Well, going on through a second month in the land of green tea, 'Ni hows', chaos and big dreams, I have, aside from the language, adapted quite well to my environment - perhaps I even look a little like an Oriental Roger, because I have lost weight and perhaps my face even seems more Chinese than it was when I arrived. But then, my physical habits are different. I'm still not drinking, and though I went through a brief love affair with Chinese cigarettes, that too has stopped now, except for the occasional cigarette – I love smoking so much – don’t know why..) and with the regular meditation my habits are as pure as it is possible for them too be.

Interestingly enough in Daqing I find that generally my body has settled on a waking time of about 5.30 am. I know that those of you who know me from Melbourne will find this quite a surprise, given the consistency and persistency of my nocturnal habits there. But experience has shown me that this nocturnalness of Roger is very much attached to Western environments. In Asian environments he becomes the opposite. In Bangkok I am a morning person, when I was in Hong Kong, in Bali, and now in Daqing – in Asia I love the mornings.
Well, perhaps it’s more that, in most Western cities, I hate mornings.

There is a hysterical edge to the average Western morning, a kind of resentfulness, as if the world would much rather have stayed in bed. In a Western morning I always feel kind of acidic and hurt. In a Western morning it's like the whole world has drunk too much coffee, and is late for work - all the cars, people, even the light is impatient, brutal and stupid. Unlike the gentleness of a Western dusk, there are no relaxed philosophical wonderings in a Western morning. Everything is hideously hard edged, dull-eyed and pointy.

But here in Daqing, as I've described in previous letters, the mornings are a gentle time, perhaps when people are at their best. It's a time when old friends talk about the great march, the price of vegetables, or whether that gaunt foreigner who rides through here every morning on his bike will ever learn to ride on the right side of the road. It's a time for old men to fly a kite, for parents and children to play and look around, for another game of mahjong with the neighbors. Each morning is a kind of celebration - no resentment or irritability - only a kind of optimistic anticipation of the day ahead. So I find it entirely natural to want to be up during this time.

So let's go out once more for a walk in the pale morning air pf Daqing, where there is no sound of birds, no traffic, but rather the quiet chatter of millions of people. But this time we won't wander through the park with all its backward walkers, strange string bands, tree kickers and ballroom dancers.

We'll go the other way - through a short cut between apartments, and round the side of the giant redbrick building with its tall round chimney stack, which houses a massive oil fired furnace - one of many in Daqing which send hot water out through grey insulated pipes that snake all throughout the city. The whole of Daqing, except the slum areas (which I stumbled upon while riding the other day), is centrally heated by these oil furnaces which provide hot water and heating for the many thousands of apartments and buildings throughout the city. I don't know how they organize the bills, but I find these pipes very reassuring. It's like these furnaces and pipes are the arteries of a vast organism within which I am a foreign body that has temporarily found a place. I feel like this often in Daqing, as if the whole city is alive and profoundly interconnected around me. And what seems chaotic, like the traffic, is actually incredibly orderly when this invisible interconnectedness is taken into account.

As I walk, I keep a look out for the dope plants that Kingsley regularly rips into for his supply of ganja… but perhaps I should explain. The Western contingent has discovered, to its amusement and more often, its incredulous excitement, that right throughout Daqing, in gardens, alongside some roads, in schoolyards and vacant lots, outcrops of marijuana are as common here as garden weeds. So of course Kingsley “I'm into it man...” from Queensland is like a pig in slush, because he just loves anything that alters his body chemistry.
For a while I didn’t believe them – I thought maybe they were smoking garden weeds. But yes, only yesterday, I saw what they were talking about. I went for a bike ride up a dirt road into some backlot behind Yen Jiu Yuan where our hotel is and there, in a dusty lot, ignored by the many youths who were playing soccer nearby, were a couple of big fat bushes of healthy marijuana, positively glowing in the morning sun. So Kingsley and many of the others have a steady and reliable supply of marijuana here, which they use quite constantly it seems.

It's not as if the Chinese don't know about it. Apparently the other night Kingsley and one of his mad Canadian mates lit up a scoob in a taxi and the taxi driver was right into it. So I don't know what's going on, but it's strange that a drug that is so demonized and romanticized in the West is not even an issue here - they just don't care, though I imagine many of the Chinese herbalists use it. I don't know for sure, but I can't imagine that they are ignorant of its medicinal qualities.

And here, of course, the subject of dope inevitably brings us to contemplate the ‘Kinger’.

Aaaah Kingsley, Kingsley, Kingsley. What a phenomenon he is. Red haired, capacious, and irrepressibly ebullient, the Kinger is very busy here. Where usually he’s used to raging through the pubs and beaches of Melbourne and Byron Bay, right now he’s consuming China, because that’s what the Kinger does – he consumes. He consumes everything – beer, food, drugs, sex, experiences, sights, sounds. The sheer irrepressible physical capacity and appetite of the man is almost surreal. And, as happens when one consumes at a great rate, the Kinger universe is expanding greatly, as he freely admits, uttering “geez, I’m stacking it on mate...” from around the side of yet another upended bottle of beer. One night I caught myself, sitting across a table from him during a meal, thinking what a universe separated us, because I cannot fathom the Kinger mind, and he cannot fathom mine – and yet I know that, many years ago, I too was trying to consume the world. But I’ve forgotten that mind now, so it seems alien. It’s strange how change happens in a life. Once we were one way, and could not imagine being anything else, then we are someone else, and we cannot imagine how it was to be who we were before. But still, I like his lust for life.

And so I walk on, through the crowded market place, along the road between apartments, through a garden, keeping my eyes carefully unfocussed on anything but where I'm headed - because everybody stares. As Tamir and Jen, two Canadian teachers, said when I first arrived, “In this city we’re all pop stars.”, and it’s true. Foreigners here are a source of endless fascination for the locals. And if their eyes were laser beams, each of us would be incinerated the moment we walked out the door.

But this comment of Jen’s reminded me of a little trick I learnt off Michael Hutchence when we were both pop stars in another world (him more so than me) - we were talking about how intrusive it was to be stared at all the time, and he told me that whenever he was out and about he just kept his eyes unfocussed on everything but what immediately concerned him, and it had the effect of making him invisible. And it works. If you're being stared at by hundreds of eyes, as happens if you're a foreigner in Daqing, you just fix your attention on where you’re going, or whatever you're doing, and focus on that. It’s a wonderful exercise in mindfulness, and is handy for letting go of the parts of the world you don’t want - in some strange way, because you're not responding to them, they rapidly lose interest, and it's like being alone.

At this time of the morning all the restaurants are still closed, so I head down through the apartments, and across the road to the middle of another apartment block where there is an impromptu market most mornings, where farmers squat on old blankets selling the fruit and vegetables piled next to them. The vegetable sellers yell and hawk and spit carefully between the feet of all the old Chinese men and women in brightly colored jogging suits weaving between them, shopping for everything from freshly baked bread to steamed dumplings, or savory egg pancakes stuffed with chopped spring onion.

I eat an early morning breakfast as I wander - two biaizu (round steamed dumplings stuffed with god knows what - some chopped spicy stuff) for half a Yuan. Then I sit with an old man and strike up a long conversation, him prattling in Chinese, me prattling in English, while drawing pictures of little men with birds on their heads in my book, which amuses the gathering crowd very much. And though neither I nor the old man understands a word of what the other says, we enjoy the exchange nonetheless. In fact, this early morning exchange is perhaps been one of the more satisfying conversations of my life.

Breakfast finished, I bid farewell to the old man and the giggling crowd, and wander on, shopping for my regular fare of carrots, banana’s and peanuts. Shopping is an endless acceptance of the inevitable markup of prices which, unlike Kingsley (“Ohm fuckin’ sick of bein’ ripped off…”), who now bargains relentlessly, I accept the increased prices as my personal 'foreigner tax'. I can't be bothered haggling - good luck to them. The money will be well used, I'm sure.
As I walk along a row of stalls, I know they all know me now, and the other shop keepers laugh and point, and the stall holder who's lucky enough to have the banana's I want can barely resist rubbing his hands together as I hand him my purchase and wait for the verdict. I'm sure I pay triple the market price for everything.

And there is a reason for this.

They all know of me because of one ill-fated purchase I made when I first arrived, which I'm sure is outrageous enough to now have become legend throughout the entire market. It was very hot when I arrived, and I didn't have any sandals, so on one of my first trips to the market, I was picking through some footwear at a stall, when the woman came out and handed me a larger version of the sandals I was inspecting. I was still dazed I think, from the traveling and being in a new place - because what followed was such an outrageous act of mindlessness on my part, I still get shivers when I contemplate it.

Anyway, she handed me these sandals, and I didn’t think they were that flash, but I couldn't be bothered ploughing through the language disparity explaining that I didn't really want them after all. And considering that she'd hunted through for my foot size, I sighed and told her, yes, I wanted them.

How much?

She uttered some intelligible Chinese, so I handed her a pen and indicated I wanted her to write down the price. She wrote down what looked like the number '63' and some Chinese characters after it. I assumed it meant '63 Yuan', the equivalent of about $15 Australian. Not yet used to the different value of money here, I figured that, though expensive, it sounded equivalent to sandals in Australia, so I shrewdly decided to offer her 50 Yuan. I wrote down the number '50' beside her price and she shook her hands vigorously, indicating it was not acceptable.

Thinking myself a tough negotiator, I kept nodding my head, and saying 'hao, hao' meaning, ‘good, good’(my only Chinese at the time, meaning “good, good”. My, my, what a lunatic optimist… wandering through Daqing with only "good, good" to get by with). I kept indicating that she should take my 50 Yuan or I'd leave. Eventually she shrugged her assent and, feeling quite satisfied with myself, I took out a 50 Yuan note and handed it to her. She grinned widely as she snatched it from my fingers and it disappeared very rapidly into some small space on her person.

Then something made me pause.

It was something about the incredulous tone of the laughter coming from a bloke squatting nearby watching the exchange that caused me to do a retake. By this time she was packing my sandals and the incredulous tone of the conversation from the gathering crowd all round was becoming louder, and punctuated with rising laughter and much shaking of heads.

So there I am in the midst of this carnival – and I'm gazing at the piece of paper with our original negotiation on it, and now I'm thinking more critically. I inspect the original price again, that she had scrawled on the paper - and I realize that what I had thought was a '3' was actually a Chinese character - meaning what, I don't know - but it wasn't a number.

I realized she'd been asking for 6 Yuan, not 63.

By this time, still grinning widely, she was pushing the bag with the sandals into my hand, and nodding frantically for me to take it. I absent mindedly took the bag, then pointed at the piece of paper and began mouthing mutely like a fish, trying to think of how to explain. I looked into her eyes, and at that moment the whole crowd around us went quiet. But it was too late. My 50 Yuan note was gone, and there was no way it was coming back. All I could do was clutch my bag of plastic sandals and shake my head with a melancholy smile. And at that moment she and the crowd around us knew I now knew. And I knew that they all knew that I now knew - and even with all this knowing, it was still a done deal. Nothing to be done.

Walk away.

I took the package, and, with as much dignity as I could muster, to the sudden hilarity of the now substantial crowd I packed my hideously expensive sandals into my backpack and pushed out into the street.

Two days later, a plastic strap on one of the sandals broke, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away. They’re still sitting hopefully beside my bed. Maybe one day I might find some way of getting some value out of them.

So I'm sure they all know about me around the market. I can feel the ripple of gossip follow me down the line. But it doesn't matter. After many years of traveling, I have long accepted that the bottom line is that when in Asia I am inevitably a fool. I am a fool because I cannot speak their language, and I do not have their mind, and I come from a place they do not understand. But this is not a bad thing - in a way, I find it quite comforting to have no face or high reputation to have to uphold. After all, everything is upside to a fool...isn’t it?

Of course, I’m not always this philosophic about my defeats on this particular battle ground. Sometimes an event will bring out my innate stubbornness, and I’ll make sure I win. One particular instance occurred a week or two ago. I was ambling through the street market outside a large department store near here, looking for bananas.

There is a way of doing this. You cannot approach anything here without immediately being hooked into obligation to buy by the eager vendors. So I have developed the habit of appearing not to care about what is there, until I see what I want – then I go straight to it, and before the sales pitch begins, I pick up what I want and make clear that this is all I want.

So I did this – I saw a bunch of bananas that looked okay, and indicated to a boy at the stall that I only wanted half the bunch. His mother, a hard faced leathery whip of a woman, stood nearby picking her teeth, with that glisten in her eyes that a prospective sale often brings.

While the boy separated the banana’s the mother moved in to close the sale. I mimed ‘how much’ by rubbing my fingers together in that universal signal for ‘money’, and she held up her hand and displayed five fingers. I assumed she meant 5 Yuan, which was a fair price for the 6 banana’s I had chosen. So I took out a 10 Yuan note, and she whipped it out of my hand and it quickly disappeared. The boy offered me the bananas, but I indicated I wanted some change.

The woman flapped her hand disdainfully and yabbered in Chinese, then went back to picking her teeth, pointedly ignoring me. I looked at the boy, and he looked at me, and I said very emphatically, “Wu Yuan!’, meaning ‘5 Yuan’ to which he shook his head and said something like, “Bu dway, shi Yuan”, meaning ‘not right, 10 Yuan’. And suddenly my blood went hot and I’d had enough.

Now, 10 Yuan for 6 bananas is quite expensive, but not outrageous for a foreigner. And she might well have given five fingers twice, very fast, but I was in no mood to be reasonable. The boy pushed the banana’s at me, urging me to take them. I shook my head and repeated that I wanted my 5 Yuan. The woman kept ignoring me, so I went up to her, and put out my hand, saying, ‘5 Yuan’. She pointed to the bananas while flapping a hand at me to go away, but I shook my head and stood with my hand out. She began yabbering derisively to a customer standing there about what was going on, and tried to walk away, but I followed her, with my hand out, asking for the 5 Yuan.
By this time a crowd had gathered, and she began yelling at me, flapping her hands – and with the boy still trying to push the bananas into my hands, I kept following her around the stall, saying quietly, “Wu Yuan, Wu Yuan”.

At this point various people in the crowd began offering their opinions, and it seemed, from the way they were speaking to her, they sympathized with me. I had not expected this, but I presume the price was steep enough to offend them. So anyway, this stand off went on for about 5 minutes, with me following her around her stall, quietly saying ‘Wu Yuan, wu Yuan…”

By now she was screaming at me and making a real scene. It was then that a Chinese man in a suit appeared at my side and asked me in good English what was going on. I was surprised, because an English speaker is a rare thing in Daqing. I told him, and he nodded sagely as the woman warily watched our exchange.

“I think she is a bad woman.” he said eventually. “I will speak to her.”

So I stood back and, with the crowd muttering and commenting from the sidelines, he took up my case. This lasted for another couple of minutes, and the muttering turned to shouting and gesturing at the woman. I don’t know what they were saying, but it was clear that they were on my side, and I assume at some point, she figured the 5 Yuan was not worth the damage this was doing to her business. She whipped out the 5 Yuan note and threw it on the ground.

Again my stubborn streak took hold. There was no way I was picking up my money from the ground. Ignoring it and, taking the bananas from the boy, I carefully put them in my bag, then stood over the money, looking at her, but not picking it up. Again there was much arguing back and forth. The boy was standing next to me, obviously extremely embarrassed. The man was ripping and tearing at her with Chinese, (it can be a wonderful medium of abuse I’ve noticed) and by this time, she was looking pretty hunted. It was her boy who took the initiative to finish the fiasco. He picked up the 5 Yuan note and handed it to me, with an apologetic smile.

“Sheh sheh,” I said (thank you) to him with a conciliatory smile, and took it and, after thanking the man I turned, and seeing the surrounding crowd all peering curiously at this strange scene, bowed deeply to them all, and walked away with victory singing in my heart. It’s such a rare thing for a foolish foreigner with no Chinese to win here, that when it happens it is sweet.

As it happened, the man who had come to my assistance caught up with me and we talked for a while as we walked. I asked him what the woman had said. He told me she had been telling them all that I had agreed to pay 10 Yuan, but that the price had been so outrageous to the Chinese that they all took my side.
“I was surprised.” I said.
“Why?”
“I thought everyone would agree with her.”
He shook his head.
“We don’t like that she make us all look bad.” he said earnestly. “So we help you.”

And once again, my heart felt full with the innate ‘goodness of spirit’ that characterizes so many of the Chinese. It is something I have felt many times, not just in China, but in all of Asia.
There is this myth that Asians will rip you off as soon as look at you. And many times this is true. But running parallel with this is a kindness and sense of fairness, honesty and grace that is stunning in its directness, which has made for so many magical moments in my travels. I suppose this is because in Australia, the dichotomy of ways is less defined. You don’t get ripped off as much, but it’s also the case that people rarely exhibit the spontaneous grace, concern and kindness that Asians so often do.

But I digress….where was I?

It’s now 7 AM, and I make our way back to my hotel to get ready for work. I cross the road, and walk along the lane, past ‘Mamma Jiowsa’s”. I’ve spelt that phonetically. It roughly means Mamma Dumpling, a name given by the foreign teachers to the woman with the kind smile who runs the place. She’s always very patient, waiting as we stagger through our mutilated Chinese, and hunt through the pages of phrase books looking for a particular dish, and often gives a free dish when we eat there, using her only word of English, taught to her by Tamir, “free” – so everybody eats at ‘Mamma Jiowsa’s’.
Then through the park with its communist kitsch chrome globe of the world, from which the familiar shape of Australia always whispers ‘home….home…’ as I walk past.

Pause to watch the team of Tai Chi people doing their stork poses and slow motion kung fu, then back to the hotel to knock on the door and wake up the night porter to let me back in. He blearily scowls at being woken by me for the second time this morning, but…well, he is the night porter. Then down the long and expansive Communist hall with its high ceiling, stone floor and stark quasi-classical design to the door of my rooms.

Everything is big here - the buildings are huge echoing mausoleums, with high ceilings and whispering echoes, and convoluted corridors, with many rooms, often empty, or sparsely furnished. Bigness seems to be the Communist way, particularly the streets – even the small streets are big enough for a couple of tanks to trundle down – and perhaps that is why they are the size they are. Perhaps it is thinking ahead to the military concerns – the need to get troops and armored vehicles into any part of a city if there is trouble, because as far as I know, the way cities were before the revolution, was more cramped and complex.

And right down at the end of the long, long corridor are my rooms.
Aaaah, the rooms of my life.

So often, it has been the rooms where I lived that have embraced my soul, my spirit and my life. I can live anywhere, be anything and put up with anything, so long as I have pleasant rooms, or even a good room. It is an extension of my body, a mansion in which my mind tinkers with various projects, that are left lying about in variously assigned departments – a painting here, the guitar at rest over there, a letter half finished on the computer, a book left lying open on a table, another waiting on a shelf. If I had not had these two rooms - beautiful, high ceilinged and gentle, with their double glazed windows, billowing lace curtains and luxurious silence, I think I would have left Daqing within a week.

I have two rooms – a rather spacious living room with a lounge suite around a coffee table, a desk, and cupboard with a microwave and water cooler, and a bedroom with two beds, and a bathroom. The bathroom is prone to flooding whenever I have a shower, because of haphazard Chinese plumbing, but it doesn’t matter. It’s a home. It is here, when I close the door, that I breathe a sigh of relief, and flop down in a couch, and begin contemplating better things. The quiet in here breeds ideas and wonderings, and nurtures me when I nap, or sleep. It enjoys the music I play, and looks over my shoulder at the banal little drawings I have been doing, and the air chuckles.

I have a habit of spreading the bits and pieces of myself all around a room, which makes it my own. This habit began when I was with the band - I used to carry a special bag with all my ‘home’ things in it – paintings to put on the walls, scarves to put over the lights and odds and ends to scatter about, which would immediately turn wherever I was into home. The habit still remains. I carry my bits and pieces with me, and wherever I am, whether it is a tiny hut in the monastery, or a room in someone’s house, as soon as my things are put here and there, home appears. I suppose it comes from having spent most of my life in transit to somewhere else.

So I get ready for school – packing my bag with the books I need, and tuning my guitar. Then I clatter back down the hall to where a driver waits to take me to any one of the half dozen schools that we service.