Walking home one day, I pass the same woman I passed the day before on the exact same route, the exact same sidewalk. Only, I never see her face. The whole of her head, including her eyes is covered with a black jacket. She looks like the headless horseman without her mount.
As long as I leave the house I am guaranteed to pass by hundreds of faces a day. I see students, studious boys and girls who use the time walking to class or back to their dorm for socializing. I pass the elderly, perched on minuscule stools playing card games and chess under shady trees. Grandpas and their young charges walk from home to school and back. At night, husbands take their pregnant wives and cherished puppies out for after-dinner strolls. I can walk the same street at the same time every day, passing up to a hundred people, yet only spot maybe a couple that I have seen before. Some days I find myself at an intersection where each crosswalk has at least twenty people waiting at any given moment, and I wonder, "After three years here, how many different faces have I passed?"
All these foreheads, noses, and bodies usually coalesce into one body, one hair color, one word: Chinese. I don't think anything of it, except when something sticks out as particularly Chinese or especially Other. That's why today as I leave the dorm there's only one thing on my mind. Jog.
I've already done some yoga this morning, a pumped-up version in preparation for running. Despite the yoga, I'm off to a choppy start. But I'm in no hurry. I've given myself an hour, set by my own body's clock. I head to the park with the hope to gather some energy from nature. I start out slowly, just focusing on getting a rhythm and regular breathing pattern. Oh, look at those trees. That's a nice distraction, I think, and continue with that train of thought for a whole stretch. Black squirrel I've never seen before! Wow, the things you notice when you just open up. I start to look deeper into the woods and higher up into the sky. My breath is regular and I'm coming up to a downhill stretch. Energies are flowing.
I'm not alone, as is always the case when one is outside in China. People doing lunch-break exercises walk in my direction. We pass and continue on our ways. I'm not people watching on this run, which is why I don't know what kind of person said it, except that he was an older man pushing a wheelchair. As he passed me he deliberately shouted, "Xiao chi dian!"
TRY EATING LESS! His loud, public words--that I understand--punch me in my chest. My breath catches. My face flushes. Tears pool in my eyes. Miraculously, I'm still jogging. I keep going, but his words, biting, stinging, sonant thoughts, keep up with me. Reason tells me to use them to push myself harder. "Overcome them!" she presses. Anger is digging around for his boxing gloves. Humiliation urges me to find a small tree in a deep clearing and cry. Ignorance wants to believe it didn't happen, that we didn't hear it right. Compassion, that mother of all those riled up emotions, lovingly listens to each cry. As she does, she gives strength to my lungs and my legs. I do keep running, still clocking in four kilometers.
A part of me still wants to shout back at him, something like, "Cut it down to one pack a day, why don't you!" But just as he knows nothing about my diet or habits, I know nothing about his. As tough as it was today to get outside and run in the first place, that man put a spotlight on the obstacle that's constantly in front of me: my own mind. It was with a lot of self-control that I did allow myself to cry, but that I also made myself continue to run. There's no other way around it. I had to let it pass.
