Last Days in China
The final dispatch.

Mr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor
August 16, 2001 8:35 a.m.

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.