Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

There is a snarl up outside C’s Irish café. A truck with a whole tree, roots and all, lashed to the back is trying to get up the narrow, (I thought pedestrianised) street. The tree’s branches are snagged in jerry-rigged electricity and phone cables and a man and a woman have climbed into the branches and are trying to lift the cables out of the way.

Someone is yelling instructions to the truck driver, another person is shouting warnings about more cables that might got snared, and a woman is yelling because the truck’s side has knocked tiles off her roof.

I wouldn’t go near a Chinese electricity cable under any circumstances. I wince watching this guy who, with no specialist equipment, is squatting precariously on a branch about twenty foot in the air, trying to pull electricity cables up and over the tree with his bare hands while smoking a cigarette.

I am on Renmin Lu. It is a lovely street, how, you feel, Chinese streets ought to look like and so rarely do – a paved alley lined with two storey traditional terraced houses, with decorative shutters and grass growing between the roof tiles, and above the roofs you can see the mountains.

The problem with spending a lot of time in a place is that you have to work harder to see it. I’m sure someone unfamiliar with China would really appreciate walking down here, stopping to consider the minority women selling veg, the chillis laid out to dry, the gory muslim butcher’s shops, the little cobblers and tailors and so on. But all I am usually thinking about is the fried English breakfast I am about to eat at C’s café.

When I am not working on guides I am a slovenly tourist. I find a bit of town that I like and wander round it endlessly with no desire to explore anywhere else. I eat the same thing in the same restaurant every day and you couldn’t pay me to go near a temple. It is shocking that I have lived for three weeks a hundred and fifty metres from Ear Lake and I have not been to see it once.

I feel I should point out that I do not spend all my time in bars. But if I spend, say, eight hours a day typing, and then three hours propping up a bar, which of those two would be more interesting to write about? If I wrote about the typing it would be like, ‘sat in Café de Jacks. Bored waiter doing press ups. Drank too much coffee. Flicked through National Geographic. Oh, not more Simon and Garfunkel.’ Tedious.

Which is a preamble to writing about bars again. On an average night there are enough barflys to pack one bar, and what tends to happen is that they all migrate, a capricious herd, to one place and fill it. Which creates a great deal of resentment and stress for the bar owners.

Like I was in Bad Monkey with about twenty people and I saw C from the Lazy Lizard peering through the window. His place was obviously completely empty. C and S ribbed him and he scuttled away (I would like to say, lizard in tow, but he only walks it in the daytime).

Cs struck back with a well advertised ‘Japanese cultural evening’, which attracted thirty or so. I have rarely been to a less Japanese evening. Not only was there absolutely no evidence of anything culturally Japanese there weren’t even any Japanese people there. But there was a fire in the yard at the back, and hippies drumming, and poi spinning, with nineties squat party music and décor – lots of UV paint and scavenged furniture.

Poi seems to be a popular thing to learn here. You have two balls of cloth dipped in paraffin and lit, on the ends of chains, and you spin the chains round and you get these impressive visuals going as the firey balls spin really fast in parallel or across each other. And someone who’s good does tricks like making them cross over or doing a kind of limbo dance with the flaming balls spinning horizontally above them. It looks like a cross between a martial art and drum majoretting and when anyone does it a group of appreciative people gather which I guess is enough reason to learn. I do think though that they ought to have a bucket of water handy.

S was singing songs and playing the guitar. She has a mournful face with that striking Naxi look, very high cheekbones, quite masculine, like a red Indian (ethnically, the Naxi are Tibetan). Like all the Naxi I have met she sang very well.

But Angel, this Chinese girl (I should explain that Chinese people give themselves English names for when they hang around with foreigners) who was off her head, was hassling her and S’s patience broke and she said to me, quietly but intensely,
‘Fucking Han Chinese. All my life they give me trouble. When I went to Beijing, every day people asked me, do you live in a mountain, do you eat raw meat, do you drink blood. They think we’re – what’s the word?’
‘Savages.’
‘Savages.’

Angel has the usual Han prejudices and it messes with her head that a Naxi mountain girl is clearly more sophisticated than her. S, for example has even been to England – Weston Super Mare.

To be fair to the Han I should say that the traditional prejudice is changing and these days in some circles it’s cool to have a minority background. A lot of Han guys like to marry minority girls because they are allowed to have two kids not just one. The minorities have maintained their traditional culture while the Han have largely abandoned theirs, and now I think a lot of insecure Han feel a longing for the perceived authenticity of minority culture and the secure sense of cultural identity that minorities have.

S’s boyfriend  has had to give up his t-shirt printing business because he is out of money so he is going back to Wandsworth to, he says, get a job on the tills at Waitrose, save a thousand pounds, and come back. It is a prospect that does not fill him with enthusiasm, so he keeps putting it off, and he and S live in a twilight world of last suppers before his long deferred departure.

S told me to look up her Naxi friend’s bar in Beijing called UPSETTER.
‘Are you sure that’s what it’s called?’
‘She’s married to a French truck driver. Neither of them have a good grasp of English.’

S has to go to Bejing to take her mum to hospital because the hospitals in Yunnan are really bad. I tell her about the time I went to the hospital in Kunming. I was instructed to go and sit in this room with about thirty other people. So I was sitting there thinking where’s the magazines, when this guy in a white coat came in smoking a fag, got out his stethoscope and told me to take my shirt off – what I had assumed was the waiting room was in fact his surgery. And this other time I went to hospital I was sold ‘special antibiotics’ for about twenty quid, and then I went to the chemists and saw you could get them over the counter for eighty pee.

This American girl whose name I do not recall talked about going to stay with her Chinese boyfriend’s parents. They lived on a mountain with no electricity and she was expected to get up, like them, at 6, wash in cold water and then go and help with the harvest. Which is one way to bond with the in-laws I guess. She talked like it was a good experience but of course it was over.

I met another Chinese student drop out . She said,
‘I want to get a tattoo of metal pipes across my heart.’
‘Pipes?’
‘Yes pipes, and valves.’
‘Across your heart?’
‘At the back.’
‘Right.’
‘Either that or a cat.’

There I met the owner of Plan B, which is a trendy nightclub on Brixton High Street, and he said ring him when I get back and he’d put me on the guest list. His Irish girlfriend smelt a passing French hippie and it reminded her of Irish travellers back home and she went on this anti-gypo rant, which I felt did not accord with the spirit of the place really.

C the writer has given me compelling new evidence for my theory that writing books about Tibet drives you mad – he told me about a writer (who will remain unnamed, as will his company) who disappeared while researching a guide to Tibet. He was living in a cave. Some nomads found him and took him to the police. He was delirious and nobody could get any sense out of him but they found an address book in his pocket with some Hong Kong numbers in it, so the police called them and his friends flew in and collected him. So there you go. He still finished the book, apparently.