Karmic Neutral in Beijing

We steal two seats in the crowded corner of the Railway station and sit watching E gobble sweet corn kernels from a tiny plastic container. He fingers a small blue Japanese toy and seems a bit dazed after last night’s delayed flight from Ulaanbaatar flung us from the mute hills of Mongolia back into the fiery crush of people and smoke and cars in Beijing. 

An old sweeper in a blue work suit moves across the room amidst seated passengers as if waltzing, his leg gone limp by who knows what childhood malady, his facial movements slurred and his bottom teeth missing but his gaze fixed squarely down on E.  The man moves closer with his broom and smiles at the boy, who presents the sweeper with a corn kernel and points at the accumulated debris in the plastic dustpan. There is no anonymity for the only foreigners in the rail station. Chinese passengers eating from cardboard noodle bowls watch every nuance of this interaction until the sweeper glides away and returns with a newly purchased yogurt drink. He presents it to us, a gift for the young child. 

The white sticker reads 8 RMB, just over a buck. The price of two and a half bowls of street dumplings. How do you accept the gift of an hours’ wages, bestowed upon three passengers who need it least? It is a gesture so sweeping and generous that it crosses borders of class and race in the name of a child. We resist, and attempt to compensate, but the sweeper refuses, and E stares wide eyed as his parents hold back tears and the Engineer stands and presses palm to fist and bows at the waist again and again and again as Beijing watches.  There is no ruse, bitterness, regret, trickery, no accomplice slicing open our backpacks to get the goods.  There is only the gift.

An old man ambles by, a cardboard sign in Chinese letters in hand, he is blind maybe, and poor, and while some passengers avert their gaze, many give what they can, or cannot, some of them young with Diesel label t-shirts and shiny cell phones in palms. We give. We are trying to find karmic neutral – the Engineer’s words- but the universe keeps spilling silver beads of fortune into our buckets.

We compose ourselves – the entire scene has made us raw and humble and forgetful of spit on pavement and smoke in lungs -and notice a family with a small girl seated behind us.  The Engineer gives the mother a toy for her child, and moments later she returns with two hard-boiled eggs in a tiny plastic bag, part of their dinner for the night train. More reciprocity. This corner of the Beijing Railway Station is in a hungry frenzy of generosity that feeds on itself until the room seems to spin and heave on ocean waves.

A second blue suited sweeper appears and grins.  She dances away and returns from the nearby café with a watermelon ice pop and plops it down into E’s lap.  6 RMB.

It is just too much. This Great Wall of Humanity. I avoid eye contact with the Engineer. Later we will crawl into our train compartment and clasp hands and watch Beijing disappear into the distance, replaying this scene, stifling tears, reshuffling the world order, sketching the man’s face into memory. For now, though, we bow and gather up our belongings and say our good byes and wheel E off toward our train.  He fusses. He arches his back in the stroller, his face pink from the July heat. He is a celebrity here in his beloved China. And as we stride away he grabs the ice pop and hurls it toward the ground.