The Police Station

I was sitting on a bed in an office, belonging to one of the police man , looking around. The room was cold with dirty walls, two wooden desks facing each other and two beds next to each other on the parallel wall. I felt like I was in an episode of Dexter and that was his secret hiding spot where he  kills and then goes to sleep, satisfied. To my left was a chair. It was a 20^th century torture chair with hands and legs chains. My friend and I both looked at each other with disbelief and we only had one thought in mind, “Take a picture!” My friend pulled out his phone and aimed it at the chair. The police man was trying to spit out an English word, when he finally said “forbidden”. My friend didn't listen and just kept aiming his phone on the chair until he got a clear picture. Without a care in the world, the police man just kept writing things down. At this point we had waited 40 minutes for a man from the foreign affairs department to come. 

Richard finally showed up. He was the only one who was able to speak English. He knew Peace Corps and my Waiban, Zhou. He pointed at my friend and said, “You know me!” My friend was a bit confused, when Richard interrupted and stated that he came to Lanzhou University last year to do an orientation on safety and policy to all the foreigners. Then, he also told me he knew me and we had met before at the Gansu Foreign Provincial Day. He started to work for Peace Corps about 6 years ago and his first case was the stabbing of the American-Asian volunteer in Lanzhou. More men started trickling in just to see the two foreign sitting ducks and were curious to speak to us, except for one guy. He was the chief officer of the police station. When he asked Richard a question in Chinese, my friend laughed at the comment when I asked him to translate. The chief officer said, “If she can’t speak Chinese how the hell is she teaching English?” In which I told my friend to translate, “In my first two months in China, I learned how to bargain, buy my own shit, ask for directions, and tell people what I do, where I’m from,  what my parents do and what I like. You've been learning English since you were 5 and can’t speak one word of it. How the hell are you not ashamed of yourself?” Just kidding, I wish he told him that! At that point I was just fed up with the whole situation and starving that I wanted to walk out.  Richard got off the phone with Zhou, and apparently told him to come. When I asked why, he told me that it would be better if Zhou got here to go over the documents. 

We were moved to another room across the hall where another man was sitting, but he actually looked like a police man. There we were the six of us sitting and staring at each other for yet another hour waiting for Zhou. They were asking me questions about where, how and why it happened. Not word for word, the guy was writing it down. In between lines they would state comments based off of assumptions. For example, “Oh, the two of you were on a date, well it’s a memorable one now!”, “It’s a good thing your boyfriend was there to translate, he can teach you Chinese” , “The two of you look like you match as a couple”. Then after all the paper work was done, I had to stamp with my index finger and red ink on the lines of each statement, including the one where “I’m with my boyfriend”. To piss me off, my friend was joking around that it’s official, and I even fingered it. To make matters worse, my Waiban finally showed up only to take me back home. This poor man was called in the middle of the night to get to the police station that’s so out of his way just to pick me up and safely bring me back home. He looked at me and my friend and said, “When you said you were with a friend that spoke Chinese really well, I thought it was Sarah”. Then I had to tell him that I couldn’t go home because we still had to meet our friends that we were supposed to see 3 and a half hours ago. When we got to his car, I finally got to meet his fiance (which let’s face it, was probably not the happiest woman in the world). He gave us a ride to where our friends were, and we finally arrived at the bar that we then left from 20 minutes later because it was closing.

So, what was it exactly that happened to me that I had to spend 3.5 hours in the police station, you ask?

My wallet was stolen. My Chinese debit card, my American debit card and cash is all gone.  If there is one thing you must know about China it’s that if your belongings are stolen or lost, save the tears and move on because there is no Chinese person with a soul that will give it back to you.

Yesterday was Women’s Day- a big deal for Russians. A good friend wanted to hang out and just take me out on a friendly dinner. Despite the fact that I spent all day at home, there was something in my gut telling me not to go. However, I brushed it off and just decided to go. I took a taxi to meet up at Lanzhou University. Apparently I have a tendency to lose my cell phones in the taxis by not checking twice before getting out. I didn’t want the same thing happening to my money so I took out 20 yuan, put it on my lap, closed the wallet and put it back in my purse and zipped it up. I had the 20 yuan in my hand ready to pay. When we arrived to my stop I handed the 20 yuan, got change, put it in my pocket and walked out as another person was getting in. I was waiting to cross the street and I finally got to the other side and we took a bus from there. When I sat down I opened up my purse and noticed my wallet was missing. We got off at one of the stops where there was a police station nearby. My friend knows Chinese very well and was translating for me about what happened. The guy suggested going to the main bus terminal and looking at the cameras to see if someone stole it. How that would exactly help, is beyond me. The person already must have gotten off by the time we got to main bus terminal, and you can’t really track anyone down in China unless that person is a foreigner. We go there anyway, and a woman calls the police for us in order to report the theft. A car finally comes. On the outside it definitely looks like a police car, but when I get in it looks like a regular car. There are no bars to separate the front and the back; however, all taxis in Lanzhou have those bars. 

The guy driving is dressed in casual wear -a red sweater and jeans. I turn to my friend and say, “Can this man be trusted,?”, he responds with a, “Well right now people are seeing 2 foreigners in a police car, and they are probably thinking,  ‘can they be trusted?’ so basically, we’re screwed’ "

So lesson of the day, if you have a gut feeling to not leave your house- follow it!