My life in China, Part 24- Ode to a bike

The mind is a strange thing, and mine loves to become most active precisely when trying to go to sleep. So last night, I lay in bed staring into the dark, trying to think of a good topic for this post. Suddenly, I realized that the last time I rode a bicycle was in China. I know, strange, right? But it got me thinking and opened a floodgate of memories (which, unfortunately, pushed the sandman further away). The bicycle is such a quintessential image and way of life in China, and If you are going to be living there, you had to have one.

In my next post, I will likely go into detail on my struggles learning the Chinese language (this came to mind soon after the bicycle), but let me say that my Chinese was pretty useless when I landed in the country back in 2005. If you’ve read some of the earlier posts in this series, you will know that this caused me a bit of trouble right at the beginning (check out that story here). Until I met my wife and gained a better grasp of the language, this meant to get around Baoding city, I had to walk.

I severely doubt a single taxi driver in all of Baoding spoke more than a “hello” or an “ok.” We did discover a rickshaw puller that spoke fluent English much later, so maybe I am wrong about that, but anyway, getting into a taxi without basic Chinese was risky. Taxis can be rough places (check out this post if you don’t believe me), so I rarely took them unless I was with someone who could give directions if needed, or in the more likely case, could argue. That means I had to walk and walk a lot. In time, I was able to get out ‘Hebei Daxue’ (Hebei University) to get back home and a ‘duoshao qian’ (how much) to negotiate a fee for a rickshaw, but going anywhere from campus required that I huff it.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t mind. There is no better way to get to know a city than exploring it on foot, and it is a mythos my wife and I continue to adhere to in our international travels. You will miss so much if you zoom by in a car, taxi, or bus. What could be more exciting than finding some pedestrian alley in an ancient city like Rome or Budapest and stepping into a little mom-and-pop bakery that only the locals frequent? We had the best panini I’ve ever tasted in Tivoli doing just that. In China, it wasn’t always that glamorous. Much of this exploration at the time was an effort to find new pirated DVD shops. Being from the US, the prospect of hoarding as many movies as you could for $1 a pop was just too tempting, and I amassed hundreds by the time I left. They’re all in one of two places now. Either a box in my basement collecting dust or in a cupboard at my in-law’s house in China. But, I had my fair share of glamorous adventures in Baoding too.

Gosh, I walked that city so much that I knew it better than the town I grew up in, or Boston, a city where I’ve lived near for the last 15 years. Up until the pandemic, I could probably say the same for my current neighborhood, but that has, of course, changed, and we have been down every road possible in our nightly walks. In Baoding, too, I explored every street, alley, path, and shop for a 10-mile radius around campus. I knew the restaurants, the stores, the parks, the wet markets, the shortcuts, everything. Every stroll was an adventure. You never knew what would be around the next corner, and it was always changing as the city grew. One day I turned one of these corners and discovered an entire street just lined with bicycle vendors.

China is a bit strange in this regard. There is a tendency to clump like stores together. In Baoding, some streets had nothing but clothing stores, and others lined with little more than restaurants. Some peddled jewelry, others only antiques (like where a taxi almost hit my wife), and even one that specialized in plumbing supplies. The strangest was perhaps an old thoroughfare near a Buddhist temple that harbored establishments full of incense and fake paper money you could burn in offerings to the dead. This segregation made for fierce competition, and haggling battles would erupt all around, but I guess if you needed something like a bicycle, you knew precisely where to go to find one. Anyway, just about every single store, literally hundreds of them, sold bikes on this street in all shapes, sizes, and colors.

At this point, I had met my future wife and started working some part-time jobs, which I would often travel to alone. The kindergarten (story here), in particular, was a bit of a hike. So for 150 RMB, I picked up a brand new bike, my first new bicycle since I was 13. It was nothing fancy, just a single gear with a comfortable seat, a bell, and a bench on the back for passengers to sit sidesaddle. I loved that bike, and looking back, it marked a crucial moment. Until that point, I was a tourist on an extended trip, but purchasing this large item, something I could not bring back to the states, was a statement to myself that this city would be home for a while.

I hopped on that wide seat with my girl taking up position on the back, kicked up the kickstand, and twinkled the bell as if I was revving a Harley. After a few wobbly practice runs, we joined the lazy flow of the city. In hindsight, we were taking our lives into our own hands. No helmets, treacherous traffic, and just a sea of people, but then, we didn’t care. With the wind in our hair and laughter booming, we zigzagged between those that had long since forgotten the joy of flight—just the two of us with an endless road ahead.

It wasn’t all rosy. In one particular jaunt of recklessness, my hat flew from my head- yes, we were really moving. Anyway, my wife tried to grab it and fell from the back, scraping her knee. It was a bad scrap. Luckily we were close to campus and its little clinic, so I helped her hobble to get it cleaned and disinfected. As I’ve said, Baoding was a dirty city, and even though the nurse doused the wound in Crystal Violet disinfectant, it still got infected. Without any of the gory details, it left a noticeable scar on my wife’s knee, one that she still blames me for to this day. My excuse is that a scraped knee is just part of bike ownership, but it doesn’t get me very far. My wife is one of the few Chinese that doesn’t know how to ride a bike, so she never had that childhood experience. Her hometown is quite hilly, so bike riding is just not a very useful skill there. That just goes to show you there are always exceptions to stereotypes.

The day we said goodbye to that bike was a sad day. We sold it for 175 RMB to another foreign teacher new off the boat, knowing that it would have adventures still. We made a decent profit on that bike even after using it for almost two years. Still, it marked the end of an era. As we set off on the next step in our life journey, I remember looking back at it sitting in its little bike shed, knowing with a bit of sadness that I would never see that two-wheeled friend again.

I haven’t ridden or owned a bicycle since (if you don’t count our dreaded stationary bike, god, I hate that thing). But, every once in a while, I get an itch. I find myself craving the feel of the wind through my hair as I zoom to some new adventure. I hope those days aren’t gone because they are some of my most special memories, ones that bring a smile to my face still. A bike might be a silly or mundane thing to write a blog post about, but sometimes memories attach to strange things, and if you don’t dust them off and take them for a ride every once and a while, you risk losing them forever.

Cheers!