Enforcement
Know your local police checkpoint.
My social media feed is full of videos of scooterists in Beijing dodging police checkpoints, trying to avoid fines amid new helmet and single-rider regulations. On one hand, it’s not terrible that people are being forced to take safety precautions, but on the other, it’s hard to not feel like we’re being pinched for money, all these enforcement officers tasked with meeting KPIs. How any of us feels about it depends, as much does here in China, on one’s mood that day, liable to swing as unexpectedly as the weather.
Enforcement
After the night of long rain
We idled under shade, heedless, the somnific sun
Subduing the day, torpid, dry at midmorning
Breathing easy, trying to let things be
Seeing how turning a blind eye
Might work. Scooterists passed
Those without helmets and those carrying an adult on the back
Sidling away at twenty-five kilometers per hour
An old woman with liver spots and two sharp rubies
From the back of her son’s bike sized us up
Disdain? Disgust
As if we were here to ruin anyone’s day
A superior drove by pulled up
Wake a little, comrades
Who gave you fuckers the authority to mercy?
We stepped out then to stop them
The ones we could
We ticketed scanned their IDs fined them twenty kuai
The others, the bold, those with nothing to lose or maybe
Nothing to give, steered around the blockade
As we did our best to not look
Also see: Scooters (from May 6, 2024)