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

  I approached these two women in headscarves and indicated that I’d like to give them money for their meatballs, and that I was amenable to being overcharged. In response, they stared at me with contempt. What? I thought. Is it the beard? Was it unwise to wander around China with facial hair? Chinese men are not creative in this way, and since my barber experience in Lanzhou, I’d again let things slide. But this was the Muslim Quarter. Isn’t there something in the Koran about beards and that men, ideally, should have one? All of our most famous Muslims today have beards. So that probably wasn’t it. Was it an infidel thing? Iraq? That wasn’t my idea, you know, and I was tempted to blame George Bush for this denial of cooked and delectable-looking food. But this was hardly the first time such a thing had happened, and as I had long since learned, for many people in China, laowais are like an alien species. What does one do when confronted by an alien species? Some are curious, wanting to know what it’s like on Planet Laowai. Others see an opportunity to take advantage; the alien does not know the ways of Planet China and is easily snookered. Some regard the laowai as a harmless freak and they mock him or want to have their picture taken beside him. And some simply have contempt for the Other.

  So I moseyed on and bought a hot bun with a vegetable filling from a Muslim man who was only too happy to feed me, and he took a moment to point me in the direction of the Great Mosque, because as always, I was lost here on Planet China. Non-Muslims cannot go inside the Prayer Hall itself, which is a shame really, because it is said to be wondrous and can accommodate upward of a thousand worshipers. Like the Catholic church in Dali, the mosque has a distinctly Chinese architecture, with sloping tile roofs and stone archways. Originally built during the Tang Dynasty in the year A.D. 742, the Great Mosque of Xi’an has four courtyards where visitors can admire the arches and halls and the photos of Muhammad Ali visiting the mosque. It’s a contemplative place, and as I watched art students sketching and men with hats and dangling prayer beads wandering among them, I was reminded yet again that once I’d been so wrong about China. I’d assumed it was a monolithic place. But it is not a monolithic place. Planet China is as varied and diverse as Planet Earth.

  The Terracotta Warriors are in Xi’an. Actually, they’re a ways outside Xi’an, surrounded by fields of pomegranates. With reluctance, I had joined a tour group to see these Terracotta Warriors, and as I settled myself among the Western tourists on a tour bus, I felt more than a little ugh about the whole endeavor. Had I become a travel snoot? I’d been traveling on my own for some time now, and if I did touristic-type excursions it was in the company of Chinese tourists, and while I couldn’t actually understand what anyone was talking about, I still absorbed things. I could not speak the language, but I could still learn. I learned through osmosis. And now I was in the midst of people speaking my language. It was discombobulating, like going to the aquarium instead of donning snorkeling gear and heading out for the reef.

  Our first stop would be the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. Built during the Tang Dynasty, it was seven stories tall, and was named the Big Wild Goose Pagoda because one day, right in this very spot, some monks got hungry, whereupon a big wild goose fell out of the sky. This seemed auspicious, demonstrative of a benevolent deity, and so they built a pagoda to commemorate this big wild goose that fell from the heavens. But by now I’d been in China for months and had seen and experienced approximately 742 pagodas. And so I had pagoda fatigue. I climbed it for the exercise and at the top peeked out of the window to see a couple waltzing below. I couldn’t see anything else, of course, because this was China and China lives in a cloud of smog.

  Back down at the base, some tour group members, who had found the Big Goose Pagoda about as enthralling as I did, were asking our young and friendly guide Polly about Mao and his legacy.

  “I think he was mostly good except when he got old,” she said. “I don’t think he was right in the head. There was the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976,” she went on. “My parents suffered. They were sent to the countryside. My mother could not go to school beyond primary school.”

  And yet, as with so many of the Chinese people I had encountered, Mao was still mostly good in her world. This remained both fascinating and perplexing to me. He was a bad, bad man, Chairman Mao, and yet he was still regarded as mostly a good man among the people who had to endure his colossal badness. It’s a complicated country, China, full of complicated people.

  We hopped back on the bus and continued with our tour. I’d hoped that we’d go directly to the Terracotta Warriors, the thousands of fearsome stone statues that Emperor Qin Shi Huang had constructed in the third century B.C. so that he’d have an army to rule the underworld. The Chinese refer to the warriors as the Eighth Wonder of the World. Clearly, this was something to see. It was grand. It was important. It was the Eighth Wonder of the World! So we should get going. Move on. Enough with the dawdling.

  So we went to the souvenir factory.

  See how the ancients made the Terracotta Warriors, said the sign as we hopped off the bus. It should have read, See how the moderns make cheap trinkets to sell to tourists. Here you could buy little warriors, big warriors, warriors on chariots, archer warriors, really, any kind of warrior. It was a warrior mill. But I was not yet so jaded as to resist bargaining for a box of mini warriors for my kids.

  “Two hundred yuan,” said the saleswoman.

  “How about thirty kuai,” I offered.

  We settled at 160, not a strong performance on my part. I’d been schooled by this saleswoman, and I trudged back to the bus. Soon we went onward, not to the Terracotta Warriors but to the Huaqing Hot Springs, where we could see where Emperor Xuenzong cavorted with his favorite concubine during the Tang Dynasty. All right, I thought as I wandered the grounds. I’m bored senseless. So, I thought, perhaps I had indeed become that most insufferable of persons, a travel snoot. Onward to lunch, past the Eight Wonders of the World theme park, where along with the seven original wonders of the world the park had included replicas of the Terracotta Warriors. The Chinese will no longer be ignored. They will be heard. This failure to include the Terracotta Warriors as one of the wonders of the ancient world was clearly an oversight on the part of Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian who compiled the first Top Seven list. It must be rectified.

  Meanwhile, we found our restaurant and began to graze through the buffet line.

  “This is so good. Isn’t Chinese cuisine marvelous?” commented Janet, a kindly woman from Albuquerque.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s good.”

  Actually, it was awful. It was the kind of food you’d find at the Lucky Dragon lunchtime buffet in Boise, Idaho. Reflecting on this, I concluded that I had also become a food snoot, the second most insufferable of persons.

  At our table, we discussed leather goods. Normally, leather goods do not figure very prominently in my conversations, but Janet was a professional purveyor of leather goods and she’d come to China to do business-type endeavors with her manufacturers.

  “About eighty percent of the manufacturing is done in China now,” she noted. More than ever, it seemed as if eighty percent of everything was manufactured in China. “So what are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I’m just kind of wandering around,” I said.

  “And where have you wandered?”

  I told her, and as I mentioned taking the train from Lhasa to Lanzhou, the other tablemates interjected.

  “You took the train from Tibet!”

  I had encountered English train buffs.

  “What kind of engine was it?” asked an older man with a white mustache. “Diesel? Electric?”

  I didn’t know. If he wanted information on the condition of the train’s squat toilets, I could have offered a few observations. But locomotive engines? No. I was busy reading about nefarious doings in the Vatican. If he wanted to know what it’s like to listen to “Billie Jean” at 15,000 feet as the train rumbled past a Tibetan nomad’s tent, I could have offered some insight. Or
what it’s like to lie in the darkness inside a small compartment next to the noisiest man in China. Or the odd sensation of finding yourself in the most remote, inhospitable corner of Earth as you guzzle a can of Budweiser, a beer that you’re calling breakfast. These are things I could have helped him with, not train engines. Still, I tried to be helpful.

  “Um…” I said. “I think it was electric.”

  “Really. Are you sure? If it was electric, they’d need to construct a mainframe with about fifteen gigawatts of torque. Wouldn’t you say, Lester?”

  “Provided, of course, they used an A-frame design. Did you happen to look?”

  “Er…perhaps it was a diesel.”

  “Yes. Quite likely. Now, I heard they blasted a tunnel through an ice mountain to build that railway. Did you see it?”

  I don’t know. I was busy rummaging around trying to find the Imodium.

  “Well, I slept through the highest parts of the journey,” I explained. Sensing the inadequacy of my answer, I hastened to explain. “It was dark. You know, nighttime. But I have a distinct memory of being awoken by a strange noise. We were in a tunnel. And the noise? It was different than a regular old train tunnel. It didn’t go clickety-clack. There was something otherworldly about it. Something…icy.”

  “Marvelous, marvelous.”

  Finally, it was time to see the warriors. We’d been told that we might have the opportunity to meet the farmer who’d found them one day in 1974 as he dug for a water well. He’d be in the visitors’ center signing books. Of course, it’s not always the same farmer who greets visitors, but China aims to please, and if visitors wanted to meet the farmer who’d found the Terracotta Warriors, then they’d meet the farmer who’d found the Terracotta Warriors.

  The sight of this farmer’s findings is essentially an ancient mausoleum. It is near the tomb of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, who ruled during the Qin Dynasty. The emperor had found ruling the known world such an agreeable experience that he set off to rule the unknown world as well. And thus the Terracotta Warriors. Hundreds of thousands of workers had labored for years to give the emperor a life-size fighting force of thousands of stone statues to help him conquer that world he’d encounter upon death. Clearly, this was a man who thought ahead. Fortunately for us, the warriors remained in this world and we can only hope that Emperor Qin Shi Huang isn’t lonely there on the Other Side.

  And I could see why he might miss them. The Terracotta Warriors are extraordinary, an entire army of archers and cavalry, generals and foot soldiers, horses and chariots, and each statue is unique. True, Emperor Qin Shi Huang was the Henry Ford of his time, constructing assembly lines where workers fashioned the torso and limbs of each warrior. But every face is individualized, and to gaze upon these statues is to glare into the past. And there were thousands of them. More than 8,000 had been found thus far, but many more are believed to remain unearthed. More than 700,000 workers were needed to construct the warriors and the enormous mausoleum, and it took them nearly forty years to finish.

  The warriors are contained in three pits. Pit one was the first to be excavated, and many statues had been reconstructed and repositioned to provide a semblance of what they must have looked like when they’d first been sent forth to the Other Side. The remaining statues that had been unearthed were still broken and severed, victim of a warlord’s looting just five years after they’d been interned. Polly informed us that they weren’t excavating any further until the technology was there to preserve what they’d found. The statues had been brightly painted when they were first unearthed, but the colorful artistry had disappeared due to sunlight and pollution. Nevertheless, they are an astounding sight. Earlier, I’d read an account of a tourist who had disguised himself as a Terracotta Warrior and who had hidden among these statues, standing rigidly at attention. I could understand the compulsion. Actually, no. Clearly this was someone off his meds.

  On the way out, I discovered that the little figurines I’d bought before lunch could now be had for 10 yuan. And suddenly I no longer felt like a travel snoot. I felt like a chump.

  23

  It’s cold in Harbin. It should be cold. It would be unsettling if it were not cold. Harbin is north of Vladivostok, home of the Russian Pacific fleet. So it’s cold. This was not the tropics. Harbin is in the far north of China. So the coldness should be expected. But man, it’s cold in Harbin.

  I’d felt this coldness, this very intense nostril-freezing coldness, the moment the flight attendant opened the door. We’d been crowding the aisles waiting to disembark the plane since, well, I don’t know, probably an hour before we landed. Please remain seated until we reach the gate. As if. This is China. We do not remain seated in China. And I further endured this bitter coldness in front of my hotel when I’d had to deal with the usual let’s-rip-off-the-dumb-laowai routine of the airport taxi drivers. It no longer even fazed me. It was normal, just part of the experience.

  “Four hundred and fifty kuai, do you say? Well, yes, that sounds reasonable. But let me ask the doorman what he thinks.”

  So I got the doorman and I got the guy at the check-in counter and I’d asked passing pedestrians in fur hats what they thought of this 450-kuai fare, and soon the cabdriver was surrounded by dozens of people heckling and jeering him because everyone’s been ripped off in China, everyone’s been cheated, tricked into overpaying, and no one liked it one bit, and now they had one of these cheaters on their hands and they shamed him and told me not to pay one yuan and to report him to the police. But this I did not do. I asked the crowd what is the standard taxi fare from the airport to downtown Harbin and that is what I magnanimously paid the driver, who slinked off into the night like a chastened fox.

  I continued to experience this coldness as I waddled up the cobblestones of Zhongyang Dajie wearing seven layers of clothes, everything in my possession. My quest for a warm coat, abandoned in Xi’an, had suddenly become more urgent. Style? Who cares. A good fit? Immaterial. And soon I became the owner of an enormous parka, a coat that would eventually make its way to a member of the Beijing Choral Society, because I have no need for an enormous parka. Except in Harbin. Because it’s cold.

  But I liked the cold. There’s something about freezing together that brings the warmth out of people. Extreme heat tends to make people irritable. But in the cold, particularly when you have a heavy coat and a fur hat, mirth ensues. Brrr, it’s cold, you say. I know, says your friend. Let’s get some hot chocolate. Happy times.

  But in Harbin it wouldn’t be hot chocolate. It would be tea, hot tea, served in the Russian style. This is because it feels like Russia in Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang, the northernmost province in China. It is surrounded by Russia. To the north, there is Russia. To the east, there is Russia. If you don’t like Russia, you can go to the west and find yourself in Mongolia. But still, Harbin seemed like a Russian city. Sure, the city is surrounded by the grim factories common to every city in China nowadays, and the downtown is rife with glitzy new high-rises, and the Songhua River is hideously polluted because of an explosion upstream at a benzene plant, but nevertheless in the Daoliqu District in Harbin, it feels like Russia. There is, for instance, Stalin Park. Yes, it’s true. A pretty riverside park full of inline skaters and waltzers is named after Joseph Stalin. Nobody names anything after Joseph Stalin anymore. Except in Harbin, apparently. And to complete this little tableau of yesteryear, there are also bread lines. I’d found a bakery selling bread, which was odd because the Chinese don’t eat bread, except apparently in Harbin. Odder still was the long line of customers waiting outside to purchase this bread. Normally, the Chinese are pretty good at matching supply with demand. But here there were bread lines.

  And there were onion domes. Russians had moved into Harbin early in the nineteenth century when men such as Rasputin, Lenin, and Tsar Nicholas II began their fateful dance, making life just far too interesting for many Russians, and some found their way to Harbin, deep in Manchuria, where they built Orthodox churches an
d charming cafés that remain to this day, serving blintzes and borscht and sausages and demitasses of vodka. But I had not come to Harbin to eat blintzes and borscht washed down with a clarifying shot of vodka, though I did do that and it was good. Nor had I come to Harbin to meander among cobblestone lanes while humming the theme from Dr. Zhivago, nor had I come here because I thought I might like this city of 4 million, which I did. I actually liked it very much and hoped one day to return for the Ice Lantern Festival, when ice sculptures are shaped into fantastic, whimsical creations such as the Forbidden City itself.

  No, I had come to Harbin to explore China’s peculiar relationship with the animal kingdom beyond the endangered-species markets of Guangzhou. Take the Yangtze Sturgeon, for instance. When I was in Chengdu, I’d seen an engrossing program about the Yangtze Sturgeon on CCTV’s nature show. Yangtze Sturgeons are, unsurprisingly, not particularly happy at present. It’s a migratory fish that lives in the Yangtze but returns to the ocean to do other fish-type business. It goes back and forth, freshwater to saltwater, doing fishy things, following a cycle that has lasted millennia. But now with the Three Gorges Dam the sturgeons could no longer go back and forth from river to ocean. So this is a problem. But the Chinese, naturally, have a solution: They’re going to train the Yangtze Sturgeon to remain content in the river, to give up its wandering ways, and to forgo its need to do business in the ocean. To that end, they’d captured a couple of Yangtze Sturgeons and put them in a tank where they would be trained to dispense with millions of years of evolutionary adaptations and learn how to live happily in this all-freshwater-all-the-time environment. Training consisted of, as far as I could tell, placing many divers in the tanks to pet these large Yangtze Sturgeons, to pull at their tails—in fun, surely—and to hold on to their fins so that they could catch a ride. Alas, the announcer informed me, despite all this love the Yangtze Sturgeons refused to feed. Typically, they feed in the ocean. But this wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the sturgeons were depressed. And that’s why they were listless and wasting away. Fish depression. That’s what they were working on now, a treatment for fish depression, and so the show ended on a hopeful note.