by Rob Schmitz
“When do you think that’ll happen?” I asked.
“Soon,” he answered.
“Will other cultures look to Chinese youth culture to define their own generational identity?” Henry’s boss asked him.
Henry nodded. “I think so. We have the potential. Everything is in the seed and we have a potential to go very far. I have a firm belief in the root of Chinese culture and that it still has value in a global perspective. And if we can leverage our roots and heritage, we will be invincible in the future.”
There was a pause in the room. Doctoroff and I looked at him. Did he just say young Chinese would become “invincible”? He sounded like China’s Darth Vader. Doctoroff broke the silence, attempting to restore face to his young colleague. “Henry is very exceptional, but usually you have, in my observation of young Chinese, a dream phase before they enter the system. I can’t tell you how many young Chinese women say, ‘I want to go to France and study cooking,’ but ultimately, the system and structure pull them back to conformity.”
Henry smiled calmly, and with a soft voice, he corrected his boss: “I was never outside the system.”
WHILE DREAMERS on one side of the Street of Eternal Happiness marketed tennis shoes and imported cars, a dreamer on the opposite side sold accordions. But business was slipping. Years ago CK helped build Polverini’s supply chain to keep up with demand in the European market. Now with the EU in the midst of an economic crisis, accordion orders were down. What’s worse, the instruments that CK managed to sell were marred with problems. CK had signed contracts with his suppliers and had paid them an initial price to begin production, but after the assembly was finished, the accordions didn’t sound right.
The previous year, CK had spent an entire month at a factory in Jiangsu province rebuilding thousands of accordions. But after the instruments were exported, the problems multiplied. More than two thousand customers in Europe had returned defective Polverinis that had fallen apart after a few months of use. It turned out the Jiangsu factory had used the wrong type of glue. Polverini’s Chinese suppliers were required by contract to compensate customers in cases like this, but when CK traveled to the factory to collect the money, the factory boss laughed at him. “He told me to fuck off. He said it had been over half a year and it wasn’t their problem anymore,” CK told me, shaking his head. “He said, ‘You came here and checked them one by one! It was your fault that they were shipped to Europe! It’s not my problem, it’s your problem!’ ”
That’s when Polverini stopped making accordions in China.
Instead, the company retained CK to sell its Italian-made accordions to middle-class Chinese. Chinese factories may not have treasured the craftsmanship of a Polverini, but China’s rising middle class did. At first it was refreshing for CK to be on the opposite end of the global supply chain. He had traveled throughout China establishing a promising network of distributors. Soon enough, though, another typical Chinese problem arose: a competitor appeared online claiming to sell Polverini accordions at nearly half the retail price. CK called the number on the site and a man with a northern accent answered. “He told me he was selling Polverinis in all sorts of colors, colors like dark blue, which we don’t even make. I told him, ‘Really? You have a dark blue Polverini? Could you send me a photo of that?’ ”
CK had to train Polverini’s legitimate distributors how to deal with customers who had fallen for the ruse. “The copyright problems in China, it’s just horrible,” CK sighed.
Managing 2nd Floor Your Sandwich was adding to the headaches. Now whenever I stopped by the café, there didn’t seem to be anyone working in the kitchen. I asked CK if he and Max had downsized. “No! Everyone just quit!” he said.
CK had fired his chef, and nearly everyone else resigned in solidarity. They were left with two waitstaff and one kitchen helper, a gangly, lost-looking young man who was promptly promoted to chef. A month later, they still hadn’t found anyone to replace the rest of the workers.
And just when the Your Sandwich sign facing the Street of Eternal Happiness couldn’t seem to get any smaller, CK said they were eliminating most of the sandwiches from the menu to make room for breakfast and brunch items. “Nobody wants fancy sandwiches,” CK told me, “but they’ll spend a lot on a pancake which costs next to nothing to make.”
He was also thinking about removing the wall of books and obscure record albums in the restaurant’s sunroom, décor that made the place feel cozy. “All of this gives people the impression that they can stay here all day and read,” CK complained. “People like busier places where you come in and out very quickly. People like renao, hot and noisy.”
CK lit a cigarette and exhaled. His eyes were developing bags under them from a lack of sleep. He was working seven days a week from ten in the morning to one in the morning, dividing his time between selling Polverinis and doing whatever it took to save his restaurant. “I guess we’re putting aside our dream of a sandwich shop for a bit,” he said.
After failing at his first business idea, he was entering a familiar phase of the Chinese entrepreneur: throwing everything onto the wall in the hopes that something will stick. Down the street, I noticed Uncle Feng’s electric griddle was producing an expanding offering of fried snacks. When flower sales were down, Zhao Shiling dabbled in prepaid phone cards. A block down the street from CK was a tiny Kodak shop that sold silk pajamas. The place hadn’t developed a roll of film in years. In a place like Shanghai, consumer fads came and went like a typhoon rolling in off the East China Sea. A good businessman adjusted quickly to the changing winds.
Some of the changes CK had made to his shop were inspired by a trip he had made to Seoul for Polverini. “Koreans care about how a place looks and feels and how things are built and designed,” he said, marveling at everything from the architecture in Seoul to the minutiae of the handles on some of the city’s subways. “They’re not clunky like the ones here in China with plastic ads for telephone companies on them. These are made of steel and they’re round and they fit in your hand, and each of them has a different color: orange, yellow, red, brown.
“Before I went to South Korea, I thought it would be full of people getting plastic surgery and all caught up in how they looked,” CK observed. “But I was wrong. They’re not fake. They’re interesting. You know why? Because they don’t have a government like ours who lies to them and forces them to be uncreative. Their system is different.”
It was a predictably sweeping judgment based on a short trip to a developed Asian country. The South Korean government wasn’t a perfectly transparent model of governance and all 1.3 billion Chinese were certainly not all uncreative drones, but CK was tired and angry, and he felt like ranting. “It’s our education system,” he griped. “It lacks two very important lessons for students: creativity and the ability to love others. If you’re creative, you begin to question things and you see deeper ideas into everything. But we are very shallow and we are unable to do that. We just come out of school very selfish and unable to love others. We only care about serving ourselves. We’re all shallow and selfish.”
YOUNG CULTURE CONNOISSEURS like CK labeled themselves Wenyi Qingnian, literally “Cultured Youth,” or Wenqing for short. The term was often translated as “Hipster,” but Wenqing evoked a love of art, culture, and living life to its fullest without the snobbery and cynicism associated with the hipster label in the West. Another difference was that hipsters were often born into the cozy suburban middle class of a developed economy. Wenqing were not, and they had to work hard to find their way through a competitive and intricate system to earn money to support their interests. CK’s generation grew up in a China that was emerging from decades of economic hibernation. They were China’s first generation in nearly fifty years who had opportunities to work for the time and the means to do things like study existentialism, watch independent films, and visit art galleries. Wenqing were those who incorporated these new ideas into the way they lived, altering their value systems
and making life decisions based on these fresh—oftentimes global—perspectives.
A popular Beijing arts magazine listed profiles of Wenqing in a 2014 article: “An advertising employee who writes critiques of plays and goes to the Philippines for diving trips. In her spare time, she translates cookbooks. Another works at a multinational and is in charge of public relations. She goes to work on a bus and listens to classical music. She copies poems into a tiny notebook each night and has translated three romantic novels from English into Chinese…They want a comfortable life, but also a rich spiritual existence. They appreciate the poetry of Rilke and they go to Europe for fun.”
Sometimes they didn’t come back. Wenqing were known to quit high-paid, unfulfilling office jobs in the big city to search for beatific enlightenment elsewhere, like CK had. In 2013, a young couple who worked corporate jobs in Beijing abruptly quit their jobs and drove their orange Volkswagen Polo station wagon across China to resettle in Dali, an ancient walled town along the banks of a scenic alpine lake in Southwestern China more than fifteen hundred miles away from Shanghai. The blog they wrote about their new life went viral. It was circulated among millions of post-’80s office workers who longed for a similar escape from the pressures of city life.
“We’re not looking for business opportunities,” wrote Shi Xuxia in a blog post; “we only want to live in a small town near the mountains and the water, to pursue a peaceful life, a breath of fresh air, a pot of tea made with snow water, and a meal made with natural ingredients. Many people back home admire us or are jealous of us. All I’ll say is you can do it, too.”
Her final blog before arriving at Dali ended with a farewell to China’s smoggy, pressure-ridden capital:
GOODBYE, BEIJING.
GOODBYE, PM2.5
GOODBYE, UPS AND DOWNS OF LIFE IN THE CITY.
GOODBYE.
A book deal followed. Leaving Beijing for Dali: Do What You Like with Whom You Like was in stores two years later, the ultimate Wenqing experience, neatly packaged and sold through one of China’s largest state-owned publishers.
The book was a hit among young urbanites. Dali was everything cities like Beijing and Shanghai weren’t: the pace of life was slow, wages low, and the air and water were clean, the locally grown food safe to eat. The lake town was completely surrounded by snowcapped mountains. It was an ideal place for idealists: more and more Wenqing from the cities were arriving to town to stay, in search of a better life.
On a reporting trip I took to Dali in 2013, I met several people CK’s age who had dropped everything and had moved there from the big city. “We’ve met more friends here in a year and a half than we did in our fourteen years in the city,” one urban transplant boasted to me.
She had moved there with her husband and three-year-old daughter from Guangzhou, where the two adults had worked long hours in the import/export business. The urban refugees lived in a traditional courtyard home at the foot of the mountains above town, offering a panorama of the water and mountains. Each morning they biked downhill to the old town to drop off their daughter at preschool and to open their wine-tasting gallery among the cobblestone lanes of the old town. Just like CK, the couple had established their shop in hopes of attracting like-minded people.
“There are more interesting people here from all walks of life,” she told me as I enjoyed the view. “We’re friends with film directors, journalists, writers. We get together and talk about how life should be lived and our ideals. That’s the last topic urban dwellers in China want to talk about. Back in Guangzhou, people were only interested in talking about buying new apartments or new cars. All of urban China has been engulfed in a whirlpool of consumption. Everyone is helpless,” she told me.
I asked them about the downsides of living in Dali. Healthcare was bad, they said, the schools weren’t the best, and they were far away from family—the same downsides to being a foreigner in Shanghai. But the biggest disadvantage seemed to be money. None of the Wenqing I had met there was independently wealthy, and between conversations about the evils of materialism, several of them quietly admitted they weren’t making enough. They had traveled more than a thousand miles to sell wine, psychological advice, books, or coffee to people who were just like they used to be: tourists and transplants from the city who had money to spend. Their customers were daily reminders of a time when they were part of the consumer class.
What’s worse, they were now competing with each other to serve these tourists. Even the Wenqing married couple from Beijing with the book deal ran into these problems. In September of 2014, Shi Xuxia stunned her devoted blog followers with the news that she and her husband were packing up and returning to Beijing. She wrote that she had received a “sudden job opportunity” that required her to start working after that year’s National Day Holiday. No other explanation was given. Her final post from Dali was accompanied by a photo of her dressed in a hemp blouse longingly gazing toward the sun descending behind the mountains, radiant clouds hovering overhead.
It’s the last day in Dali. The sky cleared up after a few days of drizzle. I walked up to our terrace on the second floor and stared into a sky full of stars. I spent over five hundred nights in Dali like this. The dream has been achieved, so it’s time to chase the next one. I think that’s life. We are about to start a new life. In fact, every day is a new life. Every day is a beautiful day, isn’t it?
Goodbye, dear Dali. I will return to see you someday.
Dali, Dali…
CK ONCE REFERRED to himself as a Wenqing. But in true Wenqing fashion, he immediately qualified the label, explaining he was more of an engineer by nature. It was his engineer’s mind that had helped him secure the job at Polverini and paid the bills, but it was hard to overlook the Wenqing parts of CK: he was a musician, he read Nietzsche, he dabbled in drugs, and before establishing his sandwich shop, he worked in a store that specialized in Lomography, an obscure art movement dedicated to a Russian camera that devotees used to take colorful lo-fi images of everyday objects.
But there was also a Fenqing side to CK. The term was short for Fennu Qingnian, literally “Angry Youth.” It described young patriotic Chinese who were suspicious of foreign intentions in China but who also didn’t completely trust China’s own leadership. Fenqing were deeply proud of the country’s long history and cultural traditions, and they channeled that passion into fighting for a stronger Chinese role in global affairs. Apart from the generational groupings, the term was yet another categorical box young Chinese neatly sorted themselves into, making introductions a fatiguing exercise in pigeonholing: Are you a post-’80s or a post-’90s generation? Cultured Youth or Angry Youth? Wenqing or Fenqing? After a while, the classifications seemed meaningless. To me they were all simply Qing—young. They were trying to make sense of their world. And they were doing what came naturally to young people everywhere. They were searching for happiness.
WHEN I RETURNED from Dali that spring, I stopped by 2nd Floor Your Sandwich. It was lunchtime, and the place was empty. CK was sitting behind the bar counter deep inside the café, doing the books on his computer. “I’ll be out in five minutes!” he yelled.
He wore a forest green scarf around his neck and a beige sport coat over a button-down shirt sprinkled with flowers. His wrists were covered in Buddhist beads and he was dabbing an open cold sore on the left side of his mouth with a tissue. While I waited, a young foreign girl with bright pink hair wearing a trench coat sauntered in. “Hello, darling,” CK greeted her in British-accented English.
It was sunny but chilly outside. Buds on the plane trees outside the windows showed spring was on its way, but warm temperatures were still a ways off.
The British girl ordered a cup of tea, and while CK made it, he used the downtime to grill her about the different types of English tea. “Proper tea would start with English Breakfast,” she said, the lecture becoming drowned out by R&B playing over the stereo.
CK listened carefully and took notes, her tea came, and she
took it to go, mouthing “Ciao, sweetie,” over her shoulder as she descended the spiral staircase to the sidewalk.
CK sat down next to me and I asked him about girls. “I’m just playing around,” he said, “seeing girls here and there, but I’m getting tired of it. I’d like to get serious about someone. I just haven’t found her yet.”
CK had met his last serious girlfriend over WeChat. She was from the coastal city of Qingdao. Her frequent posts, written in the same breathless style as the blog written by the couple who had moved to Dali, were forwarded to him by some of his friends. It was standard Wenqing material: her dream was to go to Cuba, but her parents wouldn’t let her. So she entered an essay contest to win a free year’s worth of sailing lessons. She won, moved to England, and learned how to sail. After she completed the training, she sailed all the way to Cuba. “She sailed across the Atlantic for eighteen days without showering or anything,” CK said, marveling at the thought that such a woman existed.
Now that sailing to Cuba was out of the way, she was trying to start a café in her hometown, and CK had become friends with her on WeChat after he offered to share his own experiences doing the same. Following a few months of trading stories from the front lines of the food-and-beverage industry, she flew to Shanghai to see him, and a romance blossomed.
“But then she went back to Qingdao. She didn’t want to put aside her dream to start a café,” he told me wistfully, looking like he respected her more for that anyway. That’s what he would’ve done.
I glanced around the empty restaurant and noticed some changes from a few weeks before. There were purple placards on the tables advertising “Free Tarot.” If a customer spent more than one hundred yuan, they could make an appointment for a tarot card reading, free of charge—limited to a single question. The consultation had to take place at 2nd Floor Your Sandwich. “The type of people who come here are curious about this sort of thing, and it ensures they come back to eat here. It’s a win-win,” CK explained.