Whiffing and the Zen of Hackey Sacking

I arrived about 2 hours later in the port city of Guangzhou (the current name of Canton as in "Cantonese"), set at the mouth of the Pearl River, at the scene of an argument. I don't know what was being said. I have no idea what they were arguing about. But all of a sudden the driver blew up at the two "bus stewardesses" over something or other, and next thing you know we're pulling off the highway much in the vein of kids driving their parents over the edge (think "one more word out of your mouth and..THAT'S-IT-I'M-PULLING-THIS-DAMN-CAR-OVER" kind of scene), and all the Chinese are hopping out the side with a shake of their head and a clear air of "I hope they cut this crap out someday" with absolutely no expectation that such will ever occur.

This, of course, left me, a baffled looking Indian guy, and a pacifist Chinese freshman-in-college aged youth sharing our bewilderment at what was going on before. Strike that. The Chinese kid seemed to have a pretty good idea of what was going on and was keeping an amazingly neutral face that really was concealing the fringes of laughter, or so I saw when after a particular putrescent sounding verbal barrage rang off and he was looking at me to wonder if I found that as funny as him.

(I probably would have, but my Cantonese sucks. I could tell by how hard he was holding back losing himself in laughter that it MUST have been pretty damn funny. One of the girls, clearly the object of the tirade, even turned her face and concealed a smirk, and he was yelling at her!)

"You uh.. You look confused."

"Yes, er.. A bit. Is this Guangzhou?"

"Of course," he snappily replied. A split second later it occurred to him that it wasn't very 'of course' to me if I were asking, and so he looked for a meaning in the question other than testing him on the obvious. "Oh.. Uh, this is not Guangzhou you need. Uh, hold on."

He tried valiantly for the next few minutes to hail one of the attendants while avoiding stepping into the middle of a hot tantrum before realizing that this probably wasn't going to work. It was about then that I stepped in.

"Let me," deciding to borrow for once all the negative energy pointed at my home stereotype, "I'm an American."

He nodded almost too quickly, understanding the intent without the sarcasm all too well. Well enough, I suppose it's what I wanted for this situation anyway, so it served to fuel my abrasiveness. How's that for the oracle making true the fate?

I stepped about 60% of the way directly into the line of fire. "Excuse me," I declared with perhaps too much gusto, "is this Guangzhou?"

It had more or less the desired effect. Hey, I didn't make the world...

"Huh," the derailed but irate driver mumbled after a moment of stunned silence.

"Er.. Li go hai m'hai Guangzhou ah? Di si, hai bhin do ah?"

"Oh. That way," and pointed in the general direction of the taxi.

"Thanks er.. m'goy." Exit Guy, stage left.

The kid nodded to me as I passed his seat, clearly happy for my part in the little charade. The actors resumed their debate, though much less heated now that the passengers were all gone and the driver had made it clear that he wasn't going a single kilometer/meter/centimeter (I don't know how they reckon these things around here) further. He also helpfully added that there were a lot of other people with my plight and that the bus company had arranged another shuttle to the main station.

When we got off the bus, he showed me over to a queue with just about none of the original passengers from my bus in it, then bid me farewell. I thanked him in English, sparing him the trouble of hearing me debate whether what he did for me was a service ("m'goy") or more of a gift ("daw-shay"). I split the difference and shouted out "shay-shay" (the Mandarin single form) at his back, feeling somehow that the English was inadequate. He waved before disappearing into some nearby unmarked building. Hey, maybe the driver was his father...

I did a lap with the other passengers who ostensibly knew where they were going around the next bus. In the end, we ended up right back where we started. The doors opened up, and the strange lap was seemingly wiped from the collective memory of humanity. The bus sped away to I-haven't-the-faintest-idea-where, and we were in Guangzhou a-bit-more proper.

I hailed a cab, simply wanting to find my hostel as quickly as possible and increase my horizontality as fast as I could manage. After putting the cab driver on the phone with the hotel (it's just easier when you have no idea) and him recovering from some shock or other on the phone, we left the ultimate bus station.

And basically went on a big u turn circle which had the net effect of putting us on the other side of the street.

In retrospect, I probably should have noticed that the ultimate bus station happened to be adjacent to the very large Guangzhou Main Rail Station. Had I noticed that, I might possibly have combined it with the key piece of information that the hostel I had chosen was in the "Train Station Area" portion of my travel guide, and while we're on this hypothetical venture, have then looked at the handy little Guangzhou map included in the chapter clearly indicating that the hostel in question was basically on the other side of the street from the station.

BUT, things as they were, I put none of this together. And had a terrific time trying to explain this to a taxi driver with an amused look on his face in Cantonese, while again wrestling with the correct version of "Thank you" to append to the verbal butchery.

I did, however, manage to pass out fairly abruptly after a brief attempt to rally and see the city which turned more into a brief recon of a few of the surrounding blocks.

Today passed with quite a lot less whiffing. I picked a spot pretty much at random on the subway near what I roughly guessed as a built up part of the city. After a couple of hours of that, I jumped back on the metro to Huangsha and made my way over to Shamian Island, a former enclave of the Dutch, English, and just about all of the old seafaring powers that made their way over to this side of th world at one point or another.

I had been to the bar part of Shamian on my last (and only other) trip to Guangzhou, but Fong and I had had a "get dinner" mentality on our mind at the time which isn't very conducive to wandering about aimlessly. I walked the small island back and forth, stopping about a quarter of the way in when I saw the familiar (and odd) shape of the Chinese hackey sack for sale at one of the local vendor's stands.

"How much," I inquired, cutting through the preliminaries and drawing the young girl minding the shop out of her Gameboy reverie.

"This? This 10 Yuan."

"10? Ok," as I gently placed the sack back down.

"Okok, you make me price." Her rhythm only slightly marred by her lack of experience clearly owing to age. But I wasn't really in the mood to bite, so she had an easy time. I went honest.

"I like 5 better."

"Ok sir, 5 - hey!! You wait for him buy it!"

Right then, much to the dismay of our young negotiator prodigy, her sister bolted around the front of the stand, and proceeded to hack another sack, passing it over to me.

I wasn't one to take that sort of invitation lightly, so I immediately shot a foot out to keep the hack from touching its mortal enemy, the ground. Alas, I could only briefly keep the hack away from its dire quest.

"Here," as I placed my bag on a nearby chair, "Let's do it again."

And off we went; I didn't want the negotiator savant to spoil the fun, so I quickly dropped a 5 on the table before serving the hack.

The girl turned out to be pretty good, but stuck almost solely to her right inside, rather than moving things around. The Chinese hack is a bit strange as I mentioned before because it is basically a stack of plastic 1/8 inch high discs, forming all told about a half inch of "sack". Protruding from the top of this is a plume of feathers, usually four, extending about 5 inches further up. This adds some aerodynamic/distance qualities to the game, but damned if I didn't have the thing land sideways on my foot a slew of times before I started learning to wait for the thing to flip all the way over (and subsequently adjust my kicking style to try to further that agenda).

We went at it for the better part of an hour, much to the amusement of the passing Chinese and foreigners in the area. More than once I heard one of the older people exclaim at the sight of seeing Gweilo hack, I guess it's not the sort of thing that happens around here every day. Or maybe it was my style they were picking at. It better not be the beard...

Finally she begged off, but I knew I wasn't done. I dropped a quick goodbye (skipping over the whole dodgy Cantonese thank-you business) and continued on around the island.

After about 3/4ths of the way all the way around, I was pulled from my idle observer daze by the familiar clack-clack sound of a nearby hack being put to good use. I homed in on the target and found a guy probably 5 years older than me hacking by himself.

His style was entirely different from the girl's. Where I had noted some themes of distinctly non-western origin in the brief back and forth with the girl, there was a fully developed aspect of calm and deliberate passiveness exuding from this guy's presence. And this guy was not limited to the right inside alone. He passed the 4 sides frequently, though clearly favored the toes. But there was a quiet acceptance of the ancient duel between the hackey sack and the ground, and this guy's mission was clearly to assuage the pain of the contest with the barest minimum of effort.

It was the Zen of Hacking.

I weakly tried to get his attention once or twice but failed to pierce the veil of concentration hanging about this man. After what seemed an eternity, he actually dropped the hack, and I took that minute to move in.

When I caught his eye, I pointed at my hack which I had produced off camera to dodge the language barrier. I then looked inquiringly at him and pointed, following by a back and forth gesture between us. He nodded, and I stuffed the inferior hack of mine away and put down my bag efficiently. And then we began.

It went on for hours. I was a sweaty mess by the time I finally begged off, but he smiled gladly and seemed to hint that I should come back some time. We had kicked, we had stalled, we had jestered, we had slapped the late afternoon away, and I had felt completely sated at least within my body's limits for the moment, parting ways in the end. I caught just the barest inkling into this man's world of hacking zen, the calm persistence and accuracy, while still keeping some of the flare for the fun. Movements just so, not over exaggerated. No force misused, nor tiredness hurried on. Just simple hacking.

Word.