Chengdu Nightlife
First Time Out
Lennart, Michele, Simon, and myself decided to go out and see the Chengdu nightlife. We hit the city center and found a club filled with fake greenery and vibrant neon lights. This was sufficient to draw us in, but once we were halfway to our table we saw at some tables there were towers of colorful shots on the tables of other clientele. Immediately we knew we had to order one of these. Now, before I go any further, I have to tell you about an experience you’ll have if you ever go to China. From the moment you decide you’re going you will constantly be told “watch out for the alcohol, it’s sometimes fake especially if it’s free, and can leave you blind.” Before I even made it to China I had been told this maybe thirty times, and since I’ve been in China I’ve heard it probably fifty more. But when that tower of shots arrived at our table, and we all slammed one back after our first of many “乾杯” that night, we discoverd that these shots had something much worse than fake alcohol: no alcohol. Maybe we got screwed because we’re foreigners, or maybe people in this club people really like to pretend they’re drinking, but all that was at our table was a tower of overly sugary neon drinks. I was at more of a risk of getting a sugar rush than getting drunk or going blind. So we finished the “juice” as we started calling it, and ordered a bunch of beers. This is another great opportunity to explain some Chinese, or at lease Sichuan, culture. It’s very hard to find a western “bar” in China. Especially if you want to go out by yourself to grab a beer. You need to go with a group of people and you need to order at least 6 beers and you can’t order just one. If you’re by yourself, be prepared to stand awkwardly in a corner because there is no one-person seating. You order en masse. The music is way too loud, and the people are even louder. Another night we did end up finding a nice western style bar, but on this night in particular we didn’t mind the noise and chaos. Ultimately this bar was pretty uneventful so we finished our beers and walked to another location which was designed to look like a bright red British double-decker bus, and filled with Union Jack imagery. There was a stage with live music, and I recall I walked in to the band performing Yellow by Coldplay which made me feel extremely nostalgic. I ordered another round of beers, and after quickly finishing mine I felt drunk enough to start sitting at random people’s tables and practicing my slurred Chinese. One Chinese man kept insisting in broken English that he needed to talk to me about something important, but couldn’t say what it was until another day. Hoping he wanted to talk politics was my wishful thinking. Anyways my drunken Chinese and their broken english resulted in conversations that made no sense, and having beer and cigarettes constantly shoved in my face for free. Once again I was plagued with that sense of perverse guilt I mentioned before. But before too long I found another distraction, but this needs some background information.
China has something called the 戶口 (Hukou) system. It’s basically a citizen registration much like the American social security number. It’s given to you when you’re born and is what makes you, officially speaking, a citizen of the People’s Republic of China. It’s what allows you to get a real job, receive healthcare, and enjoy the benefits of being a real citizen of the nation. However if you were born as a second child during the one-child policy, or as the child of an unmarried mother, you simply don’t get one of these numbers. You’re not recognized by the state. When you come to China you’ll see lots of impoverished people cleaning the trash off the streets, these are typically the unrecognized people of China. It’s not clear how many of them there are since China doesn’t count them, but it could be in the thousands to, conceivably, the millions. Impossible to tell. They’re typically very short, well below even the Chinese height average, and I suspect this is because they grew up without access to proper nutrition.
As I sat at that table talking to the Chinese men and women around me, laughing and drinking, I would sometimes feel a brush against my leg. It was a broom held by the resident cleaner of the place, one of the unrecognized, sweeping up broken glass bottles and tossed cigarettes all discarded by my new compatriots onto the beer soaked ground. He would clean meekly, and politely, and apologize if I noticed his presence. Later that night, out of some pitiful sense of false solidarity I asked for his name, and told him mine, then shook his hand. As stupid as I felt doing it, the genuine-seeming smile that appeared on his face when I spoke to him was enough for me to feel it had been worth it. This became something I couldn’t shake from my thoughts the whole night.
I got separated from my friends and ended up at some Chinese restaurant at 3am with two chinese girls and a guy, all of us eating some really gross stuff. Then they left me on the street to go home. I walked back to the campus only to find an enormous gate locked shut, between me and my dormitory. I drunkenly climbed over it, made it to my room, and passed out only after thinking a little while longer about how the PRC really feels about its workers.
