I only voted ‘idiot’ because there was no option for ‘holy Mother of Jesus, you’re idiotness eclipses entire galaxies!’. Idiot.
with all due respect, you’re a dumb ass for getting in a bar fight in a foreign country and especially in china. You know, don’t you, that if you win, the other guy can then put a world of hurt on you legally?
And IMHO based on quite a few years in China, that you have to have really shitty language skills, totally clueless, and generally be kinda a dick to even get in a bar fight in china. A foreigner can generally lighten the mood and make the agressors buy a round if you play it right. Granted, northerners, where I figure you were (are) tend to fight more while southeners tend to swear.
ETA: many foreigners in China get to feeling that they are special and societal rules don’t apply to them. Speaking in generalizations, the foreigners usually have more money than the average Chen, come from a country that many Chinese have dreamed of going to, generally physically bigger, may find themselves more attractive to the opposite sex than they are used to (akin to certain people going ga-ga over a French accent in the US), physically may be bigger, etc. Many foreigners, especially drunk students (of which I was one at one time), can pull stunts that might get the law called but are generally tolerated. Experience this enough and you may find yourself crossing an absolute line in the sand and getting fucked over severely in a situation you never ever in a million years would have gotten into back home.
I had a buddy get in the face of a Taiwanese gangster boss in Shanghai. Swearing in Chinese and physically threatening. Bodyguards beat the ever loving crap out of him, gangster boss kicked him real good a few times, and he spent weeks in the hospital. Lucky in that he did have any real permanent damage. Yes, alcohol was involved. Thing is, my buddy probably could have ended up going out partying all night with the boss man or at least had a good laugh and hugged like the prodigal son, had he not been a dick.
(I wasn’t there but I did visit him soon after in the hospital)
My first “bar fight” was at a roller rink. (In a rival town. Early '60s.) We were all standing in line waiting to get in. Some guy came up and pulled the brother of a friend out of line and punched him in the face, breaking his nose. I heard the crack and saw the blood. And fainted like a doofus. When I came to we were surrounded by a bunch of girls with ponytails tied back with chiffon scarves. I learned not to check out “during,” (save it for later) and how to go from zero to screaming MF in less than sixty. Good times.
I say you get no extra points for it happening in China unless you have the Chinese embassy demanding your imprisonment/deportation/execution. Then, your numbers go into the stratosphere!
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I voted for normal / everybody does it. Just because I didn’t want to call you an idiot.
It also depends upon whether you’re instigating or if you’re coming to somebody’s (or your own) defense.
The worst (or best?) fight I’ve even been in was at a pool hall. An elderly man was getting drunk with his son and fell out of his chair. My (almost) elderly friend was just trying to help the man get up. This somehow pissed off the son and the drunken son went to attack my friend. Probably to defend his father, but the racial slurs (n-word) were not required. This is how the fight started. It spread through the entire floor quite fast. The place quickly turned into a Tarentino film; everybody got involved. I went after the drunken son in defense of my friend. I was lucky enough to get the first blow in and dragged him to the ground. Then I pinned him down in a corner (and got in a few cheap shots) while the rest of the fight was going on. As it spread, chaos ensued. The band got shoved off the stage, the drum kit went through the plate glass window. Bottles were flying. One drunk girl got mad at whoever was fighting her boyfriend and started hurling billiard balls at people. By the time the police got there, it was so bad that the cops just walked through the entire bar and pepper sprayed the whole room, cuffing some of the larger participants. Big drunk son got arrested and my friend got away with a small cut under his eye. I was unharmed 
Another time, I was at (a different) bar and this guy was totally berating his girlfriend for something she had done (I didn’t catch what that was). After about 10 minutes of his drunken rant, I had to say something. The conversation was mostly 'treat her nice, don’t be a dick to women, etc.) After a bit of posturing, he punched me in the gut and I bent over. He then slammed my head into the bar, breaking 3 teeth and knocking me out cold. When I came to, the medics were cleaning all of my own blood off of me. I didn’t get a single blow in. Not so lucky that time, but my intentions were good. I just can’t stand people yelling at women to the degree that he was.
I have no experience with the laws in China, but I’d say it was a risky move there. Not being a local can be a bad thing in the eyes of the law. They’d probably believe the locals before a gaijin.
As an aside, this is why I don’t approve of the UFC and the like. You have learned that getting your butt kicked hurts. I hope you have learned your lesson.
I had to vote for idiot. A month ago, one of my patients was clocked good in a bar fight, went to the hospital, was examined, then released, with no trouble but a shiner. I have been treating him for PT for a totally unrelated trouble. He called in sick last appointment with “the flu”, he had been throwing up and his legs felt weak. I could hear the hesitations in his speech on the phone, and it seemed odd. So I started quizzing him on if he had any vision changes, numbness, and other things that indicated neurological trouble. He denied everything, except; “That’s funny, I was writing this down and I can’t read my writing”. Cue 5 minutes of arguing in which I try to convince him this is an emergency, not something where he should wait and see if it goes away. I won the argument, and after his trip to the ER, he was admitted for brain surgery to remove the large hematoma from the very slow leak of blood for the past month.
You forgot Option #6: You are unfortunate, but bad things happen to good people. And bad people. And all points in between.
Physical Therapy?
Non psychics need to know!
Oops physical therapy. Totally unrelated to the bar fight brain bleed. I forget that professional jargon is not real English .
Like "my elbow has an Ouchy spot " degree of unrelated.
I voted “You are normal. Everyone gets into a barfight at least once.” but would’ve preferred to have voted “You are normal. Everyone can get into a barfight at least once, but twice is clumsy whilst thrice or more shows you for the malevolent, ignorant thug that you are.”
I got into a bar fight once without even realizing. I was in our college bar, and the night had a ‘special’ on triple vodkas - £1.50. It was a large bar and there was over a hundred in there, plus no restrictions on who entered. I was engaged with the usual gambling I enjoyed at the time when I noticed something was odd in my peripheral. I looked around and there was what could best be described as bedlam where once was a mass of staggering, slurring and good-natured drunkenness. It took a while for me to take in the nature of this particular scuffle, for it had no limit to participants. I saw friends fighting strangers, strangers fighting acquaintances, strangers fighting strangers and chairs, glasses and tables flying across the room.
By the (unoccupied, at this point) DJ table I noticed a slightly diminutive, aggressive and particularly drunk mate go down under the feet of someone I hadn’t clapped eyes on before and who looked particularly non-student like. I wandered over and picked up said friend, where upon I received several blows to my own face. With my free hand I directed some fists to my/our assailant’s nose which, miraculously given my state of inebriation, made contact enough times for him to quickly retreat. I took/dragged my friend by his cuff to the bathroom and offered some wet tissues for the cuts to his head and hands. Once I was happy the men’s was a safe haven from the conflict I returned to the arena to find some more of my compadres, but was barely able to stand up straight so couldn’t see what was actually going on.
Within a few minutes two ambulances, four Black Marias full of police in stab vests and two cars full of the local CID turned up and quickly were able to disperse a rapidly tiring throng. Several glasses flew after their arrival but a relative normality returned quickly enough. They were able to quickly identify and arrest a group (of non-students) who’d already been thrown out of several local bars that night, and warn the manager for serving intoxicated patrons. In the time they were identifying who was who one of the girls from that group punched my (then) girlfriend in the face. I raised an arm to strike back and (literally) the long arm of the law intervened as a very large copper grabbed my wrist. Upon seeing he was armed with baton and a badge I relaxed and said ‘Sorry, mate’. He let me go and I and my girlfriend joined our other friends - once we’d located them all from both the men’s and women’s and all cuts had been bandaged - and left by the nearest exit.
What they didn’t find out was that the manager had bought multiple fifths of vodka from the local shop and all of the takings went into his own pocket and not the budget of the college. Crazy days.
Unless you were entirely innocent and could not, by reasonable effort, get the hell out of the way, IMHO you are an idiot.
I’m going to go with idiot. I guess you’ve never heard of a retina detaching from a blow to the head.
I had a brief fight start over and around me once. I corrected some guy’s ill-conceived observation of one of my family members and decided the best way to deal with his ensuing vociferous challenge of my masculinity was to completely ignore him. He evidently suffered from abandonment issues because the less I heard him, the more concerned he seemed to become that his feelings were not being validated. After taking one of many sips off my beer and then setting it back down on my table I was quite surprised to feel a closed fist navigating the side of my head. Pretty much immediately several people I recognized as regulars began a sincere campaign of redirecting the fellow’s attention. When they’d finished making their point I reckoned it fairly sucked to be him.
That said, I’d have to rate the OP as an idiot. For when I realized what had happened, my first instinct was to identify a viable egress route. Running away has always been my go-to strategy when it looks like fisticuffs are inevitable.