11 The fight

Eight years after I haven't seen one person throwing his fist into another or throwing a chair at another after I finished primary school, I didn't need to listen to Maximus(Gladiator) to bring up my courage.

So 5 in the morning, after the runs, I was getting ready to go to Shen Zhen, a southern city in China to visit my cousin. My roommate asked me if I wanted to take a shower. I thought it was weird. We had a common bathroom with two shower places. I thought he was gonna use one and another was occupied or something so I said yes that I indeed need to take a shower before I leave for the morning train.

But a few minutes after I washed myself up, 20 people ran into the bathroom, asked the other person in the bathroom to come out, blocked my bathroom door and started dumping salt, sugar, flour,vinegar, soy sauce that were mostly more than 2 years old that they had in their kitchen. After the culinary down-pour, they started the sermonizings again.

They asked me to think about "how disrespectful I was towards seniors", "how I was wasting their time" (when I said I had to go for the train and did not have the time for this) etc.

We exchanged words when I first realized that I could argue and querrel in Cantonese which I again learned off watching Hong Kong TV shows. For half an hour, we argued and we finally got to the point where they said "if you could come out ...". I didn't let them finish when I knocked the bathroom door down and broke all the plastic brooms, mops that they used to latch the door. I have had no chance to test how sturdy the bathroom door was but I was surely very mad.

Then they kind of talked to me at other end of the corridor and the event was soon over.

I learned that cultural shocks can be fierce. No matter how I verbally mocked them, they still hold their strong belief that by doing all of the things they do, they show their perseverence and love of their hall.