Which Asian river reverses course when it floods during the rainy season?

What automobile part did Mary Anderson invent in 1903?

How did the Battle of Balaclava end?

What unit is used to measure torque?

Athos and Porthos are two of the “Three Musketeers’’ in Alexandre Dumas’ novel. Who is the third musketeer?

If you answered the Mekong River, windshield wiper, Charge of the Light Brigade, newton meter and Aramis, you’re very smart. You also would have done great in this week’s trivia game at the Tao Bar in Zhengzhou.

Every Tuesday night, the popular expats hangout hosts a trivia contest, where teams answer questions on a variety of subjects, from science and sports to movies and history. It’s like an extra-hard version of “Jeopardy,’’ though your answers don’t have to be in the form of a question.

Expats in China tend to be peculiar, albeit very intelligent people. Many of them are teachers, so they have areas of expertise. But to win the Tao trivia contest, your team has to have experts in many fields.

My team started out strongly, but weakened down the stretch and finished fourth in a six-team field. We answered all of the questions at the top of this post correctly except for the one about the Asian river, but we didn’t know that arm wrestling was never an Olympic sport, that fish is the avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu, that bats sleep 20 hours a day or that Macau supplanted Las Vegas as the world’s gambling mecca in 2006. (As a lifelong gambler, I’m ashamed that I got that one wrong.)

Though we didn’t win, we did take home first prize for the most offensive team name:  Stephen Hawking’s Speech Therapy Club. The group I played with is renowned for its politically incorrect monikers, including Anne Frank’s Hide-and-Seek Club and Dr. Kevorkian’s Suicide Help Line.  As long as they don’t make fun of Chairman Mao, anything goes.

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Losing meant we had to pay for own drinks – first prize is a free bar tab for the night – but we didn’t let that spoil the party. My friend Matt, a young teacher from San Francisco, regaled us with the bizarre story behind the large scar he now has next to his right eye.

While riding a train in Vietnam during the Lunar New Year holiday, Matt slipped and hit his head on a fire extinguisher, opening a huge bloody gash. Train workers wrapped his head in gauze — “It felt like I was in a Vietnam War movie,’’ Matt said – but he had to wait three hours before the train arrived in the scenic town of Sapa and he was taken on a motorbike to a local hospital, where he was stitched up without anesthesia.

Not one to be deterred, Matt went ahead with a scheduled mountain hike later that day. When he got to Hanoi about a week later, he visited another hospital, where they redid some of the stitches. Looking at the scar today, it’s obvious that if the cut had been just an inch closer to his eye, he probably would have lost half his vision.

“When I get back to San Francisco, I might get some plastic surgery,’’ Matt said nonchalantly.

For now, we’re going to keep him away from fire extinguishers.