Emerging from the Oulu
Guangchang Starbucks. Sailing after a
remarkable discussion, I was fiddling with my keys beneath an audacious blue
sky. Something was wrong. I sensed that there was something wrong
before I’d taken off my headphones and noticed the faint yelling. I walked my bike over in the direction, which
I was heading in anyway. Two young men
were yelling at each other. Traffic had stopped and people were beginning to gather.
One young guy with glasses was yelling at another man, in a
white shirt saying he had a problem. The
man in the white shirt walked away two times and each time he’d get to a
certain distance, he’d stop and turn and march back, asking: “who has a
problem?” The be-speckled gent insisted once again that it was the man in the white shirt who had a problem. Whenever they’d get close friends of the man
with glasses would make to hold him back.
At least no one had pulled a tire iron.
Traffic was now stopped for two hundred yards in either
direction because of these young fools.
People were beginning to yell from their cars, and ride their horns. I found myself pedalling slowly to have a look
at them both as I passed. No shortage of
cutting things one might yell out, were bubbling up in mind. But this had nothing, whatsoever to do with
me.
In New York, or at least the New York I knew, loud arguments
in the street, were never something to sit around and stare at. The chance that someone might pull a gun and
start firing wildly was always too great. In
China people are accustomed seeing street arguments as street theatre.
Leaving I noted that the mood had infected me. I began imagining the guy in the white shirt
speeding off and, finding me in the road, riding his horn at me. I could then flip him the bird, or slow down deliberately. If he had touched me with his car I could leap
off and throw the bike frame at his window.
These images all passed in my mind.
I rode on. No one beeped at
me. And I never saw the man in the
glasses or the man in the white shirt again.
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