On to the actual story, which has only taken us six months
to recount. I suppose I have been delaying the inevitable for fear of associating
my name with such a risqué and disreputable occurrence; we are beginning to
verge upon the point when reputations and careers must be taken into account!
As such, consider this a second-hand portrayal, an observation penned on behalf
of an acquaintance not fit to feign innocence for much longer.
It was a late Sunday afternoon and our protagonist was
returning from a day atop the Great Wall, the portion of which they climbed being
some 2.5 hours north of the city by combination of train, bus and taxi. He and
his friends were tired but contented, having encountered the Sino Wonder of the
Early Modern World on an uncharacteristically spectacular autumn day. Southern
Manchuria not being a climate known for its kindness, they’d had the good
fortune to stumble about the crumbling parapet under a sky of beaming rays and forgiving
breezes. By any account it had been a very good day – the kind you forget too
easily after a satisfying meal and a good night’s rest.
They returned to the city at dusk in search of suckling pig.
Whether they found it or not the author cannot recall. It being the
protagonist’s last night in town, the three of them decided to go for a drink
in the center of Wudaokou, a rambling ten-block strip in the student district lined
with bars and Tex-Mex joints catering to youngish Yanks, Koreans and Euros of
every stripe. Though somewhat contrived, the neighborhood wasn’t without its
charms. The three of them – our protagonist, his friend and the latter’s
Manchurian belle – went for shisha and a quiet beer at the Lebanese joint run
by a markedly pro-PLO proprietor (the details that reemerge when pen is put to
paper). All rather exhausted, after a short hour they paid their bill and made
for the intersection to hail an oncoming cab.
It being a holiday – the commemoration the founding of the
People’s Republic no less! – the streets were awash in scholastic revelers. Bad
tunes here, worse music there: there is a cosmopolitan solidarity for tasteless
ditties that knows less boundaries than the Internationale
at the height of the Purges. This being Beijing, our protagonist’s friend would
still have to make himself scarce while his girlfriend tried to hail a ride back
to the northern district where she lives: no self-respecting man would pick up
a ‘local’ suspected of cavorting with a gweilo.
One rejection leads to two and after a while they are left
stranded. Nay, not a single taxi would take the young maiden back to her distant
apartment in district ____. In some sense it was very understandable: who would
take a passenger to an airport with no incoming flights? We stood at the corner
and twiddled our thumbs.
At this point I should mention a bad habit our protagonist
had mentioned to his friend earlier that week. The former, whenever violently
cut off by a motorized vehicle in which the pedestrian normally had right of
way, had adopted the courtesy of giving said car a little tap on the back hood
as he ignominiously walked behind it. It reminded the motorist, he’d convinced
himself, that pedestrians also throw down from time to time. This, however, was
not the placid South, the land of moist skin and marble skirts, pleated pants
and buffered shirts. It was the northern plain, where Mongols rode and peasants
were tamed. Some tricks don’t translate that readily.
In his anguish to put his girl in a cab back home, the
protagonist’s friend was on edge. After a delightful, if exhausting, day hiking
the continent’s most celebrated relic, the combination of blaring music,
drunken students and ill-natured cabbies did less than evoke a midsummer
night’s dream. They would rather have been fishing, or wrapped up with a book
of Welsh grammar drinking Earl Grey.
Suddenly a ricer came careening down the street. (While the
author has been notified that this is an offensive term, he begs to differ:
never had he heard the term used in association with any particular race or
creed, other than that of poor taste). Since they were 20 meters from a red
light, it didn’t seem to matter: surely the motorist would break before coming
within striking distance of our protagonists? He nearly ran the girlfriend
over.
The reader is now invited to predict the outcome of the next
few minutes. We have already mentioned that our friend living up north is a
sensitive man: it goes without saying he defends both the honor and safety of his companion with equal
vigor. Given the events of the previous week – the crazed cabbie, the constant
harassment, the anguished stares and passing utterances – the protagonist’s
host was in no rosy mood. Hence he did what seemed sensible at the time and
gave the rushing ricer a nice little tap on the back trunk.
This, you may have surmised, is where hell breaks loose.
Immediately, the car comes screeching to a halt; two youngish goons hop out.
Though making quite a droll entrance, they turned out to be rather serious. Your
protagonist, for his part, was entirely caught off guard. A reformist of sorts,
he was also lugging around a messenger bag awash with cameras and heavy tomes:
hardly the kit with which to beat back intruders. That being said, the moment
forced itself upon him like a congressman from Queens. As each goon
simultaneously lunged for his friend, he found himself throwing a right hook quicker
than you can reject a boat of Haitians approaching Fort Lauderdale. The rest is
(not quite) history.
For those who’ve chanced upon such occasions, the ensuing
action is somewhat predictable – even anticlimactic. The receiver of the first
strike, a very clean blow to the ocular region, spent the next 30-40 seconds
dutifully doing his best: alas, to no avail. Such are the risks of bringing
about the first punch. At one point all he could do was grab our protagonist’s
messenger bag and twist it round him – the latter doing his utmost to wind
things down before any uninvited guests joined the melée (more of that in a
moment).
The second scrapper to emerge from the car – the one who’d
been in the passenger seat when poo decided to hit the fan – continued to
pursue the protagonist’s friend with zeal. Alas, he too took something of a
spanking, so much so that by the end of the scuffle each character from the car
was in a rather sorry state. (The author has yet to divulge the discrepancy in each
camp’s size: rather large). Though nothing daytime television-worthy, the
brouhaha was something of a one-sided affair. Tant mieux? Not quite.
This being a very public place, the other chief concern was
that men of similar ethnic persuasion might decide to jump in. Though doubtful,
I’ve been told by various ‘experts’ that in cases of foreigner-v-local this is
a very real threat (think Boxer Rebellion, anti-Japanese demonstrations of last
fall); no matter how peaceable things
may seem between nationals and foreigners, the local mood can ‘shift’ as
quickly as it takes the Fed to print a $17 trillion dollar note: damned fast,
if dubiously so. The only other cause of worry, the most typical of these sorts
of situations, was that of the Law. This being 1am on a holiday in a
rambunctious student quarter given to BBQ joints and thunderously bad music, the
Man was surprisingly nowhere to be seen.
So our boys prove rather lucky, do they not? They had
forgotten one very crucial factor, perhaps the most important of all: losing face. Here they stood, in what
might as well be considered broad daylight, two dirty gweilos effortlessly victorious over their local brethren who,
might I remind the reader, had blatantly begun this whole affair. Their
counterparts, visibly blemished, were not going to wait to dispense of their lost
face in the morning. Hence the old Christian adage: if not in this life,
justice in the next. In this case that would be ten minutes later and five
blocks up the road.
Smelling the sour skittle for what it was, they tried to
flee the scene. Their new friends were already frantically on their cell phones,
calling Kevorkian knows whom: imagining the possible scenarios was less than edifying.
The catch? The girlfriend was in no state to run. Not that she couldn’t – just that these things aren’t
done. When was the last time you saw an elegant Chinese girl in a hurry? Q.E.D.
Or, as a sagacious Frog once said, “Why would anyone run unless someone were
chasing them?” In this case, however, they were.
So there you have it. Two 6’2, 200-pound lads trotting down
a back alleyway as their five-foot-nothing nemesis scurries after them,
screaming directions into his phone and promising all hell to pay. They
couldn’t go fast enough to lose him because of the girlfriend, though they
certainly couldn’t leave her behind, either. The other option, of course, was
to finish what they’d begun 10 minutes earlier – thereby avoiding brothers,
cousins, police, prisons, the whole lot – or at a very minimum rid the
gentleman of his cellular device. Knowing very well that (at least) the former
wouldn’t do, they continued the charade a few blocks longer, trotting at
half-speed while making vague appeals and apologies to the little man they’d
just routinely attended to (in self-defense, mind you). Having lost the battle,
the Corsican troll was out to win the war. After all it was his country, and he was perfectly well aware of it.
Our protagonist’s friend finally takes a stand. “Comrade, go
with my girlfriend and find somewhere to hide. I’ll stall them as long as
possible and find you later.” The first two dash across a darkened alleyway and
emerge at the nearest sign of life, a modernist complex of 12-story apartment
blocks set against a tree-lined courtyard. They scamper into the first door
that’s open and plunge down the stairs into the car garage.
Fear has an interesting way of blowing things out of
proportion. Like the icicle gathering snowflakes as it meanders down the hill, terror,
when seasoned, is granted entirely too much license. In the case of our
protagonist, it wasn’t until he was three-stories underground and hiding from
an angry phone-clutching midget who’d just gotten his ass whooped that fear
gripped him like pneumonia on a midsummer’s day in Minsk. He could already see
the show trial, stilted press reports and paucity of judicial review: if not
sold into public relations bondage (we all remember the defectors from the
Korean War), he would surely face time in one of the famed black prisons or, if
he were really lucky, the Political Reeducation camp itself. After 2-3 minutes
in terrifying limbo, he told the girlfriend to wait there while he went
upstairs to check on his friend.
Back outside there reigned a terrifying calm. No screaming
urchin, no sidekick, no car, no police, no phone, no dogs, no friend. Something
terribly amiss had just happened. Only a coward abandons a friend in need! –
and now the latter was wasting away in some basement on the outskirts of the
Gobi Desert, being force-fed pickled boar’s penis and obliged to consult his
captors on their Second Life strategies. He went back inside to find the
girlfriend and ponder a plan of action. She too was nowhere to be found.
Imagine our protagonist’s fear and trembling at this point:
alone, abandoned in a Beijing apartment complex, no phone, no Chinese, no
contacts, no nada. His friend has been abducted by vindictive lost-face-seeking
goons, while the beautiful, street-smart girlfriend with impeccable negotiating
skills had similarly disappeared. The end was surely nigh. Is it time to start
knocking on doors again? Perhaps. Parading for alms? Seeking out Jehovah’s
Witnesses? Anything would have done at that point.
As it turns out, no one was abducted, disfigured or disposed
of. In fact, everyone escaped with their dignity intact. The missing girlfriend
reemerged five minutes later; she too had been trying to locate her boo. The
latter, it shall be said, is the true hero of the evening. After throwing the
vigilantes off the scent for long enough to sneak into the same residential
building, he climbed to the 6th floor to evade whatever might come
next (incidentally he had a friend who lived in the building: out of town that holiday
weekend). From a bird’s eye view he was the only to witness the madness that
ensued: within moments of our protagonist descending the stairs to the car
garage, a riot unit of 20-odd storm troopers burst into the complex from all
sides. Swat cars, dogs, lights, the whole shebang. It must have cost the State a
fortune.
Erroneously – though chivalrously – fearing our protagonist
might face the Law alone, the friend went downstairs and turned himself in. He
was duly escorted to the nearest precinct, obliged to make a statement and
forced to pay a due diligence tax of ¥1000 ($160 US), the logic being that he who sustains injuries
in an altercation (in this case very minor albeit visible) is to receive
compensation, regardless of fault, intention or origin of said dispute. Truth
be told, it’s not a terrible approach. Like betting against your favorite team:
if your squad loses you still get paid.
What became of our protagonist? After finding the
girlfriend, he went back to the same street it all began, found a 24-hour café
and sipped coffee next to a friendly Japanese foreign exchange student. The
girlfriend, for her part, went to the precinct and waxed lyrical, halving the
fine from its original ¥2000 (terms are always negotiable). They reconvened at the
scene of the crime, hailed a cab and went back home.
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