when i was 25 years old. my second trip to beijing, china: a visit to the past.
this story is a reflection.
have you ever had the feeling of being stared at and then when you turn around somebody is looking at you? well, this experience is about the most extreme version of this sensation i have ever had!
where to start? i think i should start at the moment when i was in my hotel room, in beijing, looking into the bathroom mirror. the moment that i realized somebody was behind the mirror watching me. actually, i need to start a wee bit before, i will start here and i will end this story here:
"we'll see you later..."
the man had said to me, and really, i didn't think much of it at the time. after all, it's a hotel. and the chances of seeing 'doormen'? again is very likely, or, so i had thought...
the thought slipped my mind as i entered the hotel, dog tired, to book in at 2 or 3? am...after a long fleight and almost no sleep at all....
around 6am or so? finally in my hotel room, at first, all i could think about was how badly i needed to take a bath, as i stripped off my clothes, i took the liberty of walking around my room in my underwear, smoking, and then looking out the large windows facing out into the never ending rivers of traffic below. that familiar scene: sckyscraper after skyscraper flooded my eyes. i went from the window... could not stop paceing back and forth my room. mind flooded. flooded with thoughts and memories. back and forth back and forth. as if the paceing helped this thought process. feelings and sensations of the past all coming back to me...
"I'm back", i thought "i'm back... home?"
...beijing did feel like my home, some how. after all it was the first place i ever lived after graduation. moving out all "on my own" into the "big bad world", my first living experiences outside of home had been, in china: first job, first rent, first "adult" experiences, had all been there. and, so yes, it was a kind of "home" for me and in the strangest possible way. after all, it had not been a place i had just passed through, i had lived there. i mused over all of these memories...rolling this sour tasting candy over my tounge. the sour kind of candy that leaves a kind of sweet after taste; that as much as you hate, you love.
but the strangest thing was, as i was thinking of the past, i had been hit by all of these feelings and emotions, not from my own past or connected to anything that i had been thinking about, but, these introjectory images and emotions that had started to invade my mind...
i felt strange in that hotel room. ...more than strange, i felt a very distinct sensation
"something bad happened here"...i felt..
the walls were screaming it at me, in their silent pervasive way but i did not hear the silent scream from the walls...i heard it from the floor.
who has not had this sensation in a hotel room? i hope i'm not the only one! and if you have had this sensation before, then you know what i'm talking about, because it's a very un-nerving sensation.
the hotel was beautiful, fancy,'chik' massive and at the same time; empty, dark, moody, haunted, and it was very very scary. i had felt like i was inside a horror movie being there.
on a side note, the hotel was the"beijing international hotel"haha original name!...the chinese have the funniest names for places and things in english. the shopping center i used to go to from my old neighborhood was called "the pretty shopping center", ahaha, always made me laugh looking at that giant sign! "the pretty shopping center", yes shopping is so pretty. ching-glish is really funny. there is a whole entire book of rediculously funny signs and things from china.
unfortunatley this story is more about the dark side of things...i should continue. where was i? oh yeah...
the feeling in the hotel, it was like i was inside a movie like 'the shinning', being in that hotel, being in that room.
while i had been pacing the floor, lost in thoughts, i had noticed two big stains on the floor. wine? it was too big of a stain to be wine. the stain was so subtle, and yet very distinctly, there. it looked like somebody did an almost-good-enough-job of getting it out of the white carpet. it was only a very light light shadow, hardly detectable at first glance. like a blush. but the more i stood there staring at it, the more prominent the stain became. the carpet was a face slowly burning into full blush. the stain was sprawled across the carpet just outside the bathroom door. the massive mirror overlooking ALL.
the floor revealed the rooms dark secret to me, it said:
"some one has died here, and not just one...
more than one person, has died here,
you could die here, you know."
the floor whispered this dark nasty thought to me. it gave me shivers looking at it. i imagined two differnet scenerios:
when i was at the window...i felt the first introjectory sensation of unease, and a visual of a man dressed in a nice suit...jumping out of the window after an argument had taken place, over money. i saw this in my mind as clearly as if it had been a movie clip from one of those maffia scenes. or something like that?
the second image that invaded my mind, when i saw the carpet stain, was of this woman bleeding from the head...and the body.
"was it from a gun shot wound? a knife? i don't know"...i thought to myself,
but there must have been two distinctly different wounds. one to the head, which was the smaller stain, and the larger one was to the body, the core of the body..maybe even to the heart? i pictured how the body would have been laying there...then i said to myslef
"STOP!"
i had to control my mind at this moment. i could not handel these images that were invading my mind....i told myself
"this is your imagination, you're very wild and vivid imagination, nothing more!"
my logic told me to "shut up, be quiet!... your just jet-lagged, thats all"...after a sixteen? hour fleight, hardly no sleep at all " my logic continued to argue with my intuition and was forcefully trying to comfort me by saying
"your wrong, your crazy to think these thoughts"!
..and really! i had wanted to believe i was crazy...but what followed showed me that...my intuition might have known more than my logic had been able to see at that moment.
another detail that i have to mention before i forget, and really just don't know where to insert into this story is... is that when i put the keycard into my hotel room door, the lights would instantly turn on...but only in certain parts of the room. i had never seen this before, and i wondered at it thinking at first " wow, fancy hotel!!"
... i had thought...haha...wow...little did i know...little little little...did i know...
i went into the bathroom, the majority of the wall was covered with a large mirror. i observed that there was something odd about the mirror, but i could not exactly pick out what the oddity was! first of all, it was a shade darker than most mirrors. tinted? thats what had stood out to me the most, at first...
i looked at myself in the dim relfection thinking "oh my god, i look haggard!" in fact, i looked old. eyes sunken in from hardly no sleep at all... hair matted to my head. i observed myself in a way normal to most people when they are alone, until, a sudden sensation hit me while looking at myself.
i felt like i was being watched.
a very distinct feeling. a feeling that i have had before, but not like this, this feeling was stronger. i started to feel more and more insecure as i looked at my own reflection and now had started pacing back and forth the large bathroom, as if interrogating the mirror, and myself!
i did not want to take off my under garments... i no longer wanted to have a bath.IT had started... the whole annoying... logic and intuition debate!!
this ridiculous argument with in myself continued but, the thing is, that, i needed a bath, very badly, and so...with that very ferm decision... i took off my bra and undwear, and did this half trying to cover my body on the behalf of the part of myself feeling insecure for reasons i could not understand or fully comprehend at the moment!
it was like the mirror was screaming at me when i looked at it, just like the floor had been! i have never felt so shy about my own reflection in my entire life. the only other time i felt this shy while naked, was the first time i was naked infront of a boy. but never, ever alone, did i feel this way!
i waved at my own reflection at first, as if to say "hello" to myself and the sensation i felt of being watched! more as a joke, really than anything else. waving at your own reflection is a stupid thing to do, but i thought, oh well, who cares. i can do whatever i feel like doing if i'm alone, and if i'm not, then, somebody will be surprised about my greeting them!
i got into the bathtub, and put my head under the water. the water turned red.
the water turned red from my hair dye. i had just a day before my fleight to beijing died my hair from blonde to a very dark browish red. i noticed this as i had lifted my head from out of the water. looking at it through the mirror and thinking at first
"oh shit, i guess some of the dye still hasn't been washed out!" or that "it must be bleeding through the blonde!? i don't know?!"...
i had died my hair lots of times, and always had washed it thouroughly, and yet...for some reason, this time...i obviously had not done a good enough job of cleaning it. hence the result of the murky brownish red water!!
looking through the reflection at myself, the bathtub, the water and my eyes!
the bathtub looked like it was filled with blood!
seeing myself and to my own horror at what was reflected back at me
under my eyes had run black from my mascara. i looked at my reflection in the mirror, again, blinking...
"wow"...
i thought to myself..."i look dead!"
eyes sunken in and black, sitting in red bathtub water. if it had not have been for the insane situation i founf myself in, i almost would have looked at it more artistically ( which, i can see it in this way now) except for in that very moment when that happened, along with all the other weird thoughts i had been thinking, i could not see it in this way, yet. and i could not shake this feeling...like this image reflected back at me, this was a sort of premonition...and this eerie feeling that somebody was on the other side of the glass. looking at me, musing at this specatcle.
i went right to the edge of the bathtub, right up to the mirror, and started vigorously scrubbing my face to get rid of the black stains that had seeped under my eyes. closing my eyes, then opening them wide...looking at myself...knowing. somehow...that there was some-one there, looking back at me. where they laughing? maybe? where they wondering why the water had turned red? who knows.
after scrubbing my face vigorously for what seemed like a long time...i sank back down into the murky water. thinking, "how disgusting!" i felt dirty, i felt old...and i felt really scared for some reason.
i continued to examine the mysterious mirror:
looking into it, it was exposing myself and the entire room behind, the bloodstain, and myself to my very own tired and paranoid eyes.
as i looked at the mirror, it dawned on me, the strangest detail, of all. and maybe even the most important detail. the very detetail that i had almost missed! this detail of the mirror that confirmed to my logic that my intuition may not be so crazy...
the mirror i noticed...was protruding from the wall by at least two inches. there was a space where the mirror met the ceiling that did not completely connect with the ceiling...and it was the smallest of spaces between, about half an inch or so... and i realized that it made the mirror look like it was almost floating there, off the wall. in fact the entire architechture of the bathroom all of a sudden did not make any sense to me...and as i sat there...i thought...to my own horror
"oh my god, it looks like they have built a wall in front of a wall...and the mirror...IS that Wall!"... so suble was this detail, but like the blood stain. once i saw it...it became even more and more noticable. everything started to make more and more "sense" ?
Instantly i covered myself. got up slowly. looking direclty through the mirror now, not at myself, but at whoever would be, could be, possibly behind that mirror. behind that wall.
i turned around, sitting on the edge of the tub. and very nevously tried to grab for a towel. awkwardly and nervously trying to co ordinate keeping myself covered and at the same time to dry myself.
then my intuition became very angry. i turned to the mirror...now fully covered...hair wrapped up in a nice safe towel. looking at the room around me, myself, everything through that fucking mirror...and i raised my right hand...all fingers down, except the middle one...and said out loud..."FUCK YOU!" FUCK YOU YOU MUTHER FUCKING FUCKERS!" FUUUUUUUCK".
then i walked out of the bathroom. tried to get as far away from that fucking mirror as possible...and then i started shaking. started thinking, i have to get out of my room. i have to get out of my room right NOW!
but, i didn't get dressed right away. i started speaking in "tounges"! i started to go into some kind of a spiritual tranz...and i started speaking in a different language. i didn't know why, i didn't care. my intuition took over at that point...and it was my intuition telling my logic now to "shut up"....i paced the floor back and forth like i had done before, but this time speaking in this strange language that my mind did not understand.
after doing this for a long time. maybe about an hour? i got dressed and went out to find some food to eat. i was really hungry by this point.
as i walked down the dark hallway from my room to a small lobby where i had argued aimlessly with the stubborn chinese staff about why i couldn't book into my hotel room, yet, when it was 2am, they had made me wait in that empty crpeepy fucking lobby until 6am to book in.
i noticed, again, these large mirrors outside my room in the hallway. i had taken note of it breifly, before, but this time they stood out to me with a different kind of significance:
... "umm" ...i wondered while passing through the hallway...
"that mirror aligns directly with the mirror on the other side of the wall, aligns directly with the mirror that is in my bathroom"
...i let the thought go...and continued on my search for food.
after all the crazy babble i had been doing in my room previously, unaware of time passing, unfortunatley ended up missing the buffet breakfast and so decided to go to the bar and get a drink to calm my very frazzled nerves. after that, i went to a mc donalds across the street to eat something. good old mickie d's is everywhere in the world! sometimes it's comforting, even though the food is disgusting plastic waste! in moments like this, i couldn't care if i were eating garbage. may as well.
while going to the mc donalds i was reminded how scary it is to cross the street in china! almost didn't know how to cross the road, until i realized,
" oh yeah right, there is the underground walkway, duh. "
i returned to the bar in the hotel and drank another beer to wash down the garbage and ordered a couple more to bring back to my room. the mini bar in my room had been ridiculously over priced for what it was worth! at this point i needed a good buzz to get me through the rest of the day.
when i had been wandering around earlier, and also when i was at the bar, all the workers in the hotel had been staring at me in this really foreboding way. there were no other guests in the hotel, as far as i could see...it was like the place was completely empty...just the workers, staring at me. silent. looking at me. it was like everyone knew something that i didn't. the song "i know something you don't know do da, do da" was playing over and over in my head...and i could read it in their thoughts, all of them seemed to be singing this song at me with their slanted eyes, and sly smiles. i still get the shivers thinking about this experience. dark, really dark. china can be fucking DARK!... bugio!
i returned to my room, but this time, stopped in the hallway, where the mirror that was parallel to my bathroom had been. the thought, then, occured to me...
"if there is really a person behind the mirror, well then, there must be a door!
could this mirror in the hallway be that door...to the mirror in my bathroom?...
if there is a door then when i push the mirror, it will move, if it doesn't move, then i'm crazy, and i will forget every crazy thing that has just happened"
...at this point my intuition and logic where making a truce...agreeing to dissagree..to confirm, "reality"...and what really IS...the truth? of this very perplexing situation!
i pushed ever so slightly on the mirror in the hallway...and my heart sank...because as i pushed the mirror moved inward. like...like...just like i had thought! just like it should do, if a mirror..were to be a fucking door!!
i said to myself
"OK"...logic still not letting go of this debate...
"well then if it's a door, then, there has to be a way to open it!" ...
i started to examine the fine detail to the edges of the mirror. eyes desperately searching all sides...left to right, up and down...and then...there on the bottom left hand corner of the mirror near the floor..there...gleaming at me...smiling almost...was this very tiny, very small...silver...KEY HOLE. something you would completely miss, unless, haha, unless you were looking for it!
"brilliant... brilliant!" my logic said to me
" and, yet so...so... totally fucked up!" my intuition replied...
"OH my god" my logic said.."intuition was RIGHT"!
with that...the two halves of myself that had been waring against eachother decided to make peace.
i walked into my room with a new found confidence. I started screaming at that fucking mirror! without anything held back. whereas before it was more my intuition going off, and rather insecurly. this time it was full force. both of me was on the same page. i had now proven to myself, that i really was being watched, and this made me a hell of a lot angrier than i had been before.
i don't even remember what i said, all i know is that i yelled a lot!!
don't even know if anybody was there at this point to see me! BUT, i didn't care. the only comfort i had was that, at least my intuition had acted before my logic had the time to catch up with the situation...that i had told the mirror "fuck you" already when somebody had been, no doubt, there watching. my intuiton had been right...it was RIGHT!! i was happy then that i had said fuck you already, before any of my feelings had even been confirmed, yet.
i made a point of every time crossing in front of that mirror to say "FUCK YOU", to it...and to myself. haha. although this really isn't funny. this experience was really quite truamatizing. saying fuck you to your reflection knowing someone is looking at you messes with the mind, in more than one way...and you know, there could be a philisophical value to this, but i'm too tired to get into that right now.
but wait...i have to tell you... it gets worse! i could not recieve calls to my room for some reason?! and... my best friend had been trying frantically to get a hold of me because she was stuck in india, and wasn't able to make it to the airport because her passport had been stamped on flying through china to get to india, and so now, they would not let her through.
i found out all this information after a couple hours of argueing with staff...asking them to PLEASE!!help me !!!...figure out what the fuck is wrong with the phones and why i cannot get my messages!!!!! ? ? ?
i had missed her call while i was at mc donalds. haha. "Awesome! brilliant, just, GREAT!"...
" thank you hunger, thank you logic, thank you body for fucking everything up for me! "
i ended up fiiiinally, getting her call...waiting in my room anxiousley, and, i tell you now, those hours waiting, there, felt like more, i assure you! a millenium may as well have passed between the moments of waiting for that phone call.
the chinese staff could not figure out what was going on, and it took about five of them in order to do anything! in order for them to, even, understand themselves! it was...familiarly agrivating...and comforting some how watching them all bicker between themselves. talking amoung themselves for about half an hour, or more, to simply turn to me after and explain with blank faces, two word responses to any questions i asked! ....welcome to the twilight zone...! whatever the fuck that means. china must be it!!!
i mentioned to the staff, the stain on my carpet, that they should have cleaned it better. told the lady that it looks like blood! she looked at me wide eyed, shaking her head in this very superficial laugh, saying
" haha oh, no no no, you have mistake, it's wine stain!"
and i said,
"um, i don't think so, it's too big of a stain to be a bottle of wine!"
she said to me again, "no, you mistaken"...
"fine, whatever", i thought..."this arguement is pointless"...
at this point i didn't know if i would be meeting up with my friends that day or not, with the way things were going, i thought i would have to spend another night in that room...
so i said to her "look i really don't like my room, can you book me into another room, at least!!"
she started making arrangements to give me a different room while i wated to get in contact with my friends.
finally, ashley called me crying, explaining the whole situation from the airport in india
she had called and let lindsey, in beijing, know that i was in beijing and all the contact information to the hotel. shortly after that lindsey called me and we made arrangements to meet at the hotel in a couple hours or so...lindsey ended up meeting me at my hotel, the friend i had planned on surprising, there. little did i know this trip gave me the surprise!
... i booked out of there as soon as i heard her voice on the phone! waiting for the rest of the time in the lobby, not in my room. i made a point of telling staff that their hotel should be sued for having mirrors that perverts may be able to look through ! they just smiled and nodded, and said,
"yes yes...no plob-lem!"...haha. again funny...but in a really sad way!
i made a point to tell the staff that their hotel is SHIT, and that they are the WORST hotel, in the whole entire world. not that they cared, i'm sure, but it felt saticefying for me to say out loud to them, none the less. i was ONLY thankful not to have had to spend a night in there, alone. i'm sure that if i had not have had a contact in beijing, if i had of stayed a night in that room alone...i may not be here right now.
you know those porno's that are illegal? the ones that sick people pay big money for? the ones people don't normally talk about?...the ones where women get raped and murdered on video? well...i'm pretty sure that...one of those types of porno's had been made there, before. i came to this conclution based on the blood stains and the mirror in my bathroom, and really, only came to this conclution entirely with my intuition!! what sucks about this is that i will never be able to confirm this, and don't care to confirm it..except for the little details of evidence i was able to find...to confirm to myself that i was right....
all in all....all things said and done...i'm just really happy i wasn't in the next episode of some sick-fucks-million-dollar-fantasy! my logic knows that chinese people pay big money to cover up crimes and that they very sadly, all too often, get away with what they have money to pay to cover up! corruption to the core. the apple is rotten. i was lucky not to be another missing person. people go missing all the time! i know very well that the people in china with money do horrible things, and cover it up. this time....i think i really fucked with their minds. i wish i knew! i wish i could see the reaction from the other side! i don't know who was sitting behind that glass...but i'm sure...when they or he or whoever the fuck it was realized, that i realized...what was going on...some fueses must have ruptured. and i'm happy about that :)
i won't get into all the other details of how long i waited in the lobby for my friend to arrive, and all the shit that happened inbetween. all i have to say is that i could have cried when i saw linsdey there...coming to pick me up to bring me back to her place
..sitting there anxiosly, waiting, and then i saw her there, haha, almost running through the hotel doors towards me, i heard her cry out:
"BEAN!"...my nickname...
and i just ran over to her and hugged her!
i could have broken down crying at that moment..but somehow i didn't. it had all been just a wee bit too sur-real for me....lost for words...and so i smiled and said
"it's SO good to see you!"...
china, beijing...like i said before, and will say again...anything can happen there, anything can happen anywhere, really!
so now that you know the core of the story, the very rotten nasty core, i want to fill you in on the beginning...
the story starts like this:
i had decided to take a week vacation in beijing to surprise a friend if mine who had decided to go live there based on the stories my sister and i had shared with her about beijing! she had been there for already a year, almost two. a trip to see her was way over-due.
strange place to decide to go on "vacation" you would think, and you would be right. i guess it was not so much a vacation as it was an oportunity to visit the past. i really wanted to see my old neighborhood and go see my old friend who owned the restaurant. it would turn out that the restaraunt was closed for the chinese new years, never got to see her and i had lost contact with sufwey-tom, so that was out of the options. there was no way i could have ever been able to find him, again.
so, yes, i had this opportunity to go... because my two best friends and i planned a sort of "reunion" in china. luckily i have found friends in this life who are as crazy as i am! lindsey and ashley:)
ashley was flying through beijing, from india, and lindsey lives in beijing. i was flying over to beijing to surprise lindsey. she did not know that i was going to be there, was only expecting ashley.
ashley and i had made up this brilliant surpise, and worked out all the details so that it would go perfectly, or well, as perfectly as you can manage when dealing with places such as india and china! which, if you've been there, i'm sure you'll know, are a bit mental...and pretty much you have to be ready for anything to happen.
it was february and the chinese new years festival. couldn't have picked a better time of year to go. no body does the new year, like the chinese do it! it's like a fucking war is going on! seriously. for that whole week i was there. the sound of those "BANGS" and "crackles" and "pops" were the background music to my trip...along with Caribou the album 'swim'. haha. and it was a marvelous combination:)
i had made all the arrangements perfectly, or so i had thought. booked myself into a nice hotel so that i would have the comfort of a bath and a nap after the grueling 16? hour fleight there. also, my fleight was arriving at night. needed somewhere to go before meeting ashley at the airport the next day. where lindsey would have been surprised to see both of us together there!
my fleight was delayed, i arrived at my hotel at 2 or 3 am...had to wait in the lobby until 6am to officialyl book into my room because i messed up the dates when booking online, only realized when i arrived! my fleight had been delayed because of bad weather, and had to wait more than a couple hours, in shanghai. i will skip the details of the fleight, because it was scarry AT parts, and boring at parts, and over all it made my legs feel like they were jelly by the time i arrived.
i will also just mention, briefly, that upon arrival, the taxi ride to my hotel was no less entertaining then i had once remembered. the driver kept on calling me "pretty" which if i think i can remember is "piow-leeung" in maderine...and he kept saying this over and over at me... when we arrived at the hotel the taxi driver had tried to kiss me! he had been touching my hand in the cab, commenting on how cold they were, and i just laughed nervously thinking, "wow, this is weird". but i let him touch my hand. i was so tired my mind was hardly functioning at this point and really, it's just a "hand" i thought, no big deal..didn't really know what to say or do about that.... but when we arrived and he pulled me towards him to kiss him i said "NO!" and ran out of the cab, basically throwing the money at him...and running.
"weird" i thought. "weird china experiences here we come, bring it on!!"...
but...that was nothing compared to what was waiting for me in my hotel.
outside the hotel there was nobody around except about four or five men dressed in suits. i had assumed that they were door men. they were outside smoking. my lighter had been confiscated at the airport and so i asked one of the men for a light. they, in return, asked me what the hell i was doing there so late at night, and alone. these men were not chinese! they looked of indian origin, spoke really good english, and now that i think of it,i don't really know where they were from. they all looked like they had different nationalities. and i found this strange....
i told them that i had plans to make a reunion with some friends.
they looked at me like i was out of my mind to be in china, a woman, alone. and so late at night, or by this time, early morning, i guess!
after smoking a cigarette and small talking with them for a bit, i went inside, but as i left...one of the men said while i was walking away
"we'll see you later..."
i didn't understand this comment at first. .. and the way he said it, i remembered thinking, was strange. something in the tone of voice. he said it with a kind of irony, a cruel irony that i nievly missunderstood at the time...
Now i know what that muther fucker meant...
but i'm sure they never expected to see what...what happened next! they, for sure, did not expect me to see through...
the looking glass.
and...you know...when you see a reflection as ugly as that...makes you never want to look in the mirror, ever, ever again.
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