The best decision I made in Beijing was to stay at the Red Lantern Hostel near Hou Hai. In the evening, I met Gao Chang, an Engineer who had recently arrived in Beijing after quitting his job in Ningbo, Zhejiang. Initially in my broken Chinese and then his much better English, we started talking. He told me he liked an Indian song very much, and wanted to play the video for me. I wondered if I’d know the song. Although the choreography was somewhat Indian, the words were decidedly not. Possibly Thai. I understood as much of it as Gao Chang did.
My disappointment was short-lived. He said he had watched 3 Idiots and most of his friends thought it was hilarious. The conversation then turned to food. I was famished and had a headache. The result of a long day in the beating sun walking through Tiananmen Square and wandering around Forbidden City – so forbidden that 80,000 people are allowed in each day! Many years removed from the unforgiving Indian sun, long days in more forgiving suns now lead to pounding headaches. The Chinese sun, not significantly more forgiving than my native Sun, had inevitably taken its toll. We decided to find a medicine shop and then get some food.
On the way to the medicine shop (yao dian), we passed some rosy-cheeked, mustachioed men grilling kebabs in front of a restaurant. A clean-shaven, younger, balding man in T-Shirt and jeans stood in the doorway of the shop. They did not look Han. From their grills and from the doorway, the men looked up as I passed. Their brains computed my face and skin colour silently, and one of them said:
‘As Salaam Alaikum’
‘Wa-Alaikum Salaam,’ I replied.
We turned the corner and reached the medicine shop. It had just closed its shutters. Gao Chang asked them for some headache medicine.
“Tou Teng,” he said.
The man on the other side of the shutters obliged. He unlocked his cabinet, pulled out a red pack of medicine, handed it to me and I paid him in exact change through the gaps in the shutters. Walking back the same way, we passed the kebab joint and decided to grab a bite there. Gao Chang had already eaten dinner, so he declined.
We started with tea. The place had eight or nine tables and only 2 or 3 were occupied. The man in the T-Shirt and jeans came over and sat down at a table near us. A man in a dark cotton trouser and black coat came into the shop and proceeded to sit down behind us in the manager’s chair. He took out his oversized phone and started typing into it. I turned my attention back Mr. T-Shirt and Jeans and asked him where they were from. Gao Chang was absolutely certain they were from Xinjiang. However, unlike Gao Chang, I’d already been wrong in Xi’An. Some Xi’An-ese Muslims had seemed offended when I asked them if they were from Xinjiang (justifiably so) and had replied that they were ‘Xi-An de Musleen’ – Xi’An-ese Muslims, natives of the land. Abandoning that approach, I had settled on the less presumptuous ‘Where are you from’?
They men were, indeed, from Xinjiang.
They asked where I was from.
‘ Yindu Ren …,’ I started.
I usually add ‘… danshi wo zhu zai mei guo’ (but I live in the US).
In this instance, the man gave me no chance to clarify – ‘Saaah Roookh Khan???’, he asked.
Damn it. The great taste these men from Xinjiang had in food did not extend to Indian films. I wanted to converse with a man who was obliging me and my broken Chinese, but I did not want to lie to him. I told him I thought Aamir Khan was a far better actor, and that he made better films.
‘Aamer Khan?” he asked.
“Is he a Muslim too?”
Yes, I said, all the Khans were Muslim. Apologies to the solitary non-Muslim Khan I have met – I am told there are more (e.g. the rest of his family). My limited Chinese vocabulary proved a blessing, and prevented me from launching into a diatribe about why most Shah Rukh Khan films were terrible. I believe I said something like:
“Aamir Khan makes films for both the brain and heart, but Shah Rukh Khan makes films that assume people who have hearts do not have brains.”
We didn’t get into why I thought Salman Khan films were more acceptable than Shah Rukh Khan*.
Later that night, we were walking next to Hou Hai, and Gao Chang started humming a song that sounded strangely familiar. We kept walking, he spoke of many things. He worked for a car manufacturer in China, but had just quit because he wanted to start writing. He was looking for a job, possibly a copy-writer in advertising (since then, he has landed one!). He had friends in Peking University and was living at the hostel while he figured out more permanent living arrangements.
We passed a place selling Donkey Burger. I asked him if donkey meant stupid in China (it does in India) and why someone would name their restaurant Donkey Burger. With a perplexed look, he explained:
“Well, … they make burgers with ‘Lv Rou’ (lee-oo row – donkey meat).”
It struck me then that I might have eaten donkey meat without realizing it. People had told me the meat on the menu was Lv Rou when I asked what kind of meat it was. Lv Rou sounds a lot like Niu Rou (nyo row – beef) and I had incorrectly attributed it to a difference in dialects. No religion I know of expressly forbids the eating of donkey meat. If I ever start a religion, I’m going to make that the first commandment.
Gao Chang started humming again. This Chinese song sounded eerily familiar. I asked him if he knew any of the words. He said he knew the words were not Chinese, but he didn’t know where the song was from. He started singing. The words flowed phonetically, touched my mind and turned to Hindi. I sighed and started
‘Aankhein khuli ho yah ho bandh,
Deedar unka hota hai.’
Saah Rookh Khan, the blood from the brainless bodies of thousands of boys walking around school looking like buffoons – with their sweaters slung over their shoulders – is still on your hands, but, damn you, you win this one.
*It’s a nuanced argument about setting lower expectations and over-delivering instead of saying one is the best and then never innovating by making the same films over and over again. Salman never promises to be something he isn’t. When you buy a ticket to a Salman Khan film, you are satisfied if he just shows up and says something patently ridiculous every ten minutes. In fact, that might be exactly why you bought the ticket. Paisa vasool. People who grew up with first-day-first-show Salman Khan fans around them have zero difficulty in understanding Donald Trump supporters, but once in a while, he ends up making a crowd-pleasing work of genius like Bajrangi Bhaijaan.
merlinspike 