Saturday Night Live

It’s that time of the year, the penultimate weekend after the last final exam. It is the last Saturday to bid roommates adieu for the summer. The graduating class finished earlier and it was a sight to see a bunch of 12 to 18 guys bid a buddy or two “goodbye.” Class membership are assigned according to one’s rating in the national exam rather than personally chosen, and dorm mates are designated, so it is not unusual for a bunch of male and female students to have quarreled and journeyed together for four years.

Last Saturday’s crowd at the street sidewalk’s open food and market stalls was a fiesta. The summer ambience had merchants fixing their outdoor tables like one was in Tuscany or in Provence. Latitude-wise, they are not too distant, and have comparable weather to Lioaning, thus when students are asked in Oral English which place they want to visit in the future, these Italian and French destinations invariably come up.

The heat is comfortable and the young ’uns take advantage to wear as scanty an attire as possible, and with relish to boot. On sartorial preference, Chinese shed clothes like snakes molt their skin, as compared to how we drape our bodies “in shame” by medieval European virtues. Unless one is an avant garde unaffected by the Vatican, delights in parading bikinis in the Canaries, and hangs out at Club Med, designers are draping unsmiling cadavers in Milan for export to Tokyo and New York.

The local girls in Shenyang tend to wear shorts anyway, even in winter save they slide into those skin-colored leggings that can keep a bear warm in Siberia and still look like Paris Hilton or Lindsay Logan on an early morning prowl before the bar makes the last call. When spring springs, the leggings give way to nylon net stockings of the kind that Sophia Vergara was once paparazzi-caught while sporting the latest in G-strings!

Our unforgettable sight last Saturday was the office girl wearing a modern qi pao on an electric bike, ear geared with a headphone connected to her cellphone so she can ride and talk, wearing Converse rubber shoes. If she had a PDA for texting attached to the bike’s handle bar, I would not have been surprised. It was her dainty form alighting from the bicycle saddle that was the coup d’grace worthy of a video clip that I was not fast enough to catch.

The growth industry in China has got to be cosmetics. Never mind health and nutrition, my collectivist unadorned students confess, as long as the eyeliner and the false eyelashes, the puff of powder, and the dab of rouge are abundantly applied. The ultimate among the radical coeds is the tatoo-ing of the flesh line around the iris and the pupil.

We may be accused of a sexist attitude for delving too much on girls, but a poster of a computerized panel that says it takes 281 buttons for a female to boot, one for the male, is very telling, and if dear reader does not understand this fact, please join the third line! On appearance, the girls take time and thought lining up the accessories. The male in his sport’s playing uniform will take his shirt off to bare his hairless chest anyway, so what is there to describe?

This brings us to this season of great difficulty to procure a ticket on the train line. Trains remain China’s transport of choice for economic reasons. They are cheap compared to the bus fares, though they are time consuming unless it is between two major cities served by the bullet train.

Over May Day, we headed to Qiandian near the Korean border. It took eight hours to get there in what is definitely a milk train. Returning, it took four hours by bus, but the train ticket was less than half the cost of the bus fare, and the jars and jolts on the bus was hardly comfortable.

With all the students returning home (out-of-province students on scholarship get 50-percent off their train cost), getting the reservation is the challenge. One cannot buy earlier than 10 days before departure, and for the long distance run, the sleeping berths are a premium. The Internet savvy can do that online, and with the new national I.D. requirement, those carrying spurious documents take the bus.

But it is the Saturday night live on the sidewalk that is this week’s interest. Until halfway into the evening, fruit vendors ply their trade. The fruits are resplendent as they are varied. It is also seasonal. A vendor brought a truckload of cheap and sweet oranges that only a few of us bought because it was not in season. It appears that the taste buds abide by the rhythm of atmosphere.

Like Tuscany and Provence, Liaoning has many vineyards, not yet producing for the vintners but for the dining table. Not yet pesticide and insecticide laden-though unhappily they will soon be-we relish the abundance and the affordability. The seedless Concord grape with the chewy skin is the preferred grape for the table, and a special sweet variety is raised for the mid-autumn festival in October when the fruit of the vine makes its annual bow par excellance.

The apples, apricots, plums, pears, peaches, lychee, mangoes, et al, along with the green beans of numerous variety, replaced meat in our diet. And we handle fruits and vegetables gingerly like we do girls. “Ah, you are so sexist,” I can hear my colleague’s holler. Touché.