After I return from Chinese Wal-Mart for the third time in 24 hours, the word comes from on high: French 75 says we’re going out. I’m staggering with exhaustion, but not opposed: I haven’t seen anything of Shanghai besides the airport, International K-12, and the wet market. I want to know where to drink to forget Chinese Wal-Mart.
75 collects me and Tom Collins on the second floor and we walk to the IK12 gate. She hails a cab and we pile in.
Consciousness is work. The jetlag kicks and I feel my jaw going slack. I hope I’m not drooling. It’s raining, again: I lay my head against the cab’s window and watch the city swallow us. The lights bleed down the windows.
A small monitor is buried in the headrest in front of me. It sings the praises of Shanghai and advertises upcoming movies. It also advertises China’s version of The Voice, which is called “China Voice.” Two girls sing with theatrical emotion to the judges. One is a woman in black robes and a massive hat, with a brim the size of a planet. Another judge is dressed in a sleeveless T-shirt and a vest, which are both white. He is wearing a silver chain. His hair is shaved at the sides and set in a dramatic wave at his bangs. As the girls sing, he inhales and rolls his eyes back, communicating an uncomfortable amount of pleasure. He pulls his hands up to his face, like he’s praying or gasping, and kneels his head and hands into the giant red button on his terminal. Because the cab’s video loop is short, I get to see him do this four times. He is my favorite person on earth.
The cab stops. I open the door to a barrage of horns. An intrepid scooter has wormed its way to the far right of traffic, and brakes inches from my door. I close to let it pass. The driver is gaunt, and he looks like he has been recently electrocuted. He yells at the driver and then at me, pointing. His eyes are so wide I think the lids have been surgically removed. He screams and glares. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anyone this angry in my life (n.b. this is a full year and three months before Donald Trump is elected President). I shrug in response to the fury. I don’t really know what else to do.
I check for traffic this time, and successfully exit. The ride was forty-five minutes and cost about six dollars.
_ _ _
“She should be in this area,” says French 75.
The “she” here is 75’s friend, who is going to meet us. Except, adds 75: “I don’t have a SIM card yet, and we’re a little late to meet her.”
“How late?” I ask.
“Only like a half-hour.”
That turns out to be like a half-hour late: we trek to the appointed meeting spot to find no one but locals. It’s a massive walking street; built of concrete tiles. Retail envelops us: There’s a sparkling Hershey’s sign planted amid vertically aligned Chinese neon. I spot a Starbucks. The lights bathe us red. A red train – on wheels; not rails –motors through the center of the walkway. It’s packed with mothers and children. A small bell announces navigational intent.
“Of course,” says Tom Collins.
75 tries to acquire the internet in a mall. She negotiates with the mall guards; said negotiation taking the form:
French 75: “Hi, I am very white and showing cleavage.”
Guards: “We see your white, apparently sexual self; and are appropriately frightened of you. Allow us to confer before announcing we do not have WiFi in this place of business.”
“They don’t have WiFi here,” says French 75.
At 75’s lead, we take the subway in some direction, and emerge on some street. We cut behind another massive shopping center to a smaller road. It’s dark, and there’s bamboo scaffolding over the sidewalks even though there doesn’t seem to be construction ongoing. It’s like coming off of a movie set and onto the backlot: Shanghai, presentable and proper, fronting for Shanghai, a raunchy, grungy sprawl. I see a tiny restaurant stuffed into a wall. Men play cards outside; sitting on low, plastic stools. They smoke; large, wine-bottle-gauge Tsingtao bottles pool around their feet.
French 75, thirsty for internet, turns us into a different sort of bar. The place is called “Mission Control,” and it’s about as bland as it sounds. It’s pretty empty. The drinks are mostly Heineken and Carlsberg. The only other customers are four white men at the long end of a communal table. They worship at the altar of a Carlsberg quarter-keg.
The menus are in English. The bar is organized and arrayed like a Western bar. But there are differences: The crests on the wall do not represent any sports club you’ve heard of. All of them seem to be made up – they’re not that different in graphical and lexical tone from the NewbailunLP shoes I saw yesterday, as if all Chinese knockoff products adhere to a strict code of nonsense words and design forms. I’m an instant fan of Guangzhou Tigers: their crest is a tiger engulfed in flame, and it demands, “BE THE BEST FOREVER.” The wait staff is not motivated by the crest: I see several Chinese in matching dress behind the bar and hiding amid tables, but they do not approach. They chat and stare at nothing; not simultaneously. One of this crew says “Hello” eventually; before resuming other important staring-based activities, like staring. I try to wave them over (for purposes of beer), which doesn’t do it.
“No, they’ll never come over like that.” One of the men by the mini-keg takes a long pull on his cigarette as he nods to the waiters. “You’ve got to insist with ‘em. This is China.”
He sounds Australian. I’m stunned by his weary use of “them,” right in front of our presumably English-speaking waiters.
“What do you want?” asks another man in the group. “Hey, FUYAN!” he barks. His volume is the volume of screaming, but he’s languid; bored, even. And the waiter doesn’t seem to mind: he ambles over to our table and gives a jerky half-nod. The spasm indicates it’s time to order.
“Uh, could I have a Carlsberg?” I try.
“CAHRS BURR?” the waiter bellows, leaning in.
“Yeah, uh, just…”
“CAHRS BURR?”
In this way I finally acquire a beer, which is very good because French 75’s friend Car Bomb finally arrives.
“Hi-eeeee!!!” squeals Car Bomb, making a noise that encapsulates her personhood.
“Oh my goooood!” adds French 75.
Introduce women to a party, and all the men are politicians, testing quips and slogans in lieu of clearly-stated policy goals. I stay in the race only till the first debate, and then concede. I’m far too fatigued to be interested or interesting, and Car Bomb is too herself to be either of those things, ever. She also brought another guy to the bar complicate the delegate math, and I feel like I’d lose in the primary to Tom Collins anyway (Other Guy gives serious Ross Perot vibes). I also feel, listening to Car Bomb compose sentences that are mostly the word “club,” that I maybe don’t want to run for this office. I feel, ultimately, that Carlsberg maybe isn’t the worst way to pass the time.
The Australian flirts with French 75 the way bats chirp to test distance: He doesn’t seem to be terribly interested; he just talks like that, at least to girls. I’m jealous of this offhand facility, and then sad for him, and then sad for myself.
“And what about you?” I hear a non-Tom Collins Englishman ask. “You work with ‘em?”
“Yeah, it’s my first year.”
“When’d you get here?”
“Yesterday.”
His quartet erupts.
“He’s a virgin!” sputters Britain. They all cheer.
They’re all part of the same project, it turns out: installing a massive office space in a commercial high-rise. The Aussie works for the company that’s actually going to put screws in the walls. He’s the project manager: younger, late thirties maybe. Trim. Britain is in his late fifties; maybe sixties. He’s the project owner. This language makes some sense to me, because before I considered teaching overseas, I applied for something like fifty different project manager posts in Denver. I didn’t get interviews, but I did learn that, as in most professions, the key to entrance is to misuse words in the same way everyone else in the industry misuses those same words.
I ask them how long they like it here.
“Love it, love it,” says Aussie. He taps his chest. “It’s a city with a heartbeat.” The others nod. “You have to dance around the cars when you cross the street – you seen that?”
I tell him I have noticed.
“It’s just…” Aussie exhales smoke. “It’s just a little more lively; little more wild. Some of the people I know are moving out – it’s not wild enough anymore, you know?”
Murmurs of assent from the quartet.
“You’re going to love it here,” Britain assures me. He sees the look in my eyes, and considers: “Well, either that or you’ll hate it.”
“It is a little dirty,” allows the Scot.
“Yeah,” I say, “I noticed that. Like, they seem to let the buildings just rot. They don’t really replace them. They don’t seem to have building maintenance.”
They roar and pound the table.
“He said ‘building maintenance!’” howls Britain. “My lord!”
“Listen,” says the Scot: “I live in a building here; downtown. I pay a pretty penny for it too. Built around a strong metal cylinder – good quality steel. The floors all hang off it.” He shows me with his hand: like a tree. “So, they haven’t bothered to properly distribute the loads anywhere else. And now each floor is sagging off of the foundation.” The branches of the tree dip. “There are cracks in the tile walls of my bathroom. From the stress. They’ll never fix it.”
“What will happen?” I ask.
“I’ll move,” he shrugs.
“And on these projects, you have to stay on them,” adds Aussie.
(Again, I’m struck by the persistent, pervasive use of “they” – we’re not colonists anymore, right? The Chinese are our hosts – right?)
Britain agrees: “Paint,” he nods.
“Always paint,” Aussie nods back. “They always try to give you a coat with lead, or not the color you asked, or they won’t do more than one coat.”
“Try to build the walls out of anything,” sighs Scotland. “Whatever’s cheapest for them; not what you paid ‘em for.”
“Wiring,” Britain shakes his head. “Have to really stay on ‘em.”
“Hey, hey,” Aussie leans over to me, cigarette first, in the manner of Tarantino characters: “Here’s the main advice, okay: Here’s the real thing.”
He’s staring so deeply at me I’m worried I’m going to have to explain I’m straight. It’s jarring, but he’s deathly serious. He speaks like each word is a barbell lift:
“Never. Ask. Why.”
A murmur of assent from the table. The other men nod into their glasses, the way American men do when they bring up a dead buddy or a first-round running back who never made All-Pro.
Aussie is still staring at me: “It doesn’t matter what happens. It doesn’t matter if you think” – and here he doesn’t describe, he acts: waving his arms in helplessness – “Wha…? How is –? What is this?”
The men all laugh, like they do that dance a few times a week.
Aussie turns stone serious again. I’ve seen this move – deathly gravity after a joke that plays in flyover states – from Evangelical churchmen and college orientation staff.
“Never ask why.”
I’m in their conversation now; I’ve left French 75 and Car Bomb to each other. Tom Collins drifts between conversations, never exactly engaging in any of them. Tom Collins is always daring you not to bore him.
“All right, where next?” Says Aussie.
“Dunno,” says Britain.
Scotland and the fourth man, who isn’t too much for talking, beg off. They drop some Mao-faced bills and quit the bar.
“Big Bamboo?” Aussie asks.
“I might could,” shrugs Britain. To me: “You coming along?”
I can’t – I don’t know my way around, don’t know how to get back to the school, and don’t even know how far away the school is. I’m not sure I have any of the equipment or knowledge necessary to make it to my new bed. And anyway, I’m beat.
So what I say is: “Sure!”
“You serious?” asks Tom Collins, logging back in.
“I’ll catch you back at the place,” I tell him. “When do I have to stop drinking?”
Tomorrow, we have been informed, is our Health Check. I’m not sure exactly what that means, except that Red Tea and Co. have sent us emails to be at the north gate early in the morning for our Health Check. A bus will take us on to somewhere. And we’re not supposed to eat or drink for…
“Six hours before,” shrugs Tom. “So, like one, two in the morning at worst. Definitely we’re not supposed to eat.”
“You coming or what?” Asks Aussie, halfway outside.
I’m coming. Aussie is drunkenly throwing himself at a taxi. The taxi lays on the horn and races past.
“We can’t get a taxi,” explains Aussie.
“Uber!” decides Britain.
I didn’t know they had Uber in China, but they do, for now. The company will depart China in the back half of 2016. And there’s chatter in the meantime that it’s technically illegal. But I don’t know any of that right now: what I know is that I’m climbing into a sedan and going to Big Bamboo.
“If you ever want to watch the match, this is the place,” says Aussie.
Big Bamboo is an Epcot sports bar: it’s like I’m back on set, as on the walking mall earlier in the evening. It’s like they’re filming a movie about white people, and I wandered into the shot.
(“They.” Now I’m doing it, too. Shit.)
Big Bamboo is very clean, but the streets outside aren’t and the bathrooms inside are war zones (they’re not shooting this movie outside or at the urinals). It’s laid out mostly like a Buffalo Wild Wings – personality-free, bulk surfacing under massive television sets. Except here you can smoke. And they have some plastic, faux-wood panels, to suggest perhaps the United Kingdom or perhaps just somewhere amorphously European.
I feel terrible being here: I feel nauseous. I feel like someone is trying to build a world out of the misremembered recollections of people who lived in another world. All the world is not, in fact, a stage: when you’re on stage, you can feel it. And it doesn’t feel great. It feels like I’m being held and entertained for observation. If I see a feeding trough I’m bolting.
Aussie buys me another Carlsberg. The server knows Aussie. The server is in fact very happy to see Aussie, and brings over drink after drink and nods and smiles and says “Oooh!” a lot and calls Aussie “Mr. Aussie.” It’s a very strange interaction: The server half bows, and sort of spasms forward when he talks, and basically acts like he’s a cartoon imagination of the Chinese by white Ohioans c. 1957. I want to tell him, “Hey, that’s racist!” He can’t pronounce “L” and is so obsequious to this random white adult that it’s physically revolting. For his part, I feel like Aussie is going to call the server “Boy” at any moment. I’m going to need more Carlsberg.
“Isn’t it great here?” Aussie says, kind of misreading my vibe. “You can smoke indoors!”
“And it’s better for you in this air,” Britain chuckles.
“Why?” I ask.
They answer in unison, like it’s a bit they’ve had on tap: “Because at least the fucking cigarette has a filter!”
They laugh so hard at this I think I see tears. So far, no one in China has answered my chief question, which is: will the sky give me ass herpes? The men pull hard on their cigs, still cackling.
“What next?” asks Britain some time later. I’m not sure how much time later, because I’m not sure how much time, in sum, has been happening to me. I’ve been drinking cocktails and 7% A.B.V. beers for four years at mile-high altitude in Colorado: my tolerance is approximately “granite.” But there are powerful forces at play here, and they are weaponizing the Carlsberg: I am tired in my bones, I am terrified about my immediate future, and I haven’t eaten anything for about four hours. And I can’t eat anything – or drink any more – because I have a Health Check tomorrow, which presumably includes a blood test. So time is difficult, and the table is not staying very still.
“I think we should take him to church,” Aussie nods at me.
“Church!” Britain raises his hands.
“What’s church?” I do not like the sound of this.
“You have to go to church to know,” says Britain. (This phrasing is making Britain sound like an actual churchgoer.)
“You have to see it once, at least,” says Aussie. “Just to see it.”
“So what is it?”
They look at each other.
“It’s… a bar,” says Aussie. “A bar with women.” He doesn’t say “hooker bar.” He says a bar with women.
“I don’t think that’s my speed.”
“You’re in Shanghai; you have to see it,” says Britain. He’s kind of stern about this.
I sigh. I don’t think I’m likely to enjoy this. But I’m this far into the longform improv show that constitutes my life. And I am in Shanghai. Just once. Just to see it.
“Wait,” Aussie stops me right before we leave our table. “What’s your street? What do you say to the cab?”
French 75 has previously coached me. My impression of her satisfies Aussie.
“Okay. Do you know left and right?”
I don’t.
He taps his left shoulder with his left hand. “Zou.” It sounds like “Zo.” (As a childhood Miami Heat fan, I log this information by telling myself I have to turn left to meet Alonzo Mourning.) Aussie daps to his right shoulder. “You.” It sounds like “Yo.” “Zo, Yo,” he dances out the meaning. “Got it?”
Sure.
“Now, what if someone does something you don’t like? Tries to give you something you don’t like?”
I don’t like the vaguely menacing scenario he’s concocted. And I don’t have an answer.
“Bu yao,” he says. (It’s not that different from “Boo ya!”, suburban fathers will be happy to learn.) “Boo yow.”
“What’s it mean?”
“It means, ‘I don’t want.’”
We’re walking now.
We head down the block a short way. My guides make a practiced turn. We pass a place that says “Pizza!” and does not appear to have ever sold pizza. It’s a little brick kiosk. The attendant holds a walkie-talkie and scans us as we pass. I have felt safer.
Around the corner, up some stairs, sits Manhattan. I know because of the neon blue lettering. It’s loud, but not loud enough for an organic club. The windows are dark. They built the word “eerie” for this shit. At least there’s apparent foot traffic, and good light to the street.
Inside there’s a little coat check, then a curtain. We brush through the curtain and enter the sanctuary of the church. It is a bar, and there are women: there are lots of thin Chinese in tight, reflective dresses sprinkled across the floor and the barstools. A group of some five lounge on a raised platform at the back of the room. I want to call it a stage, but the lighting doesn’t sell it. The women there move, occasionally, in spasmodic pulse. It’s unclear if the thing they think they’re doing is dancing. The men are old. Aussie looks young in the room. We all look blue: the lights are blue and purple, and these lights fill every corner. The entire space feels and looks like overexposed music video outtakes from a forgotten 90s band.
This entire evening, I’ve felt the uneasy sense that I’m on set – that I should check for cameras, because the thing I’m in isn’t life: it’s a very intricate terrarium. This place is different. This place is a theater, sure, and we’re all on the stage; but we’re also the audience. It’s a fake bar not the way Big Bamboo is a fake bar – not because this city feeds me back half-translated American culture. This place – this church of the unfeeling – is a fake bar because we the colonists asked for it. At real bars, the women don’t sidle over to you once you eye them up. At real bars, they don’t eye you back and pounce with mechanical regularity. We designed this set for ourselves. I never thought money for sex would look so calm – so clinical.
The only saving grace of Manhattan is rank capitalism: the women know where the money is. They know that I’m young, and they know that young men probably aren’t getting paid by the global firms setting stakes in the marsh of Shanghai. They know, like any good student of economics, that earnings rise in your fifties. They know that Britain has what they want. Women glide past me and rest arms on Britain’s shoulder. He makes a face of theatrical delight and amazement.
I’m disgusted. I try not to be disgusted too often. I was raised very religious: I was raised to hate people. I was raised to consider my regular desires evil, and my sexual desires unspeakably foul. So I don’t like to indulge in that kind of judgment: I don’t like to tell people what to do about sex anymore. I like to separate what I find unappealing from what I find gross from what I find immoral, and I try to be very careful about punching that last card.
This is immoral. I don’t have the ethical calculus on a whiteboard. I don’t have any scripture or hymn or holy commandment to back me up; I’ve left all of them behind me. I can’t even say that this is unilaterally bad for women; can’t even cash the one moral token allowed progressive academics: maybe some of these girls like it; maybe it’s a relatively painless way to cover rent. Maybe. I don’t fucking care. There’s nothing cute about this. Whatever you find sacred, if you find anything sacred, is desecrated here. The place is very clean, and I smell vomit. I taste acid in the dip of my throat.
I tell Aussie I’m out, and he hugs me and I push past thin silhouettes and outside, where for the first time in two days the air is better than it is indoors. I tumble down the steps and tumble into the first cab I see, right outside Manhattan.
“Ni hao,” the driver greets me.
I give him the address. He squints at me in the rearview. He asks something, and of course I don’t know what he’s asking.
I give him the streets again. I focus. I try to pronounce each syllable with the right intonation – Chinese is all about the swooping, high, or dipped intonation; I’ve been told. Get the tone right. Now I’m just repeating the streets over and over and over; louder each time. The driver grows agitated, and soon he’s just yelling at me. I don’t get most of it, but I do understand “Bu Shi!”, which is kind of like “No!” plus “Don’t do that!”
The cab door opens. An older prostitute – a madam of some kind, it looks like – sticks her head inside the cabin and barks at the cabbie. The cabbie barks back. I can read the bodies and the tone enough to get it: She was mad at him, but he explained that I’m doing it wrong, and she sees that the mistake is mine. She takes my arm gently, and guides me out of the cab.
Bewildered, I stare at the cab and the cabbie. I see other patrons getting out just fine. And I see that those other patrons have women with them. And I get it: These cabs aren’t running a meter. These cabs aren’t for me.
The next time the madam takes my arm, there’s no compassion in her. She’s pulling me in. I lightly take her arm off mine. “No,” I try. “Uh, bu shi.” She grips. With nails. Other girls crowd around, cooing an calling. I summon my training from Aussie – while remembering quite clearly that it’s his fault I’m here – and mutter, “Bu yao.” It doesn’t seem to work. They gaze at me hungrily. They clamor, so loud and insistent and urgent my composition training comes back to me: They’re singing the “Kryie” from Ligeti’s Requium. I gather myself, and yell: “BU YAO!” That does the trick. That, and prying the madam’s fingers off my shoulder and bulldozing the crowd of vultures.
This is less than ideal. I don’t know which direction to walk, but I have to get away from Manhattan to find a working cab, so I walk; in some direction. I’m definitely, dangerously drunk: The jetlag and liquid diet slipped through my regular armor. The sidewalk takes a few steps away from me as I try to follow it. The whole neighborhood is infested with hookers, like termites in the frame. They come at me in waves. I slowly lose my patience, and my politeness, and then my sympathy. I slap away thickets of bejeweled arms. I scream at them, in their eyes, “BU YAO BU YAO.”
The next cabs I see are also in a line. There’s a lot of light and noise at the building they’re circling. There seem to be a lot of women hanging around outside the doors. The sign says “Ruby’s.” I’ve seen this movie before.
I walk on. The roads darken. The buildings are either houses or closed businesses. The shops are pitch black. I am very hungry, and very lost, and I don’t have a working cell phone. I have a little bit of Chinese cash, and maybe a 60% chance of pronouncing the intersection of my school correctly. If I can get a cab.
I walk still. Finally, I get to a main artery. I think – the streets are so reliably massive I don’t know what a highway properly looks like relative to another highway. But this one is elevated, and I think the elevated highways are more important – because they’re elevated. (Whatever.)
There’s not much traffic here. Occasionally, a car races by. It’s usually a cab. I wave at a few and they blaze on into the night. There’s a point in this wait I find myself at the corner of a monstrous street in a city of twenty-seven fucking million people, and there’s no one around: no cars, no pedestrians. I’ve managed to find perfect solitude, for thirty seconds. The stars can’t even find me under the smog.
Thirty seconds are up. A cab approaches at high speed, and I raise my arm. It works: it skids to a halt and I get in; passenger seat, this time. I stare very carefully at the cabbie and repeat the intersection, as I’ve understood it. I repeat it like I’m telling a president the nuclear codes for the first time.
He grunts, and kicks it. I have no idea if he’s going the right direction. I lean on the window, like I did when I came out, hours back. I’m dizzy. I don’t remember drifting off, but I do remember waking up a few times.
And then I see it: places I know. Spots I understand – I think. This looks like the way I came. It’s terrible figuring it out – all the roads look the same, and the buildings leer in the same square, flat, molding shapes all across Shanghai. But there’s a weird kind of tunnel in one of the roads right before the school, and I think we passed it, and I think I’m maybe actually safe.
The driver mumbles something at me. I try to remember Aussie’s tip, and I try to point the right direction: “You!” (It’s pronounced “Yo.”) Turn right, please. He does, and I’m at the school gate. I fumble cash into his hands, in I hope the right amount, and stumble out.
I can feel my school I.D. in my back pocket. I take a heavy breath. I’m not entirely sure I know what I have to say, but I have to try. I reach the guard gate, and the bored attendant greets me.
“Wo shi yinyue laoshi,” I try. “Yin yue lao shi.” Music teacher. I have no fucking clue if this is how you pronounce it, in a language where pronunciation is meaning.
The guard is confused for a minute, and I try again and brandish my badge. “Pffft,” he says, when he sees that. It’s oddly but very comforting to know that this sound is the same, and means the same, in any language: “Whatever, man.” He motions me past, annoyed.
I thrill – I’ve made it. But then I remember the second-most dire problem: I have to piss. I have to piss so terribly that I may burst; may just expire, ruptured, on the brick walkway of International K-12. Just past the gate, and my first turn, there’s a wooded nook in the campus. I take a step in and spray vengeance across the greenery.
Yinyue laoshi indeed.
_ _ _
In the coming days, I learn three important things:
- Every road sign in Shanghai is marked with an “N” and “S” for north and south, for English-speakers.
- No I.D. is required for white people at International K-12. It doesn’t matter the hour of night: you just walk in. You can add a nod and a ni hao if you’re feeling polite. Your I.D. is your race. About a tenth of the time the guard is asleep anyway.
- There are literally hundreds of security cameras on the school’s campus, and some of them are pointed at a certain wooded nook.