Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (3 page)

“I’m thinking China,” I said to Sylvia one evening. Why not, I thought. True, we had small kids. Normally, one would buy another house, settle down, do normal-type family things, give the kids stability. We had tried that. And we had found it wanting. Perhaps it was the meth dealers next door. That wasn’t part of the American dream. Perhaps it was the Sisyphean task of trying to keep a lawn green in 105-degree heat. It is the unwritten rule of suburban life: The grass must be green, even if you live in a desert. Perhaps it was all the massive SUVs driving to Target and Wal-Mart with the little yellow ribbon decal. I don’t know. Whatever it was, I did not want to raise a family like this. And so I was amenable to some out-of-the-box thinking. China was the future. That’s what everyone said. It would be a few years until the mess in the housing market sorted itself out, allowing us to prudently plant the flag in some other town far removed from the box-store burbs. So why not take the kids to China and live there for a while? It could be done. It would undoubtedly be interesting. It would be good for the kids. Probably.

“I’m thinking Monterey,” Sylvia replied. This was her out-of-the-box retort. We were unable to afford to buy a home in coastal California, so we would rent there. We couldn’t buy anywhere, but we could rent everywhere. And Sylvia was from the central coast of California. So it would be a homecoming of sorts.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m thinking big cities, a country in transition, history in the making.”

“I’m thinking beaches, clean air, perfect weather. Besides, you don’t speak Chinese,” she noted.

“Not yet.”

Sylvia gave me a dubious look. “I’m all for making some changes,” she said, “but
China
?”

Why not China? One out of every five people on this planet lived there. We should get to know them better, I argued. And we’d spent years living on the far peripheries of the world—Kiribati, Vanuatu, Sacramento. It seemed reasonable to want to spend some time in the very center. And from what I’d read and heard, that center was moving to China. It seemed important to try to understand this place. Besides, I like a little dissonance in my life. And the prospect of shifting one’s gaze from the smallest countries in the world to its largest was supremely discordant.

But there were little people in our lives now. On the one hand, it would be good for them to learn Mandarin and to experience another culture. That would be good parenting. On the other hand, impulsively moving to the other side of the planet and setting the children down in a city that was reportedly swirling with clouds of pollution would not be good. That would be bad parenting. It’s complex, this parenting thing. And so we decided that I would set forth on a scouting mission to China. While Sylvia perused the rental listings in Monterey, I was off to the bookstore. It was time to learn Chinese.

2

I
want to be very clear about this. I am not blaming anyone. No one is at fault. I am even willing to consider the possibility that it wasn’t done on purpose. But, as I delved into
Chinese for Dummies,
I couldn’t help but conclude that the Chinese language is the Great Wall of languages, a clever linguistic barrier erected to keep outsiders out. What, frankly, is wrong with Esperanto? Or alphabets? What is so deficient about an alphabet that uses a judicious twenty-six letters? We can make lots of words with those twenty-six letters, big words even. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of linguistic diversity. In fact, I take no small amount of pride in the fact that I can order a pint in eight languages. I am even, dare I say it, fairly good at languages. Typically, it takes me no more than a few weeks of study until I can more or less function: I can get myself from point A to point B, I can discern the general drift of a conversation, I can sit in a restaurant and feel reasonably confident that the dish I just ordered wasn’t the Monkey Penis Special. But, as soon became coldly apparent to me, there was not a chance that I was going to even manage that in Chinese. And that worried me.

Take the issue of Chinese characters. There are 20,000 of them. Fortunately, you don’t need to learn all 20,000, just 7,000 should you wish to understand what an educated Chinese person is talking about. Three thousand might get you through a newspaper. But as I delved into this black and yellow Reference Book For The Rest Of Us, I soon realized that if it was indeed sufficient to teach Chinese to a dummy, then clearly I must be a feeble-minded moron. I was not going to learn 3,000 characters. In truth, I was rather taken aback by how complex a Chinese character is. I had always assumed that a character was essentially a pictograph and that to discern its meaning one simply had to understand Chinese drawing.
Happy
would be a happy face with Chinese characteristics. Like nearly everything else I assumed about China, I was wrong. The vast majority of Chinese characters are singular mixtures of the phonetic and the semantic. They are unique composites that offer both meaning and sound. But then, remembering that human beings cannot produce 20,000 unique sounds, even if you were to include belching and hawking great globs of phlegm (which I think counts in Chinese), the linguistic powers that be—whoever they are—threw in tones, possibly to ensure that no foreigner over the age of thirty would have any chance whatsoever of understanding the Chinese language. There are four primary tones, which means that if I were to pronounce the exact same sound in four different tones, I would be conveying four distinct meanings. You see how difficult this gets.

To further muddy the waters, there was the question of which Chinese language in particular should I be studying. There is, of course, Mandarin Chinese, which is spoken in Beijing, but take a train south to Shanghai, and you will find yourself surrounded by people—many, many people, this being China—who speak the Shanghainese dialect of Wu Chinese, and who will look at you a little quizzically as you try to order dim sum (they’ll look at you quizzically anyway). Travel even farther south to Guangdong Province and Hong Kong and you will enter the world of the Cantonese, who speak a language also said to be Chinese, but which is utterly unintelligible to the speakers of Wu and Mandarin. There are seven other major linguistic groups within the Chinese language, and within each there are a plethora of dialects, which are called
fangyan,
or “speech of a place.” And then there are sub-
fangyan,
of course. For a traveler, this is not good.

And so, as I arrived at the airport to begin the long flight to Beijing, I practiced the few phrases of Mandarin I had memorized. Yes, the Chinese language, every variant of it, would be unfathomable to me, but that didn’t mean I had to arrive completely unprepared.
“Qingwen. Wo buhui dun zhege cesuo. Youmeiyou biede cesuo keyi yong?”

“What does that mean, Daddy?” asked my four-year-old son, Lukas.

“It’s Chinese for
Excuse me. I am not proficient at squatting. Is there another toilet option?”

Lukas reflected. “So do people in China use different potties?”

“Apparently, from what I’ve read. I’ll call to let you know.”

Four-year-olds are inquisitive, and I do nothing to crush it.
“Zhege zhende shi jirou ma?”
I offered.

“What does that mean?” Lukas asked again. My one-year-old son, Samuel, repeated what I’d said with a baby accent.
Zhe ge zhe ge.

“It means
Are you sure that’s chicken?
”

I said a difficult good-bye to the boys, kissed my wife, pledged my eternal ardor and devotion, and set forth to enter the departure terminal, where a few moments later I was pleasantly startled to once again encounter Sylvia.

“You might need this,” she said, holding a small backpack.

“Right,” I said, considering it contained my passport, plane tickets, and traveler’s checks.

“I’m trying to envision you in China,” Sylvia said, “and I can’t decide whether to laugh or weep.”

I empathized. It’s a thin line that separates tragedy from farce.

It was an awfully long flight. From San Francisco, we flew parallel to the Inside Passage along the western coast of Canada, up and over the Aleutian Islands in the northern Pacific, following the curve of the Arctic over sheets of glistening ice not yet melted by spring. I endured three movies of sufficient banality that I can now recall nothing more than the passage of time. I read. I dozed fitfully. Now and then, I chatted with the man next to me, a manager with Boeing who was relocating to central China. I asked him what, precisely, Boeing was planning on doing in central China.

“We’ll be building wings.”

Wings? The one part of an airplane that cannot be made redundant?

Super.

It was somewhere in the vicinity of Siberia, just off the Kamchatka Peninsula, that I began to ponder the implications of this. It was, of course, informative to learn that even the manufacturing of Boeing airplanes was now being outsourced to China. Apparently, America has a surplus of well-paying manufacturing jobs and is now helpfully sprinkling them elsewhere. But this wasn’t what I was musing about as we hit a brick wall of an air pocket. As the aircraft shuddered and swooned, and the wings fluttered like a bird’s, I hoped, really hoped, that I would like China, that I would be reassured by it, that one day I would feel secure and confident flying upon a Chinese wing.

Finally, below, there was land, a hard land, brown but not quite dead, studded with lonesome villages, surrounded by barren fields. And then we descended, hurtling through a gray-brown swirl of what? Clouds? Pollution? I had never before seen air like this. It was otherworldly in its strangeness. We landed and I felt that quiet elation I always feel when arriving someplace utterly foreign to my experience. I was in China.

I didn’t know what to expect, and without expectations, I followed the other passengers through the terminal in a state of absorption. I handed my passport to the immigration officer, half expecting to be denied entry. I had, of course, lied on my visa application. I had known enough about China to realize that one profession that must never be listed on a visa application is
Writer.
Instead, I had professed to be a real estate investor, an answer that made me chuckle, which I acknowledge is a little sad. Moreover, I was concerned because I had once written about Chinese spies in Kiribati, and I suspected that my name may have been entered into some secret government database used to identify Undesirable Elements. I tried to look bored as the immigration officer pondered my passport. Since I had written about the spies in Kiribati, the Chinese had been kicked out of the country. Their satellite-tracking station had been dismantled and, even more disturbing for the Chinese, the government of Kiribati now affirmed that Taiwan is the true China, while the People’s Republic was merely an usurper. Did they think I had anything to do with that? Were Chinese intelligence agents now being alerted to my presence?
Mr. Troost. We have been waiting for you. Come with us.
And I’d be taken to a cell room aglow in the faint glare of a single lightbulb.

Fortunately, my skills at parrying an interrogation remained untested, and I emerged into the arrivals hall, which had an interesting odor, like a thousand people who had all just stepped in from a smoke break. Through the tumult, I could see the familiar storefronts of a Starbucks and a KFC Express, which left me befuddled, since I was in the turbid throes of jet lag and I had assumed that after traveling such a vast distance, I would have made it somewhere farther than the food court at a shopping mall in Sacramento, an impression that was swiftly and thoroughly upended once I stepped outside.