我们去不了

I find, hopefully, temporarily, that this interlude between my posts will not continue to widen.  However, I find the subjects I wish to talk about simply becoming too difficult to write about so simply.

The below is an example.

While living in Guangzhou in the early 90’s, I found that using 港币to pay a bill was not only convenient for myself, but welcome by the Chinese.   People always mention that going overseas is great for one’s worldly growth and cultural experience.   But no one ever mentions it’s great for deepening your understanding of economics as well!

In the beginning if a bill was say 10 rmb, I’d simply pay 10 HKD.   No one ever told me I could pay a bill using less.   And I never thought to ask.  On the black market at the time, one 港币 was probably worth 1.5 rmb.  

I mention the above as context only for the privilege and status Hong Kong had at the time in China.    It is different today of course.   The father not so charitable. Not so patient.  But I will try and get to that later.

While living in my dorm in Guangzhou, I finally accepted a dinner invitation from a fellow I’d been trying to avoid for the longest time.  A drunkard actually.  A sweaty, 30 something with that touch of hair growth just on the chin.    A typical drunken, Cantonese peasant.

Now you might be wondering how I knew this fellow and how we had crossed paths, and just why now I was excepting his dinner invite.   Simple.  He was the husband of one of our dormitory ayi’s.  A pretty, fair skinned lass with short hair, partial to loose skirts with a simple shirt that never matched.  Her daughter was barely a year old, and was as cute as her mother. 

She was a very nice young lady and I had absolutely no idea how she got the job she did, or even more amazing, how in the hell she wound up marrying this guy.  But it happened, and Thank God their daughter came out like mom and not like dad。

A couple of days a week the husband would spend the night in the Ayi quarters, which were on the first floor just behind the registration desk.   I of course thought nothing of it.   But quite often, we’d simply sit there in the office watching TV while this drunkard peasant was probably having his way with the Ayi on the other side of the wall. 

I do recall that I never once saw dad hold his daughter.  Not once.  While the Ayi and her daughter were nearly inseparable.

I’ve already told you all the thrill we foreign students had of leaving Guangzhou on a Friday afternoon after class and taking the train to Hong Kong.   It was like escaping Devil’s Island and going to San Francisco.    We gorged ourselves at Pizza Hut, McDonald’s and watched movies in the theater.  We gazed out across from Victoria Harbour(notice I’m spelling it the English way) and walked up and down Nathan Road, with all its lights and noise, time and again.

Then on Sunday afternoon’s we’d trudge back across the border, handing our student ID’s and showing our passports to the always stern and unsmiling customs officers on the other side.   Leaving Hong Kong and going to Guangzhou was like leaving Earth and going to the Dark Side of the Moon.  

I told of how I once snuck a Hong Kong Playboy Edition across the border to give to my Chinese friend(who still lives in Guangzhou). 

Going back to China was always a battle for me.   I said some pretty stupid things at times to the customs officials, and they in turn punished me quite often.   I can’t recall what I said to a female customs lady but whatever it was the bitch sent me to the back of the line.  This happened twice.

I always seemed to get especially pissed at the ugly habit of the Customs Department to change the entry form.  Those of us accustomed to going across the border simply filled it out before we crossed, thus saving time and gaining a spot closer to the front of the line.  But when presenting your entry form sometimes only then you would realize that Good Ole’ China had switched over to a new entry form and yes, you have to go get that form and fill it out and no, you cannot use the old one, and sorry but I guess you lost your space in line!!

I recall once I told one guy while I was in line to “hurry up” and he simply stared at me and said in reply “you are lucky you are not Chinese”.

I literally hated these Guys.  I was a 23 year old punk high on my ability to speak Chinese, and thus go toe to toe with the bureaucracy.  Yet their power was immense and so to compensate for their inability themselves to travel where I was coming from, they used it.

I tried to keep my distance from the Ayi’s.   A simple hello would suffice and in hindsight I’m sure they had one of the more difficult jobs on campus.  Putting up with the laowai, few of which could string a sentence together, myself in the beginning included.   The Ayi’s had no leverage over us.   No department chairmen to punish us, or keep us from getting a job or plum room assignment.  They weren’t going to kick us out either.  Rather, we were looked upon as a source of hard cash!  

Still, I don’t recall any of us ever being rude to the Ayi’s.   Nothing of the sort.   We did resent their intrusions into our private lives yes.  There was definitely resistance there.  Many years later I went back to my University and to my shock one of the meaner Ayi’s was still there, on station.  And you know what?  She was as nice as could be.   I guess I was just too young to appreciate her at the time.

When the day finally came to have dinner it was the beginning of the second semester and on what was probably a Sunday night I trudged over to their room.   The husband of the young Ayi was already drunk. Making small talk, I remembered my shock upon hearing the Ayi was actually younger than me.  This guy was really robbing the chicken coop.  

He immediately poured me a glass of rice wine.  He told me he drank rice wine for breakfast as well, and I believed him.  Thinking back, it must have been a loss of face for him to have his wife work such a job, babysitter to a bunch of students older than herself, playing Overlord over us all.  But she was really easy going and hospitable to us all, with a genial personality.  With that in mind, she was perfect for the job! 

Her husband however, nice though he was, struck me as not only being uncouth but also quite frankly, leading what was clearly to me a life of quiet desperation.  He knew his lot sucked, and he saw not one iota of hope in his future.   Though this was the same guy so successfully robbing the cradle night after night as well.  Though I should have felt sorry for him, his habit of being perpetually drunk for some reason peeled away any sympathy for him I could have maintained. 

If only he knew what the Future of China held for him.

(Congratulations if you’ve gotten this far in the story without turning off your laptop.  I see it’s taken me 1200 words just to get the topic.  All the same, this is a story I’ve been meaning to tell for quite some time.  I’ve three other posts lined up behind this one.   Just need the patience to get them out.  I’ve found my posts are increasingly requiring neurons to write.   Which in turn makes me hesitant.  Maybe I’m simply becoming intimidated by the work required to put them out? My apologies.)

This fellow, who’s name I’ve never taken the time to remember, is forever lost in my memory.  The odds are he’s a Wang, or Zhu, or maybe even a Li.    But I just can’t bring myself to call him that drunken peasant either.

Over the past semester he’d see me as I came back from Hong Kong.   He was one of the few that peppered me with questions.  He knew what it was like, of course.  He could see it on TV.   The tall buildings.  The hairstyles of the women.   Like everyone else he watched the Hong Kong news and the Hong Kong programs through a banned antenna dish.  An oasis only an hour or so by train, to him it was like going to the Moon.   Just wasn’t gonna happen.

As luck would have it I’d just come back from HK the day before.   Going to Hong Kong was good not only for my stomach but my emotional wellbeing.  I don’t understand how those deep in China could’ve survived China without some taste of Western culture.  I really don’t.

I once tried to sign up for some type of American celebration at the local US Consulate.  Sold out.  Which pissed me off.    It obviously wasn’t for all Americans.  My guess was Guangzhou maybe had 50 or so Americans there at the time.  A bunch of old people living in the China Hotel serving as some type of China Representative for their company.  Spiteful wives in tow.   I knew one American wife in her late 50’s perhaps that always took a taxi from the hotel to a mall across the street.   One day her regular taxi had someone else get in before she could and she started screaming in English.

“I guess I’ll have to walk across the street.”  And she did.

One could tell she was more emotionally exhausted than anything.

My point is the only way to get to Western Civ was to go to a Chinese enclave off limits to Chinese! 

Soon as I sat down in the drunkard’s room he started filling my glass with rice wine.

He knew of my trip to Hong Kong of course, and started a tirade.  The tirade I’ve long since forgotten, of course except for one phrase that has stuck in my memory since and is the basis of why I’m writing this.

But back to his tirade.  He went on and one about how bad the Chinese government was.   Back then the phrase of the month was “human rights”.   

“We Chinese have no human rights”, he’d say.

I wasn’t sure if he even knew what the concept was.   But I’m quite positive he was simply comparing himself to the Hong Kong folks rather than to anyone in the West.    Like most drunks he wouldn’t shut the fuck up. I found myself just nodding, trying to keep up with what he was saying.  My Chinese barely kinda sorta proficient after only one semester, huge gaps everywhere in my grammar.  His thick Cantonese accent…drunk…not helping.

Finally like Kanye West quipped at the end of his infamous tirade against George Bush,  this dude, long before KW finally ended his tirade with,

我们去不了。

And just that, this drunken, ugly, robber of cradles, peasant guaranteed himself a spot in my China Memory.

That one phrase summarized everything he felt.  It would have been far more efficient to have just left out the previous 30 minute tirade.  I would’ve caught his point far more quickly.   This phrase really crystallized the resentment everyone had against China.  To them, it was China’s fault they couldn’t travel to Hong Kong.  See how life was in a democratic environment.  It was as if The People had gathered at the bank of a stream on a hot day to gaze out at a peach orchard, there for the taking.   Except it was forbidden to cross the stream to reach the damn peaches. 

As I walked back to my room slightly tipsy from all the rice wine, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for this guy.   I never considered for a moment that Hong Kong simply wasn’t equipped perhaps to start allowing Chinese to come over in droves.  After all, wouldn’t they all just squat and stay?

It is not true by the way that Mainland Chinese could not go to Hong Kong in the 90's.   I knew one or two that did.  Usually sponsored by their company.  Or of course married to a Hong Kong fellow. But his point was clear.  there was no way someone like HIM could ever get across. 

It’s quite alright to call me a wumao here, but the Chinese really had to wait until The Handover in ’97, (which I witnessed！), and China took over, in order for Chinese visits to be orderly made.  After all, anyone coming over to squat would simply be returned.

I have to admit I’ve rarely thought of that guy since I left Guangzhou.  I’ve thought more of their daughter, of what she’s become, to be honest.   I’d say those two have probably divorced by now, as so many Chinese women married so young have done, and she’s probably remarried.   And as for him, well I’d think for some reason he’s probably dead by now.    Self-inflicted shall we say.   I can only hope he made it to Hong Kong.