I Stand Corrected (15 page)

Westerners are prone to believe that China, at its political worst, is responsible for destroying individuality. But Chinese culture defines individuality by what precedes and follows a single life, and there has always been a collective nature to the Chinese people. “May it rain first on our public fields, and afterward, extend to our private ones” is a prayer found in the oldest Chinese scripture,
The Book of Odes
.

Deeply rooted in China’s culture is the desire to conform to a unit. The people living in
hutongs
seemed to me especially happy. I was drawn to these Chekhovian hubs of activity, and it became our habit to eat lunch in front of the portable woks that lined the interconnected walkways.

There was an understood division of labor between Gilliam and me: I would commandeer one of the low makeshift
tables and two rickety stools while Gilliam conferred with the mélange of vendors standing not much farther than an arm’s length away but shouting nonetheless.

It was also the understanding between us that, as long as I remained ignorant of what we were eating, Gilliam had my preapproval in choosing our food. While I hold to the belief that in a foreign place one should try all manner of food, that did not oblige me to know what I was actually eating. Gilliam, on the other hand, was a genuine enthusiast. His unfettered approach to whatever foods happened to be on our plates came naturally, having taken hold long ago in L.A.

L.A. is a city accused of lacking a
there
, but, with a closer look, it reveals itself in hidden villages. When Gilliam was a little boy in L.A., his Sunday nights provided ritual delight for us both. I would send our globe into a slow spin with a gentle push. Eyes shut, Gilliam would bring his finger down. Eyes open, he would see where in the world his finger had landed. That place under his finger would be the country we explored for the week: the atlas was bedtime reading Monday through Thursday; Friday dinner was had in a restaurant serving that country’s cuisine. During Gilliam’s early childhood, we found our way to Bulgarian, Cambodian, Chinese, Indian, Israeli, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Samoan, Thai, Vietnamese, and Yugoslav cooking—all within driving distance.

I have eaten unbelievably exotic things in China. That cannot be said of the Chinese. They take very few culinary risks and, when traveling, are not particularly adventurous in sampling new foods.

The World Tourism Organization estimates that a hundred million Chinese tourists will travel abroad by 2020. Eventually, some of them will need to try foods they don’t already know. I can sympathize, for just as the Chinese consider many foods eaten by others to be strange—cheese and butter being examples—I, too, have found myself confronted by local specialties that even a wicked boy intent on tormenting his little sister would not have the imagination to invent. I tried my best to remain open-minded when passing Chinese food stalls selling
silkworms, grasshoppers, sea horses, and scorpions (stingers still intact), and with the exception of turtles, which have a sentimental place in my heart, I always ate what was placed in front of me by my hosts. Thus can I claim to have tasted snake-head soup, duck feet marinated in blood, pork lungs, and peacock and pig face (prepared by pouring hot tar in the head to remove the hair but not the skin).

For every action, there is a corresponding reaction. It is not difficult to imagine why, after partaking of unidentified Chinese dishes, I sometimes felt a frantic need to locate “the facilities”—a euphemism I’d been taught as a child—no matter how improbable their availability. Toilets in China require users to squat over a porcelain opening. Women are obviously expected to squat more often than men, and Western women can be put off by the calisthenic circumstances. I am no exception, and though I long ago learned to carry a purse-size packet of tissues while in foreign lands, I’ve often had to remind myself that everything is relative, including toilet standards. My most memorable facilities were forced upon me while my brother and I were crossing the open plains of Tanzania to track the gorillas in Rwanda. Our guide—brandishing a loaded rifle—stationed himself not far from the tree he designated.

“He makes it impossible for me,” I complained to my brother.

“I don’t see how,” was his callously male retort.

“Of course you don’t. How could you? You’re a man. You can’t imagine what it’s like to balance yourself like a human tripod in front of a stranger … one who’s wielding a weapon, no less.”

“Get over it, Eden. You’re literally a sitting target for the lions. You should be grateful someone with a gun is watching out.”

Years later, I discovered a very different interpretation of “the facilities” when I traveled to Tokyo. Indeed, my first impression of Japan had to do with the elaborate—and some would say overly complicated—relationship the Japanese seem to have with their toilets. Drinking copious amounts of water during the ten-hour plane trip from New York had left me desperate
by the time I arrived at the Hotel Okura. Grateful for the close proximity of the ladies’ room to the lobby, I was confronted by a toilet that, instead of a handle, provided the choice of half a dozen buttons. With no obvious option for producing a flush, I was forced to try them all. None had to do with actually flushing the toilet. There was a button that shot an unexpected stream of warm water my way, and another offered music. There was even a button that mimicked the sound of a flush—the faux flushing to override the sound when, finally, thanks to the music, you were relaxed enough to perform. And if all else failed to cue your bodily need, the toilet was able to feign the sound of urinating, presumably to encourage a Pavlovian response—exactly the method the Chinese use with their babies. In most places in China, babies do not wear diapers but pants whose crotch seam is expediently split for when nature calls.
“Ssssss,”
a parent prompts, holding the baby in the direction of the wind and a safe distance from those passing by.

C
hina’s government now protects
siheyuans
from being destroyed. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be moved, and I have met an extremely rich man who did precisely that. He paid a fortune to relocate several families living in a Beijing
siheyuan
and then spent another fortune moving the entire
siheyuan—
stone by ancient stone—to the roof of a five-star hotel. I speak here of a
siheyuan
built in the Ming dynasty and reincarnated as the penthouse of a luxury hotel so that its owner might enjoy room service.

Before the ebb tides of China’s middle class began lapping onto the shores of communism, it was believed that love was built on a foundation of common political understanding and comradeship in work. Money was not a consideration in marriage because money was not the foundation of love.

No longer.

Today, a man in China who does not own a house is not considered very good marriage material, and pressures caused by the mainstream societal expectation of marriage and progeny have resulted in financial Darwinism among the army of young Chinese men coming of age.

The ostentatious display of home ownership in China is made more remarkable by the fact that most of the ground on which the Chinese stand—along with the buildings, residential
and business alike—is government owned and leased for a curtailed period of fifty years.

China’s government has claimed its legitimacy from the past ten years of growth, and grow the nation it must continue to do. The Communist Party’s sweeping modernization plan is to move nine hundred million people—about 70 percent of the country’s population—into newly constructed cities by 2025. This top-down mandate is meant to transform China’s export-based economy into one whose growth is based on domestic demand for products, but acute problems with farmland rights and housing have deepened the class divide and bred public discontent.

The government hopes that by providing consumer credit it will propel consumer spending, which will result in a different kind of economic growth. But there are financial hazards to China’s loosely regulated cash-borrowing options, and with no unified official procedure, registration of land-use rights falls under the jurisdiction of local authorities whose self-serving interpretation often invites corruption. Land can be expropriated for reasons of “public interest,” the definition of which has been deliberately kept vague, which—deliberate or not—enables government officials and developers to dispossess farmers and pay them below-market prices for their land.

As a result of this rushed urbanization program, China’s land-leasing winners are the developers who can flash enough money at real estate opportunities to make short-term sense. What is left in the wake of the country’s binge growth is an eerily repetitive landscape seen even in the poorest parts of China, where luxury towers and monolithic office buildings stand empty and motorways end suddenly in a patch of gravel.

The theory behind China’s urbanization—whereby newly created city dwellers will, of their own accord, create new business and break the cycle of those farming the land consuming only what they grow—has proved uneven in its implementation. Despite the promise of a permanent stream of revenue from the land they’ll lose to developers, farmers are often unwilling to leave a life they know for one they don’t. Pushback
has come from bloggers born in the digital age and unafraid of writing about the forced evictions and the corruption in their communities. Pushing too hard brings a visit by the authorities for an informal interrogation, euphemistically known as
he cha
. The literal translation is “to drink tea,” and it is one of many approaches to state censorship in China.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, a parody unrivaled in name, is China’s censor. When, in 2010, the Chinese civil rights activist Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, foreign news outlets covering the story were blocked. But blogging, already an integral part of Chinese urban culture, proved a formidable tool of instant communication.

The Chinese government is quick to learn, and has positioned itself in front of the inevitable consequences of its increasingly web-savvy citizens. Public security authorities follow citizen opinion with 8,583 official microblog sites on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like website.

The party shapes its image by flooding popular web-based communities with pro-party opinions, by creating fake accounts in order to skew perceived opinion, and by paying people to post favorable sentiments about the government. The word
mao
has a denominational meaning of one-half a yuan. Rumor has it that each favorable post is rewarded with a
mao
, and so the Chinese slang for those paid to do so is
wumao
.

It is worth considering that Britain is estimated to have more security cameras recording its citizens—one for every eleven people—than any other country, including China. When I lived in London, I cared less and less about the cameras stationed in plain view. That might explain why, regardless of China’s ubiquitous censorship, my daily life in Beijing didn’t evoke the visceral feelings of oppression I’ve felt in Cuba and Russia, where cameras and microphones are installed out of sight. It might also be worth considering the idea of censorship from the Chinese perspective. Most Westerners forget that, over the past thirty years, five hundred million Chinese have been lifted out of poverty. They do not go hungry. They are employed. Their children are being educated. These are
the unarguable results of China’s one-party reform policies. Despite the fact that censorship is stitched into the fabric of their lives, the majority of Chinese people appear grateful for the advancements brought about by their government.

But things never stay the same. And the quest for personal fulfillment among a new generation of Chinese is threatening to create what might very well be impossible challenges, for the Chinese want what Westerners already have: things.

They also want to travel.

L
eisure travel is new to the Chinese.

In the past, arduous conditions prevented it for those adventurous enough to wander beyond the province of their birth. “The road to Sichuan is more difficult than that to heaven” was not much of an exaggeration. And if that warning weren’t enough to keep the Chinese in one place, Confucius, who preached against journeys, believing they interfered with the importance of family, added his own guilt-inducing instruction: “While your parents are alive, it is better not to travel far away.”

With the unstoppable rise of the Chinese middle class, tourism is expected to increase by double digits annually for years to come, but it wasn’t until the late 1970s that the Chinese were permitted to travel even to Hong Kong to visit relatives. The country’s economic momentum of the 1990s benefited its travel industry. Determined to encourage consumer spending, the government has purposely increased the number of mandatory public holidays in order to stimulate domestic tourism.

Gilliam and I decided to make a contribution to the Chinese economy by planning a trip to Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu Province, in eastern China. It is a city with which Gilliam was familiar, having previously lived and worked there during an extended break between his freshman and sophomore years at his UK universiy.

I suggested we take the train.

“Are you sure?” asked Gilliam.

“What are you telling me?”

“That you might want to put some distance between yourself and your expectations. The last time I took the train to Nanjing, my seat partner was a rooster.”

“Was it in a cage?” I asked.

“Yes …”

“Well, that’s something,” I said, determined to hold any second thoughts at bay.

“You’re serious? You really want to take a train?” asked Gilliam a second and third time.

“The prices are unbelievably cheap,” I told him. “We can afford to go first-class.”

“First class in China is not the first class you probably have in mind,” was the last of Gilliam’s fair warnings.