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A Libertarian in China

by Terry Hulsey
by Terry Hulsey

My family and I returned last month from three weeks in China. The experience provided some concrete references for the often abstract views about that country. As a Libertarian, my key questions were:

  • How open is the society?
  • Is it easy to travel about?
  • How pervasive is the influence of the state?
  • Are the people receptive to the basic principles of a free and prosperous commonwealth?
  • What are they like in general?
The mobility of foreigners

Notable in my visit through several key cities in the south was the absence of Americans. In three weeks I encountered not one native American citizen who was visiting directly from our country. And yet there is no state restriction on tourism from abroad. It is easy to get online and book a tour without any intervention or oversight from any government body aside from the visa required by most countries. The visitor can go to any part of the country and engage in any ordinary tourist activity such as hiking, sightseeing, bicycling, etc. and does not need to be a member of a package tour, whether state-sponsored or otherwise. Once there, it’s unlikely that you will take any notice of government at any level – at least I didn’t.

This current relative openness contrasts sharply from my visit of about 10 years ago, when I had to travel with a sponsor – in my case with a private citizen who later became my wife.

If you are thinking of a trip to spread the Gospel, please stay home: there is official indecision on the subject of religion. On the one hand, the government has since 1999 officially banned cults – especially the Falun Gong – and it makes occasional arrests of Christians for what it interprets to be political reasons. On the other hand it tolerates Christianity and the mass distribution of Bibles, and during my visit the government was busy restoring Saint Mary’s Catholic church in Kunming along with other church properties.

But entirely apart from what is and isn’t allowed, the whole idea of going to a country over a hundred times older than your own and lecturing its citizens on a subject at the heart of their culture is extremely presumptuous and in the worst form.

The influence of the state

During my entire stay I saw only three police interventions, all in traffic matters: one to stop an overloaded vehicle, one to check a taxi medallion (free hire being illegal, just as it is in America), and one to resolve a minor fender-bender. This is not to deny that there are few legal protections from the state: the recent arrest of journalists Shi Tao and Ching Cheong and the holding without trial of journalist Zhao Yan (not to be confused with the Chinese woman of the same name who was beaten by a Homeland Security guard) are proof of that.

The Chinese government, like our own, dabbles freely in purely economic affairs. And just as in our country, the Chinese state offers examples of public policy producing results exactly opposite of those intended by the law. For example its one-child can be better enforced in smaller towns, but many families have extra children in one place then migrate anonymously to bigger rural cities, adding the further problem of indigent poor migrating to cities.

The Chinese government is very busy in building infrastructure, but lacking omniscience of economic variables, the result is predictably uneven. In Kunming I witnessed the open sewers right alongside brand-new streets. In Guangzhou it has created overnight a very impressive university system. This is part of the central government’s effort to provide the next generation of technicians – an effort that is already gathering considerable momentum. But there is no state-prescribed cursus honorum for scholars, and since it’s obvious that ideas can’t be swallowed whole, no one can guess the outcome of that initiative.

The state has a few vestiges of its totalitarian past. There are the typical gold-on-red banners, but they aren’t conspicuous in the south as they are around Beijing. They almost all carry the same uninspired message: “Citizens [note, not comrades], be patriotic, honest, polite, and kind!” The personality cult is certainly non-existent with today’s current leadership of technocrats, but at least in Tiananmen Square you can still see the huge portrait of Chairman Mao hanging from the Gate of Heavenly Peace. The southern part of that square is dedicated to a macabre public exhibition of the Great Helmsman’s corpse – or what is said to be his corpse.

Sun Yat-Sen, an apostle of democracy in G.W. Bush’s vein and the first president of China’s first republic, is given honorific respect by the socialist state. (Another contributor to LewRockwell.com, the very learned Bevin Chu, makes a case for him as a proponent of limited democracy.) In this regard he is much like our “Founding Fathers” – prolific in lip service but not studied. Even Mao commemorated Sun Yat-Sen as far back as 1956 (page 339 of the 1967 edition of his Quotations). There are two museums to him: one in Guangzhou proper and a new one in his home town of Zhongshan.

The receptiveness of the Chinese to capitalism

Millions of Chinese have decided to xia hai – jump into the sea of entrepreneurship. In the small circle of family that I met on my three-week trip there was a stockbroker, an owner-manager of a company selling air ionizers to Wal-Mart, three successful businesswomen, and a handful of self-employed small businessmen. Anyone who has had business dealings with the Chinese can tell you that they are very astute, to put it mildly.

The Chinese economy is a juggernaut. No matter what time of night I looked out onto a prominent bridge in Guangzhou there were concrete trucks on the move. Everyone seems to be busy, and indeed “on the make.” I did not once see an idler on a street corner or in a public place.

In spite of this cultural foundation of industry and hard work, when I asked a professor at one of the new universities what he thought was the main problem facing the country, he gave a surprising answer. He replied that the main problem is getting all the people, many of whom were scrabbling just for their next meal a few years ago, or who just came from some night-soil-enriched farm, “to act like gentlemen.” It’s true that there is some jostling in public – literally so in some cases, since there is no notion of an English queue for a bus or other public service, for example – but this may be a function of recent poverty. In my own case I found strangers to be courteous and eager to please. An example of what he meant is the case of intellectual property theft: some businessmen are more than willing to satisfy the appetite for Western videos by making illicit copies of them. Although it’s not yet released for purchase, you can buy Cinderella Man for less than a dollar.

The character of the Chinese people

“Gentlemen” or not, it is certain that all of the Chinese I met lacked Western sentimentality. For example, there was no second thought about chasing beggars and cripples away from the front of businesses. Similarly, I found that there was no hesitation to “stretching” the terms of a bargain so as to make themselves gainers. My wife, who is herself native Chinese, was surprised to learn that a prominent business didn’t have a lost-and-found. It seemed to the clerks perfectly natural that property could be taken by the finder without any questions asked.

Once again, all of this may well be a function of recent poverty. Hardship has a way of removing sentimentality, and it has certainly been a way of life for the Chinese. The common greeting “Have you eaten?” attests to this fact. This long history of hardship may also explain their lack of restraint when the Chinese are able to eat their fill. It may also explain their willingness to eat just about anything that moves.

The historical inward-looking of the Chinese may account for several characteristics that may annoy the American traveler. On quite a few occasions I found myself the object of unabashed staring. I felt, however, that they were not trying to be rude, since the staring was never accompanied with ridicule, but that they were looking at me with a kind of scientific detachment, as if they had happened upon an animal as yet unknown to anthropology. I could suppose that they thought all humans should look like themselves. What was annoying to me was the scarcity of English speakers, in spite of the fact that English has been a mandatory part of the public school curriculum for a generation. But I can suppose that they have few opportunities to feel a need for English in the Middle Kingdom.

In general, my brief snapshot of the Chinese leads me to believe that they are most receptive to capitalism, and that it’s silly to suppose that they have some kind of ant-like instinct that disposes them to authoritarianism. Working with their noses to the grindstone for basic needs, they are beginning to lift their heads to higher things – just beginning to ask what constitutes the good life for a Chinese

23.July 2005 Saturday

A downpour greeted me when I arrived at noon in Guangzhou. According to Qiong this was a blessing since it brought a cool respite to the previous steamy week. It’s wonderful to see the two girls Miranda and Helen, Qiong, and Qiong’s father Mr. Chen. As we travel by taxi south from Guangzhou airport to the apartment on Hua Yuan Street we pass over a bridge on the Zhu jiang (Pearl River) just west of there, seeing the Hai yin qiao (Ocean Bridge), which is suspended from two white-pointed spires about 10 storeys tall with pinkish copper-painted cables streaming down from both sides of each spire. It had not been there ten years ago.

The rain has stopped. We arrive at Ji you xin an (Free Spirit Shore) condominiums and cross broken sidewalks and pass through an opening on the side nearest the river. The river is less than 200 yards away to the north. There are all the signs of construction (stacked scaffolding, wheelbarrows, stacked 1-meter square finished stone) but no activity. The courtyard which will obviously have a swimming pool and fountains is a mud hole. We ascend a slow elevator (automatic but nevertheless attended by a woman) to our apartment 2205. Walking to the front of our door you look through the breezeway to see the Hai yin qiao.

Qiong must leave to meet friends, but she wants me to get a massage from an enterprising shop that has just opened across the north driveway to cater to condo tenants. The two-room shop is plain with plain girls, who to Qiong’s surprise, refuse to do any massage on a man: a facial is the best they can give me. No, we must walk a block toward the river and down a side street to an incredibly seedy salon: two young women and three young men sit on broken chairs, watching TV; a hole in the front glass allows electrical access. To the right of a narrow stairway covered in long plastic grass (we will never know why) is a dark hole where one girl is having her hair washed as she lays on a two-foot-high table. After chatter between Qiong and the matron, I am led to the hole and asked to recline on a table alongside the other one. I do so. As I look up at the peeling ceiling panel my demise becomes evident: my throat will be slashed and the blood will go down the drain; the three young men will sit on my body to squeeze out the last drops of life; and my corpse will be rolled up in a dirty carpet and dumped. But this fate passes me by. Instead, a young woman starts a languorous hair washing with annoying flicks the fingers as they leave the scalp. Midway, one of the young men takes over, who, a graduate of the same school, also employs the same annoying flicks. I close my eyes and compose my exit sentence in bad Chinese. After toweling, I return to the main room where a boy with an orange mane of hair and long fingernails dries my hair. I give my exit sentence (Nuren ni gei wu yuan?) to nods of comprehension that gratify me, and I escape.

At the apartment I watch the two English channels from Hong Kong, looking in vain for BBC news, which I know to be accessible. Minus Qiong, we all eat. I go to our balcony, over 60 meters up and facing the Pearl River. Dark now, concrete trucks even at this hour are crossing the Hai yin qiao. Below it, the boats plying the river all trimmed in colored neon lights look interesting, but this planned excursion is put off since I suddenly feel terribly sleepy.

24.July 2005 Sunday

Sunday is a big day: it’s the day the round-eyed monkey is introduced to the Guangzhou relatives over lunch.

Morning begins with a walk to the playground on the west side of the river (which is nearest to the apartment), I and Mr. Chen leading the two girls. We visit the playground, which also has adult exercise stations. Miranda can make seven steps as she hangs from the ladder bars: she is strong now; only a year ago she could barely do one. We see a little boy urinating in public.

Occasionally a person will stop and look at me with that pinched, suspicious look. It is the same look the world over, given by those for whom each day is a struggle between life and death. I look at them and remember Whitman: “not till the sun excludes you, do I exclude you; not till the waters refuse to glisten for you, and the leaves to rustle for you.” My countrymen may be busy pissing in the well from which their children will drink, but I will remember you and the well that belongs to all of us. Of course the look is unknown to Americans: we grin ceaselessly; we say “Hi!”; cutting up, we want to do a cannonball into the big ethnic melting pot. Other gawkers look at me dispassionately, with a kind of scientific interest. I imagine them thinking: “How, like a fish, does his brain digest those two different images from either side of his nose?” However, I must say that there seem to be fewer of either variety since my last trip of ten years ago, and none of them show any ridicule toward me.

We go to a three-storey restaurant (we will visit even bigger ones) where we have rented a private room. Qiong will also meet a courier there who will take cash to pay for air tickets to the western part of our journey. At the round table we sit and eventually the relatives arrive: Victor Tian, a man who owns a company that makes air ionizers for Wal-Mart in Kowloon, in his 30s and, blessedly, an English speaker. He sits to my right. Around from him are his wife Awing, two cousins (the male of which is also Awing), the stooped and elderly Tai Gugu (“gugu” meaning “aunt” – Qiong’s father’s younger sister), uncle Yu the stockbroker (also Gu-Zhan because he’s the husband to the elderly gugu), Mrs. and Mr. Chen, another uncle (shu-shu) and auntie (shen-shen), and back to Qiong at my left. Lai-lai (the Tian’s girl) and the cousins’ boy sit with Miranda and Helen at a separate table.

Hot jasmine tea is first brought out, as it is at every restaurant. This is not immediately drunk, but rather poured into one of the soup bowls, where all the china is then washed. If possible the wash is then thrown out the door onto the street; if not, the waitress just takes it away.

At the public table the Chinese cast off restraint, especially the Chinese of Guangzhou, the Latins of the country. Hey, some people aren’t eating at all, and we’re feasting – hot damn! Talk is loud and simultaneous; bits of food are spat out onto the tablecloth; the edge of the tablecloth is used as a napkin; unapolagetic belching is in order: in short, it’s just this side of a food fight.

Uncle Yu is vivacious and interesting. He says all the right things. He remembers that ten years ago I sent money to the Chens when Qiong had lost an expensive violin. (It was owned by the Party – not the one providing keggers – and she was accused of stealing it, and was even led away to jail in the countryside. Mr. Chen advertised widely and someone saw one of his flyers and came forward with the missing violin.) I offer a ganbei – a toast to be drained in one gulp – and he points out to all that I have some knowledge of Chinese ways. I say (through Qiong) that the grasshopper has much to learn. At a later juncture I suggest that freedom is an orphan, being driven from its home in America, possibly to China. This is met with surprise – do I say that China is more free than America? No, I didn’t say that: I hope I don’t live that long. Their great-grandchildren may see what I mean.

Qiong’s courier arrives and we must replace one of the US one-hundred dollar bills: he has rejected it because an eighth of an inch is nicked from one corner. All larger denomination bills are closely inspected in China: counterfeiting is rampant. Indeed, Qiong had taken a fake 50-yuan (RMB) note before my arrival. Comparing it to the real thing, you see great craftsmanship. But a sheen is missing from the numbers, and, the usual downfall of the counterfeiter, the paper feels wrong.

We leave, traveling in Mr. Tian’s Lexus SUV to the Grandview Mall, the largest in Guangzhou. I entertain the tribe by describing some of my linguistic mishaps and innovate some more mishaps by trying to speak Chinese. Of course the chief difficulty of the language is the requirement that each of its four tones be sounded correctly. Ma can mean “mother,” “leprosy,” “grasshopper,” or “horse” (not counting the synonyms!) depending on the way it’s sounded: high, high with a waver, low, low with a waver. In short, the requirement is not only the memorization of words unrelated to Indo-European, but that the accent be perfect, right from the start. I tell them that not only do they get to see a monkey for free but they also get free laughs. I foresee a career as a Chinese humorist – where I will have little competition among this literal-minded people.

We drop the wives near shoe and clothing stores; Mr. Tian drives on to shops where I can bargain for the three things on my shopping list: a PC camera, an iRiver MP3 player, and a repair of my DVD player, whose tray sticks half-way open. For these I pay 100 yuan ($12.50), 360 yuan ($45 – not an iRiver but all the features and 256Mb memory), and 20 yuan ($2.50), respectively. It is good to see the young repairman work: he seems to sense how the tray must work, with a kind of empathy for the machine. He asks for only 10 yuan, but I insist on 20 (more might insult him). I also pick up some pirated DVDs for 80 cents apiece (The Polar Express and Cinderella Man), although the latter has not even been released to DVD yet, justifying my complicity by calling them conversation pieces – and anyway, Bill Gates said it: “As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours.” I check my email at one of the sales booths.

Going out, a man with some kind of bone deformity has lain down in front on the sidewalk, with a tin can for alms beside his head. Someone comes out and yells at him, gives him a poke with the foot, and chases him off.

Mr. Tian and I return in the SUV to pick up the wives. Negotiating traffic is hair-raising. Although lanes are painted, they are taken as merely suggestions, and on urban streets you never see that stripe of oil drippings that observance paints in the middle. There is indiscriminate competition for the asphalt: cars, trucks, people, shirtless men on bicycles with huge loads of vegetables and slaughtered unplucked chickens stacked over the rear wheel, motorcycles, and scooters all pass within an eyelash of death. But several natural laws seem to have emerged from this anarchy: in town no one dares go more than 30 kilometers per hour (less than 20 mph) except for rare non-competitive bursts of 50 kph; competitive claims to the right-of-way are resolved in a duel of horns; and the bigger vehicle or, for vehicles of the same size, the more aggressive driver, is generally given the right-of-way. During the motorized melee we talk about the UNOCAL deal that has put Chevron and a Chinese-government-controlled company in competition. Mr. Tian readily concedes that the US government is interfering. I’m not sure how he takes my characterization of Congress as a bunch of fair-weather capitalists and demagogic yahoos.

I consider all my observations of the Guangzhou street scene, and I feel that something is missing. It occurs to me that several things are conspicuously absent. There are no policemen, no speed limit signs, no pets, no bumper stickers, no panhandlers at corner traffic lights, and no babes in arms. For my entire stay I will see three police interventions, all in traffic: one to stop an overloaded vehicle, one to check a taxi medallion (free hire being illegal), and one to resolve a minor fender-bender. By a count of uniforms you would think that America is the police state. But I suppose the Chinese rely not on the show of force, but its swift and sure application upon apprehended criminals, putting to death more of them than the rest of the world combined. As for the missing stop signs, one might also question the absence of all sorts of state-posted signs bearing information, exhortations, and orders, disobedience of which in America can result in a fine. Local governments in China must get their money somewhere else, and with much less nuisance to the citizenry. I learn that there are no pets in Guangzhou because one must pay an annual fee of 10,000 yuan ($1250.00) to keep one. You can step into many things on a Guangzhou street, but dog poop is not one of them. I suppose the missing bumper stickers is a function of mass democracy, since these stickers are often an appeal to sway some faction of the voting public; and voting is certainly not a civic duty of the Chinese, as it is for American Supreme Court justices. The corner panhandlers are unceremoniously carted off by the authorities, without any yelps or squawks from the ACLU. As for the absence of babes in arms, I don’t know.

25.July 2005 Monday

Monday is a down day. Mrs. Chen, I, Miranda, and Helen walk to a large park just northeast of the Hai yin qiao. The steamy heat is enervating. Once inside the park the girls drive a motorized boat on the largest lake; they feed huge goldfish and coy there. Choral song comes from a small amphitheater facing the smaller lake. Getting closer, we see retired people singing. I know that fake uplift music anywhere: I ask Mrs. Chen if they are singing hong tongzi (“red comrade”) music, and somehow she understands me and says yes.

I see women walking arm-in-arm. Later there is a pair of men walking, one with his arm across the shoulder of his companion. They aren’t “gay.” They are the same guileless innocent pairs that Hedrick Smith recorded in his wonderful 1984 book The Russians. To see them is to understand, by its absence, what those in the West really mean by “self-consciousness”: it is in large part a self-monitoring, a self-censorship. “If I touch my friend’s shoulder, will people think I’m gay?” – or the flip side: “If I tonsil-wash Bruce in public will I get the thrill of offending someone?” “Gay rights” has done great harm to true friendship, which I think Aristotle was right to view as a love higher than romantic love: the latter introduces many complications, lacking in the spiritual exchange between friends. But this notion of friendship is certainly not what commonly passes under that word, whether in English or Chinese. The great majority have acquaintances instead; true friendship is a great natural mark of distinction. And fry me in a vat of PC oil, but the democratic levelers are at war against every natural distinction: families, social hierarchies, the natural aristocracy of ability, and even individual identity, which is rooted in sex – all to be pummeled into the shapeless dough that the revolutionary will remake into the new socialist man (cf., Igor Shafarevich, The Socialist Phenomenon). The strolling innocents are in for a nasty collision with democratic modernity.

26.July 2005 Tuesday

Zhang Qiang, a violin teacher in Guangzhou Conservatory, who has been working in Belgium the last few years, arrives in front of our apartment at 9:30am. Not with him is his wife Li Dan from Shanghai, now teaching in the preschool of the Guangzhou Conservatory where Qiong went to school. She is away with their two girls Qiau-Qiau and Yang-Yang, which is probably a fortunate thing.

He drives us through University Island in the Guangzhou suburb of Panyu, a part of town thick with new condos and gated communities for the well-heeled and nouveau riche, and just 16 miles north of Macao. This suburb is in fact the site of the original settlement of the city in 214 BC. He has given up a job in Belgium to come back to a professorial position on this new campus.

University Island is in fact surrounded by the Pearl River, which fans out around Guangzhou and thus has very many branches. It is the central government’s new showcase in higher education. It provides newly built facilities for old departments of established universities, such as the Guangzhou University’s music department where Zhang Qiang is a professor, and new departments, such as the School for Foreign Economic Partnership. Inside the former there are even humidity-controlled rooms for practice and instrument storage. Outside, the landscaping alone represents a serious investment: flowers, shrubs, and grasses are meticulously trimmed. Conspicuous by absence is the motorized lawn mower. It is used here, I am told, although I have only seen two during my entire three weeks in China; but I have seen very many people crouching barefoot, cutting grass with something between a carpet knife and a scythe.

It is impressive that just a few years ago only ancient shacks existed on what is now University Island. The inhabitants of these shacks took it ill that all their land was being confiscated, so much that Zhang Qiang tells us that students are cautioned not to get their fresh vegetables from them: they might be poisoned. But most of the durable structures of this village were preserved and the village renovated.

For lunch we go to a restaurant on the island where water sheets down an entire wall of glass. Once inside you have the unusual feeling of dining inside a waterfall.

Afterwards we are driven to our check-in at the fabulous five-star Chime Long Hotel, built in 2001, which features two glassed-in atriums: one with a pair of white tigers and one with a flock of flamingos. After my wife’s wheeling and dealing in Cantonese we get a huge suite with a king-size bed and two twin beds for the kids for about $100 US per night. (If you do only English, that amount still gets you a great regular room.) The theme of the hotel is African safari, since it is host hotel to the giant African animal nature preserve, the Xiang Jiang Safari Park, next door, and nearby Night Zoo. We go swimming in the giant pool, with an outdoor spa under a thatched roof.

That evening we have dinner in Yu ming xin cun (Fisherman’s New Village), a five-storey restaurant where you walk in to meet a six-foot alligator, a menu item of course, roaming freely though attended by a man in rubber boots. Fortunately his mouth is taped shut with black electrical tape. For about a hundred feet in front of you, open aquariums and, on the floor in front of them, plastic buckets of water, are filled with every imaginable live creature of the deep: shrimp, prawns, lobster, eels, turtles, urchins, sea slugs, flounder, grouper. Girls with the traditional Suzie Wong silk dress with a slit to the thigh take you to your numbered table, then back to the sea creatures. Add a new term to the French list of huissier and sommelier: your poissonnier, who, dressed in the restaurant’s uniform and pen in hand, now approaches you to write down your selections. You can point out the particular critter you want if it’s big, or if you’re fussy about your choice. The choice is written on a book of labels with carbons behind; the label, bearing your table number, is stuck on a scale for the next worker in rubber boots and plying a fish net to fulfill. This worker takes the thrashing prey to cooks along the wall, who start to work and have it ready for your table just minutes after you’ve sat down. Restaurants of this setup, not unique to Yu ming xin cun, will give me the best seafood I’ve ever tasted. And you wonder why Americans, who prefer theirs deep-fried in a blanket of batter oozing oil, don’t care for seafood.

At the table with Zhang Qiang, I ask why he returned to China. He explains that in Europe “every move you make is regulated” and that he was always made to feel he was taking a job from some European. Also, his money goes further here, and this is his home. I ask him about China’s prospects for the future. He replies that the main problem is getting all the people, many of whom were scrabbling just for their next meal a few years ago, or who just came from some night-soil-enriched farm, “to act like gentlemen.” I wonder how to compare these formerly poor Chinese with the “gentlemen” of South LA, or Oak Cliff in Dallas, or South Bronx – how to compare them with the multicultural “innerleckshuls” (as Flannery O’Connor put it)…. But I don’t say anything.

27.July 2005 Wednesday

The Xiang Jiang Safari Park is the largest of its kind in Asia, and home to one-third of all the known white tigers in the world – 89 of about 270. While waiting in the shade for the family to buy tickets, I provide waiting Chinese with another curiosity. Some boys, aged about 10 to 12, surround me to get a closer look at the white animal even more strange to them than the tigers. I humor them by saying, “OK, it costs one yuan to look at the monkey.” An adult among them knows English and translates. They laugh. Another adult asks for a lone photo of me, and without asking why, I comply with a smile suitably big enough to identify myself as an American.

The park is divided between the open-air native habitat and the zoo. After a quick bus tour of the open-air side, we walk through the zoo in the steamy heat. We get the obligatory photos of pandas, as well as albino wallabys. The girls are variously photographed on the backs of a pony and a Bactrian camel, and even beside and petting a white tiger – an event that insurance companies would surely forbid in America. There is a bird show where parrots fetch money held aloft by spectators, one where baby elephants play soccer against young humans, and one where chimpanzees compete in various games against humans. In one of the latter, the wife Qiong is drafted into a tug-of-war against a chimp and loses – but after a respectable showing. The most spectacular event has 14 white tigers jumping through flaming hoops and a tug-of-war between a white tiger biting the rope and humans outside the cage pulling it (after adding a fifth human, the tiger loses). We are reminded that this is the only white tiger circus event in the world after the mishap at Siegfried and Roy’s show in Las Vegas. Once again, considering the humans pulled against the bars of the cage, the insurance companies obviously don’t rule over here.

In the cool of late afternoon we take a golf cart tour of the open air half of the park. Our driver is a young man fluent in English, knowledgeable, and funny. Lots of photos. Bruno Bettelheim was right: the kids have a magical affinity for animals.

Back at the Chime Long Hotel, we meet not relatives but family friends. “Joseph” Wong is a dealer in scrap metal with a pretty wife Zhuodan, who used to own a photography studio with my wife’s sister. Joseph is an interesting character. His dark, cropped head is as square as building block and he has a very flexible expressive mouth, usually turned down after uttering some wry or sardonic comment. His face reminds me of many drawings of the Chinese emperors, especially the first one, Shihuangdi: with the nostrils flared he could appear very cruel. Squat and powerful, he is dressed in a camouflage t-shirt and shorts, and he has a heavy belt replete with all sorts of gear: digital camera, cell phone, keys attached to climbers’ carabiners. A wireless pipe microphone connects him to his cell phone, which apparently rings several times during dinner: at those times he’s talking to his food.

“What kind of business are you in?” I ask him. He replies in good English, telling me about his dealings in scrap, especially scrap metal and lead from batteries. For most of his business he rounds up used vehicle batteries around Guangzhou, ships them to Vietnam where they are dismantled, and then reimports them to battery makers in Guangzhou. There is something shady about the detour into Vietnam, which may be illegal in itself, not to mention the possible dumping of pollutants into that country, but I don’t press Joseph about it.

They drive us through the night over new eight-lane expressways in their new Chinese-made compact to their house in Zhongshan, over an hour away, flying at 110 kph (almost 70 mph). Downtown Zhongshan is interesting, with huge floodlit billboards in the heart of the city. Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Subway have a presence. Joseph drives right through the first stop sign I’ve yet to see, just like the guys in front of him. I tell Joseph that the Chinese when driving must have a sixth sense like fish in the water, so that they all move together in a school. “Well, you don’t see fish bump into each other, do you?” he answers. We turn down a narrow alley near the heart of the city and park on the curb. A woman is scavenging trash bins in the dark.

Once inside, I ask if Joseph has an Internet connection and he says yes and shows me his office. He does not drive to work, but conducts all his business out of this room, which is equipped with several computers with a fast Internet connection sitting on a big desk buried in papers. I mentally excuse his non-stop use of the cell phone when I think of what long hours are signified in America by “owning your own business.” I ask him if there are any government restrictions on his use of the Internet. He says that there are supposed to be, for example the restriction on accessing pornography, but he smiles and says that they’re easy to circumvent. I tell him that I won’t be doing anything like that. He leaves me alone, free to shut down and go to bed when I like.

28.July 2005 Thursday

After a good sleep-in, we have a look at the walled three-storey home. It’s about 40 meters square with an eight-foot wall topped with vines and barbed wire. Doors and windows of the house are kept open, and our hosts seem to tolerate the heat very well. The garden on two sides has pomegranate, lime, and peach trees. (The trees and grass are maintained for 50-yuan [about $6] a month; a housekeeper comes in every morning at 7am [100 yuan a month].) There is a swing in the shade and a nude marble of a Roman woman. It is quiet.

After a big Western lunch at Prince Grill in downtown Zhongshan, we drive to see a quarter-million yuan home where the owner Mr. Li is directing building. In an unusual arrangement, the land itself is not owned; it is leased from an element of the People’s Army, who are the true owners. There is a small waterfall and goldfish pond in the back and a great view over a valley, where tractors are clearing for further development.

We drive to the new Sun Yat-Sen museum – quite different from the museum shown to visitors in Guangzhou, only the latter of which existed ten years ago. This new museum is a memorial to his birthplace in the village of Cuiheng. His home and many artifacts of his life are preserved there. After his death in 1925, the county was renamed for him, and in 1983 the city was renamed for him. Although he founded the Kuomintang, the political party that became the steadfast enemy of the Communists, and which fled to Taiwan after its defeat by them, the Communists also hail him as Guofu – the Father of the Nation. Both sides indeed have a right to claim him: his thought was a muddle. He confessed to be influenced by Karl Marx, Lincoln, Hamilton, and Henry Clay, to name a few. His most systematic utterance is the Three Principles of the People: nationalism, democracy (as foggy as George W. Bush’s notions and equally ignorant of the Founders’ distrust of it), and something called “the principle of livelihood,” which marries Marx and Clay to enshrine the interventionist state. As he puts it in his Fundamentals of National Reconstruction: “After comparing various schools of economic thought, I have come to the realization that the principle of state ownership is most profound, reliable and practical.” Well, considering the context of the times, it’s a bit much to have expected Adam Smith or David Ricardo of the man.

I sign the visitors’ ledger: “Democracy: the ideal of absentee vote counters.” Don’t worry about it: the Chinese don’t understand it either.

After several hours of museum walking, all of us are ready for swimming at the all-indoor Hawaii water park. 100 meters by 50 meters, the facility has slides, jets, hot jacuzzis. All this for just a few yuan per person.

Afterward we are ready to eat. On the road I see the big gold characters on a long red banner on the side of one building. My suspicions are confirmed: it is a “public service announcement.” It says: “Citizens, be patriotic, honest, polite, and kind!” Hard to argue with that. In fact it has a certain groove that might work in Los Angeles. Nothing so hard-edged as George Washington saying “government is force,” you know. We continue downtown to a seedy but very “authentic” restaurant, which nonetheless has the Suzi Wong greeters. Just inside the door are buckets of menu items, most of them alive. There are squirming grubs – OK, call them silkworm larvae and eat up – giant earthworms, beetles, waterbugs, snails, along with the usual sea critters, eels, turtles, and frogs. I walk past and have rice noodles, stir-fry beef, and bai cai.

29.July 2005 Friday

After a good night’s rest at Joseph’s and Zhuodan’s, we insist on riding the bus back to Guangzhou, saving them a boring drive there and back. In the afternoon Qiong’s old friend Xiao Mei and her husband Gu He and family drop over for conversation before our plane flight. I am somewhat puzzled that so few Chinese can speak English, despite its being a school requisite at all levels for some 20 years. Quite aside from the convenience to myself, it would certainly be a vocational benefit to the speaker. I learn that the English teachers however are Chinese. The result is the same as state-certified English speakers teaching German or French in American high schools: it can never give fluency.

We get the airplane to Kunming at Guangzhou’s modern airport. Like every flight I’ve ever had on an Asian airline, it’s pleasant. There’s a genuine courtesy and desire to please. Besides that, all the stewardesses are damned good looking. And come on, I want you to say that word OUT LOUD: stewardesses. STEWARDESSES! If you remember the days when there wasn’t “political correctness” or other forms of thought police, I know you feel better. Sometimes I have the impression that the Western flight attendant or clerk does a quick mental scan, asking himself: “Is there a rule I can reference to deny this traveler his request, or show him that although I make a tenth of his salary I’m the boss here?” Also, it is very clear that the Western airlines no longer make youth or attractiveness a job requirement.

Qiong’s old friend Hong Jian and her husband Don Zhou and Tong-Tong, their four-year-old girl, meet us at the airport. On the way out we are greeted by deliciously cool and dry night air, some 20 degrees Fahrenheit less than Guangzhou, and some 30 less than Shanghai, which is gripped by a heat wave. Many are in long sleeves, it’s so cool. We see the n’er-do-wells annoying the travelers: some offer carts to arrivals for a fee, when everyone seems to know that the carts are free; some approach us with the same cockamamie story that if they only had a few yuan they could get their car going, which is either carrying or going to a sick relative, blah, blah, etc., etc. – Chinese versions of Krishnas, Moonies, Scientologists, and the usual airport crackpots, except that they don’t know how to say “Do you know Christ as your personal savior?”

Don Zhou knows some halting English, but at least he’s eager to try to speak it. I see some amazing things, and he tries to answer my questions, often with my wife’s translation. But what impresses me about him is the way he answers: he doesn’t want just to dispose of the question; he tries to see where I’m going with it and tries to answer comprehensively. For example, unlike Guangzhou, the streets of Kunming, even at 9pm, are filled with children: youngsters, toddlers, and especially those elusive babes in arms. Don Zhou explains that this is the result of China’s official one child per family policy: in small rural towns it’s easy to enforce this policy. But in the larger cities like Kunming, where people arrive anonymously every day, it’s not possible. So the rural people, who cling to the old idea that a large family is old age insurance, come to the city and live where they can, even if they have no job or even no skill. This also explains the presence of lean-tos and shacks around the city – another of my questions. He says that he had covered this story as a reporter for the Kunming People’s Daily.

He also explains that there is no fee for keeping pets, hence there are a number of dogs on the street. In fact, there is a pet market in the middle of town where we will go tomorrow.

Kunming streets are in a state of development. Driving down a nice paved road, we suddenly are bouncing along a pot-holed gravel one. We drive alongside a dark canal, and Don Zhou points out that where we now see apartments, only a year ago was a field. We reach a paved street again, turn, and see street vendors working over smoky barbeques, narrowing the street. Bare light bulbs illuminate carts of fresh vegetables and meat, which can be bought for home use or selected for the grills. Across the street from the vendors someone has dumped a trash can full of lettuce and other vegetables. Someone is poking through the pile with a stick.

We stop at a guardhouse where uniformed young men peer in to verify that it’s someone they know. They salute with white gloves and raise the barrier.

Inside the new apartment with ash hardwood floors there is evidence of good taste constrained by parsimony: There are few but quality pieces of furniture in white fabric, one with a bowl of fresh flowers; there are good curtains; there is a piano. But there is nothing on the walls, there are no carpets, and despite his being a reporter, there is no computer. (“I have one at work,” Don Zhou explains.) Clearly, much of their income goes to the nice apartment, with the decision to acquire furnishings piece by piece, and with care.

Incredibly, they want to give up this new apartment to us entirely, and stay at Hong Jian’s teaching studio in town. More thoughtfulness: they have put Western breakfast food in the kitchen, including eggs and fresh-baked white and wheat bread. Qiong says we should accept the arrangement.

That night after the girls are asleep, we go into the study where the VCR-DVD player is located. An entire wall is filled with at least a thousand books, including Dan Brown’s The daVinci Code in Chinese, poetry, and politics – more evidence that indeed Don Zhou lives the life of the mind. We view the pirated Cinderella Man, which is a very bad copy: the sound seems to come from a barrel, there is occasional coughing, and a shadow of a person finding a seat passes over the screen. Someone had held the equipment in a theatre. As I said, this was only a conversation piece, and I hope that’s been a lesson to you. – Hey, did I mention where you could get a fine $20 Rolex on the street in Guangzhou? OK, I kinda figured you weren’t interested.

30.July 2005 Saturday

The oldest restaurant in Kunming is our first destination at the center of the city, where upstairs we have lunch of the locally renowned guo qiao mi xian (“over the bridge rice noodles”), a giant bowl of noodles cooked in boiling chicken stock into which we rake various thin cold cuts, onions, and green vegetables. It’s like a small cauldron of chicken noodle soup, with a floating film of oil to keep it hot. In spite of the old admonition “never to eat anything bigger than your head,” everyone except me finishes off his bowl.

At the curb outside the restaurant an old man wearing the traditional pointed rice farmer’s hat is selling crickets for three yuan each. They’re not to eat – where are your manners? – but for the sound to keep you company at home, or to help you sleep. The crickets are in a little prison of woven bamboo leaves, an angular wiffle ball. The cricket reminds me of gentle, sympathetic Lafcadio Hearn, who describes just such an “atomy” in one of his last Japanese writings, entitled “Kusa-Hibari” (Wandering Ghost: the Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn, Jonathan Cott, ISBN 0394571525, page 398). I want to buy one, but have nowhere to put it. Also, what to do with it when I leave?

We go out into the street where there are a number of open-air markets: a parakeet market is directly in front and a puppy market is diagonally across from the restaurant. We spend a long time wandering around. Trinkets are bought, mostly for the girls. I see a gun, but it is plastic. I ask Don Zhou whether he has any kind of home defense. No, he doesn’t. Well, does he have a weapon? No, that’s illegal. In some areas it’s possible to get a hunting permit, but only the rich can afford it. Well, don’t the criminals shoot up everybody? No, they don’t have guns either, although some have been known to use homemade pistols. A nationwide offensive against criminals was launched in 1996 (under the rubric “Strike Hard”), with no official close, but this rounded up only a few hundred weapons. All things considered, you’re pretty safe from criminals in China – the unincorporated ones at least.

We take a taxi for the biggest park in Kunming. Watching the city go by, it seems to me that the girls here seem to be prettier than in subfusc Guangzhou, especially in the appearance of their skin and in their making an effort to look stylish. In all the cities on this trip, I see no billboards along the highways, especially between cities: they are reserved for the middle of town, where they are huge and floodlit by night. One of them congratulates officials of the on-again, off-again Singapore-Kunming Rail Link.

Construction techniques are similar everywhere in these southern cities. It seems that building the concrete shell is the heart of all construction. In Guangzhou especially, these older residential hives cluster with depressing regularity, nearly all stopping at nine storeys: a law had been passed requiring elevators only after the tenth. Sometimes it seems that the shell was built with electricity and plumbing as an afterthought, since they can be exterior to the building. There is no central heating, and air conditioning usually consists of a hole for the unit, punched into the wall separate from the window. Conspicuous by absence, these units are very rare in Kunming, the “Spring City,” and consequently the buildings look nicer. We pass a new mausoleum-like building. I am told that it is a regional Party administration, but that despite the structure it’s not too powerful. Most of the public affairs decisions are made by the city and by Beijing.

We arrive at Cui hu (“Emerald Park”) to pedal boats on the lake there. There is an hour of unhurried talk as we pedal around. Willow trees line the lake. Old people sit on benches there and watch us softly churn past, children playing around them. We finally go out, walking past a shaded square filled with earnest mahjongg players with numerous onlookers. We catch a taxi home.

Lao Zhou (“old Joe”), a very close cousin to Qiong, comes over to pick us up at the apartment that Hong Jian and Don Zhou have surrendered. This is another big grin-to-the-relatives dinner where I meet Lao Jiu, his young wife Xia, their son, the elderly Kong shu shu, his wife Tai Po, and a rich aunt Yang Ling Ling, a successful businesswoman. None except Lao Zhou and Yang Ling Ling make a big effort at conversation. Food is shared from the big rotating lazy Suzan in the center of the table, but I home in on to doe zi (shredded potatoes with hot green peppers) and xuanwei huo tui (fatty ham in a bed of sauerkraut steeped in soy sauce) – though the local mushrooms are good, too.

Qiong brags on our girls; Lao Zhou tries to make a remark to the effect that his son is lazy, but his wife says “stop right there.” There’s a lot of subtext here, and I really don’t want to know about it. I realize that the really great thing about being an American is that unless you’re from the South and read a lot, you’ve got no history – not the kind that pits families and nations against each other. If you want history you go to the library and whip up a genealogy – and nobody gets hurt. But I am from the South, and still pissed off – mostly at Lee, just the way Allen Tate was. I think of the popular song from The Band: “He was just 18, proud and brave; but a Yankee laid him in his grave; I swear by the blood below my feet….” What blood? Do I have the right to compare my relatively puny half-million Confederate dead to the some 35 million Chinese victims of the state since 1949? But here now, I’ve got nobody to talk to, and I’m chattering to myself! Think of the great meal in front of you and enjoy!

31.July 2005 Sunday

This morning we meet Xiao Boa, Qiong’s very close cousin, who first takes us to Qiong’s old music conservatory overlooking Lake Dianchi, the eighth largest lake in China, which is west and south of the city. She was sent to this school from Dali at age 12 to continue violin study. After crossing from Kunming over the lake to its west side the road becomes potholed dirt and gravel: piers for a brand new multi-lane expressway rise up alongside. Qiong points to the spot where she would lay in the grass reading, with a fishing pole in the lake. It would be noisy there now.

We wake up a dozing student who is at the conservatory’s guardhouse, and he lets us drive through. Some of the buildings from 25 years ago are still there. Between two dormitories are long concrete tables where the students washed their own clothes by the centuries-old pounding and rubbing method. We go into Qiong’s old dorm, up to the third floor on the end facing the lake, where her room was. Although there was no plumbing, heating, or cooling when she was there, I can easily imagine how the trees dappled light over her window, and how simple, serene, and perfect it once was.

We take a cable car part way up the Long Man (Dragon Gate), a steep cliff overlooking Lake Dianchi, and start walking a single lane asphalt road the rest of the way. It’s cool, and since it’s Sunday, many people are out, including older folks. Along the side of the road opposite the mountain are vendors. Most are holding great wads of cash folded in half, but there is not a policeman in sight. Two different booths are selling original 1967 editions of Quotations from Chairman Mao, with English on the right facing the Chinese. I buy one for 60 yuan ($7.50). Near the cable car were Buddhist temples, but along the ascent there are only Daoist temples: the ancient creator of the path wanted everyone to know that the Daoist gods were superior. We crest the mountain, which lacks a dramatic spot to mark the event, and begin the descent. Xiao Boa carries Miranda on his back down the peak, so I have to do the same for Helen.

That evening there is a big dinner at Lao Zhou’s house, with local mushrooms and local huo tui (ham). I sense a bit of tension at the table and feel that I am being tested. What, are these thimble-gut Chinese trying to out-drink an American, and with German ancestry besides? Fools! So I accept every offered ganbei, and follow with one of my own. Over four liters of beer disappear in short order. And since I know that you must show deference by touching your glass lower than those around you, and since they know that, there is soon an I-can-go-lower-than-you competition. Hamming it up, I thrust my glass under the table and call out a ganbei. They roar with delight. After a good deal more of this, Lao Zhou thinks I’m tanked, and he says, “OK, OK, drink just half this time.” I shake my head like a beaten man. “No… no,” I mutter, looking sadly at my full glass. Then I holler: “Let’s ganbei!” and I drain my glass in two seconds. A great roar of laughs goes up, and I know they’re ready to go on a Long March with me any day, comrades forever.

People start to leave soon after, and when Lao Zhou’s wife Xia asks him to drive her to the tea house that she owns and manages, the party breaks up. With the feast ravaged in front of us and the ashtrays full, Qiong serves as translator between myself and Yang Ling Ling. I ask her if she can tell me anything about the Mao years, and she tells about the time of the disastrous Great Leap Forward, Mao’s attempt at complete economic self-sufficiency in 1958 that starved to death some 27 million Chinese. She remembers being constantly tired and hungry and how so many people had terrible skin conditions because of their subsistence diet. I ask her whether she prefers Hu Jintao to Mao, and I am astonished to learn that she not only prefers Mao but still admires him. I am unable to get to the reason for this admiration, other than the feeling of solidarity in a great cause, in spite of (or possibly because of) the great suffering it entailed. Beyond this, she herself might not even know. But this single reason divides two moral orders among human beings: those who hear a summons within their own hearts, and those who hear what is blared into their ears by a clerisy waving banners that change from one day to the next, like those crowds forever circling outside Dante’s hell, stung by hornets.

Zhou returns and asks if Qiong and I want to go see the tea house, which is actually close by. We go. The tea house is the product of Xia’s wanting her own business, and has been recently acquired. There are some quiet tables partly open to the street and just close enough to see the street life without being noisy. Inside are more tables on the right side, and a row of closed rooms on the left. The four of us, Lao Zhou, Xia, Qiong, and myself, go into one of the vacant closed rooms and sit down at a kind of automated mahjongg table: you can sweep the polished bone pieces off into a hole in the table, press a lever, and suddenly the pieces magically appear in neat ranks before each of the four players, facing a green felt battlefield. We go out to one of the tables near the street and have very expensive black tea. It is very strong, so that you can’t even drink the first two or three brews. We sip this in very small glasses. This is a good moment, and I silently wish the tea house success, thinking that it would have a hard time in America. But at last we do need to put the two girls in bed, and we must leave.

Later that night, when we are unable to sleep because of the tea, Qiong tells me the real reason for the tension at the table at the start of the evening. It had really nothing to do with me, the foreigner. Under the pretext of meeting Qiong, aunt Yang Ling Ling the rich businesswoman had brought together some feuding family members hoping that later they might make up. More subtext. All these studiously polite people – Chinese, French, Arabs – are just alike in that way: you never know what they’re really thinking.

1.August 2005 Monday

Toward dawn the wife and I sleep at last, but we are up for a late lunch at Jiang Brothers Restaurant downtown. It faces the Jin ma bi ji fan (golden horse and emerald rooster gate), at the heart of the city. Inside the noise is terrific, and yet there is a small stage where various ethnic minorities – principally from the Bai and Dai peoples – present a show, and manage to be heard by amplification. Afterward, waiting outside for a taxi, I look down a pleasant vista of what seem like sycamore trees lining the street alongside the restaurant. I ask Kong shu shu about this, and he tells me that they are fawen shu (French trees). However, most trees along the streets are small four-foot-high shrubs with small yellow flowers, which I am told are called baun shu, but which I can’t otherwise identify.

I spend the afternoon at a wan bar (Internet cafe) near Don Zhou’s apartment. I am surprised that he does not know about it, since it is just around the corner from his house, and very easy to spot: the Chinese character is a box with the bottom missing, with two “X”s inside. These places are much alike, all charging about 2 yuan per hour of unrestricted Internet access. Don’t expect to order drinks inside the “bar,” however: you walk in to see just rows of computer terminals. It looks more like the computer lab at a community college, and most of the patrons are of college age. The browsers typically open onto Baidu, the Asian-character complement to Google, which just in the next few days will become an American IPO, with already a sixth of Google’s traffic even before the public offering. (In just a week its stock price will move from $27 to $122.54 a share.) Those around me seem to be especially interested in playing computer games with impressive graphics and intense interaction. These wan bar are supposedly monitored by the government, with some sites restricted, but I was able to get to all the popular sites, including Lew Rockwell’s blog and the Drudge Report, but not CNN.

For a light dinner Don Zhou, six children, and I go to Teresa’s Pizza for dinner, near Yunnan University, on Wenlin Street. We later cross this street, which is completely torn up by construction, to check out Lan Bai Hong (Blue-White-Red) French Cafe. Both are simple bistros, which for reasons that I did not experience during my visits are highly rated by the guide books. But of course they exist as conversation spots for the students – not for their menus.

2.August 2005 Tuesday

This morning we are up to catch the bus for Dali, a smaller city some 400 km (250 miles) to the west. We travel along the new four- and six-lane Highway 320, and will drive through at least three long tunnels through the mountains, on a trip that will take us five hours. Along the way I see many impressive things – quite apart from the smooth ride of the new road itself.

Getting out of Kunming takes some time, since there is highway construction. On the road there are only PetroChina and SinOpec gas stations – although I’m informed that a few smaller ones do exist. Most of the rural houses along the way look much the same: there is the initial meter of the foundation made of rocks, on top of which is packed earth. The roof is variously clay tile, galvanized metal, or even straw. There are few windows. But surprisingly, outside of the meanest house you can see a satellite dish pointed up to the southern sky. The green earth buckles up wondrously, and you see that every arable square meter is carefully terraced and cultivated – primarily with what looks to me, a city slicker, like corn (maize). By the small, imperfectly straight, and very closely planted rows, one sees that no mechanical harvest is conceivable: it’s all done by hand, and it’s everywhere you look. Occasionally there is a copse of slender, straight, and very tall trees – up to 30 meters – some looking like birches, others like firs. More common along the road are the shrub-like baun shu with their bright yellow flowers.

Since no less than Voltaire supplied an encyclopedia article about testicles, I feel no constraint in mentioning Chinese toilets, which the bus dutifully stops to honor. The Western porcelain throne is definitely a luxury article, but is everywhere gaining acceptance. The typical facility however is nothing more than a dirty hole in the floor, over which you must squat with no aid for raising or lowering yourself. Gathering up your pants so that they don’t touch the floor and simultaneously aiming your release so that you don’t miss the hole requires gymnastic ability. Even in the Zhongshan Sun Yat-Sen museum, a brand-new toilet facility kept this ancient arrangement. In that case the “hole” was a half-meter of porcelain, and had a joystick flush handle, but it still made no concession to the West: one still had to crouch agonizingly low so as not to spatter effluvia. Proponents of the hole might make the case that the low crouch facilitates the parting of the buttocks and allows the body weight to bear down, squeezing out the contents of the entrails. Well, Voltaire allowed that absence of huevos might better promote conjugal action, too, but I for one plan to hang on to mine. I take the negative of this resolution, and bring as evidence a scene in Harry Wu’s poignant memoir of life in a Chinese re-education camp. In his Bitter Winds (a title not cited to stoop to the pun) a stoic musician is seen rising from this position and having to stuff his viscera painfully back into place. Might the long application of this toilet technique have contributed to his condition? But enough of this.

When we arrive in Dali, Qiong’s brother Zhouan and family meet us at the station. He allows himself to be constantly interrupted by his cell phone: he is self-employed procuring buses for travel agencies and tours, and independent bus drivers are calling to declare their availability. We drive out of the Dali proper, passing through traffic lights that give a digital reading of how many seconds until the light changes, and passing a new mausoleum-like building – another regional Party administration, as in Kunming. We travel north along the west shore of Lake Erhai (Ear Lake), headed for the ancient city of Dali, a jewel less than one mile square, with huge gates neatly in the middle of each wall at the compass points. Here we check-in at Landscape Hotel, getting three-star accommodations for the price of a Motel 6. All of us, about 14 in all, half of which are children, walk to dinner. Inside a sign with red background and gold letters proclaims it to be recommended by the city government.

On the way back in the dark we walk through the courtyard of the Landscape Hotel. One of the children trips and falls, and some guests behind us look on. One is a very pretty and athletic Chinese girl wearing white shorts. “Small accident,” I say to her. “Oh, it looks like just a scrape,” she says, in English with no accent. I start talking to her, and I discover that she’s not only an American, but a Texan, from Austin. She is the first American I’ve seen so far on my trip, but she is originally from China, and here to see family.

3.August 2005 Wednesday

The next morning our goal is to ascend one of the Nineteen Sisters, in the Cangshan mountains just west of the ancient city. Although we could have walked, we have the children so we ascend most of the way on an Austrian Doppelmayer Gondelbahn. Then there is just enough walking to the waterfall to give a sense of accomplishment. We drink its cold water. Clean water does have a taste.

Like Kunming, ancient and new Dali sit inside a bowl of surrounding mountains and beside a large lake, but on a smaller scale than Kunming. Its Lake Erhai has its long side running north and south. On lake’s narrow west shore the ancient city sits on a slope of the Nineteen Sisters; at the southern end of the lake is the new city.

For the afternoon we take a dragon boat ride, leaving a little dock in front of the ancient city first for the island of the nan jao Imperial Palace, which is now a new hotel, then to the new city. On the way, the passengers are called up in turn to view Bai and Dai ethnic dances in the ship’s auditorium. The dancers are young and enthusiastic. Everyone especially enjoys their antics during the courtship ritual dance. Afterward the same dancers perform the Bai three tea ceremony: by design, the first cup is too bitter, the second too sweet, and the third is just right.

When the ship comes to the island of the Imperial Palace I walk around and take some photos. At the new hotel I am surprised that there is no literature about it in the lobby, and no sign such as “Ask the concierge about your next stay.” Business must be good.

On the last leg of the journey to the new city, a young man who has overheard me speaking English approaches me. He is a student at Beijing University. After niceties, he gets right to the point: he has been studying computer science but doesn’t really want to become a programmer, and he wants some career advice. I tell him that because of his university training and his fluency in English he has many opportunities, one of them being a software designer who can gather requirements from English-speaking customers then explain them to Chinese-speaking programmers. Then he asks about politics, politely prefacing his remarks with the observation that most travelers don’t want to talk about that subject. Oh, but I do, I do. And I unload a 15-minute tour of Libertarianism on him. In it I emphasize my (and the Founding Fathers’) profound distrust of democracy. “Suppose that you lived on that little island – ” here I point “ – where the total of people is 1000. Suppose also that 501 of the people vote to take away all of your money – your money, and no one else’s. That’s unlimited democracy.” He appreciates the illustration. Then – I’m not sure whether he’s being polite – he says that with George W. Bush you know exactly where he stands: he doesn’t say one thing then do another. I do not directly contradict him, but I say that I emphatically do not like him, a C-minus party student, alcoholic, cocaine-sniffer, and failed businessman.

The ride ends at the dock of the new city, where we go to an authentic huo guoa (hot pot) restaurant. In this kind of restaurant a hole is cut into the tables to accommodate a gas burner, controlled by the diners sitting there. Over this flame a cauldron of beef or chicken stock is placed. Beside the table is a small stand of shelves which hold plates of various foods that will be raked into the cauldron. These plates of food are brought out in a certain order – meats cook longer, so plates of that arrive first, followed by fish, then kelp and green vegetables. Little bowls of soy sauce and sesame oil mixed together are on the tables, as well as rice. I like this arrangement very much: you can see that the ingredients are fresh before they go in, and you can extract just what you feel like eating. The only danger is that because you take out bits at a time, you lose track of how much you’ve eaten, so you can end up stuffing yourself.

After dinner I go outside on the sidewalk to wait for the others, and I have an annoying moment. A family of people from the country come up to me and beg for money. I tell them no, but they return, especially the old mother, and I must be even more emphatic. A Chinese group exits the restaurant and gets the same treatment from the beggars. It seems that they are so rude because they are so desperately hungry. One of Qiong’s friends brings out a bowl of rice, and the family carries it away and then pounces on the contents with their dirty fingers.

4.August 2005 Thursday

In the morning the wife, two girls, and her friend and two boys, and I are destined for the Butterfly Spring, some 27 kilometers to the south. Ostensibly it should be a great attraction: like the swallows at Capistrano, butterflies had been coming to this particular spring every year, covering the grounds with living color. But because of the presence of so many humans, they stopped coming. Undaunted, the entrepreneurs came up with the idea of selling colored hearts on a long ribbon, which prospective lovers must purchase and fling onto the willows overhanging the spring: lots of color, but quite a mess, and a sure deterrent to any future butterflies. Add to this a huge throng of people with a distinct aversion to the English notion of queuing up, and the site gets scratched off your itinerary.

In the afternoon our same group strolls along hu guo jia (or alternately yang ren jia) (Foreigners’ Street), which, it turns out, can be accessed through the back of our hotel. I hear more French, some Dutch, and something else, which I later learn to be Finnish. There were Finns at Chinese universities during my visit ten years earlier, so apparently there is some inter-government cooperation at work. I see many European students, and even lone pairs of girls with the standard equipment: backpacks and long Western legs, tanned and athletic.

We walk up fu xing lu, the north-south axis street of the city, headed for the north gate. There is a poorly maintained watchtower on top of the gate. We ascend the gate and pay a few yuan to a family that is evidently the caretakers, and enjoy a view of the city from about 30 meters up. The most remarkable thing to see is that virtually every roof has solar panels to fire the water heaters.

On the way back I get ahead of the group and sit in the shade to wait for them. A pair of girls walks by, wearing sandals and thin skirts. They’re speaking German. One of them makes eye contact, so I speak to her: Entschuldigung, ich habe Sie zufällig mitangehört. Kommen Sie aus Deutschland? Yes, they’re from Germany. They are traveling around with no definite purpose, but their next stop is Tibet. They were in Shanghai, which was roasting at 40 degrees Celsius when they were there. The girl is plump – she must have suffered in the heat – but pretty. I want to talk to her, but I have to tell her that my group has gotten ahead of me, and that we’re sure to bump into each other again – it’s a small place, after all.

After we have gone back to the hotel and showered and rested, I learn that this is my night to dine alone: Qiong wants to party a bit without any detours into English.

I have supper at the Tang Dynasty restaurant on Foreigners’ Street: beefsteak with French fries. The butter is from New Zealand. As I eat, sip my wine, and watch the young world go by, I listen to a recording of Country Western music, a good artist that I don’t know, covering Willie Nelson’s Blue Eyes and others. I figure that this would be a great spot to open up a place selling real barbequed brisket. Had any brisket passed under my nose lately? I would have known about this. But quality beef seems to be imported from Australia. And could the chili powder be imitated over here? Hmm. And finding good help may be another problem: over my table is a sign offering, incredibly, free lodging to waiters who speak fluent English. Can the pay be that bad?

I wander around a bit. I pass a shop offering to rent bicycles for 60 yuan ($8.50) a day, and I take note of its location. While buying some bottled water, I strike up a conversation with a young man and his wife who are originally from Michigan, but who are on vacation from their English-as-a-foreign-language assignment in Japan. I ask them, and they admit to being fluent in neither Chinese nor Japanese, which, they say, is no great hindrance to their teaching assignment. In one way they aren’t being paid well, but all their expenses are covered, and they are having the experience of their young lifetimes.

5.August 2005 Friday

After a sleep-in, I awake to find that it is raining, I think because of tropical storm Matsu that is sweeping into Shanghai, far away to the northeast. I go alone to the free Western breakfast offered by the hotel. It is cussed difficult to get two eggs over easy with salt and pepper, but I finally manage it. I talk with a family from France while waiting at the buffet table for my toast to pop up. (On doit y attendre parce-que le grille-pain ne marche pas parfaitement: il y a de danger de brűler le pain.) He says that he usually comes through China on business, but decided to bring along the family this time. I overhear other French speakers as I sit alone and eat.

Our morning destination was to have been the Three Pagodas northwest of the city, but I decide to part company with the group and spend a few hours browsing at a wan bar – not the one directly in front of our hotel on yuer jia, but on fu xing lu, the north-south axis street. I also need a haircut. The group’s visit to the Three Pagodas northwest of the city and ride ponies near the north gate is actually not far from my destination.

According to the wife I’m supposed to bargain, so I decide to practice this important skill. I first go to the barbershop, which is right next door to the wan bar. I suggest five yuan for a haircut, but the young man in charge gives a short laugh, says no, and looks offended, saying the price is ten yuan. I try again, same price. This time he raises his voice a bit, saying “shi quai,” and makes a Celtic cross with his two pointed index fingers – the Chinese character for ten. I have a try at looking offended, and I walk out – to go next door, that is. After two hours of answering email and surfing for three yuan (38 cents), I come back to the barbershop. I try the five yuan again, and this time the young barber gives a curt “shi quai,” keeping his eyes on his work dying a Chinese woman’s hair reddish brown. Without any more nonsense I agree, and in just a few seconds he has turned over the dying to an assistant and is at work on my hair. This includes a shave of the neck with a straight razor, the beginning of which operation I preface with “wo bu yao don” – I’m not going to be moving around. This remark breaks up the group in the back seated around the TV into laughter. The ten yuan also includes a wash and dry of the hair. As I leave I tell him, “Zhe ge meiguo ren shi hun nan” – these Americans are really difficult. “Meiyo,” he says politely: not at all.

I walk back to the Tang Dynasty on Foreigners’ Street, and just by luck the wife is eating there and has sent the girls out in front to look for me. They see me, yell, and come running.

On the walk back to our hotel, just outside the back gate we pass a shoe-shine man. I had put him off the day before with a “mingtian” (tomorrow), of which fact he now reminds me, and the wife as well. It’s only three yuan, so as the girls clean up I go back to fulfill my promise. With my cowboy boots off and in a comfortable spot, I watch the people go by. It seems that this operation is taking a long time. The actual polishing seems to be perfunctory, but complete. He has moved on to cutting out a pattern from a sheet of rubber. I ask him what’s that for. He points out that the bottom of my boots is thin, but I emphatically say wo bu yao – I don’t want that. He insists. “OK,” I say, “san quai,” meaning three yuan, part of the original deal. He nods absentmindedly, although he is already at work. In short order I have a new rubber sole epoxied to my boots. He writes down 150-yuan on a scrap of paper and shows it to me. What! I didn’t ask for that. We agreed on three yuan! Another shoeshine man comes over, genially points out the work, and in one hand rubs the thumb against the fingers – the universal dumb sign for money. I give him all that I have in my front pockets, 50-yuan, wipe my hands down my arms, and turn up my palms. “That’s all I’ve got, pahdnah.” Actually, I’ve got quite a bit more in another pocket, but this guy has been dishonest.

Back at the hotel, I relate this to Qiong, and she explodes. She does so hate to be out-bargained. The problem is, she counts in terms of yuan; I count in terms of dollars, always dividing the figures by eight to see what I would have paid in America.

That night we have supper back in the new city with Qiong’s brother Chuan, his wife Xian, and their son Jia-Jia and daughter Hui. The interesting moment of the evening comes when I ask Jia-Jia, who is in his sophomore year in high school, what he’s been doing in his computer classes. He starts his computer, whose home page comes up on a gaming site. Then he launches Excel, in the English version, and shows me a page with two columns: one of goods, the other of prices, but with no total. I ask if he can get a total and he says no. I tell him that he should make himself the task of going through the all the F1 Help. But at least part of his problem is the deficiency in English.

It is said that in China Bill Gates has more star power than Britney Spears, but this may not be universally true. Still, China is turning out four times America’s number of engineering graduates, and they’re just getting started.

6.August 2005 Saturday

For our final day in Dali, I first take the girls to the Tang Dynasty for lunch. There is a new group of waiters there this time. I order one pizza, half fruit and half meat, stating this several times in Chinese – wo yao yi pizza, ban shui guo, ban rou – complete with mime: raised index finger for one, chopping motions for the half and half. All of this is greeted with nods of perfect comprehension. Then the order appears. It is two pizzas, one fruit and one meat. I dig my heels in. I let the waiter know that I am not paying for two pizzas. Not only are the prices close to Pizza Hut retail at 20 yuan apiece, but dammit, this is card sharping. John Wayne wouldn’t stand for this, and besides, I’m not going to be whipped a second time. Qiong arrives just then from shopping at this point, and tells the waiter that I ain’t a-payin’. He seems to accept this. But when the bill is presented, there is two yuan added for the paper napkins – which in every Chinese restaurant are free. I refuse to let 12 cents get my goat, and I laugh at this and pay.

In the afternoon we go near the north gate so that the girls can get a second pony ride. There is the inevitable dickering over the price, which Qiong seems to enjoy. While the girls are riding, Qiong tries to drive down the price of a carriage ride to the southwest corner of the city, where there is a gentle waterfall running between the sidewalks. “What, you want that price? We’d rather walk!” The genial old man with a flat army cap smiles and replies, “Yes, you can do the Long March, too. That’s a long way.” There is the walking away, returning, and further exchange of offers. At last a price is agreed upon. When the girls return, we all get into the carriage and travel from the north gate, along the outside of the city wall to the west gate. Qiong wants him to go a bit further, but he won’t. We walk the rest of the way to see the waterfall, which I think has really been a diversion for more shopping. Qiong does get a huge bargain on some colorful shawls.

The cases of the shoe-shine man, the waiter, and the carriage driver are small examples of the notoriously tough business dealing of the Chinese. There’s an admirable side to this trait: the Chinese strictly obey the law – the need for a police presence is not necessary. But up to the letter of the law they feel free to rape and pillage. Furthermore, the party who seems the loser in any deal feels compelled to shift the terms of the deal so as to regain face (ai mianzi, an important concept to all Asians) on the putative winner. Thus the driver of the carriage took us exactly to the west gate and not a step further, although it might have been no real effort to take us closer to our true destination.

On the way back to the hotel to pack, Qiong looks for the shoe-shine man as we go past his corner. She is “loaded for bear” as my mother used to say – ready to tear into him. He’s not there. “Of course he’s not there,” she says. “Yesterday somebody paid him a month’s vacation.”

We catch the bus for the long ride the back to Kunming. When we arrive, I deal with the luggage while Qiong goes to the lost-and-found to see if our video camera has shown up. We apparently had left it on the Kunming-to-Dali bus. She comes back laughing. “I asked them for the lost-and-found and they looked at me as if I was from another planet.”

At Kunming we catch a taxi for the loaned apartment and on the way pick up supper from Dicos’ Chicken, which comes in a bucket and looks like the KFC product, except that the neck and head of the chicken are also included. It tastes good, though.

7.August 2005 Sunday

In the morning I and girls go to Mrs. Fu’s house, the mother of one of Qiong’s friends. I doze and browse the Internet while Qiong shops and talks until supper time.

We all go to Lao Zhou’s home to a simple but large meal cooked by his wife. It includes fried bee larvae, which I try. They are crunchy on the outside and gooey on the inside, but tasteless. Afterward Lao Zhou drives his wife to the tea room, taking our two girls to meet his wife’s mother. Alone with just myself, the wife, and Tai Gugu, the big screen TV is off and she is able to talk. This she does for about an hour. In the course of the talk I ask her what was the worst time of her life, and she says that it was the time of the Communist takeover in 1949 and shortly thereafter. Her father was a landlord who had his house and property taken away. The family had to suffer and go hungry like everyone else.

8.August 2005 Monday

After a late snooze we have lunch at a good Kunming restaurant near to the apartment. One of the more interesting items is baby shrimps, brought alive to the table in a clear covered dish, wriggling and flipping around like two-inch-long minnows. The cold, spicy, tomato-red sauce eventually kills them, whereupon the lid is removed and they are eaten – by the Chinese, thank you very much.

After having our Yunnan red wine confiscated at the airport security point, we fly back to Guangzhou. Qiong learns that the mechanics of our airline are on strike, so we have to leave early to accept the airline’s rescheduling offer. Since it takes us to Beijing, I want to go.

As we return to our apartment in the taxi, we see an airship covered in lights in the night sky above the city. It is advertising the very development in the Panyu suburb where Zhang Qiang (see 26.July) lives. I can’t help thinking of the street scene in the film Blade Runner, where an advertising airship floats above a rainy, squalid city of the future. Later, after cleaning up, we stand on our balcony facing the river and watch it float by, following the path of the Pearl River, seeming almost close enough to touch. Even after midnight, concrete trucks are busy crossing the Hai Yin Qiao.

9.August 2005 Tuesday

This is a shopping day in Guangzhou for Qiong. Also I need to buy a cable, which I have somehow misplaced, that allows unloading of photos from my digital camera onto my laptop. Walking to the taxi, I pass the second gold-on-red government political slogan of my stay in China. Like the first one in Zhengshen, it bears the same message: “Citizens, be patriotic, honest, polite, and kind!” It’s a banner in a closed walkway over Dong Xiao Lu, so few people can see it.

10.August 2005 Wednesday

We meet the relatives of friends at the apartment. One of them, a very successful businesswoman, drives us to the airport for our flight to Beijing. We arrive there and are shuttled to the Sino-Swiss Hotel in the Shunyi district late at night.

11.August 2005 Thursday

We are up early to squeeze in a visit to Tiananmen Square before our flight leaves. (See the excellent interactive map by Andrew Nathan at Columbia University’s site.) We walk out of the hotel to a taxi pool parked a short distance away. Qiong launches into bargaining for the cab fare to a group of drivers who are standing under some trees. After she is satisfied that she has jawboned the last yuan out of them, we climb in. The girls sleep during the long drive, and we arrive at last at the square.

The roads approaching the square are notable for their weird combination of corporate signs (Motorola, Siemens, Toyota, Lucent, DuPont, Nestlé) alternating with red banners bearing gold patriotic slogans (compared to the south, they vary on the same theme, but there are more here than all I’ve seen so far combined). In perhaps an icon of this hybrid, I see a John Deere riding mower cutting grass on the Chang’an jia median, which runs east-west, separating the Forbidden City from the square in front of it.

The visitor is immediately impressed by the enormity of this slab of concrete. In the morning haze, it seems to stretch to the horizon. In the middle of it is the Monument to the People’s Martyrs, the center of the center of Beijing, at which the student demonstrators erected their Statue of Liberty in 1989. To the north of it, just across the boulevard Chang’an jia, and hanging from the Gate of Heavenly Peace, Mao’s big portrait is visible with its eponymous wart on the chin. A few meters to the south of it there are neatly-dressed soldiers, regularly changing guard.

Further south from the Monument is the tomb of Mao Zedong, which has two entrances: one from the Monument and one on the opposite side. Thousands of visitors, almost exclusively Chinese, and many of them gradeschoolers following the flag of their teachers, are lined up to walk past the body. We don’t have time, and besides, the whole thing is ghoulish, with a whiff of the totalitarian occult: there are large signs outside in both Chinese and English giving detailed warnings against spitting, disorder – even disorderly dress – and against the use of cameras. Inside are armed guards briskly moving everyone along. (This last detail I take on faith from a member of a tightly-controlled package tour.) I tell Qiong that those people are lining up to see a piece of wax: human flesh can’t be pickled that long – at least not by the techniques available to China in 1976, the year of his death.

But our adventure has come to an end.

After waving off vendors who want to sell us Mickey Mouse watches with Chairman Mao replacing Mickey, we climb into the cab, starting our return trip of over 18 hours to arrive at last in Fort Worth. During the drive out of Beijing I see a pretty woman on the sidewalk, with long legs and full breasts, like many others here in the north it seems. Oů sont les nieges d’Antan? – Where are the snows of yesteryear? I think that some things will outlast the propaganda, the popular noise, the everlasting lying that is at the heart of everything that comes out of a crowd or goes into a crowd. There will always be a young man and a young woman sitting alone in a garden, with the fountain splashing and the linden leaves falling, and his blood will rise as he looks at her. There will always be a hope that humanity can one day stand up and walk without a crutch of lies

September 15, 2005

Terry Hulsey [send him mail] is a writer living in Fort Worth, Texas. His latest book is Heroic Tales and Treasures of the Lonely Heart.

Copyright © 2005 LewRockwell.com

 
 
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