Have you ever had one of those moments when your life has flashed in front of your eyes? You know, a time when the world seemed to slooooooow down and allow you enough time to see everything so clearly?
They can take you by surprise, those moments. And, when they do, nothing particularly profound is likely to come out of you.
Usually its one of the following three options:
“Arrrrgggghhhhhh!!!!!” At an ear-splitting level; or
“………”, just deathly silence; or
“Oh, fuck.” Not loud, just resignation.
An acceptance of fate or destiny; the inevitability of one’s own situation.
It was the third of these options that left my mouth as the taxi I was in careened sideways across three lanes of traffic and headed, now backwards as it spun, towards a concrete wall at about 100 km/h.
But let me rewind a bit first. Before I get carried away with the whole spiritual journey that I undertook as my fate awaited.
Before I watched the scene unfold from outside of my own body.
Before the tension of anticipation was broken.
I was in Dandong, China. Liaoning province, north east of Beijing. On the Yalu River, directly opposite North Korea. Population 2.4 Million – plus five Aussie tourists/businessmen on this particular April evening. We were all in the steel industry – our company had several mills throughout China, including one in Dalian just three hours west of here. With me on the trip were the several colleagues and a couple of translators.
The Great Wall of China ends just outside of Dandong and we climbed that earlier in the day, sweating in the sun as we traipsed the stone steps like thousands of workers and soldiers did many years before. At times more of a climb than a walk, the wall helped work off the hangover from the night before, alcohol and sweat perspiring from every pore. From my vantage point at the top of the wall, though, North Korea didn’t look a lot different from China – except that there seemed to be a party going on over on the Chinese side of the river. It was like China was the house full of young people having a party every second week and North Korea were the grumpy old neighbours who secretly wished they’d been invited.
We took a trip down the Yalu river to view the North Koreans and not a lot was seen – the factories didn’t emit smoke (so they were either very efficient or they simply didn’t work), the cranes on the riverside were rusted and idle. The trucks looked older than me. The difference was even more stark at night when the Chinese side was lit up like a Christmas tree – the riverside esplanade lined with practioners of Tai Chi, with market stall vendors and hawker food vans. The Korean side showed a grand total of three lights on – one was a car I saw moving sloooow.
The Broken Bridge – so called because it was bombed during the Korean War by the Americans – jutted out into the water. Next to it was the rebuilt new bridge to connect China to North Korea but that was only lit halfway – darkness began halfway across the Yalu River.
The eeriness of a half lit bridge and a darkened land on the other side of the river took on an almost sinister feel as the fog rolled in at night, blanketing the towns with a heaviness that dampened sound, reduced visibility, and provided possible cover for would be refugees from the darkened side of the river. As we walked to the restaurant, I could hear feint bangs and clangs from the other side of the river, imagining rusted ex-fishing hulks being loaded with potential escapees using the cover of the fog to make their bid for freedom.
Well, relative freedom anyway.
Now, I know this is a long way away from that taxi I mentioned earlier, but I’m getting to it. That moment of instant sobriety and spiritual awakening was only a few hours ahead of me - hiding in the future.
I had heard so many different things about food in smaller cities like Dandong. I was expecting exotic dishes like sea snail, or bat’s livers, or monkey’s brains. Fried dog or stewed rat. Perhaps donkey or even bird’s nest soup. However, the restaurant was standard Chinese fare with the added exotic delicacy like stingray and giant snails. Also, the beer and rice wine came out at regular intervals – that is, every minute or so. The tradition of each guest toasting the whole table in turn meant that before we had even eaten we had skulled eight shots of rice wine and had three stubbies of beer each – then the meal came out.
There was nothing too extreme on the menu - our local guides were looking after our bellies somewhat. This was partly out of hospitality and respect, and partly due to the fact that we would be travelling in their cars the next day and they didn’t want fat Aussies being sick in their cars.
I tried stingray for the first time - not bad, a little chewy.
I tried turtle for the first time - never again. It even looked wrong.
I tried goose liver for the first time - slimy, revolting and a texture that could only be described as “acquired”.
Bellies full, food devoured, the beers and wine took effect. We staggered out into the foggy street, motorbikes and bicycles jostled and wound their way between sluggish cars, ancient trucks exhaled blackened breath, coating everything with a grey/brown dusting that I felt must have been cancerous. The horns were constant, muffled in the heavy moisture of the fog, like someone had stuffed my ears with cotton wool.
I checked the time on my watch and concluded only one possible course of action…to the bar.
Two doors up from the restaurant was a bar - the “Texas Bar”, decked out in a cowboy/wild-west theme. That was where any similarity to the USA ended however as the beer was the tepid Tsingtao I had come to expect in this part of the world. Two young Chinese guys ran the bar and only one spoke English. There were several girls working there too - waitresses in the traditional Chinese sense of the word.
None of the girls spoke English so conversation was stilted, at best. Boredom was written all over their faces. It was a look of servitude, acceptance and defeat. I felt sorry for them - for their lives that really weren’t much of a life anyway. Their pimps, for that’s what the guys surely were, tried to tout the girls, prompting them to sit next to us but we weren’t interested. The previous night’s bout of alcoholic indulgence had taken its toll. After several drinks and a few half-hearted attempts to start up a conversation with the girls, we decided to call it a night and take a taxi back to the hotel.
That was when the fun began.
See, I told you I’d get back to that taxi - that life-changing, world-defining, spirit-cleansing mode of transport that changed us forever.
The hotel we were staying in was cryptically named the Pearl Island Golf Club Hotel. Cryptic because it was neither on an island nor was there any golf club in the vicinity. They did, however, have a driving range but as Aristotle once remarked “one swallow does not a summer make”, so too “one driving range does not a golf club make.”
The confusion over the non-existent island and golf club after which the hotel was supposedly named became more understandable once I read the guest directory. I understand that English is the second language in China - and I will admit that their English is much better than my Mandarin - however, the directory was a classic example of ‘lost in translation’.
Example 1: If you leave the hotel and want messages forwarded to you from the hotel, this is the instruction -
“Please relate with the onstage service person. When you must leave the room, but when waits for the telephone or comes the visitor, please yours whereabouts, message onstage, in order to we let us obtain the relation with you”.
Simple, right?
Example 2: If you wanted to set a time to go and practice your golf, this was the instruction in Engrish -
“If the fate plays a ball game please ahead of time one day with the onstage relation, significant holiday ahead of time three days relation”.
I still can’t figure that one out.
With the extremely well hidden golf course and mysterious, Atlantis-esque Pearl Island remained undetected, I still hadn’t gained some understanding as to how the hotel may have been named as such.
Because there were seven of us (the five guys plus our two Chinese translators who were wilder than all of us put together), we hailed two taxis. Four guys got in the first taxi and I sat in the second one with one of my colleagues and our Chinese translator, Ken. The confusion over the whereabouts of the hotel was unsurprising when we sat down in the taxi and the driver had no idea where any golf club was - let alone one with a hotel.
Ken handed the driver a business card of the hotel so he could read the address but the driver handed it back to Ken and said something that made Ken laugh - then they exchanged a few words in Mandarin and took off.
“What’s so funny?” I asked Ken as the shops and slowly moving vehicles flashed past the windows at break-neck speed.
“He didn’t know the name of the hotel so I gave him the card to read it in Chinese. But he said he was too drunk to read it and gave it back! I had to tell him again.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but did you say the driver said he was too drunk to read the card?”
“Yeah! He said his eyes were all fuzzy from wine”
I looked over the driver’s shoulder, as I was sitting behind him, and tried to get a look at his face. I could see the tell-tale signs of alcohol poisoning - burst veins in his nose, bloodshot eyes, a maniacal grin on his face as he dodged in and out of trucks and cars.
“Oh,” Ken added, “I also told him there an extra 100 RMB in it for him if we beat the other taxi back to the hotel.”
I was too tired to argue, beer and wine and a hectic schedule invoked resignation rather than protestation. I just sat back in the cab, my fingers gripping on for dear life into the vinyl seat in front of me. There were no seatbelts in the back of the cab and every lane change had us meet in the middle of the cab as we slid across the seat.
The moisture of the fog turned the four-lane esplanade into an ice rink - the obviously bald rear tires of the cab sliding across the lanes like a rally car on a mission. There were two lanes each way, no median strip between them. On one side of the road was the dark and filthy Yalu river - by day a brown and unwelcoming breeding pit of disease, but, by night, it was a pitch black cavern of death waiting to swallow any racing taxis driven by drunk taxi drivers with appalling wigs.
Oh yeah, his wig! I forgot to mention his wig.
It shone with a deep black radiance that revealed tinges of deep blue and purple as the lights flashed by. It sat on an odd angle, obviously ill-fitting and had worked its way loose over several hours of drinking and God-knew what else the driver had been doing prior to picking us up. I doubted that the wig was even his - perhaps he had won it in a card game of some sort. It wouldn’t have surprised me at all.
On the other side of the road was a long concrete wall that protected row after row of apartments from the nose of the traffic. We were in a chute - a slippery barrel of oncoming death as we ploughed ahead.
The speed limit was 60 km/h but, from my vantage point, I could see the speedometer nudging 120 km/h. We rounded a slight bend in the road and overtook the other taxi which had slowed for some reason.
Then the reason became apparent - a police car was right next to him.
Our driver, completely oblivious to anything else on the road (and to life in general I think), sped right on past the taxi and cop, switching into the oncoming traffic to avoid rear-ending either the other cab or the cop car.
The road veered left and we followed it, turning into oncoming traffic on a blind corner.
On a slippery road in the fog.
At twice the speed limit.
In a cab driven by a guy so drunk he could barely see past the front bumper.
It was no surprise, therefore, that we suddenly found ourselves drifting around in circles with absolutely no control and heading through the traffic towards the concrete wall.
This was when I said “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!”
How we never hit anything coming the other way was simply a minor miracle. I felt the wheels hit the kerb as we spun around, the rear of the car now heading towards the wall. My grip on the seat in front of me was complete, my fingers had torn into the vinyl as I held on for dear life. The cab was filled with screams and I’m pretty sure some of those were mine.
Then, by some strange quirk, the rear bumper of the car hit the wall and spun the car around further - facing the oncoming traffic. The hit was soft - almost like a metallic pin-ball hitting the rubber flipper in a pin-ball machine.
The cab stalled and I extricated my fingers from the vinyl seat - the marks left there would be there forever as evidence of the panic and mayhem experienced. The driver was plastered to his seat - the wig even more askew and had slid halfway down the side of his perspiring head like some sort of slowly migrating animal - a hairy beret perched precariously on the edge of his face.
That was when the laughter began.
Even after the police arrived and took down our details - deciding that the driver was solely to blame and bundled him off into custody - my laughter would not abate.
It was the laughter of relief.
The three of us hitched back the hotel, eventually sitting in the back of an open truck and ended up saturated by the humid moisture that rolled in even thicker after midnight. I needed a cleansing ale to finish the night off - calm the nerves a little bit.
One Tsingtao.
One scotch.
One more Tsingtao.
One last Scotch.
Then a few more drinks were bought by someone who clearly knew better than I did about what I really needed.
Another Tsingtao.
One last Scotch - and this time I meant it.
I went up to my room, undressed and showered. I washed away the meal, the drinks, the tepid air. I washed the bored girls out of my hair, the smell of cigarettes from by eyes, my pores. I washed away the fetid taxi smell of body odour and of close proximity sweating. I washed away spinning cars, flashing headlights, oncoming walls and deathly back rivers.
I washed Dandong nightlife out of my hair, my skin and my mouth. I could taste the city on my tongue, it’s essence seeped out of out my pores. I wreaked of third-world progression and cheap alcohol.
When I collapsed into bed, the exhaustion hit - the exhaustion of emotion.
