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Record no. 25
Over the last two days a thick fog has descended over my girlfriend's hometown of Jinan — a city beneath the mountains. We're here for Chinese New Year. Her mom warned me against showering, taking out the trash, or making the bed during these first few days of the year. She doesn't say what will happen if I do any of these things, but I can only assume they'll turn this year of the snake into yet another year of waste and regret. Or maybe they're just all different ways to kill my uncle.
The last time I was in Jinan was August. I stopped here on the way back to Shanghai after spending a week in Beijing. My girlfriend met me there and we took her little bespectacled cousin to see the (at the time) new Haikyuu movie at one of those movie theatres on the top floor of a mall (I'm not sure whether or not this is a China-only phenomenon — I never encountered such movie theatres back in the United States). When she was growing up, this was the newest fanciest mall around, but by the time I'd gotten to it, it'd become old and dilapidated. It had that bowling alley style black carpet speckled by constellations of abstract color — just like the bus seats back in Baltimore County — the sort of pattern that really makes one feel at home, even if "home" turns out to be quite a filthy place.
After the movie was over (I fell asleep 5 minutes in, then woke up at the credit sequence) we went to get nitrogen-infused coffee. My girlfriend's cousin was too young to drink coffee, so she just sat there awkwardly watching us as we sipped away beneath a herbaceous vine that had climbed its way up to the ceiling of this coffee shop. Suddenly my girlfriend's friend Bingbing called. He said he was in Jinan too, taking a stop on his long journey to the far north. They used to work together, doing wardrobe and styling for advertisements, until one day Bingbing moved back to his father's village. It was his father's car that he was driving all the way up to Inner Mongolia, along with his buddy Professor Wang.
We agreed to go and meet them at the hospital they'd spent that night in. You see, on there arrival in Jinan, Professor Wang had gotten horribly intoxicated and passed out. He was still asleep when we got there, stretched out on the hospital bed, his shoulder length hair strewn across his face and his shirt covered in vomit.
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