Matt Schiavenza From the Dragon to the Apple- A Sinophile in New York

Robert’s

Every city in China that has foreigners has an foreigners bar. Many have more than one- Beijing and Shanghai, of course, have hundreds. In Kunming there are several. Even in Fuzhou there were always a few.

In Lianyungang there was just one, and it was called Robert's. Now, Robert's was only a bar in the strict sense that it accepted money in exchange for alcohol. There wasn't really any atmosphere to speak of. The food was putrid. The service could be best described as laissez-faire. Yet it was the bar- the only bar- that I went to during my first five months in Lianyungang. It was a second home and a refuge.

I arrived in Lianyungang in the fall of 2004, six months out of college. I was 23 and couldn't speak a word of Chinese. The other residents of my building were either a generation older or not, for whatever reason, very social. I was desperate to connect with people my age.

I received a tip from a colleague that there was indeed a group of youngsters in town, and that they congregated at a watering hole called Robert's. He suggested I go and find it.  But the first few times I attempted to find the bar, during my second week in the city, I failed miserably. I would take walks to the center of town each afternoon, scouring the landscape for the bar, and find nothing. Of course, I couldn't ask anyone for directions due to the language barrier. Was it possible that Robert's didn't actually exist? Was it just a state of mind?

Then, one day, I found it. I took a left turn at a junction where I had previously gone right, and came across a non-descript building with adorned with a large mural of Bob Marley. In Lianyungang,  a fairly typical Chinese city with bathroom tile apartment blocks and excessive neon, Bob definitely stood out.

I walked in and took a seat at an empty booth. The only other customers were three young Chinese guys and a pretty brunette. As I sat, she jumped up from her booth and wandered over to me. "Is there something you'd like?," she asked in heavily accented English. I scanned the menu and checked my watch. It was 4:30, and even in my addled 23-year old brain, I subscribed to the notion that respectable people didn't drink before 5. I ordered a coffee.

The girl, whom I would later find out was a 20-year old Russian named Olga, gave an uneasy look at one of the Chinese guys. She spoke to him in Mandarin, and he looked confused.  This was not a good sign. But, he marched into the kitchen anyway. "OK," she said, "he make it for you". And so he did.

Ten minutes later, he presented to me the worst coffee I have ever had in my life.

But it didn't matter. I had found Robert's, the Mecca, the locus of all my hopes and dreams. I was delighted.

A few days later I returned to Robert's in the evening and found a crowd of foreigners gathered. This was it! My people! I walked in, expecting to be hazed like a fraternity pledge, but instead found that the assembled patrons took more interest in me than I did in them.

Think of it this way: imagine that you're at a bar with six of your friends. Sounds great, right? Now imagine that your six friends are the only people that you'll ever hang out with at bars. Still OK, but after awhile you're bound to get sick of them. After all, most people have more than six friends for a reason.

Now imagine that you have six people you hang out with at bars, but they're not your best friends. They're not even necessarily your peers. In effect, they're six completely random people, a cross-section of ages and nationalities and personalities and quirks. If you're a reasonably outgoing and social person, you're probably going to like at least three of the people. The others you might dislike or merely tolerate. But it doesn't matter. Those are the six you have. You'll do anything to be on friendly terms with them, because the only other alternative is isolation and silence. So when a new person comes along- the seventh!- it's easy to see why the other six get excited.

Though there were slightly more than six foreigners in Lianyungang, this was the basic dynamic of the city's "bar scene". Throughout the year, a person would stop into Robert's and announce with genuine excitement that they had spotted a new foreigner on the street, or had a new colleague at their school. (We were all English teachers, the only gig in town). And so Robert's would resemble a big game of sardines, a game of waiting for the new guy or girl to come and chlorinate our little pool.

Bad coffee was just one of the way Robert's fell short of an ideal bar. The beer were often only cold when they days were cold, owing to poor and irregular refrigerating. The food was best left safely in the kitchen. The bartenders couldn't really tend bar, meaning that we often had to go and mix our own drinks. One night in November the electricity suddenly cut out. It didn't come back on for days. Undeterred, like hurricane survivors, we huddled in the darkness and continued our ritualistic imbibing.

Chinese expat bars tend to foster uninhibited behavior, and Robert's was no exception. A group of French engineers would come and on occasion dress up like women and form conga lines. Sexual acts in the bathrooms were not uncommon. Neither were random flashes of nudity. Robert's kept no hours, no regulations, and no restrictions. We were in complete control of the music, the atmosphere, and the drinks. One night, the lone bartender on duty simply fell asleep at his post while we continued on partying. Everyone placed their money in a neat pile next to his head. It might seem strange that he would trust us to that extent, but he knew we had nowhere else to go.

Sometime in January Robert's shut down. Nobody knew anything, but there were rumors that the bar would be knocked down. Sure enough, a week or so later, Robert's and all the other buildings on its block had been reduced to giant piles of rubble.  Even the Bob Marley mural was gone.  Later, when I learned more about China,  I discovered that such occurrences were extremely common throughout the country. But for the moment, Robert's demise struck me as a great tragedy.

But- like the Chinese people themselves- the redoubtable foreigners of Lianyungang quickly colonized a new, better bar some three blocks away. Within a week, sipping on lukewarm beer and shouting over the din of bad karaoke warbling, we had forgotten that Robert's had even existed.

Well, almost.