These small disambiguations occurred almost daily when I first got to China. But as time went on, there was one mystery whose deeper logic would simply not reveal itself to me. That was karaoke. Its existence and near-unanimous popularity confirmed that I did not understand something absolutely fundamental about China.
China’s obsession with karaoke reminded me of a classic science fiction short story by A. E. van Vogt called “The Weapon Shop” (1942). In it, shops selling gleaming, high-tech guns begin to pop up overnight all over the fictional Empire of Isher, which spreads across our solar system. At first citizens are outraged at the presence of violent wares in their peaceful towns. But those who enter the shop leave ideologically changed. Vogt reveals the shops themselves to be independent political entities, islands of revolution within the Empire of Isher. The selling of weapons was just a convenient front.
That is how I used to envision karaoke joints, known as KTVs; nearly every block in any Chinese city has at least two. They constituted a violent imposition on the peaceful scenery of my social schedule. Everything in my body would scream at me, “No, you’re not meant to go sing garish pop hits in a dark room and drink weak tea on a Friday night!” I believed it with every fiber of my being. So when, day after day, night after night, I was invited to go sing karaoke, I figured I was missing something crucial.
KTV shops have a collection of private rooms that rent by the hour. I figured those dark black boxes with leather couches, bejeweled walls, and flat-screen TVs must have a secret purpose, like the weapons shops in Isher, islands of political impunity or revolution that I was too dense to access.
Long karaoke sessions have become the social glue that binds relationships, especially in government and business. When you walk into a karaoke room, you enter an explicitly private space within which people are expected to let their guard down. China has no other spaces where custom dictates checking pride and formality at the door.
At my first job in China my Chinese coworkers went to karaoke together almost every Friday. I could avoid it for only so long. We took taxis to a nearby shopping mall and walked into a midlevel KTV. Others I would visit over the years would be mind-bogglingly upscale, with crystal chandeliers, dazzling in-room light effects, and offerings of high-end food and alcohol. Most were like this one: a high-gloss lobby and a small army of attendants to bring food like kettle corn, peanuts, sunflower seeds, or even barbecued duck neck and soft drinks and alcohol to your room at the push of a button.
KTV offers one of the few private spaces in China that one can buy for cheap. As Joy, a whip-smart, somewhat reserved young woman with whom I worked, told me, “There are multiple people in our homes. Our dorms are packed. We even have to shower in a hall full of people. Restaurants are overrun with people. Where else can we have privacy with our friends?” A private karaoke room is one of the few second spaces in China that you can truly call your own, even if just for a few hours.
Six of us piled onto one of the leather couches in the dark room. Several young women immediately went over to the flat screen’s control panel on the side of the wall and began to choose a playlist. Before long, music began to stream from the surround-sound stereo system, and Joy jumped between two other coworkers to snatch up the microphone, yelling, “It’s my song, it’s my song!” On flickered the music video for the number-one pop hit at the moment, “Within My Voice.”
Still remember us once walking side by side together past that bustling alley
Even though we were strangers, just passing by each other, we still felt each other
One look, one beat of the heart,
one unexpected delight. It’s like
a dream that was destined.
Karaoke’s popularity has a formative impact on the Chinese pop music industry. Chinese musical artists intentionally gear their music to create karaoke hits. Most music in China is freely accessible—free to download one way or another on apps or on your computer—so karaoke popularity is one way for artists to skyrocket up the charts and make money through licensing fees. Karaoke chains buy the rights to songs and music videos. At the time “Within my Voice” was such a big hit that people didn’t get tired of it. I’d heard the song a hundred times in fifty days, and that was while avoiding karaoke.
Joy’s rendition of “Within My Voice” was, not surprisingly, pretty damn good. The linguistics community has offered an explanation of why the average Chinese speaker is a better singer than native speakers of other languages; it has to do with the higher occurrence of vowels and vowel combinations in Chinese than in other languages. Vowels are easier to enunciate clearly and with more resonance, and a lifetime of such pronunciation, alongside more opportunities to sing, leads to better-trained voices. On top of that, research suggests that the tonality of Mandarin and the necessary heightened tonal awareness means Chinese speakers are much more likely to have absolute pitch than English speakers.8
After she put down the microphone, Joy fielded the question I would ask all my friends whenever I was forced to sing karaoke, a question whose answer I was sure would unravel the other cultural mysteries of China: What do you love about KTV? Behind her, the other employees hovered around the touch screen song menu, scrolling, laughing, and pointing excitedly when they found a song they liked. During lulls in the music Joy gave me an explanation I would hear time and again during the next three years. She said, “We have lots of pressure at work. We have pressure at home. We aren’t able to let that pressure out in our daily lives. It isn’t ‘Chinese’ to do that. Karaoke is a release.”
China places a tremendous amount of value on 含蓄, hánxù. It means “subtle,” “implicit,” or “contained,” and it is a term often used to describe the characteristics of classic Chinese poetry. When referring to people, it means “reserved.” For young people especially, the modalities of expression in China and the hierarchies in the office make for a bottled-up life.
Work hierarchies also tend to be more stifling in China. The distances between bosses, managers, and staff are greater in China. Regular staff members, like Joy and her coworkers, are not supposed to exercise autonomy within a work unit. Opportunities for self-expression are limited throughout the week. In a study titled “Consuming Karaoke in China,” the author breaks down karaoke’s functionality: Political (a private, democratized space separate from the hierarchies of society), Personal (release of tension), Community (builds comradery amongst employees and friends), and Class. Karaoke offers a space at least relatively detached from those social constrains. As Gil, a colleague at the school, would tell me, “We are all here making asses of ourselves. There is something tremendously unifying about that.”
Over the years I saw that the dark music rooms, lit only by videos, served as therapy sessions countless times. In a culture that doesn’t encourage showing emotion, karaoke becomes, as Joy said, a release. When a friend of mine from Henan, a server in a local restaurant where I often ate, was fired and had to go home and restart his life, he took me and other friends to KTV, where he ripped Chinese rock ballads of pain and sorrow until he cried. The next day, with his belongings crammed into cheap plastic sacks for the train ride home, his eyes were dry as he said goodbye, and his face was as expressionless as when he washed the dishes. When a friend gets fired, Chinese go to KTV. When a friend gets promoted, they go to KTV. When someone has a birthday, suffers a breakup, fights with his parents, has a baby, or starts a new business—people go to KTV. When Huan Huan’s girlfriend broke up with him and he failed the civil service exam, he went to KTV five days in a row, singing his favorite rock songs in the dark with a rotating cast of friends by his side.
Few activities give me as much anxiety as being handed a microphone while a song by Lady Gaga or the Back Street Boys is queued up. I find it difficult to imagine KTV as relaxing. But it soon became clear that, if I were to have a normal social life in China, I would need to get over my reluctance to sing karaoke. I never did figure out how everyone was doing this with a
straight face. In the end, though, I ended up going to KTV by myself for a four-hour afternoon session. With a tabletop of beers, thirty or so songs, and a well-oiled rendition of Gao Jin’s “My Blood Brother” under my belt, I had at least somewhat overcome my fear of karaoke. I called five friends and we sang for hours. Fei Fei, the young Maslow enthusiast, rushed over to line up her song. She picked up the mic, hushed us, and gave her best rendition of “Within My Voice.”
11
Be There Now
One Hundred Million New Travelers Hit the Road
The ice spreading across the sleeper cabin window finally swallowed up the last moonlit glimpse of the outside world. I rocked back into the small foldout seat in the narrow hallway. Now I had nothing to look at except the icicles forming on the seams of the doors between the train cars.
Sitting with me were Feng and Ma, both of whom were twenty-one-year-old college students. Feng sat on the foldout seat opposite me, and Ma had propped himself on the foot of the nearest bottom bunk. We had met in the first hour of the trip. Now, in the twenty-seventh hour of our train journey to Harbin, the capital of China’s icy northernmost province, we knew each other quite well. What began with small talk had turned to a discussion of food in hour four, family in hour six, marriage in hour eleven, government in hour sixteen, and sex in hour twenty. By hour twenty-four we were exhausted and had reverted to small talk.
Feng and Ma were college roommates. This trip was their graduation present from their parents, a sum of money they begged for a semester before they graduated and would receive in a “Red Envelope” of cash, congratulating them for earning their diploma. Feng, the more talkative of the two, had explained that ice was forming on the window because of the temperature difference from inside to outside. He pointed toward the rest of the cabin, which was filled with people heading back to their hometowns in the North from their jobs in China’s more prosperous southern cities. Inside, the heavy breathing of the thousand or so sleepers throughout the train created humidity within the train cars. Outside the wind-chill factor put the temperature at forty degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and the winds were whipping the train’s steel exterior into a deep freeze.
Feng took out a creased pamphlet. On its front was a picture of Saint Sophia Church, Harbin’s most recognizable landmark. Saint Sophia was built in the Byzantine style in the early twentieth century by Russians, who in the late nineteenth century had turned a small fishing village into a city by making it the construction center for the Chinese Eastern Railway; in 1904 that railway linked the Trans-Siberian Railway with Vladivostok in easternmost Siberia. Harbin later became a refuge for Russians fleeing the Revolution of 1917. The church was built of timber in 1907 by Russians, who then rebuilt it of masonry between 1923 and 1932. It features an iconic Russian onion dome and spires, and today is a museum, listed since 1996 as an important cultural relic under state protection.1
Harbin, however, has two versions of Saint Sophia Church. The second exists only in winter, made entirely of snow and ice. The church on the front of Feng’s pamphlet glowed blue and yellow and orange from within, lit by streams of lights snaked through the large ice bricks and pillars supporting the structure. I asked Feng why he had the pamphlet. Ma rolled his eyes and said, “He’s a romantic.” Then Ma used his phone to show me a far more detailed description of the Harbin Ice and Snow Festival, held from January to March each year. Feng pushed Ma’s phone out of the way, pointed to the faded picture, and said, “We’ll be here tonight.”
Like me, Ma and Feng were traveling to China’s northernmost province in what was once called Manchuria to see the festival. “Over one hundred thousand cubic meters [more than four million cubic feet] of ice go into making the ice sculptures,” Feng read from the pamphlet. “Fifteen thousand craftsmen work around the clock to build the massive city of ice and snow. There are replicas of the world’s most famous churches, temples, and statues. They can be six or seven stories tall, lit up like a wonderland by multicolored lights.” It is by far the biggest festival of its kind on Earth. Each year more than a million travelers arrive in Harbin during the festival’s seventy-day run.2 The northern city’s fusion of efficient Chinese architecture and whimsical classical Russian architecture make the city unlike any other in China. Ma watched me zip my jacket a bit tighter and added, “And, of course, the temperature will be thirty degrees below zero.”
Despite warnings from Chinese friends in Suzhou, I had not realized just how cold Harbin would be. As I watched the scenery go from green to gray to white, the windows from clear to frosted to totally opaque, apprehension set in.
I doodled with my finger on the ice on the window. I was more than a little frightened about the cold we were about to face. Jokingly, I asked Feng and Ma, “Remind me why you’re going here again?”
Feng inhaled deeply. Like many people I’d met, Feng took on the role of cultural interlocutor when having a conversation with a foreigner for the first time. He took the role seriously. He patiently explained, “Every young kid wants the same thing right now: travel. Our parents lived very constricted lives. When we were young, we lived pretty constricted lives too. For us, travel has become the socially accepted expression of ‘freedom.’ We want to live in the moment.”
What I had meant was “Why are you going to freezing Harbin instead of the beach in Sanya?” Still, Feng’s answer made us all think, and the three of us slipped into silence. Behind Feng, a sleeper let out a giant snore and turned over. The train rattled softly as it raced north through the darkness.
We arrived several hours later. Hundreds of passengers hustled onto the platform at the Harbin train station. The first thing to freeze in the bitter morning air was the hair in my nose. Cold pressed in. It singed my eyes. It clogged my throat. In that moment I felt my reptilian brain start to shoot off bursts of warning flashes. I felt trapped in the freeze, claustrophobic in its cold. Around us some of our cabin mates, locals returning home for the holidays, smiled and waved. They wore blazers, loafers, and thin leather gloves, whereas I was dressed in a heavy winter jacket and dogsledding boots.
Feng slapped me hard on the back, breaking the spell. “We can’t get into our hostel rooms till noon,” he said. “We should check out the Siberian tiger reserve. Do you want to come?”
Grinning, he spat. The spit landed on the platform and crystalized within seconds. “I hoped it would do that,” he said with satisfaction and turned to go.
He nodded to Ma, and they moved into the flow of passengers, all laden with gifts for their families for Chinese New Year.
* * *
By tradition China lionizes the wanderer, the person who has seen the world. As children they memorize Chinese poetry extolling the virtues of discovery on the open road. For the first time in China’s history, the precious ability to travel is within reach for growing numbers of people.
China has the largest outbound tourism market in the world.3 Since the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the Chinese have spent ever-growing amounts on international travel, zooming past the traditional globe-trotters, the Americans, Germans, and British, in 2011. “My mom couldn’t get a visa to Australia when she was younger because she was single. They thought she was going to try to marry someone and emigrate or flee underground and emigrate illegally,” Xiao Jiu, a twenty-four-year-old brand representative for Qunar, one of China’s biggest online travel companies, told me. “I helped a group of ten leftover women book a trip to Australia last week, all single. The Australian visas? Their consulate couldn’t give them to us fast enough. Times have changed.”
Considering the size of China’s population, that China is now the biggest spender on international travel doesn’t seem like such a big deal—at least until you consider that only 4 percent of the population has a passport.* Then it’s a really big deal, especially when that number is projected to grow to 12 percent by 2025.4
Two-thirds of all Chinese passport holders are younger than thirty-five. Chinese are only beginning to travel inte
rnationally, and young people are leading the movement. They’re not traveling to emigrate or to seek for a better life for themselves or their children, as in generations past. Young Chinese are traveling to see the outside world, because they are curious and, frankly, can afford it.
In 2015, a counselor at a middle school in Henan Province submitted her resignation, which consisted of only ten characters; it soon became the stuff of Internet lore. It said, “The world is so big, I want to see it for myself.”* The Internet exploded. Aside from inspiring a bevy of job resignations, the simplicity and straightforwardness of the counselor’s resignation letter inspired what felt like a vigorous and synchronized national nod of agreement: we want to see the world. For months everyone used the line from the resignation letter to caption their travel pictures. People posted selfies in the office with the wistful caption “The world is so big…” In a report released by the Department of Education’s Minister of Language, The State of the Chinese Language, 2016, “The world is so big, I want to see it for myself” was on the list of the ten most influential Internet phrases for that year.5
Most big Chinese trends begin at home. In 2015 Chinese tourists took four billion domestic trips and about 120 million abroad.6 For the first time in China’s history, its people are seeing their country, and the world, en masse. The first place they go is often Beijing. Chairman Mao said you are not a real man until you’ve climbed the Great Wall, so the nation’s capital is the first stop. That is why the first Chinese people that foreigners encounter while on their own sightseeing trips are also coming to a first-tier Chinese city for the first time.
Young China Page 21
