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

by J. Maarten Troost

  “There’s always someone named Irene in a Catholic church,” Jack observed as we walked down cobbled streets toward Huguo Lu, which locals call the Street of Foreigners. Feeling hungry, we stopped and settled ourselves to eat at an appealing spot called The Yunnan Café.

  “I’m having the yak,” Jack announced after perusing the English-language menu.

  “I think I’ll have the same.”

  The culinary possibilities in China are endless. Why not yak? Or cat? Or swan? Or bullfrog? Or live squid? Why limit ourselves to pigs, lambs, and chickens? And why dine on cow but not their big, shaggy cousin, the yak? I’d been in China for a while and it seemed only natural to sample this new offering. In China, we eat everything with four legs except the table, and anything with two legs except a person. Splendid, I say, now pass the chopsticks.

  We sat on a wooden terrace, idly enjoying our surroundings, watching the street life.

  “So,” Jack said after a while, “have you ever wondered where the hippies went?”

  This seemed like the ultimate non sequitur. I hadn’t wondered where the hippies went. I’d just assumed they’d rechanneled their narcissism and become yuppies, before evolving into the self-indulgent, squabbling baby boomers of today.

  “No,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because,” he said, “they’ve all moved to Dali.”

  Just then a pair of fetchingly bedraggled young Western women in dreadlocks wandered past. Shockingly, they were barefoot. I could not begin to imagine what kind of altered state I’d have to be in to wander around China barefoot. Considering the rivers of piss and phlegm that flowed down Chinese streets, these women were clearly insane. Or very, very high. And they were not alone. As I looked around, I saw that there were dozens, hundreds even, of Westerners in Dali who looked like they’d boarded the bus for Woodstock. What were they doing here? And what was it about Dali that had made it the go-to destination on the hippie trail?

  “Ganja,” whispered a voice.

  I turned to see an elderly woman with a deeply lined face standing beside me. She was in traditional Bai dress and carried a wooden basket with a baby on her back. With a beatific smile, she leaned forward and whispered again, “Ganja?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t understand.”

  “Ganja,” she repeated, bringing her fingers to her lips in an imaginary toke.

  “Ganja?” I whispered.

  “Ganja,” she nodded. “Smokee, smokee.”

  “Er—awfully thoughtful of you, but I think I’m going to pass.” And then, feeling helpful, I told her, “We’re in China, you know. It’s a police state.”

  “Ganja,” she said again. I shook my head and off she finally waddled, with the baby bouncing behind her.

  We had arrived in a place where kindly elderly ladies gently inquired whether your stay might be enhanced with a little smokee of the ganja. I suddenly admired the Bai for their entrepreneurial pluck. There was no better way of luring a steady stream of backpackers than by offering them the prospect of readily available weed. And clearly, the dealers themselves were among the most genial and solicitous in the world. What’s not to like? We had solved the mystery of why the hippies had come to Dali.

  Reefer Madness.

  Jack looked at me, relieved. “Thanks for not buying a dime bag from grandma there. I don’t want the Chinese police after us. It would suck to end this trip in a gulag in Manchuria.”

  I laughed. “You can relax. One thing I will not do is smoke weed in a country with mobile execution trucks.”

  It is true: There are Death Vans in China. And lest you think that mobile execution trucks are just a trifle barbaric, the roving Death Vans are, in the words of its manufacturer, a sign that China “promotes human rights now.” Until 2004, all prisoners sentenced to death were shot, which can be messy and inefficient if the prisoner requires a coup de grâce. Now, for the lucky few, there are Death Vans that roam the country, going from town to town, efficiently and humanely—the Chinese really stress this—executing prisoners by lethal injection. No one knows for certain how many people are executed each year in China. Some say 2,000, others 15,000; the exact figure is a state secret. And the offenses can be something as simple as tax fraud. But the Chinese are also moving toward Death Vans because the government is involved in a profitable enterprise harvesting human organs from condemned prisoners, which is frankly much easier when the bodies aren’t splattered with bullets. Members of Falun Gong, in particular, are said to be the go-to prisoners for organ transplants, and apparently the Japanese are big customers. So while back in the day I might have had a smokee here and there, if there was one criminal justice system in the world I wanted nothing to do with, it was China’s.

  That night after dinner, we passed a bar with a big dog slumbering at the entrance. “Tell me that doesn’t look just like Osso,” Jack said.

  Osso was Jack’s dog, his very big dog, the sort of dog who greets guests by barreling at them, chest level, to see whether the guest is to be played with. But the guest, of course, doesn’t know this dog is being playful. All the guest knows is that there is a very large dog, a Rhodesian Ridgeback, about to knock him over.

  “Have you ever seen a Rhodesian Ridgeback in China?”

  “It’s probably the local delicacy.”

  “Let’s go in.”

  I looked up at the sign. The Elephant Bar. Inside, the air was redolent with a smoky haze familiar to anyone who’d attended a Berkeley sit-in in the summer of 1969. We took a seat at the bar and spoke to James, one of the dreadlocked owners, who explained that they’d rescued the dog from dog fighting. As we talked, a couple of Colombians walked in. “Shots?” they offered. It was a little early to set such a blistering pace. “It’s on us.”

  Okay, then.

  Soon the bar began to fill up. There was an Englishman in a straw hat who had spent the previous night sleeping there. Two brothers. Australians. Dutch. For a time, this was the crossroads of the world. The bar began to fill up with a crowd of convivial, determined drinkers. There were beers, shots. And then joints were lit up, and while we declined a proffered toke, it wasn’t because we were trying to maintain a pretense of sobriety. No, with the first shots it was established that tonight we would get cheerfully hammered. But there was no need to actually smoke weed. In the sweet, fragrant haze, my eyes watered, I had a curious case of the munchies, and I couldn’t stop laughing.

  I turned to James, who was English. “So can I ask you something?” I said between chuckles. “How long have you guys been here?”

  “We opened about three years ago. We had a place in Thailand, but Thailand became just…” He waved his hand languorously.

  “And business is good?”

  “Business is good.”

  “Has it always been like this?” I went on. “I mean, there’s tons of Westerners here. Why are we here? What is drawing us to this town in Yunnan Province?”

  “It’s because of Lonely Planet, man. A couple of years ago, they made a reference to the local herb. You’ve probably noticed the friendly locals selling weed. It grows wild up in the hills. So the writer mentioned it and voilà.”

  It is astonishing, the power of Lonely Planet. One offhand comment by a freelance writer and suddenly a small town in Yunnan Province had become the Mecca of the hippie trail.

  Just then James’s attention was diverted by the arrival of a fierce-looking Chinese man in a suit. It is, of course, very difficult for a stoned man in long dreads to convey tension, but that is exactly what he exuded. They conversed with the aid of a waitress translating, and pointed frequently to the dog, which slumbered happily on a couch.

  Afterward, I asked what that was about.

  “He’s one of the local mobsters. His boss’s dog is missing, and since it looked a lot like ours, he came over to take a closer look.”

  “Is the mafia powerful here?”

  “They control everything, man.” He shook his head.

 
“Don’t mess with the mobsters in Dali.”

  We were not in Dali to mess with mobsters. We were here, it now seemed clear, to get positively lit. Not for a moment was there an empty glass before us. Not in this bar. This was a place for drinking, where the moment a glass was drained, another was placed before us. I was liking it here, this merry place where everyone was funny and quick-witted and where you could settle back and enjoy the secondhand cannabis. No, Officer, I’d say should I encounter one. I didn’t inhale, I’d assert as he stared into my glassy eyes.

  I soon found myself next to a young Chinese woman from Shanghai. Her Western name was Judy and she’d settled in Dali three months earlier but would join her boyfriend in Dalian, a city in northern China, when he returned from the United States.

  “I want to be a housewife,” she said.

  This was a surprisingly popular ambition among young women in China. But then, I reflected, it sure beat working in a factory twelve hours a day.

  “And where’s your boyfriend from?” I asked.

  “He’s from North Carolina. He was my English teacher.”

  “And a fine job he did too. Have you been to North Carolina?”

  “Yes.” She scrunched her nose. “I don’t like it there.”

  “Why not?”

  She struggled to convey her thoughts. “People are very fat there.”

  “Well, that’s not a good reason to not like North Carolina. It just means the barbecue is pretty good.”

  “There is no culture there.”

  “No culture? Have you ever been to a basketball game between Duke and the University of North Carolina? It’s a tribal conflict that has its roots in the dim mists of time.”

  “I still don’t like North Carolina. I just want to be a housewife.”

  “But what if your boyfriend wants to return to North Carolina? What if he becomes homesick? As an American, he can never truly become Chinese, can he?”

  She nodded her head slowly, as if she’d never considered the possibility.

  “But if you come to America, you can become an American,” Jack chimed in. “It’s what makes America great. Anyone can become an American.”

  “But I don’t want to go to America.”

  “I know,” I told her. “But I’ve seen this many times before. Your boyfriend will always be a laowai here. Maybe he doesn’t want to be an outsider his entire life. Maybe, one day, he will want to return to North Carolina because he wants to be someplace that feels like home.”

  She began to quiver. “But I don’t want to live in North Carolina. I want to be a housewife in Dalian.”

  “Dude,” Jack interjected. “You’re going to make her cry.” He turned to her. “Don’t listen to him. He’s a bad man.”

  “I don’t think he’s a bad man.”

  “I’m not a bad man, but him?” I said, pointing to Jack.

  “He’s a bad man. Do you like George Bush?”

  She shook her head emphatically.

  “He likes George Bush.”

  And just like that, all the goodwill toward us evaporated. Our barmates ignored us. Our glasses remained unfilled. The owners wouldn’t even look at us.

  I knew, of course, that George Bush wasn’t the most popular of presidents. But still, simply because Americans had elected a psychopath didn’t strike me as a sufficient reason for this denial of alcohol. True, we did it twice, but I think that would elicit the need for more drink, not less. And so here we were. We’d been 86’d? Cut off from ale. Cruel indeed.

  “You don’t think it’s because we’re completely drunk?” Jack asked.

  “I don’t think you get 86’d for that around here.”

  Jack tried hard to regain their good graces. He served up witty banter, to no avail. His attempts to rejoin the conversation around us fell flat.

  “So, James, can I ask you something?” Jack finally asked, raising his voice so that James, who had slinked far, far away from the Republican and his guilty-by-association friend, could hear. Cautiously, he moved toward us. “So, James.” Jack searched his mind for something that would alleviate this wall of bitterness. And this is what he came up with:

  “Do you like the Grateful Dead?”

  I snorted so hard I damaged my sinuses. But it was enough. James did indeed like the Grateful Dead. People were talking to us again. Soon, Jack was no longer regarded as a dangerous madman but as a peculiar alien, one called to explain his world. It helped that Jack had always thought that invading Iraq was a bad idea, and that his conservatism was of the old school, Reagan kind.

  “No, I respectfully disagree,” he said to the Englishman. “Gun control is bad. See, the reason we don’t have soccer hooligans like you do in England is because we’re all armed.”

  Soon, another group of foreigners arrived. Jack, eager to reclaim the warmth so recently lost, asked them where they were from.

  “Israel,” one offered cautiously.

  “Israel! I’ve been hoping all night for a group of Israelis to walk in. Mazel tov, my friends. This round is on me.”

  And the night went on, leading inexorably to flaming shots sucked through straws and a long, endless stumble in the dark—Which way? I don’t know. Fuck. I’m drunk—until finally we found the heavy wooden door of our guesthouse, and we pounded—so much pounding, had they never before had drunken guests needing an open door at 2 A.M.?—until, at last, a young boy undid the lock and wordlessly, loudly, we tottered in.

  A knock on the door. Groan. I opened the latch. Jack stood in the darkness. “You’re not going to church with me, are you?”

  I was in that grim place halfway between gross inebriation and a head-shattering hangover. It was not a moment I wanted to be conscious for. And I certainly wasn’t going to drag my sorry ass out of bed for predawn mass, though I did resolve to never, ever drink again if God would please, please spare me the hangover on the horizon. I had a dim recollection of a shot glass on fire. This was going to hurt. Please, Lord. I’ll never touch a drop again.

  “No. I’m not going to church. But pray for me. I am not well.”

  It was as if my head had been invaded by little men with jackhammers. They pounded. They drilled. And my mouth felt as if I’d swallowed a wad of cotton. My body felt as if it had been poisoned, which of course it had been. It’s the first sign of aging, the crippling hangover. True, I’d had hangovers before. More than a few. But once, not so long ago, I could simply guzzle a couple of Gatorades, go for a run, sweat it out, and move on. Not so now. After thirty-five, hangovers hurt. Jesus, they hurt. Flammable shots? Good God, what was I thinking.

  Some hours later, I stumbled downstairs to find Jack on a chair outside, smoking a cigarette.

  “Tell me that you’re as hungover as I am,” I said to him.

  “I am hungover,” he said. “But I’m not the wreck that you are right now.”

  Enough of a wreck, however, to have missed the church service himself. It turned out that we’d also missed breakfast at the guesthouse. I was, of course, in no mood for food. I was not entirely convinced I could handle food. But the cure, of course, could only begin with nourishment.

  We walked into the old town in search of sustanence as the little men inside my head continued to pound away. I yearned for the sun to disappear. I wanted darkness. I wanted the grim twilight of Guangzhou. Anything to dull my headache.

  Soon, we came across a pizzeria. Dali is that kind of place. There are pizzerias. I sat there in the tiny restaurant with my eyes closed, massaging my temples, trying to decide if I could manage to eat a slice without hurling. It was a very bad hangover. Somehow, I forced a few bites into my mouth and lived in hope that they would stay down.

  Back on the street, we walked on to a large outdoor Bai market. There were dead pigs, dead chickens, blood, flesh everywhere, all over the place, all these carcasses being butchered. This was not a good milieu for someone desperately trying to suppress the spontaneous expulsion of a pizza breakfast. I had a vague notion that I shoul
d linger here, that there was traditional Bai culture here among the animal carcasses. Something to learn. But I was not well. And so we marched to the Three Pagodas, which are among the oldest pagodas in China.

  In my surly state, the entrance fee to the pagodas seemed an offense of the highest order.

  “A hundred and twenty kuai,” I sputtered. “It’s an outrage.”

  I fumbled with my money. My head throbbed. And then the fireworks began. The Chinese love their fireworks. Pop, pop, pop. Every Saturday in China—wedding day—the country explodes to the sounds of head-shattering booms. Pop, pop, crack. Rat-tat-tat-tat.

  “I need to get out of here.”

  So instead of lingering at the pagodas, we walked back toward the West Gate, where we were convinced by a woman to follow her on the Number 2 bus to Erhai Hu for a boat trip to a temple and fishing village. This was more my speed. The bus was very crowded with women carrying babies on their backs inside wooden baskets, but the farther away from town we got, the better I felt. As as we ambled down a country road, we passed fields of hay and innumerable carts pulled by men or donkeys and a young woman walking alone in traditional white and pink garb listening to an iPod.

  Lakes, I discovered, are the cure for hangovers. There was a freshness to Erhai Hu, a pristineness that soon purged the lingering effects of last night’s revelry. It was blue. It was cleanish. There were fishermen plying the waters, and in the near distance rippling hills, and beyond that the Jade Green Mountains that rose to a lofty 12,000 feet. We took a tour boat across the pleasant expanse, and soon I began to feel better.

  We were let off below a temple, which like those on Putuoshan was devoted to the worship of Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion. There was a graceful pagoda on a promontory overlooking the lake, and we stepped in to pray for some compassion. Or rather, I prayed. Jack doesn’t pray to bodhisattvas. I, however, was willing to seek help for my hangover wherever I could find it. Then the boat took us onward from the temple to a small fishing village on an island in the center of the lake. On its banks were nets full of tiny fish drying in the sun. There wasn’t much to see save for a small outdoor market. Still, it was pleasant, quiet. We sat around a tree stump for tea. Nearby, on the shores of the lake, women were washing clothes by hand. Soon, we were joined by the villagers. We couldn’t understand a word, of course, but they were very friendly. A fresh breeze blew and an elderly woman offered us a plate of tomatoes.