List of the Month - Why it's good to be back home...

It does feel very, very good to be back in England at last - after the longest absence I have ever endured, very nearly three years; and after almost ten years of living overseas. There will, in all likelihood, be a fair amount of overlap here with this list that I compiled at the beginning of last year. Let's see.

Greenery

As I mentioned yesterday, the voluptuous greenness of this country has taken me somewhat by surprise. The vegetation of the English countryside is perhaps particularly lush at the moment, having bided its time, tensing and contracting during the unusually cool, wet spring before exploding in grateful profusion at the approach of summer's long days. I am overwhelmed by it. The dominant colours of Beijing are brown and grey: there's hardly any grass, and even the leaves of the trees get crusted in dust. I was enraptured by this riot of green within hours of arrival, taking a bus from London up to Oxford; two weeks in, the rapture has scarcely waned one jot.

Birdsong
Birds are not unknown in Beijing, but they are exceedingly rare - apart from the occasional whipporwill (easily mistaken for a rusty extractor fan, and vice versa). Even out in the surrounding countryside birds are comparatively thin on the trees, and the sound of their singing is muted, easily drowned out by the semi-feral dogs and insomniac roosters who fill the villages. There isn't the profusion and variety of bird life we find in England. Here - even in Oxford, even in the heart of London - the morning chorus can be quite deafening, and makes it almost impossible to sleep in beyond 5am or 6am. But you can't complain about this; it is rather beautiful.

Goodwill

In that post of mine in January last year, I lamented the general absence of 'casual courtesies' in China, the fact that people seldom acknowledge strangers on the street with a smile or a greeting and never hold a door open for anyone. I had forgotten just how very different the culture is here in England. In fact, I am inclined to think that things may have got better in this regard since I last lived here: we seem to have absorbed some of the openness and friendliness of the Americans, particularly in the attitude to customer service in shops and restaurants. Almost everywhere - in bars, cafés, corner shops, supermarket checkouts - I am finding a relaxed, unforced chattiness in the staff, and it's nurturing a general sense in me that the majority of people here really want to be nice to each other. Maybe I am exaggerating this, maybe I am imagining it; maybe a few isolated instances have struck me unduly deeply because this is such a huge contrast to China, where people most of the time, especially those in service jobs, seem to behave towards their fellow men with sullen introspection, distrust, irritation, or barely disguised contempt.

Affordability

Of course, China, and even Beijing, still has a huge lead in some areas: heavily subsidised public transport; locally manufactured-under-licence Western comfort foods like crisps, chocolate, and soft drinks; fresh farm produce, though it doesn't have much taste and is filled with pesticides, etc.; scrappy, unhygienic neighbourhood restaurants; the piss-weak, nearly tasteless local beer. But for an awful lot of things - most of the things that define a 'comfortable' expat lifestyle - Beijing has now become significantly more expensive than our home countries. Coffee and other packaged Western foods (admittedly these have to be imported into China), fast food (or even 'gourmet' standard burgers), drinks in a bar - these things are all at least a little cheaper now in England than I've grown used to paying in China in the last couple of years; in a few cases, quite a lot cheaper.

Clean air

I'm a little spoiled, having stayed mostly in quiet Oxford suburbs or the scattered villages of Buckinghamshire. In rural England, air pollution is almost zero. But even London seems invigoratingly fresh and wholesome compared to Beijing. In the last few years, I had got used to having a hacking cough nearly all the time, to having the glands in my neck swollen like golf balls at least half of the time, to having a wretched sore throat for much of the time, and to being laid low with a really debilitating cold three or four times a year. I had got used to being quite significantly ill almost constantly. Almost all of these symptoms had disappeared completely within a couple of days of my leaving China.

Safe drivers

Now, England has its percentage of impatient, reckless, negligent, incompetent, or downright psychotic drivers, of course. All countries do. But I am forming the impression that these days this percentage is very, very low; whereas the general level of driving standards - and the general level of courtesy, consideration, and tolerance towards other drivers and pedestrians - is quite high. Again, perhaps I am disposed to exaggerate how good behaviour on the roads is here because of the contrast with China, and particularly with Beijing - where the "impatient, reckless, negligent, incompetent" component of the driving population must be pretty near 100%, and the downright psychotics probably account for a good 10-20%.

Rain

It has been raining, or at least drizzling here almost continuously for the last week. This has been rather limiting my activities, but it brings its own pleasures. This is clean rain (rather than loaded with sand and construction debris that will dapple car roofs with mud), natural rain (not precipitated by the massive deployment of cloud-seeding chemicals), moderate rain (not the spasmodic downpours that paralyse Beijing with flash-floods). It is refreshing. It is soothing. It is probably one of the things that I have missed most.

At the moment, I am dismayed that I ever abandoned England, struggle to remember why I did, and cannot readily imagine leaving again any time soon. This euphoria will probably wear off in a while - as I run low on money, and start remembering how bloody difficult it was for me to get a job here. But for now... I am loving it, it feels very good to be back indeed.

Too polite!

That's the standard Chinese response when you display any routine social courtesy. It's meant to suggest, "You don't need to be so polite", but the clipped, choppy nature of the language always make it seem more a rather abrupt and disimissive instruction - as if to imply, "Why on earth are you bothering to be polite?" It's one of the features of the 'culture' that I don't much like: the exaggerated deference which seems to require that people hold themselves unworthy of any kind of compliment, courtesy or consideration from others, and which leads to the expected social response to any such pleasantries being to reject them.

However, there have been times recently when I have felt that American drivers are overdoing the politeness.

It is, I admit, a very pleasant change from Beijing, where drivers treat pedestrians as something to be recklessly ignored or murderously aimed at but never ever as something to slow down for. After a long spell in China, I always find my first few days in the more civilized road-user environment of the USA (or Europe) highly disconcerting. Drivers slow down for you if you're anywhere near the kerb. They usually STOP for you, if you look like you're attempting to cross the road - even if you're not at a designated crossing place. Such behaviour is quite unheard of in Beijing!

But this can be overdone. In Alexandria, VA, over the past couple of weeks, while out walking or (especially) running, I have frequently had cars stop and wait for me to cross in front of them..... when I was not yet anywhere near the junction. OK, these are mostly four-way stops, so drivers are required to come to a halt before proceeding across the junction. And it's a very sleepy, small town kind of environment - so drivers are in less of a hurry, more graciously disposed towards their neighbours, or inclined to be more wary of the possibility of kids or tourists crossing the road without paying attention. That's all very nice.

But really, guys (and gals), if I haven't yet reached the kerb, please feel free to drive on without waiting for me. I might not have decided yet if I want to cross the road - I might change direction, or loiter on this corner for a while. I might stop to re-tie my shoe laces, catch my breath, get my bearings, have a drink of water. There is no other traffic on any of these four roads for at least a quarter of a mile, so you're quite safe to go ahead. There's really no need to wait for me. You see, if you move on, after pausing for a few seconds to check for the possible approach of other road users, you won't be in my way when I finally jog across this road. And if you pause just a little longer, are a little slow to pull away.... well, I'm quite happy to jog around the back of you. But if you stand at the junction motionless for several seconds as I'm approaching, I wonder what the hell is wrong with you..... and I STOP at the kerb, because I think you've probably just zoned out for a moment, and will lurch forward as soon as you come to yourself again, without noticing my presence.

If I'm at or near the kerb and obviously looking to cross, then your waiting is a much appreciated kindness. But if I'm still five or ten yards away, it's really not necessary - you're just wasting everybody's time.

But, oh boy, how I wish I had these problems in Beijing.....

I HATE Beijing drivers

I have noticed that there is one circumstance in which Beijing drivers will slow down for a pedestrian attempting to cross the road.

The driver approaching you in the lane you are about to cross will slow down to a CRAWL if, and only if......

i) there is still not enough time/space for you to cross the lane safely in front of him; AND

ii) the driver approaching you in the lane you're still standing in is accelerating.

This really doesn't seem to happen anywhere else I've been in China. Only here in the capital is everyone behind the wheel of a car a lamebrained psychopath.

An angry incident

I had another of those near-death experiences last night. I was leaving the Sanlitun bar district with a few friends after a nice farewell dinner and drinks for the visiting sister of one of them (it wasn't even particularly late - single mums with babysitters to relieve!). We were having to walk a few hundred yards to a major road to find a cab. The road we were on was fairly well-lit, but narrow, and - as so often in this town - it didn't have much of a usable sidewalk because of the massive obstructions of trees and telegraph poles planted in the middle of it.

Car drivers, knowing that this is adjacent to the teeming bar zone, and that people have no choice but to walk on the road, should anticipate the likelihood of pedestrians - often, indeed, large crowds of less than fully attentive pedestrians - blocking their path. This is not a stretch of road that cars should be driving along at 11 at night at 40+mph.

The bastard didn't even honk his horn or flash his lights. We heard his engine behind us, heard the tyres on the road approaching stupidly quickly. My companions instantly scattered to safety. I, on the other hand, spun around to fix the driver with my most baleful stare, and obstinately held my position in the middle of the road. I admit, I do play 'chicken' like this quite a lot. I almost always win. However reckless and incompetent Beijing drivers may be, they do have some slight instinct of self-preservation and they know that killing a foreigner would be very, very bad for them. Unless they're one of the black Audi brigade, of course; in which case, they can pretty much get away with anything. Well, this guy wasn't in a black Audi, but he was approaching so fast that I didn't really have much opportunity of getting out of his way if he didn't manage to find his brake pedal.

He braked - very late and very hard. His car nearly touched me, only finally coming to a stop an inch or two off my shins. I don't believe his car control is anything near good enough to have judged it that finely. He just got lucky. Very lucky. So did I. It was a sickening, terrifying moment.

My adrenalin levels, naturally, were through the roof. I vented by yelling obscenities and flicking the finger at him. I considered - as I have done once or twice in similar incidents in the past - pounding on his bonnet (that's the 'hood' to you, my Yankee friends), or kicking out at his bumper or headlamps.... but I refrained from this, being somehow still rational enough to realise that I didn't want to risk provoking an ugly escalation of the confrontation in front of my female companions.

The guy was glaring at me and revving his engine impatiently. He was off again the instant I started to move aside, and almost creased me with his rear end as he swung into a left turn. I was again tempted to aim a kick at his doors, but again relented - contenting myself with a loud slap of the flat of the hand against a window. This time it was his turn to stop and hurl obscenities at me.

We exchanged psycho stares for a few moments through his open passenger side window. I out-psycho-ed him and he drove off. I'd always been pretty confident he wouldn't actually get out of the car to start a fight. (I was much bigger than him; and there's a strong vein of physical cowardice in most of the Chinese - they'll yell a lot, but they won't often come to blows. Not unless they can take you by surprise with a brick or a bottle. That's a topic for another post, perhaps.) He may even have had some instinctual awareness that the fact that I had women to 'protect' - or show off in front of - would be likely to make me a more formidable opponent (that's not particularly a facet of my personality, just universal human nature).

There was a danger, though, that he would come after me in the car. I've had that happen to me a couple of times. (Again, perhaps, a topic for a later post.)

Fortunately, he disappeared into the night, and we were soon able to put the unfortunate encounter from our minds.

Sadly, this is a pretty routine event in China, and particularly in Beijing. Standards of driving are just appalling. People don't follow the rules of the road. People don't know how to control their cars (a nation of bike-riders who don't like to use their brakes is slowly becoming a nation of car-drivers who don't use their brakes). People don't have any basic sense of road safety. People drive too fast. People drive aggressively. People drive drunk. People drive with feeble, uncorrected vision. Official road death figures are in excess of 100,000 per year, and the WHO speculates that there is probably massive under-reporting. Even so, it's a little over 10% of the worldwide total.

My one-man campaign to defy and challenge arsehole drivers whenever I meet them is going to get me into big trouble one day, I know.

Dao-le!

I had a cabbie the other day with the impressively aged registration number 0347**(yes, it's about time I tried to revive interest in my 'Search for Beijing's longest-serving cabbie' feature). He told me he'd been in the job for 21 years. (Unfortunately, he seemed to be one of those drivers who've been hopelessly outgrown by this crazy city: completely bewildered by the strange new metropolis that has sprung up in that time, and unsure of his geography outside of a few well-travelled districts. The garish novelty of the Haoyun Jie bar strip was completely unknown to him, and even 3rd Ringroad landmarks like the Hilton, Kunlun, and Kempinski Hotels seemed to evoke little recognition.)

The most memorable oddity of this cab ride, though, was the fact that the chap had chosen to insert his registration card into its dashboard display upside down. I'm always a bit suspicious when the card isn't easily visible (dirty display pocket, excessively sun-faded print, card missing from pocket altogether, or being substituted by an illegible photocopy - I've had all of these more than once), but after a little theatrical neck-craning I satisfied myself that my driver was indeed the same guy pictured on the card, the one with the veteran registration number.

Why had he done this, I wonder? He was plainly used to being asked about it, and seemed to find it amusing in some obscure way; but he didn't offer any explanation, and my Chinese was too limited to probe for one.

I wondered if he was repeating the visual 'pun' invariably used at Chinese New Year with the posters or paper cutouts of the character fu (good fortune) - 福 - pasted on people's front doors upside down: 倒 (upside down) and 到 (arrive) are, as well as being almost identical in written form, perfect homophones (dao, with the 4th [falling] tone]); and thus, putting your 福 on the door the wrong way up is considered to express the auspicious thought "good fortune is here!"

As it happens, 到 (with the addition of the intensive particle 了 to indicate a completed action: dao-le) is also what you tell your taxi driver when you see your destination going past.

I wonder if my long-serving but not especially knowledgeable cabbie thought this was a witty way of announcing to his passengers "Wang [not his actual name] is here for you!" Maybe so.

Postscript: My curmudgeonly erstwhile drinking companion, Big Frank, had very little patience with Beijing's cab drivers. But then, we all got into more trouble with taxis in our early days, because we didn't know our way around either. And I think there was a spotty patch in the early Noughties where the Supervision Bureau didn't seem to be doing anything effective to vet the standard of newly recruited drivers. The situation seems very much better to me now. Anyway, Big Frank used to joke sourly that the Beijing taxi drivers' test to qualify for their licence should be nicknamed not The Knowledge (as the London cabbie's notoriously demanding exam is known) but The Ignorance; anyone, he suggested, who was foolhardy enough to admit some slight familiarity with The Forbidden City or Wangfujing Street or the Kempinski Hotel - or any other significant landmark - would be immediately disqualified. Honestly, 4 or 5 years ago, that idea didn't seem so far-fetched.

Wishful thinking

A little earlier this evening I saw a bi-lingual sticker across the rear windscreen of a car (one of the scary black Audis favoured by the cadres and their affluent business associates).

In English it said: "Considerate driving creates a good city image."

Ah yes, more Olympic propaganda!

This, I fear, is very much too little, too late. I haven't seen any other efforts at driver education here. And, as I have often remarked before (just try searching for "Beijing+drivers" on here.... and maybe "homicidal"), Beijing has the worst drivers in China, probably in the world: no road sense, no car control, no awareness of what's going on around them, no regard for the traffic rules. It's every man for himself.

Other foreigners complain most of the undisciplined filtering right (and left) at major intersections, which often jams up the traffic flow in all four directions. My No 1 bugbear is the vice - which shows no sign of diminishing - of failing to slow down for (or, more often, actually accelerating aggressively towards) pedestrians attempting to cross the road.

How many visitors to Beijing next month will be killed on the roads? I'm afraid there will inevitably be some; possibly quite a lot.

Take care: it's a jungle out there.

HELL

Or Wangjing, as it is also known.

I have never liked Wangjing.

I have never liked the idea of Wangjing.

It is one of the first of the hideous 'new towns' to spring up outside the northern periphery of Beijing. And, being on the north-east side, the quadrant where most of the laowai live (conveniently en route to the airport!), it has been seen as an appealing location for the headquarters of a number of major international companies. In the past, I've taught training courses there for the likes of Siemens and ABB.

And I've absolutely hated every second I've spent in the place.

When they bulldoze one of the old neighbourhoods in downtown Beijing, the new constructions usually bear at least some faint vestige of the previous urban layout: a few of the small connecting roads remain, some of the old place names survive. Despite the colossal size of some of the malls and office blocks being put up, we yet manage to retain some sense of human scale - perhaps because these new developments are at least still interwoven with a few older, homelier neighbourhoods.

But when they build on a greenfield site, it's just horrendous. Wide roads, with few if any footbridges or underpasses to facilitate pedestrian crossing. Intricate, swirling road junctions that are even harder - all but impossible - to get across on foot. And block after block without any sense of a residential community; mile upon mile of offices, with little more than an occasional Costa Coffee by way of a retail/leisure/food distraction. It is a how not to model of urban planning. Walking through Wangjing, I invariably find myself contemplating the Zombie Apocalypse; indeed, I become convinced that it is already upon us.

Worst of all, it is the least accessible part of Beijing. Insofar as it was 'designed' with any intelligent foresight at all (which I rather doubt), it appears to have been designed for people who live in Shunyi (mostly well-off expats) and who have cars (and, usually, drivers). It's still not on any subway lines. (Part of Line 15 appears to now be open; but there are only two Wangjing stations, at the extreme ends of the development - the line does not penetrate into the heart of the office zone desert. The proposed new Line 14 may be slightly better, but not much, I think; and that's still 3 or 4 years away from opening.) There are precious few bus routes through there (most of them go up the Jingmi Highway towards Shunyi; if you want to get out to Wangjing from anywhere in central Beijing, you usually have to make at least one change). And it is very ill served for taxis (and the ones you find there mostly have out-of-town drivers who only want to do the shuttle to and from Shunyi or the airport, and don't know where anything else in Beijing is). Because so much of it is purely business rather than residential, you don't even find many hei che (the 'black cabs' - unlicensed privateers who, although they can be a pain to haggle with sometimes, are usually a boon in outlying areas starved of regular cabs).

From where I live, it takes about 1hr 20mins to get there by bus and/or subway, or at least 20-30 mins by cab. Getting back (in the evening rush hour!) takes more than 1hr 30 mins by bus/subway and ???? by cab.

Considering these dire logistics, I really should not have accepted a 2-hour teaching gig out there!

Oh, but wait - it gets worse.....

A Beijing street scene

As I was (belatedly) setting off on my run on Saturday afternoon, I passed an interesting bit of street theatre unfolding right outside my apartment building. I was tempted to abandon my exercise regime so that I could stay and enjoy it all, but..... I really can't afford to miss too many more days of running.

A pedicab (a sort of tricycle rickshaw arrangement: the cheapest form of local hire transport; though not that common in central Beijing, other than the slightly upmarket ones that cater to tourists) ferrying a frail old lady somewhere had - apparently - swerved across the road (having been on the wrong side of the road - a very common offence for Beijing cyclists, who seem convinced that their own convenience is far more important than any considerations of general safety), and was very nearly hit by a black Audi. I couldn't see any evidence of injury or damage to any of the parties, but it had evidently been a very close call and the pedicab guy was fuming about it.

Now, as far as I could infer, it was the pedicab that had been entirely in the wrong. However, none of the many bystanders gathering to watch the stormy confrontation was likely to take the Audi driver's side - and neither was I.

These black cars are the curse of Beijing. Luxury sedans, all in gleaming, glossy black, with completely blacked-out windows; usually Audis, or some other flash imported brand; reputedly the official vehicles of upper-level Party cadres. However, not even Beijing has that many senior cadres. There are thousands upon thousands of these fucking things. I imagine that a lot of people are merely posing as senior cadres. A lot of these sinister black cars, I think, are driven by, for example, a relatively lowly official who just happens to have become more-than-decently rich by virtue of holding a modest but influential position in a local planning department somewhere. Or his dodgy brother-in-law who owns a building supplies company which wins a lot of valuable government contracts. Yep, these are the guys who are bleeding the country dry; complete c*nts, the lot of them, and everybody knows it. You can always tell the type (on the rare occasions they leave the protective anonymity of their black-window cars): all sharp haircuts and sunglasses and genuine Lacoste polo shirts (rather than the cheap local fakes that everybody else settles for). They're all swagger and bluster and bullying ("Hey, don't mess with me; I know people, people who could make life very unpleasant for you."); they think they own the bloody country (well, they do), and that the little people are just there to stroke their egos by being in awe of them. They are universally hated, but universally feared.

Our pedicab guy, though, was undaunted. He was a typical "old Beijinger" - tatty old jumper and a cracked leather jacket that looked as though it might date back to The War Of Resistance Against Japanese Agression (as WWII is quaintly styled around here), huge paunch, chain-smoker, world-class swearer. Beijingers have a reputation for being irreverent, bloody-minded, truculent; they all love to slag the government and 'the system' off in conversation any chance they get, but that bravado soon evaporates when they're actually confronted with one of these 'connected' guys, these black sedan bastards. But our working class hero felt wronged, and was damn well going to get satisfaction. He had prised the Audi driver out of his car, and was haranguing him in the middle of the street.

Confrontations over petty traffic accidents are a common sight in Beijing (lots of cars, very poor standards of driving; hence, hundreds, perhaps thousands of minor shunts every day). There seems to be an ingrained belief (I doubt if it's actually a law, but it's the rule everyone seems to follow) that you should not move your car after an accident - any accident - until the police come. The police might take a very long time to come. Sometimes they might not come at all. The two drivers have to sort matters out for themselves. Probably one of them will be manifestly at fault, and will eventually agree some on-the-spot compensation (since we're rarely talking about more than a scratch or a dent or a broken tail-light, it'll be a matter of a few hundred kuai). Most of these transactions are pretty trivial, but there's an awful lot of pride invested in them - the crazy Chinese notion of maintaining 'face'. These heated exchanges in the middle of the road can drag on for hours. Literally hours. It is one of the major causes of the hopeless traffic congestion in this city.

The black sedan drivers, though, are scary motherf*ckers. People don't usually take them on; and if they do, they are soon intimidated into backing down. The pedicab man's storm of fury was an unusual, inspiring sight, a one-man 'peasants' revolt'. I had hoped the argument might still be raging when I got back from my run 90 minutes later - but alas, no. I imagine that the Audi driver, with his path completely blocked by the errant pedicab and an unsympathetic crowd forming around him, will have decided to buy his way out of trouble by reaching into his fake leather clutch-purse (they all have them; another of China's fashion oddities) and pulling out one or two 100 yuan notes. On the other hand, if he was seriously 'connected', he may just have summoned the police to come and kick the shit out of the pedicab guy. I do hope it was the former.

Favourite posts from the 2nd quarter of 2011

Time for a roundup of my best posts from the middle of last year.

Pick of the Archives:

Favourite Posts, April-June 2011

1)  The vision thing  -  5th April 2011

One of the things I found most striking on a recent visit to Malaysia was the fact that drivers there actually look where they're going - in striking contrast to what we find on the streets of Beijing! (And here's another example of homicidal stupidity by a Beijing driver.)

2)  It makes a fellow proud to be an Oxonian!  -  8th April 2011

Forget the Boat Race; now we have a Stoat Race!

3)  Signs of Spring in The Jing  -  9th April 2011

None of them good, unfortunately; the blooms we've long hoped to see are still hiding in their buds.

4)  Inscrutable llamas  -  13th April 2011

In which we learn how to interpret the facial expressions of the woolly animals... because it might come in useful one day.

5)  Time travel is BAD, m'kay?  -   14th April 2011

One of the daftest stories to come out of China since... the last one. State censors attempt to ban TV shows featuring time travel.

6)  It doesn't travel well  -  18th April 2011

Perhaps the ultimate reason for not learning Chinese: nobody speaks it outside of China (and not even everybody in China speaks it).

7)  Does that come with potatoes?  -  19th April 2011

Assorted silliness inspired by my recent crashing of an International Potato Expo in Beijing.

8)  A lesson from history  -  25th April 2011

I happen upon an analysis of everything that went wrong in the latter part of the reign of the Emperor Qianlong; and it all sounds uncannily similar to today.

9)  Limits to growth  -  5th May 2011

Academic economists come up with more highly persuasive evidence that China is on the brink of a slowdown... that could become a meltdown (but maybe not).

10)  Uses of the Jasmine Flower  -  7th May 2011

Some reflections on the possible origins of China's misfired 'Jasmine Revolution'.

11)  The after-scent of a sunny day  -  9th May 2011

One of the - sometimes too rare - incidental pleasures of living in Beijing.

12)  An important lesson  -  15th May 2011

What does a Mexican gravestone have to do with Hilaire Belloc? I can find a connection!

13)  Mr Grindtooth again  -  17th May 2011

Why I don't like working for Chinese education companies and universities... (Amongst the reasons!)

14)  My Fantasy Girlfriend: Phyllida Trant  -  22nd May 2011

The lady barrister played by Patricia Hodge in ITV's Rumpole of the Bailey may have been responsible for one of my signature fetishes. My own failure as a barrister is probably down to my falling in love five times a day whenever I went to court.

15)  A touch of Zen  -  25th May 2011

A rare example of a good Beijing cab driver experience.

16)  Great Movie Songs  -  28th May 2011

A list of favourite songs that somehow didn't make it into the American Film Institute's Top 100.

17)  Reasons to live in Beijing  -  7th June 2011

I'm not convincing myself any more. (Three years earlier, I'd come up with a much more positive list.)

18)  HELL  -  21st June 2011

Just when I thought my working life couldn't get any worse... they sent me to Wangjing, the worst place in Beijing. And my experience got even worse... and worser.

19)  FREE at last!  -  23rd June 2011

A little musical celebration, prompted by my ecstatic relief at having quit one of my most horrific ever jobs.

20)  Film List: Great chat-up lines  -  25th June 2011

An end-of-the-month quiz for you.

21)  The secret to a long life  -  28th June 2011

I'd been having a very stressy month, but my discovery of this wonderfully restful little song - Be Like A Duck - by Sandra Boynton may have saved my life.

22)   A strange dream  -  30th June 2011

I don't remember my dreams very often; but when I do, they are doozies!

The most important lesson of The Tank Man

Yield to pedestrians!!

I was hit by a vehicle in the street a couple of days ago.  This is at least the fourth or fifth time that's happened to me while I've been living in China.  As opposed to NEVER in the thirty-odd years I've lived in other countries.  That's a fair indication of just how murderously bad driving standards are here.

I think driving is particularly awful here in Beijing, where the people seem to be imbued with an especially robust bloody-mindedness, a selfish conviction that rules don't apply to them.  Such rules as there are, that is.  There don't seem to be many.  And even the few pathetically inadequate traffic rules are not backed by any significant enforcement (again, it may be that the situation is particularly bad in the capital: nearly all the police here are busy monitoring potential 'subversives'; traffic police are just about invisible, non-existent - trying to curb homicidal incompetence on the roads just isn't any kind of priority).  Driver education is minimal.  Road junctions are poorly designed; traffic light timing is illogical, insane.  The problems seem too numerous to begin to address, impossible to rectify.

But the No. 1 problem - at least here in ME, ME, ME Beijing - is that nobody pays any attention to pedestrians crossing the road.  A green crossing signal means nothing, because drivers will often have a green left filter light at the same time (and you can turn right on a red light!); and drivers turning left or right at a junction will not slow down - much less stop - for pedestrians attempting to cross the road; indeed, at times it seems they actively delight in trying to scare you, aiming straight for you and trying to force you to scurry out of their way.

Of course, I tend to take them on: I'll keep obstinately to my chosen path and pace, refusing to be hurried out of the way; sometimes I'll even stop in my tracks and turn to face them, demanding that they STOP, or detour around me.  It's a dangerous game, and I'll probably get splatted one day.

Drivers turning left are a particular problem because the major roads in Beijing are so wide that they are given a very generous turning circle and scarcely need to slow down at all to make their turn; they'll just steam straight across the junction at 25 or 30 mph, or even more, heedless of the vulnerable pedestrians in their path.  

That's what happened to me the other day.  I got creased across the left thigh by a lightweight mini-van taking a turn at well over 20 mph.  The driver saw me, but made no attempt to moderate his speed or steer around me; he expected me to avoid him.  The dozen or so other people attempting to cross with me saw the lunatic gleam in his eyes and either ran to the far side of the road or scuttled backwards out of his way.  Me, I just kept on walking at a normal pace, expecting that the guy would realise I was going to be slap bang in front of him when he reached the crossing and that he would have to deviate just slightly to the left or the right to avoid killing me.  He didn't.  He just kept on coming - way too fast to have had any chance of braking to a halt.  And, at the very last moment, realising the bastard was going to run me down, I had to check my stride, take a swift half-pace backwards, and flinch away from the speeding vehicle.  And the bastard still clipped me quite hard.

Such murderous lunacy on the roads is one of the most depressing things about living in China, and one of the things that most disposes me towards giving up on the country and moving somewhere else.

Battle Royale: Beijing v. Shanghai

I cross-post this from my other blog, the Barstool.

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Since I'm going away for a few weeks - and am likely to post little or not at all in that time - I thought I would leave you by trying to kick off an online debate on the relative merits (or failings) of China's two greatests cities, Beijing and Shanghai. (Yes, for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to leave Hong Kong, Chongqing, et al out of the discussion for now, if you don't mind.)

I have touched on this great controversy here on the Barstool a couple of times before (here and here), but I somehow failed to trigger the expected torrent of pugnacious opinions. Oh, well, third time lucky?

So, which do you prefer, and why?

Beijing, the seat of government, or Shanghai, the centre of commerce?

Shanghai is commonly said to have more of a 'European' feel to it, but is that necessarily a good thing? And does that make Beijing 'more Chinese' by comparison?

I love Shanghai as an occasional weekend getaway. I love the narrow little streets of the old foreign concessions. I love the fact that it's on a huge river, close to the sea. I love the fact that its taxi drivers mostly know where they're going. I love the fact that the grass is actually green there.

However, it is expensive, pretentious, and it rains all the time. It doesn't seem to have such a lively cultural scene as the capital, with a particularly notable deficiency in live music venues. The city has two of the worst airports in the world. Shanghai natives are notoriously snooty and exclusionary towards outsiders - even (especially!) other Chinese. And did I mention how bloody expensive it is??

On other issues - such as the purported superiority of Shanghai's women and of its cooking - I'm not really experienced enough to comment. I suspect these views have a lot of truth in them, but it's not enough to save the city for me. Good for a holiday, terrible place to live!

Most people I know share this overall assessment. But then, I live in Beijing; and most of the people I know who have a strong opinion on this topic are people (both Chinese and foreigners) who have moved from Shanghai to Beijing and have found that they prefer it here.

What about the great blog-reading public out there? Let's hear your views - but on the Barstool post, if you please.

The vision thing

Malaysia, I found on my trip there a month ago, is one of the most pedestrian-unfriendly countries in the world. The traffic is tumultuous; pedestrian crossings are few and far between (and seem to work on absurdly long intervals, when they are functioning at all); and underpasses are even fewer; in many places, there aren't even any sidewalks (the main railway station in Kuala Lumpur is currently surrounded by construction sites, which make it just about impossible to access on foot).

It is, at first, quite daunting. Trying to walk any significant distance can be unduly stressful. Trying to cross a busy road seems a terrifying prospect.

But the thing is.... drivers there look where they are going.  Yes, the roads are packed, and the traffic often moves dangerously fast; yes, drivers are selfish and undisciplined and not always well-skilled in controlling their vehicles. But it's not anywhere near as bad as China. And they look where they're going.

I was quite stunned by this phenomenon when I first recognised it, because it is so very, very different from the situation I have become used to here in Beijing.  I soon found that it was actually surprisingly safe to cross the street in Kuala Lumpur, because, even on the busiest roads, drivers actually look out for hazards ahead of them and take appropriate evasive action. Understanding the use of the brake pedal is novel enough; but it's the noticing obstructions in the road ahead - the way that drivers actually look at you and see you; make eye-contact, and then don't try to run you down! - that I found most astounding after all these years of living with Beijing's homicidal traffic.

One of my earliest posts on here, The Land of the Blind, mused about the possible link between the notoriously poor eyesight of the Chinese and their apparently often limited imaginative vision, particularly in regard to the narrow range of their consideration or compassion for others.

It is on the roads that this failure to pay attention to others is most bothersome, most dangerous; but you see it everywhere - in people dropping their luggage on your feet when they board a subway carriage, in people parking their bikes across doorways, in people constantly walking into you (and then acting as if it's somehow your fault). The Chinese seem to actively avoid looking about them: they look down at their feet, they check their mobile phones constantly, they focus on the point they're aiming for several yards ahead and filter out everything and everyone else around them; they waddle along in trance-like cocoons of self-interest, almost completely insulated from the outside world. resolutely unaware of what's going on in the environment around them. Most of the time, the Chinese really do not look at other people around them; and when they look, they don't see; and when they see.... they don't care.

And it is tempting to derive other metaphors from this, to discern a wider significance in the phenomenon. You speculate that this 'cocoon of self-interest' evolved as a necessary defence mechanism against the oppression and hardship the Chinese people suffered under Mao - and through so much of their history. And it is certainly the thing that is chiefly keeping the Communist Party in power here: so long as there are more people who are complacently satisfied with their increasing material comfort than there are people who are frustrated and disaffected and suffering, then... there isn't much chance of a revolution. Nobody much cares how many lawyers and journalists and academics are thrown into jail, so long as they can save enough money to buy an i-Phone or a flat-screen TV. This really is The Land of the Blind.

Après moi, le déluge

I scored some freebie tickets for me and a friend to go and watch the final rounds of the day's judo on Sunday.

Unfortunately, just as we were setting off at around 4.30pm, the skies opened - one of the hugest, heaviest rainstorms I have ever seen in Beijing, or anywhere else.

Apart from some light showers that morning, we hadn't seen a drop of rain in nearly 10 days. Then we got the whole week's ration and then some in the space of less than an hour. (I guess perhaps the cloud-seeding boys get a daily allocation of 'ammunition', and were using up everything they'd saved over the previous week!)

As I have mentioned once or twice before on my blogs, Beijing's storm drain system just doesn't seem to work very well - or at all. Within minutes of this downpour starting, there were inches of standing water on all the roads. When we got to the venue, the water wasn't just standing, it was gushing in rapid torrents, scurrying in search of the nearest unblocked drain, and in many places it was three or four inches deep. My shoes are ruined.

Despite my umbrella, my friend and I both got soaked to the skin, and sitting watching judo for two hours as our sodden clothes began to steam and stink wasn't very comfortable.

The downpour had relented before we'd gone inside (if we hadn't been so anxious about getting there in plenty of time for the start of the session, maybe we would have been spared altogether), but it had resumed once more, not quite so strong but witheringly relentless, by the time we got out. And when it rains in Beijing, no cabs. Actually, I rather think that our patriotic cab drivers were declining to pick up foreigners until they'd got all of their own people home: a couple of guys with their 'For Hire' flags lit obstinately drove by ignoring us. Then again, perhaps they were just reluctant to have drowned rats mussing up their seat covers. I did see a couple of gaggles of bedraggled Chinese apparently being similarly spurned by taxi drivers.

This particular venue isn't that well-served by public transport (ooh, there could be another post in that!), so we had to make our way back to the centre of town by bus and subway and a lot of walking: it took us nearly an hour and a half.

Strangely enough, though, it was all quite jolly fun. I am used to getting the occasional thorough soaking here in Beijing, and I rather enjoy it.

Most of the Olympic visitors I saw at the venue seemed to be taking it in good part as well. But I'm sure BOCOG would rather not have this happen too many more times during the Games.

Losing my composure

A series of interesting encounters with strangers in bars kept me out rather late last night. When I finally set out for home, I was so tired that I decided to treat myself to a cab (19 times out of 20 I will walk back, because it's only a little over a mile from my apartment to my favoured watering-holes).

It turned out to be not so much of a treat.

"Turn right here," I said.

"Right?" said the cabbie disbelievingly, and acting like he was somehow terribly disappointed that he couldn't go straight on.

Now, Beijing cab drivers will almost invariably repeat the address and/or instructions you give them two or three times, as if seeking confirmation. They're usually not. A gruff dui, "That's right", will get them on their way more effectively than a foolhardy attempt to repeat or elaborate what you've just said. (This seems to be very much a Beijing quirk. I haven't found taxi drivers anywhere else in the country doing this.)

With this guy last night, though, his reluctance to actually do what I told him amounted to a psychosis. At the next junction, he made to turn left - despite having just been told to turn right, and acknowledged as much. At the next lights we needed to do a U-turn. He set off in the right-hand lane - and then made a big fuss about the difficulty of pulling over to the inside lane, even though at 3.30am there was no other traffic anywhere in sight. Even then, he failed to execute the required U-turn, claiming it was "impossible", and waiting instead for the traffic light to allow him to make a left into Gulouwai. While we were waiting - for what seemed like several minutes - another cab squeezed up inside us and made a U-turn. I found that rather galling. I indicated the ease and legality of the supposedly "impossible" manoeuvre to my driver, but he still didn't want to attempt it. However - perhaps to prove to me that a U-turn was within his repertoire of driving skills - he started to perform one at the next junction where I asked him to turn left. More amazing even than that, even when I'd put him right and got him pointed in the right direction, he again tried to show off his U-turn as we were entering my road.

My "taxi driver Chinese" is perfectly adequate, and I almost never encounter any difficulties telling people where I want to go. And it is difficult to conceive of any possible misunderstanding that would prompt someone to attempt a U-turn in the middle of the entrance to a narrow side street.

This guy only had to make 5 or 6 turns in the space of a 5-minute ride; and at every single one of them, he tried to turn the wrong way. Every single bloody one! I gave up trying to give him verbal instructions, and just pointed the way vigorously. By the end of the ride, I'm afraid, my patience and calm had all evaporated - it was not quite a Christian Bale moment, but getting there.

I am usually very tolerant of the foibles and failings of our cab drivers. It's a tough job. He was probably knackered.... half asleep.... maybe even a little drunk (you do quite often see cab drivers taking an extended meal break in the wee small hours of the morning, and fairly freely partaking of beer and erguotou; Jeremiah reported a particularly alarming cab driver experience the other day). But this chap was being so bizarrely, creatively incompetent that I couldn't help thinking he was deliberately pissing me around.

Beijing Taxi

A week or so ago, I went to a screening of Beijing Taxi, a new film by young Beijing documentary-maker Wang Miao.

It's a diverting study of the lives of three taxi drivers in the capital over the two or three years leading up to the 2008 Olympics. In fact, though, it's not much focused on the business of driving taxis at all (I think there's a great documentary still to be made just following what happens in the cars): the film aims for a broader scope by concentrating more on the private lives of its three subjects. Also, interestingly enough, of this central trio, one takes a better-paid job driving tour buses, and another decides to try her hand at running a market stall instead - leaving only one, the oldest, to struggle on with his taxi-driving, despite health problems which threaten to lose him his cab.

I fear most expat Beijing residents will have felt a little disappointed, as I was, that there wasn't more of the city on view here, and that there wasn't more insight into what Beijingers actually think of living here. The only really striking comment in the whole film was the female driver-turned-entrepreneur's complaint that the Olympics were lousy for business in 2008.

This project looks to have been very well-funded, and the technical crew were mostly foreigners. Thus, the production values were much higher than we've come to expect from the majority of Chinese documentaries, which tend to be mostly ultra-low budget 'underground' projects - often shot single-handedly by impassioned 'amateurs' rather than full film crews. The photography here was gorgeous, and the editing very slick indeed.

However, the classic vices of the typical Chinese documentary were all still there - unfortunately.

Chinese documentary-makers seem to hate to editorialize at all. They just like to present an unmediated slice-of-life. This means that a lot of very inconsequential scenes will be included to enhance this conceit of 'realism', and often left to play out in real time - with few if any cuts. I saw a film about the police in a northern border town a few years ago, where a suspect was made to support himself against a wall for ten minutes with his legs slightly bent at the knee (a softening up exercise, prior to interrogation): a Western film-maker would have cut to a clock to show the passage of time, and just shown a few short passages of the prisoner's discomfort to make the point; this Chinese director showed the whole ten minutes (nothing happened - except that the prisoner, predictably, stood up to rest himself every time the officer supervising him left the room). Such longueurs, alas, are inescapable in a Chinese documentary.

It doesn't help that you have no idea how long you're going to have to endure such plodding exposition. I sat through nearly an hour-and-a-half of Beijing Taxi - 90 minutes that felt more like 3 or 4 hours - and it showed no sign of approaching a close. The running time had not been announced by the organisers of the screening. It isn't even listed on the film's IMDB page. Perhaps there's an unwritten pact between Chinese documentary-makers that they should never advertise the length of their films - for fear that potential viewers might be discouraged. I suspect Beijing Taxi, a film that has obviously been made with an overseas audience in mind, probably runs somewhere between 90 minutes and 2 hours. That would make it a relative lightweight in the field of Chinese documentaries, where most run well over 2 hours, and some 3 hours or 4 hours or even more.

And you have little sense of when the end - and your release from your rock-hard chair - might be approaching, because there is no structure. None whatsoever. Well, that would be 'editorializing', wouldn't it? Although there's a similar problem in most Chinese feature films, too: in this country they seem to have never developed the concept of narrative drive, of stories shaped by the developmental character arc of the protagonist(s). A story is just "a bunch of stuff that happens". And then it stops happening. THE END. I fear most of their classic literature is much the same. Aristotle's insights are sorely missed.

There's never any voiceover narration, either. And little or no captioning. You're just left to make your own sense of the pictures and the recorded dialogue presented to you. Up to a point, this can be quite a refreshing change from the heavily structured documentary style we're familiar with in the West. And I can see that this approach might work well with certain kinds of subject. But I think it would have to be allied with more selectivity and self-discipline in the use of footage, and much shorter running times. I would like to charitably suppose that Chinese documentarians opt for this excessively spare, unobtrusive, 'selfless' style out of some kind of ideology; but I suspect, in fact, they're just lazy, naive, or uneducated. If they watched something like Fourteen Days In May or Bloody Ivory or A State Of Mind, they would see how an only slightly more intrusive 'editorial stance' can render a documentary so much more compelling, and sustain audience interest even at full feature-length - rather than creating films that are, whatever the potential appeal of their subject matter, little more than a penance to sit through.

Turning up the temperature in HELL

So, I have a non-event of a class with a trio of especially irritating students in far-away Wangjing...

How much worse can it get??

Well... last Wednesday, a torrential downpour began half-way through the class.

The streets flooded. Taxis withdrew themselves from service. Buses became appallingly overcrowded with damp, sweaty, irritable people (such as myself).

But, you know, at least I'd managed to get on a bus within a few minutes of finishing the class. Not so bad, right?

Well.... the bus driver decided not to halt at the bus stop but 50 yards up the road - I assume, purely for the sadistic pleasure of seeing a dozen drenched office workers being forced to leave the comfort of the bus shelter and run as fast as they could - through a particularly deep puddle! - to reach him before he decided to close his doors again and pull away.

And my dipshit students had misinformed me about which bus stop to use, so I had unwittingly got on a bus going in the wrong direction. I had been alert to this possibility, but it took me a while to verify which direction I was going - because I'm not familiar with this part of town; because the bus stops in this part of town do not (as they do just about everywhere else) have their names written on them; and because the notification of the stops onboard, by both digital sign and bilingual pre-recorded announcements, had been disabled by the driver. I realised after one stop, by asking a fellow passenger; but was then stuck on the bus for one more stop....

And the bus stopped moving... Now, traffic over on the east side of Beijing gets pretty horrible in the rush hour at the best of times. And heavy rain makes things even worse (as everyone, for once, starts driving over-cautiously). But our problem seemed to be almost entirely down to an absurd piece of traffic management by the Beijing authorities: at the major junction we were approaching, the red light was against us for 5 or 6 minutes or more at a time, and then turning green for barely 30 seconds! I kid you not. Utterly f***ing CRAZY! It took us over 25 minutes to cover a distance of about 200 yards to the next stop.

And the driver - helpful, cheery, philanthropic soul that he was - obstinately refused requests from myself and several other passengers to open the doors and let us out. There was no safety issue: we were near the side of the road, and no other traffic anywhere around us was moving for minutes at a time. But the driver insisted on keeping us trapped inside the bus. It was a nightmarish experience; it had begun to seem that the ordeal might drag on for hours, forever. Had I really died and gone to hell this time?

When I did finally get out into the open air again, it was such a blessed relief that I was not too concerned about being LOST (very few street signs in Wangjing; and those there are, too small to read in such poor visibility), in the pitch dark (very few streetlights in Beijing; and those there are, heavily shaded by the ubiquitous goddarned trees), ripe for ambush by lurking potholes and ankle-deep sewage-tainted puddles. So, it's 8.15 at night, and it's pouring with rain, and I haven't eaten yet, and I'm 10 or 12 miles from home - but it's not that bad, right? I mean, it's not like I'm going to have to walk all the way home?? Er.... 

There were a lot of taxis around, parked near this junction, or sailing past - but they didn't want to take any fares. Not from a laowai, at least. Everyone, it seemed, either wanted to take a break while traffic conditions were so "dangerous", or was only interested in heading out to Shunyi (although the eastbound traffic was logjammed, while the westbound route into the city was remarkably empty). 

Eventually I found one enterprising shifu who was willing to consider taking me back to civilization 'off the meter'. Ordinarily, it would be a 35 or 40 rmb metered fare. 50 rmb would be a not unreasonable hei che rate. In these extreme circumstances, I was willing to consider offering him 100 rmb. But he asked for 200 rmb - and that, I thought, was taking the piss a little bit too much.

So, I gave up on that vain exercise. I got my bearings and started to walk. I was soon back in modestly familiar territory, and managed to duck into a bar for an hour to get some food, and shelter from the worst of the storm. Once the rain starting slackening off again, it actually started to feel quite pleasant to be the only person out on the streets, and to be making progress towards home - although it was now becoming soupily humid, and I didn't have a very good pair of walking shoes on, and there was still a long, long way to go...

However, after making such a good start, I probably should have persevered in my walking - at least until I got to a subway station.

Alas, just shy of the Third Ringroad, I unexpectedly managed to flag down a taxi. And this was really NOT the driver I needed to be meeting at the end of such an unusually stressful evening. 

He was the archetype of every complaint everyone - foreigner and Chinese - makes about the Beijing taxi service, a blackly comic exemplar of every imaginable negative cab driver trait. His registration number was 27****, one of the most recent ones, so my heart began to sink immediately. He STANK to high heaven (I don't usually like to comment on the personal hygiene of these folks, since I think laowai disdain in this matter is patronisingly overplayed; and I do have a lot of sympathy for how hard drivers work and how limited their opportunities to bathe are - but this guy was like a tramp, his body odour was making me gag!). He drove at a crawl, even when there was no other traffic nearby. He was reluctant to go into the city centre, and pretended not to know (or perhaps genuinely didn't know?) where anything was. When he was eventually persuaded to accept directions from me, he insisted on trying to correct my Chinese pronunciation every single time; indeed, he enjoyed this game so much, he started asking for confirmation of which way we should go at every junction, and would then correct my pronunciation of 'straight on' or 'turn left' two or three times with wry mockery - at every single junction, every 15 or 20 seconds. Jeez, that was a LONG ride!!!

I was VERY GOOD. I did not punch him in the face. Nor, indeed, did I punch the next three people who annoyed me unnecessarily that evening in the face. But I did fantasise about it very vividly. And I beat the shit out of my sofa for a couple of minutes when I finally got home.

I am lobbying for this bloody Wangjing class to be cancelled. If I am unsuccessful, and it rains again, expect to be reading reports of a foreigner running amok in north-east Beijing and strangling cabbies or bus drivers.

Old school!

I have said that I find taxi drivers in Beijing to have been getting much better over the past few years.

But then.....

Yesterday I got one who epitomised all of the worst traits of Beijing taxi drivers that foreigners so love to complain of. It was not exactly a pleasant experience, but it did nevertheless prompt a fond little shiver of nostalgia for my early days here - when such ordeals were commonplace.

The interior of the cab was dusty and malodorous. Well, no, the cab driver was malodorous. Cab Driver No. 1772** had the kind of B.O. that could kill a horse.

The cab driver was chomping (on some kind of nut, I think) - open-mouthed, hugely NOISILY (I didn't dare to look, but it sounded as if slobber would be cascading over the chin).

To overcome this self-generated noise, the driver had the radio turned up full-blast.

The driver was also maintaining an almost continuous burble of heavily accented misanthropy, complaining about the behaviour of other drivers on the road, complaining about the price of fuel, complaining about the sullenly uncommunicative laowai in the passenger seat.

The driver's own road sense and car control skills left much to be desired.

The driver then changed tack rather, ditching the sour schizophrenic mumbling, and instead complimenting me extravagantly on my Chinese. Well, I think they were compliments. Highly inappropriate, since I hadn't said anything other than my destination (5 or 6 times) and, "I'm sorry, I don't speak Chinese."

Then, of course, the driver didn't have ANY change. Luckily I had a roll of one kuai notes on me.

Taxi driver No. 1772** is a woman. Incompetence, curmudgeonliness, and rustic manners are not the exclusive preserve of the male.

Once Upon A Time In China

A couple of weeks ago, at the onset of this 'celebratory month' when both my blogs turn five years old, I was challenged by a regular commenter (JES, of the most excellent Running After My Hat blog) to come up with something "cinematic" to mark the anniversary. And so, in an idle moment a couple of days later, I knocked off this frippery.

My thinking was... any film treatment of my experience in China would have to ramp up the levels of conflict and excitement. I am mostly far too introverted and intellectual and easy-going (yes, really!!) to get myself into situations of danger. My erstwhile teaching colleague Big Frank was much more apt to get himself into dramatic confrontations, and was a better model for a cinematic story. So, I began thinking it might be fun to try to transform the typical experiences of your average China expat (coming over to sample the life and finding easy work as an EFL teacher) into something of an action movie. Jason Statham was the obvious choice for the central role (not that he looks anything like me; but he could portray Big Frank quite well, though significantly less formidable in stature): he's one of the most readily recognisable British film stars in the world now, and with just the right combination of being essentially good-natured but hard-as-nails. I pictured him as basically playing himself (for a change!); and, for ease of recognition, and to play up the jokey incongruity, I thought we'd use his own name too. Also, I confess, I was striving to work in as many reminiscences as possible of Sergio Leone's classic Western Once Upon A Time In The West, and so was rather taken with the pun on his surname (read on, and you'll soon see what I mean). It's not finished, of course; only the beginnings of a sketch of an outline... But I think it has some promise...

*******

An empty parking lot in front of Beijing Airport (the small, grotty, pre-2007 one), shortly after dawn. Three minivan drivers are standing around, waiting for pick-ups from the first inbound flights that day.

One them is relentlessly picking his nose, examining the pickings closely for a few seconds before wiping them on the cuff of his jacket, picking again. The second is methodically chewing watermelon seeds, spitting out fragments of husk. The third is rhythmically clearing his throat, the exact same hawking-rattling noise every four or five seconds, never quite leading to a spit. Several minutes pass with no variation in these activities. Occasionally, a flimsy orange plastic carrier bag scuds across the tarmac, filling the office of a tumbleweed.

... Some time later, inside the terminal building. One of the Chinese minivan drivers is scanning the arrivals board. All flights are listed as 'Delayed'.

... Much later... a group of weary, bemused Western European travellers emerges through the 'Arrivals' door, among whom we recognise the charismatic British actor Jason Statham. One of the drivers is lolling against the railing beside the door, holding a piece of cardboard with the word 'Station' clumsily written on it in felt marker. JS notices the sign as he walks past, does a slight doubletake, then attempts to ask the driver if he is waiting for him. Driver insists he is waiting for a 'Mr Station'. JS sees which way this is going, and agrees that he is Mr Station.

... Some days later, in a small neighbourhood restaurant in central Beijing: six or eight seating booths, only a few of them occupied by Chinese diners. The lights suddenly go out. The owner shuffles around, one by one lighting the candles which had already been put out on the tables for such an eventuality. When he lights the last one, he is mildly shocked to discover that it reveals the glowering face of JS in one of the booths that had previously been empty. JS makes several attempts to order a beer in bad, toneless Chinese. The owner looks at him in bafflement. 'Beer!' moans JS despairingly. The owner's face lights up in recognition, and he replies in fumbling but serviceable English, "Why didn't you say so?" JS rolls his eyes slightly.

... The next morning. JS is teaching English to a group of Chinese teenagers. He has brought along a hammer, with which he mimes that he will smash any mobile phones he sees being used in the classroom. Three students immediately try to SMS their friends about this hilarious behaviour, and duly have their phones smashed. The class is reduced to stunned silence. Some of the girls begin to weep.

... A few weeks later, Mid-Autumn Festival. JS, now known as 站老师 (Zhan laoshi - Teacher Station), has been invited to an all-night Karaoke party by his female students, who take it in turns to make gauche attempts to seduce him...

... Three months later, the end-of-semester 'thank you' dinner for the foreign teachers. The evil Dean of Studies, jealous of JS's popularity with the students, challenges him to a baijiu-drinking duel...

'Ganbei' that!