Complete and Creative

Embarrassed on the Great Wall…

If you lost in a footrace on the Great Wall to a middle-aged lady who was at least thirty years your senior, you’d be pretty embarrassed too.

Pictures of the Great Wall don’t get any more stereotypical than this.

That’s what happened to four buddies of mine and me a few years ago. Thanks a lot, Billy. Great suggestion. We lost our dignity and cash.

How could this have happened? Why, thanks for asking. Let me tell you.

There were six of us (one of the guys felt a little tired and unabashedly opted out of the race). I was the youngest of us all, 18 at the time. The oldest among us was 23. Granted, none of us were exactly athletes, but we didn’t have any serious health problems either. Therefore, being the young men that we were, we had no excuse to do anything less than leaving the middle-aged lady in our dust.

She was one of those numerous souvenir vendors you’re going to find on the Great Wall. After many fruitless attempts to sell my friends and me little golden plaques that say “I’ve Climbed the Great Wall!” and different art books filled with pictures of the Great Wall through the four seasons and numerous grammatical mistakes in English, Japanese, and various European languages, she started talking to Billy about his ethnic background.

“You’re American, aren’t you?” she insisted.

“No, I’m Chinese,” Billy repeatedly replied out of ethnic pride.

They were speaking in Mandarin. I don’t think the lady really believed Billy considering the way his sounded.

Anyway, I never found out what convinced Billy to make the following proposal (desire to prove something, impulse for amusement, who knows), but he told the lady that if she beat him up the flight of fifty steps (you know there are plenty of those on the Great Wall), he would buy something from her. Somehow, he got most of the rest of us in on it too. I’m not sure about the others, but I just felt as if I needed a workout.

Billy worked out forty-five minutes a day in his dorm, doing twisting crunches and stuffing his schoolbag with all his books to use it as weights. But what none of us really thought about was that we had all been living the fairly sedentary life of summer international students, eating out for almost every meal, going clubbing two or three nights a week, taking taxis everywhere we went instead of biking like the locals. While we were living like spoiled American students, this short, tanned, unimposing lady was walking up and down the Great Wall on a daily basis, trying to support herself and her family.

By ripping off ignorant tourists, but who’s counting?

We started up the stairs, oblivious of the lady and mentally taking bets which guys would end up there first and last. I mean, of course, the lady would finish last. The only question was which one of us fast young men would make it to the top first and who would be the one to finish right before the souvenir lady.

She beat us. And not by a small margin either. We saw her stopped there while we crawled up the last dozen steps or so.

I shelled out more RMB than I would’ve liked in exchange for a flappy art book that’s been collecting dust on my shelf for the past three and a half years.

Moral of the story? You can’t judge a book by its cover. Either that, or just don’t mess with middle-aged ladies in China.