Fresh Air Fiend (35 page)

Passing the railway station, I mentioned that we could nip through the turnstiles, hop on a train at Lo Wu, and be drinking a beer in Kowloon in less than an hour. I had made the trip myself from the other direction one rainy morning, catching the subway outside the Sheraton Hong Kong, changing trains in Kowloon Tong. I was at the border before I had finished reading the
South China Morning Post.
I had gotten back to Hong Kong Central in time for lunch. "I would like to go to China," the poet Philip Larkin had said, "if I could come back the same day." That was now possible.

"I don't like Hong Kong," Mr. Lu said. "It's too crowded."

"Is it too full of
gweilos?
"

Mr. Lu laughed politely. There were no
gweilos
here. No tourists at all. Why would they come here? I had seen no tourists in Guangzhou. None in the provincial towns, none in Huizhou, would see none in Dongguan. There was a park in Shenzhen, but it was not for foreigners. It was for Chinese, a theme park with replicas of every "sight" in China—a Great Wall section, a temple, a pagoda, a group of terra-cotta warriors, a portion that looked like Guilin's limestone mountains, and so forth. Tourists are an irrelevance in these economic zones: there is no place for them, everything moves too quickly for them, and really there is nothing to see. Only lives being lived, people working and undramatically raising families. There is not even a pretense that these places are tourist destinations. Tourists would be in the way. Although it is just over the border from Hong Kong's New Territories, there is no sense of nonChinese here—no "big noses" at all. One might as well be in the middle of China.

 

One night in Shenzhen we were in a restaurant that at ten o'clock abruptly turned into a disco. There we were, Mr. Lu and I, talking about the future of Hong Kong over our shrimp and bamboo shoots, and the lights dimmed and young men began setting out sound equipment and tuning their guitars.

"Hong Kong will be handed over. China will give no assurances. These people in Hong Kong who are asking for elections and referendums are wasting their time," Mr. Lu was saying.

Then the music started, so loud we could not hear each other. The guitarists wore silver jogging suits. The lead singer was in blue. I recognized one or two of the songs—Michael Jackson seemed popular here. Then the singer started hectoring the audience and waving green slips of paper.

"What's he saying?"

"He's asking for requests."

I took a slip of paper. "I have a request. I want him to sing '
Dong Fang Hong
.'"

Mr. Lu, delighted, copied down the Chinese characters, and we passed the paper to the singer, who glanced at it and called out to his musicians. Without wincing at the words, he began marching in step and singing:

 

Dong fang hong!
Tai yang shang!...

The East is Red!
The sun rises!
China produces Mao Zedong!
He works for the happiness of the people!
He is the savior of the Chinese people!
The East is Red!

 

When he was finished, he went back to singing rock songs.

A book just published in China,
A Modern Rich Man's History of Getting Rich,
is full of Horatio Alger stories of people starting businesses, filling a need, buying low and selling high, making something out of nothing, turning lead into gold, scrap into millions. In one story, a man who was sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution spent his nights reading Mao and his days learning to assess antiques: He began buying objects in free markets during the reforms and reselling them to tourists until he had the price of a down payment on an antique store. He got rich in three years.

As soon as you arrive in China you hear such success stories. Everyone tells them, affirming the Chinese miracle.

— The $8-a-week driver for a company in Shanghai who spent his nights flogging defective shirts with designer labels, used the profit to get involved in a joint venture, and is now making $60,000 a year. He now owns a house in Australia, having paid for it in cash by sending his cousin to Sydney with the purchase price in a brown paper bag.

— The man who recognized a need for cycle helmets. His were very cheap, because his were very unsafe—just a plastic shell, but never mind, you could have one for 10 yuan. This entrepreneur became a multimillionaire, and he prospered until he died in what was described to me as "a bizarre fishing accident."

Foreigners tell these stories even more than the Chinese, and always in a tone of admiration and amazement, because anyone who was in China ten or more years ago knows that this bountiful place exploded from a colorless country of blue suits and gruel, a scrimping, saving, mend-and-make-do society of reluctant sloganeers. These days the stories are of decadence and wealth:

"Last year ten new Rolls-Royces were imported into Guangdong by Chinese businessmen—"

"The most popular dish in Canton these days is lobster sashimi—"

"There is a Chinese businessman in Zhuhai who buys a case at a time of Rémy Martin Louis XIII brandy, and it costs thousands of dollars a bottle—"

"There's a massage parlor in Shenzhen staffed entirely by Russian girls—"

Foreigners are surprised not so much by the extent of the development but that it happened at all. The Chinese are less amazed.

"We knew it would happen eventually," a Chinese woman told me.

It is not a cultural enigma but a political necessity that the Chinese keep their dreams and their fears to themselves.

There is a quaint Chinese expression for turning capitalist or starting a business.
Xia lai,
a person might say, meaning "Down ocean!" In other words, "Take the plunge." An American friend of mine was at a dinner with a high-level Chinese diplomat, and they were chatting about their next assignments when the diplomat said enthusiastically, "
Xia lai!
"

He was about to leave the PRC's Foreign Ministry, where the pay was poor and the prospects dim, even for an ambassador, and about to enter into a joint venture with a foreign partner. What makes the story especially interesting is that in June 1989, he made his name by denouncing students. Never mind! Take the plunge! Everyone else is doing it, or trying to.

 

I penetrated farther into Guangdong, beyond the red hills and paddy fields and stands of bamboo, the muddy ditches and hot boulders, the haunts of snakes and eels and lizards and frogs, popular in the restaurants in those parts.

In spite of all the new wealth, some things in China never change. The small side roads made by hand, squatting workers pounding the asphalt flat with mallets. The rice-growing process—women scooping water into the terraces using large wooden ladles, others bent double planting the rice shoots; the men plowing with buffalo, up to their knees in water. Cyclists transporting squealing pigs or lengths of steel reinforcing rods on their bike racks. The edge-of-town dump pickers, usually a man and a boy, studiously sorting junk into piles—glass, metal, rags, paper. The barefoot men kneeling by the roadside welding metal without masks or eye protection, sparks flying. On the highest and most ambitious building, men erecting a scaffolding of poles and tying them together not with metal clips but with string or split cane strands. The gardeners lugging heavy buckets on yokes and watering their beautiful vegetable gardens. The men fishing for tiddlers in canals. "The principle of diligence and frugality should be observed in everything," Mao said, though it hardly needed saying.

We came to a town. What was its name?

"I don't know," Mr. Lu said.

We asked. It was Bou Lou.

"This was just a small place last year."

It would be a city next year.

The strangest place I saw was like a movie set, all bamboo scaffolding and buildings rising in the middle of nowhere, with an archway lettered "Welcome to Zhang Mou Tou."

"So this Zhang Mou Tou," I said as we drove through the flying dust in this city of unfinished buildings. "It's not on the map."

"It is new."

Last year it existed as a mud-and-buffalo rice-growing village of ten huts. The rice fields have been filled in, the buildings are rising, and to fill in the fields they have had to pull down all the surrounding hills—an amazing sight, just like the Maoist fable, quoted in the Little Red Book, "The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains."

 

It was on the way to Dongguan that I had a vision of the new strangeness of China. Perhaps it was the late afternoon light, perhaps the dust or the detour. Whatever, it was the apparition of a city-in-the-making. I had been seeing them for days, but they were additions, enlargements, new subdivisions and districts. This was something else, the sort of thing one sees in horror movies, rising from wisps of fog, a vision of the weird city, weirdly lit.

It was skeletal, unfinished, all of it brown with blown dust and dried mud. Everything was being built at once: roads, pedestrian bridges, apartment houses, factories, stores. The buildings were thirty or forty stories high and still clad in spindly scaffolding. Because of the time of day—twilight—no one was working, and only workers were involved in this. No one lived here. Except for the detour arrows, there were no signs. There was no color. Nothing alert or alive.

I had never seen anything like it, in China or the world, a whole city under construction, and what made it strangest of all was that no heavy machinery was in evidence—no bulldozers, no cranes, just the odd wheelbarrow or ladder, and the stitched-together scaffolding covering every structure and making the city seem fragile.

We drove slowly, looking for someone to ask about it, perhaps find out its name, but there was no one around. Then it was behind us. Here in south China, in a short time—months maybe—it would be inhabited and brightly lit.

Dongguan could not have started very differently from this nameless place. Dongguan had been little more than a village when it declared itself an Economic Development Zone. It was not on any railway line. Now it was full of factories producing the sort of light industrial products I had seen at the trade fair. It had eight big hotels and many restaurants, and it was the only place in the province where I saw large numbers of infants and small children.

Barbie lived in Dongguan, and so did Ken—they were produced in vast quantities in the Mattel plant here. Kmart imported Batman electronic games from Dongguan. There were Mattel plants outside Guangzhou as well, but in a profound sense Dongguan was Toyland, and I knew that later I would not be able to see a Barbie doll or a Batman item and not think of the muddy streets and dreary tenements of Dongguan.

The BBC morning news (I was listening on my shortwave radio) reported that inflation in China in the first quarter of 1993 had risen to 15.7 percent. I had so far spent my time in factories and shops. In Dongguan, and again in Shenzhen, I decided to look at the food markets and ask people about inflation.

All the shoppers agreed that the quality of fruit and vegetables in the markets was much higher than before the reforms, because now the farmers were growing what they wanted, in their own way. There was greater selection, and this competition had resulted in better food items.

Chinese in the south subsist on bowel-shriveling meals of oily greens and boiled rice and sticky portions of sinister-looking meat.

At a spinach stall, I asked a woman, "How long have you been running this business?"

"Five years."

"How much did greens cost five years ago?"

"How am I supposed to remember that?"

The market at Shenzhen was fifty miles away, across a bridle path, through a ten-mile-wide building site, past a racetrack, behind a checkpoint. You needed an official pass, a sort of internal visa, to be admitted to this Special Economic Zone.

This was another aspect of old China, the high walls that gave each city a forbidding and fortresslike look. There are remnants of walls in Beijing, Xian, and some other cities, though most of the walls were torn down during the Mao era and the bricks recycled. It made little difference that the crenelated walls and battlements were now chain-link fences, and the archers and spear carriers now members of the police. It came to the same thing. There was even a district in Shenzhen with the name Dong Men—East Gate, a resonant name if ever there was one. Certain cities were sealed, off limits to outsiders. The proof of it was the woman in tears I saw being physically pushed through the turnstile because her papers were not in order.

 

The Shenzhen market covered six acres or more and was on two levels—vegetables, meat, fish, clothes, crockery. At the butchers' stalls the cheapest meat was beef or chicken, 7 yuan a catty (about one pound). Pork was 8, dog was 10, and snake was 50 yuan. The dogmeat section of the market was no different from any of the others: a series of long stone slabs smeared with blood, and blood-flecked Chinese working their cleavers through stringy bone joints. The creatures themselves were either gutted and strung up on hooks or else piled in cuts, and even headless they were recognizable as dogs, from their long narrow muscles and lean haunches.

Looking for an antique shop, we wandered into the Shenzhen Small Commodities Market: leather goods, electronics, video games, clothes, and knockoffs. The antique shop displayed crockery, lacquerware, and jade along with old Rolex watches and battered Kodak Brownie cameras.

Mr. Lu told me that as a result of Guangdong's huge commercial success, it had become stylish in other parts of China to use Cantonese expressions. It was fairly common for people to say, "
Mo men tai
" (No problem), "
Ho sai ye
" (He's got class), or to call out in a restaurant, "
Mai dan
" (I'm buying).

As I drifted around the city with him, it was clear that Mr. Lu had put his Red Guard past behind him. He was proud of this proliferation of factories and housing blocks. It was undoubtedly the best-organized city in China. The authorities tried to keep crime to a minimum. Eighty-two men in Shenzhen had recently been stripped of their Party membership for being "prostitution patrons" (a half year of reeducation was also part of their punishment). Still, women quietly solicited in many bars. They wore the Chinese hooker fashion of the day: very short shorts, once known in America by the evocative name "hot pants." The girls were pretty. There were brothels, too, many of them using the cover of barbershops. ("I got suspicious when my husband needed a haircut every day," the wife says in a current Shenzhen joke.)