Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation or How He Became Comfortable Eating Live Squid

by J. Maarten Troost

  We got off the subway in the gleaming new downtown. In front of an enormous shopping plaza, a gathering of uniformed security guards was being led through their paces, marching like a military regiment on parade.

  “Now, compare these with the mall security guards at home,” I said to Jack.

  He shook his head in wonder. “We’re so screwed, aren’t we?”

  Inside the shopping mall, I could sense Kenny’s pride. There were seven or so stories of gleaming stores topped by an entire floor devoted to the amusements of kids, something I rarely saw elsewhere in China. Whenever I thought I had stumbled upon a playground, it was, in fact, an exercise yard for the elderly. But here, there was a haunted house. There was a movie theater.

  Kenny suddenly turned to Jack. “How many pixels in your camera?” he asked. “Two?”

  “Five, I think. I don’t know.”

  “But I see that your camera is three or four years old. In China, we only use the new. Cell phones, cameras, computers, we only want the newest.”

  Slowly but surely, Kenny was confirming an incipient impression I had been forming. The Chinese were becoming the Americans of Asia. There was a sureness to the Chinese, a cockiness even, that not so long ago could be found among Americans. Today, of course, many Americans, even conservatives like Jack, would concede that the U.S. has lost its way. From endless war to the expensive absurdities of the health care system, onward through the colossal amount of debt that Americans have assumed, most of us can’t help but begin to feel that things in the USA aren’t looking particularly perky at present. The rest of the world, of course, couldn’t agree more. China, however, was beginning to strut. And they were even beginning to assume some of our most remarkable characteristics, like buying shit they didn’t actually need.

  “When I was in the U.S.,” Kenny continued, “I thought everything would be modern, state-of-the-art. But it’s not. Much of it is actually very backward. Here in Guangzhou, we have flat-screen televisions and air-conditioning in the subway.”

  And crippled kids begging on bridges. And the foulest air this side of Venus. But I knew manners were important in China, and I didn’t want to be disagreeable with our host. Kenny had offered to take us out for traditional Cantonese hotpot. We left this showcase mall and walked past the Starbucks in the New China Marriot Hotel. Nearby, we were besieged by hordes of young boys not more than twelve years old who began stuffing our pockets with the calling cards of prostitutes, many of whom appeared to be lingering in front of the Starbucks alongside a couple of animal-skin peddlers, including one who was actively hawking a tiger pelt. So, okay. Maybe Starbucks was a little different in China after all.

  The restaurant we entered was encouragingly crowded. Kenny did the ordering. “I will tell you what it is after you have eaten it,” he said. “In China, we eat everything with four legs except the table, and anything with two legs except a person.”

  “My only request,” said Jack, “is no dog.”

  “You don’t want to eat dog?”

  “No dog.”

  “I better get the waiter again.”

  Soon, in a sizzling spiced hotpot, Kenny stirred the meat.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “It’s delicious.”

  “Good. This is goose intestines. And those are cow veins. And that is lamb.”

  Jack was sweating from the spiciness.

  As we ate, we continued to talk economics. “American debt, both public and personal, now runs into the trillions of dollars,” I said. “China sits on more than a trillion dollars in reserves. Should the Chinese Politburo choose to, it could blow up the American economy at will. This is something that is beginning to make many Americans nervous.”

  “Yes,” Kenny acknowledged. “But what do we really have—paper, IOUs, nothing. We lend you the money, but we have nothing to show for it. Just paper. Nothing tangible. But you use that money we lend you, and what do you get? Tanks, fighter jets, aircraft carriers. You use that money that China lends you to secure your oil supplies. You get something very tangible, very important. We just have paper.”

  I must confess that I had never looked at things from that perspective. But Kenny was onto something. Official statistics suggest that the Chinese economy grows at roughly 10 percent per year. Unofficially, the rate is far higher, more like 20 percent. That level of growth can only be maintained by secure access to energy, and with oil depletion far outracing the discovery of new fields, it is inevitable that for the next decade or two—or even longer should we fail to move on to a post-carbon-based energy world—resource competition is likely to characterize U.S.-China relations. And that could get very ugly indeed.

  But perhaps that level of tension might be offset by increased democracy in China?

  Kenny scoffed. “In America, you are always talking about freedom and democracy. But China is a different place. We are not ready for that. We have fifty-six different minorities here. How do you think they’d vote? How do you think those guys who gave you the prostitute cards would vote? If some politician gave them one yuan, they would vote for them.”

  Provided, of course, that the voting age was reduced to twelve.

  “In China,” Kenny continued, “you will find educated people in the cities. But China is a very big place. Most people are not educated. Most people—900 million—live hand to mouth in the country. Their votes would be bought. So China needs to do this slowly, at its own pace. Now, what we need are opportunities.”

  Kenny paid the bill. We offered to pay but were quickly waved off. Indeed, we had been warned not to press too hard. In China, the distinction between host and guest is important.

  “So what do you guys say? Are you ready to go to a nightclub?”

  “Rock on. Let’s party!” Jack enthused.

  We walked a short distance to the nightclub. Though Guangzhou might be China’s wealthiest city, this particular nightclub suggested that the city wasn’t swaggering like Shanghai. True, inside the club, there were rap videos on the big screen. A lounge. A bar. Enthusiastic dancing. Loud, loud music. We could barely talk. But it wasn’t hip like the clubs in Shanghai are. I’m not sure why this was so. But perhaps it was just us. Jack went to the bar and ordered Long Island Iced Teas for all. Then another. It wasn’t really my drink, but what the hell, I thought, we were in a nightclub in Guangzhou. I did a yeah, yeah, let’s party dance in front of a group of girls dancing on a couch. I was utterly ignored, shot down, a leper in the disco. Jack was beside himself with mirth. And then he sat down beside a group of young women who could very possibly have been prim librarians. He did something goofy. They got up and moved away. But still, he wanted to have another Long Island Iced Tea. He wanted to party like it was 1999.

  “I don’t know, Jack,” I yelled into his ear. “We’ve got a really early morning tomorrow.”

  “TOMMORROW?” he yelled back. “THERE IS NO TOMORROW! I HAVE SARS!”

  14

  We escaped.

  There really is no other word for it. We had awoken four hours later in the predawn darkness and congratulated each other on our good fortune. Surely we should have been hideously hungover. Our heads should have throbbed, our stomachs churned. There had been beer. There had been Long Island Iced Teas. All consumed on a base of spicy goose intestines. We should have been feeling wretched.

  But we were not wretched.

  We were buoyant.

  “Let’s hear it for watered-down drinks,” Jack said.

  And so with unexpected cheeriness we left Guangzhou. We said good-bye to the choking sprawl of urban China. And none too soon, either. I had begun to form dark thoughts about China. I wanted happy thoughts. China was the future, yes? The twenty-first century would be China’s, no? But that thought alone filled me with dread. Perhaps it was the crated kittens in the Qingping Market. I do not object to the consumption of cats. If one can eat a pig, I don’t see how one can morally object to a cat-burger. So bon appetit, I say. But must they be s
kinned alive? Or maybe it was that pervasive tingling I felt, a sense that at any moment, someone might accuse me of being German and proceed to bitch-slap me senseless. But mostly, it was a creeping awareness that there are no rules in China, that so much of life in China is essentially a flirtation with anarchy.

  Oh sure, it’s not all rioting and chaos. Things get done in China. Lots of things get done. This is because the system that prevails throughout the country—the system that has always prevailed from the Imperial days of yore to the Maoism of recent years to the hypercapitalism of today—is guanxi, the network of family, friends, and contacts that grease the wheels of life in China. Monarchism, Communism, and Capitalism have always been inadequate isms to describe China. Guanxi is what makes China go. It is a society based upon connections.

  But above this guanxi, and below it, too, there is anarchy. The government, of course, would dispute this. Despite evidence to the contrary, there are, in fact, rules. Technically, slavery is illegal. But this doesn’t stop brick-kiln-factory owners from kidnapping hundreds of boys to work in horrific conditions in northern China. Theoretically, it should be possible for a Chinese parent to buy baby formula with reasonable confidence that it won’t kill Junior. But you can’t. Hundreds of babies in China have died from counterfeit formula in recent years. Product safety, clearly, is not a high priority. While stores from Canada to Chile were busily emptying their shelves of contaminated toothpaste, did shops in China do likewise? They did not. Once the deluge of contaminated exports became a trifle embarrassing for the government, however, they did do something: They shot the head of the Chinese Food and Drug Administration. But actually recall the toxic products within China? No.

  From the madness of the roads to the endangered animals in the market, it was hard to discern the rule of law in China. And I kind of like laws—good ones, anyway. I’d spent enough time in the South Pacific, where laws are regarded as mere suggestions, to know that the absence of a fair and impartial application of law is a sure path to instability. True, somewhere there is presumably a big book of Chinese laws, but if no one enforces them, what does it matter? I had asked a lawyer friend of Dan’s in Beijing about Chinese law and he had scoffed at the very notion that there was such a thing. “Look. Here’s how it works,” he said. “Lawyer Zhang is doing pretty well. He’s a partner. He’s making some money. He buys a Mercedes, a very expensive car in China—more than twice what you’d pay for it in the U.S. The judge notices Lawyer Zhang’s shiny new car, so he says, ‘Lawyer Zhang, you must be very rich to afford such a car. I would like to borrow it.’ So what does Lawyer Zhang do? He turns over the keys. He doesn’t see his car again. But he wins his cases before the judge. That’s how law works in China.”

  And it has become pernicious, this gotta-get-mine, screw-you, get-out-of-my-way kind of thinking. The toxic brown sludge that the Chinese call air is only the most visible manifestation of this abandonment of rules designed to foster the common good. But it goes beyond the unregulated air and soupy rivers: Thousands of miners in China die each year in illegal mines. Almost every hotel has a brothel. A sidewalk stroll can quickly become a walk of misery; from the abandoned old to the criminally abused young, one can’t wander twenty yards without needy hands thrusting out tin cups. The wonder I felt nightclubbing in Beijing or idling among the gilded skyscrapers of Pudong was increasingly supplanted by something far different. I was, in fact, appalled by much of what I was seeing in contemporary China. And I was beginning to feel like a bad host. I felt responsible for Jack.

  “So what did you think of Guangzhou?” I asked him as our taxi sped toward the airport.

  “Sing it with me: I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free…”

  Few songs irritate me more. Somewhere in my formative years, I had heard something about scoundrels and patriotism. And that song in particular, with its love-it-or-leave-it pomposity, conjured up images of professional wrestlers, Playboy bunnies, and American Idol finalists leading the cheer as fighter jets swooped through the sky on their way to bomb some country few could find on a map. But that’s the thing about China. Suddenly, the good ole U. S. of A. starts to look, well, pretty darn good. But surely there were parts of China where one didn’t need a gas mask to breathe, where a China of quiet pagodas and babbling brooks could be found, a place where the country didn’t seem quite so cruel. I’d decided to look for that China in Yunnan Province, in the far southwest of China, where steamy rain forests meet the soaring pinnacles of the Himalayas.

  We flew to Kunming, the largest city in Yunnan, on China Southern Airlines. Kunming had recently begun to call itself China’s most relaxed city. The competition for that title, of course, was not particularly stiff. But not even such an alluring moniker was enough to keep me in urban China for a moment longer than I had to be. From Kunming, we would fly farther west to Dali, which had come highly recommended by a well-traveled friend. Ordinarily, I would have taken the train, stopping for a few days in Guilin and Yangshuo to admire the karst formations, the jagged limestone cliffs that are featured on every Chinese postcard. But Jack was pressed for time and I was eager to start acclimatizing to the lofty heights of the Himalayas. Besides, the travel agent I had spoken to in Guangzhou had described Guilin as very touristy, and I did not want touristy. Okay, maybe a little touristy, touristy enough for picture menus. That would be good.

  “You know, it’s okay to let go of the armrests now and then,” Jack said as we took off.

  “We haven’t flown together, have we?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Well, I’m not a really strong flyer.”

  “I see. And yet your work takes you to faraway places?”

  “It does.”

  “Places that you have to fly to?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think, maybe, you just might be in the wrong profession.”

  “Very possibly.”

  In Kunming, we transferred airplanes. This was the first airport I’d seen that hadn’t yet been renovated into something glassy and shiny, and strangely this seemed good, to wander around a dingy airport. It suggested distance from booming coastal China. I noticed nursing rooms for mothers, which seemed like an unexpectedly thoughtful touch. On the runway, there were lines of blue fighter planes.

  “So what’s in Dali?” Jack inquired as we took off.

  “No idea, really. But it’s near the Burmese border. So I figure it’s bound to be different.”

  I liked the sound of that—near the Burmese border. Surely, Dali would be exotic, intriguing, possibly even dangerous.

  “Also,” I remembered, “most of the inhabitants there are not Han Chinese.”

  Jack nodded. “And who are the Han Chinese?”

  “Ninety-two percent of all people in China are Han Chinese. They’re the Chinese Chinese. But the people living in Dali, while technically Chinese, are called Bai, one of the fifty-six minorities Kenny was talking about.”

  “Hey, wait a minute. You’re not taking me to some separatist region, are you? This isn’t going to be like Bosnia, is it?”

  “Who can say for sure? But if there’s trouble, we’ll just cowboy-up and deal with it.”

  Of course Yunnan wasn’t going to be like Bosnia. But I couldn’t help myself. I was traveling with someone who knew even less about China than I did. Still, I had absolutely no idea what to expect, which was why I was so immensely pleased when we found ourselves at the airport in Dali, surrounded by rolling hills awash in that strangest of things: sunshine.

  “Am I mistaken or is the sky actually blue here?” Jack asked.

  It was. Stepping outside, our senses were flooded with clean air, blue skies, and golden sunlight. Never had I been so grateful to be in the presence of the great bright orb in the sky. Here it was at last, along with sweet, undulating hills and villages that—from the air, at least—seemed to be more than large piles of rubble surrounded by toxic ponds. We had finally found bucolic China.

&n
bsp; We checked into our guesthouse, which was done in the Tibetan motif with thick wooden beams and carpeted doorways. There were a number of Tibetans in Yunnan, including the owner of this particular guesthouse. We deposited our bags and walked toward the old city walls, past portentous signs that read THE THOUSAND YEAR VALUE OF HONG-LONGJING STREET WILL CONTINUE AND LEAP IN THE CONSTRUCTION THINKING. What is this? I thought. This was not encouraging. I had not come to Dali to experience CONSTRUCTION THINKING. I was looking to escape from that China. And then, once we’d walked through the city’s imposing East Gate, it soon became clear that we were not alone in our pursuit of escapist bliss.

  Dali is tucked between Erhai Hu, a lake in the style of Tahoe, and the Jade Green Mountains, which are, in fact, green. Indeed, parts of them are even spray-painted green—the solution to the aesthetic problems posed by mining. Old-town Dali is small, with narrow streets bustling with people in traditional Bai dress, blues and pinks and soft knit hats, sitting on the ground selling walnuts. Outside the old walls is an ever-expanding Chinese city, but inside it feels like a village.

  We walked around, absorbing atmosphere. From a window, we heard a child practicing her English “A, B, xie.” On the street curbs, there were many Bai in their colorful garb, selling things, laughing. And there were many Chinese tourists too, some stopping to stare and gape not at the locals, but at us, the foreigners. We had come to Dali to look at the Bai. They had come to look at us looking at the Bai.

  A sign pointed us toward the Catholic church. This pleased Jack, who gets a little shaky without his weekly mass. We followed an alleyway until we found ourselves in front of what appeared to be a stone pagoda on steroids. It looked nothing like any church I’d seen. It looked, strangely, like a boat in heavy seas, with flaming eaves parting like turbulent waves. We went inside and met a friendly woman named Irene. Jack inquired about mass and learned that they’d have one at 6 A.M. the following day, and we promised to attend.