Saturday, July 15 Konqu Opera

 (written two weeks later)

Woke up around 7:40am without alarm – earlier I was checking my phone at 5 something, then slept again. 

There was a shelve of English books in a large bookstore that also served coffee drinks and had tables. Popular coffee drinks here are cold brews mixed with various bubble-tea-kind flavors. On the English bookshelf there were the classics: Uncle Tom's Cabin, Essays of Montaigne, Tocqueville, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Karamazov Brothers, Don Quixote. English books are usually labeled in English on the front, with some other signs in Chinese, and Chinese text inside. There were two shelves of books of Russian literature: those are all Chinese translation, with Cyrillic title on the front; Lermontov, Pushkin, Doctor Zhivago, etc. Василий Гроссман, "Жизнь и Судьба" – that I don't know. I like how they put the original title on the book; wish more publishers did it, and wish they used some more of original key terms, perhaps, in footnotes.

Another bunch of used books stores housed among crafts shops, computer repair businesses, arts stores, and the like. A precious book among bookstore owners here is a Chinese translation of diaries of Алексей Позднеев called “Монголия и монголы: результаты поездки в Монголию 1892—1893 гг.” (Aleksei Pozdneev, Mongolia and Mongols: the report of traveling in Mongolia in 1892-1893). Only 1000 copies was printed in 1989, and since then the party did not permit reprinting it, afraid of Mongolian nationalism. They ask US$200 for the used book. As I understood, the text is valued by many researchers because it is an unedited diary written during the traveling; somehow, this kind of first impression unedited reports are considered more reliable than when written later. 

We went to Konqu opera called “The Peony Pavilion” in the evening – it’s southern Shanghainese opera. Events like this here in Hohhot are scheduled pretty much everyday. Classical concerts, performances, theater plays, all the socialist cultured life. Hard it is, this opera genre. The place even had English captions, but only on a side wall, so I was interrupted by looking at either the performance or the text. Somewhere in the middle I caught some interesting feelings about the opera plot, falling in love in a dream, and sadness of reality. Spring time and an afternoon vivid dream, and a touch of love in a sunny garden. 

If I hadn’t come to the garden, how could I have ever known how beautiful spring was!

不到園林，怎知春色如許！

But then I spaced out and thought of my own things, and these captions on the side wall were so interrupting and didn’t help. Serving some coffee would be so helpful with opera! I had a good night sleep that day.