Restless Me - The Journal of World Travel

My enthusiasm for my students was all that matched my joy of biking. Throughout the autumn, they accompanied me on my rides into town. They taught me Chinese phrases useful for requesting bicycle repairs. I taught them how to race madly through traffic, and how to stop when the brakes failed.

We rode in sunshine and in the face of fierce yellow winds blasting in from the Gobi Desert. And we rode despite the cabbage.

The cabbage arrived on a warm October afternoon. Vehicles the size of dump trucks barged in from the countryside, leaving a wake of slick, sour leaves. They unloaded the cabbage in town, in front of the Number Two Department Store, in piles that reached above the second floor. So abundant was the cabbage harvest that the Party announced everyone had the "political duty" to buy lots of it.

My students told me that snow always followed the cabbage harvest. I didn't believe them, but the next day a snowstorm hit like sticky rice in a ceiling fan. We rode in spite of it.

Gradually, however, they stopped riding with me. Then they stopped visiting me. Only one of my better students, who went by the English name Lester, agreed to meet with me, but only off campus. He would borrow a roommate's bike and ride into town well ahead of me. Then we'd meet at the house of an artist we knew. By trade a painter of Party-line signboards, this artist spent every free moment creating what he believed was contemporary Western art. That included skulls arranged Warhol-style and crucifixes that doubled as clotheslines. He longed for the freedom to exhibit his underground avant-garde creations.

He once challenged me to draw a picture of freedom. I sketched out the first object to come to mind, though with my talent for the abstract, it passed for neither a Cannondale nor a Flying Pigeon. It was just a bike.

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Lester later confided that the Dean of Discipline discouraged my students from talking to me outside the classroom. He would further reveal that this guarded attitude toward me stemmed from the behavior of my two Western male predecessors. The first, a Canadian, developed an inappropriate relationship with a student. She was expelled and he was deported. The second devoted an inordinate amount of time to thumping Bibles and damning the godless communists. He died under mysterious circumstances.

The Dean of Discipline had good reasons for turning me into a pariah. I just wished he'd shared them with me first. I would've understood. Instead, I sank into unfathomable loneliness, with only my Flying Pigeon to keep me company.

Regrettably, mistrust between Chinese and Americans was often mutual, as I found out when I realized that I was the only person in Siping paranoid enough to lock up a bicycle.

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I continued cycling deep into the bleak Manchurian winter. My riding outfit consisted of a long quilted coat, a fleece-lined leather jacket, a fleece-lined hat with earflaps, two shirts, jeans, sweat pants, wool socks, wool-lined boots and a scarf wrapped around my face. Still I kept up my usual pace just to stay warm.

The outfit allowed me to travel incognito. The quilted coat was standard issue for Chinese police, the hat Chinese army surplus. I occasionally slowed down to blend in and marvel at other cyclists. What they lacked in pace, they often made up for in payload. A family of three easily enjoyed a Sunday outing on a single bike. Dad pedaling, Mom on the rack over the rear wheel, kid on the handlebars. I never saw a bike helmet, but some children did ride encased in plexiglass boxes strapped to the rack, like little emperors in two-wheel Popemobiles.

Cyclists in Siping and elsewhere often cruised along carrying a couple of full-grown pigs or a flock of ducks or an armoire. The antics of the Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe, famed for carrying up to thirteen adults on a single bike, no longer seemed like such a remarkable feat. Next