Chapter 122

I woke up around 9, sore all over but especially my right ankle, which felt like it got crushed by a buffalo. And this is despite sleeping almost eleven hours. I popped some ibuprofen, took a cold shower and walked it off a bit, then I got a rent-a-bike and rode around looking for a massage place with the help of Baidu Maps (out of fairness, because I’m a fair guy: I trashed Baidu’s search engine not long ago, and it is indeed worthless, but Baidu Maps is pretty good). They were either not open yet, or overpriced spas in shopping malls, or dingy-looking hovels that looked to be made out of 50% crumbling concrete and 50% mold and were probably quite seedy as well. I kept riding, it alleviated my soreness, and I stopped for a cheap breakfast of baozi (stuffed buns), youtiao (fried dough, like a savoury donut) and hard-boiled eggs (chicken eggs that had been boiled) with a C-100 lemonade.

I still had a lot of time before today’s chalk talk, so I stopped at one of Kunming’s five million tea shops to buy some pu-er tea, a brick for myself and one for the in-laws. The boss was extremely friendly and invited me to have a few cups with him, one of the joys of tea shopping. I stayed there for a while and then got a message from a hasher friend, she was having brunch with others in a shopping mall, I had eaten already but I thought I’d join and eat a bit more. There was a rent-a-cop at the entrance of the mall telling people to put their face diapers on, and pretty much one second after passing the door they’d remove it. Another hasher asked me if I have one to spare and I happened to have a second one, so he could go through this most pointless of checkpoints to enter the huge glitzy empty mall.

We ate a few dim sums and fried rice at a Cantonese eatery. My Hong Konger friend obviously loves this food, and she talked about how she doesn’t fit with either the Chinese or the Asian-Americans and how she doesn’t understand them culturally at times. She also told me she espouses accelerationist views, I was a bit surprised to hear this word in the wild, I usually only encounter it when browsing political forums on the internet. That got us talking about Clown World and the western media outlets trying their hardest to ignite a race war, I understand accelerationism but I’m myself more of a popcornist, finding entertainment watching the world crumble and living my life with a certain apathy knowing that I’m powerless in the face of all of this, which might seem cripplingly nihilistic but is also very liberating.

So yeah, just to be clear, the key to still live a good life as a black pilled popcornist is to unplug from the matrix and do fulfilling shit. With that firmly in mind, we went to the hash bar, ready for the hash day. Everyone was in good spirits, beer in hand, some were limping a bit or hungover or sunburnt but the conversations flowed and soon we were on another bus headed outside the city. As I’d seen riding my bike around, Kunming itself isn’t very special, it’s a huge Chinese provincial capital quasi-identical to any other, but it’s surrounded by forested hills, in an almost tropical environment. It’s also almost 2000 m above sea level, something that caused a bit of a problem for visiting hashers, most being from lowland cities.

Again, a really cool trail was on the menu, bringing us through the woods to a beer stop on top of a hill with a temple and a spectacular view over the whole city. I overdid it a bit, drinking four Beerlaos that went down wonderfully after such a long climb, and when people started joking about the time being almost 4:20 (marijuana enthusiasts’ favorite time of the day), one Shanghai hasher gave me a tobacco dip, saying I’d get a buzz from it. Well, fuck me... my head was spinning and my stomach felt hollow as we went down, single file, down a steep rocky path. I had to really be careful not to miss a step. All along I was having a really cool conversation with a guy named Keg On Legs, about languages, long-term expat life, and Taco Bell. I was getting to know a lot of people from different backgrounds, but I knew few of their real names, only their trail names: Master Wanker, Chuquita Hammock, Socradeez Nuts, Limp Fish Dick, Psycho Babble, Verbal Diarrhea, to name just a few of the hilarious ones on the list. The Nash Hash t-shirt was personalized with our trail name on it, and I commented to a guy named Goat Fucker that he now has to wear that in public.

We made it to the end, some kind of park with ponds and pavilions. Everyone was in a celebratory mood, emptying crates of beer, I felt like lying down on the ground first and get my bearings back. Soon after that we sat around little barbecue pits in the huts and they brought huge trays of food for us: sausages, hamburgers, tofu, vegetables, chicken skewers, rye bread, as well as containers of hummus, potato salad and cheesy garlic dip. Quite a feast! There was a table of Beijing female hashers who were pretty drunk already, singing Ke$ha songs and flashing their breasts. And it was still about two hours till sunset, things were about to go crazy.

The circle was a lot of fun, with lots of hilarious charges brought forth to punish or reward hashers who did something memorable on the trail. Durian beer made its appearance, and, well... it was what you’d expect. I can still smell it from here. There was also a baptism, a middle-aged Italian lady getting the name of Mamasan. She knelt down and got showered with beer, being thus welcomed in the brotherhood/sisterhood of Hash House Harriers. There was also an announcement, the next Nash Hash will take place in Suzhou, a city located a pretty short distance from where I live, great news!

We got on the buses again, with a few beers “for the road” and a repertoire of songs to drunkenly sing together. We arrived at a craft beer bar called Chaba, where a dozen 3-liter towers of homemade IPA were awaiting us, the party kept going. A hasher named Kiddie Pool had hurt himself bad on the trail, trying to shortcut by jumping over barb wire, falling awkwardly and hyperextending his knee. He had to be carried down the path and brought to the hospital in a taxi, it was the talk of the town for a bit. Well, he turned up at the bar, his leg all wrapped up, on crutches. He resumed his drinking, under cheers. That’s how legends are made.

Part of hashing culture, aside from the silly trail names, songs and ambiguously marked trails, consists of the patches. Some collect them, accummulating dozens over the years, and sewing them on sleeveless vests like thrash metal fans and their “battle jackets”. Of course kennels (HHH chapters) have their patches and notable gatherings also produce commemorative ones, but one thing I learned is some individual hashers also make their patches, that they give out upon completing a challenge. I asked a bespectacled Chinese girl with a butterfly tattoo on her chest and who goes by Super Squirter what her challenge is, she told me to bring a shot and find out. I bought a shot of rum at the bar, she told me to kneel down, poured the rum in a water bottle with a tiny hole in its cap, and sprayed it. Half landed in my mouth, which is more than most people can say. There was also a guy named Stilett’Hoe with a rather lewd and hilarious challenge that I won’t describe here, because some things better “stay on the hash”, like they say. Also I’m wondering about the legality of the whole thing.

Drinking games and competitions also took place, the most notable being the boat race. Silly me thought there would be an actual race involving canoes on a body of water, but no, it’s a team effort in which five hashers line up, pints in hand. When the first guy finishes his, he upends it on his head, signaling the second one to start chugging, and so forth. There was a bit of controversy, the Beijing team seemed to have won handily but there were claims of excessive spillage by the referee. The IPA towers were now empty and got replaced by a rauchbier, a rare style of German smoky ale that is pretty interesting but not really a thirst beer.

Rip Van Stinkhole, a large bald Texan, announced that a stripping contest was about to happen at the after-after-party bar. Some people had a giant inflatable unicorn and were trying to blow it up, but there was a leak somewhere. I had medical tape in my bag so I saved the day.

The next bar was quite small, and mostly dancefloor. The large group of drunken, smelly hashers carrying a huge inflatable unicorn must have scared the other bar patrons, mostly effeminate teenage rich mama-boys with bouffant haircuts, and a bunch of them left to go play with their phones elsewhere, sneering on the way out in a way that could have been threatening if either of them weighed more than 115 pounds.

I can’t say I’m the biggest fan of nightclubs and dancing and the predictable (but well-crafted to elicit WOOOOs from the females on the floor) playlist the DJ was playing from his laptop, but at least this bar was an old-school student joint, not a shitty shiny glitzy Chinese nightclub. I was just drunk enough to dance, and by this I mean gently sway my shoulders, but my aloof exterior and apparent lack of enthusiasm (not yelling WOOOO like a sorority girl when Usher’s “Pwee pwee, pwee pwee” starts) was mistaken for a vibin’ coolness by a tall attractive Chinese girl in a striped top and later an equally attractive Latina with curly hair, which led them to rub their backsides on my genitals, in this bizarre mating ritual I’ve never fully got a hold of. I deescalated, not that it wasn’t pleasant, but I have to be a good boy.

People were climbing on the bar to dance, and clothes were coming off. The first round mostly featured dudes and it was a bit weird, but then all those Beijing hash girls got on and the windows had to be shuttered. Rip Van Stinkhole handed me a half-full water bottle, I asked “Water?” and in the deafening environment, I thought he said “Water” but it turned out he said “Vodka”. I took a swig and spat it out, I hope he wasn’t offended. Though I had consumed a torrent of beer through the day, I had mostly paced myself, and now as I was about to leave I didn’t want to get pointlessly plastered.

The Latina didn’t want me to leave, or perhaps didn’t want me to leave alone, and was blowing kisses. It had been a long day, so I walked the half kilometer or so to the hostel and was in bed at 2:30.