Barbarian Lost (8 page)

“Well, he sounds like your typical small businessman,” I say. “What do you think his politics are? For or against the Communist Party?”

“Businessmen are all the same here,” Viv says. “They don't care. As long as they can make money, they work with whoever has the power.”

Wei picks us up on the breakwater along the bay. He's a tall and well-groomed man in his mid-thirties. He wears the casual but neat golf attire that entrepreneurs worldwide favour. He drives a new car, a Chinese copy of a Korean sedan. He's confident and generous in his ways. Hardly soft-spoken, he turns to me with a big smile as he speaks. He knows some English but unfortunately not enough to engage in easy conversation.

“I'm always hoping to learn more English,” he says, looking pensively at the traffic, “but when?”

We're driving north.

“I'm taking you to the most beautiful and famous part of Qingdao,” he says.

With its pleasant hills, large protected bay and mellow maritime climate, Qingdao was once favoured as a retreat by foreigners and later by the Chinese elite. They built Italian-style villas, surrounded by lush gardens and manicured woodlands. These now antiquated domains sprawl up the coast from the harbour. After the flight of the denizens of these neighbourhoods, the Communists took control of the quarter. They enjoyed the luxurious abodes or turned them into guesthouses with which to woo foreign visitors. Recently, many of these mansions have been finding their way back into private hands.

Most prominent among these estates on the water is the stone palace that once belonged to a Russian aristocrat. The villa was later used by Chiang Kai-shek. The ample grounds have now been converted into a public park. We leave the car and set off on foot to meander through the neo-rococo gardens toward the sea.

Although it is a Monday afternoon, the park is filled with people. Couples and families leisurely stroll the grounds. Vendors have set up stalls along the wooded footpaths leading down to the beaches. As we reach the seaside, I am struck by the sight of scores of wedding parties scattered across the rugged and rocky coast. In the afternoon sun, the irregular coastline is indeed quite pretty: the reddish rocky outcroppings strike dramatic poses against the white sand beaches and the blue-green sea. The wooded hills are dotted with cream-coloured Romanesque villas. Photographers scramble about taking pictures of brides and grooms, all identically dressed in flowing white gowns and white tuxedos. It's a happy scene, rife with shrieks and laughter as grooms help their begowned and high-heeled brides over the rocks to choice portrait settings.

“The Mid-Autumn Festival starts soon,” Wei says. “It's a very romantic time.”

Viv stops to admire some jewellery at one of the beach vendors. Wei magnanimously buys her a pendant.

As we walk the coast, I count over thirty wedding couples, and there's a constant turnover, with new pairs arriving as others depart. Almost every element of the scene is borrowed from the West—the romantic, Europeanized landscape, the white gowns and suits. Still, I find the joyous conformism strikingly Chinese. The same wedding portraits are repeated over and over again by newly arriving couples, dressed identically. The idea is right, so it must be obeyed.

A popular interpretation of Confucius is that, to be happy and respected, we need to all behave in harmonious accord. All dress in the same way, in acknowledgement of our service to common ideals. All make the same oaths. This is a logical consequence of extreme demographic pressures. A billion people packed together require a strong notion of collective harmony. Already long ago,
the large populations of the Yellow River basin made for constant friction. A highly developed sense of station and custom provides some relief.

As we continue walking, Wei tells me that his computer business gets contracts to install and maintain networks of computers in offices. He buys the hardware from wholesalers or straight from manufacturers. Most of the gear is Chinese-made, but for the more sophisticated networking gear—server equipment and switches—he occasionally uses foreign-made.

He employs a handful of permanent employees, using outside contractors for most jobs. He explains to me that his business finalizes a new contract perhaps every week. But most work is for large existing clients who are expanding, moving or upgrading.

Wei describes a rather loose tax system in China. In principle, his company must pay a tax on profit, but really it is more like a small flat fee, and his company's reporting requirements are slim. He adds that many of his clients are government entities.

“How do you find clients?” I ask.

“Through contacts.”

“Do you advertise? Or do you approach companies with proposals of services?”

Wei grins. “No, it's not like that here. I get contracts from people who know me. You can't get contracts for work here without some kind of relationship.”

“You mean, you won't get the job because you have the lowest prices or provide better services?”

Wei grins again, then nods his head in the negative.

“So you pay to get work?” I ask.

“Of course. Anyone involved in getting you work at their company expects something in return.”

As for getting paid, Wei explains that all his prices are negotiated, often after the work is provided. He admits that it's often hard to get paid. Even when a price is determined beforehand, clients often pay only a portion of it. When I ask him if he sometimes needs to use lawyers to ensure that he is paid, he blandly says, “I never have. No, really, I can't imagine it. Also, the government clients are the worst at paying. I have still not been paid for work I did last year for some government clients. But I can't exactly start threatening them with lawyers.”

“So how do you collect?”

“I use persuasion.”

“Sounds hard to do business here,” I say sincerely.

“Yes, I work hard. But I enjoy my work,” he counters with good humour.

It seems that Wei doesn't find this way of doing business as alarming or as challenging as I do. Perhaps he even accepts these practices as part of the game. And perhaps eager to demonstrate that he plays it with some skill and has prospered, he insists on treating us to an early dinner before our flight onward.

We drive up the coast. I'm amazed that instead of the city dwindling as we get further from the port and old centre, a whole new city erupts before our eyes. This recently built business quarter has little to do with the old city. Slick new skyscrapers line up along the wide boulevards. We pull up to a restaurant at the base of a residential tower.

“It's a chain restaurant, but a good one,” Viv tells me.

As is often the case in Chinese restaurants, the establishment displays a wide variety of ingredients and prepared dishes, covered by transparent plastic, on tables near the entrance. To order, customers need only point to those they desire. Within minutes, freshly
prepared versions are brought from the kitchen. Good-humoured as ever, Wei is intent that I help him order. Among other things, we order tofu with fish eggs, garlic-stewed eggplant and sea intestine, a kind of marine worm popular in Qingdao, with peppers.

As we eat, I can't help but notice the profusion of soft words that Wei's directing at Viv. She's mostly silent and blushing. As I happily chew on leathery sea intestine, there is no mistaking what is happening: Wei is declaring his romantic feelings for Vivien. Viv's natural coyness soon turns to rigidity and discomfort. Lucky for her, a flight awaits us and we soon have reason to take our leave.

After a pleasant but awkward goodbye, Viv and I climb into a taxi. Viv lets out a big sigh. “Wei's a nice man,” she says. “But he's not my type, and he just doesn't want to give up. I don't think that I can see him again.”

“Wow, Viv! Shandong is brimming with ex-boyfriends and unwanted suitors.”

“He was really starting to get on my nerves. He was listing off all his good qualities! Can you think of anything less appealing?”

“Viv, maybe you should settle down to a comfortable life of marital bliss with a stable businessman husband?”

“Come on!”

“Doesn't Confucius advocate getting married? A simple happy life of devotion?”

“Stop it,” she says firmly, turning her head to look out of the window before finally saying, “I don't think I could make a life here. Every time I come back here, it's a little weirder for me. This time seemed especially weird because I'm here working with you and we stayed at a hotel. It's like I'm no longer really connected to this place. It's already far behind me.”

He kept beasts for sacrificial purposes in his kitchen and so was called Kitchen Victims.

—Sima Qian,
Records of the Grand Historian
, first century BC

From a distance, it is easy to gaze upon the dirty farms and rice paddies of China. From the window of a speeding car or train, one can see the occasional man or woman up to their knees in mud, tools in hand. One can only imagine what life might be like in the squalor of these villages where the age-old agricultural practices of China's heartlands are in use.

Country people are crossed in every city and town. In certain places, a good many of the brave folk one encounters were born in the countryside—people who left everything behind to find employment. They are sucked up into city life, with little thought for the landscapes of their childhoods.

At first, Viv cautions me about staying in villages. She doubts that I am “up to it.” Wincing, she tells me that they don't have running water there, that they eat strange things and that their homes aren't clean.

I only laugh. Those inconveniences won't bother me.

Then she admits that there's a reason other than comfort for being skeptical about the feasibility of such an enterprise. “Villagers will not be very open to us,” she says. “The local authorities will ask us to leave. From their perspective, we have no good reason to visit them.”

“How about we stage a car breakdown? We find ourselves suddenly stuck in a village while our vehicle is being repaired.”

Viv laughs. “The villagers would organize transportation before offering their homes for us to sleep in.”

Behind our humour is some darkness. Vivien is describing villagers inherently suspicious of outsiders, and sure to wonder what hidden agenda or danger might lurk behind our arrival in their hamlet.

But to be fair to them, isn't the idea of going somewhere perfectly mundane and average not questionable? Why would anyone want to travel to somewhere dirty and poor? Where no great person was ever born? Where nothing important ever transpired? What blessing could one possibly seek in such a place?

Viv and I can't simply explain that by sleeping in their village, we hope to learn about the plight of the Chinese peasant class. We would come off as deeply offensive, dishonest or crazy.

“Let's just keep thinking about it, Viv,” I say. “There's a lot of countryside in China. Eventually we'll find a way there.”

Ironically, the door is opened to us in Chongqing, a huge city. The Chinese call it the biggest municipality in China. But Chongqing is more of a province than a city. It was carved out of Sichuan Province and given “special” status in the mid-nineties. Its territory encompasses a large swath of farmland and numerous towns and villages quite distinct from Chongqing proper, yet the entire thirty million denizens of this territory are con
sidered residents of the city of Chongqing and can move freely within the territory.

Chongqing is deep within China. During the Second World War, Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang government retreated here to escape the Japanese occupation along the coast. As Japanese control extended all the way to Burma, the American air force flew supplies into the city from India, over the Himalayas.

Chongqing is the riverine gateway to mythic and enigmatic western China. It is both unique and highly representative. Unique because it is huge and politically autonomous. Representative because it exemplifies the Chinese megalopolis: both ancient and brand spanking new. Chongqing grows at a tremendous rate, sucking in incredible amounts of resources from the countryside. An example of the rapid growth made possible by rapid urbanization, it's a place of much hope and some despair.

We arrive in Chongqing late at night, the airport bright, new and relatively empty. The taxi, clean and also new, speeds us silently along a sleek highway toward the city. Crisp illuminated billboards line the road. The windows of the taxi are rolled down, and a balmy, moist breeze floods in. Hints of jungle are in the air.

In the thick, dark night, the city core where we'll be staying is like a fortress, perched on steep cliffs above great rivers. Access to it is through a network of bridges, elevated highways and tunnels that wind their way over river and through mountain up to the city's high redoubt.

Our hotel's neighbourhood looks shut down for the night. Tree-lined avenues snake through dense rows of skyscrapers. But human life is absent. A Chinese Gotham, ever so slightly sinister. Shops hide behind metal shutters.

Our taxi driver is not quite sure where we're going. He drops us in front of a building that looks closed and dark. Viv tells him to wait. We bang on the glass doors of the supposed hotel, peering in at a wide, dark and dusty lobby, then return to the car, laughing anxiously.

When we finally find our hotel, we beat a quick retreat to our rooms to sleep. I'm filled with the mystery of the disturbingly quiet, urban landscape outside my window. I pay heed to every sound, then remind myself that I'm in China, not Beirut or Baghdad, and that no violence lurks in the silence.

By morning, the anxiety is forgotten. Chongqing is now completely different. It's hot, noisy and busy. It makes me think of what Pittsburgh might have been in its heyday. A rambling, hilly place above its rivers—the mighty Yangtze and the still respectable Jialing. But its proportions are unprecedented. Its clusters of high-rises multiply across the hills, a true urban jungle, still quite organic with tufts of thicket and bamboo growing wherever it's too steep to build. A marvellous chaos.

Travel in Chongqing can be done in two ways: by automobile through tortuous and traffic-choked streets, or on foot along an intricate network of stone staircases that connect the upper city on the hills to the lower city along the river. Occasionally, one discovers patches of old Chongqing neighbourhoods accessible only by foot, too treacherous and wild to be properly controlled. Once places of gambling and vice, fire and magic, the few remaining are now clearly doomed.

The traditional guardians of these quarters were porters. Chongqing once used manpower to carry goods between the Yangtze and the city above. Some of these men remain. They are an ancient and disappearing caste; a cog, a prototypical migrant
worker, hewn from the hardiest peasant stock and armed with rope and a bamboo pole.

These men are not only old school—carrying two bundles hanging off either end of their shoulder-slung poles—they are old for such hard work. Most of them seem to be in their fifties or older. A dying breed. Too old to find work in the factories, these are men who have been displaced, who lost their land or were somehow unable to make it work as farmers or in the new economy. I can only imagine where they live.

Still, silent and dedicated, the porters seem to take pride in their work as human beasts of burden. Old Chongqing may almost be gone, but wherever the porters still carry goods up from the muddy flux, the old order faintly endures.

Our journey leads us to a more modern type of migrant worker. Through a colleague of hers, Vivien established contact with a Chongqing lawyer who acts for injured migrant workers. Although the lawyer is now based in Shenzhen, a southern manufacturing city, his brother runs an office for him in Chongqing and agreed to introduce us to some migrant workers.

Li Gang is presented to us in the gloomy halls on the seventeenth floor of a partially completed office tower. He's ripping out plaster with a hammer. As we follow him down a few flights of stairs, I am momentarily confused about what we are doing. A hint of war-zone anxiety kicks in and I suddenly feel uneasy about following someone I don't know to an unknown location through a darkened stairwell. It doesn't take me long to buck out of it and remind myself that I'm in China, not some dangerous place.

Li Gang leads us to a dishevelled sitting room where we can talk more comfortably. Light floods through the windows and I take a better look at him. He's short and slight, with long and bony
features. He sports a wispy moustache and goatee. His right forearm is missing.

He tells us his arm was smashed in a faulty industrial press in Guangzhou some years ago. Li Gang was born to a very poor peasant family in a village about sixty kilometres up the Yangtze from Chongqing. The elementary school, which he attended, was a good hour's walk from his home. The high school was at least a four-hour walk away. To study there he would have had to find boarding near the school, and his parents didn't have the money for that.

With few other options, Li Gang hit the road. In 1994, at age fourteen, he headed to the south coast of China, where the first free-market boom occurred. He quickly found that no factories would employ someone as young as him. He gravitated to construction sites and eventually got the only kind of work an unskilled kid could get: portering. It was hard, crude work and kept him just barely fed for a couple of years.

When he was sixteen, he managed to land work at a television manufacturer, where he was assigned to a giant plastics press that churned out casings for the televisions. His pay was four hundred yuan a month—less than two dollars a day—and he worked seven days a week. The machines at the factory were all quite old. Li Gang tells us that from the start he was slightly afraid of the one he operated. The plastic press was a huge metal beast: old, angry and noisy. After the plastic had been heated and pressed into the appropriate shape, Li would reach into the monster's jaws and pry out the casing.

For months he complained that the safety lock on the press's jaws was not functioning properly. His superiors only chided him for his repeated complaints. Then one day it happened. As he was
reaching into the beast, its enormous jaws closed. It got his arm. From just below Li's elbow right down to his hand, his forearm was pulp.

Vivien squirms in her seat.

“What did it feel like?” she nervously inquires. Li Gang is perfectly calm. He has told the story a thousand times.

“Nothing,” he says. “I didn't feel anything. Actually, only small pains hurt. Big pains like mine don't hurt at all. That's what makes them even scarier. My mangled arm looked and felt like it was not even a part of me.”

The manufacturer initially offered him the yuan equivalent of three thousand dollars as compensation. He felt that he had no choice but to accept it. But later he heard about a lawyer who specialized in workplace accidents; he was told that this lawyer could argue for more appropriate compensation. He contacted the lawyer, who agreed to take his case. After a lengthy trial at which numerous witnesses were called, the lawyer managed to prove that the company had indeed been negligent, that it hadn't maintained its machinery properly and that this had led to Li's injury. The court ordered the company to pay Li the equivalent of about twenty-two thousand dollars, which the company never fully paid out.

Li eventually returned to his village. He used the money to buy stock for a little grocery store he opened in his home. But he soon found that the store and attending to his mother's tiny parcel of land didn't generate much of an income, so he returned to Chongqing to find odd jobs at construction sites, leaving the store for his mother and wife to look after. He has become proficient at handling tools with the stump where his arm was amputated.

Li Gang may be a dirt-poor migrant worker, but he has a
strangely peaceful energy about him. He has a certain poise, and radiates a calm and wisdom. I long to know more about his origins. We talk more about his village and his life there.

Li has two children. He explains that peasants were partially exempt from China's recently abolished one-child policy: some were allowed to have a second child. Li's first child, a son, lives with his wife's parents in a village fifty kilometres north of Chongqing. He explains that his wife's parents never liked him and insisted on taking the boy from their daughter. Because Li needed to make his living in the city and was away from home for weeks on end, he was unable to resist his parents-in-law. He sees his son perhaps once a year.

Li's situation with his son, whereby his in-laws virtually kidnapped his first-born, is not unique in China. Beyond the particular dynamics of Li's family, children are precious but until recently also forbidden in any numbers. So they are stashed away in unlikely ways.

And behind all this, the Confucian way still dominates. For the Chinese, children are the only obvious way toward immortality. We're immortal only insofar as we live on through our children's children—a belief that's hard to argue with.

The cornerstone of Confucian morality is filial duty, and the respect that children must have for their parents. It's not simply enough to have children; they have to make a real contribution to the common good, beginning with their family. This ensures a family of a name, a place and perhaps a legacy.

Through the ages, Confucius has been regularly discredited as elitist—or worse, a friend of tyranny and oppression. But the sage's teachings still have huge resonance in China and need to be understood if Chinese society is to be understood.

In Confucian thought, the individual is regarded as the builder of the nation. But all nation building starts with the family. One builds by making sacrifices for one's family and assuming more and more responsibility, making more and more sacrifices for higher purposes. One is not judged by what one has achieved for oneself, but by what one has achieved for one's family, one's town and one's country. What indeed is wealth, or success, if it is not a blessing on one's kin through the ages?

At bottom, Confucianism is a responsibility of memory. Parents teach their children to one day assume responsibility for themselves and others. They teach them to become good parents and good citizens, to accept, obey and respect. At a deeper level, parents teach their children and grandchildren to remember, and teach them that an individual is no individual at all, standing alone and for oneself, but that every man, woman, father, mother, son and daughter is a piece of a bridge. With both past and future resting heavy on their shoulders, something grand is being passed on through the ages.