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

by J. Maarten Troost

  I hesitated before taking the key. There was still time to find a room a trifle less lavish than this, but then they offered an upgrade to a Super Deluxe Executive Suite at absolutely no additional cost and I thought, What the hell, go on, spend a night living like a Master of the Universe. I took the key, swiped it into the Guests Only elevator, and proceeded upward to the seventy-fourth floor, where I found my room, a sanctuary in the sky with soft woody colors and a top-of-the-line king-sized bed and a bathroom that evoked an extremely weird sensation of desire. I wanted this bathroom, this haven of chrome—no, not chrome, platinum probably—with the multinozzled immersion shower. But most impressive was the view, the kind of view that left my jaw scraping against the floor. There below me, far, far below, swirled the Huangpu River, choked with boats of every variation, and across was the Bund, evoking the Shanghai of yesteryear when the city was famed as the Whore of the Orient (now, there’s a moniker), and beyond that the thousands of buildings, the swarming immensity of Shanghai, just beginning to light up a crepuscular dusk. Even in my hermetically sealed Super Deluxe Executive Suite, I could feel the intense drive and pluck of the city, and compelling as the city was, more compelling was the exorbitant amount of money I was spending for this view, and I figured for that kind of money I better have a little look-see at the rest of the hotel.

  If you ever happen to find yourself on the fifty-sixth floor of the Jin Mao Tower, make a point of wandering toward the middle of the floor, where you’ll find a lobby-type bar and a bunch of tables thoughtfully spread out to give businesspeople—and they’re all businesspeople, mostly of the male persuasion—enough room to conduct deals and discuss strategies without having solo travelers in jeans eavesdrop on them, and then cautiously look up. And I do mean cautiously if you are at all susceptible to vertigo. Here you’ll find a staggering thirty-story atrium, and if you’re unprepared it’s very possible to feel a sort of reverse vertigo, this sudden overwhelming awareness of an immense void. Sort of like being in a Star Trek movie, but with better lighting. Then, if you’re curious to know what weeks of nothing but vividly flavorful Chinese food will do to your taste buds, head on over to The Grill, the hotel’s Western restaurant, where every seat offers a window view of the shimmering city beyond the glass.

  The restaurant was filled with businesspeople—Chinese, American, European, Japanese, Arab—and sitting in an opulent restaurant in bustling Shanghai is to be reminded of just how much money there is sloshing around China today. The government is sitting on a roughly $1.4 trillion reserve, and if you think China is just going to idly rest on a big pile of dollars while the U.S. government does everything possible to depreciate the dollar, you’re wrong. The Chinese government started a sovereign fund, and in its first big move bought a stake in Blackstone, the private equity firm, which together with hedge funds is representative of the parts of Wall Street that have gone feral. They did this not merely to make some money—which they haven’t since share prices in Blackstone have tumbled more than 50 percent—but to learn how the sharks operated in international finance, which is an interesting skill set for the Chinese Politburo to learn.

  Of course, it’s not only the government that sits on wealth in China, though they do have their hands in an awful lot of it. There are now more than a hundred billionaires in the country itself. And it’s no wonder. Forty percent of all goods imported by the United States comes from China, and the United States, of course, is hardly China’s only customer. More than $500 billion of foreign investment has found a home in China, and it has finally become the massive consumer market that businesspeople have been salivating over for decades. There are more than 500 million cell phones in China, and it’s now the second-biggest market in the world for cars. Ditto computers.

  And there are stock markets. Two, to be exact—in Shenzhen, near Hong Kong, and Shanghai. The Chinese, among the most prolific savers in the world, have more than 17 trillion yuan in household savings. Investors, however, are permitted to invest only on the domestic exchanges, which they do with manic glee; 69,000 people open brokerage accounts per day in China. Indeed, pawnshops have even started accepting houses and apartments as collateral for loans. The thrill of investing has become so pervasive that the government had to pass a law making it illegal for high school students to invest in shares, which they’d been doing with about the same measured restraint typical of sixteen-year-olds everywhere. But you can hardly blame the Chinese for throwing everything they have into the stock market. In 2007, the market rose 97 percent. In 2006, it rose 130 percent. Few markets in the world have ever approached the gains of the stock market in China.

  Real estate, too, has experienced a similar manic appreciation. “Do you see that building there?” said the waitress, pointing at an apartment building far below us. “It’s more than 20,000 yuan per square meter.”

  “Really,” I said, mulling the Tuna Tartare. “That’s terrible. How do people afford it?”

  “Its too expensive. It’s very difficult for most people. I think it is mostly overseas Chinese who are buying.”

  She was wrong, it turns out. Eighty percent of homes in China’s cities are owned by private citizens, and just as in the U.S., some have turned to property flipping. But while in the U.S. that bubble has burst, leaving a grim trail of foreclosures and bankruptcies, in China the real estate bubble has continued merrily along, with some cities, like Shanghai, experiencing a doubling in home values every year. As with the stock market, investors have convinced themselves that nothing bad will be allowed to happen, no crashes, no depreciation, until the Olympic Games have passed, and so meanwhile the party continues.

  As I finished my steak, which was a very good steak, nicely marbled, seared just so, and to my evolving taste buds, which had adjusted to Chinese fare, completely flavorless, I wondered if it was at all possible to lose money in China. And then I considered the bill, which was hideous. I looked around the room, listened to the businessmen in murmured conversation, and realized that there was probably just one person in this room who was not coming out ahead from his stay in the Jin Mao Tower. But I consoled myself and figured that if all went well, my wife would never learn just how much I squandered in one evening in Shanghai—unless, of course, I decided to write about it. (So, Honey. It’s like this…)

  The yin and yang of my budget had been thrown into disarray, and so to restore cosmic balance to my fiscal world, I moved across the river the next day and into a dilapidated hotel. Drunks in the lobby? Check. Dirty green shag carpet in the room? Check. Seat missing from toilet? Check. Bed that looked like the scene of a gruesome crime scene? Check. View of trash-strewn alley? Check. Harmony was returning to my fiscal world. True, it was the kind of hotel with the cracked walls and the chipped paint that suggested sinister things were afoot, but it was cheap, and even more important for my interests, it was well-located, within walking distance of the Bund, which is where I found myself on one gloriously crisp, radiant sunny morning.

  No, I jest. The air was breathtakingly foul and I could only assume that for the people of Shanghai sunshine was now nothing more than a dim memory sometimes recalled in elegiac detail by an elder old enough to recall the Qing Dynasty. But still, the swirling clouds of particulate matter did little to deter my enthusiasm during my stroll on the Bund. This little corner of China across the Huangpu River from Pudong and extending through the leafy tangle of villas and avenues in the French Concession is quite likely the easiest place for a Westerner to feel at home in China. This is, of course, because it was built by Westerners. Before they arrived, Shanghai was a sleepy port city of little importance, but its status changed considerably after China lost the First Opium War in 1842 and the city was opened up to the barbarians, who sought to re-create a splendid European burg of Art Deco and Neo-Classical edifices. The fifty-two buildings that comprise the Bund are reflective of the apogee of that era in the early nineteenth century, when the city was quite likely the very coolest place to be for an expat. It was
n’t suffused merely with British, American, and French seekers of wealth and adventure, but also with those displaced by the galloping hoofs of history, mostly White Russians and European Jews who had discovered how very quickly things can change. This was an era of intrigue and champagne, when fortunes were won and lost, gambling dens thrived, and so, too, prostitution, and an Englishman could stroll along the river and dismissively wave off the locals as nothing more than coolies. Things changed, of course. There was the war. And then, in 1949, red flags flew over Shanghai, too, as Mao Zedong marched into power. Somehow, Mao managed to make glittering Shanghai both bland and terrifying, which is a tricky feat to pull off.

  Today, Shanghai is no longer bland, of course. There’s a transcendental hipness to the city. It’s a happening place. There is groove music. There are lounges. And spaces. There are restaurants, like M on the Bund, that rival any restaurant anywhere. It is the sort of place where, if I were a restless, unattached, childless man of twenty-some years with lungs of steel, I’d perhaps make it a point to learn the Shanghainese dialect of the Wu variation of the Chinese language, then hightail it pronto for this city on the coast. Because there is action here, even on the Bund, where stores line the cobbled streets offering the latest from Givenchy and Hermès, and bankers can be seen in slick suits and skinny ties driving BMWs, the 7 Series, on their way to lunch at Jean Georges.

  But I was just a visitor in Shanghai, and as I viewed the goings-on on the Bund from the River Path across the road, I experienced exciting first-time-visitor encounters with the path’s local denizens.

  “You want Rolex?” asked a woman, displaying her wares on her arms.

  “A Rolex? Really?”

  “It is very beautiful.”

  “Yes. It sure is beautiful.”

  “I give you special price. Hundred dollars. Good price.”

  “Gosh. That sounds like a real bargain. But tell you what. Let me help you today.” I showed her my traveling watch. “Let me give you a special price—say, $50. It is very beautiful. See, it even has Mickey Mouse on it. It’s very valuable.”

  She laughed and pulled out a pen. “Mont Blanc. Good price.”

  I pulled out my pen. “Bic. Very good quality. Made in China. Ten dollars for you.”

  This was fun for the first three Rolex sellers, but then I grew bored and instead I replied to their inquiries with the all-time most useful Chinese words I had yet learned in China: bu yao. I don’t want it. But if I’d had a pressing need for a Rolex, I now knew where to find one. Of course, the watches on offer here were poor imitations, but if I knew what I was doing, and I didn’t, shopping in China being one of those things best left for professionals, I have no doubt that somewhere in Shanghai I’d be able to find a top-of-the-line, can’t-tell-the-difference genuine imitation Rolex of sufficient craftsmanship that not even a watchmaker in Basel, Switzerland, would be able to tell them apart. The Chinese not only produce mountains of fake products, they also produce mountains of very good fake products. And the aspirations of fake-product producers had moved far higher than watches to include such things as, incredibly, cars. The Chinese automaker Shuanghuan Automobile even went so far as to produce a knockoff of the BMW X5, an SUV, and if you think they felt a little shameful about shamelessly copying a BMW, you’d be wrong. They unveiled the car at the Frankfurt Motor Show, just up the autobahn from the home of BMW. Now, that’s gumption.

  But, apparently, the Chinese regard counterfeiting a little differently than people do in the West. “The Chinese believe they can make the same thing, same quality, at lower cost, and pass the savings on to consumers, while making a profit,” Dan had explained one afternoon as we perused the DVDs for sale on a Beijing sidewalk. “So it’s a win-win for everyone. That’s the Chinese view. No one is going to spend $100 or whatever buying an operating system from Microsoft, when they can buy a counterfeit operating system for $10. It’s just inefficient.”

  But hadn’t they been forced to crack down since joining the World Trade Organization?

  “Sure. It’s not as blatant as it used to be. There aren’t as many people selling counterfeit DVDs as there used to be, though, as you’ve seen, there are still a lot of them. In the Silk Market, you used to be able to buy fake Armani. Today, you can still buy fake Armani. But it doesn’t say Armani anymore. Same jacket. Different label.”

  The result being, of course, that it is nearly impossible to ascertain the authenticity of anything in China, and while I walked around magnetically attracting every peddler of Rolex watches or jade pendants, the Chinese, too, could find no assurances that the baby powder they bought was really baby powder or the High-Quality DVD Genuine Imitation Mission Impossible III was, in fact, High-Quality, and not, in fact, the recording of some guy with a camcorder sitting in a theater. Near the river, in the warren of alleys that is the Yuyuan Bazaar, between the clusters of old men playing mah-jongg, I’d spotted absolutely everything ever made for sale—buttons, cloth, yarn, fans, belts, sunglasses, beads, tea, antiques, so alleged—and I even beheld in my hands a carved mammoth tusk (!), which has to be just about one of the finest things one could ever have on a shelf of curios. Mammoths, of course, have long been extinct, which solved any potential moral qualms I had. And while I wasn’t at all certain whether the global ban on ivory trading extended to mammoth tusks, I did very seriously consider beginning bargaining proceedings with the proprietor, who assured me that it was very real. But I didn’t completely believe her. You can’t in China.

  After I’d been accosted by the twentieth watch peddler, I began to wonder if there was anything else of interest on the Bund. I’d popped into the Peace Hotel, the home away from home for luminaries like Charlie Chaplin and Noël Coward. I’d turned to glance up at the apartment of Victor Sassoon, bon vivant of the Shanghai of yore. I’d pondered the boundless river traffic, the trawlers bearing coal and trucks beneath the steel-and-glass facade of Pudong. And then, as I ambled onward, I came across the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel and I thought, Hey, I’m a sightseer on the Bund, so why not have a gander?

  All I can say is that if you happen to find yourself in Shanghai with a bag of magic mushrooms and you were looking to maximize the sensory overload of your magic mushroom ride, the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel is just the place for you. I was led to an underground monorail that called to mind a Jetsons cartoon, and soon I was experiencing one of the trippiest journeys I’d ever made. There were flashing lights and lasers, and then suddenly balloonlike figures, like the ones you see fluttering in suburban car dealerships, appeared, followed by a film screen with sharks on it, which quickly rolled up, and all the while a strange, female voice would murmur space swirl, magma, fossil variations, shooting stars, and as I stepped off with a baffled air—what the hell was that?—I soon found myself confronted by a big sign that read “China Sex Culture and History Exhibition: First Time in 5,000 Years,” and I began to wonder, What doesn’t this tunnel have?

  In the spirit of journalistic inquiry, I put on the proverbial raincoat, bought a ticket, and entered the exhibition, which could have been called The Art of the Dildo. I had assumed that China maintained a relatively repressed attitude toward sex, but in this, too, I was wrong. True, the government holds a prudish disposition and keeps a careful eye on the lyrical content of pop songs and the skin content of films, but Chinese society, at least its urban variation, seemed to have a rather Swedish disposition toward sex. Whereas the French suffuse sex with romance and eroticism, Swedes have a much more matter-of-fact approach. It’s just something people do. No big deal. The Chinese, thus, are the Swedes of Asia (you heard it here first), and nowhere is this more evident than in the sweeping proliferation of dildo shops in urban China. Every neighborhood seemed to have one. It’s true. You can’t buy Playboy in China, but should your sexual needs involve battery-operated devices, just head on down to your friendly neighborhood sex-toy emporium and pick up the new and improved Deep Thruster—made in China, of course, which has pretty much cornered the gl
obal dildo market.

  And, as I was now being informed, China has a long history with dildos—5,000 years apparently. There were jade dildos and ivory dildos and wood dildos of every size and shape. And there was also ancient porn. I’m partial to an illustrated Kama Sutra. (Have you seen the ancient Hindu goddess of fertility? Hot, even with four arms.) But, as I peered a little more closely at these crudely rendered porcelain depictions of intimate acts, I gathered that these images were not meant to arouse but to inform, and I can only say that if I were an ancient Chinese lass on her wedding day, spending a few minutes with Mom, who was informing her daughter of what exactly was expected of her on her wedding night, I’d flee. Though I did note that the evening would end with cuddling.