I went ice skating and everything was perfect, that is to say it was full of glorious flaws. First my mother, my sister, my mother’s friend Victoria, (<-Oxford comma) and I had dim sum at the apparently famous Yank Sing near The Embarcadero. The parking garage at the Ricon Centre is claustrophobic and full of atmosphere. The ceiling is only seven feet from the floor and the landscape is dominated by slate blue support beams and a network or pipes that lead to nowhere.
I didn’t think Yank Sing would be spelled Yank Sing; I imagined a strange alignment of rarely used consonants. I love our waiter, his name is “Freddy” and when I order a Tsing Tao he says “Tsing Tao, Chinese beer!” and gives me a hearty pat on the shoulder. This is feasting this is glory. There is tea in clear glass pots with a cylinder of free standing leaves in its centre the taste of which I forsake for Tsing Tao, Chinese beer! but the smell of which is warm and calming. Carts and carts of dumplings, noodles, salads (<- no Oxford comma) and fried delights make an endless parade around our table and it is less like a military march than it is like a ballet. I take particular joy from hai gow, a shrimp dumpling that this place has managed to compliment with an unplacable nutty undertone. Then, oh then we are treated to the paragon of animals: Xiao Long Bao. Xiao Long Bao are the jewel of Shanghai, a dumpling filled by a mysterious, almost alchemical process with pork soup. By the end I feel that I am as I should always be: full of sodium and translucent dumpling wrappers, it’s a powerful tonic to the disappointments and accidents of this life that can make one feel as a rusty can drifting in a fetid algae-coated river. “Freddy” hands me, the assumptive patriarch, the extravagant check and says, “Sir” When he leaves I give the party my best Frenchman’s shrug and wave the leatherette fold toward my mother. I put on the sardonic, satisfied expression that can only exist in someone whose reality has finally given them what his/her expectations have been yearning for. I have been taken care of, a sensation slightly less pleasant than taking care.
Walking out my vision is tinged red and purple, like blood, with neon and lucky Chinese colors. I am full of blood. Victoria says she wants to take photos of me next to my sister because we are so different. I take that as high praise. We sit back to back on a bench and she snaps pictures of us looking to opposite poles. I look to the bizarre and transient North a place of flux and my sister to the South where dirt holds up the ice and snow and millions of identitcal penguins congregate. The pictures must look something like the poster for an action movie or a prize fight.
Finally I make my way to the Wachovia ice rink at The Embarcadero Centre. I look good because my walk is confident and half-tipsy, and my hair has for once conformed to my wishes. Little wisps stick up to show that I am a rougue and a Young Turk. At first I am unsteady on the ice because it’s been about a year since I last put skates on, but then it comes back to me. There’s something about the motion of skating that is different from anything else. I think it’s because you aren’t really going anywhere. Even though I have to weave between flailing children and human chains of twelve year-old girls I make good laps and figure eights. In the middle of the ice a woman is twirling in her figure skating tricks and her purple skates make me smile. Skating is a wonderful thing. The feeling of going air moving around me and the envy everyone feels at seeing my buttocks perfectly dry is part of it. But the greater enjoyment comes from the juxtaposition of how wholesome it is with how dangerous. My highlighter yellow-colored wrist band warns I won’t be able to sue when I burst my head against the boards or blood from my knee comes pooling out onto the ice. It’s the junction of speed and murder to kindness and love.
I don’t end up trying to go backwards because the ice isn’t properly surfaced (they don’t even use a zamboni and there are puddles of water everywhere) but I consider getting back into the rythm of things victory enough.
