hēi shèhu

Also, there was some absolutely crazy stuff going on in Songyuan the last month I was there, some of it involving the Chinese mafia.

A bunch of us were out to dinner about a while ago and a really drunk Chinese man wandered into our room (we usually get seated in private dining rooms). He looked at the lot of us and immediately fixated on my Canadian friend. He somehow instantly knew he was from Canada and went on and on about how he loves Canada people and somewhere in his past (University perhaps) he had been very close with a "Canada man." The guy made us all drink with him and we ended up all having to stand up and basically leave mid conversation or he would have kept us there drinking forever.

Before we left, he got my Canadian friend's phone number. He called him a week or so later and invited him out to dinner, so my friend brought a few other foreigners and they all went out. Apparently the guy was again very intensely in love with my "Canada man" friend and also seemed to be pretty shady, mentioning hēi shèhu ties (which essentially amounts to Chinese gangsters). The other foreigners were weirded out and said they wouldn't go out with the guy again, assuming everyone felt the same.

My Canadian friend continued to keep in contact with him though for some reason or other, texting and going out to eat and such. Then, one day, the guy calls my friend and tells him to come outside his apartment. The guy has a Chinese girl there and tells my friend that she doesn't speak any English, but that he should take her upstairs to his apartment, have sex with her and send her on her way. Clearly, this chick is a prostitute. Apparently, this was not so clear to my friend, because he does it.

A few days later, he comes home from school to find the Chinese man, accompanied by two other, large Chinese thugs wielding baseball bats, waiting for him. They demand 5,000 yuan to pay for the hooker. My friend says he doesn't have any money, it's all in his apartment, so they march him up there, ransack the place and take all his money (11,000 yuan total).

Songyuan is a seriously small town. The fact that this happened there is absolutely crazy to me, but my friend was kind of asking for it. In the end, he went to the police a few times (the sex factor made it a "domestic dispute" so they didn't want to get involved), talked to my old boss and a few Chinese friends and ended up getting 5,000 yuan back. Soon after, he got fired.