Chinese Whispers

I never really cared about going to China.  For the last half-decade or so that we've been planning this trip, my head has always been filled with images of sweltering jungles and banana pancakes.  Lao, Thailand, Cambodia, those are the places that stir the imagination.  China, on the other hand, brings darker things to mind: open sewers, dirty streets, contaminated food, crushing mobs of strangers who spat and smoked and shouted, toxic clouds of pollution, an oppressive government spying on its citizens or disappearing them in unmarked vans.  These ideas come from the American media, from friends who've spent time in China, or from my own frantic imagination, and even though I knew they were probably of limited veracity, they hung over my head as our ferry pulled into Qingdao port.  Years in Japan had intensified my already timid nature; I feel like crying when someone cuts in line in front of me, how the heck was I going to cope in China?

Over the next four weeks, though, I found myself proven wrong in the best possible way.  The people we met were friendly, welcoming, and chatty (even when we didn't understand a word that was being said).

The food was abundant, easy to order, cheap, safe to eat, and damn delicious.

Except for the scorpions, of course.

The scenery was absolutely breathtaking.  Especially where we did all of our cycling, Yunnan province, which means "South of the clouds."

And the cycling, most importantly, was top-notch.  Mountainous, sure, and therefore exceedingly difficult.  We were unable to keep up our usual molasses-on-a-cold-day pace what with all the 20-kilometer climbs, and so we had to cut our visit short to get out of the country before our visas expired.  But if we had had another 30 days, we would have spent every one happily pushing up those mountains and taking photos of clouds.

The road leaving Kunming is lined with these solar- and wind-powered streetlights.  On a windy day like this, the turbines hum like cicadas. 

Unfortunately, China's nice modern roads are the product of constant construction, which leaves day-long patches of road that are nonstop mud puddles or dusty pothole fields.

 

Of course, not everything about China is perfect.  Beijing was a good city to be a tourist -- easily navigable by bike or foot, plenty of English, lots to see and do -- but the pollution was so unbelievably thick every day we were there.  It was so bad that skyscrapers a block away were all but invisible and the sun looked like it was coming through smoked glass.  In a way, Beijing felt like being in the future.  The dystopian future, y'know, where the earth is too far gone to save and all we can do is cough and squint and hope that it doesn't go completely kaput until we're already dead.  Leaving the city for the countryside was a relief, but we haven't forgotten how awful it felt to be somewhere so polluted, and I hope we never do.

And we did find the pushing, rude, anarchic China that we'd head so many horror stories about.  In fact, we lived it for one brief afternoon.  On our trip to visit the Great Wall, which is only a short train ride away from Beijing, we made it to the train station an hour early for our return to the city to find the station completely mobbed.  We took our place in line and scoffed at the bent-backed grandmothers and young spiky-haired dudes trying to muscle past us.  "Where do they think they're going?" we asked each other quietly, unable to believe that someone would be so rude in order to get on the train 5 seconds faster.

As time ticked closer to departure, though, the station swelled with more and more passengers desperate to get a spot on the next train, which was also the final train of the day.  Miles from the city, none of us could afford to be stranded out here overnight.  Hundreds packed into the hallway, and it grew more doubtful that there would be room on the train for all of us, much less room to sit down.  After an hour of waiting, all thousand of our knees began to ache and we all knew that we needed to get on that train.  Uniformed officials shuffled around uselessly, occasionally making announcements far too quiet to be heeded (also they were in Chinese).

When the gate to the platform opened at last, civilization collapsed.  We all broke into a run.  Elbows out, backpack clutched to my chest, I sprang between mothers and their children, headbutted my way past old men with canes and young women in high heels.  A hand grabbed my shoulder, pulling me back, but I shook it off and sprinted to the end of the platform were there were already a dozen people waiting.  The train pulled up and hundreds of eyes stared at that door hungrily, all breathing that we would kick our own mother in the shin to get a spot on that train (sorry, Mom), so tired were we of waiting and so desperate to get away from this awful place.

In the end, we did make it on the train.  As far as I know, no passenger was left in a bloody heap at the station.  Somehow, Jenn and I even got seats.  We stared out the window into the smog, breathless and dry-mouthed, and we wondered if the price of getting our seats was worth the spiritual toll we paid.  All it took was a little bit of discomfort and a little bit of fear to turn two friendly, sensitive hippies into crazed animals who were perfectly ready to murder the crap out of Piggy if that's what it took.  If this is what train travel in China was like, if this sort of unmediated competition for limited resources was a regular situation to be in, then that must really make it hard for the people who live here to be nice people.

As bad as we felt, we still kept our seats.  I don't know how many orphans or limbless veterans had to stand up for another two hours, and I didn't want to know.

I don't know why China has such a terrible reputation in the West.  I think a fair amount of it stems from good old-fashioned racism; hell, Chinese people have been distrusted or outright reviled in the US for a couple hundred years.  There's also a healthy dose of distrusting the other major world superpower.  I mean, there are more Mandarin speakers than English speakers in the world, and that's scary as hell to a place where few dare utter that USA does not equal #1.  I guess the biggest reason there's such a negative image of China, though, is just basic media scare-mongering: people will watch a news program about a big bad empire of not-white people who oppress their citizens and hate our capitalist freedoms.  Programs about diverse, complicated places don't really make it to air.  And I don't mean to say that China's without problems (because that would be a dumb doo-doo-headed thing to say), just that it's really easy to assume from watching the news that America is nothing but school shootings, state-sponsored executions, and McDonalds, and that's just as ignorant a caricature as thinking that China is nothing but jack-booted authoritarianism and poison toothpaste (and pandas).

So I guess the lesson here is: don't trust the media (sorry again, Mom).

The other, probably more relevant lesson?  China's an awesome place to tour, and we're sure as hell coming back someday.