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

  “Maybe,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. And then he nodded off to sleep.

  Pity, I thought. In a way he reminded me of my grandmother, born in the hills of Moravia, a place where over a lifetime, without once leaving the village, one could find oneself living in four separate countries. History looms large for the seventy-plus crowd, and while the sands of time have largely been benign for the last generation or two, I sensed that we were on the cusp of something momentous and unprecedented, and I hoped to be able to ride it out so that I, too, decades later, could greet foreigners on a train while resplendent in tweed.

  It is but a two-hour journey from Shanghai to Hangzhou, and I left the train for a grubby train station, where the taxi drivers weren’t at all confident where West Lake was.

  “Bloody hell,” fumed an English backpacker. “What, is it not far enough? They don’t think they’ll make enough money?”

  “No,” I said to her. It’s interesting how quickly China can reduce the traveler to a state of rage and confusion. “In all likelihood, the driver is from some distant town and has never encountered a foreigner before and probably doesn’t know how to read a map.”

  I felt like an old China hand.

  At last, with map in hand, a note with my hotel’s name in Chinese characters, and with my big dopey laowai grin that suggested I could be easily overcharged, I finally convinced a taxi driver to take me onward. I had assumed Hangzhou, on the shores of famed West Lake, to be a town of modest size. It is one of the most popular destinations for Chinese tourists, and I had expected that it would be cutesy quaint, possibly even a seasonal town, the sort of place that quietly shuts down at the end of the summer. I’m not sure why I was so fantastically misinformed. Hangzhou is a humming city of 7 million people on the forefront of the tsunami that is the Chinese economy. Indeed, as in Beijing and Shanghai, should one have a compelling need to buy a Porsche, Ferrari, or even a Bentley, there are dealerships in Hangzhou only too happy to assist you. Though how anyone could be brave enough to drive such a gilded car in a country with 200 million hungry migrant workers was something I could not quite understand.

  Eventually, we made our way through this teeming city to the very edges of West Lake, which shimmered appealingly in the hazy light of late afternoon. We drove along Hubin Lu, and then we drove back down Hubin Lu, all the while with me beside the driver, sputtering, No, this way…no, no, turn there…it should be right there…okay, just stop here and I’ll find it myself. Which I did thirty seconds later. It was an unusually fine hotel for me in China. It was no Grand Hyatt, of course, but there were Chinese men in golf shirts in the lobby pondering the purchase of a condo from a sales group offering luxurious abodes in the sky in a place called Upperclass. This must be like what Miami felt like in 2004, I thought. I wondered what the Chinese word for “subprime” might be.

  I checked in, pleased that while the dollar might be slipping into the abyss elsewhere in the world, in China, which pegs its currency to the dollar, $35 and a bit of haggling gets you a mighty fine room in Hangzhou. I dropped my bag off and walked toward the lake, where I soon found a statue of Marco Polo himself. There was a walking path beside the lake, and beside it were speakers piping in ambient traditional Chinese music, which is rarely ambient, but did seem so here. On the footpath, a policeman was chasing a man pedaling a heavy black bicycle. He reached for the back grille and grabbed it and then the two men began to argue violently, which seemed interesting to me, this lack of deference to policemen, until finally and unhappily the cyclist turned around, muttering darkly as he sped by.

  There must be some sort of code enforcement here, I thought. So far this footpath was the only place in China where I hadn’t found myself beseeched by beggars and hounded by pimps. I found a sedate restaurant that offered superb crab dumplings and mushrooms, and thought how amazing it is what the Chinese can do with fungi. We just squander them on top of pizzas or ignore them in our salads, but here in China the mushroom gets the respect it deserves.

  It was dark when I finished, and I wandered back toward the general vicinity of my hotel. Now, in the dark gloom, I was approached by the familiar touts and purveyors of counterfeit shoes.

  “Nike, Adidas,” said one. “Good price. You buy?”

  “Bu yao,” I said, and stepped inside a well-lit convenience store to buy some water, since the likelihood of finding tap water anywhere in China that isn’t contaminated—either with parasites or industrial waste—is approximately nil. As I went to pay, a man pushed his way up before me and demanded a pack of cigarettes.

  Now, I want to be clear about this. I am very open-minded when it comes to other cultures. By this time, it did not trouble me—well, okay, it troubled me less—that men in China would hawk enormous globs of phlegm and send it hurling forth before you like a wet, gloppy fusillade. But this cutting-in-line business? It continued to steam me. I took a deep breath and reflected on the Chinese context here. Perhaps if I’d been raised in a country of 1.3 billion people, a country that on the surface seemed to be organized on largely Darwinian principles, I’d be a pushy line-cutter myself. And then I extolled myself for my cultural empathy.

  Outside, I cooled my temper with a refreshing gulp from a plastic bottle of what I hoped was clean-ish water—you really can’t hope for more—and soon found myself enmeshed in a gaggle of little beggars.

  “Do you not have parents?” I asked the little girl, three, maybe four years old, who tugged at my sleeve and who looked upon me with giant saucer eyes. There were four, five, six little ones now, all pleading money money. “Seriously, you are very little people. You should be at home reading Chinese fairy tales. Really, you are just way too young for this. Who takes care of you?”

  Money, money.

  In the shadows I saw an old, hunched woman with a weathered face. She waved and smiled. I waved back and wandered off to search for a place to drink a beer. Inside the Party-Time Disco and Bar, I found myself bathed in a dim blue light listening to trance music. Who are you people? I wondered, glancing at the dozens of figures around me. They must have been eighteen, tops, and they sat on couches listlessly playing games with dice as the tables filled with bottles of Crowne Royal and 35-yuan Tsingtao. I sipped at my beer and watched these young Chinese hipsters, the girls sucking on lollipops, and thought, You kids are just way too young for this. Really, ennui at eighteen. It’s just not right.

  As time went on, I had begun wondering about sports in China. The Chinese, of course, are fantastically good at gymnastics, Ping-Pong, swimming, particularly diving, soccer, especially women’s soccer, basketball, and badminton (it’s a sport, really), but you never actually see the Chinese doing sporting endeavors. Not once in China did I see a jogger. Of course, the mere thought of jogging in China made me laugh. Few endeavors strike me as more absurd than running in China, a country in which people routinely wear surgical masks while conducting their errands. Nor did I see anyone playing soccer or volleyball or even badminton, which, judging by the television coverage on the Chinese sports channel—a knockoff of ESPN, incidentally—is a sport in which the Chinese kick serious butt in international competitions. Beyond the basketball players and the gangster rap in Shanghai, I never actually saw anyone in China play sports as just a sort of fun thing to do on a Saturday afternoon. And yet they excelled at so many sports at the international level. How could this be? I wondered.

  In China, sports are not meant to be fun. Like in the East Germany of old, China has sports factories where youngsters who have demonstrated an unusual aptitude for a sport or a particular body type, like being a six-foot second-grader, are sent for rigorous training. Sports are seen as an extension of China’s strength and swiftness. It’s not about you, these youngsters are told. It’s not about the team. It’s about the great nation of China. To see a Chinese woman lose a badminton match is a searing experience. She is crushed, humiliated, embarrassed. You can barely look. You can tell that she feels she has shamed the nation. And while I c
ouldn’t understand the commentators, I sensed they believed likewise. You did not try hard enough, Liling (which, incidentally, means Beautiful Jade Tinkle). You have shamed the Motherland. And after China has done so much for you, you dare to lose? Shame!

  Sports are seen in an almost martial light. Indeed, as they prepared for the Olympics, the Chinese national basketball team trained by going to boot camp. They lived together in communal barracks. They were given military uniforms. Chinese military uniforms, alas for the players, did not come in the size XXXXXL required to cover a seven-footer, and so the team went through their paces in pants that flopped around their shins. But did they complain? They did not, except for Wang Zhizhi, a seven-foot-one center who was the first Chinese player in the NBA, and who refused to join the team for the hard drudgery of boot camp. Then the shame campaign began. Newspapers denounced his selfishness. Television commentators bemoaned his lack of national pride. After all, look what China had done for him. In the end, sputtering his humblest apologies and reaffirming that he would endure any hardship for the Motherland, Wang Zhizhi joined his team for the rigorous training that followed.

  Though few Chinese participate in sports themselves, they are not without activities that they turn to as sporting endeavors. There is, of course, bargaining. The Chinese excel at bargaining. They live and breathe it. This game of parrying back and forth is not played with hostility, it’s just mindlessly played every day for almost everything. For spectator sports, however, the options are more limited. To be sure, there is professional soccer. And there is professional basketball. It’s a good league too. The Chinese, in general, are not the tallest people in the world, but in a land of 1.3 billion people, there is bound to be a large number of statistical aberrations. Indeed, the tallest person in the world is Bao Xishun, a seven-foot-nine Mongolian herdsman famed for once being called upon to use his lengthy arms to reach deep into the throats of two dolphins who had swallowed bits of plastic in an aquarium in Fushun. But other tall people have found their way to the sport academies and now play some really good professional ball. Indeed, Americans, those who were good enough to play college ball but not quite good enough for the pros and just can’t let go of the dream, have found themselves playing in the Chinese league, and as I watched them on television I couldn’t help but wonder what on earth it must be like to be big and black in China.

  For everyday spectator sports, however, the Chinese have turned to arguments. Nothing attracts a crowd in China like a good quarrel. This was my observation on the shores of West Lake the following morning. Two elderly women had stopped before a park bench where they were engaged in an argument of epic proportions. They screamed. They mocked. They waved their hands in threatening manners. They did not strike each other. But they wanted to. You could tell. All around them, people had stopped to observe the commotion. They had halted their lakeside perambulations to view the goings-on. There were dozens of people, then a hundred or more as the ladies argued. It was a flash crowd. I could imagine the text messages: Two old women going AT IT beside West Lake. 9:47 AM. Be there.

  I had come to West Lake because it was said to be serene, and I wanted to see what that felt like, serenity in China, and so I kept walking. In the botanical gardens, there were temples and pagodas and ponds full of goldfish. They were all replicas; not much of Hangzhou survives from its glory days as capital of the Southern Song Dynasty. What wasn’t razed during the Taiping Rebellion of 1851 was finally destroyed during the lunacy of the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, not much of old China can be found anywhere, since so much of it was built with wood. But that’s okay. The Chinese are very good at replicas. In fact, the shoreline walk around West Lake seemed sort of ideal from a Chinese perspective: It was both tranquil and fake, but not fake in a bad way, fake in a new and improved sort of way. At the eastern shore of the lake, I came across a woman on a bench who was feeding dumplings to her Western boyfriend.

  “You will be a sex maniac,” she said. It’s what I do in China. Eavesdrop.

  Shortly thereafter, I opened my wallet and discovered that I was in need of money. China is largely a cash-only economy and so I headed over to the Bank of China, where I hoped to find an ATM that could manage an international transaction. I found one, which asked me for my pin number in English, but after I’d entered it the next screen appeared in Chinese, making it a trifle challenging. Was I getting cash or was I transferring my entire savings to an account in Laos? I fumbled with the keypad, and afterward, flush with cash, I walked toward the streets of downtown Hangzhou.

  Suddenly, a man with a wild, leering expression appeared beside me. “German?” he said mystifyingly. I told him no and kept walking.

  “Money,” he said. I ignored him and walked on. Suddenly, from behind, I was struck hard.

  “WHAT THE FUCK!” I yelled. Pain seared across my ear. I whirled around to face this man. My ear was ringing mightily.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” I demanded.

  He began yelling at me, smiling, leering. He was with others, young men with cruel expressions. A crowd had stopped to watch. They stood silently, just watching. I didn’t like this. None of it. I didn’t understand what was going on. I had been hit. I didn’t know why. The man continued to yell. And he smirked. He leered. The scene was incomprehensible. I decided to walk away. I turned to go. I started walking.

  SMACK.

  “WHAT THE FUCK, YOU MOTHERFUCKER,” I shouted.

  He had hit me with an open-handed slap to the back of my head. Now he was taunting me, smiling maniacally, yelling. There were hundreds of people gathered around, staring with inscrutable faces. No one said a word.

  “COULD SOMEONE TELL ME WHAT HE’S SAYING? WHAT DOES HE WANT?”

  Adrenaline was surging through my veins. Being hit, unexpectedly and without cause, had left me in a state of confused shock. And fear. What the fuck? I thought this was a police state.

  “You,” I said, addressing a man with an officious-looking name tag. “Can you tell me what’s going on? Do you speak English?”

  My assailant continued to scream and leer at me.

  “Anyone?”

  There was nothing, just hundreds of faces staring, utterly devoid of expression. Then I saw Mr. Sex Maniac.

  “Do you understand Chinese? Can you tell me what he’s saying?”

  “No, man. But my girlfriend does.”

  But she refused to say anything. She demurred and turned away with blank eyes.

  “Where’re you from, man?” Mr. Sex Maniac asked.

  I’m being stalked by a violent lunatic and you want to get all social-like? What the fuck!

  “California,” I muttered. You useless, unhelpful shit.

  I decided I needed to get away from this as quickly as possible. I walked on. I turned to see what the lunatic would do. He continued to scream. When he saw me looking at him, he smiled and then screamed some more. I kept walking.

  SMACK.

  I kept walking. Walking. Walking.

  So I was a little stressed. A little tense. Discombobulated. Should I have hit him back? Yes. Probably. I don’t know. Maybe he knew that kung-fu voodoo magic. Perhaps he’d spent his formative years in the Shaolin Temple. I’d hit him and he’d drop me like Bruce Lee. Possibly he had a knife. It was a very long walk back to the hotel, as such walks are when, at any moment, you expect to feel the cool blade of a knife slicing through your torso. This was not typical of China, this getting slapped around at rush hour. In China, one gets the death penalty for far less. I simply had no idea what, exactly, had just transpired. Typically, in fights one knows precisely what they’re fighting about. Was it because I was German? But I am not German. I am half-Dutch and half-Czech. Both halves have been invaded by Germany. Maybe he thought I was someone else. Laowais all look alike. Could be. Maybe he was insane. Very likely. Maybe it was an anti-foreigner thing. Possibly. As a foreigner, I wasn’t exactly feeling the love in China. Perhaps it was a robbery attempt. He did ask for money. I don’t kno
w. It was just strange.

  But what chilled me to the bone was the reaction of the crowd. There was nothing. Just hundreds of faces. And their expression? Dead. Lifeless. Nothing there. Just watching. All of them just watching with blank expressions, doing nothing, saying nothing, completely still. They would watch me die there. I would be stabbed. An artery would rupture, spilling blood. I’d be on a sidewalk in Hangzhou, China. Bleeding. Dying. And they would watch with lifeless faces. I would die. And they would watch as if it were a spectator sport.

  But bleeding to death on a crowded sidewalk in Hangzhou was not on the itinerary. What to do now? I paced inside my hotel room, wandering from wall to wall. I was agitated. My adrenaline had surged and found no outlet. I felt like running for five, ten, fifteen miles. But I did not want to go back outside. And then I saw it. A little triangular card with an English translation. Spa. Relaxing massage. Korea Massage. Thailand massage. Swedish massage. China Massage. 3rd Floor.

  I have had but one professional massage in my life, and it was on my honeymoon in France, in a seaside hotel in Brittany. There was a spa pour hommes, and I went, and I was oiled, and I was rubbed down by Philippe, who dimmed the lights and massaged me to the sounds of Enigma. It was okay, but it was also weird, what with scented candles and the Enigma and all. A man’s hands. But I decided that now would be an excellent time for my second professional massage. It would be relaxing. It would relieve the stress. So I went to the third floor.

  I was greeted by a young man dressed as a bellhop. He bounded forth and took me to a locker room. Off with my shirt. Okay. Away with my pants. Fine. Boxer shorts. Off, off, off.

  All right. I stood naked before him. He handed me a pair of cotton shorts and a T-shirt. They were beige. They were also Chinese-size, and I am not Chinese-size. I would pop out of these clothes like the Incredible Hulk. One twitch of the shoulders and the shirt would shred. And the shorts were short, 1950s-style. I felt like I should be doing calisthenics, throw the old medicine ball around.