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

by J. Maarten Troost

  “Nihao,” I’d said at the front desk of my chosen hotel in Nanjing. I was pleased to notice a sign that read, Today’s Hotel English Lesson #86. “We have many amenities to satisfy all our guests.” “How much is a room?”

  “Six hundred eighty,” he said, pointing to the listed price.

  “But it says on the Internet that it’s 280 kuai.”

  “Okay. Two-eighty.”

  So easy!

  Earlier that day, at a small newsstand, I’d stopped to purchase an umbrella. The proprietor typed 70 onto his calculator. I typed 30. Sold. True, the typical Nanjinite could probably get it for 6 yuan, but I took my triumphs where I could. I’d then found a cavernous restaurant where, beneath a ceiling of lanterns and birdcages, an elderly man plucked at a traditional instrument—toing, toing—while a woman dressed in silk sang old-school Chinese songs. The available dishes were wrapped in cellophane before an open kitchen, and I simply had to point at the dish that my heart desired, and the chef would rustle it up and deliver it to my table and stool, which was an excellent table and stool for a leprechaun but made me feel like Gulliver. As I inhaled a steaming bowl of clams, shrimps, and cabbage, and sipped at my Tsingtao, I thought, Gosh, I like it here. Nanjing is a fine city. But I had not come to Nanjing to enjoy myself; I had come to understand the serious antipathy for the Japanese that seems to lurk deep within the Chinese soul. Which is why I found myself the following morning in Jiang-dongmen, a neighborhood not far from the Yangtze River, and the site of the Memorial Hall for Compatriots Killed in the Nanjing Massacre.

  And I was not alone. No. There were hundreds of schoolkids taking a field trip into the grim past. And grim it is. Right where we stood, thousands of people had been slain when the Japanese marched into Nanjing late in 1937. Their bones are even visible, jutting through mounds of dirt that are encased behind glass. Outside, on the Mourning Square, I had encountered a statue of Iris Chang, the author of The Rape of Nanking, a book published in 1998 that demonstrated that the Nanjing Massacre wasn’t simply one of those really, really bad things that happened during World War II, which had started a little earlier for China when Japan invaded during the summer of 1937. This was something far, far beyond bad. The Nanjing Massacre attained a level of murderous cruelty that makes you wonder not only what exactly went on inside the head of a Japanese soldier as he bayoneted a child but, more broader still, how it is that human beings can do this to other human beings. For six weeks, the Japanese brutally slaughtered 300,000 unarmed, defenseless people. It was a sadistic barbarism without equal. As Iris Chang recounted in her well-documented book, soldiers competed to see who could decapitate the greatest number of people in the shortest amount of time. Kill and count! Kill and count! they encouraged one another. With bayonets, they ripped open the stomachs of pregnant women, pulling out the fetuses. Tens of thousands of women were raped before they were killed. “Blood was splattered everywhere as if the heavens had been raining blood,” recalled one of the few survivors. And strangely, so much of it was photographed, not only by the handful of Western missionaries who had remained in Nanjing, but by the Japanese soldiers themselves. These photographs were now on display, and as I peered at these images of rape and murder over the heads of murmuring schoolkids, I wondered what exactly these images would do to the psyche of a child, because they were certainly messing with mine. Toward the end of the exhibit are photographs of the Japanese officers who oversaw the butchery, and I watched the kids dutifully jot their names down. They might not have had a beef with Japan earlier, but they certainly did now. And with good reason, of course. The commander in chief of Japanese forces in Nanjing, Prince Asaka Yasuhiko, would go on to live out his days as a prosperous golf course developer.

  It’s remarkable that relations between Japan and China today are as civil as they are. The two countries are bound together by mutual economic interests. The Japanese are major investors in China, and now that China has become an economic power in its own right, the Chinese government, too, is concerned about global financial stability and is unlikely to allow domestic protesters to derail the money train. But take away the money, and what remains is simmering hatred. As a Japanese friend once explained: “In Japan, people are ashamed about the war. They are ashamed they lost.” Unlike Germany, Japan has never accounted for its wartime atrocities, and it is this lack of remorse that feeds the well-justified hostility most Chinese have for Japan.

  Later, I found myself in the hotel restaurant. A hard, sweeping rain had returned, keeping me in. Hotel English Lessons hadn’t yet reached the waitresses or indeed the menu, and I tried to convey that I’d like to have whatever they thought was good. “I leave it up to you. I am at your mercy.” Whereupon they returned with a bowl of tomato soup, which is very possibly the last thing I expected to eat in China. Meanwhile, I had written a postcard to my son.

  Dear Lukas,

  I miss you very much. I am in Nanjing. It is a very big city with lots of cars, buses, mopeds, and bicycles. It’s just like Busytown.

  Love,

  Daddy

  9

  One day, I found myself musing about China. This often happened, of course, because when in China there is much to ponder. But, possibly because the coffee in the Temperance Lounge at the Nanjing train station was strong enough to induce a cardiac event, I found myself having deep thoughts, which, inexplicably, occur only when I’m hypercaffeinated. Despite a jaunty hike to the summit of Tai Shan and excursions into the Chinese past, I felt like I still didn’t get China. Not even close. Say what you will about the U.S., but it’s easy to get. It’s loud and brash, and it stands up for liberty and commerce, and it wants the rest of the world to be like it. And very often this has been good, this zeal for liberty and commerce, and much of the world did indeed cheer for America (you can Google it), which is why when George Bush was elected and proceeded to completely fuck everything up, the rest of the world felt the outrage it did. In the international papers one reads mournful articles about America, this country of renditions and Gitmos and waterboarding, and how it is finished as an idea, an aspiration, and as we move deeper into the twenty-first century, new models and new ways of organizing society will supplant the American ideal, now battered and tarnished. Maybe even the Chinese Model, the papers declare. It is always expressed thus, the Chinese Model.

  But what is this contemporary Chinese Model? It is usually, very simply, described as unfettered capitalism combined with authoritarian rule. Give us power, says regime X, and we will give you economic growth, opportunities to become rich, and stability, just like the Chinese Model. There is, of course, nothing uniquely Chinese about such an arrangement. Chile, under Augosto Pinochet, combined authoritarian rule with capitalism. So, too, did the city-state of Singapore. But this isn’t quite what China feels like. Singapore is settled in its ways. So, too, was Chile until, of course, it wasn’t. China, however, is anything but settled. When in Beijing, I had asked a Chinese engineer, a friend of Dan’s, what he thought China might be like in fifteen years. “I cannot say,” he said. “If fifteen years ago you had asked me what China might look like today, I never would have imagined that it would look like this. And so I cannot answer your question. Everything is changing so fast.”

  Everything is changing so fast. That’s exactly what China feels like. Even I could pick up on that, and as this was my first trip to China, I didn’t even have a frame of reference to compare. All I had were the books I’d read, which, now that I was in China, all seemed hopelessly dated. But from what I could see, there is no Chinese Model. There is only movement, a wild, hurtling movement, like a speeding train barreling down the tracks, the brakes shredded, and somewhere down the line is the train station, but no one knows which station, exactly, is it that this train, barely in control, is hurtling toward.

  Once, not that long ago, there was a Chinese Model. It was called Maoism, and China was interested in exporting Maoist revolution. Today, of course, China is interested in exporting everyth
ing but revolution. Red guard fanatics may have had their uses, but they made for terrible consumers, and no one needs consumers more today than China, with its mammoth factories and pressing need to keep hundreds upon hundreds of millions of people employed. Now there must be growth in China. There must be building. There must be consumption, everywhere. The train can’t be allowed to slow down.

  But where is it going? Not even the government knows for sure. True, they still have their Five-Year Plans. And Hu Jintao speaks confidently of building a harmonious society. That will be his contribution: harmony. But the government today doesn’t really plan with a big P. Instead, at least to the lightly informed eyes of this traveler, all one can detect is improvisation. There is no gold-plated Big Book of Rules and Laws in China. Or perhaps there is, but it’s irrelevant. Old neighborhoods are destroyed, villages bulldozed, all to make room for the barreling train carrying China toward some vision of modernity. Sometimes residents are compensated fairly; sometimes not. It depends. Throughout China, factories defile rivers, contaminate land, foul the air, sicken the people. Sometimes these factories are fined, sometimes not. It depends. Every year in China, there are tens of thousands of mass protests of very angry people rising up against corruption, pollution, or even the impervious insouciance of a Party official or businessman. Invariably, these protests are quickly crushed. But sometimes, in the end, there is justice. And sometimes there isn’t, and everyone is told to lighten up and remember what really nasty people the Japanese are.

  The one constant, however, in this new, evolving China is money, both its despairing absence and its increasing abundance. A walk through a Chinese city is to experience this particular dissonance in overdrive. I’d look up at the buildings seemingly taking flight, each one reaching higher than the other, and I’d look down and find the most hideously disfigured, dismembered, burned, or otherwise heartbreaking displays of human suffering, lying on a sidewalk, sometimes with a beggar’s bowl, sometimes just huddled there. I’d pause and gawk at a Ferrari dealership—every city seemed to have one—and soon my sleeve would be tugged by an old man with a wispy Fu Manchu beard and a blue cap shaking a tin cup lightly filled with twinkling coins. At construction areas—and urban China is really one vast construction site—I’d admire the big poster boards with the artist’s renderings of skyscrapers and shopping malls filled with happy people with pockets full of disposable income, and then I’d peek through an opening in the wall and see the migrant workers bustling over bamboo scaffolding, welding a building together without welder masks, busy like ants, desperate like ants, doing what they could to hold on to a job that offered an on-site shantytown shack for a home.

  Money seemed to be the link that bound China together. Economic growth was the beginning and end of the Chinese Model. There is no vision of a shimmering city on a hill, a bastion of liberty and inalienable rights. So, too, the Commie-speak of yesteryear, this language of class enemies and proletarian revolution, has largely faded into the history books. Indeed, I had spent May 1st, May Day, the most revered holiday in Commie World, ambling on Tiananmen Square, fully expecting to trip over soldiers on parade marching past the members of the Politburo carefully arrayed on a display stand beneath the portrait of a smirking Chairman Mao. But there was nothing. A few more flags. A few more tourists. Actually, a lot more tourists. But it certainly didn’t feel like a celebration of revolution and the glorification of all things red. It felt like Columbus Day.

  And so I thought I’d have a closer look at money, and Shanghai seemed like a good place to find it. I’d moved on from the Temperance Lounge in the Nanjing train station, and with a caffeinated jitter made my way to the Soft Seat Lounge, where hundreds of besuited businessmen sat in comfortable, ergonomical seats, tinkering at laptops and barking into cell phones. Once again, I sputtered at how very delusional my preconceptions of China had been. Sacramento might be a heat-blasted backwater in America, but surely I wouldn’t feel like a poor, disconnected yokel missing out on the money train of globalization inside a train station in Nanjing. But I did. It’s a new train station, gleaming and shiny like the airport in Qingdao, with enormous windows offering panoramic views of Lake Xuanwu and shimmering high-rises soaring above the green hills. Again I wondered, Why couldn’t we have infrastructure like this? Are we not richer? Are we not more—quote unquote—advanced? Not for long, I thought, if this waiting room is somehow indicative—or if not indicative, predicative—of where, exactly, the train called China is heading. And then the announcement came that the train to Shanghai was departing imminently, and as several hundred businessmen raged toward the doors, battering one another to get on board, I allowed myself a brief contented moment of cultural smugness.

  But this does not last long in China. A train ride from Nanjing to Shanghai is the Sino equivalent of the line connecting Philadelphia with New York. Whereas the Phil-NY run is very often a sad reminder of what midcentury America once was—a decaying sign on a passing bridge reads TRENTON MAKES. THE WORLD TAKES—the line linking Nanjing with Shanghai is, well, it’s blighted too. But it’s not a dead blight, it’s a living blight (except around Tai Hu, which was once a living lake, full of fish, but is now a dead lake full of dead fish). But this industrial furnace of a train route, with its belching factories and eye-popping destruction/construction of towns and cities, is unquestionably an industrious area, providing the funds that keep the crisply dressed businessmen around me tapping and yapping into the latest wonders emanating from the world of telecommunications.

  And then, a short three hours later, I arrived in Shanghai. It’s always very exciting arriving in a city of 20 million people where you can’t speak the language and you can’t read the signs. Naturally, I had prepared accordingly. “Nihao,” I’d said to the taxi driver.

  “Nihao,” he’d said, and I was pleased because apparently I could communicate my greetings in both Mandarin and Shanghainese. Proud that I’d bridged the communication gap, I handed him a note describing in crisply written Chinese characters my intended destination.

  “Shanghai,” he said, pointing to the ground after reading my note. “Shanghai.”

  “Ah. Yes. So it is. Sorry. Wrong note.”

  I searched my pockets, pulling out tattered scraps of paper.

  “Qingdao?” he said, arching his eyebrows. You want me to drive you to Qingdao?

  “Er…No. Sorry. Here. Try this one.”

  I didn’t understand his response. “Er, what’s that?” I said, offering the familiar big dopey grin.

  With his hands, he pointed to the sky.

  “Yep. That’s the place,” I said, and then as we made our way to an expressway leading toward Pudong, the gilded district that resides across the Huangpu River from the Bund and old Shanghai, I wondered if I’d very accidentally handed him the note that said, Please take me to the airport. Long inward sigh. Then I remembered that there’s a super-fast, state-of-the-art bullet train connecting the airport to Pudong, and I decided that this would be interesting too, to ride this train back into Shanghai, and so I settled back and relaxed into this ride toward I-didn’t-know-where. I’m flexible that way.

  But I had handed him the correct note. The driver pulled up in front of the Jin Mao Tower, an enormous skyscraper that looks like an accordion that’s been stretched to its snapping point, and yet still looks really striking. It’s the tallest building in China, though not for long. Next door, cranes were already crafting a steel skeleton that would become the Shanghai World Financial Tower, an immense cone that would scrape the sky at 1,614 feet. The designs for the tower had to be altered at the last moment when protesters noted that the huge, circular aperture at the building’s peak reminded them of the Rising Sun, the symbol on Japan’s flag, which wasn’t exactly what leaders in China wanted to see on the world’s second-tallest building. The Jin Mao Tower was a trifle shorter, but for the moment it still dominated the glass-and-steel canyons of Pudong. Twenty-five years ago, Pudong was swampy farmland. Today, it is the
glittering center of finance in China and its buildings tell the story of that transition. It was here that the new China first emerged, and in its architecture you can see the early struggles with confidence. There is the Oriental Pearl Tower, reminiscent of Seattle’s Space Needle, with its mutant, galactic orbs, screaming Look at me! I’m modern too!—a sort of Space Age Sixty–ish towering architectural relic where you just know that the restaurant inside sells Rocket Burgers. Or maybe Rocket Dumplings. And then there are the early skyscrapers, the ones built in the eighties, plain inverted rectangles topped with a golden pagoda: Modernity with Chinese Characteristics. But it’s the newer buildings that suggest that China is feeling pretty cocky these days. The Jin Mao Tower is also meant to convey a pagoda, but it doesn’t at all look silly and ill-conceived. It looks really cool.

  I had gotten all crazy and reserved a room at the Grand Hyatt Shanghai, the world’s highest hotel, located on floors fifty-four to eighty-seven of the Jin Mao Tower. I figured that if I was going to look for money this would be an excellent place to find it. Then, as I handed over my credit card at the check-in counter on the fifty-fourth floor, it occurred to me that this was a profoundly addled way of thinking. I wasn’t going to find money here. I was going to go broke here. I hadn’t stayed in a hotel quite so august since my days as a consultant to the World Bank, when I traveled as the Official Carrier of the PowerPoint Projector. The Grand Hyatt is the sort of hotel where, if you’re not wearing a suit, you feel a little sloppy, a heretofore unexperienced sensation in China. It is very likely that I was the first guest to wander into the lobby with a backpack. It is also the only place in China where I felt acutely self-conscious in seeking the customary 50-percent-plus discount off the listed price. And that was a very odd sensation indeed. By now I was hardwired for bargaining, and when vendors tried to overcharge me, the dumb laowai, I’d haggle with glee. But not here, deep inside the Grand Hyatt Shanghai, where everything was hushed and graceful, and guests exuded an overwhelming sense of richness that precluded them from even caring how many zeros there were on their hotel bill.