Back at the table, Viv and Sue explain that people mostly eat snake for vigour. It’s food to bring the fire up. Many men think that snake will help them perform in bed or be more fertile.
“A little too obvious for my liking,” I say.
The snake arrives in a series of dishes. Its organs with country herbs. Its bony tail dry-fried with salt and spice. A brothy soup with its head. Then a bigger dish: sweet fried snake sections. I reckon these my best bet. The sauce is sweet and tasty, but the meat is beyond tough. On one side of the morsels, the black skin is like stewed belt leather. On the other side are portions of the creature’s bony rib cage, equally difficult to chew through. Only by pulling the skin hard away from the ribs can I nibble on the sliver of meat between the two.
I am left wondering whether this snake business is just a gimmick. Then I think of all the live animals in the back; it’s no small affair to catch and assemble so many of them. Snake eating must be serious enough business to some people.
A waiter asks us how we are enjoying the meal. The snake is too tough for enjoyable eating, I say. He quickly offers to take it back to be cooked more. Pretending to be a connoisseur, I declare that snake should be cooked right the first time.
Jokes aside, I conclude that I’m going about it all wrong. The skin and bones are probably relished by avid snake eaters. I picture a lustful lover coming here to chew through a whole bunch of snake gristle, believing the meat’s resilience and endurance will wear off on him and his member. Too much for me.
As we leave the restaurant, Sue unexpectedly takes her leave. Her newspaper has called and she has to report to duty for an event on the other side of town. She promises to meet up with us later. So much for seeing the sweatshops of Guangzhou, I muse to Viv.
Viv reassures me by saying that Shenzhen, where we’ll soon be heading, will have more of what we are looking for. We make a plan to tour some historical sites. But we soon realize that we are in the middle of a rather strange place with no taxis for hire. We walk toward a large boulevard with newly manicured wide lawns on either side. There’s no traffic, only brand-new mid-sized apartment buildings, looking barely occupied. A pleasant neighbourhood, I guess, but not yet very practical for living. Unless one’s idea of a pleasant night out with the missus means an evening walk to go nibble on sweet fried snake.
We finally flag down a car. Viv persuades the driver to serve as a taxi driver and take us back to downtown Guangzhou. I want to see the old docks. A tiny section still exists on the shore. It’s no longer a functional port, more of a tourist quarter. It has also been overwhelmed by the city; an inhospitable freeway cuts it off. Our citizen driver stops along the highway to drop us off. Viv and I find a pedestrian bypass to scamper over the dark canal that separates the small island from the mainland.
As we descend into the old quarter the rich canopy of mature trees soothes us with their presence. The construction also catches the eye: official and colonial. The neighbourhood is deadly quiet. I chirp up that slow dereliction offers beautiful puzzles and hides good stories.
We walk beneath grand plane trees and less familiar tropicals—tamarind or mahogany, perhaps. A few awesome specimens indicate that beneath all the masonry there’s wet mud. These trees grow here as they would have long before on the flood plain, adapted both to heavy, saturated soils and compacted hardpan, something similar in effect to the compressed dark matter beneath the quarter.
Once upon a time, this quarter was China’s gate to the world. The streets were filled with ship officers and customs officials. This was once the official quarter of Canton. Here, the captains of incoming ships would come ashore. Before air-conditioning, leafy giants were needed for shade. In those days, cholera and yellow fever were frequent banes of the old Pearl. Then the shiny uniforms of the foreign officers would be especially important, suits of armour against filth and corruption.
The buildings are Western in design, many of them stone monuments erected by great Western commercial houses for their agents in this rich port. A hundred years ago, when they were built, foreign governments would have had offices here alongside money changers, underwriters and the rest. There’s also evidence of expatriate residency in the quarter. Maybe even the residues of tenement Chinese, discreetly mixed in for all the dirty jobs of the time.
The quarter speaks of the time when the West ruled the world. On the docks of old Canton on the Pearl, it shaped itself a door into China’s great wealth, made it strong and respectable, staffed it with the stiff-shirted type who flipped deftly through a big book of rules. For a good while, the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service was a kind of foreign entity, run and staffed by a large cohort of Englishmen, supplemented with Germans, French, Americans, Russians and eventually a few Japanese nationals for good effect. Clearly, it was thought that China could no longer function properly, that the Qing court was no longer fit to oversee international trade and properly collect customs duties. The responsibility had to be outsourced to a power that could. China was on its knees.
This period of Chinese subjugation started in earnest in this harbour in the 1830s when foreign ships blasted Qing officials into submission. The cannons were English and their demand was simple: trade with us or we’ll continue to fire on the city. Beyond the warships were merchant ships that carried in their holds something China craved: opium from British India. With their battery of guns, the British officers were insisting that this merchandise be sold into China.
I can imagine the Qing officials of the day distraught over accepting the terms of these violent foreigners. From the Imperial Court far to the north, there could be no understanding for bending to such seaborne rogues. The business made also no economic sense. The trade being demanded of the Chinese meant seeing large amounts of valuable Chinese production, such as porcelain and silk, traded for a substance that despite its great popularity brought little to China except sloth and misery. The officials probably also felt that the imperial treasury and their own pockets were not benefiting enough from this trade. In the end, their homes and city were burning and not much could be done to silence the English cannons. So, in defiance of Beijing, the Cantonese officials ultimately surrendered to the foreign fleet and the limey came ashore to unload his drug.
Viv tells me the story of the high official Liu who stood up for the Qing in Canton and initially held firm against the foreign bully. At the emperor’s court in Beijing, some twenty-two hundred kilometres to the north, he was initially praised for his honourable actions, then sacked and punished when they failed and Canton was burning. The war on drugs had failed.
Britain had another demand as well: land. Victoria needed a place to park her gunboats and cargo ships, somewhere she wouldn’t have to deal with the nuisance of Chinese laws. Hong Kong island, at the mouth of the Pearl, would do nicely, thank you.
After the docks, we head uptown in search of the city’s biggest shopping mall. Failing a glimpse at manufacturing, we want to at least see how and what the Cantonese are consuming. We pass nothing too telling or impressive, only a glitzy new car dealership geared toward the middle class. Amid a general low buzz of shopping activity, Viv and I quickly walk several floors of a fancy department store. In the bathroom section, we are amused to run across the same wooden bathtubs we had seen assembled earlier that morning selling for around three hundred dollars.
The afternoon traffic is picking up and we head down the street to a large park for peace and fresh air. We stumble upon the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, buy refreshments from a vendor and take a seat across from the doctor’s statue. Dr. Sun—Sun Zhongshan—is the father of modern China and set his country on the path to healing. A good follow-up to the old docks and foreign-controlled China, we agree.
A glimpse at Sun’s biography or even his likeness reveals the archetypical Cantonese gentleman bridging decaying imperial China with modern China in all its tumult and glory. Sun is revered both in mainland China and in Taiwan.
Born into a privileged
and worldly Pearl River family in 1866, young Sun was exposed to the wide possibilities of the Pacific Rim. A much older brother was a landowner in Hawaii, and by his early teens, Sun was studying in a Christian school in Oahu alongside European and American children, mastering English.
By his late teens, he was in Hong Kong finishing his studies under proper English masters. After that, medical school in Guangzhou under American Presbyterian supervision, then back to Hong Kong where, not surprisingly considering all his Western schooling, he converted to Christianity. From the protection of the British Empire in Hong Kong, he then began to observe the continued breakdown of the Qing Empire and soon vowed to devote all his energies to saving China.
For the young Sun, already an iconoclast, saving China increasingly meant fomenting republican revolution, often with overseas Chinese support. His early efforts were unsuccessful, and they forced the doctor into long wanderings in foreign lands. In Japan, he plotted with other Asian revolutionaries also bent on freeing their countries from foreign domination. In the West, he bounced from Chinatown to Chinatown, seeking support for his republican efforts among both the Chinese and the occasional foreigner.
Eventually, he settled in Southeast Asia, from where he directed revolutionary uprisings against the Qing in the south—bloody failures each and every one. The doctor was proving himself a poor conqueror. But where Sun failed, others were succeeding. Even without his agency, uprisings continued across south and central China. One rebellious faction even managed to secure a pocket of resistance in the strategic city of Wuchang (now part of Wuhan), on the middle Yangtze and at the crossroads of China.
With faith in rebellion bolstered, Sun returned to China and parlayed his overseas connections into enough clout to rise to the forefront of the fractious movement. In December 1911, he managed to get elected as provisional president of the Republic of China, which held sway over more and more pockets south of the Yangtze. Nanjing was even chosen as the capital before it was secured by the rebels.
Prying south China away from the Qing was one thing. Manchu command in the south had been growing weaker for a long time. Sun was also adept at evoking scenarios that the poor, the republican intelligentsia, organized crime and the diaspora might all support. Gentleman traveller, doctor-poet, he embodied ancient notions of the scholar-bureaucrat and combined them with polished modern and worldly manners. Daring as he was, he was also reassuring to the Chinese people.
Unifying all of China under a single republican government, as Sun hoped, was a far more grandiose objective and well beyond Sun’s reach from the south. Unification meant bringing the north under republican command. Power in the north had long been military. Beijing and its reaches could not be secured without battles. The surrounding plains and steppe lend themselves to the type of mobile warfare that had propelled the Mongols and the Manchu to domination in China. Sun had no comparable assets. He would have to acquire the north by alliance. Fortunately, the late Qing Empire was not lacking in potential usurpers, including the powerful military commander Yuan Shikai, the very man to whom the Imperial Court entrusted the mission to put down the rebellious south.
Thinking they could use each other, Yuan and Sun were soon negotiating the balance of power in post-Qing China. Provisional President Sun had the republican state apparatus and domestic and foreign credibility; he also had accessed the rich trade networks of south China. Marshal Yuan in the north had the soldiers and guns of China’s professional army.
Back in Beijing, Yuan soon turned his army on the palace and forced the young Qing emperor to abdicate sovereignty in favour of the Republic of China. For his part, Sun handed the presidency over to Yuan Shikai, who became the first real president of the Republic of China. The capital was to be established in Nanjing, with Sun’s united revolutionary party meant to provide the state apparatus.
Yuan was nothing of a republican and harboured far more ambitious designs on power. He also refused to govern from Nanjing. Sun and his republican ideals were sidelined as Yuan turned the presidency into a military dictatorship, based in Beijing. Sun’s allies were killed or persecuted, and Sun himself went back into exile, calling once more for uprisings, this time against the imposter Yuan.
Before long, Yuan declared himself the Hongxian emperor of a new dynasty, claiming legitimacy of rule. But he’d overplayed his hand; the people acknowledged no heavenly mandate. Yuan’s closest war captains soon turned on him, and China broke into pieces. Within six months of his imperial proclamation, Yuan, widely despised and ridiculed, died of kidney failure. Warlordism descended upon the Middle Kingdom.
Sun returned from abroad and settled again in the south, where this time he fashioned himself military commander of Guangdong, making it clear that he intended to win the Chinese republic through violence, which he would start in the south. To acquire the required military power, Sun courted both American and Soviet advisers and drew ideas from nationalism, capitalism and socialism. But the doctor did not live long enough to put his ideas into practice or stare down their contradictions.
This battle would be left to his successors: on one side, Chiang Kai-shek, the nationalist, who proved a better military commander than the doctor had ever been and managed to finally seize the north and set up a unified republic; and on the other, Mao Zedong, the Communist. Each one claimed himself to be the true heir to the father of modern China, Sun Zhongshan.
Viv and I are strolling downtown when Sue returns to us. There seems to be a buzz around the city’s conference hall. We go to take a look. To our amusement, it’s an exhibit devoted to traditional Chinese sex toys.
Mostly young people visit the collection, including more than a few young couples, although several pensioners are also viewing it, dwelling at length before the display cases. There are dildos—wooden ones, ivory ones, stone ones, bumpy ones and smooth ones—as well as sex balls of different types, a few odd antique contraptions, a wide assortment of aphrodisiacs and excerpts from classical texts describing elaborate sexual practices.
It’s very much a museum exhibit. The tone and manner of the presentation suggest that the subject could just as well be a collection of ancient cooking implements. The displays elicit giggling from the Chinese, but by and large they just take it in with a seemingly dispassionate curiosity. But I suspect they wouldn’t be lining up for antique kitchen tools. The exhibit is also clearly a business venture.
In the West, it wouldn’t play out this way. Sex toys are naughty business. An exhibit like this would not be held in a minor state hall as if there were nothing risqué about it. A for-profit show about sex toys would not be welcome at city hall, for instance. It would be serious business, with warnings and restrictions, for public edification. I struggle to imagine whether a collection of antique sex toys could even be assembled in my country.
With the Chinese, with my female guides, all I discern is a resounding nonchalance about the inference of erotic massages, bondage, masturbation or other rather lurid ideas. Like us standing at the bottom of the staircase to the massage parlour, poised to go up and have a look without shame.
The evening is balmy and there’s a buzz in the air. I want to see more of the extremely dense neighbourhoods. Before long, my companions and I are walking deep into another maze.
It’s still early and people are out. The narrow alleys feel more like the rows at that morning’s market, with people bumping into each other, merchandise on all sides. Looking up past the bright lights, I see the buildings rise up six or seven storeys. Way above, a narrow slot opens to the darkening sky beyond. Wires and clotheslines bridge the gap. Windows are open and people talk to each other across the way.
Food and clothing are laid out on tables in the streets. Basic nourishment but splendidly varied. There are meats, noodles, dumplings and kebabs. Bright colours, strong smells. We turn into a passage not two and half metres across. The buildings above us overhang the street and leave barely half a metre between them.
“Imagine livin
g up there somewhere,” Viv says, looking up at the apartment windows in the slot above.
“Just the kind of place where I could sit down and finally write my novel about the human condition,” I joke.
Sue tells us that the city has been trying to tear this neighbourhood down for safety reasons, but people have been mobilizing to resist. They’ll likely fail in the end. This place will surely be destroyed soon enough; in the meantime, it’s amazing that someone would come to the defence of such a place. More amazing still, Sue recounts how many of the defenders were not property owners but renters.
We make a right turn into a passage that slowly ascends. Just then a troop of teenage boys flies past us, jumping up onto a ledge to clear us without slowing. Up ahead a smaller group is calling out to them, playfully promising retribution. They’re in the middle of a game. These alleyways, these buildings and all the rooms they contain are a kind of run for these boys, an ecosystem of their own.
Beyond their cramped apartments, the whole neighbourhood—the dense tangle of private and public spaces—is home to this moving, changing yet somehow constant mass of people. The noise, the action, the smells, the compressed existence of so many dwellers are surely not just hardships they need tolerate. These dwellers might even miss these things if, now that they’re accustomed to them, they all suddenly disappear.
Everyone here is in a good mood tonight. This is no dead end. People living here are not unemployed, not squatters like in most shantytowns. They’re not at the margins but at the base. There’s a spot for them in the new China. So they pay their rent, pay their dues, raise their families, look forward and keep smiling.
“Does this place seem unhappy to you, Viv?” I ask, with no expectation of an answer.
When we finally find our way back to a main artery, I’m surprised to come across used booksellers. I can’t picture a whole lot of reading being done in this anthill. I stop to inspect the titles. There are a great many books on how to do things, on how to get somewhere: how to master computer programs, how to cook, how to learn English, how to help oneself. I quickly choose some well-illustrated books on Cantonese banquet-style cooking. Viv then points me to a large section on Chinese astrology. Instead, a bin filled with foreign paperbacks entices me. I scan the titles: mostly just a collection of pulp novels in English, read quickly and abandoned by travelling westerners. Not much to learn here, I’m about to conclude, when a slightly larger, well-used and floppy softcover in English catches my eye: Shirley MacLaine’s Out on a Limb. Not my type of book, but I’m amused to find it here and decide to buy it for Viv.
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