Last Chance to See

its axis.
    The other sound is the Chinese bicycle bell. There is only one type of bell, and it’s made by the Seagull Company, which also makes Chinese cameras. The cameras, I think, are not the world’s best, but the bicycle bells may well be, as they are built for heavy use. They are big, solid, spinning chrome drums and have a great resounding chime to them which you hear ringing out through the streets continuously.
    Everyone in China rides bicycles. Private cars are virtually unheard of, so the traffic in Shanghai consists of trolley buses, taxis, vans, trucks, and tidal waves of bicycles.
    The first time you stand at a major intersection and watch, you are convinced that you are about to witness major carnage. Crowds of bicycles are converging on the intersection from all directions. Trucks and trolley buses are already barreling through it. Everyone is ringing a bell or sounding a horn and no one is showing any signs of stopping. At the moment of inevitable impact, you close your eyes and wait for the horrendous crunch of mangled metal but, oddly, it never comes.
    It seems impossible. You open your eyes. Several dozen bicycles and trucks have all passed straight through one another as if they were merely beams of light.
    Next time you keep your eyes open and try to see how the trick’s done; but however closely you watch you can’t untangle the dancing, weaving patterns the bikes make as they seem to pass insubstantially through one another, all ringing their bells.
    In the Western world, to ring a bell or sound a horn is usually an aggressive thing to do. It carries a warning or an instruction: “Get out of the way,” “Get a move on,” or“What the hell kind of idiot are you, anyway?” If you hear a lot of horns blowing on a New York street, you know that people are in a dangerous mood.
    In China, you gradually realise, the sound means something else entirely. It doesn’t mean, “Get out of my way, asshole,” it just means a cheerful “Here I am.” Or rather it means, “Here I am here I am here I am here I am here I am …,” because it is continuous.
    It occurred to me as we threaded our way through the crowded, noisy streets looking for condoms that perhaps Chinese cyclists also navigated by a form of echolocation.
    “What do you think?” I asked Mark.
    “I think you’ve been having some very strange ideas since we came to China.”
    “Yes, but if you’re weaving along in a pack of cyclists, and everyone’s ringing their bells, you probably get a very clear spatial perception of where everybody is. You notice that none of them have lights on their bicycles?”
    “Yes …”
    “I read somewhere that the writer James Fenton tried riding a bike with a light on it in China one night and the police stopped him and told him to take it off. They said, ‘How would it be if everyone went around with lights on their bicycles?’ So I think they must navigate by sound. The other thing that’s extraordinary about cyclists is their inner peace.”
    “What?”
    “Well, I don’t know what else it can be. It’s the extraordinary, easy unconcern with which a cyclist will set off directly across the path of an oncoming bus. They just miss a collision which, let’s face it, would not harm the bus very much, and though they only miss by about an inch, the cyclist doesn’t appear even to notice.”
    “What is there to notice? The bus missed him.”
    “But only just.”
    “But it missed him. That’s the point. I think that we get alarmed by close scrapes because they’re an invasion of spaceas much as anything else. The Chinese don’t worry about privacy or personal space. They probably think we’re neurotic about it.”
    The Friendship Store seemed like a promising place to buy condoms, but we had a certain amount of difficulty in getting the idea across. We passed from one counter to another in the large open-plan department store, which consists of many different individual booths, stalls, and counters, but no one was able to help us.
    We started at the stalls that looked as if they sold medical supplies, but had no luck. By the time we had got to the stalls that sold bookends and chopsticks, we knew we were on to a loser, but at least we found a young shop assistant who spoke English.
    We tried to explain to her what it was we wanted, but seemed to reach the limit of her vocabulary pretty quickly. I got out my notebook and drew a condom very carefully, including the little extra