The China Match

I was robbed in a bar tonight.

I am in Xi’an. Not even my home base in China. Just some random city where I’m traveling.

Aside from the cash I had in my backpack, I have no access to money whatsoever.

I have no mailing address. They won’t send a credit card to the hotel, and even if they could, they have no mechanism by which to do so before I leave Xi’an. I leave in 3 days (today is technically the 4th) and the soonest they can mail something is the 9th.

In sum, I have 1000 kuai to my name; that is $151. I am pretty sure my hotel and plane ticket back to Beijing have been paid for. If not, I can’t quite articulate how completely fucked I am. I have no credit or debit card. They’re canceling my credit card now. If the cancel voids my plane ticket, I have no way to get home. I still have my passport.

Parents trying to help. Not much they can do. Bank can’t get me a card until 5 days from now; and even then they can only send it to my office. God knows how that will work. I don’t even know if my office has a proper mailbox. But it does have an address, which is better than trying to send a credit card to my fucking 胡同。　Hutong, by the way, means alleyway. And off of said alleyway, you have to have a special RFID card to get into my little courtyard thing, at which point I am house 8. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have a mailbox, but even if it did I don’t really have a way to communicate how to find it. So there’s no way for me to receive mail in Beijing aside from sending it to my company’s front desk and hoping for the best. So basically pending divine intervention I won’t have any money for the foreseeable future.

I’m scared, poor, and very, very alone. I have a sorta-friend that I made named Eric; he has been a huge help with translation, but even he can’t get my wallet back. I am not sure what to do.

I want to see the terracotta warriors tomorrow. This involves spending about 150 kuai, from what I can tell. That’s like 25 bucks, which wouldn’t be a big deal at all if it wasn’t a significant portion of my total funding at present.

Shit. I’ve been awake for 21 hours; I’m exhausted but too nervous to sleep.

What am I supposed to do?

…is pretty damn hard. Mainly because they don’t run cabs. Not that I could look up cab services easily anyway, because the house ran out of electricity as soon as I got home from the miaohui (just to make things more exciting, the power went out in exactly the same instant as a massive firework exploded so I couldn’t tell if like, a fuse had exploded or not). My roommate forgot to mention that we have an electric bill that works the same way as the gas — namely it runs on a special special card which one may only replenish at the bank.  Guess what sorts of establishments are closed for the holidays? So no heating or internet for a while.

Fortunately these two pretty sucky things combined to be not so bad; because I couldn’t cab out in the morning, I had to subway to the airport and sleep in an airport hotel. Which meant that I was both able to get more sleep and significantly warmer. I was actually going to stay in the airport proper but got accosted by one of those guys who invite you to come stay in their ‘near-the-airport’ hotel. You know those suspicious looking dudes who you’re never ever supposed to trust? Mm. I hope the wind appreciated my caution.

In truth, 200 kuai cheaper and a free shuttle was just too tempting. Was a fun van ride, actually. Just talked about language with the driver, and he had me leave three separate audio recordings of how to say the word ‘elevator’ on his phone. Got to the hotel, successfully haggled a 30% discount from the posted price, got to my pretty-darn-sketchy-but-whatever room and promptly knocked out at like 10:30.
This 5:30am though found me in the same van (meant to seat seven) with maybe ten chinese people, half of whom were very clearly sick. Every once in a while in this country I get hit with a rush of perspective — like, a ‘what the hell i am i doing in this situation? Clearly I do not belong here and instead should really just be in my bed in Austin right now.’ This morning’s was particularly strong, but passed quickly.

Some quick observations on New Year’s in Beijing —

• Fireworks must cost next to nothing, because from the looks of the sky everyone in Beijing has purchased about seventy-five.
• If fireworks cost next to nothing, I think stores actually pay you to take their firecrackers. Writing this from 6pm Xi’an time, I can honestly say that in the last 18 hours, with the exception of the subway and the plane, there has yet to be ten solid seconds that haven’t been broken by at least one firecracker, more commonly a four-foot-long string.
• Aside from groups of people actively setting off fireworks, nobody is in the streets at all with the very notable exception of Germans. I have yet to find an explanation for this phenomenon. But I walked for about a mile, and passed maybe 20 Chinese guys setting off fireworks, and 20 people from Germany all watching them. Maybe this is just the street by my house, but it was hella weird. The subways were empty all day, too. I don’t get it.
• A lot of fires get started from fireworks hitting trees. You can tell because people will launch them anywhere where there’s a clearing on the ground, regardless of what’s above. Charred branches all over the streets this morning
• But that’s ok, because instead of trying to ban fireworks, china just hires a fleet of middle aged women to bike around with carts full of fire extinguishers. They wear special white jackets and red armbands and are pretty much the best
• Did I  mention the fireworks? Because there sure were a lot of those.

Edit: Eleven hours (eight of which spent asleep) after getting the idea and writing the initial post under the jump, I have booked plane and hotel tickets. Will be there Feb 3-7. Exploiting the downtime in the middle of 春节 as opposed to dealing with the insane prices on either end, I found some cheap flights so the whole trip is only running around $400.
Call me what you want, but don’t call me indecisive (=

Oh! And for any Cage Match readers who have been to Xi’an before, please please please leave suggestions for things to see/stuff to do/thangs to eat in the comments. Or on yesterday’s facebook status, I guess, because it has kinda exploded in the past few hours

~~~

I really want to go to Xi’an. I have a week to travel starting in 3 days. It is the worst travel week in terms of volume in the most populated country in the world. I’m going to talk to people about it at work tomorrow. How bad of an idea is this? How awesome of an idea is this?
Completely unclear. But I’m stupidly excited all of a sudden, which is usually a good sign!

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).

The street itself is hidden behind a set of these big ol’… err… buildings. I’d be more specific if I could.

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…

So today was really, really awesome. Especially from a… business perspective, which sounds a little weird to say. But no seriously in this one day I’ve done more to directly advance any potential career or internship that I may attain in the foreseeable future than I’ve done in like, the last year of my life (not counting education being a desirable asset blah blah blah).

Day started off with a half-hour phone interview with the head of Deutsche Bank Argentina, who gave me a lot advice regarding what I should be doing with myself to network while I’m still in Beijing, and then moreover said that I should get back to him about a career when I graduate because he has a few friends in Argentinian internet companies who might want to hire me. So that was neat.

And then I was given a huge stack of these business cards; I’ve never had or deserved one before, so I was pretty excited about them.

And it’s a good that I got them when I did, because I had to give out about seven of them to a bunch of international entrepreneurs that I met at a Venture-Capital-and-Fritz-sponsored dinner where I got to learn a whole whole lot about how VC works in the Chinas, and where new industries are emerging, and where money is flowing, and a whole lot of interesting (to me) things like that. And then there was mingling time, where I met people who had all at one point or another founded their own companies. I met people from Chinese consulting firms, banks, the Chinese indie music industry (I plugged goblin, Connor!), a woman with Microsoft who came from Escapia, a company that Homeaway just bought, and some random guy who makes cellphone games for SKT1 in Korea, among others. It was really neat and one of them told me he might know people who are looking for interns in San Fransisco, which is a city where I would absolutely love to spend the summer.

Also, I got a free dinner that according to their menu should have cost me 458 kuai. I usually eat a gaifan (half rice, half meat and veggie) dish for dinner, and it costs 10 kuai. So I got 45 days worth of dinner for free; if that’s not nice I’m not quite sure what is.

But I certainly do know what isn’t — the Chinese traffic system, specifically the random people-barriers and easily angerable police that inhabit it. I live pretty much right next to this place that this dinner thing was held, but instead of taking this route, the one I was forced to take looked more like this.

But it’s cool. I took a really scenic tour, and got to go past the huge portrait of Mao, Tiananmen, the opera house, and Qianmen — all four of which are definitely sights worth seeing. Ended up being a little late to the meeting because of it but it was only like 5 minutes because I bike like a freaking demon and hop fences like it’s my job and don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise.
Oh, and Rayco’s coming home tonight! Excited!

My parents and particularly brother are fond of teasing me about the Chinese propensity for public urination. Normally I just deny it, or brush it off and attribute it to small children in split pants, or maybe people in rural villages. Till tonight. Block or so from my house (see previous photoblog with the intersection from which you can see the forbidden city — that one) outside the restaurant I usually go for dinner; two dudes hanging out outside of it, one of em peeing on the traffic light, the other one looking on approvingly, chatting away.

“Surely,” I think, “surely these are homeless people, are drunk off their asses, or something. This cannot, cannot be a normal happening.”

I’m a third right. I go into the restaurant and order my meal, and then the two dudes come inside and sit down with the girl at the table next to me. This girl incidentally knows exactly who I am, including where I studied this summer, and regularly says hello to me on the street. I have no recollection of ever, ever meeting her. But that’s neither here nor there —
The point is that these two guys come in and sit down and proceed to have a completely civil and normal discussion with the girl and with me. Not slurring their words (any more than beijing dialect is already slurred, anyway), not walking funny, not obviously drunk. Just you know, outside peein’ on the street for a sec, then we’ll get back to dinner.
The one salvation here was that each of the dudes had taken down a bottle of baijiu, which is a little like having a fifth or so of vodka with your dinner. Unfortunately when I asked them about it they’re like ‘yeah we drink baijiu all the time, it barely does anything.’
Hmm.
Just wish this had happened on January 2nd; it woulda been the best ‘welcome back’ I could have asked for. Either way I now feel somewhat initiated.

edit: It occurs to me that I should be more thankful for these sorts of ‘what-the-fuck, china’ moments. A) they’re a lot of fun, B) they give me endless stuff to write about c) it reassures me that global culture isn’t quite homogenized yet, which is nice because that’d be kinda sad

Because I am lazy, and Beijing is pretty. Sometimes. All those blue skies sure are weird though, huh?

For all my Spirited Away fans out there:

I’m on to you, Miyazaki.

I’ve even blogged about snack street before, but come on. Between the overhangs and the lanterns, and how it’s deserted during the day but lit and full of food and stuff at night? Ol’ Hayao has clearly been to Wangfujing. I don’t know how I didn’t notice it last time I was here. Anyway all this is also like two blocks from my house. Fun times! Snackable scorpions whenever I want!

The electric plaza at 9:30am and 7:30pm


*Yeah I have no idea what these actually are supposed to represent, sorry

So before I tell my story about what happened today, I first want to share one from… musta been five or so years ago at this point. Geez. Anyway it was late in the summer and my family and I had been doing some yard work — my parents love yard work more than they love me — and Dad’s like forty-year-old hacksaw just wasn’t cutting it (get it? get it?) because it had gotten really dull. This being late July and Dad’s birthday being early August, I decided to get him another one as a present. Now I think I had a car at this point but I decided against taking it, because there was a hardware store about four walking minutes from my house, and in what is certainly the exception that proves the rule in Texas, driving just didn’t seem worth it.
So I walked over to Breed and bought a rather sizable hacksaw. Maybe three or so feet long? Big orange one. Thing was, of the short walk home, about two minutes of it had to be spent walking down Bee Caves, a pretty well-trafficked road. Considering that it was five in the afternoon at that awful, awful light by the Walgreens, traffic was naturally backed up for about half a mile. Come to think of it this means that Austin traffic engineers have done nothing to ameliorate this intersection’s traffic problem for at least five years. Huh. Anywho as I was walking past all the stopped cars on Bee Caves and I noticed that nearly everyone was looking pretty intently at me. After a second I realized this was probably due to me carrying a big ol’ hacksaw, which not only didn’t have a bag or anything obstructing it from view but moreover didn’t even have a blade cover. I recognized the sight of this might be a little odd, hence all the people staring at me, and so it made me smirk a little bit.
That was a problem, though, because as soon as I started to smirk, I realized now I’m the kid carrying a big hacksaw and looking quite pleased with himself. Which made me grin. Which looked even creepier. Which I also recognized, but found even funnier. So I smiled more and more, and quickly wound up with this absolutely huge maniac-grin on my face, walking within a foot or two of these cars, carrying a saw. If I recall correctly I may have even laughed out loud a little bit and there was nothing I could do to stop myself because the fact that I was happy was what was (indirectly, through the increasingly-horrified looks of the drivers) making me more happy.

So today, my Ipod rickroll’d me on my commute home. For those of you unfamiliar, to be rickroll’d is to have this song, usually accompanied with this video played to you when you don’t expect it. The two most popular rickroll videos have a combined sixty or so million views on them. People rickroll each other a lot. So yes, my Ipod was on shuffle in the first time in forever, and after ten songs Rick Astley began crooning about how he just wants to tell me how he’s feeling — just wants to make me understand he’s never going to give me up, etc etc.
Now: why, you might fairly ask, do you have this song on your Ipod in the first place, Kevin? To which i would shamefully be forced to admit that back in the day my friends and i would occasionally rickroll passerby from our vehicles, because we were stupid and we felt it our duty to make sure everyone in the city heard “never gonna give you up.” Needless to say my Ipod is pretty old and I guess I just never actually took it off.
So yes, I was about to get on the 1 when I got rickroll’d, and I immediately laughed out loud at the pure bizarrity of hearing Mr. Astley on the swarming platform of the chinese subway system. It was just completely, completely unexpected*
I cracked up. Which immediately prompted the six nearest people — I did, in fact, count — to wheel around on the platform and just goggle at me. Which lead to a rush of perspective which subsequently put me back into that feedback loop that I just spent like 600 words describing so I spent a solid four or so minutes on the subway home just trying and failing not to laugh (for whatever reason, it never occurred to me to turn Rick off). It didn’t at all help that halfway through it, I remembered the hacksaw story. So now my fellow commuters may think I’m somewhat of a lunatic but it’s fine; just because I ride the same train with them at the same time every afternoon does not at all guarantee that i’ll ever see any of them again. Not even sarcastic. It’s a funny world…

*For those of you who’ve read the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy series, if I had at this point tripped over something, I definitely would have missed the ground.

Presentation went over really well. Ended up speaking for twenty or so minutes due to questions/answers (about half of which were fielded in chinese! booya!) about all sorts of social-buying related stuff. I asked my boss at the end of it if I was understandable through the broken grammar and questionable vocab and she told me that she got 80% of it, more or less. I’m willing to believe that this was genuine because one of the most endearing parts (at least to me) of Chinese culture is the propensity to be very blunt the vast majority of the time. Especially with anyone who isn’t a very young person from a big city, there generally aren’t personal topics that people stay away from, and people tend to be extremely inquisitive or direct to a point that westerners sometimes see as prying or rude. While this is sometimes a bit awkward — the best exercise we ever did in Chinese was the “deflect-the-way-too-private question” drill — it also means that you can count on people to be basically honest, most of the time. I kinda think that’s worth the trade off.
Note: the “personal/private” is very important here. It’s actually an interesting situation — generally, the same people who will gladly ask about your income, marital status, age, and sexual orientation without batting are an eye are precisely the same people who will avoid conversation about the government, taiwan, the falun gong, and tiananmen (man, if there was ever a list to get your blog blocked by the chinese, there it is) like the plague — and vice versa. Younger people tend to be politically very open and outspoken but are becoming a little more western-minded in terms of personal privacy. While I think the former is fantastic, I see the the latter as a bit of a shame because the I-could-care-less, no-BS approach to conversation fits in so perfectly with the rest of the culture; it’s sad to see that start to fade.
All this to say that the same cultural force that drove a nice middle-aged lady across the street from the hotel where I lived in August to inform Dan and I (completely unprompted) that, because we lived in the same place, she suspected that were probably gay would equally compel my boss to tell me precisely what percentage of my garbled mandarin she could comprehend. Although to be fair, being way too kind with regard to foreigners trying to speak Chinese is far and away the most common white lie that gets told, but that’s a discussion for another day.
Anywho. The speech went as good as I coulda hoped, and I’m looking for a new thing to start working on.