Completely Lost

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China is a terrifying place. I’m back in my prison-like room now, complete with metal (and completely unsound-proof) doors and regulation hospital walls, but not long ago, I was wondering around a completely unknown place by myself not entirely soberly and in the dark.

It’s past midnight here now and all is quiet apart from the chirruping of crickets, the buzz of my fridge and the flush of toilets (not mine). After drinking some disgusting supermarket rice wine (mixed with fake grape juice) and a lot of Chinese white spirits at a random hot-pot food place, I attempted to get home via a taxi, which decided to take me to some the North Gate of the Wrong University.

The place was pitch black with only 1 security guard around, and being as I was too drunk to communicate in Chinese, I pretended I could only speak English. I do a mean ‘I-am-not-actually-Chinese-but-can-actually-speak-a-little-with-bad-tones-isn’t-that-cool’ accent. So he directed me to go straight and go right, then ask other people.

Southern Yangtze University, where I teach, is uniformly grey, concrete and tiled. The buildings here however, were equally uniform, grey, concrete and tiled, but also too spread out. Building sites were less prevalent, there were car parks, and the buildings were a slightly different shade of grey. After about 10 minutes of walking, I realised I didn’t recognise a single thing I had passed. There was no one there, no cars, no lights on and no sign of life. An alien grey concrete hell.

You know that feeling when you have no idea where you are, there’s no one around and you have no idea which way you're going or even where you want to get to? I could feel the panic rising inside in sickening waves, blood pumping to my face and fear taking over. Thank god I was too dehydrated to do anything ridiculous such as cry, and too sober to fall asleep on the (do-not-step-on-the-)grass. So I carried on walking.

I walked straight on and tried to ignore the fact that the buildings were thinning out and the increasing darkness. About 20 minutes later I reached large road, around 6 lanes wide, completely empty and obstructed by a sliding metal fence. A man sat in the security office, probably my age and completely ignorant even when I dropped my ‘I can’t / am too drunk to speak Chinese act’. He told me he didn’t know where Southern Yangtze University was, which at least confirmed that I was on the Wrong Campus, and pointed in the direction of North. So I headed in the opposite direction because he seemed like an idiot.

Thankfully I was right. Southern Yangtze University was directly opposite this gate, across the 8-lane highway (again completely empty). And about 10 minutes later, I woke the doorman up to open the bike lock that kept the doors shut and got back to my room.

Now there’s a very drunk man my outside shouting loudly and incoherently in the courtyard. I think it’s time I went to my other room, went to sleep and pretended I was elsewhere.

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