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

by J. Maarten Troost

  In any event, I did not call Cinderella. It was a curious choice for a name. I’d observed that many Chinese had assumed Western names. At first, I’d thought that this was just the Chinese solution to a sweeping epidemic of multiple-personality disorders. I imagined people waking up in the morning and, as they settled down with a cup of warm bean-curd milk and picked at their steamed buns, they’d decide who, exactly, they were going to be that day. Would they be Suyin, the factory worker in Lanzhou? Or was it time for Lola?

  But, as always in China, things are not what they seem. It turns out that people in China choose Western names because there are so very few Chinese names. Like Western names, Chinese names are toponyms. They are essentially descriptive. The reason we have so many Smiths is that a long time ago blacksmiths were apparently irresistible, extremely hunky mates. And so, too, it is with Chinese names. But in China, of course, everything is magnified by the sheer number of Chinese. Li, Wang, and Zhang are the most common names. There are 88 million people in China named Zhang. There are more people called Chen in China than there are Canadians in Canada. Go to a typical school in China and ask to see Zhang Li and you will likely to be greeted by a half-dozen kids. It’s become so problematic that no one knows Hu’s Hu in China (Ha Ha Ha). And thus the Western names.

  But the name Cinderella evoked aspirations I didn’t want to go near. And so I’d explore Qingdao on my own. I’d gone there because I lived in hope of one day seeing the sun in China, and if ever I was going to see the great orb in the sky, it seemed likely that I’d find it on the coast. Also, I’d read that Qingdao was where Communists went to play, and I wanted to see them play, these Communists. Furthermore, Qingdao was the home of Tsingtao beer, and this, too, seemed like a compelling reason to visit.

  To my delight, I found all this and more in Qingdao, a city of some 7 million people that jutted outward on a peninsula surrounded by the Yellow Sea. The city can roughly be divided into two parts—the old town, a little Bavaria with pagodas, and the new town, a forest of white and pastel skyscrapers with a proliferation of real estate offices and nightclubs like the Boys and Girls Show Bar and Disco, and Club New York, where patrons enjoy personal bottles of Crowne Royal, the drink of choice for those wanting to make an impression in China. To my eyes, this new Qingdao seemed like a comfortable, prosperous playground with stores devoted to golf and fashion, interspersed with an endless array of karaoke clubs. It is a place where inquisitive cabdrivers thoughtfully ask whether you’d like to make love, Chinese girl, and in case you don’t understand, they’ll helpfully circle their index finger with their thumb and stab at it with the other index finger. So romantic, the New Qingdao!

  But it was old Qingdao that I’d come to see. For the first seventeen years of the twentieth century, Qingdao, or Tsingtao as it was then known in English, found itself under Imperial German control. The Kaiser had wanted to base his Far East squadron in Qingdao and the Qing Dynasty said sure, fine, whatever, and ceded the city to the Germans. This, of course, was not Imperial China’s finest hour. The Germans arrived, built a city of strasses and schusses, beer gardens, and churches, and not long after finishing the city’s masterpiece, the Tsingtao Brewery, the moment when their re-creation of a quaint Bavarian town was complete, the Germans proceeded to screw everything up and lose World War I. Sadly for the locals, instead of Guten Tag, they soon found themselves learning how to say Konnichi Wa, as the Treaty of Versailles turned the city over to the Japanese, who remained until 1922, before returning again in 1937, when they began to do really, really bad things to China. Upon reflection, the Chinese probably had some more choice words for the Japanese than Konnichi Wa.

  Nevertheless, by the time Mao finally wrested control of the city from the Nationalists in 1949, Qingdao, despite being bopped around by the vicissitudes of history, remained essentially intact. One misty morning, I set off for the old town, following a scenic waterside pathway that led me past the Marine Beasts Performance Hall and Aquarium and the city’s famed beaches. The air was redolent of the sea and fried seafood. As the sun burned through the morning haze and the giant containerships offshore blew their fog horns, I watched people fishing from the bluffs and noted a few hardy old-timers out for their morning swim. I was on the Number 1 Bathing Beach, and I settled down to watch them, these Communists at leisure. Many officials, I’d been told, had their villas in Qingdao. I wondered what they did to amuse themselves.

  “You want Jet Ski? Parasailing?” asked a man sporting flashy shades as he sat beside me on the stony beach. “Special price for you.”

  “Maybe tomorrow,” I said, trying to imagine the Politburo parasailing.

  “Today is Saturday. Tomorrow everyone go home.”

  Excellent, I thought, envisioning riding a train while actually seated.

  My companion moved on to try his luck elsewhere and I wandered down the beach, now and then stopping to watch people waiting for the waves to bring in clumps of seaweed, which they then bagged, because seaweed can be very tasty. In the distance, enormous vessels maneuvered in and out of Qingdao’s port, the fourth largest in China, and I tried to ascertain whether the ships coming in rode higher in the water than the ones going out.

  Soon, I found myself in a part of the city that reminded me very much of Nuremberg, a city in southern Bavaria where my father had lived for some years in the nineties. I walked up streets half expecting to find a sign informing me that I was ambling up the Kaiserstrasse, but of course the signs don’t say Kaiserstrasse, they say…Well, I had no idea what they said. Nevertheless, were it not for the busy stalls selling dried fish and the tinny Chinese pop music and the soldiers in olive uniforms with red stars, you might think you’d found yourself in Germany. Okay, maybe in a German Chinatown.

  I walked up a hill to St. Michael’s Cathedral, which I was looking forward to visiting. A few months earlier, the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association had appointed two new bishops. I’d found this a little vexing as I tried to recall exactly which provision was it in Canon Law that had designated the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association as the appointer of bishops. Wasn’t it the Pope who decided such things? The Pope thought so, too, and he had expressed his concern. Soon after, the Chinese government had released a statement asking the Vatican to stop interfering in Chinese internal affairs. The selection follows the will of all clergy and believers in the Chinese Catholic Church, so stop creating obstacles in Sino-Vatican relations.

  But, but, but…the Vatican exclaimed. Protests, however, were futile. This is because the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, a government agency, is the titular head of the official Catholic Church in China, not the Pope, which is why one will never hear a Chinese bishop utter a peep of protest on matters of interest to Catholics elsewhere, like abortion. It’s not just the Catholic Church, however, that the government picks on. There is also the Chinese Patriotic Islamic Association and the Three-Self Patriotic Association, which monitors the Protestants. For the Tibetan Buddhists, they’ve dispensed with associations altogether and simply settled on the People’s Liberation Army as the preferred means for keeping the followers of the Dalai Lama in line. Falun Gong has been assigned to the secret police. Clearly, the government has some issues with organized religion. And it is no wonder. In 1999, 10,000 members of Falun Gong silently surrounded Zhongnanhai, the walled compound of the Chinese Communist Party in central Beijing, to demand freedom to practice their beliefs. Communists don’t like that, this stealthlike organization by a group outside their control. A short while thereafter, the government unleashed the violent crackdown on Falun Gong that is now grimly documented by protesters outside nearly every Chinese embassy abroad.

  I paid a small entrance fee and made my way inside. The cathedral had been thoroughly looted during the Cultural Revolution, but today it has been restored to a polished luster. I was the only visitor, and I stopped in front of a statue of Joseph. Very helpfully, signs had been put up to explain who exactly these people were, Jesus, Mary,
and Joseph. “Joseph is the legal paternity of Jesus, who played an important role in the salvation history.” Technically true.

  Afterward, I had lunch at a modest restaurant on a side street with tables outside. In the corner, a man stood grilling seafood. The proprietor, an unusually burly man with a friendly disposition, indicated that he didn’t speak a word of English, which was just fine, because every meal I could see looked lip-smacking good. I pointed to a table where a waitress was setting down a bowl of small clams. “I’ll have one of those, please,” I said, pointing to the clams. “And some of that,” I said, pointing to a plate of braised cabbage. We must remember our greens. “And one of those,” I said, nodding toward an enormous mug of beer, which seemed to be the beverage of choice in Qingdao. I didn’t normally drink beer with lunch, but I had a when in Rome moment, and if I were to understand the essence of Chinese culture in Qingdao, it seemed important to drink the beer.

  I am a master with chopsticks, I thought, plucking the clams out of their shells. This was fine food indeed. The clams came in a fragrant, sweet-and-spicy broth, and as I finished the clams I thought that this might be an excellent time to introduce the idea of bread to China. It seemed like a small crime to let that broth go without sweeping a crusty piece of bread through it. I finished my beer, a large half-liter mug of Tsingtao straight from the keg, and suddenly I felt very pleased to be here, right now, in Qingdao, that fine city on the sea, and then, as I was overcome by a deep yawn, I remembered why I don’t drink beer with lunch.

  I felt an unshakable urge to nap. But the sun had finally burned through the early mist and now danced brightly across a blue sky, and the air smelled of the sea, and it seemed really so enormously wasteful, so disrespectful of the sunny day, that rarity in China, that I resisted the call of the pillow and set forth anew into old Qingdao.

  Must have coffee, I thought as I walked, zombielike, toward the glimmering sea. I found Taiping Lu, the broad seaside avenue, and headed toward the Number 6 Bathing Beach. As I walked past the Oceanwide Elite Hotel, I noticed the familiar green and white logo of Starbucks and, pleased to have found a place that sold coffee, joined the Elite and settled on a terrace with an Oceanwide view. Except, as I looked a little more closely at the green logo, I realized I wasn’t at a Starbucks. True, it looked like a Starbucks. They may have even adopted the coy pretensions of Starbucks-speak, that peculiar language that insists that small is tall. But this place called itself SFR, and to my pleasant surprise, they even maintained a basket of light and harmless English-language magazines. I picked up a copy of Redstar, a magazine oriented toward expats and visitors, and as I inhaled a dose of caffeine, I read the horoscope page. I’m a rooster in the Chinese zodiac, and apparently I was having a bad month. Frustrating. You got more failure than your success. You got some oral quarrel. And better not think about big amount investment. To try to do more exercises is very good for you.

  So true, I thought, though I did wonder about my oral quarrel. It’s difficult to have an oral quarrel when you can’t actually talk to people. The other horoscopes seemed to fixate on sex and money. As roosters around the world were brooding on their failures and waddling around with their fat butts in dire need of exercise, those born in the year of the sheep were reveling in their good fortune. Lucky month! You will on fire with opposite sex! Hopefully for the sheeps, they’d know to avoid the boars, the cads. Trouble to love affair is also possible, but not big deal. Evidently, the boars were having affairs with dragons. A lucky star is shining above you. It goes really well with your money making and your marriage. You may get trouble with your girlfriend/boyfriend. Meanwhile, the hares were laughing all the way to the bank. You got the luck of making some money this month, so catch it up.

  The coffee, alas, did little to alleviate the postlunch, beer torpor I felt, and since, apparently, I was in need of exercise, I walked onward to Zhan Qiao, a long, broad pier that jutted far out into Qingdao Bay. I joined a sea of tourists ambling toward the Huilan Pavillion, which graced the end of the pier, and was amazed, yet again, at how quickly my disposition could change in China. I had been feeling rather mirthful on the terrace, idly flipping through the horoscope. Sluggish, but mirthful. Possibly, I was slightly drunk. It was a very large beer. And yet, ambling upon the pier, I could feel my light mood disappear. I wondered why it was that in China, alone in the world in my experience, when presented with a two-way crowd, the Chinese didn’t naturally gravitate to the right. Why is it that crowds in China must always bash into each other like one enormous rugby scrum? I mean, it was Saturday. It was sunny even. Surely, we should all be mellow. And yet a walk along the pier was anything but. Thousands surged one way and thousands surged the other. I darted through the crowd, dodging the brown, gelatinous loogies that flew past me in every direction, and moved my wallet to my front pocket as I sensed the menace of young men in dusty, ill-fitting clothes moving through the crowd like vultures. It was like walking though a crowded hallway in high school where half the students were looking for a fight. No one twists a shoulder here to avoid confrontation.

  Then, suddenly, the crowd parted as if it had stumbled upon a lane divider. There before me sat a boy, not more than seven years old, though it was impossible to tell with any certainty. He was an albino with skin that was nearly translucent. He had no arms, and his ragged shirt had been pulled down to reveal the rough scars from where his arms should have been. His skin had been burned raw by the sun, and he sat there rocking and moaning with a plastic bowl before him that contained a scattering of coins.

  Who was this boy? Who had done this to him? The scars on his stumps suggested that he wasn’t born armless. Who was sending him forth to beg on a pier? It would be far from the last time that I’d find myself pondering a display of mind-boggling cruelty in China, and it was why, despite the whiz-bang, China-is-the-future vibe I felt in this coastal city, I’d likely never have warm and fuzzy feelings for the country.

  Later, I found myself on a pedestrian square. Above me loomed the towers of New Qingdao. I had settled on a bench in front of a large JumboTron screen that displayed an NBA playoff game. As I watched Steve Nash feed the ball to Amare Stoudemire, I was approached by three little boys in filthy torn clothes who inquired whether I had any money, and would I perhaps like to give it to them. Perhaps they were three, six, and eight years old. Perhaps they were older. They were all smaller than my four-year-old son, and as I regarded them, dusty and hungry, I wished that one day they’d grow to be giants, tall and soaring, as big as Yao Ming.

  8

  One of the interesting things about living in the United States is that you know, just know, can feel it in your bones, that you inhabit the beating heart of the world. This isn’t true, of course. (It’s actually in Tuvalu.) Nevertheless, we take it for granted that when we have our Super Bowls, 3 billion people around the world upend their work schedules and forgo sleep so that they, too, can watch. We assume that as we view the colossal fuck-up that is the life and times of Britney Spears, people abroad care as much as we do when the sad, bloated Mouseketeer decides to shave her head. We are told that when our economy sneezes, Canada, Europe, Asia, wherever, catches a cold. When we screw up, it’s the rest of the world we screw up. And when we triumph, the rest of the world stops to admire the great shining city on the hill. We are, we believe, the prime movers and the rest of the planet just rolls along on the ride that is America.

  Which is why it’s so very interesting to be in China. Here, too, is a place that feels, knows in its bones, that it is the beating heart of the world. Indeed, there’s nothing subtle about its self-assurance. The Chinese word for China is Zhongguo, or Middle Kingdom, a name that implies that there is China and then there are the sticks. The great emperors of China spent much of their time ensuring that other countries kowtowed toward them, and when these dynastic emperors periodically retreated behind their walls, it certainly wasn’t because they were humbled by the outside world. Instead, it was because they couldn’t d
eign to be concerned about the unlucky barbarians living beyond their borders. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that most Chinese regard the incursions and interventions of Western powers in the nineteenth century, and the chaos unleashed by the opium trade, as profoundly humiliating. Indeed, modern Chinese history can often be read as the story of its reaction to the West.

  The Chinese, of course, as a people are immensely proud. As well they should be. Theirs is an ancient culture, and for much of the past 5,000 years, few civilizations could claim to be as advanced as the people living behind the Great Wall. In science, art, literature, and astronomy, and culminating in the wonder that is the steamed dumpling, the Chinese have contributed much to the betterment of humanity—at least when they felt like sharing, which, apparently, wasn’t very often. For many Chinese, who despite Mao’s best efforts to smash the old culture remain steeped in history, the tribulations of the past two hundred years, when Europe humbled it with its drug trade and Japan bloodied it with its occupation, are regarded as an anomaly. But now that the tumult of those years is behind them, and China is emerging to what many Chinese would regard as its rightful place atop the economic and geopolitical food chain, I’d begun to wonder how this pride, this nationalism, would manifest itself.

  If you spend any time on an Internet message board frequented by Chinese, you’d know that this nationalism can often come across, to put it kindly, as a little prickly. Type in something relatively innocuous like I’d like to find some dog food that isn’t flavored with pesticides. Any suggestions, gang? And be prepared to be viciously flamed. Do not criticize great country China!!!! China development very strong!!! We make you China bitch!!! We eat you!!! Sincerely, Henry Chen, Wuhan.