Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (21 page)

Eventually, we made our way through this teeming city to the very edges of West Lake, which shimmered appealingly in the hazy light of late afternoon. We drove along Hubin Lu, and then we drove back down Hubin Lu, all the while with me beside the driver, sputtering,
No, this way…no, no, turn there…it should be right there…okay, just stop here and I’ll find it myself.
Which I did thirty seconds later. It was an unusually fine hotel for me in China. It was no Grand Hyatt, of course, but there were Chinese men in golf shirts in the lobby pondering the purchase of a condo from a sales group offering luxurious abodes in the sky in a place called Upperclass. This must be like what Miami felt like in 2004, I thought. I wondered what the Chinese word for “subprime” might be.

I checked in, pleased that while the dollar might be slipping into the abyss elsewhere in the world, in China, which pegs its currency to the dollar, $35 and a bit of haggling gets you a mighty fine room in Hangzhou. I dropped my bag off and walked toward the lake, where I soon found a statue of Marco Polo himself. There was a walking path beside the lake, and beside it were speakers piping in ambient traditional Chinese music, which is rarely ambient, but did seem so here. On the footpath, a policeman was chasing a man pedaling a heavy black bicycle. He reached for the back grille and grabbed it and then the two men began to argue violently, which seemed interesting to me, this lack of deference to policemen, until finally and unhappily the cyclist turned around, muttering darkly as he sped by.

There must be some sort of code enforcement here, I thought. So far this footpath was the only place in China where I hadn’t found myself beseeched by beggars and hounded by pimps. I found a sedate restaurant that offered superb crab dumplings and mushrooms, and thought how amazing it is what the Chinese can do with fungi. We just squander them on top of pizzas or ignore them in our salads, but here in China the mushroom gets the respect it deserves.

It was dark when I finished, and I wandered back toward the general vicinity of my hotel. Now, in the dark gloom, I was approached by the familiar touts and purveyors of counterfeit shoes.

“Nike, Adidas,” said one. “Good price. You buy?”

“Bu yao,”
I said, and stepped inside a well-lit convenience store to buy some water, since the likelihood of finding tap water anywhere in China that isn’t contaminated—either with parasites or industrial waste—is approximately nil. As I went to pay, a man pushed his way up before me and demanded a pack of cigarettes.

Now, I want to be clear about this. I am very open-minded when it comes to other cultures. By this time, it did not trouble me—well, okay, it troubled me less—that men in China would hawk enormous globs of phlegm and send it hurling forth before you like a wet, gloppy fusillade. But this cutting-in-line business? It continued to steam me. I took a deep breath and reflected on the Chinese context here. Perhaps if I’d been raised in a country of 1.3 billion people, a country that on the surface seemed to be organized on largely Darwinian principles, I’d be a pushy line-cutter myself. And then I extolled myself for my cultural empathy.

Outside, I cooled my temper with a refreshing gulp from a plastic bottle of what I hoped was clean-ish water—you really can’t hope for more—and soon found myself enmeshed in a gaggle of little beggars.

“Do you not have parents?” I asked the little girl, three, maybe four years old, who tugged at my sleeve and who looked upon me with giant saucer eyes. There were four, five, six little ones now, all pleading
money money.
“Seriously, you are very little people. You should be at home reading Chinese fairy tales. Really, you are just way too young for this. Who takes care of you?”

Money, money.

In the shadows I saw an old, hunched woman with a weathered face. She waved and smiled. I waved back and wandered off to search for a place to drink a beer. Inside the Party-Time Disco and Bar, I found myself bathed in a dim blue light listening to trance music.
Who are you people?
I wondered, glancing at the dozens of figures around me. They must have been eighteen, tops, and they sat on couches listlessly playing games with dice as the tables filled with bottles of Crowne Royal and 35-yuan Tsingtao. I sipped at my beer and watched these young Chinese hipsters, the girls sucking on lollipops, and thought, You kids are just way too young for this. Really, ennui at eighteen. It’s just not right.

As time went on, I had begun wondering about sports in China. The Chinese, of course, are fantastically good at gymnastics, Ping-Pong, swimming, particularly diving, soccer, especially women’s soccer, basketball, and badminton (it’s a sport, really), but you never actually see the Chinese doing sporting endeavors. Not once in China did I see a jogger. Of course, the mere thought of jogging in China made me laugh. Few endeavors strike me as more absurd than running in China, a country in which people routinely wear surgical masks while conducting their errands. Nor did I see anyone playing soccer or volleyball or even badminton, which, judging by the television coverage on the Chinese sports channel—a knockoff of ESPN, incidentally—is a sport in which the Chinese kick serious butt in international competitions. Beyond the basketball players and the gangster rap in Shanghai, I never actually saw anyone in China play sports as just a sort of fun thing to do on a Saturday afternoon. And yet they excelled at so many sports at the international level. How could this be? I wondered.

In China, sports are not meant to be fun. Like in the East Germany of old, China has sports factories where youngsters who have demonstrated an unusual aptitude for a sport or a particular body type, like being a six-foot second-grader, are sent for rigorous training. Sports are seen as an extension of China’s strength and swiftness. It’s not about you, these youngsters are told. It’s not about the team. It’s about the great nation of China. To see a Chinese woman lose a badminton match is a searing experience. She is crushed, humiliated, embarrassed. You can barely look. You can tell that she feels she has shamed the nation. And while I couldn’t understand the commentators, I sensed they believed likewise.
You did not try hard enough, Liling
(which, incidentally, means Beautiful Jade Tinkle).
You have shamed the Motherland. And after China has done so much for you, you dare to lose? Shame!

Sports are seen in an almost martial light. Indeed, as they prepared for the Olympics, the Chinese national basketball team trained by going to boot camp. They lived together in communal barracks. They were given military uniforms. Chinese military uniforms, alas for the players, did not come in the size XXXXXL required to cover a seven-footer, and so the team went through their paces in pants that flopped around their shins. But did they complain? They did not, except for Wang Zhizhi, a seven-foot-one center who was the first Chinese player in the NBA, and who refused to join the team for the hard drudgery of boot camp. Then the shame campaign began. Newspapers denounced his selfishness. Television commentators bemoaned his lack of national pride. After all, look what China had done for him. In the end, sputtering his humblest apologies and reaffirming that he would endure any hardship for the Motherland, Wang Zhizhi joined his team for the rigorous training that followed.

Though few Chinese participate in sports themselves, they are not without activities that they turn to as sporting endeavors. There is, of course, bargaining. The Chinese excel at bargaining. They live and breathe it. This game of parrying back and forth is not played with hostility, it’s just mindlessly played every day for almost everything. For spectator sports, however, the options are more limited. To be sure, there is professional soccer. And there is professional basketball. It’s a good league too. The Chinese, in general, are not the tallest people in the world, but in a land of 1.3 billion people, there is bound to be a large number of statistical aberrations. Indeed, the tallest person in the world is Bao Xishun, a seven-foot-nine Mongolian herdsman famed for once being called upon to use his lengthy arms to reach deep into the throats of two dolphins who had swallowed bits of plastic in an aquarium in Fushun. But other tall people have found their way to the sport academies and now play some really good professional ball. Indeed, Americans, those who were good enough to play college ball but not quite good enough for the pros and just can’t let go of the dream, have found themselves playing in the Chinese league, and as I watched them on television I couldn’t help but wonder what on earth it must be like to be big and black in China.

For everyday spectator sports, however, the Chinese have turned to arguments. Nothing attracts a crowd in China like a good quarrel. This was my observation on the shores of West Lake the following morning. Two elderly women had stopped before a park bench where they were engaged in an argument of epic proportions. They screamed. They mocked. They waved their hands in threatening manners. They did not strike each other. But they wanted to. You could tell. All around them, people had stopped to observe the commotion. They had halted their lakeside perambulations to view the goings-on. There were dozens of people, then a hundred or more as the ladies argued. It was a flash crowd. I could imagine the text messages:
Two old women going AT IT beside West Lake. 9:47 AM. Be there.

I had come to West Lake because it was said to be serene, and I wanted to see what that felt like, serenity in China, and so I kept walking. In the botanical gardens, there were temples and pagodas and ponds full of goldfish. They were all replicas; not much of Hangzhou survives from its glory days as capital of the Southern Song Dynasty. What wasn’t razed during the Taiping Rebellion of 1851 was finally destroyed during the lunacy of the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, not much of old China can be found anywhere, since so much of it was built with wood. But that’s okay. The Chinese are very good at replicas. In fact, the shoreline walk around West Lake seemed sort of ideal from a Chinese perspective: It was both tranquil and fake, but not fake in a bad way, fake in a new and improved sort of way. At the eastern shore of the lake, I came across a woman on a bench who was feeding dumplings to her Western boyfriend.

“You will be a sex maniac,” she said. It’s what I do in China. Eavesdrop.

Shortly thereafter, I opened my wallet and discovered that I was in need of money. China is largely a cash-only economy and so I headed over to the Bank of China, where I hoped to find an ATM that could manage an international transaction. I found one, which asked me for my pin number in English, but after I’d entered it the next screen appeared in Chinese, making it a trifle challenging. Was I getting cash or was I transferring my entire savings to an account in Laos? I fumbled with the keypad, and afterward, flush with cash, I walked toward the streets of downtown Hangzhou.

Suddenly, a man with a wild, leering expression appeared beside me. “German?” he said mystifyingly. I told him no and kept walking.

“Money,” he said. I ignored him and walked on. Suddenly, from behind, I was struck hard.

“WHAT THE FUCK!” I yelled. Pain seared across my ear. I whirled around to face this man. My ear was ringing mightily.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I demanded.

He began yelling at me, smiling, leering. He was with others, young men with cruel expressions. A crowd had stopped to watch. They stood silently, just watching. I didn’t like this. None of it. I didn’t understand what was going on. I had been hit. I didn’t know why. The man continued to yell. And he smirked. He leered. The scene was incomprehensible. I decided to walk away. I turned to go. I started walking.

SMACK.

“WHAT THE FUCK, YOU MOTHERFUCKER,” I shouted.

He had hit me with an open-handed slap to the back of my head. Now he was taunting me, smiling maniacally, yelling. There were hundreds of people gathered around, staring with inscrutable faces. No one said a word.

“COULD SOMEONE TELL ME WHAT HE’S SAYING? WHAT DOES HE WANT?”

Adrenaline was surging through my veins. Being hit, unexpectedly and without cause, had left me in a state of confused shock. And fear. What the fuck? I thought this was a police state.

“You,” I said, addressing a man with an officious-looking name tag. “Can you tell me what’s going on? Do you speak English?”

My assailant continued to scream and leer at me.

“Anyone?”

There was nothing, just hundreds of faces staring, utterly devoid of expression. Then I saw Mr. Sex Maniac.

“Do you understand Chinese? Can you tell me what he’s saying?”

“No, man. But my girlfriend does.”