beijing, 2

We woke up to the sounds of backpackers gnattering over coffee.

Simple white cotton drapes fluttered off the windowsills, billowing out to scrape Robert’s nose. A big thick morning sunlight poured in through the broad glass window panes that opened up unto the courtyard. Somewhere out there a voice was complaining about the price of coffee.

Someone with a heavy German accent was grilling the harried staff on the proper English terminology for fried eggs. “Sunny side up? Ya, okay, you’ve got that, now, Over Easy? Yes? You understand? Ok, good.” We all helped China along in what little ways we could.

The hostel was staffed by a fleet of young girls who had all attended the same English program at a university in Fujian province, and had been come out to Beijing with the promise of a job that supplied a room, a wage, and a chance to use English at work. Each one was small, slight, pretty, and an impossibly young kind of twenty. You could see traces of a new China as much in their adopted names –Sage, Mandy, Francoise – as in the carefully selected jeans and t-shirts they wore beneath their red work aprons.

They all had an innocence about them, crusted up just as much as they’d been working there: hardened by streams of backpackers who often had more smiles and demands than money and sympathy. They all bunked down in the same room just off the entrance, and you sometimes caught sight of them slipping out bewildering lacy layers of blouses and skirts to spend their day off on the shopping streets just out the front door.

I tried to get to know them as best I could without coming off as a creep, but there was something fascinating about them, these creatures of China’s first consumer generation. If they had all been born in the second half of the nineteen-eighties then their parents should have grown up during the Cultural Revolution of the sixties and seventies, and their grandparents must have been part of the first generation to remake China in the fifties. So what would they make of themselves, these students of English, remaking China in their own way by just stepping out the door to look at all the shiny new things to buy. I asked a bit about their families, showed them pictures of my parents, my brother, and the American girl I was in love with, but all I could find out was vague details about shared apartments, missing their families a lot and very excited to be in Beijing.

I met the cook on a van ride to the Great Wall. For a flat fee the hostel ferried guests out to different points along the wall, I happened to share the ride with three Canadian girls who were studying business in Singapore, our Chinese driver with a leathery face like a cowboy and the hostel’s chef, all of us taking the afternoon to see the world’s longest wall.

Our point was a little under two hours from Beijing proper, two hours through the countryside, the first non-urban bit of China I’d come across. It was early May and we were edging into spring but the landscape looked like it had been beat up by hundreds summers. The sky was a hot haze of gray-blue, the ground was nothing but a swirl of soft dust kicked around by lazy winds and passing trucks. The soil looked to old and tired to be asked for anything more than to blow around listlessly. There was little green to be seen aside from the long rows of tired trees that had been planted to filter the waves of dust that blew off the Gobi desert and clogged into the machinery of Beijing. The chef sat up front and spoke with the driver, I strained my little knowledge of Chinese to eavesdrop on them. Every once in a while a bit of English would drop from the mix and they would crack up. “Ahh… very big!” “Hmm… very beautiful!” From what I gathered the cook was asking the driver for more ways to talk about a very big wall in English. “What do you think?” There was a pause, and then the driver went haaah! and the cook went gwee hee hee!

The driver had been out this way before, so once he’d dropped us off by the women selling plastic swords and key-chains he disappeared to share cigarettes with the other men waiting by their empty tour buses. The rest of began the hike up to the wall, the Canadians charging up the hill myself and the cook walking behind. I had asked the Canadians all I could about their business school, and learned that it was essentially an expensive excuse to spend six months in Asia and see its officially certified wonders. “Have been to Angkor Wat and the Taj Mahal, so this is my third Wonder,” one said, a distinct absence of wonder in her voice.

It was my very first wonder, and I got to thinking about what exactly had brought us out here. The wall itself was just a long pile of stones, the only parts that stood up were sections that had been rebuilt for tourists like ourselves. It was just a very long pile of stones, the longest in the world. The wonder was in the thought of a society that could mobilize millions upon millions of individual people –every single one with their own thoughts in their head, their own splinters in their feet, their very own set of fingerprints—and get them all to pile rocks, again and again and again and again.

We didn’t look so organized now, those of us scrambling up the slope to the wall on top, those of us selling bundles of gnarled walking sticks, those of us who had carried coolers of ice up the slope to sell bottles of water and cans of beer. I couldn’t even agree with the Canadians, so they bounded along the wall and I stayed back to talk with the cook.

He had decided to use the name John with me. We walked along the length of the wall, the structure dipping and swerving line graph style along the ridge, the stones scratched and marked with the names of some of the wall’s more aggressive visitors, like “Amelie, 2006” and “ZachBrittanyUSA!”

“Very beautiful!” John said to me. The line of stones wove off into the distance, disappearing into the soft brown haze that hung all around us. “Very big!” The ridge took a sharp upward turn and the stairs on the wall turned to a stone ladder. “Very steep!” I said, tilting my hand to show what I meant. “Steep… very steep,” he repeated under his breath, our hands leaping off of the masonry baking hot in the sun.

We passed the rest of the afternoon ignoring the wall and learning about each other. John was from the western city of Xian, where he had worked as a chef in a large hotel until a childhood friend had tapped his shoulder and begged him to come to Beijing and kick a kitchen into shape for this youth hostel he was working at. He had arrived in the city just a few weeks before I had, and we had pretty much the same opinion of the place. Bad air. Too much construction. Rude and stressed people. His ears perked up when I told him I also used to make food for money. “You can make pizza? Teach me to make good pizza dough.”

Like me he also had a lot of time on his hands, running a kitchen primed for four star guests for backpackers whose most complicated request was eggs, over-easy. He spent most of his time in a chair in the front lounge, twirling two dried and hardened walnuts in the palm of his right hand. When I asked him about them he pointed a finger at the temple of his forehead and said “Good for mind.”

That night we went back to the kitchen to make pizza dough from scratch. We mixed yeast into hot water and folded dried rosemary into the dough as a few of the girls peeked in from the doorway at the guest who had somehow broken into the staff’s quarters. In the end I didn’t have any secrets to tell John, he knew his pizza dough backwards and forwards. We ate the final product a few hours later, a decent enough batch of pizzas, wolfed down by the flock of desk girls and picked at politely by the women who swept the courtyard and the old men who were building the bunk beds and the skylights. Well, it was a change from the usual staff meal, the bowl of vegetables over some rice grabbed furtively in the corner. Instead we had this bread smeared with weird and expensive ingredients of tomato sauce and cheese.

It wasn’t then but later in the night when I felt I’d stepped across the language and the pressing differences in income to something like a friendship. It was 2 am and I was walking with John, some of the kitchen scrubs, and the girl who called herself Mandy. Mandy was taking us up to the lake where the tourists hung out. The streets of Beijing were endless, black and quiet. The construction workers from the provinces were sleeping on the sidewalks by their open pits, a few desperate red taxis tried to pick us up. We skipped stones in dust along the street. And then we were on the lake, and there were trees, lines of rickshaw drivers calling out to us in Chinese and English, and cafés and bars, cafés and bars that glittered along the shore. Those of us with money to spend were drinking laughing and glittering inside, and those of us without were looking inside from among the rows of darkened trees and listening to the water lap against the shore.

beijing, 1

Beijing was under construction when we arrived. From what I could make out, the screaming sounds that emerged from clouds of dust on the street were giant buzzsaws being lowered into the pavement, ripping open the city's skin.

The student who had befriended us on the train from Tainjin lived just minutes from our hostel, and offered to walk us there: an offer we were only too happy to accept. The walk from the subway station was a blinking shopping street of Adidas outlets, shoppers blithely stepped around the men who had turned the sidewalks into rubble pits, rooting around under the ground under massive headlamps like they'd lost something. Occasionally you'd walk down a path only to find it had been blocked off with temporary barriers, forcing you to retrace your steps for a few minutes. Robert and I blinked through all this, boots, backpacks and white skins touring through the jungle of Beijing sneaker boutiques.

The street unfolded like a cartoon illustration of a construction site, with clean young Chinese students sipping coffee in brightly lit lounges as scruffy construction workers dismantled scaffolding and swept the wood shavings off the newly tiled flooring, before moving on to finish the back door. It was an amazing parade of contrasts and forced myopia. Young Chinese shoppers coughed up laughter and stepped over broken looking men curled on the pavement. Construction pits would open in the sidewalk without warning: holes the size of pickup trucks where ropy little men in thin dirty jackets labored under high wattage projection lamps. The newly minted shopping class could barely stand to acknowledge the weary black bodies building their city for them, and the bodies had quickly learned to stop gawking at all the things around that they couldn’t have. Both sides had agreed to just put their heads down and get through this process as quickly as possible.

Hobbled by our ridiculous traveler’s backpacks Robert and I threaded through the mess as best we could, with the shoppers and the construction workers ignoring us as enthusiastically as they ignored each other. We followed the outline of Charlie’s bobbing melon-head, the student having volunteered to help us find our hostel. Our landmark for the hostel was the orange plastic sign of a Japanese fast food chain. Robert and I nervously fingered a map we had printed off of the hostel’s website, the letters and lines fuzzy and indistinct. After wandering back and forth for close to thirty minutes we found our turn: a black concrete box caged in a scaffolding of metal pipes and plastic bands, and empty except for tufts of wiring bursting from the ceiling. This was what remained of our landmark.

Charlie had a proprietary look on his face as he led us to the hostel entrance: a pair of red lanterns framing a wooden gate large enough to accommodate a bus. The three of us stood there awkwardly.

Umm, this is for your trouble I said, holding out a single yuan note. He stepped back with a twisted look on his face. Robert leaned in with twenty yuan and the smile returned. Bye-then!

That put Charlie twenty-yuan farther away from the men in the pits.

the universal language

They had put in a new train to Beijing six days before I arrived. White, slim with a sloped nose like a pencil, the interior had individual reclining seats like a jet. This shaved down the commuting time down from ninety minutes to a nice round sixty. Thirty more minutes in your day, thirty more minutes into the Chinese economy.

Like pretty much everything else of consequence Tianjin’s train station was closed for renovation, and our taxi dropped us off at the place they were using in the meantime. The interim station was a camp of sheet-metal barns. A thick mob of scruffy men with chattering laughter and quick eyes milled in front of the station: outnumbering the small trickle of travelers by at least three to one. They made driving motions with their hands and repeated the words Beijing? Beijing?, hoping to get three times the train price out of you. As we passed through they parted like smoke, their questions and their worn jackets brushing faintly against us. One of the shacks revealed a ticket office, another opened up to a long dining hall where we sat down to kill an hour. Which is where we met Charlie.

Luck had given Charlie a bony little body and a head like a flattened basketball, which he kept permanently decorated with a half moon grin, whether his eyes agreed or not. He was on school break and heading back to his home in Beijing. That’s where we were headed? On the 4:15? Perfect! I’m hungry, let’s… WAITRESS! Bring us three orders of goburi dumplings. Yes, yes, now. What? You’re not hungry? Oh, but I insist! So you are traveling here in China? Why are you Tianjin? You should be in Beijing! Tianjin is terrible, the people here are so stupid. They are… hicks? Yes! They are hicks! I am an English major here at the university. I go to school in Tianjin but my home is Beijing. That’s right, I don’t have any brothers or sisters. I am a little prince! Here, eat! Oh, you like these dumplings? Tianjin’s goburi dumplings… well, they’re not as good as Beijing dumplings. Come on, come on, eat up. Oh! It is time for the train! Just give the ticket to that woman, yes. What? Oh, this train is new! I’ve never seen this before! What? Looks like the Japanese bullet train? No, not the same company, this is Chinese. This is China. Here is your seat? Hello, excuse me mister. You. Yes, you. I want to switch seats with you so I can sit next to this American and practice my English, alright? Ok? Ok? Good. Are you comfortable? This is my laptop. It is a good one. A bit old, but very good. Would you like to watch a movie? No? But I have so many. Here, what do you want, action? What? A Chinese movie? No, I don’t have any of those, Chinese movies are terrible. Here, what about comedy? Do you like “Mr. Bean”? Here, you take one earphone, and… yes. Okay, here we go, Mr. Bean.

For those of you who don't know Mr. Bean is a British export, physical comedy about a little man in a brown suit. In each scene the character stumbles through modern set-pieces like the hotel, the shopping mall, the parking lot. He fumbles, breaks things and spends absurd amounts of energy (and physical comedy) trying to get out of situations without looking stupid. He stumbles through modern civilization with a complete ignorance of how things work and a terror of looking foolish in front of other people. Perhaps because of all this he is extremely popular in Asia, where whole populations are bungling through the new and strange paraphenalia of Western civilization, trying to make sense of it all and terrified of looking stupid in the process. For that matter he looks a lot like me in China.

As one of the first English speaking Chinese I'd stumbled across I was eager to pick Charlie's brain, but instead we just sat and watched Mr. Bean devising more and more elaborate ways to peak at his neighbor's paper during an exam. Charlie and I exploded in big horking laughter as we sped to Beijing at 160 miles per hour.

the largest nation on earth

It really isn't news, but after arriving in China all I can really tell you is what you already know: China is big.

There is the mile long laundry list of facts that you already know, the largest number of people gathered within a single border (and still hankering for Taiwan), the harnessing of all that human energy into the fastest moving economy on earth, the construction boom for the Olympics that some people have estimated is the largest construction project undertaken by humans since, well, the Great Wall. The view from the taxi didn't make the place seem any smaller.

Tianjin looked a lot like Cleveland. Our little red taxi tore out from the ferry terminal and onto a six lane freeway barrelling straight through a landscape of crumbling concrete and hobbling industry. This landscape unfolded in front of our eyes, unending, unchanging, for over an hour, the highway we rode charging on dead straight, without a curve or a flinch to acknowledge anything lesser than itself.

Like Cleveland the population seemed completely unphased by the wide aprons of concrete. Men in tweed jackets and women in faded heels sauntered through several lanes of traffic to reach the small city of fruit vendors that had set up shop underneath the concrete pylons of the freeway. The city was falling apart but the cheap white shirts were flat and pressed, the dresses on the women still clean and bright.

=

I had met a Dutch traveller from the Netherlands on the ferry, and we decided to share a room for the night. Everyone else had hurried past Tianjin, making the hour or two farther to Beijing, but Robert and I were intruiged by this massive anonymous city, which had somehow made itself the third largest in the country without anyone really noticing.

By evening every other building on the street outside of our room had lit up in neon, each one hoping to draw your eyes to the stadium size dining rooms that you could see through the windows. Every pore on the diners faces brought out by stark hospital lighting. These alternated with the dark gray concrete faces of banks. Walking up and down the street we counted over a dozen just on the single block, some of them two branches of the same bank, just across the street from one another. When we asked the owner of the hostel we stayed in about the number of banks he just looked at us quizzically. "I'm not sure," he said, smiling and shrugging it off casually.

Our room was on the eighth floor, the hostel just being a large apartment with a few extra rooms. Like the wrinkle free clothes we'd seen among the crumbling concrete, the apartment was a spotlessly tended bit of private space among the smoggy buildings. Immaculate wooden floors, a wide screen television. The toilets and the sinks were kissed with a little gray bit of script that said "American Standard." We fell asleep on wooden poster beds, Snoopy sheets draped in the pale neon from the restaurants, the air thick with the symphony of bleats, horns and protests of the ceaseless traffic.

fyi

As you may have noticed I've got a backlog of things to write about here. Things like my two weeks in Beijing, my time in Manchuria, the north Korean border, the Russian built city of Haerbin and the time I just spent in Hong Kong. I don't think any of those need as finite a treatment as I gave my two day boat ride from Japan, so I'll try to get them up periodically. I swear.

Basically I've been a bit too temperamental about writing. Internet cafe's in China are widespread and (yes) quite cheap, but they also aren't the clean dark little cubicles you find in Japan. Nope, they are full on screaming arenas of combat, where Chinese nerds hunker down for hours, their screens blazing with exploding starships and speakers wailing with the screams of dying orcs. And since the enemy is usually just sitting across the room at another terminal they'll be yelling taunts at each other. Which makes it hard to read the paper, let alone try and put my thoughts together. Excuses excuses.

Also, as you are probably aware of, modern China is obsessed not only with damming up every major river, but also the entire flow of the internet. The most populous nation on earth is extremely wired, but they are only connected to the outside internet by three cables. Very big thick cables. Last year an earthquake damaged one and all of northeastern China lost internet access for a week. Oops. Three cables means they can effectively block anything they don't like, including the BBC, Wikipedia and the Blogger websites. (Although I can access all of the Wall Street Journal's articles on Chinese development from last year. Weird.) For some reason I can access the page that let's me write stuff, I just can't see my actual blog. Or your comments. Sorry.

june 4, 2007

Ma Lik, the governor that mainland China appointed to Hong Kong, recently stated that the reports of the government massacre of demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989 are "greatly exaggerated." This pissed off enough people in Hong Kong to spark the largest Tiananmen memorial rally in recent years. Last night, somewhere between 27,000 (police figures) and 55,000 (organizer figures) people gathered in Hong Kong's Victoria Park on the 18th anniversary of the event to commemorate the victims of Tiananmen Square.

the slow boat

Once I found out it existed, well, the slow boat to China was just about the only way to get there.

No one travels by boat anymore. Have you? Not one of those floating pleasure palaces loaded with swimming pools and shuffleboards (or whatever they do on those things), but a ship fitted for transport, not a vacation.

While it would have been a bit quicker to slide into China on one of those pressurized tubes called an aircraft, my trip wasn't really motivated by a goal any more specific than to "experience China", so there was no real need to get in fast, hit places on a checklist and then tube it on out. The jolt to the system is pretty rough, and jetlag is only one symptom. It is always profoundly weird to step off of an airplane and taste the air, take in the weird new landscape around you. Your first impression of the country becomes the airport, a shopping mall distinguished only by the Asian editions of time and the nutritional information on the Snickers is labeled in Chinese. You didn't glide gracefully there, you were teleported in, and the shifts of night and day are the least of your problems.

There are a million other ways to slide, paddle and zip around the surface of the earth, but they seem to be getting slowly killed off by these glittering steel tubes hurtling through the sky that plunk us at our destination: disoriented, thirsty and tired.

The Yanjing departed from the Japanese port of Kobe, a beautiful little city mostly renowned for how un-Japanese it is. In the mid-nineteenth century a small clutch of Europeans had established a small trading port here, bringing with them a rabid desire for houses without dirt floors and a mania for freshly baked bread, two things that have caught on here like wildfire. The city occupies a warm and fuzzy space in the Japanese imagination, a true domestic example of the sophistication and refinement of Europe. Just look at the old stone townhouses! The bakeries! The cheese shops! The only thing missing are living, breathing Europeans. They had absconded at some point in the intervening hundred and sixty years, chased out by Japan's rollercoaster relationship with the outside world. Coming to Japan can be like walking into a bad shower, the country scalding you one moment and freezing you the next. It takes time and patience to learn how to jiggle the handle to that happy medium. And now that I'd learned here I was, walking up the gangway to a ferry, bound for the Chinese Mainland.

=

I met another gangly looking white guy with a backpack at the boat terminal, and we chatted as we boarded the boat and then watched Japan slide away. He was from the Netherlands, and was taking a year off from his IT job to travel the world. This was his third boat in just so many weeks, having taken the ferry from Russia to Korea, then Korea to Japan. "This boat!" he told us immediately, "It's... so nice. They gave us beds!" The last few he'd taken had been large carpeted rooms where everyone fought for floor space to roll out their futon and sleep on their bags. He had slept uneasily, his laptop nestled under his head, digital camera held close. This time he had booked himself a private room, but it hardly seemed necessary. I was in steerage, which was a bunk with clean sheets and a curtain you could pull around you for privacy. The folks around me were mostly Chinese of unguessable ages somewhere between thirty-five and seventy, their skin calloused to a brown toughness, their eyes bored. They hunkered down in their bunks and barely emerged the whole trip, whittling away the time with naps and snacks of sunflower seeds. Just down the corridor was a young American couple who had been teaching English in Osaka for a year, and were going home by way of China. They were both noticeably short, even in this diminutive country. Farther down were two Japanese backpackers comparing the various clips on their bags.

A quick run up and down the boat unveiled three main floors: first class private rooms on the top, the dining quarters on the second, and the steerage bunks on the first. The ship was an odd duck, half-heartedly gilded in brass and faded carpeting, but whose entertainment facilities consisted of Chinese television in the lounges and a dusty looking mahjong room on the second floor. A staff of bored looking young women in uncomfortable looking uniforms of synthetic material would spend their hours polishing the banisters and vacuuming the rugs, keeping them clean but worn,the poor materials that had not expected to be put to this much service.

Below the main decks you climbed down into the depths of the hull, the section of the ship with the least pitch, which is probably why they put the bath and the steel blue room with the ping pong table down there. A handful of dead arcade games were kept company by a growing wave of old carpets. A crew member locked the doors behind me as I climbed back above decks, shutting them off until the officially regulated bath time. Life on the open seas.

I wandered back to the main lobby in the center of the ship only to find the American couple strapped awkwardly into a set of bright orange life jackets, arms flapping helplessly. Without warning I was grabbed by a girl in a scratchy powder blue suit stuffed me into a life jacket, grabbing the cords from my hands to tie them into tight, burly little knots. I gathered from the impassive look on her face that we weren't sinking, but you couldn't be sure. Maybe the ship sank a few times every voyage.

We were paraded up and out through the decks, by the girls in the scratchy looking synthetic blue suits, joining other hapless passengers wrapped in orange. Some passengers who had inexplicably not been rounded up lounged by the windows, looking at us first with surprise, then pity. We were taken outside and lined up in front of three male crew members in jumpsuits and hardhats who stood legs apart, hands folded behind their backs. The vests propped our arms up at an silly angle a few inches off our bodies, dangling helplessly. I propped my thumbs on the vest straps, putting me in a pose that looked somewhat like a 19th century plutocrat, surveying his factory. Life on the open seas.

While the Asian passengers were lectured through a megaphone in Japanese and Chinese, one of the crew members took me aside with the American couple and the Dutch guy, who had also been rounded up. "I wilr now review safety procedures of ship. OK?" We nodded.

The ensuing explanation must have been memorized word for word out of some nautical safety manual, but the crew member's tongue sounded like it had been soaked in painkillers, flapping helplessly against acrobatic sounds like l's and v's. He gamely recited the safety procedures, most of which were lost in a long stream of soft consonants. My mind started to wander, and I tried to imagine the best way to write out that stream of sound on the page. The closest I came up with was "ferghjngsshijegrwa. OK?" Lots of soft consonants. My attention would sometimes snap back as the stream of consonants took a recognizable shape. I remember them sounding like this:

"Two short blasts is fiair in rear of ship. One short blast one long blast is fiair in fghringhe. Two long blast is fire in passenger quarters. OK? Ther is no smoking inside the ship. Smoking is only outdoors of the ship. There is no smoking in the beds. OK?"

"That's okay, I don't smoke," I volunteered with a smile.

This provoked a burst of laughter, which he sustained for just a few beats longer than seemed natural. Life on the open seas.

Properly briefed on what to do in case of an emergency, we were finally left to ourselves. Some people opted to watch Hollywood movies dubbed into Chinese. They nodded off as Steve Martin swam through an impeccably furnished American household of screaming blond children. I found a spare table on the very top floor and sat down to write in my notebook. A Chinese mother and a little button of a boy took two of the seats next to me. They took out his English workbook and began to do exercises that involved crayons, coloring and counting. I kept on waiting for the mother to lean over and impress some English on the kid by white man osmosis, but they seemed perfectly content to fill in the lines and count 1-2-3 on their own, and I was happy enough to leave them to it.

After a few minutes another man joined us, brazenly taking the seat across from the mother. He had twinkly eyes and a mustache perched on a weary and weathered face. He was wearing an undershirt without any sleeves, long ropey arms extending out. He offered to draw the boy's picture, and the astonished young mother agreed, her Japanese fluent, touched with the vaguest of accents. He pulled a calligraphy pen and a clean square of stiff cardboard rimmed in gold out of his bag and began to flick out a version of the boy's face on the white square in thick black lines. After just a few minutes he had produced one of those caricature portraits that you see people do on the street, the face balanced vaguely between reality and a kind of cartoon abstraction. He handed the picture over to the boy, free of charge, then offered to do mine.

As he threw down each stroke he explained to us that one of his jobs on the ship was as a "cultural-liaison", and was here to see that the passengers enjoyed themselves. He always did a few caricatures as a way of breaking the ice. He chatted as he drew, about the viability of this ferry, the busy summer season, its precarious position between freighter and cruise ship. He gestured over to a couple of young Chinese guys smoking at the table next to us. "They work construction and factory jobs for a year or so in Japan, then bring the savings back to their families when they've got enough cash. Some of them are carrying about seventy, eighty thousand dollars. Cash. Right guys? How much you bring with you?" They smiled affably and waved off the question.

The finished drawing was unmistakably me, but not the image I had been carrying around in my head. I had recently shaved my head and was wearing glasses, and he'd given my face a contemplative scowl, eyebrows arched downwards. The face looked hard, angular, and vaguely German. He signed it with a flourish and handed it over, before moving on to a stocky Chinese guy in his mid-30s who had been peeking over at our table, unable to contain his curiosity.

Half an hour later the cultural-liaison in the wifebeater was taking us all up to the bridge, each of us clutching a square cartoon version of ourselves. The young mother, her son, the stocky Chinese guy, his wife, and myself. Our guide was the only native Japanese speaker, but we had all spent enough time on the islands that it became our common language, which seemed to color our reactions to everything around us. We nodded with deep interest when he showed us the nautical charts and beamed with enthusiasm at the islands that slid by us. The crew went about their jobs matter-of-factly, steering the steel ship along the southern end of the Japanese archipelago. Everything was exciting, we gawked like children, asked questions politely, and took photographs. After a few brief minutes of all that we were escorted back to the passenger deck, and the cultural liaison moved on to a new group of passengers, dully absorbing a Hong Kong soap opera.



Before leaving I had hopes of finishing Moby Dick on the boat, imagining long leisurely hours reading on the deck, but now that I'd made friends I set it aside and talked about China. The Chinese man and his wife had lived on the northern coast of Japan for the past eight years, as he had worked as an engineer for a major electronics firm and she had done graduate work in architecture. He had recently switched companies, to a Japanese-Chinese joint venture tech firm in Beijing, she was looking for a position teaching architecture. They were in no particular hurry to get back, and had chosen the ship both for the ease of travel, and because they could simply take the eleven boxes of stuff they'd accumulated in Japan along with them.

People who has lived in Japan for a few years but didn't grow up there seem to ease into the same overall attitude towards the place. The country is basically benign, with a host of quirks and pathologies that are at first infuriating and then kind of endearing. Like a good-natured friend who speaks in non sequiturs, you learn to smile and nod. So what if the cops are lazy and ineffectual: there's barely any street crime! We all start to develop the same absurdist bent to our humor, whether from rural China or urban USA.

Being so easy to talk to, I was eager to find out what I could about Mr. and Mrs. Wang. They seemed like ideal people to talk to: educated people who formed opinions slowly, and looked at the issues facing China with both personal concern and a bit of foresight. Mr. Wang had eyes that lit up in conversation and a smooth, plump boyish face despite the few wisps of hair on his head. His wife wore glasses close to her face and spoke fluent Japanese that she enunciated extremely carefully.

They seemed extremely concerned and interested in the issues of climate change and environmental destruction, but they tempered it with an observation that is hard to answer to. Basically, who is the US to lecture anyone on conservation? As for recent Chinese history they seemed to see it mostly as a tragic series of setbacks to development, but nothing to waste too much time worrying about. "I was five at the time of the Cultural Revolution, and my parents were university students. Very lucky, we weren't affected by it." "Those ten years set China back for decades..." And moving from Japan "We'll of course be making a lot less than we were making in Japan, but things are so much cheaper in China that in one way we'll be making more."

It only occurred to me after the fact that the conversation I had just had would have been almost impossible if I'd flown into China. On the boat we had the space, the table, the chairs and the luxury of time to talk. While it's probably not practical for most people to travel this way, it's an absolute shame that they don't. Your few hours on a plane feel like absolute dead time, which the airline does everything in its power to help you kill. There was the obligatory television here, but other than that all they gave us were tables, chairs and a slowly scrolling view of the Japanese islands. We would enter China in one slow tracking shot, not just a single cut.

After dinner that evening a voice came onto the PA System, letting us know that at eight PM that evening an "amusement party" would be held in the mess hall. I walked in at about a quarter after the hour to find practically every seat filled, Mr. Wang belting out a brief ballad into a microphone, a karaoke machine cranking accompaniment, the audience of fifty people swaying vaguely side to side in their cafeteria chairs. The singing got worse as the minutes and the beer bottles piled up, and I started to develop a theory about how the tonality of the Chinese language makes it impossible to sound good in Western style pop songs, the tricky little tones sliding up and around when they should be landing, thunk, on the beat. The whole thing seemed to be less about the singing (which was pretty awful) or the songs (which were saccharine), than the social bonding, the polite claps given for a good job, and the obligatory plastic flowers handed to each participant as they took their little bows, passing the microphone on.

I had just about reached my limit when a cross eyed little Chinese man got up to sing a Japanese ballad. The song was one of the syrupy sweet nostalgia ballads of a man longing for spring in his hometown in Tohoku, Japan's bitter and dumpy north east. An area of Japan that, due to it's crushing poverty, had contributed a large number of settlers to the Manchurian colony, and a large number of young men to the Imperial armed forces. The man chewed on the lyrics, his Chinese accent giving a mushy edge to the crisp Japanese syllables. It was a song of the Great Pacific War, of Tohoku men pining for home as they were pinned down, dying on foreign soil. And it was being sung, enthusiastically and tunelessly, by a Chinese man who looked like he had been born around 1945.

It was nearing nine in the evening, and the man's alley cat rendition of the Japanese ballad had thinned even the polite applause. The mic was passed to one of the young women in the powder blue suits that had strapped us in life jackets, polished the banisters and served our dinner. Her previous look of crushing boredom had been washed away by a glazed look of contentment. The calm look of a princess, or a pop star, basking in attention that is their absolute right to receive. She thanked us several times as the karaoke machine played the opening bars of the song.

It was beautiful. At first I felt my pet theory about Chinese singing crumble, then my critical thinking, and finally my spine. She had a clear and serene voice that would land on the edge of the melody and hover there, quivering. Balanced in the most delicately precarious of places and held there by firm technique, before sliding to the next tone. She still wore the same pitiful little suit, but her voice silenced the room, and for the first time I wondered just what all those Chinese lyrics meant. The song finished and she took her bows over the final bars of the karaoke synthesizer. Someone handed me a handful of plastic flowers which I tentatively held out to her, and she accepted with a curtsy and the princess smile.

The emcee walked on and thanked us for coming, the amusement party was over. It was nine o'clock, and the party had proceeded for one thin hour, a sliver of unreality into our day. I hadn't even had time to check the thick book of song listings. Who knows, maybe buried in there somewhere was the song I'd been humming for days. "Slow Boat to China."

why china?

When I first told my parents that I was very interested in studying Japanese and maybe living in Japan for a while, their first response was, "Japan? Why... Japan?" My parents had very bleak childhoods devoid of the surreal landscapes of Super Mario Brothers and the creative physics of Voltron, a large robot made of five smaller robots. Robots who were cats. That were driven by humans. With such a strong pull on the imagination, who wouldn't want to see just where those robot cats came from?

So five robot cats dragged me to Japan, where I ended up spending my mid-twenties. I spent those years like most of my contemporaries back the states, drifting through a series of odd jobs and odder girlfriends. I learned to use words like "short-term lease" and "sublet" except that, well... I only learned them in Japanese, and just had to look them up in a dictionary before I typed this. I read a few novels by Graham Greene, set in distant locales, bought flowy white cotton shirts and fancied myself as an ex-patriot of the United States.

And then suddenly my life just started to feel a little bit too... Japanese. I was working overtime five days a week at a Japanese office, sweating out a forty minute commute on trains running at 120% capacity, and my body had started to develop all sorts of nervous tics, like an obsessive dipping of my head when I smiled at someone, and an abrupt chopping motion of my right hand as I moved through crowds of people.

So then my mind started drifting to those robot cats again. Specifically those little plastic replicas of them I used to bang around, augmenting their crashes with exploding sounds I made myself, in the back of my throat. If you ran your fingers over their bellies you could just make out a series of letters, faintly raised off the plastic, spelling out those mysterious phrases:

MADE IN HONG KONG

MADE IN CHINA

What wondrous kingdoms! What possible delights awaited me in the Far East? What treasures could be found in these mysterious lands on the other side of the globe? The mighty empires who had amassed their wealth and prosperity with the ancient secrets involved in forging my Underoos and talking GI Joe dolls. I may have spent the afternoons of my childhood wandering imaginary pixel kingdoms dreamed up by Japanese programmers, but I spent every waking second wrapped in Chinese underwear.

Now that five years in Japan had helped initiate me into the secrets of the conception of those robot cats (Answer: the Japanese love robots. And cats.), I was ready to discover where they had been forged.

=

Reading about China before setting off on my trip made it sound like I was planning a six week vacation to Mordor. In Beijing the air pollution has been recorded at 78% above recommended levels. There were reports of migrants in major cities abducted, killed and bisected, their organs sold to first world patients desperate for transplants. In the south they have started construction on the largest single dam project in the world, a gargantuan effort that attempts to simultaneously dam up three major rivers, harnessing the energy for the expanding cities in the south. Companies had been started where dozens of young men played online games for twelve hours a shift, selling their virtual assets to gamers in the United States,The week I decided to leave cats from across the United States started dropping dead from eating Chinese pet food. And who knows where the plastic toys I was so interested in had been made.

The more I read about China the worse it sounded, and the more I wanted to go. No country on earth could be that horrible, could it? After all, I come from just about the only other country in the world that may be getting worse international press than China.

The day before I left a young man walked into a quiet college campus in the Deep South carrying several semi-automatic weapons he had obtained legally, and proceeded to methodically kill 32 people before shooting himself. China may sound like the world's last evil empire, but I'm pretty sure it isn't the wild west.