Snapshot Yangzhou: shortcut

It was Team China versus Team USA one hot day, and we were the sideline cheerleaders. They had kept this rivalry up for a number of sports: basketball, table tennis, and most certainly, soccer. We, the girls, were not the most cheery crowd, but we tried to be present when we had the time. Out of nowhere, this guy came across the soccer field, mid-game, on his bicycle, and we thought surely something important had happened, and he was either coming to tell us or the guys, or perhaps just trying to get somewhere quickly. None of the above. He pedaled lazily all the way across the field, right through the game, stopping to talk to no one and continuing on through the campus leisurely. It was moments like this that I appreciated and marveled most at the Chinese way of sharing space; who were we to say this green patch was entirely ours, anyway? It's kind of exhilarating and a bit frightening too, to live within a cultural sense of community space that is unheard of in my own country. No one cared at all, and the game was not affected.