Good Earth’s dust

“From dust you came, and to dust you shall return,” is the phrase in Lent’s Ash Wednesday echoing the desert wisdom of Ecclesiastes. The facticity of the matter lends enough credence to the statement, making it a description of reality rather than an invitatory leap of faith.

Pearl Buck’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Good Earth, China in the aftermath of the Qing emperor’s abdication before the nationalists found their mission and the communist located their voice. These days, “good earth” is “dust,” which idles everywhere in this land of the Middle Realm. “To dust I came, and to dust I will surely return, and one lives in it the rest of one’s life, too!”

I had chosen Liaoning’s latitude and longitude being in the same position as Oregon halfway between San Francisco and Seattle inland, expecting four seasons. We did; had two days of autumn and two weeks of spring. Already, the sweltering summer heat has enveloped the Manchurian plain, but it is the dust that irritates the eye and gnaws at one’s antiseptic sense of equanimity.

Some of the dust comes from nature. The dust bowl dynamic has hit China hard this year, and some of those scorched by the drought were also mercilessly inundated with floods when the rain finally drenched the terrain. One of Beijing’s Metro stations swam in water this week as the skies poured its tears, a little too late for Jiangsu and Henan’s farms, and a little too much for some whose hills no longer can hold the cascade’s romp.

We got more dust Saturday just when a former Saipan resident we assisted located us. He asked that I join his family in their famous jiao zi meal (dumplings) chopsticked into a bowl of sauce. I am partial to wonton soup but that is more of a Guangzhou-Shanghai-Beijing urban delicacy that has made it to Western palates, so homemade dumplings was good enough. It is Final exams week but this offer would have been impolite to refuse.

The University is situated north of Shenyang’s outermost circumferential road so my host picked me up to their modest but chandelier-equipped dining room on the top floor of their housing development. Viewing the city from their apartment’s vantage point, it became clear that the source of the perpetual dust is not just from the swirl of Siberian winds nor the air currents of the plains that originates from Neimonggu (Inner Mongolia), but from the ongoing construction projects and housing developments every other block, along with the city’s rush to do work on the underground Metro before the north freezing winds returns.

After the meal, I told my host to let me take the bus back to the University, and he gladly consented, handing me two boxes of light summer shoes (one by Chrisdien Deny, which I first thought to be a play on Christian Dior, but turns out to be a legitimate and reputable Italian shoemaker), and a Renminbi coin (15 cents) for the bus. He might have noticed before I got into my flipflops that my old walking shoes had seen more than its share of superglue to keep the cracked material together. He knew my mendicant monastic lifestyle enough that the sharing of means was taken for granted as a matter of course, rather than a case of loss or gain of face.

It was the bus ride back that made the dust go real earthy. The jam-packed bus ran every hour so I bravely pronounced my “Ting pu dong” (I do not understand) in response to the driver who was probably explaining that he could not take any more passengers. I didn’t have another waiting hour to spare. I could have taken a taxi for $3 but I coveted the experience so I stood on the entry steps the whole time with my two shoeboxes, a plastic bag with dumplings and fruits, my ubiquitous laptop computer and a front view.

Where the cuisine thrives on onions, garlic and other spices, the human fragrance in the non-aircon bus was noticeably rich and spiked. The sights in the city neighborhoods this early summer came bursting out all over. Red streamers and inflated arches abounded, advertising goods and dwelling units, while fruit (mangosteen and durian along with all kiwis, cherries, plums, berries) and vegetable stalls (green, green, green) were set up along the sidewalk. The watermelon trucks were parked on the curb as newlyweds bought their share of the Vitamin-E rich luscious saran-wrapped sliced summer fruit.

Dong Bei dancers (youngish retired folks who took benefits after 50) graced the front of stores doing their two-steps in their colorful garb and fans, which got all the folks out this Saturday afternoon; young lovers held hands as they promenade while children shrieked as they chased each other in their games. Permanent and modular water fountains were turned on for the first time with dancing waters in tune to blared music. Chinatown girls were doing the samba down Ipanema way!

It was then I realized that I did not mind if in dust I shall remain. With deep breath, I sensed I was right home in my glocal village. The dust affirmed my finitude, and the dust, even in McKibben’s Eaarth, is good.