China, city of disillusionment

Daniel is working slowly toward greater geographic precision. About six months ago, when we went to Chinatown in Boston, it turned out to be Thailand. That was the time that Daniel told Amy "All we did was go to Thailand, and it was boring." [I think Thailand might have been, primarily, the Vietnamese restaurant where we had eaten super.] Some months later, he reflected that we had been to Thailand, when we were discussing places we had visited...

Today, when we arrived in Chinatown, apparently he didn't recognize the surroundings, because he proclaimed, "We definitely haven't been to this China before." At least we were now in China...

Later on, as we were walking down Summer Street, approaching South Station from Downtown Crossing (well outside the conventional reckoning of Chinatown's borders, for the legalists among us...), he and Ian were quite shaken, seeing a homeless man sleeping with his entire body covered in a blanket and several large notes asking people to leave him money, with containers in place to deposit donations. I'm assuming that this encounter was what influenced his observation, within the next few minutes: "China isn't a very happy city."

But Ian quickly set him straight: China isn't a city; "it's a whole state!"

(October 22, 2011)