Part 1
Late June/early July 2003
Zibo, Shandong Province
In the heyday of SARS panic, I was left with a whole lot of free time on my hands. My already light teaching schedule was further reduced to only 8 hours a week, the local middle schools having cancelled our classes to hide from the dreaded virus. The foreign teachers were mostly confined to the university campus, and this led to definite cases of cabin fever. We played lots of volleyball and held raucous keggers in the “Foreign Building” where we all lived (yes, hallway bowling with plastic ball and pins was a highlight).
As SARS mania eased gradually with the arrival of summer, it was easier and easier to get off campus. I decided I was going to start biking…a lot. Zibo was rather ideal for this: the terrain was completely flat, the roads were very wide and the traffic was nowhere near as suicidal as Hangzhou.
Zibo itself is less a city than a huge county; in fact, it can often take almost one hour to drive from one “district” to another. It works on a spoke-and-wheel model: Zhangdian is the central and largest district with a few hundred thousand people (and lots of tall white-tile buildings). Spread around this urban core are various satellite “districts”, some of them no more than oversized villages (and others no less than industrial nightmares). Between all the districts are country-like highways and vast tracts of farmland.
The university campus was located right on the western edge of Zhangdian, with farmland for several miles between it and the next district, Zhoucun. The road leading West was straight and flat, a rather uneventful ride. Although my bike was hardly ideal for this sort of trekking (think uncomfortable seat), I made the trip several times with fellow teachers just to do something a little different.
Along this route was a massive barbecue restaurant set up in a field just off the road. It was outdoor seating only; maybe one hundred low tables, the ones where you really have to crouch down low to sit on a tiny fold-out chair. Each table had its own barbecue “pit”, and the restaurant owners must have had their own giant pit nearby because it often seemed as if half the farm was on fire.
This was not a place you came to be seen; the bathrooms were holes in the ground, the kind where you stumble around in the dark praying you aren’t about to put your foot somewhere it shouldn’t be. Basically, you were dining on someone’s farm.
Nevertheless, the place’s popularity with the locals was evident. The dirt road off the highway was kept constantly buzzing by the arriving Santanas and Chang An minivans.
People came here in big groups to laugh, smoke, roll up their shirts and drink liters of cheap beer. At the end of the night, the general debris scattered around the area was rather unbelievable. I don’t even think Woodstock got it so bad. In this setting, choking on barbecue smoke, we would gorge ourselves on various meat kabobs and order way too many bottles of beer.
This place is one of my fondest memories of Zibo: an ideal manifestation of the unpretentious and down-to-earth attitude of a mid-sized industrial city in Northern China.
On one particular night, an hour or so into the festivities, we got invited over to a table by some soldiers. They were young and outgoing, but conspicuously still in their uniforms. As per the norm, lots of toasting and broken conversation. Their commanding officer steadfastly refused whenever I tried to take a picture of their group, saying it was not proper because they were in uniform. Even when he was undershirt-only about ten minutes later, still no pictures.
Invariably, things got a bit strange. The young soldiers were very hospitable and fun, but the older officer kept pulling each foreign teacher aside to talk more seriously. Luckily my Chinese was absolutely horrible back then, so I could quickly claim confusion and excuse myself to regain the main group’s festivities.
Apparently he told one teacher we were spies or something, and said something to another one of the teachers that troubled her enough that she decided she was leaving. If fact, she just took off rather upset. Realizing something was amiss, the other soldiers apologized. Beers were finished, goodbyes were made, and we chased off after our friend.
A few hundred metres down the road on our bikes, we realized that we had not paid our bill. Considering the amount of meat and beer consumed, it was bound to be substantial. Two of us rushed back and found the boss, who by that time was surveying the Armageddon scene his field had become.
He had seen our friend get upset and take off, and steadfastly refused to accept our money. We kept telling him to take it, but he just wouldn’t and kept apologizing for what had happened. I think he also started apologizing for his guest’s behaviour. The 120 RMB or so got written off, and he told us to come back anytime.
And so we biked home along the two-lane highway that joins Zhoucun and Zibo, by this time plunged into bug-inhabited darkness. We raced each other, hitting huge potholes in the bike lane and laughing the whole way. Our companions on the road were blue flatbed trucks and rumbling old harvesters, both mainstays of the Shandong countryside. At one point I raced alongside one of them, egging on the driver to get his engine cranked and show this dumb laowai who was boss.
Unfortunately for him, I could actually bike faster than his harvester motor could chug. How do you tell your friends you were passed by a drunk foreigner on a one-speed bike? I dared not race the blue trucks, however, because everyone knows they are sacred and untouchable.
The next time I went down that road was in a taxi a short while later, on my way to the Jinan airport and onwards to Beijing and Canada. I passed the barbecue place (not very active at the crack of dawn) and couldn’t help but laugh.
Since coming to Hangzhou I haven’t really looked back, but damned if I don’t miss those Northern countryside summer nights.