Young China

by Zak Dychtwald

  Young Chinese, who have been seeing the world through the Internet since they were small, are especially eager to hit the road. At any given moment my WeChat wall is flooded with dozens upon dozens of articles about travel, such as “Travel Is Not a Luxury; It is Necessity!” They are written, circulated, go viral, then disappear under the next wave of articles: “Dreaming of a ‘Say Go, Then Go’ Spontaneous Vacation.” A host of my favorite Chinese podcast, a twenty-three-year-old student at Peking University, revealed in a podcast his compulsion to look up flights and Airbnb rooms in places he wants to visit. “Before I know it, I’m on C-Trip [one of China’s largest e-travel companies], and my fingers are typing in S-a-n D-i-e-g-o, and then I’m, like, nope, can’t afford it and close the page. But then half an hour later I’m looking at apartments on the beach before I even know how I got there.”

  During my first year in China, I taught on and off for months at a night school in Suzhou, saving just enough to buy a set of train tickets and take off. China’s train routes spread across the entire country, linking the provinces with fast, affordable transportation. That first year alone I spent more than two hundred hours on trains.

  One of the classes I taught was Hobbies. The teacher’s manual for the course prompted me to ask, “What are your top three favorite hobbies?” I would end up keeping tallies of the answer during the year until I had gathered a hundred.

  The number one choice, of course, was eating with friends. Karaoke always predictably ranked near the top. But neck and neck in the standings with karaoke was travel. Because I had not been in China long, I was surprised. My students were usually young college graduates who clocked out of work and came straight to English school. They left at 8:00 or 9:00 p.m., went to sleep, woke up at seven the next morning, and punched back in to work only to repeat the day. Employees in China are guaranteed only five paid vacation days and have eleven paid public holidays. A one-day public holiday such as Tomb-Sweeping Day (when families pay their respects at the graves of their elders), means companies and schools make up the missed day on a Saturday or a Sunday. Two days of holiday can mean a twelve-day week with no break. The unbridled traveling spirit did not seem compatible with the tightly regimented lives of Chinese.

  Beyond the practical elements, on the surface, travel struck me as un-Chinese. For most of Chinese history the average person had little to no experience of the outside world. Late in China’s history, during the Qing era (1644–1911), Westerners were assigned small swaths of land as trade zones. They were not permitted to enter China’s interior. Traders and merchants were among the few locals who interacted with Westerners.

  China did not explore the seas. Before and during the European Age of Discovery (mid-1400s–mid-1500s), China stayed home. In its five thousand years China embarked on only one famous series of explorations, seven voyages in the early 1400s. They were led by Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch diplomat and mariner of the early Ming Dynasty. Zheng’s first voyage was more an exhibition than an exploration; he presented extravagant gifts to the few countries (including Vietnam, Thailand, and Sri Lanka) he and his fleet of sixty-two ships visited. Zheng has become a point of differentiation for China over the last twenty-five years. Even though among his fleet were ships exponentially larger than the three captained by Christopher Columbus decades later, Zheng rarely resorted to the type of violent, coercive measures taken for centuries by European colonizers, as a Time article points out. He did not come back with pillaged gold, new colonies, or even substantial trade routes. Part of the Zheng lore is that one of the most noteworthy prizes returned from his travels was a novelty item, a giraffe from what is now Kenya.7

  China had been turned inward for so long that the emperor considered outward exploration unnecessary. The empire was already complete. China, as Emperor Qianlong wrote to King George III, lacked for nothing.* The average person left the existence of an outside world to rumor and speculation.

  Hundreds of years later, Feng’s and Ma’s grandparents and parents still had little to no access to the outside world as they grew up. The first Chinese television broadcast did not come until 1958, and no foreigners lived in Chinese communes. Feng’s and Ma’s families knew an outside world existed—many of Mao’s slogans referenced catching up to England, defeating American capitalists, or smelting iron to bomb Taiwan—but it was almost entirely abstract. Ma’s grandparents told him that their only view of the outside world came from a calendar in their neighbor’s house. The twelve pictures in their “Fields of Europe” wall calendar made its owners famous locally because they were so worldly. There was intense interest in the outside world, especially as China opened its doors and foreign industries, products, and ideas began to make their way in, but limited access for the average person.

  Yet despite China’s being so closed off, or more likely because of it, travel was consistently the favorite pastime of my students. May, a young computer programmer, was no exception. When I asked about her hobbies, she said she loved to eat Cantonese food with her friends. She also liked to sing with her friends on the weekends.

  Like everyone else in the class that day, her next-favorite hobby was travel.

  “What do you like about travel?” I asked.

  “I like the feeling of … freedom. I like to taste different foods and see the … way of life … of other people,” she continued, bringing her hands to her face as if using a camera. “And I like to take pictures of it all!” May concealed a laugh behind her hands. The other students nodded their agreement, smiling their solidarity.

  “Very interesting. What are some of your favorite places you’ve been?”

  She cocked her head at an angle, mulling it over. I watched her repeat the words to herself more slowly, think it over after making sure she understood, and then responding, “Outside of Suzhou, I have only been to one other location, Wuxi, to see the”—she looked up, thinking, and then said, “樱花 … yīng huā?”

  “Cherry blossom,” a more senior student chimed in. May nodded eagerly.

  Wuxi is a city twelve minutes from Suzhou by bullet train. Shanghai was only eleven minutes farther down the track. At twenty-two May had yet to venture that far.

  May was neither the exception nor the rule. Many, many young people have traveled within China. Some have traveled abroad. But many more have not traveled at all. For those who had never been more than a dozen or so miles from their hometown—the farmer’s son in the mountains of Guizhou; the tea seller in Fujian; the tour guide in Beijing; May, the computer programmer from Suzhou—traveling was a dream to be realized.

  Feng, Ma, May, and countless friends inherited a driving curiosity about the outside world. Theirs was the first generation to be able to see beyond China’s walls through the Internet, to witness the outside world—not just out of their village but out of their country—in high definition.

  “But the place I want to go to most is Harbin,” she said. I asked her why, but she couldn’t immediately describe it, slipping into what I call “language angst,” the frustration of having complex thoughts limited by your simple vocabulary. After class we sat down and figured out how to translate the Chinese words for ice sculpture, chilling cold, and the feeling of being immersed in a magical, otherworldly place.

  * * *

  I gulped as I stood on a skywalk overlooking an expansive cage filled with hulking Siberian tigers. We had come straight to the Harbin Siberian Tiger Park from the train station, with only a quick detour at our respective hostels to drop off our stuff. The park was packed with tourists snap, snap, snapping pictures of the beautiful white tigers below. A child got his head stuck in the grate of the fence overlooking the tiger cage. I vaguely remembered reading a story somewhere about how zoos elsewhere in the world build fences significantly lower than the maximum jumping height of big cats, and I hoped that was not the case in China.

  Harbin’s extreme cold is hard on tech. An iPhone’s lithium-ion battery will function at only 50 percent of capacity in temperatures
colder than minus 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Feng and Ma came prepared. Their phones and digital cameras lived inside their jackets while their hands braved the cold. Ma, the camera photographer, had gloves with removable fingers for handling the camera settings. Feng, the iPhone photographer, had the gloves with padded tips on the forefinger, middle finger, and thumb designed to be used on smartphone screens.

  In China, this era has been heralded as the “face-centric society.”* Travel captures that part of young Chinese culture perfectly. Groups of travelers with selfie sticks saying, “Qiiiieeeeeezzzi” (Chinese for eggplant) at the count of three—like cheese, it forces a grin onto everyone’s face—denote you’ve arrived at a landmark location. Even those who don’t document their daily happenings succumb to taking selfies wherever they go. When people are starting a business like a bar, nightclub, or coffee shop in China, the essential questions are: How photogenic is my shop? How pretty are my cocktails? Will someone want to take selfies with this chandelier?

  When Feng encountered my reluctance to take selfies, he invoked the famous metaphysical conundrum: “If a tree falls in the forest but no one hears it, did it fall at all?”

  I looked toward Ma for help, confused by the non sequitur.

  Ma picked up where Feng left off, his pointer finger extended in the air: “Ah, yes, and, to build off said thought experiment, ‘If a tree falls in the forest and no one takes a picture of it and posts it to WeChat, did it fall at all?’”

  Feng continued, “A subtle point, Professor Ma, and, may I ask, ‘If a foreigner feeds a live chicken on the end of a bamboo stick to a pack of Siberian tigers and no one takes a picture of it, did said foreigner really sacrifice said chicken?”

  “If the sun sets on your vacation but you didn’t take a picture of it, did the sun set at all?”

  “If you eat a bowl of noodles larger than your head without photographic evidence, did you—”

  “Got it. My hands are going to fall off. Squeeze together. Say ‘eggplant.’ Good. Let’s go.”

  On the skywalk over the tiger pen, we reached a point where a pack of tigers had gathered. Feng told us to take out our wallets and give him 20 RMB, or US$3.50, each. We complied.

  On the way in, I’d seen what looked like a menu on the park’s pamphlet. When I was studying Chinese, I had decided early on to spend most of my energies on the spoken language first and work on the written later on. I still studied and did flashcards for hours every day, but I hadn’t done the hours and hours of handwriting necessary to learn how to write in Chinese. As such, my writing at the time was worse than my reading, my reading worse than my spoken Chinese, and my spoken Chinese worse than my listening comprehension. I practiced my command of Chinese spoken by someone else all day every day, through songs, podcasts, TV shows, and movies. Even so, I was pretty sure the pamphlet had said, “Chicken: 60 RMB [US$10.50]; Goose: 120 RMB [US$21]; Pheasant: 150 RMB [US$26.25]; Goat: 300 RMB [US$52.50].” I had made a mental note not to eat at the Siberian tiger reserve’s restaurant. Those prices were outlandish.

  I had it all wrong.

  Feng took our collective 60 RMB (US$10.50) and walked it over to an old woman who was wearing a hospital mask and heavy jacket but only thin gloves against the cold. Upon receiving Feng’s money, she plucked a live chicken from a Styrofoam tub and bound it to a long bamboo pole. Behind the hospital mask I saw her eyes crinkle into a smile. She then waved me over. Feng and Ma went wild. The other Chinese tourists rushed over, whipping out cameras from beneath their coats.

  The old lady grabbed my hands and guided the pole—with the live chicken dangling on the end—through the metal bars of the skywalk fence. The skywalk itself was less than ten feet (three meters) off the ground, and I had the pole dangling over the cage at about chest height. My chest. The old lady showed me how, when the tigers jumped up for the chicken, to push the pole down against the bar. This jerks the chicken end of the pole up, and the tigers, jumping twelve feet (four meters) in the air, come up just short of being able to bat their chicken piñata. My stomach turned. With each squawk of the bird, the tigers squeezed in closer, ready to leap for the kill. The woman handed me the bamboo pole.

  If the goal was to prolong the fun to get more pictures and taunt the tigers, I failed. If the goal was to catch a Siberian tiger with a bamboo fishing pole and live chicken as bait, I succeeded, but in the end my line broke and my catch got away with the prize. A massive tiger jumped up and snatched the chicken in its jaws and ran away with the corpse, with the other tigers in hot pursuit, feathers flying, a few drops of blood escaping the squeeze of tigers onto the white snow. Pictures snapped. Game over.

  * * *

  The Chinese Communist Party sees travel as a bright spot in the country’s still vibrant but slowing economy. In addressing the First World Conference on Tourism for Development in May 2016, Li Keqiang, premier of the People’s Republic, said, “China will implement the paid vacation system, improve … facilities such as … scenic zones and spots,… and tighten tourism market regulation, so that Chinese and foreign tourists can have more convenient, safer and happier travel experiences in China.”8 A year earlier the Party had released Tourism Strategy 5159; the document outlined the latest comprehensive plan for improving the safety, quality, and oversight of the travel industry in China to ensure its development continues. As Li put it then, “Increasing the speed of the development of the travel industry is a necessary step in adapting to the escalation of consumption needs and industrial structure in China. [Doing so will help China meet] the goals of expanding the job market, increasing wages, promoting the development of the central and western regions, and funneling wealth to isolated impoverished regions.” Li also describes a new century of “travel for the masses”—travel in China has shifted from a luxury for the few and is now “a necessary consumption for the general public.”10

  China sees tourism as helping to pull China’s more remote regions out of poverty in addition to stimulating consumption. Because of their remoteness, these places are typically more serene than the industrializing areas of China and are relatively untouched. I found that to be true in the villages in the mountains around Chongqing, a leading Yangtze River port in southwest-central China. I was invited to spend a week as a volunteer teaching English to young children at an underserved school. From the center of Chongqing the school was two days of bus rides into the mountains. The region was developing itself as a tourism destination and for good reason: It was absolutely beautiful. The Chongqing city government was helping the local government rebuild a road that ended just outside the schoolyard. Nearby, workers were clearing a large area for construction of a big hotel. An equestrian facility had been built to feature horse shows and pony rides.

  The hotel they lodged us in was bizarrely nice, a grouping of upscale villas spread out across rolling hills. But the villas were showing signs of disuse. Dust coated the banisters. Some circuitry was no longer working. Wall mirrors were askew.

  An entrepreneur from Chongqing had built the hotel and then left without much thought to maintaining it. The tourists had not yet arrived in large numbers, but his investment was small enough, particularly with government incentives, that it should have been worth the wait. The government provided inducement to build the hotel because its construction—along with building roads and establishing the tourism committee to provide infrastructure for tourism—was employing nearly half the village, including many parents of the schoolchildren. That meant some children no longer had to walk two hours from home to school; their parents could take them on motorcycles and drop them off at school before going to work across the street. Those jobs meant the family would have money for shoes, books, and winter jackets. We had brought down jackets for the children, but many parents toughed out the winters in worn cotton overcoats.

  My four companions from Chengdu had hardly ever been out of the city before, and they were initially afraid to go into the hotel villas. This was the quietest, most isolated place they�
��d ever been. The villa-style hotel rooms evoked the scene of a ghost story or murder movie. The parents of two of these twentysomethings had grown up an hour away in neighboring mountains. When Chongqing began developing during the Great Western Development Campaign, they took their parents, their kids (my friends), and left for the city to find work. Now, their children wanted to sleep in the same room for protection from the unknowns of the countryside.

  * * *

  After arriving in Harbin that morning and going to the Siberian Tiger Park, we went to the Harbin ice festival as night was setting in. The lights of the ice festival were said to be prettiest after dark. As with much of China, the scale of the ice festival was imposing, a lifesize wonderland entirely of ice. We saw five-story ice cathedrals lit from the inside, careened down an ice luge run the size of a football field, and rode in a horse-drawn carriage driven by a stoic Manchurian in a mink coat and tall fur hat. We banged gongs outside a Buddhist temple of ice blocks three feet thick and carved with elegant, intricate wall art. The reproductions included the famous Suzhou gardens; individual ice-chiseled flower petals were lit up in red, blue, orange, and green. Some of the ice installations were sponsored. Caterpillar, the construction equipment company, parked an ice sculpture of a tractor and crane right by the entrance to the festival. The maker of the Angry Birds tablet and phone game sponsored a reproduction of bowling pins several stories high, and about fifty feet away was a twenty-foot slingshot loaded with a bird in the shape of a bowling ball and the size of a Fiat. An ice-dancing show featured skaters imported from Russia. It was so cold and I was wearing such heavy clothing that my feet began to sweat. Then my sweat froze and I had to ask myself whether this event was worth losing a toe. We went inside to thaw and refill our thermoses with hot water.