China Dispatch/Andrew Gramling
Back to Hefei
Summer and I took the number three bus, and headed west down the relatively straight-shooting and somewhat hilly Changjiang Road that was lined with banks, family restaurants, Internet bars, and businesses of all kinds. We passed by the south gate of the Anhui Agriculture University on the right where several taxis waited for students in a small parking area directly in front of the gate, which was nearly across the street from the Carrefour shopping center on Changjiang Road. Carrefour was a three-level shopping center a little smaller than a football stadium, with clothing stores and a KFC on the first level, and electronics, school supplies, more clothes, and a grocery store all in one big open area on the second floor. In a previous visit to this shopping center, I never made it all the way up to the third floor. Perhaps there wasn't much to see there. There was also a large open area in front of Carrefour where people sometimes set up tents to sell various items. Just after Carrefour, there was a small hill that led up and under two bridges that crisscrossed each other over Changjiang Road. The rest of the bus ride was uneventful as there were no other significant buildings in the steady line of buildings on either side of Changjiang Road.
The buses in Hefei were quite modern. They usually had two flat-screen televisions in front and in back of the bus hanging from the ceiling that often played Tom and Jerry cartoons, and also had news reports. The overhead rails had small yellow triangle-shaped handles running along the entire length of the inside of the bus, because the buses would get packed with people at busy times during the day. Sometimes there were so many people on the bus that they had to stand on the stairs right in front of the door, smashed up against each other because there was no room anywhere on the bus. When that happened, people would pass their bus fare up to the bus driver, and then get on the bus through the back door where there might be a little more room. Also, at times when there were long lines to get on the bus, people would often push the line of people in front of them as though they weren't going to get on the bus unless they did that, but they always got on anyways. It annoyed me at times, but I tried to understand that people in China were raised with different beliefs and have different levels of acceptable behavior from what I was used to. Those were the times when I saw people at their most disrespectful. At many of the major bus stops, there would be between 30 and 50 people waiting for different buses, and many of them would push each other out of the way without concern for anyone else. No one ever seemed to be bothered by it except for foreigners.
The new hotel I would stay at was located on a road off Changjiang Road where there was very little traffic. That had its advantages and disadvantages. While the traffic was less noisy and dangerous, it was also more difficult to catch a taxi as very few of them would come through that way. Near the T intersection on Changjiang Road where the road the hotel was on and where Changjiang Road met, there was a tall cylinder shaped hotel called Fengle International Hotel that stood majestically over the other buildings. It was by far the tallest building in the area. Continuing down the road just off of Changjiang on the left side were some buildings that were soon to be demolished because the government claimed they were illegally built. After the "illegal" buildings, there were several other old buildings that had no division between them, except for an entrance that went back into a dark and stuffy maze of apartment buildings, which was cooler than most areas since it was hardly ever touched by direct sunlight, except for times when the sun was at its highest point. Those apartments seemed smaller and less modern than most in China, and that part of the city appeared to be one of the older areas that was a little more undeveloped aside from Fengle International Hotel. Moving past the entrance to the maze of apartments, there was another very small entrance that was easy to miss between a small open-faced shop and a restaurant right next to the road. It was basically a square-shaped hole in the wall big enough for a person to walk through. It led to a small back alley where there was a side entrance to the restaurant on the right, where the cooks sometimes did some of their prep cooking, and a staircase leading up to the hotel on the second floor on the left, which was built on top of the small shops and restaurants. There was also another staircase in the back alley next to the restaurant leading up to Summer's friend's five-story apartment building. Once we climbed the stairs to the second floor, we walked around to the front of the building and Summer talked to the hotel owners that lived in the first and biggest room in the hotel which overlooked the street below. The second floor was composed of a dozen or so small hotel rooms and a one-person public bathroom. There was a railing that went all the way around the second floor balcony, but the walkway was severed in back of the building, which prevented people from having direct access to the hotel rooms without first passing by the owners' room in front. There was a quick way to get to the rooms in back of the hotel, but that required going through the owners' room to get there. After helping me with my hotel arrangements, Summer went home to take care of some business, but told me Jackie would come to the hotel later to visit.
The owners of the hotel were a family of three -- a mother, father, and a young daughter who was learning English. They were very friendly. Later, I sometimes helped the girl with her English while her mother washed my clothes for free. It was a very cheap hotel that charged only 20 yuan ($2.50) per night, but the owners kept the place super clean. Late at night, they would lock the door-sized front gate on the balcony right next to their room, and they would wake up to the sound of anyone knocking on the gate knowing fully that it was part of their duty to answer. On the front balcony of the hotel, I looked down over the rail onto the street that flowed past me to the north. About 50 people or so would be spread out across the street at any time riding their old fashioned bikes and walking down the old gray concrete road underneath the hot summer sun, and some of the young women walked with their sun umbrellas resting on their shoulders or held over their heads. Occasionally, heavy transport trucks would plow through whoever was on the street, rapidly blowing their loud air horns that sounded like a studderer trying to play an oversized trumpet at a one-man street parade. Underneath the hotel on the gray sidewalk in front of the shops on the ground level near the entrance to the back alley, some of the neighborhood residents, mostly older people, liked to gather around a small table to play cards and other games. People in this area had much more relaxed lives than the businessmen and women who flooded the busy downtown area, going to and from their jobs with heavy stress on their minds to earn the big money. This area of Hefei was like a section of a small town carved out and placed in the middle of a large city.
Jackie came to my hotel room later and we watched T.V. for a while. There were many soap operas on television about ancient Chinese warriors with long hair and dressed in elegant silk, who could spin around and float in the air with such grace, while attacking their enemies with weapons, kung fu, and chi energy-blasts. There was also a popular show about a legendary monkey, with the power to do almost anything, who was kind-hearted and always outsmarted his opponents. Summer called her friend Rae, who lived across the small back alley from the hotel, to come meet Jackie and I. When she entered into my small hotel room, she carried with her one of those significant presences. I instantly knew she was one of the main characters. She presented herself as shy and conservative at first, but that was far from the truth, as I later found out. After talking to me for several minutes in English that almost sounded like she had a British accent, Rae said to me, "You are a panda." I didn't know what she meant by that, so I asked her about it and she said, "I say you are a panda because you are rare." I suppose she would have said the same thing to any foreigner she met, but it made me feel honored for a second. While we were all talking, the female hotel boss came to my hotel room saying in Mandarin that someone called on the phone in her room, and I had a feeling that's what she was talking about even though I couldn't understand her. She was kind enough to let people use her phone without charging any money for it. I was still talking to Rae when Jackie came back into my room and said that Summer wanted to talk to me on the phone. When I picked up the phone in the boss's room to talk to Summer, the first thing she said was, "Why did Jackie answer the phone instead of you?" I said, "I didn't even have the chance to answer the phone. The hotel boss said something, and then Jackie went quickly to answer it." Maybe she thought I would rather spend time talking to Rae instead of her, but that wasn't true. Summer was a little suspicious of Rae for some reason.
Jackie, Rae, and I went down to the restaurant underneath the hotel to eat dinner, through the small dual sliding glass doors that had red Chinese print on them, and sat down at one of the six four-person tables there. There was a T.V. hanging up in one of the corners of the room that other customers and some of the restaurant workers were fixated on. There was a small electronic gambling machine that looked like a pachinko machine in the kitchen in the next room that had flashing lights and was making electronic sound effects that never stopped. I had heard that such machines were illegal, but someone in the next room was making full use of one. We ordered fish soup, which comes in a large porcelain bowl with chunks of fish and bones, leafy green vegetables, and hot spices all boiled together in water. We also ordered a plate of sweet and sour pork, and a plate of tomato and fried eggs, which Summer got me addicted to. Back when Nathan was still around, Summer and her sister Amy gave me a short quiz, and one of the questions was, "When eating tomato and eggs, do you think about which one you should eat first?" By the end of the quiz, judging by my answers, they determined I had "Water on the brain." While we were eating, Jackie and Rae were having a conversation in Mandarin, and Jackie pulled out a small photo of Nathan from his wallet. Rae looked at his picture and said, "He looks like Juices." I didn't know what she was talking about. Orange juice or lemonade? Then I finally figured out what she was trying to say. She was trying to say that Nathan looked like Jesus, though I didn't understand that either since he didn't have any facial hair. Jackie started sorting through one of the plates of food with his chopsticks, looking for the piece of food he wanted, but Rae was disgusted by it. "That is very impolite," she abhorred. Jackie wasn't known for his polite table manners. In the middle of a meal, he would often spit goobers on the floor while making loud hacking sounds because his lungs were so full of tar from smoking all the time. Rae had a very refined manner about her, but she dually possessed quite an emotional character, and would often have emotional outbursts of tearless crying and moaning for what seemed like no reason. The other half of the time, she was perfectly calm and relaxed. I think she opened up more of her emotional side to others as she got to trust and know them. She didn't trust Jackie because she said that most Chinese can't be trusted, so she never opened up while he was around, but I trusted him like a brother.
September 5, 2007 Archives