The China Match

The haze was a little unfortunate, but I doubt it's the last time I'll see this

Went to the Great Wall (长城) this past Sunday. It was only two hours away from Qinghua – the bus left at eight – so it made for a really nice day trip. The wall is (shockingly) pretty long, so we were able to find a part that didn’t have many tourists on it until we showed up. The NU president came with us, along with a trustee couple and their eleven year old kid. I got along way better with said kid than I did with the adults, but that’s kinda to be expected.
I mean, granted, my only interaction with the president of Northwestern was to ask him to Ice my friend on my behalf. Now, I have been lead to believe that I might have a few readers who may not be familiar with the concept of “Icing” someone (shoutout to mom’s friends, potential future employers, or really anyone else over thirty. While I am generally a responsible boy and would of course never even consider drinking whilst underage, the alcoholic age of majority in China is eighteen, so such behavior in moderation is completely justifiable and socially acceptable), so here’s a very brief explanation: there exists a rather unpleasant drink called Smirnoff Ice. It comes in a variety of unnatural fruity flavors, and is widely accepted to be both very girly and something that even most girls have a healthy distaste for. You might imagine, then, that the market for such a beverage is fairly limited — and it is, with one exception. Smirnoff Ice is used as a weapon. By presenting someone with an Ice, you obligate them to “take a knee,” that is, kneel down, and chug the entire thing in one go.
The drink isn’t that alcoholic, so this isn’t as damaging as one might initially imagine, but chugging for instance a warm, Green-Apple flavored Smirnoff Ice certainly isn’t a fun experience. Refusal to drink results in excommunication — you can never Ice anyone else. The only way to block an Icing is to have an Ice of your own on your person when you are challenged, in which case the challenger is forced to kneel and drink both. This puts Smirnoff in an awkward position, because while it’s clear that the drink’s sales have skyrocketed since the game became popular, the company still can’t really endorse an activity that is only “fun” because their product is so awful.
Anyway, my friend Andrew Iced me the other day, and was doing some pretty heavy networking with the president, so I thought it’d be funny if Mr. Schapiro were to Ice him back for me on the Great Wall. Morty was tempted, but alas, some policy prevented him from pressuring a 20 year old student to chug terrible alcohol in a very public place. Damn. But of course the Great Wall was a lot of fun anyway. We were in a more run-down part of it, which actually proved to be much more of a blessing than anything; it apparently kept the bulk of the tourists away, and it made the experience feel like something more than just walking down a sidewalk. There were steep ledges that you had to climb, sections of the wall that had collapsed, all sorts of plant and insect life obstructing the way, and a dozen other tiny challenges that made the hike, if you want to call it that, a lot of fun. The eleven year old was actually a huge help here as well. He wanted to go fast and explore the further parts of the wall, but kept having to wait for his dad to catch up and was getting frustrated. Noticing this, I generously volunteered to accompany the lad so that he could go as fast as he liked. And by that, I mean I was grateful to receive social permission to go running down the Great Wall like an idiot, because really when it comes to climbing and exploring I’m still eleven too.
So while the group was taking their seventeenth or whatever round of pictures, on the first tower they found, two or three of us were basically just running around everywhere else. Because we were going quickly, we were actually able to get to the ‘end’ of our section of a wall – demarcated by impassable, dense brush ending in a barbed-wired barrier – unlike almost everyone else in the group. Needless to say I had a good time with it. I was honestly a little afraid that it’d just be a tourist-packed trudge past a ton of stands selling T shirts or something; the fact that the wall was totally empty aside from our group was probably the best part.

A side note about the wall: the old ladies who hang out there are insane. Like, will follow you a mile or so, trying to sell bracelets or drinks or whatever else. And you have nowhere to run except straight forward along a narrow path and you’re up against someone who does nothing but climb up and down the great wall all day harassing people. From what I could tell, there are only three options to make them leave you alone: you can ignore them for like twenty minutes, be really really rude to them, or haggle extra-unreasonably, which only works if you’re a native speaker and can argue for a fair price of like 2 kuai with a straight face.