Chapter 189

I woke up at 8:30 and had breakfast on the third floor of the hotel. My friend was already there and we discussed my travel plans, I wanted to go to the seaside city of Qinhuangdao today but the weather forecast was saying heavy rain. “You can stay one more day here, no problem. It’s the company’s hotel, we don’t have to pay anything” I pondered for a bit and accepted his generous offer.

I had also decided to not go back to Beijing. I wanted to go back from the north, check out a remote section of the Great Wall, and then attend a hash run, but going to the big joyless capital is too much of a hassle, I’ve already got a parking ticket, a traffic violation and a fine for going there with an out-of-province car. I send messages to the Hutongster and other hashers, and then arranged a visit to Tianjin instead.

My old friend couldn’t hang out today and tonight, as he had business meetings to attend. I kept it easy. I took a walk with the dog, and when I came back, every shurgwaydinger wearing a uniform in the hotel lobby tried to stop me from getting in, even though I had slept there and been in and out with the dog a few times already. They were very very adamant, blocking the elevator’s doors from closing, to the point that I just started wondering where the stairs are. “Talk to manager Zhang, she said I can bring the dog in” seemed to satisfy them or at least give long enough of a pause for me to close the doors and go to my eighth-floor room. You often hear things about guanxi in China, how important it is to know people, especially people more powerful than all the pesky shurgwaydingers constantly up into your shit. I dislike discussions on the topic and gladly leave it to the fresh-off-the-boat Tim Budongs who want to show off how much they know about their new country of residence. I just think it’s the biggest fucking cliché ever and far from exclusive to China, you have the exact same shit everywhere in the world, and the more of a dysfunctional third-world shithole where rule of law is merely a suggestion, the more prevalent it is. That said, it’s undeniable that a bit of “talk to that guy” opens doors and I don’t like playing this game. It’s a rich person’s move, and as a honest middle-class pleb, the way I bend rules is through cunning sneakiness or brute confrontation, not power plays of the sort.

It rained a bit during the day and it was hellishly hot the rest of the time. I read, wrote and also watched a documentary about UFC fighter Diego Sanchez and his disturbing relationship with his manager, trainer and scam artist Joshua Fabia. At around 6, I got out with the dog and got picked up by another old friend. He drove to a restaurant but had to park in an apartment complex half a mile away, just as it started raining. His umbrella was of no use, with the wind that sent the raindrops flying horizontally. Ah well.

He was carrying two half-liter bottles of baijiu, and once in the restaurant, I saw that nearly every table had baijiu on it. In the placid Yangtze River Delta small city I live in now, people don’t drink very much, and baijiu is mostly kept for holidays or special occasions, but here in the north people drink like their life depends on it. The food was amazing once again, the highlight being a plate of pig elbows, they gave us plastic straws to suck the marrow out of the bones. We had a good talk in 80% Chinese, 15% English and 5% Italian, that he can speak to a rusty but decent extent, having studied medicine at a university in Milan. He worked as a doctor for a while and just now graduated from a master’s program about epidemiologic research. That got us taking about Covid.

“Can you believe we’re in that much trouble just because some guy in Hubei wanted to eat a weird animal?”

He frowned. “That’s not true” Like most Chinese people, he’s convinced that the Americans engineered the virus and brought it to China.

At the next table was a big group of people celebrating the end of the school year. The middle school kids, still in their uniform, came to talk to me, foreigners being a rarity in Tangshan and in 99.9999% of China. It was a nice quiet evening, I drank two beers and just two cups of mind-numbingly strong baijiu but was feeling it. My doctor friend had the rest of the bottle and looked like he wanted to open the second one.