I stood beneath a nine story building. There was no elevator, only uneven stone steps spiraling upwards into the sky with the other thousands of exhausted apartments. The area was home to piles of shack-like garages selling fried tofu with a fetid odor of urine. I ran up and down the stone stairs of the apartment building. My thighs burned, but all I thought of were the calories I would never burn if I gathered dust indoors and dealt Majiang tiles to seniors. Sweat stuck my clothes to my skin, but I remembered the onerous ladles of soup I would soon be forced to drink while in the humidity, steam draped itself across my face. Eating, drinking, and gambling. All of that would only precipitate to starving, begging, and dying.
I stood on top of a mountain of reclined climbing, soaking in the muggy clouds and dampening trees, watching a mass of college students scramble over stone structures with gaiety. They defied all rules, totally ignoring the lame families around them, while I? I posed for photographs with my family. We smiled into the camera with our faces. Our faces blocked out the mountains. No matter how high the cliffs soared, the camera would only capture our visages. The mountain, the sky, the city were completely casted in a saturated wetness that did not weigh anyone down, but lifted the earth to meet our eyes, yet not the camera’s.
I walked to the biggest, richest, most high class restaurant in the city square for a family reunion of twenty people. Hearing one, strong voice resounding in the rush of the hour, without music, I spun to see three men on the dirty, saliva-stained walkway. The singer held a microphone and as he dragged himself across the floor. A trash bag hung limply around his waist. He had no legs. His accompanying cripple sat on a scooter, crawling with spider-like feet, legs that were thinner than my arms. Beside the two men stood a midget, holding out his hat for money to the pedestrians towering two feet above him, who never gave the trio a glance. I passed the performers without the slightest gaze, with enough money in my pockets to buy them a karaoke machine.
I ate egg tofu, the flowers in my tea, sweet and sour fish, salted beef turnovers, and colorful domes of sticky rice, disgusted that I ate this luxurious food, disgusted that everyone ate with a delicacy and etiquette, disgusted that our host ordered some dishes to be taken away and done differently. Leftovers were whisked away to be dumped outside for the dogs and homeless. Bloated, our family ambled out to find an old beggar imploring for money, shuffling down a line of well-dressed citizens. “去,” my uncle spat. “骗子，走!” My dad pulled out a wallet of cash and sifted through a pile of 100 RMB bills carefully. Finally, he dug an extra coin out of his pocket and donned it to the croaking beggar.
I stood on a mountain once more, this time rearing over the remains of the Sichuan earthquake. An elementary school lay buckled at my feet, walls crushed and roof shattered. Hiking up the mountain only to find rows and rows of graves, I passed line after line of small boys grasping yellow flowers, advertising them at an unimaginably cheap price. A baby waddled past with a gun in his hand. He toddled by a bridge snapped in two. No big deal, the bridge was only a couple tons of concrete; its collapse only wiped out a couple cars, a couple of families. I stepped around the child vendors and past the rubble. The money my tourist group paid to see this site for two hours could have built a makeshift village for these people.
Neighbors in the apartment building died from heart attacks. My grandmother is almost blind. There has been a mudslide at the earthquake site and whatever huts still stood are now buried. I saw this, turned around, backed into an airplane, and left.
