Warning, this post contains explicit language. I had to put it in order to faithfully display the situation
Wow! What an interesting Tuesday night!
I had just gotten comfy in my bed, all snuggled under the covers at about 11:20pm, when a great deal of drunken laughter and noises sprung up from outside my window. Now, I live on the 5th floor in an old apartment building next to the reasonably quiet, leafy JianGuo Xi Rd. There aren’t any bars or such right in the vicinity, but sometimes a bit of late night drunken conversation floats up from the street below. No big deal. They usually walk past and the noise fades away. Not Tuesday night. After a few minutes, super loud music plus bass starts blaring away outside. Dang, my building is 6 stories tall and I hear that music clear as day on the 5th floor. Everyone in my entire apartment complex can definitely hear that, most of them are kinda old. This is really obnoxious.
I can’t tell what language the music was in and it sounded rather indy. In the background, behind the music, I could hear rather unintelligible shouts and some snatches of poor Chinese. My racist self thought , “Damned Foreigners” “Must be the French” Expats tend to drink a lot, and I’m not sure why I thought French. Maybe because the music sounded hip. Anyways, after about 10 minutes of this, I take a look out my window at the scene below. Holy crap! No wonder the music is so loud. There is a car parked on the side of the street with all the doors open, blaring music, and there are like 5 or 6 wasted Chinese being complete idiots. I shut the window and lay back down. 10 more minutes pass, then the music goes down a bit, but the yelling persists. The lull lasted about a minute, the music is up full blast again. I wait another 10 minutes and then head over to the window again to look out. Now the music goes down again, and one of the group- a big guy probably in his 40s has grabbed one of the potted small trees from the sidewalk, knocked it over, and is in the process of smashing it by jumping up and down on it(while drunkenly falling) while a lady (presumably his wife) is shrieking with laughter. Just then I notice the the red and blue flashing of two motorcycle cops that have pulled over into the bike lane on the opposite side of the one-way street. I can’t hear what the cops start to say, but the driver of the car realizes he should probably get out of there. The driver shouts over to the cops something about how he will get out of there right away and maybe a sorry. As some of the people get into the car and prepare to leave, the big guy is still smashing the tree and is is shouting at max volume in Shanghainese “Hey fuck you cops!” “I’m fucking smashing this tree” “Fuck your mothers! “Fuck you!” “Come and fucking fine me!” The driver drunkenly stumbles over to the car and drives away. Yes, I could tell he was wasted from the 5th floor, and the cops just let them leave. Ok, music taken care of. I was getting ready for the show! An absolute piss-drunk asshole screaming obscenities at the cops while smashing public property? His ass is getting beat and going to jail! Wrong. The cops look at him doing this and procede to drive away. What?
Now there was just a very wasted guy left screaming in the street. Still not very conducive to sleep. I retreat back to bed, hoping it will be over soon. Time passes, it doesn’t stop. My girlfriend and I go back to the window and she shouts out (In Chinese) “Shut the hell up! There are people trying to sleep, idiot!” The guy looks stunned. Like he is amazed someone would challenge him. He glances around and shouts , “Hey, who swore at me?!” He glances upwards and sees us. He lets out a torrent of rage our way. He screams (In Shanghainese) over and over again “Fuck you , fuck your mother, fuck you, fuck your mother, fuck you, fuck your mother.” My girlfriend is furious now. She yells back “Go to hell, you piece of shit” and storms back to the bed (the bed is right by the window). I’m left there and I just look at the guy. He notices I’m foreign and now starts to mix up the “Fuck you, fuck your mom” in Shanghainese with a heavily accented “fuck you” in English. He then starts to scream in Mandarin “come out of that building and fight!” “fuck your mother” in Shanghainese, and “fuck you” in English at me. I didn’t even say a word to him. After a few minutes of this, I slip out of sight. He doesn’t stop. I’m getting a bit worried that he will throw something at the window or try to break into the building. Our lady security guard for the building wouldn’t have much of a stopping effect against him.
I would have loved to chuck some glass beer bottles at him but it wouldn’t have helped things. Seeing as how this is China, then police would then have probably come back, ignored the guy, and then come up to my apartment and arrested me for chucking the bottles. I choose the smarter option and slunk back into bed. We laid there for a good 10 minutes while the guy continued to shout. Then I guess his wife managed to drag him away, but the whole time we could hear him saying “fuck your mother” in Shanghainese, just getting fainter as he got further. Finally it stopped. Now, my heart is beating pretty hard and I can’t fall back asleep. We lay there nervously. 5 minutes later the shouting starts again right under our window! Fortunately, it started to die out after another minute.
Damn!
That’s the story. Wake up a 100 people (probably more, those 28 high rises down the street could probably hear all that racket) at night, blare loud as hell music for 20-25 minutes, smash property, drive drunk, scream swear words at police, threaten citizens, and nothing happens! You get away with it all! Congratulations!
I guess I have some rather choice words for those worthless Shanghai police.
You can probably guess what they are.
roomaomao 