PC Room Stories

Since I've been in China, for that matter since I left Korea in July, I have been operating sans computer. This has not been easy, in part because I can't search for porn, waste time with video games, or illegally download music and tv shows like I used to. But I've also been forced to rely on my local PC room, which is something less than perfect.

First let me just get away with praising Korea once more. Korean PC bangs, despite being dark smelly generally unhappy places, represent the difference between flying first class and hanging on for dear life as a stow-away amidst the cargo whence compared to their Chinese counterparts.

My biggest complaint is how much the internet sucks here. It's slower than the short bus in reverse. Time wasters like youtube, facebook, and the washington post are all more or less inaccessible because of The Great Firewall that protects the people's republic here.

Then there's the filth. Public PC rooms are typically not the cleanest of places, whether you're in sunny Barcelona or chilly Seoul. But the ones in China have managed to distinguish themselves. Roaches are abundant, well-organized, and bold; I can't count how many times I've had one crawl across my keyboard and caress my typing hands before I recoiled in horror, shrieking like a banshee. And one time I avoided my local PC room for an entire week, a lifetime in Internet hours, because a rat jumped from the ceiling and landed a few feet away from me before scurrying away into the impenetrable darkness.

Also, the computers are all locked away, protected in a plastic cage, meaning you can't open the CD drive to play Age of Empires or even plug in your iPod to try and charge it.

The quality of people you meet at these places is also something less than spectacular. I remember the first time I walked into one, I encountered a stream of giggly derka before I finally realized they wanted to see my passport, and when I logged onto the computer and couldn't spot the ubiquitous Internet Explorer icon, I asked the helper dude a single word I thought he might understand: "Internet?" It's a cognate in Korean and anyway I thought surely someone who spends so much time around computers must know that word, whether he's Chinese or not. Instead he looked dumbfounded, pointed at me, and then made some joke to his buddy.

This last one's the kicker, tho, the gawkers. I come into my local PC room now 5 or 6 times a week, so I'm more or less a fixture and no one pays me any mind. But every now and then there'll be some newbie who's never seen me before and who just has to check up on what the laowai's doing with a computer. Just the other day I had some guy walk over to my chair and stand behind me, alternatively watching me and my monitor, for something like 30 minutes. At one point I turned around and stared at him for a good 15 seconds, but it did no good. For him, watching me read wikipedia and check email was a fulfilling and rewarding way to pass the time.

I will not miss these places.