There comes a time when a situation might be so weird that you just have to write it down. And I feel that the past few days probably qualify.
So my German friend and I were having drinks, and a Chinese gentleman, aged about 29, in the booth behind us turned around to introduce himself. After saying hello, he promptly turned back to his booth. It was a little odd, I dare say, and I commented as such to my friend. If one were inclined enough to turn and introduce themself, wouldn't it follow that they would want to continue the conversation and not simply turn around thereafter?
Well clearly I spoke too soon, as the gentleman turned back around to engage us further. He peppered us with questions on a variety of topics, which we humored him through. Most of them centered around his wonderful girlfriend, how she had gotten pregnant in the past, how his grandparents didn't like her for that very reason, and what should he do. He also managed to convey that he's from the west part of china, near Kazakhstan. (Not a joke). He asked me if I'd seen the movie "Borat", and I'd said I had. His stories then elaborated on how that really is how they live, despite the humor of the movie and its obvious mocking tone.
Does all of it really happen like in the movie? Yes. Yes, he says. Small communities, everyone knows everyone, people marrying prostitutes, the love of foreignors, etc. He says he misses it out there, a sense of real community no matter how weird, as opposed to the big city living where you don't even know who lives next door to you, and most of them don't want to know you. His dream, he said, is to find a woman to marry and move back to the west of China.
It all sounded very romantic. Until he started telling me that people there love foreigners so much that they willingly share their wives with them. "Please, take my wife! =D " We laughed, of course, as we were quite drunken, and the conversation turned to other topics. Honestly, I didn't even remember this part because the guy just seemed so depressed and pathetic that the main feeling my friend and I walked away with at the end was just that this guy is letting his grandparents run his life, his future, his choice of wife, etc. We both felt bad for him.
Later on in the conversation, we talked about how you have to make an effort to keep friends, invite them out for a beer once in a while... introduce them to others. If you invite 5 friends, and each of them invite 5, that's 25 new people you can meet. Every friend is not just 1 new friend... they could be bridges to lots of new people. Sharing friends, I called it. He seemed to like this idea, and said he'd try to do such things. In the next 20 or 30 minutes, he mentioned "sharing a girl" several times, and my German friend and I were very confused as to what he meant. Did he really mean share a girl? Or did he just mean share a friend, who was a girl? We had a good laugh over that later, but we never really thought anything of it. We just thought it sounded funny.
By the end of the conversation, I was hoping he wouldn't remember what I had said about inviting new friends out to drink all the time, hoping in part that he would neglect to give us his information (and thus ask us for ours); a moderately depressed guy with problems who's a little over-eager could be a potential liability in the future (not that I'm unfamiliar with that personality type :cough:). But I'm a pretty nice guy, so when he did end up giving us his info, we felt compelled to be friendly and accept cordially.
All of this talk of sharing friends, though, didn't seem to be just idle chatter. I got a call Sunday night while in bed, at midnight, watching some tv and preparing for slumber. The caller was, naturally, this fellow, and he told me he had two friends he wanted to share with me. Oh, goodness, I said to myself. He sure is over-eager to meet new people... and he took what I said and ran with it apparently. "Rob... I've got two friends to share with you! I put up a message on a message board and found two who wanted someone to practice English with! One's a girl and the other's a guy."
Notwithstanding the repetition of "share my friends", I responded thus:
"Erm... thanks pal... I guess... um... I'm in bed right now so I can't really come out or anything, but mebbe I'll invite you out for a beer or something later this week and you can bring your friends along and we can all have some beers."
"Oh... ... ... : cricket : ... ... so you can't come out? erm... ok... "
Great. I maneuvered around that one. (I've perfected... a maneuver). One bomb avoided. I can go to sleep. And so I did.
The next day, yesterday, on my way to dinner with some co-workers, I get another call from a number I don't know. I never did add him to my phone, so I was pretty sure it was him. I didn't answer... but I did send a text message asking who it was.
The response was blatent. "This is soandso. I want you to fuck my girl."
..... we have lost cabin pressure.
He tried calling again 20 minutes later, but I had my co-worker answer the phone and my co-worker is too nice to have called the guy out and mocked him. So instead I get the message: This guy wants to talk to me urgently.
I felt the need for closure; that, and I'm a New Yorker and like to be fairly definitive in my rejection of new friends. So I sent him a text. "I will not fuck her here or there, I will not fuck her anywhere. I will not fuck her in a room or with a broom or today or tomorrow or anytime soon." I wasn't trying to be rude. I just wanted him to be clear that the extent of our friendship does not include me "fucking his girl". In fact, at that point, I'd say the extent of our friendship was nonexistent.
At this point, despite the fact that I gave a firm rejection, I was still weirded out. Luckily the next text message made me feel better. It outlined that this opportunity was not, in fact, free, but was 300 yuan, turning it from a weird Kazakhstan social ritual into a simple inner-city oldest-profession-in-the-world business deal. While I still rejected the situation out of hand, I now felt much better. There is some sanity in the world. This man does not want me to fuck his wife.