My brother, Dror, came back from a month in China. “It’s nothing like I’ve expected it to be”, he said. “What do you mean?” I tried to understand. “Well”, he said, “I’ve expected it to be, you know, China. Instead, it was this extremely filthy place”. He said that the Chinese litter everywhere. No garbage cans, no nothing. On the bus, a guy was sitting next to him chain-smoking while throwing the fags on the bus’s floor. On the airport he picked up a ticket and offered it to the person who dropped it by mistake, so he thought. The man looked at the ticket and said: “I don’t need this", while throwing it back to the ground.
He said that he couldn’t read my blog ‘cause the Chinese government censors the Internet.
He brought us Yak meat, that I found delicious and ate a whole bowl of, and Shrek 1 and 2.
I feel odd these days. Ever since we’ve received the visas (it says immigrant on them), I feel as if the ground is being pulled from under my feet. On the one hand I feel extremely excited, I have this buzzz in my tummy and I wish to just pack our stuff and go. On the other hand, totally unexpected, I feel extremely sad. I see Daniel playing with his older cousins, among his family; so natural, I think to myself. How can we take him away? When we returned from New York it struck me; that’s how a child should live, among his tribe. He was two years old back then, and hardly spoke a word. A shy boy, we thought. On the first day he met his cousins he was rolling on the carpet wrestling with them, screaming gleefully and talking. The change in him was amazing.
An immigrant, my friend Amanda once told me, never quite feels the ground beneath his feet. He never feels as if he is rooted in reality.
We went to Jerusalem yesterday. Placards are screaming at us; “Sharon is dividing the country”, “The people love Gush Katif” (an Israeli settlement in Gaza). A fascist propaganda per se. An acquaintance of mine described in Ha-ir, the local newspaper, how she and her friends were bitten up by policemen in a silent demonstration against the atrocities taking place in Gaza. The demonstration took place in my neighborhood – in the center of Tel Aviv. It was odd, she writes, after ending the demonstration and walking the streets back home, to be transformed instantly from an enemy of the state to an un-noticed passer by.
Comments