Songyuan City is in Jilin Province, far north-east China. It's the kind of winter wasteland place an average mid-western American girl can come to and after six months say distractedly, "It's mmkay." (Actually i don't live there anymore but oh well.)
I have been obsessed with making wide shots almost everywhere i go. Maybe my photos would be a bit better if i wasn't so obsessed. It's been quite the Wild Guce Chase.
However, i finally stitched them all together, and whole collection (of 40, yeah, ridiculous) has now been slapped online.
In each case i had no idea whether they would work, and most didn't. Some at least worked well enough, so at the conclusion of this latest epic journey, epic of course for its shortness, panoramas are here. (They may well look shit and pointless but they tend to reveal themselves when clicked.)
"I'm Chinese," he said, "i understand the Chinese. The Chinese are a war-loving people. If China was as strong as America you would have been finished long ago."
An attention-grabbing comment in these times.
"If 9-11 had happened to China, the Chinese would have massacred a whole country."
Yes indeed, you could probably even get the attention of a Songyuan Oilfield High School classroom full of oil-honcho little-emperors with comments like that...
Romeo was the first person i heard criticise the Communist Party in Chinese. He also became my best friend south of the Yangtze. I met him at the 30RMB all-u-can-drink night (now equal to $6 but it was about $4.70 with the exchange rate at the time) - one of the very last, perhaps even THE last of those golden opportunities to experience the worst hangover in Shanghai. Everyone in the room was loose, obviously, but Romeo was even looser with his talk.
It must be hard, mentally, to be so negative of the Chinese, yet at the same time be Chinese. I mean, Americans are often very critical of America and the American people, but they criticise themselves from the comfortable position of assured superiority to everyone else. Perhaps it's the same with Romeo - he often says what a good country Shanghai would be.... are Shanghai people are the Americans of Planet China?
Well, Romeo does swear he will never go to north China - get this - because he's afraid: "Chinese people aren't united. They'll treat a foreigner better than someone from another part of the country."
I asked him where he got all his hyper-critical views from, and he simply replied, "Many of my friends have been thinking this way since we were in high school." Well i only met the friends he was talking about once, at a big feast, and politics wasn't on the menu. But he had two neighbours whom we would hang out, smoke and "liao" a lot with, and who didn't exactly agree with his views. One, an older fellow, was a perfect model of moderation, while the other, maybe 50-55, was always nostalgic about the Chairman Mao days. (When i asked the other two why the latter liked Mao despite having witness his destructiveness, they replied, "Well, he's a relatively lazy person. He had an easy job [i.e. a tenured easy job] until Deng Xiaoping.")
These three would sit together day after day, and i was struck by the great respect they seemed to have for each other's views. They never tried to convince the other of the rightness of their position, they just each stated things as they saw them, whether that contradicted the other or not.
All of this would take place in Romeo's somewhat filthy restaurant in a superb location right near People's Square. His Sichuan cook would do an amazing "Oyster Oil Beef" with green chillies, and aside from the lunchtime rush-hour, Romeo just sits, chats and watches TV all day - like 99% of all other small Chinese shopkeepers. He certainly isn't building a business empire. Which is half the reason he's 31 and can't seem to find a wife.
China's gender imbalance problems are well documented, but Romeo faces what's possibly a uniquely Shanghai problem: he's too good for a country girl - his parents would never accept one - but not good enough for the Shanghai girls, who are all either more successful than him (many are so this instantly rules out a great many possibilities) or dreaming of roping in a big boss or a foreigner.
Worse, even though women are in short supply, in Shanghai there would still appear to be a Sex-and-the-city-style class of spinsters (i would find out for sure if i were a journalist). For example, another Shanghai friend of mine, my language exchange partner actually, is a single lady over 30. As a talented graphic designer with her own business, the marry-up requirement limits her potential partners to a very small pool of hard-to-score high-flyers - and they of course can afford a different 19-year-old every night. Even if she eventually ropes in one of these rare beasts, she must then somehow mitigate the threat her successful career might pose to its self-esteem - probably by giving up graphic design.
Romeo would probably say only Chinese men are averse to successful women, that Westerners are more "advanced" and "understanding", but even where that is the case it's only because the idea of mooching off a woman has a simple rational appeal - but only outside the Chinese social system. Fair enough though, his impression of the west and westerners (nandao China and the Chinese also??) is deduced, according to his own estimation, entirely from Hollywood movies, which he watches at an alarming rate. (He has quite a few thousand DVDs, most of which were given to him by a friend who had quit selling them roadside.)
Similarly, like most westerners, Romeo spends all the money he earns - remember i met him at a discount mega all-u-can-drink night. And it was he who introduced me to the wonders of all-u-can-eat "Baxi BBQ" (Baxi pronounced "Bashie" and meaning "Brazil"... i'll take any excuse to say it out loud it's so much fun). But though Romeo may be westernised in most of his consumer behaviour, he certainly is not in his culinary preferences. On my last night in Shanghai i went round to his place and he grabbed us some takeaway: frogs' legs, jellyish pig tendons and pig kidneys.
March 17: The night i came down from Hua Shan i caught a train to Beijing. Most of that journey's waking hours were spent in conversation with a peach promoter from Pinggu district.
An announcement on the train's PA system as we pulled into the station boasted of Beijing's "complete" subway system. Unfortunately i was on one of the very large number of Beijing trains that go to Beijing West Railway Station, which the subway system as yet does not reach. So my introduction to the capital consisted of being rudely jostled into a corner by peasants on a bus, followed by the bus driver opening the bus door, which opened into my corner and forced me to rudely jostle the peasants to get out of its way.
Beijing's not that dense a city - the buildings aren't really that tall and as a result, it's geographically massive. From the bus stop it took another 25 minutes' walk to reach the hotel. From there the nearest subway station was 15 minutes away. But walking had its advantages: all around i found wonderful breakfast foods - baozi, jiaozi, congee, flatbreads, chilli chicken burgers. I almost felt what might have been a more general ambivalence to or even animosity towards foreigners - glances averted, people shuffling away at the bus stop. Actually that comment pretty much confirms me a country bumpkin. Or maybe i was just subconsciously missing the celebrity-style burning attention i tend to get almost everywhere else....
But my roommate, a "trader" (he refused to be more specific) from Cameroon who wants to spread the Good News, told me of the racism he had struggled with in China. He claimed it was because Africans were poaching all the Chinamen's girls. Strange, i've only ever had Chinese men encouraging me to go after Chinese girls. Anyway, whatever the reason, he spoke of "deliberate humiliation", being ignored as a customer, etc., and i could certainly see it happening, although for his part he himself didn't come across as very willing to adapt to China. He saw it as "very uncivilised and very backward", particularly because of the spitting in the streets, which people presumably don't do in Cameroon. Have heard about good cheap French baguettes in Cameroon... and no spitting in the street too? This Cameroon sounds like the place.
I spent my day in Beijing in an internet bar where i met Mr Liu, from Jiangxi Province, who had come to lodge a petition against a local government honcho he said had ruined his life.
He told me it started in 1994 when his family added a side door to their home, allowing them to enter via a communal strip of land shared with the neighbours. Who happened to be relatives of a powerful local official who intervened on their behalf.
Unfortunately Mr Liu and his family were a little too justice-bent - they tried to bring a lawsuit and things got serious. His brother had half his face slashed off and went insane. Thugs attacked Liu on several occasions, and he considers himself extraordinarily lucky to be alive.
Since then he says he has been constantly watched and followed, prevented from getting a job or getting married. Needless to say he was an angry man and i asked him if he knew about the "black prison" phenomenon in which petitioners are known to have been arbitrarily and illegally arrested in Beijing. He just didn't give a shit, and i feared for his safety in the internet bar as he yelled obscenities about the government to the foreigner.
This - and the man himself - all seemed pretty reasonable, and, more importantly, perfectly sane, given a Chinese professor's recent claim that more than 99% of petitioners are mentally unsound.
Then he sent me the "full story" via email. Poor Mr Liu.
I don't have much doubt that what he told me is true, that he's been menaced, followed, intimidated and attacked. But the full story was heartbreakingly insane - involving roommates dispatched by a hidden puppet-master to disrupt his studies for 2 years before eventually killing him. The would-be murderer had decided against completing the job. That was more than 10 years ago.
I would speculate that Professor Sun is just about right, most petitioners probably are insane to some degree. Not 99+ percent, but would it be any wonder if you went through the harrowing, soul-crushing shit that these people go through, that you ended up disturbed. How many of these people are being driven insane? Or is that actually Professor Sun's theory, and the reason for his apparently crazy comments? It's unlikely he would have been implying that his petitioner-insanity correlation was a coincidence.
Poor Mr Liu, that's all i can say. I don't know what to say to him now. If anyone happens to read this (at any time) and also happens to know someone or some NGO who helps petitioners, i've been looking for you. Please leave a comment down the bottom, or contact achubb|at|gmail|dot|com
The exchange probably was a timely reality check because i went from the internet bar straight to the Olympic Park. And there it was. I don't know whether it was Liu's tale or the fact i'd been up country too much lately, but i wasn't impressed. As incredible as these structures may be as feats of human imagination, skill and effort, they really pale in comparison to nature...
I crossed the road and got drunk in a supermarket that ripped me off. It was the ethnic minority hangout next to Ethnicity Park. My drinking partner in the supermarket, a Mr Zhang, fluent in German and shakily ok in English, introduced to me these peoples' minority wonders:
Me: "So what goes on there, in Ethnicity Park?"
Zhang: "They can dance."
Me: "Anything else?"
Zhang: "Umm..."
Me: "Surely they do more than just dance?"
Zhang: "They can do service."
Behold, the splendour of China's 56 ethnicities! I was feeling a tad cynical that night.
I took a bus to Sanlitun, a well-known centre of foreign debauchery. I didn't have any spare cash so i settled for sauntering up and down the street and street drinking in front of "Bao An", or public security police, who, in their camouflage uniforms looked a lot more like an army. Their rule was far from martial though as they paraded up and down in military formation past the pimps, drug dealers and underage drinkers (and street drinkers).
I got chatting to a Dongbei pimp (from the Northeast, where we started in China) who, with his partner/wife, was hustling the best way he knew how - calling obscene propositions in English at every foreigner who came within earshot. Particularly, for some reason, People of Middle Eastern Appearance.
But his phrases were all jumbled after repeating the same mistakes every night, as though he had been playing a months-long game of Chinese Whispers with himself. I offered to help him renew his arsenal and asked him in Chinese the phrases he would ideally be using, from a marketing point of view.
His wishlist:
1.) "Have you fucked a Chinese girl?" 2.) "She swallows cum," and 3.) "No pubic hair!"
The big three - he was very confident thereafter. I may have made him a rich man.
On the way back to the hostel in a taxi, without my even mentioning the pimp, the taxi driver of his own volition just launched into a random, vicious rant on the evils of Dongbeiren (Northeasterners). People in China seem to see fellow-provincials the same way we westerners see fellow-countrymen; they sometimes appear to look at people from other provinces as we look at foreigners. That would make foreigners in China the equivalent of space aliens. China is its own planet.
My flight to Dongbei was the following morning. It started with a near-disastrous wrong-terminal problem. It never occurred to me that there might be another terminal at Beijing Capital Airport besides the glittering, cavernous new one. But upon finding my flight missing from the departures board i made inquiries and was redirected to a shitty little rolled aluminium shed of a Terminal 3 that reminded me a lot of Perth Airport.
By the time i had transferred from Changchun Airport to Changchun Bus Station to Songyuan City, i had about 11 hours to "play" with my old friends in Songyuan, and i have to say it was very good to be back. Songyuan seemed a lot more rural than i remembered it, with the donkey carts and various classes of "agricultural vehicle" roaming the massive 8-lane boulevards freely. Outwardly, it just looks like a very rich "Xian" (county capital) - it essentially is 2 separate Xians joined by a bridge. It really is rich - so rich that its inhabitants even admit it, and as far as i remember that's rare in China. And Feiyu Jinlun Huayuarrrrr, the luxury apartment complex we lived in, has taken over two more villages and is now so massive it takes about 10 minutes to walk from one side to the other.
Predictably, most of the people i knew from the school had left - especially the Chinese staff, of whom only 3 remained from 2007. Had a time catching up with those who were there, which became especially fun when i made the mistake of insisting on paying our own bill in a place called Kebab Bar.
Two blokes next to us had been engaging an American teacher and me in riveting conversation regarding New York policewomen and other matters, and had taken to keeping our beer glasses full. Then they said they were going to pay the bill and i asked the American teacher if she was happy with that and she was ambivalent.
I went up to the counter and insisted on paying our bill ourselves. The fuwuyuarrrr, however, couldn't be bothered with the bill-paying games, and as the two drunkards had already given her money for our bill, she took the money i gave her and slapped it down on their table.
Suddenly the drunks were deathly silent. They didn't touch the money, and i instantly realised i'd fucked up...this was a mortal insult: two guys get drunk, build face by stacking up the beers on the table to show how much they've drunk, foreigners come in, they win even more face by engaging them in conversation for an hour, they generously express their appreciation by paying their bill, and the foreigners not only publicly shun their generosity, an insultingly small sum of money gets thrown at them as though they need it. A truly disastrous loss of face...
My mind flashed back to the taxi driver in Beijing the previous night, and it gave me an idea: rectify the situation by cravenly stoking regionalism. "I'm sorry," I said, taking the money off their table and stashing it in my wallet, "I owe you an apology. I've been out of the Northeast for too long and, well, people in the South are just not as polite and kind as you Northeasterners. Actually they're really very rude. They don't have your level of culture. Or quality."
"We'd heard that too," one of them replied. And all was well.
I was out of there at 5am the next morning, back to Changchun, a short reunion with Mr Robert, airport, plane to Pudong (i agree with the departure boards in Chinese airports - Pudong doesn't count as Shanghai), then Maglev to Shanghai in six minutes or something ridiculous:
March 15, 2009: I had come to Xi'an with the intention of heading north onto 2007's Great Wall journey route and catching up with a couple of nice people in shitty polluted towns.
But somehow instead i ended up at the second completely unreal scenic location of the trip.
When i reached Xi'an i found that a timetable change (it was actually much more likely a case of a Chinese train info website being plainly wrong on the existence of the train in question) meant would mean i would only get to one place - and that, i decided, would be Shenmu County. In fact, flying in the face of my "shitty and polluted" description, Shenmu was recently crowned number one among Shaanxi's 10 "Super-Counties" 强县 in social and economic development in 2008 - although in Shaanxi obviously the competition isn't as strong as elsewhere. The provincial government said it was based on a combination of 30 indices, including those of 'economic institutions, social development and ecology and environment'. Going by my recollection of the state of the environment up there, i think it's probably safe to assume it's the economy and society that are propelling Shenmu to the top of the ratings.
Actually, all of our North Shaanxi favourites from the Great Wall trip were right up there at the top of the list - Dingbian and Jingbian, Shenmu and Fugu. (One day 30 years from now, when the bored grandsons of today's coal miners find themselves hangin' on street corners and hatin' on the (clean) air they breathe, i predict some little red-guard-without-a-cause will end up rapping about those four places.) Even Hengshan, which gave me the impression of being somewhat closer to Burundi than Beijing, was there at number 14, and the whole thing appears to be saying (i may simply be misreading it completely) that sandy, barren, mountainous, rotten North Shaanxi 陕北 is doing significantly better than the rest of the Shaanxi countryside. I continue to rant at people about China's miraculous elevated superhighways (don't worry they all deserve it - especially the foreigners - after asking the question, "What's China like?"). The one between Xi'an and Jingbian County just ploughs through range after range of steep, sandy mountains, bringing the whole "Shaanbei" region within 5-10 hours of the provincial capital, where before it was days - conceivably weeks in many places - distant. The idea appears to be "maintain elevation at all costs", with 400-500km of alternating tunnels and bridges. Mountain in the way? Tunnel straight through it. Deep, wide valley on the other side? Keep the road going straight outwards, Wile E. Coyote style, just add concrete legs underneath, getting longer and longer as required. Just awesome feats of engineering that bring massive social benefits:--
So i messaged my Shenmu County "Taiwan Hand-pounded Pancake" chain store dude (actually "chain sign" would be a more accurate description as the franchisee doesn't need to have anything more than a table and a hotplate) and wondered how he was going. He replied that he was pleased i had remembered him but he "wasn't in that place anymore," that he was now a policeman, and he wished me a safe trip. This i interpreted to mean he was not in Shenmu and didn't have time to see me, and now, reading back over the messages i'm not so sure. Still, i had to make a decision at that point, and the decision was that instead of sitting for a whole day on a train, stopping for 2 hours in a coal town, turning around and getting back on the same train as it crawled back, i would go to Hua Shan, one of China's five Sacred Tourist Mountains.
While in Xi'an that night, i visited the backpackers bar that was the scene of "what's my cat gonna do now?", definitely my personal funniest moment of the last two years. Insanely, one of the two poms from that episode was there in the bar playing pool! He wasn't overly keen to talk it through in detail in front of the other people he was with...perhaps he was fearing i would bring up the bit where he's jumping around like a gazelle trying to escape Randy...
I set off the next morning.
It's a very civilised mountain, as you can see above - the paths are all paved and probably have been for eons. Most tourists take the cable car straight up to the north peak from the other side, bypassing probably half the climb. As i neared the north peak, through the silence i started hearing a buzzing noise like a swarm of bees. It became louder and louder until it finally took form as the sound of swarms of people - although as you will see further down if you get that far, this being low season, these swarms would certainly not qualify as such.
Even now the taming of the mountain continues. This guy and his mates were constructing a new paved viewing platform, presumably out of the mountain itself.
Although there are a few crazy vertical ladders (e.g. above), i saw nothing at Hua Shan that really matched the danger described by this dedicated anti-Huashan website. My biggest danger came from my heavy backpack, whose shoulder straps snapped three times. Whenever this happened i would be dragged violently towards one side of the path, which on occasions meant towards a massive drop. However, the backpack may have actually saved me too: most of the climbing was above the snow-line, on the couple of occasions when i did slip over, my backpack ruled out the possibility of cracking the back of my head.
Most of the time though the bag just made me labour like an old-time coolie. Actually, beyond the cable car station a few times i found myself overtaking or being overtaken by a porter carrying supplies up the mountain for the numerous mini-shops and guesthouses up there. These guys would just about be the coolies' closest contemporary relatives, but given the prices up there (Coke 12RMB, pack of biscuits 20RMB, "convenient" noodles 15RMB) i would hope they were very well-paid. Shame i forgot to ask one his income. Somehow, despite the presence of these hardy, hardy troopers, Chinese fellow mountain-goers still saw fit to comment - sometimes to me, other times to each other thinking i wouldn't overhear/understand - on my "ferocious" European body strength. When i pointed out that most of the people climbing the mountain were Chinese and that their bodies were holding up just fine, the reply would invariably be to the effect of, "Yes but your bodies are better than we Chinese'." After a few times i started inquiring as to the status of Africans' bodies - and indeed, black bodies are physically better than white ones. Although that assessment seems to play out true in the form of the Olympics and ball games, i still find the Chinese tendency to rank the races very interesting. In terms of civilisation Chinese people will sometimes say the Chinese are more civilised than blacks and less civilised than whites, though of course they're more than well aware that the Chinese were civilised long before Europeans. Taking, then, China as the longest-running civilisation, and Africa as the most recently civilised (or uncivilised) continent, China with the worst bodies and Africa with the best, i wonder if many Chinese people would perceive a link between civilisation and bodily decline. And of course, physical degeneration in the form of obesity and no exercise has been a status symbol in China in the past. This idea even Orwell touched on, when he discussed his fear of "progress" leading to brains-in-bottles, in the second half of The Road to Wigan Pier. Impeccable timing, thinking of this now as i'm just about to leave China for years!
The top of Hua Shan is just beautiful: the three main peaks, South, East and West, are clustered together, with a triangular bowl of forest between, covered in snow at least a foot deep. It's dotted with temples, and quite a few trees are marked as being over 300 years old; one was 800. I stayed the night in a guesthouse on top of the mountain, sharing a room with an extremely generous fellow from Hebei who showered me with biscuits and other sustenance-related products. Soon we were joined by another guy who was keen to shout us 15RMB beers (actually probably more like 20RMB - i wasn't paying), and even keener for us to share his long-life chicken feet. We got up early to watch the sunrise from the East Peak, along with about 40 others, mainly students it seemed. I think they got even more of a kick from it than i did: whooping noises reverberated around the peaks all morning, long after the sun had peeped over the pollution line.
Mountains made of this kind of rock must have been the inspiration for the Mario Bros. mountains, no?--
I descended by cable car, which must have increased the number of visitors tenfold when it opened. It's quite a blessing that many visitors don't even climb at all, instead just taking a look at the view from the North Peak cable car station and then going back down again. As i mentioned above, the North Peak was buzzing this time, and just imagine in summer when even these racks, this stockyard, can't control the cable car queues....
...actually it was a local tourism bureau official who told me that, and he told me rather enthusiastically. Maybe he just felt he needed to justify the empty racks. Or maybe to him crowded mountains, as tourist attractions, are, well, touristically attractive.
March 14: He roped me in at Yichang bus station. Probably as thoroughly roped-in as i've ever been.
I told him to take me to the train station, and he asked me why i'd want to go there, as there were no trains tonight. I replied that i knew this, and i was going to take tomorrow's train.
To where, he asked.
Xi'an.
"Oh you should go by bus, there's sleeper buses - buses with beds going to Xi'an tonight."
Yeah, i said, i know about the sleeper buses. They go a long, long way with very infrequent stops, which stops me from whiling away the journey with beers. I'll take the train.
But he did well, talking me round by pointing out the whole extra day, plus cash, i'd save.
I asked him what time the bus left. He didn't reply, but rifled through a stack of business cards before pulling out a typical bus owner's card and calling the number on it. This was a bad sign; i'd been under the impression that by "buses with beds going to Xi'an tonight" he'd meant buses leaving from the bus station. This was a different game - the game the peasants have to play, hailing down buses in the mostly-vain hope they'll stop cold on a superhighway.
Anyway, the outcome of the call, he told me, was that the bus was indeed coming, and we negotiated a price that i found quite reasonable. He dropped me off at an internet bar and said he'd be back in two hours to take me to the bus.
Two-and-a-half hours later he rocked up and told me the bus was running late and would be coming at 1.30. AM, of course. So i wasted another hour online before he picked me up and we headed to the supposed meeting point, under a highway bridge. Half an hour we waited there with no sign of any bus before taxi finally agreed, on my urging, to call bus and check the other's present location. For once i understood the conversation almost-perfectly, and it wasn't encouraging: it was clear that the bus driver wasn't all that fussed whether or not this deal (delivering me to Xi'an) came through or not. The taxi driver was an irrelevant minnow in the transport business; he didn't know the bus driver personally, he'd just come by his card somehow and was now trying to cultivate his "guanxi" (Chinese-style 'connections', or 'netw**king') with these great sharks on the intercity bus scene. The bus driver hadn't bothered to notify him of a change of plans, and he now had to drive 20km out into the countryside if he wanted to make the deal. He laughably tried to get me to pay, then quickly recanted as i started to get out, and away we went to the outskirts of Yichang at top speed.
Once again, however, the bus driver hadn't thought it relevant to tell the taxi driver that the bus was still more than an hour away. Not only did he waste his own petrol and risk our two worthless lives, he was now risking his whole livelihood driving at 140km/h down wet roads to make this deal.
Waiting under another highway bridge, it was now 2.30am and i was getting pretty keen for the bus-bed. Taxi convinced me it would be a good idea to go up onto the bridge, in the rain, to wait for the bus which would be here "on the horse", (ie. a very non-specific "soon"). After about 5 minutes of this a cop pulled up and banished us from the bridge, effectively forcing the taxi driver to pay the toll to enter and use the highway just to stop in the rest zone 500m ahead to meet the bus. Still he fought the inevitable - he stopped the car just before the toll gate and we watched for the bus, which still didn't appear. It looked and felt decidedly like a wild guce chase, but i actually felt sorry for him, this taxi driver who had got me into this and deprived me of a night's sleep. After witnessing his struggle to make it happen I actually wanted him to make his deal. At 3.30, with the bus now a full 4 hours late, he called the bus driver again and discovered that the bus had already gone past us. Luckily, at least as far as our immediate aim of getting me onto the bus was concerned, it had some kind of mechanical problem and was still there in the rest zone ahead. So he floored it, paid the toll and i got on the bus.
Inevitably, having finally got on the bus, desperate for sleep, there turned out to be no berth for me, but i was so tired that the floor proved very inviting.
The next day i awoke as the bus pulled into a(nother?) mechanic's, presumably for the same reason the bus was so late. But inside ten minutes those passengers who had braved the drizzle to relieve ourselves on the green and sodden Hubei countryside were being herded back on board.
The driver seemed to be avoiding the superhighway, instead hurtling along side-roads, probably to maintain proximity to mechanical services. But we weren't hurtling for long before we reached a traffic jam where a "horror smash" had recently taken place. A truck and a passenger bus had apparently collided head-on and the front of both vehicles was completely mangled. Somehow, people said, no-one was seriously hurt, but nothing was getting past on that road. So, after a farcical 10-minute, 15-point turn, we backtracked the 20 minutes to the superhighway entrance.
I was at this point holding the bus bosses - the driver and the owner - responsible for all that had gone wrong, and had decided the previous night, in a fit of pique upon learning i had only the floor to sleep on, that i wouldn't be speaking to either of those two dirty scheming wretches. But as the questionable nature of my decision to devour fresh fruit for breakfast became clear (they don't call fresh fruit 水果 "water fruit" for nothing), i asked when the next stop would be. I didn't quite catch the reply, but apparently when the bus is late there are no bathroom stops. I suggested i could use a plastic water bottle to relieve myself, which the bus bosses found hilarious and quite awesome. Two hours later i was about to crank out another bottle, but the bus owner insisted a plastic bag was a better idea. These seemingly "low quality" behaviours - i don't normally litter China but that double-blue piss bag obviously went straight out the window - apparently endeared me to them, and the owner invited me to stay up front, which was much more comfortable than being walked on in the aisle.
The pair of them, boss and driver, from the start plied me mostly with dirty questions, and the conversation actually ended up quite worthwhile. The boss, who said he was 51 but looked about 30, was a former soldier who'd gone into business with the money he'd saved from the army - an extremely common story in China. He'd bought the sleeper bus for 200,000-odd RMB, and said it took 2 years to recoup the initial outlay. He then had 6 more years in the profit zone before the bus would get pulled off the road. At this point the driver chimed in with, "he's really rich!" He didn't look it, but he's certainly doing alright.
The conversation came pretty quickly round to sexual practices when he told me very confidently that he knew the West was all about "free love" whereas "we Chinese are conservative". I replied that the situation in China's cities was almost exactly the same as in the West - that people pick up in nightclubs, but obviously not everyone does it all the time. He laughed, saying he didn't believe me, that i was trying to protect my "country's face"...so i told him every fucked-up detail i could think of about the treatment of Aboriginal Australia, and he seemed genuinely taken-aback that i would tell him such things, and (possibly, or so it seemed) keener to consider what i was saying.
Maybe it means nothing, but perhaps it could be the start of a legitimate tactic for foreigners trying to talk about controversial issues with Chinese - start by talking about the worst crimes of the Wild West or the British Empire. Make it something worse than they've even heard about - like Younghusband's invasion of Tibet in 1904, if Tibet's the topic under discussion - and your Chinese counterpart may decide your points are more worthwhile considering. The Iraq War might offer some excellent opportunities because the Chinese media, according to the Chinese professor behind this fascinating speech/article, covered it and the all-important leadup to it very similarly to Fox News, only probably less critically. The speech was made in '04 but my experience, or more specifically the near-complete absence of anyone in China ever bringing up the Iraq War with me in the last 2 years, would seem to suggest that the mainstream Chinese media have continued on a similar trajectory.
We drove into a tunnel in the rain and came out the other side in the snow.
Then we came down from the mountains and we were back in Xi'an, the Tang Dynasty capital with the awesome wall. If only Beijing's hadn't been pulled down...
March 13, 2009: I'm pretty sure the toothbrush salesman had exhausted his supply by the time we reached Chongqing. I headed straight to the "wharf" to look at Yangtze River travel options.
I wanted to visit Fuling, home of some nice varieties of pickled vegetables and the "River Town" of Peter Hessler's classic book. I wanted to go there via the river, as Hessler had done before, but i was assured that no passenger boats went to Fuling.
"How do peasants from Fuling go home then?" I asked the taxi driver.
"They sit on a bus. It takes 1 hour. Sitting on the boat takes 5 hours. Why would they sit on a boat?"
The superhighway screws the river then, or rather, the (former) river transport operators - actually it's probably good for the river itself if the peasants are kept away from it... However, the truth is the river's already screwed. a situation educated Chinese blame on a lack of awareness of one's place in the world that they often refer to as part of people's "素质“, or "quality". For the "low quality" people who throw their household rubbish into the river, they say, the river takes the rubbish away from their world - their immediate area - and that's it, full stop. Throwing rubbish into the river is thus a reasonable plan. The really fucked-up irony is that as poor people's material position improves, their non-biodegradable rubbish output probably shoots up much faster than their education level. Given "low-quality" people make up a good 800+ million of this country's population, the logical conclusion is that the whole world is fucked. I wonder what percentage of China's population have even been told the idea of biodegradable and non-biodegradable.
Eventually i gave up on Fuling, so all i wanted now was a plain old ticket that entitled me to go by boat through the Three Gorges. But apparently no-one in China wants that - only packages that include marked-up entry to the various tourist attractions along the way. After all, what's travelling in China without temples and trinkets? I was about to find out. After long negotiations the company admitted there was a plain simple ol' 3rd class ticket - and at 435RMB for the 2-night, 2-day cruise it was a bargain.
Chongqing reminded me a lot of Changchun with the addition of a skyline. It's very confusing and chaotic, a bit greasy on the pavement side of things, and undeniably, potentially endearingly, ugly...well, the parts i saw anyway.
It's built on steep slopes (not in the photo above) above the Yangtze, slopes so steep that in the central city area there are many massive retaining walls - up to 20 storeys or maybe more - so you generally can't just walk from A to B, you have to know where the staircases are and they're not advertised; and huge highways dominate the river banks, adding to the messy effect and pedestrian mayhem. The passenger wharf is so far above the river (the river looked relatively low when i was there) that a special kind of toothed railcar is provided (and whose tracks mean you must take a long detour if you want to walk down) just to get up and down from the boat.
It appears to be a converted city bus, but i've no idea how or why they'd go to the effort of bending a whole bus into the required shape, rather than just making a platform with walls. Maybe it was a face project in the 80s - "Come to Chongqing - where you can sit on a bus right down to the water's edge!". Speaking of water's edge, the rubbish layer is visible even from afar:
Chongqing is also famous for awesome greasy, spicy snacks including chilli potato pieces.
The tourist boat turned out to less shit than i was expecting, given the discount price: a three-storey floating hotel, basically, like this one.
When i first boarded, the staff simply couldn't understand what i was doing coming aboard with a boat-only ticket. Did i understand i wouldn't be able to get into the "attractions" we would be stopping at? They immediately commenced upselling me the tourism products and services i'd just spent more than half an hour eliminating.
Fellow passengers, too, didn't understand why one would go travelling down the Yangtze but not participate in tourism activities. But of course, the next day when they would return to the boat from this or that temple or fun park, i would ask them how it was and the reply would be that it was just like all the others.
A suitably motley crew of characters had emerged by the second morning on that boat: The Shanxi Coal King who was desperate to "treat" me to a Chinese prostitute at the next port;
...the paranoid Taiwan Cryogenics Mogul who, after giving it to me, wouldn't let me look at his business card in public lest the details on it be seen by the Mainland riff-raff;
...the Shaanxi county-level government goons, who oversee welfare in their county (although they had strangely little to say on the subject, about as uncontroversial as subjects get, when asked);
...and the Ningxia book editor with a daughter too fond of Chairman Mao for her liking.
So i kicked back, drank beer, smoked pipes and waited alone on the boat at various Yangtze ports, until we reached the entrance to the Gorges.
Unfortunately the most immediate way they looked to me was "flooded". Although the mountains all around are probably still at least 1,000 metres high, and the portion underwater is only a bit over 150m, they really looked like the peaks of mountains sticking up out of the water. I'm sure a huge part of the Gorges' former glory and impact on travellers was due to their narrowness, which effect is obviously completely gone now. Still insane to think there used to be massive, raging rapids 150+ metres straight down below though.
And the disappointment of a spoiled foreign tourist here or there is, of course, very irrelevant. I'm convinced that the dam has brought benefits to the majority of locals. For a start, the new towns - i didn't see the old towns, of course, but by all accounts they were shitholes by comparison. And river freight transport is so much more efficient than road that these massive drive-on-drive-off ferries for trucks are almost the most common type of vessel. The multi-storey part at the back is presumably a floating inn for the truckies.
The cruise ended at Yichang, or rather, the river port before the dam that they choose to refer to as "Yichang" but is actually an hour's bus ride from that city. Luckily, by blending in with the package tourists (ie. everyone else), i was able to sneak aboard their bus and save myself the cost of a ticket.
