Palace Postcard Catharsis

12/13/2000

She came over early today and we went to the summer palace. In the middle of the winter, the place was empty. There were maybe a thousand people there and of those thousand I was perhaps one out of ten foreigners. Even this figure is high. There were street vendors (this is a nice name for them) who were selling postcards and stamps and hats and maps of the park. They were women of older age, short dark deep set eyes hair long in a ponytail braided or short and to their shoulder gray / jet black hair. The only English they spoke was "hello" and then they described their products in Chinese. Cyn didn't help, she said what she could but she was not enough to stop these people, I filmed two men. One of them was selling a map. The other was a solder who told him to stop. Some of them were selling Chairman Mao books, I told them I had one already. It was all a pretty nice joke until one of the men selling postcards started saying bad words in Chinese at us. He called Cyn a prostitute that was using me. I could not believe he would say that. I wanted to make him understand who I am. I wanted Cynthia to know that we could change his mind. The man came back and Cyn started crying. Her eyes were so big with big tears rolling slowly down her cheeks. She mad a high pitched moan that told the man to back away. She was clearly upset and the other people watching were alarmed. I looked at Cyn, she said that the man had to feed his children, I looked at him, he backed away and looked like a fifty year old man who was a hurt boy. I gave him a hug and he left, I tried to give him money, but he was humiliated by the display. I felt horrible, but I justified myself as much a possible.