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

by J. Maarten Troost

  I trudged upward, momentarily pleased to have summited, until I noticed a sign informing me that I was presently at the Midway Gate to Heaven, and that I had roughly another 2,000 feet in elevation yet to conquer. Well, shoot, I thought, noticing a man who had just managed to hawk an enormous amount of phlegm out of his mouth while still keeping a cigarette dangling from his lips. If he could do it, I certainly could. And with a deep breath I resumed my climb into the clouds.

  Fortunately, the mountain offers plenty of diversionary temples and pagodas along the way. I entered one, a dimly lit temple dominated by a large golden Buddha. Or perhaps it was a bodhisattva. Or maybe Pan Gu. Really, it’s so hard to tell. In front of the Buddha-esque statue lay plates of food. I made a mental note—snacks? why?—and as I stood pondering this curiosity I was approached by an affable young monk.

  “Would you like to make an offering to the goddess?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, pleased to learn that the statue was a goddess.

  “Sign your name here,” the monk indicated, pointing to a ledger. “One hundred kuai.”

  Fifteen dollars. That’s no small sum in China. I wondered what I would get in return for this largesse.

  “You take the joss sticks and bow three times in front of the goddess and say a prayer,” informed the monk.

  “And what should I be praying for?”

  “Wealth.”

  “Wealth?”

  “Yes. You make an offering and bow and pray, and the goddess will make sure you become a wealthy man.”

  I pondered this for a moment. The cost of health insurance was becoming onerous. And the price of food certainly wasn’t going down. And we’d probably need a new car in the next few years. I decided that I was amenable to wealth. I paid the monk. He took his chop, a carved seal that the Chinese use much as we use signatures and notary publics to legitimize a document, and stamped it next to my name. And then he placed a small red bag over my head.

  “Inside,” he said, “is a Taoist medallion. It is very holy.”

  Indeed, there was a round golden medallion inside. “A gift bag too. Thank you very much.”

  I did my devotions, and as I prayed for loot, I could hear from somewhere in the depths of my brain the stern voice of Sister Mary Anthony reciting the Ten Commandments—Thou shalt have no other gods before me—and I felt a sudden chill. But then I reflected: I was killing a lot of birds by climbing Tai Shan. I’d live to be a hundred and I’d be a wealthy man.

  The last 1,000 feet or so was particularly grueling. I could feel the burn in my legs. You don’t quite comprehend how many steps 6,660 steps are until you’ve climbed them. As I clambered up, I paused to consider the postcards available for sale. They offered a far better view of the mountain than what I could see through the damp, gray gloom. Indeed, they made it seem rather idyllic. But Tai Shan, when viewed ten, possibly twelve feet at a time, depending on the swirling mist, and all the while surrounded by thousands of breathless people, didn’t leave me feeling soft and fuzzy inside. It left me feeling really knackered.

  I passed through the last archway, did a desultory raising of the hands together with the others who had staggered up, and then, with my Taoist medallion dangling around my neck, found a mountaintop vendor and celebrated my ascent through the ancient Chinese custom of eating beef-flavored Ramen noodles. And it was good. And then I began to freeze. Powerful gusts of cold, cold wind buffeted the summit. I spent a half hour shivering, poking my head into temples, and then decided, That’s it, I’m done. Mission accomplished. I could now confidently expect to become a rich old man.

  I pondered the descent. I could man-up and climb down. Or I could take a cable car. I would take the cable car. Thousands of others were of similar thinking, and as I joined them in the now-familiar hell that is lining up in China, I thought of Neil Peart. And China sang to me / in the peaceful haze of harvest time. What drivel, I thought. Did you think of that while putzing about on your synthesizer, Neil? Clearly, I was in a grumpy state of mind. Indeed, I had only one thought while I was being shoved and squeezed in the line for the cable car. The next person that cuts in front of me I am flinging off the precipitous cliff. And yes—I glared at the elderly four-foot woman who was attempting to push me aside—that means you, Grandma.

  7

  In China, it doesn’t take long for a first time visitor to realize just how very delusional he has been in terms of his assumptions about the country. If nothing else, traveling through China is a profoundly humbling experience, no more so than when you realize that nearly everything you thought about the country, all your presumptions and book learning, your opinions, turn out to be utterly, completely wrong. Take, for instance, the issue of public order. I had taken as a given that in a country under one-party rule, a party that has periodically felt the need to kill a million here and a million there and to now and then run over its citizens with tanks, and that even today jails its citizens for even the slightest suggestion of dissent, public order just wouldn’t be an issue. But this turns out not to be the case. Indeed, I couldn’t imagine a people more disinclined to obey rules than the Chinese. And nowhere is this more evident than in a train station.

  The next day, I found myself idly waiting in what a sign informed was the Communist Youth League Waiting Room inside the Tai’an train station. I was bone weary. My legs still smarted from the climb up Tai Shan. And I’d been awoken so often the night before by telephone calls from courteous young women kindly offering to provide me with a messagee that I finally felt compelled to take the phone off the hook. Somehow, I had managed to successfully convey my desire for a train ticket to Qingdao, a coastal city on the Yellow Sea, and after responding to the clerk’s inquiries with the big dopey grin I used to answer all questions put to me in Chinese, I found a seat on a bench in the waiting room, quietly pleased that at least the Chinese were thoughtful enough to display numbers in the Western manner. I matched the numbers on my ticket with the numbers on the board, found the correct waiting area, and settled in together with hundreds of other travelers. Then the announcement came. It was time to board. And then there was pandemonium. Why? I thought, watching the melee as 500 people scrambled to squeeze through a single turnstile. Are there door prizes for the first fifty people to squeeze through? Free DVD players? Coupons offering 20 percent off the pig knuckle special at the Golden Dragon? Wearily, I looked at my ticket. It’s assigned seating, right? Please?

  I concluded that the seat number on my ticket was a mere ruse and that trains in China, particularly hard-seat-only trains like the one I was about to board, operate on a first-come basis. Nothing else could explain such a lunging, shove-the-kids-aside, leap-over-grandpa stampede. Grimly, I joined the horde and was sucked through, only to find that the train hadn’t yet arrived. On the platform, guards checked our tickets and pointed to where each of us were to line up. Other guards were holding signs with numbers—1, 2, 3, 4, and so on—and I deduced that each number was meant to match the number of the individual train cars. I studied my ticket—seat 17 in car 4—and found the appropriate line. The train approached. The crowd tensed. The woman next to me began to vomit, extravagantly and copiously. Poor thing, I thought as I made a mental note to never, ever dine on the gloppy offerings of a train station lunch cart. Things can always be worse, however, and then, as the train pulled into the station, they grew so at an alarming pace.

  As the train rolled by, conductors stood in the open doorways holding numbered signs, and as I watched them pass, I came to the startling realization that each train car was randomly numbered. 1 was not followed by 2 and then 3. There went train car 7 followed by train car 2, and was that train car 4 rolling ever farther down the platform? Again, pandemonium ensued. Hundreds of people were now running like headless chickens, chaotically dragging their bags up and down the platform, desperately seeking their car before the train departed. I leapt over the pool of vomit and raced down the platform. When at last I tumbled toward car 4, I was dismayed to dis
cover a hundred or so others urgently trying to clamber aboard, the preferred method being to shove and toss aside anyone who might be in front. For someone coming from a culture where people are taught to wait their turn at an early age, to never push, to magnanimously insist that ladies go first, the spectacle of watching people board a train in China is a jarring, breathtaking sight to behold.

  I clutched my ticket before me and noticed with some curiosity that the woman squeezed beside me carried a ticket with the same seat number. “I guess I’ll be sitting on your lap,” I noted with as much cheeriness as I could muster, given that my rib cage was being pummeled by a dozen elbows. I hadn’t really expected to be understood, of course. I was in a provincial town in Shandong Province, and to escape the conversational dead zone caused by my linguistic limitations, I’d developed the admittedly peculiar habit of sharing my random musings with strangers, just to keep the old vocal cords humming. Typically, this was met with stony silence, and then their eyes began to flicker with the realization that they have a deranged laowai on their hands.

  But, apparently, she had understood, and she leaned over to look at my ticket. “Is same,” she agreed, and then she was swept onward into the train. By the time I boarded, all hope of obtaining a seat had long ago been lost. I wedged myself in the fetid, airless space between two cars, and as the train began the six-hour journey to Qingdao, I had a brief glimpse of harried police officers on the platform slugging it out with a passenger who had been left behind. Then, as the train began to rumble through Tai’an, the dozen men around me lit up cigarettes, and soon I was enveloped in a thick blue haze.

  Excellent, I thought. I was finally having an authentic Chinese experience.

  It was miserable, and as I reflected on my many attempts at quitting smoking, it occurred to me that this experience right here, stuck in a cramped, airless corner of an overflowing train next to a filthy squat toilet, breathing in the lung-searing smoke of Chinese tobacco, had I had it years ago, would have cured me instantaneously of any tobacco cravings, saving me the hundreds—no, thousands of dollars—I’d spent on nicotine patches and gum.

  Soon, a conductor slipped through. I handed him my ticket. Regrettably, he felt the need to ask me a question.

  “Uh…” I said. “Duibuqi. Wo tingbudong.” This was my guidebook attempt at explaining that I didn’t have the remotest idea of what he had just said. Sadly, however, I could not even convey my lack of understanding and be understood in China. The conductor barked something else at me.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t speak Chinese. You wouldn’t happen to speak English, would you? No? Parlez-vous française? Sprechen zie Deutsche? Español? Nederlandse? Cesky? Rusky?”

  So useless, these European languages. I recalled my time in Melanesia.

  “Me no save Chinese. Yu tok tok Pidgin?”

  Finally, my interlocutor gave up, and as he moved on he muttered something that made my train companions laugh hard and merrily until they were seized by lung-splattering hacks and coughs.

  And so it went, my journey through Shandong Province. Every hour or two, the train would pull into a station, and I’d count the number of people getting off the train and compare them with the number boarding, until finally I sensed that there was a reasonable likelihood of an empty seat and I leapt into the cabin, only to discover that not only were there no free seats, but that I had lost my place among the smokers, where at least there had been a wall to lean on, and that the remainder of the trip would be spent lurching and swaying in a narrow aisleway, periodically apologizing to the people around me as the shifting train sent my elbow into their faces. Soon, the sun descended behind the murky haze outside and we rolled on toward Qingdao in the darkness. I was lost in the fog of my mind, doing everything I could to resist the urge to look at my watch yet again, when suddenly I felt someone tapping on my arm.

  “Come,” she said.

  It was the woman whose ticket I’d noticed back on the platform in Tai’an. I followed her as she led me to an open seat across from her.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I mean, Xie xie.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said with fluttering hands. “My English is very bad.”

  “No need to apologize,” I said, trying to imagine an American apologizing for his poor Mandarin to a befuddled Chinese tourist in New York. “It’s me who should apologize. I probably should have learned a little more Chinese before deciding to travel through your country.”

  Not that it would have mattered. Every attempted utterance I’d made in Chinese was met with quizzical glances.

  “Your ticket?” she asked. “May I see it?”

  I passed it to her.

  “Yes,” she said, glancing at the piece of paper. “Your ticket is for tomorrow.”

  “Ah…so that’s what everyone’s been trying to tell me.” I reflected for a moment. Apparently, people did have assigned seats, then. So why the mayhem of boarding? As I was pondering this question, my rescuer tapped me on my knee.

  “My name is Cinderella,” she said.

  Another curiosity! Many young Chinese had assumed Western names, but I hadn’t yet encountered one quite so evocative as Cinderella. I glanced at this Cinderella, who, unique in my experience in China, had inexplicably decided to subject her hair to a perm, and tried to remember the name of the prince in the fairy tale. If the Chinese can assume new names, perhaps I could too, and then all sorts of red flags popped into my brain and I introduced myself as the man I am.

  “Maarten,” she repeated, uncomfortably rolling the word in her mouth. There was that pesky r in the middle. “What do you do?”

  “Do you mean for a job? I’m, uh, a real estate investor,” I offered, inwardly chuckling in a demented manner.

  The train rolled on through a black night and I spent the time in stilted conversation with my new friend Cinderella. She was from Tai’an and worked in a factory in Qingdao, where she made handbags, an occupation she called “very boring.” I asked her to teach me Chinese phrases like I’ll have the dog special and I think President Hu Jintao is very sexy, but when it became apparent that vocalizing the Chinese language was clearly a physiological impossibility for my mouth, we settled on learning how to count to ten with my hands, which is completely different than the Western way, and learning it left me feeling giddy and triumphant.

  It was nearly midnight when we pulled into Qingdao. Outside the train station, the air was cool and a mist hinted of the sea.

  “Well, it was very nice meeting you, Cinderella,” I said at the taxi stand.

  “You are going to your hotel?” she asked. “I will go with you.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I can manage.”

  “You are a laowai. He will overcharge you,” she said, hopping into the taxi and immediately beginning to haggle with the driver. Well, okay, I thought. Did I really seem so utterly incapable? Yes, probably.

  As we pulled into the hotel driveway, I paid the driver and turned to Cinderella. “Well, thanks so much and good luck to you at the handbag factory.” But she had leapt out and marched onward to the check-in counter.

  I checked in. The front-desk attendant fetched the key and I turned to Cinderella. “Well, thanks so much for all your help…” But Cinderella had taken the key and had forged toward the elevator. Now this was getting to be a little awkward. Surely, I could be trusted to find my room.

  “Well, thanks so much,” I said again as we reached the door to my room. She used the key to open the door.

  “This is a nice room,” Cinderella noted. She turned to me, her perm billowing on her head. “It is very late.”

  “It sure is.”

  “I am locked out of my room. I have no key.”

  “Oh, well, I see,” I stammered, trying very hard to understand the Chinese context of this particular situation. Perhaps she regarded it as auspicious that we shared a seat number on the train. Perhaps she’d concluded that her destiny lay with this laowai from the West who would sweep her off the
factory floor and take her onward to a life of romantic intrigue. Or perhaps this was normal, accompanying a random foreigner from a train all the way to his evening hearth. Are Chinese women really so very helpful? And Cinderella was nothing if not helpful. Should I chivalrously offer to sleep on the floor while she claimed the bed? In the Chinese context, would this be the right thing to do? I had planned on calling my wife. Hi, Honey. I’m in my hotel room in Qingdao with my new friend Cinderella. No, I reflected. I probably didn’t want to make that call.

  “Listen, Cinderella,” I said, reaching for my wallet. “Let me help you find a room in another hotel.”

  Cinderella batted her eyelashes. “No,” she sighed. “I will stay with friends. But I want to see you tomorrow. What is your cell phone number?”

  “I don’t have a cell phone.”

  “No cell phone? Everyone in China has a cell phone.”

  This was true. Imagine tens of millions of people screaming into their handsets—Can you hear me now?—and you have an idea what urban China is like. It’s true. Wei is the standard greeting when answering a cell phone in China, and it does indeed mean Can you hear me? This alone struck me as a compelling argument for the return of the rotary phone.

  “This is my cell phone number,” Cinderella said, writing it down. “And this is my e-mail address. Will you call me tomorrow? I will show you Qingdao.”

  “Absolutely. Look forward to it. Good night. Thanks so much for your help,” I said as she left.

  Then I bolted the door.

  Now, what was that about? I wondered. I was very perplexed. Was Cinderella just a particularly helpful young woman? Or was she a seductress? I had no idea. Perhaps I was just a little dense. It wouldn’t be the first time. So mysterious, this country.