Not even the rain

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"Yi - èr - san" was the first sound I heard in Chinese. There are moments when people make you reconcile with the place you live and that moment was one of them. Over one year later, I still live in the same apartment and those kids are still there doing exercise everyday at the same time; following the rhythm imposed by a teacher with a speaker before coming into their class.

Manuel Navarro [Photo privided to chinadaily.com.cn]

During this time, I have found endless Chinas within this one. Although, there is the one which skyrockets every graph (economical, demographic, political achievement, car sales…) there is another China which is anything but one which reconciles West and East cultures.

There is a moment in the afternoon when everyone is on the street and a complete silence is easily found. It is like when the collapse of the day has arrived to the limit and it is not longer possible to produce more noise.

The city is in a very bizarre momentum of peace (even more than when the rain homogenizes time and place); people walking like mute shapes, very beautifully, very smoothly, easily like actors in front of the camera.

By the time I go out from the subway station and I turn to my house, I see how my neighbours become less hesitant and more immediate about what they want to do, what they like, or don't like. Their dynamism, determination, improvisation, invention to face the daily life is really a sort of pragmatic creativity; huge amounts of efforts that make you understand how it is possible this city has changed so fast in such a small time. It seems like harshness or brutality, but it is really a sort of sensitivity.

Five min after leaving the subway station, I turn right and I see in my left hand the barber in his tiny-and-smelling hairdresser (also his house). Close to my right hand, there are some more people playing cards inside a small construction (I am surprised about the intensity of life within its half square metre). All of them are always there, every day, every afternoon when I return home from the office I see them; peaceful living.

It is in that moment, when I find myself reconciled with this city and by extension with the rest of the country and its culture; a moment when you find the close similarities of both cultures (yours and mine) summarized in the essence of that moment. There is a place outside the clamour (political, commercial or media) in which relationships, communication, cultural exchange, therefore all the possibilities of creating something beautiful (social art) is easily found. There is somewhere, gladly beyond any epidemical experience, where you come across with the frailest gesture which encloses yourself.

The first professional memo I had already lived in Beijing made me close myself as fingers (what I saw, it was not what I got eventually). Nevertheless, the approach to its citizens opened me: touching skilfully, mysteriously.

The connection with the daily life opens possibilities very beautifully, as when the heart of flower imagines the sun light carefully everywhere descending.

Nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of intensity of the daily-human-life fragility; whose textures, smells, feelings compels us with the place we live, rendering happiness forever with each breath. The reality of this country appears in that exactly moment of social and urban intensity (not possible to find it in any enclosed place). If talent is probably a result of luck, it is necessary to point out the importance of courage in life. There is no more courage than what I see in the genuine apparition of the extreme creativity (daily) on this street.

Just before coming into my house, this city offers me chances for believing a complete new-next-day beginning, which I cannot found anywhere else. That's deeply satisfying. I do not know yet what this country is about; only something in me understands there are more voices deeper than all prefabricated images.

(Although, neighbours for life, still like strangers.)

The author is a Partner Architect of Latitude Studio in Beijing.

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