Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (26 page)

More than 25 million people a year come to Macau to gamble, most on day trips from Hong Kong or the mainland. Formerly, when Stanley Ho held his monopoly, gambling took place in smoky, dingy dens of vice. It was the anti-Vegas. But today, the plethora of new casinos are betting that the gamblers in China will want what those in Las Vegas do. Near the ferry terminal on the Cotai Strip, there were a half-dozen new theme-park casinos under construction. Everyone was there, Shangri-la, Sheraton, InterContinental, Raffles, St. Regis, all building casino hotels with swanky nightclubs and swanky stores that will happily take your winnings. This despite the fact that the vast majority of Chinese gamblers are day-trippers from Hong Kong or the mainland who rarely stay longer than a day. Still, the average table in Macau earns more than three times what a table in Vegas does, and this in a country where the average monthly wage is $150. Indeed, even now Macau already earns more in gambling revenue than Las Vegas.

We walked to the Wynn Macau, a top-end resort in the Vegas style with a golden facade and dancing fountains built by the famed casino magnate Steve Wynn. Frankly, I wasn’t convinced that the Chinese were yearning for a Vegas-type experience. Not yet. Gambling is technically illegal in mainland China, so when the Chinese come to Macau they come with a mission. Gambling is the be-all and end-all of the trip, and I thought it highly unlikely, indeed deeply un-Chinese, that someone would take their winnings and blow it on overpriced jewelry and furs, rather than ply it into the family business back on the mainland. Nevertheless, there were crowds of gamblers swarming around the casino floor. There was a strange vibe among the tables, something dark and menacing. Perhaps it was the metal detectors and the mandatory bag check and the plethora of security guards that led me to expect an imminent raid by some triad displeased by their new competition for gamblers. Most Chinese play baccarat, and we stood alongside a table, quietly amazed to see a man in peasant garb pull out a fat wad of 100-yuan notes.

Jack’s game of choice was roulette, so we set off to find a table.

“Isn’t that the game with the worst odds?” I asked him.

“Yes, but when you win, you win big.”

“I think this reveals something about your character.”

“All or nothing, baby.”

We finally found a roulette table, and as Jack laid his bets he explained the game to me.

“I didn’t understand any of that,” I said. “All I see is that you’ve just lost about $100 in a fraction of a minute.”

“Yeah, well…but when you win, you win big.”

Jack played a few more rounds, and just as the carnage was getting interesting, we decided that now might be a good time to head to the lounge, drink an overpriced Coke, and observe the action on the floor. I had, of course, witnessed hundreds of people in a casino before, mindlessly dropping coins into slot machines. They don’t play for money in America. It’s true. The big payout is incidental to most gamblers. It’s the numbness they’re after. Not so in China. No one had that look of glazed stupor often found in American casinos. The Chinese were nothing if not engaged over the baccarat tables. They yelled. They smoked. They bet. But no one seemed to be having any fun. And this is why I suspected that a Macau reborn as the Las Vegas of Asia wouldn’t quite work. The expensive nightclubs would fail. The Piaget watches would remain unsold. Because gambling isn’t fun in China. It’s business, and no one takes business more seriously than the Chinese.

“You know,” Jack noted, “this place kind of creeps me out.”

“Agreed. Let’s get out of here.”

We moved on to the Sands, one of the first new casinos to open after the monopoly was busted. It had more of a Reno feel; the flash was ersatz.

“I’m getting a better vibe here,” I said. “I think I’m more of a Reno kind of guy.”

“Not sure I’d admit to that if I were you.”

I found a blackjack table with a low minimum bet, while Jack wandered off in search of another roulette table. Soon, I was in the zone, that thoughtless place, reacting to numbers, calculating odds, playing systematically, and resisting those moments when I get a really good feeling that now would be an excellent time to throw it all in. A couple of hours later, Jack appeared.

“How’d you do?” he asked.

“I’m up…let’s see, about 4,000 Hong Kong dollars. You?”

“I won a couple of hundred bucks.”

“Let’s do something really insane and quit while we’re both ahead,” I suggested. “The likelihood of both of us being ahead has got to be so infinitesimally small that we best run.”

With an hour to kill before the ferry returned us to Hong Kong, we settled in a lounge to watch a cabaret show with dancers in sparkles and spandex and cowboy hats.

“See?” Jack said, watching the dancers. “Everyone still wants to be just like us. Even the Chinese.”

It was time to take Jack to see the real China.

13

I
t was a swift transition. One moment we were in Kowloon discussing real estate with a taxi driver. “Those buildings there. Eighteen thousand dollars for one square foot. Too much money. In Hong Kong, no money, no honey.” So true. And then, after a perfunctory stroll through Immigration in the sleek and modern Kowloon train station, we boarded a train that whisked us through Hong Kong’s Northern Territories, a hilly and wooded expanse speckled with sudden bursts of high-rises, and suddenly we found ourselves in the bustling border city of Shenzhen.

A quarter century ago, Shenzhen had been little more than an anonymous fishing village. In the 1980s, however, Shenzhen became the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, China’s first foray into the exciting world of capitalism. Comrades turned into entrepreneurs, communes became factories, and tirades against the imperialists of the West gave way to trade with the world. In 1992, Deng Xiaoping, during his tour of southern China, is said to have proclaimed, “To get rich is glorious.” It’s quite likely Deng Xiaoping’s most famous quip, and one can understand why. It’s not, typically, the sort of thing often heard spoken by Communists. There’s a disconnect between
Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!
and
To get rich is glorious.
And yet no one actually heard him say it. No one. There is no record anywhere of Deng Xiaoping expressing these words. Nevertheless, Deng Xiaoping never countered the widespread belief that he’d uttered this paean to the veneration of wealth, and the expression—
To get rich is glorious
—became a whipsaw moment in China. To get rich was now desirable. It was permitted, encouraged. It had been officially sanctioned by the head honcho of the Chinese Communist Party. And what had started as a tepid stream toward capitalism became the tsunami that continues to this day. Except, of course, they don’t call it capitalism in China. It’s called Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. To which the Chinese say,
Who cares what it’s called? I can be rich, gloriously rich.

While Shenzhen is indeed richer than it was before—far richer—it is still, frankly, a dump. True, from the train platform we could see a skyline of cranes and glittering skyscrapers, but everything else built over the past twenty years had already become decrepit and forlorn. The Chinese are said to venerate the old. Perhaps this is true when speaking of people, but it doesn’t apply to buildings. Still, there were millions of people now occupying these apartments. Most were women attracted to the region for the factory jobs, but more than a few had come to serve as girlfriends, professional and otherwise, to the wealthy businessmen crossing the border from Hong Kong. I had surmised from the daily offers for
messagees
and night ladies that every city in China had a thriving sex industry, but the one in Shenzhen had been deemed such a threat to public welfare that the government undertook a shaming campaign, rounding up the city’s prostitutes and forcing them to march through crowds of people who hurled abuse and scorn upon the women, a tactic last seen during the Cultural Revolution. Within months, however, the prostitutes were back. They might not become gloriously rich, but they’d at least divest the rich Hong Kong johns of some of their wealth.

The train continued its journey onward. We passed rubble. Lots of rubble. It really is quite amazing how much rubble there is in China. “It doesn’t feel like San Francisco anymore,” Jack observed. “This is more like Tijuana.”

As we traveled on from Shenzhen to Guangzhou, we passed vast numbers of factories and crossed over pools of still water bearing wholly unnatural chemically-induced colors. We rumbled past enormous mounds of trash and the ever-present piles of rubble. We began to think of a new slogan for China.

“China—A Giant Pile of Crap,” I offered.

“China—It’s Chinastic!”

A short while later, we arrived in Guangzhou. Jack knew someone who knew someone who knew someone in Guangzhou, and this alone had seemed like a good reason to visit. Also, I did not want Jack to be lulled by Hong Kong, to think for a moment that Chinese cities are anything other then bastions of swirling mayhem, and invariably, as expected, and as I had explained to Jack’s disbelieving ears, after passing through Immigration, we experienced the assault upon the senses that is contemporary China. In the hallway, we were quickly surrounded by aggressive men yelling,
Taxi taxi!
Tour and hotel operators shouted at us. People clapped their hands in our faces.
Laowai! Laowai!
Beggars thrust their hands before us.
Money, money!
Touts marched beside us.
Make love Chinese girl.
The policemen looked stupendously bored. “No, Jack,” I said to him when he moved to accept a ride with a gypsy cab. What was he thinking? Jesus. This is a train station in China. These are vultures, these people who linger here.

And then there was the taxi line, a long, snaking length of people—people who pushed, who jostled, who spat out wads of phlegm and clouds of smoke, people who cut in line,
goddamn it.
I am not the sort of person prone to going postal, but if ever it did happen, it would be in a line in China.

“Well, this is different,” Jack observed.

“Good. I’m glad you found what you were looking for.”

Finally, we made our way into a taxi. True, we could have avoided the line by agreeing to a gypsy cab. But while there was a one-out-of-four, maybe one-out-of-five, chance that this regular, state-sanctioned, official taxi driver would seek to overcharge the dumb
laowai,
a ride in a gypsy cab was a guaranteed rip-off. We tossed our bags into the trunk and the taxi left the train station to follow one of the many ring roads.

“Remind me to start investing in cranes,” Jack said.

Guangzhou, of course, was huge, another of the mega-cities that China specializes in. Three quarters of the world’s tall building cranes are in China, an unsurprising statistic for anyone who’s been to China, but a source of wonder to first-time visitors like Jack, who’d encountered his first true Chinese city. On our way to the hotel, we passed enormous work sites, construction zones with on-site shanties for the migrant workers. Guangzhou is also a rich city; the per capita GDP is about $10,000, making it one of the wealthiest cities in the country. Like Shenzhen, it was favorably located near Hong Kong. But of course, as elsewhere, an endless layer of pollution hung in the air. We battled our way through mad, crazy drivers until we crossed over a small bridge and found ourselves on Shamian Island.

This island in the middle of Guangzhou had once been a Western outpost. Like lepers, early traders from Europe and the United States had been isolated here on this small sliver of land in the Pearl River, and even today the island retains a Western focus. On every corner, there are statues of American kids engaged in some Rockwellian endeavor—fishing, playing tag, reading a story on Grandma’s lap, and otherwise carrying on like storybook characters circa 1931. It was, frankly, a little creepy.

But then we noticed all the American couples pushing strollers. The American Consulate was on Shamian Island, and this was the last stop for couples adopting Chinese babies. Laundry shops offered free strollers. A shop sign informed passersby that a jade pendant means Mother–Daughter. We counted dozens of new parents. Like so much in China, the scale could be unsettling. But, of course, this was good, this economy of scale in adopted babies. Fate was smiling on these children. Almost all were girls, and China, as we know, is a hard place for girls. So I was pleased to see hundreds of Americans pushing strollers with Chinese babies as we drove past. These children would have lives. They would be taken care of. They would be loved. So this was good.