China Road

by Rob Gifford

  Now, though, the wheel is turning again. It’s clear that five thousand years of male domination take more than sixty years to change. The Communist revolution is over. The status of women in China is certainly much higher than it was sixty years ago, and to the Western visitor it definitely seems higher, proportionately, than it is in much wealthier Asian countries, such as South Korea and Japan, where women sometimes seem to be treated like a lower form of life. But while their place in society may be higher, the death of Communist equality has meant that, as in the former Soviet Union, Chinese women are struggling to hold on to some of the gains of the Communist years. The death of Communist ideology also means that the strict morality the Party enforced has lost its grip on people’s behavior. Studies estimate there are between 10 and 20 million Chinese women involved in the sex trade in China.

  Which all leads to the karaoke bar on the seventh floor of my hotel in Xinyang (pronounced Shin-yang), a rather nondescript city in the flat agricultural heartland of southern Henan province. Karaoke seems to be the biggest boom industry in Xinyang (possibly the only one). And where there is karaoke, there are invariably what are known in Chinese as the sanpei xiaojie. Literally, that means “the young ladies of the three accompaniments.” For a small fee, they accompany you to drink, to dance, and to sing. There is, of course, a fourth accompaniment, but that costs extra.

  Two institutions exist in almost every midsize or large hotel in China that show the radical changes in public morality. One is known as the “sauna massage” facility, which, as its name suggests, provides every type of sauna and every type of massage, often, I’m told, at the same time. The other is the karaoke bar. Both are advertised openly, and unashamedly, and both are generally just fronts for prostitution. Although there are regular clampdowns on such institutions, if the management has good relations with the local police (or, more likely, offers them free visits), the authorities will leave them alone. Indeed, it is well known across China that the police and the military have been some of the biggest sponsors or owners of brothels.

  I have interviewed several Chinese prostitutes during my years in China. These women frequently have the most compelling and tragic stories about life at the bottom of Chinese society. But I still feel slightly uncomfortable going to the karaoke bars where they work. There is something about looking for a prostitute, even just to interview, that annoys me, because doing so only feeds the Chinese stereotype of Western men as sexual predators. I always call my wife in Beijing to tell her what I am doing (“Hi, darling, I’m just going out looking for hookers”), in case I get detained by the police.

  By the time the elevator door opens on the seventh floor, though, I have transformed myself into the stereotype of a Western man, looking for a Chinese woman for the night. I am greeted by a middle-aged woman who appears as though she is trying to fulfill a stereotype too. Wearing a traditional red Chinese qipao dress that probably fit her perfectly five years ago, she dominates the entrance with the presence of a woman who enjoys being in control. Her smile is a little too tight, her bow a little too polite. She is the mami, the madam who runs the karaoke bar. She motions with the slightest flick of her head to two girls who hover quietly behind her, then motions to me with her hand, and an even more unctuous smile, that I should follow them. They take me down a darkened corridor covered in green wallpaper toward one of the karaoke rooms. Several Chinese men in different rooms are wrestling with high notes of love songs, and the corridor echoes with the discord. It’s a good sign. As a general rule in China, the worse the karaoke, the more interesting the story.

  As we pass, one of the doors is just being pushed shut, but I manage to see inside a room full of young, attractive women, sitting, chatting, many in skimpy clothing, applying makeup. These are the girls of Xinyang, preparing for a night’s work, and if you want proof that the Communist revolution is over, it is here.

  I’m led into a large room with a green and purple couch in an L shape, along two walls. There is a large, low table in front of the couch and a huge television on one wall. The girls disappear, and I am left alone, feeling too small for the room, looking at the menu of songs for the Chinese karaoke.

  The smiling mami reappears, leads four girls into the room, and asks me to choose one to sing with me. The girls all stand, looking ashamed, avoiding eye contact with me, and I feel embarrassed to be putting them through the ordeal. I point to the girl on the end, and the mami and the three others file out.

  “Qing zuo. Please sit down,” I say with a friendly smile that is trying to tell her, “don’t worry.” She picks up on my friendliness and sits down, a little less nervous, on the green and purple couch.

  “Your Chinese is very good,” she comments, having heard me say just two words.

  She says her name is Wu Yan, and she’s twenty years old, although she tries to exude the confidence of someone older. She is not very tall, with shoulder-length black hair, and is wearing a short fake-silk black dress. Her nails are painted red. Her job is to play dice and sing and drink with men who come here, and sometimes offer the fourth accompaniment too.

  I encourage her to sing, so she picks up the microphone and sings a syrupy Chinese ballad in a sad, lilting voice, pouring her whole being into the song.

  Watching karaoke in China is a wonderful pastime. As a radio journalist, I found over the years that persuading Chinese people to speak frankly into a microphone is a real problem. The country has loosened up a lot since Maoist times, but there is still hesitancy about speaking frankly, especially to a foreigner and especially to a foreign reporter. Of course, there is the fear of saying something that might lead to political problems, but there is also just an inbuilt Chinese reticence to speak frankly to strangers.

  Thrust a karaoke microphone into a Chinese person’s hand, though, and he or she needs no second invitation to sing, no matter how badly. Karaoke is the ultimate socially acceptable vehicle for Asian people to say the things that are hidden deep inside them. Wu Yan just said a whole lot of things to me, and to the large empty room, which I didn’t really understand.

  Most Westerners (including most of those in China) would rather stick needles in their eyes than sing in public. Perhaps we are so used to speaking our minds, frankly asking questions and expecting frank answers, that little remains hidden to come out in such an embarrassing, indirect manner as public singing.

  The truth of this point is brought home even more sharply when it is my turn to sing. It’s hard for a happily married father of two to say too many hidden things to a hooker he’s just met and doesn’t want to sleep with, in a karaoke bar in central China, while singing Rod Stewart’s “I Am Sailing” at the top of his lungs. I try not to embarrass myself, but my poor performance is all too clear. Wu Yan grabs the microphone and sings another, slightly more upbeat number, again infusing it with all sorts of dark emotion, perhaps things she has never told a soul, and here am I, hearing it all poured out but not understanding.

  The second song over, she produces dice. Once again, I’m the dumb foreigner. It’s a game I don’t understand, and she can’t believe I don’t. She rattles the dice and throws them onto the table with a confident laugh, and whatever it is you have to do to win, I manage not to do it several times. While we’re playing, I tell her what I am doing here and ask her if she will answer my questions. She looks at the door to check that the mami is not coming in and then, after a long pause, agrees to talk, as long as I don’t use her real name.

  She is paid twelve dollars for accompanying a man to sing and chat and dance, and if the man wants the fourth accompaniment in his hotel room, he must triple the price, to nearly forty dollars. That seems a lot of money for this part of China. A third of that sum she must then give to the mami, who runs the karaoke bar.

  Sixty years ago, and throughout Chinese history before then, there were prostitutes like Wu Yan on every street, in every town. When the Communist Party rose, in the 1930s and ’40s, with the aim of reuniting China and making it
politically strong, it also set about wiping out gambling and opium and prostitution, and after it came to power, it largely succeeded. After 1949, society was transformed. At the height of Maoism, Wu Yan might have been a young factory worker, toiling alongside young men to build socialism, cared for from the cradle to the grave by the state.

  Now, though, socialism is dead and prostitution is back, and so are gambling and drugs. The intense, enforced morality of Communism was just a blip in the country’s long history. Sheer market forces have killed it off.

  Wu Yan’s story is most interesting, though, because it is not just about money. I was expecting what she said about her father dying when she was young, and her having to live with her grandmother, and how she had to leave school early because there was no money, and how she couldn’t get a proper job when she left school. Life is tough on the bottom rung of society in modern China, and the tragedies are legion.

  But there is a dangerous tendency for everything in modern China to be given an economic impetus, as though financial pressure is the only reason anyone ever does anything. We often fail to see that Chinese people are living, breathing, loving, hating individuals, who do things for complex psychological reasons, just like Westerners. And as Wu Yan sits talking about her life, her story doesn’t have that standard tone, which says, “I must do this or I won’t be able to eat.” She is slightly laconic, and cynical and angry.

  “So why are you working here?” I eventually ask her.

  There is a long pause.

  “There was a boy…” She pauses again for a long time, rattling the dice in the cheap plastic cup. “Wo ting xihuan de… who I liked a lot.” She is looking at the floor.

  “But he liked another girl.” She stops shaking the dice, then looks up at me with large, hurt eyes. There is a long silence as I try to compute what she is saying.

  “So…you’re…doing this to punish him?…Or to punish…yourself?”

  She doesn’t answer but reaches out her arm to me, the palm of her hand facing up. There are two jagged scars on her lower arm, as though her wrist had been cut. She looks angrily into my eyes.

  “It’s difficult being a person, isn’t it?” she says finally.

  I look at her and nod slowly. She shakes the cup with the dice inside and slams it down on the glass table.

  8. “Put the People First”

  The next morning I rise early, feeling a slight sense of trepidation. So far on my journey, I have not really done anything, or been anywhere, that I shouldn’t. It is perfectly easy to do that in China, to travel around, marvel at the phenomenal change, chat with all sorts of people, and never really be aware that, lurking underneath, there are still some terrible things going on. Today I am going to investigate one of them.

  As a radio journalist in China, I have reported on a fair number of sensitive stories, and there is a checklist of three things that I always make sure I have before setting off. First, an excellent local guide or driver, who knows people and can whisk you in and out of your destination before the police find out you’re there. Second, a safe cell-phone SIM card that the authorities don’t know about. And third, the right type of underwear.

  The most important parts of any reporting trip for me are my minidisks, the three-inch-by-three-inch digital disks on which I record all my interviews. If I return from a trip without them, then I have nothing to broadcast. When you go places you are not supposed to in China, you are running the risk of being detained and searched by the local police, who, needless to say, do not want you snooping around their turf and reporting on things that make them look bad. And if they detain you, they will invariably search you and your bags very thoroughly, and take your minidisks, camera, videotape, and notebooks if they find them.

  So I have developed a strategy, which I will be using today (because I intend to record my interviews), that means I am well prepared should it become clear I am about to be arrested. It involves having in my pocket a decoy minidisk, which I can switch at the drop of a hat with the minidisk in my machine (containing the sensitive interviews I have just done). With the dummy disk safely in the machine, the sensitive disk then disappears down my pants, where even the most belligerent Chinese cop is unlikely to venture.

  Now, if you have ever tried to hide a minidisk (or anything else that shouldn’t be there) in a pair of boxer shorts, you will find that, sooner or later, it will be slipping down your leg toward your ankle and, if you are unfortunate, spilling out onto the floor. If you happen to be standing in front of several fierce Chinese policemen, your goose will be cooked, and you will be led off to the cells (and, more to the point, so will your Chinese interviewees). So, take my advice. If you’re planning any sensitive journalistic missions in China, pack your Jockeys.

  The province of Henan definitely has an image problem. Henan (pronounced Huh-nan, not to be confused with the province of Hunan, pronounced Hoo-nan) is roughly the size of North Dakota, but whereas North Dakota has 642,000 people, Henan’s population is 93 million. That’s right. The single Chinese province of Henan has nearly 150 times more people than North Dakota, and in fact has a larger population than any country in Europe.

  Where there is a farm in North Dakota, there is a village (or two) in Henan. This means that plots of land here are very, very small and margins of subsistence very, very slim. Perhaps the squeeze on land is why so many people find their way into scams of every kind. Henan is the province that other Chinese people love to hate. It is amazing how often you will hear people say, “Henan ren hen huai. People from Henan are very bad.”

  Henan’s reputation has not always been bad. Quite the contrary. The province used to be synonymous with the glory, not to mention the robustness, of Chinese civilization, and consequently it was considered a most wondrous place, nestled in China’s heartland, far away from the dangers of any frontiers. The Shang dynasty (1750–1040 B.C.) had its capital near Anyang, in northern Henan. The Shang cast fantastic bronze vessels and developed the first known system of Chinese writing. The Longmen grottoes, southwest of Anyang, are world-famous for the 100,000 Buddhist images carved into rock faces in the sixth and seventh centuries A.D. And Henan’s very own Shaolin Monastery has, since the fifth century, been the center of martial arts in China. Everybody was kung-fu fighting in Henan when Europeans were still living in caves. And I haven’t even mentioned the extraordinary story of the Jews of Kaifeng, long-lost descendants of the Israelites who somehow found their way to Henan in the twelfth century, or before.

  But alas, all of those finger-licking venues will have to be the subject of someone else’s story, for they lie too far north from Route 312, and out of reach of this particular traveler, who must limit himself to the south, where there are fewer signs of the glory of past Chinese dynasties and more evidence of the horrors of the current one.

  I’m heading for what are known as the AIDS villages of southern Henan. Foreign nongovernmental organizations estimate that there are at least 300,000 people infected with HIV in Henan province alone, and the epidemic has been entirely caused, exacerbated, and then covered up by the local Communist Party government.

  AIDS is a problem that, in the Western mind, has not been largely associated with China. The epidemic that has decimated southern Africa has not yet reached such proportions in Asia, although the United Nations has warned that there could be 10 million cases in China by 2010 unless serious action is taken. China does have problems similar to those of the rest of the world when it comes to the drug and sex trades, which are both growing rapidly. But Henan province has been the center of another, perhaps even more shocking, source of HIV/AIDS: government-run schemes encouraging farmers to sell their blood.

  When central government subsidies came to an end as China moved from the planned economy toward a more market economy in the early 1990s, local governments had to think of ways to raise their own money. The Department of Health in Henan came up with the idea of paying ordinary farmers to give blood, from which plasma could be extrac
ted and sold to Western and Chinese pharmaceutical companies, which use it for making vaccines. The schemes were set up in other provinces too, but Henan’s was the largest scale, and consequently the worst affected.

  Blood-selling stations were set up in small towns, and large mobile clinics traveled to villages, where farmers discovered they could make more money than they earned in a month every time they sold their blood. The news spread like wildfire. Unfortunately, so did the HIV virus.

  A farmer would be taken into the blood donation van, and a needle would be placed in his arm. The extracted blood would go directly into a vat in the middle, where it would be mixed and the plasma extracted. Then, because Chinese people traditionally do not like to lose blood from their bodies, the blood would be pumped back into his arm.

  When, in the late 1990s, strange rashes began appearing on the farmers’ skin, local health workers had no idea what they were. Then, in 2000 and 2001, these peasants started to die. The local government would not allow any media coverage of what was going on, but in China’s more open social climate, it is much more difficult these days for government officials to keep secrets. A few reports were published by the more daring Chinese media outlets, and soon foreign journalists, including myself, were visiting the villages undercover and gaining interviews with the AIDS sufferers. For several years, the central government refused to accept that there was a problem, but suddenly, at the end of 2004, the leaders in Beijing changed their stance and launched an initiative to tackle the problem head-on. That, however, has by no means solved the AIDS issue in Henan, because of the age-old difficulty of enforcing central government policies at the local level. Henan authorities don’t want to look bad, so they do all they can to restrict any kind of access to the AIDS villages, even trying to stop doctors and officials sent from Beijing from doing their work.