Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (20 page)

I really don’t have any particular expertise or insight into the dominant trends affecting the calligraphy of the early Tang Dynasty or the dreamy landscape paintings from the late Song era (except to say that they’re kind of dreamy), so we’ll dispense with Olympian-like art criticism and just add that the Shanghai Museum is a very fine museum and that my appreciation for Chinese art was very much uplifted by my wanderings through its thoughtfully lit halls and corridors. Also, I’d add that when it comes time to update my current furniture situation, which is presently under siege by two enthusiastic little boys with a proclivity for fort-building and toppling sippy cups, I will definitely be looking for teak furniture in the Qing Dynasty style, maybe when the boys are in the sullen teenage years when they just want to sleep all day and refuse to believe that their parents really do understand them. That’s a good time for new furniture. And I liked this furniture in the Qing Dynasty style very much.

There was also an exhibition detailing Buddhist influence in China, and as I peered at the display, I listened to an American man explain its contents to the Chinese woman beside him.

“And what is this? This is the bodhisattva. He received enlightenment under a tree. I have a leaf from the actual tree. It’s in Sri Lanka. Remember? I showed it to you. And now,” he said, pointing to a statue. “You know what this is? Yes? We’ve discussed this before.”

What is it about Shanghai that elicits this need in the Western male to inform, to enlighten, the locals? I could not understand it myself. Indeed, my general state of being in China could best be described as one of bewildered ignorance. But perhaps this resort to pedantry was simply their reaction to a similar sense of befuddlement.
I can’t tell the difference between the Ming and the Qing Dynasties, but did you know that suits come either single-breasted or double-breasted?

I walked out and followed Nanjing Xi Lu toward Jing’an Park, and all the while tried to remind myself that the average monthly income of a typical resident of Shanghai is only about $300. In this sparkling stretch of Shanghai, it appeared one would need to add a few zeros to that income. There were Chinese fashionistas tottering down the sidewalk wearing Prada and Armani. On the road, there was a preponderance of Mercedeses. I even saw a limousine. At Jing’an Park, I had expected to find a quiet temple, but instead I’d found four statues of punk rockers next to a plaza featuring a basketball demonstration game played to the thumping beats of American gangster rap emanating at sonic levels from a massive boom box. It really is so easy to be weirded out in China. As I watched these ball players dunking and competing to see who could get their head above the rim, I spent a few minutes deciphering lyrics.
Motherfuckin’, hustle, guns, shit, homicide. Women in my life causing me confusion and shit. Sell my weapon. Fuck you. Fuck you.

Excellent, I thought. The Europeans could take confidence in the allure of their products in China, but Americans could at least take pride knowing they were winning the battle for hearts and minds here.

But there were more curiosities to be found. On the sidewalk, an elderly woman with a headband inscrolled with Chinese characters and a sign pasted to her shirt, was loudly and theatrically complaining about something. I stopped to watch. So, too, did others. Nothing stops a crowd in China like a really angry person. I approached a fashionably dressed woman, thinking that the wearing of fine clothes might have some correlation to knowledge of the English language.

“Yes. I speak a little,” she confirmed.

“May I ask you something? What is this lady saying?”

“Her dialect is difficult to understand. But she is saying that she is not happy with the Party. She says they are not fair.” Pause. “She says that they murdered her husband.”

“Ah…I see. And does she say why the Party murdered her husband?”

“I am sorry. She is very difficult to understand. She does not speak the Shanghai dialect.”

“Do you think the police will bother her, or is it okay in China today to stand on busy street corners and accuse the Party of murdering people?”

“No. The police will bother her. I must go now. Thank you.”

I waited at a discreet distance and watched three plain-clothes policemen take this elderly woman, screaming mightily, into an unmarked minivan. Well, maybe there is something Westerners can teach the Chinese, I thought. And then I thought of events in the U.S. over the past few years, where it is now acceptable to jail people indefinitely and without charge as long as the President says so. Perhaps I’d approached this wrong. Maybe the Chinese aren’t working toward some vaguely American-type model. Maybe it’s us who are moving toward the Chinese Model, and this realization caused a fleeting moment of despair, and then I remembered that it was time to search for sustenance again, and I walked onward into the Shanghai night.

10

I
n the year 1298, a romance writer by the name of Rustichello found himself sharing a prison cell in Genoa with a man who called himself Marco Polo. Bored, they got to talking and the results of the encounter eventually became the book known as
The Travels of Marco Polo,
which was the Harry Potter of its time. Well, not quite, as it would still be another 120 years until Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Nevertheless, the book captured the imagination of the medieval literary world, which was composed of the approximately eleven people who could actually read in medieval Europe. But for these eleven people the book was a sensation. And it is no wonder. In it, a young and intrepid Marco Polo leaves Venice with his father and uncle, crosses the Black Sea, and follows the Silk Road all the way to the summer court of Kublai Khan in the pleasure dome of Xanadu. Young Marco clearly made a fine impression on the emperor, for he remained a part of his court for the next seventeen years, during which time he was frequently sent as a diplomatic emissary to the far-flung lands of what we now think of as China. During one such mission, he was sent to Hangzhou, a city that so enchanted him he referred to it as the “finest and most splendid city in the world,” full of stone bridges and charming lanes and winsome women leading an idyllic life on the graceful shores of West Lake.

Of course, these winsome women would have been tottering on bound feet, an observation that seemed to have escaped young Marco, and the beverage of choice in Hangzhou, and indeed throughout much of China, would have been tea, another detail somehow overlooked by Marco, leading some to believe that
The Travels of Marco Polo
was really a fabulist’s dream. Perhaps Marco Polo did really spend an eventful seventeen years in the court of Kublai Khan. Or perhaps he simply had a keen ear for the tales told by the Arab merchants who traded along the Silk Road. In any event, someone somewhere in the late thirteenth century once described Hangzhou as the “finest and most splendid city in the world,” and this alone seemed like a compelling reason to visit.

I’d boarded a train in Shanghai, where, as I tumbled among the multitudes of travelers, I was quickly reminded that Shanghai is not all money and glitz. There are 200 million migrant workers in China, and I do believe they were all migrating together through the Shanghai train station on that same day. And really, these migrant workers with the disheveled hair, clutching worn bags, economic refugees from a rural China that has seen none of the prosperity of the cities, remain representative of the vast majority of Chinese. There is an enormous gap in China between the women in Chanel on Nanjing Xi Lu and the migrant workers washing windows high above the city. These workers sat behind me on the train, in hard-seat class, while I stretched in relative comfort in a soft-seat car, watching vendors wander the aisles selling drinks, food, trinkets, toys, bracelets, and even golden commemorative plates graced with the visage of Chairman Mao.

Next to me sat a nattily dressed elderly man.

“You are traveling in China?” he asked in flawless English, a linguistic feat that startled me, as I had to yet to hear a soul over forty speak English during my travels here.

“Yes,” I said.

“Where have you been?”

I told him.

“You have not seen much yet. China is a big country.”

This was manifestly true.

“Where are you going now?”

“To Hangzhou,” I said.

“You must walk around West Lake. It is very beautiful.”

“I will. May I say that your English is excellent?”

“I studied English as a boy, and I always remembered it. Later, I had to study Russian, but I’ve already forgotten most of it. I was a professor of chemistry in Shanghai.”

“Ah,” I said, trying very hard to think of a question or observation that pertained to chemistry, but before I could ask him to explain the mysteries of the periodic table, he asked me what I did.

“I do some writing,” I said.

“And will you be writing about China?”

“Maybe. It’s a very complicated country.”

“You need to live here if you want to understand China.”

Yes, well, I would, I thought, if I could find someplace in China that didn’t feel like a biohazard zone. Until I found such a place, I was beginning to realize, I couldn’t in good conscience bring two little kids to live here. I could imagine them years later;
I’m glad you had a chance to understand China, Daddy. Cough, cough. Don’t worry. It’s only the emphysema.

“I’m thinking about it,” I said noncommittally. It seemed impolite to suggest that I found the air in China so abysmally foul.

“Hmm.” He nodded. “You are an American?”

“I live there.”

“I think many Americans believe we still shave our foreheads and wear long ponytails.”

“Do you think so?”

“Yes. American movies portray the Chinese very unkindly, like Charlie Chang.”

“That’s true. But I think that’s changed.”

Surely he’d be proud to have his culture represented by Jackie Chan. And then I thought about it for a moment, and as I recalled the Chinese stereotypes in the latter
Star Wars
movies, and the evil agents on
24
and so on, I had to concede that he did have a point and that for Hollywood, when it comes to the Chinese, there is only Bruce Lee and Ming the Merciless.

I asked him if he’d traveled to the United States.

“I have been to Berkeley, Seattle, and Omaha,” he said.

And Omaha?
An interesting choice for a travel itinerary in America. And a good one. I wondered where I could find the Chinese Omaha.

“My son works for Microsoft,” he added.

“Is that right?” I said. “You must be very proud of your son.” It’s a long, hard journey from the streets of Shanghai to the gilded campus in Redmond. “But I would think that today there are as many, if not more, opportunities in China as there are in the U.S.”

“Maybe,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. And then he nodded off to sleep.

Pity, I thought. In a way he reminded me of my grandmother, born in the hills of Moravia, a place where over a lifetime, without once leaving the village, one could find oneself living in four separate countries. History looms large for the seventy-plus crowd, and while the sands of time have largely been benign for the last generation or two, I sensed that we were on the cusp of something momentous and unprecedented, and I hoped to be able to ride it out so that I, too, decades later, could greet foreigners on a train while resplendent in tweed.

It is but a two-hour journey from Shanghai to Hangzhou, and I left the train for a grubby train station, where the taxi drivers weren’t at all confident where West Lake was.

“Bloody hell,” fumed an English backpacker. “What, is it not far enough? They don’t think they’ll make enough money?”

“No,” I said to her. It’s interesting how quickly China can reduce the traveler to a state of rage and confusion. “In all likelihood, the driver is from some distant town and has never encountered a foreigner before and probably doesn’t know how to read a map.”

I felt like an old China hand.

At last, with map in hand, a note with my hotel’s name in Chinese characters, and with my big dopey
laowai
grin that suggested I could be easily overcharged, I finally convinced a taxi driver to take me onward. I had assumed Hangzhou, on the shores of famed West Lake, to be a town of modest size. It is one of the most popular destinations for Chinese tourists, and I had expected that it would be cutesy quaint, possibly even a seasonal town, the sort of place that quietly shuts down at the end of the summer. I’m not sure why I was so fantastically misinformed. Hangzhou is a humming city of 7 million people on the forefront of the tsunami that is the Chinese economy. Indeed, as in Beijing and Shanghai, should one have a compelling need to buy a Porsche, Ferrari, or even a Bentley, there are dealerships in Hangzhou only too happy to assist you. Though how anyone could be brave enough to drive such a gilded car in a country with 200 million hungry migrant workers was something I could not quite understand.