The China Match

Well apparently it’s been too long since I’ve posted on here, because now I have more to talk about than I am able to easily organize into something approaching coherency. Granted this is partially due to one of the components I was going to try to explain happens my current mental state, and even by itself that’s just a mess waiting to happen (if you can’t remember why this isn’t a good idea, I invite you to reread that $40 Pabst post). I also want to write about Egypt/Tunisia/that whole shebang, and I’ve got an ongoing piece about this whole exchange rate debacle in the works, primarily because I need to decide how I actually feel about it, and writing out an argument will force me to substantiate some sort of definitive conclusion.

So naturally this post is just going to be a stupid story about this past Wednesday, when I used my whitey card for the first time. (Get the title? I’m choosing to ignore all of the challenging or important topics. Plus, my story involves police. Puns!)
But first! Another pretty picture from my commute — this one’s of the entrance to the forbidden city at night, taken from the Southeast corner, above the moat. I wish Plex had a moat.

I have an atrocious sense of direction, but a hyperacute perception of time. Seriously. If I had to identify one singular skill that I have and declare “this is what I am best at” it would be knowing, pretty much to the second, about how long everything takes. I am the first to concede that this is more than a little bit sad. I mean ostensibly I’m pretty OK at other things too, but anybody can be sarcastic or write decently or whathaveyou. Not everyone can put lasagna in the microwave for ten minutes, go play with Jack outside, and come back in when the microwave’s at two seconds left. Or regularly wake up naturally fifteen seconds before their alarm goes off. But I digress. Point is knowing pretty much how long any given trip is going to take fits into the same talent, and generally can compensate for the fact that actually getting from point A to point B is something that I struggle with perhaps a lot more than a 20-year-old should. This post about getting to the office on day one demonstrates how this works pretty well. The consequence here is that while I have to perpetually fight the instinct to leave for a party at 10:22, I am exceptionally rarely late to things that matter.

So when I left for this 7:30 dinner at 7:10 or so — hah! you thought that 200-word preface was going to be relevant! Joke’s on you, reader! — I figured I was being pretty generous about time. It was just past Qianmen (do I really not already have a picture or post about Qianmen on here to link to? I guess I don’t. Well, damn I guess I’ll have to dig through my old photo album, I knew I took some around there).

Qianmen

Anyway, biking straight it’s maybe a ten, twelve minute ride. The extra ten minutes were added because I’d never been to the restaurant before, had no idea where I could actually park my bike, and I knew the whole Qianmen area positively plagued by the most infuriating people-blockers I’ve ever encountered in my life. Honestly they have 5-foot-high white fences bordering every single street. You can see the top of one of them in the picture up there. You have to go underground to cross most streets, but you do this via a series of random tunnels that aren’t all connected to one single nexus so when you head down a tunnel you have no idea where it will spit you out. Truly a marvel of design.

So all this in mind I was pretty confident as I started biking out, until I came to the big street that runs between Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. It is fourteen lanes wide. You can’t actually cross it anywhere near the square. Or rather, you *can* cross it, but doing so will quickly earn you the ire of the dozen or two policemen stationed at the two intersections flanking the square.
I figured this out as I came to the first intersection and positioned myself to cross, but was immediately approached by policemen who made it very clear that they would break my face if I attempted to do so. In not so many words. But I had looked on the map and remembered that if I crossed, I’d be biking the wrong way down a large one-way street. I had planned to bike on the sidewalk to avoid this, but hey. Maybe they were just looking out for me. So I biked all the way to the intersection on the other side of the square (it is worth noting here that Tiananmen’s is the largest public square in the world) and tried again. I watched the traffic lights for a full cycle to make sure I could cross without getting killed, and found a window where such a thing would be possible. I quietly realized that the “walk” sign was conspicuously absent on this intersection, too. But there sure were a lot of police. A lot a lot of police. And I couldn’t jaywalk, due to the aforementioned people-blockers. Was gonna be an intersection or nowhere.
So I accosted the nearest cop, asked him if I could cross. No. Hm. Well, I need to go on that side of the street. How do I do that? He shrugged. I tried again, in the clearest mandarin I could come up with: 我怎么去那儿？Shrugs again.
I leave and join some bikers on the other side of the intersection who looked like they were going to cross. They weren’t actually going to cross, because you can’t, but they were positioning to turn into the left lane of the right side of the street, or something. I actually didn’t look back to see where they all went because as soon as they started pedaling and bearing to the right, I took off in a mad sprint across the fourteen lanes. I did this while mentally reciting what has become my mantra here on the multitude of occasions that I do stupid things. It’s a sentence from a Peter Hessler book that I read on the plane to China, and reads simply: “In China, much of life involves skirting regulations, and one of the basic truths is that forgiveness comes easier than permission.” I really needed to cross this street.
I had gotten maybe ten feet when they guy I had talked to and his buddy started yelling “EH! EH! YOU CAN’T DO THAT! STOP!” in Mandarin.
It occurred to me that there was really only one option left open to me that could maybe, maybe keep me from getting in deep shit, and that was to embrace my ignorant American roots to the fullest. Continuing to pedal, I yelled back — in English — “WHAT? I DON’T UNDERSTAND!” Then for emphasis, I dropped all tone, all accent out of my Chinese (this is not much of a feat) and added “DWAY BOO CHEE WAH TING BU DUNG” at the top of my lungs.
And it worked! He gave up! But the shouting had caught the attention of the cops on the other side of the street — there were about eight? Ten? As is so frequently the case on the Cage match, I wish that were an exaggeration — and they took up the yelling almost immediately. What followed was a laundry list of pretty much every single way to say “no,” “don’t,” “stop,” or “prohibit” that I have ever learned in Chinese. They also started waving. Crap. Avoid eye contact.
Me, staring pointedly at the ground two feet in front of my bike: TINGBUDONG A!
Them: “停止! 止步! 禁止!不准! etc”
Me: TINGUDONGTINGBUDONGTINGBUDONG
Them: “Stop!” [in English]
Shit.
I stopped, but was pretty much across the street at this point. I hopped off the bike and walked it the last two lanes. The one policeman who spoke English came over (regarding why they need so many cops to just watch an intersection — I’ll write something about the concept of “overemployment” that Dan and I developed soon) and told me that this entire area was prohibited, but he couldn’t articulate why.
But that’s fine, right? I’m now on the correct side of the street, and the way traffic is going is the way I need to go, so we’re good, right?
Not right. They were pissed, and they’d be dammed if they were going to let me go the direction I wanted. I tried the ‘zenme qu nar’ line again, and they explained that I was going to have to go probably altogether like a mile more out of my way to go around the whole square. They let me go, and I eventually learned that the intersection they directed me to was also blocked to cross, meaning that there would have been no way to legally get where I was going. Fun stuff, right? My sense of time isn’t used to accounting for that one. So yeah I biked another half mile or so out of my way and THEN got to the people-blocker-literally-on-every-curb area, at which point I was already late so I locked my bike to something random and then just jumped a whole whole bunch of fences and ran the rest of the way to Qianmen. All in a suit, of course.
For a city with so many freaking people and traffic as awful as it is, you really have to wonder why they’re doing pedestrians zero favors…

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