmered off the distant outline of the Black Sea with the day’s last portion of light. The guards and their search dogs would never find them here.

When Yilmaz lay in his cell, he’d often dream of a moment such as this: the torches would be blazing long after dark, welcoming him home. He’d round the corner to be greeted by the cries of his boy and the warmth of his beloved and the scent of evergreens. The door would be open, stuck in the gravel, and upon entering his home he would be received with the laughter of friends, the sighs of relief, and an overwhelming desire to crumple to the floor and bawl and kick and moan.

I’m awakened in the morning by a phone call — It’s Mr. Smith, and his car needs a jump. The evening before we had spotted him in the parking lot; he was still seated in his parked car, eyes closed in rapt concentration or heavy sleep, we couldn’t tell.

“It’s jazz,” he explains later. He listens to the jazz giants in his car as is his tradition upon returning home from church. He is aging, his frame is small and hunched, he is becoming forgetful. His car is often parked askew between the lot lines, drifting at odd angles, curious flotsam in an asphalt sea.

Years ago, Miles, John and Dizzy serenade Mr. and Mrs. Smith as they sit together in the driver and passenger seats, holding hands all the way back from church on 98th Ave. There they float and unwind, recounting the events of that evening’s ministry. I imagine she smiles at the way his pageboy hat carries at a rakish angle, the way he recites the benediction with the voice of a man much younger than his years. And now I imagine him still sitting in that parking lot, recounting his evening with her, murmuring and chuckling in a half-conscious reverie.

Kind of blue, Mr. Smith drifts to where his beloved still lives, who leans over to playfully adjust his bow tie, takes his wrinkled hands into hers and lets him feel her beating chest where the cancer has not yet gone. There he stays with her, hearing the music well into the morning when the instrument panel will dim, the frost will clamber onto the hood and the chill will irritate his throat and cause him to cough a couple of times. Slow, measured coughs. He turns over in his seat.

I run into the morning chill and see his car is running with the help of a friendly neighbor. “I’m going to get a new battery,” he tells me, fumbling with the jumper cables. With bright, certain eyes he declares, “Tomorrow.”