the garrison show

* there seem to be two faces to chinese people, as far as gross generalizations go (which may not be dissimilar from any other people). on one hand, they absolutely adore americans and are thrilled to practice their english (even if it’s just saying “hello” over and over again), show you their country and see someone who looks so different from themselves. they will go half an hour out of their way to make sure you get to your hotel, catch the right bus or buy from the right store. unfortunately, there is also a dark side that looks to capitalize on the ignorance of tourists at every opportunity. this is the side that will scam you mercilessly as they smile right at you. i suppose this is just human nature and not particular to chinese people, but the two sides seem so distinct in china.

* there are no fat people in china. strike that, there are no fat CHINESE people in china. well, there are no fat chinese people over the age of 1 in china. chinese babies are fat, but that only makes them more adorable. but in three weeks and four cities, i did not see one single overweight chinese person. i don’t know what they’re doing (besides not eating), but americans need to adopt it.

* driving is absolutely insane. i guess there are places that are actually worse, but it’s difficult to imagine how. the roads have line markings painted on just like the US, but they don’t even qualify as suggestions. they’re more like decoration. cabs routinely drive square in the middle of two lanes trying to figure out which one is faster (answer: neither, you idiot). i never managed to figure out how there aren’t constant collisions with the absurd number of buses there since they seem to operate under their own rules. stop lights, signs and even the direction of other traffic all have no impact on the decisions a bus driver makes. and yet a chinese driver’s license is one of the most difficult certifications possible.

* i saw poverty in china not like any other poverty i’ve ever seen. people living in huts made out of dirt and trash line the highways. i can now say that i’ve seen a real-life peasant. they work in these fields and rice paddies all day and then sleep in the trash. i really can’t imagine.

* there are few ‘toilets’ in china. the chinese are more interested in ‘pits.’ great.

* in general, the eastern standard for cleanliness is a bit shy of the western. i saw children literally take dumps on the sidewalk and then just walk away. trash is everywhere. awesome.

* it’s weird that everywhere you walk you see police with guns standing at attention. most are communist party police but some are just city police. in either case, they never seem to look very opening, especially as they march down the street carrying their submachine guns. they do provide quite an incentive to only cross the streets at the crosswalks.

* every sweet-looking building you see is a government building, almost without exception. there really aren’t such things as office buildings due to the lack of capitalism.

* the pollution is appalling. i could count the number of clouds i saw on one hand, and all of them were at the great wall, 2 hours outside of beijing. in every other city, the sky is grey from sunup to sundown. about 1 in 30 people wears a mask when they walk around outside.i think more than anything, this is the reason i couldn’t live in china. i need blue skies and sunshine. the government has only started even talking about the environment in the last 5 years. it was not long ago when the yellow river was full of chemicals dumped from manufacturing plants. ugh.

* every chinese male over 13 smokes. everywhere. all the time. unbelievable. there may be 1.4 billion of them right now, but give them 15 or 20 years of this and i think we’ll get under a billion pretty soon. someone should tell them smoking kills.

* i assumed asians were genetically blessed with clean, smooth skin. i saw a surprising amount of adult acne in china. go figure.

* when they drive, chinese people honk constantly. it’s the most annoying thing ever. it doesn’t matter how close you may or may not be, you will receive at least 5 honks if you are even glancing at the road. it seriously drove me crazy.

* chinese cities are pleasantly full of random green spaces. from hong kong to shanghai, anywhere in the city you’re never very far from a nice park or open square. it’s an admirable characteristic of their city planning and i wish it were better emulated domestically.

* chinese people are crazy about being in pictures with things. a picture of chairman mao? worthless if you’re not in front of him throwing a peace sign. the great wall? you might think it would hold its own in a photo, but not unless you’re standing in the middle of it giving yourself a high-five. it’s just a personal irritant, maybe. maybe they’ve got the right idea and i’m the one that’s the idiot, taking all these pictures of things with nary a human being in sight. there’s no accounting for taste.

* i really enjoyed almost every moment of my trip. i’ve now been surprised at how little reaction i get from americans when i tell them i was in china for 4 weeks:

“so i went to china for three weeks.” “really, how was that?”
“oh, it was amazing.”
“wow - cool. where did you want to go for dinner?”
i guess i should have gone to the moon.

i’ve come to the last stop on my mainland china tour. it’s not technically the “last stop,” since i fly home from hong kong, but we all know hong kong isn’t china so there.

xi’an has one major claim to fame from which its major tourist attractions flow: it was the capital city of china for 13 different dynasties and home to 3100 or so years of chinese culture. ummm…America is 230 years old?

so there’s one central attraction: the terracotta army. one of china’s most famous emperors, Qin Shi Huangdi. he is known for uniting china during the warring 5 kingdoms period. anyway, he had a copy of his entire army made in clay and buried. why were they buried? to guard his tomb when he’s dead. that actually gives a great insight into chinese leaders. this guy was more concerned with protecting his tomb than his people.

anyway, he had a few thousand of these things made and placed underground. of course, peasants and invaders found them through the years and destroyed them and all records of their existence. no one had any idea they were in the ground until a farmer digging a well stumbled into one of the sites in the 70’s. now millions of tourists see the 3 pits every year.

it’s pretty amazing but the actual site doesn’t really pack an immediate impact. you can’t get too close to the warriors and it’s difficult to really appreciate their significance in chinese context. but still cool. and that’s about all i’ve got to say about that.

on the other hand, xi’an had the absolute worst climate of any place i’ve been to on earth. the pollution is so bad, on the drive to the airport you could not see across the median to the other lanes of traffic. i had a headache the whole time i was in the city and maybe 1 out of 10 people wear a mask walking around. it’s abysmal.

speaking of the airport, i missed my flight to hong kong in the morning. there was a traffic accident and i was about 20 minutes late. so i went to the ticket counter to get a new flight. well, the chinese haven’t learned “lines” so i found about 30 writhing bodies fighting for a spot at the front of the booth. i was disgusted. i was already in a bad mood and seeing this childlish squabbling really put me off. i went and sat down out of sight to let it pass and tried regain my center. i ended up on a flight later than night but to say it was an ordeal would be putting it lightly.

can you tell these posts are hurried nonsense? now that i’m back i’m just trying to hurry up and post some thoughts so i get back to the present…

i’ll end my time in beijing with a few last observations.

the city is being destroyed. i mean literally demolished. much of this has to do with renovation for the olympics and the rest of it has to do with simple modernization, but the effect is all the same. there is construction everywhere and there are are debris and rubble everywhere else. whole city blocks are nothing but makeshift landfills until they can be cleared and built over. as sites are excavated to prepare for skyscraper foundations, tombs and ancient cultutural sites are being discovered. then they’re being looted and destroyed. the smithsonian, EPA, historical society and archeological restrictions are all completely unknown. china is simply uninterested in its past as the price of being consumed by its future.

mao is everywhere. it’s almost nauseating how far the chinese will go to get the chairman’s likeness on some kitsch. he’s on flags, t-shirts, watches, banners, kites, books, shoes, jackets, maps, guns and food. it’s weird.

finally, i went to the military museum and was a little creeped out. i think the extraordinary celebration of military equipment and feats hints at the reason why mankind’s history is plagued with violence. we give parades for it. we watch it, read it, hear about it, sing it and play with it. the image of the chinese children playing with the fake automatic weapons in the gift store was haunting and will stay with me. i only wish i could say that our culture was any better.

a few words on the darker side of beijing…

everywhere you go, and i do mean everywhere, someone will be trying to sell you something. it could be someone relatively official hawking gaudy souveniers or a peasant trying to make money selling maps, but it is assured, you will be harassed. fake fur hats, mao watches, little red books, incense, miniature flags, there’s no limit to the tackiness of the trinkets being sold. to be sure, not many vendors are aggressive in any manner, but they’re all relatively annoying. and they will disturb whatever setting you’re trying to immerse yourself in; i was a little taken aback by how many stores there are in the forbidden city. china has not learned restraint in commercial ventures. i wonder how this will play out when beijing is swamped by international visitors for the Olympics in 2008…

along a related line are the scams that chinese locals try to run on tourists. the most common, which is also mentioned in most guidebooks, involves art students setting up an exhibition and wanting you to see the last day of it. then they give you a hard sell on some of the (worthless) art there. not mentioned in the guidebooks, however, is the scam that i fell victim: the teahouse scam. i will elaborate.

i was walking in tiananmen square, on my way to quianmen, an old-time marketplace. 3 chinese girls stop me on the stairs and ask to talk to practice their english. they speak very well and one speaks exceptionally well, even using “calcification” in a sentence at one point. it’s all laughs and smiles and they offer to walk me around the old town and since i’m going there anyway, i agree.

we walk for 5 or 10 minutes and they ask if i’d want to see a tea ceremony. i actually already had in shanghai, but it was fun, so i agree. we head up to the teahouse (which they pick) and get a room. we taste maybe 5 or 6 different teas and there are small snacks, as well. it’s all going swimmingly and then we get the menu (thank you very much) and the bill….for 2200 yuan, or almost $300.

i shouldn’t have to tell you that this price is absurd to a criminal degree. it’s honestly like selling cups of hot water on the street for a few hundred dollars. so i see the bill and i just start to laugh because the idea that i’m going to pay this (all the girls are now watching me) is ludicrous. i hadn’t spent that much on my entire trip up to that point and i certainly wasn’t going to spend it for shitty tea.
i reached in my pocket and pulled out a couple hundred yuan (around $25) which was still more than i should have paid, but i put it on the table and declared that was all i had. the explained that the teahouse took credit cards - how convenient! i explained they could kiss my rich, white ass. they were still “arguing” about how to pay when i simply got up and left. i wondered whether it was really a scam or not until i met some dubliners who had the exact same thing happen to them. then all doubt was erased when i googled beijing tea scam. in all seriousness, someone should do something about this.

my first stop in beijing was tiananmen square. you can check this for a brief description and some history, if you’re interested. it is the largest open-area public square in the world at just under half a million square meters but that doesn’t even approach the feeling of standing there. it is massive and no matter how filled with tourists and vendors and chinese it may be, you can’t escape this eerie feeling of calm that vibes right off the stone. there’s a weight and a depth that is unmistakable even if you’re totally ignorant of the incredible history of the place.

to the north of the square is the forbidden city with a huge illuminated protrait of chairman mao (one of many) and to the south is mao’s own mausoleum where you can see (but not photograph) his preserved body. in between the forbidden city and the mausoleum is a monument to the “people’s heroes” which stands 125 feet in the air, but this never really manages to feel impressive. to the east and west are grand, soviet-style museums and government buildlings. everything is quite done up and feels formal and very grand. it’s an interesting dynamic with the serene flatness of the square itself.

the forbidden city is literally that - a city. there are 9999 rooms and some emperors lived their entire lives never leaving it. and they would not have had hard lives… it’s an unbelievable place and even more so when you learn how many times it’s been destroyed by invaders or revolutionaries. i can hardly blame the latter, however, considering the way many emperors used to rule. consider the following: china was in war and needed an imperial navy. but the empress decided to use the money (taxed from the peasants) build a marble boat at the summer palace instead. riiight. the king is dead, long live the king.

finally, there’s the great wall. holy shit. it really is amazing. i managed to get directions to one of the (seven) sections that isn’t open to tourists. no people, no guardrails, no signs, just wall after wall. i went with a finnish girl staying at the same hostel and we had some initial communication issues with our taxi driver, but finally made it to right town. walking up to the wall, a local charged us 2 yuan (about a quarter) to get on the wall. we climbed a ladder, picked a direction and headed off.

it’s sort of unreal to walk along the top of this thing. it’s been called the 8th wonder of the world and i know why. there are little fortresses built along it every 30 meters or so and it climbs, with stairs or a smooth sloping floor, quite steeply along the mountainside. it’s quite easy to imagine a troop of chinese warriors digging in and defending against invaders. it’s slightly harder to imagine whole troop movements occuring along the top of the wall, including calvary units.

we’d gone on for about 10 minutes when we were stopped by another local who wanted 20 yuan ($2.50). not having much cash, we demurred and he produced an axe. this gave us enough motivation to turn our asses around and check out the other side of the wall, which turned out to be a great idea anyways. the locals have taken to preserving and maintaining a large section of the wall but if you walk long enough in the right direction, you come to the point where they’ve stopped any maintenance and the wall is in a deteriorated condition. awesome. the stones are cracked, weeds grow everywhere, the ceilings have all collapsed and most of the fortress walls are crumbling, as well. totally brilliant.

i couldn’t be happier getting to see these unbelievable treasures. go now.

shanghai is, like hong kong, not china.

strictly speaking, of course, it is, even more so than hong kong (which is a “special administrative region”), but it doesn’t feel like it. it feels like new york. there’s tons of people and storefronts and neon and markets and taxi’s and white people. i did not come to china to see any of these things.

there’s one area, called the bund, which is like a riverfront walkway which gives you a tour of the city’s varied historical influences. as you walk along the bund, you can see the riverfront architecture change from english to german to french to soviet as each of these controlled shanghai from time to time. it’s nice and i took pictures.

other than this and a handful of museums (some quite good), shanghai has more to offer the businessman than the tourist during the day. like any city worth its salt, there’s no shortage of activities after nightfall…

one final note. the hostel i stayed in had a projector set up in a lounge area and showed at least one movie every night, often the request of people staying there. bootleg dvd’s were easy to come by on the street and many would buy some and come home to play them right at the hostel. this is exactly what the danish fellow from our last post did and would you like to guess what movie he bought? jackass 2.

now, the chinese are somewhat reserved. pornography is outlawed and there’s not a lot of toleration for obscenity. every major media outlet is state-controlled and the state is not idle. as a consequence, they are still quite sensitive compared to americans. granted, the youth have a thicker skin than the older generation, but even many chinese college students are unfamiliar with sexually-charged joking and vulgarities. so this is the environment that our great dane wants to show jackass.

this was probably one of the few times i have been embarassed to be an american. this is not a cultural export i am proud of. there are parts of it i can laugh at it and i’m not so outraged that i would advocate any sort of censorship. i simply always advocate taste. shock appeal carried the day, however, and jackass 2 was popped in the dvd player.

almost as if in answer to my unspoker prayers, within about 15 seconds the picture started to skip and blur and then completely stalled. international disgrace averted and chinese quality control takes another hit. a shame, really.

okay, here’s my complaint. if you run a hostel, it’s pretty obvious that your clientele are going to be unfamiliar with your city at best, right? especially if you’re a hostel in china. so given the opportunity to provide directions to your customers, do you think you might want to come up with something a LITTLE better than, “take bus #361. go to People’s Square stop, turn around and walk 5 minutes.” turn around? are you serious? can i really not even get a direction? it did take 2 hours or so to follow those directions, and that was only with the help of spencer, another in the long line of helpful chinese friends. sheesh.

once i actually got to the hostel (which did turn out to be awesome in the end), i met a few fellows and we decided to go out. unbelievably, it did not take much discussion to reach this decision. what else does one do in shanghai?

so we end up at a spot where there’s a little drinking and a lot of dancing. we’re all standing outside on the patio, comfortable in our maleness and our non-dancing status. i head in to get another beer and i’m stopped right inside the door by a chinese girl. an extraordinarily hot chinese girl. with a halter top. that we’ve all been talking about for the last half hour. oh, yeah.

she asks, “do you dance?” we can all agree there’s only one correct answer to that question in that situation. “yes, yes, and yes.” so my trip to the bar gets aborted and the grind commences. then her friend joins us. suddenly she rips a large sticker, previously unnoticed, off her jeans and slaps it on my chest. and just like that, i’m “#3.” a few minutes later, her friend agrees and annoits me “#4,” as well. other people would wonder what was going on. i had other things to think about.

the mystery resolved itself when an older fellow, presumably an employee of the establishment, unceremonially ripped my stickers off and gave them back to the girls. he ordered them to the stage and it became clear they were contestants in a dance contest. clearly i was not about to take their place, though the sentiment was sweet.

fast-forward a few hours and we’re all ready to go but we’re hungry (and some of us are quite drunk, though not me - seriously). my new chinese girlfriend suggests we hit up a neighborhood restaraunt she knows. done and done. now at this point, there is one of us, a danish gentleman, who is quite a bit more intoxicated than anyone else in the metropolitan area. he starts to protest this idea but ends up going along with it.

now at this point, the story is just going to fall apart. here’s the ending: we finish eating, the girls get in a cab to their place and we get one for the hostel. the danish guy then explains how we were just scammed. in his mind, the “restaraunt” we just ate at was really just a front. never mind that the meals cost a grand total of about $13, it had to be a scam because the chinese girls suggested it. see, the story sucks because it’s not really funny - but it was. it was hilarious. and you’re going to have to take my word for it.

i’ll content myself with the idea that if i’d actually written this when it happened instead of two weeks later, i could have translated the humor. next time.

who’s the celebrity, you may wonder?? me!

this has got the be the greatest thing about china…i’m just walking down the street and all of a sudden i feel a tug on my sleeve. lo and behold, it’s a chinese girl (or three) waiting to take a picture with me! it does wonder for the self-esteem.

an example: i’m walking down the street with my new friend chaolin and we’re looking for the beach. we end up asking a couple of girls for directions (now, i say ‘we’ but i really mean ‘he,’ in chinese) and they point out the way. we’re off down the sidewalk when 10 seconds later they call out - can they take a picture with me? of course they can!! so we take some photos then they ask if they can walk us to the beach. surprisingly, i can’t think of a good reason why not! so we get to the beach and they’re practicing their english and one of them whips out a violin! no shit! so we sit on the sand by the water and listen to the waves and the girls plays the violin as the sun sets peacefully. ridiculous.

you might assume that my appeal would be limited to the younger female crowd, but you’d be wrong. xiamen has a island, gulanyu, which i visited with a couple other backpackers. there were three of us, myself, a bloke from jersey and a cute girl from princeton. you might assume, that if a group of businessmen stopped us to take a picture with us, they might be interested in the princeton girl (as i was!). imagine our collective surprise when they line up to take individual snapshots with me!

if i wasn’t in beijing and already at least two posts behind, i’d tell you more stories and end with a funny joke.

xiamen is a port city on the east coast of china, about halfway in between hong kong and shanghai. i only tell you that because i’m pretty sure you didn’t know it.

the highlight here is the couple of fellows i met in the hostel. first i met this guy who was on his way back home after living in a temple for 10 days without speaking or eating. i thought that was pretty crazy then a guy came in who’s been biking china. all of it. and it’s not a small country…

we became instant BFF’s and walked all over the city together. they told me stories about china and i laughed at their bad english. i taught them a few things (friends don’t say “you’re welcome” to each other) and then we had lunch together. it’s impossible to overestimate the value of eating lunch in china with someone who is chinese. ordering what you want becomes possible! and ooooh the food is so good, once you get it. and cheap!

there’s a gorgeous university in xiamen (it’s called xiamen university) and it overlooks the ocean. and there’s beaches. and, no exagerration, everyone is friendly. everyone smiles and says “hello” even if that’s the only english word they know. it really is heartwarming in a mushy sort of way.

these posts are getting worse and worse because i keep getting further behind…

to get from hong kong to xiamen, i took a bus. a 9-hour bus.

it was really cool, though, because you got to see a little bit more of china, and a completely different china, than just what’s in the cities. basically, china is poor. i’m talking broke-ass, do-we-have-any-food, get-up-and-work-on-the-farm poor. in between the handful of modernized cities, there’s just these villages with no-joke peasants working the fields. tractors? plows? no. try shovels, pickaxes and hoe’s. it’s sort of sobering to drive by this grinding poverty, especially coming out of hong kong where if the car that just passed you wasn’t a BMW, it was a mercedes.

i am embarrassed to say, this bus ride taught me that i am, at heart, an asshole. many of you will claim you’ve known that for years, but verily, it’s true. i’m waiting for the 7:30 AM bus and i buy some peanut m&m’s to pass the time. i pocket them for now and then eat them 30 minutes or so into the bus ride. it occurs to me to offer some to the old chinese woman across the aisle but, for no real reason, i decide not to. it’s better if i eat them all.

fast-forward an hour or so. the old woman is now peeling an orange. she’s about halfway done when she breaks off half the orange, and with no shortage of grunts and gestures, offers it to me. damn her! showing me up! i tried to graciously refuse, but she was adamant. i was afraid she might hit me. so i took the orange and ate it. delicious. shit!

fast-forward again another two more hours. we’re making our first food stop and guess who doesn’t have any yuan, the chinese currancy. did you guess me, the asshole? you’re right!! now, guess who shares her pistachios with me that probably cost 1/3rd of her annual income? correct, again - mother theresa sitting beside me! curses!! i was also the benefactor of an apple and half of this weird twinkie thing from a fellow i met on the bus who spoke english for business.

as you can see, essentially, jesus bitch-slapped me. so let this be a lesson. for you.

i stayed in hong kong 3 nights. and honestly, that was at least one night too many.

i guess i don’t have any problems with HK, it’s just not what i was looking for. it’s a huge, cosmopolitan (sort of), metropolis and i was looking for small, intimate china. for those of you not up on your history (ahem), hong kong has been a british possession for most of the last century or so but in 1997 gave it back to china. under the terms of the treaty, though, hong kong is a “special administrative region,” meaning essentially that it has its own government separate from the communist party in beijing.

in practice, this means that capitalists are still relatively free to make a boatload of money. and there is tons of money washing around HK. at times it resembles new york, sydney and vegas, to try to compare it to places that i’ve been. it’s usually not too difficult to find someone who speaks english and there’s no shortage of industrialization or modernization.

i stayed at a hostel which, like every sub-million dollar livng place in hong kong, was tiny. new york studios are imperial palaces compared to this mailbox. the room was probably 8′ by 9′ and had 2 bunk beds in it. there was one “desk” and the bathroom doubled as a shower. i shared the room with another american, an aussie and a dubliner. no shortage of white people, as you can see. all in all, not what i came to see.

we travelled around together during the day doing the standard sight-seeing tours and went out at night doing the backpacker party thing. it was all moderate fun, but i think it’s telling when you spend a few days with people and when you leave, no one asks for contact information. we’re all just as happy to be our ways now, thank you very much.

the only really noteworthy thing that comes to mind from my hong kong adventures (as i’m writing this 4 days later) is the last night we went out and we ended up in a high school bar. the drinking age is 18 and it was totally freaking me out to see these kids, the incredibly rich, white kids, partying at this bar and getting completely wasted. it was like the madison i never saw (thank god). i did not think it would be so weird, but it was. all you kids out there, no booze until you’re 25 or so!!