Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation or How He Became Comfortable Eating Live Squid

by J. Maarten Troost

  And then China disappeared behind its walls. Its fleet of treasure ships was left to rot. The Middle Kingdom would become peripheral as Europe arose from its long slumber. How can this be, you wonder? China was at the very edge of global domination, something every nation wants, no? And yet they turned back.

  Apparently, Heaven had become unhappy with the Son of Heaven. Heaven went so far as to hurl a lightning bolt at the Forbidden City, burning most of it to the barest embers. Crushed by this display of celestial approbation, Zhu Di was no longer a match for the imperial mandarins, who had become appalled at the expense of money and resources that Zhu Di’s ambitions cost. Conscious that the dynasty was at stake, Zhu Di began the retreat inward that culminated with his successor. And the eunuch admiral died at sea on the last great voyage of the treasure ships.

  The Forbidden City would be rebuilt. But global dominance would have to wait. As I wandered through the resplendent halls of the Forbidden City—noting, as I watched a group of small boys, that while smoking was clearly advertised as forbidden, peeing on walls was apparently okay—I couldn’t help but wonder about what a fickle thing fate can be.

  “Imagine,” I said to Dan, “if lightning hadn’t struck that day. The Chinese Empire could have swallowed the world.”

  “Oh,” said Dan cheerily. “There’s still time for that.”

  5

  It is remarkable how quickly a country like China can reduce a foreigner—this foreigner, in any case—to a state of childlike powerlessness. True, I had traveled to places where people could still recall what a human being tastes like (it tastes like pork). I had visited islands where the inhabitants had not seen more than a dozen foreigners in their lives. I had wandered in Russia when the country seemed on the cusp of civil war, and, for one particularly memorable week, I had found myself in the midst of an actual civil war in Bosnia after making my way to a Muslim enclave that was presently being obliterated by Serbian shelling. Perhaps more important, I had made my way out of that war zone. And yet in Beijing, as a traveler, I felt like a quivering cupcake.

  No doubt this was partly the result of my incomprehension of the language. In China, if you don’t speak Chinese, and even more important, if you can’t read Chinese, you are essentially helpless. When an elderly man began to speak with me as I wandered through one of Beijing’s hutongs, the rapidly dwindling labyrinths of traditional neighborhoods in Beijing, I had absolutely no idea what he was saying. Perhaps he was encouraging me to have a savory dumpling. It would make me feel harmonious inside. Or perhaps he was expressing some indelicate thought about the barbarian wandering around his neighborhood. You just don’t know, and all you can muster is a shrug and a big dopey grin, causing your counterpart to offer a contemptuous wave because, clearly, you are an imbecile.

  It was the same when trying to get myself from point A to point B with a minimum of drama. While Beijing has gone to some lengths to make things easier for the Chinese-impaired, including offering some signs with the street names translated into Roman letters (or pinyin, as the Chinese call the Romanized version of their language), the fact remains that the vast majority of signs offer nothing more than Chinese characters, which makes things just a trifle problematic for those with a predilection for getting lost. I might set forth for what my map confidently informed me was the broad avenue known as Dongzhimenwai Daijie. Invariably, I’d soon find myself wandering around, hopelessly lost, staring at a sign in Chinese that did nothing to alleviate the complete and total befuddlement I felt.

  Even Dan, who had lived in China for years now, periodically had difficulty getting himself from one place to another. Aware of how utterly incapable I was, he had taken to escorting me back to my hotel whenever we parted ways. One evening, after he had given directions to the cabdriver, the driver apologized and explained that he was new to the job, had just arrived in Beijing from his village, and could he please repeat the street name.

  “Dengshikou Xijie,” Dan repeated.

  “Dengshikou Xijie?” said the driver.

  “Dui, Dengshikou Xijie.”

  They spent a minute going back and forth, repeating the street name, which was apparently the name of a well-known avenue in central Beijing that every cabdriver surely knows.

  “Just explain that it’s near the Crowne Plaza,” I offered helpfully.

  “I can’t,” Dan said. “I don’t know the character for Crowne Plaza.”

  “Do you mean to tell me that you can’t just say Crowne Plaza or Holiday Inn and have the taxi driver take you there?”

  “No. You need to say it in Chinese.”

  Jesus, I thought. I had no intention of staying in Western hotels during my travels, but I’d hoped to be able to use their brand names as landmarks in the major cities. For the next couple of minutes, Dan sought to explain precisely where it was that we hoped to go, until finally the driver had his ah-ha moment.

  Ahhh…Dengshikou Xijie!

  “But that’s what you’ve been saying all along,” I pointed out.

  “He said that I used the wrong tone and that’s why he didn’t understand.”

  This did not bode well for me. Dan had studied Chinese for fifteen years and still tripped over tones. I had studied Chinese for Dummies for a matter of weeks and hadn’t even reached the tone section.

  But it was written Chinese that truly had me stymied, and with my level of ignorance menus had become my nemesis. I carried a pocket dictionary, of course, but it was useless as a tool for navigating a menu. Dictionaries are written in pinyin, which is helpful when you’re trying to say something but not when you’re trying to read something. And the Chinese don’t read pinyin. They read Chinese. No method of translation will allow a traveler to look at a Chinese character on a menu, flip open the dictionary, and learn that this amalgamation of lines and squiggles is the character for Basted Elephant Testicles. Perhaps you want Basted Elephant Testicles. Perhaps you don’t. But what you do really want to know in China is what, precisely, you’re ordering. Or maybe not.

  And so one day, I found myself on an English-speaking tour bus heading for the Great Wall of China. I was in the general vicinity and felt compelled to at least see it, this wall. I had asked Dan what he, as a titan of the Orient, would recommend for a superior Wall-viewing experience.

  “You should hike the Wall from Jinshanling to Simatai,” he told me. “It’s a very evocative part of the Wall away from all the tourists, and you can really get a feel for Imperial China.”

  “Excellent. And how would one get to this place, Jin-shin-shin?”

  “From the northern Beijing bus station, you can get on a minibus to Miyun. From there, you need to find another minibus to Bakeshiyang. And make sure you take a daypack with food and water. You probably won’t encounter anyone there, and it’s a pretty rugged hike.”

  I considered.

  “Or I could take a tour.”

  “Or you could take a tour.”

  Given that I still didn’t have a clue what I was doing, the cocoon of a tour bus seemed, at the time, like a good option. And so one morning I was greeted by a young Chinese man who called himself Tony, which, I suspected, was not his birth name.

  “How much you pay for your ticket?” Tony asked.

  “Two hundred and fifty yuan.”

  “Okay. Don’t tell anyone. Other people paid 300.”

  Or 200, and I was the sucker. Nevertheless, the trip to see the Great Wall at Badaling, fifty miles north of Beijing, would soon offer plenty more opportunities for me to divest myself of yuan. As we finally escaped through the ever-sprawling, traffic-congested, filthy haze of Beijing, I listened to the conversations among my fellow tourists.

  “I think there’s too much of an entitlement mentality in Europe,” David, a middle-aged denizen of Kansas, was saying.

  “I am very much in favor of free trade, but there’s too much government involvement over there.” He wagged his finger at the Frenchman beside him. “And Jacques Chirac,” he snorted, “was
a disaster for France.”

  Behind David, an Australian Muslim of Lebanese descent was chatting with the Venezuelan Jew sitting beside him.

  “Halal and Kosher? It’s the same thing, mate. Arab and Jew? We’re the same people. We’re Semites with big noses.”

  Other than David of Kansas, his apparently mute wife, and myself, all the other passengers on this love bus had come to China for business reasons. The Venezuelan had arrived with his equally fashion-conscious brother to buy motorcycles for the dealership they owned in Caracas. The two Australians had come for the Spring China Import and Export Fair in Guangzhou, otherwise known as the Canton Fair, a biannual event that attracts upward of 25,000 booths and nearly 200,000 attendees. A German had just finished a six-month stint on the island of Hainan, where he was involved with a factory making car-engine parts. The Bolivian man was in China to obtain training from a Chinese cell phone company. And the Frenchman stoically absorbing the opining of one David of Kansas had spent his time in China hiring programmers for his software company.

  I turned my attention away from David of Kansas and his thoughts about the evils of socialized medicine, and paid heed to the landscape unraveling outside the window. We sped past villages and wound our way around cragged hills speckled with farms. How anyone managed to grow anything here was a mystery I could not resolve. The land was profoundly parched. Once, not so long ago, a farmer in the region wouldn’t have had to dig more than a few feet to establish a well. Now he’d have to dig a half-mile or so until he reached an aquifer. That’s a lot of shoveling. As I watched the barren landscape roll by, Tony pointed out the obvious.

  “You see, it is very dry here. We are experiencing a very long drought. So I ask you, on behalf of the people of Beijing, not to use too much water. Don’t take long showers. There’s only five years of water supply left for Beijing.”

  Well, I thought. No wonder the Chinese government was doing everything possible short of a rain dance to seed the clouds for rain. Every few months, authorities would announce that scientists had succeeded in discovering a method for triggering rain showers. Meanwhile, the drought continued. In response, the Chinese government drew up a plan to bring water north. Naturally, this being China, it would be a big plan, a $60 billion network of rivers and canals that would transport water from the drenched south to the bone-dry northern provinces.

  One would think, after all the fussing Zhu Di had had to endure with his canals, that perhaps the Chinese might want to reconsider having their capital in a subarctic desert. But, of course, in China it’s not really possible to move tens of millions of people anymore except, apparently, from the countryside into the cities, which doesn’t quite alleviate a water problem. There is no vast empty hinterland in China capable of sustaining a huge population that isn’t already presently sustaining—barely—a huge population. There is no great emptiness in the middle of the country like there is in the United States. (I know. Technically speaking, there are people in Nebraska. I’ve been there. I met both of them.)

  And so the Chinese have turned to engineering. Even if they should succeed in pumping the floods of the south to the dry north, it’s not entirely clear whether northerners would be grateful, considering the quality of the water. One-third of all the freshwater in China—that is, all the rivers and lakes in this enormous country—is considered unsafe for industrial use. When the water is so vile that you can’t even use it in a lead paint factory because it’s too dirty, I’d say you have a water problem.

  “So we are approaching the tomb of Zhu Di,” Tony said as our bus clambered toward a parking lot.

  Oh good, I thought. I hadn’t realized it would be my buddy Zhu Di’s tomb that we would be visiting. All I had heard about the Ming Tombs was that they were awfully boring, a sideshow really from the Great Wall, and just another way for tour operators to extract money from tourists not yet brave enough to ride a local bus on their own.

  “Do you see where the tombs are located, on the hillside overlooking the river? It’s located there for good feng shui.”

  “But, Tony,” I noted. “There is no river.”

  “This is true. But in former times there was a river.”

  “So does the absence of a river change the feng shui?” I asked. “Are we now in a place with bad feng shui?”

  “This is a good question to which I do not have a good answer.”

  In any event, there was very little to see, simply a small hole in a hillside surrounded by a few pagodas and gardens. Though, very helpfully, there was a sign informing us that Zhu Di was an outstanding and remarkable emperor of the Ming Dynasty. Sporting a well-groomed beard, he was pleasant and good-looking.

  I had always suspected that Zhu Di was pleasant and good-looking. But the aforementioned rumors were correct. The Ming Tombs were not among the more scintillating sights in China.

  “We cannot excavate anymore,” Tony informed us. “Because as soon as we take old things out of the ground, the pollution destroys it. So we are waiting for new technology before we dig further.”

  Reducing pollution, apparently, wasn’t the obvious go-to solution. We returned to the bus according to our cultural heritage—Anglo-Saxons first, Latins dawdling in the distance—and drove onward to join a thousand other buses parked in front of the Traditional Jade Factory. I spent possibly twenty-five seconds lingering inside the cavernous showroom before realizing that there are far more interesting ways to get ripped off in China. Indeed, I would soon discover one as we pulled into the parking lot in front of our next stop: the Traditional Chinese Medicine Center.

  We were led into a classroom, where we were greeted by a nurse—or at least a woman dressed up like a nurse—who proceeded to inform us of the wonders of traditional Chinese medicine, and that here, right now, were world-class specialists who could help us, today, now, diagnose our ailments and provide the treatment garnered from a 3,000-year tradition of medical knowledge. In came the doctors, looking very doctor-like, and soon my fellow tourists were lining up for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be seen by the World’s Very Greatest specialists in this area. Strangely, I did not see any Chinese people lining up for a consultation with the superstars of traditional Chinese medicine. As it turned out, the young among us were all suspiciously healthy. But if you happened to be a middle-aged man with an inner tube of a gut and a florid expression, oh dear. There were gallbladder problems. Kidney issues. And the liver? Best not to ask. Fortunately, there were cures. And there was a traditional pharmacy right here on the premises, available now to fill orders for powdered gingerroot and the crumbled leaves of a birch tree.

  David of Kansas, I was pleased to see, did indeed have an open mind when it came to other cultures, and he returned to the bus with five bags of powder and an ashen expression. I could not bring myself to see the doctor, since I’m highly susceptible to the power of suggestion, and I feared precisely what had befallen him—he who now knew that the welfare of his colon depended entirely on the consumption of eggshells from the red-bellied swiftlet, found only in the high mountains of Sichuan.

  At last we moved on to Badaling, one of the most well-preserved sections of the wall. It is indeed a very great wall, this Great Wall of China. Richard Nixon said so himself. “I think that you would have to conclude that this is a great wall,” he said when he visited Badaling in 1972. Unsurprisingly, one doesn’t find Nixon’s ringing endorsement of the wall in the Chinese government’s marketing literature. Instead, what you find is this:

  The Great Wall is not only the magnum opus of human being but also the soul of China!

  The soul of China! The magnum opus of human being!

  They sure do know how to bring in a crowd, I thought as I joined, I don’t know, perhaps a million, possibly 2 million, visitors jostling among stalls and carts selling trinkets and postcards on the edge of the parking lot. There were camel rides and donkey rides and immense lines for the cable cars bringing people up to the Great Wall itself. Badaling is the pl
ace where the wall becomes a spectacle, a place where dare-devils leap over the wall on skateboards and motorcycles. Upon its stone ramparts were vast crowds and innumerable beggars; the restored guardhouses smelled like urine, and it wasn’t long before I began to wonder what, exactly, I was doing there.

  If you come to China without climbing the Great Wall, just as well you come to Paris without visiting the Iron Tower!

  So true. And so I climbed farther. As I made my way through the swarming crowds, I resolved to stop being such a cupcake, that it was time to forgo the tour buses, because I could see nothing of China through the teeming masses of tourists. I followed the worn stones past the refreshment stands, up and over the steep inclines, until at last the crowd had dribbled to the last outliers, and finally I could see, really see, this Great Wall of China.

  It cascaded over rugged mountains—indifferent to cliffs, unimpressed by summits, impervious to obstacles—as it spilled into the distance, a jagged stone snake uncoiling across China. No one seems to know quite how long the Great Wall really is. Some say it’s 4,500 miles long; others that it’s a more modest 1,500 miles. The true scope is unknown, because they are still finding parts of it; in 2001 and 2002, another 360 miles of the Great Wall revealed itself. But surely, you think, measuring the length of the Great Wall must be a straightforward thing to do. Simply start at one end—say, its eastern terminus near North Korea—and keep walking until you reach the other end. But the Great Wall of China, it turns out, is not one long continuous wall of bricks. It is, in fact, several walls. The oldest were built during the Qin Dynasty in the third century B.C. Designed to keep the Mongols out, the original walls were built with pressed earth, stones, and, when available, the bodies of the workers who died during the construction. Over the centuries, as successive emperors added to the walls, more than two million peasants would die building what would come to be known as the 10,000 Li Wall, a li being a unit of measurement that is roughly 500 yards long.