The roller rink is located on the roof of a mostly abandoned shopping mall.
-Alex de la Garza, Summer of Service, Jishou ,China
Most of the street level shops are open, as is the second floor tech store. But the next six levels up are completely abandoned, the insides roughly gutted and left exposed to the elements. Passing these empty stories, you finally reach the roller rink. It’s a warehouse style building, apparently constructed on top of the already-completed mall. The inside is shaded, but the relative darkness is misleading; inside, it feels like a sauna.
Yet, you hardly notice the temperature once you’re skating. You glide along on your four-wheeled old-fashioned roller skates, listening to the Chinese electro-pop reverberating from the speakers hanging from the ceiling. The sweat pools in your shirt, but you’ve already started looking around at the rink’s other patrons.
There are the groups of girls, high school students perhaps, who link arms and circle the rink in a giggling line. They wear high-waisted jean shorts and blouses or tee shirts with nonsense English expressions on them. Occasionally, one of them stumbles, nearly pulling her friends to the ground with her as they struggle to keep her upright.
Then there are the boys. Based on the composition of my students, I inferred that Jishou was experiencing a major shortage of virile young men. There were probably ten female students for every one male. There was even a special expression for them at the college. They are called “pandas” for their rarity. Of course, this trend has more to do with the primary purpose of The Regular College of Jishou University then the demographics of Jishou itself. The students there are primarily preparing to become teachers, specifically of English or elementary school, professions typically delegated to women in China. Gender roles have not been as fast to change as other parts of the society.
But here at the roller rink, there are lots of boys. They are much younger than our students, probably around thirteen or fourteen, though it is always hard to tell. A student who I could have sworn was no older than seventeen was, in fact, twenty-two.
The boys are universally skinny, wearing tight-fitted tee shirts and the long narrow shorts popular in Jishou. They glide along backwards, rippling their front feet side to side to propel themselves. They barely look where they are going, like professional figure skaters sure of their routine. Except in this case, the Olympic ice rink is crowded with schoolgirls scooting along like newborn foals and clumsy, sweaty foreign English teachers who stare at strangers for far too long. But the boys are unaffected. Their trips to the roller rink are not an occasion, but a ritual.
I look again. The boys are more idle. Some glide lazily along smoking cigarettes. Others stare intently at oversized smartphones. They perform tricks for one another, jumping in the air or sliding by in contorted or comical ways. Three of the boys have made a circle. They interlink arms and push off, spinning faster and faster until the centrifugal force hurls one from the others. He slides along the floor for a few feet, then stands up grinning. The tallest member of the ring laughs and flicks his half-finished cigarette hard, arcing it a good ten feet. The third laughs too, then turns, skating toward the counter to buy an ice pop.
I look down again at my sweat-soaked shirt. My own movements are clumsy by comparison. I lean forward like a swimmer arms slightly outstretched as I turn a shaky circle around the rink. To stop, I pick a spot on the wall and hurl towards it, hoping to catch myself on the chrome railing before I flip over it.
I lean on the railing now. I’m drenched. I glance again at the boys cutting swift arcs across the wooden floor. They might be the bad boys of their school. Their mothers don’t know they smoke cigarettes on weekends.
Perhaps they dream of reaching the world they see on TV. Or maybe they just live for this hot summer day.
I definitely should not have worn long pants today. I clunk myself to the counter and drink tepid water from my bottle. I am still confused about what it is to come of age in Jishou. The same twenty-two year old student has a girlfriend who, from what I know of Chinese culture, he will probably marry. His favorite television show is “Goodluck Charlie”. He knows that it’s for kids, but he says he likes it anyway.
Another student gets so embarrassed when we ask everyone get up for a repeat-after-me game, that she stammers “I, I cannot” then stares intently at her desk in mortified concentration. Her entry in that week’s journal described how she hitch hiked to Tibet and back alone the previous summer.
I turn back to the rink. I’m tired and ready for lunch. I spot the same boys from before. They are spinning circles again, their wide grins marked by the lit ends of their cheap cigarettes.
-Alex De La Garza, Summer of Service, Jishou, China
Originally published at blogs.princeton.edu.
