Blue Sun, Yellow Sky Read online

  “No one wants to see you puking up spiders,” I laughed.

  “They’re gonna love it. Take the photos.”

  I led him through the market as the local vendors laughed and pointed at us. Red and white striped awnings lined the street, lit by dangling, bare light bulbs attached to the tent tops. Raw poultry hung from hooks while fried and candied insects stuck out like lollipops at Disneyland. I looked up and down the rows trying to find the perfect snack.

  My eyes lit up when I saw them: fried scorpions on skewers. I gestured to the vendor, grabbing a skewer and handing him a bill.

  “Open up, here it comes,” I said, sticking the scorpions into Jeff’s mouth as I snapped a picture. He chewed like a champion as I cringed.

  “Not bad. Crunchy.”

  “Do you want to know what it is?”

  “Let’s see, too big to be grasshopper or roach. Crab?” he guessed.

  “You wish. Scorpion,” I laughed.

  “Let’s go two for two. I’m feeling good about this.”

  “Done,” I said. Drinks seemed a small price to pay to not have to endure this awful eating extravaganza.

  I took his arm and walked a little further along until I spotted my next victim: boiled worm.

  Jeff held his mouth open patiently as I dangled the worm above his lips. I had to retake the photos several times because I was laughing so hard the images came out blurry. He looked like a bird waiting for dinner. I dropped the worm into his open mouth, and his facial expression said it all.

  “Uck, I wasn’t expecting an explosion of poop to ooze out of it,” he said, still trying to choke it down. “And the outside is chewy in the worst possible way. This has to be the snake we saw earlier.”

  “Nope.”

  “Worm?”

  “Yeah. Juicy, boiled worm,” I taunted.

  “Do we have water or something? God, the aftertaste is…I can’t even describe it, it’s so bad. Awful to the tenth degree,” he said, pulling the bandana off his face and reaching for his bottle of water. “Your turn.”

  “Do I really have to wear this thing?” I asked. “Can’t I just close my eyes?”

  “Yeah right. You’ll take one peak and the jig will be up,” he said, reaching over my head to secure the fabric. As soon as it was on, I froze; blinking my eyes open, I still couldn’t see anything.

  “You ready?” Jeff asked.

  “K,” I said, afraid my voice might crack if I dared utter a longer syllable.

  He took my hand to guide me and I begged it not to shake. As we moved along the street a rush of sounds came at me: voices, the clamoring of metal, the repetition of a singular bang of a hammer and toss of something—shells maybe—into a pile, firecracker pops, bells, horns, engines, and too many others to identify. My nostrils filled with the scents of: rosemary, mint, lemon, and a very light odor reminiscent of the inside of a shoe, which I assumed was the raw meat.

  We stopped and I waited for Jeff to order and pay for whatever I was about to ingest. I heard him say, “Thank you,” as he let go of my hand. “Ow, it’s hot,” he said, blowing into what sounded like a container. “Hang on a sec,” he said. I heard a light tapping and crack, more blowing, and then the feel of something slimy at my lips. “Open up wide,” he said. I opened my mouth halfway and heard the shutter of his camera open and close several times before I felt the spoon slide into my mouth. The consistency was similar to chicken. Still, I cautiously chewed, tasting the salt, lemon, and pepper seasonings. Honestly, it wasn’t all that bad, until I bit into something hard and heard a crack.

  “Ohh!” Jeff said.

  “What was that?” I asked, mouth still half full and ready to spit.

  “Swallow,” Jeff warned.

  Reluctantly, I ground the meat up a little more before swallowing hard. “Done,” I said. “Now what was it?”

  “Duck fetus,” he laughed.

  I gagged. Gross. “That bone—”

  “The beak.”

  I was instantly sorry I’d asked.

  He led me a little further and then, without notice, I felt something slimy and bumpy part my lips, which instinctively snapped shut. I reluctantly opened them again. The texture was thick, rubbery, and…wait a minute… was I imagining things or was it still moving?

  “Uck, nope. I can’t do it,” I said, spitting out what was left and pulling off the blindfold. Jeff laughed hysterically and took photos as I turned to see what it was I’d had in my mouth: live octopus.

  “I think I’m gonna be sick,” I grumbled.

  “That was fantastic, but nowhere near as disgusting as the worm, which by the way was the most foul thing I’ve ever tasted. I win.”

  “Remind me to get you a trophy when we get home,” I said. “Drinks?”

  “Drinks.”

  There wasn’t much in the way of hard liquor near us so I bought us each two Tsingtao beer bottles, which were popped open and served warm. When I asked for ice I received a curt “No,” in response. Warm beer wasn’t at the top of my list of favorite things, but the taste of octopus still lingered in my mouth and I was desperate to dispel it.

  We took a seat at one of the many brightly colored foldout tables surrounded by mismatched plastic stools.

  “Cheers,” I said.

  “Cheers,” he replied, clanking my bottle. He took a long swig and I waited for the verdict. “It’s surprisingly smooth.”

  I, too, was startled at how light and smooth it tasted. There was no bitter aftertaste I’d come to expect from beer. “I’m surprised you like it,” I said. “Weren’t you always a Guinness guy?”

  He laughed. “I don’t know if stealing a couple of Guinnesses from my dad constitutes being a ‘Guinness guy’. But you’re right, I do like darker beers.”

  “Honestly, I can’t even remember the last time I had a beer. I drink cosmos,” I said, hanging my head in shame.

  Jeff laughed. “Well if it’s any consolation. I’m pretty ashamed to admit that I get the reference.”

  “Jeff Anderson, you watch Sex and the City?” I gasped.

  “Watch-ed, past-tense, and not by choice.”

  “Aha! Amazing. What other dirty little secrets are you hiding?” I asked and waited. As Jeff thought for a second, I blurted, “Why are you really on this trip?”

  “Why does anybody travel? To see the world,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “Alone?”

  “Why not?”

  “In my experience, people who up and travel the world are usually running from something.”

  “Only women think that,” he said.

  I smiled. “You mean, only women are willing to admit that.”

  Jeff took a long swig of his beer and said, “I’m not running, I’m re-evaluating.”

  “Was it that bad? Your break-up?”

  “I mean, it wasn’t fun.”

  “No, I guess not,” I smiled.

  “What about you?” he asked. “What are you running from?”

  “Who says I’m running from anything?”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you bought a ticket to China with less than 24 hours notice, which by your own calculations makes you the Usain Bolt.”

  Jeff always was good with the logic games, but I wasn’t ready to talk about RP, so I said, “Same reasons.”

  As we walked though the rest of the market, watching others nervously order something new and mysterious and then take a bite of it, Jeff became uncharacteristically quiet.

  “Whatcha thinking?” I asked.

  “Huh?” he said, looking down at me. He shrugged a little. “Nothing. Should we head back to the hotel?”

  I could have pressed it, but I instead I said, “Sure.”

  Back at the hotel, we got ready for bed in relative silence. In the bathroom I brushed my teeth and changed into my oversized T-shirt and gym shorts. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and instantly wished I’d brought cuter pajamas. As I opened the door, Jeff was getting into bed, bare-chested, wearing a
pair of boxers. He looked at my ensemble and said, “Nice jammies.”

  “Wait, aren’t you going to remake the bed?” I asked.

  “I don’t do that anymore,” he replied.

  “Oh. Why?”

  “Veronica hated it.”

  “Gotcha,” I said, wondering what else I didn’t know about this new Jeff.

  “Night Aubs, don’t forget about your night guard,” he said turning out the light.

  “Night.”

  After a quick continental breakfast at the hotel, we walked for miles and miles all around the city, going from neighborhoods with narrow alleyways to wide streets full of shops. Beijing was so dense and vast that in the two days we spent wandering we only covered a small part of the city.

  The sun had already begun to set as we walked home, but the streets were busy as ever. Vendors selling food, glow-in-the-dark toys, T-shirts, magnets, and other theme-park-type souvenirs lined the street before a set of huge, cast iron gates that led into a giant garden. Once inside, there were only a few carts selling candles and giant paper lanterns; the rest of the area was full of people taking photos of the colorful lotus flowers permeating the scenery. The lotus was everywhere: in the hands of kids as a glowing lotus wand; as a giant, ceramic art piece in the center of the garden; carved into the wooden railings of the 30-foot bridge crossing from one side of the small lake to the other; and even clipped onto women’s ponytails and buns. A British lady next to us explained that this was the end of a week-long festival celebrating the return of the lotus. She told us the Chinese had a high regard for the lotus because it grew from mud to become a pure, beautiful flower, and poets often used the lotus as an analogy to inspire people to push through difficulties. They believed the bendable nature of the stalk represented love, because although you can bend it, it is very difficult to break. “In eastern religions as a whole, it represents purity, divine wisdom, and the individual’s progress from the lowest to the highest state of consciousness,” she said.

  Was this the universe talking to me?

  The woman was a writer for BBC, there to cover a story. I wanted to talk to her more but she got a call on her cellphone and had to leave. I will be forever grateful for the last piece of advice she tossed our way as she left: “Make sure you stay until the end, even if you’ve got a flight at 3:00 a.m. It is absolutely worth it.” Then she was gone.

  We shuffled through the crowd, taking photos of the different lotus flowers. All the various colors—red, pink, white, and pale yellow—were on display and in mixed stages of bloom. Then, in the dark of night, a single, shining lantern floated upward followed by three more, then ten more, and before we knew it the entire sky was filled with them. For a moment, everyone was silent as they gazed at the lanterns. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

  As the lanterns rose higher and higher into the sky, they shrank in size. Joining the ranks of the stars above them, the floating lights fused with the night sky as man’s addition to the universe—at least for the moment.

  “Have you ever seen anything like this?” I asked.

  When Jeff didn’t answer I looked around for him. Surrounded by strangers all speaking a language I didn’t understand, I started to panic.

  “Jeff?” I called. “Jeff?” I began to walk around when he tapped me on the shoulder. “What? I’m right here,” he said. In his hand was a flattened paper lantern. “Here, hold this,” he said as he pulled the paper lantern from its flat two dimensions into its full three-dimensional form. The two of us held it up as he lit the fuel cell at the bottom and we waited as it filled with hot air. As it slowly rose to the height of the others, we watched until we could no longer tell which one was ours.

  “Can I borrow your camera,” I asked?

  “Sure,” he said, handing it to me.

  Lifting it to my eye I pointed the camera at the lanterns and took a photo. When the image reappeared on screen the picture was far away and distorted. The photo looked nothing like what I saw.

  “You have to turn off the flash and use the manual focus. Try to get the closest lamp in focus,” Jeff said, adjusting his camera and handing it back to me.

  I set the frame, retook the photo, and saw that the image was clearer, but still only an abstract image of what I was actually seeing.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I started clicking back through the photos, smiling at how well they turned out, but Jeff stopped me. “I think it’s time to put down the camera and just enjoy the moment.”

  Turning my head, I saw that he was looking at me intently. Our eyes locked and he took a step toward me—I could tell he wanted to kiss me, but I wasn’t ready for that and all it entailed.

  “I can’t,” I said, stepping away from him. “I’m sorry, but I came on this trip to kind of sort out some personal things and I don’t want to make things complicated.”

  “Yeah. No, of course. Me too,” Jeff said.

  Quickly lifting the camera to my eye I took a photo of him, and then said, “I really want a photo on the bridge. Will you take one for me?”

  I saw his face fall, but he said “Sure” and followed me to the bridge. I could hardly breathe as I walked, trying to imagine what he must have been thinking. I wanted to kiss him but I had so many questions. If Jeff knew I was going blind, would he still want to go there? When I reached the bridge and turned to face him, he already had the camera up to his face, “Ready? One, two, three.” Snap.

  The next morning, still quite early, I quietly grabbed my brushes, mixing plate, dry color pigments, a bottle of distilled water, and a pre-primed canvas, before slipping outside to the balcony of our hotel room to paint. Using a metal fold-out frame, I stretched the canvas and clipped it tightly into place. I grabbed a sheet of paper from inside and began to fold it into the shape of a crane. Creasing the paper with the lines I would need to later bend it into the shape I wanted was a ritual I’d practiced since my dad taught me origami as a kid. My fingers moved automatically and when I was done, I set the crane down on the table next to me. Time to work. Pouring a tablespoon of magenta pigment onto the mixing plate, I mechanically stirred the mixture while I focused on the blank canvas.

  I painted a lone lotus bud floating in the Mekong River with glowing lanterns littering the night sky behind it. Next, I set the river in the middle of Downtown Beijing. Ancient Chinese art used the same techniques as calligraphy, so I used long, thin brush stokes, but still painted the modern society as a city sprawling along the famous river. At first it didn’t sit well with me, and I thought I might have to scrap it, but the painting transformed the longer I sat with it. Turmoil had created ripples in the strokes. It was an emotional juxtaposition of my life, captured in a flower. Neglected and forgotten by modern society, the scene begged the question of whether or not the bud could come to term and bloom in unfamiliar conditions. At the bottom of the painting, strategically placed just outside of a downtown skyscraper, was my signature—a red fire hydrant.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  App World

  I was a graduate student at Columbia when I wrote a paper on the third dimension of paintings. My argument was that the layers of a painting, although microbial in volume, had depth. A face on a canvas did not exist, for example, without several layers of paint. Starting with the primal base, nude shades were layered in, darkened by shadows, and topped off with specks of red beneath a final sheen that made up the color of human flesh. To push my idea further still, I also argued that a painting without a viewer ceased to exist. By considering the viewer as part of the equation, I argued that denying the three-dimensionality of a painting would be to deny that we ourselves lacked a third dimension. I got a “C+” on the paper.

  My teacher thought I was mocking the assignment, which to be honest begged to be mocked. She wanted us to come up with a unique theory on art and map out an argument; if she was swayed by my argument, I got an “A”, if not I got a “C.” I think she gave me the “+” because although she thought I was
full of shit, she also thought it was funny. The only problem was that I wasn’t trying to be funny.

  Of course I knew my paper wasn’t going to change history. The complexity of dimensions was far beyond my scope as an artist, but I truly believed two-dimensional paintings had three-dimensional value. I firmly believed emotion, though not measurable in the spectrum of art, mattered.

  When I proposed this same argument to my good friend Charles, who after getting his PhD from Colombia was offered a job doing research at the UCLA School of Physics and Astronomy, he said, “Unless you add a physical object to your artwork, your argument doesn’t hold water. It doesn’t matter how many layers of paint you add to your canvas—at the end of the day, when that paint dries, it becomes one unified mixture of paint.”

  “But we conceptualize and create our work in three dimensions. You draw the outline, lay the foundation, and layer in dimensions with tone, texture, and color,” I argued.

  “Yeah?”

  “So, paintings are three-dimensional!” I exclaimed. “The definition of being three-dimensional is that an object has volume, right? If you look at the painting as layer upon layer of paint and texture, then just because it’s paper-thin doesn’t mean it lacks the third dimension.”

  “Yes it does,” he answered. “When, and only when, you can pluck a mug out of the painting and drink from it, will I consider your theory.”

  He went on to describe the Standard Model of physics and how I should read some article he published about exotic models that combined hypothetical particles and something about extra dimensions. To be honest, most of what he said flew right over my head, but the one thing he made very clear was that I fully deserved my C+. If anything, it seemed like he thought my teacher was being generous.

  Still, I was obsessed with the idea of layering, certain that without it, a painting was little more than a photograph. And although I appreciated the art of photography, I hated it as a medium. Photos, the really good ones, were the culmination of skill and luck; knowing how to take a really great photograph and being able to find the right subject. In my opinion there were too many variables, whereas with a painting every inch of the canvas was controlled. And control was something I was much more comfortable with.