I don’t want to be misleading. My past year living in Hangzhou, China, has been one of the best of my life. I’ve met people I’ll remember for the rest of my life, and I’ve been given some fantastic opportunities to broaden my horizons professionally. last year, having been my second year in China, was characterised by a host of not-so-small personal accomplishments too. All of those minor tasks that every foreigner struggles with and that made living in China quite difficult at times during my first year, have become the source and inspiration of a collection of newly acquired skills. Milestones in my journey as I transform myself into some kind of amalgamated man of both eastern and western cultures. I've been banking coin too, as a result of my hard work (at one time I was juggling four different jobs). All this hard work didn't stop me enjoying myself either. One of the great things about China is that it’s not hard to save and have fun simultaneously. Perhaps I was starting to enjoy myself a little too much. It might have been the result of some karmic energy transference to account for some just slightly devious behaviours I might have begun to make habit. Maybe it was a culmination of factors. I don’t know. Whatever the reason, I felt like the unluckiest person in Hangzhou during the last lunar new year, as my last two months in China were definitely my worst.
My problems really started when I lost my passport on a train coming back from Shanghai in August. Firstly, I didn't make my application for a new passport within the required 30 day period following the filing of an initial report at the Entry and Exit Bureau. I made five more trips to Shanghai over the course of the next couple of months to submit further documents in order to finalise my applications for a replacement passport. When my application was delayed and it looked as though I might not receive my new passport in time to update my visa before its expiry, I was forced to apply for an emergency passport. But, now I'm getting ahead of myself. My visa application was protracted over several months, while all the action in my story takes place in the time between.
Sometimes in China, a foreigner can avoid getting into trouble. There are probably many reasons for this, and I can only speculate about what some of these reasons might be. Police and security will often give foreigners a free pass, I believe, because the officers' English is so limited that they are not likely to be able to make themselves understood. I know for a fact that many foreigners will take advantage of this fact. If a foreigner does know any Chinese, all they need to do is pretend not to, and depending on their level of English, a police officer will have a hard time getting anywhere. I never needed to do this, but I did get into a habit of jumping the turnstiles at the metro station. Whenever my card was read empty when standing at the front of the line entering the turnstiles, I found that the quickest and easiest option was to jump the turnstiles and pay the money later. This was never a problem, because a record of failure to pay always registers on the system upon the next transaction. I'm not saying it was the right thing to do, but I'm just saying that I was lured into a false sense of security in my actions.
Running late for one of my part-time jobs one evening, I did just that, except that on this occasion a hand snatched my arm from behind. A man pulled me violently back into the turnstiles, and began screaming into my face in Chinese. My explanations were likely not understood, or if they were, they were ignored. This went on for some time. I'm am embarrassed to say it now, but the truth is I slapped the guy.....twice. Of course, it sounds terrible, and it is, but it's not like I didn't try reasoning with the guy first, and honestly, he was really hurting me. At this point, security saw fit to finally step in, and separate the two of us. Finally, the seemingly mere self-righteous Clarke Kent clone, determined to make citizen's arrests of turn-stile jumpers, whipped out a police badge and pushed it into my face. So began a gruelling interrogation that lasted the rest of the evening and into the night. The reason it went on so long, it turns out, is that if the guy had chosen to forgive me, the police would not have needed to charge me, and all officers on duty spent many hours trying to convince the guy to do just that. Unfortunately, this was to no avail.
I had a lot of trouble sleeping last year, and you can imagine how depressing it was when on the verge of finally drifting off after such a long day my phone rang around 1pm. It was the same police officer who had been interrogating me all night. It turns out that, as bad as it was to have hit a police officer, it was especially bad that I had hit that particular police officer. Without going in to a lot of details, he said it had been decided at higher level that I would be processed and charged as soon as possible, and that meant the very same night. He would pick me up from out the from of my apartment complex in 1 hour. Depending on the results of a hurried investigation, it was entirely possible that by morning’s end I would be behind bars. In the meantime, he said, I should notify family members, the Australian embassy, and any employers, who may need to be informed, and…get some rest. He would call me when he was parked outside.
Not surprisingly, many have asked me what it was like to spend a week in a Chinese prison. It was not a common thing to happen amongst the expat community, in Hangzhou at least. Back home in Australia, people react with outright disbelief when I tell them the story of my brief incarceration in a communist country. Of course, China, as far as many Australians are concerned, is a place of terrifying tyranny, where people face the firing squad when caught with some hooch, and so the idea of hitting a government official sounds like an unfathomably precarious scenario.
Ok, so it wasn’t exactly a prison so much as a detention centre, but in many respects, it was as you might expect a prison to be. The food was terrible, all daily activities follow a strict routine, and the environment is small and restrictive. Eight men live in a space barely 3 metres by 10 metres, and do EVERYTHING in plain view of each other. Most of the guys in my room spoke at least some English, but it was difficult to communicate with any of them in any really meaningful sense. I was, however, extremely lucky to be have been placed in the same room as the only other laowei (foreigner) in the whole complex, a 21 year old Thai guy who had been in the room for 6 months already, and was understandably over the moon to have me around. I didn’t have any trouble really. In a room of eight bunk beds, which were more or less full over the course of my stay, I found only one guy to be a pain in the arse. It wasn’t so much that he was a troublesome person who intended to cause his room-mates any harm as it was that he was just a troubled person, without any conviction of where exactly the ground beneath his feet really was. I’m not sure if it was his first time at that particular facility or not, but it wasn’t his first time in a like one, if not the very one. Rest assured, he was taking flicks to the ear during the afternoon TV viewing sessions by the end of my week in that room. I am not the kind of person to play bully under normal circumstances, but I have found that some people only know how to deal with others on a particular level, and in a confined space, you eventually have to deal with any problems that arise, and its probably better to do it as soon as possible.
One of the things I needed to do inside was to stop thinking about Bitcoin, and how it, along with the entire cryptocurrency market, was likely to be shooting up and away into the bright hazy sky above Hangzhou and beyond. I only got involved in cryptocurrency at all last July, when on a short trip home to Australia for a funeral, my brother told of how some investments he had been recommended to make had brought some serious returns. For the months that followed, I was logging onto exchanges multiple times a day to check on the progress of my rapidly expanding portfolio. Before I knew what a bull-market was, I was seeing my money grow by the hour, by the day, and the minute, Suddenly, without freedom, and worse, without access to phone or computer, I felt like I was missing out on my chance to double or even triple down on what was likely to be the greatest investment opportunity of all time.
I have had a few brushes with the law and I do ask myself often why it is that I get myself into these situations. Perhaps at some level it is so that I can entertain you all. As for the crypto-market crash. A few times during my life, I have been left wondering whether I have a guardian angel. For example, I once avoided killing both myself and one of my best friends in a car crash when a small and solitary tree stopped my car from toppling over a cliff. My brief incarceration may not be such a great example, but I was left contemplating how my crash course in market investment could have been much more devastating, if I had had my freedom, and my phone.
The last couple of months in Hangzhou were a bit of a blur. I was clubbing as hard as I was working, and by the late January, I was totally exhausted, having got by on less than 4 hours sleep per night for nearly 6 months. I had even planned to party both the Friday and Saturday nights prior to my flight on the Sunday of my last week in Hangzhou. Friday evening started like many others had before.My best friend, a beautiful and talented South African woman, met me for dinner, at a popular Western style restaurant, and as per usual, the two of us were in a cab headed across town towards the bars and clubs shortly before midnight. Hangzhou had finally delivered on its promise of snow, and . The club was warm though. I had only been there for 45 minutes, and was having a great time. The venue had opened only 6 months before, but had quickly become one of the most popular expat bars in the city. I was scouring the venue for all the friends I had made in Hangzhou and at the venue since I had been frequenting it more and more during the months prior when I heard smashing glass, followed by a long dull sound of gushing liquid. The pain didn't actually start right away, but instead only seemed to become apparent after bringing my hand to the left side of my head and confirming that I had in fact been hit with a glass object. My head was totally numb, and the wound was letting a significant amount of blood. Based on the sounds I can remember hearing, people around me were only discovering what was transpiring as I was. Then there was a very loud scream from my left side. Unsure of whether another blow was coming, I went down to the ground. The rest of the night is rather a blur. I remember being quite angry, and likely abused several people who most probably didn't deserve it.
Movement was very difficult for my last day and a half, and perhaps unwisely, I spent most of the time in bed replying to friends on WeChat, before finally packing my things and boarding my plane without getting stitches, or even visiting the doctor. Instead, I was in transit for nearly 13 hours, with a wound that was caked over with dried blood, and which could or could not have been haemorrhaging the entire time.
Rest assured, that was not the case.
I'm home. And I've slept.
