Chapter 1

I woke up at 7 with a hangover I couldn’t sleep off, due to the torrent of sake and beer imbibed the night before. I drink a few beers every day, but rarely get drunk anymore, the hangovers are too excruciating now that I’m 35. I popped two ibuprofens, drank some water from the bottle I keep on my nightstand, and emerged out of the warmth of the blankets to the bitter cold of my poorly insulated Chinese apartment. First day of 2021.

So I guess it’s as good of a time as any to reflect on the year that just passed us by. It was a pretty eventful one to say the least, no need to rehash the whole thing. As far as I’m concerned, it wasn’t too bad, I went to visit the family and friends in Quebec over the winter vacation and my direct flight back to China got canceled, so I had to buy another ticket to Thailand and get home from there. Going back to China in the height of the pandemic was quite the gamble, but my girlfriend, my job and most of my life is here so I took it. It paid off, after a few weeks of lockdown the situation has been mostly back to normal since late March while large swaths of the world are still tits up as I’m writing this. So yeah, I empathize with people who got negatively affected by the virus in any capacity, but aside from forcing us to cancel our planned summer trip to Africa, I came out mostly unscathed.

The reason for me waking up so early on my day off is to get some hours in at the driving school. There’s a scheme for foreign residents of China to obtain a local driver’s license by presenting a notarized copy of their home country’s license and doing only the theoretical exam, but I haven’t had a license since 2008, when I just let mine expiring upon deciding to embark on this godforsaken expatriation journey. Consequently, I have to do the whole thing from scratch, which involves a mandatory 34-hour practical course. So my whole morning was spent driving a car in first gear around a circuit that involves S-curves, sharp curves, parallel parking and other fun stuff like that. As I know how to drive already, it was quite painfully repetitive and boring at times, but I went along, since I don’t have much choice and also it’s quite a nitpicky test so it’s good to get a bit of practice.

The instructor told me to come back the next day, from 8 to 10, and then from noon to 2 PM. All the 10 to noon slots are taken, so I can’t do a straight 4 hours.

“What am I gonna do during those two hours?” The driving school is pretty far out of the city, in the middle of nowhere.

“You can go for a massage, get a nice little chick”

I smiled, and replied “I don’t think my girlfriend will agree”

He shrugged. “She won’t know”

I’m not sure if he was joking, but for sure prostitution and adultery is quite rampant in China. Culturally, it’s still frowned upon, but as long as the man fulfills his role as a provider, taking care of the immediate and extended family, a lot of wives turn a blind eye to his extracurricular affairs.

I made it back home and took a long afternoon nap. Then we went for more driving practice, but with me in the passenger seat this time. We inherited the car from the girlfriend’s parents when they upgraded to a new one, the problem is, even though she got her driver’s license three years ago, she has had very little practice and still has a lot of trouble with getting the car in gear, often releasing the clutch pedal too early and stalling. We did that for a bit, then went to the park with the dog so he could run around a little bit like the spaz that he is.

The popular Korean fried chicken chain Frypan just opened up a franchise in our town, so we rode our bicycles to the mall and gorged ourselves with poultry. It was glorious.

We got home at half past seven, I poured myself a double negroni and sat down writing this, which will most likely be just another piece of junk literature floating on a distant corner of an internet already saturated with navel gazing shit of the sort, but also an exercise in self-improvement of some sort, as I do plan on keeping a daily diary for the whole year. Thanks for reading.