On imaginary cricket
In the news agency at the airport there was a makeshift bookshelf. It was made from red cardboard. On each row sat a white, hardcover book. On the front of the book there was a portrait of the General Secretary of the Chinese Community Party and underneath, the book’s title: Xi Jinping, The Governance of China, Volume II. I flipped through. It was a collection of speeches and writings by Xi Jinping, along with some pictures of him at construction sites, rural factories, meeting with international leaders, usually wearing a suit, often with one hand in his pocket, pointing at some point off in the far distance. I asked the shop clerk, who was wearing a Darth Vader style face mask, where the books had come from. “What books,” he asked. I pointed at Xi Jinping. He said that “some people” had come with a shelf and the books and asked if they could pay the shop money to display the books. “Some people?” I asked. “Some people,” he answered. He said that at first the people had assembled the shelf right in front of the cashier, but his boss later made him move it. “It was disrupting passenger flow,” the clerk said, making a wave-like motion with his arm, to denote the movement of crowds. I asked if anyone else had ever assembled their own bookshelf in the shop to sell books. He said no. “Strange,” I said. “Strange,” the clerk said. I left the shop and walked to the departure gate. While waiting for the plane to board I watched a mother playing imaginary cricket with her son. She would bowl an imaginary ball at the boy, who stood holding an imaginary bat. He would swing and the mother would watch the ball fly over her head, and then frantically chase after it down the walkway. An old man who was also watching the game elbowed his wife in the ribs. “Would you look at that,” he said. “The power of the imagination.”
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Reading Recommendations
The New Journalism, revisiting Tom Wolfe’s anthology.
HEAT, the new-old Australian literary magazine, edited by Alexandra Christie.
A Vibe Shift is Coming, an essay about aging millennials by Allison P. Davis.
A tweet.
Fighting Fire with Fire, a profile of Victor Steffensen, Indigenous fire practitioner, by me.