Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation

by J. Maarten Troost

  It was after crossing a street that I came to my second observation about life in Beijing: Do not play chicken with Chinese drivers. Even if they see you, they will not slow down. Even if the pedestrian light is green, they will not slow down. So do not play chicken with Chinese drivers. Or you will die.

  A moment later, I made my third observation about life in Beijing: Do not play chicken with Chinese cyclists. See observation 2. Same applies. You will die.

  And most of Beijing hadn’t even woken up yet.

  Never before had I felt so fearful as a pedestrian as I did on that early morning. After dodging the loogies that came whistling past, I’d find myself at an intersection. I would dutifully wait for the pedestrian light, the flashing man, to turn green, and then, assured that I had the right of way, I would confidently take my foot off the curb, only to nearly lose it a moment later as a car hurtled past, sending me sputtering back toward the sidewalk. A moment later, while the little man still flashed green, I’d spy an opening in the traffic and again set forth, only to find myself dangerously entangled amid a dozen cyclists, who may or may not have been cursing at me. I couldn’t say for sure. Chinese for Dummies didn’t cover colloquial cussing.

  How, I wondered, was one expected to cross a four-lane road in China, a road shared by cars lined six abreast, with another two lanes carved by a sea of bicycles and mopeds? How does one navigate through the mayhem that is a Chinese city? Very, very carefully, I deduced. Crossing a street was no straightforward wander from curb to curb. It was a problem to be broken down into six parts. First, I’d dart through the mass of bicycles and mopeds that hugged the road near the curb. From there, I’d cross the street one lane at a time as cars whished by just inches from my being, and I’d try very hard to not linger on the noteworthy fact that China has the world’s highest per capita rate of vehicular fatalities. And so I moved, a quick leap at a time, as fleets of cars zoomed around me, driven by people who, it occurred to me, probably hadn’t been driving for all that long.

  It was with some surprise, then, that I suddenly found myself on the vast expanse that is Tiananmen Square. I was excited to be there, not merely because I had crossed a dozen intersections to get there and managed to live, but because Tiananmen Square is one of those iconic places that I had always wanted to see. It was gratifyingly familiar in that Communist theme park sort of way. Here was Red China—the lustrous portrait of Mao hanging in its place of honor above the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the fluttering red flags, the immense Great Hall of the People, the towering Monument to the People’s Heroes, and of course, the Workers Cultural Palace, because no celebration of all things red is complete without a Workers Palace. Vehicles are forbidden on the square, though exceptions are made for tanks, and in the early, hazy morning, only a scattering of Chinese tour groups were beginning to assemble there. With so few people, its massiveness was laid bare. More than a million people could fit comfortably within its dimensions. Now and then, Mao had enjoyed rallying his Red Guards, and as I strolled about my spine tingled at the thought of Mao’s call and response with a million homicidal teenagers. Be violent! Destroy old culture!

  But today there were Chinese tourists. They were easy to identify. Each group was given a distinctive baseball cap. There was the red group and the green group and the baby blue group, and each was tightly gathered around a guide holding an umbrella. As I wandered around, happily gawking, I played an exciting game of spot the secret policeman, and by the time I reached the Chairman Mao Mausoleum, I figured I’d counted more than twenty, though I may have been mistaken. It is entirely possible that the tough-looking men wandering about in their Members Only jackets were conventioneers and not government goons. Still, it seemed imprudent to let out a lusty “Free Tibet Now”—Tiananmen Square, of course, being one of the better places in the world to get beat up for protesting.

  I absorbed this celebration of Socialist Realism, the architectural style that glorifies the proletariat by making a mere individual seem very, very small. As I neared the entrance to the mausoleum, I was approached by a young man in a honey-colored Members Only jacket.

  “You cannot take a bag here,” he said in English, pointing to my daypack.

  “Can I leave it someplace?” I asked.

  “I will take you,” he offered.

  I had no idea whether he was a policeman, an employee of the mausoleum, a hustler, or just a helpful fellow looking to assist a befuddled foreigner. I followed him, and suppressing the dread I felt as he directed me through six lanes of traffic, I became his shadow, which was okay because, as I’d already discovered, the Chinese are very accommodating when it comes to infringing their personal space. He led me toward a building where I could drop off my bag.

  “Xie xie,” I said, mangling the word for “thank you.”

  “You have money?” he said after we had darted back across the road.

  “Yes, I kept my wallet. Thanks for asking.”

  “Twenty yuan,” he said with a hopeful smile.

  I gave him ten, which was far more than his service required, but I was new to China and hadn’t yet acquired the flinty-eyed determination to haggle for the Chinese price. I took my place in line; it was still early, before 9 A.M., and by Chinese standards the line remained relatively short. Perhaps 500 of us waited for a chance to gaze upon the Chairman. Meanwhile, over a loudspeaker we listened to a recounting of the life and times of Mao Zedong while waiting for the grim-faced guards in crisp blue uniforms and white gloves to let us in. Actually, I had no idea what they were talking about over the loudspeaker. Perhaps the voice was informing us that there was a blue-tag special on Mao watches in aisle three of the gift shop. Who could say? Certainly not me.

  A flower vendor sold fake roses, and a fair portion of the waiting crowd purchased them. I guessed that most of the visitors were from somewhere in the far hinterlands of China. Having lived in Sacramento, I can recognize a fellow yokel anywhere.

  Finally, we surged up the steps and entered. Inside, we were greeted by a white statue of the Great Helmsman, and it was here that visitors deposited their roses, bowing deeply as they did so. Mao as Buddha. I wondered what happened to the daily pile of plastic flowers. I guessed they were probably swept up and sold to the next group. Dillydallying wasn’t encouraged, and the crowd shuffled forward, carried by its own momentum. In the adjoining room lay Mao himself, tucked under a cozy red flag featuring the hammer and sickle.

  Typically, I find the presence of dead people a little unsettling, but there was nothing ghoulish or macabre about Mao. This is because he is orange—a festive playful orange, toylike, as if he were nothing more than a waxen action figure in repose. And that is probably all that he is after thirty years of death. I almost felt sorry for him, a diabolical tyrant reduced to a morbid curio. But then I noticed the reaction of my Chinese companions. I had expected some good-natured joshing—Look how orange he is. Do you think he’s a fake? It’s so hard to tell in China. Mao had been quite dead now for thirty years. Surely, one could poke a little fun at the fat despot. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. People bowed before him. Some of the older ones even wept. They couldn’t have been more reverent if they were viewing their own grandfathers, a spell broken only by our emergence into the next room, the souvenir emporium, where we were encouraged to buy authentic, straight-from-the-source, Mao watches and Mao cuff links and Mao portraits and, of course, Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, otherwise known as The Little Red Book. More than 900 million copies have been sold since it was first published in 1964. And it is no wonder. During the Cultural Revolution, to leave home without one was to risk a thumping by a deranged youth or even exile to a labor camp. To stand before Mao Zedong, dead though he may be, must be an interesting experience for those whose formative years were spent learning that there is no god but Mao.

  I reclaimed my bag and returned to the square, which was now, only an hour later, seething with crowds. There were more vendors selling The Little Red Book. I walked
past legless peasants on carts. A man offered to sell me his charcoal portraits of Mao, Vladimir Putin, and George W. Bush. How to choose a favorite? In the distance, near the imposing walls of the Forbidden City, soldiers marched past the looming portrait of the former Chairman. I walked back to my hotel, noting the plethora of black Audis with tinted windows, the vehicle of choice for Communist Party officials. Chinese drivers yield to this car, and from what I’d observed, they yield for no other.

  A strange place, I thought. Wandering around Tiananmen Square had felt like a walk into the rapidly receding past. Perhaps it was also the smell of burning coal that prevailed in Beijing, an odor I associate to this day with the Communism I remembered from my childhood visits to Czechoslovakia. I am half-Czech, and when Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, most of my family had thought it was an excellent time to leave the country. My grandfather, however, had remained, and my mother, who had legally emigrated when she married my Dutch father, often took my sister and me to visit during the gloomy years that followed as Czechoslovakia discovered that it wasn’t quite done with Marxist Leninism just yet. Tiananmen Square, with its red stars and Stalinist architecture, reminded me of those years, except that at no point in Czech history would people there have regarded a man such as Mao as anything other than a villainous despot. But perhaps the Czechs had had better information. Indeed, even today in China one can still be tossed in jail for “incitement to overthrow the government” simply by publishing articles about the Cultural Revolution that deviate from the official line, which holds that the excesses of the time demonstrate the perils of allowing the public to participate in politics. At least the government acknowledges that Mao was capable of excess. Nevertheless, that to this day there are people in China—the vast majority, in fact, who regard Mao Zedong with adoration, while his heirs commute to work in luxurious black sedans—suggested to me that this new China people were speaking of wasn’t quite here just yet.

  And then, back at my hotel, I turned on the television.

  Of all the things I never expected to see in China, Tweety Bird speaking in Mandarin was certainly one of them. I watched as once again Tweety Bird confounded a sputtering Sylvester the Cat. How odd, I thought, to hear a cartoon cat speaking Mandarin Chinese with a lisp. Then I turned the channel. It was a commercial for Stay Fit Health Powder, a powerful new cream that enlarges breasts. It showed a woman being mercilessly mocked by her big-breasted friends. She had tried breast-growth lotion after breast-growth lotion without results. Until she tried Stay Fit Health Powder. The advertisement tastefully demonstrated its enhancement power by showing anime-type breasts ballooning upon application of the cream. It finished with happy testimonials of other customers, who were shown carelessly reclining on the couch, reading a magazine, bending over to water the plants—and all this could be yours for 99 yuan.

  Okay, I thought. In a single morning I had gone from Mao Zedong to Stay Fit Health Powder. Perhaps China isn’t so simple after all.

  Fortunately, I had a friend in Beijing. And a friend is a very good thing to have in Beijing, a city of 17 million people, give or take a million, inhabiting a municipality that is roughly the size of Slovenia. For many years, I had lived in another capital, Washington, D.C., a city that many think has been transformed over the past twenty years. Not so long ago, Washington was a sleepy hamlet in the South notable for its swampy weather and dissolute politicians. The weather has remained the same, of course, and so too the dissolution of the politicians, but what’s changed in Washington is the exponential growth of lobbyists. It is really quite amazing that the government of the United States was able to function without them for quite so long, but now that everything from education to war is regarded as a commercial enterprise, the private sector has moved in. Whereas once you could be reasonably confident that the neighbor next door was an employee of the federal government, today should you have a pressing need for a cup of sugar, it is just as likely that you’ll be knocking on the door of Blackwater’s friendly representative in Washington. Money permeates the city. Untidy neighborhoods have been transformed by Whole Foods. The mom-and-pop delis have made way for Pottery Barn, and today Washingtonians speak smugly of their rivalry with New York, a self-proclaimed rivalry about which New Yorkers can barely muster a snort of derision. Nevertheless, it remains true that the Washington of the mid-aughts looks and feels like a vastly different place than the Washington of the mid-1980s, that colorful era when the city was ruled by a mayor with a fondness for crack and whose most celebrated zinger was “The bitch set me up.”

  But nothing can compare with the transformation of Beijing. It is an immense, seething city. Washington still has but one ring road, the notorious Beltway, and you are either inside where you matter or outside where you don’t. Beijing is constructing its sixth ring road, and within those six rings, an entire city is being razed and reborn. Tiananmen Square will always remain an ode to Stalinism, but just past the Great Hall Of The People lies an ode to the odd—the new and otherworldly National Theater, otherwise known as the Alien Egg. Throughout Beijing, the superstars of international architecture have been given license to realize their inner whimsy, with the result that today no city can claim to have embraced the avant-garde with greater enthusiasm than the capital of the People’s Republic of China. From the Bird’s Nest, or Olympic Stadium, to the Twisted Donut, the new home of CCTV, Beijing has said good-bye to the bland uniformity of Mao’s day. Whether it succeeds in creating a cutting-edge capital for the twenty-first century—China’s century, they hope—or whether they’re merely constructing tomorrow’s Brasília remains to be seen, but there is no denying that today’s Beijing is buzzing.

  To help me navigate the wonder that is contemporary Beijing, I called my friend Dan. Once upon a time, Dan had been an unassuming temp in Washington, D.C. Like me, he had received a graduate degree in international relations, and while our fellow graduates were finding jobs with the State Department, the United Nations, and Citibank, Dan spent his days filing and rearranging supply closets—also like me. But, unlike me, Dan had real-world skills. He spoke Chinese. He had studied in Nanjing. He had even been the quality-control manager at a shoe factory in China. And so one day he stuffed his last binder, organized his last supply closet, typed his last invoice order, and left the world of temping for the new land of opportunity to become the man he is today.

  Dan the Man, titan of the Orient.

  Dan and his business partner had arrived in Beijing several years earlier to help fill the yawning gap between foreign investors and Chinese businesses. “There’s the Western way of doing things,” he explained, “and there’s the Chinese way of doing things. We try to bridge the two.”

  And make some money. I felt so proud. I remembered when he was a mere pup, just another temp at the National Association for the Advancement of Proctology, and now here he was, fixer extraordinaire in China. Dan knew Beijing, and as he showed me around, he was very helpful in pointing out the best market for pirated software and in explaining that the migrant women standing on the corner with their babies were not merely migrant women standing on corners with their babies, but also purveyors of pornography, a fact that flummoxed me just a little until he explained that policemen don’t want to deal with babies, ergo the baby accessory for dealers of pornography. Very thoughtfully, he then turned my attention to the Dongba Hospital for Anus and Intestine Disease.

  At night, once I could safely stay up past 8 P.M. without nodding off into a jet-lag-induced, drool-producing slumber, Dan introduced me to the trippy mayhem that is Beijing night-life. It was breathtaking. Of course, as a parent of two kids under the age of five living in Sacramento, it didn’t take much to impress me. Indeed, I couldn’t recall the last time I had been inside anything fancying itself a club, though I’m fairly certain it must have been back when INXS was king. Twenty years ago, Beijing had been about as sexless a city as humanity is capable of creating, and now here I was, somewhere in the slinky depths of
Club Banana, listening to a throbbing techno-funk-house-electronica-groove. Dan, helpful as always, translated as the stunningly beautiful young woman who stood before me inquired whether I’d like to dance with her, and just as I was beginning to feel particularly good-looking, I was informed that the privilege would cost me 300 yuan.

  Now and then at night, I’d feel as if I were anywhere—London, Tokyo, New York, feeling as groovy in a nightclub in Beijing as I did in a lounge in London. The China of the Mao era seemed far removed. In the darkness of night, beneath the glimmering neon, this Beijing, with its thumping nightclubs and plethora of elegant restaurants, felt familiar—provided, of course, one ignored the loogies landing at your feet. But, of course, things in China are not always as they seem. One evening, while I was enjoying a delectable duck cooked in the Peking manner at a restaurant in the Embassy District, I asked the Australian businessman who had joined Dan and me for dinner what it was like to do business here.