In Evan Osnos´s so worthwhile to read article on China in the New Yorker, there´s a snippet of a quote from a Chinese man: “…for a brief period in the grand sweep of history,” he said.
And that line took me. How Chinese, to step back, and see all of history before you, and reflect on the brief period we live in in the grand sweep of it all.
Like so many Chinese children, among the books I had were the 5000 Years of Chinese History, two-volumes. The histories started with the goddess Nüwa repairing the sky, with the invention of the plow, the loom. The first histories are only stories now, but once upon a time, before they were mythologized, they happened in some way. Just as though I only can imagine (and barely at that) my Ur-ur-ur-ur-ur-great-grandmother, I know she existed, she was real then as I am now, in her brief period in the grand sweep of history.
And what is important in our very brief period in the very grand sweep of history?
Friends I had, met each other in a Beijing bar when she said to him: “I´m terribly attracted to you.” And he responded: “What´s so terrible about that?”
In our brief period of time, in our circle of friends as we all lived in Beijing, she bought my dog Captain Houhai a green dinosaur outfit to help his little body against the northern cold, and he looked after him in his apartment (which was three floors beneath mine) despite his dog allergy when I went to visit relatives for the Spring Festival, or Chinese New Year.
I had bought Captain Houhai on the banks of a Beijing lake (Houhai, Back-Sea). On the way back in the taxi Captain Houhai had jumped all over me and those in that brief circle of friends, when we were all young, and Beijing, old as it was, had felt young along with us.
Captain Houhai and I went ice skating on the lake in Peking University. We weren´t skating, so much as scooting around the ice. Captain Houhai and I had a brief period of time in the sweep of our histories. When I left China, that time, I found the best family I could for him, and I ran after the car a bit as it drove away. I remember the tall trees along the boulevard, and the way my tears came down, holding on to the family´s promise to send me updates on his happy life with them.
The friends didn´t marry each other either, but later other people. Because it was just a small, brief period in the grand sweep of Beijing. Of when we were there, of when we were us, of when I cuddled Captain Houhai´s small squirmy body in my arms, of when my locked bike was stolen from the shed downstairs but by then I had ridden all over Beijing, of when I was friends with every single person in the three floors beneath me.
In our brief period of time in the grand sweep of history, we have each other, no? What´s so terrible about that?