Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (24 page)

I found refuge from the weather inside a small restaurant with a leaky roof overlooking the beach. What I really wanted was coffee and perhaps a slice of pumpkin bread. Instead I had seaweed tea, and ordered a boiled egg with slices of tomato and cucumber, and received instead a plate of scrambled eggs mixed with diced tomatoes. Perhaps the waiter thought I was Australian. That’s what Australians do, mix eggs and tomatoes with everything—an unholy combination, in my opinion.

The wind roared and the rain gave no indication of lessening, and so I decided that today I would just be wet. I made my way past streetlamps decorated with swastikas, a sight that always succeeds in startling me. But, in fact, in Buddhism it is a symbol for love and mercy, and to this day it strikes me as particularly twisted that the Nazis chose to appropriate this ancient image of peace and love. I made my way to the Western Paradise trail and climbed the stairs to a rock that was carved with calligraphy. Etched in stone was the character for love, and visitors had left thousands of padlocks linked to a low fence that lay before it, testimonies of someone’s devotion to another. At this point, I realized that I could go no farther—water was now rushing down the stairs and soon they would be all be but impassable. The wind had picked up further, sending twigs fluttering across the steps and against my rainwear, and I decided that the yin and yang of wandering around in a maelstrom compared to being dry and warm tilted to the latter. I returned to the hotel to inquire about boats traveling back to the mainland.

“No boats,” I was told. “Typhoon.”

There are typhoons and there are super typhoons. Typhoon Chancu was only the second super typhoon to ever be recorded in the South China Sea. And somehow, I had managed to place myself on an island while it struck. Clearly, I really needed to learn how to read a Chinese newspaper. This was inconvenient, a small problem, as I had to be in Hong Kong shortly to meet a friend. But instead of leisurely making my way south through Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong Provinces, I found myself marooned on an island while thunderous waves broke on its shore and gale-force winds buffeted the trees.

But this was my fault too. China is a big country, and you don’t quite realize how big it is until you start plotting the time and logistics it takes to get oneself from here to there. Nothing is straightforward in China; there are
always
complications. And it is enormous, this country of 1.3 billion people. What I usually assumed would be a three-hour journey was invariably a ten-hour one. And so I found myself stuck on an island approximately halfway from my intended destination. And there was a typhoon.

Perhaps it was just one of those things. Typhoons happen. Even super typhoons, though not very often. Perhaps it was some deity in the sky who saw that this guy who had lived on islands was on an island again and so why not send in a typhoon. But I knew that was not the case. I am dust in the wind from a deitological perspective. I come from a Catholic tradition, and that God ain’t personal.

More likely, this super typhoon was a harbinger of climate change. No single weather event, of course, is indicative of anything. Shit happens. Just because. But it’s difficult to spend a moment in China and not be utterly awed by the scale of the ongoing environmental catastrophe. Today, there is one vehicle for every forty inhabitants in China. In the U.S., it’s one vehicle per 1.25 inhabitants, so you can see where China is trending. Chinese oil companies are traveling to the ends of the earth to secure their oil supply: Sudan, Angola, Papua New Guinea. They even tried to buy Unocal, the eighth-largest American oil and gas production company. Together with India, there are now 2.5 billion people in the global economy that just weren’t there fifteen years ago. The consequences for the environment are alarming. The U.S. has 5 percent of the world’s population and emits 25 percent of the world’s pollution. So what happens when the Chinese, and one out of every five people on this planet lives in China, start to live like us? Sure, they deserve it. Everyone should have the right to have a car, to have heating and air-conditioning, to have a job in an office or factory. But from an environmental perspective, this is a terrifying development.

And meanwhile China rumbles in discontent. There are thousands of protests. In 2005, there were 87,000 official, government-recognized “mass incidents” among the
laobaixing,
or common people. Many of those protests occurred due to land seizures or corruption. But, according to
China Daily,
50,000 of those mass incidents were due to pollution. It’s bad in China, really bad.

So I decided that I didn’t mind being stuck on an island during a typhoon. Putuoshan was an escape from that China. I spent my time in a tea room, surrounded by monks and golden statues of Buddha and the bodhisattva Guanyin, drinking a bottomless cup of green tea, and periodically emerging to sample the menu at the hotel restaurant, which steered me to such offerings as Pork That Tastes Like Fish, which is quite likely the most hideously foul-tasting meal that I have ever come across.

Finally, the storm abated. The eye had hit a little to the south in Fujian and Guangdong Provinces. Dozens had been killed. The roads were washed out. The coastal cities had been flooded. The water was still too rough for the jet boats to Ningbo, but there was a larger ferry making a run to Shenjiamen, a fishing village on a neighboring island, where I could catch a bus to the other end of the island, then another ferry, then another bus to Ningbo, and then a taxi to the airport, where I hoped to buy a ticket for the evening flight to Hong Kong. This stretched my ability to get from point A to point B to point C through the chaos of China to its very limit.

At the airport thirty miles outside Ningbo—sleek and shiny like every other Chinese airport I’d encountered—I approached the counter to buy a plane ticket. I was informed that it would cost 1,100 yuan. I had 900.

“No American Express!” barked the woman when I took out my credit card.

“How about Visa?”

“No Visa!”

“Is there a bank machine where I can access an overseas account?”

“No! You must go to Ningbo!”

“But I don’t want to go to Ningbo.”

“You must go to Ningbo!”

“Can I use a credit card to buy a ticket at the travel desk in the airport hotel?”

“No! Machine broken! You must go to Ningbo!”

And so I went back to Ningbo, to a business hotel, where I bought the plane ticket for 800 yuan. I returned to the airport, irritated, a sentiment that soon gave way to the familiar, primal fear I felt as I flew through the turbulent remains of a typhoon.

And then suddenly I was in Hong Kong. What is this? I thought. Cars that remain in their lanes. Cars that do not honk. Who are you, Mr. Bus Driver, wishing me a nice day and to be mindful of the step? Are you trying to make me weep? Do you want me to hug you? Such kindness is overwhelming for the China traveler. And here, inside this hotel in Kowloon, is this, could it be, an orderly line at the check-in counter? Yes. No. There are mainland businessmen cutting in line now, marching up to the desk, insisting that they be served immediately, ahead of us, all of us. But the woman at the counter directed them:
Please join the queue.

Oh ho ho, I thought. Sweet Jesus, take me home now. What is this place?
Please join the queue.
This is not China.

12

S
uch is the end of Empire,” wrote Prince Charles in his diary. The occasion was the handover of Hong Kong, the crown jewel of the British Empire, to China on June 30, 1997. It was, according to the Prince, the “Great Chinese Takeaway,” but this was not what he was lamenting in his ode to empire’s loss. It was the indignity of flying business class on British Airways while the English politicians, lowborn and common, who had attended the handover ceremony, were seated in first class.

Indeed, one senses from the Royal Family that they were only too happy to return Hong Kong to China. “If you stay here much longer,” said Prince Philip, he of the golden tongue, to an English student, “you will go home with slitty eyes.” But leave they did, and after 156 years of colonial rule, Hong Kong again became a part of China.

Except that, ten years later, it didn’t feel like China.

It felt like a vacation from China.

To say that I adored Hong Kong would be a colossal understatement. After weeks navigating the mayhem of the mainland, I
needed
Hong Kong. I had assumed Hong Kong to be a vast, teeming city, but compared to the megalopolises up north, Hong Kong is but a quaint English seaside village. True, it boasts an impressive skyline that every night lights up the sky with a laser show, but it lacks the madness of a true Chinese city. Technically, of course, Hong Kong is part of China. Indeed, when I arrived, Hong Kong was preparing for the “Celebration of the 10th Anniversary of Hong Kong’s Return to the Glorious Motherland.” But while Hong Kong today might be a little less English than it used to be, it did not at all seem any more Chinese.

On my way from the airport, I had asked a taxi driver how things had changed since Hong Kong had reverted to Chinese rule.

“Not many changes,” he said. “Hong Kong is still the same.”

His grandparents had come to Hong Kong from Fujian Province long ago and he spoke both Mandarin and Cantonese. I asked if he ever traveled north.

“Yes,” he said. “Across the border to Shenzhen. The shopping is much cheaper.”

If anything, Hong Kong, ten years after the handover, is even more like New York or London today than it was when it was an outpost of the British Empire. To be sure, Beijing has been quietly exerting its authority in Hong Kong. Judges are accountable to Beijing, not to the people of Hong Kong. And yet one can still see members of Falun Gong humming and chanting in Kowloon Park, a practice that would get them a thrashing and a stiff jail sentence elsewhere. While the rest of the country lives in an information bubble, Hong Kong enjoys a lively free press, and most newsstands offer the
International Herald Tribune
and various other newsweeklies, papers, and magazines from abroad, which I gleefully consumed.

“One thing has changed,” the taxi driver added. “The economy is different. All the jobs have gone to China.”

It is the worldwide lamentation.
All the jobs have gone to China.
Even in China itself.

Once, Hong Kong had been one of the great manufacturing cities in the world. Today, it is centered on the alchemy known as international finance, and while it may be more difficult for the average resident to find a factory job, the city continues to attract an ever-revolving band of expatriates. More than 2,300 multinational firms have their Asian headquarters in Hong Kong, and with everyone from Merrill Lynch to the Bank of China competing for space, the Pearl of the Orient is perhaps the only place in the world that makes Manhattan seem cheap. And clearly, I thought, as I wandered among the lofty skyscrapers of the Central District below Victoria’s Peak, which today was enshrouded in a damp, muggy mist, there is money in Hong Kong. Lots of money. The city had long ago ceased to be a bargain. I saw my first Maybach, among the world’s most expensive cars, and I also spotted Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and Bentleys. True, one could buy a Ferrari in Beijing or Hangzhou, but they actually drive them in Hong Kong. A BMW in Hong Kong is like a Kia at home. But the real prize for the tycoons here was the personalized license plate. Millions of Hong Kong dollars had been spent on COOL, KING, and I
 U. Albert Yeung Sau Shing, the colorful chairman of the Emperor Group, a media conglomerate, had spent HKD 13 million—that’s nearly two million U.S. dollars—on the number 9, the symbol for longevity.