Grading my final tests in China.
It was July. I had just finished grading my semester tests; my time in China was coming to an end. This meant that my time with Aunt Fong was coming to an end.
My university had been good enough to give me until the end of the month on my work visa, so I had four weeks of time to do what I willed in their country. Being a Chinese socialist state, “doing as I willed” did not include viewing YouTube, blogs, Facebook, or other social media online, but likewise being a dilapidated society in the midst of industrial revolution, I probably could have demo-rigged an old concrete farmhouse with fireworks and been let off with a stern talking to. Realistically, in China I was free to set off fireworks at will, start fires on the sidewalk, and use the street as a human waste receptacle with intersections.
By the end of my journey, I was so sapped of energy and enthusiasm that I barely had the spirit to go on. Had I not had the strong desire in my heart to stay with my Chinese aunt, I would have gladly booked a flight the week after classes ended and bid China a hasty “88” (that’s a texting abbreviation for “bye, bye”; eight, in Mandarin Chinese, is pronounced “ba”). I had spent part of every week with stomach cramps or diarrhea, I had come to my wits’ end with classes who would not speak freely no matter how easy the atmosphere or how soft I made myself (if a rare student did have the audacity to ask a question to the foreign teacher, they struggled to say something worthwhile), and, as if I have not made it plain already, I was completely disgusted with the Chinese lifestyle and living within Chinese society in a Chinese city.
Before you think to lecture me on having the open-mindedness to accept a different culture, or chastise me for my bitter attitude, I think it should be noted that my treatment of China, her people and culture, has been nicer than necessary. Too generous, even. China is a country where, if you fell down dead (or unconscious) on the subway, the other passengers would leave your body to lie there as they scrambled out of the car like it was on fire, justifying it later with pathetic excuses about liability risk and fear of disease. If your small child wandered away from you and got run over by a van, don’t expect the people nearby to notice her or do anything about it. Don’t even expect those neighbors of yours to recognize you or your child when the police and newspapers come questioning. That’s community life for many in this collectivist society.
Sure, those two events might be notorious and not normative, but they result from a norm of cold indifference to strangers- with “strangers” being a much broader category in Chinese thought versus Western assumptions. I saw appalling things all the time there, even if they weren’t great enough to attract the same media attention. As I observed in the real China, periled strangers are someone else’s problem (as are safety standards, cleanliness, basic resources, etc.). Even family are viewed in terms of cruel economic survival. Getting wealthy for one’s own is the spirit of the times; living life for softer reasons would seem extravagantly foolish.
And let me advise the reader that, before I ever came to China, I spent five weeks in out-of-the-way, Thailand, sleeping under a mosquito net, using a bucket and a barrel for showering and washing my waste down a hole in the bathroom, and being chased by feral dog packs when I ran past the neighboring farm houses- and I loved it. Poor conditions don’t scare me. What bothers me are filthy, crowded cities run by a society shaped by communist groupthink, irrationality, and intense pride in inane, centuries-old cultural tidbits.
My bathroom in Thailand. I didn’t love THIS part; I learned to live with it though.
At least, in the midst of the squalor, I could find comic relief in the chickens trotting around wherever they pleased.
Being in that situation for so long, practically alone except for an occasional group outing with other English teachers who could venture into deeper conversational waters than “Do you like NBA?”, not being able to speak my thoughts and feelings- at length and in depth- was probably the burden that weighed on me most in China. Many times, I would find myself wanting to cry out to someone, “Can you believe these people?” only to look around and see everyone else either involved in said situation or blissfully unaware of what had me in shock. They were these people. Silently, I would cry out, “None of you notice that girl using the sidewalk as a bathroom? That 9-year old girl, squatting right there? You do notice, but you don’t care!?” My perspective would neither be understood nor welcomed, so my moments of exasperation had to be swallowed and left to fester as unanswered objections and misery.
Throughout all of these “Can you believe this?” experiences, Aunt Fong would plead with me, “Don’t angry China.” She would even beg me to blame her for my disappointment, the one person in China and in my life who was with me whenever she could be and always looked out for me. She made sure I had meals, checked on me at my university, took me to the Sanda (kickboxing) gym and introduced me to the instructor, took me along on various dinners and social outings with her friends, and planned weekend and holiday trips so I could see and potentially enjoy China. Far from being blameworthy, Aunt Fong was my constant companion in China and the only reason I stayed longer than my teaching duties required.
Near the last of my evil days in China, my evil countenance said it all. Aunt Fong, at left, was still keeping a sunny demeanor.
Well, it so happened that while in my summertime blues, feeling diseased, dejected, and disgusted, Aunt Fong felt inspired for us to take a weekend bus trip to the coast and tour a resort town. It wasn’t her first plan (that trip fell through), but as we returned to her apartment complex one afternoon, she stopped to pick up a flyer and listen to the pitch of a sales representative (a young lady who looked like she might be a college sophomore) standing at a marketing table outside her apartment gates. At the time, I had no idea what the trip was all about; I didn’t even recognize the section of map enlarged in the brochure.
All I knew was that Aunt Fong was initially excited about it and thought it would be a great opportunity for me to see a beautiful seaside area. In her mind, she still thought she could win me over on China and get me to stick around another year. Of course, as soon as Uncle Jiang learned of the trip, he chided me, while chewing sunflower seeds and pacing the living room floor, “No! ….no! Tell her, ‘No….’” He was very convincing, groaning out syllables in a gruff tone and setting his face in an inflexible frown.
It only put me in an uncomfortable spot. There was no way I was going to dash Aunt Fong’s hopes and tell her no, and I could likewise neither tell Uncle Jiang to his face, “It ain’t happenin’.”
The next afternoon, when a different sales rep, a young man in his early 20’s, came over to my aunt’s apartment to sign us up and collect the trip fee, she looked at me tentatively and checked if I really wanted to go. “How much is it?” I asked. Cheap, she said, and she was paying.
“How long is the bus ride?” I asked her through Chinese, English, and the mutual understanding we had developed through our time together. It would take about 10 hours to drive to our vacation spot, which would be spent riding Friday night through early, early Saturday morning. Then, on Sunday afternoon we would have to load up and make the return trip home. I wasn’t excited about spending 20 hours plus of the weekend in transit, trying unsuccessfully to sleep on a Chinese bus, so the reason I asked this question was to convey to Aunt Fong that I did not think this trip was worth the travel. I had heard that the Chinese were practitioners of the indirect response; so was I.
There was a moment where she waited on me, looking sympathetic and unsure of my answer, and I sighed and shifted uncomfortably as I begrudgingly told her okay. The sales rep knew enough English to tell me that when I was at the beach, pictured in the brochure, my heart would feel amazing. That wasn’t the point. My aunt thought it would be a good trip and we could have fun seeing a new place. She wanted to make me happy, and I wanted to make her happy, so I consented.
I was miserable, but if being happy would make her happy, I was willing to give it a try.
On Friday evening we loaded our bags and took a taxi to the travel company’s office. I refer to them as a travel company, not because I fully understood their business, but because as a naïve outsider I had to make inferences and plug along despite my gaps in comprehending the situation.
We waited an exceptionally long time in a building lobby that could have served as a set for a Jackie Chan movie where he beats up the thugs in their derelict, dumpy hideout. Then, we chanced fate and squeezed into a typically trashy Chinese elevator and rode up with ten other people. It was not the first time I was in a precariously slow elevator and my group tripped the weight limit buzzer or had to turn people away.
Upstairs, we walked into a room clearly separated into plain-clothed travelers and business-dressed sales reps. Most of them were young men with white dress shirts and black slacks, and there were a couple young ladies in sexy black mini-skirts. There was always something a little off about Chinese dress clothes, which were almost always in the typical Western style. They were cheap-looking with frilly style accents like a fanciful extra button or a diagonal seam running across a pant leg. I surveyed the scene of that waiting room in an instant and groaned about what I feared was coming. Not a sales pitch, it’s Friday night, let’s just get on the road. I had sat through a sales pitch a few weeks before, when on a tour group through the famous Yellow Mountain, but that was only for tea, so the ladies walked around with samples (some of them quite good) and I and the two students who accompanied me just slumped in our seats and drifted to sleep until the 30-minute meeting was over.
Sleeping, the unanswerable objection to any sales pitch.
At the travel office, they didn’t pitch anything to us. Not yet. They led us down the hall to another room for some reason I wasn’t privy to, then a minute later we were back into the elevator that looked like it had been stripped for parts, then onto the bus. All the young people in business dress accompanied us tourists on board, a ratio of one company rep to two tourists. It hadn’t yet dawned on me why we would possibly need so many hired hands to accompany us on a weekend getaway. Cheap Chinese labor costs, I guessed.
Our group, 30 to 40 large, piled into our seats and snacked as we gabbed and watched a movie on the overhead screens. (One thing about China: no business or public transportation system attempted to forbid outside food or drink. People chewed seeds and spit the shells out, noisily tore through plastic to get to eggs, noodles, or pickled meats, and they littered on the ground whenever they didn’t have a waste bag convenient, which was often in the lacking infrastructure of China. In China, trash is what you make it.) To my relief, Aunt Fong suggested we move out of our restricting seats so I could stretch out my long legs in the back row. Once there, the young company employees seated in the back area turned around out of curiosity and struck up an excited conversation with this charming middle-aged woman and her foreign friend. The young men asked me the usual questions, but their English was decent enough, plus the excitement of the trip spurned them on, so they tried more than I used to to have a good back-and-forth talk with me.
Then, unprovoked by anyone, one of the two young ladies working for the company, sitting near the back row, turned around in her seat and blurted in Chinese that she thought I was handsome and wanted to know if I had a girlfriend. This girl was very easy on the eyes, and for a moment I thought my luck in China might have changed. I had no idea how I would functionally communicate with her, but during that bus ride she conveyed that there was a water park back in Aunt Fong’s home city that we could go to together. I was left to think over her advances as I uncomfortably shifted on the back row of seats, letting my feet hang down in the aisle until it bothered my back, then lying flat across the seats until it hurt my neck. Through the quiet hours of the night, I phased in and out of semi-consciousness until our bus slowed to a lurch and released its air brakes outside the hotel.
The time was right before sunrise on Saturday morning, and we had a couple hours until the company reps would come knock on our door to make way to our first destination. Aunt Fong was exhausted, but I was restless after the poor sleep, so I left her to snooze in our hotel room while I went out for a run. Our hotel was situated at the top of a steep hill, overlooking a shabby amusement park, garden area, and groups of hotels lining the valley along the river. As I explored, I observed how unusually clean and empty the streets were, how new the buildings looked, how planned and color-coordinated they seemed, and how many trees were planted along the broad sidewalks. Every other Chinese city I had been to was clamoring with people, scooters, cars, and animals by sun-up. This place was practically deserted by those standards, and judging by appearances it resembled a seaside American vacation spot- the skies were even (mostly) blue!
I came back to the hotel room, had to rouse poor Aunt Fong awake from her brief snooze, and set out with her and a company rep closely at our heels, who hurriedly insisted that he carry our bags for us. After driving through the town for a half-hour and listening to the other female representative clamor into a microphone (“SHA-SHA-SHEY-BAR-BAH-SHEE-BAH-BAI-SHA-SHEE-SHOO-SHOW-JI-KWAI-BAI-BAR-SHU-SHA-SHA-SHOW!”), presumably to build everyone’s excitement for the trip (and that must be one of the most awful sounds I have ever been subjected to– shrill Chinese barked over a scratchy speaker system), the bus pulled over and our group was ushered off to see our first site.
An overwhelming crowd of tourists, each shadowed by a young company rep, milled around at the gate below a mountain whereon was nestled a very large, seated Buddha statue. The company escort assigned to my aunt and me (the same man who came to her apartment and signed us up), started to become obnoxious, walking step by step beside us and forwardly offering to take our picture at the gate. It still hadn’t dawned on me why there were so many travel company employees accompanying the tourists on the trip, why there could possibly be a need for one rep for every two tourists. I figured we could take our own pictures. Chinese crowds might be exceptionally callous, but there were always a few friendly volunteers to help hold a camera. Like most things I didn’t understand about China, I chalked this nonsense up to the way people there did things.
I wasn’t the least bit interested or impressed with the mountain’s idol, so after observing it momentarily I went back to milling about aimlessly, like all the other tourists, for the next 30 minutes. 30 minutes of pacing around a blank plaza and parking lot. Okay, there were a couple gates with some frilly ornamental carving and Chinese characters on them, like there are gates in front of every other place in China, but other than that there was nothing to do there. Eventually, everyone made it back to the bus and we continued on through the town. That was a letdown, I thought, this beach had better be impressive.
It wasn’t. It was populated with swimmers and loungers- some in tight one-piece swimsuits, some in bizarre, bright orange, Chinese beachwear- but my group was only there to walk along the broad concrete barrier that served as a lookout point. It was also a station for another dopey statue, this one a crescent moon with a face. The company rep took our picture again (what a burn that is to yield to a courtesy you don’t wish for), then Aunt Fong and I walked down to spend a moment on the beach. I was less than overjoyed at that point. One, the setting didn’t seem all that great- spending a half-hour each at a simple beach and the base of a small mountain was nowhere near worth a 10-hour bus ride. And two, the vigor I felt earlier during my morning jog had fast dissipated. I struggled to put on a happy face and pose on the beach as Aunt Fong took my picture, and as we marched back to the bus I felt my familiar stomach pain returning.
Note the breathing mask, parasol, and bright orange purse and shoes, de rigueur for the young Chinese lady at that time.
China’s version of McDonald’s Mac Tonight “Moon Man” character from the ’80’s?
They took us to a restaurant, where we filed through the kitchen and up two flights of very narrow stairs, then into a dining room that struggled to contain four large, round tables and enough chairs to fit most everyone on the bus. (Walking through the kitchen, or inside then outside then inside, or past a utility room or a small bedroom, or even walking past the pens of the sheep you were about to eat, was not uncommon in small, family-owned restaurants.) I grimaced at the sight of the food set before us. Except for the mantou (steamed buns), most everything had the familiar reddish-orange tint of overly spiced, oily food.
At that point, my stomach pain and appetite were about even, so I tentatively choked down some food, which seemed foolish because the unsavory food was the primary culprit causing my recurring stomach pain in China. Consider though, I had no alternative food source than what was set in front of me. China does not have prevalent convenience stores in most areas, and the snack shops they do have are not very accommodating to Western palettes (more spiced meats and tofu, and instant ramen noodles). So, to feed my natural hunger and try and maintain strength, I would usually stick with the safest options, like noodles and soup, and avoid irritating dishes containing chili peppers.
My eating strategy was no help. Back on the bus I lay down and shut my eyes, resting the back of my hand across my face for relief. I didn’t care where our tour group went to next; I only wanted a long bus ride so I could take a nap. But then- !
The bus began sloshing one way then another, slowly bouncing up and down as it crawled forward. What is this? I sat up, angered and annoyed, and looked out the window. We were at a construction site. The bus driver was navigating over potholes on a dirt service road. I thought for sure he was either lost or incompetent, having chosen a stupid place to make a U-turn, but after five minutes of abuse by shocks, winding past hollow concrete structures, the driver parked in a row behind two or three other buses and the company reps made a commotion to hustle us off right away.
Hollow apartment buildings outside and the tension of a hot bus inside, the darkness descends.
In a daze of sleep and sickness, I asked myself what the rush was, why we needed to see the end of this construction lot, and again “What was wrong with these people?” Then, out in the bright summer light, I surveyed the apartment buildings under construction and heard the blare of loud dance music, drums, and a girl’s voice screaming over the large PA system inside the ranch-style building in front of us. Then, I watched as the bus driver locked the door and walked off with his wife to find a napping spot. I swallowed hard.
They had stranded us for a timeshare pitch.
The multi-colored streamers, loud sounds, and legions of sales reps were intended to excite us, but I could not have felt more dread. Facts of life, transferred from American to Chinese terms, usually turned out louder, smellier, dirtier, much more populated, and just plain miserable. We faced the nefarious timeshare pitch, but not in comparatively tame America- in China. What horrors did our captors have planned for us?
As I drug my feet down the salesmen-lined walkway leading into the building, I glowered at their broad, crocodilian smiles and glib welcome cheers. Aunt Fong was tugging at my arm, pleading, “Don’t angry. Don’t angry.” I was too far out of my senses to know what to do other than resent having to spend part of my afternoon inside their sales office. If I had my health, I would have followed my plan of exploring the construction site and the surrounding town on foot. I strongly considered this option later on, as our annoying sales rep followed me out to the open lot where they liked to show their marks the site of the next proposed apartment building. Sadly, I could feel I didn’t have the strength to walk off. My body was quivering and I thought I might need to use the sales office’s nearby toilets, however filthy, at any moment.
Could I just walk off and explore?
Reasoning with myself (the desperate recourse of a man stuck in a hopeless situation), I suspected that my aunt and I would be held for an hour and then, after our repeated refusals, they would have to let us go. After an hour, all the tourists will have said yes or several times said no, so that will be all, right? I was underestimating the depth of indecency within the timeshare salesmen of what must surely be the country with the greatest impropriety in the Orient, if not the whole of Asia.
Continued in Part 2.
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