Comment

A kick that kicked back

By Earle Gale (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-04-28 08:02

I've learned many lessons since I arrived in China and almost all of them have been positive.

This week, I was a reluctant student who was made to sit at the front of the classroom while my teacher explained slowly, and in words of one syllable, an important new one - that no matter how frustrated I become with the way something works, there really is nothing to be gained by getting hot under the collar about it.

This week's epiphany came on the dusty road to the antique market south of Jinsong subway station.

It was a beautiful day.

The birds were singing. The air was warm. People were smiling. And my girlfriend had just remarked that the weekend - a whirl of concerts, picnics in the park, cycle rides, book reading and romantic walks - had been as near to perfect as it was possible to get.

A kick that kicked back

In a state of relaxed anticipation, we set about crossing the road in front of the market, wondering what delights awaited us in this hitherto undiscovered oasis.

We nipped between slow-moving traffic on the marked crosswalk and made it, along with a sizable crowd, to the center of the road where we waited a while for another break in the traffic oblivious to the two-tone decoration on the road beneath our feet and apparently unaware of the traffic rule that requires drivers to stop, or at least slow down, for pedestrians on crosswalks.

When another sizable gap opened up in the approaching traffic, we stepped back onto the black and white stripes - only to see a car loom toward us at high speed with its horn blazing.

We leapt back out of the way and the black import whooshed past, ruffling the air in front of our faces and missing my girlfriend's toes by a matter of inches.

Simultaneously, before I realized what I had done, a base instinct temporarily took over me.

Motivated by an impulse to protect and an urge to repulse, my foot shot out and met the side of the car with a resounding ding.

It was a firm connection.

If I had been taking a penalty kick from deep in my own half during a game of rugby, the ball would not only have flown between the uprights but likely carried on, out of the park.

The car screeched to a halt a little way down the road and some burley men leapt out and ran over, boiling with anger.

They were furious and apparently quite convinced that their behavior in scaring us half to death on a marked crosswalk was anything other than honorable.

I've been in Beijing for more than a year and know crosswalks don't work quite the same here as they do in the West, but I also know drivers are not supposed to gun for pedestrians and I was almost as angry as they were.

I couldn't help wondering what might have happened if my girlfriend and I had not been as fleet-footed as we were - if we had a child with us or an elderly relative.

Their demands, right from the get-go, were for money.

I told them firmly and not too politely to sling their hook. There was a good deal of grabbing, quite a lot of pushing and a cacophony of shouting during which a crowd the size of a small village formed around us.

While hardly anyone in the public gallery wanted to get involved in any way, a lovely disabled lady who had lost the ability to speak and a man who had recently arrived in the capital from his home in the Tibet autonomous region, both bravely stepped forward to try to diffuse the situation.

My girlfriend, shaken up by the confrontation and in tears, left out some of the nuances of the car driver's comments in her on-the-spot translation, but it was clear he and his friends were making comments about my mother, my girlfriend and one or two other people I hold near and dear.

At one point, the driver tried to spit in my face but missed.

My patience was as thin as a sheet of cigarette rolling paper and, if not for my girlfriend's mediation, a Herculean struggle with my self control and the prompt arrival of the police, the loud-mouthed driver, his seething friends and I would all have spent the next few days in various city institutions and several of us would have been horizontal.

I was convinced that, with the arrival of the police, all would be well and, in many ways, it was.

Back at the police station, the grabbing and shoving was but an unpleasant memory and the shouting was almost non-existent.

But the sad thing was, after the police officer took possession of all the facts, it was I who was wholly in the wrong.

I had damaged the man's car. The car had damaged neither me nor my girlfriend. My coat did not tear when the men grabbed and jostled me. My girlfriend's handbag did not break when the brutes pulled at it while it hung from my shoulder.

My girlfriend's tears and the trauma she suffered were worth nothing.

The insults lobbed at me in front of all those people disappeared into the morning air and went unpunished.

The attempt to spit in my face was forgotten.

The kindly and judicious police officer who handled the case admitted the situation was less than perfect and sympathized, but explained that the law was a bit hazy when it comes to crosswalks.

He said drivers are supposed to slow down and ideally stop, but admitted no one ever does. He said the driver was wrong to speed through a crowd but essentially "no harm, no foul": If he didn't hit anyone, he did no wrong.

The officer made me hand over a token payment to the driver to repair the dent on the side of his car, but it was such a small amount that he'd be lucky to get his car washed for that, let alone fixed.

I guess, in a way, it was some kind of victory for justice.

After I got back home, I scratched my head and wondered why I lashed out that time, when so many similar incidents had come and gone. I guess it had something to do with camels, straws and backs.

Maybe this driver will think twice the next time he sees a crowded crosswalk and feels the urge to put his pedal to the metal, but I doubt it.

Change will only come when society as a whole says "enough is enough" and decides that pedestrians, and especially China's treasured senior citizens, should not have to take their lives in their hands every time they cross the road.