I’ve referenced this life lesson so much that I feel I should write an authoritative account that I can reference. I’ll try to keep the fun educational aspects to the parentheses. It’s worth mentioning that this story takes place on the outskirts of a dirty town you’ve never heard of in non-coastal China; there were pockets of modernity and a McDonald’s downtown but shortly after this story a donkey-drawn cart of toilets overturned in front of my building, strewing porcelain around the dirt road (this gives you a pretty accurate feel of the place).
From Socialitter to Capitalists’ Fat Cat
Baijiu (”By Joe” = White liquor, a foul tasting vodka-like drink) got his name iteratively, after we learnt out that “Chairman Māo” (mao1 meaning cat, and pronounced like an angry mother saying “now” slowly) was co-incidentally very similar to “Chairman Máo” (mao2 meaning hair or fur and pronounced more like “ow!”). Clearly this was unintentional, as my 98 gram weakling of a cat had barely a Deng Xiaopeng (4′11″) frame, never mind the great helmsman’s 5′11″. Nonetheless, we were told his political career would go better with a less contentious name, and no, Chairman Meow wasn’t going to cut it either.
As the runt in a 9 kitten litter where only 8 found homes, Baijiu was thrown out onto the street and had to compete with all the other strays for scraps from the restaurants in the open air market. He didn’t do so well. After a few weeks though, he stumbled onto a sucker (me) with an informal agreement with a veterinarian back home that if he (I) were to, say, let a cat starve to death, she would kill him (me) in his (my) sleep. So I bought the little guy some spam in a tube for a nickel (the cheapest kind of meat on earth), and people stopped and stared — it was a little strange, the idea of buying food specifically for a house pet; most local cats lived on diets of leftover scraps of bread, vegetables and tiny bits of meat and here was this stray getting the royal treatment from a lǎo wài (meaning foreigner, but in the same sort of vein as a tractor salesman from Iowa might refer to an interracial gay couple from New York thinking of opening up a chai tea shop in his town as foreign). This cat knew a good thing when he found it.
Baijiu was hooked, I was hooked. My girlfriend, who had only recently been making scary noises like “adopt” and “a Chinese child” was hooked and distracted. We took him home, bathed him, made him a collar and bought him over 30 cents worth of food (these prices are all as accurate as I can remember).
Stacey and I were living on a compound of the provincial power company in a few rooms in somewhat renovated workers quarters built in the 60’s. We each had twenty times the living space of other workers our age (of course, I doubt I would’ve been coaxed across the sea to live in a cot and share a small sink with 11 other people) but I’m allergic to cats, so Baijiu had to be an outdoor cat.
Smashing the Gang of Foreigners + Cat
All the buildings housing foreigners had “assistants,” peasant girls who slept behind the front desk. They were ostensibly there to help us, but mostly they kept a log of our comings and goings and made sure we didn’t bring any Chinese women back to our apartments. Stacey and I were relatively popular with the girls, She gave them popsicles, I hadn’t tried to sleep with any of them and we both speak a lot more Chinese than you normally get from white people. And they loved Baijiu, so they told us they’d help keep our secret, which was a little odd, since “I have a cat” doesn’t seem like a very interesting secret.
Baijiu used to sleep on top of a large column in the croquet pitch beside our apartment because he was afraid of the local stray cats. He couldn’t get down so every morning I’d get him down and give him his spam and milk.
One day he wasn’t there, the girls were concerned but reserved and wouldn’t tell me anything. This is what we’ve managed to piece together, none of this would hold up in court:
The foreigners weren’t supposed to have pets, but the people in charge of enforcing that rule weren’t really sure where we were in the hierarchy (I was drinking buddies with the local party secretary and Stacey was literally the poster girl for the school) so rather than confront us on the issue, they took my cat and drove him a little ways out of town and left him there.
Communist agents of the provincial power company disappeared my cat.
In which I destroy the suspense
At least a week and a half later, I was walking home from the office around midnight and a little marmalade ghost ran out across the plaza to me. He knew which side his bread was buttered on, and I guess he had more luck reading road signs than I ever did.
The cat came back.
By then we thought he was a goner, but the cat came back; he just couldn’t stay away.
And some Clarifications
Baijiu was actually kidnapped 3 times, the first was by the girls who ran the company store. They “adopted” him, tied him up in front of the store, and fed him scraps for a few days until I found him. The second time was the communists, and the third time was just before Stacey and I left town. The propane delivery man took Baijiu home to his daughter without asking our permission, but since we were looking for a home for him anyway, that may have been the best outcome anyway.
