Just Past the Horizon

Every living place has its own distinctive background noise. When you're away from home on a long trip, its one of those things that prevents you from getting proper sleep at night: you miss the sounds of home. The sound of cars going by in the city, or the chirping critters and windy nights of the country. I sleep best to the sound of thunderstorms.

I've learned that China's sort of hostile to the whole notion of peaceful sleep. You've got to get to bed at decent hour if you want a good night's rest. Take a night from a few days ago as an example.

I've finished classes for the day. As I walk out of the building where I teach, J16, I listen to the buzz of incomprehensible voices that surround me like a river, each heading to their own destinations for the evening. The buzzing fades to a helter skelter percussion beat as I walk by the basketball courts: the footfalls and bouncing basketballs of over a hundred Chinese students sometimes brings me to a stop, and I watch them.

I get home and my key rattles in the front door. My footsteps echo as I climb up to my fifth floor apartment. My door always opens and shuts with a metallic thunderclap. It looks a lot like a bank vault door, and has six pins that slide into the wall. (I don't worry about thieves much) I strip off my outer dress shirt and change into a pair of shorts. In the distance you can hear the nasal, high pitched yells of Chinese women, which never really fade. Some poor henpecked husband somewhere is getting told what for. I bust out my laptop and start my work for the night, usually planning future lessons or getting a little writing done. AC/DC keeps me going, reminding me that when you "work, work," "money made." When ten o'clock rolls around, its time for bed, regardless of whether I've got work the next day or not.

I doze off. Sometimes sleep is delayed by the buzzing of mosquitoes if I've forgotten to close the door to my balcony. The hours tick by and I sleep the sleep of the dead, restful and care free.

One o'clock in the morning:

I wake up to the sound of barking dogs. Barking dogs?, I ask. I the middle of the campus? I try to ignore it, but it's not just any dog, its the shrill bark of a bunch of little yappy dogs. Where did they come from? Who knows? I finally get up and go out onto the balcony. Sure enough, there's a pack of four of them down there, running in circles, chasing each other, wagging their devilishly cute little tails.

"Shut up," I yell. Unfortunately, Chinese dogs, like Chinese people, don't speak much English. They keep barking.

I lay back down. To get rid of the dogs I'd have to walk down five flights of stairs in the middle of the night. I hope they will go away. I'm disappointed for the next half hour. If you could see my face in the dark you'd see my brows, which start off relatively straight, forming a steeper and steeper V shape. My mind, naturally morbid to begin with, starts concocting a plan. In the evenings, the English teachers from the apartment sit up on the roof and have a few beers. There are a lot of empty bottles up there.

I smile.

Whistling "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life", I grab my keys and head up to the roof. I'd forgotten. Not only are there beer bottles, but there is the occasional rock as well. Perfect.

I look around and select a palm sized rock, no sense in making some poor Chinese street cleaner pick up a bunch of broken glass. I look over the edge of the roof and find the dogs. I cock my arm back, taking aim.

"Shuuuuuuuuuuuut Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuup!" I yell again. I've found that you can sometimes penetrate the language barrier if you repeat yourself slowly and more distinctly.

The rock (more like a hunk of roofing material) explodes when it hits the ground, and all the dogs simultaneously jump in the air, landing to look in the direction where the rock landed. I throw a few more, hoping to scare them off, but it doesn't. Now they just have something to bark at, rather than barking randomly.

Defeated, I go back to my room. I encourage myself by thinking about a restaurant nearby that serves dog. The dogs did go away eventually, though it was something like three o'clock by the time they did. I dropped off immediately after they left, drifting back into the wonderland of dreams.

Six o'clock in the morning:

BANG.

Groggy mumble. Ten seconds pass.

BANG.

Whah?

BANG. This bang literally reverberates through my room. It sounds like somebody is up on the roof with a sledge hammer. Randomly hitting things. This doesn't surprise you much after you've lived in China for a while.

There may have been some yelling in my room. Perhaps some indistinct swearing and oath taking, but it didn't make man with hammer stop what he was doing. There wasn't anything I could do about it. I got up, showered, dressed, and got ready for class. Then I left for class so I wouldn't have to listen to the pounding above me. I thought about going up to see what was going on, but I thought better of it. An encounter involving myself and man with hammer may have ended in him accidentally falling off the roof.

Later that day, I was coming back with one of the other Engish teachers, Daniel. He lives on the floor above me, the top floor. Whatever man with hammer is doing it's right above Daniel's head.

"I thought about going up there and pushing him off the roof," Daniel confided to me, sounding a little ashamed. We decided that our tempers had cooled off to a point where we might be able to visit man with hammer, so we went up to the roof to take a look around.

Now, you have to know a bit about the layout of our roof before I can continue. The room is divided into flat sections with high walls that connect a row of three apartment buildings. Each building has a tower situated on top, this is where the door is located to go back down into the apartments.

We got up to the door, and looked out to see that man with hammer had been busy while we'd been teaching. I kid you not, he'd dug a trench a little over a foot wide and a foot and a half deep around the tower. I couldn't tell you why. When we got out onto the roof we discovered man with hammer had two companions, man with pickax, and man with hardhat who watches man with hammer and man with pickax, but doesn't seem to do anything. Man with hammer and man with pickax were crouched around the trench they'd dug and were pulling out the concrete they'd broken up while man with hardhat looked on, occasionally pointing and giving suggestions. I suspect man with hardhat is management. Some things stay the same, no matter where you go.

When I look back I'll always remember man with hammer. It's not because of the trench he dug (and will hopefully fill with water and piranhas as a defense against crafty wall climbing thieves), but because he personifies the sound of China so well, the sound of construction. I've taken a number of walks around the school, and on those walks I can think of at least eleven buildings that I've seen that are under construction. There are probably more. Everywhere you go, China is absolutely exploding, not just in population, but in infrastructure as well. Three of the "buildings" (one of them is a football pitch) out of the eleven I've mentioned are being put up directly around my apartment. To say the least, I've gotten used to the sound of jackhammers and construction machinery during the day.

It's mid morning on Sunday. I got all of my work for next week done on Saturday, so it's going to be a relaxing day. I think I'll go down by the lake and read a book. Maybe take a walk afterwards. I've been devilishly busy lately, so it will be nice to be able to kick back for a while. The one thing I've neglected while I've been here is my intention to get involved in the stock market. I probably won't dig into that today, but I just might sometime during the week. The university has asked the English teachers to do a two hour lecture on a topic of our choice, (mine was western fairy tales and folk lore) so I'll probably get some of that done as well. I really need to get started on Light, the book I'm currently reading. I've only gotten a chapter in so far.

Later everybody,

Derek

PS: I've noticed a lack of material from certain blogs that I follow. I find this lack of material disturbing.

Maybe you guys should get on that *hint, wink, nudge, poke, prod*. (Kudos to Chris though)