Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (4 page)

The haze that hung over our surroundings was unearthly. It swirled in gray and brown and yellow plumes. It suggested that not far away, something catastrophic had occurred—a volcanic eruption, a meteor strike, a thermonuclear bomb—and now life had been reduced to a state of grim survival. But this was China, not the slopes of Mount Saint Helens. This was Beijing, not Hiroshima. Under a grim, eternal twilight of a sky, I followed the unarguable dictates of a skinny teenage boy in an olive uniform and slowly shuffled forth toward the taxi line.

Lining up in China, I soon discovered, was played as a contact sport. Men and women, young and old, cigarettes dangling from their lips, used their elbows and shoulders to muscle their way to the cabs. With knobby elbows in my ribs, strange hands on my arms, and my back feeling the amassing weight of the hundreds who had not yet slinked ahead of me, I began to ponder the idea of personal space, and whether the Chinese have a character for personal space, and after being shimmied aside by a grandmother who could not have been more than three and a half feet tall, concluded that no, such a concept is evidently alien to the Chinese. And so I, too, began to dig in against the line hoppers, flinging my shoulders to contest the passage of three businessmen behind me. A shoulder here, a foot there, soon I was moving like a heaving linebacker. Some fifty people had managed to bypass me in the scrum, but now that I knew that lining up and getting bruised were intertwined, I was determined not to let this troika of businessmen pass me by. If I hadn’t begun to regard the queue as a forum for physical sport, it is quite likely that I would still be there today, for lining up in China is not for the meek.

Finally, I was directed toward a small green taxi. I had printed out the name and address of my hotel in Chinese characters before I left and now I handed it to the driver. Inside, he offered me a cigarette.

“No, thank you,” I said. “I’m reformed.” Though why bother not smoking in China, I wondered, as I again noted the dull gray haze stained with soot and sand from the encroaching Gobi Desert, which was a mere fifty miles away. I indicated that I didn’t mind if he smoked, and soon, as the driver approached what I was pleased to learn from a passing sign was called a carriageway, I relaxed. Carriageway suggested an idyllic ramble through a thicket of woods. And while I was reasonably certain that the drive from the airport to the center of the city would not be an idyllic ramble, my addled brain was nevertheless wholly unprepared for the mayhem that is highway driving in Beijing.

Elsewhere in the world, a four-lane highway suggests that no more than four vehicles can move forth side by side. Yet somehow, in China, seven cars manage to share a space designed for four. There was an unforgiving frenzy to get ahead. We leapt forth, swerved, smited competitors for position, and in leaps and fits made our way into the city. The taxi driver drove without consulting his mirrors, and often, far too often, we’d swerve into another lane, sending cars screeching and swaying in every direction, and as my heart palpitations threatened to turn into a full-on cardiac event, the driver calmly sipped tea from his thermos, smoked his cigarettes, and unleashed the clamor of his horn. Chinese drivers, I was discovering, speak with their horns. They blast it when they’re about to pass someone. They blast it while they’re passing. And they blast it when they’re done passing. Then they blast it some more, just because. Then there are the other horn blasts, the short ones that convey mild irritation, and the long Munchian screams that reflect a troubled soul. Together, the blasting horns converge into one endless sonic wail. We tolerated no other car, until a black Audi A6 with tinted windows rocketed behind us, flashing ominous blue lights and a panic-inducing siren. Swiftly, we changed lanes, and as the Audi sped ahead, we returned to its lane and allowed ourselves to be pulled in its wake.

“Police?” I asked.

The driver indicated otherwise as he again offered me a cigarette. Around us, the scene had turned into something familiar. There were thousands of squat apartment buildings constructed in the flimsy Communist-bloc style I remembered from my time in Eastern Europe. They are called
panelaky
in Czech, soulless and austere apartments designed to crush the soul. Most were in advanced stages of dereliction. But throughout the city, everywhere and in immense numbers, there were also cranes. It was a city of cranes. It was the invasion of the cranes. They stood atop hundreds of buildings as if they were nesting. There were big cranes and little cranes, yellow cranes and green cranes. They ruled the city from their perches in the sky as a toxic haze swirled around their steel facades. They were the tools of Beijing’s transformation. They were destroying buildings and they were creating buildings. Above all, it is the cranes that dominate Beijing.

Darkness descended and there was a long moment of gloom. What? I thought. Did they not have electricity in Beijing? Did Chinese cars not come with lights? And then, as if some unseen deity had flipped the proverbial switch, Beijing emerged in a sea of light. We passed restaurants bathed in a harsh fluorescent glare. This pleased me. It was familiar. Chinese restaurants with bad lighting. It was just like home. But this wasn’t home. I had, of course, seen Chinese characters aglow in neon. I had been to dozens of Chinatowns. But this was the mother of all Chinatowns, and these thousands of signs, all presumably offering information, directions, imploring you to buy this and do that, were utterly alien to me. I understood nothing, a sensation that disturbed my psyche. I felt profoundly out of my element.

We careened around a corner, scattering pedestrians and cyclists. Why did he do that? I wondered. They had the right of way. Was my driver an asshole? He did not seem like an asshole. This was perplexing. He drove as if to kill. Why was this so? Finally, I was deposited at my hotel, and I was left with my head throbbing with jet lag and sensory overload.

I entered the modest lobby and waited for the woman at the check-in counter to notice me.

“WHAT?” she barked.

“Er…I have a reservation,” I said.

“PASSPORT!” she wailed.

I gave it to her.

“ROOM 587! KEYS! GO THERE!”

I thanked her for her kindness and made my way to my room. Off the lobby, there was a restaurant full of Chinese patrons. That’s always a good sign with Chinese restaurants. As I stood waiting for the elevator, a woman rushed out of the restaurant carrying her toddler son. She stopped beside me, opened the flap of his pants, and directed a stream of urine into the ashtray to my right. When the boy was done, they returned to their table. Right, I thought. There’s pee in the ashtrays. In the taxi, I had briefly toyed with the idea of relaxing my no-smoking rule to “No smoking in North America.” But the prospect of stubbing out a smoke in a pond of pee encouraged fortitude.

I made my way upstairs. I had an overwhelming urge to simply collapse upon the bed, but I wanted to adjust to the time difference as quickly as possible, and so I forced myself to go out for a walk and possibly find something to eat. I emerged into the din outside, consulted my map, and soon found myself wandering upon Wangfujing DaJie, a pedestrian arcade that runs north to south in Central Beijing. The evening was warm. Up on the billboards, I spotted the familiar visages of Tiger, LeBron, and Ronaldinho, and in the square in front of the gothic facade of St. Joseph’s Church, a gathering of scruffy-haired migrant workers with hard, shell-shocked faces. Three mistrals played their instruments, singing a song in a language I could not place. Everything felt strange and I wondered whether it was the jet lag. Or was it the presence of a Gothic cathedral in Beijing? I had not expected to see a cathedral before which brides were having their photos taken, inline skaters loitered, and men with tousled hair and dirty faces stared at the world around them with an expression of despair. As I absorbed the scene, a woman approached me. “Night lady?” she whispered.

Night lady.

I had begun my day in Sacramento, and now I found myself in front of a church in Beijing, surrounded by shoppers and migrant workers, being propositioned by a lady of the night. It had been a long and strange day. I walked on. Ahead, blinking brightly, I could see a sign that announced itself as the “Moslem Restaurant.” Encouraged by the English words, and the implication that there might even be English menus, I entered. It was busy, and as I settled into a seat, I was gratified to receive a menu I could comprehend. And as I perused the restaurant’s offerings, I was more than a little thankful.

Cattle Penis with Garlic

Chicken and Sheep’s Placenta in Soup

Ox’s Penis and Sheep Whip in the Soup

Processed Ox Stomach

Sheep’s Heart

Sheep’s Testicle

Sheep Brain

Ox Larynx

When the waiter returned, I pointed to the Grilled Chicken. I am amenable to eating anything, but not after a long airplane journey, which for me results in a strange and inexplicable knotting of the stomach. Some time later, he returned with a dish that was manifestly not what I thought I had ordered. It was vaguely gelatinous. It quivered. I called the waiter over.

“Zhege zhende shi jirou ma?”
I asked.

He looked at me blankly.

“Zhege zhende shi jirou ma?”
I repeated, indicating the food. Surely this wasn’t the chicken I had ordered.

He fetched the menu. I pointed to the dish I thought I had requested. The waiter nodded his head effusively. I looked at the menu a little more closely. And then I recognized the enormity of my mistake. Cultural hegemonist that I was, I had assumed that the menu items were displayed in English first, followed by their Chinese translation. The reverse, of course, was true. And now I learned that the grisly mass that lay before me was not a chicken but the brain of an unfortunate sheep. As I sat there, chopsticks in hand, it occurred to me that it was time to start paying attention in China, because there are consequences for not paying attention in China. Big consequences.

3

L
et’s begin with Chairman Mao. So much in modern China begins and ends with the colorful tyrant from Hunan. When the China of yore, that long twilight presided over by the doddering Qing Dynasty, finally collapsed with the abdication of the boy emperor, sad little Puyi, it was Mao who emerged in 1949 as the last man standing after decades of civil war. There are still some, apparently, who regard this as a fundamentally good thing, arguing that a fractious, backward country like China could only have entered the modern age under the steely guidance of a megalomaniac like Mao Zedong. Indeed, this view is often expressed empirically as 70:30—70 percent of what Mao did was pretty darn good, while 30 percent of his actions were a trifle excessive. This is, in fact, the official view in China.

Of course, the government acknowledges, here and there mistakes were made. In retrospect, the Great Leap Forward was probably not such a good idea after all. In the spring of 1958, Mao had decided that China should be a superpower. Not just any superpower, mind you; Mao was nothing if not ambitious. As he unleashed his Great Leap Forward, Mao idly drew plans for what he called the Earth Control Committee. At the time, China was a land of peasants still reeling from years of war and centuries of impoverishment. And yet Mao believed China should rule the world. He just needed a year or two to boost the country up and prepare it for global domination. And thus the Great Leap Forward, a headlong rush to transform a country of farms into a nation of factories. Gazing at a vista of temples and pagodas from his perch in the Forbidden City, Mao declared: “In the future, I want to look around and see chimneys everywhere!”

And so it would be. Throughout China, city walls that had withstood the Mongols were destroyed and replaced with steel factories. The ancient cores of cities were flattened and from the ashes new power plants were built. Some people, of course, objected to this willful destruction of China’s cultural heritage. In response, Mao put them on the wrecking crews. Meanwhile, in the countryside, a half-billion peasants suddenly found their lives in turmoil. Massive waterworks projects were inflicted on the country, including a dam in Henan Province that would subsequently collapse in 1975, killing 250,000 people. Villages were abandoned for communes, where soon the villagers lost their names and gained a number. Numbers, after all, were more efficient than names. Tools and cooking utensils were melted into steel in millions of backyard furnaces so that Mao could claim to have doubled China’s steel production within a year. The steel, of course, was useless, and any pilot flying a plane made with the steel produced in a backyard furnace would soon be dead. But the steel quotas were met, and this is what mattered to Mao.