Year of the Cat

I got a hot shave and a haircut on the way to the bus station. As the razor skimmed my cheek, it shot a ginger stream of hair follicles into the barber's face.

"Fuck," he shouted in Chinese, "I'm choking on your beard!"

He wanted to know about the American Breast.
"There are big ones and small ones," I said.
What about the American Ass? It comes in many different sizes, I said. America is a very diverse country, I explained.

He took me into the back room for a scalp massage.
"How big is your pepper?" he wanted to know.
"That's a secret," I said.
"Secrets don't make friends. Tell me. It'll be our little secret."
"Um," I said.
"Okay, Mr. Laowai. Next time you come in, you can tell me how big your pepper is."
"Deal."
A hot shave and a haircut, a shampoo and a scalp massage, a lesson in Sichuanese: one U.S. dollar.

There were no buses left - it was already 7 PM - so I caught a communal minivan and we shuttled through the mist towards Chengdu. Already the drunk dials were pouring in. Seventy-five Americans with volunteer stipends to blow, gallivanting up and down the alleys of that big dusty construction site 180 kilometers to the west. I leaned forward in my seat to speed the minivan along. I was running four hours late. But, I thought, glancing at my reflection in the window, tussling my bouffant and palming the powdery baby-ass of my cheek, I was looking pretty damned good.

We pulled up to a gas station just outside of Chengdu and the driver seemed content to wait in line for two hours to refill his tank. I paid my fare, hopped out of the van, and flagged down a cab. I checked into the Kehuayuan Hotel around ten and on my way up to the room, someone snagged me by the elbow and the montage began. Such is memory. All the anxiety and nausea and shifting silences are erased. What remains is this montage, six minutes and 35 seconds long, to the tune of Al Stewart's Year of the Cat.

Pulsating neon, hot blue blowtorch blasts, jackhammers and bulldozers, dust and trampled cigarettes, motorbikes and vacant taxis. I think I'd better stay in tonight. Well, maybe just one drink. Up the stairs to a pleather wrap-around sofa in the corner. Tapping your toe against the brass footrail beneath the bar. Frosted steins and sinister shot glasses. A cloud of Rastafarians by the door and the ponytailed Frenchmen around the billiards table. The Chinese girls in their Groucho Marx specs. You asked the bartender if he had any Cure and he did. The married couples danced like they were merely dating. One more and we'll go home. You sent Dave out for another pack of Pandas. Pulling a five-kuai prayer from the depths of your corduroys, the bartender said it was alright and slid a shot of Jack your way. Amplifiers and instrument cases. Broken conversations in line for the men's room. You got Boston Joe to do a JFK impression. Levi did the national jig of Ethiopia while the Ripleys went Costa Rican on the dancefloor. You stole some Irish girl's drink and her man held you hostage until you'd given him the last of Dave's cigarettes. Strobe lights, camera flashes, tobacco hieroglyphics, the stubborn, unrelenting beat. The paternal warmth of watching two young kids make out for the first time, drunken bodies pressed against the Samsung AC Unit in the corner and you across the room wondering how you got so relatively old. What time is it, anyhow? One more and we'll go home. You ask the bartender if he has any Steely Dan and he does. A beer and a shot. Peanuts and sunflower seeds. The Sharpie graffiti on the bathroom walls. One more and we'll go home ...

And then the music fades out like the 1970's and you find yourself at the train station, bidding short-term farewells to people you will never see again. And then the long train ride back home, the countryside all rotting cement and flooded fields in the rain, a formaldehyde hangover squeezing vinegar out of your eyes, and you sitting there with a barfbag close at hand, wishing you'd never gotten so damned attached.

Public Girl

The postmodern slacker hero tends to find his closest confidants among the service sector. Bartenders, shopkeepers, barbers, cabbies, record store cashiers: by definition, these confidants are not friends. Their job is to remain as removed from the plotline of your life as possible and, from that abstracted vantage point, to occasionally serve up meaningless advice that solves none of your problems but makes you feel damned good about yourself.

The Dude confides in Tony, his limousine driver.
"Fuckin' A, man. I got a rash," says The Dude. "I was feeling really shitty earlier in the day. I'd lost a little money, I was down in the dumps."
"Ey, y'know what?" says Tony, gesturing into the rear-view mirror. "Fahgettabout it!"
"Yeah, man! Fuck it! I can't be worrying about that shit."

When I was back in Nebraska last winter, I aired my grievances to a gas station attendant at the BP on Galvin Street. The guy was a retired drug runner, and he was constantly getting in trouble with the management for posting NORML propaganda all over the shop, which apparently didn't jive with the broader interests of Better Petroleum. Nevertheless, whenever I went in for a coffee, he would give me just the sort of nonspecific wisdom I needed at the time, would regale me with tales of his titty bar exploits across the border in Council Bluffs, his most recent car wreck, and so on. Once, for no reason at all, he was pretending to be Australian for the day, which didn't hinder our usual bull session one bit, except that he called me "mate" instead of "dude." Our confidence was a beautiful, insubstantial, mutually beneficial thing. But it ended all of a sudden one afternoon in April, when he invited me to meet him and his crew at the Brazen Head later that evening. An unspoken line had been crossed and from that day forward, I bought my coffee from the Kwik Shop next door, where the attendant didn't seem to speak English or any other human tongue, for that matter.

In China, my service industry confidant is a convenience store clerk. Whenever I pop in for a tube of yogurt, instead of asking me whether I've eaten, as one does in Chinese, he asks me how I've been. He listens for a bit, dispenses some fortune cookie advice. Then he talks about his own shit: running two shops, working 14 hours a day, feeding the dog, keeping the girlfriend at bay. We can spill the beans back and forth for hours. By the end of it, I feel so much better that I'll walk right out the door without paying for my yogurt.

The other night I swung by for a couple cans of fake Budweiser. The clerk's dog, a handsome young yellow lab, is more human than canine. He wears a purple jacket with his name embroidered on the back: Green Tea, it says. He stares me down whenever I come in because he, too, knows I am a foreigner.
"How's it going, pengyou?" my confidant asked.
"Fuckin' A, man. I got a rash."
About an hour into our bull session, a cute but heavily made-up girl threw some dried squid snacks on the counter and complimented my Chinese.
"My Mandarin is alright," I said, "but I can't make heads or tails of Sichuanese."
"Let me teach you," she said. "Sichuanese, Shanghainese, Hunanese. I am a master of dialects. And I'll teach you for free."
I'm studying fifteen hours a week as it is, but I let her write her phone number on a one kuai bill and agreed to call her over the weekend. I walked out the door with my beers. Green Tea yelped.
"Hey, pengyou!" shouted the clerk.
I stopped in my tracks.
"Oh, right!" I remembered. I pulled a wad of dough out of my pocket.
"You moron!" shouted the girl, snatching a bill out of my hand. "My number's on that one!"
"Oh, right," I said. I stuffed the bill back in my pocket and handed the clerk another one.
"... and last week's yogurt," he said.
"Oh, right."
I fumbled around some more and gave him a ten spot.

A couple days later, I was at my confidant's rival shop, the one next door. I usually go to his arch-nemesis, the old bag, for my coffee fix because sometimes I don't have anything to confide to my confidant. Other times, I don't have three hours to burn shooting the bull. And anyway, the absence makes our occasional bull sessions that much more cathartic. Everybody needs a little time away, a wise man once sang. I was walking up the aisle to the checkout counter when I heard a "Pssst!" from the other side of the Red Bull display. Glimmering through the grated metal was a pair of black-painted eyes. It was my Sichuanese tutor.

"Why haven't you called me yet?" she asked.
"I dunno," I mumbled. "I've been lazy."
"Do you still have my number?"
"I haven't spent it yet."
"Call me tomorrow," she said.
"How you been?" I asked.
"Bad. Really bad," she said. "I'm having problems with my boyfriend."
She pouted.
"Oh," I said. "Sorry to hear that."
"Just call me tomorrow."
She turned and left. I set my jug of instant coffee on the checkout counter.
The clerk looked me over.
"Have you eaten?" she asked.

Later that night, I paid my confidant a visit and noticed the dog wasn't around.
"Where's Green Tea?" I asked.
"He's sleeping."
"Sleeping? Busy day?"
The clerk nodded.
"Does he have a girlfriend?"
"Of course he does," said the clerk.
"He seems to have a lot of them. I always see him out on the street in his purple jacket," I said, "sniffing three butts at once."
The clerk laughed.
"Whenever I see him sniffing butts, I run out and smack him on the head," he said. "I'm afraid he's going to catch doggy AIDS."
"Just buy him a pair of matching dog pants."
"They don't sell pants in his size."
"Well, does his ... thing ... still work?"
"Oh, yeah," he said. "It works."
Green Tea's virility seemed to be a source of great pride for the clerk.
"Do you think he's fathered any children?"
"Certainly he has!" the clerk shouted. "Some nights he doesn't come home at all! I find him in the morning, sleeping in the gutter with a smile on his face."
I laughed and smacked my thigh.
"By the way, while we're on the subject," said the clerk, leaning low over the counter, "I have a secret to tell you."
I looked around and ducked towards him conspiratorially.
"You know that girl you met in here the other day?" he asked. "Your Sichuanese tutor?"
I nodded.
"Right. Well, I don't know how to say this," he said, "but she's ... a public girl."
"A public girl?" I scratched my head. "What does that mean?"
"Well, you know that shop next door? The old guy?"
"I know the one."
"One time I saw her run off with him. Then, with the owner of the dumpling joint down the street," he said. "She's always hanging around on the street. Like I said, she's a public girl. Thirty year olds, forty year olds. I've seen it all. Who hasn't she slept with?"
"No kidding," I said.
"So I'm not saying you can't take Sichuanese lessons from her," he said. "I just wouldn't put your thing in there. And if you do, be sure to wear one of these."
He took a Jissbon packet from the impulse rack and flapped it in my face.
"I had no idea," I said. "She seemed like a nice enough girl."
"Take my word for it. You're my friend," he said, "and I don't want you to get doggy AIDS, neither."
"Thanks," I said. I shook his hand, even bowed a little. Then I turned and walked out the door.
"Hey!" shouted the clerk. "Yogurt."

The next day, the public girl called me six times. I sent her a text message suggesting I was busy for the next several years. And then, as I rolled back over in bed, with a few effortless thumb movements I banished her name to the ranks of the Trixies and Candies and Surreals and Lemons, filed her name away in the growing folder reserved for all stalkers past and present, whose phone calls I will never intentionally answer.

Puppies and Kittens

In order to survive in China, you must push a lot of the foreground into the periphery. Otherwise, the madness will drive you mad. As I've mentioned before, peripheralization is something your mind will do on its own, provided you don't throw a wrench in the process by dwelling too damned much. Lately, an overabundance of leisure has given me time to reflect on what my brain passes off as normal these days. When I sit down to write, I can no longer rattle off half-a-dozen pages at a time, partly because my surroundings aren't all that novel to me anymore. A cavalcade of absurdities that would add up to the weirdest single day of my American life are, in China, commonplace and forgettable nuisances that stand between me and my apartment. What baffled me six months ago no longer even registers in my consciousness, though I could probably make a million dollars by wearing a hidden camera and selling the chopped-up footage to Spike TV.

Part of the peripheralization process involves honing your ability to act like a total douchebag in public, i.e. pushing your instinctive American politeness into the periphery. Otherwise, you will be torn apart by wild dogs. On Sunday afternoon, I was smoking one last ciggy outside a bus station in Chongqing when a bag man caught me by the arm and started breathing mustard gas in my face.

"Where are you going, my foreign friend?" he asked.
"Nanchong," I murmured.
"Nanchong! Let's go! Eighty kuai!"
"No," I said. "Leave me alone."
I snubbed my cigarette prematurely and went inside, tossed my bag onto a conveyor belt and waited on the other end of the x-ray scanner for it to emerge. But the bag man was persistent. I saw his hobo-bindle-on-a-bamboo-stick come sliding out of the machine. He swept it up, grabbed me by the elbow, gestured at someone in the distance, and the next thing I knew, I was being pulled at by three men in ragged suits, all of them chattering about Nanchong this, eighty kuai that.
"Don't touch me," I said. "Go away."
I waited in the ticket queue. The art of Chinese line crashing is something I have yet to master; I am not yet that big of a douchebag. So I waited politely, a cosmic fool, standing two inches from the plexiglas ticket window while one old lady after the next cut in front of me, completed their transactions, and jostled their way back out. By then, the three old men were literally riding my coattails.
"They don't have any tickets to Nanchong! It's useless!" the bag man shouted. "They're sold out!"
"I don't believe you," I said. "I'll ask the ticket lady about that, thank you very much."
But the bag man was right: they had sold out of tickets to Nanchong. As often happens in moments of Chinese frustration, a Mandarin phrase leapt to my mind: mei fa - nothing can be done. And so I turned to my old foes, the three old men in the ratty suits, and I asked them, "Nanchong. How much?"
"One hundred kuai," said the bag man, grinning. Miraculously, the price had jumped.
"Eighty kuai," I said.
He said nothing and led me out to the bus. The driver and the bag man exchanged a look. There were no vacant seats, but after a tense standoff with a baby, the bag man succeeded in persuading the toddler to sit on his mother's lap. I handed the bag man one hundred kuai and held my palm out for change, but he turned and walked away.
"How much did you pay for your ticket?" the mom asked me, her child gnawing at its hand, pondering my existence.
"One hundred kuai," I said.
"Ha! One hundred kuai!" She leapt up to her feet to tell the rest of the passengers. "This laowai paid one hundred kuai for a ticket to Nanchong!"
Laughter, a few incredulous scoffs, lots of puzzled stares. The mom sat back down.
"You got cheated," she told me.
"I got cheated," I agreed, unable to explain that being gypped the equivalent of four dollars was vastly preferable to spending the night at one of Chongqing's 32 McDonald's franchises.

Unfortunately, the Chinese bus offers no respite for the ripped-off and haggle-hardened expat. Chinese buses are loud. There is, of course, the ever-squalling horn, the ever-shrieking babies. There is also the feature entertainment, playing on a flatscreen television with the volume cranked way up into the red, a Tang Dynasty romantic comedy exploding with cartoon sound effects: slide whistles, cuckoo clocks, tweetie birds, farts, boings, bonks, bleeps, toots, belches, trombone wah-wah-wah-wahhhhhs. A Chinese bus ride without any passengers would be enough to trigger a sonic seizure, but Chinese folks of all ages love to contribute their own personal ruckus to the general cacophony; one by one, young and old alike will fire up their cell phone MP3 players, so the inside of the bus starts to sound like the symphonic train wreck at the end of A Day In The Life by The Beatles. And yet, for me, ear plugs are no longer necessary. Somewhere along the way, my brain, thoroughly fed up, cut out the middle man and stuffed wads of cotton directly into its auditory cortex. I can actually fall asleep in a Chinese bus, and so deeply that you have to fire up a Boeing 727 to bring me back from the land of nod.

So I fell asleep. A couple hours later, I woke up and noticed that the mom in the seat next to me was holding her baby out over the aisle. Curiosity sometimes gets the better of me: I craned my neck to see that, indeed, the child was pooping in midair, turds dropping single-file into a tie-dye colored bucket on the floor. A few minutes later, the bus stopped, mother and child disembarked, and the tie-dye bucket remained there in the aisle for the rest of the trip. I cracked open my window and resumed reading Kurt Vonnegut.

I don't mention this anecdote for the obvious gross-out factor, or to discourage those of you with aversions to public defecation from visiting China. But it is indeed a place where the boundaries of excretory liberation are being pushed into new and frightening frontiers. And that is something you get used to. I, for one, no longer find China's will-ye nill-ye, squat-when-the-spirit-moves-ye philosophy the least bit odd.

When I got back to Nanchong, I waltzed into my usual haunt and ordered a plate of eggs and pork. Then, half a paragraph into Vonnegut, I heard a soft jingling and, glancing up, had to fight back the most sickening sitcom "Awwwww!" as two tiny beasts, a puppy and a kitten, came tottering my way. The both of them sniffed at my shoes for five minutes, then got tangled up in a play-fight. The puppy won. My eggs and pork arrived. They were so good that I nearly wept with gratitude. Oh, China. Despite my better judgment, I am falling ever more deeply in love with this beautiful and disgusting place, a gorgeous but unkempt mistress who will chloroform you, splash you with mud, piss on your doorstep, and at the end of the day, smother you with puppies and kittens.

The Capital of the World

China is the center of the world. China is the edge of the earth. China is a superpower. China is an undeveloped backwater. China is the America of the 21st Century. China is the China of the 20th Century. China welcomes the world. China eludes the world and the Chinese alike. The contradictions of modern China recall the paradoxes of ancient Taoism: perfect straightness looks bent, extreme skill looks clumsy, a brilliant speech sounds like stammering. Whether or not China is the center of the world, the world now believes that China is at its center. The West believes it and the Chinese believe it. "Our China is developing rapidly," the Chinese will tell you with a mystifying mixture of pride and meekness.

If China is the center of the world, Chongqing is the center of the center of the world. Shanghai and Beijing have always been cities of commerce, trade, and European imperialism. The east coast was developed centuries ago. But the real action is taking place out west, out in the Chinese hintergrund, in roaring metropolises that Westerners have never heard of: Chengdu, Lanzhou, Chongqing, Kunming. In the east of China, the pace of change is merely whiplash-inducing. In the west, it is truly breakneck.

Native Chongqingers will tell you that Chongqing is the biggest city in the world, and after you have been there, you will find that you are no longer inclined to doubt that claim. Chongqing was immense to begin with, and it is expanding at such a pace that it is no longer possible to measure how big the city is or how rapidly it is growing. Nowhere on earth is urban migration so frantic as it is in Chongqing Province. While modern western folk find refuge in the suburbs, the Chinese are elbowing and shoving their way towards the center of the world.

On New Years Eve, I, too, wanted to be at the center of the world, and several of my friends were already there, waiting for me, in various enhanced states of consciousness. But I missed the last bus to Chongqing. I stood around in the rain for half an hour before I was shanghaied by an unmarked taxi. I didn't ask how much the ride was going to cost. I didn't want to know. The important thing was that the cabby got me to the center of the world before this catastrophic decade drew to a close. We were slow getting out of Nanchong. "I gotta take a crap," announced the co-pilot, so we drove around for a good long while looking for a public squatter. Then the cabby decided we needed a few additional passengers, and stopped to consult one of Nanchong's many taxi pimps. The backseat was heated from below and upholstered in panda pelt, so despite the foul-smelling and overcrowded cabin, I quickly fell asleep. The cab ride only cost eighty kuai, twenty less than a bus. Two hours later, I was just another back-alley vagabond searching for the center of the world.

I had no idea where my friends were, so I meandered towards the center of the center of the center of the world, only to find it blocked off by a row of expressionless but collectively fierce-looking army men. A gaggle of girls in fluorescent pink devil horns tried to get around the wall by sneaking through the lobby of the Harbor Plaza Hotel, but their efforts were crushed by the soldiers at the back door. I didn't know where to go, so I remained in one place. Three old women wearing matching strobelight mouse ears asked me to take their picture with my camera. They flashed peace signs. "Eggplant!" they shouted in unison. A six-year-old introduced himself as Jack and asked me, in English, which nationality I belonged to. "American," I said. "How 'bout you, Jack?" "I am Chinese," he said, and walked away. A few minutes later, my friends called and told me to meet them at the Harbor Plaza Hotel, which was precisely where I was.

We sat under a nylon tent and ordered vegetable dishes from a dive restaurant. The new decade snuck up on us so stealthily that we weren't even drunk for its inception. We hugged each other one by one and sat back down to sink into our own individual decade-in-review reflections. One year ago, I was in Omaha, working at a library, lusting after ... Five years ago, I was in college, working at the Kiewit Hall front desk, lusting after ... Ten years ago, I was sixteen, working at the zoo, lusting after ... And now I am 26, teaching in China, lusting after ... A handful of fireworks splattered against Chongqing's heavy metal atmosphere. Some hoots here and there. And that was it. At the center of the world, the arrival of a new calendar year is not such a big deal. If you want fireworks, you have to wait for the Lunar New Year.

I stayed in Chongqing a few days too long. On the third day, I set off with my friend and wandering companion Erin for a Saturday evening stroll. By bidding farewell to our hosts and missing the last bus out of town, we had committed ourselves to another night in Chongqing. But it was unclear where the night would end, whether we would find ourselves sleeping in the gutter, or in a swan-shaped bed on the 97th floor of the Chongqing Hilton.

I have visited Chongqing twice. The city doesn't feel like a city. It feels like a very large village. In the West, the city-village aesthetic might call to mind places like Madison, Wisconsin: cities full of mom 'n pop diners and plenty of green space. But that's not what I mean. What I mean is this: Chongqing is a city full of country folk. You'll pass the most opulent nightclub in all of China: strobe lights, crystal chandeliers, a god-awful Fatboy Slim remix thumping on the PA, some dude in a bear costume breakdancing on the stoop, a salaryman in a seersucker suit vomiting over the balcony. Fifteen feet later: a mud-streaked peasant lugging a cartload of pig heads up the hill, a teenaged beggar squatted in the lotus position with an eleven-digit phone number scrawled at his feet, a circle of toothless hags playing mahjongg. The juxtaposition is not exactly cozy, nor is it loaded with socioeconomic tension as it would be in The States. It is simply surreal. You wonder whether the peasants are aware of the glittering, ephemeral riches around them, and whether the young hipster kids are aware of the peasants. As a Westerner, you are aware of both. At the same time, you are aware of nothing.

Erin and I wandered. She asked me how China compared to Korea.
"Korea is brighter than China," I said, indicating the neon haze around us, "if you can imagine anything brighter than this."
But I can't really compare China to Korea. I lived in Korea for a long enough time, but that was three years ago. I was different then. Korea was different then. We change, and our surroundings keep changing at a rate that makes knowing anything impossible. Those who know do not speak, those who speak do not know, etc.

We wandered for eight hours. I exaggerate not. We wandered. We passed a shoe vendor who was selling boots with facial hair, big orange boots with eyebrows, mutton chops and little moustaches. "Fu Man-Shoe," I quipped. Nightclubs and eel vendors. Limousines and trishaws. We passed a man belting karaoke through a portable amplifier: he closed his set with a falsetto flourish, then he hawked a legendary loogey at 120 decibels. The locals laughed, we laughed. Starbuckses and whorehouses. Skyscrapers and hovels. Movie theaters and plastic-wrapped bootleg pornos spread out on dirty quilts.

We arrived at a trio of pagodas. In China, you can never be sure whether the scenery that surrounds you was built 4,000 years ago, or yesterday. These pagodas were built yesterday, and were infested with karaoke rooms and massage parlors and internet cafes. We climbed the stairs and walked to the end of a courtyard that looked over the Yangtze. The earth lay hundreds of feet below, obscured by the eternal fog that pillows the Chongqing skyline. I trembled with a sudden fear of heights: I'd no idea we were so high up. A boyfriend came waddling towards us with his girlfriend on his back and jokingly threatened to hump her over the ledge.
"If any man ever does that to me," Erin said, "I'll throw him over the ledge."

The ledge was covered in keychain graffiti, half of it in Chinese, half in bad English. "I love GJ for ever!" "You are gay fuck." "Thank you very much, World." "Your welcome!"
We walked back to the dimly lit joint that we'd passed in the courtyard. Chongqing, a city of countless millions, is home to perhaps ten bars worth going to. We pressed our foreheads against the window and peered inside. Black people! Heineken! Conversation! Couches!
"My god," I said, choking up a bit. "It looks like - a bar."
We went inside. A bar, indeed, it was. The bartender recommended "the black beer," and I was stunned to find that, after only two bottles, I was tipsy.
"I feel slightly drunk," Erin said to me, "and not formaldehyde drunk. Drunk drunk."
I was zoned out, watching the fractal display on the projection screen. I've been abroad so long that I'm no longer sure what is modern and what is obsolete. But, I said to Erin, slobbering into the collar of my suitcoat, if I'd had access to this sort of psychedelic stimulation as an undergrad, I would never have graduated. And yet there were peasants on the other side of the wall, smoking pipes, skinning radishes, hauling meat uphill. If you brought them inside to see this, even for a moment, if you dragged them inside to observe Afro-Caribbean men digging a reggae redub of Dark Side of the Moon while the universe unfurled itself across a projector screen, would the peasants understand? When we'd paid our tab and stumbled back outside, would we understand? Does anyone understand what is happening?

But existential dilemmas quickly gave way to more practical concerns: where were we going to sleep? We stopped by a love motel. The clerk assured us that a room would be available in 25 minutes, and we waited until a sweaty old man and his escort went scampering out the front door, but in the end, the clerk wouldn't let us stay because I'd forgotten my passport. We hid out in a nearby McDonald's until 4 AM while a schizophrenic girl in the corner pulled her hair out over a Big Mac. We ventured to the four-star hotel across the street. The clerk didn't give a shit. We checked into a room on the 17th floor. The room service menu advertised "vib condoms" and "the magic pants." On the bed was a plastic-wrapped pill that I did not ingest because it cost fifty kuai. In the morning, I parted the curtains and squinted through the Chongqing haze and wondered just how I'd arrived at the center of the world.