Nanjing & the final destination

---

Aboard the train a young Chinese guy is watching me with obvious curiosity. He finds the courage to approach me, sits next to me and asks if we can talk. I am his first foreigner. This is what independent travel is all about. Wumin is a student returning to the military college after a weekend at home in Anhui province. He helps me find my way to the hostel near Fuzi Miao. He asks to stay the night with me so he can show me the sights the next day. We stroll around the neighbourhood. The pavement is wet after an evening's downpour, store windows and temple lights reflect in the puddles, barbecued meat with a spicy seasoning lures us to a street vendor. We find a cheap eatery and feast on several dishes, coating each chopstick-full in sticky rice. The next day we struggle on rented bikes, one hand to steer, the other holds aloft an umbrella. Sightseeing, a bike tire, spokes spinning, mucky grey-brown puddles and sharp turns through short-cut neighbourhoods. Wumin produces an ID card and has free entry to the city's historic sites; the walls, the gates, museums, towers, temples, shrines, paintings, ponds and teahouses, souvenir stands, I was here trinkets, and glitzy-red-golden, cheaply-made, quickly-carved, hawked by the roadside, dust collecting I was here evidence of a 'lest we forget' revolution, a massacre, the memory, the restoration, preservation of a time, walled in by apartment blocks and the promise of future prosperity. The idea of a time line emerges trailing my bicycle, a long ago Confucius, a three kingdom period of famous generals, a eunuch who sailed to Africa and Arabia in the fourteenth century, emperors, scholars, Sunyatsen, the Japanese invaders, communist revolutionaries, Chairmen Mao didn't see me staring death in the face.
Tuesday, August 23rd, 8:58 am. A man, middle-aged, somebody's father, brother, husband, friend, son, nephew, grandson, coworker, along Taiping Lu, downtown Nanjing, on a zebra crossing, struck dead. Together, the Chinese characters for 'flat' and 'harmony' form the word 'peace'. The man lay still on his back on the road, long limbs like a starfish floating in the rain. The traffic merged, kept moving. Here, he was, I thought, finally, he has found some space in this walled-in mayhem of ten million elbows.
Each chapter in the tale of strong, wise, revolutionary, philosophical, and courageous men ends the same as the forgotten man, in death. Black and white matt prints of the Nanking Massacre, a model of Zhonghuamen guarded by tiny soldiers under attack, figurines fallen over, the life-size model of a scholar locked in his cubicle, yelling fire! fire! but no way out. Tickets, please.
8:59 am, a window seat aboard the no. 1 heading north on Taiping Lu, I passed within metres of a man lying dead calm on the road amid the noise and bustle of umbrellas, shoes, tires, horns, headlights. Everybody, strangely silent at the curb, averting their eyes, waiting for the universal green man to continue to their destination. Death now life size the final destination stares me in the face.

---