Fùyáng 2024 June 02

The morning of Ricky’s wedding. Around 0730 we gathered in Ricky’s hotel room and donned our matching outfits: “traditional” Chinese style robes with swords. We participated in a photo and video session with Ricky which would later be played at the wedding. Thereafter, we made our way downstairs to the hotel lobby where a convoy of Volkswagen Beetle cars were waiting to chauffeur us to Ricky’s fiancée’s familial home…where we would “abduct” her (the bride-to-be) after a series of games and hóngbāo distributions.

Ricky’s wedding was wonderful! It took place across the street from our hotel in a large event center building. It was highly decorated with a crystalline aesthetic and stocked with professional light, video, and sound equipment—the entire thing felt like being on a movie or television production. We all went on stage and delivered our well-wishes before feasting, drinking, and smoking our fill. Thereafter, we made our way back to the hotel.

Jack, Elric, Becca, and myself went downtown for some food. We ate an early dinner and then made our way further downtown to a shopping mall where we bought a large communal tank of beer to drink and learned how to play “liar’s dice” (taught to us by Jack).

Max eventually joined us as well; Enamored with his phone camera, Max wandered the shopping mall taking photos. Becca and Elric decided to call it an early night and opted to return to the hotel by way of ride-share. Max, Jack, and myself decided to begin walking.

The three of us chose a direction and began exploring, stopping at small shops and corner-markets as we went to purchase drinks. My drink of choice was Snow Beer due to its low alcohol content.

We made our way down various streets and wandered through random alleyways, essentially chasing lights—going whichever direction seemed to teem with the most life or have the greatest illumination. We had no agenda nor destination. We just walked, talked, joked, drank, and smoked.

Eventually, one street took us to a city park. The park was dark and mostly empty at this hour, but still had some people strolling through and street vendors peddling wares or services. It was a tranquil place with stone stairs leading down from the sidewalk to a large pond populated with lily-pads and flanked with Chinese pagodas.

Jack and I took a seat on a park bench along the street for a break. Max, meanwhile, became intrigued with a vendor next to us, an old Chinese woman, who was offering ear-cleaning services. Max decided to give her business. Jack and I got up to find a restroom.

Max’s ear-cleaning was essentially complete by the time we returned from the restroom hunt. We began walking again as Max explained to us that the ear-cleaning woman had added him on WeChat and was propositioning him for sex. She had messaged him saying that she fancied “foreign boys”. Max responded to her asserting that he had a small penis, but this did not dissuade her from her interests in him. We laughed about this entire scenario and kept on.

Ricky messaged us saying he, his new wife, and some bridesmaids were going out to get dinner. The plan later on was inconclusive, but KTV was suggested as a possibility.

The daily parts of the city was mostly asleep at this point—it was nearly midnight at this point, after all—but, various pockets retained activity. Many stores remained open, and people still walked the streets. We meandered down more alleyways and turned down whichever streets seemed of greatest interest. There was no “getting lost”: getting lost was the whole point! Some girls greeted us as we rounded a street-corner, shouting “hello!” and trying to strike up a conversation. We departed from them once they told us they were 17 years old.

A five-star hotel called “Buckingham Palace” came upon our flank. It was a lovely building with a statue of a knight mounted within the center of a fountain before the entrance. We walked inside and admired the lobby, smartly decorated, and sarcastically lamented that Ricky hadn’t put us up here, in luxury, deep inside the city proper. The sole front desk attendant paid no attention to us.

Max had an amazing camera on his phone. —Some kind of Chinese Vivo phone, but it took phenomenal pictures. My Sony Xperia seemed to handle night shots slightly better, or, at least, more natural…less processing. Jack’s Asus phone didn’t keep up as well, but still performed. We kept on down the street the hotel sat along while comparing all our phones’ cameras with different targets: taking pictures of alleyways and buildings and mutually critiquing the various resulting images produced.

It was approximately this time we heard the horn of an e-bike from behind us. As we turned around, the e-bike had already passed alongside us on a side-street and quickly parked before us, nearly blocking our path. The driver was the old Chinese ear-cleaner from the park! She threw her e-bike into park, and in a singular motion, jumped off, going straight for Max. The woman grabbed Max’s arm and pulled him towards the bike. Jack and I could not contain our laughter—we were dying laughing and encouraged the woman to take Max away with her. Max expressed to us a face needing rescue while trying to turn the old woman down, who, eventually, gave up and drove off into the night. The experience was a highlight of the evening. How she found us so far from the park, so buried into the city, was a mystery. Dumb luck or a hunter’s determination for a “foreign boy”.

The avenue here was full of KTVs and we suggested to ourselves that Ricky and his posse should come to us for KTV if that’s what they really desired. The cigarettes were starting to get to me. It felt like I was swallowing the smoke into my stomach. As soon as I’d take a drag I felt as though I wanted to vomit. We took a break outside of a corner store after buying more beer. I tried to heave to alleviate the feeling of nausea in my stomach, but to no avail. I threw my lit cigarette away and we continued onwards.

We found an interesting alleyway with a modern hostel-style hotel at the end and a storefront that was closing shop. We ventured down it.

Despite the darkness we continued further. The alleyway cut across into another side-street that ran between sets of apartment blocks and connected to a larger road on the other side. A red LED sign from a building cast color into the darkness, exposing shadows of other night-crawlers passing us by and staring at us (foreigners) with either confusion or intrigue.

The road down the alleyway opened up onto a sprawling night market full of street vendors of all sorts. The open-air street markets and nightlife in China is really fantastic, something that I haven’t been able to experience much anywhere else. Max continually fell behind purchasing interesting snacks and filming footage for his vlog while Jack and I slowly strolled along.

About the time Jack found a vendor selling mixed drinks, Ricky contacted me informing us that he, his wife, and couple bridesmaids had finished their own respective dinners (very late) and were going to a KTV place near our hotel. At this point, Jack, Max, and I were fully committed to staying in the city—we had previously tried goading Ricky, et al., out to join us, but they had declined, claiming the need for rest and relaxation. This was partly the reason Becca and Elric had decided to retire so early and did not opt to join us: nobody else seemed keen on going out. However, it was Ricky’s wedding night, and we are all good friends. Therefore, we opted to book a ride-share to take us to the KTV to join them.

KTV was fun enough. We drank weak beer and sang until our voices were hoarse. It mostly seemed as though just Max, Jack, Ricky and I were enjoying the singing and drinking the beer. The two bridesmaids kept to themselves while a strange Russian guy named Alex tried to awkwardly enamour himself with one of the bridesmaids I was previously hitting on. To be fair, he was awkwardly trying to enamour himself with everyone.

The KTV place kicked us out at some point; I guess the staff wanted to go home and we were their only customers. Everyone walked across the street back to the hotel. Jack, Max, and I decided we’d go back out and have ourselves a night. Alex wanted to join us, but we ditched him. Jack and I fetched a ride-share to a club while Max went his own way, ostensibly (jokingly?) to find a prostitute, but with the promise that he’d later come find us.

The club was basically closed when Jack and I arrived. We were able to walk inside and check it out, but it was shutting down and too loud to really be chill. Max joined us not twenty minutes later after we’d picked up more beer at a corner market and Jack had picked up a pack of smokes. We were hungry by this point. A few Chinese boys outside the club recommended us a street with restaurants that’d still be open, including places with good shāokǎo. We followed their advice and began walking that direction, arriving sometime around 0400 or so.

Many of the eateries were closed, or closing. One of them opened up for us, but I suppose changed her mind (or, we changed ours) and we kept perusing options. Eventually we were called over to one restaurant and welcomed in. Before we could even decide to stay or move on, a group of Chinese insisted we stay and eat with them, as well as pay for our meals. The group of Chinese in question commanded a presence, and declining would be rude, so we acquiesced.

We drank, ate, smoked, and socialized with them watching the sun rise. We stayed until long past dawn, watching all the other night-owls returning from their nocturnal adventures. A woman in pajamas and slippers arrived and joined us for beer. A group of 3 drunk girls on a single e-bike sped down the street at speed screaming and laughing. One of the Chinese “gangsters” who had hosted us showed us his super-car, which had to have cost at least $150,000. He took great satisfaction in revving the engine and speeding off the same direction as the drunk girls on the e-bike had earlier.

We got a taxi back to the hotel. Somehow we were gifted red roses, which we thought would be funny to leave on the door of the bridesmaids’ hotel room. We took a train back to Shanghai that afternoon.