My musings on Monday about the dangers of a sudden explosion of violence between Chinese drinkers might at first have seemed somewhat mis-titled, since the incident last Sunday that prompted me to write was not in fact a fight.
I thought I should further illustrate my point by describing the biggest, most protracted (but also most surreal, funniest) bar fight I have witnessed in China.
When I was on holiday in the northern city of Harbin last year, there was one bar my companions and I visited almost every night. Indeed, it was the only 'bar' we were able to discover in that part of the city. I can't now remember the name of it, but it was decent enough: cosy, booth seating, lots of dark wood; and an endearingly megalomaniac owner who had plastered the walls with photographs of himself in various military uniforms and other fancy dress. (However, it was stupidly expensive, so we did most of our drinking in an old Russian restaurant in a basement nearby.)
There were rarely many people in. On the night in question, there was a solitary Russian guy in the booth behind me and my two companions, and four Chinese guys drinking together at the booth on the other side of the small room, just inside the front door. They didn't seem to be drinking heavily or making a lot of noise, so I hadn't been anticipating any threat. I wasn't paying much attention to them; I had my back to them.
Suddenly, there was a loud crash behind me. I spun around to see that a full beer bottle had just exploded against the wall behind me. It had probably only missed the Russian's nose by a foot or so, and the back of my head by considerably less.
What appeared to have happened was that one of the Chinese guys had abruptly fallen out with his best friend and had thrown a beer bottle at him. Yes, he had thrown a beer bottle at the person sitting right next to him - and MISSED! I don't really see how that's possible, but he'd managed it!
Now, I was absolutely livid that this idiot had nearly brained me with his wild throw, but there didn't seem to be any way I could productively intervene in the situation. The Russian guy, I imagine, was similarly disgruntled, but appeared completely unfazed - and merely moved to another part of the bar to enjoy the unfolding show from a safe distance. Perhaps he'd seen it all before.
The four Chinese guys, amazingly, managed to retreat from whatever the flashpoint had been; the three less drunk ones were patiently trying to calm down the bottle-thrower.
No, the trouble came when one of the staff said something. I didn't catch what. I don't think it was anything very strong; perhaps not even a request to leave, or settle down. But it seemed that having the effrontery to mention the incident at all rubbed all four of them up the wrong way - the bottle-thrower especially, but his friends as well. And that simmering anger which had briefly shown itself started to bubble up again. They began to abuse the staff. The two waiter guys were fairly weedy, and backed off. But the head barman took one of their insults very personally. We could tell he meant business when he divested himself of the unmanly green barista's apron his boss required him to wear.
And yes, after an extended preamble of posturing and shouting, we did actually get a brief, furious, Wild West saloon-style brawl with the two main antagonists - the barman and the abusive bottle-thrower - attempting to batter each other with barstools.
There was a curious theatricality about all of this, though. Even though everybody seemed to be completely out of control, I wondered if - subconsciously at least - they weren't reining themselves in a little. One table was violently overturned, and two or three stools were used as weapons. Several of the tables had bottles or glasses or vases or lamps on them. The walls on the side of the room nearest the fight were lined with glass display cabinets. Wildly swinging barstools came within inches of these glass cases, or of tables filled with glasses.... and yet..... nothing was broken. It was quite uncanny. The barman got in a few very solid-sounding whacks across the bottle-thrower's back with a stool, but all parties emerged from the mêlée without significant injury. Thank heavens.
After all this, the four guys went and sat back down. Yep, despite having nearly trashed the place and insulted the barman's mother, they did not leave. Well, I think they left for a while, and then came back. It was a very, very protracted incident; for a while, there threatened to be further eruptions; the guys would hang around outside for a while debating whether or not it was "over", and then come back inside to start it all up again.
The police were called (and, amazingly, didn't take that long to show up). They didn't ask the guys to leave either. They approached the situation with a worldweariness that suggested that they saw this sort of thing every single night - perhaps, indeed, every single night in this very bar. Their approach - not as punitive as I would have wished (remember, this guy had come within an ace of fracturing my skull with a beer bottle) - did seem to be admirably effective: they just talked and talked and talked, calmly and matter-of-factly, without trying to ascribe any blame..... until everyone had cooled down and forgotten what all the fuss was about. Each of the participants in the brawl was interviewed individually; some were taken outside for further words (but then allowed back in). Eventually, I think, the miscreants agreed to hand over a few hundred kuai as an apology for causing the disturbance (though not actually for damage caused, since - astonishingly - there hadn't really been any). And then, finally, they left.
It had been a fascinating slice of life. But I wouldn't want to have such experiences too often.
The only damage, in fact, (apart from a few splinters of glass embedded in the wall) was that one or two of the barstools used in the fight had gone a bit wonky. But the bar staff soon restored them to stability by tightening up the wingnuts which secured the legs to the seat - and they performed this task in such a routine manner, they gave the impression that this was indeed a very common event there.
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