THE GATES OF BEIJING (7)
In which Jim gets set up on a dodgy blind date at a disreputable hotel no one's ever heard of. Suspecting a trap, he decides to hop on his bike and check out the joint first.
*SHADY HOTEL
The landline in the lobby, a weak link if there ever was one, remained, despite the admonitions of the dorm staff, my hotline to Huamei. It was monitored on both ends, but it was fairly convenient and a good deal faster than dropping notes in the mail. The clunky old phone sat on the security desk in the Foreign Expert’s Reception Hall where there were perky young attendants, crusty old minders, dour floor moppers and dust sweepers drifting in and out of auditory range. Between the slapdash, sleepy campus switchboard on my end and the busy governmental switchboard on hers, there was a lot of room for listening in.
“Wei, wei, wei?” I answered, scanning the lobby for snoops, cradling the scuffed plastic receiver close to my ear.
“Why do you answer in Chinese?”
“Because you never know who’s calling.”
“It’s me!”
“Yeah. But I didn’t know that till I knew that.”
“You don’t know anything.”
When Huamei rang, which was not often, she could be quite short with me, which is to say, even more abrupt and brusque than usual, and getting shorted by her tended to make me bristle, bristle to the point of provocation.
Given that she was giving me the rush, I went out of my way to slow her down. Anything to introduce a note of interpersonal warmth to the cold proceedings.
“Stop jo-king.”
“Who’s Joe King? And why should I stop him?”
An exasperated sigh followed by a frosty silence. Her phone etiquette was falling flat.
“Wei?”
“Stop it! Or I will hang the phone!”
“Oh. Poor phone. What’d the phone do to deserve that?”
“Hang on the phone.”
“Like you keep me hanging on?”
“Grrr. Listen to me.”
“I’m all ears.”
“Someone will meet you.”
“Who?”
“You don’t know.”
She could be cryptic, even in person, but there were times she left so much out of the message I’d wager even the NSA couldn’t crack it.
“Someone? Some, ah, a stranger?
“Are you interesting?
“Yes. I’d like to think so.”
“Good.”
“But you mean ‘interested,’ right?”
The vacant crackle of static came to the fore. I could almost picture the peeved, slightly pained look on her delicate face. She hated being corrected much more than she minded being wrong.
“Are you still there?”
“I make a date for you?”
“A date? Sure. Okay.”
“Sha, she…she is my friend.”
“Oh, sweet. Book me right away.”
“Saturday. You are free?”
“A friend of yours is a friend of mine.”
She didn’t give me much to go on, but I was willing to be strung along. With her, you never knew. What more did I need to know?
“Tush?”
The phone got so quiet I could hear the ambient sound of the room she was calling from. No voices or anything but a low mechanical hum. It sounded like there was a fan on. The line crackled sharply for a few seconds.
Click, click!
I’d been disconnected with prejudice.
The click was so loud the sleepy white-shirted attendant slouched over the desk gave me a sidelong look. The person standing behind me waiting to use the phone heard it too.
The shift from conversation to no conversation was so abrupt, I found myself addressing the dial tone, as if to wrap it up, to end it on a good note.
“Okay, great talking to you, my good friend,” I announced for dramatic effect as the floor sweeper brushed by. “Thank you, thank you, for the ah, business introduction. Don’t mention it. See you soon. Bye!”
Huamei had been short with me, but she probably had her reasons. I shouldn’t have invoked the naughty ol’ nickname, but I was pretty sure it was a word totally opaque to the usual campus snoops, and a tough nut to crack for any state linguist listening in.
‘Tush’ was one of those obscure Yiddish-derived words I picked up as a kid in Queens. A pet word between us, I had good reason to doubt it was any Chinese dictionary.
So. The old Tush, setting me up on a date?
Sweet.
It would be a first of sorts. Most of the people my gal pal put me in touch with were businessmen of the transactional, mutual back-scratching variety, though in a few cases, her husband being a prominent case in point, it might be a member of the party elite.
This time, though, it sounded like she was setting me up for something rather more, shall we say, down-to-earth and interpersonal? I couldn’t fathom it exactly, but I knew for a fact several of her girlfriends were unattached. Huamei wasn’t exactly the matchmaking type, she liked to have what little of me she had to herself, but in her less possessive moments, she hinted about my need to find a nice girl and settle down.
A date, a date, a date. My imagination got the better of me as I climbed up the stairs back to my room.
A cute overseas returnee seeking work-life balance? Or maybe a gallant youth league gal, still young at heart, who had a thing for foreigners? Perhaps a modest, blushing Zhongnanhai maid-in-waiting? Or a hot high society housewife looking for something cool and clandestine on the side?
For the next week I labored under the delusional misapprehension my good ol’ gal was setting me up for something sweet, real sweet. I had just blithely assumed—and this reveals something about the nature of my mindset at a time when there was this big empty hole in the middle of my romantic life—that enticing female company was at the heart of her offer.
A terse note arrived in the mail confirming the “date.”
Saturday 3 PM Formosa Hotel.
Formosa Hotel? The name alone piqued my interest, because it was the rare hotel I had never heard of, and I prided myself on knowing all the good hotels in Beijing.
Not having much of a social life ever since Reiko went back to Japan, other than to kick up dust in the hutong and drink away the world’s sorrows with Kirk on the watchtower, I decided to hop on my bike and check out the mystery hotel to better prep for the upcoming booking.
Scope it out, case the joint, take a little familiarization tour.
The first thing I discovered about the Formosa was nobody seemed to know where it was. It was too new to be on my old map, and I wasn’t the first person to confuse it with the Taiwan Hotel, which was totally on the other side of town.
The great expectations I had been harboring for the tryst dimmed with every last person I had to ask, every extra kilometer I had to pedal. I peddled hard the whole way there, all in the hopes I could make the place work for me when Saturday, the day of the big juicy date, finally rolled around.
The Formosa was way beyond the familiar precincts of the city, in fact so far away from the city center it fell into a liminal zone where buildings gave way to cultivated fields, where the smell of truck exhaust was cut with the stench of fertilizer.
Was my impish ol’ gal sending me off on some kind of wild goose chase or what?
The Formosa Hotel was not only not situated in a fashionable district but was in the fashion-free zone of a not-so-good district. Forlorn in its isolation, it was wedged between a ramshackle side street where people still cooked over smoky coal fires in front of shanty shacks and a formidable barbed-wired, steep-walled enclave, apparently a Public Security encampment. And then there were the fields redolent of manure, human manure, just around the corner.
The dusty, shabby exterior of the hard-to-find hotel did not so much disappoint as confuse. The building was more slapdash than sturdy, a five-story edifice finished with cheap-looking chrome and tinted glass. It was a knockoff of a knockoff of a knockoff, inspired at several removes by some iconic hotel property it ended up bearing little resemblance to.
No cars or taxis in sight. The small parking lot was cluttered with bicycles carelessly strewn about. Given the lousy location, I was surprised to see a China Travel tourist bus parked out front. What tourist in their right mind would want to stay in a dump like this? Only tourists who didn’t read the fine print, or tourists who had no choice in the choice of hotel they were herded to, like first time visitors arriving on a steeply discounted, cut-rate package tour, that’s who.
The property boasted three red stars, prominently displayed above the entrance, three stars being the bottom bar for accepting tourist greenbacks, and it wore its three stars proudly. There were grungy, flea-ridden one-star and two-star hotels dotted around town offering rooms at cut rate prices, but they didn’t cut it as state-approved flophouses for foreigners. This was partly for reasons of pride—China’s officialdom didn’t want visitors to see the unsanitary, unsavory side of things—but also because the “honored guests” could better be fleeced by forcing them to frequent the more “honorable” establishments.
The Formosa was no great shakes to look at, inside or out, but appearances can be deceiving, all the more so when they are intended to be. My original plan was just to poke my head in the door, look around the lobby and leave, but the minute I stepped inside, there was something in the air, something indefinable drew me further in. No one greeted me, it wasn’t that kind of hotel, and the laid-back clerks at the check-in counter could hardly be bothered to lift their sleepy heads to register my presence. In fact, if anything, the indolent, indifferent staff went out of their way not to look.
I cut across the lobby, coming upon what I took to be a café, judging from the collection of small round tables with laminated menus mounted on small plastic stands. The café alcove was empty and unlit, and the person who was presumably the service person appeared to be napping contentedly. I sat myself, taking a seat to rest my tired legs. The place was clearly a subpar property. What was Huamei thinking?
The entrance lobby was drab, the ersatz atrium drafty. The lights were off, the limited natural illumination muted by the residue of dust on the skylight. My chair was the wrong height for the table, which was stained and sticky. In a city where five-star hotels were getting eclipsed by so-called six-star hotels, this dive wasn’t anything to write home about. It was a legal hostel that met the minimum statutory requirements for hostelry, and from the looks of it, just barely.
Still, the place wasn’t a total bust. Part of what made the lobby intriguing was the utter absence of the usual hotel lobby habitué.
No jaded expatriate traders, no pot-bellied bon vivants, no old party hacks reading People’s Daily, no businessmen with barcode hair, no plainclothes spies pretending not to be spies. Nor were there any foreign tourists stumbling about, though I presumed they would tumble in by the busload if they came at all. This was a hotel unlike any other I had been to in Beijing, and I’d been to too many of them.
It was all but deserted, yet it oozed of intrigue, and not just any intrigue, but hormonal intrigue. Despite the subdued, uninspired design, there was a steady trickle of local clientele, most of them nice-looking, almost all of them young. Now and then, nervous couples could be seen shuffling across the shadowy lobby in breathless anticipation.
Over the course of a tepid cup of coffee and a tepid refill, I witnessed an unbroken flow of fresh-faced youth with shy smiles going about the tentative and awkward business of checking in and checking out, as if for the very first time.
For some of them, it probably was the very first time.
I was sitting there sipping my second cup of murky mud brew, pausing now and then to pick rogue coffee grounds from my teeth—at least it wasn’t instant—when a busload of foreign tourists came pouring in, all sweaty and smelly, looking unkempt, ill-at-ease and utterly lost.
The fresh-off-the-jet budget travelers had just been disgorged from a bus idling noisily by the front door. Their deep-set eyes and rounded bodies had the startled look of Caucasians who had never seen so many Chinese people before, and the lobby wasn’t even crowded. They dressed like they were still in Europe, they talked like they were still there, too. Bulgarian? Hungarian? Polish?
They lined up for their room keys with stoic determination; it was as if they were waiting on a bread line back in the Eastern Bloc. Key cards in hand, ratty travel bags in tow, they trudge wearily to the elevator, seeking relief from jet lag. The promise of working showers and reasonably clean sheets is not a trivial one after a long haul across the Eurasian continent.
And then it got magical again. Chinese students, and young people in general, were conspicuous by their absence from Beijing’s better hotels. I wasn’t used to seeing them converge on such a habitat. Every good hotel had its guards, security goons and righteous gatekeepers who were as quick to turn away a young couple in love as to turn a blind eye towards a drunken party member with a sultry painted woman in tow.
But this place felt unguarded. And while it was a long ways away from the main tourist attractions of Beijing, except perhaps the Summer Palace, it wasn’t far from the edge of the congested university district, and therein lay a relatively untapped market. Young people looking to do the kind of things young people like to do. Shacking up could get you in trouble on campus, not that sex-segregated dorms with bunks sleeping eight to a room provided much opportunity.
I scanned the lobby, unable to identify a single authority figure. Sure, there was the guy dressed like a bell-hop leaning against the luggage trolley, and a yawning shopkeeper slumped over the display case of a lobby shop no one deigned to enter. There were two harried workers on their hands and knees polishing the marble floor and two or three lackadaisical uniformed clerks lounging behind the check-in counter.
No one seemed to be in charge, which for certain people in certain situations is a very good thing.
The flow of couples in and out, who in keeping with the unwritten rules of the joint did nothing to bring attention to themselves, were as quick to exit the lobby as enter it.
People look good when they are happy, and at the risk of reading too much into the lip-biting enthusiasm beneath alert rosy-cheeked faces, there were a lot of happy people passing through. The reigning apparel was down-market, the couples wore the kind of plain outfits my students, most of whom were on tight budgets, might wear when shopping or going to the movies. The guests could be seen nervously fidgeting with keys and impatiently pressing elevator buttons before disappearing into bliss upstairs. They didn’t dress to impress and I now knew why.
What was the point of dressing up when the whole point of being on the premises was to remove one’s clothing?
The unseen intimacies taking place under the Formosa’s façade cast a languorous mood over the premises. The secret juice wasn’t in the layout, and it certainly wasn’t in the dinky décor, it was the clientele, the comers and goers. The lobby was little more than a public passageway through which sex-stressed guests had to pass in order to take the elevator to the delights of a private room upstairs. Judging from the empty shop and the half-shut café, your average guest had little desire to linger in the lobby once the room key had been procured and the room bill squared away.
The clientele, male and female in almost even proportion, clung close and kept to themselves as they crossed the shiny lobby floor. Some of them slyly pretended to be flying solo, only to excitedly reunite at the elevator.
Nervous minds racing ahead of touch-starved bodies, and who could blame them?
The coffee was so bad it hardly merited another refill, but I sat there spellbound, cup after cup. I began to recognize people checking out who, only an hour or so earlier, I had seen checking in.
What kind of naughty nonsense was my old gal getting me into? What sneaky kink was her devious mind not capable of?
By the time I stood up to leave, head abuzz from too much ersatz brew, I knew all I needed to know. It was a short-stay hotel, what enterprising hoteliers in Japan dubbed a “love hotel.” Only this being China, it was thinly disguised as a no-frills hotel for low-end foreign tourists.
The Formosa skirted the edge of respectability in terms of socialist rectitude, but as best I could tell, it wasn’t about offering sex for sale. The tawdry, gaudily-clad prostitutes who graced the lobbies of the better hotels—hotels run by the military, public security and other state entities—were nowhere evident.
Instead, it was fresh-faced couples blushing on the way in, flush-faced couples on the way out.
What not to like about it?
I slapped down a few bills for the lousy brew and went out to retrieve my bike. The long haul back to campus gave me ample time to ponder the set-up. It surprised me so socially prominent a woman as Huamei would deign to arrange a rendezvous for me in so unseemly a place, but she was always surprising me.
And as time went by, I came to realize the Formosa was perhaps the most honorable of all the crooked businesses Huamei, her husband and all their high-flying, high-end friends were mixed up in.
A safe haven, a haven for free sex, the Formosa produced a cleaner and more honest income stream than the average avaricious investment fund, faux pharmaceutical line, crooked property development, or perilous coal excavation.
The Formosa was not in line with the latest forward-looking Five-Year plan for modern socialist construction, rather it was built on ever-green capitalist greed, gently fleecing people in lust and love.
And I was no more immune to its seditious charm than anyone else.