Published by Swiss James on 21 Apr 2008 at 03:00 pm
A rent boy Bruce Lee
I nearly got into fisticuffs this weekend. Sort of.
At the Blue Angel on Tongren Lu (a classy sort of establishment where if you dose off after a few ports, the valet will leave a crisply ironed copy of The Telegraph on your lap) I was enjoying a Raspberryade with my visiting chum.
Whilst Jose was enaged in a game of dice with a friendly young lady, I was watching the band do an awful cover version of “Livin La Vida Local”.
This young chap comes up to me, and through a mixure of spittle-flecked Chinese and hand gestures, indicates that he wants to play the game “Rock, Scissors, Paper”.
Well I don’t know if you’re aware of the rules of that, but basically the first one is that you have to be sober enough to see your own hands in order to play. This guy wasn’t.
I beat him a couple of times at that, when he decided it wasn’t the game for him and stumbled off to aggressively hug his friends a few more times.
Back he comes, this time to try his luck at an arm wrestle. Now I’m no David Hasselhof, but for some reason I always do OK at arm wrestling, and despite the fact this guy was dressed up like a rent-boy Bruce Lee, I beat him pretty easily.
Next thing you know he’s back with two tumblers full of iced beer which, I realised after he started drinking his, I was supposed to try and drink more quickly than him.
After draining his glass all down his black vest, he was all up in my grill shouting
“F** YOU!”
in capital letters- only he didn’t use asterixes, I can tell you.
“Now seems like a good time to leave mate”
I says to Jose, which was a shame as he’d just worked out the point of the dice game (you always lose and have to buy the girl a drink).
We went home shortly(ish) afterwards.
You don’t say how you extricated yourself from the sticky situation. Did you batter Brucie with your Telegraph? Or have the valet show him out?
I left forthwith Champers, didn’t want to end up brawling like some kind of ruffian. It’s a mug’s game is that fighting.
hi, i am a local shanghainese. this article is interesting but i have to spend some time rereading it to understand what u really meant. frankly i havent heard of the place located at tongren lu u mentioned above. probably i will go there,seeing with my own eyes things vividly related in your blog. i am ashamed and feel sorry for that if those Chinese purposefully did some things hurt ur feelings, but believe me most of my fellow chinese are nice to people from other countries. by the way, i am currently working for an online mandarin training company and my workplace is somewhere around zhangjiang hi-tech park. we are hiring some university students to do part time for us, the main duty of which is to do promotion for our products by whatever means they can use. if u r interested, let me know and u will be invited to come to our free demo courses(held at east jinling lu). i ‘d greatly appreciate it if u r willing to contact me.
Ike
maybe he thought you were french.
Ike- oh don’t worry about it! You see and hear worse than that every night of the week back where I come from, he might not have even been from Shanghai for all I know.
I just thought it was funny the way we went from playing rock / scissors / paper to his mates trying to pull him away from me in a few minutes. It’s like a knife fight breaking out over a game of Connect 4.
Alcohol: The cause and solution to all of life’s problems.
(T. He most certainly did not think I was french, how dare you!)
I think it was the croissant from Paul in your mouth, the gallic cigarette, your Thierry Henry t-shirt and beret, cocked to the side, that fooled him.
Didn’t you know that the winner of the pour-drink-on-shirt race traditionally gets to punch the loser?
Yeah I once had a Chinese bloke pull a big bastard of a knife out on me for no apparent reason. Managed to calm him down and he bought a bottle of tequila and insisted we both finish it together. I obliged, and afterwards pissed as a newt I escaped with all vital organs intact and no main arteries severed. Chalk it down as just another of those quirky things that happen you to in China.
James if you must hang out in the seediest street in Shanghai then I think you should expect to encounter drunks looking for a reason to smash yer face in. He must have thought you were one of those Tibetan trouble makers that’s been in the news lately.
it’s your shaved head JC, for your own sake you need to grow the back and sides out a bit, just an inch or so.
I was thinking of growing one of those long pigtail things actually, but with the price of pork being what it is..
I think you should just go for it James, maybe a rat-tail instead. Maybe couple it with a Fu Manchu moustache as well
(L)CHINA!
James - How many extra hits are you getting today from people Googling RENT BOY? Good way to boost your hit rate, bravo!
WoAi- all my googley hits come from people looking from Chinese men looking for hairstyles-
and if you are looking for Chinese Hairstyles, then you could do a lot worse than ISpyShanghai (Chinese hairstyles)
Did you mention that he looked like a rent boy Bruce Lee at all during your many pub games? How much raspberryade had you consumed? We all know what happens after a few pints of the stuff.
Man, I dont believe how all this stuff happens to you, you are lucky that your life is so rich with events like how the guy plays with you, drinks with you, curses you. My life on the other hand is so boring, when this happened to me in the pub the guy just smacked me with a bottle. That’s it. Nothing to write about in a blog. Life is just not fair.
Loosa- that’s why you keep coming back huh?
Scarletti- he knows it deep down, that’s why he’s all aggro.
Actually you know, I saw the same guy in Bonbon a few weeks prior- he’s a proper dick.
Mr. Swiss,
Of course, I live vicariously through your blog which is my only source of information about China.