Features [1] [2]
|
It's Hard To Imagine A visit to the heart of changing China or: the dangers of a Beijing dance club by Barron Young Smith [Photo by Alexis Arieff] To attempt to comprehend or even envision China is to enter into a world of the imagination: a land of silk and smoke with an inscrutably poetic past, filled with vague notions of ancient courts and enigmatic revolutionaries. China closed itself off to Western trade in 1727, effectively blueballing the eager mercantile companies who were left gasping and pining for a glimpse of its mysterious wonders. From then on, the Middle Kingdom has been a subject of fantasy and speculation: the unreachable, incomprehensible wet dream of an adolescent West. |
|
In rendering our understanding more tangible, we must first start with the imagination, and proceed from there to the concrete. "Imagine" was John Lennon's starry-eyed and hormonal ballad to a socialist future, inspired by a heady whiff of the evening air on a trip to Beijing. And Imagine we must. I have to admit that, as our 747 sailed quietly over eastern Siberia, my mind was filled with conflicting and unclear visions of my destination.
My mother visited China in the seventies, and her experience there was, in a word, communist. It was the grey, grim, massive China of lore: a teeming pack of silently industrious Yoda-like wise men and women dressed in wool Mao suits. Insert your images of the repression of the Cultural Revolution and the Tian an' men square massacre here. Movement by visitors was severely restricted to the Great Wall, the Forbidden Palace (China is incredibly skilled in the art of naming tourist attractions) and a command-economy invention called the "Friendship Store" - a state-run department store only for foreigners, where foreigners were distributed a separate currency only usable in the Friendship Store. Imagine an empty Sam's Club with no employees and you're starting to get the picture. At the time, visitors were never allowed to see more of China than said Friendship Store. If you believed the old Western world newspapers, the real nation was a sort of quietly oppressive hive of humanity full of bustling worker bees, hidden behind an impassive wall of solid grey stone.
That bare-walled image of a totalitarian state combined incompletely with my cultural memories of my grandmother's rice, firecrackers, dragons, gaudy red paper, staunch familial ties, silly paper-looking umbrellas, Zen, calligraphy, kung fu, and a mountain of other friendly, industrious stereotypes. I didn't know what to think. I didn't know what to imagine. The worst problem was that China seemed, indeed, so absolutely foreign. I needed to go there myself and look into the concrete reality of Beijing. Concrete jungle The simple truth about Beijing is that the whole thing is made of concrete. It was poured in great swaths below us like a gigantic welcoming mat. Concrete is to communist architecture what formulaic plots are to Hollywood films: indispensable, universal, and applied in the same feistily heavy-handed manner. The terminals, the hangars, the control towers, and the guardhouses were concrete and, furthermore, they all looked exactly alike. The tarmac was absolutely deserted. Not another plane or baggage handler was in sight. It was silent as Mao's tomb (operating hours: Thursdays from 2:30-3:00 pm); but sparks of vitality were scattered across the airport like the telltale bits of confetti outside the door of a gigantic party. Billboards had sprouted up along the greywashed, boxy landscape - little oases of neon, silently proclaiming the primacy of Japanese electronics and British magazines. The billboards were not obnoxious the way they usually would be in, say, Florida, where they seem to befoul the Everglades and drag the eyes away from the natural landscape. Instead, they were signs of life - they were welcome against the backdrop of hazy concrete cubes that had taken the place of nature. Colonel Sanders, meet General Tso Oddly enough, the inside of the airport was packed. The main terminal had been renovated so that you could find at least two cutting-edge Panasonic flat-screen TVs every ten feet playing alternating reruns of Bono and u2 running away from exploding cars and of US f-18 fighter bombers doing aerial acrobatics. I tried to see this in the context of a rising power contemplating the military prowess of a potential Western adversary. The man next to me leaned over with a confidential wink and pointed to the TV. "Bono," he said, mysteriously - then smiled and began to talk on his cell phone again. It turns out Chinese people are very friendly. Our tour guide was very tall and very smartly dressed in a dark, London-style coat. He introduced himself to us on the bus with skilled but stuttering English. "This is our driver, Ho Lu," he said, "and this is Han Hsin, travel coordinator. You will have to remember my name for the rest of the trip." We all leaned in: "My name, listen carefully, is Tony." This turned out not to be his real name, of course - it came from an English class, but he was quite proud of it. Tony went on to describe Beijing and its surrounding areas. "There are 65 McDonalds in Beijing, and 73 KFC." Several frizzy haired, middle-aged, traveling soccer mom types let out moans of dismay. Tony froze in his tracks. "Why do people say this every time? It's your restaurant! You should be proud!" The bus grumbled vaguely and offered, "Because it's McDonalds." Tony squinted. "Beijing people like it. It's from your country, how are you not proud of your country?" There was definitely a gulf of cultural understanding. I got the feeling that some of the tourists might rather be in Europe. They hemmed and hawed, and played with their jewelry. In any case, I was happy because our tour guide was funny, and because I had just had a firsthand cultural epiphany: Chinese people love chicken. Kentucky Fried Chicken (or, as the legal system would have it, KFC) included. Aside from cheap plastic toys, China's greatest foothold in the United States is its cuisine. Every Chinese restaurant in America is like a little embassy, although it is less likely to be targeted by the CIA than, say, a real Chinese embassy. And the restaurants in China don't disappoint, although they have more exotic fare than the average Imperial Garden in western Idaho. Most of the exotic food is less something to eat on a regular basis so much as something one eats to be macho. This is not just a phenomenon unique to gringos scarfing 20 tequila frijoles in Tijuana. Mainland Chinese only order snake venom when they're with their inebriated buddies or to impress the foreign girls. Impressive it was. I went to Beijing along with my family, a Boulder policeman (family friend), and his 26-year-old daughter. Throughout the course of her trip, she saw three scorpions, six beetles, two sparrows, and one snake eaten - all off of skewers. It wasn't so much to attract her as it was to make her squeal with high pitched, Meiguo horror. Indeed, Chinese entrepreneurship has advanced far beyond its Western counterpart, at least where diet is concerned. Where Western music attempts to push the boundaries of taste, Chinese food really attempts to push the boundaries of taste. Along the main street of Beijing, something akin to Times Square in New York - but with fewer neon lights and more pungent smells - is a long promenade of about 40 identical food stalls where scorpion kabobs and snake pancakes are laid out. We went to watch with morbid fascination as the daredevils got some grub(s). Every stall has three shopkeepers, dressed like pizza men with the little white hats, loudly advertising their gastronomic wares. Every time a Westerner passed by, they would lift up a tray of snakes and wiggle it around while making "booga booga" noises until the women screamed. China makes, the world takes But if exotic food isn't your style, check out the other marketplaces, because they will have something you want. Sorry England, China is the modern world's workshop. Virtually every consumer product sold in America was constructed in China. And the effects of the market transformation are obvious. The garbage truck man was wearing a designer suit. You'd be hard pressed to find a Brown University student with a suit, I can tell you that - and yet the proletariat's proletariat, a garbage man in a Marxist state, looks like Don Juan de Beijing. How can that happen? First of all, China is clearly no longer a socialist or communist state. Talk to any government official about it and he'll find an excuse to sneak away. (Admittedly, we only asked one.) Talk to any merchant, and he'll either shrug, laugh, or try to sell you something. China has opened itself up to business, and the Chinese people are good at it. Maybe better than anybody else. Everywhere I went, I was impressed and even moved by the diligence of the shopkeepers, trinket hawkers, manufacturers, laborers, and even our tour guide, Tony. Everywhere I went, I asked about family structures and working conditions. I visited the pearl factories: unmarked buildings full of young women in double breasted suits, tending to glass tanks full of oysters, stringing pearls, and cheerfully showing tour groups how to flay an oyster to get to the pearl. I asked about work conditions and work ethic. It turns out they'd all moved from the provinces to seek a prosperous future. They wanted to travel and have successful children. They worked all day, took classes on the side, and had no weekends off. No weekends? Capitalist oppression. These women weren't living in a workers' state, anyhow. Of course, the real test of oppression is whether one is working voluntarily or not. "I don't want to be lazy," was the answer. Here was the American dream quietly facing down a full seven-day work week with no breaks and smiling all the while. The shopkeepers were no different. The factories in China pump out rivers of American consumer wares for sale at name-brand outlets in the garment district or in malls across the country. Irrepressibly enough, the Chinese keep some for themselves. That means that every shop the size of a closet is packed from ceiling to ceiling, wall to wall, with designer clothing for a going rate of about $3 a sweater and $5 a jacket. Which is not to say that the shopkeepers are stupid. The casual browsing white guy might pay $100 for a jacket, which means that the shopkeeper is set for the day. Of course, you can haggle down to about six or seven bucks if you like to play the game and face down the giggling shopkeepers shouting "cheaper cheaper friend price!" and bodily dragging you back into the store until you buy. These same shopkeepers are incredibly diligent, and they are also everywhere. They work nonstop, not returning home until very late at night, eating only when absolutely necessary, and, judging by their grins, taking it as the course of everyday life. Beijing appears to be expanding and changing faster than any American city since the early 1900's. It feels like a dynamo. The government has decreed that everybody must try to learn English before the 2008 Olympic Games, and the English Language Bookstore is open on the main thoroughfare called Wangfujing Street. This English Language store only contains books on how to speak the English Language. The silk suits cost as much as sweatshirts do in the West, which explains the dual Chinese fashion: Mao coats and silk suits. Everybody smokes. Everybody keeps something on hand to sell to the casual passerby. Our tour guide was knowledgeable to the point of absurdity. He could have been a professor of Chinese history. (His real name turned out to be Sun Yat-Sun, derivative of the original Doctor and founder of China's short lived Republic.) He also knew some harsh jokes. There was a Chinese man, a Japanese man, and a Korean man. They wanted to know when their countries would win the World Cup. The Korean man went to God and asked, "when to Korea win the World Cup?" God said 20 years, and the Korean man cried. Then, the Japanese man went to God and asked, "when to Japan will win the World Cup?" God said 32 years, and the Japanese man cried. Then, the Chinese went to God to ask "when to Chinese win the World Cup?" and this time, God cry. Or how about, Chinese have a very round face. Japan is an island facing into the wind, which is why they have a very flat face. An ardently Chinese perspective. We saw the sights. The Great Wall was one heck of a stair sprint, and the Forbidden City was one heck of a Sheraton. I marveled at the closeness of architectural symbolism between Confucian temples and Roman Catholic churches. I came to epiphanies on the nature of human religious symbols. I marveled at the pre-Roman organization of a civil service. I saw the underground city built to house the entire population of Beijing in the event of Soviet nuclear attack. I met a family living in the feudal city, and visited a school. I petted the yaks. It was amazing, and transformational. It was time to see what Chinese dance clubs were like, and to meet the police. East coast po-lice reprazant Bill and I decided to go try to exchange his police patch for a Chinese police officer's patch. We finally found a small police van parked in the middle of Wangfujing square, ostensibly on a cigarette break. Bill and I approached the police, clad in their snazzy black and silver uniforms, and proceeded to gesture and blabber in English. Nobody communicated, and the police told us to sit down in the van while they searched for a translator. Bill had a goatee and a macho Italian jacket on at the time, so there was naturally some gawking, as it looked as if Vladimir Ilych the Boulder County Sniper and his sidekick had been arrested by the Beijing police. We finally managed to communicate that the Chinese word for policeman is Jing-Cha, and that Bill was an American Jing-Cha. In the interest of international brotherhood of police, we tried to find somebody who could speak both English and Chinese. After 15 minutes or so of benevolent silence, two Beijing Central Art University students came to our interlingual aid. One was wearing an orange life-preserver-type jacket and the other had a handbag with a sunflower on it. Her name turned out to be Sunflower. We talked about relative crime rates, caused minor cardiac palpitations with the Beijing Jing-Cha when they asked about Bill's salary (cost of living on everyone's mind in China) and found out that they can't give away their patches. They gave Bill cigarettes instead, and sent us on our way, which happened to be following the students to Beijing Central Art University. Sunflower and I had an in-depth conversation about how good shrimp is, and Bill tried to get a date with Aida (the other one). He has no shame. The university was selling its art as a fundraising measure, and the room was packed with watercolors and masterpieces of every sort. I was impressed, and I ended up buying a watercolor of shrimp. (Sunflower: "I think you like the shrimps.") The only disconcerting thing about the experience was that a student was playing a computer game in the corner, shooting at distinctly American aircraft makes. Bill got Aida's phone number and immediately told his daughter about his success when he got home. We decided to go dancing with them at the Club Banana the next night. Dance dance revolution Club Banana was located directly on the side of a highway that pours through a central Beijing district right across from the Silk Market. Aida's reasoning was that Club Banana was perfect because I was a banana. "What does that mean?" I asked. "It means that you are yellow on the outside but white on the inside." Political correctness in China means that you don't support Taiwan. The inside of the club was dark and semi-modern. It was the kind of place that would be oh-so cool in a mid-'80s movie - dimly lit glass blocks and all - except that it was filled with all ages of Chinese patrons in suits, and they couldn't dance worth spit. The predominant music was the sort of trashy, ripoff enthno techno prevalent throughout the world today. TV screens playing American cartoons and MTV smiled down from the walls. It seemed like half the guys there were about 35 to 40 - all sitting around in the same ubiquitously stylish suit coats. The dance floor was packed with rabidly enthusiastic (usually younger) kids who just, I'm sorry, didn't get it. They had never even seen somebody dance well before. There was no frame of reference for them. Here, the best dancers seemed to be the ones who could slam their heads back and forth between the left and right shoulders as fast as possible. The faster you bobbleheaded, the better a dancer you were. It was spastic and probably dangerous as well. Cultural relativism is a joke: these guys were horrifying, and they were not good dancers, and they needed to be whupped into shape by some old school dance missionaries. I did the best I could, but I can only hope that a break dancing troupe will spread some funky manifest destiny after me. A few minutes later, I came face to face with China's authoritarian side. The bouncers picked me up, and dragged me out to the front to the claim check area. There was a lot of vague gesturing and threatening arm-folding. It turns out that I had brought a disposable camera into the club, and that this was a very serious issue. I got the idea, pretended to check my camera, stuck it in my waistband, and went back inside. I told Bill the story and he said, "Wondered where you went." Sunflower tried to corner me in the cab on the way home and I bailed out the passenger door at the last second. Eyes wide shut On the way home from China, the same confetti lights winked up at me quietly. I felt as if I had been to some sort of mysterious masked ball, oddly relaxing and not so much foreign but rather comfortably removed from my ordinary life. It's the kind of other world I'd want to spend every weekend at if I could. China is where the party (both the Communist party, though reduced in strength, and the literal party) is at. It was nothing like I imagined. I still have the feeling that I missed what was really going on behind the scenes, in the insecure countryside, and in the back room. I still did not get to see what the Party did not want me to see, though it was much more fun than the damn Friendship Store (which I visited, and which nobody goes to anymore). But I felt like I had stuck my hand directly into flowing current of China's change. I could see a nation transforming before my very eyes. I was stunned. I was bowled over. Perhaps my impressions were just further illusions. Hopefully, you have a small idea of China is now like - but my suggestion is that the only way to get beyond our own collective imagination is to save up, find a good package deal online, and go suck some concrete. BARRON YOUNG SMITH B'06 is the unreachable, incomprehensible wet dream of the adolescent Indy. |