Sorry Sun Yat Sen


i know you’re the father of the nation and everything but my injured back and osteo-arthritic knees stopped me climbing the last 400 steps to your mausoleum so i searched out nonsquat toilets in the flat carpark then espresso coffee and watched thousands of chinese tourists and highschool students watching me. a woman openly breastfeeding her newborn. an old man smoking a cigarette between heaven-pointing finger and thumb like Mao would have. thousands of high school students not displaying the appropriate solemnity for a significant national monument but rather doing what the signs forbid: “romping larking and horseplay”. and all they know of Tiananmen Square is that it’s in Our Nation’s Capital. and all they know of the Cultural Revolution is a few lines in the text books back at school. the girl with perfect makeup and sunnies who asks if sun yat sen was a ming emperor and pouts herself a series of selfies away from the signage to Weibo her friends that she is
somewhere else.