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

by J. Maarten Troost

  “Well, this is different,” Jack observed.

  “Good. I’m glad you found what you were looking for.”

  Finally, we made our way into a taxi. True, we could have avoided the line by agreeing to a gypsy cab. But while there was a one-out-of-four, maybe one-out-of-five, chance that this regular, state-sanctioned, official taxi driver would seek to overcharge the dumb laowai, a ride in a gypsy cab was a guaranteed rip-off. We tossed our bags into the trunk and the taxi left the train station to follow one of the many ring roads.

  “Remind me to start investing in cranes,” Jack said.

  Guangzhou, of course, was huge, another of the mega-cities that China specializes in. Three quarters of the world’s tall building cranes are in China, an unsurprising statistic for anyone who’s been to China, but a source of wonder to first-time visitors like Jack, who’d encountered his first true Chinese city. On our way to the hotel, we passed enormous work sites, construction zones with on-site shanties for the migrant workers. Guangzhou is also a rich city; the per capita GDP is about $10,000, making it one of the wealthiest cities in the country. Like Shenzhen, it was favorably located near Hong Kong. But of course, as elsewhere, an endless layer of pollution hung in the air. We battled our way through mad, crazy drivers until we crossed over a small bridge and found ourselves on Shamian Island.

  This island in the middle of Guangzhou had once been a Western outpost. Like lepers, early traders from Europe and the United States had been isolated here on this small sliver of land in the Pearl River, and even today the island retains a Western focus. On every corner, there are statues of American kids engaged in some Rockwellian endeavor—fishing, playing tag, reading a story on Grandma’s lap, and otherwise carrying on like storybook characters circa 1931. It was, frankly, a little creepy.

  But then we noticed all the American couples pushing strollers. The American Consulate was on Shamian Island, and this was the last stop for couples adopting Chinese babies. Laundry shops offered free strollers. A shop sign informed passersby that a jade pendant means Mother–Daughter. We counted dozens of new parents. Like so much in China, the scale could be unsettling. But, of course, this was good, this economy of scale in adopted babies. Fate was smiling on these children. Almost all were girls, and China, as we know, is a hard place for girls. So I was pleased to see hundreds of Americans pushing strollers with Chinese babies as we drove past. These children would have lives. They would be taken care of. They would be loved. So this was good.

  Still, I’d never seen so many babies in my life. After checking into our hotel, we walked around the neighborhood and watched men console wailing infants and women prepare bottles. Most of these new parents looked to be a bit older. Things had changed in America; women had professions, dreams that needed fulfilling. Life was complicated. But biology had remained the same: tick-tock, tick-tock, and then the buzzer sounded. And so now hopeful parents came to China. And there were so many of them that China could now afford to be picky about where it placed its unwanted babies. There were income standards, of course. And marriage was required. And you couldn’t be fat. There will be no fat parents of Chinese children, the government had declared.

  We continued moseying around the island, which was strangely peaceful. We could hear women singing through an open window; boys played soccer on the cobblestone streets as if they were in provincial France. This was hardly the urban China I’d come to know. We wandered through the leafy streets, past the Guangdong Animal By-Products Import and Export Corp., until we reached a table of vendors selling watches, whereupon Jack decided to buy one.

  “You’re a brave man,” I noted. “Buying a watch in China is not for the meek.”

  “How much for this watch?” Jack said, pointing to a huge, ornate timepiece that claimed to be a Bulgari.

  “Four hundred yuan.”

  “Okay,” Jack said, reaching for his wallet.

  “You know,” I interjected, “I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that now is when you’re supposed to start bargaining. You’re insulting his culture by agreeing to the first price.”

  The vendor, however, didn’t look insulted. Instead, he looked rather annoyed at me.

  “Well, I certainly don’t want to insult Chinese culture. How about 300?”

  The watch seller leapt at it before I could utter another word.

  “Well, it’s a very nice watch,” I offered. “It makes you look like a very wealthy man. Which, of course, is exactly the image you want to convey in a bus or train station in the middle of China.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  We left the island and walked across a footbridge that took us over a narrow channel of water and six lanes of traffic and headed toward the Qingping Market, where I hoped to introduce Jack to the peculiar wonders of authentic Chinese cuisine. It’s different, I’d told him. He’d wanted different. Food is different in China. He’ll love it for its differentness.

  Whereupon we stumbled over a tiger paw.

  At the entrance to the broad expanse of the Qingping Market, a vendor had laid out a red blanket upon which lay an assortment of animal parts.

  “What’s this?” I asked the surprisingly burly salesman.

  It was the paw of a Siberian Tiger. An endangered species. And then he demonstrated how he’d saw the claw out. Two claws were already missing.

  “This, tiger tooth.”

  I held it. “And this?

  “Rhino horn.”

  There were tiger tails, monkey skeletons, lungs and other organs, and a plethora of horns, all from species that didn’t have them to spare, and all arrayed on this red blanket at the entrance to the largest open market in Guangzhou.

  “What price?” he asked me as I beheld the tiger tooth.

  “Big problem taking this into my country,” I said.

  “No problem,” he said. “I mail it.” And then he imitated a plane.

  Oh, sure. I’ll look for my tiger tooth in the morning mail.

  “Well,” I said to Jack as we walked on. “That counts as one of the more appalling things I’ve seen in China, and that’s a very high bar.”

  And then, as if we were lost in some grim Humane Society nightmare, we began to wander past stalls selling frogs, chickens, eels, turtles, cats, scorpions—big and small—dogs in cages, ducks in bags, and snakes in bowls. There were 2,000 stalls in this market, and this, apparently, was where Noah’s Ark unloaded its cargo. If you were planning a dinner party and looking to tickle your guests’ palate with a delicately prepared Cobra heart, perhaps followed by some bunny soup and sautéed puppy, the Qingping Market is the place for you. And if your needs should involve a tiger penis and a rhino horn, these, too, can be found in the market. Once relegated to medicinal uses, the consumption of endangered animals has become a mark of status in the new China. Siberian Tigers are rare, ergo they’re expensive, which means they’re valuable. Nothing makes an impression in China like Tiger Liver Soup.

  We stopped in front of a crate of cats.

  “You do realize we’re still in the food section,” I observed.

  “I don’t feel like I’m in Sydney anymore,” Jack said.

  As we turned to go, Jack tripped over the sidewalk and stepped into a fetid pool of water and animal waste and who knows what else. Jack, it should be noted, was wearing sandals. If there was one pool of water that one didn’t want to step in, it was quite likely this one in the Qingping Market in Guangzhou.

  “My feet are wet,” Jack observed with a touch of panic in his voice. “I’m not going to get sick, am I? This isn’t how you get SARS, is it?”

  “You might have a problem.”

  “Seriously, I can feel something eating through my skin.”

  “That doesn’t sound like SARS. Maybe gangrene.”

  “I’m really starting to regret this trip.”

  I vaguely recalled that SARS had begun somewhere in southern China before killing hundreds and leading to a panic when the government was s
low to grapple with the problem. But I put it out of my mind as we made our way to a restaurant with an appealing courtyard facing the river. Chinese people were dining in private open booths. At the entrance, the hostess told us that No, we could not sit there, and seated us on a viewless terrace.

  “That was weird,” Jack observed.

  “Not really,” I said, feeling like an old, grizzled China expert. “Many Chinese look down on us. Thus, we’re not worthy of riverside booths.”

  On the illustrated menu, we considered deep-fried whole pigeon, fried sliced swan, boiled frog in radish soup, stewed pig lung, and what was alleged to be boneless pig fnuckle.

  “I’m having the swan,” Jack decided.

  “I’m leaning toward the pig fnuckle.”

  “You know,” Jack observed. “This is different. China is different.”

  “Yes,” I told him, “it is.”

  The next day, we again found ourselves strolling alongside the Pearl River. The opposite bank was lost in a shroud of toxicity.

  “It’s…apocalyptic,” Jack observed, not without a little awe.

  “Exactly,” I said. “There really is no other word.”

  We’d been discussing the air in Guangzhou, because it simply could not be ignored. It was worse then Shanghai. It was worse than Qingdao. It was worse even than Beijing. The air in Guangzhou is brown. No, not brown. Yellow. No, not yellow. The air in Guangzhou is sick. It is unwell. The air has been poisoned and now the air is noxious. Today, the average life expectancy for a traffic cop in Guangzhou is forty-three. And remarkably, it’s not Chinese drivers that kill them (at least not directly). But their fumes do. Ninety percent of those traffic cops still among the living have lung infections. And it’s not going to get better anytime soon. There are 10 million people in Guangzhou and every year they buy 150,000 new cars. This boggled the mind.

  Jack lit up a cigarette. “You know what I get from smoking around here? I get clean smoke.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Those are Chinese cigarettes.”

  We had an hour to kill before we met Jack’s contact in Guangzhou, and so we ambled to Lucy’s Café, a restaurant that catered to Shamian Island’s typical visitor. We joined the multitudes of American couples with their Chinese babies and listened to “Sweet Home Alabama” wafting from the jukebox.

  Jack pondered the menu. “I’m having the hamburger.”

  “You don’t want to do that.”

  “Why?”

  “There is much in China that I don’t understand. But this I know. You do not want to order the hamburger.”

  “I’m ordering the burger.”

  “You’ll be sorry.”

  When it arrived, we spent a long while marveling at this alleged hamburger. We began with the bread. There are four regional schools of cooking in China and hamburger buns don’t figure prominently in any of them. Having heard that hamburgers involve bread, the chef had included a spongy slice of Wonder Bread. But what was really breathtaking to behold was the meat. We had never seen meat quite so gray. Nor was the texture recognizable to us. And the smell? It was the sort of odor that would cause even a coyote to flee.

  “I’ve never seen meat that looked like this,” Jack observed. “Or smelled like this.”

  “Perhaps it’s cat.”

  Is this where the unsold cats ended up, we wondered? Is this where cat vendors dispose of the really gnarly cats, the ones that not even a cat-craving Chinese customer would eat? Very possibly, I speculated. Everyone in this restaurant was a Westerner. They wanted hamburgers, I imagined the chef thinking. A cow was expensive. But cats are cheap. We’ll give them cat-burgers. They’re laowais with undeveloped taste buds. Ground-up cow on bread is their most celebrated dish; ketchup their most famous sauce. So we’ll give them cat-burgers.

  Next to us, a young Dutch couple asked if they could borrow our Lonely Planet guidebook. I spoke my mother tongue with them. Geert and Lois were from Utrecht and they’d spent nearly a year traveling through South and Central America, Australia, New Zealand, Laos, Cambodia, and points in between. They were hardy travelers, had seen the world, had climbed mountains and endured hardships.

  “Have you been to the market across the river?” Jack asked them. His plate had remained untouched. “It’s pretty interesting.”

  “No, we don’t go there,” Geert said. “I have an uncle who works here as a lawyer. He told us that whatever you do, do not go to that market. That market is where SARS began.”

  It’s a remarkable thing watching the blood drain from someone’s face. “You said come to China, so I come to China,” Jack stuttered. “And what do we do on my first day here? We go to the market where SARS began! And now because I stepped in that puddle, I have SARS. What’s the mortality rate with SARS? Fifty percent?”

  “I think it’s more like 10 percent,” I said.

  “Yes, about 10 percent,” Geert agreed.

  “So there’s a 10 percent chance I’m going to die,” Jack said. “And my trip is just beginning.”

  “Look, you don’t know if it’s SARS. It could be any number of things. But what I think you should do is just live for today. And I think we need to go. What time is it?”

  “It says here on my brand-new watch that it’s 6:23 A.M.”

  “As they say, even a stopped watch is right twice a day.”

  As we got up to leave, Jack gave the running tally. “Fake watches, cat-burgers, ‘Free Bird’ on the jukebox, apocalyptic air, and SARS.”

  “You got it,” I said. “Welcome to China.”

  Before leaving for Hong Kong, Jack had called a friend who had provided a number of Chinese contacts for us to look up in southern China, including a woman in Guangzhou named Gallon. “She has a business on eBay. You might find it hilarious or deeply disturbing, but here’s the link,” his friend had e-mailed. I’d clicked on the link in a crowded Internet café in Hong Kong. It was something about Egghuggers. I’d expected knitted sweaters for Easter eggs. But then, as a half-dozen people waited for the computer behind me, my screen began to fill with photos of dozens of male genitalia bedecked in a variety of sacs. I desperately stabbed at the little X in the corner. Close, close, please close now.

  Tragically, when we arrived in Guangzhou, Gallon’s e-mail address no longer worked. But Kenny’s did and he’d agreed to show us around Guangzhou.

  We met Kenny in the lobby of the hotel after Jack had spent the better part of the afternoon with his feet under scalding water. “Whoa. You guys are big,” he exclaimed. “Cantonese people are smaller than the Chinese up north.”

  This was true. The Chinese to the north were considerably taller, quite likely because of differences in diet. It’s noodles in the north, rice in the south. Jack, in particular, towered over everyone in Guangzhou. Kenny wore a T-shirt with a kneeling woman in dominatrix leather. He had lived in Los Angeles and spoke flawless English. He told us he was involved in transportation; when a car-parts supplier needed a widget, he’d find a widget producer for them in China.

  We walked with him from Shamian Island back into Guangzhou proper. On the bridge over the highway, we came across a young girl with a horrific leg condition. Her legs were split open to the bone and she sat on the pedestrian overpass with a beggar’s bowl.

  Since my encounter with the albino boy in Qingdao, I’d discovered that some people do such things to children in China. Children are burned, disfigured, and maimed simply to provoke pity and an outpouring of kuai. But Kenny seemed to anticipate my train of thought.

  “Her parents are very poor,” he said. “Don’t assume that this was done on purpose just to make some money. Everyone pays for their own health care here,” he went on. “No money. No doctor. It’s not good for the poor. But in your country, you have what, 250, 300 million people? We have 1.5 billion. Not 1.3—1.5 billion. Many people are not counted. And it’s very expensive to insure 1.5 billion people.”

  “That’s not legal,” he said as we passed the endangered-animal
traders. “And that’s a fake,” he continued, pointing to an enormous root vegetable that looked uncannily like a man with an erection, which was drawing a large crowd. We walked back through the Qingping Market—despite Jack’s fears, it was the only way into Guangzhou proper—and then crossed some invisible line where the animals were no longer meant to be eaten, but to be cared for as pets—turtles, cats, dogs, fish, rats. And then down we went into a gleaming subway station with flat-screen televisions.

  The subway seemed the epitome of the new China, and as we rode we talked economics. “You see this part of your shirt,” Kenny said, pointing to a button. “You probably think this was made in a factory, but it wasn’t. It was made in a village, in a house. Much cheaper in the village. Millions of houses in thousands of villages, all making something. And you know what? No one can make it cheaper. You think maybe Vietnam or Malaysia? But no. To get around your quotas, Chinese people buy businesses elsewhere in Asia. Everything is still made in China, but assembled in Vietnam or wherever. Now you buy computers and cameras made in China. And do you know what we buy from America? Corn. Because we have to meet quota rules.”

  Walk through a Target or Wal-Mart and it’s difficult to believe that there are indeed quotas on Chinese goods. Everything seems to have been made in China. And yet, while the U.S. government may have abandoned the country’s textile mills, and its steel producers, and its television manufacturers, and its toy producers—really, what hasn’t the government thrown under the bus—somehow, a few corporate farmers were able to draw a line in the sand with corn. It’s miraculous, really. Nevertheless, Kenny had provided a succinct summary of the trade situation. In the U.S., we squawk about shoddy goods, poisonous toothpaste, contaminated toys. We bemoan the lost jobs. We point to the slave labor in China, like the unfortunate people, kids even, snookered or kidnapped to work in the factories. Or we lament what China is doing to the environment. But it’s like blaming an addiction to crack on a poor, illiterate farmer in the highlands of Bolivia. We’re the market. We decide what to buy. But do we decide to buy domestically made, high-quality goods manufactured in a well-regulated environment that ensures humane working conditions? We do not. We want it cheap, no matter what the consequences. And thus China, with its “millions of houses in thousands of villages, all making something.”