China Joins the WTO

It's the weekend, my second weekend in cold, grimy, dirty Harbin. I'm missing my girlfriend and not in the mood for drunken loudmouth ashtray-throwing local geezers or eastern European prostitutes. In fact, after crawling out of another class where half the students behaved as if it were their first ever Engrish lesson, and the other half slept, I'm not much in the mood for anything.

I don't have a choice, however, as Betty and Athena invite (order?) me to go shopping. The two girls are best buddies and sit giggling at a two-berth desk most days in my PET1 class. I don't want to go but I can't say no. I mean, it would be good to get at least two students on my side. I accept and, quite unexpedtedly, enjoy myself.

We got a lift to Nan Gang in Betty's father's black VW Passat. I sat in the passenger's seat and pulled on the seat belt to find that there was no attachment for the belt to clip into. Betty's father laughed uproariously, his daughter translating that no one wore seat belts in Harbin. I let the belt ping back to find a dusty diagonal stripe across my new jacket.

The two girls wouldn't let me pay for a thing. The bus rides, the lunch (in a huge hall where, after buying different coloured tickets, you could walk around and pick anything you wanted from a multitudinous range of foods), the photo-booth, the ice cream, the arcade games, even the taxi ride home. Felt a mixture of discomfort and warmth at this. I objected politely every time they paid for something, more for my own dignity than anything else, but really all the girls wanted was for me to enjoy myself, and I did.

Betty is one of the class brain-boxes, plump bespectacled and shy. Athena is sharp and confident, frizzy hair with a reddish tint and the plucked, pink tattooed eyebrows that are the fashion here. Her mother owns a clothes store in the city, and she dresses accordingly. Betty has a lively sense of humour when you winkle it out of her. Athena is talkative and streetwise. They complement each other nicely. Athena knew the bus routes, the coolest shops, the best places to eat, Betty stayed by my side, taking my arm by the elbow in motherly fashion every time we crossed the road. Athena went home late afternoon, leaving Betty and I to make our own way back to the college. Betty had a minor panic, getting us lost while trying to find the correct bus stop. I insisted we take a taxi back then she insisted on paying for it.

In the evening, Leon, our volunteer translator at gong fu, held an English Corner at his father's restaurant, to celebrate China joining the WTO. Tam and I talked to two pretty girls, English names July and Caesar. (Seriously. When I suggested that Caesar was generally a man's name she refused to listen.) The girls were interested in the more tacky side of Scottish culture: bagpipes, kilts, haggis and all the other stuff I never wear, eat or play . I described to them tartan and mountains and rainy days. July told me about Chinese New Year, setting off firecrackers to drive away evil spirits, and the Harbin Ice Festival, with igloos, frozen palaces and ice lanterns. J dragged us to DJ Fridays afterwards, a faux-western bar in Nan Gang. Of course the girls couldn't come, having to get back to their university to beat the curfew. We commiserated, and thanked our lucky stars that there wasn't a 10 pm curfew when we were students.

At 11.40 pm last night it became official: China is now in the WTO. The whole world's putting freedom of trade above freedom of speech, and I don't know what to make of it. In fact, at the time, J, Tam and I were downing tequilas and dancing to bad Chinese techno.

Today I visited the Ji Le Si temples for a second time. The great golden Buddha now has a giant yellow crane in his eye-line, bigger than he is.