China diary, concluding part
11:22 a.m. -- 2010-11-15
Hmm... now where was I?
Oh yes: the People�s Republic of China.
So, there I was, in my nice hotel. A little bubble of English language in one of those rare lands where the majority of people can�t understand you.
For me, the most significant thing about the language difference is the absence of western characters. I don�t mind when those characters spell out unfamiliar words (such as the umlaut-tastic �Tilltr�de f�rbjudet f�r obeh�riga� in Sweden)... at least you can look those up in a dictionary. When the characters themselves are unrecognizable, you�re in trouble.
Chinese street scene. The closest I got to the �old� China.
In some places in China, you see western characters, but not for the purpose of putting the foreigner at ease, or actually conveying information. Oh no; that would be far too simple. Instead, western lettering is included where its use will show how modern and cosmopolitan a business is. The fact that the message has been completely garbled by word-for-word literal translation, a sloppy attitude to spelling and a complete inability to appreciate the role of that oft undervalued punctuative morsel, the space... produces marvels like this:
Ice cream. Seriously.
Well, I tell you this: they may not be great at writing comprehensible menus, but they�re fucking demons when it comes to Scrabble�. Can you image what a word like that would score?
Useful food tip for travelling in China: tell everybody you�re a vegetarian. The Chinese are actually pretty darn good at veggie cooking; you won�t get bored if you�re only there for a week or so. The thing is, with China being so grossly overpopulated, they waste absolutely nothing. Hooves, beaks, trotters, brains... it all goes into the food. Including quite a few creatures that we don�t think of as food sources. Boiled bullfrog, anyone?
Second food tip: assume nothing. Remember that western food names are only applied to make the restaurant seem funky, and say very little about the actual content. Case in point: my margherita pizza... complete with pepperoni slices, hidden beneath the cheese. Menus in China seems to be only indicative, and what you get will depend upon the chef, his inclinations at the time, and whatever ingredients he happens to have at hand. (One fears this might extend to whatever he found in the trap that morning...)
Third food tip: if you must eat meat, avoid anything described as �fermented...� because that means it�s made with rotten meat. (Fourth, related food tip: Never delve too deeply into a bowl of soup or broth. You might not like what you find in the depths.)
Fifth health tip: �vegetarian� in this context should be interpreted strictly; don�t eat the fish. If you�re only staying a week or so, you probably won�t absorb enough heavy metals and other pollutants to do you any harm... but why risk it? Chinese rivers are among the worst in the world. As one person explained to me, when he was a child in the 1960s, they drew their drinking water from the river; in the 1970s it was still okay to swim in it, but their drinking water had to come from elsewhere. By the 1980s, people stopped washing their clothes in river water because it made them smell funny, and by the 1990s, there was no point fishing in a lot of places. By the turn of the century, people didn�t want to live near the stink of the rivers...
Nice!
Funny thing is, most Chinese people are desperate for you to leave with a good impression of their country. If I contrast that with the hospitality of Londoners... wow. And it wasn�t just an act, put on for the duration of the Olympic Games: the people really do want you to get a good impression of their homeland. They exhibit national pride of a kind that is distinctly unfashionable in the United Kingdom.
Trouble is, while I can appreciate their efforts as individuals, I still feel that they are complicit in a scandal that has made slaves out of a fifth of the world�s population, including quite a few million entirely innocent Tibetans. Quite aside from the pollution that China is belching out in the name of �progress�, the ongoing offence to human dignity was almost enough to make me refuse point-blank to visit the place.
In the end, I decided I would go, but that I�d strike a small blow for freedom while I was there. As I said in my first China-themed diary entry, I was carrying contraband.
I�m not stupid, though. As you may recall (like I ever gave you a chance to forget...) I am a �member� of the protest group Anonymous... and one of the key things I have learned from that Struggle is that remaining nameless and faceless is a very good idea. Here, once again, was a group of criminals that commanded the unquestioning loyalty of a large group of followers, and had their own secret police and military.
Versus me. I was going to have to be careful.
I entered China with my trusty laptop, a stack of blank DVDs and a heavily encrypted memory stick. On the memory stick was a BBC documentary about a border incident where a group of fleeing Tibetan refugees had been fired upon by Chinese soldiers, and several had been killed. My plan was simply to wait until I had been in the country for a few days, to gauge the lie of the land, and then make my DVDs, and �accidentally� leave copies wherever I could.
I didn�t expect it to change anything, as such... but I just felt the need to confront the smugness I had encountered in Chinese people in the West. We�re so great; we�re growing so fast; we�ve got the Olympic Games... I couldn�t let all that �growth� and �progress� go unchallenged, and I feared that my own presence in the country would constitute some kind of tacit acceptance � even validation � of the current state of affairs.
As Anonymous members leave little calling cards to spread awareness about the Cult of $ci�nto�og�, so I would leave my DVDs.
I didn�t do it. Two reasons.
Firstly, the Chinese people that I spoke to, in China, seemed much less nationalistic than the ones I encounter at home. (Maybe they only let Communist Party members travel?) The ones I met would quietly � oh so quietly � acknowledge that all is not perfect, and when they talk about their own lives and families, they describe a kind of game where they work to retain choices, and to stay informed about the wider world. It�s a complex tightrope-walk that an outsider can�t really imagine, whereby they have to remain invisible to the State, and outwardly unquestioning, while privately reaching accommodation with what they know to be true; that the governing elite has lost its way and has lost influence over them. Many of the Chinese people I spoke to privately could probably be described as playing a waiting game, knowing that their totalitarian government will fall � but trying not to martyr themselves in that cause. Kindred spirits, because that�s a lot like how a �member� of Anonymous thinks.
Secondly, the �lawai� � the foreigners. I worked with a person whose predecessor had attempted to spice up a Powerpoint presentation by including some graphics. He�d downloaded a map of China and used it as a background... only it seems this was not the �right� version of the map of China, in that it implied something about Tibet. Nobody in the audience said anything, but a few days later, the employer was questioned about this act of subversion. The presenter�s visa was revoked, and as a result he was sent home, jobless.
You see, my plan with the DVDs, to shock people out of their complacency about modern China�s �progress�, would actually have been like unexploded ordnance. Anybody could have picked one up... and paid a heavy price as a result. Instead of attacking smugness and complicity, I�d have been putting people in harm�s way, at random. Not brave. Not clever. So I didn�t do it.
Actually, I came away from China in a more hopeful frame of mind. The problem isn�t the Communist Party; Communism in China is the new emperor�s new clothes, and one day, some na�ve little kid will point that out, and it will crumble away. The problem is that meanwhile, the rest of the country is intent on making money and acquiring stuff, hand over fist. Modern-day China exhibits nothing so much as capitalism on steroids, and they don�t care what they do to the people or the planet in the process.
It�s an ugly place, and the air is so bad that it�ll give you daily nosebleeds. But then, I seem to remember that our �green and pleasant land� was once covered with �dark Satanic mills�. Perhaps it�s inevitable, and it�s a troublesome teenage phase that a nation has to grow out of.
As I blogged last time, you can�t put an old head on young shoulders.
Eventually, my work done, I was able to escape... and it�s certainly made me appreciate the comforts of home, so perhaps it was a good thing that I went. It certainly gave me a few laughs. The last of which (and it�s a shame Bluey doesn�t some here anymore...) was found at the airport in Shanghai:
(�From Canada the best place on Earth.�)
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