Chapter 170

I woke up around 9. The Chilean and I went to a rooftop in the apartment complex to do tai chi, a good way to start the day. Then he had to go teach a private lesson, I went out to buy groceries. The little corner shop only had processed shit packaged in plastic, and when I asked where I can buy vegetables, it’s as if I asked them where to buy clown shoes. “Woooouuuffff, hmmmmm, eeerrrrr, there’s a market, you can take bus number 59 but hmmmmm, it’s far...” Fuck. I found myself in a shit-fucking food desert, the kind you have in the shittiest American suburbs.

I decided to try my luck on foot, it’s not as if I’m in a rush. The walk on Zhongshan Road was mostly pleasant, with those old heritage buildings (rebuilt in the past 15 years after the Japs and then the Commies leveled them to dust) and the dog was having a jolly good time, sniffing all the puddles of urine and learning about the small subtle differences between the local dogs and the dogs back home. Eventually I got to a slum area of old crumbling buildings and they had a tiny market. It looked grossly insalubrious but the vegetables were fresh and plump so I filled my bag and slowly made my way home.

I cooked myself a lunch of scrambled eggs and broccoli that I blanched and fried in a bit of oil, and then started making rice and beans. I boiled the small black beans for an hour, sautéed onions, carrot and pepper, added uncooked rice and coated it all with the oily mixture, and then added a vegetable broth I’d been simmering. Normally I use chicken broth but my two Latino homies are vegetarian now. I also made a spicy salsa to accompany it and it was a great lunch. The Chilean had also made quinoa with mushrooms and I tried it, normally I hate mushrooms with a passion but those black chewy ones didn’t trigger my gag reflex the same way little shitty grey mushrooms do.

The arroz con frijoles pot was gigantic, enough to feed an army, and when I sent a picture to the Venezuelan, who was at work, he suggested we bring some to the lake later that night. Hmmm, good idea, so I packed a Tupperware, removed some stuff from the trunk of the car and made space.

In the late afternoon I got in the car and drove to the gym where capoeira practice takes place. There was a bit of traffic along the way, and at some point, I was in the right lane and when I approached the red light, I saw the arrows painted on the asphalt saying that it’s only for right turns. So I squeezed diagonally in the gap between two waiting cars and the guy behind me started hurling insults. I cranked up the volume of the Exodus album I was listening, and his passenger threw something that made a loud CRACK sound and got the people in the left lane look at my car with concern. What the fuck?! I considered taking the camping shovel I stash under the passenger seat, getting out and smashing the cunt’s hood, but is it really worth getting deported over that shit?! Yeah, cutting line like that is a bit of a dick move but doing so I cleared the right lane and frankly it pales in comparison to the hundreds if not thousands of retarded moves you see every time you’re on a Chinese road. At any rate there was no damage to the car.

I parked in an underground lot, the dog wasn’t very happy he had to wait but sometimes life isn’t all rainbows and bubblegum waterfalls. I went to the Nanjing BJJ academy, a MMA sparring class was taking place and then we split the mat space in two for our capoeira practice. We warmed up, practiced moves in isolation, then with a partner, and then a whole sequence. Afterwards we had a small roda, I played music for half and played a few games, my timing is all off due to lack of regular constant practice but it was fun nonetheless.

Then I drove to the lake, a small reservoir on Purple Mountain that is one of the coolest things about Nanjing (some might say the only cool thing about Nanjing). We had to take a bit of a trek from the parking lot but eventually made it. A lot of locals swim there during the day, I remember the first time I went was for a triathlon. At night it’s very quiet and a nice place to hang out and have a little picnic. I brought my little camping stove and christened it, heating portions of rice and beans and passing it around, some people mentioned it was a bit spicy for them but it hit the spot nonetheless, a good refuel after a training session.

We hung out for a bit, ten of us now that some other friends of my friends came to join. Half of us jumped in the water, which felt amazing, and we sat around jamming a bit, playing the berimbau and capoeira percussions and singing.

At some point, a funny little incident happened. One Chinese guy started trailing his sentence with 那个，那个那个那个, which sounds like nigganigganigga, and then turned around to the African dude in our crew and said “Oh I’m sorry!” Everyone erupted in laughter. The African is fluent in Chinese and obviously knew the guy wasn’t throwing around racial slurs, it was a case of “only awkward now that you brought it up”, like that Bojack Horseman joke in which a character says “I’m getting married because I don’t want to die alone... no offense” and the reply is “None taken! Until you said no offense”. That started a discussion on the n-word, some Chinese people and other second-language users of English can be a bit confused regarding that infamous word, and who can blame them?! On one hand you’re told it’s an absolute no-no and you must never utter it under any circumstances, but then you put on a hip-hop album and you hear it 348 times. That particular Chinese guy is a big ball of muscle and plays for the Nanjing American football team alongside a few African-Americans, and he initially thought it means “brother” and he could just call his teammates that way. Of course it’s a bit more complicated than that. The Togolese guy didn’t have much of an input one way or another, having grown up in French West Africa and having a very different perspective than black Americans.

Either way, a good time was had by all. We walked back to the car and made our way home, where I finally had a beer, a tasty wheat weiss by Shandong province’s Taishan brewery.