At the hostel later that night, young Chinese travelers gathered in the lobby, which had a heated floor, so we walked around in our socks. Two young college women were in a corner writing postcards. They told me they were writing poems and allowed me to copy one into my journal. It ends:
Winter grips our eyes, but summer drives our legs,
And northeastern fare propels our chopsticks.
The world is so big, we must see it ourselves.
All the traveler’s sorrow fades away,
What better place to rest than this?
It was an adaptation of a poem by the famous Chinese poet and wanderer Du Fu (712–770 AD) that most Chinese have to memorize in grammar school. When I asked, the students said they were writing to their friends back at school a few provinces away. A couple sat reading together on a couch. I asked what they thought of the festival. They said they loved it. What about all the lines, I asked? We had had to wait in line for an hour just to get in. They shrugged. The young man said, “This is our first time ever traveling together as a couple.” They cuddled closer on the couch.
For Feng and Ma, their trip to Harbin was as much about the thrill of being on the road and taking pictures as checking out the tourist destinations. They spent an entire late afternoon on Harbin’s Songhua River, frozen three feet thick in winter, making sure to avoid the hovercrafts that thundered by giving rides to tourists waiting on the shores. Feng and Ma had their cameras ready just before sundown when the ice fishers pulled out nets full of flopping fish.
The Chinese poet Zhuangzi (369–286 BC) writes that one of the highest ideals in life is being on the road with a full stomach (“Hán bǔ ér xī, gǔfù ér yóu”). Feng and Ma splurged on big meals of northeastern specialties—huge plates of sweet-and-sour pork, a Harbin specialty; smoked and spiced salmon; and stir-fried sausage and cabbage—with flavors worlds apart from the modest southern fare they grew up on. Much of Harbin’s food has become a fusion of Russian and Chinese, and the city has the best bread and sausage in China. According to popular Chinese archetypes, northerners also eat more noodles and drink more dairy than southerners and so are taller and more full-figured. Just as Chinese recipes are adapted for Western tastes when they are brought west, even southern China’s “northeastern cuisine” restaurants were different than the real deal in Harbin. “The serving sizes were literally twice as big as the ones we’d get back home,” Feng recounted, using his hands to trace an oval twice as big as his head. “I don’t know how these guys eat so much. The high school girls at the table next to us ate twice as much as we did,” he marveled. “The Northeast is something else.”
Deeply instilled in Chinese culture is romance about travel. In the Chinese literary world few poets stand taller than Li Bai (701–762 AD) and Du Fu, two wizened men who wandered different paths during the later years of the Tang Dynasty (618–907). Hundreds of millions of Chinese schoolchildren have had to memorize their poems, and with memorization inevitably comes internalization. Both poets were inveterate wanderers, and their poems espouse a deep respect for travel as the path to wisdom and experience.
Du Fu’s hometown, Gongyi, was not far from Chengdu. Two years after I visited Harbin, I visited Gongyi. It had, not coincidentally, become a major tourist destination. One of the idioms used most often to describe Chinese tourism is “人山人海,” rén shān rēn hǎi. It is also one of the most popular idioms to say in translation. If you are ever in a big crowd and say, “people mountain people sea!” (that is, a sea of people), your Chinese friends will love it. I was there with a group from the travel company run by Wei Wei’s family, and we waded through the people sea to tour the ancient wanderer’s old stomping grounds. I walked with Wei Wei, her cousin, and her grandfather as they recited together Du Fu’s ancient words:
I remember the temple, this route I’ve traveled before,
I recall the bridge as I cross it again.
It seems the hills and rivers have been waiting,
The flowers and willows all are selfless now.
The field is sleek and vivid, thin mist shines,
On soft sand, the sunlight’s color shows it’s late.
All the traveler’s sorrow fades away,
What better place to rest than this?
12
A Young Man and His Party
How the New Generation Sees Its Government
Tom and I returned to our places on the tan leather couches in our apartment. It was one o’clock in the morning. The overstuffed couch on which Tom sat was tattooed with faded blue ink doodles—a giraffe on the arm rest, a stick figure man with a bow and arrow on the seat cushion—clues to a different time left by landlord Wang’s grandchild a few years before. Tom shifted his weight several times and then sat quietly, waiting for us to start.
We were tired. For the last few days I’d been interviewing Tom, uncertain what I’d do with all the material but certain we’d both want a remembrance of the last half year of living together. We’d hung four large whiteboards on one wall of our apartment. During the last several months, Tom and I had had long, deep discussions about economics, politics, sex, history, how one ought to spend one’s youth, relationships, family, and purpose. As the conversations evolved, we’d draw and plot as we argued about issues, rotating the whiteboards as the conversations became more complex. He studied philosophy and was an expert on Confucianism.
We had recorded six hours of interviews. I had proposed that we take a break for the rest of the night and pick up the thread the next day, but Tom had insisted that we keep going. He was, in part, looking for a distraction. His crush, whom I’ll call Cindy, had not replied to his last two WeChat messages. The talking calmed his nerves.
At just twenty-three years old, Tom was a probationary member of the Communist Party. Soon he would join the Party’s nearly ninety million full members. He wanted to embark on a career in government because he believed he could be a fair, considerate, thoughtful, and intelligent leader for his people and his country. He was ambitious, capable, intelligent, thoughtful, and proud to be Chinese. He was also, by academic achievement, one of the better minds of his generation, at the top of his class at Sichuan University, the best university in western China. Tom’s ultimate goal was to be the mayor of a “small or large town” with a population of one to fourteen million. Power, then, was also a motivator for Tom; politics was a way to be somebody. It was too early to tell if he was on track, but those were his ambitions.
A bottle of baijiu rested on the glass table between us. Tom reached over and poured the clear liquor into two white porcelain teacups. We both drank a toast. “Drunkenness,” he intoned with mock severity, “reveals what sobriety conceals”*—a well-known business idiom. We clinked glasses.
I asked Tom to turn his phone off so he could focus on our conversation. He looked at his Huawei phone for a moment as if pleading for it to buzz to life with news from his crush, then reluctantly powered down. Cindy would have to wait.
“Let’s start with a word association game,” I said. “Do you know what word association is? I say a word and you reply with the first thing that comes to your head. Fast.”
Tom nodded and readjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose.
“Milk?” I started.
“Cake,” Tom replied.
“Girls?” I said.
“Marriage,” Tom fired back.
“Planes?”
“Fly.”
“Kong Qiu?” I said, using Confucius’s original name.
“Confucian thought,” Tom rejoined, maintaining the rhythm.
“Marriage?”
“Divorce.”
“Parents?”
“Kind.”
“Money?”
“Shit.”
“Russia?”
“Big.”
“India?”
“Poor.”
“Taiwan?”
“China.”
On the table between us sat a Taiwanese history tex
tbook that was illegal to possess in mainland China. I had smuggled it through customs when I returned from a trip to the politically contentious island. Tom and I had spent the better half of the afternoon comparing the Taiwanese textbook with a history primer used in a mainland Chinese high school that a friend’s little sister, Xia Xia, had given me when she graduated. She’d grown so tired of my borrowing her books that she’d given me the whole stack. Tom was a history buff and loved comparing the Taiwanese history book with Xia Xia’s. Earlier that day, before he dived into the divergent narratives, he had cautiously turned off our phones. “Just in case,” Tom had said. “Of what?” I asked. “Big Brother,” he whispered, referencing George Orwell’s sci-fi dystopia, 1984. Smiling, Tom then had moved to unplug our Internet modem too.
“England?”
“The Queen.”
“Germany?”
“Tanks.”
“Japan?”
“Porn.”
“North Korea?”
“Crazy.”
“South Korea?”
“Kimchee.”
“America?”
“Powerful.”
“Sexuality?”
“Straight.”
“Love?”
“Stupid.”
“Autocracy?”
“Stable.”
“Tom?” I asked, but I used his Chinese name.
“Hopeless…,” he said, gazing down at his inert phone. Tom smiled and ducked a pillow launched from my side of the room.
* * *
In his own way, Tom was a typical Chinese nerd. He was probably more comfortable opposite a computer screen than a person, a far more capable conversationalist over WeChat than a white tablecloth. He had had one girlfriend early in college. They were together for more than a year, but—and he was quite open about this—they never had sex. Tom also was never interested in visiting a prostitute; although they are not numerous, they certainly are available in China. He was waiting for a real relationship, but it had not come along. Tom was not an extrovert. He also was not tall or rich or handsome, which is what every Chinese mother wants in a son-in-law. He was ambitious, however.
Tom had grown up as the government’s plan for modernizing China unfolded. Every five years the Chinese define a new five-year plan, a map for the whole country, including major milestones along the way. Chinese presidents can also set longer-term goals. When President Xi Jinping took power in 2012, he declared two primary long-term goals for the country, the Two 100s (see chapter 8). The first is to turn China into a “moderately prosperous” country by 2021, the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.*
Tom’s dad owned a bakery, where he and Tom’s grandfather baked a pastry from a secret recipe that their family had kept for decades. On the strength of his grandfather’s pastry recipe, Tom’s family had become, in the parlance of the Party, moderately prosperous, middle class with Chinese characteristics. The pastry had a flaky crust with a sweet and savory filling. What kept crowds coming back was the trace of 花椒, huājiāo, the peppercorn spice that creates a numbing sensation in your mouth and is Chengdu’s signature style of heat. The happiest I’ve seen his grandfather was when I visited the bakery and, unable to help myself, ate a half-dozen of his signature pastries. He smiled ear to ear and sent me back to America laden with boxes of pastries. Those baked goods paid for Tom’s high school education at boarding school in Chengdu, a forty-five minute bus away, and the family’s new middle-class life. They lived in a new apartment complex with a large high-def flat-screen TV. They had an at-home soymilk machine and an automatic soup maker that allowed bone broth to simmer safely overnight. Their water filtration system and heater provided ten different temperatures for various strains of tea. Their new microwave looked like it could lift off the counter and blast off into space.
Tom’s parents were against his commitment to a career in politics. His mom worked in government as an administrator. When she was climbing the ladder in the government system, it was bloated with deeply rooted corruption. The best universities in China were considering Tom for a graduate school scholarship in philosophy. She liked the idea of her son’s being a respected academic. “Why can’t you just start your own business?” Tom’s father asked.
Tom had weighed his parents’ considerations carefully and remained resolved to try to make his way in government, certain he could make a positive impact.
Then he met Cindy.
The woman of his dreams came from a middle- to upper-class family, whereas Tom’s family had moved into the middle class from considerably less prosperous origins. Cindy had just returned from studying in England at a middling university.
Chinese used to describe a perfect match as 门当户对, mén dāng hù duì. It means that two households are of equivalent wealth and stature. Tom told me matter-of-factly that his household had less status than Cindy’s; she was not out of reach but a measurable notch higher. Tom hoped to win her over with his intelligence and ambition.
But Cindy had been decidedly lukewarm toward Tom since she met him. They texted back and forth, but she kept him at a safe distance. Whereas her family would have considered a young suitor with government ambitions an appropriate match only five to ten years earlier, in the more constricted government atmosphere of 2016, when the anticorruption movement more closely scrutinized the perquisites of a government job, even the mayor of a city would not earn as much as a middling entrepreneur.
Cindy had told him her stance against government work was about freedom. With so much opportunity now to grab the life you want in China, why join the slow-moving, low-wage bureaucratic government? Her ambivalence had thrown Tom into indecision about his future.
* * *
Freedom was in many ways a buzzword that cropped up in all my conversations, friendships, travels, adventures, meetings, and even dates in China. Young people craved freedom, talked about it, tattooed the word on their body, daydreamed about it, and went to bed hoping it would stir up from the mists of their dreams.
For about a year, I asked people what freedom meant to them. In classrooms, the library, at bars, while playing basketball, badminton, or mahjong, I’d make a point of asking about freedom. Almost everyone described a sincere desire for freedom, from China’s poorest provinces to wealthiest cities, and then went on to explain their money problems or the family pressure they faced.
Tom’s generation’s attitude about the government tends to be, almost overwhelmingly, summarized by the Ming dynasty idiom “Heaven is high and the Emperor is far away.”* More than indignant or displeased, most young Chinese people are simply indifferent. They are focused on other things, and freedom stands paramount.
The freedom most young Chinese people craved was not liberation from an oppressive, restrictive government, but rather freedom from an impossibly demanding set of cultural traditions and expectations, as well as the freedom to determine their own fate. Older generations, including that of Tom’s and Cindy’s parents, had not always felt as if they were in control of their own fate.
I’d ask, “What about freedom to vote?”
Most people would only shrug. “That’d be nice too.” Some would say that, with such radically different levels of development and education across China, their country wasn’t ready for it. “Our system works if the leaders are virtuous,” Tom would tell me.
One young woman named Jing, a podcast host on a popular program about rock ’n’ roll, explained democracy in the context of China’s most famous rocker, a Beijinger named Cui Jian.† Cui famously played on a rickety stage during the Tiananmen protests. Some say his song “Nothing to My Name” became the anthem of the entire movement. “Cui Jian’s song resonated with people because of feeling small in China, of feeling like an ant in a big anthill of a gazillion people, all trying to run to the top at the same time,” Jing said to me. “That is why Cui Jian is still so relevant today. Give us democracy and you’re still just one vote in 1.3 bill—” Jing
stopped and recalculated, correcting herself. “—nearly 1.4 billion. That isn’t having a say. It’s an ideal that doesn’t mean much on a personal level. Young Chinese just want to feel like we have control over our own lives.”
Most frustrating, of course, was the issue of censorship. Cindy’s phone was her ever-present companion. Cindy, twenty-two, belonged to the half of the Chinese Born After ’90 population who checks their phone once every fifteen minutes.1 She spent a significant amount of time clicking through links she got through her WeChat content subscriptions or articles and videos that her friends shared. A day in her life might look like this:
Cindy wakes up in the morning and looks at Fitness Girl’s daily burst of news, a workout for the day, an article on how to get the so-called mermaid line (the V formed by lateral abdominal muscle lines, and de rigueur to be considered a be a hot, fit woman in China). On this particular day she also spends an extra minute or two on a full-length article featuring pictures of the British actor Jason Statham with his shirt off and arrows labeling his neatly delineated muscle groups. She reads an article about travel in Sichuan and forwards it to her WeChat Friend Circle. Then she goes to her internship at the bank. While she is working, her mom sends her a news piece about a local Sichuanese official who’s been busted for taking bribes—the state-sponsored newspaper has denounced him for abuses within the Communist Party. Cindy glances at it. Then she watches videos of puppies slipping off furniture and a panda playing in the snow at Canada’s Toronto Zoo. She shops for a while on Taobao or Jingdong—70 percent of her generation prefer to shop on mobile. She’ll buy a Korean brand—real, not fake—because she cares about quality. Later she reads an article, “Ten Pieces of Dialect You’ll Only Know If You Grew Up in Chengdu!” They are mostly curse words. She’ll also read an article about the opening in Chengdu of a new Apple store, the twenty-sixth to open nationwide. She posts another article to her WeChat group that disagrees with the findings of “It’s Decisive: 5 Best Hotpot Restaurants in Chengdu.”
Young China Page 23