aikou was a fabulous blaze of crackling neon, palatial seafood restaurants, karaoke parlours and hair saloons enlivened by lurid pink lighting. We drove under a pedestrian overpass so crowded with people that I immediately began thinking in headlines:
  



 20,000 DEAD IN OVERPASS TRAGEDY.




	"What's going on there?" I asked the driver. 

	"Been a murder," he said darkly. 

	"What, on the overpass?"  

	"No, under it."  

	"Phew!" I gasped in what I hoped conveyed a good mixture of shock and `tell me moreÆ horror.  










	"Inevitable, isn't it?" he said. "That's progress for you. Modernisation. You're going to have a killing or two." 





	This, I should explain, is the kind of conversation you find yourself having if you take the trouble to spend four or five years learning Chinese. You master the grammar and the vocabulary, and then you spend the rest of your life wondering what on earth people are talking about.
 














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All text © 1997 Chris Taylor. 
All images © 1997 Lonely Planet Publications. All rights reserved.