Golden Week, part one: or "Are the Olympics China's Super-Sweet Sixteen?"
We’ve got another typhoon today in Zhejiang province, the second in three weeks. It’s gotten cold and it’s windy as a well digger’s ass, the river outside is on the verge of flooding, the trash dump is ankle deep in water (and I know this because the old man searching through it for plastic bottles to recycle for change is up to his ankles in water), none of the food vendors who set up right next to the trash dump and sell stinky tofu and fish and snails and fruit and vegetables and flatbread and squid kebabs are out. The chicken-man with his live chickens which he grabs by the feet and unceremoniously drops squawking into boiling water just before he gives it to you, with a smile—he’s not out. Today on the bus, as we were driving through a little flash flooding, the driver hit the brakes and brown water started rushing under the doors onto the bus until it was up to my ankles. The driver had to hit the brakes only because another bus driver floored it and cut him off, forcing him to slam the brakes and swerve left, almost running a car into the median wall, all while we were driving through a foot of water. The internet is down, the wind is getting in the cracks in my windows, the rain is hitting my balcony door even though there’s a four foot overhang and I’m holed up in the apartment with no beer. Even if I was to step outside into the horizontal rain to the only store within walking distance, I would only be able to purchase 2% Snow Beer. I think they call it Snow Beer because it tastes like it’s made by filling the bottle halfway with beer and the rest with yellow snow. I could continue, but I haven’t decided if I’m gonna disparage 2% beer in every post, or save it all for one monster Snow Beer rant.
It’s time for an update.
Just got back from a week in southern China’s Guangdong province with some of my friends from the teaching program in Beijing. Fergus, a British guy teaching in Beijing, came down on Friday the 29th and met up with Daniel from Mexico. On Saturday we took a 25 hour train from Shanghai to Guangzhou (what used to be called Canton), and from there an hour train got us to Shenzhen. On train to Guangzhou we shared our cabin with a computer programmer from Shanghai named Zhang, who asked us to give him a common name. John was too common. Craig was not common enough. We settled on Mark, making him the fifth or sixth person I've named Mark. Any time I have to give a student an English name, I write down all the names of my family and friends and let them choose. That's why there are five Marks, two Alex's, an Abby, two Marys, a Neal, a Gavin, a Jerome, a Rick, a Zak, a Reena, and even a Sam, who I insist on calling Sammy J. (Sorry Florencia, I'm not going to give a Chinese person a name with an 'l' and an 'r' that close together, that's just mean.)
We took a soft-sleeper, which is the old socialist euphemism for first class. On Chinese trains soft sleeper means four beds in a cabin with a door. Hard sleepers are open cabins with three rows of beds, six to a cabin. I took a hard sleeper to Hangzhou from Beijing and thought it was fine, but this time Daniel Alegre, “International Superstar,” bought the tickets, so soft sleeper it was.
Here’s a great example of how communism and capitalism in China sometimes intersect awkwardly: the government has mandated that the Golden Week is a national holiday. As such this is the only time, beyond the New Year in early February, that people get a chance to travel, to see distant relatives or to visit tourist spots such as Hangzhou. Taking off work other times of the year is essentially unheard of for regular people. So that’s all well and communist. But, the prices for everything travel related operate under standard capitalistic principles. Our train tickets were a full 200 yuan higher than they were the week before. Hotels and restaurants and tourist attractions charge more. Food vendors jack up their prices. It’s no different than the hell of flying the day before Thanksgiving. . . Mao must be doing triple lutzes in his grave.
So, to recap—government mandated demand is high, free-market prices go up. It’s little things like this which contribute to the feeling that one has absolutely no idea what’s going on, and makes me happy I don’t have a job that involves predicting what’s going to happen here. Anyone here who doesn’t feel like they have no idea what’s going on is either arrogant, stupid, or Thomas Friedman.
Two of our friends are teaching English down in Shenzhen, which is just north of Hong Kong and about an hour by fast train (100 mph) from Guangzhou. I’ve been saying for a while that China makes a person immune to absurd statistics, and Shenzhen is a big reason why. Today Shenzhen is the focal point of trade in Guangdong province—a province with a population of around 90 million that might have a larger manufacturing workforce than the entire United States. Shenzhen has quickly become the world’s manufacturing center, and 30 years ago it barely existed.
During Reform and Opening in the 1980’s Deng Xiaoping, then leader of the party, hoped to temper the move to capitalism by first declaring Special Economic zones in a few areas as a sort of trial capitalism. The area around Shenzhen, known as the Pearl River Delta, was a logical choice because it was close to Hong Kong, had a good port, and could be politically isolated if the experiment turned disastrous. The old planned economy was dropped and foreign companies were invited to come in and set up shop. Shenzhen was then a fishing village of about 80,000. Now it’s as big as New York, which makes it a pretty large city by Chinese standards. One estimate has Shenzhen as the 20th most populated city in the world. That’s about a hundredfold population growth. I would try and pin down a population guess—say, 14 million—but by the time you read this it will be higher.
The city has a rootless and unmannered feel, very different from Shanghai or Beijing. Almost no one here is from Shenzhen. Most are from the interior provinces, here to make money to send home, or to save enough to return home and start a family. Whereas in Hangzhou most foreigners are studying or teaching, most of the foreigners are here with their company’s logo on their golf shirts.
Shenzhen is in many ways what you would expect a totally made-up boomtown to be like. Shining and new in places, rough and tumble in the tenements, spread-out, loud, gaudy, polluted. There’s a skyscraper that is an obnoxious bright gold, and one that has a giant metal sculpture of Neptune erupting from its 10th floor while the sea god’s horses spring from the opposite side. One of its main attractions is called the Window of the World, where a person can go and see cheesy replicas of famous landmarks like the Eiffel Tower. This isn’t a Chinese city of traditional humility and restraint. It follows the new Chinese morality that new is good. The Shenzhen official history boasts, “During the founding period, Shenzhen people were bold and resolute in smashing the trammels of the old ideas.” It’s good to see the bombast made the transition to capitalism alright. And speaking of making propagandistic transitions, the guy who got this whole party started in the 80’s, Deng Xiaoping summed up the new ethos pretty well: “To get rich is glorious.”
I imagine Neptune’s horses aren’t aligned to maximize the feng shui of his building.
No, No, Yes, Yes
But we weren’t there to procure cheap semiconductors or computer parts. We were there for some sanity. Fergus lives with a person named Worried Mike who some theorize may have been dropped down a well as a child. Daniel Alegre International Superstar, lives in the leather capital of China, which most Chinese people haven’t even heard of, with who only speaks when spoken to and a French guy who’s in love. I live with two very nice girls, but a month of hearing how nice this dress was and how horrible her hair was and how cute that guy was and how nice the boiled rice tasted was driving me mental. I was most excited about the fact that we were meeting up with my best friend from Beijing, Jakub, who’s insane and Polish, two facts that I think might be related. There were six of us renting a hotel room for 300 yuan a night, which isn’t too bad normally but is great when you are splitting it six ways. There are limitations to staying with six dudes in one hotel, but for seven dollars a day, as the old man would say, you can’t beat that with a stick.
Our friends Fabian and Jakub were our tourguides. Fabian is 18 and from Mexico, and as we were to find out, knows nothing about Shenzhen. Jakub had just moved schools from a nearby city a week before, so he knew about as much as us. Fabian has a tour guiding style which started out funny, became annoying, and then was so predictable and ridiculous it became funny again. We’d be headed somewhere, whether by bus or subway or on foot, and suddenly he would turn to us and say, “Where are we going?”
“We don’t know Fabian, you live here.”
“No no no, yes, but I haven’t been here before.”
“Well neither have we, seeing as how we just got here.”
Sometimes he would say, “What bus should we get?” or “Which way should we turn?” or my favorite, “Where are we?” This happened literally every time we had to go anywhere. I kept thinking he was going to stop asking us where we should go, that maybe this was all an elaborate joke, but even on the last day in Shenzhen he asked us how we should get to Hong Kong about 15 minutes before we were supposed to leave.
He also had this amazing skill of revealing the least important information first, and saving the most important things until it was almost too late to do anything about it. Here’s a good example: Fabian, a Danish guy named Matthias and Daniel Alegre International Superstar wanted to get fancy and go clubbing one night. Jakub, Fergus and I’s attitudes towards drinking are more Polish, English and Midwestern, respectively, meaning that we require a building with a hole in it that lets us move in and out, and a place inside that building where we can give people money in exchange for alcohol. But we were down for whatever Fabian put together. Which was, of course, nothing.
Early in the day, when asked about clubbing, he said, “No, no, yes yes. We can go clubbing.” We asked if there was a street with lots of bars and clubs. “Yes yes, yes, no,” he said. Around seven p.m. he decided to tell us that he didn’t know where a club was that we could go to.
“No, I don’t know any bar streets. There are many bar streets.”
“Well let’s just go to one of them then.”
“I don’t know where they are.”
Fair enough.
Around eight he said, “I don’t think it is a very good idea to go to a club. It can be dangerous for westerners. There are many people who will try to screw you.” This made the International Superstar very upset and caused Fergus, Polish Guy and me to laugh very, very hard. I think he meant financially.
“That’s because it’s a brothel, Fabian.”
“No, you can sit there and talk to them.”
“Yes. Because it’s a brothel.”
“Maybe.”
“No, not maybe. It is.”
“Maybe, but you can sit and talk to them and don’t have to pay them or anything….right?”
“Right, because they are trying to get you to pay for sex.”
“Maybe. But still, it can be very entertaining just to talk to them.”
He had been saying things like this all week, but this night confirmed it: Fabian really, really loves just talking with whores.
Swimming with the Colonel and Some DVD Jellyfish in the South China Sea
Fabian’s tour guiding reached its most ridiculous point the day we went to the beach. For various reasons, we didn’t get on the right bus until around three in the afternoon. We were going with one of Fabian’s fellow teachers, a 21 year-old from Sichuan province named Cary. She asked me if Cary was a boy’s name. I thought about some of my students--Dolphin, Money, Alby, Polia, Brain, Johnson, Harry Potter, Jenny Depp, Star, Sun, Snow, Monkey, Angenes, James Fish, Duck, Berry--and told her not to worry about it too much.
Cary must have taught Fabian everything he knows about Shenzhen, because she also had no idea what was going on. After about an hour on the bus, we asked Cary how far away we were.
Four or five “20 minutes” later, we found ourselves stuck in standstill traffic. We asked Cary how far away we were if we got out and walked.
“20 minutes.”
So we got out and started walking. The sky was sfmoggy and we were walking along the harbor where the big 20 foot storage containers are shipped all over the world, one per second, 24 hours a day. They were stacked about a hundred feet high to our right, red and blue and yellow and orange, stretching endlessly through the sfmog. Soon it became clear that there were thousands of people walking with us alongside the traffic. No one had considered that, this being the national holiday, there might be literally half a million people trying to get down this two-lane road to the beach, and that when we got there we might not see the sand but for the people.
We walked for a full hour next to those containers. An hour walking with thousands of people along a few million storage containers that might be more important to China than Beijing is, that are why China has a trillion dollars in U.S. currency, that are giving it the money to make it a player on the world stage, that have helped bring 25o million people out of poverty in the last 30 years, that probably have more of an impact on America than anywhere that doesn’t start with an I and end in a raq, that are sitting on a spot that 25 years ago was a fishing wharf. It struck me as a long time to be walking next to storage containers. Luckily the Polish Guy and I were splitting a bottle of possibly fake Jim Beam we had bought, with great foresight, that afternoon.
Walking past a few miles of shipping containers made me think something not altogether original: China does it big or not at all. If they are going to build a dam, it’s going to be the biggest damn dam ever. If they’re gonna build a city from scratch it’s going to have 10 million people. If there’s going to be a canal it’s going to be the world’s longest. If it’s going to be propaganda it’s going to be as bombastic as humanly possible. If it’s going to be a wall it’s going to be a great one. And if there’s going to be an Olympics, they’re gonna go all out.
This reminded me of something Fergus said a few nights earlier while we were watching a show on the Olympic torch, after the 47th time Yao Ming’s Olympics commercial came on: “The Olympics are China’s ‘My Super-Sweet Sixteen.’”
For those who might not know, 'My Super Sweet-Sixteen' is an MTV show where obscenely spoiled American princesses whine and bitch while their parents degrade themselves by buying 10,000 dollar dresses, letting their children throw shoes at them, and apologizing for not getting the right color Mercedes. At first I was appalled that this is the mindless shit we export to other countries, and then I realized he was right. Being in China right now, in some ways, is like watching the middle ten minutes of My Super-Sweet Sixteen…all the plans are made, preparations are under way, dissenters are being squashed, anticipation is building, and China is getting impatient to just get the party started, so it will be all about her and she can put on the crown and have everyone look at her and take pictures with her friends and dance on tables and publicly humiliate that girl she hates and jump up and down when she gets the Mercedes.
(Maybe you have to be inundated with Olympic hype to appreciate it, but look up some pictures of the Olympic Stadium, the "Bird's Nest," if you haven't seen it, or read about how big the Olympic village is going to be, or think about the fact that 1.5 million people are being displaced for the games and you might get an idea of what I'm talking about. But that's still just the beginning. This isn't an Olympics, it's a century-claiming coming out party. It's China's 'My Super-Sweet Sixteen.')
We reached a small town at the end of the harbor, where Cary guessed we were about 20 minutes away from the big beach, da mei sha. Predictably, we came to a sign: da mei sha 4 km, pointing up a road that led up into the mountains. This is when the International Superstar and the Dane got upset and started storming angrily up the mountain, because I think they had had visions of wearing fancy pants and drinking cocktails all night. About an hour later it was almost seven and there was no beach in sight. The sun was dropping over the South China Sea. The people were packed going up the side of the road, as cars blew by us on the left, honking for no apparent reason. One of the ubiquitous blue utility pick-up trucks drove by.
“We should get on the back of one of those,” said Jakub. This seemed like a good idea, and with almost anyone else it would have stayed just an idea. The next truck that came, he threw his bottle to Fabian and jumped on the back. I had no choice, really, but to follow. Soon we had both pulled ourselves onto the bed of the truck, where we looked back to see our friends and a few dozen Chinese people laughing hysterically. We went around a bend, and our friends were gone. There was nothing but the cliffs and the sea on our right and the mountains on the left. There was no back window in the truck, so the guys up front couldn’t see us. The truck blew past the people walking on the side of the road, and some called out to us. Waiguoren! Waiguoren! Foreigner! Some just laughed. It was amazingly fun, for the same reason taking motorcycle taxis in Shanghai that race eachother, duck between trucks and ignore red lights is fun: you’re never really having fun unless there’s a chance you could die. We looked forward and immediately recognized some holes in our plan, beyond the usual problems you face when jumping on the back of a moving truck.
First, there was now no traffic, and we were going a good thirty miles an hour.
“What if we just drive right past the beach and into the mountains again?” I asked. Jakub shrugged. These are not the kinds of details that bother a maniac of Jakub’s caliber.
“We’ll jump.” Oh. Yeah, we’ll just jump.
“What if they get pissed off?”
“We’ll jump.”
“What if they turn before we get to the beach?”
They didn’t, and we didn’t have to jump. Eventually the truck caught a little traffic, and we passed the International Superstar and the Dane. So we hopped off, trying to smile off the looks from some confused bystanders. It was dark by the time we got to the beach, which was packed as expected. Everywhere people were yelling, splashing, chasing, and having enough fun to make up for a 2 hour walk. A few in our group were furious that it had taken so long to get here, and the Dane was cursing Fabian’s friend Cary out of earshot, whose crime seemed to be offering wait until three pm on her day off to take some foreigners to the beach. Oh yeah, and being unable to predict that a lane would close and traffic would be a disaster. NO CLUBBING!! Oh, the horror! The horror! (Aside: This kind of pretentious, affected, entitled, self-centered attitude is part of what I wanted to get away from when I came to China. You don’t have a pre-ordained right to have everything go as planned, you don’t have a right to hate on people with good intentions when they mess up.) I might be being a little too harsh, but I didn’t see a single Chinese person look put-out in the slightest that they had spent the first day of their holiday (which for most people was half the length of ours) walking to the beach, or that there was so much traffic, or that the beach was crowded, or that the sun was already down. They were with the people they loved, and having fun.
Then I saw it—a jellyfish. Right there in front of me, a big jellyfish, red and clear. Oh shit, I thought, another one floating right there. I looked around and realized they were all over. I turned around…they were behind me. The slimy fuckers had me surrounded. I can’t believe it, I thought, my mom was right. The ocean is an incredibly dangerous place. I should have stayed on the truck. Then one touched me. And another. It didn’t sting. Then another rubbed against my leg. It didn’t feel like a jellyfish. I looked closer. I grabbed it, and saw a familiar face looking back at me. The Colonel. That smug Kentuckian. KFC bag. I looked at another. Die Hard 4 DVD case. DVD case for a movie that doesn’t come out until November. Pizza Hut. Water bottle. DVD wrapper, Chinese movie. Kung Fu Chinese fast-food wrapper. Another KFC. Suddenly it was quiet, like the sea was taking a deep breath. I then heard the collective gasp that comes before a big wave, swelling into a full-out holy-shit “Ahhhhhhhh!”—the anticipation of a few hundred people swelling with the wave. I threw the Colonel back in the water and looked up, because a massive breaker was about to land on my head and I had to decide whether to dive through or go with it.
