My working hours at my school were very generous. I didn’t start work until 3pm for most of the week. A rough hangover could be assuaged by then, and with a new city to explore, an independence unlike I’d had before and a city that was absurdly cheap it was difficult to resist late night exploring.
I quickly felt like a male Simpsons character as I began to frequent a bar by myself. Bing Bing Baby was run by a bloke from Reading called Jason and his Chinese wife (bing means ice in Chinese…). I finally had a place to watch football, and with kick off times starting around 10pm, most visits would end up spreading deep into the night, often accompanied by sessions of soul bearing with Jason.
Bing Bing Baby attracted mostly expats; a cast of characters lifted from various spots across the planet. It became a hub to meet people and exchange stories through smoky air.
I got talking to a man once who, upon seeing my injured finger from an aforementioned onion incident, decided to Crocodile Dundee 1up me. You call that a finger injury? THIS is a finger injury. He showed me his hand, contoured around his palm and thumb was a connected network of scars. But there was something odd about his hand that I couldn’t quite figure out.
He told me how he had been in a motorbike accident some years ago. It explained the scars. He also told me he had lost his thumb in the crash. I looked at his hand again. He told me how the doctors grafted another similar body part onto his hand as a replacement thumb. His big toe.
I spent another night drinking with a Scotland Yard police detective. He had come to Chongqing to take a two year break from the stresses of his horrific sounding job.
“Do you not become desensitised to it all?” I asked
He gave a throaty snort. “There’s only so much child pornography you have to sift through before it starts to take its toll”. I didn’t know what to say.
“When I get into work on Monday morning, there are ten fresh cases on my desk waiting for me.”
He took a gulp from his bottle.
“When I get back, I’m joining the counter-terrorism unit” he told me with a glint of optimism in his eye. “One case on my desk, and I’ll have a team of ten around me to deal with it.”
There is something disposable about those meetings with other expats. There is an odd, unspoken obligation to communicate with someone despite only having in common that you were in China and not Chinese. Though this natural gregariousness spat up some entertaining nights and chance meetings with interesting people, to forge real friendships wasn’t easy.
They were the all signing all dancing scenery that reminded me that I wasn’t the only person on this adventure abroad. On the contrary, some had been in China for more years than I had been alive with a family and career. But they did not solve any problems or cure any loneliness, though at times it seemed that many were searching for it.
There is a constant, two-way conveyor belt bringing in new faces and tossing out old ones. Inevitably the news comes that x and y have left China, that’s the last you hear of them, those faces you were going out for BBQ with in the middle of Asia are back to their normal lives and out of yours. It became less motivating to even try making friends as inevitably one of you would usually be gone in a year. Like an immortal soul wandering the earth for decades, another face is another NPC, they have their life, their story, their adventure and you are as unimportant to them as they are to you. Most of the time.
Expats are an odd breed of human. There must be some wiring within us that has calibrated us to dive into the decision to move to the other side of the planet. The decision of looking at your friends, family, life in general, thrust it away and decide to search for something else, be it a good reason or a bad one.
A beautiful simplification of the whole process was worded in a single question in Helen’s bar in Chongqing. Not long after I had arrived in the country, a fellow Englishman, James, asked with a wry smile: “So, what are you running away from?”. I instinctively laughed. Though immediately the thought reared it’s head like a cobra, what AM I running away from?
James dropped another smile and followed up “or are you running towards something?”.
I liked that question a lot more. Though I wasn’t sure of the answer. It’s dependent on which version you tell yourself. I think I’m doing that one.
