Home Free

Today I was biking home in a good mood. After spending two weeks biking to and from work on the less-than-dependable Beijing bike share system, I had finally gotten my bike fixed. Even better, instead of paying the 50 kuai “deal” I had been offered by the bike repair stand closest to my office, I had walked an extra 30 minutes to a bike shop a friend had recommended and gotten the same repairs done for about half that much. Success.

Even though it was now past 7 in the evening, the traffic on the road I was taking home (which ran through a notoriously congested area called Sanlitun) was the Beijing standard of barely bearable. Cars were piled so deep that even the bike lanes were filled, and to get home I had to squeeze through a column of parked cars on my right and a column of essentially parked traffic-jammed cars on my left. Really, nothing I wasn’t used to.

In hindsight, maybe the problem was that I was now too complacent with this type of situation, because while fitting through one such gap (admittedly not a particularly large one, but still not the smallest I had ever dealt with), my bike handle banged against one of the side mirrors of a parked car on my right side, pushing it out of place.

I stopped. This was new territory for me; I had had a couple of close calls with stationary objects on the road before but never actually hit one, let alone had such an obvious effect on it. I’m either too nice a guy to bike off or I haven’t been in enough collisions to have developed that hit-and-run instinct yet (I’ll let the reader decide which), but I was now deer-in-headlights mode, trying to decide what to do.

While I gaped, a Chinese man hurried over to the collision scene. He was wearing an orange vest uniform that identified him as some sort of city official, maybe a traffic guard (at the time I was too distracted to read the title printed on the back of his vest). Either way, he had some sort of professional standing, a diligent government employee fulfilling his obligation to uphold traffic justice.

He examined the mirror quickly, then came up to me, took my bike from me, and moved it about ten feet away. I could almost see him following some sort of protocol: “Step one: take the offenders’ bike out of his reach so he can’t get away.” While he was doing this, I took a look at the mirror myself and realized that it had been pushed backwards on a pre-existing hinge (as in, it was supposed to be able to be pushed backwards), and it could be moved back to its regular position easily. Apart from that, there was no other damage to the mirror that I could see. I even checked the car’s other mirror to confirm that there were no noticeable differences.

While I was doing this, the man came up to me and told me that he was going to call the car’s owner and have him come to inspect the damage. This was a worrying development. The last thing I needed was some uptight Chinese businessman arriving on the scene, pointing out some minuscule blemish in his car’s side mirror, claiming I had destroyed his super expensive whatever-the-model-was, and then forcing me to pay him a thousand dollars or my indentured servitude or however these things were settled in China.

At this point though, I was in too deep to really have any choice. Plus I was reasonably certain that the damage was nonexistent. In any case, I informed the man that that was alright, I would wait while he called the owner.

At this point though, a couple aspects about this situation began to seem fishy. For example, how did this random traffic guard (or whatever he was) have the cell phone number of the car’s owner? When I asked this, the man said that he would get the owner’s number by calling yao-yao-er, or 112. I didn’t know what this was (some kind of hotline, maybe?), but the man already had his phone out and was punching in the trio of numbers in front of me.

“Or,” he said, finger still on the keypad. “You can give me 200 kuai, and then I won’t need to call.”

Suddenly things snapped into focus. This wasn’t a concerned government employee doing his contractual duty; this was a shake-down. The man was counting on the fact that, given the type of payment the owner of the car might demand if he found something wrong with the car, I would see 200 kuai as a bargain. Otherwise, I would take the risk that he would dial those numbers and then…

“What exactly is yao-yao-er,” I asked. It was a question motivated partly by curiosity, partly by a need to buy myself some time.

“Jingcha,” the man said, pantomiming an official-looking hat on his head to clarify.

Police. The plot was thickening all around me. Who knows whether the police would actually be able to access the car owner’s number (a long shot, but knowing China’s police-state leanings I wouldn’t rule it out). At this point, I saw this action as just another scare tactic the man was using to extort me. The laowai definitely doesn’t want to get police involved in the situation, I could imagine him thinking. He’ll just pay the 200 kuai and ride off.

The idea of involving police was indeed a little disconcerting, but there was also no way I was going to pay this guy $33 for non-damage to a car that wasn’t even his. Besides, now that I knew that this guy wasn’t acting out of some professional responsibility, I was feeling calmer, like I had more leverage in the situation than I had initially thought.

“How long will the police take to get here?” I asked the man. He said he had no idea.

BAM. Leverage.

“Shifu,” I said, affecting a needling whine in my voice. “You’re wasting our time. There’s no damage. Do you really want to wait for the police? I don’t want to wait.”

The man hesitated on his phone’s keypad. He went back to inspect the mirror I’d hit, then walked to the other side of the car to examine the other one. Like me, he seemed unable to find any damage that might actually make the police bother to call the car’s owner. Or, maybe more accurately, any damage that he could point out to me to make me nervous enough to fork over the 200.

“Fine,” he said to me, waving me off. That was all the invitation I needed. I hurried to my bike, knowing that the sooner I left the scene, the sooner I would be immune to any further extortion. I pushed off and maneuvered my way (more carefully) out through the still-clogged bike lane, not even bothering to look back.

In hindsight, It could have been useful to play up the ignorant-foreigner card a bit more than I did. If you’re obviously not Chinese, it’s often possible to get out of situations like this simply by feigning an inability to understand the language. This might have proved particularly effective in this situation, since the man’s entire game was dependent on my understanding enough of what he was saying to be worried about what he was threatening to do.

But from the get-go I had displayed a pretty strong grasp of Mandarin, so acting ignorant midway through the interaction might not have held much water. Also, it’s possible that showing I knew the language actually helped my case, convincing the man that in an encounter with the police, he wouldn’t be able to do all the talking. And on a deeper, more egotistical level, I’ve been in this country long enough that I’m not sure my pride would allow me to go this route, even with 200 kuai on the line.

It felt better to deal with it the authentic way, i.e. the way that a Chinese local would do it. On that bike ride away from the collision scene, I had never felt so acclimated to the city, so comfortable in my status as a resident. I had twice today successfully avoided scams that would have tripped me up even only a couple months ago. Even though I was still (and would forever be) a foreigner here, I felt that today I had crossed some line in my relationship with the country. The evidence was mounting that I was more than just a transplanted American muddling his way through life in the Middle Kingdom. Slowly, little by little, this place was starting to feel like home.