Chapter 188

Distance covered: 185 km (total 2306 km)

I woke up around 10, sleeping in an S shape on the Hutongster’s small couch, with both dogs cuddling me. I took them both for a walk, going in a direction I hadn’t been before, and orientating myself with the sun and my general instinct to get out of that maze of narrow slummy alleys. Then I packed my stuff, said goodbye to his dog and started walking towards my car. There were no rent-a-bikes around until I had crossed the expressway, then I rode the rest. The municipality of Beijing left me a parting gift in the form of a 475 yuan parking fine, what could I do at that point but shrug?

I got in the car, put on a Jocko Willink podcast, and got on my way. The GPS was malfunctioning and I got stressed out and very angry, which made me feel dumb. Among the numerous topics he talks about related to self-improvement, control of one’s emotions is one he emphasizes, and this is something I’m very shitty at. On one of his podcasts, he suggested to just imagine that you’re a football player at practice, with the cameras on, and that a coach can just replay the tape at any moment. Would you act that way then? I just pictured how silly I must have looked getting all pissed off at that inanimate smartphone, especially while on the speakers Jocko was reading excerpts from a book written by an Auschwitz and Treblinka survivor. My problems are pretty fucken trivial in comparison.

Even though it was now noon on a Wednesday, parts of the dystopian metropolis were clogged with gridlock. Eventually I got through the endless eastern outskirts and made my way smoothly to Tangshan, yet another city I lived in, part of my pilgrimage tour. I arrived in Tangshan in October of 2010 after a failed repatriation attempt that only got me shitty part-time minimum wage jobs and a perverse case of reverse culture shock, and eventually led me to take the first job I could in China. It turned out to be a shitty English mill with an idiotic frog-faced boss, cliquey colleagues, a pittance for a salary (though I saved more in a week there than in two months in Quebec) and the city of Tangshan was a grey industrial shithole whose only claim to fame was its near destruction by an earthquake in the 1970s. So I wasn’t in the best place mentally. I still made friends, notably one guy with whom I hung out quite a lot and he became probably the best Chinese friend I’ve ever had. A former pro basketball player, he then worked for the local TV station, doing all sorts of work in front of and behind the camera. I visited a few times in the years after I left Tangshan, but now it had been six or seven years so I was stoked to see him and the other pals.

He booked a hotel room for me, giving me the manager’s number in case the zealous shurgwaydingers at the counter give the dog trouble. But no, check-in was a quick formality, and I got shown to my room, a huge luxury pad. I sent him a message, he said he had stuff to do at work and he’d send someone for me an hour later. I gave the dog a shower, caught up on my diary for a bit, and did 50 burpees to get the blood flowing. Then a young lady came to fetch me and we walked to a neighboring building, where my old pal welcomed me.

We talked in his office a bit, then went for a drive in one of his Jeeps. He used to drive this old beater, now he has four of them, seems like he got quite rich since the last time I saw him. He runs some kind of sports company, operating soccer fields and gyms and other facilities, he drove around showing me all the new sports installations that didn’t exist back in tha day and that are now supplying him with a big stream of income. I remember the lake on the south of Tangshan and rode my bicycle there a bunch of times a decade ago, but now the whole area is greatly developed, and it is very pleasant. This positively verdant environment clashes with the old wintery grey image I had of the city, and he confirmed that things had changed quite a lot in recent years.

We got back to the hotel, drank tea for a bit, and then went to have dinner with some of his pals I also knew ten years ago. We had amazing barbecue and crawfish at a rooftop restaurant, and then more beers at an upscale German-style beer hall. It was about one kilometer down by the lake, I’d have been perfectly fine with walking, but they chartered some kind of oversized golf cart to bring us there. The buildings were in the European style, a French one, a British one, a German one, etc. in the same vein as all those bizarre “European towns” you find around China, in places where a developer had a few extra million yuan burning a whole in his pocket.