When I lived in Beijing, it was as if calendars were printed deliberately with the day ghosted out. It ran straight from 3 June to 5 June, without blinking. Without passing Go or collecting 200 dollars.
The year in Beijing I remember most clearly was 2009. I cycled my city bike, blue with white spots and basket; proud up on the front, to the square. For the first time, there were checkpoints and black-clad officers checking with instruments. Like an airport. The sun baked down hard on the concrete stones from a sky sickly grey. The ghost of the Great Helmsman lay in his box. The Olympics were just yesterday.
I felt a ball of black in my belly.
I didn’t linger. I pedalled my blue bicycle back home, off the broad avenue and into the lanes that wound with time.
Home, I thought 20 years. Too long to remember, yet too long to forget.
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These days I live in Taiwan, where the soft and sleepy voices sing a different tune to one I knew in Beijing.
The calendars are not curated to skip that day in early June. There are no black-clad officers, no ghost of the Great Helmsman. Just a brassy dictator with a fixed smile, a gift shop and Chinese restaurant below it, and a few thousand missiles, waiting, unblinking.
This June 4th I am flying in a high speed train, Taipei bound. Faster than that little blue bike more than a decade ago. We are going so fast my online map blue ball darts in shock. When we arrive at the capital I search my bags, panic fluttering. I’ve lost my keys.
I stop. I count to 5 and remind myself, surrounded by the crowd of commuters with their smartphones and shopping bags, that, yes I’ve lost my keys. It’s OK.
Because I did not lose my life.
How to cite: Gardner, Dinah. “Just Another Day: Dinah Gardner.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 4 Jun. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/06/04/dinah-gardner.
Dinah Gardner has been a journalist for more than 20 years and has lived in Hong Kong, China, Tibet, Nepal, India and now Taiwan. She also works as a researcher for a China-focussed human rights NGO.
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