Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (16 page)

If ever there was a place to grasp anti-Japanese sentiment in China, Nanjing was it. I considered my travel options. I could take a fifteen-hour overnight train—hard seat only, I was confidently informed—or I could fly. For all the hours I’d spent in rickety tin tubes elsewhere in the world, I remain a fraidy-cat when it comes to flying. And yet, as I contemplated a night wedged into the fetid space between two train cars, an airplane suddenly seemed a little less terrifying. I took a taxi from Qingdao and arrived at the airport, where I soon found myself marveling at the polished sheen, the courteous English-speaking check-in people, the lack of lines, the broad, expansive views, and wondered, Why can’t we have airports like this in the U.S.? I had expected the anarchic tumult of a train station, and yet this glimmering, multilingual, hyperefficient airport reminded me of Singapore. Of course, I’d never been to Singapore, but when I think of Singapore, which isn’t very often, I imagine something very like the airport in Qingdao.

I wandered around the departure terminal. The majority of passengers appeared to be businessmen in trim, dark suits. At a bookstall, I perused the books for sale. Most were concerned with management and leadership and effective team-building and all sorts of other topics to help the businessman get ahead, including
Wine for Dummies.
There were biographies of Hu Jintao, Mao Zedong, and Ronald Reagan, and for the randy businessman, the bottom shelf offered a selection of soft-porn DVDs.

As I watched the aircraft pull into the gate, I was pleased to notice that it was a new plane, an Airbus of recent vintage. Excellent, I thought, trying to settle down my preflight butterflies. New Airport. New Planes. And then I looked at the pilots. New pilots too, apparently. In the United States, pilots tend to be in their fifties, ex–fighter pilot jocks, comfortable flying a plane upside down. In China, pilots are barely old enough to shave. Earlier, I had read an article in
China Daily
that noted that while aviation in China has grown exponentially over the last few years, there were now acute shortages of mechanics, aircraft controllers, and pilots, and that flying today, even on a snazzy airplane taking off from a snazzy airport, is, apparently, a very risky thing to do. And that even though there haven’t been any major accidents lately, it was really just a question of time. I did what I could to completely forget what I had read just days earlier in a newspaper not particularly known for being critical of anything pertaining to, well, China, but as I boarded, I couldn’t help but note that something was certainly a little off here. What was it? I wondered. What was causing the electrons in my brain to buzz so strangely? I’m boarding a plane. It’s just like any other plane. What’s different? It’s…the music.

Instead of Muzak, there was American Christian Country Music. I am, frankly, not very familiar with American Christian Country Music, and as the plane taxied down the runway, it felt just a little funny listening to a deep, drawl-y, baritone voice strumming a guitar, sharing his musings on the Lord and what He means for the good ole U.S. of A. Cool, I thought. I’m in China. I’m on an airplane listening to the red-blooded, God-fearing songs of the Confederacy. But soon, as we reached our cruising altitude, my attention turned to the bathroom, which was apparently the smoking lounge. Did the pilots just ignore the alarm? Or had the passengers disabled it, and would this tinkering with wires affect the plane’s hydraulic system? Was it possible to reach into the No Smoking in Bathrooms alarm system and very accidentally disable the rudder on an Airbus? At that moment, the pilot turned on the seat-belt sign. The flight attendants urged everyone to take their seats right now. The aircraft began to shake. Was it the rudder? Were we rudderless 27,000 feet above Jiangsu Province? The flight attendant spotted me, the lone
laowai.
“If turbulence causes feelings of airsickness, please vomit in bag.” And I clutched the bag, and I held it tight.

I am quite likely the only member of my generation who still watches the evening news on national television. Our culture is committed to satisfying the needs of the old and the young, and those in between are often forced to choose. I once considered Facebook, but after spending a few minutes idling through its pages (they are called pages, yes?), I could never get beyond the Why of it. Scrolling through the walls of pithy comments, I’d wonder who, exactly, are these “friends” and why don’t they just call? And so I’d tossed my lot with the old, and begun to watch the
Nightly News
with Brian Williams on NBC. In between the pressing news items of the day—the quest for female Viagra, the perils of missing the annual colonoscopy—Mr. Williams would inform us of the day’s events in Iraq, a country where, apparently, we were fighting a war. Invariably, there would be footage of the grim results of a car bomb, and as the sirens wailed across the screen, my eldest son would scamper over, because nothing quite interests four-year-old boys like vehicles with sirens.

“What happened, Daddy?” he’d inquire.

“Well, it’s like this,” I’d say, assuming the measured gravitas of Mr. Williams. “In a place far, far away, there was a car accident, a little fender bender. And Mr. Frumple—you remember Mr. Frumple?—hurt his knee, so the ambulance is taking him to the Busytown Hospital, where Dr. Lion is going to make him feel better. Meanwhile, Bob the Builder is going to come over with his heavy equipment and clean up the scene of the accident.”

Lukas would scrunch his nose and ask: “Is that true? Or is that another fairy tale?”

“It’s true. Just ask your mother.”

It’s what we do, cosset the kids behind thick barricades where they can enjoy the wonder of childhood without being disturbed by anything so troublesome as reality. When I sensed Lukas was troubled by the ladybug he’d just squished with his bike, I’d take the time to explain the phenomenon known as the Great Reincarnation of Ladybugs, and that right now, at this very moment, the ladybug was being reborn as a horse, and soon this ladybug would be galloping across a broad, golden meadow, so grateful to have been squished by a bicycle.

This is a perilous form of parenting, of course. It is very possible that as the hard truth of the world begins to seep in through the barricaded doors, the kids will become bitter and twisted, distrustful of their parents, paranoid even, and eventually they’d start making furtive calls to AM talk radio stations.

“We’ve got a caller from California.”

“Hi, Rush. It’s me, Lukas…”

Nevertheless, we persist with our NeverNeverland, and if the boys end up in counseling, at least we will have provided them with a few years in which nothing bad happens. Ever.

Chinese parents, apparently, think differently. True, kids in China today are often regarded as spoiled, the pampered lone offspring of the One Child system. Of course, most of China is predominantly rural and poor, where a pampered child is simply a fed child. But for the little tykes of the newly evolving urban middle class, no sacrifice, no indulgence, is deemed too small. So perhaps they are spoiled. But if the hundreds of uniformed little kids visiting the Memorial Hall for Compatriots Killed in the Nanjing Massacre is indicative of anything, it is that children in China are certainly not sheltered.

I’d arrived in Nanjing during a spring storm, the kind of squall that tosses airplanes in bracing, sickening ways, leaving certain passengers profoundly grateful to be back on terra firma, even though it was pouring rain—sheets of it—the kind of nighttime maelstrom that makes it exceedingly difficult to see the bicycles on the road, which led to a groan-inducing collision with a cyclist, and though I bled from a gash in my fore-leg I didn’t care, because I was no longer on an airplane and that alone gave me cause for jubilation. Plus, Nanjing is surprisingly nice. There are, for instance, trees, lots of trees. It is a verdant city. And it is no wonder. Clearly, it could be extremely rainy in Nanjing.

The city lies on the Yangtze River, the river system that carves China into north and south. The north gets heating. The south does not. The south gets rain. The north gets the Gobi Desert. Sun Yat-sen, universally regarded as the father of modern China, made Nanjing the capital of the Republic of China in that difficult era between the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1912 and the triumph of the Communists in 1949, thus restoring the privileged position of the city that had been lost when the Emperor Zhu Di moved his capital to Beijing. Temples and gates and walls from the Ming Dynasty still grace the city’s lush hills. But within those old walls there is a modern city, where taxis come with little flat-screen televisions, and the streets are all glimmering and neon-lit, and the buildings, too, come with enormous screens featuring gyrating girls, and it’s hard to believe that you’re not somewhere deep in the world of Blade Runner.

And yet the city does not seethe like Beijing. Bargaining, for instance, is just far easier in Nanjing. I’d slowly adjusted to the need for haggling in China. At first, I moseyed about like a walking ATM, a convenient place for vendors and cabdrivers to extract a brazen
first price
from a dim
laowai
not yet familiar with the need for bargaining for the
special price,
much less the
Chinese price.
It was only after I discovered that I was paying approximately four times what anybody else was for a bottle of dodgy water that I’d begun, tentatively at first, to dicker for the
special price,
and I lived in hope that one day I’d be able to negotiate down to the
Chinese price,
the holy grail for foreigners. I’d found a Web site that offered discounted rates on hotels, and while there was no way I was going to input credit-card details on a computer in a dingy Internet café in China, I would take note of the discounted price at my target destination and make that my bargaining ambition whenever I needed to haggle for a roof.

“Nihao,”
I’d said at the front desk of my chosen hotel in Nanjing. I was pleased to notice a sign that read,
Today’s Hotel English Lesson #86. “We have many amenities to satisfy all our guests.”
“How much is a room?”

“Six hundred eighty,” he said, pointing to the listed price.

“But it says on the Internet that it’s 280
kuai.
”

“Okay. Two-eighty.”

So easy!

Earlier that day, at a small newsstand, I’d stopped to purchase an umbrella. The proprietor typed 70 onto his calculator. I typed 30. Sold. True, the typical Nanjinite could probably get it for 6 yuan, but I took my triumphs where I could. I’d then found a cavernous restaurant where, beneath a ceiling of lanterns and birdcages, an elderly man plucked at a traditional instrument—
toing, toing
—while a woman dressed in silk sang old-school Chinese songs. The available dishes were wrapped in cellophane before an open kitchen, and I simply had to point at the dish that my heart desired, and the chef would rustle it up and deliver it to my table and stool, which was an excellent table and stool for a leprechaun but made me feel like Gulliver. As I inhaled a steaming bowl of clams, shrimps, and cabbage, and sipped at my Tsingtao, I thought, Gosh, I like it here. Nanjing is a fine city. But I had not come to Nanjing to enjoy myself; I had come to understand the serious antipathy for the Japanese that seems to lurk deep within the Chinese soul. Which is why I found myself the following morning in Jiang-dongmen, a neighborhood not far from the Yangtze River, and the site of the Memorial Hall for Compatriots Killed in the Nanjing Massacre.

And I was not alone. No. There were hundreds of schoolkids taking a field trip into the grim past. And grim it is. Right where we stood, thousands of people had been slain when the Japanese marched into Nanjing late in 1937. Their bones are even visible, jutting through mounds of dirt that are encased behind glass. Outside, on the Mourning Square, I had encountered a statue of Iris Chang, the author of
The Rape of Nanking,
a book published in 1998 that demonstrated that the Nanjing Massacre wasn’t simply one of those really, really bad things that happened during World War II, which had started a little earlier for China when Japan invaded during the summer of 1937. This was something far, far beyond bad. The Nanjing Massacre attained a level of murderous cruelty that makes you wonder not only what exactly went on inside the head of a Japanese soldier as he bayoneted a child but, more broader still, how it is that human beings can do this to other human beings. For six weeks, the Japanese brutally slaughtered 300,000 unarmed, defenseless people. It was a sadistic barbarism without equal. As Iris Chang recounted in her well-documented book, soldiers competed to see who could decapitate the greatest number of people in the shortest amount of time.
Kill and count! Kill and count!
they encouraged one another. With bayonets, they ripped open the stomachs of pregnant women, pulling out the fetuses. Tens of thousands of women were raped before they were killed. “Blood was splattered everywhere as if the heavens had been raining blood,” recalled one of the few survivors. And strangely, so much of it was photographed, not only by the handful of Western missionaries who had remained in Nanjing, but by the Japanese soldiers themselves. These photographs were now on display, and as I peered at these images of rape and murder over the heads of murmuring schoolkids, I wondered what exactly these images would do to the psyche of a child, because they were certainly messing with mine. Toward the end of the exhibit are photographs of the Japanese officers who oversaw the butchery, and I watched the kids dutifully jot their names down. They might not have had a beef with Japan earlier, but they certainly did now. And with good reason, of course. The commander in chief of Japanese forces in Nanjing, Prince Asaka Yasuhiko, would go on to live out his days as a prosperous golf course developer.