“Ugly Chinese” in Europe
Image courtesy of turkeymacedonia.wordpress.com
I really enjoyed reading this Evan Osnos piece in the latest New Yorker, a dispatch of his journey to Europe with a Chinese package tour. For anyone who has encountered Chinese travelers before, Osnos' account should ring true. I loved reading about the rigid insistence on eating mediocre Chinese food on the road, the obsession with shopping, and the "if it's Tuesday it must be Belgium" style of warped-speed travel. Osnos mixes his account of the trip with observations of the travelers. These are middle-class Chinese, not the Western-educated elite but rather a group of people whose demographic constitution would be akin to a group of Americans on a package tour. While touring through a mixture of European sites the affable "Guide Li" lectures his travelers on both aspects of European history and culture as well as ways in which the Europeans differ from the Chinese.
When reading the piece there's a sense that Osnos is portraying the Chinese in a typically chauvinist manner, as insular people obsessed with their own perceived notions of superiority as well as the shortcomings of others. It would be tempting to ascribe these characteristics to the Chinese as a whole. Yet Osnos' observations about the Chinese remind me jarringly of my experiences meeting other Americans in Europe. I recall an older couple, wearing gaudy cameras around their necks, wandering aimlessly in Rome in pursuit of a McDonalds. (My foodie parents were not impressed). In Amsterdam I met a college friend who had dragged along his reluctant brother and cousin. As we walked through the streets of the Dutch capital the cousin made constant references to how inferior everything was, even resorting to absurd comments like "Look at those flowers, man. In America they'd be arranged more nicely". When I asked the brother what he thought of travels through Europe, he said, "it's Ok, but it isn't America. That's why we're the hegemon,". Incidentally I knew without having to ask that he was a political science major given his use of the word "hegemon", but this is beside the point. These were by and large interesting and kind people, but their observations reflected an embedded sense of national superiority not at all uncommon in Americans.
Yet in thinking further on this subject, are these qualities unique only to the Americans and the Chinese? I've mentioned before how insularity- coming from such large countries- has inbued both populations with a more isolated worldview than those who live in close proximity to foreign countries, but in my memory I've met so-called "ugly" travelers from all over the world. Italians, for instance, tend to look down on virtually every other cuisine but their own. I needn't discuss the French, need I? I met Germans in Italy furious and aggravated by train delays and labor strikes. No nation can claim immunity from producing grumpy, condescending, culturally ignorant people who choose to spend their money on trips abroad.
About a year ago my New Zealand friend told me a funny story. A former colleague of his from their days teaching in China contacted him and said he would like to visit my friend in Japan, where he and his Japanese wife were then living. The friend, a fellow Kiwi, came and for the three days together proceeded to be obnoxious, demanding, difficult, grumpy, sour, and altogether an atrocious travel partner. Upon his departure my friend and his wife breathed a sigh of relief. Sure enough, two weeks later, they received a card in the mail from the friend telling them how wonderful a time he had had in Japan and how he hoped to travel there the following year. As the saying goes, you don't know what you've got till it's gone.
Being Alone in a Strange Land
Cafe de Paix, Paris
Roger Ebert may no longer be able to speak, but it is clear he hasn't lost his voice. In this blog post, he writes movingly about being a stranger in a strange land, a theme that I can certainly relate to.
I'm one of those people who likes to travel alone, despite being outgoing and extroverted by nature. This isn't necessarily contradictory- in a way, traveling alone can be more social than traveling with others due to the range of people you're likely to meet. Nothing makes a man more talkative than having to spend twenty-four hours by himself, after all. I still keep in touch with people I met briefly on trips many years ago, even though we're unlikely ever to meet again.
Yet it's the anti-social aspect of solo traveling I find more beguiling. When you're alone, you're not bound by an agenda or influenced by peer pressure. If you're in Athens and don't want to see the Parthenon, no one is going to stop you. You don't have to compromise with anyone. It's liberating.
Most people travel to see things they don't have back home. After all, what's the point of sitting in a cafe all day if you can do it anywhere? Why spend a few hours in a bookstore, go to the movies, or sit in a park?
I understand the conventional wisdom behind sightseeing, but it doesn't do much for me. There are exceptions- I can still remember audibly gasping the first time I saw Angkor Wat- but generally things like museums, temples, churches, castles, and other historical relics leave me cold. This can make me a grouchy and frustrating travel companion, I'm aware.
So when I travel, I normally do the things I do when I have a day off at home- like the things listed above. I like imagining what it's like to live in these distant places- what a normal routine there might be like. In July, I found a little bar in Vientiane, Laos that seemed to have expats as regulars. I sat outside each afternoon with a book and a mug of beer and eavesdropped on their conversations. Nobody said anything noteworthy- their observations were as banal as anyone else's, anywhere. Yet to me, solitary episodes such as these encapsulate what I love about traveling. I was just a guy sitting at that cafe at that moment, among others. Nobody knew a thing about me, nor I them. This was a very comforting feeling.
I used to encounter backpackers quite a lot in Kunming, and invariably they'd ask me what there was to do there. Not wanting to waste their time, I'd give them a perfunctory listing of the city's sites- the ones already written in their Lonely Planet. But to be honest, had I been sincere I'd have said that the best thing to do was to rent a bicycle, pick a direction, and just observe people living their life. Sit in a tea house and watch old men play cards. That kind of thing.
Maybe I'm like this because I've spent a quarter of my life in foreign countries, or maybe it's just a matter of personality. I certainly don't begrudge people who travel differently. Everyone has their own style. But anyway, now that you've read my two cents, check out that Ebert piece. He as usual puts it more eloquently.
(Paris cafe image from this site)
Beijing
I recently spent a few days in Beijing, a city I hadn't visited since the beginning of 2008- a lifetime ago in laowai years. As always, a trip outside Kunming calls for a few observations.
- For the first time ever, I visited Beijing in decent weather. Normally my visits to the city coincide with either harsh winter or scorching summer temperatures, necessarily limiting my desire and capacity to explore the city on foot. On this occasion- barring one day of rain- the skies were blue and temperatures perfect. This made a big difference in forming my impression.
-The local food in Beijing is best avoided. As a Kunming-bred friend of mine says, Beijing restaurants to take all the flavors available around the country and replace them with heaping mounds of salt. I had a bowl of daoshaomian, a favorite noodle dish of mine, and nearly wept when I tasted it. Give me southwestern lajiao every day.
That being said, Beijing has an array of cuisine on offer befitting a great capital city. And the prices are reasonable, too. I had passable Mexican food with real guacamole and didn't have to pay through the nose to get it. One regret from not staying longer was being unable to sample all the fine food on offer.
- So how is Beijing in comparison to Shanghai? This, my friends, is a question that arouses fanatical opinion in China. As a person who has lived in neither city and a resident of the hinterland, I don't really have a dog in this fight. What struck me more was how similar the two were to one another, and how different both were to Kunming. I truly felt like Rip Van Winkle walking around, gaping with amazement at the dazzling array of, well, stuff there was to buy and see and do.
But alas I am not Switzerland; neutrality is not an option. And I must place my lot firmly in the Beijing camp. This isn't really a slight to Shanghai, which is a helluva city in its own right and one I look forward to seeing again. But Beijing has better retained its essential Chinese-ness in the process of its development than has its southern counterpart.
While in Beijing I stayed at a chain hotel in Shuangjing, a fairly non-descript neighborhood just off the third ring road. Within walking distance of my hotel was a Starbucks, a French bakery, and the other trappings of a major international city. Yet also nearby was an ordinary Chinese neighborhood with noodle houses, Sichuan fry-up dives, a few gritty looking bars, and the normal hum of daily life so common in China.
I didn't find this in Shanghai. Maybe I didn't look hard enough, but what I saw was a city eager to shed its Chinese-ness rather than embrace it. Of course, 'out with the old' is as Chinese a concept as face, chopsticks, and dragon boat races. But in the opinion of this humble correspondent Shanghai looks a little too much like a shanzhai Hong Kong*, with the exception of the magnificent architecture along the Bund that is truly one of Shanghai's great trademarks. It's difficult to imagine a hutong in Shanghai, for instance, being used for anything other than a German beer garden and Gucci outlet.
In writing this, I am trying to avoid the easy temptation of romanticizing pre-development China, a trait associated with spoiled rich-country writers the world over. Given where it was 30 years ago, contemporary Shanghai is a staggering, momentous tribute to China's economic miracle. But it feels so disconnected with the rest of the country that the effect is almost jarring. Beijing seems to possess a better mixture of quotidian Chinese life and the international sophistication the country has embraced.
- As much as I enjoyed my time in Beijing, it was good to get back home to Kunming. On the drive home my taxi got stuck in a traffic jam caused by two men who had parked their cars in the middle of the road and engaged in a furious fist fight. The short guy with the cap had a quick jab, but he was foiled by the tall guy's swift uppercut, though before long the boxing match descended into good old fashioned rolling-on-the-ground brawling. Ah- it's good to be home.
The Chinese Fly
Over the past three weeks I spent some time on the road, visiting first Shanghai and then Chongqing. Unavoidably, this meant a lot of time in airports, the truest indication that in the words of Thomas Friedman, the world is indeed flat.
I've been to airports in probably 25 different countries, and what strikes me is how remarkably similar they all are. It's as if airports exist as a country unto themselves, peaceful enclaves surrounded by an often hostile world. The prices, too, seem to have little relation to how much things cost elsewhere, a point most humorously made by Jerry Seinfeild. "Tuna sandwiches, 14 dollars. Tuna's very rare here,".
In China, the verisimilitude of airports is even more striking, as China itself is so vastly different from everywhere else. For those who haven't had the chance to visit our lovely Middle Kingdom, China is a smash of sights, noise, attitude, excitement, and hustle.
So airports here provide a respite from the madness, an oasis of order, sanity, and direction. Nevertheless, differences in the flying habits do persist.
Over the course of my lifetime airports in the United States have become progressively less pleasant. This is of course a consequence of our idiotic 'homeland security' regime, in which airports enact inept and reactionary policies in a futile attempt to ward off terrorism. The security check at American airports is particularly galling. Uniformed officials herd us together like cattle, barking orders like kindergarten teachers on a school field trip. Once the passenger approaches the magic security point, he's ordered to remove all clothing that might remotely trigger the ire of the metal detection machine. Should he neglect to remove a coin, or a belt, or some other harmless item, he's forced to try again, keeping the queue from progressing smoothly.
In China, on the other hand, the system is far more laid back. For some reason, I set off the metal detector each and every time I walk through it. No problem. I merely step on a platform, have a polite official scan my body with a wand, and then am sent through. Far more humane and pleasant.
The Chinese though are rather impatient when it comes to getting on and off the plane itself. People hover around the gate anxiously, trying to block others from marching into the passageway first. When the gate opens, people hurry through in a desperate attempt to sit still in their uncomfortable seat before all others. I've had little old grannies slip past me so slyly I thought I'd been caught in a basketball-style pick'n'roll. In the end, though, we all end up tied- sitting still in our seats, breathing recycling air, ready for the ritual of the flight.
The flights themselves are mostly unremarkable, though is it just me or do the Chinese seem unnaturally eager to announce the onset of turbulence? On the one-hour flight from Chongqing to Kunming, the stewardess announced that we'd encountered turbulence no fewer than five times, so much so that I became irritated by the constant 'fasten your seatbelts' bell sound.
Then there's the landing, which is so ordinarily so rough you might as well have parachuted in. While the plane taxies around the airport at high speeds, Chinese passengers are fond of standing up, switching on their phones, and organizing their luggage. The young, pettite stewardesses try in vain to get everyone to calm down to no avail. Again, all the rush is for no apparent benefit. We all end up having to stand in a straight, orderly line anyway before disembarking.
Finally, there's the baggage claim. The Chinese have turned jockeying for position at baggage claim terminals into something of a contact sport. At the airport last week I counted no fewer than five people literally poking their heads into the space where the bags come out from, as if to call for the bags to arrive sooner. Of course, this is again a waste of time. All the movement, pushing, shouting, and frayed nerve do not make the slightest bit of difference into when we actually get to arrive at our eventual destination.
That last bit depends on the taxi. So once you've miraculously gotten off the plane, found your way into baggage claim, fought successfully for your suitcase, navigated the crush of people in the terminal, and gotten outside, you're faced with an even bigger challenge: China itself. And there, as if they'd been waiting for you all along, stand a group of men and women who'd love to take you to your hotel if you'd just be willing to pay three times the meter price.
So maybe the flying experience in China isn't like it is everywhere else, after all. Yet like airports and airplanes all around the world, China's are possessed by ritual and habit and arcane rules and a million other little things that are uncannily part of the process of moving, very quickly through air, from point A to point B.
Chungking Express
I'm currently writing from the comforts of the Starbucks just astride the Liberation Monument right in the center of Chongqing, China, where I'm attending a work-related conference. My hotel, the conference room where my meetings have been, and my hotel form a triangle representing a mere sliver of this city. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to throw out thinly-referenced, totally unfair perceptions gleaned from my few days here.
Chongqing by some accounts is the largest city in the world. This might come as a surprise to some of you who, while your knowledge of Chinese geography might not be Magellan-like in its thoroughness, still think you'd know a fact like this. In fact, this distinction relies a little too much on misleading accounting.
Amid its various provinces, special administrative regions, and laughably named 'autonomous regions', China has four cities that serve as their own province: Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing. Until 1997, Chongqing was snuggled neatly in the eastern part of Sichuan Province. After a bit of administrative maneuvering, it is a province of its own.
So while there are technically 30 million people in Chongqing, this figure represents the population of the province, not the city. An area, mind you, roughly the size of the Netherlands. Fuling, the city made famous in Peter Hessler's River Town, is now considered part of Chongqing.
Chongqing itself then isn't the largest city in China, much less the world. This isn't to say, though, that it's in any way small. It's astonishingly, mind-blowingly big. The skyline appearing on the banks of the Yangtze River stretches on for miles in all directions. Everywhere one looks in this city- provided the notorious air pollution isn't particularly nasty that day- there are gigantic apartment and office blocks. The city's many hills also allow for a number of neck-craning vistas during a day's stroll around the center.
Chongqing is also known for its hot food- and hot women. Proving the former conviction is as easy as a bite of the city's tongue-numbing hot pot cuisine. As for the latter, conclusive evidence is rather more subjective, but in the humble opinion of this blogger the reputation is justified. Also hot- the tempers of the locals here. I knew the Sichuanese were fiery but even I was surprised to witness two near-fracases (fracasi?) in the space of five minutes while quietly eating a bowl of dandan noodles (æ‹…æ‹…é¢) only the aptly named Good Food Street (好åƒè¡—).
Tomorrow night I fly back into the mountainous redoubt I call home: Yunnan Province. But in the meantime I'll enjoy my last 24 hours in one of China's three furnances, one whose name rather unfortuantely has been given to a well-known Hong Kong slum guesthouse.
Shanghai
I suppose China is one of the few countries in the world where one can have culture shock during a domestic trip. During my first two or three days in Shanghai's French Concession, I felt much like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. We're not in Kunming anymore, Toto.
That Shanghai is big needs no more comment. Nor that it is expensive- I felt like a country bumpkin when I audibly gasped at the price of a whiskey cocktail I had at a trendy bar. What struck me as most impressive about the city was the individuality of its businesses.
This might require further explanation. In Kunming, as in most Chinese cities, quite a lot of the businesses one encounters on the street have an ersatz quality. The various å°å–部, 兰州拉é¢,过桥米线, and other joints all resemble each other and have little discernible special qualities. It's as if Kunming's city planners conceived a Platonic ideal of a snack shop, replicated it a thousand times, and distributed them throughout the city.
In Shanghai I noticed that every little shop, or restaurant, had individual characteristics, much as they do in San Francisco and Paris and Istanbul.
Then again the cumulative effect of Shanghai is that you feel like you could be anywhere around the world. I seem to think a Westerner could be transplanted into the French Concession, given a wad of 100 RMB notes, and feel utterly and completely at home. I recall in Beijing wandering through neighborhoods that were unmistakably Chinese, while in Shanghai these proved elusive. For me, as a person very much at home in China, this felt unnerving.
Then again Shanghai has the hustle and bustle of a city that knows it's world-class. The subway system is fantastic- clean, fast, efficient, comprehensive, and affordable. Even the taxi drivers seemed to have a degree of professional polish occasionally lacking in places like Kunming.
Yet I wonder if in a way Shanghai hasn't reverted back to its pre-revolutionary days as a playground for the international elite; a place whose back seems firmly turned against the hinterland behind it. I got a few looks from people when I mentioned that I lived in Kunming- like a visitor from the stix who wandered into the big city.
Nevertheless, as I sat with my perfect orange juice, coffee, and burrito breakfast one morning overlooking the city I felt a distinct sense that any city that can provide this, in such a setting, is alright by me.
Shanghai Slim
I'm currently visiting the Whore of the Orient...no, silly, not a person but rather the city of Shanghai. I'm here attending a conference for work but will have a few days off to explore a little. More content to come.
Look at the Funny Minorities
Living in Yunnan we're treated to the regular spectacle of Chinese tourists from the coastal provinces arriving en masse to indulge themselves in a little å°‘æ•°æ°‘æ— exploitation. This New York Times article touches upon this subject, and includes a funny concluding section:
At another table outside were two Han tourists from the city of Chongqing. Zheng Jing, a big-bellied man wielding a Canon camera, was a repeat visitor. He said this park was the only place in the Dai region where he would ever consider staying.
"There are many villages around, and they're all primitive," he said as a Han motorcycle club pulled up to Mr. Ai Yo's house for lunch. "It's not suitable for us to go there. They don't speak the Han language. You can't have exchanges with them."
That kind of attitude puzzles Dai residents living right outside the park.
"The culture here is the same as inside the park," said Ai Yong, 32, a rubber farmer in Mannao village. "You're getting cheated inside. You come out here, you can see everything for free."
Fortunately Ai Yong is right- Yunnan is still rich in authentic minority life, and given the narrow scope of Han travel itineraries one doesn't have to go very far outside of the tourist zones to find it. Within a 30-minute walk from the Dali and Lijiang old towns, for example, you can find living and breathing minority towns, free from Han tourists and 50-kuai cups of coffee. Though I've spent less time there, the same can be said for Jinghong I'm told.
Tengchong and Heshun
Greetings from Tengchong, Yunnan, where I've been staying the past two days after surviving the Bataan Death March--i.e. the bike ride over Gaoli Gong Mountain. We had initially planned to spend just a single day in Tengchong but have instead remained for two; the consequence of consuming some bad baijiu at the hostel bar and spending an entire morning in bed, recovering.
Tengchong looks like most other provincial-level towns in Yunnan, though less compact and more green. I had expected signs of gentrification owing to Tengchong's popularity with travelers but haven't seen much. The city is refreshingly down-to-earth with a buzzing night market and several simple restaurants.
Near Tengchong lies the town of Heshun, a village now known for the large numbers of locals who, flush with cash from the jade trade with nearby Myanmar, have emigrated. Heshun's narrow, cobblestone streets and traditional architecture reminded me a bit of Lijiang, and in true Chinese form tour groups and kitsch shops have popped up everywhere.
Heshun might be 'ruined' in five years, though for now the it has retained its charm. In the course of researching a story I was put in touch with a middle-aged local man who lived in a traditional courtyard home on the outskirts of town.
Our interview ostensibly concerned the Burma Road, the famous supply route through India and Burma that supplied Allied forces in China during World War Two. Tengchong's history is intertwined with that of the road, a subject I had intended to explore further.
In the course of our discussion the man instead spoke movingly of his family history. His parents were members of the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party that governed the mainland from 1911 to 1949 and has dominated Taiwanese politics ever since. From the end of World War Two to 1949 the Kuomintang fought against the Communists in the Chinese civil war.
When the Communists won, the Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-Shek fled with much of the country's treasury to Taiwan. Many of his supporters followed him. For the parents of the man I met, history was less kind. They were unable to flee.
Later, under Communist rule, the man's father was accused of being a counter-revolutionary and a spy for Burma. He was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. After his release, his son sadly described him as a changed man; the years of torture and imprisonment had caused him to lose his mind.
I asked him whether he harbored any bitterness towards these years and he said no. Things were good now, so good that he could do what he wanted and buy what he pleased. When I asked whether he was concerned rampant tourism would ruin Tengchong's spirit, he simply laughed and said that the economic development to him was progress.
Tomorrow we press onto Ruili, the capital of Dehong prefecture and a city which has supposedly shed its seedy image. By how much? We'll have to see.
Shenzhen Redux
Aloha, dear readers- my silence in recent days is attributable to being on the road, in this case Shenzhen. I've been here for a work-related conference held at the Shenzhen Exhibition Center, a building I found more interesting than the exhibition itself.
The exhibition center is huge. Enormous. Very, very big. Let's put it this way- you could hold both the Democratic and Republication national conventions in the building simultaneously without attendees from either side even running into each other. You could hold the entire NCAA tournament there; in about two days. The entire Moscone Center-the exhibition center in San Francisco I once thought was somewhat large- would fit neatly within one of the seven halls in this monolithic edifice.
Walking around the Shenzhen center got me thinking that China has bought into the cult of the large. Once a uniquely American paradigm, the cult of the large basically refers to an unquenchable desire of a nation to have the biggest of everything.
China already has the biggest population in the world. It has the biggest municipal area (Chongqing, with 30 million smoggy souls). China has the biggest square, the longest bridge, the biggest international terminal (Beijing), and even the biggest Buddha for those needing a spiritual angle. If China were a US state, it would be Texas.
For better or for worse, China may never get to see its "bigness" era to its logical conclusion. America's development meant big cars and big suburban single-family houses. Today's reality of recession and global warming makes that choice impossible for the Chinese, who will likely have to content themselves with little apartments and rail travel in the years going forward.
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I read today that Americans can visit 155 countries around the world without a visa. Unfortunately, the one I choose to live in isn't one of them. I'm off to Hong Kong on Monday to extend my visa, a process that takes 24 hours, most of which I'll spend trying to figure out ways not to spend money.