The breaking of the Fellowship

Once upon a time, there were three of us. The Three. The Three Amigos. The Unholy Trinity. Even, on occasions (our team name at a Tuesday night pub quiz we participated in a few times), The Three Represents*.

It might have seemed an unlikely grouping at first. Tony, a dithering, mild-mannered Brummie; Big Frank, an argumentative London bruiser (well, Margate - close enough; Frank insists it's where all the East End villains keep their 'country homes'); and me. The only things we had in common were that we all fancied ourselves as 'academics' (Tony had been a philosopher and Frank a military historian in minor British Universities; both had fallen victim to downsizing in the academic sector as student numbers contracted at the beginning of the Noughties) and were of a similar age (Frank and Tony were both just past 40 when I first met them, while I was still a little ways short of that unhappy landmark; but we were all significantly older than the rest of the teaching staff we found ourselves working with, most of whom had not that long finished their undergraduate careers, and tended to behave as if they were still students). Oh, and, of course, we were all fond of a drink.

Fate pitched us together nearly 5 years ago when we all found ourselves coming to China to teach English in a private college in central Beijing. It was a wretched first posting for us: a starvation wage (and little confidence even that we would receive that, since inexplicable delays and inappropriate deductions were commonplace); a wretchedly incompetent and untrustworthy management (the archetype of every 'bad employer' story you hear about China: lazy, corrupt, dishonest, bullying); oh yes, and then SARS came along. Stressful times. The sort of pressures that foster an intimate and lasting camaraderie amongst even the most ill-matched of associates.

Ill-matched indeed! Frank is a hulking bear of a man, with close-cropped hair and a glinting gold crown on one of his front teeth; he looks every inch the nightclub bouncer (which indeed he was - one of his more salubrious employments at that! - before becoming "a leading authority on the use of cavalry in 17th Century warfare"). Irascible and curmudgeonly, he has a particularly intimidating 'psycho stare'. Tony 'The Chairman', by contrast, is a slightly built, bumbling figure, and exasperatingly meek. (He does, however, dress quite well, and has a certain air of quiet authority about him: when we went out together, the Chinese would regularly assume that he was the 'boss', the 'big shot' of our trio, and that Frank and I were just his bodyguards or henchmen.... hence the 'Chairman' nickname.) And me? I suppose I fell somewhere in the middle: as tall as Frank, but nowhere near as burly; better dressed than the big man as well, I hope, (his idea of dressing up was to put on his England rugby shirt and his 'best' trainers) though not as dapper as The Chairman; more conciliatory than Frank, but more assertive than Tony; yes, somewhere in the middle.

In our first year here, our social lives were constrained by our miserably small income; so we spent almost every night together, eating in cheap local restaurants, and drinking cheap local beer till the early hours of the morning. We were starting to drift in separate directions by the end of that year, but still kept in close touch, and had regular reunions to reminisce about those strange, wonderful early days here in Beijing.

At the end of the second year, The Chairman left. He tried Thailand for a while. There was talk of him trying Saudi Arabia, but that fell through. He returned to China, and tried Shanghai and Hangzhou. Now, he's finally back in Beijing. He's visited quite a bit over the past couple of years, but I have missed having him around on a regular basis. At the beginning of last year, Big Frank finally quit to try his luck in South Korea instead (he'd never really taken to China: too many run-ins with slippery employers and braindead cab-drivers). I've made new friends in the last few years; I have much more money now, and a more broadly-based social life as a result. However, none of these newer relationships run quite so deep as those first China friendships, the bonds forged between us through shared adversities - there'll never be another 'Three Amigos'.

* For non-China-watchers, 'The Three Represents' is Jiang Zemin's definitive contribution to Chinese Communist theory. Not only is it a dismally clunky slogan, the substance of it is pretty impenetrable too. I have pointed out to Chinese friends that the standard English translation of the third 'represent' - "the Chinese Communist Party always represents the orientation of the advanced culture" - is drivel, and they've said to me, "Oh, it doesn't really mean anything in Chinese either." The bit that really matters is No. 2, about representing "the advanced productive forces of society": this decodes, more or less, as "greed is good!"; it is the Party enthusiastically embracing unfettered capitalism (and trying, though with rather limited success so far, to bring the new entrepreneurial class within the Party fold).