We walked into a grand lobby with high ceilings, dark gray
walls, and austere furnishings. It had as much personality as a pair of black
socks – and with as much fragance as unwashed ones.
The lobby’s décor was simple, foreboding, and duplicitous,
as transparent as China had been reputed to be – and what I’d been expecting.
The dank, cramped elevator we took up to the third floor only added to the
ambience. A cluster of thoughts cascaded through my addled brain.
What kind of school is
this going to be?
There was a ding!
and the doors opened…
…to a bright, airy lobby with windows from the ceiling
nearly to the floor. To the right was open space and doors leading out onto a
huge patio. Forged though snow piled as high as the winter was long lay a
walking path; the displaced impure snow had been shoveled to to each side of
the path, discarded like old washrags after a morning of handwashing floors.
To the left was a front desk before an unornamented but
freshly painted wall. (Later I would find irony in its being painted sky blue,
the background of an East Turkestan flag). Beyond that were a computer lab, offices,
classrooms, and bathrooms. All modern. All newly constructed or in the process
of being so.
The juxtaposition of my first impression when I got out of
Scott’s car and when I entered the first-floor lobby with the actuality of the
school amused me. It was like going apartment hunting and pulling up in front
of the most unappealing building imaginable only to find an residence therein complete
with remote-controlled privacy shades, marble countertops, and velour
carpeting.
I was about to smile to myself, but it turned into a smile
for a short woman with bad teeth and a stylish haircut that I came to realize
later was unsuitable for her. She introduced herself, in English, as Ellen.
“I am the Assistant School Director,” she said. It didn’t
take but a few days to realize it was titular, for she had as much say in how
the school was run as did the scrub brush blowing out in the semi-desert wind.
And she had about as much backbone, too.
But I digress, for at that moment, I was just happy for the
first time in a week to be speaking to an adult whom I understood.
After a quick tour of the still-under-construction school,
we headed to my apartment on the northwest side of town, on West Ring Road,
located on the western edge of Karamay proper. As we drove, Ellen proudly
pointed out city landmarks big and small that I would soon know myself:
People’s Square, Xinjiang Karamay People’s Hospital, Karamay Radio and
Television University, and more.
Within a quarter of an hour or so, we turned off West Ring
Road and into an apartment complex. In Korea, I was used to scores of
nondescript apartment buildings comprising a complex, all colored the same beige
or white or light gray. And I had seen similar structures and collections of
structures in Shanghai and Urumqi. But I had never lived in one.
But that was going to end. I was finally going to be living
in a dank, gray apartment building, a residence with as much personality as
frozen mud. We wound through the complex until we got to the far end where,
tucked away from most of the other local Han residents, almost in isolation, was
a six-story edifice. Along with one adjacent to it and another across from it,
it was a buck-toothed rectangle – a three-sided rectangle instead of the normal
four-building design with a center courtyard.
It was an apartment complex for foreigners – and the
denigrated scourge of Han society forced to share, as punishment, courtyard
space with us.
And I say that in the warmest of ways.