Chinese Traffic - Huaiyin Blues

(to go to Da Qing Blues click here)

(to go to 'Bangkok Blues' click here)

I’d just got out of a month retreat at a monastery in Thailand, so being stuck for two hours in the middle of a tidal wave of North Koreans smelling of mould and wearing Soviet seconds and carrying cardboard boxes tied with string was good exercise for my patience.
It also very interesting.

The queue between me and the immigration desk was quite short so one would think it would not take too long for me to arrive. But it kept expanding because the North Koreans have a peculiar talent of ‘appearing’ in front of other people without ever having been seen to intend to appear. They’re so slow, so persistant, and so patient, and so apparently unconcerned - pushing very gently so that natural politeness would cause me to move, whereupon the Korean’s, still aqpparently absorbed in their conversation would ‘accidentally' move in front without seeming to intend to.

And then I’d feel another pair, apparently chatting unconcernedly - their natural shuffling and pushing resembling simple restlessness, slowly insinuating themselves into my space. Once again, being polite and thinking they were simply not aware of what they were doing I’d make way, to give them room. Then I’d see, five minutes later, they had appeared ‘accidentally’ in front of me further down the queue.

So because most of the queue were North Korean and they were all doing the same thing, the positions of everyone in queue was constantly evolving as they were not only guzumping the foreigners, but each other as well, all without a word being said. The effect was, though the queue was very short, eventually all the Koreans appeared down the front, still; quietly rearranging themselves, while the few foreigners like me, seemed to be perpetually moving backwards.

Seeing another planeload of North Koreans pouring into the immigration hall to begin their game of ‘invisible insinuation’ I decided to throw off my monastery tolerance and I began pushing back - elbowing, shoving and not giving way - otherwise I’d never get out of this place.

But the trouble with this was now I was seen to be beinbg rude. Their feigned unawareness of what they were doing gave them the option to plead ignorance, whereas me, with my determined pushing back - well, I had no excuse at all. As I'd push back, or simply not move when they pushed against me, they’d look at me with shock and dismay, like, ‘Oh! The rudeness of this coarse foreigner!’

So they had me checkmated which ever way I behaved. If I was polite I'd reman in this immigration hall for the rest of my life. And if I pushed back I was a rude foreigner. Brilliant.

As I slowly and stressfully made progress down the queue I wondered at the subtle aggression of these people, thinking that perhaps President Bush might gain some insight into the nature of being North Korean, by standing in a queue with them. But then, considering I’d been reduced to brute force in the face of their svelte persistence, perhaps that’s not such a good idea.

So, three hours after I entered the immigration hall, I finally got through immigration. And by the time I got to baggage collection I was feeling ... kind of tested. But I took solace in the fact that once I made it out through those doors I would be taken care of. My new employer, Ms Dai, was sending a car to pick me up at the airport, so all I had to do was make it out into the hall, then I could fall asleep in the car until I got to Huaiyin.

Silly me.

I forgot that I was in China, and in this parallel dimension well laid plans usually are the first to go awry.

I picked up my baggage, pushed past the Chinese police who seemed to be cherry picking the queues for random searches, and with all my years worth of possessions balanced on a trolley, I passed through the doors into the main hall, where another crush of people were waving signs saying things like:

"Please you Mr Grolsh Hans
Very you welcome for China"

So I naturally looked for the sign which said: "Very Welcome Mr. Roger," but it wasn’t there.

I pushed my trolley of luggage through the crowd, looking meaningfully into the faces of various likely suspects but no-one smiled in recognition and no-one shouted out my name. It seemed whoever was picking me up was a little late.

Time ticked by as I stood beside my trolley with a look of expectation on my dial. And though I worked hard at looking as cool and confident as possible a chill of panic began to flicker within.

You see, I’d assumed (silly me again) that, because I was being collected from the airport, I wouldn’t need to put money in my travel accunt, or carry the address and phone number of Ms Dai, or even know where I was going other than the name of the city – Huaiyin. Adee to this, I'd come in on a one way ticket - so, with no money, how was I going to get out?

I’d simply put myself on the plane to China and gone apparently comatose. So now I had a problem. I was lugging a years worth of luggage, knew no-one in the country, knew pitifully little Chinese, had very little money, and no idea of where to go, or who to ring.

Belatedly, I began thinking logistically.

I knew I shouldn't move, because if I left the departure area and they came, they'd not be able to find me. Thinking I'd probably changed my mind, like a lot of foreign teachers do, they’d give me up as a no-show and go home, and I'd be lost in Shanghai.

So I waited.

And sometimes I waited here. Then I’d wait over there. And after that, I'd wait somewhere else.

Amid the shifting currents of the crowd, I must have cut a forlorn figure in my long black overcoat buttoned to the neck, a black woollen cap down over his ears, hopefully looking about from the island of his little trolley of possessions - a large suitcase, backpack and guitar.

I waited desperately, passing the time by thinking: 'At the count of five, a friendly Chinese man will appear. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ... at ther count of ten, a friendly Chinese man will appear' and so on.
But no friendly Chinese man came, and no voice ever called my name. Only the constant flow of strangers in the midst of which I was the only one standing still - the gabble of Chinese and arriving Westerners rushing by like water around a stone.

I began to imagine that I could be here for days, a ghost that no-one saw or remembered, simply because everyone was in transit. We only remember what we see repeatedly - so if everyone was just passing through I could be here for the rest of my life and no-one would know!!!! Like: 'Where's Roger?' 'Oh, he went to China.'
End of conversation.

I kept on waiting. What else could I do?

I waited in many places – I even stood directly in front of the sliding doors in case someone hadn’t seen me and was just about to rush out without me. But the gusts of freezing air from the opening and closing doors kept turning me to ice so I gave that up.

Luckily, around 8.15 pm a Chinese man in a suit appeared at my side, and he was smiling. By now I'd given up, so my first thought was that he was just another taxi spruiker, so I said, "Bu yow, bu yow!", (don't want, don't want). Luckily he ignored my rudeness. He smiled reassuringly.

"You are lost.” he said.

In my anxious state, his use of the word ‘lost’ struck an emotional chord and I almost exclaimed, ‘Yes, I’m lost. I've been lost all my life! And now, now you've found me and ... and I'm so grateful ...’

But I didn't. I asked him who he was.

“I am from business center,” he said, pointing to a booth on the other side of the hall. “We see you are lost … so can I help you?"
I swallowed the rush of gratefulness and calmly explained my position - that I had been assured that someone would meet me here, but they hadn't turned up.

So he took me to the business desk where a young Chinese woman with strange scuffed eyes, curly hair and a beautiful smile, whose name was Venus, looked up the number of the Huaiyin Institute of Technology, and rang. But no-body there knew a Ms Dai, and nobody had heard of me. Venus regretfully told me it looked as if it was too late for a proper enquiry - everyone at the Institute would have gone home because it was well past 8 pm.

So they sent me to a hotel booth where I told the attendant I needed a cheap hotel. He took 280 yuan off me, gave me a coupon, then quickly hustled me out through the sliding doors into the freezing gusty night, to shovel me and my luggage into the back of a dirty old Toyota bus with no suspension and two dark silhouettes up the front who kept turning and grinning at me as they drove me somewhere a long way away.

After driving for a half hour through wide snow whipped streets lit by lonely fluros, the bus dropped me outside a decrepit Imperial Chinese type building, and after dumping my luggage into the snow, drove off leaving only the sound of laughter and the howling wind.

I dragged my luggage over the slushy verandah through the swinging glass door. And a lonelier, more desolate place I have never seen.

In the pallid yellow glow of a light globe hanging off a cord, the large foyer, which had obviously been built a long time ago to impress, even inspire – was now a ruin. Empty and bare, with a mud streaked tile floor, the once ornate Chinese trimming along the walls was flaking gilt paint onto the floor in little piles along the bottoms of the walls.

In the centre of the tiled floor there were two old coin driven massage chairs (not plugged in), which perhaps some desperate manager, now long gone, had once imagined would have people queuing at the doors. Perhaps, as he brainstormed promotion ideas, he visualised weary travellers clicking their fingers and saying to each other, "I know! We'll go there. They have two massage chairs!!" "Oh yeah!! Just what we need!!"

Didn't seem to work. The place was deserted - except for one motionless figure behind the long, fake marble counter - a girl in a grimy ski jacket and scarves wrapped around the bottom of her face, who stood watching me.

The wind was moaning through a hole in the window and a swinging door to the restaurant kept squeaking as it banged open and closed, reverberating deafeningly in the freezing echo chamber of the reception hall. I wrestled my suitcase, pack and guitar up to the desk, and in tentative English I asked for a room.

She didn't move or respond. Just kept on watching me.

Like an idiot, I repeated my request more slowly, but she kept on watching, her eyes glittering dully above the folds of the scarf covering her mouth.

"Hello?" I said, waving my hand in her face and to my surprise she nodded.

Then, listening more carefully, I realized it had been my mistake. She'd been speaking all the time, but I hadn't been able to hear anything over the moaning of the wind and the scarves covering her mouth.

She handed me a key in return for the coupon I'd bought and directed me upstairs. So I dragged my luggage into a tiny elevator at the side, which wheezed and shook as it transported me up to the fifth floor where I found my room at the end of the corridor.

I slotted the key in the door and dragged my stuff into a room as desolate and cold as a Siberian prison cell - a freezing concrete-walled box standing on its end with a window and two heavy curtains clinging to rods falling out of the wall.

But one interesting thing made me pause. The walls had scuff marks way above my height. I wondered how. How did those scuff marks get up there? Did someone jump off a chair to karate kick the wall with sneakers on, just so they could make their mark - their very own special mark, which others (like me) would stand before and wonder at? After all, we all desire to make a mark of some kind in a life, dont we? Well, men do anyway - silly us.

Life’s little mysteries. They take the edge off desperate circumstances I suppose.

There was an air conditioner that blew hot air so I switched it to high then sat down on the bed in my overcoat, giggling at the lunacy of my situation. What the fuck was I going to do? Nobody knew where I was and I imagined nobody really cared. Still, at least I had the number of the institute. But then, even if I rang it, nobody would be able to speak English - and I couldn't speak Chinese.

Fuck it, I was too hungry to worry. So I had a hot shower then put more clothes on under my overcoat, pulled my woollen cap on again, and went down to hunt for some food.

As if she’d flicked a switch in her head to standby the minute I’d disappeared into the elevator, the girl at the front desk was in the same spot I'd left her. So I went up and, standing in her eyeline, I spent some quality time miming eating in front of her. I imagined aclick and a whirr and, with marvelous economy, she wordlessly pointed at a door behind me.

I looked around and noticed it said, in English: "Restaurant". Silly me. But I couldn't smell any food, or hear the clicking of knives and forks or hum of conversation beyond.

Thanking her with the few Chinese words I know, I went over pushed through the door to find a vast empty room dimly lit by a low watt lightglobe over the bar. It had evidently been some kind of grand ballroom, because it was so big I couldn’t even see to the back of the room. And there were all these tables stretching right back into the darkness, all of which were fully laid – white table cloths, silverware, wine glasses. But everything was covered in a ghostly patina of dust, as if a gala event had been cancelled many decades ago and nobody had ever thought to clear everything away.

Beyond the yellow effulgence of the lightglobe, in the dark space between all the fully laid tables, I imagined I could hear the ghosts of purged Imperialist lackeys from the cultural revolution still moaning and rattling their chains as they were carted off from some ruined celebration. The whole room seemed full of past celebrations - all the laughter, toasts, tears and chatter, resonating in the dark space of that room.

I turned back to the bar and noticed another woman, similar to the other one outside (or possibly the same) - the same grimy ski jacket with scarves around her face, the same machinelike immobility. And like the other one, she was busy conserving energy by standing totally still watching me.

I assumed she was who I had to see about food, so after a cheery "Ni how", which didn't move her, I went back into my 'eating food' mime act.

Something must have connected because she reached down below the counter for a cracked plastic menu which she slapped down, flicking it open with a gloved finger. Smiling companionably into her inscrutable gaze, I looked down and was surprised to see that the menu was written in English, and all the dishes were similar to the nosh in any average Chinese restaurant in Australia - beef in black bean sauce, combination vegetables, fried rice and so on. Maybe this was the special Chinese food they kept for foreigners. Except for dim sims - there were no dim sims. And no Chiko rolls either.

Leaning on the counter, I flicked through and eventually found something interesting - salted fish (my favorite Asian food)and rice.
"Jiege. (this one)" I said, pointing to my selection.
"Mai yoh," she replied curtly. (don't have)
Okay then. I pointed to fried chicken with vegetables.
Again the curt, "mai yoh."
So I ordered fried rice with octopus. "Mai yoh.”
Fried eggs with pork and brocolli. “Mai yoh.”
Everything I ordered I got the same curt "Mai yoh."

Finally I closed the menu and handed it back to her with a shrug.
She stood motionless for a few moments. We both stood motionless. Then she slapped the menu back down on the counter and flicked it back to the page it had been at originally.

Silently she pointed to 'combination vegetables, and I heard a muffled, "Neige." (that one) from behind the scarf. I realized then that she hadn’t offered me the menu for me to review my choices. She’d simply been indicating the only dish they had.

I nodded and said, "hao la," (okay) and the transaction was done. Together with a bowl of rice it cost me 5 yuan (about a dollar).

I turned and peered back into the gloomy room, thinking I’d probably have to sit at one of the dusty tables, but she pointed to the roof and muttered something I took to mean, ‘In your room.’ I nodded obediently, and gratefully I have to admit, because it was freezing down here - then went back up to my room.

Fifteen minutes later I was sitting on the bed watching Chinese propaganda on the television when the food came. It looked great. And I was flattered to see it was the cook himself who brought it, still in his smeared apron and grimy whites. He stood in the hall with a strangely mournful smile on his face and dark shadows under his eyes, holding a tray with my plates and a pair of chopsticks piled on it.

I thanked him profusely and went to take the food, but he indicated with his chin that no, I was to let him come into the room. So I stood back and he sidled past, and went to the bedside table where he carefully laid the tray down. He then stepped aside and indicated with the flourish of a hand for me to eat.

I sat on the bed and checked out the food. Very nice. I poked my finger into it and licked it.

"Hmm, hao cher!" (delicious)I said enthusiastically.

He worked up a tepid smile, but didn't make a move to leave.
'Aaah' I thought, 'he wants a tip'. I dug out a few yuan coins and held them out. But no, he didn't want a tip.

He indicated that he wanted me to eat.

So that was it. He wanted to see me eat the food.

I picked up the bowl of rice and the chopsticks and dug in, eating as noisily as I could with the bowl at my mouth in the Chinese way, to show my appreciation. At this, his face lit up and with his mouth in wide downturned grin, he nodded enthusiastically. Then, as if finally satisfied, he backed away and let himself out.

I was touched - seriously, I was very touched. I mean, maybe it was simply that he was curious to see if the foreigner could use chopsticks,I don't know - but I'd like to think that it was more that his heart needed to see me enjoy his food, to glisten a little with a rare satisfaction. I mean, surely it's the case that in this cold joyless place, pleasures had to be savoured wherever they were found.

So with my woollen hat on I slept in the damp bed that smelled of mould, with the blankets pulled over my face because, from somewhere in that the upturned stone box, a freezing breeze kept reaching down and stroking my face through out the night. Maybe it was one of the ghosts from downstairs, I’m not sure, but I slept surprisingly well.

In morning, I decided to return to the airport, simply because beautiful Venus at the business center was my only contact in China so far.

So, with the same scarf wound girl as had been there last night waving goodbye (did she stand there all night?), I caught a taxi back to the airport. This in tself was an adventure because the driver nearly killed us both on the way because he refused to believe I wanted to arrive all over again.

As we hurtled along the freeway toward the Departures turnoff (the obvious choice, considering he'd loaded all my luggage into his boot)I was arguing with him in English that I wanted him to go to the Arrivals lane instead. So he was arguing in Chinese and pointing to the turnoff, trying t impress on this foreigne idiot that I needed Departures. Eventually he gave up to my apparent lunatic insistance of arriving in China all over again, and at the last moment made a belated screeching swerve through the honking traffic into the Arrivals lane.

But even then, as we drove up the road to arrivals, he kept looking at me, expecting me to suddenly realize my mistake. I mean after all, if you’ve already arrived, wouldn't the obvious next action be to depart? My heart went out to him, but I didn’t have enough Chinese in me to explain.

So with my trolley of possessions piled before me, I arrived in China once again and this time Venus did the trick - after about fifteen calls to various bureaucrats around the place, she finally got Ms Dai on the line for me.

"Oh Mr Roger, where you were last day?" she cried, "Our driver got up at one o clock in morning to drive to Shanghai to meet you ..."
“Oh … well, why did he do that, Ms Dai. My plane didn’t get in until 4 in the afternoon.”
"Ooooooh, but no, I think you come on the morning flight."
"I emailed you my itinerary …"
"I am sure it said the morning..."
“Do you have my email?”
There was a pregnant silence of about a minute. I could hear shuffling of paper on the other end of the line.
Then Ms Dai again.
“No have. Email is now gone,” she said shortly. “Erase.”
Which probably meant she’d just checked and realized her mistake, but this was the only way to save face. So I quickly changed tack because one should never cause a Chinese person to lose face. So, when in doubt, blame it on someone else.
"Oh.” I said, “Well, why didn’t the driver wait for me?”
“He saw you were not there. He left.”
“But why didn't he ask for my flight number, then wait?"
"Flight number?"
"Yes, to see what time I am coming ..."
"What flight number?"
"The flight number of my flight.”
“Flight?”
“The jet. The airplane!"
"No, my driver, he doesn't know this number.”
“But didn’t you give it to him? It was in my email.”

Uh oh, responsibility was slipping back to Ms Dai. This was getting dangerous.

“Your email is now gone,” she said testily. “Erase.”
“Oh …”
“The driver, we make a sign.” Her tone was accusatory. “A sign with your name, which we make for you but you did not come. So the driver come back to Huaiyin. He drive for ten hours yesterday."

I had the general picture anyway – she’d erased the email, so all they had was my name, so she sent the driver to drive for five hours to the airport, to stand there with nothing but my name, and when I didn’t appear, because he’d thought I was arriving at 4 in the morning instead of 4 in the afternoon, he hadn’t thought to wait, but drove five hours back to tell her I had not arrived.

I just don’t understand. But then, ‘welcome to China, white boy’. Just the average Chinese fuck-up. Nothing special. Just like the average Australian fuck-up, and the American fuck-up, every culture has them, only they’re all different.

The only thing exceptional about the Chinese fuck-up is that, because it has its own curly Chinese logic, it always seems frustratingly absurd to the logical western mind. So we get seriosuly messed up, asking 'why?" In our arrgance, we wonder why they don't do things the way we do? But to the Chinese, because it’s their fuck-up, and they understand it, it always makes sense. So it’s never their fault - it's always the foreigners fault because we don't understnad th4e Chinese way of doing things. So this is why many arguments between foreigners and Chinese have ensued over the last 100 years no doubt.

But luckily I learnt from six long months of Chinese fuck-ups in Da Qing:'When in the presence of a Chinese fuckup, do not argue, do not try to understand, and most importantly, do not ask why!’.

"Well here I am..." I said resignedly.

"Yes Mr. Roger.” Still with the accusatory tone. “So, now … you will stay in hotel and the driver will come to pick you up … again. He will be there in five hours ..."

Five hours?

I didn’t feel like going back to the hotel of lost souls, so I stayed at the airport simply because the airport was the only place I felt sure that I would be found. So I parked my trolley of luggage by the window of a restaurant on the second floor, commandeered a seat inside where I could see it, ordered some obscenely expensive food on Ms Dai's account and read a book for five hours - then returned with my trolley down to the hall.

Eventually a large and harried Chinese man dressed in a black suit and spectacles came hurrying in.
"Oh Mr. Roger,” he exclaimed, “We are sorry, we have not welcomed you …" and so on and we went out to the car. An innocuous black car. With an innocuous driver - weighty, black suit, smoking a Hong Hu cigarette and looking at me like I'm a specimen. I suppose in retrospect, having just driven to Shanghai twice for this idiot foreigner, he wasn't feeling too friendly.

So I'm hustled into the back of the car, and the driver starts the motor – and when he took off I knew this was not a normal car - from the deep throated roar of the motor and the G forces pressing me back into the seat it sounded like eight very potent cylinders all beautifully tuned for maximum grunt.

And then I remembered - oh, that's right, Chinese traffic.

For the next five hours I listened to this motor screaming as we hydroplaned along an freeway covered in icy slush, weaving like an angry wasp through long lines of blue government trucks, mud caked busses and apparently static cars – well, the entire freeway seemed static simply because we were going so fast.

Nothing stopped him. If he couldn't find a way to pass, we swerved over to mount a verge, thumping and sliding through the grass, spewing gouts of mud in our wake, slipping sideways on the icy slush, to return with a thump to the freeway where, shaking off the dirt in the light rain, we continued hurtling through the traffic, which all seemed to move in slow motion.

For five hours I sat like a statue in the middle of that back seat, my knuckles aching and pale as I gripped the seat watching the speedometer hang between 140 and 170 kms (I'm not kidding - I watching that needle for the entire five hours).

And all the time the driver, who was leaning against the door driving one handed as he smoked a cigarette, slipping between trucks at 160 kms an hour – he kept glancing at me in the rear view mirror, perhaps to check out the sweat sliding down my face, or perhaps to see if the foreigner was about to scream, or at least blink. I figured he was paying me back for yesterday, I dont know. But I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.

So I sat as blank faced as I could, while my terrified brain thought, ‘this is the last thought of my life! The last moment is now!… no it’s not, it’s now!… no it’s not, it’s now! … in this next second I'll be instantly transformed to a mear of blood and bone over the road … now! … and this is my last thought because …” and so on.

And though ‘now’ never came, the sense of death sitting quietly on the seat beside me flipping coins and scratching his head as it pondered whether to take me was almost overwhelming.

Finally we slid into a petrol station, where trucks and busses all jostled and shoved each other in the mud, and I was able to take a few breaths.

"Does he always drive this way?" I asked the spectacled guy, whose name I found out later was Alex.
"Oh yes, he is a good driver ... the best. He is the official driver for the Huaiyin Institute..."
“Oh.” I said.

Welcome to China.

(to go to Da Qing Blues click here)

(to go to Bangkok Blues click here)

Huaiyin is, at the moment, experiencing the coldest March many can remember – brown slushy frost strewn over the roads, white frosting of snow over the dead lawn, which crackles as I walk across it, and out through the spiked gates of the Institute, swapping ‘Hallos’ with the pretty girl who stands there all day in the oversized policeman’s uniform.

I’ve wrapped myself in a cheap Chinese coat with a fake fur collar, but the cold is of the acidic kind, that eats in through the fabric and darts deep into the marrow of my bones.

Added to this, there’s not a skerrik of moisture in the air, which is a bit of a shock after the lush climate of Thailand. The air here seems to suck the moisture out of everything. Even clothes which I hang in the spare room of my apartment; though there is no heat to speak of, they dry simply because moisture disappears from them.

So my dehydrated face currently looks somewhat like the face of an Egyptian mummy – shriveled, wizened and ancient. For someone as vain as me, it’s a serious test to look in the mirror each morning and see once again how I’ve aged by centuries overnight. What makes it worse is that I had my hair shaved to a couple of millimeters in Thailand, so my newly emaciated face is starkly unadorned.

The Chinese don’t appear to be affected by this moistureless atmosphere – their full round faces are flushed with the cold, though in some cases, particularly with the women who pedal the trishaws, their cheeks are blotched with crimson or scabbed from frostbite, but nonetheless, compared to my corpselike countenance, they all look gorgeously alive.

So I’ve obscured as much of my face as possible with a black woollen hat, so as not to frighten the locals, and with the fur collar of my cheao Chinese coat buttoned up over my chin, I’m standing on the corner waiting for a taxi, because I’m on my way into town to buy some blank CD’s and some food.

Being International

Now, obviously you would go to a computer shop to buy blank CD’s - but I’m wondering as I stand here – how will I find the shop?
From the outside there appear to be no shops I’d recognize in this city other than Chinese food shops. Most of the buildings look the same – either unpainted concrete, Communist immense with Corinthian columns, or pale crème Noddy buildings with square windows and peaked Chinese eves. And all the signs are mostly standardized too – the more modern shops have billboards with brightly colored images of beautiful Chinese men and women laughing – but no pictorial representation of what the shop actually sells. The others simply have painted signs or banners painted red, yellow and gold with images of dragons and black calligraphy. It’s as if they’re all painted by the same bloke, who learnt his trade a long time ago, while writing placards for Chairman Mao on The Long March.

So finding a place to buy blank CD’s is not so simple.

Added to which, I know from experience that every computer shop in Huaiyin will either be on the same street or in the same building. I know this, because it’s a wierd truth in most of the Asian cities I’ve been in. All shops of a kind are usually grouped together.
Now, you’d think – being a westerner and all - that it would be much more sensible to do it our way. For a shop to seek out a position where there is no competition, and set up there to take advantage of being the only outlet for a particular good.

But no, this is not the Asian way.

For instance, in Bangkok, if you want a spanner, there will be a particular street in Bangkok where every one of about a hundred shops will sell the same brands of spanners. Or, if it’s a more popular item, like a computer, there will be a whole building complex, like the Pantip Plaza Centre in Bangkok, where almost all of the computer sellers in Bangkok are gathered in one vast multi storied market.

And there you’ll find all the shopkeepers asleep in deck chairs at the backs of their stalls or shops, or wilting over their merchandise which is identical to the merchandise in every other shop on the block, simply because the number of customers available to them is divided by thousands of other competitors who are also falling asleep over their merchandise.

I found myself wondering, ‘Why would anyone choose this shop over that shop if they’re all the same?’

I put this question to a Thai friend, Chet, one day a short while ago, while wandering through Pantip Plaza, but he just said, “Is more convenient for shopping.”

I nodded, assimilating this seemingly obvious truth, then politely argued, “But how do these people make a living. There’s not enough customers to give them all a living.

Chet shrugged. “If they cannot sell, then they close their shop.”

I nodded again. “But don’t they see? The shopkeepers … don’t they see that if they all group together, they’ll get less sales?”
He looked at me quizzically.
“Why don’t they set up shop somewhere where there are no other computer sellers?” I explained.
He smiled condescendingly, then shook his head.
“Because all people who want computer come here, to Pantip. Everybody come here to buy. Everybody know what is here, so they go nowhere else.”
“But…maybe they would buy somewhere else if there was a somewhere else …”

I stopped. He was right. But then again, he was wrong. But neither. It’s just different. But …

I was about to resume my argument, then stopped myself once more, because I saw the dark hole of ‘why’ inviting me to jump into the unknown and, like Alice falling down the tunnel, disappear into a place where my reasoning and cultural conditioning was useless. I know now, that when in Asia, not to go there – not to fall into that dangerous questioning, because in that place Western minds wander in circles, searching for beginnings and ends of mobius-like circles of reasoning, in which their western logic is useless.

Luckily Chet put me out of my misery.
“We are not like you,” he said sanctimoniously, “Here, people like to be friends with the person they buy from, so they get a good price. Thai people only buy from people they know, so there is no need for competition.”

He pointed to a sleeping shopkeeper and said, “That man can sleep, because he know his friends will only buy from him. So he can relax until one of his friend come in. No need for competition.”

“Ooooh.” I said, while thinking, ‘how civilized … how beautiful.’

But even as I thought that thought, I became aware of the maelstrom of young spruikers all desperately hawking everything from pornography DVD’s to pirated software – the competition between them was intense – you couldn’t move without one of them pulling at your sleeve, or muttering, “You like sex DVD? Pretty girl, pretty girl, pretty girl!”

I caught up with Chet who was now checking out iPods sat a stall.

“But what about all these people?” I said, gesturing at the crush of frantic spruikers, “They aren’t selling to friends …”

He looked around with an expression of surprise, as if seeing them for the first time. Then his expression changed to gentle contempt.
“Oh them,” he said. “They are not for Thai people. They only sell to farang(foreigners) …”

So I’m sure that somewhere in Huaiyin there will be a massive building full of computer shops where all the stalls sell exactly the same stuff as all the other stalls, but right now, I don't know where it is.

The only place I know for sure that I’ll be able to get a blank CD is ‘Times-Extra’, the biggest department store in Huaiyin. It’s where I often buy my food, and where I bought my cheap Chinese coat. A recent western innovation in China, this immense building has everything from bad suits to toothpicks, custard tarts and roast duck, to mobile phones, plasma TV’s, washing machines and Chinese wine – it’s got everything.

God knows why it’s called ‘Times-Extra’ though.

As I hop from foot to foot on the side of the road trying to keep warm, I wonder what the words ‘Times’ and ‘Extra’ in combination are supposed to mean? But then, it’s most likely the title means nothing. Perhaps its just the look they wanted, of English lettering - to look ‘international’.

It’s the same with ‘The Chicken Run Coffee Bar’, just around the corner from the Huaiyin Institute where I’m living. Aside from Times Extra, The Chicken Run’ is the only other building in Huaiyin that I’ve seen so far which has a sign in English. Encouraged by this, I dropped in one day as I was passing. I was drawn to the familiar - the words, ‘chicken’ and ‘coffee bar’ and the images they created in my head, so I expected to find a warm, coffee scented home away from home, where I could meet other foreigners while sipping a café latte and …you know.

As I pushed through the door, I thought they’d be happy to see me. But they weren’t. There were no special smiles for the foreigner – just the usual expressions of naked shock. And there were no sandwiches, no coffee or newspapers either. Just standard Chinese spartan – lino and benches, menus in Chinese and a waitress and owner who stared me down when I asked if they spoke English.

So I left, wondering why they had a sign in English if they didn’t care to cater for English speakers, and why they said it was a coffee bar when there was no coffee?

Again the siren call of ‘why’ beckoned me to founder on the rocks.

Perhaps the answer is: They don’t even know what their sign says, because it’s in English. They just like the look of it.
The presence of English words and lettering seems to be scattered randomly all over the place in Asia, and no-one seems to give a damn what it all means.

Like, there’s these cheap little plastic covered journals which they sell in ‘Times-Extra’ for young people to write their secret thoughts in, and some of them have little poems in English, printed on the front in brightly colored happy-font, surrounded by cartoons of wide-eyed babies and pink puppy dogs.

So, the other day as I was wandering the aisles, a Westerner lost in a jittering puzzle of Chinese calligraphy, and my eyes picked out one of these journals. As I stood in the aisle gazing at the poem on the front, the small flashes of familiar English started a pinging in my heart for home. So, thinking, “Oh, a poem in English” I picked it up and read:

“Window people
Hand for heart
Some sky are come
It water dream
Out for open the tree
Love tell future!”

Now, being a Westerner, used to the abstractions of Western art, when at first I do not comprehend, I read it again, and then again until I have some idea of what it’s about. I need to know that what I’m reading means something, because that’s what a western mind requires - it restlessly seeks meaning wherever it goes. And naturally with this poem I assumed meaning was present because the language and form were there.

So it was with a mixture of amusement and disappointment that I eventually realized it wasn’t a poem, so much as English words in the form of a poem – simply there because of the look. It was most likely written by the printer’s assistant, using random words out of an English dictionary.

And this is something I’ve noticed all throughout Asia.
For some reason there is a fetish with the ‘look’ of English lettering, as if some authority or charisma emanates from it which their own language doesn’t have. So wherever I go I keep getting caught, mesmerized in front of signs, or following someone down the street, trying to understand the esoteric message on the back of their T shirt.

For instance, in Bangkok I saw a shop with a sign in English announcing: ‘Forget Magic’ over a shop selling clothes, and another – a hair dressing salon which called itself ‘Cheap Green Hair’ and a Thai guy wandering about with a T shirt proclaiming in neon pink over green:

… as well more use of materials existing facilities as … the number advanced composites manufacturing ... more frequently encounter in the course ….

I stopped him because I wanted to write it down in my journal so I could tell this story later, and he was totally mystified as t why I would want to write down what was on his T shirt. So I asked him if he knew what the words on his T shirt meant. He seemed amused at first, but then became worried, because he didn’t know what it meant and was beginning to think he was perhaps carrying some salacious message around on his back. I reassured him it meant absolutely nothing, and he seemed happy with that.

Over and over again I’ve found obscure English messages scattered throughout Asia, and they all mean nothing. They’re just random English words bunged onto a T shirt, or on a sign, or onto the cover of a diary and that’s it – it’s the look of ‘International’ that they want – not the meaning.

I suppose they can get enough of that in their own language.

Huaiyin Traffic

A cab pulls up, I climb in the front, next to where the driver sits in his own little wire cage – pull the door closed and show him the well worn piece of paper with the name of “Times-Extra” written in Chinese characters, which I carry because I have no idea how to say ‘Times-Extra’ in Chinese.

The driver grunts recognition, I shout, ‘Hao la?’(okay?), he nods, and I settle back in the seat and sigh as my heart-rate rises once again in anticipation of another exhilarating dose of Chinese traffic.

In fact, when I was teaching in one particular Middle School of Da Qing, notorious for its hellish conditions, the daily drive through Chinese traffic was essential for raising the energy levels sufficient for the job. You see, at this particular school the children had been toughened by daily beatings and were uncontrollably hyperactive, so one needed to be charged with a massive dose of adrenaline just to walk in through the door, let along the daily two hours of dodging kids literally bouncing off the walls, dragging recalcitrants out of the room by their hair and kicking in the sides of desks while screaming louder than them. And I remember the morning drive through Da Qing traffic always managed to set me up quite nicely for it. But that’s another story.
So, once again as we pull into the close woven stream of cars, trucks, bicycles and scooters, though I have experienced it many times, I can’t help my wonderment – the magic, the poetry, the chaotic theatre of it all.

We gain speed, swerving around people and bicycles dawdling obliviously all over the road; children wandering between lanes chatting into mobile phones and chewing on the skewers of sweet toffee’d sausages they like to eat.

A mother riding an electric bike with her young daughter perched precariously on the back coasts out from a lane-way, not pausing as she barges into the weaving traffic - again with that amazing blank face that all the Chinese on the roads have, which manages to combine a svelte ‘fuck you’ with ‘I don’t care if I live or die’ and ‘you don’t actually exist’ all together without actually saying it.
The daughter, balanced precariously but elegantly on the back of the bike is as unconcerned as her mother, trailing her hands in the wind as she gazes distractedly off to the side, as all around taxis, trucks, and busses honk and threaten each other in a constantly evolving tussle of dominance without anger.

An electric scooter meanders in front of the taxi, causing my driver to brake suddenly. In Melbourne, this would instantly cause an explosion of rage – fists out the open window, snarling replies, threats and counter threats - but here there is no anger, no threats. The taxi driver settles in behind the scooter, and the rider of the scooter does not look back – he doesn’t look anywhere but adamantly ahead. He can’t. Bundled against the wind, he resembles a bag of washing on a runaway scooter, and his face is so tightly closed within the hood of his thick nylon puffy-coat, he cannot see either side – which is perfect for Chinese traffic, considering no-one looks anywhere but straight ahead anyway.

The taxi pulls out past him, narrowly missing an oncoming bus, and when I look back through the passenger side window the rider’s eyes flick to me as we pass, but there is no reaction. He’s riding his bike to get to where he’s going – simple as that. The world must make way.

Suddenly we all stop at an intersection. I’m shocked. Traffic doesn’t stop in China, not like this anyway – not without edging forward, politely hassling the car next to you, or jockeying for a new position in front. Even red lights are driven through in this country, if the slightest space appears in the cross traffic.
As I will never cease reiterating, nothing stops Chinese traffic. But here it is – everything has stopped.

I crane my neck to see past the jam of cars in front. Perhaps it’s an accident.

Nothing.

Then I see her. A woman appears, marching up the middle of the intersecting road with her head held high, kicking her shoes up as she carries a huge scarlet Chinese flag which flutters lazily in the air behind her.

At first I think it’s just her, but then the taxi edges into a space in front and I see, following the woman down the middle of the road, a long procession of about five hundred tiny Chinese children marching in pairs behind her. Their hands and feet swing high as they mimic the woman leading them. They’re so small against the wall of idling trucks, busses and cars that face them - they’re minute; almost babies, rugged up in brightly colored puffy coats like a line of little troll dolls, pink faces solemn and eyes wide with excitement as they look about them with wonder at how the whole huge world has stopped for them.

I glance across at the face of the driver - his previously dour face is now alive with a smile he is not aware of, as are all the people stopped on bikes and in cars around us. All of us have forgotten ourselves – the innocence of these beautiful children has stripped us naked in an instant. The driver looks across at me, and his eyes are sparkling with a gorgeous emotion as he says something to me in Chinese, and though I don’t know what he’s saying, we both laugh with the lunatic joy of it all and my heart feels like it’s been suddenly filled with champagne.

And I imagine that in this moment, this street in Huaiyin has become a tiny luminescent spot of white love-light on the face of an otherwise darkening planet, visible billions of miles away as a momentary spark of hope in the universe.

The Glass Door Debacle

Ooop, here we are.

A quick “Sheh sheh” (thank you) and 6 yuan to the driver, and I’m out and into a river of dawdling people, bicycles and cars. Ahead of me is the massive monolith of ‘Times-Extra’; grey stone and concrete, trailing scarlet and gold banners and flags and a three floor high billboard featuring a pretty Asian girl laughing into a mobile phone.

I navigate my way through the thick forest of thousands of bicycles parked out front, up the stairs and through the plastic strip curtain into the babbling noise of a cavernous hall of people gathered around glass counters selling mobile phones, jewelry and many hundreds of brands of Chinese cigarettes and Bai Jiu. (a Chinese alcoholic drink – looks like vodka, tastes like distilled compost – definitely an acquired taste)

Up the elevator to the third floor where the electric’s are – a new consumers dream - immense televisions, stereo systems with flashing lights of every colour, rice cookers, washing machines, MP3 players the size of cigarette lighters, Russian cameras with names that begin with ‘Z’….

But no computers.

At first I’m incredulous – how could this immense theatre of consumer items not sell at least one computer. But then I remember the Asian way. As in Bangkok, all the computers available for sale in this city will probably be in a street full of small shops, or a vast building filled with little computer stalls all cramped together selling exactly the same thing as their neighbors.

Trouble is, right now, I don’t know where that building or street is. So, hoping I might get lucky, I wander around the various floors of ‘Times-Extra’, where the arranging of goods is so haphazard you’ll find the books displayed next to baby-food; men’s clothing next to rows of various cooking oils.

As I wander through, looking down each aisle I pass, I’ve very aware of my foreign presence pulling the curious gazes of everyone I pass along with me - people stopping and turning as I go by, often gaping with surprise. In this provincial city I’m an eye-magnet.

When I first came to China in 2002, in Da Qing, it was also like this. In that city I used to greet everyone with a cheery ‘Ni how’, because though the gawks and gazes were inquisitive, the people smiled so readily I could not fail to be charmed.

But here in Huaiyin it’s different, and I’m not sure why.

I’ll try to explain.

You see, Da Qing, being an oil town, though it was an ugly place, it had a kind of playful vibe about it – a frontier city pazzazz which made the air quiver. I suppose in part it was because there was a lot of money there, so the trickle down effect was very much apparent – brothels, expensive bathhouses, Mercedes, high quality leather and fur coats and BMW’s everywhere. The shopping in Da Qing was huge - a glut of consumer items; particularly clothes, DVD’s, mobile phones, computers and Western hamburgers.

And I suppose the other thing that Da Qing had in its favor was it was a long way away from the bureaucratic centers of Beijing and Shanghai – it was largely owned and run by the Da Qing Oil companies, who were known for their …um …independent spirits. Hence the plethora of bars, expensive cars and flashy hotels.

Added to this was the strong influence of Russian and Mongol blood in the people in Da Qing which gave them not only their extraordinarily exotic looks, but also a sense of humor that was refreshingly mischievous and much to my liking.

But here in Huaiyin, where the previous President of China, Jiang Zemin, was born, there is relatively little of that. It’s a relatively obedient, slow and desultory place; an encrustation of brick and concrete buildings around the sluggish brown artery of the Huaihe river - very rural Chinese – 99% pureblood Han Chinese peasants with none of the sparkle of Russian, Northern Chinese and Mongol blood that gave the Da Qingers their magic.

The people here are relatively dour and kind of defeated looking - their black leather jackets are fake vinyl and their clothes are often shapeless and threadbare. There are none of the rich colors and sassy leather – none of the sharp pointed sado-masochistic boots of Da Qing women; the beautifully cut black suits and chisel toed Italian leather shoes of the men. The Da Qingers were slim and tall, with fine boned faces; and walked with a sprightly demeanour, and when they shouted out to the foreigner, it was with a wide and engaging grin. And if they stared it was usually accompanied by a wide and beautiful smile. But here in Huaiyin the people look thick skinned and resilient and … kind of blunt.

And though I accept it might be my distorted foreign imagination, wherever I look, as they watch me wander by, there seems to be a strange resentment in their eyes - something that is unnerving to me.

Then I realize what it might be.

It occurs to me that the expressions on their faces as they watch me go by resemble those of people gathered around a road accident. Impassive and tucked deep inside themselves, looking through the slits of their eyes, absorbed in a strange and fascinating thing.

I suppose I’m sensitive to that look, because I’ve experienced it often in my life. Perhaps from when I was in a pop band in Australia in the 80’s, when I remember kids staring blankly, kind of drinking in my spirit from a distance – but that wasn’t so bad.

No, the look I’m talking about happened earlier – from when I was a kid. And as I remember, it unnerved me then as well.

I think I was about 12 years old when it happened - and it was a hot summer day. I was walking across a street in the busy shopping district of Lakes Entrance, a holiday town in Gippsland. I was going to return some bottles to a shop, when a speeding car hit me.

My body flew up through the air and fell down, face first to the ground. Disoriented and numb with shock, I had no idea why I was now lying on the road, so I stood up and as I stood there wondering where I was, I saw something that gave me the creeps.

As if time itself had been terminated, the entire street; all the cars, and all the people had stopped. Everything had stopped - and they were all looking at me, agape, with impassive, almost expressionless faces.

Standing there in the middle of the road with my time and space suddenly stilled, I had no idea why they were looking at me, so being a polite boy, I lifted my hand and waved to them. But no-one moved or waved back. They just stared. Then I saw the blood all over my hands and soaking through my shirt sleeve, and I realized then what had just occurred.

So maybe it’s me, not these people, that is the problem. Maybe that’s why these people’s gaze unnerves me so much - I feel like a car accident.

I factor it in and keep walking with my eyes focussed beyond them, and my ears closed to their snickering. And as I walk, I reassure myself by remembering the maxim: ‘What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’.

After a half hour of searching, I finally find some blank CD’s in a cabinet at the back of the women’s clothing section.
Other than the small pile of about four CD’s on the top shelf, the glass fronted cabinet is otherwise empty, and when I try to open the thick glass door, I find it’s locked. It’s a very large, strong looking cabinet with steel reinforcing and a bright chrome lock at the bottom of the glass door – it looks new, and the glass is spotlessly polished.

I stand in front of this cabinet looking around until a pretty young girl with small red circles of frostbite in the center of each cheek comes and says “Hello … can I help you,” in beautiful English.
“Aaah, you speak English?” I exclaim hopefully.
Her cheeks become all the more red as she explains in a mixture of masticated English and Chinese that “Hello can I help you,” is all she knows, and we both laugh.

“Mai gwan shi,” I say. (no problem)

I turn and point to the discs in the cabinet, mimicking that I need to buy one. She nods and goes back to a desk to get a large bunch of keys. She comes back, inserts one of the keys, turns it … but the key will not open the door. She pulls it out and tries another, but that one doesn’t work either. She puts the first key back in and tries coaxing it, then she tries wrestling with it, then coaxing again. Then she tries wiggling it as she turns.

But the door will not open.

She looks up and says something apologetic in Chinese.

I say again: “Mai gwan shi.” No problem.
But actually, I’m getting a bit testy because a crowd of gawkers has now collected, and one particular elderly woman in a high collared communist suit and short grey hair is standing next to me now, with her equally ancient friend. They’re both looking up into my face and exchanging observations about me in Chinese. I move in closer to the girl, who is now shaking the door of the cabinet while turning the key.

I ask her if I can try, so she gives me the key and I kneel down to have a go, but no dice. I stand up and the ancient crone in the communist Nehru suit goes back to her shortsighted scrutiny of the pores on my face – and the rest of the burgeoning crowd presses in - and they’re all looking at me, so I’m getting a touch of claustrophobia.

I’m just about to tell the girl not to worry about the CD when she calls for the supervisor, a young Chinese man in an immaculate pin-stripe suit and sparkling glasses.

So now, considering he’s in the picture, I figure I should stay.
He gives me an efficient nod, takes the keys, and he too begins pushing, pulling, coaxing and even stroking the key, trying to unlock the glass door so I can buy my blank CD.

The old biddy and her friend are still peering up at me, and I’m sort of getting used to it, but now an old guy in a Mao cap and army overcoat is on my other side – and he’s bent over and staring closely at my mud covered Blunstone boots.

Five minutes later, the supervisor is on his knees, still twisting, turning and coaxing the lock, and the group of people who have gathered to watch have begun blocking the aisle.

But now the key is fucked. It’s stuck in the door and the guy in the suit is red-faced and flustered, his spectacles askew. His previously efficient pride is forgotten as he pulls at the key with a delicate but pressing impatience. Like the girl before him, he tugs it, wiggles it, strokes it, pushes then pulls it - but it won’t come out, and the door won’t open.

Finally he looks up at me with an apologetic smile.
“Hwai le (Broken)” I say helpfully, holding my hands up in the air in a universal gesture of helplessness. He nods, then stands up and wanders off.

Figuring it’s all over, I’m just in the process of thanking the girl and bowing to the crowd of spectators when the man in the suit comes back – and this time he’s got a screw driver.

Now, if I could speak Chinese I’d be telling them ‘thank you, but don’t bother’, But as I have no Chinese other than my spatter of strangled idiot-talk, I cannot explain to this man and the attending crowd that, having caused this unfortunate occurrence, I’m really very happy to walk away without my blank CD’s.

So the Chinese people all watch me as I watch the man delicately pull up the legs of his immaculate suit and kneel once again with a painful sigh to begin unscrewing the screws which hold the metal clasp of the lock in place.

The screw comes out and rolls under the cabinet, and the tension rises a little more, and I’m praying through a fixed grin for the lock to give, but it doesn’t. The pin is too long, and there’s another screw on the other side which can’t be got to because it’s obscured by the door.

The old woman has started picking at the sleeve of my coat now, while having some kind of loud argument with her friend. I look down at her with an irritated glare, but she is not intimidated - she frowns up into my face and tells me something in stern Chinese, shaking her head as she says it.

“Yes, I know, I know,” I say, nodding apologetically, “It’s a very cheap coat.”
They both shriek with laughter.

Now the man in the suit has commandeered a couple of onlookers to grab a hold of the cabinet while he vigorously shakes the door while trying to lift it out of the clasp at the same time.

The rattling is very loud, which attracts an even larger crowd of people, and now I’m mindlessly muttering the only Chinese I can think of: “mai gwan shi, mai gwan shi,” as if it’s a magic incantation that will miraculously spring the door open. The fact that ‘mai gwan shi’ actually means a cheery “No problem,” is something I’ve forgotten about. It’s all I’ve got at the moment.

Then, just when I think things can’t get worse they do.
With a small ‘snap!’, the glass door cracks – a long one, from beside the lock, right up to the center of the door. The crowd gasps, and some at the front point at the crack, going, “Eeeeeeaaah!”
With my eyes fixed on the damaged door, I’m still muttering, “mai gwan shi, mai gwan shi,” to myself like a lunatic.
The man in the suit turns to me - his face is bright red and troubled, and his glasses are still askew. I feel like reaching out and correcting them for him but I don’t. If I had enough Chinese I’d tell him, but then again, he probably wouldn’t appreciate it right now.

He gestures back at the door and speaks to me in rapid Chinese. I’m shrugging, saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry”, in English. I feel so bad I’m seriously thinking of throwing money at him and running away.
He shakes his head, then shoulders off through the crowd with me and the girl following, to a desk where he picks up a phone. Right then the girl gently lays her hand on my arm and says, “It okay, you not sorry.”
I’m offended. “Oh no,” I say, “I am sorry. I’m very sorry.”
She shakes her head, saying, “No, no, you not.”
Then I realize what she’s actually trying to say. She’s trying to tell me not to be sorry.
“Oooh, sheh sheh.” I say inadequately. (thank you)

The man has finished his phone call, and the vibe is now that something else is about to happen – I just don’t know what it is. So we’re all standing about smiling at one another, because there’s not much to say.

At that point, considering nothing is happening, and the foreigner is not moving, the crowd begins to thin. So thinking I might be able to escape as well, I turn and begin wandering away but the sales girl grabs my arm and holds me back.
“You stay,” she says.
I look at my watch, and say brightly, “No thanks, sorry, must go.”
Right then I see two workers in blue overalls arrive with a tool case, and for a second I once more feel obligated to stiff this thing out. But honestly, I don’t think I can. I’ve been trying to buy this blank CD for almost an hour now, and I don’t think I can handle any more excitement today.
So muttering, “Mai gwan shi, mai gwan shi…” to whoever is listening, I sidle away to lose myself in the river of people in the main aisle.

The Turtle

To recover from this debacle I decide to go upstairs to the supermarket to buy some food. So I catch the elevator upstairs, pick up a plastic shopping and wander through the vegetable section, where I finger some broccoli, then decide to buy some dumplings instead – so I wander off to where all the big steamers are on the other side of the room. To get there I have to go through the fresh fish section, where aquariums are piled on top of one another, teeming with different species of fish.

I notice to my left a small table holding a shallow glass bowl full of turtles piled on top of one another, peering out through the glass with their doomed little eyes. It’s heart rending, so I try not to look, but as I pass I see one brave little chap hanging over the edge of the bowl – he’s waving his flippers and craning his neck, and my foreign heart catches for a beat, because he seems to be looking right at me.

As I pass, I mutter, “Sorry, can’t help you,” and walk on.
And when I look back I notice he’s stopped waving his flippers and gone still, as if to say in hurt wonder, “You heartless bastard.”.
I feel terrible, but what am I supposed to do. I’m in China for gods sake. They eat turtles here – that’s the truth of it.

So I go and buy a bag of Chinese dumplings, then decide I need some broccoli after all, so I head back to the vegetable section. As I pass the bowl of turtles again I notice the little chap I saw before, who had been hanging over the edge of the bowl, is now gone. And there is a thin man standing next to the table, and he’s spriuking with a very loud voice. Turtles are on special today it seems, so I assume the little chap has been sold.

I make my way back to the broccoli and I’m just making my selection when I catch a movement out of the corner of my eye – something under the watermelon stall - a flash of something small and black. I squint to see, and there he is, madly flippering his way across the slippery linoleum. He must have jumped from the bowl soon after I’d passed, and covered all of three metres without being noticed.
Plucky little thing.

Standing there clutching a head of broccoli, I quietly cheer him on as he appears from under the onion counter with his head bobbing, and his flippers skidding on the floor. Miraculously he makes it all the way across the aisle and disappears under the counter where I’m standing.

I think to myself, how amazing it is, this little creature, making a dash toward an impossible freedom. But where would he go? We’re on the third floor and the stairs are a long, long way away, through throngs of jostling Chinese, none of whom would be particularly inspired by his courage. But nonetheless, a part of me is still jumping up and down inside myself, screaming, “Go you little fucker, go!”

Right them, as I’m placing a head broccoli in my shopping basket, I feel a gentle tapping at the toe of my boot. I look down and there he is, flippers still going like fuck, trying to navigate his way around my boot.

I move my foot back and he continues on past without a look back, and I think, ‘That’s the way buddy, don’t look back.’ But once again my heart fills up with pathos of this small creature’s desperate courage.

And that’s when I make a big mistake.

I don’t know what I was thinking, but for some reason I decided I could help – so I bent down and picked him up.
The inspiration had been to save him in some way, but I wasn’t thinking straight. As I stood up with him suspended in my hand, flippers still scrambling desperately through the air, I wondered what the hell was I going to do now?

Put him in my pocket? Or inside my coat?

But then, how would I explain his presence on my person if I was caught at the checkout? A foreigner trying to smuggle a frantic turtle out of ‘Times-Extra’ might be a difficult thing for Chinese security to comprehend, even without the language barrier.
And all the while as I dithered, he still struggled in my hand. I imagine he must have been screaming, “Well don’t just stand here, do something for Christ’s sake!”

But I made another mistake.

Deciding maybe I would put him in my pocket, I turned to see if anyone was watching, and as I turned, the spruiker at the turtle stand also turned. Our eyes met, then his eyes dropped, and a big smile came over his face when he saw the turtle in my hand.
There was nothing I could do. I stood there like a fool as the spruiker came across and, thanking me in Chinese, took the turtle from my hand

And as he laughingly bore the turtle away I could almost hear the desperate scream fading into the distance.
“…but I trusted you!’
The guilt. The betrayal. I felt terrible for the rest of the day.

A few days later I was telling my girlfriend the story on the phone, and how bad I felt, and she said, “Well, why didn’t you just buy him?”
I stopped. Of course, why didn’t I buy him?
“You know, it never occurred to me.” I said.
“You could have had a pet turtle.”
“Yes I could have, couldn’t I?”
“And it would be your little friend …”
“Yes, a little friend.”
We both thought about that for a few seconds.
“What do turtles eat?”
“Don’t they eat mud?”
“No… I think they eat plants.”
I wondered why I hadn’t thought of such an obvious solution. I thought about how I could have kept him in a bowl in my apartment – about how I could have had a little friend. It could have ended happily.
“Do turtles feel pain?” I said.

(to go to 'Da Qing Blues' click here)

(to go to Bangkok Blues click here)

The other day a Chinese teacher offered to take me to a local bathhouse where he’d shout me a sauna and massage. And though I’m not usually one for sitting around in hot steam or being pummeled and kneaded by a stranger, in this country if your host offers to pay for a very expensive gift (and a sauna and massage is very expensive), it is very rude to refuse – so I thanked him enthusiastically.

It was a small shop-front decked out with pine paneling, potted plants and carpets in the foyer, with a kid in a glitzy uniform opening and closing the front door, as well as supplying each of the guests with a glass of green tea.

I was asked to take off my shoes and was given a pair of plastic sandals, a couple of towels and a locker key, then I followed my friend in through the wooden doors into the dressing room.
The moment the door opened, a hot and pungent fug of ammonia, sweat and used steam hit me in the face, fogging up my glasses. My first reaction was maybe I should plead sickness and go, but I figured it would at the very least be an interesting experience.
I took off my glasses, cleaned them, then put them back on and was presented with wall to wall Chinese flesh – hairless, pale, rubbery bodies – standing about scratching themselves, sitting, lying about on couches, sprawled on vinyl massage couches with their legs splayed like dissected frogs.

A man sat bent over on a bench peering between his legs at some fascinating anomaly he’d found beneath his scrotum. And there in the corner in a couple of open cubicles, where two Chinese men squatting over hole-in-the-floor-toilets, contemplating me over their folded arms as they each took a quiet shit.

Now, I’m no prude, but having never been in a football team, my delicate western sensibilities with their secret code of ‘don’t look’ found all this a little confronting - the moreso because almost each of these men was watching me with a long expressionless gaze. I don’t know what was going through their heads – I never do – but the pressure of all those silent eyes was palpable.
So, acting like I do this all the time, while keeping up a stream of light conversation with the Chinese teacher, I opened my locker and got my gear off in a purposeful fashion, then turned around and noticed every eye in the place had immediately dropped to check out the foreigners dick. Nobody gasped…but then, thankfully, nobody smirked either.

One guy gestured at it, then made a speculative observation in Chinese to his friend who smiled, said something back, and for a moment I wondered what kind of exchange it had been then, but knowing that whatever I imagined a Chinese man would be thinking would be wrong, I put it from my mind.
Keeping my face blank, I slipped my feet into the little plastic sandals, slung my towel over my shoulder and followed my host into the larger room where the hot baths were, and all the eyes followed me like so many invisible laser beams.

Now, call me neurotic, or paranoid, and I might well be both, but in the West I rarely feel comfortable being naked with other guys. I’ve got no problem being naked with women, but with men it’s … kind of difficult.
I think it’s because either I’m self conscious, or I sense self consciousness, I’m not sure – but there’s a kind of comparing thing that happens when Western men get their gear off together - a kind of furtive vanity, in which I feel as if each man is secretly grading himself against the other men in some kind of pyramid of power.

And it’s not exclusive to the sauna - I feel the presence of this invisible pyramids of power most times when I’m with groups of Western men. If they’re talking cars, it’ll be about what kind of car they have, what they know about cars and so on – or if they’re talking about their careers, it’ll be all about what they do, how much they make, and so on - each man will be positioning himself in relation to all the others in some kind of dog pack pyramid of power. Whether it’s a conversation about their house, their work, their kids or even gardening, it’s often the same. Many western men are so pathologically competitive I get claustrophobia whenever I’m in a group of them.

And in the sauna, that same dynamic is palpably present. It might be about the size of their gut, or other guys gut, or their dick, or how racked they are, or whether the guy they’re sitting next to is bigger, smaller, stronger, hairier, better looking – whatever - the self consciousness is furtive but persistent, like a vanity driven mind-fuck which makes simply sitting in a sauna a politically fraught event– so I’d rather not be there.

And there’s this other thing – a covert paranoia about being seen to be checking out the other guys dick. I mean, everybody does it, but they try to do it without being seen to do it. I think the only guys that don’t give a shit about comparing dicks are gay guys and football teams – but straight guys – it’s definitely a no-no.
The effect of this is rather odd – you’ll be sitting on benches in a sauna, or hanging out in the dressing room talking, and there’ll be this peculiar ‘dance of the eyes’, as each man tries to keep doggedly aloof from the swinging bits of the other blokes while at the same time struggling with their natural curiosity.

But in a Chinese sauna I’ve discovered, it’s a very different vibe.
Strangely enough, for all the blatant scrutiny, I didn’t feel self conscious at all. It felt different, and when I thought about it, I realized it was because the power pyramid was not here – which is a paradox, because outside the doors of this room, the power pyramid is very much a part of Chinese male life, engendering a whole repertoire of subtle precedents, manners and body language.
But then it also occurred to me that perhaps I was just not conscious of the power pyramid simply because I was an alien.
But still, it definitely felt different – as if male competitiveness had taken a holiday within these walls.

All these Chinese men, stripped of their usual power-dress uniforms of black and grey, lolling about with their cocks out, gossiping about stuff, inspecting their balls, taking shits – they seemed comfortable together.

And I remember that comfort from when I’d been a boy with my mates, all of us leaping about in the river with no clothes on, comparing dicks, farts and whatever else came to hand – the innocence and joy of it. Well, a bit of that was here too – these blokes and their frank curiosity with me and each other – they lacked the adult vanity that makes it all go weird. We were simply a room full of men – some skinny, some well built, others flabby or with sunken chests or weird lumps, some squat, some long and thin, others fat – a room full of naked men enjoying some leisure time.

Hanging Out With the Chairman

Speaking of ‘frank curiosity’ - I’d had a similar experience a couple of months before, in different circumstances. A day after I arrived in Huaiyin, Alex, the assistant to Ms. Dai, our supervisor, had rung me and requested that I attend a medical examination in an hour.

Now, I’m not overly keen on doctors, or with being probed with rubber gloves. There’s something obscene about being poked, probed and peered at while being treated as possibly toxic at the same time.
Also, there was an icy blizzard raging outside and the freezing fingers of the wind where everywhere, so I didn’t fancy the idea of taking my clothes off in some draughty communist surgery.
“Why do I need a medical examination?” I asked peevishly.
Alex’s calm Chinese voice smiled patiently down the line.
“To see if you are ill,” he said.
“Do I look ill?”
“No … but maybe the doctor can help you.”
This curly logic made me pause.
“But I’m not ill.”
“Aaah, how do you know? You might be ill inside.”
“Inside? No. I am very healthy inside.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know.”
It was Alex’s turn to pause – then he said quietly, “But Mr Roger, the doctor is expecting you.” As if the poor doctor would be heartbroken if I didn’t turn up. But what could I say?
So I pulled on two sweaters, two coats, two scarves and my woollen hat and leather gloves and, swaddled in this way, I waddled out into the blizzard to meet Alex at the front gate where we caught a taxi.

Skidding to a skewed halt in the slurry of ice on the road, the taxi delivered us to an imposing grey building with chipped Corinthian columns – the usual dilapidated remnant of communist-classicist grandeur left standing in towns like Huaiyin all over China.
With its high ceilings and damp concrete floors now channelled from wear, and most of its internal doors and windows cracked, it was the worst possible place to have a medical centre on a day like this.
Added to which, the foyer was packed with young Chinese men in terrible suits – and they were all smoking strong cigarettes, the thick smoke of which combined with the vapour rising from their clothes, sticking in my throat like noxious clag.

Alex told me they were all prospective coal miners waiting for their examinations. I joked they must be preparing themselves for the lung diseases of their chosen profession.
But Alex didn’t smile.
“Lung diseases?”
“Yes, you know … smoking?”
He thought about this, then nodded earnestly and said, “Yes, it is very bad for the health.”
I left it at that. It was a bit obscure, I must admit, and besides, it was too cold for laughing.
We joined the queue at a sliding window where Alex picked up our form and gave it to me to fill out. On ancient yellowing paper in rickety typed English, it was headed:

‘PHYSICAL EXAMINATION RECORD FOR FOREIGNER.’

The form then asked me to ‘truthfully’ tick yes or no as to whether I had had a long list of things, many of which I had never heard of, like ‘Brucellosis’ and ‘Relapsing Fever’.

And then it asked me a more interesting question:
‘Do you have any diseases or disorders endangering the public order and security’ and listed toxicomania, mental confusion, and other varied psychoses.

I paused over ‘mental confusion’, wondering what would happen if, in all truthfulness, I ticked ‘yes’. I mean, hasn’t everyone had mental confusion? (Voice from above: “No Roger, you’re the ONLY ONE!!!)
Then I thought, maybe they’re all trick questions, because as any seasoned psychotic knows, you’re always the last to know. So maybe the most indicative response from a total nutter would be to deny everything.

But all musings aside, I knew what they expected. In all reality, they didn’t give a damn if I was sane or totally nuts so long as the semblance of public order could be seen to be maintained – and that meant giving the right answers rather than the correct ones.
So I denied everything.

Basically, the examination consisted of wandering from room to room, each another grimy cold store, in which there seemed to be the same ancient and anonymous nurse bundled to the nose in white cotton with a cap pulled down over her eyes so she looked like a bag of washing with a human trapped inside – and each of these apparitions would curtly order the queues of young Chinese men in terrible suits about – getting them to lie down on beds with their shirts up while she slid a freezing stethoscope over their chests, or pushing them to stand in front of ancient, clanking X-ray machines.

It was all okay, even entertaining, though I had momentary uncertainty when we pushed through the door to one particular room, beside which was a large bin full of stained swabs and used syringes spattered with blood. And there was that same old nurse, drawing blood from a the arm of a pale young Chinese man.

With the wind whistling through a crack in the window, the room was like a relic from the Korean war, cluttered with rusting metal benches, racks of glass bottles and old paper packages of swabs. The concrete floor was covered in dusty footprints and trodden in swabs from where she’d missed the bin.

But still, I figured I’ve seen worse in my travels so I took my turn at showing how manfully I could keep chatting with Alex as the needle went in and took three small test tubes of blood, each one of which she dutifully labelled.

Then I noticed her turn to the section of my medical form listing a whole lot of diseases including HIV, venereal disease and the plague among others, and quickly tick all the boxes denoting that none of these diseases were present.
‘But … how does she know?’ I thought, looking at my three untouched test tubes of blood among all the other test tubes of blood in the rack. It was all very mysterious, but then, I’m the last to know correct procedure in a Chinese medical lab.

So where are we going with all this?
Well, I’m simply setting the scene I suppose – and where it’s all leading is to the next room, where the last page of my medical form had to be filled out.

It was right down the end of the corridor, where a large circle of men milling about puffing on powerful Chinese cigarettes as they gaped at me coming toward them.

Inside it was dingy, the only light coming from a grimy louvered window high up on one wall. Next to the door as I came in was a huge cast iron weighing machine, an eye chart and a gilt framed portrait of Chairman Mao as, along benches on either side of the room, men waited, whispering to each other, the hissing Chinese consonants reverberating in the air like the sound of water over rocks.
At the end of the room was a rickety old wooden desk behind which, on a swivel stool sat a stern old Chinese man in a white coat, his round spectacled face brown and weathered like a walnut.
He and the desk were surrounded by more young men in bad suits, all whispering and watching the goings on as they waited their turn.

I sat down on a vacant stool and slowly got an idea of what I was in for next.

One by one, each of these guys was pulling down their pants and bending over for the doctor to matter of factly spread their cheeks and squint through his spectacles and mutter to himself at whatever he found. He’d make a small and meticulous note in their form, then slap them on the bum to turn round so he could paw at their scrotums while once again squinting and muttering to himself.

Now, as I have said, I’m no prude, but the idea of this close examination of my foreign anatomy within a ring of gawking Chinese coal miners was a bit shocking.

I turned to Alex.
“I’m not doing this.”
Alex drew his eyes away from the scrum around the old man’s desk and frowned.
“Oh, but you mus’. You mus’ be examined.”
I pointed to the old man.
“But ... he’s not washing his hands, or wearing rubber gloves.” I said in a restrained panic, quite forgetting my phobia of rubber gloves.
Alex smiled. “He is very clean,” he said, waving his hands reassuringly. “He is a doctor.”
I pointed to all the men standing around.
“But … they might have crabs.” I said.
Alex did a double take, stepping back.
“Crabs?” he said, “What is crabs?”
This stopped me. How do I explain?

Then the door opened and Chairman Mao stepped in.
Well, he looked like Chairman Mao - a big man in an old khaki army coat, with the same round and benign features and panda ears of white hair – the same smiling eyes and that kind fatherly thing going for him. I looked up at the portrait of Mao on the wall and he was the spitting image. He pushed through the door as if he’d just dropped in from the Long March to check on the troops.
He spotted me as soon as he came in and immediately began talking to me with great interest. He was holding a lit cigarette daintily between the ends of two fingers and he had the easy confidence of authority, which added to his resemblance to Mao. My temporary distraction and his strangled English was such that I didn’t notice he was speaking to me until Alex told me the old man wanted to know where I was from.

I told him I was from Australia, and he nodded appreciatively. The room had gone quiet, and everybody was watching us as, between puffs at his cigarette, he asked me in fair English what I was doing in China, then nodded thoughtfully over my brief answer that I was here as a teacher at the Institute.
“You will be examined?” he asked, pointing to the old doctor who was still at his desk, diligently ploughing through a steady procession of obediently spread bottoms and Chinese scrotums.
“He is a very good doctor,” he said grandly. “He is my very good friend.”
He threw a loud quip in Chinese over to the doctor while pointing to me and everybody in the room laughed – well, everybody except me, who was still panicking at the idea of having to drop my pants in the middle of this scrum of Chinese blokes.
But the combination of my ever-present pride and Chairman Mao made it such that I couldn’t back down now. I had to go through with it or risk looking like a wimpy foreigner with something to hide – couldn’t get his drawers off like the other blokes – that kind of thing.

So I calmed myself down and waited.

I noticed then that new young men kept coming in through the door, but nobody was leaving. I wondered why they weren’t when their examinations were over – why were they loitering and glancing occasionally at me?

Silly me.

As more men came in the atmosphere became more expectant until finally the old doctor gestured for me to come to the scales to be weighed. By this time the room was jam packed and they were all watching me, and right up the front was Chairman Mao, beaming down through the smoke of yet another cigarette.

After having my eyes checked, I took off my two coats and my two scarves and stepped up to the old metal machine to be weighed. Then I was measured, and my big moment came. With a hiss and a poke in the ribs the old doctor hustled me behind his desk, where he sat down and gestured for me to drop my pants, which I did.
He then gestured with a twirl of his forefinger for me to turn around and bend over. I obeyed and heard the shuffling of many feet as the entire room moved in. The doctor kindly parted my cheeks for their pleasure. There were no gasps or exclamations so I figured everything was fine.

A slap on the bum indicated for me to stand and turn around, so I did, and found myself cocooned within in a wall of Chinese faces, at the front of which stood Chairman Mao, still smiling exuberantly, with his cigarette poised thoughtfully to the side.

The old doctor matter of factly grabbed my scrotum in one hand and lifted it up to peer beneath, prodding with a finger at whatever he was looking for. As he did the crowd all shuffled for position, craning their necks to look over his shoulder - no gasps of surprise or admiration – just the stilled hush of absorbed fascination.
It was then that Chairman Mao, also up on tiptoes, made a comment in Chinese which caused the doctor to pause. With my scrotum still cradled in his palm, he turned and laughingly responded, and a lengthy conversation began.

This conversation went on about a minute, during which time I stood blank faced, gazing intently at a spot high up on the wall as the audience remained equally transfixed, blinking thoughtfully as they gazed me.

Now, when your bag of jewels is resting in a Chinaman’s palm while his attention is elsewhere, time goes rather slowly - so I found myself wondering how many scrotums and bums this old bloke inspected closely each day, and got caught up with the mathematics of it all.

Assuming a rate of about six scrotums and bums an hour, with an eight hour day, that gave me the impressive figure of 48.
And then if you extrapolate that to a week – 240
And for a year (assuming a month holiday), I came up with the astounding number of 11,520 scrotums and bums the old bloke had pawed and peered at.
I was sure I must have calculated wrongly, but just as I was about to begin again the old Doctor remembered where he was and, turning back, released me and gestured curtly for me to pull up my pants. Evidently all was okay.

I pulled up my fly, and seeing the crowd still gazing opened mouth, I gave them all a deep bow, murmuring an ironic, “Thank you gentlemen, thank you so very much…”
To my surprise, they all burst out laughing, then everyone loudly applauded. And once again, as happens so often in this strange, alien place, my heart filled up with the wondrous lunatic joy that blindsides me so often in China.

So, back to the sauna.
Me and the Chinese teacher found ourselves sitting in a tiny wooden steam filled box on one of three benches, surrounded by naked Chinese guys all talking at me in Chinese, with the teacher translating.
It was the usual stuff: ‘where are you from’, ‘I like kangaroos’, ‘are you married’ and so on.

It was very exhausting, so after a few minutes I said I was going out to sit in the pool. So they all followed and sat around me in a wide ring in the hot blue water and, with our voices echoing loudly off the tiles, the questioning continued, meandering endlessly through the usual fascinations with the mundane and inconsequential:
‘Do you have brothers and sisters’; ‘yes’; ‘how many’; ‘four’; to which there was much widening of eyes and looking at each other with incredulous shakes of the head.

It’s an amazing and somewhat piteous side-effect of the one-child policy that wherever I go in China people are astonished by the fact that I have four brothers and sisters. At least once a week, I am asked this question, and the effect is always the same – amazement, bafflement, incredulity and sometimes, especially in children, a muted yearning.

The only other thing that gets the same incredulous effect is when I am seen writing left handed. This also provokes hisses of amazement, largely because Chinese schools, for reasons no-one has yet explained, actively discourage left handedness in children.
By now the heat was getting to me. Everything was hot – the sauna, the pool, and when I went to cool down under the shower I found it was also set on hot. So I staggered out into the dressing room, to find the air conditioner was blowing hot air and the attendants were all smoking, which mixed with the powerful melange of other odours, making a particularly noxious atmospheric soup.

My heart was pounding and I was sweating like a pig, but still this procession of naked Chinese men followed me wherever I went, sitting when I sat, going wherever I went, and all the way the Chinese teacher was translating questions, swapping quips in Chinese, and selling me into slavery for all I knew. But by this stage I didn’t really care, because everywhere I went was hot, hot, hot.

I decided I had to get out, so I told the teacher I’d had enough, and thanked him.
“Oh no, you cannot go.” he said brightly. “You mus’ have massage.”
I looked over at where men were spread like latex rubber dolls over wet vinyl couches as attendants scrubbed them vigorously with salt and coconut oil, and I shook my head.
“No thanks. Think I’ll pass on the massage.”
He cocked his head quizzically and I realised he didn’t understand the idiom, ‘I’ll pass’.
“I don’t need a massage, thank you.” I said, pointing to the couches.
He shook his head.
“Oh no, no, massage is not here,” he said, then pointed to the roof with a finger. “Massage is upstair.”
“Ooooh,” I said.
I hadn’t realised they had an upstair.
Then I remembered a story a friend of mine had told me about his experience of an ‘upstair’ massage in Da Qing.

Being Businesslike With Hector

I’ll call him Hector, and this story is told from memory so it’s not his exact words – but as close as I can recall.
Hector was a portly bloke who’d spent his transient life reeling throughout the world on various intoxicants working as a musician while making a buck wherever and however he could. So now he was in China, living in an apartment around the corner from the hotel where I lived, doing the same thing I was doing – teaching in the hellish ghettos of the Da Qing Middle Schools where a single 40 minute class could suck the life out of you, leaving only an empty skin bag clutching a briefcase.

One day, soon after his arrival, Hector came trundling down the hall to my rooms for a visit. He sat down on the couch, lit a fag, and I offered him a cup of tea which he accepted.
He waited for me to sit down, whereupon he declared enigmatically, “I just had a massage.”
“Uhuh. So what?”
Now, Hector has a yen for the dramatic – he talks very slowly and particularly, as if stitching his sentences together with string, with many meaningful movements of the eyes implying ‘things better left unsaid’.
He leant forward with a little smile flickering on his lips.
“Well Roger, I have found that a Chinese massage is … um… somewhat unique…”

So he told me this story.
He’d gone to a bathhouse that most of us attended in Da Qing, particularly in the winter. It was similar to the bathhouse in Huaiyin, only much larger and more luxurious, with many hot and cold pools and the usual rows of vinyl covered tables which were always covered with naked guys being scrubbed with salt and coconut oil. (Seems to be a national pastime - I tried it once, but found it a little unnerving to have a bloke rubbing salt and coconut oil all over the place.)

Now, I knew there was an extra facility for massages upstairs, but as I’ve never been one for massages, I’d never bothered with it, and knew nothing about it. But this particular day Hector had done the sauna and hot bath thing, so he decided to give the massage a go as well. He paid the money and, briefly wondering why a massage should be so expensive, wandered on up the stairs.

He said he’d been met at the top of the stairs by a very grim looking middle aged Chinese woman in a long white cotton coat like doctors wear, who’d directed him into a small cubicle to the side. She followed him in and, closing the door, indicated he should get his gear off.

So Hector stripped to his underwear and laid down on his face on the cotton couch, and the woman in the white coat gave him a very vigorous massage.

At that point in the telling, a new smile crept onto Hectors face. He lit another cigarette, then continued.
“So I’m lying there and … well, it had been a long time since, you know, the touch of a woman, so…”
He gestured indistinctly with his hands.
“What?”
He pursed his lips and looked to the side.
“Lets just say I experienced … a distinct swelling of the gland…”
“You got an erection?”
He winced. “Not in such words, Roger, please…”
“Yeah, yeah … so go on.”
The woman finished doing Hector’s back then nudged him to turn over, which he did.
“So I’m lying back, with what is by now, um … well … quite a bit of a tent, and…”
He paused.
“And what?”
“Well, she whipped the front of my underpants down, scooped up some massage cream from the pot by the couch, grabbed my cock and jerked me off in a very businesslike way.”
We both sat in silence for a second.
“A businesslike way?”
“Yeah. Businesslike. No mucking about. Just whoop! Like milking a cow. Finished me off, pulled my pants up and continued on with the massage. Very efficient.”
“Huh. No warning?”
“Nope. Took me quite by surprise.”
“But you lay back and took it.”
“Well, of course. It was most welcome.”
“Was she good looking?”
“Roger, she was wearing a white coat. Like a doctor.”
“Oh.”

She finished the massage, told him to get dressed, then hustled him out of the cubicle with him feeling very much more relaxed than before. The two of us had been very amused by this practical handjob. Somehow it seemed quintessentially Chinese. Sensible and … businesslike.

We found out later that this event was not exceptional – that in fact, in bathhouses throughout China this service was the norm, carried out without a flicker of lasciviousness or sham eroticism. Simply a practical part of having a massage.
We speculated that perhaps this practice had to do with the lack of women in China – that this inclusion of an orgasm as part of a massage was a practical means of assuaging a national need. I mean, I don’t know how far back this practicality goes in China’s history, but it definitely serves a purpose now.

In 2000, the statistic showed that there were 18.07 million more boys than girls in the age range of 0-14, so the problem is quite extreme, to the extent that Chinese men are now buying North Korean women as wives, and even going further afield to Cambodia, even though many Chinese regard South East Asian people as inferior.
The reasons for this imbalance of the sexes are largely related to the combination of the one child policy and the continuing myth of male superiority. Though superficially the revolution gave lip-service to the equality of women, human culture remained impervious, such that even now most men do not know how to cook, and they do not participate in cleaning.
So many couples try to avoid having female children. In extreme cases, in rural areas, female babies are discreetly killed, though this practice is dying out now.

More usual is the use of abortion. While the country has laws prohibiting gender identification through scientific means (unless it is medically required), there are still no laws to prevent a girl embryo being aborted once the gender is ascertained. A pregnant woman can find out the sexuality of her future baby by spending 40 yuan (about $6) to do an ultrasonic check in a hospital, followed by an abortion. And though this is strictly illegal, the penalty of a small fine is not a deterrent.
But anyway, I digress.
Where was I?
Oh right.

So when the naked Chinese teacher pointed his finger to the roof and said: “Is upstair,” I got to thinking of Hector and his practical ‘upstairs’ wank, and found myself in two minds.
The loudest mind was my ‘dog mind’ which is keen on any kind of stray sex, wherever it comes from.

But this mind was moderated by the more sophisticated ‘Roger’ mind which overrode ‘dog mind’ to decide that I just didn’t feel like being jerked off in a businesslike way. Not in some little cubicle with a stern Chinese woman in a white coat anyway. There was something demeaning about it, the idea of a businesslike orgasm.
It was all very complicated.

But then I thought, well I’m assuming a lot here – perhaps it’s just a straight massage after all, though I knew that wasn’t likely – the ‘upstair massage’ was now well known to all the foreign teachers.

But anyway, I was hot and tired, and sick of being stared at, so I figured I’d take the risk of offending the Chinese teacher.
“No thanks,” I said, “I think I'll go now.”
He nodded seriously, then said, “It is very good for the health to have a massage. You will feel more relaxed.”
“Yes, you're probably right,” I said formally. “And you have been very kind, but it’s time for me to go.”

He seemed relatively unfazed by my refusal, so I got dressed, then thanked him and, after shaking the hands of all the other blokes and promising to come back, I left him sitting on a bench, still naked, smoking a cigarette and gossipping loudly and happily with the attendants.

...........................................................

PS
On this fine point of Hector's businesslike wank, and how it was applied so matter of factly by the stern middle aged woman in the white coat... I've had some extra thoughts, which are perhaps not entirely relvant to what I've been writing bout...but most of what I write about it entirely irrelevant anyway, so what the fuck.

I was thinking that if it had have been a western working girl in that room with Hectory it would have been different. There would have had to have been a whole fake erotic dance involved - to flatter, titillate and tickle the sexual ego of the western customer.

Which got me thinking, ‘maybe that’s what is so offensive to the Chinese (and the Thai’s for that matter) about foreigners and sex (because they do find our western relation ship with sex quiter repulsive). It’s not the sex organs, or the orgasms or the simple ‘fact’ of sex that offends them, so much as the whole charade of eroticism that westerners feel compelled to apply to sex, which forms a major part of our culture – in films, fashion, and the way we relate to each another.'

In the West we're kept in a fairly constant state of erotic tension by the media and advertsing. Women dress to create an erotic charge in men, and men live in a culture which, compared to Chinese male culture, is hyperactively sexual

But there’s none of that here – not yet anyway. (But it’s coming, I’m sure).

People here don’t dress for the ‘wow’ factor – they don’t give a shit about brands or standing out in a crowd – they simply wear clothes. Men don’t care about the size of their dicks, and women don’t care about the size of their breasts, and they don’t swap stories about how good last nights pickup was in bed, simply because there was no last nights pickup. The majority of mature men and women can count the lovers they’ve had on one hand.

I had a class recently, (and remember - we're talking about university students here - 21-22 years old), where I spent the class telling them all about the sex habits of Australians, and the reaction was shocking. When I told them that it was common in Australia and most western countries for boys and girls of sixteen to be having sex with different partners their virginal squeals were deafening, and many of the guys had their hands to their mouths in shock and disbelief.

“For Christ’s sake, you’re all adults,” I said finally in frustration. “What’s the problem?”

As usual when everyone was embarrassed, there was a prim silence, so I pointed to the monitor, who was also spokesman for the class.
“We think this is bad,” he said. “We think love is more important so we will not have sex with anyone but our wife.”
“Rubbish!” I said, “I see many of you kissing and holding hands …”
More giggling and squealing (remember again, these are 21 year old men and women)
The monitor cut in emphatically.
“But we don’t have sex!” he said “Sex should never be abused! Love is more important”
And all the class nodded, and some girls cooed, and in a cynical moment it occurred to me that he was getting lots of brownie points for this little speech.

But, from that final statement, they wouldn’t be budged any further. My class plan of an enthusiastic disclosure of the illicit sex habits of Chinese youth flew out the window. I reached for plan ‘B’ – a discussion about divorce, and how it is growing exponentially in China.

But you see where I’m headed? There’s a paradox here.
In this country, even wearing a short sleeved shirt in the supermarket is considered risqué, and hipster jeans on a girl with her belly showing?
No way!

In this city, if not in most of China at the moment, sex is simply not important – not like food, which is of supreme importance.
In China the whole day seems to be filling in time between the highlights of the meals.
Even in greeting each other, the concern of food comes first for the Chinese.
“Ni chilla ma?” (have you eaten?)
To which the common response is, “Hao chilla!” (good food).

When I first came here, I thought this was odd. I asked why this was a common greeting. My students explained that it had to do with the powerful theme of starvation in Chinese history.
Put simply for thousands of years the majority of Chinese have been very, very hungry, and everyone remembers relatives who have died of starvation. It’s only recently that food has been relatively plentiful.

But sex? No problem there – it’s always been plentiful. So why make a big deal out of it? Why indeed? Perhaps the only reason we foreigners make such a big deal about it is because of our Christian past, in which sexual expression was polluted with shame.

So we have this paradoxical situation - on one hand the face of sex in China is covered with a sentimental and very moralistic mask, as was indicated by the students, yet on the other it’s considered normal behaviour for a female masseur to jerk a guy off as part of a massage.

And this fits perfectly with a people who are obsessed with safety and security yet find it normal to ride their motorbikes at top speed without a helmet, with their baby nestled in their lap, and their wife riding side saddle on the pillion - hurtling headlong into cross-traffic without a look left or right.

And its the same with the government and the authorities – on the face of it, they’re heavy handedly authoritarian and moralistically rigid. And yet, on the streets and in the alleys, in the houses and in their heads, the Chinese, like most Asians, are in a constant state of spontaneous improvisation – and in that perpetually mischievous state they’ll bend any law if it it’s practical to do so.

Of course, it must be remembered that the two cities I have lived in here are Da Qing, and now Huaiyin, and in neither place is the local culture even a fraction as cosmopolitan as Shanghai or Beijing, where bare bellies, sex toys and promiscuity are now approaching Western standards – not to mention drug use, divorce and depression –but that’s another story.

Added to this, I recently found out that the sexual conservatism I have been alluding to has not always been a characteristic of Chinese life. In ancient China, before the sexual conservatism of Confucius and then Mao’s revolutionary council, erotic sex was an important part of the Tao view of health and life.

During the Chou Dynasty (770 BC to 222 BC), in line with Taoist doctrine men and women were divided into the yin and the yang aspects of human life. In this, life was seen as essentially an energy field in which the female was said to have an inexhaustible supply of yin essence.

Men however, had a only limited supply of yang, so it was forbidden for men to use up their yang essence without acquiring plenty of yin essence. That meant that before a man was allowed to ejaculate, he had to prolong sex, to give the woman the opportunity to orgasm several times, so her yin essence would be powerful enough for the both of them. So if a man ejaculated or used up his yang essence before he got a chance to take in enough yin essence, it was said to cause him health problems and even death.

As a consequence of this a culture of eroticism and sexual artistry was an important thread of Chinese life, all designed for the practical (that word again) function of maintaining people’s health and wellbeing.

Another interesting point is that female homosexuality at that time was widespread, whereas male homosexuality was rare – though not for moral reasons. Male homosexuality was avoided simply because it they thought it would cause a loss of yang essence and harm both the man and the community as a result. But since women were said to have an unlimited yin essence, there was no loss of yin in female homosexual relations, so they could make love with each other to their hearts content – and apparently they did.

It must also be remembered however, that this culture of the erotic was not widespread in China - as in many western countries, it was largely restricted to the aristocracy. For the peasants, like peasants the world over, sex remained something covert and animal.

So, how can I finish this long, meandering postscript?

I’ll just tell one more story ... loosely connected to the Chinese yin/yang thing, where men were supposed to restrain their orgasm.

When I was in Da Qing in 2002, I was accommodated in a suite of rooms at the back of a large hotel. Various other teachers had other similar suites upstairs, but I was the only one downstairs.

Anyway, right next to my suite was a room which was always empty during the day, but very busy at night, because various bar girls from the clubs down the road used to bring their clients there. So, because the walls were very thin, I got an interesting 6 month aural excursion through the sexual antics of drunk Chinese men and bar girls.

Now this would not be at all interesting, except for the fact that, for all the appreciative noises the girls would make during sex, I never once heard anything signifying release from the many men who visited that room.

It was very strange.
The soundscape would go something like this.
Slam of the door … then talking.
Then the bathroom, then more talking, then the television.
Then they’d start. Rhythmic thumping of the bed against the wall together with her doing the ecstasy thing, “ … oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, OH! OH OH OH!!!!
And I’d be lying in bed on the other side of the wall thinking, ‘okay then, this is getting somewhere,’ and I’d wait for the final climax - but then it’d stop.

I’d hear the low drone of more conversation. Then the television would change channels. Then it’d start again, with her going, “ … oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, OH! OH OH OH!!!!” again.

Then it’d stop.

More conversation, laughter, changing channels on the television, then the bed would start thumping again and, “ … oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, OH! OH OH OH!!!!”

So this would go on for a couple of hours, or until I fell asleep. And as I said, not once in the six months of listening to Chinese sex did I ever hear any of the men make even a grunt. I figured either they were cumming with their teeth clenched or they were saving it up.

But gee, the girls sure worked hard for their money.

So what’s the point of all this?

Buggar all. But it’s all very interesting, nonetheless …