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

by J. Maarten Troost

  I would come to hear about this as the 1-2-4 problem. When one person marries, the couple assumes responsibility for the welfare of four parents, should they all be living. And the generation that is now approaching retirement is the generation least likely to have prospered from the changes that have taken place in China recently. Indeed, their formative years were spent being whipsawed by Mao in an era not particularly encouraging of 401(k) plans. So even with nearly a billion and a half people, China finds itself short of young people to take care of the elderly. As we left the park, a sign informed us that if we wanted to reenter the park, we would have to return to the East Gate. It was a one-way park. I thought about all the parents milling among the trees. Enter a father, and if you get lucky, leave as a father-in-law.

  “So what you say? You want to go to karaoke now?” Meow Meow asked.

  Karaoke? I didn’t want to go to karaoke. I would rather have major dental work done than engage in karaoke. Among the top ten bad things the Japanese have inflicted upon the rest of the world, karaoke ranks very high in my opinion. Possibly, my feelings about karaoke arise from the sad fact that I was born without the music gene. I listen to it. I like it. But I cannot produce it. I have tinkered with guitars and harmonicas and can manage to play nothing more than discordant noise. Nor can I sing. When I do, dogs cower, children cry, and everyone else looks upon me aghast as if I’ve just unleashed a deep, throaty, malodorous belch. I cannot even hum a tune. I can, however, whistle, and when I do my children plead for me to stop. A karaoke bar is, therefore, not my natural milieu.

  “I can’t sing, Meow Meow. People whimper when they hear me sing.”

  “I don’t believe you. I think you can sing. And you said you wanted to see how people in Beijing live. Karaoke very popular in China. Many businessmen relax with karaoke.”

  I wasn’t entirely certain what Meow Meow meant by “relax.” There still remained an air of ambiguity about her. Perhaps she was a student. Perhaps she was a take-out girl. Perhaps she was both or neither. I wasn’t particularly concerned anymore. If my translator enjoyed getting dolled up and loitering outside hotel lobbies, who was I to question it? She was an agreeable companion. She spoke English. She was informative. And she was undoubtedly correct in pointing out the popularity of karaoke in Beijing. Every block seemed to have a building with a flashing, neon KTV sign. And so, despite my misgivings, I decided to engage in some pith-helmeted anthropological exploration of the karaoke phenomenon in Beijing.

  I followed Meow Meow up a broken escalator to a landing where we were greeted by an attendant in a white shirt and a black vest.

  “Give him 50 kuai,” Meow Meow instructed me, using the local vernacular for yuan. “Better service.” We followed him as he led us through a hallway, past a warren of rooms that contained the warbling customers of this karaoke emporium, until he led us to a room with a long cushioned coach facing a television screen. “What do you drink in America?” Meow Meow asked. “Whiskey? Cognac?”

  “Usually just beer or wine,” I said.

  “You want to try Chinese wine?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I had expected a glass, but the attendant returned with a full bottle of what the label informed me was Great Wall Wine, which he proceeded to pour into a decanter full of ice.

  “What you think?” Meow Meow asked.

  “I’ve never had red wine that’s quite so…icy.”

  “Wine is very new in China. People are not sure how to drink it.”

  “I kind of got that impression.”

  Meow Meow turned to the karaoke machine. “I will sing for you,” she said, choosing a love ballad. She picked up the microphone, and as the words appeared upon the screen, she proceeded to sing…very well, as it turned out.

  “That was very nice, Meow Meow,” I told her. “But is this really what people do in Beijing for entertainment, sing to each other?”

  “They make relationships at karaoke.”

  Again with the ambiguity.

  “You have wife?” Meow Meow suddenly asked me.

  “Yes, I’m married. Very happily married. Excellent marriage. Great marriage,” I told her.

  “You have picture?”

  I showed her a picture of my wife.

  “You lucky man. Very beautiful. She very skinny. American women very fat. So you lucky man. You have children?”

  I showed her photos of my sons.

  “Two boys. So handsome. Lucky man. Do you have car?”

  “I do. It’s very difficult to live in America without a car.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “A Volkswagen station wagon.”

  “You rich man too. Pretty wife, two sons, Volkswagen. You lucky man.”

  Yes, I thought wryly. That’s what rich folks in the U.S. drive—VW station wagons full of strollers, diaper bags, and discarded sippy cups. But in China, VW was actually a luxury brand.

  “Now it’s your turn to sing,” Meow Meow continued, handing me the microphone. Naturally, I demurred. I shunned the microphone. I explained in great detail to her my deficiencies as a singer. When I sing, I explained, people are sometimes scarred for life. They did not know that there could be such terrible sounds in the world, and their psyches suffer irreparable damage. Often they end up in counseling. But really, little can be done for them.

  She was having none of it.

  She pored over a small list of English-language songs, which included that well-known song by the Beatles, “Hey Judy,” as well as, mysteriously, “Starfuckers Inc.” by Nine Inch Nails, a song not often found on a karaoke machine.

  “You live in California?” Meow Meow asked.

  I nodded. Please, no. Please, please no. Anything but…

  “‘Hotel California.’ You will sing ‘Hotel California,’” she informed me, handing me the microphone.

  And there on the screen appeared the words On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair, and soon throughout Beijing, windows shattered, small children wailed, dogs howled, and a short distance away, inside the mausoleum in Tiananmen Square, even Chairman Mao was said to turn.

  4

  The Forbidden City was the longtime home of the Son of Heaven, and the Son of Heaven, of course, couldn’t live just anywhere. At least not this Son. What he (He?) needed was a home that would make mere mortals quiver in awe. And thus the Forbidden City came to be. It is immense, sprawling over nearly 200 acres and imposing to the degree that even today, when a mortal can enter with some confidence that he will leave with his head intact, it still leaves one shaking in awe. It intimidates. It overwhelms. It is also the most wickedly cool palace I have ever been to.

  I had joined Dan one morning to have a gander at this home of the Son of Heaven. It was a warm and, invariably, hazy day as we marched with the crowds toward the red-ocher walls of the Forbidden City.

  “So was Meow Meow helpful?” Dan asked as we approached the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the imposing archway that marks the entrance to the palace grounds.

  “Yes, she was. She took me to karaoke.”

  “Interesting. And did she turn out to be a take-out girl?”

  “I have no idea. She did, however, refuse to be paid for translating for me.”

  “She’s probably paid a commission by the karaoke bar for bringing people in.”

  If so, Meow Meow had certainly earned her commission. I studied the cracks in the looming walls of the Forbidden City. I’d probably caused those cracks, I thought, with my rendition of “Hotel California.”

  We joined a dense crowd of Chinese tourists and entered through the Gate of Heavenly Peace, walking shoulder to shoulder with the mass of visitors as we passed below Mao’s portrait.

  “It’s a little crowded,” I noted, stating the obvious.

  “Well,” Dan said. “If you don’t like crowds, the Forbidden City is probably not for you. Now that I think of it, if you don’t like crowds, China is probably not for you.”

  This was undeniably true. From th
e outside, 1.3 billion people is simply a statistic. Inside China, the enormity of the country’s population colors everything.

  “Also, it’s particularly crowded because of the Golden Week holiday,” Dan added.

  I had, apparently, managed to be in Beijing during one of China’s busiest travel weeks. There are three Golden Weeks a year in China, officially mandated weeklong holidays when urban workers and students return to their home provinces, and domestic tourists descend upon the country’s most famous sights, including, of course, the Forbidden City. Up to 150 million people were expected to jam the bus and train stations during this time.

  “Imagine traveling in the U.S. during Thanksgiving,” Dan said. “Now multiply the scale by a factor of five, and you get an idea of what Golden Week is like in China.”

  Despite the crush of sightseers, once we were through the first gate, the Forbidden City revealed its magnificence. Before us stood the imposing Meridian Gate, an enormous red wall of brick upon which stood a palace with a golden roof. It was here, upon its ramparts, that the emperors of the Ming and Qing Dynasties had ordered the decapitations of prisoners of war.

  “It’s easy to imagine, isn’t it?” Dan observed. “Off with their heads!”

  It was, in fact, easy to imagine. Perhaps it was the towering walls. They are the color of blood. There were three central arches and we passed through the middle one, where once only emperors could walk. Beyond was an enormous courtyard, which was known as the Outer Court, where the Emperor had conducted his ceremonial functions. The purpose of the Outer Court was to intimidate, to banish any doubts that the emperor was indeed the Son of Heaven. Surely, back in the day, one could but conclude that only the divine could live in a place so vast and magnificent. Inside the walls, there were dozens of palaces and hallways, and the names alone of each towering edifice left me captivated. There to our left was the Hall of Military Prowess, which stood directly across from the Literary Glory Hall. Before us stood the spectacular Hall of Supreme Harmony, beyond which lay the riveting Hall of Preserving Harmony, which could be reached by passing through the Hall of Middle Harmony, which makes sense when you think about it. But it doesn’t just stop there. There is a hall devoted to Mental Cultivation, something every home should have. There is an Earthly Tranquility Palace and a Palace of Heavenly Purity, which should not be confused with the Eternal Spring Palace or the Western Palace. Should you need to step out, you’ll pass through the Divine Military Genius Gate.

  There are some 9,000 rooms in the Forbidden City, which makes you wonder who could possibly need 9,000 rooms in a place where, technically speaking, most people were forbidden from entering. And who would build such a palace in the first place?

  I had read the book 1421—The Year China Discovered the World by Gavin Menzies and become intrigued by his perspective on the era. Menzies, of course, had made the provocative claim that in all likelihood it was the Chinese who were the first foreigners to stumble upon the New World. Most scholars dispute this, but there’s no arguing that, at the time, China was a power to be reckoned with.

  In the early fifteenth century, when Imperial China was near its apex, the country was ruled by one of the more extraordinary emperors to ever put his derriere on the throne inside the Hall of Preserving Harmony. Indeed, Emperor Zhu Di was the very Son of Heaven who originally built the Forbidden City. The fourth son of the first Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, Zhu Di was not chosen for succession upon the death of his father. This was not good for Zhu Di. As was the custom, the new emperor, Zhu Di’s nephew, set about killing possible rivals to his succession. Zhu Di promptly gave up the good life of being part of the imperial household in Nanjing (then the imperial capital) and escaped to Beijing, where he became a homeless vagrant. Apparently, he must have been a very charismatic drifter, for he was soon able to raise an army that he marched down to Nanjing, where he was enthusiastically greeted by the city’s eunuchs.

  Eunuchs! And you wonder where Chinese cinema comes from. Within the Imperial Court, it was typically the eunuchs who controlled the levers of power. This is because, severed from their manhood, they could be trusted to wander among the hundreds of comely concubines that resided with the emperor. The new emperor, however, had fallen under the sway of the mandarins, the well-educated bureaucrats who managed the empire’s day-to-day affairs. This did not please the eunuchs. They’d been castrated, after all, and while being able to hit the high notes in the imperial karaoke bar had its benefits, it did little to alleviate this sudden fall from favor. And so when Zhu Di arrived in Nanjing with his army, the eunuchs flung open the gates. We welcome Zhu Di! they squeaked.

  Zhu Di claimed the Dragon Throne for himself, changed his name to Yongle, and set about killing any possible rivals to his reign. The old emperor, Zhu Di’s nephew, Zhu Yunwen, was never found. Some suggest that he may have died in the fire that consumed his palace. Others that he escaped by disguising himself as a monk. In any event, Zhu Di issued a decree ordering the extermination of the ten agnates. Traditionally in China, when killing political opponents, it was acceptable to exterminate the three agnates—the father, son, and grandson of the doomed opponent. Zhu Di extended this to the tenth degree to include pretty much anyone remotely related to the former emperor, excepting of course himself. Some 8,000 family and friends of Zhu Yunwen were killed, often in a gruesome, highly creative manner.

  Zhu Di then moved the capital to Beijing, which had once been the imperial capital of the Yuan Dynasty, which is the polite term for describing the Mongol hordes who ruled China in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The dynastic capital was an itinerant place, having been located as far west as Xian during much of the first millennium, and emperors saw it as their privilege as Sons of Heaven to move the capital according to their whims and needs. The Mongol leader Kublai Khan had made his capital in present-day Beijing, then called Dadu. It was Zhu Di’s father, the peasant Zhu Yuanzhang, who had led an uprising that dislodged the Mongols from Beijing, a feat that enabled him to call himself the Son of Heaven, founder of the Ming Dynasty, without anybody calling him out on it.

  When Zhu Di came to power, trouble still lurked on the northern border. Tamerlane, a Mongol leader who had a notable penchant for stacking the skulls of his slain enemies in enormous pyramids, was threatening to invade China, returning the country to Mongol rule. Zhu Di didn’t much like the sound of that; thus he moved his capital and his million-man army north to Beijing, where he could counter the threat. Fortunately, Tamerlane soon died, and as his descendants began the squabbling that would eventually doom the Mongol Empire, Zhu Di found himself with some idle time on his hands. And so he began to build.

  The scale of building can only be described as epic. Hundreds of thousands of people were forcibly uprooted from towns and villages around the country and sent to Beijing, where they were guarded by the army, since without Mongols to fight they didn’t have anything else to do. The challenge, of course, was feeding such a multitude of people in a region where winters were long and bleak and the growing season was short. Zhu Di’s solution was to enlarge the Grand Canal, which had first been constructed during the Wu Dynasty, way back in the late fifth century. At that point, Europe had descended into the Dark Ages and men like Conan the Barbarian roamed the earth, smiting enemies while reveling in the lamentations of their women, whereas China was already building a canal that would eventually link Beijing with Hangzhou, more than a thousand miles away.

  With the canal enlarged, Zhu Di ordered thousands of barges to deliver the enormous amount of grain needed to feed this city of soldiers and workers. Elsewhere in China people starved, but Zhu Di pushed relentlessly on. He had aspirations. Forests were denuded of wood to build not only the Forbidden City, but the vast number of barges plying up and down the Grand Canal. And then, once the scope of his ambition was realized, he began emptying forests as far away as Vietnam. This was because Zhu Di wanted a navy.

  Not just any navy, but the most powerful and immense navy
the world had ever seen. Enormous treasure ships were constructed, each requiring the wood of roughly 300 acres of hardwood forest. Said to be more than 400 feet long, a treasure ship was capable of carrying upward of 500 people. Zhu Di built a fleet around his sixty-two treasure ships, and by the time this armada was put to water there were more than 300 ships capable of carrying 28,000 people.

  This mass of ships was led by Admiral Zheng He, one of the more intriguing men to take to sea at the dawn of the age of exploration. To begin with, he carried his penis in a box. And not just his penis, but his cojones too. His dismemberment had been particularly thorough. A Muslim, Zheng He had been captured as a boy of eleven by the Ming Army in distant Yunnan Province. Deprived of water, Zheng He was then castrated, and once the threat of infection subsided, he was given gallons of water to drink, until finally his urethra burst and a tube was inserted. (The author is wincing; he can barely go on.) Few people survived the procedure, and yet an imperial decree was needed to prevent men from self-castration (the author doesn’t know what to say), but such, apparently, was the lure of the power held by the imperial eunuchs that men were willing to take the knife to their own manhood (completely inexplicable).

  Zheng He went on to become a servant of the Ming emperor, and soon he had acquired a nickname, San Bao, which—unsurprising, really—means the Three Jewels. With his special box beside him, Zheng He moved on to become possibly the best-traveled man of his era. Eighty years before Columbus set forth in the Santa Maria, a pitifully small boat compared to one of Zhu Di’s treasure ships, Zheng He roamed the seas during the seven grand expeditions he undertook between 1405 and 1433. He crossed the Indian Ocean, alighted upon India and Sri Lanka, visited the Arabian Peninsula, moseyed down the coast of Africa, picked up a few giraffes to stock the zoo in Beijing, and brought back local envoys and ambassadors so they could kowtow before the emperor. Some, like Menzies, even speculate that Zheng He was the first foreigner to discover North America. In any event, China stood on the cusp of ruling the world. No nation had a fleet that could match that of the eunuch from Yunnan.