disparity

The conversation is racing on, faster than I can write this.

Double bed, feet touching. He watches the ceiling, I face the sheets until breathing gets difficult; I only turn my head when I have to. There's space enough in here for conversation, room between the sheets to talk about the big thing, that real thing, the who and what we are. And it starts with the past, which I love, and the thought that it doesn't really matter, which I hate.

I shouldn't care, we think, about anything other than this moment. What led up to it, the infinity of glances and words that brought us here mean nothing now that here has arrived. But how will I know where I am if I've forgotten all the street names I've taken?

We set the fire to the third bar, we're miles from where we are. I tell him I want to staple these moments down, to pin something and keep it, to read it again and get something back. So I can know where I once was, and see myself from years away not lessened by perspective but as big and bold and awful as I used to be.

And, and I don't see what's wrong with using the internet to do that.
But it's a little bit egocentric, Don't I think?

*****

At work, I become Chen's token white friend, immerse myself in the language issues and ask him why every Asian volunteer at the shop has asked me - the painfully English teenager whose job it is to train new starters - about films above anything else.

I try to explain that in all of my relationships, all of my conversations, Hollywood has never been so discussed.

He tells me, in English, exactly what it is to try and break through the divide and make friends with a native Westerner like myself, how it is to be dependent on someone being patient enough to speak slowly. How much effort it takes on both sides to do that.

I tell him how incredibly stupid I feel when him and Li break into impenetrable Chinese mid-conversation. He asks me how I think it feels when I banter with English customers, who make jokes that I then have to explain to him, how patronising people can be.

They were told by their tutors that the best way to make and hold conversation with someone who knows nothing of your language or culture, is to find some common ground and in Die Hard, Tom Cruise, Pearl Harbour we have something to talk about.

And I tell him that that's sad, that I don't want to talk about that with him or with anyone, I don't want that to be the way my culture is defined. I don't want the fact that the culture I belong to is slowly taking over the world to be the basis of our shared experience.

I want to know about your family, and what you want to do, does it rain a lot in Shanghai and what do you reckon to Communism, does it make you sick or glad to be here?

I guess I just want to have a conversation with you.

*****

We smoke in bed, dotting ash into a glass vase, and I try to communicate the vastness of it, how overwhelming it is. How this experience of mine is so meaningless and so transitory, and yet so mine, and it's not that I think my words so special that I want them preserved, it's that this gigantic world, this mass culture, this loss of self - it terrifies me. And the only way I can see of getting round it is to try, in some small way, to defend myself. To staple a little bit of what I feel to some great technology, and how that makes me feel somehow safer.

I tell him that everybody has the right to tell their story, and that they should, because all we really ever learn from is each other. Everything you know is the result of everybody else, as if every thought were a grain of sand pushing the heap upwards.

I could cry, but it sounds so pretentious here in the dark, with miles of sheet between us, and when I move my foot away, the gulf of opinion in the bed seems somehow larger than language could define.

*****

What he doesn't know is that I wake up later to watch him sleep and I realise how stupid I am. I want to know about experience and other people's thoughts and here it is next to me and I just won't listen.

Nine times out of ten the 'otherness' I'm obsessed with only matters when I agree with it, and he'll wake to find me over on his side much sorrier.

The conversation carries on while we're speaking, but I'm the arse because I'm just not listening.

He's definitely not right about the ego thing, though.




Hell no.