At night when cycling back to the university campus I would soak in darkness. Everyone would. In the late 1990s there were no streetlights in the suburbs of Beijing. At first it was frightening, than once you’d learned to see with sound it became enjoyable. You’d hear hundreds of feet pedaling in the dark of the night rustling like wild animals in search of a bite. It was a quiet noise, sometimes interrupted by big blue trucks that would pass by, forcing us to jump off the bike and protect our eyes from flash blindness. It always took some time to adjust back to the darkness and start running wild again. I was in my twenties. 12,000,000 bicycles were still operating in the capital city. We were the last generation of youngsters without ever-present cars and traffic jams.
