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Guilin
 Our
last night in Guilin, we decided to sample the local culinary specialty
— snake. (They kill and skin it right in front of you, and give
you the blood to drink in white rice liquor, and drop the gall bladder
into another glass of liquor to steep and be drunk later.) We made
enquiries, then took a cab to the recommended restaurant. The kids
ran in ahead in their boisterous way. Rosie followed. I paid the
cab and went in last. Just as I got into the lobby I heard Rosie
cursing rather loud and, I am sorry to say, very eloquently, in
Chinese. She was cursing at one of the two receptionists seated
at a desk in the lobby. The cursing went on for a while. A manager
type came out, and Rosie cursed at her, too. Then she called the
kids and we stormed out, Derb of course totally confused, but head
up and indignant — my wife doesn't lose it like that for no reason.
What had happened was that, crossing the lobby after the kids, Rosie
had overheard one of the receptionists say to the other: "Za-jiao!"
Which, being translated, means "Mongrels!" This kind of
thing is never far below the surface in China. To judge from occasional
emails I get, it's not altogether unknown in the U.S.A., either.
Shenzhen, Hong Kong
I
had the opportunity to defend National Review on my penultimate
day in the People's Republic. This was at a dinner-reunion with
some of Rosie's college classmates who had moved down to South China
in the eighties as the region opened up. The speaker had stayed
in the northeast to do a postgraduate law degree, practiced up there
as a lawyer for a few years, then moved to Guangzhou and started
a real estate business. He is now seriously rich. "Oh, National
Review," he said. "They are against China."
Now, this man
is very far from being a friend of the Communist Party. He is, in
fact, though thoughtful, well-read (he is the only mainland-Chinese
I have met who has heard of NR), and extremely intelligent,
almost completely apolitical. Yet he has internalized the Big Lie
of modern China: that if you speak out against the communists, you
are "against China." The Party is the nation, the nation
is the Party, and to dislike the communists is unpatriotic. It was,
of course, no use to remind him that the CP is just a political
party, and that we are against the Democratic Party, too. Did that
mean we were "against America"? No use, he had internalized
the Big Lie. Bad news folks: An awful lot of Chinese people have.
All together now, you know the tune:
Without the
Communist Party
There would be no New China....
Creeping
Singaporization (cont.)
The government of Hong Kong "Special Administrative Region"
is closing down the daai-pai-dongs — those impromptu sidewalk
hot-food vendors where you could get a bowl of tripe, or fish-balls
with noodles, or chicken feet in red sauce, or a hundred other things,
and sit on a little stool right there on the sidewalk and eat it,
with a bottle of beer to wash it down, for less than a dollar. The
Hong Kong government says the daai-pai-dongs are "obstructions"
and "unhygienic." Heaven forbid anything so untidy should
obstruct our march into the radiant future, or our view down those
spacious boulevards lined with glittering towers that have haunted
the totalitarian imagination for a century now.
Hong
Kong is OK. I had heard a lot of negative stuff about the economy
tanking, shoppers fleeing to Shenzhen for cheaper goods thereby
wiping out the retail business, and so on. Well, the local economy
isn't in terrific shape, but people are all right, there are still
good jobs to be had, and probably fortunes to be made — though not,
nowadays, without a China connection, and by no means as easily
as twenty years ago. People still talk freely, they still have immense
pride in their city, they still have that rather coarse, pawky humor
I like so much. (Learning Chinese here, I once asked a friend: "When
a Chinese person goes to school, what's the first character he learns?"
My friend wrote ren, the character for "man." "And
what," I asked, feeling playful, is the last character
he learns?" My friend thought a moment or two, then wrote the
character si. "This one, I guess." Si means
"death.")
I
find it difficult to write objectively about Hong Kong. For me,
this city, generally advertised as coldly commercial, culture-free
and soulless, is a deeply romantic place. It was here that I learned
some of life's sterner lessons. It was also here that I had the
most fun I ever had, and made my firmest Chinese friend — one of
those friendships so intimate and understanding you can resume conversations
interrupted by a departure several years previously. Together now,
in a restaurant, we talk easily and happily, no hesitation or reserve
between us, and get gently drunk on imported beer, as we used to
when we first knew each other too many years ago now. At that time
we both worked for an American firm that was in serious difficulties,
to the degree that we were paid as and when there were funds to
pay us. On one occasion, we had financed the Saturday night beers
by raiding the coin box of the company's Coke machine. We reminisced
and laughed about this and many other things, then said farewell
in the style of knights-errant in the old stories, when they separate
after some shared adventure: Hou hui you qi — "There
will be another time." A hundred Chinese poems about friendships
and partings tolled in my head.
Driving
to the airport in the early morning, I watched the Kowloon street
names click past: Nathan Road, Jordan Road, Argyle Street... Every
one with a story, every one with a memory, happy or sad, sweet or
sour. Milestones on the road from the unforgettable blithe follies
of youth to the dull getting and spending of middle age. More and
more depressed now at parting from a place I love so deeply, my
imagination fled from the past to the infinite future. I saw the
slow decline of the city, the gradual slipping-back into opium dreams
and stasis, as China's immemorial torpor reasserts itself; then,
further forward to the end of all things.
When the
great markets by the sea shut fast
All that calm Sunday that goes on and on:
And even lovers find their peace at last,
And Earth is but a star, that once had shone.
Goodbye, China.
Hou hui you qi.
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