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

by J. Maarten Troost

  But you can steal them.

  So steal them is precisely what I did. This was not a crime of opportunity even. This was planned. It had been weeks since I’d read a newspaper that wasn’t a broadsheet of propaganda. Deep inside the Middle Kingdom, one could even doubt the existence of a world beyond the walls of China. True, the Chinese press was very diligent in reporting on the Deputy Minister for the State Economic and Trade Commission’s successful meeting with counterparts in Tajikistan. And they did note that a Chinese firm had won a bid to build a road in Algeria. But this wasn’t the news I was yearning for. Out there, beyond China, celebrities were falling apart in glorious splendor, politicians were soliciting sex in airport men’s rooms, vice presidents were shooting people in the face, and the cost of housing in California was finally (finally!) coming down. Such were my informational concerns. And they had gone unmet in China.

  And so I put on my cleanest clothes and did my best impersonation of someone who would pay $350 for a night at the Hilton, when you can get a very good room in a Chinese hotel for $35 (and it even comes with a brothel). “Good afternoon, sir,” said the doorman as he opened the door, and I was delighted to discover that they speak English at the Hilton. Tempted as I was to stop and inquire about his life story, I marched in, busy-like, as if I had meetings or possibly an important conference call, and walked up to the business center. There arrayed ever so delicately lay my prize. A sign warned me to not even think about taking these magazines and newspapers outside the business center. But that was precisely my plan. I waited patiently, idly flipping though the International Herald Tribune, which informed me that while I was in Tibet, the Chinese army had shot two Tibetans on a mountain pass near the border with Nepal. Normally, of course, one wouldn’t hear about the Chinese Army shooting Tibetans. But the incident had been captured on videotape by German mountain climbers on the Nepalese side of the border, and soon the tape, like all tapes today, had made its way to YouTube.

  And then, when the attendant left to help someone with a fax, I rose from my plush chair and grabbed the newspapers and magazines. Not just one or two, but all of them. I stuffed them inside my backpack and fled.

  So, as you can imagine, I was absolutely overflowing with glee. I found a backpackers’ café on the Brocade River, ordered a Tsingtao, and flipped open my newspaper. Really, I couldn’t have been more pleased with my world at that moment. It had been so very, very long since I’d beheld a newspaper beyond the peppy offerings of China Daily. It’s astonishing, really, that in a country with 34 million bloggers and another 123 million Internet users, a number growing by leaps and bounds each day, that the government maintains such a tight grip on information. The media continues to serve the interest of the state, but online anything goes. True, there were thousands of Internet police officers lurking and trolling the Web. But they can only react once something has been posted. Meanwhile, information and opinion moves on to other sites.

  But today I had newspapers. And I was connected to the outside world.

  “Excuse me,” said a very tall, thin laowai with a wispy mustache. “Can I buy you a beer?”

  Well, okay, I thought. I have newspapers, magazines, and now complete strangers want to buy me beer. Good call, coming to Chengdu.

  His name was Max. A Dutchman, he had on a uniform not unlike a chauffeur’s. Gaunt and with a cadaverous pallor, he reminded me of a very young Vincent Price.

  “So what brings you to Chengdu?” he asked as he settled at my table.

  “Just traveling. You?”

  “I live here,” he said as our beers arrived. “Seven years now. I even married a local. And now I have a son. He is one month old. Everyone wants to look at him, this mixed-race child. They look at him like he’s an alien.”

  The Chinese are nothing if not curious. I asked him what exactly he did in Chengdu.

  “I’m a bodyguard.”

  “Really?” I had not in my lifetime actually ever encountered a bodyguard. The number of people willing to take a bullet for complete strangers is, presumably, small.

  “You see, it says so here on my tag.”

  Indeed it did. Bodyguard.

  With evident pride, Max showed me his gear: a walkie-talkie, a fold-out spring baton, and an electric shock zapper.

  “I’m licensed for weapons here,” he went on.

  “Guns too?”

  “No. But if you want a gun, I can get you a gun. Or cocaine, heroin—whatever you want I can get.”

  “I’m good with beer right now,” I said, “but if I change my mind, I’ll let you know.” Though that seemed unlikely. Thus far, I had maintained a firm Just Say No policy when it came to drugs in China. I was confused enough as it was.

  “I don’t do cocaine anymore,” Max explained. “You never sleep when you do cocaine.”

  I’d already discerned that Max was unlikely to be helped by cocaine. He was a little bouncy, a little jittery, a little manic. His movements were sudden, jerky, as if he’d been seized by tics. I couldn’t even begin to wonder what he might be like high on coke.

  “You hungry?” he asked me.

  “I am, actually.”

  “Do you want to get some hotpot?”

  We finished our beers, hopped into a taxi, and sped through the glittering lights of the city. Although half the size of Shanghai, Chengdu is still an enormous city of 10 million. As the cost of doing business in Shanghai rises, ever more companies are moving westward to cities like Chengdu, another place where wrecking balls and cranes are transforming everything old into something new. It, too, is a city of vast buildings and construction, of crowded streets and honking cars, of beggars and entrepreneurs forging their way in the new China. As I watched the city unfold, Max turned to me.

  “Just pretend you’re my client, all right?”

  “Um…okay.”

  Clearly, this was a man who loved his job. He got out of the taxi and opened the door for me. He began muttering into his walkie-talkie, his eyes darting through the crowd. He circled me closely, muttering away. The crowd stopped to stare. Well, I thought, we all know whom to shoot now.

  As Max hovered protectively beside me, prattling into his walkie-talkie, I noticed a sign that informed us that we were on “a provincial-level model street without any fake product, striving to become a national level.” We’ll just bring the fakery with us, I thought as Max forged a path through the crowd for his pretend client.

  Inside a restaurant, we dipped various meats and vegetables into a burbling vat of spicy flavored oil. This is really good, I thought. I was totally digging Sichuan cuisine. True, my eyes were watering, I was sweating, and my mouth was ablaze from the red Sichuan peppers that locals use to flavor everything, but this was some good food. Incendiary, but good.

  “So who do you work for?” I asked Max as he scanned the restaurant for any patrons betraying malicious intent toward his pretend client.

  “Businessmen. Mobsters,” he said, momentarily relaxing.

  “It’s the same thing here. They like to hire a foreigner as a bodyguard. It gives them prestige. I had a client yesterday, he asked me, ‘Why aren’t you wearing sunglasses?’ He thinks foreign bodyguards should always have their sunglasses on.”

  “Is it just a prestige thing? Or do you actually have to defend clients now and then?”

  It wasn’t long before I regretted the question. Here inside the restaurant, Max proceeded to display his scars. There was the knife wound in his back, and the gash that had resulted from a steel pipe that had been smashed against his shins, and then there was the ice-pick incident with his forearm, and the crumpled knuckles. “It’s always in the nightclubs,” he said. “Once a week, something happens. My wife thinks I should find another job. But the money is good. And I like it. I’m one of the top bodyguards in Chengdu.”

  Freak.

  We finished eating, and as we left the restaurant, he again circled me and whispered nonsense into his walkie-talkie to a phantom backup.

 
“So what do you say? You want to go to the nightclub?” he asked.

  With you?

  I have enough scars, I thought. This man seemed to act like a force of gravity for every weapon-wielding mobster in Chengdu. And with him muttering into his walkie-talkie, I’d convey the impression that I was somehow important, and I did not want the denizens of this city’s nightclubs thinking I was important. Perhaps they’d think I was challenging them on their turf, sauntering into a nightclub with a bodyguard. Who does the laowai think he is? they’d grumble as they slammed back their Crowne Royale. Then there’d be trouble, and I did not want trouble. Plus, once I’d established that there were, in fact, nightclubs in China, the thought of lingering in the boom-boom environment of a Chinese nightclub was no linger interesting.

  So I bade Max farewell, thanked him for the interesting evening, and returned to my hotel. Inside the elevator, I became curious as I noted an absence of a sign indicating what might be found on the second floor. The first floor was the lobby. The third floor was the restaurant. There was no fourth floor, of course, because the number 4 is considered unlucky since it sounds so much like the Chinese word for death. But on the fifth floor there was the mah-jongg room, karaoke bar, and spa, which was presumably the “spa.” So why no sign for the second floor? I pressed the button for the second floor, and as the doors opened I saw that there was a bar. Well, why not, I thought. I’d read my magazines and have a nightcap.

  I was escorted by an effusive host to a seat at a table. The bar was completely full. I ordered a beer. On a small stage there was big-screen video karaoke and young men were taking turns singing love ballads. I was beginning to sense something. Half the men were attired in short blue robes. I hadn’t felt this since I’d arrived in China. Suddenly, I started to chuckle.

  My gaydar was ringing.

  I looked around. There was not one woman inside this bar. On the walls, there were huge black-and-white portraits of buff Chinese men. And all around, there were men chattering in short blue robes. And my presence had not gone unnoted. A table of young men with big spiky hair pointed at me. They started whispering.

  “Check, please?”

  I rose up. The host took me by the arm, looking concerned.

  “Thank you. But I think I’ll go to sleep now.”

  Misunderstandings could take so many forms in China. I could at least avoid this one.

  In front of the elevator, there were more men lingering in the same blue robes. The bar was connected to a sauna. A short, rotund man of middle years in a little robe indicated he’d like to have a drink with me.

  “Xie xie, but no,” I said, making the universal gesture for sleep and pointing upstairs. He found this an agreeable answer and stood beside me waiting for the elevator, which would take us upstairs to “sleep,” whereupon I gestured and explained that I meant sleep without quotation marks and that I thought I’d go ahead and do that alone.

  Typical, I thought as I stepped into the elevator. Out of all the gin joints in China, I’d found the gay bar.

  21

  There are many fissures in Chinese society. There is the enormous gap between the rich and the poor. There is the simmering tension between the urban and the rural. There are multitudes of linguistic barriers. There is discord between those who are Communists and those who are not. And there is factionalism within the Communist Party itself. There is the Chinese Youth League faction under President Hu Jintao. And then there is the Shanghai faction that was aligned with Hu’s predecessor, Jiang Zemin. The Shanghai faction is presently losing, though they cannot be counted out. They are very cunning, the Shanghai faction of the Chinese Communist Party, and not easily cowed.

  But perhaps the greatest fissure in Chinese culture, I would soon discover, is the yawning chasm between the practitioners of waltzing and the devotees of karaoke. You must choose in China. Do you waltz or do you sing?

  I’d found myself on a steel boat on the Yangtze River, a small cruise ship where the decks bounced as you walked over them and the boat staggered with a pronounced list that made sleep challenging. In my small cabin, I’d tried both ways. If I lay this way, as I was apparently intended to lie, the blood would drain into my head, but if I lay the other way, gravity pulled me down toward my feet. Was this troubling, this listing of the boat? I didn’t know. It didn’t pay to think like that in China. In for a penny, in for a pound, I say, and if listing boats were the norm on the Yangtze, far be it from me to worry. Besides, I had faith in the captain, a small, weathered-looking man resplendent in a red shirt emblazed with the steely visage of Tupac Shakur.

  I had boarded the boat in Chongqing, a vast urban expanse of more than 30 million people. That sounded like hell to me. By now, I’d had my fill of Chinese mega-cities, thank you, and so I did not linger long in Chongqing. I had booked a cruise through the Three Gorges, emerald canyons that are said to offer some of the most enchanting scenery in China. All of the other passengers were Chinese tourists. They’d come from Fujian, Hunan, Hebei, Shaanxi, and Guangdong Provinces. Average age, possibly fifty-five. Socioeconomic class, middle class. Median height of the women, four feet. Disposition, variable. English proficiency, none. View of lone laowai on board: the ship’s pet. During mealtime, my tablemates were very kind, and I sensed their admiration for my chopstick skills. As I poured tea into my neighbor’s cup, I could hear the ladies twittering about my good manners. I’d been in China for some time now. I knew how not to be a barbarian. During our communal meals, I spun the glass wheel and attacked the food with the same gusto as my tablemates, because it was good food, very good food.

  I’d joined them on the deck as we steamed our way to the Three Gorges, passing fishermen on the banks of the Yangtze sweeping giant nets in the brown, fast-moving water. There were other cruise ships and shallow container boats and truck ferries and coal barges plying this watery highway. It’s an astonishing river, and for me, it had become inescapable. Whether I was in the far east in a city such as Nanjing, or in the distant western wilds of Yunnan, or near the very center of the country as in Chongqing, I was always tripping over the Yangtze River. As we headed downstream, I kept an eye out for the Baiji Yangtze River Dolphin. It had been years since anyone had seen this freshwater dolphin, and while I lived in hope, it seemed unlikely that this creature would escape extinction. There is the pollution, of course. The Yangtze is alleged to be a freshwater river, but it is a river of silt and mud. And there is the river traffic. Tens of thousands of boats ply the river, ferrying goods from the heartland of China to the ports on the coast. But it is also a fundamentally different river today.

  A few years earlier, much of the Yangtze had been only a few feet deep and subject to fast currents and boiling rapids and all sorts of other challenging conditions that made navigating a boat difficult. Now, as the signs on the verdant limestone hills informed me, the Yangtze was more than 450 feet deep, and to ply down this river is to experience Noah’s Ark–type sensations. The rising waterline had swallowed trees and villages, graves and temples, centuries of life and activity that now lay submerged below. This was because the Chinese government had decided to build a dam, a very big dam, fulfilling a long-standing ambition to plug up the Yangtze. Indeed, it was Sun Yat-sen who had first proposed the Three Gorges Dam in 1919. Mao, unsurprisingly, was also amenable. It would be the world’s biggest dam, something every megalomaniac would like to claim as his own. Opponents of the idea were, naturally, disposed of in labor camps. Subsequent leaders, too, supported the dam, and so today the Yangtze has been flooded.

  Fortunately, not every sight and diversion has yet been swallowed. Near the city of Fengdu, a little more than 100 miles downstream from our starting point of Chongqing, lies the Temple of Ghosts, and after we’d docked, I joined my cruisemates for a look at this famously haunted temple, perched on a hillside above the river. On the ramp, we encountered the usual plethora of map sellers and beggars and children whispering hungry, money. There was a chairlift to the summit, 600 feet
up, but I’d been hankering for a walk, so I climbed the stone steps, listening to the strange Chinese pop music wafting though the speakers. I rejoined my cruisemates and tried to coax some English out of our tour guide.

  “That’s a new city,” she said, pointing across the river to Fengdu. “Old city underneath walls.”

  It was just like Fuling, which we’d passed earlier, an old city consumed by a massive seawall with a new city built on top. It’s an unsettling sight, seeing the effects of Beijing’s whims, knowing that a Party official’s ambitions could level hundreds of thousands of homes and displace millions, destroying the region’s cultural heritage forever.

  But at least we had our little Temple of Ghosts. The eminence upon which it stood was one of the traditional spiritual graveyards of Taoism. The earliest temples were built in the third century not long after two men who were said to have superpowers, Wang Fangping and Yin Changsheng, moved to the hillside and combined their family names to Yin Wang, which, apparently, means Ruler of Hell. There were a number of shrines and pagodas, as well as a few monks in saffron robes, but mostly this Temple of Ghosts existed as a maudlin tourist attraction. There were stone statues of a man beating a woman, another was holding his severed hand, and there was one depicting a woman breast-feeding a deer. And these were the tasteful statues.

  “This the torture chamber,” informed our guide. “Look, the playboy being ripped apart so all the women can have a part of him. There the playgirl turn into snake. That the bad husband being sawed in half.”

  And on and on it went inside the Temple of Ghosts. Frankly, I couldn’t wait to leave. It had been a while since I’d been in the midst of something so very touristy, and as the ship set off, I was pleased to find myself back on the ship’s deck, just idly watching the limestone cliffs pass by. After a convivial dinner, I made my way to the lounge, where I found half the passengers gliding under the disco ball, waltzing as if they were at a party in old Vienna. Waltzing, as it turns out, is very popular in China, and even President Hu Jintao himself was on the university waltzing team back in the day. I was unaware that waltzing was also a competitive sport, but in China the government, in an effort to overcome the rising rates of obesity that have occurred as more Chinese eat Western foods, has mandated that schoolkids will now be forced to waltz. Lucky for the Chinese, Hu Jintao was not a square dancer.