I live on the fourth floor of an apartment building, and just now coming home, as I lifted my bike to carry it up the stairs, I happened to bump into a motorcycle parked in the stairwell just a tad too hard. Immediately an ear piercing siren went off. I froze, just a little scared, and then started to bolt up the stairwell. A white guy heaving a bicycle up your stairs after he attacked your motorcycle tends to cause too many questions. And I don’t have quite enough Chinese to explain “accident,” but I think I would be able to say “I don’t know, maybe the guy in 2B hit it.”

But my neighbor has good reason to have an obnoxious alarm on his motorcycle. And I’m not carrying a bicycle up 4 floors because I like the exercise. We do this because Zhangye has a lot of thieves. This is something that took me a while to understand.

Sure, when I arrived in Zhangye, people told me: “Be careful. Zhangye has a lot of thieves.” But I chalked this up to good old fashioned Chinese superstitions. Like they believe brown sugar is good for women to eat because it gives you more blood in your body. And raw green beans are poisonous. So sure I would say, yeah, Zhangye has a lot of thieves, and I won’t eat brown sugar unless I’m in a major trauma unit. But all along I would be careless with my things and eat brown sugar in my apartment, alone in the dark, with self-destructive, reckless abandon.

This was until the day my first bicycle was stolen. I remember this night the way I’m sure Mary Todd Lincoln remembered her first play at Ford’s theater. I locked my bike in a dark area, and then walked several blocks to eat dinner with some other volunteers. After dinner, when I returned, the bicycle was gone. For weeks after, I was mired in depression, engaged in soul searching, and even bargained with God. Why did this happen to me? Why my bicycle?

I finally managed to move on. I bought a new bicycle and bought two locks. Things seemed to be going fine. Then one day, my Chinese tutor and I went to lunch. I parked the bicycle outside the restaurant, locked it, and went inside with her to eat. When we came out, it was gone.

I kept pacing back and forth, looking at all the bikes locked in front of the restaurant. Oh yes, there were plenty of bikes out there, and only one was stolen. Mine. I replayed the events in my mind; everything was fuzzy and faded – there was the guy with the hat, and another guy with a coat, and, oh yeah the other guy with the other hat… It was like the Zapruder film replaying in my mind, and I had just eaten noodles at the Texas School Book depository. The emptiness in my heart soon became an enraged fury. I must have been watched the entire time – they knew the bicycle was mine. People are going in and out of the restaurant all the time – you wouldn’t dare steal a bicycle if you didn’t know who it belonged to, because it could belong to the next guy coming out the door. I was being watched the whole time, and when I had a mouthful noodles at my table, much like an innocent newborn baby eats noodles, they struck like thieves in the night, only it was the afternoon.

For the next few weeks, I was in a very dark place. Every stranger I saw on the street was the bicycle thief. I had fantasies about booby-trapping my bicycle – nothing too dangerous mind you, just enough to give them a small scare. Perhaps I could electrify the chain, and when they try to cut it, it would complete the circuit, blowing them up a mere hundred or so yards in the air…. In my mind, the thief who stole my first bicycle was the same guy who stole the second. I imagined him at home, with his wife, eating filet mignon and drinking champagne in their penthouse apartment:

“Oh Maude, the latest bicycle we stole rides like a dream! That poor Alex is a nincompoop! Stealing his bicycles is more pleasurable than counting the diamonds in my Rolex!”

“Oh dear you are so brave to steal his bicycle! How I love you dear for stealing bicycles!” (This is what Maude, his wife, would say back to him).

The bicycle thief would adjust his monocle and start puffing on his cigarette in its quellazaire. Then he would throw back his head and laugh. Laugh at me. Laugh at my pain. Why does my bicycle thief look like the Penguin? Why do I equate losing a bicycle with a Presidential assassination? I’m not exactly sure.

After a while, I started to calm down. While my paycheck here is pretty small, I am lucky enough to have savings. And it just so happens that the restaurant where I was eating is right next to a neighborhood of mud and straw houses. So once I had bought my 3rd bicycle, and was able to put some distance between me and the latest theft, I thought perhaps someone from the mud houses had stolen it. If you are born into circumstances without any opportunity to better your station in life, it is very hard for me to condemn petty theft like that. Then I started to feel really good about myself, that I had given the poor guy my bicycle – I mean, people just don’t go around giving bicycles away every day, so it takes someone with a really big heart to do something like that. Someone like me.

And I’m not the only one who has had things stolen. There is another American teacher at my school, Patrick, and he estimates he is on his 7th bicycle. But he has been here for a year and a half, and his patience is starting to wear thin. Just a few weeks ago, we went to a club. I got really drunk, and went home. He started to leave, but couldn’t find his sweater. He went home, then got angry and went back. Apparently he made this huge scene and demanded that they give back his sweater. The staff was very concerned, and started scurrying around, looking under furniture, and basically apologizing to him on their hands and knees. I’m sure one of them would have offered the shirt on their back to Patrick if it would have helped. And Patrick just wouldn’t have it – I mean, come on, he walked in there with a sweater, drank for a couple hours, danced, and now it’s gone? He finally gave up, I think maybe 3 or 4 morning, and left.

The next morning when I woke up, I was a little hung over, and started to clean up the mess in my room. And I happened to find this sweater that didn’t belong to me. When I gave it back to Patrick, I was tempted to blame it on the guy in 2B. I mean, who would believe the honest explanation? That I drunk slept-walk out of the bar with his sweater? Why did I even want the sweater? This time I couldn’t reconstruct the events – too much wine. All that came to mind was me going to one of the bar’s cleaning ladies and dancing with her that night.

So Patrick was right to be suspicious, but of the wrong people. And I’ve certainly learned my lesson – lock your bike up tight, and never lose sight of it. It seems like the people of Zhangye already knew this all along, and I was just slow on the uptake. The guy in my building certainly knows this – that’s why he puts an alarm on his things. Because if he didn’t, there’s a chance one day I could wake up with a splitting headache and a strange motorcycle in my bed.