Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (22 page)

But she refused to say anything. She demurred and turned away with blank eyes.

“Where’re you from, man?” Mr. Sex Maniac asked.

I’m being stalked by a violent lunatic and you want to get all social-like? What the fuck!

“California,” I muttered.
You useless, unhelpful shit.

I decided I needed to get away from this as quickly as possible. I walked on. I turned to see what the lunatic would do. He continued to scream. When he saw me looking at him, he smiled and then screamed some more. I kept walking.

SMACK.

I kept walking. Walking. Walking.

So I was a little stressed. A little tense. Discombobulated. Should I have hit him back? Yes. Probably. I don’t know. Maybe he knew that kung-fu voodoo magic. Perhaps he’d spent his formative years in the Shaolin Temple. I’d hit him and he’d drop me like Bruce Lee. Possibly he had a knife. It was a very long walk back to the hotel, as such walks are when, at any moment, you expect to feel the cool blade of a knife slicing through your torso. This was not typical of China, this getting slapped around at rush hour. In China, one gets the death penalty for far less. I simply had no idea what, exactly, had just transpired. Typically, in fights one knows precisely what they’re fighting about. Was it because I was German? But I am not German. I am half-Dutch and half-Czech. Both halves have been invaded by Germany. Maybe he thought I was someone else.
Laowais
all look alike. Could be. Maybe he was insane. Very likely. Maybe it was an anti-foreigner thing. Possibly. As a foreigner, I wasn’t exactly feeling the love in China. Perhaps it was a robbery attempt. He did ask for money. I don’t know. It was just
strange.

But what chilled me to the bone was the reaction of the crowd. There was nothing. Just hundreds of faces. And their expression? Dead. Lifeless. Nothing there. Just watching. All of them just watching with blank expressions, doing nothing, saying nothing, completely still. They would watch me die there. I would be stabbed. An artery would rupture, spilling blood. I’d be on a sidewalk in Hangzhou, China. Bleeding. Dying. And they would watch with lifeless faces. I would die. And they would watch as if it were a spectator sport.

But bleeding to death on a crowded sidewalk in Hangzhou was not on the itinerary. What to do now? I paced inside my hotel room, wandering from wall to wall. I was agitated. My adrenaline had surged and found no outlet. I felt like running for five, ten, fifteen miles. But I did not want to go back outside. And then I saw it. A little triangular card with an English translation.
Spa. Relaxing massage. Korea Massage. Thailand massage. Swedish massage. China Massage. 3rd Floor.

I have had but one professional massage in my life, and it was on my honeymoon in France, in a seaside hotel in Brittany. There was a spa
pour hommes,
and I went, and I was oiled, and I was rubbed down by Philippe, who dimmed the lights and massaged me to the sounds of Enigma. It was okay, but it was also weird, what with scented candles and the Enigma and all. A man’s hands. But I decided that now would be an excellent time for my second professional massage. It would be relaxing. It would relieve the stress. So I went to the third floor.

I was greeted by a young man dressed as a bellhop. He bounded forth and took me to a locker room. Off with my shirt. Okay. Away with my pants. Fine. Boxer shorts. Off, off, off.

All right. I stood naked before him. He handed me a pair of cotton shorts and a T-shirt. They were beige. They were also Chinese-size, and I am not Chinese-size. I would pop out of these clothes like the Incredible Hulk. One twitch of the shoulders and the shirt would shred. And the shorts were short, 1950s-style. I felt like I should be doing calisthenics, throw the old medicine ball around.

Still, I put them on and followed the spa attendant. This was China and things were done differently here. We entered a dimly lit room where there was a bed, a chair, and a dresser. The attendant left and a young woman entered, tall and lithe, dressed in white stretch pants and a T-shirt. We exchanged
nihaos
and I expressed an interest in the China Massage. Not the Thai or Korean Massage. The China Massage. This was China; thus, I should have the China Massage.

I lay down on the bed. She began to squeeze my shoulders. I was not familiar with the China Massage, but so far it was not pleasant. She kneaded my shoulders like dough. I am not very doughy, however, and neither were the Chinese, so this was bewildering, this gnashing of muscle and skin. Perhaps, I thought, it’s one of those massages that are supposed to hurt but leave you feeling better in the end. I had a Japanese friend who gave massages like that, a karate-like massage that made you wince, but then afterward all the tension just seemed to have melted from your back. Maybe the China Massage was like that too. I’d hurt now but would feel better later.

She indicated that I should roll over, so I did. She squeezed my shoulders. She smelled nice. She moved down to my legs. She rubbed my thighs. And then her hands began to go up my shorts. My short shorts. Um, I thought. Er. I don’t think so. I turned back over and pointed to my back. Men are not complex creatures. They are biological automatons.

Her hands returned to wringing my shoulders. Suddenly, her tongue was in my ear.

“Make love, make love,” she suggested.

“No, no. No make love! China Massage,” I exclaimed, startled.

“Make love, make love,” she breathed.

“No, no, no. No make love. Massage. Massagee.”

She reached for her cell phone. She typed
900.

“No, no, no. I came for a massage. Relaxing China Massage.”

She typed
800.
“Make love,” she pleaded.

“Er…look…no! There’s been a misunderstanding.”

750.
“Make love!”

It was all very embarrassing. I left and went to the locker room to change. And then I realized I’d forgotten my glasses. Once I’d dressed, I walked back toward the room to retrieve them. I encountered her in the hallway. There was bowing, many
xie xies.
Just totally embarrassing.

What an interesting day you’re having, I thought. You found the brothel. Well done.

11

I
n the morning, I pondered the man dangling from the fifth-floor ledge of my hotel. It was a very exciting place, this hotel in Hangzhou. Clearly, this was a hotel that accommodated a wide variety of needs. There was, predictably, a large crowd below. There were also firefighters, all watching this man. Would he jump?

Typically in China, it’s the women who jump. China has the world’s highest suicide rate among women. And it’s no wonder, really. In rural China, when a woman has a baby girl she is said to have delivered a
poyatou,
a worthless servant girl, instead of a
dapangxiaozi,
or big fat boy. As a result of the One Child policy, there is enormous pressure in rural China to produce boys, and as a consequence girls are often aborted. Though gender-based abortions are illegal in China, ultra-sound scans are readily available and doctors routinely give coded signals to their patients, nodding if it’s a boy, shaking their head if it’s a girl. And if it is a girl, very often women will terminate their pregnancy. This is not good, of course. Decreeing that half of the population will never rise above mere servitude suggested a place that had more in common with the blight of Afghanistan than with the wealth of Norway.

And there are unintended consequences to enforcing a One Child policy in a society that diminishes women. Today, there are more then 40 million men in China who will never find wives. That’s because the women just aren’t there. They were never born. Forty million men will thus never have children of their own, will never settle down in the sociocultural arrangement that has spanned millennia—that’s 40 million men who just aren’t getting
any
—and yet women are still treated so abysmally badly in rural China that every year another 150,000 women go on to kill themselves, most often by swallowing pesticides. It’s baffling, frankly. One would think that in a society with such an acute dearth of women, the remaining women would be swooned over, their every need catered to, that rural China would worship all things female, and yet, evidently, that is not the case.

I turned my attention back to this man on the ledge. Perhaps he had taken it upon himself to do what he could for gender parity in China. But did I want see how this ended? I did not. And I had an island to reach.

In contemplating my next move, I had set my sights on Putuoshan, a very small island in the East China Sea, about thirty miles off the coast of Ningbo. The bus to Ningbo was driven by a man with a fondness for swerving and blaring his horn, which could pretty well describe every driver in China. They are insane, these drivers; mad, crazy, dangerous. They drive angry, pissed off, aggressive. Cars, buses, trucks are just tools for them to say Fuck Off. That is how they drive in China: the Fuck Off school of driving. China has just three percent of the world’s drivers, but has a quarter of all people killed each year by cars. They don’t know how to drive in China. Really. Someone needs to teach them.

We passed a scene of rugged hills that appeared to have been chopped in half by a giant’s sword, and more power plants nestled next to black, dusty slag heaps. We progressed past a mind-numbing array of factories, big and small, new and old, until near a cluster of umbrella factories we joined a traffic jam that had gathered behind a truck accident. It was a minor accident, a mere fender bender, but rather than move the trucks to the side of the road and clear the lane, the drivers stood in animated argument, and as we finally made our way past, our bus driver yelled at them too, then resumed the speeding, swerving, and horn-blaring that made driving in China such a lively, hair-raising, really awful experience.

In Ningbo, I changed buses and bus stations. I can say with some confidence that the part of Ningbo located around the two bus stations is hideous. It was filthy. It was, of course, teeming with crowds. Cigarettes and phlegm hurtled through the air in every direction. The buses droned by in a blue haze of exhaust fumes. Soon, however, I was joined on my new bus by four older, very chirpy Chinese passengers. They joshed and laughed, and this pleased me, because so far Ningbo was a soul-crushing dump and it felt good to suddenly be in the midst of innocent frivolity. He was funny, that old man with the blue cap and the twinkling eyes. I only wished I knew what he was talking about. But he could tell a good story, that much I gleaned. We rolled out of the city on our bus of mirth. Even the bus driver was laughing. And suddenly, the landscape had changed. It was lush and green, or rather it was lush and green in the areas that hadn’t been paved over for factories and convention centers and office towers. BUILD A FIRST CLASS EXPORT PROCESSING ZONE, said a sign. And then there were more:

CONSTRUCT AN ADVANCED

MANUFACTURING SECTOR

ADHERE TO SCIENTIFIC PRINCIPLES AND BUILD

AN ADVANCED COASTAL ECONOMIC ZONE

TIDING OVER DIFFERENCES TO

ACHIEVE BRILLIANCE