Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [44]
So true, I thought, though I did wonder about my oral quarrel. It’s difficult to have an oral quarrel when you can’t actually talk to people. The other horoscopes seemed to fixate on sex and money. As roosters around the world were brooding on their failures and waddling around with their fat butts in dire need of exercise, those born in the year of the sheep were reveling in their good fortune. Lucky month! You will on fire with opposite sex! Hopefully for the sheeps, they’d know to avoid the boars, the cads. Trouble to love affair is also possible, but not big deal. Evidently, the boars were having affairs with dragons. A lucky star is shining above you. It goes really well with your money making and your marriage. You may get trouble with your girlfriend/boyfriend. Meanwhile, the hares were laughing all the way to the bank. You got the luck of making some money this month, so catch it up.
The coffee, alas, did little to alleviate the postlunch, beer torpor I felt, and since, apparently, I was in need of exercise, I walked onward to Zhan Qiao, a long, broad pier that jutted far out into Qingdao Bay. I joined a sea of tourists ambling toward the Huilan Pavillion, which graced the end of the pier, and was amazed, yet again, at how quickly my disposition could change in China. I had been feeling rather mirthful on the terrace, idly flipping through the horoscope. Sluggish, but mirthful. Possibly, I was slightly drunk. It was a very large beer. And yet, ambling upon the pier, I could feel my light mood disappear. I wondered why it was that in China, alone in the world in my experience, when presented with a two-way crowd, the Chinese didn’t naturally gravitate to the right. Why is it that crowds in China must always bash into each other like one enormous rugby scrum? I mean, it was Saturday. It was sunny even. Surely, we should all be mellow. And yet a walk along the pier was anything but. Thousands surged one way and thousands surged the other. I darted through the crowd, dodging the brown, gelatinous loogies that flew past me in every direction, and moved my wallet to my front pocket as I sensed the menace of young men in dusty, ill-fitting clothes moving through the crowd like vultures. It was like walking though a crowded hallway in high school where half the students were looking for a fight. No one twists a shoulder here to avoid confrontation.
Then, suddenly, the crowd parted as if it had stumbled upon a lane divider. There before me sat a boy, not more than seven years old, though it was impossible to tell with any certainty. He was an albino with skin that was nearly translucent. He had no arms, and his ragged shirt had been pulled down to reveal the rough scars from where his arms should have been. His skin had been burned raw by the sun, and he sat there rocking and moaning with a plastic bowl before him that contained a scattering of coins.
Who was this boy? Who had done this to him? The scars on his stumps suggested that he wasn’t born armless. Who was sending him forth to beg on a pier? It would be far from the last time that I’d find myself pondering a display of mind-boggling cruelty in China, and it was why, despite the whiz-bang, China-is-the-future vibe I felt in