Don't Wake the Pool

After five summers in my youth spent working at a swimming pool, I have a pretty good idea how they are supposed to run. Perhaps it is because of this knowledge that I am stupefied by my new watering hole. Having joined the pool on the 7th floor of the mall next to my office, I can enjoy the rewards of physical activity between my Chinese and English lessons, but this daily release of tension itself doubles as a cause of stress.

The pool is 25m long, 1.45m deep, and has absolutely no demarcations to specify swimming lanes - in short it’s a giant open pool; no lane lines, no stripes on the bottom of the pool, nothing to guide anybody. Swimmers are free to choose their own path across the pool and, believe me, they do. Most of the swimmers choose the breaststroke, which enables them to see everything around them, but for crawl-lovers like me, we’re out of luck. Adopting the same mentality that most Chinese have on the sidewalks, I hurtle myself up and down the pool, with little regard for myself or others. Though you might think this is cruel, be warned that the other swimmers offer no more mercy than I. It’s a shark-eat-shark pool out there.

This bewildering pool, while providing nearly as much stress as exercise, also affords me time to think. It was while swimming and thinking about how poorly the Chinese build pools that it struck me – “what if they knew exactly what they were doing?” What if they had built a perfect pool and everyone but me knew how to swim in it without crashing into one another and I was the obnoxious foreigner who didn’t know the rules? Maybe the Chinese did know what they were doing after all. I thought about all of this as I stormed ahead, forcing a fellow swimmer to dodge into my thunderous wake.