Chun nuan hua kai

The city is vast, the city is silent, but only for some. Li sleeps by day and works by night, when he moves through Beijing at dawn and dusk, it’s almost as quiet as the rooms he’s paid to watch over, the office building with the glass corridors and fluorescent lighting. Its immaculate surfaces match those of the cityscape outside, although gaps remain, the saplings among green netting and trash, the playground walled in by panels of graffiti-covered plastic, the old building marked for demolition whose damp basement is Li’s abode. He shares the room with another worker, they meet only to swap shifts in bed or eat together outside, otherwise Li is alone, silent, a slender man in a red t-shirt, singing to himself softly, typing on his phone, wandering streets that do soon hum with people, gazing at the photo of the lake and the great rock formations above it, impossible to reach, like the images of all those new constructions waiting to be built. The woman next door moved to Beijing to see what would happen, years have passed and she’ll not go back, like Li, like past, present and future in one, like the city. “From tomorrow on, I will be a happy person”; from tomorrow on, I will. (James Lattimer)

In the presence of Ivan Marković.