A friend once told me, "Greg, the difference between you and me is that when I drink I stay at home and watch TV. You go on adventures." I wish I could say that I'm that interesting (I'm not), but there's something to be said about going on a jaunt to parts unknown just to see what you find. The right amount of alcohol, daring and happenstance sometimes make me feel like I'm reliving the events of
Ulysses and has bulked up my collection of mini-epics to tell over drinks with company both polite and rough.
Living in China, The Land of the Entirely Too Permissive Drinking Culture, has added quite a few stories to my portfolio. The time I mistook a hospital wall for my apartment door. The time a friend and I wandered to all corners of Beijing to all manner of places looking for a simple bed for the night. The endless seafood and beer corners of Qingdao. Nighttime rambling is when I'm at my most comfortable, my most reflective, my most aware.
Zhengzhou provides plenty of stimulation for a party-seeking drunk. Start at the bars, which can only be described as bars, then circle out to the garish, loud, gaudy karaoke club mazes and proceed to the flashing, superficial dance clubs, all layered with mirrors and young men hawking carafes of Ballantine's spiked with sugar water. Club girls playing their dice games, girls to help you belt out the songs in the KTV (or more if you're a businessman or government official). It's all flash and no substance, the appearance of fun without any of the epiphanies.
Now that I haven't been drinking I've been wandering around a different sort of after-hours China, a place beneath the quicksilver veneer of luxury and modern living that supposedly distinguishes this city from the less "cosmopolitan" urban districts of China. During the day, Zhengzhou is loud, crowded, smoggy, a clogged artery of a city, but once the clock strikes nine most of the normal people with normal families and normal lives (by normal standards at least) go to bed and what's left is the acute character that makes living here so great.
Outdoor restaurants spill into sidewalks, parking lots and intersections, serving grilled everything on a stick or heaping plates of fried this and that (noodles, crawdads, bread). The other night a friend and I stopped at a night-only food market and bought an entire Beijing duck with all the fixins for three (including spring onions, wraps and duck sauce) for all of 26 yuan. The woman offered to throw in the carcass for free, and I might take her up on it next time to boil up some duck soup at home. I try to go to the places where I'm least likely to encounter a foreigner, far away from major roads, fast food restaurants and western style "coffee shops. Some people pride themselves in finding the closes thing to a Starbucks latte; last night I found a place that serves giant plates of spicy rivercrab.
What I love most about this late-night Zhengzhou is that it is the perfect snapshot of China as it stands: a country-in-progress. Half-finished luxury skyscraper shells jutting out from old, twisting neighborhoods. Incandescent lights strung above people gathered around squat tables brimming with food and beer and liquor and shouts of serious recreation. Hazy alleys littered with small stores selling any fake ware you can imagine. Small fruit stands neighboring pink light massage parlors neighboring fluorescent-lit beef noodle restaurants. Quiet, dusty streets hosting small caravans of old trucks and farm equipment. The smell alternates between wafting piles of garbage and grill smoke. Distant generic pop music. Nothing is fresh, left to be admired; it's all chaos and action and improvement. The fleeting nirvana of constant change.
