My apartment is on the sixth floor of the Hua Qing Jia Yuan (Liesure Garden) apartments. In general, Hua Qing is not a bad place to be. The staff is courteous and helpful. The residents are a mix of locals and foreign students (this is Haidian, after all). There is convenient shopping all around.

 

The convenient shopping is located in the base of the Hua Qing Jia Yuan apartment blocks. Think of my apartment complex as kind of like a large medieval castle. The buildings form an enormous, city-block sized ring (and Beijing blocks are larger than some Singapore neighborhoods), with interconnected highrise and lowrise buildings forming a continuous wall punctuated by the occasional portcullis (well, gate). The center is an enormous courtyard. The bottom floors of the outward facing section of the ring are entirely filled with shops. There are coffee shops, groceries, convenience stores, mobile phone stores, restaurants, etc. It’s all very convenient.

 

There is also what appears to be a club in the bottom of the block next to ours. My bedroom overlooks the sidewalk in front of the club, which has jumpin’ Thursday nights. I don’t know why Thursday is big. Perhaps it’s ladies night, or two-for-one maotais.

 

Suffice to say from about 11pm to 3am on Thursday night, the street outside my bedroom is, well, bedlam. People who live in Singapore should think Mohammed Sultan. Taxis lined up in droves, cars parked on the sidewalks. Drunk youths staggering around. People who don’t live in Singapore can think Mohammed Sultan if they want to, but heaven knows why you’d want to.

 

My windows are double paned (Beijing has winter, remember) and the noise isn’t really much of a problem unless someone leans on the horn in a drunken fury (often). But last night I was woken at about 1:30 AM by a series of piercing yelps loud enough to penetrate my windows and my sleep.

 

I staggered over to my windows and drew the curtains. Down in the street below, in the middle of the throng of clubbers, one dude was beating the tar out of another dude.

 

You know how in the fight movies, the trainer tells our embattled, suffering hero, more often than not played by Sly Stallone, “stay down, stay down!” Well the guy on the receiving end would not stay down. He must have been drunk to the point of anesthesia, because he kept staggering to his feet and charging at the guy who was clearly in control of the situation, only to be pummeled to the ground again. A friend was trying to hold the loser down to no avail. Eventually the guy who was administering the beating decided that waiting for the indefatigable victim to continue popping back to his feet like a Weeble (they wobble, but they don’t fall down) was a bad strategy. If you’re old enough to remember John Landis’ Kentucky Fried Movie, think Fistful of Yen. The next time the drunkard went down he took a further series of Ronaldo-like kicks to the head for his trouble. He made one more valiant attempt to Weeble back into the fight before collapsing in a knee-wrenching heap.

 

The odd thing was that the cops fifty feet up the street, waiting in their car with the cherries lit, did nothing to intervene until the fight was over and a crowd began to gather around the inert victim.

 

I would like to take this moment to mention that the Chinese police are called the Gong An, which translates roughly as “Public Peace”. I am not sure that, to pick some random malfeasants, a group of bank robbers would feel intimidated by the Public Peace. “Cheeze it, youse guys! The Public Peace is coming!” As though, if you didn’t flee the scene quickly enough, a blissful calm might suddenly settle upon you.

 

This is probably why police are also referred to as jing cha, which translates as the somewhat more dynamic “vigilantly observe”.This is appropriate. Readers of the newspaper and students of history will know that the Chinese police are not universally associated with blissful calm. But they do have their place. And their place, for some reason, was not breaking up this potentially lethal fight.

 

But once the victim was down for the count they were at the scene in a flash to hoist the unlucky drunkard to his feet (he was vaguely conscious) and hurl him into the back of their SUV for hasty removal.

 

I saw no signs that the victor was apprehended. Makes you wonder. I hurled myself back into bed.

 

Comment:

 

Bob sez:
This is actually the pattern for much urban habitation up until, say, 1900. If you go to Paris, Rome, Munich, and I dare say most any big city in Europe, you'll find exactly what you describe above: ground level-retail, what appears to be one building that comprises an entire city block (but which may really consist of several buildings sharing walls), courtyard in the middle w/ gate (this is where you would have brought in your horses and carriage, if you were wealthy enough to own them; it is now where you bring in your car, if you're wealthy enough to pay for a courtyard parking spot) (although most of the gates in the cities above are just really, really big wooden doors), and apartments starting on the first floor above ground, up to, say, the fifth or sixth floor above ground (what we in the U.S. would call the sixth or seventh floor).

Interestingly, those old cities topped out at about six floor for both engineering purposes (structural integrity of available construction methods) and practical purposes (in the absence of elevators, who wants to walk up ten flights of stairs to go home? And who wants to pay workmen to build & service so tall a building?)

Will writes further:
"My bedroom overlooks the sidewalk in front of the club"

And Bob sez further:
Ahh, this is why the travel books always tell people to "ask for a hotel room on the courtyard; it's much quieter than one on the street".