Got hammered Friday night at Target Pub, a dive bar that’s a popular hangout for expats in Zhengzhou. A Taiwanese businessman kept buying me shots of Jameson, which I washed down with bottles of Tsingtao beer. After a while, I wasn’t sure whether I was in China or Chile.
Target, which is owned by Zhengzhou native and world traveler Lao Wang, is on a quiet street a mile or so from downtown. It’s a ramshackle joint with an old tire hanging from the stairs, laminated paper money from different countries hanging above the bar and St. Patrick’s Day banners hanging from the ceiling. There’s posters of Bob Marley and Che Guevara on the wall, along with faded photos and scribbled messages from old customers. When I arrived with my Canadian buddy Damian, Neil Young was blaring from the speakers and “The Italian Job’’ was playing on TV with Chinese subtitles. The bathroom wall is covered with colorful graffiti, including this gem: “If shit had any value, the poor would be born without any assholes.’’
Damian, who is teaching statistics on the old campus of Henan University of Technology, introduced me to Dave, a 30-year-old Scotsman who is teaching English at the same place. Dave is getting married to a Chinese girl next week, if the bureaucracy cooperates. When you get married at a government office, Dave told me, it’s on a first-come, first-serve basis. “So it depends on how long the line is,’’ he said.
Dave, who came to Zhengzhou a year ago after working in the London Underground (that’s subway, for you Americans), is a small fellow with short sandy hair who speaks with a thick Scottish accent. I asked him why he came to a relatively obscure Chinese city like Zhengzhou. “I didn’t want to move somewhere like Beijing or Shanghai, where there are a lot of foreigners. If I wanted that, I would have stayed in London.’’
Dave is an avid bicyclist who, along with a British friend, took a 2,000-mile ride last summer in China. They cycled from Zhengzhou to the Mongolian border, then biked to Beijing before returning to Zhengzhou. The whole trip took 24 days. “Sometimes we were in the middle of nowhere,’’ Dave said. “There was nothing as far as the eye could see.’’ One night, they stayed in a mud hut. “One of the walls had collapsed, so there were only three walls,’’ he said. “We played Scrabble to pass the time. It was the strangest place I’ve ever played Scrabble.’’
I also met Paul, an Oregon native who has been living in China for 10 years, the last eight as an English teacher in Zhengzhou. Balding and bespectacled, he is married to a Chinese woman and they have a 1-year-old girl. I asked him if he had any plans to live in the U.S. again. “I left after they passed the Patriot Act under Bush II,’’ he said. “I’m not going back until they repeal it.’’
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Before going to Target, Damian and I sampled some street food in Erqi Square in the heart of Zhengzhou. One street was lined with outdoor booths serving all kinds of Chinese delicacies. We bought a couple of skewered snacks on a stick. One was octopus, which was chewy and tasty. The other was lamb, which was juicy and spicy. For dessert, I had a fried banana rolled in what looked like coconut. It was scrumptious.
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A few days ago, Damian (who’s 36) and I (61) played basketball with a bunch of college students on the old Henan University campus. The Chinese players were surprisingly good. They obviously watch a lot of NBA games because they try to emulate the stars with fancy spins, crossover moves and acrobatic shots. Damian and I held our own, at least for a couple of geezers. (I did need a few breaks to restart my heart.) Damian was most impressed by the English vocabulary of one Chinese player, who kept shouting “fuck’’ whenever he missed a shot.
Rick left out the part about his huffing and puffing on the court – definitely some cardio improvement required, though Rick probably shot a solid 85% from the field.