China vs US: Black fuzz and civility

It has been two months since I left China, and I’ve received several e-mails from friends asking about my new life. I’ve experienced the usual culture shock – some of which I’ve described here – but my overall cycling life has been fantastic. All of the riding I’ve done so far has been in the Kansas City area (on the Kansas side) and Ann Arbor in southeastern Michigan. Here are the things I like:

Clean Air - It’s great to come home from a long ride and not feel like I’ve just emerged from a coal mine, with a sweaty layer of soot stuck to my face. It’s wonderful not to cough up a pound of lung butter on a ride. I’m still blown away by the amazing blue skies I’ve been seeing in the U.S. The beauty often overwhelms me so much that I have to pull off to the side of the road and just stare at the robin-egg blue sky. I know it sounds sappy and New Agey but it’s true. I still shudder when I  think of the toxic air I had been breathing the past six years in Guangzhou and Hong Kong.

Shortly after I moved to Ann Arbor, I took my personal computer to a shop to get a part upgraded. It was the PC that I kept on a small desk in a nook in my dining room in Guangzhou. Waffles & Steel was born on the machine. Anyway, the computer store technician opened up the processor and said, “Dude, was this thing really working?” I looked inside and was horrified to see that it was covered in dusty black fuzz. The stuff was close to choking the PC’s cooling fan. It was all over the motherboard. Like an idiot, I forgot to take a picture or collect a sample. Now I’m wondering if my lungs are coated with the black fuzz! It might be psychological, but it feels like I’m recovering faster from hard rides. I don’t feel like I ran a marathon while chain smoking unfiltered cigarettes.

Civility - In China, the drivers all seemed to be competing to see who could screw me over the worst. Cyclists had no rights. We were on the road because we were willing to be killed by a car or cement truck. Drivers could (and would) cut us off at will. They would harass us  by honking at us constantly. It was on the roads where the ruthless, selfish, dog-eat-dog side of contempory Chinese society was really on display. So far, during my rides in Kansas and Michigan, I’ve felt like drivers are competing to see who can be the nicest to me. Last month, I was dead tired near the end of a three-hour ride in the blistering early afternoon heat. I was cooling down, just spinning out the lactic acid in my legs a few kilometers from my parents’ home. I was climbing a hill at a casual pace when a lady in an SUV stopped at a stop sign at an intersection at the top of the incline. She was ready to turn into my path until she saw me. Although the driver was about 200 meters from me and had plenty of time to make her turn, she sat there waiting for me to crest the hill. I gestured to her to go ahead but she sat there smiling. So I had to get out of the saddle and sprint to the top of the hill so she wouldn’t have to wait too long. She nearly killed me with kindness. On another ride, I was on a country road with a bunch of rolling hills. I began to sense there were several cars behind me but they weren’t passing. I did a quick shoulder check and saw a huge black pickup truck with a gun rack. I started to worry that maybe the driver was a redneck who was getting ready to mess with me. But I looked back again and saw there were 3-4 cars driving slowly behind the pickup truck. I realized that they were just waiting to get over the hills so that they had a safe section of road to pass me. In China, the truck would roar up to me, honking its horn until I pulled off to the side. Or the cars would just gamble, take their chances passing me on a blind uphill and hope they wouldn’t have a head-on collision with vehicles coming over the hill. Just one more example. On Saturday, I pulled up to an intersection with a green light. A car caught me just before the intersection and was a half-car length in front of me when it signaled it was turning right. The driver then stopped and waited for me to go past before making the turn. In China, if a car was a millimeter in front of you, the driver felt he had the right to turn into your path and cut you off. During the past two months, I’ve only had three bad experiences – all of which were minor. Last week, a guy in an old beat-up Chevy came racing up to me from behind, honking his horn like an idiot. It kind of made me feel at home.

To be continued…

Musings: I fought the law and the law…

I was nearly finished with my 150 kilometer ride and was hammering down a four-lane thoroughfare when I saw the police van on a side road to my right. It wasn’t really a van. It’s hard to describe. It was a weird, creepy vehicle with a large container in the back that is used for transporting people swept up at mass arrests at protests or factory riots.

I could tell the vehicle was preparing to turn into my path. The question was whether it would stop for traffic before merging onto the busy road. As usual, it didn’t. It pulled in front of me and cut me off, causing me to grab a handful of brakes and swerve to miss its back bumper. I yelled out, “Wei! Wei! Wei!” (meaning “Hey, hey, hey” in Mandarin). The two police in the cab saw me out of the corner of their eyes, but they did what Chinese drivers usually do when they blatantly mistreat me on the road: Ignore me, pretend that I’m not really there.

The close encounter gave me an adrenaline rush and reawakened my contempt for the Chinese police, who for me symbolize one of the worst parts of the authoritarian regime. I sprinted to catch up to the vehicle and was almost able to pull up to the passenger side. I yelled, “Fucking assholes!” But they didn’t acknowledge me before speeding away.

One of the great things about living in a foreign land is that the police usually don’t understand your English expletives. However, they’re often savvy enough to realize that you’re disrespecting them, so I rarely confront them in this way. If they wanted to, they could haul me down to the police station because I didn’t have my passport with me. It’s the law that foreigners must carry their passports at all times. I never do when I’m riding because it can easily get wet or mangled. I’ve photocopied and laminated the important pages and keep them in a plastic ziplock bag in my back jersey pocket. But technically, this isn’t good enough.

It only took me a minute to feel stupid about the incident. It’s never wise to indulge in bouts of road rage on Chinese roads. While I was yelling at the police, I was unable to watch the road, and I rode over a big mound of concrete and almost fell off the bike. Lumpy, concrete blobs are common on the streets. I’m not sure how they get there. Maybe concrete trucks spill excess material and no one bothers to clean it up. They’re extremely dangerous and you must be constantly watchful for them.

Venting in traffic is also bad form because a foreigner – especially a white man – rarely gains sympathy from the locals by yelling and screaming in public. It never looks good. As soon as you lose your cool, you’ve lost the battle. I think half the time, the Chinese don’t even understand why you are mad. Last weekend, I was cruising down a road about 38 kph when a small sedan cut me off. The driver saw me coming, but, as usual, he didn’t think he had to stop for me. I road up alongside the vehicle, slammed my palm on the car’s roof a couple times and called the driver a “zhu tou,” or a “pig head.” The guy gave me a bewildered look, stopped his car and apparently had a brief conversation with his passenger about what the hell just happened. Why was the weird foreigner in Lycra yelling at him?

On my better days, I yell to the drivers, “Zhongguo pengyou! Xiao xin yidian!” or “Chinese friend, be careful!” Drivers usually acknowledge me when I do this and I don’t come away looking like an uptight foreign jerk. I’m not sure if I’m able to convey the right message to the driver, but it certainly leaves me feeling better.