Young China

by Zak Dychtwald

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  FOR MY MOM, DAD, AND SISTER

  1

  Organ-Stealing Prostitutes

  Myths, Language, and Other Walls Between China and the World

  九零后—jǐu lǐng hòu, n.: The generation China calls post-90s. Sometimes called the Net Generation, Me Generation, or Strawberry Generation for its members’ inability to “eat bitter.”

  When Philip, my Chinese godfather, heard I was planning to take the train to Shenzhen, he wrote me a note.* This was not the first note he’d written me. After we first met, he wrote to say he had marked my birthday on his calendar. Weeks later he wrote to remind me to get a flu shot. Soon he sent another note, this time to suggest that I ought to more seriously consider the merits of bok choy as a source of vitamins to supplement my student diet. He once wrote me a beautiful note that said he would be honored if I met his grandson.

  This latest note, however, was a warning about Shenzhen, the Chinese metropolis across the border from Hong Kong. I had told him I planned to travel to Shenzhen alone later that day. Philip cautioned me against three things. The first two were pickpockets and counterfeit goods, which might complicate my return to Hong Kong from China. The third was this:

  You must not pick up any hookers from the street. Not only are you running the risk of catching a disease and being robbed, they are also likely to steal your internal organs.

  Sincerely,

  Philip, Your Chinese Godfather

  I ended up in Hong Kong by something of a fluke. Columbia University has strict requirements around language proficiency that determine to which countries you may go to study. Hong Kong was a linguistic loophole. Because I had taken a semester of Mandarin during my freshman year, I was eligible to apply to the University of Hong Kong. At the time I’d never been to Asia. Despite my bad experience with Mandarin—I spent more time on that one class than I did on all my others and still got my worst grade in college—I wanted to see the place where everyone told me the future was happening.

  But within weeks of arriving I had begun to find Hong Kong disappointingly manageable, something like a showroom for the rest of China. Hong Kong had been a British colony for more than a century before it was legally returned to China in 1997. People spoke English. Many were proud of their Westernization. Before I went, everyone had told me that the future was in China, but all my professors in Hong Kong seemed to be saying that Hong Kong was not China.

  Just across the border was Shenzhen, the real China. The city had once been a collection of fishing villages, thirty thousand people living at the mouth of the Pearl River delta. During Mao’s rule, the area was deliberately left undeveloped as a buffer zone between Communist China and then-capitalist Hong Kong. During the 1960s, the middle of Mao’s rule, Philip’s family risked death to slip past the border patrol into Hong Kong’s New Territories and make a better life for themselves in the Pearl of the Orient, as Hong Kong was known. Philip was only a boy.

  Two years after Mao died in 1976, China opened its doors to the world and its money. My economics professor at the University of Hong Kong put it this way: “Shenzhen’s Special Economic Zone became the testing ground for all of China’s economic experiments. Most of them worked.” Shenzhen’s population swelled to twelve million, four hundred times what it had been a few decades earlier. The area was transformed from a southern backwater into the fourth-largest urban economy in China and twenty-third largest in the world, earning the nickname the Overnight City. The joke went that Shenzhen University does not have a history department; the city only looked forward. Although I had great respect for Philip, I was not going to be deterred from seeing China’s boom city.

  The train from Hong Kong to Shenzhen looked like a typical subway line—plastic seats and metal handrails. The people in suits were doing their daily commute across the border. The man next to me held two big cartons of milk in a bag on his lap. He told me that because mainland milk was poisoned, people would pay top dollar for Hong Kong dairy. The woman sitting across from me motioned to her child to stop staring. I waved, the girl laughed, and an hour passed.

  When we arrived, we were separated into lines for foreigners, mainlanders, and Hong Kongers, who still need a visa to get into the mainland. I was stamped through and swept out into Shenzhen Luohu Railway Station, which sees eight million border crossers a year.

  As soon as I walked out through the doors of the customhouse, I was slammed by a deluge of noise. Salespeople hawking everything from fruit to suits to consultations on international shipping logistics to factory space by the square meter rushed travelers at the doorway. A handful of dedicated “milk dealers” immediately swallowed the man who had sat next to me; then he rushed out of the pack with a few bills scrunched in his hand. The churn of life was dizzying. I saw signs in English, and tried asking for directions in English, but no one spoke it, unlike in Hong Kong. I tried calling the hostel I had booked, but my phone didn’t work in the mainland. I tried to buy a Coke so I could sit and get my bearings, but after what seemed a promising exchange, I received a box of twenty on-the-go tissue packs instead.

  The worst part was that I couldn’t shake Philip’s warnings. I became convinced that the sea of people—the woman with a big wicker basket of oranges, the cab drivers motioning toward their backseats, the middle-aged women beckoning me into their watch stores—were prostitutes in disguise conniving to steal my internal organs.

  I sat in the plaza outside the train station for an hour before deciding not to turn back. A classmate had written the address of the hostel in Chinese for me, and I handed the slip of paper to a cab driver. He puzzled at the characters in Traditional Chinese, not the Simplified Chinese used in the mainland. After some consultation with a few other cabbies, he said, “Very good!” and motioned me into his cab. I began to worry when he kept repeating “very good” every time I asked him a question. After half an hour in the cab I had done some calculations: at this speed I would suffer only a broken arm if I jumped out onto the freeway. An arm would heal. Kidneys do not grow back.

  Three hours later, I sat at a table in an artists’ compound on the edge of town with three students, two guys and a woman, from Shenzhen University. I had arrived in an artists’ district safe and sound. The area was hip and modern, a combination of Brooklyn and Seoul. These students had noticed me as I was eating alone in a restaurant and had invited me to join them. They wore bomber jackets, peacoats, and tight jeans. One of the guys was wearing a hat backward and had a tattoo on his wrist. It said FREEDOM. The other guy and the young woman were a couple. They sat close, her hand on his arm, his on her knee.

  Communicating was difficult. Before they asked a question in English, they would confer with each other for several minutes. I spoke no meaningful Chinese beyond “I don’t want.” We didn’t get very far—a brief discussion about movies—and mostly just ate in a strangely happy silence. All the while they played host, putting the choicest pieces of food on my plate i
n place of conversation. They insisted on treating when the meal ended. With the dignity of a diplomat one student managed to tell me, “You’re a guest in our country.” We went our separate ways with a wave and a smile. That was it. No pickpockets, no swindlers, no prostitutes. I left Shenzhen certain that China was not like the descriptions people had given me, but I also felt ill equipped to understand what the differences were.

  During my time at Hong Kong University, six months at the beginning of 2011, I went to Mainland China several times, doing my best to get deeper into China. I went with a robotics team to Shenzhen’s computer centers and marveled at the technological fluency of the fourteen-year-olds who were gutting and stripping computers in minutes as they sat at folding tables heaped with motherboards and circuitry. I walked through Internet bars with rows of teenagers and twenty-year-olds click-click-click-clicking wordlessly through alternative realities for hours on end. I took tours of factories that manufacture electronic cigarettes as a “quality control specialist” (my friend’s cousin sold them in the UK and asked us to put on suits and tour his suppliers) and sat in on a start-up meeting run by twenty-year-olds looking to change the world. What did they talk about when they were alone? How would growing up in a city like Shenzhen mold you? What did these kids—my peers—dream of?

  Seeing more of China didn’t make me understand it better; it only created more mysteries to solve. It was clear that the China I was experiencing wasn’t the China I had been told about. Real China seemed to move behind a wall, and I was seeing only its shadows. The Great Wall, Shanghai’s skyline, Suzhou’s meandering canals, and even Shenzhen’s Luohu station—in all these places I felt like I was looking at a postcard of China, something fascinating but paper thin. As both an empire and a modern culture, one of China’s most distinguishing features was its insularity from the world. However inefficient the Great Wall was at repelling enemies, it was an apt metaphor for China’s attitude toward the outside: keep out.

  After I returned to the United States, I found that China’s reputation at home was worse than it was in Hong Kong. When I would ask someone, “What do you know about Chinese people?” I’d hear a smattering of headlines, a description of Chinese people as a Maserati-driving, dog-eating people who live in empty, underpopulated cities but who need to be shoved from behind to fit into crammed subways. They’re poor child laborers who also buy more clothes from Kate Spade and Michael Kors than anyone else in the world. The contradictions carried a whiff of Philip’s Shenzen warning, but I didn’t know how to set the Americans straight. I became determined to go back and dig into China’s mysteries.

  After I graduated from college in 2012, I left New York for China armed with the address of a hostel and the phone number for a language program. I did not speak the language and I didn’t know anyone or have a job. My plan was to try to get through that wall.

  * * *

  In 2008, China beamed a new image of itself to the world. It was the first time many people had seen China outside kung fu movies, Chinese restaurants, or National Geographic specials. It was China’s coming-out party as a modern nation, and it began with 2,008 Chinese drummers lined up on the floor of one of the world’s most impressive stadiums, engineered to look like an enormous bird’s nest of steel and iron. All were dressed in identical pale yellow Chinese silk ensembles. In front of each was the same ornate iron drum. Suspended cameras panned across the rows of drummers, a sweep of hard, neat lines. In perfect unison, the drummers began to pound their complex rhythm. People moving in such hive-minded coordination was both beautiful and chilling.

  This was the first act of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. Many international reporters and pundits would agree: given the scale, technology, coordination, and complexity of the stage—at one point fifty-eight actors defied gravity as they ran horizontally on a globe several stories high—it was probably the greatest show ever performed in human history. That image of immaculate synchronicity has affected how many people across the globe still think about China: a unified, homogeneous, tightly choreographed glide into the future.

  The opening ceremony expressed a Chinese ideal, the blurring of the individual within the whole. Such displays rarely have a protagonist or a hero. Rather, the beauty is in the harmony of all the actors; the hero is the balance of the whole. “This is our new country,” China was telling the world, “a balanced and unified nation striding in lockstep toward its future.”

  The reality is different. A century ago the father of modern China and its leader after China’s last emperor abdicated in 1911, Sun Yat-sen, described China as a “sheet of loose sand”: 一盘散沙 (“Yī pán sǎn shā”).* Millennia of rule by emperors had ended. The country had slipped into disorder. Sun Yat-sen led China’s rocky transition from ancient empire to modern government. Under his tutelage both Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong would emerge as leaders and then fatefully diverge. Chiang would lead China after Sun but never gain full control. After World War II, Chiang’s Nationalists and Mao’s Communists would divide the country through a civil war, with the winner set to determine China’s future. Against imposing odds and with incredible feats of will, Mao’s Communists won. “Chairman Mao,” as he would be immortalized, would found today’s People’s Republic of China in 1949. Both Chinese and foreign historians regard as Chairman Mao’s greatest undertaking his attempt to transform Sun’s sheet of loose sand into one solid country.

  Today China remains fragmented. More than 95 percent of the population lives on only two-fifths of all its land.† China has more than six hundred billionaires but one of the widest wealth gaps in the world.1 The east coast cities and the metropolises clustered around the Pearl River delta, with Shenzhen at its head, developed fast, while the center and Western reaches of the country are pushing, and being pulled, to catch up. Different dialects still cause divisions across different regions of China, particularly among older generations.

  China has about four hundred million people who were born between 1984 and 2002—the millennials. But in China they’re not called millennials: China divides its generations by decades—post-50s (those born in 1950–59), post-60s, and so on.2

  Those plain vanilla labels give no hint of the vastly different experiences of these generations. The post-50s generation began just a year after China’s civil war ended and Mao Zedong founded the People’s Republic of China. This made that generation the first born in the modern nation-state of China. The tail end of that generation and the first born into the post-60s generation entered a world of deprivation: From 1958 to 1961, China’s Great Leap Forward saw many tens of millions die of starvation. As the 1960s continued, China’s push to modernize failed, and Mao plunged China into the Cultural revolution, which venerated the peasant farmer above other social classes and created a cult of personality around the Chairman. It was simultaneously anti-intellectual, anti-modern, and anti-historical; much of China’s traditional and historic books and buildings, as well as the best minds of the generation, were laid to waste during the Cultural Revolution.

  Here marks a major pivot in modern China’s development. The first members of the post-80s generation were born in a particularly radical moment for China: In 1978 China threw its doors wide open to invite foreign direct investment and put China’s manufacturing boom in motion. At about the same time, China inaugurated its one-child policy, an effort to curtail China’s burgeoning population by decreeing that couples could have only one child (the policy eventually included forced abortions and sterilizations).

  Then came the post-90s. The student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989 urged a more democratic government for China and were violently put down. Sensing a moment of national identity crisis, China changed its national education program to reframe Chinese identity for this generation, moving away from Mao and his “accomplishments,” emphasizing China’s historic might as a country and culture, and defining internal weakness and outside aggression as the reason for China’s downfall in moderni
ty. Then, in 1992, Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China’s economic boom, planted a tree in Shenzhen as a symbol of the growth he intended to bring to the region.

  A decade and a half of growth turned the fishing village into a multimillion-person manufacturing mega city, and the poor, backward country into a modernizing power poised for the world stage. China regarded the Beijing Olympics of 2008 as the country’s formal debut as a modern power and culture. By 2011, more than half of China’s population lived in cities, and by 2015, more than half of the country’s gross domestic production was derived from services, not manufacturing.3

  The generation-naming system isn’t perfect, but it is how China understands itself and why its generations are so different. The young people I describe here were born into a country brimming with ambition and aspiration. Now, the post-90 and post-2000 generations are part of the world’s middle class, the first modern Chinese generations less preoccupied with needs and more involved with wants, in particular, “Who do we want to be?” Their generations will define what being Chinese in the modern world means.

  * * *

  Like my Chinese godfather, my last roommate in China took an English name. He chose Tom. Tom was born in 1993, three years after I was born. We had very different upbringings. By then the protests and vicious government response at Tiananmen Square had subsided. China was in the midst of a different type of revolution, this time about refrigeration. China’s 1.1 billion people had only thirty million refrigerators.4 Tom was not part of that privileged minority. “We were a normal household, not one of those rich households,” Tom’s mother told me. Tom was born in a city, but three-quarters of his generation was born in rural China.5 That same year, the first McDonald’s opened in China, in Shenzen, nowhere near Tom’s native Sichuan Province. An uncle who had gone to work at a factory in Shenzhen tried eating there and, when he told his family back home about his meal, described the taste of a Big Mac as “confusing.”