Arriving in China
Why China? Why not? Vive la difference! I wanted to work with kids at some point, but never mustered the hutzpah to be a camp counselor. It was a great place to lose and find myself. My rent was paid and I had time to record my music. Fulfilling a teaching contract also earned me airfare compensation, so why not?
Boulevard of Dreams: A mother and daughter eat dinner at KFC
I spent my last hours in America bobbing around a swimming pool in North Hollywood with Frankie Jewett, a long time friend. She took me to the airport a few hours later for a midnight flight that eventually brought me to Shenyang, China. The smell of burning coal assaulted me as I stepped from the plane into the pastey rain. The rain coated the tarmac and leaked through the terminal roof into buckets scattered across the hallway floor. In the line for customs, one of the Korean businessmen standing next to me asked me "Why you come this... how you say... shit hole?" My visa was stamped and I was waved through; the palm trees and oranges of a few hours before may as well have been on the moon.
First Impressions
My early observations were of a loud and dirty place. I couldn't tell whether the drivers were the best or the worst I had ever encountered. Similarly, I could never tell whether a construction site was in the process of erecting or demolishing a building. Pedestrians and bicycles swarmed across busy streets. It was several days before I saw a pregnant woman, but only a few hours before I spied women comrades driving bulldozers and shoveling stones. It seemed that everywhere, people wanted to be my friend. Daily I tried to look past the imperfect surface to the subtleties below. 
The sound of crossing a Chinese street.
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A 1st century porter carries 21st century electronics |
Tricycles carry women, refrigerators |
I loved seeing porters carrying boxes of electronics with bamboo poles or the tricycle contraptions that were loaded with anything from refrigerators to sleeping secretaries.
Crowds
Huge crowds gather to stare at accidents, and they often were the jury in settling disputes: whoever could convince the most onlookers of their innocence would win. The police usually step in only when things are wrapping up. The American owner of our school once got into an argument with a taxi driver over a few Yuan (less than a dollar) and tactfully punched the driver in the face. As it turned out, the driver had far more friends and relatives who believed our boss was guilty -- we certainly did -- and he was fined some lavish amount. Because of our bellicose reputation, Westerners are often at fault in any accident, regardless of evidence.
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A woman in a greenhouse pushes oranges with bullhorn marketing. |
One of my feverish, Kafka nightmare visions is of billions of people making incessant, mindless noise. This vision was realized at this green house, where this woman was selling "home-grown" oranges with her bull horn. This is the preferred method of selling things in the streets. A vendor sets up his or her goods on a blanket, turns on a bullhorn with a recorded slogan and blasts it at full volume, attempting to be heard over the hundreds of other vendors doing the same thing. I witnessed a similar tactic in Japan, where supermarkets were speckled with blaring tape players perpetually belching jingles and sales pitches.
Don't go to China to get away from people. It's not as crowded as some countries, but personal space is a luxury that you can't afford while on the bus or shopping.
Traffic
China's industrial accomplishments are on course to dwarf those of America and Japan, but I can't figure out if they are a hive of industry or suffering from a bout of mass stupidity. They'd work 18 hours a day to pave a road, then tear the whole thing up because they forgot to put in the sewer. I suppose our bureaucracy isn't much better. You'd see stuff like a chair in the middle of the road marking a pot hole. Manhole covers were removed so that snow and other detritus could be shoveled away out of sight, but no one ever seemed to close them; I saw cars stuck in them, and I'm pretty sure I heard cries for help coming from swallowed pedestrians. The driving situation has no American equivalent: horns substituted for brakes and turn signals; headlights were optional at all times; and traffic "laws" were merely suggestions. Making a left turn was usually done by veering into oncoming traffic and heading for the bike lane on the opposite side of the road. That way you didn't have to wait for the light or turn signal in order to make your left. Oh yeah... and all of this without a seat belt.
Despite the drivers' heightened awareness to all the obstacles around them, accidents were rather common. While riding in taxis, I hit several bicycles, a couple pedestrians, and one bicycle hit me (he wasn't looking). I saw one cyclist in Beijing veer across a 4 lane highway without so much as a glance. I was sure that a bus and an Audi were going to kill him, but after a banshee screeching of brakes and tires, the man's bicycle was merely given a comical nudge. The man slowly looked over his shoulder, surprised to see cars on the road. This reminded me of what my friend Christian Borja told me about bona fide country bumpkins in Mexico. They don't know what to do when confronted with a street and cars, so they pull their ponchos up over their eyes and run across blindly.
In the mornings, the tractors arrived with vegetables from the countryside. There were a lot of these three wheeled trucks (san-lun-che) that I called bumpkin-mobiles. They had a distinctive thump-thump-thump sound and spewed out so much smoke that I came to believe that the Chinese had developed an internal combustion engine that ran entirely on heating oil.
If the ordinary pollution weren't bad enough, the ancestors are honored about once a month by the faithful burning yellow paper. A touching gesture, but the acrid smoke turned already black boogers to charcoal.
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