A breakfast of meat dumplings: juicy dumplings stuck together in a sliver bowl on a wobbly table barely a foot wide along the edge of a dank room, the expanse of which one hardly needs to turn one's head to see. Push back the grimy curtain blocking this room from the bustling city street and hobble towards an empty spot on the singular long bench: an old man. His clothes all the same shade of dusty green brown out from which thrust two nearly black, wrinkled hands delicately gripping cheap warped wooden chopsticks. He bends over his tiny sliver bowl of dumplings raising first one then another to his face which despite the wrinkles and due perhaps to the hairlessness gives one the impression that you are looking at someone much younger. His cowboy style hat nonchalantly resting on his head is the exact color of all the rest of his clothes, indeed all the rest of the city street. Upon hearing my Tibetan declaration that “these dumplings are so delicious”, he chances to look up from his own rapidly disappearing dumplings and give me a wide, gummy grin accompanied by a slightly slobbery, “so good.”
Wandering down alleys so narrow it strikes one as miraculous that ladies selling hot pancakes can actually set up tables in them, two tiny old women catch the eye. The larger of the two is also obviously younger and gently leading her companion by the arm as they both step and misstep on surely stunted feet. The older, a crippled figment of a lady in a long wool dress, gray hair neatly braided and tucked under the most absurdly out of place sun hat, is also sporting a gray book bag, half unzipped. To all appearances a small sheep leaped into her bag head first: if that small sheep had in fact been a corpse without wool or skin and frozen stiff into a leaping pose as though its front half had either lost itself in the depths of the bag or the back of the lady. The shaded frosty air of the alley provides silent witness to the fact that grandmothers bring home the bacon.
A chubby lady blocking the entrance to a shop with items piling, spilling, tipping into and over nearly every ounce of available space. Her thin gray braids peek from beneath a knitted hat as she turns to reveal eyes milky with age and chapped lips covering less teeth than can be counted on all one's fingers combined. She teeters nearly topples in an effort to turn around and remove herself from the entrance. Her clawed fingers search for but cannot grasp her small plastic bag, cane, face mask, and spare yuan all at once. To the rescue, extra hands, even foreign hands do what hers failed to. As she in her frail near helplessness does all she can to remain erect, we stuff her recently purchased items into her stained, zipperless bag, we place the extra yuan in the warm, dirty, butter smelling folds between her dress and her shirt, we reach for her cane and assure her that her face mask is secure, we send her shuffling slowly down the street, a pebble in the midst of a raging torrent of motion and activity.
Some wear their age as armor, fiercely defying social conventions as they navigate a life that is no longer theirs. Some carry it on their shoulders, nearly crushed by the passage of time. Some adorn themselves with it, wrinkles like jewels, hair like silver. Others are blinded, deafened by the years as their glazed eyes and shriveled ears testify. They live; they live slowly, hobbling where others dash; they live quietly, groaning where others shout; they live.
They are the keepers of that which once was and is no longer. Their crippled bodies, cracked skin, and crumbling pace tell stories that will never be heard. Old people, like ghosts and mirrors, populate this city: a reminder of what is forgotten, a vision of ourselves.
