Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (7 page)

“The Ferrari dealership?”

“There are eleven Ferrari dealerships in China now.”

I wondered if the owners of these Ferraris drove them with the same manic gusto as Beijing’s cabdrivers. Would one have to be truly insane to drive a Ferrari on the streets of China? Would people here even know how to operate a Ferrari? From what I’d discerned on the streets of Beijing, the Chinese, while in possession of cars, didn’t actually know how to drive them.

Having cut through the Oriental Plaza, we stopped in front of the entrance to the Grand Hyatt, one of the most luxurious hotels in Beijing, whereupon Dan approached two attractive young women who were loitering near the doorway. They wore makeup and tight, form-fitting clothes that suggested that they were either unusually curvaceous for Chinese women or dedicated customers of Stay Fit Health Powder.

Dude. What are you doing?

“She says she speaks English,” Dan said, gesturing to one of the women.

“Yes, I speak English,” she confirmed.

“My friend here would like to hire you for the afternoon,” Dan explained.

Dude!

Around us, shoppers turned to stare. There were children.
Jesus.

“As a translator,” I stammered.

“What’s your name?” Dan inquired.

“Meow Meow.”

Meow Meow.

“Meow Meow, meet Maarten.”

Who was this Meow Meow? And why was this woman with the Bond-girl name lingering at the entrance of an upscale hotel?

“You need translator,” she said. “I can be translator. How much money? Money very important in China.”

Dan took charge of the negotiations. He had long ago absorbed the rules of China, and while I still instinctually paid the first asking price, bargaining had become second nature to him and he now haggled down everything from a restaurant meal to a cab ride to a bottle of water. It still seemed presumptuous to me to quibble over a restaurant bill, but in China no one ever took offense. One bargains for everything in China, including, apparently, the services of an attractive translator hanging around the Grand Hyatt in Beijing.

“Let’s get a coffee,” Dan said, having come to an arrangement that was satisfactory for all parties. We walked back toward the Starbucks in the Oriental Plaza, which was just like any other Starbucks, except that small isn’t Tall. It’s just small.

“China is Starbucks’ second-largest market,” Dan blithely noted, as I stood wondering what, precisely, Meow Meow did for a living.

As she waited for her frappuccino, I approached Dan. “Just an observation here,” I said, “but in other countries the young women lingering outside swanky hotels aren’t usually translators.”

“Do you think she’s a take-out girl?”

“A take-out girl?”

“That’s what the prostitutes in the karaoke bars are called. But I don’t think she’s a take-out girl. But if she is, just think of her as a full-service translator.”

“Thanks, Dan.”

“You’re welcome.”

We settled at a table and sipped our coffees. “So, Meow Meow,” I began, searching for a way to ascertain her profession. I could, of course, have simply asked her what she did for a living, but I’d spent enough years in Washington, where
What do you do?
is the template for tedious conversation, that I hesitated. “Your English is excellent,” I offered.

“No,” she said. “But it is better than your Chinese.”

Very true.

“I am a student,” she continued. “I study English.”

What luck. Suddenly, I felt like I could be helpful.

“You are American?” she asked.

It’s a complicated question for a half-Dutch, half-Czech, Holland-born Canadian citizen with a Dutch passport and a green card presently living in California.

“I live there,” I offered. “Have you ever been to America?” I asked her. She hadn’t. “Well, it’s kind of like this,” I said, waving my hand around the mall. Except this was far nicer. I watched the shoppers mosey about, and reflected that surely this kind of economic transformation had been matched by some sort of social and political transformation. I asked Meow Meow if she discussed politics with her friends.

“See, in my country,” I said, “we talk about politics a lot. There are two groups—or factions, as I think you call them in China. There is one faction that believes George Bush is a simpleton with the brain capacity of plankton, and that is why we are in the mess we’re in. Then there’s another faction that believes George Bush is not only smarter than plankton, but that he is a diabolical mastermind, possibly even the spawn of Satan himself, and that is why we are in the mess we’re in. Do you have similar conversations about President Hu Jintao?”

“No,” Meow Meow finally replied. “Politics are more the concern of poor people.”

Of course, there are 900 million or so of those in China, give or take. The Communist Party has nothing to worry about. Still, I found Meow Meow’s answer revealing. In 1989, it was the students, the children of the elite, who gathered in Tiananmen Square and nearly toppled the regime. Today, students like Meow Meow are sipping vente frappuccinos inside upscale shopping malls. I asked her about what she had heard about the massacre in 1989.

She looked befuddled. Dan translated. “He’s asking about the events of 6/4,” he said, using the Chinese expression for the bloodshed that had occurred on June 4.

Meow Meow shook her head. “I don’t know about this. Was it something that occurred during the Cultural Revolution?”

This, frankly, was a remarkable answer. A little more than fifteen years earlier, the People’s Liberation Army had slaughtered hundreds, possibly more than a thousand, of unarmed kids just yards from where we sat, and yet that recent tragedy had already been obliterated from memory.

Dan smiled. “There’s reality, and there’s Chinese reality. They’re different.”

We started to talk about traveling in China. I had a loose plan to slowly make my way south, but nothing firm. I wondered about crime. I had noticed that many of Beijing’s taxi drivers sat encased within a protective cage. Was crime a problem?

“Yes,” Meow Meow said.

“Well,” Dan interjected. “It’s nothing like the U.S. I feel a lot safer here than I do in D.C. But it’s probably a little worse here now than it was ten years ago. My business partner’s girlfriend—she’s English—had her backpack stolen at the Beijing train station. She reported it to the police. Twenty-four hours later, they tracked her down at her hotel in Shanghai and told her that they had found her backpack and not to worry—they had already executed the thief.”

“Do you believe that?” I asked Meow Meow.

“Yes,” she said matter-of-factly.

It was odd having this conversation. Here we were, embraced by the familiar and unchanging confines of a Starbucks, deep inside a shopping mall that would not be out of place in suburban Chicago, and yet we inhabited an alternate world where massacres didn’t happen and thieves were disposed of for good. My cognitive dissonance was throbbing mightily.

And so, too, was my head. I had, of course, read that China is a little polluted. It’s just one of those things you know about China, along with the fact that it has more than a billion people. You know they use chopsticks. They have an expansive view of what constitutes food. And the country is a little polluted. I had no expectations that my wanderings through China’s cities would be accompanied by crisp, clean air. I knew it would be a trifle smoggy. But in no way was I ready for the swirling filth that constitutes air in Beijing. It was, frankly, apocalyptic.

Living in Sacramento, I had grown familiar with air pollution. Now and then, on a cool winter day, I’d catch a glimpse of the High Sierras and I’d be reminded that we lived awfully close to the mountains. Indeed, the Sierra foothills roll into the suburbs of Sacramento. Mostly, however, this mountain range remained hidden behind the nasty haze that blights life in the Central Valley of California. For a while, I blamed the people of San Francisco, blithely gallivanting about their fine city while sending us their air pollution, which became trapped behind the Sierras and above us. But, as studies on the Sierra snowpack confirmed, more than
a third
of the air pollution affecting California originates in China. When one considers that China is more than 4,000 miles from California, one would be forgiven for concluding that they have an awful lot of pollution. And they do. In their race to be number one, the Chinese have already eclipsed the United States in one significant area. Today, China leads the world in carbon emissions.

Dan had left us to tend to his duties as a Titan of the Orient, leaving me to walk around Beijing with Meow Meow. As we walked, clouds of filth swirled through the city’s canyons, obscuring the massive new high-rises. Cranes peeked through the smog, appearing to levitate. I suddenly had an inkling of what a post-strike nuclear winter might look like. Some people had taken to wearing surgeon’s masks. This seemed completely inadequate to me; I yearned for scuba gear. Meanwhile, my head hurt. My eyes itched. I coughed, and while I hadn’t picked up the locals’ colorful habit of hawking and spitting phlegm, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if the contents of my lungs had blackened to the color of coal.

I couldn’t begin to guess at the number of pollutants swishing through the air. But among all the colorfully named toxins, many are what really smart people call particulate matter. In the United States, anything more than 50 micrograms of particulates per cubic meter of air is considered unsafe, leading authorities to issue red alerts advising children and elderly people to remain inside. In Beijing, the average particulate matter swirling through the air on any given day is 141. For a foreigner, even for someone accustomed to the haze of Sacramento, this is unimaginably foul.

“It’s very interesting air you have here in Beijing,” I noted to Meow Meow. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it before.”

“Yes. It is very dirty. More bad today because of dust storms last week.”

“Dust storms?” This only seemed to heighten the End Times atmosphere.

“Yes, every spring we get dust storms. You can still see the sand.”

It was true. Beijing remained coated in a fine layer of sand. This, too, was unexpected for me. When I had envisioned Beijing, I didn’t think it would be particularly green, but I certainly didn’t expect it to be quite so brown. Then again, this too is a new problem for China. More than a quarter of China is a desert, and sadly for the people of Beijing, the Gobi Desert is coming for them. Not more than fifty miles from the center of Beijing, great sand dunes are moving inexorably toward the city. Forty years ago, sandstorms were rarely seen here, but today, they are a seasonal event. Every year, the
shachenbo,
or dust-cloud tempest, deposits more than a million tons of sand on Beijing, and some scientists believe that within the next couple of decades Beijing will be swallowed by the Gobi Desert.

“So you’ve got hideous pollution compounded by dust storms,” I observed.

“Los Angeles is polluted too,” noted Meow Meow.

I nearly blurted out,
Thanks to China,
but, of course, that wasn’t entirely true. We’re pretty good at pollution too. We didn’t just hand over the title of world’s greatest polluter, we made China earn it. Indeed, somehow, inexplicably, we’ve even made owning an SUV seem like a patriotic thing to do. Nevertheless, the refrain
Los Angeles is polluted too
is something I would come to hear often in China, as if the swirling clouds of toxins that churn through Beijing are merely the unavoidable cost of development. But I’ve seen polluted cities before. I’ve been to Mexico City. I’ve trampled through the soot-stained streets of Katowice, a grim city in industrial Poland. And I’ve spent more time than I cared to in Los Angeles. And I can state with some confidence that none of these places have air quite so vile as Beijing’s.

“Do you want to walk or catch taxi?” Meow Meow asked.

I wanted to walk. I figured that the quicker I became accustomed to the pollution of Beijing, the quicker my headache would recede. Perhaps my eyes would stop itching too. And possibly my lungs might stop wheezing as if I’d just chain-smoked three packs of Marlboro Reds. So I wanted to walk through Beijing. For health reasons.

Once upon a time, the capital was regarded as a fussy, imperial sort of town full of officious bureaucrats who disdained provincials. This suggested an orderly place. Clearly, this must have been a long time ago. What I saw now as we walked along was mayhem. In the dismal haze, people screamed into their cell phones. Beggars pleaded for money. And everywhere there were crowds, seething masses of people, striding up sidewalks, filling underpasses, crossing roads as speeding cars cleaved them apart. And there was noise, an earthshaking wail of jackhammers and buzz saws and, of course, the ever-present howl of car horns. In China, I’d discovered, when getting into a car, the first thing a driver is expected to do is blast the horn. This is to be repeated in ten-second intervals, and because, by my count, there are now a bazillion cars in Beijing the result is an endless honk, a ceaseless clamor amplified by the ear-rattling grind of construction. Half the city seemed to be going up, while the other half seemed to be coming down. And it was only when I found myself in the presence of a bucket of live scorpions that I was able to tune out the havoc of Beijing. There’s nothing like coming face-to-face with a black scorpion to concentrate the mind.