This story is a continuation of Alone, Illegal and Broke Down in China
Part II of the first story from my upcoming book Alone, Illegal and Broke Down: Stories from motorcycling in China
A man pushes his way through the girls and speaks
in sharp tones that makes them stop giggling and stand aside. He is very young
and so thin that his brown wool pinstriped suit hangs on him in folds like on a
coat hanger. His hair is carefully clipped and gelled into a stiff American fifties-style
flat-top, with one lock left long to hang rakishly in his face. He tosses his
head back to fling the lock out of his eye, and says something to me that makes
the girls laugh nervously and flutter a little farther away.
I greet him with a Chinese hello and a look
straight in the eye, and the girls giggle again, their hands flying up to cover
their mouths. Sighing, he beckons me to his office, a lit doorway just in front
of us, and takes me by the arm to guide me inside. Surprisingly, he is a few
inches taller than I, perhaps 5 feet 10 inches tall..
The girls follow us in but after few sharp words
from the boss they reced into the darkness and we are left alone in the office:
a square concrete box with a steel desk and a ratty Naugahyde couch bursting at
the seams. I fish through the pockets of my black leather motorcycle jacket and
hand him 20 yuan, the amount the woman at the gas station had quoted. He laughs
and pushes it back to me.
I am too tired to go through an extended
haggling process, and too tired to remember that I am desperate for sleep.
After riding all day in the heat, after the stress of being lost, the
uncertainty of the motorcycle, finding gasoline, night falling unmercifully
black and those tiny villages with fires and stray pigs and white-trunked
trees, I am exhausted, and I could strangle him for what he is doing,
opening drawers to find a pencil so that he can write the digits 200 on a piece
of paper, ten times price the woman at the gas station had quoted.
I hold the
paper and we stand silently together on the stained burgundy carpet. It is as
thin as denim, and glued badly onto the concrete floor. The walls are covered
in crackling stucco, and the sagging ceiling is stained with water. The black
and white television set is turned on full volume, the sound horribly
distorted. Two attractive anchorpeople, a man and a woman, report the news.
Their announcements are a combination of guttural and singsong nasal whining.
Footage of a public execution flits across the screen: two kneeling men,
blindfolded with hands bound behind their backs, a mass of enraged or excited
people. Would they be shot or beheaded or hanged? Then they show blond Russian
children digging through a vast garbage dump for scraps of food, followed by
stills of President Clinton who is due to visit in a few months. I’d seen the
same footage in Beijing, over and over and over again. It is 1998, the year
that China would remove borders and other barriers to sharing in first world wealth.
I study the piece of paper. I could counter with
thirty, and he would insist upon 100, and I would write down thirty five, and
he would then write fifty, and then I would hand him forty. He would take it,
and I really should do all that except that the woman at the gas station
already gave me the price of twenty yuan and in my exhausted state I’m not thinking
about all the trouble I will cause here with paperwork and lack of language and
writing skills and my need for hot water. I shove the paper back at him and
explain in succinct English that the owner told me it was twenty yuan and twenty
yuan was all I was damn well going to pay and hadn’t he heard that the days of
Foreigner price were over. I wave the twenty toward the gas station and tell
him that if he thinks I’m going to pay two hundred for a dump like this he was
crazy and I push it into his hand.
He takes
it with a little shrug and a smile that means, “Well, I had to try,” and I stomp
back to the motorcycle but it’s not there any more. Stunned, I look around and see,
with no little relief, that it had only been pushed away into the crook of the
L-shaped compound near the wooden gates. I feel the manager watching me as I
stomp across to it.
I jerk my suitcase out of the sidecar, unlock
and open the trunk to get my computer case and camera, and two of the girls suddenly
appear to escort me to my room.
The hallway is glassed in, and we step up two
shallow stairs onto the same thin, wrinkled burgundy carpet that was in the
manager’s office, and even more blotched. Standing by each door is a little
yellow pot decorated delicately with pink fleur-de-lis, a quarter full of
water. As I puzzle over the purpose of these, moths bash themselves to death on
the bare light bulbs in front of each door, falling in the collected heap in
front of each threshold. Every tiny impact creates a tinging sound that is just
audible over the sound of a river.
The room is a concrete box. One of the girls pushes
by me to rush in and turn on the television set at full volume. The other girl walks
in behind me bearing a thermos of hot water and a small, thin towel. I walk
into the bathroom—it built into the corner of the room like an afterthought,
with walls that fall short of the ceiling by a foot. The hot water tap runs
cold, as does the cold water tap. I request more thermoses of hot water, and
she returns shortly with three more.
I put my suitcase on the double bed and the
girls come closer as I unzip it. I packed very little but carefully; a Gortex rain
suit, a fine-gauge, bicycle-weight wool sweater, long silk underwear, thick
hiking socks and boots, sports-bras and tights, quick-dry shirts and a
toiletries kit with neat little bottles of shampoo and conditioner, moisturizer
and sunscreen and a clear plastic bag full of bottles of medicines I might
need.
I wonder how to get the girls out of my room so
I can have some privacy, and then the manager strides in, barking at the girls,
who wander out reluctantly. Alone again, he looks at me and sighs, then hands
me a form, knowing that this is going to be an ordeal for it’s in Chinese and
I’m illiterate. We settle ourselves down at the fake walnut desk at the foot of
the bed and study the form and my passport, attempting to figure out which
information goes in which box. After studying each others documents, we look up
at each other, shrug, and begin.
I ought to have asked a clerk in a Beijing
tourist hotel to give me a form that was printed in both English and Chinese,
as a reference, but I didn’t, and so with a combination of my phrasebook,
sign-language, grimaces, and some laughter, we manage to fill out about a third
of the boxes when he abruptly pulls the paper away, indicating that’s all that’s
required. Now that we were done I wished that I had given him more money. He
was really just a very young man trying to be a big deal, and I had already
been a lot of trouble because of the form and demands for many thermoses of hot
water. Maybe I’d give him twenty more, anyway, in the morning. That was
“tourist price” anyway, even though China had officially revoked the two-price
policy.
I put my passport away and we walk outside,
parting ways as he returns to the office and I go to cover and lock the
motorcycle. Suddenly, a large blue truck roars in at an alarming speed, just at
the place where I’d first parked the motorcycle. No wonder they’d moved it—it
would have been run over. Two girls in peach polyester pyjamas run to the door as
it opens. One literally catches the driver as he falls from the high truck cab
waving a nearly-empty bottle in his hand like a prize. It drops to the ground,
empty and unbroken, and the girls help him, stumbling, to a room next to the
manager’s office. The door remains open for a moment, and I hear the sound of
retching. Two different girls break the passenger fall out of the truck and drag
him to a different room.
So fabulous, this is who I’m sharing the road
with. I’d been warned that these big blue trucks were piloted by drivers fueled by amphetamines and alcohol. They’d would be my most
frequent companions on the road, though that was changing, fast. Even though
private cars have been allowed for many years, most Chinese haven’t been able
to afford them, and so trucks and official vehicles make up ninety percent of
the traffic out here in the country.
I lock and cover the bike to discourage theft
and to hide the attention-getting black Beijing plates, go back to my room, the
door of which, I now notice, doesn’t have a lock. But I’d brought a solution
for that—an alarm that worked by sliding into the doorjamb. If the door opened,
a piercing alarm would sound.
I pour the hot water from the thermoses into a
red plastic basin on the bathroom floor and took a sponge bath. Brushing my
teeth, I peer out from between the tattered curtains to catch the action in
the compound. Apparently I had arrived just ahead of rush hour. Blue truck
after blue truck roar in, their drivers and passengers falling out like the
first ones, spilling empty bottles of high-octane liquor. From the courtyard
the sound of broken glass and giggling penetrates my walls. The same scene
occurs again and again, the girls in orange pajamas dragging drunken
truckers to their rooms. I am forgotten.
I settle into bed and try to sleep, but my
mind turns over and over on the problems of my trip. I am traveling
without a license, nor permissions of any sort from the Chinese government or
mine, and risk arrest at any moment. In addition, the first day into the
countryside I found that I couldn’t rely on road signs or local people to
tell me the way. Since I just generally wanted to head west, that didn’t matter
so much. I had no particular place to be at any certain time. But it is also now obvious that hotels are difficult to find. Although I still doubt my trip is
dangerous, since I felt perfectly safe even in this brothel, I
wonder if I'm not taking too much of a risk this time. Tomorrow will
be the time to turn back if I'm going to, only one day’s ride from Beijing.
I miss Beijing. In Beijing people
interacted with me. Foreigners are not rare, and they laugh good-naturedly
when I practicde my traveler's Mandarin. They willingly look at maps and
point me in the right direction. I miss hanging out with Teresa, the
agricultural attaché at the US Embassy. We rode motorcycles together
through the countryside once before I left, and the farmers were astonished
at us, the motorcycles, and at her fluent Mandarin. She talked endlessly with
them about the state of the crops, the weather, and whether the government had
paid them in cash or pink IOU slips. Tonight, at the brothel, I long for
Beijing.
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