Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (44 page)

Normally on board this cruise ship on the Yangtze, we woke to the strains of
Doctor Zhivago
softly wafting through the intercom system. On this morning, however, we arose to the bleating of fog horns, and as I looked out the window I could see why. We were enshrouded by a wet cloud, a billowing fog that reduced visibility to less than fifty yards. This would be my last morning on board. We’d celebrated the end of the Yangtze Cruise the night before with a crew fashion show followed by karaoke and waltzing. The boat could go no farther on account of the dam, and so after breakfast we’d clambered into a bus to go see the Three Gorges Dam itself.

Sadly, we could barely see it, this very large dam that should not be hard to see. It’s more than a mile long and 610 feet high, but so thick was the fog that little could be seen beyond the locks that carried ships above it. There was a sound system near the viewing platform and it informed us that “when the dam is completed it will have the attention of the world.” This seemed very important to China, to be noticed, to be paid attention to.

And they could already see that the world was watching. The Three Gorges Dam generates 22,500 megawatts of power, which sounds like a lot but comprises a mere 3 percent of China’s energy generation. The Three Gorges Dam seemed like a lot of trouble and destruction for a 3-percent bump in the power supply. It does little to alleviate the burden from China’s 21,000 coal mines. And nuclear energy still produced only a little more than 2 percent of electricity in China.

And only now is the dam’s environmental impact becoming evident. According to Xinhua, the state-run news agency, the lack of water flow in the Yangtze is preventing the river from flushing out the pollution, and needless to say, there is a lot of pollution floating in the Yangtze River. Increasing levels of sedimentation have become problematic, and today the Yangtze is an extraordinarily brown river. And now there are algae blooms too. The eroding banks along the reservoir have caused landslides and waves that, incredibly, have reached 150 feet high. And these are the problems that the government admits to. Who knows what’s really going on.

“So will you join my tour to Wuhan?” Lu Hang asked me as we walked around the visitors’ center. “I will get you a hat.”

“I am very tempted because of the hat.”

But there are 10 million people in Wuhan, and those were 10 million very good reasons not to go there (no offense, good people of Wuhan). Instead I made my way to Yichang, a modest city on the banks of the Yangtze, where I walked around trying to figure out why there were so many coffee shops. And as I walked around some more, I came to the inescapable conclusion that there were so many coffee shops because Yichang itself is such a sedative. True, there were people waltzing in a riverside square. And there was a strange plethora of bridal boutiques. But this small city lacked the mad vibe I’d come to expect in a Chinese city. It was strangely quiet. I walked into the Old Street Café Bar, which was doing a very good imitation of a Hungarian café, with its high ceiling and gold inlay and wall paintings done in the style of Titian, ordered a coffee, and wrote postcards featuring giant earthmoving equipment and cranes for my sons. There are quite likely only two groups of people who think that building the world’s largest dam might be a really cool thing to do—Communists and the Bob the Builder set.

22

X
i’an reminded me of Dusseldorf. This was the peculiar thought I had as I wandered around the Bell Tower, a gray stone eminence from the Qing Dynasty that marked the center of the city. How can this be? you wonder. Isn’t Xi’an the fabled terminus of the Silk Road? Yes, it is. Isn’t Dusseldorf in Germany? Yes. And isn’t Xi’an in China? Yep. And aren’t Germany and China, you know,
different
? Truer words have never been spoken. So how can Xi’an be like Dusseldorf?

I know. It’s weird. Here I was in an ancient capital that had presided over the rise and collapse of eleven dynasties, and I was thinking of Dusseldorf. Perhaps it was the rain. Whenever I’m in Dusseldorf, the weather is dreary. And it was dreary in Xi’an too. I’d haggled for what I estimated, by this point, was my twenty-eighth umbrella in China. I did not have twenty-eight umbrellas in my possession, of course. The world is divided between those who lose umbrellas and those who don’t. I lose them. But it wasn’t merely the damp spittle that conjured up a city in the Ruhr Valley. From the Bell Tower, I could see a sign informing me that Starbucks would be brewing soon. There were two McDonald’s within my line of vision. The streets that fanned out from the Bell Tower were all lined with bourgeois retailers. Before me, there was an enormous new shopping plaza. It seemed so comfortably prosperous. Like Dusseldorf.

Even the beggars in Xi’an were fat. In front of the Bell Tower Hotel, two obese teenage girls glided by on pullies in the rain, showing their curled feet and bent toes to any and all. The idea being, apparently, that they had suffered cruelly from bound feet. Surely, the upscale tourists who stayed at the Bell Tower Hotel would greet these girls with hoots of derision. Binding feet had ended generations ago. There wasn’t a woman alive in China whose feet had been bound. And then I watched a couple in their North Face parkas drop 50
kuai
into their fat hands, and suddenly I was filled with admiration for these enterprising youngsters. The tourists would go home with tales of the poor young women disfigured by bound feet in Xi’an, and the girls would go to McDonald’s. And then I came across a man on the sidewalk who was missing a third of his head, as if it had been sliced off by a blade, a blade that had also taken both arms, and who stood painting calligraphy on the sidewalk before taking a microphone between his stumps and belting out a few tunes. Okay, I thought, so maybe Xi’an isn’t like Dusseldorf after all.

Nevertheless, I was struck by the prosperity evident in the streets spilling out from the Bell Tower. I even found a bookstore with an English-language section, and as I perused their eclectic selection of titles I wondered how the censors had missed
Penthouse Letters.
I bought a book about Harry Truman, and as I went to pay for it I noticed the bestseller list hanging on the wall. And who might we find at the summit of the Chinese bestseller list?
The Da Vinci Code
by the nefarious Dan Brown.

I had more to shop for, however. When I’d left months ago, I’d packed for spring in Beijing and summer in tropical Hong Kong. I was no longer in tropical Hong Kong. It was November. Indeed, before my journey’s end I had plans to go up to Harbin in the far north of China, where the newspaper confidently informed me that it was presently well below freezing, suggesting the need for a warm coat. I did not have a warm coat. To rectify this deficiency, I wandered around downtown Xi’an popping into stores and trying on coats of various styles and shapes. I, frankly, often wished that men’s fashion had remained frozen in 1940 so that every day I’d know to wear a gabardine suit and a fedora and I wouldn’t have to spend any time choosing what to wear and wondering what my sartorial choices might reflect about me. I didn’t care about clothes. But I also didn’t care to look like a dweeb. So, I suppose, I did care. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to reach into my closet and grab my gabardine suit and my fedora without another moment’s thought. It’s a complicated mind, that of the male animal.

So I walked around Xi’an trying on coats, where it soon became clear that I was getting ahead of myself wondering about style issues, because as I tried coat after coat, it became evident that Chinese men, apparently, did not have shoulders. I couldn’t find anything that fit. I walked into a high-end mall, and ambled past a woman playing a grand piano, and loped among stores selling Polo, Versace, Hugo Boss, and other upscale brands, and wondered who in China spends $5,000 on a coat. And was there some essential
Chineseness
being lost as the Chinese started to buy cars and condos and lattes and $5,000 coats? And was this good or bad? Will we all be united in consumerism? And then I realized there wasn’t a soul buying anything in this upscale mall. There rarely is. The Chinese are frugal. They do not waste. So I guess that’s that, I thought, and then I figured since I’m here I might as well try to find a clean toilet, but a sign informed me that it was Restricted To Four Star Patrons Only. And this I know about myself: I am not a Four Star Patron.

And so I set forth for the Muslim Quarter. There are Muslims in Xi’an. Lots of Muslims. Sixty thousand Muslims. True, it’s all relative in China. There are 10 million people in Xi’an, give or take, and 99 percent are Han Chinese, non-Muslim. Unlike the Uyghurs, the Muslims in Xi’an are Hui, another of China’s diverse minorities, and they’d settled in the sprawling warren of alleys and streets beneath fluttering, colorful streamers near Xi’an’s Great Mosque. I walked in what I presumed was the general direction of the mosque surrounded by men in white hats and women in headscarves and more than a few Arabs and Africans. I could hear the call to prayer emanating from loudspeakers. Every second shop in the Muslim Quarter appeared to be a butcher’s shop, and inside these shops dangled the carcasses of cows and goats and sheep. There were hunks of flesh everywhere, much of it spilling onto the ground. Meat is rarely refrigerated in China, and as I walked among all this flesh and bone, I contemplated a permanent conversion to the vegetarian cause, until I came across two women selling delectable-looking meatballs, the ultimate comfort food, and I reflected on the art of cooking, and that’s why we cook food—right?—to kill the germs, and so it was perhaps okay to eat meatballs amid this scene of bloody carnage.

I approached these two women in headscarves and indicated that I’d like to give them money for their meatballs, and that I was amenable to being overcharged. In response, they stared at me with contempt. What? I thought. Is it the beard? Was it unwise to wander around China with facial hair? Chinese men are not creative in this way, and since my barber experience in Lanzhou, I’d again let things slide. But this was the Muslim Quarter. Isn’t there something in the Koran about beards and that men, ideally, should have one? All of our most famous Muslims today have beards. So that probably wasn’t it. Was it an infidel thing? Iraq? That wasn’t my idea, you know, and I was tempted to blame George Bush for this denial of cooked and delectable-looking food. But this was hardly the first time such a thing had happened, and as I had long since learned, for many people in China,
laowais
are like an alien species. What does one do when confronted by an alien species? Some are curious, wanting to know what it’s like on Planet Laowai. Others see an opportunity to take advantage; the alien does not know the ways of Planet China and is easily snookered. Some regard the
laowai
as a harmless freak and they mock him or want to have their picture taken beside him. And some simply have contempt for the Other.

So I moseyed on and bought a hot bun with a vegetable filling from a Muslim man who was only too happy to feed me, and he took a moment to point me in the direction of the Great Mosque, because as always, I was lost here on Planet China. Non-Muslims cannot go inside the Prayer Hall itself, which is a shame really, because it is said to be wondrous and can accommodate upward of a thousand worshipers. Like the Catholic church in Dali, the mosque has a distinctly Chinese architecture, with sloping tile roofs and stone archways. Originally built during the Tang Dynasty in the year
A.D.
742, the Great Mosque of Xi’an has four courtyards where visitors can admire the arches and halls and the photos of Muhammad Ali visiting the mosque. It’s a contemplative place, and as I watched art students sketching and men with hats and dangling prayer beads wandering among them, I was reminded yet again that once I’d been so wrong about China. I’d assumed it was a monolithic place. But it is not a monolithic place. Planet China is as varied and diverse as Planet Earth.