How I met my wife - Episode 5

I’ll start with a quick summary of events up to this point in time.  I first met Nicola at the Vancouver Airport.  On the plane, I was told that she was living in Sexsmith because that’s where her boyfriend lived.  Point taken.  She sits beside me on bus to Huangshan.  We climb mountain together and generally get along. 

I don’t know when the romantic part of our relationship began.  Probably within the next few days.  Essentially, we were a couple the moment Nicola got on the bus with me leaving the town Hangzhou for the mountain resort of Huangshan.  After that, we spent most of our free time together.  Sometimes, she would meet me places.  Other times, she’d hitch a ride, side saddle on the rear carrier of my bike like the other girls with their boyfriends in Shanghai.  There was not a lot of privacy for young people in Shanghai.  Even after marriage, the Chinese would have to wait months or even years for an apartment.  Often, their liaisons would take place in public parks in the bushes after dark.   

The weekend following Huangshan, our group travelled to Suzhou, the sister city to Victoria.  We’d been invited by the mayor to celebrate their sisterhood during lunch with the mayor of Suzhou along with a small group of his fellow officials who like him, were all male.  The mayor gave a long, flowery speech praising Victoria’s many tributes and Honore followed with a speech filled with equally wonderful pronouncements about Suzhou.  All bullshit because, as far as I know, like us, he’d never been to the city before and, if I can be frank, Suzhou was a bit of a hole.  It has a beautiful lake

where Nicola and I sat for what seemed like hours at a tea house admiring the gazebo about 20 metres off shore and the bright green scum that separated us. 

The lunch featured a delicious array of dishes many shaped like real and mythological creatures like the dragon made of shrimp and the panda made of rice and seaweed pandas.  Most memorable was the rice wine which was served in small, stemmed glasses that contained about the same volume of liquor as a shot glass.  The difference here was that every time that glass approached empty, it was filled, as if by magic by waiters standing surreptitiously by the side anxious to anticipate your every need.  Unlike Japanese rice wine or Sake which contain as much as 15% alcohol per volume, the Chinese version exceeds 30.  Needless to say, we left feeling a lot better than when we went in. 

That night, Aaron, Nicola and I went searching for a bar where we could order the same, purifying spiritual sustenance.  The one we found had a low ceiling with heavy wood beams and small wood tables and chairs polished smooth over what must have been decades of use.  The dim light from low-wattage incandescent lights could easily have been kerosene lanterns from days of old so that I could imagine the place as it might have been decades ago. 

We were given a menu in Chinese and then resorted to the time-honoured practice of pointing to the objects of desire. In Chinese “retail” stores, all the items for sale were located behind a counter.  Customers would stand on the other side and then make their request to a store clerk standing behind it.  Foreigners like us could only point at the objects of our desire and hope that the often cantankerous clerk would accede to our request.  Sometimes he or she would be on a “break” and not be assisting any customers at all.  Other times, they couldn’t be bothered with a non-speaker.  And sometimes, they would mock us and point at every sales item except the one he obviously knows we want.  That guy was such an asshole.  He really thought he was funny. 

This bar was an exception.  Liquor was located on shelves behind a small bar at the far end of the establishment.  When I pointed to what we believed was rice wine, the waitress shooed us back to our table and shortly after delivered us each a generous portion of rice wine in similar small,l stemmed glasses to those we’d been drinking from that afternoon. Now, in the dank interior of a local bar in Suzhou, I contemplated the otherworldliness of my experiences in China.  This was 1984.  There was no internet. The country had been closed for almost 40 years.  The bar seemed more like a product of my imagination than reality. I thought of Chalmun’s Cantina from the first movie of Star Wars or of times when the Chinese wore coolie hats and an opium den could be found in an adjoining room.   

As any respectable drinker from Northern Canada can attest, we could not stop at just one.  That said, the waitress seemed surprised when we ordered another. When our second round arrived, we were disappointed to discover that the glasses were considerably smaller than first.  Unsatisfied, Nicola and I ordered a third round which came in the same small glasses as the second that had only been partially filled.  I blame this on the paternalistic attitude of the Chinese state.  The waitress was simply looking out for our better interest.  For all she knew, we had no understanding of the

Canal in Suzhou

intoxicating power of the wine.  And then, there was Nicola.  One or both of us might have been attempting to take advantage of her.  After the third round, Nicola and I went for a walk along the canal and Aaron went back to the hotel. 

Being in China in the eighties was like going back in time.  For example, on this walk, we did not see one motorized vehicle.  Nor were any jets flying overhead or helicopters ff-whopping for criminals or electricity used on any of the barges moored along the canal.  The occasional bicycle or pedestrian would pass by and that pretty much all the activity we saw.  It was like going back to the turn of the twentieth century. 

On the front of one of the barges a young family of four was squatting around a charcoal brazier while the mom cooked a late night dinner.  Like those in the other barges, these people lived with only the most rudimentary of conveniences sleeping in a small wood enclosure located at the back of the barge and living without electronic conveniences of any kind.  Despite my addiction to the Sony Walkman that I listened to most of the time, I sort of envied the simplicity of their existence.  It reminded me of camping in the wilderness and how relaxing it can be to live like our ancestors.  How daily life was consumed with the provision for necessities like heat and food and the rudimentary shelter of a tent but only in a romantic way without actually having to hunt for gather nuts and berries or feel the pain of starvation.

Shanghai Seaman's Club plus new roadway in front

The Shanghai Seaman’s Club was a very different bar we frequented while attending Normal University.  It was a neo-classical building located next to Suzhou Creek where it empties into the Huangpu River.  It has since been converted into the luxurious Waldorf-Astoria Shanghai Hotel.  On our first visit to the club, we sat at the gorgeous 111-foot mahogany bar with glass cabinets displaying all the Western drinks for sale behind it.  After my cousin’s wedding, I’d developed a taste for Scotch and so enquired as to the price of the Chivas

Modern version of Seaman's Club bar

Regal.  At a dollar a shot, we could certainly afford more than one before moving onto our staple, Tsingtao beer.  Fortunately, the bartender did not monitor our alcohol consumption like the waitress in Huangshan.  That said, according to my reading, we would not have been allowed to get obnoxiously drunk.  According to a quote from Mr. Gu, the proprietor of the Seaman’s Club at the time, ''We are not capitalists.  We don't try to make them drink too much. We want to preserve their health. We want to love and protect them.” 

Later in the summer, we shared a table with a few sailors and a couple of Swedish girls.  The girls were blond, beautiful, fit and flighty and the first independent travellers we met in China.  Unlike us, they weren’t connected to an education program or tour group of any kind. Even though we’d travelled without supervisors to Huangshan, I’d met only Chinese men in the dorm room where I’d spent the night and a couple of elderly Chinese fellows drinking tea at the weather station on the side of the mountain.  Only having recently opened their country for travel, the Chinese liked monitor what tourists saw in the few cities that were open. 

The girls shared some of their experiences with the Chinese International Travel Service or CITS or SHITS as it was known to travellers.  Accommodation and much of the travel had to booked through this organization.  We would soon learn for ourselves how frustrating an experience this could be.  Mostly, we learned how to annoy them with our patience and persistence. 

The girls flirted and the seaman told stories and we all shared theories that might explain what we were experiencing in China.   We stayed so late that the busses were no longer running and no taxi could be found.  So, we walked back, Nicola and I arm in arm and Aaron on his own.  Pleasantly inebriated and probably in love, we just didn’t care about making him uncomfortable.  The night was warm.  

The road was empty of pedestrians and traffic and dimly lit by the occasional yellow streetlight.  People were sleeping in hammocks outside their one and two room concrete hovels, the occasional charcoal brazier still smoking.  The air was still and quiet except for our footsteps and hushed voices. We were all alone in this new and exotic, fantastic and romantic world.  Like a pot at the end of the rainbow, it was a feeling we would pursue for the rest of our lives.