I've run into some interesting misfortune while adapting to life in Shanghai. Most of my romps with bad luck have entailed losing things. Important things. Not just little things (though I've certainly left my share of groceries in various store aisles while shopping), but rather important ones as well. I don't know what it is about living in a foreign country that makes one especially careless (or perhaps the degree of shit into which one stumbles with every misfortune makes every ordinary mistake seem that much greater). Perhaps it's the air of invincibility that the well-funded American fellowship student carries in her subconscious that makes it somehow less dangerous to lose precious objects. The rewarding part of all my missteps is that for every example I have of how cruel both chance and humanity can be, particularly in a huge developing city like Shanghai, my faith in mankind is renewed by the people who have come to my aid.

Misfortune #1: Disappearing bike trick
Bad luck first greeted me upon my return from hanging out in Shanghai's commercial district, Nanjing Lu at nightfall. I was on my way to meet a friend at the campus of my university. As familiarizing oneself with the intricacies of the Shanghai public bus system takes about a lifetime, I ended up getting off the bus about a 15-minute walk from campus. As I walked home, my legs beginning to ache slightly from all the walking I had done that day, my mind brushed upon a longing for my bicycle and the pleasantness of not having to take the bus everywhere. Lately, I've often gotten the odd sensation of levity while riding, of a sort of liberation because I have a vehicle that is both much faster and more efficient than walking and much easier to maneuver than a car.

I stopped by a bicycle supply store and bought a bell for my bike, which was, I assumed, waiting for me at the gate of Fudan University, where I had left it. Though this may just be my hindsight, I seem to remember thinking how ironic it would be if my bike were stolen that night. And alas, as I approached the now-deserted bike parking area in front of the campus bookstore, which I had left only four hours ago, I was chilled by the discovery that my premonition had been right. My bicycle, a beautiful maroon and silver looker, was nowhere to be found. In a daze, I told the guard at the gate that my bike was gone. "Was it a new bike? Was it eye-catching?" he asked. If it was, then there was a good chance it was stolen.

I had known I was doing something wrong when I parked it carelessly at the bus stop instead within the campus gates that afternoon when I set off to meet the artist. Somehow, the feeling of invincibility that bicycle riding gave me carried over to my careless handling of it while parking. Now, looking at the near empty sidewalk, it seemed obvious how unwise it had been to park there. In the afternoon, the front of the bookstore I parked in front of was teeming with bicycles and mine was just one of many. But after closing time, the sidewalk must have cleared considerably, leaving only my very new and very license-plate-less bike gleaming in the dusk in a high-traffic area. Any moderately intelligent thief would have seen the opportunity instantly.

On my way home, I called Zhang Li Ming, the friend whom I had arranged to meet and told him in my frazzled state that I had been delayed because my bike had been stolen (actually, I was running late anyway, but this provided a convenient excuse). He said he would come and pick me up from my house. So I rushed home, wolfed down some supper, mulled over my misfortune, and tried to regain composure after the adenaline rush. I then felt surprisingy calm; under comparable circumstances in America, I'd be freaking out and banging my head against the wall, but for some reason, the fact that I am in China raises my chaos threshold, and I am better able to let go of those problems that are outside my locus of control. My last two times in China taught me that I can never prepare for what will happen in the future because some crazy and/or unfortunate unforseen circumstance is bound to tumble your way sooner or later.

I then met up with Zhang Li Ming at the front entrance to my housing complex (he was kind enough to pick me up on his bike) and listened to him ramble and wax philosophical about Chinese culture, filial piety (which he illustrated with a 10 minute explanation of a famous Tang Dynasty tale which involved the beheading and cooking of a mythological figure), and how I should buy a really shitty bike the second time around to make sure it wouldn't be stolen. He volunteered to take me to the Shanghai Railway Station, where used and stolen bikes were hawked from dark alleyways.

Another friend of mine, Xiao Ming, met up with me and Zhang later that night. He had been the one who convinced me to take the bus to the park instead of my bicycle because it would be much easier and faster. After looking around for about twenty minutes, the three of us were convinced of the hopelessness of the situation. Xiao Ming was still cheerful though. He reminded me that this happens to just about everyone in China. He's had his bike stolen several times, he noted almost proudly.

I feel that I've experienced something that most Chinese experience at least once, and it makes me feel like I've really managed to assimilate into this society. Having a bike stolen in the spectrum of bad things that can happen to foreigners is preferable to being swindled by a cab driver, mugged, or being the victim of fraud--those experiences happen because one is foreign, while having a bike stolen is, well, extremely Chinese.

Misfortune #2: Locked out

The next afternoon, my friend Yipin, a hairdresser at a local salon, agreed to take me to the local supermarket to purchase a new bicycle. (Despite Zhang's suggestion, I decided not to "go native" and, like a good little foreigner, went to a well-lit and overpriced supermarket instead.) Funny, because exactly 3 weeks ago, he brought me to the same supermarket to purchase my first bike. I rode on the back of Zhang's bicycle and he took me to the supermarket. We looked around for a while and then settled on a blue and silver "lady's bike" (smaller size). This model had actually caught his eye during our first bike buying trip, but I had picked another bike. "Then having my bike stolen was fate," I said, since I ended up purchasing the bike we had overlooked the first time. He was a great help in going through the red tape of large purchases at the supermarket, which involves getting your receipt stamped with some meaningless stamps.

We hung out the rest of the night, and he kept commenting proudly that he thought my bike suited me well and looked nice. He also accompanied me to buy a basket and a second lock (for extra safety). We then spent a night on the town Shanghai style, sampling a bit of the terribly dull and overpriced youth culture the city affords with movie-watching at an overcrowded internet cafe. The bike ride home was eventful. He thought he was following me and I thought I was following him down the dark winding streets behind the Wujiaochang commercial district, which took us several sprawling Shanghai blocks in the wrong direction. When we finally reached my door, I was ready to call it a night and lock up my bike when suddenly, Yipin realized that he didn't have the keys to the bike lock. He searched his pockets and said that he had left the keys in the lock, as he usually did when he went somewhere, since you generally only had to remove the keys when you parked the bike. Except there was a slight problem this time, because the keys had fallen out. The more unfortunate aspect was that upon Zhang's suggestion, I had strung his lock key onto my house keys. So on our way back, which covered about half a mile of asphault in our confusion, all the keys had tumbled out of the lock. "I was feeling happy, and didn't pay attention to the keys," he explained in his nervous, stuttering boyish voice. I was again in a daze. How could I be this unlucky? He blamed the cold weather, since he said in his haste to zip up his coat he had forgotten to take the keys out. It was almost amusing. He took me on Zhang's bike to the guard at the front gate. The guard gave us the phone number of a local locksmith. I tried calling him on my cell phone, and of course I had run out of minutes. So we went next door to use the public telephone. Yipin tried to describe the problem, but apparently the locksmith had trouble understanding him through his thick Anhui accent and slight stutter. I didn't do a much better job of communicating, but at least I could describe for him what my door looked like. As I waited for the locksmith, Yipin went back to the internet bar to look for my keys. But, as with the bike, the situation was hopeless; the keys and my bike had both been lost in the black hole that is urban China. My bad luck seemed to have reached astronomical proportions. That might just be my fatalism gnawing at me, I could not remember a time when so much had gone wrong within the span of two days.

Misfortune #3: D'oh!

The last god-awful yet oddly satisfying event in my life was the loss of my wallet about two weeks later. I was riding down Handan Road one rainy day to check out some history classes on campus. It was the coldest day of the year so far, a day that was clearly telling me in every possible way to stay indoors. But I went out anyway and rode down the muddy and congested bicycle lane alongside pedestrians and the edge of a huge construction zone, my hands numb and my body covered by a down coat and a cumbersome bicyclist's vinyl poncho. I was so bogged down by clothing and inclement weather that I did notice as my wallet, which was attached to my keys slipped out of my shallow coat pocket. And in a brilliant example of that peculiarly Chinese brand of irony, the wallet had been purchased after much bargaining at a market because I thought it would be more convenient to keep my money and my keys in the same place. I probably wouldn't have kept the wallet in my front pocket were it not for the "convenience" of having my keys at hand once I got off my bike. Then again, the wallet was designed without a place to store credit cards, so at least I did not lose those.

I realized what had happened about five minutes after the fact, which was ample time for some passerby to pick up my wallet and marvel at his fabulous luck. I gave up searching this time rather quickly, having become accustomed to such unfortunate occurrences.

This time, I didn't have to call a locksmith. My friend Xiao Ming came to the rescue by climbing through my second-storey window and opening my apartment from the inside. Back in his home village during his boyhood, he climbed trees in neighboring orchards to steal fruit, so he was quite an apt scaler of the relatively smooth walls of my apartment unit. Once again, a good friend helped ease the sting of my careless mistake.

Misfortune #4: Lost civilization

Oh, but there's more. In my haste to get back the cash I had lost, I went to the nearest ATM, took out about US $150, and left before the Bank of China automatic teller, which is a bit slower than its American counterpart, spit my card back out at me. Two days later, I discovered my bank card was gone and, numbly, wondered to myself who was punishing me and why.

I went to the Bank of China branch, expecting some indolent bank employee to tell me in Chinese that it was not their problem and shake his head at the silly foreigner on the other side of the musty service window. But instead, in a striking example of civilization where you least expect to find it, the lady at the window took out a bundle of found bank cards and found mine. Somehow, the person behind me in line for the ATM happened to be moral enough to bring my card to the service counter after I left.

Misfortune #4: The Big One
The climax of my ever-worsening bad luck occurred on Huai Hai Zhong Road in downtown Shanghai. I was walking to the site of an interview I was conducting as part of a research project for the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. I and another researcher spent the afternoon outside, trying to locate an office building on a busy street. It didn't occur to me what an easy target we were--two young girls wearing fairly nice clothing and carrying large, obvious bags down a street packed with streaming, anonymous crowds. That evening at the subway station, as we headed back from the interview, I realized at the ticket vending machine my wallet was gone. In disbelief, I insisted that I must have carelessly left it somewhere. We retraced our steps back to the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, the office building where we conducted the interviews, and finally, the restaurant we had eaten at, a sweaty Sichuan canteen with formica tables, to ask in futility if they had seen my wallet. The party that had sat at our table after we left was already gone, and if my wallet had been left there, it was now replaced by scraps of refuse and used napkins. "The street outside is full of little boy pickpockets from Xinjiang Province," the waitresses told us. They were certain that my bag had been picked. This time, I had lost all my credit cards along with some cash. (I've realized tend to lose things in pairs. It was oh-so-ironic in that Chinese sort of way that in this instance, my keys were on a separate keychain this time.)

My co-researcher without a second thought handed me 100 RMB for the cab ride home, and I spent the rest of the evening freezing my credit cards and wondering what the litle boy from Xinjiang was spending my money on, whether he was amused by the various English-language ID cards and other meaningless documentation in my wallet. The only thing that really had worth in that wallet to the thief was the cash. And the more I think about it, even for me, there was nothing in the wallet that was irreplaceable. Had I lost my voice recorder with all my interviews on it, or my notebook, I very likely would have burst into tears in the middle of the dank, brisk Shanghai street. But just like you don't realize how valuable things are until you lose them, you also don't realize how worthless things are until they are taken from you.

So there are positive elements in all of this misfortune. For starters, the very fact that my sanity was not among the items lost revealed a resilience that surprised even me, who usually overestimates my toughness. Moreover, I realized what good and resourceful people I have befriended during my time here in China. In a foreign country, and perhaps anywhere, what matters more than language skills or money is a network of people you can rely on. I've never been very good at displaying my vulnerabilities, and that aspect of my personality was partly what drove me to China all by myself. These mishaps laid bare my weaknesses as an individual, but also proved that there are people around me worth trusting. Maybe not all 1.2 billion, but at least a few.

Weird. China seems to be turning me into an optimist by default.

2004 1-42 Online