Revised: Bar Fight at the Prop

Well, then there was the time I got into a bar-fight stone-cold sober.

For an American, China is cheap. It was cheaper in the summer of 2006, when it was 8 kuai to a dollar. When we of my study-abroad group – all Americans, all students – went to dinner on campus, the cost came out to maybe 20 kuai a head. If you don’t want to do the mental math, that’s $2.50 per. A dish of gongbao jiding, a dish of su shao tudou, a huge bowl of suan la tang, a bamboo dish of chicken fried in red sauce, two veggie dishes, and a rice each between ten of us – 200 kuai for the whole, so 20 kuai each. We didn’t even finish all the food.

And of course, since China was cheap, and we were all students, it was fairly inevitable that on the way back to the rooms someone or other would suggest, “hey guys! Wanna go to the Prop tonight?”

Most of us did. Some people were here to study; others were here to “study”. It was pretty easy, looking at our group, to pick out who didn’t come along to bar nights. Two married women. One geek. The chaperoning professor. Everyone else piled together near the glass doors of the Foreign Students’ Dormitory, waiting impatiently for the rest of us to drop Important Things off in Rooms and run back down the rickety stairs. Then, in a conglomerate amoeba, we rounded the dorm’s corner, passed through the campus’ South Gate, and started down Chengfu Lu toward Wudaokou.

Any and every city has its own districts, each with its own reputation to uphold. Wudaokou is widely known as the student district, for the ten-some major colleges within walking distance of its metro stop. Its neighborhood is built on what students want. Restaurants. Tea shops. Clubs. Clothing stores. Food stores. Cheap eateries and expensive cell phones. Stores for everything: a textbook store, a comb store, a store for wispy and fashionable clothing. Food carts stop in the middle of the sidewalks – or, if they’re more enterprising, the streets, and there vie with slow-moving traffic that considers bicycles in the same vein as cars. Rows of more bikes and food stands and tiny buildings and parked cars and potholes all herd people into swirling currents on the once-white but now spit-grey sidewalk tiles. The metro line runs overhead, and proper train-tracks run below-beside it; trains run by periodically.

This being a city, nothing stops running at night. Wudaokou picks up, in fact: the night market opens. People drag out blankets and spread them out like picnics on the sidewalks. Each blanket is a shop: clothing, books, baby toys still in plastic wrapping, candles and homemade holders, mass-produced scarves, piles of cheap shirts with English letters in random formations. Food carts park by the metro doors, selling foods and fruits that change with the seasons. Bicycles park in long, rusty rows, and outside the Cool Hangouts crowds of young people stand and smoke and talk.

The Prop was definitely a Cool Hangout. It stood up from the sidewalk on a waist-high step faced in black rock, and couldn’t’ve been more than fifteen feet wide. Once side squashed some restaurant’s stairs into the side of a teashop; the other side butted up against a 7-11. (The 7-11, incidentally, was deemed almost as cool as the Prop.) It served as club and bar for bother foreigners and locals – for any students coming by, and for anyone who’d read their Lonely Planet guide and decided, “this is the place I want to get drunk tonight.” The cover charge was 25 kuai – in the summer of 2006, $3.

Its full name was The Propaganda.

Propaganda outside was small, city-soot-stained, with a big red star hung by the door and tall iron shutters rusting against the second-floor windows. Propaganda inside was smaller – there was a bar, there were booths, and the space between the two was just enough for one person to walk, or two to squeeze awkwardly past each other. Everything was done up in blue light, and at the back, there were stairs down.

We, still in our tight American group, took the stairs down. A huge, heavy steel door was at the bottom; shoving it open brought a blast of music and red light. We, still grouped, piled through.

A bar is a bar is a bar, as Gertrude Stein might say, and so what people did was start drinking. I didn’t. I didn’t drink at all in those days, which, for a college student was weird. People wanted to know why, though a couple gallant souls would lead into it with, “hey man, leave ‘er alone. She doesn’t wanna drink, it’s cool. Incidentally, why don’t you?”

To avoid all that, I danced. The downstairs was about the size of my bedroom back home, only a little longer and a little fatter. Lights sat under the tables and under the bar-counter and along the walls at waist-level, making weird, bottom-lit triangles on people’s faces; the dance floor was where the bar and booth weren’t, and lit up red and blue and strobed over the massed, bouncing dancers.

Eventually I got tired and sat. There were tables and chairs, and our group had commandeered one. Our group was five-sixths boys, massive American guys, and they huddled around that table territorially like it was Home Base. They tagged foreigners to come and talk with us; they mostly ignored locals, since none of this group spoke Chinese all that well. (Of course: we’d left the geek back at the dorm.)

The evening wore on, and got drunker and drunker. I was on my second “naw, you go ahead and dance, I’m tired,” my third “aw, is that beer on the floor?” my fourth “no, go ahead, keep talking, I’m listening,” – everyone tells their life story to the sober person – and my two hundredth “no, I don’t want to drink.” Finally, and probably understandably, I accepted. “Fine. If you really want to get me a Coke, sure. No rum okay? Just a Coke.”

The boy who’d been badgering me pushed his way to the bar, pleased as punch he’d finally gotten me to get something. Well, gotten to get me something, actually, but when you’ve had sixteen shots at 30 kuai apiece, you don’t mind details like that so much. He came back to the table balancing two more shots in one hand, and stretched the Coke out to me in the other. “You sure y’don’t want something in that?”

“Yes,” I said, smiling patiently (god! boys!) and took the drink.

Here, of course, shenanigans struck. As will often happen at exactly the wrong moment in crowded rooms, there was a break in the noise, or maybe in the drunk/listening continuum. What happened was that Dan, the guy next to the one who’d gotten me the Coke, heard that it wasn’t spiked.

“Aw, man, that’s no fun!” he exclaimed, and tipped his own drink into my cup.

Both drinks were overfull; Coke and vodka poured down the glass’ sides and splashed my jeans. I didn’t want it all over me, so I shoved the mess back at Dan. “Dude, what the hell’re you doing?”

Dan probably thought – well, I don’t know what he probably thought. Maybe he got knocked forward from behind, or maybe he was just annoyed his Clever Plan hadn’t worked. Anyway, he pushed the glass back at me, “I ain’t takin’ that, it’s yours.” Then I shoved it back and he got angry and I got angry and somewhere in there someone dropped the glass, splashing Coke and vodka and broken glass over both our feet.

Summer, and we’re both in flip-flops.

Dan, of course, barely noticed. He just kept yelling, and I, not about to be out-yelled by a drunk, kept yelling back. Someone with more sense than both of us shoved us out of the room, through the heavy steel door, up the stairs, through the blue room, and out onto the sidewalk.

And that’s where we both shut up. Because in the crowded night market, Chinese people selling and buying and walking three abreast and stopping to smoke by the Prop – yeah, they were all interested in seeing a tall black guy and a small white girl yell at each other while picking broken glass off their jeans and feet.

And as drunk as Dan was, he didn’t want the stares any more than I did. So we simmered down. We stood outside the Prop, among the streams of people, ignoring the neighborhood beggar and having a civil discussion about drunkness and China and coming here and childhood the existence or nonexistence of ADD and ADHD and our places in school and the universe and why we were here and where everyone else was.

Everyone else was back inside, except for the guy who’d steered us out. American as he was, he was off smoking with the locals, watching us, and being watched in turn.

The two of us talked. Dan, exhausted, or maybe just drunk, sat down, then lay back on the sidewalk to continue the discussion. And I, smelling like smoke and bar and Coke and vodka, tiny scratches on my fingers from picking glass slivers out of my jeans – I was just spiteful enough not to tell him: Chinese sidewalks are spit-grey for a reason.


[words: 1571]
[due: 3/17/2010]